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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Dreaming of Uncle Hugo’s
Reading Time
Bookstores bookstores bookstores! All book dorks love them, and yet not enough of us have easy access to them. Up here in Bemidji, the closest thing we have to a bookstore is the used games and DVD store, which has a fairly meh book collection and a business name that doesn’t really fit what it is, and the comic book store, which, as you’d guess, mostly carries comics and has a fairly small but reasonably OK book collection (the comics collection is awesome, though). Beyond that, the next best thing is a trip to Park Rapids for Beagle & Wolf or to Brainerd for Emily’s or CatTale’s, all decent small bookstores. Otherwise, you gotta go to Duluth or Minneapolis for a really big bookstore experience!
Since I’m stuck up here in Bemidji during a pandemic, I’ve started reminiscing about some of my favorite bookstores in Minnesota — of which they are many. When it comes right down to it, though, there is one bookstore that stands above them all: Uncle Hugo’s!
Pretty much every geek in Minnesota knows about Uncle Hugo’s and it’s sister shop, Uncle Edgar’s. At least, they should. My friend Larry did not, which required him to take a six month geek training course. But Larry is an unusual geek because most of his best friends are the ghosts of ancient Vikings. Needless to say, he came out of his first Uncle Hugo’s experience with a large bag of books, a grin on his face, and enough ethereal joy in his heart to light a sun.
What is it that makes Uncle Hugo’s so great? Let’s recount the ways, shall we?
Truly, Uncle Hugo’s is in the upper tier of great bookstores. If you’re ever down in Minneapolis, you have to check it out (not to mention all the other great bookstores down there; Minnie has so much going for it). And if you can’t go, they have an AbeBooks store you can buy from!
Now I throw this back at you! What is one of your favorite bookstores?
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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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