First came RSS Club from Dave Rupert wherein bloggers commit to some number of their posts being made available only through RSS. Definitionally this has varied from posts that literally only appear in RSS feeds to posts that technically still get publicly published to the blog b … | Continue reading
Briefly this past October, because of Kev, I spent some time looking into Kirby as a potential replacement for WordPress, because at this point that CMS is bloated and my solutions to thinks often pretty janky. It didn’t take long browsing the Kirby documentation for a legit anxi … | Continue reading
Elisa had some things to say about cheese while Radim had some things to say about watches, and together they’ve put me in mind of a story about a trip I took to France. | Continue reading
There are some subjects you should leave alone if you’ve already addressed them. There are some wells to which you should not return, leaving well enough alone. Alas, these are where one’s pet peeves are to be found, and so I must confront Ruben’s suggestion that you can read an … | Continue reading
Rachel examines her midlife crisis in contrast to the straight, white, and male version that’s become the sort of normative American default idea of what a midlife crisis looks like. | Continue reading
That online restlessness that might not even be rooted in anything online, per yesterday, burrowed its way into spurring some more tinkering with the blog theme today. In the end, my changes were not quite as dramatic as they might have been but nonetheless will be noticeable. | Continue reading
In the early days much if not most blogging was microblogging, and then Twitter effectively took over that niche. I’ve been off that site for some time, and I’ve played several different times with Mastodon, and lately I’ve been spending time playing with Bluesky. | Continue reading
It’s happenstance and coincidence, but as I’ve again recently been speaking of blog anniversaries, I should note that today is the twenty-second such of my mother following me into the early blogosphere as it stood in November of 2001. | Continue reading
Annie, another blogger who accidentally got lost in a cleanup of my feed reader a little while back, wrote up something of a concise guide to types of blog posts and, as near as I can tell, I’m pretty sure that out of the twelve listed types my posts regularly fall into five of t … | Continue reading
Saturday marked five years since Oregon’s disability determination process, during my first failed Social Security application in the wake of the disastrous and dysregulating Vocational Rehabilitation job placement, diagnosed me with Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Anxiety and Dep … | Continue reading
While the bright sun is an autistic sensory issue for me, once we’re firmly into autumn and the temperatures start hitting 50°F, I do need clear skies to be comfortable, and this afternoon that’s what Portland at just the right time to hit up one of the two neighborhood coffeesho … | Continue reading
It only just suddenly occurred to me this morning while thinking about my blog restoration project where my first webpage must have been located, and although it would have pre-dated the Wayback Machine and so is lost to time I went on a little search journey to see if it were po … | Continue reading
One week ago my back went out although it only kept me squatting on my kitchen floor for several minutes. What confounded me was that I’d becoming fairly convinced that my new aches and pains were the result of my shoes pretty dramatically being worn out. | Continue reading
Just the mere thought of trying to assemble a list of my default apps gives me mild anxiety not worth the confronting. However, I’ve slowly but methodically been browsing that compiled list of participants looking for bloggers to follow. Which brings me to the subject of blogroll … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that I like reading posts about blog anniversaries, in part because of my project to restore two decades of blogging here into a single, unified place. There seem to have been many such posts recently, but Ruben’s might be the most unique. | Continue reading
At the end of a serious bit of incisive self-reflection about tensions between intellect and psychology, Winnie expressed some passing concern with where the post ends up. | Continue reading
It’s never a good sign for me to start feeling squirrely about my blog design. Partly because it’s a gargantuan task should I decide on a complete overhaul, and partly because this squirreliness often comes when I’m feeling especially disjointed or dejected about life in general. | Continue reading
I’m not going to belabor this one, because in truth were I still also microblogging here, this might be a short, untitled post, and I’m not yet ready to revisit that idea. That said, I didn’t want to let Dave Karpf’s thoughts on what elections are for pass by without highlighting … | Continue reading
There’s a long list of blog posts I’ve wanted to get to, some more so than others, but events keep intervening and I don’t have the energy or motivation for them. Instead, here’s a look at what seems to be going wrong with my brain. | Continue reading
Every morning when I wake up, the first thing that does in the weekly notes file I use to structure my weekly therapy session is whether or not it was a night of intense dreams, and if so, and if I can remember them, what the dreams were. Often in the night, when I wake to go to … | Continue reading
So, it was looking increasingly like my back aches and pains were the fault of needing new shoes, because after getting new shoes things seemed to be on the upswing, with my daily walks accompanied by less and less of the aches and pains. | Continue reading
I’d like someone with more patience and fortitude than I have to take a close look at this recent study about autistic midlife and tell me if my initial, cursory response to it seems valid, because the thing that nags at me about it is that not once does the paper reference or us … | Continue reading
While saving various links to a notes file over the past week or so, what was percolating in the back of my mind was something along the lines of my roundabout on mediocrity, not least because this, too, is about whole-personhood and its thwarting. Instead, as the title suggests, … | Continue reading
So, I did manage to haul myself out of bed at an ungodly-for-me hour to hop public transit all the way across town to the zoo for Nora and Amelia Gray’s (observed) birthdays, and exhausted myself into the ground taking nearly 800 photos with the D5300. | Continue reading
Over at Bear Blog, I ran into Connie offering up a breakdown of what they’d do if they had no job, and I have to say that the agenda looks hellaciously exhausting. Was I ever capable of doing so much in a single day? I’ve no job and I can’t do half that. | Continue reading
Back in December of 2021, I’d made an appointment to go donate blood, something I’d not done since college. In part because I still don’t know my blood type, although I’ve a vague recollection from three decades ago that it was O-Positive. | Continue reading
Lauren Schenkman, writing for Spectrum, interviewed researcher Mirko Uljarević on the “restricted and repetitive behaviors” component of the current, mainstream view of autism pathology. Uljarević suggests that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual “may erroneously lump together … | Continue reading
Last week, David Pierce for The Verge suggested that the future of the social internet is Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a mainstay of the IndieWeb community, and an idea that exhausts me utterly just to think on. | Continue reading
If ever you’ve taken a mental health diagnostic or research survey, it’s possible you’ve encountered a question here or there that stymied you a bit. I’ve mentioned this before in regards to empathy. It’s something tiramisú notes having encountered with regard to loneliness. | Continue reading
Mighil, I think, conflates two different things in this advice for presenting yourself online. The advice cites social media specifically but I want to broaden the scope a bit as I argue that it’s a mistake to correlate or equate the idea of being authentic and that of being uniq … | Continue reading
I’m not one for going out of my way to make lists of things that are good, probably in part because they always feel performative although that could be the lingering smell of the era of social media (in)authenticity and wellness woo-woo. | Continue reading
One of the things I’ve been wanting to get around to is describing the recent changes I’ve made to how I deal with blogs, news, and newsletters. This is something that I switch up now and then, trying to find the right overall process for me. Tracy just responded to Alex Sirac on … | Continue reading
Ben reminisces about LiveJournal and writing posts and hosting discussion threads that “could be shared with the whole world, just with your friends, or with a subset”. It’s a part of the internet that never was part of my internet. | Continue reading
I’m currently siting in my living room having a trauma response. Last week I marked the second birthday Willow never got to have, and tonight Meru’s bout of atypical crying while walking around the apartment her her tail down nearly sent me immediately into a sobbing fit. Right t … | Continue reading
When a new animated Star Trek show first was announced, I was intrigued. When it turned out that Lower Decks was a comedy, I was skeptical. When I first tried it, I was in a bad sensory space and the bright colors and rapid-patter dialogue was too much for me. | Continue reading
There are a couple of days back-loaded into the end of the year that tend to throw me down the mood hole: New Year’s, because it’s a social demarcation of transition and the passage of time, and then today, October 25, the day I was born. | Continue reading
Nicola Griffith, writing for Literary Hub, warns authors to be wary of how they deploy empathy, taking care not to weaponize it needlessly. Alan Jacobs, on the other hand, cautions against that advice. Or, so he says. | Continue reading
Dan Shipper over at Every reposted an old interview with Robert Sapolsky, the guy in the news for his new book about the nonexistence of free will, about stress. For reasons you’ll understand if you read me regularly enough, I was struck by the strategies suggested to reduce it. | Continue reading
Time to do some follow-up thinking out loud about my earlier post on blogs and digital gardens because, as happens with blogosphere-like (gardenosphere-like?) things happen, there’s been some additional chatter around and about. | Continue reading
Apparently the last time I checked in here about the new and exciting back problems I’ve been having was Monday, when I lamented that while Sunday’s walk clear across downtown Portland went without a hitch, Monday’s evening walk in my neighborhood did not. For more reasons than o … | Continue reading
Last night I dropped myself down a blog-browsing rabbit hole, including adding the discovery feeds of Write.as and Bear Blog to my feed reader, and somewhere on the way I ran into Joel Hooks having some thoughts on what works for him and what doesn’t when it comes to writing onli … | Continue reading
Romello Goodman, writing in the latest Logic(s), talks code and scale through a professional history with online obituaries and guestbooks, and hits at what happens when the systems in we find ourselves living grow too large to any longer be fully human. | Continue reading
This morning while lounging in bed because I managed to wrench my back, already lately plagued by aches and pains, I took to something I was going to do last night but didn’t want to stay up late.… | Continue reading
For current events reasons, today I thought I’d go take a look at traffic to Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, which I’ve maintained continuously since late in 2001, for then-current events reasons. Typically, in “down times”, the site gets somewhere between fifteen to twenty views ea … | Continue reading
Today would have been Willow’s fourteenth birthday, had not a combination of degenerative illness and my autism cut short her life before she turned thirteen. Likely this explains why she’s been popping up in my dreams, including twice last night. | Continue reading
Nick Heer, while noting that Jason Kottke is adding comments with all the benefits and travails that entails, also notes that since the fall of Twitter there’s been an uptick in email from his readers. | Continue reading
After worrying about the prospect of my world shrinking due to the mysterious increase in back aches and pains especially when out for a walk, something reality only continued to reinforce, the story then got weirder this past weekend. | Continue reading
I’m trying to clear out something of a growing backlog of prospective blog posts, and rather than belabor this one (not that it would have come close to my discursive post on mediocrity) I’m just going to lay out the relevant links serially. | Continue reading