Existing citations

Implementation of microformats citations will go unhindered, but here's a light refresher of where I started. The h-cite property resides on a list item and contains one or more of the following properties:

• dt-published
• p-author and h-card
• p-publication
• u-url and p-name

Here is an example from the referenced CSS Color Modules post above, minus the updates (added below):

<li class="h-cite"><small>
  <a id="cite-note--4" href="#cite-ref--4">[4]</a> 
  <time class="dt-published">2023-02-02</time>, 
  <span class="p-author h-card">Adam Argyle</span>, 
  <span class="p-publication">Chrome for Developers</span>, 
  <cite><a class="u-url p-name" href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/migrate-hd-color" rel="external"><i>Migrate to HD CSS color</i></a></cite>
</small></li>

You should also note that the u-url and p-name reside on an <a> inside of a <cite> element. This citation matches the cite attribute on the citation reference on either a <q> or <blockquote>:

<blockquote cite="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/migrate-hd-color">
<ol>
  <li><p><b>Graceful degradation:</b> Use the new color spaces and let the browser and operating system figure out which color to show based on display capabilities.</p></li>
  <li><p><b>Progressive enhancement:</b> Use <code>@supports</code> and <code>@media</code> to assess the capabilities of the user's browser, and if conditions are met, provide wide gamut colors.<sup id="cite-ref--4"><a href="#cite-note--4">[4]</a></sup></p></li>
</ol>
</blockquote>

Footnotes

From what I understand, the EPUB epub:type attribute usage is being replaced with ARIA roles for accessibility: This document provides guidance for publishers looking to move from the use of the EPUB 3 epub:type attribute to ARIA roles for accessibility.^[1]

That quote is from the abstract of this document{rel="external"}, and goes on to explain:

The biggest of these differences is in their primary applications. The epub:type attribute has evolved to aid publisher workflows. It has limited use enabling reading system behaviors outside of some core functionality of EPUB (identifying navigation elements and enhancing media overlay documents). Although it was hoped the attribute would also expose information to assistive technologies, in practice it does not.

The primary purpose of the role attribute, on the other hand, is to expose information to assistive technologies. It is not to facilitate user agent behaviors.^[2]

The two roles I am concerned with for citations are complementary to the two parts of what I've already implemented: the citation reference and the citation note; these are: role="doc-noteref" and role="doc-footnote". The recommendations for each have some stipulations as follows.

doc-noteref

A reference to a footnote or endnote, typically appearing as a superscripted number or symbol in the main body of text.^[3]

• HTML usage: <a>

doc-footnote

Ancillary information, such as a citation or commentary, that provides additional context to a referenced passage of text. The doc-footnote role is only for representing individual notes that occur within the body of a work. For collections of notes that occur at the end of a section, see doc-endnotes.^[4]

• HTML usage: aside element when identifying a single footnote, or on descendants of sectioning content when identifying individual footnotes in a group (refer to footnotes and endnotes)^[5]

From this information, I am a bit torn on the requirements, as they seem to slightly contradict each other. You'll see how I've decided to implement this (for now) under Template updates, but I am open to clarity and improvements if this method proves incorrect or incomplete.

Endnotes

In addition to proper citations relating to references, I also regularly include additional resources and links at the end of most blog posts. This is where I may eventually end up, after adding the requirements for role="doc-footnote" usage, as I believe the better method is to stick with role="doc-endnotes" as the containing section and role="doc-endnote" for each item.

doc-endnotes

A collection of notes at the end of a work or a section within it.^[6]

Important context: Note that the doc-endnotes role is never applied directly to the list of endnotes. See the doc-endnote role for more information.^[7]

This context is important because giving roles to elements can override their inherent nature, such that adding a role to a list element itself will override its role as a list. This will then cause issues with child elements' roles as listitem. Along these same lines, it is no longer necessary to add the role doc-endnote to a list item in a containing doc-endnotes section: [t]hese roles are now implied on list items within sections that have a...doc-endnotes role.^[8] However, as I cover in the next section, I have added both roles.

doc-endnote

One of a collection of notes that occur at the end of a work, or a section within it, that provides additional context to a referenced passage of text.^[9]

Important context: Authors MUST ensure that elements with role doc-endnote are contained in, or owned, by an element with the role list.^[10]

If you understand the context in the previous section, the above context should also make sense: doc-endnote must be a child of an element with the role list, either by default through being an HTML list such as <ul> or <ol>, or by having an explicit role of list assigned. My usage of both doc-endnotes on the sectioning element and doc-endnote on the list items may be redundant or unnecessary and I may end up cleaning this up. For now let's see how all this looks together in the template updates I made for weblog.

Template updates

The updates needed on weblog pretty much exclusively apply to the default post template in config. Since I am using Drafts for weblog authoring, I have both a recipe and post template, the post template mimicking the default post config in weblog, so I'll need to update all three templates.

I've added a sectioning element with role="doc-endnotes" and role="doc-endnote" to the list items. The ... denotes omitted content in the default post that is not relevant.

Default post: <<[---
...

--- 

<section role="doc-endnotes">

<h2><i aria-hidden="true" class="fa-solid fa-circle-info"></i>Post info</h2>

<p class="u-font-ur--medium u-spacing--bottom"><small>Links in this post:</small></p>

<ul>
<li role="doc-endnote"><small><a href="" rel="external"></a></small></li>
<li role="doc-endnote"><small><a href="" rel="me"></a></small></li>
</ul>

<p class="u-font-ur--medium u-spacing--bottom"><small>POSSE copies:</small></p>

<ul>
<li role="doc-endnote"><small><a class="u-syndication" href="" rel="syndication">Shared on social.lol</a></small></li>
<li role="doc-endnote"><small><a class="u-syndication" href="" rel="syndication">Shared on Apple Annie's Microblog</a></small></li>
</ul>

</section>

--- ]>>

For reference notes and citations, here is an updated example from the CSS Color Modules post above:

<li role="doc-endnote" class="h-cite"><aside role="doc-footnote"><small>
  <a id="cite-note--4" href="#cite-ref--4">[4]</a> 
  <time class="dt-published">2023-02-02</time>, 
  <span class="p-author h-card">Adam Argyle</span>, 
  <span class="p-publication">Chrome for Developers</span>, 
  <cite><a class="u-url p-name" href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/migrate-hd-color" rel="external"><i>Migrate to HD CSS color</i></a></cite>
</small></aside></li>

Additions to this citation note: a role="doc-endnote" on the list item and a nested <aside role="doc-footnote">.

<blockquote cite="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/migrate-hd-color">
<ol>
  <li><p><b>Graceful degradation:</b> Use the new color spaces and let the browser and operating system figure out which color to show based on display capabilities.</p></li>
  <li><p><b>Progressive enhancement:</b> Use <code>@supports</code> and <code>@media</code> to assess the capabilities of the user's browser, and if conditions are met, provide wide gamut colors.<sup id="cite-ref--4"><a href="#cite-note--4" role="doc-noteref">[4]</a></sup></p></li>
</ol>
</blockquote>

This reference includes the addition of a role="doc-noteref" on the citation reference link.

As you can see, my updates include some redundancy and possibly incorrect markup: addition of the <aside role="doc-footnote"> even though part of the recommendation says to only use this on a single footnote within the "body of a work." I chose to include it because of the conflicting recommendation to use on descendants of sectioning content when identifying individual footnotes in a group.^[11] Additionally, I included role="doc-endnote" even though that role is implicit on a list item within a sectioning element with the role doc-endnotes. These can all be updated and refined when I find clarity on this information.

Update: Isn't it just like publishing a post and a few hours later coming across something to change your mind? Well, I've found the thing I needed to make me definitively remove role="doc-endnote from the list items. In the W3C Candidate Recommendation, published February 27, 2024, doc-endnote is listed as deprecated with the following note:

The doc-endnote role was designed for use as a list item, but due to clarifications in the WAI-ARIA specification, it is not valid as a child of the list role. As the doc-endnotes role already identifies a section of endnotes, authors are instead advised to use the list and listitem roles when native HTML elements cannot be used to structure the entries.^[12]

Secondly, within the same document, the recommendation is now unequivocally to not use doc-footnote within the endnotes as it is redundant. I also appreciate the addition of mentioning that multiple and separate lists of endnotes can be contained within the doc-endnotes sectioning parent.

The element carrying the doc-endnotes role MUST contain at least one descendant list containing the endnotes (if the notes are subdivided, for example by chapter, the element would contain more than one list).

Authors MUST NOT declare elements with the role doc-footnote within the endnotes as it is redundant with the implied role.^[13]

After leaving this post feeling quite unsettled with how I left things, conflicted by what I had found (and documented above), this feels like a 180° turnaround just a few hours later!

Understanding Existing Code

I work with a lot of code that was either written a long time ago, or I need to work with only infrequently. Sometimes both at the same time. I’ll need to figure out what that code does before I can make any changes, and that can take a while if I’m doing it “manually” - often it won’t be until I run the code through the unit tests or a debugging session, or sometimes “as a user”, until it really clicks. Copilot has made this a lot faster.

Selecting a bit of code, opening the chat interface, and asking it “what does this do?” and getting a very clear and concise breakdown, has been genuinely revolutionary to my workflows. I don’t need to scratch my head for hours at a time. I don’t need to sketch out flow diagrams or step-by-steps on a piece of paper to map things out. I ask Copilot, it churns away for a moment, then it gives me the answer in clear steps, highlighting particularly important variables and function calls.

One side-effect I’ve noticed of asking Copilot to explain something is it will sometimes highlight potential bugs as part of the explanation, which can make resolving issues quicker. You can explicitly ask it to find and fix issues instead, but mentioning them in an explanation is useful context.

I can already see how I might make use of this in story analysis, and discussions around extending or improving legacy systems, even just in regular day to day work like code reviews.

Documenting Existing Code

This one is a little more hit-or-miss than providing mere explanation, but Copilot has been pretty good at generating documentation of code. By documentation I mean useful inline comments and the use of JSDoc or other, language-specific, syntax used to aid in autocompletion and the generation of API documentation, etc.

I tend to find that asking Copilot to document an entire file at once will make it choke, so going function-by function works better. Some nuance in, say, type definitions might get glossed over, but if it saves me typing out 80-90% of the details then I think it’s a win in this particular task.

I have a use-case for this very feature at work right now, and I’m sure I’ll refine and improve my use of it over time.

Improving Code

I’m distinguishing “improving code” from “writing code” here, as I personally think Copilot is better at the former than it is at the latter. Everyone thinks of Copilot generating new code for us, and much of the criticism of it I’ve seen has generally been along the lines of “the code isn’t very good/is completely wrong”… and honestly, I get it. Sometimes Copilot is scary prescient and suggests the exact code I want before I’ve finished considering what to write, but often I find it’s quite wide of the mark^[1].

But give it some existing code and ask it to improve (or as I usually ask: “simplify”) and in my experience it is much more likely to do the job right.

This even extends to code you might have just generated with Copilot. It might only be my experience, but for anything more than an obvious one/two-liner, often the first (acceptable) code Copilot will give me is correct but verbose, sometimes needlessly so. By selecting the code and asking for a simplification, most of the time you will get a much better version of what was originally there.

I’ve found myself doing this quite a bit lately, as I refactor a personal project I wrote over fifteen years ago, and I’ve been pretty happy with the results. I’m sure mid-20’s me was very smart and knew exactly what he was doing at the time, but me of the present is looking at a lot of his code and thinking “it doesn’t need to be this complicated”.

Being Productive in Unfamiliar Languages/Frameworks

I jump around between stacks a lot, and often I’ll need to work on something that’s similar to a thing I did before, but in a new language or framework. I’m sure you know the drill.

By combining my existing knowledge and experience with Copilot’s explanations, suggestions, and iterating over the code, I’m able to be productive faster on something new than if I was picking it up from scratch on my own.

Is this initial output equivalent to that of someone experienced in the language/framework? No, of course not. But it moves me closer, faster, and with the right support allows me to jump into new scenarios with less trepidation. I don’t necessarily need to do a course or binge a bunch of related YouTube videos to get up to speed on something before starting work on it - now I can likely get started first and augment that initial productivity with learning materials. As someone who learns better by doing, this reduces the friction somewhat.

Where I’ve Struggled with Copilot

I’ve mentioned a couple of things above where I’ve found Copilot less magical than the marketing would suggest, but for posterity, here are some additional areas where I’ve found Copilot lacking:

Unit Tests

If there was one thing I really wanted Copilot to be able to do for me, it was this - generate unit tests for my code. I am generally not quick at writing tests on my own, so it becomes a bit of a bottleneck. I’ve seen loads of people be able to generate whole test suites using Copilot, but I’ve just never managed to get it to work. Maybe it’s bad luck, maybe it’s how I’ve written the code to be tested, I’m not sure. The recurring problem seems to be it hallucinating things that aren’t in the code it’s meant to be testing.

Inline Chat seems less accurate than the main Chat Window somehow?

This one confuses me. If I use Ctrl+I to bring up the inline chat, and ask it to suggest some code/explain/whatever, the resulting suggestion is wrong considerably more often than if I use the main chat window (Ctrl+Alt+I). This might be down to how I’m using inline chat, given the importance for context in getting accurate answers, but it’s been a frustration for a while. Perhaps I need to dedicate some time to figure out what I’m doing wrong, as there’s no reason I should be seeing such wildly different success rates between the two interfaces!

Summing Up

Overall, I find Copilot genuinely helpful for several things: understanding, documenting, and refactoring existing code, as well as jumpstarting work in new languages/frameworks. That these tend to be some of the most common or important things I do on a daily basis means Copilot does earn a place in my toolbox. Outside of these things though, I find it less useful, and certainly nowhere near living up to the marketing hype.

 

Hope everyone is having a nice sunday. Todays post is on culture cycles and the need for work to ‘Settle In’ to our collective psyches. Very much a first pass at the idea. Comments are open if you have any thoughts.

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• Settling In
• Permanently Moved
• Photo 365
• The Ministry Of My Own Labour
• Terminal Access
• Dipping the Stacks
• Reading
• Music
• Remember Kids:

Settling In

People have been fretting about the acceleration of culture and new technology for as long as there’s been a culture and new technologies to speed it up. In 1858, an unnamed New York Times correspondent complained:

There can be no rational doubt that the telegraph has caused vast injury. Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth, must be all telegraphic intelligence. Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth? Ten days bring us the mails from Europe. What need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes?

How trivial and paltry is the telegraphic column? It snowed here, it rained there, one man killed, another hanged. 

That was in the 1850’s! Since then we’ve had the influence of the mass paperback novel, film, radio, television, and the Internet. Culture responded to them all, digesting, re-digesting. In my lifetime I’ve seen the rapid acceleration of culture with 24-hour news, the web, then social media, the emergence of fast fashion, music streaming etc.

The rapid feedback loops between creation and consumption work upon each other, spinning the flywheel ever faster. ‘Consumerism’ is what we call the response to this state of affairs. It’s found across the board: Clothing, cars, phones, products, fashion, art, movies, books, comics whatever. Physical goods or otherwise. There’s always a ‘new thing’ someone wants you to buy or consume.

In the current moment, creatives make art (commercial or not), and we the consumers have to try swallow as much of it as we can before the next thing comes along. We sense this in our personal lives, we describe it as ‘information overload’, ‘social overwhelm’ or whatever. But if we’re feeling this as individuals, I can’t help but wonder what its doing to ‘The Culture’ at large.

The rapid creation / consumption cycle leaves no space for anything to ‘settle in’

Despite being my mortal enemy – This week I was happy to see Disney announcing that they are scaling back the release schedule for its Marvel properties:

“We’re slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three,” Disney CEO Bob Iger told shareholders during Disney’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday (via Variety

The key line came later in the investor call when he mentioned ‘quality’

Disney CEO Bob Iger told analysts that the company is finally moving away from “a vestige, basically a desire in the past to increase volume.

“I’ve been working hard with the studio to reduce output and focus more on quality, that’s particularly true with Marvel,”

As per ‘Cultural Fracking‘, Disney has been treating culture like a commodity. Therefor under the logic of consumerism, more product is better product- regardless of quality.

Whats been happening for the best part of a decade, with social media and the explosion of metrics beyond crude numbers like ticket sales etc, is that our cultural overloads owners have managed their releases/products solely towards what they can measure. Engagement online on Twitter became part of a media properties measure of success etc. Not just box office receipts or sales.

The peak of this thinking has got to be from the brain of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek:

Spotify’s billionaire CEO Daniel Ek informed artists that in the streaming age “you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough. The artists today that are making it realise that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”

When you are a streaming platform, the only cultural quality that matters are the streaming numbers. Under his logic you have to be continually releasing new music and new content in to the fast feedback loops of consumer culture to survive. An artistic practice built around the gesture of the album, a self contained world of sonic ideas once every 4 years isn’t enough according to Ek.

But thats not how culture works – culture needs to marinade. Work needs to settle in to the collective psyche. Albums are super important.

Art takes time to act upon culture

The idea that a new work must come out, be consumed, burn bright before we all collectively move on to the next thing is a crazy one. It’s rotting peoples brains, its rotting culture.

The other week a friend was bemoaning in the group chat telling us about the following interaction Her newest book came out in February, and she was being interviewed on a podcast. During the conversation the host apparently straight up ask the following (I’m paraphrasing): “Why are you still talking about your book? what about AI? what about xyz? whats next for you?”. Translated: Why are you still, 4 months on, talking about the book that took you 3 years to write?

Rapid cycles of media consumption prevent any kind of deep cultural engagement and collective sense making from occurring. True engagement with art requires time, attention and taste – which the current pace of media release does not allow for. ‘Content’ needs time to embed and resonate within societal and individual consciousness. One thing needs to influence another, be juxtaposed and in dialogue with one another and the audience. It’s from this psychic vibration that responses can begin to flower.

Take for example, Netflix and other streaming platforms approach of dropping whole seasons of TV shows at once – the season binge. This release strategy leads to brief, intense periods of discussion followed by a rapid falling away on social media towards the next ‘new thing’. But this only ever leads to confused commentary. Who knows how far any one has got though the series on day one, two, or three after release? Little sense making can occur when just as everyone finally gets on the same page, it gets immediately turned but the industry that funded and created the work.

I don’t watch much TV – but I did binge the new Fallout series whilst I was back home on the chalk at my parents the other week. It’s the first TV show I’ve watched since the last season of The Expanse. I liked it. Nothing more needs saying.

Had the show dropped weekly as ‘appointment viewing’ we’d all still be discussing it. And thats just better for culture. Fallout would have stayed at the edge of the cultural zeitgeist for 8 weeks, not 10 days. Its release would have had a bigger, deeper cultural impact. It would have had a chance to begin the process of ‘settling in’.

Fandom is part of the problem + the solution

What passes of ‘settling in’ in our current media environment has become endless long tail proliferation of SEO optimised articles like the ones that show up in my Google Discover. ‘Culture websites’ baiting me to click on them to read what fucking stupid dross or opinion someone has.

They are always empty of actual information. Articles about speculative fan theories, canon issues, ranking who’s the best, fan drama etc. It’s not digestion or the marination of cultural works, but fan bait to grab eyeballs and show ads. All stuff I couldn’t give a fuck about.

Even Lord of the Rings isn’t safe, look at what showed up on my discover this morning! I didn’t click it.

Dune used to be my favourite of all online fandom. This 2018 article in The Outline was something I identify with very much:

Beyond that, Dune is not a corporate cash cow, and being a fan doesn’t carry with it that icky feeling you’re doing an unpaid PR internship for Disney or AT&T Time Warner. You’re not being cultivated when you make a Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim Appreciation Thread, the way you are when you do something similar for, like, Harley Quinn or Groot. Nor are you helping billionaires whitewash their crimes if you point out politically positive aspects of the series, like its environmentalism or its bone-deep skepticism of leader cults.

I wrote about Dune and people shouting ‘spoilers’ at me over a 60 year old book back in 2020. For literally my whole life online I enjoyed reading things about Dune. Thoughtful essays, critiques, and observations from people newly discovering the book series. Discussion of its themes and characters etc. Dune was influential in our culture for far longer than it has been ‘relevant’. But the new movies have ruined it all. Dune has been sucked into the media consumption cycle like everything else. It’s no longer marinating in the cultural psyche. Google search Dune and you get the movie not the books. This is no way to organise culture.

None of this should be seen by anyone as evidence of ‘settling in’ at all. It’s just the exploitation of ‘fandom culture’ to ensure that every last drop of monetizable attention is rung from an idea before everyone has moved on.

Settle Cycle

The thing is, as works of culture ‘settle in’ their relevancy diminishes, their influence may grow. Which is bad for owners of the IP who need relevance to sell stuff but good for audiences.

Fandoms keep old books, tv shows, movies alive in the long tail of culture. Consider all the podcasts out there with large audiences watching and discussing a 90’s TV show episode by episode or whatever. Or think of the fans that kept Star Wars influential (but not relevant) for 20+ years. These are the people who (rightly) got fucked off when Disney blew up the canon.

Right now, everyone in my extended circle seems to be reading and discussing Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. I don’t think anyone would say that this book is very relevant to the present, but its influence ‘right now’ on people who make and create culture seems to be enormous. Ed Rathke is currently writing a chapter by chapter breakdown on his substack. The Agitator boys talked about it on Getting Lit Pod etc etc.

The Book of the New Sun has settled in. This is 40 year old culture still marinating.

Last week I wrote about competitive Tetris, and the need to go deep on subjects. How paying attention to something for a long time allows you to develop your taste. I don’t want to sound like an again Hipster, but there is immense value in paying attention to things that aren’t mainstream. Taking time with the content and culture you enjoy.

Hopefully Disney slowing down the MCU juggernaut is a sign that culture owners have seen that fast release cycles does a disservice to the art and our culture. No one is still talking about the Barbie movie, but I have (personally) noticed that folks are still talking about Oppenheimer.

Some of my favourite conversations about media I’ve consumed recently has been about books I read decades ago, or albums that I’ve sat with for a few months or years. Prolonged exposure and discussion among audiences allows culture to settle in. It allows us to digest it, consider it, sit with it. Culture that is settled becomes more valuable to us all.

Permanently Moved

React + Re-Consume

Reaction videos were (and still) are considered ‘low effort’. At worst a parasitic grift. Leveraging the creative work of others for social clout

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2024/05/11/2408-reaction-re-consumption/

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• I updated my online essay collection worldrunning.guide this week. It now totals 22 Essays. About 23.7k Words.
• Finished up some feedback for a start up
• Wrote some more of the impossible object text (next issue of my zine)
• 1 meeting in town
• 3 zoom calls about potential projects

I’m currently open to/for work.

Terminal Access

Ol’ buddy ol’ pal Andrew Dana Hudson is currently in Italy. The reason for his visit was a residency at the Sci-Fi Economics Lab. He’s now at the Turin book fair.

In todays newsletter he covered some of the thinking that came up during his residency and raised the idea of a ‘Planetary currency’

So I started asking the economists at the residency, as an icebreaker, how they thought a planetary currency would work.

It was a surprisingly underexplored idea, even in a room full of SF-loving heterodox economists. What would we even call it? GeoDollars? Planetary Pesos? UN-Yuan? AllCoin? Terrabucks? Unicash? ‘Credits’? Would we even need a name anymore? I’m very open to suggestions.

I would call it Bitcoin imo. Seems like a catchy name.

Dipping the Stacks

Waging Culture Wars Justly

This is all an imperfect analogy, to be sure, but analogies don’t have to be perfect to be helpful. The main thing, I think, is that we who believe that culture matters enough to fight for it ought to have equally strong convictions about how to fight – or not to fight. Otherwise, we’re part of the problem.

The Great Joy of Returning to Your Childhood Hobbies

I started practicing at night in my acoustic-blessed bathroom. Outside the door, my daughter applauded at the end of every stanza. A week later, my husband shyly told me that he was inspired by my renewed creative energy and wanted to take guitar lessons. Between his daily practice and mine, our house is now full of music.

On Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation – by Clinton Ignatov

Squint your eyes, and almost every book or conversation on in this subject can be reduced to four words: “It’s the phone, stupid!”

How WhatsApp became the world’s default communication app

WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform. Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services.

There is way too much serendipity – by Malmesbury

While researching novel uses of sucrose and its synthetic derivatives, Phadnis was told to “test” a chlorinated sugar compound. According to an anecdotal account, Phadnis thought Hough asked him to “taste” it, so he did and found the compound to be exceptionally sweet.

Reading

I finally finished reading The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. It’s a 2005 collection of interviews with 19 of the top Non Fiction writers at the time of publication. Lots of New Yorker writers, Atlantic writers, Pulitzer Prize winners and long form non fiction book authors. A theme of the book is around the legacy of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism of the 60’s and 70’s. The book suffers in 2024 by being produced in the Interregnum between the personal computing revolution and the internet. Especially the questions around the prospects for long form journalism. None of them saw whats coming. It amazes me that some of them wrote two 10k pieces a year and made a living! A big portion of the authors are now dead, some are in their 60’s grinding out Substacks.

On a recommendation from a blog reader Tom, after my post about motivation and todolist woes the other week I started reading “Laziness Does Not Exist: A Defense of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked” by Devon Price Ph.D. I’m afraid I bailed on it after the first 50 pages. The book is mostly for chronic workaholics. There was nothing in it for someone like me with the twin issues of having a self castigatory nature towards not doing enough AND lack of intrinsic motivation. Ditched. DNF

I wanted something to burn though so started the Warhammer novel Harrowmaster by Mike Brooks. its not my favourite subject mater/lore topic but Brooks is a good writer and I’m enjoy it. Nearly done!

Music

Spotify Playlist

• Spotify

Sunshower – Taeko Ohnuki

Suns out here in the London, so I’ve been listening to Japanese 70’s lounge pop legend Taeko Ohnuki. Perfect summer sunshine music.

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The post Settling In appeared first on thejaymo.

A song I’m loving:

When I was pregnant, I’d sing Landslide by Fleetwood Mac to my daughter all the time. In the shower, in the car, while doing dishes, “well I’ve been afraid of changing…” would pour out of me and into her. The song became part of her experience of growing. It became part of my experience of growing her.

Once, about a year ago, I started singing the song while we were on my bed, moving through a giant stack of books. Reading together is her favorite thing; mine, too. Her eyes welled up as I sang and she kept doing the sign for “more”, tapping her tiny fingers together repeatedly. More mama, more, more. I kept singing, her misty blues staring widely at me, as though we were communicating some secret code woven between us. I’ve thought about it often since.

A few nights ago, she was really struggling to go to bed. I eventually went into her room, picked her up, and started singing Landslide while I swayed with her in my arms. Her soft blonde hair immediately melted into my shoulder, her warm cheek curled into the nook of my neck. My eyes welled up and suddenly I was singing to her through tears, tears that seemed to keep coming. She didn’t mind — I think she somehow knew why it all felt so tender. I think us being in the tenderness together has, more often than not, been everything we both needed. When I put her down, she quickly went to sleep. I’ve been thinking about it since.

I think about all the hours I spent singing to the growing being in my body, the daughter I hadn’t met yet, knowing before even knowing her that it would mean something.

I often wondered if my birth mother ever sang to me, even though she never planned on keeping me. I wondered if singing to me would have created too much intimacy and thus too much heartbreak for her. I wondered if singing to me could have been a way of her weaving a piece of herself into me, a piece I’d carry long after she left. Sometimes, when I sang Landslide to my growing daughter, I wondered if that song had been sung to me while I was growing. Or maybe I just wish it had been. I wish I knew whether I heard any songs at all while my heart was taking shape inside a stranger’s body. Why did I choose that song, for no reason other than the felt sense that it was what I was meant to be singing to her? But each time I sang it — and every time I sing it to her now — some untapped part of me feels cared for as I care for her. Some quiet ache of mine is also getting soothed. I am singing to her and I am singing to me. I am lulling each of our hearts at once. That’s why it makes me cry.

Some things stay forever tender. I am reminded so often that some of my aches will never fully go away. They will get tugged at and resurfaced throughout my life, in different seasons, in expected and unexpected ways. I spent so much of my life desperate for the pain I carried to suddenly disappear. I spent so much time in therapy trying to fix it, cure it, turn it into something else, deny it, become bigger than it, conquer it, contain it, control it, erode it. I thought eliminating it was the goal.

I know now that the grief I carry might always linger in some form. So now, when I sing Landslide to my daughter and feel tears forming in my eyes, I don’t try to force them back. I know they need to be let out, to be felt, to be integrated into an experience of deep love, to be met with presence. I practice saying, “here it is. How cam I tend to it?” I practice leaning in, rather than forcing out. I practice listening to the wisdom it has for me, the sensations it’s asking me to feel. I practice.

I know there will be times where a part of me needs to be sung to in the ways I sing to her. I know there will be times I need to ask for more hugs, for an extra chat with a friend, for time alone to be with what’s swirling. I know I’ll need to carve out space to feel the sadness of what I missed, of what I still sometimes miss and wonder about. I know I need to meet the bubbling grief with curiosity, with the welcoming warmth of a mother. And somehow, all of this feels much easier, much more gentle, much more doable than battling the desperation for all the hurt to go away.

May the grief that arises in unexpected ways become a place to practice love.
May the nourishment we pour into others somehow also pour into ourselves.
May we acknowledge what’s within us, whether ache or complete awe.
May we no longer force away the parts of ourselves asking for tenderness.
May our capacity to be with what’s real become wider and wider, ever-expanding.
May our willingness to tend to the grief make room for so much more joy.
May we remember there is always, always, always space for both.

As always, thank you for being here.

△ On nurturing capacious hearts

△ Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

△ The roaring

△ ‘All I’ve learned, I’ve learned because the abyss swallowed me’

△ My growing collection of Nicole Lavelle stickers

△ Hala Alyan in the LA Times

△ Changing your heart towards pain

△ Revisiting this exploration of our roles in change

△ Being her mom.

With care,
Lisa

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