Rewatching Alias on Disney+. I forgot how engaging season one was. The cliffhangers at the end of each episode. The rapid pacing. The costumes. The Rambaldi mystery. The twists and turns. So much fun.
I know the plot gets messy as the seasons add up, but I’m enjoying these early episodes.
The only Barnes and Noble in town is one of the last tenants in a dilapidated mall that is about to be redeveloped. I was nervous that they would just close the store, but they announced that they are moving to a new location. Good news.
This article makes me want to use periods even more. No More Periods in Texting. Period. - The New York Times
It seems to me that fewer people are posting on social media, but the people that are posting are posting more frequently. Could just be algorithm changes favor the heavy posters. Could just be the people I follow. But I think heavy social media users are worried about losing their audience and so they are posting more in a bid to stay relevant.
Picking out my pens and pencils for the Fall semester.
I’m working on revisions to a paper that is going through a peer review with a journal. It’s a long, intimidating process. I’m hopefully nearing the finish line, but the process wears you down.
Just got a minor revision decision on a manuscript. Excited to push this paper across the finish line.
I’m surprised that the Strange New Worlds musical soundtrack isn’t on Apple Music yet.
The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Musical Episode is amazing. Lots of musical talent on the cast. Enjoyed it so much. 🖖
This ESPN story about Florida State wanting to leave the ACC is bananas. Where would they go? The SEC isn’t adding anyone else. I don’t think the Big 10 wants to add a Florida team, although who knows? Sounds like their ego is bruised because they don’t make as much as they think they should.
Thanks to the Barbie movie, my girls have discovered the Indigo Girls. I love it.
My daughter just declared that her favorite font is Times New Roman, and I can’t think of a bigger sign that the kid is destined to be an academic.
I’m at a local coffee shop that’s normally packed with college students. But students aren’t back in town yet. Completely different clientele. It’s funny how a college town changes when school isn’t in session.
My academic research is primarily in branding and visual communication, but I’m discovering that as a media scholar today, part of my research always overlaps with social media in some way.
Spent my morning working on some typeface designs in Glyphs. I really enjoy working with fonts, and I have several designs that I’ve started and not finished. I need to prioritize creative time – not just writing, but also sketching and type design.
When the exodus from Twitter first started last year, many tech-savvy people were moving to Mastodon and I wondered if brands would move their accounts to self hosted instances. After all, from a branding standpoint, @offical@starbucks.com is better than @starbucks@mastodon.social. At the end of that post, I posited that someone would come along with a service that handled the fediverse complexity for companies.
That service is Threads.
Lots of people have asked why Meta was interested in providing ActivityPub support. I honestly think part of the story is so Meta can tell brands – their advertisers – that they can just publish on Threads and it will eventually be accessible on any other non-Twitter platform. Of course, they’ve still got to deliver on that promise… right now Threads doesn’t have ActivityPub support.
So far, branded accounts have flocked to Threads. If @BRAND-NAME@threads.com becomes the default for official branded social content, Meta benefits. I still think companies would be better off owning their instance with a branded domain, and maybe we will get there some day, but for now, it looks like Threads is where the brands are headed.
(I think that eventually, Meta will offer an upgraded “brand tier” that allows companies to use their own domain instead of @threads.com. for a substanial fee, of course.)
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.
The University of Georgia School of Journalism took over a community newspaper that was about to go out of business in nearby Oglethorpe and started running it with students. This reflection digs into what has worked, what hasn’t and what smaller communities want as news…
Finally got around to adding a fonts page to my Micro.Blog site.
I’ve been reading the coverage of the Twitter rebranding and the most interesting framing is related to legal issues. It’s not an issue typically covered when a company rebrands… but it’s not a typical rebranding.
A coworker of mine took Twitter off her iPhone home screen today and replaced it with Threads. She’s been a heavy Twitter user for a very long time. More and more people I know are making the jump away from the service formerly known as Twitter.