Links: Henry, come on (+3)
- Henry, come on (AM / S) is the new track by Lana Del Rey, released this week, from her upcoming tenth studio album which will presumably be released later this year. It’s a quiet acoustic ballad with country elements: country is really big at the moment with everyone from Lana to Beyonce trying to squeeze its influence into their pop music. What a time to be alive.
- Author Robin Sloan’s newsletter was particularly great this month, packed full of links to interesting things. Sloan has a huge variety of interests and can seemingly write about absolutely anything. Will need to pick up one of his books.
- This week I learnt about the Indie Web carnival, which is an effort across the independent web to choose a writing prompt each month to give independent writers inspiration around a common theme. This year April’s theme is renewal, which I also read about on Sacha Chua’s wonderful blog, and which I feel like I have also written about a bunch on this site since I started it a month ago. Anyway, a very welcome intitiative. Considering putting my name down to “host” a future month.
- Because of new web searching capabilities, ChatGPT is now capable of answering the questions “Who is Clinton Boys?” and “Write a small post in the style of Clinton Boys” for the first time. I can only imagine the directions this kind of “SEO” for LLMs is going to go in the coming years. I desperately wish there was a way to ensure AI scrapers can’t touch a site and make it only accessible to human beings.
Photograph: Close up of a butterfly on a leaf at the Horniman Museum, Forest Hill, London, 2023.