Perhaps the best idiosyncrasy of electronic music is how, more than anything, it manages to convey moral clarity. A synth can tell you who you are, or, more accurately, who you’re not.| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
The new Apple headset — the clunkily named Vision Pro — has begun to roll out to the public. You can preorder it now, even. Tech journalists have been getting stage-managed experiences with it; it is the latest gizmo that purports to change at least something about the| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
I have been obsessed with this phrase over the past week or so. It came across my various feeds in that fragmented way I think of as characteristic of TikTok: I was seeing reactions way before I saw the actual event. Which is here: imagine if ninja got a low| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
The sun is shining, finally. Weakly — New York, for all its winter rain, is still in the northeast — but it's there. This isn't a metaphor or anything. Lately I've just been stuck inside, playing Rayman 2 on the Dreamcast. Anyway! I was| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
You know, I'd forgotten what it was like to be a freelancer. I realize now I was spoiled by warm, unhealthy embrace of some years of Salaried Labor (though, I should note, I was freelancing that entire time). It's just different here on the other side,| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
It's me! Your friendly neighborhood blogger man Bijan. The first thing you'll note is that this newsletter is not on Substack. You know why. And so here we are, starting again. This time on Ghost. The second thing you'll probably notice: there are now subscription tiers. That's right, I'm asking| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
Hello! I disappeared for another week — sorry about that. I should be back to regularity soon, I think. It's been busy over here at Bijan, Inc. You know how it is when you're a freelancer: can't look a gift job in the payment system, or something. Anyway. I have returned| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
Hello! Sorry for the brief, unscheduled break in newsletters — I was at the Game Developers Conference out in San Francisco, and things were a bit chaotic. The weather was beautiful, though, and I learned to love the city's municipal transit. This time around, GDC drew in nearly 30,000 people;| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
I saw this TikTok the other day — which I didn't think to save and now, naturally, can't find again — where this guy showed a screenshot of his TikTok payout for the month, incensed at a potential ban. He said something like: where else am I going to make $11,000| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
By now you've probably heard that Akira Toriyama is dead. If you haven't, well, I'm sorry that this is how you're finding out. But the fact remains: on March 1st, at 68, the most famous manga artist of his generation left this| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
I published a video this week, which you can watch here if you feel like it: I wanted to write a little about how it all came together. The story is both more and less interesting than you'd think: it was, in fact, commissioned by an organization. (Yes, you can| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
You know, it looks like the era of blogging for money is definitively over. VICE died ignominiously, killed by the same ravening capital that's destroying America's fourth estate — and, of course, its ability to understand itself. I idolized the site much longer than I| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
Every day I wake up and the first thing I do is check my phone. I know I'm not unique in this. I do it because it's where my friends are; I do it because I'm still waiting for the email that I know| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
A few years ago I had this podcast idea I posted about on Twitter. And it went something like this: What if there were a show that talked to the creator middle class about how they made their money? Pretty simple, imo. The idea was we'd talk to people hustling| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles
I've been thinking about Gunpei Yokoi a lot lately. Before his tragic death in 1997, Yokoi was a game designer at Nintendo — one of the first, in fact. For them, he created the Game & Watch, the Virtual Boy, and the original Game Boy; over in games, he produced games like| You've Run Out of Complimentary Articles