I dunno if this is notes, or notes to self, but the jotter is here for reasons:

I’ve really had no time to give this place any thought for a few months, and mostly use it to log stuff. Which is fine, because logging stuff is half the reason I caused the thing to exist.

I was looking into a timestamp app for using on photos, but all the iOS timestamping apps look bad. I’m not even sure why that got stuck in my head, except perhaps that I find it easy to fire photos here from my phone, and a photo is sometimes more useful than words.

And many of my photos here flow through into Instagram automatically, so it’s another way to make me look alive on social media. Which shouldn’t, of course, be a concern; but also is, because, as a cultural worker who now produces on long timeframes, it doesn’t hurt to be seen to be at least alive.

Also, it would be nice to experiment with new ways to do this thing. There’s been a new spate of “keep blogging weird”-style posts here and there – and even as I write this I have an old muscle memory twitch of “don’t blog about blogging!” — and I’m aware that this space ain’t weird and doesn’t innovate. And it would be nice to fuck around with it a bit.

After I started thinking about that, I saw Venkatesh go to an odd timestamped format, and his explanation has interest.

The culprit in the stillborn promise of log-like writing of blogs was the introduction of names. Meaningful, theme-scoping names. Attention-seeking meaningful, theme-scoping names. Specifically the headline.

I mean, the lack thereof is what caught everyone’s eye about tumblelogs, way back when. I still think the tumblelog was a marvellous thing that got usurped and murdered by Tumblr (even as Tumblr itself gave different things back and had its own value).

(Kicking around, I discovered Trivium is still going, from an original tumblelogger.)

Tumblelogs, as early microblogging forms, also obviously form part of Twitter’s DNA, and Venkatesh gets into some of that too. Interestingly, though, the chain he’s started in this format are long things that read like stream-of-consciousness exercises or exhaustive trains of thought.

Much like this one, which I will close now so that I can figure out the third plot stream in this story document.