Finished reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 📚Would recommend if you or your culture appreciates video games. It’s also for those who believe the diverse worlds of work deserve a more prominent role in fiction. Working life isn’t just cops and doctors (and spaceship pilots). It’s also game designers. Oh, and of course it’s a love story, a love-of-games love story. I got teary three times reading this, but who’s counting?
Can you keep all your notes in email?
Zsolt suggests using email as a kind of append-only note storage system. Edit: Zsolt is actually referring to Raveen Kumar’s post on append-only logs
This seems like a good idea, especially since many people already have an archive of old emails to search through if they like.
My only hesitation is the horrible mess that is html email. If I could use a plain text format like in the good old days, I’d have greater confidence that this system would last.
Zsolt quotes Raveen’s opinion that the standard 20mb limit for email attachments is plenty big enough. I’d agree except for the arrival of video, which often requires pretty large files. Otherwise, yes, I don’t usually write notes to myself bigger than the size of an email attachment.
I wonder if anyone is actually doing this?
Updated to include the original source.
📷 🎶 Can’t let the day go by without marking that Sydney Opera House opened exactly 50 years ago today, 20th October, 1973. Ironically, Sydney’s live music scene is struggling after COVID shutdowns and cost-of-living pressures. More music for another fifty years!
📷 Ominous weather above the Parramatta River. What does the morning have in store?
If we're not just making content, what are we making?
My little struggle with editing text directly in Wordpress has highlighted a distaste for the term ‘content’, as in ‘content block’, and ‘content provider’. Others have also questioned this terminology. Is all this effort really just content?
But what other collective noun is there? Online platforms are in the container industry. They provide containers for other peoples’ stuff. YouTube , TikTok, Instagram, Wordpress, Substack, Spotify, Etsy, Facebook Marketplace, The New York Times. They’re all containers. And what do you call the contents of a container, if not ‘content’?
The rise of neoliberal economic ideology turned everyone into a ‘customer’. It eroded all other forms and structures of personhood. It became hard to argue that you were more that just a customer, because the extra something had already been devalued.
Now, the ideology of the container economy is turning everyone into content creators, with a similar flattening impact.
So what’s the creative alternative?
Finished reading: Farsighted by Steven Johnson 📚
Wrote 17 notes in 2 hours, and enjoyed doing it by hand. Realised this book is as much about novels - especially Middlemarch - as it is about making decisions. And that a good novel is a decision-making simulator. #Zettelkasten #Notemaking
Updating a Wordpress site this weekend felt like a chore. I really wanted to enjoy it, but the writing interface, with its content blocks, seemed to block the flow. Why is it like this? Feels like the priority is machine convenience, not the human experience. Opinions, anyone?
Yet more good vibes in Sydney: Glebe Point Road closed to traffic means it’s open for a weekend street party! Watch and learn, city authorities 🎉📷
#ReclaimTheStreets #SafeStreets #BetterStreets #Sydney
Good things in Sydney, continued… the brand new accessible entrance to Redfern Station. Bollards in the foreground show Aboriginal art, recognising Redfern’s vital Indigenous culture. This needs to be more than a token move, but embedded in every Australian place. (Also… lifts!)
#Sydney
Linda Burney, Minister for Indigenous Australians, at our local polling centre this morning for the #VoiceToParliament referendum. I had a few good conversations with people who hadn’t made up their mind. Whatever the result, Australia needs better ways forward to #CloseTheGap #AusPol
