If you're reading this, I have, perhaps succeeded at finding a way of getting some sort of a newsletter out on a little bit more of a regular basis. I always go into writing with great optimism, and then systems don't hold up. But still making the attempt beats the alternative.

I've had a number of abortive attempts at writing something for this. One part of it is the increasing gap that I still feel a need to fill. And as time goes on with a longer delay from the previous note, it just becomes harder and harder to get the next one. So this will be incomplete, but they're all incomplete.

The Tech
Personally, I have started to use an RSS feed reader (my personal app for the present moment is Readrops for Android, but I've used others in the past, and I'm not committed to this one; fortunately, a good thing about RSS readers is that the feed list is very exportable and transportable.

RSS feeds also let me string together newsletters from some thoughtful people I like to track regularly (Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American, Joan Westenberg) along with news feeds, as well as closer, less frequent blogs from friends and acquaintances. And it's not poisoned by "engagement" or slop, and it's not choked with advertisements. It's information at a more agreeable pace and with much less distraction around it.

RSS doesn't work for everything, though. I thought I had found a way to keep track of a couple reporters I used to follow on Twitter (back when that was a thing reasonable people might do), who are now mostly doing social media on Bluesky. I do have an account for Bluesky, and I do use it slightly more frequently than I do Facebook, but those aren't seas I want to swim in on a regular basis.

I posted some other thoughts about RSS on my personal website (https://www.psproefrock.com/2026/01/22/feeding-the-infostream/ ) and having both this newsletter and that site are maybe a bit of the problem, with focus and maintenance requirements spread out too thinly. I think they are separate things, but maybe the differentiation isn't enough to bother with. Up to now, this has been a very limited audience that I'm writing to, but I'm going to open it up a bit more. Maybe I'll do some kind of merge between the two.

Being Contrarian
I've always been a contrarian in a number of things. If something is popular, I'm likely to be against it. I always felt like an outsider as a kid growing up. So I always looked for the other side of things, the other, the things that are undervalued or overlooked, and I think that's stuck with me my entire life.

I encountered this (below) recently on Mastodon (the weirdo social media that I /_DO_/ find my communities in), and I think it's apt in a couple of ways:

Businesses keep massively screwing up the Al writing thing, so let me put it in a CEO's language.
Let's say overnight 10,000 cafes popped up in your town. Just wall-to-wall cafe. Your VIP comes to you and says: "I got it.
We will open a cafe here."
Your cafe might be decent, it might offer some different stuff, but there's no escaping the fact that it's another cafe that no one asked for.
For some reason we all understand basic supply-and-demand with stuff like the housing market, gas prices, shoe sales, etc.
But when it comes to "content," the entire bed-rock philosophy of supply-and-demand goes out the window. Al content is now unlimited. As such, it has no value.
It doesn't matter if you "do good prompts" or whatever.
There's no escaping the fact that it's a cafe on a street with 10,000 other cafes - and that every person on Earth can now build their own cafe in an instant.
In short, there's no value there.
Human writing is like putting a pizzeria or Thai restaurant or sushi place on that block, where everyone is sick and tired of the same lukewarm burnt coffee and stale bran muffins. You might still fail. But you now stand out and give yourself a chance where the supply of your services is low and the demand is high.
In short, you are offering real value.

The Updates
Not a whole lot to say here. Theo is off work for a few more weeks before things start up again at Leslie Park. Neil is going to be coming back to Michigan to work at Arcadia Bluffs (on Lake Michigan shore, between Manistee and Frankfort) starting in a few weeks. Stacia still working her series of jobs including the tutoring lab(1) and teaching classes(2) at Henry Ford Community College, coaching at Forged(3), and the JFS health aide class(4), as well as her own clients(5) and the occasional USAPL refereeing(6) and event management(7). And I am still commuting to Livonia 9 days out of 10.

We had a pretty good garden last year, and I'm hoping to do more with it this coming year. Neil's dog (who is becoming our adoptive dog) is known for his Crimes, and was discovering that green tomatoes were fun to play with late last year, so our fencing will need to improve. Now, not only do we need to worry about bunnies and squirrels, but also pit-basenjis, too.

The Travelogue
Stacia and I went out to the Pacific Northwest in December. I had visited Seattle for a couple days in the late 1980s for a Friends of Photography workshop, but didn't see much of it at all - just flew in and flew out again; Stacia had never been there at all. And we were interested in seeing the Hoh Rainforest, so that was our plan: a couple days in Seattle and then a couple days out on the Pacific coast. Then, it turned out that the region was getting pummeled by an atmospheric river and there were torrential rains and serious flooding in the area.

The city itself was very pleasant. We stayed downtown, took the municipal transit from the airport to downtown and walked a few blocks to the place we were staying, which had a view out over Puget Sound. We walked from the ferry terminal to the sculpture park to Pike Place market, and up to the Frye Museum. Wonderful urban experience; I'd go back for more.

Then we got a rental car and drove out to the coast. We stayed at a lodge in the National Park that was on the Pacific coast. (And because it was off-season and mostly empty, they upgraded us to a cabin with a woodstove (at no extra charge) because they anticipated, with the storms, they might lose power (they were right), and the cabin would be more comfortable.

All the main parks we wanted to visit were closed, or flooded, or inaccessible. Hoh Rainforest, Quinalt Rainforest, and Sol Duc Hot Springs were all places we tried to get to but could not reach. But, that did not make for a ruined trip. Just driving in the 10 or 15 miles off the main road to get to the Hoh, for example, we were still /_in_/ the Hoh Rain Forest, just not the National Park portion. And, since it was off-season and it was closed, there was no other traffic, so, at a couple points, we just stopped the car and got out and looked around at the trees and the mosses and lichens and the waterfalls and all the silence and the scents and the amazing quality of the place. We did also, eventually find a place that we could get into the woods and hike, to a place called Marymere Falls, near Lake Crescent.

Even just driving round through the area was mostly a great experience. It is different enough, and the forests in the region feel different from forests in Michigan. But we also had multiple encounters with trees down across roads (including a swerve-to-miss crash avoidance in the dark on our way back to Seattle for our flight home), and that kept us from getting to a couple places (though the two outright blockages were places we came back to later), and I joined in with several other people to get the pieces of a tree across Highway 101 tossed off to the side while a guy with a chainsaw in his pickup diced it up so we all could get past.

The road along Lake Crescent was scenic and looked like something out of central casting for a car commercial. It was overcast, with diffuse light and dramatic mist and low clouds among the mountains on the other side of the lake. Rocks and trees on one side, an amazing, scenic vista across the lake on the other side, and a beautiful, winding road perched between the two providing a constantly shifting view. (We stopped at a scenic turnout to just take it all in and got overflown by a pair of bald eagles just soaring around.)

And that’s it for now, and I’m going to actually hit [send]