🛝 App Demo — Muddy

SharePoint + Slack + Arc = Muddy..? I don’t know. This app is definitely not for me, especially since I’m not looking for collaborative tools, but there’s some interesting stuff in there. The group surveillance aspect is pretty off-putting though.

📺 President Biden’s reaction to seeing MTG before the speech is all of us. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Chris D. Jackson on Twitter

Meant to drop this in with the other SotU posts yesterday…

😰 My Anxiety — New Yorker

My work suffers, of course. How could it not? I’m sadly not a perfectionist but, rather, an avoider and a regretter. There are periods when I will respond to e-mails at a reasonable pace, and then there’s the e-mail about a potentially lucrative project that I ignored for months. I haven’t even opened it; I don’t know what it says.

Boy, do I feel seen. Don’t even get me started on the “getting out of bed” section…

👽 Spawn, Scorched, and More — Humble Bundle

Second humble bundle I’ve linked to this week. I’ve always wanted to go back and read old Spawn. $20 for 43 volumes of Spawn and Spawn related books. Now I can.

🎵 What Makes an Album the Greatest of All Time? — Pudding

Really great stuff as always. I definitely think the biggest factor was the change/addition of panelists. I still think Sgt. Peppers deserves the 1 spot though.

📣 So Much for “Sleepy Joe”: On Biden’s Rowdy, Shouty State of the Union — New Yorker

Biden wasn’t exactly a happy warrior on Thursday night, but he was a forceful one. He seemed unfazed by the occasional word salad that he made of his script. He was definitely not soporific. The speech kept one part of the evening’s traditions intact–it was terribly long, more than an hour–but the general vibe was different than most State of the Union addresses I can recall–sharply confrontational, intensely divided.

🥊 Joe Biden comes out fighting against Donald Trump — Economist

Mr Biden not only attacked his opponent but goaded Republicans in the chamber and scolded the justices of the Supreme Court, who sat before him, for their decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Coming from this president, an institutionalist who reveres such traditions, that in itself was a signal that he recognises Mr Trump has shifted American politics onto new terrain, and that Mr Biden intends to take the fight to him there.

🐺 Anthony Edwards Did Not Expect To Jump That High — Defector

At some point in the near future he’ll almost certainly be the best two-guard in the NBA, but right now he’s still just 22, and not yet the sort of player that can be entrusted to steer the offense every possession without stress.

I didn’t catch this one, but I think it’s safe to say this was a career defining game for him. Regular season-wise.

🛸 US once considered program to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft, Pentagon report reveals — POLITICO

The effort was eventually rejected by DHS leaders “for lacking merit,” and never actually recovered any other-worldly craft.

In a world where people only read headlines, we need to quit this shoddy shit. They’re doing exactly what they said happened in the first paragraph.

🛌 Floored — Jen Sorensen

Super thoughtful look at one of the things we take for granted with an empathetic POV.

📚 Cory Doctorow Novel Collection — Humble Bundle

18 of his books for $18 in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

🕴️ Corporate Fetish is the response to Girlhood — Feed Me

Paywall unfortunately, but Emily’s essay at the end does a great job going into the fashion trend. What’s missing is the corporate world desire to entice people back to the office, which I think is a major element.

🎰 Did Apple Just Make a Gambling App? — Atlantic

The following year, it became the exclusive broadcaster of Major League Soccer, and now it may be readying an up to $2 billion bid for the rights to Formula 1 racing.

Nothing super enlightening in the article, but I completely missed that Apple was bidding for F1.

🇷🇺 Moscow After Navalny — Puck

What we saw this weekend was the end of that hopeful arc. First, the protest movement had been killed, and now so too had its leader. And though over 10,000 people in Moscow came out to bid Alexey farewell, what did it change, really? Putin would still be re-elected overwhelmingly for another six-year term, Russian missiles would keep killing Ukrainian children for no discernible reason, and dissent would land hundreds and thousands more Russians behind bars. If we thought the repression of Russian society was bad 15 years ago, it has become Stalinesque now.

🏀 Clark passes Maravich to become NCAA DI’s all-time leading scorer — Guardian

Truly historic stuff.

🎺 Tiny Desk: Butcher Brown — NPR

Solar Music made my top ten albums last year, and while they might not have the stage presence of Juvenile, not much in this world beats live, soulful music.

🐂 A quick vid on Onuralp Bitim’s debut — Noh’s Notebook

Never even heard of this guy—I haven’t been paying much attention to the Bulls since I let me League Pass lapse—but I love to see it! If he can keep up what he did last night, he can easily be a role player off the bench for any team.

🎮 The Nerve of Balatro For Being This Good — Aftermath

One more on Balatro for good luck.

🎮 It Is, In Fact, Preferable To Suck Real Bad At A Game Like ‘Balatro’ — Defector

I haven’t purchased a new video game since 2020, but this might do it. A rogue-like, deck-building, poker game?? How can I say no??

🤖 Former Twitter engineers are building Particle, an AI-powered news reader, backed by $4.4M — TechCrunch

For those missing Artifact, it looks like you’ll have something that should at least last a bit longer.