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Homelab For the Beginner: You Can Self-host Your Own Server on $50 Hardware

| technical-tutorials | 6,214 words
TAGS: Self-hosting, technical, homelab, IndieWeb, Linux, Docker

A beginner-friendly guide to building your own homelab on inexpensive hardware. Covers finding old computers, setting up Linux, SSH, Docker, and self-hosting services like password managers, RSS readers, and your own Fediverse instance. Digital...

Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 2,656 words
TAGS: Indieweb, Small Web, technical, Digital Culture, history, decentralization

Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web's is in a renaissance. On the solarpunk philosophy of intentional technology, and how...

Introducing writer-cli: a bash tool I built from scratch to blog in the terminal!

| writing-craft, technical-tutorials | 2,017 words
TAGS: bash, technical, tools, blogging, indieweb

After finding the tildeverse and the Tilde.town feels engine, I decided to build my own simple command-line tool for blogging that handles the full lifecycle of a blog post (creation, editing, building, and git push). A walkthrough of the design...

Groundhog Day, Groundhog Day, and Variations on a Theme

| culture | 1,550 words
TAGS: philosophy, psychology, Media Criticism, Creative Writing

I love time loops in media--from Groundhog Day to...hey, wait a minute. Does anybody else feel a weird sense of déjà vu? It can't just be me. Do you ever get up in the morning and feel as though you've already lived the same day?

Groundhog Day, Savescumming, and Our Endless Numbered Days

| culture | 2,198 words
TAGS: philosophy, Media Criticism, Video Games, Anime, psychology

I love time loops in media--from Groundhog Day to Haruhi's Endless Eight. What do they reveal about mortality, memory, and the human desire to escape consequence through Nietzsche's eternal recurrence?

SPICE: Our Antifragile Biology

| science | 1,593 words
TAGS: Food, Biology, Science, Health

Spicy food and capsaicin demonstrate hormesis and antifragility in human biology. The science of pain, TRPV1 receptors, and how controlled exposure to stressors makes our bodies stronger rather than weaker.

Manifestation, the Law of Attraction, Cancer and Abuse

| religion | 1,785 words
TAGS: Social Commentary, Spirituality, Gender, New Age, Cultural Appropriation, Health

Examining the dark side of manifestation and Law of Attraction movement: its New Thought origins, cultural appropriation of Eastern and Indigenous practices, gender dynamics, and the hidden cruelty of victim blaming cancer survivors and abuse...

/r/SlopcoreCirclejerk and the Men who are pro-AI

| ai | 1,497 words
TAGS: Digital Culture, Social Commentary, AI, technical, politics, Gender

With the AI bubble finally deflating, what can we learn from the gender gap in genAI enthusiasm? Looking at /r/SlopcoreCirclejerk's culture of contempt, historical Luddite parallels, crypto bro demographics, and why men are drawn to extractive...

A Love Letter to Everything

| personal-favourites | 2,546 words
TAGS: personal essay, IndieWeb, community, writing, blogging, internet, open source

My first IndieWeb Carnival entry--the theme is love letters, and I couldn't pick just one thing. A letter to the infrastructure that holds my corner of the internet together, to the strangers who maintain the open-source tools I depend on every...

Cleaning House: Refactoring My Eleventy Config Into Modules

| technical-tutorials | 1,413 words
TAGS: eleventy, javascript, technical, web development

How I decomposed an 866-line .eleventy.js monolith into four focused modules, fixed some lurking bugs, and eliminated dead CSS and dead dependencies along the way

On Being a River

| personal-favourites, history, culture | 1,702 words
TAGS: personal essay, mythology, philosophy, biology, history, identity

Sixty thousand miles of blood vessels run inside each of us, more than twice around the Earth. 330 billion cells are replaced every single day. Humanity has always built civilization beside rivers because we are rivers. Always in motion, never...

What We Lose with Cultural Extinction: The Red Thread Cut

| culture, indigenous | 1,915 words
TAGS: personal essay, history, politics, culture, language, indigenous, colonialism, identity

In 1995, China abducted six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima--the recognized 11th Panchen Lama--severing the chain of mutual recognition at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist succession. Meanwhile, Michif, a language born from Cree verbs and French nouns...

I Made My Eleventy Build 5× Faster with Five Changes

| technical-tutorials | 1,507 words
TAGS: eleventy, javascript, technical, tutorial, IndieWeb, personal site

A walkthrough of how I audited my 11ty build benchmarks and cut cold-start time from 14 seconds down to 2.6 seconds by caching two custom filters and swapping out a bare network fetch.

Last Online 620 Weeks Ago: Why I'm Loyal to the IndieWeb

| indieweb, community | 1,163 words
TAGS: personal essay, indieweb, internet, community

You visit your parent's house and find your white Xbox 360 in your childhood bedroom. A friends list full of gamertags that haven't booted up their own console in hundreds of weeks. On the heartbreak of digital disappearance, and why I'm...

The Hondius Pneumonia (Low Risk Assessment)

| science | 699 words
TAGS: personal essay, science, politics, health, covid

A hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius in the South Atlantic has sent thirty passengers home across twenty-three countries before a single test was run. What does the WHO's 'low risk' framing mean? The institutional failure of January 2020...

Where is the Indigenous Cultural Revolution?

| indigenous | 4,314 words
TAGS: personal essay, politics, Indigenous, Social Justice

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's 'The Undercommons' describes a space of collective refusal beneath the institutions of the master. On why Black American cultural revolution was possible, why Indigenous cultural revolution is structurally...

PATTERN RECOGNITION

| science, politics | 2,795 words
TAGS: personal essay, science, politics, conspiracy theories

Scientists working in classified American aerospace and nuclear research have died and disappeared. The story has migrated from UFO forums to the White House briefing room. A conspiracy requires a conspirator. On grief, and the brain's furious...

Announcing My New Radio Show (a Love Letter to Public Access Television)

| 2,840 words
TAGS: personal essay, community, Radio, Technology, IndieWeb, Creative Process, technical

From Shaw Community Television on Channel 10 to Paper Tiger Television and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, public access was original community media. Anybody, any channel, no notes from the network. In that spirit, I'm starting a self-hosted...

Writers Who Burned All Their Words feat. Bix Frankonis

| writing-craft, history | 3,678 words
TAGS: personal essay, writing, Literature, Digital Culture, blogging, IndieWeb

I am a compulsive archivist, terrified of losing my words, but many of history's greatest writers asked for theirs to be burned. Kafka, Dickinson, Plath, Virgil all had their reasons. A meditation on self-erasure, ego, and the difference between...

Dreamwidth and Yearning for Humanity on the Web

| indieweb, community | 2,578 words
TAGS: personal essay, IndieWeb, Social Commentary, community, internet

The sonder and vertigo I feel about people's interior lives. Corporate social media fails to offer genuine witnessing. So, I look to Dreamwidth, a fork of LiveJournal, and fifteen years of unbroken communities. On digital gentrification and the...

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