Take

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.