/reader

 

Win of the week: 🦾 actually went to Craig Mod’s book talk, despite a) it being in Seattle*, b) there being over 50 people there and I’ve only been to an event this big once since Covid, and c) finding mouse poop in the car again when I got in to leave 😾

Looking forward to: doing some house cleanout

Stuff I did:

• 10.75 hours business development — proposal
• 3 hours writing
• 0.75 hours consulting
• baked lemon blueberry loaf cake
• played games with my sister
• been working on a blog post about cultural literacy and taste but haven’t quite figured out what I think / want to say yet
• finalized shades order
• one virtual appointment

Dinners:

• Pasta e ceci
• Fake chicken burgers
• Thai takeout — Massamun curry with fried tofu + rice
• cheddar popcorn + baby carrots
• breakfast for dinner — fried eggs, air fryer potatoes + frozen waffle with blueberries, lemon yogurt and syrup
• lentil soup + ciabatta bread
• peanut butter toast + milk + cheddar popcorn + apple + Drumstick ice cream

Reading:

• read A Touch of Darkness by Scarlett St. Claire and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
• reread Hot as Hades by Alisha Rai
• continued reading More Than Words by John Warner and The Plenitude of Distraction by Marina van Zuylen
• received Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things, Non-Places by Marc Augé, and Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Beaudrillard

Words I looked up / concepts I learned:

• pursy
• dun
• sagacious

Choice phrases:

“[M]y windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade”

— Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener

Pretty stuff I saw:

• Jan Erik Moström’s peaceful photo of their village
• Laura Boswell’s moody landscape linocuts, which give me a little Rackham vibe (via this print on Bluesky)
• cool cover art for Tongues, designed by Anders Nilsen (via The Casual Optimist)
• 😱 this banana slug pin (this orchid mantis pin is pretty sweet too)
• Vasilisa Romanenko‘s painting Habitat
• this quiet but almost Escher-y engraving of the Hall of the Abencerrages by James Cavanah Murphy
• this 1938 goth “skeleton dress” designed by Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí
• “Heirloom” tomato wallpaper by Hygge & West x The Aesthetics of Joy
• Agnes Pelton’s painting Fires in Space

New music I listened to:

• This Is How We Walk On The Moon (LOR Remix) (via) — this kept popping into my head all week

• Every Time I Feel Afraid by Carriers (via)
• Samantha Crain – Dragonfly 👍 (via) — liked this track but the next two sucked and I bailed on the album
• Tennis – Swimmer
• Future Ghosts – This
• Chastity Belt – I-90 Bridge (via) — really dig the guitar, not sure on the vocals
• Brigitte Calls Me Baby – Eddie My Love (via)
• Dark Chisme – Sombras
• SPELLING – Portrait of My Heart (via) — I like how the chorus gets belted out
• Trois Deux Un by Juniore 👍 (via) — funky retro French monster mash with surf rocky undertones — same shelf as Wild Belle, Claude Fontaine and Asteroids Galaxy Tour — not 100% sold on the vocals (which remind me a bit of the sometimes-I-like-it-sometimes-I-don’t Courtney Barnett) but the music’s so fun I’ll listen to this again

Nature notes:

• purple rhodie is starting to bloom now, pink rhodie is really going off
• allium are still at it
• saw a big banana slug in my yard, I think first sighting! the ones up here are spotted vs the plain yellow ones in CA where I grew up

 

I like them a lot. 

I was really just a child myself when I had them. So young, knowing nothing. I was 25 when my oldest was born. I turned 30 a month after my youngest was born.

Having four kids in five years is a life choice that may not be what we’d consider, um, wise. But here we are, almost twenty years into it, and I look at these kids who grew up with me, who taught me how to grow up, who loved me through my fumbling, who still love me through my fumbling, and I cannot imagine a better version than this one. 

These kids, my kids — who are not really kids anymore — they’ve been through a lot. They’ve dealt with complex stuff, with scary things, with big changes, with huge challenges. They’ve already learned a lot about life. Some of those lessons I would have delayed, if I could have. But they’ve taken them in and become kinder and wiser.

I still have to remind them to do their chores. 

And wipe the counters after they make a snack. 

I feel really lucky. 

That’s all. 

I think the perspective on this topic varies between developers partly based on whether you expect users to randomly discover your app in the App Store, or whether you’re building a service outside the store and the mobile app is just a companion to that. Much of Curtis’s framing is around discovery in the App Store:

Remember, your goal when trying to convert a sale is to try to cause as little friction as possible. Make the user think as little as possible. “Enter your credit card information for this random app to start your free trial” is hardly frictionless compared to IAPs.

There are many advantages to Stripe other than the lower fees. There’s more control and flexibility across the board. Also you get paid daily instead of waiting over a month for Apple to cut a virtual check, as if developers are kids waiting for their monthly allowance.

Apple’s in-app purchase works really well for Slopes. That’s great. For Micro.blog, I’m not convinced there’s much of an advantage. Very few people want to start a new blog and think, “First I’ll search the App Store.”

Developers are in the best position to know what marketing and payment options will work for their app. The whole point of these changes — from the EU’s Digital Markets Act to the judge’s ruling in the Epic trial — is to put the decision back in the hands of developers where it belongs.

 

I’d been away from New York for over three months. I returned to the city in the fall of 2018 only to discover that my local barbershop had turned into a Baskin-Robbins. Why do changes in the landscape accelerate as one ages? You take a quick shower and another Duane Reade opens. You wake from an afternoon nap and there’s a new president. The second you hit sixty, life becomes the unstoppable bus in the film Speed.

— Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir (Gallery Books, May 6, 2025)

Notes:

• NY Times Book Review: The Brash, Working-Class Londoner Who Redefined New York’s Restaurants
• Wall Street Journal book excerpt: Keith McNally: “I Had No Chef, No Toilets and No Budget. But I Was Determined to Open Balthazar.”
• Photo Credit: Pixabay

I feel this. The internet of 1995 to 2010 changed my life. It opened up the world to me in wonderful ways. I loved blogging. And even though Twitter killed blogs, early Twitter was a lot of fun. I made some good online friends and we had fantastic conversations. And while everything has changed, I’m thankful for my great little circle here on micro.blog.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I’ve been a technical writer for a little over a decade now, after a previous decade and change as a web developer. I’ve been a writer of one sort or another for as long as I can remember—when I’m not writing for the job, I’m often off at a coffee shop or craft brewery working on a science fiction or fantasy story. (Or occasionally a blog post.)

Other than too much writing, I like traveling—both around the United States and just on day trips around my local area. Right now, that local area is the middle of nowhere, Florida, about fifty miles north of Tampa and fifty miles west of Orlando; on Saturdays I’m usually puttering somewhere around one of those two metro areas. I also love tiki bars in the mold of Trader Vic’s and Don the Beachcomber’s; while you might imagine Florida is full of tiki bars, it’s actually full of beach bars, not at all the same thing.

For roughly the first two decades of this century, I lived around the San Francisco Bay Area, which is much more my vibe as far as climate, geography, culture, and politics—basically everything except housing costs. I’m in Florida for family reasons, so I don’t regret moving back, but sometimes I wish I’d found a way to swing moving my mother to the West Coast rather than moving myself here.

What's the story behind your blog?

Huh. Well, I’ve had something resembling a blog for an absurdly long time, going back to the LiveJournal days. Coyote Tracks got started on Tumblr when I decided to sort of “soft reboot” it—I’d been trying to tumble-blog and failing—and began writing musings on tech, particularly Apple. Like many people around that time, I was inspired by John Gruber of Daring Fireball.

I tried several other platforms after Tumblr, although to this day I’d argue it’s severely underrated given what you get for essentially nothing. WordPress was in there at one point, and I think I tried something else I’ve forgotten before moving to Micro.blog for a few years. Most recently I’ve gone back to self-hosting.

As for the name “Coyote Tracks,” I don’t know if I have a great reason. I’m a semi-closeted furry who likes coyotes, and as mentioned, I’m pretty peripatetic.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I keep a list of ideas for articles, but also sometimes just get inspired by stories I happen to come across—a news article, another blog post, a social media post, whatever. Sometimes posts will come together in an afternoon, other times they’ll kick around for days, depending on how much research they need. The very long post in which I used an “AI novel writer” to see if it was as bad as I expected (spoiler: yes) took quite a while.

Lately, I’ve been writing (and keeping the list of ideas) in Obsidian. I’ve used other tools over the years: Ulysses (which is what I write most of my fiction in, after moving there from Scrivener), iA Writer, and BBEdit (still my favorite tool for technical writing). In Obsidian, I use a LanguageTool plug-in for a semi-automatic proofing pass; this is the same technology Ulysses uses for its “revision mode.” (I don’t use LanguageTool’s new “AI” features, for the record.) For both of those, I also use Marked as a preview tool, turning on its keyword highlighter to show oft-overused words, passive verbs, that sort of thing. I do this all for fiction, too, by the way. LanguageTool almost always catches something I missed, even if it frets that I use the word “fuck” too much.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I think the space does influence my creativity, but I don’t know if I have an ideal environment—it depends on my mood. At home, I have an office space set up with lots of natural light, a nice keyboard, and an overpriced office chair. Sometimes I get my best writing done when I’m out, though. If I really want to go out and sit somewhere to work, I’ll take my iPad and a low-profile Keychron K3 mechanical keyboard that fits in the same bag, and sit down at a coffee shop or, better yet, a brewery. (Macs are better for editing/publishing, but iPads are as good, if not better, for doing first drafts.)

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

My website, including the blog, is generated with Zola, a static site generator similar to Hugo. I maintain it, and publish it, with Panic’s Nova—I have tasks configured so I can press a button to run a local preview, and press another button to deploy it.

My blog also supports webmentions now—when I make a post, the link goes out on Bluesky and Mastodon, and if someone favorites that link, reposts it, or replies to it, that gets sent back to the blog and shows up under the post. This is handled using a Rube Goldberg machine comprised of Bridgy, Webmention.io, and get-mentions, a small client-side bit of JavaScript I wrote.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I don’t know; I like static site generators, and appreciate that most of what I’ve done is pretty “close to the metal”. Having said that, Zola is better at building websites than it is at building blogs—it has absolutely zero special handling for blog articles, and the more posts you write, the more unwieldy it gets.

I suspect if I moved to another system, it would end up being Ghost, or maybe a CMS like Craft. I’d probably avoid WordPress; as nice as it would be to have such a huge ecosystem, their new block-based editor seems actively hostile to people who just want to, you know, write. And Matt Mullenweg needs to do for WordPress what Markus Persson did for Minecraft, by which I mean disappear and never be heard from again.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetizing personal blogs?

I’m hosting the blog on Hetzner, so it’s €4.49/month, which is just over $5/month at current exchange rates. So, it’s as close to free as you can realistically get. While I have a Ko-Fi set up, people mostly don’t bite.

If you figure out how to monetize a personal blog, I mean, more power to you, right? There's an alternate universe where I did figure that out sometime around 2012—I got linked to semi-regularly by bigger blogs, sometimes by Techmeme, was a featured technology blog on Tumblr, all that. I was never a “big name,” but I probably made it to medium name.

Even so, putting Google Ads on my Tumblr—remember when that was a thing?—earned me like seven bucks. Before I tried anything else, I ended up getting my first tech writing job at a startup whose founders had been reading my blog. So, I suppose you could say I did find a way to monetize…just not directly.

I think newsletters are interesting as a strategy, and I might try to start one—but I feel like I’d have to be a more consistent blogger to pull that off.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I’m going to be a dingus here and recommend two blogs that are technically newsletters. Since they’re both on Buttondown, though, you can read them on the web and subscribe to their RSS feeds, so they’re kind of blog-shaped.

First, Mike Monteiro’s Good News is amazing—every article takes the premise of answering a “how to” question, from “how to make a book” to “how to choose a donut,” and turns it into a beautiful rhapsody of righteous leftist politics and warm-hearted compassion, and he’s a ferociously good writer.

Next, science fiction and fantasy author Charlie Jane Anders has a newsletter/blog called Happy Dancing that talks about writing, politics, and sci-fi/pop culture news, all in her beautifully quirky style.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Let’s see. The aforementioned Charlie Jane Anders co-hosts a podcast with her former co-worker from io9 (and also a great writer), Annalee Newitz, called Our Opinions Are Correct, which explores the connections between science fiction and real life. It’s often a lot of fun, and the episodes are kept to a reasonable length.

And, even if you’re not particularly into science fiction and fantasy but you’re into incredibly well-crafted short stories, I’d recommend a collection from last decade called At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson. All the pieces in it are weird and literate and beautiful. And if you’re an aspiring genre writer, look into her novel-writing course—or Chris McKitterick’s short story course—at the Ad Astra Institute, a residential workshop in Lawrence, Kansas that used to be part of KU until the college decided to institute a policy against being interesting. My own novel, Kismet, probably wouldn’t have ever been finished, let alone be as good, without that workshop, and I’ve returned to Lawrence a few times as a “graduate.”

This was the 90th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Watts. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

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