I like to keep things as minimal as possible on my phone. If there’s a web version of something, nine times out of ten, that’s what I’m using. Reddit, Miniflux, Fark, Lemmy, Micro.blog (with the assistance of OutPost for publishing, of course), Tumblr, and any forums I’m on; the website is almost always the best way to go for me.

I’ve always liked wearing a watch. It seems redundant at first, since we’re perpetually glued to our phones these days, but it’s really not.

I picked up the TestFlight for Jim Mitchell’s new Micropub client OutPost yesterday, and I think this will go down as my favorite tweak to my blogging workflow since I discovered Micro.blog a couple years back.

I bought Brave Origin shortly after it came out, but I’ll be god damned if Apple’s ecosystem doesn’t keep pulling me back in.

I’m about to take on a new management position at work, at a store closer to home, and it’s just now fully hitting me.

Right now I drive about an hour to work every day, but the drive is actually pretty meditative and I absolutely love the city I work in. You grow attached not only to the kind of people who shop there, but also to the place itself.

POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) is a cool idea that works for a lot of indie bloggers… just not me. Occasional cross-posting, sure. But not all the time.

A lot of people are so comfortable in their skin that they can be the same person no matter where they go. Me, though? I’m only on a few different places online, and each one has a different purpose. I see my different accounts as a digital tapestry of me.

The Return of the Optimist ↗

Everyone could use a little optimism these days. This isn't anything crazy, but I thought it was cute and maybe even a little inspirational. Bob Wertz blogs about switching the fish logo on his blog from an anxious expression to one with an optimistic smirk:

This year, I surprised myself I chose the “optimist.” Don’t get me wrong, the world is still chaotic and disappointing in many ways. I could have chosen the “anxious” logo, or honestly, one of several “angry” logos. But in my personal life, the kids are settling into their new realities and my new job is going well. I’m making progress on my dissertation and I can see the end of my graduate studies. I see at least some signs of progress that make me believe that we’ll get through the global chaos and political bullshit. So I’m choosing to be optimistic about the semester. We’ll see how long I stick with this version.

As shitty as everything is in the world right now, life goes on. One day we might even make it out the other side.

↳ via bobwertz.com

See the income a family needs to live comfortably in every U.S. state ↗

Annnd here's a little pessimism to even things out: in my home state of Ohio, your household income needs to be at least $226k to live "comfortably." We're nowhere close to that at my place but we do alright... aside from the mountain of constantly growing credit card debt that keeps us both up at night. The state with the highest cost of living was Massachusetts at $329,555 and the lowest was Mississippi at $188,000.

↳ via visualcapitalist.com

Be Afraid! The Silent Role of Fear in Decision Making ↗

Negative emotions sell products:

Fear is a huge factor in our decision making. The fears we’ve listed here are only a few broad ones. There are other strong emotions that prompt users to make decisions. For instance, dating apps capitalize on loneliness, while ride-sharing apps prey on our desire to be independent and mobile.

When I used to sell cars, I remember this big boisterous sumbitch from Texas who founded some scammy company to keep customers coming back to the dealership for service, and ultimately, to trade up to a new car every couple of years.

He had this word track he called "action, good feeling, PAIN."

One example he used was something along the lines of this:

"We have this great Platinum service package I think you'll really like. You said you were taking the new 4runner on your trip to Hilton Head this summer, right? Man that sounds like fun; hanging out at the beach all day, having a few cocktails, living the easy life. Boy, I'd hate to see you stranded on the highway down there in the middle of that summer heat. Imagine having to pay $8000 out of pocket for a new transmission at some hole-in-the-wall mechanic just to get you limping home. That'd really throw a wrench into things wouldn't it? Part of that Platinum package includes a FREE pre-vacation checkup! So just sign on the line here and we'll get you through financing -- it'll only add a few bucks a month to your payments, and you'll get some peace of mind"

I know the linked article is meant to be a lesson in marketing, but companies who have to scare you into buying their product probably don't have a very good product. And if they do, what a fucking shame it is thinking they have to manipulate you into spending money with them.

↳ via ixdf.org

MapQuest Tops App Store Charts After Refusing 'Lake America' Change ↗

"We took the same approach we did with the Gulf of Mexico: be part of the conversation, and give people an app that keeps the names they're familiar with," said MapQuest general manager Doug Berger, in a press release. "Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right, by downloading our app."

Fear sells, but so does having a spine and not caving to every whim of a delusional dictator. I didn't even know Mapquest was still a thing, but it looks like a real viable alternative to Google Maps even in the year of our lord 2026. I never used Google Maps; Apple's version has been good enough for me over the years. But if I did, I would absolutely be giving Mapquest a try right now.

Update: god damn it Apple. As soon as they get a new ceo they go and pull this shit. Hope this isn't a sign of things to come 😒

↳ via macrumors.com

How Solitaire Became the Blueprint for Casual PC Gaming - Old School Gamer Magazine ↗

Technology has transformed where and how games are played, but the old lessons remain useful. Start quickly. Let the player understand the goal. Make actions readable. Create a session that feels complete even when it is short. Respect the player who wants only one round as much as the player who returns for ten. Solitaire did not invent every one of these ideas, yet it placed them together in front of an enormous audience. Its legacy is larger than nostalgia. It helped prove that a game could be simple to enter, satisfying to master and perfectly at home on a computer screen.

↳ via oldschoolgamermagazine.com

Twitter.now is still down at the time of writing this. I keep checking every once in a while to see if anything has changed, but the landing page is still just that graphic of an AI bird with a slingshot on top of a dead AI whale saying, "we're already learning the hard way..."

I'm genuinely curious to see if they'll be able to pull off a re-launch with working moderation. At least to the point where it's usable. Not holding my breath though.

To be fair, it's only been three days, so maybe we'll see some kind of update in the near future.

Cameron Banga's Weblog. · Working with the Iconfactory ↗

I've been lucky enough to work on iPhone apps since 2009, starting a small iOS application development shop right after college. Throughout my time working to build a small studio, the work of the Iconfactory was always something to aspire to. Along with companies like Panic and The Omni Group, they have helped define what makes the Apple ecosystem so special.

Nice post from Cameron Banga on working with the IconFactory to get a sick new icon for his Bluesky client, Skyscraper.

The IconFactory is a hell of a team. They've been around since the 90s and you've probably seen their work whether you realize it or not — they've done everything from the Windows XP icons to a lot of indie apps, and even made quite a few of their own apps like Linea Sketch, Tapestry, Tot, and a ton of others.

I bought a pixel art portrait from them a year or two ago and I was super happy with it — and it looks like they're still offering them on their website to this day.

So many people are turning to AI slop for their app and icon design these days because it's so cheap and easy, but there's no comparing that trash to human-made art.

ⓘ This is not a paid promotion; I just really like the IconFactory, and smaller (human) teams like them are struggling in the age of AI-everything. If you can afford it, when it comes to hand-made vs something a bucket of microchips can shit out, always go team human.

↳ via blog.cameron.software

It's Weird that Zoomers are Nostalgic for Beta Minecraft ↗

One can debate the merits of Beta Minecraft. But, it is unlikely that our elderly zoomer ever experienced it. If he did, it was long after the vanished springtime of his life. In general, youthful zoomers did not grow up with personal computers. If we had one, it was probably a locked down school Chromebook. Far more people played Minecraft on consoles or on Pocket Edition. And these are very different games from Beta.

I love this! It makes a lot of sense to me, honestly. As an aging millennial, most of the retro games I've fallen in love with over the years are things that were never on my radar as a kid. We had a NES console with a pretty good selection of games in the 90s, and while Super Mario Bros 1-3 still hold a nostalgic place in my heart, my favorites today are the ones I never had. Castlevania, Bonk's Adventure, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, isometric Sega Genesis games like Light Crusader and Landstalker, and other classics I just never played until adulthood like Secret of Mana and Fire Emblem. The first time I ever saw Castlevania: Rondo of Blood was on the PSP and I wasn't that impressed. Then, years later, I played the original version front to back on PCEngine CD and it instantly became one of my all time faves. There's this raw charm and character you get with older games. Just because the shiny new one looks more polished and adds a bunch of extra stuff, it's not automatically better, you know?

The beta years were definitely the golden age for Minecraft, full stop. It was simpler and more limited in the way of blocks, so you had to get a little more creative, but that also means it wasn't overwhelming like it can get these days. It still ran like shit if you didn't have a higher spec PC, but it was a walk in the park compared to how resource intensive the later versions have become. I could at least play it on my old plastic MacBook with all the graphics settings cranked down back in the day. And best of all, it wasn't owned by a megacorporation yet. It was just a solid indie game that came out when I was a teenager — and that's some true nostalgia for me.

Gen Z kids flocking to the beta version is a lot like my love of retro console games that came before my time. It somehow feels a little sentimental, but more for a simpler time in general than simply reminiscing on the good ol' days.

For what it's worth, the folks on r/GoldenAgeMinecraft have determined 1.7.3 beta to be the sweet spot.

↳ via davidmcgee.xyz

"iT woRKs BeTter in THe aPp!!" ↗

I was there in the early days of phone apps. I built stuff for Symbian, BlackBerry, even the bloody Palm Pilot! The central problem with apps has always been that they are hard to update. Every new bit of functionality - or even a new page - needs to be tested on a thousand devices. Once done, it takes an age to distribute to users. The only way to solve that is to have the app dynamically pull in new functionality from a remote resource. At which point, you've reinvented the Web browser!

Sometimes I still daydream of a world where Firefox OS actually caught on and didn't die a horrible, premature death. I don't think the term "progressive web app" had even been coined yet, but that's essentially what your apps would've been. From what I understand, anyway. I have like four apps on my phone that aren't stock. Everything else I use lives in Safari. That was always the whole point of smartphones for me; a thing with a fully functional web browser that lets you carry the entire internet around in your pocket.

↳ via shkspr.mobi

Miniroll - Your blogroll, anywhere ↗

I came across this neat blogroll web app earlier today. You can add each website manually or import an OPML file from your RSS feed — pretty much what I was trying to mimic with my old blogroll, only it looks really slick and it's much easier to manage. On the paid version, you can style it however you want but I'm just using the free one right now because it does everything I need it to do. Some of the links are a little wonky though; I'm getting an error in Safari for random sites:

Safari can't open the page.
The error was: "Navigation was blocked 
by Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy

I think it's because I embedded the HTML directly on my blog and it doesn't jive well with Leaflet, so I just made it an external link in my nav. It's a pretty cool little widget nonetheless.

↳ via miniroll.app

Mine, by Adam Ouston, a novel length story written as one sentence ↗

That’s Mine, by Hobart based Australian author Adam Ouston, which features one incredibly, outrageously, long sentence of perhaps eighty-five thousand words. No full-stops, chapters, or even a few lines of space to break up the text it seems.

I wanna buy this but I have three more new books to finish on my kindle before I can justify buying another one 🤪

↳ via disassociated.com

I wrote a thing about the new Twitter.now project yesterday. I said I was "cautiously optimistic" but I'm erring more on the side of cautious now. I think the two guys who started this thing might be in over their heads. There was a massive spambot attack going on all afternoon, flooding the feed with thousands of pics of cartoon catgirls and crypto bullshit for hours, and then they finally shut it down when the racist 4chan style nonsense started piling on.

You can still access the landing page, but I'm getting "a server with the specified host name could not be found" when I try to visit the app.

Before the spam started, a user pointed out that it was oozing personal information like emails and birthdays. Someone said you can bypass the fee altogether and create an account for free but I don't remember how and I can't search the post because it's offline. Update: @cassidyjames.com posted on Bluesky that you could bypass the signup form and create a free account directly from Firebase. The AI moderation system they called VERA was doing fuckall, so they took it offline earlier that day before everything went down.

It's a whole shitshow over there.

If you do a web search for "Twitter now" you'll still see big news sites running with the story about its launch as recently as four hours ago. None of them mention any of the fuckery from last night.

It's easy to fall for nostalgia. Especially when it's hyped up to be some revolutionary "fuck you" to Elon Musk and promises to bring back that cozy public square vibe we had in the old days of Twitter. The fact that you had to pay for it gave it this sense of exclusivity; you can get in on the ground floor of this awesome new social network. It feels like a crypto scam without the crypto. Maybe that's the new grift? Forget about all the digital ponzi money; just charge users to make an account on a new house of cards and pull the rug after people hand you money for nothing.

To be completely honest, a part of me wants to believe Elon Musk is sitting at his laptop, bundled up in his favorite Snuggie, personally carrying out the spam attacks all on his own — tears streaming down his face and into that stupid fucking sink he carried into Twitter HQ the day he took it over.

In reality though I think it was just a vibe coded fever dream from a guy who knows more about trademark law than software development. Bad actors noticed some big vulnerabilities and went in for the kill.

For a social network that sells trust as its main feature, I don't trust a goddamn thing about it. Of course I'll still follow up and start poking around on there again if it ever goes back online, but it's pretty sketchy right now, to say the least. I would've felt a little better if there was a blog where anyone who paid money for an account could check for updates, or at the very least an email blast explaining why the site is offline and what the plan is going forward.

It's a reminder of just how well places like The Atmosphere and Fediverse are being built; all the planning and security measures that were taken to make sure it won't all evaporate overnight — and that you can't trust every vibe coded app some LLM shits out.

It's also a reminder of why I was so excited to join Bluesky when it was new, and why I've been so cozy over there ever since. If anything, it's a great advertisement for how resilient and well thought out the more established platforms like Bluesky are. I like to see innovation and new takes on social media; I like seeing new things being built on the web. I don't even condemn vibe coding if you're using it as an extension of your own skills, but this... does not feel like that. And I'm no developer either, so this take is 100% an end user's perspective. But as an end user, I expect a thing I paid for to work and not to leak my personal data or let it get to the point of racist shitheads taking over before deciding to do anything about it.

It was almost surreal watching it go from classic 2010 era Twitter vibes to the dumpster fire it became after Elon's hostile takeover, all in the span of two days.

Update, 4:45pm EST:

They posted an AI generated image of a bird with a slingshot, perched atop a dead whale with X’s for eyes, stating “We’re down. We’re on it. Already learning the hard way.”

Maybe this is harsh but I don't think so: it's a bad look to go into a project with such lofty goals, without planning for obvious risks like spam and privacy issues, idk.

It's good they at least posted some kind of update.

I don't know how to feel about this thing but I'm definitely here to watch it unfold 🍿

News about Operation Bluebird first broke back at the end of 2025 on Ars Technica.

An attorney from Illinois named Michael Peroff and his business partner Stephen Coates, who used to be on Twitter's general council, got the idea for the project when Elon officially dropped the Twitter branding and switched to X.

In 2025, they filed a petition with the US patent and trademark office claiming the branding had been abandoned:

“The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.’s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,” the petition states. “The TWITTER bird was grounded.”

It's been the better part of a year since that Ars Technica article was published, and Twitter.now has been online for a few days now. You can pay either $20 or $40 for early access, so of course I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see yet another microblogging site start off at the ground floor.

That said, as nostalgic as it feels right now, there are definitely a few areas of concern. For one, it's as centralized as OG Twitter. The Fediverse and Atmosphere are both decentralized; they both have their flagship servers like Mastodon.social and Bluesky respectively, but anyone can break off and make their own instance if they want. Mastodon has thousands of third party servers now, and ATProto is slowly but surely expanding out to places like BlackSky, Eurosky and Northsky.

The whole idea of making alternative microblogging sites was to do it better than Twitter did; to avoid some fuckass space nazi like Elon Musk ever ruining another one of these things again.

Their approach is different; it's being touted as more of a trademark challenge, with the intention to blow up in popularity because of the familiar branding:

“There certainly are alternatives,” Peroff said. “I don’t know that any of them at this point in time are at the scale that would make a difference in the national conversation, whereas a new Twitter really could.”

It feels like more of an outsider's approach at building something for the sake of going viral than something built out of passion and love of the game like Bluesky or Mastodon.

I'm pretty opinionated on that idea; that in order for a social network to be "successful" it has to be this behemoth where everyone you know has an account. I prefer smaller spaces online, so I definitely don't see it as a weakness. If anything, that's a selling point for me.

I have to say, it feels a lot like the Digg reboot — which failed miserably, for the record. With Digg, you could pay $5 for early access and get in on the ground floor as a Groundbreaker. Kevin and the rest of the Digg team took feedback and suggestions from these early backers and, honestly pretty quickly, built an app as polished as Reddit. The problem was that it wasn't an overnight sensation like they hoped it would be and it ended up having a bot problem. So in an ironic twist, Kevin promptly shut it down and turned it into an AI news hub.

And that's another thing Twitter.now shares with the short-lived Digg reboot: AI moderation. It's a selling point here; an AI that filters every tweet for authenticity and weeds out the ragebait that powers places like X. You can set a slider to what kind of trust score is acceptable and it hides anything that doesn't make the cut.

At the time of writing this, the moderation tab has been taken offline for upgrades or something, idk.

All of that being said, I'm still poking around on there and enjoying the familiar experience of joining yet another microblogging startup with only a handful of users.

There's no pressure; post whatever you wanna post. No cliques have formed yet. It’s mostly just the chaos of awkward introductions and cat pics.

The UI leaves a lot to be desired, but coming from two guys who (as far as I know) aren't developers by trade, that makes a lot of sense. I'm almost positive this thing is vibe coded but I'm not basing that on anything but a gut feeling, so I could be wrong.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I would never go all in on something so centralized; I am a total Atmosphere nerd. So many cool things are being built on ATProto there's not even any debate for me. This feels more like someone re-claiming that old MySpace swag and building a nostalgic throwback like SpaceHey than a X or Bluesky killer. Honestly though, if it pisses off Elon Musk even a little bit, or if it can get a sizable amount of people off of there — people who might be on the fence, or maybe someone who has tried Mastodon or Bluesky and just didn't vibe with it, I consider that a win.

My handle is [@nic](https://micro.blog/nic) over there and you can check it out for yourself at Twitter.now.

UPDATE: jesus christ there's a horrible spam problem on this website. Not worth even trying until they shut down and address the abuse and spam. Absolutely fucked.

Update 2: looks like it's gone completely offline. You can go to the landing page, but it looks like the SSL certificate is invalid when you go to log in, so that's pretty sketchy.