Business talk

"When we’re speaking for ourselves, we express ourselves with a communication style intended to reassure our friends (or are they our shareholders?) that the best is always yet to come. In recent years, brands and some influencers have begun deviating from this posting style in an attempt to startle increasingly distracted scrollers into paying attention, but for people who aren’t in the business of holding an audience’s attention, the pressure to communicate as a corporate self remains in place."

-- Kathryn Jezer-Morton on social media's taboo on struggling.

Le truc

It was never yours

Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that "you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library." There's no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away "due to our content licensing agreements," once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that's digital, just temporarily renting it.

– Full story by John Walker at Kotaku

Now playing: Sometimes

1. Paycheque - 'Generic Actress'
2. Yppah - 'Never Mess With Sunday'
3. PJ Harvey - 'Voyager'
4. Boards of Canada - 'Prophecy at 1420 MHz'
5. Sellorekt/LA Dreams - 'Beta Girl Lost in Forever'

Bleeding edge in every way

"Gawker eventually became like Lennie from Of Mice and Men, where it didn't understand its own power," [Cord] Jefferson says. "It started out as this little blog published out of Nick Denton's living room. Everything he was doing was punching up because nobody had ever heard of it or him. By the time I got there, it was a powerful entity that could rattle and affect lives. But people continued to write as if they were still in a living room when they should have started thinking, 'The story's true, but is it a story we should be sharing?'"

The Hollywood Reporter on Gawker's legacy. I was an avid reader at the time but the site left a trail of bodies, most of them staff. Ben Smith's Traffic locates the site in the zeitgeist; Ryan Holiday's Conspiracy reconstructs it from the wreckage.

Cut-ups

Most music has a very strong sense of narrative. It’s teleological, as art historians say. Therefore, it has a strong sense of time being cut up into sections. That’s exactly what you don’t want if you’re trying to dream. You don’t want to be constantly brought back to a world that’s cut up into little chunks.

– Brian Eno interviewed by Robert Doerschuk

I bore myself to sleep at night

When chaos consumed the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night, I didn't hear a peep. I can count on one hand the number of people who mentioned something the next morning, and most of it was to ask if there was a chance the shooting was staged.

– Andrea González-Ramírez on The Great Numbing Out.