ATTN: I like feedback even if it's just "hey bro I read your post" so feel free to send an email: keeganoneida at gee male

There's no maximum amount of emails I'm willing to receive. I don't consider them intrusive or formal or informal or really any way other than as a reasonable comment system.

Dec 11 2025

My ancient digital SLR camera arived! So much delight for < $100 already! I feel like I'm already learning a lot and I haven't even left the house with it. Got some great pictures of my kids, did some experiments with reasonable settings for indoor shots, tried my hand at post-processing.

I'll make it a point of taking some photos of things other than my family and post them here. One recommendation I saw elsewhere was to pick a class of mundane object (signs, cars, dogs, cats, birds, doors -- anything), and make it a point of going out in search of them as subjects. Since I'm assuming photography is going to be a typical 3-month interest, I'd like to come out of that three months with a rudimentary and workable compositional sense and the ability to develop negatives at home so that I can confidently shlep around my manual film camera and end up with a bunch of interesting analog artifacts that I can make artistic or documentary use of.

In other news, I can feel my preferred use of AI tools changing. It feels somewhat irrational at this point, but I am definitely backing off, reducing, using them as a last resort, feeling wistful about reading documentation, deliberately choosing a slower pace over fast fast vibey outcomes. Not entirely. And at work I still do a lot of "dump my problems onto the LLM", but even there it's shifting a bit. We'll see.

Dec 09 2025

The klezmer house show was of course not a big deal and any stress that I felt before the event was totally pointless.

There was no dancing, though! None of my fantasies, good or bad, came true. It was a very polite house show: snacks, a glass or two of wine, everyone seated. Another one of my friends was there by chance, so people I knew made up like a quarter of the attendees. I did some fretting on the way about whether to bring a bottle of wine. The invitation did say that I should feel free to bring my own...refreshments, which implied that I could bring wine. But what if they keep a kosher kitchen and I intrude on it with my treyf wine??? But what if everyone really wants wine and nobody keeps strictly kosher because this is a random klezmer show and most klezmer people I've met are very secular?

I decided to bring the wine. It was appreciated. The hosts weren't even Jewish, I don't think, so no kosher kitchen concerns.

==

Dishwasher needs minor repair. I have done this exact repair before. I attempt to fix it. I break the dishwasher.

Dev 08 2025

Tomorrow I've got a social event to go to: a klezmer house show. Is there dancing at a klezmer house show? Wife says: probably yes. What does one wear to a klezmer house show? Wife says: The same thing you've been wearing for the past two weeks. Will I have fun? Yes. Am I feeling anxious about it: YES KIND OF. NOT A LOT BUT ENOUGH TO WRITE ABOUT IT.

I remember when I was like 22 and single and lonely and I would be like IF I CANNOT GO OUT TONIGHT I WILL DIE. I WILL GO ANYWHERE. FOR GODS SAKE LETS GO OUT EVEN IF IT'S BORING PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE. And now I'm like: I WILL DIE IF I GO OUT BUT I MUST FORCE MYSELF. I KNOW IT WILL BE FUN BUT I WILL DIE.

I've got a really good social track record but social anxiety isn't rational. I can think of one absolute worst case social event in the past year and it went like this: after a Shabbat morning service at the synagogue, I hung around for the after-service eating and chatting and didn't recognize anyone other than the Rabbi, who I wanted to say hello to. He was talking to someone else and I failed to catch his eye and maybe awkwardly stood nearby for two heartbeats too many before moving on and having a random and pleasant conversation with someone else.

I've even been to like...a lot of klezmer events. I'm a good and confident and enthusiastic dancer. I'm going with a good friend. What the everliving fuck am I anxious about? "You're leaving the house and there are people there." Stupid anxiety.

Dec 07 2025

Really enjoyed a couple posts over in gopherspace that I thought I'd share. The first is a post that just details this person's offline-centric use of smartphones, which I found inspiring. Many off the applications were new or fresh-feeling to me (apps to ease the process of getting/browsing wikis and technical documentation, apps for offline navigation, etc), and I enjoyed imagining making using of them.

Offline-first android

The second post, by the same author, touches on a variety of topics related to poverty, tech use, a kind of pragmatic survivalism, and in general, the sort of mindset one might acquire in relation to ones current wealth having come from a background of poverty. I've lived a very charmed middle class life and I found her perspective enlivening. Shared it with my wife even, who was forced to read it in bombadillo and nearly destroyed the delicate arrangemnet of chomebook with in-browser terminal -> ssh -> tmux -> bombadillo pathway by swiping on the touchscreen. Lots of "press d for down! u for up! no, no! D FOR DOWN" lmao.

Thoughts on prepping for hard times

She's got all kinds of good stuff. I guess I'll post this third with no commentary:

How I use SDF in daily life

Dec 06 2025

Shavua Tov. I went to a Christmas party tonight and, like last year, got a little sloshed. Had a long enjoyable conversation alongside my wife with two other parents from our kids' school who had a sort of eerie-pleasant overlap with us in terms of relationship dynamics, introversion/extroversion, etc. I've been aware of them for awhile but tonight made it seem like we could all hang out on the regular and have fun. THOUGH THEY WERE JUST DRINKING FIZZY WATER, which makes me think they're...healthy. I'm not healthy. Well, I'm healthy-ish, but I'm just a little suspicious...morally suspicious...about the centrality of *health* in contemporary nice-liberal discourse. Anyway, this couple did not make me think about this on the spot, and lots of people of course have excellent reasons for not drinking and I have no ill feelings towards them whatsoever, but I'm going to talk about health now becuase it's on my mind and because I've already gotten started.

Health is good, but it's *a* good. A good among many goods. A prominent good. We should aim for health, assuredly. But it's absolutely not the only good, and I'm deeply suspicious that it's become the *primary* good among otherwise healthy nice liberals.

I am 100% willing to sacrifice my health -- and really, others' health -- for other goods. Even seemingly-trivial ones. Like, I don't think this is that shocking: I think the social good of having some drinks with some acquaintences and bonding and solidifying a human connection *easily* outweighs health. More controversially, I tend to think that a lot of nice-liberal healthy things like organic foods and avoiding plastics and stuff are given disproportionate weight against other goods. Like, your individual health is not that important. Eat conventional agriculture and give the difference to charity. Use plastics and give the difference to charity. Live in a city and breathe in some smog and don't buy a car. That's what I'd do.

I tend to think of this in religious terms. Like, people are reasonably like "there is no god", so they remove god from their heirarchy of goods. So far, so good. But because they don't have well-ordered minds, it sometimes happens that the next good in line is something like "don't die", which is bad. It's disordered. That's a terrible primary good. And if that's your primary good it's pretty straightforward to reason yourself into a health-centered, self-centered sorta life.

Anyway our nice acquaintences weren't doing that. My assumption is that they're great and have well-ordered minds. I'm just talking, here. This is just something I'm noticing or inferring or maybe just mind-reading about. But I'm pretty sure this is a preeminent contemporary ethical disorder.

Instead of obsessing about your individual health, I recommend studing moral philosophy and giving your money to charity.

Goodnight.

Dec 04 2025

Well I joined SDF last night and I think it'll serve the anti-loneliness purpose. Not sure it's even loneliness; I just want to be around people talking and doing stuff. The radio station on there (anonradio) is charming and has, like, open mics and quirky long-running shows and stuff.

I had been thinking I'd keep a parallel phlog on there that is less tied to my real world identity, but...so far all I can think to put in there feels like whining, so maybe not.

Feel like I've got a good thing going on in the smallweb! I've got around ten regular readers of this thing, I think. I've got a handful of people on Gemini I'm subscribed to, a handful of people on Gopher I'm keeping an eyeball on, and little projects percolating here and there.

I've been trying to run away from my digital life for a while now, but this recent smallweb interest has got me turning back. I still have no interest in social media or gaming or...anything that requires more than a terminal client, but there's a lot of interesting reframing going on in this space -- reframing software (yet again) as something tinkery, hackerish, pleasurable, magicalprosocial, and even occassionally countercultural.

Dec 03 2025

What is this feeling? Loneliness? I dunno. Feeling a little frantic this evening trying to find some kind of additional online spaces to exist in. I love this one and I want more of it, but it feels a little quiet moment-by-moment. I think I want some sort of IRC-like thing running on the side -- some sense that people are awake and alive and responsive. I guess I'll look into that now.

---

I think it's that I live such a contained little life like a lot of people these days that when things are a little socially off-kilter (wife in a bad mood, kids behaving this or that way, something off in the house, etc), it feels very destabilizing. I'm always here. I have no out of the house routines. Mostly it's good but sometimes it's bad. Tonight it's a little bad.

Dec 02 2025

Still feeling intensely stressed out, and it's making it hard to write here, although I have a kind of manic energy about everything else.

I wanted to talk about this newfound manic energy, because it's largely been a good thing. I've always been someone who goes through intense swings of interest, but I've also gradually been chilling out over the last decade and the swings have gotten more predicable and smaller and controllable.

But then back in August sometime I started doing pushups. Just a trivial amount of pushups. Like ten a day. I tracked them on beeminder with a small penalty if I failed. I found myself kind of enjoying watching the total sum of pushups go up and up. I bumped the required number to 20, 30, 40...now I'm at 70 a day, with weekends off! Once I hit sixty, which took a few months, I started seeing changes in my appearance.

I used to be a weightlifter, and I feel like I spent so much of my 20s struggling to maintain more than 3 months of momentum on lifting, because lifting is *hard*: The exercises are hard, you have to get off your ass and go to the gym, you have to change your diet, it takes a lot of time...but pushups as trivially easy. Throughout the day almost automatically now if I need to like stretch out after boring software engineering shit, I just drop and knock out twenty. I used to hate pushups! Now they feel great.

Ok, I have more to say about exercise, but really when I'm here to talk about is the unexpected side effects of something as simple as pushups: the intense swings of interest came rushing back. I'm here on Gemini because of it, for sure. I started juggling, which I'm guessing has its own cognitive side effects. I picked up photography. I'm writing every day. I learned Spencerian cursive. I'm just kinda kicking ass and looking good.

So, as a random middle aged *infuencer* on Gemini, my hot take is that everyone should start doing a few pushups every day and maybe take up juggling. Juggling is way better than those fidgit toys everybody is into these days, anyway.

This past week I'm also adding pullups, too. I suspect soon I'm going to become fairly intolerable.

Nov 30 2025

Since I am now 41 years old and have been getting overexcited about this or that language for twenty years now and have only really attained significant mastery in one, I have been employing all of the mental brakes I am capable of employing to stop myself from being interested in Danish after devouring On the Calculation of Volume the other day. Really good book but no thank you only one language family at a time please, brain.

Sometimes my brain whispers to me, though. It's like: You are currently only learning Hebrew in a kind of grammar-first, reading-first sort of way. If you picked up ANOTHER language and did it in a spoken-first, zero-grammar sort of way, you could do both without it slowing down your Hebrew. Doooo itttt.

This whispering part of my brain is cute and sweet and seductive so I let it watch a few videos of Danes being funny about Danish and then went back to my considered life.

Nov 29 2025

Finished reading The Giver to my daughter and started in on Number the Stars by the same author. Realized in discussing the novel with her that her hippie-ish school has essentially brainwashed her, morally speaking. I mean, she's nine. She is just barely edging into the age of reason. But she's unshakably willing to wish the extermination of all of humanity to save the environment. She's very clear about this. She doesn't care about animals, either. It's the trees she's worried about. I mean, I also am deeply concerned about climate change, kid! I didn't own a car until I was 39! I lived on a car-sharing, vegetable-growing commune in the woods for a decade! Ugh.

It's interesting because we're the sort of family that converses about moral issues together. I'm a vegan, and my kids know I'm a vegan out of a concern about animals experiencing pain. I give to charity, and my children have watched and discussed videos about poverty with me. I mean, on top of that, my kids are the usual sort of kids who howl about every sliver of perceived injustice against them. And they're human, as far as I know. So you'd think she would extend her empathy beyond trees. But ok. I assume it's temporary and fine and she's just developing and trying out her moral imagination and moral reasoning and seeing how far she can push me on it.

On top of this, the Descendents movies have brainwashed her into a kind of naive moral relativism and a naive belief that all immoral people believe themselves to be moral. I get that the naive good guys vs bad guys trope is *also* bad, but it's possible to explore moral disagreement without papering over the fact that irrational and violent hatred exists in the world.

I should probably do some sort of pre-writing warmup thing if I'm gonna be writing dead sober. This took me forever and it's only a tiny amount of writing.

Nov 26 2025

Suprising payoff from learning photography: I'm a little bit less of a homebody. Typically I get a little grouchy about going anywhere or doing anything, but now I have a thing I can do when I'm out and about that exercises my intellect and creativity and gives me a readymade possible-conversation topic with anyone. So that's neat. It's also a super hip accessory. Such a sleek retro metallic tank of a camera.

That said, I bit the bullet tonight and bought a very old digital SLR camera. The plan is to use it as a transition tool to the fully manual 1970 Minolta I've been using lately. Kids in photography classes back in the day typically had access to darkrooms, so the feedback loop was relatively short, but not only do I not have a darkroom, I have to mail off my film at great expense and wait almost two weeks before I see any results. I'm fine with the waiting part *in general*, but not at this early stage where I'm literally just trying to make sure I am pushing the right buttons and twisting the right knobs.

That said, today I felt super cool shooting what turned out to be a 26 year old roll of film in my 55 year old camera.

So far my vacation has largely consisted of obsessive thoughts around photography, learning shorthand (for the second time -- this time for realsies), and drinking Old Fashioneds. Pretty good vacation. I'm getting pretty good Hebrew in there too, but mostly review. I did officially finish memorizing the entire vocab list in the back of my Hebrew textbook today, so that's cool.

Nov 24 2025

How did newspapers, prior to computers, organize all of their content for the day? Movable type? How about with photographs? Like papers in the 1950s. In my imagination I can see black and white videos of these big rotating-drum kinda machines that spit out infinite newspapers, but I have no idea how they work. It must be some technological step in between movable type and modern printing, but I guess I don't even understand how modern printing works. I guess my ignorance begins immediately following the invention of movable type. I'm going to dwell in this ignorance for a little while.

I got to thinking about this today while I was taking some photos and imagining making a normatively-analog zine (i.e, as analog as my budget and skills allow). I was like...how would I arrange these photos on a page with text? Probably with a typewriter, scotch tape, and a copying machine. But surely newspapers in 1950 did not affix photographs with tape/glue/etc to a master copy. Or maybe they did!?!? You see where this is going.

Nov 23 2025

Status: Two Old Fashioneds

I stumbled on a way to develop black and white film in a way that my toxin-averse wife approves of: Caffenol.

I would really like the process from taking a photo to getting a print to be entirely analog, but for now this seems like it'll save money (at least $10 a roll) and speed up the process (by at least a week) of getting actual photos back. Maybe one day I'll have a real darkroom and I can do all the steps myself.

Mentally my interest in photography doesn't fall into my usual three-month obsession loop, but maybe I'm fooling myself: I certainly don't expect to maintain a *deep* interest past three months or so, but overall I think of this as an extension of a long-running and unlikely-to-peter-out interest in "doing more analog stuff" as a response to the world being consumed by a digital, algorithmic, AI order (notably, I am complicit in this, but I'm one foot in, one foot out).

I like that it's messy and chemical. I like that there will be happy accidents and entire rolls full of failure. I like that some of those failures will be precious artifacts that I or my children or my wife will peer at and desire more from. I like that this bulky half-century old mechanical contraption still functions -- not only functions, but functions with precision: it's fucking magical -- it's amazing how acclimated we are to images that we take the process for granted. At some point in our history we developed a technology that mimics our eyes. It's like a temporary ensoulment: this contraption and this film for the briefest moment mimic our minds, but we can push it, pull it, stretch it, shake it -- we can tamper with the ensoulment such that the process of sight is brought under our conscious command. It's wild. I'm not going to convince you. But that's how it sits with me now.

And the process of getting the photos ennobles us. There's so many choices to make, and so many of those choices are in terms wholly unfamiliar to me. And they organically interact! It's so messy! They are not orthagonal! What am I talking about? The three main choices you make when taking a photo: the ISO rating of your film, how open the aperture of the lens is (f-stop), and how long you keep that aperture exposed to light (shutter speed). You want your photo to be just bright enough, right? Not too dark, not too light? Well, open up that aperture! Let in more light! Well -- if you do that, you're ALSO changing a different property: how wide the range of things you're focusing on is. Ok well, don't let in more light. Take a longer shot! Slower shutter speed! Well, if you do that, you're ALSO changing a different property: how things in motion appear. Make it too slow and you introduce motion blur.

You already know this and I'm saying too much. But it's just so different than the normal processes I work with professionally as a software developer. We have more control. There is less mess. You can adjust variables without affecting other variables.

The chaos is pleasant and I encourage you to add more chaotic processes to your life.

Also donate all your money to charity.

Nov 22 2025

I started reading The Giver to my nine year old daughter tonight after holding off on reading it as long as I possibly could (I think I made it about a year), and she was like YOU MUST NOT STOP READING and TELL ME WHAT RELEASE IS and WHAT ASSIGNMENT DOES JONAH GET etc. I think she's still a *little* too young for it but she is a voracious reader. More voracious than I was, and I was kind of insatiable at nine.

This Shabbat I thought about: shorthand, memory-palace-based storytelling games, sci-fi novels involving technologically advanced Orthodox Jews able to maintain both strict Halachic observance but with such technological sophistication that they were roughly indistinguishable from non-Jews.

I wonder in general if memory palaces are either 1) already a thing in Orthodox communities or 2) would be a thing if I sold it the right way. Why do I wonder this? Well, one traditional Shabbat observance that I sometimes observe myself is to avoid writing. This is a pretty fascinating practice for a nerd, especially since Shabbat is *also* traditionally a time of study. So you're led to things like: well, what other modes of study *are* there that don't involve notetaking? Are they effective? Effective for what? The same ends as notetaking? Different ends?

But sufficiently advanced memory palace practices obviate the need for notetaking entirely. We have accounts of medieval scholars doing mental composition and notetaking over weeks and months and years and only commiting their ideas to writing at a very late stage. When I'm doing a writing-free Shabbat and a briliant idea enters my brain, I just generate an image in my Shabbat-idea palace and it's always still there Saturday at Sundown.

But this raises the question: Is a memory palace a kind of writing? Certainly Aristotle and his mnemonic heirs thought so: the standard metaphor from Aristotle all the way through the medieval era is of artificial memory as a kind of wax imprint upon the mind. A wax imprint would absolutely be a form of writing for observant Jews, and Aristotle (maybe surprisingly?) is a major influence on Jewish thought, so maybe this has already been decided for centuries in Jewish law and I'm treading no new ground at all.

It would be interesting for there to be legal restrictions on *thought*, during Shabbat or otherwise. There's certainly a multitude of restrictions on speech. And memory palaces are at least as deliberate as speech, if deliberation is the key critereon.

In other news, I'm on vacation for a whole week! May I read interesting things and come up with interesting things to share with you.

Shavua Tov.

Nov 21 2025

Shabbat Shalom.

One traditional Jewish thing that I have enjoyed introducing my kids to is giving to charity before sundown on Fridays. Traditionally observant Jews don't handle money during Shabbat, so daytime Friday is the ideal time. I'm a big fan of GiveDirectly and a portion of my income goes to them automatically, but to get my kids in the habit of being charitable, we do a small once a week donation that they get to press the buttons for on the phone. We also watch the occassional video that they put out, talk about the insane wealth that we have relative to many people in the world, and think about our obligation to be of direct use to those who have less.

As a religious person I actually don't have strong ideas about God. Typically when God-related thoughts enter my brain they quickly translate into charitable compulsions, which I think is a pretty desirable outcome.

Have a nice Friday! Give away your money!

Nov 20 2025

Not that many years ago, I got it into my head to do "no coat November" or something like that. It was an idea that hit on two important streams in my consciousness: the desire to look sexy and the desire to be a badass.

I think I had read somewhere that persistent cold exposure develops a novel form of fat in one's body that...requires high caloric expenditure to maintain? So you can get skinnier? Something like that. So ok, I can be svelte, I'm on board so far. But also I read that the cold stops being so painful -- partly due to this special special form of fat, but also due to just being more of a badass. Like I said, being a badass -- I'm in.

You do no-coat November by just not wearing a coat in November unless it would be actually harmful to not wear a coat. Like, is it raining? Wear a friggin coat. Don't die. Is it just cold out? It actually takes a long time before you get hypothermia. so NO COAT. I lived someplace where I did a lot of short-distance walks between neighboring buildings, so, tops, I'd be out of doors for 45 minutes or so.

On long walks, I noticed all the things I expected: cold-pain becomes an easy thing to focus mindfulness on, so I did so. And eventually the cold sensations transformed and I felt attuned to a kind of inner warmth as my skin numbed. I also began to sort of dreamily consider that this is a form of classic training for death: dying will likely be a cold experience. Or at least it seems plausibly like it will be, what do I know. And so in allowing myself to be pained and cold I was able to have a quasi-spiritual experience. A closeness with death. A closeness with God? It gets quiet when you're that cold.

I didn't get any sexier and I didn't do no-coat November after the first year -- I think in the long run I've become more sensitive about not wanting to be cold. But I still wistfully remember some of those cold walks and that sense of death, inner heat, and God.

Nov 19 2025

Sometimes I think I should cancel my New Yorker subscription but then sometimes I arch my eyebrows and order novels on the strength of clever book review subtitles alone.

---

I have an unusual obsession or mental tic about fundamentals. I'm not exactly sure where it originated, but it's been with me for a couple decades now. Studying Latin definitely fed it -- there's some idea that a mastery of Latin and Greek opens up a magical store of riches, both in terms of understanding some core historical/intelletual arcs and in understanding English. It's not wrong, I guess? I certainly haven't done anything close to *mastering* Latin, and I have only a scrap of Greek, but I do think I see English differently than other people, and I do think I have a certain quirky perspective on European history. It's all logicians and grammarians and theologians, right?

But it's not just classics. Like, it comes up in software engineering too. Instead of wanting to build things, I want to toy around with different programming paradigms. Logic programming? Cool. Functional programming? Cool. Stack programming? Cool.

But it's not just programming! Like, with writing: The strongest repeated urges for me are to cease writing actual content and instead devote myself to, like, rhetorical exercises.

I need to prepare myself for...something! I'm not sure what. It has occurred to me with some frequency that I'll be dead soon enough. Four decades? Five decades? Surely I've arrived at some kind of ability at reading, writing, programming, etc. Surely I can just read, write, and program!

I guess it's probably trauma from being a college dropout. It's a useful sort of tic. I don't hate the tic. The tic provides. I'm just getting old and I can't prepare forever and maybe I'm FINE JUST THE WAY I AM. lol.

Anyway, here's an exercise in rhetoric from today: converting the first sentence or two of the first fable of Aesop into iambic...tetrameter!

A lion sleeping soundly snores

and dreams of feasts of blood and gore

while swiftly scamp'ring mouse ignores

the carnivore beneath him

Nov 18 2025

Work stress reaching a local peak. Maybe it'll chill out with the holidays? But if it keeps up I need to reinstitute some sanity-maintenance routines. The best one is inspired by the maxim (not my invention):

"SLACK IS A SAUNA"

That is to say, Slack is ok and pleasant and possibly healthful for short periods, but if you stay in there too long you will dehydrate and fall over and require your friends to resucitate you with ice water and gentle calming words of encouragement.

In periods where I have heads-down "deep work" to do (which isn't always), I have sometimes successfully done a deep work/check Slack/deep work/check Slack cycle that radically reduces my time on there without anyone noticing.

But a lot of the time my role is genuinely to keep all the small trivial fires from blazing up, and in that case I can't really stay off Slack. I need some pattern that maintains sanity. Maybe these things people talk about called "breaks"? I'm bad at breaks. I guess I could leave the room, but as a work from home family dude, leaving my office means trading one set of constant responsibilities for another.

A second desk with no computer? A book reading chair? Lay on the floor?

ED: Ooh, I had an idea. I could put money on it with beeminder. Something smallish but meaningful like 45 minutes off Slack per workday. I set a timer that has a beeminder connection whenever slack is off (or I could code up an script that detects this on my work laptop?), and if I fail to take 45 minutes off, I am penalized like five bucks. Sounds good sounds good. I'll set that up today. Beeminder is great.

Nov 16 2025

Nescio cur sed velim etiam hic scribere latine. In hac robotorum aetate,

latine scribere minime ad verba celanda iuvat. Homo potest sententias meas

in LLM ponere et -- mirabile visu -- reveniunt statim in lingua sua. Suppongo

exstare alias latinae scribendae rationes. Lingua ipsa pulchra. Homines

mihi amabiles in ea delectant. Fortasse scribendo eos attraham.

Mox mox etiam loquendo latine ad verba celenda non sufficiet: omnes

habebunt illos pisces mirabiles in auribus positos qui linguas omnes

sciunt et verba mea murmurare sine mora in quamlibet linguam.

Sed cur, rogas, cur velim tam vehementer celare verba mea? Nugarum plenus

ego. Nemo verbis meis curat.

Suspicor parvum puerum in me latere qui iam occultis rebus delectatur.

--

Good lord LLMs are atrocious at terminal user interfaces. Was trying to vibe code my way into a friendly, config-free NNTP client aimed at local-only bulletin board on the tilde host I mentioned yesterday, but it just failed over and over again. User interfaces aren't really my thing so I don't really know the space. Playing around with python's Textual tonight. Kinda displeased at python being my cozy language even though I don't like anything about the language in a technical sense. People probably feel that way about English, too.

---

My daughter got me to watch Descendents today and it was awful. It got a 90% on rottentomatoes! I feel uncalibrated. Maybe I'm just in a cranky mood. Usually if the critics like it, I like it.

It was also filmed in that way that completely prevents me from suspending my disbelief. I don't know how to characterize it but it's that thing that started happening once high-def became commonly/cheaply available. I hear that young people don't notice this but it makes me feel like I'm watching an elaborate home video instead of a movie.

Nov 15 2025

I kinda like not linking to http sites for now, so I'm not gonna link it, but I was inspired by an article about the founding of tilde club a couple days ago, and I ended up getting about zero sleep and overcompensating for it, and the outcome is that I put together my very own tilde style host for me and my friends (i.e, "a boring unix server hosted on the internet"), with all the usual amenities like:

I'm into it as an alternative to discord. A private "social network" for nerdy friend groups.

--

I did a good job this Shabbat with doing the prepwork beforehand (I made a beeminder goal for it). This prepwork only amounted to premaking pizza dough on Thursday so I wouldn't have to make food in the middle of Saturday. But that was enough to make a big difference! I ended up having a much-closer-to-fully-observant Shabbat experience. I still ended up writing a little bit with my kids, tidying, and making coffee, but otherwise it was very much a classic "not imposing my creative will upon the world and instead basking in the world as it now exists" Shabbat. Got a call from the Rabbi about an hour before sundown on Friday that included a Shabbat Shalom. I try to collect Shabbat Shaloms because I am a completely serious and not-ridiculous convert in need of validation, but that's my first rabbinic one.

--

I got three rolls of black and white film in the mail today and I'm gonna shoot me some pictures tomorrow. It's gonna be great. Also did you know that you can get big honking heavy 4X or more zoom lenses from 1980 that only work on old manual cameras and they're super cheap and in good condition? It turns out that the market of "agéd hipsters with agéd manual cameras" is quite small, actually, and there's a lot of old camera equipment flooding that market.

Nov 13 2025

Beers: 2

My very first roll of film got developed! I didn't know what I was doing, but I took notes on exposure, f-stop, and time. The photos I thought would turn out good turned out totally underexposed, and the photos I thought would turn out awful turned out beautiful. Some of them stunning. I got a few really beautiful and professional photos of my wife almost by accident. She is pleased with me. Much more rewarding than my usual completely random interests.

The actual prints are on the way.

I'm totally sold on the process. So much about it is commendable; so much deliciously delayed gratification:

1) You take the photo but can't see what you took. What mystery!

2) You send off the film in the mail. Has it arrived yet??? IT HAS! So exciting!

3) It arrived yesterday...is it developed yet? IT IS! OMG THEY EMAILED ME PHOTOS.

4) When will I get the prints? Surely tomorrow? How far away is the lab, anyway? NOT FAR, RIGHT!?

There's apparently some kind of system one can use to mentally calculate f-stop and exposure settings based on sunlight/etc, but some very helpful youtuber said you can train yourself in this by doing the calculation and then checking with a light meter. The youtubers use light meter apps but apps make me feel gross so I'll go see how expensive actual lightmeters are. Checking...Checking...Pretty cheap! I should order one tonight.

Nov 12 2025

beers: 2

Random interest that nobody has heard of: the topics of invention.

Imagine a very plausible scenario: you are compelled to give a speech before a large audience on a subject of current interest. Let's say the subject is *distraction*. You have one hour to come up with something meaningful and entertaining to say. You are not allowed to use notes. That would be crude.

The process by which you come up with something to say is the process of invention. You may be naturally good at it. You may naturally suck at it. You may have read many books about distraction. You may not have. Whatever you've got, you've got. What would this process look like for you? I might go for a walk or a run and let the subject roll around in my brain. I might jot down whatever ideas strike me. I might read about the subject or around the subject. But you only have one hour! You gotta make it quick.

The above paragraph describes something like NATURAL invention. Natural invention is boring. Everybody does it. The interesting thing is ARTIFICIAL invention. Artificial invention is a mental process we can go through to come up with something to say about a given subject. And the way you do it is to consider your subject in a variety of different, set ways. These different ways are called the *topics* (from the Greek "topos": place). Let's do that now. Here's part of a typical list of topics:

Definition, division, genus, species, contraries, similarity, cause, effect, antecedent, consequent.

I was taught to use this kind of list as a series of questions, so let's do that. Feel free to skip forward once it's clear what we're getting at here:

Having memorized such a list of topics, these questions take you only a moment to run through. Certain questions stand out as particularly juicy; maybe you haven't thought of them before. Sometimes they're grammatically odd or provocative (e.g, "what is the opposite of a 'particularly juicy' question?").

To me in this case perhaps I'd run with, "What things are *like* distraction, but *aren't* distraction?" That's an interesting topic.

You can leave now but I'm just gonna live blog that one, since I'm not actually sure, two beers in, what those things are. I pulled that from the genus/species/similarity/difference topic. So let's use that. What kind of thing is distraction? It's a state of mind or a thing that causes one to be in that state of mind. I'm more interested in the former. What other states of mind are there in that vicinity? I dunno: attentive, determined, worried, anxious, fretting, calm.

Why are those all in that vicinity? Well, they all relate to attention. Distraction is characterized by an involuntary giving-up of control of attention. Something like that. So some other nearby ideas are going to shift those adjectives in the definition around:

How about...VOLUNTARY giving-up of control of attention: This is like...sitting down to watch a movie, or...taking hallucinagens, or...drinking two beers! This feels very adjacent, and it's interesting to explore, because I don't think we have a word for it in English. Do we?

---

Anyway, that's invention. I think there's orders of magnitude more subtlety possible here -- I think the traditional use of artificial invention is not going to lapse into "riffing on my chosen topic" quite as quickly as I did, but I think it gives you an idea of what invention *is*.

The next step in your speech would be to mentally compose it, but I'll have to go over that later in another two-beer treatise on things nobody cares about anymore.

If you're this far, one fun thing about the above is that it's hard to talk about in English, because it's built into our language: "In the first PLACE, in the second PLACE...", "our TOPIC today is...", "In this CASE..." [topics were typically used in legal training/procedure], etc. I had to keep saying "subject" instead of "topic".

Nov 11 2025

I've spent a lot of years resisting the style of study that brought me to a strong level of proficiency in Latin: the much-maligned (for good reason!) grammar-translation approach. My first attempt at learning Latin, before I knew anything about second language acquisition research, before I had ever encountered youtubers trying to sell me on this or that method, was just to grind conjugation and declension charts on a chalkboard I drilled into my $200 a month dilapidated shared basement apartment wall.

It isn't for everyone, but I loved it.

For vocab, before I had ever heard of Anki, I used an analog system reminicent of it: One box for new cards or cards I suck at, one box for cards I'm pretty good at, one box for archive. Fluidly shift cards between them as feels right. Always review the first box.

There's a certain romance to it. Generations of schoolchildren down through the ages suffered through almost this exact method. If you have the stomach for this kind of romance, I think it puts you in a good spot to hit the ground running for the extensive reading that everyone is always yammering about (myself included). It gives you a genuine and pleasurable sense of mastery to be able to look at a verb form and be like: oh yeah, that's the second person plural subjunctive passive pluperfect in the third conjugation. That's power, folks.

Not everyone should take this approach. I in fact don't recommend it to anyone who doesn't spontaneously become aroused by verb charts. But I'm starting to think that -- for me -- I should stop resisting this approach with Hebrew.

The Hebrew verb charts are significantly more scary than Latin. There's more classes of verbs in general, and (as you may know), the endings are not inflected in particular, you just stuff sounds around core consonants. With Latin it's like am-avi am-avisti am-avit am-avimus am-vistis am-averunt -- easy peasy. Root + ending. With Hebrew it's SHaMaRti SHaMaRta SHaMaRte SHaMaR SHaMRa -- omg the pain ow my poor Indo-European brain.

But I gotta do it. I can't stop myself. I'm copying out the charts. I'm copying them right now. I'm leaving right now to go copy them. Bye.

Nov 10 2025

I'm doing a bad job of getting through novels lately at this tail end of my year of novels, but I am completely awash in books. Looking around me:

There's a few others but I think those are my focus right now.

Also my cursive handwriting is beautiful already after teaching myself Spencerian cursive a few months ago, and today I picked a print script to mimic. Pretty plain but nicer and less cramped than my habitual script. I use cursive for most things but it's nice to have print as an option too.

Nov 09 2025

Not enough people have added LaTeX tools to their terminal-centric belt. It's a small superpower to be able to churn out fully-justified text with simple but beautiful typesetting. Minimal effort, too. Mostly I just use Overleaf.com when I'm feeling too lazy to do the full LaTeX setup on whatever machine I'm working on.

Nov 05 2025

Had a meeting with my Rabbi today. If all goes according to plan I should be officially Jewish before the new year. Feeling very :-O

Nov 03 2025

I've had a manual 35mm SLR camera in a box for about ten years. Never used it. An overgenerous acquaintance handed it to me when I expressed the smallest interest in photography. I got it out last week and realized it needed cleaning, so I ordered a cleaning kit, which arrived tonight. I *think* I didn't destroy it in the process of cleaning. The viewfinder still seems to have a bunch of dirt in it, but I think it's in a portion of the camera that isn't photographically relevant (though it does make focusing more difficult).

I'm gonna give it a whirl tomorrow with a roll of B&W film, take some notes, send it off to be developed, and see if it's worth holding onto.

I'm more interested in crappy photography than good photography, so as long as the images are sharp/not smudgy, I'll be happy. Though I guess if I start getting beautiful shots of my kids with unfortunate imperfections I might be motivated to get a not-busted camera. We'll see.

Nov 02 2025

I was having a conversation with an old friend a few weeks ago, and we were having the usual conversation about how we're completely dehabituated from ordinary social engagement and feel way too comfortable in our little tiny familial cocoons to venture forth, we who a decade ago were almost comically sociable, flitting all over the state, sometimes in a single evening, mixing it up in bars, house parties, wandering around in the streets. Anyway we were talking about this, and the also-typical conversation around alcohol-as-social-crutch arose, and I found myself thinking about it very differently than I used to.

I spent a couple years of my thirties sober. Even before that time, I still held sober socializing -- sober partying -- to be the normative ideal: alchohol is objectively poison, and even if we're ok with that, there's many obvious downsides to drinking: for me, the haziness of drunken memories and the lack of congruence between "meeting someone" while drunk and knowing someone while sober.

But in the midst of this exuberant (drunken) conversation with my friend, I found myself speaking differently: "Well dammit we should just get drunk and socialize, then! If that's what it takes to break us of this mushy cozy homebodiness that so many of us share!" And I think this is basically true even after a few weeks of sober reflection. Sobriety can still be some kind of normative ideal, but pragmatically speaking we need to get the fuck out there and be human, and if IPA is the way, so be it. L'chaim!

Oct 31 2025

Environmental concerns around LLM usage never get me riled up enough to change my behavior, but it turns out aesthetic concerns do. I wanted to copy quotes from my gemini browser but theres no copy functionality in it, so I just had to copy using the terminal copying funxtionality, which introduces all kinda of whitespace artifacts.

My instinct these days is to just paste that into an LLM and say "fix this", but I was just reading a rant on here about the absurd amount of network activity and computational respurces this requires, and I was moved to try a more elegant local solution using ordinary unix tools. I know that this description sounds like a concern about energy use but mentally it's more like the distinction between using a Rube Goldberg contraption to screw in a screw vs just getting a screwdriver. It felt less silly and more beautiful.

Ended up needing to bust out a hex editor because one of the odd characters was a unicode whitespace character that wasn't getting touched by my ASCII-chauvinist sed usage. So that was fun.

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