Russell Davies

Here we go again

I've had a pleasant afternoon of digital pottering. Sorting and tidying, prompted by the death of typepad.

Phil has very kindly helped me get an archive of eggbaconchipsandbeans and agoodplaceforacupofteaandathink online. Those links should (hopefully) work post-typepadxit.

And I've set up a blog on Ghost. It's possible (if the good people of the Ghost Concierge service help me out) that this blog will be archived over there. If not I'll do another archive like those above.

Here's the new blog. There is, of course, RSS.

And then since I had an archive of the whole thing Dan told me to upload it to NotebookLM and make a fake podcast. I wasn't sure I could bear that so I tried the video version instead. It might be even worse, the AI sycophancy is in full effect. I could only listen to about a minute but, well, it's interesting, so here it is. Let me know if it says anything offensive.

(I'm pretty sure I've written something about how annoying I find it when people use 'evolve' to mean 'change' and the LLM does that in the opening sentence so that says something...)

*I guess I'll copy this to the Ghost version too.

 

End of an era

It seems a bit useless to write it here but this blog will soon be gone. Typepad have announced that they're closing down/going away/screwed. I need to decide what to do. As does Ben. We're probably the last two typepad users.

The export tools don't seem to work very well. But I'm hoping my Web 1.0 pals will be able to help with that and, if they can't, the Wayback Machine seems to have everything.

But I need to decide what to do. I think I'd like to keep blogging so I'll probably move to Ghost. But should I try and bring the archives with me? Is it worth it? Dunno.

In the hope that it's useful, if and when I work out how to do that I'll post it here for people in a similar predicament.

Signs for the times

Alex is right about the general standard of signs, but I hadn't thought about how much it sometimes matters. She's right. Sometimes it's more than a petty annoyance.

Maybe we should try this sort of thing.

Essays After Eighty

I'm not sure why but I've started making daily videos on TikTok in the way I used to do daily blogging over here. Some of them are based on books, it's sort of turning into a thing.

I've putting them in other places too, because it feels precarious to rely on a single platform. Here are some of the things about Donald Hall's Essays After Eighty.

Interesting 2026 - RSS first

hello RSS massive

You're the first to know. Interesting 2026 will be on the 20th of May.

The First 100 tickets are £30. After that they'll be £40.

Get tickets here.

This is a good listen

No coffee morning on Wednesday

I think this is just for Jez's info. But, still.

Notes on substack

I have a few friends with Substack newsletters. Mostly writers trying to find a way to make a living as the rest of their various industries collapse. They're mostly not in this little bubble - where substack's Nazi / underpant gnomes problems are well understood. They're mostly just pleased that substack makes newsletters easy and there appears to be a well-paved path to making some money.

Personally, I suspect they're going to end up in trouble. It will inevitably fall apart and they'll have built another house on sand. But this can be a hard case to make, there's nothing as comfy-looking as a port in a storm. And I don't want to lecture anyone, it's very hard to be on the internet without compromise. Maybe we should all have shamerolls below our blogrolls. Mine wouldn't be pretty.

But, in case it's useful, I'm going to keep this post as a place to collect evidence/arguments.

AMC: Substack did not see that coming (Thanks Phil)

AMC: Pushing up Nazis

Colin Nagy: We’ve gone from some high minded Jane Jacobs INTERNET discourse to Nazi notifications in mere weeks!

Anil Dash: Don't call it a substack (Thanks again Phil)

And, the clue is in the URL leavesubstsack (Thanks Tom)