works of wanderlust

Category: wandering & thinking

  • third-place-less

    I’m sitting in a coffee shop trying to do some writing, but first I needed to get some words off my chest: this was fifth place I tried. It’s shortly after lunchtime on a Monday in October and the first four places I tried—including three other cafes and the local public library—were so stuffed full of people that I would have been squatting in the corner hoping for a sympathy chair had I stayed longer than walking in and right back out again.

    We’ve stopped making third places.

    Or, if you want to call coffee joints third places, we’ve stopped making the kind of third places where you don’t need to spend anywhere from three to eight bucks to buy a drink so you can use their wifi guilt-free for an hour… tho, even then, I had to drive in a loop of about fifteen kilometres just to find one with a spare seat.

    First places are where we live.

    Second places are where we learn, work and contribute.

    Third places are where we go to be social and thrive and be outside of the other two places. I like to write and create and think in third places… but this usually means I do most of my writing and creating and thinking over an expensive coffee in a local Starbucks. 

    Fair enough, there’s a teachers strike on right now and the library being packed with teenagers who are off school because of the labour dispute was not a surprise, but I’ve been there on any other given day and finding an empty chair is always a roll of the dice.

    And true, when I go out at 8am with my writing device ready I usually have my pick of places to be a write and create and think and sit pretty much anywhere I want in the doing of those things.

    But we’re not a society that creates public buildings to just hang out in. There’s a local rec centre, but I’ve checked there, too, often and found it just as hopping busy as any cafe or library, it’s thirty or forty seats filled with people who beat me to the punch with their computers or whatever.

    Parks are wonderful third places, as is the bragging rights of the city having an absolutely enormous river valley trail system filled with nooks and crannies. But too, we live in a winter city, so on a cool, late-autumn day when the rain is off and on and the wind is blowing a pre-winter chill, sitting outside is not a great place with a sketchbook let alone an expensive laptop computer. 

    Where are our third places?

    Certainly if you have a few bucks to throw at a coffee or a beer or a hamburger you can sit in a cafe or a pub or a fast food restaurant. Is that the healthiest situation for a society? I have written elsewhere, or maybe even here, on the trouble with losing our third places, the virtualization of our seconds and the isolation of our firsts. The ones we have left are filled with social media trolls and AI ghosts in the machine or pay-to-play hot seats at a bustling corporate cafe, and it all seems a little sickly and sad. Even more so as winter creeps closer day by day and I remember that I’ll be trapped in my house for weeks on end soon, hunkering down and trying to find the motivation that is so much more clear and urgent when I’m out and about in public.

    Either that, or I’ll drive around looking for a warm seat in what is left of the third places, shell out my three bucks for a mediocre coffee and try and feel like the world is not blurring into something even more isolating than in already seems.

  • state of the blog, one: un-curated

    When I relaunched this site back in April I suggested that I would try not to write too many navel gazing posts about the blog itself.  I mean, to be fair, I like reading about how the sausage is made—as it were. I wish a lot more people who maintained personal websites and writing projects were actually interested in the creative process as much as they are interested in click-through optimization and search engine manipulation and all the other topics that seem as much about duping users into reading your drivel as is was about actually creating extensive collections of online expression.

    I probably don’t need to mention that writing this as I am in October 2025 the world is in a period of retracting rights of personal expression.

    I have been consciously moving further and further away from the corporate social networks and continuing to build a slow-but-steady presence here online. To my earlier point, this site was never about click-throughs or search engines or tricking you, the reader, into reading anything you don’t want to read. This is just the manifestation of opinion from one guy here on the Canadian prairies and the things I write about span a hundred different topics—you’re going to find something interesting and you’re probably going to be bored by just as much.

    When I relaunched this site, scraping it together from the remains of about four other niche blogs I was maintaining, while I was trying to find my footing and my rhythm I did stray into writing far too often about the blog itself. So, I declared that I would only drop one of those navel gazing “meta” posts no more than once per week. I’ve held pretty solid to that, and the number has been more like once per month.

    But here’s the sausage-making part: a lot goes on behind the scenes to write the words and collect the photos and too, keep the lights on here. No one would or could afford to have me sit here and recreate this kind of thing for them. It is a kind of work of personal madness that it even exists. My blogs have always been a kind of personal passion project. 

    All of that is to say that I do appreciate readers. I do appreciate clicks and when you find this on search. I have some light stats running and so I have a rough idea that people are visiting and they are reading certain topics. I know that, for example, if I shared more cast iron recipes I could flood this site with traffic. If I posted more hiking tips for the rocky mountains, I would probably build a dedicated user-base. Or, if I complained more about oddball observational neighbourhood gripes the search engine would light me up like a firework. I’m not a performing monkey, tho—so you get whatever I feel like writing about and you can feel free to dig through the archives and look for anything that is more interesting.

    Social media really has trained us to expect an internet built for an audience of one. That’s the simultaneous beauty and danger of the algorithm. When it’s acting nice we call it curation. When it’s isolating us to niche information we call it siloing our perspective.

    This blog is my perspective, but there is no algorithm. I have written about that before—somewhere here—and all to the point that like in yee good ole days, when papers and the evening news showed us everything they could jam into their publication-slash-broadcast allotments, we didn’t live in these curated silos of expectations. We just read everything, whether it was something that made us clap like a trained seal or not. 

    I’m no news outlet, but as I keep writing on this blog and filling it with stuff that interests me (knowing only a fraction of it will interest you) I do so understanding that I have far more in common with traditional media publications than I do with corporate social media feeds. There are (as of right now) about four average-length books worth of writing on this site and not a word of it is curated (or siloed) to you. And I think that’s a good thing.

    Thanks for reading.

  • social games, three

    I spent an hour curating. 

    Look, I’m sorry: If you follow me and I follow back, that’s the powerade of what is supposed to make social media work—but if I open up the feed and literally the only thing you do on there is repost angry memes and incite capital-lettered ranting commentary above links to random articles, I may need to unfollow you.

    I probably just did, actually.

    A fairly famous cartoonist I follow wrote something about his ideal social media feed, and it being free of algorithms and video reels, sorted in a meaningful (read: chronological) way, and a place for good discussion. Or, as he footnoted, he wanted the internet of 2008 back. I agree. Jokingly, sure, but gawd am I sick of whatever these spaces have become. 

    The flood of stupid is inescapable. You’ll notice that this blog, my site, and anything I control may be thought of as a highly managed and ordered space, but unlike the vomiting algorithms of The Socials, mine are purposefully curated to reflect a kind of personal expression on my part. That difference is important. 

    Dropping reshares and drivel into a big churning algorithm whose only job is to grab ahold of your attention and never let go, as is the case on social media platforms these days, is the polar opposite of what I attempt to do here.

    Yeah, to the untrained eye, they look pretty similar. But that similarity stops at a level so shallow that it would make the silver scratch off goop on a lottery ticket look like an atomic blast shield. 

    I curate what I post, I figured, so why shouldn’t I take more care curating what I see? Weed the garden, as it were.

    I mean, I need to spend less time online in these apps. I really do. And I barely spend any time at all in them, so I can only imagine what other more deeply entrenched social media addicts feel from their mainlining the algorithmic feed juice. Curating only does so much for that effort. And in fact, it may be that by curating I give myself more reason to stay on them longer. Sigh. But the hard reality is that I need to curate now so that when my energy levels are lower and more susceptible to the doom-scroll flow of the feed I have already done some of the work to reduce its potency. 

    So last night I unfollowed some of the people who I have incidentally picked up along the way. They will not notice. They don’t engage that way. They don’t comment or reshare or like. They are on there to firehose themselves, and give almost nothing in return.

    I had this rule: the courtesy follow. Had. If you are not a bot, and you seem like a real person posting real things that are not trying to sell me something, I would follow you back. But that rule has bit me in the ass. Angry shit-posters.  The hyper-political. The influencer repost machine. The caps lock granny. The patriotic sledgehammer. You all have a role, sure, but you are overwhelming me and you have created an internet that is dank and sickly. 

    My amendment to the courtesy follow has changed (even if it has not been posted so clearly elsewhere) that I will follow back anyone who is not a bot and who appears to be curating a web more closely resembling the internet of 2008: creativity, discussion, and something leaning in the direction of their own truth.

    I’m not rushing back quite yet, but I am trimming the digital weeds because I know I almost certainly will go back soon.

  • social games, two

    We all start to sound a bit like junkies when we ponder aloud the idea of fleeing the social platforms once and for good, weaning ourselves off our feeds, setting limits and goals and self moderation parameters, or screaming digital curses to the gods of going cold turkey.

    It has been a week. A fucking week of social media garbage.

    Let me define my parameters. I used to vaguely claim that blogs and personal websites and sharing platforms all fell into some common harmonious categorization under the term “social media” and that posting on facebook or twitter or bluesky were just another form of socially participating online. No longer.

    When I write from here on in about The Socials I am strictly referring to the toxic sludge pool of low friction group-text platforms that slurp up our engagement vibes for likes and shares and algorithmically grind it into a type of endless digital slop hose. It may be photo sharing sites like instagram or discussion forums like reddit or hate-text engines like shitter, but those are the targets of my current ire.

    These machines had such potential for good, but humanity it seems had different plans. First came the artists and philosophers, sharing ideas and vibes. Then came the marketers spinning webs of greed and consumption. Next came the bots in their AI legions attempting to con us into clicking and buying and selling our secrets for a hint of fake human contact. Finally have arrived the ideologies, hate filled rhetoric machines set on dividing and destroying the fragile peaces of times through misinformation and threats and raw, unfiltered hate.

    Each time a new platform arrives I dip my toe in the digital river and see if the current is any different than the one I just left.  But people never really change, it seems. Even the most honourable approaches to creating a space of the kind we all seem to yearn is thwarted by sinister agents of chaos hell bent on shaping the world to their dark visions of division and rage. 

    Bluesky was my latest attempt at participation, and yet nine months on my efforts are once again beset by the unavoidable impression that it has become a whirlwind of political rage and a blur of misinformation. Post sweet nothings and you are ignored. Post creative joy and it attracts hoards of malicious bots bent on deception and digital theft. Post opinion and someone will set their heart on vengeance and attempt to destroy your life. Post truth and someone will dispute it with every fibre of their being.

    If there was a kind of metaphorical temperature dial to control all this, the ouija spirits of the internet cranked it up another notch last week upon hearing the echo of a sniper rifle. Orwell warned us of the dangers of crowdsourcing our hate to the masses and of handing off our power to an unchecked state. We did not listen. And in fact if the vibe resonating within the socials is to be analyzed with any confidence democracy is rasping it’s last breaths. The end of meaningful freedoms may not be completely over, but the front line of expunging them from the modern world will be on the feeds of social media.

    I may not be done writing and posting, but I am considering if I am now finally done writing and posting there, or if I am just another junkie who will never truly break free.

  • meta (not) monday and other stuff

    Starting with an aside, I’ll just note that it drove me nuts when the company that makes and runs that dystopian social network—you know the one—decided to call itself meta. Many wager that they stole the term from Neal Stephenson’s classic novel Snow Crash which itself was a fiction-shaped social commentary on the explosive expansion of technology into our lives and his “metaverse” was, at least in my opinion, an analogy for the navel-gazing narcissistic amplifications that would inevitably extrude from every pore of an increasing entrenchment of virtual spaces into human lives. Zuckerbot probably just thought it would be a cool name, so now when anyone uses the word “meta” —which simply and properly in English just means something along the lines of “self-referencing”— one can’t help but seem like they are talking about that perverse social network, and not say, being reflective and talking about one’s own work and platform—which is where I was going with this…

    For years when I blogged I used to routinely use the term “meta Mondays” as an excuse to plant a flag in the ‘state of the blog’ and write about what I was working on in and around it, or more often write down excuses about why I wasn’t writing more or building it bigger and better. Meta Monday. Alliterative and clever and whatever.

    I apologize if you are a reader and were expecting a sudden explosion of new and insightful content about my random musings. I apologize if you have stumbled here from my old urls and are now wondering why those more focused brand-idents are a guy blogging about his weekends and his fitness.  My energies have been focused on other stuff.  Who knows how long that will last. I have put a lot of those energies into a couple project about which I may or may not ever share—professional stuff, ahem, you know how it goes—and when I’m spending six to eight hours at a keyboard doing that stuff, finding time to be expressive and philosophical here is a slipping luxury.

    And those damn social networks, amiright?

    The wasted human potential that has been sunk via billions of human life hours every day into this fuzzy digital existence. Gah!

    I was always a bit of an optimist. 

    Do you know why I started blogging?

    It was the afterglow of the science fiction idealism of the eighties and nineties. Authors would create this abstract setting where virtual spaces were pure and engaged. A place where truth was challenged, sure, but where rational thought and big ideas prevailed. People would write and share and create and build and make incredible things.

    What did we get?

    We got the shitty shadow. The Internet. Influencers selling their souls for clicks, deep fake images and video, AI slop, hate, rage, unfiltered racism, the masses looking at reality but then jabbing their own fingers in their eyes to avoid seeing it.

    If you can’t express your idea in an eight second video clip no one cares. 

    Ninety-nine point nine percent of attention goes to zero point one percent of the voices and creators. We haven’t broken celebrity, we’ve amplified it and commodified it.

    Long form expression is all but dead.

    Why write a post if no is going to read it?

    Why write a novel if an AI is going to steal it?

    Why host a blog if search engines will bury it?

    Why engage in a discussion if the brain at the other end of the connection is unwilling to consider it?

    What I used to hope for was a kind of online world where everyone has a place to write and share and create, at least a little something worth reading, but that was always a kind of long shot idealism—I will admit—and I honestly never even considered that it would go this badly for us online. In the last year or two my hope for a lovely digital future has faded to a kind of dystopia of necessity, of me eventually eluding escape for but a single reason: that ceding even one more byte to the darkness would be a betrayal of my life’s work. The internet is deeply broken for good and all that is left is a commercial platform run for the sole purpose of harvesting as much cash out of the fibres before the whole thing burns to the ground, and worse. 

    How’s that for a not-Monday morning thought?

    I guess what I’m saying is that my optimism is on life support.  Objective reality is apparently broken. The internet is a bully platform. The nerds built it and then the rest of the tribe saw merely another space that could be used to induce hate and pain and hurt—and for every one of us there and ninety-nine of them, and now they are shifting algorithms to amplify the ninety-nine to ninety-nine millions. I am drowning in a sea of digital stupid and I sometimes feel as though I am on the precipice of a post-internet phase of my life.

    And yet, here I am still writing.