Posts in Culture (20 found)
Justin Duke 3 days ago

Levels of the Game

It seems fortuitous that my McPhee reading spree coincided with having watched Challengers . Like Challengers did sixty years after the fact, Levels of the Game uses tennis as an object of fascination in its own right—see also Infinite Jest and how much of that book, indeed all of DFW's worldview, was shaped by the relative weirdness of the tennis circuit compared to its team-based sport brethren. But even more than that, I'm interested in it as a canvas to explore systemic issues. Challengers touches on class nominally, but Guadagnino is at the end of the day much more interested in the love triangle that dominates the film, and in the idea of competition as a pure entity. McPhee has no problem dispensing with subtext and speaking plainly about the differences between his twin protagonists: one is white and comes from a solidly middle-class background; the other is black and comes from a solidly lower-class one. Side note: Arthur Ashe was born in Richmond, Virginia, and I live one block away from a boulevard named in his honor. You can credibly accuse Richmond of using Ashe as a bulwark against criticism, given how many of its other heroes are old white Confederates. But Ashe did in fact grow up here, and this book is not sparing in its description of how white Richmond rejected him. McPhee is not really interested in competition the way Guadagnino is; he describes Ashe and Graebner less like fierce competitors and more like two rival members of the same French New Wave. Part of this is truth—they were literal teammates playing in the Davis Cup together. That aspect of tennis, somewhat alien to me, is interesting in its own right. And while we know from the future that Ashe emerged as the superior and more exemplary player, McPhee is more interested in talking about form and style than raw prowess. This is a brief book—really just a snapshot of a single day—and as such it never outstays its welcome. By the last few passages, McPhee has perhaps run out of novel ways to describe a backhand. But it's a good read and a lot of fun. It speaks about style and grace and athletics, and it elevates the form of sport in such a way that sixty years after its original publication, it still feels not just prescient but modern.

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Weakty 3 days ago

Define: Sardonic

"Do you think being sardonic is a requisite of getting older?" "What the hell does sardonic mean?" Jeremy asked. He picked at the grass on the hillside and threw it into the air. "I think it means sarcastic . Or no, maybe just like cynical . Sometimes those two things go hand-in-hand. It’s like, the opposite of earnest ." "I haven’t seen an earnest person in a lifetime," Jeremy said, "'cept for you, of course." "What makes me earnest?" I asked earnestly. "Probably that you’re pretty open? I don’t know the definition of earnest, either." "We don’t know anything, do we?" "Maybe that’s part of being earnest—you’re eager and ok with your dumbness." "If we look up the definition does that make us less earnest?" "No, you can be earnest and educated," Jeremy postulated. This time he ripped up a whole chunk of grass with a clod of dirt attached to it and threw it down the hillside. We both watched it roll until it crumbled to pieces, and the grass, once detached again, blew away in the wind. "People don’t like earnest people, I think." Jeremy said. "You still like me?" "Most people, I mean. I think most people get so chucked around by life that earnest people come across as naïve, or someone who hasn’t had a hard go. Most people are too impatient or bitter for that, I suspect." "You mean the people who are sardonic, cynical, negative, or complain a lot?" "Hey, be nice to them. They’ve earned it. By their reckoning." I didn’t say anything. I just pulled a clump of earth from the ground and threw it in mimicry of Jeremy. I felt like an ass. The field we were in was practically pristine. It got mowed every Sunday. Even the steep hills we were sitting on—somehow a mower got up and down them. When we would leave today, we’d be leaving a bunch of holes, like gophers on a golf course. "Did you hear that Nicky and Jen hit it off?" "No! Jen hasn’t spoken to me since before the date. I’d say Nicky is pretty earnest, though." "Jen, too." Jeremy said. "What made you want to set them up?" Jeremy shrugged and stared out at the people using the park below. "When you introduced me to Jen, it just clicked, like a puzzle piece snapped into the right spot," he said finally. At this, Jeremy stopped plucking at the grass and leaned back on the hill and closed his eyes. I followed suit, nestling my head into his shoulder. I took a deep breath in. I smelled the grass and pretended it was his cologne. L’eau de Terre , it would be called. "Maybe we can all double-date someday, if things continue going well." "Between you and me?" Jeremy blinked. "No, between them, you goon." He laughed and settled back into his reverie. The sun was directly upon us. "We’ll build an enclave of earnest people," I said. "You’re halfway to starting a cult." Jeremy murmured. With the sun on my face and my eyes closed, my mind began to wander. I thought about Jeremy’s theory. By his reasoning, I was likely to be perceived as someone who had not faced adversity, or was naïve. A real softy, perhaps. Definitions of words floated through my head. Did any of it matter? To my surprise, these days I didn’t care much what people thought of me. Everyone already had plenty of assumptions about me. The people I ended up wanting to be around proved that they didn’t live by their assumptions. But the people I was around—what was happening to them? Jeremy seemed fine, but old friends, co-workers—they were accreting a sort of bitter residue. Their words were all coated with a cynicism that, at first, I had failed to notice. But it wasn’t already there. It was seeming like so many people I knew had had a switch flipped in their brain and seemed quite different now. I pictured that while I might be on a sun-covered grassy slope, picking at grass, they might be underground trying to dig to the surface—but every movement they made had them going deeper still. These thoughts made me uncomfortable. Maybe I did care more than I realized about what other people thought of me. Clearly, I was feeling an uneasiness toward my own earnestness—that it should float so freely while it seemed that others were held down by forces either in or outside their control. The more I saw this bitterness in the lives around me the more I realized I wasn’t conforming to the same sort of discourse and dialogue, and once again that feeling of fear of being different, long rooted deep in my past, surfaced. I opened my eyes and looked at Jeremy. His eyes were closed. He seemed perfectly at peace, lying in the sun. The sounds of the park drifted up the slope, mostly children playing, unencumbered by this sort of rumination. Time passed, the sun moved. Eventually we were in the shade. I woke up. Jeremy was propped up on one elbow watching something in the distance. "Are you ready to head home?" he asked, not turning to me. His voice tumbled down the hill and my ears tumbled after to catch it. Without saying a word, I grabbed my knapsack, got up, and extended my hand to help him up. As I pulled him up, there was a moment where, due to the slope of the hill, we both could have easily overshot our momentum and gone tumbling down (after his voice, after my ears). Instead, Jeremy righted himself, and we started walking down the slope toward the other side of the park. We passed his voice and my ears, talking and listening at the bottom of the hill. I looked back over my shoulder as we walked. There were no signs of uprooted grass. No holes in the hill. It was as if we had never been there.

culture Culture writing Writing
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Jim Nielsen 3 days ago

In The Beginning There Was Slop

I’ve been slowly reading my copy of “The Internet Phone Book” and I recently read an essay in it by Elan Ullendorff called “The New Turing Test” . Elan argues that what matters in a work isn’t the tools used to make it, but the “expressiveness” of the work itself (was it made “from someone, for someone, in a particular context”): If something feels robotic or generic, it is those very qualities that make the work problematic, not the tools used. This point reminded me that there was slop before AI came on the scene. A lot of blogging was considered a primal form of slop when the internet first appeared: content of inferior substance, generated in quantities much vaster than heretofore considered possible. And the truth is, perhaps a lot of the content in blogosphere was “slop”. But it wasn’t slop because of the tools that made it — like Movable Type or Wordpress or Blogger. It was slop because it lacked thought, care, and intention — the “expressiveness” Elan argues for. You don’t need AI to produce slop because slop isn’t made by AI. It’s made by humans — AI is just the popular tool of choice for making it right now. Slop existed long before LLMs came onto the scene. It will doubtless exist long after too. Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

writing Writing ai AI culture Culture
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A Room of My Own 5 days ago

On the Compulsion to Record

“When I gave such importance to archiving my life, it felt as if I was already dead,” said Karen Kingston , as if the moment we begin prioritising the archive, we step slightly out of life itself. The need to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs. The compulsion to write every thought down. These ideas keep circling me. I came across an Anaïs Nin quote again recently: “I am lying on a hammock, on the terrace of my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write. The sun, the leaves, the shade, the warmth, are so alive that they lull the senses, calm the imagination. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to preserve. It is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete.” Why can’t I, too, feel that there is no need to preserve? Why does it feel almost impossible to let a moment exist without turning it into words, photos, notes, some kind of proof that it mattered? Anaïs Nin wrote this long before phones, notes apps, and digital storage, before all that enables us to document our lives as evidence (although I did this compulsively in binders and notebooks before, even as a child; I was cataloguing life). I don’t only record happy moments. I record feelings. Thoughts. Confusion. RELATED: My Writing Life so Far I don’t think this means we should stop writing or remembering. But I do think it asks a difficult question: When does recording become a way of avoiding presence? When does organising life become a substitute for living it? And yet, on the flip side, in The Fun Habit by Mike Rucker , which I read recently, he talks about how memories, both good and bad, continue to shape our wellbeing long after the moment itself has passed. When you have something tangible, like a scrapbook or a journal, you don’t just remember the moment; you get to relive it. There’s real joy in that kind of time travel. So many of life’s peak moments are brief and surprisingly rare. Reminiscing lets us stretch those moments out far beyond their original window. We all experience this when we catch up with friends we haven’t seen in years, especially when there’s shared history, and suddenly you’re laughing about old stories like no time has passed at all. Curation plays a role too, says Rucker. Memory keeping isn’t about documenting everything equally; it’s about highlighting the good, and also gently shaping how we hold the harder moments. I try to do this intentionally in my own memory keeping. That thought gives me comfort, and a bit of reassurance that all this effort isn’t for nothing. It’s helping me carry joy, meaning, and connection forward, not just archive the past. Maybe the real practice isn’t to give it all up (as I truly love better systems, better archives, better memory-keeping), but knowing when to stop. When to close the journal. When to trust that a moment doesn’t need to be saved to be real. Maybe one day I’ll sit somewhere warm and quiet, and feel,  genuinely, that there is no need to portray, to preserve. Just to be… Letting Go of Old Journals and Mementos The Cost of Organizing Ideas – But I Keep Doing It Anyway The Journal Project I Can’t Quit Letting Go of the Fear of Losing Data The Art of Organizing (Things That Don’t Need to Be Organized) If You Want to Capture Ideas, You Are Lost Why can’t I, too, feel that there is no need to preserve? Why does it feel almost impossible to let a moment exist without turning it into words, photos, notes, some kind of proof that it mattered? When does recording become a way of avoiding presence? When does organising life become a substitute for living it?

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ava's blog 5 days ago

bringing back trisanet

My wife is a historian, and sometimes, she likes to look up really old German recipes. One of those recipes was for strawberry soup from 1752. “Durchklaube die Erdbeer, und wasche sie schön, zuckers nach Genügen; gieß gemeinen oder, so du willst, süßen Wein daran, treibs durch und lass es nur einen Sud aufsieden: alsdenn rößte weißtes und würflicht-geschnittenes Brod im Schmalz, richte die Erdbeere darüber. Wenn man will, kan man ein wenig Trisanet drauf streuen.” Modern translation: “Sort through the strawberries and wash them thoroughly. Add sugar to taste, then pour over some ordinary wine—or, if you prefer, sweet wine. Pass the mixture through a sieve and let it come briefly to a boil. Meanwhile, fry cubes of white bread in lard until browned, then arrange the strawberries over the bread. If desired, sprinkle a little trisanet on top.” She was interested in making it, but it needed one ingredient she hadn't ever heard of: Trisanet. So she researched a bit further, and found out it's a specific spice mix, sometimes also referred to as ' tresenei ' or ' trisenet '. It used to be very popular in Germany, but faded away in favor of just using Zimtzucker (a mix of cinnamon and sugar), which is cheaper. There are different recipes for it as it seems to have regional variants and predates the metric units, but thankfully a kind soul online has shared these two. It mainly needs ginger, mace, cinnamon, sugar, and galangal, with some variations adding other spices like cardamom or pepper, too. My wife chose the original first listed recipe, which says: In metric units, half a pound of sugar is 255g, a Lot ginger is 16g, and a Quintlein is 4g. A modern version of Quintlein is Quäntchen and would translate to a pinch (a pinch of salt, etc.). Instead of the bark, use cinnamon powder of your choice, preferably Ceylon. Galangal was more frequently used here back then, but now is hardly available anywhere except asian grocery stores. We tried our best finding powdered galangal, but ended up buying fresh roots and drying and mixing it ourselves. My wife cut it into thin slices, and put it in the oven at 100 degrees Celsius for 3-4 hours, then let it cool down and used an electric spice grinder to turn it into fine powder. Historically, the powder would be a lot less fine. I have to say, it's been amazing and fits to a lot of different foods, no matter if sweet or salty. Even added it to a red lentil stew. I asked my wife to make a low sugar version next :) My favorite right now is making a hot beverage with it, similar to chai or salep. With a teaspoon of the powder and a bit of hot water and/or milk. We have gifted friends and family a lot of this spice mix for Christmas (we had them try it beforehand on a previous visit) and they were all delighted :) I encourage you to try it out. Reply via email Published 09 Jan, 2026 half a pound of sugar one Lot ginger one cinnamon bark one Quintlein mace one Quintlein galingale (=galangal)

Science culture Culture
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Manuel Moreale 5 days ago

Bix Frankonis

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Bix Frankonis, whose blog can be found at bix.blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Brennan Kenneth Brown and the other 129 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. My name is Bix, and I’m a straight, white, middle-aged, cisgender man born in upstate New York who now lives in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, Oregon—my hometown since 1997 and the longest I’ve lived anywhere since becoming an adult. I’m actually-autistic and multiply otherwise disabled, and remain, as I’ve been for most of my life, financially dependent upon my remaining parent. (If that’s for some reason not enough, my homepage will tell you more than you possibly could want to know, and a previous birthday post serves as the first part of my, and my blog’s, manifesto.) “Bix” is a descendent and derivation of an online handle I’d once had that became my everyday name and then, in 2018, my legal one . To a large degree the modern era of my blogging is dedicated to posting through the above realities both present and future. I live alone except for a gray and white domestic shorthair cat named Meru after the protagonist of the comic book Mind MGMT. I’ve been online since a dialup gopher server run by public libraries in upstate New York allowed me to upload a file of Twin Peaks symbolism to an FTP server in Australia and telnet into an internet BBS based in New York City called MindVox . In the mid-90s, along with two other people I ran a large and cumbersome online petition effort against the Communications Decency Act which inspired a more rigorous one from the Center for Democracy and Technology, and which landed me in the pages of Rolling Stone . In the late-90s, I ran an Internet cafe , or more accurately ran it into the ground for reasons I now know to be the unaccommodated and unmitigated autism, since I wasn’t diagnosed until 2016. In the early-2000s, I blogged original political reporting (also at the time called “stand-alone journalism”) here in Portland that was widely-read in local government circles and got me profiled in The Oregonian and cited in two books. If you traveled in Firefly fandom circles, you probably at least once found yourself on one or another fansite I’d put together in my own decade or so. Finally, for a time in the mid-2010s, I project managed a nonprofit herd of urban goats here in Portland. These days, life mostly is just about listening to, reading, and watching things, and, of course, the blogging . As with most autistic people, habit and routine are foundational and self-regulating, and so every day I get in an hour of reading at a neighborhood coffeeshop; once a week I take myself for breakfast out (also in the neighborhood); and— fatigue willing —once a month I try to get across town to Oregon Zoo (where I’ll also indulge in my intermittent but long-standing photography hobby ) but over the past year this hasn’t happened all that often, much to my increasing chagrin. The current iteration of my blog goes back to 2019 when I received the bix.blog domain as part of Automattic’s “dotblogger” program (you can read my pitch for it), although I consider my actual modern blogging era to start the year before, in 2018 when I started blogging about my 2016 autism diagnosis on Medium. This current era includes earlier this year having had my twenty-fifth blogging anniversary (a post which also serves as the second part of my manifesto), since I’ve been blogging in some form since early in the year 2000—usually personal blogging but occasionally something subject-specific, using many different kinds of blogging software, hosting and self-hosted solutions, and domains. Since I cannot for certain remember what was my very first blogging, it’s not clear to me whether I was motivated to represent myself personally online or whether my first blog was project-specific—even though the latter undoubtedly still was infused by my personality. It’s unlikely that I’ve ever blogged in any kind of dry, “professional” tone and so, in that sense, it’s all personal blogging. As the late Christopher Locke once said, for better or worse, “Voice is what happens when you shitcan the cover-up.” These days, blogging also (at least in theory) includes the longterm project of working toward restoring as much of those two and a half decades as possible, using categories to designate a post’s original domain. It’s a positively gargantuan task —not least because I don’t have archives of everything and some things will need to be re-created post-by-post using the Wayback Machine. As I noted in my IndieWeb Carnival post on self-expression, blogging very much is a coping mechanism, without which I’d only be even more lost, despite the continually recurring mixed feelings I have about it because on the matter of ego (yet another reference to my manifesto post). One of the things that interests me about the restoration project is learning how that coping mechanism functioned for previous versions of me . Simply put: I blog when I cannot not blog. Depending on the post and how time-sensitive it is or isn’t, I might jot things down in Apple Notes (as I did with my initial pass at answers to these questions) before creating and saving a draft in Markdown on my laptop. Typically speaking, though, many if not most posts are written in one sitting, with a post now and then set aside for a second look later that day or the next morning before actually posting it. It’s not unusual for me to spot typos or remember something I forgot to add within hours after a post goes live, in which cases I will make edits. In most cases where I need to come back to post to add something days later, I include an Addenda section at the bottom where I include those updates. Any farther out than that, and mostly I just write a new post. It’s very rare for me to have posts “banked” for posting at a later date, like I know some other bloggers do, since publicly posting something is the final step to getting that thing out of my head where it’s been taking up space—and also because blogging for me is an ongoing process of self-narration (and self-belief ), which for me necessarily means it’s got to be happening in real-time. For that same reason of self-narration, many of my posts necessarily link previous posts somehow relevant to the post at hand. While writing, I’ll often have such posts in mind but don’t bother to do the work of actually adding the links to them until the post is substantively written. Those linked posts then carry a “referring posts” section. In this way, my blog partakes of a tiny bit of “digital garden” magic (the digital garden being the other popular way in which people who make personal websites organize them) by helping to tie together my thinking on specific matters over time. My blog, then, becomes (somewhat like my phone ) an external component of my autistic or otherwise-addled brain. As for what motivates me and the question of what I actually blog about : in the end anything and everything I write can’t help but be about myself—whether the specifics of what I’m writing about happen to be blogging itself, or a movie or television show I recently watched, or autism research, or the politics of solidarity. Over the past year or two, I’ve become especially interested in how important it is for us to spend time letting each other know that we are seen and we are heard. (There’s nothing quite like blogging a movie no one’s seen, one that’s emphatically about being seen and heard, and—this part, too, is in my manifesto post—having it make the filmmakers’ day.) All of this is subject to the whims of fatigue or, as has been the case lately, autistic burnout —which is why I’ve not been blogging as much as I usually do, and why, in fact, it took me nearly two months just to answer these questions. Never before have I felt such cognitive paralysis and claustrophobia when attempting to write, which as you can imagine is simply terrific when writing is one of your self-regulating activities. Only very rarely can I write outside of the house—say, at one of my neighborhood coffeeshops. As I’ve returned to again and again, my blogging is a sort of writing myself into existence and claiming the space I take up in the world, and this is a sensitive mindset that’s, perhaps ironically, best protected by being alone and home instead of up and about and subject to the stressors of being autistic and anxious out in the world. This in part is because the “spotlight effect” is real, and if I’m writing at a coffeeshop I can only do it with my back against the wall. (I mean that literally, not metaphorically.) It’s extremely rare, although not completely unheard of, for me to have anything else going on around me, like a television show or music, when I am writing. If I do feel the need for music, it’s generally going to be something instrumental like LoFi Girl playlists or the soundtracks to Station Eleven or The Fallout (of all things). It’s fairly common, at least when it comes to my longer posts, and almost surely when it comes to my more discursive ones, to fall into hyperfocus . If you’re autistic otherwise neurodivergent and know this state, this usually means looking up after an hour or two and realizing you’re light-headed from forgetting to eat lunch and with a very pressing need to go to the bathroom—themselves two things perhaps better realized at home than at a neighborhood coffeeshop. Early this year, I migrated to 11ty after several false starts looking at various static site generators and failing to come to terms with them—despite the fact that once upon a time in the mid-2000s I self-hosted MoveableType on an OpenBSD box over my home DSL, so it’s not like I’m incapable of understanding things. Right now, posts are written in Panda, the stand-alone editor from the makers of Bear (the Markdown notes app, not the blogging service), on my MacBook Air where I have my local 11ty install. Recently, I switched from manually uploading the built site directory to Netlify to using continuous deploy via pushing to GitHub, after a timezone snag with the latter process finally was resolved. For the rare post that includes an image or two, I currently host those on some.pics, a service of omg.lol, because my blog previously was on their weblog.lol service and it’s just easier to keep doing that for now. I’m still a Flickr Pro member, so at some point I might switch over to them, since that’s where all my photography is anyway, except that, even more rarely, sometimes I’m posting a graphic instead of a photo, and those I do not also have on Flickr. (This is one way in which I miss the ease of an actual blogging CMS, but there currently aren’t any such tools that don’t frustrate me past my point of patience. When I win the lottery, I will pay someone to build me one that does everything I need, and only what I need. Ironically, all these years decades later, Blogger and MoveableType still had the right idea: a CMS that publishes a static site.) There might have been some early iteration of my blogging which was done manually, but if so it’s lost to the severely deficient autobiographical memory and no archive exists. The earliest blogging software I would have used would have been Blogger, but (as noted) I spent many years self-hosting MoveableType over my home DSL, before moving on the WordPress for at least as long. Along the way I’ve tried many different things, from TypePad to Tumblr, micro.blog to weblog.lol, Proseful to (the other) Bear to Pika. I think I even very briefly used really simple a shell script on a VPS. (Full disclosure: I fully admit to an ethical conflict when it comes to “bullshit bots”, or generative so-called AI. I dislike their misuse of copyrights, I dislike their climate impact, I dislike removing cognitive friction from creation, and I dislike that ultimately these bots will just keep narrowing the breadth of human knowledge and expression and everything becomes increasingly self-referential. Nonetheless, I’ve used ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot when needing to solve specific technical challenges, especially when converting archived posts from previous blogs, or to create features such as my “on this day” and “recently read blogs” widgets. I am not a coder, and while I often can understand, for lack of a better way to say it, the story of a piece of code and make tiny, piecemeal adjustments to existing code because of that, I cannot myself code from scratch. My “excuse” in the end is inevitably a selfish one: the blog, in many ways, is all I have, and all that will be left of me when I am gone that said “I was here”, and I need it to function in a certain way. I’m up front about this, because people have a right to call me a hypocrite. That said, as I recently announced , it is my intention not to use these tools going forward, although any existing code will remain in use barring a clear route to replacement.) This is a pretty good example of the type of question I don’t know how to answer. I started blogging within a particular context and at a particular time, and that context and time, and their circumstances and people, are ancestors to who I am today. I don’t know how to blank out that past to imagine how I’d do it now absent that history. More generally, if we take this question as advice to others: there’s a saying (of a provenance I’m not even going to attempt to trace) that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago—but the second-best time is now. I think we are right now living in the second-best time to start a blog, because there’s a clear interest percolating in trying to re-center blogs in a way that hasn’t been seen since before the combined rise of content marketing and Twitter, as seen by the advent of sites such as ooh.directory and blogroll.org . Perhaps all we’re really lacking is something along the lines of Technorati and the other services that once existed to help us see not merely who is linking to what URLs but who is linking to whom . This unmet need, I feel, needs to be addressed if blogging truly is to become once again a blogosphere—or, more likely in this day and age, a whole, diverse, plural set of blogospheres . Two years ago, I ran with an idea Kevin Lawver had of blogging as the empathy engine of the web, and in today’s increasingly authoritarian environment we need more than ever as much public solidarity between and among whole persons as we feel we safely can put online. We have a real chance to reclaim an internet where we are people , not users. For anyone reading these interviews who isn’t themselves yet blogging: please start a blog. We need you here. (If someone is looking for some passionate motivation, I suggest watching Pump Up the Volume , the 1990 film that is the patron movie of blogging despite pre-dating blogging itself. “Talk hard.”) It currently does not cost me anything to run my blog beyond the domain which isn’t due for renewal until 2030, nor does it make any money. I’m technically part of One a Month Club , but I don’t really promote that beyond a site badge and in the footer of my RSS feed. However, I cap membership numbers because above a certain threshold it would affect my eligibility for SNAP and Medicaid benefits here in the U.S. without actually providing enough support to make up for those losses. (I’d never actually reach those kinds of membership numbers anyway, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.) More generally, people of course can do whatever they want with their personal blogs. That’s what makes them personal. I’d assume that I’m more inclined to expect personal blogs not to be behind outright paywalls, but your mileage may vary. I don’t have any inherent objection to blogging as a side-hustle, but blogs that specifically try to hustle readership behind paywalls or otherwise cumbersome hoops will tend to feel much less personal to me. That said, I’ll readily admit to an outright bias against anyone whose primary purpose is “content marketing” or growth hacking, or who obsesses over things like SEO, because I believe that the focus on these things is part of what helped push blogs to the edges of the internet and mainstream irrelevancy around the same time that Twitter not only consumed the subset idea of microblogging but also made it explicitly—and frictionlessly—social. Recommendations are always difficult for me because my brain dislikes ranking things or people. It’s why I don’t rate books on Goodreads and why I don’t rate movies on Letterboxd and simply mark the things I enjoyed. It’s also why I don’t maintain a blogroll, although I certainly did back in the OG blogging days. So, the first part of my answer here is going to be a bit of a cheat, if nonetheless a responsive one. At the bottom of the front page of my blog, above the four links to places to find more blogs, is what I’ve referred to as a “bloglog” (what others lately have taken to calling a “postroll”). In my case it lists the ten blog posts by other people that I’ve actually read most recently (or, at least, as of the last time my site was built)—and it’s also available as an RSS feed . It all runs off an Instapaper tag, and I’m sure there’s plenty of blogs there for people to discover. That said, I will offer a short list that splits the difference between some fellow OG bloggers, a couple of more recent finds, and some of the newer self-tagged “word vomit” bloggers on sites like Bear. This is less about placing any of these bloggers above any others in my estimation than about making some suggestions that help expand the types of bloggers represented in this series. Here I’ll just crib a couple of projects from the “sites” section of my homepage. Since late 2001, around the time that so-called “warblogging” became a thing, I’ve been hosting an ad- and cruft-free, minimalist presentation of Mark Twain’s The War Prayer which often finds itself shared with students by teachers. (It’s also on my longest-running domain.) Two years ago I returned to the internet the complete archive of a shipyard workers zine from World War II, updated my research into it, and this year I finally turned over the originals to Oregon Historical Society. Finally, although Joss Whedon became quite evidently problematic, I remain a fan of one of his unmade scripts , which I wrote about nearly a decade ago because I appreciate its (workable? impractical?) ideal that there are no expendable people. (If I can tack on a postscript of sorts: given my eternal struggle with my own ego , I thank Manu for inviting me to participate in People and Blogs.) Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 123 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Andrea Contino and the other 129 supporters for making this series possible. Absurd Pirate Elaine (my mom, who’s been blogging as long as I have) Jessamyn West Shelley Powers

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Alex White's Blog 1 weeks ago

Year of Calmness

There was a thread recently on tildes.net about New Year resolutions. In one comment the poster mentioned how they choose a new "name" each year the represents what they want to embody. The idea of picking a new name for yourself stuck with me.. Instead of prescribing to set goals and feeling deflated when you miss them, you define what you want to become and figure out what that means throughout the year. For me, I immediately thought of "Calmness". I've always been an anxious, relatively negative person. I live a somewhat hectic life between 2 kids, 2 dogs, 3 kids, working at a startup, doing freelance work and managing 2 rental properties. I almost always have a physical feeling of anxiety in my chest, something that used to be regulated to the night before tests in college has become a constant companion. This year, I want to embody calmness, regardless of the situation. I don't know exactly what this looks like, and that's kind of the idea. I want to make decisions and react based on what it means to be calm, rather than dictate meaning beforehand. In pursuit of discovering what calmness means to me, I plan to get back into researching non-secular Buddhism and meditation. Before my son was born, I really dug into Buddhism and enjoyed what I learned, but after the birth that faded away. There was also an incident of joining a local sect that turned out to be internationally recognized as a cult, but hey shit happens! Another aspect I've been thinking a lot about is my tendency to see things in absolutes. A big example of this has been AI/LLMs. I've been nothing but critical and vocally anti AI, to the point I quickly dismiss any ability to see a positive side. This week I returned to work and (much as I expected) AI has integrated itself into every workflow. Following my new mindset has allowed me to see there are true benefits, even if that is a renewed interest in technology from my teammates. Whereas previously I would have dismissed and moaned, I'm now listening and learning. Now don't worry, this site will still remain LLM free, but maybe I'll stop complaining about the technology so much. Maybe. The final supporting piece I've discovered (so far) for my new mindset has been daily journaling. I've tried to pickup journaling before, but was always too serious and prescriptive about it. This time, with the help of the excellent DayNotez program on Palm OS, I've been writing multiple times a day. These have been short entries that help me process events or get my thoughts onto "paper". There is a lot to be said about writing your thoughts and seeing them laid out in-front of you. It sparks new ideas and frees space in your mind. Realizing that we are only 6 days into the new year, I admit things will change and I may even forget this whole adventure. But so far, embodying the "name" of Calmness has helped me navigate a number of things (including a crisis with one of our rental properties). I hope I can look back in a year with a deep understanding of how to approach situations with calmness. I'd love to hear what resolutions or goals others have for 2026, maybe we can help keep each other accountable! Feel free to shoot me an email . Stay calm and carry on!

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Kev Quirk 1 weeks ago

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

Joan makes the case that the modern web, dominated by platforms and algorithms, has stripped away depth, ownership, and genuine thought. Blogging, she argues, is a quiet act of resistance that lets us think clearly, write freely, and leave something real behind. Read Post → I’m not sure where I first heard about Joan and her superb writing, but I’ve been following her for around a year or so now, I think. Anyway, I was catching up on my RSS feeds and came across this post from a few days ago. It’s fantastic, as it most of what Joan puts out. Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking. I couldn’t agree more. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

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A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Tyrannies and servilities

In an effort to understand the then-present state of women in the workplace, Virginia Woolf goes looking to the newspapers, where she finds a number of letters and articles declaiming that women have too much liberty, that they are taking jobs that men could do, and that they are neglecting their domestic duties in the process. She finds an immediate parallel to those complaints in other events of the day: There, in those quotations, is the egg of the very same work that we know under other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do. Let us quote again: “Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.” Place it beside another quotation: “There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women. Nature has done well to entrust the man with the care of his family and the nation. The woman’s world is her family, her husband, her children, and her home.” One is written in English, the other German. But where is the difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal? And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the heart of England. Is it not from this egg, to quote Mr Wells again, that “the practical obliteration of [our] freedom by Fascists or Nazis” will spring? The first quotation is from the Daily Telegraph ; the second is Hitler. (I would draw comparisons to the present moment, but they seem to draw themselves.) Woolf later concludes: It suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other. That is, the tyranny of government is the tyranny of the workplace is the tyranny of the home. Each begets and creates the other. But perhaps that also suggests the reverse: pull the thread on one, and watch as they all come undone. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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Ankur Sethi 1 weeks ago

I'm not listening to full albums anymore

In the last few years, I’ve lost my appetite for discovering new music. The main reason is that I’ve focused on listening to full albums for most of the last decade, but increasingly I find it irritating and anxiety-inducing to listen to albums from start to finish. I’ve been reading/watching music reviews online since my early twenties. In this time, I’ve also been part of a number of music communities online. One defining characteristic of music discussions online—at least in the Anglophone world—is that they’re centered entirely around the album. To most critics and “serious” music fans, the album seems to be a single, indivisible unit of music that must always be considered as a whole. Five minutes with a search engine will dredge up hundreds of blog posts and op-eds touting the benefits of listening to complete albums rather than individual tracks. Some people almost attach morality to the act of listening to an album. If you’re not listening to full albums from start to end, in a darkened room, with your eyes closed, with noise-cancelling headphones, then do you even respect the music? Are you even a true fan? In my mid-twenties, I wanted to be a musician (I still do, but not as intensely). So when I started taking music more seriously myself, I focused my listening mainly on albums. This wouldn’t have been such a terrible thing had it not been for the fact that I didn’t enjoy listening to full albums. At all. Never had, never will. I grew up in an era of cassette tapes. When I was a teenager, my parents would take me to the local Planet M once a month, where I would be allowed to buy exactly one album on tape. My family couldn't afford CDs because CDs cost ₹400-500, whereas cassette tapes cost ₹100-150. So even when most of the world had moved on to CDs, I was still listening to all my music on tape. When you're listening to albums on tape, you're not really skipping around the tracklist. Sure, it’s possible to skip tracks on a cassette tape. That’s what the rewind and fast-forward buttons are for. But it’s not easy. You have to know precisely how long to rewind and/or fast-forward so you land where you want to. If you don’t get it right the first time, it becomes a frustrating back-and-forth dance between the rewind and fast-forward buttons until you manage to find the exact spot you need to be. Kind of like parallel parking in a tight spot. Listening to most of my music on tape, I should’ve grown up to be the sort of adult who enjoys listening to albums, right? But that's not what happened. The moment I discovered I could record my favorite tracks from their original tapes onto blanks, I stopped listening to full albums altogether. I had discovered the joys of making mixtapes, and there was no going back. When my family finally bought a computer, and I discovered how to download MP3s from the internet, I completely gave up on listening to full albums or even downloading them illegally. Freed from the constraints of linear analog media, I began collecting individual MP3s, making playlists, and curating music for myself. This changed in my twenties. As I started participating in music communities, going to gigs and festivals, and running a music blog, I also started forcing myself to listen to albums. That’s how all the pros did it, after all, and didn’t I want to be a pro? However, even when I was listening to nearly a hundred new albums each year, they didn’t quite make sense to me. They still don’t. To me, they just seem like a convenient packaging for a collection of music. Outside of some loose themes and sonic similarities that hold an album together, I don’t see why a certain set of tracks placed in a certain sequence makes for a better listening experience than a slightly altered set of tracks in a slightly altered sequence. There’s a lot of talk about the artistic intent that goes into curating and sequencing an album. But when artists play their music live, they often curate setlists by mixing and matching tracks from several different albums. DJs go even further, curating their mixes from tracks by many different artists, genres, and eras. If musicians themselves don’t constrain themselves to the album format, why must I? Sure, there are some artists who have turned the album into an art form . There are albums out there that are designed to be one unified, cohesive experience. But those albums are exceedingly rare. I’m willing to bet less than one in a hundred albums is designed to be listened to as a unit. Most albums are just collections of tracks that an artist made in a certain time period, or which share a common theme or sound. Albums also seem to me a modern invention, one that came about because of the technical limitations of recording media rather than a human tendency for enjoying a certain amount of music at a time. An LP is about 40-50 minutes long , not because that’s a magic number but because that’s how much music a vinyl record can hold. That’s why so many rock albums are still around 45-50 minutes long to this day. Rock music rose to prominence in the heyday of the vinyl record. On the other hand, hip-hop rose to prominence around the time audio CDs became more common, which is why many rap albums are a bit longer at around 60-70 minutes . The length of an album has little to do with something inherent in the genre or user preferences and everything to do with the technical limitations of the media it's distributed on. And now that streaming music has become more common, we see many artists breaking the mold . Some artists release albums that last several hours , while others only ever release singles. Unless an artist is planning to release physical versions of their music, they’re no longer constrained to the album format. So after more than a decade of forcing myself to listen to albums, I too am releasing myself from the constraint of album-centric listening. Starting this year, I'm going to listen to music in the way I enjoy: by seeking out individual tracks that move me, and arranging them into curated playlists for myself and my friends. To discover new music, I'm listening to more singles, curated playlists, and radio stations. I'm reading Bandcamp editorials and diving deep into obscure tags. I'm allowing myself to open an artist's Spotify page and click around on whatever tracks catch my fancy. I'm even allowing myself to listen to albums on shuffle, something I’ve already done with Audrey Hobert’s Who’s the Clown over this last week. I'm hoping that by freeing myself to listen to music in the way I want will allow me to discover a lot more this year.

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annie's blog 1 weeks ago

To be defeated by ever greater things

How small that is, with which we wrestle, what wrestles with us, how immense; were we to let ourselves, the way things do, be conquered thus by the great storm,— we would become far-reaching and nameless. What we triumph over is the Small, and the success itself makes us petty. The Eternal and Unexampled will not be bent by us. …growth is: to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things. from  The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke

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Rik Huijzer 1 weeks ago

Noteworthy Bible Quotes

Old Testament quotes from Brenton’s Septuagint and New Testament quotes from KJV. David would today be called a “conspiracy theorist”: “Thou hast sheltered me from the conspiracy of them that do wickedly;” (Psalm 63) “It is better to hope in the Lord, than to hope in princes.” (Psalm 117:9) “I was peaceful among them that hated peace; when I spoke to them, they warred against me without a cause.” (Psalm 119:7) “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord; but he that deals faithfully is accepted with him.” (Proverbs 12:22) This re-emphasizes that the Old Testament is al...

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fLaMEd fury 2 weeks ago

What I Listened to in 2025

What’s going on, Internet? 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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Weakty 2 weeks ago

The other side of distraction

I love the energy of New Years. Resolutions and intentions thread through my day-to-day thoughts in the days and sometimes even weeks leading up to a new year. That has toned down quite a bit since having a kid, but I’m still holding on to this meaningless date that we attribute meaning to and I am looking forward to some fresh-starts. More than anything, this coming year, I’d like to steal back my attention, even more. Focus might be an apt theme for the year. As I work to continue to eradicate unwelcome, manipulative distractions from my life and redirect that stolen time and attention back to more important matters, I find myself thinking about what it means to be on the other side of distraction; that is, imagining what kind of person I am after "arriving" (he said, trying not sound extremely obnoxious). Arriving back at having my attention belong to me takes me to thinking about my post on priorities, and spending time—namely, what do you do with that new time that you have? One thing I’ve realized, is that what is on the other side of a doomscroll, is another kind of doom: facing up to what you actually want to do, and how uncomfortable that is. For me, it’s an abundant backlog of several creative art projects, idly standing by for me to just start (and keep going) . It is altogether scary to have even gotten to a point where I’ve realized I could actually just do these things once I’ve taken command of my attention. I don’t know what to call this petrifying position beyond analysis paralysis . But what I find interesting about it is that it exists at all. I would have thought that just having gotten at least some of my attention back would mean I’d be free and clear and the actual directing of this newfound time/energy/focus would be immediately put to use. Not so, of course. I expect that as this year progresses, I’ll be whittling down more and more things. I look forward to this, as hard as it can be to let go. But the things you love, and you want to love, are out there waiting for you—you have to drop a few of the heavier things to make it out there, though. I don’t know what shape writing on this site will have for me this year. I’ve enjoyed writing here in this all-too-non-fiction-way, and I hope to continue doing it. But really, it is a stand in for more important writing I want to do. I expect my writing here to be whittled down or change shape in some way or other, too. Everything is an experiment, everything is exploration. May you have peace, happiness, love, joy, and continued experiments in your own way this year.

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fLaMEd fury 2 weeks ago

Books I Read in 2025

What’s going on, Internet? I read fewer books this year, which reflects a shift rather than a slowdown. I listened to more podcasts during the day and read more comic books at night. Audiobooks remained my favourite format, I followed authors I already enjoyed, and I was quicker to walk away when something wasn’t clicking. This wasn’t a year of trying everything. It was a year of reading in ways that fit my day better. Stats shown here are generated from my metadata-library, I used ChatGPT to crunch the numbers. Don't @ me. Here’s how 2025 shaped up: Books Finished ↓ 10 from 2024 Still my default format Average Rating More consistency, less filler 5-Star Reads The standouts Reading less made the patterns clearer. When something worked, I kept going. When it didn’t, I moved on. Audiobooks continued to do the heavy lifting. Based on titles where duration is recorded, I listened to at least 260 hours of audiobooks this year, with Onyx Storm easily the longest single listen at just under 24 hours . My rating scale is deliberately simple. I rarely use one or two stars. If a book isn’t working, I’ll abandon it early and move on rather than finish it just to rate it. These were the books that really landed for me this year: Michael Bennett’s In Blood series was a real highlight this year. I read the three Hana Westerman books as back-to-back as the library would let me. They’re crime novels, and what really worked for me was the setting and perspective. They’re distinctly Aotearoa without leaning on clichés. As audiobooks, they were great to listen to and easy to stick with over long stretches. I finished the last book, Carved in Blood , during the final drive from Wellington to Auckland during our move. This was a good example of how I read this year. When something clicked, I kept going. Non-fiction showed up in a more focused way this year. I wasn’t reading broadly, but when I did pick something up it tended to circle similar themes: power, media, politics, and how systems affect people on the ground. These were the standouts. They weren’t comfort reads. Parts of Careless People had me thinking “what the actual fuck”, and A Different Kind of Power had me shaking my head at how many fellow Kiwis disappeared down the alt-right rabbit hole and turned on Jacinda, who saw us through the COVID years relatively unscathed. This wasn’t a year about reading more. It was about reading in ways that fit my day. Audiobooks for most of my reading. Comics before bed. Weekly, fortnightly, and monthly podcasts in between. A nice variety to keep things interesting. 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. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Loved it ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Liked it a lot ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Liked it The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue Malibu Rising The Axeman’s Carnival The Dream Hotel Better the Blood Return to Blood Carved in Blood Careless People Wars Without End Fahrenheit-182 A Different Kind of Power Gangland my favourite

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マリウス 2 weeks ago

Updates 2025/Q4

This post includes personal updates and some open source project updates. As the year comes to a close, I’d like to begin this update by sharing a famous (and sadly now gone ) tweet . My goal is not only to remind those who have seen it before, but also to introduce it to those who haven’t, along with the thoughts it inevitably sparks. It’s a way to preserve this rare gem of social media for posterity. Below is the original post, with added speaker information for easier reading. Warning: This text is a bit long. If you’d rather skip ahead to the next part of the update, click/tap here . Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine right up until we try to explain our calendar to them. Humans: “yeah we divide our year into a number of sub units called ‘months’ made up a number of days, and they’re not all the same length” Aliens: “I guess that’s unavoidable, if your rotations-count per orbit is a prime number” Humans: “yeah, our’s isn’t prime” Aliens: “but surely you have most of these ‘months’ the same length and just make the last one shorter or longer?” Humans: “No… They’re different lengths following no logical pattern” Aliens: “what” Humans: “and we further subdivide the months into ‘weeks’, which is 7 days.” Aliens: “ahh, so each month is an integer multiple of weeks?” Humans: “that would make sense, but no. Only one is, sometimes” Aliens: “SOMETIMES?!” Humans: “yeah our orbit around the sun isn’t an integer number of days, so we have to change the number of days to in a year from time to time” Aliens: “oh yes, a similar thing happens on Epsilon Indi 7, where they have to add an extra day every 39 years to keep holidays on track” Humans: “yeah that’s how ours work! Although the ratio doesn’t work out cleanly, so we just do every 4 years, except every 100 years, except except every 400 years” Aliens: “oh, you number your years? What’s the epoch?” Humans: “uh, it’s supposed to be the birth of a religious leader, but they got the math wrong so it’s off by 4 years, if he existed at all.” Aliens: “if? You based your calendar off the birth date of someone you’re not sure exists?” Humans: “yeah. He’s written about in a famous book but historical records are spotty.” Aliens: “interesting. I didn’t realize your planet was one of the ones with a single universal religion, that usually only happens in partial or complete hive minds.” Humans: “uhh, we’re not.” Aliens: “You’re not?!” Humans: “yeah we have multiple religions.” Aliens: “oh but they all have a common ancestor, which agrees on the existence of that leader, right?” Humans: “uh, no. Two of the big ones do, but most of the others don’t believe in him” Aliens: “YOUR CALENDAR IS BASED ON A RELIGIOUS LEADER THAT NOT EVERYONE BELIEVES IN?” Humans: “well, on his birth. And yeah, we got it wrong by a couple years.” Aliens: “OK, fine. So, you have somewhat complicated rules about when you change the length of your years, and I’m scared to ask this, but… You definitely just add or subtract that extra day at the end, right?” Humans: “…. Nope.” Aliens: “At the start of the year? " Humans: “nah. The end of the second month” Aliens: “WHY WOULD IT BE THE SECOND MONTH?” Humans: “I’m not sure, really.” Aliens: “huh. So at this point I’m dreading asking this, but how do you measure time within each day?” Humans: “oh that’s much simpler. Each day is divided into hours, each hour has minutes, and each minute has seconds.” Aliens: “ok. And 10 of each?” Humans: “10 hours? No. There’s 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds” Aliens: “…. I thought you said you used a base-10 counting system” Humans: “we do! Mostly. But our time system came from some long gone civilization that liked base-60 like 5000 years ago” Aliens: “and you haven’t changed it since?” Humans: “No.” Aliens: “huh. Okay, so why 24? That’s not a divisor of 60” Humans: “oh because it’s actually 12!” Aliens: “what” Humans: “yeah each day is 24 hours but they are divided into two sets of 12.” Aliens: “and that’s 5 12s, right, I see the logic here, almost. So like, after hour 12, it becomes the second half, which is 1?” Humans: “No, after 11.” Aliens: “oh, you zero-index them! So it’s hours 0-11 in the first half, then 12-23 in the second half?” Humans: “No. 12 to 11 in the first half, and again in the second half” Aliens: “please explain that before my brain melts out my mouth” Humans: “the first hour is 12. Then the next one is 1, then it goes back up to 11, then 12 again” Aliens: “that is not how numbers work. And how do you tell first 12 apart from second 12?” Humans: “oh we don’t use numbers for that!” Aliens: “you don’t number the two halves of your day?” Humans: “nah, we call them AM and PM” Aliens: “WHAT DOES THAT MEAN” Humans: “I think it’s ante-meridian and post-meridian? But I’m not sure, I dont know much Latin” Aliens: “Latin?” Humans: “yeah it’s an ancient language from an old empire which controlled a lot of the world and we still use some of their terms” Aliens: “oh, and that was the civilization that liked base-60 and set up your time system?” Humans: “that would make sense, but… No, completely different one.” Aliens: “okay, and what do you do to if you want to measure very short times, shorter than a second?” Humans: “oh we use milliseconds and microseconds” Aliens: “ahh, those are a 60th of a second and then 60th of the other?” Humans: “No. Thousandths.” Aliens: “so you switch to base-10 at last, but only for subdivisions of the second?” Humans: “yeah.” Aliens: “but at thousands, ie, ten tens tens” Humans: “yeah. Technically we have deciseconds and centiseconds, which are 1/10 of a second, and 1/100 of a second, but no one really uses them. We just use milli.” Aliens: “that seems more like a base-1000 system than a base-10 system.” Humans: “it kinda is? We do a similar thing with measures of volume and distance and mass.” Aliens: “but you still call it base-10?” Humans: “yeah” Aliens: “so let me see if I get this right: Your years are divided in 10 months, each of which is some variable number of days, the SECOND of which varies based on a complex formula… and each day is divided into two halves of 12 hours, of 60 minutes, 60 seconds, 1000 milliseconds?” Humans: “12 months, actually.” Aliens: “right, because of the ancient civilization that liked base-60, and 12 is a divisor of 60.” Humans: “No, actually, that came from the civilization that used latin. Previously there were 10.” Aliens: “what” Humans: “yeah the Latin guys added two months part of the way through their rule, adding two more months. That’s why some are named after the wrong numbers” Aliens: “you just said two things I am having trouble understanding. 1. Your months are named, not numbered? 2. THE NAMES ARE WRONG?” Humans: “yep! Our 9th month is named after the number 7, and so on for 10, 11, and 12.” Aliens: “your 12th month is named… 10?” Humans: “yeah.” Aliens: “what are the other ones named after?!” Humans: “various things. Mainly Gods or rulers” Aliens: “oh, from that same religion that your epoch is from?” Humans: “uh… No. Different one.” Aliens: “so you have an epoch based on one religion, but name your months based on a different one?” Humans: “yeah! Just wait until you hear about days of the week.” Aliens: “WHAT” Humans: “so yeah we group days into 7-day periods-” Aliens: “which aren’t an even divisor of your months lengths or year lengths?” Humans: “right. Don’t interrupt” Aliens: “sorry” Humans: “but we name the days of the week, rather than numbering them. Funny story with that, actually: there’s disagreement about which day starts the week.” Aliens: “you have a period that repeats every 7 days and you don’t agree when it starts?” Humans: “yeah, it’s Monday or Sunday.” Aliens: “and those names come from…” Humans: “celestial bodies and gods! The sun and moon are Sunday and Monday, for example” Aliens: “but… I looked at your planet’s orbit parameters. Doesn’t the sun come up every day?” Humans: “yeah.” Aliens: “oh, do you have one of those odd orbits where your natural satellite is closer or eclipsed every 7 days, like Quagnar 4?” Humans: “no, the sun and moon are the same then as every other day, we just had to name them something.” Aliens: “and the other days, those are named after gods?” Humans: “yep!” Aliens: “from your largest religion, I imagine?” Humans: “nah. That one (and the second largest, actually) only has one god, and he doesn’t really have a name.” Aliens: “huh. So what religion are they from? The Latin one again?” Humans: “nah, they only named one of the God-days” Aliens: “only on… SO THE OTHER DAYS ARE FROM A DIFFERENT RELIGON ENTIRELY?” Humans: “Yep!” Aliens: “the third or forth biggest, I assume?” Humans: “nah, it’s one that… Kinda doesn’t exist anymore? It mostly died out like 800 years ago, though there are some modern small revivals, of course” Aliens: “so, let me get confirm I am understanding this correctly. Your days and hours and seconds and smaller are numbered, in a repeating pattern. But your years are numbered based on a religious epoch, despite it being only one religion amongst several.” Humans: “correct so far” Aliens: “and your months and days of the week are instead named, although some are named after numbers, and it’s the wrong numbers” Humans: “exactly” Aliens: “and the ones that aren’t numbers or rulers or celestial objects are named after gods, right?” Humans: “yup!” Aliens: “but the months and the days of the week are named after gods from different religons from the epoch religion, and indeed, each other?” Humans: “yeah! Except Saturday. That’s the same religion as the month religion” Aliens: “and the month/Saturday religion is also from the same culture who gave you the 12 months system, and the names for the two halves of the day, which are also named?” Humans: “right! Well, kinda.” Aliens: “please explain, slowly and carefully” Humans: “yeah so cultures before then had a 12 month system, because of the moon. But they had been using a 10 month system, before switching to 12 and giving them the modern names” Aliens: “the… Moon? Your celestial body?” Humans: “yeah, it completes an orbit about every 27 days, so which is about 12 times a year, so it is only natural to divide the year into 12 periods, which eventually got called months” Aliens: “ok, that makes sense. Wait, no. Your orbital period is approximately 365.25 days, right?” Humans: “yeah. That’s why we do 365 or 366 based on the formula” Aliens: “but that doesn’t work. 365 divided by 27 is ~13.5, not 12” Humans: “yeah I’m not sure why 12 was so common then. Maybe it goes back to the base 60 people?” Aliens: “okay so one final check before I file this report: Years are numbered based on a religious leader. Years always have 12 months, but the lengths of those months is not consistent between each other or between years.” Humans: “don’t forget the epoch we number our years from is wrong!” Aliens: “right, yes. And your months are named, some after a different religion, and some after numbers, but not the number the month is in the year.” Humans: “right. And when we change the month lengths, it’s the second one we change” Aliens: “how could I forget? After months you have a repeating ‘week’ of 7 days, which is named after gods from two religons, one of which is the month-naming one, and a nearly extinct one. And you don’t agree when the week starts.” Humans: “nope! My money is on Monday.” Aliens: “that’s the Monday that’s named after your moon, which supposedly influenced the commonality of the 12 months in a year cycle, despite it orbiting 13 times in a year?” Humans: “correct!” Aliens: “and as for your days, they split into two halves, named after a phrase you don’t really understand in the long dead language of the same culture that named the months and Saturday.” Humans: “Yep. I took some in college but all I remember is like, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘stinky’, ‘cocksucker’” Aliens: “charming. And then each half is divided into 12 hours, but you start at 12, then go to 1, and up to 11” Humans: “all I can say is that it makes more sense on analog clocks.” Aliens: “i don’t know what that is and at this point I would prefer you not elaborate. So each of those hours is divided into 60 minutes and then 60 seconds, and this comes from an ancient civilization, but not the one that gave you the month names” Humans: “yep. Different guys. Different part of the world.” Aliens: “ok. And then after seconds, you switch to a ‘base-10’ system, but you only really use multiples of a thousand? Milliseconds and microseconds?” Humans: “right. And there’s smaller ones beyond that, but they all use thousands” Aliens: “right. Got it. All written down here. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just gotta go make sure I didn’t leave my interociter on, I’ll be right back.” The tall alien walks back into their saucer without a wave. The landing ramp closes. The ship gently lifts off as gangly landing legs retract. There’s a beat, then a sudden whooshing sound as air rushes back into the space that previously held the craft, now suddenly vacuum. NORAD alarms go off briefly as an object is detected leaving the earth’s atmosphere at a significant fraction of the speed of light. In the years to come, many technological advances are made from what was left behind, a small tablet shaped object made of some kind of artifical stone/neutrino composite material. The alien message left on screen is eventually translated to read “Untitled Document 1 has not been saved, are you sure you wish to quit? (yes) (no) (cancel)” Many years have passed, and we await the day the aliens return. They have not. As I mentioned in the previous update ( here ), my beloved 9barista coffee brewer started malfunctioning at the end of Q3, likely due to the age of the O-ring sealing the water chamber and the descaling process I performed. However, I was able to fix the machine using the official 9barista repair kit and have been using it daily ever since. In recent months, though, I’ve almost entirely switched to decaf coffee in an effort to reduce some recurring headaches I’ve been dealing with for a while. It doesn’t seem to be the constant consumption of caffeine causing the issue; rather, the headaches mostly appeared whenever I skipped a cup, making it seem more like a caffeine withdrawal effect. Although I continued to experience headaches in Q4, those were likely linked to being sick rather than coffee, see below . That said, both the frequency and intensity of the headaches have noticeably decreased. Toward the end of Q4, I also began experimenting with additions to my coffee, specifically Lion’s Mane , a well-known component of traditional Chinese medicine that’s often advertised as an alternative to caffeine. It’s believed to enhance focus without the jitters or cold sweats that usually come with high caffeine consumption. In mid-October, I unfortunately got hit with a heavy dose of COVID-19 , which knocked me out for three weeks and has had (once again) a lasting impact on my overall health. Since I was mostly bedbound during that time, I spent some of it exchanging COVID anecdotes with the friendly folks in the community channel . I was surprised to find that many people there had similar negative experiences, particularly in relation to post-vaccine infections. My first encounter with COVID was back in 2020, and for me, it turned out to be little more than a bad flu, with two days of fever and some headaches. I didn’t lose my sense of smell or taste, nor did I experience any long-term effects. In fact, the most troubling part of the whole COVID experience for me back then wasn’t the sickness itself, but the fear of being picked up by local authorities for having an elevated body temperature. This was especially concerning because I was still traveling the world at the time, enjoying the eerie quiet of empty airports and cities. Due to increasing social pressure, especially from governments imposing heavy travel restrictions, I was eventually pushed into getting vaccinated shortly after that. Unfortunately, my body didn’t handle the two doses very well. I experienced extreme muscle pain and a general sense of being under the weather . While those side effects faded after a few days, in the months that followed, I felt more tired and inflamed than usual, with recurring flu-like symptoms and headaches. At some point, COVID hit me again, but this time it was really bad. I ended up battling a fever around 40°C/104°F for over a week, and I was completely knocked out for almost two months. On top of that, I began experiencing cardiovascular symptoms, which persisted for months and even years afterward. The adverse effects I’d never experienced before didn’t just show up with subsequent COVID infections, but also with regular flu. There was one point when a strain of Influenza B hit me so hard that I had to visit the emergency room, which is something I’d never done before, even though I’d never received the annual flu vaccine. To this day, it feels like ever since I got the Pfizer shots (for which I had to sign a liability waiver), my health has been in a constant decline, especially whenever influenza or COVID strikes. No matter how healthy my diet or activity level, it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. In fact, the ongoing inflammation and regular flu-like symptoms have made it especially hard to push myself during a workout or a run. At some point, I started digging deeper into the issue, with regular bloodwork and visits to specialists, particularly cardiologists. Unfortunately, as is often the case, no medical expert has been able to diagnose the underlying issue(s) or propose meaningful solutions. Society seems quick to ridicule those who seek to improve their health through unconventional methods, yet most people fail to recognize the globally poor state of healthcare, which leaves people stranded, regardless of how much private money they’re willing to spend to solve their problems. Long story short, will I continue to get the battletested shots for Hepatitis , Tetanus , and other dangers humanity faces? Definitely. But will I be significantly more skeptical of vaccines that didn’t undergo year-long trials and were fast-tracked by every government on Earth to curb an allegedly man-made virus that escaped a biological research facility, all while creating shareholder value ? You bet! Note: This is a complex topic, and everyone has their own personal experience. For many, the COVID shots seem to have had no negative side effects. For some, however, they did. This doesn’t mean that COVID doesn’t exist, nor that lizard overlords used it as an excuse to inject us with nanobots . Medicine certainly has its flaws, and financial interests were prioritized over absolute safety, something that’s happened in other areas as well over the past few years (e.g., Boeing ). If, however, you think there’s a pLaNdEmIc or some intentional, eViL gEnEtIc ExPeRiMeNt at play, there’s no need at all to launch your XLibre Xserver to reach out to me with fUrThEr iNfO oN tHiS tOpIc . Thank you. You might have noticed that the main menu at the top of this website has grown, now including a now page , as well as a link to Codeberg, but more on that in a second . The now page is exactly what the name suggests: a now page . Given the failure of social media, I’ve pretty much given up on maintaining a public profile for posting status updates. Up until the end of 2021, I was still actively maintaining a Mastodon account alongside a TUI client , but that eventually fell apart for multiple reasons. After that, I used Nostr for a while, but eventually gave it up too. These days, I’m somewhat active on Bluesky , though my account isn’t publicly available. I don’t have high hopes for Bluesky either, and I’ll probably delete my account there one day, at the latest when Bluesky inevitably becomes enshittified . The now page , however, is here to stay. It will continue to feature short, tweet -like updates about all sorts of things. If you’re interested, feel free to check it every once in a while. I might even activate a dedicated RSS feed for it at some point. For the past few months I’ve been silently moving most private project repositories away from GitHub towards privately hosted instances of Forgejo – a terrible name, btw – as well as many of my public GitHub projects to Codeberg . One reason to do so is… well, let me just quote Andrew Kelley here, who probably put it best: […] the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it. Priorities and the engineering culture have rotted, leaving users inflicted with some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework in the name of progress. Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken. Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected . After the CEO of GitHub said to “embrace AI or get out” , it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started “vibe-scheduling”; choosing jobs to run seemingly at random. Combined with other bugs and inability to manually intervene, this causes our CI system to get so backed up that not even master branch commits get checked. However, unlike most people who decided to migrate from GitHub to Codeberg, I won’t be deleting my repositories on GitHub just yet. Instead, I’ve updated all my local clones to point toward Codeberg, and I’ve enabled synchronized pushes from Codeberg to GitHub, as I plan to continue using GitHub’s workflows. “But why?!” you might ask. The reason is simple: Because I’m happy to waste Microsoft’s resources on automated tests and build actions. While I could use Codeberg’s Woodpecker CI or even set up my own, I’m more than content to keep using GitHub’s CPU cycles for free to build my silly little projects , while hosting the primary source code repositories on Codeberg. Since there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable Pull Requests on GitHub for my respective projects, I’ve added pull request templates that warn against opening PRs there. I’ve also disabled the Issues tab and updated the short descriptions to link to Codeberg. Additionally, my overview page on GitHub now links to Codeberg, with the GitHub repositories listed explicitly as GitHub mirrors . At the end of October I encountered an issue with ungoogled-chromium on my Gentoo laptop that prevented it from compiling successfully. Upon further investigation I learned that, quote: Using the system libc++ is no longer supported This change was driven by the Chromium project and affected my, along with many others’, Gentoo installation, due to the use of system libraries instead of the in-tree ones provided by Chromium. As mentioned here , this is a security concern, as users will need to trust the Chromium-provided libraries over those from their distribution. In case you’ve ever wondered why anyone in 2025 would still compile from source when tHe PeRfOrMaNcE bEnEfItS aRe NeGlIgIbLe , this is one of the key reasons why compiling from source still makes sense and, in fact, is more important than ever. The same projects that have historically taken a controversial stance on sensible default settings are now the ones seemingly rejecting security-critical system components in favor of their own. Tl;dr: If you’re using Chromium or a Chromium-based browser (other than ungoogled-chromium on Gentoo through PF4Public ’s repository), it’s highly likely that your browser is not using your system maintainer’s libraries, but rather Chromium’s in-tree ones with whatever versions and features the Chromium developers deem necessary and sensible. In what to this day remains a mystery the keyboard switch of my key has decided that it rejects its existence and seemingly removed one of its legs, presumably in an effort to escape and start a new live. I had documented the whole incident on Keebtalk for anyone who’s equally as puzzled by this as I am. I invested quite some time in pursuing my open source projects in the past quarter, hence there are a few updates to share. At the beginning of November I released Zeit v1.0.0 , a full rewrite of my command line time tracking tool. In case you missed it, I summed up everything in a dedicated post and have also published a dedicated project website that will soon act as more than just a landingpage. With 📨🚕 (MSG.TAXI) continuing to grow and evolve, Overpush has received a few important updates improving its stability with long-running XMPP connections. One thing that made me very happy throughout the debugging phase was the fact that despite stability of Overpush not being perfect , no messages ever got lost whatsoever and were always successfully delivered the moment the service would be able to reach the target platforms (specifically XMPP in this case). :-) If you haven’t yet tried Overpush yourself, I encourage you to sign up on 📨🚕 and give it a go. If you find the service useful you’ll be able to easily spin up your own Overpush instance further down the line and won’t have to depend on any closed-source proprietary platfrom. As those of you idling in the community channel might know, I’ve been actively working on an internet forum software for some time now . What kick-started my efforts was the desire to set up a support and discussion forum for 📨🚕 , among other things, but I was dissatisfied with the existing options. I was looking for an internet forum that… The first thing that came to mind was phpBB , which has been around for decades and appears to be one of the few options that (unlike Discourse and Lemmy ) doesn’t require users to have JavaScript enabled. Sadly, phpBB is a monster . It has too many features, takes a lot of time to properly install and configure, and, more importantly, when looking at its runtime dependencies and extensions, it requires some recurring effort to keep it safe and sound. Don’t get me wrong, unlike Discourse , which is frankly terrible, phpBB is a solid piece of software. However, for my use cases, I wanted something more lightweight that is easy to set up and run. None of the existing solutions, with maybe one or two exceptions like DFeed , came close to what I was looking for. And those that seemed like a good fit sadly lacked some functionalities, which would have required me to extend them in ways that would significantly alter core functionality. These changes would have likely not been merged upstream, meaning I’d probably end up maintaining my own fork anyway. The bulletin board I’m working on is built in Go, as a single executable binary (without CGO ) for all major platforms ( Linux , * BSD , (maybe) Plan 9 , macOS , and (maybe) Windows ) that doesn’t require a runtime (like Erlang / Elixir , PHP , Ruby , Python , or worse, Node.js ) or even assets (e.g., HTML/CSS files) anywhere in . It renders modern HTML on the server-side and doesn’t require any user-side JavaScript to be enabled. The forum will support only PostgreSQL (single- and multi-node setups), require a Redis/Valkey instance or cluster, and use S3-compatible storage for user content (e.g., profile pictures, file uploads, etc.). The platform will allow sign-ups via email and XMPP addresses, supporting notifications and replies through both services. But don’t worry: OAuth authentication via popular providers will also be available. Additionally, the forum will feature a dedicated REST API that, unlike Lemmy ’s or Discourse ’s APIs, will be much easier to work with. One mid-term goal is to integrate this API into Neon Modem Overdrive , which will become its official TUI client. Short story long: I’ve been working on this project for a little while now and expect to release a first live demo around February ‘26. While many basic features are already implemented, there are still details I’d like to perfect before publishing the first version. I’ll set up a live online demo for people to try out first, and only after fine-tuning the code based on feedback will I wrap up the actual source release. The forum will be open-source and available under the SEGV license. If this sounds interesting to you and you’d like to participate in development or testing, reach out to me ! With that said, I sincerely hope you’re enjoying a wonderful holiday season and gearing up for a great new year! As we wrap up 2025, I’ll be taking a well-deserved break from posting here on the site. The start of 2026 is shaping up to be quite hectic, and I’m looking forward to diving into some exciting projects, especially focusing on the ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ bulletin board system I’m building. I hope this season brings you moments of joy, relaxation, and time well spent with those who matter most. May the new year be filled with new opportunities, exciting adventures, and personal growth. I look forward to reconnecting with all of you next year ! Stay safe, take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you in 2026! Can use an existing database to authenticate users and/or… Supports simple email/username signups. Ideally supports notifications and replies via email. Is lightweight and doesn’t require a ton of runtime dependencies. Does not require users to have JavaScript enabled . Does not overwhelm me with administrative features. Is somewhat easily themeable.

c++ C++ css CSS open-source Open Source elixir Elixir culture Culture
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Phil Eaton 2 weeks ago

Year in community

This year I ran three book club readings over email with 1,230 unique attendees. I ran 12 coffee club meetups in midtown Manhattan with 170 unique attendees. Angelo and I ran 6 NYC Systems meetups with 12 different speakers and 281 unique attendees. I took 3 visiting PhD students out for Banh Mi . I raised $6,915 for educational non-profits, offering chats in return. I got coffee, lunch, or took 30 minute calls with 55 people I'd never spoken to before in person or on video. (Most, but not all, were in return for fundraising receipts.) This list included women and men based in the USA, Germany, Canada, Nigeria, Nepal, India, the United Kingdom, Brazil, New Zealand, Israel, and Australia. (I think I'm forgetting one or two.) Thank you to every person who has been a part of these efforts, making them so special and so valuable. See you in the new year! Year in community pic.twitter.com/n7jrmsZiKN

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Artyom's Chaotic Blog 2 weeks ago

2025: Never-ed(1)-ing Lisp, Writing, and Feelings

Read on the website: This was a hard year, filled with Lisp hacking, ed(1) editing and meta-programming, escapist writing, and heavy feeling. A good K-pop soundtrack tho.

writing Writing programming Programming culture Culture
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ava's blog 2 weeks ago

enjoying media and fandom

I enjoy media without actively participating in fandom. I prefer that over witnessing fandom drama or being influenced by the current consensus these spaces hold. Fandom is not without its use or effect on me, but I enjoy the more passive, indirect parts of it more. I like being able to research in a wiki someone made, or reading an elaborate fan theory, a guide, or long effort post about a small detail or episode, or the fact that there is so much fanfiction to choose from and fanart to admire. I prefer seeing a strangers’ work vs. talking to them directly. What I have never enjoyed are the ways fandoms operate on microblogging services and Discord servers, so I don’t participate. They are just not designed to discuss media well, because you’ll join as a new member and bring stuff up, and the seasoned veterans go “ugh we discussed that like 4 times last month I’m kinda over it”. I also don’t want to talk about these things all day long directly to strangers, or make it my personality, but I also don’t see why I should discuss other things with a stranger just because we enjoy the same game or show. I enjoy more elaborate ideas on media over being fed small crumbs via short messages by just anyone. In general, prefer to talk with the people I know and like about the media. With them, I even enjoy short messages of liveblogging the experience. My wife and I are the kind of people who will pause multiple times in an episode to discuss what just happened and talk about our little theories, at least for shows like Severance or Pluribus. The discussions we had about Pluribus so far on the Gazette’s Discord servers have also been amazing. I think largely staying away from fandom has saved me from losing my enjoyment of certain games or shows, whether due to not associating difficult people with it or just not burning out on it. Whenever I do peek into spaces where a game or show is discussed, they hone in on negative aspects I haven’t even noticed or that didn’t bother me, and I don’t like how that can change my perception negatively. I’ve also gotten the impression that the loudest fandom people tend to be the most unstable and exhausting, and I don’t want that around me. The few times I tried, I just never felt free enough to discuss what I wanted to discuss because there are always “leaders” in the space who have the final verdict on a character or episode, and going against that is not as accepted. Sometimes those leaders are simply the most vulnerable in the group, who have built up an intense emotional reliance and connection to the story or character, who will interpret any mild criticism as an attack on themselves and so everyone is used to tiptoeing around it. I feel a little sorry for people who continue to get burnt in fandoms and keep seeking new spaces just to have to flee from another bully, but I also think some underestimate how much just not participating in fandom like this could help them enjoy media again. It initially might feel unusual or lonely, but I think it’s worth exploring why you might feel like enjoying media without talking about it publicly feels cheap or like it didn’t happen. It’s worth experiencing media without a performative aspect of it, and weaning your brain off of the dramatic, edgy, and highly emotional fandom discussions. In my experience, it often seems to negatively alter the way you talk about the things you love. Reply via email Published 30 Dec, 2025

media Media culture Culture gaming Gaming
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