/reader

Manu asks where the line falls between self-promotion and advertising. Asking for money feels like a necessity for creators in an age where our jobs are all precarious, wages aren’t keeping up, we lack sufficient safety nets, and the value of art and writing are under attack. Frankly, a lot of creative folks don’t ask for enough support or remind people about the things they sell often enough! For me, the difference is when asks make me feel commodified instead of that I’m supporting a creator who I like.

I’m not bothered at all by asks for patronage — whether asking readers to sign up for Patreon, donate to a Ko-Fi, or join a membership program. Craig Mod has spoken about the creative permission that his membership program gives him. Hamilton Nolan includes a great pitch that’s a little different each time in his newsletter “How Things Work,” and Anne Helen Petersen does a good job in her newsletter “Culture Study” of calling out what paid subs allow her to do (like pay guest writers). I recently learned that Eleanor Janega, whose blog “Going Medieval” I enjoy and have followed for years, has a Patreon, and enjoyed her playful, socialist tier descriptions.

Some creators rely on selling products or courses to support their writing or artwork. The buildup sales pitch of a product launch can become obnoxious as the emails roll in day after day, but especially if it’s infrequent, I understand. Caroline and Jason Zook do a good job with their email newsletter “Wandering Aimfully” — in the first email of their promo kickoff, they let subscribers opt out of the series, so if you know you aren’t interested in the product or able to buy, you won’t have to get the stream of sales emails. I’ve also found Ingrid Fetell Lee is thoughtful and generous with her sales, with even the promo posts having information worth reading, and she gives away supporting materials even to readers who don’t want to sign up for her course. There are some creators who I have unfollowed from exhaustion that every post felt like it was trying to sell me something. Tara McMullin writes about how creators can make a living from their work in her newsletter “What Works,”  exploring the difference between “content marketing” (icky) and getting your work to your audience in a genuine, respectful way.

Merch and product sales are expected ways for creators to make money from their work. Crowdfunding feels like a fair way of spreading risk around when capital is hard for creators and workers to access. All of this stuff, I actively want to hear about. I’m sad when I don’t know that artists are selling neat stuff! I hate to miss out on your kickstarter! I want to pre-order your book or request it from the library! (Personally, I’d rather buy your book / merch than commit to an ongoing subscription.) I find this problem to be especially true for artists, who focus their energy on Instagram, but neglect to share about it on their email newsletter (!) or their website. (FFS pls link me to your prints) Artists, remember: people need to hear about things multiple times before they act! Tell me about the stuff you made! I have the memory span of a goldfish!

And advertising unrelated services is tricky, but doesn’t have to be bad. Adam Ragusea’s YouTube sponsorships are so deftly woven into seemingly unrelated topics that I actually find them entertaining. Ryan Broderick’s “Garbage Day” newsletter and Kai Brach’s “Dense Discovery” newsletter both include advertisements that feel curated from the community and suited to the readership — they do advertising in such a way that it feels like a “raise all ships” help-fellow-indie-creators proposition.

I am irritated by nagging pop-up subscription boxes, especially “this is not a paywall” pop-ups that show up before I’ve even had time to read the headline of the article. Substack crams multiple pop-ups and sign-up fields into every newsletter. These make me feel like my value is in becoming a number, an eyeball to be sold to, rather than as a reader. Pop-ups are (imo) a manipulative design practice; I understand that sales are a numbers game, so growing an audience is important for creators, but it’s a turnoff for feeling like part of a community.

If (the generic) you want to raise money through your personal website and creative work, let your readers practice solidarity with you as a fellow human and creator; mutual respect and gratitude go a long way.

This video is ridiculously great.

— Erik Forman

One interesting wrinkle here—a lot of the capital that VCs are playing with is actually workers’ capital. There is hundreds of millions of dollars of union pension fund money invested in Uber. Labor pension funds hold by some accounts 1/3 of the securities in the United States. But too often that money is managed in ways that actually hurt workers.

— Erik Forman

Coop funding:  Shared Capital Cooperative

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Phinney Ridge Apartment Complex Pioneers Unique Communal Model by Andrew Engelson (The Urbanist)

Rather than using a traditional condo or co-op model, each of the investors owns a share of the building’s LLC. Investors contributed anywhere from $50,000 to $5 million in the project and own a percentage of shares based on the size of their investment. Residents all pay rent to the LLC, most of them at market rate.

Banks weren’t initially enthusiastic about the funding model, Dale noted. “It was very challenging to get financing,” he said. “I must have talked to 50 banks.”

See also:

Disguising and reinforcing the status quo with tech

Finding enough together

Financing Cohousing

Re-doing the Industrial Revolution

Resources for divesting your retirement

Prioritization of themes

Respondents are asked to select their top three priorities for Parks from these options:

1. Safety and belonging
2. Equity, representation, inclusion, and access
3. Maintenance, repairs, and staffing
4. New parks, trails, recreation opportunities, and infrastructure
5. Information, education, outreach and engagement

Five feels like a reasonable number of options to choose between. There’s also a space for folks to answer if they “don’t relate to any of these themes.”

Defining success

I like that they ask users to define success (in up to 450 characters) because I actually went back and changed the prioritization of the three themes I chose after I started putting down what each meant. I settled on safety first, equity second, and maintenance third. New parks are exciting and all, but I’ve been seeing so much talk about the value of maintenance — and know how constantly underfunded it is — that I had to “put my money where my mouth is.” I’m sure there’s plenty of other good stuff I didn’t think of under each of these, but that’s where crowd-sourcing comes in 😊

“Safety and Belonging” in parks

I answered that success would look like:

• People feel safe getting to parks and trails on foot or by bike.
• People feel safe to use the park by themselves.
• Parks are welcoming and provide ample, comfortable seating and all-season bathrooms.
• Safe needle programs reduce use of drugs in urban parks and support is provided for unhoused folks — shooing people away doesn’t solve the problem of homelessness.

I tried to think beyond just the parks themselves, but that getting there is part of using them.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people in the Seattle area seem scared of homeless people camping in parks and there’s a lot of fearmongering around needles — if we could re-route those fears into productive responses instead of just doing clearings, that would be swell. (I don’t know how much of an issue it is in King County Parks specifically but the housing shortage is severe, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was common.)

“Equity, Representation, Inclusion, and Access” in parks

I answered that success would look like:

• Information is available in multiple languages.
• Outreach and access supports communities that would otherwise have a hard time accessing, or not feel welcome in, County parks and trails.
• Most parks have ADA accessible activities.
• Where appropriate, Parks involve Tribes in co-management of lands and resources.

Eyyyy, fit in some #LandBack ethos. I don’t expect anything of it, but I’ll say it wherever I have the chance 🤷‍♀️

“Maintenance, Repairs, and Staffing” in parks

I answered that success would look like:

• Catch up on backlogs and fix what needs to be fixed.
• Maintain paved trails for bike access.
• Hold the line against invasive plant species.
• Keep bathrooms clean and open year-round.
• Staffing is appropriate to maintenance needs.

Squeezed in some ecosystem recovery 💪

Other priorities

They provided a space for other priorities that weren’t covered by their themes. I answered “habitat restoration and wildlife connectivity.”

Park locations

I didn’t look at the levy webpage before answering the survey, but that probably would have been helpful to refresh my memory on where the parks all are and what programs they offer 😅 I might have been tempted to bump “new facilities” up because there are literally none in Seattle proper and the north end is pretty sparse too. The Cross Kirkland Corridor / Eastrail is a less than ten minute walk from my house 🙌 But other than that, the two nearest King County parks are both a 20 minute drive away.

It probably makes sense for them to prioritize purchases in unincorporated King County and leave local parks to the cities to manage, but I wonder if there’s an opportunity for King County to help cities acquire or link more land than they might be able to afford otherwise, and to enable land purchases when choice parcels come up for sale so they don’t get missed out on. Also, I wonder if it would make sense for King County to spearhead more expensive facilities like aquatic centers.

Let’s keep talking about it 👏 I think the next phase of the IndieWeb is developing clearer social norms. This is also a great way to engage non-technical community members!

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A thought from Jacky:

But I sorely wish the “Web” part of the “IndieWeb”, in the sense of building collective tools that lift all the boats instead of individual yachts being propelled, were something that was focused on more and not left to the rest of the world to just “adopt”.

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Ghost is federating:

ActivityPub is a lot like email, and Ghost already supports email subscriptions. This means we can use the same interface to support both. Your audience enters whatever address they’re used to subscribing to things with, and Ghost figures out the rest.

This allows your readers to choose how they would prefer to subscribe, and your work to reach farther and wider when you publish.

Including readers in the IndieWeb

The IndieWeb in general is publishing oriented; however, the pool of people willing to publish anything is very small as a subset of the online audience. If the IndieWeb is meant to be for all, we ought to consider how our indie websites can serve people who primarily read content rather than write it — at the same time we lower the barriers to entry of posting replies and interacting with our sites. And I mean both technical and social barriers.

This conflicts with the idea of one’s website being the center of our online identity. But if that’s a barrier to making more flexible tools that are welcoming and encourage interaction, maybe that’s a principle the IndieWeb should revisit? *Throws down the gauntlet, but gently*

I’d posit readers are just as important a part of the IndieWeb as writers. We talk a lot about the problem of discovery, but not enough about who’s doing the discovering and how they’re going to follow and interact with whoever they discover. I think Jacky’s onto something that the approach of building things for ourselves may neglect building tools that are suited to a broader audience — and a (not necessarily true) perception that people are mostly interested in building for themselves could discourage conversations about adapting tools that start for oneself into something more people could use.

What draws new folks to the IndieWeb, I think, is the focus on people — and I suspect the underlying desire is connection. Except, the IndieWeb neglects those who are drawn to that ethos but don’t themselves want a website… yet.

I say yet purposely; websites are not something you can “try out” having easily, and there are big upfront costs as well as ongoing ones that might not seem worth the gamble. The first step to participating in a community is often observing; over time, as people reading see what others get out of having their own websites, it may become less daunting and more appealing to put in the work and emotional energy to have their own website. We should welcome people to the community even if they’re not at the stage where they want a website — as people are exposed to others’ personal sites, having a personal website becomes normalized.

Is requiring a website to participate something the IndieWeb community prioritizes enough to disregard the needs of most Internet users (i.e. non-posters)? Can we better support IndieWeb readers who don’t have — and don’t want — their own websites? Frankly, can the IndieWeb “succeed” if having a website is a mandate?

Let’s experiment!

In support of the idea of making small interactions easier, this week I’ve added the Open Heart Protocol to posts on this blog. That means readers can “heart” an article by clicking on it. (I welcome feedback / suggestions for better placement 😄 Currently it’s in the article header.) There’s a count shown, but no names — it’s just a quick, anonymous way to say “hey nice” or express sympathy or solidarity. I don’t know whether anyone will use it, or if different functionality would be better, but I think it’s good for people in the IndieWeb to experiment with different ways of connecting and making a human-centered web.

Now, the only reason I could add this little tool at all is because Benji set up the… er, I don’t even know what it does, but the thing that makes it work 😂 (Thank you Benji! I’ll post how I got it working on WordPress later this week for anyone else interested.) As a non-technical person, I rely on technical community members to share tools they make. I don’t want to demand labor from all y’all, and I imagine most others are the same — we’ll use the tools you offer up but we’re probably not going to ask you for them — unless you say you’d like to make a tool for the broader community, and want to know what problems we have and want solved.

If there’s appetite for building more things for the community at large, a conversation about the gaps in the system might be a good place to start. Let’s talk more about the tools we already have and figure out what needs they’re not meeting, and especially about the social side of them. If the tools we have technically will do what we want, why aren’t we using them that way? We’ve been having this conversation asynchronously via our blogs over the past year, and I think there’s still lots more to talk about!

Also posted on IndieNews

Technology has given us instant access to everything. From internet with all of humanity’s knowledge, to food delivery at our door, or even cat videos, you have an app for it. But technology has also given everybody access to you, and that’s bad. Not everything requires an instant response, nobody will die if you answer a text message later today or even tomorrow.

This sounds appealing, and even maybe plausible… except that I was one of those weirdos who held out as long as possible on Windows Phone, and even though I thought it was a superior OS, still eventually gave in because of apps. (Do I hate going to the ATM enough to keep a smartphone I don’t want? Apparently.)

I didn’t used to keep my phone on me nearly all the time, then I started needing reminders to take medication a couple times a day. I’m testing out whether my Fitbit alarm could fill that role for me — if so, I could stop carrying it around.

I still have my old digital point and shoot from circa 2004 — I’m curious how teensy the photos are 😂

Another thing I use it for often is recipes… but I’ve been considering getting a new computer, so my laptop could become a floater and live downstairs for that purpose instead 🤔

The cheapest Garmin car GPS model on their website is under $200. Frankly, I don’t even need directions most of the time, it’s just helpful if I go somewhere horrible to drive like downtown Seattle.

The thing is, I do want to have a phone available when I drive somewhere in case I break down. But a bit of looking around made it sound like AT&T is a harder network than others to use some random cheapo dumb phone… and dumb phones that’ll work are actually not that cheap ($60+?). So probably I won’t do it 🤷‍♀️

See also: How to live without your phone by Sam Kriss

I stopped playing Fruit Ninja, eventually. But for nearly fourteen years afterwards, I stared at a smartphone every single day. Five thousand days, all in all. I can’t think of anything else I’ve done with the same level of commitment. There have been days where I’ve had nothing to eat or drink and there have been nights when I didn’t sleep. But until very recently, I never once went twenty-four hours without remembering to look at my phone.

After a while without my phone, I started to really notice how much everyone else was staring at theirs. On public transport in particular. Every adult is sitting there, pushing around coloured squares and popping coloured bubbles. They are playing with toys for babies. Now look at their faces. These people are not being entertained. They’re not having fun. They are turning their brains off while they wait.

Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive.

Related:

Read The Shallows

The value of friction

Trade and exchange have been around essentially forever. How much is too much, though? How far is too far? How do the critical quantities of phosphate mined in the Western Sahara and sent to fertilize farms all over the world compare with peat moss harvested fifty miles from me and used to feed gardens like mine?

I knew natural nutrient transfer from the Sahara to the Amazon was important ecologically, but I never considered human-driven nutrient transfer from the tropics to temperate zones.

(FYI: Composting your food scraps is one of the best behavioral changes you can make at home to help with climate change. In the landfill, they emit methane gas; as compost, they sequester carbon into the soil. See if you have access to a municipal program!)

 

Highlight of the week: Got happy hour sushi and took a walk at the waterfront on a gorgeous sunny weekend afternoon

Looking forward to: Finally got around to ordering a new Discover Pass so I’d like to get out to a State Park soon (I need to plan some more stuff to look forward to!)

Stuff I did:

• 13.5 hours consulting — I’m shockingly only like an hour over my estimate for the current phase! Just another hour or two more to turn in the deliverable, so this’ll be much closer than the first phase 👍 (It’s a fixed fee project so I just get a slightly lower effective hourly rate than my target when I underestimate. Not ideal, but estimation is ever a learning process.)
• Figured out (and paid) my estimated taxes
• Listened to an author talk about going wide
• DH got his braces off!
• Set up a bike stand for my husband’s bike and reorganized the living room
• Met a friend for a quick walk — but oh nooo my allergies! Got a headache afterwards and had to send husband for acetaminophen
• Took the cat back to the vet for a followup booster shot 😿 They gave us medicine (gabapentin) to help him panic less about riding in the car — maybe it helped a little?
• One online appointment

Dinners:

Didn’t cook much, I must’ve been tired 🤷‍♀️

• Shake Shack veggie burger
• ???
• White bean and mushroom stew + toast
• Thai takeout — eggplant and tofu + rice + veggie spring rolls
• Peanut butter toast + milk
• Fancy frozen pizza + bagged caesar salad
• Taco Time frozen crisp bean tacos + sour cream + guac + pico

Reading:

• Read:
  • Novellas: The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo and The Factory Witches of Lowell by C.S. Malerich
  • Comics: The Hard Switch by Owen Pomery and Dumb: Living Without a Voice by Georgia Webber
  • Art books: Susan Point: Works on Paper by Dale Croes and Mexican: A Journey Through Design by Newell Turner
• Continued reading Come Together by Emily Nagoski
• DNF’d Last Ship Off Polaris-G by Carol Van Natta, The Dragon of Ynys by Minerva Cerridwen, Goblin Girl by Moa Romanova, and Burning Roses by S.L. Huang
• Bought ebook All That They Desire by Zoe York, ordered Design is a Job zine by Mike Monteiro, and backed The City We Chose by TO Comix Press

Words I looked up / concepts I learned:

• Ligne claire — looked up for the art style of The Hard Switch
• Sturgeon’s Law — I have a hard time keeping track of all these things named after people, but this concept would have been handy when I was writing about critique recently

Pretty stuff I saw:

• the paperback cover of Hummingbird Salamander
• Kevin Gleason – Full Moonrise–Evolution Valley
• Liron Gertsman – The Frigatebird and the Diamond Ring (story behind the photo)
• Ravi Zupa – Fun Tonight
• love the color combo on this turquoise and coral tumbler

New music I listened to:

• Ben Howard – Couldn’t Make It Up

Website changes:

• Updated my blogroll (last updated in November) — I’ve been on a spree following other bloggers over the past several months and had 30+ new folks to add, that was exhausting 😅 I think I’m only gonna do it twice a year… unless I figure out some easy way to do it as I go 🤷‍♀️
• Updated my robots.txt with a bunch more AI user agents… I know this is a losing battle but this is the one protest move I can take so I’m doing it while it’s still marginally viable.
• Updated my theme, which requires making some manual updates to the theme files because it doesn’t honor child theme edits for a few microformats updates I needed for IndieWeb friendliness.
• Followed these instructions to replace youtube.com embeds with youtube-nocookies.com embeds — the inline iFrames method worked for me once I fixed the URL typos in lines 5 and 6.

Nature notes:

• Camas in the raised bed is blooming! Not the camas in the ground yet though, but close.
• The espalier apples are starting to flower so I’m waiting for the deer to show up and chomp down like usual… I never noticed before but the leaves are budding out from the bottom tier up, so the top tier barely has any leaves but the bottom is already flowering 🤷‍♀️

Random thing I learned:

• Cookbook authors pay for their own photography 😳