P.O.S.S.E.
“other major Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou, announced that they now required popular users’ legal names to be made visible to the public. Weibo stated in a public post that the new rule would first apply to all users with over 1 million followers, then to those with over 500,000”
https://restofworld.org/2023/weibo-legal-display-name-influencers/
“All of them are connected by the subject matter (of course), but also by the particular shade of orange, the uppercase Gorton typeface, and the all-around certain Marcin-ness of it all: the strange curiosity, the obsessiveness, the visual storytelling, a touch too much vulgarity at times, maybe, and at other times a misguided fondness for the word “paroxysm.”
Here’s something I should confess, but also something you all probably already know: I live for diminishing returns. I love staying somewhere long after everyone else left, fiddling with minutiae to never be noticed (although sometimes I will try to make people notice), finding pleasure in superfine tuning that comes after fine tuning. I love connecting things and pouring myself into the cracks of a project that few others notice”
“Warhammer’s gothic ultraviolence was clearly gelling with the studded leather getups of Britain’s burgeoning metal scene. And with Games Workshop embracing what Jones describes as an “entrepreneur spirit” where “anything was possible,” the idea of following up these musical dalliances with a full-blown record label seemed less like pivot than a natural next step.
“We hadn’t got a clue about making a record, or what that involved,” says Jones. “We just thought, Well, how difficult can it be?”
https://www.polygon.com/23954679/warhammer-records-oral-history-brian-may-john-blanche-metal-af
“for more than 500 years, anyone who wanted a Master of Arts degree from Oxford had to take an oath promising they would never “agree to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis” (this was in Latin, so quod numquam consencient in reconciliationem Henrici Symeonis). The requirement was added to the university statutes in 1264, and wasn’t removed until 1827—more than half a millennium later. The good part is that for most of that enormous span of time, nobody had any idea who Henry Symeonis actually was or what he might have done”
“It was not a real newspaper but a zombie – a piece of promotional material created for the local Conservative MP, Robert Largan, by a company in nearby Manchester. As such, it was just the latest example of how the local newspaper industry, which has been all but destroyed, is now being replaced. Freed from the oversight of local reporters and editors, businesses and politicians have begun to create their own information networks – they look like local news, but report only the things their owners want the public to see”
“S Group poses a more fundamental challenge. Here we have a hyper-efficient retail operation, run with cutting-edge management and logistics, dominating half the grocery market of a wealthy country, without minting a single billionaire in the process. It is not just competitive with capitalist businesses; it is more successful. It’s enough to make the ghost of Ronald Reagan cry.
https://prospect.org/world/2023-10-11-cooperative-that-could-s-group-finland/