This blog’s gone multiplatform. Please clap.

It’s here, it’s on ATproto,¹ it’s available by email.² The point’s to use it, right? And it’s less likely to sit stagnant if I can actually push it out to folks. Only took me the better part of a Sunday afternoon to get it all sorted, fueled by decaf lattes and a savory pastry at The Understudy.³

And now I’m overusing footnotes ’cuz I got those working again, too.

Brick by brick this thing’s coming together, and with each update I get closer to ... I’m not sure. Flipping the algorithmic platforms yet one more bird, I guess.

Anyway, it gives me hope. Scrolling the latest random blogs on Leaflet.pub’s explore page gives me hope. Clicking through gloriously overcoded Neocities websites gives me hope. I’m seeking out the last vestiges of a bygone web.

I’ve been revisiting The Deuce, the three-season HBO series from David Simon and George Pelecanos, exploring the sex trade of early 1970s Times Square and the transitions it underwent through that decade and into the ’80s. I didn’t finish it the first time around, but it’s resonating more with me now. The show’s about many things, but in particular it’s about the steady march of time and the changes that bulldoze through, sweeping everyone along. The women working the streets get pushed inside to parlors and peep booths by mafiosos and crooked cops looking to get in on the action, or they get pushed to on-camera work as porn goes mainstream. The pimps find themselves becoming more and more irrelevant in the process. And later the filmmakers shooting the skin flicks are steamrolled themselves, with the advent of VHS.

The world changes, sometimes multiple times over in a short span. Maybe the glut of algorithms and AI everyone’s getting pushed toward by powerful tech and corporate forces is the next steamroller—or maybe, like the peeps and parlors, they’re only a temporary change in the status quo, on the way to other kinds of disruption.

I can’t control the future, but I can keep my little corner of the internet tidy in the meantime—find some ways to plug it into new modes of dissemination. And it’s more fun to play around with than the platforms have been in years.

Footnotes

1. Thanks to the standard.site schema and the (remarkably simple) Sequoia CLI tool. And thanks also to Anuj Ahooja, who wrote about it in a way that showed me I could do it, too. ↩

2. Thanks to Buttondown’s RSS-to-email option. ↩

3. A bookstore focused on plays—A+ concept. While there, I also bought two new-to-me scripts by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

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