Weekly Assemblage for 2025 Week 03

Weekly Whaaa…?

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 03 is the week of 2025-01-13/2025-01-19.

Ghosting of the Week

People I follow on social media started widely discussing Substack’s Nazi problems anew this week. I’m going to do a more substantial dive into the problems & the alternatives in another post—but the clear winner in terms of newsletter-based alternatives has been Ghost.

It has been really encouraging to see how many people have been thinking about ways to move themselves away from the sturm und drang and churn of social media toward spaces that they can control better, both as readers and writers!

If you’ve recently started a newsletter or website—or if you’ve begun posting anew—please let me know! There are many ways to participate in what might be called the cozy web, the personal web, the IndieWeb, the lowercase indie web, etc., and I’d love to read whatever you might be making.

The Extended Pomodoro Technique

Sometimes I rediscover and readopt techniques that have worked for me in the past, and although I can’t recall just why or how, I was lead to re-acquaint myself with what I’d call the extended Pomodoro Technique this week.

In addition to timing myself working in bursts (what many people consider the Pomodoro Technique), I also have started listing the tasks that I’m aiming to complete in a day, then tracking how many timed bursts those selected tasks take me.

Me being me, this is mostly happening in my daily bullet-journal style notes in Obsidian—but I’m also using and enjoying Llama Life for the timer part of this. It syncs to my phone and has a web view that plays extremely nicely with Rectangle, the window position manager I adore for Macintosh.

The Twilight Zone

I’ve always enjoyed The Twilight Zone, and my admiration for Rod Serling grows whenever I learn something new about him and his ethos. Up until now, however, I’ve only ever watched The Twilight Zone randomly, such as being assigned an episode as part of a film / television / media course, having a friend want to watch, or just landing on it while flipping channels (back when channel-flipping was Very Much A Thing).

After recently concluding our ViewingAlpha of Star Trek, my spouse and I have been looking for something with vaguely similar vibes. Although The Twilight Zone is far more episodic than later Star Trek series, it has a very similar “logic puzzle” to the original.

So we’re embarking on a first watch of all of the original series of The Twilight Zone. If I come up with a clever name, I’ll add it retroactively—and I’ll post about (or at least mention) any episode highlight as we come across them.

I’m impressed by how rapidly it hit its stride, with some of the most famous episodes happening within the first 10—including time travel, a deal with the literal Devil, a nuclear apocalypse, a convict living on a remote asteroid, an android, and various encounters with fate. As a slice of late 1950s America, an evolutionary moment within television, an overview of sci-fi/fantasy/horror, and legal/criminal/psychological/social discourses, it’s a profoundly rich series already!

Kudos

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