More than 1,500 people have pledged over $100,000 to bring Upcoming back. It’s hard to articulate what that means to me. To me, it represents a chance to make things right. I miss Upcoming. I miss the community that made it great. And I won’t sell out again.
Happy to be one of those people and even happier about Upcoming coming back.
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Here’s what happened in America between April 14 and 17. In the state of Washington, a 6-hour downtime of the 911 emergency phone system was caused by a third-party vendor’s router failure, resulting in 4,500 missed emergency calls. Police responding to an unrelated incident at the home of a New Jersey man found three containers of radioactive material he had stolen from a military arsenal. A bomb threat was made against a Verizon call center in Tennessee. Copper thieves stole cabling, causing internet and phone outages in New Mexico, and then again in Hawaii. A routine police traffic stop found four people with over 100 counterfeit Walmart gift cards, $32,000 in blank money orders, and a credit card coding device. And a new piece of malware was discovered that compromises Android devices and makes them mine for the cryptocurrency Litecoin, among other things. This is only a sampling of the 90-plus events that were reported over a three-day period, but it is more than enough for the plot of a cyberpunk novel.
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David Byrne, journalist Lisa Robinson, and Ramones manager Danny Fields in Paris, during the Talking Heads/Ramones European tour, 1977
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3 random strangers make an awesome song (by Jaime Maldonado)
We used to have a map of a frontier that could be anything. The web isn’t young anymore, though. It’s settled. It’s been prospected and picked through. Increasingly, it feels like we decided to pave the wilderness, turn it into a suburb, and build a mall. And I hate this map of the web, because it only describes a fraction of what it is and what’s possible. We’ve taken an opportunity for connection and distorted it to commodify attention. That’s one of the sleaziest things you can do.
A screen doesn’t care what it shows any more than a sheet of paper cares what’s printed on it. Screens are aesthetically neutral, so the looks of things are not a part of their grain. Sorry, internet. If you want to make something look flat, go for it. There are plenty of reasons to do so. But you shouldn’t say you made things look a certain way because the screen cared one way or the other.
What Screens Want by Frank Chimero
Finally getting around to reading this gem from the end of last year.