If you are not fully vaccinated yet — well, McSweeney’s essay is important for you — you need to search for a genuine reason for that. The only reason that’s genuine is that you physically can’t. Either there aren’t enough vaccines where you live, or you have some physical condition which limits you from getting the shot.
I always wonder what is the right response to people reaching out for guest posts. Most of the time I feel they are just fishing for attentions. So, ignore and mark them as spam? Or be patient, read and decline humbly? Or maybe inform them politely that you are marking them as spam, and then mark as spam.
I am not the one to do the last option here. But I will get fed up someday and that will be my option.
While closing a task in most of the task management systems, including to-do lists, you can set it to any of the available states. So, basically, you could say it is completed or fixed etc. There is one state in there that always tickles my funny bone, “won’t do”. I mean, that’s an official way of giving the middle finger, isn’t it? Learn to mark issues with that state and you have found the best way to say no.
Is a third booster shot proven to be helpful for all? Nope. So I don’t understand the rush to administer it to all the populace just because you can. You know what would be better use of those shots? Making sure each person in the world is fully vaccinated.
I’m cleaning the list of the RSS feeds I am subscribed to. There are a few subscriptions that I have no interest in today. They simply get marked as read every few weeks. Plus the list is missing a few voices I follow that regularly write long form posts. Time to curate again.
The tension is simple: If a platform is carefully vetted and well-curated, it meets expectations and creates trust. If it’s too locked down and calcifies, it slows progress and fades away.
Seth Godin talking about how open platforms are always in risk of becoming spammy and losing the trust of the users. I entirely agree — it’s a path that most platforms, open and closed, follow.
They enjoy the carefree attention from the excited early adopters who associate with the core values of the platform creators. But as the platform grows, it attracts users which would neither share the excitement nor the patience of the early adopters. They get noisy — they want to use the platform like their old one they are comfortable with. They need features that they are used to, not what the platform provides.
So, eventually, the tension that Seth refers to above gains prominence.
It’s crazy how one’s mind works. Here are two posts separated by 4 years. I recently published one a couple of weeks back. I had published another in 2017. Both the posts talk about a similar observation, about the constant fight between the coder and a writer in me. It reads in such a similar manner. The choice of words, the structure, the flow. It should be pretty apparent to anyone who reads it that both the posts come from the mind. From the same author.
Surprisingly, when I wrote the recent post, I had no clue that I had written about the same topic earlier some time. In a way, then, the adage that “there’s no original work being written, but just rewrites” is not that far off.
Ulysses looks to be a really great app for writing all types of posts. Sure, it does not work cross platform - something I dearly wish it did. But I have iA Writer for that. My big problem at this point is I have no clue what editors I am paying for currently, for which platforms and in what form - subscriptions from Google Play Store, App Store or I have them out right purchased. I need to sort this mess up pretty soon. Sigh!
Now that I think about it, the overall messaging space is a mess and personally it’s a frustrating issue for me. We are so close, yet so far. Here’s what I want.
- A service for messaging folks, share text and images
- A service for voice/video calls
- A service that does both 1 and 2 with apps across platforms - mainly iOS, Android and Web
This will allow me to not worry about device on which I am using it.
iMessage and FaceTime combination is brilliant, but Apple continues to see them as differentiators for its ecosystem. I don’t blame them — but it hurts me. I interact with only a handful of people that own an Apple device.
Google, well, decides to live in a fantasy world where there can exist no perfect messaging app. They get close to finding that right solution and throw it all away.
I had hopes from Microsoft. But for some reason they seem not to be interested in consumer space. Skype is ugly, its too bloated and the experience is terrible. It is not easy for families to join from.
WhatsApp, amidst all the mess, remains the only solution that does the required to any extend. It’s a terrible experience, but at least it works.
Google’s inability to decide the story of its messaging apps is laughable. Sure, there’s some dev in there who looks at the old screenshot of Google Talk and says, “we should have never stopped working on this.”
That app has a special place in my mind. Just like Google Reader.