A blog. Like the good ol' days.
It's been a minute between episodes of Nostalgia Goggles, but Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo was just too good to pass up dusting off the microphones and having a discussion! Have you played Pipistrello? Does our effusive praise make you want to give it another look? NEWstalgia Goggles: Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
It took nearly an entire year but I have decided on my second slash page : /carless . Which I invented, so it might need some explaining since it isn't in the official directory [1] . A few years ago I was able to switch to electric cars for my household, but it still felt silly to drive if I was going somewhere close by, in nice weather, by myself. America is not famous for it's bike…
I learned quite recently that August 8 [1] is HTML Day , a celebration of HTML that includes actual meetups ! It almost feels like a silly thing to celebrate when I think back to my teenage self building fan sites in notepad.exe , but in reality it's quite impowering to be able to craft something with one's own (digital) hands. I know most people, especiailly people who grew up with social media,…
If this post has a screenshot in it from Mastodon showing my Mastodon account as being the verified author of this website then I successfully followed Robb's instructions . So legit. So indieweb.
House House, makers of the delightful Untitled Goose Game and Panic, makers [1] of the fascinating Playdate , have teamed up again to release Big Walk . It's a game where you "hang out and get lost with close friends in a big world." And the trailer makes it look cozy as heck. For most of my gaming life I have been a solo gamer, playing mostly various flavors of (J)RPGs, (Action-)Adventures, and…
I've been wanting to redesign my website for some time. The turn-key 11ty "starter blog" I was using before was probably perfectly editable, but who wants to try and understand someone else's mistakes when you can start from scratch and make all of your own mistakes! At the same time, ever since I stopped streaming [1] (which was fun in its own right but was mainly to support podcasting ) I've…
Blaugust [1] is here again and it gave me the kick in the ass I needed to work on my website. There are a bunch of things I've been wanting to do but they all take time and effort so I compromised by not doing them. Turns out that was not an optimal strategy for getting things done. After two days of very rushed and unnecessarily stressful work I come sliding into home just in time with: A new…
You're not behind on your feeds. There is no behind. Nobody's waiting. via Phantom Obligation This is an excellent read on the connection between interfaces and how they effect us. It is also a visually beautiful.
There are a lot of people on the indieweb who carefully track every book they read, movie they watch, game they play, album they listen to, etc., etc., etc. Some of those people then write thoughtful reviews on their site to share what they liked and didn't like. Even with my growing list of blogs I follow ( thanks, RSS! ) I'm going to miss lots of interesting people saying interesting things…
re: But they don't love you back , Puzzle games A genre I love that doesn't love me back is puzzle games. I am okay at puzzle games, and would like to believe I am a passably intelligent person who is decent enough at problem solving, but puzzle games fill me with anexiety that I will feel stupid. Feeling stupid makes it difficult to enjoy something, which is a shame because the elation of the "Ah…
The LEGO Game Boy comes with 2 cartridges you build: Super Mario Land and Link's Awakening. When you build the Link's Awakening cartridge it includes a tiny LEGO battery which is not included when you build Super Mario Land because Super Mario Land did not have a save function, while Link's Awakening did. Even if you are old enough to have lived through the cartridge era you may not have realized…
A few of the folks I follow online posted 10 Pointless Facts About Me and I thought that, just like App Defaults , it seems like a fun and easy trend for me to bandwagon absolutely ages after the moment has passed. Some of these were surprisingly difficult to get down to a succinct answer. A restriction, I now realize, I arbitrarily set myself. Do you floss your teeth? Yes. And I use a waterpik…
Rating: Final Fantasy Tactics is one of my favorite games of all time. I have probably played it a couple dozen times start-to-finish at this point. We even did a Nostalgia Goggles episode on it ! Final Fantasy Tactices: The Ivalice Chronicles is a remaster that I was not holding my breath would ever actually happen. I still have my original PS1 and PSP copies of the game, as well as the android…
I mentioned to my piano teacher that I had replayed Super Mario Odyssey recently, and he asked if I had tried to 100% it. I laughed and said no, I don't really have the time to 100% games these days. He replied with this comic: Why play a game if you're not going to 100% it? Why play piano if you're never going to be rich and famous? "The joy is in the playing." I really like that…
"A software update rolling out to Samsung’s Family Hub refrigerators in the US is putting ads on the fridges for the first time. The “promotions and curated advertisements” are coming despite Samsung insisting to The Verge in April that it had “no plans” to do so." Samsung brings ads to US fridges, The Verge I will store food in a root cellar and cook over a fire pit before I have smart appliances…
A year or two ago I first noticed some of the folks I follow on Mastodon posting about the coming of Blaugust, a community-driven hey-you-should-blog-more event. From Blaugust 2025 is Coming! , by Nerd Girl Thoughts: Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place each August which focuses on blogging primarily and has started to include other forms of serialized content over the last several…
Microsoft Excel is one of the most successful pieces of business and consumer software ever made. Excel is probably used to do more calculations daily than all the calculations done by all the people using mechanical calculators in all of history combined. Governments, businesses, and personal lives are literally run out of Excel spreadsheets. Even "Apple and Google shops" still license Excel for…
I've been reading a lot of blogs and looking at a lot of cool websites during the #blaugust2025 challenge. Seeing the amazing things people are making on the IndieWeb to disenshittified the web has been inspiring. One of the things that resonated with me, and is small enough to be easily actionable, are slash pages . Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a…
A surprising (but good!) thing about trying to write more has been the momentum building. As I have been writing more I've been wanting to write more, making each bit of writing feel less difficult. A surprising (but bad!) thing about trying to write more has been caring way more about the "quality" of what I post. As I've started more and more drafts I'm feeling more and more self-conscious about…
My new Read-It-Later system is appending links to a note in Obsidian. It's been working great. I'm not sure why I didn't try this sooner.
I don't normally use the Trending tab on Mastodon because I like my social media highly curated, but sometimes serendipity has other plans. I just opened it by mistake and saw this amazing photo on a post from Prof. Sam Lawler , and I was hitting print on the FREE knitting pattern for the fuck dishcloth before my partner had even finished agreeing to knit one for me.
I've had a bunch of websites over my life. When I was a kid I made some fan sites, I've had nameplate sites of various flavors, all the great shows , and of course, several blogs. Any blog I had on a platform that came with comments built-in (wordpress, blogger) had the comments left on, and any platform that didn't (hand-crafted HTML, static-site generators) didn't. I never thought too hard about…
Between Hank Green moving his money around , CoreWeave cratering , and basically everything Ed Zitron has ever written , the news is looking pretty bleak for "safe" investments in the US (global?) economy. Even Sam Altman admitted AI is a bubble , though I suspect he believes he's playing 5th dimensional checkers. It sure would be nice if the entire economy didn't expect line-always-go-up.
I was talking to someone recently about a project they are working on. They're not a technical person but they have been tasked with a technical project. At some point they mentioned parsing HTML using regex and the rest of the conversation is kind of a blur because all I could think about was the famous Stack Overflow response to this question about parsing HTML using RegEx . (Captured below…
I have a manual sprinkler that needs to be turned on and off at the spigot. I do not have a brain capable of remembering when exactly twenty minutes has passed, but I do have a pocket computer made by one of the richest and most powerful companies on Earth; a company absolutely synonymous with technology. My pocket computer has a timer function built into the clock app that can count down from…
Hollie on telling the indieweb community they just want to make websites and not "learn to code": In one conversation with four or five people, one person said, "I don't understand why everyone doesn't just learn to code." I was floored. Yeah, and I don't understand why everyone who wears pants doesn't also get excited about learning how to select fabric and choose a pattern and then download that…
My daughter needs a laptop for school. I have a 10 year old Macbook Pro that works great other than 1. no longer being supported by macOS and 2. having a 10 year old battery. Fixing the first issue was as easy as installing Ubuntu, which is pretty gods damn easy. The second issue was trickier. Battery replacements for that model and people willing to do them exist, but by the time all is said and…
I came across this ridiculous looking videogame tie-in children's picture book while looking for the release date of this ridiculous looking videogame tie-in remix album several weeks ago and thought "I really really want to read this book but I will read it exactly once and then own it forever," and with a heavy sigh of responsibility "I guess I'll pass..." Then I remembered that libraries exist!…
I have a pair of over ear bluetooth headphones that have an auto-pause/play feature when you take them off then put them back on. Handy! Most of the time. Unfortunately, macOS has decided that the Play command the headphones send obviously means that I want Apple Music to launch and start playing whatever the first song in my library is. Think about the incredible hubris of that design decision.…
What you see when someone says "Just going to change rooms real quick" on zoom. I've had this joke rattling around in my head for ages so I decided to finally let it out. Unfortunately, to get to the one-sentence-and-short-looping-video above took around two hours of work. First, I had to get a clip that looked the way I wanted, which meant I needed to figure out what the hell that style of shot…
As important as it is to own what you write , make sure you also own what you read .
Ghost announced today that they are adding fediverse "social web" support to their open source publishing platform and that got me thinking about POSSE again. I've had a draft post sitting around for ages inspired by an article The Verge published that essentially had the thesis: "negativity about cross-posting is a false flag operation to stop people from having their own website." While that is…
About a year ago I subscribed to NPR+ which added a half dozen or so shows to my rotation. I also added the entire available backlog for each show. About 6 months ago I re-committed to RSS and added a bunch of feeds to my reader. I also added the entire available backlog for each feed. A month or two ago I went on a rare binge of subscribing to new YouTube channels. I also planned to watch the…
In August of 2021 I decided to try a #100DaysOfX challenge for drawing trees in pixel art. Like an idiot I posted them only as a giant thread on twitter so that's all gone now. While compiling this post I realized I couldn't find the text entries that accompanied the last few days, which was a nice little reminder to not trust anything I care about keeping to social media. Tutorials Some of the…
I've been sitting on publishing this for so long I actually had to update several rows. I hope if I look back on this in a year I'll have less BigTech™️ and more self-hosted. 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail 📨 Mail Client: ☝️ 📝 Notes: obsidian.md ✅ To-Do: obsidian.md 📷 Phone Photo Shooting: Pixel 6 🟦 Photos Management: Google Photos 📆 Calendar: Google Calendar 📅 Calendar Backend: Google 📁 Cloud…