2025 Reading Log | 35/200 yearly goal (+2 from last update)

I've gotten sucked into a fanfic-reading frenzy (Naruto, of all things) so my book-reading has been sparse these past few weeks. However, I did read two books since my last Reading Wednesday post!

First, I decided to read the Oz books (including the post-Baum books by Ruth Plumly Thompson) as a kind of reading project thing, and I of course started with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

I've read it before, but the last time was (I'm pretty sure) back in 2007 when I got my first ereader and put a bunch of public domain books on it.

It's a charming book, and I especially liked the intro from Baum in the beginning that spells out the aim of the book: to be a modern fairy tale for kids that isn't focused on morality lessons. And it does that!

( Chatter about Wonderful Wizard of Oz, including spoilers )

Besides that, I also read a novella by KL Noone called The Pooka's Share. It's a m/m urban fantasy romance between a paranormal police officer and a pookah (Celtic shape-changing spirit) with surprise (to me, because I hadn't read the summary) BDSM elements. A cute story! Perhaps spent a bit too much time on the worldbuilding when this is just a one-off and short to boot, but overall good.

Link: joanwestenberg.com (2025)

The web isn't dying. It's becoming infrastructure.

Just like newspapers didn't disappear when the telegraph arrived—they just became less central to how information moved through society. The human-facing web will persist, but the economic and structural center of gravity is shifting toward systems designed for machine consumption.

This new infrastructure web won't be as colorful or engaging as the human web. It will be more like plumbing—essential, efficient, and largely invisible. Success will depend on reliability, speed, and interoperability rather than creativity, engagement, and virality.

We're moving from an internet designed to capture human attention to an internet designed to feed machine intelligence. The companies that recognize this shift early and position themselves accordingly will build the foundational infrastructure of the AI economy.

What’s at stake now is the kind of infrastructure web we build—one that supports human flourishing or one that prioritizes machine efficiency above all else. The telegraph era of journalism wasn't necessarily better or worse than the penny press era, but it was fundamentally different.

The same will be true of the infrastructure web. It won't be better or worse than the human web that preceded it. But it will be optimized for entirely different purposes, serving entirely different users, operating according to entirely different economic principles.

And most of it will be invisible to the humans whose world it increasingly shapes.

This is definitely already happening-- I just got an email from a professional blogger about writing for Google's AI search, and to structure your blog so AI can more easily read it. You basically have to, if you want to be seen (and maybe make a few bucks off ad revenue).

There's another angle where you could instead move to write for Pinterest search (which is just another kind of AI), or you could pivot to video (Youtube = Google), but for me...I think I'm just take a step back. My little for-profit blog makes about $100/month and hasn't moved beyond that despite a year plus of work, so I don't feel like it's worth the anxiety to worry about what Google's doing or try to change my writing to give AI more access. I do still enjoy writing for that blog, though, so I'm gonna keep going, but I'm just gonna do my own thing.

Anyway, if you're interested in an internet that isn't written for robots, check out the IndieWeb instead!