Friday Five: Feb 12, 2016

1. Your Annual “Is Fashion Week Dead?” Article

Right on time, another “is this the last fashion week?” and “should it be?” article. This time from a semi-unexpected place, The Atlantic. A good breakdown of where the hell the two season trend of fashion shows came from and how it morphed into the four to eight show season we see today.

2. The Last “Twitter Is Dead” Piece In This Newsletter Ever, I Promise.

I know, I know, we talked about this last week. I said it on twitter some point this week, but maybe if Twitter wants to stop losing users they should spend some time fixing their problems instead of creating new ways for advertisers to leverage the platform. A good place to start would be a better abuse reporting system and arming their users with the tools they’ve been asking for to protect themselves. While a lot of the examples given in the article are extreme, it’s beyond a doubt that there are a lot of cases where harassment and doxxing have gotten out of hand. More from a financial/business perspective in the NYTimes.

3. Bitcoin Vs. Bitcoin

I haven’t been following the cryptocurrency news as much as I used to, so somehow I was completely unaware of this split in Bitcoin. A simplified TL;DR version of the issue goes like this: some users want to allow peers on the bitcoin network to have slightly more control over the blockchain in an effort to aleivate the lag time and burden on the network, on the other side we have users who say doing this is “against the rules” so to speak of the original Bitcoin system and that by upsetting the balance of user power it would defeat the idea of a purely equal currency.

4. Hack The (JSTOR) Planet

The story of a group of people who decided that academic papers and research shouldn’t exist behind a paywall and created a pirated database of them. When a publisher went after them for piracy, they did what all pirates do, and re-hosted their cache of academia on the dark web.

​5. Firewatch

After all the hype and buzz building up to it’s release, Firewatch is out. I’ve gotten about two hours of playtime in, and it’s a damn good looking game, although the gameplay still leaves a little to be desired. Both Wired (linked above) and The New Yorker took similar approaches to talking about the game, mostly revolving around Indie Designer Numero Uno: Olly Moss.

Bonus: Fear And Loathing In The Andes

Models, a snow storm, a Neiman Marcus Furs catalogue, and lots and lots of cocaine.