Taper 9, Draft Shutting Down, Avenues for 2023

Maybe I should change this whole section into This week I learned because that's what this page is about.

This week, I learned that Taper #9 has been released. Taper is an online "zine-type"....thing where digital artists, poets and agitators submit pieces for each published collection. They're usually something between an "interactive poem" a "visualization" or some avant garde HTML experiment. They're very forward thinking and very cool. I've only looked at a couple of the art projects/poems in #9 so far, and I must confess I've missed every Taper installment since #3 in 2019. I bet they just weren't up to date on sending the updates to their mailing list or whatever. But there's definitely some cool stuff in there and I recommend the full archives. I actually submitted this piece for Taper #2, which was about duality, and it got rejected because the file size was too big (embedded JPG), and the editors found the writing too incoherent.

This week I learned that my my favorite distraction free writing web app, Draft is shutting down at the end of 2022 (less than a month from this initial writing!).

I am very sad about this, but I totally understand that the project is probably in the sweet spot of side project that 1) is big enough to cause all kinds of costs and responsibilities and 2) not big enough to produce meaningful financial rewards for the former.

I've written more about my feelings on this and included some emails I sent to the site's creator on the page for Draft in this garden.

This week (in fact today, this time) I learned about Robin Sloan's excellent newsletter post about "A Year of New Avenues". It is hopelessly exuberant and optimistic, and in that way extremely intoxicating. It also challenges the reader, especially in the span of prompting for "new avenues" for 2023 but at the same time gently chastising that "Mastodon is not it".

In my internet travels, I've been looking at Gemini as a protocol that could be useful for building the next internet thing in the whale corpse of Facebook and Twitter.

I've also heard of Secure Scuttlebutt a few years back, around the time I was first learning about Mastodon. It seems much more quirky, experimental and revolutionary than Mastodon will ever be. Especially with it's focus on offline social networks (did you even know there was such a thing?).