Week note
Weeknote #3 : Weeks 46 & 47
I’m back after a short break off-island. The break was well-deserved and needed and was something I had been looking forward to for months. I was away for around ten days, with just over two of them taken up with travel and waiting for connections. I’m back home now and returning to a regular routine, picking up where I left off.
It’s funny that nothing can be left to wait too long when you’re in your usual work context. Everything needs to be finished in the given timeframes discussed and agreed upon, but when you’re away —either on holiday or due to illness or similar— everything can wait, and there’s no urgency. As soon as you step back, everything suddenly becomes urgent again. This sense of urgency is completely fabricated, with no actual grounding in reality or the bigger picture of your life’s priorities. I’m glad I tuned out.
As I’d previously written, I loaded up on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio 4 series and listened to fifteen or so episodes of this brilliant series.
Once I’d arrived at my destination, I pretty much switched off the Internet, only keeping up to date with a few bits and bobs of news. I almost entirely ignored my emails and other requests on my time that were not directly related to being on holiday. People talk of a “digital detox”, but this was absolutely nothing of the kind. It was simply taking back control of my time and doing what I wanted when I wanted.
Spending a lot of time on two transatlantic flights, both over 8 hours each, allowed me to read and mark up a couple of papers I’d had in the queue for a while. As I mentioned previously, I printed them out and used my workhorse fountain pen to mark up my notes in the margins directly on the paper. It’s probably a result of my generation, but I find it easier to make meaningful notes like this rather than the several digital note-taking methods I’ve tried.
The notes I collected are slowly being turned into digital notes and stored in a large database that I keep for purposes of research, thinking, and writing. I use DEVONthink as I find it fits my way of thinking and provides me with a powerful search and related-item discovery that other systems don’t. This is going to take a little time, and some of the notes will get expanded and turned into articles or other longer-form writing.
During my time away, an election in the US concluded, and then there was a sudden exodus from Twitter. The social media product that seems to have been the main beneficiary of this is Bluesky. I’d opened a Bluesky account early on and it had been a relative ghost town until a week or so ago.
When I write here, I automatically cross-post to Bluesky for no other reason than that I can. I’m currently reevaluating my media diet and online presence, and although I haven’t made any decisions yet, I’m likely to step back from time online and privilege meaningful time with books and other preoccupations. To that end, I might stop cross-posting altogether and only use this blog and my main blog (my professional look at things) as my main presence online. More thought is needed.
One thing that I seem to think is that I like things when they’re niche, manageable and different from the norm. I generally start to dislike things when they become big and ‘too’ popular. Bluesky is verging on that, and although I think I’ll stay for now, I’ll not post much.
One more note on Bluesky. Many who have come onto the website have remarked on its “nice” and “enjoyable” nature, something that was lost with Twitter several years ago. Whilst this is true for the moment, popularity and population size are about to change that forever. The scum, the cranks, and the fascists will arrive shortly. And whilst the moderation tools are pretty good on the site, they won’t be able to cope with the influx and the sheer scale of the problem, and we’ll be back to square one.
Social media will never be and can never be a truly “nice” place for communication and human interaction. The reason? Sheer scale. Once you pass a certain size, desensitisation and inherent reduction in empathy automatically install themselves, making interactions tokenised data exchanges. This dehumanisation means meaningful exchange and communication are a rarity, not the norm.
We will understand this one day, but I fear it will be too late.
25 November 2024 — French West Indies
Week note #1 : W44
I haven’t been posting much here for reasons I can’t quite explain. But as it’s not a commercial adventure and really only a personal space to put down ideas, reflections and other thoughts, I don’t think it matters too much.
Looking through the archives, there’s a lot of stuff here, and I didn’t realise just how much I had written over the years. Some of it is good, and I’d still stand by it, and other posts… perhaps not so much.
But I think that’s what blogging is about. It’s not publishing. It’s not static media like newspapers and magazines, even if the articles don’t generally change (at least mine, as I don’t go back to edit them). Blogging is more of a stream of consciousness than deeply researched and thought-out articles.
So, to get me writing more here, I wanted to try something different, even if it is not that different from what we see on the Internet, or at least the indie web. I’m thinking of writing this more regularly and loosely in the “week note” format.
I haven’t quite found the format yet, so it’ll take time to settle down, I guess. Plus, I might blog the odd post now and again that is outside that format. I’ll see.
My idea is to go over a couple of things that affected me in the previous week and a couple of other links to articles or other things I’ve been doing.
A note on PII. Despite writing here for the entire connected world to see (if they so choose), I’m pretty private, so I’ll unlikely leave too much PII in the articles. Names will be changed, as will places, times, and dates. Particularly where they directly concern me. If I do publish something personal, it’ll most likely be delayed, as I don’t think it is wise to publish live feeds of where you are to the world. Also, while I’m on the topic, you should understand that this site uses no tracking, so I have no idea who, when, or how many times this site has been read. I’m more than OK with this. It was one of the reasons I decided to use the micro.blog platform in the first place.
I’m not sure when I’ll post them either. I write a regular —and longer— article on Sundays, editing and tweaking them on Monday, ready for the email system to post them as a newsletter on Tuesday mornings. So, writing twice the amount on the same day is out of the question. Given my schedule, it leaves my Thursdays a little freer than other days in the week, so I think I will try to post them on Thursday evenings.
This is the first (although not quite the format I will use yet).
I hope I get something out of it, and I hope you do too, so reach out and say hi or reply (⬇). I’d be happy to hear from you.
31 October 2024 — French West Indies