The last of the four Wes Anderson adaptations of Roald Dahl short stories for Netflix, Poison was my least favorite (but still glad I watched them all)
Why then the world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open…
— The Merry Wives of Windsor
This picture from Andy Allen of all the various Twitter-like apps now fighting for attention, along with Meta’s launch of Threads this week, really made me think about the current state of social media in 2023. As I’ve written on this site many times in the past, I find social media to be a fascinating bit of technology that has had a profound impact on life in the last two decades.
I also don’t really like most of it. Hmm.
When I think back to my primary uses of social media, it’s really been as much to stay informed as it’s been to stay connected to people. Since launching this site back in 2006, I’ve supplemented social media with posts here to keep family and friends updated on personal news (and have often automated connections between those services and this site). It automatically produces RSS feeds and content is now pushed to the Fediverse using the ActivityPub plugin. I also love this site as a way to learn new technologies and skills, such as WordPress, PHP, MySQL, Linux and AWS.
It seems like one by one, my favorite social media companies have done questionable things (Doctorow’s enshittification) that caused me to close up shop: Facebook, Instagram, then Twitter. I miss family from Facebook, restaurants from Instagram and some really awesome people on Twitter. I still keep my LinkedIn open for work reasons (after closing it once) and I’ve really grown to like my Mastodon experience. Was never on TikTok or Snapchat and it seems like I will be on the Bluesky waitlist forever (their new domain revenue model is certainly interesting). Don’t think I will try Threads at this point, given my issues with past Facebook products, but I am cautiously optimistic that the promised interactivity with the Fediverse will happen.
Aside from the time commitment of keeping up with the volume of my Mastodon newsfeed, I’m still a huge fan of the Tapbots team and their Ivory Mastodon client for iOS and macOS. It gives me everything I want: chronological feed of just the accounts I follow, synchronized across all of my devices, with no ads, “promoted” posts or other weird algorithm junk. I’m now following 334 people as of today and I believe the quality of a feed is directly related to how well you curate your follow list. I’ve also found that allowing or muting “boosts” from certain accounts helps a lot too.
So what other supplemental things do I still use outside of social media? Group texts have become much more common with our family and friends. It’s fast and (generally) secure, offering easy ways to share photos and keep in touch across platforms (hello green bubble Android friends). Don’t really email all that much outside of work and other commercial interactions. Currently out of the Teams world, but that may be hard to avoid forever. I still love using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds, but that volume seems to be dropping a bit lately. Apple News is a part of our Apple One Premier bundle, but it’s always seemed a bit off to me (nice to get around some paywalls, though).
Speaking of paywalls, I do still like to financially support a handful of traditional news websites (Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Washington Post, New York Times, The Economist and Racket). I use two ad blockers with my primary web browser (Duck Duck Go and Privacy Badger) and have to say that browsing the web now without those is just a disaster. Ads in general are awful: just about all iOS gaming ads, ads on paid streaming services, ads you can’t fast forward, ads embedded in social media feeds. The only good things I can say about ads right now are 1) Mad Men, 2) the Super Bowl and 3) the British Arrows Awards (and the last two really haven’t been all that great post-pandemic, to be honest).
It’s encouraging that really smart people keep talking about new social media advances so that I don’t have to sign up for everything to learn what’s going on. It’s also encouraging to see people like Dear Dara post again on Mastodon after 120 days away. I have to laugh when pundits make definitive statements about new services like Bluesky and Threads when one isn’t open to the general public yet and the other has been live for two days. Things evolve, projects and companies change, people can be jerks. Stay tuned…
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
— No Country for Old Men
Hell is empty and all the devils are here…
— The Tempest
Back in 2017, I posted my top 7 online publications. The list today has changed a little:
- Star Tribune*
- Washington Post*
- New York Times*
- The Atlantic*
- The Economist*
- Daring Fireball (RSS)
- 9to5Mac (RSS)
* paid subscriber
Published since September 1843 to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress…
— The Economist
As I started reading through Joe Bissen’s new book, More! Gone. Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses Part II, I realized that not only are there a lot of closed courses I actually played, there are also a large percentage of the courses I included in my Minnesota Golden Links CD-ROM back in 1999 that are no longer here (43 by my initial count). Joe was kind enough to include a chapter with a list of all the closed courses he knows about, so I thought it would be fun to go back to my original Photoshop files and post the screens for the ones that are no longer open for play (pics after the jump – please excuse the ancient Photoshop techniques and poor color corrections).
Joe says in the introduction to the new book that he isn’t as interested in the courses that have closed recently, but it’s amazing how many of the entries in my 1999 guide are gone (including a few that opened after my guide and are already closed). There are a number of inconsistencies between his list and my guide, as I only included public courses that were members of the Minnesota Golf Association (MGA). Make sure and check out his original book Fore! Gone: Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses, 1897-1999, as well as his website. Fun stuff.
I read a lot of words, but not enough of them are in books. This one I took from my parent’s house on Lombard and brought up to Croftville Road for the weekend. Turns out my sister purchased it for my dad when she visited Highclere Castle as part of her Downton Abbey tour. I never knew that the real Downtown Abbey Lord was Howard Carter’s partner (George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon), but I’ve loved Egyptian history ever since the 1982 World’s Fair (and multiple Ancient Civilization courses from Mr. Demers at Central). This was a quick, light read, with a few pictures I know I’ve never seen before (hello, Tutankhamun mummy).
Now on to my pile of Economists…
One of the highlights of grade school for me was Scholastic’s Dynamite magazine. It appears I started to subscribe to that in 1976, lasting until 1982. I found a box of these in the basement of my parent’s house on Lombard as we were getting it ready to sell, but they weren’t in great condition. I scanned and posted the entire issue from August 1979 here, if you want to get a feeling for what it was like.
Now that I have my ancient Canon scanner working again with my iMac, I thought I’d scan the front and back of the issues that survived the trip down to our loft. SK will now get the originals for her art projects and I get to keep the digital scans (which you can see after the jump).
