| science | 1,647 words
TAGS: nature, wildlife, ecology, calgary, IndieWeb Carnival
Responding to two different themes in one post: I answer Robert Birming's Knowvember of getting to know the blogger, as well as Z1NZ0L1N's IndieWeb carnival theme for this month of getting to know the environment and place of where I live.
| culture | 1,804 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Social Justice, Social Media, entertainment, ethics
The Internet is full of controversy and scandal, sure, but how much of that is actually about morals, and how much of it is actually about us? An examination of what we're really talking about when we talk about "Internet drama" and the...
| science | 1,964 words
TAGS: personal essay, philosophy, psychology, theology, addiction, recovery, free will, self-deception, attention, Mental Health
We tell ourselves we want to meditate, learn the language, start the Etsy--and then we doomscroll anyway. On the 'excellent use of free will' meme, Kierkegaard's dizziness of freedom, and Sartre's bad-faith gambler. On lockdown as an accidental...
| politics | 1,443 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, politics, Digital Culture, optimism, hope, philosophy, psychology, nature, IndieWeb, publishing, Digital Preservation, community
Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, and the markets shed $2 trillion. What we want is safety rather than power, and the Seville Statement's insistence that war isn't in our nature. On Salon announcing its end after thirty...
| ai | 1,286 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Digital Culture, Small Web, IndieWeb, AI, generative AI, security, open source, self-hosting, fanfiction, fandom, mutual aid, community, activism, optimism
AO3 went dark after a security breach, and fanfiction.lol doubled overnight. On the blur of breaches and Sam Altman calling it 'terrible' that people have RAM in their PCs. On the end of affordable hardware and DDR4 prices quintupling, 2026 hard...
| history | 2,074 words
TAGS: personal essay, gratitude, Métis, Indigenous, linguistics, theology, spirituality, history, science, time, Urban Planning, community
The holy clean and the October urge to shake the dust and start again. I have gratitude for this absurd life. On Marcus Aurelius leaving his warm blankets and existence as a freefall kicked off a precipice. On thanking the bus driver, coral...
| lyric-essays | 1,182 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Digital Culture, Small Web, IndieWeb, AI, generative AI, security, web development, blogging, writing, memory, creativity, forgiveness, optimism
A childhood meditation of closing my eyes to imagine myself grown, and opening them twenty years later to find it true. On myelin, telomeres, and the cellular wear the body registers as mid-life. On PHP2Shell as a canary in the coalmine and why I...
| indieweb, ai | 1,139 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, IndieWeb, Small Web, Digital Culture, AI, generative AI, open source, community, ethics, decentralization, activism
A response to Aaron Parecki's response: on the false dichotomy of rewriting with Claude or shutting down, why 'understanding matters more than tools' severs craft from ethics, and the heartbreak of 'code was never the interesting part.' On the...
| indigenous | 4,109 words
TAGS: personal essay, Indigenous, Métis, Queer, masculinity, botany, berries, linguistics, theology, gift economy, colonialism, history
On #RezTok, a berry picker is a man who comes home without the moose. On fruity men and Canada's fruit machine, Man the Hunter and the women who hunted anyway, and pemmican, the food made of meat, fat, and berries that the Métis Nation first...
| indieweb, ai | 1,518 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, IndieWeb, Small Web, Digital Culture, AI, generative AI, open source, community, ethics, decentralization
The IndieWeb's pro-human, anti-genAI consensus has met its own infrastructure: Aaron Parecki, co-founder and the movement's 'single point of Aaron,' now commits with Claude Code to webmention.io, indielogin.com, Meetable, IndieNews, and...
| indieweb, ai | 1,518 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, IndieWeb, Small Web, Digital Culture, AI, generative AI, open source, community, ethics, decentralization
The IndieWeb's pro-human, anti-genAI consensus has met its own infrastructure: Aaron Parecki, co-founder and the movement's 'single point of Aaron,' now commits with Claude Code to webmention.io, indielogin.com, Meetable, IndieNews, and...
| indigenous | 3,049 words
TAGS: personal essay, lyric essay, Indigenous, Métis, Two-Spirit, Queer, rights of nature, water, law, ecology, colonialism, identity, history
On October 11, 1869, nineteen unarmed Métis stopped a Canadian survey crew by standing on its chain, refusing to let a square grid be laid over our river lots. On the Whanganui River, declared a legal person in 2017 after 140 years of Māori...
| community | 1,776 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, IndieWeb, Small Web, Digital Culture, community, creativity, digital minimalism, generative AI, open source, web development
After cataloguing the computers I already own, I asked the fediverse to share things made with their human hands, and they delivered. On itch.io games and the free tools anyone can start creating with (Twine, Ink, Inform 7, Bitsy, Godot, GB...
| ai, politics | 1,223 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, politics, AI, generative AI, activism, Social Justice, free speech, labour, ethics
Workers are being forced to choose between their ethics and their livelihoods--Coinbase employees fired for refusing AI tools, professor Kim Crawley pushed out for refusing genAI in her classroom, 50 Google workers fired over Project Nimbus...
| 1,504 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, self-hosting, fediverse, community, politics, privacy, free speech, empathy
Why I'm putting folk.zone's social services on hiatus? 500 spam users, my embarrassing WriteFreely database blunder, and the legal weight of self-hosting in a Canada without Section 230. On Bill C-22 and Psiphon's planned exodus, slowing down to...
| personal-favourites, history | 5,994 words
TAGS: technical, Small Web, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, web history, community, unix, tildeverse, pubnix, decentralization
The essay I promised back in May. A history of public-access Unix from Dennis Ritchie's 'fellowship' and Grex's potluck dinners to Paul Ford's drunken tilde.club and ~vilmibm's birthday gift to themself; a tour of the seven tildes I call home...
| indieweb | 1,793 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Media Criticism, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, Small Web, decentralization, community, activism, optimism
The Internet isn't a story, but a setting--our agora and town square--where the stories worth telling are still human ones. Drawing on Nathan Jurgenson's digital dualism, Jessa Lingel's gentrification of the Internet, danah boyd's digital white...
| culture | 1,199 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, feminism, masculinity, misogyny, sexual violence, consent, bystander intervention, activism, Social Justice
You are a worn-out horse, not a beautiful green stone. You must do the hard, awkward and right thing anyways. On the Cornell Chi Phi lawsuit broken by the Daily Sun's two-year investigation, and how men's exhaustion is no excuse for silence. Men...
| religion | 1,499 words
TAGS: personal essay, spirituality, religion, philosophy, Buddhism, astrology, tradition, ritual, web design, IndieWeb
Why I redesigned the blog--trading gruvbox for greyscale and 'Moonflower' palette and Bunny-hosted serifs--as a small ceremony to give my writing weight and gravity. On tradition and ritual as a grammar of gestures and the shared shadows of...
| writing-craft | 1,496 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, writing, blogging, Digital Culture, community, empathy, dialogue, philosophy, ethics
Why writing--and writing back--is never wasted time. From Patricia Lange's troll whispering to reparative civility, deep canvassing, Daryl Davis, Megan Phelps-Roper, and moral elevation, I defend engaging difficult people as a deliberate ethical...
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