A couple of months ago Jim Highsmith explained how practitioners writing for each other forms a distinct style of writing. He now adds a section to the article with more detail on the craft of how we write in this style. How the writer shows up in the prose, its four principles, the role of story, how to sensibly use AI, three levels of editing, and clarity of the audience.
For me, boredom is just a signal. It means I've hit a roadblock and my brain is trying to convince me not to go any further. "Give up. This sucks anyway. Why are you still wasting your time on this silly thing?" That's how I feel when I do things I'm really bad at. I think I'm not good at making YouTube videos. Whenever I think of a subject I find really exciting, I start writing, record a first pass, and then load DaVinci Resolve. With my current schedule, job, family, and responsibilities, I've found that it takes me a whole week to polish three minutes of video. That means I hear the same material I wrote and recorded over and over until it becomes completely boring. After a few weeks, I lose interest in the subject and have no motivation to finish it. But I think that's just an excuse I tell myself. I like the videos I've managed to complete. I wish I could change some parts, but I still like the final product. It's just that the process gets in the way, and it does so because I have no expertise in making videos. But then again, I always go back to my trusted method: if you're bad at something, do it at least a hundred times before you decide to give up. We all suck at the beginning, and we're in no position to judge a craft until we've practiced it enough to love it or hate it. So here's to another attempt. I'll be publishing videos in the coming weeks. The first one will be just a minute long, the second will be two minutes long, the third... you get the gist. Hope you enjoy it.
The thing about bearing witness to the past is that you can also see it in the present.
André Aciman’s Homo Irrealis leaves a strange feeling lingering long after I put down the book. The irrealis aspect of his essays comes across as an aggressive and rather depressing form of nostalgia, where the temporal context is heavily skewed towards the past. André describes it as follows: imagine a heartfelt moment with your lover, perhaps on a special occasion. Instead of savouring the moment, you imagine yourself well into the future, looking back at this moment with nostalgic feelings. That alone took a while for me to understand: you’re creating future moments of nostalgia with every significant moment, yes, but why would you be deliberately thinking about a future where you’re looking back at his moment instead of just being in the now? Exaggerating this further, a constant yearning for the past to the point that you attempt to retread your (or someone’s) exact steps will always result in disappointment. Aciman often tried to visit the New York he experienced when watching a seventies movie. But that version of the city was an imaginary one where imperfect parts of the place have been expertly brushed up to deliver a great picture. When Aciman tries to locate an apartment where a scene from a movie took place, he realises that the building has been torn down a long time ago—heck, even the entire neighbourhood is gone and replaced by a more modern version of tall concrete. It gets worse: some buildings never even existed in that city. For the purposes of a movie, streets and facades can be rebuild and completely altered—in Hollywood, not in New York city. Miles away from the city you live in and you think evokes pure nostalgia because of those magical moments in the theatre. That yearning is dangerous, and yet, thousands of tourists travel all over the world to retread the steps of their favourite author/actor/whatever: visiting their grave, their birthplace, the studio they worked in, the school they spent time in. Homo Irrealis is full of these brain twisters where Aciman identifies with an actor in a movie that in itself is already filled with irrealis moods , where the things that are being discussed have not happened and might never happen—yet they’re discussing it as if it already happened and looking back on it. My brain hurts. To my big surprise, I often catch myself in an irrealis mood. If I’m unsure to take up that job offer, I imagine myself doing it and try to reflect “back” to evoke a feeling: will I like this? Do I see myself doing this for a long(er) time? Suppose I take this, will this make thing a and b less painful? If I say yes to this offer to give a talk, how would I look back to having given the talk? I gave a sourdough bread baking workshop last weekend and always regret saying yes at first because an event like this in the weekend causes logistical problems for parents with young kids. Yet I’ve been doing this for more than ten years and I just know the participants will be enthusiastic and I just know I’ll bike home with a big smile on my face. Thinking about that makes the initial reluctance disappear. Technically speaking, that’s an irrealis mood, since I’m reflecting on the workshop being done before it took place and how I feel having given it. But since I’ve gone through these many times before, I guess it’s less problematic? What I take away from André Aciman is that indeed, irrealis moods can be problematic as we can get stuck in the future of the past (huh?) without just enjoying the ride. I guess the main perpetrator here is again restorative nostalgia. I stumbled upon Aciman’s book by sheer luck: it was set on display in a second hand book store and somehow attracted my attention. Hoping to extract some philosophical guideline on how to contain and constrain nostalgic feelings, I walk away confused. Not here nor there, what should you make of this? That the human mind is an extraordinary thing that can look into a future that hasn’t happened yet and there reflect back on this moment now as if it happened a long time ago. But to what purpose? All of us seek a life that exists elsewhere in time, or elsewhere on-screen, and that, not being able to find it, we have all learned to make do with what life throws our way. I don’t know about you, but I don’t seek a life that exists elsewhere in time. Making do with what life throws my way sounds great: making amends with making do might be my most important mission ever. So perhaps I misunderstand the entire concept. Yet an irrealis mood might help putting a currently challenging time in perspective. My kids might be giving me trouble, but I can see myself in the future looking back at this moment and thinking ah, weren’t those the days? . That might possibly even involve a bit of yearning because in that future trouble will still find us—that’s simply what life throws our way. It’ll be a different kind of trouble. But it will be trouble. Looking back at the things I have experienced, done, or not done, does not immediately invoke yearning. I’m glad many of those aspects are gone: I was happy to finally live by myself; learn how to stand on my own two feet. I was happy to let go of commuting to Brussels every day and slowly killing myself, even though working with that team was such a privilege. All things considered, I am happy to have kids now. Every part of life comes with its own upsides and downsides. Suppose that wasn’t the case, then living turns into a boring drag. Nothing to look back at in order to pat yourself on the back and say hey, I survived this. Is that part of being a Homo Irrealis ? Perhaps not. Less irrealis , more realis . Related topics: / nostalgia / By Wouter Groeneveld on 6 October 2026. Reply via email .
I really enjoy writing. Not typing - writing . With a fountain pen on good quality paper. I find the whole process cathartic; putting pen to paper demands far more use of my grey matter than hammering away at a keyboard. I mentioned in a recent post that when I finished an English course many years ago, I was hunting for creative reasons to type. Similarly, over the last 6 months or so I've gotten into fountain pens, and now I'm looking for ways to write creatively. I thought about handwriting some text then scanning/photographing it to publish it here, but that feels too convoluted. Plus, I feel like writing with a pen is more of a personal endeavour. Then it struck me - why not get a few pen pals! So I'm throwing this out into the wild - does anyone fancy exchanging letters with me? The only real requirement is that you can read and write in English (sadly, it's the only language I speak). I'm looking for perhaps 3–5 people to swap letters with. Naturally, we'll need to share postal addresses so we can send our prose back and forth. There’s zero pressure when it comes to frequency, either. Just write back whenever life allows. If a month or so passes without hearing from you, no hard feelings. I'll just assume our correspondence has naturally run its course. If you're interested, please fill out the short form linked below. Since I can only manage 3–5 pen pals, submitting the form doesn't guarantee we'll write, but if we seem like a good match and share common ground, I'll reach out by email to swap details and get things going. I won't be publishing these letters online - these are purely offline, private conversations. I'd ask that you keep them private, too. If you prefer not to use Google Forms, feel free to email me with the following: Sign up to become a Pen Pal 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 . Preferred email address Which country/city you live in A little bit about yourself and why you want to write to me Some topics you'd like to discuss
For the past decade, every time I went up to the mountains here in my area, I got the chance to look at one particular mountain ridge standing there silently in the background. It spans roughly 30km, east to west. On one side, the Slovenian one, there’s the town of Kobarid. On the other, just more mountains. I’ve considered walking this ridge for years, every time making a different plan for how to tackle it. Some people do it in multiple days, sleeping either outside or in one of the various huts that are scattered all around. Other people split it in chunks, walking one section at a time. None of those options is either appealing or available to me at this moment in time. The only option I have is to park my car on one end, walk the whole thing in one go and have someone pick me up on the other side. As I said, it’s roughly 30km and some 2200 meters of ascent. It’s nothing crazy, but at the same time it’s not a walk I can go do completely at random. It does require at least some preparation, and part of that includes walking the two sections at the beginning and at the end, while the middle part is just one long crest so I’m not worried about that. To make my life easier, I could walk this west to east because that means doing only ~1800 meters of ascent, but what’s the fun in doing that? 2200 is way more appealing than 1800. So the plan is to end the walk on the Italian side, touching the summit of Mount Mali Varh for last and then descending to the little village of Micottis some 1000 or so meters below. The various maps do show a trail that goes up to that summit, but I learned not to blindly trust maps because more than once I reached places where trails were supposed to be there only to then find myself standing in front of either an impenetrable wall of vegetation or absolutely nothing. Speaking of maps, I recently learned about the existence of hiking.waymarkedtrails.org , which is a fantastic resource if you hike around Europe. The plan was to go up to Monte Testa Grande through the CAI trail 710, walk the final km or so of the ridge, and then come back down through that trail I spotted on the map. But during my preliminary search, I learned that the trail I want to walk on my way down for sure exists because they run a race on it! It’s the Ultra Vertickal Contesa and much respect to the people—and their knees—who go up this trail at that pace because it’s an enjoyable 37% of average slope and it looks something like this: And yes, as soon as I saw 37% I knew I had to go check how bad it looks and yup, it is bad. And nope, the trail doesn’t zig-zag its way up to the top. It’s basically a straight line . The people running the race do turn to the right near the top because the finish line is at the summit of Mount Contesa, which is the second to last peak of the ridge. Being up here, walking the final bit of this ridge made me even more convinced of my plan. We’ll walk this whole thing in one go, and it’s gonna be awesome. The view is amazing; you can see the sea in the far distance on one side and the Julian Alps on the other. Descending down through the CAI 710 was also quite the experience. The trail is incredibly vertical in certain sections; according to Alltrails it’s anything between 50% to 60% (the uphill section peaks at 64%) and not very well maintained. I think I spent almost as much time coming down as it took me to go up, which is unusual. But the scenery was lovely. The trail ends—or begins, depending on the way you want to look at it—in the village of Monteaperta , so the only thing left to do was to walk my way back to the parking spot where I left my car. Very happy with this first preparatory walk. The ridge is nice, going up this stupidly steep trail was an experience, my cardio is shit, but we’re working on that, and I’m now even more convinced I’m gonna walk this whole crest one of these days. And I have a potentially quirky idea for how to share that walk, but more on that later. You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.
"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë - good writing, but the protagonists are quite something. There's barely a likable character in the whole story - they are all either crazy, evil, stupid or a combination of these. It's also remarkable to consider how small the world of some people in those times was (pre-Victorian England); whole lives spent within a tiny area, interacting with a handful of other people. And that's for members of the nobility, not some bumpkin on a remote farm. "The Pickled City: The Story of New York pickles" by Paul Van Ravenstein and Monique Mulder - yes, a book about pickles, with lots of cool photos! That's what you get while randomly browsing in the local public library while your kids are picking out their books. All you wanted to know about the history of pickles, with particular emphasis on NYC in the early 20th century and the connection to Jewish immigration to that city. "Rebel Island: the incredible history of Taiwan" by Jonathan Clements - a detailed history of Taiwan, focusing mostly on the early years (pre-modern times). The writing is a bit academic and dry, but it's very comprehensive. I wish the book spent more time on the modern era, though. "The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot" by Robert Macfarlane - an ode to taking long walks (from hours to multi-day hikes). The writing is very beautiful, but much of it feels pointless; the author describes friends and obscure historical poets in a lot of detail which has little to do with the main thesis of the book. I'd say the first 1/4 of the good is very good, and the rest is unnecessary. "After Rain" by William Trevor - I'm on a quest to find additional authors that write evocative short stories that stay with you, and Trevor was recommended as someone to try since my current favorites are Steinbeck and Lahiri. "After Rain" is a collection of 12 stories, mostly about love and relationships - between partners but also parents and children; the settings are usually in 1980s Ireland or England. Very good stories overall, I'm glad I tried this author and should try something else by him. "Spoonhandle" by Ruth Moore - a novel about the lives of Maine natives living through changing times, seeing their picturesque coastal area become a magnet for "summer people" - rich vacationers from the big cities. There's no single protagonist in the book and the writing is very warm and human. I enjoyed it. "The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money" by Brendan Greeley - a history-oriented exploration of the importance of the dollar in world economy, from its beginnings as the Joachimsthaler in 16th century Bohemia and until modern times. This book has some interesting ideas but I found it to be quite academical and not easy to digest. "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" by Robert M. Sapolsky - the scope of this (very long) book is huge: explaining how human behavior works starting from basic biological principles. Our understanding of the actual biological underpinnings of behavior is so nascent, however, that the vast majority of the book focuses on the usual things - the psychological studies (including all the well known ones like prisoner's dilemma, the Stanford prison experiment, etc) and comparison with other animals. Having read several other books on this topic in the past, I haven't found much new in this one. "Humorous short stories" by Anton Chekhov (read in Russian) - a collection of short stories with a humorous angle. The stories are typically very short, just 2-3 pages each, but the character building is superb. I should try reading something longer by Chekhov. "Plainsong" by Kent Haruf - describes a year in the life of several loosely connected people in a remote farm town in eastern Colorado. A wholesome story, without a specific beginning or end - just the lives of ordinary folks. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" by Katherine Boo - investigative journalism of the lives of several connected families in Annawadi - one of Mumbai's most miserable slums - roughly from 2007 to 2010. The only thing more shocking than the squalor in which these people live is the degree of corruption, fraud and exploitation surrounding them. A very poignant read. "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin - science fiction only in the sense of 1984; it's always amusing to examine how unambitious the futuristic vision of some authors is. The book was written in the early 1970s, and it presents life thousands of years in the future as one that's pretty much identical to what it was in the early 1970s, except for close-to-speed-of-light travel. But science is not the point of this book anyway; it's more of a political or philosophical fiction, examining an anarchist-communist society and comparing it to a capitalist, "propertarian" one. Overall, this book gave me very strong vibes of the famous Soviet kids story "Dunno on the moon" (Незнайка на Луне), which I recall reading as a kid. "The Lion Women of Tehran" by Marjan Kamali - a multi-generational novel focusing on the life of young women in Iran from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, in the context of the various authoritarian governments of those eras (from Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's rule to after the Islamic revolution of 1979). Nice book showing that a good story can be told without too many unnecessary twists and classical attention-grabbing dramas. "The Old Way: A story of the first people" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck
Today marks a year since my little sister, Lisa, took her own life. She was 34. It was an overdose, but we don't know if it was an accident or suicide. We’ll never get an answer, yet I lean toward believing it was by choice. As grim as it sounds, picturing her with some control over the end brings me a small measure of peace. I still think about her every day, and I still get upset regularly. Especially when I've been to visit my nephew and I see the sadness in his eyes. At first I was angry at the selfishness of it all, but I think that's gone now. These days I'm just sad. Mum blames herself, and has asked me numerous times where she went wrong. I never have an answer for that. What can I say? "Well the rest of us turned out ok, Mum. So you did fine. " That feels dismissive of her emotions. So I just give her a sad smile and ask her to not think those things. I miss her. I miss her laugh and dry sense of humour. I miss how she would always call people on their bullshit. Never afraid of speaking up. Hopefully next year it will be a little less raw... 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 .
Lavinia, daughter of one king and wife to another, is barely mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she is just a wisp of a girl, ripe for marriage and little else. But then in the final hours of his life, Virgil finds himself with Lavinia in the sacred woods of Albunea, and discovers she has a voice and desires all her own. Lavinia is surprised to discover that she has been breathed into life by a poet, but the clues he tells of her life are enough for her to begin to weave her own story, one that is infinitely richer than any he might have seen. As Virgil leaves her life untold and unfinished, it becomes no one’s life but her own. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .
“[S]o much of what’s presented to us as ‘the real world’ or ‘the way it is’ is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact….Hence my love for science fiction, which analyzes reality by changing it.” In this collection of essays originally published in the 70s and 80s, Joanna Russ turns to what science fiction is , how it works, and how our understanding of the world is either expanded or (in the case of terrible sf) constrained by it. Russ is routinely and delightfully acerbic in her writing, but that is in many ways the point: the world is too often a very sour place. We must speak directly of the devastation around us if we’re to have any hope of knowing it well enough to change it. She was writing at a time when sf was not taken entirely seriously relative to traditional literary criteria; that has changed somewhat in the decades since, but her analysis of how sf works has not penetrated as much as the tropes (space ships, time travel, robot overlords) have. Which is to our shame; but the remedy, close to hand, is to read, and to read as she did—attentive to what the writing is asking of us, and what we must ask of it. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .
by Bryce Wray A departure post from Bryce where he talk about his exit from blogging and his motivations for doing so. Read post ➡ It's always sad to read these kind of posts. Yet another blog has fallen by the wayside, but I understand Bryce's rationale. I've been quietly following his blog for a few years now, so I'll be sad to see him gone from my feed. Bryce, if you're reading this, all the best and thanks for many great reads. 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 .
We lost our favourite chicken last night. I know, just a chicken, right? Big deal. It's not like we lost a pet. But that's the thing, Amelia was more than just a chicken . She was a pet. She was very tame and would often come into the house to sit with one of us. She would scratch around the kitchen while we were eating breakfast then quietly cluck at one of us to be picked up for cuddle. We named her after Amelia Earhart because she was always the first of all our chickens to go exploring. Right from the moment we got our first 6 chickens, Amelia came up to us while the others hid. Often posing for photos. Amelia on day 1, posing for a photo It's very sad when you lose a pet, and although this won't hit us as hard as when we inevitably lose one of our dogs, it's still really sad. Both my wife and I have shed a few tears for Amelia this morning. We'll miss you, girl. x 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 .
The commerical airport we use here in Bend, Oregon is actually in Redmond, Oregon. Flights from here generally depart very early. It think it’s because they need to make it to bigger airports to make connections to further-away places. Flight typically depart at 4:30-6:30 AM. They want your bags an hour before departure, and the airport is 30 min from Bend, so you gotta be out the door sometimes at 3:00 AM meaning ungodly 2:30 AM alarm clocks. That’s the extreme case though. If you aren’t checking a bag and you’ve got a 6:00 AM flight, maybe you’re leaving the house at a spicy but tolerable 4:45 AM. That was too much preamble for this, but now you know. The one giftshop/coffeeshop in the airport opens at 4:00 AM. One person opens it up and starts selling things to the couple hundred people milling around in the one terminal preboarding area. This shop sells all the normal stuff you see in airport giftshops like cheezy Central Oregon sweatshirts and magnets, cold beverages and string cheese, magazines, and the like. They are also, and perhaps mainly, a coffeeshop. People stand in line to buy coffee. It’s early in the morning. You can’t bring in liquids. It’s damn coffee time. Right in the heat of the morning airport action, there might be 20-30 people in line. It’s a whole thing. Now we’ve arrived at my point. What do you order from this one person working at this coffeeshop at 4:00 AM? You can’t help but be aware there are 20 people behind you in line and how there is one person taking orders and making the coffee drinks. Right?! You could order a latte, which will take like 3 minutes to make. Or you could order a drip coffee in which this person hands you a cup in 3 seconds. My brain is built such that I cannot possibly order something that will take this person a while to make. Like the words would be unable to come out of my mouth. Even if a cortado sounds really good right now, actually , I can’t do it. I can make an active choice to get a perfectly fine drip coffee and get this line moving and get all these strangers-yet-neighbors their coffees too, or I can cause a big ol’ hitch in the giddyup. I hope I’m not trying to grandstand how perfect I am. I’m showcasing one part of how my brain works. I really don’t like inconvinencing other people. I notice, because it seems like plenty of other people don’t. People order cappaccinos and flat whites and all that shit without abandon. The line takes forever. It just is what it is. And we come to why I titled this The Rude Trifecta. These mocha-ordering fellow humans must fall into one of these categories: I actually don’t know how it would break down if there was a way to figure it out, but I suspect it’s a fairly even mixture. Like for some, it just doesn’t cross their mind that it’s any problem at all to order a 3 minute drink. It’s a coffeeshop and they ordered a coffee. Maybe if they thought about it for far too long like myself, they could see the problem, but that’s not their normal thinking pattern. For others, they couldn’t give any less fucks. Again it’s a coffeeshop and they ordered a coffee. They stood in line like everyone else. Yeah, it might take a while, but it’s their turn and they are going to use it. Put whip cream on it motherfucker. The last one is very similar to the above, but it’s more intellectual. Again it’s a coffeeshop and they ordered a coffee. This is not a rude action. It’s not on them to dechiper what is and isn’t rude on a menu , or to personally shoulder a understaffing issue. They might go so far as to think it’s actually rude in the other direction , where self-censoring an order doesn’t give the business the appropriate feedback on their operations. That’s why if I was with a friend and they did it , I’d be totally fine with it. I can’t do it. I can’t ask them to get me the americano. But their actions are their own and this isn’t a situation where I cast any judgement. I mean assuming it’s #3 and not #2, that is. Speaking of airports and flying, this is why I literally cannot recline my seat if someone is behind me. It takes up their room. Can’t do it. Reminds me of a recent-ish Marcel post : I feel like the neighbor: They don’t know that it’s rude They don’t care that it’s rude They disagree that it’s rude doesn’t know it’s rude doesn’t care it’s rude disagress that it’s rude
What stops me from writing and posting something publicly? Probably the same thing stops you, too: the belief that it is not novel enough. I think it comes from the belief that we do not have good enough content to share. When we read highly cited or widely shared articles online, we usually find something novel in them. So, when it comes to writing and sharing our own ideas, we judge them from the perspective of novelty and tend to undervalue them. Because most of the ideas that come to us exist within our informational bubble, we genuinely believe they are common sense and that there is nothing worth sharing. So, we decide they are not worth writing about or posting. There is research behind this intuition. The effect is known as the curse of knowledge : once something feels familiar to us, we tend to overestimate how widely known it is. The original experimental work on the effect showed that better-informed people struggle to ignore what they know when predicting the judgments of less-informed people ( Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989 ). More directly, a later series of experiments found that people were more likely to judge information as common knowledge when it was easy for them to recall, even when others were unlikely to know it ( Birch et al., 2017 ). The next time you are about to discard an idea for something you want to write, ask someone else whether they think it is common sense. Ask someone outside your bubble. Then write your article anyway. Write it and post it for yourself. People have been fundamentally alike for centuries and millennia. We share the same problems, although different people may have distinct or similar opinions on the same matter. You may have noticed, if you have read enough self-help or personal-development books, that there is a limited number of ideas and principles underlying almost all of them. There is nothing wrong with offering your own interpretation or your own perspective on the same idea. This happened to me this year. I had a simple idea that I could post on my blog. I almost discarded it. Then I read an article that was at the top of Hacker News. It was simple but touching. The fact that many people engaged with it made me believe that, when you write and share something authentic, it can still be well received even if it is not something brand new. So I wrote my post, published it on my blog, shared it on Hacker News, and forgot about it. Then, one morning, I saw messages from my friends telling me that my post had reached the front page of Hacker News. It was a post about a small trick I use to save my evenings (sometimes, hehe). I had not invented anything new. You can read comments from people who do similar things, and some people even shared links to well-known techniques that describe the same idea. So, it was not novel, but somehow it was well received. I do not really understand why or how. I think it was mostly luck. But for me, it was a strong confirmation that novelty is a powerful self-filter that makes us discard potentially good posts. If you have recently thought of something but self-filtered and discarded it because you believed it was common sense and there was nothing worth sharing, bring it back to life. Take a pen and paper, spend 60 minutes on it, post it somewhere, and share the link in the comments.
Last weekend my wife called me over to show me something on her phone. She was going through her old emails and came across some emails we had passed back and forth, from when we first met. She and I met in a club and went on a couple of dates, but then I deployed to Afghanistan with the Army. We continued to converse via email mostly, and phone where possible - this was before the days of FaceTime etc. - and the rest is history. That was in 2006, and 20 years later we're still very happily married with a couple kids. Anyway, upon reading the emails I immediately wanted the ground to swallow me up. Not because they were overly mushy or lovey dovey (they were), but because the spelling and grammar were horrendous . I was never a particularly academic kid - in fact, I was mostly disengaged in school and really didn't try. I was clever, but I never applied myself. I was too busy being a stupid teenager. As a result, my written English was awful (it's still not great now, but it's better). For example, I didn't know the difference between " there ", " they're ", and " their ". And you can forget about " your " versus " you're ". " Too " vs " to "? Not a chance. Where , were , and we're baffled me. I had no idea where a comma was supposed to go in a sentence, and I'd never even heard of an Oxford comma . You get the idea. During my time in the Army, written English wasn't really needed, so I wasn't too concerned. But after getting out and finding a job in IT, it quickly became apparent that my lack of basic English knowledge would hold me back. So I decided to fix it, and enrolled in a night school course. To my surprise I really enjoyed it. It turned out that writing and learning are a lot of fun, and I was constantly looking for ways to practice my new found writing skills. I think that's part of why I still love typing - I just find creating words on a screen a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm weird. I know. So I completed the night school course and came away with much improved grammar and a desire to write all the things. But replying to emails and writing reports in work wasn't scratching the creative itch for me. One of the services the IT company I worked for offered was web hosting. I'd never really got involved in any of that, so learning about DNS, web servers, MySQL etc. was really interesting. I'd done a bit of basic web design during my college IT course, but never anything more. "College" in the UK is different to college in the US. We call that university here. In college we do our A-levels, which are intermediate qualifications between high school and university. I don't have a degree. A few of our customers had WordPress sites, and it blew my mind. Here is a web application that I can host myself, on my own server, with my own domain name. Furthermore, I can write what I want and publish it on the web for anyone to read. This was the creative outlet I'd been looking for! So in 2010 I registered , set up WordPress on a shared host, and started writing. Sixteen years later I'm still here, and still thoroughly enjoying writing on the web. Albeit no longer on WordPress . It's funny how these seemingly unrelated things connect together in retrospect and take us down a road we never thought we'd walk. Back in 2000, when I was leaving high school, if you'd have asked my high school English teacher ( hi Mrs Daniels! ) if she thought I'd be producing creative writing on the web for 16 years, she'd have laughed in your face. Hard. But I am. And it's all thanks to a basic written English course that I attended for a couple of months, just to improve my writing to help me with work. I'm not really sure how to wrap this one up. I suppose my final thought is that it's never too late to learn. And you never know where it will take you. A simple thing like a basic English night course could end up forming the longest running, most enjoyable hobby you have in your life. 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 .
“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it” – Blaise Pascal, Pensées I enjoy writing. Most of the time I write for myself, or that is what I tell myself. The act of writing is me trying to deeply understand something and then recording my thought process. It has paid dividends already as I have gone back numerous times to reference myself. When I am honest with myself though, I deeply enjoy knowing when others read my work as well. Knowing that something I found interesting and insightful landed for someone else too is incredibly satisfying. If I could have helped someone understand something better while having done so for myself, pure joy. The peak of that vanity seems to be when the Hacker News crowd has deemed your content “worthy” to have made it on the front page . There is a sort of inner satisfaction when someone else messages me to let me know one of my posts has made it onto Mount Olympus. I have for years added Google Analytics tracking to my site to understand engagement but I rarely went any deeper with the metrics to understand it, until now! 🤓 I have put my vanity on public display by collecting metrics pertaining to my readership . 🪞 The numbers deflate the myth a little. As of writing, my writing has been submitted to Hacker News 127 times, and 26 of those reached the front page. Those 26 bought me 121 hours up there in total, under five hours each 1 , and exactly one ever touched #1. Mount Olympus turns out to be crowded, and difficult to climb. Turns out building the vanity site was itself rewarding. I got a better understanding of the metrics I am collecting through Google Analytics & Search Console. I also tied my writings to submissions to Reddit , Lobsters & Hacker News . The data is fetched offline and periodically updated via a GitHub Actions workflow and included in the site, of course, as a Nix derivation. Pascal was probably right. I tell myself I write to understand things, and that part is true, but I have now built a daily pipeline whose only job is to tell me who else was listening. Curiosity is only vanity. My curiosity now has a dashboard. A goal of mine is to have Fareed Zakaria mistaken for me instead of the other way around. 😅 A mean, which I have previously argued means nothing. ↩ A mean, which I have previously argued means nothing. ↩
Most people, when asked why they do what they do, lie. This isn’t because they’re malicious but it’s because the honest justification for a career is rarely noble. It’s usually a combination of a decent paycheck, tolerable hours, and whatever neurosis you were nursing at that particular juncture of your life. Take my friend the ER doctor in Chicago. He’ll tell you he went into medicine to help people. The truth? He became an ER doctor because he’s the kind of person who cannot do the same thing twice. He requires the chaos and strangeness of a city emergency room the way a 90s sitcom dad needs a beer and to watch the game. Helping people is a delightful side-effect of his pathological need to never sit still. I fell in love with tech work the same way a 13-year-old falls in love with anything. It was the late-90s, and I was in a small-town computer shop that smelled of burnt ozone, cheap carpet, and cups of noodles. I didn’t love technology as its own thing. I didn’t believe it was a transformative tool for the human mind. I liked fixing desktop computers because I got a dopamine hit from solving the riddle. Why is the video not showing up? Why can't I do this in the UI versus that? These were problems people were grateful to have solved, but honestly, their appreciation meant nothing to me. I was fascinated by the puzzle until the moment it was solved, at which point the entire affair ceased to matter. Technical problems, if you have the sickness, are among the best. They can be insanely complicated, but really, nobody dies if you fail. If you poison a soup, someone goes to the hospital. If you bork a database, it's just a bad night. Since everything in the entire stack is knowable at some level and designed by humans, intuition often gets you further than rigorous logic. They’re immensely satisfying because they require hours reading documentation or source code i.e. there is a toll to be paid in the mines before you see the diamond. But the underlying solution is usually quite simple, easy to explain, and fast to test. You confirm your hypothesis, ship the solution with your name on it, and wait for the next fix. If you like to test and iterate on your theories as you work, software is a dream. I don’t need a lab, or equipment, or really anything other than any laptop ever made. It’s like being a scientist if the only thing you needed was one test tube, one beaker, and some loose mercury rolling around on your desk. The driver for me going further and further down the stack was that you don’t get a rush for solving the same problem twice. The first time I diagnosed a blown capacitor on a videocard, there’s a rush. The tenth time, it’s just a job. Fixing problems in a GUI was good for a while, but eventually, you want harder problems that exist exclusively inside of CLIs. Debugging closed-source software is boring because you capture the logs and produce a bug report like a good little citizen. Open-source software lets you go right down to the metal. Then you get to the next level, which is: What if I can solve the problem by making a better version of the thing? This is the zenith. Now you are perhaps the most expert in the world on fixing this thing. You made it. The call is coming from inside the house. Every problem is a new problem, often one you never predicted. It’s nested endless puzzles stacked on top of each other. Then your job is sitting quietly in the dark, headphones on, listening to music and solving puzzles, which, sweet fucking Christ, is paradise on Earth. If fortune smiles on you, maybe you don’t have to manage actual humans to keep getting promoted. Maybe you get to just wander around like a modern-day ronin and solve problems in other stacks for the remainder of your career. I’ve met other tech workers with the same sickness as me, but we’re a minority. In my experience, most people who work in tech can be sorted into very specific buckets: "I'm here because I love technology." Sometimes they are obsessed with OSS and how it’s going to save the world. Sometimes they’re programming language nerds who delight in solving problems with clever quirks of their chosen syntax. These are the lunatics who say things like, "Writing my own programming language was a lot of fun." "I like high visibility, low stakes work." Some people absolutely get off on working for Company Name Everyone Knows, maintaining a product people rely on daily. If it stopped working, it would be a serious problem, but again, nobody dies. Maintenance and keeping the lights on is the name of the game. God bless them. "Money is here, so I am here." No shame at all. Some people needed a job, tech skills were hiring, so they’re here. They do just fine work. Honestly, they tend to get stuck in the weeds far less than the "I love technology" people, who pick weird esoteric ideological hills to die on all the time. This is the largest group by a lot now. They are the mercenaries. "I'm here for a hard time, not a long time." This is me. I want the worst problems in fast succession, which I will complain about, but if I solve them all and the job becomes easy, I will get bored and leave. I’m like the worst kind of restaurant customer. I order everything on the menu, eat it all, complain that I’m too full, and then when you don't change the menu next time, I never come again. Now, the LLMs have arrived, like a fleet of Sysco food-service trucks backed up to the kitchen door, delivering pre-chopped onions and powdered hollandaise. They came for the "I love technology" people first. There’s no prestige in being an active contributor to an open-source community anymore because you are just a meat proxy for the Borg. Make sure your docs are formatted for them! Now in LLMs defense, it's not hard to make the "I love technology" people upset. These are people who I've seen quit jobs over framework debates. I once watched a senior engineer get into a yelling match with another over whether we should mandate emacs as the official text editor of the team. Their desire for the most pure thing often overrides any ability to do cost benefit analysis. They're closer to musicians than factory workers. However now, it seems they are coming for me. So here’s the issue. LLMs make programming much easier. Because it is easier to make a thing, you care less about fixing the existing thing. There is no hit from solving a problem, because who gives a shit? Nobody is impressed that you sat there, studied the docs, and read the source code, because an agent will do that work for you while you eat a slop bowl on a Teams call. I used to get really excited when someone made a new Mac application. Typically, these were deep passion projects by people who loved the ecosystem. Indie Mac developers are the best part of owning a Mac. SoundSource, BBEdit, Things, Dropover—the list goes on. It was craft. Now I am flooded with LLM-generated Mac apps and I just don't care. All it means is someone paid Apple the $100 developer fee and gave OpenAI $250 to stitch together a UI, then copy-pasted error messages into the prompt until the thing finally launched. Nothing was mastered. Their passion for solving the problem didn't push them through the hard part. They had an errant thought, manifested it into reality, and are now showing it to me. It's exactly like a coworker cornering you in the breakroom to tell you about a dream they had. You have to nod, but you are dead inside. You see the same thing in the CLI space. How it worked before is someone would decide they needed to solve a problem. They would put in a ton of work, then launch the thing. You'd find it on Hacker News or wherever. There was a vested interest in working together on this thing because yes maybe it didn't do what you wanted perfectly but it was way closer than starting from scratch. A community is formed about taking this work and then extending it in the directions that allowed it to maximize its usefulness as a tool. Now why bother? If this CLI tool doesn't do what I want exactly, I'll just wait the....72 hours until someone has the robot make a new one. It's like gaming before Steam and after Steam. If a game doesn't hit exactly for me now I just refund it before the trial period is over. There's no reason to stick around and follow its progress. There will be another Metroidvania in the next 36 hours. Important to note, games aren't better now that there is a firehose of them, they're more niche and the prices have been driven down. I don't get the impression that these CLI tools are more stable or trending up in quality, there are just a lot more of them, more than a person could reasonably try out. I tolerated a lot of the ridiculous bullshit of the tech industry because, at the end of the day, I got to return to my endless series of puzzles. Stand-ups. Meetings with investors. Retros. Kanban boards. Agile vs Waterfall. Endless discussions over pull request formatting. Decision syncs. People saying stupid things like "don't let perfect be the enemy of good". Ground-up rewrites because a new language is the fashion. Those were the tolls I paid in order to do the interesting part in the back of the house. I didn't like working with rude people who ran little fifedoms—like I've had to do at some, but (thankfully) not most jobs—but the payoff was worth it. My new job is to watch the robot work. Then I need to do a ton of reading about what the robot is doing so that I can, at a moment’s notice, seize control back from it and course correct. Calling this "programming" is a farce. I'm closer to those poor souls who have to sit in the driver’s seat of a self-driving car, hands hovering, sweating, waiting for the robot to try and mow down a pedestrian. In reality, I am a SaaS provider, and the service I provide is responsibility . I am a flat-rate monthly responsibility service that agrees to assume full liability for the output of the robot. I am the human face with a pulse who can be lectured about why something did or didn't work. I will apologize. I will attempt to fix it. I will take the blame.
I was planning to write a reply to a post I read earlier today. I sat down in front of my computer, started typing, then a bunch of different people sent me messages for a variety of totally unrelated reasons, and I spent half an hour chatting with them. When I finally got back to writing the post, I stared at the screen and I was like «what even is the point of writing this?» . That is something that happens more and more often, recently. I still believe that dialogue is, by far, the best, and probably only, tool we have to make progress on a multitude of societal issues. At the same time, I’m more and more convinced that dialogue, on the internet, using the public digital spaces we have at our disposal, is almost impossible to have. Some of the reasons why I think this is the case are not worth repeating; I already wrote about them plenty of times over the years on this site. But one reason I think is worth highlighting is that a core ingredient for healthy dialogue is the ability to listen. But listening is not part of the social internet landscape. You cannot perceive the listening; you can only perceive the saying. And that is why social media dialogue is fundamentally unhelpful. It’s a lot of saying and not much listening. Which is why it often degrades into the lowest forms of communication: the name-calling, the ridiculing, the mocking, the shouting, the insulting. Not much progress though, which is unfortunate. Which is why I think sometimes it's better not to say anything. It’s better to simply read, nod along or shake your head, and then move on. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Connect via email :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month
Spent some time this weekend at Land School seeing some old friends and meeting new friends. Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me
Two months ago I bought another pen—my first new entry in over three years. Ah, that’s a good lad! Indeed. But I must confess. Forgive Me Father , for I have sinned: I bought another one right after it. I just couldn’t help myself. But I swear, this time, it’ll be my last, for sure, I can almost guarantee it! Almost. Anyway, this time, we’re taking a look at the Pilot Custom 743 with the Falcon or FA nib. I am a big fan of Pilot’s golden nibs: they have never failed me and they’re smooth yet provide a rich writing experience. Yet this time, I was “chasing nibs, not pens”, so I planned on acquiring an FA nib. The unique draw (ha!) of such a nib is the fact that the tines can spread with a bit of applied pressure, thereby producing a great variety of line thicknesses. That sounds complicated, but seeing is believing, so let me just paste in my review written in my notebook to get you to run out and buy one for yourself. The Pilot Custom 743 <FA> nib; a review written in my notebook. Note the subtle but very present line variations in the title, the I love this one! on the lower left, and even in the text itself. In case my handwriting is too bad for you to read (it is, I know, sorry), let me spell that out for you: This is Pilot’s “modern flexible nib”; the or Falcon one; on the Custom 743 body—the #15 [nib] size. Their #10 is on the Custom Heritage 912 which I already own with a Waverly nib. The 743 is about as big as the 823 Vac Filler so also more pricey. The nib is the highlight here—slightly pointed downwards to produce a (very) fine line without pressure. But what happens then [with pressure]? This: a huge amount of line variation! (And railroading; depending on the speed of writing and the ink—this is Kaweco Turquoise. This pen is quite wet with ink like De Atramentis.) I love this one! More than enough “flex”, easy to pull off; but also: an excellent surprisingly smooth daily writer for such a fine point. There is noticeable feedback present but no scratchiness. Is it worth the price tag? That’s up to you, I guess… There are ways to alleviate the railroading issue by buying an ebonate 2-slit or 3-slit feed but I haven’t tried that yet. When I do try to write a bit of Copperplate(-esque), I have to slow down anyway, so the railroading only happens when quickly pulling the pen downwards, which I never do with such a big line as in the example above. The green “Verdigris” body is only available in The States. That sucks: my only option of buying a 743 here in Belgium was the boring black body for a painful . I initially wanted the 823 with an FA nib, but that’s even more difficult to get as only a select number of Japanese brick & mortar stores sell these. So I went with the import option through Goldspot Pens . Price: about . Shipping: about . I did find a 10% coupon code that almost nullified the shipping cost, so I was quite happy. Until it arrived in Belgium and customs said “Hi. Uhm, what’s this? You gotta pay VAT here dude! Oh, and since I’m typing this, an additional fixed amount of “processing fee”. That’ll be… Let’s see… .” There goes my attempt to cheapen out. So I paid about for an injection-moulded green resin pen that can’t be found elsewhere in Europe. That’s still less than the boring black one. The nibs: Waverly on CH 912 (top), Falcon on Custom 743 (bottom). Note the tip bent slightly upwards and downwards. So what’s the difference between a Custom Heritage 912 and a Custom 743? They both use Pilot’s CON-70 converter which I’ll take any day over their crappy CON-40 in my Capless. As you can see in the photo above, they both have the exact same grip, but the 743 shows a bit more “class” by having more elaborate engravings (oh look, three stars) and a classic bulb on the end of the clip. The 743 is a tad longer due to the cigar shape. The biggest difference, however, is again the nib: the 743 houses Pilot’s bigger #15 nibs, and the CH 912 the (slightly) more modest #10. To be honest, I prefer the body of the CH 912. I would have bought a CH 912 with the FA nib if I didn’t already have one with a WA nib—the CH 912 is only available in… drumroll… black. Except for very very limited editions in Japan only that sell out in a few hours and come with a premium price tag. As I didn’t want two pens to look exactly the same, I went with the 743. And no, having someone put on urushi art for only and a waiting list of about half a year with additional shipping fees was not really an option. I tested the #10 FA of a friend and didn’t feel a huge difference. They say that the #10 FA nib is softer so it’s easier to pull of nice flexy writings, but I didn’t feel that in practice. Since 2022, Pilot did “stiffen up” their #10 FA nib according to a few sources so take that with a grain of salt. The biggest drawing point of the #10 nib is the price: that same Goldspot will charge you for the 912 with the #10 FA nib—about less than the Custom 743 with the #15 FA nib. Pen prices are going crazy: when I got my WA one, I paid about . The caps: CH 912 (top), Custom 743 (bottom). In the end, is it worth it to buy Pilot’s FA nib? Absolutely: they’re beautiful writers, the flex part works well, and they’re surprisingly smooth for a downwards-facing pen point—much smoother than the Posting (PO) nib I tried, although of course that one writes even smaller/thinner. Is it worth it to spend half a fortune on these pens, though? I don’t know. Maybe? If you get a cheap body that can house JoWo/Bock #6 nibs, you can also go to and buy a steel semi-flex nib for that is supposed to pull off the same trick. I don’t have one so I can’t compare. But damn it, these Japanese folks know how to make a nice writing implement. (Even though my friends who are not into the pen world think this pen looks like cheap rubbish because of the resin and rather boring looks. Guess what friends, chase nibs, not pens!) Related topics: / fountain pens / By Wouter Groeneveld on 8 September 2026. Reply via email .
Career
Writing
Programming
Culture
Books
Media
AI