Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Of the web - Werd I/O

2025-11-24T15:11:42.000Z

I think Dave Winer makes an important distinction here:

“For a piece of software, being of the web means that it is built to share data with other apps, ones that receive data as input, as a feed reader consumes feeds, or generate output for other apps, e.g. software used to publish feeds. Or competitive apps, that do roughly the same thing another app does, and want to be able to receive the user's data, or better, share the users' data so they can use both apps (we shouldn't settle for less than this, imho).”

By his definition, most web apps are on the web, but not of it. This seems right to me, and I suspect web instigators like Tim Berners-Lee would agree.

The odd thing is that, for a while, desktop software did exactly this. Word would save a document in a particular format, and another application written by someone else entirely could open that document. When we moved to the cloud, we signed up for a computing environment that was as much about siloing and isolation as much as it was about ease of access and maintenance.

Some of the effects of that are good: zero trust enterprise services have made organizations more secure. But the obvious benefit for vendors is lock-in. That’s been true for decades: the whole thrust of the tech side of my has been helping to remove gatekeepers and empower people to access the data and services they need, on their terms. These days, some jurisdictions have legislation to help prevent that.

But the web, as Dave points out, was never about lock-in. As Tim Berners-Lee made clear, again and again: this is for everyone. It’s a public domain platform, using open protocols, that allows anyone to publish, share, and read. Anything that’s truly of the web is in line with those principles — and those principles are worth protecting.

[Link]

Snowy morning - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-24T09:23:34.000Z

On the cusp of the snowy doorstep, I felt a child-like excitement. I wanted to run outside and embrace the snow — the first proper snow, as we would say here, in at least a year. This is the kind of snow that will lie on the ground., I thought. The snow flakes were thick, leaving a white blanket over the whole countryside.

I walked to get my train, still wearing my summer trainers. Maybe part of me didn’t think it was necessary to prepare for snow — there was little last year. Except, outside, I knew a different shoe would have gone a long way.

I walked on untouched snow. I must have been the first person out in my neighbourhood. The loudest sounds were my footsteps on the wet snow, followed then by the snowflakes delicately falling onto the quiet stone paths. I started to notice a few snowflakes were falling into my long hair, which made me smile. I was darting a bit of the snow with me where I went.

I looked back briefly and noticed the track that my footsteps had made — each one a step in my journey. There were no footsteps ahead. Later, I encountered a pair of footsteps — maybe they were left by a couple out walking to the same train to which I was headed. The footsteps were in a beautiful alignment.

On the train — the warm, bright train — I was delighted by how many people there were, each one bracing the snow to be here. I felt less lonely, and smiled to myself. I carried a smile with me as I started my journey for the day, as well as crystals of snow that lay in my hair.

Mead Update - 11/23/25 - Ginger Peach - Cool As Heck

2025-11-23T15:27:26.000Z

After taste testing and gravity testing the ginger peach mead, I decided to bottle it. The .75g of ginger only needed about 12 hours in the carboy to extract the right amount of flavor. That, along with a little back sweetening from the peach syrup, has given the mead a nicely balanced flavor.

The other batch I've got going, the maple vanilla one, got to about 11% ABV with plenty of that maple sweetness left, so I decided to stop fermentation there and keep this one from going as dry as the others I've been making. I put it in the fridge to cold crash it for 24h, then racked it into a new carboy with potassium sorbate and a campden tablet already dissolved in a bit of spring water. This will help to further inhibit the yeast and keep the mead around 11-12% ABV.

After a few more days in the fridge, I'll sanitize the oak chips and add those to the mead in a brew bag along with the vanilla bean and allspice berries, each in their separate brew bag for easy removal when the flavor is right. I'm very excited about this one! I think this is going to be the best one yet. It should age well and be a really nice fall mead next year.

Now witness the power of this fully operational Fediverse! - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-11-23T12:34:35.000Z

How can you measure the popularity of a social network site? Perhaps by counting the number of active accounts, or the quality of the discourse, or even how many people reply to your witty memes.

Me? I prefer to look at how many people visit my blog from each site. It is an imperfect measure - and a vain one - but lets me know where I should be spending my time. No point posting on a network which is just bots talking to each other, right?

Earlier this year I built a stats-counter for my blog. Every time someone clicks from a website which links to my blog, it records that visit in a database. I get to see which blog posts are doing numbers, and where those numbers came from.

Until fairly recently, the Mastodon social network didn't send referer details. I thought that reduced the visibility of the network and lobbied for it to change. As various Mastodon servers upgrade, and admins opt-in, it is becoming more apparent just how much traffic originates from the Fediverse.

Over the last few weeks, here's how many people have clicked from BlueSky and Mastodon to one of my blog posts.

Total	Source
1,607	bsky.app
752	mastodon.social

At first glance, it doesn't look good for our elephantine friends, does it? The butterfly sends over twice the traffic. Game over!

But, of course, while Mastodon.social is the biggest instance - it is far from the only one. What happens if we slide down the long tail? Here's all the Mastodon-ish instances which sent me over 10 clicks.

Total	Source
193	phanpy.social
120	android-app://org.joinmastodon.android/
106	infosec.exchange
62	mas.to
59	mstdn.social
55	social.vivaldi.net
49	wandering.shop
48	fosstodon.org
33	mathstodon.xyz
27	mastodon.online
26	mastodon.scot
24	app.wafrn.net
19	indieweb.social
18	social.lol
17	tech.lgbt
17	toot.wales
16	en.osm.town
16	feditrends.com
14	mstdn.ca
14	piefed.social
12	wetdry.world
11	c.im
11	mastodon.nl
51	Sites sending < 10 clicks

Ah! Add them all up and you get a grand total of 1,773 visitors from Mastodon-powered sites. That's more than BlueSky.

Now, there are some obvious caveats to the data:

I have a smaller follower count on BlueSky than I do on Mastodon.
My posts may appeal more to one demographic than another.
People may have strict privacy controls which suppress the true volume of visitors.
There's no way to measure how long someone spends reading my posts.
RSS and newsletter visitors aren't counted.
Clicks from apps may not always show a referer.
Some people may be on multiple services.
Fediverse users can follow the post directly, so don't need to visit the site to read it.

And yet… no matter how you slice it, Fediverse servers are sending as much traffic as BlueSky!

I think this is brilliant. Web services should be able to scale from small to big - and each ActivityPub-powered site helps power the open Internet.

Just for completeness, this is how Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Lemmy do over the same period:

Total	Source
1,158	reddit.com
585	android-app://com.reddit.frontpage/
76	facebook.com
76	https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/
56	https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/
52	youtube.com
41	t.co
38	https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1nsw7f4/til_in_mongolia_instead_of_a_street_address_a/
31	linkedin.com
27	android-app://io.syncapps.lemmy_sync/
27	https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1nsw7f4/til_in_mongolia_instead_of_a_street_address_a/
22	https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1n96ftn/40_years_later_are_bentleys_programming_pearls/
22	lemmy.ca
17	android-app://com.linkedin.android/
16	lemmy.dbzer0.com
14	feddit.org
11	https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1n96ftn/40_years_later_are_bentleys_programming_pearls/
10	discuss.tchncs.de
10	l.instagram.com
8	lemmy.blahaj.zone
6	https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1m2l84b/considering_making_the_switch_does_google_pay/
6	reddthat.com

If you add up all the Lemmy instances, they send about as much traffic as Facebook and LinkedIn combined. That's not a huge surprise - those platforms hate anyone clicking away to the wider web.

Twitter is basically the Dead Internet. I'm no longer on there, but I do occasionally search it to see who is sharing my posts. The popular posts I write get shared a lot - sometimes by accounts with huge followers - yet there are no comments or retweets and barely and clicks.

I don't do Instagram or Threads, and that might be reflected in their low numbers. But I'm not active on YouTube either - yet people there occasionally link back to me.

Final Thoughts

Firstly, my stats only represent my site. Your site might be very different.

Secondly, I've ignored search engine traffic, big blogs, newsletters, and other sources.

Thirdly, and most importantly, this isn't a competition! The desire for a "winner-takes-all" service is dangerous and disturbing. An ecosystem is at its most vibrant when there are multiple participants each thriving in their own niche.

I want a thousand sites, running a hundred different software stacks, some of which only serve a dozen people, or even a lone participant.

Diversity is strength.

Bookmarks - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-22T20:08:10.000Z

My copy of Stephen King’s On Writing has been sitting on the shelf for a while. Why I stopped reading the book is one of those things lost to time. But about two weeks ago, I went to my bookshelves and picked out the two books that I had started but not finished yet. I could finish these now, I thought. I remembered enjoying what I had read so far.

The blue ribbon bookmark built into the book, which I had placed at the page I had read last, let me pick up where I left off. At first I was a bit hesitant: would I remember where I left off? I quickly got back into the book, though; given the book is autobiographical in nature, I didn’t need to keep looking back to pick up the story.

I’m glad I started reading the book again. I am learning so much!

This week a friend said something that made me write down that bookmarks are a way of understanding where you are. A bookmark, sticking out at the top or the bottom of the book, lets you know how far along you are relative to all the pages. You have some bearing of your progress. But just as true is that bookmarks are a way of noting where you left off so that you can come back later.

There are topics I want to write about but for which I don’t yet have the words; I need to do more thinking, more reading, or have more conversations to help me figure out how to get started. It’s almost as if some of my ideas are mental bookmarks. When I come back to an idea, I can think oh, yes, this really interests me! and get back to thinking. Maybe there is no change and I leave the bookmark where it is. Or maybe the bookmark leads me to a story for which I am now ready.

Icebreakers - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-22T19:55:52.000Z

This evening I hosted an online event about writing and writing on the web. “Writing” is a broad topic, so I wanted a way to help get the discussion going. A few weeks ago, I tried an ice breaker question in an event which went well, so I decided I’d try one again this evening.

At first, I wasn’t sure what question I wanted to ask, but I had a few criteria in mind. I wanted a question that any participant could answer. To me, this meant the question had to be resonant to the audience (writers), approachable, and not too daunting.

For this event, I didn’t want to have a schedule – that would be too structured. I didn’t think we would need a schedule, ether: writing, as I mentioned earlier, is such a broad topic. I was confident there would be things to talk about. However, moving from the event introduction into the first topic of discussion without an agenda can be tricky (and for long running events may encourage the same few people who are more confident to speak first).

I came up with the icebreaker question “What do you like to write about?” After introducing the event, I asked the question. I didn’t ask anyone in particular to answer because I think a key part of an event on writing – especially online – is for people to talk when they feel comfortable. A few people answered, which both got the discussion going and allowed us all to learn a bit about each other.

Then the thing happened that I was secretly hoping would happen: the discussion would naturally flow from there. And it did. In the following 90 minutes, we covered many topics, from writing as art to the use of emojis in writing to many more topics.

I am hoping to do another writing event in December. If you'd like to join, let me know and I can email you when the next event is scheduled! My email is readers [at] jamesg [dot] blog.

Magazine Review: DOCTYPE - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-11-22T12:34:50.000Z

D'yer remember the eighties? The eighties, eh? Remember 'em? With the Acorn Archimedes an' that? What were we like? Remember them mags what y'got? The computer mags? Wirral the source code? Remember typin' it all in be hand? If yer semicolon were outta place y'd gerra syntax error! And you try telling that to the young people of today, will they believe yer?

For those of you born this century, it might be hard to believe but - yes - the way we distributed source code back in the day was on paper. Computer magazines would be full of news, reviews, letters (like the comments section of a website), classified ads (like eBay), and code listings - like this:

That's how I learned to code. Laboriously type in a few hundred lines of dense code, check it furiously for mistakes, get frustrated at a syntax error on line 115, scream "eureka!" when I got it running, and then investigated its inner workings.

A few months ago, Internet funster Matt Round announced that he was bringing back type-in mags. But, this time, for the web!

Would that work? In an era of vibe-coding, templates, and batteries-included frameworks, who on Earth would buy a magazine like this?

Well - you, I hope. Because it is now on sale and features a project written by me!

For a very reasonable £7.99, you get ten different games, projects, and demos to type in. That's a mere 79p per website! Cheaper than a C64 cassette I reckon.

The artwork by HappyToast is lush, the layout is gorgeous, and the programs are fun. Some of them you'll understand straight away, others you won't quite get until the very last character.

Could you cheat by scanning it, running OCR over the code, and then running it? Sure. But you can also hire someone to kiss your partner if you can't be bothered to put the effort in. Where's the fun in that?

Here's a sneak preview of mine:

I'd love your feedback on my project and I'd be delighted if you turned it into something awesome.

Copy-typing code - especially Max Goodhart's incredible "Quine" project - is a meditative and unusual experience. I propped up the magazine on my laptop and was delighted that I only made five typos the first time through.

Is this really how we lived? Yes! Is this something we should go back to? Well, that's a harder question to answer.

I hope you enjoy playing with what I and others have created. I bet you'll learn something new. Please remix mine and show it to your friends. If you haven't got a friend, one of the projects is a primitive Markov chain - so you can build your own digital pal.

You can buy DOCTYPE magazine now. It will make the perfect Christmas gift for all the nerds in your life.

Streets of Rage 4 - Joel's Log Files

2025-11-22T02:59:48.000Z

Some games give you a lot to talk about, and some others are pretty straight-forward mindless fun!

I don’t have a huge history with the Streets of Rage series, but I am quite familiar with multiplayer games, and this just happened to be one of the popular ones when I looked at lists online. Still, I never prioritized it as much when I had plenty of other options, and I also wasn’t a big fan of the artstyle from the screenshots, since I really preferred the pixelart style the series had had during its original trilogy on the Sega Genesis.

In any case, I saw the physical edition of Streets of Rage 4: Anniversary Edition for cheap online, I lost control again, and by the time I noticed I had the game on my collection and pretty much played from start to finish with friends on a weekend.

While this is a fantastic game I will return to many times, I didnt’t have that much to say about it and it’s not like I am incredibly passionate for it—or so I thought. I almost didn’t feel like writing a review and sharing it because I don’t think I add anything new to the conversation, as someone who isn’t super familiar with beat’em ups and such.

However, I write whatever I want here so that’s irrelevant :P

Streets of Rage 4 official artwork

The story is simple and to the point. The children of Mr. X (a villain from previous games) started their own Crime Syndicate and have brought the city to chaos once again, so it’s up to you to save the city once again, venturing into the streets of rage to clean it up from the criminals raoming around.

The gameplay is great! it’s a beat’em up after all. It’s fun, it’s easy to learn, but there’s a high ceiling to master especially if you are chasing high scores. You basically have regular attacks, throws, and Blitz moves. A new addition to the series are some special attacks, which will lower your HP, however, succesive attacks will let you recover it, unless you get hit, providing a great risk-reward balance that I enjoyed a lot. There’s a variety of characters, some new ones and some old ones, all of them with their own unique styles. Tanks, lightweights, etc.

The art was neat. As I mentioned before the franchise started and stuck on the Sega Genesis, and never went through an early 3D graphics phase or high-res pixelart like other classic series did. This new entry—a couple decades after the previous one—went for hand-drawn character art, which looks absolutely incredible. At first I wasn’t a fan, but as soon as I started playing it, the animation work did its magic. It works perfectly and the lightning, shadows and other visual effects make the whole thing amazing. The locations and background art is good too, some of it is inspired by old stages from the original trilogy , but most are brand new ones that fit right in with the overall aesthetic. Every boss and enemy has pretty good animation and attack patterns too.

The soundtrack of this game is as amazing as it gets. It fits perfectly with the rest of the franchise and it’s one of the main standouts of the game. This will hype you up like nothing else and get you in the mood to go to the streets and punch some criminals and corrupt policemen. Seriously though, it adapts depending on the action going on and is something I’ll definitely listen to while going to the gym or running around.

Some other cool things this game offers are a Roguelike mode, which comes included in the Switch version (both physical and digital) and some great extras like concept art, pixel art, character profiles, a PvP mode, etc.

Overall, this game was a fantastic experience to go through. This review was made after a single playthrough of the campaign and a couple of runs of the roguelike mode, I think there’s quite a lot of other things yet to experience, and I kind of want to get better at it on the Roguelike mode.

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Winter sunset - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-20T15:48:52.000Z

A dusting of snow blankets hills in the distance, left over from the snowfall two evenings ago. There are thin light clouds above the hills through which the sky peeks. On the horizon, separating the snowy white hills from the light grey clouds, there is a hint of a pale red, cast from the sun setting at the opposite end of the sky.

The sun is setting, I think to myself. Knowing that it will soon be the evening, I stand by the window and gaze out the window so I can see as much of the hills as possible before sunset. Will the snow be there tomorrow? I wonder. Whatever the case, the snow is beautiful right now.

On another hill, a few streaks of sun shine through gaps between the clouds, illuminating strips of a green hill – whose snow has already melted – with an amber colour. At the bottom of the hill, the treetops are dark green, occasionally interspersed with a few trees whose leaves are still orange – all trees change with the seasons at different paces. As autumn turns to winter, the orange sky and the remaining orange treetops complement each other well.

Most trees have lost their leaves, moving into their winter phase. A few leaves hang on to the trees near me, memories of the vitality of summer while I exist in a sea of Nature’s calls for rest that come in winter – the sleepy hills coated in snow, quieter streets.

The sun has set over the hills; yellow and orange colours are cast onto a few clouds, but the rest of the sky is light blue. Soon, the blue will change. We will cycle through gradient of all the colours that come in evening. I leave to look at the opposite end of the sky and see a warm pink hue envelops the clouds on the horizon, above which there is a fluffy line that goes from pink to light blue. I wonder if I will see the purple in the sky this evening, I think to myself.

I consider how much I love winter sunsets, and how much easier it is to notice them in winter for they happen much earlier in the evenings. I wonder for how long the sky will be pink, I think to myself as I continue to look out at the horizon in awe.

RE: Why Do You Need Big Tech for Your SSG? - Kev Quirk

2025-11-20T11:41:00.000Z

RE: Why Do You Need Big Tech for Your SSG?

by Loren Stephens

Loren posts a response arguing that while self-hosting and local builds have their charm, the simplicity and zero-maintenance nature of services like Netlify often make them the more practical choice for small personal sites.

Read Post →

I enjoyed this post as it approaches the problem I wrote about yesterday from a completely different perspective. While I spoke about rolling my own infrastructure and building locally to maintain control, Loren talks about the simplicity and cost (free!) of hosting with services like Netlify.

Loren closes his post by saying:

If you’re running a complex site or you’re philosophically opposed to big platforms, a VPS + rsync pipeline might be worth it. […] For my tiny, low-traffic static site, the convenience, zero cost, and redirect handling of GitHub + Netlify are hard to beat.

I think this is the crux of the whole discussion. For me, it’s more about control than being opposed to big platform. I think they have their place, but for my use case, my personal blog isn’t it. For Loren, it’s all about simplicity and just getting shit done.

It’s fantastic that we have different options that allow for more control, or for ease of use. As a result, we have a diverse pool of people and opinions on the Indie Web, and I don’t think anyone can argue against that being a good thing.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️

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Read "The Charlie Kirk purge: How 600 Americans were punished in a pro-Trump crackdown" - Molly White's activity feed

2025-11-19T22:46:01.000Z

Read:

“The Charlie Kirk purge: How 600 Americans were punished in a pro-Trump crackdown”.

Raphael Satter and A.J. Vicens in Reuters. Published November 19, 2025.

Two months after Charlie Kirk's assassination, a government-backed campaign has led to firings, suspensions, investigations and other action against more than 600 people. Republican officials have endorsed the punishments, saying that those who glorify violence should be removed from positions of trust.

Published on Citation Needed: "Issue 97 – This is hardship" - Molly White's activity feed

2025-11-19T22:37:17.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

Issue 97 – This is hardship

While slumping prices have some fearing it’s crypto winter again, Trump looks to Saudia Arabia and American retail crypto investors to fund the development of his next hotel

The Peaceful Transfer of Power in Open Source Projects - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-11-19T12:34:27.000Z

Most of the people who run Open Source projects are mortal. Recent history shows us that they will all eventually die, or get bored, or win the lottery, or get sick, or be conscripted, or lose their mind.

If you've ever visited a foreign country's national history museum, I guarantee you've read this little snippet:

King Whatshisface was a wise and noble ruler who bought peace and prosperity to all the land.

Upon his death, his heirs waged bloody war over rightful succession which plunged the country into a hundred years of hardship.

The great selling point of democracy is that it allows for the peaceful transition of power. Most modern democracies have rendered civil war almost unthinkable. Sure, you might not like the guy currently in charge, but there are well established mechanisms to limit their power and kick them out if they misbehave. If they die in office, there's an obvious and understood hierarchy for who follows them.

Most Open Source projects start small - just someone in their spare room tinkering for fun. Unexpectedly, they grow into a behemoth which now powers half the world. These mini-empires are fragile. The most popular method of governance is the Benevolent Dictator For Life model. The founder of the project controls everything. But, as I've said before, BDFL only works if the D is genuinely B. Otherwise the FL becomes FML.

The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad Kings. They become tyrannical despots, lashing out at their own volunteers. They execute takeovers of community projects. They demand fealty and tithes. Like dragons, they become quick to anger when their brittle egos are tested. Spineless courtiers carry out deluded orders while pilfering the coffers.

Which is why I am delighted that the Mastodon project has shown a better way to behave.

In "The Future is Ours to Build - Together" they describe perfectly how to gracefully and peacefully transfer power. There are no VCs bringing in their MBA-brained lackeys to extract maximum value while leaving a rotting husk. No one is seizing community assets and jealously hoarding them. Opaque financial structures and convoluted agreements are prominent in their absence.

Eugen Rochko, the outgoing CEO, has a remarkably honest blog post about the transition. I wouldn't wish success on my worst enemy. He talks plainly about the reality of dealing with the pressure and how he might have been a limiting factor on Mastodon's growth. That's a far step removed from the ego-centric members of The Cult of The Founder with their passionate belief in the Divine Right of Kings.

Does your tiny OSS script need a succession plan? Probably not. Do you have several thousand NPM installs per day? It might be worth working out who you can share responsibility with if you are unexpectedly raptured. Do you think that your project is going to last for a thousand years? Build an organisation which won't crumble the moment its founder is arrested for their predatory behaviour on tropical islands.

I'm begging project leaders everywhere - please read up on the social contract and the consent of the governed. Or, if reading is too woke, just behave like grown-ups rather than squabbling tweenagers.

It is a sad inevitability that, eventually, we will all be nothing but memories. The bugs that we create live after us, the patches are oft interrèd with our code. Let it be so with all Open Source projects.

Resonance - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-19T12:12:11.000Z

I have been listening to a podcast interview between Ezra Klein and Brian Eno. In it, Eno referenced the concept of the “premature sheen.” I stopped what I was doing, paused the podcast, and started to think about what those words meant.

I wanted to learn more about the concept, so I searched for “preamture sheen” on the web. DuckDuckGo returned an info card of Martin Sheen at the top. Not quite the result for which I was looking, then I realised that there was a typo in my query and maybe that had something to do with it. ¹

The second result was Adactio’s blog post called “The premature sheen”. This looks familiar, I thought. I clicked on the result and realised that it was through Adactio’s blog that I first found this podcast episode.

I saw the post in my web reader, clicked through to Adactio’s blog, clicked on his link to the podcast, and that’s how I got here. Then a web search engine took me back to his blog. All of this is something of a cycle in finding information, a cycle in which personal websites are at the heart. I discovered the podcast through a personal website. I kept up to date with the personal website through a web reader tailored for following blogs.

I haven’t yet read about the concept of “premature sheen” for the serendipity of finding the blog post on which I originally discovered the podcast swept me away. The web is both wide and small. The web is full of potential. The web is wonderful.

I have been thinking for a while of making a list of “reasons to be optimistic about the web.” I tried writing that post but the writing felt a little bit forced, almost as if I was trying to apply sheen before I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I kept my writing as a draft. Now, I wonder if the form of that idea is a list of stories that emerge as I experience wonder with the web – stories like the one I shared above where I had a full-circle experience involving personal websites. A story where the next place to learn about something I heard was from a friend, on the web.

On a similar note, I read Y’all are great by Manuel earlier today, in which he noted “with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making sure the old school web, the one made by the people, for the people, is not dying.” Another personal website that is beaming hope into the world about the web can be!

The web is indeed not "dead." With every voice publishing on independent platforms, and every link between websites, the web shines. With every blog post, story, and note, the power of connection that the web makes possible is illuminated. We can build the web we want.

If you are looking to make something for the web today, I have a prompt for you: What stories do you have of times recently when the web has felt alive?

[1] Typo tolerance is one of my favourite features of search engines. Fun fact: when you add spelling correction in the background to a search engine, the engine becomes significantly more delightful to use. I don’t think Martin Sheen should have come up in the search result, but I’ll take any excuse to think for a moment about the West Wing.

Routines - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-19T11:14:25.000Z

Over the last few weeks I have been working on rebuilding my morning routine.

I used to be regimented in my morning routine – everything scheduled down to the minute. I then ebbed the opposite way: my routines became unstructured, my mind every morning exerting itself to remember everything I need to do to start the day. With the experience of both of these extremes – regimentation and structurelessness – I feel like what would serve me best is a middle path: something in between.

I started by asking myself how I would like to start the morning. I decided that I wanted to do a bit of reading, even 15 minutes worth, before starting the day. Reading helps me ease into my day. I am reading Best Wishes from the Full Moon Coffee Shop right now. Because it is winter, the mornings are relatively dark so I light up my room with my fairy lights – my day starts and ends with reading under the fairy lights. At least as much as possible, for within routines there are fluctuations.

I then make coffee. To make coffee, I start by putting water in the kettle and turning the kettle on. I put a filter paper in my coffee brewer. I weigh 15 grams of coffee. I grind the coffee with my hand grinder. I put the coffee in the filter paper, then the coffee brewer on top of my cup. I put my cup on the scale, reset the scale to 0g, and then start brewing coffee. I pour water at 50g of water starting at 0s, 100g of water starting at 40s, and a further 100g of water starting at 1m15s. I try to be as consistent as I can, striving to pour exactly 250g of water in total. I celebrate a little bit every time I pour precisely; my accuracy fluctuates.

I love making coffee. All the steps may be the same, and I may have made coffee hundreds of times, but it doesn't make the process of making coffee any less special. I always look forward to making coffee.

With coffee – and breakfast – ready, I finish the rest of my routine of all the other things you need to do to get ready. Then I start my day.

Getting to the point of having a morning routine was hard. If I wake up early enough that I will have time to read, will I not be tired? How will I stop myself from snoozing the alarm?

Despite all the looming questions on my mind, I kept reminding myself of how much it matters to take care of the essentials – getting good sleep, reading stories, and starting the day right with a good breakfast. I’m going to bed earlier too, so I feel more well rested (although coffee is still an essential in helping me find the energy to start the day!). You don't realise how true and important the advice "take care" is until you realise that you are tired all the time.

I am not regimented about having a morning routine at certain times any more – if I read a bit more or less, that’s okay. If I start breakfast a bit later than normal, that’s okay, too. I am also not sleeping in, either.

It gets easier to wake up on time because I know I have a bit of time to read my book before I have to start the day. Occasionally – like this morning – there are fluctuations where I have something scheduled that means I have to be up earlier, but no routine is the same twice anyway. I have a different routine for weekends. With that said, as long as I am going in the right direction, I am content.

With the desire to have a bit more of a routine, I’m even building a little night time routine too – when it gets to about nine o’clock, I try to read some manga or continue reading whatever fiction book I am reading.

After time with both regimented routines and ones with less structure and schedule, I find the necessity both in having a bit of structure but also not being too rigid. Embracing something in between has made me happier.

This is my submission for this month's IndieWeb Carnival on "Cycles and fluctuations", hosted by Alex.

Why Do You Need Big Tech for Your SSG? - Kev Quirk

2025-11-19T09:57:00.000Z

A look at why small, personal websites don’t need big-tech static hosting, and how a simple local build and rsync workflow gives you faster deploys, more control, and far fewer dependencies.

OK, so Cloudflare shit the bed yesterday and the Internet went into meltdown. A config file grew too big and half the bloody web fell over.

How fragile.

It got me thinking about my fellow small-web compatriots, their SSG workflows, and why on earth so many rely on services like Cloudflare Pages and Netlify. For personal sites it feels incredibly wasteful: you’re spinning up a VM, building your site, pushing the result to their platform, then tearing the VM down again.

Why not just build the site on your local machine? You’re not beholden to anyone, and you can host your site anywhere you like.

✅ No CI/CD pipeline.
✅ No big tech — just you and your server.
✅ No VMs spinning up and down at the speed of a thousand gazelles.

How to build and deploy automatically

All you need is a hosting package that supports SSH (or FTP if you must) and a small script to build your site and rsync any changes. Here’s the core of my deployment script:

#!/bin/bash
set -e

LOCAL_DIR="/path/to/your/site/source"
REMOTE="user@your-server.example.com"
REMOTE_DIR="/path/to/your/website/files/yoursite.com/public_html"

cd "$LOCAL_DIR" || exit 1

# --- Build Jekyll site ---
echo "🏗️  Building Jekyll site..."
bundle exec jekyll build --quiet
echo "✅ Build complete"

# --- Sync _site to remote server ---
echo "🚀 Deploying to server..."
rsync -az --checksum --delete --omit-dir-times --quiet \
  "$LOCAL_DIR/_site/" \
  "$REMOTE:$REMOTE_DIR/"

# --- Fin ---
echo "✅ Deployment complete"

Here’s what it does:

Jumps into the directory where my source website files live.
Builds the Jekyll site locally.
Syncs the built files to my server over SSH, deleting anything I’ve removed locally.

That’s it. And that’s all it needs to do. With these few lines of Bash, I can deploy anywhere, without waiting for someone else’s infrastructure to spin up a build container.

My full script also checks the git status, commits changes, and clears the Bunny CDN cache, but none of that’s required. The snippet above does everything Cloudflare Pages and similar services do — and does it much quicker. My entire deploy, including the extras, takes about eight seconds.

Final thoughts

If you’re hosting with one of the big static hosting platforms, why not consider moving away and actually owning your little corner of the web? They’re great for complex projects, but unnecessary for most personal sites.

Then, the next time big tech has a brain fart, your patch of the web will probably sail right through it.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️

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Snow - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-19T09:54:55.000Z

The snow looks like drops of moonlight I thought to myself as the cool light from the street lamps illuminated the falling snow. It’s beautiful. I have never seen anything like it.

Earlier this week I saw light rain fall that looked almost like it was snow – the light reflected off the falling rain in a way closer to snow than water. Although I am not sure if what I saw was exactly snow, my hopes were raised that it may snow properly this week. The air has been getting cooler; the outdoors feels evermore like winter. Yesterday evening, at around 9 o’clock, my hope for snow came to reality. I looked out the window after reading a book for an hour and noticed the heavy clouds and the white drops of snow.

The last time I saw snow was more than a year ago. Despite my hope that it would snow – one I shared excitedly with people in conversation this week – it took me a moment to internalise that it was now snowing. Then, my mind turned to the beauty of the snow fall – the way that the light breeze blew the snow over the grasses illuminated only by streetlight.

Time froze. I was eager to take in as much of the snow as possible, knowing that, like all seasons and weathers, snow is fleeting. Would the snow be here in the morning? I wasn’t sure, but I knew the snow was there, in the present moment, right in front of me. All that matters is it is snowing now – drops of moonlight fall from the heavens onto the frosting countryside grass.

My gaze was focused on the areas under the streetlights, which illuminated the snow and, over time, showed how the snow was accumulating. This isn’t the kind of snow that will lay there until morning, I knew from having seen many snows growing up; maybe there would be a dusting on the next day.

This morning, I woke up and saw on the horizon a white skyline, above which was the increasingly light blue that comes at 7am in November here in Scotland. Under the white skyline, there were hills dusted in snow. The coat of snow on the hills – enveloping a few almost like a cold blanket – brought to mind last night at which I stood by the window and, for how long I do not know, gazed out and watched the snow paint the countryside with brushstrokes of white whose full beauty would appear in the morning.

22.00.0169 An invoice disappears - Johnny.Decimal

2025-11-19T00:49:03.000Z

An invoice disappears

Well this is weird. I just lost an invoice, as in one that I was sure I had raised a couple of weeks ago. Here's how I discovered it, and what I'll do to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The invoice

I don't raise many invoices manually. This one was to a friend, whose domain name I manage. It's a fancy expensive domain so, when it renews, my company bills his company for it.

I raised it the other week. I remember doing it. And yet now: no trace. A puzzle.

Discovering its loss

I know I'm not going entirely mad because, in reviewing my Small Business category 13 Money earned, spent, saved, & owed this morning, I saw a task due next week:

▷ Check that [name] has paid his invoice
▷ Due: 25 Nov

– and I thought to have a quick look. So I'd done some things right:

Set a quick reminder to myself, in a trusted place.
Made sure that I actually saw that reminder, by reviewing my system regularly.

I'll show you how I do this in the upcoming series 'Task and Project Management using the Johnny.Decimal system'. Will be released on JDU in the next couple of weeks.

The vanishing act

I went to look for this invoice in the only place that it could possibly exist: my Stripe console. It just isn't there. No trace.

I'm deeply confused by this, but whatever. No point dwelling; let's just make sure it doesn't happen again.

Deliberate record-keeping

Last time, I raised the invoice in Stripe and that was it. Other than leaving myself the follow-up task, I didn't record its existence anywhere else.

If only I had a predefined ID for this sort of thing. Oh wait, is that 13.23 Invoices & sales for your work at the door? Oh, come in old friend.

Update: found it!

Talk about real-time updates. Gripping stuff.

So there isn't only one place that this could possibly exist. There are two: the other being my Xero account.

This makes our solution more interesting. Why did I choose Xero over Stripe in this instance?¹ How would I know which to choose in the future?

Solution: new ops manual

This is a textbook ops manual. Next time I need to raise an invoice, I need to be following a process. Last time, I just made it up on the fly.

So here's what my new 13.23+OPS1 Raise an invoice says:

Raise all invoices directly in Xero, because this integrates with your accounting system.
Raise the invoice, and create a note at 13.23 with its number and a link.
Create a new customer record at 33.11 and from there, link to 13.23.

That's it. Three easy steps; but now they're unambiguous, and I won't make the same silly mistake again.

100% human. 0% AI. Always.

I'll tell you why. Because this invoice has nothing to do with Johnny.Decimal, really. In my mind, that's what the Stripe/Xero split is. Stripe was JD stuff, Xero was more fundamental company stuff. Logically, I now understand, this makes no sense. ↩

The State of the Open Social Web - Werd I/O

2025-11-18T23:50:45.000Z

With today’s news of a new leadership team for Mastodon, I thought it would be a good time to take stock of the state of the open social web.

I’m not new to this space, or an impartial observer: I co-founded Elgg, one of the first open source social networking platforms, over twenty years ago. It was used by governments, Fortune 500 companies, global NGOs, and universities, and embraced early open standards. Known, a social publishing platform I co-founded, was used by media companies to build award-winning communities. And I’m on the board of A New Social, a non-profit dedicated to bridging open social platforms.

When you think of social media, many of the platforms you think of are what we call proprietary: their underlying software is private to the companies that build them, and it’s very difficult to move your data or your connections anywhere else. They are, in a very real way, closed. The indie web movement goes so far as to call them silos.

These proprietary silos include:

X (formerly Twitter): now owned by Elon Musk, who actively promotes far-right voices on the platform and in its algorithms.
Meta’s platforms: chiefly Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. (A caveat for Threads follows below.) Meta was, of course, credibly accused of substantially contributing to the genocide in Myanmar by Amnesty and others. Owners of pages across Meta properties increasingly find that they need to pay to reach their followers.
TikTok, which is now controlled by the Trump-aligned Ellison family.
LinkedIn, the business network owned by Microsoft, which has placed itself in the middle of many hiring and job-seeking processes, and whose professional subscription costs between $30 and $100 a month.

Why should you care?

Anyone whose brand or livelihood depends on these networks has created risk for themselves: there’s nothing to stop any of them from changing their business policies in a detrimental way, as X did when it labeled NPR as state-affiliated media. Any of these networks could disappear, as TikTok almost did in the US before being strong-armed into selling its US business to a Trump ally. And referrals to websites could dry up, as happened in Canada when Meta stopped linking to news sites.

Proprietary silos each have an owner that can, ultimately, do what it wants with them. At best, that can mean that users receive content through curated feeds that might suppress certain kinds of content (including links to certain publishers) and promote others. At worst, it means that traffic and reach could disappear at any time.

In contrast, open social web platforms are designed not to be silos. While each platform is built by a core vendor or community, they run on open protocols that anyone can build software for.

Remember AOL? That was a closed silo. To publish content, you needed to have a relationship with AOL the company. But you don’t need to have a relationship with anyone in particular to publish a website.

The open social web works the same way as the web itself: it’s permissionless. You don’t need to have a relationship with anyone in particular to have a profile and gain reach. And that means nobody can take it away from you.

Just as AOL became less and less relevant, because maintaining a relationship with AOL the company was more friction than simply publishing a website, silos will become less important and the open social web will become more important over time.

It’s early days in that movement. The user bases are still small in comparison. Today, these networks are still mostly filled with early adopters. In my direct experience working with ProPublica, they’re more likely to engage with journalism and information, more likely to donate to non-profit causes, and more likely to re-share according to their values — perhaps because they’re people who have self-selected to move away from proprietary silos. That means these networks are worth engaging with now — and because they will continue to grow, doing so is a good investment in the future.

So what are those open social web platforms and what is their status today?

✉️

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There are two main open social web networks. This isn’t so much a rivalry as a technical consideration: each is based on a different open protocol.

I’ll describe them both in turn.

The Fediverse

You’ve probably heard of Mastodon. When Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, this was the first network that people flocked to, although it had been running for many years before that.

It can be hard for newcomers to get their head around. Whereas to join a silo network you just go to that network’s website and sign up, Mastodon is best thought of as a co-operative network of smaller communities, each with their own rules and culture. That means that signing up involves choosing a community you trust and signing up to that, which is a big ask. How, after all, do you know? In reality, you can’t go wrong by joining mastodon.social, the flagship community run by the project itself.

Source: Mastodon blog

But you don’t need to use Mastodon’s software to join the network. This brings us back to Meta’s Threads: it has support for the underlying protocol, so you can actually talk to and follow Mastodon users from there (and they can follow you). For publishers, Flipboard has become “a Fediverse browser” (particularly in tandem with its newsreader Surf, which I use every day), while the Newsmast Foundation is working to onboard newsrooms and surface trustworthy journalism on the network. Ghost and WordPress both now have extensive support (Ghost's keeps getting slicker and slicker). And there’s a long tail of other platforms like Bonfire and Friendica that are compatible, too, all powered by the underlying ActivityPub protocol.

Source: Flipboard Surf, via TechCrunch

Regardless, Mastodon is definitely the flagship. It’s also the only European major social network. A longtime German entity, its non-profit status was stripped some years ago (the team says it was never told why), and it’s now in transition to becoming a Belgian AISBL. Backers include Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (who once sat on the advisory board for Elgg, the open source social networking platform I co-founded), and Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood.

Critics say it hasn’t focused enough on user experience, that it feels too different from other networks, and that it can be a bit nerdier. The thing is, there’s still everything to play for here: a solid foundation, millions of dedicated users, and a governance and business model that’s very different to the Silicon Valley norm. And at the time of writing, Mastodon just announced a new executive team that includes a lead dedicated to the communities it runs. That new lead, Hannah Aubry, is incredibly important. Bluesky has made great strides by focusing on the culture of its own flagship site, and there’s much more that Mastodon could do here.

I’m personally more excited about Mastodon than ever. Even if it fails — which I don’t believe it will — it’s forging a brave and different path.

Quick facts about the Fediverse:

Flagship platform: Mastodon
Fastest place to sign up: mastodon.social
Other platforms: Ghost, Flipboard, Pixelfed, Friendica, etc
Funding model: Mastodon is becoming a Belgian non-profit. It also has a US 501(c)3 and an original German entity that it is moving away from. It is funded through donations and its own managed hosting services.
Advocacy groups: Social Web Foundation
Underlying protocol: ActivityPub

The ATmosphere

The network built on the AT Protocol — often playfully called “The ATmosphere” — functions a bit differently. On Mastodon, you join a neighborhood; on Bluesky, you rent a storage unit that any app can access.

Bluesky began as an internal Twitter project championed by then-CEO Jack Dorsey. Concerned about political pressure on Twitter’s content decisions, he imagined moving parts of the platform’s governance onto an open protocol that nobody could fully control. In that vision, Twitter itself might eventually run on the underlying protocol.

In its earliest phase, Bluesky was essentially a working group of open-source developers exploring what a “locked-open” social protocol might look like. Jay Graber quickly emerged as the clearest technical and organizational leader, and she ultimately convinced Dorsey to spin the project out as an independent company.

Because of that lineage, the flagship Bluesky app looks and feels like Twitter in many ways. When the site opened to the public, most of the people who left Elon Musk’s X chose Bluesky because it felt more familiar and easier to understand than Mastodon. Over time, the team found itself building not just a protocol, but a full social platform with moderation, recommendation features, and active community management. It’s now the de facto open social web network for journalists, writers, and other public intellectuals.

Source: Bluesky blog

Dorsey’s involvement has been a point of criticism, but ironically, Bluesky’s emphasis on community health is part of what pushed him away. His original aim was to avoid building trust and safety systems altogether: he sees moderation as a path to censorship rather than a requirement for healthy online spaces. Once Bluesky embraced trust and safety as core ethical work rather than something to outsource to the protocol, he walked away and shifted his support to Nostr, a more libertarian network designed to minimize moderation.

All of this sits on AT Protocol’s underlying model. While Mastodon is a series of federated communities, on Bluesky, every profile is actually a storage unit containing that user’s data. When you follow someone, you’re really subscribing to updates to their data. Other applications beyond the flagship Bluesky app can also write to your data store: Leaflet is a blogging platform, Graze lets you build custom feeds according to your interests, and so on.

Source: Graze blog

By default, your data is stored with Bluesky, but there are other options. The best known and in many ways the most exciting is Blacksky, Rudy Fraser’s Black-owned datastore and social application. Eurosky, meanwhile, is an emerging attempt to build outside of North American jurisdiction.

Quick facts about the ATmosphere:

Flagship platform: Bluesky
Fastest place to sign up: bsky.app
Other platforms: Blacksky, Graze, Leaflet, Flashes, etc
Funding model: Bluesky is a VC-funded startup that has raised at least $36M to date. It hasn’t deployed a business model yet.
Advocacy groups: Free Our Feeds
Underlying protocol: AT Protocol

Protocol TL;DR

If you don’t care about protocols at all, here’s the summary:

The Fediverse = small communities talking to each other
AT Protocol = personal data pods that apps plug into
Both = avoid lock-in, centralized power, and unpredictable corporate incentives

Other alternatives

The Fediverse and the ATmosphere aren’t the only open social web networks, although they are by far the most prominent.

Nostr and Farcaster have both attracted a crowd that’s heavy on crypto and libertarian ideologies. (diVine, funded by Dorsey and run by Twitter OG Rabble, rebuilds Vine on the Nostr network.) Given his relationship with trust and safety, it shouldn’t be a surprise that these networks are very technically pure but low on community safety or culture-building.

Source: Nos Social blog

Meanwhile, Project Liberty is a $500M endeavor funded by Frank McCourt, which has built its own open social layer, Frequency. It’s also funded policy blueprints and real legislation designed to give users more control over their social media.

And the indie web, which builds decentralized social functionality on top of web fundamentals like HTML, should not be discounted. Its focus on a world where everyone’s profile is a website that is completely unique to them but can still communicate and share together has led to an enthusiastic community that’s been growing for over a decade. I think the indie web and the open social web are complimentary: you can build a following on the open social web and build an amazing indie web website that really represents you.

Working across networks

The protocols are not as important as the people and communities who connect across them. Part of the ethos of openness is that it’s not about building a “winner”: nobody should be locked into any platform or technology. These movements are also too young for everyone to have converged on one underlying protocol; we’re still at the early innovation stage.

I’m on the board of A New Social, a non-profit whose mission is to provide bridges between protocols, creating a single, unified open social web. Its product Bridgy Fed has long allowed you to follow Fediverse profiles on the ATmosphere and vice versa. And its new product, Bounce, allows you to easily move your profile from one network to the other, bringing your network with you. The result is even less lock-in: you can decide which network makes the most sense for you.

Earlier in this piece, I also mentioned Surf, which allows you to find news stories and conversations you care about across all the open social web networks. I’ve curated a feed of non-profit US newsrooms and one of investigative tech journalism that are also available as Bluesky feeds.

Buffer is one of many social scheduling tools that support both networks. Fedica allows you to analyze your stats and surfaces characteristics of your community.

These are the kinds of tools that could only exist on the open social web. A network like X would charge these providers a ton of money; others would simply block them as a threat to their business models. But on the open social web, where the open protocols are permissionless and open to all, they can thrive.

It’s not zero sum

There’s no reason you need to pick just one. Like many people, I maintain profiles on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as through my blog and on Threads, and I’ve found that the conversations across all of them are different. There’s a lot to be gained on each — but, again, Bridgy Fed and Bounce mean you can try one without worrying about missing out.

The most important thing is to take back ownership of your community and your relationships online. The silo networks have done their best to become intermediaries between you and your connections, forcing you to pay to reach people who have already subscribed to you. They’ve partnered with authoritarian governments and caused great harm through their negligence and blinkered self-interest.

Another world is possible, and it’s only just beginning. Go grab your profile and get started.

Home alone gaming - W46 - Joel's Log Files

2025-11-18T23:50:00.000Z

Long weekends while home alone are the best! You are going to find quite a lot of gaming was done this time around, however, I also catched up on quite a bit of manga, and went through some painful stuff at work, but nothing too bad.

🎨 I have completed and published my AdwaitaPod-based theme (with Arcticons) for the Innioasis Y1! Feel free to give it a download if you get the device, and check the original theme as well if you want to try it on an iPod or something.
💻 My coworker got a vacation on Friday and it was pain. Some critical machinery malfunctioned at the worst possible moment. I had to set up a plan B in case the automation/maintenance team couldn’t manage to repair it in time. I was on-call during Saturday too, thankfully things turned out fine.
🏠 I stayed home alone for pretty much the whole week. I survived thanks to the existence of cereal and buying lunch at my workplace, I spent most of my time early in the week working on my theme, then I played a bunch of videogames during the weekend.
🐕 My doggo still doesn’t want to use his front leg, I guess there was some nerve damage after all, he doesn’t seem to mind that much so, I’ll just try to get over it, I guess? I wonder if there’s some other therapy to try.
🛍️ El Buen Fin (The Good Weekend) is the mexican equivalent to Black Friday, and I fell for it. I acquired Crypt Custodian and Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake for Nintendo Switch. I also acquired Streets of Rage 4 Anniversary Edition, which arrived early in the week and I have already completed the campaign so that’s fine.
🍕 Went out for some pizzas on Sunday night with friends, it was pretty great and we got to drink some Horchata which is always a big plus.
🎵 Even if I don’t have a music/listening section, I think I can always say some album or song that is currently on my mind. Right now it would be: Daydream by Tatsuro Yamashita

Reading

When it comes to manga I am actually rather impressed with myself. After finishing Ariadne in the Blue Sky, I got to catch up on a lot of other stuff! Here’s it. When it comes to books, not that bad.

Exit Strategy - Up to chapter 4. There’s some characters that made a comeback and it’s been really interesting to watch it unfold. I hope to finish this book this week!
Blue Lock - Up to chapter 325. The match against Nigeria resulted in an absolute victory for the Japanese team. It was an absolutely bloodbath, but the next two matches looks like they’ll be a real challenge, France and England are next.
Chainsaw Man - Up to chapter 220. Crazy stuff is happening as always, for example, a whole city was turned into a weapon.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End - Up to chapter 142. Finally returned to Frieren, and I love these characters so much. The current arc is super stressful though, and the action is about to begin.
Sakamoto Days - Up to chapter 227. With Sakamoto out of commission, everyone tries to escape, and new enemies have showed up, crazy action sequences upcoming.

Gaming

This was definitely a week filled with gaming to the brim! I will even make the format a little different because I got a lot to say about a few of the titles here.

Completed

Streets of Rage 4

I didn’t expect this at all, but in a moment of weakness, I bought the physical Anniversary Edition of this game, and as soon as I put the cartridge on, we just couldn’t put it down.

An incredible soundtrack took over my speakers, and we just had to start it immmediately. I played it with my friends and completed the campaign in one sitting.

The simple combat, the animation, the artstyle, the excellent dynamic musical score. This game is probably the best the franchise has to offer, a glorious return to form for anyone who missed the franchise on the Sega Genesis.

Solo, I did a single run of the roguelike mode, and died on the first boss fight, and I decided to focus on other games for now. I can see myself returning to this plenty of times with friends.

Ongoing

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

This game’s the reason my weeknotes are a day late, and the main thing that occupied my time. I started it and “finished” its story months ago. If you are curious, this is officially my most played game on my Nintendo Switch, and it has managed to hook me quite a bit. After beating the game once, the game allows you to play it a second time. However, this playthrough lets you make decisions throughout the story, creating deviations that amount to a total of one hundred endings. This mix between tactics RPG and visual novel is really cool.

This has been an extremely interesting choice from the developers, and it has allowed me to see how every character in the game reacts to the outcomes at hand. It’s fun, stressful, terrifying and exciting. So far, I have gone through 11 endings. Multiple writers were involved, some routes are shorter than others, some moments are samey, and others are absolutely insane. There’s a lot to like, and I absolutely love (most of) these characters. The game lets you skip battles you already played and return to previous branches at any point, it’s unbelievable.

Streets of Rage 2

After a 10 hour-long session of The Hundred Line, I felt like trying out something quick before going to sleep. Alas, Streets of Rage 2 seemed worth trying since I had recently fiddled with the first one and this one was considered the best of the franchise.

And well, yes, that music told me everything I needed to know. It was cleaner and more polished than the first one. I got to the 3rd stage in a few minutes and things were pretty cool, I must say that the second boss flying on a jetpack was very annoying though.

Others

CrossCode: I should have focused more on this one, if I’m honest, all I did this time was focus on getting leveled up equipment and progressing through the story. For now, I joined a guild, I unlocked my way to the dungeon, and now I just want to get a bit more XP before venturing inside!
Astro Boy: Omega Factor: I returned to this game after a break and it’s honestly just awesome plain fun. A beat’em up platformer that goes through lots of iconic moments of the franchise, fun stuff!
Monster Hunter Rise: To break things up I also progressed a bit on the high rank quests of this game, I went for a Rathian, defeated her, and called it a day.
Spelunky: After me and my friends beat Streets of Rage 4, we felt like trying something a little more chaotic for a bit, so we tried a couple runs of this game, and of course, failed miserably.
Slice & Dice: I hadn’t played this much but during a meet-up with other S&D friends we decided to do a race to see who could win a run first. I didn’t win, but trying was fun!

Around the Web

I read most of these earlier in the week and you can tell, lol.

Blogposts

A Morning of Physical Media - There’s just something about the physical interaction with stuff that is unmatched.
Learning Spanish Update - It’s weird to see La Rosa de Guadalupe mentioned in a blog I follow.
Input diet - yet another good post about media intake and managing that stuff.
Offline first? - Just being a little more offline, and interacting with less short/quick/easy stuff and replace it with meaningful things.
Why I Don’t Need a Steam Machine - Wouter has a big backlog, and so do I.
Self-Hosting for Everyone - Laura is a new discovery, and she is a self-hosting sicko, I have enjoyed her blogposts so far!
My Relationship with Stuff - Curating is better than hoarding, don’t just collect for the sake of it. Figure out what you actually want! I gotta remember this.

Videos

Mind if I complaing for 15 minutes? - I love JadenAnimations and this video is one that I’m sure many will find relatable (not me, I am glad I’ve avoided all that stuff).
Daft Punk Alive 2007 full concert - I had no idea this was a thing that existed, but I am extremely, extremely happy that it does. Just take a break from everything and experience this album as if it’s 2007.
Why I uninstalled ublock origin, this is WAY better! - This is an interesting plugin, although I don’t know if I’ll actually use it.