Posts in Writing (20 found)
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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Sean Goedecke 3 days ago

How to keep thinking

Imagine you’re the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show. The host is constantly flipping over new cards with questions that you have to answer as fast as possible: Working in 2026 feels a bit like this. When frontier AI models can do most of the tasks in your queue, the most efficient way to work is often spinning off tasks for an AI agent and continually context-switching between the results 1 . This isn’t quite mindless — in fact, it requires quite a lot of skill to skim the AI response and rapidly decide what to do with it — but it certainly involves less time for slow, careful reflection. Why does it have to be frenetic? Why not just slow down? I suppose you could , but I don’t recommend it. It’s just such a miserable experience to spend your day close-reading LLM output : carefully chewing and savoring each morsel of slop. It’s far less unpleasant to skim through quickly and pick out the useful nuggets of content. Couldn’t you simply do more of the work by hand? It’s unfortunately true that tech is high-pressure these days . If you’ve got the time and space to work more slowly, that’s great! But when your company gives you a “solve this task ten times more quickly” button, you are heavily incentivized to use it as much as possible, or risk being outcompeted by your peers. I sometimes worry that working with LLMs is making me dumber. Not in the “literally melting your brain” sense that some papers imply , but in the sense that it’s biasing me towards the quick “skimming and judging” parts of my mental toolkit and away from the slow “hammock time” needed for deep thought and real creativity. I don’t want to attribute this shift entirely to LLMs, since the post-2010s tech industry has become more frenetic for broader economic reasons . But either way, it’s got me wondering how I can keep thinking slowly . The main thing that’s worked for me is to write more. Specifically, I mean writing in my own words . Writing with an LLM does not work for this at all, even if you’re going to some effort to iterate on the content and outline the things you want to say. Why? Having to put the words together yourself forces you to articulate your thoughts. In a very real sense, it forces you to think . When you have an idea in your head for something to write, you don’t really have an idea. What you have is a kind of directional sense of where an idea might be, or a fragment of the kind of thing that might eventually become an idea. You construct the idea itself while writing. Incidentally, this is why I don’t really agree with “ideas are easy, execution is everything” 2 : most “ideas” are not really even ideas. The other thing I recommend is to read actual books . Books — particularly dense non-fiction books — are the antithesis of AI slop. The slower you can read them, the better. I’ve been reading more and more non-fiction in the last few years, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think my brain is naturally craving information-dense content, in the same way that sodium-deficient people start to crave salt . In fact, I’ve been combining the two approaches: reading a book and then writing about it . This process is exactly what I’ve been craving since I started programming with LLMs. I get to carefully read a book, think hard about it, often go and read another book or two on the same topic, then sit and try to articulate what I’ve learned. It’s great! I can feel parts of my brain stretching again. It was pretty nice when I got paid to use those parts of my brain all day. Unfortunately, I think those times are coming to an end . There will always be room for some amount of careful, slow reflection in software engineering, but (for at least a little while) we’ll be expected to be rapidly switching between LLM outputs. We may have to find ways outside of work to continue the habit of thinking slowly. Even just in terms of work, I think losing that habit entirely would be a big mistake. There are still plenty of ordinary problems that are too hard for current LLMs to solve on their own. The most common example I run into is “large refactor on a complicated codebase”. Current-generation LLMs can do this without (many) errors, but they can’t yet do it tastefully . Sometimes you need to be able to think a problem through entirely with your own brain. This doesn’t mean switching between tasks . I routinely use six or seven different agent sessions on the same task: one for exploration, two or three for trying out different implementations, two or three for review, one for manual testing, and so on. Many of these can proceed in parallel. I remember reading a story 3 about a well-known author. Someone wanted to tell him their book idea, but they were so protective of it that they forced him to first sign a NDA before they retrieved the idea from their office safe. It was a single word “bioweapons” written on a slip of paper. Ironically, when I tried to google the source, Gemini kept trying to write me a story about bioweapons. Is this adjustment to the database schema right? Do these bits of data look plausible? Do these five paragraphs of text describe an actual series of manual tests that took place? Does this suggested architecture pass the smell test? Is this implementation better than the current code? Or this one? Or this one? This doesn’t mean switching between tasks . I routinely use six or seven different agent sessions on the same task: one for exploration, two or three for trying out different implementations, two or three for review, one for manual testing, and so on. Many of these can proceed in parallel. ↩ I remember reading a story 3 about a well-known author. Someone wanted to tell him their book idea, but they were so protective of it that they forced him to first sign a NDA before they retrieved the idea from their office safe. It was a single word “bioweapons” written on a slip of paper. ↩ Ironically, when I tried to google the source, Gemini kept trying to write me a story about bioweapons. ↩

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Kev Quirk 4 days ago

📝 2026-08-05 22:52: I have a habit of giving all our pets nicknames, there's many of them for...

I have a habit of giving all our pets nicknames, there's many of them for each of our dogs. We've Nelly for 4 days and already I have: Nells Bells Nelly Bean Nelly Furtado Man Eater (after the song) Nelly the Elephant It's anyone's guess which will stick. Our other dogs, Tia and Sid, are t-bone and squid (short for Sqidley) respectively. 🤷🏼‍♂️ 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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annie's blog 6 days ago

Waiting to be found by only you

Who knows how reality will continue to develop? There’s no way to prepare. When you can’t be prepared, be prepared to find poetry in the chaos. Secret messages, serendipitous grace, lines of meaning in a whirlwind of uncertainty. “It's gonna change, baby doll It's gonna change, honey ball It's gonna change, sugar cane It's gonna change, sweetie legs.” This is a test but so is everything. Everyone is watching you and everyone will judge you and you have to make peace with it. Also, no one is watching you and no one cares and you have to make peace with that, too. You will always displease some people. In the end, you are watching and judging and ignoring and being displeased, too. It evens out. Give up on pursuing happiness as quickly as possible. Seek to live, instead. It's quite the experience, but it will include much, much more than happiness. Give yourself comfort in small things and challenge in big things. Or maybe the opposite. Pick 3 skills from the list below and master them as quickly as possible: how to defuse an argument how to make a Venn diagram how to not take everything personally how to be running up that hill how to stop trying how to keep trying how to properly use the words effect and affect how to make a dent in the universe how to roast a marshmallow perfectly the way you like it how to forgive yourself how to make a great sandwich how to ask questions how to make numbered lists how to write in cursive (A fading skill! Grab it now before it’s gone. Or don’t because literally no one cares.) how to find your people how to make a great lemon dessert how to ignore lists like this Alternately, memorize a poem instead. It will be more beautiful, and just as useful. Perhaps more useful. Who knows how reality will continue to develop? When you can’t be prepared, be prepared to find poetry in the chaos. Find your kind of poetry — whether it’s in words or music or the ocean or motion or a really great sandwich — and look for it everywhere. It will always be there, waiting to be found by only you. how to defuse an argument how to make a Venn diagram how to not take everything personally how to be running up that hill how to stop trying how to keep trying how to properly use the words effect and affect how to make a dent in the universe how to roast a marshmallow perfectly the way you like it how to forgive yourself how to make a great sandwich how to ask questions how to make numbered lists how to write in cursive (A fading skill! Grab it now before it’s gone. Or don’t because literally no one cares.) how to find your people how to make a great lemon dessert how to ignore lists like this

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ava's blog 6 days ago

show respect - name things correctly

I occasionally come across people who call themselves “almost vegan” “practically vegan” “99% vegan” and similar descriptions. The reasons for that are usually casual in nature: They still want to enjoy grandma’s great cake, they don’t wanna cause a ruckus at the company barbecue, and when it’s pizza night, they can’t say no to a good cheese. But other than that - plantbased. And they quickly want to convey that to someone. I still want to urge others to be precise with language. We have words for “almost vegan”. They’re “vegetarian”, or, depending how you mean it, “flexitarian”. When you say you are vegetarian, people will understand that you refuse to consume certain animal products, but still eat some. When you label yourself a flexitarian, it suggests to others that you made the decision to reduce the animal products you consume, but you still consume them. Meanwhile, “vegan” is more restrictive. It is supposed to tell the listener that the person avoids consuming animal products as far as is possible and practicable. People like to forget the latter part, but this is the exception needed for emergencies, medicine and similar pressing matters. And this also applies to non-food items, something I don’t see many vegetarians practicing. When you are saying you are “ basically vegan, but still eat xyz ”, you are making things complicated for others, and reduce the lifestyle choice to merely food intake. I’ve been vegan since 2019. Education about different ways to eat/live is still lacking, and I’ll still encounter people who have trouble keeping vegan and vegetarian apart. “ You eat no animal products? What about eggs? And fish? Wow, no fish! And what about milk? ” and I think, unfortunately, one puzzle piece of it is that what vegetarians do seems willfully inconsistent to most omnivorous people, and makes it hard for them to remember who eats what. They wonder: “ If meat is so unethical, why not milk and eggs too, coming from similar conditions? Why still choose to eat fish, when that is also an animal carcass, and technically meat? ” And then you come on top, saying you’re vegan but still eat this or that animal product, adding to the confusion. You’re then becoming the person people bring up to me like “ But so-and-so is vegan and still eats cheese! ”. Please don’t further add to confusion. Make it easy for people to understand your boundaries and lifestyle, make it easy for them to cook and bake for you if they want to do that. I’ve been wondering: What makes the vegan label so attractive to people who are not vegan? After all, vegans are not very popular. Some people will know none personally, yet have a passionate (hateful) opinion about them. Others invent weird strawmen of the hypocritical vegan who preaches to others and yet flies 200 days a year while gorging themselves on avocados and almonds. Allegedly, the vegan will harass anyone at the table, brings the mood down and makes everyone uncomfortable. They’re extremists and privileged, some say veganism is classist and racist. So what is there to gain? I hypothesize that deep down, surprisingly many people actually have no problem with veganism and think it is good, and that they’d also live that way if it was easier for them - maybe cheaper products, better recipes, better replacement products, better and bigger selection of vegan products everywhere, normalized in society, their caregivers agree to enable it, possible with their illness or allergies, and so on. So they do what they can (for example, becoming vegetarian), but reach their current limit. It hurts though, to be aware of an ideal you have and falling short of it. You know what you think is right, yet you feel hindered from acting like it. This dissonance is unbearable at times, especially when you see others living the life you want to live, or feel like you have to justify yourself in front of others whenever this topic comes up (vegans can tell you all about this awful stage before they finally made the jump!). It usually goes as follows: Person makes an impassioned speech about how eating animals is wrong, and to not seem like a total hypocrite, they follow it up with “I am basically vegan”. It’s supposed to convey: I am almost there, this is just an embarrassing temporary situation, I totally know what’s right, and these exceptions shouldn’t count much! They’re practically non-existent! But I don’t think this is serving you well. In the moment, it saves you some embarrassment and makes you feel better about falling short of your ideal, but further on, it just minimizes your actions and doesn’t hold you to the standards you want to fulfill. It protects you from facing the fact that, yes, no matter how strongly you have reduced anything, you are still by definition a vegetarian (or flexitarian), which means you eating cheese once a week falls under the same umbrella term as vegetarian Aunt Emma who still eats eggs and milk daily and fish on Fridays. It feels unfair, but that is how it is. I also understand that it feels better for some people to claim the harsher, more extreme, more difficult label (in anything, really) because there is some clout in it. You might want the image of being someone who is doing something that is uncommon and regarded as difficult, someone that is going against the grain to do something good; you want the valor, and maybe you wanna come off as morally superior. But you cannot get the valor without doing the work. Your friends still see you eating that kebab while drunk, no matter what you say otherwise. You’re losing credibility, and people might come to the conclusion that you don’t practice what you preach. Plus, you are not going to build rapport with vegans when you do this, no matter if you might do this to impress them. It comes down to respect for me. If you want to acknowledge that veganism is worth doing, but it is difficult and you cannot do it right now, then leave the label to those who can, and acknowledge where you fall short. This isn’t about punishing people who do what they can - even little counts - but about using language correctly, and making it easy for people to understand your habits and lifestyle. You would also not seriously say any of the following: (Though I have to say, saying them as a joke is funny.) So continue to be precise in this aspect as well. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying “I’m vegetarian.” or “I avoid animal products except cheese.” or “I prefer to eat vegan options, but not all the time.” Published 03 Aug, 2026 “I don’t drink liquor, just beer and wine. I’m almost sober.” “I jog twice a week. I’m basically an athlete.” “I can order tapas in Spanish. I’m kinda bilingual.” “I have a few houseplants. I’m practically a botanist.”

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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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fLaMEd fury 1 weeks ago

Open Tabs July 2026

What’s going on, Internet? If you don’t folllow my Bookmarks through the feed , then here’s the bookmarks from July. Enjoy. For more, check out the bookmarks archive, and subscribe to the feeds if you want these as they happen. 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. Rant about blogs and the IndieWeb - Dom Corriveau Okay, this one had me in tears. Such a good read. Your Metablogging is Lame as Hell – Absurd Pirate’s Internet Blog Lol, kinda nodding my head here. Blogging about Bear Blog blogs is becoming a bit of a thing, isn’t it? don’t let Web nostalgia obscure a positive Web future This has always been something I’m an advocate for. Draw inspiration from the 90s/2000s web, but don’t rely on old and outdated hacks. Take advantage of the capabilities we have today, but don’t go overboard with modern bloat. Pseudonym as an escape I’ve written about this previously. The pseudonym isn’t hiding; it’s breathing room. Been enjoying not being my IRL name online since 96. Websites Are Not Going to Die If Google stops linking to websites, it stops being a search engine. Another good reminder to keep the personal website going while corp search eats itself. The Web Won Because It Got Easier Worth a read for anyone pushing the indie web. Knowing how it all works doesn’t make it easy for the next person. Netizen Contributing to the internet for the good of it, not for profit. Now I’m wondering what my netizen contributions will be… The Music Discovery Problem Music discovery takes intentional effort once the algorithm’s gone, and that’s fine. I should write up and document my discovery process. We need a physical digital music experience Olly’s model already exists in the audiobook world. Libro.fm sends a slice of my audiobook purchases to my local (physical) bookstore. Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day Great read. The Overthinkers Guide to rekindle your Blogging Mojo Maybe some inspiration for some of you to start writing again. Sometimes I just cbf writing, lol List of things I love seeing in personal webspaces A non-exhaustive list of things Folkmoss love seeing in blogs/personal websites. What should a personal website be? Ratfactor asks about what a website should be. A reflection of yourself, not some idea of what a website is meant to be. Kevin Boone: Why Idon’t really care if web content is AI-generated Kevin Boone talks about how scepticism should apply to everything online, not just the AI-generated stuff. Trust the source you know, not the medium. It feels like people forget how crap search results have been since 2008 with the rise of “SEO Spam”. Humans have been shit long before AI. Dirty Little Zine — Free 8-Page Printable Zine Maker Super cool little tool that will help you create simple 8-page zines What We Lost When We Quit Using Crappy Old Web Forums A fantastic read about forum software all the way from Usenet to Discourse, which is where we ended up at the 32-Bit Cafe, same as every other forum these days. RIP phpBB. #11: fLaMEd Fury (flamedfury.com) - Wonders of Web Weaving So, I did a podcast. James had me on his podcast to talk about my corner of the web. We got into gaming and TV communities, music, and why the indie web is worth it.

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Kev Quirk 1 weeks ago

📝 2026-08-01 08:47: Today is the first of August. Where the hell did the first two thirds of...

Today is the first of August. Where the hell did the first two thirds of 2026 go??? 😵‍💫 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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Kev Quirk 1 weeks ago

Left-Handed People Can’t Use a Fountain Pen

Apparently left-handed people can't use a fountain pen as the left hand smudges the ink as they write. I call bullshit on that. I'm left-handed, and I use a fountain pen just fine - even with an "overhand" grip. I read this post from Neal Stephenson a few days ago (thanks to Sal for sharing it), where Neal - a professional, left-handed writer who writes his books with a pen and paper - shares some of his experience and advice on writing with a fountain pen. I've been back using fountain pens for a few months now and it's going great, but as Neal says - it's all about the paper. I use a decent quality notepad for writing my notes, with either a £30 Lamy Safari fountain pen, or a ~£100 Kaweco AL Sport. Both work great and I'm yet to find myself with pen on my hand. Here's an example of me writing in my notebook, using both my Lamy and Kaweco. As you can see, I have an overhand grip where my hand swipes across the ink as I write, but the ink is dry by the time my hand gets there. Both these pens have a medium nib too. So if you're left-handed and think you can't use a fountain pen, you can! You just need some decent paper. 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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Martin Fowler 1 weeks ago

Why I’m Writing Rachel’s Ramblings

TL;DR I have ideas. I haven’t been writing them. That’s about to change. I promise… myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about talent. Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking. And writing. Or more specifically, not writing. This really hit me earlier this year at the Future of Software conference. I was surrounded by people sharing their latest ideas and I had a slightly uncomfortable realization: I have my own. Not just opinions. Actual patterns. Hypotheses. Things I’m seeing across clients, across teams, across the industry that feel new or at least not well articulated yet in a way that a leader can think about and act upon in some way that can influence how they strategise and plan for the future. Because helping clients and other leaders internal and external to thoughtworks do this is actually a big part of what I do and without letting my northern humbleness get in my own way, I’m actually pretty good at it. If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be the global CTO of a future thinking tech org, you know the kind that has Martin Fowler as its Chief Scientist. A title I know he loves… Martin, by the way, is one of the people pushing me to do this, which is weird because on paper I’m his boss but I don’t believe in the traditional idea of a boss anyway. I’m a strong believer in the servant leadership type but I’ll save that for when I write about that. Anyway the point is for all the ideas I have and discussion I have I don’t do a good job of writing it down. At best I’ll stick it in a presentation deck when I’m forced to communicate with them in some forum or another. I hate decks and love writing so I’m obviously doing something wrong. So why haven’t I been writing? It’s easy to say I’ve been too busy. I don’t have an easy job. It’s a fun one but not easy. I also have two small children, 5 and 8. In case you are interested, I attempt to give as much time as possible to this busy job. And then I try to have a life. I’m also writing an epic world building sci-fi fantasy book which is a huge passion project I may also share more about so I am definitely busy. But that’s not actually the real reason I haven’t been writing this down and pushing it out publicly. The real reasons… So this is an experiment. Rachel’s Ramblings is exactly what it sounds like. Fast, imperfect, thinking out loud. Naming ideas early rather than waiting until they’re fully formed. Because the reality is, most of what I do day to day isn’t answering known questions. It’s spotting patterns and asking questions we haven’t quite figured out yet. My brain works a bit like a knowledge graph. Constant associations, constant pattern matching. That’s useful in conversations, in client work, in strategy. It’s less useful if it never gets written down. So this is me fixing that. I’ll write about: Some of it will be wrong. Some of it will evolve. That’s the point. If nothing else, this is a forcing function to turn thinking into something that exists outside my head. Let’s see where it goes. I overthink it. I move too fast to the next idea. I’ve convinced myself it needs to be more polished than it does. what is the future of software how software development is changing in the age of AI and what that means for engineers, leaders, and organizations how platforms, agents, and people actually work together and occasionally, how I manage the reality of doing this job with all the other things I have going on

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Kev Quirk 1 weeks ago

📝 2026-07-27 17:54: The poor buzzard was still there when I was walking the dogs this morning, so...

The poor buzzard was still there when I was walking the dogs this morning, so clearly something was wrong. Luckily my wife was able to get hold of a local falconer who was able to catch him and hopefully nurse him back to health. 🦅 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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Brain Baking 2 weeks ago

I Guess I'm Playing The Long Game Now

My latest post on the difficulties of young parenthood has loosened something in the back of my mind. In a few others’ too; thank you so much for your encouraging messages! These small replies might not seem like much to you, but they do to me. So again, thank you. I’d like to take a shot at solving the problems that surfaced. I’m playing The Long Game now—I should enjoy the daily small wins, knowing that it’ll be an exhausting ultramarathon, not a short sprint. I never fully realise this but a friend of mine might be right: I usually overly focus on the negatives instead of cherishing what I already have. So how to turn that around? Perhaps I should simply repeat an experiment from 2013. In one of the first blog posts ever to appear on this site, I explain how I end my days with happy thoughts . I never thought I’d cross-reference to something more than 10 years old but there it is. The idea is simple: instead of letting frustration roar at full speed inside, try to shift your attention to small wins. Tiny little things that unlocked a smile are enough. A daddy, look! perhaps. This is what I came up with in my journal: A 'small wins' logbook in my journal. The “small wins” page spread should cover the entire month and is divided into four columns: (1) day indication, (2) small win description/remarks, (3) mood, and (4) physique. It should be dead-easy to fill in otherwise I won’t be doing it, hence the Studio Ghibli stamps. Totoro happy? Me happy. Totoro OK? Me so-so. Totoro with umbrella? Me expecting emotional rainfall. I have yet to stamp a happy Totoro in there but the point is mostly to what you’d call “get a grip”. For that reason, I don’t want to write anything neutral or negative in the second column. I’ll be needing a fine nib to squeeze everything in there. Maybe I should ignore the “remarks” title altogether. I wrote “TIRED” next to the first umbrella, but should I? A considerate reader told me they take more pictures of their kids just running around in and around the house to look back on fondly afterwards. That’s sound advice. We should do that more often and forget about it in the many hectic moments. I re-read three journals from a few years ago today and the pasted in photos (mostly from the pocket printer ) always make me smile. Our daughter found the photos of the baby funny: “hey look, that’s mom and little brother!” “No it’s not, it’s you when you were a little baby!” “oh wow! but now I already am high up in the sky!”. Note to self: order new pocket printer sheets. The Long Game means leaving short bursts of dopamine behind. And yet I find myself buying fountain pens—the last purchase was three years ago—or scrolling through BoardGameGeek’s The Hotness list to see what else I can pick up after I sold a few ones just lying around on the shelf. I often try to escape into my laptop or book or whatever when things get heated with the kids. I notice I grab my smartphone during breakfast while I never did that before. The Long Game means noticing, admitting, and trying to change behaviour. I guess stage one is as good as any place to start. The youngest gave me a really hard time today. In August I’ll be playing daddy-day-care for both of them and I already feel slight hints of panic rolling my way. The Long Game means acknowledging it’s going to be a mess but we’re going to be okay regardless. As my favourite philosopher Michel de Montaigne said: the purpose of life is to live it. A short sprint would mean this to be over in no-time. The look back into my previous journals already taught me that The Long Game is more than fast enough: one day you’re writing “hey today the first one said bye bye and walked off onto the street for the first time!” and the next day you find yourself writing “next month the youngest turns one what happened??” Small steps. Small wins. I’ll be writing them down. Related topics: / parenting / By Wouter Groeneveld on 26 July 2026.  Reply via email .

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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 open universe

In her 1974 essay “Escape Routes,” Le Guin addresses a common criticism of science fiction: The oldest argument against SF is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that SF, like all fantasy, is escapist. This statement is shallow when made by the shallow. When an insurance broker tells you that SF doesn’t deal with the Real World, when a chemistry freshman informs you that Science has disproved Myth, when a censor suppresses a book because it doesn’t fit an ideological canon and so forth, that’s not criticism, it’s bigotry. If it’s worth answering, the best answer was given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison: if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can. Le Guin, The Language of the Night , page 221 But, she continues, “from what is one escaping, and to what?” Evidently, if we’re escaping a world that consists of Newsweek, Pravda, and the Stock Market Report, and asserting the existence of a primary, vivid world, an intenser reality where joy, tragedy, and morality exist then we’re doing a good thing, and Tolkien is right. But what if we’re doing just the opposite? What if we’re escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a nice simple cozy place where heroes don’t have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured —like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony. This doesn’t take us in the direction of the mystery of the real. This takes us the other way, toward a rejection of reality, in fact toward madness. Le Guin, The Language of the Night , page 221 That word “phony” is an interesting one. We might think the word comes from telephony, but the OED has that it may have been borrowed from the Irish fawney , referring to a gambling trick in which someone passes off a gilded ring for much more than it’s actually worth. Something is phony when it’s a fraud, a trick intended to deceive; and not only to deceive but to fleece, to take something of value without giving anything in return. A machine transmitting sentences that purport to be spoken by a thinking mind is phony, and what’s taken is not only the cash from our pockets—what little there is—but also our skill and capacity for the messy, complicated, and joyful experience of being with other human beings. And the real trick, of course, is that the fraudster has maneuvered himself out of the scene. If science fiction has a major gift to offer literature, I think it is just this: the capacity to face an open universe. Physically open, psychically open. No doors shut. What science, from physics and astronomy to history and psychology has given us is the open universe: a cosmos that is not a simple, fixed hierarchy but an immensely complex process in time. All the doors stand open, from the prehuman past through the incredible present to the terrible and hopeful future. All connections are possible. All alternatives are thinkable. It is not a comfortable, reassuring place. It’s a very large house, a very drafty house. But it’s the house we live in. Le Guin, The Language of the Night , page 223 Too much of our technology—and I reach here, as I often do, for Ursula Franklin’s definition of technology as practice , as how we do things—is oriented towards giving us a comfortable, reassuring place to be. A phony place, that is. This is not to say that we should not seek, or that we do not deserve, comfort. But that the only way to achieve unending comfort is to wall ourselves in, close up the doors, lock them inside and out. When we train ourselves to expect easy and efficient answers to every question, to tolerate only smooth, vapid dialogue, we refuse the glory and necessity of escape. When, instead, we reach for that terrible and hopeful future, when we notice the seeds of it in the present, we break out. Out into the unlikely and the uncomfortable and the unyielding, the doors wide open, the wind urging us on. 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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iDiallo 2 weeks ago

Have you read it?

I think I finally figured it out. That is, the reason why AI written articles suck: Both the author and I are reading the article for the first time. When an article is insightful I don't even mind the emdashes or that the stark truth is not X, but Y. A good take can transcend even llmism. But then you have questions, and somehow the author doesn't even know what you are talking about, it's simply because they are discovering the insight at the same time you are. They were busy, they didn't have time to write. As a consequence, they only dedicated enough time to skim the result before publishing. They don't know what's in it. You can't ask them what they were thinking when they came up with the insight because, well, they didn't think. The great article sucks because there is nobody behind it.

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Brain Baking 2 weeks ago

Creating Life Is Giving Life

This is what it feels like. As a parent of very young kids, it often boils down to putting your own life to a grinding halt in order to “give” life to them. I don’t know if it makes a lot of sense but again, this is what it feels like for me. I never realised how much a parent has to give: as a child you just receive. And take and take and take, without taking anything into consideration except for yourself. I can’t remember my parents having any hobby except for keeping me and my sisters—and perhaps the vegetable garden—in check. When I ask them about this now, they respond along the lines of “just wait, you’ll quickly learn that with kids there’s no space for that”. That was a few years ago when we had only one kid. I didn’t believe them. Now I do. I also can’t remember my parents taking the time to often visit friends. There have been a few moments where they would drive over to friends with us three kids but that was initially limited to a few times a year and then gradually disappeared. Yet another thing scratched in favour of more time/life for the kids? Perhaps I am writing this down as a warning for myself not to let my own life derail too much: last week I could feel the dark abyss calling my name. I often resent just starting the day and sometimes wish I didn’t wake up. I am exhausted. Should I be? I see friends jamming their way through life, with multiple kids, pretending there’s an endless well of love to give. I read and hear about folks taking their very young kids on their far travels while we can’t even muster to get our asses to the Belgian coast. My well isn’t endless: it’s drying up. It’s love level is about the same as the rain barrel outside: dangerously low. We are giving and giving up to the point that we don’t recognise ourselves anymore. My relationship with my wife is crumbling because of these little takers. I partially changed jobs because of them. My head is a gaping void and the few intact spots are partially inaccessible due to brain fog. I want to go and sleep this off and wake up a few years later. But I should know better. We people are experts at pretending. Other households have their own problems, they just carefully hide them. As my wife likes to say: nobody escapes their youth unscathed. I’d like to extend that saying: nobody escapes parenthood unscathed. It permanently changes you—and not always in a good way. What am I doing here in front of this laptop anyway, during these few hours that my parents are looking after the kids? Shouldn’t I go back to bed? More anxiety pops up: how to most efficiently pass this highly rare quality alone time? Before you know it it’s gone. This need to quickly enjoy this little bit of free time evaporates my motivation to do anything at all… And thus I keep on thinking: creating life is sacrificing a bit of your own. Creating two lives is sacrificing a lot of your own. Sometimes too much. But the kicker is that you are completely unaware of this as a soon-to-be parent: you’re just excited about what’s to come, blind to the “few” downsides that come with it. And then it’s too late. What did we even do to pass the time before we had kids? I can’t remember. Loitering? Nothing? Gaming? Living? Even in the sense of a non-living creation, creating life is also giving: you’re pouring years of hard work into a project to realise something. Only with kids, these years never end, and the working hours are not from nine to five. Every little scream and cough at night will keep you awake and every little scream and cough during the day will drive you crazy. We don’t have the fortitude of a big social safety net making it difficult to break through this circle of negative thoughts. I didn’t write I regret having children but sometimes I do and today is just one of those days. Another problem that presents itself in our situation is that you can’t talk about this with anyone. Friends with only one kid don’t understand what the big deal is. Friends with multiple kids that are older simply forgot their biggest nightmares and very helpfully say it’ll get better. Friends that don’t have kids can’t imagine that misery—and I don’t blame them for not trying. And even if you could. I don’t have the energy to talk. What is there left to say that will change our situation? Nothing. We’ll still have to get up tomorrow and we’ll still have to keep on giving life in order to sustain and grow these other little lives. A few months ago we had a rare weekend off for ourselves and got out of the house to do something nice together. Later that night I got sick. Flash! Now the weekend is gone and you’re back to giving. My apologies for these rather depressing words but I have the feeling that too many parents are pretending and not showing the true side of daily misery. That’s what it is. It could be happy bearable misery but it’s still misery nonetheless. And it won’t end: diapers will be replaced by another thing to worry about. We endlessly worry. Why is she eating so little? Oh no the youngest fell again, what’s this bump on his head? Was that there yesterday? Why doesn’t she say how school was? Does she feel at home there? Do we really need to rush off to the doctor again for the third time this month? During all that worrying, we lose ourselves. We should be worrying about ourselves instead. But at the end of the day, when the kids are in bed, all we have left in us is the ability to lie down on the couch and mindlessly watch something or read a light novel, if that. Maybe the secret lies in not thinking too far ahead: if you look ahead in time you’ll only be faced with that gigantic amount of life still to give until they’re old enough to start changing our diapers. Related topics: / parenting / By Wouter Groeneveld on 22 July 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 3 weeks ago

In Search Of A New Fountain Pen

Let’s start this post off with a quote from myself back in February last year when I let you all peek into my stationary drawers: I keep telling myself I don’t need more but somehow I think I do. There; the search can already stop before it has properly begun: I don’t need more. But I think I do. Shut up little devil in my head. It’s been three years since I bought a new pen and the ache is real. Especially after seeing a few top list posts appear in my RSS feed such as The Gentleman Stationer’s 12th anniversary post: what’s in your pen case these days? . Six out of ten pens are Pilots! The Well-Appointed Desk followed up with a if I could only keep 10 fountain pens post, as did Rachel’s Reflections . And now I also want to list ten. Except that I don’t have ten decent pens! As mentioned in my daily drivers post , there are three workhouse pens that are constantly inked with a few newer ones and a few that I barely use. I guess I can make up a top 5: Okay fine, a top three then. Spot four could be taken by the newer Pelikan M400 Medium ground to a cursive italic that’s fun to write with, yet I regret not getting a M600 or even M800. The 400 body is just too small. My ideal body proportion-wise is Pilot’s CH 912 that’s just perfect. The M400’s grip section is short and thin, but the M600+ versions come with a (too) hefty price increase. I guess I can still hunt down a bigger body and attempt a nib swap. My wife gifted me a Waterman Expert III Fine when I got my PhD and while it’s an excellent writer it doesn’t really come close to the three pens listed above. And then I wanted a proper Sailor with some colour but not a Slimline variant. I bought a Wancher variant on eBay that came with a busted nib so had to send that off. I postponed that for years hence it’s not really been used yet so I can’t give it a proper place in the above list. A friend listed his own top 10 as well: Pilot Falcon, Pilot CH 912 FA, Pilot CH 912 PO, Pilot Custom 823 F, Pilot Vanishing Point F, Sailor Pro Gear Naginata Togi specialty nib, CONID Bulkfiller, Montblanc 149 Calligraphy nib, and two others. After the Pilots, the price ramps up to almost which is way above my budget for a pen. I don’t really want another 912 even though the nib variability is seductive: it only comes in one colour; black. When we visited Italy in 2016, I wanted to buy a proper Italian fountain pen. The Brain Baker in me of course first thoroughly researched all Italian brands and I concluded that Aurora makes unique in-house nibs so I wanted an Aurora—perhaps even their expensive flagship model the Aurora 88. In Milan a friendly employee helped me to an Ypsilon as the others were very expensive. Two months later, some of the cheap metallic layer covering cheaper plastic came off. I also hear quality control issues for other Italian brands so I’m still unsure even though that Leonardo Momento Zero Grande special edition Tulp Fields Ru looks great. But both the size and the price are a bit too big for my liking. Is it just me or are you just paying for more looks after passing the mark? So what else is on the wish list? Back to Pilot? Yes! Their Custom 823 is a vacuum filler and in select shops in Japan you can order a flexible #15 Falcon nib along with it: impossibly difficult to import. But you can also buy a 743 with a FA nib and swap them… One for the price of two! Why not just get a single 743 then? Because it only comes in black. Except for the US-only limited edition Verdigris colour. I can almost hear the custom till going ding ding ding. I always like looking at special nibs as my daily writers are already here, lying on my desk. Sure it’s lovely to have a bit of a pen rotation going on, but I’m not dropping hundreds just to have yet another fine nib. A Platinum music nib then, which has two slits and has wide down strokes but thin side strokes? As a Belgian fountain pen writer, I’ve always wanted a CONID, especially after testing one from a friend . These expertly machined pens in small batches are made from very durable materials which… drumroll… makes them ridiculously expensive and difficult to get. But they are the ultimate demonstrator vacuum pens with swappable Bock nibs that make it easy to order a few crazy ones from say . Maybe that’s what’s missing in my lineup? The cheapest alternative are TWSBI pens, but my Eco already has plastic nicked off here and there so I’m not a huge fan of their usage of cheaper material. Perhaps the more robust Vac700R is worth taking a look at. In-between CONID and TWSBI, you have the Irish Gravitas pens, of which the new Vac 2.0 looks very attractive both price-wise and aesthetically. Vac-filled, two separate ink chambers, can be fully disassembled, and easy to screw in other Jowo #6 nibs. So what’s the conclusion here? Perhaps I already own anything I will ever need. Otherwise: I left out Visconti’s Homo Sapiens, Aurora’s 88, and Sailor’s Naginata Togi. I just can’t justify putting in so unless someone wants to get rid of theirs at a reasonable price, those will stay within the bounds of distant dreams. Whatever you do, don’t look at the latest Sailor and Pilot prices. Pilot is planning to increase their prices in October—again. On top of that, their limited edition CH 912 is priced at which is more than twice the base price. And Sailor? They’ve been upping the stakes and marketing themselves as more premium: since 2024, prices have literally doubled. Yet another reason to hold your horses… Or to get out that cheap but very serviceable Kaweco Sport? Related topics: / fountain pen / By Wouter Groeneveld on 18 July 2026.  Reply via email . Pilot Custom Heritage 912 Waverly Lamy 2000 Fine Pilot Vanishing Point Matte Black Fine Buy a too expensive and too big Leonardo just for the looks Import a too expensive Pilot 743 with FA nib in Verdigris Buy a Gravitas Vac 2.0 and order another Jowo semi-flex nib to fiddle with Meanwhile be on the lookout for a Pelikan M600 body? If all else fails, get a Platinum 3776 with a music nib?

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Lalit Maganti 3 weeks ago

What I'm Changing After A Year Of Blogging

Writing for the world is something which has ebbed and flowed for me over time. I’ve always liked sharing my thoughts, starting with websites all the way back when I was a kid. In times when I sustained it, I had various “blog”-like things for technical projects which would often veer into sharing personal beliefs as well. It’s been a year since my latest attempt at what I expect to be a lifelong endeavor. So I’ve been reflecting on how it’s gone, and that’s led me to make some decisions on how I want to rework things going forward. I have two goals with my writing: Although it might not seem like it, these goals are somewhat in conflict with each other. Sometimes I’ll write up TILs or low-effort posts which may not be that interesting to most people, and I don’t want these mixed up with my best work in the eyes of readers encountering me for the first time. I’m by no means unique in this; lots of internet writers have the same dilemma and take different approaches to dealing with it. Two options I considered are: I don’t like option 1 because I don’t particularly like social media. I was off it completely for years and have begrudgingly come back because it’s useful for sharing things with people, but it’s not something I enjoy. More importantly, I want everything I write to live on my own site, under my control, rather than scattered across platforms I don’t own. Instead I’ve taken option 2: I’ve decided to more strongly separate articles and notes from each other. The main way I’m doing this: I’m no longer going to be sending out notes over email on Substack . I initially conceived of Substack as a “newsletter” of sorts, rounding up everything new on the blog since the last edition. But over time I’ve come to dislike the effect this has: I don’t feel like sending out a newsletter until a high-effort article is ready to go with it. If nothing is ready, I end up just waiting, sometimes for more than a month. Why? Because I don’t want a newsletter edition which doesn’t put my best self forward. This might all be a me thing: I don’t know how many of my newsletter readers mind if I send them low-effort things. But I feel bad about it, and I think that’s enough for me to not do it. So instead I plan on reworking it from a newsletter into an articles-only feed. When an article is ready, I’ll publish it on the blog and send it out over email on the same day. I’m going to try to do this on Saturdays, though I can’t promise I’ll always manage it. At the bottom of each email, I’ll also leave a short “since I last sent you an article, I published thoughts on X, Y and Z”. But it’ll be a one line footnote, not the full content as I do today. If folks do want to subscribe to everything, my suggestion (see the subscribe page ) is to use RSS or an RSS-to-email service. Setting one up on my side would require either managing emails myself (which I think would be painful), manually copying posts to Substack (the tedium disincentivizes me from writing the short posts), or paying for a second email service alongside Substack (which I don’t want to do unless someone will actually use it). If you want everything from me in your inbox, reach out as it will help me decide if I should change my mind. This also knocks on to the homepage. In my previous redesign post I discussed how I switched to a two-pane dashboard feel and categorized what I wrote into three things: essays, write-ups and notes. While this was certainly cool and I liked it, I also constantly fell into the trap of having content which could debatably fall into either essays or write-ups. So I’ve erased that distinction: both are now simply articles, reflecting the effort and thought I’ve put into them. Notes remain much the same as before. I also went back to a single chronological feed, because readers gave me the feedback that they liked seeing at a glance if something was new, rather than scanning across three distinct sections to try to work it out. Articles are still clearly differentiated from notes though: they’re bigger, bolder and have explicit labels. Unrelatedly, I also spent a bunch of time improving RSS. After dogfooding my own feeds, I realized I had made some real mistakes in the way the feed was generated: content was losing all its links and being shortened. Now full articles are published properly to the feed (though things like sidenotes still won’t look the same as on the website). All in all, I feel a lot happier after figuring out how I wanted to handle high- vs low-effort content and deciding on making the Substack articles-only. My best work now gets presented in the way I want, and that makes me feel a lot freer to publish the imperfect stuff too. I want the freedom to write what I want and put as much or as little effort into it as I like. I care a lot about presenting the work I think is good in the best way possible to readers. High-effort content on the blog, low-effort content on social media. Separating content on the blog into high-effort (articles, essays) and low-effort (notes, snippets, TILs, etc.).

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