Stagger onward rejoicing
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 … Continue reading the three paths of micro.blog
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 … Continue reading hidden features of micro.blog
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 … Continue reading getting back to the open web via micro.blog
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 … Continue reading adjustments
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 … Continue reading hiatus
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 … Continue reading a better way
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 … Continue reading Blake domesticated
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: … Continue reading removals: a few year-endish thoughts
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 like something else. Like when you’re sitting in a quiet carriage softly chatting with a couple of friends and then an entire platform of football fans get on at Jolimont Station after their team lost. They don’t usually catch trains and don’t know the protocol. They assume everyone on the train was at the game or at least follows football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat configuration.
It’s not entirely the Twitter people’s fault. They’ve been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago. It was part of the reason many moved to Mastodon in the first place. This means there’s been a jarring culture clash all week as a huge murmuration of tweeters descended onto Mastodon in ever increasing waves each day. To the Twitter people it feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves “refugees,” but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don’t know how to order room service. We also mourn the world we’re losing.
I’m a bit concerned about micro.blog — I don’t use Mastodon — for just this reason. That’s why I wrote a few months ago, “On micro.blog, you have absolutely no incentive to flex, shitpost, self-promote, or troll. You’re there to post interesting things and/or chat with people. Nothing else makes sense.”
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 … Continue reading so let’s chill
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.
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 photo blog, which is also how I’m using micro.blog. My friend Sara Hendren just told me about finite.photos, which looks promising. Glass isn’t, I think, quite right for me, but it’s lovely. Heck, there are even people still using Flickr, though my experience there was horrible. But anything is better than Instagram.
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, … Continue reading excerpt from my Sent folder: nodes
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 … Continue reading a bit of advice
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, … Continue reading scatterings
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, … Continue reading revisiting architectural blogging
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 companies should be required to permit the use of alternate filtering and sorting algorithms — democratizing content moderation by allowing users to choose which content they wish to view or block, rather than relying on the black-box internal processes of an individual, hyper-concentrated company.
Agreed, except that the first point is potentially in tension with the second. Perhaps micro.blog should be forced to become interoperable with Twitter, but I should also be able to set my micro.blog account so that I will never see anything that anyone on Twitter says to me — which is precisely the setting I would choose.
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 … Continue reading here I am again
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 … Continue reading heads up
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 … Continue reading thoughts on Glass
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 … Continue reading the fault
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 … Continue reading next steps
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 … Continue reading it’s time
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 … Continue reading iPad update
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 … Continue reading hoisting the flag
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 … Continue reading on blogging
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 … Continue reading here and there
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, … Continue reading to put the point plainly
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, … Continue reading plain text and WordPress
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 … Continue reading indie web in the New Yorker
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, … Continue reading scale is the enemy
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: … Continue reading interim tech report
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, … Continue reading maintaining lines of connection
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 … Continue reading the “gradual decay” of Twitter
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 … Continue reading good-bye Instagram
