Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
-
I've always had a certain familiarity with computer image editing (I think I got my start writing Apple ][+ BASIC programs that spat out ASCII art, before graduating to making pixel-art for Broderbund's "Print Shop"), but I've never applied myself to *any* visual field in a serious way, until now.
Amazingly, after 50 years of thinking of myself as someone who is "bad at visual art," I find myself identifying *as a visual artist*.
15/
I find myself pondering visual works the same way I do prose - mentally unpicking how it is done, and thinking about how I could productively steal some new techniques for my own work. I'm also privileged to have some accomplished visual artists in my circle, like my pal Alistair Milne, who generously share technical and aesthetic tips. It's got to the point where I published a book of my art, and I think I'll probably do it again next year:
16/
-
I find myself pondering visual works the same way I do prose - mentally unpicking how it is done, and thinking about how I could productively steal some new techniques for my own work. I'm also privileged to have some accomplished visual artists in my circle, like my pal Alistair Milne, who generously share technical and aesthetic tips. It's got to the point where I published a book of my art, and I think I'll probably do it again next year:
16/
There's also a *ton* of technical work that goes into publishing each edition of this newsletter. Things have moved on somewhat since I published an in-depth process-post in 2021, though I'm still totally reliant on Loren Kohnfelder's python scripts that help me turn the XML file I compose every day into files that are (nearly) ready to publish:
17/
-
There's also a *ton* of technical work that goes into publishing each edition of this newsletter. Things have moved on somewhat since I published an in-depth process-post in 2021, though I'm still totally reliant on Loren Kohnfelder's python scripts that help me turn the XML file I compose every day into files that are (nearly) ready to publish:
17/
Much of the technical work is down to the fact that I'm still wed to the idea of "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):
This means that after I write the day's post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a *ton* of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I'm always wrestling with them.
18/
-
Much of the technical work is down to the fact that I'm still wed to the idea of "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):
This means that after I write the day's post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a *ton* of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I'm always wrestling with them.
18/
This year, *all* of them got *worse* (incredibly).
Medium - where I used to have a paid column - has dropped its free-flag for my account, which now limits me to how many posts I can schedule. This doesn't come up often, but when I *do* schedule a post, it's generally because I'm going to be on a plane or a stage and won't be able to do it manually.
19/
-
This year, *all* of them got *worse* (incredibly).
Medium - where I used to have a paid column - has dropped its free-flag for my account, which now limits me to how many posts I can schedule. This doesn't come up often, but when I *do* schedule a post, it's generally because I'm going to be on a plane or a stage and won't be able to do it manually.
19/
There's no *way* I'm going to pay for this feature: I'm happy to give Medium my work gratis, but I will not and do not pay anyone to publish my work, and I never will.
Tumblr did something to its post-composing text editor that *completely* broke it and I've given up on fixing it. I can't even type into a new post field! I have to paste in some styled text, then delete it, *then* start typing. It's ghastly.
20/
-
There's no *way* I'm going to pay for this feature: I'm happy to give Medium my work gratis, but I will not and do not pay anyone to publish my work, and I never will.
Tumblr did something to its post-composing text editor that *completely* broke it and I've given up on fixing it. I can't even type into a new post field! I have to paste in some styled text, then delete it, *then* start typing. It's ghastly.
20/
So now I just have a text file full of formatted HTML snippets and I work exclusively in the Tumblr HTML editor, pasting in blobs of preformatted HTML (including the florid, verbose HTML Tumblr uses for its own formatting) and then laboriously flip back and forth to the "visual" editor to see the parts that went wrong.
21/
-
So now I just have a text file full of formatted HTML snippets and I work exclusively in the Tumblr HTML editor, pasting in blobs of preformatted HTML (including the florid, verbose HTML Tumblr uses for its own formatting) and then laboriously flip back and forth to the "visual" editor to see the parts that went wrong.
21/
Here's how busted Tumblr's visual editor is: searching for a word then double-clicking on it does not select it. You have to click once, wait about 1.5 seconds, click again, wait again, and *then* you can select the word.
Twitter has entered a period of terminal technical decline. I know, I know, we always talk about how fucked Twitter's content moderation is, for obvious and good reasons, but from a technical perspective, Twitter just *sucks*.
22/
-
Here's how busted Tumblr's visual editor is: searching for a word then double-clicking on it does not select it. You have to click once, wait about 1.5 seconds, click again, wait again, and *then* you can select the word.
Twitter has entered a period of terminal technical decline. I know, I know, we always talk about how fucked Twitter's content moderation is, for obvious and good reasons, but from a technical perspective, Twitter just *sucks*.
22/
If I make a post with an image and alt text in anticipation of later using it to start a thread, it often goes "stale" and will not publish until I delete the image and re-attach it and re-paste the alt text. Meanwhile, the thread editor is also decaying into uselessness. Fill in a 25-post thread and hit publish and, the majority of times, the thread publication will die midway through, displaying lots of weird failure modes.
23/
-
If I make a post with an image and alt text in anticipation of later using it to start a thread, it often goes "stale" and will not publish until I delete the image and re-attach it and re-paste the alt text. Meanwhile, the thread editor is also decaying into uselessness. Fill in a 25-post thread and hit publish and, the majority of times, the thread publication will die midway through, displaying lots of weird failure modes.
23/
(Phantom empty posts at the end of the thread that need to be individually selected and deleted are a common one, but not the only one.)
The old Twitter's ability to add a new thread to an existing one has been dead for at least a year, so every post after the 25th stanza has to be manually tacked on to the previous one, which is made *far* harder by the fact that Twitter no longer reliably shows you the post you just made after it publishes.
24/
-
Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
1/
The link didn't work for some reason, perhaps this will https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/
-
(Phantom empty posts at the end of the thread that need to be individually selected and deleted are a common one, but not the only one.)
The old Twitter's ability to add a new thread to an existing one has been dead for at least a year, so every post after the 25th stanza has to be manually tacked on to the previous one, which is made *far* harder by the fact that Twitter no longer reliably shows you the post you just made after it publishes.
24/
Mastodon *still* lacks a decent thread editor, one that has even the minimal functionality of Twitter circa 2020. Meanwhile, the Fediverse HOA continues to surface from time to time, with someone who's had a Masto account for ten seconds scolding me for posting threads - from my account whose bio starts "I post long threads."
25/
-
Mastodon *still* lacks a decent thread editor, one that has even the minimal functionality of Twitter circa 2020. Meanwhile, the Fediverse HOA continues to surface from time to time, with someone who's had a Masto account for ten seconds scolding me for posting threads - from my account whose bio starts "I post long threads."
25/
It's tedious to be shouted at for "using Mastodon wrong" by someone who got on Mastodon yesterday (I opened my first Mastodon account in 2018!), and even worse when they double down after I point them to the essay I've written to explain why I post the way I do, and what to do if you want to read my work somewhere that's not your Mastodon timeline ("Can you believe this asshole wrote a whole essay to explain why he posts his stupid Mastodon threads?"):
26/
-
It's tedious to be shouted at for "using Mastodon wrong" by someone who got on Mastodon yesterday (I opened my first Mastodon account in 2018!), and even worse when they double down after I point them to the essay I've written to explain why I post the way I do, and what to do if you want to read my work somewhere that's not your Mastodon timeline ("Can you believe this asshole wrote a whole essay to explain why he posts his stupid Mastodon threads?"):
26/
Then there's email: I continue to love email, but email doesn't love me back. After years of being blackholed by AT&T and then Google, this turns out to be the year that Microsoft bounces thousands of messages to its Hotmail and Outlook users because they have arbitrarily and without warning added my mail-server to a blacklist. Thank you to the Fediverse friends who escalated my trouble ticket - but man, this is a headache I could certainly do without:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
27/
-
Then there's email: I continue to love email, but email doesn't love me back. After years of being blackholed by AT&T and then Google, this turns out to be the year that Microsoft bounces thousands of messages to its Hotmail and Outlook users because they have arbitrarily and without warning added my mail-server to a blacklist. Thank you to the Fediverse friends who escalated my trouble ticket - but man, this is a headache I could certainly do without:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
27/
My sysadmin, the incomparable and tireless Ken Snider, tells me that he's got the long-overdue new hardware installed at the colo and he's nearly ready to stand up my long-anticipated personal Mastodon server, which will let me solve all kinds of problems. He's also going to stand up my own Bluesky server, at which point I will part ways with Twitter.
28/
-
My sysadmin, the incomparable and tireless Ken Snider, tells me that he's got the long-overdue new hardware installed at the colo and he's nearly ready to stand up my long-anticipated personal Mastodon server, which will let me solve all kinds of problems. He's also going to stand up my own Bluesky server, at which point I will part ways with Twitter.
28/
I wish I could have used the regular Bluesky service while I waited, but just setting up an account permanently binds you to totally unacceptable and dangerous terms of service:
What's the point of a service that has account- and data-portability if signing up for it makes you *permanently* surrender your rights, even if you switch servers? This might be the stupidest social media unforced error of the post-zuckermuskian era.
29/
-
I wish I could have used the regular Bluesky service while I waited, but just setting up an account permanently binds you to totally unacceptable and dangerous terms of service:
What's the point of a service that has account- and data-portability if signing up for it makes you *permanently* surrender your rights, even if you switch servers? This might be the stupidest social media unforced error of the post-zuckermuskian era.
29/
There is one technology that *has* made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama - an open-source LLM - on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren's python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is "find typos").
30/
-
There is one technology that *has* made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama - an open-source LLM - on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren's python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is "find typos").
30/
Ollama *always* spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words ("the the next thing") or typos that are still valid words ("of top of everything else").
The reason this is so valuable to me is that errors magnify through each stage of POSSE. Errors that make it through the python publication script take 10x the time to fix that they would if I caught them beforehand.
31/
-
Ollama *always* spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words ("the the next thing") or typos that are still valid words ("of top of everything else").
The reason this is so valuable to me is that errors magnify through each stage of POSSE. Errors that make it through the python publication script take 10x the time to fix that they would if I caught them beforehand.
31/
Errors that I catch after running the scripts and publishing the posts take 10x time more. Errors that I have to fix later on - once I've closed all the relevant tabs and editors - take 10x again more time. Some POSSE channels (email, Twitter) can't be fixed *at all*.
So catching these typos at the start of the process is a huge time-saver.
32/
-
Errors that I catch after running the scripts and publishing the posts take 10x time more. Errors that I have to fix later on - once I've closed all the relevant tabs and editors - take 10x again more time. Some POSSE channels (email, Twitter) can't be fixed *at all*.
So catching these typos at the start of the process is a huge time-saver.
32/
I have some very generous readers who have the proofreader's gene and are very helpful in catching my typos (hi, Gregory and 9o6!), and I feel bad about depriving them of their fun, but there's still the odd error that slips through, and they always catch it.
Ollama is a pretty good typo-catcher. Probably half of the "errors" it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs' grammar-checker.
33/
-
I have some very generous readers who have the proofreader's gene and are very helpful in catching my typos (hi, Gregory and 9o6!), and I feel bad about depriving them of their fun, but there's still the odd error that slips through, and they always catch it.
Ollama is a pretty good typo-catcher. Probably half of the "errors" it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs' grammar-checker.
33/
As someone who uses a lot of jargon, made up words, etc in his prose, I'm used to overriding my text-editor. I wouldn't simply trust an LLM's edits any more than I would accept every suggestion from a spell-checker. Hell, yesterday I sent back a professionally copyedited manuscript (the intro for the paperback of *Enshittification*) and marked "STET" on about a third of the queries.
34/
