Recently updated blogs

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says content moderation died on January 6, 2021: [T]he Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries …

I decided to start posting on Dreamwidth for awhile at the beginning of 2024. I thought I needed something to shake up my blog and help motivate me to write more. One of the most prolific periods of writing in my life was approximately 2002-2008 on livejournal. That site's been co-opted and barely exists anymore, but dreamwidth is a long-running community alternative based on the livejournal source code from around …

Hello! Recently I ran a terminal survey and I asked people what frustrated them. One person commented: There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it all came out of the box. My immediate reaction was “oh, getting a modern terminal experience isn’t that hard, you just need to….”, but the more I thought about it, the longer the “you just need to…” list got, …

Back from calling my second Saturday night dance, this one for Circle n Squares in Santa Rosa. 4 hours (ish, double rounds and a snack break), but dang I put it all out there and will sleep well. A lotta compliments, it feels good.

About a year or so ago, Manuel Moreale wrote a post called I’ll read it. In it, he made a simple offer to anybody who was on the fence about starting their own blog because they either didn’t know what to write about, or because they were afraid nobody would read what they had written. I was one of the people who took him up on his offer. I believe …

All the Way for the Win was just published by Penteract Press — today! It’s available for sale from their online store. This book of poetry begins by narrating the birth of the universe and concludes after describing the eradication of the last human-authored poetic text. While it doesn’t deal with everything in between, it’s mean to touch on many aspects of human history and experience. The poems in the …

To read this excellent edition and translation of John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De Anima is to encounter two things at once: an intellectual landscape remote from both ancient hylomorphism and post-medieval European philosophy and a bridge between the two.[1] Like Aristotle, Buridan thinks that all living things are animated by souls. But these souls are in many ways unlike the souls of Aristotle’s De anima. According to Buridan, the …

I don't normally do blog challenges, but I got pinged by ~hyde with the call, so here goes: Why did you start blogging in the first place? I don't remember a specific thing that got me started. My first post talked about students and learning and technology, so it was probably something I heard during a professional development at school. This was my first year teaching and the school was …

Last year I wrote that I wanted to be able to do one pull up. This year, I just want the year to progress uneventfully. I first started using the word “uneventful” when my traditional chinese medicine physician asked if I had any symptoms between my visits: there were rare times when I would tell her I didn’t have any symptoms in the couple of weeks since I last saw …

We're less than a week from the opening of the new film Wolf Man, a reimagining of the classic character. From everything I've seen (I've been trying to stay very spoiler free) we are definitely in for a different take on the story rather than a remake of the 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. film. I'm actually really excited for the movie and, to help find an outlet for that excitement, …

The Soviet documentary maker Roman Karmen at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 From this English language Doco: His film on Vietnam here: https://en.qdnd.vn/culture-sports/culture/unforgettable-time-with-director-roman-karmen-in-viet-bac-562800 Mai Lộc And all the other films Karmen makes – Spain, China, Berlin, Cuba, Chile – right up to filming Burt Lancaster in Moscow’s Red Square.

I wrote another book about television. I like television. I like television so much that the first thing I modelled and printed on my new 3d printer was this … What shows do they make you think of? I made some more after that too. Can you hear it? Everything needs painting still, of course There’s a few more, including TVS, ATV, and HTV, but I bought you here to …

While in Palo Alto for the holidays, I stumbled on a piece of public art I didn’t previously know about: the Linus Pauling Commemorative Ceramic Mural, created in 2000 by Ross Drago. It’s a set of individually decorated ceramic tiles, installed on a wall along the sidewalk on the north side of Oregon Expressway, near its corner with El Camino Real. It’s not an area that attracts much foot traffic. …

By C. D. Rose. Zsuzanna Gahse, Mountainish, tr. Katy Derbyshire (Prototype, 2024) Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a slim book with short, numbered sections rather than chapters, and whose blurb promises the reader ‘a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish.’ These days, on receiving such a book, a reader might easily anticipate what they’re in for: reflections on all manner of interesting ephemera; odd encounters with random strangers who’ll tell oblique …

Watch a half-hour video in which we discuss comedy craft with the directors of 'Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.'