Make The Thing

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Make The Thing

Last month on the pod I made the episode ‘Make Something To Your Taste‘. People said nice things about it – even if my own aesthetic choice/taste is not to theres.

One person who liked it was Jmac on mastodon from the blog Fogknife. My episode, in part, inspired him to make a new creative work of his own – also whilst documenting the progress in public. The project is Venthuffer:

Venthuffer is a series of monologues about the Steam Deck video game console. I realized in 2024 that I have become as much of a fan of this machine as I have for any piece of digital hardware since my years of deep identification with the Apple Macintosh, when I was much younger. This discovery surprised me a little, and I wanted a space to explore the reasons for it, out loud. Here it is.

It’s very personal and wonderfully produced, can’t wait for more. The first episode is about 5mins long too! which I very much approve of as you can imagine. lol

Now listen. I love this shit. It’s really inspiring. This is what the Internet is for. Make the thing, write thing thing, create the thing, whatever you want and share it. You don’t have to participate in the walled gardened social spaces or ‘play the game’ of getting a high score on social media.

You can just create the thing, own the thing, and share the thing on the Internet.

It’s this energy you can find on the on the web is something I think people are starting to rediscover.

While you can try to play the platform game. Like YouTube if you’re making videos, it’s a lot healthier and more productive to think of it as a free video hosting service instead of a social network or a platform.

I also do genuinely think we’re seeing a shift back to the open web. I know Venkat is retiring Ribbonfarm, (an end of an era) citing that blogs are ‘over’ and putting more of his energy into Substack. But to me, his whole post feels less like a statement on blogging and more a reflection of the effort he’s invested in other platforms. Blogging isn’t over – there’s so much vitality and creativity happening outside the big platforms, and I think audiences are catching on and finally rediscovering the hyperlink.

So, here’s my encouragement: if you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, making a podcast, or building your own corner of the web, just do it. Be like Jmac. Just make the thing.

The more of us there are putting things out, the better the web will be. The more people start blogs to blog about their lives and creative work – and not try and make passive income with Adsense or whatever blogging was in danger of turning into for a minute there – the more we bring back a richness and diversity that social media often flattens.

Create what you want, in your way, and share it on your terms. The open web needs it. We all do.

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On The Blog:

Blue Ant Trilogy

Over the last few months, I’ve been in conversation with Eddie Rathke from Wolf Newsletter about William Gibson’s Blue Ant Trilogy as part of his ongoing book club. Eddie has taken on the challenge of reading all of William Gibson’s books in order this year, and I joined him for the Blue Ant Trilogy, often known as the ‘Bigend Books.’

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• PROJECT FORK began – All day Booksprint #1 with Rival on Tuesday
• PROJECT DIVE had a long call with partner in crime
• Catch up about PROJECT DIVE
• Full Day on PROJECT ENTRY
• Call with Sarena @ World Weaver Press

Terminal Access

Eddie Rathke wrote a great piece this week: against the algorithm. Really recommend.

You might ask why I persist, why I deliberately write about things that alienate my potential audience.

I don’t have a great reason except that I am interested in reading deeply into something, into interrogating a subject and myself, into tracing trails of memory and the way art has bled into my life and shaped who and what I am.

And I do it for an audience much larger than I ever expected to have.

If all I wanted were the numbers to go up, I’d write about politics and especially culture war.

Also, and I can’t belive I’m saying this… Check out this 2.5h conversation between 1975’s Matty Healy and Joshua Citarella. It’s absolutely fantastic. They cover so much. Its really crazy how ‘mainstream’ outlets have pulled one sentence out of this long interview and turned it into a bit of a shitstorm. I guess swifties are masters of this.

Reading

The Lays of Marie de France I burnt though all 12 narrative poems this week. Absolutely fantastic. Can’t express how good it they were, all about courtly love. Here’s the blurb:

This is a prose translation of the lais or poems attributed to Marie de France. Little is known of her but she was probably the Abbess of the abbey at Shaftesbury in the late 12th century, illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet and hence the half-sister of Henry II of England. It was to a king, and probably Henry II, that she dedicated these poems of adventure and love which were retellings of stories which she had heard from Breton minstrels. She is regarded as the most talented French poet of the medieval period.

Been really inspired by this book. I think I’m going to read some more of the Knightly Tales

Still on deck: Wisdom – Letters of St. Joseph the Hesychast, Puppets, Gods, Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing

Nervous Gender – Music From Hell (2023 Re-Release)

This amazing documentary on the history of West Coast Punk and the ‘Chinatown Punk Wars’ came up on my Tumblr feed the other day, as I follow the Alice Bag hashtag (previously on the blog).

Anyways about 2/3rds of the way though the documentary it brings up a band called ‘Nervous Gender’. The founders of what today would be known as the queercore movement.

Music from Hell is just that. Distorted keyboards and synthesizers with punk as fuck lyrics screaming, yelling and shouting over the top. Monsters is the opening track on the album and ROCKS hard. The album sounds as fresh now in 2024 as it did when it came out in 1981.

In fact, hearing it in back 1981 or seeing them support Psychic TV or NON in the early 80’s must have felt like an alien landing in your life. Especially when you consider that ‘The Birdie Song’ spent 7 weeks in the top 10 in 1981 in the UKt:g

Remember Kids:

The catch is the same as any game: to enter the magic circle, you have to give up some of your real life.

Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson