I said a while ago that my GF and I switched from Youtube Music to Apple Music. While she is back with YTM, I’m enjoying Apple Music a lot more. I am working from home, though, listening to music through my laptop, while she has to deal with a lot more different environs.

I am introducing a new collegue to the project and it is a joy to notice how much I have actually learned myself over the last few years.

I just stumbled upon this, while scrolling through the iPhone 13 pages on Apple’s website: The Plan to Protect Indigenous Elders Living Under the Northern Lights

Beautiful presentation. Makes me inspired.

Teamflow is a kind of virtual office, in which every worker has a “video” bubble, that others can interact with. This seems like a surveilance tool to me. But trust and management are polar oposites.

I wonder if @baldur has a take on stuff like this?

A kind of Obsidian lite? nota.md

… and done!

Vegetable pasta. 🧑‍🍳

Colors of the ruska season in the Riisitunturi Nationalpark

Just upgraded to MB premium! Reasons forthcoming.

The maxfun show story break is gonna end their run in 5 eps. Damn. Not one of my regular shows, but just goes to show that projects we love might end sooner then we‘d expect.

The Netflix movie Kate, which we just watched, is amazing. Check it out if you haven’t already.

(I should really pledge to interact with people here, every day, a little bit.)

What a nice thought: My mom sent me a Google Nest Mini for my birthday. But: In Finnland you can’t use it for Apple Music (Why?). Siri won’t work with it (e. g. can’t put tasks into my Things inbox) either. So I now have a very smart, barely usable bluetoothspeaker on my desk.

Kinda surprising: The recommendations on library thing are very very good. I’m tracking my read books here, since this is were I write about them, but I also track them there, because library thing somehow really gets online recommendations.

Working with heavily linked notes shows that one unexpected value of a link is not the link but its usefulness as an alias for what you are actually looking for. Quite often I don’t find the title of the note, but a link to the note I was looking for.

When I think about it, it is very fascinating to think that my body can metabolize food and drinks. I can alter the state of my mind through what I do to and with my body. But how do you find the right food that makes you want to write (undercomplex perspective, I know.)? ;)

Jeez. Somebody blocked the ventilation slits above almost all of our windows in our apartment (probably a freezing previous tennant?) with insulation wool instead of air filter material. We have been living here for two years.

Hm. For how much I dislike when a discussion gets derailed, I tend to do it quite often. We had such a nice evening. Argh. Hate the feeling of when a loved one shares something and all I have is critical remarks. ☹️

This vacation has me the most motivated about writing in a few years. Have to transform it somehow into a steady thing.

Accidentally opened twitter. Ugh. I want to be enlightened and able to say: You can have or be part of a „positive“ social graph over there, but I’m not so sure.

Thinking about starting my own newsletter.

First little balcony harvest. 🌱 It wasn’t easy or sure with all the scaffolding from the roof reno that lasts the whole summer. But grateful for the results nonetheless. 🍅 ☺️

Today I discovered Manuel Moreale’s Blog thanks to this great endorsement by @uncertainquark (which I in turn found thanks to micro.blog’s discovery tab):

I just donated to a personal blog writer I really like. Check out his very human blog, which actually cares about the state of the Internet: manuelmoreale.com 📝

One of the posts there (On discovery and consumption) made me pause when I was thinking about how to react to this beautifully little post by @pimoore:

Who we are is the most eloquent and unique story that we all write every single day.

There is a difference between commenting and quoting a post like this. Since that post was inspiration to a point (this) I wanted to make, I don’t think that a comment would have been appropriate. Looking at the comments other people actually made, they are engaging with the post more directly, by uttering e.g. approval (for example, @patrickrhone’s “Truth”)

There is also a difference in the way I engage with the post when quoting it: The engagement here is very indirect, the other person does not even necessarily notice that I took what they wrote and re-contextualized it for my own needs.

Similarly to Manuel Morale’s point about discovery and consumption, this might be an obvious difference. But I think commenting and quoting also is related to what Manuel has to say about the centralization of discovery and consumption (meaning the engagement with the discovered content):

One major change the web has experienced was the consolidation of discovery and consumption. Digg was—and still is—a place to discover new content but the consumption of that content takes place away outside of Digg. And the same was true for discussions around the content. Those used to happen in comment sections spread across the internet. But now, places like Twitter or Instagram are acting as places for both the discovery and the consumption of new content.

A platform that only allows comments about content linked from elsewhere on the web will not lead to this kind of centralization. A comment-only platform like this is also much less convenient to use to actually build upon other people’s content, which most often happens in the quoting (or linking) style instead the commenting-style of engagement.

Making it easier to quote other people’s content might on the other hand have consequences as regards to how we engage with the creators behind the content. Which brings me to another post of Manuel (The internet is not broken. People are.), which is that social media exposes a lot of people’s interest not in doing the thing for the love of the thing, but for the fame, which might be achieved through it (Something I have always appreciated about @merlinmann: He does the things because he loves doing them).

A commenter is not very likely to become famous through commenting. A quoter on the other hand produces first order content: This post here stands on its own, even though it is inspired by other content. Combined with the strong network effects of the big social media platforms, odds are that the wish for fame becomes more likely to surface - because fame itself is more probable in these conditions.

Therefore offering tools for quoting, for building upon other people’s content, is a double edged sword. If the social media platform is too big and quoting is too easy, there is an increased likelihood of a bloodless hunt for fame, in which first order creators become increasingly invisible to each other.

I had a feeling something was up after this week’s RecDiffs - which was excellent btw. As if you’d notice something off in a good friend’s otherwise normal behavior. I hope everyone is fine. (I’m just a listener and concern of this sort feels intrusive.)

That there hasn’t been a new Back To Work in two weeks has me gravely concerned for @merlinmann and Dan Benjamin alike. I noticed that there was also no new Road Work. So I assume it has something to do with the Fireside Dispute.