Tag: hypothes.is

I follow thousands of people, so my office mate, who happens to be a skilled programmer, wrote a script for me that turned off retweets from everybody. Retweets make up more than a quarter of all tweets. When they disappeared, my feed had less punch-the-button outrage. Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times. Less breathlessness. And more of what the people I follow were actually thinking about, reading, and doing. It’s still not perfect, but it’s much better.

For me, retweets aren't the problem, following the wrong people is. At least half, maybe more, of what I glean that is useful from Twitter comes from re-tweets...perhaps because instead of following thousands, I follow people I trust and/or want to converse with?

I find some consolation in Stephen Spender’s poem “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great.”

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

A sweet excerpt from James Geary's latest book. He is punstoppable. I am punapologetic.

The frisson in the ship captain’s reply to the first-class passenger who asks if he can decide for himself whether to help row the lifeboat—“Of course, sir, either oar”

groan

more verb than noun, it only exists through the convers

Bpah

If you burn down a Library of Alexandria full of paper scrolls, you destroy knowledge. If you set fire to a bunch stone tablets, you further preserve the lettering.

A nice phrase