Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Chatbot election answers are dominated by one right-wing dude and an army of AI slop. - Werd I/O

2026-11-02T21:01:38.000Z

Link: How an obscure website became a force in America’s election information machine, by Ian Duncan and Kevin Schaul in the Washington Post

There hasn’t been enough discussion about the proliferation of reference sites that are built not for humans but to influence chatbot answers. Take the Ballot Brief, which was designed to influence questions about the election:

“In tests by The Washington Post, ChatGPT cited the Ballot Brief in 22 percent of its answers to questions about the election. Microsoft’s Copilot cited it in 75 percent of answers. […] Anthropic’s Claude initially turned to established voter guides run by nonprofits — but started frequently linking to the Ballot Brief in The Post’s second round of tests.”

The Ballot Brief is, in itself, built using AI, with one guy — Ben Torres Ezrick — in control. Here in the US, 42% of adults use AI to ask questions, including about the election. That gives Torres Ezrick outsize influence on information people receive that may influence how they use their vote. Given that Torres Ezrick’s most recent position was Chief Marketing Officer at the far-right video streaming service Rumble, that should probably give us some pause.

And even without that potential rightward skew, the Ballot Brief consists of a bunch of content created at scale using AI with little oversight. So inevitably, there are mistakes:

“The Post identified numerous mistakes on the Ballot Brief. Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) was credited with supporting a bill that passed before he took office — an error that Copilot repeated in a response to The Post. Two Robert Garcias running in California were collapsed into one profile. And several House members were listed with incorrect committee jobs.”

The web has already been insufferable for years because of SEO; this has only gotten worse with the rise of AI-generated marketing content. Now it stands to become a battleground as various entrenched interests fight to have their perspectives represented in chatbot results.

Should newsrooms counteract this with their own set of open, validated information? Or is it an unwinnable arms race that is bound to be dominated by moneyed interests? I’m not sure. But the web is certainly no longer just a place for humans to publish and be heard.

Lorem Ipsum Dot Gov Dot UK - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-02T12:34:00.000Z

I love testing in production. The thrill of accidentally publishing some dummy data - or taking down an entire website - is similar to skydiving without a parachute. Exquisite excitement followed by heart-stopping terror.

Before going live with a new website or service, it's sensible to test how text looks on it. Most people don't test with readable text - it's too easy for management to start reading the content rather than looking at the layout. So the default is the Latin text "Lorem ipsum". Latin looks enough like English to get a feel for how text will render - but most people can't read it so they gloss over the words and look at the layout.

Say, it sure would be annoying if those dummy pages ever made their way to production, right?!?

One of the things that's fascinating about seeing testing data in a live environment is that you get a small peek behind the curtain of how a site was made. A tiny glimpse into the minds of the people who made it.

Who was Alice? Did she enjoy her time working on the London Councils' website?

Was she friends with Henry at Lambeth council? We may never know.

Some of the placeholders eventually become load-bearing. For reasons which remain inscrutable to those who follow, the Elders declared some pages must remain sacrosanct forever!

What would happen if that page were deleted? Would you dare risk it?

Sometimes finding a test page leads to a dead end. A stub of a page which should have been purged before go-live.

But other times it can lead us to a page hinting at something more. Deeper tests of long-forgotten functionality.

What did those plugins do? Aaaaaaaa indeed!

The purpose of this post isn't to point and laugh, it's to show that searching for dummy data is a good way to find interesting things. It might show you a style-guide, or lead to you to a forgotten and outdated plugin, or it might lead you to an entire pre-production environment.

Finally, this image was on one of the FCDO blog posts. I assume that means it is available under the Open Government Licence and, therefore, I can start T-Shirt production immediately!

St Jude Drawings Gallery - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-11-02T12:28:00.000Z

Now it's been a month of so since the end of St Jude September I think enough time has passed that I think everyone's drawings should have arrived now so I can share them. It's hard to pick a favourite but here's a selection of them I wanted to highlight here because I enjoy them. I won't be including Jimothy because I included him in the last post, not because I don't love him.

I can't wait to do this again next year. I scanned all the drawings this year so I've put them all up on the 2026 gallery for your perusal.

Backporting security fixes at scale with Codex - Trail of Bits Blog

2026-11-02T12:00:00.000Z

Stable Linux releases lack existing security fixes because backporting them is time-consuming and often thankless work. We’re using Codex to reduce the backporting process time from days to hours per fix, empowering human patch reviewers to rapidly submit fixes for critical software like Ubuntu Long Term Support, Fedora, and the Linux kernel. By October 29, our project helped deliver fixes for 149 distinct CVEs into stable Linux kernel releases, and several fixes to Fedora and Ubuntu packages.

Deploying fixes to older software requires multiple steps, including adapting fixes to older code, checking dependencies, and ensuring the fix did not introduce new bugs. A single task (like tracking down a bug in a bad commit) can take a week or more of effort that no one sees or appreciates.

Our Codex workflow has reduced the human effort required to prepare and review fixes. Excluding project-specific initial setup, preparing and reviewing a straightforward backport takes about 30 minutes of human attention; a more involved case can take around three hours. The workflow’s approach is twofold: agents perform activities like identifying missing fixes, adapting patches, assembling validation evidence, running tests, and preparing submission packets, while engineers review the patches and submit them to maintainers.

Those estimates only cover patch preparation and review; regression testing and maintainer acceptance remain essential. But the reduced human commitment makes a substantial class of neglected security work practical to undertake. The patch backlog is large, but we now have a practical way to work through it.

Do we have to decide between stability and security?

Software has bugs, and we try to fix them when we can. The first place the fix happens is in the latest version of the software. Unfortunately, that’s often the only place where the fix happens.

Backporting is the process of getting a fix from the latest source code to older versions. Fixes for big-name, critical bugs are indeed often backported quickly. But for many other bugs, the backporting process never happens. It is easy to understand why: software packaging is often done by volunteers who are already overworked, and backporting is frustrating, thankless work that gets little credit or publicity. For open source projects staffed by teams of volunteers, backports are (understandably) a low priority. As XFS developer Dave Chinner once described, this work is “effectively a full time job” that simply goes undone without sufficient resources.

The lack of backports is a problem because almost no one runs the latest and greatest version of software that’s been freshly built with today’s code changes. People overwhelmingly prefer slightly older, more tested software packaged in “long term stable” releases. For example, about 95% of Ubuntu Linux installations are of the Long Term Support (LTS) variety. When looking at installed Linux kernel packages from Debian’s popcon, the overwhelming majority are based on older stable trees:

Figure 1: A Codex-generated graph of recently installed kernel packages from Debian’s popcon. The overwhelming majority (about 96%) are older, stable releases, and not the latest kernel series.

Users are faced with a decision: they can either stick with a stable, familiar version of software that has security flaws, or upgrade to a newer version that fixes those flaws but introduces other changes and new features they may not want.

Many people purposely do not update to new releases; I think this is entirely justified and normal end-user behavior. Just recently, I updated my Mac to macOS 27 and couldn’t use a printer that had worked flawlessly for years (until Codex wrote a new, compatible printer driver). Similar situations effectively require older software.

We should not have to make a choice between stability and security.

Thousands of known CVEs lack stable-branch fixes

A swarm of cyber-capable AI agents can cut through a network of stable, known-vulnerable software like a hot knife through butter. The scale of the problem is such that the software you are currently running likely contains unfixed security bugs that can be exploited by modern AI agents. As AI-assisted bug hunting makes it easier to identify vulnerabilities in older code, reducing this backlog becomes increasingly important. This is not merely theoretical. A fix for the latest high-profile bug, CVE-2026-98432 (a critical remotely exploitable flaw in the Linux TCP stack), still had not landed in distribution kernels weeks after being patched upstream. That bug is high-profile enough that it will soon be fixed everywhere. But fixes for more obscure bugs never get backported. I saw this during my sandbox escape research, and an old vulnerability in stable software was used as a part of the recently disclosed OpenAI hack.

Let’s quantify the scale of the missing backport problem. To make counting simple, we can limit ourselves to known bugs (with assigned CVEs) that are patched in the latest release but missing from stable packages. For this example, we’ll look at the Linux kernel, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Debian 13 Stable. I’m not singling out those projects—they are all run very well! I’m using them because they have documentation and accounting for unfixed CVEs. Other projects lack this transparency.

Let’s look at the number of outstanding CVEs in the Linux kernel, by stable branch. The table below shows CVEs per supported stable branch that do not have a fix in that branch, but do have it in a newer branch. (Hence, older branches by definition have more unfixed CVEs.) The source is the kernel CVE team’s vulns.git as of September 18, 2026. This is not an exact bug count, as it both over- and under-counts due to several technicalities. It is also not a measure of exploitability. Rather, it’s a measuring stick showing that a substantial amount of known CVEs have not been fixed in stable kernel branches:

Branch	Unfixed CVEs	% CVEs with an NVD Score	High or Critical Severity
5.10.y	2,006	55.8%	213 (19.0%)
5.15.y	1,889	51.5%	195 (20.0%)
6.1.y	1,329	43.9%	99 (17.0%)
6.6.y	1,012	35.6%	65 (18.1%)
6.12.y	686	22.3%	21 (13.7%)
6.18.y	337	15.1%	3 (5.9%)

The package landscape is not any better. These are non-kernel CVEs reported as open or affected in Debian 13 and Ubuntu 26.04 (raw data via their respective bulk CVE data feeds, compiled by Codex). These are distro-metadata findings, not individually source-confirmed vulnerabilities. Again, this is not meant to be an exact bug count, but more of a measuring stick indicating how many unfixed vulnerabilities remain in stable software packages:

Distribution	Source Packages with Unfixed CVEs	Unique CVEs	High or Critical Severity
Debian 13	1,128	4,562	1,822 (39.9%)
Ubuntu 26.04	1,028	770	335 (43.5%)

Engineers and AI can accelerate backporting

We realized this was an issue and have been fixing it proactively. First, we started with the equivalent of finding money on the sidewalk: there are bug fixes to known CVEs that apply cleanly to the stable kernel trees, but the fix was just never pulled into the kernel. We used Codex with GPT-5.6 to find these fixes, and asked the maintainers to apply the existing patches. They did, graciously. We then moved on to backporting patches that don’t apply as-is, starting with the most trivial to validate and review, and are slowly moving towards more complex changes. So far 149 CVE fixes in stable trees are currently applied; the list on our backport tracker just keeps growing.

We’ve done the same for Linux distributions: we used Codex and GPT-5.6 to identify known vulnerabilities in shipping stable packages, and then backport and validate a fix. We have begun reaching out to Linux distributions with an initial batch of patches.

If you run an open-source project or a Linux distribution and would like help backporting security fixes, please apply at trailofbits.com/patch-the-planet and we’ll be glad to assist.

The big upside of stable software that does not add features is that we can, in theory, fix bugs before attackers exploit them. So, let’s continue to patch the planet!

Rest of World tells vital stories about the impact of tech on the world. We may lose it anyway. - Werd I/O

2026-11-02T01:32:00.000Z

Link: Rest of World faces prospect of shutting down, by Max Tani in Semafor

I was distraught to hear that Rest of World may have to shut down in January. Since its launch, I’ve relied on its coverage about the impact of technology and the tech industry on communities and geographies that often fall outside of a Western lens. And I’ve become a huge fan of its Chief Product Officer Michael Donohoe, who I think is one of the best product and engineering people working in journalism (or in any industry). Working with a small team, he’s built a site and underlying tech that punches way above its weight.

On one level, the forces that have created issues for Rest of World aren’t unique to it: declining search and social referrals, intermediation by AI chatbots, and a fixation with the Trump administration at the expense of other topics.

But then, as Semafor reports, Rest of World had a unique problem in that its audience was partially the tech industry itself, which has shifted to become more insular and conservative:

“The organization’s leaders also attributed the decline to a deeper cultural shift to the right within the tech community. One senior leader at the organization said they believe tech news readers who previously expressed liberal values and an appetite for consuming global journalism have grown disillusioned with the news media, and now prefer an information diet of inward-looking podcasts, YouTube shows, and chatbot outputs.”

This coincided with a tonal shift in coverage of the tech industry from typically fairly optimistic, glowing pieces about connection and innovation to criticism about oligarchy and the role of tech power in the global rise of authoritarianism. Looking at Rest of World’s homepage today, many headlines are now about how communities around the world are being either taken advantage of by American AI firms or left out of AI developments.

That’s vital coverage, in my opinion, and makes Rest of World required reading for me — but for an industry that likes to be praised for changing the world and is bad at engaging with criticism, it might be a tough read. Semafor notes that the likes of Wired and The Verge, which also produce excellent coverage, are suffering from the same problem (although I’ve also heard that Wired’s subscriptions are growing).

What’s surprising to me is that Rest of World should also be required reading for a whole slew of foundations and NGOs that want to make a positive impact globally, as well as investors looking to support ventures in underserved markets. Clearly this either isn’t happening or it’s not happening in a way that converts into the kind of financial support the newsroom needs.

It’s also, in a way, a warning about newsrooms started by founders with deep pockets. Sophie Schmidt (Eric Schmidt’s daughter) committed $60M to Rest of World a months into its launch. That gave it both a solid mission and an enormous runway that may have made it harder to test and pivot. It did pivot, to focus more on countries that Western readers might be more interested in, as well as to require user registration as a way to know its audience better, but it was relatively late in its life. I’m very grateful for the resulting coverage but I think it would be worth having an open conversation about whether those funds helped or hindered its ability to become sustainable in the long run.

Anyway, I hope it finds a home. I badly want it to continue to exist. For me, it’s the best tech journalism there is.

Anticipation - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-02T00:00:00.000Z

Does the tree anticipate the sunrise, or nonchalantly receive its growing light?

Is the sun why leaves turn yellow in autumn, the colour coming from months of light, and, anticipating darker nights, the tree becomes the sun for as long as it can, before shedding into the new silver season?

The hope-filled tree grows into where it is.

How I Customised Pure Blog for This Site - Kev Quirk

2026-11-01T17:10:00.000Z

A few people have reached out to me to ask how I did X, or Y with my site, so I thought I'd talk about the customisations I've made to this site, and how they work.

Firstly, this site runs on Pure Blog, a CMS that I've been building over the last year or so. As it's matured, I've added features that allow more advanced users to do clever things without having to fiddle with the core platform. This means that people generally shouldn't have to fork the project and should continue to get all the new goodness as I release it.

This site is no different. I haven't done anything clever that Pure Blog can't do out of the box - everything is documented so by reading the docs and using a bit of creativity, you can do quite a lot with this plucky little CMS. I'll link out to the appropriate docs as we go through this post.

Ok, so what customisations have I made? This is going to be a fairly long post, so I'll list them here with links to each header so you can jump around and read the parts that interest you.

If you want to see specific code examples for any of these customisations, feel free to contact me.

Post layouts

I have three custom post types on this site - notes, links, and books. Notes are used as short-form social media type posts, links are links to other blog posts that I've enjoyed, and books are short reviews of the books I read.

Each has their own layout and in the case of notes, they have a different view on the homepage too. To do this I've created a custom post-list.php partial, but we will come to that later.

I could just use the default post type for all these posts, but I prefer to have a customised UI at the back-end for each. Here's what books and links look like in my editor:

Book editor layout

Link editor layout

Notes are a little different as I use a custom page for them that only I can access. This looks more like a social media post window than a blog post window:

Read the custom post layout docs ➡

Hooks and automations

I like to think of hooks as little tripwires that are set to go off when certain conditions are met. For example, something happens when an image is uploaded, or a new post is published. They're extremely useful and I have a number of them on this site:

Email Obfuscation (on_filter_content): Scans rendered content and encodes the site email address into hexadecimal HTML entities to protect against scrapers. This has been pretty effective at reducing spam - I wrote more about this feature in this post.
Post Sanitisation & Metadata Preservation (on_filter_post):
- Automatically generates date/time titles for new notes.
- Normalises layout values by stripping quotes (turning layout: "notes" into layout: notes), ensuring posts written in external editors like Obsidian don't break layout checks.
- Preserves mastodon_url in post frontmatter when saving via the admin interface so the Mastodon card at the bottom of every post continues to work.
Image Optimisation (on_image_uploaded): Automatically resizes images exceeding 2560px width whilst maintaining aspect ratio, also converts them to lossless WebP, and cleans up original unoptimised files.
Mastodon Cross-Posting & Syndication (on_post_published): Automatically crossposts all published post types to Fosstodon via the Mastodon API.
- Notes posts are cross-posted with full body text and media attachments (uploaded to Mastodon's media endpoint).
- Articles, links, and books are crossposted with their description and permalink URL.
- Captures the returned Mastodon status URL and automatically persists mastodon_url into the post's frontmatter which is then used for the Mastodon card at the bottom of every post.
Custom Font for Open Graph Images (on_og_image_font): Makes dynamic Open Graph image generation to use my custom font.

Read the hooks docs ➡

Templates and partials

Beyond custom post types, Pure Blog lets you drop PHP files into content/includes/. These can either override default pieces of the site (like navigation or post footers), or serve as entirely bespoke standalone pages, like my quick-publish notes screen, or the terminal 404 page.

Here's a full list of the templates and partials used on this site:

post-list.php (partial): This replaces the default post-list.php and adds post-type filter buttons, preserving query parameters across pagination. It also displays notes in full, while other post types show only the title and excerpt.
post-meta.php (partial): A customised version of the default post-meta.php file from Pure Blog. On top of the default tag list and post pagination, this version adds the obfuscated "Reply by email" button, a client-side Mastodon conversation card displaying live stats (favourites, boosts, replies) as well as a link to the post on Fosstodon, Pure Comments integration, and a subscription call-to-action.
discover.php (template): Dedicated discovery hub combining Pure Blog's full-text search with an alphabetical, weighted tag cloud showing post frequencies.
sitemap.php (template): An interactive metro map that lists all of the pages on this site. There's also an option to see the pages as a list.
social.php (template): My quick-publish admin screen for composing and publishing short-form note posts.
100.php (template): Dashboard for tracking the 100 Days to Offload challenge streaks in batches of 100 posts.
masthead.php (partial): This replaces the default masthead template in Pure Blog. It adds a custom layout, as well as 404 handoff ($is404) to render the custom 404.php template without modifying core Pure Blog files.
404.php (template): A fun interactive terminal-styled 404 page with custom commands that include goats!
random-post.php (template): Endpoint that resolves and redirects visitors to a randomly chosen published post.

Read the layout partials docs ➡

RSS feed enhancements

I've replaced the default feed with one that allows for filtering on post type. So one feed file, 5 feeds - one for each post type, and a fifth for everything.

My custom feed template allows you to visit /feed/ for everything, or /feed/[post-type] (e.g. /feed/books) for the posts of that particular type. This custom feed file lives in /content and I then used .htaccess redirects to redirect the default /feed URL to /content/feed.php.

All the feed URLs are available here.

Newsletter subscriptions

I use a self-hosted instance of Sendy to send out email "newsletters" whenever I publish a new post. These emails always contain the entire post, so people can read my content from their inbox if they wish.

Because I write notes much more frequently than long-form posts, I let readers choose what they receive: everything, long-form content only, or notes only.

To make that work without sending people through clunky third-party forms, I wrote a custom server-side handler (content/subscribe-handler.php). When someone submits the form on the subscribe page, the handler:

Checks a simple verification question ("What is Kev's surname?") to keep bots at bay.
Silently discards submissions that trigger a honeypot field, or exceed IP rate limits.
Subscribes the user to the correct Sendy list(s) via Sendy's API in a single click.

This not only helps segregate the emails people receive, but it has also had a dramatic effect on spammy sign ups. Which, if you've ever run a newsletter, you will know is a common problem.

Functions and helpers

Pure Blog allows you to add your own PHP helper functions for all kinds of things. On my site, I only have 1 function defined:

render_star_rating(string $rating) which transforms fractional score strings in my book posts (e.g. "4/5") into accessible star glyph strings (e.g. "★★★★☆"). I just think that "★★★★☆" looks far nicer in a post than "4/5".

But how is this star rating accessible? Well, it's rendered on the front-end like this so screen readers can parse it:


    ★★★☆☆

Read the custom functions docs ➡

Design and typography

I don't do anything magical with the design on this site. I use the Victor Mono font, and around 850 lines of CSS, which I've added to the custom CSS field within settings. Combined with the custom masthead, post-list and post-meta files above, it gives me everything I need to customise the site from the default look to what you see now.

I have a custom theme palette that I've defined too, also in settings. The colours used can be found at the bottom of my colophon.

Read the design customisation docs ➡

Data driven pages

One of the most powerful things about using a static site generator is the ability to use data files. With data files you can have a structure data file, like YAML, that contains repeated data, which can then be looped through on the front-end to render content.

I really wanted Pure Blog to be able to support data files, so I added support very early on. Personally, I use two data files on this site:

data/blogroll.yml which is then used to render my blogroll page.
data/projects.yml which is used for my projects.

Data files are fantastic as they reduce the amount of repetitive code you have to write. Instead of typing div, after div, after div manually, you write your div once, then loop through it with a data file and Pure Blog does the rest.

Read the data files docs ➡

`.htaccess` rules

The final thing I customise is my .htaccess file. There's a number of things I do to the standard Pure Blog .htaccess file to either redirect URLs, or protect various locations:

Admin Access Restriction: I restricts /admin/ access to specific allowed IP addresses.
Legacy URL & Feed Redirects:
- 301 redirects mapping historical /blog/* and /categories/* URLs to clean root and /tag/* routes that Pure Blog uses.
- Redirects for legacy feed and social endpoints (/feed.xml, /social-feed, /social-feed.xml, /rss, /blog.rss, etc.) to /feed or /feed/notes to make sure the feed URLs from various versions of this site don't break.
Route Rewrites: clean URL routing for all my RSS feeds so they have simple to share URLs.

Final thoughts

This ended up being an even longer post than I anticipated, but hopefully it shows just how much you can bend Pure Blog to your will, by design.

None of this requires hacks to the core code, or maintaining your own fork. Everything you see here is achieved using Pure Blog as designed: settings, custom CSS, hooks, custom layouts, and partials. Because all these files live inside /content, /config, and /data, I can upgrade Pure Blog the moment a new release drops without worrying about overwriting my site's bespoke features.

That was always my goal with Pure Blog - a super simple, distraction-free blogging platform out of the box, with enough flexibility under the hood for tinkerers (like me!) to build whatever they want.

If you're running Pure Blog and have built your own customisations, or if this post inspired you to try something new with your setup, hit the reply button below, or find me on Mastodon. I'd love to see what you've done with it.

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.

October 2026 Summary - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-01T16:45:33.000Z

Another month goes by! For October I decided to mostly focus on a plan for my gaming and my reading! That’s the reason I managed to get a lot of books done! I am quite happy with that progress, although I still have one week to finish all the games I planned. Still, this was all pretty cool!

Some artwork of my favorite media that showed up during the month!

Podcasts

Into The Aether - I listened to this the most, but not as much as usual because the last episode came out in October 31st and I didn’t listen to it in time!
The Ten Minute Bible Hour - A bunch of listened episodes this time around! Finally getting started on Matthew 17, and past the 400th episode!
Darknet Diaries - I enjoyed a couple episodes this time: Bayrob and Melody Fraud. Although the casual chitchat on crypto annoys me sometimes.
Welcome to Night Vale - I can’t remember what I listened this time, I must have fell asleep quickly.

Manga

✨ Battle Angel Alita: Last Order - Chapters 1-18. I started this one right after being done with the original run. Taking into account that a lot of the manga I read is in the hundreds of chapters, it’s kinda funny how this became a new series instead of just continuing. I think there was a span of time between this continuation though so, I get it. I am really enjoying the continuation to Alita’s story nonetheless. Perhaps the most confusing thing is the name changes though.
✅ Battle Angel Alita - Chapters 45-51. I started this manga ages ago, and to see it finally over was pretty cool! The finale, which felt a bit rushed originally, was replaced by Last Order, so I decided I’d give it a go too. I still really liked the finale of this run though, which goes for a more philosophical take on things and has some timeskips that worked well for me.
Blue Lock - Chapters 360-364. Just the weekly chapters! It has been fun so far.

Books

✅ Dune Messiah - This is the first physical book I’ve read in a while, and it was amazing from start to finish. I didn’t expect to be so utterly hooked! Done with it in a week, reading it everyday during my trips to work. The plot is much more political and full of twists and difficult to understand dialogue, but I just couldn’t stop myself. It felt ominous and grandiose and like something that I had to see through until the end. Good stuff.
✅ The House on the Borderland - A very interesting predecessor to what would eventually become space/existential horror and the like. This was a very interesting read, but with some dated elements in its writing. I have a feeling it won’t impress you by itself without taking into account its context. It features a few different experiences from som old man living in this old house, and some are more interesting than others too. Overall pretty satisfied by it, since I haven’t read anything like it.
✅ The Left Hand of Darkness - One of the more famous works of fiction, written by Ursula K. Le Guin. This was a very interesting story about some envoy tasked with establishing an alliance with a planet of androgynous people whose sex is only defined for a few days every month or so. And it’s also a very cold planet. There is a bunch of interesting things going on because of this society’s behaviour. But also political intrigue, survival, and understanding of each other.
✨ Clarkesworld #212 - Only one of the short stories is done. I need to continue this one soon.

Movies

Klaus - Starting October with a chrismas film was not on my plans, but I am glad that it was this one nonetheless. I had a wonderful time watching this story. Beautiful animation, great characters, wonderful message. Just everything a christmas movie needs!
Bumblebee - I have a feeling I watched this one at some point before, but not from start to finish, and not since I started to keep track of the movies I watch. In any case, Bumblebee is my favorite transformer and this origin story is quite a good coming-of-age story.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - It has been ages since I had seen a Ghibli film. I had heard lots of things about this one. Seeing how it is considered as the “Dune of anime” and the like. This film is gorgeous. The animation, the story, the message, the world. It was mesmerizing to watch. I really really enjoyed everything about it, so much it’s probably my favorite movie I’ve watched this year…

Anime & TV Shows

Death Note - Espisodes 7-8. I decided to return at last, and watched some more of this in the background. Since I read (and really enjoyed the Manga), revisiting this story has been quite nice. I am going for the Latin Spanish dub on this, which is quite good too.
Lanterns - Episodes 4-5. For some reason I haven’t watched more than a couple episodes. I should get going with this one some more, but well, I have put my focus elsewhere.

Videogames

✅ Final Fantasy IV - The quintessential JRPG! Completed over a span of multiple years, I am glad that I gave it a go and managed to complete the whole thing and some extra dungeons!
✅ Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye - A paralogue to the story of the base game. Answering questions I didn’t know I had, introducing new elements to the story, featuring new uses for tools that have always been available to me, and so much more. This was incredible, and the soundtrack was also pretty much perfect.
✅ Strange Jigsaws - This was an incredible puzzle game that really brings a lot of excellent ideas in a pretty tight package.
✨ Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - This is the second Castlevania I have played, and it has been a blast so far! I’ve played about 7 hours of it, the gameplay has been great, the artwork is insanely good for the PS1, and the score too! I enjoy it so far and I’m taking my time with it.
✨ Meccha Chameleon - This was a complete surprise! Everyone in my play group felt like giving it a go, so we started doing matches together and it became an instant favorite of ours. Hide and seek, brought to the next level!
✨ Astral Ascent - Only played this for like ten minutes so, yeah we’ll see if I return to it.
Donkey Kong - More pretty good platforming puzzles in the iceberg section of the game.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land - Barely touched it this month. Focused on other games and books.
Ultimate Chicken Horse - I even unlocked two new maps, there’s not much left but this is still super fun.
Nintendo Switch Sports - Still fun as ever! Golf and volleyball.
Guncho - A great tactics roguelike I’ve mentioned before.

Finishing thoughts

October is gone now. Even though I’ve managed to do a lot, completing three books and finishing some great games, it still feels like everything went by so fast. To be quite honest, I wrote most of this summary while watching more episodes of Death Note. Excuse the lack of detail or the quality of this summary overall.

This is day 61 of #100DaysToOffload

Reply to this post via email | Reply on Fediverse

Note published on November 1, 2026 at 3:17 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-01T15:17:40.000Z

If you are reading this, you are someone who reads the news, and if you are someone reading the news, that hand is throttling your heart right now. On some level, you know this, but you are likely so used to it that you do not really know how hard it’s squeezing, and how much it saps your strength.

There is a difference between burying your head in the sand and periodically reminding ourselves that the world can be beautiful and good. We have somehow become convinced that turning away even for a second is a betrayal of the most vulnerable amongst us, but constant activation paralyzes us with dread and leaves us too exhausted to take action. Hyperawareness is not a virtue, it’s a symptom of mental illness—ask your complex post-traumatic stress disorder friends about it sometime. We are not betraying the cause by turning off our phones for a few hours; we are not lazy pieces of shit who deserve to be poor when we opt for sleep over pseudoproductivity.

Note published on November 1, 2026 at 2:48 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-01T14:48:44.000Z

The healthcare marketplace would like me, a self-employed person with no recorded disabilities who has never served in the military, to prove that I DON’T have insurance through an employer, the VA, or Medicare.

Apparently I am meant to do this with things like a letter from my employer saying they don’t over me coverage?? “Dear me, I regret to inform us...”

10 Years on Mastodon - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-01T12:34:18.000Z

As of today, I've been on the Mastodon social network for 10 years. I think that deserves a little reflection and celebration.

Post by @Edent@mastodon.social

View on Mastodon

Social networks often launch in a blaze of glory but limp out of existence within a year or so⁰. How many services have you signed up to, only to gradually drift away from? If you're anything like me¹, your password manager is a graveyard of unloved services and your MFA app is filled with icons of websites you barely remember.

It could easily have been that way with Mastodon. I gradually drifted away from Slashdot. Despite a promising start, AppDotNet died an untimely death. Slack works as a meta-social-network - but there are half-a-dozen communities which I know I'll never check in on. Once in a blue moon I'll think about uploading a photo to Flickr. I tried quitting Twitter several times - only to walk away cold turkey to prevent my soul being polluted by its filth.

I lurk on LinkedIn mainly to gawp at the brainworms. Threads just pushed too much crap into my feed. I think I have a tumblr and a dozen other social media accounts which fell into disrepair.

So what made Mastodon so sticky for me?

Silence Brand

Brands on social networks is an anti-pattern. You cannot be friends with a company.

In the early days of Twitter, brands were desperate to join the global conversation. They saw people complaining about them and wanted to intercede. Sadly that just promoted maladaptive behaviour as people (especially those with large followings) found they could bully brands into submission.

So brands retreated into the only thing they know how to do; advertise.

Mastodon has been remarkably resistant to corporations coming along to plant their flags. The few that are on there are either genuinely interested in the technology or are broadcast only.

Algorithms and Filters

It's wrong to say that Mastodon doesn't have an algorithm. It displays posts in chronological order - that's an algorithm. It has decent enough spam filtering - again, an algorithm. But it never tries to promote far-right hate posts to me.

Even better, it has proper support for a user's personalised filters. I can easily block discussion of politics² and sport. I can turn off reposts from individual accounts that I follow - you know the guy who reposts every puppy video he finds.

That makes for a relaxing and stress-free experience.

Fun Technology

I wasted years on the Twitter API. While I got some lovely swag from Twitter for faffing about with their tech, it was always clear that certain sections of Twitter's leadership hated that 3rd parties could use their APIs. Similarly, Facebook's API started as fun but quickly descended into a locked-down corporate hellscape.

Mastodon's API is mostly a delight to use. There aren't weird and arbitrary restrictions. Even better, because of the inherent open nature of the Fediverse, I can write my own ActivityPub software to interact with it.

I'm even getting paid to develop ActivityBot!

Nice People

Most of the people who join Mastodon³ feel rejected from more corporate social media. They've either made an active choice to try something different or they've been thrown off the mainstream apps. That's (mostly) good - and means that they're invested in making work something that's different.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss some of the people from Twitter. I think most of them are on BlueSky now - so I'm on there as well. Think of it like quitting smoking by taking up vaping. Sure, not ideal, but better than the alternative.

What it is missing

I can't pretend everything is brilliant. In no particular order, here are some of the papercuts which annoy me daily.

Reply Controls

BlueSky allows me to set a limit on who can reply to my posts. It is bliss. Sometimes I don't want the world chatting back to me. Yes, there's the ability to restrict who can see my posts in the first place, or who can quote my posts, but it isn't the same.

Super Block

Similarly, I want to be able to remove replies to me. If someone is being abusive or annoying, I don't want my friends to see that. If I block them, I want their replies to vanish from view in my threads.

I can moderate replies to my blog posts - why can't I moderate replies to my microblog posts?

Reply Guys

The two issues above are caused by the same strain of reply-guy. There's something about Mastodon which attracts a certain class of person. I get so many replies from people who either have never heard of this Earth concept called humour, or think that their inexpert Googling is helpful, or want to argue about something I haven't said.

It can be infuriating and I understand why it drives people away.

Geolocation

I just think social geolocation would be nifty!

More People

I'm in two minds about this. Services like Brid.gy allow me to follow my BSky friends on Masto, and vice-versa. Having more people on the Fediverse and away from corporate-owned social media would (hopefully) make it more viable in the long-term.

But more people means more spammers, grifters, and agents provocateur. There's a delicate balance to be found - not enough people and the network fails, too many people and it collapses.

I don't know what the right number is.

The nice thing about the Fediverse is that it literally cannot fail completely. Much like IRC survives despite "everyone" moving to Discord and WhatsApp, it chugs along in the background. ActivityPub servers will be around for the foreseeable future. So I'll be available on Mastodon (or its successor) until the bitter end.

Here's to the next ten years!

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to Mastodon (and the Fediverse as a whole) by 2036. I am sure it'll have some wobbles, I hope it will see a renaissance, I look forward to shitposting far into the future.

You can follow me on Mastodon - @edent@mastodon.social.

I'm pulling these numbers out of my arse. But, come on, that feels about right, doesn't it? ↩︎
Poor you! ↩︎
I am grateful that so many politicians have reasonably unique names! ↩︎
Yes, I know it is the Fediverse and they're not all on one platform. Cut me some slack. ↩︎

Weeknotes W3 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-01T00:00:00.000Z

Today I got to see one of my favourite places in the world – a park I really like – in its full autumn colours. The paths were lined with autumn trees and scattered with yellows and oranges and reds. I heard crisp sounds with almost every step on certain straights of the walk. I forgot how beautiful the trees get here. The colours get more beautiful by the day, even though the trees are more sparse.

For the first time this autumn, I thought to myself that it will only be a few weeks before the oranges and reds will be mostly gone. I will have to make the most of the next few weeks and soak myself in the colours of the season for as long as I can.

The highlights

After last weekend’s storm had me inside for the weekend, I was especially excited to get out this weekend. I went for a long walk – one of my longest this year – and enjoyed the weather. I was surprised by how warm it was, though; I was expecting a chillier air. I went to places I haven’t visited in weeks, visited a new bookshop (where I bought a poetry zine with a layout that caught my eye), and generally appreciated all the time outside, breathing in the fresh air of day.

Today – Sunday – I spent the whole day away from the computer. When I sat down this evening to check in with notifications and prepare to write this weeknote, I realised that the day passed by quickly and I seldom thought of my computer. So too was true of yesterday: I spent many hours walking, checking my phone occasionally. I love being outside.

I spent some time in a coffee shop and started journaling. I am still not in the mood for reading on the weekends, but I was in the mood for writing. I let my stream of consciousness flood onto the pages, writing about all that came to mind while I looked around and watched the world go by. I haven’t written as much prose by hand in quite some time, even though the sum of my writing was less than a page in my writing journal. I wonder if I will write more on paper in the coming weeks. I did enjoy the experience.

In terms of studying, I got back my final grades for last year. I am pleased with how I did. Admittedly I am a bit nervous for my first art history assignment this year, but I am sure I will get through it. This is the first time I have felt nervous about an assignment weeks before it is due, and before we have even been fully introduced to it. I have a lecture about the topic of the assignment tomorrow, on Monday, in which I expect to take many notes. I am already feeling more confident by the day.

In the creative writing section of my studies. I submitted my assignment for the first block last week, marking the end of our block on defining ideas. I am already in love with the next module, fiction writing. Next week I will be starting to study character building, for which I am excited. I have found my confidence in fiction writing has come on leaps and bounds this year, owing, I think, in large part to my studies. We also had a lecture on poetry that I really enjoyed, studying Hayden’s Full Moon.

On that note, this is Writing Month. I am not sure whether I will participate, but this morning I had a burst of creative inspiration and ended up writing a few paragraphs toward a story. I am unsure whether what I wrote has a strong enough foundation to be a longer work – and whether the plot went in the way I want – but it did give me more confidence. I will make a decision about Writing Month by the end of the day. I like that you can set your own goal rather than committing to a longer project such as the 50,000 word total that NaNoWriMo formerly set.

Music corner

On Saturday I picked out a few songs from Bandcamp at random to listen to. I can’t remember any in particular, but I did enjoy many of the songs I heard. With that said, there are a few other songs I remember listening to this week.

This acoustic recording of Soon You’ll Get Better by Taylor Swift.
Little Feat’s Long Distance Love.
A cover of Bon Iver’s Perth, performed by the Coastal Sound Youth Choir: Indiekör 2016.
This cover of Bon Iver’s 715 Creeks.
Maisie Peters’ “It's Your Bed Babe, It's Your Funeral” EP from 2019.
The album “we’re all feeling the same” by lovelytheband.
I am enjoying music by Alice Kristiansen.

Thoughts, wandering

After a Homebrew Website Club meetup this week, I worked on a feature in Artemis that lets users opt in to see boosts from an ActivityPub account. Previously Artemis only showed posts originally authored by the ActivityPub user, but now there is a checkbox to opt in to see boosts in the settings for a subscription. My implementation shows the title of a post to be “Shared a post by @accountname”, rather than showing the actual post. This was inspired by Colin who has a similar implementation in their web reader. I much prefer this minimal approach to showing materials from an account I do not directly follow in my reader.
A little snippet from this morning: “The joy of the first sip of coffee — of how that may beget words, words that beget more words for there is rhythm to be found after starting. I am listening to electronic music. Despite having few words I am starting to appreciate the music for its own qualities — for the repetition, for the moments of change, for the pitches that I seldom hear. There is joy to be found in so much music. I started my morning thinking about ambitions and potential adventures — where I want to go, what I want to try.”
I opened a box of chocolates that I received as a gift a while ago. I love chocolate. Especially the ones in the box that is open now.
I am hoping to “lock in” to my fiction writing next week. I am really excited to see what I learn. I have a feeling that I am going to go through the phase of writing stories that aren’t great while I find my feet, fiction being so new. With that said, yesterday I did a writing exercise and I ended up writing way more than I expected. I found something of a flow state that I feel with other kinds of writing that I enjoy. That was a real delight to feel.
I am starting to get used to the darker nights again. It was nice to see the stars so early last night. There was a forecast that indicated the Northern Lights might be visible later in the night, but I didn’t see them. One of my dreams is to see the Northern Lights. I really hope to see them one day.
I have had this idea of “building bridges” in my mind related to the indie web for several weeks now. I don’t really know what I want to say, but I think the message is how I wish the indie web was more interconnected with other interest groups. My zine “A Creative’s Guide to Personal Websites” is an experiment in communicating the value of websites to creative people (artists, photographers, painters – anyone who thinks of themselves as creative) and how to get one set up while trying to avoid as much technical language as possible. If the words “building bridges” mean anything to you as it relates to the indie web, do let me know. I am still trying to piece this idea together.
I want to make another zine in the next few weeks!
I had a note that is almost a year old nearby with three questions I thought I’d put here: “How did Michelangelo feel when he painted the Sistine Chapel?”, “Has anyone painted HTML code?”, and “Is reading a creative art?”. I don’t plan to actively search for answers to these questions, but I thought I’d give them space here both for future reference and in case they are interesting to you, dear reader.

Miscellanea

I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature for the first time. I think I will have to re-read the work before I would feel comfortable sharing any thoughts, but I certainly thought this was worth reading. I have known Emerson’s name for a long while as he was friends with Thoreau, so it was good to finally read something written by him.
I love Frances’ link-roundups, and was overjoyed when I saw a few of my recent posts linked in the last edition.
I love the idea of showing a count of how many images have alt text as detailed in the article “Number go up”. This is one case where I am in firm support of “number go up.”
I was listening to the episode of the In Our Time podcast on Logic earlier this week. I think it was in that podcast I heard the term “syncategorematic term”. The term was so full of character I knew I had to bookmark it.
I love the Why Cheap Art manifesto by Bread and Puppet.
The 3D virtual museum linked in “Virtual museum for my wife's artworks” is unbelievable. I have never experienced a museum on the web like I have that one.
The “Historical www-talk archives made complete” publication by the W3C is worth perusing. The “Guido van Rossum writes a web robot that "tries to map out the entire web", distributed along with python 0.9.8” link caught my attention in particular.
I haven’t read this piece in full, but I bookmarked “'It's offensively cheap': How solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear” so I could link to it. Quoting from the piece: “By 2030, the IEA thinks solar power generation will have reached double that of 2025's levels, with solar overtaking hydro to become the world's third-largest electricity source.”

Thank you for reading! My inbox is open if you have any recommendations or ideas that follow from this weeknote.

Artemis Why Cheap Art manifesto Virtual museum for my wife's artworks syncategorematic term last edition A Creative’s Guide to Personal Websites My inbox is open Guido van Rossum writes a web robot that "tries to map out the entire web", distributed along with python 0.9.8 Number go up Colin Writing Month Full Moon 'It's offensively cheap': How solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature Historical www-talk archives made complete Soon You’ll Get Better This cover of Bon Iver’s 715 Creeks. Long Distance Love Bon Iver’s Perth, performed by the Coastal Sound Youth Choir: Indiekör 2016

in their season - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-01T00:00:00.000Z

The leaves are in their “flying season".
Coating the skies in colour, brilliantly.

The trees are in their “wintering season".
Branches bearing and silvering, beautifully.

The sunrises are in their “November season".
Pink comes later in the day, unpredictably.

Leaves, trees, sunrises and all, perpetually
Delighting day, cyclically.

Discoverability Is Only Solved If You Can Be Discovered - Kev Quirk

2026-10-31T13:58:00.000Z

Discoverability Is Only Solved If You Can Be Discovered

by Widdershins

This is a follow up to my post where Widdershins talks about how they agree with certain parts of my argument, but that the discoverability piece is flawed.

Read post ➡

Saw this in my RSS feed and thought it was an interesting take that's worth sharing - also Widdershins' blog is excellent. I'd recommend adding it to your feed reader.

I think the argument around other people controlling the gate to discoverability is a sound one, generally, but sites like Bubbles tend to add most sites, unless they're somehow obnoxious. So inclusion (and therefore discoverability) is only an email away. Having said that, one person's obnoxious is another person's heaven, so it's all subjective.

Either way, it's an interesting debate and I'm glad we're having it. Go check out Widdershins' blog too!

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.

Open Tabs October 2026 - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-10-31T13:00:07.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? If you don’t follow my Bookmarks through the feed, then here’s the bookmarks from October. Enjoy.

Bit of a theme this month, the old web was messier and more fun, and running a site now keeps getting harder.

Jenny O’Connor on why the embarrassing internet was the good internet. My old fan pages agree.
Winnie Lim on why running a personal website is not fun anymore. Rough read. Between AI bots scraping the fuck out of the open web and hackers using AI agents to find holes, no wonder.
Aaron’s Early Web Links is a one-person directory of personal homepages, covering all types of personal websites.
wulfpaper on why making websites shouldn’t seem so hard. Start with the writing, worry about code and design later.
A big alphabetised list of old linkware webset graphics sites. Handy if you’re after that old-school look.

For more, check out the bookmarks archive, and subscribe to the feeds if you want these as they happen.

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.

Gig Review: The Witcher in Concert ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-10-31T12:34:18.000Z

The most common way people experience classical style music these days is via movies and video-games. After seeing The Force Awakens - live in concert, I've become rather a fan of watching movies performed with a live soundtrack.

But what about watching a video game with orchestral accompaniment? We travelled up to Wolverhampton to see "The Witcher":

A one-of-a-kind live event that transforms the lasting legacy and emotional storytelling of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt into an immersive concert

Obviously you can't have someone sat there with a PS5 controller while a band plays (although that'd be a hell of a Twitch stream!) instead a large screen projects various cut-scenes and in-game footage. It works pretty well - most of the popular scenes are in there (Geralt in the bathtub got a big cheer) although there was no hyper-extended Gwent session. The videos were a little repetitive. Some of the music is obviously composed to be swelling in the background and so repeated shots of swords looking cool or Geralt looking grumpy were sprinkled throughout.

The highlight was seeing Percival Schuttenbach play a variety of instruments with absolute joy and gusto. The entire band look like they're having a whale of a time, and the conductor encouraged us to whoop and cheer for our favourite scenes (with perhaps a few boos for some of the more notorious enemies).

As soundtracks go, it isn't particularly varied. There's a decent mix of tunes, some with singing, but they do tend to blur into one after a while. Nevertheless, a brilliant time for fans of the game who want to soak up the music.

The Witcher in Concert is on tour around the world now.

Pre- and Post-Show

There was a merchandise stall hidden in one corner of the venue. Between doors opening and the start of the show (about an hour) a video looped through three screens - one of which encouraged up to share our photos with a hashtag. That's fine, but a few more videos wouldn't have gone amiss.

After the show, the conductor said the band would stick around for selfies - which was nice of them.

A touring show like this probably can't spare too much space for large scale models for people to pose with, or a couple of cosplayers to photograph, but it might have been nice if there were something to interact with before and after the show.

Identity Assertion JWT Authorization Grant Draft 06 - Articles by Aaron Parecki

2026-10-31T00:55:21.000Z

We've just published draft -06 of the Identity Assertion JWT Authorization Grant (ID-JAG):

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-oauth-identity-assertion-authz-grant/

It's been great to see so many new implementations of ID-JAG over the past few months, across identity providers, authorization servers, clients and libraries. -05 and -06 are mostly about bringing what we've learned from these implementations back into the spec. The diff looks big, but most of it tightens the wording so independent implementations interoperate better. The flow and the overall design haven't changed.

Most of the changes are clarifications, such as:

How resource and audience values are compared and validated
Which sub value the IdP selects for the Resource Authorization Server, and how subject identifiers are mapped
Whose claims the ID-JAG carries (End-User, client, etc)
How the Resource Authorization Server finds and validates the ID-JAG signing keys
SAML NameID handling
Using a Refresh Token as the subject token
Error codes for common failure cases, and when a Client should request a new ID-JAG
Fixes to examples and references

A few changes are new, or make explicit what implementations were already doing:

The IdP authenticates the Client at the Token Exchange step, and the request carries a single audience value
When a subject token fails validation, the IdP now returns invalid_request instead of invalid_grant, as RFC 8693 requires. If you've implemented the Token Exchange step, please check your error handling.
At the Resource Authorization Server, a key-bound ID-JAG can be used in place of client authentication
mTLS is defined as another option besides DPoP for binding the ID-JAG
New id_jag_signing_alg_values_supported IdP metadata
A new Privacy Considerations section

The full list is in the Document History section.

Diff from -04

Thanks to everyone who has been implementing this and sending feedback, and especially to Karl for working through so many of the issues. I'm hoping to get time at IETF 127 to go over the remaining open issues. In the meantime, comments are welcome on the list or at https://github.com/oauth-wg/oauth-identity-assertion-authz-grant

Morning - James' Coffee Blog

2026-10-31T00:00:00.000Z

A golden glow peeked through the edges of the curtains. What colour is the sky this morning?, I wondered, knowing in the back of my mind that the colours may only be there for a few more minutes – such is the pace of the sunrise. No moment can be taken for granted. I opened the curtains and saw a salmon-esque glow in the sky: not quite pink, but not quite orange: a mix of both colours. The sun was rising in the opposite direction, at the stage where the whole landscape seems transformed by ephemeral colours.

I later thought about how the landscape is always changing with the day – the sunrise on a relatively clear day like this morning’s, where the sky was only dotted with clouds, brought forth the aforementioned pink-ish colour, and golden colours, too. Trees not yet touched by the sunlight had a faint patina, as if they were in a Renaissance painting that had long since aged. But these trees were real, right in front of me, bathing in the rhythms of the day.

If only I could describe the trees with the same precision of a painting.

Was that an eagle, soaring through the field? I haven’t seen one as long as I could remember. The interlaying golden light rises from the distance; the streams in the valley were woken on their own accord, always flowing, for the sparkling sunlight has not shone on them yet. I watched the landscape with wonder, as I always do.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

I went on a long walk today, to make up for the time lost from last weekend where I stayed mostly indoors to weather the storm. The last week has been one of missed routines and reminding myself that this too shall pass. While last night I sat by my piano playing sad songs, later resting my tired head between my arms on top of the keys, this morning I woke up with newfound energy and vigour. I can never remember exactly how I get better when I feel down, but going out for a walk surely helped.

The morning sky ushered forth darkness’ bye.

In the park, I walked on wood chips sprinkled with yellow trees under relatively low canopies. The path on which I walked was only meters away from the concrete one with which I was more familiar, but I wanted to feel something new under my feet – to get closer to the ground; to feel whether the wood chips would be softer than the concrete. Although I was so close to the concrete path, what was ahead was different, the sounds and sensations of the ground were different; the view of the sky, intermediated by low hanging yellow and orange and green leaves, is new.

I walked for miles, finding a rhythm that meant I was walking up the hilly streets faster than I expected. At one point, I stopped at a gallery window to admire an artist whose works depicted landscapes over the sea. The pink and orange and blue colours were breathtaking, the kind of works that stop you in their tracks. The gallery was one where works were for sale. It makes me think about how much I love that there are still new artists making works. I don’t know if the works I saw today were new, but they did feel more contemporary, capturing the world in a different way to pieces I have seen in museums.

A man walking down the street wore a shirt that caught my eye. “Creatives are the new athletes.”

Note published on October 30, 2026 at 11:03 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-10-30T23:03:27.000Z

this is a very weird headline to run alongside an article that essentially says that an organization that believes in the importance of fair use thinks that fair use should not be interpreted in a way that narrows existing copyright law

Note published on October 30, 2026 at 10:13 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-10-30T22:13:53.000Z

In July 2024, I reported that Coinbase appeared to be violating campaign finance law by making contributions while holding federal contracts. I filed an FEC complaint alongside Public Citizen. The FEC hasn’t acted. Since, Coinbase has given $60M more and landed another federal contract.

Coinbase responded to the initial complaint by arguing that, despite having received a federal contract, they were not a federal contractor — then insinuated I had secret funders and made lightly veiled legal threats against me.

“It’s bad enough when the laws are weak or there are loopholes in the law, but it’s almost worse when you have laws on the books that aren’t being enforced because the regulator is inadequate, and that’s the situation where we’re finding ourselves now,” said Eric Petry, counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program.

I track Coinbase’s (and its top executives’) campaign spending. They’ve spent $100 million+ since 2024 across super PACs, Trump campaign committees, and other individual candidates.