We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Why I Stopped Paying Attention to Feedburner Subscriber Numbers
Reading Time
Readers of this blog probably haven’t noticed, but the little chicklet/button for Feedburner disappeared from my sidebar about a month ago. The Twitter one, however, has stayed fixed in place (mostly so people can easily find my account; the feeds for my blog are linked above the Twitter gizmo). There’s a good reason, too.
One of the things that I have noticed since the disappearance of Google Reader is the unreliability of Feedburner subscriber numbers. They’ve never been terribly reliable, for sure, but the death of GR resulted in a massive drop off in subscriber numbers for my blog, and, it seems, a whole lot of weird fluctuations throughout the blogosphere. For example, in a matter of hours (yesterday), SF Signal’s subscriber numbers went from 19k, then down to 4k, then up to nearly 21k, then down to 15k, and so on. For a site like SF Signal, I suppose those drops are meaningless, since the popularity of the blog can be easily measured via other means (a vibrant comments section
and site views). For a blog like mine, where I babble about things I like, there isn’t a whole lot of that kind of activity, so measuring popularity relies on subscriber numbers.
But watching the numbers for my blog plummet by hundreds after the death of GR made me rather anxious, and after a time, I became aware that I had put too much attention into how many people read my blog, and not enough attention elsewhere. And since Feedburner, thus far, hasn’t demonstrated the ability to catch numbers from cloud-based RSS readers (like Feedly), I also realized that there isn’t a point even paying attention to the numbers anymore. People read my blog. They are now commenting more (in part, I think, because I took all of the barriers away). Whether I have 400 subscribers, 800, 100, 12, or 47.5, I think there’s something toxic about fixating on subscriber numbers, in part because that means energy I could spend on other things (you know, like blogging interesting things) is spent worrying about where my subscribers went and how I can get them back. I’ve never spent a lot of energy on the numbers, but I’ve come to the conclusion that any time spent thinking about these things is stupid.
So I deleted the chicklet. Feedburner is now merely a RSS dispensary for this blog. And that’s what it’s going to be for the time being. There’s no point sitting around worrying about numbers. If people hate my blog, then they hate my blog because I suck. I trust that someone will tell me as much at some point. If they love my blog, they’ll comment or lurk forever (I will hunt down all of you lurkers eventually). But it’s time to move on now. It’s time to just blog about shit I like.
It’s time to stop caring about the numbers.
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
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2025: The Year of Something
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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