Category: Uncategorized

It is so painful watching Twitter go into a horrible tailspin.

I was always against the idea of selling Twitter to Elon Musk but I never imagined it could get this bad, this quickly. He never wanted to buy it, he clearly doesn’t know how to unlock its potential and he’s just flailing. Just this week he has suspended a number of independent journalists without warning and banned any and all tweets mentioning competing social platforms. Unsurprisingly many of my friends and creative folks I follow have either left or are substantially using it less.

I am not giving up entirely on Twitter. But I will use it less. And I’m now giving Mastodon a shot.

I’m still getting the hang of it and suggest a few tidbits if you want to learn about it as well.

Start by reading Joanna Stern’s article which provides a great intro and overview on how it all works

Next, visit Fedipages to find your friends on Mastodon (I’m @bijan@home.social)

The onboarding is clunky for sure. But it’s also a breath of fresh air.

Also leave me a comment with your Mastodon username. Unlike Musk’s Twitter, you can do so freely on my blog

There is so much opportunity to build what’s next. I don’t know if Mastodon is the answer but it’s worth our time to find out.

ps: oh, and please don’t delete your tweets

New Weezer. Yes, please.

I very much enjoyed this recent interview with Matt Mullenweg (founder of Automatic, developer of WordPress and the most recent owner of my beloved Tumblr).

This particular response from Matt was my favorite part of the conversation

I will add that one of the most amazing things about the technological revolution was allowing for economics of abundance, not scarcity. Things get more valuable the more copies there are. We were talking about the positive flywheel of open-source earlier. WordPress gets more valuable the more free copies there are. Now we’re getting more things to introduce scarcity and the value of scarcity into the web, perhaps even programmatically with stuff like NFTs. The difference between what’s come before — from tens of thousands of humanity’s advances — is this idea that, in the world of bits instead of atoms, you and I don’t have a zero-sum way of prospering. We can both benefit from the same thing. We can perfectly copy that software and that actually enables entirely new business models that are pretty exciting. Or maybe that it’s not a business at all, which is okay. Everything doesn’t have to be for profit.

My love affair with the internet, online communities and the web came from this ethos. And it still does today.

Photography is not reality, and for me, it is not about capturing exactly what was there. This is one of the reasons why I love film. With different film stocks you get different looks to the work. Either it is a colour difference, or a contrast difference or perhaps both. I use Fuji Velvia for most of my landscape work. Fuji Velvia does not record accurate colour. More or less, each time I get the films back, it is like I am staring at images made in a parallel universe to the one I was photographing. I also love film grain because it ensures that the images aren’t hopefully considered to be ‘real’ or ‘verbatim’. Film has a tendency to roll off the highlights so they don’t hit a sudden wall. And lastly, I like to use film because I understand there will be a big disconnect between what I am seeing and what I am recording.

Bruce Percy