things i think about while powerwashing 147

Shortcut to anonymous subscriber submission link: https://forms.gle/2MABf8jNr2V8kEY87

For most of my friends and readers, this blog and newsletter is the place where you all learn about me. And that’s the point! Without my newsletter I would feel like I have to post in Instagram and such in order to keep in touch with friends, meet new friends and interact with communities. Since I’ve deleted the app from my phone, finding new places in the city has gotten harder, I have no memes, my brain has stopped rotting.

But what if I yearn for the rot? What if the creases of my brain desire to be smoothed, like the round dome of a beach ball? What if I want to support Meta, a small indie grassroots company that is definitely super mindful of its consumers (me)?

Well my latest coding adventure does not handle the last one but it does make me think about how I want to interact with the internet, and the ways they do not let me do that.

To get one thing out of the way: yes it was vibe coded. I did not feel like it was worth the effort of writing by hand, and wanted to try out vibe coding via my phone.

But onto the application. It’s very simple! It checks my Instagram account following and followers list and creates a list of “friends.” And then it checks my feed every so often looking for the latest posts by Instagram users in the list. Then, it takes each post and publishes it as in an RSS feed so I can access it on my RSS reader on my phone without having to open the Instagram app.

Why do this, you may ask. Well if you’re a longtime reader of this blog you’ll remember that I read this book called Surveillance Captialism by Shoshana Zuboff which basically explains the theory and explores the avenues of data captured employed by the big tech companies (i.e. only letting users access Instagram posts from their site instead of in an open feed). So to escape that I decided to quit Instagram and start writing my blog.

Here’s the kicker: I write, but not many write back. So back to Instagram I go to passively learn about what you all are doing. This could be a really long essay about how I want an open internet and for all posts to be in the same format so theoretically anyone could make their own Instagram client and view Instagram posts. But the mone

museum of the week

I AM BACK FROM MY VACATION GANG!!!! And thus begins the long slow march of Singaporean museums! Should keep us fed for the next few months.

And when I go to a new country, one of the first things I do is go to a local museum to learn about the history. This ends up not working out sometimes — I remember when esteemed subscriber Stephen Davis and I went to the national museum in Switzerland, we were greeted by a lot of Swiss German (Singlish for Europeans I guess) in the descriptions. But luckily everything here was in English!

The museum gives a rather thorough overview of Singapore’s history! There are a lot of interesting artifacts including the Singapore Stone — one of the major artifacts in Singapore’s precursor civilizations. It’s currently indecipherable, with some portions of text being identified as Old Javanese and one portion being identified to be Tamil. Mysterious!

In a strange American twist, there’s a certain Revere Bell in the museum — a gift from Paul Revere’s daughter Maria Balestier who was married to the first American ambassador to Singapore. When I was there an American guy was with the docent and apparently the bell had a more practical purpose as an 8 p.m. curfew bell, but after it cracked it was put in storage until the National Museum of Singapore found out about it in 1937.

Overall a pretty good intro to the young country of Singapore. The one area the museum DID go into good detail on was life in Singaporean during WWII, when the Japanese carried out a mass killing of Singaporeans and the various heroes that helped save the lives of the Chinese — including a lady at the chow hall in prison who was passing messages to prisoners of war!

anonymous subscriber news

Submit here: https://forms.gle/2MABf8jNr2V8kEY87

Yeah sure anon. Sure you did ....

• anon flees: Fled nyc after the election to avoid the crime

animal of the week

SEND IN ANIMAL PHOTOS TO THIS GOOGLE FORM! https://forms.gle/NT3nSkKVbpkjCr1u8

This one comes from esteemed subscriber and my sister Carolyn Chen from her awesome trip to Singapore! Enjoy everyone, hope you don't see a boar when you don't want to!

"pua’a - hawaiian boar
in hawaiian mythology, kamapua’a is a shapeshifting god who turned into a boar 🐗 "

Send me your animal photos at ryan@torrtle.co OR at this form https://forms.gle/NT3nSkKVbpkjCr1u8!