"Chayka, a millennial, is nostalgic for... the images he once shared on Tumblr; an earlier, jankier World Wide Web of illegal file-sharing, blogs and and massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) forums."

"He first heard 'My Favorite Things' not in 'The Sound of Music' but the John Coltrane version, listening to an indie station as he wended his way back from a friend’s house in the suburbs in the early ’00s. Boomers and Gen X, with more years logged algorithm-free, might find 'Filterworld' unduly bleak; Zoomers, hopelessly naïve. Or, as they say on the internet, YMMV."

I'm reading "Can You Escape the Algorithm?/‘Filterworld’ Gives It a Try. An experiment in digital disengagement prompts Kyle Chayka to consider how technology has narrowed our choices and dulled the culture" (free access link to the NYT).

That's a review, from a couple weeks ago, of the book "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture" by Kyle Chayka (commission-earned link).

I'm reading that this morning after searching the NYT archive for "MMORPGs," a very annoying set of letters that I'd never noticed before, but ran across as an answer in a crossword, clued as "RuneScape and World of Warcraft, for two: Abbr."

My reaction was: If that's the way it's going to be, I'm not doing your crosswords anymore.

Overreaction? My test of whether this is something I should recognize, because it comes up in real life, is whether it's in the NYT archive. This was not the NYT crossword. And, yes, I'm a Boomer.

You can see that the recent appearance of MMORPG was in parentheses, after a spelling-out of what it abbreviates. Before that, it hadn't appeared since 2019. But back in 2013 and in 2005-2006, the annoying letter combo appeared a handful of times. I see the phrase "the wonderfully named MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games)."

I guess I won't boycott that puzzle, but I can see how puzzle publishers risk alienating their audience. Puzzles are full of things that are easy for Boomers like me and that must be very annoying to Millennials and Zoomers. But when I see something like MMORPG, I just think it's a pathetic play to get young people to think this thing is for them. And please don't say YMMV either. 

And yet MMORPGs are among the things the "Filterworld" author is nostalgic for. It's not new. It's old. Mid-level old. Like blogs. I'm nostalgic for blogs too, of course, but I'm still here in mine, and I presume there's this other group of people — who the hell are they? — who are still out there in their MMORPGs.

Obsessively following Twitter.

Elsewhere in the NYT, there's a whole big story about a woman who tweets other people's recipes. It's a challenge translating the directions into 140 characters. It's also a challenge translating them out of 140 characters if you actually want to use them.

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Remember when you borrowed the notes of a classmate who had a penchant for compression? Or were you the one who always went to class and then did you deliberately compress, compress like mad — with lots of idiosyncratic abbreviations — so you could say I don't think these notes are comprehensible to anyone but me? Did they insist on borrowing your notes anyway? (Remember how nerve-wracking that was back in the days when it meant handing over your precious spiral notebook?)

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Questions:

1. Tightly compressed writing. Good or bad?

2. New York Times constantly writing about Twitter. Good or bad? If bad: bad because they need to keep being obsessed with blogging?

3. Class notes. Were you the one who wanted to borrow or the one pressed to share? Did you?

4. Blogging: Compress more or go ahead and expand? (No one stopping you.)

5. Blogging: One topic per post or mix it up?

6. Bloggers: Annoying or cool? Cooler/more annoying than Twitterers?