Every few years someone declares something dead. Books. Writing. Europe. Renewable energy. Mainframes. Declaring things dead is premature.
1. Read.
Books. I’m still reading Butter by Asako Yuzuki. I reread Excellent Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly. And I’m reading De man achter het raam - (The Man Behind the Window) by Gerrit Krol, a book about what we’d now call an AI that takes on human form. Published in 1983 and suddenly very relevant. The AI starts to display too many human traits - even falls in love. The researchers who created him have to decide to put him to sleep.
Article. Europe needs to show some backbone and set aside its petty national interests. This dependent behavior toward the U.S. is outdated. The U.S. is no longer an ally. Says someone from … the U.S.
2. Ideas.
Reading is not dead. It may be a niche, but this article inspires me to makes zines again. Don’t know why I stopped doing it. This closely resembles the discussions when photography got taken over by digital. And now AI.
Sometimes I get demotivated thinking reading is a dying habit and when the books people read are written by celebrities about their idealized lives. Or how these lives fall apart. But I suspect there will be a point when people get tired of video snacks from media personalities on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, and start looking again for something slower, more mundane, and intellectually more challenging.
Of course technology changes things. And then we change.
https://stackmagazines.com/update/the-stack-reading-habits-report/
Neither is writing dead. The sort of writing of self-help books that can already easily be summarized on a single page, yes that can be replaced by an AI answering a question. But there is another sort of writing – another sort of creative output that AI cannot replace.
https://tim.blog/2026/06/12/has-ai-already-killed-nonfiction/
“Will anything survive in roughly its current form?
Probably. Experience that isn’t solely information: comedy, entertainment, storytelling, fiction, etc. You don’t ask an AI to summarize a stand-up special, and a synopsis of a great novel is not a great novel. Voice, taste, and personality may end up being the only durable moats.”
3. Photo
View on the sea from table 300 at Landgoed Huize Glory, Bergen aan Zee.
4. Work in progress
Working on too many things at once. That’s probably my natural state – not that I like it necessarily. The difference is that this week one of them actually reached the finish line.
912 uur Japan. I consider it finished. I had another idea for tweaking it, but it is what it is.
Sent a novella to publishers expecting zero result (too short and edgy). But… done.
Writing ‘The Last Mainframer’. A novel condensing 30 years of notebooks. Before I upset people: the ‘Last’ is tongue-in-cheek. I’m thinking about publishing it on Medium or somewhere similar.
5. Noticed
In a week when we reached another summer heat record, Shell announced it was selling its investments in renewable energy to focus on fossil fuels. And somehow this barely caused a ripple.
It also makes you wonder whether their net-zero ambitions are still credible. And whether concerned employees will speak up again, as some did in 2023.
On solar, we all watched the eclipse. My second. The first one was in 1999.
https://nos.nl/liveblog/2626544-de-zonsverduistering-in-groot-deel-van-europa-van-minuut-tot-minuut
https://nos.nl/video/2626407-zo-keken-nederlanders-naar-de-zonsverduistering-in-1999
I remember birds getting silent being the most impressive.
The same weird silence this time.