I'm running a One Minute Park fundraiser for the next week to keep the site online. This goes towards the domain, server, and my time 🍀

oneminutepark.tv

Gather, the offline-first client for collecting, curating, and cultivating multimedia collections, is officially on the app stores!

Start archiving daily moments like you would text a friend on gather.directory and cultivate your capacity to notice

I just released the Museum of All Things version 1.0!!! You can find it at mayeclair.itch.io/museum-of-al...

My Discord server is officially opening its doors! 🚪

It's a place to have discussions and connect around the projects + topics I'm working on. There's also a patron's only room for my supporters!

The @cred.blue project has a dedicated set of channels as well for feedback, support, etc.

I wrote some thoughts about making Special Fish (special.fish) sustainable in 2025

🟩 memory.elliott.computer/posts/making...

Looking for 4 companies to support a quieter, poetic,  thoughtful web. Each company will be mentioned on the site and in email newsletters.

🐠 sponsors@special.fish

🟦🟩🟨🟪

🎈 partyvite ⚡️
---
a fullstack template for 🎈 partykit ⨉ ⚡️ vite ⨉ ⚛️ react ⨉ 🌊 tailwindcss ⨉ ⛅️ durable objects

npm create cloudflare@latest -- --template threepointone/partyvite

hmr, vite plugins, websockets, whatever. start here. 

lots more in the very near future, lfg.

github.com/threepointon...

okay i did it. i created Bimbo: the static site generator for dumb girls

still needs a lot of work but also i need to focus on making my own blog with it so let's just get the damn thing out there

github.com/iznaut/bimbo

i made an app for texting groups of people, as part of my union's contract fight (but you can use it for parties and other organizing too). i wrote about it here! bigboy.us/other/templa...

I made a micro-library over the past few years for drag and drop, inspired by the instagram story editor. It's touch friendly and has accurate hit-boxes for transparent images.

Try the demo here:
maxbittker.github.io/draggablejs/

Escape socials purgatory for a blog of your own at https://pika.page. Today's the last day to use coupon code ZUCKINHELL for 15% off your first year. Join us–it's decidedly less hot here!

last year I met many cool people working on interesting things; but I find it difficult to remember all the details and see who I know 😅

I’m building a way to visually map your personal network + act as a second brain for who you know and who you meet 

waitlist at orbits.so 💫

🥁 Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive! 🥁

We are v excited to share our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of 10k+ out-of-copyright historical images, all free to explore and reuse: pdimagearchive.org @pdimagearchive

Cute tool for making Pollinator Pathways 🪲🦋 pollinator.art

hey all, just boosting this again. Thick Press put out this amazing (& super relevant) book called the Encyclopedia of Radical Helping-- all about community-based projects and tactics. I was lucky enough to be a contributor.

if that's up your alley, here's the link:
thickpress.com?productId=3058

Salesman's sample book of decorative gold and silver embossed paper, Germany (?), 1850-60, Rare Books, Library of Congress

📚10. IN ASCENSION by Martin MacInnes. “Science fiction” in an old sense, as in “fiction about scientists”—concerned with their curiosity, their methods, their modes of probing mystery. Interesting, then, that the puzzle-loop central to this novel is elegant, humanistic, governed by beauty over logic

Fluorescent green is the color of cyberfeminism 
 
www.inventorypress.com/product/cybe... + mudamstore.com/products/rad...) 

artlab.hyundai.com/editorial/mi...

2024 reading roundup! 📚

fave 4:
Illuminatus!
The Uses of Art
Game Over
The Timeless Way of Building

& faves (more!):
Computers as Theatre
Demon Copperhead
A Wizard of Earthsea
The New Games Book
Moonbound
Money Machine
Ball Four
Research for People Who Think They Would Rather Create

The Vera List Center (my favorite thing abt The New School) has published a ✨ book abt PROTOCOLS, broadly conceived! I contributed a chapter on sonic protocols 🔔🔊🎵. 

The 📘 is open-access + purchase-able in print, and we've got a launch event @ TNS on March 21! event.newschool.edu/asforprotoco...

📡 at very long last, today is the big day! my beloved book, OTHER NETWORKS: A RADICAL TECHNOLOGY SOURCEBOOK, is officially available for pre-order! 1/5 #othernetworks shop.mexicansummer.com/merch/495898...

in case you are into sentence diagramming, my Alaska-based brother wrote a book about it, available on Amazon. "Designed to be entertaining & engaging, each chapter’s examples & exercises follow the story of two adventurous women & a #dog named Comma" #booksky
Link: www.amazon.com/dp/B0DW9883R...

some boxes from the US arrived

I loved this exhibition.

Tremendous book. Cannot recommend it enough. Hard to put into words what a special work this is; it truly pushes the boundaries of art, criticism, literature. 🫡

coincidentally i just read this a few months ago which has a whole section on how messed up apartheid was from (among many things) an administrative perspective mitpress.mit.edu/978026252295...

has someone written this book:

The Hidden History of How PDF Took Over the World

i want to read it.

1) You do not get an ebook file, you can access it only through their app (so no sideloading anywhere) 
2) Dedicated Kindle readers will never leave their beloved eink ereader to read on their phones
3) Kobo did this 10 years ago and failed, though they had huge support and displays in major indies

Only 3 copies remain of my book STRAY ARTS (AND OTHER INVENTIONS). Once they are gone, this book will go out of print:

www.anthonyetherin.com/shop/p/stray...

read "confederacy of dunces" (5/5), an absolute romp macwright.com/2025/01/25/a...

i first heard about wendell berry through an article about a friendship/book club btwn four middle-aged evangelical men

it moved me deeply... helped me reflect a lot on how to love other people... highly recommend

archive.ph/McEnv

Roll #137 — jasdev.me/film/137 #believeinfilm

Welcome back to “daily photos of Lake Michigan” season! Always love the eastern pastels of the fading light. 47°F because it’s always 5-10 degrees cooler at the lakefront than it is 1-2 mi inland in spring. Which can also make it a very frustrating season at times, tbh. But always beautiful.

Digital photo printing is not dead.

#photography #fotografia

medium format film photography — from a nice photo walk a few weeks ago in prospect park with @jasdev.bsky.social @awarm.space @jinjin.bsky.social @kasey.bsky.social

surprisingly decent results considering I was shooting with > 10 yr expired film & first time using this camera in ages!

📷 New Photo Challenge dropping!

I bought a Leica and unfortunately it's defective--

It didn't make my photos magically better.

It's SO fun to shoot, but I think I just suck at #photography

So I decided to work on my composition... 1/🧵

Rolls #132–133 jasdev.me/film/132-133

Newly minted CineStill BwXX fan as of roll #131 jasdev.me/film/131 #believeinfilm

what's up with my taste in names? always two words:

beautiful company

perfume area

very interactive

flight simulator

fruitful school

firefly sanctuary

ping practice

Tesseract Sine Wave Heart

oyster    quartz    lichen

violet

To irridesce is to be diffracted

Half of Rustica saw a beetle green dress

Half thought the parking lot smelled like a swamp

Some want to give me cleanses

Some want to save me from my legs

from my hands

from my abalone under 
tongue

one of the great pleasures of blogging is giving your posts gnomic, 2000s-style titles, rather than the optimized, hyperlegible lures now required of all real publications 😌

A love-letter to Bluesky. 

salrandolph.substack.com/p/endless-sc...

Side by side translations should be the default when publishing novels. For example, why wouldn't you print Calvino's Invisible Cities with the original next to the english?

i've got a bunch of poems just sitting around and i'm like hmm do i

1. make a zine/self publish
2. start submitting to publications
3. rewrite them in a new notebook with a new pen babey !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the answer is almost always #3

PERSIST: A Shakespearean sonnet in anapaestic trimeter. Reading only the red gives a Shakespearean sonnet in anapaestic monometer. Reading only the blue gives a Shakespearean sonnet of monosyllabic lines.

so many poems... I'll pick two short ones I always enjoy reading aloud

- Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Preacher Ruminates"
- Billy Collins, "The Lanyard"

childrens book titles that are valid bash commands. what'd i miss

would it be possible to make a feed that contains words that appear only once on bluesky

Put another way: poetry had to first be isolated into a specialized discipline for it to be 'destroyed,' and I think challenging that precondition is key

guerilla gnostics, swashbuckling pagans, sibylline brigands, clandestine cowboys, heuristic heretics

so there’s this strong “summarize everything” trend: a 15-minute summary of a book, a 5-bullet-point summary of a call, etc

why not take it to its ultimate conclusion?

✨idea: summarize anything in just 1 word✨

Hamlet -> XIJALEMENDO

The Unabomer Manifesto -> GLORP

Das Kapital -> FLIBBERTIGIBBET

POEM SEALED IN A BOTTLE

A Petrarchan sonnet in iambic pentameter, holding inside it a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic monometer.

Has anyone ever made a heuristic to calculate how “nice to type” a word is? Like “referee” is nice, “yourself” is nice, “dexterous” isn’t very nice, “monkey” isn’t very nice.

Basically looking for words that alternate nicely between fingers and hands used to type each letter.

DAYS (Lipograms*)

Monday may doom my mood.
Tuesday’s steady duty tests us.
Wednesday dawns and sends a yawn.
Thursday's truth thus hurts.
Friday air a far affair,
Saturday’s as stray as dust — as rusty.
Sunday’s sad.

(*each line uses only the letters of its day of the week)

Dunno buddy, double rhythm speaking fashion’s deffo harder, compared against single. Doubtful about whether longer phrases really doable without dropping lexemes.

wow apparently zine fairs are a thing
www.stencil.wiki/fairs

🌱 Tabletop: Anathem and interfaces

I will forever and always be thinking about the cavern of possibilities between meow wolf and sleep no more. We need more weirdo interactive art that you cannot experience in it's entirety

Did anyone ever write a little memento/recognition of room-like user interfaces? In my head it‘s nice, interactive, and very fun. Like a videogame where you switch between worlds. 

Microsoft Bob and Magic Cap are the most popular, but there is a long tail of those in other shells and videogames.

New project: I recreated Moses Harris’ prismatic and compound color wheels from The Natural System of Colours published in the eighteenth century and expanded them to dark versions.

Explore: www.c82.net/natural-colors
How they were made: www.c82.net/blog/?id=97

today years old when i found out that there is a companion site to a pattern language by christopher alexander

www.patternlanguageindex.com

and all of this really is making me think about the role of urgent publishing in a moment like this. the Urgency Readers that I did in 2019 and 2020, which gathered hundreds of artists and writers into something that could be circulated and kept as evidence of a moment www.are.na/paul-soulell...

🌱 Inspiration: Phyllotaxis
Doing some color work and thinking/learning once again about Phyllotaxis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllotaxis) (by way of [d3).

accepting applications for a mutual apprentice:

you teach me everything you know about software engineering, testing, frontend frameworks, and iOS

I teach you everything I know about ux design, foundational user research, product strategy, and workshops for moving teams faster

projects I think could be fun to collab on w/ someone!

~niche performance score or event template
~pop-up virtual social space
~particular personal (parameterized?) poems
~digital museum/library collection spelunking
~parenting rituals, recipes, routines (incantations?)

How would you actually pull off this HyperCard brochure’s interactive map case study? Make 2^n different cards, and have the filters navigate? Could you actually implement the filters via HyperTalk?

2024 was a hard year—i thought the 2nd year of being an indie creative would be easier, but I had a lot more expectations for myself and what i made

i got caught up in scheming rather than the joy of making. im going back to basics for a normal" 2025

https://spencer.place/posts/normal-2025 

let’s imagine a festival with hands on workshops for providing the tools to get you started on big, ambitious projects—

what would you most want to learn how to do in these workshops?

Every time I gather with people I love, the question arises: what should we be doing? For myself, I have a clear feeling, a take, if you will. One inspiration for it is the work of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Maintenance Art Manifesto. 

salrandolph.substack.com/p/ways-of-se...

im searching for unusual, whimsical, intimate gestures that we’ve had to do on our phones.

like swiping to accept a call.. or setting up your fingerprint

what else comes to mind?

WEIRD ASK: We need some “Answers”. Can you help us out?

An answer might be something like “ice scraped off the windshield”, “rude sounds emanate from the armpit”, “a cloud eaten by the moon”. Go to town! 

Questions are still TBD. 
#writing #amwriting #poetry #paranormal

tinyurl.com/theseanswers

I have some of those 1970s 📚 on cardboard furniture, but I was unaware of their cnxn to the 💐Workshop for Learning Things 🛠️, a Whole Earth-y resource + learning center for teachers (same as the 60s Ctr for Understanding Media, predecessor to my old dept @ The New School!) 

(via Eames papers LoC)

substack does so many sleazy, growth-hacky things

like i view newsletters as a necessary evil; i find them extremely retrograde as a use of the medium but i understand why they need to exist, so i put up with them

but like, substack gives you a newsletter and then moves immediately to geld it

And the social aspect of Substack is almost certainly overrated! The reason people’s newsletters grow is because other authors mention them and link to them. That has *nothing* to do with the platform! Other platforms (Ghost, Beehiiv, Wordpress, Buttondown, Medium) have better economics, too.

For a lot of us the “simple” prospect of filling in a web page with content presents an insurmountable writer’s block.

For all their flaws, this is in large part why the mainstream social media applications have been so successful:

All it asks for is a blurb, and now we can be WRITERS together 💌

they should invent a wordpress that's easy to use and looks good

today i’m launching a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter program: readers can support Escape the Algorithm by doing something as little as sending me a gift/postcard in the mail or taking me out for a cup of coffee. here’s why:

I feel like it's time for the wordpress equivalent of what replit is trying to do. Community-built, easily-installable custom apps

I am sorry, but I cannot read all of your Ghost and Substack(🤨) and Buttondown and PonyExpress and PreciousDispatch and RadicalTruth and CozyCurator and HeyGirlfriendKlatch newsletters. It's just toooooo muuuucccch!!!!!

“Notion for teams” how about Notion for NOBODY

This is your sign to join @subvert.fm

Open source software on Kickstarter is my jam.

@ghost.org was born on Kickstarter, and now thrilled to be able to sponsor the amazing ActivityPub-driven PixelFed on our collective quest to bring back the open web.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/pix...

Just to dispel the notion that Substack is the cheapest option for smaller paid newsletters than I described in my first example:

($ amounts represent monthly cost)

i’m attempting to create the most comprehensive list of people who are contributing to the AT Protocol community/ecosystem

if you know of someone who should be on this but isn’t yet, please tag them or yourself in a reply!

doesn’t have to be a “dev”/“builder” could be contributing in other ways!

new thread—MORE notes on bluesky / atproto social apps! b/c:

1) I'm excited about what people are building
2) we're exploring adjacent things @leaflet.pub [stay tuned]
3) it's fun to think about potential for the ecosystem!

(btw…gonna make a leaflet soon to collect all these!)

This week's news about ATProto and the ATmosphere:

- @roomy.chat is building a P2P public group chat app on ATProto, now in public alpha
- Microcosm is a new selfhostable API that tracks backlinks for the entire network
- Tracking all lexicons with Lexidex

fediversereport.com/last-week-in...

#freeidea: I think a really good alternative to Kickstarter (crowdfunding platform) could be made quite easily by combining atproto and polar.sh

I know I need this as an indie.

Please reach out if you’re interested in making this and I will find the time to elaborate.

github.com/bluesky-soci...

the urge to make a meta-lexicon lexicon

thread: exploring open social apps on bluesky / atproto!

I've seen many emerge (+ more in development), we're playing in this space with @leaflet.pub, and excited to explore the landscape

my notes from digging in, trying a bunch, seeing what feels promising & where there's room for improvement:

Bluesky feature request: unlimited footnotes

I want a BlueSky feed that is:

1) Only followers
2) Only posts or quote RT
3) No images or URL previews
4) Less than 140 characters

when i open bluesky, i’d like to see a number at the top of the screen that is an anonymized indicator of how many of my mutuals or followers are currently present

Currently thinking about two ideas for @atproto.com apps:

- a better Goodreader using the follow graph
- a blogging application that would be like Medium with commenting

Not sure which to build though. 

Books are hard to get data for.

we need an extremely weird and avant-garde bluesky client, and i think i’m gonna have to build it myself

"lexicon.community is an independent effort to develop reusable atproto Lexicon schemas in a collaborative manner. They have a defined governance and contribution model, and an initial schema declared for bookmarks."

😃

if the social internet is migrating from closed platforms → open networks that put users in control... then for every content format that exists on a closed platform now (microblogging/X, photos/instagram, forums/reddit, etc), you'd expect to see an open version of that app take off

💭 mini thread

one fascinating thing about coming from twitter is realizing that there really are a few non-fungible people that make up outsized network effects

bluesky feels much more fungible overall, perhaps because it's just younger and doesn't have big cornerstone names (in my corner of the world, at least)