There’s been a noticeable shift over the last two years or so towards owning your own corner of the Internet. Besides myself, plenty of others are doing the same. Mattias Ott even has a newsletter all about it.
Cultivating your own digital garden is one part of taking back the internet, but we’re still figuring out what the post Twitter community looks like.
I made friends on Twitter. It was a special place. I miss it. Like an ex that broke all our collective hearts, we’re still working through that grief.
We need to try and move on - make new relationships, memories, and Internet friends.
Blogrolling
I’m a big believer of be the change you want to see in the world, so I added a blogroll to my site - a place recommend some other nice corners of the Internet. I wanted to go one step further though, and shout out three moments recently when I enjoyed the web feeling a little smaller.
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One of the nicest and smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of working with is Neil Williams. Like myself, he started blogging again. He has a really interesting job working at the BFI, and writes about it regularly, so his blog his definitely worth reading. Also like myself, he has been enjoying Cyberpunk, and when reading a weeknote I was surprised to spot my own love letter to Night City.
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After adding his site to my Blogroll, I got an email from Jason saying he loved the design of my site and thanking me for linking to his. He writes absolutely banging posts, but he wrote one recently titled Where have all the websites gone? It hit hard. I love websites. I miss them too. Let’s make more!.
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Louis Pilfold made a programming language - Gleam. I met Louis at a rave and recognised him from some of his talks and introduced myself. Then, a few weeks ago, I went to the first Gleam London meetup, which was also around the time Gleam reached 1.0. Everyone there was super nice and interesting. Being there at the start of the a programming language felt monumentous. Louis is a very cool person, but even cooler is that I know someone who made a programming language! How cool is that!?
Twitter was the townsquare, and for better or worse, became a de-facto place where the Internet community gathered.
Hopefully our websites bring us back together again.
Other things
We’re planning our Wedding, a cruise, a holiday in Miami, and a garden renovation. All in the next 4 months. No sweat.
- 📺 The Scoop was a wild watch. I love a good story about how massive pieces of shit the Royal Family are.
- 📺 Still MAFS Australia. A facsinating insight into the human condition of wanting love and terrible plastic surgery.
- 📺 Taskmaster season 17 is off to a strong start. I’m cheering on Joanne McNally for Ireland, but John Robins and Sophie Willins are cracking me up.
- 📺 Big Mood on Channel 4. Real life besties Nicola Coughlan and Lydia West play fictional besties hanging around Hackney while Coughlan’s Maggie deals with being constantly on the verge of a mental health crisis. Funnier than it sounds.
- 🎙️ Joanne McNally’s podcast on the Avril Lavigne doppelganger theory has been cracking me up. She’s hilarious, and the levels she goes to made me laugh out loud.
- 🎙 BBC Sounds really smashed the recommendations with The Bomb. I listened to season 1 in a few days. It follows the story of Leo Szilard and his role in the creation of the atomic bomb. It’s made by someone whose grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project, so it grapples with that too.
- 🍿 Both the old and the new Roadhouse films. Equally good and shit in different ways.
- 🍿 The Antisocial Network was crazy. Who would’ve guessed the history of the US pivoted at an anime convention.
- 🎮 Under the castle on the Playdate is such an addictive little game. It’s interesting to see how developers approach making games with such limitions.
- 🎮 Dipping back into Halo: Infinite for The Yappening event. Fighting waves of Grunts is total carnage, and they’re surprisingly difficult for the lowest level of the Banished hierarchy.
- 🎮 Game Pass added Shadow of the Tomb Raider, so I got around to playing the previous game, Rise of the Tomb Raider. It feels like a mix of The Last of Us and Uncharted. A lot wonkier than what Naughty Dog might put out, but it’s scratching that itch.