Welcome to 5 Quick Things that I saw since last month that I thought were interesting enough to share with you. None of them are particularly timely so feel free to just enjoy 🙂

>Number One<

What is To Be Done About Thought

This entire post is worth a good deep read but it’s perfect summary is about 2/3 of the way through:

The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you’re doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can’t produce understanding.

I spent a lot of my time in college flabbergasted by how many students cheated, bought papers, and took shortcuts which in turn caused them to fail to learn basic principals in their fields and now have a machine that does that and we tell all the students they have to use it. You can’t learn by watching, you learn by doing and we’re telling people to stop doing things.

>Number Two<

Parasocial Media

While the author laments that they’re not good at coining terms at least the usage and history in this article of “parasocial media” are both completely top notch. This really got at something I had been noticing in a drift over the past 10 years where people stopped sharing images and ideas they themselves had generated and moved to sharing only from other people publicly while presumably privately engaging in the same pre-2015 sharing behaviors and how we do not class those things as social media because of the actual relationship building those create. Just a really interesting journey.

>Number Three<

Just a Quick Little Video about Gay Marriage

I’ve probably linked Internet Gay TV Guide, Matt Baume before but this time he has absolutely completely outdone himself by making this whopping tome about the road to gay marriage in the United States. As a person who lived through the second half of this video it was still enlightening and interesting to see the nuance I missed living around the fight for gay marriage instead of the through it. Absolutely worth watching this because it really shows how long you need to fight for these rights and how changing hearts and minds does eventually pay off.

>Number Four<

Banal Comedy

If you ever wanted to post a page of the internet and you had no idea where to start this is fantastic set of resources. It also contains some art, gif making, small web, and getting started with game making resources. Just an all around good hub of getting yourself creating on the computer.

>Number Five<

The Weather is a Mood

This is a very simple and silly weather app that pairs your personal locations weather with a corresponding artwork from Rothko. I love it. That is all.

That’s all for this month and hopefully I’ll see you back again next month with some more exciting and cool things!