Resculpting

November 16, 2022

Current location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Listening: ANYWHERE BUT HERE by PVRIS

(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status—either via email or in the comments)

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Resculpting

I'm in the process of rethinking my platform use, moving things around, and reconfiguring various projects and online presences.

This process is partly the consequence of a semi-regular desire to shuffle the components of my life and try out new arrangements, new approaches, new projects and options and tools.

But it's also the consequence of forces beyond my control: a sort of economic and digital weather composed of recessionary animal spirits, political hubbub, inflationary concerns, and billionaires snapping-up and setting fire to well-established online infrastructure.

Thus, I'm recalibrating and relearning.

Among other transitions and reconsiderations, I'm moving a whole lot of work from one email service provider to another, because the former is reportedly being killed off by the end of the year, while the latter seems to have staying power and has introduced some interesting new features since the last time I used it in a serious way.

All of this is a pain in the neck and there are other things I'd much rather be doing.

That said, this is also serving as an excuse to trim and consolidate and pivot and augment.

Everything's been knocked off all the shelves and the furniture has been overturned and dragged into other rooms, so what better time than now to pause and assess and make a few adjustments?

I generally embrace moments of minor (and even medium-sized) tumult because they incentivize this sort of thinking, and it's ever-so-easy to fall into rigid routines and methods because, well, they’re already there.

The ruts in the road grow deeper and more defined not because they represent the best path to where you're going, but because there were already ruts and it's easier to just double-down on those existing (possibly non-ideal) grooves than to consider carving fresh ones.

There are always downsides to deviating from the well-tread path, though.

Lots to clean up in the aftermath, a fair bit of stress that the new path will also be imperfect (and it will inevitably be lacking in some way), and the anxiety associated with attempting to manage something in motion, rather than maintaining something that’s (seemingly, at least) in its proper place.

Right now I feel like I've got a few things where I want them, a bunch of stuff roughly where it needs to be, and a long list of more minute, fiddly adjustments to work through before my productive space feels like home, again.

I know from experience I'll let out a grand sigh of relief and fulfillment when I eventually come out the other side of this, having sculpted a digital footprint that feels right—feels like me—rather than a presence that at times, from certain angles, captures a glimmer of the right shapes and colors and intentions, but which is otherwise often muddled, convoluted, and confusing.

At the moment, though, I'm doing my best to find satisfaction in the minor labors, the tedious process, and the slow whittling of rough, unpolished e-materials into something a bit closer to its intended, next-step form.

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A quick note related to the above:

1. Moving everything to Substack wiped out the monetary support I was receiving for all the individual projects I had elsewhere, so if you were contributing monthly to OSN, Curiosity Weekly, this newsletter, etc—first, THANK YOU, and second, if you’re keen to keep doing so, you can become a paid (monthly or yearly) subscriber to whichever project you prefer (including this newsletter), which serves as a donation (and in some cases will also net you some added “bonus” content).

2. You can also support all my projects at once by becoming an Understandary member or patron at Patreon.

3. Or! If you’re keen to contribute in a one-off rather than recurring fashion, you can buy me a coffee.

Whatever shape your support takes, thank you thank you thank you—you’re the reason I’m able to make and share all these things, and I appreciate you :)

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A portion of my “art corner,” where I only do “non-work” things.

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Some Things I've Made This Week

• Aspiring Generalist: Life Satisfaction and Age

• Brain Lenses (podcast): Egregores

• Climate Happenings: Growth Decoupled from Emissions

• Let’s Know Things (podcast): US Midterms 2022

• Curiosity Weekly / Daily: Nov 15 / Nov 15

• One Sentence News (podcast): Nov 16

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Interesting & Useful

• Explosive Photos Capture the Ocean’s Mercurial Nature

  “Ever fickle, the ocean and all its excitable energy provide endless fodder for Ray Collins. The Australian photographer is known for his dramatic images that capture the diversity of textures and forms that emerge from the water.”

• Visualized: The World’s Population at 8 Billion

  “At some point in late 2022, the eight billionth human being will enter the world, ushering in a new milestone for humanity.”

• The Reality of Celebratory Gunfire

  “Logic dictates that indiscriminately firing a gun into the air is probably not a great idea. There's an old saying, “what goes up must come down”, and it certainly applies here. But just how dangerous can a falling bullet be? Where will it land and how fast will it be moving? How long will it take for it to reach the ground?”

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Keeping it simple.

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Outro

One of the benefits of having almost all my projects based on one platform is that there’s more opportunity for interconnected experimentation.

I’m thinking about, for instance, bundling my news-related offerings into an umbrella-entity, which would allow me to continue making OSN and LKT as their own thing, but to also have supplementary add-ons like a news-focused chat room, smaller, fragmentary updates, and the like.

We’ll see how this goes. The settings for some of these options leave a lot to be desired right now, so I may hold off on some of these ambitions till changes are made (I’m not too keen on starting a chat room that requires everyone download the Substack app, for instance, especially when those chat features only work on iOS devices—which is currently the case).

What have you been up to this past week? Working on anything you’re especially excited about? Planning next steps? Thinking through anything you’d like to share?

I respond to every email I receive, and you can reach me by replying to this newsletter or by writing to colin@exilelifestyle.com.

You can also communicate via the usual methods: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or digital ER-99 drum synth.

Days since incident.