Thanks for all the Qs in response to my post yesterday! Here are my answers. Also, here’s Jason’s great AMA if anyone missed it.
How long have you been knitting? How did you learn? Also do you have a favorite project/technique? I’ve fallen in love with cables.
I taught myself in 2015 using YouTube, which is great because you can replay the videos endlessly.
Aside from the Pengweeno cardigan and Sawtooth mittens I’ve already mentioned, I make a ton of these Classic Ribbed Hats from Purl Soho (above), which is probably a boring answer, but they’re great to give as gifts.
What is the most active conversation in your group texts right now?
In my friends’ Discord, we’re praising Lucy’s Christmas playlist.
How do you not run out of things to write? How does any one-person creative unit not run out?
I definitely run out of things to write. I did here on Day Two, and I freaked out. Then I just kind of pulled things out of my butt.
Back when I ran a blog of my own, I was super tuned in to the internet, and it was relatively easy to find a ton of cool/funny stuff to share and riff on all day — scrolling through Google Reader was like second nature. These days I’m less looped in.
WILL YOU BE HOSTING YOUR OWN WEBLOG IN THE FUTURE?
Probably not, but I’m hoping to start my newsletter back up again. It’s just comics, though, unless something changes. I flirted with the idea of trying to bring back The Hairpin (the blog I used to run), but it would probably be a mistake, even if it was possible. I’ve really enjoyed posting here for Jason, though. Almost no one does it like this anymore!
I once worked for a publication that was technically a blog, but one of its (unofficial) policies was to summarize the articles we linked to, rather than encourage people to visit the sources, so as to not lose traffic. That was my understanding anyway, after an early conversation with an editor. I thought that was a bummer; the linking-out part of blogging has always seemed like the spirit of the internet. Which is of course part of why I love Kottke.org so much.
My question is more about you pausing your Substack comics. I’m curious about what happens to our work and creative process when we build an audience. I don’t know what the question really is — I guess: How do we share art without creating so much pressure on ourselves?
I wish I knew! At first sending my newsletter was so easy, but then I built up expectations around what I thought readers wanted. And then I became really worried about what people would think of any given installment, which started to disfigure the whole process for me. (“Will they like it? Is it stupid??? Will they hate me?? Do I hate me????”) I ended up creating work I thought sucked, and eventually I stopped posting altogether.
As for solutions to the problem, I got a lot out of something the writer Jessa Crispin mentioned in her newsletter, which I posted about a few days ago. The idea is basically that one should cultivate some healthy “contempt” for one’s audience. It sounded counterintuitive at first, even rude, but then it made a lot of sense. It helped me get out from under the weight of worrying about what people think, since that’s a losing game.
I used to really fear people disliking my work, and I still do, but maybe I have one degree more acceptance of it.
If I bring back my newsletter, I’m thinking I might turn off the “like and comment” feature. While I loved getting that feedback, I think specifically the “likes” were bending my work to their will. I’ve actually loved sharing stuff on Kottke in part because there’s not a ton of immediate feedback here. It’s like, Okay, the stuff is just out there. Hopefully it will help me connect with others eventually, but it’s not the end of the world if that doesn’t happen right away, or ever. It feels healthier.
How does the experience of blogging like this change how you feel about blogging, and if you want to get back to it?
I’m in a weepy mindset where my first response is: “Blogging this way is PRECIOUS!!! I didn’t appreciate it a tenth as much as I should have when it was my full-time job!”
I also forgot how intense and all-encompassing it can be. Like every day I keep wondering if I’ve gotten so zoned-in that I’ve forgotten to pick my daughter up at daycare. (I haven’t yet.)
What are your three favorite movies of all time, and one that you hate that everyone else loves?
I don’t watch a lot of movies, so nothing really comes to mind, but I do have an emotional attachment to the 1922 movie Nosferatu.
If you asked about books, though — let’s say favorites of the past five years — I would say War and Peace, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Pride & Prejudice. I was on a classic-novel kick in 2022, and it was one of the most fun reading-times of my life.
The story behind all the British novels is that many years ago my dad bought a leather-bound set of “100 of the Greatest Books Ever Written” that arrived once a month until the whole set was complete. When he died, I boxed them up and kept them in storage. I finally brought them out last year, when I had a real house with real bookshelves — after 14 years in those storage boxes! — and began reading a few. (For War and Peace I read the amazing Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation.)
Other great recent-ish reads: Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson, and Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke.
Thanks for the Qs, this was super fun to write!
A few weeks ago, writer Kyle Chayka Tweeted “I predict a great Blogging Renaissance,” to which also writer Kevin Nguyen responded, “i kinda wanna do a weird free-for-all quarantine blog.” Then they added other writer Bijan Stephen and started Indoor Voices, a group blog which has now grown to about 80 members, all of whom miss what the internet used to be like AND happen to be home quite a bit at the moment. (To cement old school credentials, Indoor Voices is hosted on ancient blogging platform Blogspot, the place I got my blogging start in 2004. (Out of an abundance of shame, I absolutely will not be linking to this first blog.))
From the Indoor Voices about page:
Blogging is not a substitute for direct action. Direct action in this case involves staying home. Blogging is one thing to do while staying at home. Please wash your hands. It’s hard to believe, but there was a time where the internet was just full of casual websites posting random stuff. And you’d go to them maybe even multiple times a day to see if they had posted any new stories. It was something we all did when we were bored at our desks, at our jobs. Now there are no more desks. But there are still blogs.
There’s no theme, except quarantine. There’s no schedule, except people post every day whenever they want. As you might expect from a group of 80 people, post subjects vary. There are beauty tips, missives to Deadwood and Steven Universe, strategies to get through your pile of New Yorkers, and a regularly featured What Should You Do Tonight? I myself have posted about working from home with kids (it’s…fine), what help small businesses need right now, and Quarantine, an anthem sung to the tune of Dolly Parton’s, Jolene. (This level of blogging productivity hasn’t been seen by me since 2014.)
In a brief interview, cofounder Kevin Nguyen had this to say about Indoor Voices:
We started Indoor Voices because we were nostalgic for classic days of blogging, and partly as an inside joke. Then we realized that the blogs we missed felt like an inside joke that a small community was in on. So far, we’ve been really thrilled with the creative, chaotic energy that people have been putting forward. It’s writing for writing’s sake, and we’ve enjoyed seeing just how diverse and funny and strange that’s been. Probably helps that we’re all slowly going stir crazy.
Note also, Kevin’s first novel, New Waves, is finally out. It’s my most anticipated read of the year, but don’t take my word for it. Almost every publication that writes about books regularly listed it as anticipated as well.
In my last post for the week, I want to talk a little bit about what Kottke.org means to me: why I’ve loved reading Jason’s blog for years, and why I love writing for the site whenever he asks me to fill in.
Part of it is the content. Liberal arts 2.0, an idea I take seriously enough that my friends and I wrote a whole book about it two years ago.
And a big part of it is the audience and credibility Jason’s built up over the years. I’ve written for a lot of big-name websites, but nothing sends ripples through the blogosphere and Twitter (at least the corners I care about) more than a post on Kottke.org. Jason once wrote a two-sentence post complimenting my writing on Twitter. 48 hours later, I’d gone from 500 followers to 2500.
But really, if I had to pick my favorite thing I love about Kottke.org, it’s the structure.
The structure of a Kottke post is totally elemental:
- Title
- Link
- Pull (blockquote, picture, video)
- Response
- Reader comments (optional)
And that’s it. It’s the five basic units that blogs were built on, distilled to their essence. And titles and comments are important, but Jason’s done without them both. They’re paratext. The real core is link, pull, response.
If you read Andrew Sullivan or Ta-Nehisi Coates, their posts are structured almost exactly the same way. Jason does it with artful minimalism, while I usually wind up pushing two or three of them together like Legos. But it’s really the same idea.
These are also the elements that help establish bloggers’ identity as readers in conversation with other readers: I have seen something that I feel strongly enough to think and write about, and what would make me happiest is if you look at it, then think and write about it too.
It’s one reason I like using enigmatic titles (like the one above) rather than spelling everything out. It’s like, if you’re a Kottke.org reader who’s ready to read, then read. And trust me that I’ll make it worth your while.
Traditional print journalism doesn’t do this — but really, it can’t. Twitter rarely does it, because there just isn’t enough room. (You can usually do exactly one, maybe two, of the big five above.)
The vast majority of professional, corporate-owned blogs have rejected it, too, in favor of SEO-approved heds, totally predictable story lines, strict divorce between news and commentary, and pretending like their competitors — even their colleagues at the same organization — don’t exist.
Instead, we’ve got officially-approved categorial mantras like curation and community engagement — as if what mattered in great blogs was their arty taste, skill at embedding viral videos, or pushing out tweets to their followers. Rather than watching an agile mind at work, one attached to a living, breathing person, and feeling like you were tapped into a discussion that was bringing together the most vital parts of the web.
That’s what you can do with blogs. That’s how they work. That’s what we shouldn’t forget, even as we add more tools and figure out how to use them. And what I think of Kottke.org, that’s what I think about.
Let’s keep this thing moving, citizens.
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