David Emery Online

2manydjs present As Produced by Soulwax 2020-2022 (DJ Mix)

2manydjs—also known as Soulwax—have released a series of DJ Mixes on Apple Music. This one is a mix of some of their recent recent remixes and songs they’ve produced, and—unsurprisingly—it’s very good.

A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.

I could have quoted all of this, it’s well worth a read.

It feels like we’re going through a few substantial shifts in technological thinking, all at once. For a long time it felt like we were coalescing around a few large, American, ad-supported social platforms. With the rise of TikTok and—to a much smaller extent—Mastodon, and the fall in Facebook and Twitter, that seems to be undoing.

At the same time, half of my social feed is screengabs of ChatGPT. A year ago it was all terrible mass produced art of bored monkeys, so I guess that’s progress. ChatGPT—or at least, its productionised successor—as a virtual barman for a social community? That’s an interesting thing to think about…

NYC

Replay ‘22

A good spread this year.

One of the things I like about Apple Music Replay is that it updates every week, all year round. Strongly suspect the latest Arctic Monkeys album might sneak in there before we hit December 31st.

Shame, Tamesis Dock

The Jurassic World Exhibition

There is an amazing weaponisation of consumer psychology at this end of this. You walk through room after room of dinosaur set pieces, each slowly ramping up in terms of scariness. Brachiosaurus first, velociraptor later, etc. Then, just at the point where your kids are getting a little tired after bouncing around petting anclyasauruses, in the last room—no spoilers—they terrify the pants off them.

And spit you out, tears akimbo, in an extremely well stocked gift shop.

Hyde Park, November 2022

So Much Wine by Phoebe Bridgers

Global warming is such that it’s likely that we’ll never get snow at Christmas in London again. I’m wearing a t-shirt right now and it’s late November.

But here we are, and this is another great addition to Phoebe Bridgers’ slowly completing Christmas album.

Everything old is new again

What I realise, now, about getting old is that it is possibly less about the old, and more about the getting.

To experience something is often the only way to truly understand it, and sometimes that just takes a while. Or it takes being in the correct place at the correct time. I was fortunate to have been an eager twentysomething around that social media took off, deeply invested in the possibilities and potential. I’ve been on Twitter for 16 years, as of this week, which is less time then the going rate for defrauding people out of billions of dollars.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and those that followed have not exactly lived up to the wide-eyed potential that I hoped they could fulfil, sacrificing so much at the gods of engagement and growth.

Back to base principles, then. There’s two sides to social media: connections, and content. Blogging was—and remains—bad at connections, but having your own home for “content”—writing, photos, links, not so much video—that is not at the whims of bankers and billionaires is feeling like it might be a good idea again.

So here we are. I’ve dusted off the design so it works for things that aren’t big long articles, and am typing in the compose box like it’s 2001.

For the “connections” bit Mastodon seems like it… might work? But we’ll see. Follow me if you’re on there, or just add this site to your RSS reader. Those things still exist, too.

Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) by Fred again..

It took a minute—and sometimes sounds a bit like Moby?—but I have got truly engrossed in this record. It’s the only thing holding back Taylor Swift from dominating my Replay 2022 mix…