The Pancake Discussion

Pancakes are not my favorite thing to make. They require me to make a messy, gloppy mixture of wheat, milk, and eggs. They come out imperfectly every time. And when you’re done with them, you’ve created a bunch of heavy, saggy discs. (However, not floppy disks.)

But they can be made quickly, and by the thousands. There’s a reason why greasy spoons the world over specialize in pancakes: Anyone can make them, and they can do so quickly, without too much thought.

But they leave a hell of a mess behind. (Especially after the syrup gets involved. God, the syrup. There’s so much of it, and little of it actually gets sopped up by the bread discs you made yourself.)

Sure, you can automate the process—I hear there are frozen pancakes, in case you like your frisbees to melt into food—but nothing is quite like making pancakes yourself.

Just one problem. When everyone does it, all pancakes look the same, they’re greasy, eating them makes you tired and bloated, and it’s hard not to want to grab a yogurt or something instead.

My wife loves them though, so I make them frequently.

When Everything Feels Flat

This is a pretty good metaphor for why some describe the discussion on social networks as being flat at times. AI is the natural example of this: It’s either love it or hate it. (And don’t take that to mean I want a bunch of pro-AI content in my feed. It’s very possible to argue against AI really well, as Ed Zitron frequently does in some of the longest blog posts I’ve ever seen.)

Politics are another, and that often leads to the most polarized takes dominating the discussion. Nuanced takes are hard to come by, and if you do make one, it’s most certainly going be drowned out by every other pancake in the stack.

Every take has a beginning and end, and then you throw another one on the griddle. Most end up a little burnt. Occasionally one slides off the pan, as a work of art.

But most of the time, pancakes fall over themselves, one flat discussion point after another. It’s easier to spit out a ten-word takedown of someone’s bad take than to offer real nuance as a discussion point.

Which is why I love blogs. Rather than offering up little discs of information that can be created quickly and digested slowly, you can spend as long or as short a time as you want on them. You can put a mere 30 minutes into them; you can put in 30 days. You can do as much or as little research as you want, and you can lay out an argument with a far different shape than your average pancake.

In many ways, that’s kind of why I’m keeping an eye on the AT Protocol, which is just starting to get good. That will help to make room for more colors and shapes than the 300ish characters you see on Bluesky.

Pancakes: Not The Only Thing On The Menu

Recently, I’ve found myself clicking through Kagi’s Small Web interface. It’s effectively the same concept as Stumbleupon, except more focused on helping you find interesting voices and actual blogs.

I was excited when I found it.

They lead to the kinds of posts that social media would never let go viral on their own but are nonetheless super-interesting. A few examples I found with a little searching:

1. This piece by Max Mautner on his decision to not own a car.
2. This project by Bogdan Buduroiu to go on an “AI lent,” where he goes 40 days without using AI to code.
3. A tale about how Brad Frost, a web designer, used AI to redesign his websitewhile working on a mural in his bathroom, not touching his keyboard at all.
4. A post from Nathan Vass, a bus driver/writer/director who loves driving a bus as much as he does shooting a film.
5. A list of bespoke shoemakers from Permanent Style, a men’s fashion blog. I don’t care about shoes or men’s fashion, but I do care about bespoke shoemakers.

There are gaps. I did not see a lot of women or much in the way of Black culture in these posts, for example. (I did spot a post titled “6 Ways to Make the Cheese World More Inclusive,” but that’s only after I narrowed in on food.) Many authors kind of looked like me—a middle-aged white dude who has been blogging half his life. That’s super-unfortunate, and I wonder if the push towards social platforms has meant that blogs have lost some of their diversity as folks have moved elsewhere. (But it could also be an effect of its sourcing: Kagi built its initial lists from a number of Hacker News threads, among other places. Fortunately, anyone can add to it via its GitHub page.)

And while it doesn’t put it front and center like Google does, Kagi is not afraid of AI, and it’s clear that the skepticism about it that permeates some social media platforms doesn’t necessarily extend to the blogs.

But Kagi essentially revived blog discovery by bringing back an old idea in a new way. I hope it becomes huge.

Eating Fewer Pancakes

I can tell that the interest in a more primitive form of communication is coming back. My RSS subscriber count recently passed my newsletter subscriber count for the first time—in part because someone put me on a list somewhere and that list went viral.

That’s honestly the kind of thing I’ve been waiting to happen for a long time. I wrote a post about why I wanted blogging to come back seven freaking years ago.

But strangely, I find myself struggling to post as much as I used to.

I’ve been trying to figure out why blogging, a medium I absolutely adore and that I’ve dedicated much of my adult life to, has felt so tough to do over the last six months or so. I think the answer, as far as I see it, is that my loosey-goosey experiment in writing when I feel like it has failed.

It’s not that I don’t feel like it. It’s that it’s too easy to let every other pancake fall on top of the thing I actually care about. The result is a lopsided plate that often feels too overwhelmed to do the thing I originally set out to do.

With that in mind, it is my hope that I can re-commit to this thing I love by making a pledge I hope to stick to: Tuesday and Thursday evenings, twice a week, starting in April. That’s where Tedium started in 2015, and that’s where it should end back up. If I have something ready to go, I’m going to have to sit on it for a couple of days. If I don’t, I’m going to have to live with that pressure. I’m the kind of guy who works best with a deadline. My problem is that, by removing that deadline, I find it easier to let other things dominate.

And that might mean that I post less on other platforms, where I’m just filling up on pancakes anyway. I’ll still post on Bluesky and Mastodon, but it needs to not be the first place I look in the morning.

Maybe I can click through Kagi’s Small Web thing for inspiration instead. As far as I can tell, it’s serving up more than pancakes.