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When I was a young boy I played cards with my friend and his Sicilian father. Dad would cheat. He’d palm cards, fudge the score, take extra turns. When I got to age 9 I realized he was cheating and I was so mad . Cheating was wrong! I realized much later that he was teaching us a lesson. That while it might be wrong, sometimes people will cheat you. He taught us to recognize being cheated. When I…
A small update to my linkblog that you probably won’t notice: I’m now using self-hosted linkding as the backend instead of Pinboard . I switched to pinboard back in 2011 and have appreciated having a hosted service all these years. But development on the product stagnated long ago and the last few years service quality has been erratic. Right now the service is down because the domain registration…
For the first time in about 25 years I’m running a Linux desktop. It’s great! I used to use Linux all the time. But even back in the early ’00s all I was running for work was ssh terminals and a web browser and Windows did that just fine. And for gaming you had to have Windows. I had a few years of using a Mac, then switched back to Windows once WSL got good enough to have a local Unix. But I…
In 1983 Steve Dyer created the Usenet group soc.motss , possibly the first-ever online LGBT community. It was an important part of my life in the early 1990s. There’s a couple of good retrospective histories of motss: Avery Dame-Griff and David Auberach . I wanted to re-post Steve Dyer’s original October 1983 post from when motss was first created. At 1AM! Subject: Net.motss is born! From:…
I’m planning to do Dry January again this year: no drinks for the month. Last year was the first year I did it and I found it really helpful. The main thing I learned last year is I could drink less. It’s the longest I’d gone without alcohol in a long time and I wasn’t sure at first I could. It helps that the goal was simple and short term. I felt better pretty much immediately, more energy. And…
Cheese enchiladas are some of my favorite old school Tex-Mex food. Corn tortillas, orange cheese, smothered in a beefy thick gravy. The gravy is not like a typical Mexican enchilada sauce: no tomatoes or tomatillos. Instead it’s more of a Southern gravy like you’d put on biscuits or serve with turkey, but spiced with chile, cumin, oregano, and garlic powder. The key thing is it’s made with a roux.…
One of the best things on our trip to Cambodia in March was a street food tour in Phnom Penh led by Urban Forage . They provided a great guide and a tuktuk and driver. It was an amazing chance to try all sorts of casual snacks and meals, the kind of stuff that always looks so interesting but too intimidating to try on my own. Places were vetted for food safety for delicate Western stomachs and our…
Edmund White died June 3, after a long and much-loved life as one of America’s great gay writers. His 1982 autofiction novel A Boy’s Own Story is his best known, a frank and honest story of growing up gay in the 1950s. Many gay men (including myself) found themselves in that book and the ensuing trilogy . He published 36 books including memoirs, autofiction, novels, historical treatments, and the…
I took an amazing trip to SE Asia last month, including Angkor Wat. I had a hard time finding good reading or other resources to learn from before I went, in part because Amazon is awash in AI garbage. Here’s some books and podcasts I found useful about the Khmer empire in general and Angkor in particular: Ancient Angkor by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques. The closest thing to a coffee-table…
I’ve been doing Dry January this year. One thing I missed was something for apéro hour, a beverage to mark the start of the evening. Something complex and maybe bitter, not like a drink you’d have with lunch. I found some good options. Ghia sodas are my favorite. Ghia is an NA apéritif based on grape juice but with enough bitterness (gentian) and sourness (yuzu) to be interesting. You can buy a…