Posts in Writing (20 found)
Unsung Today

“The broken, slapdash, bed-shitting end to one of the most iconic franchises in all of gaming history”

I absolutely love Billy Maher’s body of work . He’s been writing about older games and software in general since 2011; it’s always solid, always an enjoyable read, and always providing new perspectives even on stuff I thought I knew well. (Maher also goes by The Digital Antiquarian.) I linked to his work once before , and today I wanted to share a recent essay about the disaster that was the 1999’s game Ultima IX . = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-broken-slapdash-bed-shitting-end-to-one-of-the-most-iconic-franchises-in-all-of-gaming-history/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-broken-slapdash-bed-shitting-end-to-one-of-the-most-iconic-franchises-in-all-of-gaming-history/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> I have never played any Ultima games, but this felt a gripping read. […] Richard Garriott, the motivating force behind Ultima from first to last, has done his level best to write the aforementioned last out of history entirely. Ultima IX is literally never mentioned at all in his autobiography. But, much though I may be tempted to, I can’t similarly sweep under the rug the eminently unsatisfactory denouement to the Ultima series. I have to tell you how this unfortunate last gasp fits into the broader picture of the series’s life and times, and do what I can to explain to you how it turned out so darn awful. In some sense software projects always fail for one of the few obvious reasons, and it’s just details that change. Here, the details are fascinating. The Ultima series started in the very early 1980s as a series of small games made by one person, and ended ignominiously as an almost-AAA title rushed to market that no longer wanted it: They met the deadline — what other choice did they have? — but the playable game eluded them. It’s not just the deadline. There’s also a studio past its prime, a fascinating but deeply flawed leader, the market forces and trends, and perhaps even some enshittification long before the word’s invention. It is also a story of the first two decades of the videogame industry itself. It happened so long ago that it almost feels like a fairytale itself, but one with a sad ending. Maher also lists some learnings that are universal enough to apply to a lot of other projects: And, in case you want more, here are handy links to Maher’s all Ultima essays: I (3 parts!), II (3 parts), III , IV , Multima , V , VI , Worlds , Underworld (2 parts), VII , and VIII . I have no personally read them in order, and I’m better for it. #enshittification #games #software evolution No game can be all things to all people. Development teams need a clear leader with a clear vision. Checking off a list of bullet points sent down from marketing does not a good game make. When the design goals do change radically, it’s often better to throw everything out and start over from scratch than to keep retro-fitting bits and pieces onto the Frankenstein’s monster. It’s better to release a good game late than a bad game on time.

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fLaMEd 🔥

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with fLaMEd 🔥, whose blog can be found at flamedfury.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. What's going on, Internet? Kia ora, I'm fLaMEd 🔥. I'm originally from Te Awa Kairangi (Lower Hutt), now living in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa, New Zealand with my wife and two kids. I get up every morning at 4:30 am to get to the gym before the kids get up and the day begins. I've recently picked up golf again, but find less time for that than I do for website work. You can get a better idea of what I’m into over at my website, Flamed Fury I'm not a developer, not a designer, just a guy who loves the web. Flamed Fury started in 1999. It's been through more versions than I can properly count, but the rough timeline: 5 versions before it became a personal blog, a few side quests at different domains inbetween, and finally 4 versions in the 2020 era when I landed back at flamedfury.com where I started. Started in summer 1999 on one of the free hosts, I don't remember (probably cjb.net). Moved to sweeetnet.com in 2000 through hanging out in the #sweeet IRC channel. A guy called kertiz from #sweeet took pity on my design skills and gave me a proper redesign, then stuck around contributing. Another guy fitty-two joined in. We iterated every couple of years until the dot-com bubble burst, advertising money dried up and the IRC crew drifted apart. I tried to keep it going by myself with a 2002 layout that wasn't great. But "blog" isn't really the word for any of this. The 1999–2003 version was effectively microblogging before microblogging was a thing, built around a niche (lifestyle magazine style, lol) before niche blogging was a thing either. We just didn't have the vocabulary yet. November 2003 was when Flamed Fury became a blog in the way I'd recognise the format today. Posts about polytech, nights out, whatever was going on. That lasted until 2005, then I parked it and tried being "more adult" at another domain through 2006–2008. Took a break as MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and Twitter took over. Came back in 2012 with a niche barbeque blog and carried on with it for six years before archiving the whole thing in 2018, once I realised how much I absolutely loathed niche recipe blogging. Revived the fLaMEd persona in 2019 on a new domain (Hugo + Netlify). In 2021 I settled back on flamedfury.com with Eleventy on Neocities. Two redesigns later and a move to a local VPS, here we are. Every version of this site, going back to 1999, has been the same instinct: a personal site as a place to be yourself on the web. The 1999 version was more of a microblogging website with three friends collaborating around celebrity magazine scans, that's where the era pointed. The 2026 version is the opposite. Everything and nothing, no algorithm to satisfy, no brand. Different tools, same instinct. There's a longer version of this story I'll get round to writing on the site soon. It's in draft , I promise. Hit me up if you want to see me finish it. Inspiration for what I put and write on my website comes from across the web and life experiences. A gig, a new record, a beer, a trip with the family, or any number of posts I find across the web gets me thinking. Storytelling, sharing my experiences and interests. I love monthly recaps to populate my now page, reflections of last night's gig, new (usually local) music finds, a fun time out with my friends or family. Drafts begin as a note on my phone, my notebook before I find myself with a spare opportunity at my computer. I'll begin with these rough notes and begin fleshing them out. I'll have a couple of tabs open to grab details and links of what I'm talking about to sprinkle through the post. Sometimes I'll start a draft and they'll sit there for days, weeks, and sometimes months in an untracked markdown file in Codium. Depending on what I'm writing about I won't have any proof reading. If I'm writing about something topical about the web I'll often have xandra or one of the other 32-Bit Cafe crew read over it and give me some pointers or a thumbs up. Then after sitting on it for a minute, an hour or a day, I'll publish it. Other pages on the website will get worked on and usually published in unfinished states and I'll continue to work on these over time - nothing is ever really finished is it? My ideal creative environment is in my home office, at my desk or couch in silence. I might listen to a few songs or watch a couple music videos to get me in the zone, but when it comes to focus time, all noise off and I work in silence, often talking to myself. If I'm away from home and I get a moment to myself, it's either at a table, kitchen bench or an arm chair. Hopefully with silence, but usually with the chaos of family life going on around me. Our kids are young, they're busy, noisy and need lots of attention so focus time these days is few and far between :) Do I believe the physical space influences my creativity? Heck yeah, if I'm not in the office, then a walk around the block or through the village listening to music will help me get creative - as long as I get those thoughts out of my head before they dissapear. If I'm travelling, then any beautiful location might inspire some spark. I use Eleventy for building my website. I originally started with Eleventy Excellent by Lene Saile , but it's evolved beyond that over the years. I often check in with her when she releases new versions to make sure I take in any key updates, but also find some changes I've made find their way back into the starter template :) These days flamedfury.com runs on an NZ-based VPS to keep the site close to home. I use a local domain registrar for my domains. Deployment is a simple then rsync directly to the VPS. To participate in the web, I've implemented a bunch of IndieWeb features, Webmentions, h-cards, h-entries and of course provide a number of Atom/RSS/JSON feeds which are syndicated to Mastodon through EchoFeed to meet people where they are. My Bookmarks are backed by the 32-Bit Cafe's instance of Linkding and pulled into my website at build time and shared via Atom/RSS/JSON and EchoFeed. I run an instance of Forgejo on my homeserver and commit the project there multiple times a day. I don't think so. If anything I would have tried to preserve everything rather than ditching things over the years. I've managed to recover a lot of the old stuff through old CD-Roms where I'd burnt old versions of the website or from the Wayback Machine. I would have definitely tried to keep in contact with a lot of the old crew from IRC. We drifted apart before it was easy to keep in contact with each other. I do regret losing those early relationships. I'm really happy with how I've managed to salvage a lot of the old stuff and merge it into what the website is today. It really is a labour of love. All in NZD. The domain is $39/year and my VPS is $82/year. All the other infrastructure on my home network is sunk cost over the years and I'm not sure how I'd put a $ value against that. I haven't made money from my website since 2001 along with the original internet advertising bubble burst. I did have a go with ads and affiliate marketing with the barbeque blog, but that left a sour taste in my mouth. I'm a fan of services like ko-fi and the like but haven't looked into setting it up for myself - not sure if anyone would be interested in supporting me. I throw money at the 32-Bit Cafe's ko-fi and contribute to infrastructure costs there as well as my time to help moderate and run the forums and will throw other bloggers tips here and there through their ko-fis, and will buy sticker packs wherever I see them being sold in the wider hobby web community. When I need some new graphics for the website I'm always on the look out for a commission and will happily pay for talented graphic designers services. I support a few independent journalists through their newsletters that I enjoy reading and support a local independent news/media website to help keep the lights on there as I enjoy their local content. A great way to keep up with what's going on in the country and the world without the doom-and-gloom. What's my position on people monetising personal blogs? Go for it as long as it's not intrusive or full of dark patterns. Keep it personal and creative. I love the sticker packs or graphic commissions. So many to mention! More at my blogroll and links pages. Who do I think you should be interviewing next? Hit up Chris Burnell if you have time before wrapping the project up :) If you're into making websites, or you want to start you should most definitely come and check out the 32-Bit Cafe - our small community of the web where we welcome hobby web developers of all skill levels and help each other out building our websites. We have monthly web weaving workshops, discussion forums, and other fantastic services offered free for the community and join in on the discussion at our forums . Plugging my own stuff, check out my record collection , and my ever growing list of bookmarks And for all the readers out there, keep building the web you want to be part of. There's so much great stuff going on out here. Laterz 🤙 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 143 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it. Chris Burnell — we've become great friends over the years. I love to bounce ideas with; dev, IndieWeb, beer, music. Xandra — xandra is my small web bestie and I've got to know her pretty well over the years through the Cafe. yequari — another of the Cafe barista team. The driving force behind our infrastructure endeavours. His new project https://webweav.ing/ recently launched a guestbook service that I'm using on Flamed Fury. jay , fyr , key , and rodrick - all my fellow 32-Bit Cafe baristas who help running and making the Cafe an awesome place to hangout. Cory Dransfeldt — another I've chatted to heaps with over the past few years. We have heaps of the same interests. His media collection and the direction he's taken his website is "beyond amazing". Robb Knight — Robb always has a new and interesting project to check out. I'm always picking up neat things to add to my website from his. america's decline - not often seen outside of the Neocities circles, but one of my favourites on Neocities. A throwback to my favourite era of the web, music, celeb, pop culture, and fantastic graphics. shellsharks - an indie web powerhouse and curator of the fantastic scrolls weekly . James - another indie web powerhouse. James's blog is full of thoughtful and insightful posts about the web and has recently launched a new podcast centered around the independent web, Wonders of Web Weaving .

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Herman's blog 3 days ago

Resurfacing posts

One of the things I like best about blogs is that posts stick around (or at least they should). I enjoy scrolling through historic posts of bloggers and reading about what they were thinking about 1, 5, or even 10 years ago—if I'm lucky. I've noticed that my most recent posts get the more attention than the rest of my blog. This makes sense, as I have the most recent 5 posts on my homepage, alongside the fact that newer posts go out to my email subscribers and are more likely to find themselves on link aggregators, Twitter feeds, and RSS readers. I'd like to take this opportunity to resurface some posts you may have missed, or may enjoy revisiting. I also encourage you, if you happen to be a blogger, to do the same. There's so much great writing buried by more recent posts that could do with some additional attention. This is also the reason I've added a Random tab to the discovery feed. I recently got back from a month-long trip to Japan where Emma and I visited some of the big cities, but spent most of our time in rural Japan and hiked a well-preserved portion of the Nakasendo trail. While in Japan, I had the privilege of meeting up with some bloggers: Seio for some tea in a lovely old tea house in Tokyo, and Daiki for some delicious okonomiyaki in Kyoto. Thanks to both of you! With that in mind, I'd like to resurface the post Yes, I will have coffee with you where I invite people to meet up with me, if we happen to be in the same city. I love meeting new people, and enjoy the opportunity to share my city, or take part in theirs. The second post I'd like to resurface is Why I started journaling , and its follow up Observations on 6 years of journaling . I still journal daily, however since 2024 this has been in one large text file instead of disparate physical journals. I write about this in Plain text journaling . There are a few posts I wrote about city design, which is a topic that has always fascinated me. I have a WIP post about Japanese city design, and what makes their cities interesting and easy to traverse. With that in mind here is a tongue-in-cheek post on The future of self-driving , and my Thoughts on buying a car . One note: I no longer drive the teensy orange car. It turns out that at highway speeds it got so loud in the cabin (due to its lunchbox shape) that I had to wear noise-cancelling earphones to be comfortable. Related is a post on how Roundabouts improve cities for everyone , for those of us not graced with efficient public transport. And finally, off the back of completing a 45km trail run through the Drakensberg mountains (post incoming as well), I'd like to resurface A case for socks with toes where I champion toe socks. These were extremely helpful in preventing blisters and other discomforts on my run, and the post is worthy of a bump up. There are so many other posts that I put a lot of time and love into that I haven't mentioned here. If you're interested in checking them out, I encourage you to browse my blog page. As a side note: In putting this post together I reread so many old posts of mine that I'd forgotten about. It's interesting and delightful seeing what I was doing and thinking at certain times over the past few years, which echoes the sentiment of Valentine's post from yesterday.

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Manuel Moreale 4 days ago

14 down, 30 more to go

The stars are finally aligned again, and I’m back on the road for chapter 3 of this 10-part saga. Clear sky, not too warm, I have someone who can come pick me up and drive me back to my car, the calendar is empty, so we’re going for it. Contrary to the previous two segments of this walk, this one’s quite lean on the churches department—we’ll only see 3 of them—but it’s by far the most challenging one from a physical perspective. That is, if you’re a sane person and you do these walks the way they’re intended to be walked. There’s an upcoming one that’ll likely be more challenging, but we’ll get there eventually. For now, in front of us, we have about 16 kilometers to walk and roughly 1600 meters of elevation to gain. So we better get going. Breakfast is in—coffee and bread with Nutella + peanut butter if you’re wondering—and after a short drive, we’re back at the same parking spot where we ended our walk a few weeks back. Flip flops are off, hiking shoes are on, sprayed some SPF50+ on my face and head, and we’re ready to walk. I say we, but it’s just me. Well, me and you reading this. I walked this one solo, but it is quite fun to do these hikes while keeping in mind that I’ll have to write this newsletter. I’m very much enjoying it. We cross the road, walk through another parking lot, and we immediately see sings that tell us that we’re on the correct track. Quite a few trails run through here, apparently, I counted at least 4 different ones. But we’re here to follow the yellow and white marks (for the most part), so over the bridge we go and across the fields. We’re not even 5 minutes in, and already there’s a steep stone stair in front of us. We have 1600 meters to climb after all, we better start sooner rather than later. The initial part of the trail was a bit overgrown, and I was worried it was going to continue like that for quite some time because this is not a trail that sees a lot of traffic but, thankfully, that wasn’t the case. I was also surprised by how varied the trail is at the beginning. We’re not even 15 minutes in, and we have already walked through fields, up stone stairs, and now we’re on a stone “bridge”. And shortly after that, here we are climbing another stone stair, but this time built as part of the dry stone wall. Big fan of these walls, they’re so cool. The forest itself is also quite nice here. The problem we have at the moment is that as soon as the warm season hits, the vegetation explodes, and sometimes the trails become an absolute mess. 15 minutes into the walk and we have now connected with a proper road, and we’re no longer on a trail. There are a lot of these roads around here. They’re service roads for people who have properties, but they’re closed to general traffic. Still, it’s quite rare to see cars on these and you usually only see mountain bikes. Actually, you usually see nobody on these roads. We’re now almost at the first exciting part of this journey. The yellow and white marks take us right, but that’s the normal path. We’re going left because we have one of those pesky variants to take care of and, as you know, I don’t want to walk the same road twice which means I made some changes to the original route. The problem is, I am not 100% certain the trail I saw on the map exists. It’s there on the map, sure, but a lot of times I saw lines on maps that were not there in reality. Thankfully for us, the trail is there—and it is steep—and we can continue forward since the first church is not far from here. We have already gained enough elevation to see things from above, and the view is lovely. And just like that, we’re at the site of the church of San Leonardo Abate (12/44) likely built around 1540. The church is similar to many of the others we saw in previous walks, but the interesting aspect of this one is that it has the old bell visible on the outside porch. Apparently the was a bell tower that got demolished, and I guess they decided to put the bell on display. I tried to take a picture of the inside, but it was too sunny. And in case you’re wondering, the church still has a bell outside. This church is the one that’s part of the variant, so we’re now standing at the end of that part of the trail. Which means we need to walk back to the main path, so off we go in that direction. The weather is still absolutely gorgeous. Out of the woods, across some fields, through a tiny, tiny village, and we’re now back on asphalt for a little bit, heading towards the next church, which is just right around the corner. But first, no, not a Mary, we get our first Jesus out in the wild. There’s gonna be a few more, I think we’ll see more Jesuses and Marys this time around. I should probably start counting these. 1 hour and 15 minutes in, and we have reached the church of San Zenone (13/44). Which, I’ll be honest with you, is everything but small. Consecrated in 1493, it’s probably the most luxurious one of the bunch I’ve seen so far. And it has a nice view. If you’re team Mary, it’s your time to be happy because look what we have here, just outside the church. This also doubles as a memorial for the fallen during both world wars. We’re only 20% into this walk, and we have already seen 2 of the 3 churches we’ll visit today and the next one is waiting for us roughly 3kms ahead. So we leave civilization behind us, we climb up through the forest, and we emerge on another of those service roads. I decided to try something different this time around since I was alone, and I recorded a couple of minutes of the walk. It’s unlisted on YouTube; hopefully, you don’t get bombarded by ads. The video is embedded below, or you can watch it on YouTube . Part of me was tempted to title it “You’ll not believe what happened on this trail”. On our way up, we stumble on this interesting-looking tree. I have no idea what could have caused this. If you happen to know, send me an email. I’d love to learn more about this. Also on our way up, in the middle of nowhere, stuck inside a retaining wall, another Jesus. Finally out of the woods and back into civilisation for a little bit. We’re almost halfway through our walk, and I was planning to take a quick break after 2 hours, but the remaining church was not too far, so we keep going. Like my dog, they’re also not massive fans of the hot weather. We’re less than 200 meters from the final church, where I was planning to take a quick break, but look how lovely this spot is! There’s a bench—yes, there is a bench hidden in the tall grass—two big trees that provide some much-needed shade, and a swing! We’ve found our resting spot. And since we’re stopping here, I'll use this opportunity to let my shirt dry a little bit. This place is so relaxing, I contemplated taking a nap, but we still have 8kms to walk and some 800 or so meters of elevation to gain, so the nap will have to wait. Shirt is back on, backpack is back on, we’re walking again, ready to visit the third and final church of the day, the church of San Lorenzo Martire (14/44) We’re now done with the churches, and we can set our sights on the top of Mount Matajur, our next target. The official trail would not take us up there and walk around it but, come on, if we get that close to the summit, we might as well go up to the top. And so into the forest we go again. I’m not sure who’s getting a point here between team Jesus and team Mary. I’ll let you decide. I never walked on this side of the mountain. I walked this general area many, many times, but never walked here, and I’m loving it. I also found this interesting construction. It’s currently used as a shed, but I wonder if it was used for something else in the past. It does look quite old. Time to record another short video , I think one day I should attempt to make a video of a full hike recorded in 60 seconds chunks all stitched together. Could be fun, I might do it the next time around. We’ll be out of the forest soon, but first we need to walk through a lot of flowers. There are so many colours out here at the moment, between the flowers and the butterflies. What a lovely time of the year this is. We have emerged, we’re now fully under the sun, and it is hot. I’m also starting to feel the fatigue a little bit. But we’re powering on because we’re almost there. We also have a great view on a ridge I’m dying to walk, but can’t figure out the logistic of the trip. It’s a 30+ kms walk from one end to the other, I can’t take the dog with me, and I also can’t leave him alone at home that long. So this is a walk that will have to wait for a better time. But damn if it is tempting. The summit is in sight, we’re almost there. That’s not the end of the walk, just the highest point, but once there, walking the final part is gonna be super easy since it’s all downhill. And here we are, at the top of Mount Matajur , quite literally on the border between Italy and Slovenia. I hiked this mountain more times than I can remember, at all times of the day, during all the seasons and with all sorts of weather. I walked it with snow, with rain, with winds at 100kmh, at night, at sunset, at sunrise, you name it. And on the other side, we have a view of lovely Slovenia. Way too many people up here today though, but that was expected. This is a very easy hike, and plenty of people come up here over the weekend. We’re not gonna spend much time up here, but I might come back another time and take you for a hike with me from a different route. That could be fun. Today’s hike is gonna end down there, at the parking lot next to Rifugio Pelizzo. Down the mountain we go, which feels so nice after having walked uphill for the entire hike. I could go on another 6 hours, but there’s no need to do that because we only have 1km left to walk. And just like that, we’re at the parking lot. I actually walked down some more to a secondary parking spot because there were too many people yelling and screaming at the main one. And the next chunk of this walk passes through here anyway, so next time we’ll start from this same spot. And there you have it, we have walked from Pulfero sitting at 185 meters above sea level, up to the top of mount Matajur at 1643 meters and visited 3 churches on our way up. This was fun, and less tiring than I was expecting. The data recorded by my watch during the walk is available if you’re interested in that type of stuff, and I have dumped all my photos on the shared iCloud album . The only thing left to do now is eat a proper post-hike snack. See you next time! You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.

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annie's blog 6 days ago

Oh to be a snail feasting on a sycamore // Week 21 — 2026

Are these weeknotes again ? Yes they are! Is this a fluke or is it a trend? Who knows! Who cares! Let’s do iiiiiittttttt. Current situation: Monday 18 May: Went for a walk early, before the rain set in. I adore a rainy day. Got a lot of work done. Afternoon thing canceled due to power outage from the storm. Evening thing canceled due to it being outdoors. Busy day became cozy day. Did an interview for a freelance piece. Do you have questions about EoE? I might have answers 1 . Thinking about studying but not studying. I should just study. Tuesday 19 May: Hospital day. Walking out to my car I happened to go past a young couple leaving the hospital with their brand-new baby. Mom sitting in backseat, leaning over, looking, exhausted smile. A glimpse of tiny baby face nestled in. Dad checking and rechecking the car seat, slowly easing the door shut, hustling around to the driver’s door. A precious, unrepeatable moment I was lucky enough to observe. Grammar books were my books of prayer. Looking up words in the dictionary was for me an image of goodness. The endless endless task of learning new words was for me an image of life. — A Word Child , Iris Murdoch Wednesday 20 May: Long walk in the morning listening to podcasts. Trying to brush up on my Spanish so it doesn’t fade away entirely. I don’t think this conversational listening podcast is gonna do it but maybe it will help. When I can’t make a decision I’m usually overcomplicating the context and overestimating the impact. A veces no me gusta tomar decisiones. Thursday 21 May: Early morning meeting. Long walk. Work. Last day of school. For Lily, last day of middle school. If I squint and tilt my head I can see the light at the end of the school-parent journey. Then I start crying. WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FEELINGS ALL THE TIME. Anyway here’s a flower. Another Official and Exceedingly Delightful Meeting of the Cunty Bitches Book Club. We talked about books for 10 minutes. It’s fine, books aren’t even the point. Friday 22 May: Made shrimp and collard greens and cornbread for dinner. Mom used to boil collard greens with a ham hock. I sauté them in bacon grease. Won’t change a thing about her cornbread recipe, though. It’s perfection. It  is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so  that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number  of disagreeable surprises. — The Art of Eating , M.F.K. Fisher Saturday 23 May: Hospital day. Hit 10,000 steps by 12 but things were fairly quiet all afternoon, so only 15k total for the day. Sunday 24 May: Hiking church. Look at this snail feasting on a downed sycamore. 💪 Three gym sessions: push/pull/legs. Sauna every time. Benched 95 lbs, my max so far. Maybe I’ll hit 100 next week. 👟 Four long walks and a nice hike. 🎵 Leave Me When I Need You // Lahra 📚 Continued A Word Child by Iris Murdoch. Started The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. Dipped into The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher. Started Moonbound by Robin Sloan. Reread a bit of Finite and Infinite Games 2 by James P. Carse. 🔗 I Did Not Come to This Kids Party for an AI Sermon // Justin Ribeiro h/t Baldur Bjarnason The quagmire is clear; to engage with the preachers is to legitimize not  only the sermon but rather the dominant hierarchy that the viewpoint  attempts to crystalize. That hierarchy is not one of “the AI fulfills  your needs” but rather the external force that AI is is inevitable and  places a radical demand on your life—you may not want to use it, but its  placement in applications you use places demands on you. The sermon is  no different; it places a radical demand for you to engage, with someone  who is either ill-informed or worse, well-informed and willing to seek  gains at your expense. 🔗 Friction deserves a better reputation // Nicholas Bate What costs something to produce tends to be better than something which  costs nothing. The slow letter beats the careless message every time. I agree. 3 🔗 Prepare your no and keep it handy // Derek Sivers It’s so handy in those high-pressure moments where someone is looking  you in the eyes, asking you to do something, and awaiting your answer. No problem! You have it memorized and ready-to-go, even when unexpected. You can be kind but decisive on the spot. A good practice . I leave you with this cautionary reminder: Eosinophilic esophagitis. It’s becoming much more common. Caused by food allergies but the triggers aren’t obvious as symptoms/reactions build over a long period of time. The gist is if you have trouble swallowing or keeping food down, it’s not normal, get it checked out, symptoms do worsen without treatment. This is not medical advice. I can’t find anything I’ve written about this book but I know I’ve written about this book this is one of my favorite books wtf I must remedy this situation immediately OMG I AM LOVING THE PIKA LINK SEARCH FEATURE Eosinophilic esophagitis. It’s becoming much more common. Caused by food allergies but the triggers aren’t obvious as symptoms/reactions build over a long period of time. The gist is if you have trouble swallowing or keeping food down, it’s not normal, get it checked out, symptoms do worsen without treatment. This is not medical advice. I can’t find anything I’ve written about this book but I know I’ve written about this book this is one of my favorite books wtf I must remedy this situation immediately OMG I AM LOVING THE PIKA LINK SEARCH FEATURE

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Dan Moore! 6 days ago

AI Can’t Care

I saw one post recently discussing how AI can’t substitute for judgment . There are many others if you search. And they all make an interesting argument. But to me what feels more true is that AI can’t substitute for caring . AI doesn’t care if the answer’s right or wrong. It doesn’t care if you were led down a rabbit hole only to find a dead end. It doesn’t care if a reader wasted their time or got a response that doesn’t actually address their question or need. However, AI is good at giving feedback, checking details, and letting you create more quickly. AI should be used to help you draft but never publish. Use AI as a thought partner, a research assistant, someone who can help give you synonyms, reword a tough passage, review your work; but never take something AI creates and just publish it. Why? AI can’t care. But caring about your reader is the root of communication. You can feel it when someone doesn’t care about their audience. We’ve all seen those LinkedIn posts full of emojis, or blog posts that have a smell that screams AI. That doesn’t mean the concepts explored are useless. It doesn’t indicate that the poster is incorrect. It doesn’t mean the post is not going to get engagement. A post that AI creates may get seen or shared. But it also devalues the reader. When someone does this, it means they don’t give a damn. They don’t care enough to realize what they’re putting out there is not valuing their readers’ time. Why would you pay attention to someone who doesn’t care about your time? Everyone who reads something online, whether they scan it or read it deeply, is giving you the precious gift of their time. Even oil we can make more of . But not time. So use AI as a tool to help you move faster. But don’t forget to care about what you publish. That means carefully reviewing AI output to ensure correctness. Otherwise you’re burning your reader’s trust.

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ava's blog 6 days ago

summary trust issues

I have previously written about what resources I subscribe to (newsletter, RSS, manual checking) to keep on top of data protection law news, cases, new reports, recommendations by authorities, papers of notable personalities in the space, and more. Since then, it grew to even more sources. Many of these notify me of new releases and briefly summarize them before linking to them. While I use the summaries to judge how relevant it is to my specific interests or needs, I can never just let that be it. I can't even just read a longer article by someone else who has read the entire original document and is diving a little deeper into it while still being shorter than the original. I have to read the original myself . I just don't fully trust summaries or coverage by others. I need to confirm myself whether the conclusions are true, it was correctly interpreted, nothing was taken out of context, exaggerated or left out. I don't want to miss out on any additional info or new knowledge the other person did not think was worth sharing or was outside the scope of the summary. It also feels wrong for me to reference anything I haven't read fully myself, when you would clearly expect me to, or are led to believe that I did. Last year at a different conference, I was surprised, because there was a running gag throughout the presentations that everyone is grateful for the same few personalities in the space for quickly giving a summary of a new happening or source material on LinkedIn, because no one else has the time or patience to read it, or it is too difficult to read and they wouldn't be able to make sense of the court case or whatever without someone else interpreting it first and writing it in shorter, easier language. What the hell? These are industry experts. I just cannot relate, at all. I'd rather put in the time and effort. I never want to be caught in a situation that makes it obvious I didn't read something when I should have. I think the only exception I am comfortable to rely on reading deeper summaries by different people about the same thing are some US bills. Anything EU, I wanna see it myself. My web reader, Artemis, has a dedicated folder titled "privacy" where all of the relevant stuff is sorted into for ease of use, and when going through it to see what to check out, I have a dedicated space in my browser where the to-be-read stuff goes. I sit there multiple times a week chipping away at it. I will now do so again. Let's do some inventory; I have: to read. Each day adds more. That seems little so far, but in my experience, it doesn't stop there, as the stuff I am reading is also linking to other articles and papers, which I then also often want to read completely, or at the very least, read the relevant chapter completely. AI summaries obviously have the same issue for me, if not even more so. I trust a human to see the point of the paper better than the machine. Whenever I tried it out, I still felt dissatisfied, uninformed, and like I got the children's version of it, spoonfed in a way that would make me feel competent without actually being so. In my view, you can't just technically know things in some easy terms to be good at something, you also need to be able to read the original papers, know the jargon, and know where to find something, and I don't think summaries serve that goal well. By learning to read the complicated stuff, it sticks more in your mind, and it also serves your academic writing skills (good for my uni stuff). It still frustrates me, because that isn't even half of what I'd actually like to keep on top of; I have to be ruthless in what I pay attention to and read as time and focus is limited, and I still keep adding new resources into the mix to hopefully get even more of what I want and need. Data protection and privacy is such a dynamic and interesting field, with so many people and orgs publishing interesting stuff each day. It's hard to keep up for anyone, and I still have to work full time, study part time, and volunteer on the side, blog, socialize, answer emails, visit conferences, etc. On the latest conference, there was an ad for a service that keeps track of so much. The most important documents in the EU digital rights space, cross-referenced and updated daily. It's expensive, unfortunately, but I might consider it in the future... I'm hoping to tackle all articles today, and then both papers tomorrow, and then see for the rest, and whatever else is coming in the next day. Reply via email Published 24 May, 2026 22 articles 1 court case 1 activity report (70 pages) 2 papers (64 pages and 60 pages)

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Kev Quirk 1 weeks ago

Using Fountain Pens for Note Writing

My note taking process has evolved a lot over the years. Originally I used my iPad with the Apple pencil, but having to charge it every few days was a pain. Then I switched to the Remarkable 2 , which was great and I didn't need to charge the pen. But as I produced more and more notes, it became awkward to search for them. Unfortunately, handwriting to text, and handwriting search both require a monthly subscription. Screw that. So I switched to the Supernote Nomad , which (in my opinion) has better tooling for finding notes than the Remarkable. I mentioned this in my how do you take notes post. I created a new system for taking notes, and it worked well. It still had it's frustrations, but I could generally find what I was looking for on the Nomad. Then I started writing the occasional journal entry, and for that I decided I needed a physical book and fountain pen. I don't know why, it just felt more personal and more permanent doing it that way. Being left-handed, fountain pens can be difficult, so I got myself a Lamy Safari with a left-handed nib. It writes lovely, especially for the ~£25 ($30) price. So I got myself another one and put red ink in so I can "highlight" certain notes in my journal. It is a really nice experience, and as my journal entries mount up, I can easily flip between pages. And then it dawned on me...it's not the technology that I'm using for notes that's the problem. It's the fact that I'm using technology in the first place! As a test, I dug out an old notebook that we got a freebie from work (it's a really nice one - I figured nice paper would help) and started using my Lamy for note taking in work too. Using a slightly adapted version of my note taking system, it's been glorious! Flipping back through physical pages and easily finding my notes for a particular day has been very refreshing. Everything is in my notebook now, and I rarely use OneNote as a result. I decided to go all in, I sold my Nomad back in January and haven't looked back since. The Lamy is a nice pen, but I wanted something a bit more substantial (and made of metal) as the pen gets a lot of punishment being bashed around in my bag all day. I was happy to spend more money, but didn't want to go crazy, so I ended up buying a Kaweco AL Sport in a lovely stonewashed blue colour. Unfortunately Kaweco don't offer a specific left-handed nib, but I've found it to be nicer to write with than the Lamy anyway. It doesn't scratch as much - not that the Lamy is particularly scratchy, but the Kaweco is soooo smooth. I realised that my main frustration with both the Nomad and the Remarkable is that there's a 1-2 second delay on every screen change, so if I need to flip back 10 pages, that's like half a minute of pissing about. Half a minute doesn't sound like a lot, but I can flip back 10, or even a hundred pages in my notebook in a second. It just feels smoother. My note taking system now surrounds the specific paper I have in this fancy notebook from work (wide ruled lines, and a side margin) and I can't find anything else that's the same. Everything I find is either shitty quality paper, narrower lines, or no margin. Luckily for me, I've been able to find some spares hang around the office, so I have a cache of half a dozen or so, which should last me a few years. I'm totally converted to analogue note taking at this point, and I really enjoy the process of writing with the fountain pens. I just need to force myself not succumb to my constant desire to start collecting things - as I don't need 50 fountain pens, just like I don't need 50 watches... but I have them ! This post kinda went all over the place, sorry about that. 🤷🏻‍♂️ 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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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Piri

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Piri, whose blog can be found at pketh.org . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hey, I'm Piri. I'm a software designer, engineer, and artist of sorts. I build Kinopio , and have been blogging about the craft of making software for 12+ years (:O). I went to school in Toronto for biology and urban planning. There I learned that I liked illustration a lot more than writing boring reports and papers. After school, I got a job at a startup as an illustrator, that turned into product design, when also turned into writing code so I could build the ideas in my head. I can't remember a time when I didn't have some kind of blog. In university, I met a lot of new friends around the world by doing more angst-y cringe-y livejournal-y style writing. I started designing pketh.org while on a flight to SF, paid for by Yahoo, for a job interview at Flickr (times sure have changed). If you’re curious about the green design, I was inspired by the 1956 Jaguar D-Type, which I still think has such a unique prototype race car shape. My posts are usually long essays that take about a week or two to write and produce, so I try and make them timeless. When I have an idea for a post, I'll make a Kinopio space for it and collect thoughts, images, and URLs in it for a while. If after weeks or months it’s still on my mind, I'll start connecting and organizing everything into a rough outline. From there I'll start pasting things in and typing it up in either IA Writer or TextEdit. When the draft is done, I usually have someone proof-read it and use that feedback to make final edits. Then the final HTML formatting bits are done in my code editor of choice, SublimeText. Writing is like a muscle that atrophies when you don't use it. Mine's out of shape so the process is quite painful. When I finally a new post out to the world, I just want to lie down and never get up again. Probably related, but I end up throwing away 1/2 to 2/3 of what I write in a blog post. If I had the time to write more often I suspect it'd get easier. I think I could get pretty good at it. I prefer different places and tools depending on where I'm at in the process. I collect notes, inspiration, and connect related ideas wherever I am, usually on my phone. I like doing the early writing stage in a coffee shop or in bed. Anywhere that doesn't make me feel like I’m doing “Real Work™” yet. When I get really into it, I like to type on a desk with a good keyboard (I'm a big HHKB fan), on a screen big enough for me to keep my context windows (dictionary.app, Kinopio spaces, related web pages) next to my writing window. My blog uses Jekyll and is published on Github Pages. The domain stuff is done through Hover. It's quite basic. I might use something newer and nicer than Jekyll, but it would probably be compiled from markdown files the same way. The current design is a bit of a Ship of Theseus that I've been slowly and gently updating it over years, so it's kind of grown on me. I think the domain name is $20~/yr and I think that's it. I'm split on blogs with paid content: If writing is your job, then monetizing somehow totally makes sense. Quality independent writing and journalism is really important and should be compensated (I like Craig Mod's approach ). But for basically everyone else, blogging is a thing they do on the side for fun, and I think it sucks when people feel pressured to turn everything they do into a passive-income side-hustle potential-business-empire. Skimming the depths of my RSS feeds, I realized that I’ve subscribed to literally 1000s of blogs. But sadly most have withered away over the ages. Funkaoshi has been around for even longer than I've been writing – I consider the author my Toronto blogging senpai. I really enjoy Alexotos' in depth mechanical keyboard reviews. It's really cool and encouraging to see newer people blogging the same way we did. Lilly Ashton’s blog is worth reading If you're looking for something more personal and cozy. Since 2018, I've been building Kinopio , a spatial note-taking tool to collect and connect your thoughts, ideas, and plans. You can use it to make sense of your thorniest problems and grow your coolest new ideas into plans. I hope you enjoy it. 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 142 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

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Tara's Website 1 weeks ago

Spring 2026 updates

Spring 2026 updates Servus from … a random hotel. I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed in my pyjamas, laptop on my legs. Mx Liebe is sitting beside me, a reminder that he is part of my portable home. I glance outside the window. The sun is starting to set, that small daily proof that the days are getting longer. Outside there is a large walled lorry park, all its lights turned on: a safe place for drivers to spend the night before entering their final destination.

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

On people writing about their use of AI

I find the trend of people posting about the way they use generative AI to be fascinating at an anthropological level. I do not remember the last time a piece of technology pushed so many different people into writing about the way they use it, or not use it, or abuse it, or misuse it. To me, this is way more interesting and intriguing than the technology itself. I obviously do not know why so many people are doing so, and I suspect they must all have their own specific reasons, but I currently have three main theories but I’m sure there are more than that. The first theory is that a good percentage is trying to capitalize on the trend in an attempt to become some sort of AI thought leader. Those people are insufferable. They usually hang out on LinkedIn, but sometimes they escape containment, and they remember that they do have a blog (and that’s often a Substack, unsurprisingly) where they can post these generic-looking blog posts filled with lists and it’s-not-this-it's-that statements. The second theory is that techies are gonna tech. A lot of the people who have blogs are also into tech, and gen AI is an interesting piece of tech and so it’s natural that those people will end up writing about how they use AI. The third and final theory is that there’s a group of people who feel the need to distance themselves from what AI represents. So those posts are not really about the technology itself, but rather a statement on the state of the world around them, and they want to make it clear if and how they participate in it. This final group is to me the interesting one. Now, if you’re a techie, don’t be mad at me, I’m not saying you’re not interesting, because you are (if instead you’re an AI bro, click here . You're welcome.) I’m saying the last group is the interesting one because to me, it’s fascinating how people feel compelled to justify or explain to strangers on the Internet how they interact with a piece of technology. And it’s especially fascinating because it’s a completely pointless exercise in my opinion. Let’s pretend you just landed on my blog for the first time (hi, welcome, nice to have you here) and you have no idea who I am. For all you know, I might not even be a real person. This entire website could be a psyop run by the Italian government. With that in mind, what’s the value of a post in which I tell you how I use or not use AI from a moral perspective? Would it make a difference if I were to tell you that I don’t use it? Or that I use it maybe once a day to answer a coding-related question? What if I told you that I don’t use AI at all, but in reality, this post was entirely generated by a swarm of AI agents while I was outside walking the dog, enjoying life? Unless you have prior knowledge of me and this blog, a post like that, in a vacuum, would be meaningless. How about the opposite case, though? Let's now pretend you weren’t new here, and you had, in fact, been following this blog since 2017. If that was the case, you wouldn't even need me to write that blog post, because by this point, you’d have all the necessary information to make an informed judgment. And you’d also know that you could ping me via email or via DM and ask me directly if you had any doubt about anything related to this topic. In both cases, a post stating my use of AI would have pretty much zero value. Which genuinely makes me wonder why so many people feel compelled to write about this stuff. If you wrote one of these posts, can I ask you why? Why do you feel the need to explain how you use this technology? Is there a specific reason? I’d love to know. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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House of Day, House of Night

In a region that was once Germany but is now Poland, a woman and her husband make a life in a house where a stream runs through the foundation. Their neighbors include Marta, an older woman and wig maker, and So-and-so, who tells the story of how young Marek Marek hanged himself. Other stories weave through this place: a man dies on the Czech border and his body is dragged from one side to the other; a young monk writes the story of a saint and longs desperately to be a woman; a husband and wife each fall in love with a mysterious visitor, neither of them knowing of the other’s indiscretion. Occasionally, Germans are seen walking through the fields at night, digging in the ground. There’s a question here about place and displacement, about what happens when the people who built a town come to haunt it, and the people who live in it walk lightly over the ground. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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annie's blog 1 weeks ago

It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese // Week 20 — 2026

Are these weeknotes? Yes they are! Will I do them again next week? Who knows! Sunday 10 May: Got home from hospital shift around 7:30pm. Exhausted, hangry. Walked into a clean tidy home, flowers and cards, and the kids cooking dinner (spring roll bowls which were so so so good). Plus! a NEW CHAIR for the balcony. We ate and talked and did that thing where you laugh so hard you cry. Then I sat on my new balcony chair & had some nice bourbon while they cleaned everything up. Anyway it was a great Mother's Night 💗 More spaces in my life for uncensored unfettered thinking. Less platform, more workshop. Less stage, more garage. Less producing, more tinkering. Tuesday 12 May: Took a sick day. Felt off, sore throat, achy yesterday. Woke up with the full experience. This was to be an uncomfortably busy day and instead I am canceling all the things I can. Left with a couple of items to do from the comfort of the couch. Hot tea. Window open. Cats sitting in the sun. Breeze and blue sky outside. If I feel enough energy I’ll take a slow walk later. Dreamed about being evicted. Felt very real. Woke up panicked. Relieved to realize it was a dream and I have a two-year lease. Wednesday 13 May: Took my chemistry final. Not as difficult as anticipated! A relief, since I didn’t study as much as planned. “I want you to see all kinds,” he would say to her. “I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show. The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time.” “What whole thing?” “Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they’re not pleasant things. That’s living. Remember, no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s just so much” — he used the gambler’s term, unconsciously — “just so much velvet.” —from So Big by Edna Ferber Denial and suffering may be good methods for undoing the old / destructing but they are not good methods for creating / constructing what you actually wish to build. Thursday 14 May: Still sick. Tried to do a bit of work. Mostly just rested. Feeling somewhat better but end of day. Friday 15 May: Mara’s college graduation day. Those two years have flown by. Many feelings! So proud of her. Saturday 16 May: Lily’s birthday! A weekend full of celebrations. Took her and a group of friends to one of those combo bowling / laser tag / arcade / overstimulation places. They did all the things & had fun. I got some studying done. But is it doable? Sunday 17 May: Hiking church. Warm today, 70℉ when we started. Chubb Trail from West Tyson. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own power without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being.  …primarily Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese. —from On Writing , Charles Bukowski 💪 One gym session (Monday) before the sickness took me out Tues-Thurs, then it was A Weekend of Events. Back to our regularly scheduled program next week, I hope. 👟 A few short walks, and a nice hike. 📺 Unfamiliar (loved it) and season 1 of The Thaw (liked it, will watch the rest). Lots of tv time with sick days. 📚 So Big by Edna Ferber (finished) and On Writing by Charles Bukowski. 🔗 The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born // Baldur Bjarnason No matter the flavour of Christianity, a core idea baked into every aspect of the religion is that singular revelatory events can fundamentally change the world. There’s the “before”. Then the “event”. Then an “after” that has been completely transformed. In Christianity itself this is usually associated with Christ’s chaotic transit schedule –  “He is here! He has left! He is about to arrive again! Now he’s leaving again! But he’s also somehow always been here! And not.”  – but the mode of thinking is common throughout literature, philosophy, and storytelling in the Christian west. 🔗 Letting things build // Tracy Durnell The way I often read non-fiction — snatches of twenty pages here, twenty pages there, putting a book down for two months (or two years) at a time — is  not conducive to *finishing* books, but I do find it conducive to thinking . Rich texts can take a while to sink in, so I’ll jump to another book while I let the first one marinate. 🔗 You are here // Sebastian As I approach my topics and ideas through writing—whether in the form of brief notes or by looking back when I pick up the journal and flip through its pages—a process of contextualization takes place. And that is important. For me, this is a form of metacognition: observing myself as I think and being able to analyze and categorize my thoughts “from the outside.” It doesn’t completely solve the black box problem of self-perception, nor does it eliminate the blind spot of the mind that seeks to explain itself from within itself, but it does make things a lot easier and more accessible.

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A Room of My Own 1 weeks ago

Rediscovering Physical Journaling and Creative Pursuits

It’s been over a month since my last blog post. I had decided to step away for a bit and focus on the physical world around me, as I felt like I was living too much inside my digital artifacts. And once you step away from writing for a while, it slowly becomes easier and easier not to write anything at all. Every now and then I’ll come across a topic and think, this would make a good blog post , and then immediately stop myself from writing it. Part of that is probably the thought of, who actually cares what I write anyway? But every so often I get a lovely email from someone who read one of my posts and resonated with it, or someone signs my guestbook, which I always appreciate. And then I remember that while it’s a small community, there are people out there who relate to what I write in the same way I relate to what others write. I also stepped away from my RSS feed for a while. I subscribe to a lot of personal blogs, and I needed a break from that too, so I deleted my RSS reader from my phone. A few weeks ago, though, I reinstalled it and slowly started catching up with some of my favourite bloggers. I really admire people who blog regularly. I think it helps with formulating thoughts and making sense of things over time. But one unexpectedly good outcome of stepping back from digital spaces was rediscovering paper journaling. I’ve always journaled, literally ever since I learned how to write. Last year, though, I experimented with voice journaling using an app called Untold. I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. It was easy to put my headphones on while driving to or from work and just dump my thoughts into the app. The recordings stayed there, and the app would surface patterns and reflections over time. One thing it did particularly well was reminding me about things I’d said weeks earlier. It would notice recurring themes and say things like, “You mentioned this was one of the most important factors for your wellbeing.” In my case, it kept circling back to something that feels embarrassingly superficial but is clearly important to me - feeling comfortable within a weight range that feels acceptable to me. I hadn’t even realised how often I talked about it until the app pointed it out. There were genuinely useful insights in there. But there was also a lot of AI slop. At one point my daughter, who is nine, joined me while I was recording. I jokingly said something like, “My daughter doesn’t need me anymore,” and she immediately replied, “How dare you? I always need you.” After that, the app became obsessed with this interaction. It kept bringing it up in these deeply earnest reflections like: “How did you feel when your daughter strongly expressed her need for you?” We still laugh and joke about it. What I eventually realised, though, is that speaking thoughts into an app does not affect my wellbeing in the same way writing on paper does. So during this little “detox” period, I started carrying around a composition notebook again. I journal in it several times a week, and also whenever I’m upset or need to untangle something in my head. I’m already halfway through it. And honestly, it’s done wonders for me. At the same time, I think I’ve finally reached a point where I’m comfortable with my overall journaling system. I now treat Day One as my single source of truth. Everything eventually ends up there in some form. I freely journal on paper without worrying about digitising things immediately. Then at the end of each month, I scan the handwritten entries into their corresponding dates in Day One. ▶︎ Sidenote on PDFs in Day One I tag those entries as “paper journal” and leave them attached to the relevant dates so they’ll pop up in “On This Day” memories years from now. Day One has basically become the archive of my life. Photos, voice notes, things my kids said, books I’ve read, emails I want to keep, random memories - it all goes there eventually. At the end of every month I also export both the JSON and PDF versions for backup. It took a long time to get to this point. I’d been struggling with a journaling project where I scanned all my journal entries from the past five years - the journals that are here with me in New Zealand. A lot of my other journals are back home in Bosnia, from a time when I journaled far more than I do now. That will be a big project for someday, and I’m still not sure I’ll tackle it. But I have the last five years sorted, and I’m gradually gathering the courage to let those paper journals go now that they’re safely scanned and backed up. It was a big project, and I resented myself a little for the compulsion to do it at all. But something that came out of my time away was a realization: even though none of these things make any difference to anyone but me, they are my creative outlet. They are what I want to do. But as a mother and a wife working full-time, it is surprisingly difficult to justify taking time for creative pursuits that don’t obviously “produce” anything. I constantly feel the need to defend (to myself) the time I spend organising journals, building albums, preserving memories, or writing things nobody may ever read. Which brings me to the actual reason I wanted to write this post. I’ve started working on my novel again. A few years ago I finished a draft and paid for a professional manuscript assessment. The assessor gave me detailed chapter-by-chapter feedback: what worked, what didn’t, what needed restructuring, and what was already strong. I remember reading the assessment excitedly and importing all the notes into Dabble Writer (the writing app I moved to after Scrivener, though that’s probably a post for another time.) I organised everything carefully, set it all up properly… and then abandoned it completely. That was almost four years ago. Two weeks ago I opened the project again. And this time I want to approach it differently. I want to stop treating creative work as something indulgent that needs to be earned after every practical responsibility has been fulfilled. I want to keep journaling the way I do now, keep feeding things into my “single source of truth,” and stop overthinking whether any of it is productive enough to deserve my time. I’ll end this post with a quote from Cheryl Richardson’s latest post - something I saved as my guiding quote for May. I’ve learned something important by not postponing joy: Nothing catastrophic happens when you make pleasure a higher priority in your daily life. Instead, it softens the edges of the day, stretches time in the most delicious way, and reminds us that life isn’t something to be earned—it’s something to be lived.

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

RMF

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with RMF, whose blog can be found at baccyflap.com/prs/blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. My name's rmf. My legal name's not terribly hard to find, but I like to keep it lightly buried just so my 2006 blog isn't the first thing you find when you search for my name. I'm a native of the Netherlands, where I reside. I live in a small city with my partner; she's an archaeologist and I'm a botanist, though I currently teach museum anthropology classes. I went from doing science, to teaching science, to teaching culture. I've never believed in restricting a whole human life to one field of study, so I'm having a blast. My computer skills have always been self-taught. While I was in middle school I fiddled with Microsoft Paint and from there on I got to grips with ever more advanced graphic software (currently GIMP and Inkscape). In high school I liked to make videos with my friends which I edited in Windows Movie Maker, which lead to an ongoing on-and-off hobby of video editing (in Kdenlive). In 2002, I set up a WYSIWYG website which lead to me learning HTML and later CSS and, later still, PHP. Right now I do some graphics stuff for my job in education, such as making instruction sheets, posters and some other small-time stuff, but really, pretty much all my computing is done in my free time, for fun. I think that's a blessing - I don't have to work with anything I don't want to work with and do everything I do for the love of the game. Beside that I make soap which is part hobby, part side job. I enjoy tinkering with technology, so I have lots of esoteric hifi equipment, some old games consoles, old calculators... if it can be tinkered with, I like it. I enjoy writing prose and poetry and have recently been getting into fermenting and pickling, though I am subordinate to my partner in that. She's the head of pickling and fermenting, I take care of the old electronics; she draws and paints, I write; and then at the end of the day, we cook together. I started my website in 2002 and by 2003 I had a little update box to briefly communicate whatever I was doing with the site. That update box turned into a shoutbox of my random thoughts and as those got a bit longer and rantier every time, in October 2005 I turned it into a blog. Blogging was the thing to do at the time and so, at age sixteen, I figured I had enough to say to warrant a stab at the practice. It was all coded by hand: no CMS or JavaScript, just handwritten HTML with the appearance of a blog. It was all over the shop, subjectwise. A fair amount of it had to do with palaeontology and/or me being an epic atheist - ups and downs. It was simply named 'blog' and it changed over the years with the design of the site but all in all, it was very simple. No RSS, no comments, just static HTML pages updated manually. The surprising thing to me is that I had an audience - I got somewhat regular emails about my posts. I blogged until 2009. I did that classic thing of writing fewer and fewer posts and finally announcing a newer, better blog hosted at Blogger. I wrote a grand total of 4 posts for it, stopped for a year, and finally took it down. I lost interest and so, it petered out. Cut to 2026, I'm reading a few more blogs than I had been for the past several years and I start to get the blogging bug again. Or perhaps the bug was dormant and now reawakening. I'd been considering it for a while but specifically, funnily enough, after reading your article about stopping the People & Blogs series, I got inspired to pick up the pen again. Over the last decade I've written on and off for a couple of magazines and I had a regular column in a local newspaper for a while. I think my intrusive blogging thoughts started when that column went away - I like to write, it's something of a compulsive thing, and while the newspaper let me write practically whatever I wanted, it still had some constraints such as length, a certain form, and at the end of the day, some amount of harmlessness. It had to be a column - it could make the readers think, but not too much or about controversial things. So the blog suddenly popped into my head as a perfect fit. Whatever topic I want, whatever length, whatever form. And so in 2026, I picked up blogging again. I did write a CMS and some code for an RSS feed - other than that, I tried to keep the form of the blog as close to the original as possible. And again, to my surprise, there are people reading this blog. I'm clueless as to how they're finding it, buried in a subsection of my site as it is, but I'm getting emails again. A grand total of two people suggested I give the blog a name, which I did. It's now called 'bakelite & roses', a name I explain at baccyflap.com/prs/blog/2026/?m=03#1773065697 . My inspiration comes from whatever happens to me. So far I've written about umbrellas, tamagotchi, deadly accidents, CD collections and some other stuff - that's the most liberating thing to me, getting to write whatever the hell I want. I like it to be interesting, to have some novel (to me) observations in it, but other than that, it's just whatever occurs to me. It's comparable to the columns I used to write in that sense - I write them quick, maybe give them a quick read later on, and then just post. I'll often read them to my partner who will usually describe them as 'cute', which is good enough for me. I write wherever. Back when I had deadlines I'd slack off right until the final hour and then just use whatever's to hand. I've written a few on my phone but I suppose I mostly write on my laptop, just because it's faster. I'll do it at home, on the go, at work, wherever inspiration strikes. My site's hosted on a buddy's server. He runs a small IT company so he takes care of the domain too - it's an old arrangement and we're sticking with it. I pay him, he pays the bills. The blog itself is written in PHP - when I restarted in 2026 I finally wrote a backend, still pretty primitive but it makes my life a bit easier and crucially, it enabled me to provide an RSS feed. I type a post into a dirt simple little CMS and hit 'post' to add the post to a JSON file, which the RSS feed also pulls from. I may provide the source code at some point, when it's not as hokey as it is now. Well, I started it in January, which is pretty close to today, so I think I'm all good. I guess, looking back at my old posts, I do sometimes cringe at them. I added a disclaimer to those posts, just to distance myself from the bad ones. But I didn't remove them - they still reflect who I was at the time and in some weird way, who I am now. I wouldn't be honouring teen me by removing any of it and looking back I guess I could say I'd wish I'd written better stuff... but you know what, that's what I wanted to write at the time and as confident as I was of my own intellect at the time, so I am now about the public's capacity to contextualise these posts. There are wonderful, thoughtful posts in there, but also some dubious stuff, and some garbage. So short answer: I think it's perfect, wouldn't change a thing. I pay my buddy €100 a year to cover his costs and so he can write me a bill which is good for his company. It generates precisely nothing, which is how I like it. People can do whatever they want with their blogs but for me, it's just a bit of fun in my free time. No Patreons and Ko-fis for me - I know everyone wants to turn every aspect of their lives into a revenue stream these days, but for me, it's just a way to reach out. Of all blogs, the one I've been reading for the longest (22 years!) is Pharyngula . Out of all the 'new atheist' types, PZ Myers is one of the few who did not turn out to be a dirtbag. He stuck to his progressive guns and has as sharp a pen as ever. For the sheer dedication of the author it's worth a read, whether the range of topics is up your street or not. I'm currently working on a podcast, a bit of a personal project that has been taking more of my time than I thought it would. Currently in the outline stage, it'll take some time before I can finally start recording. It is driving home to me that making a podcast is, at the best of times, an effortless thing that very few people know how to do well. I honestly don't like most podcasts but one I've been enjoying, one of those podcasts that springs up on you and just keeps on giving, is Bread & Bananas , a podcast about Kampung Gelam, an old neighbourhood of Singapore, made and presented by three inhabitants of said neighbourhood. And if you're wondering why on Earth this would be a topic of interest to anyone outside that neighbourhood... well, just give it a listen. It's chill, it's thoughtful, it'll surprise you. Six episodes so far, a new one every couple of months. 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 141 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

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Freedom from unreal loyalties

In the work against war, Woolf notes that women—unlike many of their brothers—have four great but perhaps misunderstood teachers: And those teachers, biography indicates, obliquely, and indirectly, but emphatically and indisputably none the less, were poverty, chastity, derision, and—but what word covers “lack of rights and privileges?” Shall we press that old word “freedom” once more into service? “Freedom from unreal loyalties,” then, was the fourth of their teachers; that freedom from loyalty to old schools, old colleges, old churches, old ceremonies, old countries which all these women enjoyed, and which, to a great extent, we still enjoy by the law and custom of England. We have no time to coin new words, greatly though the language is in need of them. Let “freedom from unreal loyalties” then stand as the fourth great teacher of the daughters of educated men. Woolf, Three Guineas , page 267 These are strange teachers. We may be forgiven for not seeing them as such when they’ve visited us. Woolf continues: By poverty is meant enough to live upon: That is, you must earn enough to be independent of any other human being and to buy that modicum of health, leisure, knowledge and so on that is needed for the full development of body and mind. But no more. Not a penny more. By chastity is meant that when you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money. That is you must cease to practice your profession, or practice it for the sake of research and experiment; or, if you are an artist, for the sake of the art; or give the knowledge acquired professionally to those who need it for nothing. By derision—a bad word, but once again, the English language is much in need of new words—is meant that you must refuse all methods of advertising merit, and hold that ridicule, obscurity, and censure are preferable, for psychological reasons, to fame and praise. Directly badges, orders, or degrees are offered, fling them back in the giver’s face. By freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must rid yourself of pride and nationality in the first place; also, of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride, and those unreal loyalties that spring from them. Directly the seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity, tear up the parchments; refuse to fill up the forms. Woolf, Three Guineas , page 270 Woolf is echoing what we already know of wealth, fame, and loyalty—namely, that they encourage possessiveness and defensiveness, that they drive us to the violent defense of prestige and power, and that on that road lies war . We see this possessiveness and defensiveness in the whingeing insecurity of the leaders declaiming DEI; in the boss who insists his workers flatter his every decision, however foolish and arbitrary; in the patriarch who demands obedience from his wife and children; in the man who beats his partner when she tries to leave. (The most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is always when she is trying to leave.) Woolf, again: “the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected…the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” 1 If we are to prevent war in our public worlds, then we must also root it out in the private. And we must root it out among ourselves. For we are no more immune to the appeal of tyranny than anyone else: And the facts which we have just extracted from biography seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement on their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war? Woolf, Three Guineas , page 249 In naming these teachers, Woolf transforms a proscription into a refusal. The lack of wealth becomes the refusal of it; the lack of fame, of prestige, of authority becomes the rejection of all those ugly and pernicious forces. (The one benefit of living in an era in which we are bombarded with the lives of the super wealthy is we cannot even for one moment forget that they are deranged.) By claiming that lack as a refusal, we release ourselves from longing for that which we can never have; we end a ravenous hunger that could never be sated. For had we great rank and great wealth and all the rest, we would be as eager for war as the warmongers, as miserable and unhappy as the billionaires. Without, we can see war for the horror it is; we can use our time and attention to imagine other worlds, and other roads to get there. I think these teachers go by other names—frugality, integrity, humility, and solidarity, to name a few. Like the best teachers, they ask a lot of us. Perhaps too much on some days; we may not always be able to hear them, especially through the din of the war drums and the noise of the platforms and the very real fear of precarity that screams ever so loudly in our ears. But I think perhaps that if we make an effort to listen, we will find that they still have much to teach us, that we still have much to learn. Woolf, Three Guineas , page 364  ↩︎ View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email . Woolf, Three Guineas , page 364  ↩︎

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Martin Fowler 2 weeks ago

Bliki: Interrogatory LLM

When we need an LLM to perform a complex task, we often need to feed it a lot of context. Coming up with a design for a new feature requires descriptions of how we want the feature to appear to the user, guidelines on how it should be implemented, information on external systems to consult, and so on. All this can be several pages of markdown. The obvious way to do this is for a human to write this context, but an alternative is to use an LLM to write this context after interviewing a human. The way I can do this is to prompt the LLM to interrogate me. It should ask me all the questions it needs to create this appropriate context. I can feed much of the information it needs, and tell it other sources it needs to consult if it can't figure those out itself. Once it's done, it can then create the context report for another session (perhaps with another model) to carry out the next step. I first saw a decent description of this approach in Harper Reed's blog . A striking element of his approach is insisting that the LLM ask only one question at a time. (When I tried it, I found it needed to be frequently reminded of this.) Another way to use an interrogatory LLM is to give it a document, such as a software specification, that captures knowledge about a domain - and then ask the LLM to interview a human expert to determine if the document is accurate. This is an alternative to getting the human expert to read the document to review it. People often find reviewing hard, so a conversation with an LLM might be more fruitful, particularly if the document isn't well-written. Naturally we can use both of these, using one interrogatory LLM to build a document, then using other interrogatory LLMs to review it with other experts. The above is getting an LLM to create or assess context for a particular use of an LLM. But the technique is more broadly applicable. I've become a natural writer, someone who finds the process of writing an essential part of thinking. To really understand something, I need to write about it. But different people are different. Many folks find writing hard, often very hard. This can be a real problem when we need to get information out of someone's head into a form that other humans can consume. Maybe such people would find it easier to ask an LLM to interview them than to write a document themselves. Certainly the result will have that tang of AI-writing that folks like me shudder at - but that's better than not having the information itself, either due to rushed writing or no writing at all.

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DYNOMIGHT 2 weeks ago

What’s with all the slide decks?

News from the world of real jobs: Apparently, sometime between 10 and 20 years ago, it became standard for people to communicate by sending slide decks around. These slides are never presented. They aren’t intended to be presented. They’re born, they’re sent around, and they die. What? I stress, the question is not why (or if) people give bad presentations . The mystery is why everyone is using presentation software for communication that is not a presentation. Is it because we’re all dummies? I’m putting this theory first because I suspect that you, beloved readers, will favor it. True, if you ask people why they make slides instead of writing, they’ll usually say, “because nobody wants to read”. So there’s that. But I don’t consider this much of an explanation. Dummies though we may be, we’ve been like that a long time. If we entered the Slideocene 15 years ago, why then? Why not before? Did we get worse at reading? The Discourse seems to have decided this is true, but is it true, or just moral panic? Since 1971, the US has tested 13-year-olds to measure long-term trends in reading ability. This shows a slow improvement until 2012, then a slow decline, and finally a post-COVID drop. The declines seem too small and too late to explain our mystery. Since 2000, PISA has tested reading performance in 15-year-olds around the world. This shows a decline on average, but it’s smaller in rich countries and nonexistent in the United States. (It’s the same story for science and a bit more negative for math .) Among adults, data is scarce. Basic literacy is generally improving , and American time use data shows a decline in reading for pleasure from around 23 minutes per day in 2003 to around 16 minutes per day in 2023. But this seems to miss time people spend reading on their phones. So it’s unclear if people got worse at reading. It feels plausible that people now spend less of their adulthood grappling with complex written arguments, and so got worse at that. But there’s little firm evidence. Another obvious theory is that we now have computers and software and the internet. Without these things, it would be impossible to email slides to each other. This seems relevant! Yes, but we had those things for a while before slide culture really took hold. And think about the situation before computers. Photocopiers were ubiquitous in corporate offices by the mid-1980s, and mimeographs were around decades before that. If slides were really that great, people could have made them by hand. But no one did. Of course, making slides by hand is inferior. But it’s not that inferior. So slides can’t be that big of a win. And… that’s pretty much the end of the obvious theories. None of them are very satisfying. So let’s take a step back. Historically, how did the slide-as-document displace the memo? As best I can tell, this was driven by management consultancies. If you go back to 1960, they delivered detailed written memos. The memo was the product. They’d likely give a presentation as well, but that was a separate ancillary thing, likely done using flipcharts or chalkboards. In the 1970s, the memo was still the product, but consultancies started to enforce a top-down logical structure (the Pyramid principle ). Presentations shifted to acetate transparencies. Both memos and presentations often included hand-drawn graphics like the nine-box or growth-share matrices. In the 1980s, the memo was still the product, but presentations became increasingly lengthy and polished. Expensive computers like the Genigraphics started to be used to generate charts. The 1990s were when things started to shift. By then, PowerPoint was everywhere, and junior analysts were expected to create presentations themselves. Consultancies gradually started to notice that (1) clients didn’t always read the memos; (2) clients loved slides and passed them around long after the presentation was over; and (3) creating a memo and a polished presentation was a lot of work. They put more and more effort into the slides. McKinsey especially evolved towards treating slides as the primary product, and mostly stopped writing long memos. Other consultancies followed. During the 2000s, slides became even more ornate. Consultancies evolved their formatting rules, and created fancy data-dense charts. They learned that a 200 slide deck made clients feel like they got a lot for their money. Gradually, they oriented their entire business around slides. Projects would start with managers creating a template presentation with “ghost slides” and assigning different parts to junior analysts. Soon, this spread outwards, both from people who interacted with consultants and from the ex-consultant diaspora. People everywhere started thinking and communicating in slides, and now everything is slides, yay! That story makes slides-as-documents sound inevitable: People liked them, so they became popular. But there’s an alternative timeline in which we resisted the slide into slide maximalism. That timeline is Amazon.com, Inc. In 2004, Jeff Bezos famously instituted a no-presentations policy at Amazon. His logic was that slides hide poor reasoning and are a tool to persuade rather than inform. Instead, everyone involved with strategic decisions at Amazon needs to learn to write a six-page memo. Meetings begin with everyone sitting and silently reading one of these memos. Presentation software is not banned at Amazon. The ban is only for using it for internal meetings and decision-making. They use slides for external communication. There is no policy that prohibits someone from making slides and emailing them around. And yet, people don’t make slides and email them around, because it’s not part of Amazon’s culture. In effect, Amazon is a counter-movement. Most of the world decided that slides are good, because slides are easy. Bezos decided that writing is good because writing is hard. There are millions of articles explaining why Bezos’ policy is pure genius. They claim that constructing a narrative requires deeper analytical thinking and exposes flaws in logic. I want to believe those theories. I now realize they’re very similar to some of my arguments for why writing with too much formatting is bad. I’m not sure if writing is the secret to Amazon’s success. But Amazon is successful. This demonstrates that slide life is a choice, not technological destiny—institutions can choose writing over slides and flourish anyway. Warning: If you like your theories simple and mono-causal, you aren’t going to like this. Slides are a win, but a small one. The shift to slides wasn’t a “mistake”, it happened because people like it. But if sharing slides outside of presentations became illegal, this wouldn’t cause per-capita GDP to crash. That’s why people didn’t scratch slides into mimeograph stencils back in the 1950s. It wasn’t worth the modest effort. When computers and software showed up, it became easier to share slides. But people didn’t immediately shift to slides-as-documents because the win isn’t that big, because culture changes slowly, and because everyone had pre-existing skills for reading and writing documents. Consultancies happened to be in the economic niche with the strongest selection pressure to evolve towards slides-as-documents. So when making slides became cheaper, they shifted. Slowly, that norm spread outwards, people got used to communicating in slides, and here we are. Institutions can resist that norm and still be successful. If you take modern people and force them to read and write, they do just fine. Humans evolved to learn and communicate in a fragmented, interactive, and visual style. It’s hard to argue that any shift in that direction is a catastrophe. Except blogs. The decline of the blog must be arrested.

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ava's blog 2 weeks ago

a little note on the choices we make

When I think something is bad, immoral, unethical, harmful, evil - or whatever may apply - I neither do it in private or in public. I don’t just adhere to this rule of not doing it when I’m by myself, I also don’t do it when I’m with others, regardless of whether they might do that thing and would think it’s more comfortable for them when I partake as well. That’s what’s at the core of living within my own moral boundaries and values. Yes, it might be difficult at times or offend people, but at least I neither feel like a hypocrite nor a coward. I stay true to myself and my behavior aligns with what I expect from myself and how I wish others lived. I cannot force anything they don’t want on them, but I can lead by example and enforce my own boundaries. Do what you want, but I will not do it. You compromising on your understanding of what’s right and wrong simply to appease others and not stand out is sad. You are betraying yourself and what you stand for for very little, temporary gain, and you rob others of being challenged and inspired. It also makes me wonder if you really stand behind what you preach; if you truly think something is cruel and unacceptable, you would not try to find loopholes to still keep doing that thing, and then pointing fingers as to who made you do it or what exception counts. No more excuses pointing at what others are doing, how your behavior has no impact and how hopeless or hard it is. Hard things are worth doing. It’s time that you show some respect to yourself and stop putting off making some decisions and sticking to them. Your trust in yourself erodes when you keep making promises to yourself you don’t keep. Aren’t you fucking sick of seeing other people live the way you want to? You don’t have to feel inadequate, guilty, jealous or like a hypocrite in their presence. You can avoid feeling like you have to justify yourself if you commit even for just a month and go from there. Take inspiration from the people you admire and ask them for help. Find your own path that’s similar to theirs if that’s what works. You made yourself do that. Take someone accountability for your actions. You have a choice every time. Reply via email Published 11 May, 2026

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re: Hey you, start communicating!

David writes about the importance of reaching out to the author of blog posts and starting a conversation, I 100% agree! I love when something I write resonates with somebody, and more often than not it turns into a continuing conversation. I see this blog-o-sphere as it's own little world filled with friends across the world. I recently ran across a blog that belonged to a Youtuber. On the "about me" section they stated the following: NOTE: I don't answer any personal questions - Please don't send me emails. This does not sit well with me. What's the point of creating if not to spark conversation and meet others? At that point, it feels like you're just in it for the adsense revenue. The internet doesn't need that, it needs community (now more than ever). I don't have a problem with people making money off of their work, but it shouldn't be the only motivation. So reach out, send an email, even if it's just a "hello". I promise, you'll make the other person's day!

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