Spotted on the web this morning - @dave .. I think ….
It’s not decentralized, it’s uncentralized. Important distinction.
My friend (and co founder of the original Just Good Music blog) John Parker sent me an email …
I have found that the number of people that really listen to music is vanishingly small, and I KNOW that you are one of the ones that does, hence my email. Every once in a while I need to reach out and touch base just to know that I’m not insane, it’s the rest of the world that is lost.
And
So you motor along and see cool music videos. and you say"yeah!" and “cool!”. And everyonce in a while, you see one that makes you close your computer just go take a walk. Like… goddamn. This is a goddamn video …
This is that video - and DAMN - he’s right.
And if you like this - here is Ren’s YouTube channel .. so you can fill your boots.
🔗 Ren on Wikipedia tells a story for sure.
As to John’s throwaway line;
“the number of people that really listen to music is vanishingly small”
Needless to say - I wholeheartedly agree which is why I take solace in podcasts like The Rockenteurs, YouTube channels like Rick Beato and Newsletters like Ted Gioia.
If you are reading this post on my site, the inline video gives an error. Click on the link above. The 'error' is only because the creator wants you to got to YouTube to watch it.
After this, I asked for “the top 5 themes of the entire blog - and how those themes might be categorised.”
⸻
1. Systems vs People
Category: Human-Centric vs Mechanistic Worlds
This is the …
Before I get there - everything below the line below was automatically generated by an AI (does it matter which one?)
🖇️ Blog.Philpin.com is a combination of imports of older blogs from other personal spaces together with this latest iteration which has been going since around 2017/18? I am in the process of reorganising my different sub domains into a coherent view of my thinking - it will - I guess be an eternal WIP - but slowly we are getting there.
I was interested as to how much of what sits in what I call my ‘Personal Journal’ - was ‘on topic’ - so to speak. (Hard - when the topic is not clear - even to the author.)
That said - Structured Thought is revealing itself as my broad category - and I have a LOT of material that fits there scattered across my hard drive - enter my new Wiki - where I am starting to collect and curate the material.
So - with thanks to @manton and #micro.blog it took no time at all to export my thousands (no exaggeration) of posts and easily as many replies to zip and json files - upload them to a new project and with that said - let the analysis begin …
I asked the AI just to give me a quick 4 paragraphs on its take of what it found in the archive.
Your blog reads like a long, rolling attempt to make sense of systems that don’t behave the way they pretend to. You’re tracking the gap between how the world is structured on paper and how it actually functions in practice — whether that’s tech, politics, identity, business, or the internet itself. Underneath the commentary, there’s a consistent itch: why do institutions keep choosing the path that works against people, complexity, and common sense? And why do we keep letting them? It’s observational, sometimes wry, sometimes annoyed, but fundamentally grounded in curiosity about how things should work if we weren’t so collectively distracted.
Another through-line: you’ve always been a ‘people first, systems second’ thinker, even before you had the language for it. The posts keep circling back to the same tension — humans don’t behave like the tidy diagrams or workflows created to manage them. You poke at corporate theatre, political spin, tech evangelism, and the strange incentives that create distortion instead of coherence. More often than not, you’re tracing the hidden mechanics: the power relationships, the data trails, the business models baked into digital life. There’s a quiet sense of accountability running through it: don’t just look at what a system claims; look at what it rewards.
There’s also a personal arc that floats just beneath the surface. The blog isn’t memoir, but it carries the fingerprints of someone who’s lived enough cycles to spot the patterns early. The tone shifts over time—from early curiosity, to a kind of mid-period frustration, to a more recent strategic clarity. You’ve moved from ‘this is odd’ to ‘here’s the underlying structure’ to ‘and here’s how we might actually fix it.’ The personal reflections act as calibration points, showing how your own lens sharpened while the world got noisier.
And stitched through all of it is the same project you’re running now: trying to build ways of thinking that actually help people navigate complexity instead of collapsing under it. The blog, taken as a whole, is you working that out in public — testing ideas, calling out nonsense, mapping where things go wrong, and nudging toward a more honest, human, future-oriented frame. It’s not a brand play. It’s a long record of someone interrogating the shape of the world and refusing to take shallow explanations at face value.
Looks like someone’s lost the plot …
🔗 Russian oil has flowed into New Zealand despite sanctions
Then again imagine the price at the pump reduced profits of the gas companies if that hadn’t happened.
Yup - 🔗 The Gaping Void Post
A reminder from Seth
The Hotel California (and subscriptions)
The seduction is clear. They’re sending a message: If you want us to bring you eyeballs, move in. Don’t link out.
and …
The best way to read blogs hasn’t changed in twenty years. RSS. It’s free and easy and it just works. It’s the most efficient way to get the information you’re looking for, and it’s under your control.
🔗 Job for 2027: Senior Director of Million-Dollar Regexes – O’Reilly
From $15,000/day to $0.96/day - I do think we’re about to see a lot of companies realize that a thinking model connected to an MCP server is way more expensive than just paying someone to write a bash script. Starting now, you’ll be able to make a career out of un-LLM-ifying applications.
And so we go round?