One Man's notebook this week.
One Man's Notes
I think I may have over-bought Christmas coffee. It's past twelfth night, and I still have two bags of beans to go.
After a storm and flash flooding knocked out the power in south-east Queensland, Australia, a local woman used her electric car to power her son's life-saving dialysis machine.
Sometimes having a giant mobile battery is incredibly useful.
OK, now the snow is getting serious and settling. My daughters are going to be very excited.
VideoMan shocked to discover that two-edged sword does, in fact, have two edges.
This, and the piece it's based on, are well worth a read: Dorothy Thompson On Who Goes Nazi
Sad that it feels as relevant today as it did when it was written.
On the intrigue side, Fieldwork can be relied on to provide the spectacularly weird. Downstream from Richmond we once spotted a polystyrene takeaway tray on which somebody had placed - for no adequately explicable reason - some poo. They had adorned this with a small Union flag, fixed at a jaunty angle, and set the whole thing sailing off down the river. We watched it until it was gone from view.
— From Elegy For a River by Tom Moorhouse 📚
Frosty but beautiful beach walk after school drop off this morning. Starting to feel like I’m finally shaking off the Christmas lurgy.
Oh, marvellous. The UK government is now making policies based on easily disprovable conspiracy theories.
They’re either idiots, or they think pandering to idiots is the only way they’ll stay in power.
These cactus leather iPhone cases look nice. Still a natural material, but without the environmental costs of cow skin.
Quite tempted to get one in a few months.
This was very interesting to write. It does feel like some models of society and lifepaths have reached their natural end — and are now running on human inertia.
Opportunity lies in spotting what's dead, and figuring out what should replace it.
Substack launched Notes to steal attention from Twitter.
It succeeded. Right now, I bet they’re regretting that.
My inability to remember which is the correct spelling – whether or wether – means I accidentally write about castrated rams rather more than anyone outside Farmers Weekly should ever do so.
One of the (very) small ironies of the "Substackers against Nazis" ruckus is that I've ended up spending way more time on Substack than usual, just to track what's happening.
It would be better if journalists did not gravitate to a Facebook-owned Twitter clone.
Amen.
My annual look at the most popular posts on my journalism site, One Man & His Blog.
The clearest trend is the real sense of uncertainty surrounding social media right now. If it's confusing for users, think how challenging it is for professionals…
I'm getting a lot of traffic from Russia at the moment.
Not quite sure what to make of that.
This is an insanely long, but very detailed and compelling, telling of the Substack story — and how the platform got into its current mess.
Recommended.
Platformer leaving Substack for Ghost over the “platforming Nazis” issue.
That’ll be a substantial hit for Substack.
Whether or not Substack ever had a significant Nazi problem is now a moot point.
It undoubtedly has a Nazi image problem – and that's not going to easy to shift.