| 1,247 words
TAGS: personal essay, productivity, habit tracking, Beeminder, self-improvement, commitment devices
After deleting corporate social media, I'm returning to Beeminder, a commitment tool that charges you money for failing to complete tasks, to reclaim my productivity. I explain how Beeminder works through externalizing willpower, share my current...
| culture | 2,362 words
TAGS: personal essay, Media Criticism, Gender, Love, Television, Anime
What could a prestige antihero legal drama and a shonen apocalypse epic have in common? As it turns out, love. An analysis and comparison of Attack on Titan and Better Call Saul. Beyond the violent carnage, there's a tender love and labour which...
| ai | 1,657 words
TAGS: personal essay, web development, AI, code quality, programming, Social Commentary
Vibe coders brag about adding thousands of lines of code with AI, but measuring productivity by lines of code is like measuring aircraft progress by weight. Research shows AI-generated code has higher duplication, lower reuse, and can run up to...
| 1,242 words
TAGS: personal essay, writing, criticism, scrupulosity, mental health
Yesterday, Unattributed posted a thorough dissection of my article on note-taking PKMs, analyzing my lack of intellectual rigour, nebulous wording, and poor research. I use this as an opportunity to discuss the milkshake duck phenomenon, my...
| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 1,533 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, technical, web development, accessibility, progressive disclosure, tutorial
Responding to Adam Newbold's 'Hardcore IndieWeb' guide, I argue for a ladder approach to joining the IndieWeb. Rather than choosing between easy platforms and full technical independence, people should climb rungs progressively. Start with...
| 0 words
TAGS: interview, IndieWeb, writing, blogging
I was interviewed in Zachary Kai's People and Blogs series, founded by Manuel Moreale. I share about my background, the evolution of my blog, creative and technical workflows, philosophy on monetization, and advocacy for the IndieWeb.
| science | 3,034 words
TAGS: personal essay, writing, research, productivity, knowledge management, criticism
As somebody who writes a lot, I've always been interested in personal knowledge management systems and note-taking apps. But what do these frameworks and methodologies actually give to researchers and the broader world? Has there been a...
| writing-craft | 2,202 words
TAGS: personal essay, writing, Writing Process, blogging, creativity, creative nonfiction
Let me be unglamorous and honest about the actual furniture of a writing life. What do my private, invisible days look like? What does it cost and what does it pay? A look at the 4 a.m. writing routine, the physical setting, and what I hope my...
| technical-tutorials | 1,209 words
TAGS: eleventy, javascript, netlify, technical, tutorial
A sequel to my Eleventy build post: this time the bottleneck wasn't the build tool, it was the hosting bill. Notes on caching webmentions and guestbook fetches, killing a dead Discord webhook, nearly breaking my JSON feed, and a git error I still...
| personal-favourites, lyric-essays | 2,639 words
TAGS: personal essay, psychology, humor, Métis, friendship, sincerity
Clown white doesn't come off in one pass. A personal story about how I can never take myself seriously no matter how hard I try. Notes on the history of whiteface and Auguste, the clown egg registry, the Indigenous medicine of laughter, the...
| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 2,614 words
TAGS: technical, IndieWeb, privacy, social media, tutorial
Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Reddit, Discord. Eight platforms, eight different deletion policies. A full technical walkthrough of what 'delete' actually means on each one, the prep work nobody tells you to do first, and...
| culture | 1,529 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Sports, culture, feminism, politics, UFC
Conor McGregor returns to headline UFC 329 tonight after being found liable for rape in civil court, a comeback made possible by the UFC's right-wing politicization and the broader 'Epstein class' culture of impunity for powerful men. On the...
| culture | 1,280 words
TAGS: personal essay, review, Media Criticism, Social Commentary, privacy, ethics
Nearly a decade after Dan Taberski's Missing Richard Simmons first asked the world where its brightest fitness star had gone, a review of the podcast that helped invent true-crime infotainment--and of the public's complicity in turning a man's...
| personal-favourites, lyric-essays | 828 words
TAGS: personal essay, philosophy, values, IndieWeb, mortality, purpose
A laminated poster with an unsourced quote changed the trajectory of my entire life when I was a teenager. On the immutable transaction of trading days for how we spend them, the urgency of risk-taking in a world that needs it, and what it means...
| 853 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, personal essay, writing, community, blogging
I finally curated my blog posts into collections, revealing what I write about most: the IndieWeb, the craft of writing, community, technical tutorials, politics, culture, and more. A call to my readers to tell me what they want to see more of...
| writing-craft | 1,351 words
TAGS: personal essay, literacy, writing, Social Commentary, philosophy, gratitude
In our current year, there is a global literacy crisis. As a result, there's a privilege in being able to read and write. Notes on Frederick Douglass, the problems you don't think about, and why the ability to write is something to be grateful...
| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 2,616 words
TAGS: eleventy, javascript, technical, tutorial, IndieWeb, atproto
A walkthrough of how I wired up Standard.site AT Protocol lexicons into this 11ty blog: from writing a custom publish script to migrating to Sequoia, with code for the link tags, and handle verification.
| ai | 1,640 words
TAGS: personal essay, AI, philosophy, ethics, Social Commentary, technical
Are there ethical implications of generative AI consciousness? From von Neumann's self-replicating machines to modern LLMs, we must inventory the problem of other minds, the possibility of AI consciousness, and why we ought to consider the...
| technical-tutorials | 3,628 words
TAGS: technical, tutorial, web-design, CSS, IndieWeb, accessibility, symbols
You don't need bloat. You can use CSS variables and Unicode symbols to add visual personality to your personal website while keeping it minimal, accessible, and fast-loading. Includes a reference of symbol sets (celestial, elemental, occult, card...
| 1,199 words
TAGS: technical, tutorial, ruby, web development, fanfiction
By default, the OTWArchive codebase blocks all imports from AO3, a problem for every fork. My fix includes removing AO3 from PERMITTED_HOSTS, writing a custom Ruby story parser that extracts only the story content from AO3 work pages, and...