Hello

I'm Alex, a technologist from Calgary, Canada. This is my blog.

For information about myself & my philosophy, see the About, Design, and Values pages.

Miniposts are bookmarks, snippets of thought, and syndicated content from elsewhere.

Longform articles are below, sorted by date.

You may also peruse the archive.

Projects


(Almost) Everything You Need to Run a Blog


We’re living in the cyber dark ages. The primary way most people interact with the internet is through social media. This is the default space people not only listen to others, but also try to make their voices heard - which is sad, because social media isn’t very good for that.

It is liberating to have complete control of your own cyberspace. I’ve been running lagomor.ph, or some derivative of it, for almost ten years, and it’s been an incredibly fulfilling project - Without it, I would have missed out on countless opportunities to express myself and interact with interesting people - the number of friends I have made on account of this blog are countless.

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Ricotta Cheese is a PsyOp


I categorically refuse to believe anybody actually enjoys ricotta cheese. For those unfamiliar, this Italian cheese comes out of a mistaken way to boil milk in the Bronze age, and for some reason hundreds of years later, it’s still an ingredient people try to eat.

It’s tasteless, so all you really have to go off of is its texture, which is chewy, grainy, and offputting - it has the same consistency of curdled milk (because it is), except unlike curdled milk we’ve somehow been convinced we’re supposed to eat it.

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They Don't Make It like They Used To


Nostalgia for the past has supplanted our yearnings for the future, becoming the default marketing tool for corporations. Instead of asking ‘what’s new?’, they ask ‘what have we done before that you liked?’. This trend transcends marketing tactics, reflecting a destabilizing era of remakes and reboots. Crucially, nostalgia is a finite resource, and its exhaustion bears unknown consequences.

Jean Baudrillard’s notions of simulacra and simulation offer a valuable framework for understanding this phenomenon. In the post-postmodern era, the line between reality and representation has blurred into hyperreality, where simulations precede and replace the real.

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