I’ve written here from time to time about the excellent service known as micro.blog — and I still want to commend it to those of you who have had enough of the big social-media platforms. You have to pay for it, but you get a lot for your money, including freedom from advertising. Micro.blog is […]
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Micro.blog has some cool features that many users are not aware of. (They’re not really hidden, but that made for a better title than “not especially well-known.”) Here are some of my favorites: 1) An emoji-based system of tagging: for instance, 📚, which will show you books that micro.blog users are currently reading. And here’s a […]
I was a Kickstarter backer of micro.blog and an early enthusiast, but I eventually drifted away from it because I was having trouble getting it to do what I want it to do. In some cases there were bugs in the system — it’s still a new platform, after all — and in some cases […]
I find this interesting: John Gruber reports that more of his listeners on The Talk Show use Overcast than Apple Podcasts. I used to love Overcast, but about three years ago it simply stopped playing podcasts in the queue. No matter what was in the queue or how I had added it, Overcast played the […]
Here is Ivan Illich, from Energy and Equity (1974), his book written in the midst of a global energy crisis that heightened everyone’s sense of our dependence on fossil fuels for transportation: The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of […]
In 1980, a curiously polymathic Jesuit priest named Michel de Certeau (1925–86) published a provocative book called, in English translation, The Practice of Everyday Life. (The original and more evocative French title is L’invention du quotidien Vol. 1: Arts de faire.) In the book’s introduction he lays out a simple and yet wonderfully generative opposition […]
As many of my readers will know, I am continually fiddling around with my online presence, to such a degree that I try my own patience. The one element that’s fixed is my newsletter, which (IMHO) has a clear identity and purpose. I always know when something I’ve come across will be a fit for […]
I’m back! — well, partially. Posting will be light for a while. But I certainly learned that for me micro.blog works best as a place to post images and sounds (and to make note of books I’m reading).
Heads up, friends: I’ll be taking a break from this blog in order to work on several projects — some essay-length, one (or maybe two) book-length — that my daily commentary here has been distracting me from. But while I’m away from here, I’ll be more active than usual at my micro.blog page, because links […]
I’ve often written in praise of RSS — see the tag — as a Better Way to read stuff online than any social media platform could possibly be. There are a thousand ways to use RSS, but if you happen to have a Mac an especially good one is NetNewsWire, the app that, many years […]
John Higgs’s William Blake vs the World is a real disappointment. Higgs writes vividly and is a fine storyteller, but like most people who write about Blake, he’s simply not willing to take Blake seriously. He wants to like Blake, and so he has to make him safe. The curators of the 2019 Blake Exhibition […]
One: I don’t do year-end lists, and I typically don’t read those of others. (Those of you who write them: Please forgive me!) I make note of books I’ve read, music I’ve listened to, and movies I’ve watched, but I do it in my paper planner. I like seeing my aesthetic experiences in their Lebenswelt: […]
Home invasion: For those of us who have been using Mastodon for a while (I started my own Mastodon server 4 years ago), this week has been overwhelming. I’ve been thinking of metaphors to try to understand why I’ve found it so upsetting. This is supposed to be what we wanted, right? Yet it feels […]
Noah Smith: So, Elon Musk bought Twitter. Personally, I’m pretty sanguine about this development. It’s no secret that I think that Twitter is a uniquely dystopian feature of the modern media sphere — a bad equilibrium that traps the nation’s journalists, politicians, and intellectuals in close quarters with all the nastiest and most strident anonymous […]
I won’t be blogging here for the foreseeable future, for reasons I explain here. I will continue, God willing, to produce my weekly newsletter, and I will post photos and links at my micro.blog page. Thanks to all for reading. UPDATE: See more recent thoughts here.
Om Malik: Instagram’s transformation into QVC is now complete and absolute. Instagram is dead — or at least the Instagram I knew and loved is dead. It is no longer part of my photographic journey. It’s way past time for anyone who actually cares about photos, and sharing photos, to ditch Instagram. Om himself has a […]
I try to make the best of the blogging environment, but I have always been fascinated by Jorn Barger’s early-web idea of what he called “single-layer web design” — it’s ironic that he is sometimes called the inventor of the weblog, because while he was one of the first to create a reverse-chronological list of links, […]
Interesting convo at micro.blog about what people use to take notes. Me? Handwriting in notebooks (usually Leuchtturm) Marginal commentary and sticky notes in books Voice notes in .mp3 format (the plain text of audio) Plain text notes on the computer I want my notes to be future-proof and platform-agnostic.
Elon Musk’s imminent purchase of Twitter has a good many people scurrying for the exits, and some of them are coming to micro.blog — which is awesome! I’ve written often here about micro.blog, and here’s a selection: Micro.blog and the open web Why a social network that scales up is a bad thing On Cal […]
A few brief notes: You’re seeing more posts about movies these days because I have a couple of long-term projects in mind that concern cinematic art, especially things made in the middle third of the 20th century. I am having a lot of fun watching! Related: Remember to explore this blog using the tags, […]
I think a lot about blogging, about why I like it, what I think I can accomplish through blogging that I can’t accomplish, or not easily anyway, through other kinds of writing … and that leads me to metaphors. For instance, I have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, […]
Senator Josh Hawley: To start, large social media companies should be required to become interoperable with one another: Just as you can email someone who uses a different email provider than your own, you should be able to contact and engage with individuals across different social media platforms. In the same vein, large social media […]
Well, my abandonment of this blog lasted less than a month. Here’s why, in a word: tags. When I decided to move quotes and links, as well as photos, to my micro.blog page, I forgot that I have been tagging my posts here for a long time, and that anything I post to micro.blog, where […]
I’ve been re-thinking my approach to blogging, and here’s my decision: Blogging has been rather parasitic on my essay-writing, so for the rest of this year and all of 2022 I am putting this blog on hiatus. We’ll see if that will help me to write more essays. Right now I’m working on one about […]
And by Glass I mean this. Holy cow is it beautiful. I’ve seen people saying “This is what Instagram used to be” — no. Instagram never looked this good, this clean. Photographs are all you see unless you swipe to get more details. I’m just following a few photographers right now, none of whom I […]
This is prompted largely by Robin Sloan’s comments on comments. A decade ago I was active on Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinboard, and wrote a couple of comment-inviting blogs on magazine websites. Now? No Twitter No Tumblr Pinboard bookmarks are set to private I blog on my own site, and have comments disabled I’m on micro.blog […]
Work on the Invitation & Repair project has basically come to a halt, and there are three major reasons for that. First of all, I really need to buckle down and get some work done on my project of editing Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles. I agreed to produce this edition a year or […]
I read stories like this almost every day: banned from Twitter for no good reason; banned from Facebook for no good reason; banned from Facebook supposedly by accident, but come on, we know what’s going on here. I don’t for an instant think Bret Weinstein’s Facebook account was flagged by an algorithm: someone there wanted […]
Herewith an update to this post. Since I still don’t have a Mac I can easily use without broiling my fingers, I have continued to work on being a better user of the iPad. I’m running the iPad OS 14 beta, and am find it very useful to create Shortcuts for common actions and put […]
I mentioned on my micro.blog that I’ve been reading Stephen Harrigan’s magnificent Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. (The title comes from the painter Georgia O’Keefe, a native of Wisconsin who remembered her first coming to west Texas: “I couldn’t believe Texas was real. When I arrived out there, there wasn’t a blade of […]
Brent Simmons is right: It’s weird to see people bemoan the decline of blogging and do it on Twitter. You can blog! You can blog for free if you want! (Though the best options require a few bucks.) Get over your social-media Stockholm Syndrome and start doing the thing you know is better. Cross-post to […]
As some of you may have noticed, I’m not posting here very frequently. I think for the foreseeable future I’m only going to be using this blog for longer reflections — long by internet standards, anyway. From day to day you’ll find me posting to my micro.blog account — and if you haven’t checked out […]
Nolan Lawson: Get off of Twitter. You can’t criticize Twitter on Twitter. It just doesn’t work. The medium is the message. There’s an old joke where one fish says to the other, “How’s the water today?” And the fish responds, “What’s water?” On Twitter, you might ask, “How’s the outrage today?” (The answer, of course, […]
Here’s something I often find myself wanting to do: write plain-text files in a text editor using Markdown and then publish directly to WordPress. As far as I can tell, there’s only one way to do that on the Mac: Byword. There are other apps that give you some of what I want: for instance, […]
As a consistent and perhaps obnoxious advocate for the open web — see here and especially here — I was thrilled to see this article by Cal Newport, and more than thrilled to see the shout-out to micro.blog. Please come check it out, along with me. Just one point for now: Newport writes, “Despite its […]
Jeffrey Zeldman: Along those same lines, can the IndieWeb, and products of IndieWeb thinking like Micro.blog, save us? Might they at least provide an alternative to the toxic aspects of our current social web, and restore the ownership of our data and content? And before you answer, RTFM. On an individual and small collective basis, […]
Over the past year I’ve been making some significant changes to certain elements of my technological life — significant, but incremental and slow. I have tried not to change too many things at once, because when I’ve tried that in the past it has never worked out for me. Here’s a summary of my progress: […]
A note for those of you who don’t look at my micro.blog: I have deleted my TinyLetter account and moved my newsletter to buttondown.email. If you have already subscribed through TinyLetter, you should also be subscribed to the new one. If you have not subscribed, you may do so here.
Warren Ellis: I feel like I want to see some more thought around getting the fuck off social networks but being able to maintain lines of connection between friends, comrades and fellow-travellers in addition to the Republic Of Newsletters and the Isles Of Blogging. Status pages as the signals from the Invisible Monastery, or, possibly, […]
Am I finally done with Twitter? After years of leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back? If I haven’t learned how to leave Twitter, at least I’ve learned how not to claim that I’m leaving Twitter. But I’m closer than I’ve ever been. There’s almost never any pleasure in visiting Twitter now, just the […]
Instagram is very pleased with its algorithm. Good for them — but that algorithm is the reason I have deleted my account. I could never see what I want to see in Instagram — again and again and again I would find out what friends were doing days after I needed to know. The only […]
