I'm going to kick this off with a little housekeeping:

1. This newsletter is now sent using Buttondown, a service I've used in the past and trust. I've got nothing against Convertkit, but it wasn't for me. You don't need to do anything, everything should just work.
2. The Bored Horse website is back! You can find back issues there, and can expect new posts somewhat regularly.

Now, let's move ahead to this week's essay.

I stopped journaling when I needed it the most

I was behind on my journaling a couple of weeks ago. It happens, circumstances makes me put in my notes and photos in bulk sometimes. I use photo metadata to tie things to their respective days, something that the Day One app can read.

Except it suddenly couldn't. In fact, I wasn't allowed to add older photos to the app at all.

What gives?

Some background is prudent. Day One was one of the first apps to switch from a paid structure, to subscriptions. They did it poorly, people got mad, myself included. In the end, they backpedaled and created a specific subscriber role, called Plus, for the premium customers who'd paid good money for apps on different platforms. I'm on the Plus plan, and I think that's why I suddenly can't add photos this way. If this was a conscious move (it almost had to be), or a clumsy one, I can't tell. What it did do was to get me out of my journaling groove, ruining a 1,000+ day streak in the app. Streaks are important, just look at the retention in an app like Duolingo.

I haven't journaled in any organized capacity since this happened. I've talked about moving to plain text files (albeit for fiction writing) in the past, and this seems like a good enough reason to do so. It's just that I want all my old entries, so I need to export these from Day One and figure out how this should work. There hasn't been time for that, it's been a hectic summer, as I've mentioned before. I didn't feel like there was any rush, though. Important things from the past couple of weeks have been jotted down, and there's always photos to tie things together. No reason to stress further, I'll get back to it later was my thinking.

It's been a bumpy week and a half, and in midst of it, I realized I missed journaling. I could've gone through things better had I sat down to make sense of them in the organized fashion I've been doing daily, in Day One, for years. Except I didn't because the app lost my trust, thus everything hit pause. In essence, I stopped journaling when I needed it the most.

The lesson here is, obviously, to not stop journaling. Tools come and go, but habits and things we do to grow and improve, they should be tool-agnostic. This was a stark reminder of this, something I didn't think I'd needed. After all, I keep talking about owning your own corner of the internet, to not rely on Instagram or Twitter X or whatever to publish and document things. You never know when the overlords might pull the rug out from under your feet. Or disable a feature you rely on, as it were.

I'll pick up journaling in some fashion next week. It'll likely be hit and miss when it comes to finding a method that works as smoothly as Day One used to do. Or maybe I'll swallow my pride and get a Day One premium subscription. It is, after all, a great journaling app, and I don't begrudge them to make money. We'll see, and you'll know because I'll no doubt touch this topic again in the future.

Linkage

🤡 There's no way anyone missed this, I'm mostly adding these links for posterity: Donald Trump to face four charges over efforts to overturn 2020 US election, and here's the charges in a PDF. If there ever was a bigger carrot for Trump to become president again, and thus pardon himself, I don't know what it would be. Here's hoping he fails miserably.

🇨🇦 Meta will remove news links on their services in Canada because they don't want to pay publishers to comply with a new law. This is troublesome, I think, because it'll skew the information landscape for Canadians. Meanwhile, Norway has had it with Meta's atrocious privacy policies, so they'll fine them $100,000 daily from August 4th until the policies and data collection has been remedied. While Norway isn't a EU member, it is part of the larger partnership, so this might create ripples on the water for snooping tech giants.

🧑🏻‍⚖️ Speaking of legislations, the people behind the largest open-source publishing platforms – WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Typo3 – have sent their concerns to the EU regarding the Cyber Resilience Act. Legislators are constantly struggling to keep up with the tech world, and open-source platforms are worried about wordings, possibly rightly so.

💙 Twitter Blue subscribers can now hide the verified tick. Pay for a service, then hide the fact that you pay for it, that's not the makings of a good product to me. But hey, you’re safe on the platform, right? Nah, X just nabbed another active account , a Blue subscriber at that. Suing anti-hate organizations isn't making the company look better either. But hey, Elon will defend your atrocities if you post them on X. Sheesh.

💀 Regular readers might remember that I rewatched the old Indiana Jones movies recently, and I mentioned that I thought the fourth one, with the crystal skull and the aliens, is underrated. I'm not the only one, and I do agree with most of these highlighted moments.

Got something I should read? Send it to me, either by replying to this letter, tweeting to @tdh, or hitting up bored.horse on Bluesky. Thanks!

Currently

📚 I'm not sure what to say about Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking. It's a sad book, scattered and weird, but also a profound recollection of the time after her husband's death. I'm glad to have read it, but not sure if I recommend it, if that makes sense?

🎵 I needed blaring heavy metal this week, preferably with a rougher touch, so I've been blasting Rob Zombie's later albums. Venomous Rat Generation Vendor is my favorite out of the last bunch.

📺 I've been rewatching the Mission: Impossible movies, the ones with Tom Cruise. They don't hold up particularly well, at least not until you reach Ghost Protocol, which is the last one I saw. Still, relaxing fun if you watch it for what it is.

🎮 I did the mistake of downloading Bejeweled 3 from Xbox Game Pass, and that was a couple of hours gone. Love that game.

Most of you are likely reading this in your email inboxes. Does it look okay? Hit reply and let me know. And also, do check out the new Bored Horse site. It needs a bit of work, and I'm looking forward to both posting to it, and the tinkering. Your thoughts are, as always, appreciated.

Until next week, hang in there.

— Thord D. Hedengren ⚡