We Love the Internet 2025/03: The Against optimisation edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good
• Why Do TV Title Sequences Have So Much … Stuff?
• Meta surrenders to the right on speech
• The Typography Maestro Getting Calls From Greta Gerwig and Robert Eggers
• What Happens When TikTok’s Trend Machine Shuts Down?

Reference points:

• idiots year in review
• Soderblog seen, read 2024
• The Incredible, World-Altering ‘Black Swan’ Events That Could Upend Life in 2025
• 2025 Marks The Start Of A New Generation. Here’s What To Know About ‘Gen Beta.’
• 25 mega-trends for 2025
• Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

Longer reads:

• Against Optimization
• It’s Time to End our Subscription Addiction
• How Ben Shapiro Conquered the MAGA-verse
• Has TikTok made us better? Or much, much worse?

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• The Beauty Of Old Hollywood In One Scene
• she showed us up
• Unseen Italian Food
• Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money

Things to look at/read:

• Licence to spill: six London landladies on what it takes to run a pub in 2024
• The Agony of Texting With Men
• 10 years later, meme still draws fans to Tampa sidewalk
• I Suction-Cupped Displace TV’s Wireless OLED to a Wall. I’ll Never Be the Same
• Musk Vaulted to the Top of a Popular Videogame. Everyone’s Asking Where He Found the Time.
• We’re in love — so we implanted magnets under our skin that connect when we touch

Animal corner:

• My favorite dogs of 2024
• My Favorite Dogs of the Year!
• When your Bulldog decides to outsmart you
• Bilingual
• Buddy oso
• Does he actually bark?

Tweets of the week:

• Alright thread of the absolute worst music I’ve found on Instagram Reels
• oh god
• Pornhub used to pay $2 dollars a word before it pivoted to video. So few outlets are paying for fiction these days!
• Gotta love ppl who work in book shops
• Will Smith’s famous catchphrase
• This takes “the European mind could never comprehend” but throws it right back bc I am utterly shaken

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?
• The Next Drug Epidemic Is Blue-Raspberry Flavored
• How a Would-Be Bomber Rebuilt His Life
• ‘If I had the power I’d destroy the whole thing’: what went wrong with the ghost town of Disney-style castles?
• Eastern promises

sk