2026-01-07                             dispatches from helix
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

   I've been doing this Gemini / Gopher / .plan thing for five
   years now. It's been a surprisingly resilient habit -- every
   few weeks. If you want to have five years of writing you
   just need to write regularly, and then keep doing that for
   five years, I guess.

   There's probably a small lesson to be learned from the fact
   that I gave up Blogging (with a capital B) a few years ago
   because of a mixture of not feeling my posts were good
   enough combined with an ick feeling that I was writing to
   "get" something from it. (External praise, job offers,
   whatever).

   Around the same time I started writing on Gemini
   (gemlog.blue and circumlunar.space before town). Around 2023
   I started writing week notes on a domain unrelated to my
   usual things.

=> https://ts.binch.top
 > ts.binch.top

   I actually enjoy writing quite a lot when its for me, or my
   friends, or people who I can reasonably expect to care about
   or have some interest in my actual life. I don't care about
   writing articles, which is kind-of what I ended up with on
   my old blog. Articles are for people arriving from a search
   engine or (latterly) an LLM hoovering up knowledge. I'd make
   a bad journalist.

   I would like to rethink my relationship to "articles" -- I
   do learn some interesting stuff in my jobs and hobbies that
   deserves to be shared, but that I don't feel needs an
   announcement.

   I'd like to start thinking of these things as a little gifts
   to the outside world, to the web. That's what writing about
   stuff that you know and care about _can_ be.