RSS Feed for geoffdgeorge.com

Behold, the Future

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

David Krumholtz, in _The Deuce_, showing off the new technology of videotape, in the 1970s

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 (which we, in the future, know will undergo a decline of its own).

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.

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. One drawback: in updating the comment section to Sequoia's component, I did lose the comments on older blog posts, but I think I can get them back once I figure out how to manually tie those old posts to their corresponding Bluesky posts. A project for another day. ↩
Thanks to Buttondown’s RSS-to-email option. ↩
A bookstore focused on plays—A+ concept. While there, I also bought two new-to-me scripts by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

↩

Raising the Garage Door

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Image by Marius Ciocirlan, from Unsplash

I haven’t had much fun online lately.

For all the obvious reasons, of course: the news is bad, the good jokes are harder to come by (when people feel like making them), most of the platforms have enshittified themselves into an algorithmic stupor, etc. But also because I’ve been feeling the past couple of years that, generally, too many people on the internet are engaged in a mode of social interaction that no longer mirrors my own.

I think this sense started creeping up on me sometime in the early half of 2024, scrolling through TikTok (when I was still on TikTok), when I began to see a good number of videos from accounts either offering tips on how to work your way to 10,000 followers or actively pursuing that same goal. These weren’t accounts from news outlets or journalists seeking eyeballs, nor from brands seeking customers, nor from politicians seeking votes. They were just the personal accounts of random people who all somehow collectively got it in their heads that 10,000 followers was where things really got cookin’.

And this behavior followed me to Bluesky, where so many of the new accounts migrating from Twitter post-November 2024 tried to initiate mass follow-for-follow campaigns to fast-forward their way to an audience of thousands.

And it struck me, encountering this repeatedly, how much of “social” media (which we might as well start calling engagement media) is now just about the numbers—about the accumulation of follows, views, likes, reposts, often with the unspoken (or sometimes even declared!) aim to eventually make money off it. I think there might be a not-insignificant portion of the population that sees the whole system as a zero-sum game, where those with small followings are just the sad suckers who can’t accrue. Meeting new people, keeping in touch, exchanging ideas thoughtfully, maybe even eventually making friends and forming bonds ... these all seem like afterthoughts now for so many.

I first got online during the AIM/Geocities/Angelfire era, and by college was keeping up with friends on early blog networks. My crew’s chosen space was LiveJournal, the circle was small, each post was like a postcard or longer letter tossed off to everyone at once (publicly or privately), and each reply was like a postcard or letter back. The reveals were more personal, the feelings more raw, the ads nonexistent, the frequency of posts more manageable, never a deluge.

But everyone grew up, got scared that LiveJournal was embarrassing or got frustrated that it wasn’t immediate enough, and slowly stopped posting regularly there as Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram came into the picture. Nowadays, it feels like my friends keep up mostly through Instagram Stories, possibly the most sterile social environment yet to be conceived, with follow-up conversation relegated to private one-on-one chats where one-sentence replies or simple emoji reacts are the norm.

I was lamenting the transition with one of those old LiveJournal friends on the phone the other day, wondering if there was any way to still chase that slower, more intimate and communal mode of being online. “Maybe it’s just gone,” she said, inviting me to think of the generations before ours that didn’t get to experience it at all, and the generations after that only know the current morass. “Maybe we were just lucky enough to come along at the right time. Maybe we should just be glad we got to be there for it while it was happening.”

Which, fair enough. Maybe I’m feeling nostalgic for a bygone era and need to get over it. But I’m still unsure where that leaves me now, having quit virtually every social platform but Bluesky and Mastodon, where few friends have joined me. Other than that, I have this blog and a new Leaflet.pub blog I started for my ongoing reading project, neither of which I’ve told many people about. Where would I tell them about it?

Writing about digital sovereignty recently, Matt Pearce hit on something that resonated:

To become sovereign — to control the most meaningful decisions about your own existence — is to exit an existing status quo, sometimes at steep cost. Could be a democratic nation risking American tariffs to build a domestic tech sector, or a journalist sacrificing the reach of extractive platforms like YouTube or Instagram to build more independent modes of distribution.

What I’ve been pondering lately is what it means to become socially sovereign, online. What does it look like, minus the big platforms, to still try to connect with (not amass—never amass) people in the corners of the internet where I remain?

I was perusing other blogs on Leaflet the other day, through the platform’s Discover page, and I came across a post introducing a phrase I hadn’t heard before: working with the garage door open. As described in the post:

Working with the garage door open is a quiet, public way of working. It is not demanding attention, but invites interested parties to stop by and engage. It is accountable to the act of work, but not necessarily to some grander scheme or external demand.

I like this, and it feels like a particularly good counter-ethos in an increasingly “like and subscribe” world. I don’t want to reach everyone, or even most, and wouldn’t know what to say to them if I did. I don’t have a niche to focus on or a hobbyhorse to ride. I don’t have a particular area of expertise to dispense sage wisdom about. I just want a space for my thoughts as I work them out, and I want people to feel like they can drop in for a chat as I do so, and hopefully sometimes they will.

Maybe I just need to find more ways to let them know the door’s open. Consider this post a start.

The View

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

2:50 a.m. Typing from the porch. From a wicker chair on the porch, overlooking a back lot of cracked concrete, crooked parking spots, and crisscrossed power lines.¹

Quiet. Trees in silhouette. Cool finally, after a summer of punishing heat.

A nearby window A/C unit kicks on intermittently. Rats move between overfull dumpsters and the underbellies of cars. The blinking lights of planes descend into O’Hare.

This is the city so many are afraid of, apparently. But everyone should experience a quiet porch here at least once. It mystifies me to see no neighbors taking similar advantage, even if I’ve long accepted that my hours are not normal hours.²

Anyway, it feels good to write like this, out here, about nothing in particular.

Some days you’ve got a topic, and some days, you don’t, and that’s OK. Introspection’s a worthy enough goal. I can already hear the “Get a journal!” haters, but let’s be honest, it’s boring when every blog post is a take.

Too much alliteration, but we’re leaving it. ↩
Some nights one of the houses next door will have a big backyard blowout later into the evening. Music, dancing, string lights, the works. Brings the block to life. It’s not quite the same, though, as it would be to see some other soul out on their wooden perch, alone, taking in the breeze. I can’t even get a smoker stepping out to rip one from time to time? I mean, c’mon! ↩

Don’t Be Precious

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Tonight’s mug

12:52 a.m. Herbal tea balanced on the armrest of the couch. Laptop in my lap. I’m taking stock of my year of attention thus far.

On the one hand, I feel victory. I’ve stepped away from so many poisoned platforms: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (though I was already mostly off that). The remaining feeds on Bluesky and Mastodon are slower and reverse-chron. Been watching more movies and hitting that "Review or log..." button on Letterboxd more often. Been reading at a more sustained pace than I have in years. And not just books; I got an RSS reader set up again, like it’s 2007.

On the other, I feel defeat. So few posts since I posted that post! Is it really so hard for me to sit with a blinking cursor and hammer out a few thoughts? Do I even have thoughts to hammer? Has my brain turned to mush?

I can see now it was a mistake, in that post, to foreshadow certain kinds of posts for the future. I was already boxing myself in with expectations to meet and formulas to refine, completely countermanding the hopes outlined in the end:

In general, I want to try to look at this space more as a place for ongoing trains of thought rather than fully concluded ones. I don’t need to come here with a fully fleshed-out argument or thesis. I need to come here ready to ponder, to plumb the depths, to peek in the nooks and crannies.

Gotta just let this space be what it will be. Gotta just write what comes. Structure can come later and form more naturally, if it must. Been reading some old Ftrain posts again and feeling like Mr. Ford had the right approach. Some days, the words alone are the goal—nicely arranged, yes, but not necessarily grandly unified in message. And maybe other days you achieve something more.

TikTok Gets (Barely) Banned

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Melbourne’s Flinders Street station (photo by yours truly)

Greetings from Melbourne, Australia. The weather is warm, the birdsong is different,¹ cars drive on the left-hand side of the road, and there are trams. Glorious trams.

Public transit turns out to be rather remarkable here, coming from Chicago. Swipes on and off basically work on the honor system, as far as I can tell. There are no turnstiles. There’s a free zone, where no fare is required. Supposedly you can get fined substantially if you’re caught failing to tap on or off a tram appropriately with your fare card, but I’ve yet to see it happen. And there are certainly no armed officers prowling the platforms, threatening to take a life over a missed swipe.

It’s a strange time to be abroad. My plane from LAX took off just as the TikTok ban went into effect, and by the time we landed in Auckland, New Zealand, for our layover, about 14 hours later, it had already been lifted. The messages kicking off the ban and reinstating the app were both obvious, farcical displays of fealty to the incoming president.

A few hours after that, we landed in Melbourne, checked into our digs, went to dinner, and then I dragged my jet-lagged ass to bed. When I awoke the next morning, Trump had already been sworn in, with TikTok’s Shou Chew and other social media CEOs (Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.) all making prominent inauguration appearances of one variety or another.

Even setting their leaders’ craven, obsequious behavior aside, I have a longer piece in me on why I’ve soured pretty much entirely on algorithmic social platforms and why I think we should all start to avoid them, but for now I’ll just say I’m off the big apps. They’re built to keep a user’s attention divided, and as the new administration pushes forward with another round of “flooding the zone with shit,” what we choose to focus our mental energy² on is only going to get more important.

I’d stopped using Twitter a while ago, I deleted Instagram from my phone a couple of weeks ago after posting a Story committing myself to doing so, and having already left a goodbye video on TikTok just days ahead of the ban, I went ahead and deleted that, too.

What remains on my phone are the federated, decentralized platforms: Bluesky, Mastodon, and ActivityPub’s new photo app, Pixelfed. There, user control is more granular, the attempts to manipulate and direct me far fewer and far less powerful. Plus, I’m having a lot of fun on vacation posting to a photo app where the focus is back on the photos!

I’ll try to find more time to write about all of it once I’m back in the States, but for now I’ve got more trams to catch.

The common myna is as ubiquitous here as the American robin is back home, and you can hear its call all throughout the city. ↩
And physical energy, come to that. ↩

RIP, Mr. Lynch

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The first photo of David Lynch I can remember seeing

In the fall of 2001, a high school friend and I drove from our hometown of Mount Vernon, Iowa, into nearby Cedar Rapids to see Mulholland Drive. We went to Carmike Cinema 7, a low-slung cinderblock cineplex that I’m almost positive has since been converted into a church.¹ It was a Thursday night and a late screening, starting around 9:30 or 10, and because Cedar Rapids was not a hotbed for art house cinema, we had the theater to ourselves.

My friend was a longtime fan of Lynch. He’d seen Eraserhead at some point and become changed. This was the first I’d heard of him, though, and I went into Mulholland Drive having read nothing and having not seen so much as a frame of the trailer. The lights went down, the previews played, and then the notes of the opening swing music began to creep in over black.

When other people talk about wishing they could experience something again for the first time, this is one of the moments I think of. I did not, at 18 years old, know that a film could do what that film does. The conversation at Winkie’s that somehow tips over into abject dread; the dead-eyed cowboy at the ranch saying, “There’s sometimes a buggy …”; the man on stage shouting, “NO HAY BANDA, and yet we hear a band”—every odd, surreal minute brought fresh surprises. I was rapt.

Even twenty-four years later, I can think of few other directors who’ve been able to keep me on my toes like that. I looked forward to every new Lynch project, knowing that whatever else, it would be a singular experience.²

Between algorithms and the repetitive dependence on theoretically bankable IP by money-grubbing streamers and distributors, we live in conservative, conformative times creatively, so part of what I’m mourning this week is the loss of a distinct voice, the voice of a delightful weirdo,³ a voice I wish had had the time, health, and financial backing for another ten films.

I’ll miss David Lynch. I’ll miss his weather reports. I’ll miss his style, with his shirt buttoned all the way up to the collar. But it was a privilege to be alive at the same time as him, and to experience his work as it developed, and I’ll be holding fast to what he left us with for as long as I can.

I have no outright proof of this, but the church is at the address the theater once was at, in a building that looks an awful lot like a converted cineplex with a new addition attached to one side. ↩
My first viewing of Inland Empire left an equally deep impression. I can remember going to a screening at the University of Iowa’s single-screen art house theater with a college roommate, and we were so unnerved that we had to come home and detox with random sitcom episodes on cable just to get our minds right.

I revisted the film this week, and even though I was braced for the moments that seized my heart the first time around, they still got me again. The shot of the Phantom’s face near the end—a horrible clown face with Laura Dern’s eyes and mouth, distorted in exaggerated agony—will forever haunt my dreams. ↩
Even his commercials were weird! ↩

Attending to My Attention

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Live image of me, writing this

I’m typing this in my kitchen, at a small stretch of counter that rises taller than the rest. I use it most days as an improvised standing desk while I make my tea.

Today’s teas? I’m so glad you asked. The first two are Christmas gifts from my wife, from Kolkata Chai Co., one a special-blend black cardamom chai, the other a classic masala chai. The third and final variety will be a maple espresso black tea blend from Trader Joe’s, which I bought on a lark earlier this week. I say “will be” because I’m still on my first cup—the black cardamom.

In other words, I’m just at the start of a nice, quiet Saturday afternoon, and in an effort to continue populating this space, I thought I’d take a moment to try to think about the year just past and the year ahead and maybe try to set an intention or two.

I didn’t have a great 2024, if I’m being honest. Was too online. Didn’t touch enough grass. Didn’t see friends in real life enough. Didn’t leave the house enough at all, frankly. Spent a lot of time staring at the little screen in my hand and at the late hour displayed on my watch and at the fresh-laundry pile that always seemed to be growing in the armchair next to my usual spot on the couch, perpetually waiting to be folded and put away.

I fretted over the state of things (in my body, in my personal life, in the nation and outside of it) in a way that, in retrospect, was not particularly helpful, that on some days rendered me inert with frustration/grief—but that I always knew from my phone was something to worry about anyway, the chorus of talking heads, amateur pundits, and armchair experts conspiring to keep all the worries top of mind. But also of course the algorithms would serve me more of this if they saw that it’s what I happened to be paying attention to. The modern internet enables the ability to aware oneself to death.

I think the way out of this in 2025 is not to pay less attention overall, to shut out the world, but to pay more attention to my attention, if that makes sense. Where is it directed? What am I reading / watching / listening to? What value and/or takeaways am I actually extracting from these things? Beyond what they’re telling me, what do I think about them personally?

And when it comes to the algorithmic spaces, how am I complicating them? How am I working to look beyond what they’re spoon-feeding me? And when posting on them, what work am I doing to go against their grain—to not be seduced into homogeneity (either of the personal or social variety) by the prospect of likes/views/engagement?

Maybe this is something I can use this blog for: radical attention in the new year. A small corner for me to go long on what’s invading my brain and to explore other ways of thinking about it. And maybe by posting through it, I can find other things I’d like to pay/call attention to. These are not novel concepts for a blog, and yet they feel novel for me. I’ve gotten so used to being a longtime listener; I’d like to try being a more frequent first-time caller.

And in addition to any longer posts on particular topics, I’ve got a few ideas for recurring posts, to keep this space more regularly updated:

Journey to the End of the Shelf: This is a project I’ve been working on for a while. I started it on Tumblr, then carried it over to TikTok, and basically the idea is I’m working to get back to shelf zero, meaning no unread books occupying my shelves. I’ve worked myself into a pretty good hole over the years, and I’ve got 134 left to go to get out of it. Maybe I’ll continue to post TikTok book reviews for the project, if TikTok manages to hang around after Jan. 19, but the nice thing about moving it here is I don’t have to worry about its ties to any one platform.¹
As-yet untitled week-in-review posts about what I’m reading / watching / listening to: I’m probably an above-average consumer of various media. Not a brag, just a fact. I haven’t felt in conversation with much of what I consume in a long time, though, outside the confines of my own head. These posts would be an attempt to remedy that. I’m imagining something in the vein of Steven Soderbergh’s annual list, but compiled at a weekly cadence, with some ruminations of my own on what the media on the list has had me thinking about.²

In general, I want to try to look at this space more as a place for ongoing trains of thought rather than fully concluded ones. I don’t need to come here with a fully fleshed-out argument or thesis. I need to come here ready to ponder, to plumb the depths, to peek in the nooks and crannies.

That’s the mission, anyway. Here’s to a better, more thoughtful, more attentive 2025 in which I stand more like a tree and less like a leaf against the winds of the discourse.

UPDATE: Just kidding. I eventually turned this into a Leaflet.pub blog, both to give it some room of its own and in the interest of experimenting with blogging in ATProto land. ↩
OTHER UPDATE: OK, I'm strong enough to admit this just didn't work at all. After a trial run of weekly posts, I found the cadence tiresome and the output uninspired, so I’ve pivoted to this Seen/Read/Heard diary. If I want to go deeper on anything I'm watching / paging through / piping through headphones, I can just do a standalone post. ↩

Bluesky Replies as Comments

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been on Bluesky a lot lately. I joined about a year and half ago, but since it blew up at the beginning of the month,¹ it’s been exciting to see everything people have been doing with it. It feels like the platform has truly made it now that the tinkerers are out in force, and their experiments have felt like something from an earlier internet era, when user control was at a premium and we weren’t all so hemmed in by apps rigorously streamlined to keep us from navigating away.

On an open network, so much more is possible. Bluesky’s a big sandbox where people have been figuring out how to connect skeets² to the pages of the internet through Chrome extensions, how to create their own customized filtering algorithms, and, as I discovered a couple of weeks ago, how to turn Bluesky’s threaded replies into slick comment sections.

I first caught the idea from Emily Liu, who posted this:

And a short while later, Cory Zue followed up, turning Liu’s work into a pluggable npm package.

I’ve been wanting a way to add comments to my posts, if only to incentivize myself to post more often, so I decided to get in on the fun myself. Rather than just grabbing Zue’s plugin, though, I opted to reverse-engineer some of his and Liu’s work in .tsx files into straight .js files, for compatibility with my existing Gatsby setup. After some copying over into a series of components and a bit of refactoring, you can observe the results below.

Is it wise to pull in a comment section from Bluesky? I suppose we could debate about it, though I don’t think it’s much different from pulling in replies from some other service, like Disqus. Plus, because the comments are entirely built in their own set of components, I can strip them back out if they ever feel like a mistake, or if Bluesky itself ever goes the way of enshittification. This is, in the end, just a trial run. Nothing’s gotta be permanent when users have control.

I still have a few tweaks to make. I want to include some of Zue’s filtering options, for instance, to do away with repetitive replies such as the 📌, should they become an annoyance. But for now, comments are at least here and working. Let me know what you think.

When so many people flocked from the bird app, as the now-blatant mouthpiece continues to enshittify. ↩
Yes, I’ve accepted that’s what they’re called. ↩

We're Mad as Hell. What Now?

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Screenshot of actor Peter Finch as Howard Beale in the film _Network_ (1976)

It was a week or two before the election that I first started making the connection. I was up late again, scrolling through TikTok, watching video after video of people shouting—shouting at each other,¹ shouting at the powers that be, shouting simply to shout about this or that.

Just a total sea of grievance, and I was letting it wash over me and not feeling particularly happy about it and scrolling madly. I started thinking about exactly what information/value I and anybody else getting these particular videos on their FYP² were deriving from these rants.

Somehow I got to thinking about the film Network, and about the unrestrained ravings of the character Howard Beale, the news anchor turned “mad prophet of the airwaves,” whose famous speech in the movie galvanizes a politically resigned viewing audience into running to their windows across the nation to scream, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”

When the movie came out in 1976, the idea of someone with an audience turned loose on the airwaves to spew their every unedited thought and thus move the minds of millions was novel, groundbreaking, and over the years, as we’ve moved from AM talk radio to Alex Jones to Twitch/YouTube streamers, people have come to see it as prescient. But I specifically bring up Twitch and YouTube because I’m starting to wonder what it means for the ranters and for their audience when anybody can set up a camera and a mic and get to venting.

In Network, Beale’s fulminations jolt his audience awake because they are an anomoly in a staid, stodgy, centralized media environment, giving voice to their basest frustrations. As Faye Dunaway, playing a cynical TV producer in the film, puts it:

The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression. They’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve screwed themselves limp and nothing helps. So this concept analysis report concludes, ’The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them.’ I’ve been telling you people since I took this job six months ago that I want angry shows.

The media environment today, though, has plenty of talking heads willing to articulate the people’s rage, and it’s anything but staid and stodgy, let alone still centralized. According to the Pew Research Center, more people every day are getting their news regularly from podcasts and social media, and when they do, it’s often delivered passively by influencers more concerned with maintaining audience attention than with any project of accuracy and/or depth.

“A very small minority of voters may ever encounter the carefully prepared written material that many professional journalists produce at any newsroom anywhere,” writes Matt Pearce, in the first of an unsparing trio of Substack newsletters analyzing the broken media/information landscape in the wake of the 2024 election. And he elaborates on this point in his second piece:

Consumers have gotten pretty tolerant of bullshit. By “bullshit” I’m referring broadly to the kind of stuff—like social media commentary, podcast chat shows or ChatGPT summaries—that can contain factual information but often contains nonsense, in a context where there’s zero consequences for bullshitting to begin with and then bullshitting even more. Consumers hardly ever realize it, but they hold traditional news media to vastly higher standards of accurate and ethical behavior than practically every other information source they encounter, even when they’ve started relying on those other information sources instead of the news media. It’s good consumers hold journalism to high standards. The problem here is that the bar is getting lowered, not raised, for everything else.

In Network, Beale explains on air that he himself began deviating from his written news scripts because he “just ran out of bullshit,” so it seems bullshit has now swung to the other extreme, from just-the-facts reportage offering no broader view of societal issues to generalized opinions from frustrated internet yappers who rarely take the time to back up their thoughts with deeper analysis relying on hard data and historical precedent.

So I guess what I’m ultimately thinking about is this: if unvarnished, low-information rage and frustration were thought to be what would wake people from their stupor in 1976, and if unvarnished, low-information rage and frustration are what we now have in abundance (from hundreds upon thousands of decentralized sources rather than any set of centralized sources), then how effective is that rage, really, now, at moving people to action? To put it another way, if everyone’s blowing off steam, how does anybody stand out in the mist? Is there now a different sort of message, packaged in a different way, that’s required to actually break through to large numbers of people? Does it involve coming to topics with a great amount of care, curiosity, and consideration and less unearned certainty and/or self-righteous grandstanding?

I don’t know the answer here, and I’m not looking to scold or tone police. I just wonder if there’s not some middle ground that we haven’t found yet. And if we’re all potential media influencers now,³ it sure seems like something we’re all gonna have to start thinking about.

Not just about politics but an awful lot about politics: the left shouting at those on the right, those on the right returning serve; “leftists” and “liberals” shouting at each other, talking as if the two labels/sides are clearly defined and agreed upon in the first place; third-party advocates shouting in all sorts of directions.⁴ ↩
And I know I wasn’t the only one, given how much engagement these sorts of videos were getting. ↩
Meaning all of us participating in the ecosystem of algorithmic social media, which I would argue is now just as much a part of the mainstream media as any legacy outlet, given that the post of any random schmoe can hit like a slot machine and spread to thousands or even millions. ↩
Yes, I’ve got a few footnotes here. Apologies in advance. I promise they won’t be part of every post, but I’m trying to throw a bit of everything into this early entry to stress-test the blog layout I’ve been building for this site in Gatsby. Please clap. ↩

Back to the Text

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Image by Fernando Arcos (@ferarcosn), from Pexels.com

I turned forty earlier this month. Fifteen days ago, in fact. Took the day off. Woke up late. I think I did some laundry. Might have played a little of Life Is Strange: True Colors but quickly got bored. My wife made buffalo cauliflower wings and a lemon tart with shortbread crust—the same birthday dinner she's made the past three or four years, since the first time I had it and practically fell to my knees.

So it was a good, chill birthday. The best kind, in my opinion. But I've also been feeling the typical midlife dread. Had a dermatology checkup recently for some itchy skin, which turned into a conversation about a questionable mole, which I get to go back and have biopsied later today (”Don’t lose any sleep over it,” the doc told me during the last visit, but sometimes that’s easier said than done). Also had my first colonoscopy last week, five years earlier than most because of some family history.

So death has been on my mind, and all the things I’d still like to do before death—and all the things I’d like to stop doing to do more of the things I’d like to do.

I think that’s part of what’s occasioned my return to this space.

I built this site four years ago, as a showcase for my early projects as a software engineer, but since then I haven’t had much use for it. The blog was an early addition, but what exactly was I going to say there? I never had any idea. I posted an initial entry, then a second eight months later, in the middle of the pandemic, then nothing. And the site otherwise sat inert. The homepage displayed a couple of intro paragraphs I never updated. Links on the portfolio page died as old Heroku-based projects got deactivated after I stopped paying to keep them running. The form on the contact page took in not a single submission (and why would it when I was doing so little with the site, given that I was busy with a full-time coding job I already enjoyed and was learning from?).

This had, in short, become just another forgotten, neglected corner of the internet.

And then I started looking at Paul Ford’s old website, ftrain.com. It’s a beautiful place, the kind of Web 1.0 DIY organized mess that I sometimes wish we could get back to. I’ve already deleted my Facebook account. My Instagram timeline is ninety percent ads and suggested posts from strangers. Nearly all the people I once kept up with on Twitter have abandoned ship as Elon prepares to start charging for the service (and I’ll be joining them if it happens, now that I’m on Bluesky; I just want to stick it out as long as possible). TikTok’s still interesting, but it feels so passive, built for the mindless scroll, not the building of a community.

So I’ve been feeling like maybe the longform blog is due for a comeback, and maybe this can just be a space for that, nothing more. And why not add to the fun by bypassing all the usual blogging platforms (Tumblr, Medium, good ol’ Wordpress) to make something from scratch? I want to follow Katie Notopoulos’s call and relearn “to appreciate areas of the internet that are small.”

I’ve torn down most of the site for now. Goodbye nav bar, goodbye halfhearted old blog posts, goodbye about, portfolio, and contacts pages. Maybe some things will come back or get modified as I try to think about how to make this a space that feels worthwhile, but first I want to focus on the text.

What do I want to say?

RSS Feed for geoffdgeorge.com

Behold, the Future

Footnotes

Raising the Garage Door

The View

Footnotes

Don’t Be Precious

TikTok Gets (Barely) Banned

Footnotes

RIP, Mr. Lynch

Footnotes

Attending to My Attention

Footnotes

Bluesky Replies as Comments

Footnotes

We're Mad as Hell. What Now?

Footnotes

Back to the Text