Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Typewriters and labyrinths - James' Coffee Blog

2025-10-18T14:07:05.000Z

This morning started as many this year have done: should I get up and explore, or stay in bed for one more hour. The warmth of bed, especially as the days get cooler, is comforting. But I know how great I feel when I get up on time and start the day. I am trying my best to get back into a daily routine. On my second-to-last alarm – set for five minutes to seven – I got out of bed and started the day.

After breakfast, I walked past the park in the University of Edinburgh campus and noticed the gate was open. The park is usually open only on weekdays (when I am working!) so I haven’t been able to visit more than once or twice. I learned this year that there is a labyrinth path in the park – one of those circles that has a single path on which to walk to get to the middle. I have wanted to walk on there for a while. Today I finally got the chance.

As I walked the labyrinth, my mind calmed. I started thinking about the labyrinth itself. Labyrinths are definitionally convoluted. The path to the centre is rhythmic but, unless you have seen the path from a clear view, unpredictable. You weave from side to side, ebbing between getting closer to and further away from the centre. The labyrinth is less about the destination than it is about the process: putting one foot forward after another and letting the path take you to the centre. The path is the direction. I can relax while following the set direction and, in the process, let my mind wander.

Direction is especially calming right now; the last few weeks have been a bit more tumultuous than normal. October is historically a month in which I tend to make more changes in my life. I am unsure why. Perhaps seeing all the change in the environment around me – the trees going from green to wonderful reds and ambers and yellows, the temperature going from warm to cool – gives me confidence to change. Maybe the changes in the seasons helps me better internalise that change is natural.

The labyrinth let me put one foot in front of another and make progress without having to choose the direction. When I got to the centre, I felt great – calm and excited for reaching the end of the journey, and excited to continue with my day.

And continue with my day I did! I took a walk to the other end of town to a shop that sells books and has a large collection of vintage typewriters on display. Today was my first time visiting.

The bookshop – Typewronger Books – has a Royal 10 typewriter on which customers are welcome to type. I asked the shopkeeper a question about how to get started with typewriters and, after answering, he encouraged me to try out the typewriter. The shopkeeper was so kind. Before answering my query, I overheard some customers from the United States say that a friend from Oregon wanted to say “hi!” to the shopkeeper; they then proceeded to say they had come to the shop on their friend’s recommendation. The owner then gave them a tour through the shop, to which I listened along and found great joy in the shopkeeper’s enthusiasm for encouraging people to write.

Surrounded by words, typewriters, discussions about the joys of writing, embracing physical spaces, risograph art, and more, I found myself most at home. I felt grounded, like I did in the labyrinth earlier that day. In both cases, I was somewhere new, but felt at home among the familiar – in Nature and among words, respectively.

In response to my question about getting started with typewriters, the shopkeeper gave me some advice, among the most prescient of which was that typewriters need to be pressed much more firmly than a computer keyboard. As I typed, I realised that some of my letters were not showing up. I made several typos, too. With that said, I proudly wrote a few lines of text, and confidently signed it - james.

As I typed, I smiled. This is amazing! I thought to myself. I was making something physical. I left with the intent to go around a few charity shops in the coming weeks to see if I can find myself a typewriter that I could use. A few bloggers whose writing I enjoy have type-written blog posts. I would love to do the same!

Career Snakes & Ladders - Kev Quirk

2025-10-18T13:36:00.000Z

After years of climbing the ladder in cyber, I’ve learned that sometimes the best move isn’t up. It’s stepping back to make life sustainable again.

The corporate ladder is less of a climb and more of a game of Snakes & Ladders. Moments of progress, setbacks, and the occasional lucky roll where everything just seems to align. Sometimes you go up, sometimes it’s a move sideways, and sometimes it’s a move down.

The climb never ends

In August 2024 I was offered a promotion at work that moved me from a “senior manager” position to an “executive” position. It came with all the cool perks one would think an exec-level role should come with; a nice corner office, a personal assistant, the kudos of being one of a few very senior people, and of course a salary to match.

I took the role, but the expectations of a senior manager versus an executive are very different. I work for an American company, so a lot of the people I work with are based across the US. That means lots of late evenings.

But I also have a team in Singapore, so that means early mornings too. Then there are my teams in the UK, Ireland, and India, so I’m busy during my core working hours as well.

Running a global team is hard enough, but add to that the fact that I work in the cyber security industry for a large American bank that’s a huge target. Shit gets busy.

Then layer on top of that regular travel to America, a young family at home, lots of pets to look after, and a disabled brother who my mum and I both care for. It’s a lot.

Re-framing success

When I took the role, I had a feeling that this promotion might be a step too far. I knew what I was getting myself into, but I had to give it a try to see if I could do it. I’m one of only two executives within the cyber team where I’m based, the other being nearly 20 years my senior. This was a huge mark of success for me, and I was incredibly proud of what I’d achieved.

But as time went on and I spent more time at my desk and less time with my loved ones, it became clear that I needed to re-frame my measure of success. Plus, I was burning out.

I vividly remember the moment it clicked that I was messing things up. I’d had a string of particularly late evenings working on a project we’d been running for a few months. It was a Thursday evening, and I signed off around 9pm. On a Thursday, my kids have swimming practice and it’s usually a late night for them. They got home at around the same time I signed off, and my youngest came up to me, gave me a big hug and told me he’d missed me.

I didn’t understand. I asked why he’d missed me when I hadn’t been anywhere. He said:

Yeah you have. You’ve been in America again, haven’t you?

I hadn’t been in America. I’d just been working such long hours that I hadn’t seen the kids for four days.

It wasn’t a dramatic “breakdown” moment, just a calm clarity. The realisation that being present with my loved ones matters more than being important.

Stepping down, not away

So I decided that the exec role wasn’t for me and it was time to step back to a senior manager position with a smaller scope, less stress, and most importantly, more balance. This wasn’t a failure or a retreat, but a deliberate move toward sustainability.

I set up some time with my manager and broke the news to her. She told me she understood my decision, that I’d clearly put a lot of thought into it, and she was happy to support my stepping down.

We agreed that she would speak with HR and make the arrangements so I could transition out of the role while supporting whoever took over from me. We estimated six months for this process to happen.

But then my sister took her own life and everything was turned upside down. While off on bereavement leave, I caught up with my manager and explained that I needed to take a step back ASAP because I didn’t have the capacity to carry on with the exec role.

She was a few steps ahead of me and had already arranged cover so I could step down. A week later, I did.

I’ve never felt so supported by any employer I’ve ever had. Anyone who’s worked for a large enterprise will know that things move glacially slow, so for my manager to get this squared away in a couple of weeks felt like she’d moved mountains for me.

That right there is the kinda shit that makes me want to work somewhere for the rest of my career. The pay, the benefits, the corner office — it’s all just bullshit and noise. The work is important, but the humans are what matter most.

Redefining what winning looks like

Sometimes sliding down a rung is exactly what keeps you in the game. I’d much rather be in the game, albeit having slid down a snake, than be up another rung of the ladder; overworked, miserable, stressed, burned out.

As a result of all this, I’ve realised that success isn’t just about upward motion. It’s about endurance, purpose, and perspective. It’s about being content in the work we do. Being challenged but not overworked. And most importantly, being in a position to spend time with loved ones.

Because let’s be honest, people: no one ever lay on their deathbed and thought “I wish I’d joined that meeting at 9pm.” But I’m sure plenty of people have laid there thinking “I wish I’d spent more time with my wife and kids…” I refuse to be that person.

So I’m now back to being a senior manager and proud to be doing the work I do. More importantly though, I’m still in the game, just playing it on my own terms.

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

Reply to this post by email

Read "Opinion | World Liberty Financial Is a Powerful Vehicle for Those Seeking Influence" - Molly White's activity feed

2025-10-17T21:50:05.000Z

Read:

“Opinion | World Liberty Financial Is a Powerful Vehicle for Those Seeking Influence”.

Jacob Silverman in The New York Times. Published October 17, 2025.

Trump's crypto windfall represents a mixing of personal and government interests at an unprecedented scale.

Evolving my personal music scrobbler - Posts feed

2025-10-17T21:50:00.000Z

I've nearly entirely rewritten my site over the past few months. First, I refactored the frontend into a Laravel application that leveraged the same postgREST endpoints that my long-running 11ty site used. Next, I wrote a new administrative application in Filament and migrated off of Directus. If I did this right, the changes went largely unnoticed. It made management of the site more seamless and it made writing dynamic frontend templates simpler by using a single, unified syntax.

I've been scrobbling my listening history to my own site for over a year now and it's gone well. It's also undergone significant change. I started it as an experiment and as part of an effort to own more of my own data. I've long been a fan of last.fm but it often felt minimally maintained and has now been acquired by new owners (as part of the Paramount sale) that, to be frank, I have absolutely no faith in to steward the platform, discard it or mine it for AI training data.

My scrobbling application started out by reading from and writing to massive JSON blobs in Netlify's blob storage. This was an approach and tool not suited to the task. I soon migrated the data to Supabase. Postgres, naturally, worked better for structured data. At this point, I was using Plex and Plexamp to listen to my music which, conveniently, emitted a scrobble event. I pointed this scrobble event at a Netlify edge function and wrote the listen to Postgres.

With data in Postgres, I would query Supabase's API during 11ty builds. This was a slow process as the amount of data and complexity of relationships caused queries to slow. Learning as I went, I wrote optimized views to significantly reduce the time these API calls took, improving build times in turn. I migrated from Supabase to a Postgres database I host and build times remained consistent.

At this point, the scrobbler looked like this:

A dedicated music page with my top artists, albums and track plays for the current week.
An identical page, but rendered with the data for the last month.
A page for each artist I scrobbled listens to.

Relatively simple, right? I had skipped pages for each album, knowing that it would dramatically increase the number of pages being built. But, build times still grew as artists were added. Each artist was a new page to write, each artist image was a new image for 11ty to optimize and a new discography of album images to optimize. Perfectly workable, but not sustainable over the long term.

I eventually moved my music listening to Jellyfin. This worked fairly well, but made scrobbling more difficult. Rather than a single scrobble event, Jellyfin would send playback ticks to a webhook (again, an edge function). I revised the receiving edge function to accept the playback ticks, perform some simple math and scrobble the track. But, without fail, it would stop sending events for longer songs.

Enter Navidrome. This is where I'm at currently and happily. It's reliable, performant and easy to manage. I've enjoyed it enough to write and maintain my own client. The catch with Navidrome was that it supports scrobbling to ListenBrainz and last.fm, but doesn't emit events to webhooks or custom endpoints. It does, however, have a dynamic frontend that makes API calls to the application backend. I poked around a bit and found a private API that returns exactly the data I need. It doesn't send events, I simply fetch the data from my instance regularly.¹

Enter Laravel. Rewriting the frontend of my site became necessary as the amount of data and rendered pages grew. It required a significant effort to write, migrate the hosting and develop a caching strategy. But, it solved the ever-growing build times. I'd started with a personal site and blog, hit constraints and grew it into an application.²

Now, with the build time constraint no longer a concern, I've added pages for each album. I already had album records which allowed me to create pages by writing a migration to add a slug field and programmatically populate it as /album-name. This is then appended to the artist slug and used to present the appropriate album as determined by the requested route.

Albums need a track list though. Up to this point I hadn't created a dedicated tracks table or incorporated track data into my scrobbler schema. Listens were connected to albums, albums to artists. Having album pages and wanting track lists meant that I could add static track lists and not attribute listens to tracks or I could try and either create them from my listen records (e.g. normalize song titles and match artist, album and listens to get unique tracks), but this wouldn't get me track numbers in the records, which doesn't make for much of a track list. Instead, I wrote a node script that went through every single release I have on Navidrome, wrote the necessary data to a new tracks table and connected them to the appropriate album.

Once I had tracks populated and linked, I wrote yet another script and associated listens to the appropriate track record. Out of roughly 40,000 records, I ended up with about 600 misses to correct. Some of these were malformed and discarded, while others were valid and were not linked due to differences in capitalization or another edge case. With listens linked to tracks, I was able to populate a play count field for each track based on the count of linked records. When a track is scrobbled, there's a Postgres function that updates the total plays attributed to a listen, album, artist and genre.

I've also written a bespoke Navidrome importer. When I log into Filament, I have a widget with buttons that let me post a status, manually fetch scrobbles, manually update play totals, re-deploy the site and import books, movies, shows, artists and upcoming episodes for shows I'm actively watching. Clicking to import an artist opens a modal with a single input for their Navidrome ID. I paste in that ID and, for new artists, it creates an artist record, all of their associated albums and all of their associated tracks. This data is guaranteed to match new scrobbles because it's sourced from where I'm scrobbling from. If it's an existing artist, it will only import new albums. If it's an upcoming album I don't have tracks for yet, it will import and attach those. After an import, I briefly verify the import data to make sure that artist and album art is correct.

If my importer happens to create a duplicate artist or album record (this happens occasionally with legacy records when my slugify method used to create artist and album keys creates a new key that doesn't match), I have album and artist correction fields in their respective edit views in Filament. I supply the key for the old record to the correction field in the new record and, when saved, a service will move all data and related records to the new album or artist.

If I've added an upcoming album that doesn't have a track list I can import, I'll take a look at MusicBrainz to see if the track list and durations are available there. If they are, I've written a MusicBrainz service that will import tracks from their API when provided with the appropriate relationships.

If a scrobble happens to not find a listen record, my scrobbler emails me via forwardemail.net's API with the data I need to identify and correct the record. This will happen if there's any missing data in the listen -> track -> album -> artist chain.

With tracks for each artist and each album, this site has roughly 5,000 pages dedicated to this scrobbler implementation.

Recently I, somewhat jokingly, posted a granular breakdown of my workflow for adding new music:

Buy music
Tag music
Add artist image to root (if new artist)
Export album covers to mp3 and flac folders
Copy album covers to screen saver directory
Use rclone to sync music to S3 storage
ssh into Navidrome server
Restart Navidrome + rclone mount to invalidate cache and initiate a scan
Import artist/album data into site from Navidrome after the scan
Verify art for artist + albums
Format/update/write artist bio
Play

This is accurate and also much quicker than you might expect. It's also much faster than the manual data entry that my earlier implementations of this entailed.

My initial scrobbler implementation was both naive and poorly designed. I've learned a lot as I've evolved this across new storage mechanisms, platforms, players and languages. What I have now is mature and robust. Imports are reliable. Scrobbling itself is reliable. Errors are reported automatically and easy to correct.

This also means that I own all of my music, play it from a server I control, using storage I control, via a client I've written and all of the data is stored on my own infrastructure. I author my own charts and can do as much or as little as I want with the data. I enjoy being able to view my own listening habits and run whatever granular queries I want. I've integrated concert tracking with artist pages, I've added support for tracking upcoming albums and exposed a calendar subscription.

It's my data, in my control, on my infrastructure and the freedom to do what I want with it.

This has the added benefit of persisting the data to be re-fetched should my consuming application experience an outage. ↩
I also track books I'm reading, movies and shows I'm watching and concerts attended here, but those are separate posts. ↩

Published on Citation Needed: "Anatomy of a crypto meltdown" - Molly White's activity feed

2025-10-17T21:39:04.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

Anatomy of a crypto meltdown

October 2025 brought the most dramatic crypto flash crash of all time, but it was only a dress rehearsal for the systemic crisis the industry is building toward.

Russell Vought: The Shadow President - Werd I/O

2025-10-17T13:54:42.000Z

[Lisa Riordan Seville, Andy Kroll, Katie Campbell and Mauricio Rodríguez Pons at ProPublica]

It’s exciting to see the newsroom where I work, ProPublica, publish more medium-form video.

On a meta-level, I think this is very well done — but it’s also an important story that I hope everyone will pay attention to.

As the newsroom explains:

“Over the past decade, this unassuming budget wonk and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist has quietly injected his ideas into the bloodstream of American politics. He was one of the chief architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and said he spent much of 2024 drafting the executive orders, regulations and other plans to use in a second Trump presidency. Since returning as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget in January, he has led the president’s effort to dismantle large swaths of the federal government.”

It’s worth your time and attention. You can watch the video here.

[Link]

Europe Can’t Defend Democracy on US Servers - Werd I/O

2025-10-17T13:39:29.000Z

[Alexandra Geese in Tech Policy Press]

More on European data sovereignty from Alexandra Geese, a German Green Party member who has served as a member of the European Parliament since 2019.

In an environment shaped by the Trump administration and far-reaching legislation like the CLOUD Act, the argument is obvious:

“Europe needs independent European infrastructure now—especially home-grown social networks that preserve a level playing field for information, safeguard media freedom and guarantee genuine freedom of speech, including the right to access facts instead of being fed lies and propaganda.”

The need for data storage and application services that can handle sensitive information beyond the reach of America’s jurisdiction has been spoken about quite a bit, but it’s interesting to see politicians begin to talk more about social networks and social media. Geese calls out Eurosky, an attempt to build an AT protocol PDS on European infrastructure — and, of course, Mastodon is a German non-profit.

It’s interesting that part of her argument is that European alternatives won’t suppress clickthroughs to journalistic media in the way algorithmic social networks and AI-driven Google search results have.

“As Google’s ad monopoly devours media revenues and AI tools harvest content for data, journalism’s financial model crumbles at an alarming rate. When media shift their output to European platforms, advertising dollars will flow, creating mass-appeal services for 450 million citizens.”

While Geese focuses on Europe’s economic and cultural independence, I’d extend the argument: the threat isn’t just monopolies, it’s authoritarianism. X, LinkedIn, Meta’s properties, and the US TikTok consortium have all made financial and strategic deals with the current administration. That doesn’t just create risk for vulnerable groups; it carries risk for any country that might be competitive with the United States, or anyone inside the country who might be considered at odds with current policy.

If European investment continues to be diverted to decentralized networks and open technologies that allow for greater data sovereignty, everybody wins. We all get to use technology designed to be run on our own infrastructure, on our own terms. In turn, that will help create a more free and open internet — which benefits all of us.

[Link]

Was my website mentioned in a GitHub issue? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-10-17T11:34:51.000Z

This is a quick GitHub action to get alerted every time your website is mentioned in a GitHub issue.

Doing it manually

You can search GitHub for a URl, and sort the results with the newest first, like this:

https://github.com/search?q=%22shkspr.mobi%22&type=issues&s=created&o=desc

Using the API

GitHub has a fairly straightforward API - although it uses slightly different parameters.

https://api.github.com/search/issues?q=shkspr.mobi&sort=created&order=desc

That will return a bunch of items. Here's the 29th. I've truncated it down to only what is necessary for our purposes:

{
    "html_url": "https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-webfinger/issues/29",
    "id": 3286159033,
    "number": 29,
    "title": "Tracking support for non-ascii characters",
    "user": {
        "login": "evanp",
    },
    "created_at": "2025-08-02T17:52:46Z",
    "updated_at": "2025-08-02T18:50:27Z",
    "body": "One of the benefits of using Webfinger is that it's […]"
}

Action

I'm not very good at creating actions. But this should:

Search GitHub for mentions of your URl.
Store the results.
If there is a new entry - open a new issue describing it.

You will need to set your repository to private in order to not spam other repos. You will also need to go to your repo settings and give the action write permissions. You'll also need a Personal Access Token with sufficient permissions to write to your repo. I bloody hate actions. YAML? Eugh!

name: API Issue Watcher

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/59 * * * *'

permissions:
  issues: write
  contents: write

jobs:
  watch-and-create:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Restore latest seen ID
        id: cache-latest
        uses: actions/cache@v4
        with:
          path: .github/latest_seen.txt
          key: latest-seen-1
          restore-keys: |
            latest-seen-

      - name: Fetch latest item from API
        id: fetch
        run: |
          curl -s 'https://api.github.com/search/issues?q=EXAMPLE.COM&s=created&order=desc' > result.json
          jq -r '.items[0].id' result.json > latest_id.txt
          jq -r '.items[0].title' result.json > latest_title.txt
          jq -r '.items[0].html_url' result.json > latest_url.txt
          jq -r '.items[0].body // ""' result.json > latest_body.txt

      - name: Compare with previous run
        id: check
        run: |
          NEW_ID=$(cat latest_id.txt)
          OLD_ID=$(cat .github/latest_seen.txt 2>/dev/null || echo "")
          echo "NEW_ID=$NEW_ID" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
          echo "OLD_ID=$OLD_ID" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
          if [ "$NEW_ID" != "$OLD_ID" ]; then
            echo "NEW_ITEM=true" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
          else
            echo "NEW_ITEM=false" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
          fi

      - name: Open new issue if new item found
        if: steps.check.outputs.NEW_ITEM == 'true'
        uses: actions/github-script@v7
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.MY_PAT }}
          script: |
            const fs = require('fs');
            const title = fs.readFileSync('latest_title.txt', 'utf8').trim();
            const url = fs.readFileSync('latest_url.txt', 'utf8').trim();
            const body = fs.readFileSync('latest_body.txt', 'utf8').trim();
            await github.rest.issues.create({
              owner: context.repo.owner,
              repo: context.repo.repo,
              title: `[API] ${title}`,
              body: `Found new item: [${title}](${url})\n\n${body}`
            });

      - name: Update latest seen ID
        if: steps.check.outputs.NEW_ITEM == 'true'
        run: |
          mkdir -p .github
          cp latest_id.txt .github/latest_seen.txt

      - name: Save cache
        uses: actions/cache@v4
        with:
          path: .github/latest_seen.txt
          key: latest-seen-1
          restore-keys: |
            latest-seen-

This is probably all kinds of wrong. If you know how to improve it, please let me know!

22.00.0146 How many things are you trying to do at once? - Johnny.Decimal

2025-10-17T08:24:16.000Z

How many things are you trying to do at once?

Here's a trick I've been trying. This is difficult, which I think reveals just how much we flit between tasks in the course of a day. I haven't managed to do it well yet.

Open a new note. Just a blank text file will do, it's not forever. Now, as you go through your day, every time you're doing something, identify what that thing is in your Johnny.Decimal system.

I'm at work all day. So whatever I'm doing has to be represented there somewhere. Am I working on a 21 product or 31 marketing? Helping 33 customers? To make this easier as you start out it's good enough to note a category or even an area number. But an ID is better.

By the end of the day this note should be like a run-sheet of all the stuff you did. Every time you switch, update it.

Can you do it?

100% human. 0% AI. Always.

I wanna do it but then I don't - Joel's Log Files

2025-10-16T18:10:00.000Z

It’s always fun when you get inspired by some post and then you see another one talking about pretty much the same thing.

Earlier today as I checked my RSS reader I read this update from Steve, who wrote:

Last week I wrote about the two-sentence journal method, which I was generally optimistic about using.

I actually shared a link to this “two-sentence” journaling method in my last weeknotes, so that’s fun. Anyway, the next paragraph starts with:

Well…I really haven’t been using it.

So, I think, that’s literally me!

Then on the fediverse I saw another post from Matt about how buying a Steam Deck didn’t pay off for him, because he doesn’t even play videogames much, and he says:

I could sit here, and tell y’all that I’m going to be different this time. I’m going to sit this morning and play a bit before I have to get to work. But we all know that would be a big fat lie. Oh, maybe I’ll stick to that goal for a little while, but eventually, my attention will turn elsewhere, and the Steamdeck will go back into its case. Then the cycle will continue, as it has forever.

Once again, that’s literally me!

Committment is kind of difficult. Even for something that should be easy like writing two sentences in a journal, or something that should be fun, like actually playing the videogames you have.

I’ve written a few posts about some of the issues I’ve been dealing with—which in the grand scheme of things aren’t really a big deal, I guess—such as:

trying to buy less games—something I’ve failed at spectacularly.
going to the gym more often—with really mixed and unpredictable results, and
eating less snacks—which hasn’t really worked out, as I’ve barely lowered my intake.

Now, some of it is no big deal, I haven’t practiced cursive writing in a couple days, I haven’t finished Silksong yet and it’s still waiting for me.

And sometimes I just can’t believe I keep digging myself deeper, I literally just got Super Mario Galaxy 1+2 and Suikoden I+II Remastered for some reason. Why are there so many great games coming soon???

I can say all I want, it doesn’t matter until I take action. I’ll keep trying even if I fail again, and maybe, eventually, it’ll stick. Or maybe I should stop considering all this a problem and just embrace the chaos.

But no, I refuse, I know I’m doing some things wrong, and I’ll keep on hitting my head against the wall until something clicks.

Clicks buy on the Dragon Quest I and II HD-2D Remastered for Switch.

Reply to this post via email | Reply on Fediverse

What Made Blogging Different? - Werd I/O

2025-10-16T16:20:43.000Z

[Elizabeth Spiers in Talking Points Memo]

Elizabeth Spiers nails what was — and is — amazing about blogging:

“If you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it.”

The result was a constellation of individual outlets, writing on a cadence that was divorced from the news cycle, often about topics that were highly personal that nobody else would necessarily cover. One person would write a piece, then another would write a post referencing that piece, and the conversation would continue from site to site to site. Each site may have been centered around an individual, but it was a group, community activity. Even the word “blog” is predicated on that idea: a play on words that took us from weblog to “we blog”.

As Elizabeth notes, newsletters are a form of that same medium, although the prevalence of paid subscriptions has added a layer that maybe isn’t as conducive to distributed conversation. They’re definitely not dead: I’ve been continuously blogging since 1998 (although not on the same site), and many others have too.

Hopefully we’ll continue to see a resurgence? If you’re reading this, I’d love to read your thoughts in long-form, too. I'd love nothing more than to see slow, long-form conversation bloom on the web once again.

[Link]

Ten Pointless Facts About Me - Kev Quirk

2025-10-16T11:45:00.000Z

I've seen this doing the rounds on a few blogs recently, so wanted to add my own version because I'm a narcissist. 🙃

Pete Moore did his version yesterday, and David did his version all the way back in April. I actually had this in draft from around then, but never got around to finishing it (there’s always something more fun to write).

Well, I don’t have anything more fun to write at the moment, so Pete’s post prompted me to get it done. So here’s Ten Pointless Facts About Me…

Do you floss your teeth?

Kinda. A pet hate of mine is having food stuck in my teeth. So I always clean them out with a toothpick every time I eat. 🤢

Tea, coffee, or water?

All 3. I mostly drink water and coffee, but do enjoy a cup of tea with breakfast at the weekend.

Footwear preference?

Crocs! I love Crocs! But I don’t wear them outdoors - they’re more like comfy slippers for around the house for me. When I’m out of the house, it’s usually trainers or walking shoes. Usually the latter as I’ll take comfort over fashion any day. My personal favourites are Merrell and Columbia.

Favourite dessert?

Anything lemon flavoured. Usually lemon drizzle, or lemon cheesecake (not the America kind though 🇬🇧).

The first thing you do when you wake up?

I always have a pint of water next to the bed. So the first thing I always do is to take a drink to freshen my mouth, then go to the bathroom to get rid of the water I drank the night before.

Age you’d like to stick at?

Probably 28…ish. I think late 20s is a good balance between health, disposable income, and level of responsibility.

How many hats do you own?

I actually don’t know. 8 maybe? I have a few winter hats, a cap, some summer hats, and my old beret from when I was in the Army.

Describe the last photo you took?

A photo of one of the watches that I’m selling. I don’t take a lot of photos really. When I do, they’re mostly of my pets, my kids, or my motorbikes.

Worst TV show?

No idea. I have a pretty low bar when it comes to TV and movies. I can usually find something I enjoy in pretty much everything I watch. The worst movie I’ve watched though was Dog Man; absolute steaming pile of dog shit (pun intended). 💩

As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?

I didn’t have any serious aspirations to be honest. I was too busy being a child to worry about adult stuff. I did want to be a doctor for a while, but then I realised that I don’t like blood, and that I’m not clever enough.

That’s it

And that’s it, those are the Ten Pointless Facts About Me. Maybe you found it interesting and learned something about me?

If you want to take part, here’s the questions in a copy/paste format to dump into your own blog post…

Do you floss your teeth?
Tea, coffee, or water?
Footwear preference?
Favourite dessert?
The first thing you do when you wake up?
Age you’d like to stick at?
How many hats do you own?
Describe the last photo you took?
Worst TV show?
As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?

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

Reply to this post by email

Hyper Light Drifter - Joel's Log Files

2025-10-16T05:40:02.000Z

I must admit this wasn’t a game I expected to complete this year. Not because I didn’t like it, or because I could not do it, or I didn’t want to. I was simply focusing on other games and I never really felt like giving this one a try properly.

However, this one is a bit of a special case, because they reason I actually completed it is pretty different to other games, I simply played it with a friend!

Hyper Light Drifter came out in 2016, almost 10 years ago at this point, a great indie game with a sucessful kickstarter campaign. I heard of it even soon after, and it was actually one of the biggest reasons for me to grow interested in game development and pixel art, and the only indie game I ever obtained through alternative methods, until I felt guilty about it and deleted it after 20 minutes. I was just a teenager so, yeah.

You get the drill. I’ve been aware of this game for a while, and for some reason, I took a long time to finally get around to it.

Hyper Light Drifter's cover art

It wasn’t until I bought my Nintendo Switch that Hyper Light Drifter became one of the first games I purchased for the console. However, among so many games I had to try out, I shoved it aside.

If you look at my log journal, you’ll see I played this game for a grand total of 6 days. Two times in December 2023—the month I bought the game for Christmas—one time in July 2024—where I somehow played it for 3 hours—and three times since September 2025—where I finally completed it. I really could have beaten this game in a couple of weeks if I had focused on it.

The time I dedicated to it was due to its awesome 2-player co-op mode, as games with an actual story and a world to uncover, with a sense of wonder that gets you to actually challenge yourself, think about what it’s trying to say, and uncover the secrets hidden everywhere in the map, are pretty rare for multiplayer gaming.¹

So, whenever a friend came over and we felt like playing something a little bit deeper that required more than just smashing buttons or pushing each other off of platforms, Hyper Light Drifter became the go-to.

The story

Hyper Light Drifter is not very explicit on its story telling, there is pretty much no text other than the instructions of the game itself. NPCs don’t have any dialogue, and only some of them will tell stories in the form of graphics and drawings depicting what happened to them.

You are The Drifter, and you have some sort of disease that weakens you and makes you cough up blood. You journeyed to this place looking for a cure—although the game doesn’t really tell you that. After a tutorial section, your goal is to collect the modules required to raise four pillars, located at each cardinal point of the map, for something to happen that maybe give you the answers you are looking for.

The world is kind of rotten, there are bodies in many places, after some sort of event, or a series of events, occurred on these lands.

Most of this I got from the wiki. The game is really obscure on this. What you actually know is to collect the modules and get to the bosses shown on the map.

The story itself is kind of a mirror to the experience of one of the devs working on the game, who suffers from a heart disease and has dealt with it constantly throughout his life.

Overall, the game mostly consists of visual storytelling, via flashbacks, characters sharing their experiences and the environments around you, who are in a state of decay and abandonment.

The gameplay

Your main weapon is a sword, made of solid light, you can also dash, and use guns.

The game plays like an old school adventure game like The Legend of Zelda, it features with minimal dialogue and text, you are supposed to explore the world and collect modules, keys, skill points, as well as lost technology that can help you get stronger, unlock doors and new paths.

The world is divided in four regions with different climates and enemies, and also different types of challenges while traversing the world. Falling platforms, spiked floors, moving obstacles, projectiles, gauntlets and puzzles are going to be present along the way.

Of course, the variety of enemies is quite big too.

The combat system is simple, but difficult. YOu have a sword combo and you can dash to get close or away from enemies. There is no parry system. Once you unlock more abilities, you can shield certain attacks or redirect projectiles, as well as get more attack combos.

With skill points, you can use learn new sword or dash techniques, such as charged attacks, or chain-dashing. You’ll also be able to unlock more slots for your gun ammo, and grenades to target groups of enemies.

The chain-dashing ability lets you dash in sequence, and it can be performed forever, similar to bomb-jumping in Metroid games. However, it needs a certain rythm to perform well, and it’s kind of annoying to master. Thankfully, you can complete the game without it, but it’s nice to get a feel for it especially to make traversal faster.

Each area will also contain bosses. I think the boss design is pretty good, but some times the attack range felt too short, and there are moments where I would get hit and stun-locked after multiple attacks.

Snowy mountains, the corpse of a giant frozen in place, leaning against the terrain, me and my friend looking at it

The art

There is no other way to put it.

Hyper Light Drifter is probably one of the best showcases of modern day pixel art that I have ever seen. There really is no other way to put it. The game looks absolutely gorgeous, one might say the whole budget of this game went towards making sure everything looks as slick as possible.

During the covid lockdown, I clearly remember having screenshots of the game side by side while designing pixel art for my own projects.

The character animation is quite simply, immaculate. I absolutely love every little detail about it. From attacks to movement to the simple idle animation, it is extremely well done.

While there are not many regions in the world, each of them is distinct and familiar, and one can’t help but wonder at what their original purpose was, and how they ended up on the state they are during the game.

There will also be incredibly animated cutscenes with unique and extremely mind-blowing visuals, in a similar style to Neon Genesis Evangelion, although I must admit, it feels like too much flare and not enough meaning, or at least, it’s just confusing overall.

A creepy lab facility filled with containers with strange lifeforms inside, me and my friend are about through a locked door.

The music

The soundtrack of this game is simply magnificent. It is instrumental, environmental, with a mix of electronic sounds that merge seamlessly and provides the game with an atmosphere unique to it. Elevating it above and beyond and giving a certain grávitas to the quietest of moments. I simply cannot imagine this game without the music here!

A few songs of the soundtrack were on my now defunct Spotify playlist for relaxing videogame music, years before I even got the game, it was just that good, and yet another reason I wanted to play this so badly.

Panacea, one of the main tracks of the game, deserves a listen, along the rest! You can also get the album on Bandcamp.

The sound effects for the environment, item collecting and others were also quite good, although it’s mostly just checking the boxes rather than doing anything too special. In fact, sometimes the music would (welcomingly so) take over the game and play regardless of what was happening on screen (usually during battles or cinematic moments) and it was just fantastic.

Finishing thoughts

There is a lot to like here. It is one of those indie games that really does everything right, and has managed to build an identity for itself.

In modern days, there are other indies that have surpassed some of its elements and design choices, but I think it deserves a playthrough nonetheless.

The game is difficult, but not as much as something like Hollow Knight or Silksong. However, some of the bosses and hitboxes can be a little janky, so there will be some times where you will get hit when it looks like you avoided the attack, and there will be times where the attack is touching the enemy, but they don’t lose hitpoints.

The chain-dashing mechanic is rather finnicky and annoying, and there’s some challenges that are a pain to do, but they are never essential to complete the main game, so I think it’s alright.

Overall, I am glad I finally got to play this game, and given how short it is, I am probably going to revisit it and try to beat it by myself sometime.

There are platformers like Super Mario Bros Wonder and Roguelikes like Ember Knights and Spelunky, but they aren’t games you take too seriously. Fullmetal Furies is the closest to a proper story, but it’s still mostly an rpg beat’em up where everyone is trying to survive and have fun. ↩

Reply to this post via email | Reply on Fediverse

Rambling about Science Fiction books - Joel's Log Files

2025-10-15T18:00:00.000Z

There are plenty of science fiction books I’ve read that have stayed with me for one reason or another.

I started out reading the classics by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. But actually, my earliest read for Verne was an adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days that I read at school, and came with fantastic art accompanying the text. I knew then that science and speculative fiction would be my jam!

Since last year, I’ve been reading The Expanse series. And honestly, it has managed to stay really really engaging for me the whole way through. I am currently on the 6th book: Babylon’s Ashes, and it’s seriously incredible to see.

At this point in time, I am completely invested in the world—the society, technology and conflicts—and even more so, its characters—their struggles, development, and relationships. Bundle that with the fact that it’s great at pretty much everything it tries, such as military action, political intrigue, cosmic horror or existential monologuing. Even if the build-up in some entries can take time, it always manages to hook me by pulling off some crazy premise, and seeing how the story evolves as the series has gone on has been a complete joy so far.

Even so, there are books where I can’t even tell you the name of the protagonist at all, but I can vividly remember the imagery and the wonder of the world described in the pages. This is the case for Brian W. Aldiss’ Hothouse, with it’s dying Earth, tidally locked, two million years in the future, dominated by sentient and deadly vegetal life, interwoven to the moon by giant webs and huge vegetal beings roaming free in the space between, with humans devolving to almost animalistic insticts, as everything around them represents a constant danger.

Or maybe the concept of a story is simply incredible to read, getting deep into the human psyche when put in terrifying situations. The utopian future lead by a benevolent alien species over the whole planet in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, or the very much not utopian society found in D.G. Compton’s Farewell, Earth’s Bliss where every “undesirable” individual is sent to a settlement on Mars to form its own culture—which doesn’t go too well when every character is broken and messed up.

There’s this one time that I went blind into a book and was completely disgusted by it, while also being unable to stop reading—despite my best judgement—because of the premise of it all, Tender is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica kept my eyes peeled, as Humanity resorts to cannibalism because they would rather do that over going vegan, after all animal meat on the planet becomes unedible.

Overall though, I’ve mostly stuck with older works of science fiction, classics of the 20th century, like The Mote in God’s Eye by Niven and Pournelle, which is still the most interesting first contact plot I’ve read, while featuring a bunch of cool concepts and world-building. And of course, Dune, an incredible, dense, palpable story that I got to both watch and read, and needs no introduction.

I guess I prefer to read older books because I like to compare the differences and similarities between the future they envisioned and today. How things turned out to be. From something like E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops which I feel I’ve mentioned so often because it’s just so ahead of its time, or the bleak hyper-capitalist world in The Space Merchants by Kornbluth and Pohl, filled with massive advertisement campaigns, modern slavery, and never ending debt.

Despite how dire some of those futures seem, there will be other books that fight back. The fear of the unknown, quickly replaced by an admiration for the alien, something beyond our humanity that gives us hope, in the spiritual and natural harmony shown in C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet. Or the inspiring, never-ending ingenuity of the human mind in its battle for survival, which can be seen in the journey against all odds on Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.

If there’s something that long time readers may be able to tell, is that me truly disliking something I read is rather strange. Sometimes I think I just don’t go that deep into the things I read, even if I am enjoying them and even when they stay with me for months or years. I’ve never rated anything under 3.5 stars. I rarely rate things during my reviews at all—the times I’ve done it, they haven’t really added any value in the end—I just share my thoughts and overall conclusions.

As long as something gets me thinking and entertains me, it usually works out. Even when I didn’t enjoy the topic, or what happened, or dislike its conclusions (it’s hard to look away during a train-wreck). Most of the time I try to appreciate what an author attempts to do. Besides, I tend to be really picky about what I read in the first place, so it’s hard for me to end up with something I don’t enjoy at least a bit.

And of course, there’s space for books that are just dumb fun and filled with geek references while keeping the science pretty real, like the Bobiverse series! I read that long before I started this blog, but maybe I’ll revisit it someday.

This post ended up being a general overview of books I’d recommend—except for the cannibalism one but you could read it I guess—so that was quite the ramble to go on. I was going to turn this into something general for other types of media like Manga and TV Shows, but I think I’ll just do separate posts for them.

Funnily enough, after all this time, I am yet to read anything from the big authors of the last century, nothing by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick or Robert Heinlein. Other authors like Ray Bradbury are still a blind spot too. There’s just so many things to read.

In any case, just check my bookshelf! Pretty much everything there is good in my opinion. Although I haven’t updated it with my latest reads like the Murderbot series.

Reply to this post via email | Reply on Fediverse

The Long Play Podcast - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2025-10-15T11:59:01.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? I just finished listening to The Long Play, a four-part podcast series from The Spinoff. Each episode is aptly named Side A, B, C, and D - just like a vinyl. Researched, written, and presented by Charlotte Ryan with support from Duncan Greive, it covers the rise, fall, and revival of vinyl over the last century in Aotearoa.

You can listen through your favourite podcast app or find the feed on The Spinoff’s podcasts page. If you’re in New Zealand, they’ve taken it a step further - in collaboration with Holiday Records, they’ve actually pressed the podcast onto vinyl and distributed it to more than 40 record stores across the country.

I haven’t had a chance to get out to any of the local record stores for a hunt for a copy yet, been busy house hunting, but I’m keen to see if I can still track one down. What a brilliant idea.

Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP, or send a webmention. Check out the posts archive on the website.

Book Review: The Anarchy - The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-10-15T11:34:11.000Z

This is a marvellous and depressing book. Marvellous because it finely details the history, atrocities, and geopolitical strife of unfettered capitalism. Depressing for much the same reason.

Dalrymple takes the thousand different strands of the story and weaves them into a (mostly) comprehensible narrative. With this many moving parts, it is easy to get confused between the various people, places, companies, and loyalties. Your eReader's dictionary will have a good workout as you try to decipher the various calques and loanwords.

It is more nuanced than I expected. Rather than just an unending parade of awfulness, it does dive in to the various attempts to reign in the terror and promote peaceful trade. These nearly always failed. Similarly, there were individual acts of kindness and honour which, nevertheless, cannot begin to make up for the exploitation.

The one question it doesn't (and possibly can't) answer is "what would India have been like without the EIC?" Obviously the company was hugely disruptive and extracted vast amounts of wealth - but the history of every continent shows internecine warfare whenever a ruler dies. A constant theme of the book is "Almost immediately, the court disintegrated into rival factions" The bloody battles between the various states, despots, kings, and tyrants would have eventually occurred. The French - and other colonisers - would have also rampaged through the nation. This isn't to excuse the EIC, and almost everything they did was inexcusable, but rather to say they probably weren't uniquely awful in the atrocities they committed.

We see the rapacious nature of megacorporations today. While few have a standing army, they are all dedicated to usurping authority and plundering resources. The Anarchy describes how the Company whispered in the ears of leaders, promised them the world, and then cruelly turned on them. Again, a depressing reflection of our own times.

Notable by their absence are women. There are an endless assortment of unnamed dancing girls and courtesans, but the only named women are the (mostly British) wives in the background and Begum Samru. There's also only a brief mention of the other geopolitical impacts the EIC had. For example, I had no idea that the tea from the eponymous Boston Tea Party was supplied by the EIC.

I don't understand why publishers pretend eBooks have the same limitations as their paper counterparts. The paper book puts all the illustrations at the end - presumably to save money. But this book would have benefited from interspersing the portraits with the text. Similarly, a map or two wouldn't have gone amiss to help the reader visualise the tangled path the various armies took.

The books is disturbing and upsetting, but a vital read for anyone who wants to understand a key point in the world's history. If only we could learn from it, eh?

Why the open social web matters now - Werd I/O

2025-10-14T19:45:55.000Z

I was privileged to deliver the opening keynote at this month's FediForum, a conference for people building and supporting the open social web. My talk touched on what's happening now, drew on my experiences building Elgg and Known and investing at Matter Ventures, and gave participants three important questions to ask themselves as they build platforms and serve communities.

Here's the talk in its entirety, courtesy of FediForum. The transcript follows below.

Introduction

If we haven’t met, my name’s Ben Werdmuller. I’m based just outside of Philadelphia.

Today, I’m the Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom here in the US that investigates abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions. If you remember the Clarence Thomas corruption scandal, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought’s private remarks about how he was going to go after the left, or Peter Thiel’s tax-free investment scheme, that was our reporting.

I’m not a journalist but I’m very proud to support the people doing this journalistic work.

But I actually started my career by building open source social networking platforms. I built a platform that allowed communities to self-host on their terms, using exactly the features that would support their needs. Elgg started in higher education, but it was used by NGOs like Greenpeace and Oxfam to train aid workers, it was used by the anti-austerity movement in Spain to help them organize, and Fortune 500 companies and at least one government used it as their primary intranet.

We always wanted Elgg to federate. That was the plan from day one. It was an obvious need. There was no ActivityPub yet. We picked up on whatever tech we could — OpenID, Friend of a Friend — but ended up trying to cobble our own standard together. It wasn’t ActivityPub, and it didn’t work out quite as we’d hoped, but it began to touch on some of those underlying ideas.

I built Known as a way for anyone to build feeds containing content of any type. It was mostly used by indie web bloggers, and it supported indie web standards for decentralized conversations, but it could support any number of users, and a feed could be published to by webhook and micropub, meaning theoretically any automatic system could post there.

I led west coast investments for something called Matter, which supported early-stage mission-driven startups.

There were all ventures with the potential to create a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society. That was our hypothesis. They had diverse teams and missions that weren’t a million miles away from the missions of people in this room.

And then I took a hard left turn and moved into leading technology for newsrooms, because I felt like that was the best way to be useful in this era.

The 19th reports at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy - a much-needed inclusive newsroom in a world where much of our news is produced by white men in New York City. And I’ve already introduced you to ProPublica.

So I’ve been involved in building platforms, supporting people who are building platforms, and leading technology in the kinds of organizations that we hope will be platform users. I’ve been on all sides of the table.

And now, maybe ironically, while I’m not building or supporting platforms, open social networking is finally taking off. My timing has always been terrible, but I’m thrilled to be back in the fight.

Why should anyone care?

I’d like to open FediForum with this provocation:

Why does this matter? Why should anyone care about decentralized or federated networks?

Let’s start by examining the moment we’re in.

Here in the US, our government is becoming increasingly authoritarian.

Immigrants are being ripped off the streets by masked officers without due process and often shipped to places like El Salvador or South Sudan. Just last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told a roomful of American generals that he wanted them to fight “the enemy within” in the United States, echoing a phrase used in Nazi Germany.

In Gaza, a UN commission found that there is indeed an ongoing genocide in progress. Many tens of thousands of people have been killed. Some of them were allegedly identified by a targeting AI through metadata from their WhatsApp chats.

Here in the US, students and journalists who have described it as a genocide have been detained or deported. Even liking a post on Instagram has been considered an actionable signal that you support terrorism by aligning yourself with Hamas.

And on some US-run social networks, people from Palestine who have been asking for help have been systematically removed.

National security policy now describes the following amongst signals that you might be a terrorist:

“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality”.

People from communities that were already vulnerable - trans people among them - have been explicitly targeted, just as they were in 1930s Germany.

And speaking of trans people, they’re reportedly about to be classified as a nihilistic violent extremist threat group.

Categorizing these communities this way is a pretext to surveillance.

The CLOUD Act, passed in 2018, compels US-based online services (including US subsidiaries of foreign organizations) to share data with the US government regardless of where in the world that data is stored, and regardless of local regulations like GDPR. In the event of a criminal subpoena, including for suspected terrorist activity, you may never know your data was supplied.

That was always creepy, but in a world where you may be profiled as a potential terrorist for having left-of-center opinions, or for being a member of a vulnerable group like the trans community, that really matters.

The first step towards doing something about these events and threats to democracy is to know about them. How do we learn about them?

In most western countries, social media and video networks are now our main source of news and the way we receive updates from our friends. A handful of companies own how we learn about the world, giving them the ability to shape our collective worldviews, influence movements, and prioritize their own interests.

They have never been great actors — Amnesty International accused Meta of platforming a genocide in Myanmar in 2017 — but their influence and power has never been greater than it is today.

And every major commercial social network is complicit. They’re collaborators.

We all know about Twitter acquirer Elon Musk, who bent the platform to fit his political worldview. But he’s not alone.

Here’s Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, owner of LinkedIn, who contributed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, who said that he feels optimistic about the new administration’s agenda.

And here’s Larry Ellison, who will control TikTok in the US, who was a major investor in Trump, and who one advisor called, in a Wired interview, the shadow President of the United States.

Social media is very quickly becoming aligned with a state that in itself is becoming increasingly authoritarian.

The decline of journalism

Journalism and the media is a way we’ve traditionally learned about the world. And a free press is usually a check on power. Multiple studies have found that communities with an active newsroom have less political corruption - or, rather, that communities without an active newsroom had more corruption.

But the news industry failed to adapt to the more personal nature of the web, and has been in slow decline for many years.

Compounding this, business decisions by companies like Google have led to fewer clickthroughs to news sites from search engines as well as from traditional social networks. They display AI summaries and show you answer boxes instead of prominently linking to the sources themselves.

Fewer people clicking through translates to fewer pageviews, fewer subscribers, and fewer donors. Engagement and revenue are both declining. Public service journalism is withering just when we need it most.

And now public media has been defunded by the government, driving the final nail into the coffin for many outlets. Hundreds of them have closed or are predicted to close soon.

Between the capitulation of social media and the slow decay of journalism, the result is less sunlight, more corruption, and more freedom for authoritarianism to spread and thrive.

The problem is global

I’m speaking from the US context, but these aren’t US only problems. For one thing, America’s influence extends worldwide, both through agreements and through overarching legislation like the CLOUD Act.

For another, there are parallel movements elsewhere. Over in Britain, a nationalist movement that started with Brexit is taking hold, while public journalistic institutions like the BBC are under threat. The Online Safety Act requires identity verification that can put people in vulnerable communities at risk, and the government seemingly continually asks for backdoors in privacy software. Similar patterns are emerging over much of Europe. Japan just elected a far right prime minister.

There’s a lot going on everywhere. It can be overwhelming.

And whether you like it or not, sitting in this virtual room, you’re the counterculture. All of you are building platforms, communities, and relationships, with the potential to create an alternative to this centralization of power and influence.

We talk a lot about social media these days, but I want to register two definitions with you. Social media is the town square: a global commons where we can all learn from each other and build audiences at scale. Social networking, on the other hand, is a way to support communities of any kind using technology. These two things can interact and intersect, but they are not the same.

Because of its emphasis on scale, I think social media is more predisposed to centralization, and because of its emphasis on relationships and communities, social networking is more predisposed to decentralization.

Let's make this more concrete. Imagine I'm part of a rapid response network protecting immigrants from deportation without due process.

I have a core community. We trust each other completely. We coordinate the sensitive stuff in our private space: who has access to various resources, which volunteers are trained legal observers, how we move money to families when someone gets detained.

This inner circle needs to be absolutely secure. These conversations could get people deported if they fall into the wrong hands.

But our community can't cover a whole city. So we connect with other groups we trust: other mutual aid networks, immigrant rights organizations, faith communities that have offered sanctuary.

These groups have their own secure spaces, their own trusted circles. But we need to coordinate with them. When ICE shows up to detain someone, we might need bodies there within 20 minutes: witnesses with cameras, legal observers, community members who can slow the process down and ensure due process is followed.

We're building an archipelago of trusted communities, each with their own secure space, but able to communicate across those boundaries.

Together, across this archipelago, we can have private, end-to-end encrypted conversations about who's available for rapid response, where ICE was spotted this morning, which families need emergency funds.

This encryption is vital. Without it, the web hosts that power our communities can be subpoenaed without our knowledge, and our conversations can be handed over to the government, putting everyone we're trying to help at risk.

So at this level, everything must be encrypted. The inner circles and the archipelago both need to be surveillance-proof.

Federation makes us stronger. If one community is compromised for any reason and is taken offline, the others remain online. Just like the web itself.

And when we're ready, then we step into the public fediverse.

We announce the action. We share the video. We name the officials responsible. We rally public support. Everyone has access to this: it's the town square, the place where we build power at scale.

But we only got here safely because we could organize privately first.

That's the distinction: networking builds trust and enables coordination within and across communities. Media scales that message to everyone.

And the fediverse can do both. And it can do it without centralization, without being subject to any one company’s business decisions, and, if we add encryption, with freedom from surveillance. For vulnerable groups in particular, that provides a refuge, a place to build relationships and community, and, perhaps most crucially, a place to organize.

But these two modes - social media and social networking - are different modes with different use cases and different technical requirements.

In my example, each group hosts its own communications and controls its own data. They federate to form an archipelago with other trusted groups. At both of these levels, communications are end-to-end encrypted because they have to be. These conversations can’t happen safely without it being physically impossible for adverse actors, including the government, to obtain access to them without the active participation of the community itself.

The fediverse is not inherently safer because it’s federated: an open, permissionless protocol can be exploited just as easily to surveil as it can to build.

But then, at the public level, those same groups can broadcast to the open fediverse when they need to.

The spec for MLS over ActivityPub covers these activities, and using it within a limited archipelago limits potential exposure to a set of trusted communities. Most fediverse platforms don't currently support this archipelago model. But the building blocks exist.

Start small

Of course, this isn’t limited to immigration protests or even activism. This model of small, trusted communities that intersect with the public sphere is already at the heart of the open social web. With the right tooling, it has applicability for journalism, for mutual aid, for co-operative culture, for collaborative marketplaces, and for every aspect of public life. The open social web is, I believe, and I know I’m preaching to the choir, the future of social and the future of the web.

So you might reasonably disagree with me about the threats, the needs, and this particular manifestation of a solution.

But my point is not necessarily to advocate for this particular model. It’s when we’re building something new, we need to start somewhere small and specific.

We need to start by supporting a specific community’s burning needs really well and grow outwards from there.

Let's talk about TXTmob.

TXTmob was an SMS messaging service originally built by the Institute for Applied Autonomy for protesting political conventions in 2004, towards the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Activists used it to coordinate actions, report on police movements, and share their whereabouts. A user would send their status update via SMS, and other members of the group would receive it. They refined it based on this very specific use case.

After the Republican National Convention, there was a weekend session of hackers and activists. Two of the people there - Rabble and Blaine Cook - worked for a company called Odeo that was having trouble getting its social network for podcasting off the ground. They made some helpful suggestions that improved TXTmob, but they also did an internal presentation at Odeo about the tool and how it worked.

A few days later, at an internal hackday, the team there prototyped a tool that worked very similarly. Eventually, they named it Twitter.

All of our microblogging tools have this lineage: short messages designed for a specific group of people and limited in length for a specific reason that was an outcome of that use case.

A specific use case led to a working prototype that led to a wider application. That pattern is repeated again and again.

Helping communities today

For the open social web to thrive, we need to go back to real communities with real-world use cases and solve their problems better than anything else. Not the needs of individuals within them, but of the interconnected communities themselves. We need to build social networks that deeply support their needs, and then social media that helps them thrive.

So if microblogging emerged from SMS updates for activists coordinating at the RNC in 2004, what should emerge from the needs of communities in 2025?

What does that look like in practice?

I'd challenge anyone looking to start a new platform - or add features to an existing one - to ask three questions.

First: Who specifically do we want to help?

Not "activists" or "journalists" in the abstract. Which organizers? Which newsrooms? Which communities?

Have you sat with them? Marched with them? Watched them work? Have you understood how they communicate and where their current tools fail them?

Second: Why are we the right team to help them?

Is it lived experience in that community? Deep domain knowledge? A unique technical capability they need? Or are you building what you find intellectually interesting, rather than helping someone?

If your team isn't representative of the people you're trying to help, you might not be the right people yet.

Third: How can we address their needs better than anything else that exists today?

I don’t mean ideology. Open source or federation are not solutions in themselves. They’re characteristics of a solution.

We need to be concretely meeting needs. Not what you think their needs are or what they should be, but what you’ve learned they are from getting to know them deeply.

What specific pain point are you solving that keeps people on WhatsApp despite the surveillance risk, or on X despite the white supremacy?

What does open source or federation make possible that concretely makes their lives better today? Is it really better than Signal or email or whatever else they’re using?

Concepts like "credible exit" are hypothetical. They matter in the long term, but they won't drive adoption today if the immediate experience isn't better. What’s making their lives better right now?

It might be that you don’t have the answers today.

Even then, there’s so much you can do. Maybe your role is to provide infrastructure, funding, technical support for communities building their own solutions - or just to promote the movement and spread the word. Maybe it’s about supporting and contributing to other projects in forums and communities like FediForum. Maybe you need to build your community or a team, building relationships and doing research until you do have the answers.

But I don’t think any social movement, any community, needs saviors riding in on a white horse.

The world particularly does not need more tech teams swooping in to change the world from the basis of their own assumptions, even if they do believe in open source or federation. It needs more people willing to listen to the people who know, and to support people who are already on the ground.

These questions work.

At Matter Ventures, I invested in and supported a portfolio of 75 startups, all of which were mission-driven, trying to make the world better in some key way. It taught me a lot about projects and how they succeed or fail.

It turns out these questions for mission-driven open social web teams happen to be the same ones that most closely predicted whether one of those companies would live or die.

If a team was trying to be the smartest people in the room and invent a solution without knowing, being of, and co-creating with the communities they were trying to help, they were not likely to succeed at what they were doing. The startups who were led by unwavering visionaries who thought they could invent something amazing because they were smart and clever and creative, with better values, were the ones that died fastest and hardest.

If, on the other hand, they did the work to understand their communities, make sure they were building something that really served them, made the effort to grow to be representative of them, and changed their focus when they learned that their communities needed something different to what they had in mind - those teams were much more likely to succeed.

I realize most of this room probably doesn’t care about startups.

But again, not to belabor the point: the same questions that predicted whether mission-driven startups would succeed apply to everyone building on the open social web. Who are you building for? Why are you the right team? How does your solution concretely serve their real human needs better than anything else?

I’ve learned this first-hand.

I mentioned my two social networking projects, Elgg and Known. Elgg started with a concrete use case in higher education, then expanded to adjacent use cases in non-profits, and then to businesses and startups. It became a thriving business for years. Investors came to us asking to put money in. Several governments used it as their national intranets.

Known was designed for the indie web, and had a community of people who were lovely people - they’re all my friends today - but they liked and supported us because of a certain set of shared values that we were in line with. It was ideological. There was no concrete real-world use case and Known had real trouble building traction.

The internal newsroom conversations I’ve had about the open social web have been disappointing to someone like me who cares about the space. They want to know why it’s better for their bottom line than the incumbent social networks that they already know how to measure and use. The answer can’t be ideological. There are real answers - people on the fediverse are more likely to engage in and donate to journalism, for example - but stories about how the fediverse is decentralized don’t land for them. It doesn’t speak to their needs.

It turns out that if you solve a community’s needs deeply, you’re valuable to them. And these communities have intersecting communities, which you can get to know too, and be valuable to also. You’re more likely to reach sustainability, whatever your model is, because you’ll have communities that you’re serving deeply, who you’ve become valuable to, and who want to support you. That might be through donations or mutual aid or revenue or collaboration.

And we need the open social web to be sustainable. We need people to keep working on these problems. We need you to be able to work on this full-time without burning out.

These aren't just good questions to ask: they're survival questions. Because the threats communities are facing aren't abstract and we need the open social web to exist.

The threats are real

As I was writing this talk, an entire apartment building in Chicago was raided. Adults were separated into trucks based on race, regardless of their citizenship status. Children were zip tied to each other.

And we are at the foothills of this. Every week, it ratchets up. Every week, there’s something new. Every week, there’s a new restrictive social media policy or a news outlet disappears, removing our ability to accurately learn about what’s happening around us.

And, look, I don’t mean to scare or pressure you. I really don’t. But you have so much power.

The threats are real. But so is the community in this room. You have the skills, the values, and now hopefully a framework to build what's needed.

Everyone here has the potential to be building the future. You’re building platforms that provide an alternative to an authoritarian, extractive status quo, and every platform on the fediverse has the potential to help build a more informed and equal global society.

What I hope we'll all remember is that protocols and code are only valuable if they serve real communities with real needs. And today, there are communities facing real threats.

The opportunity right now isn't to build a better Twitter or to provide a nice place for people who care about Linux to chat: it's to build infrastructure that vulnerable people can actually use to organize, to communicate safely, and to build community. But we can only do that if we're building with those communities from day one, not building for them based on our assumptions about what they need.

Over the next two days, I hope you'll use those three questions as one of your lenses. Who is this really for? Are we the right people to build it? And does it concretely serve their real needs better than what exists today? Because the stakes are real, and there’s real scope to help.

Thank you

Thanks for listening.

If you want to yell at me, I understand. Here’s where to find me.

Fediverse: @ben@werd.social
Bluesky: @werd.io
Web: werd.io
Email: ben@werd.io

I'm Selling Most of My Watches - Kev Quirk

2025-10-14T10:34:00.000Z

I have too many watches in my collection, so I'm trying to reduce it down to around 24 watches. As a result, many of them are for sale if you're interested.

I think it’s time to drastically reduce my watch collection. You see, as I started getting into watches, I bought everything I came across that piqued my interest. But now I’m a few years into this hobby, I have a much better idea of what I really like to wear on my wrist.

Fact is, I only wear around half of my collection on a regular basis. Many of my watches have never worn, or only worn once or twice. So they’re mostly brand new, and frankly, a waste.

So I figured instead of dumping them all on eBay, I’d list them here to give you fine people first refusal. Here’s how it will work:

You take a look at what’s for sale and if anything floats your boat, use the email me button to make an offer. Please make sure you fill in the offer amount and your country so I can calculate postage.
I’ll review the offer, calculate postage and will come back to you with a full price (inc. postage), or a counter offer.
If we’re both happy, you send me the money via PayPal and I’ll ship the little ticker out to its new home.

This will be a first come, first served process and as the watches sell, I’ll remove them from the list.

So please, take a look and if you’re interested, make me an offer. I’m planning to donate all proceeds of these sales to a local mental health charity, Open Door in memory of my sister, Lisa.

⌚ View My Watches for Sale

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

Reply to this post by email

Analyzing the domains (and sites) of an authoritarian regime - Posts feed

2025-10-13T22:01:00.000Z

If you've ever wondered what domains the US federal government has registered, there's a rather exhaustive list over in the dotgov-data repository on GitHub, which is maintained by CISA. You can see the raw CSV here. They don't include the registration date, but you can derive that from public WHOIS records or by examining the repository's git history.

With that data in hand, it's easy enough to assemble a list of .gov domains registered since the inauguration of our aspiring dictator. Visiting each domain reveals a number of things:

Not all of these are active.
Given how brief some of the acronyms used as domain names are, it's not easy to definitively say what they pertain to.
Several are redirects (e.g. waste.gov redirects to dei.gov which is inactive — because this administration is staffed by the stupid and the cruel).
Sites built by this administration are embarrassingly bloated, gaudy and poorly designed.

doge.gov dumps a payload of over 200 MB on unsuspecting visitors. This is because it's built with Next.js¹ and is little more than a stack of X/Twitter² embeds. Government efficiency, right?

trumpcard.gov? That's a 7.18 MB payload. americabydesign.gov weighs in at 3.75 MB, ndstudio.gov dumps 12.3 MB into your browser and trumprx.gov is a comparatively lightweight 2.15 MB. All of these are with Next.js and have A records with IPs pointing to Cloudflare.

The lightest of these new digital disasters is usai.gov at 1.66 MB, but that was built with Astro and is sitting on AWS. It also looks like it was designed without the help of THE NATIONAL DESIGN STUDIO IN PART BECAUSE THE TEXT ISN'T ALL SET AT 60 PX.

whitehouse.gov predates this administration, but the current WordPress install weighs in at a hefty 12.4 MB.

Of the 24 domains registered since inauguration day:

Only 6 are active websites (25%)
4 are redirects to other sites
14 are completely inactive or placeholders
The 6 active sites average 39 MB each in transferred data³

Why is nearly every site this administration builds using Next.js + Cloudflare? A whole lot of this could be static output — the source for go.gov is nice and boring and weighs in at 103.1 KB.

Everything this administration does is cruel, thoughtless and sloppy. What they've built for the web is a reflection of that.

Domain	Registration Date	Stack	Status	Notes
doge.gov	2025-01-21	Next.js + Cloudflare	Active	207.4 MB payload
dei.gov	2025-02-04	Redirect	Redirect	Redirects to waste.gov
waste.gov	2025-02-04	N/A	Inactive
creators.gov	2025-03-04	N/A	Inactive
whcs.gov	2025-03-05	N/A	Inactive
trumpcard.gov	2025-03-24	Next.js + Cloudflare	Active	7.18 MB payload
whes.gov	2025-03-26	N/A	Inactive
deregulation.gov	2025-04-08	Redirect	Redirect	Redirects to regulations.gov/deregulation
whms.gov	2025-04-08	N/A	Inactive
lfs.gov	2025-04-15	N/A	Inactive
aha.gov	2025-04-24	N/A	Inactive
fedezfile.gov	2025-04-25	N/A	Inactive
maha.gov	2025-05-13	Redirect	Redirect	Redirects to whitehouse.gov/maha/
go.gov	2025-07-07	Static	Static
usai.gov	2025-07-07	Astro + AWS	Active	1.66 MB payload
lda.gov	2025-07-24	N/A	Inactive
crypto.gov	2025-07-30	Redirect	Redirect	Redirects to whitehouse.gov/crypto/
americabydesign.gov	2025-08-20	Next.js + Cloudflare	Active	3.75 MB payload
ndstudio.gov	2025-08-20	Next.js + Cloudflare	Active	12.3 MB payload
nds.gov	2025-08-20	N/A	Inactive
abd.gov	2025-08-20	N/A	Inactive
war.gov	2025-09-04	Legacy	Legacy
usxports.gov	2025-09-10	N/A	Inactive
trumprx.gov	2025-10-05	Next.js + Cloudflare	Active	2.15 MB payload

lol, why? ↩
It's pronounced "shitter". ↩
They're all bad, but the DOGE site really skews this. Without DOGE, the average is still 5.4 MB. ↩

Get Okay - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2025-10-13T21:26:12.000Z

Of all the things parents can annoy you with the clichés are the worst. "You won't know until you try". Okay mum, whatever you say. I think you know where this is going.

I've always thought I wasn't any good at drawing but what had actually happened is I never tried. Like really, sat down with a pencil and paper and tried to draw something. Maybe with a reference image. It turns out, if you actually try a little bit you might be okay at a thing.

Near the start of the St Jude campaign I noticed I had some spare stamps so I figured why not use them on something interesting like...do a drawing and I'll send it to someone. Initially I intended them to be my usual "I haven't tried that hard" ones but then people actually donated for one and I panicked. I can't send something crap to someone who has donated, it had to be at least a little bit good. So I actually sat down and tried. Those came out pretty well so I offered a few more. And some more. By the end of the campaign I had sent out 26 unique animal drawings and one London bus (Hi Joe 👋). Turns out, I was okay at drawing.

These requests led me to ask some curious questions like do snails have nostrils? Whats the different between a tortoise and a turtle? What the fuck is an opossum? What is an ionic column? If a hotdog horse had a hot dog bun body, would the legs also be made of bun?^[1]

Doing these added somewhere in the region of $1000 to the total we raised this year and has introduced me to a new hobby I'm enjoying and doesn't cost lots of money. I've been doing Inktober and plan to continue through the rest of the month. I also seemed to have stumbled upon a character who is yet to be named, but he is a dinosaur with little stubby hands and feet. Here he is on his way to comic con, lil' cutie.

Sort of. The latter lives in water. It's a marsupial, proper weird looking. They are the tallest, thinnest, and most ornate out of all three ancient Greek orders. I decided that yes, it would. ⤾

Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Typewriters and labyrinths - James' Coffee Blog

Career Snakes & Ladders - Kev Quirk

The climb never ends

Re-framing success

Stepping down, not away

Redefining what winning looks like

Read "Opinion | World Liberty Financial Is a Powerful Vehicle for Those Seeking Influence" - Molly White's activity feed

Evolving my personal music scrobbler - Posts feed

Published on Citation Needed: "Anatomy of a crypto meltdown" - Molly White's activity feed

Russell Vought: The Shadow President - Werd I/O

Europe Can’t Defend Democracy on US Servers - Werd I/O

Was my website mentioned in a GitHub issue? - Terence Eden’s Blog

Doing it manually

Using the API

Action

22.00.0146 How many things are you trying to do at once? - Johnny.Decimal

How many things are you trying to do at once?

I wanna do it but then I don't - Joel's Log Files

What Made Blogging Different? - Werd I/O

Ten Pointless Facts About Me - Kev Quirk

Do you floss your teeth?

Tea, coffee, or water?

Footwear preference?

Favourite dessert?

The first thing you do when you wake up?

Age you’d like to stick at?

How many hats do you own?

Describe the last photo you took?

Worst TV show?

As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?

That’s it

Hyper Light Drifter - Joel's Log Files

The story

The gameplay

The art

The music

Finishing thoughts

Rambling about Science Fiction books - Joel's Log Files

The Long Play Podcast - The Weblog of fLaMEd

Book Review: The Anarchy - The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

Why the open social web matters now - Werd I/O

Introduction

Why should anyone care?

The capitulation of social media

The decline of journalism

The problem is global

Social media and social networking

Start small

Helping communities today

These questions work.

The threats are real

Thank you

I'm Selling Most of My Watches - Kev Quirk

Analyzing the domains (and sites) of an authoritarian regime - Posts feed

Get Okay - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed