2026-07-02 00:10:00
This morning Mr Overkill sent me the link to the AI Compass test, which I guess is a spin on the famous political compass test. It’s a bunch of questions—27? 29? 15? Who knows!—and at the end you get your location on the map and your archetype, from a list of 30. It’s harmless fun, and I found the results so far to be fairly accurate. If you end up taking the quiz, let me know if your result was accurate. Or even better, blog about it!
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2026-06-29 12:55:00
I stopped tracking books using apps or services, even though there are good ones out there. I have two little shelves in my bedroom, on the left I put books I want to read, on the right the ones I have read. The plan was to empty the one on the right halfway through the year and post a picture here on the site to remember what I have read. This is that picture, and those are the books I have read so far in 2026.
A lot of Terzani, a lot of stories about death and suffering, about misery and tough times, but also a lot of stories about nature and mountains. The fiction-to-non-fiction ratio is probably 3:1, which is unusual for me, considering I read non-fiction almost exclusively for most of my life, but that’s fine.
Look forward to fill up the shelf again and post a second picture here on the site somewhere in late December.
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2026-06-29 01:55:00
I’m sitting on a rock, in the middle of a forest. On my right, not even 30cm away from me, a dog panting like crazy, because even though it’s almost 8pm, it’s still way too warm for his liking. To be fair, anything above freezing probably fits that description. Behind me, the ruins of a church that was, and no longer is. A stone arch and a few chunks of walls are all that’s left. I don’t know what happened to this church. I could probably look it up, but I don’t need to do it. Knowing would not add anything to my experience of sitting here.
Is it important to know how things end? Is it important to know when something has ended? Some things are clearly easy to know when they’re done: I have a bottle of water that’s almost empty, and the end is gonna come pretty fast. Other things are a lot trickier. When does a life end? I remember reading that the medical definition of death keeps evolving as our technology progresses and we’re able to bring people back to life. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to upload our brains to the matrix and “live” forever, who knows.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of things lately, as my mind wandered around, stressed out by a series of things not worth discussing. And thinking about the end of myself is weirdly comforting. The classic this too shall pass. Everything is transitory after all, and life itself is impermanent. We’re here now, we might be gone tomorrow.
And when gone, what’s left? Maybe just ruins, traces of our past, books left on a bookshelf, photos in a box, a blog online perhaps, destined to be washed away quickly like everything else in the digital world.
If you’re wondering where I’m going with this post, I’m afraid the answer is nowhere. I’m just sitting on a rock, in the middle of nowhere, thinking about death as a way to figure out how to go through life.
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2026-06-26 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anne Lee Steele, whose blog can be found at aleesteele.com.
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I’m Anne. I’ve spent almost a decade in what I call the ‘open ecosystem', the first five years as a lurker and participant, the second five as a researcher and facilitator. I’ve done ethnographic studies of OpenStreetMap, was the Community Manager of The Turing Way, and have held a variety of fellowships with organisations ranging from the Internet Society to the Software Sustainability Institute. Outside of all these things, I would call myself an artist-of-sorts, maybe to say that I make art more than I embody the spirit of an artist, per say. But I sometimes throw the title around anyway. I guess I’ll say it: I’m a researcher, facilitator, and artist.
I was a big ‘micro’ blogger in my teens, using platforms like Xanga, Livejournal, and Flickr to document my teenage life. Then I inevitably moved to Tumblr alongside many angsty and artsy teenager girls right as Facebook started to take off in parallel, before moving to Instagram (and using it as a kind of ‘blog’ for years). I’ve gone through the inevitable cycles of use then rejection, of deleting and reactivating all my social media accounts. My original Facebook account is gone now.
When I started grad school in 2019, I started my blog as a method of sharing more about my life and research when I moved to Geneva. I think it came out of the joint desires for self-expression and a desire to get out of social media. We now collectively call this platform decay “enshittification”, but I really felt like what I was putting online was performative more than anything else. The blog felt like shouting into a voice, yes, but it was my shout, on my own website, in a void of my own creation. There’s no like button for that.
I often just create a new page on Obsidian or VSCode and just start to write. Sometimes it all comes out in one go - sometimes the draft will take years to fruition (and yes - I’ll often backdate that post to when it was created, not when it was published). There’s actually a secret draft folder on Github that hosts all my drafts in progress.
Out of all the creative processes, I find writing the most difficult, but also the most transformative. I rarely enjoy the process, but always feel better, or have more clarity, or understand something or myself better, afterwards.
In parallel to writing, I’m very much a power user of are.na which feels like a more instinctual, affectual, and social form of thinking out loud. I think a lot of the nascent themes contained there eventually end up on the blog in some form or another.
I’m a big listener of NTS radio (specifically the Breakfast Show with Flo) and use earth.fm a lot. Sounds really create a space for me - and are a way I stay grounded and aware, no matter where I might be working. If I have control over that however, I tend to need a big desk for books and papers of all kinds - maybe I need a messy desk in order to have a cleaner mind. I absolutely believe that physical spaces influence creativity. When I’m writing something long form for example, I’ll usually surround myself physically with books and visual artifacts (photos, sketches, and other detritus) related to the topic, almost like it’s a living alter to the work, or an externalised process of thinking that starts with the visual, then becomes injested and cognitive. I’ve been on the move for the past year or so, and I’ve really felt its impact on my creativity: in some ways I’m more spontaneous, but less deep and situated with my thinking. I have no doubt that this is because of my perpetual motion.
My website (and blog attached to it) is very simple. I used to host my website on Github Pages, but now it’s built on Netlify (very open to alternatives - please reach out!). I used to use Heroku before it was shut down. The whole website and codebase is on Github. You can see more about the ethos of the website, and specifically the practices I am aiming to adopt better practices for accessibility and open practices on this easter egg of a page (which you can find by clicking the sticky note in the footer): aleesteele.com/design
Field Notes from my Desktop is the name of both my blog and newsletter these days. I feel all sorts of ways about having a newsletter now – I’ve only sent out one so far. It’s a very different feeling to have a captive audience, some of which have been subscribed automatically after an event I’ve facilitated, or joined from the web. I don’t know if I like it, but it feels like in the age of information glut, there’s something about the inbox that remains sacred for many folks. I want to respect that, and maybe want to think of it as a seeding process...
For my blog, I remain dedicated to maintaining it as is, without any real changes. Looking back, I guess I would have held myself accountable to finishing more blogs in the moment: when that whiff of an idea, or a concept, or an event or reflection has completely capitvated me and I feel the need to write about it. Unfortunately I have so many half-finished blogs not because I didn’t like the topic, but rather because it was such a struggle and a slog to finish, that I didn’t bring it fully over that crest into fruition. Maybe I should have ritualised it.
At the same time, I don’t want to be too hard on myself. I did the best I could at the time. Maybe the newsletter is meant to be the rhythm, and the blog is the burst of free jazz.
I have no monetization plan, and currently don’t monetize anything I do for the blog. In fact, I pay to use Buttondown at the moment, and I’m debating whether to do that (currently $9 USD a month since they changed their membership plan). I pay for my domain, which is £12 GBP annually.
Now I’m mixing blogs and newsletters! I’ve been such a periodic reader of a bunch of different things that I tend to save on are.na, that it’s hard to pick out a few.
I’ve been a passionate reader of the Marginalian and the Creative Independent for many years. At this point, both are less blog, and more of a wiki-like resource about life, creativity, ecology, and all sorts of topics that make life meaningful and mysterious. I’ve also used read and used Open Culture for many years – which is also a blog-of-sorts. I recently learned about The Examined Mind.
One person whose writing practice I look up to is Shannon Mattern, an academic anthropologist turned New York Librarian-of-sorts and my friend Jonathan Gray who has a fantastic (and consistent!) public writing process. Both of them are academics with public practices - and while I’m not an academic, I do have a research-informed process.
I also love Julian Stodd’s blog on leadership and organisational practices. He’s done a lot of deep and open thinking that I’ve appreciated about the topic, and has stayed loyal to old school Wordpress.
This question inspires me to bring together a more curated list of blogs I’ve read and followed over the years, and also to recognise the shortfalls of my own ‘blogging’ practice. I have saved blog instances (meaning individual blogs), but I haven’t ‘followed’ a single blogger in a really long time actually. Is that because of the newsletter because I don’t use RSS feeds?
I’m developing a series of mapping meditations, based on Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations. If you have a map or a meditation to share, please reach out.
I also run internet infrastructure walking tours in London, in an effort to make invisible infrastructures more embodied and playful. This year, I’ve been experimenting with a monthly walk, and you're welcome to join one using Luma.
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If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 147 interviews.
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2026-06-23 14:25:00
I’m hosting July’s IWBC and the timing is perfect since I split my reading year into to halves, which means I’m starting with an empty shelf in July. The book I picked is “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm.
I read this book now more than 20 years ago, and I remember having a great impact on young me. And so I started wondering what current me would think of it. And the IWBC is a good excuse to pick it up a second time.
If you decide to read it and post a review on your blog, make sure to send me a link and I'll be more than happy to link it here on the blog.
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2026-06-19 20:00:00
If you are subscribed to People and Blogs, you might have noticed that today’s newsletter arrived from a different address. That’s because the always lovely Zach has officially become the new custodian of this series. The peopleandblogs.com domain name has been transferred, the mailing list has been migrated (from Buttondown to Buttondown), and the RSS feed has been redirected.
As I wrote in a previous post, I’m gonna publish three more interviews here on the site before officially saying goodbye to the series on July 10th. But contrary to what I wrote months ago, I decided that I’m not gonna keep the interviews archived here on the blog, and instead I’ll redirect them all to their new location.
Keeping them here would be obviously good for me, it’s extra traffic that comes to the site, but I don’t care about traffic, and I much prefer to send people towards Zach’s site and help the series grow that way. I’m very happy that the series will continue on, and I’m excited to see where Zach will take it. As I said to him, this is his series now, he can and should do whatever he wants with it, and I look forward to seeing it evolve over the next months and years.
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