Caring by Way of Tying Your Hands

I got in on Twitter not quite on the ground floor, but pretty close. (It’s kind of fun being in your 30s, because you can almost truly say “back in the day” unironically, but the luster of that ability hasn’t gone away.) This was back in the day, like 2009. You could text 40404 or whatever it was and send and receive tweets. In fact, in those days, I think the 140 character limit was designed so that the rest of the message’s information (its “header”, if you will) could fit in the remaining 20 characters an SMS message gave you.

I don’t think I had anything truly interesting to say, nor, really, did anybody I followed. There was a woman I knew tangentially through some long-defunct website; I think at the time she must have been in her 20s or 30s, living in England, possibly a PhD student, and a self-published author of fantasy stories that I couldn’t tell you a thing about now (except that “Icahn” was a proper name in her world; when I see the signs for Icahn Stadium out the window of an airplane near LaGuardia, I think about her). A couple years later, early in college, when I tweeted sheepishly that my strategy of “stay up much too late, work very last-minute” appeared to have gone off without too much of a hitch, as far as my finals grades were concerned, I remember her saying words to the effect of “hey, maybe that’s what works for you”.

Anyway, by the end of college, I had a sneaking little worry that I was really thinking mostly in tweets. Like, developing a take that wouldn’t fit in 140 characters sometimes felt difficult. In grad school in 2017, reflecting that looking at Twitter really was not helping me feel any better about anything going on in the world, I deleted my account. I’m not sure that I ever actually really needed to worry about the way it was shaping my thinking, but I think it’s fair to say I can think at length now.

Where do you Put your little Yops?

Similar stories happened with other forms of (essentially) blogging, like Tumblr and previous iterations of this blog. I hopped back onto Twitter during the height of the pandemic, and then left quietly in 2022 as I started to feel like I was seeing a bit too much of the uglier sides of the communinity I ran with. I’m sure many people are huge fans of X and Instagram lately, right?

There are lots of ways to choose your own social media adventure. I think lately the things I’m interested in are surprisingly “mailing list”-shaped. Unlike a blog, you can just reply to an email. Unlike a blog, the contents of an email are semi-impermanent by default. Unlike a blog (the Recurse Center community’s excellent “Blaggregator” project notwithstanding), newsletters arrive surrounded by their friends: other emails. A mailing list also allows for a little more community creation, although less so than something like a Discord server.

I want to share my little yops. Apparently it matters to me at least a little the company that the yops keep, and I want a certain amount of ownership over the yops.

Anyway so apparently I have a home for yops now.

Think of it like a trade offer: you give me one (1) email address, and I return to you many (eventually) fun (hopefully) things to read in your inbox.

What are your Yops like?

Some of them, surely a bit like this: a post that winds up telling me what it is by the writing of it. I like having these sorts of posts about culture and cultural artifacts (uhh, art pieces of varying kinds), about writing itself—I’m sure you’ll get the spirit quick. Another vibe I like is “the checkin”. A third, in a similar vein, is an idea I read on the WaniKani forums: you need to have adventures every day. I’m sure I don’t need to have a full little essay every day, but more frequently would be very welcome.

So, the first one is this post, essentially. A bit more and a bit less.