Using the words that fit

From the blogger Michael Lynch, who was writing about what changed for him when he started to use non-business school terms to describe what he makes.

When I talked about my personal blog, I just called it a blog. There was never a situation where “content” would have conveyed a richer meaning. My website visitors aren’t “traffic”; they’re readers. They don’t “generate engagement”; they send me comments or questions. When I started writing my book, I never called it an “info product.” It’s a book, and I’m its author.

He goes on to say,

I did notice an immediate change, especially with words like “traffic.” Traffic makes me feel like I’m just throwing out flypaper and measuring whatever sticks. When I describe website visitors as “readers,” it reminds me that these are real people who have literally billions of other things they could be reading that day, but they’re choosing to spend some of their limited time with me.

From the first paragraph of this dispatch from Chris Arnade’s Substack.

A friend of mine came out of her “Conquer your fear of Flying!” course even more nervous, saying “They spent hours explaining how an airplane works. Great, now I have hundreds of different details to worry about. All I wanted was for them to tell me ‘It’s magic’ and move on.” That’s me, but with the body.

Yeah. I can relate to that.

Via Manu’s blog

When you’re mad at a company, figure out who is actually responsible for the things you’re mad about, and be mad at them. Because people can be held accountable.

Yeah.

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Manu was writing about how people get mad at companies, when it might be more useful/productive to direct dissatisfaction at the decision-makers within the companies.

As I read the post, my thoughts turned to the way that some people in my life seem to be freaked out about AI, and are talking about what the frontier models are doing, or about the data centers as objects.

Talking about this is fine.

However, I would say that it is vital to remember that the models and the data centers Are things that are created by people? who control large companies, or who have been elected to legislate (regulate?) the action of said companies.

It seems to me that we would get the most bang for our buck if we held the legislators accountable. If we demand they do the things we have elected them to do. One of those things is to make sure large powerful companies can’t just do whatever they want without being held accountable for what goes wrong when they move without concern for the downstream affects of their actions.

I deleted five RSS feeds that I’ve been only skimming or skipping for many months now.

My RSS experience keeps getting more the way I want it!

This site that regenerates am the headlines of NYTimes articles to communicate facts,, as opposed to click-bait, is really cool.

I know this is very old-news-dot-com, but for years I’ve started my day by looking at email and mainstream news. Recently, I’ve changed things up. I’m starting the day by opening Net News Wire, an app I really like, and reading the RSS feeds I follow.

The effects are interesting (at least to me).

1. I am generally out of touch with whatever is in the current news cycle. People often ask me about something happening, and when I tell them I’m not aware of what they are talking about, they are surprised. (I think it isimportant tosay that they are surprised but not frustrated, angry, or incredulous. Their reaction is usually something like, “You have not heard? Really? Oh wow, ok I’ll fill you in.")
2. I still don’t feel like I’m in touch with where I live my life locally. But I do feel like I’m more in touch with things/ideas that I find personally interesting and relevant to me.
3. I’ve emailed people whose work I follow more often, and they usually email me back. So, I think I’m making new acquaintances.
4. I’ve been taking out RSS feeds that I subscribed to at one point for some reason, but nowadays I don’t really care for them.
5. I’ve discovered a few new RSS feeds (via the RSS feeds I follow linking to them).

This morning, I was thinking this kind of feels like the internet did around 2005-2010.

I llike it.

I saw something else from James Reeves today about how he got an email complaint and how it made him angry, but he followed a rule he made for himself — wait an hour to reply; two hours is even better.

Then he looked into it and saw the complaint was rather justified.

I like his rule. I’m going to try to implement it for myself. (I can actually set a timer and prevent myself from typing out an angry reply to something until after the timer is done. It’s such a good idea.)

I read this on Dave Winer’s Scripting Newsthis morning.

The siloers are probably scrambling to find a way for the AI to run inside their world, mistake – instead they should be trying to tear down the silo, and become the default version of whatever it was meant to be wrt the web. Both Bluesky and WordPress find themselves in the same quagmire. Probably a lot of others do, but this is the area I study.

This is the intuition we all had, coming to fruition. Evolution is something we haven’t seen much of in the software world since 2006 or so. Incredible stagnation because of the dominance of the social web. We lost the software web. All the focus was on personalities, celebrity – hype and 99.999% bullshit. It was a 20 year period where all that happened was scaling.

Dave is someone who’s work has fundamentally changed how I engage with information via RSS and podcasts. I think he’s on to something here.

I started reading Consider Phlebas, the first book in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, last night. I stayed up way too late reading it, and I’m feeling the effects this morning.

Reading this book is interesting because in the beginning there are all these strange things in the text that I have no context for. Be that as it may, the text is interesting and I’m enjoying what I read.

Some more publications that I want to take a closer look at.

1. Bikepacking
2. Sidetracked

I just picked up a copy of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert MacFarlance. The first sentences in this book are double plus super good.

Two days short of the winter solstice; the turn of the year’s tide. All that cold day, the city and the countryside around felt halted, paused. Five degrees below freezing and the earth battened down. Clouds held snow that would not fall. […] Then just before dusk the snow came – dropping straight for five hours and settling at a steady inch an hour. […] The snow was sinking through the orange cone cast by a street light, the fat flakes showing like furnace sparks.

Wow.

I’m posting this here so I won’t forget all these interesting publications I’d like to learn more about.

1. Drift - It’s about wandering the streets aimlessly, cup of coffee in hand, and learning more about what a place has to offer, whether you’ve been there for 25 minutes or 25 years.
2. Orion - Their argument is that literature grounded in the natural world is really literature about lives lived in places. Fiction, essays, poetry, visual art, conversations, ecology, culture. It’s also nonprofit and ad-free.
3. Apartamento - Its ostensible subject is interiors, but its actual subject is how people live.
4. Emergence Magazine - Its explicit philosophy is “slow consumption.” Online it publishes long-form essays, films, interviews and photo essays about our relationship with the living world; once a year it makes a lavish physical volume of several hundred pages with essays, poetry, art and photography on varied paper stocks. Think less “outdoor culture” and more attention, ecology, temporality and ways of inhabiting the world.

A fellow parent and blogger deathmtn shared this earlier today:

The guy has started sleeping twelve hours a night in the past week. The adjustment to school hours is gonna be really rough.

Yeah.

(Solidarity, bro.)

Via Warren Ellis’s blog:

It occurred to me the other evening that the bingewatch and the doomscroll are the same thing: a symptom of having given up control of your life.

Yeah.

Note: I realize I link back to Warren Ellis, and a few other people who produce work I enjoy. There are a few reasons for this.

1. Ellis posts often, and posts a lot of stuff I think is interesting.
2. I use this space (my blog/open notebook) as a way to capture things I want to remember.

What would it change?

I read this today on Ganzeer’s blog.

Random thought: The whole simulation theory that seems to be increasingly trendy these days actually isn't at all at odds with any of the traditional religious beliefs of old, the ones that imagined God as an anthropomorphized king on a throne in the clouds. Because simulation theory by definition implies the entire universe being created by someone somewhere

I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing, because I’ve been talking about it with a few people.

When I say “this kind of thing,” I mean big questions like:

• Does God exist?
• Is the universe a simulation?
• Do we have free will, or do we live in a deterministic universe we experience in a way that allows us to feel like/believe we have free will?

I’ve noticed that in the conversations I’ve had about these questions, some people have really strong opinions which they will argue for fervently. They will get really worked up.

I tend to enjoy the conversations, but I don’t get worked up, because I keep thinking to myself, for me, the answers do not change anything.

• If God exists, what would I do differently? Nothing.
• If God does exist, what would I do differently? Nothing.
• If God exists in a way that human beings can and never will understand, would I do anything differently? Nope
• If the universe is or is not a simulation, would it change how I live my life? I don’t think it would.
• If free will is an illusion, would it change how I live my life? Again, I don’t think it would. (Though after watching the show Devs, which I learned about when a friend talked about it in one of these free-wheeling conversations about all this stuff, I’m not as sure about this one.)

As I reflect on all this stuff right now, as I write these words, I wonder if I’m being a little too sure of myself. I don’t know the answers to these questions. They are mysteries, and I think that’s why they are cool and fun to think about or talk about. But maybe if I could know the answers to these questions, if they stopped being mysterious, it would have some massive effect on who and what I am. If I did know the existence status of God, or that I was/wasn’t in a simulation, or that free will was/wasn’t an illusion, all sorts of stuff about how I live my life would change.

I don’t know.

I guess I like not knowing.

Not knowing is fun.

The national mantra

From John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog

“Fuck you, make me” is, to me, the founding principle of this nation. That was our message to King George III, a tyrant descending into madness...

Then from another post

This is how you handle a bully: “Fuck you, make me.”

Yeah.

From On Writing, Content, and Art, by Manu:

This is clearly writing and, therefore, I am a writer. But in that case, we’re probably all writers. We all text and send emails and post online. Are we all writers? What makes a writer a writer? The medium? The length? The meaning? The time spent?

Fun to think about those questions, eh?

From Warren Ellis’s newsletter Orbital Oppositions:

Feeling good, doing what you like and taking pleasure in things isn’t a luxury. […] here’s the takeaway: live your life like it’s worth living. You’ll feel better. Wear your favourite clothes. Cate Winter, a wiser woman than I will ever be a man, once said to me; don’t save things for that perfect time, because that time will never come and what you’re saving will either go bad or never be used at all, so enjoy them now.

Yeah.

From Midnight Radio: A Toarchlight Shining at the Bastards by James Reeves.

Where he writes about this amazing brass pirate lamp his grandfather owned.

For decades, this brass pirate lamp stood on a workbench in my grandfather’s basement that smelled of spider poison and Saginaw Bay.

That, whoever is reading this, is one hell if a sentence! I wish I wrote sentences that good.

Anyway, James talks about how when his grandfather was moved into a retirement home.

To help residents locate their rooms, the nursing staff encouraged each patient to place a memento on a shelf next to each door. Plastic flowers, birthday cards, family snapshots, and woodland figurines lined the halls because it’s easier to remember a picture of your grandchild than room 27B.

That got me thinking about memory, and our relationship to memory. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as of late. Don’t know why.

Via Warren Ellis’s blog:

Very quickly filling up a notebook with bad ideas. Which is the only way I know of to get at the better ideas.

Yeah.

Just found the site Write That Blog. Lots of fun, interesting stuff here. Too bad I don’t have more time to read it all!

From The Journal 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau.

Oct. 22 [1837] “What are you doing now?” he asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.

I propose that this become the standard first blog post, rather than “Hello world!”

I read the post On Dreams and Goals on Manu’s blog this morning. That post is an example of the internet at its best. If you’re reading this, please click the link and read what he wrote. It’s not long, and it is very, very cool.

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P.S.

This is an old post from a prior blog, which I’m currently migrating over to From78.

Writing on disquiet, Marc Weidenbaum says,

The key thing is that blogging is not about final drafts. Blogging is as much a public notepad as social media is at its best (to be clear, most of social media is social media at its worst). It’s not a magazine; it’s a journal.

Earlier in the same post, Marc also had this to say about an RSS feed being a key part of a blog because RSS gives the reader a different experience than going to the blog-as-a-website.

A certain breed of email newsletter counts [as a kind of blog], as well, when the issues double as URL-specific posts, and — and this is key — there is an RSS feed to access them. I remain convinced that an RSS feed is an essential component of a blog — that, alternately, to require people to repeatedly visit your website of their own volition, and in the process for them to recall precisely where they left off reading the last time they were there, is simply too much to ask of a reader. It was too much to ask in the late 1990s, and in our cellphone-mediated, notification-riddled present, it is all the more so. RSS brings the writing to the reader, and in some ways isn’t that distinct from email.

I’ve been thinking back to what early blogging and podcasting were like lately. Reading Marc’s post reinforced something that had crossed my mind: a return to an older style of blogging (and podcasting?) could be a good idea. Certainly something to try.

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P.S.

This is a re-post of an old post from a prior blog. I’m slowly migrating those posts over to From78.

Many people have been posting about an essay by Terry Godier that articulates something he calls “phantom obligation”. I’ve read it twice and have been thinking about the concept much more than unexpected.

However, the way I’ve been thinking about it has more to do with how I feel a version of phantom obligation in relation to small household tasks, and within significant relationships with other people and institutions.

It’s nice to have phantom obligation as a signifier to think with, to name what I might be feeling after I feel it…

The rendering of the concept into words does not cure my tendency to experience phantom obligation, but it does help me retroactively interpret that experience in a way that has the affect of reducing the pressure of the imagined/assumed/felt sense of obligation.

I think this is a good thing.