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Thank you for broadcasting the coolguy.website vibes. The ritual for PCs is good and future too. https://coolguy.website/rituals/enchantment-ritual.html
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Phoneticalized ‘COTMs up’. COTM is crontab of the mind.
Phoneticalized ‘COTMs up’. COTM is crontab of the mind.
Much like a jubilant toast, this expression ends an immensely thought-provoking discussion where I am left with much to reconsider. Like the ‘crontab’, a long-running system process that periodically triggers itself, these are the thoughts that might poke me on an hourly schedule throughout the night.
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Ok, trying out an interview here—throwing some questions to the author of a beloved ‘zine’/‘operating system’.
I try to go out looking for links as much as possible.
(God’s sake, man—why?? Who needs more links, I can give you links—don’t toss yourself into the brambles—)
But I love to see the horrors and grotesques—to measure and inspect them. I aspire to be a grotesque and must be very studious about achieving it!
It all pays off when a link like whimsy.space comes a long.
kicks: Daniel, had a few questions about whimsy.space. (I really love glitch, too, of course—and hope it’s doing well, but the zine hits a nerve for me.) So, what ‘works’/‘zines’ inspired whimsy.space?
danielx: I was inspired by sites that have a lot of heart, things like the original Geocities. Also the feeling of personal computing from the mid 90s like win 3.1 and Win95. I’m also a fan of things like Dwarf Fortress and Bennett Foddy’s games.
Not necessarily that they are inaccessible for the sake of being inaccessible, but that if they were simpler they would be something different. Philosophically I’ve read and respect Alan Kay “The real computer revolution hasn’t happened yet” and Bret Victor.
kicks: Yeah, oh man, Foddy. I teach at an elementary school and a favorite activity I do is to play Foddy games with the kids hooked up to wires (Makey Makey-style) so that when they close the loop (by jumping on the floor or slapping hands, for instance) then CLOP hops around. It’s a credit to the simplicity of his design that we can do that.
What do you hope for it now? Was it just a momentary plaything—or is it an obsession?
danielx: It has been an on and off obsession. It depends on what else I’ve got going on in life and work outside of my own esoteric pursuits.
It’s definitely the hobby
that brings me the most joy when I get to dig into it and see where it goes.
Early on I decided that it would be for my own personal enjoyment and I wouldn’t
look for ways to “make it a success” or “turn it into a business”. I want to
keep my work and play separate you could say 
kicks: I like that it doesn’t explain itself. I didn’t even get that it was REALLY a zine the first time I visited. I still don’t really understand how the filesystem and social media inside of it works. And I can’t help but feel that its opacity is symbolic. It feels like a hidden trove - like a person is or maybe like an animal is. You probably don’t care about ease of use - how did you design it?
danielx: I’ve created a lot of different web applications and sites and things over the years. Some of them for fun and some as businesses. With whimsy.space my goal was to have it be a curated collection of all my works along with other things I find interesting. About eight years ago I built an online game development environment at pixieengine.com. Now it’s been simplified to a pixel editor and art community. Whimsy.space is the spiritual successor to that, I want many different applications that can interact and contribute to creating content. To recreate the part of personal computing where the operator of the computer could combine small components in interesting ways to get profound results.
I care some about ease of use, though it’s not been my top priority lately. Similar to Bennett Foddy’s games I want it to be as easy as it can be without losing its essence and becoming something else.
The design and implementation is a lot of custom code and some integrations of existing components. The site itself is serverless/static hosted on AWS with S3 and CloudFront. I use AWS Cognito for the My Briefcase authentication feature and each user can upload to their own S3 subfolder. The UI is all my custom js/css inspired by Win3.1/95. The code editor is Ace. The apps run in iframes and talk to the system over postMessage. I use CoffeeScript for most of the code.
The essence of the zine part came from my tendency to always go too deep on architecture and infrastructure, so by having a periodic release of content it would force me to prioritize only the features that aided the content and not be a system of pure mechanics with nothing to showcase it.
kicks: Jeepers, didn’t expect that. Is this a kind of backend that you would recommend to hobbyists? I’m used to static HTML and JS.
danielx: I wouldn’t recommend going deep into AWS or other Cloud services for hobbyists. Since I do software engineering for my employment I’ve gained a lot of experience on “industrial strength” solutions.
The challenge is finding the subset that actually solve more problems than they cause.
I often feel like I’m crawling around in Jeff Bezos’ spaceship trying to bring alien technology to the people.
kicks: Are handmade ‘blogs’/‘zines’/‘home pages’ dying? Would that be a bad thing - like: is there something else?
danielx: They’re dying in the sense that every living thing is in a constant cycle of death and rebirth. There are probably more handmade blogs and home pages today than ever before (in an absolute sense) but proportionally they make up a smaller part of the internet.
I would like to see more people sharing personal computing and smaller internet communities. Businesses exist to consume consumers, by getting our hands dirty and crafting using technology individuals can gain knowledge and understanding of how these systems work so we might not be so vulnerable to all these forces trying to devour us. The web is a modern marvel, not quite as complex as nature, but it has its own evolution and ecology. I enjoy the first hand experience of digging around in it to see what I can learn about systems as well as myself.
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This is too good. A directory. By a novelist. Structural collapse, eh? Damn inspiring. (By Dennis Cooper. Discovered by laurex.)
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On some hypothetical future niche directory it’s that webring code that prevents the linkrot. As long as the webring/directories robot keeps finding that validation code you stay in the directory, no code and eventually you will be dropped. Not perfect but it automates the process a bit.
Ok, yeah—this will be essential. I wonder if I can use the page’s title tag for this? Like: save the title tag the first time I check the site. Because it’s much less rare for the title tag to change than the body text.
I like the idea of the webring code. I just don’t have any influence on some of the sites that I am linking to. But yeah: mixing webrings and Indieweb.xyz is interesting.
As for the size of a directory (or webring), that is such a big problem on the Web. They need to have upper limits, for sure. If it gets too big, it feels (and does become) unusable. If it’s too large, then nothing in it is special. Like with these “awesome lists”—you are led to believe that the list is a severe abridgement, because the links in it are truly impressive.
With webrings, someone is special by virtue of discovering the ring first. So I can see closing admittance. I’m not that into webrings because it’s a pretty fragile link between all parties.
I’d like linking to take some effort, which also limits the amount of links you can have and makes them more potent.
Thanks for the ideas! Great stuff.
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From my point of view, M.B’s diversity challenge comes out of Indieweb’s own priorities and values. Decentralization, independence, tech-centrality, building your own bespoke blog/website with home-grown/open-source tools… to me, these values originate from a particular paradigm and method of engaging with the world. This paradigm is itself shaped by the wider culture. To put it in reductionist and stereotypical terms, the “self-made” webmaster who builds a self-contained website, independent of the centralized aggregate (and by extension, The Man), using home-grown tools, falls very much in line with the values of the American Dream.
“To put it in reductionist and stereotypical terms, the ‘self-made’ webmaster who builds a self-contained website […] falls very much in line with the values of the American Dream.”
This entire essay is very insightful—and your whole blog has a whimsical and determined air that has me punching my ‘subscribe’ button several times to make sure it does the job.
One question I wonder: while I think the self-made entrepreneur has got to be synonymous with imperialist America—couldn’t the independent autodidact, operating apart from corporate interests, be a modern type of vanguard for the dispossessed? I feel like the Instagram influencer is more a direct descendant of The American Dream; the bespoke blog a piece of the underground press—particularly in 2018, when they have become ancient machinery.
As Chris quotes:
I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself.
— Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, 1942
Perhaps the difference is that the Indieweb has had an “every person for themselves” kind of ethic. There are those who DIY and there are those who GTFO. Whereas underground presses functioned collaboratively. And maybe M.B could be an underground press if it had an editor and it sought out its sources. It feels more like a Lions Club, some casual martinis and a snapshot of the dwindling sun.
I hope that’s no condemnation. I think the underground presses had their coffee houses, which gave you a place to bump into co-conspirators.
But it’s the editor thing that I keep bumping up against on this Web—that we do need more editors, more librarians, more collaboration. We haven’t quite figured out how to organize in structures that benefit, well, all of us. That means starting with the lowest tier. If the library can make a way for books to land in the hands of prisoners, refugees, the poor—then those books can make it anywhere.
And I think this spiritual cause exists in the Indieweb when I see notes like those on Brid.gy’s FAQ entry “How much does it cost?”
Nothing! We have great day jobs, and Bridgy is small, so thanks to App Engine, it doesn’t cost much to run. We don’t need donations, promise.
I feel to inspire readers that might fall across this post—those who can fashion things and who can throw themselves into rebuilding the Web (as if it were Dresden)—to take up this same spiritual cause. To make a generous piece of this crucial public engine. (I realize that this sounds terrifically technopiliac and loathsome, maybe even in a shameful ‘tech bro’ way, but this technology is here, right here, fucking everywhere else too it turns out—so let’s try to find our way, shall we?)
I do think the Indieweb has the glimmer of real answers. But it’s a massive undertaking. But that’s okay—real answers are too.
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[…] I can get done reading blogs, and creating a half-decent blog post is much harder than sending a tweet. I like to add art to mine, so there needs to be at least a photo (I prefer a drawing). But, the end result is far more gratifying. There’s something you can point to and say there, I did that. […] it turns out that removing the anti-patterns of big social also removes some major inhibitions to creation.
Ok, so if I’m reading you right here: when you move away from a crowd of people, there are fewer conversations to have—so you can decide to just go home. Is that closer?
This almost sounds like a case for making discovery difficult. We don’t want to spend all our time searching fruitlessly—if it’s too easy to find things, then we just follow those trails.
If it’s true, I wonder why the “searching fruitlessly” is something we will stop doing—while the “reading fruitlessly” is still something compelling.
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do what i mean.
do what i mean.
This could be seen strictly as an acronym, however I find the sound of ‘dwim’ as a word to convey exactly the sense of the fully expanded phrase. I usually use it in the context of a tool functioning well in the overall spirit I intend for it and may have to adapt for situations. I also feel like this term wards against uses that would be nice—but would move it outside its purview. But also: ‘I have been holding the kite like this, but feel free to dwim it much higher.’ (So: ‘the specific rules are not important if the wind changes.’)
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Bloke uses an ESP8266 to connect his Commodore to an online BBS. Schematics on page three.
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Great idea—using the ESP8266 to hook NTP up to your table clock. I know they sell these, but this is still a great learning project. Would love to see this in Lua or JS for NodeMCU.
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I’m in the middle of a redesign. I’m rolling it out in pieces. You’ll know it’s done when I put up an article about it. And, yeah, this doesn’t matter. 😘
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In my first game of Rising Sun, a Kaiju came in from the sea—and what happened next brought a profound mix of delight and sadness.
This is the first in my Fables of Tables series. It’s a type of review series. But instead of dryly reviewing the game’s mechanics and stamping some harsh grade on its face, I’m just going to tell a story.
Today’s game is Rising Sun. This is a miniatures game—full of plastic monsters. I don’t really play miniatures games, but a friend had a copy so it just happened. And, what the blazes? A miniatures game in pastels?
Midway through the game, I noticed that you could buy a giant Godzilla-like monster to have in your crew.
“What’s the Godzilla do?” I asked.
And the friend who owns the game—I’ll call him Hustle—says, “Oh, he has five force.” So he’s huge—his power is equal to five whole army guys.
He goes on to explain that when you buy the Kaiju, you put him out in the sea—the whole board is a rough map of Japan and there is water surrounding the islands—so you put the monster out there, and then during battle you can spring him on to any of the game’s provinces and he’ll destroy all the buildings there. (The buildings are these strongholds where your units can appear.)
“Oh man!” I’m thinking. “Just like Godzilla! I love it! I gotta have it!”
I just really enjoy monster movies—particularly Shin Godzilla—that wail that sounds like metal sheets tearing and that slow, sinuous tail as he moves methodically through the cityscape. I get that he’s historically out of place in this game, but I don’t care! He is the force of the Earth fighting back against civilization—what if he could have done this in some bygone age?
The guy playing purple (don’t recall his name) buys the Kaiju before I can. This player is already in the lead and now has Godzilla, placing him in the sea. It is as if two titans of this world have allied and we are waiting for our defeat.
I look on wistfully at this being. Five force! I am in awe and I sit in anticipation of what the lurking god will do when war begins.
War arrives and the fellow playing purple brings Godzilla on to land in the northern province of Hokkaido. The Kaiju storms into the scene and—well, there are no buildings there—he has no effect. But still—this is an island teaming with monsters and warriors and look how Godzilla towers above them!!
Hustle reaches across the giant board and points. “Ok, so, you see, I have the Earth Dragon here.”
Hot snakes, I had forgotten about the Earth Dragon! So the Earth Dragon does not have the force that Godzilla has. However, the Earth Dragon is able to push away one unit from each opponent in the battle. It is as if the Earth Dragon takes a big breath and then >SNUFF< a bunch of guys fly off to other parts of the island.
Of course, he chooses to snuff off Godzilla. The Earth Dragon takes a big breath and a myriad of warriors and creatures scatter across the map. Godzilla is propelled all the way across the board—using a marked sea lane, I should add, since the winds of the dragons respect these rules as well—and he lands in Kyushu, destroying a few buildings when he lands.
War rages on and, before long, the spotlight shines on Kyushu. Godzilla has picked up the pieces and, with some tarnished pride, admirably overshadows the vast assembly of demons and gods there.
“Hang on,” says the player to my right, “my Fire Dragon goes first.”
Holy cats! Right! The Fire Dragon! This twisty, devious dragon coughs his terrible fireballs just as the battle forms—incinerating one unit for each opponent present in the conflict. Warriors and barbaric creatures fall away in the fire—and Godzilla himself, no, it can’t be! Can it??
Gods, it is true! The vast unshakable behemoth is now wildly dashing from the island in a pyre of his own burning scales. He tumbles down the beach, a maniacally flailing lizard, a lizard of flame and agony, howling his metal-rending chord.
The great Kaiju sinks back into the ocean—in shame and sorrow—having made no effect on the actual game at all. Like we never did any math with Godzilla involved. Literally no effect.
I sat there for some time after the game had concluded. Stunned and humbled. I contemplated the fate of Godzilla. Perhaps even the great gods get tossed and squashed and embarassed on a bad day.
Perhaps when I die, my Guardian—or my Saint or Kami—will approach me to greet me into a new kingdom. And she, too, may trip and fall into fire, to be engulfed and never seen again. These things happen. I realize that now.
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Geez I was really hoping the ending would reveal that they were all dead the whole time. Now we’re going to need to band together, in order to resist this intoxicating urge to deify F.A.T.
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‘Simon replied: "I don’t make a habit of displaying my reverence for a great many things. I tend to keep matters like this to myself, for I believe: What’s the point of wearing a serious expression if one’s been earmarked by fate—’
— p99, The Tanners by Robert Walser
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In the past there were blog specific places to search for blogs and new blog posts: blog directories, blog search engines, RSS feeds directories, RSS search engines. In addition there were blogrolls, mentions by fellow bloggers, regular web search engines,etc. Not a lot of that infrastructure remains today.
Mostly, similar to what coldbrain has said, I find blogs when they are casually mentioned on a blog or comment somewhere. Stuff like blogrolls and directories and such just don’t seem to exist. I know, because I’m constantly looking for them!
Now, these things do exist in the small enclave of the Indieweb. There is the Indieweb wiki, which has links all over it. And IndieNews, Indiemap, Blog Snoop and so on. But if I’m looking for blogs and websites that are out there—it’s impossible.
If I’m looking for a specific topic, I’ll Google “quilting blog” or I’ll look on Pinboard under the tag “chess”—and see what blogs come up.
But more often than not, I really want to read someone interesting. Someone’s stories and thoughts. To find all the great writers of our time that are out there. (Most writers I know that write in the literary tradition are lost as to where they should find readers now. It’s terribly ironic when you consider all the reading that is done on the Web in this age.)
This all excites me, though! It seems that there is still a frontier on the web. There is still a chasm to cross between all of us. We have a long way to go.
And I think that’s what drew me to the Indieweb. The answer will start here, in this group, because we’re thinking about it. I think about when Ward Cunningham came out with the wiki—it seemed like such a small, pointless invention. But what a masterstroke! What will be next?
Oh and one more thought about directories: I have a theory that exploring a directory is possibly not directly the best way to discover new things. They can be big and dry and tough to get through. I think they more directly benefit the builder of the directory and, also, those listed in the directory.
The builder of the directory explores and unearths other folks. They then leak into this person’s life in a myriad of ways. (For example, I began by simply linking to you once, in pursuit of new things, but now I follow you very closely.) The initial link begets more. Knotty, twisty—here I think of Sam Ruby’s word intertwingly—vines of links around each other.
And the recipient of the link is possibly motivated to build their own directory, so as to establish (or at least to not forget) their new network. So it can be viral. Blogrolls very much experienced this.
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Always looking for simple programs to take apart. And Glitch is fantastic. Source code here.
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I am going to make an effort to read through this dissertation and comment on it. One thing I like about the web is that it’s made of more primitive building blocks—too much orderliness injures flexibility. (Even blogs and aggregators have become too structured and, well, boring in a way.) I will still really enjoy reading this!
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I’ve created handmade hobby/artistic websites in the past (some contained dozens of pages and had custom CSS on every page) and still want to make them, but they’re very laborious to create and maintain, and there’s no separation of site content and site structure. I recently discovered static site generators - exciting stuff, because they segregate structure from content, and allow you to easily build templates for different kinds of content. So that takes a lot of the grunt work out of coding layouts and pages, and makes it much easier to build the kind of arthouse websites that break the conventional visual templates.
I use Jekyll—a ‘staticgen’ like Hugo. I absolutely agree that it gives me flexibility. I don’t think I even realized how much until you mentioned it! I have been kind of hard on it lately, because my customizations are starting to cause me a lot of pain. And it’s just not a good way to do Indieweb things right now. I keep shopping for a new program; I think it’ll just have to do.
In a way I feel similarly about CSS—it’s pretty expressive and flexible, but it really strains when I try to do something complex with it. Actually, I just struggle to speak its language. So what you’re saying about handmade sites being ‘laborious’ is dead on. It’s rewarding when it’s done.
Oh and I really like Codepen. Here’s a prototype I built before diving in. Thank you for asking—I appreciate that.
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If you’re eager to find more “creative coding” type works. Going on instagram and using hashtags like #creativecoding are a great way to find amazing work. Also twitter is a great source of absolutely mind-blowing artistic work that leverages technology. I’ve spent far too much time just browsing all the amazing stuff out there.
Ok, I did this - this is great, there are some ‘neat’/‘inspiring’ things there. A few other questions for you:
How do I find more hashtags? I would have never found #creativecoding - is it known to be a community or is it just an ad hoc hashtag like #lostinthehashtags (which I just made up - but which has posts!) I guess what I’m saying is - I don’t sense that these hashtags are a community - or are they?
As ‘neat’/‘inspiring’ as these are, they are mostly only (very small) images and (very short) clips. I ultimately can’t see myself using Instagram or Twitter much because you just kind of skim and can’t go deeper. They lack the ‘hypertext’. (This is similarly to the OP’s trouble with this post just being a simple ‘box algorithm’ - where do I go for more?
Most of these look like art I’ve seen on t-shirts or album covers. Dating back even to the seventies. It is still beautiful and remarkable - but I can’t help but wonder: Where is innovation happening in tech+art?
I will say that I do follow a lot of things happening in vaporwave - any idea what else is happening out there? Thank you for your time, HammadB. I am eager.
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Phonetic HFEI. have fun, encourage, inspire.
Phonetic HFEI. have fun, encourage, inspire.
This is my ethic as a teacher. Having fun is priority one. And part of that is to encourage the kids along their way and inspire them to dig in with me. Of course, there is a lot more to teaching—but there are times I forget to heyfey and I always regret it…
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tl;dr The demand for recency (Chronos!) obliterated the Web’s static directory—and the lowly home page. Strangely, the home page is still out there in plain view. But it has died as an art form.
In a way, portfolio/brochure-style home pages also killed home pages by stagnating the form. On the other hand, home pages are also very alive in the form of wikis (such as Creepypasta) and static directories like Know Your Meme.
I think the underlying appeal is a return to the Old Web. I don’t think this appeal is possible—we’ve moved on—but I think a more cohesive #DeleteFacebook and IndieWeb movement (hang on a sec, the IndieWeb is cohesive! get in here!) could help steer us. Related: Here’s my post discussing what we should take with us.
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Time to scare up some links. Today, I’m asking around for personal websites on Reddit’s /r/web_design—if you want to participate: post there, or respond to this on Twitter, or send this post a Webmention. https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/9etudd/what_personal_blogs_or_websites_have_you_made/
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A speech I like to give—my beliefs wrt Nicolas Cage.
This is a speech I like to give my students about my beliefs with regard to Nicolas Cage, to clear up any misunderstanding. Please contact my office if you would like me to give this speech at your school or at a civic meeting.
Let’s get right to it.
I believe in Nicolas Cage.
I believe he is real.
I believe that he is not a projection of my mind. I could not have invented Nicolas Cage—that much I know.
I believe he lives.
I believe that he believes that he lives. Which I find even more convincing.
I believe in him—that he’ll go far in life. He already has gone far, yes, but he will go far again and again.
I believed him in National Treasure when he said he would be stealing The Declaration of Independence. He did.
I believed him in National Treasure 2 when he said he would be kidnapping The President of the United States of America. He did.
I believe in the “nouveau shamanic” style of acting that this man employs.
And so I believe that there was no script for the National Treasure movies. I believe we are simply watching a man go about his daily routine. I believe that, right now, Nicolas Cage is solving national mysteries and nerding out over rare coins. He could be travelling back in time to kill Betsy Ross. He could be fighting a giant lizard-enhanced Benedict Arnold and walking on a bridge made of rare historical documents—a bridge which he himself made using a power like Iceman has—but with rare historical documents in place of ice.
I believe Diane Kruger is with him on these escapades.
I believe the quiver-like document case that he has slung over his shoulder, and which he often carries The Declaration of Independence in, except when he’s faking out Sean Bean’s character, is made from the hollowed out wooden leg of President Zachary Taylor. I believe that, at the time of his presidency, people suspected that Zachary Taylor had a wooden leg—but they said nothing, because it was possible he was using it to traffick state secrets and important rare and historical documents.
However, I believe that President Taylor NEVER COULD HAVE imagined that his leg would one day carry The Declaration of Independence. I believe this information would have been too much. I believe he would have turned away from his destiny and began a new quest to destroy the leg, in a misguided attempt to save The Declaration of Independence.
But I believe you can’t change the timeline. I believe everything happened as it should. I believe in the vindication of the Gates family. I believe Diane Kruger should have rightfully had the missing 1789 button for George Washington’s inauguration and that part of Nicolas Cage’s destiny was to help her complete the full set. It makes sense and I believe Diane Kruger collects masonic aprons as well.
I believe that they DID heat up the back of The Declaration of Independence together with their breath, though I believe Nicolas Cage’s breath accounted for more than two-thirds of that exhalatory heat. I believe that Diane Kruger’s breath was very hot as well, though, considering that it only took them one breath—and not even a particularly strong one at that—though not a bad one either—a good breath—a generous but not strengthful breath—just one breath to heat up the whole corner of The Declaration of Independence. I mean that’s pretty good!
I believe the “national treasure” referred to in the title of the film series is not The Declaration of Independence, nor is it The President of the United States, nor is it the sweet steampunk glasses of Benjamin Franklin—I believe it’s Nicolas Cage duh.
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While Tumblr is a type of blog, I think it is sufficiently different to categorize differently—microblogging, tumblelogging. Simply because it generally eschews writing. And that appeals to people.
So, question for you: are you satisfied with a blog for your approach? It seems that you post links, essays and announcements generally. However, these three things are not equal. And to see your essays roll off the front page while links take their place—well, I can see myself wanting a directory of those.
Yes, you have an ‘article’ post type that shows me those essays. But even that list is not comprised of equals. I wonder if a wiki might suit these.
I also wonder if there is a new way to structure all of these thoughts that might do justice to what you are doing and assist the reader in navigating what you are doing. A way of mixing and matching the ‘blog’, the ‘wiki’ and the ‘directory’.
To me, the great failing of blogs is that it is difficult to find the beginning and the end—and I don’t think they facilitate the ‘memory’ of a discussion. A blog post is a thought balloon floating alone. You and I can follow it pretty well, because we are juggling some memories to do it—but someone who stumbles across this post will not realize what is really going on.
Anyway, this is a great post—I’ve been pretty stumped about how to preserve the wee ‘web page’ and this is a thread we’ll need to continue over time.
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Hopefully over time the feed will involve fewer articles about the IndieWeb. I mean, assuming we want more people to be interested, if not get involved; the harsh truth for us nerds is that most people don’t have the time or energy for mastubatory musings.
@simonwoods I’m guilty of a ton of navel-gazey, unchecked wankery of that type, even though I initially found that part of Indieweb pretty off-putting. (And the “blogosphere” that came before it.)
It’s an unfortunate thing that we have to do so much meta-discussion to make progress. But I guess when I look around at all the decrying of social media and silo-stuffing (you know, writing posts for Reddit) going on out there, I start to wonder if maybe that energy is best put into shameful blogging about blogging. I don’t know why such an act is so much more shameful than blogging about skiing, recipes or rash prevention—but it truly, truly is.
(Oh and @eli—thank you for making an attempt to crosspost to Indieweb.xyz. Never seen one from a micro.blog and you should be good now.)
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Neat blog! It’s good to see so much longform blogging (like yours) still happening.
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Here’s a web directory I stumbled onto—all the links you could want related to the “surf clubs” of the mid-2000s. I like the tight structure and the histories woven in. I’m beginning to think that the failure of early directories was that they were just piles of links with no sense of an editor or curator. (Oh and I had also long forgotten about Google Directory, which was shuttered in 2011.)
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Okay. So I think I’ve sorted this out: in that long post that kept reposting, I had a link to several micro.blog posts (including one of yours). That one post was showing up as like three replies in the timeline.
For my own reference (and others that I may point here), I did this to solve it:
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Hi, Eddie! So you syndicated this post to Indieweb.xyz and it didn’t go perfectly. I had a bug that prevented your author name from displaying. I hope to provide some better tools so you can see what’s going on when you send a Webmention.
In the meantime, the bug should be fixed. Cute cat! (Oh, and this post should +1 Jasmine on /en/cats.)
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Don’t know what’s going on here, but this reminds me of an old school web page done up in IG. I wonder what other subversions are out there on the big silos.
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Pleasure to meet you! Well done on the hand-drawn borders on your blog. I’m not necessarily nostalgic for the 90s—I just miss handcrafted blogs and I am starting from that aesthetic, we’ll see where it goes. Your sketches are great. I love pencils (as a crossword enthusiast) and I love that your sketches are in pencil.
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A charming and campy kind of directory. The shifting popups draw you in. You want to click before they disappear.
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I am collecting links to anything, anyone. Non-commercial, non-software links. It’s become somewhat difficult to find my way out of my bubble. So I’m wondering if you can just tell me where you are.
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Rumors spread that large link pages (for surfing) might be considered “link farms” (and yes on SEO sites they were but these things eventually trickle down to little personal site webmasters too) so these started to be phased out. Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to be phased out. Then the biggie: when Google deliberately filtered out all the free hosted sites from the SERP’s (they were not removed completely just sent back to page 10 or so of the Google SERP’s) and traffic to Tripod and Geocities plummeted. Why? Because they were taking up space in the first 20 organic returns knocking out corporate and commercial sites and the sites likely to become paying customers were complaining.
Holy smokes—didn’t realize this was actually how this played out. I now see more what you mean by ‘sucking the fun’ out of Web1. Thankyou for spelling that out. Haha, now I am angry!!
So, is getting rid of the ‘Gates of Marlborodor’ good? I think it’s similar to my feelings about Yahoo!—I don’t miss having to click down seven levels to get to the ‘smoothies’ topic. (Or not finding it in the hierarchy at all!)
The trouble is: only a human can say if the ‘Gates of Marlborodor’ was useful to them. Google may not be able to tell the difference between a link farm and a link boutique, but a human can—and humans are the ones we’re trying to connect here, not the Baidubots!
One interesting thing to me: as I have been digging and scraping around for sites, using all the search engines and feeds I can find, there is one that I am finding surprisingly useful. The search on Pinboard—which is a bookmarking site, the heir to Del.icio.us. If you type in ‘smoothies’ there, you are going to get much more interesting results.
And it strikes me: I think it’s the closest thing we have to a human-edited search engine! Think of that.
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Can’t get enough of this—with the blazers—with the straw boaters—out in the open air amid the echelons of tiny soldiers and their beloved castles…
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‘After walking through a few other rooms, thinking about The Rose, I returned to look at the painting again. I read the placard again, though I had read it less than an hour before. Everything that is is a record of its process, I thought; this description of The Rose in front of me had more to do with where it had been composed and when than with what The Rose itself was struggling to be. Had the curator lacked imagination, or was it our language that lacked imagination? I looked again at the radiating folds of paint, like rock chipped away by the wind and the rain. Each one recorded the time that had passed while DeFeo worked on The Rose. All the placards around me were lists: a title, an artist, a place, and a time. The best the curator could do was log the facts. Facts are a set of coordinates, in space and in time. Causation, motivation, character—all the rest is fiction.’
— p134, Madeleine E by Gabriel Blackwell
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‘Logic, [Nicholas] suggests, knowing, is like an n-sided polygon nested inside a circle. The more sides you add, the more complexities you introduce, the more the polygon approaches the circle which surrounds it. And yet, the farther away it gets as well. For the circle is but a single, seamless line, whereas your polygon seems to be breeding more and more lines, more and more angles, becoming less and less seamless.’
— Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler
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An ideal: privacy should increase as one goes further down the fame, class, race, power hierarchy. A public figure has traded privacy for these things, right?
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glitchyowl, the future of 'people'.
jack & tals, hipster bait oracles.
maya.land, MAYA DOT LAND.
hypertext 2020 pals: h0p3 level 99 madman + ᛝ ᛝ ᛝ — lucid highly classified scribbles + consummate waifuist chameleon.
yesterweblings: sadness, snufkin, sprite, tonicfunk, siiiimon, shiloh.
surfpals: dang, robin sloan, marijn, nadia eghbal, elliott dot computer, laurel schwulst, subpixel.space (toby), things by j, gyford, also joe jenett (of linkport), brad enslen (of indieseek).
fond friends: jacky.wtf, fogknife, eli, tiv.today, j.greg, box vox, whimsy.space, caesar naples.
constantly: nathalie lawhead, 'web curios' AND waxy
indieweb: .xyz, c.rwr, boffosocko.
nostalgia: geocities.institute, bad cmd, ~jonbell.
true hackers: ccc.de, fffff.at, voja antonić, cnlohr, esoteric.codes.
chips: zeptobars, scargill, 41j.
neil c. "some..."
the world or cate le bon you pick.
all my other links are now at href.cool.
Reply: Confusing One’s Self
You should! I wondered if I would enjoy teaching kids or if they would drive me nuts. And they drove me nuts! But then I learned to adapt and now I just think they’re each a wonder. There have definitely been kids that I didn’t like. But then I got to know them.
I haven’t really discovered too many ‘educational’ apps—I like the form factor of the iPad and the kids use apps for filming, recording, drawing, linking to each other. We use it more like a ‘medium’ rather than a ‘subject’. I went into this job thinking that I wanted to help find a way to bring programming into the classroom—but I now feel that was misguided and arrogant. There are more important things than programming. Perhaps not in commerce—but in life, surely.
Thankyou for your questions and for the linked article. I really appreciate your sincere searching for answers and the fact that you would take the time to read and to listen is remarkable!