Kicks Condor

#chain

I use three main tags on this blog:

  • hypertext: linking, the Web, the future of it all.

  • garage: art and creation, tinkering, zines and books, kind of a junk drawer - sorry!

  • elementary: schooling for young kids.

05 Mar 2021

Reply: Captured Patterns

maya.land

You know how certain issue / ticket tracking software lets you specify the type of link between two issues or tickets? Jira has four types, one that I use in my life uses more – “is caused by”/“causes”, “is fixed by”/“fixes”, etc. I want flexible types of relations between notes along these lines. “This reminds me vaguely of this” separately from “I found this when I was looking into this” separately from “I think this is the same thing as in this other domain over here.”

This is fantastic - and reminds me of some of the flexibility I’ve seen with Webmentions. (They can be used to summon, they can be used to chat, they can be used to just plain bookmark…) And it reminds me of some of the metadata used in Webmentions: like one can imagine u-is-caused-by in a microformat.[1]

But yeah - a free text equivalent to that would be sweet. You’re on to something. Keep it rolling, my friend.

This then means that there has to be some thought put into the UI about letting an author privilege certain edges other people have applied, while still allowing discovery of that persons wrong opinions about accents.

I personally would just moderate contributions that show up - sure that means that I end up with a queue and conversation isn’t real-time that way. But that’s a fine tradeoff I think. And if you want real-time, you can make unmoderated additions monochromatic or something to set them apart.

In a federated world, I wouldn’t want to publish stuff if I don’t know what it is - and sifting through all that stuff and hand-selecting the good stuff is key effort that I think we have to get used to.

You can decide how to shape it all.

I mean the other way of doing this is like the public self-modelers did. They just gave each other direct access to each other’s wikis and trusted each other to take care of it. That worked really well.

Oh! You should also check out everything2. They’ve been doing this kind of thing for a very long time. I bet there’s some good nodes about this.[2]

paragraph based, not an outliner

Yes yeah.


  1. Not that I’m big on microformats - but just am already knee-deep in them. ↩︎

  2. Question is… where…? ↩︎

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

09 Feb 2021

The Multiverse Diary

@glitchyowl and I have a new project coming up - based on ‘whostyling’, scrapchats and Hypertext 2020.

I’m basically a Bilbo, content to stay at this corner of Bag End, being a layabout, munching wiki squares and playing all of Soundcloud chronologically in the background. (They were right about this ‘cozy web’ thing!)

Now glitchyowl has snatched my coat collar and dragged me into the woods on adventures. My pipe is still spinning in the air.

This is the tale of purple desert designs, silent HTML livestreams, MacPaint toolbars, Mario Kart-inspired JavaScript and disgustingly gaudy drop shadows.

We’re starting to draw the curtain on Multiverse - our combination of a new ‘blog’/‘wiki’ aesthetic, paired with some Indieweb sprinkles.

Also - we’re doing this diary at Futureland, which is really great. If you’re looking for a (somewhat minimalist) hideaway to blog at - but with much more style that the pastebins and a nice community - give it a go.

Of course there’s not the autonomy of a self-hosted customized TiddlyWiki or Neocities site - but it’s a community. Think of it as a replacement for the old message boards.

  1. do you happen to know if there's an rss feed for the multiverse diary? would love to keep up in my feed reader, but i can't find an rss link anywhere...

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

30 Jan 2020

Reply: Vias and HTs

Chris Aldrich

I’ve been fascinated with this idea of vias, hat tips, and linking credit (a la the defunct Curator’s Code) just like Jeremy Cherfas. I have a custom field in my site for collecting these details sometimes, but I should get around to automating it and showing it on my pages rather than doing it manually.

Links like these seem like throwaways, but they can have a huge amount of value in aggregate. As an example, if I provided the source of how I found this article, then it’s likely that my friend Matt would then be able to see a potential treasure trove of information about the exact same topic which he’s sure to have a lot of interest in as well.

All the concentrated salience contained in a single offhanded link.

My level of fervor for these kinds of links has gone way up since reading Rebecca Blood’s simple comment in The Weblog Handbook (2002):

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.

These are really strong words! But I kind of think she’s spot on. Blogs become less bloggy when they don’t have blogrolls, linking back, linking to - this is the stuff of hypertext. She goes on to explain how these links are more than just attaching a URL for mere credit - you’re basically attaching an entire conversation and history.

And if we look at the state of the Web in the present day - I think we need to be much more generous with our links if we’re going to survive. The more links, the more we’re connected and intermeshed. It’s a bond.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

12 Dec 2019

Reply: The Hyperchat Modality

Chris Aldrich

[wrt to my conversations with philosopher.life] I’m curious what modality you use to converse? Am I missing some fun bit of something about that wiki?

How do you converse with a wiki?

Yeah—it’s quite hidden. We’ve been calling it hyperconversation. It’s very informal and fluid. It’s completely simple: just leaving messages for each other on our sites. No Webmentions necessary or anything like that.

We’re actually trying to really push this concept right now. So there’s this sprawling group chat going on between my blog, philosopher.life, sphygm.us and wiki.waifu.haus for the last few weeks, going through December. The master thread is right here.[1]

You might be tempted to say that using Webmentions would improve the chat because it would give us notifications. But I’m not so sure! The great thing about doing a chat like this is that you really have to keep up on each person’s wiki (or blog), because messages could be hidden anywhere. With Webmentions, you would read their reply and move on. (Think of how, in your reply, you had to reference this article for me—but there is probably a lot more relevant material on your site—I know this is true, just because you do a lot of metadiscussion about blogging and online conversation.)

If you and I were to chat this way, we basically mutually agree to dig deep into each other’s blogs. Think of how this contrasts to ‘the temporality of social media’ that you mention.

Chris:
We’re being trained to dip our toes into a rapidly flowing river and not focus on deeper ideas and thoughts or reflect on longer pieces further back in our history.

Taking this a level deeper, social is thereby forcing us to not only think shallowly, but to make our shared histories completely valueless.

This is absolutely what we’re trying to figure out too, in our own way. Here’s a summary of what this group (the ‘public self-modelers’) is doing:

  • Cross-wiki chats get compiled and placed in permanent pages so that they can be referred back to and built upon.
  • Each individual works on writing master pages for specific concepts (Find The Others has been a topic that we’ve fleshed out together) or even for specific people (such as h0p3’s page on Sphygmus or my page on h0p3.) These personal pages are just good fun - a reminder that the point of our conversation isn’t just to explore a topic, but to get to know each other and goof around.
  • Because conversations and chats span months and months (compared to a Twitter thread, which may last only a few days,) even the ‘ephemeral’ threads are pretty solid, because a lot of thinking and back-and-forth have gone into them.
  • Since we’re not using a rigid protocol (like ActivityPub or microformats,) we can shape the conversation however we want. (For example, at one point we decided to start using each other’s colors when quoting - I think this was Sphygmus’ idea - so we worked on ‘whostyles’ - you can see them on my Hypertext%20%20 page. So we don’t really care about protocols. We care about messing with the hypertext. They’ve each done a lot of work tweaking their wikis. So there’s an aesthetic component.) So we’re not just work on permanent writing - but long-term design/art projects, too.

People seem very focused on technological solutions to online communication (ActivityPub, Indieweb, this absurd BlueSky idea), but the hyperconversation approach is trying to prove that the problem is a human problem. If you read and listen to each other and try to respond thoughfully and carefully - and try to find your own style and wee innovations along the way - you start to feel like you don’t need anything more complicated than a TiddlyWiki!

That’s been a very stunning realization for me. (As I’ve been an Indieweb zealot as well, of course.) Thank you for your curiosity and for your excellent blog and for your work on improving the Web! You are one of the main writers that I feel has been keeping the Web healthy. You connect a lot of people, Chris. That’s human work.


  1. Right now you have to weed through it all, but I will be publishing a finalized, edited chat on my home page when it’s over. ↩︎

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

02 Dec 2019

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

05 Nov 2019

Reply: Auto-XYZ

fluffy

I also finally set up this site to autoping indieweb.xyz with my entry tags, because I keep forgetting to do that manually and anyway it was easier to just set it up to be like Technorati was back in the day. (Say, isn’t one of the prominent IndieWeb folks formerly one of the prominent Technorati folks?) In any case, I apologize for all of the apparent spam that’s going to happen when I do a webmention backfill.

Yup—this is great. Feel free to just syndicate everything to Indieweb.xyz. It looks like there are some percent-20 characters I need to clean up and I should try to show your posts in chronological order—so this has already been great for catching problems.

One thing to keep in mind is that your posts will really only show up under the first tag in the list. (So, since this post’s first tag is life, that’s where it shows up. The other tags will get cross-posted to—for example, you can see a bunch of light-green colored titles on /en/indieweb, if you click ‘view crossposts’.) The reasoning for this is to prevent what happens with hash tags on social networks—people just throw twenty hash tags on a post, diluting the meaning of each individual tag. If you have one tag to use, you may be more likely to use it judiciously.

I’ve had Indieweb.xyz on the back burner for quite a while—but there has been more activity in the last few months. So I’ll spend some time in December improving it. It’s pretty barebones at the moment.

Anyway, great work on Publ. It’s cool to see what you’re doing with logins—love the idea of IndieAuth on tilde.club.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

29 Oct 2019

Reply: I Will Answer Your Emails

Brynn claims to respond to anyone’s e-mails. Brynn responded to mine!

Hey there. I stumbled across your website today[1] and I can’t resist writing you. I actually have a similar thing where I just like to meet random people through random chance. Don’t know if that’s part of your desire to respond to e-mails—clearly you like being useful to people—you mention that on the page.

I’m also really into The Web—particularly the people who choose to hang out there rather than on all of the corporate social sites. (For example, the two who write at philosopher.life and wiki.waifu.haus.) I kind of count you in that group now that I think about it—even though you’re only on the Web for three paragraphs—the rest happens for you in e-mail.

I can’t find any old snapshots of your site—so it seems it might be quite new, even though it looks as if it could have been there for many decades. Are you having fun with this so far? I’m a bit reluctant to pass the link on, because I don’t want you to become completely inundated. Perhaps you already are.

Well, I won’t go on. Pleasure to meet you. - kicks


  1. Found at iwillansweryouremails.com. ↩︎

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

09 Sep 2019

Blogchats

Notes on hypertext interviews.

People will hate this word. This is great because I can keep this page for myself and keep notes here and only the truly intrepid will venture through the tamarisk surrounding that word to be here.

Blogchat is a misnomer because I interview people over e-mail. But the actual conversation comes alive when it is posted to the blog.[1] But I don’t want to call them ‘e-mail interviews’—I feel I can classify them blogchats and be done. Much as people say ‘slide into my DMs’ but reality is nothing of the kind—one stiltingly, jarringly skids into my DMs.

I don’t want them to happen live. My interview with Nadia Eghbal took many months—and I’m so glad. The instinctive feeling arrives that, since the world is connected, the signal should always be live. That one should chat and chat and chat for many months. And the quicker one chats, the quicker one will come to the conclusion, the quicker one will know someone, know things. I have to resist wanting my ‘blogchat’ to happen across streaming blogs with advanced technological scaffolding.

One distinct advantage: asking questions and waiting over time to answer them. It’s not that one is constantly mulling over the question for months. The questions are free to go completely out of mind. But, time passes, and new experiences happen.

I think the best phase is after the initial round of questions is over. Once answers are given, the conversation is rolling and we return to life for a day or a week. When we return to converse again, the topic is quite fresh. The feeling that I am not reaching for questions.

As marvelous as podcasts are, conversations can be too slow. I don’t want to get too deeply into min/maxing this shit. It’s a respectfulness idea, as stodgy as that may sound. You can read a decent blogchat in five or ten minutes and possibly hear everything except the vocal camaraderie and perhaps some finer points. You can definitely more easily re-read and quote. This is essential to me—I never hear it all the first time.

I’ll stop there—it all just feels polite. I don’t think I could talk for an hour and feel deserving of anyone’s attention. It’s possible that some guests aren’t comfortable on a podcast. I don’t know if that comes up ever.

I actually think that podcast hosts might get the benefit of the running conversation, the dayslong mulling—the microphone is always looming. But the guests can’t benefit from this. They have their one shot to say whatever might emerge. They can’t improve or correct anything. Maybe this is why podcast hosts can also be the best podcast guests—they are just delivering another batch of thoughts that has emerged from the muse of constant podcasting.[2]

Of course, blogchats are not some zenith of human communication. They lack the sensations that a podcast can produce. I’m reveling in their brief, concentrated way. Like a rollercoaster ride.

I think the next thing is perhaps to see what it’s like if a blogchat can be posted as a draft over time, building periodically.


  1. I keep the e-mail conversation in chronological order, but I may interleave questions and answers in a way that is harshly ripped from the original material. I am unsure about removing phrases that are related to the upkeep of the chat. I want what the respondent says to remain intact. They will do the editing for their material—they’ve spent time crafting it. ↩︎

  2. It’s possible that podcast hosts ARE actually the guests. ↩︎

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

15 Aug 2019

adamcadre.ac

This writer/game designer’s home page is full of interesting hypertext flourishes.

This link was passed on to me by David Yates a while ago and I’ve finally had some time to explore it further. And it turns out there are quite a few interesting uses of links and layout that could be useful to anyone out there who is designing a TiddlyWiki[1]—for instance, the detailed organization of Adam’s favorite songs and albums page or the multiple views for the archives of the blog (called the ‘calendar’—which has been around since the 1990s.)

One of my favorite little touches is the presence of mouseover boxes throughout the essays in the ‘calendar’. In the small screenshot above, you can see a spoiler rating mouseover shown on the Stranger Things review. But there are footnotes, images, even short videos that will pop up when you hover over certain dotted links. (These remind me of the footnotes and links on philosopher.life—but with more effort put into designing them—they may have unique colors or borders.)

More than anything, this highlights again the range of things you can do with a website that just isn’t possible on social networks or Medium blogs—perhaps only an app of some kind could be customized like this.

The site also brought to mind this quote from the recent ‘Writing HTML in HTML’ article:

But how can I then keep the style and layout of all my posts and pages in sync?

Simple: don’t! It’s more fun that way. Look at this website: if you read any previous blog post, you’ll notice that they have a different stylesheet. This is because they were written at different times. As such, they’re like time capsules.

Like Phil Gyford’s site, the pages throughout Adam’s site often each have unique designs which hearken to the author’s style and sensibilities during the time when they were created. I feel like websites like this have fallen out of favor—but access to these old designs is now full of nostalgia—so perhaps we will see more hand-crafted HTML in the same way that we now see a TON of wonderful Windows 95 ripoffs in web design and gaming.


  1. And, if you are, you should really be checking out the recent ‘outrun’-colored tags and tighter design on sphygm.us. Or the erratic page-filling that is happening on chameleon’s wiki. ↩︎

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

07 May 2019

Reply: C’s Book Club

Chris Aldrich

Some of us have thought about doing it before, but perhaps just jumping into the water and trying it out may be the best way to begin designing, testing, and building a true online IndieWeb Book Club.

Using Indieweb.xyz to form an ad-hoc book club.

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

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

12 Mar 2019

Reply: Allo

nitinkhanna

href.cool is cool 😃

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

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

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

Reply: Rabbits Are Good People

1uxb0x

But of how many rabbit holes? And how deep are they? And what rabbits dug them?

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

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

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

As for your “Notes”—I like pages like this. Or pages like this one about your dad and your sense of morality. You might feel that this page is very disorganized and messy—but I find it to be absolutely readable and I can tell where copy-and-paste is happening and where you are writing.[3] I have a friend who will very much enjoy reading your writings and I hope it is okay if I show him. (He will probably have some excellent advice as well.)

Ok, for now, au revoir, fellow human.


  1. Or, flakes of solid gold, if they happen to be smaller pages. Or boxes of sticky pencils, if they happen to be lists of random thoughts that are in your head that day. ↩︎

  2. My grandmother used to read me her journals when I would visit her. She would start by reading a few funny e-mails she got, but inevitably she would end up pulling out a volume of her personal journals. Many of my relatives didn’t enjoy that she would do this—and they thought it was anti-social or maybe impolite of her—but I always found it quite charming. I loved to drink tea while she would read to me. And her entries were much like your “Free Writing”—It is July 3rd. There is a blue van parked outside the house that has been there all week. One of the kids peeked inside and said that it was filthy. It sure does stink. They are also selling a new kind of cinnamon roll at the grocer’s across the street— ↩︎

  3. Your writing reminds me very much of Édouard Levé. I am sorry to compare you to him—because he killed himself—but I assure you that you only remind me of his writing style. I’m afraid I don’t know you as a person. I hope you realize that I am paying you a very sincere complement. You are doing very well in your writing. I hope you are enjoying it, because it is fun to read. (No lie. I think you could publish a book of these “Notes” pages and it would make waves in the literary world. But don’t do that. I like you better as a wiki kid than as a literary hootytoot.) ↩︎

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

11 Mar 2019

Reply: Supposedly Unreadable Tripe

k0sh3k

I am one of the few people who read everything h0p3 writes. It’s a good thing I read fast. Also, we talk a lot. We started this whole thing by walking and talking and disagreeing on the definitions of ethical and moral and I guess we’ll keep doing this until he realizes I’m right and he’s wrong about the entire nature of the universe.

It might take a while.

h0p3’s wife does a mic check.

(This is sooo cool—to get a response from h0p3’s wife on her own personal wiki. I just can’t believe we’re having these conversations. This was not what I intended to do on this blog. I actually didn’t have any intentions really—I just wanted to mess with hypertext again—which I guess opened me up to reading random TiddlyWikis and having these delightful, possibly pointless, just-for-funsies conversations. It’s better than anything that I could have intended to do.)

k0sh3k! First off, I love ILL, too. I am a massive cheapskate and I try to avoid clutter—but mostly I just like the weird editions that show up. And I like to see where the books come from. (I give a shoutout to this in my Stories/Novels page.)

My favorite was when Denton Welch’s Maiden Voyage came in. It was an ancient hardback from the 1950s. (It was the first book I read by him—I love him now.) As I read, I began to realize that this edition had been published right after he died (at age 33) and it really transported me to that age. I had a hard time giving that one back.

I actually should read The Educated Mind again before I recommend it. I went back and read my review—and some of my perspectives have changed since then. A lot has happened in four years. I still think I would love that the book bows before the visage of Socrates… (I am not a fast reader.)

My favorite poet is e.e. cummings, and if you haven’t read his work, you should.

I loved him in high school—I guess I have forgotten so much about him. I think I liked him at the time for gimmicky reasons. I know I saw past the mere shape of his poems. I thought he was funny. But to hear about ‘anti-industrialist poems’—you shouldn’t have lost that paper.

You’ll have to excuse the place - I only started keeping this to make h0p3 happy and to be a good example to the kiddos, although I’ve started keeping things here just for fun, too.

I am not nearly as good at keeping a wiki as h0p3 is; I haven’t gotten much better on any of this web stuff since the early days of chat rooms.

I think it’s charming. Your worries about organization or curating—sure, it’s fun to spend time on that stuff—but you’ve put a lot of work into what you’ve got already and it’s already very amusing and interesting to idly search and click around. I like that it’s informal. I like that it’s off-the-cuff.

I feel I should apologize for reading. It feels voyeuristic. Or like a robot eating up feelings. (CAN DESPISING AYN RAND REALLY FEEL THIS GOOD.) And maybe I am just scoping up anecdotes and recommendations in slapdash—this is just my own librarian way. It is shameful, it is noble—it is just a way to pass the time.

I think education, across the board, including college level, has hit a rough patch. It’s no longer about helping individuals become good, ethical human beings; it’s about shaping individuals into efficient little workers and consumers. I’m glad we have the chance to raise our kiddos to be good persons, and to recognize the systemic evils that use others as mere means for wealth accumulation.

Most of the teachers I’ve met and worked with are aware of this and frustrated by it, too. It’s strange to me that this awareness has been around since at least the 1970s—yet it’s only gotten worse, I’d hazard.

There was a conversation between Seymour Papert and Paulo Freire back then that really—well, it might have gone too far in places, but I think it’s mostly right on:

Now there comes a time when the infant is seeing a wider world than can be touched and felt. So the questions in the child’s mind aren’t only about this and this and this that I can see, but about something I heard, saw a picture of, or imagined. And I think here the child enters into a precarious and dangerous situation because not necessarily, but, I think, in point of fact in our societies, there is now a shift from experiential learning—learning by exploring—to another kind of learning, which is learning by being told: you have to find adults who will tell you things. And this stage reaches its climax in school.

And I think it’s an exaggeration, but that there’s a lot of truth in saying that when you go to school, the trauma is that you must stop learning and you must now accept being taught. That is stage two: it’s school, it’s learning by being taught, it’s receiving deposits of knowledge. I think many children are destroyed by that, strangled. Some, of course, survive it, and all of us survived it, and that’s one reason it’s often dangerous discussing these questions among intellectual people. In spite of the school what happened to us was that in the course of this stage two we learned certain skills. We learned to read, for example; we learned to use libraries; we learned how to explore directly a much wider world.

Now I think that there’s an important sense in which stage three is going back to stage one for those who’ve survived stage two—creative people in any field, whether in a laboratory or in philosophy—whether artists, businessmen, journalists—all the people in the world who are able, despite all the restrictions, to find a way of living creatively. We are very much like the baby again. We explore; it’s driven from inside; it’s experiential; it’s not so verbal; it’s not about being told.

To me, I agree that the scaffolding is important—but I think we tend to make the whole thing about scaffolding and public school tends to be all scaffolding all the time. But I think of scaffolding as being rough-shod. You hammer together a few planks and then get back to the building itself. The scaffolding goes away with time. You forget it was ever there.

(In case this is too vague—I tend to make ‘scaffolding’ synonymous with ‘adult assistance’, Vygotsky’s meaning, rather than the other meanings that float about from time to time.)

Of course, I think the above goes wrong a bit because I view reading as experiential and driven from inside—and I think even “telling” can be this way. Teaching can be very immersive and very improvisational. It’s difficult to know if it can ever be prescribed. (I don’t often watch television, but I think this is one thing that has kept me watching The Good Place—the main character is provided with a personal philosopher, a man who finds himself given an Herculean chore to try to prescribe his wisdom to her, even though it all is completely applicable. It simply cannot be told I think.)

Thank you for all the books and links—I will always be on the lookout for more and I am glad to know you and your family. While I’m interesting in the pioneering work you all are doing with wikis and such, I think it’s eclipsed by the effort you make among your two children. These words might be, at their height, a ‘model’ of us.

But they are only artifacts compared to the humans behind them. This j3d1h and kokonut seem like great additions to our reality. (Just from things they pop off with in h0p3’s writings.)

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

09 Feb 2019

Reply: To All the Bizarre Corners

Hey, glad you opened this tear in the hrefs—I love what you’ve got going here! Yours is just the sort of blog I live for. The badges are fly. (Posted about them on HrefHunt!.)

You mention you have a personal wiki on your blog—is it hidden? I collect links to those. But also understand if its hidden. Keep it on the downlow, keep it discreet.

Your modular synth is a feast for the eyes. It’s like NASA Mission Control if it were made from marker and wood. Damn—going to try to find a place for this on href.cool.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

06 Feb 2019

Reply: Careful Answers

Kevin Kovacs

With that being said, the short answer for a lot of your questions is going to be either a) I’m planning on moving those or b) I haven’t even considered it yet.

Tsss! Ok, well, hey—thank you for the elaborate reply! And let this also act as a test of your Webmentions setup. And welcome to the club of individuals experimenting with hypertext organization and layout—those forking wiki sensibility, I suppose. I’m interested in seeing what you do—in fact, I really like the variety of layouts you use on TIV for the different post types.

I love the look of minimal, white websites, but now everything seems to look like that.

I don’t know about you—my love of the brighter base comes from wanting to mimick books and zines, paper things. (Although I do have a favorite book, self-published by a psychic, that explores the correlation between extraterrestrials, prodigies and ‘vanishing twins’—the whole book is printed on a lavender paper, it’s just wonderful. The cover of the book is darker, almost the exact color of Humdrum Life!)

I have been trying to cook up a darker scheme, but I just can’t seem to settle on a background color. I think it will have to be black. Any other color really forces the palette choices for all the borders and words.

At any rate, I like to see more color on the web and I think you’ve got a nice scheme going.

I’m assuming the link logs you are referring to are the ones tagged reading, usually with “Articles” in the title.

Yes, exactly. This type of post is a major draw for me.

These are essentially to force myself to reflect on what I read. Even if I’m only writing a word or a sentence, it’s been helpful as a reflection practice. On occasion I forget to add things, but it’s supposed to be everything I read that day. Due to that fact, they dont necessarily think it is all worth sharing. I have a podcast log too where I do the same thing for myself.

Worth sharing. Huh, ok, this is a pretty ripe topic still.

I can’t help but feel that this goes in with the modern view that we must be “content creators”—writing original essays and gathering unique data to share. And that a pile of links is not worthy. Am I way off? Can you explain further—you later refer to things being “worthy to share with ‘the world’”—is this tied into RSS, like what sort of significance must a bit of hypertext have in order to justify making all the smartphones go ding?

I’m increasingly against RSS. I don’t know that anything I’m writing should fire off notifications. I’d be much happier if I could just fill up a blog without being accused of dinging the bell too many times. (This is an issue with all the social media platforms—there’s a threshold you cross when you become the one who overshares. So you have to pace yourself against the group’s pacing.)

But back on whether link lists are worthy. I mean—that’s the goodstuff for me. That’s the draw! Personally, I’m looking more for a tangled web of thoughts and chains of ideas, following link to link, to get a sense of what is happening out there. Exploring, discovering.

I think many people think they can’t or don’t care to write a blog, because then they’ll have to come up with ideas for tutorials or articles—“content” again—when I think that’s kind of rooted in a ‘performer’/‘audience’ relationship. I think what has appealed to me about h0p3’s work is that you can write out in the open, for your own purposes, and just pile up hypertext there—and if it’s organized sensibly enough, then those who want to correspond with you will find what they need. (It particularly interesting/innovative to me that he works on drafts of his letters in public—and that it works so well in practice.)

On the other side, TIV link posts are more considered.

I think I have felt this way, at times too, like I won’t post something to my home page if it’s just a little ‘thumbs up’ type of comment. But, more and more, I find myself writing detailed and considered entries that don’t get broadcast.

Can you relate to that? Is ‘more considered’ really the line between TIV and Humdrum? You just wrote me a lengthy reply that seems very well-considered. Could the difference be something else? Is it tonal?

It might even be that ‘public’ blogging has traditionally been directed toward an audience and now that the Web has changed (there is less of an audience)—then it doesn’t need to be that way. (I say this as someone who also blogs at some imaginary audience—tho I’m not sure I like doing it that way.)

I kind of view TIV as a digital publication […] I like to think of it as a digital newspaper. It’s text based and more professional. Am not a reporter in any sense though, so the metaphor starts to fall apart of you really think about it.

Ok, so, then a zine or something. But whatever: a newspaper, surely you’re safe to use that term.

Yeah, I can relate to that! I think one benefit of the ‘publisher’/‘audience’ type relationship is the pressing desire to draw someone in and not to waste their time, but to benefit them and serve them. And to take your craft seriously, too, I guess.

I’ve done a few album reviews, which are more fully formed; I think these should stay on TIV. The top ten lists I view in the same way Rolling Stone or SPIN would publish a top ten list, so I feel like their home is still TIV.

This is such a motivating, creative thing to be play-acting in homage to magazines and fully-staffed writing houses. It provides vision for your work and a kind of high aspiration.

It really makes me wonder what the future holds for the lone blogger. Now that I can look back a decade at so many of the blogs I’ve enjoyed, I can see that they often either went away or became real magazines themselves.

I feel some longing for those days when all these personal websites wondered to themselves, Is there anyone out there? But it’s also very much like that now! And I wonder if something new might spring up—outside of newspapers, magazines, blogs and anything else we know.

[On the ‘now’ page:] This is for me/novelty, but mostly just an exercise in learning Siri Shortcuts.

This section of your letter was very enlightening and I think I’ve gleaned a better understanding of this phenomenon. I imagine much of it is certainly prompted by a desire to play with integrations just like you’re talking about—whereas some of it is linked to Public Self-Modeling and basic journaling.

I think it’s very useful for you to discuss your methods and the software details of how you work. TiddlyWiki isn’t for everyone—neither is Ceasar Bautista’s Encyclopedia project—so options like yours could be very useful to other microbloggers and Mastodon users who want to start building a permanent file.

I’m going to leave off the discussion about URLs, because I have to leave now and wanted to get this letter off—but I think there is much to talk about there as well. I just thank you for fielding my questions! I feel so lucky to have had this chance encounter with you. Looking forward to your work on TIV and Humdrum.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

25 Jan 2019

Reply to BeachPackaging

Hey, this was a good read. And I think your blog exemplifies moving away from ‘big attention’. Covering a niche inherently disqualifies it from the mainstream—although occassionally things like Primitive Technology become somewhat mainstream. Thank you for the interesting links you’re providing!

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

Reply: Should We Pool?

Joe Jenett

Since 1997, Ive spent, on average, about 4 hours per day grinding away on my web linking projects, which also included coolstop.com (daily site reviews) from 10/1997 thru 9/2010. I cant conceive of the notion of waiting for links to come to me, which leads me to the other part of your comment.

Ok, interesting—yeah, I’d agree, hunting can suck up hours of time. And, yeah, if you are spending four hours per day, I’m not going to keep up, since I’m lucky to get in four hours per week.

Glad for your honest reason. Very glad for ‘brutal’ honesty—to just have your thoughts succinctly, rather than to beat around the bush for three months.

What I mean to say is that I’m not looking to combine my efforts with yours (or vice-versa). We’ve already shared knowledge and our enthusiasm for the medium and our love for linking—that’s sure to be an ongoing (enjoyable) thing. But pooling our knowledge, or collaborating between sites on some type of joint effort is different than simply communicating between sites, and between us, in my mind.

Right—I don’t mean to say that we’re going to just merge our sites together—although I did discuss trying to be clear about link-finding strategies, which borders on a trade secret I suppose. (Especially where you’ve been doing this for several decades.) And I am happy to rescind that request—I’m not trying to steal your strategy, even if I am planning to clearly lay out mine.

But let’s back up: I think we must have a fundamentally different view of where the Web is today. (imho) Link-finding has changed dramatically from the early days of the Web. Back then, everything was a link. The whole landscape was personal home pages, web comics, and niche forums. Magellan-level exploration.

Today, the Web we’re inhabiting is a niche. There is very little growth out here by comparison. Surely, there is still an infinite landscape to explore, but much of it is ad-ridden, startup- or software-focused. ‘Bloggers’ are moving toward ‘influencers’. When people talk about ‘the blogs’, they think about pundits, TMZ-type Paparazzi and minor celebrities. The rest of blogging has become an extension of Pinterest: personal recipe and home decor blogs dominate.

The ‘Indieweb’/‘Indie Web’ is a niche like vinyl collectors. It won’t ever achieve mainstream significance again. When I talk to meatspace friends about The Web, they look at it as a quaint little city that doesn’t really offer them anything new. And the only thing I can appeal to is a type of idealism: aesthetic and political idealism.

So, whereas link-finding use to be the essential task of mapping out the frontier, our new task is different: to broadcast the location of our outpost so that the holdouts who are still blogging and the wanderers, who happen to be drawn to experiment with a blog, know where we are.

I really think that an important part of our work will be to lay out how we link-find—not so that newcomers can just copy the technique—but so that they know where we’re looking. If we’re looking at tags on Pinboard, then they know where to post on Pinboard. If we’re sharing on certain hashtags on Twitter, then they know. In the past, this might have caused those channels to be oversatured—but I really don’t think spam will be our problem. Our problem is survival.

Of course, we wish the old days would return. But the future will be better, somehow. I just don’t think it will inhabit The Web again.

If you disagree or roll your eyes at any of this—no problem, no problem whatsoever. The invitation is soft—no need to get involved with anything. Focus on your work. (Fantastic work!) I just hope that my efforts won’t be upsetting you in some way. I’d rather be of a benefit, if that can possibly be the case.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

22 Jan 2019

Reply to BeachPackaging

It’s a pleasure to meet you! I’m quite in awe of the formidable breadth of your blog—and amazed that you have kept it so full of personality and fervor. Can I ask: how have you been able to keep Box Vox going so strong for TWELVE years??

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

18 Jan 2019

Reply: We Are All Animals

Sphygmus

Perhaps this is it: these visceral qualia form the most intense and common language between us all.

Boy, these letters you and h0p3 write—I feel such tension. On one hand, it’s really good to discover you and to write these almost old-fashioned personal letters that reach out with an arm and wriggle around and attempt to find some crack in the sentences where some potent, pungent piece of us can seep through. I have had so many e-mail chains and letter correspondence that went poorly—I had given up on personal writing.

I still feel anxious that I might not reciprocate well—or that what seeps out might be too very pungent. You might laugh awkwardly at that shocking smell and let it pass. Or you might produce a gaping horror on your face. You might go away—and here’s more tension, why would I need you? Why would I care if you needed to go your way? (Well, obviously, I don’t want to insult you. I want to try to enjoy what letters we do write while we are fortunate to be riding the same network packets.)

Perhaps the biggest tension is anonymity. I don’t know if I ever dare to shed it. I had hoped for such a comfortable place to be just a mere character. I like being my real identity here and there—just for moments, at times. But I want to be other people, too. To be dozens of them! (Here I am, pretending to be “Kicks”, but is it not “myself” that is talking here? Or is this just another Narrator meta-character, who is allowed to stay aloof and detached from all these faces?)

But I feel from our discussions: Who are you really? And: Let’s see each other plainly, let’s know each other well. This does make me wonder. Who am I really? (I think you ask yourself this question, too, in reading your old journals. Whoever was I?)

Of course I’ve followed along—in fact, straight off, I’ve wanted to talk to you about Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer (etc.) and Shards of Infinity, because they’ve been favorites of mine, too. I am really into card games—and Ascension is one of the most divisive games I’ve played—the art, the theme, the way it’s played. (There’s a card in the first set that some friends call ‘racist dog’—don’t remember the exact name, but perhaps you’ve also noticed that you can see the lined paper in the background on some of the images from that set.) But I really enjoy the wild style of the art—I’m not sure it’s my favorite, but I get a kick out of it. Some of the art I just cannot understand, other cards I just adore—there’s a card with a kind of scuba guy on it that I think is amazing. I just love that the art stirs me up.

My favorite expansion was Storm of Souls, because the combos felt out-of-control at the time. But I’ve liked all of it. When it comes to games, I’m not a critic.

I think what you’re doing with your wiki is amazing! I’m not going to try to be poetic about it; I just want to gush openly. That you are finding your own ways to riff on h0p3’s work—it’s not a carbon copy—you’ve had a glimpse of futuristic sight-seeing that is guiding you, that’s what I really think.

It’s as if you’ve spread a giant sheet of graph paper before you on the floor—and have begun to box and triangulate your aspects, to map out yourself. And, to anyone watching (and why would they watch? well, hell, if I saw someone mapping out on a giant self-o-graph in the campus quad, I think I’d stop to see) they’ll see the places where they map onto you, or where their points go near or interweave. You have your own handwriting and flourishes of decorative arrows and bullets. And those discoveries made in the mundane and detailed, knotty parts of the graph could be surprising—these lines are all pathways of experience. Who knows which are the most vaunted.

I am often told, “I cannot imagine what X must be feeling, what X must endure.” (Where X is the epicenter of my pain. This person X is the epicenter, not me. I am given the luxury of crying. My effort is often to simply control my crying; X must spend the effort just to stay alive.)

“I cannot imagine…” But you must imagine. How can you not imagine? To imagine—that is the first step. To imagine that it is you and your life. To try to understand—which, incidentally, is exactly how you two have both reacted, to project the bare, vague, scattershot feelings of my heart—without even knowing the specifics—on to your life and into your imagined experience. And you both responded by wanting me to understand you, too—I like this, this is great, you think me capable of it.

So this is the graph paper, right? And we walk down whatever lines we want to. And some lines we just have to. The mazeway.

As we read the words of Others, our bodies respond with the knowledge and recognition of our deep wounds, our brokenness, our despondence, our faith, our hopes, our excitement; all of our being resonates together.

I am so jealous of the footnotes you both have. I am only setup for numeric kinds. Yours are like little secrets and ciphers. Sometimes I can tell what the letters mean—and it is like moth language coming through, too.

Public drafting is also working out very well. It’s strange that I get a more tri-dimensional sense of what the finish letter might mean. You’d think that the draft would only be full of imperfections. But it is its own model.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

12 Jan 2019

Reply: Wandering the Infinite Extremes

h0p3

I’m glad to have the chance to engage in this. I am pretty goddamned worried I’m going to offend him right here.

I felt very worried about this, too, while I was working on my page for you. I was teasing you, of course. And that can feel like all the respect I might have is discarded for cheap sarcasm.

However, I think relationships need to be tested to see what they can withstand—one of the ‘teases’ on that page is that I paint you as having this overly analytical sense of humor and I take a shot at autism. This is pretty cruel! But your sense of humor is not really that way at all—your sense of humor is completely transgressive and degenerate—it’s fantastic—and part of your great work is in perpetually nailing up these new self-portraits of yourself that are ridiculous and grotesque—the jester in the almighty courts—though I think you see your inner self as very noble and refined, in a way. My writing this effacing page of you is simply the act of doing your work for you. You do this to yourself anyway on any given day—I am just joining you for once.

So I’m glad it gave you a laugh for a moment—I don’t think you’ve said anything remotely offensive to me, which is pretty disappointing. I would think that you of all people could pull it off and I’d like to see you try. My fear is that I’ve not revealed enough of myself for you to hang on to—so it may take some time for you to discover that I am a grotesque in a completely different form: I am an emotional wreck, crying and pleading day after day, a small and insignificant creature in my real form—weak and crushable like Gandalf’s little moth buddy that flits around in the chaos, whisphering insignificant greetings.

One of things which is beautifully striking about your absurdly flattering hypertext object is that you accept me as your retarded brother (all of my family do me a great kindness in this) that sometimes has a good point to make (even if this bastard takes fucking forever to say it to you).

Hahhaha! My God—it’s so much funnier when you mock yourself than when I do. I do accept you as my retarded brother!! Can I be yours as well? I am not as retarded as you are, of course, but I will try to be! I am daftly sucking the collar of my lime t-shirt as we speak. I am fully wetting it, brother.

Yet, I would like to extend my trust to you further at no cost to or expectation of you.

(Since I am responding to a draft, I am just hanging on to this sentence in case it disappears. It’s just wonderful. It reminds me of a travelling salesman—my Trust, the whole Caboodle, the brushes, the Extension Arm for the trust and the fur-lined Encasement—all at no additional cost. All I ask is that you do nothing. Don’t move a muscle.)

I would like to send my cards to an address (which will not be disclosed on this wiki) of your choosing (I can also just send you the digital copies).

I am not to this point yet. This is probably a bit awkward to navigate—let me just say that I don’t see my correspondence with you as a short-term whim. It is a long game. We have a lot of years ahead of us to find out why the hell we’re talking to each other and what the Fuck is going on.

You can ask and say anything—I think it’s amazing that you would want to pass cards, converse and possibly make chat logs together. But this blog is not me quite yet. I am emerging from two years of great sorrow and struggle. I am trying to find my way—not through depression, but just through grief. “Kicks” is my prototype for this self that could survive.

I am building him and you’re helping me greatly. Hopefully he will appear in more realistic and fully-fledged forms. I am not catfishing; I am just trying to have fun again. I think it’s working.

One thing I have to tell you about autism. I had this second-grade student named Ethan. One day I took the desks out of the classroom and put down yoga mats instead for the day. The kids came in and got comfortable on the floor, except Ethan who leaned against the wall, eating a Tootsie Pop. He was a big kid with a flat top and bushy eyebrows.

Many of the kids were complaining about Ethan not sitting and eating candy in class.

“I get to have this,” he said. “Ms. Principal said so. I have a ticket in my pocket to prove it. And I have to stand up, I can’t sit down.”

“Oh, wow,” I said. “You have to stand up? You’re going to stand up all day?”

“Look, I have autism,” he said. “Yeah, that’s right! And I have it pretty bad right now. Ms. Principal said I could have this sucker. I have the ticket and everything.”

The kids go into uproar. “Ms. Principal didn’t say he could have a sucker! She never lets us have candy in class! He’s lying!”

“Okay, look class, leave him alone, he has autism, at least for today,” I said. “Ethan, will it last into tomorrow?”

“I have autism,” he said, shrugging, motioning with his sucker. “I really get it bad sometimes.” His whole body language was like, “What can any of us do about it? We just have to deal, ok?”

It was a good day. He got to stand up and enjoy the sucker like he wanted. And the rest of us had a lot of fun reminding him that he had autism that day. He was, honestly, the least autistic person I think I’ve ever met.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

18 Dec 2018

Reply: Joe Reading h0p3

Joe Jenett

I’ve been exploring ⦗h0p3’s Wiki⦘ – amazing.

Cool! I’d be interested to hear more of your reaction. At first, I thought it was kind of a novelty—like a quirky little website, no big deal.

But I’m starting to think it’s a big deal! He solves a lot of his technical issues by simply coming up with human conventions to solve them. Rather than waiting for his wiki to become compatible with Reddit, he just copies and pastes his conversations from there. Rather than trying to setup a group or a forum to communicate between his readers—he just copies and pastes their e-mails, voila—they are suddenly reading each other!

Most importantly, he doesn’t rely on an algorithm to sift through his communication. He just reads—in true human form—and writes back in detail. And readers are expected to do the same. There are no ‘popular’ posts that people are reading or ‘hot’ posts that are stimulating conversation—you just have to dig around.

I also think he’s successfully merged microblogging, linkposting, ephemeral notetaking with the creation of a larger body of work—which all stems from his central lexicon that he’s working to define. It’s very inspiring to read h0p3 and then to think, “Hmm, if I put this kind of work into my own thoughts—how would it look?”

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

My Url Is Jgregorymcverry.com

“Be your own social network.”

Very good podcast with Greg McVerry. Off the bat:

The idea of blogging on my own domain and switching was part of my own growth. Whereas I think I—you know, you start on—everybody starts on some kind of scaffolded platform. Very few people just jump into HTML or build a, you know, CMS. They start on some kind of shared host. And that used to be blogging.

I have also been thinking that a domain gives you some resiliency against impersonation. If a Twitter user has a name close enough to mine and uses my same avatar, they can really come off as me. But mimicking my own domain and styling is a steeper barrier.

I also like the term ‘scaffolded platform’—which rings of Vygotsky rather than marketspeak—and I think it is far more interesting to think of innovating our scaffolded platforms rather than our social networks.

He also has some comments about how his online community, that of educators talking to and writing to each other, started trying to build things with RSS and blogs—but that it was a struggle until Known[1] spread, and Wordpress with Indieweb support spread, among his group.

He touches on RSS later in the discussion:

I think ‘mass follow’ feeds have like: it leaves a problem, it’s like, I just literally deleted my entire RSS feed after, what, like fifteen years I’ve been using it. Just because it got so broken with copying this OPML file and this file and this blog going like—I never groomed it. I’m a bad tagger, categorizer. I’m not good at, like, putting things away.

Greg goes on with an idea of a ‘reader’ which catalogs any blog that he makes a ‘follow’ post about. And it just adds them to his ‘network’.

I feel similar pain—I want to keep track of a lot more blogs and wikis than I actually have time for. I just wish I had a kind of dashboard that would show me an overview of what all the sites I read have been up to—and it would prioritize those sites that I am keeping a very close eye on—and it would just give me direct links to those blogs so that I could get around my network easier. I just don’t care for RSS—I like what it’s trying to do, but it’s not doing it for me.

Near the end, he also points out the friction between privacy and the Indieweb[2]:

Private groups: that is, like, the—that is—that’s the cash cow—I won’t say ‘cash cow’ as in ‘moneymaker’—but like, that’s always been the long-term goal. I don’t know if you’ve read Hertling’s Kill Process, but that idea of the Indieweb needing private posting—like the semi-private posting […] there’s something there.

It’s weird, but I really agree with this! I say ‘weird’ because part of me just wants to give up on privacy on the Web—maybe we just have to accept that everything is private. But this sucks—there are many private thoughts and nascent ideas that I want to store here, to collaborate on in the shadows. If the ‘blog’/‘wiki’ can be a ‘home’—then it needs its hiding places, its private gathering rooms. (And it does have these—just not on blogs, generally.)

I’ve been thinking about taking a stab at this with Indieweb.xyz. Greg mentions using h-cards to accomplish this. And his idea can certainly work and I would like to see it happen. But I may not want my whole blog to go private—I also envision myself posting some things to private groups, some things to public groups, some things that are general public musings. And I think Indieweb.xyz works well for this—you add the link to your post and that post goes to that group.

What I think I will add is encryption. So, basically, you could create a ‘sub’ that is a whitelist—you add blogs or wikis to the ‘sub’ individually. If the ‘sub’ is marked private, those blogs or wikis will need to login with IndieAuth to get a key to read the posts. The hard part would be encrypting the post on the blog itself—you’d need an extension or a separate tool for that.

The nice thing is that a static blog could suddenly support private groups without much trouble. (And, in fact, the static blog software could store the unencrypted posts locally—much like an e-mail reader keeps a local database of fetched e-mail—so that the posts could be backed up for the author, in case the key ever got lost.)


  1. Known, a blogging platform which connects with the Indieweb. ↩︎

  2. Another sore spot in the Wars of Conflicting Webs. ↩︎

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

22 Nov 2018

Reply: Dark v Light

h0p3

I have tried to go for the white background, and I can’t. =( I’m sorry.

Fleshing out a footnote in the spacing between parts eight and nine of my reply.

Ok—this is a great angle I haven’t approached yet. Do I provide a dark whostyle? Does it get computed from the actual whostyle? Could there be several variants offered?

I also think it’s really cool that you ended up just baking your own style that feels like me to you. Hey, yeah, go with that.

Well, if someone redesigns—might they still want to give people out there a choice between the old and the new? I think there is no need to overdesign this. I think you could just offer multiple whostyles. The hard part, for me, is to concoct a dark style from what I have—but this excites me, I’m on it.

If you have a secondary mildly-darker background I can use, I will use that. I hate that the solution to my light sensitivity detracts from your intentional style.

Yeah, it’s not practical for me to make custom styles for every user of my website—perhaps that’s where your troubled feelings arise. But fuck practicality! I will gladly make a custom style for anyone out there. If you care enough to read, then I would like to care enough to make things comfortable to you.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

21 Nov 2018

Reply: More Joe Questions

jenett

@kicks Thanks for the compliment kicks. Though it’s never totally free of bad links, a fair amount of time is spent revisiting sites along with periodic link checking sessions. Glad to know you couldn’t find one - yay! I found your blog recently via this very thread - very unique. Spoiler alert: It’s in the pointers queue.

Wow, you hand-check the whole thing?? Ok, wow, so if you don’t mind I have a few more questions—actually, quite a few more, but I’ll constrain myself!

  1. A lot of links I find through just old-school surfing, but there are some tools that are like virtual mines for me. (Google is often useless, because a search for ‘interesting blog’ usually just yields clickbait and I don’t want to just regurgitate that stuff.) What tools or sites have you found most useful for discovering links?
  2. Also, is surfing a kind of skill? I mean: finding obscure avenues, well, they are obscure—hard to find by definition! At the same time, having a ‘linkpost’ at least provides an intersection between worlds where people can find each other. Do people find you? Is that just as important as you finding them?
  3. And, yeah, since you’ve been doing this for several decades—has linking changed over time? Like: what is modern linking?

Also, if you’d rather post your answers as a blog post, I can link to that. Great to meet you—I’m immediately a huge fan!

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

17 Nov 2018

Reply: Doorknobs Out of Reach

h0p3

It’s hard to beat the flexibility, resilience, and longevity of flat textfiles, but that is almost definitionally committing to non-committing. I like both extremes.

Part one of thirty-five.

Sweet letter—I’m going to dig into this further over the next while, I’m going not to say much here, because h0p3 has many things to do and I don’t want there to be any timer started just yet, in fact, let’s suppose that I’ve already written a very lengthy reply, but am just sitting on it, to let the wide variety of worthwhile non-hyperconversation things transpire. Just want to mop a few fallen fruits off the floor.

TW defeats a number of frictions like a champion. I posit that TW is radically more decentralization-capable than Dat. Legions of analog and digital systems can move one file, but it is possible only few will speak Dat.

Oh, for sure—its resilience is proven. I side with TiddlyWiki in the long-term, no doubt. In fact, I am siding with its powers of adaptation. It runs on Node, it runs on Beaker—let’s push that adaptation further. (Perhaps this means that Dat is less resilient and will fall—but I think the protocol has to be narrow/simple to see widespread use.)

My money is on WASM-Web 3.0 taking further down that rabbithole.

I’m great with this, so long as we don’t lose hypertext in the process.

To my eyes, Dat is competing with IPFS, Syncthing, Resilio Sync, mutable torrents, etc. For now, I just use Resilio Sync for the functional Dat-properties I need.

Try to keep in mind that it’s not even Dat that excites me about Beaker. It’s that you can read-write entire locally synced folders from the same languages ‘for which every computer has a virtual machine’. With Beaker, I can make an editable copy of your wiki—even if it was split into tiddlers, even if it was in a thousand pieces.

This is clearly an innovation that we follow. Take the rock-solid v.machine and let it create, babe.

I’m a P2P idealist who agrees there are classes of problems which can only efficiently be federated.

Mmmm, yes—same here. One of my fave networks was Soulseek. You could connect to people and see all the files they were sharing. I ended up just raiding people’s shelves rather than trying to track down Pavement b-sides. But that required some kind of cohesive network where you can ‘see’ everyone.

Wowowow-it’s still there! Just installed. There is a lot of good stuff still on here. How has it stayed so obscure and devout?

A starting place for the opposite style seems like poetry or crystallized summation. It only shows semblances, outlines, glimpses, fragments, and impressions on purpose. I think it must be antipleonasmic.

Yeah, this is a sweet letter. I hope there’s a worthy reply somewhere in my timeline.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

13 Nov 2018

The Federation

A directory of ‘federated’ communities.

A list of all of the various blogging and messaging services that are connected to each other by way of ‘federation’ (e.g. Mastodon). This is impressive—user statistics and lists of smaller communities within each group. I’ve thought that the Indieweb was ‘ahead’ of the Fediverse, but it’s much easier to find each other with this kind of centralized directory.

I also generally advocate human-curated directories. But, in the case of examining the offerings of a network, this kind of entirely machine-constructed catalog makes perfect sense. A stat-based and rather spreadsheet-like view is the whole point.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

02 Nov 2018

Reply: Federated Wiki and Directories

Brad Enslen

I think our choice of tools is widening. I’m going to experiment with Dokuwiki. And you really need to check out Federated Wiki. It’s that copying feature, in essence “forking” another persons post, that really caught my eye and made me think back to all your conversations with h0p3.

I spent about a week playing with Federated Wiki and was initially extremely excited about it—I’ve always admired Ward Cunningham’s work, there was a recent blog post called The Garden and the Stream that promoted Fed Wiki as a way to do Hypertexting (‘the garden’) and I had hoped to integrate my hypertext with it.

However, it simply did not function for me and I could not seem to find useful protocol documents. I didn’t even feel like it was worth posting about yet. I will continue to keep an eye on it to see if it becomes something practical. (Even as a reader, I find fedwiki.org really neat but difficult to use—I feel that it is more opaque than TiddlyWiki even.)

If you chose to go with a search feature, I was going to add you to the search engines at the bottom of Indieseek’s SERP like I did with Wiby.me. That way I could share traffic – like someday when I have traffic, with your directory.

Yeah, so—I think we start talking about federating our directories. Here are some basic starting points:

  1. A central search engine that we can use to index our directories. I will work on this at some point. Or maybe sites like Wiby.me could collaborate with us. I may require microformats for the directory entries and maybe there will be a novel way to use Webmentions.

  2. And, possibly, a directory using the same index—the question is how to find matches between our categorization systems. Perhaps we could treat categories like tags—or to provide a mapping to another category system.

  3. Perhaps a way of collecting submissions from a central bucket? Maybe we could publish our submissions on a page, regardless of whether they’re included—this could also be useful for establishing a spam list.

  4. It would be cool to syndicate entries—like I may want to take an entry from yours and embed it in mine. People may want to syndicate entries elsewhere—maybe as Twitter cards. And, most importantly, I may want to periodically ‘guest’ a directory and highlight that directory’s activity for a month.

I think it’s also useful to acknowledge that this is all different from Pinboard because our directories:

  • Are heavily filtered. We don’t include stuff that is ‘to-be-read’ or not (in our view at least) of very high quality or interest.

  • Entries generally have thorough commentary.

  • There is kind of a team thing going on—you and I are working separately, but there is a lot of collaboration and linking going on—I see this being good long-term because we can rope in others who cover other topics and act like a decentralized DMOZ. We could even safely double-up on the same topics because people will have different takes.

Interesting point about using comments and stars yourself. Sounds cool!

I will definitely add a query string search and will look at doing what you do on your results page. Cool, so far, so good.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

29 Oct 2018

Reply: Self-Made Doorways

h0p3

I think if you look through FTO, my letters to people are meant to be the initial entry points for each of them. However one chooses to build and focus the storyriver in their link to this hyperobject is a curated entry point. […] curation appears to be something any agent can be engaged in here.

A discussion of portals into a large hypertext.

Ok, this is rich—this point is on fire. We agree, yeah, oh hell yeah we agree. This is what I’m saying every third paragraph about how our technology is underutilized. This is a great example of the ‘social’ overemphasis of the single ‘post’ or ‘link’ or ‘article’ as opposed to the hypertext ‘body’.

(For anyone just joining this conversation, h0p3’s link in the quote above loads about 10 pieces of hypertext that represent his current ‘place’ in this massive [20 megabyte] ‘body’ he’s creating—so the ‘link’ he’s sent doesn’t represent a single ‘article’ or ‘tweet’, which is what we’re trained to think of a ‘link’ representing. And I wonder—beyond h0p3’s twenty megs—how can I ‘link’ to the ten related tabs I might have open so that you can see them together? How can you create your own ‘link’ that puts me into the center of a hypertext perspective you have?)

(In some ways, this reminds me of heavily cross-referenced and footnoted texts like religious scripture—which are hyperlinked in a fashion—and folks have long batched together references to these works through verse-chapter or page citations, and most often through quotes. The amazing feature of the link above is that it isn’t just a set of quotes—it is the definitive source material, connected to the live author. Is it possible that citation could be improved by allowing one to construct a link of views to many definitive hypertexts?)

I won’t even touch Reddit [and it’s spidering onto the rest of the web] without half a dozen tweaks and tools; it’s not worth my time.

I like to say that all our problems are human problems at this point—but I think I am starting to see that every site needs good search, some kind of indexing and a way of positioning it within the whole landscape outside of it. I wonder what tools you find most useful—are they just useful within Reddit or should they be available to you and I somehow?

I grant, however, that some methods are better than others. What counts as finding relevance in our hyperreading in general is some ridiculously hard problem. It’s probably fair to say most people will quickly run out of things they find worth reading on this wiki (if they found anything).

Yeah, I think if we start to get too ‘hyper’ we get lost in the linkage and things get blurry. I mean when it comes down to it, I just want to do some very basic things: meet people, connect thoughts, really dig into a concept, see neat things—and try to route around the armchair arrogance that seems to be plaguing the world.

I don’t plan to read your whole wiki—I plan to use it to research your takes as we correspond and to consult it while I’m studying, to see what other directions I can go. (I wonder if you’ll agree with this:) I think the point isn’t to make your wiki the Penn Station of philosophy—I just think some valuable things will bubble up out of your project that will connect to Penn Station bidirectionally. Just like I might draw from Vigoleis or Dr. Strangelove from time to time—philosopher.life is in there, too.

I’m not sure if I can say that they are manipulating the feed.

Manipulators treat the minds of others as mere means; they do not respect your dignity. Satya Nadella is a manipulator. Does that mean he and cabal of powerful deep state actors have conspired to control every little detail of your mind? No. But, the science of rhetoric, mass manipulation, and our ability as a species to produce increasingly effective apex predators only continues to rise. Power centralizes at any cost, including moral ones.

I guess I try to manipulate the feed, too, so yeah, of course he’s manipulating the feed. Why I’m reluctant to just pin the award on him: I’m not sure he’s actually accomplishing what he claims to be. I love that he’s put all of this work into influencing Hacker News, but his boasting about it could clearly undo all that work—so what kind of master manipulator are we really dealing with here?

The short-term efforts undermine the long-term—his infrastructure is not nearly as sound as it seems.

What are games except for sets of rules we play by to win?

Yeah, man, good questions. I think the trolls are way ahead in this effort—I think they see that they can create games that are honeypots. And I do think that the Internet still holds the power to flip the structure so that it is the powerful who get caught in these games that they think they can play. (Thus, the meme warfare centers.) I think the trouble is that trolls are chaotic and can align anyway they like—evil, neutral and good—are even ‘neutral’ and ‘good’ more likely to turn out to be ‘evil’ than vice versa? On the other hand, chaotics have been the Robin Hoods, the Guy Fawkeses, the Snowdens perhaps. I think we benefit by tapping into that subversive light-heartedness.

As you point out, we are still going to need a standard for when we define something as cooperating. If I respond to your letters with one word answers, I’m offering a token. You cannot escape measuring reality to some very large extent. I think this is part of our plight. Yet, the goal is to not be overly quantitative (where, unfortunately, “overly” is quantitative).

Oh—I like your arguments, answers and agreements on the T42T outlines. I think this also goes in with my thoughts on what I called ‘pluralism’ (but which really just means ‘a multimodal system of thinking’)—just as one needs to both ‘quantify’ and restrain from such a thing, just as one must respond in kind, respond with a token, respond with a tome (and never know precisely if one is doing it ‘right’)—it is always a constant balancing in a battle of extremes and competing ideals. Much like a relationship is a balance between what I am looking for and you are looking for.

So also I look at socialism and capitalism as arrows in my quiver; left and right as sides of myself more than two religions at war. This is overly simplistic—but so is T42T, it is a useful starting place for me. It is not the end, it is the curated entry point. It is the self-made doorway.

(The remainder of your letter—the part that essentially argues for staking a position—I am going to digest and figure out how to respond. I don’t have any problem with what you’re saying in a general sense; it is principled. I, personally, cannot get myself to ratchet down to anything concrete, for some reason. I think part of it is that I really do enjoy human beings—I am hard-staked against misanthropy—and that puts me in a really weird place wrt to modern culture and forming an alliance with a group rather than an individual. But if the mindset is totally bereft, then I am willing to abandon it.)

(As far as the TiddlyWiki loader: I am also waiting for more inspiration there. I think of that prototype as ‘chapter one’—I usually have to batch up ideas and code fragments in order to realize them. But glad it got the conversation going. I am thinking a lot about versioning—for example, can the timestamp also be part of the curated doorway that is the undercurrent of this exchange?)

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

26 Oct 2018
19 Oct 2018

Reply: Emergent Connections Between You, the Readers of These Hypertext Piles

Pinboard and Indieweb.xyz as clustering tools.

Ok ok, one other thing that has dawned on me: it’s not just the emergent connections between writers that is salient when clustering. It’s the connections between readers as well! (This is one thing that Google cannot possibly capture.)

To akaKenSmith’s point:

Having found each other, kindred parties need a work space where they can develop shared understandings.

The old Delicious was this kind of workspace for readers - a similar effort can be found in Pinboard.

One interesting thing I like to do with Pinboard is to look up a link - say ‘The Zymoglyphic Musem’ (results here) and then look at the other bookmarks for those who found the link. For example, the user PistachioRoux.

All of those links are now related to ‘The Zymoglyphic Museum’ by virtue of being in the realm of interest of PistachioRoux. YouTube uses these sorts of algorithms to find related videos by matching your realms of interest with someone else’s. However, in the process, that person is removed. (Or ‘those people’, more appropriately.) PistachioRoux is removed.

But perhaps PistachioRoux is the most interesting part of the discovery.

Particularly in a world which is becoming dominated by writers rather than readers - maybe the discovery of valuable readers is part of this.

Say a post tagged with #how_to #mk #fix_stabs could be crawled and collected into a single mechanical keyboard maintenance page. All that really calls for is emergent keywords from communities and tagging posts which bloggers can do and automations can assists with.

This does sound a lot like Indieweb.xyz, as @jgmac1106 mentioned. The concept is simple:

  • Blogger ‘tags’ their post with a URL: https://indieweb.xyz/en/mk.
  • Their Webmention (pingback) software notifies that URL: “Hey, a post has been made on this tag.”
  • Indieweb.xyz checks the page for a valid link - sure enough.
  • The blog post is added to that URL on Indieweb.xyz.

So the emergence should come from blogs clustering around a given URL.

I’ve been wondering if they could do a similar thing with http://www.adfreeblog.org/ - a ‘general’ blog community could be established around a simple ideal like that.

Might look like this:

  • Blog links to adfreeblog.org on their home page.
  • Adfreeblog.org notices visitors coming from that page and checks that page for the link and the image.
  • If found, it adds the blog to a directory, using the meta description and keyword tags.

The adfreeblog.org home page then becomes a directory of the community. So, kind of like a webring, but actually organized. With Twitter cards and such floating in the metadata, it is probably much easier to extrapolate a good directory entry.

Spam is an issue with this approach - but it’s a start toward discovery. There aren’t a whole lot of ways for a blog to jump out from the aether and say, “I’m over here - blogging about keyboards too!” And, in a way, the efforts to squash abuse and harassment are making it more difficult.

This can become an important component in the new discovery system like how awesome-blahblah github repos are playing a key role in open source discovery.

I think it’s important to point out, though, that ‘awesome’ directories are intended to be human-curated, not generative. They feel like a modern incarnation of the old ‘expert’ pages.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

17 Oct 2018

Reply: Finding Blogs in the Future

Don Park

I feel that discovery layer is missing or lacking. blogrolls didn’t scale. ring blogs just sucked. SEO is just survival-of-the-fittest money pit.

Discovery layer is critical. Without it, even recent push to reshape blogs into shops is meaningless. even small towns have a Main Street for discovery.

Blogrolls worked more like book recommendations. Hard to maintain too. Worked well with new technology. With other and over multiple topics, not so well. We need a more self-organizing and ad-hoc, emergent if you will.

It’s constant work—finding each other through the noise.

Hi, folks - just jumping in because this is my wheel house a bit. I have been having an extended discussion with Brad Enslen (so, on our blogs: ramblinggit.com and kickscondor.com) about discovery. We talk a lot about how this is more of a human problem than a technology problem - and that technology has played a negative role in this, perhaps.

(My part in this is: I have been spending time every day for the past six months searching for blogs - to see what the Web looks like outside of social networks. So I have a good perspective on where one can search nowadays - you can’t just type ‘blogs’ into Google. And I’m starting to get a good feel for where I would want to go to find blogs.)

blogrolls didn’t scale. ring blogs just sucked. SEO is just survival-of-the-fittest money pit.

Yes, so - for sure. (See Brad’s comment on Google here.)

In addition, self-promotion has become a dirtier word these days - you can’t just post your blog to Reddit and Instagram - it’s seen as being overly assertive. So there is almost nowhere for blogs to go.

The thing is: no, blogrolls didn’t scale - but I think they are pretty essential. We’ve traded a human-curated list of links for a ‘friends’ list that is really just a number on an individual’s feed. And the best blogrolls had nice descriptions of who was who (see: Chris Aldrich’s following page as a good example) which is a generous way of turning your readers on to other good work.

I guess I just think of it practically: how would we treat our friends and the other ‘writers’/‘artists’ we admire - by making them a number in our list? Or by spelling it out: “Annie writes about her processes as a sci-fi writer and how to improve online relationships. Basically - it’s uplifting to read her.”

Blog clusters are emergent. Fake or not, blogs with posts on similar topics will be mapped to same cluster which can be seen as a place in which a blog belongs to. Once we have that, a blog reader should be able to ‘pop out’ of that blog and see some visual representation of that cluster with neighboring blogs, not unlike a shopper leaving a store will see a street lined with other shops. That’s how discovery is done IRL and I envision that may be possible online.

Sweet - feels practical. One question I have here is: ok, so blogs have also become more topic-based. The most common blogs are recipe blogs, movie blogs, etc. But a great ‘lost’ element of blogs was just the original web journal or meta blog, where a person is just writing about whatever - I think of stuff like the old J-Walk blog or Bifurcated Rivets. Even Boing Boing used to be more this way. (So like an online ‘zine’.)

I think the orderliness of the Internet and the systems for discovery - these blogs were not found through Google, but only because there was more of an ethic of linking to each other among early blogs. A lot of discovery was just being done by bloggers back then - people simply passed links around.

Again, ‘likes’ have drained linking of a lot of its bite. We don’t write so much about why we like something - we like it and move on. And it’s so easy to ‘like’, it is done so vigorously that even we can’t keep up with our own likes - whereas we used to be limited by how much energy we would spend dressing up our links.

I’m with Don on this – whatever is going to have a chance to work has to be emergent, meaning it can’t require any investment on the part of writers.

I think ‘emergent’ can require work - in fact, it might demand work. Yes, too much work will dissuade anyone. But if it’s too easy, then it’s virtually worthless. I think the value of human curation is in its additional care.

An algorithm cannot simulate the care. Chris’ blogroll linked above is done with care - a human can plainly see that another human has taken the time to write about others. And the more time he spends designing it and improving it, the more it shows that care. People can visit my blog and see that it is built with care. (To me ‘care’ can be represented by thoughtful writing and splendid artistry or shaping of the information.)

Ok - sorry to go on so long, I hope you see this as my effort to generously engage in your discussion.

The effort Brad and I are now engaged in is an effort to bring back the link directory and to attempt to innovate it based on what we’ve learned. (Link directories have already evolved several times into: blogrolls, wikis, link blogs, even the App Store’s new ‘magazine’ approach, etc.) The idea is to jump right into discovery and link up with anyone else who wants to get in on it. Thus, my reply today!

Good to meet you all - take care.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

16 Oct 2018

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

12 Oct 2018

Reply: Those Darn Phantoms

Sphygmus

[to h0p3] I appreciate the exchange of notes! I feel the Dunbar Number problem; I think we can geek out together with informality, while also engaging each other on a higher level with the more formal, thoughtful, or directed letters.

I’m not really responding to your draft here—just testing the ‘whostyle’ I’m working on for your quotes. Of course, this is your idea, S. It’s simplified compared to what the two of you can do cross-wiki. I’m trying to decide if I want to copy h0p3’s complete letters over. I think I am against it.

I think about the Dunbar Number now and then. I’ve always felt resigned to it. There’s a limit, so why reach out? Maybe the point is to have few friends and find ‘depth’.

But I’m feeling awfully pluralistic—I just want to embrace the reverse as well. Can’t let a scientific number say how it should all be. ‘Knowing people’ seems like ‘all’ that should be. To make it easy to know me—say a bit here and there, but no need to be popping up all the time; to make it easy to know others—read many and try to develop the skill of ‘feeling’ for who they are, acknowledging their tones and colors.

There are people I’ve known my whole life who are still a mystery, whose relationship still feels tentative—I question whether depth can be. Perhaps there is only commitment.

A person changing changes the ‘depth’. When a singer’s voice or style changes, we have to start liking them from the place where they last were. But a singer who sang me a great song once—well, I could be devoted forever in sheer gratitude.

h0p3:
I quietly write this existentially isolating autopoietic self-idiom to (and seek the approval of) both current and future [conscious and non-conscious computational processes] which comprise my identity, the family I love, Humanity, The Others, the philosophers, my causal and especially memetic [sublators, descendents, and inheritors], any possible posthuman or AI-related demigods interpreting this text beyond some inconceivable (for me personally) techno-epistemic-blackbox singularity, and every appropriately fitting metaphysical object which transcends the limits of my mind or world.

Just testing another ‘whostyle’ here.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

09 Oct 2018

Reply to paulg

Paul Graham

[On the topic of Hacker News’ creation] At first it was called Startup News, but it was so boring reading about nothing but startups that a few months later we broadened the focus.

XDXDXD—imagine if the startup-related news was excised.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

Reply: Not Technically Salmentions

Eddie Hinkle

I don’t think it technically follows Salmention but it achieves similar results. Salmention requires each post to send it’s children posts up the chain. Since Micro.blog owns the whole thing it simplifies things. But the key is that if I’m not the originator of the conversation and someone replies to me, I’ll still be the replies to my post.

Ok, got it. It’s interesting—we kind of have to do this on our personal sites anyway. Like if I get a reply from myself further down the conversation, it’s useful to just use the post I ‘own’ directly rather than go parsing myself. 😄

It’s kind of tough to get it all working by hand—but it’s also amazing, so I’ll take it!

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

Reply: Verify and T42T

h0p3

I care about {Verify}. That doesn’t mean I’ve built it well or correctly. But it’s important to me that I can sign my wiki. This wiki is epicly portable, and I think signing makes good sense. Your tool makes signatures a bit more complicated, and I ask for your advice.

I realize you’re writing a draft 😉 but I’m going to say make a few squeaks and then go back to work.

So, {Verify} should actually be pretty trivial to add. Since the diffs are generated by this script, there would just need to be a step added to generate the .sig file (or add the hash to the .json file—the hash could be used by the loader to do the check there.) I will work on adding that soon—because my curiosity is peaked enough.

I fear I fail to T42T both you and kickscondor by failing to reciprocally build a useful tool for you. I’m trying to think of how I can contribute to your lives and art as much as you have for me. I apologize for not knowing how to do that. I feel inept like someone who doesn’t know how to buy a good Christmas present for their friend (and that makes me a bad friend). I don’t know you well enough to figure out how to create a gift that you’ll love and use. I’m sorry! I’m thinking about it.

So I think this is one of the possible misprojections of T42T—it leaves someone in ‘debt’. It is a very rational approach to relationships, because it reduces the interaction to numerical totals. But those numbers are very hard to derive—how much is the script I wrote worth? 2T? 3T? 16T? And how much are the thorough, immensely thoughtful replies that you write? Is that 2T? 53T?

Oh and: does 2T literally mean double? Or is it just a bit step beyond single T?

And–what is T? Does T represent “your last set of actions” in our relationship? So, if you just pulled off a 2T (doubled my T)—T is now 2T, expanding 2T into 4T from now on.

My take is that T is simply a ‘neutral’ action. It is a token of cooperation—it is not measured. I realize that 2T and perhaps even plain T imply a measurement, but I think that (might be wrong) measurement requires too much maintenance and is too difficult to sync (how do we keep our measurement identical?) so I see T as ‘neutral’ and 2T as simply ‘positive’—it will be hard enough for us (humans) to agree on the polarity of a T. So maybe let’s start there.

This way a simple ‘thank you’ for a massive gift can still be T42T. (If I were to remove the numerals: I might look at T4T as neutral-for-neutral and T42T as neutral-or-positive-for-positive. The question then becomes how to derive a polarity for an action—which brings us back to ‘the moral imperative’ and ‘the golden rule’ and the rest of THAT discussion that you are having.)

I’ve also read Grim Trigger, but I’m not talking about a recovery strategy in case T42T becomes malignant—this about how to do it in a realistic but generous way. To live it sustainably in a relationship like ours (it’s a tentative, nascent arrangement; but I think we both just want to make it work long-term.)

At any rate, I hope that riffing on your thoughts counts as a plus; your thankyous are sufficient and your generous replies are 2T always!

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

Reply: Webmention Improvements on Micro.blog

Manton Reese

Improved replying on Micro.blog to send Webmentions to any external site in the reply chain, not just the root post. This more consistently allows replies to be copied to multiple external blogs that are participating in the conversation.

Sweet! So this works identically to Salmentions?

Ok, let me see if I’ve got this right—if I reply to a reply that’s later in the chain, I try to track down the original post like this:

  1. Load the URL I’m replying to.

  2. If it has an u-in-reply-to link, load that page (repeat step 1 & 2, ad finitum).

  3. Once I hit the end of the chain, I am left with an array of the reply history.

This should work on micro.blog because the only actual h-entry on a reply’s permalink is the ACTUAL reply—the other entries shown on the page are just posts that won’t be picked up by the microformats parser? Pretty interesting approach.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

05 Oct 2018

Lobste.rs Sends Webmentions Now

But doesn’t receive them? Still—neat!

Sending Webmentions to other sites seems like an insane thing to turn down. Your blog software sends a simple message and now that blog can know to link back to you. (And go ahead and send pingbacks, too—way too easy.) But a site like this one, Lobste.rs, where there is a lot of discussion about a given link—seems even better, more advantageous, generally, usually, to bring the author in.

Now imagine if this continued:

  • Send a Webmention (u-syndication style) to https://lobste.rs to submit a link.
  • Send a Webmention (u-like-of style) to a lobste.rs page to upvote.
  • Send a Webmention (u-in-reply-to style) to a lobste.rs page to comment.

And you could verify these Webmentions (and attach them to a user) by verifying that the Webmention source is listed in the user’s ‘about’ section.

Just a quick mention that this is how Indieweb.xyz works and I am very anxious to see if it’s possible to really have a community work this way! (I’m not sure I know of any other community that is entirely built ENTIRELY from blog and wiki crosstalk—maybe the deceased ‘bloglines’ was one?—‘is’/‘was’ there one?)

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

26 Sep 2018

Reply: H0p3styl1n6

h0p3

The CSS fragment idea is very interesting; it celebrates and signifies our participation in each others’ identities and work. It is a gift to try to represent someone’s aesthetic point of view or voicestyle in quotation. It’s like reading a letter in someone’s handwriting that you’ve seen many times before, conjuring memories like the smell of cinnamon rolls.

Ok, great start to our discussion about styling citations from each other in matching CSS.

I am sending this reply with a musky pork pie smell. See the attached WIFF file.

Yet again to my ignorance: I clearly do not appreciate Art as well as others. I’m an uncouth pig here. I love consuming it as a drug, and I’ve (very poorly) made plenty of it before. Trying to emotionally communicate the cognitively ineffable is something I do take seriously (enough to be very particular about it). Forgive me for being the joyless buzzkill rhetoric-hawk.

Ha-ha! Well, you are becoming very endeared to me, hawk. And you are right to keep us all in check. The buzz that you do kill—and it’s certainly not a buzzard-sized buzz—is not any buzz that was killed just 'cause.

I’m especially interested in form as it relates to function; I want something productive (pleasant workspaces help me work, of course). I don’t think I’m obsessed with minimalism (though I appreciate it), but rather plainness irwartfrr. If it works and it looks good enough: cool, I like that. I’m the kind of dude that will buy 5 identical shirts if I know they are cheap and comfortable. I want the majority of expressive work in my wiki to be in my words. Ideally, I want my words to carry as much of their meaning as possible without relying upon appearance (which I think can be nearly all of it), and only then do I want to work on appearance beyond as function as the delicious bonus.

Oh, I see this in you and I applaud it—loudly, standing—an ovation which goes in a great arc, knocking over the drinks of everyone else standing around me. (Part of this ovation is a simple appreciation of your last epic missive, which is due.)

I only side more toward art because I get so much out of it. I can’t think of a reasoned argument that has transfixed me as much as “Starry, Starry Night” has. And I don’t reach for a reasoned argument when life has fallen apart, but for Neil Young. (I am not arguing with you here—I know you have these things, too, and that you love cartoons and songs and shows and all that. And, come on—you are nuts for ASCII art, amirite? Alas, I also do fall into the trap you’re talking about of form over function.)

Alright, so with all those caveats in mind, we may end up doing this all by hand and passing tiddlers around—I’m also going to play with some styled RSS tonight and see what happens. And we’ll toss some ideas around.

One thing I know for sure: I don’t want to go too crazy on fonts, because I don’t want readers to have to load ten Web Fonts to make this work. That would be EXACTLY fonts over functions. But the basic colors and stuff—worth a try, yeah?

(One time you asked if you should read Vigoleis—no, don’t. He’s mine. And it’s like Infinite Jest, it will take you way too long to read and you’ll never want to read it again. Infinite Jest also wasn’t for me.)


Oh, also, from the footnote:

In a blind, stripped-down test, I’d prefer to make it so even a paraphrase of something I’ve said would evoke: ‘that sounds like h0p3’ or ‘h0p3 would like that’ or ‘you know who probably wouldn’t stop blathering on about this if he were reading this with me right now?..h0p3’ or ‘omg, this sounds like that asshole h0p3, lol.’

I feel this way about the words, too, for sure—but also the appearance. It’s like remembering The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch for both the chitinous foreheads inside and the orange-red cover of the bug-eyed man with the robotic hands. It all comes flooding back like that.

This post accepts webmentions. Do you have the URL to your post?

You may also leave an anonymous comment. All comments are moderated.

PLUNDER THE ARCHIVES

This page is also at kickssy42x7...onion and on hyper:// and ipns://.

MOVING ALONG LET'S SEE MY FAVORITE PLACES I NO LONGER LINK TO ANYTHING THATS VERY FAMOUS

glitchyowl, the future of 'people'.

jack & tals, hipster bait oracles.

maya.land, MAYA DOT LAND.

hypertext 2020 pals: h0p3 level 99 madman + ᛝ ᛝ ᛝ — lucid highly classified scribbles + consummate waifuist chameleon.

yesterweblings: sadness, snufkin, sprite, tonicfunk, siiiimon, shiloh.

surfpals: dang, robin sloan, marijn, nadia eghbal, elliott dot computer, laurel schwulst, subpixel.space (toby), things by j, gyford, also joe jenett (of linkport), brad enslen (of indieseek).

fond friends: jacky.wtf, fogknife, eli, tiv.today, j.greg, box vox, whimsy.space, caesar naples.

constantly: nathalie lawhead, 'web curios' AND waxy

indieweb: .xyz, c.rwr, boffosocko.

nostalgia: geocities.institute, bad cmd, ~jonbell.

true hackers: ccc.de, fffff.at, voja antonić, cnlohr, esoteric.codes.

chips: zeptobars, scargill, 41j.

neil c. "some..."

the world or cate le bon you pick.

all my other links are now at href.cool.