Weeknotes 1467

Weeknotes

• Another heinously busy week! Flat-out working every day, including the bank holiday, and in the evenings, Fringe shows! (while it's been exhausting, I really enjoyed There's A Ghost In My House, Nathan Cassidy: Bumblebee and Back Passages Of Brighton in particular!)
• Those review above are on Seagull, which has been great fun!  We've been planning for what we're going to do with it over the next few months, and I'm very excited!
• Work is also very busy at the moment; on top of the stuff I'm doing for people I'm planning a course, thinking about developing some tools and speaking to some interesting people about some projects they're doing too! It feels like the future is full of potential :)
• I've been thinking about it and I'm going to try and move to a process-focused rather than an output-focused mode of working for this blog: which is to say, rather than trying to force myself to write something every day, I'm going to try and spend a certain amount of time every day writing and then publish when ready.
• In short, I'm copping out of daily blogging, for now (though I'll still do weeknotes, because I like those!). Alternatively: trying to behave more like a normal person and less like the kind of person who continually gives themselves multiple overwhelming ludicrous projects all at the same time.
• But because I am still that guy to an extent: I am currently planning for a new podcast (Memhaz will return when it's safe to be indoors together again, but this is something else!), thinking about building a group for a collective learning initiative (trying to construct, or possibly just articulate, personal philosophies) and writing a comic, again.

Links

• "Indeed, any time you hear the word ‘flywheel’ relating to Amazon, replace it with ‘monopoly’ and the sentence will make sense."
• L.M. Sacasas is a writer who I find utterly fascinating when I can get my brain to read the words he puts down. For some reason—I couldn't tell you why—my eyes will just run off his prose. Adam Tooze is another one like that: I find them brilliant, just hard to focus on. Anyway, here's one of his I was able to focus on, about questions you should ask of technology.  These questions at the end put me in mind of the Amish, who I think are due getting turned into the new Luddites in that boring brocialists who work in tech, like me, will enthusiastically explain to you at length that, actually, they're not against technology per se; they are against technologies that have negative effects to their community as they see it, while most people adopt technologies with only an eye for the things it adds.
• After a bit of a break, one of my favourite podcasts, Ghost Stories For The End Of The World, is back! Conspiracy theories with a heavy primary source edge—actually something of an influence on Unnamed Podcast Project mentioned above!
• Ed Zitron on one of the reasons I'm not on Twitter anymore.
• Bnet, probably the most sufferable of the Online Culture Update substacks, has ended, and their (somewhat bitter) diagnosis of the problems with the internet and the people who write about it are worth a read.
• David Renton on what no platforming was (from his point of view), which I found to be both interesting and instructive and I definitely want to pull out the idea of it as a tactic which had a specific target and context being applied in contexts and to targets to which it was perhaps less suited.
• Perhaps related, this by Our Freddie touches on something I've thought about before, namely the end goal of a certain section of what is termed social justice politics being not just equality or freedom or justice but the elimination of friction and discomfort. Again, I think I have more on this but I'd like to give it a bit more thought.
• Chris D on full employment.
• And finally: I came to this song via the Vanessa Carlton thing; it bumps:

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Over and out.