Ira Cogan

Welcome to my corner of the world wide web.

Meta has vehemently denied the allegations in the book. “The book is a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, said in a statement. Ms. Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance, he added, and an investigation at the time determined that “she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.” “Meta executives have also responded online to Ms. Wynn-Williams’s claims, calling most of them wildly exaggerated or flat-out false. The New York Times

So, Meta is trying to shut Sarah Wynn-Williams up.

I’d guess the “wildly exaggerated or flat out false” allegations are the unverifiable ones, and the “out of date” or “previously reported” ones are true. That said. I knew I had to read this book. I read the book and would say about 92% of it is verifiable. Well written too. Are there criticisms to be made of the book? Sure. But those criticisms have nothing to do with how ugly all this “out of date” or “previously reported” stuff is. I’m not even talking about allegations of harassment or anything in the 8% or so of the book that isn’t verifiable. My critique is that it glossed over or downright omitted quite a few things that I’m sure Wynn-Williams knew all about. Maybe there are reasons for that, after all the book is supposed to be a memoir of her time there, not a history book about her time there, but I think the book could have been about fifty pages longer than it was. Some things are just glossed over in my humble opinion. I guess I’m just whining that the book wasn’t exactly what I wanted it to be (like so much criticism of everything in the world). My other critique is that some of her problems (also a small percentage, maybe 5%), are self-inflicted and/or have nothing to do with Facebook but are spun as if they have something to do with Facebook. Well, it’s also her memoir, and she’s entitled to tell her story from her point of view her way.

That said, Facebook is an ugly company run by ugly people who suck and are ruining the world. And Sarah Wynn-Williams has written a terrific book that everyone should read. I give this book a Must Read.

I finally read Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein and thoroughly enjoyed it. Rather than write a review or a critique of a classic that was written in 1959, I'll say that I don't need to agree with everything someone writes to find it enjoyable. I'll also say it's something everyone should read. It wouldn’t be the best use of my time (or yours) to write down all my thoughts here on the book, that’s been done by people far better at that kind of thing than me. And. By people far worse at that than me who I suspect got it totally and completely wrong. I think everyone should read it and come to their own conclusions. I give this book a must read too.

I’ll also say that as much as I love every Verhoeven movie I’ve ever seen, I can see why fans of the book hated that movie. I think what a film based on a book owes to the source material isn’t that it’s literally the book translated to film. But. It does have to take place in that same world, touch on the same themes, and the characters have to behave in the ways they would in the book. If the characters don’t, there better be a good reason for it. Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers does almost none of those things. It touches on those themes occasionally in a perfunctory way and it’s an entertaining Verhoeven movie, but it is not that book at all. Yet, I don’t have it in me to hate it. I’m too big a Verhoeven fan.

On this day in 1970 (well, yesterday now, I meant to publish this last night. Whoops!) Kurt Vonnegut gave a wide-ranging interview to the BBC. If you haven't read any Vonnegut, you should read some Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle are good starting points.

There's no shame in getting around to the things you want to get around to later than you intended to get around to them. Or. Better late than never.

If you’re heading out to the protests today, be SAFE and be LOUD out there!

-Ira

Well this sums up my feelings lately:

Maria Hernandez Park, Brooklyn, January 4, 2025

Lenovo Ideapad AMD, 16Gb RAM, 512GB hard drive running Windows 11 $700ish after taxes

24” Monitor. It’s just the right size.

Corsair K70 Core RGB mechanical keyboard -I got a Best Buy gift card from someone at Christmas and treated myself. I just got this thing yesterday and I’m enjoying it. $70ish

Microsoft Surface mouse -Someone threw a box of these things away, probably because their whole office upgraded. I don’t think they make these anymore but I assume they were inexpensive. It works good!

An Xbox controller -There are a lot of PC games that you can use an Xbox controller with. I don’t have a “gaming” machine. I don’t play games often enough to justify it but it’s fun sometimes to play games that don’t require a machine with a lot of horsepower.

Bose WIRED computer speakers -these they definitely don’t make anymore. I got them over twenty years ago and recently dug them out of a storage box and they still sound AMAZING.

A copy of Strunck & White’s The Elements Of Style 4th Edition.

A copy of Keys For Writers, 7th edition.

A copy of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 11th Edition.

A mag mount charger for the phone and the headphones.

On the wall above my desk I have a 2025 Complexly wall calendar. I became a fan of wall calendars again a few years ago. They’re easy to fill out, they’re nice to look at, and they’re a pleasant reminder of things to look forward to and that time is a real thing that’s passing by. It’s fun to mix it up each year too, sometimes I have a Van Gogh calendar, sometimes one from the local supermarket. It’s also nice to look up and see something different each month.

And a wall clock with a second hand. Aesthetically pleasing and also, a reminder that that time is passing by.

All the reasons I didn't update my blog in 2024. But first! Well first, I had to start a blog and I think I got started on blogger or blogspot or whatever the one is that google owns, and then I had to make a Tumblr blog. And of course, once I made those I had to toggle the bells and whistles on them. And on the Tumblr one I had to look at everyone else's Tumblr blogs, oh also, I have to backtrack, I had to make a yahoo email address, then I had to move to Gmail because I heard it was better and was able to get an invite to it, then I had to join Friendster, then I had to join myspace, and then I started playing music again so I had to make a myspace page for my music, then I had the myspace blog, this was all before I made the Tumblr blog but it was probably after or concurrent with the Tumblr... I don't know, I was in my twenties. Where was I? Myspace! So, I made the myspace page for the music and I was playing bass in two bands, and I was washing dishes in a restaurant in the West Village and moonlighting bussing down tables and washing glasses in a bar in the East Village and playing bass in the bands and going to shows sometimes. Like, punk and metal shows. I used to go to CBGBs and Coney Island High and Castle Heights and The Spiral. To be honest I didn't really go to The Spiral unless I was playing there anyway, oh! The Wetlands! That place was cool! So in between that, I didn't have time to update the blog on the myspace and then nobody was on the Tumblr and I forgot about the google blogger blogspot blog so I forgot about that and Tumblr, and then...

Now we're up to chapter two, in real-time 2025 I'm starting chapter three but I'm gonna write about chapter two now. Ghost made a Kickstarter or something that had a really cool side by side whatyouseeiswhatyouget markdown editor, so I was like now I'm gonna be a blogger and take it seriously! So, I plunked down MONEY! And secured my piece of real estate on the web. I registered https://www.iracogan.com and felt very official. Then I set up the Ghost blog hosted by Ghost (Pro), then I connected email to it with another company called fastmail which I found through my domain registrar iwantmyname. Oh right, I forgot. I found iwantmyname through Ghost.

And then I barely updated the Ghost blog, then I made a WordPress blog and closed out the Ghost Blog, and then I barely updated that, and then, last week, I closed out the WordPress(still in that process by the way), then, then I switched to write.as, well, it isn't that simple.

First I had to make the ghost blog, and then I had to toggle the bells and whistles, then I had to learn markdown, then I thought I was gonna become a software developer because if I could learn markdown, how hard could markUP be? as in HyperTextMarkupLanguage! HTML, CSS, and Javascript! I was gonna become a computer whiz, start a company, and become a bazillionaire! Easy peasy! So, then I didn't do any of that, because I was too busy being a writer who doesn't write and a bass player who doesn't practice playing bass. I mean look. I was busy. How could I have time to update my blog when I was so busy with the going to shows and the being social? Oh Look. I know how to prioritize.

I'll double back to that, but I'm trying to write about why I didn't update my blog here. So, I started taking bass lessons. I can't remember what year it was, but I did take lessons for about a year and my timing got better and my notes sounded solid, and I started to be able to improv and that was cool. So, I closed out the Ghost blog and started a WordPress one because WordPress felt official. Everyone else who was official was using WordPress, and I started to feel limited by Ghost because I was too busy to learn about things like code injection for headers or footers, how could I learn about that when I was trying to learn html, and how could I learn html when I was trying to learn Markdown. And how could I learn about Markdown when I was so busy with all these other important things?

I'd get sidetracked with the WordPress and it's bells and whistles, and every once in a while I'd update the blog up until 2024 when I resolved to update it more, which I did, but not by much, and then I made the write.as blog. Oh wait, let me backtrack again. I started to hate WordPress. At first, I liked the gravatar thing, then I hated it, then they introduced this thing called “Blaze”, it's pretty much you pay money to elevate your posts and I was like “oh so now WordPress is like every other stupid company”, and then there's this drama now with the WordPress guy and WP Engine, I have no dog in that fight. Just a buncha wealthy assholes having a big dick contest, so I would re-up on WordPress hosting every two years and my wife was like, the last time it was up for a 2 year renewal she was like 'why don't you switch to monthly?' and I was like 'but it's more expensive that way' and she was like 'switch to monthly, try it' and I was like 'ok' and I felt like this weight was lifted off my shoulders. There was something weird going on in the back end with my fastmail integration with iwantmyname and the wordpress anyway, so I was like 'I feel so liberated! Lemme see what else is out there!' so I go to iwantmyname which has the 'one click integration' that worked well with fastmail (and with Ghost) but not with wordpress, to see what other CMS/blog hosts they have one click integration with. I perused some and came across one called write.as and I think it was love at first sight.

The rest is history. Wait. No. There’s more.

So, I forgot to tell you about yahoo and Friendster in the days before gmail existed. I also completely skipped over Netscape Navigator and the dialup and AOL. So I think I was 13 or 14 when my parents got a computer. The Computer. It was the early 90s and they got an IBM Aptiva! I don't remember the specs on that thing, but it took about 45 minutes to load a big picture. Sometimes someone would have this thing called a scanner and take their pictures or art and scan it and put it on their webpage on the internet and it would take so long to load.

So fast forward a few years, Friendster, blogger, Tumblr, and the like. We're in the post AOL era but before the Gmail era I think. I tried to get into it. Too many things. Then Ghost was cool. Then WordPress seemed cool, and is cool I think, but not for me, also, too many distractions.

write dot as. words. images. markdown (or rich text) and that is all! That's all I need and everything else that I was fucking around with is bullshit. Like, was I trying to be a writer or a flounderer.

I read a book recently called Becoming A Writer by Dorothea Brande that I stumbled across. I found out about it through a book called Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer. Benjamin Dreyer was the head editor at Random House-Penguin and he wrote a book about English in the spirit of William Safire's On Language. It's a good book. Anyway, he mentions and quotes Brande's book, and, last year I read Jenna Fischer's The Actor's life, and in that, she mentions Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way helped her out and continue to help her out whenever she's in a creative funk, and I started reading that one, and the exercises there? I was like “fuck this book” but! there was one exercise I thought was valuable to me, writing first thing in the morning, and it turns out that exercise was based on exercises in Brande's book, and given that Dreyer mentioned Brande's book and he's had a lot of success in publishing and writing, and Fischer mentioned a book that had exercises based on that book, I was like, I gotta read Becoming A Writer by Dorothea Brande. So I read it. And I liked it. Look, if you're already doing something creative, practicing your craft every day of your life, you probably don't need it, but if not, check it out.

To be continued.

-Ira

Youtuber Dan Olson of Folding Ideas’s talk at XOXO Fest 2024

The Computer History Museum remembers Donald Bitzer ^I read his obituary in the NYTimes yesterday and I had no idea who this guy was. He did so much great stuff!

Terrific read about Bluesky and some of the problems with social media in general by Katherine Alejandra Cross in LiberalCurrents. I’d quote some text but the whole thing is so great I think you should just read it! via

I had a pleasant week. I had Christmas Day and New Year’s Day off so that was nice.

I just started reading Confessions Of An Advertising Man a couple of days ago and will likely finish it this weekend. I read Ogilvy On Advertising a while back ‘cause I finally got into Mad Men and I wanted to read the other one and am finally getting around to it.

This weekend I’m gonna organize my file cabinet, drink lots of water, and eat right. Monday I start with the exercise. I’m at about 230lbs right now, and feel healthiest and strongest between 190 and 200. I want to get down there by the summer. I think that’s achievable.

Have a great weekend everybody!

-Ira

A couple of things that made me feel inspired in 2024:

The New York Mets!!

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard live at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, Friday 8/16/24

2025: Lets Goooooo!

Test.

Hi there. Long story short, I left Wordpress and deleted everything and am starting over. New year new blog. The thing was long overdue for some major changes, and I needed something with fewer bells and whistles. Something where I just get right down to writing. Too many distractions with Wordpress and I’m distracted enough as it is. Wordpress is fine, it just isn’t for me at the moment. I’ve switched to something called write.as and over the next few days I’ll be figuring this thing out and toggling and checking out the bells and whistles on here.

While we're under construction, check out the blogroll and about sections up top!

xoxo -Ira