The personal site

Andy Baio and Gina Trapani recently expressed the sentiment of what I’m trying to do with this site–I’m making a place where I can write and share short things that either don’t belong on other platforms or shouldn’t only exist on other platforms. They are also reviving their sites to share and writing more personal short-form stuff.

Andy said:

Twitter’s for 140-character short-form writing and Medium’s for long-form. Weirdly, there really isn’t a great platform for everything in the middle — what previously would’ve just been called “blogging.” Mid-length blogging. Middling.

I think that’s partly why seeing Matt Haughey, Paul Ford, and Michael Sippey restart regular blogging on Paul’s delightfully retro tilde.club is so refreshing to me. I miss seeing people I admire post stuff longer than a tweet.

Gina had a similar sentiment:

I find tweets too reductionist and Medium pieces too bloviating, so I came to the same conclusion Andy did on mid-length writing. His post reminded me of a working draft I started awhile back called “New rules for blogging.”

It was interesting that one of the early comments on Andy’s post was from Seth Godin, welcoming Andy back to the party.

I love the Renaissance the personal site that the web is going through. The more Twitter and Facebook do to push away web geeks, the better the independent web will become.

Update: A couple more favorites of mine, Jason Snell and Marco Arment, have joined in with more short-form blogging too. — 11.02.14

Skottie Young’s Star Wars Covers

SkottieYoungStarWars

Skottie Young drew this great interlocking cover set for the first three issues of the upcoming Marvel Comics Start Wars series.

Young shared his excitement at getting to do these covers with MTV:

“Like most people my age, I spent a good part of my childhood playing with ‘Star Wars’ toys for hours on end,” Young said via statement from Marvel. “I cried like a baby when I realized I left my wampa figure on the radiator and his leg melted half off.

“Flash forward years later and I get to be a little (pun absolutely intended) part of the ‘Star Wars’ universe by creating my take on these covers. It’s surreal. Also, I’ve shared that wampa story before and fans actually bring me wampa figures to cons. THIS IS MY LIFE!”

I’ve been enjoying the Star Wars series from Dark Horse and was sorry to see the publisher lose the title. However, I’m interested to see what Marvel does with the franchise now that Disney has bought it. Skottie Young doing the variant covers can’t hurt.

Police Clash with protesters in Hong Kong

For weeks now, pro-democracy protest groups have occupied parts of central Hong Kong, calling for open elections and the resignation of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. Local police have been urging the demonstrators to leave for days, and have recently stepped up efforts to dismantle barricades on several major roads – only to have many of them rebuilt hours later. Tensions boiled over last night, leading to a violent clash between police and protesters.

Alan Taylor at the Atlantic has a stunning collection of photos from the scene.