Posts from December 2022

1PM

12PM — For anyone maintaining a blog, remember you’re not writing for The New Yorker:

A post doesn’t have to have a destination, a point. You can bundle or concatenate several different topics, push into adjacency things that don’t obviously or naturally belong together - like oddments inside a Cornell box. You can start somewhere and end up somewhere completely different, without any obligation to tie things up neatly. Unlike most paid journalism, you are unshackled from release schedules or topicality - able to address anything, from anywhere, and anywhen. Lovely too the way you can illustrate with videos and images (always the danger of getting a bit carried away there) while linking to related writings by others or the texts that spurred your essay into existence (again, tempting to overdo).

2PM — What do you want from the internet? “welcome to your first Internet Death”

all of these things — perils of relying on a single place on the internet that has no personal interest in your success — have been obvious for quite some time. You’re allowed to be mad at having to face these issues now, but I also think it’s worth asking the question: Why didn’t you prepare for this? Why is the supposed end of Twitter, regardless of the reason, such a crisis?

1PM — Pelé, one of the greatest footballers to ever play the game, has died aged 82.

He had become such a hero that, in 1961, to ward off European teams eager to buy his contract rights, the Brazilian government passed a resolution declaring him a nonexportable national treasure.

Imagine Messi or Ronaldo being forced to spend the prime of their career in the far inferior Argentinian or Portuguese football leagues. Would they be as good and as popular as they are today?

9PM

In a lovely animated short film, five life-long friends recount life in Brooklyn in the 1970s. (via Waxy.org)

2PM — Similar to my Stylesheet for a Calmer Twitter, Nick Herr explores user stylesheets for a calmer browsing experience. It’s a shame only a few browsers support user stylesheets natively. Obviously, Google wants their login forms plastered all over, disrupting our browsing experience as much as possible.

2PM — Journalists don’t understand Mastodon. I’m glad we’re discussing another variation of “media people don’t understand blogs.” I can’t wait for “Tooting isn’t tweeting” and “Can Mastodon users also be journalists?”

3PM

6AM — Hackernews, the online community renowned for its connoisseurs of southern German cuisine, debates an article about German pretzels. It didn’t take long for someone to post a comment psychoanalysing European’s insecurities and character flaws because the author compared US American and European bread. Peak Hackernews.

8AM — The Yard Sale Theory tries to understand why wealth is so unevenly distributed these days. Wealthier people have more leverage to place bets, on the stock or property markets, for example, so they’re more likely to win big and find it easier to cover their losses. The Pudding explains the theory in a series of visualised experiments.

I came across a rare scenario where the poor person wins all the money when they have an early winning streak allowing them to accumulate wealth.

I ran the same experiment a couple more times, and, as expected, the richer always got richer.

11AM

Kid Koala – Jump & Shuffle

Hand-cut audio made with 1135 scratches. Hand-drawn video made with 1038 drawings.

6AM — Here’s a reason why I can’t get myself to add any “smart” devices to my home:

The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level.

Vacuum cleaners, doorbells, personal assistants — all these devices collect personal, often sensitive information. It’s hard to comprehend how much data they collect, and in whose hands this data ends up.

Roomba says the images came from special development machines, and standard devices don’t possess the same video capabilities. What are they working on that they need to label machine-learning training data to identify TVs, fridges or ceiling lamps? A little drone that cleans the dust off your TV screen?

5PM — The topologist’s world map is a map that is heavily distorted for compactness but with the borders between countries preserved. Is it a useful map? Not really. Does it look good? Yes, very.

10AM — One of my gripes with the current hype around Mastodon is that the discussion around social-media alternatives focusses mostly on Mastodon, presumably because it’s that resembles Twitter the most.

But as Bastian Allgeier points out that Mastodon is just one part of a puzzle. Using IndieWeb protocols, other platforms, even websites, can exchange data with Mastodon and between each other.

There’s a lot of wisdom in being careful after all we’ve seen happening to Twitter in the past weeks. There’s even more than enough reason to be cynical about any future form of social media. Mastodon is being praised a lot right now and it will most definitely not be a magic healing potion for all our social problems.

But Mastodon is not a platform. Mastodon is just a tiny part of a concept many have been dreaming about and working on for years. Social media started on the wrong foot. The idea for the read/write web has always been different. Our digital identities weren’t supposed to end up in something like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.

Decentralisation, Federation, The Indie Web: There were many groups silently working on solving the broken architecture of our digital social networks and communication channels – long, long before the “web 3” dudes tried to reframe it as their genius new idea.

11AM

7AM — Block Protocol is an open standard for building block-based interfaces (the blocks you know from content-management systems). Its goal is to allow developers to create and share reusable content blocks that simplify adding semantically structured information to websites, like books or addresses.

There’s a reference implementation for Wordpress, and Joel Spolsky published a write up outlining the ideas behind Block Protocol.

8AM — IndieKit provides IndieWeb tooling to self-publish content and share on social media; and it integrates with static site generators.

6AM — Who would have thought that teenagers dumping their smartphones would be an act of rebellion against their parents:

“My parents are so addicted. My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart. But I guess I also like it, because I get to feel a little superior to them.”

What do they do instead? They spend time outside, they read and do craft.

6AM — Six video games from the USSR:

A few of you probably won’t believe it, but the USSR also had video games. They existed either in arcade form, or had to be played on do-it-yourself game consoles.

Yes, Tetris is on the list.

1PM — On the current decentralisation movement — a short take I want quote entirely. I have similar feelings about the topic; much of the discussion is centred around technology to re-create existing platforms instead of thinking about whether we need these platforms at all.

7AM

3AM — Of the New York Times list of football movies, I have only seen The Cup, which was great.

Certainly missing from this list is Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a documentary that focusses only on Zinedine Zidane during a league match in 2005. You only see Zidane, never any other players. Closeups of his face, how focussed he is; his feet, you see how he moves, how elegantly he handles the ball. Truly beautiful.

9PM — In the 1960s, urban planners drew up plans to build an elevated ring road through inner London, potentially displacing a large population of poorer people. Luckily the plans were scrapped, and the road was never built. It’s hard to imagine today how the highway would have changed London.

Ring road or not, poorer residents were eventually priced out. The areas in the way of the road, including “Earl’s Court, Clapham Junction, Brixton, Blackheath, Hackney Wick, Dalston, Camden, and Kilburn,” are highly sought-after neighbourhoods to live in London today.

11AM — Ooh, how did I miss this? Karate re-released three of their albums Unsolved, Some Boots and Pockets alongside the Cancel/Sing EP as a limited-edition vinyl bundle. It’s mostly sold out already, but if you’re quick, you can still snatch a copy.

Why yes, I did get myself an early Christmas present.

6PM — Henn Tan is the name of the man who gave us the thumb drive. You know, that thing we used back in the day to get the master’s thesis to the printer, to share photos and music that was absolutely legally obtained, before we moved all our digital belongings to someone’s server.

12PM — I stumbled across this Kid Koala mix while digging through old Solid Steel episodes. The 53 minutes embody everything I love about Kid Koala: The vast, eclectic but assorted record collection, technical skill, paired with an insatiable hunger for experimentation.

It’s beyond me how Kid Koala only has a relatively small following; this mix has amassed only 18,000 plays since it was released in 2003.

2PM — Every Frame a Painting examines lenses, camera position, and editing used by the Coen Brothers to shoot dialogues in their movies.

I love content that explains the technical aspects of making art. (via kottke.org)

7PM — You can add ActivityPub to a static website built with Jekyll and hosted on Netlify. Tom MacWright shows how.

8AM — The iconic Blue Marble picture, taken by Apollo 17 astronauts on their way to the moon, is 50 years old now.

7AM — Robin Sloan calls on us to make 2023 a year of experimentation and create new things that let us connect online, but outside of established platforms:

I am thinking specifically of experimentation around “ways of relating online”. I’ve used that phrase before, and I acknowledge it might be a bit obscure … but, for me, it captures the rich overlap of publishing and networking, media and conviviality. It’s this domain that was so decisively captured in the 2010s, and it’s this domain that is newly up for grabs.

It is 2003 again. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram haven’t been invented yet … except, it’s also 2023, and they have, so you can learn from their rise and ruin.

12PM — Desktop blogging editor MarsEdit 5 is out, introducing micro-blogging, Markdown syntax highlighting and a new rich-text editor. Now, I need to implement AtomPub on the site so I can start using MarsEdit.

10AM — The most popular social networks by monthly active users since 2004, animated.

I had never heard of Hi5 before, or Qzone, which had over 650 million active users in 2014. (via Waxy)

7PM — Kalley Huang, New York Times:

“Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” one Meta employee wrote in a post. “LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.”

Not sure how you feel about it, but wouldn’t it be a good idea if the people building Twitter alternatives today were not the same that built the dreadful social-media platforms that currently exist?

6PM — The Tumblr community has invented a Scorsese movie called Goncharov. And Martin Scorsese is aware of it. The Internet is still weird.

5PM — I love these black-and-white photos from London. The whole of aegir’s blog is a thing of beauty; each post has a different header graphic and colour scheme. (via ooh.directory newsletter)

9AM — In The Blog Cycle (from 2005), Anil Dash traces the typical discussions within blogging communities as they evolve from initial formation to maturity. I wonder if we’ll see this pattern again if the current interest in weblogs continues.

8PM — Google Maps is no longer served from the subdomain maps.google.com but from a path on Google’s main domain (google.com/maps). If you’re allowing Google Maps to use your location, Google can now use it on all sites under google.com.

5PM — Nobody knew what would happen after most of Twitter’s workforce was laid off or resigned. Still, Gruber is right: The doomsday scenarios that were predicted haven’t happened yet.

6PM — Shaun Ganley recorded the approach to New York’s LaGuardia Airport, arguably the best view over the City. You get to experience the size of New York, how the architecture changes, and how the different parts connect. It’s like a vast, real-life map.

Getting a view of my destination while approaching the airport is one of my favourite things about flying. Approaching London Heathrow, you get an excellent view of the city on most days; if you have a window seat on the right-hand side of the plane and if the weather plays its part.

5PM — A nice bit of internet nostalgia:

a collection of more than 700 88x31 web buttons from the 1990’s and 2000’s, including the famous “Netscape NOW” and “Internet Explorer” buttons

I’ll definitely put one of those on the site soon.

7PM — Claus-Henning Schulke hands world-record Marathon athlete Eliud Kipchoge drink bottles during races. He celebrates every successful hand-over to Kipchoge so excessively that people started noticing and nicknamed him “Bottle Claus.”

FloTrack did a behind-the-scenes look with Schulke during the 2022 Marathon in Berlin.

You can see Schulke’s energy, excitement and joy; they are infectious.

3PM — Great news, Kottke is back. I’m glad (hope) he and his tree are doing better.

3PM — Netflix is streaming That ’90s Show, a sequel to That ’70s show, from January 2023. The Formans are grandparents now and their granddaughter is visiting. I’m not sure the sequel was necessary, but ok, it might be good actually.