Applied Divinity Studies: How Substack Became Milquetoast. How often have you gone back to read an old edition of your favorite newsletter? Why bother when you’ll have a new one tomorrow? Has anything you’ve read recently stuck with you? And if so, has it stuck in your heart like your first kiss, or merely to your tongue, not poor or foul, spicy or sweet, but bland, boring, milquetoast. (more)

Rosie Sherry: Building a community digital garden. A digital garden for me is about moving away from the idea of a blog (or even a newsletter like this 😬), where the posts are displayed chronologically and with a focus on perfection. It becomes more about moving towards a curated resource where you, the owner, tries to surface what you think is most important (more)

Hunter Walk: Why a Paid Newsletter Won’t Be Enough Money for Most Writers (And That’s Fine): The Multi-SKU Creator. (more)

Robin Sloan: Advice for newsletter-ers. Here’s my advice: A personal email newsletter ought to be divided into seasons, just like a TV show. (more)

Adam Keesling: Substack Rhymes With Medium. (more)

Clio Chang: The Substackerati. Will Substack replicate the patterns of marginalization found across the media industry, or will it help people locked out of the dominant media sphere to flourish? To a large extent, the answer depends on whether or not Substack’s founders believe they’re in the publishing business. When we spoke, they were adamant that Substack is a platform, not a media company. (more)

Steven Levy: The Tenuous Promise of the Substack Dream. (more)

Sean Monahan: Why are public thinkers flocking to Substack? (more)

Historical Fiction by Robert Anton Wilson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Historical_Illuminatus_Chronicles (more)

Stewart Brand: We are as gods and might as well get good at it. Part of the Whole Earth manifesto. (more)

Thirty7 Signals made some big changes to their Splash Page which significantly increased their conversions (A-B Test). The long form page had a 37.5% increase in net signups compared to the original. Oddly, by the time they posted this info, they had undone the biggest change (running everything together into a single "Long Sales Letter")! I Commented. (more)

Mark Granovetter Model (more)

Roguelike (or rogue-like) is a subgenre of role-playing games characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character. Most roguelikes are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. (more)

A role-playing game (RPG and sometimes roleplaying game[1][2]) is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a Narrative, either through literal acting or through a process of structured decision-making or character development.[3] Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines.[4] (more)

A comedian or comic is a person who seeks to entertain an audience by making them laugh. This might be through jokes or amusing situations, or acting foolish (as in slapstick) or employing prop comedy. A comedian who addresses an audience directly is called a stand-up comedian. A popular saying, variously quoted but generally attributed to Ed Wynn,[1] is, "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny", which draws a distinction between how much of the comedy can be attributed to verbal content and how much to acting and persona. Since the 1980s, a new wave of comedy, called alternative comedy, has grown in popularity with its more offbeat and experimental style. This normally involves more experiential, or observational reporting, e.g. Alexei Sayle, Daniel Tosh and Malcolm Hardee. As far as content is concerned, comedians such as Tommy Tiernan, Des Bishop, Kevin Hart and Joan Rivers draw on their background to poke fun at themselves, while others such as Jon Stewart, and Ben Elton have very strong political and cultural undertones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian (more)

In the context of his new ADD (Adolescent Demo Division) comic book, Douglas Rushkoff identifies the Reality Hacker potential. I've always been interested in gaming from the perspective of the playability of the world we're living in. Most people don't seem to recognize that we're living in a constructed world, that a whole lot of the things we take for granted as the given circumstances of nature are actually very specific creations of people, of man. And they're playable. The economy can be played with, the media can be played with. These are not laws of nature written in stone. These are very virtual worlds. We're living on top of operating systems, however much they try to hide that from us. You know, central currency (fiat money) is an operating system. It was developed in the 1200-1300s by specific people with specific goals. Now, we go around thinking this economy is some natural thing, this economy is the way all economies work, and it's not. Even this idea of free market -- we don't live in a free market. The extent to which this market is free is the extent to which we agree to play by the rules that were set in place by the people who invented the market that we're living in right now. Gamers, it seemed to me, especially good gamers, are people who have the ability to see beneath the rules to the actual 'who wrote this game' and 'what do they want this game to actually do.' How is this game rigged, and who rigged it, and why? (Game Playing)

Values in Action (that's a framing from the Authentic Happiness folks - they have an assessment) (more)

Discord is a proprietary freeware VoIP application and digital distribution platform designed for video gaming communities, that specializes in text, image, video and audio communication between users in a chat channel. Discord runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and in web browsers. As of 21 July 2019, there are over 250 million unique users of the software. Video-game messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software) Not open-source!

Converting PrivateWiki content from PikiPiki To WikiFlux, after coding WikiFlux For PrivateWiki. Similar to Converting Moinmoin Text To Markdown. (more)

Theory Z is a name for various theories of human motivation built on Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y. Theories X, Y and various versions of Z have been used in human resource management, organizational behavior, organizational communication and organizational development. (more)