Jared Shurin's Blog, page 3

Don't make Nazis your business model

“We have been encouraged by the quality of discourse on the platform” says Substack.

Substack, in case you’ve missed it, has been doing their best impression of Twitter.

An investigation (really, a bit of light poking) revealed that actual genuine by-gum Nazi newsletters are not only present on the platform, but thriving. Extremist groups are using the platform to organise, distribute propaganda and make money. This is awful, but also - to be pragmatic - how the internet works in 2023/4. It isn’t...

Alphabetical and hauntological

I’ve got a new phone, which means my downloaded Kindle books have gone away, wiping years of digital debris. It is shockingly freely. I do most of my reading on my phone (Jared, circa 2015 is clutching his pearls hard), and the problem is, the digital TBR follows you everywhere. The physical TBR? I can live with that. We live in an anti-library, that’s part of our home’s chaotic charm.

But opening up the Kindle and finding pages upon pages of downloaded-in-good-faith books and really-interesting-...

Grand Theft Auto, Ed McBain & Nora Roberts

Unsafe driving, 90s style.

The new Grand Theft Auto is coming. How will the latest entry in a now-25-year-old franchise adapt to a new era of gaming? George Osborn muses in his Video Game Industry Memo):

The game’s often distasteful, but undoubtedly entertaining, subversion worked in a world where the industry was young, concerns about the medium ran rampant and the franchise itself was seen as a growing part of that. The world, though, changed….

The idea that ‘games can be for adults’ has shifted...

The C-word.

In Britain, at least, our much-vaunted national resilience has led to a collective repression of the Covid pandemic. We stiff-upper-lipped ourselves into Eating Out to Help Out and then the Pandemic Was Over and now this horrendous global ravaging mostly exists as a strange cultural moment, memorialised solely as that season of Taskmaster where everyone was sitting really far apart.

We don’t ever talk about Covid. We simply mention it as a thing that happened, but, you know, ‘we’re ok’. Instead,...

I have nothing to say.

I’ve been consciously trying to keep a weekly writing schedule, which means, in this case, sending an email on the busiest email day of the year. Sorry for that, and hope this isn’t the proverbial straw for your inbox camel.

Black Friday has somehow gone from dubious discounts on present-worthy clutter to a full floodgate of spam. Today I’ve received special, time-sensitive offers for electricity providers, laundry services, and (ironically) email. I don’t know about your family, but these aren’...

Strong work

My old strategy team had our own newsletter. It was a brief weekly affair that highlighted research, reports, and articles of interest. The informal motto was ‘we read this so you don’t have to’ - a true pillar of the planning ethos.

One week, we did something a little different and went full listicle; sharing some of our favourite advertising campaigns instead. The only rule was that we couldn’t choose any of our own work (either from our current or previous agencies), so these are campaigns we ...

Kurt Vonnegut and The Soul of Baseball

These things come in threes, don’t they? First, reading “2 B R 0 2 B” as part of The Big Book of Science Fiction. Second, stumbling on my old Vonnegut books as part of the great storage unit cleanup. Third, seeing write about Vonnegut as part of last week’s Sci-Friday. At a certain point, you need to stop ducking the omens.

Living in London, I’m a bit spoilt for authors. They’re everywhere. We have to shake them out of the carpets in the morning. Growing up in Kansas City, an author visit was a ...

Ok, f*** it, let's talk about AI

Andrew Griffin, in his (must-read-but-hard-to-link-to) IndyTech newsletter, referred to the UK’s recent “AI Summit” as “the usual combination of apocalypse and bromides”. I think this language aptly describes any discussion around AI at this point.

As the requisite cyberpunk guy, I took part in a panel about the impact of AI on publishing while at World Fantasy last week. I am pleased to say that the panel had overwhelmingly sensible panelists. That said, the conversation still sank, inexorably,...

Storage Unit

I am a collector hoarder from a long line of collector hoarders.

My grandfather had several collections, the most notable of which was his passion for matchbooks. He would pick them up wherever he went. This was the era where seemingly everyone smoked or catered to smokers, so branded matchbooks could be found at every shop, restaurant, hotel or visistor attraction. The collection became a family-and-friends-and-acquaintances activity. Everywhere you went, whatever you did - you’d bring back a p...

SmartArt

Choreo-graphic figures, Tanzquartier Vienna, Nikolaus Gansterer, 2018 (via Arts Cabinet)

From a conversation between Fatos Ustek and Nikolaus Gansterer in Arts Cabinet:

The dictionary definitions of diagrams, they can be defined as pictures of language altered in a way that its components are put in non-linear associations with each other. And they kind of create asymmetric juxtapositions, which might then lead to a kind of an expanded version of an elaboration of a complex thought. And those dia...