Today started off in a rather normal sort of way. Two shots of espresso were made and were delightful. Sunrise happened outside the view of my window. My Saturday morning routine of watching a bit of the WAN show happened without interruption. I took a few moments to review my top 5 things from yesterday and it is somewhat satisfying to review and consider the flow of things from day to day. Being a reflective builder is an important part of the process. My argument represented as a hypothesis would be that on any given day we can accomplish 5 blocks of time building good things. To me that is a reasonable way to look at building and creating. Some people for sure are able to work in a different way creating more or less blocks of production. Generally I’m looking at reasonably hard things that are broken into achievable blocks of things that can be done. I cannot code a whole application in a single block of time. That task could be broken into a reasonable set of blocks and I could certainly work on completing that effort.
Right now I’m working to finish up block 142 of the Lindahl Letter Substack publication. I’m seriously considering closing the newsletter at 150 weeks of writing effort. I might let it go till 156 weeks which would be a complete 3 years of content generation. I had considered switching to a pay model and delivering more in depth independent research each week. Each week right now I provide a brief research note on the topic I’m interested in researching. It’s really a sharing of what I’m interested in and that is the sole and direct focus of the writing enterprise on that one. I have already moved to sharing the same content on my weblog each week at the same time. That got me thinking about where people consume content these days.
Within academic spaces content has always been harder to access than it should have been with paywalls, high prices, and subscriptions. Journals are great for keeping and storing ideas shared between academics who subscribe and read the journal. It’s a community of interest and it works generally for that academic community. People outside that circle wanting access might need to go to a library or decide if they want to pay for the journal. It’s a limiting circle of content management. Publishing a series of research notes is probably essentially ephemeral in nature. While in the abstract the internet never forgets we have reached the point where it’s really large and probably not backed up. That ephemeral nature will mean that the weekly posts will probably at some point vanish. I had considered that reality from the start of the endeavor and at the end of each year I pooled that year’s Substack content into a book. Right now two of those ponderous tomes of thought sit next to me on the shelf.
Those efforts will probably stay in publication longer than anything stored on the internet at large. I keep my web hosting paid for 5 years out so in theory that is the longest horizon of serving up that content on the open internet. I’m digging into some deeper topics today and that is interesting for a Saturday morning.