2026-07-14 21:10:00
Matt asked me a question recently about the end of my People and Blogs run. The question was if I always thought I was going to hand it over at some point, and it’s an interesting question worth expanding on, which is why I told him I was going to write a post about it, rather than simply answering via email.
I started and ended more online projects than I can remember at this point. I bought a dozen domain names, coded way too many sites, only to have them all inevitably bite the dust, sometimes months later, sometimes years later. But I don’t think I ever started a project with a set deadline in mind. All the projects were open-ended, always.
Back in September 2021, I posted about the shutting down of my thegallery.io, a site I ran for almost 7 years, and in that post, I wrote
Once the passion is gone, it is gone. There's no point in dragging things until you reach some random date in the future.
When I started People and Blogs, the plan was to run it for a single year: 52 interviews, that was the plan. But then the end arrived, and people enjoyed the series, so I kept going. But at some point, I crossed the imaginary line that separates doing something because I enjoy it, and doing something because other people enjoy it. If you do something long enough, you almost always end up inevitably crossing that line. There are exceptions—there are always exceptions—but that’s what my experience taught me.
And it’s weird how the process of realising that something is done works. Because at first I was simply carried forward by the momentum, by the established routines. I was sending emails, posting updates, and scheduling interviews. But the moment I considered the possibility of stopping, it was almost as if a seed got planted in the depths of my brain. This process kinda reminds me of the plot of the movie Inception. And once that seed was planted, it’s incredibly hard to eliminate. And it’s almost as if deep down I already knew the right thing to do but was too busy dealing with the routine to realise it.
So to answer the original question, no, I didn’t know from the get go I was going to pass the series to someone else. But a part of me enjoys this process of seeing projects changing hands. I was happy to receive blogroll.org from Ray, and I was equally as happy to hand over peopleandblogs.com to Zach. It’s one of the many good qualities of this corner of the web I love to inhabit.
The lesson I learned this time around is that projects need an endpoint! I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I inevitably start something new in a few years from now.
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2026-07-11 01:40:00
With the 150th interview of People and Blogs now live, it’s officially time to downsize my online presence again. My digital life follows a somewhat regular rhythm and I alternate through phases of expansion, where I buy domain names, ship new projects, start newsletters, and chase a million ideas, and phases of contraction, where everything happens in reverse: domains are left to expire, projects are archived, newsletters are deleted, services are cancelled.
And my recent decoupling from the web was the beginning of one of these downsizing phases. The Dealgorithmed newsletter has been deleted; the domain is not going to be renewed, and it will expire later in the year. My From the Summit newsletter and my personal newsletter have been merged into a single new newsletter called “Thoughts and Walks”. If you were already subscribed to one of my newsletters, you can manage your preferences from the Buttondown’s Portal and decide what type of content you want to receive. I'll write a more in depth post about my plans for the newsletter.
The only project that has survived the cut—aside from this blog—is blogroll.org, and that is not going anywhere anytime soon because there are things I want to add to that site. But more on that at a later time. Decluttering is fun! It's a nice mental exercise to delete stuff and become lighter again.
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2026-07-09 19:10:00
I was down in Sesto a few days ago for Apparat’s concert. The new album is great, attending the event with family and a few friends was a very enjoyable experience, and the atmosphere was very blue!
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2026-07-02 00:10:00
This morning Mr Overkill sent me the link to the AI Compass test, which I guess is a spin on the famous political compass test. It’s a bunch of questions—27? 29? 15? Who knows!—and at the end you get your location on the map and your archetype, from a list of 30. It’s harmless fun, and I found the results so far to be fairly accurate. If you end up taking the quiz, let me know if your result was accurate. Or even better, blog about it!
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2026-06-29 12:55:00
I stopped tracking books using apps or services, even though there are good ones out there. I have two little shelves in my bedroom, on the left I put books I want to read, on the right the ones I have read. The plan was to empty the one on the right halfway through the year and post a picture here on the site to remember what I have read. This is that picture, and those are the books I have read so far in 2026.
A lot of Terzani, a lot of stories about death and suffering, about misery and tough times, but also a lot of stories about nature and mountains. The fiction-to-non-fiction ratio is probably 3:1, which is unusual for me, considering I read non-fiction almost exclusively for most of my life, but that’s fine.
Look forward to fill up the shelf again and post a second picture here on the site somewhere in late December.
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2026-06-29 01:55:00
I’m sitting on a rock, in the middle of a forest. On my right, not even 30cm away from me, a dog panting like crazy, because even though it’s almost 8pm, it’s still way too warm for his liking. To be fair, anything above freezing probably fits that description. Behind me, the ruins of a church that was, and no longer is. A stone arch and a few chunks of walls are all that’s left. I don’t know what happened to this church. I could probably look it up, but I don’t need to do it. Knowing would not add anything to my experience of sitting here.
Is it important to know how things end? Is it important to know when something has ended? Some things are clearly easy to know when they’re done: I have a bottle of water that’s almost empty, and the end is gonna come pretty fast. Other things are a lot trickier. When does a life end? I remember reading that the medical definition of death keeps evolving as our technology progresses and we’re able to bring people back to life. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to upload our brains to the matrix and “live” forever, who knows.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of things lately, as my mind wandered around, stressed out by a series of things not worth discussing. And thinking about the end of myself is weirdly comforting. The classic this too shall pass. Everything is transitory after all, and life itself is impermanent. We’re here now, we might be gone tomorrow.
And when gone, what’s left? Maybe just ruins, traces of our past, books left on a bookshelf, photos in a box, a blog online perhaps, destined to be washed away quickly like everything else in the digital world.
If you’re wondering where I’m going with this post, I’m afraid the answer is nowhere. I’m just sitting on a rock, in the middle of nowhere, thinking about death as a way to figure out how to go through life.
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