The Amazing Digital Circus

My kid has introduced us recently to some of the indie animation series put out by Glitch productions—namely Murder Drones and The Amazing Digital Circus (TADC thereafter)—which have got her absolutely, obsessively, maddeningly captivated. I’m finding them both refreshing in their earnestness to tell a good tale, as well as their quality of craft, but TADC in particular I’m enjoying as a really thoughtful and unfettered meditation on the long, and also astonishingly brief, arc of the late 20th–early 21st century collective psychosis that we’re calling the internet life.

Continue reading →

2026 is around the corner, and one of my resolutions to see through is to embrace the Fediverse! I deleted my Twitter account a couple days ago, and I’m doing my final goodbye tour on Facebook now. I don’t know where this road leads, but I suppose it’ll be as good as we make it.

Current personal growth, self-help, psychotherapy, and trying to be a better person in-flight reading list. I’m feeling like just a bit of a cliche of “middle-aged human approaching obligatory New Year’s resolutions”, but I am also feeling a genuine sense of resonance and connection to my present in these pages right now.

Landry, a former state attorney general who took office as Louisiana governor in January 2024, thanked Trump, saying it was “an honour to serve you in this volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the US”.

Via The Guardian

It really feels increasingly like the US is willing to commit to this post-international rules-based order mode, full time. What do we do in response?

Finished reading: Zone One by Colson Whitehead 📚

Finished reading: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle 📚

The transition of human activities on to surveillance platforms means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, become mere data points of equal value. … In a fully platform-based world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviours and patterns; meaning, intention and explanation become irrelevant.

The Guardian

I might be feeling some… professional regrets?

When I became enamoured with the idea of a career in “Interaction Design,” I assumed that a commitment to critical discourse came with the territory. I realize now that was always a reach, but it feels ever more alien to my field today.

“Conspiracy theory is a love affair with power that poses as its critique”.

Robyn Marasco, via this essay on Trumpism

There is something pathetic about Hegseth and Trump, who have schemed and failed their way into positions of power and prestige that are comically outsized to their character. It is telling that Hegseth is so preoccupied with making the military into a photogenic spectacle of masculine strength – an anxious fixation on surface and spectacle that only highlights the US’s declining influence abroad. … They do not want to be strong to pursue the nation’s interests; they do not want to be strong to pursue any principles; they certainly do not want to be strong so that they can ensure the safety of the innocent. They want to be strong so that they can look big and important on TV.

Moira Donegan, writing in The Guardian

We are all little ladybugs, burrowed deep amongst the branches, seeking shelter in a world that is so far beyond our ken