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Author: Ryan Boren
Howdy. I’m Ryan Boren (he/they) with Stimpunks Foundation, a nonprofit by and for neurodivergent, disabled, and queer people. I’m a retired tech worker turned wannabe sociologist.
CV: I helped start WordPress.org, WordPress.com, WordCamp.org, and Automattic.com, among the first fully distributed organizations.
About: queer, vegetarian, autistic, bipolar, hyperlexic, power wheelchair user, neuromuscular disease
Location: Dripping Springs, Texas, USA, named after the springs at the Milk House Branch of the Edwards Aquifer, a gathering place for the Tonkawa people, who were here before us. We’re a little west of Austin in Texas Hill Country.
Current SpIns: pens and paper, everyday carry/coping, punk rock, queercore, Ezra Furman, The Linda Lindas, food anime, Thai fisherman pants, Tokyo street fashion, solarpunk, solar energy, heat pumps, electrification, library economies, third places, epistemic injustice, scrollytelling
America understands new abstractions by financializing them. It’s how our culture absorbs information. Taxicabs, spare bedrooms, public education—we see markets everywhere.
We glorified the theft of the ability to be present from anyone who happened to have an internet connection.
I like everything Marisa Paternoster makes. I’m really enjoying the latest Screaming Females, particularly this nicely crafted pop punk number.
Om collected his 25 favorite tech reporters into a Twitter list. Many of my favs are represented. Check it out.
I added a Required reading page on my long-form blog. These are the pieces necessary to understand the social model perspective of my blog.
I stumbled across Bookcision, a bookmarklet for getting “your Kindle highlights out of the cloud and onto your computer.”
I just used it to copy highlights from a few of my Kindle books into my “Commonplace Book" folder in Ulysses. Works for me.
Doan Lotion Potion
A black and white cat sleeping on a bed with walls covered in art in the background
Small b Blogging
This great piece on Small b Blogging aligns with my philosophy and practice.
Selected quotes:
What’s going on here? I call it small b blogging. It’s a virtuous cycle of making interesting connections while also being a way to clarify and strengthen my own ideas. I’m not reaching a big audience by any measure but the direct impact and benefit is material.
Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.
And remember that you are your own audience! Small b blogging is writing things that you link back to and reference time and time again. Ideas that can evolve and grow as your thinking and audience grows.
As Venkatesh says in the calculus of grit – release work often, reference your own thinking & rework the same ideas again and again. That’s the small b blogging model.
So, getting a post read by “everyone” is harder than ever but reaching hundreds or low thousands of audience has never been easier.
By chasing audience we lose the ability to be ourselves. By writing for everyone we write for no one.
When you write for someone else’s publication your writing becomes disparate and UN-networked. By chasing scale and pageviews you lose identity and the ability to create meaningful, memorable connections within the network.
Come join the network. Bring a blog.
Source: http://tomcritchlow.com/2018/02/23/small-b-blogging/
Glitterstim Tiftofs
My fourth grader and I have been reading book 1 of the Han Solo trilogy, The Paradise Snare. Homework writing prompts are more fun when you have the Star Wars universe to play with. Here’s what we came up with when prompted to create a candy inspired by the book.
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Glitterstim Tiftofs are sweet, until they’re not. An initial hit of sweet yields to sour which yields, finally, to a bitter worthy of a Bantha blood fizz.
Mined in the dark depths of Kessel, glitterstim’s unique and very valuable properties are activated by exposure to light. A coating of Corellian chocolate preserves glitterstim’s telepathic effects against prying photons.
As chocolate gives way to the warmth of the mouth, glitterstim coats the mouth and grabs the tongue. With a smile at a star or the glow of a light saber, glitterstim activates and rides receptors straight to the brain. There, it opens your mind to other minds, tuning you to the frequencies of nearby sentience.
