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Interesting analysis on using social media to drive traffic by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day (one of my favorite newsletters). A couple of highlights:

  • Threads is driving the most traffic. He thinks that’s just a bait-and-switch by Meta but is happy to ride it out while the fun lasts. I agree on both counts.
  • He creates one-minute videos talking about what he’s written and posts them to various places.
  • He takes a screenshot of one good paragraph and posts to X, Threads, etc. Taylor Lorenz at the Washington Post and Casey Newton of Platformer seem to do the same.
  • Like me, he doesn’t have a lot of patience with posting in each place in its native format. To me, that’s too much like work. Like filling out expense reports.

Also:

… my main takeaway from these early days living out in the wilderness of the new internet is that everything is a big mess right now and you can kind of go and do whatever you want wherever you want. Which is, obviously, a little scary for folks who haven’t used their browser’s URL bar in a while, but four of the biggest platforms are all showing the same recycled video content and the smaller social networks that aren’t are, well, just social networks. Which means platforms don’t really matter anymore. We’re in a moment of possibility and, sure, I wish I could just write my little emails and call it a day, but exploring the web and figuring out what works for me isn’t the worst thing in the world either.

The video idea is intriguing. And the audio could run as a podcast, too! On the other hand, I go weeks now where all the work I’m doing is marketing writing, which I’m still figuring out how to promote—much of that doesn’t have my byline. Nearly ALL of it, actually. How do I promote that kind of thing? And yet, some of my favorite podcasts come out on an intermittent schedule.

It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:

To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word.

Tomasky says Trump is “not going to be throwing anybody in the gas chamber,” but:

The Nazis did a lot of things from 1933 to 1941 (when the Final Solution commenced) that would shock Americans today, and Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them: shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service….

Many Americans would not be shocked by those measures. Many would cheer—until the Republican Gestapo came for them.. And don’t be sure that Trump isn’t going to throw anybody in the gas chamber. Trump is already talking openly about building concentration camps.

Trump invoked “vermin” on the very day that The New York Times broke yet another harrowing story about his second term plans, this time having to do with immigration. “He plans,” the Times reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” And he wants to build huge—yes—detention camps. There’s much more. And all of this, by the way, appears to have been fed to the paper by his own people, who are obviously proud of it. They want America to know. And just before this, remember, Trump told Univision that he would use the Justice Department and the FBI to go after his political enemies.

Plans to add ActivityPub support for Tumblr are likely dead. I can’t see that as a priority given Tumblr’s recent drastic staff cutbacks.

Rodrigo Ghedin: Automattic’s Tumblr/ActivityPub integration reportedly shelved.

Laurens Hof: ActivityPub support was a “hasty announcement” by CEO Matt Mullenweg, followed by “quick quiet shelving of the project only a few days later.” Tumblr is supported by ads and subscriptions, and interoperability undermines both those business models.

Hof: Tumblr and interoperability, revised

Trump thinks Veterans Day is the day we salute veterans of the Nazi Wehrmacht.

The documentary “Sly” reveals depths to Sylvester Stallone.

What emerges isn’t the superstar who turned Rocky and Rambo into American icons as much as a thoughtful, surprisingly self-aware artist, who happens to be much smarter, more sensitive and steeped in cinematic history than even his biggest fans might have known.

Both Bruce Springsteen and Stallone “have channeled their inner selves through art to create a third identity, one that exists somewhere between truth and fiction, that has become a potent avatar, especially for their male fans.”

We’ve been getting Sylvester Stallone all wrong

A researcher identified the man on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV, 50 years after the album’s release. The man was a thatcher named Lot Long, and the album cover is based on a found photograph from the Victorian era. The photographer was named Ernest Farmer, now the subject of an English museum exhibition. Long lived 1823-1893. Researcher Brian Edwards, who discovered the photo, has been listening to the album since it came out more than 50 years ago.

In the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” a character recommends a specific track from Led Zeppelin IV as make-out music, but when the big make-out scene comes around, the music on the soundtrack is Kashmir, from another Zeppelin album.

When they wear the hats it’s in a dramatic scene and rather than focusing on the emotional action and dialogue I’m just thinking what is that on their head?

Marvel TV shows and movies need to get rid of the ridiculous headgear. The costumes are fine but the silly hats have got to go.

Tonight‘s TV choices: Season finale of “Loki,” season debut of “For all Mankind,” final two episodes of the season of “Bosch” and a new episode of “Lessons in Chemistry.” Tough decision!

I’m grateful to the Automattic team for keeping Tumblr running and being good custodians of the community. Today’s announcement is sad news, but I’m hopeful Tumblr will succeed many years with its new, more focused mission.

No, Grammarly, “fertile AI” is not a better way to say “generative AI.”

A guide for visiting journalists on how to write a San Francisco “doom loop” story:

You’re here to write the millionth story about the San Francisco doom loop, the much publicized (including at least 100 times by the Chronicle) and hotly debated theory that a city that endured proudly through the 1906 earthquake and fire, AIDS crisis, Zodiac killer, one tech boom-and-bust and the band Starship will be completely undone by … high commercial vacancy rates.”

I would not say I have “sensory processing issues” (autism, PTSD—I probably do have ADHD) but yesterday I was at the supermarket and the ambient music was annoying. Also, I hate that waiting rooms now have TVs playing at all times. So Walmart’s sensory-friendly hours sound good to me.

I just did a rough tally of our monthly streaming video and cable bill.

Scrooge McDuck diving into a pool of gold and jewels

Minnie wants you to know you’re awesome and she hopes you’re as comfortable as she is.

A medium-sized dog looking very comfortable and relaxed, sprawled three-quarters on her back on a chair with her legs splayed.

I have seen no policy or legislative proposals from No Labels. It’s all a bunch of handwaving about centrism and bipartisanship.

How do I stop the “Start your day?” notifications every morning on Apple Watch? They are annoying.

Jason Parham at Wired: “The internet promised us access, but I didn’t realize the totality of what that meant. It meant always being plugged in, available, in the know and up to date on what’s trending. That is a requirement of time that I no longer wish to give over.”

While walking with the dog this morning, I saw these. Seeing an El Camino first thing in the morning is lucky—everybody knows that.

I have seen this sign often while walking on Del Cerro Blvd. I have no idea what the story is. Hohokam Stadium is in Mesa, Arizona, more than 360 miles away, and what does it have to do with the (presumably, Chicago) Cubs?

Time’s 200 Best Inventions of 2023 includes Sightful, an AR laptop with a 100-inch virtual screen. Also: Shift Robotics Moonwalkers are “battery-­powered wheeled shoes [that] allow you to walk normally (not skate), just faster and more easily. The Moonwalkers use AI to sense when you’re speeding up or slowing down and adjust themselves accordingly, and the wheels lock when you’re taking the stairs.” Using Moonwalkers, you can walk 2.5x faster than your normal gait. The price is $1,400.

Also: Ryse Recon is a personal helicopter, the TransAstra FlyTrap is an orbital bag to pick up space debris and the Italian Institute of Technology is developing an edible battery.

I love Dave Winer’s vision of textcasting—write anywhere you want, using any tools, and read anywhere you want, using any tools.

Today, I take advantage of micro.blog’s great cross-posting tools and ActivityPub support, but that doesn’t get me everywhere I need to be. I have to cut-and-paste to post on Facebook, for example.

Here, blogger Tim Carmody responds to some of Dave’s ideas.

… Dave’s right: this worked for podcasts (the phrase “anywhere you get your podcasts!” is a great advertisement for interoperability breaking any single platform’s dominance), it worked for blogs, and it can work for this strange multimodal thing we’ve created called social media. It worked for the world wide web! And I will be ride or die for the open web until my life comes to an end.

One reason to seek out alternatives to silos like Facebook and X is because when we use those platforms, we’re volunteering our labor to further enrich billionaires. I need the money more than they do. And much as I like Tumblr, the same goes for them. I’m happy to do volunteer work, but not for the enrichment of people who already have far more money than me.

I’m attending an event in a few days for which I’ll be wearing a suit and tie, which means I had to bring my suits in to be cleaned and pressed.

The last time I wore a suit was on my last business trip, December 2019. I figured then that I had no travel scheduled until February, so I the suits in a pile in my closet to be brought to the cleaners.

And they’ve been sitting in that pile for nearly four years.

Telling Julie “I’m bringing my suits to the cleaners” and then doing so was weird and retro, like using a rotary phone.

The dry cleaner hasn’t changed. They still give out a paper claim ticket, rather than using a fancypants app.

Enjoying giving office supplies and travel size toiletries to trick or treaters.

The beauty of finished software: Finished software is software that’s done—it doesn’t need updates.

I missed a message from a client yesterday morning because Slack moved everything around for no apparent reason at all.

“I started reading Ed McBain when I was probably 11 or 12,” [Stephen] King said, looking at his row of several novels by the prolific author of crime procedurals. “The bookmobile would come by. We lived out in the country. The first thing I remember is, I’m reading one of these books, and [detectives] Carella and Kling go to interview a woman about some crime. And she’s sitting there in her slip and she’s drunk, and she grabs her breast and squeezes and says, ‘In your eye, copper.’ And I thought to myself: This is not the Hardy Boys. Okay? It made an impression. It felt more real.”

Also, King about why he doesn’t think about his legacy:

“There are very few popular novelists who have a life after death. Agatha Christie, for one. I can’t think of anybody else who’s a popular novelist, really. People like John D. MacDonald, he was a terrifically popular novelist in his day, but when he died, his books disappeared off the racks. They were ultimately disposable. I think that a couple of the horror novels might last. They might be read 50 or a hundred years from now, ‘The Shining’ and ‘Salem’s Lot’ and ‘It.’ If you ask people, ‘What vampire do you know?,’ they’d say, ‘Dracula.’ ‘Well, who invented Dracula?’ ‘I don’t [expletive] know.’ So, 50 or a hundred years from now, people will say: ‘Oh, Pennywise, the clown. Yeah, sure.’ ‘Who is Stephen King?’ They won’t know.”

— Book Tour: A tour of Stephen King’s personal library

Now I’m thinking about deceased popular novelists who are still bringing in new readers in large numbers. Asimov? Bradbury? Is Hemingway widely read by anybody younger than Boomers?

Either CAPTCHAs are becoming harder or I’m becoming less human.

I don’t like Halloween. It celebrates death and decay. I like a little of that—I loved the Addams Family and Beetlejuice. But an entire month of zombies and skeletons is too much.

Also, while I like people changing up their identities, confining it to a single day seems unhealthy. People should change up their identities all the time.

This is just me. If you love Halloween, I’m fine with that.

Christmas, on the other hand, is awesome. I’m a Jew for Christmas.

The dog usually has to be coaxed down the front outside stairs to the front gate. I think it’s because we only go down them once or twice a week so she’s not used to doing it. It is a slow process, and she stops to thoroughly sniff every third step.

But this morning I paused on the top landing, because I realized I had not checked my podcast downloads to see what I’d be listening to on our walk.

When I looked up from my phone, she was already down at the foot of the stairs, looking alert and happy.

And there was a big cat sitting on the outside wall of the house beside the front gate.

For the dog, there’s little that’s more interesting than a cat. And ours won’t go anywhere near her.

Overheard: There’s over 7 billion ppl in this world and I’m really the best driver, that’s so wild to me

Overheard: Just wait until conspiracy theorists discover they’re part of a conspiracy to use conspiracy theorists to spread disinformation via conspiracy theories.

Cory Doctorow “The idea that creative workers aren't workers is bullshit.“

Cory: Why creative workers get screwed in labor negotiations (until very recently):

Creative workers are part of a class of workers who suffer from “vocational awe,” the sense that because your job is satisfying and/or worthy, you don’t deserve to get paid for it.

Also:

The attempt to divide-and-rule “knowledge workers” from “industrial workers” is a transparent bid to shatter solidarity and make it easier to abuse and exploit all workers.

And:

A strong, unified labor movement is necessary if America is to save itself from inequality, racism, the climate emergency – the whole polycrisis. The idea that creative workers aren’t workers is bullshit – and so is the lie that all workers are uncreative.

Threads is in the early days of the social media enshittification cycle. That’s why it’s so great—for now

The goal now is to attract users by the hundreds of millions, so Facebook is making Threads great for users. And it’s working—Threads is, indeed, a great place.

For now. But soon, Facebook will pivot to wanting revenue from Threads, and so Threads will become great for advertisers and steadily worse for users.

Then once all the advertisers and the users are locked in, Threads will become shitty for everybody but Facebook itself. Enshittification will be complete.

We saw this happen with the Facebook blue app. It happened with Instagram. And it’ll happen with Threads.

Until then, sure, I’ll use Threads. Why not? But I’m not getting settled in.

Dave Winer: We can do better than Threads.

Running from the arms of one billionaire to another is a bad idea.

Musk is the second worst thing that happened to social media, but Facebook is much worse, because they’re so much more competent, but lack any vision other than sucking up as much of the world into their silo as possible and never doing anything that could possibly benefit anyone else.

Why’d I take speed for twenty years?

Podcaster PJ Vogt writes about his 20-year use of prescription stimulants, as well as coming to terms with the suicide of a friend.

Vogt struggled to understand what his friend’s depression was like from the inside and was surprised to learn his own thinking was a product of depression.

I had been like Ahab hunting for Moby Dick, not realizing the boat he’s on is actually a large whale in a boat costume.

Cory Doctorow: A taxonomy of corporate bullshit: “… six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial…. it’s refreshing to see how the right hasn’t had an original idea in 150 years and simply relies on repeating the same nonsense with minor updates.”

We’ve all collectively decided that the 22 years since 9/11 have gone so well that we’re just gonna do it again huh?

I think maybe video has taken off and text is declining simply because TikTok and YouTube make it easy to share revenue with creators, whereas opportunities for independent writers are harder to find and harder to use. (There’s Substack and … well, Substack. And also Substack.)

If Facebook instituted revenue sharing, I could make a significant revenue stream off this—my random thoughts, memes I find elsewhere, photos I take while walking the dog. It wouldn’t replace other work, but it would be a nice supplement.

Does that sound nuts to you? Ask Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a billionaire now because of the time and effort that I, and hundreds of millions of other people, have put into Facebook.

A little bird tells me that Tumblr is going to put some effort into fixing its RSS feeds. O frabjous day!

Reading about our new Speaker of the House and seeing absolutely nothing good. He’s an insurrectionist who wants to impose Sharia law on the United States.

I had to cold-call a relative stranger for social reasons just now. I knew it was coming and I was nervous about it for days. I have become a millennial.

Until yesterday, I had never seen “Moonlighting.” Now I have.

The first episode at least.

Much comedy. Much fast witty dialogue. Some action-adventure. The clothes are fantastic and very very 80s. Cybill Shepherd is gorgeous. Bruce Willis is handsome, and his suit is sharp. I have always liked double-breasted suits.

I liked “Moonlighting,” but I had trouble getting out of my head to just sit and enjoy it. I kept thinking, “Is Bruce Willis supposed to be charming here? He kind of seems like an asshole. How would the 1985 audience perceive him?”

This morning, I concluded that the 1985 audience would have perceived him exactly as I did, and they too would have wondered whether he was really as big an asshole as he sometimes acted.

This was Willis’s first role of any stature, about two years before “Die Hard.” He was truly an overnight success. Until “Moonlighting” hit he was a bartender and sometime stage actor who had previously done one guest role on (I think) “Miami Vice.” He’s in his 20s here, already starting to lose his hair but still in possession of most of it. And such a babyface. It was a little painful to watch him here, so young, intelligent and fast-talking, knowing that real-life 2023 Bruce Willis is far along in dementia.

The other star, Shepherd, was considered old by 1985 standards. She was 35 then! Heavens! The people of 1985 were idiots; Cybill Shepherd was stunning. Also, she’s great at the witty banter, and—like Lucille Ball—she’s a beautiful actor with no compunction about doing physical comedy that makes her look ridiculous.

On the downside: The show could’ve been better if the villains had any kind of backstory. They are stock 1980s villains. A boss wears a bespoke suit (with a collar pin—nice 80s touch there) and speaks in an educated manner. He has a giant, nonspeaking henchman. Another villain is a punk rocker with bad skin.

The stunts were phony.

The show suffers from having been shot for smaller, lower-resolution TVs of the 1980s. Much of the time I could see Bruce Willis’s makeup slathered on. One of the villains seemed to be a 35-year-old man wearing old-age makeup.

But overall, thumbs up. I’ll keep watching. I think I’ll enjoy it more over time.

I think Julie enjoyed it without reservation. She watched the series when it first aired, but said she’d never seen the first episode.

“Moonlighting” and “Miami Vice” were the two iconic TV series of the 80s. I didn’t watch any primetime TV in that decade; I was a college student in the first part, and then a daily newspaper reporter, and spent my evenings doing other things. 1985, the year “Moonlighting” debuted, was a particularly big year in my life.

I’d never seen “Miami Vice” until relatively recently either. I thought that was fine. Watched one or a couple of episodes, but did not feel compelled to continue.

Finished reading: Pax by Tom Holland 📚A history of Rome’s golden age.

For a long time, I defined myself by my work

That was fine when I was in my 20s, but it became less and less useful. I stayed with it anyway, well past the point of uselessness.

I also defined myself more broadly as a writer. But that doesn’t work for me either. I still write—look, I’m writing right now!—but it’s not who I am.

I’m an American, Californian, Jewish, white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual and Julie’s husband. Those things are characteristics. They’re not who I am.

Maybe we don’t need to define ourselves. Maybe it’s enough to just be and do.

Today I learned about the three types of fun, as categorized by outdoorsy folks:

  • Type 1 fun is just regular fun—fun while it’s happening.
  • Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect, after you’ve forgotten that you nearly lost fingers to frostbite or gotten mauled by a bear.
  • Type 3 fun is just plain not fun, not now and not ever.

From comments on Reddit:

There should really be a type 4 fun. Things that are fun at the time but you regret later, like being mean on the internet

…

Type 3 fun is actually enjoyable for others when you share those stories.

…

As a Vet I can say that the army is an expert in providing Type 2 and Type 3 fun while advertising Type 1 fun.

Things I saw while walking the dog. We tried a new neighborhood today, Allied Gardens

I’ve passed this roadside shrine dozens of times over the years. I don’t think I’ve read the plaque before.

I’ve started reading Doonesbury from the very beginning, and I plann to keep going until I catch up to the present day. Here’s the very first strip, from October, 1970.

So far I’m up to December 1970. Over that time, you can see Garry Trudeau quickly improving as a writer and slowly improving as an artist. Within three or four years he’d be doing detailed drawings and sharp satire about Watergate.

The strip was initially published in the Yale student newspaper, when Trudeau was himself an undergrad there, and it’s about as sexist as you’d expect from an Ivy League college boy of the Animal House era. Trudeau evolved quickly on that front too.

I read the strip religiously in high school, then got out of the habit, though I picked it up intermittently over the subsequent decades. I haven’t seen it in years, and I’m keeping away from he current strips for now. I want to catch up with them.

A long thread of stories about people bombing job interviews, on Ask a Manager:

When asked a (completely stupid question) about how I would react if I woke up suddenly in a cage with a tiger, I asked if the tiger was alive.

This wasn’t the right line of questioning as per the interviewer’s surprised expression.

When asked to elaborate, I said “If it’s dead, cry but no real panic. It’s alive, cry and panic and die.”

Response:

I started thinking of further clarifying questions I would ask in this interview scenario and realized I was just Dungeons-and-Dragonsing my way through it:

“What is the condition of the tiger? Has the tiger noticed me yet? What can I perceive outside of the cage? Can I see the door to the cage from where I’m sitting? Can I hear or see the presence of anyone else outside the cage? Does the cage appear to be locked or only shut? Is the tiger between me and the door to the cage? Okay, given that knowledge and my Strength and Dexterity (not good), I…”

The myth of rural America: “ … the rural United States is, in fact, highly artificial. Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts. But we rarely acknowledge this … because many of us – urban and rural, on the left and the right – ‘don’t quite want it to be true.’”

While walking the dog this morning, I saw this house. These guys own Halloween

Overheard: I don’t want to brag but I walked into a room and remembered why I walked in.

Can I list “speed grocery shopping” as a skill on my LinkedIn profile? Because I slay at that.

Last night we watched the first episode of “Lessons in Chemistry,” about Elizabeth Zott, a chemist in 1951 who is forced to take a humiliating job as a lab tech because of sexism and who ends up hosting a highly successful cooking show on TV. The show stars Brie Larson (who is not, I subsequently learned, the same person as Alison Brie).

Elizabeth is determined and humorless and takes up with Calvin Evans, a male chemist, who is also determined and humorless and is the only person who sees her for who she is. Both characters are endearing.

The costumes and period designs are beautifully done. Perhaps too perfect, but that’s typical of period shows. All the cars are clean and in mint condition; clothes are neat, clean, pressed, and tucked in. In real life, in 1951, you’d see a lot of wrinkles and untucked shirts and the occasional stain, just like today. Some cars would be nice; some would be beaters. But not in the world of “Lessons of Chemistry.” That’s fine.

I liked the show but did not love it. I was not hooked, but I’ll give it another episode, and I expect to enjoy it more over time. Julie loved it from the beginning—she just read the novel it’s based on and loved that.

One unbelievable note jumped out: Calvin is presented as having moderate-to-severe allergies. He becomes dramatically ill, simply smelling a woman’s perfume. He lives on saltine crackers and vending machine peanuts. (The vending machine, by the way, is a beautiful midcentury design.) He joins Elizabeth for lunch, and she insists he try the lasagna she made for herself. He plunges in a forkful and pronounces it delicious. As a person with allergies myself, I know that nobody with allergies will try a strange food off someone else’s plate without first inquiring about the ingredients.

“Lessons in Chemistry” has echoes of another recent series, last year’s “Julia,” about the origin story of Julia Child. Also a smart show set in post-WWII America with beautiful period costumes and designs about a strong, smart woman battling sexism to host a successful cooking show.