Eugen Rochko has spent this year perfecting federated social media in Mastodon – his open source project. We spoke to him just hours before it became a global tech conversation.

The following was sent as part of a personal TinyLetter I've just begun in the hopes of rejuvenating my ability to tell stories.

A man with a 6th-grade knowledge of moderate politics would plea for your reflection on what it really means to be your Commander-in-Chief.

In the midst of arranging Feebles for print, I stumbled upon an author and “book designer” engaged in launching a community for self-published, independent writers. I'm not going to specify names because I have no interest in shitting on his company, nor “what it stands for.” I don't want to shit for you at all, actually, just note a few still-underrealized realities about the sheer ludicrousness of the word business as it stands. Let's say you've got some manuscripts you've been sitting on for a few years, and you're introduced to the concept of self-publishing by an evermore earnestly-curious man on the radio named Audie one day. He and his interviewee (the owner of a self-publishing service) seem to say, curiously, that because an author's profit-per-unit can potentially be “four to five times more” than if he/she is published traditionally, self-publishing has now shed completely its aura of desperate amateurism.