Year Two

Aether Mug has just turned two years old.

Three-hundred and sixty-four days ago I did a "reflections post" about my blogging experience. There will be a tiny bit of that at the end of this post, too, but I've already done a lot of looking back and a lessons-learned roundup last week, so this one will be more practical: some announcements and new stuff for you—yes, You, my friendly and uncommonly attractive readers!

Spoilers: new ways to customize your subscriber experience, to give me feedback, to interact with me and other readers, and even to buy me a 🍵 matcha drink!

Reading Suggestions

I write all my blog posts to be evergreen: no "news of the week" or trendy topics, only ideas that will (hopefully) remain (mostly) relevant (if not "right") five, ten, even fifty years from now. This means that, in theory, you can go back and read any of them at any time and still get something out of them.

Now, AeMug has had an influx of new readers this year! But it occurred to me that many of you might not know where (whether?) to start reading older posts. If you're one of them, here are some ideas.

The Most Popular Aether Mug Posts Until Now

These are the ones that generated the most buzz online, in chronological order:

Year One:

• Aphantasia (5-minute read): this actually predates AeMug, it was the Twitter thread that led to me writing for Nautilus magazine.
• The Beautiful Dissociation of the Japanese Language (20 min)
• Borges on Chaos Theory (8 min)
• Boxed (12 min)

Year Two:

• An Aphantasic's Observations on the Imagination of Shapes (9 min)
• I Do Not Remember My Life and It's Fine (16 min)
• Human Stigmergy (3 min)
• I Used to Know How to Write in Japanese (9 min)
• Hi No Youjin (7 min)
• Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments that Failed to Replicate (7 min)
• Process World, Object-Oriented Mind (13 min)
• Steinbeck on Teleology (11 min)
• Linear Algebra Explains Why Some Words Are Effectively Untranslatable (13 min)

The Not-So-Popular-But-Foundational Posts

These ten didn't get much attention online, but they treat core ideas that come up over and over on this blog, so they're probably good places to start.

• Embedded Prophesy Devices (7 min)
• A Framing Is a Choice of Boundaries (12 min)
• A Fundamental Framing of Human Language (11 min)
• Language is a Bottleneck for Thought (13 min)
• A Black-Box View of Life (8 min)
• A Framing and Model About Framings and Models (17 min)
• Rationality Fails at the Edge (12 min)
• Living in a Real World, Acting in Imaginary Ones (10 min)
• Water Lilies, Water Lilies Everywhere (11 min)
• A List of Introspective Descriptions (6 min)

The Posts I Personally Wish You Would Read

The title says it all. These are some of the posts closest to my heart, painfully limited to only ten items:

• Is There Anything Untranslatable? (14 min)
• You Don't Have Time to Read Books That Won't Change Your Life (4 min)
• Philosophy Is the Battle Against the Bad Framing Kraken (2 min)
• Reading Blood Meridian with Aphantasia (18 min)
• Jack of All Trades, Master of Something (12 min)
• Ballistic Moments of Weightlessness (6 min)
• Whatever a Man or Woman Was Able to Accomplish Before, You Can Accomplish, Too (32 min)
• Strive as It Might (1 min) (It's a poem.)
• Cow Ontologies (6 min) (It's a short story.)
• The whole Darwin in His Own Words series (20 min for the first post)

Practical Stuff

Until now, the only things you could do with Aether Mug were reading and sending me email replies. Not anymore! Starting today, there are a few other things you can do thanks to the amazing functionality of Buttondown, the newsletter platform I'm using to send emails.

First of all, if you're an email subscriber you can do the following:

1. On your Buttondown profile page you can opt out of blog post topics you don't want to receive. By default, all subscribers receive AeMug emails weekly-ish. But if you really don't ever want to read my long disquisitions about, say, the Japanese language, or about mental imagery, or [insert other recurring topic here], you can now turn them off. The weeks when I write primarily about those topics, you won't receive the email in your inbox. (I may still touch on those topics in other posts you do get, so this is not an air-tight system.)
2. You can also set your first name to go along with your email by going to your Buttondown profile page. I'm not tracking you! This is fully optional, and only helps me know what to call you when I send you emails. It's a nice way to get to know each other. Hi! I'm Marco.

Pro tip: if you're currently following with a feed reader like Feedly or Readwise Reader—I respect you!—and you want to take advantage of this customizability, you're in luck: many modern readers allow you to subscribe to newsletters with special dedicated email addresses. Check your reader app's docs, and consider registering it via the form below. Then you'll be able to customize in the same way.

Second, you can now show your appreciation by treating me to a matcha latte every now and then: I'm enabling pay-what-you-want subscriptions to this newsletter. I will not lock my blog posts behind a paywall, and (at least for now) there are no special perks you get by becoming a paid subscriber. Please consider becoming one only if and when you feel comfortable with it, as a way to help Aether Mug keep the lights on as long as possible.

At the moment there is no straightforward way to send one-time donations, due to Buttondown's limitations. If you only want to donate once, please consider starting a paid subscription, and then cancelling before the second payment (or not). I will send paying subscribers regular reminders that they can stop the donations any time. Sorry for this inconvenience.

And finally, I want to talk about community.

The Year of Connections

I spent Year One mostly figuring out that the work is the reward. Year Two is when I learned how to stay in the day most of the time. I want to make Year Three about connections.

For starters, I think of Aether Mug as half-way between a blog and a digital garden. While I don't go back and update most older posts (except for lists like this and this), I do try to keep them well linked-up bidirectionally. You'll be seeing more and more links from older posts to newer ones, both in the text and in this brand new "You might also like..." component aboveto the right.

Another kind of connection I'm working on is with other blogs and social networks. I deliberately chose not to use a platform like Substack because I want the freedom to do random things like this, but this choice means AeMug doesn't get all the benefits of recommendation algorithms, "similar newsletters", and other network-effect opportunities. The discoverability of this site is rather abysmal, and it can feel a little like I'm floating on a raft in the middle of the Pacific ocean, with the occasional kind visitor swimming by to say hi.

So, at least as a first step, I've linked up the website to the Indieweb and the Fediverse. People can now follow Aether Mug posts on Bluesky (@aethermug.com) and Mastodon (@[email protected])—these are separate from my personal accounts. I'll get webmention notifications when someone in the network links to my website and vice versa. I will also be posting condensed versions of my new and old posts on my personal Twitter/X and Bluesky accounts. I haven't been very active on social media recently, but I'll be a better netizen/neighbor this year.

But by far the most interesting connection, for me, is the one with you and, why not? between you, AeMug readers.

The biggest surprise I've had since starting this website has been how many of you have written me emails to share your thoughts, ideas, links, disagreements, and kind words. I'm slow answering (expect anything between 2 days and 2 weeks), but I read and respond to them all. Write me more, seriously! It makes it all worth it, all over again.

Direct one-on-one conversations are great, but what if... readers could talk with other readers about these topics? I haven't been able to find a space on the internet to discuss this specific mix of ideas (send me links if you have!) and it would be greedy for me to lock your inputs in my inbox alone. So I will experimentally enable comments on the Buttondown archive pages of present and past blog posts.

The website is still largely unknown, so there may be very few or no comments for a good while, but I guess the less friction there is, the better. Commenting requires being registered via an email address.

If you use a feed reader app and haven't subscribed to the newsletter, you can get the best of both worlds in one of two ways: either switch to following the emails via the feed reader (see the previous section) or register your email and immediately opt out of all the topic tags (also explained in the previous section), so that you won't get any more emails but you can still comment on the threads.

With AI bots flooding the internet with slop, it's a little scary (which is why I haven't enabled comments until now), but I hope the humans among you will take the lead.

Conclusions: This Blog is a Toddler

The Aether Mug About page still says that this blog "is about something", which is intentionally but vexingly vague. I may have to update the page soon, because the fog is clearing. The blog is no longer a collection of disparate body parts; the invisible elephant's overall shape is becoming apparent.

One framing above all others helped me keep learning Japanese back in the 00's: never compare your L2 abilities with those of adult native speakers; the right comparison is with a baby born the day you started learning. I think this might apply to something like a blog, too. At two years old, AeMug is now deep in toddler territory.

Most children speak in simple words and fragmentary sentences until about 18 months of age, then their vocabulary explodes, and they begin making more and more sense. Maybe this is what's going on with this website, too. Through all the words that I write on it, it is beginning to speak its own intelligible language. This language is not simply mine, because a blog post always turns out quite different from what I initially intended for it, and because I listen to what those around me have to say. The blog's language is the product of my thoughts and the readership's response, of the rest of the blogosphere and newsletter-o-sphere, and so on.

I have mountains of ideas for what I want to write about this year. I can't wait to see what it will say next.

Thank you so much for teaching the baby how to speak! ●