whywhatsnext.com is the garden where Chris James plants thoughts for later. Society, technology, culture, ideas.*With all the pretentiousness and self-awareness that tagline and this footnote imply, respectively. ‘Is/ought’ ratio TBD.
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Kids don’t know what day of the week it is. Until one day begins an _unbroken streak_ of each day knowing what day it is. Sometimes ‘oh, it felt like Thursday’ – but to go through to the 2nd day of being wrong means your life has either fallen apart or you are doing so…
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From Usenet groups to Blogrolls to subreddits to Bluesky custom algos to Fediverse instances – we keep on discovering the concept of ‘neighborhood communities’ – and then discovering how hard it is to keep them as such when met with the frictionless mass-posting that the internet allows. We need either limited identities per person (👎)…
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I am psychologically uncomfortable with New Year’s Resolutions
in: NotesAlso posted to:I have always been dismissive and even borderline derisive of New Year’s resolutions. The two contributing factors are 1) my disdain for ritual and 2) realism/cynicism.
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I’ve done some personal projects this year, ones that only 2 years ago were impossible for me (or at least 10x harder): …
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Huh. We’ve been vibecoding whole societies for thousands of years. Soviets tried implementing enterprise top-down standards but couldn’t manage the complexity.
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At 37, late to the party, I am finally participating in public writing and posting. I just remembered that 18 years ago I had a blogspot for 2 months, so as a tactic to overcome self-consciousness and mortification, I’ll jump into the deep end with this post from a 19-year-old me in 2007: https://whywhatsnext.com/2025/06/throwback-liberte-egalite-futilite/
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This post is a “crosspost” from an old Blogspot blog I had for a couple months when I was 19. Posting online again after an 18-year hiatus – and as a tactic to overcome self-consciousness and mortification, I’ll jump into the deep end with this. Now that I have my own kids, I think some…
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Testing my WordPress -> Bluesky, Fediverse pipeline. My main frustration with figuring out how to POSSE has been lack of clear and up-to-date guides. I now greatly appreciate the onboarding UX design of the big platforms. Hoping this works from my own domain without a hitch…😮💨 #posse