I’ve owned this domain since July of 2000. For at least the past decade the blog-like incarnations of it have been dormant or gone.
At some point in the not too distant past (I can’t pin-point it — I didn’t use version control — sometime between Trump taking office and several months ago), I started maintaining a linklog again to keep track for myself the slide as we continued to batter what we’re all asked to hope is good about or be aspired of our form of government, either believing in a demagogue, or believing others who said this one was the most extraordinarily worst demagogue so if you just trusted them, the least worst demagogues who we’ve cycled through before, we could get out of the woods again … the cycle is is the demagogue and no one is breaking that, yet.
Meanwhile, in spite of this some things make progress at the same time that plenty of folks in many guises continue to try to pull the rug out from under us.
Keeping track, not being numb, and remaining indignant without being naive is the hard part, but sharing is not. Hence I embedded the linklog and the feed, both coming out of Pinboard.
A linklog is what machination.org was mostly, and most consistently, at its peak, when it seemed like I actually had a couple thousand unique vistors (woo…) — just before and after 9⁄11 ish. (I’m sure I’ll revisit how the events of that date both were a pivot point in my life and yet, how it should not have been for most of us — that it is an era marker is a failure, maybe.)
Had I a little more grit and hubris, maybe just a better self advocate, I feel like I might’ve built some traction in the spirit of Kottke.org or DaringFireball.net, or maybe more like my friend (we have a mutual good friend and shared some friendly virtual nods, at least) Jon’s TinyRevolution.
I recently started using NetNewsWire again - the version 5 alpha’s of the renewed app as an open source offering. It felt good. I control “my feed” again.
And I supposed it nudged me to see if I could contribute something again. Even if it is blithe and trite shite, because I’ve let my muscles atrophy on Twitter and Facebook for too long, because I’ve had good practice at getting drunk and shrill and need to unwind that (and have, mostly), I’ll try it here.
P.S. — if this were 1996, there’d be some sort of under construction element in the header of the site. I’m re-learning how to implement something responsive, and I have never been a designer, so constant evolving tweaks. Building the web with my own hands is a hobby these days. I’m a half-decade, at least, behind the bleeding edge of the profession.