Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

SBS Zoom sessions cancelled - Johnny.Decimal

2026-09-30T02:16:53.000Z

We've cancelled the Small Business System fortnightly Zoom sessions. Attendance was sparse, and for something that took so much mental energy they weren't earning their keep.

If you're an SBS member you can always book a 1:1 session with me. Email me for the link to my calendar.

I haven't given up on the idea of open/public Zoom sessions. We've tried a few formats over the years and nothing's quite stuck. We'll continue to experiment.

I was on a podcast (again) - Joel's Log Files

2026-09-29T18:20:00.000Z

Once again I am happy to share with you all the secret that I mentioned a couple weeknotes ago! I was in yet another podcast! This time I was a guest in James’ wonderful show:

Wonders of Web Weaving #21: Joel

The podcast is a fantastic show where James interviews different bloggers and writers that are active on the IndieWeb scene. There have been many wonderful people there already, such as Marisabel, Rachel, Mike, and some more.

There’s only about 20 episodes so far, so give it a listen if you care about blogging, the indie web, writing and the like!

The way this came to be is kinda fun. I was actually the one who reached out to James on Signal, to see if he’d be interested in having me on his show. It just seemed like something fun to try, and a way to challenge myself to speak some more English too, and of course ~~the free promotion muahaha~~ having a good chat with a friend. ☺️

My family would be out of town soon, and I’d be able to freely express myself without being shy about it. I also had no work that day, which was more convenient for our difference in timezones, as he would otherwise be long asleep by the time I get back home from a regular work day.

The only problem was… I took my shot with just two days of anticipation. So I wasn’t sure if he’d have the availablity. Still, I let him know.

Thankfully, James was very approachable, and told me he was free at that time, he was even happy to take the proximity of the event as a challenge for his organization skills—things lined up perfectly for both after all.

Going from being one of four people—on my previous podcast experience—to being the main guest was nerve-wracking at first, but James had my back the whole time and I felt pretty comfortable talking and rambling on. I think it also helped that neither of us are English native speakers so I didn’t feel self-conscious about my pronunciation.

The episode goes through many things, such as my start with blogging, how everything developed over time, some thoughts about hobbies like origami and gaming and why I like to share them, as well as what I want for the future of blogging and the web I’m general. I hope you check it out and find it enjoyable! And forgive my ramblings and bad pronunciation of the word “posts”.

Without further to do, feel free to check it out and share your thoughts about it in the comments!

This is day 44 of #100DaysToOffload

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2026-09-29 16:03: I think it's time... #Ubuntu - Kev Quirk

2026-09-29T15:03:00.000Z

I think it's time... #Ubuntu

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2026-09-29 11:10: Soooooo Hacker News happened. 🤣 - Kev Quirk

2026-09-29T10:10:00.000Z

Soooooo Hacker News happened. 🤣

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Pixel Art, New book started, lights out! - W39 - Joel's Log Files

2026-09-29T04:30:00.000Z

I have been participating with the #3GoodThings hashtag for quite a little while now! I’ve tried to be consistent with it and I’ve been dutiful documenting at least three interesting things that happened that way. Basically, they are a bit of a shorter version of these weeknotes! In case you wanna follow what I’m up to closer to real time.

At last, here are some notes and things of interesting that went on from September 22 to 28, 2026.

🐻 I have done a couple Pixel Bears! for many of my blogging friends. I am definitely looking forward to sharing the final results once they are completed. I only have a few more to do!
🕹 Two Nintendo Switch games were acquired… Red Read Redemption and MIO: Memories in Orbit. I don’t know how they showed up here at all… 😇
🍩 On Thursday we went to a friend’s birthday, but instead of a regular cake we had a bunch of donuts! So that was pretty funpretty fun.
🎨 Some badges have been made too, but I’m not ready to share those yet at all. Wanna do more first. These will be themed after videogames. Although you can get one already from my footer, the one that says “made by a human”!
🍔 On Friday I was invited by some friends to the movies, to watch the new Avengers Endgame Encore. Before that though, we got some great burguers for lunch! It was delicious and I was filled up.
🍕 My sister visit time is over at last, she left today and headed back to continue her studies. Yesterday some friends from church invited her (and me) to a pizza night! It was very fun.
🔌 During a visit to the supermarket, the lights went out! That was actually a bit of a crazy experience, I don’t think that’s ever happened to me. It literally went away for like a minute and some people were screaming and looking for their kids and the like. Very bizarre but actually kind of fun for me.
📚 I recently purchased The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, but I’ve actually gotten some other Kobo books that went unmentioned for a while! Let me know which one should I read next:
- Jade City by Fonda Lee
- Red Rising by Pierce Brown
- There is No Anti-Memetics Division by qntm
- Memory’s Legion by James S.A. Corey

A tasty pizza, my PSP playing FFIV, some donuts, Red Read Redemption and MIO: Memories in Orbit, and my Kobo reader

Reading

The Left Hand of Darkness - Chapters 1-5. One of the most known Sci-Fi works by Ursula K. Le Guin, this book was chosen for the TWG’s Low Key Book Club. Unfortunately, I realized too late and may be unable to complete it for the conversation about it. I’ll still read it though. The story is about a human embassador sent to a planet where genders constantly change with the time and seasons, so he is considered a perversion among them. So far, very confusing!
Centuria - Chapters 73-79. Just a few more action packed chapters. I have to say I’m starting to notice why some reviews say this has almost no substance. I can barely remember anything about it, there are no real epic or memorable moments. Only some entertaining twists and such. Revelations are nice, but no pay offs just yet, a bunch of unsolved mysteries and we are 80 chapters in. Hope something happens soon.

Gaming

Final Fantasy IV - I made even more progress on the last dungeon of the game, and I even teleported out to buy supplies and headed back inside to grind some more and get all the way to the bottom. I unlocked a new sword, the Masamune, beating another boss guardian. I continue to head downwards into the dungeon, I have not played enough to reach the end though. Definitely smelling the ending nearby.
Super Smash Bros - We had a fantastic multiplayer session, and this one was actually kind of crazy. We had the usual battles with 3 lives, but we were told that we had to leave elsewhere, and we decided to do a deathmatch. It was actually extremely competitive, and everyone ended up on red numbers. We even managed to survive someone’s Smash attack. A lucky friend grabbed the giant laser beam gun and managed to hit everyone at once. As epic as it gets.
Minecraft - Played it like 20 minutes, didn’t really feel the itch to do more though.

Watching

The Day The Earth Stood Still - A timeless classic from 1951. The writing is smart and holds up well. They somehow avoid mentioning conflicts so you can easily imagine the events happening today, though the Cold War was clearly present. The plot is simple, but ahead of its time. The terror is mostly implied rather than shown. An alien with technology beyond our understanding, along and unstoppable robot companion visit Earth, looking to share a critical message to every leader on the planet: To chill for once and stop the violence around us, or be turned into dust.
Avengers Endgame Encore - This was a very, very fun time. I hadn’t really watched Endgame since 2019, and it was honestly very interesting to see all of what happened between then and now. Anyway, the movie itself isn’t better than Infinity War, but I still had plenty of nostalgia and love for these characters, and I had a blast revisiting the closure of the Infinity Saga. Not going to lie, the extra scenes aren’t worth much.
Minority Report - A sci-fi film about a pre-crime detective who ends up framed for a pre-crime himself. He has to do everything to prove he is innocent (and will remain so). I only started the film, but I want to see the rest of it (will probably restart lol).

Around the Web

the reduction of intellectual labor by Ava, saddened by the way LLMs are taking away the joy out of a lot of jobs.
On reading books - A very nice slice of life and random thoughts about reading.
Learning scripting by scraping my own website - This was an absolutely lovely display of a human figuring things out.
Awe - A wonderful slice of life once again, this time by James!
Become worthless (to tech companies) - This was a fun one excercise. Ruining your value as a costumer for big tech.

This is day 43 of #100DaysToOffload

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An open note to the BSD community - destructured

2026-09-29T04:00:00.000Z

I recently switched out the operating system I use to serve this site, first from Ubuntu to Debian, then from Debian to FreeBSD. The first switch was motivated by Ubuntu’s roadmap for AI integration; the second, by Linus Torvald’s suggestion that people with qualms about AI should “just walk away” from the Linux kernel. Who am I to ignore sound advice? Moving to an entirely new system involved a few trade-offs, of course, but I’m happy with where I’ve landed.

And it seems I’m not the only one. Via the Fediverse, I’ve come into contact with a number of people making the jump to one Berkeley distribution or another. Many are either professional or gifted hobbyist software developers, an influx of talent that will no doubt enrich the ecosystem in time. You should be pleased to have them. (I’m decidedly less useful; for me, mere tolerance will suffice.)

Most of the arrivals I’ve spoken with have expressed similar reasons for the change. Our hope is that BSD (or, at least, the teams maintaining its distributions) will resist the pressure to embrace a technology that we see as not merely disruptive, but also destructive — destructive to the digital commons, including the practices of free software; destructive to communities both digital and physical; destructive to the processes of education and skill development; destructive to the operations of a free and participatory society; destructive to efforts to maintain a habitable environment.

In some sense, we want BSD to function as a preserve — not for the pre-AI state of computing, but for a more humane vision of what the digital commons can be. One ubiquitous refrain of AI marketing is that failure to adopt is tantamount to being left behind, but we’re not asking you to freeze half a century of development in amber. We hope to see BSD continue to grow and flourish — some are already thinking about their part in that growth — but we hope the path ahead follows a trajectory defined by interpersonal collaboration, rather than one ceded to predictive algorithms shaped by the imperatives of rent-seeking corporations.

It would be presumptuous to demand all of that, perhaps — fresh arrivals that we are. Presumptuous, maybe, to even request it. But we hope, and we’re willing to help.

The Lenfest AI Collaborative has additional funding. That's great for open source in news. - Werd I/O

2026-09-29T00:06:07.000Z

Link: OpenAI doubles support for Lenfest’s AI and local news fellowships, by Andrew Deck in Nieman Lab

I participated in this program in my former role of Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica. Because I’m no longer there, it’s no longer my place to say how it went / how it’s going, but I’ll summarize it this way: I have no regrets. The two AI fellows I got to hire are genuinely wonderful people who I hope to work with again, and I learned a ton from other newsrooms in the program.

If you’ve followed my writing for any length of time you know that I’m very far from being an AI fanboy, and there was never a sense that I needed to stray from the extremely careful approach that is appropriate for a newsroom like ProPublica. We did not need to use any particular approach or vendor, and most importantly, nobody ever asked us to do anything that would compromise the trust or safety of the newsroom or its community. (The idea isn’t to displace reporters, or any human; it’s to potentially give them new tools.) At its core, it was just an opportunity to explore a new technology in community with other mission-driven newsrooms.

It’s also a way for newsrooms to regain their confidence in sharing their technical approaches and code, collaborating with other newsrooms, and (sometimes) open-sourcing their work. That, to me, is a benefit that probably outweighs the use of any technology. Newsrooms should be sharing; they should be collaborating; they should be working together. Hopefully, even when the cohort is over and everyone has moved on to think about something else, they will retain this muscle. It’s important.

Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 21 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-29T00:00:00.000Z

The twenty-first episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 21, I chat with Joel, the author of joelchrono.xyz about, among other things, writing about video games, weeknotes, homepage and website design, and more.

I hope you enjoy the episode!

Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.

Joel joelchrono.xyz The twenty-first episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed

Autumn morning - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-29T00:00:00.000Z

The low clouds glowed with shades of lavender as I opened the window to see the first colours of Day. A field in the distance, yellow from harvest and the drier weather, is coated in a blanket of cool fog; in front of the trees are an almost-but-not-quite transparent haze, making the trees, full of autumn life, too, feel cool. In the foreground and all around there are yellow leaves. The occasional tree carries red leaves. All around there is colour, from deep and sky blue to countryside green to vivid red.

High in the sky, I see the moon. Yesterday the whole moon was visible; today, almost the whole moon is visible; the visibility of the moon ebbs through phases just as Nature moves between phases. I can see thin clouds passing in front of the moon, so light that they are almost transparent,. The clouds are moving fast with the morning breeze.

Here, indoors, I feel the chill of the metal on my laptop and a breeze coming from the window. One edge of the window shows signs of condensation: the contrast between the relative warmth indoors and the chill outside, where the blanket of fog continues to coat the fields. Outside, the birds sing the song of Morning, the moon shows its full but fading light before disappearing until night, and blue, cloud-soaked sky, contrasts beautifully with the warm autumnal colours below.

Good morning, world. Happy Tuesday.

The Public Ledger of Credentials directory is taking flight - Werd I/O

2026-09-28T18:41:16.000Z

Link: First steps of the PLC organization, by Public Ledger of Credentials Organization

Since Bluesky’s foundation, its mission has been to work on an open social media protocol that gives users a “credible exit” from any one company’s services while allowing them to continue participating in the network.

This has two important effects. The first is that users can feel safe investing in the network knowing they’re insulated from any one company’s individual business decisions (if their social media provider makes a boneheaded decision, they can move to another one without losing their networks or content). The second, which is even more important to me, is that the network is insulated against monopoly power.

When one company owns the way everyone communicates and learns, their incentives and priorities dominate how the network works, granting them unprecedented power over democratic discourse. The most obvious example is Elon Musk, who bought Twitter to spread his values and suppress those he disagrees with. But he’s not alone: the US attempted to co-opt TikTok because they were worried the Chinese government might have undue influence over content viewed by American citizens. In an open network, that level of control is much harder to obtain; anyone can start an alternative application provider, and anyone can migrate to it. In a fully decentralized network, no-one — not a would-be oligarch, nor a nation — can have outsized control.

One criticism of Bluesky has historically been that it’s not been fully decentralized. Originally, it provided the only application and datastore that sat on the network, and it was the only organization doing identity management — so, while there was an open protocol underneath it, in practice users couldn’t pick anyone else’s services or really migrate.

There have been alternative application and datastore providers for a while: Blacksky broke the ice with an application, algorithms, and data stores that allow communities to govern their own data and fund collective needs. Eurosky, which hosts and processes inside the EU, and Gander, a Canadian alternative, are some of the providers that followed. More are showing up every day.

Which left identity resolution — the underlying address book that takes a user’s ID on the network (their Decentralized Identifier) and figures out where their data is stored. That had previously been handled by Bluesky itself, but today’s announcement heralds the first steps of transferring it into the hands of an independent Public Ledger of Credentials Organization, headquartered in Switzerland.

This is exciting to see, and is another step towards having a fully decentralized network. Bluesky did a great job of attracting journalists, authors, and other people who want to discuss culture and society; those conversations are too important to be owned by any one entity. We’re closer than ever to a social media commons that really works.

I Switched to Brave Browser - Kev Quirk

2026-09-28T11:59:00.000Z

I've been whinging about wanting to move away from Firefox for nearly a year now. It started with Mozilla's announcement about their AI strategy and my initial thoughts. Then they doubled-down and it raised my heckles even more. Then I had a long old whinge about how fucked they seem to be.

I took Vivaldi for a spin, but I couldn't get used to it. It just tries to do too much, and has way too much going on with the UI, and dark/light theme switching still doesn't work despite it apparently being fixed. So I made my peace with Firefox and stuck with it.

I kept Vivaldi on my machine as a backup, and over the last 6 months or so, I've found myself having to open it more and more due to something not working in Firefox. This was far from a daily occurrence, but it happened often enough for it to become annoying. But I still couldn't use Vivaldi full time.

It's worth stating that things not working isn't the fault of Firefox. It's developers not testing their web apps with Firefox, since it has such a small market share.

Switching to Brave

I decided to install Brave a couple months ago just to see how things went. I had some messing around to do up front, like hiding all the crypto and AI nonsense, but once that was gone, it's been fine.

Everything works how I expect, both on Ubuntu and Android. The UI is similar to Firefox, and most importantly, it doesn't try to boil the ocean. I renders webpages, then gets out of my way. I don't need it to check RSS feeds, or emails, or have toolbars on every edge of the screen. Even dark mode switching works!

I haven't felt the need to open Firefox since starting this exeperiment, so I think Brave is gonna stick.

The elephant in the room

Yes yes yes. Brave was founded by an absolute scumbag. But there's scumbags everywhere, in all walks of life. Contrary to what some people on the internet will say, my use of Brave doesn't mean I agree with, or support, Bendan Eich's world views. I consider his personal views to be separate from Brave.

You may disagree, and that's fine. But Brave is objectively a good piece of software that does what I need it to do, and does it well. So I'm gonna continue using it for the forseable future. If Firefox get their act together and become relevant again, I may jump back, but for now it will remain my secondary browser.

I do still have Vivaldi installed too. So I will continue to check in on it now and then, and if I decide they're on a par with Brave on Linux (mainly light/dark theme switching is what's missing), then I'll definitely make the switch as I feel their moral compass is far more aligned with my own.

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Book Review: Bobiverse Books 1-3 by Dennis E. Taylor ★★★☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-28T11:34:52.000Z

Like sticky popcorn, this is a moreish but ultimately unsatisfying set of stories. After I flamed out of Dungeon Crawler Carl, someone suggested I try this series. I can see why! It's campy sci-fi fun, with enough tropes to keep you chuckling and enough tension to keep you turning the pages.

Bob's brain is uploaded to a computer post-mortem. Awoken in a dystopian future, he has to pilot a spaceship to strange new worlds, put right what once went wrong, and hoping The Force will be with him, always. Oh, and he repeatedly clones himself. Creating a universe populated with Bobs (a "Bobiverse" if you will)

It's your standard "only I, a slightly geeky guy with lots of pop-culture knowledge, can save the world" fare which is beloved by slightly geeky guys everywhere who think they're smarter than all those normies just because they can recite the list of Hugo winners alphabetically.

Like Ready Player One it throws in as many quips and catchphrases as the plot will bear. Unlike Cline's work, it never really commits to them, so you end up with a scattering of Monty Python, Star Wars, and the X-Files without an overall theme developing.

And, in keeping with Andy Weir's The Martian, it's all just one guy sciencing the shit out of the problem. Except that lots of the science is sort of hand-waved away with "and then I 3D printed a thing".

Similar to both those books is an almost total lack of female characters. The ones that are in the first two are either plot-points or harridans. By the third there's a love interest who is slightly more rounded, and a couple of other incidentals, but offset against yet another woman who just can't appreciate the "genius" of Bob.

It's all good page turning fun other than the fact that Bob is a total cretin. He begins a slow descent into fascist dictator and barely even comments on it. He spies, carries out extra-judicial killings, and meddles in politics to his own advantage. At no point does the text ever really engage with the fact that Bob is a monster.

The character rarely reflects on whether his behaviour meets the moral standard he expects of others. He bemoans the aliens who are destroying entire ecosystems while simultaneously wiping out whole species himself. At times he is a conniving bully and reacts badly to anyone who pushes back against the ineffable will of Bob.

The jumping back-and-forth between the different Bobs is a bit frustrating, a bit like flicking between TV channels. I wish each story strand were allowed some space to develop - but instead it's one chapter of this planet, then one chapter of another, before (eventually) circling back.

Annoyingly, the books are only available on Amazon Kindle. They're not on any other platform or library. I'm grateful to the friend who lent me their copies. I binged the first three but, without any indication that Bob will mature as a character or face a reckoning for his egregious actions, that's where I stopped.

Morning moon - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-28T00:00:00.000Z

When I opened the window this morning, I was greeted by a white and grey disk, the grey blending into the light blue of the surrounding skies. Clear as Day, and full, the morning moon made me feel a little bit of awe. Wow. When I went to bed last night, the moonlight cast beams of silver into the house. I didn’t expect to see the moon again so soon, on this cool, still autumn morning where increasingly sun-soaked branches and leaves sway delicately. In front of where I sit I see the yellowing leaves of autumn atop a tall tree. That tree, by co-incidence and the wonder of human perception and imagination, almost appears to point to the white orb that sits stoic in the sky. The moon is so still it almost looks like it will never move again. But I know that, by tonight, the moon will have travelled far – like us all – and rise to create once again its peaceful silver glow.

To the west, the intensity of the sun rising across blue skies and through light white clouds increases, marking the beginning of a new day, the moon both bringing back memories of last eve and leaving me to ponder the beauty of the sun and moon together, decorating the sky on this new day.

I look back up to the aforementioned autumn branches and notice the moon has moved relative to said branches. We are forever in movement, discernible especially with a point of reference. The leaves helped me track the movement of the moon; the colours and temperatures help me track the progression of the season.

Gig Review: Public Service Broadcasting's Race For Space at Alexandra Palace ★★★★⯪ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-27T11:34:08.000Z

Ahhh! PSB's RFS! A delightfully indulgent soundscape of melodic wonder, performed here on its 10th (ish) anniversary. Is it really nostalgia if an album is only a decade old? It feels like it has been in the air forever.

For something which is seemingly made up of samples, it would have been easy for them to half-arse it and basically just play the CD. Instead we got a full band, guest singers, and 360° video projection,

Oh, also a disco Sputnik flying over the crowd!

Simply magical! As were the indoor fireworks.

I might quibble a little with their song choices (no Gagarin!) but hearing the crowd repeatedly scream "GO!" was magnificent.

Ally Pally isn't a raked venue, so the video projection of the band was most welcome. An excellent gig in a splendid location.

Pre-show and Post-show

As I've written about before, the art of the Pre-Show and Post-Show is vital for getting people to pay for events outside of their homes. Right now I can stream all the music in the world for a year for about the same price as a couple of gig tickets. Why should I freeze my arse off outside, paying stupid money for mass-produced lager, when I could be at home?

PSB kept up a constant stream of emails talking about the gig. Not an overwhelming amount, just letting people peek behind the curtain of organising it, giving helpful information about logistics, and letting us know about merchandise which was available.

Crucially, they also gave us stage timings for them and their support act! How many times have you turned up on time to a gig only to spend an hour listening to some crap DJ before the crew even started setting up the stage? PSB treat their fans with respect.

Ally Pally isn't a venue I've been to before. It was well laid out with decent toilet provision - including a big block of portaloos at the back of the hall. The beer prices weren't ruinous, but I kind of resented paying £15 for a veggie hotdog and a handful of chips.

Some venues seem to think that screaming at punters to open their bags will make for an enjoyable visit. Here the security staff were polite and not overly officious. Water bottles were allowed in with a cheery wave.

Post show - although the train stations are downhill, there were several buses waiting to take punters directly back. That's a perfect way of treating guests at your venue - ensuring that they get home safe and sound.

Sunset - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-27T00:00:00.000Z

Glistening over the hills in the immediate distance, the rainbow made me first pause for breath, then pause for thought.This is the first time in months I have seen a rainbow. I am looking at the spectrum of every visible colour. I followed the rainbow for as long as I could on my journey, appreciating every moment, including the time when it faded, for, even though the beam of colours were gone, the hills’ radiance began to capture and hold my attention.

The rain started with clouds, after which point rain fell, and then the skies cleared up. I like days where the sky clears up and the sun comes alive in the evenings. But then again I like the sun in the mornings, too, and during mid-day – every weather brings something new: a feeling, a sense of immediacy (“we should go out for a walk before the rain begins”), the possibility of moments.

The sun is now behind a dark grey cloud in the distance, suppressing much of the yellow glow. But I know there is a yellow glow for, on the periphery of the dark cloud, there are a few clouds turned yellow, glowing with an intensity that reminds me of the sun. Most of the sky is blue, too; the clouds that are in the near distance are moving quickly away with the wind that moves the trees like bristles move on a paint brush. The flower outside blows delicately, a flower that has had trouble with the warmer weather this year but nonetheless has continued to grow. Its resilience makes me smile, and think of a friend who told me how much they, too, see resilience in Nature.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The sunset this evening feels more muted, until I look in the other direction to see the peaceful horizon on which the trees below, being sufficiently far away, look like they are frozen in and with time; the few clouds in the air, bathed in a pink hue, move slowly; a family plays football in the streets in the remaining hour or two of daylight. I think about how distance relates to change: the closer you are to something, the more you can see it change.

Maybe that’s part of why I love spending so much time in the countryside. The closer I am to the rolling hills and the trees of home, the more that I can see trees grow and Nature change, just as, with time, I can see and feel myself grow and change. With every day there are new colours to be seen – new questions to be asked – and new songs to be played in new-to-me places, and new moments where there is the ever-existing opportunity to form new perspectives. And when the sun sets, I can exist and reflect under a blanket of dreamy moments and silver-dappled skies, with the colours of the sunset and the rainbow in my heart, and the grace of Night to keep me company until Day awakens once again.

Finished reading A Parade of Horribles - Molly White's activity feed

2026-09-26T22:25:08.000Z

Finished reading:

Dungeon Crawler Carl series, book 8.

A Parade of Horribles

by Matt Dinniman.

Published 2026. 704 pages.

Started August 27, 2026; completed September 26, 2026.

Become worthless (to tech companies) - Posts feed

2026-09-26T18:25:00.000Z

Tech companies and their executives have, broadly, moved to align themselves with investors and adopted a posture of, often, disdain or outright hostility towards their users and employees. If tech companies don't value you, why provide value to them? If they back political positions hostile to your interests, why not return that hostility?

I'm not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for is that, given the opportunity, you try and reduce the value they can extract from you. That's very often your data, but it can also be a direct financial relationship.

Signing up for a service? Well, your birthday is January 1, 1970.

Your email address? Give them a throwaway or use a different alias for every service. Your name? Do they need it? Maybe it's James Smith. Or John Smith. Or Mary Smith. Or Patricia Smith. Phone number? 321 is a valid area code. Throw it and seven other digits in. Don't need the account long term? Delete it. Make all of your privacy settings as restrictive as possible. Turn off AI features. Opt out of everything that defaults to opt in.

Live in California? Request your personal data—you may not need it, but you do need them to waste their resources handling the request. Delete yourself from data brokers with the state's Delete Act platform.

Block their ads as best you can. Your cookie preferences are "Reject All", always. It's their responsibility to improve their product(s), it's not your responsibility to provide them with personal information that they claim will help them do so. Install ad-blockers for your friends and family and teach them how to use them. Block at the network level—Pi-hole, AdGuard Home, NextDNS—pick one.

Block their crawlers as best you can. Do you have to use or choose to use AI products? Why not use every single one of those tokens available to your subsidized subscription? Did your search engine build in a "free" AI product? Ask it as many useless questions as you'd like. Getting emails from AI agents? Why not chat with them and lead them on until they hit a billing wall? You can block their whole TLD when you get bored.

Cancel your streaming services. Buy music again. Get a library card and check out Blu-rays and DVDs. Maybe you rip them, maybe you don't. Buy ebooks from any vendor that doesn't apply DRM.

Use tech platforms based outside of the US. Self-hosting things? Use a provider outside of the US for that as well. Support indie developers. They're more responsive and charge a fair price for great software. Buy subscriptions on the company's website and don't let the app store get a cut.

Wait as long as you reasonably can between hardware upgrades. Run an open operating system (if you can—and not one developed by a fascist). Buy refurbished or used hardware. Repair what you can.

Do you have to use a big social platform? Click on all of the ads you see or click on some of them, but don't buy anything. Want it? Open your browser and buy it without the attribution from the app.

Subscribe to RSS feeds. Publish RSS feeds. Post on your site first and send links out to platforms.

See someone or a business using AI art or branding? Gently let them know that it looks like a caricature of a Men's Health cover. Did you get an AI agent when you called a business or open a chat? Ask them about programming questions or chat them up—get those vendor costs up—and then ask for the person you wanted to talk to in the first place. Tell that person that the chatbot sucks.

Is your healthcare provider taking notes using AI? Opt out of that and explain why.

Opt out of arbitration (many terms of service let you do it via email or a letter within 30 days of signing up).

Use virtual cards if you can. Cancel any subscriptions you can. If they give you a retention offer, take it and then cancel as soon as it expires.

Don't sign in with Google or Apple or Facebook. They get data out of it and lock you into their platform.

Don't do unpaid labor for platforms. Was this helpful? Don't bother answering that. Skip the survey, reject the review request and don't rate anything.

Use the website, not the app. There's less telemetry, fewer permissions and no push notifications.

Your worth to these companies is determined by what they can derive by exploiting you. Be as worthless as you can.

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook - Kev Quirk

2026-09-26T14:03:00.000Z

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

Author: Matt Dinniman
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-fi
Released: 2021
Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Welcome to the Gun Show!

The top 10 list is populated. The sponsorship program is open. The difficulty is ramping up. The first three floors were nothing compared to what Carl and Donut now face.

The Iron Tangle. An impossibly complicated subway system built out of the world's subterranean railway systems, all combined and then tied together into a knot. Up is down. Down is up. Close is far. The cars are filled with monsters, the railway stations are less than safe, and the exit is always just a few stops away.

But there is hope. For the first time, the crawlers are all working together. The loot is better than ever. And the secret to unraveling it all may be hidden in the pages of a seemingly useless book.

Welcome, crawlers. Welcome to the fourth floor of the dungeon.

Learn more on Goodreads ➡

I was on the fence whether to give this 2 stars, or 3. The series continues to be really enjoyable, but Jesus this book was confusing. There's so many train lines, monsters, and nuance that I found it very difficult to keep up.

In the end I stopped trying and just enjoyed the story for what it was. I'm still not completely clear how they managed to complete this level, which is why I've ended up marking this down to 2 stars.

Hopefully book #4 will be more enjoyable, as this one was a bit of a grind.

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.

No errors, no warnings, no gods, no masters - HTML Purity is a Fetish - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-26T11:34:02.000Z

"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new syntax⁰."

Englitch is an pretty goode langwidge. even you no grok all the pacific bits you got the jist & the splelling & grandma dont mattr to much.

HTML is much the same. You can write utterly malformed, derranged, non-standards complaint HTML and most browsers will just say "Yeah, sure, whatever dawg!" and render it adequately. Take a look at the source code for TodePond - a lovely website but some of the most abused HTML I've seen.

There's a brilliant blog post by Jens Oliver Meiert which looks at whether HTML validity is seen as a priority for major sites. Basically, no.

It’s time for the annual analysis of how much of the HTML code in the field is error-free and valid. The short version: 1% of the most-frequented sites on this planet uses valid HTML—and 99% don’t.

2 of the Global Top 200 Websites Use Valid HTML

iS ThAt A pRoBlEm????

My site is proudly HTML Valid. Run it through the HTML Validator or the Schema.org Validator and you'll see that it is fucking perfect! Same with my RSS Feed and Atom Feed. Not so much as an advisory bit of info, a couched warning, or a sternly worded suggestion¹.

Every last bit pure and holy.

Of course, syntactically valid HTML is neither necessary nor sufficient for any purpose.

Perfect HTML doesn't imply that a site is accessible (although, I'm proud to say mine meets or exceeds all WCAG guidance²).

Perfect HTML doesn't guarantee that the information it contains is accurate³.

Perfect HTML, at best, merely implies that the author gives a damn about such things. Much like Knolling, it leaves a suggestion that order is preferable to chaos⁴.

It is said that one of the reasons HTML succeeded is that it is lax about validation. Most programming languages will shit the bed if you dare to leave out so much as a single semicolon. The compiler wails can be heard throughout the land.

By contrast, HTML is designed to be sympathetic to the frailty of the human mind. "Oh, you didn't close an element? Well, you opened a new one which I guess implies the same thing. Did you forget the correct syntax? Never mind - it'll be our little secret."

That's why XHTML failed - the browser would literally refuse to render a page if it didn't meet the spec. Who can be bothered with that?! HTML just lets you get on with things.

As I've mentioned before, humans don't write or speak in Backus–Naur form. Our ideas are loosely expressed in a floating grammar which lends itself to paradoxical impossibilities and logical tautologies. And yet most of us can still parse weird sentences without too much effort.

But most computer languages are different. It might be obvious to you that if (x = 42) means "compare the value of x to 42" - but what the computer sees is "if assign x the value of 42". Within computing our code needs to be rigorously formal and any syntax errors will lead to show-stopping bugs.

Imagine if every time a human wrote Romanes eunt domus the world simply crashed. It would be intollerable.

HTML is more like a human language than a computing language. You can understand human speech over a crackly phone line in a foreign accent - Web Browsers understand CP-1252 encoded text with bizarre syntax errors.

If it is OK to write bad HTML, why do some of us fetishise "pure" HTML?

I think it comes down to an ingrained belief that it is polite to reduce ambiguity. It is nice to be precise⁵. It reduces the cognitive burden on anyone (or anything) which reads what we have written. We are holding up our end of the social contract by producing something unadulterated and easy to comprehend. It reduces the likelihood of different browsers rendering things differently but, almost on a cellular level, we feel that things must be done properly.

The browser doesn't care about your inability to follow standards. But you should have some fucking self-respect and do it anyway.

With the appropriate amount of apologies to James Nicoll ↩︎
At the time of writing. Who knows what batshit bugs I'll accidentally include in the future 🙃 ↩︎
Again, it is possible to make something pass automated testing while still being an accessibility mess. ↩︎
Although, of course, everything you read in this site is 100% accurate. ↩︎
Or some horrifying psychological issue. Potato / Tomato. ↩︎
I will grant you, there's also a strain of 100% Completionist which compels me to get "top score" on all the benchmarks. But that's just pure vanity. ↩︎

Autumn - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-26T00:00:00.000Z

The sun danced with the clouds in a competition where both the clouds and the sun wins, for there is always light and cloud. The music was the melody of morning, a morning on which I saw the first frost lying on the quiet grass by the river, a few days after having seen the first cool evening fog. The seasons are changing.

My soundtrack this morning were songs as colourful as the autumn trees, music evoking memories, recognition, joy, and the necessity to dream – to move forward, to write the next word in the story. The sunlight painted the ever-changing fields, creating a morning of blue and grey and gold and silver, as if every colour were a track in the songs to which I was listening, and the songs to which I listen. Music and colour feel like a guide.

After breakfast and coffee, I set out on a walk, starting on a path with which I have grown increasingly familiar over the past few weeks, and then wandering a little bit, letting my feet take me where they wanted to go.

I ventured from the cold grasses and the tall parallel rows of trees bathed in an ebbing, cool, distant, golden glow, through the bustle of the city centre, to the quiet concrete streets where workmen are fashioning stairs and few people wander, seeing and hearing the many colours and paces of the city.

I think about the joy of having a direction, of having a map in my mind because I have walked on a path many times before. And I think about the joy of refining my map, knowing that while I have a general sense of direction, more practice will help me navigate the unfamiliar. I felt proud that I could take a detour and still get to where I wanted to go, consulting a map only at the last minute when, to my delight, my destination was just around the corner.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The more often I walk, the more comfortable I feel walking longer distances. The more often I walk and take some time to rest, the more stories I hear. Pausing in the park for a break, I heard someone sharing the story of the clock at the Balmoral Hotel, which runs a few minutes fast to help keep people on time. The Balmoral clock is only correct on New Year’s Eve, when it is intentionally set to the correct time so that the clock can ring in the new year with the rest of the city.

A colourful red and black butterfly soundlessly flutters through the autumn park that, on such a sunny day, still feels like it is holding onto summer.

The mid-days are warm, bookmarked by the cooler mornings and nights that signify the burgeoning season in which the sky and the trees take on new colours, and in which new stories are waiting to be written.