LEECHING AND LINKING IN THE HYPERTEXT KINGDOM

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Kicks Condor

#psa

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.

21 Sep 2021

Back at it - scrapchat today (Sept 21st) at 6 PM Eastern with Talita of UH. Starting with the topic of Sunshine69 and moving outward from there. Talita is like one of my favorite people ever, so I am personally very excited about this.

  1. Anonymous
    Hi what is scrapchatting? I see this on Indieweb.xyz but don't know what it is! Thanks :)

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16 Sep 2021

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15 Jun 2021

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23 Jan 2021

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28 Dec 2020

SPECIAL GREENLAND NEW YEAR SCRAPCHATTING. 9 PM EST on Dec 31st. Weiwei Hsu will be joining us from the year 2021. Peep into the future. We will countdown to Greenlandic midnight, calling on its restorative powers. twitch.tv/kickscondor

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11 Nov 2020

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29 May 2020

Beaker: Easy Forks

The hidden magic in simple personal forks.

Just taking this chance to pass on a discovery I found in the new Beaker Browser. Notes and checkboxes by Kinopio.club - which would also be splendid to somehow bring to the Hyperdrive Network.

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04 Mar 2020

Okay, Shut Up About Me Now

A strategy guide for all you hipsters who found me in 2015.

My hypertext is in the shape of a small personal blog from 2015. My hypertext is totally irrelevant in the cultural landscape. I talk to chameleon and I talk to Jack and Tals Vals. I try not to post sometimes. Yes, I have been working on one of the most important software projects of early March 2020. But I also call it in and stick with simply reposting some of the health updates I find and like from YouTube.

I often post bad content, such as this editorial, which frustrates its fans and discourages them from sharing the www.kickscondor.com link. In fact, the whole point of today’s message is that you should not be sharing or talking about this hypertext blog with your friends.

Let’s find out if any of you can take note. This isn’t a reverse psychology message. This isn’t irony or anything. And not that I don’t appreciate when you’ve brought in new people to look around a bit. But the doors are closed. It’s time to stop talking about Kicks Condor and it would be best if you denied ANY KNOWLEDGE OF THIS BLOG at this time.

If you are reading this and you know about this site, all I can say is that you are extremely lucky, as you are probably the last one to find out.

Things are at a good point right now where I can find small websites and pass them up the chain. I’ve got Andy Baio looking in now and then. Seems like I’ve got Warren Ellis from showbiz. I worked hard to score these big guys. Pretty nice, pretty damn decent. Everyone who I want to have reading is now reading. It’s perfect right now.[1]

But now let me explain with some of the problems I’m facing that you are all causing.

  • You are ruining me. If this blog turns into some hip, exclusive thing, then people will think that Kicks Condor is a sweet brand or something. No - when I quit blogging I want to give up kickscondor.com so that no one will go near it after that.[2]
  • Recognition is like poison. All of this will turn into worthless popular shit and you will regret ever having liked me. And I will be trapped in here, pretending to be twenty-one and scrambling to “give back” to my community. I will be paying the price of it. But YOU. You will have done this to me! Does anything even happen to YOU?
  • You will think you’ve moved on and that your life is better now that you’ve put me behind you. But how could it be better? You gave up on Kicks Condor, the one person who could really help you find quality Neocities sites! Your life will not be bad per se, but you will feel off kilter for sure.
  • You are bringing bad actors to my door. People are now coming in droves to take what I have. I get e-mails from people who say, “Show me what you are doing to find success?” They want to see my deepest thoughts and impressions naked on the printed page. Others harshly defile my name on imageboards. I just had a bad experience on ratwires.space recently where a guy said he would kill me and I just had to observe it all happen dispassionately. So now I’m checking msgbored.cf, just waiting for the next attack.
  • I’ve even been threatened with a lawsuit. A celebrity figure has been sending the dogs after me for stealing the KICKS CONDOR name, the chair avatar and my very idealism for the World Wide Web![3]
  • People are not going to like me linking to them if I just send them a bunch of link cowboys. Imagine if this just turns into a bunch of YouTubers going to your links and making faces about it? In a way, that’d be pretty nice, pretty damn decent. But it’s actually a terrible thing for future generations.

I got a really nice e-mail from Justus Grunow a few days ago. But I’m not going to destroy his life by linking to him all the time! He has published GIFs of his close friends and associates on that web site. What would it do to him if those GIFs were suddenly taken over by link cowboys and used as dogwhistles for global coffee thieves?

It would absolutely destroy him. I can safely link to him ten more times here in the dense matter of my hypertext. But the eleventh time will destroy him.[4]

I know I talk a lot about “Let Me Link to You”. But sometimes things get evil. What if Google had realized, on the day they became evil, that they needed to say something to all of us, to let us know? How easy would it have been for them to post a message, explaining that they’d become evil, that we should stop, that we should go away and never return. I think we could have recovered the Earth!

I am not evil yet, I promise you! But I am certainly ALMOST THERE. It’s around the corner. Maybe the 8th. And all you have to do is shut up. Can you do that?

You can share this blog with your enemies however. And, of course, if you are a CIA operative, and sharing this is part of your current assignment, I get that.

Now, let’s all try to calm down and forget about this. Forget about this message, forget about me, forget that I spent so long talking about myself, and most important of all: deny ANY KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE OF THIS BLOG, even if you are tortured or held at gun point. If you think about it, this kind of secrecy will make you much more of an insane hipster than you already have been during the last five years that you have ardently followed this blog.

Okay, I think we can safely say this is the nail in the coffin for this blog.

  1. Except that I do want Olia Lialina to be reading along, humming along, and I would love it if she was really stalking me, but I can e-mail her about doing that later. ↩︎

  2. Part of it is a respect thing. Like you wouldn’t just go get in someone’s body and use it around town after they die. ↩︎

  3. And I have no defense. I did rip all of these things off. And if no one would have said anything, I would have gotten away with it. But now I have to watch it all be snuffed out in painstaking slow-motion. (Meaning: the lawsuit. It seems to be happening at a slower time scale than all of the other things happening out there. A supernatural force is interfering to make my agonizing defeat play out in extreme slowness. I’m not saying it’s God. But it could be God’s nephew or someone in a lower station who isn’t being supervised or responsibly mentored.) ↩︎

  4. Can someone out there put a reminder on their phone to check if I have blogged about Justus an eleventh time? In case I forget. ↩︎

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11 Nov 2019

PSA: To anyone reading this ‘unfiltered’ page: I now have feeds for this page, so you can just put /all/ in your reader if you accept the dangers.

Fraidycat is also now out for Chrome. Both extensions have been updated to version 1.0.3, which is the latest code. Now we’ll have to see how sending updates to you goes. (Planning on an update next Monday.)

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09 Nov 2019

Fraidycat is officially out for Firefox now! While it should move your follows over automatically, you should probably export them - to be safe before upgrading. addons.mozilla.org

The Chrome/Vivaldi extension is very close. Thanks for all of the encouragement this week!

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05 Nov 2019

If you’re having trouble getting Fraidycat to sync between browsers, please reinstall from fraidyc.at. I would reinstall anyway—although you will have to restart your feed list—because I now have a fixed extension ID in Firefox.

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04 Nov 2019

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01 Nov 2019

Fraidycat source code is now up at github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat. I am planning to do a more public release of the web extension on Monday, but wanted to give a treat to anyone who feels especially intrepid. (Be aware that syncing has troubles when you load a self-built extension. Don’t just throw all your feeds in there yet.)

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12 Jun 2019

PSA:

  • If my design is hard on your eyes, you hate it—try ‘reader mode’ in your browser. Vivaldi even has a dark mode.
  • Thank you to Jason McIntosh and gRegorLove for reporting Indieweb problems with my HTML. Had a bunch of wrong stuff that’s been causing problems for ages. Feels good!
  • And also to Jacky for bringing up my Twitter problems. It’s an uncomfortable subject—but had to be done. Workin on a fix.

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02 Mar 2019

So, as a result of the work Chris has been doing in Wordpress, making it easier to post to Indieweb.xyz, I’ve started “rolling up” all the posts by each user on the home page. I’m just trying this to see how it feels. I’m going to try quite a lot of things over the next few months. Let me know what works for you.

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18 Sep 2018

I am going to be online Tuesdays and Fridays from now on. I don’t expect anyone to care about this schedule unless they are looking for a response to something. So, yeah, I am going to be concentrating my reading and responding on those days. Ok, sorry—carry on!

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25 Aug 2018

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23 Aug 2018

Ticker Tape Parade

It’s good to be a little ‘river’ of thoughts—apart from the estuaries.

Inspired by the concept of Ripped Sheets of Paper, I began to see a new blog design in my mind that departed from all the current trends. (Related: Things We Left in the Old Web.)

The large majority of blogs and social media feeds out there are:

  • Highly rigid visually—a linear list of paragraphs.
  • Mostly blue and white (with a little gray.)
  • Bland. Often all posts are structured virtually the same, unless there are images.
  • Alike. There are common templates.

So, yeah, no wonder the Web has deteriorated! We just don’t care. It’s understandable—we experimented for a good ten or twenty years. I guess that’s why I wanted this site to border on bizarre—to try to reach for the other extreme without simply aspiring to brutalism.

To show that leaving social media can free you to build your own special place on the web. I have no reason to scream and war here in order to stand apart.

Exaggerated Importance

When I started laying out the main ‘river’ of strips on my various feed pages—here’s my August archive, for instance—I started to want the different posts to have a greater impact on the page based on what they were.

Screenshot of the new home page.

A tweet-style note thing should be tiny. It’s a mere thought.

A reply to someone might be longer, depending on the quality of the ideas within it.

And the long essays take a great length of time to craft—they should have the marquee.

It began to remind me of the aging ‘tag cloud’. Except that I couldn’t stand tag clouds because the small text in the cloud was always too small! And they also became stale—they always use the same layout. (It would be interesting to rethink the tag cloud—maybe with this ‘river’ in mind!)

It’s All There

Even though these ‘river’-style feeds are slender and light on metadata—for instance, the ‘river’ is very light on date and tagging info—it’s all there. All the metadata and post content is in the HTML. This is so that I can pop up the full post immediately. But also: that stuff is the microformats!

Why bother with microformats? I remember this technology coming out like a decade ago and—it went nowhere!

But, no, they are actually coming into stride. They allow me to syndicate and reply on micro.blog without leaving my site. I can reply to all my webfriends in like fashion. They have added a lot to blogging in these times—look up ‘Indieweb’.

Honestly, they make this blog worth using. For me. I feel like the design should be for you; the semantic structure is for me.

This lead to a happy coalescing of the design and the structure: I could load individual posts on a windowing layer over the home page. This is a kickback to the old DHTML windowing sites of yesteryear. (And, in part, inspired by the zine at whimsy.space.)

Screenshot of right-clicking on a post.

What’s more—nothing (except the archives dropdown, I should say) is broken if Javascript is off. You can still center-click on the square blog post cards to launch them in a tab. URLs in the browser should line up properly without filling your history with crap.

I do have some new kinds of post layouts that will be cropping up here are there—such as how this article is made of individual tiles. But it all flattens to simple HTML where I need it to.

One of the struggles of the modern Indieweb is to have uniqueness and flair without sacrificing function. I have to do a lot of customization to integrate with Twitter, micro.blog and RSS. But I hope you will not need to work around me. So that remains to be seen.

At any rate: thankyou! So many of you that I correspond with offered juicy conversations that stimulated this new design. My muse has always been Life Itself. The experiences and conversations all around --> inspiration! I feel fortunate to any eyes that wipe across my sentences from time to time.

Time to get back to linking to you.

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30 Jul 2018

You can now customize your blog’s description on Indieweb.xyz. If you include a meta tag named xyz-blurb, its content will be used instead of the meta description tag. Escaped HTML can go in there. More to come.

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27 Jul 2018

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15 Jul 2018

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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.