Kilroy Was Here illustration

This is where my writing lives. Short posts. Longer essays. The occasional hot take.

Reflections on food, leadership, entrepreneurship, reinvention - and anything else I’m thinking through at the time.

Some ideas arrive quickly. Others take their time. The topics change. The practice doesn’t.

If I’m building something, questioning something, or changing direction, you’ll find it here.

Kilroy Was Here logo Kilroy Was Here

Back to the future of earning attention

I didn’t expect to end up back in RSS.

It was a recent episode of The Talk Show with Brent Simmons that nudged me there. Listening to him talk with John Gruber about feed readers took me back to a time when the web felt more coherent. Less fragmented. You chose what came into your field of vision. It didn’t arrive pre-sorted by some faceless algorithm whirring away in a data centre somewhere across the world.

The next morning I downloaded NetNewsWire again. Ten years later.

I’d forgotten how satisfying it is.

You open it and there’s just a list. Names you recognise. Writers who’ve earned your attention. No outrage ladder. No engagement bait. No invisible black box deciding what deserves oxygen.

One of the default guest feeds is Manton Reece. His posts struck me straight away. Snappy. Immediate. Almost like tweets - except they live under your own name. Your own domain. Your own banner.

RSS might be retro. But it endures. Vinyl is retro. Fountain pens are retro. The things that last usually are.

It asks you to choose. To curate your idea swatch. To pay attention to the nuance.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you probably get it already. And if you’re not, you might be surprised how quickly it feels like regaining control.

A laptop displaying an email client and a NetNewsWire article titled Back to the Future of Earning Attention sits on a wooden desk alongside a cup of coffee and an open notebook.

If writing were reps

I’ve decided to write more in public again, and Micro.blog feels like the right place to do it.

I’ve long admired what Manton Reece has built here - a durable, independent space for people who still believe in owning their words. I’ve learned a great deal over the years from writers like John Gruber at Daring Fireball and Ben Thompson at Stratechery, and I continue to be inspired and entertained by their discipline of showing up, thinking clearly, and publishing consistently.

This feed is where I’ll share thoughts while they’re still fresh. Hot takes. Short reflections. A photograph that deserves a caption longer than a tweet. Sometimes longer essays too - but without the friction of formatting them over on Squarespace (~ another Gruber influence!) into something they’re not yet ready to be.

Over the past year I took up lifting weights and learned something along the way that applies here. Progress doesn’t come from motivation. It comes from consistency. Turning up when you don’t feel like it. Repeating the reps. Letting compound effort do its work.

Writing, I suspect, is no different.

www.thomaskilroy.com will be home to these stories, hot takes and reflections. while [www.kilroysofkathmandu.com/blog] documents the return of a restaurant I founded in Nepal two decades ago.. and the wider story of food, hospitality and culture of a changing Nepal.

This space is the notebook. The training ground, if you will.

Consistency beats motivation. Consider this post my first rep.