Great analysis of why the current New Yorker cover is so powerful: 1000 words.

Oh, flip, I’m out of coffee beans. 😱

Today is Blue Monday, which is a myth, invented by the marketing team for a travel company.

Have a great, productive day! 😉

Watching the kids do HADO.

A scoreboard shows a match between red and blue teams, with the red team leading 15 to 10.

Started reading: The Year in the Countryside by Frances Pitt 📚

Journalism department Christmas lunch (delayed)

A plate features two slices of toasted bread, a dollop of avocado mixture, a small salad with greens, and a streak of red sauce.

Just finished watching Skeleton Crew with the family.

Just the best Star Wars in years. Family-friendly but with enough of an edge of darkness to give it depth for the adults.

More please.

Oh, no. David Lynch is dead.

From now on, sadly, the owls will be exactly what they seem.

🏔️ 🏔️

These are some lovely images of winter.

Rule #1: Never trust Facebook.

It’s been over 20 years. You’d think people would have learned this by now.

People who are trying to escape Meta’s platforms in light of the changes in recent weeks, and Zuckerberg’s latest moves, here’s an unwelcome reminder for you:

WhatsApp is a Meta product, too.

For those playing with Pixelfed, an open standards-based Instagram competitor, I’m there under the usual username.

Sussex Downs, 8.30am, Sunday 12th January 2025

A frosty landscape with long shadows cast by trees during a hazy sunrise.

Duolingo rather over-estimates how much time I spend interacting with owls, bears and elephants, day-to-day.

Just another Friday night in Falmer…

Two people in shiny metallic costumes with large spheres on their heads perform on stage under a sign that says "Welcome to the Stage: Light Fantastic!" while a chalkboard displays similar text.

Telling people they’re doing it wrong is fun. In a webinar for Smartocto yesterday, as part of a panel of trend watchers, I suggested that the industry was thinking about #newsletters in the wrong way.

That prompted more questions than we could answer in the session — so I did so on my blog.

What were the five most read posts of 2024 on One Man & His Blog? They were all about the need for real, genuine audience work, the messy drama around WordPress, and a long-gone lads' mag.

Oh, and you can find out why a gender-critical philosopher irritated me, too.

Enquire within…

I think that today I have comprehensively proven that a man my age should not attempt to understand Skibidi Toilet.

That is all.

Back to some work blogging, with a look back on the posts that caught people’s attention in 2024. The fall of Twitter, Facebook and the big digital news sites, and the rise of AI slop.

And… Shrimp Jesus?

Second-Hand Bookshops in Britain: 2024 Report — not great news, but not as bad as it could be. The secondhand bookshop world is changing.