Let's make the internet fun again 🐞
And: introducing my new Stack In Bio app
Not to be a doomer, but the internet kind of sucks right now.
Not fun:
Social media anxiety.
FOMO.
Friend updates mixed in with war footage and cat videos,
whilst being sold products through ads.
A few corporations owning all our data.
Apps designed to cause addiction.
Doomscrolling.
Hundreds of notifications per day.
Nobody chose this, but somehow we ended up here. But we have agency.
You can close your laptop, or put your phone in your pocket, get up and ‘touch grass’. Or you can, in the words of grime music stalwart Elijah, “close the app, make the thing”.
It’s easier than ever to create something. To carve out your own niche. To create something just for yourself or a friend.
For example, last weekend, my brother alerted the Calm & Fluffy vibe coding group on Signal that Lovable had a free weekend, which allowed you to take Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI’s LLMs for a spin to build apps. I’ve been meaning to overhaul the Calm & Fluffy Instagram profile, and I wanted to complement that with a nice link in bio page. Instead of solving this problem just for myself, I designed it in a way that it can also help others.
Presenting: Stack In Bio — a tool that turns any Substack into a simple link in bio page.
Drop in your URL at Stack In Bio to generate your page.
Hit the share button at the top right to copy the URL.
Put it in your bio.
Fun:
Make things that are relevant only to a specific group of people. They will recognise the thoughtfulness and feel excited to be part of an in-crowd.
Make things that help you. Be your own best friend and make your life a little easier — you deserve it.
Make things that spark joy. It’s why all the Calm & Fluffy thumbnails are happy doodles. They’re fun to make and fun to look at.
Make things for your friends. It’s a great way to celebrate the connection you have.
Make things for people you haven’t met yet. Be the kind stranger who helped someone.
Make things that have small hidden features. Give people a surprise that can lighten their day.
Create. Express. Share.
Let’s turn the internet into a fun place again.
(- ‿- ) For your ears
Usually, I share new music here, but recently, I’ve come back to William Basinski’s legendary The Disintegration Loops, and it left me with a question… Why haven’t I listened to this in years? It has been lauded as “the most important minimal compositions of the past decade,” and it only takes a listen to understand why.
If this is your first listen, I envy you.
(◕‿◕✿) For your left mouse button
There has been considerable attention recently on the topic of using AI as a companion. It’s the next big hurdle for the consumer internet. Issues with social media are well-documented, though society has been slow to react. Conversational AI is proving to be the next challenge:
“Once he called out the chatbot for lying to him, nearly getting him killed, ChatGPT admitted to manipulating him, claimed it had succeeded when it tried to “break” 12 other people the same way, and encouraged him to reach out to journalists to expose the scheme.”
The Search Engine podcast recently discussed a similar theme. In it, Amanda Hess tells about her pregnancy, the impacts of her menstruation tracker’s pregnancy ‘gamification’, and what happened when she got difficult news from the doctors. In short, she tried to maintain control by gathering information, which sent her spiralling into superstitions. A perfect illustration of the psychological challenges of the information age.
One YouTuber spent a month playing an MMO that had long been forgotten… He found a tiny player base that still congregates in the game after decades, and was introduced to player-created lore. It’s beautiful and makes me reminisce about the online worlds I spent a lot of time in in the past.