A year ago, Ton launched a project to stop buying ebooks from Amazon; a few weeks ago he provided an update. 

I thought of Ton’s efforts when, in How to fix a Kit Kat clock from Mike Monteiro, I read this:

A few days ago I was sitting in the local dogpark when the ever-popular topic of San Francisco’s downtown came up. Apparently another big store had shuttered. And the Old Men of the Dogpark™ had much to say about “the state of things” including crime sprees and other make-believe bullshit that was keeping people from doing their shopping downtown. As they’re saying this I’m watching various Amazon trucks circle the park. Finally I asked one of them when he’d last bought something at Amazon.

“Last night.”

“Where would you have bought that before Amazon?”

“Downtown.”

My parallel efforts to Ton’s breaking up with Amazon for ebooks was attempting to break up with Amazon completely, for both digital and analog goods.

On the digital side, I’m most of the way there, having reduced my dependence on Amazon Web Services to a small trickle of files on S3.

On the analog side (he logs into Amazon.ca and checks his recent orders), my last order was on June 23, 2025, for a package of “stainless steel #10 button head screw caps” that I was unable to find a local source for. Before that, in 2025, my orders were for:

• “Adjustable Steel Pilaster Shelf Clip Support” (to mount shelves in the print shop; no local source).
• “Furniture Sliders Chair Leg Floor Protectors” (to protect the floors in our dining from from getting scratched; also no local source).
• “Self Seal Rigid Mailer Stay Flat Cardboard Mailers” (to mail out orders from the web store; we’re down to two stationery stores in Charlottetown, and neither had anything similar).

That was it: four orders, about $110 in total. I’ve gone cold turkey since.

I’ve avoided Amazon a number of ways: buying online products directly from manufacturers, buying locally as much as I can, reducing discretionary consumption. Maybe the biggest help to this: I deleted the Amazon mobile app from my phone.

“I’ll just order it from Amazon” has now largely disappeared as a reflex action. It feels good.

See also, Daily Drawings, from Kate Bingaman-Burt.

A highlight of Fridays is the arrival of the latest People and Blogs post in my feedreader. These weekly interviews from Manuel Moreale are a reminder that blogging is still very much alive; the people I meet each week through the feed are fascinating.

This week’s interview is with Yancey Strickler, and I was inspired by his answer to the question “What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?”:

Calling what I do a “process” gives it too much credit. All of my writing tends to start with a feeling inside of me. That feeling is often one of agitation combined with curiosity. Something I can’t quite figure out or I’m having a hard time putting my finger on. Writing is how I work through that.

That’s as close as anyone’s ever come to describing my “creative process.”

I followed that stirring of “agitation combined with curiosity” this morning to create¹ an OPML file of the blogs of all past People and Blogs interviewees.

Here’s the result, people-and-blogs.opml, an OPML file that you can import into your feedreader to automagically subscribe to all of the blogs.

———

<span class="archive-site">ystrickler.com</span>

<span class="archive-name">Yancey Strickler</span>

As I write, my mother is in the other room on a Zoom call with a group of longtime friends in Ontario. They know each other from a Burlington YMCA morning fitness class; when the pandemic hit, they moved the class to Zoom, and when Mom moved east to PEI, they just kept on going. They still work out together on Zoom, all these years later, but they spend just as much time chatting. Three mornings a week, it’s 40 minutes of social connection that Mom’s been able to maintain.

When, three months after Catherine died, in January of 2020, COVID hit, regular in-person grief support groups had no way of meeting. Fortunately, the need outweighed any resistance to embracing moving online, and I was able to join the monthly grief support group hosted by the Palliative Care Centre and Hospice PEI.

Through the same period, with my immediate family bunkered down at homes in California, Ontario, and Quebec, we instituted Friday Family Zoom: every Friday night we’d all gather on Zoom and play charades or pictionary, or make a craft together, or do a scavanger hunt. During the darkest loniliness it was a powerful weekly antidote.

Throughout all of this, I was continuing to work remotely with Yankee Publishing in New Hampshire every day, and Zoom was our way of collaborating at a distance. We had a Friday afternoon scrum every week, and, on top of any work utility, that too was an important social anchor for me.

A year later, when I was starting to feel like I needed help at the intersection of grief and loneliness, I got a reference from a social worker to Your Life Design, a PEI-based, online-only counselling service. I found myself a counsellor, and our work together, on Zoom, was transformative.

A few months after that, when Olivia came out, I needed support, and found my way to Transforming Family, an LA-based family support group. After an intake call with a fellow parent of a trans child, I started attending Zoom meetings—TF, like Mom’s fitness class, had also pivoted to Zoom—and, some months later, I became the facilitator of a monthly support group for the parents of neurodiverse trans children, a group I host still.

This past Saturday, Lisa and I joined 400-odd other people from around the world for a Zoom art class with Danny Gregory. In recent years I’ve attended several similar Zoom classes, on topics like letterpress printing in the round.

I’ve attended Zoom folk music concerts, co-hosted a Zoom unconference, set up Zoom fountain pen meetings, given  a Zoom lecture at UPEI, and attended a Zoom Publications Committee meeting while walking around the Experimental Farm.

Somewhere in there, we all got “Zoom fatigue,” to the point where, for many, the very hint that something would happen “on Zoom” was anathema. For L., and my distance niblings, “Zoom School” was an unmitigated disaster, and that only served to strengthen the general resistance.

But Zoom changed the world. As a low-barrier-to-entry, cross-platform, free (for 40 minutes) videoconferencing app that, almost all the time, just works, Zoom was one of the (few) lasting gifts that COVID gave us. 

Let’s not forget that.

Wes Anderson in conversation with The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison, in An Editor’s Burial:

WES: Well, I’ve had an apartment in Paris for I don’t know how many years. I’ve reverse emigrated. And in Paris, any time I walk down a street I don’t know well, it’s like going to the movies. It’s just entertaining. There’s also a sort of isolation living abroad, which can be good or it can be bad. It can be lonely, certainly. But you’re also always on a kind of adventure, which can be inspiring.

SUSAN: Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s founding editor, was famous for saying that the history of New York is always written by out-of-towners. When you’re out of your element, or in another country, you have a different perspective. It’s as if a pilot light is always on.

WES: Yes! The pilot light is always on.

SUSAN: In a foreign country, even just going into a hardware store can be like going to a museum.

WES: Buying a light bulb.

Jane Siberry is such an interesting singer-songwriter. I’ve been a fan for more than 40 years, writing about her here for more than 25, and during that time she’s released albums in myriad genres, with myriad collaborators, changed her name to Issa (and back), reinvented her website myriad times, reinvented the way she distributes her music myriad times.

It seems naive to write that she’s “back,” as she never left. But she does have a new album in the offing, In the Thicket of our Own Unconsciousness, with two tracks available for free advance download, Bountiful Beautiful and Bailout. 

if one of us is in darkness less bright our light shall be — if one of us is suffering then none of us are free…

The music is interesting in a whole new way, but it also includes longtime collaborators David Ramsden and Rebecca Jenkins, and Rebecca Campbell, whose voices dovetail so beautifully with hers.

In a specific way, it was the Isle of Skye that led me to Whidbey island.

So begins Islands, from Peter Miller, a poingant story that dovetails nicely with Kevin Kelly’s How Will the Miracle Happen Today?

There has been an outcropping of the Shetland Islands in my life of late: Lisa’s midway through reading Storm Pegs, and I fell down a NorthLink Ferries rabbit hole, including learning about the Islander Card, which residents can use to secure a ferry discount.

In the lovely essay How Will the Miracle Happen Today?, Kevin Kelly writes:

But the strangeness of “kindees” is harder to explain. A kindee is what you turn into when you are kinded. Curiously, being a kindee is an unpracticed virtue. Hardly anyone hitchhikes any more, which is a shame because it encourages the habit of generosity from drivers, and it nurtures the grace of gratitude and patience of being kinded from hikers. But the stance of receiving a gift – of being kinded — is important for everyone, not just travelers. Many people resist being kinded unless they are in dire life-threatening need. But a kindee needs to accept gifts more easily. Since I have had so much practice as a kindee, I have some pointers on how it is unleashed.

This resonates with me on many levels. 

I was a regular hitchhiker, for a time, in my mid-twenties. It was often frustrating, sometimes meant being cold and wet for an awfully long time. But I loved it. I loved being the “kindee,” the feeling of mutual trust. And, more than once, I vowed that I would always pick up hitchhikers when the opportunity presented (a vow I have not universally lived up to, but have lived up to more than most).

More generally, Kelly is right that we are not practiced nor particulary good, as a rule, at being kindees. 

“Not being a burden” is held as a high virtue. 

“I don’t want to put you out,” is a frequent response to an offer of help.

We can get better at this, and, when we get better, it improves the lot of both the giver and the receiver (and the lot of the world in general).

Kelly finishes his essay with:

Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering on the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping in the cold wind, and says, “How will the miracle happen today?”

Here here.

I’ve written about publishing a list of all the blog I read regularly via my RSS reader before (2003, 2005, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2025). I’d left that publishing fallow for awhile, and my public list had grown out of date.

I have fired up the process I developed in 2019 to export my list as an OPML file, and added some automation to make it all happen automatically, removing the need for me to remember to do it manually.

Heretofore you can find my blogroll at ruk.ca/opml. It’s readable by both humans and machines, so even if you’re not RSS-literate, feel free to browse.

For those who might want to emulate my process, the FreshRSS-related key is this command:

./cli/export-opml-for-user.php --user [username]

I take the resulting exported OPML, do a little cleanup via a PHP script, and move the file into place. It happens once a day, so the file stays fresh.

Lisa describes the process of learning to “get loose” in her art, inspired by an online course we took together yesterday, Pen & Paint - Paint & Pen, from Danny Gregory.

Longtime readers may recall that I first encountered Gregory nine years ago, courtesy of an advertorial reference from the great Dan Misener.

Few ads have enhanced my life more than that one.

For comparison, here are the fish I sketched yesterday:

From top to bottom: monk fish, orange roughy, big mouth bass, perch. 

My favourite was the big mouth bass: it got me to try a new “wet on wet” approach to watercolour, and I was intrigued by the unexpected result.

Seven years ago I wired up my RSS reader, FreshRSS, so that every time I “favourites” a post, it would create a record of that here on this blog.

I took a detour from FreshRSS for several years, but I’m back using it again, and I’ve updated the code that wires this all up to work with Drupal 10. As a result, you can now visit:

• Favourites (a regular old web page, updated every time I favourite something).
• Favourites RSS (an RSS feed of my favourites).

The key to all of this is low friction: to favourite something I just click on the ★ icon in Reeder, my desktop and mobile RSS reader, and everything else happens automatically.