It keeps giving me so much energy:
We need to build for timelessness, as the earth doesn’t like our wasteful habits. So creating structures taking care of us and harmonically combining with our planet, is a goal.
Meanwhile, it looks like we need better housing everywhere I look at.
LET’S FUCKING GOOOO
Just went to FB after half a year off of it. Kind of interested to see wassup!
Nothing much. Same algo. Same stuff repeating like a tile in a 3D game after five minutes.
I missed a message and a few comments congratulating me. Cool.
Groups have been updated on average 30 weeks ago. Okay.
This interface is so noisy. FB has a billion clickable things around.
Twitter tomorrow. Ugh.
Yeah so I just got owned by a WordPress plugin that I updated and it broke everything.
I think outside audio, plugins/extensions are the absolute worst:
Back in the days I had a neat Firefox that I had customized perfectly. A few plugins, all set up. This idiot program updated to the next version, killing all my plugins at once.
I never used Firefox ever again. Nor browser plugins, outside the crucial ones like anti-spam plugins called adblockers for some reason.
With audio software plugins work because by design they are easy to deal with: drop them in a folder, done. Plugin crashes? Take it out of the folder, done.
Don’t make your digital life depend on plugins. The least possible, please.
The feed is everywhere. It’s very convenient: a list of interesting things that you scroll through, at your own pace. Great design.
It’s in social media, in group chats, in RSS.
Slack is essentially used as a feed by most people.
IRC is a feed, podcasts, Twitch and Discord as well. You get the point.
Email isn’t a feed though! Email is that thing where for every item you need to make a decision for. The feed isn’t like that. The feed flows.
I know a lot is going on right now with social media slowing down. Dave Winer, RSS godfather has a vision for the feed that I don’t really share. There’s Mastodon that I don’t really want to get into. There’s ActivityPub which seems to be overly-complicated, a feature of all new software since the 2010s.
Anyway.
This is how the feed should be, based on RSS of course.
The feed should be your own carefully crafted curation of what you want to keep around you. The feed shouldn’t be shared, the same way you don’t share your clothes even though you could. I recommend having things to try out, people with different opinions or maybe aesthetics that you’re curious about. Be curious, subscribe and grow.
And the app should be extremely simple: one left pane with the feeds, a right pane with the content of the feeds. I’ve tried all the feed systems. The two-pane paradigm is by far the best, allowing you to move quickly and effortlessly through your curation.
Synchronization of feeds between devices is unnecessary. Don’t pretend that you have 2 minutes to kill waiting in line somewhere, and that this is why you need to know exactly where you are in your feed consumption. If you’re like that, seek help. Consume your feed responsibly by checking it a few times a day, not every single second when you idle. Idling has big value in that it lets your brain “print” what you’re learning.
Completely avoid general news in your feed. Think about your feed as something to inspire and motivate you. News ain’t it. They will make you depressed and quit your feed. Don’t add them.
Use this service to convert newsletters to RSS feeds. Remember, your inbox doesn’t flow. Don’t mix those things up.
It’s been so good to me this way.
All I’d need is a new feedreader with sqlite, chromium rendering and full client-side styling (if I want to read your stuff in Times New Roman or Segoe UI, I should be able to do so).
The pandemic is raging over there. The world went there for the Olympics in summer 2021, infections flared but came down. 2022 showed up with a revenge plan.
Stay strong, Japan.
You might want to open the picture in a new tab, sorry.
It’s amazing to me: as a society we keep piling up on social media and I keep maintaining that the issue is phones. The issue is constantly reaching for it, all the time. Faking everything, even presence.
Y’all are completely addicted and everyone is trying to avoid that conversation. You are addicted to your phone, and you can’t stop.
Instead of being bored and deciding to do something, to plan something and meticulously think about it, you just scroll endlessly with the attention span of a fish. It is important that you stop doing that.
(I am not addicted to phones because I deliberately chose to fight that shit back in 2010, sensing the addiction creeping up already)
We will look back at mobile computing being a mistake that supercharged abuse and dogma in a few years.
Religion significantly expanded its place in American life during the midcentury era. Between 1946 and 1955, an estimated 30 million Americans joined churches. By 1958 nearly two-thirds of all Americans belonged to a religious organization, compared to just 40 percent before Word War II.
From a book on Minnesota’s mid century architecture.
That is so wild. It is incredible how religion prospers when new tech emerges. In my mind it shouldn’t because science is about facts, questioning and moving forward, the opposite of religion’s design.
It is also wild that in the same time period, the opposite happened in Europe: Faith has been going down ever since the start of the 20th century.
It highlights the two sides of those world wars: Americans, “believing” that they can fight “evil” and win. On the other side Europeans understanding and tasting pragmatism and the fact that most countries, infrastructures, people, have been utterly decimated. There’s no belief here, just pain, resentment and reconstruction.
ANYWAY
Meanwhile mid-century, church-ey America let something like this happen. I love it. It’s insane. It’s bold. The honeycomb façade is fabulous. It looks amazing inside, a mix of star destroyer and cave environment.
I’m just in awe about things symmetrically opposed like religion and modernism, which are sometimes going hand in hand and produce unreal things. Like this impeccable, powerful structure.
I’d personally convert it to a library/skatepark, but that’s just me.
We often say that it’s a waste of space that on the road there are cars with just one person in it.
Let’s talk about those 20m/60ft long buses with 3 mfs in them.
I CAN’T HEAR YOU
This is what I liked about the open blogosphere of 2000 to 2008. Whereas something like Twitter is optimized for the fast-take and the brutal one-liner, blogs allowed actual conversations. You could write something serious, develop the idea, and maybe some other people would engage with it, also at a serious level. But then the walled-gardens began to gain ground (Facebook, Twitter, and then later Instagram) and the era of the blogs came to an end. (Yes, they still exist, but they most exist as standalone essays, not engaged in conversation with other blogs.)
This is a good analysis but here’s the thing about online conversation: it is more often than not, useless. I’ve read millions of comments on blogs and they rarely added anything.
They follow a pattern through a spectrum. On one side you have the friend, who’s going to agree with you no matter what. And on the other side, you have an anonymous troll whose entire goal is to disagree with you.
This is a waste of anyone’s time and today with bots and AI? Yeah.
The interesting thing to me is that we keep saying that blogs and online reading MUST evolve into a conversation. The so-called engagement. I don’t think it has to at all.
Reading is about you. It’s about making sense of what you read, connecting to who you are and what you’re looking for. It is mostly a personal adventure. Later on, you will have a conversation with someone and naturally if something that you read changed your mind, you will talk about it. Maybe even mention the author or share the link.
More importantly, knowledge needs to simmer through. It takes time.
The obsession with engagement and becoming a “leader” a “voice” or an “influencer” is just fast food ego trip. It’s kind of weird.
Standalone essays are the bomb. Non-sponsored (aka 100% integrity), independent and smart opinions? All day, everyday.