A collision of a few different threads all hitting at once:
1) My newsletter limps along; I find it hard to make the time to turn out something I'm happy with. (Specifically: my energy and focus on a particular idea are almost always directly mismatched with the time available I have where I try to make myself write letters.)
2) During the pandemic in particular, I've spent too much time in conversation with myself and not enough with other people. This leads to too many open mental loops and is not good for my brain more generally.
3) Warren Ellis has been ticking over his Morning Computer updates again. Whatever your view of him, I've always found his practices and intentionality interesting and informative.
4) I came across these 15 rules for blogging, the structure of which resonated with me.
5) Twitter was already a Bad Place, but it's not getting any better anytime soon.
Which leads me to this: a microblog. Somewhere for me to put out smaller, singular posts with, honestly, less filter and polish. That's key for me -- the further I get into editing or second-guessing what to put, the greater the activation energy to actually getting any posts out, ever. So I leave filtering as an exercise for the reader.
There's an image that's stuck with me from years ago: A street on which I used to live had a sort of mini-fair where all the shops and cafés set up outside on the street for the day. It gave the strange sense that the shops had been everted -- that someone had opened up the doors and shaken them out onto the street. Tables, little ovens, bar furniture that really shouldn't be seen in daylight.
Sometimes, I need to turn my brain inside out and shake it. That's not always going to be advisable or pretty, but it's certainly An Image.
This, as ever, is more for me than anyone else, though I'm just arrogant enough to think that there will be something that somebody finds worth reading in each of these.