2026-01-23 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Ryan, whose blog can be found at laze.net.
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Hey there, I'm Ryan. I'm originally from South Jersey (as in southern New Jersey) but live now in Northern Virginia with my wife, two kids, dog, and rabbit. I'm well out of school by this point, but I was a computer science major over half a lifetime ago. I've been a web developer for many years, though my current professional role is less well-defined for various reasons.
I've built fun little projects on the web since 1994, most of which were pretty low-key or niche. A couple got some nice acknowledgement in large media outlets or went mildly viral for a bit, but my favorites have always flown under the radar and garner just the rare "thank you!" email.
I'm passionate about genealogy/family history, the personal web (duh!), music/movies/books, radio archiving, personal preservation, running, animal rights, and trying to be less of a jerk each day.
I launched my first personal web site on my college's server in December of 1994 (only the second student to have done so), but my first blog post, of sorts, was on April 20, 1998 shortly after I'd moved to a proper web host and my own domain. I had a changelog for a while with updates about the site, but then I started a page with a changelog for my life--a blog, though the word wasn't widely used at that point.
The blog grew more important and eventually got its own name, "twist of fait accomplis." It ran through 2020, though slowed down quite a bit in the mid-2010s. Over that time, I did a lot of personal blogging (the type of stuff that would later be appropriate for social media), linkblogging, commentary, and longer essays. I had a few posts gain traction over the years, somewhat unexpectedly. Like the one where I wrote about seeing The Maury Povich Show in person and watching Maury embarrassingly misgender an audience member. It blew up when people got to the post through Google and thought that I was Maury and started telling me their life stories in the comments (often with PII). That post got over 700 comments before I had to turn them off. Sadly, Maury himself never reached out to do a collab. laze x Povich could have been great.
In 2020, I was using a Wordpress security plugin that was (ironically) compromised and ended up injecting sites I ran with malware. I got fed up with Wordpress and had already been growing weary of the state of the personal web, so I pulled my site down and replaced it with a single, unindexed web page that I would quietly update every few months.
By 2024, I started re-engaging with the IndieWeb (or whatever you want to call it) and felt a hankering to bring my site back in some way, so I did. Since then, I've fallen back in love with blogging and tinkering with my site. The current incarnation features selected posts going back to 1998 from assorted sites I've run over the years as well as a nice dose of new posts.
I've decided that in the current iteration of my site, I'm simply letting my interests guide me. Sometimes, that means I'm writing a post about an album I've been listening to, other times responding to someone else's post or writing about a project I've been working on or a topic that's been interesting me. Sometimes I just write about my experience getting older.
Some of the posts (like one I wrote about heart disease and lipoprotein(a)) I put some time into researching, which can make the process a bit slow. I've got one post about a pretty esoteric piece of train history that I've been working on-and-off for months on because I feel like there's more good info out there I need to find before I can hit publish (even though only ten people will end up reading it).
I have a Writing folder in Joplin where I keep all my drafts. It's a nice way to write, as I can switch between a rich text editor and straight markdown, and then copy the markdown directly into a micro.blog post when I'm done. I do any proofing and corrections myself before posting and inevitably even more after posting. I try not to be too precious about it, though. It's my site and though I don't want it to feel sloppy, I'm human and make mistakes. I'm at peace with the occasional typo or awkward sentence.
Like most people, I like to have a quiet space to think and write, perhaps accompanied by some non-vocal music. I do most of my writing in my home office/guest bedroom looking out the window on my small backyard. It's quite pleasant during the summer to see all the greenery, but even during the winter months, I appreciate the light that comes through. Writing on the front porch in nice weather or by the fireplace in the winter are nice alternatives when I need to mix things up.
I don't have as many "I'm going to sit down and write for 30 minutes"-type moments as I'd like. More often, it's "I can probably snag ten minutes now for a paragraph or two." I take what I can get, which can result in fragmented prose that requires a good deal of massaging before it's ready for public consumption.
I've gone through so many blogging platforms and web hosts over the years, but laze.net is currently hosted at micro.blog, which I use more as a traditional CMS than as a microblogging or POSSE service as it was intended. It's Hugo on the backend and deploys as a static site, which I like.
I'm at the point where I don't want to worry about managing deployments, updating software, configuring servers... none of that interests me at this stage. I find more joy in thinking and writing than I do in tinkering with what's running the site.
(I run other sites where I'm more involved technically, but we're talking about laze.net here.)
I've started and restarted too many blogs and where I've settled is this: I aim to keep things as simple as possible (while also appreciating a degree of flexibility) with a well-designed CMS on the back end that pushes out a static site on the other. I'm happy with the way things are now.
I love that there are so many options out there now, whether it's micro.blog, Bear, Pika, or any of the other services Manuel outlines on his blog platforms page. There's a service out there for whatever level of involvement one might want to have with their site's appearance or functionality.
I'm on the micro.blog premium plan, which is $10/month. My email is hosted at mxroute, which I subscribed to a while ago for some deal, so let's call that a buck or two a month since I host other domains' email there as well. The domain registration costs about $13/year. So, I'm able to run the site for around $15/month.
I don't monetize the site. Nothing against anyone who does with theirs, though.
Some of these folks may have been featured here before (and indeed this may be where I found them).
I have a proper blogroll, too, that I'm always adding to.
I've always got a few side projects going on. I've got one dedicated to a pet cemetery in the Nevada desert. I do a good bit of radio archiving (and wholeheartedly support unimportant archiving). I've also got a digital garden dedicated to genealogy, but it needs some tending. And a pal and I have a very slow joint blog where we post once a year, alternating years between us. Anything new (or old) that I may be up to, I try to add to my "projects" page.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 125 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Jamie Thingelstad and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible.
2026-01-22 19:20:00
Yesterday I wrote something. It was, as it often is, the result of reading something I didn’t agree with. If you have read anything on this blog before, you probably know I like to make stupid and extreme examples to illustrate the point I’m trying to make in a specific post. And I already wrote about how sometimes my examples can cause confusion.
Since it happened again, I think it’s worth reiterating a few things here. The point of an example is to be, well, an example. It’s not the core of the post. It’s there to help illustrate a point.
In case you need this spelled, no, I never in my life read the Mein Kampf the same way I never read many other books. And in case you also need this spelled, to clear the eventual confusion, I do think Hitler was bad in ways that are beyond comprehension. I visited the Risiera when I was in elementary school, and the signs of those wars are very much still visible here. But that’s beside the point.
The thing I find the most interesting, looking at that whole thread, is that it appears that almost none of the people are discussing what the post was about. Instead, I see a lot of arguments for what “favorite” means in this context. And look, I’m not a native speaker, I don’t claim to possess the most articulate vocabulary: should I have used another term to make that example? Maybe? I don’t know. It was an example.
Should I have used Harry Potter and being a transphobe rather than Mein Kampf and being a nazi? Maybe, but again, it was a goddamn example. And I even explicitly stated that, literally, the line below:
This is obviously Godwin's law in action, and I’m using an extreme example to make the point clear, but it applies to all sorts of more nuanced scenarios.
The problem I see is that there’s no winning here: if I use an extreme example, someone will get stuck on the extremeness of it, and if I use a nuanced one, someone will get stuck in the small details. But that’s precisely the point I was making in my post: rather than assume straight away, you can engage in conversation and ask questions. I repeated, ad nauseam, that my inbox is open. There’s a link to it at the bottom of every single post. If you read that post and were perplexed by it, why didn’t you engage in conversation then?
Heck, suggest me a better example if you have one. Or, I don’t know, write an answer and share your own thoughts, and add to the conversation. Isn’t the point of all this public posting to have conversations?
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2026-01-21 20:50:00
One of the things that irks me the most when it comes to human interactions, is seeing people judging other people based on moral false dichotomies: you said you enjoy some piece of creative work, that creative work is related to a creator who might have said or done something awful/despicable/debatable/whatever, therefore you either don’t care about the broader issue the creators is involved with (and that’s bad) or you support their awful/despicable/debatable world views (which is worse).
I have no doubt you have seen this happen plenty of times if you have frequented any type of space online and paid attention to discussions and debates happening in those spaces. Here’s the thing, though, the only information I really have when you say you enjoy something is that, well, you enjoy that thing. That’s it. If I decide to assume things about you and the person you are, based on that information, that’s on me.
Now, some preferences can raise eyebrows: if I tell you my favorite book is the Mein Kampf, you have every reason to be perplexed and ask follow-up questions. But if you just assumed, based on that, that I’m a Nazi sympathizer, that would be wrong. Because you don’t actually know what. This is obviously Godwin's law in action, and I’m using an extreme example to make the point clear, but it applies to all sorts of more nuanced scenarios.
Assuming something about someone else, based on your own worldview and without asking questions, is intellectually lazy. And it also prevents people who might have different views from engaging in conversation and exploring differences.
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2026-01-19 01:50:00
As I mentioned to the supporters on Ko-fi a week ago, I am currently considering the possibility of pausing the series at the end of this third year, with the last interview going live on August 28th. There are a few reasons for this.
The first reason is that running the series is starting to become more annoying and time-consuming over time. I tried to simplify my life as much as possible, recoded part of my site to make it easier to manage and publish the series, but at the end of the day, it’s a project that relies on other people to exist. And that can be a problem in the long run. The number of emails I need to send out, and the number of times I either get completely ignored or ghosted is trending upwards. I’m at the point where I can send out invitations to 10+ people, and I’m not confident that at least 1 of them will result in an actual interview being published. And that sucks.
It sucks because, since day one, I tried to find a good balance between keeping the series running smoothly and not letting guests wait for months and months to get their interview published. But I’m at the point where I can no longer do that. More than a few times, I found myself with the queue completely empty while waiting for dozens of people to get back to me. Every time someone came through in the end, and the series kept marching on week after week, but let me tell you: it’s not fun.
Also not fun is having to chase people. This series is obviously not important in the grand scheme of things, so it’s totally understandable if people forget to reply or can’t find the time to do it. But you’d be surprised by the number of people who, multiple times in a row, emailed me to tell me they were going to send me the answers “next week” only to then disappear into thin air. And I get it, I don’t have hard feelings towards all these people. Shit happens, and we all have busy lives. But it gets tiring after a while.
The other reason is a lack of momentum. If you have worked on any type of side project, you know how things go: you are full of motivation at first, and you can’t wait to get started, and then you slowly lose momentum. And I’m definitely running out of momentum. The main reason for this is that the past few months have been particularly tiring for a multitude of factors, and support for the series isn’t exactly stellar. You’d be surprised by how few people have emailed over the years to either suggest a guest or simply say something nice about it. And if you’re tempted to email me now, after having read this, please don’t.
This brings me to the final reason why I’m tempted to pause the series. I know there are lots of people out there who enjoy it and would love to see it continue. But the reality of the vast majority of projects on the web is that they’re usually either solo projects or they’re run by very small teams that more often than not end up losing momentum and shutting everything down because of a lack of support.
And nothing makes me angrier than seeing people popping up from nowhere to express their sadness when a project gets shut down. Because where the fuck were these people when the creators of these projects needed some help to keep the momentum going? And I’m talking about something as simple as sending a message to them to let them know you appreciate what they do. Sometimes that’s more than enough. And yet even that is so rare these days. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because it does, but it’s rare.
And so part of me thinks I should stop the series simply because it’s important to remind people that good things can only exist if we all collectively make them happen.
That’s the mental state I’m in right now. Again, if you feel compelled to email me now, I say redirect those good intentions somewhere else and go email someone who works on something else you enjoy and let them know you appreciate what they do.
What’s next for P&B then? For now, the series will continue as usual. There are 6 interviews ready to go at the moment, 12 people have expressed interest in participating, and I have emailed 10 more. I did consider the possibility of making it an every-other-week series rather than weekly, in order to make it less annoying to run. We’ll see what happens. Plenty of time to still think about all this.
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2026-01-18 17:10:00
The other day, a podcast episode caught my attention. It was titled “Can We Build a Better Social Network”, and it was a collaboration between Hard Fork and Search Engine. I thought it was just a discussion about the state of social networks, but then I read the description of the episode:
Over the past year, we've been working with the podcast "Search Engine" on a project that reimagines what the internet can be. What if instead of rage-baiting, a social platform incentivized friendly interaction and good-faith discussion? Today, we're bringing "Hard Fork" listeners an episode we made with the "Search Engine" team called "The Fediverse Experiment", where we end up creating our own social media platform.
A year of work? Creating a social media platform? Reimagining the internet? Sounds ambitious, and also very interesting. As you probably know, calling me a skeptic of social media would be an understatement, but I’m still very much intrigued by people who want to try different approaches, and so I started listening.
Not even 5 minutes in, the conversation was already off the rails, and they were saying things that made absolutely no sense.
«So the fediverse is a way for people to take back the internet for themselves.» I’m sorry what? «It's a way to have a identity and connect to other things that are important to you online and just not worry about having to fight through a Google algorithm or a Facebook algorithm. In fact, you could bring your own algorithm if you want to. I'm already doing such a bad job of explaining what the Fedverse is.» Ok at least they were aware that it was an awful explanation.
The first interesting bit of the podcast is at around 7 minutes, where they say something I find so infuriatingly wrong that I was about to stop listening.
The story these people told me went like this. Basically all of them, as different as they were from one another, had a shared view of what had gone wrong with our internet. The way they saw it in the nineties, even in the early two thousands, our internet had truly been an open place. Infinite websites, infinite message boards populated by all sorts of people with all sorts of values, free to live how they wanted in the little neighborhoods they'd made. If you wanted to move homes on that internet, say switch your email from Yahoo to Gmail, it was mildly annoying, but not a huge deal.
So far, so good.
But then social media arrived. To access those platforms, you usually needed a dedicated account. Once you started posting on that account, you were now in a game to build as large a following as possible.
Already, the fuck? First, even to access earlier platforms, you needed a dedicated account. Heck, you needed accounts for everything. Forums, message boards, you name it. Also, «Once you started posting on that account, you were now in a game to build as large a following as possible»? Says who? This is what social media became over time, sure, but social media didn’t start this way, and in the early days, it sure wasn’t only a matter of amassing an audience.
But the architects of the Fediverse, they had a more radical idea. The vision they held was that they could take control of social media out of the hands of the Musks and Zuckerbergs and reroute it back towards more open internet where no mogul would ever have the same kind of power they do now.
Did you spot the shift? We started with “our internet had truly been an open place”, and now we’re trying to take back control of social media. I don’t know about you, but to me, the internet ≠ social media. Wild take, I know.
Anyway, they then embark on this journey of, their words not mine, «finish building the fediverse» and I can only hope it was said jokingly. The whole episode is a wild ride if you know anything about these topics, and the very underwhelming outcome of all this is that what they built was…a Mastodon instance. And they’re not even self-hosting it. What they “built” is a Mastodon instance hosted by masto.host and, of course, since this is 2026, they had to use AI somehow to do it. Sigh…
If the episode was titled “We have set up a Mastodon server”, I’d not have bothered listening to it. That said, listening to the episode made me realize how some people have a very narrow view of what the internet is and can be from a social interaction standpoint.
Imagine a social platform that’s not controlled by a single billionaire. A platform that’s not powered by a closed-source algorithm. Usernames are unique, the underlying protocol powering it is flexible and very robust. Your profile page is infinitely customizable, and no two profiles need to look the same. It supports DMs and chats. A platform where you can post videos, photos, audio, 3D content, you name it, and where you can follow other people’s pages and be sure that no algorithm will hide that content from you. A platform that's not censored or moderated by arbitrary rules set by a Silicon Valley billionaire.
How good does that sound to you? Because to me, a platform like that looks like a dream, if only we could figure out a way to build it.
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2026-01-16 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Yancey Strickler, whose blog can be found at ystrickler.com.
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My name is Yancey Strickler. I'm a writer and entrepreneur who lives in New York City. I write about the internet, creativity, and my creative practice. My projects— cofounding Kickstarter, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, Dark Forest Collective, Artist Corporations, and Dark Forest Operating System — bridge those worlds.
I started blogging in 2003. Just before the "MP3 Blogs" era. I was a music journalist and had more opinions to share than places that would print them, so I started an online space as an outlet. The blogging community was very small then. You felt like you knew everyone else who had one.
I kept that going until Kickstarter took over my life in 2009. I no longer had the excess energy to publish — everything went into the project. When I stepped down as Kickstarter's CEO in 2017, I started blogging again. For the first five months I did it without telling anyone. No one had the URL but me. I wanted the feeling of a public writing practice with no one else looking. Eventually I started to share, and that space evolved into my blog and homepage where I've expressed thoughts ever since.
The blog in 2003 was called Get Up Stand Up. I chose The Ideaspace when it returned. This is a phrase Alan Moore uses to talk about the dimension where ideas come from that I learned about in John Higgs' amazing KLF book.
I've used pretty much every platform: Blogspot, Wordpress, Tumblr, TinyLetter, Mailchimp, Substack, and now Ghost. I'm thankful of the import/export norms that developed around blogging from the very beginning. That's what makes portability between writing homes possible.
Calling what I do a "process" gives it too much credit. All of my writing tends to start with a feeling inside of me. That feeling is often one of agitation combined with curiosity. Something I can't quite figure out or I'm having a hard time putting my finger on. Writing is how I work through that.
The first drafts of what I write come out quickly. A mix of prose, outline, even poetry. I let the wider consciousness flow through the scope of the idea before filling things out too precisely. The more you let yourself detach while doing this, the more appears that you didn't expect.
Many of my most "successful" posts, in that people gravitate towards them, are what I think of as "idea sandwiches." You bring together two ideas that are unrelated and smoosh them together. This can lead you to discover something new that people will immediately understand.
"The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet", my most-read piece to date, is an example. It came from putting two separate thoughts together: my own feelings of alienation and anxiety online, combined with the Dark Forest Theory that I was reading about in Cixin Liu's "The Dark Forest" book (part of "The Three Body Problem" trilogy) on how and why societies might hide from one another. I smushed together that feeling with that idea and something new popped out.
In terms of tools, I use a variety of things. When I'm working on a book I use Scrivener. I love the folder/doc structure of the program, the way you can compile your writing into a cohesive whole. If I need to get an idea down quickly I default to opening a Google Doc. I journal every morning in a notebook or in Obsidian. At Metalabel we created our own blogging tool/culture using Notion. We call it "metablogging": internally public blogs where we think through things together. Our collective brain built organically over time.
If I'm writing something that goes deep into a specific subject matter, I'll seek out people I respect and get their perspective. Some of my most impactful work from the past few years came when I wrote something and chose not to publicly publish it. Instead I shared a private Google Doc with specific people who I was thinking of. The results from this form of non-publishing have been remarkable. The ideas behind Metalabel, Artist Corporations, the Dark Forest OS, the Bento, and other projects happened this way. By not rushing to publish an idea in seek of validation, and instead thinking more precisely about who I was most interested in hearing from, those seeds manifested as actual projects and collaborations in the wider world rather than just ideas of them.
I like blank spaces. Empty rooms. White walls. Metalabel has a studio where I go everyday. Mostly empty. Lots of plants. Always some sort of meditative music. A very womb-like vibe. A de-dopamined zone.
This isn't 100% necessary. I wrote "What's the difference between an artist and a creator" on two Amtrak trips between NYC and DC. You don't need perfection. But having a place where I feel comfortable to explore and know I won't be interrupted is my favorite luxury as a creative person.
While writing my first book, "This Could Be Our Future", I wrote in several different spaces that were hugely helpful. At the beginning I got a Craigslist sublet for an empty apartment with no internet. I took it for a few months and covered all the walls with post-its and index cards outlining the book. A year later when I was deep in the writing mode, I borrowed a spare bedroom from an 89-year-old friend in LA and wrote there each day while hanging out with her and watching her fix up her house (true story). During another period I took a few 48 hour trips out to 29 Palms, near Joshua Tree, where I spent days doing nothing but alternating between writing and jumping in the motel pool to cool off. Being able to immerse yourself in a project like that, even if just for an afternoon, is always a gift.
These were not always easy times at all. That's part of the reason for the separation. You really have to put all of yourself into the thing to get to the layers of clarity where real wisdom lives. But to have those challenges and eventual breakthroughs so closely associated with specific places that are not your normal everyday creates a very rich, contextual memory of the process.
The blog is hosted on Ghost. Have tried lots of other places, but ultimately like the decentralized nature of Ghost combined with a strong toolkit. I use Umami for analytics, which is free and excellent. I still use Substack as another front page, and often alternate between which service I send emails from. My own personal website and blog are most important to me, but I'll sometimes find myself thirsty for network effects. Ugh. We're getting too close to my anxiety zones. Let's move on :)
Funny, but my first instinct is I wouldn't want to have readers. Of course that's not actually true, but when I think about the things that limit my sense of freedom or play from writing and publishing, asking for the audience's time most holds me back.
Because of my own relationship with email and newsletters, I've come to think of posting something (that also sends an email) as an ask or imposition on someone else's time. I'm saying to them, "Hey pay attention to me. Stop what you're doing and look at me." Which in no way is what my writing or output are about.
This is my own internal non-logic, I realize. People did sign-up. People tell me that my writing is meaningful to them. But this is something I've long carried. We even got pencils made at Metalabel that say: "Love to write. Hate to publish." I have one sitting in front of me right now.
Now this is not my advice to others, but it is where my first thought went. Because when I think about the goals of writing and blogging, it's to be free, it's to explore without limits. Audiences can be affirming for that. And it's generous and important to share whatever wisdom you experience in life. Blogging to me is a specific kind of writing — a personal practice and discipline that makes what's inward outward. Whatever it is that's in you, blogs are what comes out.
My personal feeling is that I don't like doing that if I know people are watching. I get self-conscious. I worry about bothering people. A place and attitude where I know I need to grow. Trying to do a better job of thinking about all the people that do want to hear from me rather than the people who don't.
It does cost. I have about 10,000 subscribers, which means I'm paying Ghost about $1,000 a year to maintain a site with them.
There are cheaper ways to do this. I could make a site with Wordpress or Squarespace. I could use Substack. I could go the whole Craig Mod/Robin Sloan routes and make my own universes. Probably one day when I have time I'll do this and go all the way. But I like the combo of things Ghost gives (and that they started on Kickstarter).
I don't have paid subscriptions for my writing, but in the past 18 months I did experiment with releasing my work as collectible .zip files that people could pay what they wanted for.
First was a long essay called "The Post Individual" that I'd spent several years working on. I published it on my blog and released a limited edition Director's Cut zip file containing a PDF, video file, audio file, and all my research notes on Metalabel at the same time. There have now been 750 editions of these collected, with 400 people doing it for free, and another 350 contributing more than $1,000 for the work. That has felt like a very successful experiment.
I pay for a few people's Substacks and buy lots of zines, both on Metalabel and off. I enjoy directly supporting people whose work is meaningful to me.
These days most of my attention goes to my projects, my family, or to books. But I'm always interested in Nadia Asparhouva, Jason Kottke, Ben Davis, Toby Shorin (read Toby's interview), Reggie James.
People who I think could be good to talk to: Laurel Schwulst, Kimberly Drew.
Sure here's my Soundcloud :)
This book that Josh Citarella and I made together on our creative practices is something people might like: On the Creative Life.
Antimemetics by Nadia Asparhouva, a book I edited and published with the Dark Forest Collective, is highly recommended.
A video I made that shares nine reflections from my creative career.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 125 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Leon Mika and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible.