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.
All Posts
Aug 2024
Aug 07 2024Ricotta Cheese is a PsyOp
Jul 2024
Jul 10 2024They 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.
May 2024
May 07 2024The Incredible Power of Oil & Steel
There is Teflon in your bloodstream.1 Dupont knew about the toxicity of their chemicals since as far back as 1976, and to this day fight responsibility for their part in creating a ubiqitous chemical that does not naturally deteriorate. 2 The chemicals used in the production of Teflon (PFOAs and PFOs) were finally deemed toxic enough that DuPont, and the 13 other producers of it, don’t make it anymore - and have replaced it with New Teflon, and new chemicals.
Apr 2024
Apr 18 2024Three Dimensions - An Analysis
Marman & Borins “Three Dimensions” was a tri-installation pop-minimalist art exhibition open at Contemporary Calgary until March 17th, 2024, composed of three mini installations: Balancing Act, THX2020, and ABCD. We wanted the viewer to walk away with ideas that we didn’t even think of when creating the work Jennifer Marman All three installations were interesting, but “Balancing Act”, the first of the three, was most striking to me, and I would like to walk you through my own interpretation of it, filtered through the lens of my own biases and thought process.
Mar 2024
Mar 26 2024Changing Grocery Shopping Habits
It is easy to forget how recent the phenomenon of the modern grocery store actually is - it only dates back to 1916, when the first Piggly Wiggly was opened in Memphis, Tennessee. Before that, grocers operated as “over the counter”, as in you would walk up to the counter at the front of the store, and ask the clerk to retrieve whatever quantity of items you actually needed, instead of wander around the store with a basket and select what you wanted from the shelves.
Feb 2024
Feb 12 2024Skiff - Or: Why Venture Capital is Bad for You
😵💫 Warning: This Diatribe was written in anger, but contains grains of truth Around a year ago, I decided to shutdown my self-hosted email service after running it for about ten years. My choice in doing such was simply cost related - for the scale of email I was processing, it was not viable to run my own servers to do as such, accounting for time in maintenance and ensuring deliverability.
Jan 2024
Jan 22 2024Daily Carry 2024
I maintain a living document called my things list, where I track all the different tools and such that I use in my daily life. I try to update this when I remember to, throughout the year, but I also thought it might be interesting to track how my daily carry changes over time. So, here is what I usually have in my pockets as of the start of 2024.
Jan 01 2024Resolutions 2024
Wow. What a year. There were many challenges and I accomplished little. The irony that it was the year of the rabbit is not lost on me. I’d like to thank all my friends and various associates for being a guiding light this year, as it would have been a lot more harrowing to do this one alone. Anyways, good riddance - here’s an outline of what I intend to accomplish by the end of this year.
Oct 2023
Oct 17 2023Digital Minimalism: Kyocera 902KC
In August of this year, I deleted Twitter off of my phone, after what I found to be the final straw after months of garbage policy changes enforced by the rich egg who now owns the site. While I have been using a minimal smartphone for years - that is to say, a smartphone with as few apps as I “felt possible” (more on that later) - what I found after deleting my main digital narcotic was that instead of spending less time on my phone as I expected, I was instead spending just blankly staring at my phone before either reading the news or finding some other way to waste time.
Oct 12 2023Laundry & The Responsibility of Search Engines
I’d like to take you on a journey through the world of scams, laundry, and search engines. In 2016, Foldimate, a California based startup, showed the world a laundry folding robot - it was the size of a washing machine, with a slot in the top for garments that would be mechanically folded and then passed down into a tidy stack at the bottom. I watched Foldimate with great interest, for you see, of all the daily chores of life that one must accomplish, folding laundry is the one I hate the most, put off the longest, and have tried to - mostly failing - hack my way out of for decades.
Aug 2023
Aug 22 2023The Death of the Search Engine
In the early days of Google and Yahoo the best hack for getting your website to the top of rankings was Keyword Stuffing. You’d make the font blend in with the background and jam in as many relevant (or in many cases completely irrelevant, depending on your intent) keywords as you possibly could. Your users couldn’t see them, but search engines could, and they’d push you up the rankings, since with so many keywords the website in question must be super relevant to what you’re looking for.
Jan 2023
Jan 24 2023Fun with Hyperlocal Data
I’ve been drawn to the idea of having many tiny sensors around my home intermittently collecting data points about all sorts of things - the Lumen measurement of our bedroom at night, the noise of the street below us, the AQI of our kitchen. This was mostly a pipedream until Pimoroni came out with a series of wireless monitors with all sorts of sensors that use a Raspberry Pi PICO to send the data to an endpoint of your choosing.
Dec 2022
Dec 15 2022Bimonthly? Update - December 15th, 2022
As with most anything I’ve tried to start as a habit, these update posts have become far less then routine. Not to say I haven’t done anything worth writing about - I’m just incredibly lazy. Anyways, here’s what’s up: What I’m Working On I’ve installed a number of Pimoroni Enviro sensors around the home. It’s been great being able to retrieve hyperlocal weather and environment data to do with as I see fit.
Nov 2022
Nov 30 2022Batman Is Kind of Strange as a Concept
Have you ever really sat down and thought about Batman? I had a surplus of spare time on my hands recently, so I went back and played through Batman: Arkham City. When it originally came out, people consistently told me it was good, but I never got around to playing it because I just never cared about superhero comics or any other type of cape media. It’s a middling game - lot’s of time wasting minigames - but I’m not here to elaborate on the game much further, just use it as a tool to examine how weird Batman is as a character.
Nov 15 2022Mastodon Is Too Heavy for Its Own Good
💀 Warning: This Article Is Poorly Written With the ongoing collapse of Twitter, there has been a lot of talk about the Fediverse, and primarily Mastodon, which in spite of it probably not wanting to be, is the flagship in the ActivityPub fleet. I want to preface this by saying that I think Mastodon is really great software from the user side. It’s a very powerful tool and deserves all the credit it gets for it’s UI, it’s filtering features, and it’s very in-depth profile settings.
Nov 13 2022Weekly Update - November 13th, 2022
As some of you are probably aware, I have the habit of going on two cyclical “kicks”, every year. Right now I’m going through a health-kick, which means I’m going to try a bunch of self-improvement type things until I forget I was doing them. Anyways, I’ve been seeing Headspace ads everywhere lately, so as a form of core rejection of their business model, I’ve been meditating on my own.
Nov 10 2022Photography, Fall 2010
While cleaning, I discovered an undeveloped roll of Ilford Delta 100. I have not shot that film stock for a very long time. I estimate that I took these photos around ~2010. This was when I was just beginning to experiment with film photography as a medium. I know I took them on my Nikon FE, but at the time it had no batteries in it, so I shot all of these on the Mechanical 90 shutter speed.
Nov 09 2022Weekly Update - November 9th, 2022
Trying something new here today. With the recent Twitter fiasco going on I started re-evaluating what I get out of using social media, and condensed it down into two things: I like watching awful people argue with each other I like keeping up with what my friends are up to, and tell them what I’m up to. Number two is the important one here - I only care about particular things my friends are into.
Sep 2022
Sep 28 2022Travelogue to the Regular Locations of My Dreams
I have noticed a pattern in my dreams. There are places that I dream, that remain consistent, that have no equivalence in the waking world. When I dream them, I can navigate to them, and am confident in where they are located, despite the fact that their location changes from dream to dream. Frequently they are places in the cities and towns I’ve grown up in, but not always. Often times I’ll forget their familiarity until I dream of them again - so I’ve written this travelogue to document them; mainly for myself, since for the most part others are uninterested in what other people dream.
Aug 2022
Aug 11 2022Neubrutalism: A Consideration, and Ruleset
I was recently investigating gumroad and was quite pleased with their new design system. I liked how all their features were summed up as simple taglines (“Go from zero to $1”, as an example), and how the vibrant color pallet drew me between each explanitory diagram. At the time, I googled “Gumroad design scheme” and came up empty with a name for it. However, weeks later, I noticed Figma did a similar design for their own website.
Jun 2022
Jun 13 2022Permashortlinks & Cloudflare Webworkers
I’ve been investigating more deeply about Indieweb, namely their idea of a permashortlink - put succinctly, it is inevitable that shortlinking providers will either Fold, or Deprecate underused links. This means that relying on them - and they are awfully convenient - is a net negative to the longevity of any web content you produce - and we’ve already seen it happen. The Indieweb solution to this deprecation problem is, of course - to roll your own.
May 2022
May 29 2022Photography, Winter 2021
These are a collection of photos from last Christmas, winter 2021. They were taken in a single afternoon at the same location - the beach located in Mill Bay, Victoria. All were shot on my Nikon FE2 with a 50mm Series E lens, on Ilford HP5+ Black & White Film, pushed to 1600 ISO. Mill Bay, South Angle Mill Bay, North Angle Cold Water, Hard Rocks Seagull, Seeking Roadside Memorial
May 26 2022I Added Indieweb Support
I stumbled across Indie Web today, and I think it’s a neat idea. Essentially, it’s a set of philosophies and toolsets to allow indie websites to communicate amongst each other, establish a standard for using your domain as an identity, and a way for websites to parse html as rss feeds. Webmention is the most interesting out of all of their various projects, which is essentially a modern replacement for pingbacks, if you remember those - I certainly did not.
May 24 2022Blogging, Updates
I stopped updating this blog after two posts for a couple reasons: I enjoyed setting up the website more then I did writing for it - I created the perfect blog in terms of reading it (personally, you may debate this), but paid no attention to how I was going to write for it, and editing Markdown files is just enough of a PITA that I wanted to avoid doing it (subconciously or otherwise)
Mar 2021
Mar 14 2021The Bedroom Speaker Conundrum
I would like to have speakers in my bedroom. Currently, my receiver has two bookshelf speakers that are loud enough for the whole common area of our apartment, but it would be nice to listen to quieter music while I’m reading in bed. This post is to outline the two main solutions I’ve come up with. Number 1 - Speaker Wire & Passives It seems fairly simplistic to run speaker wire from the receiver into our bedroom, but since we’re renting the flat, it would actually be fairly complicated to run the wire in a non-intrusive, visually appealing way.
Feb 2021
Feb 24 2021The ListenBrainz Widget
A big feature I wanted on this blog was the ability for people to see what music I was listening to right now; and you can see the finished results on the header of this page. This blog is written in Hugo, which means unlike traditional blog engines, it renders the pages server-side, flat file - no database. These posts are actual MD files. This means that getting something to update on page load is not possible in plain HUGO - as far as is my understanding of the tool; which is limited!
Feb 2018
Feb 09 2018Utilizing IRC & DCC As a Filesharing Medium
The concept of Filesharing (and digital piracy) has been around since before even the basic days of the internet - where floppy disks, and, even earlier, rolls of punch-paper, were shared at swap meets. The Internet, as it is always keen to do, revolutionized filesharing in a big way. Bulletin Board Systems was where shareware began to congregate, where the very idea of the “scene” really began. Eventually, the Scene spread to Usenet, then FTP & FXP.