A place to think
Hit and Miss #368
Skateboarding Jesus.
Those cool parents whose daughter sold us Girl Guide cookies.
The cat hoteliers.
Spend enough time in a place, and you come to “know” your neighbours. Maybe not by name, nor by place, but by behaviour, routine, and face, by the occasional encounters in which you see them going about their lives. It’s been nice to get to know some of these people—I wonder how others see and think of me. Guy with the clanking green bicycle or something like that.
We’re coming up on a year in the house and the neighbourhood, finally seeing it through every season. It’s been a good change. As we walked to visit T and D for dinner last night, we passed through the Golden Triangle, Centretown, Chinatown, and Little Italy, dipping into side streets now and again to enjoy their distinctive characters. We’re very happy here, and hope to be able to stay a long time (obligatory “knock-on-wood”, given the fickleness of renting and Canada’s real estate market!), but do miss being a bit closer to livelier streets with places to shop and eat. For this season of our lives, though, we’re very happy to keep living and exploring here.
The one must-read from this week comes, as it often does, from Mandy Brown. “Coming home” covers much terrain, but it has to do principally with how social media saps our ability to think, and the potential, in contrast, of having a place of our own (on the internet or otherwise!) to develop and share our thinking.
Along the way, Mandy speaks eloquently and forecefully to topics I’ve explored in the past. Mandy explores the meaning of the social media “stream”, pointing out that, in nature, rocks in a stream become worn down, shaped by its rushing water; I’ve wondered similarly about the meaning (and risks) of the social media “feed”. There’s also an extended gardening metaphor that feels also like a reference to earthworming, a concept dear to my heart.
It’s also a story about publishing on your own site, and sharing that content outward (“POSSE”). Reading it prompted me to revisit Frank Chimero’s writing on similar subjects, including “Homesteading 2014” (on personal sites) and “The Good Room” (on choosing better technology).
Thank you to Mandy for articulating so well what feels wrong (and increasingly so) about social media, and many of these corners of the internet where we while away our time.
And some more reading, depending on your interests:
- On the social and technological history of the public bathhouse. (Following links from this led me to the After Comfort: A User’s Guide project, a collection of essays exploring architecture premised not on cheap, abundant energy, but instead on sustainability. HVAC, man, what a conundrum.)
- Simon Willison wrote about what the board of the Python Software Foundation does (and, by extension, what the Foundation does!).
- Katherine May wrote about her autism diagnosis as an adult, and the unexpected changes in her adaptations over time.
- Ed Zitron tolled the alarm bells about the tech industry’s wholehearted embrace of AI, the near impossibility of living up to their promises, and the early signs that they’ve made the wrong call.
- CSS’s default behaviour can at times be unexpected and seemingly undesirable—but that, as Jim Nielsen argues, is a feature, not a bug. (The “CSS is awesome” image reminds me of one I saw long ago but haven’t been able to find again since, of an apartment building with windows staggered in an odd way, captioned something like “grids with CSS floats”. Ah, the good old days—how things have improved!)
- Winnie Lim wrote about learning to draw: the different approaches learners can take, and the value of forgoing formal training or “proper” learning.
Anyhow—that’s good for today. If you’re in Ottawa and interested, Ottawa Civic Tech is hosting its first meetup in its rebooted iteration. I’ll be there and look forward to chatting with folks returning and new alike. All the best for the week ahead!
Lucas