Just a quick note, a link to self, a shared bookmark.
One of the challenges of drifting away from the academic institutions is the reduced access to academic work. This has impacted the material I’m able to draw on for research and reporting. So when a good open access database is available, such as the one provided by UC Santa Barbara, it’s nice to keep track of it, and in this case, share.
We’ll squirrel this away under the Research page for now, and add more updates to that as we go.
Was struggling a bit with the creativity over the holidays, which spilled over into the new year and the seemingly unending flood of bad news. As you can tell by the existence of this post, I’ve managed to get things moving a bit. The first step was turning off the firehose, and you can follow that link to read about some constructive actions to take towards your media health.
The second step is to keep creating. I mentioned my struggle in passing and was pointed toward this interview with Heather Cox Richardson via The National Press Club. The relevant bit is at the 57-minute mark (spoilers) which this clip below should link directly to:
(Link here as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDX0hxyYcJw ).
The gist of her advice is to “behave with joy”, as a means of resistance against an authoritarian government. “Do the things that matter to you, and that you can bring to the people around you.” “We can meet the moment, and as scholars, be honest”, and that by doing the best (scholarly) work we can, we contribute back to humanity.
Which seems like a lot to ask from a blog and media channels that mostly focus on the intersection of sci-fi and technology, but it’s what we’re doing. Maybe our project is a little bit wider in scope than we initially thought.
But the big takeaway, at least for me, is that moment of reflection that I like what we’re doing here, and I enjoy doing the podcast, the blog, the newsletter, the videos (about which I hope to show you more soon!) and the various other bits we have going on here.
So, after a brief period of stasis, we’ll get back to the things that bring us joy, and find the joy in sharing them with you as well. See ya soon!
And with yesterday’s post, we’ve caught up with our backlog of ImplausiPod episodes and transcripts here on the site. You can still find them over at the dedicated site, as well as through most* podcast apps.
We’ll continue posting those episodes here now, as they air, as well as on the Indie version of the site. We’re still in the process of transitioning the blog and feeds there. It’s moving along, but still not quite ready for prime time. That’s part of the indie charm, right?
*: We’re not on Spotify, iHeartMusic, or Amazon / Audible for reasons. Mostly because I don’t want to be. I know that limits reach a bit, but that’s okay.
Looks like the last episode we published here was at the start of 2024, with Episode 25 – Echanger. We’ll take the time to link one episode a day, getting caught up, starting from then.
The indie version is also getting up to speed. Not quite to the point where I’m publishing simultaneously to both, but the archives are coming along nicely. We have full episodes of the newsletter available, and we’re working on a couple different feeds too. I’m excited to get those going. 🙂
The big job, of course, will be moving all the previous blog posts over. Still looking at a way to automate that effectively, as it’s way easier than doing that by hand.
I’m also going to try and post some of the content that feeds the sections of the newsletter here first, things like the Current Reading and Multi-Melting sections, as well as podcast episodes and other feed info. We’ll still have something unique for each issue, so feel free to subscribe here.
The Implausi.blog is hosted on a WordPress site, and let’s be honest, we’re not really using all the functionality of it. We’re pretty much plain text with a few nice elements. It grinds my gears a little bit that the site is as slow to load as it is, with ridiculous file-sizes, and requires javascript to show a basic page.
So with the recent turmoil in the WordPress community, I started looking for options, and one of those is right here. Apparently I had the option of running a subdomain on the site, so currently indie.implausi.blog is available, as a very lite version of this site. (Raw HTML, baby! We’ll add some basic CSS in the near future).
We’re moving some of the basics over, not all at once, as described on the landing page there. The blog will mostly be raw xml, with podcast full text available as we go.
Over time, we may switch the main channel to a non-WP version entirely, but right now we’re doing some parallel development. See you there (or here)!