I haven’t followed John Gruber’s “The Talk Show” for a while. I am no longer interested in Apple products and I can’t keep up with each two-hour episodes. This one with Jason Kottke is different. They talked about the blog in its early days. Both John and Jason are doing quite well with the blogs. They also talked about redesigning Daring Fireball, which doesn’t seem to happen anytime soon. I enjoyed the conversation.
Meanwhile, thinking globally but acting locally is the little bit that we can personally do. Teaching young people how to set up sites and maintain their own identities is one good way to increase and reinforce the open web. And for those of us who are no longer young, writing more under our own banner may model a better way for those who are to come.
Love to see more people getting back to blogging.
Huber de Givenchy’s words to live by:
Life is like a book: one has to know when to turn the page.
By Hiếu Minh Nguyễn
Convinced she’s in hell
my mother wakes me & begs to be taken
to the lake. Wailing in prayer on the kitchen floor
her skin itching with heat, a flame seizing for god.
I believe her. One day, we will all know when suffering comes
to play the instrument of our bodies. Her song, a single note
a copper kettle whistling for mercy. From the blue-black sand
of McCarrons, I watch her disappear
under the night water. Moonlit rings
spill from her absence.
I have not checked my Analytics for a while; therefore, Google emailed me to let me know that I had 1.4K users visited Professional Web Typography in February. Based on the lack of support for the book, I did not realize that the site is still active. Although the book has published two years ago, the content is still relevant. Last week I made some minor changes to keep the information up-to-date. Last night, I published a new chapter on “Exploring Variable Fonts.” Go read it if you haven’t.
Google also notified me that I had 1.3K users visited Vietnamese Typography in February. Although the support is scarce—except for one big donation from a Vietnamese-American fellow—the book gives me the opportunity to do advising on supporting Vietnamese language. The experiences of working with type designers and foundries give me more insights on how they approach Vietnamese diacritics and how I can help them solve the issues that they have. I am looking forward to more advising opportunities.
Overall, I am still very proud of these two projects and will continue to work on them.
One of the oldest blogs that still updates everyday. Jason Kottke reflects:
On March 14, 1998, I was 24 years old and dumb as a brick. Oh sure, I’d had lots of book learning and was quick with ideas, but I knew shockingly little about actual real life. I was a cynical and cocky know-it-all. Some of my older posts are genuinely cringeworthy to read now: poorly written, cluelessly privileged, and even mean spirited. I’m ashamed to have written some of them.
But had I not written all those posts, good and bad, I wouldn’t be who I am today, which, hopefully, is a somewhat wiser person vectoring towards a better version of himself.
I visit Kottke.org once in a while, but I am glad that he still updates regularly. Congratulations, Jason! See you in 2028.
Kathryn Schulz describes these horrifying species:
Of the five-thousand-odd species of stinkbug in the world, the brown marmorated kind is the most destructive, the most annoying, and possibly the ugliest. It is roughly the size of a dime, although thicker, but its head is unusually small, even for an insect, which gives it an appropriately thuggish look. Its six legs prop its shield-shaped body up in the air, as if they were pallbearers at the funeral of a Knight Templar. Its antennae are striped with bands of dark and light, while its eyes, should you get close enough to gaze into them, are the vivid red of an alarm clock at night. The “marmorated” in its name means “marbled,” but “mottled” is closer to the truth. Entomologists, who have a color palette as elaborate as Benjamin Moore’s, describe the underside of its body as “distinctly pale luteous” and the topside as “generally brownish cinereous, but also greyish ochraceous, ochraceous, testaceous, or castaneous.” To everyone else, it looks as dull brown as its own frass, the technical term for insect excrement.
They could be anywhere in your house. Schulz writes:
One poor soul spooned up a stinkbug that had blended into her granola, putting her off fruit-and-nut cereals for life. Another discovered too late that a stinkbug had percolated in her coffeemaker, along with her morning brew. A third removed a turkey from the oven on Thanksgiving Day and discovered a cooked stinkbug at the bottom of the roasting pan. Other people have reported accidentally ingesting stinkbugs in, among other things, salads, berries, raisin bran, applesauce, and chili. By all accounts, the bugs release their stink upon being crunched, and taste pretty much the way they smell. (They are also occasionally eaten by household pets, though seldom twice. One of my cats recently ate two at once, and promptly vomited them up.)
Finally finished reading Rachel Aviv’s provoking, chilling piece on “What Does It Mean to Die?.” Aviv writes:
African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to ask that their lives be prolonged as much as possible, even in cases of irreversible coma—a preference that likely stems from fears of neglect. A large body of research has shown that black patients are less likely to get appropriate medications and surgeries than white ones are, regardless of their insurance or education level, and more likely to receive undesirable medical interventions, like amputations.
Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.
Critchlow makes a challenge:
So I challenge you to think clearly about the many disparate networks you’re part of and think about the ideas you might want to offer those networks that you don’t want to get lost in the feed. Ideas you might want to return to. Think about how writing with and for the network might enable you to start blogging. Forget the big B blogging model. Forget Medium’s promise of page views and claps. Forget the guest post on Inc, Forbes and Entrepreneur. Forget Fast Company. Forget fast content.
This blog is written mostly for myself these days. I don’t care about page views and popularity. I am thinking of pulling the plug on Google Analytics since I have not checked it for almost a year or so. I write like no one is reading and that could get me in trouble.