Hey, Jack—just want you to know that your post showed up on Indieweb.xyz… but it showed up as a reply to the link on BoffoSocko. Here’s where it ended up. And you can get to that link by clicking the little cream colored ‘🔖 1’ on the /en/bookclub page. (This is also why it says ‘last noticed 3 days ago’—that thread got bumped to the top.)

I am still making up my mind about how to show threads—I think I need to show a tree-style display of responses rather than just rolling them up into a number. I’ve initially tried to follow the design of Reddit or HN on these pages—but I think the appearance of a mailing list or forum might be more appropriate.

Anyway, if you have any suggestions or encounter any bugs, please let me know! Thankyou kindly.

I’m so sorry! I will fix this. I’m playing with an unfinished prototype here and rushed to get it out the door. Please bear with me.

This is cool—and now I’m trying to think of ways I can improve Indieweb.xyz for a purpose like this. One thing that comes to mind is possibly offering a few moderation tools for you. I think with a sub like this, it would be nice for you to have a “pinned post” or something at the top of /en/bookclub so that you can advertise the current selection for the club and some links to how to vote for the next selection—things like that. (This post would just be a syndicated post from your blog, Chris.)

Yeah, Twine is the real deal—to me, third to sixth is the ideal group for this tool. They’ve got down how to write, but may not yet see how useful writing can be. There’s a lot of negativity (in my experience) among this age group (in 2019) concerning writing—especially with video becoming so prevalent.

So I see Twine as a writing platform with coding playing a support role. This is awesome—because often kids will look at it as a ‘coding’ platform and not realize how much writing they are doing. I think this dual nature makes it incredibly powerful.

Sure, feel free to cite or syndicate anything here. I’m just glad you’re having the conversation. I’m definitely keeping an eye on your blog. Let’s be friends!

Well, I disagree. (Though I think your record of things is correct!) Certainly if you look at this as a bot war then Google’s actions make sense: we need our bots to outsmart the ‘bots’ (human bots even!) that are writing blogs.

But look at it another way: you have lots of humans writing - and it’s all of varying quality. Why not let the humans decide what’s good? The early Web was curated by humans, who kept directories, Smart.com ‘expert’ pages, websites and blogrolls that tried to show where quality could be found. Google’s bot war (and the idea that Google is the sole authority on quality) eliminated these valuable resources as collateral damage.

Times like this, it sure pays to have your depth of knowing what’s out there—YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is definitely a classic. One that you’ve now introduced me to. I finally took the time to browse it. What an inventive take on a blog. (Or on poetry?) Since 1997. My humblest thanks, Joe.

You writing me back makes me so happy! I just LOVE the way you write. You are still reminding me of Édouard Levé: you write so precisely and plainly and in a way that feels honest to me—I agree that it’s very odd that I’m reading your wiki! But what can we do: you have one reader now.^[1]

I have decided on a name, 1uxb0x, interesting story how I got it. I am hard on myself, sometimes. I have few things planed. All those notes pages were me writing down what my dad said. I think I am a literary wiki kid, but not tootytoot. I think I answered everything that needed answering.

Okay, okay! I concede: you are not a tootytoot!

Now I am stunned that you take such extensive notes while your Dad is talking! I am hooked on your ‘Notes’ now—every home philosopher should be so lucky as to have a scribe such as you. You are doing very good work.

I will try not to comment, if it makes you nervous. But if it helps you write more, I will comment. You don’t need to be nervous, though. I am a total loser, my sister will tell you that.^[2]

Mystery.miami? As Kottke has said: it’s too bad beyonce.horse is taken.

There’s a style of site I really dig and I find things often and send them to pinboard, but I don’t really use pinboard in actuality because it has more than just those cool sites.

Yeah, this was a big reason I started href.cool. Pinboard is so awesome. But whenever I start to follow a user, they inevitably start archiving their tweets—go to /popular/ and note that ‘twitter’ and ‘ifttt’ are tags full of noise.

Far be it from me to tell people not to use Pinboard to archive. If you do use a Pinboard, just tag everything in your ‘directory’ with a unique tag. Like ‘mystery.menu’, for instance. Then, people can watch your directory using https://pinboard.in/u:kevinkovacs/t:mystery.menu.

You’re always asking me to clear up my terms—and I never do—but I’ll ask anyway: what do you mean by ‘power’? And what do you mean by ‘decentralizing power’? Because my first stab is that you’re talking about getting us back to local governments, tribes or something. The term ‘power’ gets bandied about—it’s the person with the money to hire, the person who radios the tanks when to roll in and when to back out, it’s the person with the megaphone.

I’m not really keyed in on ‘power’—I don’t see it as a kind of natural element. Seems more like it gets used to say: this, this is evil.

How to decentralize power? In a world of billions? Answering these questions is way beyond me. My wavelength is watching ‘humanity’—are we holding on to the transcendent ‘divinity’/‘shittiness’ of being human? Can we see this humanity in each other and at least allow the recognition of another human being to dawn on our faces?

A loss for civilization? Well, yeah, if you put it that way—civilization is going to roll on, regardless. I suppose you could say my effort is misplaced: perhaps better to work on helping our civilization survive, to live on, rather than trying to look to the past.

But, put another way: do I want to preserve a civilization that doesn’t embody any of the ideas that I care about? You’re probably right with your last line there—maybe I consider myself one who has ‘absorbed’ the ideas of my time and wants to ‘move on’ with those ideas in different ways. I can probably do this just fine without ready access to the source material—but I am glad that I was able to show Dont Look Back (1967) to a friend recently, rather than needing to just recount my recollection of it.

Definitely don’t want to save everything. Just some essential bits. And I shouldn’t try to be noble about it—just seems fun.

(And hey—kind of you to write up your thoughts, NK.)

Hahah, wow—it’s funny because I find this article to be a similar kind of frustrating read. A good read—perhaps like the Times article was for her—but very frustrating. I wonder: is acceptance by mainstream culture really seen as the ultimate, final, crucial reward?

(Particularly now that we live in an age where it’s clear that the previous generation of cultural winners—be it Jimi Hendrix or Harper Lee—is rapidly fading away, to be replaced by YouTubers, video game streamers, YA writers, reality stars. Isn’t the mainstream culture going to be very ruthless in its war for canonization?)

I mean I love the author’s ultimate point: here, I won’t summarize it, let’s just get into it.

We need a mass realization that pulls us out of this flooding culture. That is: the acknowledgment by powerful organizations that we do in fact engage more with original stories—it’s a fact, look it up—that lasting conversations do not come out of Twitter trends, and that diversity means diversity—more that is different, not more of the same differences. As one curator told the Times in the piece about older black artists getting their due, “There has been a whole parallel universe that existed that people had not tapped into.” Tap into it.

As h0p3 would say: preach it! Tap into it.

But the author spends the entire piece looking away from the underground—scrutinizing the fucking New York Times to show us the way, looking at the top 20 shows on Netflix, stats on buying habits on Amazon. If the concern is that our culture is spending all of their time on Netflix, Amazon and the Times—well, so is this article.

So when we go to ‘tap into it’—what is it? Where is this ‘parallel universe’ we’re looking for? Where does this culture go to look for it? Is it on Amazon and Twitter somewhere? Are we supposed to continue using Netflix and Google—but somehow spend our time on the back alleys of those services?

Is this a request to leave alone the front page of the New York Times and start with the back page? (So much simpler to turn to the back page of the corporeal printed Times than to do so online.)

Clearly, the article decries the entire makeup of these systems:

Per CJR, these algorithms are “taste-reflectors,” meaning they don’t affect taste the way critics do but simply reinforce your palate; there is little discovery here.

And how much discovery can there be, really, with the same critics occupying the same space?

Yesss! So go outside those neatly ordered corporate-approved spaces, yeah?

Sweet—well taken! I am not into the celebrity news or mainstream papes. But it still looks like 30% of this is lesser known goodshit. The whole layout and vibe is quality. Again, thankyou!

Doing good work. Koype looks sick.

Spent some time sorting out why your posts weren’t coming through Indieweb.xyz. For some reason, Ruby’s Net::HTTP module (which my crawler uses) was timing out when connecting to your web server. I’ve moved to a curl-based lib and, yeah, that’s doin fine now. I’ll keep an eye on it.

The fact that links like cosmic.voyage and quariety.com are buried in this dump is just proof that you’re on fire lately, Eli. The round-ups are brilliant, the digital abysstapes are fascinating—just want to encourage you to keep it all on.

Somewhat agree. I’ve been getting back into blogs and personal websites—some of this is categorized under ‘indieweb’. There is a lot of good work being done out there, great conversations going on, strange and wonderful new hobbyists.

But I don’t know if the Web—or the digital rights movement or Occupy or meme culture or whatever your personal fancy is—will ever be retaken. There’s space for an underground now—which is good enough for me. Perhaps better than trying to fit all of mainstream society in. And maybe social networks can stay—as a kind of fly paper.

I’m wondering lately if there’s a better way to do ‘readers’. Like you say, once you are monitoring 100s of sites, it’s disgusting to log in each day and see 100s of unread posts. I’m wondering if there’s something that could give me an overview of all the activity that’s going on out there, so I can then decide what to read. No ‘unread’ counts, no notifications. And, rather than having a big feed of recent activity, have a list of all the ‘bloggers’/‘writers’ so I can see who’s active—maybe with a little graph of how much is going on with them, maybe a list of recent post titles or something…

Makes me think of the Peach social network, where the ‘inbox’ was names of people who had updated—you could then go in and view their stuff. It was never presented as a big newsfeed or a big inbox of individual posts.

(Ok—going to try commenting on the micro.blog ‘Conversation’ link rather than on Brad’s blog directly…)

Congratulations on this! As I was pushing some updates to href.cool today, I was thinking how wild it is to have our little group of directories up and going. That happened pretty quickly! Now we’re just doing the work of filling them in, digging up the web. Takes time.

Anyway, I’ve had a good time following you.

I don’t know Inoreader—what is keeping you from paying for it? Is it not worth paying for? I also wonder what you are looking for in a reader. I mean if it reads RSS—what else is there? (I don’t understand using a reader and am looking for some enlightenment. Don’t think you’ve written about this yet—is there something you’re looking for beyond basic notification that a new post/comment has materialized? To me, they seem like e-mail clients—not much to it.)

Hey thanks for piping up. Your blog is neat—I liked the article on treating your blog like a Moleskine. I think this is why I always have used those dreary, cheap composition books. I can make them a mess.

Your Twitter bio: “I tweet seriously, but mostly for fun.” This is chill. An example to us all.

Tell me, 1uxb0x—your name is so like Linux to me. (Because of ‘fluxbox’ which was my favorite back when I was only probably three times your age.) I think you are still deciding on a name though—is that right?

Your “Notes” and “Free Writing” pages are solid gold.^[1] You are clearly a very hard worker—I can’t tell if you are hard on yourself or just very determined. You have a lot of things you want to do in your life, that’s for sure.

I like your “Free Writing” pages—and I do the same thing myself. When I am writing, I like to just write something that I see. Almost like taking a photograph, but I am writing it down. I think most people like to write what they are feeling, but that often causes me to stop and think too much. But I just want to write something—and they are very fun to read back on.^[2]

Haha, well—“don’t do much”—first off, you have hundreds of wiki pages under your personal belt at this point… and I know damn well that you are one of the ghost-architects of h0p3’s wiki. You work on scripts and CSS for him—it’s all right there in the logs, j3d1h! For hell’s sake, you set up Windows 8 VMs for him!

I’m sorry that I know all this. I do apologize. I am just a random guy.^[1] And I have no idea how to offer you any advice or suggestions as to your wiki—I like that you are just doing your own thing, you seem perfectly capable to me, of writing your own thoughts and following some of your dad’s practices—and establishing some of your own.

I just h0p3 it is encouraging that you have a reader out there who thinks your Social Studies Log is awesome—as a window into your young reactions to history. Or your Deep Reading Log—since I am an avid reader and your words remind me of what it was to read The Chosen at your age—which I probably did! (Although I can only guess at your age and am very impressed at the things you say to h0p3 which he quotes—your words strike like a queen’s sceptre of supreme sarcasm^[2]!)