Words are souls.

They are ourselves, extracted from our bodies, and they live forever.

After death we speak through words. It is the only way — but a potent way. Words live. They are real things in the world, and readers are not a passive audience, they are champions who take these words, our clues and promises, and with them shape the world. It is this, more than anything else, that Ghostwriter illuminates.

Words can touch you — physically alter your body — raise hairs at the nape, hollow the gut, send shivers shoulder to toe — and does this not change our understanding of presence and absence?

I have written these things and you have read them, you have felt my touch, and there is no distance between us at all.

From Abbey Fenbert’s The Pitch Meeting for Ghostwriter. I love The Toast.

Experiencing serious Article Abstraction Addiction — what started as a simple post about code documentation has become this unwieldy epic which is trying to look at the big picture of how tools and materials evolve and affect each other and how each generation of tools embeds some of the assumptions from the ones used to create it, and will probablly never get published.

At least I managed to impulsively write waterpigs.co.uk/notes/4Xu9i0 so that there’s something useful there.

I’m loving the feedback loop of using the things I build.

Wasn’t blogging much → improved typography, design → want to write more and better.

Started using my tune stream → discovered a bunch of problems → fixed them, now I can practise more effectively.

Lessons?

1. Hacking on stuff does have a wider beneficial effect on life, provided you’re making stuff which matters.
2. Stuff which matters doesn’t have to be life changing in order to matter

Twelve Blog Post Writing Tips From 2012: http://tantek.com/2013/001/b1/twelve-blog-post-writing-tips #bookmark

#blog post => #wiki content conversion algorithm: Put the conclusion first, the the rest of the post in a “Background” section