This blog’s visual design is plain dress, unlike the actually existing Jackpot, which has proved quite colorful so far. I chose a colorway of shades of grey, even to the rotating bleached out header photos of America’s one-time industrial might. Partly this choice opposes black-and-white thinking, but mostly it gives the color images impact (readers have commented that artwork featured in the previous incarnation of Water Cooler helped them learn to see). Like this Constable (“The Mill Stream”):
Wouldn’t it be pleasant to be that fisher boy? 1 He has sensibly chosen a spot above the cool, oxygenated water of the tailrace from the mill at left behind the painter’s easel. Certainly more pleasant than being a worker in that mill, or the tenant farmer in the cottage at left:
This study shows the view from the forecourt of Flatford Mill across a side stream of the river Stour in Suffolk, which had been diverted under the mill to work the water-wheel. The water churned up by the water-wheel left the mill through an archway below the forecourt, which explains the turbulence seen in the foreground of the sketch. The house is Willy Lott’s House, named after the tenant farmer who lived there for over 80 years. It appears in several of Constable’s finished paintings….
The Constable family owned two corn-grinding watermills on the river Stour, at Flatford and at Dedham.
The fisher boy also bears Constable’s trademark touch of red (the LeGuin quotation in the site’s motto field is similarly touched (as is, methodologically, putting the absent mill into the picture)).2
This blog’s editorial design seeks to forcibly drag us both away from the dopamine-addled doom-loop of the infinite scroll, so we have time to think and feel, not just react. From the blogger’s perspective, a topical schedule forces that; I won’t be writing about whatever the latest excitation might be on Thursday, I’ll be considering Climate (having had time to gather sources, and my thoughts). Similarly with the daily schedule; if an alarm goes off somewhere, I don’t need to rush to post about that latest demergency; the framework helps me put “the tyranny of the urgent” in its place.3
From a reader’s perspective, I hope the slower, more contemplative place is a “unique selling proposition,” albeit without the selling. The editorial design is meant to recapture our attention from social media, and the media generally. I agree it’s important to be aware of the news flow, but better to do it from above, fishing into it, not caught up in the rush and the slop of being in the millrace itself. Honestly, right now, the way social media algorithms work, it’s as if we had to buy our butter and eggs from a crack dealer.
Finally, a word on software choice: Most blogs in this world run on Blogger (Google, yech) or WordPress, with WordPress being by far the dominant provider (though apparently the WP “community” is riven by drama and feuding)3. “The number of bloggers in the USA is expected to grow to 31.7 million in 2020,” so blogging is not a bad business to be in (though we’ll see if AI slop kills it, if AIs can develop personas without becoming psychotic). There’s are a ton of blogging software out there, too, though usage rankings are hard to come by. (The first Google pages are, unsurprisingly, about the “best” platforms; I suspect most, if not all, of the pages are written by bots).
That said, I picked Drupal, because I’m familiar with it. Drupal, it must be confessed, is a bit of a pig; when it’s good, it’s very, very good, but when it’s bad, it’s horrid. There are times when this famous “engineer’s chart” seems relevant:
Except I play all the roles — the troubleshooter, the subordinate, the boss, and the rest of the office — and I would have to fire myself!
Drupal, however, has unrivalled functionality, once you get past the learning curve. Drupal allows me to write the way I want to write. Drupal enabled me to create, for example, the DOGE timeline (see the sidebar), with which I can date, quote, tag, and search all the DOGE media coverage I could aggregate in the form of a table sorted by date. This is an ongoing project, but I’m already convinced that DOGE was and is truly vile, and now I have the goods to back that up (as does any other reader, or writer, who uses the timeline as a resource). Worse, DOGE is already metatasizing. So Drupal enables the Jackpot to deliver a unique service to readers. Other candidates for a timeline may occur; bird flu, heaven forfend, or militarization (including ICE), as adding to the DOGE timeline turns into routine maintenance, and if time permits — volunteers?
NOTES
1Here I resist a “gone fission” joke (“down by the old maelstrom”; original).
2 The footnote markers are red because — at alert reader DJG’s suggestion — all the rubrics are red, as rubrics should be. Footnotes, besides being fun, funny, and often the sort of serendipitous byway I wish to encourage, are also a source-preserving civilizational achievement, important to preserve.
3 I’m almost absurdly busy in my retirement, so I hope the 9-5-including-breaks approach in the sidebar is doable, as my previous 1:00 (pm) to 5:00 (am) days on the infinite scroll ultimately were not; the news flow was making me crazy and the task of keeping up with it was wrecking my health. I want time in the evening for my other literary and artistic endeavors. We’ll find out, and adjust.
4 I would characterize Substack as blog-adjacent, rather than a blogging platform per se, since it has only some of the features that I urge all blogs must have. First, Substack uses a subscription model; in principle, it deprecates free content, and it doesn’t accept donations. Second, Substack’s tools for creating content are god-awful, and give the writer virtually no creative control. (You need a separate app to create a table? Really?) Third, Substack is a platform; unlike WordPress, you can’t install it on your own server. That raises the possibility — the inevitability — of enshittification.