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Rediscovering the Handcart - A charming article written by a lone engineer who is trying to pioneer a do-it-yourself spirit of making the world more sustainable and more human. Returning to old technologies, the ones that have always served us well. The humble, wooden handcart. It can be for transport. It can be a moving desk. A moving solar panel. A portable wheelbarrow-bed. Something which adds…
Dear readers of this blog, It is with mixed emotions that I write to you today announcing a radical restructuring of this blog. Last week I stumbled upon this article from Ars Technica about the increasing ease with which LLMs can identify writers using pseudonyms – even on small corpuses of text, even when that text is about the most mundane things. It brought up a fear of mine, that one day in a…
One thing I've been spending a lot of time with, to brighten up these engineering-heavy days, is literary magazines. The New Yorker, Harpers, n+1, and The Paris Review are all ones I've been enjoying, but they often have a bit too much of a US focus (all, even The Paris Review, are based out of New York City.) What I've really been wanting is to diversify my reading materials to literary magazines…
Something I've been meaning to post for quite some time now is the fruits of a 2024 visit to the National Museum in Prague. The thing that I most wanted to see in the Czech Republic was traditional embroidered clothing looks like, and the Ethnographic Museum was able to satisfy my curiosity. Every single stitch of embroidery on these pieces was made by hand. This was really the art form of the…
In keeping with the rhythm I seem to have established, these "best of the internet" issues are released only once its titular season has unquestionably drawn to a close. And "summer 2025" is no exception. I count this summer as having extended fully until the last warm day, last week Sunday, which means contrary to what may be popular opinion, mid-October is the ideal time to release a "summer"…
For my final paper for my course on digital surveillance, I chose to analyze the legal landscape of the United States and European Union. The course was rooted in the U.S. legal system, and really hammered home that private corporations are spying on you all the time, that data brokers sell all their data to the U.S. government, meaning that the U.S. government is effectively spying on your…
This post is meant as a guide for stumbling upon corners of the indie web that are hard to come across any other way. The 'tiny web' or 'indie web' is something you hear about frequently if you read a lot of blogs. It doesn't need to be said, but there are very few of us – people who keep blogs unaffiliated with any social media platform. The "tiny web" is supposedly reminiscent of the way things…
Last year, a friend of mine (who's authorized me to call them M) went with me to an exhibition of Shanghainese art deco. I had known nothing of this corner of history beforehand, so it was a lovely way to spend an afternoon. M has studied Chinese for enough years to have reached proficiency (!), so they could translate much of the text. The collection was of posters and graphic design dating…
Silvopasture! I had never heard this term before. But in my climate science class, last lecture, my professor defined it as a system of agriculture whereby trees and livestock live together, with the trees providing shade for cattle and the livestock providing fertilizer for the trees. This symbiotic system of agriculture was listed as the 11th-most effective means of sequestering carbon,…
Last fall I got really into the Carpathian mountains and the folk traditions of the people living on them, particularly the Hutsul people living in western Ukraine. The Hutsuls live a rural highland lifestyle as shepherds and farmers. Their population is very small, about 26,000 1 , and dwindling as young people seek employment in cities. I'm really enchanted by their folk traditions, art, and…