It has become trendy to question our allegiance to Apple.
There are certainly times I wonder why I continue to use Apple products. Between a bunch of little things always breaking and my disappointment with the new MacBook Pro I grow frustrated and threaten to leave Apple completely. I become curious about how the other half (or two-thirds, or whatever) live. I like to shake things up now and then, so this all leads to hedging my bets against Apple.
Molly Hodgdon in Aeon:
Now, I’m aware that Diet Coke is not exactly a health tonic, but blithely calling it poison in a voice cracked with the tar of innumerable organic butts speaks to a certain cognitive bias. The soda was bad purely because it wasn’t natural, and the cigarettes were good purely because they were. I refrained from asking her if she enjoyed lots of other natural things, such as cobra bites, poison ivy, malaria, and diving headlong into 100 per cent organic molten lava.
Colin Walker:
Although my Medium usage has significantly dropped off I had intended keeping my membership going. Then I realised something: I’ve only read one or possibly two members-only, funded stories.
Like Colin, I question the value of my Medium membership.
I became a Medium member the day memberships were announced. Since then, I’ve been tempted to cancel, simply because I don’t feel I’m missing much if I skip the “members only” content.
Andrew Karcher:
The solution: Netflix DVDs. In the eight years I’ve had the service I’ve never had an issue obtaining a copy of a movie or TV series I want.
I finally killed my Netflix DVD subscription in 20151. I’ve been missing it. The problem with streaming services for me is that I often end up spending an hour watching trailers and never actually watching an actual movie.
One of the factors1 causing me to bounce between publishing using a static blog generator (Hugo) and Wordpress is the option to have conversations. To participate.
Wordpress makes this easy with a number of Microformat and Indieweb plugins. Generating, receiving, and displaying comments and Webmentions is easy.
On the other hand, a static site (this one, at the moment) doesn’t provide these tools. Comments are available via JavaScript using things like Disqus but I’d prefer comments to be mine2.
Remember that time I decided to move all of my blogging to baty.blog? That was fun, right?
I had Emacs open today and wanted to post something about playing with Known so I just hit the usual key binding for a new blog post and started typing. When finished I typed “make deploy” and poof!, it was published… to the archived blog.
So in keeping with my history of never deciding anything for very long I put the original theme back on baty.
Nick Cave. Picture: Josh Robenstone I got to see Nick Cave last night at the Masonic Temple in Detroit. A Nick Cave show has been one of my few bucket list concerts and I was not disappointed. He’s charismatic, funny, brutal, and honest.
My favorites were…
Jubilee Street
The Ship Song
Stagger Lee
Known (https://withknown.com/) is described as “a social learning platform,” but it seems to work pretty well for publishing a microblog (or any blog for that matter).
I have been testing it at snippets.baty.net and it works fine. The thing is, it doesn’t offer much over a standard Worpress install, so I don’t see the point. It also feels as if Known is accidentally a decent indieweb-enabled blogging platform. I’m not comfortable relying on something for which my primary use case is a side effect of the tool.
Lots of discussion this week around Facebook vs the Open Web.
Colin Walker:
The sad thing is that most don’t care about the open web or about content longevity.
Colin reiterates that most people don’t care about all this open web nonsense. They just want to find and interact with their friends. I agree with him.
However, just because a lot of people don’t care about something doesn’t make it unimportant.
I completely understand that Kodak is messing with all my nostalgia dials with Kodachrome Magazine, 2017 Issue 1 but I ordered a copy anyway. I mean just look at it. “Art, Film, Analog Culture,” yes please.
It feels good to know when someone enjoys what I’ve written.
There’s a discussion around the visibility of “Favorites” on micro.blog. Some people want them to be a sort of bookmarking tool only for the person adding the Favorite. Others want them to resemble other social networks, in that they prefer “Favorites” (aka “Likes”) to be visible to all users. This benefits the network by encouraging everything to become a popularity contest and is exactly what I don’t want.
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