Regular Communication 019

From Jason Rodriguez

I don't have much to say about the US election beyond what I posted on my birthday. I rounded up a few articles below where smarter people than me shared their thoughts.

I will say that it has greatly influenced how I approach my free time lately, which I wrote about on my blog last night. Spoiler alert: It's been pushing me more towards Approach 3. Go read my thoughts there, then come back here and reply to let me know how you think about spending your own free time these days. I'd love to hear about it. ✌️

Interesting Things

A few things related to the election results:

First, Joan Westenberg has an excellent explainer on why Trump actually won. And another piece on what led to the world in which that was able to actually happen...

Greg Storey argues (and I’m cautiously optimistic he’s right) that Trump doesn’t have it together enough to be a true dictator. The US has weathered shitstorms before and it’ll weather this current one, too, however unpleasant it will be.

He also linked out to this post from the Daily Stoic, which argues that our jobs and duties don’t change based on who is in power. We’re still responsible for being good, courageous, just, and wise, and helping others. The stakes and circumstances change, but the work never does.

Mandy Brown has some good words she shared with her clients. I found them very helpful, too.

Once you’re done mourning, Ken White has 9 things to think about and do on the way forward.

OK, some non-election stuff:

There's a thread on Hacker News about whether or not Bluesky will become more popular than Twitter, and it got me thinking... not so much about Bluesky and Twitter, but about whether or not I care about social media at all anymore. Right after Musk bought Twitter, I archived my posts, deleted my account, and got the hell out of there. I moved to Mastodon (and also signed up for Bluesky and Threads) but—apart from occasionally scrolling through posts from people I follow—don't engage with any of them. I simply don't feel the need to post on social media anymore. I don't know if that says something about me, the state of the platforms, or both, but I just can't imagine a world where I'm eager to post on social media these days. I think we're both broken, honestly. Just like so many other things in the world. I'd rather blog and send an occasional email to folks instead. Sure, there's the whole POSSE movement, which I might pursue more in the future, but I just don't feel like I have a lot of bandwidth to spread things around right now.

Just after I wrote that, I saw this paragraph in a Dave Winer post. Serendipity.

Jan Miksovsky's mom has permanent retrograde amnesia, meaning she can't form new long-term memories (I can't even imagine 😟). So, he built an amazing device using the simplest vanilla web tech he could to improve her (and her family's) quality of life. What an amazing project.

Finally, here's a palette cleanser for everything that's going on right now: Max Siedentopf had some fun with the most boring genre of photography—the passport photo.

Some Music

My main salve these days is music. One song that's been on repeat and bringing me joy is I Was a Line by Damien Jurado, off of his exceptional album, Sometimes You Hurt The ones You Hate. I couldn't find a good video of him doing it to share, so I recommend you check it out on your streaming service of choice. Or go buy the album from his Bandcamp page. As an aside, Damien recently announced that he's retiring from touring. While his music gives me a lot of solace, now I'm sad that I'll (likely) never be able to see him perform. So it goes.

Show yourself some grace,
 Jason

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