It's even worse than it appears.
I released a new Node package earlier today.#
Just read the name "ivanka" in a Facebook message and had to try hard to remember where I had heard that name before. Another thing I'm having trouble with is remembering if and when "intent" matters with the NYT. They run an op-ed from a troll, I guess intent is irrelevant?#
A platform like Facebook is very hard to build. Serving billions of users, hundreds of millions at the same time, is a mostly unheralded accomplishment, probably like putting a man on the moon. Yet this never comes up in the public analysis. #
I don't watch a lot of movies these days thanks to the pandemic I guess. But in the last two days I watched two, NomadLand and I Care a Lot. It's hard to imagine two more different movies. NomadLand is a character study, played by a 63-year-old Frances McDormand. Her age is important. I understand this somewhat because I'm 65, and it's like that great Al Pacino speech in Any Given Sunday, as you get older things are taken from you. Parents, friends, lovers, and then pieces of yourself start going, and you're left wondering what the fuck. That's NomadLand in a nutshell. The acting is beautiful, the scenery, the characters, the feelings (somewhat) -- but the story? It's like viewing a work of art in a museum. It's just there. It's for you to decide what it means and a lot of that will depend on how old you are, I imagine. I Care a Lot is very much the opposite, but interestingly it's also about things being taken away from an old person, in this case played by 72-year-old Dianne Wieste. So much happens in the first few minutes of the movie, and it's so anger-making, I turned it off at least three times to regain my composure to continue watching. But then it becomes a rollicking ultra-violent comedy, kind of like a Quentin Taratino movie, but funnier. If you want entertainment, I Care a Lot is for you. I will watch NomadLand again. Sometimes movies like this don't grab me on the first viewing, for example, There Will Be Blood, which i panned after a first viewing, then loved after a second. I'll let you know. #
BTW, the title, I Care a Lot, is a joke. 💥#
  • My friend Jeff Jarvis is going on CNN shortly to talk about Google, Facebook, Australia and Murdoch. #
  • Had a thought. Simple arithmetic. There was a fantastic boom, blogging made a lot of stuff happen. Where did it all go? The thesis from journalism seems to be all that is over, ancient history. I think the evidence is to the contrary. Blogging reshaped the world. Not only for good, of course. #
  • Journalism plays a magic trick, ignoring the changes, and the good, and only focusing on how the new tech (yes it still is new) can be used for evil. #
  • Perhaps possibly because of their conflict of interest.#
  • Jarvis is going on with Brian Stelter who I understand got his start in blogging. So it would be interesting if Jeff asked him a question. Do you think the flow is just one way, from journalism to Facebook, or perhaps something more is going on. #
  • My thesis is that blogging may be somewhat vestigial, may be a virtual dinosaur, but its genes are still in ciculation, the equivalent of online birds. #

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Last update: Sunday February 21, 2021; 9:22 PM EST.

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