I’m not one to argue on social media very often, but even when I want to rebut someone, it’s difficult. How do you respond to someone who is reposting a commentary on something written by yet another person? You’re several degrees from the original malformed premise.
Lauren writes about the humble linklog at Flotisserie.
An outbound link points to someone else’s work, so a linklog is essentially a renewable engine for sending traffic to other people and places. That’s the precise opposite of what big platforms want from audiences; platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook quietly bury posts with outbound links to keep your attention (and dollars) on their site and with their advertising customers. A linklog further leans into that dynamic: it willingly hands your audience and attention away while crediting your forebears, comrades, mentors, and co-conspirators. It turns the rough digital filing system into a “folksonomy,” if you will.
Linklogging is still one of my favorite ways to blog.
I have to say, I’m really looking forward to The Blockbuster Chronicles from Brandon. He writes about working at a Blockbuster at the turn of the century.
That’s what The Blockbuster Chronicles is about. Not really the rise and fall of Blockbuster Video. Plenty of people have already told that story. This is the story of one Blockbuster store in Millington, Tennessee, during the last few years when video stores still felt like they were going to be around forever.
Having worked in retail for years, I think I’ll be able to relate.
The 8BitDo FlipPad looks like a lot of fun, but I have no idea what games I would play with it.
Watched: Project Hail Mary 🍿 last night. Though he shares my nickname, Rocky reminded me of my cat Jonah. Very enthusiastic, overfamiliar, and with a lack for respect for boundaries.
Emma Collins brings up the point that no one calls Wendell Berry a “country writer,” like we call musicians from rural areas “country musicians” and “country singers.” Perhaps, we should, like she does, start calling them “agrarian singers.” Her piece, Not the Times, The Eternities goes into the American love of nature. Since you can’t dig into America’s fascination with our natural beauty without mentioning the transcendentalists, she quotes Thoreau.
Thoreau spoke about chastity of the mind. “Read not the Times. Read the Eternities,” he thundered in his essay “Life Without Principle,” as he marveled that people allow “idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought.”
Time to touch grass?
Designer Jon Hicks’ obsession with music apps left him with a problem — he couldn’t find any that met all his needs. So, like many others in the age of LLMs, he built his own.
Hicks calls his app Jacket, and it’s easy to understand why when you see all the references to physical media. Giant artwork, extensive liner notes integration and perhaps most surprising and impressive, spines.
The spines harken back to Apple’s long-lost Coverflow view in iTunes.
Something about the combination of a good mechanical keyboard and typing in iA Writer just feels so right. It just clicks (NPI).
Reading the Claude watermark topic reminds me of how my son in college, who doesn’t use LLMs when writing his papers, has to check them with an LLM to make sure they don’t sound too much like AI. If they sound like AI, they’ll get flagged, even though the tools for detection are notorious for false positives.