Idiomdrottning

Impermanent echoes, sketches, and scratches for various Idiomdrottning components and libraries can be found here.

2025-12-13 12:39

IRL people misinterpret everything as if you agree with them.

Online people misinterpret everything as if you disagree with them.

2025-12-13 09:11

$10.99 for saucer, $29.99 for dinner.

Happy St. Lucy’s day everyone!

2025-12-08 21:16

Every thread I see about the NES and SNES aspect ratio has some folks insisting adamantly that they were made for 4:3 and sometimes they frame this in weird ways like saying the discussion is moot or otherwise trying to wrest control over the framing around this. But the facts just don’t support that. It’s a post-modern mishmash where some sprites and tiles were designed with 4:3 in mind and some undeniably were with 8:7 DAR (1:1 PAR). And some we will never know which. And often mixed into the same game. Either choice is a compromise.

2025-12-08 19:54

Last couple of weeks my adblocking setup in Cromite hasn’t worked very well, with the consequence that I go to those ad-laden pages even less or not at all. The value proposition of “seeing the pages but with ads” is almost never worth it to me. Our ad-driven WWW is absurd. The argument against adblocking is not credible since the ads are so awful. I love your page a lot but I hate the ads more than a lot so goodbye page.

2025-12-07 14:17

I wish all apartments had a place to ground away static electricity. I have a blanket that’s crackling. 😔

I’m not talking about any woo health effect claims but just the everyday discomfort and pain related to static electricity. Also when doing electronics work it’s an issue.

2025-12-05 22:20

Do not try to upgrade your existing server using apt-get dist-upgrade. There are too many changes especially with Dovecot.

🤦🏻‍♀️

2025-12-05 19:19

I agree with the conclusion this guy seems to be making:

That some of the games were made with square pixels in mind and look weird in 4:3, and vice versa for some other games. While the only one I disagree with among his specific examples, Balloon Fight, does not make my case stronger that most of the games look better in square pixels, there are so many games he didn’t list that do. Including The Legend of Zelda. It’s so wild that even though I grew up with them all in 4:3, in screenshots, magazines, manuals, and every TV in the neighborhood, it looks weird now. I know for sure I noted the squat tiles as a kid in those very first games (Duck Tales, Super Mario Bros.), but I got used to them and only now after a life on square tile games on other systems (like Game Boy) they are back to looking super weird.

A lot of the dev setups (I know for sure the first Super Mario Bros.) did use square pixels but that wasn’t a version anyone ever saw. (It was made with graph paper even.)

This is just gonna be one of those things that is what it is. People being snobs and gatekeepy about it are in the wrong since it’s on undeniable fact that the design intent varies from game to game. Sometimes even from asset to asset within the same game (Super Metroid being a notorious example).

2025-12-05 11:54

Regeringen tar nu nästa steg för att kunna återkalla gängkriminellas medborgarskap. Den som dömts för brott som allvarligt skadar Sveriges »vitala intressen« föreslås kunna förlora sitt svenska medborgarskap.

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Det framgår av en grundlagsproposition som regeringen fattat beslut om att lämna till riksdagen.

Segregationsarbetet fortsätter och alieneringen ska öka. Att aldrig nånsin kunna få bli svensk, det är drömmen för Tidöregeringens rasism. Kainsmärket för utanförskap ska aldrig gå att tvätta bort och existensen ska alltid vara på nåder. Att det här på nåt sätt är tänkt att minska utsattheten i samhället är inte evidensbaserat. Det kommer från ett viochdomtänk som är så grundläggande, så axiomt i högerpolitiken (inkl Andersson tyvärr) att det formar allt annat. Bind utgrupperna medan vi superrika förstör klimatet.

2025-12-03 21:00

I’m happy about something that happened on the baduk board today. I’ve seen myself as more a patterns and shape and heuristics player than a deep reader but I had accidentally placed myself in a situation where the only winning move was to create a horrible shape with two empty triangles. I had a “cupcake” a.k.a. a mouth shape and I was just about to play that “net” corner when I realized that due to black’s surrounding stones I would get squeezed out but that a solid connection would work. For once. So I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can out-read my own pattern instincts.

2025-12-03 09:15

PBF has a GTD comic out:

I love it︎︎♥︎

2025-12-01 23:06

Maybe retroarch itself can’t be scripted like this on Android (can it?) but maybe via something like Key Mapper?

2025-12-01 22:49

You know those 16×16 px character top down Game Boy games like Link’s Awakening, Survivor Kids, Legend of the River King, Harvest Moon, James Bond 007, Final Fantasy, Cave Noire etc? Even Pokémon. It would be so fun to connect them all into one experience, maybe a button in Retroarch could swap between them quickly so while playing we could pretend that we’re exploring one big world. Like I go though one door as Link and hit the macro key to swap to Mario Golf and make-believe that Azalea playing the golf game is in the same world as Link. The swap (only games in this same style) would be random and it’d save where I left off and when that game got randomly picked again I’d pick right back up. So it’s like multiple characters in a bigger story.

2025-12-01 14:11

I won’t by posting my Adent of Code attempts day-by-day here in this tinylog but I’ve made a completely separate tinylog for them over at:

No promises that I’ll make it through all twelve days. I’ll just start by doing day one and then we’ll see where we go from there.

2025-11-29 11:24

The relationship between YAML and JSON makes me hate both less.

(Or I guess hate JSON less and love YAML more since YAML was already leaning positive after coming through a rocky patch of kinda hating it.)

Yeah, yeah, it’s always gonna baffle me how we threw away schema’d outlines of elements & attributes for an un-schema’d hodge-podge of sequences and maps. I like XML (not the angle-bracket notation for it) more than JSON and probably always will.

But YAML makes JSON better and vice versa. YAML adds comments and a more readable notation to JSON whereas JSON adds queries and other tooling to YAML.

yq is pretty awesome. There are two competing ones. I’ve mostly used this one that uses PyYAML and just shells out to jq.

There’s a made-in-golang alternative here that I haven’t looked into:

(Maybe “alternative” isn’t the right word in case it came first, I dunno, but I’ve been happy enough with the Python one.)

YAML has two drawbacks.

I can’t read it the way a computer reads it. When I see s-expressions I can predict at a glance without thinking about it how the Lisp reader is going to parse them. When I see YAML it’s an effort to try to “mentally lint” what I see. Like, if I am in a suspicious mood where I wonder “hmm, did the person mess up and use the wrong scalar type here”, that’s gonna be a bad time. That’s gonna be a low-key subconscious stress because those errors don’t show up at a glance, they take effort to spot.

If I can let go and trust that what I see has been linted or machine converted, that’s when it’s eminently readable and I can really love it. I can’t write PDFs manually either.

That first drawback also leads to the second: while 99% of the time when I’m fine just writing basic tried-and-true stuff like the front matter for text documents where it’s just a couple of keys, for anything fancy or unusual linting and tooling and Emacs stuff is pretty vital. Maybe by now I’ve finally gotten to the point where I could write YAML with a typewriter or pen&paper and it’s correct, it took a while to get there and maybe I do have a li’l while left to go.

There’s actually a third drawback and it’s not because of the language but the community. They hate fun and removed things like boolean yes and no and on and off. Making it less expressive and human-like in order to mitigate the two aforementioned drawbacks but since it doesn’t completely do that and we still need to check with tools, that was pointless and joyless. I really regret that decision.

2025-11-28 13:11

I sometimes think it was a mistake to move Buy Nothing Day to deliberately coincide with Black Friday sales, it can unintentionally come across as privileged. It’s good that there’s a counterweight to Black Friday but I wish the main Buy Nothing Day had also still existed on its own day.

2025-11-28 03:00

Happy Buy Nothing Day to those who celebrate.♥︎

2025-11-26 08:09

Brukar vara väldigt fri från slop eftersom jag inte använder normala SoMe men jag lyssnade på radionyheterna i morse och då fick jag en släng av sloppan eftersom dom bedömde att nåt AI-genererat Macron-meme var värt att prata om. Beskona mig!

2025-11-23 21:00

A journalist interviews a farmer: “if you have two bungalows, are you willing to give one to the country?”

The farmer, without hesitation, “sure! For communism!”

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Journalist: “if you have two tractors, will you give one to the country?”

Farmer: “of course! For the better development of our country!”

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Journalist: “if you have two million bucks, will you give one million to the country?”

Farmer: yes! For the livelihood of our comrades!”

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Journalist: “if you have two cows, will you give one to the country?”

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The farmer keeps silent and looking at the journalist, so the journalist has to ask again: “will you?”

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The farmer answers firmly: “No”.

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The journalist is confused: “you are so generous about money and houses and tractors, but why do you draw the line at cows?”

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“Because”, says the farmer: “I do have two cows”.

This is why it’s so much harder for folks to see the problems with cars. They have cars. Suddenly I’m judging them not just the nuclear bosses whom they’ll never meet let alone be. They’re not temporarily inconvenienced Montgomery Burns.

2025-11-23 07:27

Skipping over question two, for the first I’d refer to social contract theory and for the latter I’d say it breaks the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. A principle that’s not universally accepted but without it (or without the similar but competing/​incompatible principle of “to each commensurate with their efforts”) we’ve built a society that rewards unbridled exploitation and a gold rush mentality of plundering the Earth and each other that’ll lead to us all becoming human locusts collapsing the entire thing.

2025-11-21 10:34

FRC is the same effect that they used in Dennō Senshi Porygon 🤦🏻‍♀️

2025-11-21 10:31

2025-11-20 21:00

The general concurrence of 2100 warming estimates across different groups suggests that the world is heading toward less warming than was expected 15 years ago, when most estimates were closer to 3.5C or 4C.

Let’s keep fighting, y’all! 2.9° ain’t nothing to mess around with.

2025-11-20 11:18

Have you ever had a “friend” who had a prank answering machine message so it sounded like they had actually answered the phone, but really it was just a fakeout?

That’s what so many of the anti-scraper “you-need-JavaScript” blurbs are like now.

You’re probably reading this page because you’ve attempted to access some part of my blog [blog name redacted]. Unfortunately you’re using a browser (or client library) that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious because it’s not sending a Sec-Fetch-Mode HTTP header while claiming to be Firefox or Chrome (both of which have been sending that header for a very long time), or another browser that similarly should be sending this header (such as versions of Safari and WebKit from early 2023 onward).

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Due to the ongoing problems with abusive high volume crawlers using forged User-Agent values (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training), this combination of browser User-Agent and lack of Sec-Fetch-Mode header is not accepted.

Okay I was reading with Capy Reader and ti took me until the second paragraph until I realized that what I was reading wasn’t the actual post that someone had linked to.

I don’t want to use Firefox and Chrome. And if y’all are blocking RSS fetchers or TUI browsers now and if that means I’d just rather just as not well read that web page, that’s actually fine by me. So far so good.

That’s the tradeoff y’all wanna be making, that you made a web page that people can’t actually read, I’m actually fine by that because I have empathy and can imagine how you somehow see something that horrible and extreme as the lesser evil compared to not doing it and therefore understand your decision. Already plenty of web pages I haven’t been able to read in the past few years like everything behind Cloudflare for example (which intermittently works and lets me through but usually doesn’t) so this is nothing new and I’ve already made peace with it.

(When I see posts by people who underestimate the false positive rate, that does unmake that peace a little; when I see people posting things like “Oh Cloudflare/​Anubis are so good at letting real people through” when they’re not. They do block real people. But when using these ableist blockers is an informed decisions of “okay I’m aware that I’m excluding so-and-so many thousands of real people but I believe I have to do it because not doing it equals no webpage at all anymore because it’s buckling under” or something in that vein, I can understand and I can make the informed decision on my own whether to go remote log in to a machine that has a more vanilla Firefox installation. I have the privilege to be able do that because [I don’t rely on screenreader tech], I just use accessibility apps (like the aforementioned Capy Reader) for the convenience and to get away from jitter and stress.)

My plea to y’all is then to just not waste my time with these lede-burying rants. Yes, please do include the explanation of why I got blocked (like in this case some header was missing) but start by making it clear that I was blocked. Since I was reading through Capy Reader my styling is client side so this (and Anubis’ turn-on-JS admonition text) looks just like a normal article until I’ve read enough of it to realize what’s going on.

You’re making text itself unreliable and punishing.

Going too far in the brevity direction isn’t good either if it’s impolite. I’ve seen messages like “Go and burn in hell” and no explanation of what made me deserve that (and after asking the person out-of-band finding out that it was their bot defense).

So here’s my suggestion: Start with the one-paragraph sentence: “Hi, you’ve accidentally triggered my bot defenses.” Followed by an apology and explanation and (optionally, if you do have the capacity/bandwith/spoons) how to troubleshoot it or report bugs.

In the late 00s my friends and I were dealing with a very brutal harassment campaign on our community site so we started banning IPs and I found out too late that we had wrecked our community with false positives. We had also banned the actually cool people.

2025-11-20 10:42

Yeah, the climate scientists that everyone was saying were overestimating the problem more likely underestated the problem:

2025-11-19 22:24

I feel that it reflects poorly on the interactive fiction community that one of the most recommended games is one where the main character get assaulted horribly. 😔

If people want to love it as a niche gem that’s one thing but don’t shove it in new player’s hands as like one of the first things, as a showcase of the medium. It’s like if the only movie was Dennō Senshi Porygon.

It’s not necessary because there are so many truly wonderful works of IF. And, Anchorhead can be a game that finds the audience that will love it (and all the hard work that went into it) instead of getting turned off all IF. It’s an award-winning work so obviously there are people who love it and I’m not trying to take that away. I’m just saying maybe it shouldn’t go in the starter kit.

2025-11-19 21:20

How do I get light mode on Fabularium…? 🤔

2025-11-19 20:21

Unugunu vs Gurkenkönig…?

2025-11-18 23:31

Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. But doing that by loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it is the same mistake as thinking that the imaginary Pera is a real island that we can reach by boat. A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind.

I thought halloumi being pitched as vegetarian food was the biggest mindheck of our time but here we are.🤦🏻‍♀️ Staying on Facebook is the real quitting Facebook.

2025-11-18 23:24

From How To Do Nothing:

If Facebook is such a big part of the attention economy problem, then surely quitting it is an appropriate “fuck you” to the whole thing. To me, though, this is fighting the battle on the wrong plane. In her 2012 paper, “Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and political dimensions of Facebook abstention,” Laura Portwood-Stacer interviews people who quit Facebook for political reasons and finds that the meaning of these isolated actions is often lost on the Facebook friends left behind. Facebook abstention, like telling someone you grew up in a house with no TV, can all too easily appear to be taste or class related. Portwood-Stacer’s interviews also show that “the personal or political decision not to participate in Facebook may be interpreted [by friends] as a social decision not to interact with them,” or worse, as “holier-than-thou internet asceticism.” Most important, the decision to leave Facebook involves its own kind of “margin”:

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> It may be that refusal is only available as a tactic to people who already possess a great deal of social capital, people whose social standing will endure without Facebook and people whose livelihoods don’t require them to be constantly plugged in and reachable…These are people who have what [Kathleen] Noonan (2011) calls “the power to switch off.”

This myth of “oh if you managed to quit Facebook you must’ve had an easy life” is understandable but so frustrating. Being on the outside (I never joined in the first place) has been so costly. If we had quit together we could’ve helped each other but that’s not what happened. Friends gave up on me saying “I only have room for people in my life if they are on Facebook”. I’ve lost jobs over it too and housing. I’m not exactly selling the idea of quitting here, I get that, but it’s just so frustrating when people pull the “it seems like it would be difficult for me so it must’ve been easy for you” card. I try to not victim-blame those who are on Facebook, snared in the gilded cage, but c’mon, folks, meet me halfway here: If you don’t wanna leave, at least don’t hate on those who did. And if you do wanna leave, let’s help each other.

2025-11-17 14:37

I love this:

2025-11-17 11:29

Today’s strange bug was how a couple of weeks ago I added a feature to one of my podcast-mashing scripts so it can append new episodes into the same XML file instead of only being capable of creating a new feed out of existing audio files.

The bug was that whenever I did that, all the older episodes got the wrong date. They always showed up as “tomorrow” in the podcast app I was using. And I’ve checked and checked and checked the dates until I’ve gone mad but I couldn’t see the difference.

Today I figured the bug out (by diffing the file compared to one generated from scratch, without --append) and it turns out that the wrongly-dated entries had “pubdate” whereas the working ones had “pubDate” capital-D. Because I generate the new items SXML correctly, and the from-scratch file has all-new items, but I import the older items through html->sxml which downcases all (probably correctly, that’s usually what I do want for HTML so this isn’t an upstream bug, I should just go dig up a more case-preserving XML to SXML routine). I monkeypatched it by changing html->sxml to (o pubdate->pubDate html->sxml) with that filter being a big old honking tree-map:

(define (pubdate->pubDate tree) (tree-map (?-> (is? 'pubdate) (fn 'pubDate)) tree))

Such a waste (“Lisp programmers know the value of everything but the cost of nothing”) but, enh, good enough for today.

2025-11-17 08:09

I love this font:

More evocative of Futura than other geometric sanses I’ve seen, and it’s Devaganari first.

2025-11-15 17:20

People who hate dark mode and people who hate light mode can unite in their frustration with this web page:

But this seems like a good app.

2025-11-15 12:26

It is a fact that it takes longer to get a notepad and a pen and write down “look up how many teeth a giraffe has” and then later get out that that notepad and pen and decipher your handwriting and then get out your magical don’t-panic–marked panic-inducing pocket Guide and look it up via the information superhighway “cyber space” than it takes to just skip the writing-it-down part and go directly into the “cyber space” and look up your emergency giraffe-fact right away.

Or it would be a fact if there weren’t any rabbit holes online. Because going online and then on your way to and from the alt.fan.giraffes Usenet archive, that might make that method take longer.

So one way to justify the joy of writing things down first (even though the real reason is that it’s fun to write things down) would be if we could leverage that written-down–list to get into enough fewer rabbit holes (perhaps because the giraffe BBS is just one stop on a more-or-less pre-planned itinerary) and/or use the sheer overwhelming length of the list to motivate us to perhaps cross out some things from that list entirely via the life-changing magic of WONTFIX and sifting and choosing which of our gazillion things on the list we really do want to check. That’d be one way to an efficient and fun life.

Another would be if we developed an iron will such that going online for the giraffe trivia really truly only took as little time as it does, completely rabbit-hole free. This one seems pretty difficult; it happens again and again (including yesterday) where I’m with someone and they’re like “okay I just wanna look up that one fact we just discussed” and then they end up checking nine or ten other things because they get sucked in because online is a hellvortex.

A third approach would be to trust in our own intuitive, curious, pleasure-seeking, info-seeking, instinct-powered heads and hearts and stopped seeing the rabbit holes as bad things and just lived more according to whim and stopped fighting it and reveled in the treasury of the connected world. That actually sounds pretty great but I’m gonna say no on that because that curious playful trust was co-opted, hijacked, exploited by bad-faith actors like Meta and X and Google and Bytedance who poured razorblades and toxic glue into the ballpit and now playful exploration means getting forcefed constant junk.

Ergo: lists FTW. Capture → process → do like saint Allen intended.

Also then you can do it with a proper keyboard and a proper screen and a propper cuppa. That might make going through that facts-to-lookup-list faster too, I dunno.

2025-11-14 21:18

I especially get good results making mindmaps. They are magic.

2025-11-14 20:38

As a rooibos hater it’s so frustrating that it’s now sneaking into other blends. Like mixing green tea with rooibos. Everything on the menu having rooibos. I don’t even hate the taste, it tastes good, I just get sick. Which turns out is a good thing since rooibos is bad for α1ad so I’m glad my can’t-standing of it kept me from picking up the habit before I knew that.

2025-11-14 18:53

Sverige sticker ut som det enda av nio västländer där de flesta av väljarna amser att demokratin fungerar. I andra länder är oron för extremistpartier, fejkade nyheter och korruption större.

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I genomsnitt är 45 procent av väljarna i de länderna där mätningen gjorts missnöjda med hur demokratin fungerar. Och i länderna där misstron är störst (Frankrike, USA, Storbritannien och Spanien) är över 50 procent av de tillfrågade missnöjda, enligt Ipsos.

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I Sverige—där 1 002 väljare har tillfrågats—är 65 procent överlag nöjda med hur demokratin fungerar.

Oj hjälp vilken låg ribba! 😰

2025-11-14 11:57

I really am addicted to “Moria” for all its black-and-white mode and my own more smugly and boastfully boring life. It’s not like I’m doing things I don’t want on there—a tiny bit of RSS but mostly it’s reading comics and writing essays—but what’s going on is that for example if I “just gonna check the headlines” before breakfast I might easily end up forgetting about breakfast until it’s way too late for it. I get stuck. I do things I want but out of order—I wouldn’t’ve minded reading those comics or writing those blogposts after breakfast.

2025-11-14 11:34

I’ve been writing a lot today for three reasons:

• I’m procrastinating; in the short term that thing is sorting out the rest of winter laundry and in the long term it’s creativity and the life and the universe and everything.
• I’ve been very bored (both because of the MSLT but also because I’ve deliberately been placing myself in boring situations) and that has awoken gotten lots of ideas.
• I’ve finally got my Paper 7 tablet back (I’ve nicknamed mine “Moria”) and found a not-great-but-least-bad RSS reader for it and reading begets writing.

I thought my “down period” had started because I had a few really sad days but it was a false start, or a false ending to the hyper period rather, because I’m all over. I’ve been oversharing also; both on here and to my friends. Gonna try to reel that in a li’l bit.

I apologize for the firehose although I’m sure things will continue to ebb and flow on here. And it’s not just on here, I’m filling notebooks and writing letters.

2025-11-14 07:57

I see people take issue with the FSF saying “A program which does calculations that a user does not want done is a form of malware” using equivocation and sophistry and complete disregard for gricean semiotics. I’m not onbord with that and I do agree with the FSF’s underlying sentiment there.

Now, if the counter-argument to the FSF is that in a more zoomed-out perspective it’s worth it in this case, that a wrong could perhaps right a bigger wrong, that line of reasoning I’d see as more good-faith. I.e. if your argument was that malware can sometimes do good. Still leaning more towards disagree (I really don’t wanna go online anymore with PoW junk like this up) but I’d respect that argument a lot more and I haven’t done the full LCA to see if the environmental devastation brought on by Anubis is a net positive if it’s factually actually effective in net reducing an otherwise unavoidable-in-any-other-conceivable-way bigger environmental devastation. I really doubt that but math is hard and I haven’t done the numbers so I’d hear that out.

So this is me conflating my linguist’s peeves (on semiotics and rhetorics) with the endless water-wasting jevonsing of computational capacity.

2025-11-14 07:40

Always love to see Anubis get flak:

…but don’t love to see a solution that has nearly the same a11y problems (RIP Lynx 1992–2025). At least it doesn’t use proof-of-work.

2025-11-13 12:12

I disagree with Cal about the anti-GTD, pro-timeblocking advice but this is gold:

I needed this advice because no matter how smug I am about not being on Reels or X or whatever, I do go through periods of spending way too much time chatting to bots. I never ever post slop from it but I paste or write my own ideas into it for cheerleading or validation or just comfort and it’s such an awful habit. Plus sometimes help with Python although usually it can’t help because Python is beyond helping.

And I can think back to when I’ve used paper notebooks instead over the years, including just a few months ago, and how much better that worked. I don’t know how to limit websites in Cromite (short of getting a new router, which I might down the line; until then, advice on if there’s an extension or something that works on the ARM Android version of Cromite is very welcome) but I do know that using a pen and a notebook is for me a very good way to think.

I don’t have the “mega” version of the Techō Weeks that have more notes pages but I have plenty of empty pages in old notebooks lying around at home or I could see if app-pinning a notebook app on the tablet works almost as well.

2025-11-13 11:55

I’m quicker typing than writing of course after decades of using a keyboard. But I adapted, my cursive writing slowly came back to me and I started writing faster and faster.

I’m impressed by all y’all journaling in longhand, I’m not sure I would be able to do that (I journal in shorthand). But it’s true that you do get faster; I’ve gotten a lot faster these past few years since I started writing more handwritten letters.

2025-11-13 10:50

I’m absolutely loving this trend of WLW (women-loving-women) romance running in josei magazines with the typical josei style and quality. Used to be WLW was one of two things: punkier gay-for-gay works (some of which really was excellent) and really exploitative seinen or older shonen stuff. These days we’re also seeing it in mainstream josei magazines and I am loving that so much. And, the seinen/shonen “yuri” comics have really mellowed too; it used to be really drooly whether that’s big tits or faux cute, creepy, failed moe and either was hard to read; these days a lot of it is more earnest and just have a good heart. All that harping on “male gaze”, subject vs object really paid off and changed culture, it seems. So good job, feminists! ♥︎ And I believe that’s a win for everyone because it’s just more tender and more better. That’s not to come across as sex-negative. It’s better in that regard too with slower boils and more earnestness.

2025-11-13 09:59

BlueSky, an algo site:

2025-11-13 09:54

I love this:

2025-11-13 08:40

Adam Levy responds to Bill Gates:

I know that I for the most part try to filter out pseudo news like “Such-and-such thinks something about what such-and-such thinks” and Gates being wrong is hardly new at this point but this one punched through. Policy makers already are underaware of how urgent action is.

2025-11-11 23:07

Buy Nothing Day is coming up:

2025-11-11 21:49

Doing an MSLT hits different as a rokurokubi which is also why I was so scared of doing it. They were looking at me sleeping with nightvision CCTV and electrodes on. The neck thing only happened during three of the five tests or maybe four, I’m not sure about that first one, I was so tired. It happened during №2, 4 and 5. It seemed like it also happened a little during the first one but it was after the second they were really upset. But they let me leave. They don’t have my address, I get the mail from them via a post forwarding service.

2025-11-11 21:14

Congratulations to Sahara Hotnights for the Hall of Fame induction. The first four songs on C’mon let’s pretend are my panacea. They cure all ills. And of course the anthem for the Gemini community on the most recent record. Love all your records so much.

2025-11-10 14:10

Ear Biscuits picked up the same topic (slop on Reels and TikTok) again three episodes later, episode 492. Worth a listen. They explored three avenues of solution: throwing away your phone entirely (got to say I love that), or accepting our new slop overlords, or wishing that TikTok and Reels eventually figure out how to filter it out.

Still nothing of the fourth solution: switching from algo-pushed “social” media to subscribing/following specific posters. Or as I’ve proposed before for those who really want to firehose it up: one single level of indirection where you follow “curators” and get the posts that they subscribe to. And if some of your curators start subscribing to slop, you unfollow them.

No reco algo. Just people.

2025-11-10 09:22

Teachers and explainers, hark!

I’m undergoing a medical thing which has two components, a form and a gadget. I had so many questions about the form and I tried to ask them and the nurse was like “no! I’m explaining the gadget first!” and I was like “but can I just as–“ “No! I’m explaining the gadget first” and even when we got to the form she was like “no! I’ll just explain the form step by step” and end result was I had so many unanswered questions about both gadget and form because I forgot them by the time I finally got to ask questions. The few questions I did get to ask, she made me feel so stupid about.

My mind wanders and I don’t have the best working memory and I’ll learn better if I can connect things up in a way that make sense to me and fill any gaps in my understanding before I try to build on it.

The number one question I wish I knew here is whether to write down when I go to bed or actually fall asleep. I’m writing down both just to be safe (and finding out when I fall asleep was pretty difficult. I repurposed an old zigbee remote into a kinda dead hand’s switch or screenless timestamp).

2025-11-09 09:35

+ there’s the storyline where Betsy hooks up with Lady Fantomex (which isn’t Ray related but was one of the earliest really tender WLW portrayals in 616).

2025-11-07 17:38

Det går en reklam för Liberalernas ledare där hon presenteras med olika namn typ “Mobilförbudson” och “Knäckgängenson” och “Borgerligson” och hårda tag och järnnävar och stålhättor och stoppa valfriheten och jag bara: varför heter partiet då Liberalerna?! Vad tror dom att namnet “libera” betyder? Det är så godtyckligt vilka frågor som blir högerfrågor och vilka som blir vänsterfrågor. Aha öka klassklyftorna och binda utgruppen? Ahjusteh det är ju det.

2025-11-06 21:09

While I’m way more of a Kwannon fan, this “Retsy” reading guide by Jenn seems pretty comprehensive:

But didn’t I hear something about The End and Genext having Retsy stuff too?

2025-11-05 11:04

I hate proof of work and this makes sites break on Cromite’s defaults:

2025-11-05 07:53

Not only that, but they would be the first generation not exposed to screens since the television entered Swedish living rooms in the late 1950s.

That sounds like a very good thing to me. 🤷🏻‍♀️

2025-11-04 10:25

Second, there are two simple things you can do to make Coconut produce faster Python: compile with –no-tco and compile with a –target specification for the exact version of Python you want to run your code on. Passing –target helps Coconut optimize the compiled code for the Python version you want, and, though Tail Call Optimization is useful, it will usually significantly slow down functions that use it, so disabling it will often provide a major performance boost

It’s not really an optimization then.

That can’t be what the Great Quux had in mind.

2025-11-03 13:07

I kind of want an Android launcher that introduces friction as opposed to removes it.

Like… Maybe the apps are all in lists (and an app can be in more than one list, and there’s one list with everything in lieu of the app drawer), and switching between active lists is a whole ordeal of typing in an arduous phrase and being able to set time limits.

Maybe there could be a list of emergency apps like “whoops I need my bank password suddenly” but that’s not necessary.

There’s also “App Pinning” (similar to iPad’s “Guided Access” mode) which I love and wish was even easier to get into and even harder to get out of. I also love that it doesn’t require a password to turn on and off the screen when an app is pinned. It makes the tablet be kind of like an appliance. A comics-reading appliance or an email appliance or a typewriter.

2025-11-03 11:18

SVT kör en drajv nu kontra offline, anti att ha överdrivna förväntningar på nerkoppling, programmet “Skärmfri på 100 dagar” till exempel. Dom pushar vinkeln att skärmfrihet leder till isolering osv:

Och dom har också ett program för små barn hur dom ska kunna be föräldrarna om mer skärmtid:

Jag tycker perspektivet saknas om hur sjuka dom algoritmdrivna silosajterna egentligen är och att livsviktig infrastruktur plötsligt blivit inmutad av storföretag som på bara några få år har blivit dom mäktigaste entiteterna i världshistorien. Att vi mer eller mindre tvingas vara kunder åt dom här företagen.

Och EUs galna lagstiftning blir då en förvärrande faktor eftersom den är helt science fiction utan det samhällsekonomiska perspektivet som ex vis att främja öppen källkod skulle innebära. Istället pushas allt ännu mer mot en AI-fiering och appifiering där det är dyrkan av den fjärrägda datorn som står i orubbligt centrum.

Att nerkoppling leder till isolering stämmer. Helvetes vad mitt liv förstördes när Facebook först kom. Det är en av dom största katastroferna, att plötsligt försvann 90% av bekantskapskretsen in på nåt helägt leksaksinternet och all schemaläggning och hängbokning nu enbart skedde där. Facebookepidemin slog ner som blyzeppelinare. Plötsligt hade nästan alla det. Och alla andra mötesplatser revs ner och slets bort.

Så jag tycker att SVT är ganska oansvariga när dom försöker driva igång en backlash mot nerkopplingstrenden. Det vi behöver istället, tycker jag, är att bygga ett fungerande samhälle även utanför skärmen så skärmbehovet kommer att minska. Och att infrastrukturen online ska bli mer FOSS-vänlig tycker jag också, men framför allt sitter jag med boken A Pattern Language och gråter. Städerna och byarna och boningarna vi kunde ha haft med varandra har ersatts av Facebooks och Googles och Apples stampande stövel. En sista rest av Christopher Alexanders utopiska tankar lever vidare i form av Wikipedia men det är nog bara en tidsfråga tills datorerna mosar den också.

Jag har fått flera nya IRL-vänner under hösten och jag är väldigt glad över det. Men det behövdes att jag reggade mig på vidriga silosajter (Meetup och Discord) för att träffa dom. Jag ser ett stort behov av alternativa lösningar istället som inte ägs av techjättarna. Annars blir det platform decay för all framtid.

Efter sju och ett halvt år med dumbphone tänkte jag bejaka smartphone lite halvt om halvt i somras med en kombo av en hotspot-dumbphone och en RLCD-tablet. Som tyvärr gick sönder men är nu påväg hem till mig igen från verkstan och jag har nog den inom nån vecka eller två. Men att hitta rätt balans är inte lätt. Försöker pria IRL och sånt som leder till IRL.

Att jag är en väldigt sprethövdad rokurokubi som lika gärna kan prokrastinera med en kartongbit och en gummisnodd som jag kan med en algosajt eller ett dopamindataspel gör ju inte saken lättare direkt. Det är svårt att utsätta mig för långtråkighet och för att ta tag i att faktiskt göra saker även utan smartphone.

Och, IRL har blivit sämre pga alla andras jävla telefoner. Jag har nån sorts gräset-är-grönare vanföreställning om att min online-längtan är för att jag är en sån ensamboende loser, att dom som har jobbarkompisar, kursare, familj, kombo osv inte alls har samma behov att koppla upp men så tar dom fram telefonerna stup i kvarten trots att vi äntligen har hängtid. Så stark är den enarmade banditen. Så det finns uppenbarligen en sida av uppkopplingen som skapar isolering också, zombifiering, mental istid. Mitt liv flimrar fort förbi på en status update.

2025-11-03 07:11

So-called natural gas is bad for the climate:

2025-11-02 20:23

Capitalism was deemed “late stage” so long ago (over a hundred years ago) and it’s gotten so incredibly much more latterly stagey since then 😭

2025-11-01 19:08

FN:s säkerhetsråd har för första gången ställt sig bakom Marockos plan för det omstridda området Västsahara.

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I en resolution som antogs med röstsiffrorna 11–0 skriver säkerhetsrådet att »genuint självstyre under Marockos överhöghet kan vara den rimligaste lösningen«. Bakom förslaget står USA.

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Området är en fd spansk koloni som är helt ockuperat av Marocko sedan 1979. Grannlandet Algeriet stöttar en självständighetsrörelse, Polisario.

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Säkerhetsrådet har tidigare manat till en bred förhandlingslösning

Janne Lundström har ett jättebra seriealbum som handlar om Polisario. Serien tar ställning för dom men visar också en del sjuka saker dom gör. Den heter Uppdrag Sahara. Det är tragiskt att den serien är 45 år. Och när dom i den 45-åriga serien också pratar om den redan då urgamla situationen i Palestina. 😭

2025-11-01 19:03

Ett högt saltintag ser ut att påverka ämnesomsättningen, enligt en studie.

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I gruppen med högt saltintag, mer än 10 gram per dag, verkar fettet förbrännas i lägre utsträckning.

Okej men jag är väldigt långt från 10 gram salt. Jag ska inte minska mitt saltintag. Att jag har börjat salta maten (ibland direkt, oftare med nåt typ karrismet, doenjang, surkål, grillkrydda eller nåt) har minskat mitt chips-och-lakritssug 🤷🏻‍♀️

2025-10-30 22:04

There was white cane awareness day two weeks ago (maybe you knew that already); I heard an interview about it on the radio. Hush has a more personal story on her blog:

2025-10-30 11:23

I’ve been burned so many times by proprietary handwriting notes apps that I went back to paper notebooks but I really hope this one will work well:

My Arden Vul campaign notes are stuck in Flexcil, my home-made One Page Dungeon island hopping notes are stuck in some other dumb Android app I don’t even remembebr the name of on a since-wiped device, and I have programming projects in Apple Notes. The idea of a completely FOSS handwriting app for Nextcloud seems like such a dream come true. My Paper 7 is still in for repairs but so far Saber seems to work great on iPad (and to my great shock and surprise it is much better than any of the aforementioned apps? Yeah yeah I know I always say that proprietariness is insurmountable badness in and of itself but even discounting that, this has an easier-to-understand UI for me) and even somewhat legibly on InkPalm (although I tried writing with a capacitive stylus on the latter and that did not work as well as the iPad where the “Pencil” stylus and my capacitive “Kosmonaut” stylus both work amazing). The support of type-written notes is passable too but I primarily use hand-written notes. It doesn’t try to do any kind of handwriting recognition which suits me just fine since I use shorthand.

I’ve never wanted to have a Nextcloud before but now I want to install one just for this app. I’m hoping it’ll work well on the Paper 7. If it does I’ll donate like crazy out of my oatmeal budget.

I already ordered a paper Hobonichi Techo Weeks for 2026 and bought a couple of new notebooks but this makes me think I could go back to digital handwriting. Maybe with a planner PDF or something. Maybe I’ll be able to mod the Light Phone III to run it. Having read-access to all my notes in a pinch even when I don’t have one of my way too many tablets with me seems like it could come in handy.

I’ve been hesitant to install AntennaPod along with a couple of other apps on the LP3 that have a link to open a browser (be it a help page or a podcast info page—and from there it’s rabbit holes) but this “Saber” doesn’t have anything like that as far as I could tell at first glance. It’s just a notes app that doesn’t “link out to the web” unlike so many other Android apps.

Biggest downside is the font chosen for the typewritten notes. Not into the default choice which looks like a child’s scribbles (the fact that it looks like handwriting is something I guess I could get on board with; the fact that it looks like a seven year old boy’s handwriting is not good) and there’s so far no way to change it. But it’s on the roadmap:

And if I mostly stick to handwriting until then, I’ll be fine. So I’m holding out hope that it’ll handle the Paper 7’s USI stylus just fine.

2025-10-29 15:15

One misguided idea I’ve had for many years that I recently shed is that I shouldn’t work at a greater precision that my input data affords. If I get coarse-grained, slightly unreliable data in, I don’t need to have many decimals in my own calculations, was my thinking. But my new approach is to treat that flaky in data with the same reverence as if it were precise in order to stave off further error and sloppiness, and in order to cultivate a more quality-minded approach to my own work. Perfect example is when I’m doing a moving average over data from a wonky and cheap scale: the data doesn’t get any less wonky and cheap if my moving average calcs sloppily introduce rounding errors.

2025-10-29 08:56

Oxfam:

De 0,1 procent rikaste svenskarna ökade under mätperioden 1990–2022 sina utsläpp med 44 procent. Samtidigt har de 50 procent av svenskarna med lägst inkomst minskat sina utsläpp med 31 procent.

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Det innebär att de rikaste släpper ut lika mycket på ett år som en medelsvensk gör på 30 år.

Storm the palace! 🍴🤑🍴

2025-10-28 15:23

Wow, I just heard the worst take on social media addiction: “The problem is that these companies controlling our brains are American and Chinese. It should be EU companies doing it.” Fash 101: instead of criticizing the corporate world, build solidarity with your own nation state’s corporations. Ugh no thanks!

2025-10-27 08:52

Gemini still has treasures:

2025-10-26 13:20

If Luke and Chewie had smartphones the Galactic Empire would’ve won.

2025-10-26 13:20

I dreamt that TVs and movies depicted phone use realistically. Like huge swaths of the episode just being people sitting next to each other on separate phones. Do not show pop ups of what’s on their screens like BBC Sherlock did. Instead just show them staring into their separate screens unhappily.

2025-10-24 23:20

I’ve been getting into more and viciouser flamewars lately. The more I hate being online, the more I hate being online. The frustration breeds impatience.

2025-10-24 21:18

Dom flesta svenska ord som kan uttalas på två sätt typ “lakrits” då är det ändå bara en minoritet som säger på det konstiga sättet. Utom “kex”. Där är det 50/50 eller var i alla fall det när jag läste om det här för över tio år sen. Och det är väldigt regionalt; jag har nästan aldrig träffat nån in real life som säger med mjukt k. Det är ett knepigt ord för det engelska ordet som vi lånat in har hårt k (“cakes”) men hur ska man på svenska skriva hårt k framför e eller ä? Det går ju inte. Kätting, kemi, kärlek, kela, kedja, käk—fonotaktiskt ska det ju vara mjukt! Och keramik, alla säger det med mjukt trots att det har inlånats från ett ord med hård k. Keratin brukar jag iofs säga med hårt (vet inte om det är rätt). Och namn som Kemal och Kerala oct Kelloggs men det är ju en helt annan sak än ord. Alltså jag tror inte jag skulle förstå om jag hörde mjukt kex, jag trodde dom skulle prata om chex mix eller checks all the boxes för vi och alla i vår lilla by sa alltid hårt kex men nu är jag som en flygande humla som tänker att men jag kan ju egentligen inte.

Gif är inte alls samma sak för g kan ofta vara hårt på engelska i ord som gift (“gåva”) och många andra. Giraffe är snarare utstickaren, låneordet. + det står för Graphics nånting nånting format. Ja jag och många andra blev förvånade när skaparen av formatet kom ut många år senare och sade att det skulle enligt honom sägas med mjukt g. Och gärna för mig men när jag talar spontant blir det ju med hårt g.

2025-10-23 21:16

Our chess house rules:

• Chess 960 setup (not 480).
• Kaufman draw rules (¼–¾ disadvantaging the person who got stalemated (i.e. can’t move), first got down to bare king (i.e. if I have king and you have king rook and I capture the rook I get the lower score), or first repeats a position for third time (situational superko). There’s no longer a fivefold rule: third time is automatic.
• Going beyond Kaufman’s proposal: for other draws, i.e. 50-move rule, 75-move rule, and draw by agreement, white gets ⅖ and black gets ⅗.

There’s a gazillion variants on “black should get more points for a draw” variants out there; I like these values because they fit nicely in between. ⅖ is better than ¼ but worse than ½. But they’re gonna come up once in a blue moon compared to the other draw types.