Sorry about all the screwiness around that last post—particularly if you follow via RSS. Tried to make a quick edit, but no, that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, I spent the last fifteen minutes trying to format, reformat, branch, re-encode, merge branches, before I finally just deleted the whole thing and started over.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying I’ll try to be better.
An upcoming comic from Evan M. Cohen. Originally posted to his blog Wet Flakey Park
I can’t believe how beautiful these are. Both in style and tone.
If you’re as smitten as I am with Evan’s work, then consider picking up a print in his shop.
(H/T to A Journey Round My Skull)
1964, A Child of Goguryeo with illustrations by O Su-san. Original image credit to 50 Watts.
It’s an absolute shame that this is the first time I’ve come across the site 50 Watts. Now that I’m here, I can’t stop.
This page called “The Train That Ate Flowers,” which includes a number of beautifully illustrated and beautifully decayed children’s book covers, caught my attention today. I’m not even clear how I ended up here, but I am glad I did.
I couldn’t leave without mentioning just how jealous I am of this advice from the site’s author:
The best way to navigate 50 Watts is to click about randomly until you find God or go insane.
That sums my browsing behaviour perfectly.
It wasn't so long ago that Smugmug had announced a purchase of the early Internet darling Flickr. For years under Yahoo's stewardship the service had decayed. I spent years trying to get an old account—tied to Yahoo!'s (I still despise that exclamation point) self-destructing mail service—closed to no avail. Non-existent email support and relying on public forums for hints at possible access to a human on the inside. It was a mess. Clearly, the lights were on but no one was home.
On Saturday, I have support another shot, having vaguely remembered that someone else controls Flickr. The support team at Flickr/Smugmug is alive and well. I had no problems getting the account closed after proving that it was my account.
I'm not sure how Flickr will fare in today's market, but it's clear the people behind it care about Flickr's future, in a way it was clear that Yahoo! didn't or couldn't.
I have a lot of sympathy for Jeff’s computer problem. How do you juggle multiple devices in a workflow?[1] I have gotten past this problem only by specifying a particular domain, best suited to each machine and choosing the only one that can do the work. My iPad is my main machine for writing, responding, developing (remotely), etc. and my Mac plays second fiddle based on a very, very specific set of usecases. I use the desktop only for large scale design work and website testing.[2] It took a long time to work out those uses cases but I just had to keep bashing my head against it.
The tougher problem for me was the discipline required to keep from replicating all of the workflows I have on the iPad on my Mac. I wonder if Continuity wasn’t the best feature for iOS and Mac. I mean, what people needed was a shared files platform, which we have now with iCloud Drive, and apps that can access those files. If you can get to the work, then you can get working, right?
Yet, as soon as we had apps that could share the exact same workflows, then we pushed developers to include the exact same features and functions in all places. As soon as you start targeting parity across multiple platforms, then you begin to water down the strengths of all of them. So, now it is just a favourites game. You took work with you on the iPad because it was the newest, hottest release, but you went back to the Mac because, spiritually, you never left. It was just too easy to slide across when everything “looked” the same. It was too hard to pull our collective focus from the centre of the Venn diagram to appreciate its edges.
Believe me when I say I speak from experience. I have spent more money than my spouse would care to hear on technology that I ultimately couldn’t allow myself to enjoy for what it was. Buy a computer for a very specific use, spend ten minutes setting it up for that exact function and waste away multiple hours trying to hack together that “one thing” that would make it even better: rinse and repeat.
I am definitely projecting here—I have no reason to think I speak for Jeff, nor anyone else—but I wonder how often, hidden behind the question, “How do I juggle multiple devices?” is the sentiment, “I am sad I can’t use my favourite things?” I love computers. I love software. I feel better when I can think of clever ways to use them. But that flies in the face of a tool’s job, to sink away, to be an invisible extension of the person doing the work. The joy of fiddling for productivity’s sake and the reality that George R.R. Martin can write his novels on DOS present a psychic pain that I have yet to really acknowledge. ↩︎
These days, I could probably hire a SaaS for each of those problems, like Figma and Browserstack. ↩︎
Ya, it’s been a spell. Here’s three, quick—I promise—little updates for those who care:
Something I hadn’t realised was just creating a new Digital Ocean instance bumped up the RAM and disk available to the droplet. So, Digital Ocean have been more generous in the 3 years I had the original VPS running. ↩︎
Life feels like it’s flying past. Each day minutes crawl by minute by minute, like treacle flowing in mid-winter. Yet, months and years pass without my even noticing them go. Life on the internet moves at equivalent speed but with unimaginably immense volume.
I learned to swim, well enough, as a kid. You need enough coordination to keep your head above water long enough to take an occasional breath. I’m decently computer literate but I learned to swim in the tiny community pool of the early internet, while the modern ocean of digital communication snuck up behind me.
I didn’t realise I couldn’t keep up until my head couldn’t breech the surface any longer: notification badges, push messages, real-time updates, microblogs, social media and I digress. Every time I got ahold of one, my lizard brain would light up at the prospect of another “enhancing my productivity” and off the cycle would repeat itself again. It seemed like I couldn’t help myself.
I won’t go long on the morass of the Internet advertising industry, the addictive properties of our devices, or the weak will of modern “millennials”—hey there!—but there’s just too much coming down the pipe and all of it is designed to hit that limbic system sweet-spot. We all know this is not healthy behaviour, so how to balance information overload and generally wanting to be in the loop?
The easiest answer is just to say, “No.” I say the easiest, yet what I mean is its the easiest way to patronise your friends. Remember how well that advice worked for drugs, premarital-sex and Twitter flame wars? Yeah.
I’ve managed to get ahold of my information diet (for now, honestly) using two methods of my own devising and one forced on me by circumstance (note: your milage may vary). First, I cut twitter down, mentally, to a one-way valve. I have something to share, I share it and if anyone wishes to get in touch, then we have a brief chat; otherwise, I don't look at my timeline. This behaviour was made easier still by getting rid of any client applications on my devices, instead I have to load up their mobile website... which is fine.
Second, I turned back to an RSS reader, like the cool kids, that I host on a mostly unused server. Right now, I'm running TT-RSS for my backend, a plugin to make it emulate the late great Fever API and an RSS client on my iphone (it's Reeder if you must know). The fiddly-ness of this is an important ingredient in my scheme.
I could locally pull the feeds or use a different backend, like Feedbin or Feed Wrangler, but if I did that, then I would have a constant trickle of new things to read and the pull to load up evermore sites into my queue. I know myself. I know I can’t be trusted with real-time or convenience. So, TT-RSS is pulls articles every half hour and I have to add new feeds through the web interface, which makes “increasing my productivity” a huge pain; therefore, I never do it and my mind is squeaky clean of internet-born anxiety. (Leaving plenty of room for my meat-space-born anxieties and other human foibles.)
I mentioned another way I've kept sane, this one is very new, only in the last week has Fortune decided to curse me with such restraint: I haven’t had access to the Internet at home. Before you cast your slings and arrows, know that the two previous have been happily in the works for months. But, I do take your point. Living like Richard Stallman has allowed me to dig my head fully into the sand, and like Rich (???????????), I suspect its all fine.
Canadian internet access, whether cellular, cable or DSL, is an absolute scam. An oligopoly in ways I couldn’t fathom until back from Europe, where I paid ~£20 a month for (nearly) unlimited 4G data and here I pay, what, 6–7 times that for 4GB of data. Cable internet is not much better, with decently fast downloads (with 0.10x the upload speed) clocking in at nearly $100 per month.
Unlike the Merchant of Venice, the powers that be have extracted their pound of flesh (minus the fluids that now fill this husk of a human being). They have the money—all of it. I’m now just a sucker waiting on delivery :'( Thus, I hike to a local coffeeshop every day or so and order the finest, cheapest coffee they provide so I can git push fine content like this to the ether.
That massive rant behind me, I do feel better for being less connected. A small bell dings in the back of my mind from time to time, wondering on what I’ve missed. Generally, I am getting by just fine without drinking from the firehose. Though, who knows what will change when the next internet darling rises from the ashes of Facebook. I'm sure if my lizard brain grabs the reins I’ll be strapping an Amazon project directly into my frontal lobes and happily pay for the privilege.
A week ago we spent our last day in the United Kingdom after five years. It’s been an absolute rollercoaster ride, particularly over the past month or so, with my emotions jumping back and forth as we’ve packed, recycled, donated, or sold everything we own. All that remains of our time here are two small suitcases.
I’ve been trying to make being and expressing gratitude part of my daily habit. I realise gratitude is best shown/felt in the moment but late is better than never. I am guilty of hoarding a small mountain of gifts that I have yet to show my appreciation for, so, though it’s long overdue, here are a few of the gifts I am thankful for since having moved to London. Each thank you is unaddressed, so if you feel a connection to one of these, then clearly, I was speaking about you; you've always been my favourite anyhow.
Thank you for accepting me as I was, then just a wide-eyed boy, and giving me your patience while I caught up. In hindsight, it’s easy to see the trail that led me to become the human being I am now, but back then I couldn’t have imagined. Without you, all of you, I wouldn’t have been able to place my first foot right and because of that support I feel like I’ve summited mountains. The momentum of the city could carry anyone along (or tear them apart, but I lucked out there), I benefited from that extra push and now I feel inspired to keep moving.
Thank you for exposing me to a world bigger than I could ever have imagined. Whether it was those kindred souls, who shared my disparate and strange interests, or those many who took different, sometimes challenging, stances compared to my own. At times I felt comfortable swimming in my tiny little milieu but each and every time I had the opportunity to expand those margins I’ve jumped at the opportunity. Disagreement became an opportunity to practise humility, because I had no idea there were so many types of people, so many backgrounds and so many voices. And I considered myself reasonably open-minded, how naive can a person be?
Thank you for your enduring friendship. The bonds we’ve formed over these past years have been the highlight of my time here. It’s your influence that made me pick up my feet and rushed towards a better version of myself. I’m grateful for the time you have spent with me, the conversations we shared and the opportunity to be included into your family and friends. I went to your wedding, met you out for dinner, shared a beer or two and spent ages jawing on about nothing—probably computers, but who’s keeping score? What a time we shared!
Thank you for making me feel so humbled and so small. At the end of it all, I was, I am, I always will be an infinitely small piece of a cosmically vast machine: the city of London reminded me of that every day. Wandering past/through everyone else’s lives, the struggles of living amongst 8 million other people and its crumbling infrastructure, you realise how strange it is to be so worried about yourself and how everyone perceives you. Between the cracks I managed to find space enough to define myself.
Thank you for never settling or slowing down. Left to my own devices, I would still be plodding along, neither flying high or scraping the bottom, but never making any kind of mark on the world. Now, I feel different. Now, I feel hunger. Hunger to move a little faster and reach a little further. I saw you pushing to improve and leave the world better off than how you’d found it and I asked myself, “Could I do that?” That’s when it happened. I discovered your final gift: a sense of ambition and a drive to be my fullest self.
I’ve expressed my gratitude in words, but after typing them out I only managed to capture the tiniest vessels that float on an unending sea of my appreciation. For now this is farewell. Farewell to a city that helped define my boundaries and farewell to the people that made me whole. I’ll be back. I mean that sincerely. But for the time being know that I’m so very lucky to have met you at all, let alone for all the gifts you’ve given me.
Until next time, pal.
Excited to give this app a spin now that I am back in Canada. Being in a culture that has not (yet) invested in public transportation it’s easy to get stuck indoors even when surrounded by wilderness. Also worth noting, I never once felt the pull of an app like this while in London. I must have just been content with the garbage filled sights of the Greater London area.
I’ve been moving and Internet access has been hit and miss. So when I opened up my stashed links and rediscovered this little gem, you can imagine my delight. An anthropologist and an english professor (walk into a bar... I’ll see myself out, thank you) teamed up to look deeper into the possible inspiration for Dr. Seuss’s apocryphal tale.
Their conclusion: The Lorax was inspired by the patas monkeys that live in West and East Africa. These creatures share the Lorax’s general facial characteristics, particularly his distinctive mustache. The monkeys’ vocalizations sound like the Lorax’s “sawdusty sneeze.” And the monkeys depend, for 80 percent of their diet, on the Seussian-looking whistling thorn acacia trees of the Laikipia plateau.
If you stop there, I’m sure that’d be enough for most of you, but let the weight this little nugget sink in:
That may seem like a set of curious but inconsequential similarities, but these authors argue that how we think of the Lorax determines how we think about his plight. Regarding the Lorax as an animal indigenous to the land of the Truffula trees “challenges traditional interpretations of the Lorax as an ecopoliceman asserting his authority.” In other words, the Lorax isn’t some tiresome scold, some shrill environmentalist who makes us want to throw up our hands and sigh, “Good-by, Thing. You sing too long.” No, the Lorax is a creature intimately dependent on the land that the Once-ler is destroying. That, the authors suggest, makes his story much more sympathetic.
Moving back to a country whose history can be ultimately defined by colonisation and the subjugation of an entire people (a people who have ultimately had their history largely erased from the contributions to Canadian society, mind you), I connected deeply with this slight shift of perspective. I’m not sure I ever gave the story much thought, but reconsidering it now, perhaps the Lorax is more relevant to me now, as a grown person-thing, than as a child person-thing.
I enjoyed Attack of the Show and many other shows on the G4techTV network. It strikes me as odd to think that there would be an interesting backstory at all to the show’s demise, but who doesn’t love a little gossip.
I’m backing.
Alternative web browsers scratch a strange itch for me. When I came across Browsh I was immediately sold: web standards aware text-based browsing from the terminal, including approximate support for images and video. Radical.
It depends on a recent install of Firefox to do the heavy lifting and slurps out all of the text to render natively in the terminal and a screenshot which it converts Unicode block and half-block characters to attempt to render layout and graphics. A clever, yet strange, solution to a problem I didn’t realise I wanted solved. Read the brief documentation to get a handle on how it works.