Periodical — 2
Internet Intimacy
Yesterday, I mentioned the Yoto Daily, a daily podcast for kids that loads up automatically on the Yoto player. I just wanted to add that what makes it special is that it feels like a voicemail from a friend. Listening to it gives me (and I presume, my children also) that sense of being connected to a single other person somewhere far, far away.
For me, that’s the purest magic of the internet — the way it can erase thousands of miles and make connection across them feel like an instant and gentle zap of intimacy.
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Twitters come and go, but RSS is forever.
As Twitter died, I realized that I had the opportunity to engage with information a bit differently, rather than try to recreate that experience on one of the many twitter clones. So, I dug up my old Feedly account and went through all the feeds I had been tracking circa something like ten years ago. That alone was interesting. Then, I downloaded NetNewsWire and imported the feeds I wanted to keep. I chose NetNewsWire over renewing my Feedly account because it’s free and it doesn’t run in a browser. Then, I tracked down the personal sites of many of the people I followed with most interest on Twitter and added their feeds to my list. I added a few news sources, spent a few minutes categorizing, and now I have a regular, slower (that’s a feature), personal one-way Twitter.
I will say that I do miss the two-way magic that Twitter once provided — the ability to socialize via text alone at a wider spread than email or group text threads can support — but I can get by without that. Before Twitter, it was RSS for me. After Twitter, RSS abides.
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Weird Should Win But Doesn’t Always
One of my sources provides a slew of random this-day-in-history material, and something referenced today is the end of a war between the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Milan in 1441. I share this because the Duchy of Milan — the loser in that particular conflict — had, in my opinion, the superior flag for its overall weirdness.
Comparison below:
The grid pattern shows two crowned biscione (big grass snakes) either eating or birthing a man from its mouth. Alongside this image are two Reichsadlers (Imperial Eagles) which represent Germanic powers and tie back to the Roman empire.
Venice, on the other had, had an obviously drunk lion wielding a sword. I kid. But I do prefer the weirder flag.
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Post-Google
I’m slowly transitioning from Gmail to Proton Mail. Doing this has given me an opportunity to purge my Gmail of a ton of old and unnecessary messages in my archive and reconsider all the incoming subscriptions I have been too lazy or busy to cut off before now.
It is incredibly refreshing to have an inbox that doesn’t fill up three times day.
I have also set up the browsers I use for personal activity with Startpage as their default search engine. It’s good!
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P.S. I’m not tweeting these, so if you’re reading this, you probably use RSS and that is cool.