![\"hooded_figure_on_beach_1080.jpg\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/hooded-figure-on-beach-1080.jpg\" "\\"Hooded")
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| Hooded figure on the beach by Engin Akyurt via Pexels | \n
Last week was one of the sadder weeks on the celebrity front with the passing of both Dolly Parton and Tim Curry within a day of each other. Both of them were people that were highly respected for numerous reasons. They were worthy of the tributes many posted. And they truly deserved to be memorialized.
\nSo why didn’t I post anything about them? The answer is both simple and very complicated.
\nAs I get older I find my relationship with death changing for several reasons.
\nThe first is the passing of people that don’t get nearly the attention they should have gotten in my opinion. A few examples: Vangelis, Klaus Schulze and Chris Squire. All of these artists deserved a lot more credit, and a lot more attention that they received in my opinion.
\nOthers get the wrong type(s) of attention. For example, when Quincy Jones passed most of the memorials focused on his connection to Michael Jackson. And, while his work with MJ was legendary, Quincy’s career was far more than just his work with Jackson. It was so frustrating to see that I posted the following on Mastodon:
\n\n\n\nImagine actually having a career in the #music #business that spans 7(!) decades, and being able to straddle the lines between pop, jazz, r&b and many other styles of music. This man has what should be seen as an incredible legacy.
\nAnd yet, some will only know him for his production of Thriller. (sheesh)1
\n
(Note: I fixed the typos in the original post.)
\nSomeone tried to defend the linked AP article by stating that Thriller was the best-selling album of all time. So f***ing what? One album versus a career that spanned seven decades? Surely the AP could have come up with a more appropriate headline.
\nSo, yeah, I’m becoming more of a curmudgeon when it comes to celebrities being memorialized. Especially when true artists are getting totally, or near totally ignored.
\nI don’t talk about it much, but the past decade has brought death into focus in my life in a much more personal way than I would like. Not to say that some of it I didn’t know was eventually going to happen, but that doesn’t blunt the sting of it at all.
\nIn June 2016 my father passed of natural causes. I knew it was coming, his health had been in decline for some time. In fact, I had spent the better part of a year making trips up to visit my parents at least once a month. More frequently if my mom told me she needed help with anything.
\nIt still came as a shock. Why? It was, to me, quite sudden. I had adjusted to the idea that my father was going to need long-term care. My mother down-played how serious his health decline had actually become. When I received a call around 6:30am from my mom on that morning, I knew something serious was happening. I didn’t expect to be told my dad had passed in his sleep during the night.
\nBut, the next turn was something I hadn’t expected. My mother had seemed to be doing quite well during my visits and in our regular weekly conversations on the phone. However, after my fathers' funeral it became obvious that she had been hiding the decline in her health.
\nNothing made this more evident than the day she went out to run a few errands that should have taken 2-3 hours tops, and didn’t come home for over 6 hours. And when she got home, it was obvious that there had been body work done on her car. Turned out she had sideswiped some construction cones on the road, and had taken her car to the shop to try to hide the damage.
\nA few months later I had to take a leave of absence from work when my mom needed to go in for surgery for a melanoma on her shoulder. While this could have been a trivial procedure, in her case there were concerns because of (a) her age, and (b) her previous bouts with breast cancer. It was at that point that my sister and I had a conversation and decided it was best for me to move back home to help her.
\nMy mom passed three years later. She was taken by gallbladder cancer that was discovered too late.
\nAfter my mom passed, I kept touch with my sister a little more than I had in the past. Not that either of us were in danger of meeting the grim reaper, but because we were the only members left of our family. At least, I thought neither of us were meeting the grim reaper. But just about two years ago my sister was found deceased in her house.
\nShe had sustained a leg injury that had made walking difficult. She had tried several things on her own to ease the pain and start the healing from what she thought was some deep bruising (she had a thyroid condition that contributed to her bruising easily). When that didn’t work, she went and saw a doctor. The doctor recommended that she take some pain meds, and stay off her feet for up to a week, and suggest using a cane when she needed to walk. All of this advice she followed.
\nLast I talked to her, she had told her manager she was going to take a long weekend based on medical advice. Four or five days later her manager called me when he hadn’t been able to reach her. I tried to reach her as well, and when I couldn’t reach her I called in a wellness check. I found out from the police that she had passed.
\nShe was found sitting on the edge of her bed, apparently unable to get up. Her cellphone was plugged in, charging, in another room, completely out of reach. I never asked, but I assume that she had been stuck there for days, quite a brutal way to pass if you ask me.
\nIf that was enough death in my life, there is more. January 2025 my neighbors house burned down. Fortunately, or not, I wasn’t home when it happened. I came home to find my street blocked off by the firefighters as they were struggling to put out the fire. It was so bad that they had to call in the fire departments from two neighboring towns to help with the fire (which is stunning because the house itself is actually quite small).
\nI learned later that the husband of the couple that owned the house had a heart attack. His wife had called the paramedics and left with them to go to the hospital. Apparently less than an hour after they left the house went up in flames. (Speculation: something had accidentally been left on that started the fire, but I haven’t confirmed that.) The husband died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
\nWhile his passing didn’t really affect me directly as they were a couple I only knew in passing, it really started me focusing on the people that I do care about. I decided to start reaching out to a number of them. And that’s when I found out someone had passed I never could have guessed.
\nA good friend of mine had passed in October 2024, right around the same time I was dealing with the passing of my sister. This was someone that I had a serious connection with. Her father leased to me the house I lived in for five or more years. I spent holidays with her family. I helped her son find some music to inspire him in studying trombone. They were like an extension of my own family to me.
\nAs far as I know, one day she had a migraine and decided to lay down for a nap. She’d had migraines on and off for years, so nothing seemed unusual. She never woke up. Apparently she had a stroke in her sleep and passed away.
\nTo this day I can’t put into words how much her passing hurts. It hurts more that I didn’t hear she’d passed until many months later. Had I known, I would have liked to have been there for her family. I would have liked to be there to pay respects to her one last time. But that can never happen now.
\nThis brings us to last week and the passing of Dolly and Tim Curry. Only it doesn’t, because at this time in my life, it can’t be that simple.
\nLast weekend a friend told me a mutual friend from our college days had been diagnosed with cancer. At that point the doctor wasn’t certain what type of cancer it was. There were several possibilities that it could be one that had a high survivability rate. They had done the tests and were waiting on the results.
\nThose results came in on Wednesday, in the middle of all the memorials for Dolly and Tim Curry. My friend found out he has the type of cancer that is terminal. The doctor has estimated that he has five months left on this planet. We have plans to visit him as soon as possible, there is no way I can let one more person leave my life without having the chance to say goodbye, and try to do anything I can for them.
\nAnd, in the end, I don’t know what to do with all of this.
\nLook, there are some deaths that are expected. My parents were at that age. My father was a mild surprise, but I was well-prepared with my mother. My neighbor had reached the age where it was more and more likely to happen. That doesn’t make them any easier, just something that I can rationally understand. I put Dolly and Tim Curry, and many other celebrity deaths in this basket: it’s not necessarily easy, but there their passing can be rationally understood.
\nThen there’s this other basket. My sister was only a few years older than me (in fact, in a little over a year I will have outlived her). My friend who invited me into her family. She was twenty years younger than me. It doesn’t make sense, she was a strong, community minded person. She was doing good in the world. She had a son, and a spouse. Her parents are still alive. There’s little rationalizing her passing.
\nFinally, there’s my friend whose has been diagnosed with a terminal cancer. He has so many people that love and cherish him, it’s almost crazy. Honestly, anywhere he goes, he makes friends. He is the kind of person that brought joy into the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of peoples' lives. He is a performer, he is father, he is just simply a good person.
\nMy mother’s needs took away my time to grieve my father’s passing properly. The pandemic took away the chance I had to grieve my mother properly. I don’t think I’ve properly grieved the passing of anyone for over a decade at this point. And now another friend is passing, and I just don’t know what to do with all of this.
\nI just want to scream at death: TAKE A F***ING VACATION ALREADY!
\n![\"raised_bridge.jpg\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/raised-bridge.jpg\" "\\"The") | \n
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| The Bridge Over âContent Marketingâ Bulls*** | \n
I went down a rabbit hole recently, or at least I tried to. I found it difficult to come up with the information needed to write about the topic I was researching. But while I did my research a different topic came up: Why People Quit Blogging. Then, as chance would have it, a post crossed my attention on Bubbles: Bye, bye, Bear Blog!1. I, of course, responded to the article and attempted to inspire the author to keep going. But, as an update on the post would have it, they are still planning to stop writing, quite literally at the one-year mark.
\nThere has also been talk about meta blogging (ie, blogging about blogging). This article falls into that category. There is also some talk about the quality of posts, some posts about making our blogs more interactive, and some about making them more interlinked. All of these are topics that I have interest in talking about, but I will save them for another time.
\nFor now, I want to turn to the topic of why people quit blogging. I think it is a more important topic, especially in light of the Bye, bye, Bear Blog article. After all: if people quit blogging, talking about post quality, interlinking, and being interactive is kind of pointless. And, I think there are low value articles that are doing a lot of damage to would-be bloggers.
\nAn article by Nadia Alimi titled Why Most People Quit Blogging After just a year (And How to Avoid It)2. Came up during my research for my unnamed project. During my research I kept running into a bunch of extremely low-value posts. Posts using many SEO tricks just to score highly in search results. In Nadia Alimi’s case, I figured they had done some keyword targeting to cause their article to turn up in my search results, despite it being unrelated to my research. However, I was intrigued enough to click on the link. (So, yeah, SEO tricks do work sometimes.)
\nAnd, as I suspected, Ms. Alimi is in fact running a business that centers around the subject of blogging. She is running a business convincing people they can make money by blogging. Exactly as I thought it would be.
\nI decided to turn away from my research briefly to examine this topic a bit. What I found was surprising. First, when I searched for âwhy people quit bloggingâ Ms. Alimi’s article didn’t turn up on page one of my search results. That is funny, in my opinion. It’s obvious that âbloggingâ and âquitâ are so heavily competitive that she decided to target other keywords instead.
\nSo, what did that first page of results look like? Well, here’s a list of the articles that turned up:
\nWant to know the truth about all nine of these âarticlesâ (including Ms. Alimi’s article)? They are self-serving pieces of garbage. Don’t get me wrong, they are structured in a way that will make you think they are answering the question. And, in a respect, they are. However, there is a major issue with all of them: they lack credible information.
\nThe point of the articles isn’t to share genuine, useful information with the reader. Instead, they are an exercise is SEO supremacy, generating traffic for the authors' website. And the result is, they get the opportunity to sell their services. But, if these articles are all about generating website traffic, what are they basing their writing on? And what advice should they have been giving instead?
\nMany of these websites will take as little as a single source of information, or a handful of sources, and spin a narrative that (at least on a surface level) seems to be aligned with their source(s). The sources are articles like:
\nReaders who are less than familiar with the subject of blogging don’t catch on to what they are looking at. They see a list of sources, and think the author has done a lot of research, and has the intent of boiling down the information into a more digestible form. So, they read the article, and are met with topics that seem to align with the information they are looking for. Topics like:
\nIt’s almost like the would-be author is being handed a check-list of things to avoid. And, depending on if the articles' author went the extra step, they continue with a list of things the would-be author should be doing:
\nAnd while all of this might seem like good advice, there is an underlying premise that has been totally obscured from the reader. The underlying premise is that all these would-be bloggers are doing it because they want financial gains of some sort. The assumption is that the audience is âcontent marketersâ and not ordinary people.
\nThis is what you learn if you dig into the references that these articles are based on. The references will tell you things like:
\nIn other words: this is all about the industry, and not about the person. These articles aren’t written to encourage people that want to find other readers. They are written for people that want to build a business, for people that want to find customers to sell a product or service to.
\nThe fact that the authors of these articles go to some length to obscure their underlying motives says more about who they are. In a good scenario they are running low quality businesses that offer services no one really needs. In a bad scenario they are outright scammers.
\nI met someone who runs one of these businesses. A low-quality âside hustleâ that had I known about, I never would have hired him for a different job. (He had basically built several side businesses. But I had hired him for his primary business. That business required specific certifications and insurance, which he had.)
\nHis approach was this: he did research by watching public records. Any new businesses he saw applying for licenses, or permits, etc. he checked to see if they had a website. If they didn’t, he fed the business name into a program that generated domain names the business would want. He then purchased the top 5â10 domains.
\nNext he would contact the business and offer his service to build a website for them, with the promise of excellent SEO, support, and so on. If the business turned him down, he backed off and waited for them to come back to buy the domain. At that point, he made a high-pressure pitch to build the businesses' website. If they still didn’t want his service, he would âsellâ the domain, generally at a heavily marked up price, but keep the domain under his own control as the registrar.
\nHe didn’t know jack s*** about building websites. He knew how to use a page builder and had a buddy that bought white label hosting, and helped build the sites. (This buddy also handled the domain record updates for people wanting to use their own website designers.) Several hundred small businesses use him for their websites. His estimated net income from this business is around $80-90K per month. The man is a literal millionaire, and if you saw him walking down the street you would never guess what he did.
\nHe is the kind of person that has a website with articles like âWhy Bloggers Quit After A Yearâ. It’s not about helping anyone. It’s about scaring people into using his service.
\nEnd of rant / side story.
\nThe Indieweb isn’t about running a business. At least, not the kind of business that is âcontent marketingâ based. Or, at least, I hope that’s true. That isn’t to say I’m against any commerce going on in this space. I’m just hopeful that it’s more personal, and not the kind of stuff propagated by content marketing.
\n(Let me provide some examples. There are several people on Mastodon: authors, artists, illustrators, etc. that make their wares available online and post about them. But, they don’t just post about their wares. They post about numerous other topics as well. And, much to my surprise, after I purchased my typewriter15, I found that the seller has a Bear Blog16. This is all amazing - I love dealing directly with people, especially people with specific talents.)
\nNow, after blogging for over a decade, I have some thoughts on how to approach online writing. And, the irony is, I would almost structure it similar to one of these scam articles, but without the implied moneymaking BS. Here are some thoughts for someone who isn’t a writer that wants to start writing online.
\nMany of these articles will make suggestions like âdefine clear goals,â or âunderstand who you are writing forâ. But, if you are starting from the beginning you probably don’t know what your goals are. Or, if you think you have a goal, you are likely just throwing ideas out there to just experiment.
\nAll of that is fine. Write about anything you want to write about. You don’t have to have a theme, or a direction, or anything, really. The only thing you need is a desire to write something. Just know that you are starting something new, and it will take you time to find your way in the blogging space.
\nA tiny aside. Several years ago I decided to remove a bunch of posts from one of my blogs. They were early posts I wrote when I didn’t have a direction. I archived them on another blog that I don’t advertise (I don’t even know if I can still log into it). I came across it recently, and I re-read a couple of the posts. They made me cringe. But, I’m happy I wrote them. They were a large part of where I started, and now I can see the progress I’ve made over the last decade. And I can see how I’ve developed as a person, the changes in my thought processes, beliefs, and more.
\nThat’s where I believe new bloggers should start: write anything. It can be personal, it can be dreams, observations, it can be about your research, or things you admire. Literally anything. Eventually you will find what you are comfortable writing, and you’ll be able to look back and understand yourself a little better.
\nA lot of these articles will talk about having a âschedule that doesn’t put pressure on youâ. That’s mostly correct. I’d recommend not having a schedule. Think of writing instead as a recreation, a hobby. You know you will have periods when you don’t have time for your hobbies, and other times you will. So, make writing one of your hobbies.
\nAnd, don’t think that just because you are making time for your hobby that you have to produce something. It’s perfectly acceptable to spend a few hours writing and decide that you don’t want to publish what you’ve written. It’s also fine to realize that what you have written has problems and isn’t exactly what you want to say and publish it anyway.
\nBlogging is about you, it’s about your process, it’s about what you are getting from it. It’s not about being perfect, or expecting the rest of the world to agree with you. (I can almost guarantee there will be people that won’t agree with you.)
\nWhile you can do things to help with building an audience, such as joining Bubbles17 you don’t have to do that. You don’t need anyone to read your blog, if you don’t want them to.
\nAnother side story. Years ago I found a music podcast was unlike any music podcast I’d ever encountered. It was just a new piece of music every day. It was a one-person show, and he kept doing this podcast for over twelve years.
\nAfter a while he started bundling up all the music he’d released and uploaded it to the Internet Archive18. There are now over 200 releases, many of them containing more than 15 tracks. And guess what? I just found that he is still producing music under another alias. Still as obscure as before, and still only seeing (mostly) single digit downloads.
\nThe point is: he doesn’t predicate the joy he gets in making music on people listening to it. He’s happy just to put out a release when he can. It doesn’t matter if 5 people hear it, or 100 people hear it. He doesn’t expect an audience.
\nDon’t spend a lot of money on writing online. In fact, you don’t have to spend any. There are plenty of free options, like Bear Blog19 for getting started. Don’t worry about having a lot of fancy bells-and-whistles. Just sit down and write.
\nWhy do I recommend not spending money on your blogging platform? Because it can turn this activity from a hobby into an obligation in your mind. If you spend money on something, many of us tend to want to think we are getting the most value out of our purchase. In the case of blogging, you may start to feel that you have invested so much that you need to write more to make it worth paying for.
\nAnd that can have negative effects on your writing. Writing as an obligation instead of as an activity that adds value to your life can add pressure and stress. If you aren’t paying for your blog, you don’t have to worry about how often you write, or that you aren’t getting value out of it. You measure the value by what you do, on your own terms.
\nIf anything, look for the option that is easiest to use. Don’t look at feature lists and think X has more features than Y. Measuring a blogging platform that way is a sure way to disincentivize yourself. I am literally speaking about this from experience.
\nThe blogging platform I used to use added all sorts of whiz-bang features to it after I’d been using it for over five years. But, as they added more and more features, the less I was motivated to use it. All the new features pushed away the features that I wanted, and made it less intuitive for me to use. Once I moved to a platform with fewer features, I was able to start writing again. I just configured the site to look how I wanted, and now I am writing nearly daily again.
\nI didn’t mention this earlier, but AI is becoming more prevalent in those âcontent marketingâ surveys. It appears that content marketers are trying to cut down the time it takes them to write a post by using AI, instead of working through all the writing themselves. And I get it, there are some cases that AI could make sense, but not for your personal blog.
\nOn your personal blog you want to develop your own voice. Some of the best blogs I have ever read are from people that have their own, unique style of writing. (This was before AI was a consideration.) I loved the cadences in their language, I loved the metaphors that show how the author thought, I loved the jokes they came up with. It’s all unique, and specific to them. But with AI, a lot of that is lost, or watered down. That’s not what you want to put out there in the world. Your blog should be your experience, your perspective, written in your unique voice. Not something created through an automation process to sound professional or academic.
\nThat isn’t to say you shouldn’t use any tools. I write all my posts in Obsidian20, and I use a few tools with it to help me strengthen my writing:
\n\nThat’s it. Those three tools really help me catch a lot of the mistakes I routinely make, while not interfering with my writing style.
\nI don’t use the online version of LanguageTool as it now has an AI based tool that does âparaphrasingâ. Instead, I use the self-hosted version. It doesn’t have a lot of the features included in the subscription service, but it’s enough for me. It’s up to you if you feel you need to use a subscription based grammar checker service.
\nOne of the few things that is a good takeaway from all the source articles cited by the low-effort blogs is that people tend to quit in about the 12-18 month range. I cited an example of this at the very start of this article: a person was giving up on their blog at exactly the one-year mark.
\nPersonally, I went for years with one of my blogs only getting single digit readership. Oh, the numbers looked actually looked a lot higher. But, when I checked more closely, I found that there were a lot of bots and scrapers that were (for some weird reason) scraping my blog - despite it being focused on a topic that had a very niche appeal. (And again, this was before AI.)
\nBut now, after a decade I have anywhere from a few dozen readers, to hundreds of readers for my blogs (yes, plural). And, I’ve even been hit with tens of thousands of views when a couple of my posts hit the front page of Hacker News.
\nThe point is, if I had given up after six, twelve, or eighteen months I would have lost out on a lot. I wouldn’t have developed my writing style, I wouldn’t be as good at doing research and writing long essays. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have found more like-minded people, or even more people that disagree with me. All of this has made the years I’ve spent working on my blogs worth it to me: so don’t worry about how long it takes, it can be beneficial.
\nThis, if anything, is one of my biggest blogging flaws. I love watching the numbers: seeing how many people read the articles, seeing where they are coming from, getting an idea if they are looking at more than one article when they visit. But that’s me. When I started one of my blogs years ago I had a mission statement for it. I tried to use the numbers to measure the progress I was making on my mission.
\nOf course, the numbers lied. People weren’t really finding my writing, it was mostly bots, but I didn’t know that at the time. Realizing that the numbers were lying to me really hit me hard.
\nSo, don’t watch the numbers. Don’t get invested in them. And most importantly: don’t use them as a measure of your success (or lack of success). That’s not what’s important.
\nAt first, you might think you are going to run out of ideas to write about on your blog. But if you keep going, you will find there are infinite topics for you to write about. The key to finding that infinite well of writing is quite simple: keep a list of ideas. They will come to you randomly, or you might sit down and just brainstorm either alone or with someone else to come up with ideas.
\nThe ones that stick with me the most are the ones that come up randomly throughout the day, or just before I go to bed. I just write down these ideas in a list. Currently, that list is sitting at over forty article ideas. Some of them I have been actively working on for a while now, and some are brand new. And, there are still others that I haven’t added to the list yet (I have a stub entry for a series of posts - so I won’t forget it).
\nAnother thing that will happen is when you are researching or writing one article, you will suddenly find a topic that’s too big to include in your current work. That’s how this post was born. I was doing research about a statistic that has been reported for over a decade without significant change. While I was doing that research, the article by Nadia Alimi2 came up in my search results. I knew the topic of âwhy bloggers quitâ was too large for the article I was writing, so I saved the idea. Then the Bye, bye Bear Blog!1 popped up, so I linked it in as part of this topic.
\nIt’s funny the way these things work out sometimes.
\nNow, I’ll be the first to say, some ideas just won’t work out. I’ve deleted at least a dozen ideas from my list in the last month or so. I took some time with them, did some research, and decided: (a) there wasn’t enough for me to work with, (b) I didn’t have anything to say, or (c) some topics that are too personal for me to put online. And that’s okay. Not every idea is going to generate a post that is going to be submitted for a Pulitzer Prize.
\nDon’t pay attention to the river of âcontent marketingâ bulls*** that is out there. While their advice may appear to be good at first, it is all predicated on the idea that you want to make money from your blogging. Don’t make that a goal. Instead, look at a blog as a way to develop yourself. Look at it as a hobby that you can do in your spare time without pressure, without a schedule, or any of the other malarkey these blogs are trying to sell you.
\nI offer advice from personal experience, instead of looking at some article or set of statistics. I’ve met at least one person who exemplified the kind of person that writes these âWhy bloggers quitâ articles. He was a despicable person. The only category of people I hate more are hardened criminals.
\nTo summarize my advice for new bloggers:
\nI know I’ve blathered a lot in this post, but I hope you have gained some insight or knowledge into blogging, what it is really about, and ignoring the river of content marketing manure.
\nWhy Most People Quit Blogging After just a year (And How to Avoid It) ↩︎
\nMore and more people are ditching blogging (and I can see why) ↩︎
\nThe Real Reason Most People Quit Blogging (And How to Avoid It) ↩︎
\nBlogging is not dead, just evolved. Learn how to thrive in the new era of blogging and SEO. ↩︎
\nAre people still reading blogs? I have always loved the idea of running a blog, however with todayâs e-commerce and numbers focused mindset, I’m not sure if people willingly follow blogs. ↩︎
\nThe 12th Annual Blogger Survey: What Content Works in 2025? ↩︎
\n![\"jtmorkis-chains-1080.jpg\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/jtmorkis-chains-1080.jpg\" "\\"Photo") | \n
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| Photo by: JTMorkis via Pixabay | \n
About a week ago there was a post by Trevor Morris titled The Loss of Links Continues1 to which both Naty S.2 and Michael Harley3 responded. I found these posts interesting, as they relate to another series of posts, such as Michael Harley’s post on making his blog more durable4 and his post on how he shares links5. There was also my post about embeds causing serious harm to one of my sites6.
\nFrom all of these articles I started doing some digging into the topic of link rot. What I found was a topic that was bigger in scope than I had initially thought, and I think is worth talking about further.
\nIn case I have readers that are unfamiliar with this topic, a quick definition of link rot. Linking is simply when one website has a reference that you can click that takes you to another piece of information. That information can be on the same website (like going to a different article, or pulling up a profile), or it can point to something on a different website (like all the posts I link in the end notes of this article). It is the singularly most fundamental item used for navigating the web.
\nLink rot is when a link no longer works. Typically, you’ll get something like a ânot foundâ error message. There are several variations on this error, known by their numeric codes: 301, 302, and 404. The cause for these errors are many, but the most common causes are:
\nSo, what we are talking about in this article are the way in which we handle these situations where information has been moved or removed from the internet. The idea being that we are trying to provide the best solution we can.
\nThe most common scenario we face is when a link has just completely disappeared. When this happens the most expedient way of handling this is to use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine7. And while this does attempt to ensure that a link is still pointing to something that is relevant, there are issues with this approach.
\nThe first issue I see with this approach is it’s quite possible to get an incorrect snapshot of the link target. For example, if a domain gets hijacked. It is possible that the most recent snapshot of a website is something completely different from what was originally intended.
\nAnother situation is a website that has changed the underlying content. There are cases in which the owner of a website has decided (for whatever reason) to change the content of their site, and then given up. In this case it’s very likely the Wayback Machine’s image will be of the changed content.
\nIt is possible, in these cases, to (most of the time) get an image of the intended content by searching through the snapshots. But this means that automation of updating links needs to be more aware of time. And, even then it is still possible to link to an image of a site that doesn’t match the context within an author’s post. IE, the target website updated a target (say adding a note of correction to an article), and we publish a post that is referencing that correction. What happens if the Wayback Machine doesn’t have an image of the target article containing the correction?
\nThis suggests to me there is a need to further investigate methods of not just providing an updated link, but of ensuring that the context is being preserved as well.
\nThe Internet Archive is one of the best tools available on the internet for finding obscure or potentially lost information. However, we need to be aware that it isn’t always the most accessible location for this that information. Unfortunately, politics has reared its ugly head when it comes to being able to access the Internet Archive.
\nAs I write this, the Internet Archive is reportedly blocked in five countries8. However, one of the reports appears to be erroneous, listing the United States back in April 2026. However, there is another listing stating that it is available in the United States. (And, I have not had issues reaching the Internet Archive⌠But of course that doesn’t mean it isn’t blocked at a state level.)
\nThe simple fact is, the countries that probably most need access to this information, won’t be able to access it from the Internet Archive. Of course, the fact that there are state level actors that are actively blocking parts of the internet isn’t something that we can directly effect.
\nHowever, having to switch links from targeting sources that were likely available globally, to a target that is known to be blocked in several regions is a less than optimal solution to this issue.\nFinding ways of providing relevant information without getting caught up in censorship filters is something we should consider.
\nThis is something that I don’t like to mention, but it has to be said. The Internet Archive has been subject to outages many times over its lifespan. Unfortunately, it appears that their architecture doesn’t have enough redundancy in order to weather these outages successfully.
\nThat isn’t to say that the information that they are storing is in jeopardy. They do have colocation facilities that have been quite successful in acting as a backup location for their storage. And, their storage and retrieval technology has greatly improved over the last decade. (I recall days when I would find something I had archived wasn’t available, and have to look at their storage system to find out what had failed. That is something I haven’t had to do in years.)
\nHowever, the fact is that both power and network disruptions have been a factor in service availability. This isn’t a new issue. It is an ongoing concern with their service.
\nThe Internet Archive wants to make all information that they store available in perpetuity. It’s a pretty simple statement that can be found on their site:
\n\n\nHow long will you store files?\nAs an archive our intention is to store and make materials in perpetuity. 9
\n
However, this is only a statement of intention. The issue is that (as mentioned above) there are state actors that block the information that the Internet Archive provides. But there are other concerns, for example, publishers blocking the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine10, and even content being removed based on simple requests11.
\nThis, therefore, means that the Archive cannot be considered a definitive record for all information stored within it. It might be the best option that we have, but it cannot be considered a primary source, but rather as just a source that is the closest thing we have to an accurate record.
\nI don’t have a complete answer. These are very deep issues that we have to contend with, and I don’t believe there is a single, most reliable answer.
\nOne of the things that might be useful is to record retrieval information in the same manner as Wikipedia.:
\n![\"Pasted](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/pasted-image-20260822110420.png\" "\\"Screenshot") | \n
|---|
| Screenshot of Wikipedia References | \n
If nothing else, this might help to document potential discrepancies between a Wayback Machine link, and the original link. Further, if a retrieval date could be encoded in a way that is parsable, we could use this is selecting the retrieval copy from the Wayback Machine. Of course, this assumes that there is an image that matches what we exactly used as our original reference.
\nThe final option, and it’s one that seems like an extreme option, but it may be the best option we have, is to capture our own images. I use Zotero12 for storing a lot of information, even my website bookmarks. One of the best options with this is that it can store images / snapshots when an item is added to Zotero:
\n![\"Pasted](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/pasted-image-20260822112353.png\" "\\"Screenshot") | \n
|---|
| Screenshot of Zotero entry showing Accessed Date | \n
The usefulness of this is it provides a record of when the link was added to a collection, when it was accessed, along with a snapshot. One option that might be worth investigating is keeping an archive of snapshots available, so if link rot is encountered, a snapshot can be provided in the link’s place.
\nAnother option that a tool like Zotero offers is the ability to generate a PDF of the content that you are saving. This would be useful if you want to have the content in a searchable format in the future.
\nOf course, using a bibliography database tool like Zotero has disadvantages. It’s not necessarily the most intuitive tool to use given that it’s more focused on users doing research. And, it isn’t a local first tool: it relies on cloud storage, which itself has challenges. For example, if you run out of storage you may need to pay for more, and that can be pricey. Personally, I haven’t looked into the issue of longevity where Zotero is concerned.
\nThere are many other options available: book managers, offline readers, and web clipping tools that offer features that may fill the needs for handling link rot. One that loos promising is an offline reader called Wallabang13 that can be self-hosted.
\nThe most simple option (at least for users of Firefox based browsers) could be printing webpages to PDF files, and building an index of the PDFs. The nice thing about this is a PDF printed from Firefox (or a variant) will have the URL and date in the header / footer (as long as they are turned on):
\n![\"Pasted](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/pasted-image-20260822182241.png\" "\\"PDF") | \n
|---|
| PDF of webpage, circled URL and Date | \n
Of course with Firefox variants you can also just save a screenshot. The problem with this, in my opinion, is that it will be on you to preserve the metadata that goes with the screenshot (ie, the URL, the date / time the screenshot was taken, storage and retrieval, etc.). And, to my surprise, a screenshot was larger than a PDF file (this wallabang.it page was 837K as a PDF, and over 1Meg as a PNG â not a huge difference, but a significant difference).
\nWhen I started working on an article about link rot, I didn’t expect it to take this turn. I hadn’t started with the concept that the current methods for dealing with link rot were not necessarily the best. In fact, I really wanted to look at this topic from the perspective of how it could affect our writing.
\nHowever, as I started working my way into the story, I realized that my original framing wasn’t going to be the best way to go. That talking about link rot was a whole topic unto itself that deserved some deeper investigation. The thing that really put me into this mindset was the idea of using the Wayback Machine to mitigate the situation.
\nWhile I love the Internet Archive, and the Wayback Machine, using it in this manner set off some alarm bells for me. The loudest of those alarm bells was: single point of failure. Should anything happen to the Internet Archive and / or the Wayback Machine, the mitigation would be broken. And, if it did break, it could actually make things worse.
\nAs I investigated things from this perspective, I realized that there were already issues with using the Wayback Machine, even in it’s non-broken state. These issues include it not being accessible from all countries, and the potential for posts to not be able to link to accurate snapshots.
\nIn the end I started thinking about how Wikipedia handles references. The thing that I noted that they do is to add a retrieval date to their references. This could at least help in providing an accurate link to a snapshot in the Wayback Machine, if that is the only option being considered.
\nHowever, I felt exploring other possibilities was appropriate. Honestly, I’m not convinced that I’ve found any that I really like. For me the most convenient (kind of) is either Zotero or possibly (even though I haven’t mentioned it) Obsidian. But there are plenty of bookmark managers, offline reading applications, RSS readers, and other tools that allow saving snapshots or screenshots of web pages for archival purposes.
\nSo what was the point of all this? The long and short is this: don’t rely on a service that may have issues that we cannot control. The fact is, there are too many variables that aren’t controllable, from technology issues, to social issues, to political issues. Keeping some type of local archive that is accessible can allow us to update our posts if link rot occurs, and not have to rely on third party services.
\nThere are a lot of other topics to cover related to the longevity / legacy of our sites. I will continue covering those in other posts (those will hopefully be less technical, and more philosophically oriented).
\nThe Loss of Links Continues (Accessed: 2026-08-22 11:28:33) ↩︎
\nRE: The Loss of Links Continues (Accessed: 2026-08-22 11:30:04) ↩︎
\nRE: The Loss of Links Continues (Accessed: 2026-08-22 11:31:15) ↩︎
\nHow I make my blog posts more resilient (Accessed: 2026-08-22 11:32:18) ↩︎
\nHow I share links on my blog (Accessed: 2026-08-22 11:38:28) ↩︎
\nEmbeds Did Serious Harm to one of My Websites (Accessed: 2026-08-22 11:46:09) ↩︎
\nInternet Archive: Wayback Machine (Accessed: 2026-08-22 17:19:41) ↩︎
\nSites Blocked (Accessed: 2026-08-22 17:32:24) ↩︎
\nArchive.org Information (Accessed: 2026-08-22 17:33:33) ↩︎
\nFAQ: Publishers Blocking the Wayback Machine (Accessed: 2026-08-22 17:35:02) ↩︎
\nI deleted my account but my items are still visible (Accessed: 2026-08-22 17:36:20) ↩︎
\nwallabag.it â Save & read your articles later ¡ alternative to Pocket, Instapaper & Pinboard (Accessed: 2026-08-22 18:13:31) ↩︎
\n![\"broken_cellphones_1080p.jpg\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/broken-cellphones-1080p.jpg\" "\\"Broken") | \n
|---|
| Broken Cellphones Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash | \n
So, I had planned to spend a lovely evening watching the returns in the Clacton by-election, but it seems that there are a few things I need to address on the topic of technology and voting with your wallet. (I actually did take a break and watched the results of the by-election on stream.) Gordon responded to my post with A rebuttal to a response on Tech Sucks while Michael Harley has entered with Re: Tech sucks? Really?, and both of them have made points that are worth addressing.
\nI will defend this point. Plain and simply the language in use is that of an abusive relationship. I think I documented that pretty clearly in my original post. And it is language I’ve heard others use before, and do so without the recognition that they are describing their relationship with technology as abusive.
\nSaying that people are in denial doesn’t constitute me assuming a conclusion I am trying to prove. This is pretty fundamental to abusive relationships, people often stay with their abusers because they are unwilling or unable to see a different path. This is something that is well documented. The only issue is whether the victim chooses to recognize they are in an abusive relationship, or if someone can get through to them so they can see it.
\nThe majority of these concepts harken back to the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) practice of Microsoft dating all the way back to the 1980s or 1990s. This also incorporates the embrace, extend, extinguish practice found in internal documents from Microsoft in the early 2000s during a lawsuit. And, it finally this is using the most recent concept of locking-in users.
\nAll of which are known fallacies. The way to deal with them is to find methods to undermine the fallacy, and provide better options. I know this isn’t easy. It’s especially complicated when facing some of the barriers that are thrown up by others.
\nThe lock-in concept creating the “socially impractical” issue is the most difficult one to navigate. But, I think the way to navigate it is to be a leader, set the example, plant seeds with as many in the group as possible, and work with them to bring them along. The trickiest part to navigate is not forcing things, as that will often backfire. (I talk about this more below.)
\nYou asked the question:
\n\n\nBut what I really wonder is why the barriers to leaving it are so high for so many people.
\n
Hopefully what I have laid out in this section answers the question. People have been manipulated by decades of FUD, EEE, and lock-in. The barriers are there because people believe the fallacies they’ve been fed, because the fallacies don’t appear to be illogical.
\n\n\nFirst, individual choice still matters.
\n
It does matter. And it matters most that people are informed, and that the fallacies are dispelled. The biggest issue is how to frame the choices so that they are meaningful to people? That’s the issue that I see: most people tend to make choices based on either popularity or perceived convenience, primarily because the idea of meaning hasn’t been presented to them significantly.
\n\n\nSecondly, we shouldnât pretend individual choice is sufficient.
\n
No, but we also shouldn’t undermine individual choice. Some people don’t like to make choices, but others don’t like choices being made for them. That’s why I don’t focus on the “go where” concept. When you start telling people where to go you lose them. However, when you present multiple options and empower them to make a choice there is a higher likelihood for success.
\nThis doesn’t mean you don’t provide reasons for the choice you’ve made. Showing someone the options, and telling them why you’ve made your choice is the way to help others with making a choice. It also helps to say why you didn’t choose an option.
\n\n\nThird, we need to change the incentives. Regulation, competition law, interoperability, data portability and open standards can do far more to constrain companies with this level of market power than any individual consumer can.
\n
This basically requires organizing political campaigns to exert pressure on politicians to make such a change. Or it requires unearthing and exposing things about these corporations that will garner political attention. At least that’s what it takes in this country. And I think we all know how effective that is. Look what it took for the UK Software Sovereignty concept to take off. It basically took Donald Trump being such a gigantic prick that the UK grew concerned about our government using our Tech companies to spy on the EU.
\nGoogle has (basically) laughed off fines from the EU. Apple has complied with some rulings, but has a tendency to do so maliciously.
\nAnd, how certain are you that if you go the route of political engagement is going to end up going favorably? Look at the state the EU trying to force age verification on the internet. Look at the state of the W Social platform.
\nI think the best form of incentives are going to be the ones that get the people to start moving of their own accord. It’s likely to be slow, but I think it is likely to be more effective in the long term.
\n\n\nIt is making it possible to leave without losing your data, purchases, social connections, hardware investment or ability to communicate with everyone else.
\n
Maybe you aren’t aware of this, but some of this is already possible. All these platforms are required to make it possible for you to download all your information. I’ve done it with Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and others in the past. Recently I download all my information from multiple WordPress sites to migrate to new sites. And about a month later I migrated from write.as to micro.blog. ;)
\nBut, I take the larger picture that you are presenting here. What you are looking for is interoperability between platforms. (Sorry, I am using my tech knowledge here for a moment.) Unfortunately, the likelihood of that happening on the big platforms in our lifetime is fairly slim. Why? Because all of these platforms were developed separately and don’t really have a common structure or framework to build such functionality. That’s the technical level.
\nOn the social level, there is no one, not even all the customers on these platforms that could force these companies to do something like this. It would take a mass exodus of users that would make all previous exodus events look like a Sunday stroll. The companies can’t be incentivized because they want their users locked in, that’s their business model.
\nThis is the kind of activity that would take Government intervention to make happen, and I am not altogether certain that it wouldn’t be an overreach by any government that did this. Why? Because there would be a need for some form of compliance oversight, which would put the government in the middle of regulating commerce on a level that would be seen as interference.
\nIf this were China or a similarly closed economy, I could see it happening. But in the West, I don’t see it.
\nTherefore, the best option we have is to build on the new technologies that we are working on now. ActivityPub and ATProto have the possibility to enable some of this as we speak. And, in fact, some of it is possible alreadyâŚbut it takes knowledge and effort. I’ve migrated multiple times without losing a contact, or any information. It wasn’t the easiest migration, but that will come with time.
\n\n\nA piece of technology can be genuinely transformative while the company behind it behaves badly.
\n
Technology that is not developed in the open will always be corrupted by the companies behind it. This is something we have seen over and over since the 1980s. Companies are only incentivized by profitability, and that incentivization leads to FUD, EEE, and lock-in. I could start listing the government lawsuits against companies related to these bad practices, but that would take days.
\n\n\nWe donât have to reject the technology in order to challenge the business model.
\n
We have to reject technology that is not one hundred percent developed in the open. Think about all the platforms we have been talking about: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Amazon, Google, etc. While they may open parts of their technology to public scrutiny, they keep the core of their technology proprietary and secret. And what do we often have issues with? Changes to the core technologies that we cannot see:
\nThe list is nearly endless here. Yes, we have to reject this technology. The next one coming down the pipe is AI. These companies are making a small portion of their technology available, but you know there is a large portion of it that they are keeping private.
\nAgain, the only thing that incentivizes these companies is profit. The profit motive leads to FUD, EEE, lock-in, and customer abuse.
\n\n\nBut letâs not turn that into a binary choice between âescapeâ and âdenialâ.
\n
I don’t think I claimed that it is a binary concept. However, the arguments I put forward can make it seem like that.
\nThere is a concept in modern medicine / public health practices known as harm reduction, or harm minimization. My stance is that we need to help others to understand the abuses of these technology corporations and the technologies they develop, and how it is directly damaging to them. Making the case that they are being made victims of these companies, helping them to see the options for reducing this harm is a greater good.
\nI think this may be the most succinct way I’ve found to express my thought process on this topic so far. Now on to take up a few of Michael’s points.
\nLet’s start off light with a quote:
\n\n\nThese tech giants have effectively created a cartel, which severely reduces consumer choice. I personally think they’ve won. The “war” has been fought and lost, and no one really acknowledges it.
\n
I will refuse to acknowledge defeat until I am on my deathbed. ;) I won’t be the zealot / advocate I have in the past. I won’t be the one screaming from the rooftops. But I will plant seeds wherever possible, and try to be an agent of harm reduction.
\n\n\nWhatever we’re doing to vote with our dollars is choice theater. We should vote with our dollars; I just don’t think it moves the needle until everyone is doing it and there are actual viable alternatives.
\n
It has to start somewhere with someone. If not with you, now, then who and when?
\n\n\nDoes it matter if Pixelfed has feature parity and maybe even is cooler and better if your friends and family will never join you there?
\n
Are you certain they won’t, or have you just not found the right way to plant the seed that makes them ask the questions? Have you maybe not found the way to show them that these companies are abusing them? Have you considered that Pixelfed might not be the best choice for them and shown them a range of options? Have you put them in a position to ask questions and make a choice for themselves?
\n\n\nIt’s the App Store vs the Google Play Store. Are the people who make my Litter Robots going to publish their app to whatever repo/Linux store that my not-yet-invented Linux phone will use?
\n
What about taking smaller, incremental steps? For example, there is an alternative store for Android called Aurora. This allows you to download the apps from the Play Store without a login, and without being forced to have Google services on your phone. Most apps will work fine without them.
\nPersonally, I don’t keep any banking information on my phone, and I especially don’t trust bank apps. If I really must do something with my bank on my phone, I use my browser and I never save my password. It may seem like an inconvenience, but it’s kept my finances secure.
\nIMO - I haven’t ventured into Linux phone land yet. What I have done is stripped most of the Google stuff out of my current phone, and use Aurora and F-Droid for my apps. Whenever possible I use an open source application instead of choosing something from the Play Store. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it has reduced the amount of abuse I accept from Google.
\nEventually I plan to try one of the de-Googled Android builds that offers some extra security features (like application containers). I’ll only get apps from the Play Store if forced, and I’ll use open source applications whenever / wherever possible.
\nI look at this topic from a perspective that appears to be somewhat different. I see the harms and abuses of the technologies produced by tech companies and can’t stand aside without calling it out. Gordon in particular triggered me by using abuse victim / survivor language in his original post.
\nI gave up the role of advocate / zealot a long time ago. Now I see the role as being similar to someone trying to practice harm reduction. I plant seeds, try to get people to see the abuse. I let them ask questions, and show them there are options. That is, I believe, a key: don’t try to push a solution, don’t take away their choice. Show them the choices, and let them ask more questions and empower them to make up their own decisions.
\nThe “socially impractical” or “network” lock-in issue is the most difficult to deal with, and I don’t believe I’ve successfully navigated that one yet. The only idea I have on that is to try to plant the seed in multiple people in your group. Try to get them talking to each other about the issue. Don’t let them make you the focal point, be there in more of an advisory role to answer questions. Hopefully the group might start wanting to change. But honestly, I haven’t really tried this approach⌠Yet.
\nIt may not seem that one person voting with their wallet is going to have an effect. But, if you can make a move, and help others to see the harms and put them on the road to voting with their wallet then eventually companies might start seeing the effect. And, honestly, I think that’s the only way they are going to take notice. The only thing that drives a company is profit, and if their profits are affected, then they (or their board) will notice.
\nMichael: I just wanted to ask you more questions. You’ve made a succinct statement that is quite clear. But it does beg for more questions. As for my Android stuff, I offer it as an example as to how someone can think about it. Basically, I’m using my thought process as an example, I don’t expect it will fit for you or anyone else.
\n", "summary": "Defending my stance of tech abuse relationships. And deeper analysis of technology company tactics. Finally explaining my harm reduction approach to tech abuse.", "date_published": "2026-08-14T09:51:09-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/08/14/more-tech-sucks/", "tags": ["Features"] }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/08/13/workism-ai-and-vocations/", "title": "Workism, AI and Vocations", "content_html": "![\"woman_looking_at_computer_frustrated.jpg\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/woman-looking-at-computer-frustrated.jpg\")
\nPhoto by Look Studio on Unsplash
\n\nNOTE: Sorry for the duplicate post. There was a glitch in the system here that posted this article twice.
\n
There is this truly great read in Noema: Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? by Aaron Horwath. One of the major points of this article is that Workism was used to replace religion in people’s lives. The idea that people looked for purpose in their work the way some people are called to vocations. And now, there seems to be a collapse in Workism that is leading to widespread disenchantment among knowledge workers.
\nOne sentence in particular caught my attention:
\n\n\nThatâs the true beauty of Workism: It is manufactured to distract people from the hole in their souls that a vocation would otherwise fill.
\n
While that is the state of employment now, it wasn’t always the case. However, even in my case the end result is very similar.
\nI spent approximately thirty years in technology in multiple roles. I started off in development, moved into documentation, technical support, and finally into infrastructure. The ladder I climbed literally doesn’t exist today.
\nIt wasn’t my plan to leave the tech industry when I did. Due to personal reasons I had to relocate to take care of family. When I looked at the job market in this area it became clear pretty quickly: this wasn’t the market for my skill set. This market wants the jack-of-all-trades (master-of-none). Whereas, while I wouldn’t call myself a master, I have a highly defined set of skills (and now I wouldn’t even consider it to have kept up).
\nThis was ten years ago. I’m honestly glad I didn’t even try to go back into tech.
\nEven before this situation arose I had felt tension in the IT field. And it wasn’t some specific change in the technology, the training, or knowledge. All of those things can be solved. No, this was a change in the relationship that I had with work. This was a change in how I defined myself, and how I was becoming more and more of a misfit in the field that I had spent so long in.
\nA lot of this centered on employer expectations. In my early employment there were things that were enjoyable about the jobs. There was interesting technology to experience. There were interesting problems to be solved. And, more than anything, there was a form of camaraderie with my coworkers. We shared this sense of adventure, and joy that the job brought us.
\nBut over time that changed. Probably because early on we were on the cutting edge of so many things. Honestly, when I started, most IT people wouldn’t allow an x86 server in their server room. They were still dominated by HP, IBM and Sun. By the time I left, HP and IBM were exceptions, and Sun’s platforms were x86 based.
\nWhat happened during this time was likely predictable. Early on companies looked for people with knowledge and experience in this new hardware. The IBM PC and Louts 1-2-3 had been a curveball thrown at the IT departments of many of these companies. Companies responded by finding people that were knowledgeable about the technology, but not necessarily knowledgeable about IT.
\nAnd, also during this time, IT itself went under a transformation. In the days of mainframes and minicomputers IT was an expense. It was something that was paid for, and the bean counters didn’t really understand how to quantify IT. But around this time IT departments found themselves being changed from an expense based to cost based. In other words, the accountants had been given the directive to understand the value of IT, how to quantify it in dollars instead of it just being a black hole of expense.
\nAs I moved from one employer to the next I found the requirements for the jobs changing. Things like NDA’s were being introduced. Uncompensated overtime in the form of “on-call” duty became a standard. Allocations for training were reduced. Budgets were always big enough to get the newest toy some business department wanted, and the IT people were told to deal with it instead of being consulted on the viability of these systems.1
\nWhen I started in the industry I worked for small companies. And there was a definite element of “Workism” in those companies. We put in long hours and lived for the jobs. But we were all enjoying, at least at some level, what we were doing. There were things we were getting to experience through our jobs that we never would have been able to anywhere else.
\nBut, several jobs later, I started separating my identity from the workplace. The rigidity of the structures put in place between HR and Accounting sucked most of the fun out of being an employee. Instead, it was more like being a drone, a worker bee. The changes that were force on IT departments by clueless managers changed the dynamics of the work environment, and not for the better.
\nAt first, I engaged with different technologies outside of work that I knew weren’t going to become part of my work environment. But then when most of that started running dry for me, I turned to other things.
\nI wasn’t a computer science major in school. I had started down that road, but had found it to be less interesting to me. I had other interests, mostly leaning towards the arts. Music was a particular interest to me. But, then, in college I found myself wandering into the writing program, and ended up becoming an English major.
\nI never graduated from college. But that wasn’t an issue in the early days of x86 technology invading corporations. There were plenty of opportunities for anyone that could reasonably demonstrate that they had a needed skill set and were competent. I had basically found myself moving into the IT field because: (a) It offered stable employment. (b) My parents (my father in particular) didn’t like the idea of his son becoming an artist / musician / writer / etc. My father equated it with “being a bum."2
\nAs employers tried to push their employees further in one direction, I started rediscovering the vocations I’d had before. I started finding issues that I was concerned about, and joined a podcast to talk about both technology and social aspects of technology.
\nThen I started found a whole new love and appreciation for music. The music industry had become this quagmire of manure, so I started getting into music that wasn’t from the major labels. All of this led to a series of projects that were about the person I was and still am: A blog where I reviewed indie music. A podcast where I played a lot of the music I had curated. And finally my own little indie music label.
\nBut all of those were set aside when I left the tech industry. Not because I didn’t want to keep them going, but because I had personal responsibilities that I had to prioritize above them.
\nWhen the personal responsibilities I had left the tech industry to handle were concluded, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. I found myself in a new place in my life, a place where I could pursue whatever I wanted to.
\nThe first thing that came to my mind was to start into a loosely tech related hobby. Kind of a low-tech hobby. But my interest in that hobby waned, but it didn’t disappear. Then I started turning myself towards several other hobbies, the majority of which took me away from tech.
\nI’ve been writing about these hobbies on Ennui Vagaries.
\nBut the biggest turn around happened when I realized that I wanted to get back to one of my big vocations: writing. Experimenting in writing with fountain pens led me to find the joy and purpose in my writing again. Eschewing the CMS platform that no longer fit for my writing process led me to find new platforms that are a much better fit.
\nAnd because of this newly re-found joy, I am back to writing posts daily. On three different blogs, each with a different focus. This is the life that I have wanted to have back, and I only found my way back to it by getting out of the tech space.
\nThe article asks questions about what happens when the spell of “Workism” is popped:
\n\n\nWhat would happen, then, if something threatened that faith? A paradigm shift that broke the spell of Workism? A sort of enlightenment that caused Knowledge Workers to start asking tough questions of their organizations and themselves.
\n
I would posit that this isn’t new. It’s a cycle that happens to every generation. We’ve seen it many times, albeit most of the time it’s not as loud as the current circumstances.
\nFor example, in my early career many developers were used to writing code to the bare metal. DOS didn’t offer a lot of facilities. Developers used libraries to access low level functions of the system. Those were mostly I/O related. They weren’t some class system for accessing a window manager. Then came the web and java, and the whole paradigm shifted again. And there were a lot of developers that just left. It wasn’t fun for them if the low-level bare-metal coding went away.
\nThere was a developer who was well known in the Open Source community who just shut everything down. He posted that he had left his job, and was leaving behind the projects that he had worked on for years. He was disabling his phone, and abandoning all communication in the online world.
\nMy personal journey evolved around multiple factors, the biggest of them being the continual creeping enshittification of the work environment. Eventually I found that my skills, while highly desirable at the time, AFAIK, weren’t applicable in my current job market. And that’s when I realized it was time to let go.
\nThe only difference I see now is this one is landing with a kerthunk, potentially hitting tens or hundreds of thousands of “knowledge workers” all at once. And my response is:
\nWelcome to the cycle.
\nTime to find your vocation and start rebuilding your life.
\nI could tell some absolutely absurd stories about the bleep that some managers pulled, but I have to be drunk enough to engage in those stories. ↩︎
\nI could, and likely will at some point, write more about my father’s perspective of employment. I have written a little about it before, but there is more to be said. ↩︎
\n![\"man_taking_hammer_to_ipad.jpg\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/man-taking-hammer-to-ipad.jpg\")
Gordon, Gordon, Gordon⌠I think you should look back at what you have written in Tech sucks? Really? and reassess your thoughts. Your conclusion shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between technology, companies, and customers in my opinion.
\n\n\nTechnology doesnât suck. I think the problem is that weâve allowed a handful of enormous companies become the gatekeepers to the extraordinary technology that many of us canât imagine living without.
\n
You can’t separate the company from the technology. The company produces the technology, directs how it is produced, directs what features it has, directs the terms under which it is offered. More and more the dictates of the corporation are: create technology that extracts the highest value from the customer. They don’t give a BLEEP about you, why should you give a BLEEP about them?
\nI’m honestly so disheartened any time I read or listen to someone who has given up. It’s something that I don’t like listening to or reading. It’s frustrating to the point where I want to reach out and shake the person by the shoulders and shout at them “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”
\nBut I know that won’t get us anywhere, so instead I arrange a bunch of pixels on the screen in the hopes to reach at least one person. Today, I hope that person is you.
\nYour perspective is held by a lot of people, and unfortunately while it is the prevailing perspective things are not likely to change. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t hope. There is, but first you have to recognize the situation. So, I want to point out a few statements you made, and (hopefully) get you to see what you are saying:
\n\n\nThe first problem I can see is that we increasingly donât have that many meaningful choices,
\n
\n\nMy employer uses Microsoft, my family is mostly on Apple, my friends use WhatsApp,
\n
\n\nAnd where exactly are you supposed to go? I acknowledge that Apple has problems, but so does Google. Microsoft has problems, Amazon has problems, Meta has problems.
\n
Do you see the problem with these statements? No, let me offer some more quotes:
\n\n\nI didnât have anywhere else to go. âŚand no support network.
\n
\n\nâŚisolated me from friends and familyâŚ
\n
\n\nI kept believing his promises to change.
\n
These are just a few (admittedly isolated in context) quotes from abuse survivors about why they didn’t leave their abusers sooner.1
\nThe fact is, the way many are looking at technology is from a state of denial. They accept the abuse of large corporations without questioning it because it’s better to get a long to get a long. It’s only when the abuse is recognized that true change can begin.
\nThe EU has started to recognize the abuses of Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and many other corporations. Recognizing the abuse has kick-started a movement for Digital Sovereignty. Isn’t that a wake-up call to recognize the abuse of Big Tech companies? Isn’t that enough to take the first step? (I know the Digital Sovereignty movement started more because of political tailwinds, but those motivators are still useful in taking personal recognition of the relationship.)
\nSorry, I am intense on this topic. It’s difficult to get through to people, to really make them understand how they need to see the relationship between themselves and technology companies.
\nAnother quote in your piece:
\n\n\nIâm not even sure, at the scale Big Tech works at, what number it would take for them to notice? At what number would our âvoteâ start to move the needle?
\n
That’s irrelevant. No. Literally. It is irrelevant.
\nLook at what’s happening in Clacton right now. Do you think Count Binface is actually going to win the By Election? I don’t think so. But does someone voting for him mean that it won’t get noticed? It will. Especially if enough people vote for him as a vote against Nigel Farage.
\nThe joke in the Linux community has been “This is the year of the Linux desktop.” It’s a joke that has been running for decades. Only, guess what? In that time Linux became the dominant operating system: it powers most of the internet, it’s embedded in many devices you use. It’s in so many systems you probably don’t realize how often you are interacting with a Linux system.
\nAnd now: people are migrating away from Windows because they are tired of Microslop’s AI horse manure. To make things more interesting, more people are getting exposed to Linux via Valve’s Steam Deck and new desktop devices. Large tech channels on YouTube like Linus Tech Tips have run challenges to see if Linux is good enough to switch to (spoilers, it’s really close).
\nSlow and steady wins the race. If people start switching one-by-one there will be a line that is crossed eventually. But, by the time the line is crossed, most of these big corporations won’t be able to respond. They will realize they have to pivot, concede, or go bust.
\nTo quote you again:
\n\n\nBut technology companies can, and do, suck.
\nToo often we seem to conflate those two ideas. Technology itself is extraordinary,
\n
\n\nNo, the problem isnât technology. Itâs what happens when enormously powerful companies discover they can turn useful technology into an ecosystem designed to extract as much money, attention and data from us as possible. We shouldnât confuse the thing with the business model wrapped around it.
\n
I see that you don’t want to admit to the relationship between technology and technology companies. But here’s the thing: the two are (mostly) inseparable. As I stated above:
\n\n\nYou can’t separate the company from the technology. The company produces the technology, directs how it is produced, directs what features it has, directs the terms under which it is offered.
\n
This goes back to the abusive relationship mentality I went off about earlier. Victims will often excuse their abusers' behavior by stating that the abuser is a good person. They only want the abusive behavior to change. Eventually they come to understand that separating the behavior and the person is not possible.
\nIn this case you are trying to separate the technology from company. But, except for many open source projects, the technology is the company and the company is the technology.
\n\n\nItâs probably worth linking to this piece here too. Given Big Tech gets a lot of focus itâs probably good to remember that Big Tech isnât really a thing, but Broligarchs sure are.
\n
This is an attempt at differentiation without a basis. Let me explain.
\nThe Broligarchy is the people: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, etc. The thing that puts them into the same group is that they are charismatic egotists. They believe that everyone agrees with their beliefs, no matter how messed up it is.
\nThe point here is that Broligarchy is about the qualitative aspects of these people.
\nBig Tech is a reflection of the power of the companies in terms of market share, market capitalization, perceived financial value, stock dividends, etc. This is the quantitative values verging on the concept of monopoly.
\nYes, it is extremely dangerous that we have egotistical people with extreme views in charge of the financially dominant companies. But, the two things are different concepts that shouldn’t be conflated. How can I say that? This list of CEO from some of the biggest companies in tech at various levels (just off the top of my head):
\nYou may not have heard of BOE and TCL, but they are two of the largest LCD panel makers in the world, right behind Samsung. And, of course, Samsung has a huge percentage of the cellphone market. Intel and AMD are two of the primary x86 CPU manufacturers in the world.
\nThis should make it clear that the idea that the Broligarchy and Big Tech aren’t necessarily related. All these companies I listed are part of Big Tech, and yet they aren’t headed by Broligarchs.
\nChange is hard, especially when in an abusive relationship this massive. Getting out of it can be one of the hardest struggles one goes through in life. It won’t happen all at once, but it can happen one step at a time.
\nWhile it may be true that one person turning away from one company doesn’t register. But, you aren’t alone, others are trying to find their way out. I started on that journey decades ago, and I am still on it.
\nThe best you can do is recognize when a piece of technology is toxic or abusive, and start looking for the way out. You can make a list of all the things you want drop, find alternatives, and figure out what’s blocking you from making the change. From there you can start working on how to make a change.
\nThis is something I’ve been doing for years, right now I’m working on Android. I’ve looked at a couple of alternatives, and have an idea of the one I want to use, but it currently doesn’t list my phone as compatible. (However, I suspect my SKU is actually the same as one of the SKUs they do list. When I have time I will image my phone, and try it.)
\nDon’t get too lost in the weeds when it comes to the Egotistical Broligarchy versus Big tech stuff. You need to recognize when the relationship with technology is abusive and make plans to get out from under it.
\n20 Survivors Explain Why Leaving an Abusive Partner Isnât as Simple as It Seems, from Shadows of Control. ↩︎
\nMichael Harley has been at it again in a follow-up post titled: What happens to our blogs when we die?. And, as usual his thoughts and ideas are really quite excellent. I highly recommend reading the original article.
\nBut, as seems to be becoming a habit with me, I have some additional thoughts that might be of interest. In fact, in this case, I might be able to provide an interesting idea or two that Michael hadn’t considered.
\nFirst, Michael made the point that he had been using some 11ty macros for processing his website. And now, because he is thinking of longer term storage of his posts, he is undoing the macros and converting them back into pure Markdown.
\nSomething to think about: Markdown allows inline HTML, at least in part. So things like image handling could be converted into HTML. Why is this useful? And doesn’t it reduce the readability of the original files?
\nYes, it does a little… But there is a long term gain to be had here. When using this approach you can use CSS classes with your image. This will allow you to have a consistent set of properties for images on your website. But more importantly: when producing an ePub version of the posts, you could substitute a new stylesheet that adjusts those properties for e-book and print mediums.
\nSo, something as simple as <img class="img-class" src="foobar.png"> is all that is needed, and won’t need to have attributes adjusted manually.
The idea of making an e-book archive of my websites was something I hadn’t considered before. But it’s really a good idea, and something I wish I had thought of before.
\nOne of the things I had considered recently was at least having another backup of my articles stored locally. I decided to add the RSS feeds for my sites to Thunderbird. That way I would have local copies of everything from my site, and a quick way to verify that posts published when they were scheduled.
\nBut, generating an ePub is quite literally just as easy. All I did was use Calibre. I created a custom News source recipe for all my sites, told it to download 31 days of articles on the 28th of each month. (Have to deal with that silly February issue.) The news system uses the RSS feeds from sites and translates the XML output into XHTML for ePub books.
\nNow, I didn’t dig into this part, but I think the point I was making above could be handled with Calibre… That is, you could implement the custom stylesheet as part of the XML conversion process. That would mean less time spent on creating a home-grown system for converting blogposts into ePub format.
\nBut, wait, there are more possibilities here… If your site provides an RSS feed for comments, you can make an e-book of them. You would have to merge them with the original post later, but you can at least archive them this way. Also, if you are on Mastodon, or a similar site, you can get RSS feeds for your posts on there too. I don’t think you get the responses, but at least you can archive your posts.
\nThere is one consideration to all of this: you might want to remove Calibre’s footer that has the original link for the article / post, and the retrieval date. Although personally, I think having both the published date and the retrieval date in the e-book is a good idea. Also, I don’t know how this would look for Mastodon posts.
\nOn the subject of digital archives. Something else to consider: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. While this is something that might suffer a fate at some point down the road, I have some faith that they will likely survive most of the technology and platforms we are using today.
\nOne of the things that I like about micro.blog is that they have built-in actions for the Wayback Machine. IE, when a post is published on my site, the Wayback Machine gets a copy automatically. No waiting for a bot to scan my site.
\nAnother cool thing about the Wayback Machine is that it will capture the changes to our sites and content over time. Something that we can’t easily do with building archival e-books or printed books. In fact, a yearly book can suffer from the issue of changes / edits made to articles after their initial publication.
\nGiven the Internet Archive has been around since 1996, and they have managed to continually expand their storage facilities I think it’s safe to say they will be around for another 30, 60 or maybe even 100 years. Long term archival of our digital lives can be accomplished with the service of Internet Archive.
\nThis part really caught my attention:
\n\n\nThen the part I’m actually looking forward to: a printed book, once a year. I did the math and it’s a real book, not a pamphlet.
\n
Given that I am a person who has started doing a lot of my writing using fountain pens (see: Why Fountain Pens?) I sat up and took notice when I read this part. Michael didn’t go into the cost(s) of printing a book. I wonder if Michael has thought this through completely? I’m not trying to sound condescending here. My interest in the publishing industry goes back for decades. One of the companies I worked for in the past was owned by one of the largest publishers in the world.
\nThe reason I mention this there are some special considerations for printing a book that is designed to last for a long time. When considering those options, the costs start adding up quickly. I’ll cover a few of them:
\nPaper Quality: you want to choose a paper that is reasonably heavy, at least 60gsm, but 80gsm is preferable. It should also be an acid-free paper. You want to make certain that the paper will not be affected by environmental issues, such as UV light.
\nInk Quality: You want archival quality, pigmented ink. Not the typical dye ink. Dyed inks can tend to fade over time. Things like UV light, and other environmental issues can affect the ink on a book.
\nBinding: Assuming you want the most durable, longest lasting book, you would want a hardcover book. For a hardcover book you want a saddle-stitched binding. This is really difficult to find from an on-demand print shop. Lulu, for example, offers case wrapping for hard cover or perfect binding for paperback books.
\nPrint Type: Another concern about printing. Since you have images in your book, you probably want to go with color printing. While you can go with a standard color print, it’s not going to be the best print quality (and, I’m not even certain you can do this with archival inks). In which case you probably want to go with full quality color printing.
\nLayout: doing the typesetting and layout for a book isn’t the same as we tend to do on a daily basis. There is a very specific formatting for books, templates that need to be followed. And there is the process of proofing your book. If you add in hard copy proofs, that’s an additional expense. And don’t forget the other matter for a book: the table of contents, index, and any appendices. Oh, and handling footnotes or end-notes. Also, images: doing layouts with pictures can be more complicated and cause your page count to soar. Not to mention that you will want to have photo-ready quality images available for your book.
\nAnd there’s more to consider. For example, you probably want to get multiple copies, and potentially have someplace to store an extra copy or two of each book (a bank safe deposit box, and a fireproof safe are a good start). Basically, think of it as disaster recovery for your printed works. :)
\nThis starts getting very costly. The lowest price I could get for a book (from Lulu) was around $20. That doesn’t have the archival quality ink, paper, binding, or print quality. But, personally, I think most people would be happy with it if I was selling a book as a mass-market type of thing. But this isn’t mass-market, this is personal.
\nI checked a few other sites (I’m not naming them because this was an ad-hoc search, and I have no experience with any of these printers), and found that a fully spec’ed out book would be around $900, per book. Five copies would be around $4,500 (I’m assuming the three for personal use / storage, and two to be stored with other family members or at other locations for disaster recovery).
\nAnd none of this takes into account the layout, proofing, etc. process. This is all on you. If you want to get a professional involved in the layout process it’s going to cost quite a bit more. I’m sure there is some middle-ground to be found here, but it’s going to take a lot of investigation, and some give-and-take to come up with a good option.
\nHopefully this is useful to Michael, and anyone reading Michael’s articles. Personally, archiving our posts for posterity is something I hadn’t considered before. But Michael’s articles have put me in the mindset of how do I do this with the least amount of friction possible. And, I see the possibility of accomplishing this task quite easily.
\nOne of the things I like about the idea of using Calibre’s News Fetcher to generate e-books is that it will work with any platform: WordPress, Hugo, 11ty, Bear Blog, Micro.pub, write.as, and so on. As long as your site provides an RSS feed, you can make an e-book. And the whole process can be easily automated so you don’t have to think about it all the time.
\nAs I mentioned in my previous article (Embeds Did Serious Harm to one of My Websites): I am now allergic to using embeds - especially 3rd party embeds as they can lead to serious issues for a website. Given I have that policy now, the only embeds I would need to consider would be the ones on CerebralMix Archive, but I have a lot more work to do on that site.
\nPersonally, I don’t think there is much of an issue with links being in the printed version of the e-book. It’s a fact that this is a physical archive of a digital medium. There are expectations of limitations of the medium.
\nThe trickiest part of this whole process would be the printing process. The options that you have to consider are the trickiest, and can have serious impact on the books quality. And there are options to think about in terms of storage of the books (aka, the disaster recovery options).
\nAnd, I think I can leave this topic here. Michael’s done an excellent job in inspiring me to look at some possibilities for doing something similar to what he is doing, and possibly going further. If I do come up with something else, I will write about it here.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-09T07:53:00-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/08/09/website-archival-and-preservation/", "tags": ["Essay"] }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/08/07/embeds-did-serious-harm-to/", "title": "Embeds Did Serious Harm to one of My Websites", "content_html": "![\"A](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/smashed-computer-monitor-1080p.jpg\" "\\"A")
\nPhoto by ĐНог ĐĐžŃОС on Unsplash
Michael Harley wrote a piece called How I make my blog posts more resilient a couple of days ago. There are a lot of good ideas and principles that he covers for maintaining a blog, or just about any website. Reading his article made me think back to a situation from nearly ten years ago where I went through a fairly major incident with one of my sites.
\nWhile I documented the issues broadly at the time, I only partly talked about one of the issues that I had to deal with: broken third-party embeds. I thought a discussion about the issue(s) I ran into, and how I handle them would be appropriate as a companion piece to Michael’s article.
\nIn 2018, I had to make a number of changes to The CerebralRift. (You can read all about these changes in the articles I posted back in 2018: CerebralRift Goes KABOOM!, Extreme Website Cleaning, The Long Grind Aftermath, and A Pair Of Post Cleanup Rants. But I don’t recommend it. They’re long, kinda ranty, and still somehow boring.) I’m going to focus on one part of those changes in more detail here than I did in the original articles.
\nWhile making the changes, I found there were a number of issues with the site. Those issues only got worse as I made more changes. (A lot of these changes included relocating and / or removing content, so things getting worse seemed counterintuitive.) I soon knew the situation called for a deeper investigation to resolve the issues.
\nOne of the issues that I found concerned my use of embeds on the site. In most of the reviews I had written (approximately 350) I would try to embed the release as part of the review. This was mostly a courtesy: I wanted my readers to be able to listen to, or see, what they were reading a review about.
\nHowever, what I found was when the original recording either moved, or disappeared from the internet, several of these embeds did not fail gracefully. What do I mean by fail gracefully?
\nWhen called, an embed should be able to check that the URL or URI it is passed is valid. If it is not valid, the embed should fail. That isn’t what happened with several of these embeds. Instead, one of two things would happen:
\nThis impacted the performance of my site, and the scoring that many search engines do when looking at a site (yes, I was involved with SEO principles at this time â but I’m feeling better now). The hung embed would score as an extremely long load time. And the malformed URIs would look like broken links. Basically, these broken links were wreaking havoc not just with SEO scoring, but honest technical benchmarks that need to be watched when running a site.
\nBut, I had another concern: was it possible that these misbehaving embeds could be used as an attack surface? My gut said that wouldn’t be an issue for my server, however, it could be a vulnerability for users of my site. So, being the paranoid person I am, I considered these broken embeds as a security issue. (I honestly went back and forth on this a lot, sometimes thinking that maybe there was a way to use a broken embed to get back to my server. Just a symptom of my paranoia.)
\nI think it’s pretty obvious (especially if you read through the articles I mention above): I methodically worked my way through 400+ articles that were posted on my site. (More articles than just the reviews were affected.) During this process, I updated / refreshed all the articles that needed it.
\nThis was a long process. It took literally days of work to clean everything. Along the way I put a lot of thought into how I was going to proceed moving forward.
\nThird-party embeds are no longer welcome on my sites, unless there was some rare super-specific reason that I needed to use one. Nearly ten years later, I don’t recall finding a reason to use one.
\nThere is also something else that, while I hadn’t considered it at the time, seems relevant now. We’ve always known that many of these embeds need to use cookies in order to track their state on our systems. But, do any of us really know what these embeds are doing? It’s certainly probable that they could be dropping beacon cookies, or other cross-site accessible bits of data on our systems.
\nAnd, to the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I am wrong), there is no GDPR equivalent regulating what an embed can do. That thought leaves me a little on edge.
\nThis doesn’t mean you won’t find media on my sites. The CerebralMix Archive is a perfect example of a site where most of the pages have a media player on it. But, that media player is pure HTML5 code. It’s encoded in such a way that if it fails for some reason it produces an error message. And there are still standalone links to download the media directly, so users can still access it even if the media player fails.
\nIn this age where having rich media on websites is more the norm than not, this policy might seem backwards. But, honestly, it’s made the maintenance of my sites easier. And, I’ve been able to sleep a little more easily knowing that I don’t have a ticking time bomb on my websites.
\n", "summary": "How embeds caused serious issues with one of my websites, how I handled it, and my policy regarding third-party embeds.", "date_published": "2026-08-07T07:57:00-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/08/07/embeds-did-serious-harm-to/", "tags": ["Essay"] }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/08/04/lets-talk-about-hosted-blogs/", "title": "Let's Talk About Hosted Blogs", "content_html": "![\"Fox](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/fox-in-a-field.jpg\" "\\"Fox")
Going to make a bet that you didn’t know that I was gone, and really, you don’t give a bleep. And you know what? That is perfectly fine. In fact, I’m happy if no one missed me.
Want to know where I went? No? Well, okay⌠But I’m going to talk about it anyway. I was in the process of migrating web hosts. Oh, so now you are interested? Okay, so, I think it’s fair that we talk about hosted blogs for a bit. But not just any hosted blogs, ones that are specifically more Fediverse native or adjacent.
\nOf course, there are some juggernaut blogs that have been out there for years. And, some of those blogs have adapted to the Fediverse. What do I mean by adapted?
\nWell, the biggest name that comes to mind is WordPress. They started offering Fediverse integration a few years back. Automattic went so far as to hire the author of the first working ActivtyPub plugin for WordPress in order to integrate support for ActivityPub more tightly into their platform. Which all sounds great⌠Except for a few things.
\nThere are two routes to go with WordPress: hosted or self-hosted. If you go the hosted route many providers don’t know anything about the ActivityPub integration, and you will find yourself having to figure out what isn’t working in order to get support to fix the issue. All the while you are likely paying pretty good money for the service.
\nIf you go the self-hosted route, you likely have a fair amount of time to spend maintaining your WordPress installation. There is very little that is easy about maintaining WordPress, plugins, a database, etc. It’s not the kind of activity that most people want to do when they are trying to write.
\nFor similar reasons to these we can skip Blogger, Drupal, Wix, etc. They all have interesting features, some have better integration for the Fediverse, and some offer none.
\nLet’s call them the minimalist blogs, and specifically ones that offer Fediverse integration. In particular, I’ll talk about five of them very briefly: Bear, write.as (WriteFreely), Pika Page, Micro.blog, and Pagecord. There are others, but most of them fall into the self-hosted category, and I want to focus on hosted options.
\nBear is the one that I initially saw getting a lot of buzz. The promise of a âforeverâ blog with minimal features that you could just rely on was quite appealing. For me, it was too minimal. And, in order to enhance or extend it, you have to find a bunch of recipes that have been gathered together and copy and paste the ones you want into the back-end. The whole thing has a very hack-ish feeling to it. While the pricing for Bear was great, I had concerns about extensions being incompatible or breaking. That would lead to more time invested in maintaining the back-end of the blog than I wanted.
\nwrite.as is the hosted version of WriteFreely. It has a minimal interface that allows you to write as much as you want. And, the paid plans are competitive with Bear. But, write.as does have some odd quirks. For example, to create a page you write a post and then pin it to your menu. This can be annoying because you have to pin posts to the menu in the order you want them. But, not only that, since you have to save your page as a post first, it gets posted to the Fediverse, even if you don’t want it to. I could go on about quirks of the system, there are a lot of quirks.
\nPika Page was probably the cleanest minimalist blog setup I’ve seen. It’s flexible and has a fair number of options, but isn’t overwhelming. As such I think it looks really nice, but there were a couple of things that I didn’t find all that nice. First, I didn’t see any Fediverse integration (ie, I didn’t see a way to directly publish posts to the Fediverse). Second, the pricing was limiting for me personally. I need to have 4â5 blogs, which would be considerably more expensive than either Bear or write.as.
\nPagecord is the next level of Pika Page. It’s a simple blogging system, but has a fair amount of flexibility. It has Fediverse integration, but not as complete as a platform like write.as. I had a long talk with Olly, the Pagecord creator, about a number of features⌠Without getting into the weeds too much, some he was investigating adding, and others were outside the scope he had in mind for Pagecord. Pricing wise, Pagecord is a more expensive solution than Bear or write.as, but not quite as expensive as Pika Page.
\nFinally there’s Micro.blog. Micro.blog is (potentially) the most interesting option out there. Not only is it a blogging platform, but it also adds a lot of extra features, like Bookshelves, Movies, and Notes that can be used as part of the platform. Basically, Micro.blog is the fusion of a blogging platform along with a Fediverse Mastodon-like system. You can read, follow, and interact with users on the Fediverse. You can write blog posts, and publish them directly to the Fediverse, and you can send out notices for new posts on your existing Fediverse, Bluesky, and other social media accounts. Pricing is in the sweet-spot: between Bear and write.as, while offering options that aren’t as expensive as Pika Page or Pagecord.
\nBut, there is another consideration when it comes to Micro.blog. It is based on the Hugo flat-file website generator. This is great for page loading speeds, but it brings a level of complexity that may not be for everyone. If you aren’t comfortable getting into the guts of templates, HTML and CSS, it may not be for you.
\nAdmittedly, I wasn’t one hundred percent happy with any of the options. But, I knew that I needed something that would be flexible enough to let me create the site(s) I wanted, and at a reasonable price. So I made the decision to migrate to Micro.blog. It wasn’t the easiest migration. I spent several days reading documentation on templates and stuff in Hugo in order to make the site look and (mostly) feel the way I want it to.
\nBut, once I had one site done, it was simple to copy-n-paste my work to the other sites with minimal changes necessary. And, much to the credit of Micro.blog it made migrating one of my sites easier than I’d expected it could be. (I had a site with over 400 posts, images, etc. that needed to migrate. I was able to backup the posts and import then into Micro.blog in a very short amount of time.)
\nSo, that’s where I’ve been the last week: investigating blogging platforms, and deciding what to do. And, yes, there is more to this story. I will write about my research (which went a lot deeper) in another post. And, I will likely share more of my story on why I decided to migrate a second time after setting up my previous blogs.
\nUPDATE: Just to clarify my comments regarding the pricing of each option. I was thinking about this in a price-per-blog manner. write.as has an option for a 5 year plan with 5 blogs. This plan is $250, which amounts to $10/yr per blog. Bear is $49/yr for up to 10 blogs, or $5/yr per blog. And Bear offers their $189 one-time / forever price. Pagecord is $40/yr for 2 blogs, which is $20/yr per blog.
\n", "summary": "After migrating web hosts, the author explores various minimalist blogs with Fediverse integration, ultimately choosing Micro.blog for its flexibility and features despite some complexities.", "date_published": "2026-08-04T07:55:33-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/08/04/lets-talk-about-hosted-blogs/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/26/ai-and-cognitive-dissonance/", "title": "AI and Cognitive Dissonance", "content_html": "![\"The](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/404722c3e4.jpg\" "\\"The")
The old Postville Courthouse in Lincoln, Illinois, via The Library of Congress. Abraham Lincoln practiced law there from 1847 to 1859.
Well, as a surprise to me, my silly little Gravatar article was posted to Hacker News. This has called a lot of attention to the post, and made for some interesting comments. The most interesting of this is the claim that I have âcognitive dissonanceâ:
\n\n\nWe live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don’t you’d go insane.
\nThis article is perhaps a good example of that. On the one hand live in public (post blogs, use the same avatar on multiple sites) but at the same time try and control how that publicness is consumed (humans only, no AI).
\nRight now, whatever you make public is in AI. Whether that is on HN, or your blog, or wherever. You may not like that, but public is ultimately public.
\nIronically a blog post about leaving some service because they used the marketing phrase “AI”, is immediately added to the AI training corpus.
\n
So, of course, I feel the need to respond to this.
\nFirst off, I don’t have cognitive dissonance on this topic. Instead, I would say I have a rather refined set of principles when it comes to AI. But, I’m sure you aren’t here to read all my thoughts on AI. So, I will summarize them as: AI is a technology that holds promise, but at this time it’s not ready for public consumption. Despite what Alphabet, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies have you believing, there is still a lot of work and research that needs to be done. And, it seems that a substantial portion of the AI research community agrees with this stance, according to a report published by the AAAI.
\nNow, on to the idea that âwhatever you make public is in AI.â
\nThe questions surrounding this are matters for legal discourse. There are, in fact, many ongoing lawsuits with respect to AI companies (OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, et al.) vacuuming up large quantities of copyrighted material into their system. There are currently 163 cases according to this tracker. Not just in the United States, but globally. Anthropic settled one case already, to the tune of $1.5 Billion, which shows that there is reason to believe these companies are aware of the harms they are doing in violating the ownership of the works they are ingesting.
\nThis is not a matter of public versus private. This is a matter of ownership. In the U.S. and quite a few countries works are owned by their creators automatically on creation. Sharing a work publicly does not remove that ownership. Works are not transferred into the public domain for lengthy periods of time, unless the creator explicitly assigns their works to the public domain. (And, even then it’s difficult to do. See the reasoning behind the Creative Commons 0 license.)
\nMy ownership of a work means I have the right to control how that work is reproduced. I could, for example, assign the rights to reproduce the work to a publisher. Or I could transfer those rights to a foundation or another organization. I can even reproduce the work publicly, while still maintaining ownership of the work.
\nSocial media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. are potentially a different matter. Originally they stated that their reproduction of your posts did not transfer ownership to them. However, over time, they have slid more and more towards a position that they have the right to reproduce your work in ways they feel is appropriate (this was mostly for advertising originally, but that’s becoming increasingly blurry these days).
\nAlphabet has a contract with Reddit to slurp up users postings, and they are certainly using Gmail, YouTube and as many other sources as they can to train their AI. Meta is almost certainly using Facebook, Instagram, and What’s App to train their AI’s. And Elon’s companies are doing whatever they can to feed Grok. But I don’t have to capitulate to this loss of ownership. I’ve left all of those platforms behind for a reason. They might have whatever relics are left over from my time there, but I never agreed to their usage to feed AI systems, and I won’t willingly provide them with more fodder.
\nHopefully this clears up the misunderstanding that I might have âcognitive dissonanceâ where AI is concerned.
\nAs a final side note: I was amused by the side discussion regarding the aesthetics of my site. As noted, the font is indeed Work Sans. And, I have done some very minor tweaks in terms of the spacing to make it nicely readable. The overall structure of the site is designed to be minimal. And, through its minimal design I’m aiming for each page to be small and fast loading (there is an issue here, which is based on how the underlying platform works). There are no images in the footer, the buttons are all HTML. The images I use are hand edited to reduce their size (I aim for under 250K per image). As for the color: I just wanted an earthy tone, but yeah, tan isn’t really my favorite color either. As for the person that said they didn’t like the logo, well what can I say? :) The logo is meant to be mildly humorousâthe âAâ being a triangle is intended to be a slight visual cue to the name âUnattributedâ being a joke about the Attribution clause of the Creative Commons license. (IE, âAttribution: Unattributedâ) YeahâI know it’s a joke that passes over most people heads.
\nCategories: #Features\nTags: #AI, #HackerNews, #repsonse, #cognitivedissonance, #public, #ownership, #copyright\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-26T08:04:28-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/26/ai-and-cognitive-dissonance/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/25/update-rss-feed-readers/", "title": "Update: RSS Feed Readers", "content_html": "![\"Green](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/3dd6d46bf7.jpg\" "\\"Green")
Green and Blue Nighttime Landscape.
A couple of RSS based projects have been brought to my attention since I published The State of RSS Feed Readers a little over a week ago. So here’s a brief update.
\nSeveral people mentioned Kagi News in comments on Mastodon to the original article. Kagi News was really not what I had in mind when writing the original article. It is more of a curated news service along the lines of Google News or Ground News rather than a reader that you can add the feeds you want to track. However, it bears some more resemblance to Techmeme or Memeorandum than Google News in a sense.
\nKagi News uses hundreds, possibly thousands, of RSS feeds to aggregate news stories. These stories are then fed into an AI system that reads them, and writes a summary of all the articles it has consumed. The summary is heavily cross-referenced against the original sources, and all the sources used in writing the summary are listed at the bottom of the article.
\nWhile AI is a very controversial topic these days this is one of the few times when I believe it is used properly. There is little chance that anyone could read all 50+ versions a story published by all the newspapers and magazines in the world. Having a summary that pulls all of them together, and tries to present a story with facts that align with the majority of the available reporting is interesting.
\nIt’s also useful that they provide an RSS feeds for each topic, so you can pull their feeds into your personal choice of RSS reader.
\nI didn’t mention Miniflux as an option in the self-hosted portion of the original article, despite its popularity. The reason? Quite simply: I forgot it. :) Miniflux was one of the options I had looked at, and has a major selling point in its favor.
\nMiniflux is an extremely lightweight RSS feed reader with a minimal interface that is fast and responsive. The whole application is minimal, even a full Docker image is under 20meg in size. The only downside I see is the requirement to set up an external database to use it.
\nIf you don’t want to self-host Miniflux, there is a hosted version for $15/yr.
\nThis is the reason I decided to write this update. I don’t think I saw Feedgrab referenced anywhere, and it’s a shame. Feedgrab is a beautiful, minimal hosted RSS reader from the creator of Pagecord. And while it’s a hosted application it is completely free.
\nWhile Miniflux may have a some more features than Feedgrab, it makes up for them with one feature: starting feeds. When you create an account you are presented with a menu of categories, in each category is 30-50 feeds for you to chose from. This makes it quick and easy to populate your feed with stories that will be of interest to you.
\nAnd, there is a little extra: there is a browser extension for adding the feeds of sites to Feedgrab. Just install the Feedgrab extension, and whenever you find a site you want to follow, just add it to Feedgrab. And, of course, you can import your own OPML file if you have one, or export your feeds to an OPML file.
\nIt’s a very simple system. No special features or options for you to set. You can star items, mark them read / unread. That’s it. No categorization of feeds. No ranking feeds, or tagging items, etc. It’s all about reading the feeds that you have selected.
\nThis was just a short update, a few items that I had missed the first time around, which seemed relevant to add to the discussion of RSS feed readers.
\nOne last thought: I was impressed with Kagi News. Enough that I added their feeds to Calibre to scan daily, as a âquick newsâ newspaper / magazine I can scan each morning. It’s quite a nice to have a publication that I can look at quickly, have an idea of what’s going on, and if something really catches my attention, I can dig in deeper by looking at the original sources.
\nIn testing the Feedgrab extension didn’t work as expected in Waterfox. But, that could be some incompatibility with Waterfox. Or it could be that the extension hasn’t been updated for some time. At this point there were only four downloads of the extension, so I have doubts that it’s getting extensively tested.
\nCategories: #Features\nTags: #rss, #feeds, #readers, #update\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-25T07:54:45-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/25/update-rss-feed-readers/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/23/re-mea-culpa-when-somebody/", "title": "RE: Mea Culpa, When Somebody Writes Your Wrongs", "content_html": "![\"Tinted](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/be2a3e99fd.jpg\" "\\"Image:")
Shoreline with lights. License: CC-0
So, Brennan Kenneth Brown wrote about the experience of my response to one of his posts topping the Bubbles list for most of a day. To that, I have to apologize, and hopefully provide a little context. Brennan wrote at the beginning of his post:
\n\n\nThe writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a 3,500-word article about me on the top of Bubbles.town yesterday certainly did give me anxietyâbut that’s par for the course. My chickens have come home to roost. I mean, if you’re going to share your work with the world, then you need to expect the world to respond.
\n
So, to set the record straight: I didn’t start with the intention of writing a 3,600-word critique in response to Brennan’s article. Especially not one as critical as it is. Personally, I like to pick up on someone else’s thoughts that have some similarity to mine, or are tangential and seek a common ground. That’s how my responses to Gordon Mclean and Michael Lynch have largely gone.
\nIn this case, it felt necessary to start out of with a few corrections before moving on to my own thoughts. But, by the time I had written those corrections, I was no longer sharing my thoughts. Instead, I was back in the role of the critic, attempting my best to use academic scrutiny (despite being out of academia for over forty years):
\n\n\nBelieve it or not, we haven’t even gotten to the meat of Brennan’s article yet. This article is so dense with information that it’s going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination.
\n
And this is where I failed. I wasn’t able to maintain the level of even-handedness in my criticism that I should have maintained. My only excuse: I was frustrated with myself for being so critical that I turned my frustrations towards the author at times, instead of maintaining focus on the work itself. For that I apologize.
\nBrennan then goes on to talk about his reaction to my article:
\n\n\nBut my body doesn’t know the difference. I’m somebody who has struggled with scrupulosity, or moral obsessive-compulsive thoughts, for my entire life. I hold a high (maybe impossible) bar for myself to do good, and feel as though I’m failing no matter what I do or don’t do. Irrationallyâbecause of mental illnessâI see a bad article I’ve written as an awful moral failure. The same order of magnitude as the things that actually get people milkshake ducked
\n
And I want to address this point because I think, while we experience it differently, there is some common ground here.
\nFor those who don’t know, I have another website that has been dormant now for about ten years. But, during it’s prime, I wrote over 500 articles on it, over half (360-420) music reviews. And I have a netlabel that has been dormant for about the same period of time. The reason I bring this up is to talk about two situations I found myself in that bear some similarity to Brennan’s struggle.
\nThe first, one of the artists I was working with on my label started demanding that I supply materials for him to use in support of his performances. None of those materials had ever been discussed when we started working together, and nowhere had I documented making any such materials available. The truth: the whole operation was running on a shoestring. I was putting in whatever money I could. There were no profits from the label to work with for supplying the artists with anything more than I had provided. The artist was enraged when he heard this, and started posting all over the place about me, trying to assassinate my credibility.
\nNobody who knew me bought his allegations. I made a couple of posts correcting misinformation he was spreading, and providing receipts. Receipts I had pulled together in a panic because his attacks felt personal enough that I thought we were going to end up in a legal action. That’s when things got worse: his attacks turned into threats against me. Yes, those kinds of threats. However, after his attacks had been called to the attention of the platforms he’d posted them on (by others who knew me) he cooled down a bit. At least publicly. And that allowed both of us to walk away, working relationship shattered.
\nIn the other case, an artist I had written numerous reviews about decided, at some point, that I was his enemy. He wrote a long diatribe to me demanding that I pull down all the reviews of his works over several years. Apparently, this started because I had made a couple of mistakes in some reviews, combined with him having some bad personal experiences unrelated to my reviews. It took a week (or more) of going back and forth with him, but in the end, he agreed that it would be best to just add corrections to the reviews in question. That was something I was always more than willing to do.
\nBut, the reason I relate these two experiences is they are similar in some respect to Brennan’s experience. I was invested in the work that I was doing. I thought I was doing a greater good for everyone involved. Never would I have considered my work to be harmful in any way. (Even in my reviews I had a policy: I had to have a minimum of three good things to say about a release, if I didn’t, the review would likely not be published.) But both of these experiences made me feel like I was in a war in a way, under attack and on edge for days, even weeks after the experiences. Both experiences severely undermined the person I thought I was, made me question everything.
\nThat is an experience I don’t wish on anyone. It is an experience I don’t wish to inflict on anyone. And, it is something I will endeavor to improve on in the future.
\nCategories: #Response\nTags: #criticism, #scrutiny, #scrupulosity, #writing, #experiences\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-23T07:52:02-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/23/re-mea-culpa-when-somebody/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/22/re-why-i-stopped-creating/", "title": "RE: Why I Stopped âCreating Contentâ", "content_html": "![\"A](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/87080cfc9a.jpg\" "\\"Image:")
A city full of millions of people living their lives. Photo: CC-0
Michael Lynch wrote an excellent and thought-provoking article yesterday titled Why I Stopped âCreating Contentâ. In this article he discusses a lot of the mentality that motivates the mainstream web these days which is worth discussing a bit more.
\nI started encountering a lot of the industry speak when I found my way into the bowels of the SEO industry some years back. At the time I just accepted that terms like âfunnel,â âconversion,â âlanding page,â âcontent,â and âtrafficâ had meaning. After all, these were the people that were making a lot of money, and getting a lot of eyes on their websites, right?
\nTurns out, no, they weren’t. I’ve known a few people who have been engaged in the drop-shipping industry for a while now. Basically, they use as many tricks of technology and marketing as possible in order to sell (often dubious) products at a substantial markup for profitability. Basically a âpassive incomeâ type of scheme. These are the kind of people that think of customers as âtrafficâ. They don’t care about their customers, they are only interested in chasing the dollars, pounds, or whatever currencyâŚ
\nWhen my eyes were truly opened about what the SEO world was really about, I was completely repulsed. I found the whole thing repugnant. And, while I’ve never mentioned it before, this was another black mark on Google’s reputation as far as I was concerned. Why Google? Because they enable this industry. They actively engage with SEO marketers to make certain they understand the changes being made to their search engine.
\nWhy would they do this? While I never had the time to dig into it deeper, I believe Google is profiting from SEO marketers. And, I believe that it’s significantly profitable for Google. Why? If it wasn’t profitable, why would Google directly engage with these marketers?
\nThe thing I found disgusting about this is: Google has been actively distorting search results for a long time. If some SEO marketer’s page can outrank bad review(s) of the same product, that likely means the SEO marketer had an upper-hand over the reviewer. At least that is what I keep seeing.
\nI don’t know if anyone will be surprised reading this, but the people doing âinfluencerâ marketing are just a subset of the SEO marketing crowd. As social media started becoming more influential, it was apparent to many of the SEO marketers that Google didn’t represent the whole market anymore. So, they turned to âcreatorsâ to market their garbage.
\nWhat I think many don’t realize is that when your favorite YouTuber, Instagram-er, (or whatever platform) takes a sponsorship they are subject to the same measurements SEO marketers use. They are seen as a âfunnelâ to âdrive traffic.â The result is âconversionâ to a âcustomer.â Many times their agreements depend on the âconversion rateâ of their audience. Basically, it pulls you out of your role as an audience member, and makes you into a commoditize-able asset.
\nBut who can blame the people who are creating the things you watch? They need some way to make money in order to keep making things for their audience. And that’s what these marketers are preying on. They are living on the willingness of a person to turn their audience into âtrafficâ fodder.
\nThis entire thing is a big roller coaster. Once you are on it, it’s hard to see where or when the ride is going to end. And I took a long ride on the SEO coaster, but I managed to jump off it a few years back. I had been trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life during the pandemic. Actually, I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it.
\nThe answer, of course, was writing. I t was the thing I’ve wanted to dedicate myself to since College. However, over the past few years I have been confronted with an old insecurity: would anyone be interested? It’s the age-old question that confronts every writer: who is your audience. When you start any project, especially a creative endeavor, you have to wonder if there is any appeal to that project. So, of course, I started writing again. First with this very blog, and then I started a niche blog. The idea was to see if there was any interest. No sales, no marketing, just me writing.
\nAnd, of course, they failed. Why, I wondered? I found several reasons. First was the demotivation provided by WordPress. But, I didn’t recognize that at the time. Instead, I turned to the SEO articles I had stashed away. I quickly found I was doing X wrong and Y wrong. I would never generate âtrafficâ unless I did Z instead.
\nThis was when the proverbial light bulb went off in my mind. SEO was doing precisely the wrong thing. I was looking for answers from marketers. I was looking to generate numbers instead of considering the value of my work, and the value of those that would read my work. And that’s when I put it together: what I really wanted was to build an audience instead of âfollowersâ or generate âtrafficâ.
\nArtists, especially performing artists, understand the difference. Audiences are not nameless, faceless masses being marketed to. An audience is a participant in the performance or presentation of a creation. You are a participating right now by reading these words on your screen. And, you can take your participation further by upvoting, or leaving feedback. But, that is for you to decide: that’s the audience member role as a participant in this process.
\nDon’t believe this? Let’s try another example, music concerts. Have you been to a show that just felt different? That felt like it was something that was just more than you were expecting? Have you been to shows that were less than you expected, or shows that met your expectations? Now, have you ever heard about a band or an artist talk about a show that we extra special to them? This is because the audience is interacting with the band / artist. It’s all about the mood, the reaction, and interaction between an artist and their audience.
\nSo, that’s the difference with the IndieWeb: we don’t use SEO marketing speak, we don’t think of people as âtrafficâ and more so, we aren’t in competition with each other. We each decide who we are, what the want to present, and we find the best way to present that through writing, music, video, painting, drawing photography, whatever form works for you.
\nWe don’t use the tools of SEO marketers. We use aggregators like Bubbles to allow our audience to tell others what they might like. We use web rings and blog rolls to allow our audiences to find things that they like. Our audiences grow, shrink, change, and define their role in our work. This is exactly the opposite of what marketers do: they want their âtrafficâ to constantly increase so they can âconvertâ more of them.
\nThe SEO marketing have done one thing correctly. They have provided us with some tools that are useful for making certain our blogs are set up in a technically correct manner. Beyond that, there’s little else they can offer in terms of genuine communication. Nothing about their terminology: âcontent creator,â âtraffic,â âconversion,â âfunnel,â and so on treats people for who they are. People are just numbers to SEO marketers, just a faceless mass.
\nThis is what we reject. We instead understand that people are authors, artists, musicians, painters, performers, poets, sculptors, or any of hundreds of other things they decide to be. We understand that people choose to make available the things they want other people to see, experience, and appreciate.
\nWe understand that you are an audience. You are not a faceless, nameless mass. You are people who have feelings, thoughts, and experiences you bring to our works. Audiences grow, shrink, and change over time, you are not a monolithic group. It’s through interaction that we learn to grow and change as persons. There is no place in SEO for that.
\nI would be remiss if I didn’t point out at least a few of the interactions that have helped drive this point home to me. Michael Lynch is the very reason this article exists, he was the inspiration for it. Brennan Kenneth Brown was very humble in understanding my feedback on his work, as critical as I was. Gordon Mclean made a post that he thought was just a light little piece about Gravatar, my reaction surprised both him and me.
\nIf it weren’t for these, and other people on the IndieWeb, I would not be learning and growing as a person. And that, in the end, is what the IndieWeb is about for everyone. F*** the SEO marketers.
\nCategories: #Response\nTags: #seo, #marketing, #promotion, #artists, #writers, #painters, #audience\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-22T07:53:31-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/22/re-why-i-stopped-creating/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/21/how-i-write-blog-posts/", "title": "How I Write Blog Posts with Obsidian", "content_html": "You’ve probably run into some Obsidian evangelist espousing some convoluted system of organizing all their notes, and building some knowledge base. Heck, I was just involved in a conversation about Personal Knowledge Management. This isn’t that article.
\nMy personal use of Obsidian tends to be simple. I build into it the tools that I need to get things done, to make things easier. There is a saying (which I can’t locate, so I’ll paraphrase) that a system should only be as complicated as needed, and nothing more. The idea is there is no reason to build a Rube Goldberg machine when all you really need is a wrench. That’s the approach I take: use a wrench to bolt on a few tools, and tighten things up where necessary.
\nSo, this article will walk through how I work with things now. This system has evolved a bit over the last few weeks, and is likely to evolve further. But the primary idea is, and will remain: keep it simple, but make it useful.
\nWhen I switched from WordPress to write.as, the biggest thing I âlostâ was having a way to plan the articles that I wanted to work on. Obsidian recently added a feature called Bases that made it simple to set up a table containing all the articles for all three of my sites:
![\"View](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/35b92305d4.jpg\" "\\"View")
View of the main planning table. Unpublished articles blurredâno spoilers! ;)
The simplicity here is that the table quickly lets me see which articles I have published, which are in the planning / drafting stage, and the scheduled date for the articles. But, looking at a table this big could be tricky to navigate. Fortunately, I have a couple of alternate views available:
\n![\"The](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/ece5ba0c5d.jpg\" "\\"The")
The Plan / Draft view lets me see just the articles I am working on.
\n![\"And](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/54d6f002bd.jpg\" "\\"And")
And the Published view lets me see what I’ve already posted.
\nThere are two âgeniusâ parts to this system. First, all this information is part of the article, it’s not some extra information that I need to keep track of. Second, I can update the âPublishedâ, âScheduledâ and âStatusâ fields from this list without having to open the specific post. How is this done?
\nEvery time I have a new idea, I create a new document in the website’s folder, and insert a template:
\n![\"Image](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/935bb014d7.jpg\" "\\"Image")
Blog Template is for website posts, CMP Template is for my archived podcast posts.
Once the Blog Template is inserted, the document shows up in the Planning table. After the template is inserted the document looks like this:
\n![\"Template](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/59073c29af.jpg\" "\\"Image:")
Template inserted in document, with Properties for the Planning table circled.
You might notice there is both an Untitled field, and a Title field. Untitled is Obsidian’s filename for the document, whereas Title is the actual article title. Why both? Obsidian places some restrictions on the names of documents. For example, the character : isn’t allowed in an Obsidian filename, but there are times when I need it in an article title.
From here, writing is dead simpleâŚ
\n![\"Image:](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/d9fc176de1.jpg\" "\\"Image:")
The full writing environment, with a few highlighted items.
Now it’s just time to write. The majority of the screen is dedicated to the editing window where I can work on an article. If I have images (like this article) they can be drag-n-dropped into place. To the left is the Navigation panel, with my folders on the top half, and the files in the selected folder on the bottom. To the left of the editing window is the version control panel for the current article (I’ll explain my choice in the next section).
\nWhen I am done with the article I export it to an output directory. The export process converts any Obsidian specific markup (such as using wiki style links) to standard Markdown formatting, and places all the attachments (images) in a folder with the article. This makes it dead simple to upload to write.as.
I have a selection of Obsidian community plugins that I use for working in Obsidian as can be seen in this image:
\n![\"Image:](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/9a77a8f60c.jpg\" "\\"Image:")
Image: screenshot of installed community plugins.
The most important of these are Harper and LanguageTool, both of applications these plugins call are installed locally on my system as I have a slow internet connection, and prefer to have my tools running locally. markdown export is the export tool I use for blog posts. Notebook Navigator enhances Obsidian’s built-in navigation panel a ton, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Outliner provides better list handling, allowing drag-n-drop of items, folding, and more. Typewriter Mode is really only used for one feature: highlighting the current line I am editing. (I have been doing this for 40+ years as it helps with my unique form of dyslexia.)
\nRemotely Save is the tool I use for syncing my vaults between systems. Version Control is a simple built-in version control system. The advantage to using it over git or another external version control system is that the versions of my documents are synced with Remotely Save. This removes the need to synchronize a git repository separately from the vault.
\nZotero Integration allows me to search and insert bibliographic references when I need them. Alas, write.as doesn’t support reference links, so I have to do it inline, instead of in end-note style.
Safi Site Audit is a tool that is unique to this vault for me. It’s used to check the health of my sites, and catch any major issues, like broken links, missing alt text, and so on. I don’t run it often, but it’s good to be able to check and generate a report once in a while.
\nObsidian, between it’s recently added Base feature and a handful of plugins makes for a great writing environment for me. The ability to track the status of the posts I am working on, have version control over the documents, and have some additional tools that allow me to customize the environment to my liking.
\nI know there are a lot of evangelists of Obsidian out there, and their enthusiasm and overly complicated setups can make Obsidian seem unapproachable. Personally, I’ve found that it is excellent if you tailor it to your specific needs. And that is what is most important, and makes me most productive with a tool: doing what I require in the way that I need.
\nThis wasn’t too detailed in terms how I actually tweak things (like key bindings for certain tools). Hopefully it gives you some insight into my workflow. And maybe it will give you some ideas about how you can refine your workflow.
\nCategories: #HowTo\nTags: #obsidian, #tool, #writing, #blogging, #configuration, #workflow\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-21T07:58:52-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/21/how-i-write-blog-posts/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/19/notetaking-and-personal-knowledge-management/", "title": "Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management", "content_html": "![\"Bridge](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/9d78dca46e.jpg\" "\\"Bridge")
Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0
I read Brennan Kenneth Brown’s What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan’s article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes.
\nAny good piece of writing should undertake to present the relevant perspectives, and treat them seriously. But this is where I stumbled to understand Brennan’s position. While he presented the counterpoints, or counterarguments to these positions, he didn’t seem to treat them in the same manner as his primary arguments and points. That has caused me to think about his article from a different perspective.
\nThere is a statement, or rather a question, that forms the premise of Brennan’s argument about Personal Knowledge Management:
\n\n\nObsidian has been out for six years nowâhas there been an increase in public-facing understanding and knowledge?
\n
That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. It’s taking the idea of a single piece of technology, a single application, and asking what that tool has contributed to the world. How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world?
\nTake for example a couple of applications that have been around for many more decades than Obsidian: Emacs and vim. Have Emacs and vim contributed to âpublic-facingâ understanding or knowledge? No, they haven’t. However, what they have enabled people to do a lot of things: write code, programs, applications, papers, documents, books, poems, and a lot more.
\nThe tool doesn’t make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. But Brennan goes on to double down:
\n\n\nI think it’s safe to say that, while there have always been courses and lessons on productivity people sell and buy, the unique values and principles of Obsidian (local plain-text files written in Markdown, data privacy, portability, “future-proofing,” etc.) give the ideas and the people behind them a certain higher-brow purpose and epistemological value.
\n
And this is where the wheels come completely off the train. Basically nothing about the linked document supports the statement that Brennan is making. The page in question does not mention: data privacy, portability, or âfuture-proofing.â What it does suggest is, âWe believe in plain text for something as important as your knowledge base. [âŚ] When the file system replaces the cloud, you get flexible options to work with your files: you can back them up with Dropbox, use Git to do versioning, or encrypt your disk for security. Whatever works on your file system will work on your Obsidian knowledge base.â There is no hint at the concepts being âhigher-browâ or anything to indicate an ascribed âepistemological value.â
\nInstead, the core argument the Obsidian team makes is nearly the opposite:
\n\n\nNote-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.
\nInstead of providing you with an opinionated and assembled product, Obsidian gives you a foundation and numerous functional building blocks to discover and build your own solution.
\nThe foundation is to be able to view files, edit them, and search them. For the minimalist, that’s enough.
\n
So where Brennan came up with all of this âfuture-proofingâ and âhighbrowâ and âepistemological valueâ is minimally unclear, and maximally misleading. Obsidian is just a tool. A tool that is designed for users to create the system they want or need.
\nWhere I think Brennan has gone wrong with this is reading or watching what others have said about Obsidian as a tool. I have seen this ecosystem that seems to have developed around Obsidian, and honestly it is quite off-putting. But should we judge a tool by its users? Or should it be judged based on what it’s developers have provided?
\nI think I am going to side with the developers on this one.
\nBrennan then posits his central thesis a second time:
\n\n\nMy concern is in the lack of critical examination of what these complex, robust systems are producing: Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems? This is the question I want to investigate and try to answer.
\n
I do wonder what âcomplex, robust systemsâ he means at this point. He’s only mischaracterized Obsidian, which certainly at its core is not all that complex. It’s a personal Wiki with a few extra features. Wikis have existed since 1994 when Ward Cunningham developed the first one (which was installed online in 1995).
\nBelieve it or not, we haven’t even gotten to the meat of Brennan’s article yet. This article is so dense with information that it’s going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination.
\nAfter providing a list of PKM’s (most notable of which are PARA, Johnny Decimal, Zettelkasten, GTD, and Commonplace Books), Brennan sets out a series of questions for the examination of these systems:
\n\n\n\n
\n- First, what does it mean to make an important and meaningful contribution to our understanding of the world?
\n- Second, are PKM frameworks being used by those making important, meaningful contributions in fields of academia and communications? By communications, I mean synthesizing the understanding of expert-domains so these discoveries can be understood and shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.
\n- Third, what does the process actually look like for the actual people who write important papers and books?
\n- Fourth, what is the throughput and output of the people who have dedicated themselves to PKM frameworks?
\n
This series of questions, in itself, is something of a mess. The first question doesn’t have any relationship to personal knowledge management. What a person contributes to the world isn’t measured by their ability to store or regurgitate information. Making an âimportant and meaningful contributionâ is a highly nebulous concept that is dependent on the audience and the author.
\nThe second question is a complete shift in scope. Making âimportant, meaningful contributionsâ to academia and communications is not the same as making a contribution to âour understanding of the worldâ. And then there’s this: ââŚshared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.â To many, academia is quite literally a form of elitism that gate keeps information. (Aside: I could make a long argument here about what happened to Aaron Swartz in his attempt to liberate the information that was being gate kept by academia.)
\nThird question: surely it looks like whatever works for them, right? I mean, this is what the promise of Obsidian is in the first place: âNote-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.â If someone wants to use PARA, they use PARA. If they want to invent their own system (spoilers) then they will do so. Again, how is this relevant? Is a person’s choice of system indicative or predictive of their ability to perform some task?
\nThe fourth question is, possibly, the most valuable, and yet the most difficult. How do you know what people are choosing to use for their knowledge management? How does someone measure âthroughput and outputâ? Certainly you can perform a quantitative analysis of this, however assessing the qualitative nature of this question is far more difficult.
\nNext we talk about German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose Zettelkasten system has become widely known, and is frequently cited as a âgeniusâ method for organizing one’s notes or information. Brennan here thinks of this as a âMythâ because no one has been able to take Luhmann’s notes and create new works based on them. People have realized that his system was idiosyncratic to Luhmann himself. But does that make his methodology a âmyth?â I don’t think so, it just means his method was specific to him.
\nAt this point Brennan starts going through the questions that he outlined (as quoted above), only there’s a bit of goal shifting here. For example, question one is now stated as âWhat counts as a meaningful contribution to understanding?â Before it had to be both âimportant and meaningfulâ and it had to apply to âour understanding of the worldâ. But, nonetheless, let’s continue. Brennan states:
\n\n\nThe empirical literature on insight and creativity centers on incubation, the act of stepping away from a problem, unconscious restructuring, working memory offloading. This is not the act of browsing a hyperlinked card catalog.
\n
Incubation is, quite literally, a portion of the process that systems like PARA (Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Vol. 1. Simon and Schuster, 2022.) actually supports. In Chapter 3, he quite clearly states:
\n\n\nThere are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us:
\n\n
\n- Making our ideas concrete
\n- Revealing new associations between ideas.
\n- Incubating our ideas over time.
\n- Sharpening our unique perspectives.
\n
(Emphasis added.)
\nThe understanding is that this is very much in line with the ideas that works about insight and creativity have suggested. This isn’t just spending time âbrowsing a hyperlinked card catalog.â It’s storing information such that it can be found when it is needed and additional information might surface during the process that allows intuitive leaps in problem-solving. This whole concept is completely in line with the papers being cited.
\nAnd then Brennan disproves his whole point by pointing to a paper: Scholars ARE Collectors: A Proposal for Re-thinking Research Support which makes the point that academics are âhoardersâ of information. And they organize and interact with this information in their own way. In other words: they make intuitive leaps through use of hoarded information.
\nThe next question, âAre PKM frameworks used by people making real contributions, or mostly by people selling PKM?â is completely different from the one listed in the beginning of the article: âSecond, are PKM frameworks being used by those making important, meaningful contributions in fields of academia and communications? By communications, I mean synthesizing the understanding of expert-domains, so these discoveries can be understood and shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.â
\nSeriously? How does the literal questions keep changing this much? The first question mostly in scope. But now, the second question doesn’t even match between statements of the question. I think I know why this happening, which I will explain towards the end of this article. For now, we’ll talk about the revised question.
\nBrennan notes that there is a whole market of people selling books, courses, and other materials about PKM. And, makes note that it is likely that those who are writing and doing training about it are not likely applying their teachings.
\nHonestly, I don’t know that this is really an issue. There are people that get into many lines of work, including things like life trainers, gym trainers, motivational speaking, etc. What works for one person may not work for another person. Listing off a bunch of people that don’t use a system doesn’t disprove the system, it only shows that there are other methods that can be used.
\nThe part that I think was hilarious about this section was the âgotchaâ Brennan tries to make of this post on the Obsidian forum. The way the original poster made his post, it’s obvious that he was trying to promote his own book, and his website. But then one respondent posts a literal bibliography of at least fifty works the original poster didn’t reference. The clear implication of this post: the original poster is unqualified in the field, he hasn’t done his research. And yet, here we are, using this post where someone is debunking the original poster as an example.
\nOkay, on to the third question:âWhat does the process actually look like for people who write important books?â Hey, what do you know: this time the questions actually match!
\nNow, while I love to examine the processes of others when possible to glean any insights I can from them, and possibly integrate some of their concepts into my own, I don’t see how this proves anything. Just because people that are highly successful, or are high functioning in their field don’t adopt a PKM methodology or specific tool is no reflection on the methodology or the tool. It’s just a matter of the person having found the tools and methods that work for them.
\nSo, let’s look at this statement from Brennan:
\n\n\nThe analogue systems used by demonstrably prolific working writers are project-bounded and disposable. The digital PKM ideology sells the opposite promise of a permanent, ever-growing, cross-project system that gets more valuable the longer you maintain it.
\n
Are the analogue systems always project-bounded? There are many times when fiction writers have started developing some idea or concept for a work, but found that it didn’t fit the story they wanted to tell. So, do they just throw it away? No. They put it aside someplace only to be retrieved when it fits in the story they are writing.
\nThe PKM system, on the whole, is about building a knowledge base, basically a library of knowledge that you can pull from. When you have a specific project, you pull the information that fits specifically within the scope of the project you are working on. This is basically no different from going to a library and gathering research materials. Just because a library has hundreds of thousands of books that don’t apply to your field doesn’t mean those books don’t have value. There are likely books that don’t fit in your field of study that still have value to you for other reasons.
\nSingling out three or four people that have processes that are completely different from PKM method doesn’t disprove anything about PKM methods. It just shows that those methods don’t work for them.
\nOkay, on to the last question: âWhat is the actual throughput of people dedicated to PKM?â Originally this was stated as âthroughput and outputâ but now the scope is narrowed to âthroughputâ. And, what exactly is âthroughput?â Is that quantifiable or measurable? Output could be quantified or measured: X number of articles, Y number of books, Z number of videos⌠More importantly, one could consider the potential impact based of their work product based on their relevance as measured by following.
\nThe example given in this section is of Theo Stowell, someone who has been writing about PKM and using Obsidian for several years, and now is supposedly developing a new tool. How relevant is he? Well, the highest number of followers for Theo I could find was on Medium, where he has 1.8K followers. Everywhere else I looked (YouTube, Instagram, Substack) he had well below 1K followers, and in many cases well below 500 followers.
\nNow, how big is Obsidian? On Obsidian’s own website, they indicated there were around 750K downloads by 2022. The most recent estimate I could find of Obsidian’s distribution was in this Fueler article, which states there are between 1-1.5 million copies of Obsidian out there.
\nSo, I don’t understand the example of Theo Stowell, he doesn’t seem to represent a significant presence in the Obsidian community considering there are plugins with well over 1 million downloads (23 as of this writing).
\nNow, we know that there is a big market around self-help, personal-development market. And organization systems, methods, and tools is a part of this market. But, honestly, it’s not as big as it might seem. Tiago Forte, the most notable name in the PKM had a revenue of about $2.4M from his âBuilding a Second Brainâ book. But when all the expenses were factored in, he netted approximately $1.26M. That is on the sale of 500K books.
\nSure that sounds like a decent chunk of change, but in a market worth somewhere around $46 Billion in 2025, $2.4M is a fairly small amount compared to the potential. Obsidian is very difficult to estimate, but based on the referenced Fueler article, its revenue is somewhere between $5M and $25M annually. And even that is still a fairly small amount when compared to the overall industry.
\nWhen I started the first draft of this response, I was stymied by how so much of the article had gone so wrong. I was thinking, âI don’t know how I can ever explain this.â But, then, just when I thought I was going to have to say âI don’t knowâ an article popped up on Bubbles that provided some insight: People and Blogs: Brennan Kenneth Brown. In particular, there is a segment about Brennan’s writing process where he points to a post on his own site: My Blogging Workflow: A routine for nearly a post a day for 4 months straight., wherein he talks about how he handles the research parts of his posts:
\n\n\nRegardless of my focus or topic, I go as fast as possible, as I want to reach 750 words in around 20 minutes, though sometimes it takes much longer.
\nHow do I have articles heavy with links and stats and quotes from others if I’m writing so quickly? When I’m writing a research-heavy essay or commentary, I’ll put something in brackets with TK and return back to it in the editing process so I don’t slow down with the writing.
\n
Rightly, he points out, this is a practice from journalism, as journalists are frequently writing in the field and don’t have access to the research materials. But, there is a pitfall to this process: in trying to write and edit articles quickly, it can lead to poorly done research. And that is what appears to have happened with this article. Many of the cited (aka linked) articles, papers, and websites are inconclusive in relationship to their supposed point. In some cases they don’t support the arguments that are being made at all.
\nThis response post has been a two-day slog for me through all of this, and trying to do some quick research of my own to correct the misleading information in the original article. Indeed, a lot of this is my opinion or my interpretation of the materials that Brennan has placed before his audience. However, it’s pretty simple to see that there is a substantial portion of his article that just was not well considered.
\nAnd this is where I get to point to a substantial irony in this story. Much of Brennan’s issue with PKMs and tools like Obsidian is that we don’t see a lot more output from people. That instead, we see quite a few people that have gone the route of trying to become influential in the PKM field, and writing their own books about it (with or without appropriate levels of research).
\nBrennan himself, has documented that his approach is to write a post every day. He makes it a process by which is tries to write 750 words in 20 minutes. He also notes that he has written quite a few novels, all of which are self-published works.
\nPersonally, all of this is sounding completely backwards from what I was taught to do when writing a research paper. I was always told: come up with a thesis, do the research, and only when the research is complete write the paper. In fact, I was called out several times in school for not having done my research well, and trying to use sources in a narrow manner to prove points that they didn’t support. Sound familiar?
\nI always had the excuse that I was working on a deadline, and I didn’t realize the complications that I was going to run into, so I did the best with the materials that I had. But the fact was that I hadn’t done the research properly, and I hadn’t based my writing on the research. Instead, I went into the writing process trying to prove my thesis correct, even when it was weak or incorrect.
\nAnd that’s the issue with Brennan’s article. There is just a lot of the research that doesn’t completely support the underlying statements. And even Brennan knew that he couldn’t make the information fit the narrative that he had in his mind when he sat down and started writing. That’s why we see things like restatements of questions that have substantial shifts in scope.
\nIn the end, I think Brennan went into his post with good intention. But he became over-ambitious and let the whole thing creep out of his control. However, there is one thing that we both agree on: AI. As he states in his article:
\n\n\nI promise there is a deep debt to be paid if you attempt to offload cognitive labour to a non-deterministic machine, especially if you care about objectivity and facts.
\n
Indeed, AI is no replacement for the labor of actually committing one’s own cognitive processes to the page or screen.
\nCategories: #Essays\nTags: #response, #pkm, #knowledge, #management, #research, #writing, #notes, #notetaking\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-19T07:55:42-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/19/notetaking-and-personal-knowledge-management/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/17/re-bye-bye-gravatar/", "title": "RE: Bye bye Gravatar", "content_html": "![\"The](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/023c4ad8b0.jpg\" "\\"The")
The latest anti-feature from Automatticânow infecting Gravatar. Photo by: Unattributed, Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Happily Imperfect posted Bye bye Gravatar a short while ago, and I have to say, I’ve had a similar thought about deleting my account on there as well. My feelings towards WordPress and Automattic started changing some time ago, back when they introduced the Gutenberg editor. Ever since this âimprovementâ it’s been a downhill slide for WordPress to the point where it’s become an unusable mess in my opinion.
\nI know a lot of people also think that Matt Mullenweg’s recent statements about WordPress, open source, and other companies have been problematic. I reserve my opinions on those areas. Instead, I am judging the quality of the software and the services that are being produced.
\nBut there is an irony when it comes to Gravatar: even though it serves little purpose in and of itself, it does do one thing: it serves your avatar. I can’t say how many times in the past I’ve logged into some new site / application only to have my avatar automatically populate itself. For a while it was jarring because I hadn’t updated Gravatar for years. But at least it was filling in something rather than nothing. And, I felt that something filled a purpose: a consistency of identity across the web.
\nBut, now I wonder about that. I cannot recall the last time my avatar was automatically filled in. The only notable case recently was that my avatar updated automatically on GitHub when I changed it on Gravatar. And, honestly my feelings towards GitHub and Microslop are in the shitter as well. So, there’s that.
\nAnd now, I have an absolute reason to nuke this f***ing account all to hell. I do NOT EVER consent to ANYTHING being done in regard to AI in my name. There was never any notification sent about this change to Gravatar. Hell, I haven’t received any notice of any changes being made to Gravatar in the last 5â10 years. It was a similar change that pushed me over the edge with WordPress, and I feel the same way about it with Gravatar.
\nI know, they haven’t actually sent anything directly to any chatbots on my behalf. But the fact that they saw fit to add this ANTI-feature without announcing it speaks more about where Automattic is in the process of enshittifying their products than anything else. Nopeâit’s goodbye to any and everything Automattic, including Gravatar.
\nWith newer sites like Bio Link (it has been called to my attention that Bio Link now has AI-anti features, and as such can no longer be considered a good option) and FediProfile I don’t see the usefulness of Gravatar. If anything, I think it now has ANTI-features.
And now Gravatar is gone, kaput, deleted. Goodbye and good riddance.
\nCategories: #Rant\nTags: #response, #automattic, #ai, #antiai, #nukeittohell\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-17T09:27:30-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/17/re-bye-bye-gravatar/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/16/accessibility-rant-reader-mode/", "title": "Accessibility Rant: Reader Mode", "content_html": "![\"Wolf](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/72513b2c49.jpg\" "\\"Wolf")
Wolf looking directly into a camera at close proximity.
There is a bit of an issue I have noticed lately: websites actively blocking Reading Mode in Firefox, and derivative web browsers. I was stunned to find out (just a minute ago) that Reading Mode doesn’t appear to be a default feature in Chromium, but instead an add-on. So, I don’t know if this is an issue for Chrome based browsers.
\nThis is getting frustratingly annoying for me. Why? There are multiple reasons that Reading Mode is a necessity for many people, myself included. Let’s talk about a few of them.
\nThis is a problem I see a lot with websites, it seems to be a trendy or fashionable aesthetic⌠Have a light gray background so it’s not completely white, then have a âdarkâ gray for the text. In most cases probably not too bad, but for some people that’s not enough contrast. My personal issue seems to be with blue versions of themes with this style.
\nI understand quite a few people like pastel colored themes. They really do look nice. I have even tried to take some from this aesthetic with my sites: use a medium/neutral background color, light color for the logo and highlights so they aren’t overbearing. But, I still maintain a fairly high contrast for the main content.
\nWhile sites like this can really look amazing in their simplicity, and soothing color choices, they can be a nightmare from an accessibility standpoint.
\nI get it, really I do: there is a lot of nostalgia for the 1990s personal websites⌠Heck there is a lot of nostalgia for anything that is âretroâ. That isn’t a bad thing. I enjoy websites where personal expression is as important, or sometimes more important than the content.
\nBut, sometimes, we want to read and potentially engage with the owner of the website⌠Sometimes the retro aesthetics get in the way. When it does, allowing visitors choices in how they engage with your content is necessary.
\nI don’t know what has happened in the last twenty-something years, but somewhere along the way we seem to have gone wrong with fonts. There are a lot of sites that, while they are amazing from an overall aesthetic perspective, have fonts that are either tiny or have very thin strokes.
\nPersonally, I think this is likely due to changes in displays. We have to have our websites look good on many devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, eInk tablets, phones), and under multiple browsers and operating systems. All of these factors can make it difficult to get font choices right. This is especially true when you are trying to make a site that has a clean look, or a professional aesthetic.
\nThis is another reason to allow visitors options for how they view your content.
\nI’ll hold my hand up here and say this applies to me specifically. I have an issue that is categorized as dyslexia, but isn’t typical dyslexia. The problem is my eyes don’t synchronize properly all the time. One of the worst is when I am reading. Let me try to explain.
\nWhen I read my right eye will move through a line of text more quickly than my left eye. In order to compensate for the difference in speed between them, I slow down my right eye to keep it in sync with my left eye. This issue can be exacerbated by the font and color choices. This was found when I went through a series of tests over forty years ago. (Before anyone asks / comments: no, the âdyslexia fontâ doesn’t help, it makes things worse for me. That font is more for people with issues recognizing letter shapes, or people that tend to recognize letters out of order. I recognize the letters / words / etc. just fine. This is purely an eye muscle / neural control issue.)
\nMore recently, a couple of color blindness tests have shown indications I may be partially color-blind. Not to any significant level, I can still differentiate all colors in the spectrum. Rather some blues may appear more washed out to me than they do to others.
\nAnother, far more common issue is age. As people get older their eyes can become weaker. They need to be able to read sites in as comfortable a manner as possible. The best way for many of them is using Reader Mode. How do I know this? Up until she passed away, I took care of my mother. There were numerous times when she needed to read a website, but had difficulties. I showed her how to use Reader Mode, and helped set it up so it was comfortable for her.
\nBasically, actively disabling the Reader Mode of any browser is an act of denying someone with a disability access. It’s the same as non-disabled asshats parking in the spots reserved for people with disabilities. Or stores / shops that won’t provide a ramp for people in wheelchairs or walkers.
\nWhile this isn’t a super common issue, I’ve been noticing it more and more lately. Especially with the IndieWeb, where we want people actively reading and interacting with each other.
\nI noted tonight on one site, an author made a comment about their site potentially being difficult to read. Honestly, the color scheme of the site was difficult for me. But, guess what: I was able to use Reader Mode to read their comment without issue. I wouldn’t change their site, it has a really cool semi-retro aesthetic to it. As long as Reader Mode is available, it’s accessible for me.
\nThat’s all I’m asking for: accessibility.
\nEnd rant.
\nCategories: #Essays\nTags: #accessibility, #readermode, #eyes, #disability, #rant\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-16T07:55:27-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/16/accessibility-rant-reader-mode/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/14/the-state-of-rss-feed/", "title": "The State of RSS Feed Readers", "content_html": "![\"Two](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/1b4caf8a42.jpg\" "\\"Two")
Two boats docked behind a berm.
Many years ago (over a decade) I wrote an article about RSS Feed reader alternatives after Google announced they were killing Reader in March 2013. That article attracted a fair amount of attention, including a request from RedHat to republish the article on their blog. On the ten-year anniversary of the death of Google Reader, the Verge published the article: Who killed Google Reader? (pay-walled article), indicating (to me) that even a decade on there was still interest in these products. Today, with the rising profile of the FediVerse and the IndieWeb, it seems RSS readers and feed aggregation are seeing a bit of a renaissance with the likes of Bubbles. I’ve also noted several feed reader sites showing up as referrers on my sites.
\nAnd, just to make things more interesting, as I was working on the first draft of this piece, Rishabh P. Sharma posted an article on his site called: FreshRSS vs My Own Feed Reader: A fierce competition. I took this as yet another indicator that there is still quite a bit of interest in RSS/Atom Feed Readers.
\nThis started me wondering what is the status of RSS feed readers and other news aggregators these? Are they the technology of a bygone era as once predicted by Google? Or are they still around and thriving as I’m starting to believe from seeing several readers in my websites referrers? Are there any new ones that might be worth looking at? And, most importantly, have they changed?
\nThe original article I wrote back in 2013 was focused on a simple, and single question: what to do now that Google Reader is going away? Back then, everything was an opportunity for open source alternatives to shine. So, that’s how I wrote the article (and why RedHat was interested in it). I provided a roundup of what were the best alternatives that I could find at the time.
\nObviously we aren’t in 2013 anymore, so it doesn’t seem like a roundup article is what is needed. Instead, what I would like to do is examine a few questions:
\nThese might be more of interest to you today if you don’t use, or don’t understand why RSS/Atom feed readers are useful.
\nFrom looking around for a bit, I was able to answer Google’s prediction: no, RSS/Atom readers and aggregators are definitely not the technology of a bygone era. First, not only do many websites still have RSS/Atom feeds available, but I was able to identify a number of different ways in which they are being used now:
\nWebsites like Memeorandom, Mediagazer, Techmeme and WeSmirch actually use RSS/Atom feeds in several ways: First, they use feeds from other media outlets to gather current stories. The stories are then aggregated to produce their single-page quick view website. Second, they make RSS feeds available for viewing in a feed reader. Third, they use RSS/Atom feeds to export their content to social media, like the Fediverse. (Aside: they almost make a list of all the feeds they scrape available on the leaderboards, which are part of each site. This is a great way to find a list of feeds if you need one.) Basically, that’s a lot of RSS/Atom based tech to produce what is, essentially, a single page website.
\nOf course, we have the recent site Bubbles. Bubbles is a website that presents a ranked list of posts from IndieSites that sign up for the service. The use RSS/Atom feeds to populate their lists of articles to Pretty cool stuff, reaching back to the old days of the internet.
\nAs hinted above, there is a lot of RSS feeds being bridged to the Fediverse. Possibly the biggest / most common are the weather and weather camera feeds. Of course, there is also the ever popular Elon Musk Jet tracker. Fedi Directory has an extensive list of bots on the Fediverse, including many RSS bridging bots.
\nPlatforms like Mastodon and GotoSocial make public user posts available via RSS. For example, my feed is: Unattributed’s GTS Feed. Of course, this can be disabled by users if they don’t want their posts published use RSS/Atom. But why use it? It’s a good way to archive your posts, especially if you want to implement automatic post deletion application, but might want to keep some of those bangers around to reuse later.
\nThe most unusual use of RSS/Atom feeds goes to Calibre, which uses them to scan websites and build e-Books for reading offline.
\nAnd, let’s not forget podcasts. Lots of podcasting platforms serve RSS/Atom feeds for retrieving shows, and many podcast players use RSS/Atom feeds to retrieve the podcast(s).
\nHopefully it’s obvious that RSS feeds are not tech from a bygone era. I would say, in fact, that RSS/Atom is literally the protocol that is literally powering a substantial portion of the internet as we know it today.
\nThe name RSS has multiple definitions, but for our purposes here, the best is Really Simple Syndication. Its purpose is to provide of stream of updated information from a website. This information can take many forms, and can include different types of media, such as photos, audio files, or video files.
\nThe idea is that a website produces a stream (file) when another application or website sends a query to the site. The stream contains the information that has been updated since the last query. In some cases, the site (or client) may limit the number of items in an update. This is mostly true when the site has a lot of information that is changing very quickly.
\nThe idea that only updated information is sent is what makes RSS flexible and light-weight. Since only a limited amount of information is sent during each query the overhead in processing each request is low.
\nApplications that receive these updates read them, and then take actions based on the updates. For example, if an update says there is a new article, the application can download that article. This processing includes items like images, video, and audio files.
\nRSS readers are convenient. They allow you to keep track of the changes on as many sites as you desire. In most cases, the RSS reader will automatically check for updates on the sites you have specified, at an interval you specify. Most readers also allow you to set an expiry period for the information it gathers.
\nIn addition to these features, many readers include additional features to allow you to tag items, mark items as favorites, or mark them for some other processing. Many times you can also export items to other formats or programs (say a note-taking application like Obsidian or Joplin).
\nAnd even more advanced readers will allow you to set up rules to tell the program how to treat items that match a one or more sets of criteria. For example, automatically download podcasts, or tag an item if the title contains a keyword.
\nThis flexibility can allow the user to deal with massive amounts of information in a quick and efficient manner. You can think of a reader like a berm: it provides a barrier between you and the wide ocean of information that is out there on the internet. Inside the berm’s perimeter you have your docks organized into bays where each of your boats (ie, website feeds) are docked.
\nSo, time to look at some RSS reader options that you might be interested in. This is not going to be an exhaustive list by any means. I checked out the Wikipedia Comparison of Feed Aggregators list earlier. It’s a large list, with a lot of applications that are both maintained and unmaintained, and some applications that probably really shouldn’t be on the list.
\nInstead, I want to focus on different classes of reader applications you might want to consider. We’ll talk about the reason(s) why you might want to use each, and These include extensions you can add to your web browser, desktop applications, cloud based applications, and hosting your own RSS aggregation server.
\nIf you use a desktop computer or a laptop as your primary computing device, this is the most obvious place to start. Adding an extension to your browser can make your feeds available in a way that smoothly integrates with your current environment. The ones that I would look at are FeedBro, LiveMarks, SlickReader and The RSS Aggregator.
\nOf all of these readers, LiveMarks is available as both a Firefox and Chrome extension, and is rather unique when it comes to how it works. When you add a site to LiveMarks it creates a folder in your bookmarks with links to all the articles that are in the feed. You open the bookmarks to read the article, which actually literally opens the website web page. This can be nice if there are things about the actual web page that you want to or should see. However, this can also open you up to being tracked by the website, so I would only go this route if you have strong ad block and privacy measures in place.
\nThe (unfortunately named) FeedBro for Firefox, and SlickReader for Chrome are the most traditional RSS feed readers, looking like an email application in your browser. As you add new sites, a folder is created in the application’s database. You open an email like view and can scan through and read the entries.
\nThe RSS Aggregator for Chrome differentiates itself a bit by allowing you to interact with your feeds through your choice of a drop-down menu, or an email-like interface. When installed a button is added to your shortcuts which will indicate how many updates there. Clicking the button will show you the feeds you’ve added, and selecting a feed will show you the updates. From there you can go directly to the article, or mark it off. The one downside to this reader is if you want the Filters, Rules, and Collections features you have to purchase their Plus or Professional version.
\nPersonally, I think this is where the best options are for aggregating content using RSS feeds. However, the downside is that you need to have some technical skill, and the desire to set up a self-hosting system. This is likely most appealing to people that are already into setting up home labs. However, if you run a Jellyfin server, or other media server, maybe this approach will appeal to you.
\nThere are three options for self-hosting that I am aware of: TTRSS (Tiny Tiny RSS), FreshRSS, and Nextcloud News App. Personally, I ran TTRSS on a server many years ago and absolutely loved it. This was right after the Google announcement that they were discontinuing their reader application. I haven’t used FreshRSS, but it looks to be comparable to TTRSS. The Nextcloud News App has the advantage of being available in the Nextcloud App store. If you already have a Nextcloud server set up then this is an obvious choice.
\nThe reason I feel the self-hosted option is the best is that they offer the most flexibility. You can access them through their web based interfaces, or you can use them with standalone applications as clients. In this way no matter what device you are reading on, your clients will always know what you have / haven’t read.
\nRight behind the self-hosted options are cloud based feed aggregator / readers. The biggest advantage that these applications have is they often have the work to build large databases of feeds to make available to you. You get to select the feeds that you want to read without having to find and add them to your reader. Often during the account creation process you will be presented with a list choose from.
\nSome of the most notable cloud based aggregator / readers are: Inoreader, Newsblur, Feedly, FeedMe, FeedLand, and The Old Reader. The (to me at least) downside to many of these sites is that they want a subscription for “advanced” features. The prices and features vary between applications. The plus side of cloud based applications is they often have companion web browser plugins, and standalone cellphone apps.
\nThe most interesting of the cloud based options is FeedLand. This is a platform created by Dave Winer - one of the originators of RSS. His idea is to make a site that is “social” based around newsfeeds. You can share posts from your feed to your own social feed, which others on the site can follow. The site also provides exporting lists of your feeds, which you can use with other feed reader applications. And, best of all, there is no charge for the system.
\nAnother one that is a completely free cloud based platform is FeedMe. I was unaware of it until it showed up in the referrers list in my analytics. It is self-described as a minimalist feed reader, and it is. You add your feeds manually, or using an OPML file if you have one. You can make categories for your feeds, and read them. There is no tagging feature, only a favorite option, and you have to manually mark each item as read (or mark the whole feed as read). There’s no option to limit the number of items in a feed, or the age of the items. And there is no option for third party application integration.
\nInoreader, Newsblur, and Feedly are all sites that seem to be fairly popular as they are ones that are showing up in my referrers, along with FeedMe.
\nThere are a fair number of desktop applications, with a couple of them standing out as being available on many operating systems: RSS Guard is available on Windows, Linux, OS/2, and macOS. Fluent Reader is available on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Communique and NewsFlash are Linux native applications, while Fiery Feeds is available on iOS and macOS. The reason for singling out these applications is they all integrate with the Nextcloud News application.
\nNotably, RSS Guard also integrates with Tiny Tiny RSS and Feedly.
\nAs I mentioned in the Tech of a Bygone Era section, Calibre can take your RSS feeds and produce e-Books from them, which turns them into a magazine-like reading experience. There are also a couple of desktop email applications that include support for reading RSS feeds: Thunderbird and Claws Mail. While Claws Mail is a Linux based application, Thunderbird is available on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
\nAll of these applications should be able to import OPML files, if you decide to move from one reader to a desktop application.
\nWhile I am not very familiar with iOS applications since I’ve never used an iPhone, the aforementioned Fiery Feeds is an option that provides Nextcloud News integration. A couple more options with Nextcloud News integration are: CloudNews and Nextnews. Additionally, I believe (although I could be wrong) there is a news application that comes with the iPhone?
\nOn the Android side there are plenty of options: Nextcloud News Reader, OCReader, Newsout, and Readrops are all notable for their Nextcloud News integration. A couple of other notable apps include Feedly, Flipboard. On the open source side there are quite a few more applications: RSS Reader, Feeder, Capy Reader, and FeedFlow to name a few (available in the F-Droid store).
\nAnd there are the applications designed to work with specific cloud platforms like Inoreader, Feedly, and NewsBlur.
\n(NOTE: while I did mention Flipboard, I am not mentioning apps like GroundNews, SmartNews, Google News, Yahoo! News as those apps are more specifically focused on gathering news from a predefined list of news outlets, and typically don’t allow adding your own feeds.)
\nWhat I find interesting about this is an image of seeing all the information that is available on the internet as a stream. Much of that information is available for the taking, consuming, researching, etc. However, it’s what we do with this information that matters. Feed Readers are like docks. You use a reader to set up the bays for all the information to flow into. How the docks and bays are organized is up to you.
\nSo, what would I do given the whole sea of available options?
\nI’ve already mentioned several times that I use Calibre’s RSS scanning feature. I like the idea of having e-Books that I can just put on my e-Reader and read at me leisure. But, there is another feature of Calibre I haven’t mentioned: the Content Server. This feature starts a web server application that I can use on any of my devices within my house. So, if I wanted to read anything from my library, including all the news sites I download, on my tablet or phone, I can use the content server with my web browser.
\nBut, if I weren’t using this solution, I would self-host Tiny Tiny RSS, and use RSS Guard on my desktop, and the open source Tiny Tiny RSS android app on my phone and tablet. The other option I would explore would be setting up Nextcloud, using the Nextcloud News App and using the Android version of the Nextcloud News App.
\nHowever, I wouldn’t take my advice in this area, as my needs and desires are likely far different from yours. Explore what’s out there, see which options give you what you want. Personally, I am happy reading the IndieWeb on my desktop using my web browser, and don’t see a need to do anything else with it.
\nCategories: #Features\nTags: #rss, #feeds, #readers, #windows, #macos, #linux, #android, #ios, #cloud\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-14T07:55:44-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/14/the-state-of-rss-feed/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/12/three-water-songs/", "title": "Three Water Songs", "content_html": "![\"Calm](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/b230947ebe.jpg\" "\\"Calm")
Calm waters on Lake Superior.
I’ve been collecting a lot of images of water lately. This is the outgrowth of a post I made on Ennui Vagaries about repurposing weather camera photos. There are a lot of weather cameras that are on the shores of lakes, rivers, or at the docks and launches. Collecting these photos has been made exceptionally easy by the Fediverse having many feeds of these images.
\nWhile collecting a bunch of the sunset images tonight, I thought of the song Downstream by Supertramp. It’s a gorgeous solo piece by Rick Davies with just a simple piano accompaniment. The lyrics are a tribute to his spouse at the time. Basically a simple love song, sung in a very simple manner.
\nThis, in turn, started me thinking about another water themed love song. That would be To Be Over by Yes. Not a lot of people know the story of this song. It was a song that Steve Howe brought to the group. He had written it based on a boat ride he and his wife had taken on a Sunday. Of course, bringing in the start of the song, the rest of the band expanded it into a true Yes ballad. Possibly one of their most underrated works ever.
\nAnd then I was thinking, what else kind of matches this mood? Basically slow, gentle water themed songs. And there was one that popped into my mind immediately: Ruby Pool by Vola. The wonder of this song is the piano arpeggios by Martin Werner that lead off the song, followed by the pairing with Adam Janzi’s drum pattern is just magical. I could almost listen to a whole song just built off this pairing, but fortunately the lyrics of the song are just a gorgeous as the arrangement, and as always Asger Mygind’s vocals are stunning.
\nSo, there you have it. Three, gentle, water-themed songs for a peaceful Sunday.
\nCategories: #Music\nTags: #songs, #yes, #supertramp, #vola, #pop, #rock, #progressive\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-12T08:05:50-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/12/three-water-songs/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/10/before-angine-and-king-gizzard/", "title": "Before Angine and King Gizzard there was Harry Partch", "content_html": "![\"The](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/82fc87fd5d.jpg\" "\\"The")
The Harry Partch Ensemble, via Wikipedia, under a CC 0 License.
Listening to Harry Partch is like going on a surreal archaeological dig through history. Only this is history reinterpreted by someone who has been taking shrooms for two decades. Yet, with the emergence of microtonality in the music of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Angine de Poitrine his works are more relevant today than ever.
\nHarry Partch was born on June 24th, 1901 to Virgil Franklin Partch, and his wife Jennie. They were missionaries to China who fled the Boxer Rebellion. His parents settled in Benson, Arizona. He was encouraged by his mother to learn music, and she taught him to read music. He was exposed to music from different cultures including Chinese (via his mother), the Yaqui people, and Spanish songs.
\nHe began studying piano serious in 1913 after his family relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He also began composing his earliest piano works (which he later destroyed). In 1919 He relocated with his mother to Los Angeles after the death of his father. In 1920 his mother was killed in a trolley accident. Partch studied music at the University of Southern California’s School of Music in 1920, but left two years later being dissatisfied with the teachers.
\nSometime during the 18th Century, western music settled on the tuning system known as twelve-tone equal temperament. After reading Hermann von Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone in 1923, Partch began to feel that equal temperament had forced music to become more abstract. This abstraction was stifling the true possibilities for expression in music, so he rejected equal temperament in favor of just intonation.
\nThis marked Partch’s first step in finding a different direction for musical expression that remains the inspiration for many avant-garde and experimental musicians to this day.
\nPer Wikipedia’s entry on Harry Partch, his career can be divided into several periods: Early Work (1919-1947), Academic Period (1947-1962), and his Late Period (1962-1974). These periods roughly correspond with the types of Partch’s compositions, and his exploration of tonality.
\nDuring the first period, Partch came to reject the system of equal temperament, favoring just intonation instead. His first experiments involved creating paper coverings that indicated just intonation fingerings for violins. In 1930, he decided to break from the equal temperament tradition completely and burned all his previous 12TET (12 tone equal temperament) based compositions. He then devised a 29 tone scale, and had a viola constructed with which to perform works using this scale (the Adapted Viola).
\nIn 1932, he gave several performances of his works in San Francisco, and won the support of a private group of individuals which allowed him to relocate to New York. The Carnegie Corporation of New York granted him the money he needed to continue his studies in England, where he met Kathleen Schlesinger. Schlesinger had been studying ancient Greek music theory, and had recreated a Kithara from an image on a Greek vase. Upon his return to the United States during the great depression, Partch would spend nine years as a transient / hobo. In 1938 constructed his own Kithara approximately twice the size of Schlesinger’s and devised a new 43 tone scale. While in Chicago, Partch would design and build a 43 tone reed organ (aka the Chromelodeon).
\nThe second period saw Partch settling into the University of Wisconsin from 1944-1947, during which he lectured, built more instruments, and finished his book Genesis of a Music. He left in 1947 due to not being able to join the permanent staff of the university, and there being a lack of space for his instruments. In 1949, he was offered the opportunity to convert a smithy into a studio by Gunnar Johansen to continue his work. During his work in the smithy, he recorded Eleven Intrusions and several other works. In 1951, he moved to Oakland, CA for health reasons, and put on a performance of his piece King Oedipus, but was unable to make a recording of it due to objections from the Yeats estate. Partch set up his studio / record label Gate 5 in 1953, and would release records via mail order. During this period Partch also started working with the University of Illinois, and was introduced to Danlee Mitchel, who would later become Partch’s heir. Partch produced several performances of his works with the University’s support. Partch also began what would a six film collaboration with Madeline Tourtelot. Partch left the University due hostility from the music department, despite having support from other departments and organizations.
\nPartch’s final period saw him returning to California, and setting up studio in Petaluma. He composed And on the Seventh Day, Petals Fell in Petaluma. And, in 1969, Columbia Records released The World of Harry Partch, his first major label release. Partch’s final theater was The Delusions of the Fury, produced in 1969. His final work was the soundtrack to the Betty Freeman film The Dreamer That Remains. In 1973 Partch retired. He died of a heart attack on September 3rd, 1974.
\nAs is, hopefully apparent, Partch’s work was both influential and controversial. During his life he was supported by numerous artists, such as Henry Cowell, Otto Leuning, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copeland. He also had the support of numerous foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the League of Composers, the Fromm Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
\nTowards the end of his life, The Harry Partch Foundation was established to handle his expenses, and administer his work. His instruments. Danlee Mitchel served as the Executive Director of The Harry Partch Foundation until his death. Dean Drummond’s group Newband undertook the handling of Partch’s instruments and performs with them. The Sousa Archives and Center for American Music holds the Harry Partch Archive 1918-1991.
\nPartch was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 1974. In 2004 U.S. Highball was selected by the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board.
\nWhile the work of Harry Partch has not seen wide acknowledgment throughout Europe or Eastern Countries, there is growing interest in his work. Partch’s work has established a culture where the exploration of alternate tunings for instruments has become something that is more common.
\nGroups like Angine de Poitrine, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard haven’t rejected the concept of equal temperament in their instrument selection. But, they are using the concept of adding more tones to the scale in ways that are substantive, just as Partch developed whole new scales and made large scale compositions with them.
\nThis is the way forward for music. There is an entire world of sound out there waiting to be discovered, or in some cases, rediscovered. Twelve tone equal temperament has been the primary focus of music for centuries. With the advances in synthesizers and sampling over the past several decades, artists have started exploring all sorts of new grounds.
\nHopefully, we will see more substantial work done in the field of using just intonation, and other tuning systems.
\nIf you would like to explore the music of Harry Partch, I highly recommend the four volume set: The Harry Partch Collection Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, and Vol 4, along with other recordings of Partch’s work on New World Records.
\nThere is also an excellent film of Harry Partch’s Studio from around 1950 available on YouTube. This lets you see all of his instruments and provides a deeper understanding of how they were designed. Partch also plays each of the instruments.
\nCategories: #Music\nTags: #experimetnal, #microtonal, #american, #influential\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-10T07:53:55-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/10/before-angine-and-king-gizzard/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/08/clickbait-lists-are-not-good/", "title": "Clickbait Lists Are Not Good", "content_html": "![\"Image](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/3a9f55d10b.jpg\" "\\"Image")
Image of a checklist with circle with a slash over the top.
I feel fairly certain in saying the author of the post 5 Albums meant no harm. Even the prompt: Introduce yourself with five albums that have shaped you seemed quite innocuous. And I thought: âCool. I can write a response to this with one hand tied behind my back, and three of my fingers brokenâ. Part way in, I decided to throw a curveball: I was going to list ten albums. Actually more than ten because my list had multi-volume sets in it. I reject your rules and substitute my own! Take that!
\nAs I worked on my masterpiece, I inserted a couple of snarky little comments between the first and second half that were intended to be humorous about me breaking the rules. Those comments used words like âreductiveâ and âde minimisâ. That’s when I realized I was falling into a trap: the clickbait trap. Then I had a further realization: this wasn’t just a list, it wasn’t just clickbait, it was worse.
\nSo now, after defending writing and blogging metas, I run the risk of being labeled a hypocrite in order to explain why these types of articles are not the silly puff pieces they appear to be. But rather, they are precisely the kind of thing that should be avoided. And, I even have a some potential fixes for what I see as the biggest (but not only) issue.
\nPersonally, I see three problems with these kinds of posts:
\nFirst: they don’t say anything about the author. At least they don’t say anything useful, other than being a list of objects. But there is no context to those objects. The author hasn’t given the reader any insight into why those objects have meaning. You might think they are objects the author likes or loves, but is that necessarily the case? Aren’t you just as âshapedâ by the things that you don’t like, the things that repulse you, or you are indifferent to?
\nSecond: The author of such a post is opening themselves up to be judged, and conversely putting their audience in the position of being judgmental. What does this accomplish? Nothing useful as far as I can tell. A larger portion of the social issues we have today are based around people being judgmental without having any real knowledge of the people they are judging.
\nI’ve read or heard numerous accounts from people that have found their way out of cults or hate groups that are surprised when they realize that whatever they hated was just not worth it. They often don’t realize or understand the people or things they hate because they judged them solely on the few things they thought they knew. Things that were regularly misrepresented, or twisted to cause them judge people hatefully.
\nI’m not saying that judging someone based on a silly list of five albums is on the same level as someone in a cult or hate group. But they do share a small similarity in that they invite judgment based on what is, at best, superficiality, or at worst a potential misunderstanding.
\nThird: These lists play to some of the trickiest and most difficult aspects of our personalities to navigate. They play to our ego, pride, superiority, or inferiority. This was what happened to me, I realized, when I was writing my snarky comments. I take pride in the fact that I have a wildly varied taste in music, and my ego wouldn’t let me just produce a list of five pop/rock albums when there is so much more music out there. That’s why I expanded my list (and, in reality, ten entries still weren’t enough to encapsulate my listening, and all the recordings that have shaped me.)
\nSo, having talked about the problems, what are the fixes?
\nFirst: don’t make it a call to action. âIntroduce yourselfâŚâ is a call for responses. This puts the reader automatically in the role of judging the list and the person that wrote it. If there isn’t a call to action, it removes some pressure to judge. There is still some likelihood the reader will judge the list. But it’s less likely they will have to navigate their ego or pride while reading it.
\nSecond: The more obvious option: provide context. Tells us a bit more about yourself by telling your reader why these particular items are significant to you. Was it a recording you bought with your first paycheck? Was it playing when you proposed to your spouse? By doing this you invite your readers to relate to you on some level. Their responses can focus more on similarities or differences. This, in turn, may evolve into a sort of blogging based dialog between you and your readers.
\nThird: Don’t write a list. Okay, this sounds like I’m being pedantic. But, really, I have a better idea: take your list and turn it into a series of essays. Write 300â600 words about each of the list entries. Recall stories about them. Explain where they fit into your life. Talk about the things that you like about the item, and even the things that you would change about it if you could.
\nThis is the kind of exercise that can be beneficial in so many ways. You may find new ways of expressing yourself. It can allow you to explore your relationship with the subject. Your readers may see the item in a new light. As with the second entry, responses to your post might be about the similarities or differences between you and your audience. Or, your audience might write about things that hold a similar place in their lives.
\nWhen I started writing my response list for the 5 Albums post, I thought it was just a little silly toss off article. But then I quickly threw out the original rules, and having done that, discovered there were bigger issues with this kind of post. The issues are they don’t provide any context, and therefore no real insight into the author. The second is that they are a call to judgment. The author is judged, while the audience is being judgmental. Finally, they play to some complicated aspects of our personality (such as ego and pride). Indulging in these complex aspects of our personalities isn’t always healthy.
\nSo, I set about suggesting some fixes. The first is to not have a call to action. That will somewhat minimize the judgment aspect. The second is to provide context. Let your audience in on your relationship with these items. Third suggestion would be to write a series of articles instead. Explore more of your writing skills, and let your audience focus more on what’s important t to you, instead of the object.
\nSo am I a hypocrite? Maybe partially. But, I am calling this out because I think we can do better. I think understanding when something is a bad idea, and why it is a bad idea can lead to us finding better ways to accomplish the same objective. I have little doubt that the original author of the post intended to make a positive contribution.
\nWe see these kinds of articles all the time. I’ve even participated in one myself (see: The Shellsharks Music Quiz Challenge). But, I can say at the time I was just trying to get myself writing again. And, this was actually a quiz that was more extensive and open-ended than the â5 Albumsâ post. Looking back on it, if I were to take it again, a lot of my answers would change.
\nIn the end, this is all just my opinion. Hopefully it has been food for thought, and it may do some good.
\nNow, if you’ll please excuse me, I have a series of articles to start writing⌠;)
\nCategories: #Writing\nTags: #blogging, #lists, #context, #judgment, #clickbait, #meta, #metas\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-08T07:56:43-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/08/clickbait-lists-are-not-good/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/06/on-getting-older-i-never/", "title": "On Getting Older: I Never Wanted This", "content_html": "![\"Photo](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/ec4aeff3f3.jpg\" "\\"Photo")
Photo of a circular pill sorter box against a pale blue background. Photo by Unattributed. License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Sure, I hear you saying: no one wants to get old. But it’s a fact of life, we all eventually get old. And we all eventually have to face our mortality. One of my favorite sayings about this is: One Day We’ll All Be Skeletons. A perfect thought that encapsulates the fears of mortality, and it was uttered by a six-year-old, in front of his dad, on video, available for the whole world to see. But the father got mileage from it as everyone that saw the video wanted it on a t-shirt. I’ve got four of them.
\nWhat I am actually referring to, quite literally, is the photograph at the top of this post. The dreaded weekly wheel pill sorter. But ironically, it’s not because of the pills in the sorter (that is only a small part of it), but what it represents to me symbolically.
\nSo, first, the pills. These are mostly an annoyance. A matter of compensating for a few small genetic defects that run through my family. I tried, really hard, to avoid taking medication for these defects. Alas, time caught up with me, and I had to start on medication for those defects a couple of years ago. But, given that I’ve known people that started taking these medications 10â20 years younger than me, I think I did okay to make it this far without them.
\nInstead, the pill sorter represents is the growing need to rely on medications. Not just the type that compensate for small issues, but the types of medication that keep you alive. The kinds of medications that one should question taking. The question we will all face one day: am I going to be able to live well just by taking this medication? Or, is this medication just prolonging the inevitable? Leaving me to cling to life in a degraded state?
\nThese are complicated questions to answer. And they are doubly complicated to answer if you’ve had to take care of any loved ones who were dependent on medications. I have, and I honestly questioned if it was worth it.
\nI am of the opinion that the pharmaceutical industry is too invasive in our lives. They have pushed hard for deregulation, and often bring medications to market for their profitability responsibilities. Look at how many medications come to market only to be pulled within five years because of unknown side effects. My bet is if we hadn’t seen this level of deregulation over the last 20â30 years many of those medications wouldn’t have been marketed. The harmful side effects would have been found. I’m of the opinion that we need to be extremely cautious when judging the balance between good and harm, especially when it comes to pharmaceuticals.
\nOn the flip side, I have to look at a recently passed family member who was even more anti-pharmaceutical than me. They tried as many suitable homeopathic remedies as they could before seeing a doctor. Don’t get me wrong: they weren’t stupid about this. They did research, they knew the potential side effects, and risks for any homeopathic course they chose. And yet, they passed about 20 years earlier than I would have guessed. But, it’s not clear this was related to their choices in homeopathic treatments as opposed to more established medical treatments.
\nThe pill sorter is serving as a constant reminder of these issues for me. It’s reminding me that eventually I will face those same issues, the same choices others I have loved have had to make. For now, though, this pill sorter is just a convenience, allowing me to store my medications in one place, while having a supply of them sitting here at my desk where I take them every morning before starting my work.
\nCategories: #Essays\nTags: #aging, #medicine, #mortality, #lifequality, #homeopathic, #convenience\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-06T07:40:12-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/06/on-getting-older-i-never/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/05/on-the-blogging-and-writing/", "title": "On the Blogging and Writing Metas", "content_html": "![\"Lake](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/4175d10d62.jpg\" "\\"Lake")
The view from Lake Michigan from Michigan City East Lighthouse, 2026-07-03.
Fri, July 3rd, 2026: All of these articles were in the Top 12 on Bubbles this morning: You Don’t Have to Blog Like Me, Stop Writing for Bubbles, Re: Your Metablogging is Lame, Your Metablogging is Lame as Hell. If you went further there are a lot of similar articles, especially articles talking about blogging platforms. Yeah, so there is a writing obsession running through the Bubbles community. Well alright! Time for me to get on this train to fun and profit!!
\nOkay, okay, I’m joking. Mostly. Kinda. Definitely.
\nI agree with the sentiment that writing about writing, and writing about blogging platforms is (potentially) weak content. And that writing targeted simply to get clicks / become popular is lame. Do you know what is even weaker than those styles of content? Yup, you guessed it: complaining about those styles of content.
\nMetas in the world of writing have existed for just about forever. Longer than any of us have been around. And, guess what? There will continue to be metas in writing long after all of us have joined the ranks of a million monkeys banging on keyboards in another world.
\nMetas are something that come and go in communities, they are like the waves: sometimes larger and sometimes smaller but if the tides stopped completely we’d be in an even worse situation. Want to achieve low meta-tides? The best solution is to ignore them.
\nIn my experience the thing that matters the most is having your own reason and purpose for writing, and not deviating from it. It’s too easy to get distracted by the meta high tides. It can make you want to jump aboard that wave and ride it as far as you can. But in the end you are just left standing on the shore looking for the next big wave to ride.
\nI’m in the middle of migrating all of my old websites to this platform. Why? The platform I had been using has become a completely unusable mess over the last decade. It is, in my opinion, a top example of the enshittification of platforms. I mentioned it already on this blog as part of a conversation. But, I’m not turning it into content. Why? Covering the enshittification of that platform is a little too on-the-nose for me. Instead, I can stick to my guns and write about the things that I want to write about without the distraction (although, enshittification is well within the range of topics I’m interested in exploring).
\nThe writing in communities like this is at its best when the authors have a sense of why they are writing. They find a core set of values and range of topics and ideas that they want to explore through those values. That makes for more diverse writing: everyone brings something different to the table even when covering the same topic. That makes for more natural and interesting interactions. Much more than everyone riding the next big meta wave.
\nCategories: #Opinion\nTags: #meta, #metas, #enshittification, #blogging, #communities, #community, #waves, #writing\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-05T07:53:10-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/05/on-the-blogging-and-writing/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/04/a-house-fifty-years-ago/", "title": "A House Fifty Years Ago, A House Tomorrow", "content_html": "On this day in 1976 America celebrated its Bicentennial birthday. And my family had moved to a house that was less than a year old. We had moved into the house in the late fall of 1975. Today I am living in that house after having left it for over twenty years.
\nYou might notice that I refer to this place as âa houseâ or âthat houseâ. I don’t refer to it as a home. I am not certain that this building is, or ever really was, a home. There is a big differentiation between a house and a home. That likely isn’t a revelation for most people. In fact, many understand that home isn’t tied to a specific building. Instead, home is where you have a sense to being complete instead of just existing or enduring.
\nOn this day, the 250th birthday of this country, I now know that the Bicentennial was the beginning of the end of my family. And, in an odd way, that end is similar to the state of this country.
\nMy father had a vision for his family. A vision that he felt very strongly about. He wanted to right what he felt were the wrongs of his upbringing. He had a vision for his family. The problem was: the rest of us weren’t on the same page. We didn’t share his romanticized image of living in the country, of cutting ties with a larger portion of society for the simple life.
\nAnd that made everything complex.
\nMy father had this vision of living the simple life. Of raising crops and becoming, at least in part, self-reliant. His vision included my mother, sister, and myself embracing his vision of this lifestyle. The reality is: we didn’t, and we never would have embraced it had we known what was in his mind. But, he was from a time when the father was the leader of the house, and the family was subservient to the head of the household.
\nMy mother wasn’t the type of person to be isolated. She thrived on human interaction. It was a quality I often found downright irritating. She could meet someone in the grocery store, and instead of having a brief, polite and courteous interaction with them, she would have them telling her their life story. People just seemed to innately trust that she had the knowledge and wisdom to help them solver their lives problems.
\nMy sister was the intellectual. She devoured books at a rate I never could have fathomed. A trip to the bookstore or library tended to result in her carry out stacks of books. A stack of a dozen books would last two weeks, at most. She was not the person that was going to be a âsalt of the earthâ type of person. She wasn’t destined to become a housewife, or given to the back-breaking physical labor of planting and harvesting a large garden. Her ambitions were never going to fit with my fathers vision.
\nI was the dreamer, the person given to looking at something and saying âwhat if?â. The sounds emanating from my stereo gave me more solace than any book or garden. I didn’t find any value in the social aspects of sports, and didn’t appreciate the bounties of the land. And, I didn’t have a green thumb to save my life. I was the person that wanted to go off and explore a library or museum on my own. I wanted to see how others had expressed themselves, and find my own form of self-expression.
\nMy father predicted that Donald Trump was going to win the 2017 Presidential Election. When he told me this, I thought he was making a joke, trying to get back at me for predicting the election of Jimmy Carter. (To be fair, I hadn’t made that prediction based on any understanding of politics. I just made a prediction based on how I saw other people reacting to Carter. It was as if I was channeling my mother.) What did my father know at that point? After all, in his advancing dementia he had suddenly become fascinated with Dr. Phil.
\nBut now, I wonder if there wasn’t something to that prediction? Could my father have understood that the rise of Donald Trump was exposing the deep divisions in this country? Did my father see the parallel between the rise of Donald Trump and the divisions that had been exposed in our family when we moved to this house?
\nThere is no answer to these questions for me. Just as there is no answer to the future of this country. The only thing I know is: just as this building will still be a house tomorrow, there will still be a country called America when there is a different President.
\nCategories: #Reflections\nTags: #home, #house, #family, #division, #vision, #demise, #history, #future\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-04T10:20:22-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/04/a-house-fifty-years-ago/" }, { "id": "http://unattributed.micro.blog/2026/07/02/the-summer-of-angine-de/", "title": "The Summer of Angine de Poitrine", "content_html": "![\"Angine](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/0dcc6a66b0.jpg\")
\nAngine de Poitrine in May 2026 at the Great Escape by Pauil Hudson. (Via WikiMedia â License: CC BY 4.0)
This morning I installed a music player that I am unfamiliar with, and decided that the first thing I should listen to is Angine de Poitrine Vol. 1 and Vol. II since I hadn’t listened to them in a while. And then I found, by coincidence that they played the Montreal Jazz Festival last Saturday (June 27th, 2026) and broke the attendance record set by Stevie Wonder in 2009. I cannot imagine what the guys behind Khn and Klek are thinking right now. Just a year ago they were relatively unknown, and now they’re playing for 200,000 fans in their hometown at the second-largest music festivals in the world.
There have been a couple of things that I keep hearing and reading about Angine de Poitrine that bother me. The first is they are the âAnswer to AIâ or âAI could never come up with this musicâ. The second is they are just a fad and won’t survive. And, of course, I have some thoughts on both of these topics.
\nI both agree and disagree with people who say this. There are two ways to look at it. The first way, and this is what most people mean, is that Artificial Intelligence could not create microtonal music based on building loops. The premise is that we don’t normally listen to microtonal music, so there is no way an AI could come up with it on it’s own.
\nBut, what if I were to say that we do listen to microtonal music, just not nearly as much or as often as we do equal temperament music? We’ve had groups like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard that have incorporated microtonality into their music for over a decade. True, they haven’t risen to the same level of popularity of Angine de Poitrine, but they have proven popular enough to have produced twenty-five albums worth of music.
\nHowever, there are other things to consider. For some reason there are a lot of people that seem to assume that âmicrotonalâ means using 24 EDO (Equal Divisions of the Octave), instead of the typical western style of 12 EDO instruments. But that isn’t completely the truth. We have had composers and musicians going back as far as the 1940s that used (and often built) instruments with different tuning systems. The most notable was Harry Partch, who came up with his on 43-tone non-EDO tuning system.
\nBut also, we should consider that instruments from other cultures do not adhere to the typical 12 EDO tuning systems. Possibly the most notable being the Sitar, which uses a tuning system that is unlike western tuning systems. Of course Indian Raja’s have been reasonably known in the west, especially after George Harrison introduced the instrument on several Beatles songs.
\nGiven that all of these types and styles of music are likely known to AI’s, which have been fed vast catalogs of music, it’s quite possible for one to come up with a form of microtonal music. The reason an AI hadn’t come up with something that incorporated microtonality isn’t because of the AI itself.
\nThe reason that I agree with this statement is that Angine de Poitrine is more than just their microtonal music. They have an absurdist aesthetic combined with dadaism. They invented some lore for themselves as aliens that have come to earth and love rock music. Their music is more about making fun or parodying pop-rock music.
\nAll of this is a complete package that would require someone with the imagination and artistic knowledge to have come up with. And, that’s why there is no AI equivalent of Angine de Poitrine. The majority of the people prompting AI agents to create music don’t have the level of knowledge and imagination.
\nThis is a more difficult question to figure out. There is one side of me that thinks the âgimmickâ is likely to get old after a while. But, how long will that be? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone really knows. If someone thinks they know they are likely just guessing. I mean, after all, how long did KISS go with their makeup and outfits? How long did Angus Young wear his schoolboy outfit in AC/DC?
\nIn Japan, it’s not at all unusual for music groups to adopt some form of aesthetic. Band Maid has been going for over ten years now wearing maid costumes. And I won’t even get into the Visual Kei artists and their adoption of varying types of costumes. There is a whole culture in Japan which links visual aesthetic and artistry in a way that isn’t a gimmick, it’s expected and accepted.
\nWhat could be a bit trickier is where they go musically. Right now it seems that a lot of people see 24 EDO based sound as a novelty, instead of being a serious form of music. But I don’t think that is an issue. There is still a lot of ground for them to explore musically with microtonality.
\nBut I do think they will need to find some way to change up their format. Right now they have a uniquely identifiable music style. They will need to find a way to iterate on this style. They will need to find a way of keeping it fresh, while not alienating their current fans. I could speculate on several ways they could do this, but I am not them. I don’t have the same thought process they do. After all, they’ve been playing together since they were thirteen years old. It’s only for them to figure out where they want to go next.
\nSo, in the end, are they a fad? Who knows, and who really cares? Just ride along with them. If they fail, they fail. If they succeed, then they succeed. I’ll keep listening and decide when and if I want to stop listening. That’s all you can do.
\nCategories: #Music\nTags: #microtonal, #antiai, #rockmusic, #parody, #dada\nLicense: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-02T07:06:23-05:00", "url": "https://unattributed.cc/2026/07/02/the-summer-of-angine-de/" } ] }![\"noaa-printing-press.jpg\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/361925/2026/noaa-printing-press.jpg\")
\nPhoto by ![WikiMedia](\"https://unattributed.micro.blog/uploads/2026/21c637971d.jpg\"){kind=link}