19,849 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Most Petite typewriters use T4430 or T4431 ribbon (1/4" wide or 6.50mm) which can be found on eBay and other sites. It generally requires original spools.

      These were generally carbon/plastic based ribbon.

    1. Start of an outline for a longer article on typewriter tools<br /> Suggested by reply to u/Confident_Avocado768 at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1gy25og/christmas_gift_help/


      If they've been doing restoration for a while, try to find out what they already have to avoid duplication. Anyone who's done a few machines is likely to have a lifetime supply of lubricant (it really goes a long way) and is likely to have gone well beyond cotton swabs. The sort of kit you mention would be more appropriate to someone who's recently gotten their first typewriter, not someone who has restored more than a machine or two.

      Chances are that you can up the level of their restoration tool bag with a small handful of inexpensive and easy to source options:

      • oiler bottles for solvents/cleaning
      • spring hook (push)
      • spring hook (pull)
      • spring hook (captive)
      • wiping cloths (cotton)
      • nylon, brass, and steel brushes (example; 2 or 3 sets of these are always useful)
      • high quality wool mats make a great (soft) surface for working on machines (as well as for typing on). Here's some details and a link to a well-recommended one.

      I've documented some of my own versions of these with links at https://boffosocko.com/2024/08/11/adding-to-my-typewriter-toolset/

      Slightly more expensive tools that they may not have:

      If you really want to shoot the moon and they're into the older vintage machines, you could get them a new pair of keyring pliers: http://mytypewriter.com/hello-qwerty-typewriter-keyring-pliers-kit.aspx

      You can also browse Lucas Dul's kit for other ideas via this presentation: https://virtualhermans.com/lucas-dul

      Good luck and Merry Christmas! 🪛🛠️🎅🏼🎄

    1. Useful template for emailing about shipping typewriters


      Dear TK:

      Quite often typewriters are damaged beyond repair in shipping. This is particularly true of larger/heavier typewriters like this one.

      Primary concerns are to prevent movement of the carriage and protecting the carriage knobs and the silver carriage return arm.

      Please use an elastic band(s)/rubber band(s) to permanently hold the carriage release lever to the green carriage knob(s). The carriage release lever is the silver piece just above the green knobs on either side of the typewriter carriage (the part that would move back and forth while typing.) This should allow the carriage to move freely back and forth to the right or the left and prevent any damage to the delicate escapement mechanism inside the typewriter.

      Next, to prevent damage to the carriage with respect to the heavy metal frame, use plastic wrap or bubble wrap to ensure that the carriage is roughly centered on the typewriter (or flush on the left side) and can’t move back or forth while being shipped.

      Finally, ensure appropriate amounts of packing material around the carriage, the knobs, and the return lever to prevent them from being broken or damaged in shipping. In particular, make sure there isn’t any empty space (or dead space) inside the box or the machine is guaranteed to bounce around and break. The box being dropped accidentally from even a foot or two is enough to either bend or break the heavy frame or destroy the carriage. This sort of damage is often what makes what is otherwise a fully functional typewriter a useless boat anchor.

      Thanks in advance for your kind assistance in helping this vintage machine reach me in its best condition!

      Warmest regards, name

      Video example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNISoY_7g9s Written example: https://johnlewismechanicalantiques.com/packing-instructions/

  2. Nov 2024
    1. If you love the Art Deco style of the font, look for an Olivetti MP1 ICO with Simplicitas. Same feel but in a beautiful matching machine. I picked one up for $1500 fully restored from Spain. The look and feel of it is far superior to the Royal P Vougue. I've seen dozens of Vogue for sale, only two Simplicitas.
    2. The Everest K2 occasionally comes with Simplicitas typeface. It is in the Vogue family and I prefer it to Vogue. Might be worth considering. It’s rarer than Vogue. https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/s/q7YmP7WZBN
    1. They still have some specific use cases where they aren't obsolete. For example I've worked at several law firms and every one of them had at least one office typewriter. They are super useful when you're working with older documents and want the additions to look professional and consistent. For example I once worked on a complex stock reissue where I was working with 100 year old stock certificates. Typing on them was muuuuuch faster, easier, and cleaner with a typewriter than trying to line up the old certificates in a laser printer
    1. It comesafter a couple believes they have achieved a level of financial stability.

      No Scrubs (Official HD Video) by [[TLC]]

      TLC has ensconced the idea of not getting married or even dating if a man doesn't reach a level of financial security.

    2. Poverty, by America

      the title of the book implies an ownership of poverty (by America)... there's also an implication of authorial voice as if America is a "creator", but specifically a creator of poverty as much as it is a creator of wealth

      In the framing of toxic capitalism, it's almost as if one of the things America is good at manufacturing is poverty.

      If we've outsourced most of our manufacturing sector, why not also include poverty?!?

    3. poverty is no equalizer.
    4. Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you
    5. Poverty is the constant fear that it will get even worse.
    6. poverty is instability.
    7. Poverty is pain, physical pain
    8. Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled onincarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on it goes.Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected toevery social problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing—and its persistence in American life means that millions of families aredenied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in thehistory of the world.
    9. In 2019, the medianwhite household had a net worth of $188,200, compared with $24,100 forthe median Black household. The average white household headed bysomeone with a high school diploma has more wealth than the averageBlack household headed by someone with a college degree.
    10. scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call this “the bandwidthtax.” “Being poor,” they write, “reduces a person’s cognitive capacity morethan going a full night without sleep.” When we are preoccupied bypoverty, “we have less mind to give to the rest of life.” Poverty does not justdeprive people of security and comfort; it siphons off their brainpower, too.
    11. Poverty is diminished life and personhood.
    12. There is no flag forpoor rights, after all.

      certainly better definitions, words, and labels might help this?

    13. Misery (misère), the Frenchsociologist Eugène Buret once remarked, “is poverty felt morally.”
    14. Poverty is embarrassing, shame inducing.
    15. The criminal-legal system, Weaver has written, “trains people for adistinctive and lesser kind of citizenship.”[16]
    16. The political scientist Vesla Weaverhas shown that those stopped (but not arrested) by the police are less likelyto vote.
    17. Criminal justice agencies levy steep fines and fees on the poor, oftenmaking them pay for their own prosecution and incarceration.

      I'm reminded of these issues in Salem, MA during the witch trials

    18. In the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities passed “ugly laws” banning“unsightly beggars” from public places. In the first half of the twentiethcentury, vagrancy and loitering ordinances were used to expel the poor frompark benches and street corners. Today, municipal regulations still allow thepolice to arrest the homeless for being seen in public, criminalizing abjectpoverty.
    19. Itdisappears them into jails and prisons, effectively erasing them: Theincarcerated are simply not counted in most national surveys, resulting in afalsely rosy statistical picture of American progress. Poverty measuresexclude everyone in prison and jail—not to mention those housed in psych

      wards, halfway houses, and homeless shelters—which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on.

    20. Poverty is the loss of liberty.
    21. According to the latest national data, one in eighteenpeople in the United States lives in “deep poverty,” a subterranean level ofscarcity. Take the poverty line and cut it in half: Anything below that isconsidered deep poverty. The deep poverty line in 2020 was $6,380annually for a single person and $13,100 for a family of four. That year,almost 18 million people in America survived under these conditions. TheUnited States allows a much higher proportion of its children—over 5million of them—to endure deep poverty than any of its peer nations.
    22. In the land of the free, you can drop all theway down, joining the ranks of the lumpenproletariat (literally the “raggedproletariat”).
    23. Income volatility, the extent to which paychecks grow orshrink over short periods of time, has doubled since 1970.
    24. More than3.6 million eviction filings are taped to doors or handed to occupants in anaverage year in America, which is roughly equivalent to the number offoreclosures initiated at the height of the financial crisis in 2010.

      and somehow no one seems to care about this crisis that's happening on an annual basis?!

    25. Most renting families below the poverty line now spendat least half of their income on housing, with one in four spending morethan 70 percent on rent and utility costs alone.
    26. the federalgovernment provides housing assistance to only one in four of the familieswho qualify for it.
    27. Thirtymillion Americans remain completely uninsured a decade after the passageof the Affordable Care Act.[4]
    28. poverty is about money, ofcourse, but it is also a relentless piling on of problems.

      working toward a definition of poverty and it's causes...

    29. The architect of the Official PovertyMeasure—the poverty line—was a bureaucrat working at the SocialSecurity Administration named Mollie Orshansky.

      Naturally, we will have to mention:<br /> The West Wing S3.E8 "The Indians in the Lobby"<br /> https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0745696/

    30. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson paid a visit to Appalachia and sat on therough-hewn porch of a jobless sawmill worker surrounded by children withsmall clothes and big teeth.

      President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, greet Tom Fletcher's family in Inez, Ky., in 1964. Fletcher was an unemployed saw mill worker with eight children.<br /> Bettman/Corbis via https://www.npr.org/2014/01/18/263629452/in-appalachia-poverty-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder

      Poverty Tours: <br /> - https://texasarchive.org/2010_00054

      Compare also with: - https://hypothes.is/a/ksOQmPaAEe61H7vM8pMhcg<br /> Poverty in Rural America, 1965. http://archive.org/details/0223PovertyInRuralAmerica.<br /> which was mentioned in Isenberg's White Trash (2016)

    31. But itwill also require that each of us, in our own way, become povertyabolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation andrefusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.
    32. how some lives are made small so thatothers may grow.
    33. Are we—wethe secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, thelucky—connected to all this needless suffering?
    34. In 1890, Jacob Riis wrote about “how theother half lives,” documenting the horrid conditions of New York tenementsand photographing filthy children asleep in alleyways.
    35. America’spoverty is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.
    36. This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty thanany other advanced democracy.
    37. How could there be, Iwondered, such bald scarcity amid such waste and opulence?
    38. Dadalways griped that the railroad men in town got paid more than he did. Hecould read ancient Greek, but they had a union.
    39. WHY IS THERE SO MUCH poverty in America?

      motivating question in the book

      ... why there is so much hardship in this land of abundance.

    40. We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another.—LEO TOLSTOY
    41. Poverty, by America Book Club DiscussionQuestions

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    Annotators

    1. It's the story of convenience seen everywhere. Could you clean your machine with household items like isopropyl alcohol and a Q-tip? Sure. Are mineral spirits better solvents in combination with compressed air for doing this? Definitely.

      People will tend toward the least common denominator for doing what is cheapest and easiest for their time, location, expediency, availability of materials, level of knowledge, and experience.

      The trade off may be long term life of the typewriter with respect to risk of rust, corrosion, or other potential issues.

    1. I was able to buy replacement toothed belts from an industrial seller via eBay by measurement. Actual Gates belts. Mine fit a Smith Corona electric 6TE and the part number is 3M315 but once you know the width and length it’s a matter of translating it into a Gates part number.
    1. And this is where you see how the condition of a machine comes into play when pricing is being considered. A $700 machine has had several hours of cleaning and potential reconditioning, parts, repairs, oiling, and adjusting done. At $700 and given it's age, I'd also want to ask if they've replaced the platen. Compare this with a dirty, old machine that's going to need those same hours of work, attention, parts, and new rubber, to bring it up to par and it's definitely not going to fetch the same price.

      And this is exactly what is wrong with 95% of the market: most buyers and sellers have no idea what they've got, much less the condition it's in or the work that it takes to bring these back to life for another 50-75 years. Thus they price their dirty, and rough machines at the same prices as the repair shops thinking they're going to make a mint. Apparently they're all hoping some sucker who doesn't know better will buy it.

      Remember: Dante has a special circle of hell for those who buy typewriters for pennies on the dollar and flip them on eBay without doing any work on them.

    1. Hi friends! I received a vintage teal blue SCM Smith Corona "Skyriter" typewriter. It is awesome, but it does not have the original spools. I ordered an expensive original ribbon from eBay, but it was totally dried out. Then I ordered an inexpensive "universal" (2") spool from Amazon that didn't fit in my machine. Does anyone have recommendations of new, small spool (1 5/8") ribbons that tend to be reliably inky? I am located in Canada and getting tired of paying import costs on stuff that doesn't work. Thanks in advance!

      reply to u/actualwoey at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1gqhied/recommendations_for_reliable_new_small_spool_1_58/

      You could see if a local repair shop is parting out a machine or has spools that would work for you. iirc the Corona Zephyr, Skyriter, and the later versions of the Corsair all used that smaller spool size, usually described as 1 5/8" or 1 2/3". https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-repair.html Once you've got the correct sized spools, you can wind your Amazon ribbon onto them, but you'll likely have to trim it down to fit. (2" spools usually have 16 yards of ribbon while the 1 5/8" accommodate about 12 yards.)

      If you can't come up with original metal spools to respool your 1/2" ribbon onto, you can try https://www.ribbonsunlimited.com/category-s/12779.htm which will sell you both in one go.

      Some other ribbon options: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-faq.html#q1. I've had good luck buying bulk ribbon from both Baco Ribbon and Fine Line.

      I've heard some have successfully re-juvenated old ribbon by spraying it (unspooled into a box) with WD-40 or glycerine to re-wet it and then respooling it.

    1. actual posted reply to https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1gpx62s/is_a_zettelkasten_a_largely_unknown_form_of/

      Taking too narrow a definition of zettelkasten is antithetical to the combinatorial creativity inherent in one of the zettelkasten's most important affordances.

      OP was right on track, perhaps without knowing why... I appreciate that you scratch some of the historical surface, but an apple/tomato analogy is flimsy and the family tree is a lot closer. Too often we're ignoring the history of ars excerpendi, commonplacing, waste books, summas, early encyclopedias, etc. from the broad swath of intellectual history. What we now call a zettelkasten evolved very closely out of all these traditions. It's definitely not something that Luhmann suddenly invented one morning while lounging in the bath.

      Stroll back a bit into the history to see what folks like Pliny the Elder, Konrad Gessner, Theodor Zwinger, Laurentius Beyerlink, or even the Brothers Grimm were doing centuries back and you'll realize it's all closer to a wide variety of heirloom apples and a modern Gala or Fuji. They were all broadly using zettelkasten methods in their work. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are more like sons and daughters, or viewed in other ways, maybe even parents to the zettelkasten. Almost everyone using them has different means and methods because their needs and goals are all different.

      If you dig a bit you'll find fascinating tidbits like Samuel Hartlib describing early versions of "cut and paste" in 1641: “Zwinger made his excerpta by being using [sic] of old books and tearing whole leaves out of them, otherwise it had beene impossible to have written so much if every thing should have beene written or copied out.” (Talk about the collector's fallacy turned on its head!) As nice as Obsidian's new Web Clipper is this month, it's just another tool in a long line of tools that all do the same thing for much the same reasons.

      Ignoring these contributions and their closeness means that you won't be able to take advantage of the various affordances all these methods in your own slip box, whichever form it takes. How will you ever evolve it into the paper machine that students a century hence are copying and mimicking and pontificating about in their generation's version of Reddit? Why couldn't a person's slip box have some flavor of an evolving encyclopedia? Maybe it's closer to Adler's Syntopicon? Maybe something different altogether for their particular use?

      Those interested in expanding their practice might try some of the following for more details:

      • Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.
      • Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.
      • Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. 1st ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

      For deeper dives on methods, try: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

      cc: u/JasperMcGee u/dasduvish u/Quack_quack_22

    2. As far as ZK goes, you have an interesting connection your going on. But its like saying apples are like tomatoes. Like, okay they are both red, juicy, and technically fruit. But I would not consider them a substitute for each other. Savory and sweetness and all that. Different uses

      reply to u/Hugglebuns at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1gpx62s/is_a_zettelkasten_a_largely_unknown_form_of/lwtoopw/:

      I appreciate that you scratch some of the historical surface, but your apple/tomato analogy is flimsy and the family tree is a lot closer. Too often we're ignoring the history of ars excerpendi, commonplacing, waste books, summas, and early encyclopedias from the broad swath of intellectual history. What we now call a zettelkasten evolved very closely out of all these traditions. It's definitely not something that Luhmann suddenly invented one morning while lounging in the bath.

      Stroll back a bit into the history to see what folks like Pliny the Elder, Konrad Gessner, Theodor Zwinger, Laurentius Beyerlink, or even the Brothers Grimm were doing centuries back and you'll realize it's all closer to a wide variety of heirloom apples and a modern Gala or Fuji. They were all broadly using zettelkasten methods in their work. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are more like sons and daughters, or viewed in other ways, maybe even parents to the zettelkasten. Almost everyone using them has different means and methods because their needs and goals are all different.

      If you dig a bit you'll find fascinating tidbits like Samuel Hartlib describing early versions of "cut and paste" in 1641: “Zwinger made his excerpta by being using [sic] of old books and tearing whole leaves out of them, otherwise it had beene impossible to have written so much if every thing should have beene written or copied out.” As nice as Obsidian's new Web Clipper is this month, it's just another tool in a long line of tools that all do the same thing for much the same reasons.

      Ignoring these contributions and their closeness means that you won't be able to take advantage of the various affordances all these methods presented in your own slip box, whichever form it takes. How will you ever evolve it into the paper machine that students a century hence are copying and mimicking and pontificating about in their version of Reddit? Why couldn't a person's slip box have some flavor of an encyclopedia? Maybe it's closer to Adler's Syntopicon? Maybe something different all together for their particular use?

      Try some of the following for more details: <br /> - Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.<br /> - Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.<br /> - Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. 1st ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

      For deeper dives on methods, try: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

      cc: u/JasperMcGee u/dasduvish u/Quack_quack_22

    1. Thanks to David Ring N1EA, you can download a mill font for Windows computers
    2. A "mill" is distinguished from normal typewriters by having all caps (9 point, sans serif) and having numbers "1" and "slashed 0" on the top row. Note: Portable models were typically used elsewhere than in the radio room, but still have the same key/type layout.
    1. Gerren HotRod TypewriterCoChris Aldrich this is the mat I use. It's $15 and it's soaked up 5 years of everything I do and it still looks like the day I bought it.

      Gerren of the HotRod Typewriter Co. uses a 17" x 13.5" Wool Pressing mat from the Zomoneti Store on Amazon for his typewriter repair set up https://amzn.to/3CkQS4V

    1. Going to visit Savannah Georgia next month. Anyone have any suggestions for things to do/see?

      iirc, the second oldest synagogue in America is there. It's a gorgeous bit of gothic architecture that's worth a visit even if you're not a member of the tribe. The historic district is where most of the old school charm and entertainment are. Great for just walking around and seeing what you see. If you've not seen it, watch Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to give you a flavor of some of the city, which is a central character in the movie. I'd recommend restaurants, but all the ones I liked were southern comfort food and incredibly unlikely to be kosher. I wish I had been using FourSquare/Swarm when I went in 2006 or I could give you the entire itinerary and hotels. I stayed in a different bed and breakfast every night in the historic district which wasn't bad since they were all within walking distance of each other. Definitely an experience.

      Reply to David Shanske at https://david.shanske.com/2024/10/09/7986/

    1. After using my newspaper.com acct it appears that 79 or so you see the correction key feature and the model often called "Report Electric Correction." By 1983 ish, at least in the dealer ads that show up, they have dropped it and are full steam onto the electronic version of the Report/er.
    2. Anything with "correction" (ie: originally used with white/black super-messy "correction" ribbons, and has the bichrome label "black, silver, white or white/red") will be very late 70's through the 80's. This *could* be 1987, and I think it probably is, because I know that correction started about 1978-9 for Brother, so it probably started around then for other manufacturers too. If someone knew for sure when those awful black/white ribbons were introduced *exactly*. you could pin it down more precisely, but right now, that's as good as we've got.
    1. X Is a White-Supremacist Site by [[Charlie Warzel]]

    2. The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.
    3. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.
    4. According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.
    5. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.
    1. In Appalachia, Poverty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder by [[Pam Fessler]] on 2014-01-18

    2. "We're probably one of the last few groups that it's still politically correct to make fun of," Wright says. "It's still OK to tell, you know, hillbilly, redneck jokes."
    3. Owen Wright of the Christian Appalachian Project, one of the non-profits that helps Slone, says that outside perception can hurt the self-esteem of the people who live in Appalachia.
    4. Many people here say they're rich in things that aren't included in any official measure of poverty. Things like family and faith. So they're understandably a bit bitter about how they're often seen from the outside.

      In America, where image is everything...

    1. The Poverty Tours (1964)<br /> https://texasarchive.org/2010_00054

      Sort of stunning that this film about the poverty tours starts out focused on an airplane and airline travel which would have been a terrific extravagance at the time.

    1. reality check from bluseky and Nostr perspectives

      While these may be somewhat useful, they're not significant enough examples in the broader space to provide the sort of data, evidence, support (or lack thereof) which I think you might be looking for....

    2. People do not actually spend a lot of time browsing junk content,

      The vast majority of people browsing social media streams via the web are doing just this: spending a lot of time browsing junk content.

      While much of this "junk content" is for entertainment or some means of mental and/or emotional health, at root it becomes the opiate of the masses.

    3. the notes you make about it as you curate it (which tells the AI exactly what you find useful about it)

      My notes may give some indication about what I find useful about a thing, but certainly not exactly or even all of what I find useful.

    4. Which is why you need to agree, as a group, on a collaborative tool everyone is comfortable with (TL:DR; it doesn’t exist for groups larger than 4), and then co-create on one platform while chatting on the other.
    5. ensuring everyone has a say in defining its rules is essential for any village to thrive.

      What about inter-village warfare? With diverging village interests from the center, how does one manage long-term survivorship?

    6. And if your tastes don’t match the village’s, move to another village.

      Easy to say, but the work involved in finding the right village and moving there is far from inconsequential. This friction is the biggest pain point.

    7. For AI4Communities to work

      What is the ultimate goal for AI4Communities? What is it supposed to do? Is it to build knowledge (only)? What space does it have for phatic communication, and why? What does it create at the end of the day? Where is it going to?

    8. the model collapse paper now suggests that the training data created by well-managed communities could be the new currency of collective intelligence.
    9. “Very Small Online Platforms (VSOPs)”

      purposeful cognac reference?

    10. “after greed and short-sightedness floods the commons with low-grade AI content… well-managed online communities of actual human beings [may be] the only place able to provide the sort of data tomorrow’s LLMs will need”

      The value spoken of here is that of slowly building up (evolving) directed knowledge over time. The community evolves links using work and coherence into actionable information/knowledge whereas AI currently don't have an idea of leadership or direction into which to take that knowledge, so they're just creating more related information which is interpreted as "adjacent noise". Choosing a path and building off of it to create direction is where the promise lies. Of course some paths may wither and die, but the community will manage that whereas the AI would indiscriminately keep building in all directions without the value of demise within the system.

    1. Zettelkasten Numbering is so Damn Confusing (I Think I Can Help) by [[Zettelkasten Blah Blah Blah]]

      He doesn't say it explicitly, but the Luhmann-artig zettelkasten numbers are only addresses. They don't represent hierarchies. Doing this allows a bottom up organization to emerge.

      You can later create hub notes or outlines that create a "correct" or hierarchical order. This is where things become top down.

      He points out that Scheper's recommendations for using the numbering for academic disciplines and putting cards in specific orders (giving them negative numbers, etc.) is a counter-productive habit with respect to Luhmann-artig practice.

    1. Director Rian Johnson Breaks Down a Scene from 'Knives Out' by [[Vanity Fair]]


      ᔥ Tainmere — 10/19/2024 8:33 AM at https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/979886299785863178/1297221163868491878

      oh no, the marginalia rabbit hole goes deeper (second image comes from this video, it's ryan johnson explaining how they shot that scene with two cameras https://youtu.be/69GjaVWeGQM. It's came to my mind as a possible answer to the question because - to me - it really feels like it's the concept of marginalia, but applied to video)

    1. I have to add that my own search traffic has been steadily increasing ever since I moved to an indie website setup.
    2. Google AI Overviews is the main culprit and poses an existential threat to publishers.
    3. I had hoped to somewhat emulate the success of ex-Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky and his Substack serialization project, Hardcore Software (“personal stories and lessons from inside the rise and fall of the PC revolution”). Sinofsky’s project was an inspiration for mine, but I don’t think I’ve reached his level in terms of reader comments and reshares.

      possibly due to author platform?

    4. Speaking of Substack, I count my migration off that platform and onto an indie online publishing system as one of the successes of this project.
    5. One of the quotes I will use to open the paperback book is this, from Herman Melville's poem 'Clarel': Come, thou who makest such hot haste To forge the future—weigh the past.
    1. Essay Idea: Moving beyond collecting: how to begin turning your bookmarks into something useful

    2. So look for this blog to become something like Cory Doctorow’s Memex Method, a commonplace book as a public database — though I prefer to call it the Mathom-house Method. There will be more posts here, I think. But for heaven’s sake if you don’t like, or don’t agree with, or otherwise disapprove of something I quote, don’t send me an email about it.

      I always thought that Alan Jacobs blogging practice was a method of commonplacing and digital publishing all rolled up into one. Nice to see him lay out some of his thinking and method here.

    3. So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.  — J. R. R. Tolkien, “Concerning Hobbits”
    1. He even kept “indexes to indexes,” as Robert D. Richardson describes in his wonderful biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire: Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks… Emerson spent a good deal of time methodically copying and recopying journal material, indexing, alphabetizing indexes, and eventually making indexes of indexes. When he came to write a lecture, he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the talk or lecture.
    2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who encouraged his friend Thoreau to start a journal and the man who had the most success with the journal > lecture > essay > book method, kept elaborate notebooks just for indexing his other notebooks.
    3. Emerson’s creative process is so fascinating, Richardson wrote a wonderful slim volume about it, called First We Read, Then We Write.

      This might be fruitful to read.

    1. “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,” Emerson said. “The discerning will read…only the authentic utterances of the oracle—all the rest he rejects.”
    2. Emerson is, “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

      source?

    3. Emerson liked to identify four classes of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly-bag, and the Golconda. The hourglass takes nothing in. The sponge holds on to nothing but a little dirt and sediment. The jelly-bag doesn’t recognize good stuff, but holds on to worthless stuff. And the Golconda (a rich mine) keeps only the pure gems.

      Where is the origin of this reading analogy?

    1. Its roots, though, don’t just lie in explicitly Christian tradition. In fact, it’s possible to trace the origins of the American prosperity gospel to the tradition of New Thought, a nineteenth-century spiritual movement popular with decidedly unorthodox thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. Practitioners of New Thought, not all of whom identified as Christian, generally held the divinity of the individual human being and the priority of mind over matter. In other words, if you could correctly channel your mental energy, you could harness its material results. New Thought, also known as the “mind cure,” took many forms: from interest in the occult to splinter-Christian denominations like Christian Science to the development of the “talking cure” at the root of psychotherapy. The upshot of New Thought, though, was the quintessentially American idea that the individual was responsible for his or her own happiness, health, and situation in life, and that applying mental energy in the appropriate direction was sufficient to cure any ills.
    1. Surprisingly, the American author who is quoted most in the OED isnot Mark Twain or Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe, but rather EdwardH. Knight, a patent lawyer and expert in mechanics who wrote the AmericanMechanical Dictionary and The Practical Dictionary of Mechanics. Knight isthe seventy-fourth-most cited author in the Dictionary, quoted morefrequently than Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Eliot or Ralph Waldo Emerson(who comes in at 116, the next-most quoted American).
    1. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.”

      original source?

    1. @chrisaldrich Do you have some results from your online sessions? New insights from reading Doto's book?

      Reply to @Edmund https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/21907/#Comment_21907

      Doto's book is the best and tightest yet for explaining both how to implement a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten as well as why along with the affordances certain elements provide. He does a particularly good job of providing clear and straightforward definitions which have a muddy nature in some of the online spaces, which tends to cause issues for people new to the practice. Sadly, for me, there isn't much new insight due to the amount of experience and research I bring to the enterprise.

      I do like that Doto puts at least some emphasis on why one might want to use alphanumerics even in digital spaces, an idea which has broadly been sidelined in most contexts for lack of experience or concrete affordances for why one might do it.

      The other area he addresses, which most elide and the balance gloss over at best, is that of the discussion of using the zettelkasten for output. Though he touches on some particular methods and scaffolding, most of it is limited to suggestions based on his own experience rather than a broader set of structures and practices. This is probably the biggest area for potential expansion and examples I'd like to see, especially as I'm reading through Eustace Miles' How to Prepare Essays, Lectures, Articles, Books, Speeches and Letters, with Hints on Writing for the Press (London: Rivingtons, 1905).

      I could have had some more material in chapter 3 which has some fascinating, but still evolving work. Ideas like interstitial journaling and some of the related productivity methods are interesting, but Doto only barely scratches the surface on some of these techniques and methods which go beyond the traditional "zettelkasten space", but which certainly fall in his broader framing of "system for writing" promise.

      Doto's "triangle of creativity", a discussion of proximal feedback, has close parallels of Adler and Hutchins' idea of "The Great Conversation" (1952), which many are likely to miss.

      For those who missed out, Dan Allosso has posted video from the sessions at https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/ Sadly missing, unless you're in the book club, are some generally lively side chat discussions as the primary video discussion was proceeding. The sessions had a breadth of experiences from the new to the old hands as well as from students to teachers and everywhere in between.

    1. Read A System for Writing by Bob Doto by [[Ton Zijlstra]] – Interdependent Thoughts

    2. Interstitial journaling, a term and suggestion from Tony Stubblebine , is about writing down what you did after a task, how it felt or went, plus what you intend to do next.

      Interstitial journaling predates and may have induced Ryder Carroll's suggestion of using "=" for emotion in Bullet Journaling.

      See: https://hypothes.is/a/l12OgFD7Ee-LjAevth_Piw in the piece Carroll mentions interstitial journaling.

    3. Doto’s described system provides a ratchet effect to his writing. Such ratcheting I have and experience in my note making and every day usage of my notes, but not yet in my writing. I will incorporate that in my own practice.
    4. Writers block sounds hard to overcome, but who ever has conversation block?
    1. How to Spot Emerging Note Clusters Without Alphanumeric Note Numbering? by [[Ton Zijlstra]] in Interdependent Thoughts

      I recall Bob Doto had a video at some point in which he used the local graph to show relationships to find bunches of notes for potentially writing pieces or articles as indicated in Tons' article.

      One of the biggest issues with digital note taking tools is that they don't make it easy to see and identify chains of notes which might make for articles, chapters, or books.

      Surely there must be some way to calculate neighborhoods of notes from a topological perspective? Perhaps if one imposed a measure on the space to create relative distances of notes?

    1. Why the name "CLOG?" Aren't there enough catchy acronyms? Yes! Agreed. We don't need more acronyms. Originally, I used the generic term "log," but quickly realized that whenever I wanted to search for my logs, I would inevitably bring up notes related to "blogs," "logging," "logical," "logrolling," "slog," "flog," and basically any word ending in "-ology." It was a mess. Since I am not a wooden shoe maker, my vault is relatively free of "clog" derivatives.

      Naming things with respect to future search functionality and capabilities can be useful.

    2. The term "CLOG" is short for both "catalog" and "creative log."
    1. I’m always negotiating the relationship between micro.blog and my big blog, but I’m getting closer to a system in which micro.blog is a box of delights and the big blog is a Memex. Gonna try to stick with that model.

      reply to @ayjay @annie at https://micro.blog/ayjay/48571448

      @ayjay I've long presumed you were digitally commonplacing by means of your websites, so thanks for laying out some of your specific current thoughts on the process.

      ​@Annie I've been collecting examples of bloggers who are using their personal websites as commonplaces, zettelkasten, and "thought spaces" at https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book. If you're interested, you'll also find examples and details to explore in my own digital commonplace. "Thought spaces" is an interesting entry point.

      Doctorow goes through more of his process in which he's saving both his "box of delights" and the refashioning of them into longer pieces in "20 years a blogger". In his case it's (now) all done on Pluralistic and syndicated out from there, in much the same way @dave has done for years.

    1. These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.

      Doctorow analogizes his reading and writing in the same sort of chemistry/statistical mechanics method as I have in the past.

    2. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them. Writing for an audience keeps me honest.
    3. Peter “peterme” Merholz coined the term “blog” as a playful contraction of “web-log” — like a ship’s log in which hardy adventurers upon the chaotic virtual seas could record their journeys.
    4. The auctorial equivalent to the artist’s sketchbook is the “commonplace book,”
    5. There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.
    1. Do not "dunk wash" your machine. Though some may debate, it is our opinion that this actually does more harm than good. Rusted parts will flash-rust, grime cannot be removed without violent agitation and no matter how thorough you are, you will never get all the water out.
    2. Mineral spirits are still the best for cleaning non-painted metal parts. Magic in a bottle, this is! Be careful to avoid getting it on painted surfaces, rubber, and/or plastic bits.
    1. If you've been dreaming of plunging into this profession, consider the success of Paul Lundy, who took over Bremerton Office Machine Company from nonagenarian Bob Montgomery; or Antony Valoppi, creator of Portland's Type Space, which combines a traditional typewriter shop with a cultural center; or Trevor Brumfield, a young man in his late twenties who has quickly built Dayton's TB Writers Plus into a busy enterprise.