The Great Culling
I Thought RSS Made Me Smarter Than Social Media. I Was Wrong.
This might get a little nerdy. Bear with me.
Real Simple Syndication, or RSS for short, is one of the greatest inventions on the modern web. It allows one to follow a wide variety of websites that utilize RSS feeds with a dedicated application or website. Practically every website and blog has a free-to-use RSS feed, and there are a ton of paid and free feed readers to choose from.
Basically, it consolidates web content into an inbox where one can click to read new blog posts, social media posts, news posts, etc. It saves you from actually visiting all the sites you might visit on a given day into one place where everything is ready for you to read.
I opened my RSS reader of choice, Inoreader, last Wednesday morning and stared at the number.
An even 900 unread items.
That’s not a reading list. It’s a backlog. It’s a number that sits in the corner of your screen and quietly tells you that you’re already behind, that you’re missing out, that there’s always more, and that you can never, ever catch up. It was depressing.
I’ve had an RSS reader in some form or another since the Google Reader days. For a long time, I thought of it as a healthy alternative to social media. With RSS feeds, I was curating. I was choosing my sources. I was in control, unlike those poor souls getting spoon-fed crap by that nasty algorithm. I admit, I felt slightly superior about this.
However, somewhere along the way, I hit 90 feeds. Then 110. Each one had felt like a small act of curiosity. A tech blog here. A film critic there. Three different newsletter writers who covered sports. A handful of sites I liked once, in say 2019, and never really loved again. Each individual subscription was justifiable... at least at the time. As I went on, my unread items would simply accumulate, more and more each hour, whether I read any of them or not.
I’m currently sitting at 258 feeds. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all too much.
Social media, especially over the last several years, has replaced keeping up with our friends and family with an endless stream of algorithmic content. Guess what? I did it to myself. No algorithm needed. I had personally constructed my own firehose and opened it every morning, wondering why I felt wet.
As I was contemplating the ridiculous number of things to read in my feed, I realized there is no meaningful difference between a feed that overwhelms you by design, like Facebook, Instagram, and the like, and one that overwhelms you by accident because you never actually did any real curation or culling.
My RSS feeds became a blur. I found I was skimming and deleting and barely making a dent in the unread count. I was consuming and not getting anything out of it.
I needed to simplify.
In the case of my overwhelming RSS feeds, I needed subtraction. I needed to let some things go.
So, I commenced the great RSS culling.
I spent a few hours going through every feed. This was not a reorganization. I simply opened each feed up in Inoreader and asked one question for each, “Do I actually look forward to reading this? Yes or no.”
I went from 258 feeds to 135.
It felt a tiny bit scary. There was a small sense of “Fear of Missing Out,” but I plowed through. A quick first pass and I nipped 123 feeds. After a few weeks, I’m going to do this again and see if I can’t reduce the number to under 100.
The next step is curating the 500+ items I’d saved to read later. I really wanted to just delete them all and start over, but I didn’t. I’m going to tackle that at a future date.
After reducing my feed count, I archived or deleted what I had sitting in my Newsfeed. Now I had an empty inbox. My goal was not to look at my RSS feeds in the evening and see what my item number would look like in the morning.
In the morning, I saw 81 items in my Newsfeed.
I skimmed the headlines, deleted a bunch of items I didn’t care about, and in no time, the feed was down to 57.
The reduction in digital clutter and the feeling of accomplishment after going through my feed were surprising and welcome.
If you use RSS, awesome. If you are a power user like me and follow 250+ feeds, it might be time to curate and cull your feed. I’m not saying you need to cut nearly half of your feeds as I did. However, I think it’s worth asking if the feeds you are following are serving you.
I’m down to 135 feeds. I’ll reduce it even more after a few days. I’ve taken control back, and it feels better than I imagined.
Be seeing you.
The Mandalorian and Grogu Trailer
I watched the trailer twice. Then I watched it again.
Look, I know what they’re doing. They know exactly what Baby Yoda, aka Grogu, does to people. Jon Favreau has known since that first reveal in Season One of the Disney+ show. Obviously, they’re going to use it responsibly and completely without restraint. Not.
The trailer hits all the beats: cinematic, large in scope, super fun, and Star Wars-y. I am cautiously optimistic.
Din Djarin and his kid. I’m in. This is the way.
Valentine’s Day Dio
On Valentine’s Day, I was tasked with acquiring a heart-shaped pizza from Papa John’s for my step-daughter and her friend. I walked into the place to order, and they had Dio’s “Holy Diver” playing at concert-level volume. It was a scene.
I placed my order and sat down to wait while they made the pizza. The guy swinging the dough around started singing, and suffice it to say, he was not on the same level as Ronnie James Dio. It was almost amusing, but he was clearly enjoying himself immensely.
I texted some friends, knowing they’d also enjoy the situation I was in. They loved the whole karaoke-and-pizza vibe.
It was obviously a greatest hits or playlist because the next song was “Rainbow in the Dark” and he continued to add his vocal stylings to the recording.
When my pizza was ready, I told the guy at the counter that I was really enjoying the Dio and he gave me a completely blank stare. Like, he either didn’t hear me or his opinion of the music choice/singing was less than enthusiastic.
I wanted to say to him, “Do your demons, do they ever let you go? When you’ve tried, do they hide, deep inside. Is it someone that you know?”
Somehow, I don’t think he would have appreciated it.
Vanilla in my Coffee
Before Christmas, my wife, my step-daughter, and I went up to Algonquin, Illinois, to do some unique shopping. We stopped at Syrup for a late breakfast and enjoyed the food immensely. On a whim, I had the waitress add a couple of pumps of vanilla syrup to my coffee. Somewhat unsurprisingly, that little trick turned a good cup of coffee into an amazing cup.
Since then, I’ve been adding two or three pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup to my coffee mug, and I’m never, ever going to apologize for it.
I know there’s a contingent of people who treat coffee purity as a moral position and I’ve decided they can have all that. For me, the bitterness and the sweetness do something together that neither does alone. It’s just chemistry.
Also, it makes 6 am more manageable, which is worth something.
Ted Chiang
Several years ago, I read the two collections by Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation: Stories. He’s easily one of the best authors in contemporary science fiction.
Chiang has recently been a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, writing critically about technology and artificial intelligence. Key essays include “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web“ (2023), “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?“ (2023), and “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art“ (2024).
What’s surprising to me is that Chiang has published only eighteen short stories in the last thirty years, one and a half dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, and often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas about intelligence, consciousness, and the nature of God.
Here are my favorites (found via web.archive.org):
Tower of Babylon — A Bronze Age laborer joins the construction of an impossibly high structure on a mission to breach the vaults of Heaven. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette.
Story of Your Life — A talented linguist reflects on the life of her daughter as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novella and was adapted into the film Arrival.
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate — An ancient alchemist introduces a traveling merchant to a mysterious time-traveling gateway. It won the Hugo and Nebula Award for Best Novelette.
Exhalation — A non-human scholar relates the dissection of his own brain and the implications his discoveries hold for his curious clockwork universe. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects — The relationship between people and their creations is explored in the near-future world of sentient AI. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom [scroll down]- A new technology that lets people see and communicate with alternate timelines throws society into an existential crisis.
