Ben Ward @benward@mastodon.cloud
Pinned toot
While we're playing with the new toys, and before this gets any bigger, I've jumped over to @ben
Please follow my redirect, new friends.
Hi friends. One #finaltoot that this account has moved to @ben. ❤️
While we're playing with the new toys, and before this gets any bigger, I've jumped over to @ben
Please follow my redirect, new friends.
Ben Ward
boosted
Here’s a newsletter Kottke put out earlier this year with reader blog recommendations.
https://mailchi.mp/kottke/blogging-is-not-dead-edition-2575912502?e=91fc09faed
Ben Ward
boosted
@benward Jarrett Fuller mixes pointers to his podcast episodes with good ol' fashioned blogging: http://jarrettfuller.blog/
Ben Ward
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@benward I love the blog of M. John Harrison: https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/ It's great if you know his writing and… maybe even better if you don't? Embrace the weirdness.
(Relatedly, I’m really going to try and post at https://benward.uk again. Soon.)
Like a handful of people I’ve tried to rejoin the RSS world. Who’s writing neat stuff right now? Is it you? What’re you enjoying reading? I’m back to enjoying @mathowie and @kottkefeed, but I want to know about the new blogs that just passed me by.
Me: I wish I had Doves’ classic “Lost Souls” on Vinyl.
… I mean I still wish I had it. 😔
For the four years we’ve been doing radio Simon and I have been promising each other a vinyl-only special. It’s finally happening next week. Just spent the afternoon playing records putting it together. Found I had a ridiculous Castle Face *book* of flex pressings that includes Mikal Cronin and Ty Segall doing Bowie’s “Fame.” So we’re playing that, obviously.
(Also yes, I did have to remove the platter on my turntable in order to play this ridiculous thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Ben Ward
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A man is at a friend's funeral. After the proceedings, he approaches the widow and asks if she minds if he says a word. "No, of course not," she replies. So he grabs a glass and taps a spoon against it to get everyone's attention, and when the muttering dies down, he clears his throat and speaks: "Plethora." He puts the glass back down and everyone continues their conversations. The widow turns to him, with a tear in her eye. "Thank you," she says.
"It means a lot."
Hello new friends! Another thing about me is that every week I co-host a radio show here in SF. It's on a wonderful community radio station called BFF.FM and streams from https://bff.fm/@eclectic-kettle. We start with guitars, end with things that go bleep, and @SimonBatistoni@twitter.com and I talk a fair amount of plausibly entertaining nonsense in between.
If you enjouy radio, music, or community arts, tune in! The station has a load of amazing local output and would love your support. ❤️
I’m definitely exhausted of Twitter at present. I think the strange thing about restoring Mastodon to the mix though is that it feels like it’s lowered my engagement in all of it. Set me thinking about addiction, endorphins and inert behaviour. There’s an opportunity to start over. What does it mean to do that? What’s the opportunity in doing so? Is there some realisation here of the value of ephemerality in digital space that The Teens all figured out with Snapchat?
As part of our new policy of New Doing The Old Things, I figured I should blow the dust off my blog, which I hadn't een run on this laptop yet. It was running a pre-v1.0 version of Jekyll so you can imagine how well this is going.
Maybe partly on Twitter it seemed more appealing because there was a large class of “impersonal” accounts operating on the network and seeding news from outside: News organisations, officials, etc. Quoting commentary from such entities feels different from picking apart an individual.
I wonder if there should have been more distinction between “posts” and “comments” — could have distinguished between sharing original thoughts (roots of conversation) vs people’s direct interpersonal discussion.
It’s very interesting to catch up on the Mastodon attitude toward “Quoting” (see: Cage the Mastodon, and @lexi here: https://octodon.social/@Lexi/100530964468843799.) When I was at Twitter I definitely favoured it: A device to add context on *why* you were sharing something, and a way to start new discussions on a tangent. Encouraging the posting of counter viewpoints also seemed positive, since Twitter has a big echo-chamber dynamic.
It’s refreshing to see mechanics like this reconsidered.
#intro Hi, I’m Ben (he/him)
I’m a lapsed software engineer and product manager in San Francisco. I’ve worked on developer communities, the Fire Eagle location service, and spent seven years at Twitter, until last Dec.
I’ve been taking time off to explore the US, celebrate living here for a decade, and spend more time on my radio show that streams on bff.fm/@eclectic-kettle (Tuesday 8pm Pacific.) I also do the website.
I host board game nights and I’ve been working on designing a card game.
Reheated Indian food for dinner. It was good. But there was only about ⅔ the amount I wanted to eat. So now I’m sat here, unsatisfied. If I order more, I have to eat Indian food all weekend. Will I still be still hungry when it arrives? These are the big questions.
One of my recent ambitions since taking time off has been to develop a game. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, making lots of notes and today I finally sat down to start playtesting some of the mechanics. For now it’s constructed out of Bang! and Ticket to Ride cards, which is… cost effective.
