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A Working Library 2 days ago

The Beginning Place

Hugh, suddenly overwhelmed by the dreary, lifeless routine of work-television-work, runs from the house he shares with his mother. He does not know where he is going. He runs down streets and past suburban homes and finds himself at a strange and beautiful creek. The water is cool and revives him, brings him back to himself. He soon visits this place as often as he can, finding in it something sacred and unspeakable. He thinks he is the only one who comes there, until one day he sees a young woman, who likewise thinks this is her place. In fact, she has known of this place for much longer, and knows also of the strange people who live a ways up the trail. She knows, too, of a great fear that is terrorizing them, and that there is something—perhaps someone—they are waiting for. There are several allegories at work here, not the least of which seems to me to have some of Beowulf to it. But I think the book may also be seen as a kind of coming of age story, if coming of age was the work not of one but two, not of solitude or isolation but of connection, conjoining, coupling. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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underlap 4 days ago

Improving my Go

Three months ago I started playing Go again, both online and at Winchester Go Club. Most Wednesday evenings I enjoy sipping a Guiness 0.0% at The Black Boy pub and getting completely absorbed in games against stronger players. Some of my recent games are as follows: Since there’s supposed to be one handicap stone per difference in rank, that puts me at around 13 kyu, although I’m still trying to break the 19 kyu barrier online. My more recent games are as follows: I’ve already acquired far too many Go books. Although they are all supposed to be for beginners, some of them make me feel out of my depth. I’ve subscribed to “Go Magic” which has excellent videos combined with exercises and puzzles. I’ve enjoyed some of Nick Sibicky’s YouTube videos ( categorised list ). He recently admitted “Go is so hard and so complex that you never know what you’re doing.” which shows some humility for a strong player. I’ve also watched some of Dwyrin’s “Back to Basics” series on YouTube. I found lugging my beautiful 4.3 kg goban to the club rather hard, so I’ve purchased a thinner/lighter board. I’ve never been very good at reading in Go, which means working through sequences of moves in your head. Generally, I’ve tended not to try to keep much in my working memory and have found ways of working around this. But, especially when playing in person, there’s no alternative to reading out some positions to determine the best move. I wonder if it’s even possible for me to improve my working memory significantly. According to Handicap for smaller board sizes , a handicap of 4 on 13x13 corresponds to a rank difference of 8-10 kyu. If I’m 13 kyu, that might put Angus at 21-23 kyu. ↩︎ Nigel (10 kyu) gave me a 3 stone handicap. I won. Wayne (6 kyu) gave me a 7 stone handicap. I won. Marcus (12 kyu) gave me a 2 stone handicap. I won. Mike (4 kyu) gave me a 9 stone handicap. I lost, but it was close. Marcus (12 kyu), even game. I lost. Phil (4 kyu) gave me an 8 stone handicap. I lost. Angus (? kyu [1] ) on 13x13. I gave him 5 stones and lost and then gave him 4 stones and won. According to Handicap for smaller board sizes , a handicap of 4 on 13x13 corresponds to a rank difference of 8-10 kyu. If I’m 13 kyu, that might put Angus at 21-23 kyu. ↩︎

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Justin Duke 1 weeks ago

Near to the Wild Heart

Two friends, upon learning that I wanted to get into Clarice Lispector, advised me not to start with Near to the Wild Heart . Having now finished the book, I think I understand why. The two parallels that come to mind — less in terms of style and message than in terms of how one situates the prose — are Murakami and Woolf. Murakami is, to be clear, the much less stylistically successful of the two. But like Murakami, Lispector's work has been treated with a sense of otherness — not as a method of denigrating it, but to suggest that it sits outside its country's literary tradition. And while you can make a compelling argument that Murakami taps into a distinctly Japanese sense of alienation and ennui in the modern era — and, moreover, that much of his earlier writing is explicitly political — Lispector here is ethereal, barely attempting to give any hint or indication of where and how her protagonists live. Part of this otherness — the sense of the story being completely untethered to any semblance of setting — serves contemporary reading well, in this age of autofiction and, for lack of a better term, idealistic narcissism. There is hardly a hint of whiplash going from Ben Lerner to Lispector. Woolf I evoke for a handful of reasons. First: like Lispector, Virginia Woolf is often praised backhandedly, under the umbrella of feminist literature, or feminist modernism. But Woolf's goals — say, in To the Lighthouse — are directly oppositional to Lispector's. The Lighthouse is an argument toward the permeability of consciousness and shared existence, conveyed with empathy and perspective. Woolf uses the frame of modernism to talk about shared experience , and this pattern forms a lineage in which I can find much of my favorite writing. (See also A.S. Byatt's Possession .) Lispector, conversely — at least in this book — is a solipsist. Her self-insert protagonist is the raison d'être of the entire prose, the sun about which every other character orbits. Any character not named Joana is given time and energy only insofar as they shed light on Joana. And the philosophy of the book — beyond its explicit cribbing of Spinoza — is an argument, if not quite in favor of this, then against the status quo that spawns it. All that aside: this book makes me more intrigued to read the Lispector of her later years, while considerably less excited at the prospect of having found an author I can spend the next decade absorbing. Her biggest asset on display is the prose. Even through translation, her writing is beautiful and serrated, while never being Rococo. And considering her age upon writing this — and this is where the Woolf comparisons begin to feel unfair — one gets the sense of a young master in full control of what she wants to say and how she wants to say it, but who unfortunately does not yet have much at all to say. One last note: the final chapter, a series of monologues from Joana, is indeed placeable among the highest echelons of modernism — beautiful and cryptic and self-indulgent all at once.

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ava's blog 1 weeks ago

book: whipping girl by julia serano

During my break in July, I said I wouldn't read. I partially lied! I did not read any papers, blog posts, or most news articles, and I initially wanted to extend that to books as well. But I ended up ordering and reading some, and one of them was Whipping Girl! Originally released in 2007 and edited a bit in 2015 and with an afterword from 2023, it is a tad older, but such a foundational work in gender studies. It's a feminist analysis about how femininity is punished in society, specifically illustrated on the hatred on, and cissexism enacted against, trans women and their representation in media. It discusses common models of thinking about gender (gender essentialism vs. social constructionism) and where they fall short, as well as different kinds of feminism (and why feminism needs to be trans-inclusive) and theories as to why people are trans that do not serve trans people. It's specifically mentioning trans-objectification (= disregarding trans people as living human beings, reducing them to an unfeeling thing you can speculate over and ask invasive questions, an anomaly to demonize, ridicule, exploit or fetishize), trans-fascimilation (= portraying trans genders as facsimiles of cisgender ones), trans-sexualization (= asserting that trans women transition to attract sexual desire, to attract men, or to become the women they're attracted to; relegating them to a fetish, as merely sex workers, perverts, exotic fucks etc.), trans-interrogation (= obsessively focusing on the reasons why trans people exist, pathologizing them), trans-erasure (= silencing trans voices and preventing them from being visible and coming out, prioritizing cis people's theories and feelings), trans-exclusion (= excluding trans people from events and spaces based on their trans status), and trans-mystification (= turning transition into a taboo, a hidden secret, a scandal instead of a real and mundane thing) as ways trans people, often specifically trans women, are harmed in society. It also covers the way trans people have been historically (mis)treated and mischaracterized by the medical world without giving them a chance to speak, and the way gender transition has been gatekept by dehumanizing standards like attractiveness, sexual orientation, sterilization, secrecy about the trans status, and more, resulting in only letting a small amount of people transition at all, and only if they were most willing to comply with cis expectations and also had the resources (money, changing jobs, moving away etc.). Any gatekeeping of transition resources is done for the well-being of the cis population, and especially the extremely, extremely small portion of them who could transition and regret it, and is never actually done for the well-being of trans people. This is possible because, despite many people rejecting ideas of attaining social status, occupation, political power etc. via birth right (casteism, for example), cis society has no problem seeing gender as a birth right, something you inherit and cannot gain otherwise, and is otherwise not as legit as theirs. This further leads to the ridiculous double-standards and unfair judgment trans women are subjected to: Act feminine, and you are seen as a parody, a facsimile of a woman, a costume, or "leading someone on"; act masculine, and it is deemed a sign of a "true male identity", as not even trying, as a joke for media. Pseudofeminists say women can do anything men can and should be strong and unafraid to speak their minds, yet ridicule trans women for behaviors deemed masculine, especially when they speak out about their oppression. They create standards of what makes someone a "real woman", yet reject the same when men do it. Crossdressing is fine for women and is, technically, done on the daily when you're wearing pants - yet a man wearing a skirt is already classified as a mental illness and used to historically focus on men only ( Transvestic Disorder (F65.1)). The book asserts that the mechanisms behind it are traditional sexism (the belief that maleness and masculinity are superior to femaleness and femininity, and the delegitimization of the latter as weak and artificial), and oppositional sexism (the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, and the delegitimization of gender non-conformity). Through effemimania (the word she coins for the societal obsession with transfem expressions of femininity), cissexist society is wielding transmisogyny against trans women. She also partially calls out feminists who have aided the societal view that femininity is artificial and needs to be abolished, which is misogynistic and alienates people who naturally gravitate to, perhaps "perform", femininity. Other than that, Julia Serano also develops the intrinsic inclinations model in the book as a path between either bioessentialist ideas or the idea that gender is merely a social construct, opting instead to say that there are both biological and social components to why someone is trans. She also covers how cis people take their gender for granted, as it just happened to be congruent and likely never questioned by them or others in their life, and therefore often doubt that one could "feel like" a specific gender, even though they do, too. If this wouldn't be the case, we wouldn't have so many gender-affirming surgeries and treatments for cis people, and many would freely transition to better fit a role in a movie, go undercover, or to succeed in a field dominated by another gender - but they don't. As an outlook on the future of queer/trans communities and politics, the book explains why identity politics and subversivism in queer/trans spaces are not beneficial; genders outside the gender binary shouldn't be seen as more radical and "good" while binary trans people are seen as "bad" or "reinforcing the gender binary". Alliances are more important than understanding us all as one group, as this has the chance of brushing over different needs and experiences that need to be addressed without being called "divisive". Overall, I found it very pleasant and engaging to read, and one could tell (in a positive and delightful way) that a lot of the book consisted of separate essays published elsewhere before they were combined. It didn't read to me as a particularly dry "book-writing style", no vibe of "I'll sit down to write a whole book now and talk down to readers in a clinical way", but something that could be published in a series of posts on personal blogs musing on social topics nowadays, which made me wish more bloggers would opt to release their works as different chapters in a book some time, instead of leaving them spread on platforms like Substack. Despite the patchwork, the entire book felt so cohesive, in a great order, and approachable, like a longer blog post, but without losing depth or attention. It felt very satisfying how thoroughly Julia Serano covers and debunks everything and still manages to not lose you, to lead from one thing to another with such ease. It was a cathartic read, with a marker in hand. I'm surrounded by trans people and have witnessed online trans discourse since I was about 17, but even I found some sections in the book more difficult to understand with the mixing of terms and knowing a different version of the used concepts and definitions; especially in regards to "transsexual" and "transgender". So in some sentences, both words were used interchangeably or one as umbrella term, but in other sections, they described different things. As the work is older, many concepts, words etc. have evolved and changed quite a bit, and some ideas have become very unpopular. I have also never seen anyone online hold on to the idea that there are 'transgender cissexuals' or vice versa, but this is discussed in the book, and some of it might be labeled transmedicalist. I think it helps to discuss some things in there with trans people you know (if they are genuinely interested to, and you're not burdening them). I don't know if I would give this to anyone that is a complete newbie to the topic for that reason; it's not a "I'm coming out, to understand me, go read this.", especially when some of it is no longer the default in discourse, but it's still something people should have read if they are not entirely new to gender discourse or queer history. Let me end this post with a quote from the Afterword: "As I said at the start, I cannot say how this particular anti-trans moral panic will end. But what I do know is this: efforts to eliminate trans people will never succeed, because we are part of natural variation, and we will persist as long as human beings exist. Anti-trans activists may strive to "disappear" us like they did during the twentieth century, but that outcome is no longer possible. Back when I was a trans kid, we were isolated from one another - quarantined, if you will - due to a lack of access to information and reliable ways to communicate with one another. But now we live in a hyperconnected world, and there are countless trans-centered books, artworks, media and organizations that share our perspectives and trans-related resources. Anti-trans activists may attempt to ban books about us from libraries and censor discussions about us in school settings, but they cannot stop us from finding one another online or elsewhere. Now that we know how many of us there are, we will continue to seek out and learn from one another. Trans people have always been resourceful and resilient, and nobody can take that away from us. " Published 02 Aug, 2026

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A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Reading matters deeply

In Virtue Hoarders , Catherine Liu’s polemic against the professional managerial class, she calls attention to how Obama talked about reading in the waning days of his presidency. In his farewell address on January 10, 2017, he said: Social attitudes oftentimes take generations to change. But if our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction—Atticus Finch—who said “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Obama paraphrased this line a few days later, in an interview with Michiko Kakutani for the New York Times book review, where he said that reading allowed him to “get in somebody else’s shoes.” It’s a curious reference. Finch is the white lawyer who represents a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The villain in the novel is a man named Bob Ewell, the woman’s father, who beats her and helps her frame the Black man for the crime. As Liu notes, the book holds up Finch as the “good” white man who fights for justice while Ewells are the “bad” white people who live off public assistance. But in Go Set a Watchman, the sequel published 1 in 2015—eighteen months before Obama’s speech—it’s revealed that Atticus Finch was a member of the Klan. Many Klansmen were in fact educated and upstanding citizens by day, even as they donned hoods and rained terror at night. Their daytime performance of polite civilization was as much a mask for the violence and brutality as the hoods themselves. Similarly, Liu points out that Finch’s righteousness and commitment to justice contrasts with Ewell’s “white trash” status to elevate Finch into white saviorhood while simultaneously denigrating the people who depend on welfare—valorizing the performance of justice absent the realization of it. Liu locates a similar move in Obama’s embrace of his role as “reader-in-chief.” Despite a public commitment to raising educational standards, Obama’s policies “left 19.3 percent of American children under the age of five living in extreme poverty.” 2 That is, while Obama ostensibly raised educational standards, he did not substantially increase funding to schools, nor did he upend the anti-labor practices that punished teachers when their (often poor) students didn’t make the cut. And those same standards promoted an approach to reading in which stories were stripped of their social and political standpoint and read naively, as if the world from which the stories emerged didn’t exist. Liu asks us to imagine a child from that nineteen percent of the population, being instructed to read a book in which those who take public assistance are dismissed as trash, while responding to a prescriptive writing prompt about how the book asks people to “take a stand.” But who is taking that stand, and for what? Liu writes: “Atticus and Obama showed us that individual acts of empathy and private self-cultivation would produce justice and understanding in a world torn apart by racism and violence.” 3 This is what Jade Davis warns of in The Other Side of Empathy , the reproduction of an empathy culture in which “change and action stop being necessary…because the feeling and sense of understanding are action enough.” 4 Rather than giving someone money, we feel what it’s like to walk in their shoes; rather than ending social disparities, we passively read stories about their lives. In this mode, empathy is a kind of terminating gesture: once you’ve empathized with someone else, you’re relieved of taking any action on their behalf. Liu proposes: “Let us read Atticus Finch as a political project and the novel in which he exists as a piece of well-crafted, anti-welfare state, antisocialist propaganda. Reading matters deeply, but not in the way Obama and Kakutani want it to.” 5 That is, reading isn’t about reaching empathic dead ends, or recruiting platitudes about how we must understand each other; it isn’t about the performance of social class absent a criticism of that class structure. To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means that you are there when you are reading; you, the reader, with your feet on the ground, a ground on which racism, misogyny, and extreme poverty are not so easily dispatched. You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt. To use reading to step into someone else’s shoes is to leave yourself behind. There is some controversy here: it’s unclear whether or not Lee approved of this publication (she died early the following year), and while her publisher insisted the book was always intended as a sequel, it seems more likely that it was an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird . In either case, there is no disputing that Lee wrote both books. ↩︎ Liu, Virtue Hoarders , page 49. ↩︎ Ibid. , page 46. ↩︎ Davis, The Other Side of Empathy , page 2. ↩︎ Liu, Virtue Hoarders , page 55. ↩︎ View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter . There is some controversy here: it’s unclear whether or not Lee approved of this publication (she died early the following year), and while her publisher insisted the book was always intended as a sequel, it seems more likely that it was an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird . In either case, there is no disputing that Lee wrote both books. ↩︎ Liu, Virtue Hoarders , page 49. ↩︎ Ibid. , page 46. ↩︎ Davis, The Other Side of Empathy , page 2. ↩︎ Liu, Virtue Hoarders , page 55. ↩︎

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A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Virtue Hoarders

Catherine Liu argues that the professional managerial class ( PMC ) are marked by their use of meritocracy, philanthropy, and virtue signaling to promote the core premise of neoliberal economics: an isolationist individualism that simultaneously preaches self-sufficiency and achievement and blocks collective efforts towards social justice. Liu is unsparing in her assessment of the PMC , and the book is an uncomfortable read if, like me, you are an erstwhile member of it. But we cannot change or interrupt what we cannot face, and here is our chance to face it—to look squarely at the set of cultural and political practices that the PMC have promulgated and come to terms with what they have wrought. Liu concludes that the principles of professionalism itself—with its twin concerns for truth and accountability—are critical to upending capitalism and building towards socialism. But only if the PMC get out of the way. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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Hillel Wayne 1 weeks ago

Logic for Programmers is Now Available

I am delighted to announce that my book, Logic for Programmers , is now available! You can check out the release site here or go directly to buy the ebook or print versions . If you bought any of the early access versions, you can get the 1.0 for free from leanpub . This has been a long time in the making. Formal logic is an incredibly powerful tool to understand software. Everything from “what’s a left outer join” to “why shouldn’t inherit from ” makes more sense if you know just the basics of logic. Yet there weren’t any programmer-focused resources for actually learning those basics. You were just sort of expected to crack open a math book or pick it up through osmosis. The osmosis route doesn’t work. So I spent the last five years making that resource. Logic for Programmers teaches the working developer basic logic and its many applications, covering areas as diverse as property-based testing, domain modeling, and logic programming. It’s meant for people with no math background: if you know AND and/or OR, you can read this book. I researched each chapter’s topic for months, then ran the chapter by a domain expert to make sure it was accurate, then ran it by a junior programmer to make sure it was approachable. Anyway, I am very tired and glad to be done. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy the book.

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A Working Library 2 weeks ago

Was

In 1989, Jonathan boards a plane to Manhattan, Kansas, where he rents a car, explaining to the man at the Hertz desk that he’s dying. In 1875, in the same place, a young girl named Dorothy gets off a train with her dog Toto, expecting her Aunt Emma to meet her, but Emma isn’t there. Years later, Dorothy will have a breakdown while in school, as the substitute teacher—a man named Frank Baum—watches in horror. In 1939, in Culver City, California, a young Judy Garland tells her makeup artist a story which might be confession or might be fabrication or might be both. Was is a story about The Wizard of Oz and it’s a story about fantasy and reality, two ways of seeing that seem forever intertwined. Maybe, in the end, they are the same thing: each a kind of choice that creates a world that is never quite what it was, never at all what it seems. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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A Working Library 2 weeks ago

The Language of the Night

This is one of Le Guin’s earliest collections of essays, bringing together writing about the genre of science fiction and fantasy with reflections on her own fiction, including the very critical “Is Gender Necessary? (Redux)” in which she annotates an earlier essay and notes where she has changed her mind. That piece is, I think, a kind of keystone to the whole collection, and to much of her writing generally: a facility for learning and discovery accompanied by a willingness to acknowledge being wrong. For what is learning except the ongoing, unending awareness that we have been, and will again be—possibly someday soon—wrong? And perhaps, also, this is part of what sf is for: to bring the future where we discover that wrongness into the present. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

Thoughts on “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm

As I mentioned in my IndieWeb Book Club post , I first read Fromm’s book more than 20 years ago. I was in my early high school years when I stumbled upon his work and was immediately intrigued by his way of looking at the world. The fact that he was not “just” a philosopher but also a psychologist and a sociologist meant his ideas felt more concrete and applicable in today’s world, even though his book was more than 30 years old at the time and is half a century old now. In reading To Have or to Be a second time, I was surprised by a couple of things. I remembered quite well the core thesis of the book, this tension between the two fundamental modes of existence, one predicated on the idea of possessing things, while the other is built on the concept of living and experiencing things without feeling the need to have them. It’s a way of looking at the world that felt right in my youth, and it still feels that way now, probably even more so considering the state of the world. But what I didn’t remember was the second half of the book, where Fromm tries to outline what a new human being and a new society could look like if we ditched the first mode—which is basically the pure capitalistic and consumeristic mindset—and embraced the second. He was certainly very optimistic, and there are passages that made me smile: seeing how convinced he was that the capitalist model was on the cusp of breaking down is heartwarming. But at the same time, there are thoughts in that second part that are shockingly accurate in describing today’s society. His thoughts about news, about the manipulation of people through advertising and propaganda, I was quite surprised to see how well they aged. Reading the book again made me want to pick up a bunch of his other books I also read in my teens, from Escape from Freedom to The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness , but also made me want to read some of his other books— The Art of Being seems very interesting—and also made me want to read Marx and Spinoza. I might add a bunch of those books to my reading list. Overall, very happy to have read the book a second time. I’m not a fan of re-reading books, but this was definitely worth it. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Connect via email :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month

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Michael Lynch 3 weeks ago

Refactoring English: Month 19

Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers . Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: I improved the website a bit, but it could use more polish. I adapted my chapter on design docs to a free excerpt . It did well on Lobsters and Reddit , but it flopped on Hacker News. I was surprised at how positive the reaction was to the design docs chapter. Generally, when I talk to developers about design docs, their main reaction is that they hate design docs and everything about them. The comments on my post were refreshingly supportive of design docs in general and my recommendations in particular. I got stuck for a while on the great AI blockade , but I pushed through by thinking more critically about splitting up large features and being less precious about code quality. In this case, done is better than perfect. June was the best month of book revenue since the initial crowdfunding launch. The increase in visitors was because of my excerpt about design docs . For the last few months, the Refactoring English website has listed my book as almost complete in early access. I was curious to see what the sales impact would be of going from an almost complete book to a fully complete book, so I looked at weekly sales: Marking the book as complete didn’t have an obvious impact on weekly sales, but what if I look at the daily averages? Okay, so there was a slight increase after I marked the book as complete. I was also curious whether Americans, in particular, bought at higher rates after I finished the book. I get email notifications every time someone purchases the book, and it seemed like more of my sales were from customers paying the US price, but I hadn’t measured carefully. I checked the data to see if that was true: Interesting! Completing the book had no impact on sales for customers purchasing with regional pricing, but customers purchasing in USD purchased at a 20% higher rate in the three weeks after the book was complete. I didn’t include sales after I published my latest excerpt because that obviously changes the numbers a lot, so let me treat that as its own category: But that’s always a little skewed because Americans make up the largest share of my readers. What if I normalize revenue per visitor? Oh, that’s a switcheroo. By normalizing per visitor, it flips the story. Now, it’s the Americans that buy at the same rate for a finished vs. unfinished book. The readers outside the US are the ones spending about 20% more per visitor on the completed book. I’m not sure how to use this information, but it did satisfy my curiosity. I’ve asked readers for feedback about my book in the past, and some readers gave enthusiastic feedback, but they were a small minority. I thought it would be fun and helpful to make a web-based feedback app that allows readers to leave notes as they read the book. It seemed like something I could knock out in a week or two. And now, two short… months later, I’ve got it up and running! A demo of my book feedback tool, where readers can leave me feedback directly in the book, and I can reply. My feedback tool has only been live for a few days, but it does seem to encourage readers to give more feedback. One reader just finished the book and cited the feedback app as one of his favorite parts of the experience, so that was neat. About once a year, I ask myself: where does all my time go? This question comes up for me whenever I’m focused on a project, but it’s not progressing as quickly as I expect. Here’s me asking myself this question a few times over the years: This time, I thought, “Maybe I should use a time tracking tool.” About 15 years ago, I tried a time tracking tool called RescueTime. I didn’t find it that useful, but I thought maybe I’d keep at it for a few weeks and see what happened. Then, I realized I was letting a random company collect data about every window that appeared on my screen, and I promptly uninstalled RescueTime. I was wishing for an open-source version of RescueTime, when I thought, “Wait, there probably is one.” And there is. It’s called ActivityWatch . It’s open-source and privacy-first. It records all your window and browsing activity, but the data all stays local to your machine. The problem is that ActivityWatch is way less polished than RescueTime. I couldn’t understand at all what the timeline was trying to show me: I couldn’t understand the timeline in the official ActivityWatch web interface. You’re supposed to assign rules to tell ActivityWatch how to categorize your activities, but I found that UI difficult to use as well: I found the categorization in the official ActivityWatch web UI difficult to use. I was about to give up on ActivityWatch, and then I thought, “Well, the data collection part probably works. What if I vibecode my own frontend?” So, I did , and it was pretty easy. I’m starting with a command-line tool, but I plan to expand it to a web app. To use my custom ActivityWatch frontend, I create a config file to categorize activities based on app name, window title, and/or URL: And then the output looks like this: So far, the data is interesting, but the biggest challenge is that it’s hard to categorize all of my activities automatically. For example, I can add a category for browsing Wikipedia, but am I doing it as part of legitimate work on my book? Or did I just go down a rabbit hole, and I’m suddenly reading about inventors killed by their own inventions ? Refactoring English had its second-best month of sales. I examine my sales numbers to see whether people are more likely to purchase a complete book as opposed to an almost-complete draft. I completed my book feedback tool. I’m trying a new tool to track my time. Result : Spent about three hours improving the website Result : Got 17.5k unique readers. Result : The tool is up and running. Finished the Refactoring English feedback tool. Made fixes to the Refactoring English ebook for consistency and EPUB compatibility. Made a demo video for Little Moments . I’m quite proud of the silly photos in this. Customers don’t care as much as I’d expect about the difference between a 100% complete book and an almost-complete book. Readers do purchase the finished book at higher rates, but the effect is pretty small when you control for number of website visitors. Pitch to 5 podcasts to talk about Refactoring English . Attract 30k unique readers to the Refactoring English website. Wrap up early access, and declare the 1.0 release of my book.

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fLaMEd fury 3 weeks ago

There And Back Again

What’s going on, Internet? This was meant to be the April wrap-up. It’s now the middle of July, so let’s call it the autumn-into-winter wrap-up and pretend that was the plan all along, lol. Autumn kicked off with Easter down in Martinborough and a batch of hot cross buns . I managed to get to three gigs in three months: MGK at Spark Arena , Split Enz at Spark Arena , and a solo night out for Home Brew performing Last Week at the Auckland Town Hall . I’m so happy I got to see Home Brew perform live, finally after all these years. Auckland has been really good for me being able to get out to gigs more frequently. More recently, this month we escaped a rainy afternoon at Kelly Tarlton’s . The following weekend we headed south to Butterfly Creek and spent the afternoon there. My first time visiting and really enjoyed it. It’s part butterfly sanctuary, part farm, part zoo, part adventure playground, and part dinosaur kingdom, lol. There’s a lot going on. We spent around 30 minutes in the butterfly house while my son stood super still in an attempt to have a butterfly land on him. So cute, but didn’t work out for him this time. Then finally the weekend just been we spent a long weekend on Waiheke for Matariki . We spent Friday on the beach, hot chocolate and fluffies at the beach cafe, late lunch at The HEKE, and a bus trip to Oneroa for ice cream. Saturday we spent the morning at the Ostend Markets, back to the beach, then back to the beach cafe for an early dinner and to watch the All Blacks Italy game. When I last wrote about books, it was all about reading eBooks again . Since then I’ve got through nine books, with only A Darkness Returns being an eBook. Highlights of these books were The New Girl and Leave Before You Go by Emily Perkins, Platform Decay by Martha Wells and the return to James S. A. Corey’s new universe The Faith of Beasts . I also read The Lean Startup , Blood Ties , Famesick , Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today but mostly didn’t finish these. The record shelf did some damage this quarter, 20 new arrivals. June was basically an Olivia Rodrigo situation, and each gig sent me home with its record: MGK’s Lost Americana, True Colours after Split Enz, and Last Week on pink vinyl after the Home Brew show. I guess the other thing with three months to cover is that I got through a lot of media. Highlights being Outer Banks . I wrote up seasons one and two and have since torn through season three and halfway through season four as I write this. Such a fun show. I realised as I started season three that this reminds me of the recent Tomb Raider games or the older Uncharted games which I loved playing. The other big binge was Hacks , all five seasons, 47 episodes. I had an absolute blast with this show. It was sitting there waiting to be watched for literal years and I finally sat down and blasted through it. Another standout was Tulsa King , got through the last two seasons quickly. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this show so much! The Boys wrapped up with season five. I think I was satisfied with how it ended? Yeah, I think so. I also got through Fallout season two quickly, can’t wait for the next. And also wrapping up was Euphoria which messily wrapped up with season three. This season was kinda bat shit, not sure whether I enjoyed it or not, but happy I don’t have to think about it any more. Keeping up with the weeklies and new seasons: House of the Dragon season three, X-Men '97 season two, and Power Book III: Raising Kanan season five. This season we’re really seeing Kanan turning into how we saw him in Ghost. I’m also slowly working through Only Murders in the Building season five with my wife and in-laws when we are able to sit down together and watch an episode. Eighteen movies since March. The highlights though. I caught Project Hail Mary at the theatre with my brother-in-law before it stopped showing. Finally caught up with The Fantastic 4: First Steps to make sure I’m up to speed with the road to Avengers: Doomsday. I was excited to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 as the first always had a special nostalgic place in my heart. Anniversary was an unexpected sleeper, I was not expecting what this movie ended up being after watching the trailer. Don’t Ever Stop , a fantastic documentary on Tony De Vit. This was especially good as a hardhouse fan and hearing legends of the scene talk about their interactions with Tony and memories of the origins of what became the hardhouse scene in the UK. The Drama was an interesting one, and to be honest I thought the other woman’s secret she shared was way worse than Zendaya’s. Locking a kid in a fridge in the forest and not telling anyone is wild. Get out of here. And the rest… Office Romance , Mile End Kicks , A Real Pain , Eenie Meanie , Carolina Caroline , Stone Cold Fox . I don’t think I watched any I didn’t like. The bookmarks kept flowing while the blog was quiet. The best of them are already rounded up in the May and June link dumps, so I won’t repeat them here. Check out the bookmarks page for even more. Around the web? I can’t remember if I shared this already, but I participated with issue 24 of the Ctrl-ZINE . Go give that a read! I also finally sat down with Manu to answer his People And Blogs questions. Manu has also hung up his hat since founding and running the series for the last few years and Zachary Kai has picked up the reins. You can find the archive here . James has recently started a new podcast, Wonders of Web Weaving which is 9 episodes deep as of writing. Catch up on all of them if you haven’t already, and if you keep listening you might hear yours truely in a week or two 😉 Website wise, there’s plenty going on under the hood while I prepare for the 2027 redesign. Really looking forward to sharing this with you all soon. There’ve been a few improvements around the site, but you’ll see most of the changes when I roll out the new design. I did sit down and refresh my 11ty and Neocities guide . I’m really pleased with all the great feedback I’ve received from this one, especially with all the people who have successfully managed to build a website using 11ty with it. Sweeet, laters 🤙 Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP , or send a webmention . Check out the posts archive on the website.

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Kraken

Billy Harrow is taking people on a tour at London’s Natural History Museum when he makes an impossible discovery: the enormous specimen of Architeuthis dux, the museum’s carefully preserved giant squid, is gone, tank and all. Things are about to get even weirder: he is interrogated by some very odd cops, attacked by a man without a heart, rescued by a disciple of a religion that believes Architeuthis is its god, finds himself in conversation with a statue in London, and soon learns that London itself is alive and full of viscera and leucocytes and more. The plotting is bonkers, with more twists and turns and magical intercessions than I could keep track of. But the language cracks delightfully, and there’s enough irreverence for all the gods and then some. As the story builds towards not one but two apocalypses you realize that the end of the world is always just about to happen—and always, there is someone egging it on and someone trying to stop it. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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Kev Quirk 1 months ago

Extinct

Author: RR Haywood Genre: Sci-fi Released: 2018 Rating: ★★★★☆ The end of the world has been avoided—for now. With Miri and her team of extracted heroes still on the run, Mother, the disgraced former head of the British Secret Service, has other ideas… While Mother retreats to her bunker to plot her next move, Miri, Ben, Safa and Harry travel far into the future to ensure that they have prevented the apocalypse. But what they find just doesn’t make sense. London in 2111 is on the brink of annihilation. What’s more, the timelines have been twisted. Folded in on each other. It’s hard to keep track of who is where. Or, more accurately, who is when. The clock is ticking for them all. With nothing left to lose but life itself, our heroes must stop Mother—or die trying. Learn more on Goodreads ➡ I've really enjoyed this series - I'm a big fan of Haywood's writing, as regular readers will already know, I've read a few of his books . This one took me a little while to get through though; not because it was bad, just because I've had a lot going on at home, so haven't had much time for reading recently. Haywood recently released book #4 in this series, Rebirth, which I've already bought. But I don't know if I should take a break from the series. I have the Red Rising books on my Kindle and everyone keeps telling me how good they are, so I may jump over and start those. Any recommendations? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

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neilzone 1 months ago

Holiday reading, mostly from Standard eBooks

Sandra and I have had this week off, and one of the things I wanted to do was to catch up on my reading. All bar one so far has been from Standard eBooks . From Kobo , I enjoyed this account of someone who claims to have worked for MI5 (I’ve no reason to doubt this, but, well, who knows) carrying out operational (i.e. on street / in car) human surveillance. How much is true, how much is hyperbole, I don’t know, but it made for an interesting, often challenging, read. I finished the book - perhaps as the author had intended - with a question mark as to his suitability for the role. A classic, which I last read many years ago, “The Call of the Wild” is a pretty brutal book about the life of (fictional?) dog in north America during the gold rush. I suspect that there are various parallels with humankind, in terms of the way in which different people treat the dog, and the dog’s move from bored domestic comfort to a wild animal, but frankly - animal abuse aside - it was just a good, fun, and short book. I have read “Jurassic Park” before (better than the film, IMHO, and I think that the film is superb), but for some reason, I had not read “The Lost World” before. The story is, in essence, about some privileged white men exploring a dinosaur-laden plateau. The frankly appalling treatment by white men of the indigenous population seems to be a theme of the books I’ve been reading this week, perhaps because of the prevalent attitudes of the time in which they were written. If you ever wanted to read “Jurassic Park” in somewhat older English - which, I must admit, I find a joy to read - this is worth a look. I jumped in at book two of the series - Allan Quatermain Stories - rather than with “King Solomon’s Mines” . I should probably rectify that. The book is, in essence, a series of stories reifying a hunter, Allan Quatermain, and his adventures in “unexplored” Africa. Basically, he shoots a lot of animals, supported by a cast of indigenous servants. My goodness, I found “The Last of the Mohicans” incredibly tedious and long-winded. I should probably stick with it, as I like the sound of the precis, but still, the 20 or so pages that I read were just hard work.

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Hungrier than before

Near the end of The Tombs of Atuan, the wizard Ged is in the desert with a young woman, Tenar. They have escaped a great evil and are tired, footsore, hungry. They have no food and little water and are a day’s walk from either. Tenar, having seen some of Ged’s magic, asks if he can do something about their predicament: “Can you find food for us?” she asked, rather vaguely and timidly. “Hunting takes time, and weapons.” “I meant, with, you know, spells.” “I can call a rabbit,” he said, poking the fire with a twisted stick of juniper. “The rabbits are coming out of their holes all around us, now. Evening’s their time. I could call one by name, and he’d come. But would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you’d called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. But it would be a breaking of trust, I think.” “Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just…” “Summon up a supper,” he said. “Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.” Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan , page 155 Is this not precisely what it’s like to read or watch or listen to slop? What you read isn’t really writing or drawing or art—it isn’t the creation of a mind reaching for the world—but illusion. And it’s not only AI, of course. A good deal of commercial content is more or less the same, books and movies and music created by marketing teams with quantified audience strategies but no fucking soul to speak of. AI accelerates that production process, makes it slicker and smoother, makes the illusion seem more real. Makes ever more of it, at greater and greater scale, until you come to believe there is nothing else out there. But it remains a deception. You think you’ve had your full but all the while you’re starving. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

The Eye of the Heron

On the planet Victoria, the people of Shantih Town live alongside the people of the City. When a group of townspeople scout and find a good place for a new settlement, they tell the City of their plans to send some of their people north. But the councillors of the City—the bosses—refuse to let them go. Luz, a daughter of one of the bosses, gets wind of the council’s plans, and becomes angry: at her father for refusing to see reason, at the handsome but entitled man he expects her to marry, at the passive old townswoman who advises her to stop and think. But Luz isn’t thinking, she’s walking, towards her own freedom, and theirs. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Two Cheers for Anarchism

In this series of short explorations of anarchist thought, James C. Scott proposes a “process-oriented” view of anarchism, or what might be termed anarchism by doing rather than theory. He sees anarchism especially in everyday practices of freedom and in the refusal to submit to higher, unjust, authorities: the foot-dragging, insubordination, desertion, poaching, sabotage, absenteeism, and so on which undermine empire and authoritarian rule often better than any mutiny can, and with less blood. And he sees that same anarchism in places of improvisation and experimentation that create conditions for living while also building know-how and solidarity: small, chaotic but fertile farms; mixed-used city neighborhoods; shopkeepers who answer to their community rather than a boss. Perhaps accordingly, the book comes together more as a collection of interconnecting parables than as any unified theory—not a plan but a collective and liberating practice. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Books: January to June, 2026

I stopped tracking books using apps or services, even though there are good ones out there. I have two little shelves in my bedroom, on the left I put books I want to read, on the right the ones I have read. The plan was to empty the one on the right halfway through the year and post a picture here on the site to remember what I have read. This is that picture, and those are the books I have read so far in 2026. A lot of Terzani, a lot of stories about death and suffering, about misery and tough times, but also a lot of stories about nature and mountains. The fiction-to-non-fiction ratio is probably 3:1, which is unusual for me, considering I read non-fiction almost exclusively for most of my life, but that’s fine. Look forward to fill up the shelf again and post a second picture here on the site somewhere in late December. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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iDiallo 1 months ago

I turned my prologue into a short video

It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.

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