Despite not being either the C-suite consultant or SEO expert or IndieWeb programmer type which seem to make up his main audience, I consistently enjoy the blog posts put out by internet guy Tom Critchlow. He has a very intelligent approach to the possibilities inherent in freelancing, personal blogging, and collaborative web tools. He approaches the web “as a composable, iterable, resilient thing,” and Substack doesn’t seem to think those first two words are really English, but I respect the neologistic hustle and I dig what he’s saying.
His latest post is about “The Magic of Small Databases,” and I loved it:
We have CSV files as a kind of open standard for any kind of data - possible to open it in all kinds of applications (or even edit directly with a text editor) and yet we have no standard concept for a database file that you can just open and edit in a range of applications?
The post might be meaningless to you, if you’re not the kind of person who, like me, gets really really into something AND (the AND is the important bit) will want to immediately start sharing everything they learn about that something with other people. A public hoarder, if you will. The idea of an intuitive, extensible, shareable database tool is something I didn’t realize how much I needed. I used to use Google Docs for this sort of thing; lately I’ve switched to Notion to collect and share resources, but it sometimes seems like a bad fit.
Over the last little while as I’ve experimented with trying to flit sustainably between my longterm interest in digital audiences and my relatively newer passion for history, I’ve become more and more interested in general ideas of knowledge cultures and enthusiasm as methodology, in fandom as well as non-fandom environments.
In 2005’s Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins wrote about the complex collective intelligence of a community of Survivor fans who congregated on a forum in order to process and analyze information about upcoming seasons. These fans, Jenkins argued, “were looking for ways to prolong their pleasurable engagement with a favorite program, and they were drawn toward the collaborative production and evaluation of knowledge.” As he and other fan scholars have noted, this desire for prolongation/repetition is a main condition of the fan experience. Information collecting, analysis, and sharing as as valid a way to fulfill that condition as buying merch or writing fic.
Communities like Kpop and anime fandoms use simple website builders like Carrd to construct link databases which they then promote on Twitter and TikTok; the flexibility and accessibility of Tumblr’s CMS still makes fandom masterposts easy to construct and circulate on that platform as well. But a broad and flexible tool like the one Critchlow is brainstorming would be incredibly useful as an output mode for fan obsession.
This week in polar exploration
Self-promo time! On my polar research blog this week (yes, I have one of those) I posted a deep dive into something really incredible I discovered in the archives: a love story between Harry Pennell, the navigator of Captain Scott’s ship the Terra Nova, and Edward L. Atkinson, the surgeon who was in command of the expedition during its final year after Scott died. It’s a really wonderful, bittersweet story that I feel incredibly honored to be the first person to bring to the surface.
“Antarctic Lovebirds” – the untold story of Harry Pennell & Edward Atkinson
[…] Atkinson also took Pennell to meet his own sisters who lived in Portman Square: they would all of them be departing in August for the West Indies, where Atkinson had been born, for a holiday to visit family. Pennell went all the way down to Southampton with them to see them off when they sailed, and then returned to his bustling life in London.
He still had an immense amount of work, as well as constant social engagements in the city and elsewhere, but it seems he could not get his mind off one particular subject. Near the end of the entry dated August 22, 1913, he wrote:
“Find myself counting the days till Jane returns, it is almost aggravating at times to be so violently in love with a man. It is lucky to have so many months with him now.”
This week in fandom
A celebratory launch tweet for a new book about virtual communities came across my TL, and I was intrigued by the excellent design of the book’s website and its stated summary of “uncover[ing] the fascinating history of how and where we connect to each other online.” The book is a collection of interviews with founders or major players in virtual communities, including well-known ones like Stacy Horn and Howard Rheingold, but also the proprietors of Habbo Hotel and The Palace as well as newer community leads like Trevor McFedries of DAO crew Friends With Benefits.
After clicking around a bit I learned that the book is not by a journalist or academic researcher, but by a Y-Combinator-funded founder turned Silicon Valley VC—which explains the inclusion of contemporary Web3 stuff alongside everything else. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing but it’s certainly A Perspective™. At the very least the book will be interesting, enjoyable, and a really useful resource and an accessible entry into the genre of digital histories, which as I’ve written about before I am always in favor of there being more of. The emphasis on founders is understandable in this case given the person behind the project, but if something like this that’s more user-focused turns up I’ll be a little bit more hype.
Things I read this week that I liked
Beyond the Worst-Case Scenario by Tim Kreider
Life doesn’t stop, not even in the worst case. It just keeps going, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This implacable persistence is life’s ultimate torture, as when you wish the world would be torn to its foundations by your grief, but instead it keeps going about its idiot business and making its picayune demands—but it is also its ultimate mercy. It refuses to leave you alone to suffer or mourn in stasis. It’s like an annoying friend or sibling relentlessly pestering you to laugh at a bad joke or dumb pun when all you want is to be pissed off and feel sorry for yourself forever.
The million year ice project: the quest to find the oldest ice on Earth by Jo Chandler (article is from August)
Pedro drove his panel van across the Nullarbor, and 20 years and a few twists and turns later, he’s leading Australia’s full-throttle return to deep-field Antarctic science, heading its most ambitious and costly over-snow expedition in a generation. The objective is to set up a camp in the high interior of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and drill a hole almost 3km deep. Over the next several summers, the crew will return to extract, catalogue and preserve three-metre lengths of glacial ice laid down over a million years, pushing through the moment when something cranky, dramatic and mysterious happened. Entrenched rhythms in and out of ice ages blew out, catapulting the planet into a profoundly different state.