2025 / #10: Cluttering Up
The “digital declutter” ended 31st August, but I kept it going two extra days before checking in on any social media sites (in my case, those are Twitter, BlueSky, Instagram, Reddit, Letterboxd). Honestly, I felt good, and I wasn’t in any rush to start feeling bad.
As it happened, when I finally checked in, most … let’s call them notifications … weren’t high-priority. I’d been tagged in posts about my books, while most of my Instagram DMs were reels forwarded by friends (which are sweet, of course, but these are all from people I meet/talk to frequently). I had intended to continue checking Discord during the declutter, because most of my servers are for work, but I only ended up doing so twice in the month. I had missed some stuff (see below), but the one person who had actually tried to reach me on Discord had later sent the same message via email, so nothing essential was missed.
I’m wondering what to do about this. I like not being on social media, but I know that if they are accessible, I’ll end up on one of these sites in a dull moment, and I will lose something doing so. Sure, none of these sites/apps are on my phone anymore, but I do work at my desk, and they’re accessible then. K suggested a weekly check-in, say, on Saturday, after which I’d be off again all week. Sounds like a good idea if I can implement it, but I find that nothing is generally easier to maintain than something.
I’ve logged out of everything for now. I have reinstalled Letterboxd, though. It’s the one site I missed all month.
I do also need to figure out how to get my news without social media (as I noted in an earlier edition, it was kind of creepy realising that most of my information came from Twitter and Instagram). I missed a few big news items that my friends forgot to tell me about. I did notice that none of those items, however “important”, actually changed my life, so I wonder if I’m better off without daily news. I’ll have to see.
This happened a couple of weeks ago, but I missed it entirely by not being on social media and/or Discord – I was nominated for this year’s Ringo Award for Best Letterer, alongside some colleagues I highly admire. Among my pals/colleagues, James Tynion IV is nominated for Best Writer, Jordie Bellaire is nominated for Best Colourist, and Hass is also nominated for Best Letterer.
In releases, The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos: Children of the Night #3 came out last week. Everything Dead & Dying #1 comes out this week.
And among my friends’ work, last week saw the release of Absolute Martian Manhunter #6, which concludes the first (fantastic) arc, and the debut of Universal Monsters: The Invisible Man #1 by James Tynion IV and Dani. Check these out if you like good comics.
Not much in writing news at the moment. I keep getting new pages of the first issue of SEASIDE, and they continue to look fantastic. I’m about halfway through my second draft of issue 2, and it’s been very fun adding interesting imagery and layers to the competent-but-functional first draft. More as it happens.
On the blog, though, I wrote a short post about learning things as an adult. (I decided not to post this as a newsletter, since I want to make my blog a proper blog again, so you’ll be seeing more of these short posts that aren’t sent as newsletters.)
I mentioned in the last newsletter that I finally took the plunge and purchased a Ghost subscription for a year with the intention to move this blog there and run it as a proper combination blog/newsletter. I’ve copied over all the blogposts, and I’m tinkering with the theme to find a good presentation. I’m close to being done, and you’ll see it in a few weeks, though the experience from the reading end shouldn’t be much changed.
I’m currently running this site on Wordpress + Buttondown, and while I have no complaints with Buttondown (it works very well, and the customer service is excellent), there’s just too much friction trying to run this site on Wordpress. It’s not fun.
I was talking to K about this the other day. A good software should be like any good tool – a joy to use. Years ago, I moved out of MS Word and into plaintext editors (with Markdown) because Word had become so bloated that it had lost touch with the idea of word processing. I used Scrivener for ages, and then moved over to Ulysses, and each time, the move was meant to make writing easier. Your tools should remove impedance and friction, not add it.
Which has been the case with Wordpress. It might be a great CMS that lets you do basically whatever you want with a website, but it’s a terrible blogging software these days, it crashes a ton, and it’s just so slow to use it and to make it do what I want (which is fairly simple, let’s be honest). In contrast, I set up a test site on Ghost and it just works. It’s not trying to be everything, so it’s pretty good at being the thing it’s chosen to be.
A text editor should make you want to write, and a blogging software should make you want to blog. That’s the hope, anyway.
Links for the week:
- If you liked the video that Ryan Coogler did to promote his use of film formats in Sinners, you might enjoy this video by Thomas Flight on how compression and depth of field affect a frame, and how large format videography created the look of Sinners.
- Dinamo Typefaces did a redraw of the notorious Arial font for Are.na. Here’s a fun article about the entire process.
- While I am largely an AI “skeptic” (or “hater”, if you want to simplify it)[1], I like to get opinions from different perspectives to check my feelings against, in case a change is warranted. Here’s Lauren Goode on her experience “vibe-coding” for Notion.
- I like listening to Cal Newport on the topic of AI, because he’s an actual computer scientist, and while he isn’t a full-blown skeptic, he has a clear view of what AI can and can’t do, to what extent these companies are lying, and why LLMs seem to have stalled out after getting exponentially better for the last few years.
- Clint Smith writes about the meaning of Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian.
- PolyMatt on YouTube made a floppy disk from scratch.
- In the always-interesting Aeon Magazine, “The Sovereign Individual and the Paradox of the Digital Age”.
That’s it for this week.
I’ll be posting more short posts going forward, so I suggest subscribing via RSS. In any case, once I’m on Ghost, I’ll be tuning up the blog vs. newsletter experience, and we’ll talk more about this then.
In fact, I try to have a nuanced view of the whole business, and I think there are many interesting uses of machine learning, and have been for decades. What I specifically dislike is a) generative AI and the hype around it – democratisation of art, my ass, b) the outright lying these companies do to imply their language models will lead to machine sentience (how? somehow), and c) their sudden and complete disregard for copyright and licensing after decades of helping corporations weaponise copyright to shut down small-scale creators, all because they want the money that comes from creation without the creators being involved. ↩︎