Some jokes require you to think about them for a bit before you laugh. For example, that classic knee-slapper we all heard in the locker room: “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”.

Some jokes are the opposite: laughter requires that you do not think about the joke, at all, and that as soon as you hear it you must jam a screwdriver through your eminence ridge, giving yourself a frontal lobotomy.

Playboy’s recent announcement that it will stop featuring pictures of nude women provoked in me a “hahaha” reaction followed by “…makes sense, I guess. Not like they signed a contract saying they’d print porn forever. They’re in a declining market. Or rather, a market that has declined so much that it has ‘declined’ into a hill on the other side of the world. Might as well jump ship and start doing something that makes money.”

Welcome to 2015: there isn’t a market for print porn. Photographs of naked women are worthless now. This isn’t the 70s, or an Amish community. We have a military-funded porn delivery system in our houses now. Porn is so common and ubiquitous that they might as well have decided not to print photographs of wallpaper.

Playboy’s selling point was that it had a thin veneer of class, you could read it without feeling like a total sleazeball. So why not focus on the class? Playboy’s value is not that they provide porn. Any idiot can find porn. Their value is in their brand. They’re an iconic household name. There’s all sorts of ways they can spin it to make money. They don’t have to do porn. And that’s good, because they’d file chapter 11 if they did.

The magazine actually has really good content. Porn is worth literally nothing against exclusive new writing by Stephen King and Haruki Murakami, or interviews with Metallica. It’s safe to say that the average person in 2015 actually is reading Playboy for the articles.

Times change. Playboy’s Playmates have their time in the spotlight, then they gracefully age into real estate agents and radical feminists. Hugh Hefner’s changing too – once he was the icon of crazy wild partying, now he’s the icon of crazy wild oxygen therapy (does he even have sex anymore? At that age all I’d want from my girlfriends is a nice long foot massage.). Why shouldn’t the magazine itself be ready for change? Remember, there’s no stasis anywhere in nature. If you’re not evolving, you’re regressing.

(Also in the funny if you don’t think about it category: this. That’s like a 50 meter walk. Would you want to carry heavy bags of groceries and furniture that far? Let the man have his car. Jeez.)

Ask a musician how they want their music listened to, and you’ll get an answer like “lossless FLACs over a $5,000 stereo system with a Filipino houseboy giving you a foot massage.”

Of course, the average person will listen to it on torrented 128kb/s mp3s on $19.95 headphones while watching porn and playing a videogame and texting on two different phones. That’s the world we live in now, and it isn’t going away.

This is a new and untested ecosystem for music, and I wonder how it’s affecting what sort of music gets listened to. Theory: music that you can listen to with 5% of your brain is selected for. Elaborate, subtle, and detailed music is selected against.

It would perhaps shift the tonal centers of popular music towards frequencies that are easy to filter out. Some frequency ranges – like around 10khz – have a harsh, grating quality: “look at me” kinds of frequencies. Easily ignorable music would probably dial back those frequencies and boost the soft, low 300hz bass and the clean, sparkling 12khz highs. I’ve heard it said that Bose speakers do exactly that: and their supposed pleasant sound comes from a pretty lopsided response spectrum: emphasising nice frequencies, and killing harsh ones.

What about song lengths? Here’s a graph I found about the average song length per year, but I mistrust it. They just dumped all the songs from MusicBrainz’ database into it, but aren’t some songs more popular than others? Why include a bunch of 30 second grindcore songs that nobody listens to in your data? Someone should find a way to calculate the average length of #1 singles. An ideal length of 3:20 is something I’ve heard before, although I don’t know how true it is.

Another thing is that a lot of radio stations actually speed up their music by 1% or 2% – for a more upbeat feel and so they’ve got room for more precious ads.

But to add epicycles, there’s likely other trends running counter to simpler, dumber music. Digital media also allows you to do things like easily skip to a certain point to hear it again, or look things up on the internet so you can REALLY find out what “Puff the Magic Dragon”‘s about. We’re at the mercy of radio DJs no more, and that should encourage more variety.

Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I’m afraid. – HAL 9000

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could do. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice. — La Rochefoucauld

The water a cow laps turns into milk; the water a snake licks changes into poison. — Zen saying

The most dangerous form of transportation, by passenger-mile, is the bed. — #micronations

I knew that if I lived long enough, something like this would happen. — George Bernard Shaw’s epitaph

What are the marks of a sick culture? It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population. — Robert A. Heinlein

A college student once asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe what is his job. The Rebbe gestured to the ceiling of his room and replied: “Do you see that light bulb? It is connected by wires to a power plant that powers the whole of Brooklyn. And that plant is connected to turbo-generators at Niagara Falls that power the whole of New York State and more. Every one of us is a light bulb wired in to an infinitely powerful generator. But the room may still be dark, because the connection has yet to be made. The job of a rebbe is to take your hand in the dark room and help it find the switch.”

I like the word `indolence.’ it makes my laziness seem classy. — Bern Williams

Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it might be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it. — Lemony Snicket