2023
For years I’ve complained that there’s no online equivalent to being able to buy one issue of a magazine or newspaper. Columbia Journalism Review explains the business obstacles: Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism.
Things I am grateful for this morning:
- The dog does not smell as bad as she did this weekend. (She is very past due for a bath.)
- The cats rarely throw up overnight on the path between my bed and the bathroom. (Sadly, Julie cannot say the same.)
Tens of millions Americans suffer from chronic, debilitating pain that often drives them to addiction, unemployment and homelessness. Nicholas Kristof reports in depth for The New York Times: Why Americans Feel More Pain
I meant to write “QR Codes” but instead wrote “QR Cods.” Microsoft Word tagged that spelling as fishy.
I’m doing some work in my home office this afternoon and I was literally distracted by a squirrel in the backyard.
Today I learned there’s a “Babylon 5” animated movie coming. Casting details here. I’ll watch!
America’s Caffeine Addiction: Why Some Experts Say It’s Time to Quit. Good article, clickbait headline. Caffeine in moderation is fine, but some of y’all are pounding 10 cups of joe and energy drinks daily and that ain’t right.
Inside the Last Old-School Seltzer Shop in New York. “Good seltzer should hurt — it should be carbonated enough that it kind of stings the back of your throat.” (NYTimes / Corey Kilgannon. Photos and video by Juan Arredondo)
The Enduring Mystery of Barbara Lowe and the Lost ‘Jeopardy!’ Episodes. I had no idea “Jeopardy” fandom was so large and organized. (The Ringer / Claire McNear)
Just as I got my mind un-blown about generative AI, I’m now learning about autonomous agents.
I tried doing a Midjourney cartoon to illustrate this point, on the general theme of my mind being blown, but all the drawings came out creepy when I was going for cute.
That time Heather Armstrong roasted me on her popular blog, dooce
I mentioned yesterday that I interviewed Heather Armstrong, who wrote the blog dooce and that she later wrote about how excruciating the experience was for her.
Armstrong took her own life this week. She was talented, funny, and insightful, and she helped invent professional blogging, which led to today’s social media influencers and indie journalists.
I was not offended by the piece Armstrong wrote after I interviewed her in 2006. I thought it was a fair rap. However, I was disappointed that I’d set out to interview someone I admired, and that person had found the experience horribly painful.
Yesterday, I said I was unable to locate Heather’s blog post, but a friend online found it and sent me the link this morning:
A few weeks ago Jon and I gave an interview to an IT magazine for an article about accidental entrepreneurship. They wanted to know how this website now pays our mortgage when I originally started it so that I could make obnoxious fart jokes online. Short answer: I had to give a lot of head.
It was a phone interview, and they recorded it so that they could incorporate it into a podcast (when it’s posted I’ll link to it here), and I can honestly say that I have never been more uncomfortable giving an interview. One, it was only a couple days after I had discovered that someone I thought was a very cool person was making viciously mean comments about me in a public forum, and every time I answered a question into the phone I could hear in my head how this person would make fun of the way I said things. Two, in order to make sure that they had a clean edit for the podcast, the guy conducting the interview wouldn’t say anything for at least 10 seconds after I answered a question, and that disorienting pause made me think that my thrilling discourse had bored him into a coma.
Here’s the article that followed from that interview. It’s … fine. Not my best work, but not bad either.
Accidental Tech Entrepreneurs Turn Their Hobbies Into Livelihoods. InformationWeek interviewed five accidental entrepreneurs, including the founders of del.icio.us and Digg and the author of the blog Dooce, to find out how they freed themselves from the paycheck-to-paycheck grind.
The article I wrote is perhaps notable today as a time capsule of Internet history. I also interviewed Joshua Schachter, the co-founder of a bookmarking site called del.icio.us; Kevin Rose, who co-founded digg; Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, LiveJournal, and TypePad; and Tom Davis, author of personal information manager software called Zoot, which is similar in mission to more recent applications like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote. (I’m pleased to see that Zoot Software is still around.)
I did a brief follow-up article a few years later, focusing on Armstrong alone: Maytag Crosses Popular Blogger, Gets Spun Dry. I talked at the end about how I felt about reading Armstrong’s article about our interview.
News of Armstrong’s death this week shook me in the same way Anthony Bourdain’s death shook me. Like Bourdain, she was struggling with demons, and the demons beat her.
I can’t help thinking that her living so much of her life in public, sharing her insecurities and self-loathing with millions of people, was not helpful to her mental state. And I need to think about how that relates to my own online habits.
I’m sad to learn about the death of pioneering blogger Heather Armstrong, author of dooce. She wrote candidly, movingly, and often hilariously about life and struggles with addiction and depression.
I interviewed her and her then-husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong, in the mid-2000s. The interview went badly and she wrote about the experience—hilariously—on her blog. I can’t currently find the article I wrote as a result of the interview or her blog post.
My deepest condolences to Armstrong’s family and friends.
I found IBM’s AI announcement yesterday confusing; this write-up by Tobias Mann on The Register helps clarify details.
IBM is pushing its deep enterprise expertise as a differentiator over AWS, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.
I think Watson is a brand liability at this point. It’s 2011’s hot technology—not 2023’s—and has the scent of overreach and failure on it.
Don’t replace your people with ChatGPT or other AI services (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols / Computerworld). ChatGPT and other AI aren’t ready to replace workers, and only an idiot would think they are.
The dog caught all three of her nutritional supplement treats in the air this morning, so that means it’s going to be a good day.
Mrs. Maisel spoiler speculation
In my head canon, the final episode is set today, in 2023. Midge and Susy are in their 90s and reconciled. And they’re on tour together, like George Burns. In the final scene, Susy goes into Midge’s bedroom in a hotel suite to find Midge died peacefully, in her sleep, fully made up and dressed, lying in bed with her will and funeral instructions under the pillow. Then cut to flashback to the Gaslight Club.
I’m on the hot new social app. @mitchw.bsky.social. Instead of Bluesky, they should call it “déjà vu.”
