It’s not either or, professionalism and personal life. They don’t cleanly demarcate.
There’s a tv show called Severance whose conceit is that one can have a personal life that stays personal, and then when a person goes to work–that life is utterly different–in fact, one forgets entirely about their other life and starts fresh.
In the real world (and in the show, actually, complications arise) there is no such clean demarcation. It’s messy. One bleeds into another. While one might run a personal blog, say, anonymously or pseudonymously, if that blog becomes known then it will bleed into work. As in getting dooced. And vice versa, there are people whose work is public-facing may get intrusions into their personal life because of it.
…I’ve been feeling like it might be useful to have a more professional personal profile on the web again, while blogging “on the side”
It’s funny, at various times I’ve gone back and forth on what artlung dot com and what joecrawford dot com mean to me. For a time I was highlighting my skills and portfolio on joecrawford.com and just blogging and whatnot things on artlung.com. It was Al Abut who prompted me to resurrect joecrawford dot com a few years ago. I was complaining about the fact that I couldn’t sort out how to make my website serve the needs of looking for work, and of doing comics, and of blogging.
Al is also a great designer who can take a brief and make something crystal clear. He’s responsible for that terrific, tidy design on joecrawford.com.
And so that sorts it out for me. But I have only 2 sites I really need. One might also have a side business or hobby that likewise represents oneself. I think about doing splintering further, for say, toy robots or beach panorama photos (which I posted on Twitter way back before it turned to shit, and now post these to Mastodon). But for now I’m at a state I like.
So I totally understand the tension. And I think it’s totally expected to redefine ones persona for those professional / personal selves. I hope, Nick, you find a state that you’re happy with.
WebSanDiego was a mailing list I ran for a number of years. At one time it was a terrific way to do conversation on the internet. Before MySpace, before Facebook, before Reddit. I did a visualization back in 2011.
In the heyday we had several hundred of messages per month on the WebSanDiego mailing list
I got the notion to start an alternate version in 2019. I started it very low-key. I invited people by email. I announced it on some Slacks and person-to-person. There was no usenet to announce it on. Commenting on the number of email bounces I got from inviting prior members, I tweeted on April 5, 2019:
I revived the mailing list I started in 1999 as a Slack channel. I used the original email addresses. SO MANY BOUNCES.
SO MANY BOUNCES.
!!!
I never promoted the Slack. And as a community without much purpose, it never thrived. I had a sense that Slack was not the correct tool to replace the WebSanDiego List. At one time a locally focused list was great. It was a great way to meet fellow practitioners, freelancers, get work, get answers to tech questions. Now there are other ways to do that.
Well, Slack on a free plan was never a great way to do this, it simply doesn’t scale to the costs of a community of size. And as we know the relative value of a community is a function of the number of connections between people.
Metcalfe’s law states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). The law is named after Robert Metcalfe and was first proposed in 1980, albeit not in terms of users, but rather of “compatible communicating devices” (e.g., fax machines, telephones). It later became associated with users on the Ethernet after a September 1993 Forbes article by George Gilder.
WebSanDiego had hundreds of members at its height. Say we restarted it on Slack and got to 500 members. That’d be 500 times $7.25/month per user for a lower tier plan. Or $12.50/month per user for the full plan. Roughly $10/month per user works out to $60,000 per year. It’s no wonder really that Facebook and Reddit and Discord is how people do this these days, but none of these really replicate the simplicity of how a mailing list worked way back when.
At one time Slack kept that history forever, and if you stopped paying you would lose access to messages older than 90 days or messages over your limit of 10,000 messages. Now, they won’t do that anymore. This is 100% the deal they’ve made with users, to get full access it will cost money. I’m not begrudging their need to monetize expensive and reliable and high quality tooling, but there is not a good replacement for people for this kind of thing anymore.
The email today from Slack explains the change:
Free workspace content older than one year will be deleted
We wanted to let you know about a change in policy for free workspaces.
What is changing?
Workspaces’ data, including files, messages, and other content that is older than one year will no longer be stored. Free workspaces will continue to have full access to the past 90 days of message history and file storage. This change will not impact workspaces on other plans, such as Slack Pro.
When will this take effect?
This policy will begin taking effect August 26th, 2024. Workspaces will be notified prior to the policy impacting their workspace.
What does this mean for you?
Your workspace, websandiego , is on a free Slack plan. This workspace has content that is older than one year which will be deleted once the policy takes effect. Moving forward, Slack will not retain messages and files older than one year for a workspace. This policy will impact your workspace starting August 26th, 2024.
To retain access to content older than a year, the workspace needs to be on a paid Slack plan. These plans can be reviewed on our plan page. Free teams will continue to retain access to messages and content sent in the last 90 days.
If your team chooses to upgrade to a paid plan after the policy goes into effect, you will not be able to recover any content that has been deleted under our new policy.
I likely will shut down the websandiego Slack instance, it’s not particularly useful to me or anyone else as-is. One approach I might take if I revive websandiego some day is to use IRC as the core infrastructure and use tooling to allow views into it using Slack and Discord, which is the way the IndieWeb Chat works.
I certainly wish there were more reliable and less expensive and easy to use tools for this.
“That was sick” one surfer said to me. The lone bodysurfer out with the surfers. And another thanked me for not dropping in on him at the end of his wave: “you coulda gone”—“plenty of waves today” I replied.
Teach your daughters not to be nice. Fuck it. NOT NICE. Loud. “Get the fuck away from me/Don’t fucking touch me like that” loud. I’d rather cut out my larynx than ever politely laugh my way through the things I’ve had to politely laugh my way through again. I wanna smash the word demure w a hammer.
When I think back at the kind of disrespect my mother put up with when I was young I definitely think I internalized a lot of male behavior to not replicate and that was very instructive. And just immediately shutting down men overstepping would be preferable. That monologue from Barbie was the real deal.
It’s unrelated to this post except that that line from The Harder They Come kept running through my head with each wave I took off on.
Got a good start to the day. Still some lingering cold effects but it didn’t keep me out of the water last night. As I left at 8pm the lifeguards were telling their spiel about how they were going off service. “Lifeguards are going out of service. Please cease water activities. Lifeguards will be back on duty at 9am tomorrow. If you witness a water-related emergency dial 9-1-1 and ask for lifeguards.” Well, last night they also added a warning about the “strong currents, large waves, and rip currents.”
I knew that. They don’t always mention it. I had just had a great big fun hour and a half in it. I caught a fair number of waves that were huge. 4-7 feet tall. A year ago I’d have not taken off on the waves I took off on. Or I’d have done so differently. I’m glad I didn’t then. And I’m glad I did tonight. I got some fun rides. I have data to back up that statement. Or at least about the speed of the waves. Dawn Patrol measures waves.
Share sheet for June 17, 2024. It gives me stats for the session.
Some of the tracings are longer than the rides were. I suspect because because the ends of the wave were not captured, and the computer just keeps recording. When I forget to turn the app off sometimes I have a ride from the beach to the freeway. That’s bad data.
I was constantly in motion because the water was in motion. I remember the wave the app called 52 miles per hour. I don’t know if that number is right but it was huge and fast. Closed out quick and then I barreled toward the beach on a giant cloud of whitewater.
Leveling up
I have not been in the water to swim as much this year as some of the prior years but the quality of the time in the water has not been higher. I always have fun. Every session brings new experiences and new things to try. Like a videogame. Each time I pull out the game there are new challenges. New bosses. New ways to get killed. New environments and situations.
To play a game you have to have good gear. Primary for me are fins. I switched to some Yucca fins since March. I think they give me a bit more speed to catch waves. To catch a wave you have to match its speed then stay on it. I tried a different pair a few years ago but they didn’t feel right. They kept slipping off. Now I have a pair I can trust won’t fall off in big water.
We have a lot of surfriding gear. It’s a bit of a mess. The white-tipped blue DaFins were my prior go-to set of fins.
“Yeah that’s my kid”
Day before yesterday–Father’s Day here in the USA–I saw a father and son take off on a wave together. Both with handplanes. Both riding waves. It was a joy to see that. The kid–maybe 10 years old?–caught one and went flying toward the beach. I asked the older fellow I suspected but was not sure was the dad if the two of them were family. “Yeah that’s my kid” said the dad, with a little measure of pride. I told him it was awesome to see the two of them taking off on waves together.
That was my favorite thing that day. I remember well my father’s enthusiasm for putting me on a blow-up surf mat in the ocean and letting me ride a wave.
Ride some waves today. Try not to go alone. The surf is big out there.
I'm a web developer, and I love to swim, bodysurf, and write code. I'm into collecting toy robots.
Here's more about me.
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