The personalized, colorful web pages became streamlined, conforming to modern design standards and sacrificing individuality for uniformity.

There are some pretty big advantages to ‘modern design standards.’ For one, they make the Internet a less hostile place to users with accessibility needs. I don’t have problems viewing clashing colors, flying gifs, jumbled pages with no sanity, etc, but a hell of a lot of people with various disabilities sure do. I don’t want to even think about how screen readers try to deal with pages like that. Web1.0 offered absolutely nothing for those users who needed accessibility.

Sad there isn’t an alternative to it :/

I’ll read that, thank you. I had no idea.

Queer and trans lives do not always follow the same timelines that cis and straight lives follow. We do not always hit the same milestones at the same times. Our lives are not always legible to those on the outside. This is one of the most beautiful things about queerness — the way it invites us to shed ways of moving through time that do not serve us.

I feel like this is trying too hard to claim for queer folks what is intrinsically, universally human. Is anyone’s life always legible to those on the outside? And come on, non-linear narratives are hardly new or unique to queer authors, lol. Plenty of folks have been bothered by that kind of narrative, it certainly doesn’t mean there’s anything special about that.

Of course I remain open to being corrected. It could well be that I’m just ignorant on the history and function of non-linear narratives. But this reads like the author is trying way too hard to lay claim to things that pretty much everyone experiences to varying degrees at one point or another.

Basically, the second order to me really boils down to this: AI generated content isn’t really a ‘brand’. Good writing shops tend to build a following with their writers and expectations with their editors. The writing, investigative, and editorial bent of a house is essentially what makes a shop. See The Economist and The New Yorker as examples. In other places, a lot of niche shops are selling personality as much as product with youtube, podcasts, and others.

Yep. This is why I’ve been a paying subscriber to Ars Technica for over a decade. You’re exactly correct. Ditto with NPR.

Right. That’s why searching for anything on the internet SUCKS these days. The results are all just filler bullshit.

This is fucking gross. There’s no one who thinks people will read the mass shit they pump out.

Blood Meridian is stunning, but seriously–if you’re not in a good mental place, absolutely do not read it. It’s…well, ‘dark’ really doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Ugh. Absolutely gutted by this. One of my all time favorite authors. This man’s prose is simply unmatched. An honest to god national treasure. Fuck.