Substrate

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I started thinking about this meme’s six-year journey from a dark corner of young Twitter to the florescent lighting of high-school-friend Facebook. I’ll argue are different ways of looking at the same thing: One is that a single Twitter user released this sentiment into the collective unconscious, or activated an existing sentiment, and that by going viral that sentiment has become thoroughly and invisibly embedded in the fabric of culture to such a degree that it now consistently reappears throughout the world. The other explanation is that creative originality, the kind we still police with terms like “plagiarism,” is even more of a myth than we realize, and we hadn’t faced that because we never had the tools to observe how much we repeat one another.

You’re home alone, but watching your friends status updates tell of a great party happening somewhere. You are aware of more parties than ever before. [S]ocial software both creates and cures FOMO. Ultimately, though, this began as a conversation centered around joy. Isn't that a rare, and special, and fragile thing? How often do we talk about joy, let alone actively pursuing it or protecting it? I think pursuing joy, protecting peaceful moments, seeing our friends' happiness as a cause for celebration and not envy, and engaging with our lives on our own terms are quietly radical acts. It is a brave and meaningful thing to talk earnestly about joy at a time when so many aspire to, and delight in, destroying it.

Hi, I'm a lexicographer. You might know me from my greatest hits "Yes, People Still Write Dictionaries" "Language Is Constantly Evolving (And We’re Just Tryin’ To Keep Up)” and “No, That’s Not the Etymology of ‘Posh.’” https://t.co/EH5PTVCDDL— Jane Solomon (@janesolomon) January 20, 2019

People will tell you where they've gone They'll tell you where to go But till you get there yourself  You never really know -Joni Mi...

I was recently asked on Twitter for practical examples of how I use Tally, made by Greg Pierce of Agile Tortoise. My response is way too long, even for the new 280-character limit, though, so I thought I’d write it up here. Note: This is not a paid endorsement.

Mary Oliver has died. I have a friend who used to keep her poem “Wild Geese” folded up in his wallet. It begins: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a

“By which I mean, how do *you* pick a tattoo artist?”

“on a whim i started reading the rust docs and i have to say, i'm actually enjoying it; the encouragement, analogies, etc. 👍”

“Wow. Sometimes world-crafting with illustration is so powerful and evocative that it makes you want to live in the world the artist has drawn. This reminds me of my fondest memories and makes me homesick for a world I have never been in.”

“I wanted just to be there, enjoying the mundanity of a place that would soon be mythological to me. I also wanted to tour it like a stranger and send away dispatches — to friends who would never see it, to myself who could never go back, to no one in particular.” “Some pictures I texted to friends. Others I posted to my Instagram, which is slapdash and homely, with about as many followers as it deserves — I use the app like I once used Facebook, as a way of being ambiently with people I like, or to set up a dopamine drip while I’m doing something I’d rather not. My friends, flung out over the continent, were posting their own holiday or non-holiday pictures, and as much as I love my parents I felt homesick, as one does, for my independence. I live in a new city now, and Instagram was the simplest way to reconcile two lives.”

“James had this amazing way of being a total realist, seeing all of the world’s flaws and acknowledging them, and remaining passionate and optimistic.”

“This obsession with technical innovation and growth at all costs caused the tech industry to turn a blind eye to the social impacts of its creations.”

“Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions. If some readers end up signing up for Basecamp, that’s great. But if they just like to read and not buy, that’s also great.” “In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas – big or small.”

“you can end up in this place where you don't want to engage with any of it, to talk about how burnout affects people creatively." - @erikhane @printrunpodcast https://t.co/wuJvLflFE1”

I did not realize the city was so large. Brooklyn alone is the size of seattle. I knew the boroughs were a thing, but I figured they were just big neighborhoods, not entities unto themselves. There was trash everywhere. like, everywhere. which is not to say it was dirty, but just that there were so many bags of trash. So many Canada Goose jackets. So many dogs. So many Canada Goose jackets on dogs. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was extremely lovely and kind. An order of magnitude more diversity than any city in which I’ve lived. The subway’s weird turnstile-claw-revolving-door things are dystopian. Park Ave. is breathtaking; so is East Village. You look into each little brownstone and a part of you wants to stay there forever. Everything is a little bit louder than it should be. I miss it already! I miss it so much.

Ideas often get copied from well-known established projects into new projects with the background behind those decisions lost. Projects should have a "https://t.co/iLkkhljAHY" to lay out regretful design choices that can't be reversed for time, compatibility, etc. reasons— Joe Groff (@jckarter) January 14, 2019

“People talk about businesses having "moats" but I think a better metaphor is a reef. A reef can protect and foster an ecosystem while keeping bad players out, or serve as treacherous and impassable protection. They also grow fractally. Grow a reef.”

“By bypassing many of the traditional gatekeepers of entertainment, we have seen an entirely new class of celebrity emerge.”

"he cares for the egg the only way he knows how: He plants it."

"Friends, it's time for me to recharge the batteries and take a Pome hiatus. This third run has indeed been a charm; thank you so much for reading! Stay well, support your local poet, and see you somewhere down the road. -M x" "the song was in fact the joyous concordance of a moment that would not come again"

in conclusion: I'm more myself on the internet than I am in "real life". maybe you are too. maybe that's fine— Max Kreminski (@maxkreminski) January 10, 2019

One of my biggest revelations of the last year was the @fortelabs insight that you benefit from the internet information firehose by having a system that lets you embrace it, rather than rejecting/hiding from it like this: https://t.co/NU6Qz4kZTh— Drew Austin (@kneelingbus) January 9, 2019

“Everyone thinks they can write, because everybody writes,” said Rasenberger, referring to the proliferation of casual texting, emailing and tweeting. But she distinguishes these from professional writers “who have been working on their craft and art of writing for years.” “What a professional writer can convey in written word is far superior to what the rest of us can do,” said Rasenberger. “As a society we need that, because it’s a way to crystallize ideas, make us see things in a new way and create understanding of who we are as a people, where we are today and where we’re going.”