Take

I understand the point that not everyone want to have their own web sites. Everyone who thought the advent of the web meant people would own their own domains and set up their own weblogs were living in a bubble. It's not that people don't have them, of course. I just mean people people.

Last summer I listened to one of my dad's friends talk about keeping up with some of his acquaintances and some people in a club of sorts of shared interests. To him, for that purpose, Facebook is the best thing since sliced bread because it lets him do that. He can operate a computer and especially a phone well enough to do that, and he's really positive about it.

I'm guessing he's heard about what Facebook does and doesn't care, because he's not willing to put any effort into it. If it's there and it works, lovely. Making an effort to replace it with something else: son, are you kidding me? I don't know anything about that stuff, and I want to talk to a dozen people who don't either.

There's a lot more people like him than like the people who want to have their own web sites. Probably by a factor of hundreds.

Of course, the people who make Facebooks are way less than the people who make web sites too. It's not a completely hopeless calculus. Someone could still come along with something better and steal them away and ruin Facebook's day. But the Diaspora-like people who expect those people to give a damn about decentralization and federation and hooking things up are living on entirely separate planes of existence.

I'm being unfair – some of them are talking about privacy and agency and control instead of focusing on technology, and that can move people too, but only some people sometimes. Right now, people who care have brains that are on fire and in constant pain, and people who don't don't understand what the fuss is about.

They need to speak in the language of "how do we let you do something you couldn't do before" if they want people who spend most their day not thinking about this at all to have a reason to move. (Or in the words of jwz, "how will this software get him laid". There's a disclaimer there which is almost haunting, but I guess it underlines what out-Facebooking Facebook entails.)

Me, I'm just happy to be able to have something outside of Facebook and outside of Twitter, outside of the zoo of everyone else combined with whatever today's monetization strategy calls for. To me, not being an animal in their zoo is important. But not everyone thinks like that, or sees Facebook or Twitter like that.

We're probably far more likely to see Facebook out-Facebooked by something that's a bit more convenient but with a far more horrible backside than we are by seeing it replaced by something someone like me, or someone like the Diaspora people. If you think I don't like Facebook, I'm walking city blocks around TikTok. (You know, just to end on a positive note.)

The original goal was to have no tags or categories or such. Well. No. That's like saying the original goal for a meal was to have no éclairs in it. The original goal was to have as little as possible here, so there would be as little as possible to "fill in", and so it would be okay for what was there to be there. Each thing added is one more threshold, and the thing is to have as few thresholds as possible so that I would actually write.

Maybe some organization will become necessary in the future. No such plans right now though.

People are leaving cable and their 8000 channel packages behind. No one wants to see more than two or five or nine, of course, and the three most wanted are introduced in the third most expensive, second most expensive and most expensive tiers. Some people would say that this is what you do when you have something people want and that this is how a market is supposed to work – I'd say this is what people do when there are oligopolies.

But I don't really care about cable. What I care about is that what it's being replaced with – ISPs, streaming services and so on – end up replicating the worst bits. Now you have exclusives on different streaming services instead, and have to pay monthly tithes to them instead of to cable companies. It's still an improvement I guess, because there are plenty of things not locked down to them. But if you look at these constructions and see a broken model, it's like seeing an alcoholic making their way home after a lot of fuss, looking like they're on the home stretch, producing a flask from their jacket, taking a swig and promptly diving off the side of the road into a warm nettle embrace.

I guess technical freedom is one thing and "business realities" are another.

I'm now copying the entries I've written so far into the... spartan but custom-made CMS. I get live Markdown previews for the title and the text - the title because the title can include Markdown too, mostly because of links.

There's a plain text version of the title for various uses (like the title bar or feeds). There are both Atom and JSON feeds, and they include the formatted version of the title. They also just plain include every entry, despite what I said before.

There's no search yet. There's paging. There's no date-based index pages; if you cut off the URL components from the permalink it will go to the last known instant for what remains of the date and rewind until it finds a post, and if not, it'll throw you back to the front page. If you go to an entry in a URL that isn't the canonical URL, like 2020/5/10 instead of 2020/05/10, it throws you to the canonical version, because damn it.

I just want to get this up and running so I can have something stable to work with.

Here’s me: when I download an app with a first-run tutorial, I try to find a way to short-circuit it and get to the actual app. If I can’t, I just race through it, knowing I wouldn’t have remembered any of it anyway.

Either I can figure out the app later or I can’t.

One of the biggest issues is that it's all up-front. Show helpful arrows in context – have an intelligently put together blank slate and most problems just evaporate.

When I used to write, it used to always have to feel like it was a big, coherent idea that I could loop around and break up and contextualize, and that at least I felt like I had a new subtle handle on. But often that subtleness would derail without me noticing, and I would end up writing some variant of the same thing over and over.

Everything would also have this heavy air of something substantial, as if writing for the thing that someone would pick up and say "hey, this is great". That did happen, sometimes, but it was worse-than-lottery odds, and that's a hard way to live but an easy way to get disappointed. And writing for "hits" isn't conducive to great thinking.

Here I want to make the writing itself the ceremony. The act of thinking a thought, capturing it briskly and hopefully crisply and then posting it. I have taught myself that it's important that stuff is posted/out there. Chances are it would be good for me to unlearn it, and I have tried to, which caused the heady ceremony of the things I did write to rise even more.

I don't do much in this world, and one of the only things I do is think, and everyone else is writing and sharing their thoughts much more, and I feel left behind if I don't get to do that too. Sharing is therapy for me.

I have a habit of liking or wanting solutions that are halfway in-between two established ways of doing something. Any programmatic web site is basically a factory for similarly-shaped objects, but CMSes are even more rigid and cookie-cutter (since otherwise the additional structure it provides wouldn't work well), and often don't even use the extra power that putting things in a big database could give you.

Right now I'm typing these first entries into a text editor to try to get the size and flavor down, but I want to write a custom CMS just for this very soon. I'm thinking the Atom feed will collect entries by the day or something, to avoid flooding people – or it'll just have many entries.

I tried DuckDuckGo for a few months, to see if I could get away from Google. The search results for many of my searches, it being based on Bing, were complete non-sequiturs. It's worth giving up relative perfection and settle for something less, but it was getting ridiculous. I have switched back.

Take was born in Nova, which is good and a definite improvement on Coda but still pretty quirky.

Tim Bray is brave and does what you do if you're in that position and you care. He also handled himself gracefully and didn't let big media make him the story instead of the events (and his summary of them).

Giving many people jobs where they work their bodies to the bone and can't catch their breath or go to the bathroom is not a point of pride. If you're one of the world's largest companies, you have no excuse not to pay them a living wage and allow them luxuries like breathing. If you can't afford to pay people living wages or turn it down to a sane workload without undoing your business, you are by definition running an operation you should not be allowed to be running. When a company makes its money this way, it is evil and exploitative.

Established unions don't always do what they're supposed to, but trying to keep people from organizing is fighting a war against your own employees.

No analytics, no pixels, no tracking, no ads, no caring about browsers people wouldn't pick for themselves. Fit on a floppy, load in a jiffy (both many times over).

To express myself.

To test my own thoughts.

To write.

To do "micro" things, without being in ecosystems and environments I don't like and aren't designed as vehicles for coherent thoughts.

I want Take to be many small things.

I have opinions about many things, and I want to express them. In a cultural climate where everyone reacts to everything everywhere, I want to exist.

I want to unlearn my sense of occasion, write what I think and get it out there. Some people will disagree and others won't care; it's all okay.

The color scheme of Take is purple. I am partial to blue, gray and slate. Purple and lavender are close cousins, work well and are different to me.

Purple is also the color a link turns when you click it.

Welcome to Take, where I can give my take on things.

An idea becomes a sketch, a sketch becomes a real thing, a real thing becomes a habit.

Human brains are made to seek patterns, and human minds are made to crave structure. Structure frames a narrative within which to be creative.

Human brains, minds and instincts are made to remember, to learn, to iterate on what has gone before, to develop eagerly the ideas of yesterday into a perfected whole, arguments piled on top of each other, as if to stand witness to time and effort spent, as if to legitimize, as if to define identity.

Narratives, structures, habits, prisons.

Sometimes, it's best to just start over.