Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Which Copyleft Licence is Suitable for an SVG? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-06-20T11:34:22.000Z

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format is amazing. It allows you to precisely define how an image should look. Written in XML, it uses various mathematical operations to display an image which looks crisp and clear at any size.

Here's a trivial example:

<svg height="100" viewBox="0 0 100 100" width="100" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
   <circle cx="50" cy="50"  fill="#fff" r="100"/>
</svg>

That code produces this circle:

You could print that out with a kilometre radius and it would still be a perfect circle - unlike a traditional raster image which is just a grid of blocky pixels.

But suppose you wanted to freely share your SVG with others - and ensure that they also freely share it. What sort of "Copyleft" licence would you give it?

Creative Commons

The obvious choice seems to be a Creative Commons Share-Alike licence. SVGs are images. Images are creative works. Creative Commons is suitable for creative works. Job done!

But…

SVGs are not images. The are code which produce images. If we assume that an SVG is software, this entry in the FAQ becomes relevant:

Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?

We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software.

[…]

Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software.

[…]

Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.

At the end of that FAQ, they also say:

While we recommend against using a CC license on software itself, CC licenses may be used for software documentation, as well as for separate artistic elements such as game art or music.

So, that's a perhaps?

GPL

But let us assume that an SVG is a piece of media rather than software. Would it be suitable to use a software licence for it?

The various Gnu Public Licences have this to say:

Can I use the GPL for something other than software?

You can apply the GPL to any kind of work, as long as it is clear what constitutes the “source code” for the work. The GPL defines this as the preferred form of the work for making changes in it.

A photo JPEG might be derived from the RAW image file. In which case, the RAW is suitable for being GPL'd, not the resultant JPEG.

Similarly, the Photoshop file of a complex and multi-layered illustration would suitable, but not the outputted PNG.

An SVG can straddle both worlds. It's possible to build an SVG with layers, groups, and transformations, and then simplify it for output. You could edit the optimised version, but it's hardly the preferred format.

I read the GPL (so you don't have to) and right at the start it says:

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.

(Emphasis added.)

But do they mean that?

Licenses for Other Types of Works

[…]

We don't take the position that artistic or entertainment works must be free, but if you want to make one free, we recommend the Free Art License.

But, as delightful as the Free Art License is, the FSF say:

Please don't use it for software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL.

Is an SVG software or not?

I think so.

It's written in plain text.
It contains definitions, variables, and instructions.
It can contain scripting.

That sure looks like software to me!

But, at the same time, the user experiences it as a graphic. An animated GIF, for example, contains a small amount of code-like data to say how long each frame should last for and when to stop running. Is a GIF software? Is the basic circle above software? How much code do you need before something becomes software?

Are SVGs Libraries?

Licences like the LGPL and MPL allow copyleft libraries to be integrated into non-free software.

A proprietary application could treat an SVG as a library by asking the SVG to render the output and then displaying that. A bit of a reach, perhaps?

What about embedded raster graphics?

Just to complicate things, an SVG can also contain raster graphics. That is, it is possible to embed a PNG, JPEG, or any other traditional image within an SVG.

In this case, the embedded image can be Creative Commons licenced because CC BY-SA is compatible with GPLv3.

When someone creates an adaptation of a BY-SA licensed work and includes it in a GPLv3-licensed project, both licenses apply and downstream users must comply with both licenses. However, Section 2(a)(5)(B) of BY-SA 4.0 allows anyone who receives the adapted material downstream to satisfy the conditions of both BY-SA and GPLv3 (i.e. attribution and ShareAlike) in the manner dictated by the GPLv3.

(Emphasis added.)

The barest of SVGs containing only an embedded image probably wouldn't count as software. But what if you started applying programmatic transformations to them? This SVG embeds an image and uses software to rotate it upside down.

<svg version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="64" height="64">
  <image x="0" y="0" width="64" height="64"
    transform="rotate(180)"
    href="data:image/png;base64,iVB…" />
</svg>

Is that enough code to count as software?

Wisdom of the Crowds

I conducted a rigorously accurate public survey. Here are the results:

Post by @Edent@mastodon.social

View on Mastodon

Final Thoughts

Personally, I think SVGs are software. I understand the argument that they're suitable for Creative Commons, but I disagree with it. Even the simplest SVG is distributed in a way that its contents are executed by the computer.

While SVGs may be minified and stripped of comments, they still retain the essence of source code. I suppose you could try to obfuscate them, or package them up in a quasi-binary form, but I maintain the source is still viewable and editable.

If you choose to use a Creative Commons Share-Alike licence, it probably won't cause any harm. But given CC's reluctance to endorse its use on software, it probably makes sense to use a copyleft source-code licence.

Day - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-20T00:00:00.000Z

The warm glow at the door, intensified by the morning sun beaming and then reflecting on the blank walls of the hallway, is the first colour I notice when I wake. I then look around and see the blue around the blinds – colour from the evening before, but seen from a new perspective: the hybrid of restfulness and tiredness that occupies the first few moments of the day.

My eyes are heavy, lingering between the last moments of sleep and the beginning of the new day. When I close my eyes I dream of the day ahead. Idle thoughts come to mind: when will I get up? More serious thoughts arise, too: how can I comprehend the contradictions of modernity? Such thoughts pass. I haven’t had a cup of tea yet.

I hear the birds sing. When the bird song recedes, I notice breath – life – is the loudest sound I can hear.

I wake up to a bluer sky than I have seen in a week. I later hear that the weather for the next week is to be sunny. That reminds me: the solstice is coming soon: the longest day. We are always so close to Nature. Memories of music and tales of travel come to mind. Mornings feel like the space for reminiscing and dreaming and waking.

As I get ready to go on my morning walk – a walk to which I have been looking forward for days, with the sky now clear – I find in my pocket the five pence coin I found outside of a museum. I remember the phrase “Find a penny pick it up, and all day you’ll have good luck. If you pass it to a friend, then your luck will never end.”

Leaving the house, I sing the songs I played yesterday evening with the world waking up around me: the melody of day.

Search Is Broken - Kev Quirk

2026-06-19T20:28:00.000Z

I was listening to Late Night Linux 390 during my evening walking with the pooches tonight, and they were talking about (among other things) Kagi search.

I've tried Kagi myself, but ultimately cancelled my subscription as I didn't really see the point in paying for it when I could get similar results with DuckDuckGo.

This isn't because DDG or Kagi are inherently bad, it's because no matter which service you use, the web has been SEO'd to within an inch of its life, so we're fucked either way. That's why I stopped using Kagi as I didn't see the point in paying $10/month for a service that can't fix the web despite having some interesting options to help filter the noise.

What I do instead

What I've started doing instead is to use DDG for simple queries that I can quickly and easily get the answer to. For anything more complex, I go to my LLM of choice (currently Gemini) and I ask the question there.

This is because it saves me a tonne of time sifting through all the SEO crap, and I can ask follow up questions too. Win/win.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Metroid Prime Remastered - Joel's Log Files

2026-06-19T17:50:00.000Z

I love Metroid.

While I was aware of emulation from a young age, thanks to Ocarina of Time and Mario Kart 64, I never quite understood that there’s more emulators out there besides the old Project 64 until an older friend showed me his computer running them.

Along Pokémon Fire Red and Final Fantasy I & II, Metroid Fusion was one of the first ever Game Boy Advance games I saw emulated. Fusion andZero Mission were some of the first games I ever completed, and Metroid Dread was the first game I ever finished with 100% items.

Back in the day, when I was less than ten years young. My mom would visit a friend of hers, and they would talk about whatever moms talk about. Mom’s friend babysit me when I was a youngling, she was older than mom and had a son who was also older than me. He had a Wii, and would let me play games like Wii Sports, and even Super Mario Galaxy.

There was one title there that I had seen, featuring that orange armored bounty hunter that I had seen in Super Smash Bros Brawl too, Samus. I remember clearly reading Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and reading the back of the case a few times. It looked interesting for sure, but I never got around to even ask for permission to play it.

Alas, it was one of many titles back then, but as I grew familiar with the mainline 2D games, I was interested on seeing this side of Metroid too, obviously starting from the first game.

While there are many unofficial ways to play the original trilogy, I have a Nintendo Switch and knew that Metroid Prime Remastered was praised as the ultimate way to play the first entry of the trilogy. With this in the back of my mind, I visited my local physical store one day, saw it, and bought it!—then realized it was much, much cheaper to buy online, but whatever.

Years went by and my collection kept growing, I decided I would give this title a go for the Summer Game Challenge, and I’m happy to say: I have experienced a masterpiece.

Story

Metroid Prime Remastered begins with Samus investigating a Space Pirate ship orbiting the planet Tallon IV. After an encounter with some mutated life forms, Samus is forced to escape when the ship’s self-destruct sequence is triggered—something that usually happens until the end of every game—and her power suit suffers some damage, causing her to lose most of her upgrades.

As she escapes she finds a familiar foe, Ridley, flying towards the planet. As weakened as Samus is, she is still fearless, and chases after him, about to begin a new adventure.

Samus will find her way through many environments and locations, to find out what the Space Pirates are doing here. The planet once housed a settlement of the Chozo civilization, but only ruins remain. She will be able to recover her powers by overcoming every obstacle that comes her way, defeating different bosses, and getting a bit lost, from time to time.

The Chozo are an ancient species who raised Samus in her youth. they expanded all over the galaxy, but they suddenly faded away. The game will feature plenty or murals portraying information and a backstory behind everything going on. The same is true for the Space Pirates, who will have logs of their research and plans. As the story continues, there are also mentions of Samus’ arrival and the actions taken by the enemy to try and counteract her progress.

I really, really enjoyed the way this title’s backstory is exposed, it felt like what Outer Wilds—a game I’m yet to beat but played for 11 hours—does for its own exploration. Letting you catch glimpses of what happened, not always in the right order, and allowing you to piece everything togeter until you have a full narrative.

You can find and read all these during the game, but they are also easy to miss and pretty much optional. The way things develop during the game is also interesting, as you see the planet change because of what’s going on, you can tell the influence of the Space Pirates and their plans in effect.

There’s basically no dialogue throughout the whole game, Samus is isolated the whole time. The bounty hunter will face her destiny, and Samus is not here to lose.

Gameplay

Nintendo called this a “First Person Adventure”, where the focus is not on shooting, but exploring your way around the planet. There are many areas to explore, the Chozo ruins, Tallon IV’s Overworld, the Magmoor Mines, the Phendrana Drifts, and many locations within those regions. It’s just a Metroidvania in first person okay?

For exploration, Samus counts with a variety of movement options, that will let you reach different areas of the map. Upgrades like the morph ball and the grapple beam are classic at this point, smooth and satisfying to use. There are many more upgrades and some movement options. I would rather not spoil them as some of them are unique to Metroid Prime. There was a lot of thought put into how these powers would be brought to the third dimension. I’d say all of them were adapted perfectly.

Another unique feature of Prime is the visor. The developers put a lot of care making sure the player is inmersed into their role as Samus. When something explodes, for example, the light will reflect and you’ll see a glimpse of your own face. When there is sand, or smoke, the visor will be obstructed or foggy. There are other conditions which affect your vision, and these are a highlight of the game worth experiencing.

The visor also has upgrades to unlock. The scan function allows you to investigate targets in your field of vision. This is essential to find clues to defeat enemies, translate writings on walls or decrypt computer logs. They are key to interacting with machinery, disabling enemy barriers and many other uses. Future visor upgrades will let you see behind walls or trace heat signatures.

The remaster features dual stick controls akin to Halo and modern FPS titles, but there’s also layouts that mimmick the original Game Cube or Wii. I played with the modern control scheme during the whole game.

As enemies can attack from every angle and come in a variety of sizes, there is an automatic lock-in system built into the game. Unlike regular shooters, trying to aim yourself is not really worth it. Instead, exploring your surroundings is encouraged. As you backtrack through areas, simply avoiding enemies becomes easier than trying to kill them all everytime, like classic 2D Metroid.

There is no denying this: Samus is slow as a tank, jumps are floaty and somewhat difficult to get used to. In Metroid Dread you can pretty much fly through the whole game at max speed and you feel like the most agile being in the galaxy, sliding under obstacles and running at fast speeds. Not here. However, upgrades will at least help you optimize some routes.

As an old title, some mechanics can put off players used to modern quality of life features. There is no autosave, there are no retries for rooms or boss fights, there are no quick travel options. The world will connect to areas and have have multiple ways to access them, but the trips won’t get any shorter. Some areas in the game will be true challenges, with barely any save rooms in between constant enemy fire. This game really wants to test your skill to make sure you are ready for the final moments, if you can’t make progress through those, you probably missed a lot of health or missile upgrades you could go search for.

The map is interesting. A full 3D representation of the world, divided in regions and then more detailed maps for each. You can see your location and your direction, as well as all the doors you’ve accessed and their colors indicating what unlocks them. The map will also show hints from time to time, indicating you where to go next, but you may not be able to get there yet, and you won’t know the exact path to take. This is a great feature in my opinion. The one miss here is the lack of any indication when a room has been fully explored and all the items in it have been taken. A bit annoying when hunting for upgrades and not knowing where they are.

Boss fights in the game were a bit of a mixed bag, because of the lock-in shooting, most of them are built around waiting and waiting around and avoiding attacks until a weak spot is exposed. Some weak spots will be invisible unless you use a special visor mode, and some of them require you to use a specific beam attack or missile. This requires constant switching around of the beam and visor modes, and it was part of my main struggles with the controls scheme of the game.

In Breath of the Wild switching weapons or equipment freezes the screen and lets you take choose what to do at your leisure. In Metroid Prime, you have to switch beams and visors while on the move, and there will be an animation of a few seconds between each change. I never quite learned the button combinations until the very end, and even then it was still a bit of a mess. The worst of this happens when the door to the next room also requires a different beam to be opened. Most 2D titles in the franchise stacked beam effects on top of one another, or would let you toggle them in the pause menu.

Honestly, I don’t hate this decision. There even are occasions when multiple enemies will appear that will require different beams to be beaten. Each encounter requires you to pay attention and be efficient with your attacks—or run away to the next door and ignore everything trying to avoid as much damage as possible. The mechanic is fun, I just wish the controls were a bit better. I am not sure what I would have done myself.

Overall, the classic Metroid gameplay was adapted to perfection to the 3D world, there’s a reason this game was the best sold Metroid until Metroid Dread came along. I loved playing through it, even if traversal especially because of backtracking, was a bit annoying.

The art and music

Despite all this, the truth of the matter is that exploring Tallon IV is an absolute delight.

Metroid Prime came out in 2002, and it already featured incredible graphics for the time. Metroid Prime Remastered manages to do the same in modern times, offering an incredible level of visuals and performance that I never thought possible on the Nintendo Switch. This is easily the best looking game I’ve played on the system, it runs at 60 FPS without any struggles at all.

This smooth as butter movement and camera controls were a blessing I didn’t expect, and I’m thankful for them.

Another highlight has to be the HUD, the interface around Samus’s helmet looks amazing. I already talked about how it reacts to the environment, but the overall design deserves a lot of praise as well. The stylization of the visorts is excellently done.

Same goes for the music. The score of this game has been familiar to me since 2012, when I first saw some of those YouTube playlists with a title like “Relaxing Nintendo Music to Study and Work”. When Nintendo released their Nintendo Music app, their Tallon IV Exploration playlist quickly became a favorite of mine. I recognized it as soon as the game booted up, and I was incredibly surprised at how much it fully immersed me into this world. When I first visited the Phendrana Drifts, I stood there in awe as the music played.

The score contains reinterpretations of classic Metroid soundtracks. It is very fitting and iconic to this day. This soundtrack is simply beautiful, some of the best atmospheric music ever.

The Remastered version also let’s you access a ton of extras. 3D Models of the characters and enemies, conceptual artwork of the original Metroid Prime and the Remastered, and the soundtrack can be unlocked too!

The good

The music is fantastic and very immersive, fading perfectly as you traverse the world.
The visor, the effects around it, its interface and everything truly make you feel like Samus.
The power-ups from the classic Metroid are expertly brought to the third dimension, and new powers that work great because of this.
If you are lost, there are helpful hints that trigger after some time, letting you know where to go next, but not how.
The lock-in shooting let’s you deal with enemies swiftly while strafing around them.
The world design is great, it’s fun to realize how everything connects.
The story shown through scans and logs is very interesting and adds a lot to Metroid’s lore.
Performance is smooth as butter, and mastering the movement and controls is satisfying.

The bad

The movement can be hard to get used to and feels slow at first.
Switching weapons/visor modes can be confusing and annoying in the heat of combat.
No quick travel options, backtracking can take a long time.
Scanning every room and looking for clues can be annoying.
No easy way to mark locations to remember any dead ends you may want to return to.
Some boss fights amount to waiting around a long time until you can shoot at a weakspot.
There are no indicators for rooms with missing items or upgrades.
You can only save via save rooms, no auto-save. This could be a positive for people looking for challenge

Some tips and tricks

Be ready to accept your defeat when you are far from a save spot. Also make sure to check for any enemy spawning areas to recover health easily.
Make sure to spot every door and truly analyze your surroundings. There are areas you can reach very early which you may still miss.
Screenshots! The Nintendo Switch let’s you easily take screenshots. Take one of your view and then the location in the map.
Each room in the map has a name! If you don’t fancy screenshots, just save a note somewhere to return there.
Be ready to shot at weird looking walls, and especially pillars! There are a few things that can be hidden there.
Keep scanning everything you see! There’s a progress percentage of your scans and a lot of story to read.
There is a difference in your jumps when you are targetting an enemy and when you are not, one is faster and to the sides, the normal one has more heights.
Most attacks are actually very easy to avoid, just stay at a safe distance and figure out patterns first.
Seriously, scan every boss you face. It will give you an idea of how to defeat it. Also scan any suspicious things in the arena itself, it might give you hints too.

Final thoughts

I loved this game so much! However there is a grave mistake I made that cost me hours of playtime. Make sure to always remember to look for every door. I already mentioned in the tips and tricks. But there was this area that exposed me to a lot of the early story, that I completely missed for like ten hours.

Most playthroughs of this game are about 12 hours long. Mine was 18 hours, and my playtime on Switch was about 25 hours.

To be clear. I loved pretty much everything about it. But having to drag myself across already visited areas because I missed some pretty obvious clues with items I needed to collect could have been a bit of a chore. Again, I was happy to do it, because I loved the movement by the end and the control I had of Samus and knowing my way around the world, but you may end up very annoyed by it all, or not as thrilled about the slowness of it all.

This game features the best graphics on the Nintendo Switch, the best performance, one of the most fantastic atmospheric music of all time. One of the best transitions to the third dimension in a franchise ever. The familiar sense of progression in the series that started its own genre. I am baffled I didn’t play this sooner, but I am extremely glad I did.

Yes some boss fights are meh and missing out on some scans is annoying. Backtracking will never be for everyone and the lack of a run button may cause some people to riot. Nonetheless, this is amazing stuff.

The original title has a score of 97 in Metacritic, while the remaster has a 94. No matter how you look at it, this is one of the greats! I highly, highly recommend giving it a go. It was a fantastic journey that gripped me the whole way through.

I’ve been able to play and focus on individual games lately, and I’m not sure if that is a change in my own mindset, or if the games are just that good. In any case, this was a blast. A contender for my favorites of the year.

This is day 80 of #100DaysToOffload

Reply to this post via email | Reply on Fediverse

📝 2026-06-19 12:25: Little chicks are starting to venture out from under mum. 🐥 - Kev Quirk

2026-06-19T11:25:00.000Z

Little chicks are starting to venture out from under mum. 🐥

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Proud Dad Moment - Kev Quirk

2026-06-19T11:11:00.000Z

Yesterday was sports day at my kids' school, and usually it consists of us standing in a field, being baked by the sun, waiting for our kids to come on and do their couple races each. All in all, I'm only ever interested in a couple minutes of the 2.5 hours we stand there.

Usually my oldest doesn't try that hard as he struggles with resilience. So if he's not clearly winning, he won't push, he'll give up. And our younger son was always a little too young and therefore uncoordinated, and usually at the back.

This year was different.

Our youngest tried really hard and was rapid! He ended up winning 2 of his races and coming second in another. Great result. But the stand out was our oldest son.

At the end of the day, they give out all the awards and our son won the prized sportsperson of the year award. Not the day…the year. The headteacher talked in great depth about how he is always helpful to the younger kids, how he's always a good sportsman, even if he loses, and how he's happy to share his knowledge to help others be better.

This would make most parents proud, right? But for us, even more so. Our kids are adopted, and thanks to a significant amount of early neglect, our oldest has always found it impossible to share and help others. He always put himself first.

That's not because he's selfish. He's actually a very kind, loving boy. It's because in those early years he had to survive and in order for him to survive it was literally him versus his siblings. What a horrendous situation to be in.

Anyway, to hear that he's not only been a good sport throughout the year, but also that he's sharing and working with his teammates filled his mum and I with joy and made us so proud.

My wife shed a little tear - she thinks I didn't notice, but I did. Me being the clown that I am, I shouted "WELL DONE SAUSAGE!" at the top of my voice so the whole school could hear. Everyone knows I call them the sausages so this made sure every single person on that playground saw him have his moment.

What a legend. ❤️

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Notable links: June 19, 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-06-19T09:00:31.000Z

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.

Change Agent

Gina Chua is one of the people in news who is doing the most to push the conversation forward and prepare the industry for the future. This piece of hers outlines what I think is a necessary skill for survival.

We’re in the fastest period of technology change — and, consequently, the fastest period of journalistic change — in decades. Building takes time; if we aim to build for today, we’ll always be behind. So we need to consider what the future looks like.

That doesn’t necessarily mean having one singular vision for the future, although it may be that one stands out as the most likely or compelling. It may be wise to juggle multiple possible futures, each with their own probabilities, prerequisites, and outcomes. If we deeply research them based on the work of experts in their fields, and then articulate them well, we can share them, and use them organizationally to prepare for what might become true.

Will our information ecosystem radically change in the face of agentic systems? Will people look to community as AI intermediates everything else? Will the open internet fragment in the hands of authoritarianism? None of those things are necessarily the future, but it’s worth considering what all of them might mean.

What we can’t do is assume that the world will stay the same. I would like to burn Gina’s words into the walls of every newsroom and every mission-driven organization in the world:

“You can hear that thinking if you roam the halls of any journalism conference. Get the platforms to pay for content. Do more original journalism. Build deeper relationships with audiences. Drive more direct traffic. But those aren’t theories of change; they are theories that the world won’t change that much, and that the strategies of the past will serve us well in the future, if only we execute them better, faster, and cheaper.”

Each possible future is a kind of speculative fiction. It takes creativity — and bravery — to break out of existing frames and qualitatively consider what might be. These explorations must be informed by how things have played out already, where we are today, and what we know is coming down the pipeline, but they also must be generative and open. In doing so, we uncover ideas that can help us not just navigate what the future might be, but get in front of it and help to shape it — according to our own values and needs.

The world won’t stay the same. Journalism isn’t staying the same. In addition to the rapid change in the platforms we depend on, trust is declining; engagement is declining; for many newsrooms, revenue is declining. A bet on the present is not a winning one. So we need to reach further.

Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report

This year’s Reuters Digital News Report has a key finding that’s worth paying attention to:

“Though it has been the case in some individual countries for several years, at the global level (averaging across 48 markets) social media and video networks are for the first time the single most widely used way of accessing online news (used by 54% of all respondents), ahead of news organisations’ own websites and apps (51%). This shifting composition of news consumption is happening among all age groups.”

For the first time, social media is the primary platform for news globally.

News is how we learn about the world and make informed democratic decisions. That means that, more than ever before, we need to care about who owns these networks, who dictates how they function, and which narratives they promote.

X, of course, was purchased by Elon Musk specifically because he wanted to suppress what he called the “woke mind virus”. It’s a propaganda play, which anyone can see if they load a feed on the platform: shocking white supremacist rhetoric is central.

But every proprietary social platform is subject to some version of this. We don’t have the access to view (or even the ability to truly research) how companies like Meta choose to promote and suppress information. We are subject to their business decisions, including the backroom political decisions they make in order to ensure their own survival.

In contrast, open social web platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are open and verifiable. They run on open protocols that cannot be controlled by a single entity. Their algorithms are either non-existent (in the case of Mastodon) or fully under our control (in the case of Bluesky). Rather than gatekeeping the information we need to be democratic citizens, they give us full control over our information ecosystems.

They’re also full of people who have already self-selected to inhabit more ethical spaces. These turn out to be people who are more likely to both engage with and financially support news. So not only does having an open social web strategy mean you’re engaging in platforms that don’t seek to intermediate democracy, they actually provide better return on investment than more traditional platforms. We need these platforms to exist if we want to have a healthy information landscape; it turns out that engaging in them yields real benefits right now.

News has a choice here: it can shrug its shoulders as an industry and say that it should just meet people wherever they’re at, even if that’s on X. Or newsrooms can choose to promote and prioritize their accounts in spaces that are actually aligned with their values, needs, and business models. I strongly think they should do the latter.

CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

I second this sentiment:

“It seems pretty clear to me that companies that think they’ll be able to layoff huge swaths of workers because of LLM tools are going to find out they’re mistaken pretty quickly. The power of LLMs is that when used well and used willingly it can help employees to get more done, but that doesn’t mean you need fewer humans. You need more humans who know how to work productively.”

I’ve seen some pretty dumb stuff out in the wild: leaders who have expected their engineers to dramatically increase their output to inhuman levels, company-wide token leaderboards, product managers who believe they can replace real user research with synthetic personas, and, of course, high-level leaders who think they can replace their human workers with AI agents. (None of this, I should say, has been at my job, where our work is primarily done by humans and AI, when it is used at all, is an assistive tool.)

I think Mike Masnick’s prescription is accurate: many CEOs are so distant from the actual productive work of a company that they miss the complicated nuance of what goes into it. So if they can produce something with Claude Code that feels analogous to it, a bad CEO might start wondering why they’re hiring all these people.

A good CEO will understand that they’re missing a ton of expertise that goes into building something well, doing work with skill, or even just exercising humane human judgment. The others will find out the hard way that they’re wrong to underestimate their employees.

A Scottish Post: The New Election Threat: Disinformation Inside the Answer

The dangers of AI-generated answers in search results are enumerated here in the context of the recent Scottish election. 75 questions about the ballot were posed on AI systems, and the findings were sobering. On average, 44.4% of responses were at least partially wrong; ChatGPT was specifically wrong 46.2% of the time. Improbably, Grok actually performed the best in this test, with only 8.97% of responses containing factual inaccuracies.

These findings held true in other UK elections:

“Days before the Senedd election in Wales, also held on May 7, BBC Wales tested six major chatbots, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Meta AI, and Grok, against fictional voter profiles. The results echoed Scotland’s almost exactly.”

Some of this is likely just an outcome of how these systems work: hallucinations are par for the course. Nobody knows how to build a completely accurate LLM. But it’s also relatively easy to seed bad information as training data, which can be used to whitewash disinformation: you establish the intentional falsehoods, the LLM poisons its training corpus by ingesting your information, and it then presents your falsehoods as fact.

Researchers at NYU discovered that if 0.001 percent of the training data of a given LLM is “poisoned,” or deliberately planted with misinformation, the entire training set becomes likely to propagate errors. You can do that just by hosting harmful information online: in blogs, on Reddit, in otherwise-trustworthy sites. Once the falsehoods have been internalized by the LLM, the end user will never know.

As the linked article points out, between 7 and 13% of voters in these elections used a chatbot to figure out who to vote for. We’re at the foothills of AI use; these numbers will continue to rise. And with them, a real risk to maintaining an informed democratic voting population.

Elena Rossini (rightly) calls shenanigans on what’s been happening in the European social world. I think what happened should be instructive for any pro-social technology movement.

Here’s what happened:

Earlier this month, the European Commission announced a technology sovereignty plan that included a reliance on open source software as a path to autonomy.

Eurosky, a non-profit fork of Bluesky that is both fully open source and stores all its data in the EU, subsequently launched Mu, a social media application running on AT Protocol that is fully EU-based and is arguably more fully-featured than Bluesky itself.

But the European Commission, including its President and its Central Bank’s President, went another way by migrating to W Social, a proprietary AT Protocol. Whereas Eurosky is a non-profit that has worked extensively in the open with open social web and democratic communities, W Social is a for-profit startup that has been opaque about its intentions and, as Elena now reports, has now pulled its code from being available on an open source basis. These EC profiles now live on a platform that contradicts the EC’s own sovereignty plan.

Worse, the founders have a track record of using causes like climate change for their own profit, notably using Greta Thunberg to raise money for a venture capital firm without her knowledge or consent.

So I strongly agree with Elena’s implication that the Commission made a poor decision here. But it happened because its founders are heavily connected: it launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and its advisors include politicians from across Europe.

Ten years ago I joined a top 100 website after working in open source social for a decade. Based on my naïve experience in open circles, I’d assumed it competed on having a great product. In fact, it hired well-connected partnerships people, already known to influential decision-makers, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes. That team included the relatives of Presidential hopefuls and people who had built wildly successful careers as media executives. Having a good product was table stakes at best; being successful meant negotiating politics, making quid-pro-quo deals, and convincing people to join by any means necessary.

W Social is the insider’s tool: a platform created people who know how to work the system for their own benefit. That ultimately means it’s more likely to betray its users. It seems likely to me that when the discourse moves away from sovereignty to something else, the founders will also shift. But it’s not a surprise to me that European politicians are more likely to work with a platform that partners with and pays people they already know.

The nice thing about open platforms is that there doesn’t need to be one winner. The European Commission has made a bad decision, but Eurosky can still find everyone else. By building better tools for the writers, the artists, the culture-makers, and onboarding people through careful outreach one community at a time, it can serve as the basis for a new social commons. I hope it succeeds.

Rainbow - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-19T00:00:00.000Z

“Cheers.” I like to say a toast to the day: to myself and others: peace, hope, happiness, health. After I raised my glass of orange juice, I looked up and saw a rainbow. I don’t think I have ever seen a rainbow from this view before: a rainbow that stands out among the grey clouds, originating from a valley in which many stories have been told.

As I watch the rainbow and notice the clouds movie, a tiny grey cloud floats past, insignificant relative to the rainbow: rain created the conditions for the rainbow, but the colour cannot be dulled by a lone grey cloud. I keep looking at the colours, which seem to intensify in some places. I notice the blue sky above. Will more of the sky be blue soon? The colour and light brought a smile to my face.

I see the faintest hint of a second rainbow, a tiny haze of colour, but enough for me to see. In the background, the birds sing the melody of the morning. Cars occasionally pass: people are starting their days. The world is waking up. I am, too. The warm breeze from the window eases me into the summer day.

After several minutes, the rainbow started to fade, slowly. I wanted to hold onto the colour as much as I could, so I kept watching until I could see no more colour. Soon, the rainbow was gone. But when I stood up and went to look out the window moments later, the rainbow was back again, not quite as intense as the first rainbow but all the colours of the spectrum – the reds and yellows and violets – are still discernible.

Intense and contrasting with the dark green of the trees that surround me, the rainbow brought a little bit of joy into the morning. I wonder how many other people smiled this morning too – or are smiling now – as they too notice the rainbow.

The European Commission falls for openness theater by working with W Social - Werd I/O

2026-06-18T16:31:37.000Z

Link: W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty, by Elena Rossini

Elena Rossini (rightly) calls shenanigans on what’s been happening in the European social world. I think what happened should be instructive for any pro-social technology movement.

Here’s what happened:

Earlier this month, the European Commission announced a technology sovereignty plan that included a reliance on open source software as a path to autonomy.

More people get their news from social media than anywhere else - globally. The platforms we use matter. - Werd I/O

2026-06-18T14:13:23.000Z

Link: Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report, by Jim Egan at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

This year’s Reuters Digital News Report has a key finding that’s worth paying attention to:

“Though it has been the case in some individual countries for several years, at the global level (averaging across 48 markets) social media and video networks are for the first time the single most widely used way of accessing online news (used by 54% of all respondents), ahead of news organisations’ own websites and apps (51%). This shifting composition of news consumption is happening among all age groups.”

For the first time, social media is the primary platform for news globally.

By the pricking of my corpus, something wicked answers for us - Werd I/O

2026-06-18T13:26:30.000Z

Link: A Scottish Post: The New Election Threat: Disinformation Inside the Answer, by Tim Chambers in Will Robinson's Newsletter

These findings held true in other UK elections:

“Days before the Senedd election in Wales, also held on May 7, BBC Wales tested six major chatbots, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Meta AI, and Grok, against fictional voter profiles. The results echoed Scotland’s almost exactly.”

Book Review: The Great When by Alan Moore ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-06-18T11:34:19.000Z

This is the most overwritten book I've ever read. Unfortunately, Alan Moore knows exactly how much polysyllabic pressure it takes to transmogrify base coal into precious gems.

With lines like "his shaved suede skull made him look like a wilted thistle" and "There was a rumour of pink lipstick circling her mouth" you know you're in for a treat. Even better than the joyful prose of Bob Mortimer's Satsuma Complex.

I'm also pretty sure Moore is actually a wizard. I've just finished reading a book about Black Britain in Wartime - which features Ras Prince Monolulu, who also appears in this book. Along with M. P. Shiel - who I did my GCSE coursework on. And, no spoilers, but I'm fairly sure I'd met other characters too. The only logical conclusion is that Moore is stalking my brain.

It is an epic tale full of rogues and reprobates. The story is excellent even though the plot follows a fairly basic structure. Although set up to be a series, it is a satisfying stand-alone tale.

My only real criticism of it is the trope of the "failing light of English magic" - much like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Shades of Milk and Honey, Sorcerer to the Crown, Babel, and a hundred other books. Britain was a great (magical) power and it's up to our hero to Make Magic Great Again. Well, sort of. I suspect that's going to feature more heavily in the sequels.

A pleasure to read and I look forward to both Alan and I being bitterly disappointed in the Bowdlerised Apple TV miniseries.

A realisation on the nature of information storage - Johnny.Decimal

2026-06-18T03:34:24.000Z

In opening up the ID for the topic of this afternoon's Small Business Zoom session – 33.22 Annual SBS TGIF cycle – I had one of those tiny niggles of annoyance that comes from not being able to instantly recall the location of a thing.¹

Moments later the ID was found, and with it a deep realisation about the nature of systems like Johnny.Decimal: that, at the very least, they force you to store your information somewhere.

This is best demonstrated with the counter-point: storing your information nowhere. By which I mean, on your Desktop. Or just in a floating text document that you never dare close. Or in a chat window, or in one of 40 SharePoint folders whose locations you can never recall.

Forcing you to choose an actual place – an ID, that you had to create – is a touch annoying. It's extra work: I've never pretended that it was 'free' from a mental perspective.

But, when trying to find this thing just now, there was a baseline sense of comfort: the thing is somewhere.

I'm very impatient. ↩

Hades - Joel's Log Files

2026-06-18T02:38:37.000Z

Back when I purchased my Nintendo Switch in 2023, there were only a few titles I cared about trying on it. Among the first games I purchased at the time was Hades, released in 2020, developed by Supergiant Games.

Hades had already made a name for itself, as a title that redefined the genre and the medium, in manners that only a few get to do. It happened with Ocarina of Time and 3D action combat, with Halo’s controller layout for FPS games, with Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, giving birth to a genre that has flourished with iconic titles known to all. It’s a work that left a mark this decade already.

Roguelikes have been around for ages, and I have tried and played a fair share of them, even if none have quite landed for me until now, I could appreciate what they do. I wrote a bit about roguelikes a while ago if you want some more thoughts about them. Some interesting comments on that post as well!

Alas, Hades is very different.

A roguelike is a game where you have to complete without dying. If you do, ultiple elements of the game will be randomized and procedurally generated. Item locations, rooms, enemies. Every playthrough is unique, every death permanent.

Most roguelikes are very much focused on forcing you to get better at the game. Something like Spelunky will rely on your ability to understand its mechanics a little more run after run, the rooms and levels may change, but the way the world works is the same always. You have to help yourself, improve yourself, try things and learn as much as you can so if you die, it will be a bit easier and you will have mastered the game enough to complete it, earn the victory yourself. This is the same for many other classic roguelikes, like Dungeon Cralw Stone Soup, Shattered Pixel Dungeons or Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Something like Ember Knights, Dead Cells and Rogue Legacy will feature meta-progression. Items that will ease each run, with things like extra lives, more speed, better weapons, or regenerative health, benefits present in other roguelikes, but often lost forever by the next run. Some times those games may mix those benefits with caveats that add variation to each attempt too, and I’m sure others have tried to balance the game in similar ways.

One style can be way too difficult and repetitive for some players, while providing a true challenge and a real sense of getting good at it to others. While it can be unfair to lose hours of progress in a run, a game you will eventually complete because you keep unlocking new permanent upgrades and enemies don’t get any tougher, can end up feeling just as pointless.

Hades features meta-progression, choices and multiple paths to take so you can build up your moveset and make your way through rooms until you reach the end. But how does it justify this?

The story.

Most roguelikes have a very mild sense of story. Since you often die quickly, it doesn’t really matter, you just try again for no particular reason. This can be a deal breaker if the mechanics are not enough to hold your interest. This happened to me in the case of stuff like One Step From Eden, where I feel no reason to go through it, while others absolutely love the depth of its mechanics and nods to other games.

Hades has a story, where we follow Zagreus (or Zag), the son of Hades, ruler of the Underworld, as he attempts to reach Mount Olympus to reunite with the rest of his family. Going through every level of the Underworld, an endless maze of shuffling rooms and enemies that no mortal can escape from.

This is the basis on which everything is justified. Zag is escaping the house of Hades, everytime he tries to run away, the gods of Olympus aid him with boons: attack effects, better stats, more movement options, etc. There will also be rooms that reward you with weapon upgrades, or with different currencies to get permanent benefits.

Each god has something to say when giving you a boon, and each god will offer certain powers that can even synergize with those from other gods. They all have a different character and you will get to meet them better, as the story continues. Understanding the family dynamics of them all. Making for a really interesting form of story-telling.

Mechanically, each god is different too. Athena focuses on deflecting and defense, Poseidon can push away enemies with waves, Zeus has lightning chip damage that bounces through enemies, and the like.

There are plenty of other characters in each level of the Underworld, muses, fallen kings, forgotten warriors, people who will aid you in different ways. And of course, boss fights! I’ve already spoiled enough.

You can not actually die. Each time you lose, you are carried away by the Styx river, back to the House of Hades. And this is where the things get interesting. Since there is no fighting in the House, you can just interact and know characters there better, some who want to help you, some who are there to stop you.

These moments between runs are where most of the story will develop, where you will know why Zag wants to make it to the top, why the Olympians are aiding you at all, and understand more about the complicated relationship between Hades and his family. You can get to know and unlock more lore about each character, as well as obtain certain benefits by offering something to them in the game.

All of this is aided by some of the best artwork I have ever seen. Each character is portrayed in a fantastic way, and all of them are really cool. There is some fantastic voice work too, the talent and the effort put into all of this is amazing.

Featuring half a dozen weapons and a rather versatile moveset, each run is never the same, while at the same time, it kind of is. Here’s where Hades can make or break it for a player, as it essentially is a bit of a button masher when it comes to its gameplay…

You got your Dash, Attack, Special Attack and Cast, these are the four moves you get to do, each one varies depending on your weapon and there’s some combos for each, also affected by whatever weapon upgrade you may get during a run. The truth remains the same, most of the time you’ll dash dash attack, dash dash special, dash dash attack, cast cast cast, rinse and repeat.

This is not a bad thing by itself. The game will hook you and get you in a focus state where you will evade your way through everything and anihiliate everyone and you won’t even realize it. But that’s if you get good…

The game is also quite difficult. There are no one-hit kills or anything, but the environment and traps and constant damage will eventually get to you if you are not careful. This can be really rough, and will stop a lot of people on their tracks. It took me about thirty runs before I finally reached the end, and no, I did not win that final boss fight until later.

The game features one helpful feature for this: Godmode. A tickbox in the pause menu that increases your defense by 2% each time you die.

Of course, Hades wants you to die multiple times to keep seeing more of the story, and accepting each defeat as part of the cycle is kind of important. This is a game where reaching the final boss fight is not really the end goal. Even after you win, there will be reasons to keep going, and more interactions to be had after each death or victory.

The story is full of revelations and very interesting developments, there are also other side plots that make you care about some of the side characters you meet along the way. I reached the end of some of them, but not all, before I reached credits, and it’s one of the things that I am interested on returning to, if I’m honest.

Just like the artwork, the music is outstanding as well. A very epic score that gets the heart pumping during those epic battles. Where screens are full of enemies and projectiles fill up the screen. The game is excellently optimized for Nintendo Switch, running at 60 fps despite the amount of assets loaded up. It has a hiccup here and there, but nothing significant.

The bad

The gameplay can feel repetitive if you don’t change up weapons or strategy.
The difficulty can be really high if you don’t enable Godmode.
Difficult cannot be manually configured, no difficulty options.
Button mashing can end up actually hurting you if you go too hard with it.
Not all strategies and boons are as good as others, some runs will be just bad.
Meta-progression can be a deterrent for some people.

The good

The gameplay can hook you and get you into a flow state.
The challenge is always there and can be amped up later to counteract permanent upgrades.
Godmode allows you to ease the burdens of the game over time as you continue to experience the story.
The characters, writing, artwork, animation, music and overall production of this game is top notch.
You can choose a variety of weapons catering to different styles of play.
Meta-progression and Godmode ensures you can eventually get to the end of the game with some persistence.
The story is simply fantastic and worth experiencing.

Some tips and reminders

Athena’s boons are awesome, use them
Try every weapon, one is bound to be great for you, my favorite was the bow
Talk with everyone every time you die, you can technically skip this, but why would you deny yourself the awesome interactions?
If a run is bound to be bad, try to focus on resource gathering! It will often help you more.

Final thoughts

I played through the game in a span of three years, so even though I was never fully hooked by it, I was interested on trying it and getting to complete it, and I am glad I gave it the time. Even during the span of times where I didn’t touch the game at all, it remained in my memory, and every time I returned to it, I would often spend two or three hours in a day, making progress, it was just that sort of game for me.

What is there to say about Hades that hasn’t been said? It is a roguelike with excellent mechanics that are absolutely justified within the story, and because of that, it was never tiring for me to go through the motions. The gameplay did hook me for hours at a time, always going for two or three runs whenever I had the chance. I was not helplessly addicted to it like some people who played it like 400 hours, but I got about 40 hours of playtime myself before I finally reached the credits, and saw the conclusion of the story.

There is still an epilogue, it seems, that will tie up some more knots, and side plots I would like to conclude, but I am fine writing about the game by now. It was a wonderful time, and I really recommend giving it a go!

This is day 81 of #100DaysToOffload

Reply to this post via email | Reply on Fediverse

Views - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-18T00:00:00.000Z

The faint reflection of the hall catches my eye; how nature and humanity blend — how there are so many ways to see the world; how painting lets us explore what we see and what we want the world to be, just like words. A figure — a few brush stokes and colours — stands out in the grove of light amid the shadowed grounds. To see the geometry of the inclining hill, the depth of the layers of trees at the end of which is the house and the sky.

When I walked into the National Gallery of Scotland today, there were three paintings near the entrance that caught my eye: two paintings of Durham Castle, and one of Somer Hill at Tonbridge.

When I first saw the painting of Somer Hill, by JMW Turner, I was transfixed. The painting looked both new and familiar at the same time. After studying the painting for a while, I realised I had seen it before: the artwork had been moved from another wall. Yet in this new place – in this new light – with all the time that had passed since I had last seen it, the painting was anew.

I started taking notes of the painting, an impression of which remains in my mind: of the small bird soaring in the bottom of the picture, of the boat in river in the bottom left, of the faint reflection of the hall in the water, painted with such detail, of the golden glow of the sky and the warm colours used in the painting.

After gazing at the painting for some time, I moved on to the two paintings of Durham Castle, a castle I had seen a few times as a child.

Both of the paintings, the first by Turner and the second by Sir George Reid, transformed my understanding of the castle. I held in my mind a childhood impression, and gazed before me to see two more impressions: one abstract, in full colour, the river of my childhood seen in a light beyond my wildest imaginations; the other, truer-to-life, warm, autumnal.

Turner’s impression of the Castle, a building now ruined, left me thinking about how only a few colours and details could create a whole new image of the castle. The yellow of the sunshine reflects on the river. The blue castle stands strong in the middle of the painting. I thought to myself it would be hard for me to interpret the painting without the explanatory text next to the artwork – there was no way for me to know it was Durham Castle without the text. In this painting, too, the castle reflects on the river.

Sir George Reid’s painting brought Durham Castle back to life in my mind in a new way – Turner’s interpretation was one of colour and abstraction, Reid’s was one that brought me back to my time passing through Norham as a child. The autumn leaves in the painting were wonderful; the painting radiated warmth. Two birds fly close to the river. The castle appears small compared to Nature.

I went into the gallery expecting to go to the medieval art and left having seen a place I knew from childhood in two new lights, and an image of a country house far away depicted with such attention to depth that I felt like I was only beginning to appreciate the details of the painting in my visit today. Indeed, one of the wonderful things about art is that the more you look, the more you see – the same is true, too, of life.

Sir George Reid’s painting Somer Hill, by JMW Turner Turner’s impression of the Castle

The fountain - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-18T00:00:00.000Z

I opened my eyes and saw pink flowers; the countryside was dotted with flowers of all colours. Bees bounced between the thistles. I was delighted by all that I saw when I opened my eyes on the train journey; sleep is seductive, but so, too, is colour.

I spent the afternoon on my feet, wandering. I think wandering felt right because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. I wanted to walk to figure out where I should be. This has been a theme lately: I put one foot in front of another and look around, admiring the world around.

On my first stop I saw a tiled floor with a Greek motif reflected in the chrome espresso machine in a small cafe. I revealed in the sound of the espresso machine; the way the steam wand halts with a whimper. I appreciated the colour of all the ceramic cups on top of the machine. I noted that “Greek motif” is now part of my vocabulary. With studying, I see more patterns in the world.

I kept walking, drinking one of the best decaf flat whites I have had. I look up and see a car pass whose license plate ended with “JOY”. I look around and see and appreciate the architecture of all that is around: the way that two houses next to each other have doors that look exactly the same, the corinthian capitals of the pillars in the front of some buildings, the different kinds of columns whose name I can’t remember but that I know are of specific orders.

We are all time travellers. Did this thought come from looking at Georgian architecture over a hundred years old? With every second we travel through time: we go to the future. And with every moment we look back, we go to the past . We live within time, our time, and all of time. The coffee reminded me of a place I visited last year. There is something delightful about how the mind can go from appreciating taste to admiring the temporal in the space of a minute.

I kept walking, exploring, ending up in a Parish courtyard. A person sat on the stone steps at a red door, taking notes. I wonder if they were writing a story. Studying? I wonder. Shortly thereafter, walking loosely in the direction of an art gallery, I thought to myself “the world is my art gallery”. Wherever we go there is architecture, people, stories – life – just like in an art gallery.

I stopped at a fountain, a tall turquoise fountain with a gilded top. A bird perched on the top. I appreciate how we can all see the world from our own perspectives. Perhaps only birds will see the city from the perspective of sitting atop the fountain. What can I see from where I am?

The gardens are blue and red and yellow and a lighter blue and pink and white. The grass is green; the trees around the fountain are green, too. Did we remove a tree to make space for the fountain, or did we plant the trees to make this space? Around me dozens of people sit on benches. An older man looks upward with his hand on his chin and an inquisitive look on his face, as if deciding where to go next. I, too, am deciding where to go. His gaze was toward the spire of the church I had passed several minutes earlier.

As the water rushes down the mountain, I realise I am not sure how fountains work – there is so much to learn; there are details everywhere. The prospect of rain that the sky carried fell into the background as I watched people pass by one by one, many stopping to take pictures and to look at the fountain. I wondered if I might see a rainbow here on a sunnier day.

Two kids shout “playground!”, looking excitedly toward said playground. A lady seated at a nearby bench looks toward the fountain and smiles. I do too. How many people have stood here before, smiling at the fountain?

I’m not sure how much time I spent watching the world go by. I kept watching because I was so excited by all of the stories: the people who decided to spend time here. Eventually, I stood up and started walking toward the art gallery. The fountain kept flowing as I walked away. In the background and all around, new memories are made second by second, minute by minute.

Why am I here at the fountain? I wondered. The first answer that came to mind was “To be part of the story.”

📝 2026-06-17 13:56: So you know how we have the incubator setup? Well, unbeknownst to me, my wife... - Kev Quirk

2026-06-17T12:56:00.000Z

So you know how we have the incubator setup? Well, unbeknownst to me, my wife gave one of our broody hens a cluch of Guinea fowl eggs to sit on a month ago.

She just sent me this...

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Adding a Town Square - Kev Quirk

2026-06-17T09:24:00.000Z

I recently learned about this fantastic project where visitors are able to "chat" with one another in a fun and private way.

I had to try it!

So now, at the bottom of every page on this site, you will see my little town square. Please take a look and have some fun with it. If you want to learn more about Town Square, you can take a look at this post from its creator, Cauê Napier.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

📝 2026-06-17 07:04: We have the incubator setup incubating a dozen eggs, including the last 2 our hen... - Kev Quirk

2026-06-17T06:04:00.000Z

We have the incubator setup incubating a dozen eggs, including the last 2 our hen that was caught by the fox layed.

Expect regular updates. 🐣

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

In need of numbers? - Johnny.Decimal

2026-06-17T02:32:49.000Z

It took me a while to figure out what this even was. So much potential…

Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Which Copyleft Licence is Suitable for an SVG? - Terence Eden’s Blog

Day - James' Coffee Blog

Search Is Broken - Kev Quirk

What I do instead

Metroid Prime Remastered - Joel's Log Files

Story

Gameplay

The art and music

The good

The bad

Some tips and tricks

Final thoughts

📝 2026-06-19 12:25: Little chicks are starting to venture out from under mum. 🐥 - Kev Quirk

Proud Dad Moment - Kev Quirk

Notable links: June 19, 2026 - Werd I/O

Rainbow - James' Coffee Blog

The European Commission falls for openness theater by working with W Social - Werd I/O

More people get their news from social media than anywhere else - globally. The platforms we use matter. - Werd I/O

By the pricking of my corpus, something wicked answers for us - Werd I/O

Book Review: The Great When by Alan Moore ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

A realisation on the nature of information storage - Johnny.Decimal

Footnotes

Hades - Joel's Log Files

The bad

The good

Some tips and reminders

Final thoughts

Views - James' Coffee Blog

The fountain - James' Coffee Blog

📝 2026-06-17 13:56: So you know how we have the incubator setup? Well, unbeknownst to me, my wife... - Kev Quirk

Adding a Town Square - Kev Quirk

📝 2026-06-17 07:04: We have the incubator setup incubating a dozen eggs, including the last 2 our hen... - Kev Quirk

In need of numbers? - Johnny.Decimal