/reader

I’ve found my relationships are healthier when I keep my offline-first relationships offline (e.g. not following each other on Facebook or Instagram) — following someone’s Instagram makes it feel like I know what’s going on with them without interacting. Following offline friends on social media can reduce what used to be normal friendships into parasocial relationships.

Social media made me feel like I had no excuse to ping someone to catch up because I’d already seen everything they’d been doing, so I needed some reason to call. It’s also weird the other way, when someone followed me on Instagram or whatever, and I didn’t know what they’d already seen from my posts so I didn’t know what to talk about, what they already knew. (I find the social code for this type of interaction tricky anyway.)

I suspect bringing offline relationships online is responsible for a lot of the loneliness people feel — social media looks like you have all these friends… but no one you could ask to feed your cat while you’re away, because one-to-many broadcasting replaced direct interactions 😿 Essentially, the offline relationship became an online one.

Connecting online changes the dynamic of communicating outside social media. Calling unexpectedly is now frowned upon by anyone under 40, but texting doesn’t offer the same sort of real-time connection.

Social media also keeps us attached to old relationships that would have faded away naturally when they’d run their course, but online friendships are forever — unless one of you makes the decision to manually remove the other 😳 We lose the grace of being able to simply forget about people who aren’t that important to our lives anymore.

See also:

People you know from offline don’t read your blog

Building community out of strangers

Social norms of the IndieWeb: followup from Homebrew Website Club

“Social atrophy”

Been rocking out to Flicking Your Switch all week so I put on the whole album and it’s still a banger. (First half especially.) Digging Turn It On. I’ve given these songs star ratings in the past and it’s funny how different songs speak to you at different ages — Seventeen is the first Ladytron song I ever heard so it’s a little too anchored to 2003 for me today 😄 True Mathematics maybe sounds a little dated but still has a sick beat. (Also discovered my music software is displaying the tracks in the wrong order but can’t figure out how to fix it…)

And now I see they have a new album coming out! …and apparently I missed one in 2023? 2019’s Ladytron was fine but muted for my taste.

 

Win of the week: the city installed a bike lane on the segment of greenway I advocated for!!! I know it wasn’t just me but I’m taking partial credit 😎

Looking forward to: got berries to bake Smitten Kitchen’s blackberry-blueberry crumb pie

Stuff I did:

• 0.75 hours consulting
• 1.75 hours business development — meeting and research
• 4.75 hours writing — figured out why I was dragging my feet today (I don’t know what comes next in the process 😅 get on that, self!)
• more cleanup and rebalancing of my investment accounts — somehow spent three days on this… finished almost all the easy changes and initiated a rollover! still have a couple decisions to make and things to sell in my taxable account — this process feels like a slog but setting us up well for the next decade of saving is the most financially valuable undertaking I’ll do all year… if this work sets us up to retire early (slash protects us in case of forced early retirement) it’s well worth bashing my head against Excel and making annoying phone calls
• finished another of the blog posts I’ve been chipping away at for months 🦾
• started prepping my laptop to wipe and install Linux
• research on the Portland trip — saw that the next No Kings protest is the weekend I was planning to go so will need to rethink timing
• baked apple crisp (3 granny smith and 3 heirloom; used a bigger pan; took 30 minutes to prep)
• emailed KEXP asking them to support an RSS feed for their new music review blog posts (and/or a Fediverse account) — they wrote back that they hope to add RSS along with some big website updates in the works, and will consider Mastodon (to me it seems like a no-brainer for their audience)
• neighbor launched a new food truck, cool — but has been idling a (loud) storage truck across the street all day for multiple days in a row, annoying — hoping this is not a permanent fixture :/

Dinners:

• apple crisp with lemon curd yogurt
• pasta with lox cream sauce
• sourdough fritters with sour cream + toast
• fake chicken burgers + curly fries
• frozen waffles + fried eggs
• butternut squash ravioli + mushroom ravioli in jarred alfredo sauce with sauteed leeks and pecans
• breakfast burritos with air fryer potatoes + Coke

Reading:

• Read Beautiful Things by Emily Rath (nooo it ends on a cliffhanger) and The Summer War by Naomi Novik 👍
• Finished reading Hope It All Works Out! by Reza Farazmand 👍
• Continued reading Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell and Superbloom by Nicholas Carr (trying to make this my read-a-book-I-own title of the month but still have 90 pages to go!)
• Started reading Ew, It’s Beautiful by Joshua Barkman and The Wave in the Mind by Ursula K. LeGuin
• DNF’d Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Words I looked up / concepts I learned:

• swingeing
• psephology 🗳️

Also. I feel seen 😂 (I have a paperback dictionary but a larger hardcover is appealing… 🤔)

People who appreciate the intoxicating euphoria of reading from a real dictionary expertly hand-crafted by diligent human lexicographers.Also. people who love the Oxford Comma more than some family members.

— Merriam-Webster (@merriam-webster.com) 2025-09-26T17:54:17.254Z

Choice phrases:

“This revelry was a kind of fear, for hatred was the fear people let themselves enjoy.”
— John Wiswell, Someone You Can Build a Nest In

Pretty stuff I saw:

• this painting is not pretty but the painting style is pretty on this lurid fantastical reimagining by José Luis Carranza
• Untitled (1968) by Alexander Calder
• cool swirly wood carving by Lucas Schwartz
• ridiculously adorable duck shelters by Cheng-Tsung Feng

New music I listened to:

(via) cool costumes 😻

(via) 👍

(via) mood.

• Nation of Language – I’m Not Ready for the Change (via KEXP)
• Daft Punk, M83, and Big Black Delta – Fall
• Tron Legacy End Titles (remixed by Sander Kleinenberg)

Website changes:

• did a phone tab cleanup and added links to the Neat Websites page and Graphic Design Resources page (used a 🆕 marker for added links so you can skim if you’ve looked at the pages before)
• big tidy-up / reorg of the graphic design resources page because it was getting a bit overwhelming
• updated Culture big question page
• gave my privacy policy a slight refresh after reading Ava’s zine about personal websites and the law
• added photos to the Back 40 Restoration page

Nature notes: