Things I Like
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To put a pin on the question about making a website, I guess I’d say… if you have ideas bigger than the 280~500 characters limit? A website. If you make non-portrait videos longer than two-minutes? A website. If you make images bigger than the 1280x720 summary card? A website. You throwing an event and need to communicate details but not everyone has Facebook accounts? A website. You want to eschew the algorithmic popularity game? A website (with RSS). You want to take part in the rewilding your attention movement? A website (with RSS). You want to own your own content? A website. You want to be an anti-capitalist? A website (with RSS). If you want to be a capitalist too, I guess? A website (with a paywall). You want to be anonymous? A website. You want to “share what you know”? A website.
Love this post by Dave and yeah, a website may not make you money but it's so awesome to be able to put what you want in the format you want out on the web.
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My wife and I do not have children (a decision we made prior to getting married) which means that we have never had a third thing—if you will—to keep us together. There is no buffer in our relationship which you would think would make it easier, but from my perspective is just the opposite. After a few decades of looking back on our struggles and witnessing other relationships collapse we’ve indexed on a few foundations that we have to continually practice if we want to make it to the next year.
This piece really resonated with me and I'm grateful to Storey for sharing this, we haven't made it to 30, but after 20 years of marriage I could relate to a lot of what he said.
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Regardless of the role trade agreements like NAFTA played in the continued move of manufacturing overseas, it was not the sole reason for this move, and thus its reversal (one could even go as far as to say, overcorrection) will not solve the problem. We cannot see how the current situation will do anything to increase domestic textile manufacturing in any way. Asking mills to expand production requires more labor, and more equipment. Currently equipment must be purchased—you guessed it—overseas, thus costing the company more money. If a yarn is spun domestically but uses imported materials, it now costs more to produce. Technically all these rising costs are the point of tariffs, but increased cost seems to be their only effect. As a brand actively involved in domestic manufacturing, we have not benefitted from any policies or practices over the last 6 months that have helped increase our manufacturing here versus overseas.
This series about tariffs from Kelbourne Woolens has been so well done. I've not used their yarn, but the way they point out exactly what's going on and how it affects them, a business that is trying to make yarn in the US as well as use fibers from outside the US, has been well worth the read. Related: I have a feeling lots of other small businesses in other areas could write similarly about what is happening, where their industry is at, and how this is affecting them, but I use yarn so I've been reading a lot about that.
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So I lost some wind in the professional sails. Do I need a new headwind? Do I turn the boat towards exciting new waters, or enjoy floating along in a still and relaxing harbour? Both have their appeal.
Snook and I are the same age and wow, I think in many ways we may be in a similar headspace as well. Good to know that I'm not alone with some of these thoughts.
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The place was chaos. Bankers boxes just like mine stacked in wobbly piles to the ceiling. Banks of filing cabinets stood behind a counter that was so covered in piles of dusty stamp books and shoeboxes that you couldn't see it. Unexpectedly at the front of the store sat rubbermaid tubs full of African violets, growing in the diffused light of the dirty storefront window.
I loved this piece, so well written and also I could relate as I just flew to help go through some of my mom's personal items now that she's in memory care. So many things she held on to that my sister and I don't really want and probably no one wants. It's honestly made me view the things in our own house differently.
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The same engagement-first polarization spiral that has made everything worse and still threatens democracy is Substack’s business model. They promised journalists independence but they’re optimizing for oligarchs.
A piece that speaks to what I posted yesterday about Substack. I don't know if I agree that a boycott isn't necessary, because it seems to me a lot of writers who vocally oppose the things that Substack is allowing are still using the platform.
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The one thing can be small or big, easy or labored, fleeting or long. I carve out time to go play drums for two hours, go for a bouldering session, do a shorter 20 minute run, read a page of a book, eat something I’m really excited about, and more. Even on the most difficult day, I can adjust and find the smallest thing that I am excited about and do it.
A good reminder from Naz.
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Now that we’ve explored what an average life can look like, let’s touch on what it doesn’t involve. It doesn’t mean that nothing you do matters from your viewpoint, and it doesn’t mean giving up on your goals or passions. Pursuing what you love, enhancing your skills, and striving for your dream life — however that may look — are all worthy endeavors.
I really enjoyed this piece, because most of us live very average lives, but that doesn't mean they aren't good lives.
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I bet there’s good ideas out there. I bet they’re not on Mars. I bet they’re inside people you already know. Impractical ideas that don’t scale well to billions of users but could have an incredible impact on a local economy and community (RIP Gowalla). Ideas that solve actual problems and create actual utility or connection. Small-scale ideas that when combined can breathe new life into a dead economy.
I read this piece this morning and have been thinking about it ever since. I don't necessarily agree with Dave on everything here, but there's a lot here that's got me thinking about how we function as a society. So many ideas are out there, but they won't blow up and make you incredibly wealthy and I wonder if that's what everyone is chasing, rather than being satisfied with enough.
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Substack does not have a clear future as a newsletter business, I'm not the first to notice that. But it doesn’t have to fail outright to be a disaster. It just has to keep trying to become a life-sized map of the internet: maximum content, maximum churn. The center cannot hold—especially not for newsletters, a format that depends on intimacy and long-standing trust.
This piece was really interesting to me because of the numbers. If you've worked in tech or around start ups you know the numbers presented here aren't good. Substack is trying everything to keep people on their platform (what other platforms does that sound like?) and yet newsletters are things you get in your inbox and I agree, that creates an intimacy that all the other things Substack is doing can't recreate. I've been incredibly disappointed over the past months to see so many folks whose work I admire starting "a Substack" as they say. There are alternatives, it's possible, and if any of the people I really enjoy reading were to do that, I might consider a paying subscription, but not as long as they're on Substack.
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I’m conscious of the fact that it is, in some sense, stupid of me not to be on Substack. At the very least, I could be sending my newsletter for free, instead of paying a hundred bucks a month! Yet I suppose I think it’s the stupid choices that are the important ones. And I suppose I think a standard for art is that it doesn’t just play a game, but invents one. On an internet crowded with creators eager to obey each platform’s demands, follow their Best Practices (which harden into mandatory genres: quick-setting concrete), there is, I believe, an incandescence to stubborn specificity.
I'm not sure how many times I've seen this piece linked, but it's worth the quick read and Sloan is right about how platforms steer content in certain directions and people adapt to that, even if they aren't quite sure they're doing it.
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Bochy, 70, isn’t as nimble as he once was. He possesses two new hips and an artificial knee. In his third year with the Texas Rangers, he walks slowly, a hitch in his deliberate gait. But he still believes in the power of a good walk — an hour of exercise, fresh air and contemplation, a peaceful break to mull lineup decisions, brainstorm tactics and ideas and think through tough conversations with his players.
Yup, there's a baseball tie in here, but I love walking and find that it's a key part of me keeping my mind clear just as much as it is about moving my body. I think a lot while walking, starting writing posts, think about what to do about a problem, and work through any anxieties I'm having. This article gets in to a lot of details, but I love hearing about a baseball manager using a simple walk to process through the pressures of the job.
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Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.
There's a bit of a theme in the links I'm posting today, and it's all about being on the web and owning your site and getting away from any platform. In my adult life we've spun through so many different platforms, they're all listed in this article, and yet people who've lived through this all seem to forget when the new hot platform comes along.
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I don’t think I want a map of everything I’ve ever read. I want a mind free to read what it needs. I want memory that forgets gracefully. I want ideas that resurface not because I indexed them, but because they mattered.
Over the past couple of years I've started writing down less and letting go of things I have written down, so it was interesting to read Westenberg talk about deleting it all. I read without a pencil most of the time, knowing that the important bits will stick and I'm OK if I forget things. The ideas that I can't stop thinking about, that come back to me on a walk or while driving, those are the ones that I'll pursue and I'm OK with letting go of the rest.
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I think of all the fun, unexpected, and unintentionally hilarious real-life interactions many people miss out on because they’re either too needlessly immersed in the daily distraction or are too programmed to utilize online services for mundane tasks. If I were a comic, I’d have plenty of source material for an observational stand-up routine because I brave the outside world and watch life unfold, as intended.
I'm with Jen here. I do most of my errands in person and order online as little as possible. It's one way of getting out of the house but also the interaction with people is important. Yes, I sometimes end up annoyed (the parking lot of our coop is the worst) but also you never know when you may have an interesting small interaction.