Alden Gonzalez, writing for ESPN (paywall):

From the start of Monday to the end of Wednesday, 20 major league free agents agreed to contracts totaling nearly $1.6 billion. The vast majority did so while outshooting their projections. And if there was one phrase that could encapsulate the week’s event, it was that one – muttered so often by front-office members, agents, scouts, coaches and media members that it might as well have been part of the branding. ‌The winter meetings, presented by Holy S—.

One of the topics I’ve stayed away from on my website is sports. Why? This idiotic idea that I might alienate people with it. But sports has been such a big part of my life this year that I can’t not write about it anymore.

I’m from San Diego. Born and raised. My team is the San Diego Padres. They’ve been my team since my childhood, since I went to my first baseball game in ‘96 and saw Ken Caminiti hit a home run, since I saw them make it to the World Series in ‘98 (and get swept by those damn Yankees), since I saw Tony Gwynn get his 3,000th hit. They’re my team, and oh my goodness, wasn’t this year so damn special? First, we signed Juan Soto, Josh Hader, Josh Bell, and Brandon Drury, then we lost Tatis Jr. to a stupid PED suspension, then we beat the Mets and the Dodgers to make it to the NLCS.

And now we’ve signed Xander fucking Bogaerts. These aren’t my childhood Dads. If I had children, these would be their Dads, and that’s amazing.

$1.6 billion, $280 million to sign Bogaerts. Wow.

The Padres began the week with a payroll that was already projected to surpass $200 million and stood dangerously close to exceeding MLB’s luxury-tax threshold for a third consecutive year. (“Where are they getting all this money?” one agent asked.) Then they pursued Turner aggressively, made a late – and highly competitive – offer to Judge and blew past the Red Sox for Bogaerts, who will join a dynamic lineup featuring Juan Soto, Manny Machado, Jake Cronenworth and, eventually, Fernando Tatis Jr. Bogaerts is an imperfect fit, no doubt, but the Padres believe they have the roster versatility and the payroll flexibility to make it work.

“Where are they getting all this money?” Peter Seidler and his ownership group is treating this team like the investment it is. During Bogaerts welcome ceremony in San Diego, Peter said,

I’m financially trained, I have a budget in mind up there somewhere, and I think budgets get better when you win world championships.

San Diego has never won a major sports world championship. I think if they win one, they will have all the money they need to make up for these signings and more.

Let’s Fucking Go San Diego!

I’ve done lots of sleeping and not enough reading this week, so this edition of my Notes (original name, huh?) will be shortish. Yeah, that’s the excuse I’m going with… Anyways! Here are some notes from today, this 25th day of November, 2022:

New lens

My new XF16-55mm lens arrived today. First impressions:

• It’s big
• It’s beautiful

That’s it because I haven’t really had a chance to play with it yet. Because Montana is very cold right now and because UPS doesn’t heat their trucks, my lens was ice cold as soon as I unpacked it. When I went to use it, condensation fogged up the lens, so I couldn’t really use it on anything. That’s fine because I wasn’t going to go out to shoot anything today anyway. Maybe this weekend?

Black Friday

How many people were ridiculously spammed today by emails from wish.com? Anyways, I setup a rule to automatically mark them all as spam, and my inbox has been quiet ever since.

I took advantage of some sales, many of which I did not really have my eye on, but when I saw them, I was like, why not? That’s how they get you. Well, me, at least.

Here are some of the deals I took advantage of:

• 25% off a lifetime license to Plex Pass. I’ve been using Plex for years, and I’ve always had my eye on this, so I decided to take advantage of it now. Doing so gave me access to Plexamp, quite possibly the best music player I’ve ever used. It’s not without some major flaws, but the good parts far outweigh the bad. I’ve been thinking of doing a deep dive into it… I just have to write it.
• A lifetime license for GameTrack+. I discovered this app a few weeks ago when my guilt over my backlog finally forced me to do something about it. I downloaded the app, added over 100 games into it, and realized that 1) this app is fantastic, and 2) I wanted the ability to add more lists, which, alas, was hidden behind a paywall. $20 for a lifetime pass was worth it for me.
• 50% off a basic Xnapper license. Another app I discovered a few weeks ago. I noticed some web development blogs using it for their screenshots, and I thought it looked really cool. Once I bought the license, I used it on this post from a few days ago. Simple and nice. I like it.
• 50% off Every Layout, Heydon Pickering & Andy Bell’s awesome CSS course. I love web development, and I’m always looking to improve my skills. I cannot wait to get started on this.

Video Games

I finished Spider-Man: Miles Morales yesterday, and my goodness. I have so many thoughts about this game, thoughts I hope to write soon. This game hit me hard.

Once I finished it, I still wanted to play video games, so I started Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, another game I purchased a year or two ago and never played. I’ve been playing since yesterday, and I’m enjoying it! I love the Uncharted universe, and this game is hitting all the right spots.

Finding your people

Okay, I did do some reading. I read this post by Tom Critchlow on generating agency through blogging, and this part jumped out to me:

It’s common to think of blogging as “building an audience”, but this can sound negative, self-serving, sleazy and promotional. Instead we can think of blogging as “finding your people”, which sounds much more wholesome, generative and positive.

Finding your people. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? I’ve found some people through blogging, and having them in my life has made my life that much more fun. I think when I first started blogging, building an audience was something I cared about, but when the focus turned to that, I cared more about them and not on my writing, and that only made me hate blogging, so I quit. When I returned, I did not focus on building an audience, and because of that, I’ve enjoyed writing again.

I wonder if people can notice that. I really have no clue how many people are reading me because I don’t have analytics on my site, nor do I care to add them. The odd email here and there from a reader is more than enough for me.

Again, thank you for reading. I really appreciate it.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around what exactly I’m wanting to do with these weekly notes (this is only my second one), but I’m the type of person that needs to do something to get a feel for it and not one that’s good at planning ahead… Anyways! Here are some notes from today, this 18th day of November, 2022:

Grab two of everything and hop onto the Arc

Earlier this week, I received an invite to try the brand new, overly hyped, Arc browser. First impressions:

• It’s… a browser? But the sidebar is on the left side, and it has a nice enough design, but that icon… it’s very ugly? Is that just me? It kinda looks like the Apple App Store icon had a baby with the Amazon logo.
• I really like how the ⌘+T shortcut brings up the Command Bar instead of opening a new tab. That shortcut is already ingrained in my muscle memory, so using it how the people behind Arc want me to use their browser is easy enough. I like how I can switch between tabs from here, search the web, enter URLs, whatever. Clever idea.
• I really like the idea of folders and spaces, and the easel seems like a great way to collect research and notes.
• My problem with all that though (and the fact that it’s based on Chromium) is that I already have years and years of workflows built using Safari, not to mention some amazing Safari-only extensions that I simply cannot install in Arc. I want to like Arc, but old habits die hard.
• If you’d like to try it, I have 5 invites to the first 5 people to click this link!

Not your father’s wrestling federation

Earlier this week, I hopped onto the Mastodon bandwagon, and I have mostly been enjoying myself. It’s not a place I’m spending too much of my time in, but when I do, it’s nice. Quiet. But it does have its quirks, quirks that were nicely explained in this article by the EFF:

No matter how much you love or hate email itself, it is a working federated system that’s been around for over a half-century. It doesn’t matter what email server you use, what email client you use, we all use email and the experience is more or less the same for us all, and that’s a good thing. The Web is also federated – any web site can link to, embed, refer to stuff on any other site and in general, it doesn’t matter what browser you use. The internet started out federated, and even continues to be.

I really liked this email analogy because once I read it, I immediately understood what a federated social media network actually meant and what it will mean in the future. This is what social media should have been all along!

However, it took email a long time before people fully grokked it, and I think the same will be true for Mastadon and other federated networks. Max Böck put it best when he wrote:

I think we’re at a special moment right now. People have been fed up with social media and its various problems (surveillance capitalism, erosion of mental health, active destruction of democracy, bla bla bla) for quite a while now. But it needs a special bang to get a critical mass of users to actually pack up their stuff and move.

When that happens, we have the chance to build something better. We could enable people to connect and publish their content on the web independently – the technology for these services is already there. For that to succeed though, these services have to be useable by all people - not just those who understand the tech.

Just like with migration to another country, it takes two sides to make this work: Easing access at the border to let folks in, and the willingness to accept a shared culture - to make that new place a home.

These services have to be useable by all people - not just those who understand the tech. Exactly. I think we can get there, though, especially if these services can accommodate more and more people, people who don’t want to understand all this “tech stuff.” Give it to the big guys, though: they made this stuff easy for anyone to understand. But it was this ease that got us into this mess in the first place!

“This enshittification [more mass surveillance, finer-grained and more intrusive ad targeting],” writes Cory Doctorow, “was made possible by high switching costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial and romantic ties.”

With federated networks, these switching costs are no longer an issue. Hell, I created my Mastodon account in 2018, but I switched to the social.lol instance in just a few minutes. All my followers, everyone I followed, my block and mute lists, all transferred over just fine. The whole experience was slick! Again, this is what social media should be.

To the moon! Some stretchy stuff! 8 billion people!

NASA launched the Artemis 1 rocket earlier this week, “which will, among other things, take scientific experiments to produce metal on the moon.”

What if we could save money by using the resources that are already there? This process is called in-situ resource utilization, and it’s exactly what astrometallurgy researchers are trying to achieve.

[…]

While the moon has metals in abundance, they’re bound up in the rocks as oxides—metals and oxygen stuck together. This is where astrometallurgy comes in, which is simply the study of extracting metal from space rocks.

I love that astrometallurgy exists. What a cool word and what a cool science.

Apparently, scientists have created a “skinlike sticker” that “runs machine-learning algorithms to continuously collect and analyze health data directly on the body. The skinlike sticker… includes a soft, stretchable computing chip that mimics the human brain.”

“We envision that wearable electronics,” they continue

will play a key role in tracking complex indicators of human health, including body temperature, cardiac activity, levels of oxygen, sugar, metabolites and immune molecules in the blood. […] Our work is a good starting point for creating devices that build artificial intelligence into wearable electronics – devices that could help people live longer and healthier lives.

That always seems to be the promise, huh? This promise to “live longer and healthier lives.” Living longer is always nice, but should we? Our bodies might possibly go on for forever, but can our minds? Can a human mind handle 150, 500, 1000 years of being alive? At some point, we have to die. But this stretchable sticker idea is cool.

The UN reported earlier this week that humanity has surpassed 8 billion people. Imagine 8 billion people living for over 100 years. Can planet earth sustain that? I don’t think it can. I’m glad and excited that we’re pushing our species past our home and into the great unknown that is outer space, but earth is our home, too. Are we parasites or caretakers? Are we here to ravage this place and move on, or can we live with some sort of harmony with our ancestral home?

I hope we can, but unless I live to be 250 years old, I might not be alive to find out.

Sleeping while on duty

Finally, I learned a new term today: ‌inemuri (居眠り), or “present while sleeping” in Japanese. Basically, it’s this idea of taking power naps while at work, and in Japan, these naps are seen as virtuous because it signifies that you’ve worked to the point of complete exhaustion.

For me, though, it means that napping is a necessary part of modern human culture. I’ve been having trouble sleeping all year, but my 10, 20, 30 minute naps I have taken throughout the year have helped me stay sane. And yes, sometimes I have snuck a quick nap or two while at work, and I am not ashamed! It means I have worked myself to the point of complete exhaustion. Like a real American!

Chris Coyier quoting Dan Cederholm:

As soon as I typed the HTML for my first hyperlink, the power of it hit me. This is the DNA of the web, the fabric that connects all of the bits and pieces all over the globe. It sounds so primitive now, but when this was all new to me and I was discovering how it all worked and how simple it was to create links, it was magic.

It’s still magic! URLs are one of mankind’s greatest achievements. It took a lot for them to exist, and now that they do, they have literally advanced civilization. They are the ultimate unbeatable feature.

I couldn’t sleep last night (big surprise), and when I can’t sleep, I either watch TV or think. I watched this tutorial on how to create and organize a Capture One Catalog (yes, I like watching webinars sometimes), but that wasn’t enough to knock me out. So I lied in bed, and I thought—about my life, about my friends, about my writing, about things I’ve read.

About a week and a half ago, I read Tom Critchlow’s post titled Small b blogging. In it, he wrote:

And remember that you are your own audience! Small b blogging is writing things that you link back to and reference time and time again. Ideas that can evolve and grow as your thinking and audience grows.

As Venkatesh says in the calculus of grit - release work often, reference your own thinking & rework the same ideas again and again. That’s the small b blogging model.

Before I read this, I always believed that “small b blogging” was about linking to my ideas again and again, that none of my “ideas” or “essays” or “posts” existed in a vacuum. I’ve always considered my website as my second brain, and by linking to other things I’ve written, I’ve been able to reinforce these connections in my head, helping me remember things I’ve thought about and thus, helping me connect disparate ideas together and create new connections. It’s really fun when I think, “Wait… didn’t I mention something like this before?” And I search for it, and there, I did write about it before, so I link to it and move on, this new connection firmly created in my brain.

I don’t know how many people actually follow my links (my guess is not many), but that’s okay. I write mostly for myself. It’s like I’m holding a conversation with myself through time, and each time I link back to something from before, I’m crafting this web of ideas that only really makes sense in my head. Am I “literally advancing civilization” like Chris says? I doubt it, but I’m advancing myself, I think, and that’s pretty cool.

Small b blogging is cool.

Om Malik:

I have known the truth about social platforms. I quit Facebook and Instagram years ago, and candidly I am better for it. I don’t need 5000 friends — 15 good ones will do.

I don’t need 5000 friends — 15 good ones will do.

I read this article today, and this line has stayed with me since. I never deleted my Facebook or Instagram accounts, especially after writing my thoughts on social media platforms on my website, but for a while, I either had my accounts deactivated or I simply didn’t login to them. That changed this summer. In this post, I described how I shared one of my posts on Facebook. In truth, I’ve shared many of my posts on Facebook this year, and the entire experience has been wonderful.

I have such a love/hate relationship with Facebook. The hate part is easy. If you have paid attention to what that company has done over the years, it’s hard not to hate them. Disinformation. Zuckerberg. The Metaverse. I get it. But I’ve had a Facebook account since September 2004. That’s 18 years, or half my life. For half my life, I’ve been on Facebook. I don’t think I have an active account that’s older than this, and that’s crazy to me. At the end of 2020, I downloaded all my data, then I spent a few days deleting as much as I could from that site short of deleting my entire account. I deleted all my posts and photos and likes and comments and anything else I could see to delete, but I never deleted my account.

With that said… I believe that Facebook is a fantastic tool to keep in touch with friends and to even know what’s going on in my community. Here in rural Montana, where all our towns have more bars than schools, more churches than grocery stores, Facebook is where everything happens. Somebody lost their dog? Sure enough, if you post it on the local community group, someone will help to find them, and most of the time, they do! It’s amazing. Somebody needs help with paying for medical bills? More than likely, the community knows the family, and the community will pitch in what they can to help this family. Hell, I donated to a family I know through Facebook because I would not have heard of it in any other way. In this sense, Mark Zuckerberg has succeeded in connecting people in a way no other tool has done before.

And for me? By posting many of my essays on Facebook, I’ve been able to grow closer to more of my friends, and I truly value that, and I hate to say it, but Facebook helped in that. Ever since I first heard about friend circles, or some optimal number of friends that people can realistically “have,” I’ve tried to keep my “friend” number on Facebook at or below 150 people. That means I’ve both unfriended many people and haven’t accepted many friend requests from people, even from people I know. If I met you at a party once, that’s not enough for me to accept your friend request, sorry.

I can’t count how many times someone I know, either a friend or a coworker, has come to me or contacted me and told me how much they liked this essay or that essay that I posted on Facebook. Many times, this has sparked conversation, and sometimes, these conversations have turned into regular contact, either at work or through text messages. I cannot disregard the fact that Facebook had a hand in this. Even today, a coworker came up to me and asked me if I was a “professional writer.” I said no, and she said I should be because I have “such a way with words.” It was heartwarming and amazing, and this 50-60 old woman would not have had a chance to learn about this part of me without Facebook. Hell, the day after I shared my essay on how I secretly like to dance, a friend of mine jokingly started dancing with me, and that was adorable as hell, too.

Sure, I’m on other social media platforms, most notably Micro.blog, but as much I value that community, they are not part of my life in the same way my friends on Facebook are. I see my friends regularly, and they now know something more about me because of my website, because I share them on Facebook where they are more likely to see these posts. I don’t personally know those people on Micro.blog or, now, Mastodon, and that’s fine. But like Om says, “I don’t need 5000 friends — 15 good ones will do.” And my 15 good ones are part of my regular life, but they are also part of Facebook, and Facebook helps connect us in ways that no other tool can.

However. I’ve had to setup rules around my social media usage, and these rules have changed everything for me. If you have noticed me be more active on social media lately, it is because of these rules. I will write about them soon. But for now, I’m not deleting my Facebook account anytime soon, not when it has proven to be a valuable tool in my life.

And yes, I truly cannot believe I wrote an essay defending Facebook. But here we are.

I admit, National Blog Posting Month is kicking my ass.

Part of the issue is finding the time to write. Here’s a rough accounting of my daily routine:

• Wake up at 5am
• At my desk with a cup of coffee and writing in my notebook at around 5:20am
• Finish writing at around 6:20am-6:30am
• Study German and Japanese until 7am
• Leave for work at 7:10am
• Work from 7:10am to around 4:15pm
• Come home 15 minutes later, change into my workout clothes and start my workout at around 4:30pm
• Shower, make my post-workout shake, and relax by watching TV, starting at around 5:15pm and going until dinner
• Cook dinner and eat it, 6pm to 7pm
• Write???
• Go to bed at around 8:30pm to 9pm

It’s a bit after 7:30pm as I’m writing this now, and my eyes are heavy, I’m tired, and I want to go to bed. It doesn’t help that I didn’t sleep well last night. I’ve been having trouble sleeping all year, and I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to go to bed earlier and earlier so I can get as much sleep as I could. Frankly, I need 8-9 hours of sleep a night or I’m miserable. And I feel miserable tonight.

I’m trying to build this second writing habit, and quitting now isn’t going to help me. I. Must. Keep. Going.

Warren Ellis wrote about the zero draft last week. The zero draft

is the draft you will never show anyone. It’s the draft you know is wrong but which contains the bare bones and meat-scraps of the story you’re trying to write. Get to the end of the zero draft, wait a day, and then go back and make it readable to other humans and fix all the egregiously wrong stuff, and that’s your first draft. Zero drafts are always too short: they fill out in the process of revising into a first draft. Stop thinking about your first draft as a first draft, call it a zero draft, and you give yourself permission to just slap everything you’re thinking about on to the page, knowing you can fix it before you have to inflict the draft on some other poor bastard.

I like this a lot. This is my zero draft. All the posts I’ve written for NaBloPoMo thus far feel like zero drafts to me. Sitting down at 7pm to write something and posting it online an hour later doesn’t feel like it deserves to be more than just a zero draft. Am I being too hard on myself? Maybe.

Did I mention I’m tired?

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe I’m trying to bite off more than I can chew. I did give this project very little thought, after all. Writing is something I love, though, and I want to work on being a better writer. But when I have bills that need to be paid and a life that wants to be lived… it’s tough. It’s really tough.

In a lecture titled The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art Over Nations, John Ruskin had this to say about art:

Wherever art is practised for its own sake, and the delight of the workman is in what he does and produces, instead of in what he interprets or exhibits,—there art has an influence of the most fatal kind on brain and heart, and it issues, if long so pursued, in the destruction both of intellectual power and moral principle; whereas art devoted humbly and self-forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe, is always helpful and beneficent to mankind, full of comfort, strength, and salvation.

I admit I’m not one who reads John Ruskin in my free time (though I have read a few of his books). This section was quoted in Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson Jr., a book I finished last month and loved. Around that time, I had been thinking about the role of writing in my life. To be more specific, I had been thinking about this tension I had between writing in my journal versus writing the novels and essays I considered to be more serious, and thus more worthy of my time. I hesitate to call it easy, but I can easily make myself sit at my desk with my pen and notebook and spend the next hour writing pages and pages about anything—about what’s in my head, what I’m feeling, what’s going on in my life. But once I intend to write my novel or work on an essay, I struggle. I struggle to make myself go to my desk, to open my notebook or my laptop, and simply write.

Why is this? Is it that one is something I do just to do—as John Ruskin says, practised for its own sake—and the other is destined for a bigger purpose, which is to be read by other people, to be judged by people like John Ruskin?

What is my best writing?, I remember asking myself. I used to think that writing something personal, something from the heart, will be considered “good.” That I might consider that my “best” writing. But then I started to question things. Personal doesn’t mean good, but something good can be personal, I wrote in my notes. Something honest doesn’t mean good, but something good can be honest. And on and on my thoughts went. Instead of getting to the bottom of it, I think I binged another TV show and went to bed.

And now I’m here.

I don’t know the answers, but what I do know is that I disagree with John Ruskin. Art practiced for its own sake is “helpful and beneficent to mankind,” even, or especially, if it’s just me. Journaling is something that has benefited me in ways I can’t measure, except in this one way: it has kept me alive. That is not hyperbole. I would not be here if it wasn’t for my writing. I do agree that “art devoted humbly and self-forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe” is important, but it’s not everything.

I’m going to end it here because I don’t know where to take this. That’s okay because this is just an attempt, something I can come back to later and revisit. After all, I’m not perfect.

“I’m much more a gardener than an architect,” concluded George RR Martin in an interview with the Guardian in 2011. What did he mean? He explained that there are two types of writers,

the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.

I’m definitely a gardener, but I’ve always wished I was an architect.

In school, I always struggled with writing essays because I was usually required to write an outline first, and I hated writing outlines. I didn’t know what I wanted to say; how am I supposed to write an outline for an argument I don’t have yet? I needed to write to know what I thought—to drop the seed in the hole and water it and see what grew from it. But I never allowed myself to explore this side of writing because I had deadlines to meet, and because I was an immature student, I always left all my assignments until the absolute last minute.

In this, I haven’t changed much.

It’s almost 8pm as I’m writing this. I mostly had an idea of what I wanted to write, but instead of spending time throughout the day writing, I procrastinated and only started writing a few hours before I usually go to bed. Sure, deadlines are one of the great motivators in life, but I’m not a young and naive teenager anymore—I don’t have the strength or the time to procrastinate. Nor do I want to anymore.

All my novels have languished for two reasons: I could never meet my own deadlines, and I spent too much time watering the soil instead of figuring out how many rooms the house is going to have. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve rewritten the same story because of the new “seed” I found and I just absolutely had to see what grew from it. Even this post has grown into something I didn’t quite plan or foresee. I had this John Ruskin quote I wanted to fit into this, but I think I’ll have to save it for another day.

I want to be an architect, even a bad architect, as Warren Ellis wrote back in June. “I’m bad at plans,” he wrote. “I try, but I always end up winging it.” And here, I can find both solace and a valuable lesson: as long as I’m out in the field scoring the soil with my trowel and planting the seeds and watering them, I’ll be okay. But an unplanted seed won’t grow, and an unwritten story will never be told.

Whether I plant seeds joyfully and see what grows from them or whether I pull out my drafting pencil and straight edge and get to drafting my house, as long as I’m writing, I’ll be fine.

This may be hard to believe, but I am not perfect.

I make mistakes. Like, all the time. One of the reasons why I’m still single in my 30s is because of the many mistakes I’ve made.

After I published yesterday’s post, I went to bed feeling like something was off. Was it the clunkiness in my writing? Yes, but that wasn’t it. My writing is always clunky. Was it how rushed I felt while writing it? Yes, but I always feel like that when working under a deadline. Was it my borderline inappropriate title? Yes, but it wasn’t quite that either.

It was all the above.

Another one of my many “rules” over the years has been to never update or revise anything I’ve published, except for the odd typo or to add a word I’ve needlessly omitted. I’ve never written this “rule” in some style guide or anything, but it was something I did and followed. Once my post is published, I felt like I was done with it, and it was time to move forward.

One of my goals with this project is to refine my craft and revamp my mindset, and part of that means clarifying these unwritten “rules” I hold in my head, to challenge and question them. And this is one of those “rules” I’m challenging.

I remember reading that Robin Sloan edited his posts all the time, and that has provided some comfort. Robin writes:

I remember when I blogged on Snarkmarket, years ago, I would change my posts ALL THE TIME. Not just typo fixes but make pretty substantial tweaks—clumsy language detected with the benefit of an hour’s reflection. Like oil paint; you can move it around for a long time. I loved it.

That quote comes from a post on the great Austin Kleon’s blog, a post where he writes that “blog posts can be edited, added to, improved upon.” Why is that important? Because “I want to be able to be wrong. I want to change my mind! I want to evolve.”

I want to evolve.

To evolve is to admit you’re not perfect, that you are capable of improvement, that your journey is ongoing and never-ending. To evolve is to live, and all I want is to live, mistakes and all.

Earlier today, I re-read yesterday’s post, and I spent some time revising some of it. I changed the title, I polished some of the clunkiness, and I clarified a few thoughts. I would normally be petrified of doing this, but part of my evolution is to do the scary things and hope my readers understand.

Like Austin writes, “to do the exploration that growth and change requires, one needs a forgiving medium… but what one really needs is forgiving readers.”

I will add that I also need to forgive myself for the many mistakes I’ve made and will make. After all, a life without mistakes is a life not lived at all, and again, all I want is to live.

And by here, I mean my website. By here, I mean my RSS feed in your RSS reader app. By here, I do not mean Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or any other social media company whose purpose is to suck up your content greedily to feed their money making machine without regard to you or your well-being.

It starts here.

My words in my home under my name. I own this—I own all of it—and you should, too. Your words in your home under your name. This is what the internet is, and what the internet should always be, a place by people and for people. No algorithms telling you what you should pay attention to, no corporations shoving their half-baked ideas in your face and telling you to like it, but a place where a shy, weird, nerdy guy can write without restraint and share photos of leaves or whatever.

Recently, Manuel Matuzovic, a very well-respected web developer was banned from Twitter for reasons unknown. In a post on his blog, he describes some of the things he’s lost since his ban. He doesn’t have access to his direct messages anymore, images, or bookmarks, and he even lost access to some sites that used Twitter as the login method. One day, everything was normal and the next, all the years of content he produced on someone else’s website was locked away from him, possibly forever.

Isn’t it somewhat ridiculous that these companies exist because of the content their users produce, content millions of people produce for free, and yet these users own none of it? That they can lose all of it by the whims of someone like Elon Musk? Or Mark Zuckerberg? What kind of living hell is this?

Toward the end of his post, Manuel writes:

If there’s something I’ve learned from this whole thing, it’s that I must be more careful with how and where I share my content. A social media platform should not be the primary source. […] Create everything on my own website and syndicate elsewhere, because you never know what might happen to your content or profile tomorrow.

“Now is a good time to reclaim control over your content,” he concludes.

I agree.

And it starts here.