Withers Without You

I like the premise of this app, I’m always keen to have breakfast with someone new and interesting.

Cam Winstanley on Read Only Memory writes about the making of what I still consider the ultimate real time strategy game, Dune II;

“Dune II did a great job of hitting the hot sand running, not only creating a genre but also working as a piece of stand-alone entertainment”

“You have to think anyway, so why not think big?”

Hey, you guys wanna play old people’s Seven Minutes in Heaven?

Novelist Jeanette Winterson on the value of darkness:

“I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing — their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights — then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.”

Brian Eno:

“One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.”

Chris Dixon:

“What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in 10 years.”

Well, that will be the last time I ever take hot or not advice from Balenciaga.

Annie-B Parson:

“Social media forms are performative solo forms with an odd conflation of friendship and marketing; the body is alone in a room performing the self, with an undercurrent of desire for applause. Without a town square to gather in and hash out the day with neighbors, social media communications have a shading of loneliness underneath.”

Today is day 10 away from my family. I embarked on this trip to Australia thinking I’d get lots of sleep and rest from being a dad. Instead of barely slept and miss them like crazy. Please don’t tell them, they already hold too much power over me.

1. Mastodon’s celebration of the open web, the indie web, is an evergreen celebration that enough people, me included, will always get onboard with.

2. Mastodon is everything we’re looking for in Twitter except it’s not Twitter.

3. No one single ego can rule the Mastodon, fediverse, indieweb, open web. Instead many many egos can, will, and do.

4. Mastodon isn’t a complete social media product, still requiring many features to even gain parity with what the average internet user considers the bare minimum for a social networking product. Today I couldn’t upload a video because it was too good of a quality.

5. The business model of Mastodon/the Fediverse is missing links that only generosity can complete. Which is nice amongst friends. But all of us generous admins, hosts, mods have our limits (or jobs, kids, relationships). That’s the strength begging Micro.Blog, $5 a month and you’re good.

6. It’s actually a lot of work and resource to run a Mastodon instance still. Digital Ocean’s $200 free spend will run out soon.