Becoming Place
Dear reader
With a photo of a graveyard, the italic text writes: “a lesson on how someone can transform oneself into a place.” The last words remained with me: transform oneself into a place, transform to place. I picked up the poetry collection at Adad Books. It is a neighborhood favorite and evolving into the physical representation of what I’d like this newsletter to become: a small corner café with a limited selection of zines, books, and poetry. It doesn’t intend to change the world, but it gathers a mix of local regulars who pick up their Freddo espresso and people visiting to discover words.
It is October 1st. Next month, it will be a year since we first set foot in our Athens flat. I no longer fumble around the flat but navigate through the obstacles without causing a spectacle. My hand traces the location of the light switches and remember their responding lamps. The strange noises are now familiar voices. I know the names of people passing the street. Olive green is dotting my beige outfits. I’m becoming a place, and the environment is becoming me.
With care
Kristoffer
Wayside flowers
Ways to say ily keeps generating.
Sent you a song is a cute way to reconnect.
Living digital archives is a novel spheric interface to web history.
Field notes
Amidst all the alternatives to giant social software, I prefer expressions that break with the standards. The personal feed, follower count, and likes are product choices, but few decide against them. One of the social software wildflowers spreading is logging, the publication of short text blurbs. This post reflects on 21 months of daily logging and takes us back to the origin of logging in a lovely tale of internet history.
Since the end of 2021, I’ve uploaded ~3 logs a day, with the average one being 50-100 words. These are small thoughts, usually epiphanies jotted into my phone in a rush, touched up and published the next morning onto a pinned Substack page. I’ve started a lot of weird experiments, but this one stuck.
Zine culture is another publishing tradition in Superbloom. Hurray. I’m making small zines with Uno about our daily life and appreciate sketching stories only intended for our small family. In the linked page, Alicia Guo documents the outcome of hosting a zine night with friends. I don’t understand everything that is going on, but that is neither the purpose. And what a lovely use for mmm.page.
Figuring out the brain. What do we mean by memory? — Alicia Guo
The mandatory, regular mention of the internet’s most comprehensive newsletter on sites, cultures, and absurdities. Matt’s writings will become part of future internet museums... you have the opportunity to follow along in real-time. History in the making.
I can’t help but love a wonky, slightly-orthogonal search mechanic (WHO DOESN’T, RIGHT KIDS? Eh? Oh), and this is a near-perfect example by Lee Butterman, who’s built a way of navigating Wikipedia which eschews all the normal, traditionally ‘click a hyperlink’ or ‘search for keywords’ techniques and which instead uses natural language stuff (look, there’s a more technical explanation which you can find here should you so desire, but know that I tried to read and understand it and, well, I failed) to let you search for, I don’t know, ‘those trees with the leaves that are a bit pointy but also rounded’ and return you a bunch of results from the Wikidepths. — Matt Muir
Collections
The book I quote in the opening is “Oh, that hand of yours” by Artemis Chrysostomidou.
Last postcard was sent to 2443 inboxes. Currently, thirty-nine people support me with a voluntarily paid subscription. Logo by Studio Hollywood. Photograph by Ana Šantl.