Read The word 'digital' circles back around to original Latin meaning by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
The word “digital” seems to be everywhere: digital publishing, digital currency, digital art. Digital this, digital that. What does digital mean? Dictionary.com’s six definitions for digit: noun 1. a finger or toe. 2. the breadth of a finger used as a unit of linear measure, usually equal to 3/4 inch (2 cm). 3. any of …
Replied to Do you keep a diary? Or a life log? by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
Do you keep a daily diary? I have a couple questions for you: Length: Do you keep it really short? Or do you write longer form? Medium: Where do you write it? In a physical notebook? Or maybe online in a blog? Maybe some sort of software, or Google Drive. The short diary in a …
I keep the sort of diary/commonplace book you’re talking about. Generally it lives in two places. The biggest portion lives on my website where I can generally quickly bookmark almost everything I read, listen to, watch, annotate, reply to, or deal with online in some fashion. Not all of my posts there are public, but they’re archived there privately for search. 

My secondary backup is on OneNote (I’d used Evernote in the past and I find them roughly similar), where I’ll tend to keep some personal daily to do lists (not too dissimilar from a digital bullet journal) and other private things that are easier to keep there than on my own website.

I like that both OneNote and my website are available on almost all the platforms I regularly use, so they’re always accessible to me.

Read What stops you from achieving your resolutions? by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
Maybe instead of making new year resolutions, we should make a list of the things that prevent us from getting things done. Remove the obstacles. Take your current resolutions, and transform them into a new list of “don’t do this, don’t do that.” I’ll take my 12 resolutions for 2020 and transform them using the …
Read 2020 new year resolutions - Spudart by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
Do you have any resolutions for this new year? I don’t really specifically set out to find new resolutions at the start of the year. I much rather just start new habits any time of the year. But in effort to capture some of the habits I’d like to be doing more, here’s my list …
Read The ligatures in Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
The Museum of Science and Industry is renaming the museum to be the “Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry” Sounds pretty silly right? Look at how long that name is. Plus, Chicagoans notoriously hate renaming buildings. The Chicago Tribune ran an article with selected Twitter reactions from Chicagoans. A typical Chicago response: Me? …
Read My natural eyesight is a kaleidoscope vision (seriously, it is) by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
Photographing with a kaleidoscope lens is so much fun. Recently I spent a work lunch shooting the feet of sculptures with a kaleidoscope lens. The whole time I spent focused on the kaleidoscope effect. My eyes and brain looked through this view so much, that on my walk back down Michigan Avenue, my brain felt …
Read Instagram-like app to track photographer websites by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
I’m thinking about what the domain would be for my photo website. And then an idea struck me. What if someone made an app that looked JUST like Instagram. But all the photos came from RSS feeds from individual photographer websites. You could subscribe to a whole list of photographer websites, and their photos will …
I could totally see this as an IndieWeb-based app! Perhaps there’s a way to modify or use one of the Microsub clients to filter for photos for focusing on and doing just this very thing?

My photos are far from the sort of artistic thing you’re looking for, but it would be nice if one could find a broader section of websites that provided photo-specific feeds like mine.

Micro.blog has a photo specific feed and Pixelfed is in this general wheelhouse, but possibly not quite what you’re talking about.

Read All 2,320 Facebook Pages that I have ever liked by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
You can download your Facebook data archive and look through all the various things that Facebook has collected about you. One of the items is a list of all the Facebook Pages you’ve liked and Facebook Groups you have joined. I have 2,320 in my list. I’m a little obsessive. For the record, here’s my …
A useful visualization of just a fraction of the data that Facebook has about people.
Read Discovering Cloisonnism and the incredible French artist Louis Anquetin by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
Gallery 241 in Art Institute of Chicago The Impressionist painters are known for their atmospheric treatment of scenes, loose brushwork that takes precedence over lines and contours. Yet in the midst of the Impressionism galleries in the Art Institute of Chicago stands a painting with strong lines and contours. “An Elegant Woman at the Élysée …
Read Giving up tweeting for one week by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
I’m thinking about giving up tweeting for one week, and instead write out all my thoughts and reactions on my blog. So far this year, I’ve been having a lot of fun blogging more. In the past decade when I have an idea, I would head to Twitter and blurt it out. Now, writing out …
Read Giving up tweeting for one week by Matt MaldreMatt Maldre (Spudart)
I’m thinking about giving up tweeting for one week, and instead write out all my thoughts and reactions on my blog. So far this year, I’ve been having a lot of fun blogging more. In the past decade when I have an idea, I would head to Twitter and blurt it out. Now, writing out …
It’s not a complete silo quit, but it’s a start. Matt’s got some great ideas here about why it’s important and useful to write on your own website. I do think there are some building blocks he could add to his site to improve on some of the downsides or replace bits he thinks he’s missing out on though.

Since he doesn’t support Webmentions yet, I’m manually syndicating my reply to his website in support of his efforts.

Read Introducing the idea of ‘hyperobjects’ by Timothy MortonTimothy Morton (High Country News)
A new way of understanding climate change and other phenomena.

We are obliged to do something about them, because we can think them.

Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:56AM

It’s very difficult to talk about something you cannot see or touch, yet we are obliged to do so, since global warming affects us all.

It’s also difficult to interact with those things when we’re missing the words and vocabulary to talk about them intelligently.
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 09:00AM

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University in Houston. He is the author of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End Of The World.

want to read these
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:10AM

Or global warming. I can’t see or touch it. What I can see and touch are these raindrops, this snow, that sunburn patch on the back of my neck. I can touch the weather. But I can’t touch climate. So someone can declare: “See! It snowed in Boise, Idaho, this week. That means there’s no global warming!” We can’t directly see global warming, because it’s not only really widespread and really really long-lasting (100,000 years); it’s also super high-dimensional. It’s not just 3-D. It’s an incredibly complex entity that you have to map in what they call a high-dimensional- phase space: a space that plots all the states of a system. In so doing, we are only following the strictures of modern science, laid down by David Hume and underwritten by Immanuel Kant. Science can’t directly point to causes and effects: That would be metaphysical, equivalent to religious dogma. It can only see correlations in data. This is because, argues Kant, there is a gap between what a thing is and how it appears (its “phenomena”) that can’t be reduced, no matter how hard we try. We can’t locate this gap anywhere on or inside a thing. It’s a transcendental gap. Hyperobjects force us to confront this truth of modern science and philosophy.

A short, and very cogent argument here.
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:07AM

Hat tip: Ethan Marcotte #

Read The hoof and the horse. by Ethan Marcotte (ethanmarcotte.com)
On objects and slices; on design systems and scale.

Robin brings a helpful name to this problem, by way of the philosopher Timothy Morton: hyperobject. A hyperobject is an entity whose scale is too big, too sprawling for any single person to fully appreciate their scale. Climate change, financial markets, socioeconomic classes, design systems—they’re systems we move through, but their scale dwarfs our own.

Hyperobject is an interesting neologism and concept
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:47AM