links post 2/?
In the spirit of DMail and perhaps in anticipation of its prospective revival, I'm going to drop a links post every now and again. I want to get back in the habit of sharing things I think are interesting even if my curation is a bit rough and ready.1 As is my way, some degree of care has been taken to spotlight independent media and non-paywalled articles.2
Below find some links you can click:
"A slice-of-life adventure about childhood and the magical grip soccer held over the people of Quito, Ecuador in 2001."
Exclusive: The Onion has opened a creative agency (Marketing Brew)
"As of today, The Onion is offering copywriting and creative strategy services to brands under its new agency moniker. That includes help with everything from stunt marketing to email copy to social-first vertical video."
“We are hoping to make a brand’s content as smart and entertaining as our content,” Brillson said, “like having a little writer's room in your pocket or a writer's room on speed dial.”
17 Ways to Cut Your Risk of Stroke, Dementia and Depression All at Once3 (NYT)
"New research has identified 17 overlapping factors that affect your risk of stroke, dementia and late-life depression, suggesting that a number of lifestyle changes could simultaneously lower the risk of all three."
"Decentering (sic) the CV and focusing on skills, character, and potential helps uncover talent, reduce bias, and make stronger, more aligned hiring decisions."
Building Mobile Games for Legacy Brands like the NBA, The New York Times, and Wordle (The Brave Technologist)
"Shafik Quoraishee, Senior Mobile/AI Game Developer at the New York Times, discusses the development process behind popular New York Times games such as Crosswords and Connections, along with what they learned about consumer behavior from the highly addictive and viral success of Wordle."
A few days ago a friend of mine wrote "skeumorphic design" in a LinkedIn comment and I didn't know what that meant, so I looked it up.
Elon Musk Doesn't Understand Cyberpunk | 2025 and Sci-Fi (YT/Anthony Gramuglia)
The cyberpunk genre is a long, time-honored genre. Since the early 80s, we've explored sci-fi visions of the future, with low-life and high-tech, with hackers and governments run by rich, unregulated countries: capitalism gone wild.
So, naturally, Elon Musk saw that and went "I wanna do that, but for real!" By comparing Musk's recent technological developments to cyberpunk's greatest stories -- from William Gibson's Neuromancer to Blade Runner to Ghost in the Shell to Robocop, we start to get a sense that Musk might not actually understand the sci-fi he's lifting from.
——
If this were a DMail issue, there be a 10-song Spotify playlist that conformed to a certain theme and then some parting words around here. Sometimes I wish that DMail's archives were still online, but one of the many reasons I deleted them was that I had outgrown a version of myself and wanted to start anew. Maybe that's dumb. Maybe I should have just left them all up there. But I think what we used to call the information superhighway has too much litter on it, too much flotsam and jetsam, too many sloughed skins of the people we used to be.
Footnotes:
1 This also lets me close tabs.
2 Legitimate independent and/or non-legacy media, not like unclewhosekidsavoidhim [dot] lonely [dot] weird or whatever.
3 I'm not sure how many pieces the NYT lets you read for free if you're not a subscriber (because I'm a subscriber), but this is worth using one of your freebies on if you have one to spare.