Another independent blogging platform, promising content ownership, no paywalls, and no ads. It’s great to see so many efforts to ‘bring blogging back’. The more the merrier, I’d say, though blogging (as a publishing tool) never went away. Wordpress (both the .com and the .org versions) are as available and powerful as ever.

I’ve been using this handy little tool to preview what Dense Discovery links look like when shared on different platforms.

“BitBar lets you put the output from any script/program in your Mac OS X Menu Bar.” Install the app first, then add your own script or pick from a directory of existing plugins.

Building up a base vocabulary when you’re learning a new language takes time and repetition. Reji makes creating your own database of words easy, fast and fun.

How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division →

Hope amid a feeling of endless crises

Another recommendation by a DD reader and a title that’s on my ‘up next’ reading list. “In this powerful, uplifting plea for conscious optimism, Booker Prize-nominated novelist and activist Elif Shafak draws on her own memories and delves into the power of stories to bring us together. In the process, she reveals how listening to each other can nurture democracy, empathy and our faith in a kinder and wiser future.”

Write Sketch & →

Colourful stationery

Italian stationery maker Write Sketch & runs a lovely online shop that offers tons of unique notebooks, writing tools, desk accessories, and planners in all sorts of colours and patterns.

What a beautiful ode to gardening. I’m really enjoying pieces like this that make me re-assess my relationship to nature and what I can do to strengthen that relationship as a city dweller. “As a gardener (and I am fully aware of what a privilege it is to be one) I am directly engaged with the health of the ground beneath my feet. I know from observing trees, vegetables and cicadas that linear growth doesn’t exist. I know from experience that decay enables life, and that a healthy garden requires attention, faith, action and care. ”

Oh, I love this idea of writing as a tool to attain ‘microfame’: “Fame is hard, and it has other costs. But there’s a second alternative: be microfamous. Microfame is the best kind of fame, because it combines an easier task (be famous to fewer people) with a better outcome (be famous to the right people). ... Microfame just means your friends-of-friends have a nonzero chance of knowing who you are, and striking up a conversation with you about something mutually interesting.”

I’m working my way through more essays by The Long Now foundation and this one – along with what I shared in my intro of issue 103 – is a great entry point to their philosophy: “This is our peculiar form of selfishness, a studied disregard of the future. Our astonishing success as a technical civilisation has led us to complacency, to expect that things will probably just keep getting better. ... If we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable – gauche, uncivilised – to act in disregard of our descendants.”