Writer, musician, wizardly guide to platform independence
“More music is being released today (in a single day) than was released in the calendar year of 1989.”
Lowering the bar to entry into the music world has been a wonderful thing. Along with the internet, it’s made it possible for anyone in the world to hear your music.
The problem is that every musician is doing the same thing. Everyone competing for the same listens and streams and downloads.
(source)
This is so good, from ‘No one benefits from you scrolling and feeling sad.’
“I think the root of the problem is the globalization of all problems.
Now, it feels like anything bad that happens anywhere in the world is somehow relevant to me and my responsibility. It’s like, I’m not allowed to be happy as long as someone, somewhere, is having a bad time.
Especially with global problems, it’s like, how are you allowed to smile when there’s climate change? These problems are really bad, but you can’t change everything yourself.
No one benefits from you scrolling on your phone and feeling sad and then going to Starbucks.
The antidote is figuring out what you care about, what you’re good at, and what you like doing that can make the world a little bit better.
Then, really do that thing.“
The only people who said blogs were dead were the corporate overlords who bought them all up, tried to lower costs by cutting staff, and realized 18 ads on every page turned readers away.
Trust me, I know. I worked at AOL from 2006-2011 or so. I was around the whole “let’s just make a bunch of sites, throw ads on them, and link to them from the AOL homepage” and holy shit, it worked until it didn’t, I guess.
I spoke with Thought Enthusiast about Social Media Escape Club, mantras, and Noah Kalina!
“hey… you don’t need to be loud and jump around and do stunts to connect and share your work. Like, you can just be who you are, and that’s enough, and even though the algorithm might not “reward” that, oh well. Being yourself makes it easy to sustain your work because you’re not wasting energy being someone else.”
Read more here.
Love this from Mehret Biruk:
“I ask the empty page a question and every single time, without fail, to my utter shock and delight, it answers. You can’t hear such answer, your truth dying to reach you, when you’re spending all your time inside the deafening internet noise.”
NIKON Z fc
We haven’t gotten any rain in awhile, so it was fun getting up early in the morning to take a little photo walk and capture this scene.
I put this photo in Substack Notes, but taking my own advice and doing my best to also make sure I put this sort of stuff on my own blog, too. Substack can go away tomorrow, but as long as I keep paying my yearly server bill and domain name registration, this post will never go away.
A few words can change your life:
Say it, and be done.
“What did we do before talked about politics all the time?”
A great question posed to me by one of the most politically adpet people I know.
It’s wild, in that social media has conditioned us to constantly talk about politics, at least since 2016 or so.
That was the start of Trump’s foray into politics, when Twitter became as absolute shitshow, but where I’d stay until 2023 for some reason.
But I think social media has just made us think and connect like being online has been the answer the whole time, and everything leading up to it was wrong.
As if the before times, when not everyone had a personal computer at home, or a laptop that they could use on the couch, or a smartphone so they could check it constantly.
Maybe the current mode of living was created by companies that never had our best interest in mind.
Because, honestly, the more we’re online, the more we’re seeing ads. Even if we’re not using an ad blocker, we see ads on social media. Pre-roll ads on YouTube videos.
What if the reason we’re so perpetually online is because it’s in the best interest of those that build computers and sell the ads?
What if it doesn’t have to be this way?
