Three Recs: March 14, 2024

SimCity, Smashing Pumpkins, and banning TikTok.

Hey! I’ve been sick this week. Boooooo! I think it’s just an awful allergic response to all of the trees blooming here in Middle Tennessee! The costs of spring, I suppose. Anyway, here’s some stuff I’ve come across recently.

#1) SimCity 2000 30 Years Later

I loved playing this game as a kid, even though I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I watched this video over the course of a few days while eating my lunch. Super fascinating!

#2) Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness by Smashing Pumpkins

I guess I’m feeling nostalgic in this week’s recommendations. Something recently brought to mind the 1990s grunge rock group Smashing Pumpkins, so I went to Spotify and looked up their 1995 album Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness to listen to it for the first time in a number of years.

It sounds funny, but this is one of the first CDs I remember listening to when I was a kid. It came out the day before my fifth birthday. Should a five-year-old have been listening to this album? No, probably not. But I remember the older brother of an older friend picking up this album and bringing it back to the house when I was over. I so vividly remember seeing the album art, popping out the CD, and putting it in the stereo.

Anyway, upon re-listening, I just think it’s okay. There are a few songs I enjoyed, but it didn’t hold up for me like I thought it would. It does very much capture 90s grunge for me, though. And I grew up on this, Presidents of the United States of America (millions of peaches, peaches for me), Green Day, and others like it. Here’s the album, if you want to see for yourself:

#3) What if nobody owned our children's data?

A bill is moving through Congress that would potentially ban TikTok in the United States.

We have come close to this before, but one could argue this movement has as much momentum as any to come before it. This is a short piece about it. This last portion is the most poignant, for me.

In fact, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan asked reporters yesterday: "Do we want the data from TikTok — children’s data, adults’ data — to be going — to be staying here in America or going to China?" 

What about, uh, no one? What if nobody had… our children's data?