Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 42

Back to Bookmarks

I’m definitely going through a thing. A few weeks ago I called it a season of reconfiguring, but as one season turns into another I may have to widen that scope a bit. So, fine, it might be a year of it.

Bookmarks! You know, for when you like a website and would like to see it again someday, but don’t want to remember every address for everything you like.

In the before time, browsers let you save bookmarks for quick access. At some point, they added folders for people who wanted to organize them a little better. At some point, Delicious bookmarks showed up and people liked it. You could save your bookmarks there and get at them from any computer. Then yahoo bought it and slowly ruined it until it got sold several times and eventually purchased and shut down by the guy from Pinboard, a site that started out as a clone of the original Delicious.

Somewhere along the line, browsers themselves let you sync your bookmarks so all you had to do was log in to chrome or Firefox or whatever and they’d all show up wherever you were.

But as time went on, the whole bookmarking thing became less prevalent than social media. Social media is basically bookmarks with live updates. It turns websites, services and people into a feed instead of a list of locations. Instead of saving a bookmark, you followed a feed, and this feed would mostly be made up of updates to sites you likely used to have bookmarked. Now, instead of going to a website, you just stayed on this feed.

This happened so gradually that we didn’t really notice what was happening. What used to be 100% in our control slowly became something we gave up.

Sometimes the feed would be in an RSS reader like google reader. Those kinds of places would give you a big number, indicating how much stuff you had left to read. That number went up over time. It gave some of us anxiety. Sometimes the feed was Twitter, but for most people the feed was and still is Facebook. Facebook is just a fancy RSS reader that lets you post to the feed from the site itself. Facebook doesn’t have an unread indicator. You have no idea if you’ve read it all, and this mostly just keeps people scrolling the feed.

Bookmarks are active. You have to save them. You have to click on them. You have to organize them. The feed is passive. It’s easy, and it’s much more addictive.

Over the last few years, the feed has transformed into a thing that will give you things you didn’t ask for, gives you what you want but out of order, and will restrict what you see unless the person you follow pays the feed provider to show it.

I’m frustrated and tired of the feed.

Maybe it’s this small wave of mid-aught nostalgia I’m feeling, but I’ve been looking back at bookmarks as a way to feel sane online again. The feed isn’t my friend. The feed doesn’t have my interests in mind. But the bookmark is and remains unbiased. You make a list and click on the links whenever you think to.

The missing part here is a workflow. How often does one click on a bookmark? How do I know when there’s new stuff? I don’t have a solution yet. I am looking around though. I’m gonna try some things. I’ll let you know.

Exclusivity

In 2004, there was this music forum site that you could only get into with a password. It wasn’t an invite site. There was just a password, and it changed once a week. Someone on livejournal posted the password one week and I grabbed it and found myself looking at something rare on the web: exclusivity. The site had live event listings, some mp3s, and a forum. It felt cool at the time. I only knew the password for that one week and never saw the site again.

Maybe these things still exist today but if it does it’s well hidden. It was somewhat en vogue in the mid 2000s to put passwords on sites, though. you can still do this pretty simply with tumblr. But exclusivity is a currency we don’t value as much as access. If a “secret” restaurant opens in Toronto, there’s a narcity article about it in three days, and that links to a listicle about all the coolest secret spots. It’s over before it could begin. And that always feels a little lame.

Accessibility is good, but it isn’t cool. Exclusivity isn’t good, but it is cool. I have no idea how to solve this problem.

I Know Your Real Name Now - thoughts on chapter 2

I finished chapter 2 of the new novel last night. Shoot me an email if you’d like to read it. I already laid out what happens in a bit in a . There are already things I want to go in and change. I want Ram to have more than one scene. And I want the end to pop a bit more. But on the whole, I did what I set out to do with it, which was have a “move the pieces on the board” chapter.

I’m trying something different with I Know Your Real Name Now: I’m writing out not just summaries and bullet-points on what I want to have happen before I write the chapter, but I’m trying to make those bullet points line up to a “but/therefore” method, so that the narrative has a little bit more tension and velocity.

I’m a dialogue writer who sometimes has description and world-building and plot. This book isn’t going to be any different, but at the very least there’s a structural layer where I think things will work before I write it all. At least there is a plan for more than just banter.

I do like the banter in this chapter.

Morning Pages March 21, 2018

Banks caught sight of Fourth just as House of Pain came on. She waved her over to where she was standing with Tess and Kate. The three girls fawned over Fourth’s dress. There were lots of hugs and “woos.”

This moment, early on in the evening, would be Banks’ favourite. Her friends all around her, throwback rock and hip hop playing, she was able to forget what she’d been trying to avoid. She elevated her mind and body to the kind of blissful plateau the low budget high school dance was strangely capable of providing. Every new song kept them higher. Fifteen minutes went by in an instant, but it was a fifteen minutes she’d hold in high regard as one of the brief great happy moments of her life.

“I need a smoke,” Tess said, and the whole group agreed. They made their way towards the exit door, which had been propped open by a small brick. The chaperones were supposed to keep this door closed, but it was already stifling in the gym and the fresh air mitigated. Every time a student came and went, a waft of fresh May air gave the room some life. I’m half an hour, the door would be opened fully, and no attempt was made to stop anyone from coming or going.

iPod Porn

Andrew Kim on the iPod Mini:

There is a poetry to the click wheel that I find beautiful. The simple act of rotating your finger on the wheel allows you to skim through thousands of songs. Our electronic devices have gotten increasingly complex over the past decade and I think there’s something really appealing about the sheer simplicity of a uni-tasking device like this.

I know Kim has moved on from mnmllymnml but every now and then I still spend a few minutes there, admiring his photography and writing.

There’s a lot of great iPod porn out there, from On Death and iPods, An Ode to the iPod Classic, and My Original iPod is a Time Capsule from 2002. Good stuff. Gets you right in the mid-aught feels.

Podcasting is as cheap as ever

In the last year, I’ve slowed down on podcasting, but I still like the medium a great deal. I still pay attention to the trends of how it’s done, and read a lot about process. It’s a fun hobby to follow, because there’s actually not much to it.

In DIY podcasting isn’t as cheap as you’d think”, Khe Hy argues that there’s a fairly high bar for decent production:

Wait, there are setup costs? Couldn’t you just slap an iPhone on a coffee table, pull up the voice recorder app, and start talking? In theory, yes, but here was my first gross underestimation: Live audio is a technical, cumbersome, and unforgiving medium. If you want a half-decent audio experience for your listeners (and trust me, even your besties have many, many high-quality options), you need to mitigate background noise, sirens, dogs, clinking jewelry, and AC vents—which is hard without some investment in specialized audio equipment. I settled for the middle of the road technology, and it still set me back more than I was expecting.

While this isn’t quite as crazy as what Dan Benjamin suggests in The Podcast Method, Hy’s setup is pretty expensive. And to someone who’s just looking to start, this can be intimidating advice.

I wrote a post a few years back called “How to publish a podcast on the cheap in 4 steps with lots of compromises”, and most of that advice still works today. I’m not against people spending money on this if they’re enjoying that fetish process, but it absolutely isn’t required. The only pay wall to podcasting is the one you build yourself.

Hy also talks about post-production and editing, and how much of a time suck it can be. In this regard, Hy is completely correct: it can take so much longer to post-produce audio than you think.

Jocelyn K Glei talks about this on a recent episode of Hurry Slowly. She unpacks her shows’ planning process and gives an accurate description of a common podcasting conundrum: how much time do I actually want to spend making this perfect?

It’s a question everyone should ask. I, for one, very much fall on one extreme side: I don’t post produce at all, and I often use inexpensive recording equipment. I want to spend 99% of the time recording the show, and 1% uploading it.

The only thing I’m kinda fetishistic about is writing show notes, but even I purposefully ignore them sometimes.

Again, if you like post production audio work, awesome. Podcasting can a bottomless well of work. Depending on who you know, it may even be lucrative. But just like how you don’t need anything other than your phones’ mic to record, you don’t need to edit, and you don’t need to pay a hosting site, and you don’t need to sell ads. If any of this is stopping you from making a podcast, quit worrying about it. Just start.

Morning Pages, March 15, 2018

I haven’t slept well this week. I’ve had a good week, and I’m happy, but I haven’t slept, which means something gave, and it was writing. I wrote two sentences today:

I don’t know if I’m going to make it, but I am going up the mountain.

And also

“You fucking shoegazer.”

I like both of them, but, yeah, not much today.

Morning Pages, March 14, 2018

“You know my Aunt Erica? She lives in that house on greenwood? You met her a few times, doesn’t matter. She liked you a lot. Always approved of us as a thing. Always wanted me to live my best life. So supportive. She didn’t have kids of her own. Didn’t want them, you know? Some people just don’t want kids. Do you want kids? Doesn’t matter right now. That’s a stupid question to bring up right now. God. Ram, get back to it. Anyways, Erica died last month.”

“I remember you telling me. You were really broken up about it.”

“Still am,” Ram said. “I loved her. Way more than my own parents. Christ, where even are they? Anyways, there was a meeting with her attorney and they read out her last will and everything, and I have a surprise for you.”

Ram presented a key.

“Aunt Erica left me her house.”

“Oh my god,” Fourth said.

Kanopy

Kanopy seems pretty great so far. It’s working very well on our two Roku devices and my iPhone. Video streaming services that aren’t YouTube or Netflix often don’t work as well, but Kanopy seems as good as the big companies. I love the library. It has the table-stakes features of a first-class streaming service like a que, and it’ll keep your place if you pause and move to a different device.

Most importantly, it’s the classic movie service I’ve always wanted (and Filmstruck provides in the US). I don’t know how popular “classic” cinema is, but if you find the selection on Netflix lacking, Kanopy will satiate.

The fact that it’s “free” with a library card is really great, but I’d happily pay for this. There’s an arbitrary limit of 8 movies per months, but I’m not sure what happens if I reach it. Can I pay more to watch more? Or is 8 films all I can watch in a month? It’s a civilized amount and I likely won’t go past it most months, but I’m curious.

In general, though, great, great stuff so far. I’m very impressed.

Newspapers

I don’t know if I have a year theme, but I am on a kick of swapping in new habits, cutting things out, and seeing if there are better ways of doing what I’ve unconsciously done for years. maybe it’s a seasoning of reconfiguring.

I enjoyed and repeated to a good bit from this article about reading newspapers instead of online news:

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

That all sounds nice. there may be something to it, and there may be a good newspaper out there that accurately fills this role. But it isn’t any of the papers I’ve ever read.

I’m a layout guy. I work in InDesign all day, so I might have a niche view of this. Newspapers are ugly and horribly laid out. Stories begin on one page and continue six pages later. And whats in between them? Ads, largely. Ugly ads. Ads with no idea who I am or what I’ve searched amazon for this week.

But visuals aren’t everything. I find it difficult to follow newspaper-speak, that quasi-objective tone of voice that gives equal credence to “both” sides of stories. It’s dull, and I don’t feel like I’m getting the truth, but a safe version of things.

There’s a great Chuck Klosterman essay (speaking of nonfiction writers with an actual voice and point of view) about how paper stories generally come together. I think it’s in “But what if we’re wrong” but my kobo didn’t save the note I made and now I can’t find the quote. But Klosterman lays out why newspaper articles are written the way they are, and it made me never want to read another one.

Now, I will concede that the Times article makes a lot of good points about the negative effects of getting ones news from social media. I think we all flock there not just because the news is faster, easier, and free, but is also generally brought to us by a (severely flawed, horribly reactionary, outright insane) human being. And that, even when it stresses us the fuck out, is preferable to the dullness of traditional newspaper writing.

I realize I just made the case for Newsweek. I have a texture account. I read that sometimes (it’s typography has improved since it went web-only). But Newsweek (or MacLean’s, if you’re Canadian) isn’t the answer. Better writing is the answer.

But yeah, I don’t think newspapers are gonna stick for me. Also, smudges. Gross.