notions

An exercise: next time you open a social media feed, grab a pen and paper and note down everything that catches your attention. A news story, a top tip, a lament, a prediction. How long until the page is full?

I hopped on bsky earlier after a week away from The Feeds and it is astounding, the sheer volume and variety of information blasted at you. So much of it is earnest and intriguing, real people with real thoughts, but that doesn’t make it any less overwhelming. A little bit of everything, all of the time. Maybe I’ll take another week…

Went to a superb talk tonight from Chris Fleet, Map Curator at the National Library of Scotland, on how maps have been used (and misused) over the centuries. Big takeaway is that maps always depend on “ambition and audience”- there’s always a person behind them with a purpose, if not an agenda. Even OS maps omit things due to priorities or simple time constraints. (It strikes me too that cartography could make for a very tidy detective game; so many reasons a map might tell conflicting or partial truths, or subtly shift from one printing to the next!)

Fantastic, if slightly harrowing, piece. I love an em dash and an Oxford comma and groups of threes, but find myself making edits to dial back on my own style. The tell of an LLM isn’t in the grammar, it’s in the lack of substance and concision, in the conclusion that doesn’t quite follow the premise.

Loved this article. Really like the angle of tech fatigue being something done to people rather than a moral failing on the user’s part. I do wonder what it does to us, living in a time when few things come with closure. Every product a subscription, every device a treadmill of updates, every habit a streak to be tracked and then broken. A Luddite proverb, to close: May thy television remain offline, and thy toothbrush never know WiFi.

Today is a momentous occasion: I’ve finally replaced my placeholder website with one I can actually post stuff on! Fare thee well construction pikachu gif. Very pleased with the setup - I’m writing this on my phone via SveltiaCMS, which will make a git commit and trigger a rebuild of my Astro site. Next up: actually writing things?