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diff --git a/friends.txt b/friends.txt index ebd3225..2e6afb2 100644 --- a/friends.txt +++ b/friends.txt @@ -1,55 +1,5 @@ # Sketches -## 003 -Greetings Friends of a Long year Subscribers- - -In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. - -The end of February brought strange, warm weather to our woods. The rest of the country was swathed in snow, ice, extreme cold, power outages, frozen pipes, and worse. Our relatives in Dallas lost power for days, their goldfish froze, their pool was a solid block of ice. Meanwhile, in the shire, as my Wired colleagues call this place, it was sunny and 75. - -We took advantage of the warm dry weather and hiked down to the creek, exploring the woods and river bottoms on the way. The creek isn't huge, and its flow doesn't seem to fluctuate much even with rain, but there are some knee deep pools here and there and the water is remarkably clear. The water is so clear that it acts like a magnifying glass for the pebbles and rocks slowly making their way to the sea. What caught my eye one sunny day was the amount of tiny gold sparkles in the water. - -It turns out we're in a geologically interesting area. Normally I am a birdwatcher, I leave the rocks and fossils to Corrinne. But it's winter, which means bird life is largely limited to the mixed flocks of chickadees, titmice, and wrens that inhabit the southern Appalachian woodlands this time of year. There is a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that's been working on the large pecan tree that hangs over the bus for months now, and I saw a flash of yellow I couldn't identify at the top of the same tree this morning, but the flood of migrants that really gets birdwatchers like me up in the morning hasn't started yet. - -So rocks. In streams. I need a hand lens. And a lot more knowledge about geology than I currently possess. But I do know we're in a borderland, geologically speaking, which is always the place to be -- edges are where everything gets interesting. - -We're between the Appalachian foothills, which you can see on a clear day if you get out of the forest, and what gets called the low country, the part of the state below the Fall Line, where the Piedmont foothills and Atlantic coastal plain meet. We're technically in the upcountry, but at the very edge of it. We're where everything washes down to, where the waters slow, meander, and the rocks start to collect. - -This is a land of low, rolling hills with geologically complex things going on beneath the foot or so of red clay that's so hostile to growing carrots. Under that clay layer there's a mish-mash of [schists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schist) that bubble up everything from quartz to [amphibolite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibolite) to, ahem, [gold](https://www.dnr.sc.gov/geology/pdfs/Publications/GGMS/GGMS3.pdf). - -Alas, it's tiny specks of gold. Also not our land. But, details. - -I always tell the kids they can keep all they can pan, but they never take me up on it. They're more interested in good-looking rocks with skipping potential. - -Originally I didn't think the shiny golden flecks I saw in the stream bed could be gold because where I grew up anything you thought, hoped, prayed might be gold was absolutely not gold, ever. But then if you grew up in the 1970s and 80s you inevitably watched too many westerns with too many lonely, sun-baked, half-crazed gold miners to ever totally abandon the notion that you too might find some gold one day. If you just kept looking. - -One day I spent an hour or two on the [SCDNR Geological Survey website](https://www.dnr.sc.gov/geology/) and discovered that indeed, there is quite a bit of gold in them thar hills. Enough in fact that the flecks we find in the rocks of our tiny stream probably *are* gold. - -I haven't been back to the creek since I found out it might actually contain gold. The sunshine and warm weather didn't last. Well, the warm temperatures did, but the clouds rolled back in and we've had a week of rainy, foggy, dreary days. The red clay has turned to red mud, making hiking difficult. - -I'm ready for more sunshine. I've had to settle for warm rain, which I will take over cold rain, even if it is decidedly odd to have warm rain in the winter. There was a thunderstorm two nights ago. It's not even March. Strange times in the shire. Maybe Spring will come a little early. Or maybe that's just a February fantasy, like the gold in the creek. - - -In March of 2006 I was in Austin Texas, at SXSW eating pulled pork with WIRED's then main music writer and my editor (who is vegan, but very polite about these things, and also, still my editor). We were eating, but actually do something that at that time was rather unusual: we were watching everyone in the building stare at their phones. The iPhone did not exist yet. Twitter had been around for a little while at that point, but SXSW, this particular day as I remember it, was when it really took off. I think about this moment from time to time and try to make sense of it. - -Now a restaurant full of people staring at their phones is so common we don't even think about it, but back then it was so unusual we talked about doing an article about it. I can't remember if we did or not, but I remember talking about it because I remember that nothing about the scene felt particularly prophetic. It didn't even feel like something from the future, it felt like something anomalous. - -We were talking about feedback loops. How short this one was. This was back when Twitter was mostly SMS-based. That feedback loop is even shorter now. - -All communication happens in loops. This is the start of a loop. I say something. You say something back, I respond to that response. The conversation begins, a loop is opened. - -Most online communication these days consists of loops measured in minutes, hours at the most. I find those loop overwhelmingly short. I am convinced that loops this short are only meant to be experienced in the body, in person. That kind of immediacy requires intimacy, closeness of physical space. Without that you get... the culture we have. - -How long is the loop? That's the question to ask before you devote your time and energy to something. Is it the right length for me to be heard? Is it the right length of me to be able to listen to what you're saying? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the communication. Perhaps it's as simple as more time to think. Perhaps it is something more. This is just me of course. For all the talk of how awful social media is, I know several people who love it, would be devastated to lose it, and are otherwise happy, functional people. - -My website is near the opposite end of this communication loop spectrum. I still get email asking about things I published nearly two decades ago. I have no idea how people find these older articles since Google generally ignores Luxagraf (as it ignores every small site), but they do. So I get to communicate with people in loops that span decades from my point of view. - - - - - - - # Published ## 001 - Cold, No Snow, Trees @@ -139,3 +89,96 @@ So every year, around this time, I take a pen, a scrap of paper, and go for a wa Until next month. -s +## 003 +Greetings Friends of a Long year Subscribers- + +In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. + +The end of February brought strange, warm weather to our woods. The rest of the country was swathed in snow, ice, extreme cold, power outages, frozen pipes, and worse. Our relatives in Dallas lost power for days, their goldfish froze, their pool was a solid block of ice. Meanwhile, in the shire, as my Wired colleagues call this place, it was sunny and 75. + +We took advantage of the warm dry weather and hiked down to the creek, exploring the woods and river bottoms on the way. The creek isn't huge, and its flow doesn't seem to fluctuate much even with rain, but there are some knee deep pools here and there and the water is remarkably clear. The water is so clear that it acts like a magnifying glass for the pebbles and rocks slowly making their way to the sea. What caught my eye one sunny day was the amount of tiny gold sparkles in the water. + +It turns out we're in a geologically interesting area. Normally I am a birdwatcher, I leave the rocks and fossils to Corrinne. But it's winter, which means bird life is largely limited to the mixed flocks of chickadees, titmice, and wrens that inhabit the southern Appalachian woodlands this time of year. There is a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that's been working on the large pecan tree that hangs over the bus for months now, and I saw a flash of yellow I couldn't identify at the top of the same tree this morning, but the flood of migrants that really gets birdwatchers like me up in the morning hasn't started yet. + +So rocks. In streams. I need a hand lens. And a lot more knowledge about geology than I currently possess. But I do know we're in a borderland, geologically speaking, which is always the place to be -- edges are where everything gets interesting. + +We're between the Appalachian foothills, which you can see on a clear day if you get out of the forest, and what gets called the low country, the part of the state below the Fall Line, where the Piedmont foothills and Atlantic coastal plain meet. We're technically in the upcountry, but at the very edge of it. We're where everything washes down to, where the waters slow, meander, and the rocks start to collect. + +This is a land of low, rolling hills with geologically complex things going on beneath the foot or so of red clay that's so hostile to growing carrots. Under that clay layer there's a mish-mash of [schists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schist) that bubble up everything from quartz to [amphibolite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibolite) to, ahem, [gold](https://www.dnr.sc.gov/geology/pdfs/Publications/GGMS/GGMS3.pdf). + +Alas, it's tiny specks of gold. Also not our land. But, details. + +I always tell the kids they can keep all they can pan, but they never take me up on it. They're more interested in good-looking rocks with skipping potential. + +Originally I didn't think the shiny golden flecks I saw in the stream bed could be gold because where I grew up anything you thought, hoped, prayed might be gold was absolutely not gold, ever. But then if you grew up in the 1970s and 80s you inevitably watched too many westerns with too many lonely, sun-baked, half-crazed gold miners to ever totally abandon the notion that you too might find some gold one day. If you just kept looking. + +One day I spent an hour or two on the [SCDNR Geological Survey website](https://www.dnr.sc.gov/geology/) and discovered that indeed, there is quite a bit of gold in them thar hills. Enough in fact that the flecks we find in the rocks of our tiny stream probably *are* gold. + +I haven't been back to the creek since I found out it might actually contain gold. The sunshine and warm weather didn't last. Well, the warm temperatures did, but the clouds rolled back in and we've had a week of rainy, foggy, dreary days. The red clay has turned to red mud, making hiking difficult. + +I'm ready for more sunshine. I've had to settle for warm rain, which I will take over cold rain, even if it is decidedly odd to have warm rain in the winter. There was a thunderstorm two nights ago. It's not even March. Strange times in the shire. Maybe Spring will come a little early. Or maybe that's just a February fantasy, like the gold in the creek. + + +In March of 2006 I was in Austin Texas, at SXSW eating pulled pork with WIRED's then main music writer and my editor (who is vegan, but very polite about these things, and also, still my editor). We were eating, but actually do something that at that time was rather unusual: we were watching everyone in the building stare at their phones. The iPhone did not exist yet. Twitter had been around for a little while at that point, but SXSW, this particular day as I remember it, was when it really took off. I think about this moment from time to time and try to make sense of it. + +Now a restaurant full of people staring at their phones is so common we don't even think about it, but back then it was so unusual we talked about doing an article about it. I can't remember if we did or not, but I remember talking about it because I remember that nothing about the scene felt particularly prophetic. It didn't even feel like something from the future, it felt like something anomalous. + +We were talking about feedback loops. How short this one was. This was back when Twitter was mostly SMS-based. That feedback loop is even shorter now. + +All communication happens in loops. This is the start of a loop. I say something. You say something back, I respond to that response. The conversation begins, a loop is opened. + +Most online communication these days consists of loops measured in minutes, hours at the most. I find those loop overwhelmingly short. I am convinced that loops this short are only meant to be experienced in the body, in person. That kind of immediacy requires intimacy, closeness of physical space. Without that you get... the culture we have. + +How long is the loop? That's the question to ask before you devote your time and energy to something. Is it the right length for me to be heard? Is it the right length of me to be able to listen to what you're saying? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the communication. Perhaps it's as simple as more time to think. Perhaps it is something more. This is just me of course. For all the talk of how awful social media is, I know several people who love it, would be devastated to lose it, and are otherwise happy, functional people. + +My website is near the opposite end of this communication loop spectrum. I still get email asking about things I published nearly two decades ago. I have no idea how people find these older articles since Google generally ignores Luxagraf (as it ignores every small site), but they do. So I get to communicate with people in loops that span decades from my point of view. + + +## 004 Internet Bloom + +Greetings Friends — + +It is I, Scott, maker of stuff, including this. You signed up for this newsletter at luxagraf.net. If that does not ring a bell there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this letter. + +Spring has arrived down here. Earlier this month we had two solid weeks of glorious weather, 75 and sunny, flowers coming up, everything was wonderful. Then the pine trees decided it was time, and great clouds of yellow green pine pollen began to descend like a hazy fog from the heights of the forest. The wind shifted and dumped the vast majority of it on our house. Great swirling clouds come rolling off the tree tops in the mornings to coat everything and choke you the minute you step outside. + +It's a small price to pay for private access to the 100 acre wood, but it is still a price. + +Just before the great pollen cloud began I made a trip to Athens to visit a friend, in person. It is odd to me that we, that I, feel compelled to say, *in person* as if there were some other way to visit people. We caught up a bit, talked about what we had been up to, as you do, and at some point he asked if I was still making luxagraf. I said of course I am. Once I start something I am generally too foolishly stubborn to stop. + +Then he asked, "why?" + +There was an awkward pause in which I think he was thinking I had no answer, but actually I was sorting through about fifty different answers I have to that question and trying to pick one. The one I picked for him, which is my favorite one, is, "because it's wildly profitable." + +Just kidding. I told him I do it because I enjoy making it. It's fun to build something that's your own. + +The strange thing is he was back to building his own site too. He's the person I learned to build websites with many many years ago. He's also more realistic so at some point he stopped. It never was profitable. That might have been what made it fun. + +But these days everyone says you need a website to promote your business or build your brand or whatever. I almost never hear people say you should build a website because it's fun. I try to encourage people to build their own stuff, but it could be that I'm one of the few who enjoys it. It's certainly still not profitable. + +I once calculated the total cost of domain registration and web hosting for luxagraf.net, which has been online since 2002. I blocked out the number afterward, erased it from my mind. It was surprisingly large though. + +It reminded me of a story my grandmother used to tell me and my cousins, that she was sorry she hadn't set aside $1 a day for all us grandkids starting when we were born. She would then proceed to explain compound interest to us, and by the end all of us cousins would look at each other like, wait, what? Grandma could have made us rich? But she just now thought of it? Well, damn. + +I'm still not totally sure what she was up to with those stories, they were like seedlings I think. One thing I believe grew of them for me is a life long habit of multiplying out small monthly payments to form staggering, intimidating numbers at the end of the axis of time. + +The point is, to have your own space online is not cheap, either in terms of money or time. It is an investment. One that seemed worth it to some of us. The internet has regressed dramatically since I started making this site, but once upon a time everyone made their own website and it was fun. It took some work, but all fun things do in my view. You had to learn how everything worked. You spent a lot of time looking up HTML tags and trying to make things look the way they were supposed to, but somehow never actually did. But that was part of the fun. Just like it would be no fun if the engine started the first time you tried to fix it. Where's the adventure in that? + +*Aside: This is a curious thing though, because you have to be careful not to go seeking adventure. That would be asking for trouble. You have to *hope* the engine starts the first time. When it doesn't. Well, now you have an adventure.* + +It turns out a lot of people don't think tinkering with engines or HTML is much fun, so sealed engines and MySpace came along to flatten out the learning curve. MySpace also showed you could make real money from the things people put online. And at that moment fun and adventure left the building. + +The web regressed from a fun, adventurous thing floating out there somewhere in the ether to a real thing with accountants. Statistics, money, and attention are harbingers of death for anything you love. They're good if you're looking to pay the bills, but still harbingers of death. + +In 2004, when the internet regressed and everyone became a blogger and slapped ads all over their websites and started rolling in the dough, I was too busy to do it. I never turned my website into anything more than something I did for fun. And so in 2011 when all that money dried up and everyone abandoned their sites in favor of social media, I didn't. I was still having fun. It wasn't that I thought all the ads and stuff was a terrible thing (although in hindsight I do), it's just that I never did. For me this remained a fun thing I like to do in moments like this, at 10:30 on a Sunday evening when I probably should get some rest. + +The point is, I totally missed the memo about the transition of the web from a fun place where we all made crazy weird websites into this horrible shrieking pit of existential despair where you *still* can't find the phone number of the restaurant on the restaurant website because why the fuck would you want useful information when you could have a poorly lit close up of last season's entrees, and so consequently, I still have fun making my website. + +So much fun in fact that I keep adding to the site. I recently started putting photos online again. Like Instagram, but on my own site. I actually started it a while ago, but forgot to tell anyone about it. Anyway, you can sign up for [Range](/range/), as I call it, if you're interested. If not, that's fine, I'll still have fun doing it. + +And grandma, wherever you may be, know that I did eventually figure out how I could use compound interest to my advantage. I haven't always done it, but I do think my habit of taking the very long view of things might have it's roots back there in those stories. + +Until next time friends... + +-s + |