It's less about the prediction markets & more that regular people have no idea what's going on. The mechanics of life are opaque and become even more invisible. First post of 2026

Had no idea the AMC show Pantheon was so deep, saw a rec online and decided to put it on background noise and wow, talk about storytelling. Kind of like that cancelled show Travellers both really interesting sci-fi thinking about machines, people & the dialogue in both feels uncanny to irl

tech companies using society as a staging server

George Jetson used his all-knowing future computer to find out what Orbitty was when Elroy brought it home from a school trip, but the chatbot encyclopedia kept mishearing him.

Nary a Pete Seeger to be found

Indeed many software dev orgs have a hard time naming what problem they are trying to solve

Oh my goodness I just saw the news

Folks kept asking if my last.fm list was my actual ranked list of favorite albums, so it forced me to attempt to rank them: record.club/ron/lists/fa...

moonrise kingdom is pretty rewatchable fwiw

The sanitation bureau thing was covered by the press during COVID and the fact that it didn't spur anyone into solving thing is maddening. On the bright side, it's the sort of service design x public mechanics story that's so absurd that I love including it in talks & class assignments. So thanks.

Portland subtweet i've been frustrated by the lack of interest in winning hearts & minds by actually governing effectively. there are so many low-hanging fruit wins that'd garner consensus, but we're still too concerned with winning the headline game or preening for national press.

My last.fm playback for 2025 is out tracking all my listening across streaming, vinyl and radio listening. The albums feel like a good snapshot of my listening (and tastes) www.last.fm/user/statech...

SEC deserves all of the grief it gets, but....this is electric. #cfb

this is a crazy good speech my god

I was writing a "year in review" post for myself and I remembered the whole @404media.co scoop they got wrong about what was actually happening here. I almost ended up hijacking my own year-in-review trying to explain it, but I'll do that in another blog post someday that it's been almost a year

Bring back technologies, or ways of initiating people into technology use, that allow people to learn about them piecemeal.

While getting an oil change, updated my fragrance selector at the end of the year with new notes, all 4 seasons as well as "anytime" wear along with an update of my current collection with new purchased and removed old bottles. www.outofscopemag.com #scentsky #fragranceky #perfumesky

Last playlist of 2025, you're welcome. Italo disco, synth & 80s vibes with some wild cards. on.soundcloud.com/SZcCRguGcREY...

Not bad to discover an album on the last day of the year (Stella & The Longos) www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYZV...

Very cool post from @greenbackbetter.bsky.social at @moneyontheleft.bsky.social about the politics of design.

One thing to look forward to on January 1st, my annual last.fm compendium

Robotaxis are platforms, and like all platforms the question is where the externalized costs land. Cities and laws aren’t configured for this shift, so if we’re going to subsidize it, the public case has to be stronger than “fewer crashes.”

As a grim year comes to an end, sharing the best of Can We Still Govern? These are the five nost read stories from the last year, ungated. Take a gander and read one! 🧵https://open.substack.com/pub/donmoynihan/p/best-of-can-we-still-govern-2025?r=slfke&utm_medium=ios

illegal cab service back in the news again, the platform era in a nutshell. externalize the responsibility, centralize the profits. The full-stack mullet: innovation in the front, liability in the back www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/b...

My last episode my radio show for 2025 is live. It's been a fun year putting it together, though I'll enjoy when I'm doing it back live from the studio again. www.mixcloud.com/908RB/sound-...

The most realistic thing about Back To The Future is how the preservationists insisted on the clock tower being preserved exactly how it was.

Pop Tarts Bowl setting a high bar for future silly brand activations during college football bowl season.

...highly skilled people becoming just a "cog in the machine" churning out analyses they don't get to question. If you don't do this, you are failing to lead on research and data, imho. Wrote a bit about the features of this kind of corporate groupthink here: www.drcathicks.com/post/corpora...

How did Portlandia get its own IFC channel and plays non-stop? Is this the new syndication? (

Amina Claudine Myers 1983 "The Circle of Time" LP & Marshall Allen's Ghost Horizons both arrived today #vinylsky #jazz

The Cataylst review on Abundance was good catalyst-journal.com/2025/12/the-...

The #scentsky collection has outgrown the stand, need to consider an alternative not about display just being able to access them a bit easier.

♫ Top 5 artists of the Last.week: Syndrome 81 (36) RANCŒUR (31) The National (24) Camera Silens (23) COUPE GORGE (22). #myweekcounted 848 Scrobbles with Lastfm #music via @lastfm.blue

The problem when you see "systems everywhere" is stumbling into a story about the lack of newly build ski resorts and thinking "that's gonna make a great class example" but alas...

the best conferences are the ones where when you run into an alum of the event and it's like a summer camp reunion

the privatization of proximity

my favorite immaculate grid days are when it's two founding franchises and discovering all of the old timey randos who played for those teams that i've never heard of, but who had a good season or two in their own right

only way i'd save the lloyd center is by turning it into the baseball stadium site. not everything is meant to live forever, folx

idk man, i’d just like to live in a future where i could stop finding new and increasingly worse applications for the That’s Photoshopped skillset i developed in the late nineties

can't wait to live out the real life sequel of the 2011 cinematic masterpiece "In Time"

Counting Crows documentary is great, I'm glad they only covered the first two records. Hearing about 90s bands is great because I can't conjure what documentaries for modern bands will be like, I don't think it'll be as romantic idk. :

i've been telling people for a while that pickelball's ascent is a PE play not organic demand for a professional league, because it's not a good tv sport. frontofficesports.com/how-pickleba...

today in commercials, facebook says that when you get a coworker as a secret santa, stalking their internet presence to figure out what they like rather than just talking to them is truly connecting.

I didn't realize Discogs was founded in Beaverton by a former Intel guy.

Marshall Allen putting out a record (from when he was 99) at 101 is wildly inspirational. #musicsky #jazzsky

Only way we're going to prevent synthetic user research from becoming entrenched is to shame its proliferation. Timely read

Fact is, I don't want to be looked at by machines

Fable or Literal.club neither has anyone on them that I know, the social graph being what it is means you lose all your friends