Newsletter for friends #02: Stuff from mostly July

Hello friends,

Thank you for your great response to my first newsletter for friends! Continuing to embrace a calmer digital life against the slurp of social media, I’m sharing with you another web letter of notable things I’ve been up to or enjoyed circa July.

Reading

• The moving monument
• How LinkedIn treats us like monkeys
• Studying space samples in India
• (Not) seeing like a data structure
• Casual racism
• You’re allowed to be interested in particle physics
• Accessibility features are just features

Writing

• How ISRO will go from Chandrayaan 3 to an Indian to the Moon
• Published editions #181, #182, #183, #184 and #185 of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter, covering lunar exploration updates from China, India, Japan, the US, South Korea, and Canada!
• I didn’t like writing this article but I had to: Diving deeper into NASA’s CLPS conundrum that led to VIPER’s cancelation
• Published Indian Space Progress #18, covering ISRO’s space budget and efforts to amp up its rockets
• Moon Monday but in video!

Space, personally

• I’m an Open Lunar Affiliate!
• Me after a conference
• Lovely gift from a new friend and reader

Snark..

• How to have sustainable conferences
• What will make me take LinkedIn seriously
• It’s important to be on social media because it’s useful to know what mediocrity and human gullibility is like

Notable microthoughts

• WhatsApp is a better social network than Meta’s supposed social networks
• Writing headlines in the style of “Friends” is fun
• Headlines that re-kill hope for humanity with a single word
• Easing subscribing via RSS

Life

• Introducing thoughts.jatan.space, because the internet needs to be weird, stat-less, non-performative, fun at least for one, personal, and innocent.
• My life’s mission: Write words that matter, and age well
• Smash your worries away
• Café mochas are my reading companion, which I self-delivered once without a single spill

Pictures

• The moving monument that is the Topra Ashoka pillar
• What are conferences good for? To get pictures of you speaking and standing
• The Museum of Possibilities and an eerily specific restaurant in Chennai
• More café spaces like this for humans who like to go alone please

I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.

Don’t know what to say? Reply with an interesting link!

Let’s not live an internet without intent.