Roadrunner Twice

Everything on Substack is literally just a blog?? Somehow we’re in a golden age of blogging again, except we’ve handed everything over to like three central gatekeepers who bug you with subscribe popups and try to convince you you’re not on a normal ass web page.

Okay actually maybe there's one or two more things to say about that,

Email is Feed Reading for Normies

The Google Reader shutdown didn't kill RSS but it did mark the end of people who aren't Weird Technology Enthusiasts using whole-web-interoperable feed reading.

Part of what's fueling the newsletter fad, I think, is that email functions as a "worse is better" version of having a feed reader — yeah, it sucks because all the stuff you read for pleasure or edification goes into the same swirling soup as your bills, your business, and a fuckton of useless marketing bullshit. But on the other hand, you don't need to learn how to use it all over again, and it isn't One More Thing to Check, and it has feeds' same cardinal virtue of interoperability (whereby you can subscribe to newsletters from anywhere using only the one account — no need to have a tinyletter reader, a substack reader, etc. etc.).

Somehow We Can't Stop Bloggers from Wanting Metrics

The fact that it's worse for users is also a boon to the vain and metrics-addicted part of a blogger's brain, because you (well, your platform owner, who will dribble out some amount of info back to you like a favor) can track who's subscribing, who's opening the emails and reading them (at least the subset who aren't using a mail program with tracker-blockers), who's unsubscribing, how those trends alter over time with what you publish, etc. That's much harder on the web!

But, counterpoint: data is a curse and an obfuscated prophecy that drives you to do bad things, and you should purge yourself of the desire to know that information in the first place.

Paid Subscription Content from Indie Bloggers is Sort of Almost Straightforward Now

That's fukken huge tbh. And it's one of the few real arguments for centralization, because trying to Go Payments Alone is nightmare-tier.

Few days back, I celebrated my return to networked civilization by being catty about Medium. Well, maybe 50% catty, bc I also was truly and honestly curious/baffled about how it managed to get as much traction as it has. It's clearly doing something right for someone.

Anyway, it sounded like one or two other people were also curious, so I figured I'd share the partial answers that I either heard from people (mostly Brenna and Brook) or inferred from the other stuff I heard from people. (Keep in mind that I'm not exactly Internet Popular, so my lazyweb network is pretty small, i.e. take me down to Anecdote City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty [according to a friend of mine who went there for like a day last year].)

1. Yes, the lure of windfall traffic via the related articles system seems to be most of it.

   This probably breaks out into many subtopics: the death of "surfing the web," the decline of diversified web advertising, the specialized expertise needed to fish traffic out of social media channels and searches, and of course Medium's success in marketing their youtubey "similars" thing as a solution to any of that.

   Is this windfall traffic actually sizable or good? I don't know, and I don't seem to know anyone who knows.

2. They had some innovative interfaces for doing cool page layouts at one point, but later they threw that away for some reason. Nowadays the layout and typography look ok.

   I suspect they found that talking a lot about how good they look made people anxious about their own ability to get things looking ok, and induced doubt that other hosted tools really looked ok ("I mean they look like they look ok, but if they were really ok, wouldn't they be talking about it incessantly?"), and that that ended up being a more efficient advantage than developing new capabilities for looking beyond-ok in an individualized way.

   And to be clear, yeah, a fair lot of blogging platforms either don't look ok by modern design standards or take a lot of work to look ok. (This here journal doesn't look ok! Though that's on purpose. I do have some renovations I want to do at some point, but best believe it's staying baby-aspirin orange, which BY THE WAY seems to be having a moment, e.g. it's a color option on this year's Priuses?!)

3. Straight up herd mentality. Especially for tech startups or open source projects at a delicate stage where it's important to adopt the plumage of other, already well-regarded startups or projects, or at least important not to NOT adopt that plumage. (Herd mentality can be quite rational, just ask your local prey animal.)

4. People forgot about all the other tools for putting a blog post on the internet, because it's been so long since they fuckin did that.

   Well, that's a bit uncharitable, but how about this: it used to be that maintaining your own blog software was too onerous, so people moved to hosted solutions; now the target has moved so that maintaining your own stable visual, conceptual, and structural identity for a blog is too hard, and Medium's homogeneity and porous boundaries are a response to that need.

   And in cases where the balance wasn't firmly tipped Medium's way yet (like maybe you could have afforded the effort of lightly customizing a WordPress.com template), well, it's free, and hosted WordPress for your biz ain't.

5. They have some highly evolved Twitter sharing/engagement features (which might be how that "popular highlights" thing is powered, I've never really figured that out). Mind, I don't know any readers who actually use that kind of shit. But I guess having it available is comforting to certain types of marketing folks, and it would be prohibitively difficult to build it yourself.

Update: Here's some more detail from a friend of a friend with experience running a company blog on Medium, which has some info about the Twitter integration that I didn't know!

Terri just joined DW the other day, and then I had a sudden sensation like when you have a visitor for the first time in a month or two and realize your apartment is a mess. :O

Anyway, I cleaned up my icons a bit. Remember icons? Turns out they're a pain in the butt if you have too many of them and an over-complicated naming scheme. Now I still have maybe a few too many, buuut it's working for me.

I was about to do something or other, then got distracted and did a bunch of housekeeping I've been meaning to do for a year. To wit: I've turned off comments at LJ, and imported all the old content and comments into DW. And then I got even more distracted and started cruising around some entries from '06 and '07.

Anyway, this is just by way of an update on said entries: I didn't, in fact, end up with any permanent hand scars from all those times I managed to cut myself up with a stale baguette.

via rydra_wong, we learn that LJ is ditching it's advisory board. I don't get nearly as het up these days about LJ being kind of bullshitty, and this is mostly just a reminder that the advisory board thing was kind of a sham to start with. But it's also a reminder that getting pre-emptive access and OpenID absorption working on DW is kind of urgent, soooo... I should probably start trying to rustle up some dev support for those.

There's interesting talk about userpics going on; I caught it at damned_colonial's "Icons as representation of self" post. (And she from isis: mini meta fest: userpics.)

Userpics are one of the things I've come to find most interesting about the Dreamwidth/Livejournal format over time. What a strange and wondrous convention! As near as I can tell, they were introduced as a rich feature with a poor schema, so they've been free to develop into... well, hell, all kinds of stuff. So anyway, I started trying to classify my own shit, and isis and damned_colonial's schemae didn't really seem useful for what I'd accreted, and since I'd built up my icon habits in a fairly animistic and ad-hoc way, I didn't have any sort of key ready to hand and had to actually think about it for a few minutes. Here's the best I was able to come up with:

Self-representation (literal and metaphorical)

When I use these, the person in the icon is meant to represent me. (At that particular moment in time. Prices may vary. See anima for details.) Male:female count: 4:4. Actual self count: 2. (And I'm not ultra happy with either one, but I don't have many interesting portraits sitting around. ANYWAY.)

Hexdrivers

More or less single-purpose tools, with varying usefulness. These illustrate some process, a specific (as opposed to pervasive) emotion, or some other transitory internal or external state. Or they just make a joke or cuss some.

Lamps

The most versatile and abstract tranche. More like Tarot cards than anything else, these tend to reflect some less-than-effable gestalt.



And through the whole thing, of course, there's a sort of system of references that identifies my tribe and standing, but at the moment I'm finding strategy less interesting than tactics. Anyway, what'cha all got?

Facebook just instituted a new privacy settings regime. As expected, there's ruckus. The EFF's got the full dope, and yes, I do recommend stopping for a sec to read that, as it's remarkably thorough and reasonably noise-free. The takeaway is that a, the "Recommended" settings are bullshit; b, there's a troubling trend here of selling out users in small, hard to notice ways and then weaseling about it; and c, new ground gets broken daily in terms of doing interesting and freaky things with sorts of data that we may not even be used to thinking of as "personal information."

Frankly, I have no idea whether there's any commonsense advice that's worth a damn re: number 'c.' That's some society-wide shit right there, and it's only gonna get weirder—welcome to the future, hope you took your dramamine. About a and b, though, I do have something I want to get off my chest.

For the last year or so, I have considered anything that happens on Facebook to be part of the public internet: visible to anyone, linkable from anywhere, searchable to any depth. I strongly recommend that you do the same. The current situation stops well short of that. There is absolutely no reason to believe the current situation will hold.

I've been on Facebook since somewhere around January aught-five. In that time, it has mutated drastically, turning into an entirely new beast at least three times. What I joined was a simple and elegant pictorial phonebook for my college that occasionally invited me to parties; subsequently, I found myself subscribed to a lightweight social blogging and photo platform, an alumni finder/24-7 high school reunion, a more-irritating-than-usual casual gaming site, and a cross-medium content aggregator and identity service. And every goddamn time it's changed form, I've been bitten in the ass by some habit or policy I adopted to suit some earlier incarnation.

Point being that however good or bad the current privacy regime is, god only knows what this thing'll turn into next. I don't think I consider Facebook evil, but it is a changeling, and changelings are not to be trusted.

ELLLL-JAAAYYYYY. *shakes fist* So apparently, Livejournal shitcanned the person widely regarded as their best employee, partnered with a search engine that publicly revealed content from a small subset of friends-only posts, and turned the formerly low-volume news account into a cavalcade of cheese, incidentally instituting a policy of plagiarizing users' text in each post. Awesome. I guess it's been a busy week?!

This seems like as good a time as any to turn this Dreamwidth account into a paid one, especially since the introductory pricing is still in effect for another day or two. And if you're thinking of joining with a free account, I have invite codes, so just holler.

I'm testing out one of those new Mac builds of Chromium (via), and it is actually kind of awesome! Feels sleek.

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Lately I haven't been posting as often as I otherwise might have, because it turns out that I'm actually kind of reliant on having a native-app LJ client. And they all suck right now.

Xjournal used to be awesome, but it doesn't work with Dreamwidth and is stagnant these days anyway. iJournal always kinda sucked, and now it hasn't been touched for three years. MarsEdit technically works, but its DW and LJ support is... lacking. asLJ is too new to trust, Deepest Sender kind of defeats the purpose of using a client in the first place, and nothing supports the DW crossposter. So I have to post via a web form, which shouldn't slow me down as much as it does, but it does, so.

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I AM MOVING HOUSE. Gonna go live with Schwern in inner Northeast! It'll be rad. I have not even started packing yet. Expect me to become increasingly bugfuck insane until the 6th or so.

The place I'm moving into is a 2nd-floor apartment in a brick building that kind of reminds me of my digs in Minneapolis. Not anything close to identical, but familiar enough to immediately feel like home.

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That is a rather large spider in the bathroom, isn't it? I have granted her Not My Problem status, on the condition that she gets off the counter within the next half hour.

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Writing continues to be difficult. DON' WANNA TALK 'BOUT IT.

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It's one of those nights where The Replacements are once again everything I could ever want from pop music.

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So yeah, this is my new job. I likes it lots. Folks is cool. Things:

• The yarn world is far larger and stranger than I imagined.
• Indigo is awesome. No, seriously, it's the weirdest shit. Reacts on oxygen contact! Changes color as you watch!
• We get free coffee. My caffeine tolerance has shot through the roof.
• The shop runs on this app called POS·IM, which apparently has a 20-year lineage and is One Hairy-Ass Beast. It's got a majorly schizoid personality. On the one hand, it's been polished for 20 years to suit the needs of small-to-midsize retail outfits, and in general, the developers have thought of everything you will need to do with the thing. On the other hand, the interface seems to be held together with baling wire and fun-tak, the search capabilities are about the least sophisticated I've ever seen, and none of the features seem able to decide whether they're made for database-savvy power users or the technically-disinclined. The manual is written in at least two, probably more like three different voices, which switch off without discernible pattern and use distinctly different sets of vocabulary. It perversely re-invents every available wheel. It makes it frustratingly fidgety and tedious to make any large-scale changes to the inventory, and frighteningly easy to wreck vast havoc.
  • I am absolutely confident in my ability to bend it to my will. JUST YOU WAIT.
• No, I don't know how to knit yet. Gimme another week or two.

Contusions etc.

My hip bruise is developing nicely, and is now an attractive light purple-black color; the road-rash on the elbow is doing what road-rash is wont to do.

Dreamwidth

I think I may have gotten something that I wanted, and now I have to make some decisions.

Remember how I've complained about / rolled my eyes at some of the venal/short-sighted/poorly-conceived/just-plain-weird decisions made by LJ's recent hot-potato line of owners? And how I said that seeing LJ as a way to make bank was a rum call in the first place, and that it was a better candidate for a co-op or something? Well, some ex-staffers from LJ are building the "or something," and it actually looks like it's going to rock. It's called Dreamwidth. It's not a co-op, for reasons they actually bothered to explain, but it's something I find myself liking and trusting.

( Blah blah blah etc. )

So like I said, now I have to make some decisions. I'm certainly going to get an account, but I still need to figure out whether and when to make it my main journaling space, and what to do about this LJ once that happens.

And while we're at it, I could really stand to re-evaluate most everything about my web presence. What am I doing out there? What could I be doing out there? LJ's grown on me since 2003 in a way I never thought it would, so whichever way I end up dividing my writing and photography and coding and whatever the hell else, I think I'll always enjoy having a place where I can ramble and vent about my computers and bike crashes and apartments and concerts and explorations in the city without worrying whether it "fits." But that place might move sometime soon. I've already cancelled my paid account renewal on LJ.

Oh, right...

Um, also, I could really use a new username. I've regretted "2ce" since about five days after I picked it, although I did rather like how it went with the recent "Roadrunner Twice" journal title. Maybe I could go with some variation on "Roadrunner Twice?" (It's not even my favorite song or anything, but I'm real fond of that line?) For reasons I find kind of hard to explain, I'm somewhat disinclined to use my usual "nfagerlund," but I might default to it if I can't think of anything better. (And y'know, half the draw of a social journaling site like LJ is the granular privacy control; honestly, calling my journal nfagerlund would be a better call than using that for my Twitter, but the deed there's done.)

Once upon a time, I was called Gamecat, but that shed skin won't fit no more. I don't think I've had an actual handle for a long long time now, and I find that I sometimes miss it. I dunno. Thoughts?

(Am I going to have to break out the fake-band-names file?)