Weeknotes 26
can i be real with you?
URL
you may notice a pattern here, called ‘a lot of newsletters.’
- A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox by Henrik Karlsson in Escaping Flatland
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
- so tru lol!
- I often forget that this is part of my site’s ethos, which I actually put into words way back when—things should be meaningful to myself and the small subset of people who might care. I’m not trying to connect with as many people as possible.
- Casual Viewing: Why Netflix looks like that by Will Tavlin in n+1
One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.
- Don’t Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth
Honestly, the idea of finding WiFi routers based on the signal strength seemed pretty intimidating at the time. The idea impressed me.
But don’t get distracted by all this; the software was intended to kill people.
- via Maya, who was musing about this post’s own meta rhetoric of distracting you, the reader, with technical detail.
- in praise of writing on the internet by Celine Nguyen in personal canon
if you care deeply about something, you can compel other people to care through your work. You may find, too, that it may seem as if no one cares as intensely and passionately as you—but once you start writing, all these people come out of the woodwork who are just as invested as you.
- Kyle Chayka’s substack One Thing — I read a bunch of posts here, such as:
- The machine in the garden by Emily Sundberg in Feed Me
I’m noticing this platform has become a really good way for women to monetize their diary entries — lists, random thoughts, and (easy to write) roundups of “what I’ve been doing” do really well on this site.
- lol—fucking—just, eviscerate me I guess!
- okay, okay: existential crisis about writing weeknotes—okay, writing a silly little personal blog is not the same as writing a newsletter aimed at growth, so the criticisms of sameness aren’t necessarily relevant. I think we are allowed to do stupid unoriginal shit if we find it personally meaningful. But I have been reconsidering my weeknotes, why I write them, what I want to get out of them, etc. etc. for the past little bit, so this was useful to read.
- A lot of my posts in the past have caused me a bit of dramatic anguish! Writing is hard and trying to publish regularly is hard, and the pressure of it can be both useful and grating. I don’t regret any of my efforts but I’m rethinking what I want to focus my time and energy on in 2025, now that I’ve been going about this for a year.
- Slop Infrastructure by Eryk Salvaggio in Cybernetic Forests — deeply enjoyed this. It’s a critical analysis of generative AI slop and what it means.
AI-generated images of celebrities or disasters are not meant to suggest reality. They diminish the value of reality in constructing opinions or informing decisions. To post this image is, of course, a manipulation of Swift’s image, a violation of her agency, and to be very clear, I’m talking about this specific “Uncle Sam” image, not the pornographic content with her in it. All of it points to the idea that if we share an illusion, that illusion matters in ways that are just as valid as any political reality. It is about controlling the symbols of the world, and it buys into a purely symbolic structure of power.
- Teachings by Katherine Yang — THIS IS SO TENDER AND BEAUTIFUL!!! Katherine is always introducing me to poetry in the mundane.
- The Tragic Downfall of the Internet’s Art Gallery by Nitish Pahwa in Slate — about deviantART! It mentions how DA predates the rise of Facebook, which I never thought about before, and huh. I actually didn’t make a Facebook account until I went to uni, but I had been on DA throughout all of high school. Wild.
- To Log Into WordPress, You Now Have To Agree Pineapple on Pizza Is Good by Samantha Cole in 404 Media — every update to the WordPress clowncar saga has me shrieking in horrified laughter. Matt Mullenweg keeps escalating to comical heights. He is the personification of the @dril tweet screaming i’m not owned! i’m not owned! and it would be mostly funny if I hadn’t read about his lawsuit, which describes a pattern of behaviour that enabled abuse, harassment, racism, and other things against a nurse in his family’s personal employ. Which is significantly less funny than the pizza checkbox and makes me think he is not only a clown but also a piece of shit and therefore unfit for leadership.
Substack
As you can see from those links, I fell into a weird Substack-shaped rabbit hole. I don’t subscribe to any newsletters but I do read individual posts when I come across them. I’m just terrible at Keeping Up—instead reading new blog posts via RSS, for example, I go through my browser bookmarks folder and manually click on the websites in it to see what’s new (lol), or I type the url into the address bar, or I see someone in my mastodon feed and think huh I wonder if they’ve published anything recently and go to their profile. Newsletter subscriptions would just die in my black hole of an inbox.
So I’m not very attuned to whatever is going on over there in newsletterland, which is apparently interesting writing about interesting things.
This started when I was reading Robin Sloan’s newsletter (robin sloan dot com, which I manually visited), who in turn highlighted this observation from Max Read’s newsletter:
My standard joke about my job is that I am less a “writer” than I am a “textual YouTuber for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” What I mean by this is that while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist.
— Max Read, How to Substack
Which is. Yeah! Guilty as charged! I hate watching videos but if interesting videos were made available in text form, then I would consume that. This comparison of newsletters to video feels apt.
Anyway, I was reading a bunch of newsletters, and thought it would be useful to highlight stuff to save, which led me to downloading Obsidian.
Obsidian(h)
My ‘personal knowledge management’ system is non-existent, which isn’t a huge issue because I’m not an academic, but sometimes I want to be a bit more—organized? about it? I chuck links into Raindrop out of convenience, write scattered notes in the apple notes app, and sometimes compile something in my digital garden, but there isn’t much rhyme or reason to it. I’m certainly not able to draw conclusions from stuff or form coherent arguments.
Obsidian seems like it can solve at least one specific problem for me: organizing highlights/notes from different sources about a topic. Like saving all my generative AI-related readings so I can one day synthesize that into a thesis (a blog post). Or whatever. Or just better understand things!
I feel overwhelmed by the software possibilities—there are plugins? and customizations? that I could be doing? but I’m going to hold off on looking into that. I want to use this until a need for specific solution x emerges, and then I will pursue it. In this house, we do not fall victim to premature optimization.
I googled various permutations of obsidian setup notes structure though, because after a little bit of notetaking I ended up with like, ten different notes in my root folder, one for each piece of writing, which seems like a wrong way of going about things, so at minimum I should figure this out.
Maybe I should put them all in one note by topic? e.g. my ‘Netflix’ note was me trying to fit all Netflix-related commentary into one note; versus putting different sources into their own individual notes and putting them all in…a folder? I found this post about the ‘SCTO system’ (Sources, Compendiums, Thoughts, Ontologies) by Ilya Shabanov that may be fitting.
I dunno! Feel free to @ me if you have concise suggestions about this specific thing. Because I don’t care enough, I am not too receptive to other optimizations at this time. There are apparently a lot of YouTube videos about Obsidian, but as I have mentioned, I am a hater of the Video so I will never watch any of that.
IRL
I went with my partner to their holiday work dinner, which is always fun—my company is remote so we have no such thing, so it’s nice to go to someone else’s, as much as I am an anti-social introvert. It’s a once-a-year affair, I can handle it. I also like to eat and drink on someone else’s dime.
Relatedly, every year I revisit the iconic Ask A Manager holiday story: ‘I will confront you by Wednesday of this week,’ about a holiday party gone off the rails, which lives on in my head rent-free.
Media
The DC fanart continues! Honestly, I am having so much fun! It’s kind of embarrassing but also this is why I drew anime as a kid!! So I could draw my favourite characters in outfits and situations! Truly the meaning of life. I am cringe but I am free?
This week I watched Man of Steel, because the new Superman trailer looks fun, and I’ve never watched a Superman movie before. I had heard Man of Steel is dreary and unenjoyable, and I did indeed find that to be the case. I also heard about the city destruction / collateral damage aspect of it being pretty over the top and yeah wow, it really was.
Holiday
This holiday break, I’m hoping to reset my brain, which has sucked for weeks now. I feel like I’ve developed some kind of horrible work-life imbalance in my brain that is incapable of being normal about work. Not in the sense of working too much but more like, because of the overlap between work and hobby (websites), I’m unable to do hobby website stuff on a work day, even if I have the time and energy, because I feel inexplicably anxious about it. Like the residual anxieties from work seep into the personal, no matter how unfounded. (To be clear, my job is nice and I enjoy it, I’m just a needlessly anxious person and this is a me problem.) Then I get anxious about not being ‘productive’ and my brain suffers and it becomes a whole cycle. I would like this to not be the case? I hope the time off work will be a nice mental reset and I don’t have to feel so tense about it.