2024-12-06 00:29
Bluesky Comments
As of this post, posts on this blog will each be associated with a Bluesky post and display that post and its responses inline.
As of this post, posts on this blog will each be associated with a Bluesky post and display that post and its responses inline.
I've been experiencing some burnout recently, and one of the best ways for me to fix that is to build something. Couple that with my opinions about the recent US election1, and I wanted to do something to learn about Bluesky and spark a little discussion if I could.
So I built a bot that posts once an hour about which countries various billionaires could buy.
I have young children, and keeping track of their friends' contact information is hard for me. Every year I get a list from each kid's teacher of their classmates and the classmates' parents' names and contact information, but translating that into contacts on my phone so I can text another parent to organize a playdate is a gigantic hassle. What I really wanted was something magical, a spreadsheet where I could copy those class rosters and have the contacts just appear on my phone. I looked around a lot, and nothing of the sort exists.
So I built one.
To commemorate the new blog, I wanted to have a cool logo up in the corner. Since one of my current interests is generative AI, I thought I'd try using it to generate myself a logo. This post explains the process.
Well, hello there! I've once again schlepped my writing to a new blog platform. After getting tired of trying to write in Medium's web editor, I wanted to go with something based on text files. I looked into setting up something hosted (like https://write.as), but digging into the feature set and pricing left my head spinning. What really got me going though was this post about using Bluesky replies as blog comments. Incorporating something like that basically required a self-hosted system (so I could tweak the template enough to incorporate it).
This reminds me of a broader point that I have to remind myself of all the time. It can be hard and scary to start something new; there's a thousand reasons not to do something, a thousand obstacles and rationales why this is the wrong thing at the wrong time, etc. The antidote to that inertia is, when the muse strikes, grab on with both hands and follow it as far as it can possibly take you. Those instances where the stars align and you have the time and energy and ambition all falling into place together are so rare and precious, I think it's imperative to use them, even if you haven't planned everything out or don't know exactly where you're going to wind up. There's a saying about "the tyranny of the blank page", which refers to how the hardest part of a creative endavor is going from nothing to something. Once you're over that hump, you have some forward momentum, and it's a lot easier to refine something that already exists (even in a crappy, raw form).
Kairos and praxis, taking the correct action at the exact right moment, can deliver wildly disproportionate results. But you have to set yourself up for success by giving yourself a place to start from, whenever you can.
Agent Smith's speech about 1999 being the peak of human civilization gets more and more uncomfortable as time goes by
— Adam Compton ( @comptona.bsky.social ) Jul 6, 2024 at 8:19 PM