Fluttering

I actually wrote the below a couple weeks ago and never got around to sending it out because by the time I went to hit send, ten new crazy things happened within the TwitterElonGate realm. And now at least a hundred other things have happened. Honestly, it’s exhausting. I want to care because I want Twitter to survive. But I find myself increasingly tuning it all out. It seems pretty clear that both sides should probably walk away, but cannot. It would be just such a fitting way for Twitter to end, sadly. I really hope it won’t, but my god, what a shitshow.

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I suspect like many people these days, I’m fairly worried about the future of Twitter. Regardless of what you think about Elon Musk’s takeover bid, it’s clearly chaotic and creating a new level of chaos in a company which has always been chaotic. More chaos today, of course.

I love Twitter. I know it’s not in favor to say it these days, but I really think it’s my favorite service on the internet, even now, some 15 years after I started using it. It’s just so great for so many things. Yes, some bad. But plenty good. Many useful.

I also, quite frankly, worry about the service on which I’m writing this newsletter (Revue), because it’s now owned by Twitter. Does it survive? I’m not sure anyone actually knows right now. I’ve moved this newsletter back and forth between services enough, that it’s not a huge deal. But it is yet another thing to think about and deal with. Should I stay or should I go?

Anyway, here for now.

Drinking: a Fort Point Summer Animal 🍻

– Talal Shamoon, the chief executive of Intertrust Technologies, a digital rights management company who was working with the music industry at the time of the iPod’s launch back in 2001. The product line, of course, was officially laid to rest this week with the discontinuing of the iPod Touch.

RIP, old friend.

📱Speaking of the iPod, here’s someone unboxing the original version 20+ years later. It still is a beautiful product.

🌌 As noted above, scientists now have a picture of Sagittarius A* – the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It basically looks exactly as math and science suggested it would. Good job, Einstein.

🔭 Here are some more amazing recent space pictures.

🌟 A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion power, maybe for real this time?

💎 A billion year old 555-carat black diamond, perhaps from space, sold for $4.3M – which seems astronomically low?

🚄 You know what’s not astronomically low? The cost of California’s high-speed rail line. It’s now past $100B in projected costs, which means it will actually be at least double that when all is said and done. Which should be just before or after the heat death of the Earth.

📝 A blogger passes away at 109. She started posting when she was 99.

⚾️ Disney CEO Bob Chapek is starting to talk a bit more openly about the prospects of a direct-to-consumer ESPN offering. It sounds like it’s both further out than some would hope and yet closer than some imagine.

📺 Netflix hosting live immersive events around their hit properties is interesting – though I still think there are several other more interesting things they could do in order to reinvigorate the business.

😎 Something Apple AR-y this way comes…