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Does the Internet Archive Have an Onion Address?

2026-03-11T15:47:57+00:00

Yes, the Internet Archive has an onion address. The Internet Archive can be accessed via the Tor network at its onion address: archivep75mbjunhxc6x4j5mwjmomyxb573v42baldlqu56ruil2oiad.onion

What is an onion address?

Tor (The Onion Router) is a privacy-focused network that helps protect users’ identities and browsing activity by routing traffic through encrypted layers. Visiting the Internet Archive through Tor allows users to explore the Wayback Machine, books, audio, video, and other collections with an added layer of anonymity, which is an important option for researchers, journalists, and anyone seeking greater privacy or access in regions where the open web may be restricted.

Andy Ogles and the Flushing Remonstrance

2026-03-10T20:20:50+00:00

Lost an hour or so today trying to figure out what church Rep. Andy Ogles attends, either at home in Tennessee or when he’s in Washington. I still don’t know.

While he’s in Washington, Ogles lives in the same D.C. townhouse as Speaker Mike Johnson and Pastor Steve Berger, who 0wns the home. Berger is “pastor emeritus” of a non-denominational Tennessee congregation called One Church Home, a former satellite of the nondenominational mega-church “Grace Chapel” that Berger founded in 1994. This wasn’t a new church planting, but an ugly, acrimonious split that started due to Berger’s participation in the Jan. 6 riots. Johnson is a Southern Baptist. Berger is a nondenominational serial church starter. I’m guessing Ogles is either nondenominational or Southern Baptist too, but I don’t know.

Why does that matter? Because Andy Ogles says he wants to get rid of every religion and denomination and sect in America. Except one. And thus, on the one hand, it seems kind of important to know which one that might be.

On the other hand, of course, it doesn’t matter at all which sect it is that Andy Ogles prefers for his sectarian government. His folly and his sin is not a matter of which sect he chooses to establish, or of whether or not he backs the correct one. His folly and his sin is that he insists there can be — and must be and ought to be — only one.

Here is what Rep. Andy Ogles said:

Tweet from Rep. Andy Ogles reading: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”

“Pluralism is a lie,” Ogles says, in a country that boasts more than 200 distinct Christian denominations and thousands of idiosyncratic nondenominational congregations all doing their own thing in their own way.

Ogles is not denying the existence of America’s religious pluralism, he’s denying its legitimacy. He isn’t saying pluralism doesn’t exist here, but that it ought not to exist here. He wants to get rid of it. He wants to stamp out the “lie” of pluralism, starting out by expelling all the Muslims.

This is not at all a new idea. It’s an idea that lies at the heart of the founding of America.

America was invented in Flushing.

By which I mean the vehement rejection of this idea lies at the heart of the founding of America.

Ogles’s rejection of pluralism is very much the same approach that Peter Stuyvesant took when he was governor of New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant was a government official and, therefore, also a church official who understood his role as enforcing membership in the one, true church and adherence to all of its sectarian rules.

So Stuyvesant forbade Jews and Quakers from settling in New Amsterdam.

And he forbade Catholics. And Lutherans.

The man arrested Lutherans because he understood what it means to reject pluralism as a “lie.” That mean that it could never be sufficient to decree that New Amsterdam was a “Christian” colony or even that it was a “Protestant” colony. The rejection of pluralism requires its opposite, and the opposite of pluralism is sectarianism. With one sect, and only one, acceptable. The only worship that was permitted in New Amsterdam was worship in the official churches of the Dutch Reformed Church. Nothing else could be permitted, or even tolerated — not even any of the many slightly different variants of Dutch Reformed faith. Hence Stuyvesant’s proclamation of a day of prayer and fasting to repent of “the sin of religious tolerance.”

This was a terrible idea and everyone hated it.

The Jews and Quakers and Catholics and Lutherans hated it for obvious reasons, but so did most of the Dutch Reformed faithful of New Amsterdam. These were people who had freely embraced that sect, but who understood that Stuyvesant’s sectarian policy meant they were no longer free to freely embrace it. And who understood that the inevitable next step in this process was a policing of their sincerity and daily practice.

They recognized this as exactly the same intolerable unfreedom that most of them had left Europe to escape. They knew it meant violence and death and turmoil and hatred because they and their families had experienced that — for centuries — and they were sick of it.

And so the people of New Amsterdam thumbed their noses at Stuyvesant’s proclamations and they welcomed the Quakers and the Jews and the Lutherans and transformed New Amsterdam into New York, the greatest city the world has ever seen.

But Stuyvesant’s horrible plan is precisely what Andy Ogles demands. “Muslims don’t belong in America,” he says, but that’s only the first step if he truly believes that “pluralism is a lie.”

Ogles starts with Muslims, but he cannot and will not stop there. Who’s next?

Well, atheists, of course, and every adherent of any non-Abrahamic religion. Jews, because the Jews are always at or near the top of every such list from every such sectarian government (almost). Quakers and Catholics and Lutherans cannot be welcome in Ogles’s Single-Sect America any more than they were in Stuyvesant’s Single-Sect New Amsterdam. Then it’ll be time to whittle away the Methodists and Presbyterians and Episcopalians, etc.

And it won’t do to just say “Only evangelicals will be allowed.” That’s not nearly specific enough. Sectarianism is like The Highlander: In the end, there can be only one. Which evangelicals? Very specifically, which one, single group and kind of evangelicals? One can stay, all the rest — like the Muslims — don’t belong here or else you’ve surrendered to the “lie” of pluralism.

Either Mike Johnson has to leave the townhouse because Southern Baptists don’t belong in America, or else Steve Berger has to leave because it is now officially a Southern Baptist townhouse and tolerating anyone else there would be the lie of pluralism.

That’s how this works. We either embrace pluralism or we reject it. And if we reject it, then we have to pick a sect — just one — and everything and everyone else has to go.

I do not know if Andy Ogles is smart enough to understand that this is what he is demanding. I suspect not. But that’s irrelevant because that is what he is demanding, whether he understands it or not.

(And here is your obligatory Emo Philips recitation.)

A look at the Neanderthal deep cave structures from Bruniquel

2026-03-09T18:49:52+00:00

Scene of stalagmite circular feature deep in Bruniquel Cave. Image: Kim Génuite and coworkers (2026, CC-BY)

In 2016, the archaeologist Jacques Jaubert and collaborators described a fascinating discovery deep within the Bruniquel Cave, France. This roughly linear cave is nearly a half-kilometer in length, situated within the steep-sided Aveyron valley. Most of this long system had been hidden by a scree slope inside a smaller cave until cavers dug through in 1990, opening passage much deeper into the hillside.

Three hundred thirty-six meters from the entrance, explorers noticed that the floor of the cave holds a series of circular structures made from broken stalagmites. More than 400 stalagmites were broken, moved, and piled into rings on the cave floor. Calcite had formed upon many parts of these structures after they were built, which enabled Jaubert and coworkers to use uranium-thorium to see how long ago they were built. The result was a minimum of 176.5 ± 2.1 ka. This was a time period when early Neanderthals inhabited western Europe, long before the arrival of any modern humans.

Upon some of those rings—sitting in a few cases right on top of stalagmites—are reddened or blackened “speleofacts”, objects interpreted as evidence of fire. Some fragments of burned bone and an area of “char” in one of the structures suggest that the makers of these structures had built and manipulated fires here, deep in the cave.

Last month, research led by Kim Génuite provided some new evidence about the use of Bruniquel Cave. By investigating the geology of the cave entrance, they have established a timeline for the opening and closure of the cave system and its use by early Neanderthals. Their work shows that the cave became closed sometime before 142.9 ± 1.3 ka, and likely was closed by gradual rockfall corresponding to the cold period of Marine Isotope Stage 6.

This new information corroborates the earlier findings. Early Neanderthals walked into this cave, went three football fields into the earth, created 15-foot-wide bubbles of rock, lit and tended small fires upon them. Then they left. Tens of thousands of years later, sliding and falling rock closed the cave, sealing in the evidence for more than 140 millennia.

As I explore the early cultural behaviors of hominins, I’m grateful for all the support from readers and members.

Overhead plan view showing several ring structures built from stalagmites in Bruniquel Cave. Yellow and red patches are evidence of reddened or blackened speleothem or burned bone. Image: Jaubert and coworkers (2016)

Without a trace

I wrote about Bruniquel in 2016 when Jaubert and coworkers first established the age of the structures. At the time the site stood out as an outlier in many ways.

Little evidence was known in 2016 of any hominin-made structures anywhere as early as 170,000 years ago. Hominin access into deep caves at this geological age was not well known outside of the Sima de los Huesos site and the Rising Star cave system of South Africa. There were in 2016 no small number of archaeologists who doubted that Neanderthals ever had reliable use of fire.

Bruniquel combines all these things: fires upon structures built in a deep cave, all long before any direct evidence of modern humans in the region.

The structures were an enigma. The floor of the cave looks like someone tossed stones into a pool that suddenly froze, but the rings weigh hundreds of kilograms. No other hominin-made markings exist within the cave system. There is no evidence of a living floor or occupation area, and no stone tools or artifacts whatsoever. There are no hominin bones or physical remains. Whoever made these rings on the floor, they came in, broke and moved tons of speleothems, tended small fires in ways that heated and discolored many of the stones, and left no other trace.

When I last wrote about Bruniquel, I didn’t yet know much about the backstory of the discovery. That’s a sign of how the site had become a footnote to 1990s-era archaeology. The cavers and scientists who first entered the cave noticed the stalagmite rings and obtained an AMS radiocarbon age on burnt bone of >47.6 ka BP. As noted in the subsequent work by Jaubert and collaborators, any date above 45,000 years ago suggested that the site was earlier than the Upper Paleolithic, but at the very edge of the capabilities of the method it could not be taken as real. In the 1990s, archaeologists were primed to doubt any cultural capabilities of the Neanderthals.

Little could anyone have suspected that these structures are actually more than 170,000 years old. If not for Jaubert and coworkers who revisited the site starting in 2013, the site might remain a footnote today. Looking back, it’s striking to me how many other footnotes from the 1990s are left, waiting for someone to re-examine them with today’s approaches.

Fire

In earlier eras, archaeologists often noted discolored bone, blackened or reddened stone, and dark chunks of organic material as possible charcoal. That’s exactly the kind of evidence that Bruniquel presented, localized into small areas on the structures themselves.

But by the early 2000s Paleolithic archaeologists were experiencing a wave of skepticism about the firemaking capabilities of Neanderthals, and by extension all early humans. Too often blackened bone had turned out to be not burned, instead permeated by black or reddish chemicals like manganese and iron oxides. Without dense concentrations of burned material and ash, many archaeologists were willing to dismiss even genuine burned bone as the product of accidental or natural fires, carried into caves by erosional processes or chance.

Tiny blackened or reddened areas on speleothems, traces of blackened bones and unidentifiable “char”, of the kind found at Bruniquel, these kinds of traces were too easily dismissed.

The confirmation of the fire evidence at Bruniquel came from a method called “Raman spectrometry”, which was applied to three blackened fragments. Two of those fragments were embedded within calcite speleothems that showed ages consistent with the stalagmite structures. The results of the Raman spectrometry method showed bone fragments that had been heated to temperatures consistent with controlled fires. These gave the broader pattern of reddened and blackened speleothem evidence meaning as trace evidence of the manipulation of small fires. The situation is more akin to the votive offerings in a temple than the long-tended hearths that might have gotten more archaeological attention.

Over the last decade or more, I’ve felt a sea-change in the way that archaeologists examine ancient fire evidence. Forensic methods have become more standardized, as reflected by the Bruniquel results.

Later Neanderthals were masters of fire technology. Already by 2016 researchers had observed that the birch pitch used by Neanderthals at some sites would have required prolonged heating and sophisticated control of oxygen supply. Recently Juan Ochando and collaborators identified a specialized fire structure at Vanguard Cave, Gibraltar, that seems well-suited to exactly such tar production from resinous plants, in this case rockroses.

Excavation photo from Vanguard Cave, Gibraltar, showing a pit feature with associated fire evidence and stones. The overall context shows this to be specialized for heating resinous materials. Image: Ochando and coworkers (2024)

In past excavations, such occurrences might be noted as small hearths or possible cooking fires, but the structure and import of the evidence was certainly missed.

At the same time, the processual perspective on how fire fit into Neanderthal ways of living has also become richer and more capable of testing hypotheses. For example, in northern Europe the Neanderthals of the last interglacial, around 125,000 years ago, used fires to clear landscapes and generate favorable habitats that attracted grazing animals for hunting, as well as shifting plant foraging opportunities. Neanderthals were engineering the ecosystem at the Neumark-Nord site for more than 2000 years during this warm climate period, setting and using fire as part of their strategy.

Was it a stretch for the Neanderthals of Bruniquel to transport coals and create small fires for lighting, almost a quarter-mile into the rock? For people who lived by firelight any night they wished, it was surely routine.

Structures

All human societies all around the world have at least basic architecture. Shelters built from wood, brush, grass, or reeds are nearly ubiquitous. Many societies add other kinds of structures. Some are utilitarian: workbenches for crafting large wooden items, windbreaks and fire rings, hunting blinds, thorn bomas for keeping out predators. Others are ritual in purpose: mortuary stands for exposing corpses to the elements, astronomical markers or henges,

Great apes, too, all build structures. Every great ape sleeps in a nest of their own construction, generally built each night, and around 1–2% of their waking time is spent in construction.

It’s not too surprising that evidence for structures at early archaeological sites has been hard to find. Big rocks are not a primary component of most of the structures made by foraging peoples. But considering the evolutionary context, it is inevitable that many ancient groups would have built structures.

A series of photos showing the wooden structure from Kalambo Falls, Zambia, and insets showing evidence of shaping of the wooden pieces. Image: Lawrence Barham and coworkers (Wikipedia)

This is one reason why the preserved evidence of a large, carved log structure from Kalambo Falls, Zambia, was so striking when revealed in 2023. More than 470,000 years ago, hominins notched logs to interlock with each other and built some kind of low structure out of them. It’s not clear how large or extensive the finished structure may have been, nor is its purpose evident. In that way the Kalambo Falls evidence resembles the evidence from Bruniquel: Each is enigmatic in purpose, but each was clearly part of a tradition that was much broader than the single piece of evidence that survived.

Few ancient structures as evocative as the eight-meter circle built from mammoth bones at Molodova 1, Ukraine, more than 44,000 years ago. This evidence is old, first excavated in the 1950s and subject to repeated analysis and reanalysis by Soviet archaeologists and outsiders. Most recently, Laëtitia Demay and coworkers presented a review and summary of the evidence in 2012.

The stone tools associated with mammoth butchery at this site are Mousterian, and combined with the date cause archaeologists to attribute this site to Neanderthals. The broad circle contains several ancient fireplaces, cutmarked bones of red deer and bison, a cache of red ochre, and stone tools.

Was this the base of a hut made from skins and wooden poles? Was it the base of a windbreak or hunting blind? Or did the Neanderthals who used this site merely kick and shove mammoth bones out of the way of their campsite, making a circle as an accidental side effect? Aside from the first hypothesis, these ideas were suggested by outside researchers reading the work, without direct familiarity with the site itself. Demay and coworkers emphasized that the site was used repeatedly, with remains of at least fifteen mammoths represented there. Hearths were built several times in the southern part of the bone circle, and there is much evidence for human activity within it. They interpret this as a domestic area of a long-term campsite, repeatedly used by the mammoth hunters.

Resetting expectations

One of my recurring areas of interest is the way that archaeologists dismiss or minimize the cultures of earlier human relatives. I’ve written that we need to replace a “Culture Last” way of looking at the evidence with a “Culture First” model. I keep pushing this concept because I’ve seen so many cases where evidence is published not at the time of its discovery, but only after someone else says the evidence should exist somewhere.

Bruniquel has a unique status in being used only for a very short time and closed to later access. In this limited sense, the site is the best possible case of preservation of ancient behavior.

A decade after the work establishing the age of the Bruniquel evidence, discussion of fire evidence has shifted quite strongly. Scientific discussion of building of shelters and other structures has shifted much less. The Bruniquel evidence of structures is often mentioned in other recent research, and it seems that other researchers struggle to apply the evidence of building outside the context of shelter or windbreaks. Clearly much more work remains to integrate an understanding of built environments into the early archaeological record.

The new work on the closure of Bruniquel’s entrance has some fascinating elements. At the time the site was used, the rockshelter entrance stretched fairly widely, with large speleothem pillars interrupting the view. Génuite and coworkers present a view of the cave mouth from inside, as it would have been for the Neanderthals 170,000 years ago in the site.

I see it as a metaphor. How little we know of the world of these Neanderthals, outside the cave where they left those circles of stone.

View from within Bruniquel Cave at the time the rockshelter entrance was open to entry. Image: Génuite and coworkers (2026)

References

Barham, L., Duller, G. a. T., Candy, I., Scott, C., Cartwright, C. R., Peterson, J. R., Kabukcu, C., Chapot, M. S., Melia, F., Rots, V., George, N., Taipale, N., Gethin, P., & Nkombwe, P. (2023). Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago. Nature, 622(7981), 107–111. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06557-9

Demay, L., Péan, S., & Patou-Mathis, M. (2012). Mammoths used as food and building resources by Neanderthals: Zooarchaeological study applied to layer 4, Molodova I (Ukraine). Quaternary International, 276–277, 212–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2011.11.019

Gao, X., Zhang, S., Zhang, Y., & Chen, F. (2017). Evidence of Hominin Use and Maintenance of Fire at Zhoukoudian. Current Anthropology, 58(S16), S267–S277. https://doi.org/10.1086/692501

Génuite, K., Verheyden, S., Camus, H., Burlet, C., Boudadi-Maligne, M., Bruxelles, L., Cheng, H., Cochard, D., Delaby, S., Fabre, E., Ferrier, C., Lézin, C., Ledoux, L., Medina-Alcaide, M.-A., Mora, P., Muth, X., Pélissié, T., Soulier, D., Xue, J., & Jaubert, J. (2026). The evolution of the cave’s entrance of Bruniquel and consequences for its accessibility by early Homo neanderthalensis. Quaternary Science Reviews, 377, 109866. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2026.109866

Huang, C., Li, J., & Gao, X. (2022). Evidence of Fire Use by Homo erectus pekinensis: An XRD Study of Archaeological Bones From Zhoukoudian Locality 1, China. Frontiers in Earth Science, 9, 811319. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2021.811319

Jaubert, J., Verheyden, S., Genty, D., Soulier, M., Cheng, H., Blamart, D., Burlet, C., Camus, H., Delaby, S., Deldicque, D., Edwards, R. L., Ferrier, C., Lacrampe-Cuyaubère, F., Lévêque, F., Maksud, F., Mora, P., Muth, X., Régnier, É., Rouzaud, J.-N., & Santos, F. (2016). Early Neanderthal constructions deep in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France. Nature, 534(7605), 111–114. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18291

Ochando, J., Jiménez-Espejo, F. J., Giles-Guzmán, F., Neto de Carvalho, C., Carrión, J. S., Muñiz, F., Rubiales, J. M., Cura, P., Belo, J., Finlayson, S., Martrat, B., van Drooge, B. L., Jiménez-Moreno, G., García-Alix, A., Lozano Rodríguez, J. A., Albert, R. M., Ohkouchi, N., Ogawa, N., Suga, H., … Finlayson, C. (2024). A Neanderthal’s specialised burning structure compatible with tar obtention. Quaternary Science Reviews, 346, 109025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.109025

Roebroeks, W., MacDonald, K., Scherjon, F., Bakels, C., Kindler, L., Nikulina, A., Pop, E., & Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S. (2021). Landscape modification by Last Interglacial Neanderthals. Science Advances, 7(51), eabj5567. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj5567

Rouzaud, F., Soulier, M., & Lignereux, Y. (1995). La grotte de Bruniquel. Spelunca. Bulletin, (60), 27-34.

Soressi, M. (2016). Neanderthals built underground. Nature, 534(7605), Article 7605. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18440

Stepka, Z., Azuri, I., Horwitz, L. K., Chazan, M., & Natalio, F. (2022). Hidden signatures of early fire at Evron Quarry (1.0 to 0.8 Mya). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(25), e2123439119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2123439119

The copy-editors in chief

2026-03-08T20:51:05+00:00

Evangelicals love declarations, statements, open letters, and manifestos. This is by necessity as this big, sprawling family of churches and institutions lacks the kinds of formal structures that enable ecumenical Christians — Catholics or “Mainline” Protestants — to speak collectively.

And so, back in the ’90s, when I was a staff writer for an evangelical parachurch nonprofit, I was involved in the production and circulation and proclamation of a lot of these declarations and statements, etc. I was the designated copy editor.

The problem was that the initial drafts of many of these manifestos included bold, sweeping proclamations that were also written in the passive voice. In other words, the statements within these statements included lots of categorical imperative claims, but no subjects to go along with those imperative verbs.

This was not merely a grammatical problem. A statement proclaiming that “The hungry must be fed” needed to be rewritten to clarify who it was it was suggesting “must” feed the hungry. That sentence needed a subject, and choosing and providing that subject seemed, to me, to be above the pay grade of the intern assigned to copy-edit it.

The bosses were never happy about this. These president-and-founders and pastor-and-professors and author-and-activists weren’t thrilled when the intern they asked to look over their statement to check for typos came back to them asking for a near-total re-write. But — to their credit — they usually understood the problem and took responsibility for fixing it.

They understood that if they did not provide subjects for all those imperative statements, then I would have to provide those subjects for them — to supply and create the substance of those statements. And that wasn’t my job. It was theirs.

Cleaning up their sentences to help them communicate their message more clearly was my job. Creating that message was not. Turning those vague passive-voice sentences into clear statements by supplying subjects for all of those verbs wasn’t a matter of copy-editing, it was a matter of meaning-making, of stating and formulating policy. Going beyond cleaning up their grammar to actually formulate their policy for them would have been a kind of usurpation — a kind of coup in which I put words and ideas in the mouths of my leaders, serving in their stead and, in effect, replacing them.

I didn’t want that, and they didn’t want that.

So, to their credit, those bosses would go back to the drawing board, redrafting their statements in clearer language so that they were the ones supplying a coherent meaning and message.

I’m remembering this today because I just read this post from Heather Cox Richardson, which has me, against all odds, sympathizing with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt:

At 8:50 yesterday morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).’ Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

As Alex Leary and Vera Bergengruen of the Wall Street Journal observed, the demand for unconditional surrender was quite a shift from Trump’s original promise to the people of Iran that the future is “yours to take,” or even his early claim that he was hoping to knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump’s shift highlighted that there appears to have been very little planning for what would happen after U.S. and Israeli bombs began to rain on Iran.

Leary and Bergengruen noted that Trump was bouncing ideas for the next stage of the assault off journalists even as ships stopped passing through the Strait of Hormuz, American citizens were stranded in the Middle East, the war spread to countries throughout the region, and U.S. military personnel died.

When reporters asked about what Trump meant by unconditional surrender, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to say that unconditional surrender meant whatever Trump decides it does whenever he decides what the goals of Operation Epic Fury are. She said: “What the president means is that when he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury has [sic] been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender whether they say it themselves or not.”

Leavitt’s statement is nonsense, but she was responding to reporters asking “what Trump meant,” and it probably seemed to her that the only way to clarify his nonsense was with some nonsense of her own.

My sympathy for Leavitt is, of course, limited by the fact that she chose this job and she knew what she was getting into. That’s also true of every other person now tasked with speaking on behalf of this administration and, thus, with defending the indefensible and with making sense of nonsense. Each of these people has tried — and failed — to “clarify” the president’s ever-shifting explanations and goals and contradictory statements. And each time one of them attempts this, they add their own “clarification” to the growing list of incoherent and contradictory statements.

The American military — the largest in the world — is directing its full fury on the people of Iran. Why? What for? Until what and until when?

No one seems to know. Those questions are being answered by dozens of different spokespeople whose answers change from day to day or even from hour to hour. All of these various spokespeople are not being tasked with clarifying America’s aims in this war, but with supplying those aims — with inventing them. And those aims of this war are all being invented and reinvented now, more than a week after the war began and while people are already dying.

We do not have a “commander in chief.” The interns are in charge. And they don’t know what’s going on either.

New Farsi Numbers Station Reported on 7910 kHz

2026-03-05T11:19:18+00:00

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Richard Cuff, who shares an article from Seth Hettena’s Substack about the appearance of a new shortwave numbers station believed to be broadcasting in Farsi. Numbers stations–mysterious broadcasts that read sequences of numbers–have long been associated with intelligence agencies communicating with field operatives using unbreakable one-time pad encryption. According to the report, this new signal first appeared around the time of recent military strikes involving Iran and has been heard on 7910 kHz. One of our readers reported hearing it around 2:15 UTC recently.

If you capture a recording of this numbers station, please reach out as I would like to add it to the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive. Thank you!

Exploring the Privacy Risks of Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems with RTL-SDR

2026-03-04T03:00:52+00:00

Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) privacy concerns are a topic that comes up every now and then. Most modern vehicles have wireless tire pressure sensors that communicate with the vehicle's computer to alert the driver when tire pressure falls below a safety threshold.

The privacy issue is that these TPMS sensors each transmit a unique identifier, so the computer can know which tire is being measured, and not read other vehicles' sensors by mistake. As TPMS is not encrypted in any way, anyone with an RTL-SDR or other similar radio can receive and decode TPMS messages, including the unique identifier. This raises privacy concerns as this can be used to log the presence and movement of individual vehicles.

A recent academic paper by university researchers showed how researchers deployed simple RTL-SDR + Raspberry Pi-based receivers along a road over a period of 10 weeks. They showed that TPMS transmissions can not only be used to identify, track, and detect the presence and daily routines of individual vehicles, but also to determine the type and weight of the vehicle via pressure readings. Interestingly, they also note that variations in the weight of an identified vehicle could indicate, for example, whether a truck is loaded or unloaded, or whether there are additional passengers in a car.

The researchers highlight privacy concerns, noting that such data could be collected and sold by data mining companies without the driver's knowledge.

RTL-SDR + Raspberry Pi for TPMS Monitoring

The TPMS Monitoring Setup

electronic old men i have met

2026-03-03T08:25:03+00:00

In the early-mid 90s my dad ran a PC repair business, which I get the impression he spun up in advance of knowing much about PCs and more or less learned on the job. I remember that when he hit a PC he really couldn’t do anything with, he’d hit up a guy called Jim, whose understanding of computers was more on a “get some wire and solder the ends to random points on the motherboard and it works again” level. Seemed less “computer wizard”, more traditional wizard.

When I worked in a PC repair place 15 years later, never having soldered anything, a properly-old man came in one day and spent some time staring at a PC we had built whose case was clear perspex, and I asked if I could help him. He said he was just browsing out of interest, because he used to build computers too. I said, oh yeah? He said, yes, the last one I built was the Ferranti Pegasus.

A Ferranti Pegasus.

I wish I remembered more about this dude, but he didn’t stay long – he told me a bit about how they worked and the sorts of things you’d have to repair. Pegasuses were being built from 1956 to 1959, and according to the wiki page, it was mostly developed by three dudes. It’s hard to know which I met, if any – could have been some even-less-sung contributor – but this would have been 2008, and not all of them were still around. The wiki says it was “Ferranti’s most popular valve computer, with 38 units being sold”. One of the designers, Christopher Strachey, has won my favour with this quote: “The necessity for optimum programming (favoured by Alan Turing) was to be minimised, “because it tended to become a time-wasting intellectual hobby of the programmers““. If I had a buck.

Another electronic old man I once met introduced himself to me as R.G. Napier when he saw me on the street wearing a Space Invaders shirt in 2015. He said he wrote “the port” of Space Invaders to the BBC Microcomputer, although there were very many ports and I can’t find his one (even though very helpful videos exist). I got a photo with him.

The BBC Microcomputer was there.

Electronic old men like this are a dying breed, I deem. You don’t have to be anywhere near this electronic anymore to do all the cool shit anyone cares about. I wish I had spent more time pickin’ the brain of the Ferranti dude who made the rock think.

The Gender Politics of Abandoning Your Girlfriend on a Mountain

2026-03-02T16:16:25+00:00

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!

Transcript:

I’ve previously admitted my enjoyment of the true crime genre, so you may not be surprised by a recent news story I’ve been following: an Austrian man has been found guilty of gross negligent manslaughter after leaving his girlfriend on an Alpine mountain in bad weather, where she died. In blurbs prior to the conviction, I saw the gist of his story: it was a challenging overnight ascent up a steep mountain, the weather shifted unexpectedly, the girlfriend said she couldn’t go on, so he left her to go get help but by the time he was able to summon emergency services, she had died of hypothermia.

After he was convicted, I was surprised because who could fault him for not staying and possibly dying with her when there was a chance to save both their lives? And so I dug into the details, and dear lord did it send me down a rabbit hole that led unexpectedly to some deep conversations on misogyny, patriarchy, and gender relations. So let’s talk about all that!

I was so surprised by the conviction because initial blurbs left out some key details, which I’ll go through now. This is all based on court testimony as translated by others, and I found this article by Owen Clarke for Climbing.com particularly helpful.

In January, 36-year old Thomas Plamberger invited his girlfriend, 33-year old Kerstin Gurtner to ascend the tallest mountain in Austria: the Grossglockner, at a height of nearly 12,500 feet or just under 4,000 meters. It was obviously winter, which meant severe cold and snow and ice, but Plamberger had completed this ascent more than a dozen times, according to his court testimony, and he said that he believed that Gurtner had the necessary experience to do it with him.

They began at 6:45am, which is generally considered a bit late in the day for a climb this arduous, and started up the more challenging Southwest Ridge of the peak with the plan to then descend on the other, easier side that also featured a mountain hut just past the peak in case of emergencies. Gurtner, the less experienced of the two by far, was wearing snowboarding boots that are not generally suitable for these conditions because she hoped to use what’s known as a split board on the descent.

By 1:30pm they reached what is known (in English) as the “Breakfast Spot,” a resting point at about 11,600 feet or 3,550 meters that is considered a crucial turnaround spot because it marks the beginning of the most difficult section to climb. For that reason, there’s a warning sign posted that tells climbers “If it took you more than 3 hours to get here, turn back! Your life depends on it. Expect major difficulties from here on!” It took them nearly SEVEN hours to get there, but they decided to continue, as Plamberger stated they still felt fresh.

Four hours later at around 5:30pm, cell phone records reveal that Gurtner dialed the number “149.” That isn’t a working number, but it is very close to “140,” the number for emergency services in Austria. At 6:07pm, a text was sent from her phone to her mother stating ??“we’re down.”

The next update we get from Plamberger is at 10:30pm when they still hadn’t reached the peak. The winds had picked up to 45 miles or 72 kilometers per hour and the temperature with windchill was -4 Fahrenheit, or -20 Celsius. Around that time, authorities could see the couple was still on the mountain and so they sent a helicopter to get them. Plamberger waved them away because he says they both felt fine, despite the fact that rescuers could see that Gurtner was having trouble finding hand and footholds, and made only a few inches of progress in five minutes. Immediately after the helicopter left, he says that Gurtner suddenly and unexpectedly deteriorated, stating that she could not make the rest of the ascent.

For two hours after the helicopter left, alpine rescue services repeatedly tried to call Plamberger’s phone, which did have a signal and so the calls did go through. Despite Gurtner’s supposed sudden decline, he didn’t call them back until 12:35am. According to Plamberger, he requested help. According to the police, he was vague and noncommittal, and it was “definitely not an emergency call.” According to everyone, after that call he set his phone to “do not disturb” and put it back in his pocket as emergency services tried repeatedly to reach him back through calls, texts, and Whattsapp.

They spent the next 90 minutes huddled about 100 feet below the peak, at which point Plamberger stated that they both agreed the best course of action was for him to leave her there to go find rescue services. He left her with her heavy pack and snowboard still on her back, without finding any temporary shelter for her, and without wrapping her in their “bivvy bag,” which is a thin waterproof shell used for minimalist shelter.

It was two more hours before Plamberger called emergency services again at 3:30am, at which point he suggested they send another helicopter. However, the winds were too strong at that point so there was nothing to do but wait until rescuers could get to her by foot the next morning. Plamberger told them that he left her on flat terrain just below the summit–however, the rescuers found that in fact she had been left dangling from a rope 50 meters or 160 feet below the summit.

In the end, the judge in this case convicted Plamberger of gross negligence not necessarily for leaving Gurtner, but for a series of mistakes, any one of which could have caused this problem. He shouldn’t have waved off the helicopter. He should have checked his phone. He should have wrapped her in the bivvy and removed her pack before leaving.

And here’s where I get to the reason why I think this story has particularly horrified outdoorswomen: the judge found that while Plamberger was an experienced and competent solo climber, he was not prepared to lead an ascent like this:

“You are an excellent mountaineer,” (the judge) told Plamberger. “But you are also someone who struggles to switch from your own abilities to the abilities of others, and react accordingly.”

And this is where I tell you a final reveal from the trial, which the judge did NOT consider when rendering his verdict: an ex-girlfriend of Plamberger’s testified that in 2023, he did the exact same thing to her on the exact same mountain peak.

Now, when I first heard this I have to admit my true crime brain said “oh my god he tried to kill both of them!” But listen to what the ex had to say:

“The pair had been arguing during the climb, and she wanted to take a shortcut down. That’s when Plamberger bailed.

“Apparently, I was too slow for him, and suddenly he was gone,” Andrea B. recalled. “It was the middle of the night, I was completely alone, my headlamp went out, I was dizzy, I was yelling and screaming. I was all alone; he had gone ahead … That was also our last mountain tour.”

While the judge didn’t consider this relevant, a WHOLE lot of women did. Social media sites like TikTok are currently awash with women telling their own stories of men abandoning them on adventures, with the phrase “Alpine divorce” coming up often. That term was originally the title of a short story of a man trying to kill his wife during a trip to the Swiss apps, but these women’s posts make it clear that it isn’t a case of premeditated homicide. For instance, this woman. She later posted this video. Her boyfriend didn’t leave her in the hopes that she would die. He just didn’t give a shit. He wanted to run to the top of the mountain, and her experience simply did not factor into the equation.

There are also stories from women who say their partners asked them on a “hike” only to take them mountain climbing, which some might chalk up to a “boys will be boys” silliness but in fact is a tactic of abusers, who want to stress out their girlfriends and push them to their limits to see how much they can get away with…how easily they can violate consent.

And then there’s the woman who said she hiked up a mountain with a male friend who abandoned her after she rejected his sexual advances.

And now there’s Thomas Plamberger, someone who clearly does not possess the emotional regulation to help a partner through a difficult hike. The judge said he “struggles to switch from your own abilities to the abilities of others,” but to be clear, the actual problem in my opinion is that he does not view his partners as fully human or worth considering. Their inability to keep up with him makes him angry and so he punishes them by abandoning them in dangerous conditions. Twice! At least!

That’s my hypothesis, and also that of several expert mountaineers. In another article for Climbing that was written prior to the trial, Owen Clarke asked several respected climbers for their thoughts on the case. Damian Benegas said, “if you have more experience and fitness, your job is not to bring your partner to your level. Your job is to go down to their level.”

I think that’s true in many similar adventure sports that I’ve engaged in, sometimes with romantic partners but also even in the case of friends. When I take my inexperienced friends or partners hiking or surfing or cycling, I check in with them frequently. I give them ample opportunity to bail without guilt or shame. I carry extra water and snacks, I download maps. Hell, I hike with a backpack that my dog can fit inside in case he gets hurt or even just tired. People who care about you will do this for you. It’s not some little known ancient mountaineering wisdom only passed down to those who are worthy. It’s basic common sense and empathy.

Benegas went on to say that “climbing with a romantic partner can lead to an inherently fraught, complex dynamic. This is particularly true if one climber has significantly more or less experience than the other. “I don’t know what their relationship was like, outside of this climb,” he said, “but when you have male-female relationships climbing together, we see a lot of things go wrong.” One party may be eager to please, another eager to impress, and at the end of the day, no one is thinking rationally.”

Another expert added that “although it seems likely Gurtner was the less experienced of the two, she may have been able to save herself if she’d put her foot down. Presumably, she could have flagged down the police helicopter herself when it came to check on them. Or she could have called for help using her own phone. But instead, she seemed to have trusted Plamberger to make smart decisions until it was too late. “You need to always listen to the voice you have in your head,” Degoulet said. “As soon as you have doubts, express them. The mountains will always be there.”

And that’s where I have to point out that these culturally gendered stereotypes go both ways. Yes, a more experienced man in a relationship may be more likely to get fed up, to want to show off, to test boundaries, to want to punish or “neg.”

At the same time, a less experienced woman in a relationship may be more likely to go along to get along, to not make a big fuss, to place unearned trust in her partner, to not want to disappoint him.

EVERY more quiet, submissive person, man or woman, watching this video needs to understand that ultimately you are your best advocate. Do not put up with partners who test you, who violate your boundaries, or who treat you as lesser.

This all reminded me of this video I saw a few months ago. THAT is absolutely the correct energy. That man wanted to humiliate her on their first date and she stood up for herself. Had she gone along with it just to not make a scene, or to not seem like a humorless bitch, I guarantee you that he would not stop there. He wasn’t looking for an equal romantic partner. He was looking for a victim. And while things are getting better, our society still socially conditions women to be victims. It’s incredibly difficult to fight against this narrative but these stories show that it’s so important. We can’t protect ourselves against every form of male violence, but there are small ways that we can hone our judgment, stand up for ourselves, and avoid climbing that mountain in the first place.

After learning all of this about the Plamberger case, I went from being shocked that he was convicted to being disappointed that he got off with no jail time and a fine of €9,600, or about $11,300. I can only hope that enough women around the world hear about these details so that he never has the chance to get angry and abandon a woman in the Alps for a third time. Stay safe out there, ladies.

I think we're going to need to seize the means of computing, folks

2026-03-02T18:00:00+00:00

In the 1970s the Personal Computer was heralded as a great revolution, bringing the power of computing to the masses. Democratising it. Taking it from something you had to be affiliated with an institution to enjoy to something many people could afford.

Halfway through the 2020s the Personal Computer appears to be a threatened species.

Decades of complacency have enabled corporate giants to own vast swathes of the computing market, and increasingly enclose their users with more and more restrictive computing platforms, and now with the advent of the AI bubble’s reshaping of the computing market, they appear to be preparing for a killing blow.

Gone are the days where a computer magazine would act as a hub for fellow readers’ shared source code, coach readers on how to approach computing problems and even programming. I fear we are in for a decade of the corporate interests pivoting us into owning nothing and enjoying only slop.

As a long-time Mac user it pains me to say it, but I think we’re gonna have to seize the means of computing. We must be free to use our bicycles for the mind lest it be taken from us. macOS has been slowly degrading for years now. Windows is way ahead of the curve on this. But from this position it feels inevitable.

You should be able to control your devices. You should be able to repair them. You should be able to upgrade them. You should be able to keep them going longer than the manufacturer would like to keep their profit margins up. You shouldn’t have to rent computing power from a datacentre which is poisoning your fellow human and the environment we share. And in the year where solar is starting to beat coal for the first time, we shouldn’t be investing in more dirty power to do it.

Hack your devices. Resist corporate control. Delete corporate bloatware. Run community-maintained software. Host your own services. And teach others to do the same. Keep using that “old” RAM they already sold you. It’s not broken, corporate software is just bloated.

I fear it’s our only path through this bubble.

What’s your favourite ridiculous piece of 90s technology?

2026-03-02T09:18:11+00:00

Thank you so much for the excellent question!! I've been meaning to answer this one for a while, so here goes.

My favourite ridiculous piece of 90s technology is PocketMail! It wasn't that ridiculous at the time, but it's definitely something that could have only existed in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I actually have a PocketMail device, an Oregon Scientific PM-32 that I found on the side of the road in a box full of broken landline telephones!

PocketMail devices were essentially very basic Personal Digital Assistants that allowed you to access your emails without having to use a computer with an internet connection! Here you can see the basic screen and buttons for composing, sending and receiving emails.

ALT

But remember, this thing doesn't have Wi-Fi - so how exactly can it access your emails? If you flip the device over, you'll see a strange little speaker thing that flips out...

ALT

That's an acoustic coupler! You had to hold the device up to the handset of a landline telephone! So if you had a PocketMail account (with a special email address ending in @pocketmail.com) and were away from your computer/office, you could simply dial the phone number for the PocketMail service on the nearest landline telephone, then hold the device up to the handset so that it can send and receive email data with the email server in the form of audio - and presto! You have just sent an angry last-minute email to your intern for neglecting to look after your Tamagotchi while you were on a business trip to sell Y2K survival kits.

But... what did it sound like? The phone service has long since been shut down after the rise of more capable and portable internet-connected devices, but if you press the little 'Mail' button on the top of the device, you can still hear the sounds of this poor, obsolete little thing trying to reach out and communicate in the only way it knows how to:

AUDIO WARNING: LOUD

Kind of sad, isn't it?

I'm always repeating myself about: ADHD

2026-02-24T05:37:20+00:00

This is the first of a series where I write down all the usual stuff I say when I'm talking about something I talk about a lot. In this entry I talk about ADHD.

"I've tried all sorts of medications, and none of them work"

Most of the time when people say this, they mean they've been put on ritalin, rubifen, concerta... in other words, they've been tried on a bunch of different forms of methylphenidate.

Obviously, everybody responds differently to different medications. But evidence suggests that, in general, adolescents respond better to methylphenidate, and adults respond better to amphetamines (such as dexamphetamine).

If you're ready to give up on medication, please talk to your doctor about trying something with a different active ingredient to the drugs you've already tried. This may be a pain in the ass if your Special Authority only allows for one active ingredient, as you'll have to pay to have it amended, but I highly recommend it–especially if, fingers crossed, the cost of doing so comes down with the increase in supply of professionals permitted to write Special Authorities.

And keep in mind there are non-stimulant medications you can be prescribed without a Special Authority, such as atomoxetine.

This is also a good time to note that if you're being assessed for the first time, make sure they put all the available drugs on your special authority, so you're able to change medications just with the help of your GP.

It's also important to keep in mind that if you don't respond well to dexamphetamine, you may respond well to lisdexamphetamine. And I've talked to people who don't get on with one methylphenidate-based medication, but do with another.

Play around with dosages. Too low a dose can leave you in a weird restless in-between space, and too high can leave you feeling wired and agitated.

Caffeine can interfere with medication as well, and it's worth cutting back or tapering off to see how that affects you.

In general, it's good to look up drug interactions between any drugs you take.

"Calendars don't work for me"

Were you unmedicated when you tried, and now you're medicated? Try again–most non-medication interventions for ADHD become much more effective once you're medicated.

Your medication status hasn't changed? Try again anyway.

Something I've found with ADHD is it's really easy to try something, it doesn't work, and it gets stuck in your head that that thing just doesn't work for you. But ADHD is basically the "things have trouble sticking" disorder. If you give up on things after they don't work the first time, you won't be able to do much of anything.

You don't have to keep grinding at something over and over til it works, but circling back and trying again later is basically the only way to get on in life with ADHD. Maybe your environment has changed, or your mood is different, or you're used to it now from your previous attempts; you'll be surprised at what you're able to pick up–at least for a time–if you try again.

Don't forget to change it up. I thought the idea of a physical diary for appointments was so romantic, but in practice I never stuck with it. Eventually I got into using the calendar on my phone, and the habit eventually stuck–one of the few ADHD accommodations I successfully managed before medication.

I never brought the diary with me places, but my phone is always on me. As soon as there's talk of making plans or booking appointments, my phone is out and I'm looking at the relevant dates to check availability and write plans down right away.

Sure I'm not always on time, and I don't always do all the things I plan to do; but there is no way I could keep up my job without it. I am so much less stressed when it comes to timekeeping than I was when I organised my week by setting alarms for work, and checking the course schedule glued to the inside of a workbook.

Other stuff that helps

I've been taking creatine. It helps with my fatigue, and it sorta meets the meds halfway in terms of executive function. Seems to be helpful for a lot of people with ADHD. Some people experience an upset tummy the first week or so, but it goes away. It might not work for you, but it's safe and cheap to find out.

When I started taking it I would forget to take my meds because I was functional enough to get through the morning without them. I'd only notice I hadn't taken them when I was sitting at my desk wondering why I felt so bleh.

I put a 5 gram scoop in my coffee every morning–tastes like nothing.

Unfortunately, the trite advice people give about sleeping and drinking water and eating enough is all real. Getting those things right won't fix your ADHD, but getting them wrong will make it worse–along with everything else.

Eating more protein is good for ADHD, if you aren't getting enough. Shakes are an easy way to do that.

The main point I'd like to end on is that one about trying things again. Life with ADHD is a series of picking things up then dropping them again, and it's important to keep on picking them up.

Like that blog you keep forgetting to update.

Tonight's Power Cat 2026-02-28

2026-03-01T02:11:00+00:00

Power Cat

2026-02-28

Tomato

Kansas Passes Law Legally Detransitioning Trans People in the State

2026-03-01T01:15:00+00:00

John Hanna/ AP Images

You know, what they do to us, they can do to any group of Americans. . . all who read this included.

The Kansas legislature has a Republican supermajority. They passed, over the governor's veto, a law that gender cannot be changed, and thus gender markers on a Kansas license or birth certificate cannot be changed. Anyone who had already gone through the long, expensive, arduous legal process of gender transition on their documents? Those were declared instantaneously invalidated when the law went into effect on February 26th. All trans people in Kansas are required to go get new drivers' licenses on which they are forcibly detransitioned by the state--oh, and you can't even drive to the DMV to get and pay for this license. Anyone caught driving while trans will be fined $1000 and subject to six months in jail for each "offense".

When you think about a driver's license, perhaps driving is the only activity that comes to mind for which you need one. Or perhaps buying a six-pack of beer or going to a club also come to mind. But such a list is missing two huge consequences of this Kansas law. In the US, you need a valid state ID to pick up a range of prescriptions, including pain medications, sleep medications--and testosterone, which so many transmasculine people are prescribed, myself included. So people are suddenly cut off from their gender-affirming medical care. And another major issue: Kansas is one of 38 states that require a valid photo ID both to register to vote, and to cast a vote once registered. Kansas has gone and disfranchised the 1700 trans people it has identified as having legally gender transitioned in Kansas.

The law does more than impact birth certificates and drivers' licenses, as well. It's now a crime in Kansas to use a public bathroom matching your lived gender if that gender doesn't match the binary sex you were assigned at birth. Again, a $1000 fine per violation--only this time, any person who reports a trans person for using a bathroom gets $1000 too.

As immigrants and family members of immigrants and people who are simply brown in the US can tell you, a disturbing percentage of the people around you are delighted to participate in persecuting their neighbors. Perhaps you saw how comedian Ben Palmer set up a fake tipline to report suspected undocumented immigrants, and got a pile of reports, including one by a kindergarten teacher who suspected a child's parents were not citizens and wanted them deported, and a woman outraged that a store employee who correctly helped her find the product she wanted "didn't speak English" seeking her deportation for that "crime." I have friends whose children have been threatened by classmates that they will get them deported if they don't hand over their snack or lose the schoolyard ballgame. And meanwhile, the president is seeking to end birthright citizenship and do the equivalent of detransitioning swaths of American citizens into noncitizens at a stroke.

People tell me this will never happen. People also told me no state would ever invalidate the gender transitions of everyone in it. And then this week Kansas did, and put it into effect overnight.

Perhaps you are neither brown nor trans. But what can happen to us can happen to any group. For your own sake as well as ours, please don't ostrich. Keeping your head down does not keep you safe for long. Stand up! Object. Resist.

Using git while trans

2026-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Git is the version control system. Yes, others exist, but if you're writing code you're probably using git.

Git was not designed with people's names changing in mind. This is a problem, because people's names do change for many reasons. The most common one many people will be familiar with is women changing their surname when marrying a man.

The one I am concerned about is the name change that trans people go through as part of a social transition. Unlike changing a surname at marriage, in which a person's "maiden name" can remain common knowledge, changing your name during a transition leaves behind what we commonly call a "deadname".

Revealing a trans person's deadname is a safety issue, which is a problem when working with git.

Removing your deadname from displayed logs

There is a built-in utility in git that allows displaying commits with an updated name. That is git mailmap. It allows you to create a `.mailmap` file in the root of a git repository that contains lines like this:

Correct Name <correct.email@company.tld> <commit.email@company.tld>

With a .mailmap file in place, git tools such as git log and git blame will display names found in a .mailmap file for commits that used an email address identified in there.

In order to find out what email addresses might exist against your deadname, you can run this command to see what commit authors exist in a repo's history:

git shortlog --summary --email

This will display an alphabetical list of commit author names and their associated email addresses, with the number of commits listed to the left. The same name with a different email address is treated as a different commit author.

Adding a .mailmap file is a useful way to effectively update the name against all your old commits without having to rewrite git history. This is useful because rewriting history is often not an option, especially in work environments.

However, this approach has some downsides as well:

If the email address used for your commits contains your deadname, as is common in work environments, then it will be exposed to anyone viewing the .mailmap file.
GitHub, by far the most commonly used git hosting platform, at the time of writing does not support .mailmap and will still display your deadname against your old commits.
The original log, including your deadname, still exists and can be revealed by modifying or removing the .mailmap file.

These shortcomings are only surmountable by rewriting history.

Removing your deadname from commit author data

Git does have a built-in feature called filter-branch that can be used for rewriting history, but for years now it's been recommended against. Instead, the git documentation now officially recommends the use of an external Python script called git-filter-repo.

You can use git-filter-repo to rewrite the history of a git repository. It expects to always be run against a fresh clone of your repo, so before using it you should create a fresh clone to work in. Using git-filter-repo will also remove your repo's remotes, this is intentionally added friction to encourage verifying your changes before force pushing them to the remote.

You can use git-filter-repo to modify author information against commits based on the contents of a .mailmap file:

git filter-repo --use-mailmap

If you want to use an external file (e.g. because a .mailmap file already exists for this repo and you only want to rewrite _your_ commits) you can also use an external file like this:

git filter-repo --mailmap <filename>

Note that, because git-filter-repo expects to work on a fresh clone, you'll want your external file to exist outside your repo's root directory.

Once you've done this, you can re-check the list of commit authors using git shortlog like in the example above. Make sure to remove any of your lines in a .mailmap file first, so you don't accidentally obscure any commits under your deadname at this point.

Once confirmed, you can add your remote back and force push your changes, e.g.

git remote add origin <url-to-origin>
		git push --all --force

Removing your deadname from committed files

Rewriting history like this won't remove a .mailmap file. If you don't want that file in your repo's git history either because it reveals your deadname then you'll need to remove it. If you want it removed from the history itself, you can also use the sensitive data removal feature git-filter-repo to rewrite history in a way that removes a file completely.

Remember, you'll need a (new) fresh clone to do this.

git filter-repo --sensitive-data-removal --invert-paths --path .mailmap

If you have other files that may have once contained your deadname, such as a package.json file, you can also use the sensitive data removal tool to change these.

First, you'll need to create an expressions file defining what text to replace. For example:

Deadname==>My Name

Then you can run a history-rewriting find and replace using that file by running this command:

git filter-repo --sensitive-data-removal --replace-text <path-to-expressions-file>

Be very careful with this step, as a global find and replace could result in unanticipated changes.

Once you're finished removing this sensitive data and you've verified that it worked as expected, you can force push your changes to update the history on the remote.

git push --all --force

Feedback

If you know of any other tips for removing your deadname from a git repo, I'd like to hear them! Please email me your feedback.

Have We Forgotten How to Design?

2026-02-27T02:00:00+00:00

Last week, I read a story about how Waymo (self-driving taxi service) is partnering with Door Dash (food delivery service).

And it surprised me. I was genuinely shocked. I couldn’t believe it. Because when I first read the headline, I thought it must be about putting food in a car and driving it off to the recipient. Which would have been stupid enough. But the reality was much stupider. Waymo is paying Dashers to close the Waymo car doors that passengers leave open.

How has Waymo the technical ability to self-drive a motor vehicle around a city carrying human passengers, but they do not possess the skill to automate closing a door? Did they overlook every method that might encourage the passenger to close it themselves? Was there no other possible method to get the door in a closed state without resorting to a third party that commissions human drivers to drive over to the automated car and do it manually?

Four-door taxis with automated doors are rare outside of Japan, but power-sliding doors have existed on vans for decades. The concept of vehicle doors that can open and close themselves is not futuristic. We know how to do it.

Am I to believe that nowhere in the process of creating the Waymo fleet, this was not considered? No one accounted for the possibility that a passenger might not close a door?

Working in the technology industry over the last 15 years, I can actually believe it. I can believe that such things are overlooked. Because I’ve seen people jump to much wilder implementations before the ones that feel much more obvious to me. I have witnessed people explain how apps “must” do something because there’s no other way. I’ve seen an apathetic attitude take over everything.

Just the other day, someone tried to tell me that companies like Dropbox have no choice but to display a system dialogue asking for access to other devices on my network, because Dropbox built a feature that prioritizes syncing files locally if possible. To make that assumption, you have to neglect the possibility that the app could just ask if that local sync was applicable before asking permission to scan the network for supposed eligible devices.

And I see this happening all over. I don’t expect everyone to think like me. I sincerely hope others are not afflicted with the curse I have where I question everything I encounter. But that’s how designers have to think to figure out the best solutions to problems. If the design industry has moved on from thinking and invested completely into following directions, then I suspect this can still get much worse.

It always seemed to me that devising efficient solutions to problems was the role of a designer, to draw a line from expectation to reality. In other words, to create a method that makes it work.

I think two things broadly happened that contributed to where we are now with regard to this.

Firstly, the move-fast-and-break-things world prioritizes not just the concept of shipping things in imperfect states, but accepting less-than-ideal solutions knowing you can patch them over later. And while that can be true, as Steve Jobs so famously said about hardware buttons on a phone, you can’t add a physical button later; the devices already shipped. There are situations where you can reasonably go back and revise, but there are others where you cannot.

Secondly, the designer’s responsibility shifted a bit. Modern design departments are now more in service of the company rather than its customers. Instead of developing possible solutions to reduce friction, designers follow directives to make the chart go up and to the right.

That’s what happened here, right? Powered doors—just one potential solution—are more expensive.

And to do it now? What’s Waymo going to do? Refit the cars with automated doors? Resell the cars and get new ones that have automated doors? Someone either consciously kicked the can down the road or they were negligent, and it’s costing them a more complex solution and actual money, up to $24 to close a car door in Los Angeles. A solution that necessarily requires a third party.

It is ironic, isn’t it? The premise of Waymo is to automate moving a human being on a road, but in reality, it cannot function without a human being’s intervention. I don’t even want this technology to begin with. I think it’s dangerous and reckless and unethical. But I can’t help but laugh at this “solution” because it reminds me of how scooter companies need to redistribute the scooters around a city when they all end up consolidated in a single spot.

If only they thought of ways to move people collectively instead of the vehicles.

26th of February 2026

2026-02-26T19:43:30+00:00

Icicles.

Picture album:

2026

9 users have voted.

snakes.run: rendering 100M pixels a second over ssh

2026-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

snakes.run: rendering 100M pixels a second over ssh

snakes.run is a massively multiplayer snake game that uses the Secure Snake Home (SSH) protocol. It can render 100M pixels a second. ssh snakes.run to play.

Read the full post on my blog!

Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/secure-massively-multiplayer-snake

Nettle Witch

2026-02-26T01:30:23+00:00

I bought an art from Missing and it's amazing! They do such great work, everyone reading this should commission them to make the cool wizards of your dreams!

detailed image description

A woman is wearing a tattered dress but clean apron and shawl over it. She has a large hat with string wound around and dangling off it, holding a few sprigs of nettles to the cap. A basket of nettles is looped over one arm. Her hands, wearing rubber gloves for safety, are working a mortar and pestle. She has a scythe on her belt and is wearing a black mask over her nose and mouth.

Standard E-Books

2026-02-25T17:20:00+00:00

If you're a big ereader user, you might already know about Standard E-Books, a website which creates immaculately typeset and edited digital editions of public-domain books.

The site employs a staff of part time editors who put together completely open editions of public-domain texts. Project Gutenberg is great, but the ebooks available for download there really, really suck. There's also a woman named Anna with an archive... you may have heard of her... and not everything there is great, either. Standard E-Books are formatted nicely, come with a proper and functional cover, and are distributed in multiple formats for compatibility with a whole bunch of platforms and devices. They're very nice!! Also, you can just read the books online, in your web browser! Extremely convenient!!

I am a minor-league data hoarder, and I've been filling the NAS we set up last year with all sorts of PDFs I've collected over the years - mostly style guides from old TV shows and movies, videogame design documents, entertainment pitches of various types, and so on. I recently started using Thorium, an open-source epub reader, to read the documentation for ink, which I have as an epub... and this then inspired me to start hoarding a bunch of epubs in addition to my PDFs. I immediately headed over to Standard E-Books to grab some of the ones I was sure I would always value having a good copy of.

Of course, there's so much stuff there that I immediately started grabbing books I have not read yet, too - in particular, a lot of French crime fiction, which is somewhat relevant to a project I plan to work on this year.

If I'm counting right, there seem to be nearly 1400 books on the site at time of writing. Astonishing!! I appreciated this interview with the project's founder about the process they go through to create the books - each is handled by an individual worker who is overseen by an editor and must cross-check the text constantly with various page scans of old editions.

And of course, all of this reminds me that I need to check the list of new shit in the public domain and see if anything new dropped this year that I like...

Footless Urban Pigeons Suffer Untold Trials and Tribulations

2026-02-24T17:21:32+00:00

Foot deformities are ubiquitous in urban pigeons. Why?

Caption: poor toe-less or even mostly foot-less urban pigeons, one encountered in Lisbon in 2014, the other (on the right) seen close to Kew train station in September 2014. The right foot of the Kew bird is completely absent; the left one had at least one toe, curled round such that the bird was walking on the toe's lateral side. Image: Darren Naish.

Here’s a republished version of an article that originally appeared (here, at ver 3) back in 2022.

As you’ll know if you’ve spent any time watching the pigeons of towns and cities, something like one in every ten has missing or partial toes, or swollen toes, or other pedal deformities of some sort. And then there are really extreme individuals: the ones that are missing the majority of their toes altogether.

Caption: that bird from Lisbon again, showing how badly mangled its feet are. Image: Darren Naish.

I’m talking here about the domestic form of Columba livia, the so-called Rock pigeon or Rock dove. And, while I’ve mostly paid attention to deformed pigeons here in the UK, it certainly isn’t a UK-only thing, as continental European and North and South American people (and no doubt those of elsewhere in the world too) will confirm.

The Kew bird in the photos here was able to fly around and feed itself, and it might be broadly described as ‘healthy’. However, note that it’s in pretty poor condition. The feathers on its head and neck looked terrible and its rectrices (the big tail feathers) were frayed and shabby. I reckon this is partly due to an inability to groom and scratch itself: obviously, birds use their feet to reach parts that they can’t get to with the bill.

Looking nice, keeping clean. The impact of this is more than cosmetic, since birds with a poorly maintained or unrepaired plumage are disadvantaged in flight relative to tidier individuals, and less able to keep themselves warm and waterproofed. And a bird that isn’t able to groom parts of its plumage is also at risk of being unable to keep on top of parasites like ticks and feather mites. As demonstrated through various experiments, birds with shabby-looking plumage are less attractive as mates (Clayton 1990), so a bad-looking pigeon is likely to be a non-breeding pigeon. It’s also worth noting that (like many animals), pigeons preferentially use one foot more than the other as goes the way they land and perch and sit and so on (Fisher 1957). Individuals that lose or damage their preferred foot might, then, end up being doubly disadvantaged (imagine being right-handed, and then having to rely only on your left hand for evermore). I don’t know how concerned people are about the emotional well-being of animals like urban pigeons (or how far they’re prepared to go in admitting that non-human animals have feelings and states of mind), but I think we can be confident that the most severely deformed of these birds are - at least at times - miserable, unhappy and frustrated.

Caption: toe damage is very common in urban pigeons, but we mustn’t think that it’s ubiquitous. In this pigeon group in Bristol, photographed in 2023, I can only see one missing toe (on the right foot of the bird at extreme upper right). UPDATE: ok, I’ve now noticed a second pigeon with a mangled foot. The bird just left of the one at upper right has a club-like left foot. Image: Darren Naish.

The ‘tangled’ or ‘stringfoot’ hypothesis. Several ideas have been put forward to explain the many foot problems seen in urban pigeons. Some probably lose toes after getting them tangled in litter or anti-pigeon netting, or after they've received injuries from anti-pigeon spikes installed on signs and ledges. Fine wire, string, cotton thread and even human hair can all cause problems for birds when caught on or around digits, and some people say that interaction with fine thread and string and so on is the primary cause of pigeon foot damage. My impression is that this ‘tangled’ hypothesis, causing what’s increasingly known as stringfoot in birds, is the most likely explanation for the problem.

The ‘chemical injury’ hypothesis. It’s also sometimes suggested that the deformities result from infections received after standing on excrement, and that the birds become damaged through interaction with chemicals used on roofs and building stone. This ‘chemical injury’ idea is unlikely to be correct, since (a) exactly what sort of chemicals are we talking about here, and why have they been used on buildings in the first place?, and (b) a chemical would basically have to be a powerful acid or alkaline agent (hydrochloric acid, or a very strong bleach) before it could damage a bird’s feet. For completeness, note that hereditary deformities like those reported for some captive populations of other pigeon species (Flach & Cooper 1991) might also explain some abnormalities observed in urban pigeons.

Caption: pigeons are frequently encountered as roadkill here in the UK. The Common wood pigeon Columba palumbus at left was dead at the side of the road and its lack of rectrices show that it had undergone ‘terror moulting’ prior to death, though whether this happened literally moments before it expired or hours or days before is unknown to me. At right, a juvenile wood pigeon on a road. Its position implies that it fell from the tree above before being hit by a car. Images: Darren Naish.

Caption: pigeons do have to deal with a list of predators, even in urban environments. Falcons and domestic cats are pigeon-killers of course, but so are gulls and corvids. This Lesser black-backed gull Larus fuscus at Bristol train station learnt how to kill feral pigeons and I watched it do this once. Image: Darren Naish.

And we’ll end things there. For previous TetZoo articles on pigeons, see…

The detachable tails of pigeons, September 2008
Are parrots actually pigeons?, May 2009
Giant club-winged pigeons and ninja ibises: clubs, spurs, spikes and claws on the hands of birds (part III), February 2011
Footless Urban Pigeons Suffer Untold Trials and Tribulations, September 2014
Voyeurism and Feral Pigeons, June 2015
The Asian Dove That Ate Europe Alive, January 2017
Pigeons and Doves 101, March 2018
The Dodo in Life, July 2020
Otidiphaps the Pheasant-Pigeons, April 2022

My writing and research is dependent on crowd-funded support. Thanks to those whose patronage made this article, and the others you read here, possible. Please consider assisting me if you can, thank you!

Refs - -

Clayton, D. H. 1990. Mate choice in experimentally parasitized rock doves: lousy males lose. American Zoologist 30, 251-262.

Fisher, H. I. 1957. Footedness in domestic pigeons. The Wilson Bulletin 69, 170-177.

Flach, E. J. & Cooper, J. E. 1991. Clinical and pathological findings in two Mauritian pink pigeons (Columba mayeri). Veterinary Record 129, 48-51.

I'm Still Not Over Losing My Book Review Gig

2026-02-24T17:55:38+00:00

You can still get the Humble Bundle of every book by Annalee Newitz and myself published by Tor Books for a pittance — please select adjusted donation! — and proceeds go to the TGI Justice Project, a wonderful organization.

I’m doing a Star Trek comic!

I’m really sad about the slow death of book criticism

A few weeks ago, I found out on social media that I had lost my job as science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. I've been meaning to write about it for my newsletter ever since, but I needed time¹ to collect my thoughts — and I didn't just want to rehash what everyone else was already saying.

I really loved that gig, and I'm still feeling kinda bereft. I've written before about how invigorating it was to be paid to keep tabs on everything being published in science fiction and fantasy, and to read a decent selection of the new books coming out every month. I felt like a part of the SFF community in a whole different way. Plus that gig forced me to spend a lot of time reading cool stories instead of looking at upsetting news online. Being able to shout out amazing new books by lesser known authors felt like a way to give back and to help keep genre fiction healthy and exciting.

Here’s Julie Benbassat’s wonderful illustration for my roundup of 2025’s best SF books for the Post.

As someone pointed out to me on Blue sky, this is the second time I've lost a dream job thanks to a billionaire².

It's also terribly sad to see the Washington Post gutting its Metro section and its international coverage. I lived in D.C. for a brief moment in my early twenties, and I got a print subscription to the Post because that felt like a thing grown-ups did. I remember the feeling of learning something about the world from reading great journalism. This was one of the all-time great newspapers and I always thought of it as the gold standard. Seeing the Post gutted makes me feel gutted.

I’d been so proud to start writing for the Post, several years ago. Originally I was writing for the opinion section, and I was briefly being groomed to have a regular op-ed column — but being a pundit wasn’t as fun as I’d always dreamed it would be, for various reasons. Still, I'm immensely proud of this op-ed about trans kids, which felt like a big deal to get printed in a national newspaper even back then.

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I'm trying to hold on to the habit of reading constantly, because it's so freaking good for my mental health. But I don't know how, or if, I'm going to keep writing book criticism. It's a ton of work, especially when you're not getting paid or having a real chance to influence the conversation outside of your own bubble.

A few other things happened around the same time I lost my gig. There was a new wave of drummed-up excitement about the notion of A.I.-written novels as a path to financial success. A lot of journalistic institutions started trying to integrate themselves with online betting — excuse me, prediction markets — which felt like another nail in the coffin of journalistic integrity. I've been seeing more and more of those scam emails that promise to help promote my book on Goodreads or in some non-existent book club, because there's just noplace else to get attention for your book anymore.

More than ever, I am determined to support indie journalism, including startup publications like Flaming Hydra, Coyote Media, Garbage Day, Forever Wars, 48 Hills, 404 Media and a ton of others. We need good indie journalism more than ever right now, which is why the forces of enshittification are so determined to starve it of resources.

But I also think we need to find more ways to support book criticism as an art form and as a conversation starter. I would love to see more indie book publications like Maris Kreizman’s The Maris Review or Andrew Liptak’s Transfer Orbit. But I also think book journalism often works best as a side dish for other sorts of writing — the same way people used to come to the Post for news or sports, but might have stuck around to read my book reviews. It's sometimes better if book criticism is part of a larger venture.

It's freakishly hard to get people to read book criticism, and this has been a problem for a very long time. So while I was at the Post, I spent a lot of time working with my editors trying to craft headlines and formats that’d help my column get more eyeballs without compromising the substance of the column itself. My guess is that book criticism is one of those things that people enjoy reading, but they won't seek it out. If they stumble across it, and it seems to be speaking to real things that are happening in politics and culture at large, people will devour it.

I've written before about the role of a book critic, and how important I think it is for this to be a profession in addition to being something that people do for fun at Goodreads or other platforms. This is partly because when I was writing for the Post, I would try to meet books on their own terms, rather than judging them according to what I would’ve wished them to be. There's absolutely nothing wrong with reviewing a book on the basis of "I wanted more X, and this book gave me Y instead," which is what I often see in user-generated reviews. That's reviewing a book as a consumer rather than a critic: You bought a product, you wanted it to do a certain thing, and it did or did not do that thing. (For more of my thoughts on Goodreads, see here.)

Subscribe now!!! It’s free! ! ! ! !! ! !

Part of the job of a book critic is making critical judgments — because I only had 200 words per book, or sometimes fewer if I was reviewing more books, I mostly reviewed books for the Post which I’d either loved or enjoyed with some reservations. If I'd had more space, or had been reviewing a single book at a greater length, I might have written more harsh reviews. But even in that short space with limited ability to get into the weeds, I still tried my best to offer thoughts about how the book was using narrative devices, and how well they worked.

Another key role of a book critic, however, is curation. In my case, I was allowed to choose which books I reviewed out of tons of options every month³. At other publications, an editor might assign one or several books for review. Either way, a person is making a judgment about which books are worth paying attention to — which books seem important, relevant, or exceptional.

Curation is one of those things that can only be done by a human, and it's a skill you develop over time. I have curated spoken word events, anthologies, book-review columns, news coverage, and tons of other stuff. And the more I've done that work, the more it's become clear to me that a lot of the work of making value judgments happens before you begin to review a text or feature an artist. Curation is how we shape culture — it's how we decide what is worth chattering about right now — which is much more important than fusty old canon. (Canon is about reshuffling fragments of the past. Leave it to the dead, honestly.)

In the book world, there are many points of curation. Editors and publishing professionals decide which books a particular publisher will put out. Booksellers decide how many copies of a book to order, and which books to place on the display tables with their covers visible to consumers. Voters or juries decide which books to give awards to. Maybe I'm puffing myself up here, but I always felt as though criticism was an important link in the chain of curation, partly because I didn't have to worry about picking books that would be commercially successful or which could win over a critical mass of award voters. I often went out of my way, in fact, to pick weird and challenging books from small presses and marginalized authors.

Pausing here to say that I’ve never claimed my curatorial judgment was infallible or more important than anyone else’s. I’ve got my own biases and obsessions, and there are things that other people love which annoy me — and vice versa. This is really why we need a lot of experienced, thoughtful people doing curation, so you don’t get one person in a position to make these judgments for everyone.

The enemy of curation is algorithms. In many areas of our lives, we are now being force-fed content by unthinking, unreflecting mechanical systems. Pink slime machines. I've been nervous about algorithms gaining a bigger foothold in the world of books for quite some time, especially since the rise of algorithmic social media like Booktok. The notion of making a living with A.I.-generated books appears to be predicated on the belief that algorithms will be serving up book slop the same way we are force-fed other kinds of slop.

One thing I have seen over the past three-and-a-half years of book reviews is that there are always more amazing books being published then I could ever have had space to write about. I found plenty of underwhelming books, to be sure, but I was always spoiled for choice when it came to selecting a handful of books for each monthly column. The books I either liked or loved ranged from tiny experimental publications to fancy literary works to extremely thoughtful and well-executed versions of popular trends like romantasy, cozy fiction, dark academia, etc. That was one of the things that gave me hope, in fact: a lot of what was popular in the book world was also bloody good.

I worked in Hollywood a bit before the WGA strike, and two things soon became apparent to me. If I wanted to have a career as a TV writer, I was going to spend most of my time working on IP: sequels, remakes, reimaginings of old properties. And meanwhile, Hollywood seemed desperate for new IP to mine, including recent books. Producers who optioned my works seemed keen to be as faithful as possible to my vision, even when it seemed like they'd be better off making it their own. I came away with the impression that if I wanted to ever create something brand new that got made in Hollywood, I'd be way better off writing it in book form and getting someone to option it and develop it. It’s genuinely weird: there are so many brilliant writers in Hollywood, who have tons of original ideas, but they’re stuck working on adaptations of my silly books as well as many other recent books.

Hollywood's descent into endless repetition and churn of old ideas feels like a microcosm of what's happening to culture in general as algorithms take over. And the book world, more than ever, is where new shit emerges from. So the task of discovering incredible books that nobody's talking about yet, and shouting about them, is more important than ever. As I wrote before, that's something we can all be doing to the best of our ability, but I think there's some value in it being a job. I hope the job of “book critic” never goes away entirely, or we’ll all be in trouble — even people who don’t give a shit about books.

Music I Love Right Now

The other night I was feeling a certain way about the state of the world, so I turned to the Ladies of Soul. I have written about the Ladies of Soul before: they are four or five Dutch women, including Candy Dulfer, who do an annual show at the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam where they cover soul hits. They absolutely commit to being a slightly cheesy cover band and bring a ton of energy and positivity to it. But their arrangements are actually razor-sharp, and their band is a collection of top-notch musicians who’ve played with folks like Prince. Anyway, if you need cheering up, here’s a half-hour medley they did in 2015, featuring a cameo from Sheila E:

[ED: iframe removed. Title was 'YouTube video player'; source was 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ak5uoeyBAe0']

How would you describe those outfits? Punky glam? Fetish camp?

Even when I was a paid blogger back in the day, I sometimes prided myself on being the last to write about a hot topic, coming in after everyone else had already had their say. I think there’s value in taking extra time to think before you blorp out words. ↩
You probably already know about the first time. It involved Hulk Hogan and Bubba the Love Sponge. ↩
The main exception was if a book was already earmarked for a standalone full-length review, in which case it was off limits to me for my column. There are a couple books I loved and wasn’t able to write about in my column for that reason. ↩

Breaking News: Environment Canada to permanently shut down VHF Weatheradio (and Hello Weather) on March 16, 2026

2026-02-24T16:09:07+00:00

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Paul Evans, who first tipped me that Environment Canada is ending Weatheradio and the Hello Weather service effective March 16, 2026.

Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) has posted the following notice:

Change to services:

Starting March 16, 2026, Weatheradio and Hello Weather services will be permanently disconnected.

You can get radio marine forecasts via the Canadian Coast Guard. For your local weather forecasts and alerts, visit the interactive weather map or download the WeatherCAN app.

If you use Weatheradio in Canada (especially for “always-on” alerting via a dedicated receiver), you’ll want to take note of what’s changing, what isn’t, and what alternatives ECCC is directing users to.

ECCC notes–on the same page as their announcement above–that over 90% of Canadians currently live within range of a Weatheradio transmitter, and that typical broadcast range is about 60 km (terrain, receiver quality, and antenna height can affect this). This network uses the familiar VHF weather frequencies in the 162 MHz range (including 162.400–162.550 MHz, depending on the transmitter)–the same frequencies used by NOAA in the US.

The Toronto Sun also picked up this news and notes that the service has been around for decades (launched in 1976, with a later upgrade in 2004 to include SAME-style alerting), and frames this as a significant change for Canadians who rely on weather radio for emergency alerting. Click here to read: https://torontosun.com/news/national/environment-canada-ending-weatherradio-forecast-service

Thomas’ Thoughts

As we worked helping neighbors in our remote community in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, we programmed NOAA Weather Radio on our handheld radios for reference.

I think this is a terrible idea—and I say that recognizing there are real costs involved in maintaining a nationwide radio network.

Relying only on online services for weather and alerting across a country as vast (and as frequently remote) as Canada feels short-sighted.

When a natural disaster hits (and it will) that’s exactly when internet access, cellular service, and even power can fail–and the “cost-benefit analysis” stops being theoretical.

Many of you know, I was personally in the path of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, and my community was without power and without reliable mobile data for three weeks. During that time, we relied heavily on NOAA Weather Radio to keep receiving forecasts and updates. That experience really drove home something many of us in the radio community already understand: sometimes you invest in systems not because they’re used every day, but because they can be life-saving when everything else breaks.

In my opinion, removing a resilient, one-to-many broadcast alerting resource like Weatheradio is poor management of taxpayer funds–not because it’s cheap, but because the value shows up when you need it most.

Canadians: Take Action Now

Here are two official channels I could find to ask for the Weatheradio shutdown decision to be reversed:

1) Contact your Member of Parliament (MP)

Find your MP (by name or riding) and get their email/phone info here:
Find Members of Parliament
MP directory search (another entry point):
Current Members of Parliament – search
Mailing an MP is postage-free: you can address mail to
[Name of Member of Parliament]
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada K1A 0A6 ¹⁰
The House of Commons also maintains addresses/phone numbers for current MPs:
Addresses for current MPs

2) Contact the Minister responsible

The Weatheradio decision falls under Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). Readers can also write directly to the Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Nature: The Honourable Julie Aviva Dabrusin.

Please comment if you have other suggestions about how to take action.

Another round of reporting on feed readers

2026-02-26T07:52:58+00:00

Yeah, here we go again, it's time to talk about feed readers. I'll summarize what's been happening with those tests which have been active in the past 7 days. There are many more that started and then ended and which are not included as a result.

Side note: I'm about to roll the hostname like I did last year, so if you're participating and want to carry on, go back to the URL from the welcome mail when it stops resolving in DNS. Then delete the current testing feed and add the new one.

I do this because a lot of these things seem to be forgotten over time, and they're just piling up in my database for nobody's benefit. Dropping the DNS leaves the jank entirely on *their* side of the Internet. I mean, if you run a test of a reader for hundreds of days and never improve anything, what's the point?

One thing I wanted to note before I get to the list: there are a couple of readers which have apparently added support for the Cache-Control header, and specifically the "max-age=nnnnn" part of it. The test feed sends that out, and I change the values sometimes to see which readers speed up and slow down accordingly. To the authors of those projects: I see you, and I appreciate your work! I'd put a gold star on your laptop if I could. (Not all of them are in this report since they have finished testing and are no longer reporting in.)

So then, let's talk turkey here. I'm grouping the results by client just for simplicity. Remember that means it includes vastly different config options used by different people, different versions, different upgrade cadences, and (sigh), yes, different amounts of people clicking reload.

Audrey2: 402 days, no complaints. Pretty sure this one honors Cache-Control, so thanks for that!

Miniflux: about 10 instances. My reports for them mostly go something like "400 days, no complaints", "402 days, three too-short polls", "185 days, one too-short poll", "one <1s double-poll after 400 days of otherwise perfect behavior".

It's just that chill in Miniflux world.

Otocyon: 365 days on the nose, and not so much as a hiccup from the single instance that's reporting in. This was one of the "unpublished, please don't shame me yet" agents that I only mentioned anonymously in prior reports.

NetNewsWire: about 5 of these instances, and they're all inspiring. They all show a marked change in behaviors once upgrading past a certain point. NNW itself added some cheeky code to send version numbers to a couple of sites and I'm one of them (yes, I see what you did there). Anyway, I can now see that people are in fact upgrading, and the vastly improved behaviors speak to the work that was clearly done behind the scenes.

The NNW per-instance log tables all show the same thing: a bunch of red cells for this problem or that problem, then that instance upgrades and *poof*, gone, and everything's clear and happy. It's like one of those commercials for eye drops from the 80s.

Vienna: a couple of instances, both active 350+ days. One had no complaints and the other has a handful of short polls. By that, I mean "less than an hour between requests". I assume this is from someone clicking refresh. One "refreshing" note is that they're still making conditional requests when this happens, so they aren't wasting much bandwidth.

FreshRSS: a couple of instances for this one, too. One has some short polls and unconditional requests over 206 days. The other one got past some kind of weird buggy spot that was in 1.25.0, and has been smooth sailing ever since (nearly a year now).

newsgoat: just one of these, and it was wobbly and too-quick at the beginning but then settled down. I would like to see how it does now. This is another reason I roll the DNS entries and reset the data: I want to see how things are working with the latest code, and leave the older stuff behind.

CommaFeed: just one of these, and it had some kind of caching issue that disappeared shortly before it flipped to version 5.7.0 in April 2025, and now it's fine. This is another one that would probably benefit from the upcoming fresh start.

Feedbin: did a double-tap startup, where it polls (unconditionally) twice in quick succession (< 1 second apart) when the feed was added. Two instances did this, but this was back in January 2025. This is another spot where I'd like to see how it behaves now.

Rapids: 354 days, no complaints.

NextCloud-News: this one had some weird If-Modified-Since values and double-tapping at startup, but that was January 2025. (Yes, this is the reader that once sent the infamous "1800" IMS value). It's come a long way since then and I'd like to see a fresh start from it to appreciate the work that's been done to it.

Bloggulus: 374 days, one slightly too quick poll. Hard to complain about that.

MANOS: 391 days, and nothing to complain about. I do hear Torgo's haunting theme music every time I write about it, though.

unnamed-feed-reader: technically, that's a name. 402 days, no complaints.

Something that doesn't even send a user-agent header: yeah, that's not cool. Send SOMETHING. Come on. 399 days of just doing that but otherwise getting everything else correct, somehow. One nit: sends "" as the If-None-Match at startup instead of just not sending the header at all. (Sounds like the usual "null is not zero is not the empty string is not the lack of a header is not ..." type thing.)

Some unidentified Firefox extension: it looks like it's still doing the 2000-01-01 If-Modified-Since once in a great great while (like, once), and it did a super quick poll (two in under a second) once. Otherwise it's been pretty quiet over the past 401 days.

There's also a Thunderbird instance which does the same 2000-01-01 startup but otherwise just quietly does its thing.

NewsBlur: double-tapped at startup (March 2025), and then sent lots of nutty out of sequence If-Modified-Since values. By nutty, I mean "went to sleep for 303 days, then came back, and started sending the *previous IMS value*". How do you do that when the server is hitting you in the face with a new value every time you poll?

Zufeed: unconditional double-tap at startup. Might be fixed. Need to see a fresh startup to be sure.

Roy and Rianne's ... etc: handful of unconditional requests over the past couple of months.

walrss: same deal: a couple of unconditionals in ~400 days.

Yarr: multiple too-fast unconditionals at startup (January 2025), and then a bunch more after that.

SpaceCowboys ... etc: one instance of this program, and it did something bizarre where an ancient ETag value popped back something like three months after it stopped being served to clients. Also sends some unconditional requests and a few too-fast polls.

feed2exec: poll frequencies are all over the place, and it has the usual 59 minute vs. 60 minute fenceposting thing. The version number is static throughout so it's not clear if it improved during these past 340 days.

Russet: a bunch of unconditional requests and the 59/60 minute thing, like others.

There are a few others which are active but which have had multiple user-agents prodding them and so polluted the data. The interval checking and IMS/INM comparisons mean nothing when multiple programs are involved, so I have to ignore those as corrupted.

And finally...

Free Reader: 100% unconditionals. Why?

QuiteRSS (I think - it lies in its User-Agent, which itself is evil): 100% unconditionals. Also, why?

Inoreader: one instance sends unconditional requests basically every other poll. Awful. The other instance sends a bunch of unconditionals, *and* it polls too quickly, including sub-second repeat polls at times. WTF?

inforss: something like 6% unconditionals out of > 2000 requests in ~400 days. I don't get it. The 59m vs. 60m poll-timing fencepost thing it also does is minor by comparison.

feedparser: weird timing, also has problems trying to hit the 60 minute mark and instead comes a bit too early, like some others. Also frequently calls back far too quickly.

Newsboat: ETag caching is still very broken and it will get into this pathological case where it keeps sending old values even though the server is hitting it over the head with a fresh one every single time. This means it latches into 100% unconditionals in effect and that's terrible. This seems to keep happening despite the version number changing, and it's affecting both instances which are reporting in.

BazQux: hundreds of out-of-sequence IMS and INM values stemming from something very very wrong with their caching implementation, resulting in 100% unconditional request generation once it latches in that state. A lot like Newsboat in that respect.

Sam Altman’s anti-human worldview

2026-02-23T21:22:38+00:00

The list of reasons to want OpenAI banished from the face of this planet and to see Sam Altman behind bars for the rest of his life is longer than I could possibly list in a single article. The generative AI hype wave he kicked off in late 2022 has not delivered on the promises he made, but has delivered a slew of social harms he hadn’t anticipated.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen it become far easier for misogynists and pedophiles to churn out sexually explicit images of women and children. We’ve seen teenagers and adults alike get hooked on chatbots, leading them to have mental breakdowns, be institutionalized, and even commit suicide. We’ve seen those who want to want the public question reality and not know what’s real or fake — whether simply for profit-seeking engagement or more nefarious reasons — use chatbots and image generators to push things into overdrive.

In short, it’s been a social disaster. But even with all that said, I was hardly prepared for the contrast between two stories that emerged in recent days; stories that show how deeply irresponsible and anti-human of a world Altman is trying to create, all while his company ignores its social responsibly in cases that could have ultimately saved people’s lives.

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Downgrading humanity

Altman is used to being challenged on the resource demands of his AI ambitions, and occasionally he lets slip some pretty revealing responses. In early 2024, he declared we would need to geoengineer the planet to mitigate the climate impacts of all the energy needed to allow him and the tech industry to realize their ultimate plans for the widespread adoption of generative AI — and to pursue the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Yet, on stage at an event hosted by The Indian Express on February 20, he gave a much more worrying answer.

Sam Altman’s self-serving vision of the future

The OpenAI CEO expects the most marginalized to pay the price of his ambition

The OpenAI CEO slammed claims that AI presented a threat to access to fresh water, jumping on a bandwagon that industry boosters have been riding for some time now. Their argument seeks to obscure the local impacts of data center water use by focusing on figures for the regional and national levels or making comparisons to other water-intensive industries. They certainly don’t want you to recognize that data centers were already among the top 10 water-consuming industries in the United States well before the AI boom put things into overdrive.

But the real problem with Altman’s response was how he reframed the question: it wasn’t about how much energy AI used, but how much it used in comparison to humans. Altman does not have these comparative figures at the ready. He admitted as much in his answer. He was constructing a theoretical argument that justified his desire to ignore the impacts of his company and the wider industry. In truth, the figures don’t even matter because he’s engaged in something much more pernicious as he seeks to distract from the impacts of his corporate efforts.

“It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart,” Altman asserted, talking about a typical human. “And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.” In short, he’s saying that creating humanity and humans as they now exist required a lot of energy through human history and for each person living today — which means we cannot blame companies like OpenAI for the impacts associated with generative AI and the data centers it requires.

Let’s be clear: this is an absurd line of argument. Altman is seeking to equate AI with humans once again. He’s already tried to sell the public on seeing his chatbots as companions, therapists, and assistants rapidly on their way to human-equivalent levels of cognition, if not there already — assertions that are pure fantasy — and after making those claims, he now wants the resources needed to create AGI to be judged on a human scale too.

There is an undercurrent to the argument that effectively suggests humanity itself needs to be managed if there’s a resource crunch. Human life is downgraded to be equivalent to a machine, and thus has none of the inherent value we tend to associate with it or the qualities that make us uniquely human. There is ample reason to justify the energy use needed to ensure humans live and even thrive — beginning with the fact that we’re actually alive but going as far as to recognize the inherent value of human life that should be preserved and be allowed to flourish. Those qualities do not apply to Altman’s slop-generating machines.

Why Silicon Valley is bringing eugenics back

Elon Musk is the most prominent face of the effort to protect tech’s privilege

He does not seem to share that same reverence for humanity; his reverence is reserved for the fantastical AGI gods he seems determined to bring into being. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Many of the billionaires at the height of Silicon Valley adhere to an anti-human worldview that not only sees humans merging with machines, but being consumed by them. Altman has paid to have his brain frozen when he dies, in the hope that it can be uploaded to a computer sometime in the future, and has argued that “the merge” — where humans and machines become one — is essential for the future of humanity.

This is all in line with the longtermist worldview, which argues the value of people alive today and people who might live a million years from now are equivalent. If an action today might help ensure billions of people will live in the far future, even if it means harming millions in the present, that is justified under their anti-human calculus. It’s a philosophy that seems to exist purely to justify the science fictional pursuits of tech billionaires while their actions magnify the suffering of billions of actual people. In fact, those future people they envision are not people at all, but “post-humans” who live in vast computer simulations, not as flesh and blood.

Neglecting responsibility

Altman’s statements on stage in India would have been bad enough, but they appeared even more heartless and anti-human after a report from the Wall Street Journal the following day. Mass shootings are sadly far too common in the United States these days, but they’re still quite rare in many other countries.

On February 10, Canada suffered one of the worst mass shootings in its history when eight people were killed in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, including five students and a teacher at a secondary school. After the shooting, OpenAI reached out to authorities to provide information about the shooter’s use of ChatGPT and announced it had banned the shooter’s account months earlier.

However, what OpenAI didn’t say, but the Wall Street Journal discovered, was that employees pushed for the company to reach out to Canadian authorities to alert them to what the person who would later take eight people’s lives was inputing to ChatGPT. The user was flagged through an automated system for suggesting scenarios to the chatbot involving gun violence. “Internally, about a dozen staffers debated whether to take action on [the user’s] posts,” wrote the Journal. “Some employees interpreted [the user’s] writings as an indication of potential real-world violence.”

I’ve seen suggestions online that this presents serious privacy concerns, but I think those people need to check their cyberlibertarian leanings. The companies have been quite open about the fact that chatbot conversations are not fully private, just as people’s search history isn’t. These companies have a duty to the public to identify users trying to use their tools to do harm, just as would be the case in other industries. Simply because something happens online does not mean it exists beyond accountability, and if people don’t want their chatbot conversations flagged, they can simply not use chatbots — or avoid talking to them about committing gun violence or harming people.

Generative AI is a societal disaster

Governments are deluding themselves into believing investment justifies allowing AI to upend society

There’s no question this was negligence on the part of OpenAI. For a company that has talked so much about AI safety, their leaders are clearly not taking their responsibilities for the present-day impacts to their users and the wider society seriously — in part because safety to them is again associated with fantasy rather than reality. AI safety means to align AI with humanity so a future AGI doesn’t seek to annihilate us (or some sci-fi foolishness like that). It doesn’t mean to stop real harm, as OpenAI could have helped to do in Tumbler Ridge had its leadership listened to employees pushing them to inform police.

We have already seen all the reports about the negative mental health impacts of chatbot dependence, and ChatGPT even coaching teenagers on how to commit suicide. OpenAI only announced changes to ChatGPT on that front after it was sued over a teenager’s death. But the story about the company’s decision not to report a potential shooter to Canadian law enforcement, coming right on the heels of Altman denigrating humanity to the level of machine, was a bit too much for me to handle.

Believing hype over reality

As far as I’m concerned, there are two big takeaways here. The first is that OpenAI, Altman, and the generative AI industry more widely needs to start feeling the pressure. They’ve had a pretty easy ride these past three years, as they made big promises, caused hundreds of billions of dollars to flow in their direction, and generated a slew of social harms they haven’t had to properly account for. This technology is being pushed by people who not only disregard human life, but seek to subsume it to computers, and it’s time they’re not only reined in but seriously questioned and held to account for what they’re doing.

But beyond that is to question what our governments are doing by not just welcoming the industry, but often actively pushing generative AI throughout the public sector and into the private sector too. In response to the Journal’s revelations, Canada’s AI minister said he was “deeply disturbed” and reached out to OpenAI for answers. But he’s more of an AI evangelist than someone seeking to really understand the impacts of the technologies and take action to rein them in. His response to the recent Grok deepfake scandal was little more than a secular version of “thoughts and prayers.”

X shows why stricter tech regulation is necessary

We need comprehensive rules on social media far more than age limits

Our governments are actively selling us out to companies that do not have our best interests in mind, based on promises of increased productivity and a flood of investment that are based far more on hype than reality. There are already signals that companies in other parts of the economy are pulling back from AI investment after not seeing the returns, and that even workers in tech who think they’re becoming more productive thanks to these tools are deluding themselves.

While chasing the hype, governments are leaving their citizens open to abuse and harms that few other industries would so easily get away with. As Altman and his colleagues make it clearer than ever that they care very little for most of the humans on our planet and in our societies, their word should stop being taken as gospel and the impacts of their companies should be assessed on what they’re doing in the here and now, not what they might do sometime in the far future.

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Note: I chose not to use the shooter’s name in this piece, hence the references to the person as the shooter or a ChatGPT user.

Embracing woodworking to soothe my tech brain

2026-02-23T18:00:00+00:00

I have worked in tech for, goodness, sixteen years now. And if you do, or have, worked in tech, you probably know I have a problem¹.

My brain is absolutely dead at the end of the day.

Now, I consider myself quite good at my job, but something I’ve learned is that being good at your job only makes people ask more of you.

But, that’s part of the problem. Now, I don’t have any clever solutions to that (other than being defensive of your time and kind to yourself) but I have found something that I think is helping me achieve balance, and it is woodworking!

Woodworking feels like the opposite of tech. Solutions are concrete, physical, measured in millimetres and minutes. You’re thinking not in abstract terms, but in real concrete terms. It also helps that I am working for myself.

In working for myself, I am learning to accept mistakes. I am learning to embrace the space between periods of intense focus. And I am learning to use my hands to make something tangible.

Slowly, and with an assortment of other life changes I have been making (not to mention therapy), I feel I am slowly fixing my addled tech worker brain.

I am really only getting started, but I’ve built a couple of little projects out of plywood, some power tools and some gumption and planning out on paper. It’s great. I feel so accomplished every time.

So if you feel similarly, I encourage you to find a way to build something physical. Find a problem in your life or just something that could be a little better and explore a solution. Build something for yourself and your loved ones, which will outlast the tech hype cycle.

And, frankly, I think this is making me better at work too.

Bet against the bubble: Goldman Sachs’ non-AI stock index

2026-02-23T17:34:02+00:00

Goldman Sachs announced a new stock index on Friday, SPXXAI — the Standard & Poor’s 500 top US stocks, minus the AI companies: [Axios, archive]

Excluding ‘AI enablers’ from the passive benchmark would eliminate the noise introduced by the AI hype,” Louis Miller, head of the firm’s equity custom basket desk, wrote in a note to clients about the new index.

This offering does not mean Goldman Sachs thinks the bubble is about to pop. It means Goldman saw a gap in the market for a hedging product. Any big investor likes to hedge against disaster by making a small bet going the opposite way. That’s what this index product is for.

Saying “no AI” takes out about 45% of the S&P 500. (Presumably by dollar value.) We don’t have Goldman’s list of stocks for this index.

I’m not sure the companies would be completely clean of any AI at all — because almost no top-500 company is these days. But they’re supposedly not “AI enablers” as such.

Performance is not great — the whole S&P 500 has gone up 76% over the past three years, but just these non-AI stocks went up only 32%

For comparison, ProShares’ SPXT, which indexes the S&P minus all the tech stocks, is up about 40% in the past three years.

You can’t just hop on Robinhood and buy SPXXAI. It’s only for Goldman Sachs brokerage customers.

And if you’re a day trader, you’re gambling and you’re going to lose your money anyway. Though probably less than you’d lose in crypto.

Video — Podcast

getting sick of my desk

2026-02-23T15:49:00+00:00

I’ve been outgrowing my apartment and its location, but also its furniture and size in general. For some reason, it’s becoming really hard for me to have the same space for everything.

I have an L-shaped desk in a corner that has another table on the other side, making the whole constellation U-shaped. That is because nowhere else fits other desks in my apartment.

So that is where I work from home on the days I don’t have to show up in the office, but it’s also where I journal and draw, it’s where I watch videos and chat, it’s where I make pixel art, it’s where I blog and read my RSS feed, it’s where I study for my degree and do my volunteer work, it’s where I sew, and it’s where I eat. Aside from my work, which happens on a separate work laptop, it all happens on the same machine and/or the same spot on the desk. I can spend 10+ hours sitting there seeing the same interface but doing different things. It’s technically very convenient, but I am sick of it now. And just one meter away is where I do all my fitness stuff at home.

In the past, I’ve assigned different activities to different parts of the desk, but that relief was shortlived. I also delegated some things to my other old laptop (like pixel art) and sitting somewhere else, like the sofa or bed. This sort of works, but I also enjoy having the sofa and bed as spaces where I am not working on something (unless I am really sick again or something).

I’ve also had different virtual desktops or user accounts and spaces for different activities, but that helps more with clutter and organization than a truly physical separation. I know a sort of ritual to log in to a study-only environment on the machine helps some people, but not me, at least not long term.

So if virtual separation doesn’t work, I cannot fit another space in my apartment and can’t rearrange it nor use my sofa and bed as places to offload, what’s left? Cafés, libraries, coworking spaces and the like.

That’s not working so well for me either. In general, these spaces are further away from me, cost additional money, and are often full and noisy. Especially in cafés and university libraries, it can be hard to get a spot to sit. So many cafés now opt for hostile design, with no power outlets, shitty wifi and very uncomfortable seats. More exposure to public spaces also increases my infection risk. Also, I have remote work days because 2h of commuting for the office per day is rough on me, so it’d be extra silly to also have some commute to another place on my remote days.

How I wish I had a home with 1-2 more rooms, at least. Maybe even a duplex apartment. Or a nice attic or basement, a shed in a garden to retreat to.

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Published 23 Feb, 2026

Roguecraft GB

2026-02-23T14:00:00+00:00

The dungeons of Moredecoom await… a deep dive with EGVroom on how he ported a modern classic to the Game Boy Color.

The post Roguecraft GB appeared first on GB Studio Central.

An IRC Saga: InspIRCd

2026-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

With Discord self-immolating¹ before its grand IPO, I’ve been looking for other live chat spaces to call a home. I’ve tried many to see how easy they are to run, moderate, and use. So far, none has really struck me as “good enough”, but I’m willing to make sacrifices if need be.

This blog post is about how I set up an IRC server with a NixOS machine.

IRC?

I’ve been having a lot of nostalgia for good ol’ IRC lately. I was never an OP on IRC or anything like that, and honestly not a regular user, but it was so goddamn simple. I thought, surely this would be easier than setting up a Matrix instance?

A basic inspIRCd server

InspIRCd is a IRC Server written in C++. It’s got excellent IRCv3 compatibility and is very efficient.

Really easy to set up actually, literally did it in an evening. Following my earlier NixOS on DigitalOcean tutorial, we can get a NixOS instance on DO pretty easily. I won’t say I’m an expert, but I could find basically no real docs on this, so maybe this will help someone.

Let’s set up a very basic InspIRCd config:

# modules/irc.nix
{
  config,
  ...
}:
{
  services.inspircd = {
    enable = true;
    config = ''
      <bind address="*"
            port="6667"
            type="clients">

      <admin name="Crystal"
             nick="Crystal"
             email="*wink* ;)">

      <badnick nick="NickServ"
         reason="Reserved for a nickname service">
    '';
  };

  networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [
    6667 # IRC plaintext listening port
  ];
}

And with proper DNS routing, this literally is all that’s needed for a plaintext, minimal IRC server with no access controls…

Actually we probably don’t want that. That seems like a bad idea.

Some basic security: InspIRCd with TLS

Let’s at least get TLS set up so no one sends passwords in plaintext. We need a certificate and a key for that, and nixpkgs already has a module for handling ACME certs for us!

Adding to the general networking module, let’s get our ACME cert set up:

# modules/networking.nix
{
  config,
  ...
}:
{
  # ------ other config... ------

  networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [
    22 # SSH
    80 # HTTP Web server (needed for ACME HTTP challenge)
    443 # HTTPS
  ];

  # SSL Certificates
  security.acme = {
    acceptTerms = true;
    defaults = {
      email = "*wink* ;)";
      webroot = "/var/lib/acme/acme-challenge/";
    };
    certs = {
      "irc.crystalwobsite.gay" = {
        # Use this group if you're using nginx
        group = config.services.nginx.group;
        # group = "acme";
      };
    };
  };
}

Since we’re using an HTTP challenge, we also need to serve up the acme-challenge. We’ll use an nginx config addition like this:

# modules/nginx.nix
{
  services.nginx = {
    virtualHosts = {
      "irc.crystalwobsite.gay" = {
        # ------ other config... ------
        locations."/.well-known/".root = "/var/lib/acme/acme-challenge/";
      };
    };
  };
}

And then also lets also get InspIRCd config working:

# modules/irc.nix
{
  config,
  ...
}:

let
  domainName = "irc.crystalwobsite.gay";
  acmeDir = "/var/lib/acme/${domainName}";
  acmeGroup = config.security.acme.certs.${domainName}.group;
in

{
  services.inspircd = {
    enable = true;
    config = ''
      <module name="ssl_gnutls">

      <sslprofile name="main"
                  provider="gnutls"
                  hash="sha3-256 sha256"
                  certfile="${acmeDir}/fullchain.pem"
                  keyfile="${acmeDir}/key.pem">

      # Consider disabling plaintext? Maybe?
      <bind address="*"
            port="6667"
            type="clients">
      <bind address="*"
            sslprofile="main"
            port="6697"
            type="clients">

      <admin name="Crystal"
             nick="Crystal"
             email="*wink* ;)">

      <badnick nick="NickServ"
         reason="Reserved for a nickname service">
    '';
  };

  systemd.services.inspircd = {
    serviceConfig = {
      # Important for ACME access!
      Group = acmeGroup;
    };
  };

  networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [
    6667 # IRC plaintext listening port, maybe disable?
    6697 # IRC TLS listening port
  ];
}

And of deploy this deploy-rs this to our target machine.

Testing it out:

$ irssi # From my local computer
> /CONNECT -ssl irc.crystalwobsite.gay
Success!

Yaaaaay! Except, this took several days to get working. Why?

The Many Problems of getting TLS working

There were many things that went wrong in the TLS set up that caused a lot of hair-pulling.

So some lessons on debugging:

Read the journal logs

$ sudo journalctl --unit inspircd.service

Is a godsend. Use it. Many config errors can just be found reading the systemd logs.

Use gnutls instead of OpenSSL on first setup

This makes it much easier because there are license incompatibilities with OpenSSL. gnutls is distributed in most InspIRCd packaging. OpenSSL is not. Keep it simple on a first attempt. Use <module name="ssl_gnutls">.

Remember to open the port!

It’s 6697 as the standard for TLS secured IRC connections. I forgot it. Don’t be like me.

Running inspIRCd with the same group as the ACME service

It needs to be able to read the fullchain.pem and the key.pem file. These generally have pretty locked down permissions, so make sure it’s launched with the right group under systemd. Here I set it specifically to whatever was configured with acme.certs, but a top-down approach would probably be smarter.

We do this on these lines of the irc.nix module here:

# modules/irc.nix

# -->8--
systemd.services.inspircd = {
  serviceConfig = {
    # Important for ACME access!
    Group = acmeGroup;
  };
};
# -->8--

Connect using `-ssl`

In say, irssi, you MUST connect using -ssl.

# Good!
> /CONNECT -ssl irc.crystalwobsite.gay

# Bad!
> /CONNECT irc.crystalwobsite.gay

Omitting the -ssl defaults to plaintext. Don’t want to do that! Other clients may handle this differently, but chances are you have to specify you want ssl.

Without the necessary ssl flag, the server may just respond with U, which just seems to be a handshake ending with 0x55:

> /CONNECT irc.crystalwobsite.gay 6697
18:23 -!- Irssi: Connection to irc.crystalwobsite.gay established
18:23 -!- U
18:23 -!- Irssi: Connection lost to irc.crystalwobsite.gay

Many modules in InspIRCd need very direct configuration

You frequently can’t just include a module and restart the server without any new configuration. Many have requirements and will error out with usually clear but sometimes vague errors. Read the documentation carefully on what configs must be set for a given module.

In the case of ssl_gnutls, you need an <sslprofile> tag set up and also a <bind> tag with a matching sslprofile attribute. Otherwise just don’t bother seeing if it runs.

The inspircd-testssl tool is good, but needs custom setup on NixOS

This tool is quite handy but it’s incorrectly set up by nixpkgs right now. I might try to upload a patch for this. For now, to use this tool, you additional perl dependencies. So this shell command works for temporarily installing them:

$ nix-shell -p perl inspircd perl5Packages.IOSocketSSL perl5Packages.NetSSLeay

I haven’t tested installing these through flakes yet, and this definitely works. Then you can use it as directed:

$ inspircd-testssl <domain> 6697 # This runs for a while. Just wait.

It’s somewhat sparse on details but it’s definitely better than nothing.

Use inspircd’s debug mode

It’s got it built in with -d! It’s handy! It’s very verbose, so don’t always have it on.

Halloy spams connections when it can’t connect

Halloy is an IRC client.

If a connection fails in halloy, it keeps trying. And sometimes it keeps trying even when a partial connection is set up. This gave some wonderfully annoying InspIRCd debug errors.

Just closing halloy and then debugging through irssi fixed an issue where I couldn’t connect because of too many clients.

Full source code?

The above of course are just small snippets of what the full configuration should look like. For the sake of completion, here’s my full network.nix, irc.nix, and even nginx.nix (which is not configured correctly at this time).

irc.nix

{
  config,
  ...
}:
let
  domainName = "irc.crystalwobsite.gay";
  acmeDir = "/var/lib/acme/${domainName}";
  acmeGroup = config.security.acme.certs.${domainName}.group;
in
{
  services.inspircd = {
    enable = true;
    config = ''
      <module name="account">
      <module name="alias">
      <module name="deaf">
      <module name="ssl_gnutls">

      <sslprofile name="main"
                  provider="gnutls"
                  hash="sha3-256 sha256"
                  certfile="${acmeDir}/fullchain.pem"
                  keyfile="${acmeDir}/key.pem">

      <bind address="*"
            port="6667"
            type="clients">

      <bind address="*"
            sslprofile="main"
            port="6697"
            type="clients">

      <admin name="Crystal"
             nick="Crystal"
             email="*wink* ;)">

      <badnick nick="NickServ"
         reason="Reserved for a nickname service">
    '';
  };

  systemd.services.inspircd = {
    serviceConfig = {
      Group = acmeGroup;
    };
  };

  networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [
    6667 # IRC plaintext listening port
    6697 # IRC TLS listening port
  ];
}

network.nix

{
  config,
  ...
}:
let
  # TODO: Thread this through from the flake?
  domainName = "irc.crystalwobsite.gay";
in
{
  networking = {
    hostName = "monotone";
    networkmanager.enable = true;
  };
  time.timeZone = "UTC";

  services.openssh = {
    enable = true;
    # For security reasons, always have PasswordAuthentication = false
    # and instead use SSH keys.
    settings.PasswordAuthentication = false;
  };

  networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [
    22 # SSH
    80 # HTTP Web server (needed for ACME)
    443 # HTTPS
  ];

  # SSL Certificates
  security.acme = {
    acceptTerms = true;
    defaults = {
      email = "*wink* ;)";
      webroot = "/var/lib/acme/acme-challenge/";
    };
    certs = {
      "${domainName}" = {
        group = config.services.nginx.group;
      };
    };
  };
}

nginx.nix (just in case)

{
  ...
}:
let
  # TODO: Thread this through from the flake?
  domainName = "irc.crystalwobsite.gay";
in
{
  services.nginx = {
    enable = true;
    virtualHosts = {
      "${domainName}" = {
        addSSL = true;
        useACMEHost = "${domainName}";
        listen = [
          {
            addr = "0.0.0.0";
            port = 80;
            ssl = false;
          }
          {
            addr = "[::]";
            port = 80;
            ssl = false;
          }
          {
            addr = "0.0.0.0";
            port = 443;
            ssl = true;
          }
          {
            addr = "[::]";
            port = 443;
            ssl = true;
          }
        ];
        locations."/.well-known/".root = "/var/lib/acme/acme-challenge/";
      };
    };
  };
}

What was wrong with Matrix?

I may still set up a Matrix instance, but I’m not looking forwards to it. My entire thoughts on Matrix I feel worth typing out I’ve already said on pony.social.

One week into self hosting a matrix instance and man this shit sucks.

I wouldn’t say irredeemable; in fact it can do most things I actually want. But the Element people are so fucking slimy. The standard is atrocious. I don’t fucking care about E2EE. I’m looking for “slightly better than IRC”, and I’m frankly uncertain if it reaches that bar.

How could they fuck it up this badly. It’s like I’m reading WG21 Profiles proposals again.

A longer post is probably warranted, but it’s rough. No insult or shame to the hobbyists like the Continuwuity devs who are working on Matrix outside of element.io. You are doing good work. But I get the sense the spec is weighing you down more than helping you.

You should, under no circumstances ever give your ID or your facial data to Discord or any of its partners. Not just for yourself, but for the safety of others.↩︎

❦

You can email me at “crystal (at) <this domain>” to respond!
Or just say hi. That's cool too!

Priority of idle hands

2026-02-23T03:13:00+00:00

I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me. I mean that beyond the general advice to touch grass. From an ADHD and generalized anxiety perspective, computers and the internet have become an endless supply of poison pills for my brain; feeds full of constant dopamine hits with doom at every turn.

This is hard to accept because a lot of my work, hobbies, education, entertainment, news, communities, and curiosities are all on the internet. I love the internet, it’s a big part of who I am today, but I understand how its incentive structures harm me. I’m not planning to unplug and go off-grid yet, but it did inspire me to come up with a “priority of constituencies” for my idle hands and downtime:

Instruments over pads of paper over laptop over tablet over phone.

Clarifying My Stance on Linux

2026-02-23T04:46:50+00:00

It’s pretty simple, really. I like Linux¹ insofar as it lets me game and still customize things to an acceptable level. That’s…really about it. I learned it out of curiosity, and then necessity (when I started at my first data centre job).

Contrary to what it may seem like, I don’t actually Love It. If FreeBSD suddenly introduced support that let Steam/Proton work just as well, I’d jump ship in a heartbeat just for proper ZFS support. Haiku would be cool too, but it’s further away.

Would that be my ideal OS? No. My ideal OS can’t exist; it’s literally² just Mac OS 8.x running on modern PC AMD64 hardware with compatibility layers for classic Mac software and current *nix/*BSD/Windows software.

So for now, I’ll keep plodding along with Linux, keeping my eyes on the alternatives, and until one of those is viable I’ll just keep learning what I have to in order to make the experience as acceptable as I can.

I had to fight myself really hard not to include the Stallman copy-pasta here. ↩︎
And I do mean literally. Like, imagine if Copland had happened, looked like the released version of 8.0, and then was continually updated over the years to support all of that. Sigh, a creature can dream. ↩︎

I visited the "center" of LA

2026-02-23T01:49:00+00:00

A while ago, I read this Los Angeles Explorers Guild blog post by Tom Fassbender about the "center" of Los Angeles, which is located in the woods just outside a parking lot in Franklin Canyon, a park in the mountains above Beverly Hills.

I've wanted to go for a while, so I got a bunch of my friends to come. We spent a day hanging out and eating lunch and photographing ourselves at the plaque marking the city's "center". It looks like this:

That plaque seems to have been made with individually stamped letters, and maybe a needle drawn through the ceramic for the finer lines. I imagine the thicker lines were made with a pencil tip or something. I love the parentheses:

EXACT CENTER

(POINT OF BALANCE OF THE PLANE OF THE)

CITY OF LOS ANGELES

What this refers to is that Allan E Edwards, the plaque's creator, calculated this horrifically-gerrymandered city's center by balancing a stencil of it on, like, a pin or something. From the blog post above:

As the story goes, Edwards took a 4-foot by 6-foot AAA map of Los Angeles and cut out the city along its edges. Then he glued the excised shape to a sheet of foam core, trimmed it to match the city’s border, and placed it on top of a vertical pin in different spots until the contraption balanced. Once that was done, he transferred that balance point to its corresponding location a USGS topographic map.

However, the blog post also remarks that before discovering the center of Los Angeles in Franklin Canyon, Edwards was also previously a guide at Franklin Canyon Park. So I'm left wondering in what order these discoveries actually occurred, and whether the center of Los Angeles (the plane of the, etc) is really in Franklin Canyon after all.

Because here's another thing: the coordinates on the plaque are for a different location than the plaque's actual coordinates. The actual coordinates point to the back yard of a house on Talus Place, half a mile to the east.

The funniest thing about the "center of Los Angeles" is that the center of this city is a stupid thing to want to find. It's a hugely tall city north to south - there's a gerrymandered strip of land sticking out of the bottom of the city called the "harbor gateway". This strip of land connects to a portion of the port region down by Long Beach - half of the port island called Terminal Island belongs to LB, the other half to LA. Anyway, the result looks like this:

This image from Wikipedia places the city within the context of the county. You can see that the city is pockmarked with voids - smaller municipalities almost completely contained by Los Angeles, but boasting their own municipal governments. Beverly Hills is one of these. (So is Culver City, the place where I normally live.) The coordinates on Edwards's plaque point to a home with a Beverly Hills mailing address. I was fascinated - did Edwards's "center" for Los Angeles lie inside a region which is not, actually, in the city of Los Angeles?

Well, the crazier twist is that the coordinates ARE in Los Angeles - they just have a Beverly Hills mailing address. The spot is in a wealthy neighborhood called Beverly Crest - Franklin Canyon is in Beverly Crest as well.

Anyway, we found the plaque. It's in the woods off the side of a narrow, heavily-forested trail. While we were there, it was extremely damp. The trail maps of the area differ on several different services - the best trail to get there is the Berman trail, which is not the one depicted on Google Maps. Open Street Maps has it, though.

It's somewhere around here. The actual coordinates where you can find it were calculated by Tom Fassbender, the writer of the post above - it's at 34.12448, -118.40778. If you walk along the Berman Trail northeast starting at the parking lot, it'll be in a small clearing on your left, under a tree, in the woods below the hillside, before it gets steep.

Here's a great picture that a friend of mine took of me at the dubiously-calculated, silly-to-even-want, technically-incorrect "center" of Los Angeles:

I was very glad I went. The park is nice, and it's a very silly geographical feature - worth wondering over. If you went with me, I'm glad you came!

J2ME development on modern Linux

2026-02-22T21:30:00+00:00

For some reason I have decided I want to build a J2ME app in 2026. Don’t live like me.

Anyway, thankfully other people have already blazed this trail.

Specifically, this post is to provide an addendum to this post by the author of Microgram, a project to run Telegram on your old phone.

tl;dr:

The author was using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (or a derivative)
To enable i386 packages, run sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386; sudo apt update
If you are not using an Ubuntu desktop installation you MAY need to run the JDK installer (and NetBeans and other installed components) with _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 prepended
Reboot before you run the MIDLet emulator to save yourself some panic
If you are using a different distro and/or distrobox, read on for relevant info

in more detail

So, what I’ve found as someone who is using a Fedora Kinoite installation in 2026, and therefore doing this via distrobox, is that there are some specifics which are difficult to ascertain from the above-linked post alone.

First of all, their distro. In a previous post they mentioned using Linux Mint 20.3. In the latter post, they don’t clarify. My first instinct was to use a similar-vintage Ubuntu distrobox, and 22.04 was a fairly close guess, with the caveat that libxt6t64 was missing; it appears it was named libxt6 in 22.04. That perhaps should’ve been a clue, but I didn’t learn that until later!

Also worthy of note that the incantation to add i386 package support on an x86_64 Ubuntu or derivative is to run sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 and then run sudo apt update to fetch sources.

Anyway, I proceeded with the instructions under the distrobox on Fedora, and once I got to the point of trying to install the JDK, I ran into a bit of a brick wall. The installer’s GUI was blank. I am going to skip the full rundown but I installed a separate Ubuntu desktop VM to test which side of the Distrobox the issue was on, and it worked fine. Okay, so it’s something to do with my machine. Well!

It turns out that this is a well-known oldschool Java bug and was documented on the Arch wiki; Ubuntu’s default GNOME compositor for Wayland seemingly has a workaround for this implemented by default, but Fedora Kinoite’s KDE compositor for Wayland does not, so I ran the installer with the _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 variable set, and it worked fine. Phew!

Now I know in theory distrobox has tools for exporting programs to the host system but the JDK installer had already created a shortcut to NetBeans on my desktop for me, so I rolled with it, updating it to run distrobox instead. I also added another Java workaround from the Arch wiki, which I don’t know if I specifically needed but it didn’t hurt. What I ended up with is as follows;

Name: NetBeans IDE 8.2 (Distrobox)
Program: /usr/local/bin/distrobox
Arguments: enter j2me --additional-flags '--env _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 --env JAVA_OPTS=-Dsun.awt.disablegrab=true' -- $HOME/netbeans-8.2/bin/netbeans

I updated both the desktop shortcut and the launcher shortcut to match. I then rebooted. I am not sure why I needed to; perhaps my machine or my installation were haunted, but I could not get the emulator to launch a MIDLet without that step.

Then, magically, mercifully, it worked on my host machine running Fedora Kinoite 43. Ultimately having dug further I realised that the microgram author must been using Ubuntu 24.04 or equivalent, and their instructions would’ve worked fine there, but I only had the date and a hunch to go by!

So yes, running NetBeans circa 2016 and an SDK from 2008 on Linux circa 2026. I hope this mess of keywords saves someone some time.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, things have been… weird.

Josh gets cranky

2026-02-22T12:26:52+00:00

Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out!

Shoe, 2/22/26

One of the ways that doing this blog over two decades has turned me into an actual insane person is that I feel obligated to speak up for strip lore that the strip’s creators and/or hired-hand continuators have forgotten. For instance, the way the Shoeniverse traditionally worked is that the bird characters ate lunch at Roz’s, which is an open air diner on a tree branch, and complained about the cooking, and in the evenings got drunk at a fern bar, which is a building with a roof on it, and tried to have sex with one another. Lately, though, it seems like the locations are getting conflated and there are more and more strips where the characters are getting drunk at Roz’s, and I don’t care for it. I’ve been consoling myself with the idea that these are still daytime strips and the bird characters are just so depressed these days that they’re openly getting blotto at lunch, but the dialogue here establishes this as an evening recreational drinking binge, so my concerns are clearly justified.

Judge Parker, 2/22/26

Oh, man, remember how April disappeared and then Randy went off to rescue her and also disappeared? Well, now it looks like she is gonna end up rescuing him, ha ha! Boy, he’s never going to hear the end of this, or maybe, due to his proximity to this massive explosion, he’s never going to hear anything ever again.

Pluggers, 2/22/26

YOU, AN ETERNAL OPTIMIST: Ahh, even cranky old pluggers can still enjoy moments of childlike whimsy.

ME, AT AGE 51 BECOMING MORE AND MORE AN ACTUAL PLUGGER BY THE DAY: Oh god, look at how they’re lying on that uneven ground without any cushions or anything. Look at how she’s propping herself up awkwardly on her elbow. They’re going to be in pain for days! They’re not even going to be able to walk back to their car!

IC 2574: Coddington's Nebula

2026-02-21T08:21:44+00:00

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2026 February 19

IC 2574: Coddington's Nebula
Image Credit & Copyright: Dane Vetter

Explanation: Grand spiral galaxies often seem to get all the glory, flaunting their young, bright, blue star clusters in beautiful, symmetric spiral arms. But small, irregular galaxies form stars too. In fact, dwarf galaxy IC 2574 shows clear evidence of intense star forming activity in its telltale reddish regions of glowing hydrogen gas. Just as in spiral galaxies, the turbulent star-forming regions in IC 2574 are churned by stellar winds and supernova explosions spewing material into the galaxy's interstellar medium and triggering further star formation. A mere 12 million light-years distant, IC 2574 is part of the M81 group of galaxies, seen toward the northern constellation Ursa Major. Also known as Coddington's Nebula, the faint but intriguing island universe is about 50,000 light-years across, discovered by American astronomer Edwin Coddington in 1898.

Tomorrow's picture: in the dark

Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Amber Straughn Specific rights apply.
NASA Web Privacy, Accessibility, Notices;
A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC,
NASA Science Activation
& Michigan Tech. U.

Nothing works without internet anymore

2026-02-18T19:54:00+00:00

Today is day #3 since our internet service decided to give up... Somehow... I'm still alive...

If that first sentence sounds like it was pulled from the diary of someone slowly losing their mind, I apologize, because that’s certainly not the case.¹ At least, I’m not the one losing it in this house.

Almost 72 hours ago I was enjoying a YouTube Short when, out of nowhere, the video froze and boom, now I’m writing this entry in my computer’s NotePad because I literally can’t access any other offline text editor besides this one.

At first I thought the service would be restored almost immediately; that it was just a small hiccup. But no. It was Sunday, and then Monday was Carnival, plus I live in the third world, so despite the countless calls my girlfriend has made to customer service, no technician has come to fix what seems to be an issue with the exterior wiring.

But here’s where it gets interesting—this story can be told from two very different perspectives: hers and mine.

I’ll start with the spoiler: she’s the one who has suffered the most from this whole ordeal. On one hand, she’s on vacation and had planned to rest a lot these days after pulling double shifts. On the other hand, for her, resting means being in bed watching TV and scrolling TikTok non-stop, eating chips and cuddling with the cats.² The problem? Most of the things on that list require internet, and not just “a little bit” of internet, not the “I’ll use my phone data” kind of internet. No, they require A SHIT TON of internet.

First comes the frustration that things didn’t go as planned; then the anger that almost all of her vacation have passed and the internet is nowhere to be found. It’s been so desperate for her that she hasn’t stopped cleaning, because she doesn’t know how else to kill time. It might sound extreme, but it’s in situations like this that you realize it’s not ideal for your hobbies—or most of them—to require an internet connection.

Her music? Needs Spotify. The show she was watching? Streaming. The podcasts she listens to? On YouTube. Hell, even the workout routine she follows when she doesn’t go to practice is on YouTube and there’s literally no way for her to do it.

I don’t blame her. She works a lot and trains in her free time. When she rests, she literally rests. She rots in bed, and I think that’s fine. Still, this experience has taught her that she can’t rely on the internet as much as she thought she could.

No one, ever, should trust the internet with the level of confidence millions of us have in it today.

And that’s where I come in and say that, actually, I’ve been having a good time without internet these days. The reason is simple: even though I enjoy the modern benefits of the internet, I still use it sometimes the way we used to use the internet decades ago.

My music library is stored locally on my computer; I have dozens of movies I haven’t watched saved on a hard drive;³ I have comics and books to finish in physical format; I have classic and recent video games sitting on my shelf that don’t need to go online to check if I own the license; I like to write and I do it literally wherever I can.

And no, this doesn’t make me better than her, maybe it makes me a little more “aware”? But that’s about it.

To be honest, even though I’ve been having a good time reading, playing on my 3DS, and writing—yes, I do miss the internet. And yes, over the last year I’ve made an effort to step away from streaming and to make sure not everything I do or consume depends on a single service, while also curating my personal libraries (physical and digital). That last part has been key these past couple of days, and I can’t stress enough how much I recommend anyone reading this to do the same.

Of course I miss the internet. I miss playing online, having my music stats uploaded to my Last.fm profile, and I would much rather be writing this in a Drive document than in NotePad. The difference is that my days weren't ruined by any of these trivialities which, while they do help me enjoy my hobbies more (or at least make them easier), aren’t indispensable to my leisure.

The good news is that after the first 24 hours, my girlfriend started looking for other things to do. For example, she planted a fern and started reading magazines she had bought but only flipped through. She even went and dug up her DVDs to watch something.

The world didn’t end, and she actually proved to herself that there is life beyond the internet.

Now the real problem is that I work from home and tomorrow, with no excuses, I’ll need to relocate to a café or to a friend’s or family member’s house in order to get my work done. That’s where the romanticism of a life without internet ends: when the options are eat or starve. But that’s another topic… I think.

✉ Reply via email ✉

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And also this is a Resident Evil reference because Requiem is just around the corner.↩
I can’t explain how important television is in her life; I’ll just say there isn’t a single moment when the TV isn’t on in this house when she’s home.↩
Which many close internet friends have shared with me within the proper legal framework. Hehe.↩

I’m a former teenage girl: mess with Wuthering Heights and you mess with me

2026-02-20T05:18:15+00:00

You think I’m reviewing the movie a week late – but I’m also reviewing the book 178 years late. No real spoilers, I promise.

Teenagers feel stuff acutely, especially girls.

I remember reading Wuthering Heights on a train. In my 17-year-old mind, this heightened the romanticism – even though the train was just the Southerner, chugging unromantically from Invercargill to Christchurch. The trip was quiet enough that there was no one sitting beside me, so I stretched my legs as best I could across two seats, laid the book on my knees and hunched over it.

When I got to the bit where the first Catherine dies, I hoped no one could see my feeling. Back then, and still today, teenage girls could be seen as dramatic or silly, and I didn’t want to prove the point. I pulled my hair over my face to hide my crying, as I sometimes still do.

Despite being a rubbish reader, I was wholly absorbed by Wuthering Heights – and it’s the only book I’ve come back to a bunch of times. My re-reads have followed a pretty common trajectory.

Teenage me: That was kind of hot.

Twenties me: Actually, that was messed up.

Thirties me: OK, a bit of column A, a bit of column B.

Forties me: Oh, I think I get it now. That was masterful.

I'll probably keep re-reading in decades to come, seeing new things. Somewhere or other, I still have the cheap, raggedy, much-loved paperback edition I held on the train so long ago.

I knew that going to the movie was a bad idea. I went anyway.

I don’t mind creative adaptations of the classics, or when the images on screen don’t fit with the ones in my head. And I don’t mind sexy people just going around being sexy for no reason: I thank them for their service. But the movie stripped out some of the stuff that meant a lot to teenage girl me, even if she hadn’t fully figured it out yet.

I’m not a literary critic. I mean, there’s so much in this world to criticise, and most of it takes less effort than books. But I want to tell you, even if it’s a bit dramatic and silly, why I think no movie should mess with Wuthering Heights.

The book has clever storytelling – which is why movies don’t seem to work

Without getting too technical, you’ll remember Wuthering Heights is actually told by a narrator, Mr Lockwood. I think Lockwood’s character is genius. He splains. He makes it about himself. He gets man flu and will not shut up about it. It’s just so clever. Wuthering Heights doesn’t need Lockwood to make the story work, but Emily Brontë chucked him in anyway, creating this low-grade annoyance of a guy everyone still recognises, especially women. Today’s Lockwood is thin-skinned Jeff who sulks when the work meeting starts with karakia, because no one cares about his rights, then leaves his dirty mug in the sink afterwards, for someone else to put in the dishwasher.

When Lockwood narrates, he’s actually retelling stories from Nelly. She, of course, is the housekeeper for the families at the centre of the book, and she’s seen everybody’s dirty laundry. By the time she talks with Lockwood, she’s getting on in years, and she’s reflecting.

Nelly’s a good person, more or less, but also knows she can be judgy, gossipy, a little bit righteous. She feels bad later, but the urge still gets the better of her. She’s important to me because there’s a little bit of Nelly in all of us. We know we shouldn’t bitch about Jeff, but God, he’s such a dick.

There’s no Lockwood in the movie, and Nelly’s not really a three-dimensional character. Bang – stuff that resonated with (ex)teenage girl me is gone straight away.

Race and class really matter, and if you tutu with that you change the story

OK, this debate is super interesting.

In the book, Heathcliff is dark-skinned. We don’t know his ethnicity, because we don’t know his family: Mr Earnshaw, Catherine’s father, rescued Heathcliff as a boy from the streets of Liverpool. When I first read the book, I thought Heathcliff’s skin colour was another way to signal he was an outsider. This isn’t very nice, for sure – but books often use physical traits (like race or disability) as a crude way to make hints about the moral value or status of characters.

More recent researchers into Wuthering Heights think something different. Liverpool was a major slave-trading port, so it’s quite possible Heathcliff was of African descent. In fact, he might have been fathered by a wealthy white man who forced himself on an enslaved woman – a man like Mr Earnshaw, even. Emily Brontë lived not far from a notorious family of slave-owners and she knew about current events, including the fight for abolition. In writing Heathcliff’s backstory, she trickily left a bunch of questions open.

Casting Jacob Elordi, a white guy, as Heathcliff, takes a person of colour out of the story – but it also stops Emily Brontë playing her trick on us. It seems to offer women viewers eye candy instead of food for thought. Truly, we can handle both.

Catherine and Heathcliff don’t shag in the book, and that’s important

I’m not being precious here, I promise. Historical smut is the best smut: change my mind. I just don’t think it had a place in the Wuthering Heights movie.

As a teenage reader, I couldn’t figure out the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff. I assumed they were meant to hook up – realistically too much to expect from a book assigned by my Catholic school – but page-turn after page-turn left me disappointed.

More importantly, I was confused. The traditional script in my head told me a man and a woman with intense feelings for each other have sex, or at least want to – and unless their romance somehow turns to tragedy, Romeo and Juliet style, then happy-ever-after should follow, right?

People still debate whether Heathcliff is a romantic hero or monster, a good guy or bad guy. I don’t think that’s the right question.

The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is sexual in some kind of way, for sure, but it’s more nuanced than the movie’s cringy, blunt links between sex and violence. Looking at it as an adult woman, it’s still kind of hot, but self-involved and self-defeating, traumatised and screwed up and addictive. These two people are the same person. The ambiguity is the point.

Again, I don’t know how Emily Brontë nailed this so exactly that almost two centuries on, it still hits you right between the eyes. A woman who picked up Wuthering Heights for the first time today would start out patiently waiting for Catherine and Heathcliff’s wedding, and finish with a large glass of wine in hand, wondering if she should delete her dating apps.

Isabella is an abuse victim, plain and simple – and there’s nothing erotic about it

This is where the movie lost me. Beware: there’s the mildest of spoilers here.

In the book, Isabella is a naïve teenage girl who makes a mistake. She’s not stupid, although she’s never quite given the chance to be smart – and she doesn’t yet know her mind, although she’s headstrong enough to get herself in trouble. She’s dramatic and silly, at least in the eyes of Catherine, who warns Isabella her youthful crush is a dangerous man, then cuts the teenager loose almost vindictively when she refuses to listen.

If Heathcliff’s relationship with Catherine is ambiguous in the book, his marriage to Isabella is as clearcut as it gets. Isabella delivers herself into the hands of an abuser. She is a means to an end, an object caught up in a stoush between men. She doesn’t get to tell her own story: her physical injuries tell it for her. In the movie, by contrast, Heathcliff negotiates consent with a sex-obsessed Isabella. He explains exactly how he plans to treat her and she willingly signs up. Does this plot change matter?

I think it does. It’s not that the erotic story is necessarily a bad one – it’s been told a bunch of times, most notably through Fifty Shades of Grey, and enjoyed by a lot of women. But it’s a different story. This blurring between love and abuse bothers me, because it’s not a theoretical problem for young women, even today.

Back in 2024, I wrote a piece called Consent, intent about the rough sex defence. Evidence from Aotearoa was scarce, so I looked internationally. To quote what I said back then:

In 2019, the BBC commissioned research into the rough sex experiences of over 2000 women aged 18-39. The women were asked if they’d ever experienced slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sex. If they said yes, they were asked ‘How often did you feel pressured into it?’. The women answered:

Every time (8%)
Most times (12%)
Sometimes (22%)
Never (56%)
Prefer not to say (2%)

Of all the women in the research who’d had rough sex, whether they wanted to or not, 20% said they’d been left upset or frightened.

In short, blurring the line between consent and abuse has real life consequences.

As a teenager, it was easy to read Isabella as dramatic and silly, even while feeling sorry for her. I don’t see her that way anymore.

Because you know an Isabella, like I do. She’s the girl who got drunk at the party or walked home alone, but it was the judgement after – she kind of asked for it – that ultimately hurt her more. She’s the one who’s still with that creepy guy, and you get so frustrated you sometimes want to shake her, but you know her reasons are emotional and complex and deep.

She’s your friend or your cousin or a girl you went to school with. Maybe she was you. Her story’s as relevant as ever – and until it’s not, it deserves to be told as it is.

I wish I could’ve taken Emily Brontë along with me to the theatre, shared my popcorn with her in the dark, asked her what she reckons.

In 1847, when Wuthering Heights came out, many critics were horrified or outright disgusted. Everything about this book seemed messed up, in its cruelty, its sexuality – this story without a moral that left no one a better person, neither characters nor readers. It was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, so people assumed it was written by a man. Three years after publication, when readers found out Ellis Bell was really a woman, it could only have been more shocking.

By then, Emily Brontë was dead. A year after Wuthering Heights she succumbed to tuberculosis, a painful illness that had slowly destroyed her as she wrote. She was only thirty. She must have worked on her novel for years before her death – starting when she was not much more than a teenage girl, dramatic and silly.

No one knows what made Emily Brontë audacious enough to write like she did, or how she felt as her critics disparaged her work. There must have been a streak of defiance about her, this young woman in a man’s age who never lived to feel the respect she was owed, a prodigy trapped inside a tragedy.

I hesitate, just a teeny bit, when others recreate what cost her so much to create.

One ex-teenage girl to another, I feel like I owe her that much.

References

There are vast amounts of writing on Wuthering Heights, but a recent article in The Conversation, about Heathcliff’s ancestry and a possible connection to slavery, is here.

Some commentary on Emily Brontë’s life and writing is here.

My own piece from 2024, Consent, intent, is here.

The Adenovirus Vaccine Problems, Explained

2026-02-19T23:30:28+00:00

Here’s a very interesting rundown on an issue that became apparent during the coronavirus vaccine development period. You may remember (if you haven’t expunged that entire period from your mind!) that although the mRNA vaccines were the biggest successes, that adenovirus-vectored vaccines from AstraZeneca and Janssen/J&J were also in the race.

But those ran into trouble as they were rolled out into larger populations (I wrote about this here at the time). All drugs (and that includes all vaccines) are susceptible to rare side effects that you often have very little chance of seeing during clinical trials. The Phase III trials for these vaccines involved tens of thousands of patients, too few to pick up such a signal. About 3 out of every 100,000 people who got the AZ vaccine in the UK and about 1 out of every 200,000 who got the J&J vaccine here in the US developed a vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT). By April of 2021, 34 million people in Europe had had the AstraZeneca vaccine, and there had been 222 cases of VITT. And although these effects were obviously uncommon, health authorities often advised people to get different vaccines (especially for younger patients, who appeared to have greater risk for this side effect) since there were vaccine alternatives in many countries.

These two coronavirus vaccines are really the only ones I know of that have shown a clear VITT problem - it did take everyone by surprise. There are all sorts of other thrombocytopenia syndromes that can be brought on by administration of heparin (for example) and as a complication of a number of other diseases, so the problems were certainly recognizable when they occurred. In this case, the WHO issued guidelines in July of 2021 on avoiding and managing VITT, and these were later refined.

It’s also important to note that the use of both the AZ and J&J vaccines were heavily restricted, since there were clear alternatives available. But as a thought experiment, if there had been no other alternatives, it seems clear that worldwide vaccination with these would have continued, with due attention to the patient populations and close monitoring for VITT should it occur. The benefits still would surely have outweighed the risks, although I’m glad we didn’t have to make that tradeoff. But in the US, the AstraZeneca vaccine was never available and the J&J vaccine’s Emergency Use Authorization expired in May 2023 (by which time actual usage of the vaccine was almost nonexistent). The AZ vaccine is also no longer produced - it was removed from authorization around the world by mid-2024.

Since this time there has been a great deal of research to try to figure out the details of what happened. That has implications for adenovirus vector vaccines in general, of course, since it was surely not a coincidence that the two vaccines of that type were the ones that set off the alarms. Natural adenovirus infection has also been suspected to lead to rare thrombocytopenia, and that was very unlikely to be a chance finding, too. J&J, for one, had spent years working up an entire platform for a whole range of vaccines of this type, an effort that was accelerated by the advent of the pandemic.

And now we have some answers! This new paper goes into detail. We already knew that the problems were (proximately) caused by antibodies to platelet factor 4. But why were those generated? It turns out that in rare cases, patient reacted to the adenovirus and generated antibodies to adenoviral core protein VII - and these antibodies cross-react with PF4! It looks like people with immunoglobin light-chain allele IGVB-21*02 or 21*03 are the ones susceptible to this - there’s a lysine at position 31 of this sequence that is mutated to a glutamic acid in such patients, and this is what sets off the PF4 binding. What makes this especially tricky is that the germline sequences of all the VITT patients still code for that lysine - it’s a somatic mutation that flips it to glutamate, and it probably occurs in a few B cells in the germinal centers of the lymph nodes. The authors do a thorough job of tracking all this down with a great number of control experiments in the various sequences.

This is really good to see. It lays out the problems that future adenovirus vector researchers are going to have to deal with (presumably by altering the sequence of that viral pVII protein!) and it also would seem to help explain some other rare blood-clotting effects after various infections or transfusions.

One more note: I mentioned above that all drugs and all vaccines are susceptible to these sorts of rare-but-bad effects. This is not an excuse, but it’s also neither an exaggeration nor an attempt to minimize such problems. This is especially true for anything that touches on the immune system, which absolutely the most variable part of human biochemistry and genetics - it’s evolved to be so!

You cannot run large enough clinical trials to catch all such effects beforehand, nor can you calculate and simulate your way around them at that stage, either. About 1% of the population truly has allergic sensitivity to beta-lactam drugs like penicillin, for example, and that is by far the largest and most prominent drug-related immune side effect we know of. That you could probably see in the trials. Everything else is way down there in the tiny populations, and believe me, everyone has their fingers crossed when their new drug rolls out into a really large population for the first time. No one likes to dwell on this, but it’s the truth, and it’s also the truth that there is not much we can do about it. That’s life and that’s the biology of life. That’s why I’m very happy when we can illuminate what’s actually going on, as has happened here. The immune system is large and contains multitudes, but here’s another piece of it we can use.

A New Modesty Code for Romance

2026-02-18T14:25:33+00:00

Something has changed at Amazon, and it is not good.*

Over the past several weeks, many romance titles have begun returning the same message in Amazon’s SiteStripe interface: This product is excluded from the Amazon Associates Program.** Please link to a related product or category instead. The books remain available for purchase across all formats. Their retail pages load normally. What has changed is that Amazon will no longer allow affiliates to earn commissions for recommending them.

That may sound like a technical adjustment, but it is not a small one. Amazon Associates underwrites much of the online book ecosystem. A great deal of book coverage—reviews, recommendation sites, curated lists, newsletters—is sustained by affiliate income. When a book is excluded from the program, it is not banned, but it is removed from the financial structure that makes it easier for readers to find and hear about it.

The exclusions do not appear to be random although the implementation still is.*** I began tracking the pattern after noticing that titles I had linked to for years were suddenly un-linkable. I expanded my check to a decade of top picks from All About Romance, and roughly ten percent are now excluded. The correlation is striking. These are not fringe erotica titles. They are mainstream romances from major publishers. The common denominator is simply that they contain on-page sex.

Examples include Uncommon Passion by Anne Calhoun, Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran, Hook, Line, and Sinker by Tessa Bailey, Hate to Want You by Alisha Rai, A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole, Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid, and The First Time at Firelight Falls by Julie Anne Long. These are books that have been widely reviewed, widely recommended, and affiliate-eligible for years. Older backlist titles have flipped alongside new releases, and the exclusions apply across all editions.

Amazon has not announced a policy change. I have contacted Amazon for clarification and have also reached out to several affected authors. As of now, there has been no public explanation. But the practical effect is clear: Amazon appears to be tightening the line on what it considers adult content for affiliate purposes, and books with open-door sex scenes are increasingly being swept—almost certainly by an automated classification system—into that category.

In a moment when sexual content is being policed with renewed zeal, this shift feels ominous. Amazon is not removing these books from sale, but it is making them harder to sustain in the recommendation economy. That is not censorship in the blunt sense, but it is pressure, and pressure works.

If Amazon has changed its standards, it should say so plainly. This is a company that accounts for roughly half of all print book sales in the United States and the overwhelming majority of the e-book market—by some estimates more than two-thirds, and closer to four-fifths when Kindle Unlimited is included. When Amazon–will Google be next?–decides that ordinary, consensual sex in a mainstream romance novel is too risky to support through its affiliate program, it redefines the boundaries of acceptable promotion.It’s not a stretch to worry that mechanism could be expanded to narrow other categories–political and religious beliefs, for example– just as easily. When a corporation with this reach decides which books are too dangerous to incentivize, that is censorship. We should all be paying attention.

* I first read about this here. Romance authors are beginning to speak out about this issue as well.

** Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, which allows websites and creators to earn a commission by linking to products sold on Amazon.

*** Many books that are very graphic sexually are still available. Even within series, the prohibition varies.

The post A New Modesty Code for Romance appeared first on All About Romance.

The Xteink X4 Is The Cheap, Hackable eReader That's Just Enough

2026-02-17T19:50:12+00:00

I adore a garbage paperback. My younger years were spent reading the flimsy science fiction novels they dumped out constantly in the 70s with ancient covers that would disintegrate when you shoved them in a coat pocket. The books understood their purpose — to be cheap, tawdry and legible. The Xteink X4 is the beaten up paperback of eReaders. It is neither feature rich nor powerful; its UI is sometimes in Chinese by default, it has many basic drawbacks, and requires weird workarounds to become usable. But it’s about 50-70 dollars, magnetically snaps to your phone, is barely bigger than a credit card, and with a little tweaking does exactly what is required of it and many things a Kindle could never dream of.

The Xteink X4 is by far the smallest eReader I have ever used. It’s powered by an ESP32, the low power yet infinitely useful microcontrollers that appear in countless DIY and commercial smart devices. It is not a product that was meant for western audiences as-is, but one that found a home with a community of tinkerers and hackers who developed their own custom firmware dubbed “CrossPoint Reader.” In the few months since it has come out, it has become embraced by an ever-growing fan base of obsessed everyday carry nerds and readers, an entire subreddit of gleeful people posting photos of their tasteful custom lock screens.

CrossPoint Reader is a community effort but maintained by Dave Allie, a dev who originally got the X4 on a whim. “When it arrived, I was actually pretty disappointed in the reading experience,” Dave told me via chat. “The font options were extremely limited, custom fonts required monospaced only, and probably most critically for me, it couldn't render bold or italic text. I was planning to just try it out for a little and then put it down, likely to never pick it back up again.”

Eventually he found the subreddit and a small Discord for the device, and a few forks were being discussed. A community member named CidVonHighwind eventually got a working proof of concept rolling, and after many late nights of pulling his hair out, Dave got the first version of CrossPoint in a buggy but working state.

What it has and what it doesn’t

It does not fit squarely on the back of my phone but it works enough for me to travel with it. Shown with CrossPoint Reader.

It is worth noting what features the X4 does not have. It lacks a touchscreen and backlighting, requiring either ambient lighting or an aftermarket clip-on light. It has difficulty with file formats, and some image formatting can be finicky, although that’s getting better daily. I have seen the word “flawed” used to describe it. As shipped and on a basic technical level this is true, but spiritually it is not. Because what the X4 lacks in technical power it makes up for in sheer utility, affordability and unbridled charm. Thanks to the community, it has blossomed into a device that, despite being spartan, is a truly cyberpunk one. It looks like technology from a 90s anime, unstuck in a different timeline and immediately exciting to everyone you show it to.

This conflict between functionality and implementation is perfectly epitomized in its MagSafe connector, which awkwardly does not fit squarely on my iPhone, the top bumping up against the camera hump. And yet despite the awkward fit, it works well enough (although I have seen phones it fits flush with) and serves the purpose of making it easier to remember your book. Even the Boox Palma, my favorite eReader, is big enough to make you consider leaving it at home.

The Xteink X4 weighs practically nothing. It is lighter than a phone by a significant margin, non-fatiguing to hold, and lasts a long time on single charge. You can read it all day without your hand getting tired. You do not think of it except in the ways that it is invisible. The device also comes with adhesive metal rings, allowing you to be able to quickly snap it to anything, including a tiny Muji notebook. It is an eerily frictionless device to jump in and out of, and for a certain kind of easily distracted and fidgety person, there is no reading experience quite like it, because it is burdenless and always with you.

There are notable flaws with the device itself. I noticed the logo is not exactly color fast, at least not on mine. The white version of the X4 also had a problem where the IC is not UV shielded enough, causing the display to temporarily fade in sunlight. “The UV resistance of the white version is lower than the black,” Dave told me, “and so UV gets through the shell and disrupts the driver. If you have the white X4 and put it in direct sunlight, the screen will fade after a few seconds. It's not permanent, and changing screens resets it again. Some people have put a physical sticker on that spot to stop the UV once it was discovered that was the issue.”

Later, CrossPoint added an additional feature that shuts down the display between refreshes, fixing the device at the cost of a small amount of render time. But realistically, a hardware problem that is largely fixed by a sticker feels apropos to the nature of the device. The Xteink might not be perfect, but I can work with what it gives me, and clearly so can a lot of people.

FOSS Firmware

The Xteink Flash Tools site for flashing your firmware, as of the writing of this piece.

CrossPoint is simple and easy enough to flash on your device. As long as you have a computer that can run Chrome, the process takes less than 20 minutes. It can sync with Calibre, the go-to software for Kindle sideloading and library management for decades now. You can connect it to wifi and transfer your files via a browser window by typing in the device’s listed IP address. CrossPoint lets you transfer a custom sleep screen for your device by exporting it as a .bmp file named simply “sleep.bmp” in your local directory.

Once set up, I found the device to be an absolute joy to read with. There isn’t a lot on the page, mainly a few paragraphs at normal text size, but what’s there is clear and legible. What’s more, CrossPoint is releasing new updates with features often sourced from the community, and roughly 10 hours after I installed it the firmware went to version 1.0. It still isn’t a perfect experience –image formatting still needs a lot of work and custom fonts are in the works – but that’s currently close to being mainlined according to Dave.

Reddit is also full of happy customers, with tons of posts just showing off their X4 backgrounds. There’s Mac logos, the Lumon logo from Severance, and one that’s a fake phone call from your wife. A few wallpapers are clowning on the Kindle. There’s a wallpaper generator that will make a background for any Pokedex entry and another if you wanna have Spider-man read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. I have seen multiple people claim it is their first eReader, and at least a few posting their X4s next to their FiiO DAPs (the same kind that Gita is a huge fan of).Dave hopes that one day CrossPoint will be unnecessary, and that the company will mainline the hard work the community has done. “I want Xteink to upstream all the good bits, open-source their firmware,” Dave said. “As much as I love hackability, my personal opinion is that they're dropping the ball, focusing on hardware alone, and just hoping for the best. I've seen plenty of sentiments that people would not have picked up a device without the availability of CrossPoint, I just wish that Xteink could combine some of the learnings with their own firmware to create something truly good for everyone.” Even still, one wonders what other hardware manufacturers are looking at the countless glowing reviews of the Xteink, with the availability of a community-run firmware, and hoping to get in on the action.

Even outside of CrossPoint, the simple nature of the device – an ESP32 with a battery, some buttons, and an eInk display – unlocks all sorts of possibilities. The people behind TRMNL, the ePaper calendar display that works on all sorts of devices from hacked Kindles, have already found a way to install their software on the device. The X4 plays Doom poorly and Gameboy games worse. There’s a roguelite for it. You can use it as a WiFi fridge magnet. I have seen people figure out fascinating workflows for reading manga on the device by splitting the page up into an overview and then three closeup segments. Honestly at that point you should just get a Kindle from Goodwill to hack or buy a Boox. But the point isn’t that it’s ideal, the point is that these are the capabilities that a cheap device fostered by an open community are able to quickly iterate on. “Honestly idk if I love it , but it's still nice to have it as an option,” reddit user Justpou posted.

Just Enough

It's not the sharpest screen. It doesn't have to be. Credit: Mark Fisher.

A fundamental problem with how people look at eReaders is that they conceptualize them like a phone instead of a book. Phones constantly need new features to remain narratively interesting. They must be more powerful, do more stuff, be nicer and faster. These are not demands you would make of most books. A book must be legible and on your person. What’s more, we are in the moment when affordable, simple technology has never been more appealing. People are broke, the economy is twisted and K-shaped, and the majority of all western tech is aimed at an increasingly shrinking, wealthier segment of the population while everyone else gets their hand-me-downs.

“I think a lot of the world is decompiling what Jobs did with the launch of the iPhone,” Dave told me via chat. “The attention economy is everything at the moment, eyeballs are money, and with content/advertising generation getting AI supercharged, it's worse than ever. I think people feel a strong pull back to the 90s and 00s when tech was simple, distraction-free, and single-purpose.”

The idea of a cheaper device with fewer features has never been more appealing to a huge portion of people. From Digital Audio Players to suspiciously good wired headphones, there is a beauty in a device that is simple enough, excelling at one thing in a charming and novel way. Even with its limitations, everyone I have shown my X4 has said “man, I kinda want one.” People will always find ways to make the best out of the technology they have within the parameters of what they can afford. To the extent that devices can be liberating, it is often at the intersection of affordable and hackable, because together those qualities create a sound foundation you can build a community on.

Spawnwatch 2026

2026-02-17T11:46:07+00:00

Once again it’s that time of year, by which I mean… spawnwatch season, of course.

Caption: peak spawning activity, occurring on 10th February. One important behavioural aspect to note is that activity occurs throughout daylight hours… just as it does throughout the night as well. I think that at least some frogs go for weeks without sleep during this period. Image: Darren Naish.

Yes, early February here in far southern England means that it’s once again that time when the lone amphibian species living in the grounds of Tet Zoo Towers – the Common frog Rana temporaria – gathers to breed. As ever, I’ve been keeping close tabs on things, so let’s see what happened this time round. There’s good news and bad news.

Some background. I’ve been maintaining ponds here at Tet Zoo Towers since 2006, initially with a rigid moulded pond, and more recently a large, pondliner-based one. Over that time, the number of adult frogs appearing in the ponds has increased from one or two to over 50, the number of spawn clutches increasing from one to a maximum of 31 (for 2024). In 2025, a cold weather spell caused an unusual break in breeding activity, and we never got above 18 clutches, which was surprising in view of the previous year’s high. I became worried that breeding females (which are typically the biggest frogs in the population and hence the most vulnerable to predation and maybe other things too) had disproportionally died off, and that the otherwise cumulative increase in our population was at an end, or even in reverse.

Caption: this is Plumpmot, a large and attractive female, here photographed in October 2023 with an earthworm. I didn’t see her during the breeding events of early 2026 and am not sure if she’s still around. Big females like this are especially important members of the population. Image: Darren Naish.

I should also add that the garden in which these ponds are sited is deliberately maintained for frogs and other animals. It’s a total mess and stands out markedly in contrast to the paved driveways and concrete death-yards otherwise so typical of the modern UK. There are tall hedges, piles of sticks, and any grassy areas are deliberately unkempt. In an age when people are, mostly, doing everything they can to obliterate every single scrap of greenery, I strongly believe that those of us who care should do everything we can to help the persistence of wildlife. We are fighting against those who want everything to be featureless concrete.

Caption: the look of pond 2 during early February following a couple weeks of constant, heavy rain. The water level is really high, and frogs are visible in parts of the pond that would be high and dry once the rain stopped. Note the vegetation and dead branches around the pond. These are there to provide refuge for frogs and deter pet cats. Image: Darren Naish.

As per usual, let me remind people in regions and nations that operate under what’s known as a continental climatic regime that, yes, the gathering and breeding of frogs at this time of year (early February) is normal for the mild, high latitude, maritime fringe archipelago in which I reside. A few decades ago, Common frogs here routinely started to gather and breed during the second week of February. Now, the first week is usual. Further to the west, in English counties like Cornwall, Common frogs regularly spawn in January, and late December spawnings are becoming increasingly common. I have a feeling that I’ve said all of this before, forgive me.

For a great overview of frog natural history in the UK you should consult Beebee and Griffiths (2000). More concise volumes include Inns (2009) and Beebee (2013). Cooke’s (2023) Tadpole Hunter is a very heavy and in-depth personal view of amphibian research in the UK that I’ve really enjoyed reading.

Things get underway. Male Common frogs are quite probably in a breeding pond throughout the whole of the winter, and hence ready to intercept arriving females and get things underway as early as possible. This year, a reasonable number of frogs (12) were readily visible on February 3rd, and two spawn clutches appeared on that day: a new earliest-ever record here (the previous was February 4th, for 2025). Constant heavy rain meant that the pond was at an all-time high, a fact that would have consequences once the rain actually died down…

Caption: daytime activity on February 7th, showing multiple spawn clutches in the shallow parts of the pond while frog combat and competition is very much underway. Image: Darren Naish.

Caption: Common frogs are basically all recognisable as individuals on the basis of the dark markings on their dorsal surfaces and limbs. I’ve been trying to keep track of individuals but getting the right kind of photos is hard. Silviu Petrovan at the University of Cambridge has been leading a project that does this more properly. Image: Darren Naish.

Over 43 frogs were visible by February 5th, and by February 7th a substantial jump to 19 spawn clutches had occurred, putting us above the 2025 total count. A day later, and I counted just over 50 frogs, and over the next several days the clutch count increased to 31 by February 11th, this number being the previous all-time record of 2024. After that, a slow and incremental climb to the current (as of February 17th) total of 37 occurred, a new all-time record. As you can see from the cumulative graph here, we’re now (at the time of writing) at an approximate plateau, activity has mostly stopped and the frogs have mostly dispersed. I won’t be surprised if one or two additional clutches appear, but we’re essentially there, and with a very impressive new clutch record. I hope to see this increase next year!

Caption: cumulative graph for 2026, showing how we quickly increased from two clutches on February 3rd to over 20 by February 8th, peaking with 37 clutches as of right now.

Caption: spawn clutches first appeared in our ponds here in 2010 (initially in an old plastic baby bath), but this graph shows how things improved markedly after 2020.

A rant on pet cats. As I’ve said ad nauseum before – forgive me – free-roaming pet cats are a perpetual, never-ending nuisance when you’re aiming to garden for wildlife. I live in constant dread of them killing various of the animals I cherish the most. Lone cats can and do wipe out entire families of fledgling birds and kill enough lizards, bats, frogs and other small animals to make a real difference to limited, isolated populations where there’s no migration from outside.

And a problem is not just that a lone cat from a neighbour’s garden will visit a wildlife-friendly garden ten, twenty, thirty, forty times a day, often staying there for hours at a time if allowed, it’s that this is often just one of many individuals that do the same. There are that many free-roaming pet cats. I’ve been using camera trapping in the garden for a while (see this article) and it’s disheartening to see how many pet cats – three, four, five – visit our property and hunt there during the day and night. This year, the camera trap let me down and only functioned for a single night (January 25th, days before spawning had started) before giving up, but it recorded three different pet cats on that one night.

Caption: pet cat 1, on the evening of 25th January.

Caption: pet cat 2, photographed a few hours later during the evening of 25th January.

For 2026, I observed one attack on a frog by a pet cat myself, purely by chance when I looked out of a window. It had pulled the frog out of the pond before being chased away, but the frog was lucky and survived. Several of our regular frogs have damaged eyes, bear scars and one (called Three-point-five) is missing a hindfoot, and it’s likely that cat attacks are among the events that have caused these injuries. At one pond I used to monitor, a pet cat killed or mortally injured 12 frogs in a day; it was total carnage and extremely depressing. Seeing as you’re reading this blog, it’s likely that you already care about the plight of beleaguered wildlife and are doing what you can to help it persist. But do what you can to help make others aware of this problem. I wish that things would change.

Caption: Common frogs probably select shallow spawning places since these are warmest and allow for the fastest development of the spawn and tadpoles, but the massing of the spawn that occurs might also afford protection, both thermally and in terms of ‘safety in numbers’. Images: Darren Naish.

To the future. I’ve surely said previously at Tet Zoo that I made extensive modifications to the bigger, newer pond at the end of 2024 such that it was substantially improved as a frog breeding site. Common frogs preferentially spawn in water less than 10 cm deep and large areas of very shallow water are ideal, not just for the act of spawning, but for fast development of the spawn and tadpoles. This in mind, I now create ponds with very large, shallow areas. And such it is with the modified pond here. It has worked to perfection, all the activity and spawning occurring in the very shallow end.

Caption: frog activity at the shallow end of the pond on 7th Feburary. Water level is high and very new spawn clutches are visible left and right. When spawn is fresh, it’s tight, compact and rubbery. As it ages, it soaks up water, expands and flattens out. Common frog spawn is remarkably resilient and extremely good at protecting the embryos from low temperatures, ice, rain, hail and mechanical damage.

Caption: we routinely have over 50 adult frogs massing in the pond during the breeding season now. When you combine this with the substantial number of juveniles that must be living in the same area, our population must be high. An aim of any successful conservation effort must be to have the population spread to appropriate habitat nearby. I hope that’s happening, but it’s not helped by the fact that we’re right next to a large and perpetually busy road. Image: Darren Naish.

But something is wrong. Round about February 8th, the water level started going down, and it did this so much that a few spawn clutches in the very shallowest area were ultimately left almost out of the water. This has undone a fair amount of my cleverly planned landscaping and means that I’ll have to renovate things in the future. I have no idea what’s caused this but it can only be a puncture, though how this came about I have no good idea. This isn’t an immediate disaster, since even the somewhat high-and-dry spawn is ok (Common frog spawn spreads out and there’s still enough water in that part of the pond for the embryos, once free of the jelly, to remain in water), but it is a pain. At the time of writing (February 17th), much of the shallow end is dry and I’ve had to do an emergency rescue of all the spawn. I’m going to have to do a rebuild. Again. The spawn and tadpoles will be ok though, don’t fear.

Caption: February 17th, and the water level has dropped a worrying amount. All the spawn has been (temporarily) placed in a large shallow tray and the pond will need rebuilding. These things happen.

I guess a pondkeeper’s pondwork is never done.

For previous articles on frogs, ponds, and spawning events, see…

A Love Letter to the Common Frog, August 2020
Live Spawnwatch Action From Pond 2 at Tet Zoo Towers, February 2024
News From the Pond's Edge: Spawnwatch 2025, February 2025
Suburban Camera Trapping, Week 1, May 2025

Tetrapod Zoology is dependent on funds raised at patreon. Please help support this blog if you consider it worthwhile and want to see me continue doing it, thanks!

Refs - -

Beebee, T. 2013. Amphibians and Reptiles. Pelagic Publishing, Exeter.

Beebee, T. & Griffiths, R. 2000. Amphibians and Reptiles. HarperCollins, London.

Cooke, A. 2023. Tadpole Hunter: A Personal History of Amphibian Conservation and Research. Pelagic Publishing, London.

Inns, H. 2009. Britain’s Reptiles and Amphibians. WILDGuides, Old Basing, Hampshire.

“token anxiety”; or, a slot machine by any other name

2026-02-16T18:09:00+00:00

I realize it’s gauche to blog about some shit you saw on bluesky but yesterday I saw a post that encapsulated so much of what has been bumming me out about the rise of coding agents over the last year. this dread had been slowly rising from seeing blogs about using claude code from your phone while getting ready for work, while commuting, while waiting to pick your kids up from school, but it's come to a head.

Token Anxiety

i think i mostly echo this for myself. with so much that can be done, i often feel like i should be doing something, always

[image or embed]
— Tim Kellogg (@timkellogg.me) February 15, 2026 at 6:44 AM

now obviously the opinions of founder-brained SF social bubble weirdos should be immediately discounted; they are the spiders georg of this industry. but at the same time they are playing into the dreams of management, the worker that never stops working, that's always online, that's infinitely Productive, always shipping, always wants to get back to work. I imagine this archetype exists in other industries but my experience is limited to tech so I will stick to that.

my fear is that this will become the norm. anecdotal evidence¹ tells me that more and more companies are adopting AI for their engineers to use, encouraging (and in some cases requiring) its use in an effort to boost productivity, despite no actual evidence pointing to these improvements² and Anthropic-funded research indicating that AI usage reduces skill retention³.

so where does this lead us? we know that some US tech companies are starting to embrace the “996” schedule popularized in China’s tech industry. enforced usage of coding agents makes that push even easier—is it really work if all you’re doing is telling the computer what to do and then reviewing it to make sure it didn’t do anything wrong and also babysitting it all hours of the day?⁴

many have already observed that coding agents, which require constant attention and often generate low-quality code with (by design) random results, are a slot machine. they are loot boxes. they are gambling. you are constantly pulling the lever and hoping you get the SSR SaaS Passive Income product. you will not get this, but maybe you will. just one more prompt, one more pull, one more revision, one more go at being Absolutely Right⁵.

if you suffer from token anxiety, you have a gambling addiction. I’m sorry that it’s not being formally treated as such, but you can take some solace in the fact that novel forms of gambling often take time to be recognized⁶.

now we can put our thinking caps on and follow a pretty easy chain of events. coding agents can trigger our gambling instincts with slot machine-like behavior; tech companies are pushing engineers to work more and encouraging or enforcing the use of coding agents to get there; gambling is addictive; heavy users of coding agents self-report symptoms of gambling addiction.

you see where this is going, right? by enforcing the use of inherently addictive technology in the workplace, employers are (whether intentionally or not) making their workers addicted to work. this seems bad!

one has to wonder how common this will become. will this become the norm? obviously there will be companies with a shred of ethics and empathy for their workers that choose to buck this trend, but if they become the minority there will be fewer and fewer jobs for those who value having free time. we’ve already reached a point where trying to get a job in this industry requires a gradual erosion of ethics and standards, how much worse does that get?

all I know is that if we keep down this road, I’m gonna bail out to get HVAC certified and make youtube videos about fucked up commercial systems. I can’t do this shit forever.

addendum: recommended reading/viewing that I couldn’t figure out how to directly talk about

if you have something quantitative hmu so I can read and link it↩
Becker, J., Rush, N., Barnes, E., & Rein, D. (2025). Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 ↩
Shen, J. H., & Tamkin, A. (2026). How AI Impacts Skill Formation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245 ↩
if your answer isn't "yes, obviously" I'm gonna assume you're an engineering manager that takes pride in making your reports' lives miserable.↩
you could argue that by building a slot machine OpenAI and Anthropic have managed to run wildly unprofitable casinos, a remarkable feat normally reserved for the sort of fascist dipshit that gets to be president↩
I will not apologize for linking a piece my wife wrote.↩

Some Nice Places to Find Abandonware Games

2026-02-16T15:53:41+00:00

I just realized I had a lot of sources I cycle between for abandonware games and thought it should be something to share, since this is just a blog and not a real games website, and I can post whatever I want. Abandonware, software that is no longer easily available because it is not sold anywhere by the publisher, is frequently a thing in games unfortunately and it doesn’t help that a lot of people just define it as “well this thing is old, so I can put it up for download even if it’s still for sale” which isn’t how preservation works! Anyway, here’s some sites I like that put care into what they upload, update them to work on modern versions of Windows, and take down the downloads if they get rereleased.

The Collection Chamber is the one I look at the most. It’s updated on a monthly basis and has a wide variety of stuff, with a focus on 90s games for Windows that you cannot easily run in DOSBox. It has so many games from the multimedia era that I find fascinating.

Zomb’s Lair has not been updated in a long time but hosts a lot of 90s computer games packaged for modern Windows as well. One of the most interesting ones to me is VNC: Virtual Nightclub, which was apparently an adventure game by the folks that made Burn: Cycle and was sold only through the Sci-Fi Channel phone line, so it was incredibly hard to find anything about it for a long time. I need to do a longer writeup on it sometime. It’s not “good” but it’s a fascinating time capsule of how we viewed the internet and virtual reality at the time.

Mr. Abandonware has organized a collection on the Internet Archive of DOS games packaged to run on modern windows, and it includes a lot of major games. lt’s kind of wild how many games that were commercial and critical hits just aren’t available for sale anywhere.

SentienceSnakes164 has a collection on the Internet Archive as well of games packaged to run on modern versions of Windows. This is more focused on 00s era games, mostly licensed ones that have been pulled from sale, but there’s some oddballs like early Monolith stuff and lesser known FPS like KISS: Psycho Circus.

There’s probably another post in me where I highlight freeware remakes of retro games, but I do want to give a shoutout to this one of Lode Runner: The Mad Monks’ Revenge. This was a game by Sierra that I really liked at the time and this remake adds likes of nice quality of life features.

Finally, MyAbandonware is a fascinating site to watch. It’s just constantly uploading stuff I never heard of. While it’s not focused on updating games to work on modern versions of Windows, they occasionally provide an update. This isn’t a criticism, no one could reasonably update all the games this site uploads.

That’s all I’ve got for this post. Feel free to add others in the comments as long as they aren’t uploading games that are still being sold.

Hanging Off a Horse on Old Skool Vintage Romance Covers

2026-02-16T07:00:17+00:00

So remember when I was trying to identify the color of the year for contemporary romance? That began because I was constantly noticing the repeated color schemes on book covers in NetGalley. My brain loves a pattern, and it loves to collect things.

I’ve got another collection for you. It’s from my folder named Hanging Off a Horse.

Have you noticed how many old skool romance covers there are with one or more people just hanging off the side of a bewildered or belligerent horse?

There are SO MANY.

First, my apologies for the size of some of the images.

Second: WHAT. Setting aside the ruffles and the puffy sleeves and the vest and whatever is happening in his crotchular area, there is NO WAY they aren’t about to fall off that horse, right? What kind of bicep strength does this guy have?

Third: the tagline is exquisite: On the Wings of Burning Desire, They Soared Beyond Love’s Ecstasy.

What does that mean?

The cover copy has proven difficult to find but I did locate this summary: Traveling from Paris during the French Revolution to New Orleans, from lush Virginia plantations to a new nation’s capital, Aimee de Chartres and master spy Lucian Napier, fueled by their passionate love, lead a life of intrigue and danger.

I’m sure it’s not problematic at all. No, totally fine.

The shirt is unbuttoned but STILL TUCKED IN. AND there’s a cape!

But again, how strong are this guy’s biceps? Is this like when you have young kids around and they get picked up or carried in a handled carrier, and one bicep ends up WAY bigger than the other (I speak from experience here)?

What are the workout benefits of holding up an entire person who is hanging off the side of a horse?

And also, is she even ON the horse? Where is her other leg?

There are going to be a lot of “where is the other body part” questions, I predict.

Also, GUESS WHAT THE HEROINE’S NAME IS.

He rode out of the darkness astride a coal-black stallion, appearing from nowhere like a phantom in the night. To the lords and ladies he robbed, he was an unprincipled highwayman, a common thief who deserved to swing from the gallows on Tyburn Hill. But to Lady Bliss Paynter, he was a thrilling enigma, an uncommonly skilled lover who had stolen nothing from her but a breathless kiss.

Promised to an influential nobleman, Bliss knew she could have no future with the man who haunted her daydreams. But before she resigned herself to a loveless marriage, she would know one night of ecstasy in those forbidden arms…one night of wild passion in her lonely bed…one night of throbbing intimacy that would change all nights to come.

Bliss Paynter. Also, points for an “uncommonly skilled lover” identified by one kiss, and also “throbbing intimacy.”

Where is her other leg?

What is she standing on? Is she emerging from a sea of…pink slime? Wait, is this the same pink slime as the other cover for Meet Poop? When was the art direction meeting that said pink slime was THE cover treatment?

Also, her arm is bent up and back toward him, so she’s…what lunging up at him on that horse? No wonder the horse looks so bewildered. Even the geese are like, Nope.

Also, if you’re wondering whether the cover copy is thoroughly offensive, why, yes, yes it is.

It’s so bad I’m putting it behind a spoiler tag with TWs.

TW/CW: racism like whoa, assault

VULNERABLE GIRL

Even though seventeen-year-old Luci hadn’t a friend in the world, the slender, willowy half-breed knew she could handle herself with anyone—anyone except Johnny Ace. The full-blooded Pawnee scout’s heated glance made her shiver with fear and a tingling sense of anticipation. When he appeared in her quarters, she tried to run away, but she couldn’t escape his demanding embrace. She shrieked that she detested him. . . but Luci’s body spoke much more eloquently of her desire!

VENGEFUL SCOUT

Because they had killed his father, Johnny Ace had sworn to forever call the Cheyenne his enemy. Even though that part-Cheyenne laundress at For MacPherson was sexy and alluring, the Indian tracker knew he could never harbor tender thoughts about the chit. Then he came upon her all alone, and instantly lust raced in Johnny’s veins. Before he could reconsider, the virile male was clasping his beautiful prey. Damning the consequences, he ravaged her mouth with kisses, eager for the moment when he would enjoy her fiery, tempestuous CHEYENNE CARESS.

Johnny. Ace. I hope his horse kicked him.

And while we’re here in the depths of embarrassment:

What is she standing on? Or does this guy also have the Bicep of She’s Hanging Off My Horse?

And is he wearing a puffer jacket? A fur? What is that? It’s hard to tell at this size, but this eBay listing has a slightly larger image:

First, I’m naming that hair color “Romance Heroine Red.”

Second, he’s got…something in his hair. And looks like Joey Tribbiani. And maybe that’s an iridescent Starter jacket?

Ok, I need you to brace yourself for this next one because it’s hilarious. No beverages nearby, no cats to startle?

Good.

He’s half horse, right? Like before we even get to the whole composition, that guy is 1/2 horse form this angle, right?

From midnight until dawn, she tasted rapture in his arms. Well, presuming he’s likely hung like one…?

Wait, if it’s just the back half of a horse, is he a Centaur? Or a Minotaur? I think the latter.

She’s clearly straddling his leg while hanging off the horse, and wow, there’s a lot of strain on the seams here: her bodice, his jacket, the horse’s patience.

Seriously, I feel badly for these horses.

Also, given the number of dogs named Bandit I’ve met in my life, “Bandit’s Brazen Kiss” is in my experience damp, slobbery, and usually scented with eau du Kibble.

This is one of my all-time favorite romance covers:

If you haven’t seen my close up exploration of The Raider Barbie, please enjoy. Don’t miss the abs on that doll.

I don’t think either of them are on the horse. The horse looks very upset or insulted, either way, but I can’t see how nary a buttock betwixt them is on the horse or near a saddle. So they’re BOTH hanging off the horse?

No wonder that horse looks appalled.

Now, my last three, in a subfolder I named, “Hwut?”

Y’all, things can get weird even if everyone’s on the horse and not hanging off the side by one bicep and a prayer.

She’s not hanging OFF the horse. Not yet, anyway.

Horse people, fill me in: is she going to stay on the horse’s back? He clearly has a saddle, but I’m a little worried she’s going to slide off and take a hoof for the face.

Also, if her hair is anything like mine, after all that wind, she’s going to have hours and hours of tangles to deal with.

First, John De Salvo’s pecs are certainly a-poppin’, and I kinda like that blue…doublet? he’s “wearing.”

But if he’s on a saddle, what is she sitting on? And if he’s not in a saddle, and she isn’t either, are they about to go flying into those flowers? She seems precariously perched.

Also, y’all. I am this horse.

Looking straight at the reader like, ‘Do you see what nonsense I have to put up with? Look at these two.’

And then, this is not a historical romance, but it fits the theme and also I just need everyone to see it.

WHAT is that saddle?

Is this a real saddle?

Is this like the tandem bike of horse saddles except you face each other like on the Amtrak?

IS THERE A POMMEL. IF SO WHERE IS IT.

No, wait, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.

I love the detail of the sparkle in her boots (So cute) and how they’re holding hands but…seriously, horse-wise, what is happening here?

And that’s all from my latest weird collection. Who knows what strange cover art I’ll start grabbing next. If you see any fun “hanging off the side of the horse” covers, please send them my way?

And don’t fall off any horses today, k?

Complex fiber and wood technologies of the first Great Basin peoples

2026-02-15T16:07:32+00:00

Pieces of thick cordage or knotted bark objects from Cougar Mountain Cave, Oregon. Image: Richard Rosencrance and coworkers (2026, CC-BY-NC)

Ancient peoples crafted technologies from wood, fiber, bark, leather, sinew, feathers, and countless other organic materials. With these they made all manner of implements, clothing, watercraft, and structures. Some such items were simple, made from only a single piece like a digging stick. But most were complicated, made from many pieces, each piece shaped in ways necessary to the overall function.

Nearly all these things have passed into dust.

Still, a few archaeological sites provide exceptional records of ancient organic technologies. They come only from particular times and places: Desert caves, anoxic peat bogs, or fine silty sediments that preserve impressions of objects long decayed.

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I’m fascinated by a new article that reports on some of the preserved organic technologies from caves of the Great Basin of North America. The first peoples to leave traces in these caves lived more than 13,000 years ago. The article, by Richard Rosencrance and collaborators, discusses the ways of life that were supported by tightly sewn clothing, cordage, carved wooden traps, and other perishable technologies. Most of the artifacts described in their work come from Paisley Caves and Cougar Mountain Cave, both in eastern Oregon.

Wooden artifacts and fiber cordage from Paisley Caves, Oregon. The large wooden piece is interpreted as a part of a trap for small animals. Image: Richard Rosencrance and coworkers (2026, CC-BY-NC)

Both Paisley Caves and Cougar Mountain Cave were first investigated by archaeologists more than 60 years ago—Paisley Caves by Luther Crossman in the 1930s, Cougar Mountain Cave by John Cowles in 1958 and later by Thomas Layton in 1966. Recording of the positions and context of material in these early excavations was not as precise as might be wished, and some aspects that might be highly interesting today were not systematically collected and ended up in backfill.

At Cougar Mountain Cave, Rosencrance and coworkers relate Cowles’s reporting that many coprolites were in the deposits, and these were not collected. That’s a pity because at Paisley Caves, more recent excavation led by Dennis Jenkins brought to light many human coprolites, which have provided an abundance of biological information about the ancient people who left them.

The jewel of the earlier excavations were the recognition of artifacts of fiber, leather, bark, and wood. The collection by Cowles and Layton from Cougar Mountain Cave includes a wide range of exceptional material, now housed at the Nevada State Museum. The new work by Rosencrance and coworkers includes a lot of new analysis of this collection, with radiocarbon dating on many of the artifacts.

Both sites cover a range of dates but much of the most interesting material comes from the period of time known as the Younger Dryas, roughly 12,900 to 11,600 years ago. In a world that was generally warming from the Last Glacial Maximum 19,000 years ago, the Younger Dryas represents a resurgence of relatively cold conditions.

Rosencrance and coworkers focus on the pattern of technical complexity represented by these objects. Many involve the application of multiple techniques or tools in their production.

One kind of example is tailored clothing. For example, a fragment of elk hide from Cougar Mountain Cave of Younger Dryas age has a cord sewn into its edge—the oldest example of sewn hide in the world. This is too small a fragment to know whether it was part of a garment or moccasin. But the utility of needles and sewing in producing fitted garments and footwear is widely recognized. Tailored clothing was valuable in cold environments as a means of reducing energy expenditure and avoiding frostbite, and the article presents evidence of bone and wood needles from many sites in addition to the two sites with most of the fiber and hide preservation.

Another example is weaving rushes or plant fibers into mats or baskets. Fragments of woven plant material are evidenced in both the Paisley Caves and Cougar Mountain Cave collections.

A different type of complexity is the production of special parts that must function together within a compound implement or machine. Some of the wooden pieces in the collections are interpreted as parts of deadfall traps, in which a large stone is supported by an intricate set of sticks that trigger the fall of the rock when disturbed by a small animal.

Examples of cordage from Cougar Mountain Cave. Image: Rosencrance and coworkers (2026, CC-BY-NC)

The article discusses a concept rooted in the ecology of northern hunter-gatherers that has a broad utility when thinking about such complex organic repertoire: the idea of “serial specialists”. This term was used by Lewis Binford as a way to think about the ecological flexibility and shifting foraging strategies that are needed in places where resources may have specific seasonal patterns.

“The cold-environment foragers are what I tend to think of as serial specialists: they execute residential mobility so as to position the group with respect to particular food species that are temporally phased in their availability through a seasonal cycle.”—Lewis Binford

The idea is that people move during the year—residential mobility—and pursue specialized foraging or extraction strategies for each of the resources they rely upon. One key requirement is being in the right place at the right time. That means learning the timing of the resource and the affordances of the landscape around it. Another key requirement is knowing how to make the specialized implements or follow the specific procedures that enable exploitation of the resource.

Binford emphasized that this was different from a generalist strategy; it’s a strategy of becoming specialists in multiple distinct survival activities.

The ethnographic record of Great Basin groups like the Northern Paiute provides a lot of evidence for this kind of sequential application of different specialized foraging strategies across an annual cycle. These groups moved to exploit specific resources with seasonal abundance, such as the hatching of brine fly larvae in Mono Lake, the harvest of piñon pine nuts, and the communal driving and capture of jackrabbits.

It’s very hard for any single site to provide evidence about residential mobility. Evidence of different activities at a single site doesn’t quite do this: A forager who can craft a well-balanced spear point for bison and a deadfall trap for a rabbit is mastering two very different technologies, yet may employ them in the same place and time. True, the archaeological record sometimes comes through in surprising ways: at some sites archaeologists can establish that human activity was seasonal, often through the preservation of botanical remains or animals that were killed at a single time of year. Still, piecing together an entire cycle would take an impressive correlation from many archaeological sites across a region, all representing the same range of time.

A selection of bone or wood needles pictured by Rosencrance and coworkers (2026). From their caption, the needles come from Connley Caves (C to M and V to Y). Cougar Mountain Cave (N to P). Paisley Caves (Q). and Tule Lake Rockshelter (R to U).

Sites in the northern Great Basin that share Younger Dryas-age deposits might provide such correlations. They fall within a limited timespan and share a Western Stemmed stone tradition. At Paisley Caves, the coprolites have produced abundant biological evidence including dietary remains and mitochondrial DNA.

These sites have received a lot of attention as part of the long debate over whether they provide evidence of human activity prior to the widespread Clovis tradition. The Clovis phenomenon is named for the distinctive fluted spear tips found at a mammoth kill site at Blackwater Draw, near Clovis, New Mexico, and similar points and associated finds stretch from Canada to Central America, with a strong concentration in the southeastern United States. Sites with Clovis points are concentrated in a narrow band of time just before the Younger Dryas, from just over 13,000 to around 12,750 years BP.

Some of the human coprolites from Paisley Caves are indeed older than Clovis, ranging as much as 14,800 years BP, and are authenticated with mitochondrial DNA and fecal sterol chemistry. Only one of the fiber items described by Rosencrance and coworkers comes from sediments predating the Younger Dryas; the rest are contemporary with Clovis or more recent.

The initial habitation of this part of North America is indeed an important topic. I’m just as interested in the connection between Paisley Caves, Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, and other sites that predate the Clovis phenomenon as anyone.

Even so, the work from these sites has me much more often thinking beyond the question of who was earliest.

What is most valuable in understanding the lives of the ancient people—including their adaptability upon their arrival in new circumstances—is the richness of the record of behavior. In that regard, these sites from the northern Great Basin have few parallels. I can’t wait to see more examination of the biological evidence from these sites, their interrelationships across sites, and their connection to the surrounding environment.

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Notes: All dates in this post are in calibrated years BP, and I’ve generally limited to round numbers. In the debate over the timing of sites relative to Clovis more significant digits are sometimes needed, and changing calibration scales sometimes argue for reporting radiocarbon years rather than calibrated years.

References

Binford, L. R. (1980). Willow Smoke and Dogs’ Tails: Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems and Archaeological Site Formation. American Antiquity, 45(1), 4–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/279653

Jenkins, D. L., Davis, L. G., Stafford, T. W., Campos, P. F., Hockett, B., Jones, G. T., Cummings, L. S., Yost, C., Connolly, T. J., Yohe, R. M., Gibbons, S. C., Raghavan, M., Rasmussen, M., Paijmans, J. L. A., Hofreiter, M., Kemp, B. M., Barta, J. L., Monroe, C., Gilbert, M. T. P., & Willerslev, E. (2012). Clovis Age Western Stemmed Projectile Points and Human Coprolites at the Paisley Caves. Science, 337(6091), 223–228. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1218443

Rosencrance, R. L., Smith, G. M., Jenkins, D. L., Connolly, T. J., & Layton, T. N. (2019). Reinvestigating Cougar Mountain Cave: New Perspectives on Stratigraphy, Chronology, and a Younger Dryas Occupation in the Northern Great Basin. American Antiquity, 84(3), 559–573. https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2019.22

Rosencrance, R. L., Smith, G. M., McDonough, K. N., Jazwa, C. S., Antonosyan, M., Kallenbach, E. A., Connolly, T. J., Culleton, B. J., Puseman, K., McGuinness, M., Jenkins, D. L., Stueber, D. O., Endzweig, P. E., & Roberts, P. (2026). Complex perishable technologies from the North American Great Basin reveal specialized Late Pleistocene adaptations. Science Advances, 12(6), eaec2916. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aec2916

Shillito, L.-M., Whelton, H. L., Blong, J. C., Jenkins, D. L., Connolly, T. J., & Bull, I. D. (2020). Pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas identified by human fecal biomarkers in coprolites from Paisley Caves, Oregon. Science Advances, 6(29), eaba6404. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aba6404

What Matters in Wuthering Heights

2026-02-14T13:00:39+00:00

Before we begin our rant:

TW/CW, like, so many

TW: racism, sexism, classism, animal abuse, child abuse, bullying, gaslighting, domestic violence, rape (implied), kidnapping, alcoholism, gambling, death in childbirth, possible brother-sister incest, a LOT of cousins getting married

Unless you live under a rock, and if you do, for the love of God, please invite me to live there with you, you know all about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” which is referred to in the trailer as “The Greatest Love Story of All Time.”

[ED: iframe removed. Title was '"Wuthering Heights" | Official Trailer'; source was 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/3fLCdIYShEQ?feature=oembed']

I haven’t seen the movie yet so I’m not going to comment on it. What I do want to do is give you a teensy heads up in case you run off to read “The Greatest Love Story of All Time,” and also to talk about some of the things that matter in the novel that are frequently lost in adaptations of the novel. As I tried to sum up my points, I realized that none of them make any sense unless you know the full plot of the novel – so this is a long post. But if you want to cut to the chase, look for any time I write some version of “AND THIS MATTERS” for the highlights.

Wuthering Heights tells the story of a boy (Heathcliff) and girl (Cathy) who grow up poor, abused, and neglected, in a home in which alcoholism is rampant and women, children, and animals are routinely abused. It tells of how these two children are affected by the limitations placed on them regarding their race, their class, and their gender as they grow up, and how they embody and perpetuate the cycle of abuse. It also contains a love story – but not the one you are thinking about.

I’m going to attempt to summarize the events of the book. Bear with me since there are two Cathys, a family with the last name Linton, a character named Heathcliff, and a character named Linton Heathcliff.

Just roll with it – and prepare for child abuse, abuse of animals, and domestic violence.

For a more accurate timeline of events, look at The Reader’s Guide to Wuthering Heights. Seriously, my retelling gets pretty messy because so many storylines overlap. I’m also oversimplifying or outright eliding some stuff, like the role of religion, the role of nature, and the characters of Nelly and Jacob and the unreliable narrator/nested flashbacks writing device.

The very first thing that happens in Wuthering Heights is that a lost traveller is attacked by dogs. He is brought into a house (Wuthering Heights) where the inhabitants of the house proceed to abuse animals and spit verbal abuse at each other. There is no beauty or softness in sight. This is a world in which cruelty is baked in, people, AND THAT MATTERS because all that Cathy and Heathcliff know how to do is endure cruelty and deal out cruelty to others.

This one is the STRANGEST love story ever told and I’ll accept that tagline

We learn in an extended flashback that when Cathy Earnshaw was six and her brother Hindley was fourteen, their father, Mr. Earnshaw, came home from a business trip with a child in tow whom their father names Heathcliff – one name only.He does not give the child his last name AND THAT MATTERS because Heathcliff’s very existence as someone without a surname immediately marks him as placeless in society.

Heathcliff’s parentage is a mystery although many readers have assumed that Heathcliff is Mr. Earnshaw’s illegitimate son which makes much more sense then him collecting a random child off the street and also adds ‘incest’ to the list of trigger warnings. Mr. Earnshaw dotes upon Heathcliff and neglects Hindley, who beats Heathcliff, because hurt people hurt people. Heathcliff and Cathy are inseparable as children, even after Mr. Earnshaw dies and Hindley forces Heathcliff to work as a servant.

DIGRESSIVE RANT AHEAD: RACE MATTERS!

Allow me to digress – a lot. Heathcliff is referred to frequently and from the onset as having dark hair, skin, and eyes. He is from a port town which caters to the slave trade, so he might be African. He may also be, and is suspected to be by various characters in the novel, Spanish, Indian, Irish, Chinese, or Romani. Of course if he is Mr. Earnshaw’s biological son, then we add that into the genetic mix.

Heathcliff’s ethnicity is deliberately ambiguous. However, the one thing Heathcliff is not, is ‘White.’ His appearance visibly, immediately, and inescapably marks him as ‘other’. He can change his clothes and his income but he cannot change his skin, AND THIS MATTERS because Heathcliff is driven by a desire to prove his superiority over the people who have told him that he is not good enough. And by ‘people’ I mean every single person in his life, including Cathy. He can’t be seen as a respected member of society and he certainly isn’t seen as a suitable match for Cathy, not even by Cathy herself. Race is not the only factor here, but it is a factor, and one that Heathcliff can’t change.

A note about systemic racism: When I read Wuthering Heights as a young teenager, I pictured Heathcliff as White, as, apparently, did Emerald Fennell when she read the book as a fourteen-year-old. This misreading, born of a culture that constantly seeks to erase Blackness by insisting on the White default, was reinforced by film adaptations in which Heathcliff has consistently been played by White actors, with the exception of the 2011 version in which he is played by James Howson, a Black actor.

This string of White Heathcliffs isn’t an accident, any more than it isn’t an accident that I read Heathcliff as looking, well, a lot like Jacob Eloridi, or Tom Hardy, or Laurence Olivier, or Ralph Fiennes, despite countless comments in the text to the contrary. The fact is, neither the Hays Code nor the culture of Britain or America would stand for an interracial couple in film.* AND THAT MATTERS because our culture’s insistence on a White Heathcliff is based in racism, just as the book version Heathcliff’s mistreatment is based (in part), on racism.

Emily Bronte deconstructs a great many damaging elements of Victorian culture in Wuthering Heights, including the racism. Surely a book that interrogates so many toxic elements of Victorian culture deserves a better reading than the one I gave it when I was twelve.

(*Trivia alert: Actually, we did get an interracial couple in the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights, because Merle Oberon, who played Cathy, had a White father and a Sri Lankan mother, but spent her career concealing her mixed-race heritage.)

A small taste of the excellent Merle Oberon:

[ED: iframe removed. Title was 'Merle Oberon Is More Than Just Lovely in Wuthering Heights (1939)'; source was 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/M28E8Uy0Y8w?feature=oembed']

Thus concludes my rant. Back to the story!

When Cathy is around twelve years old and Heathcliff is maybe thirteen, Cathy and Heathcliff spy on the home of the wealthy Linton family. They don’t have cable; they have to make their own fun, harr harr. The Linton’s guard dogs attack Cathy and she is brought into the house to recover while Heathcliff is forced to leave.

Years pass, and Heathcliff overhears Cathy saying that she could never marry Heathcliff due to his lower class status: cue Big Misunderstanding. He nopes off to make his fortune and Cathy, thinking that Heathcliff is gone forever and that marriage to Edgar Linton is her only chance at escaping her horrible home, gets married to Edgar Linton at the age of seventeen and suffers the fate of one who was born to be a pirate queen but instead is forced to do embroidery while smiling sweetly.

But wait! Heathcliff is back! And he has vowed revenge upon everybody! First he goes for Hindley. Hindley took time off from his busy schedule of torturing Heathcliff to get married, after which he returned to Wuthering Heights. His wife died in childbirth, leaving poor baby Hareton to the tender care of Hindley and Heathcliff, the world’s worst two dads.

TW/CW child peril

In one moment that is not only horrifying but also kind of awfully funny, a drunken Hindley drops the baby off a bannister and Heathcliff catches the baby by pure instinct and then rages at himself for having done so.

Heathcliff basically turns Hindley into a gambling addict and an alcoholic and wins ownership of Wuthering Heights in a game of cards, and Hindley dies a drunk, possibly by accident, probably by murder. Got all that?

Next up: revenge on Edgar by destroying the life of Edgar’s sister, Isabella. Heathcliff convinces Isabella that he is a bad boy with a heart of gold who just needs the love of a good woman, and he then convinces her to elope with him, just to make Edgar furious and Cathy jealous. Heathcliff then proceeds to…

TW/CW this guy is just shite.

…beat Isabella, it’s implied that he rapes her, and then imprisons her while forcing her to labor as a servant until she escapes while heavily pregnant and hides with Edgar’s help.

She has a baby whom she names Linton Heathcliff.

Meanwhile Cathy gets pregnant with Edgar Linton’s child, has a fraught meet-up with Heathcliff, has the baby and dies of childbirth and that Victorian classic – brain fever.

Here’s where I remind our readers that at the time of her death, Cathy is eighteen, AND THIS MATTERS.

Do you know why, during her short “adult” life, Cathy acts like a teenage nightmare brat from hell? BECAUSE SHE IS ONE. Her home is as hellish as possible and she is literally a teenager! As is Heathcliff, who has lived some secret life that evidentially involved a lot of suffering and maybe some crime and loses the love of his life while he is nineteen or twenty years old! And Isabella, who does a romantic and foolish thing in falling for Heathcliff, is also eighteen! Their ages matter because they are never given time to mature, to have other experiences, to grow.

Most adaptations cast older actors and lose this entire layer, and I think it sucks a lot of tragedy out of the story even when the actors are extraordinary. Heathcliff’s emotional growth is frozen at the age at which he loses Cathy, and of course Cathy’s growth is frozen by death. The very most mature of teens struggle with things like communication, emotional regulation, and impulse control. Is it any wonder that these two teenagers can’t just marry each other and grow the fuck up, given not just their ages but also the mercurial and violent upbringing that they share?

Heathcliff responds to Cathy’s death in a very healthy and normal manner.

HA HA HA No, he doesn’t.

Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s corpse and makes out with it, he begs Cathy to haunt him, he dies, their ghosts haunt the moors.

This wraps up most adaptations. As in, they end here.

It has been so far a story about codependency and enmeshment and lust. But has it been a story about love? The Greatest Love Story Ever?

Hardly. Cathy and Heathcliff do not wish for the other to be happy, even at the cost of their own happiness. They do not bring out the best in each other. They do not sacrifice for each other’s good. They are obsessive, they are clueless (in the sense that they have no models of healthy interaction or coherent communication to draw from in their lives), and they are deeply, deeply selfish.

So while I would call it a powerful story, I personally wouldn’t call it a love story. I would call it a story about the generational trauma of abuse and alcoholism. I would call it a story about how being abused as children creates abusive adults. I would call it a story about how people who feel trapped – by race, by class, by gender, by geography, by untreated mental and physical illness – do self-destructive things in attempts to escape those traps. But I wouldn’t call it a love story.

But it isn’t over my friends! Adaptations may stop here, but the novel is only half over AND THAT MATTERS because it is in this half that the themes of the book really play out.

In the novel, Heathcliff does not die soon after Cathy does, because he has revenges to plot. He figures that the best way to continue to get back at Hindley, Edgar, and Cathy is to degrade and abuse their children as much as possible. It is Heathcliff’s deepest wish to turn all the children of his tormentors into the worst people they can possibly grow up to be.

I wasn’t crazy about the actual performances, but I did appreciate that Heathcliff and Cathy were cast with racially and age-appropriate actors in the 2011 production, which also features wonderful cinematography.

Behold:

Heathcliff is now the head of Wuthering Heights where he terrorizes everybody. He’s still mad at himself for his failure to murder a baby, and the baby, Hareton Earnshaw (remember, the son of Hindley, Cathy 1.0’s brother?) is now a young man living like a servant under Heathcliff’s thrall. Hareton is taught to dress, work, and speak like a farmhand. He is not allowed to leave the estate or to learn to read.

Also sharing this happy home is Heathcliff’s son, Linton (Edgar’s nephew), who Heathcliff forced to live at Wuthering Heights when Linton was about twelve. He is always described as ‘sickly’ and under Heathcliff’s dubious care he becomes a petty, cruel whiner – in short, the worst version of himself.

When Linton and Cathy 2.0 (Edgar and Cathy’s daughter, who is also named Cathy) are fifteen and sixteen, respectively, Heathcliff convinces Cathy 2.0 to run away from home and marry Linton. Poor sickly Linton dies at the age of seventeen, with no doctor (forbidden by Heathcliff of course) and no company except for Cathy 2.0. Also please note that by withholding medical treatment Heathcliff essentially kills his own son just to spite his son’s mother, who is already dead.

Meanwhile Cathy 2.0 is effectively Heathcliff’s prisoner. Her imprisonment makes the formerly cheerful and kind girl bitter and furious, almost deranged with despair – the worst version of herself, as Heathcliff hoped.

When Cathy 2.0 first arrives at Wuthering Heights, she despises Hareton, and with good reason. Despite the abuse he receives, he is devoted to Heathcliff. Cathy 2.0 is essentially imprisoned at Wuthering Heights and Hareton does not offer to help her. He strikes her as dirty, illiterate, and complicit in her hellish life as a widow under Heathcliff’s control, and her assessment is initially correct.

However, over time, Hareton keeps extending small kindnesses towards Cathy 2.0, and over time, she begins to reciprocate. After she makes fun of Hareton for not being able to read, she realizes that she has hurt his feelings, repents, and offers to teach him. The next thing you know, they are wandering the moors and becoming real friends and falling in real love – they care about each other, they are kind to each other, they support one another in becoming better people. They are capable of change and healing.

Heathcliff is now, because of various deaths and marriages that he has orchestrated, the owner of both Wuthering Heights and the Linton estate, Thrushcross Grange. However, he finds himself increasingly tormented by Cathy 1.0’s ghost – so much so that he can’t even muster the energy to break up the happy couple.

Every time he tries to hit Cathy 2.0 or yell at her, he finds himself unable to move, or distracted. He feels the presence of Cathy 1.0 protecting her daughter from him. Finally he goes into Cathy 1.0’s room and starves himself to death. Cathy 2.0 and Hareton give up Wuthering Heights and get the heck outta there. The End.

For Heathcliff and Cathy 1.0, ‘love’ is selfish and ‘love’ is death.

For Hareton and Cathy 2.0, love is selfless and love is freedom and life.

So yes, there is a great love story in Wuthering Heights. AND THAT MATTERS because, if Emily Bronte wanted us to see Heathcliff and Cathy 1.0 as a great love story, why include its contrast? Cathy 2.0 and Hareton are a rebuttal to the claim that Cathy and Heathcliff are the greatest love story of all time – not just because they do horrible things but because they act without empathy, they are deeply selfish, and they cannot or will not change.

But even though Cathy 2.0 and Hareton have been abused, they are capable of growth, and they do act out of empathy, and they do want their lover to be happy. And that’s real love. It may not be “The Greatest Love Story Ever Told,” but it’s much better than Heathcliff and Cathy 1.0, no matter what the trailer says.

Fornication and the public sphere

2026-02-13T19:23:09+00:00

So, if like me you are teaching some version of World History 2-Modern Boogalloo, you will probably want to talk about the early modern rise of the public sphere and talk about how it creates a space (physical, like a coffee or teahouse or more abstractly like cheap prints in the vernacular) where a new public can talk about scandal, politics, ethics and buying insurance. You may also want to talk about how this is not just something happening in Europe. How to do this? Fornication!

I assume you will talk a bit about how the spread of popular literacy happened first in East Asia. If you wanted to give a good example of the spread of knowledge about official matters you could draw on Zhang Ting. Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China.¹ which has a lot on the growing ease of getting a hold of copies of the Qing code, which were was increasingly being privately printed.²

Zhang also has plenty on the litigation handbooks that were being published in the Ming and after. Most notable is Thunder that Startles Heaven 驚天雷 , which went through many editions in the Qing. You can show them a page from it, and, if they are studying Chinese, discuss how crummy some popular prints were.³

More importantly, thanks to Zhang Ting, you can talk about how the manuals popularized legal knowledge by, for example through question and answer sections and rhyming songs 歌訣 Here is an example that both explains Chinese law and ideas about behavior.

Fanjian zongkan ge 犯姦總括歌

Comprehensive Rhymed Song of [the laws relating to] Fornication

-Men and women committing fornication with consent, each shall be punished with eighty strokes of the heavy bamboo. Nannü hejian zhe, ge gai zhang bashi. 男女和姦者, 各該杖八十

-For a married woman committing fornication with consent, the punishment will be increased to ninety strokes of the heavy bamboo.

-For diaojian that seducing women to go outside [their home to fornicate], the punishment is one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo.

-Rape tarnishes the woman’s reputation; the rapist shall be punished with strangulation.

-For attempted rape, the punishment shall be one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo and exile to three thousand li.⁴

Besides getting them to memorize the song, you can talk about how this popularizes understandings of law. I suppose if this was a China class you could head off to talking about gender roles with Matthew Sommer⁵, or litigation experts with Melissa Macauley⁶

For a world history class it is maybe best to compare China to the mémoires judiciaires in France and the growing public nature of litigation. Sarah Maza Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France.⁷ is the best source, and you can talk about the scandalous Affair of the Diamond Necklace Maza will help you talk about the content of the mémoires and what they show about popular ideas about justice. This is nice if your French is not up to reading them yourself.

These are not really parallel cases, of course. The French stuff is studied in part because it leads into the de-legitimization of the French state. The Chinese stuff is not Causes Célèbres, although I suppose knowledge of the grubby nature of the law did not make the state look any better. Still, they are both cases of publicizing knowledge of what was once a state mater, and both cases where you can actually look at how popularizing knowledge led to a broader public knowledge of how the law works led to public opinion criticizing the state, with the yamen runners filling the role of Marie Antoinette.

University of Washington Press, 2020 ↩
Zhang, Ting. Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China. University of Washington Press, 2020 pg 42 ↩
Image from Legalizing Space in China ↩
Zhang, Ting. Circulating the Code Pp121, 126-7 ↩
Sommer, Matthew H. Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. 1st edition. Stanford University Press, 2002. ↩
Macauley, Melissa. Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China. 1st edition. Stanford University Press, 1998.

↩
University of California Press, 1993. ↩

Wanna meet some trolls?

2026-02-13T05:43:48+00:00

Anyone looking for tragedy needs to, literally, do nothing but read, watch, and, god help you, scroll. It’s harder to find joy.

If you are lucky enough to be in Western North Carolina this week, however, exuberant whimsey awaits you at the North Carolina Arboretum. There, you will find Trolls: A Field Study, a temporary outdoor art installation by Danish artist Thomas Dambo, featuring twelve larger-than-life troll sculptures made from reclaimed wood, fallen branches, pallets, and other recycled materials. Each troll stands about seven to nine feet tall and all are scattered throughout the Arboretum’s gardens and trails.

To see them, in person and, I hope, on the screen, is to smile. Each is named and all have risible personas. Posted discretely near each is a sign about them, all of which, using humor and wit, introduce the troll and explain an environmental problem humans have created that the trolls are puzzling over.

Here, in all their wooden glory are the twelve:

This is Wilde, the first troll you see. He’s fascinated by humans and is drawing, on his pad, a sketch of a human taking a phone picture of him.

This is Larke. She is baffled by all the good stuff humans throw away.

This is Birch. He loves measuring humans. Just like trolls, they come in all shapes and sizes.

This is Hasse. He’s baffled by lawns and, especially lawn mowers. What are the humans doing?!?! He’s hoping that another perspective might give him more clarity.

This is Poppy. She’s still trying to figure out what to do with all these shiny beep things humans love. Eat them? That didn’t work. She’s thinking….

This is Kirse. She loves humans and has figured out that if she is silly, they, especially the little ones, will be silly too.

This is Boge. He’s a little shy around humans. It’s hard to figure out how much to shake them. They seem to do better with gentle hugs.

This is Lilnut. She’s caught some lovely humans in her next. Her favorite was the one who took her home and let her lie down on something called a couch. It was the best!

This is Bignut. He too likes to catch humans, especially the small ones—it’s so easy!

This is Valle. He finds humans a bit much. He likes naps much better.

This is Taks. He’s the youngest troll. He really likes humans. They’re weird but they have the best snacks.

This is Anja. She loves numbers, especially counting. Right now, she’s using stones to keep track of all the humans who come to see her

I loved them all and I hope you did too!

This is a post from my new substack–I won’t normally cross post but I couldn’t resist sharing!

The post Wanna meet some trolls? appeared first on All About Romance.

12th of February 2026

2026-02-12T15:15:37+00:00

I remember years ago there was a brief discussion with someone who discovered my blog and was curious to hear how I managed to establish my life outside the monetary system. Huh. I'd guess this pattern of perception works both ways; we see something which seems a bit different from our own ordinary sphere of life, and we immediately assume it must be something totally different (either in good or bad - I've also had a number of discussions with people who are convinced that I'm totally brainwashed by some evil propaganda, simply because in their own sphere someone influential said that European people are like that, not like us, but totally different, brainwashed non-persons). Or, seeing an idyllic picture of producing food and firewood by manual labor, and instantly assuming "wow! this person does not need any money!". And the other way is some people presenting their own life as romanticized idyll of Shangri-La - because that is how you get followers? Or it somehow boosts your ego to feel admired by a mass of random spectators? I don't know, I really don't know. See, my life is pretty ordinary, and today it meant working at the office to earn money to pay bills, feeling slightly bored yet at the same time thankful that I have work for otherwise I'd be deep in trouble. For the most part, life is shades or common-place, mixed with various elements of normality, a hint of boredom with occasional trace of excitement, sometimes a moderate mess of conflicting emotions - and I have feeling that it is probably like this for most of us?

Picture album:

2026

12 users have voted.

git recent: what branch did I work on? [blog]

2026-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Mega short blog post, mostly for me to remember, but also might be useful to you.

In a project I'll often work on and move around different branches throughout the day, and as the years wear on it's rather dulled my memory - that's to say, I quickly forget what branch I was working on!

`git recent`

I created a git command line alias that helps my failing memory. What it does is list all the local branches, oldest to newest with the relative time and the name:

[alias]
  recent = !git for-each-ref --sort=committerdate --format='%(committerdate:relative) %(refname:short)' refs/heads/ | tail -10

It's a bit cumbersome with the !git part at the start, but it's because I want to limit it the most recent 10 results and I want it with the newest at the bottom.

$ git recent
3 weeks ago fix/ai-gen-docs
2 weeks ago feat/not-available-not-404
2 weeks ago fix/bulk-download-timeout
8 days ago fix/real-null-in-bulk
8 days ago fix/real-404
2 days ago feat/bulk-schema
2 days ago fix/transcript-endpoint-potential-null
2 days ago fix/sanitise-sql-input
21 hours ago main
20 hours ago feat/api-analytics

Memory win for me. Neato.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

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