Absorb Through All My Pores
Absorb Through All My Pores
Sometimes the inbox is full. Other times it is me.
Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly — Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
I’m your phone when it runs out of space. Slow and overloaded. Rejecting to take another photo. Or your download folder. Unorganized and uninterested. Filled with unread documents.
It started Monday when Uno screamed his lungs out after his three months vaccination. The aftermath of the vaccination settled overnight, but his sleep continued to be broken the entire week. Add to this organizing the move for later in November, the staled bureaucracy of Ana’s maternity leave, me being back at work, and *the news cycle*.
So as I am sitting this Saturday evening preparing my newsletter I don’t have the capacity to read any of the articles I had saved for today. So if you want to fill your pores with stories, make sure to check out Patrick’s newsletter linked in the very top of the Reader Interview.
With care,
Kristoffer
VISUALLY PLEASING
READER INTERVIEW
Patrick Tanguay provides me with calmness. Every Sunday, his curated newsletter adds context and perspective to our evolving world, and the language to talk about what futures we aspire after. Patrick avoids binaries, instead he nurtures a room for curiosity and care.
K: What is the size of your internet?
Patrick: Medium sized maybe? I spend a lot of time on Twitter, reading newsletters, and in my RSS reader. I’d say that’s probably… 5-6 hundred people? But all of them have been carefully selected for one or many of: their thinking / the network of ideas they plug me into / their curation. Usually all three. So I feel I probably have frequent access to 2-3 thousand interesting people who collectively lead to a wide variety of topics. My internet is definitely too North American and European but I’m working on that constantly, albeit probably not hard enough.
Taken from a different angle; from those people, the ones I exchange with regularly beyond reading each other’s content would probably be 40-50 people. That might be more my scenius than my internet but considering they are geographically distributed and I don’t have in-person access to most of them, you could also view that subset as my internet.
K: Where do you go fishing for different feeds?
Patrick: I don’t have any specific fishing hole I go to, which might be something I need to look into. Most of what I find stems from my readings in the previous question. Maybe it’s more an attitude than a place? To keep your fishing analogy, I make it a practice to let the boat drift, so I start from the same few spots but let random interests, the current, and the discovery of new interesting people take me to new places. Clicking through bios, projects, collaborators, etc. can quickly lead to different parts of the web / world.
K: What would be your fictional dream job title?
Patrick: Publisher & Curator at Sentiers. As long as Sentiers is then where I’d like it to be. I.E. sustained by members and a few projects a year, spending all my time doing what I’m doing now. I’d also like, at some point, to spend a chunk of time on a place (ideally physical, but could be a space of thinking) studio or lab-ish where I could work with collaborators and push ideas further. Basically my dream job would be to read about stuff and connect things together, that’s what I’m trying to build right now.
If you want something dreamier: proprietor of a bookshop. A proper little space with actual paper books and a real curated selection, not just the flavour of the month or what a distributor wants you to carry.
Even dreamier has the studio above the bookshop, with a corner coffee shop.
K: Where do you go to get lost?
Patrick: This might be the most boring answer possible but fiction books. I’d don’t have ready access to any place to get lost and I don’t tend to feel a need to get lost long term enough for it to require steps like driving to nature or planning a trip somewhere. Walking would be a second option but then even if I do manage to get my body lost, my thoughts are still there. Deep into a good book is the quickest and surest way for me to forget my thoughts and problems and be lost in some way. Walking in a forest might have a similar impact and be better for my health but living in a city takes that off the table in terms of quickly unplugging.
K: What would you be doing if given financial stability and three months space?
Patrick: I’m assuming the pandemic is finished by then so I’d say rent a place somewhere in Europe, start getting a feel for what being a local might be like, take side-trips elsewhere on the continent. Or maybe New Zealand and a van / camping but that’s not really my kind of “natural habitat.” The first thought is definitely for a nice place in an interesting part of a European city. My partner and I did that twelve (!!!) years ago and we still mention that kind of experience all the time.
K: What was one rabbit hole you recently fell into?
Patrick: I haven’t had a fall truly worthy of being called a rabbit hole for a while now, I tend to either bounce around too much topic wise, or get serious enough that I wouldn’t call it a rabbit hole. But perhaps video games. I don’t have any plans (or time) to become a gamer but I’m becoming fascinated with where gaming tools are going; where games become such an important cultural phenomenon; how they are starting to overlap with movies; how they connect even to architecture, health, and more; where things might go with AR/VR/MR, the Metaverse or whatever the name of this intersection ends up being.
ROADSIDE FLOWERS
Make better visuals for your social media posts.
Watch streams that nobody else is watching.
Explore the literature map where each island is an author and each city is a book.
INDIEHUNT: SEARCH ENGINES
Million Short — Discover sites that don't make it to the top of the search engine results.
Board Reader — Search message boards, websites, blogs, and other social media.
Carrot2 — organize your search results into topics.
Wiby — Search within pages made by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they are personally interested in.
INTERNETMEZZO
“Memory work is a research based scenario, indicating possible futures of women’s labour. Click play, close your eyes & listen.”
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly — Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
Last week this newsletter was sent to 692 people. Thirty-one are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write this newsletter: Nikolaj, Lars, Ditte, Jakob, Antal, Anders, Sascha, Cecilie, Søren, Dries, Tina, Gautier, Sarper, Maarten, Mystery x2, Joshua, Thomas, Mikkel, Aydo, Lukas, Hans, Vibe Johanne, Csongor, Dad, Ida Marie, Yinka, Stine, Troels, William & Angela!
Photograph by Ana Santl.
<3
Kristoffer