Category: social media

the interior of a casement room in brick fort in north carolina

For months, I’ve been needing to shut down my old blog and archive my old posts. And I finally found a solution: blog.sh!

Although the term “blog” was coined in 1997, I didn’t write my first post until 2002. I started blogging defensively. What happened was that I would start drafting an email to one person, then think “Oh, this other person would be interested too” and add them, but then realize that some of what I was writing wasn’t really appropriate for them, so then I would make two emails and have to copy and paste and edit. Finally, I realized I could just put all of the “public” info — the things I didn’t care if anyone read — into a blog post and only send specific emails to particular people.

I had been exploring wikis at the time, using PHPWiki and saw that there was a mechanism to do daily posts using a calendar interface. I used that for a couple of years but then decided to switch to using Drupal for blogging. My blog resided at blog.bierfaristo.com and my first post was on Dec 14, 2005. By this time I was also getting interest from other organizations who wanted to set up websites that were effectively blogs: the Amherst Democratic Town Committee and Esperanto League for North America (now Esperanto-USA) so I set up Drupal websites for them as well.

I was tangentially involved when the University of Massachusetts Amherst decided to standardize on Drupal as their content management system. I had been using it for a few years at that point. They brought in a focus group and had two presentations: one was by a Drupal consultant and the other was for a commercial product that was a static-site generator. I could see the attraction of using the static-site generator. But I knew that the campus would need to accept content via the web and, their only solution for that was to hand-write one-off PHP scripts. That sounded like a disaster from a security standpoint.

One of the short-comings of Drupal was that it was difficult to update: point updates were pretty easy, but each major update required migrating the content and completely retheming the site. And when Drupal 8 came out they basically threw out all of the expertise anyone had developed by completely redesigning the entire system and made managing the dependencies so complex you needed a separate tool (composer). So, I gave up on Drupal and never updated from Drupal 7.

A lot of other people did as well. Some folks created a fork called backdrop that rejected the changes that Drupal 8 had made. I had initially considered switching to that as well, but they had decided not to support the antiquated “blog” system and it required migrating the content into a different content type. So I didn’t bother making the switch.

During this period of time I had also started using Twitter and eventually also set up a separate Twitter feed for my author work. I quit using it and finally deleted my accounts when Twitter started being run by a Nazi. I grabbed archives of my feeds before I did so. But I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.

When I set up my author blog (where you’re reading this post), I decided to use WordPress. Mainly, as I’ve written elsewhere, this was because I could get my hosting service to manage the install and keep it up-to-date. It works OK, although I’ve been worried about security as AI is being used to find vulnerabilities. But I try to use relatively few modules and make sure they stay updated. So far, I haven’t had any problems. Early on, the security in WordPress was execrable, which was in part why I went with Drupal as a CMS. It seems better now.

In the interim, my old blog site still languished on Drupal 7. I hadn’t used it in several years. Even though Drupal 7 had been end-of-lifed a couple of times, people still kept patching it to keep it working. But finally, they said they really, really, really were going to stop. And, in April, I started getting a daily email whining that it really was EoL and needed to be taken down. So I was interested when I saw the announcement about blog.sh that was optimized for building an archive site.

I was particularly interested in a static site generator for an archive because I wanted something that wouldn’t require maintenance. It wasn’t something I would necessarily watch all the time and so I didn’t want to have to think about managing security. I wanted something that could just sit there.

I used it to set up the blog for Elegant Lich and that worked pretty well. So I decided to create an archive site: archive.bierfaristo.com and begin migrating content into it. I migrated the blog posts first. And I was able to import my twitter feeds.

I still have a few outstanding challenges. I tried to migrate my blog from Esperanto-USA, but that blog has been gone a long time: I tried to grab some posts from the wayback machine but have only been partially successful. I was an early user of Flickr and I still have a lot of images there. Phil and I used an early version of lychee to build image galleries. When they switched to a new new system, the upgrade looked complicated, so I never updated that either and it’s kind of orphaned. I don’t see these as high priorities. But things I can work on if I feel like it.

I have lost some things. I think I failed to grab a backup from the brief time I was at mastodon.lol. I don’t think I’ll bother to grab my history from Facebook. I very rarely wrote anything specifically for Facebook. Early on, you could gateway your posts from Twitter to Facebook, but they killed that after a while. I mostly wrote for my blog and then shared links there. They never got much traction because, of course, Facebook’s whole business model is to hide things you post from your friends unless you pay them.

I’m not expecting anyone to be that interested in my old posts anyway. But I can often remember an old post where I mentioned something or linked to something, and I’ll be interested to look things up, link to things, or share them again when they’re relevant.

The author of blog.sh seemed a little surprised at how quickly I found his system and started using it. I think I saw his original announcement at Mastodon: someone must have boosted it into my feed. I’ve identified a handful of minor problems that he’s promptly fixed. And I made one feature request that’s in the works too. (I offered to try to try to write the feature myself, which he politely declined. I really didn’t want to learn how to write in Ruby anyway, but I felt compelled to offer.)

And when this blog has run it’s course, I should be able to easily pull it into my archive site as well. It’s a nice feeling to have this long standing problem resolved.

cpu

John Gruber would like you to know that HE isn’t perpetuating the use of Twitter by going there to get “interesting content.” Only the people who post interesting content exclusively to Twitter are doing that.

Bullshit.

Nobody has to go to Twitter. Or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. You just don’t. People who use those services are pariahs as far as I’m concerned.

Your presence there is why those people post things there. And your willingness to go there is how they justify to advertisers to spend money there. By using those services, you are perpetuating their use. You are.

Similarly, I’ve heard a number of people say, “But it’s the only way I can keep in touch with my family members or community!” That’s also not true. They are there because it’s how they can get in touch with you. Your presence is keeping them there.

I remember back when I was using those services, I already realized that it wasn’t healthy. But it wasn’t until getting away, that I came to realize how stressful the constant barrage of advertising and algorithmically promoted content really was. It seems trite, but the world seems quieter and brighter when you’re not staring into a cesspool all day.

The AI slop has made it even worse. Reportedly as many as half of the posts there are written by AI now. The tech-bros have realized that slop is giving their services a bad name. But they’re trying really hard to distinguish between good slop and bad slop. The NYT claims, “Generative A.I. can produce increasingly realistic images, audio and videos, but only some of it qualifies as slop.” Uh… No. It’s all slop.

What’s funniest is that services like LinkedIn, that was constantly begging people to use AI to write their posts, is among those who are now trying to crack down on slop. They have a button for people to report content that “seems like AI slop.”

Now Anthropic is talking about watermarking their slop and, all of sudden, people are all up in arms about it. “But I wouldn’t have time to write everything I want to without AI.” No. If you’re using AI, you’re not writing it.

To come full circle, one of those quoted in the article is John Gruber, who calls the watermarking system “a Perversion of Writing“. No. Using AI to write for you is the perversion of writing. Write your own stuff or don’t. Don’t let a robot write for you and try to pretend it’s your own.

a weird abstract artwork as a stamp

Time being limited, you only have so much attention you can devote to things. The more things you try to track, the less depth you can devote to any one. I think it’s worth being reflective every so often about how many different things you’re trying to pay attention to. To begin with, there’s real live people: people in your household, cow-orkers, & friends. Then there are communication tools: telephone, email, and social media environments. Finally, there are a vast number of notifications that are competing for our attention: computer notifications, updates, and automated messages. It’s overwhelming.

There’s a vast scholarly literature about the “attention economy.” Advertisers and the commercial social media companies have been intensely interested in how they can capture and keep eyeballs on their products and platforms. There are hundreds or thousands of articles you can read where people have parsed and dissected the topic a million different ways because there’s so much commercial interest (i.e. money) involved.

Commercial social media companies have conspired to promote the idea that they are unitary “sources” of “content” and that people should be content to scroll through an endless succession of effectively anonymous posts selected by The Algorithm, provided they’re reasonably aligned with their interests. I’ve always found this notion horrifying.

As an aside, let me note that essentially all of the literary agents I’ve queried have had X-twitter, Facebook, and /or Instagram feeds. I think *one* mentioned Bluesky. Personally, I would be embarrassed to be seen with a Twitter account these days. If you hang around in a Nazi bar, who’s to say you aren’t a Nazi… The nagware QueryTracker web app they mostly use seems to only support asking about Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And many of the agents ask if you have a “social media” presence — meaning one of those three commercial platforms. Sigh… Many also ask for my “website” and/or “blog,” so that’s something.

In the 1990s, an anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, proposed a limit to the size of meaningful human communities. His statistic, Dunbar’s Number, suggested that humans can maintain approximately 150 stable relationships at a time. Various other’s have critiqued his methodology and proposed other, usually larger, potential numbers: up to around 300.

In education, there is a similar effect. When there are fewer than 300 students in a school, all of the staff can learn all of the kids’ names. This has profound effects for kids acting out in school: when even the crossing guard and the lunch lady know everyone’s names, students are not anonymous — they’re not just a number. It creates an atmosphere of respect. Once schools get much larger than that, people quit trying to learn the kids’ names because it’s impossible.

I’m trying to winnow down my information environment to entities I actually care about and want to follow. I’ve started using an RSS reader to let me follow particular writers. And I’ve begun trying to critically look at social media accounts I follow to decide whether they are contributing meaningfully to my experience. I basically always did that when I followed people at Mastodon: I always check profiles and scroll through the feed to see if they’re adding value. At Bluesky, I clicked a bunch of starter packs and so now I’m following a lot of accounts where I did not thoughtfully make that assessment. But, honestly, I haven’t liked the vibe at Bluesky enough to bother with critically evaluating my feed there.

Note in particular that I’m talking about writers, by which I mean “human beings that write things.” I’m not interested in things nobody could be bothered to write, by which I mean AI. Evidently, somewhere between a quarter and a half of the posts on commercial social media are written by AI now. And it’s even worse on LinkedIn. If a human can’t be bothered to write something, I can’t be bothered to read it.

Today, I got a notification from Google with what looked like a news headline. (I mostly don’t allow “apps” to send me notifications, but I let Google notify me mostly so that when I’m driving, it can alert me to accidents or traffic jams and help me route around them. But, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t any way to tell it to be more selective about notifications.) The headline was, “Americans increasingly disillusioned by ‘AI.'” This did sound like an article I might be interested in reading, so I clicked on it. It was not. It was not an article — just some AI summary. I closed the tab.

old jelly jar

As I reflect on my year of writing in 2025, it was a somewhat discouraging year. I did quite a bit of fiction writing, but almost none of it got published. I wrote 26,000 words of short fiction and did 20 submissions. Zip.

I also worked on longer fiction. I finished the 19,000 word manuscript for Ecorozire! the third novella sequel of Revin’s Heart. It’s not clear when they might ever see the light of day. I also finished a 43,000 word rough draft of my new novel The Ground Never Lies. It still needs a lot of work and fleshing out, but I haven’t managed to get to revising it.

The high point was that my first novel, A Familiar Problem finally came out. I wrote it in 2022 and it was rejected five times before being accepted for publication. I signed the contract in 2024 and the original scheduled publication date was December 2024. But it was delayed, first until January and then June. And it finally came out December 10, 2025. I had planned to use 2025 to promote it and scheduled myself to appear in conventions. But, over and over again, I was going without the new book to promote. This was rather discouraging.

I also had the discouraging interaction at Worldcon that left a rather bad taste in my mouth. I ended up having to interact with the other author again at LOSCon. If I hadn’t already made the arrangements to travel to Los Angeles, I probably would have canceled going. We got through it, but it really raised the tension — at least for me. I otherwise had a good time. I had many other positive interactions and, uncharacteristically for me, I managed to meet a lot of new people. And it was fun to unbox A Familiar Problem. Having a new book come out counts for a lot.

So, not everything this year was discouraging.

I did write a lot of blog posts — more than 80. Most are about stuff I was doing. A few were about news or writing. I wrote an Awards Eligibility post. OK. That was a little discouraging.

I also wrote an article about bookselling for SFWA Planetside that is scheduled to appear in January. I have a companion blog post that I will release at the same time.

I was re-elected to a full term as Secretary of SFWA. The difference between service last year and this year is striking. When I joined the Board, SFWA had lost essentially all of its leadership and staff. With fresh leadership, we hired new staff who hit the ground running and really engineered a transformation. The Board has been able to return to developing strategy. Whereas, last year was all frenetic activity, this year has been more relaxed. That’s not to say there haven’t been moments of controversy and high drama (like yesterday). But, no matter how bad it’s been, it’s been better than last year.

My service to the Straw Dog Writers Guild continues. I run Straw Dog Writes and serve on the program committee. I ran the online meetup nearly every week for the second — going on third — year. The regular group is small, but lively, with a mix of less frequent participants. On behalf of the program committee, I invited and hosted several talks during the year. I also served on a committee to review candidates to potentially update the website. I was excited and encouraged to draft the recommendation that was taken to the Board but, unfortunately, nothing ever came of it. Maybe that was another discouraging thing.

Wandering Shop Stories is an ongoing pleasure. We have 168 followers on Mastodon and 69 on Bluesky. Asakiyume frequently boosts and offers thoughtful comments on contributions. We’ve held genuinely enjoyable quarterly meetings aligned with the major solar events (solstices and equinoxen). And we’ve brought on one or two new curators. I write to the prompt most days, although occasionally I use snippets of works-in-progress or even bits of published works. It’s a great creative warm-up exercise in the morning. And reading the contributions by other authors and interacting with the small community that has sprung up around the project is always a treat.

I also participate in a number of other writing prompts on Mastodon and Bluesky, including #WritersCoffeeClub, #WordWeavers, #PennedPossibilities, #ScribesAndMakers, #Writephant, #LesFicFri, #WIPSnips, and probably others. The community of writers on Mastodon is particularly strong and supportive.

The year was also the middle half of my phased retirement. It’s weird to think I’ll teach Writing in Biology just once more this spring. I’ve been teaching this particular class since 2002 and am ready to be done. It’s been hard to keep it fresh and, honestly, seeing the end of the road ahead, I haven’t tried very hard. I realized recently that, when I fully retire in August, I will have spent 30 years — basically half my life — employed by the University. That seems like something that calls for further reflection — and should probably be the subject of its own post.

widely posted meme contrasting the social media experience one some networks as compared with Mastodon

Today, I shared one of my Mastodon posts with friends, one of whom commented, “Weirdos posting stuff to social media 😂” So I took a few minutes to explain to them why I like Mastodon.

I do like Mastodon. I get more and higher quality engagement with what I share on Mastodon than anyplace else these days. But, more than that, I really just like it. It’s peaceful and relaxing. And a few months ago, I realized why: It reminds me of Usenet.

Usenet was a kind of terminal-based messaging system that scientists and technologists used in the earliest days of the Internet and the before times (i.e. when it was still “NSFNet“). It was an amazingly interesting and useful community of people having high-level discussions of topics both academic and non-academic.

My brother, who was an Unix systems-engineer at the time, had told me about Usenet. Honestly, the main reason I decided to go back to graduate school, was so I could gain access to it. Even at my university, it wasn’t easy. The campus IT group didn’t make it available to the general university community, so I had to request a guest account from the computer science department. As a doctoral student, my request was honored and I used that as my primary computer account, and email address, the whole time I was a graduate student. That was also why I started learning Unix, which became a key factor in landing the job that became my career.

As a student, I used Usenet professionally to further my academic career and research. I had high-level conversations about science education and life science. I used it to recruit subjects for my doctoral research, developing a model of expert performance in phylogenetic tree construction. But that wasn’t all I used it for. I also lived in soc.culture.esperanto, the newsgroup for Esperanto speakers, where I could have conversations with samideanoj from all over the world. This was a genuine novelty at the time, where you otherwise might have to sign up with a penpal service to exchange paper letters with people to have similar contacts. (I did this, in fact, and had interesting correspondence, but it often took many weeks to get responses whereas Usenet allowed you to have conversations in just days — or sometimes even just hours!)

Usenet began to die when AOL came online and there was a constant influx of new non-academic people. People called it “eternal September“. The Usenet community worked for busy academics and professionals because most people respected the conventions. You could use it for high-level discussions because it was high signal and low noise. Once those conventions broke down, the really interesting people mostly abandoned it because it wasn’t worth trying to wade through all of the irrelevant crap that novices tended to post. It was very sad.

Thirty years later, I was surprised to join Mastodon and discover that it reminded me so much of Usenet. It has the same high-quality engagement by interesting, thoughtful people. And it has social conventions that make the environment functional and useful. But then I realized that Mastodon didn’t just remind me of Usenet: It’s literally the same people. There’s Gene Spafford. And Steve Bellovin. And many, many others.

A whole bunch of the old, interesting people I remember from Usenet are here! We are pretty old, too. Most of us are retirement age, if not retired. But it’s been wonderful to reconnect with so many of these folks after so many years.

It’s not just that it has many of the same people, though. It’s the thoughtful design of the software environment. And the social conventions that favor high-quality engagement and reduce both the “copypasta” and the viral “oh, snap!” types of engagement that have come to characterize most social media. It’s always a pleasure to immerse myself in a thoughtful community of people engaged in creative pursuits, whether it’s taking pictures of mosses and lichens or sharing story fragments or responding to prompts about writing pursuits.

It’s not for everyone. But I like it a lot.

It’s pretty clear that nobody knows exactly what social media is supposed to be like. People use it for a lot of different things. I like think of it as a cocktail party. People drop in, listen to what other people are saying, say some things themselves, and maybe comment on what other people are saying.

I particularly like Mastodon because I feel like I get a higher-quality of engagement here. The things people post are frequently interesting. People read the things I post and offer substantive comments. And I feel like they frequently appreciate the value-add that my comments offer.

Nobody has to come to the cocktail party. And you don’t have to be in the main room with everyone else. If you’d rather hold forth in some private room, you can do that.

What always puzzles me are the people who get exercised that other people are “doing it wrong.” If you’re saying stuff in public, you shouldn’t be surprised if people comment on it. If you didn’t want people to comment on it, you’d hold your conversations someplace in private.

Similarly, if you don’t like the things that someone else says, you can simply mute or block people.

Some people seem to really like the drama of personal confrontation. Some people are all about the snark and the SNAP. Recently, I saw someone reply to a picture someone had posted with a link to an article about the subject of the picture. The original poster snapped at them for “mansplaining”. Whoa. I had thought their post was fine. It was informative and added useful information. But, hey, if drama is someone’s thing, that’s OK too, I guess. It’s easy to mute and block.

My point is that it’s not really clear that you can do social media wrong exactly. Unless you’re a Nazi. But then it’s not really about the social media anymore, is it?

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, has changed their moderation policy to permit users to post statements that allege “mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” It’s open season on LGBTQIA+ people.

When I was a teenager, people routinely used slurs to refer to LGBTQIA+ people. I was terrified of being labeled as queer because I saw what happened to people who were. I was horrified to see people making social and environmental decisions based purely on dogma and prejudice. This was why I dedicated my career to science education. I hoped that people might learn how to use the best available information and multiple perspectives in order to make better decisions. To see the country moving back toward ignorance and superstition is profoundly discouraging.

I began using Facebook pretty early because one of my students invited me to join. I joined on Jul 23, 2007. I honestly never really liked Facebook all that much: most people didn’t post interesting stuff they created. It was always mostly “copypasta” garbage. Now, of course, it’s mostly ads and “suggested content” that Facebook tries to jam in front of your eyeballs to conceal the copypasta your “friends” share. And they’re experimenting with bots that will pretend to be people posting copypasta.

As it became more and more enshittified, I had basically quit using it. Then my publisher encouraged me to set up an author page as part of my book promotion efforts in 2021. Since then, I’ve posted snippets of my writing and even spent some money to experiment with advertising (i.e. the only way to get Facebook to not hide most of your posts.)

Before then, I had never even set up an Instagram account. When they created Threads, you needed an Instagram account to try it. So I set one up to experiment with. Instagram doesn’t allow you to disable autoplay, which results in frequent unrequested motion on pages. The same is true of Threads, which uses the Instagram codebase. Due to a mild vestibular disorder, it’s very uncomfortable for me to visit pages with unrequested motion. And I found Threads to be uninteresting anyway: it uses an algorithm that surfaces really uninteresting posts to show you. It kept showing me random short posts from people I didn’t know about inane topics. Vomit emoji.

But this new change in Meta’s moderation policy is probably a bright line for me. Meta is clearly pandering to the incoming fascist administration. I expect it’s defensible to them since, as a corporation, their only guiding star is to make as much money as possible. And the fascists have shown they’ll crush anyone that doesn’t fall into line. But I can’t be a party to it.

So, I’m going to post a message to my Meta accounts linking to this post and inviting my friends to come here if they want to find out what I’m doing. At least, until the fascists come after me.

As an author, I’m constantly looking for ways to get the word out about my work and to engage with readers and other authors. And one part of my strategy is social media.

Before social media, there were blogs. Long before I was a published author, I started blogging. I first start blogging using a wiki, then switched to Drupal. I maintained a blog at Esperanto-USA while I was webmaster there. Many people used blogs primarily to link to and comment on the other things they were reading.

Most people didn’t have the technical chops or resources to set up their own blogging environment, so they chose a site managed by a third party. Typically, these were offered “free” in a limited form as a kind of loss-leader supported by venture capitalists trying to make a bet on what the “next big thing” was going to be.

One of the most popular with authors was Livejournal. I wasn’t a published author in those days, but I was aware of the robust author community there. But when Livejournal was purchased by the Russian state and began to censor and persecute users, most of the writer community abandoned it.

This was around the time people began to use microblogging platforms that became what people collectively termed “social media”. The most popular with authors was probably Twitter, which I’ve written about elsewhere. As I took my first steps into the author community, it was great to have a place where the other authors were active: sharing perspectives and supporting one another. And occasionally quarreling.

I predicted that when Twitter became a Nazi bar, the community would move somewhere else. I was hopeful that they would settle on Mastodon. With Livejournal getting purchased by a repressive regime and then Twitter getting purchased by a narcissistic billionaire, I thought maybe they would have learned something. Unfortunately, it appears that the largest part of the active author community has settled at Blue Sky where they are once again suckling on the teat of venture capital.

But there is no longer a clear center. Blue Sky seems to have more of the established authors. But the largest microblogging community may well be Threads. And Facebook and Instagram are still the largest overall communities, though young people are more likely to be on Tiktok or Discord.

So it’s not at all clear which community is the best to focus on. I’m still guided by a presentation about book promotion I attended a couple of years ago that said, “Don’t pressure yourself to do it all.” I like the community at Mastodon. So that’s where I spend the most time. And I forward a few of my more announcement-like posts at Blue Sky and Facebook. And then I call it a day. Because, in the end, I would rather spend my time writing new fiction.

Early in my fiction writing, I really struggled with writing “stories.” By that, I mean using a narrative structure that presents a problem which is satisfactorily resolved — ideally well-paced, with rising action that climaxes at the right moment. I tended to write a rambling narrative of vaguely interesting events that raised all kinds of problems but did not resolve them satisfactorily.

Sometime — perhaps in early 2022, which is the first example I can find without visiting birdchan — I discovered #vss365: a hashtag prompt for which participants were encouraged to write a very short story (vss) that would be offered each day of the year (365) contained in a single, brief post. Baring my soul, typo and all, here is the first one I have recorded, from Feb 11, 2022:

She visited the garden center when she was depressed. The flowers didn’t cheer her up, exactly, but they helped her remember that better times might come. The annuals were too gaudy for her. She always loved tge reliability of the #perennial that would keep blooming in the years to come. Now that was something to live for.

It’s a story! She’s depressed. She visits the garden center. The perennials give her something to live for.

I found writing a brief post was something I could do, even during the academic year when I was working full time. It reminds me a bit of when I started writing haiku in Esperanto while I was a grad student and no longer had time for anything more. But it was enough.

I enjoyed #vss365 and I have hundreds of examples of brief story fragments I wrote. Some served as the nucleus of a story. And some I would string together, writing a whole rough draft one bit at a time.

But then a narcissistic billionaire purchased birdchan, turned it into a Nazi bar, and I couldn’t bear to visit the Nazi bar anymore to get the prompts. But someone had created a website that would scrape the prompt and share it on the open web. So I started participating even though I had jumped to Mastodon (first to mastodon.lol and then to wandering.shop). But then the site shut down: they were having to pay the narcissistic billionaire money to scrape a single word each day from birdchan. And he finally, perfectly sensibly, decided to quit paying.

So I wrote my last two posts on Dec 31, 2023 and commented that I wouldn’t be participating anymore. A friend, @asakiyume, suggested that we could start our own prompt game on Mastodon. I roped my brother, @philipbrewer into the conversation and we agreed to pick some words, favoring simple ordinary words with more than one meaning. (I had found it annoying to have words that had only a single meaning as being overly restrictive of the kind of post you could write.)

But then Phil suggested that maybe we should create an account to be an authoritative source for the prompt. As I thought about it, I realized that we also wanted a bot: something that didn’t need to be shared, but could be configured easily and contrived to post automatically at a particular time. So I investigating creating a bot for Mastodon.

This is not the first time I’ve done something like this: years ago, I created a bot for birdchan called “dupolusulo” that would randomly post either a proverb from the Esperanta Proverbaro or string of plausible text generated by a baysian algorithm that used the Proverbaro as a corpus. This plausible text was often utterly incomprehensible, but looked like it might mean something and sounded a lot like the proverbaro.

This time was pretty similar, though easier. I wrote a little python script that would figure out what day of the year it was, read in a CSV file, and grab a line matching the day number, parse it, and emit it as a formatted text string. Then, all I had to do was set up a Mastodon account, @wss366 configured to allow a bot to post to it. To be honest, what sold me on the whole thing was when I discovered that I sorta kinda personally know the guy who runs the botsin.space instance that was set up to support these kinds of bots. (Note: updated in 2026 to point at wandering.shop since botsin.space shut down.)

It took me about a day to set up the Mastodon account, configure it, create an avatar, add a header graphic, write the script, configure a cron job to call it at 5am. But by the end of the day, I posted an announcement that the post was live and would post to #wss366 (for Wandering Shop Stories and 366 because it’s a leap year this year) was live.

This morning, it posted its first prompt: #brick.

I can’t wait to see what it’s going to post tomorrow. Now that’s something to live for.

For years, I mostly scorned LinkedIn. I had made a profile early on, but mostly didn’t bother to maintain it. Luckily, I never lost my job at the University, so I didn’t need to look for work. I was kind of surprised when the CIO of the University talked about having used LinkedIn to make connections with employers saying (in effect), “Hey! Did you know you have X number of UMass graduates working for you? Maybe you should be more involved to help with recruitment.” And then some Department told me that LinkedIn was how most of their students found work. I was stunned, because it always seemed like kind of joke or wasteland. Still, I decided to take it a little more seriously and I’ve actually kept my profile more-or-less up-to-date.

With the demise of Twitter, LinkedIn is making a more serious effort to become a social media player. About a year ago, they changed my categorization to reflect that I posted regularly to my news feed. And they invited to join their “authors and writers” group, which I did. Although, as far as I can tell, nobody actually reads any of the stuff people post there. The whole site feels like a place where people post stuff that nobody reads. Most recently, they’ve started inviting me to contribute to “collaborative articles”.

Right around the time they did that, I saw a parody that absolutely nails LinkedIn and their “collaborative articles.”

Today, they wanted me to share “what are the best apps to help you be most productive.” Well, I had something to say about that. In terms of apps to…

Plan and organize your writing projects

In spite of (or perhaps because of) being a technologist for many years, I’m inherently suspicious of apps and use as few as possible. Apps on mobile devices are mostly funded by surveillance capitalism and I would recommend against installing any. I use a text editor for writing (currently Pulsar) — it’s very simple, generates universally readable text-files and offers no distractions.

Block out distractions and stay in the flow

I like to write in fits and starts, so I don’t mind having a browser running alongside my editor and keeping up with social media while I write. Maybe I’m just a weirdo, but I can’t be productive if I’m only writing anyway. Oh, I also listen to K-pop music and stand up and dance when favorite songs come on. Since I don’t speak Korean, I don’t get caught up in the lyrics and its a good idea to get up and move frequently, so it kills two birds with one stone.

Track and improve your writing habits

I hate being tracked. I check word counts as I’m finishing a manuscript for submission, but I don’t like paying attention to things like that otherwise. I also don’t like the structure of having particular blocks of times or a schedule: I write when I want to write and do other stuff when I don’t feel like writing. And I don’t use any apps because they’re mostly evil.

Edit and polish your writing

I do leave a spell check running, though I rarely need it. And my grammar is good enough that the grammar checkers are nearly always wrong for me. I have human beta readers that read early versions of my manuscripts to identify problems with pacing or story structure and then I have an editor to edit my manuscripts before publication. Apps are the devil.

Maybe, after this, they won’t bother to ask me to contribute again. I wouldn’t cry about that.