Support Kottke.org With a Membership
About 45% of those who have been a member of kottke.org are currently not active paying members. That’s a lot of churn! If even half of those folks would re-up, I could do some additional cool shit around here, I think. That said, the number of active members has remained relatively steady over time, which I’m thankful for.
A hyperlink is a triple where the subject is the page, the predicate is the link text, and the object is the thing being linked to.
Using the object name as link text could be wasteful.
Subtext explorations on Hashtags
Collecting into tagged buckets is not sense-making, only a coarse-grained first approximation. Sense-making should fold into Orientation, and make it possible to expand your repertoire of Actions. That means synthesizing collected information into new knowledge. This is something linking supports, and tags do not.
[Start using an approach with obvious shortcomings and use the flywheel of growth to improve.]
[Starting simple creates low-hanging fruit for newcomers to get involved, which helps increase traction.]
what was it, aaron?
which atrocity drove your desperation to set your body on fire to match your burning spirit?
was it the baby starving to death on camera?
was it the children eating food for livestock?
was it the artillery shot towards children celebrating at the border?
was it the millionth mother grieving her dead baby?
or was it the silence?
“I will pelt you to death with marshmallows” is not very credible, though it might conceivably be done if one had a great many marshmallows.
My Secret Teaching Framework (Revealed)
[Organize your message by: 1) starting with the point up-front; 2) tell a story to demonstrate; 3) make it more relatable with a metaphor; and 4) re-state the point.]
Unlike “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them” this focuses on starting with useful information. I’ve been organizing myself lately to share ’nuggets’, which gives you something without having to read further, and like the idea of progressively adding layers or enriching what was previously stated.
[Find more contributors by: 1) always recruiting; 2) caring about people first, contributions second; 3) documenting your processes.]
[Sunlight helps your skin produce melanin, which keeps hair black, skin tanned, and influences the amount of hair. Eyes also have some.]
[Lack of vitamin B1 (thiamin) can cause white hairs to appear.]
[Copper is essential for producing melanin and can be found in seafood (oysters, mussels, crustaceans), liver, nuts (cashews, Brazil nuts), legumes (lentils, beans) and dark chocolate.]
[Yanking out hairs can destroy their roots and over the long-term create gaps in your beard. Doing it gently can help keep the root alive. It might produce the same white hair again if melanin production in this particular root stopped for some reason.]
Paying people to work on open source is good actually
Every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, it’s a win.
Until we have fully automated luxury gay space communism every. single. person. who figures out a mechanism to write free software and still pay rent represents a win and we should celebrate accordingly.
What is the Difference Between a Radler and a Shandy? | Druthers Brewing Company
Shandy originated in the 1850s in England where it was earlier known as Shandygaff. The Shandygaff was a mixture of beer and ginger ale or ginger beer. By the late 19th-century, the ginger ale in the Shandygaff was replaced by lemonade or lemon soda, and the “gaff” was dropped to shorten the word to just Shandy.
This document has served as a powerful reminder to myself of how much I’ve struggled to get to where I am and why I deserve to be here. And more importantly, it serves as a place to reflect and learn from the past and be less scared of failure in the future.
Keeping a failure resume has let me be so much more ambitious in trying new things and applying for things I would otherwise think I’m unqualified to apply for.
[Better distribution matters more than better product because most people are satisfied beyond a certain ‘decent’ threshold. If you deliver a decent product to many customers, you can make enough to improve your product.]
“But the superior product must win!” Why? “Because it’s the superior product!” To who? “To me! And the 10 people I’ve talked to!” Ok but your competitor has talked to 10,000 people and they like his product well enough. And he’s hiring your product guy, oops, better luck next time.
I am sympathetic to the idea that great products, great artists, creators, etc should be appreciated. but also, “the audience” or “the market” is not actually some perfect, platonic ether. It’s people. And people are busy and tired and generally prefer to be met where they are.
If you don’t go out and do the work of teaching people how to appreciate you, your odds of being appreciated are very, very slim. you’re basically depending on chance, on the whim that Serious Appreciators will notice you. It’s very risky to leave this up to chance.
[Talk to a thousand people about it and you will notice patterns. When something resonates with a few dozen people, there are probably thousands of people that feel the same. Addressing what they mention means you connect with their specific experiences as opposed to what you think might be interesting.]
The Poor Can’t Afford the Benefits of Monogamy, and the Rich Don’t Need Them
Non-monogamy is generally cringe not because multiple people are consensually involved, but rather because relatively privileged people have dumped their neuroses and misguided aspirations for a “free” or authentic life
The people documented in our study kept households together, raised each other’s children, stayed together for lifetimes, aided each other’s work and stayed by each other during war, illness, death and grief. Much of this is the sort of relationship style I get to experience daily, too, living with my partners and my cats and I am both grateful and hardly special for it. There are lots of people like me. We are, of course, also doing a social reproduction, making the world over and over again, just slightly differently. We are generally using different relationship style and thus socio-cultural technology in a way that is responsive to the precarity of neoliberalism—not liberated from it, because we have of course not escaped material and historical trends. But though we cannot escape these trends we can counter some of their isolating or libertarian effects, and so live in a less individualist, more communal and fairly committed way.
ask: if two parents good, perhaps three parents better? Perhaps motherhood communes better? Perhaps parenting with friends better?
the following games profit solely from aesthetic upgrades: Rocket League, Fortnite, CS:GO, Path of Exile, League of Legends. In these games, players purchase outfits for in-game avatars that do not impact the competitive balance.
I plaster the word “free” everywhere until consumers pay for a license. I’m not the first to do this, and I certainly won’t be the last.
Every child on their own trampoline
Private affluence is individuals gaining things for themselves – possessions, nice homes and experiences, trampolines. Public affluence is money spent lavishly on things that are shared – libraries, parks, buses, playgrounds.
The magic of doing $10,000 per hour work
[Busywork is satisfying (swoosh) and easy (ding), so do it cautiously. Email can lack affordances for priority while allowing anyone to send you one, which can easily get you absorbed in what other people demand of your attention. If you can do it hungover, it’s less valuable.]
[Increase your anti-fragility by honing keystone skills: public speaking, writing, sales, technical sensibility, design, and negotiation.]
[$10,000 per hour work is invisible and may produce no results for years or decades.]
A simple habit to let luck find you
I’ve made one [Mutually Beneficial Introduction] per day for 10+ years.
[Once both people opt-in, take thirty seconds to write with details that can’t be found by searching online. Try this regularly.]
Writing, Riffs & Relationships
[Share what you wrote with a deliberately small group of maybe five people: your metric here is conversation and meaningful connection.]
[Write for one person to focus the text and also guarantee there’s at least one person you can share with via direct message.]
[Scan your list of decent drafts considering who you could write each for.]
Let people copy or photograph your paintings. Destroy the original.