Links: Get to know your insides

[sonia]

Yes and-ing gender related terms by sqbr. Thinky thoughts on inclusive (as in inclusive-or) ways to talk about gender.

So it's like... I'm a man&, and also a woman& and other&. [...] And I actually need three ways of writing things. Like:

• man& man plus other things
  
• man| purely man and nothing else
  
• man an umbrella term covering both.

Five Bike-Safety Tips That Are More Important than Wearing a Helmet by Eben Weiss. "It’s not what’s on your head, it’s what’s inside of it that matters." I aim to be this kind of cyclist, and sometimes I'm just too tired or cranky or rushed.

Ultimately, you can’t control the behaviors of others, but you have complete control over your own behavior. You’ve also got the power to avoid conflicts instead of engaging in them, and to avoid potentially dangerous situations, and to choose being a happy cyclist instead over being an angry one. The key to enjoying the ride is enjoying the ride. Figure out how to do that and the rest has a way of taking care of itself.

Tech Will Never Love You Back by Jason Rodriguez.

Know what you want to get out of your relationship with technology. Invest what you’re willing to in tech and leave the rest of your time and energy to activities and people that will give you more in return.

How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy. (See the comments here for more nuance.)

But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.

That’s what happened as Movable Type ate the blogosphere.

Comments

Hoy's article is fascinating!

[jesse_the_k]

Librarians vs loggers is a useful insight. While it's possible to create table-of-contents–styled information here, it does require thinking against the algorithm.

Hoy doesn't mention tags, which do enable leaping around in time. (Here's a slice of "feminism" as of 2 May 2000 on the very first blog I read, MoreLikeThis, thanks to the Internet Archive.)

Tumblr's everything-everywhere-all-at-once ahistoricism pushes back on reverse-chronological, and I still can't understand how it works.

Re: Hoy's article is fascinating!

[sonia]

Good point about tags. Seems like people missed subject-centered organization and added it back in!

[melannen]

The "how the blog broke the web" article is very interesting but also her blithe dismissal of Livejournal as being irrelevant to the primacy of the online journal format (not to mention all the similar websites that started up around 2000 for Web journals) is missing a *lot*. I'm pretty sure there were more LJs by 2002 than there ever were Moveable Type sites total.

[sonia]

Interesting point! Sounds like she's dismissing it because it didn't have the features *she* wanted, but you're right, it worked for a lot of people. Not sure how I would get numbers on LJs and Movable Type sites, but now I'm curious.

[silveradept]

That, and it pretty well dismisses the parts of the Web that were still doing exactly what she claims blogs were destroying - crafting web pages and sites around subjects and organizing things in those ways. Blogs were often added on to existing sites, rather than replacing them. (Wordpress is where I'd really start saying that the blog and the static site got smashed together and things got very confused at that point.)

And yes, there were probably more LJs than Movable Type sites for the same reason there were more Geocities pages than people maintaining their own webhosts, or why there are more people on Twitter-Facebook-Insta-Bluesky than there are people on their own Mastodon instances - because it's hard to maintain things and keep them updated and patched and to create all that content and it costs money to do all of that.

I kind of wonder what she'd think about static site generators at this point.