My personal life has been in such upheaval since April. I’m now set up in a little card table in a basement. All my belongings are packed away in a storage unit. I’ve been granted a stalking injunction against a guy. This means I’ve been entirely dependant on the courts and the police. They’ve all been good people - but have been mostly useless in helping to solve the problem.

It was nice to represent myself. I just watched videos - watched other stalking injunction hearings and read up on the different forms. I got very used to the Certificate of Service form. (Things get so meta with that form - I swear I saw a Certificate for serving the Certificate of Service somewhere.)

But, in the end, I just don’t trust the police and the courts to fix the problems. I left a neighborhood that I really loved. I haven’t even said goodbye to Kathy. I just keep telling her, “we’ll see.”

I knew every house. The guy who plays the euphonium. The guy who walks with his weights swinging by his side. The Hindi couple who lost a baby. The tall guy who loves formula racing. The lady behind me with the beautiful garden. We never talked but we always smiled and nodded. I never turned on music out there because I wanted to enjoy her radio sounds.

It’s embarassing to slink off and leave them in the mess. I guess we are all really strangers. Everyone minds their own business. Even when things get crazy.

Digging upwards, to find some light.

I have been so buried that it’s been tough to make time for Fraidycat, Multiverse or the HrefHunts. I was so comfortable before - even I would forget that there was a real person under here.

It’s not that I think anyone is disappointed - even Weiwei, who is so helpful at every turn. But I am disappointed. I want to be doing all these things. Not sifting through hours of security footage or regrouting a bathroom. Searching for a place to live is insane right now.

But hey - my cup of water is full, the card table is holding up, and there is so much good stuff to go through - filling up the Web in the interim. I love the world.

People were standing next to a machine with freon to cool it down - presumably while it rendered.

The summers were full of interns experimenting and it sounds like Joy would write up job descriptions for them that would provide them with a cover while they

She described John Lassiter’s “Pencil Test” short - and the release to coincide with Quicktime.

Hypercard. Teachers were excited about it bc they could pick off images and build presentations. It become easier to make content. The game Myst.

The idea of going up to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a Mac Plus. Had a harddisk attached as well. Was bigger than the elevator to go to the top. So it was hoisted up next to the elevator. There was no ground up there - just cables.

Dan O’Sullivan had to go up. Last minute, he mentions he is afraid of heights.

Again - thousands of pictures stitched together into an interactive scene, above the Golden Gate Bridge. They began to give beautiful interiors the treatment - palaces in Russia and museums.

Presenting to Russia, their first demo of the VR image had no reaction. No clapping, no response. They were devastated.

It turned out that they didn’t believe it was real! Afterward, they had to impress upon one of the faculty that the demo was real by putting his hand on the mouse and illustrating that the room in Pavlov’s Palace could be navigated.

A day in the life of Australia - with 30 different countries represented among the workers attending. This was a series of photographic books - and Joy loved that the series showed photographers taking the pictures and some behind-the-scenes stuff. She felt this was important bc “if you’re going to tell a story outside of reader’s worlds, you should show the connecting story that bridges to their world - to draw them in.”

Americans in the 90’s were less impressed by demonstrations than other cultures because they were exposed to it so frequently. Once we are exposed to an innovation, our imagination catches up to it and other things become less of a stretch.

Reminiscing on “background printing”. Before PCs could multitask, you had to wait for documents to print.

Re: developing guidelines for developers, to ensure that Apple products were consistent. There was no “police force” at Apple, it was designers writing well-written, simple-to-follow guidelines to ensure that everyone was on the same page.

“It wasn’t as glamorous as going to Russia, but it was just as important.”

She developed color designs on a monochrome screen, during the transition to color! Flipping down color foils over the black-and-white screen. Starting without color monitors. She asked for a color monitor. “Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t have one of those.”

Some people did not want Hypercard to be produced. Bill Atkinson worked offsite. It didn’t fit into the culture at Apple. Like asking people in the UK to switch the side of the road they drive on - people just didn’t see the reason to put on a new paradigm.

“It was a totally different way of computing. And people got confused. No shit!”

People needed to see it in a new light - but they saw it as a different model that offered no benefit. “You don’t play Call of Duty in the same way that you listen to audiobooks.” (LOL!)

Don Norman walks by - first card is an index card with a fish and a telephone number. “A fish doesn’t have a telephone number.” “Don, it’s a graphic, not a real fish.”

These creative tools opened computing to women, who had been isolated from the male-dominated world of programming. Anyone who looked different at the time was sent to Joy because she cultivated a team with a wide variety of talent. But it wasn’t just an appearance thing - she discovered that most of the people she was drawn to had a background in music.

They had to spent a lot of time in the office because most of the computers couldn’t be transported home easily. “Luggables”: computers like the Powerbook that were somewhat transportable but not easily. They still had to use pen and paper quite a lot with no Internet to keep their home and office work in sync.

Education was not a lucrative thing to pursue, never has been. Apple had to compete with IBM. There was no competition in the “entertainment” front. And games were just for children. Mechanical Universe (from JLP) was a foundational work to teach Physics. But it was an uphill battle to get to those shifts.

Re: “productivity”. Work was developing plans, producing spreadsheets. Visualizing those things was quite controversial. It seemed extraneous to spend time designing the view of a project. Now it’s taken for granted that you can design post-its as “productivity”. (This feels like a jab at Kanban boards. XD)

She’s bagging on icons again. But hey - what could be more iconic? (Esp those original slanty Mac icons.)

Mention of a female mathematician who had long hair - and all the male workers assumed she was a designer. “She’s a mathematician - don’t go asking her to make you icons.”

Story of people cutting their fingers installing graphic cards in the computers. Dripping blood would short the boards! The execs had no idea the difficulty people were having until they did studies and filmed videos of people doing the installations.

With the new color monitors, people didn’t understand that the screens were still black. (When powered off and during early boot stages and stuff.) So they would return the computers bc the monitors weren’t “color”!

Lol. Going off on “A.I.” again. The word “intellegent” and “deep” being bandied about. “Why do people not know what Eliza is? How many lines of code was it? And when was it written?”

“Ivan Sutherland will say: I’ve done nothing.”

While talking about how many great works from the past have been ignored and not followed. “Newness is very overprojected and underdelivered.”

Interesting story about getting people to open up creatively by having them cut up magazine images and Xerox their collages. People were shocked at what they were capable of.

“I listen to music today - and I hate it! But I learn new things by listening to it.”

“We don’t sit and watch enough - we react. But it can be practiced: What is that person thinking? What would happen if a ball fell on them. Practice observing.” She mentions a Welsh four-year-old who discovered a large dinosaur footprint while the father was on his phone, standing by her.

The Mac SE. A black-and-white computer that was “6in-by-6in – the smallest computer I’d ever seen”. Post-Lisa, but a Mac. A one-button mouse.

By her estimation: “this company isn’t going to go anywhere - that computer doesn’t do anything!” Just writing and numeric stuff.

“Can you tell the Quicktime story?” “No! Because it’s longer! You just can’t tell a Quicktime story!”

Akamai was run by PhD mathematicians. “I felt like a duck out of water.” They didn’t know how to communicate. She wanted to start visualizing ‘millions’ and ‘billions’.

“Cortana’s just randomly started to talking to me… And the first thing she’s just said is ‘I’m sorry.’ Which is GOOD.”

“When did you last sit down with a veteran of your industry? Silicon Valley has become so fast and young.” She points out that so many politicians

A big problem is “not focusing on a breadth of users, rather than just yourself.”

“The trust issue is horrible.” (Trust for devices.)

A very cool discussion about technology for over-70s.

“Sorry - I interrupted you drinking water…” “I’m actually drinking Scotch, man!”

When asked about a favorite interface, it was a beadbox interface - with translucent beads and a light passing through them. It made sounds with the beads - of varying pitch and “density”. She envisioned it as a group activity - something to play with others.

Interesting that what killed the product was the inability to demo it in an electronics store - bc of the need to demo the product in a store where you can’t quite hear perhaps. And people walk by it and don’t know what it is.

“Why doesn’t the font size get bigger when I move away? […] As if I wasn’t there. But goddammit - it knows I’m there.” (May-li then chimed in about the irritation of phone orientation when you lie down on your side.)

“It’s an AI! Christ! Quick - buy it!”

“Icons are stupid - you don’t want to do that… Designers should be doing interesting, difficult problems.”

“Please don’t design t-shirts. Or you’ll be doing that for the next few years. […] We don’t want to diminish the value of design down to t-shirt logos.”

Moving from a “window” computer to a “mirror” computer. She sees this - “reflecting” us as a big step forward. To her experiential computing (VR) can’t take off until you can feel the “edge” - a bump in the wall or in the floor - without any gear. (Or feeling any gear? You feel the bump bc you don’t feel the gear? Holodeck thoughts…)

“Boring men… wearing… not even black t-shirts… Brooks Brother shirts or something…”

“Another thing we worked a lot on at Ford is: pentagrams. You can fit a lot into pentagrams.”

Gossip’s Web 🡵

A very potent set of links from Elliott Cost, sea king of the special fish. Introduced me to things like Sunday Sites and to the sweet little blog of tiana.computer and to the completely-achievable lists of Doable Lists.

$1 to participate.

Jacob Hall’s Links 🡵

Just a big list of categorized links. I love linking to many of the things on here as well! (Another way to do this is to keep pages for each category, such like Maya does here under ‘ye timeless content’.)

A cheap way to do this kind of thing is to use Listography. You can go into extreme detail (highresness) or petite like (daisy.)

Terra 🡵

‘Cool sites, straight from earth.’ A very nice directory with tags. The source code is on Gitlab.

Some great material, unknown to me: The Bus Stop anonymous message temp space and Spitalfields Life anonyblog. This person knows the Web - a staple in my link trove now.

Failure Tolerated 🡵

A blog by Sean McCoy - here’s the links. Just starting - hoping a link back will encourage more. This makes me think I should start to catalog newsletters in href.cool.

The Lilac Lynx 🡵

Oh, wait - the links page is here. Categories like ‘Soundscapes’, ‘Other worlds’, ‘Tasty things’ - there are some really interesting YouTube channel links in here. Seri! Pixel Biologist?

I also love seeing links to personal things - like the tea companies linked to - which are a window into the life of The Lynx. I’m trying to do more of this as well - such as linking to headache vids in href.cool.

distinctly.pink 🡵

Looks good! I love when static text is part of the directory - such as the list of words here. (Incidentally, there was a list in Gossip’s Web as well.)

Electric Trash Dot Com 🡵

Internet trash. Literally.

This looks like an unassuming list - but there are a lot of things here that I realized I left out of href.cool for reasons of pure negligence.

The Web is so awesome!

p. 1. “Now, in the morning, most Newcomers are out there working. Later they will come to the big Sunflower Field and dance naked under the sprinklers. Then they will have lunch, and then they will wash their dishes in a big metal tin, which will be placed right in the centre of the big Sunflower Field - they’re very strict about those kinds of things here, about centres.” (It’s very amusing that they dance and then wash dishes. I think the light-heartedness of the story is quite disarming. But the thing is - it gives the main character a very childlike feeling and sets the story apart from other dystopian stories which are nearly always characterized by a damp, heavy tone. This is why I pair this with We (1920), since the tone feels so similar. Also the note about “centres” becomes very important in the story - the desire to pierce the “centre” of a group dynamic.)

(Oh, I will say - this story is quite allegorical. But I don’t think that’s where it really kills. There are some amazing moments that are only tangential - like epiphanies that seem off-topic, but which are actually central - to me, at least.)

p. 1. “I’m still very far from being considered a part of this place, someone who really belongs here, and that’s because there is way too much ‘me’ in me.” (*It’s interesting that Leo can be Leo - and Jonah can Jonah - but she can’t be herself. I think there’s a very modern pressure to tone yourself down, or to abdicate your identity, perhaps even with good reason, which is why it’s easy to relate to Alejandra here. And I think I can see why this happens on the Internet

• you have a worldwide group that has converged onto a massive virtual space - and there’s just not room for everyone, so there is pressure to pull people down, strip down one’s self, etc. At the same time, this will have to happen - one should probably step into the shadows from time-to-time.*)

She combines some confessional blogging with a larger project of self-analysis and plan-making. I think I would be more reluctant to quote her if I knew that this page would be widely read - for her tone is so completely introspective and private.

Trying to write honestly on this public journal is also a constant struggle, especially with what is happening around the world these days. It seems unfair that I am here writing in relative safety while people are out there either dying due to injustice or fighting for it. But I know if I get caught up in activism I won’t be able to survive the grief and fatigue that comes along with it. To survive, I have to carve a little bubble around me for as long as I can. The price to pay is the existential guilt that I carry around with me everyday.

— “on processing books for kindling”

These kinds of admissions, I could never actually hit publish on. Here, in a paragraph detailing a pile of her weaknesses, the subtext is: the strength she has developed in managing those weaknesses.

And - in a way - it is astonishing to read a ‘blog’-type website that isn’t rooted in a criticism of the world or an admonishment to change.

And she develops strengths of a kind that many people simply don’t value. Such as the effort to build a robust aging strategy.

I love growing old, and the only thing I hate about it is people I love growing old — one of the most important things I’ve been working on is learning how to bear grief, and how to cherish love in the present.

— @wynlim

In discussing her purpose, she writes something very similar to ‘find the others’, a close relative of my ‘let me link to you’.

Because I have abandonment issues, no matter where I go or what I do I feel alienated, isolated from what everyone else is doing.

So it has been deeply comforting to me when internet strangers send me messages to tell me that they resonated with what I shared. It is not validation that I seek, but resonance and connection. Sometimes, I would like to feel less alone. I would also like to facilitate the space for others like me to feel less alone.

— “on processing books for kindling”

Of course, this is where I am supposed to suggest that social media is tearing the intimacy of online relationships apart - by converting them into war grounds. (While, it seems, her website enables meaningful connection.) However, I can’t help but confront my own reasons for reading Winnie’s journal. Am I merely attempting to voyeuristically examine her life? Perpetuating another ill of online life - the performance, the transaction of personal privacy in exchange for public karma dollas.^[2]

What am I seeking in her words? Resonance and connection? Yeah - I think so. I am - for sure - responding to that feeling - resonance - something like, “Oh hey, what she’s saying has something new, but it’s also… very old. I recognize it.”^[3]

Yes, yesyes, oui, oyyyy. Hypertext is our connection. She inhabits here more and more, so does h0p3, Talita, all these friends. I am not attempting to self-model, but it is happening. Part of my internal state is here. And they are woven thru it.

I wouldn’t call it self-modeling tho. It’s a soul thing, conjuring, maybe a subastral soulsync (soulseek?) a fomenting of the miracel or the bizet (virtual personas that don’t exist in the physical world, even in pixels, there is no picture of them because they are entirely made of our feelings for others and whatever it is that we’ve learned but don’t yet understand…)

I feel like I’m constantly loosening the invisible chains on myself with every year that goes by. I think the gift of working on ourselves is emotional freedom, and it is emotional freedom that gifts one creative freedom. There has to be a sustainable, steady force propelling us through a 30-year project, and we cannot let our psychological baggage be dead weight in that long, possibly arduous journey.

— ‘the long view: note-taking and becoming a person’

I need to quote some parts from the chronic pain stuff, as well as her excellent stuff on grief. In those respects, I feel like I live so similarly - it’s like I’ve found someone who says the things I don’t say, because almost no one understands them.

But I’ll also observe that her writing has been excellent during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not generally about the pandemic - more a crystallization of the state of her heart and mind, clearer than before even. So many have been sidelined by the virus - their posts are like “WHOA!” - whereas hers are more uniquely determined in some way.

He goes on, elsewhere to further object to passionate, sudden smashing. This is predictable.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their un-mediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

— G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905

I do like that the monk is ‘excusably knocked down’. I feel the monk’s issue here is exactly what I described earlier - obscuring his reasoning in abstractions, in a way that feels like stalling. The pullers-down here may seem impatient, but hey, we can’t spend our whole lives analyzing a lamp-post.

In a way, all of the various reasons for pulling down the lamp-post are pretty damning. Couldn’t a variety of reasons be much more compelling than a singular, unanimous reason?

Besides, isn’t the fence’s destruction inevitable? By fire, rain, vehicle or animal - isn’t a fence ALWAYS a temporary solution? Hastening its destruction seems innovative - let’s find out what the consequences are - REAL, not imaginary - such that we can find a more permanent solution perhaps.

I think that, if people are talking about taking down a fence, then they are likely free from more pressing concerns. So they likely have the luxury of now addressing the consequences.

In this way, I feel like the current desire to destroy the police departments has come about BECAUSE culture and society have improved. We now have the luxury of this being our concern - and there is an inate feeling percolating that now could be the time to confront the consequences. (I don’t say ‘luxury’ accusingly - having experienced a lot of grief in my life, I feel that grief too is a luxury - not everyone has the luxury to dwell on a tragedy after it happens.)

I run out of steam pretty quickly on topics like this. It’s not that I don’t care - it’s just the futility of trying to tackle a big topic, having only lived as this one inadequate being. (I lose every debate I get into because I see the other person’s side too easily - and I just agree with everyone. It’s stupid - I wish I was principled.)

But I think I see the ‘fence’ differently than Chesterton. We are too attached to our personal fences. Even the big ones like capitalism and socialism. I feel that these are just tools for us to use. (And I think humans will ultimately move well beyond these two concepts.) Both capitalism and socialism have useful concepts that will stay with us. Even if they are one day only found as choices in the menu of a SimCity clone.

Life will one day be unrecognizable to us today. The events of the last few months are proof of that. And I almost feel certain that the least likely prediction will come true. (And I do wish that Chesterton’s fence was real - maybe it is - because I confess that it would be cool to visit such a thing. Even if it would only be kept alive under extremely vigilant care.)

p. 9. “Webloggers understand that people will regularly visit any website that reliably provides them with worthwhile content, even when that content is on another site. As counterintuitive as it may seem from an old-media perspective, weblogs attract regular readers precisely because they regularly point readers away.” (This is one way that I feel blogs have returned to an ‘old-media’ perspective - people are much less likely to link externally in 2019. Most Medium posts or recipe blogs or coding tutorial posts - you don’t see so many links any longer. I think this a combination of a lot of things - links now have a decent monetary value due to affiliate linking and they also became a liability due to SEO rules. (See Linkfarmville.) As a result, I don’t think we can call this an ‘old-media’ perspective any longer. I think you could even safely call it the ‘new-media’ perspective! )

p. 11. “The new information space includes a website devoted to the adoration of Converse’s popular ‘Chuck Taylor All-Star’ sneaker, a site detailing the exploits of two friends who photograph each other attempting to match the appearance of strangers they happen to see, and one that seeks to elucidate an artist’s curious obsession with young women holding celery.” Okay, had to track these links down! They are: The Chucks Connection (still up), Dean & Nigel Blend In (defunct), and The Art of Frahm (also, still there, just as it was!) It’s interesting to me though, that the conceit of these websites would probably still work in 2019 - so though the ethic of ‘new-media’ in the 2000s has died, the creative concepts haven’t. In fact, I’m sure that they’ve cannibalized the ‘old-media’ creative concepts.)

p. 12. “For everyone, the great task of the future will not be to gain access to more information, but to develop avenues to information that genuinely enhances our understanding, and to screen out the rest.” (Yes, ok, here we go. I think we can all agree with this. And this makes me think of the ‘layers’ I mentioned in Notes: We’ve Got Blog (2002) - layers of reading, layers of writing. Social media is too raw - it’s all random snippets of text, no summaries. I need high-level views of the information, then the ability to zoom into the details. A ‘layer’ is a level of detail - and it includes both a measure of polish and quality, as well as a measure of intimacy with the topic or person.)

p. 12. “Even the man who turns first to the Sports section of the paper version of his hometown newspaper is exposed, however briefly, to the front news page; and an interesting headline in the Living section may catch his eye when he puts down the rest of the paper.” (Ok, here we see the value of directories when compared to a search engine. Even ‘awesome’ directories are this way - you start to wonder, “What else is in here?” I think that even social media and Reddit give you this adjacency exposure - but perhaps it’s too random. The underlying assumption of this analogy is that the man values the newspaper as a whole.)

p. 12. “Read a good filter-style weblog for even a few days, and you will never doubt the value of an astute human editor. Because he evaluates content rather than keywords, a human editor provides his readers with more relevant information than the most sophisticated news aggregator ever can.” (This has definitely been my experience with Andy Baio. He has plugged me into better links over the years than any algorithm has. I mean algorithms have done some good work, too, but I think that they owe a lot to human editors downstream who initially bring some attention to a link that then gets picked up by an algorithm. So the algorithm relies on Andy Baio, too!)

p. 17. “With the addition of a comment system, many weblogs actively solicit ideas and opinions from their readers.” (This is one line that really struck me as being in stark contrast to today. Blog comments are seen as being synonymous with ‘cesspools’. I have not personally had that experience - but I have never had many readers and I am not a target for some reason. Large websites are obviously a target because they give a random commenter a large audience. Nevertheless, there is no question that people want feedback. For some, I think they would be happy with just measuring ‘likes’. But I think this is what the Indieweb gets soooo right - there are no ‘comments’, only blog posts interacting with each other. However, it’s clear that there are ‘readers’ who just want to send an e-mail, rather than having to write, edit and publish a blog online.)

p. 18. “I would go so far as to say that if you are not linking to your primary material when you refer to it—especially when in disagreement—no matter what the format or update frequency of your website, you are not keeping a weblog.” (What a prescient, clear-headed sentiment! This is something we still need to integrate into our ethic today.)

p. 29. “Writing short is hard—and very good for you. Seeking to distill your thoughts to the fewest words, you will find out what you really think, and you’ll work even harder to find the precise term to express your meaning. Paradoxically, writing short also spurred me to write longer pieces. Finding that I sometimes had more to say than I could comfortably fit in a weblog entry, it was natural to turn my comments into an essay. Rather than distill my thoughts, this longer form required that I flesh out my ideas and more fully support my conclusions.”

p. 30. “The weblogger is privy to the entries she posts and those that she does not: I think I’ll blog that! followed a moment layer by No. . . . Acutely aware of what she does not type, the weblogger more clearly defines her own boundaries. Reviewing what she has written, she catches glimpses of her less-conscious self.”

p. 40. She doesn’t mention how to set up any specific services, saying, “Even if I had a favorite, software of this type comes and goes.” It makes me very grateful that she wrote this book, despite the trouble with keeping it current.

p. 48. “When I look at an unfamiliar weblog, I always take note of the names listed in the sidebar. The first question I ask (still) is ‘Am I listed?’ Pathetic, isn’t it? I don’t think you ever outgrow it.”

p. 56. “I knew of one weblogger who told no one he knew about his site. His audience developed when the sites he linked found him and linked back.” It’s interesting to see my blog explained in two sentences. It’s cool that this still works twenty years later. (This section of the book focuses on the value of using a psuedonym. Kind of like with blog comments, I think people have rested on making generic claims (i.e. the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) and dismissed the valuable tradeoff that they offer.)

p. 68. “Write some linktext or a personal entry in the voice of another weblogger, using your own material. Then try using that technique once a day for a week or two to whether it suits you.” (I’m unsure as to whether this suggestion is a kind of A/B testing or if it is merely a game. I’m noticing in these next sections that there are some sales and marketing type strategies discussed. This fits inline with the idea that bloggers had to adopt the roles of editor and publisher. And promoter I guess. While I feel like there is discussion of ‘old-media’ vs ‘new-media’ writing approaches - but not so much ‘old-media’ vs ‘new-media’ publishing and promoting (whatever that may be.))

p. 69. “The audience of one is the single most important principle behind creating a website—or anything—that is fresh, interesting, and compelling. Consult your own taste, and then consult your audience—but only in regard to your presentation of the material.” (This seems a misnomer to me. I would think this would be ‘a creator of one’ rather than ‘an audience’. Look: this book, these notes I’m writing, every blog, every thread comment on the Internet, is written to the audience of humans out there. So I don’t think it’s useful to say that your audience is just yourself - if so, it would change the voice of the writing. For instance, you wouldn’t feel a need to explain anything. You wouldn’t take the time to write out your background on a topic. Even h0p3 sometimes writes in an explanatory voice and other times in a shorthand - like in link logs, where there are often short, cryptic comments in bulleted lists. Perhaps these varieties of voices also play into hypertext ‘layering’ - need a better name for it…)

p. 70. “Take your time. Think as you write, and be willing to rewrite until each sentence of each entry says exactly what you want it to.”

p. 72. “You will most enjoy writing your weblog if you approach it as your private sandbox. If, after writing and rewriting an entry, you can’t quite articulate your objection to current foreign policy, post it anyway. You’ll have another chance to try tomorrow or next week or next month.” (Again this is where ‘layering’ - ‘hypertiering’, ‘tearing’, ‘funneling’ - gaaa I don’t know what to call it - this is where it comes in. Having parts of your site that are less accessible and more personal and rough, alongside more public surface material.)

p. 74. “I would encourage you to embrace all the elements at your disposal. Experiment with different forms of linktext, different lengths of entries, much commentary, no commentary. Write short. Write long. If you are so inclined, play with the design of your site. If you love to code, your site can be a project that expands as your skills grow; if you don’t know anything about coding, your site may become a fantastic impetus to learn a little bit about HTML or cascading style sheets. Add photographs. Write essays. Hone your Web searching skills and publish the results. Tell stories. Be willing to experiment. Play.” (This is a photograph of the feeling towards one’s blog in 2002. This seems very basic now. However, most people have lost access to this freedom I think.)

p. 75. Linked article: “Adding value to your links.” This is still a solid bit of advice for writing directory entries.

p. 80. “GLBT bloggers…” (Didn’t realize this acronym had some shuffling occur. Good to see the lesbians prevail. Makes sense to me.)

p. 85. “You may choose to follow and participate in only one or two threads a day or week; you may find that you gain more from the community by lurking than by actively posting; and you must always remember that your words are the only measure other members have of you.” (There is good advice in the etiquette section here, but I am sure that anyone who needs the advice won’t take it.)

p. 87. “Some webloggers regularly provide coding tips, free postcards, or desktop wallpaper. If you feel that you are an expert user of a particular weblog tool or other commonly used software, consider offering tutorials on your site or providing advice in user forums.” (We’re past this, right? I think we’ve moved past this.)

p. 90. “[Linking to others] is probably the single most effective strategy for politely announcing your presence as a new member of the community.” (It’s interesting how this has changed subtly with @-mentions becoming the primary way on social media sites. I like how Webmentions have cleaned up this ‘strategy’ and allowed mentioning to become more nuanced. I wonder if ‘likes’ are a good way to announce your presence. Like I wonder if people generally check their likes for ‘others’.)

p. 92. (wrt to ‘cross-blog socializing’) “Be aware that if your weblog largely consists of comments to other webloggers—even two or three a day—you will severely limit your potential audience.” (Again, funneling.)

p. 95. “Every experienced weblog reader knows that the best way to find good weblogs is to follow the links from the sidebar of their favorites.” (The lost art that ‘friending’ killed!)

p. 102. “Weblog clusters emerged as webloggers converted their sidebars from more general lists of ‘other weblogs’ to ‘other weblogs like mine.’” (I don’t connect with this portrayal of the blogroll sidebar AT ALL! To me, it’s a chance to advertise my favorites - the tultywits. Admitting this is terrible - because it may hurt someone’s feelings that they’re not on my list. That’s the hard part of the tradeoff. But what can I do - I need these on my list to survive. Go focus on your list, make it good - and just don’t put me on there, I’m fine.)

p. 103. (wrt the word ‘attack’) “I don’t mean a respectful disagreement with her opinion on U.S. foreign policy; I’m talking about outright attacks that seem grounded in a personal dislike for the victim.” (Is an ‘attack’ an ad hominem argument? Is it using a derogative name? To accuse someone of an ‘attack’ - is that also an ‘attack’? It’s strange to live in a society where now I hear all the time in personal conversations with friends or neighbors: ‘[Person] attacked me on social media.’ Part of the trouble is knowing whether I can affix those intentions of ‘personal dislike’ to the other person. I get that this is unsolvable - part of my point is that we’re too wrapped up in conflict. People seem to collect it, categorize it and make rules around it, as if it were the loveliest game in the whole world.)

p. 104. “Again, I’m not counseling against thoughtful criticism of another weblogger’s political opinions or her editorial stance on the proliferation of trees with fuzzy pink flowers in her part of town. A public site invites scrutiny. Most people who offer opinions about current events are interested in, or at least not offended by, a respectful dissenting view.” (This is a perfectly rational view. But I try to stay away from criticizing someone publicly. I hope none of my thoughts here are perceived as looking down on Rebecca Blood or rejecting her work. I think this is a fantastic book - that’s why I’m talking about it. These are rough notes where I’m just using her statements as a springboard. I am probably wrong, up and down, left and right.)

p. 105. “My policy on dealing with weblog flamewars is simple: Ignore them.” (I get this. But this often feels like high-horsing. It feels arrogant to just ignore something completely. I think it’s fine to just say: ‘This hurts my feelings’ or ‘I’m not in a good state to reply to this’. People also seem to demand apologies and have become experts at dissecting apologies, as if you can get to the truth of something so subjective and surface-level. So silence doesn’t really cut it in many situations anyway.)

p. 134. “I focus my weblog on the ideas I find interesting, not on myself.” (Wonder about the PSM take on this.)

p. 144. “I don’t know if the ex-webloggers miss their weblogs. I don’t know if they ever wish they still had their little spot on the Web, a place to share stories, tell a few jokes, learn a little HTML. I think that I would miss those things, but I wonder if that might someday change.” (Would be interesting to ask Rebecca about this.)

p. 148. “Those first webloggers soon discovered a community of parallel sites that called themselves E/N pages (for ‘everything/nothing,’ a description of their subject mater). Though they used the same format (dated entries, newest at the top), their focus and sensibility was completely divergent from that of the emerging weblog community. Members of both communities agreed that though the format was identical, the sites, some how, were different.” (Hah, wow!! I missed this one. See here. Then here. I love how low the ratings are on these. I do think this is closer to what the Web has turned into, rather than blogging. Really appreciate that Rebecca pointed this out!)

Study of E/N pages also led me to Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything book. Here is an essay with some of the basics. To review later I suppose.

6 Jan 2020

I have a bit of time today, so I’m going to work on holding up my end of the chat here—however, I’m gone for a week starting Wednesday, so I’m not going to be great at getting back to anyone until after that. I’m also struggling a bit with motivation to write on this blog in general. I’ve been catching up on reading novels over the holiday and find myself almost entirely happy just doing that. I’ve also been writing some short stories—which is about the most pointless thing a person can do—but I am enjoying it, perhaps because it’s so pointless and carefree.

24 Dec 2019

Ok, never mind the timeframe. I personally feel like the discussion is just getting going. I’m really enjoying this and don’t want to just pour more words onto it. I’m definitely feeling a stupid self-satisfied British feeling (yes, the feeling is ‘chuffed’) at what good chatmates I have here. Everyone adds so much, it’s fucking great.

I hope I’m not sitting on my replies too long. I keep stirring my replies around in my head, unsure how to lay them out. I think that’s been the main thing for me this chat: I don’t want to poorly communicate a response or an idea that could cause the chat to go off into clarifications. But I also really trust you all to have replies that get high marks from me, so it probably doesn’t matter. I probably just want to hold up my end with solid contribs.

10 Dec 2019

One of the surprising parts of the chat so far has been that personal 1-to-1 conversations have emerged and seem to coalesce naturally into the rest of the chat!! I expected that we would throw out prompts and everyone would respond as a group, like you’d see when a band gets interviewed by a magazine, then we would move on to the next batch of prompts.

But this is almost like a forum with a bunch of panelists who field questions, then discuss between each other - except that side conversations can happen simultaneously, which would be impossibly noisy in real life. (This is a real problem: a panel is not only limited by time, but if a certain set of panelists takes the conversation in a new direction, there is often no chance - or desire, probably - to return to the original question with a new set of panelists.)

I’m also very heartened that there is so much longform writing occuring. I wasn’t sure how everyone would feel comfortable responding. And, if the chat is to happen naturally, it shouldn’t be needlessly gimmicky. We don’t want to just use hypertext like we’re pressing vinyl records. It should be used because it is worthwhile. But it’s like a dream - conversing over a broad time span, low-key, exploring each other’s side thoughts, ducking in and out of those newly found corridors - and I feel like I am getting to know everyone better. I’m bracing myself for a downside here.

We should set a end date - like end of December? Earlier?

There should also be a new prompt later this week perhaps. To give the group a central point again. Wondering if it should be a new prompt or a natural next segue? Maybe both - and if one is ignored, we leave it behind.

1 Dec 2019

Many of the ‘features’ of hyperconversations (drafting in public, heavy footnotes, branching discussion, more-is-more) seem to be attempts to break through possible communication problems by providing an excess of communication to draw from or to replicate the kinds of real-life annotations (body language, grunts, pointing at things) that we give in-person conversation. When someone is drafting a letter publicly and recants some words - or an emotional sentence evolves from reflexive disgust or confusion to a sentence of rationality - you catch a peek at the mind, much like you might in the corner of someone’s eye.

So, since hyperconversations continue to push toward an attempt at a ‘transparent’ view of someone’s side of a conversation or an early revelation at their motives^[1] - I’m going to lay out some of my intentions for doing this chat and everyone can fix me from there.

One of my main goals from the start is to see what editing and human curation can bring to a chat (or threaded discussion). While formulating Notes: We’ve Got Blog (2002), I noticed that one of the prevailing notions of the book was that blogging improved on journalism (and presumably op-eds) by simply removing editors and publishers from the process and letting the audience decide what is good.

But this reasoning does not hold up - blogging doesn’t simply make everyone’s writing better. (It would be harder, right? New medium?) Sure, it may produce more public writing, with some very high quality at the top end - but someone still has to weed through it all - and that’s a tough job that most people don’t want or know how to do in their spare time!^[2]

I have a hunch that there could be some remaining value in weeding through a hypertext conversation and polishing it, as a service to readers. I don’t see myself removing any of it - I think the job could be to simply highlight parts of it into a running conversation, moving the rest out of view, but still accessible. I don’t think all readers will appreciate this - some will want (and deserve) the raw text. But I think having an initially truncated version to read can help the reader get into it a bit easier and help them decide if they want the full dump.

This also seems to tap into some design skills - and I think it’s possible that an editor/designer hybrid craft could come out of a project like this.

h0p3:
I’m excited to learn how to write in this format. I’d prefer to think inside this tiddler, but it takes a while for a message to settle sometimes, so please wait until I have a timestamp and ‘draft’ lock is dropped before quoting me.

Just to set you at ease, nothing will be finalized until the chat is over. So I won’t begin wrapping it up until everyone has pulled their stuff out of ‘draft’. Yes, this gives you a chance to edit yourself and mess with old chats - I’m not sure what you all think about the ethic of that - but I’m great with that, we can accomplish more if we trust each other.

As for quoting you while you’re drafting - since we’re all drafting, too, it seems fair game, right? As long as we source YOUR final quotes from YOUR finalized wiki, right? And if certain quotes don’t add up, we’ll footnote it and maybe it’ll add to the fun of the sprawl.

1) In Charge of Apple Inc

It would actually be hell to run Apple - because a) it’s stupid, past its prime b) it’s a corporation, who knows what monumental effect it has on the world, for good and ill, running it has got to be paralyzing c) it has shareholders, which is stupid, and d) if NeXT or BeOS or Amiga was still around, I’d be talking about them instead.

So what I actually mean is running Apple as if it was SimCity or something. Like if I didn’t have to constantly brace myself about Foxconn employees jumping, I’d love to just chill and design computers, tablets, operating systems, programming languages and the whole ecosystem. In a way, I think I do all of my design with this goal in sight. I need to interview Nathalie Lawhead and ask her about this, because I feel like she’s this way - probably a lot more than I am, of course.

Realistically, this isn’t possible - I never went to school for it and haven’t been through the ropes. If someone offered me a job I wouldn’t take it because of (a)-(d). Building my own company like this - well, I’m not much of an entrepreneur.

I think I’ve figured this one out tho - I need to continue with my designs and projects along this line and post them here - much like h0p3 does with his p2p designs - and that would be the SimCity-like approach. And maybe some things will become realized - like Fraidycat is beginning to.

2) Run a Puppet Theatre In My Neighborhood

I admire little-known but amazing neighborhood attractions - like the Zymoglyphic Museum or neighborhood junk houses and esoteric museums. The marionette theatre in the Jardin du Luxembourg is just the kind of thing I would want to do if I live to be retired. It’s great - they bring in novel stuff like costumes that change themselves and smoke bombs. I think this kind of thing makes your ‘home’ even more of ‘home’ for you and the people around you. It begins your burial in that place, so that you are woven into the very grass.

It might be that putting this here dooms the aspiration - because this seems like the kind of thing that you should keep secret and avoid talking about because it could be quashed by outside negativity about its preciousness or by your own oversharing about it - at the same time, I need to plant some seeds of commitment in myself and just say it.

3) Return to Teaching, This Time First-Grade

I taught for two years and it was the best. At first, I treated it like a research project to try to sort out how to improve public education. But I’m not sure that any ‘system’ can automate teaching - we just need quality teachers and they need resources. (What I mean by ‘quality’ is - at the very least, you shouldn’t intimidate students - and, beyond that, hopefully you can heyfey to some degree.)

This kind of alt-education stuff is also starting to feel like min-maxers who just want real characters to try their hands at. But it’s like - the whole thing is already min-maxed.

I still spend a lot of time at the school, but I hope to just go back to basic teaching in like seven years, when I’ve stabilized my life. The elementary school is like the epicenter of our society (or should be) and it’s a damn sacred place. I no longer see the appeal of ‘changing the world’ compared to ‘helping thirty kids’ have a good experience during their daylight hours.

28 Jan 2020

@chameleon:
I’d like to pre-emptively avoid lumping in “activists” with those types of people.

Yeah, ok, I need to fill that in a bit. I’m not making a judgement here. I’m not putting them all in a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ category. There are good and bad trolls, good and bad activists.^[5] (Although sometimes I wonder if centuries from now we’ll look back and see the pursuit for humor as being far more virtuous and generous than the pursuit for political ground. Maybe slightly - eh probably not.)^[6]

My grouping here is more a matter of directionality or something. Hypertext 2010 was an effort in isolation - or solipsism, as you say - impossible to intrude upon (without hacking it) - so quite unsuitable for a troll or activist, whose fuel is targets, people to trigger or people to sway. We don’t really have those directional targets. I mean I’m cool if people join us, but it’s not essential.

In fact, I think, for me, the directionality is inverted. I’m here to read. I’m not trying to own or gather up a bunch of Winnie Lims. I just want to read what she’s got and see what happens.^[7] Maybe I want to be owned and gathered. No, that’s not it - I mean perhaps in the moment of reading, I’m happy to be destroyed by it - but I’ve got my own thing I’m doing, it’s just going to be less dramatic. The directionality is just: I want to collect some of these cool stickers you’re offering. It’s like the pleasant capitalism that happens at the level of coins rather than cash.

It’s possible that ‘hypertext 2020’ continues to be hermetic, ‘staying under wraps’. But, no, I think that while trying to articulate this directionality, I want that inverted movement. Perhaps it’s like a vacuum tube where the pressure got too hot. So now a hole broke and everything is getting sucked inside. It’s a nice breeze. Time to break some glass.

Agreed on the mainstream - just on principle. My back is turned.

21 Jan 2020

Ok, thank you - the answers about ‘funneling’ or ‘iceberging’ or ‘shitpiling’ or whatever you want to call it are all really interesting. I really like Chamy’s take on drafting as another layer. I hadn’t considered that kind of granularity at all.

I guess we can start to wind the discussion down - I think the last thing I want to ask about touches on the ‘culture wars’ and the surrounding online warfare that we find ourselves in. Specifically: the ingroup/outgroup dynamics that plague the Internet, the trolls and activists that stoke the fire, and the norms that are being established around how one should talk and write publicly. This is already a topic in the discussion - the personal/private distinction we’ve discussed indicates where we stand in defending ourselves, the topic of doorways into our icebergs is somewhat about who to invite and how to set the right note - and h0p3 just went into how the funnel can ‘bounce’ trolls and vampires. (Which troubles me, because I like to meet trolls and vampires, too. For sure I’d love to meet vampires! I’m not sure I want them to bounce as much as to rattle around inside.)

So this topic might kill the discussion - I feel like it’s more enjoyable to just allude to the conflict rather than to take it on - not that no one’s talking about it, it’s like everyone is talking about it all of the time. And I think it goes without saying that the shape of our ‘cozyweb’ is due to these forces.

I guess my question is: to what degree do you feel the four of us are being shaped by the culture? Or are we attempting to reshape it in miniature? Because ‘hypertext 2020’ isn’t really a complete discussion without some vision for how our smaller landscape could function. We have some good ideas for how the craft of hypertext might progress in 2020. How can it possibly work culturally?

7 Jan 2020

I’d like to propose this question as our next point of conversation: “what on this massive highly-interlinked website might I want to start reading?”

Yeah, ok - let’s get into this. What has really inspired me about all of your wikis - and some of the newer personal websites I’ve run into - is this layering of the hypertext. h0p3 has the ‘about’ page, people might have a timeline or a ‘now’ page on their site, even Twitter with its ‘pinned post’ - you don’t just have to have a blog that drops you into chronological posts.

But it goes much deeper that this. I’m starting to think of it as funneling, having layers of hypertext that become progressively more personal, or which become more detailed, or perhaps even more (or less) ephemeral as you go through the layers.

I think part of this is an evolution of the fragmentation that has happened in social networks. People may use Twitter for a certain self-image or community, then Facebook or a blog for another mode, and people have become very accustomed to using each network as a separate outlet. And there’s a nice advantage to this - because you can address groups differently and not expose certain groups to overly personal material or control the image you project in each network.

In a similar way, I see this with Nadia Eghbal’s site - she has a newsletter for offering a monthly summary of her work, or there is the blog where you can read essays when they are published, and then she has a raw notes page that isn’t tied to any notification system (like RSS even), so you have to go out of your way to visit the page to catch anything new. So rather than having separate networks, there are different avenues to how you can approach her work.

Your wikis accomplish these layers using titling conventions. Usually ephemeral stuff is marked with a date, letters marked with ‘@’, permanent content is plainly titled. But this is also related to your front page material - you all know where to hide on your wikis the more personal material that you post and how to surface the things that are more central to your dialogue with the rest of us. (Sphygmus’ page coloring is a very interesting approach here.)

So I think of this as a kind of inverted funnel - where you have these entry points to your wiki - might be an ‘about’ page or it might be one of your sidebar directories or some intermediate topical page - and pages are situated somewhere in this conical area, perhaps you are even aware of how far a page might be from the doorway when you post it. Or which series of doorways reach it.

(I’m wondering what you think about this concept - what I’ve got wrong or if I’m characterizing your process correctly.)

kicks, I think you already address this in your FILE_ID pop-up - would you say more about how you thought about what to put there?

Well, that file is kind of my personal website, but it’s hidden inside of a little square. I like my site to be disorienting to happen upon, because I think it demands a bit of curiosity as an admission fee. (I think you do this too with your KEEP OUT notebook. It has lips on it, which soften the sting.)

But I’m so big on directories - it occured to me that I could evolve the ‘pinned post’ into something like a mini-directory. h0p3’s ‘root’ page is much more detailed - it’s five pages in one - and each page is terrifically long. I just tried to think about what a mini-directory or cover page would look like.

I also like to hide it because talking about myself is very uncomfortable. I feel very insignificant - but I like it that way - to have to feel that my own ideas or personality or opinions are very valuable - that would be too much to handle. I’d rather have little ideas and wrong ideas of my own - and just be a random person living life and no need to size up what I’m saying against the great ideas of history - no need to establish some track record of being right or upstanding.^[8]

So sometimes I think about getting rid of it - it seems like an advertisement for myself. But I hold out hope that I can make it a mini-directory and eliminate the self-promotional aspects. (On the other hand, I want to encourage other people to self-promote, so I don’t know why I see it as so shameful to write that way - when I like for other people to do it.)

I think the biggest discovery that I’ve made with ‘funneling’ is to have my /all unfiltered page and then to have a main page. To describe it in TiddlyWiki terms, it’s as if I’ve taken my ‘recent’ sidebar and curated it on the home page. And, rather than using titling conventions to do it, I use metadata - so that some entries are marked ‘hidden’ or ‘draft’ and that keeps them off the home page.

Are there things us wikis could be doing to better serve readers? Is it important for us to attempt to provide something like this for readers? Should it look like Gwern’s index, or is there a more wiki-native solution that might be more ideal?

I don’t know - the thing I’ve really enjoyed about your public wikis is that I’ve had to learn your conventions before getting into them. I think you require something from your readers - and I think that sets up a really healthy relationship that the rest of the Internet has struggled with. It’s not their place; it’s yours. And that’s abundantly clear. But when I became comfortable in your wiki, you may have trusted that I had done sufficient work to be worth interacting with.

But then again, I like funneling and there would be no cone without the point. Yours is a static image - but it’s also the colored tags to the side. I think you set the right mood for what it is you’re doing. Sometimes I wish I was structured more like a wiki - but stylistically I’m trying to evoke a turn of the century blog - and aesthetic is important to me, because it surrounds everything else. It accomplishes something that can’t be expressed or done any other way.

Are we modeling fictional characters or not? Does it matter?

h0p3:
We face infinigresses here; in a sense, it can’t be satisfied by us, it can only be sought.

I’m having a very difficult time replying to this (and the remarks that follow it.) Not because it’s not well-written or because I don’t agree - simply because I want to expand on it, but haven’t the language to do it.

But, to begin, I think there is something about ‘now’ which I think is important. We can’t satisfy the modeling of ourselves in a moment (‘now’), but we can’t develop something over time.

Who we are can only be understood through dialectics with others, and at least sometimes that occurs through dialectics with imagined characters. Of course, certainty cannot be achieved, (h:cba. Of course, certainty cannot be achieved, and any time you posit a limit, you posit something beyond it.) and any time you posit a limit, you posit something beyond it. (h:sbi. and what is beyond that limit is sometimes only something which fiction can initially explore.)

Similarly, if I sought after your model, I couldn’t achieve it ‘now’, in an instant. It would become assembled over time, as if it was a gigantic LEGO castle.

But what I wonder is: are the old models relevant to the ‘now’ model? Can I render all models useless in an instant? Perhaps, in modeling, I look back and see the model of me - and suddenly want nothing to do with it. Or perhaps it’s more light-hearted than that - it’s time for a drastic change. Or I’m just embarassed - that seems likely!

I’m not suggesting that the models are flawed - all the people I know who have gone through the death of many family members at once, this model becomes quite precious. For the memories it holds, but also because you don’t want to lose who you are through the process. You rely on the history of yourself to help you not lose yourself to an internally destructive force that wants to kill you.

But then - there are things from ourselves that we can’t take with us always. Ideas become outdated, of course. And then, like losing someone who we’ve had plans with, who suddenly is gone, any of our plans or projects might not survive in the present.

This also relates to the discussion about clarifying ‘wonderful’.

The process of clarifying who we are, including what is valuable to us, (fantastic Socratic anecdote, tyyyy) appears to be at least part of the treadmill of generating our models, and they ought to be. Our brains are constantly modeling the world (including ourselves); there’d be no intentional consciousness without it.

I may think something is wonderful in the ‘now’ but that could change. (I try to resist that, though - and to always be grateful for the things I’ve loved from the past. This helps me to guarantee that I will always love philosopher.life!) But I can’t always nab (in the instant) why I love something. And I feel that even attempting to can be foolhardy. In the moment, I can usually only assemble a tiny LEGO flower of an impression. And it often seems better to hold off and try to assemble something more. Although: flowers are dainty and beautiful in their own right and I can still later surround them with LEGO cabbages and LEGO motorcycles and minotaurs and to build the fine scenery that I mean to.

And I also think that my LEGO flower (in this case) would be the phrase, “I love it because it makes my life worth living.” And to avoid the rational dissection of it is to grant it real life for the moment.

(Of course, I’m not opposed to the conversation with Socrates, I would have it in an instant. “Because drinks are more seasonal to me,” I say to him. “Drinks can’t be more seasonal,” he says, “because they have no seasons.” I say, “Oh yes, they do. They hover right above the liquid…”)

10 Dec 2019

(h0p3: Apologies I don’t have a response yet.)

Sphygmus:
Kicks, do you ever deal with information overload? Like, you’re browsing and surfing and discovering personal websites and interesting articles and now you’ve got 10, 15, 20 tabs (tb: 100s?!i??!) open and they all seem like cool rabbit holes and you’re not quite sure where to go next? Or what it all means anymore? (maybe that’s just me.)

I have experienced this in the past - and I still experience this with books. Although I’m not sure it’s the same. What I experience is gah, I’m not spending enough time reading all the things I want to read, finding all the things I want to discover, given how much there is!! And I assume that’s what people mean when they say ‘information overload’. (Your image of so many tabs.)

Is it actually ‘overload’? Or is it that there is infinite information (and there was even a century ago) and you’re feeling some inability to approach it? Which, in my case, has usually been about losing my discipline for a time span.

But I am spending the right amount of time reading online right now - and I have a very long list to work through that is in a sensible order. (I no longer have tabs open - I do have a link list, so that has helped.) I am not spending enough time reading books. If I spend enough hours each week, I feel like I am at least methodically working through the infinite mass and I feel healthy.

If yes, what do you do with that feeling? Does curation help? Like you’re specifically looking for cool people doing cool things in obscurity and you want to let us folks in your corner of the world – so does the endless array of cool people doing cool things feel overwhelming or invigorating or? (I get the sense it might be the opposite, that you feel like it’s hard to find cool people doing cool things. correct me here!)

It’s so cool to me that you care to ask me a question like this! That, alone, makes me feel like there are plenty of ‘cool people doing cool things’. Even if it was just you and me - that would be enough.

No, I feel like there are many more cool people than I can possibly be aware of. I worry sometimes that I have no sensibility. I honestly find something amazing in almost everyone I discover. If they are working in hypertext, it feels like I can count on it. And yeah – it’s invigorating.

I do wish I was aware of more black writers. I know there is a tendency to do this out of guilt or political activism. But I simply feel like black writers have an unusual angle. I think this is why black artists are popular in mainstream culture - subconsciously we know that they are outliers and can show us what it means to be human in a totally unexpected way. I mean I am definitely interested in anyone out there, regardless of their race - but among Americans, I think black artists have shown that they are always on the avant garde of cultural movements.

So, at the same time, it is difficult to find certain subcultures that you may want to find. (I would also love to find a really sweet fitness goth blog. Especially if it was a .onion site.)

When I do find someone that I really really REAALLY connect with - then I greedily spam that link wherever I can - in my notes, into Fraidycat, I recite it in my mind. I am so afraid of losing it. And it means that I begin to visit that site very frequently, to try to read everything that I can. When I found Ton’s blog, it was like that. And I was very appreciative that I could tell which posts were ephemeral and which were polished, finalized essays.

This is also what helped get me into h0p3 (and you and chamy, because you follow the same conventions): because you clearly mark dated, temporary notes vs longer, central nodes or essays. So it is very easy to know where to ‘start’. Which is appreciated when I am discovering someone and want to move from the polished stuff down to the day-to-day stuff.

(Thinking more about your other questions…)

Chameleon:
The subtitle is “things chameleon knows” and I feel like that encapsulates it. To me this is a website to throw my ideas to the wall and see what sticks. It’s obviously not every last thing I know, but it covers a broad spectrum of my interests and ideas.

Yes, this seems like ‘self-modeling’. Keep going. Why do it publicly?

3 Dec 2019

Open question: while we’re all here - what do you personally want to talk about? Like do you have any topics you want to pitch?

sphygmus:
Perhaps it’s about feeling — when the wind is warm but just a little sharp, and blows that feeling of longing straight through your bones — if one empathizes with that feeling, resonates with it, then perhaps they’ll resonate with my work as well.

(First off - great quotes! The low-key Nadia quote is unexpected, but very refreshing.)

I actually think your wiki is an ‘artist statement’ without needing to explicitly state that - and I think that’s why h0p3 could capture your essence so clearly. Maybe he inferred it from all the pieces?

With h0p3, I think I am more curious about the ‘self-modeling’ part of the phrase - but with you I definitely wonder more about the ‘public’ part. And you kind of answer that here. It sounds like you’re looking for kindred spirits. But you also keep a lot of things private - and you do explain this from a curatorial angle:

Perhaps it’s confusing to stumble upon a website where everything is mashed together — the mundane details of what I ate yesterday right alongside finished letters, notes on projects, and my drafting of this response.

How do you decide what to reveal and what to make public? (I ask because I haven’t resolved this for myself either - whereas I think h0p3 has made this line very easy for himself.)^[9]

h0p3:
I take it that you don’t see yourself as a PSM, kicks. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I see more self as a conduit. I really get into finding people and connecting people (and saying hi to them). I don’t have a desire to preserve myself or to catalog myself. But having the dialetic does make some of that worthwhile. And maybe I do model myself in other ways: in pixels, in code, in colors flickering.

I mean - you’ve all influenced me a lot and I find myself mimicking some of your conventions. This leads me to think that part of PSM-ing helps a human function day-to-day. (Talking through, remembering, clarifying thoughts.)

I wish I understood better whether ‘modeling’ meant a self-‘styling’, self-‘bending’, self-‘constructing’ vs just trying to represent yourself as you are, ‘the plain picture’ in Bob Dylan’s meaning. Maybe it’s all of it, somewhere between, or simply not possible. Are we modeling fictional characters or not? Does it matter?

h0p3:
Why do you have sites like yours on the web, what are they for? What is anything for?

To me, it’s the same - I act as conduit for discovering wonderful things. To me, wonderful things and wonderful people make life worth living. (How do I know if it’s ‘wonderful’? — Because it makes my life worth living.) (To prevent you from asking me to clarify - it ends there - an instinctive feeling of simply ‘this is worth it to me’.)

h0p3:
You have the chance to reason about whether or not I’m trying to do the best I can with my pile of puke.

Hahah! We’re all standing around examining each other’s sick. I like this interpretation. I think that if people could begin with this image, use it as the basis for their consensus, they can admirably proceed with the dialectic. There’s a lot less picking things apart if you cut the whole conversation some slack. (But I’m also glad that you asked me to clarify - and that you dug into the response - sure, why not? It’s all doodoo - but still worth rooting in, on the chance of some swallowed gems…)

h0p3:
[…] my wiki allows me to re-use my data to understand what is salient in the world (including myself).

This is a great point! I forget that you are already employing a lot of self-editing and self-curating. (And what you do with us - making a tiddler for Sphygmus that curates her, in a way.) So this is starting to lead into my next prompt, what you refer to here as ‘the chain’ (but which I also think of as hypertext ‘layers’)… let me think how to articulate this and I’ll get back to you. ‘Soup to nuts’ is one way of putting it, but it’s imprecise, it’s not just a linear progression toward ‘the end’ - or it doesn’t have to be, I guess.

h0p3:
I keep almost mindlessly answering: 42 or 42ness, which is almost vacuously true, but I’m still not showing my work well enough to you.

I think this is probably your most useful analogy to helping me comprehend self-modeling. This goes in the final.

1 Dec 2019

(This steno is something of a scratchpad. I put the latest comments I have that relate to the current point of discussion in the top box - historic stuff is below.)

Sphygmus:
expert public self-modelers, oh my! and is that the first prompt - where to go in the next decade? no gun jumping here, I think it’s all fizzy excitement. mic check at will!

@hypertext-2020 Whoa whoa - how bout let’s back up to ‘public self-modeling’? (Seems like we’ve had an adequate mic check.) For yourself, personally - is this an adequate shorthand? Or do you think of yourself in any other terms that can help someone understand your work?

h0p3:
As a habitual wall-of-texting sprawler, I feel some of the claustrophobifying tweet-syndrome creeping into me here.

Looks like we have a formidable antipleonasmic analysis on our hands here.

h0p3:
Adequate shorthand for what?

An adequate shorthand to describe you, your wiki, your work there. I feel like the phrase was an attempt to wrap all of that up into a shorter name so that you can refer to it briefly - and perhaps so people can understand from a glimpse. Or even so you can understand or remind yourself of what you are doing.

So, my first question is just to look at the phrase again. Seems like a good starting point. Is it that to you? Where does it function today?^[10]

h0p3:
I’m giddy+nauseous at the thought of how to maximize a hypertexter’s autonomy and expressivity while still packaging it up for a securely scaled mesh.

You can fully expound - that could be a virtue of this style of chat. You could footnote off into a new tiddler, if you need. Or you can simply link in an old one if it represents your answer still well enough. Carry on. (And on.)

30 Nov 2019

@chameleon @h0p3 Tentative title for the chat: ‘hypertext 2020’ - where is an expert wikier supposed to go in the next decade? But yeah - just rip into what is going to be hot techs and paradigms for expert public self-modelers in this future timeline.

If we get Sphygmus on, I’ll do a mic check and then we can start. Hope I’m not jumping the gun - just pitched this idea today…

For the first fifty pages of this, I felt nothing but self-loathing. Blogging suddenly seemed like the most disgusting thing to do - to aimlessly, carelessly write endlessly about my tastes and interests. While I quite like Rebecca Blood’s analysis in the early chapters, this quote chilled me:

As [the blogger] enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective. His own reactions - to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the media - will carry more weight with him. Accustomed to expressing his thoughts on his website, he will be able to more fully articulate his opinions to himself and others. He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead. Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration.

— p. 14, Rebecca Blood, “Weblogs: A History and Perspective”

Perhaps Rebecca could really use the confidence boost - and that seems entirely wholesome - but I personally do not need to take myself more seriously. I can definitely appreciate improving my articulation - yes definitely, definitely - but becoming more ‘impatient’ and more opinionated - yet somehow more ‘reflective’? More weighty? I don’t want this to happen… (I think I’d like to remain aware that I’m a perfectly worthless dipshit.)

Any idea that these days of blogging were somehow more idyllic, pleasant or enviable quickly goes out the window in this book. The shit-talking is near-epic! Names are named—denounced and disgraced as ruining the form—mostly deriding “A-list” bloggers, but also decrying “the unbearable incestuousness of blogging.” Seems like the confirmation I’ve needed that mastering hypertext is going to be a formidable challenge for us - one that they were only just beginning to embark on and, therefore, were well over their heads in.

However, so far I’ve found a surprising amount to glom on to. These early bloggers definitely had a whiff of what was to come (partly because many had recently left the experience of Usenet) and I think I’m coming away hugely crystallized. Unexpected!!

So, How Useful Are Blogs?

The juiciest quote, for me, so far is this one:

‘Accept that the Web ultimately overwhelms all attempts to order it, as for now it seems we must, and you accept that the delicate thread of a personal point of view is often as not your most reliable guide through the chaos. The brittle logic of the hierarchical index has its indispensable uses, of course, as has the crude brute strength of the search engine. But when their limits are reached (and they always are), only the discriminating force of sensibility will do - and the more richly expressed the sensibility, the better.’

— “Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man” by Julian Dibbell (2000)

This might be a little self-affirming, because it seems to vindicate the web directory (e.g. my l’il href.cool) but what it really seems to be describing is the blog as our premiere discovery mechanism.^[1] This must have been a common view at the time, considering this earlier quote:

[…] the weblog movement will begin to realize its true power, a more widely distributed version of what the Open Directory and other collaborative web directories have promised but only minimally delivered.

— p. 40, Brad L. Graham, “Why I Weblog”

In hindsight, this feels like hyperbole - the finished product of a blog seems (to me) less navigable than a directory, although both are usually stale by then. But I think this has played out, to some degree, especially if I think of how useful a good music blog can be when attempting to discover new music. (Though I think a good music podcast or YouTube review can be equally good.)

Hmm. A medium really is only as good as the artist makes of it. It’s not that hypertext is tapping into us. We’re pushing it wherever we want, right?

Defensive Blogging

We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions. I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from “audience” to “public” and from “consumer” to “creator.”

— p. 16, Rebecca Blood, “Weblogs: A History and Perspective”

I want to draw a comparison here between this quote and (apologies) Fortnite Battle Royale. Putting aside everything else about Fortnite, it tacked on an interesting innovation: the ability to build structures (in a Minecraft-inspired fashion) with a traditional (third-person) shooter.

Most people seemed to scoff at this blend—as if it were some kind of mere monstrosity of buzzwords. No, this ability to build boxes around yourself or staircases to scale mountains added a much-needed defensive strategy to shooter games, aside from stuff like holing-up or strafing. What’s more: the building strategy can also be seen as ‘shooting’ defenses—you are adding to the environment—it is a constructive, perhaps aggressive, kind of defense.^[2]

That’s what seems to resonate with bloggers: not the publication of a first-person journal but the chain of interaction it often ignites.

— p. 170, JD Lasica, “Blogging as a Form of Journalism”

This chain of interaction can manifest as a scorching backdraft. And that is not usually what you are trying to ignite. We like to think that we are kicking off a fantastic, fulfilling discussion that moves the world forward—but the chain is well outside of our control.

(My initial thoughts to ‘controlling’ such a thing is… defensive in the Fortnite sense. Many hypertext writers now build layers around their writing. Nadia Eghbal has direct interaction through Twitter, indirect interaction through polished essays and a newsletter—but also, concealed interaction through an unadvertised notes page that is not easily syndicated or followed. Similarly, representing the public-self modelers—h0p3 has a home page entry point that is carefully curated and groomed, but which is several layers up from a complete chaos of link dumps, raw drafts and random introspections—all of which you can only sort through by learning his curious conventions. You are on his turf. These layers run a spectrum of accessibility—there is always a learning curve before you hit the bottom. You start with a doorway before entering a maze.)

Final Takeaways

I do think what this has left me with so far is two very clear impressions:

• I still think blogging is a great way to shed light on undiscovered wonderful things. (Other touted aspects - such as ‘giving me a voice’ or ‘replacing old media’ - don’t particularly juice me up personally. Maybe I’m being too hasty here, though. It’s a luxury to publish freely with no editorial staff to shut me down.)
• Curating blog posts into a finalized book is pretty cool. This reinforces my conclusion on my Hypertexting study: that a permanent ‘body’ of text can be extracted from the ephemera of assorted links and notes that go into blogging. I think it will be useful to, at some point, roll up a bunch of old posts (perhaps delete them) once I’ve compiled a nice piece of writing that sums it all up. (Perhaps this is just a stupid realization about ‘finishing’ something - gah, sorry!)^[3]

So, while certain writers in this book seemed to look at the blog as a fully-realized literature format - and perhaps it can be that to some - for me, I see it as a conduit between writings and creations - a place where some of my own words fester and pile up, as a kind of byproduct.

Lastly, there’s no question that we are far from a mature view of hypertext. I feel that much of the last two decades has been spent just trying to emotionally process what our open exposure on the Internet means. These bloggers lived during an early expansion when the population was much smaller. The extreme growth (along with stuff like constant mobile connections and the Snowden discoveries) has transformed the Internet into a very public, chaotic place.

Developing a blog/wiki/etc demands writing, editing, publishing and even relationship chops. I’m not even touching the journalism, entrepreneurial and community-building aspects that this book focuses on at times. Trying to do this in a disciplined way is difficult in the changing landscape - partly because so much of our discussion necessarily revolves around examining that landscape.

Appendix: Raw Notes

p. 5. “[so-and-so] grouped a bunch of webloggers into high school cliques and called me a jock” the shit-talking begins, this is comfortable, nothing has changed.

p. 5. “Dave decided I must be ‘brain-damaged’ because I used frames.” first thought: this is worthy of publication? second thought: oh, wait, these are raw blog posts republished. third thought:

Tracked down the Dave Winer post myself, to ensure ‘brain-damaged’ was the actual wording. (It was.) Quote just below it:

Dad says I shouldn’t criticize other people on my site. He’s right, in theory. But in practice, what I don’t like is just as much a part of my personality as what I do like.

— Kate Adams

(Personal aside: I once criticized the cover of a Philip K. Dick book publicly on the Internet. The only response my post receive was from the illustrator that had designed the cover. She basically said: “Thanks, that hurt.” You might think she had no business replying to my post and should have just taken the criticism. But she didn’t like my criticism - which is “just as much a part of her personality” as anything else, I suppose.)

p. 9. Good Rebecca Blood quote: “These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers. The Web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them.”

p. 11. There seems to be a recurring theme that Blogger made blogging “too easy” by just having a single textbox to post in. Didn’t realize it was that much of a progenitor to Twitter.

p. 12. Filters as their own thing: “I really wish there were another term to describe the filter-style weblog, one that would easily distinguish it from the blog.”

(No indication of the tools available to the ‘filter’ blog are given - except that it has access to other filter blogs. Also, there are about five different blog types alluded to - none of them matter now.)

p. 18. The author seems to say that communities, in order to survive, must stay small - and credits The WELL with the best approach. I don’t know The WELL - but it’s still here today. Wonder if it is considered intact…

p. 20. The term ‘webpools’ is used here several times. There are many, many outdated terms and awkward language choices in these essays. These are really cool to me because the language was in such flux - and it reminds me of how repulsive the word ‘blog’ was at first. (I invent crappy words, too - guilty.)

p. 27. Having a good ‘link checker’ is mentioned. Interesting that this technology is nowhere to be seen now. (Href.cool has a simple, dumb one I made - but it’s proven essential.)

p. 31. Some discussion about crediting sources. The discussion is basically “this is a virtuous thing to do” vs. “it clutters up the blog”. This misses the point (imho) - the point is to aid discovering related blogs.

p. 32. This is so funny: “But what about a weblog for the homemaker?”

p. 32. “Wouldn’t it be great if all the neurosurgeons in the world had one place to go for up-to-date information about the numerous changes in their field?” No. Hard no.

p. 35. The need for one’s own domain name. I used to think this wasn’t very important. Starting to come around.

p. 37. “fram” - friend spam. This was nostalgic - ahh right, basically, e-mail forwards were the Facebook of that era. Again, recurring theme of: people need to become better, more disciplined independent writers and publishers. That is what the Web asks of us.

p. 43. omgz, a spoof of “we didn’t start the fire” in the middle of the book. “Wetlog, BrainLog, NeoFlux, and Stuffed Dog…” this is amaaazing.

p. 49. beebo.org?? wtf, this is the second time this has come up. “a blog best-seller list”? The captures on Internet Archive do not explain this well enough for me.

p. 51. It’s becoming clear that Blogger was the poster child of its time. Strangely, people don’t really trace the lineage of Twitter or Tumblr back to it - nor does it come up in the Friendster, Myspace, Facebook dynasty. It’s just kind of this useful website that appeared and is still here. Strangely, Google has managed to keep it low-key, ad-less, customizable - seems like a completely ignored utility. There even seems to be a “New Blogger” dashboard for mobile. I wonder what keeps this thing going?

p. 52. Fears about blogging becoming “too easy” - leading to “blogorrhea”. Yeah, that panned out.

p. 54. The Bicycle story. This seems like some kind of a precious take on memes. Or, alternatively, a satire on a template blog post. The self-loathing returns.

p. 59. Damn, this is serious shit-talking!! (Like on the level of Bernhard’s The Woodcutters.) I need to talk about this in more detail later.

p. 68. Blogs as “exteriorized psychology”. Sure. But no. Hard no.

p. 70. Where did Jorn Barger go? Seems like perception that he was antisemitic turned against him? Nah, it’s got to just be burn out or something. Everyone should retreat from the pulpit at some point. (Actually, not sure why I’m asking where he is - most of these blogs are vacated. I think people didn’t want out of blogging what it ended up giving them. There was definitely something of a gold rush.)

p. 76. This Julian Dibbell has some good stuff. “Does it even count as irony that Barger’s rigorously unfiltered perspective is perhaps as good a filter as can be found for the welter of the Web?” This is a good question! And it really confuses the topic of what makes a good algorithm or a good editor. The discussion kind of stops at: it’s a sensibility.

p. 78. Blogger was a one-man business in 2001 after initially having a team. It really squeaked by. This is cool. It actually survived.

p. 82. “I do think there was a blog concept. Then there were a couple blog concepts. And now we’re getting closer to a blog concept again.” Lol. I think we’re back to a couple blog concepts again.

p. 87. Comment about 2001’s “p2p hype” drowning out interest in blogs. It’s interesting that blockchain took that space for awhile. And it’s interesting that some p2p+blog projects have a niche community now. It’s also interesting that those were seen as competing at the time - I can see how people would think that, but those were clearly two different crowds.

p. 89-98. No real interest in this chapter (on the Kaycee Nicole Hoax) - although veracity of information continues to be a big topic. Was a topic in the radio and newspaper eras, too.

p. 103. “[Blogs are] nothing new, they’re not changing the world with their content, they’re not going to make anyone huge amounts of money, but they are a form of self-expression and community which others enjoy reading.” (Finally, some tempered enthusiasm that’s grounded in reality. No one in this book even considers that blogs might have been a fad - which is a reasonable appraisal given that blogs have almost vanished within the past ten years.)

p. 112-115. An actual essay on link-hunting! It’s rather thin, but it’s a good start. Most of the sources listed in this article are gone now. (Except mailing lists - though they aren’t nearly as prevalent.)

p. 124. “linkslut” (Sick, this is me.)

p. 131. “… most popular weblogs function to serve up the piddle and crap the authors either don’t have time for, don’t believe worth taking any further, or perhaps are testing the waters for.” (So: people know they are writing for free and withhold their best work. Really makes me grateful for insanely high-quality essayists out there like Nadia or Toby.)

p. 138. Kottke is a serious target in this book. He is quoted here, talking about his laptop bag. The writer then basically says, “See, this is the epitome of decadent navel-gazing.”

p. 141. This Blogma 2001 stuff hasn’t aged well. The satire is just thinly veiled bile. Which is not a problem. It’s just that the target of this piece (“A-list” bloggers) is not interesting. Maybe it’s too easy. (Like a satire on modern influencers - who cares.)

p. 144. In a section on blogging tips, called “Anonymous Is Okay.” ‘If you are being anonymous give some hints about you from time to time. “I am a fat boy!”’

p. 152. This has really gone downhill in the last few chapters. I’m now in an essay on how to get noticed. “Also, when sending email, try to be funny” - oh boy. And yet, this is exactly what you expect in a book titled We’ve Got Blog from 2002. (This essay does highlight that self-promotion was very awkward even then.)

p. 155. “Once in a while remind yourself that you are not only as good as your last update.” (Based.)

p. 164. Referring to a time in the late 90s: “Then reality set in and those individual voices became lost in the ether as a million businesses lumbered onto the cyberspace stage, newspapers clumsily grasped at viable online business models, and a handful of giant corporations made the Web safe for snoozing.” (Had to do a double-take on this one! Were they talking about 2011?)

p. 166. Reference to Paul Andrews’ “Who Are Your Gatekeepers?” Sounds worth reading.

p. 166. “Where the weblog changes the nature of ‘news’ is in the migration of information from the personal to the public.” (Premonitions of Snowden. Regardless of whether you think he was successful, in this respect he certainly was.)

p. 167. The rest of the essays in this book are by amateurs, so they look at editors at entirely superfluous. This section is written by journalists, so they seem to see it just as a tradeoff. Yeah, for sure. (As a reader, it certainly seems valuable to evaluate online writing on a spectrum of heavily-edited and fact-checked vs. off-the-cuff - depending on what you are getting out of it.)

p. 170. “One of the most interesting things about blogs is how often they’ve made me change my mind about issues. There’s something about the medium that lets people share opinions in a less judgemental way than when you interact with people in the real world.” (Eh? This seems spurious. The medium is still just the written word. I think what you’re trying to articulate is that you never quite know what you’re going to end up reading online - so it’s possible to be exposed to arguments you haven’t encountered. Hence all the talk about people being accidentally radicalized politically.)

p. 170. “That’s what seems to resonate with bloggers: not the publication of a first-person journal but the chain of interaction it often ignites.” (Yes. Hard yes. This explains the migration to social media. Quicker, faster, immedate sparks of interaction.) (It also occured to me at this point that ‘likes’ and such are analagous to ‘hit counters’ from this age.)

p. 171. The editorial process produces writing that is “limp, lifeless, sterile, and homogenized”; blogs produce words that are “impressionistic, telegraphic, raw, honest, individualistic, highly opinionated and passionate, often striking an emotional chord.” (I really don’t like that this paints a picture that writing just got better all of the sudden because of blogs.)

p. 192-193. During an essay which completely demolishes the war blogs of the time, Tim Cavanaugh quotes a full page-and-a-half of shameless gladhanding. ("…the consistently correct Moira Breen." “Mark Steyn—this guy is so good!” “…Natalija Radic really hit them where it hurts.”) (It goes on and on. This seems similar to current questions of ‘virtual signaling’. Which I don’t have a problem with generally. Really: what should a personal signal? I think the problem here is that the concept of a war blogger is gross. So perhaps it is the incompatibility we see between a person and their signal.)

p. 195. “For all the bitching they log about the mainstream media, none of the bloggers are actually cruising the streets of Peshawar or Aden or Mogadishu. Thus, they’re wholly dependent upon that very same mainstream media.” (Well, the mainstream will always exist in some way - as a baseline of culture, as a central point of reference, like Magnetic North. Therefore, we’re dependent on it. And we move ourselves around it by defining our various loves and hatreds of it. And, in this case, I think it should still be safely used as a resource. Also, ‘it’ is actually a massive, pluralistic, infinite, incongruous organism.)

p. 228. ICQ as “I seek you.” Durrrr. I never caught this! Wowwww.

01 July 2019

Okay, dove in headlong with Duxtape: I’m beginning to see what Dat and Beaker really are like—in a practical sense. I’ve also spent so much time debugging that I need to keep more of a diary of what this transition is like.

Beaker is experimental—and I’m tempted to quit it sometimes, because something doesn’t work. However, I’m learning that quite a lot DOES work—and I am just bumping my head against edge problems. It is one of my tultywits, though! I need to push for it—there isn’t anything nearly as promising right now.

Problems I’ve run into:

Sites don’t stay seeded when you close the browser. (Major.) (This is now the case in Beaker 1.0.) This is a problem with Duxtape—people will create a tape and then close the browser. I sometimes find myself doing this! Since Beaker is kind of like a browser AND a server, it makes sense to keep Dat running as a daemon. And, like the link describes, to keep a system tray icon running.

There’s also a related issue: ‘increase default seeding duration’ that seems appropriate.

(Along similar lines, I wish datPeers could continue running on sites that you’re seeding. This is tricky—but it would be REALLY cool to have a kind of service worker that could access datPeers for an archive. This way a Duxtape could continue to advertise itself while it’s being seeded. I am NOT complaining, though! DatPeers is sick—I love having it.)

Large files uploaded through writeFile crash Beaker. (Seems major.) (No longer seems to be an issue with Beaker 1.0.) I’ve filed a bug with some clues as to where the problem is. You can definitely upload files through Beaker’s library pages—the problem here is that my Duxtape editor doesn’t allow large music files. It would be great to figure this out. Some platforms crash even on ~8MB files.

The globalFetch API doesn’t work just like the Fetch API. (Minor.) (This API is gone in Beaker 1.0.) I have now worked around this, but it was frustrating at the time. I also filed a bug, specifically related to redirects. This is pretty easy to fix, but illustrates that experimental APIs aren’t hammered out yet (obv).

Address bar problems on Linux. (Minor) (FIXED.) If I install basic Ubuntu, these go away. So this has something to do with my dwm setup. I’ve actually identified the problem! The isVisible method is always false—for some reason, the window manager is not reporting this correctly. As a result, I cannot ever type into the address bar. This seems like an Electron bug, but who knows.

Things I’m discovering:

Dat really isn’t a replacement for HTTP. For example, I think Webmentions are better done on HTTP than on Dat. And, really, Webmentions are just the dead simplest form of a REST API—which, I’m not sure how such a thing would look on Dat.

There also isn’t a “server-side” with Dat—and this is important when it comes to something like permissions. In a way, I wonder if Github is showing us the avenue: the code is all distributed, but the centralized workspace assists negotiating collaboration—although it would be nice if more of it was distributed: the logins, the issues, the messaging. I could see Dat and HTTP having the same relationship in Beaker as Git and HTTP do on Github.

(Still dreaming more dreams for this page…)

Along similar lines, I have been trying to message the creators of the Byte app—not the hyped Vine 2, but the original Byte that was basically like an underground vaporwave social network from 2014-2016. I want to secure a dump of the public Bytes from that era. It was sick.