~hedy's blogroll - BlogFlock

Breadth, depth, and personal connection - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-08-23T00:00:00.000Z

This is an entry from my journal.

I have had several false starts with reading fiction. The stories are interesting, I know, but I never feel invested in them. A friend recently persuaded me to read Anton Chekhov. I though it was time to give it another try with my reading practice and, indeed, I read The lady with the dog. “How was it?”, she asked. “Okay” I responded and then we went on to discuss the story as well as my thoughts about relevant issues.

That experiment did not last long. Fiction bores me, as do virtually all books. It reminded me how I do not easily connect with people at the emotional level, which sounds odd to those who have seen me in action. I am sociable, can talk with anyone, will speak in front of an audience even without a script, am able to do people-oriented jobs, tell jokes, am easygoing and do not take offence, am aware of sensitivities and boundaries, have emotional intelligence, and, generally, show strong social skills. Still, I take a very long time to grow attached to anyone.

I have a propensity to go in depth with everything I enjoy: I give it my undivided attention. This is why, for example, I reached a high level of competence with Emacs even though I have no background in programming or neighbouring fields. This “digger” behaviour has a great cost though: I cannot cover a lot of ground at the same time, the way a “scrapper” would. Concretely, I want to understand a person well, which I cannot do with everyone I encounter due to time/energy constraints.

This is why, perhaps paradoxically, I remain at the surface of the emotional connection with practically everyone that does not actively try to reach out to me. Those who keep returning I naturally notice more and begin to appreciate. It also is why I have learnt to tame my curiosity. When I am introduced to a new concept, I do not try to quickly inform myself about it. Never! Instead, I ignore it, promising myself to only pay attention to it if life unfolds in such a way that knowledge of it is pertinent to my activities. A relevant example is with AI: I do not use myself and do not follow the news about its technicalities. This is not because I have an ideological predisposition against it. No! I simply do not indulge my curiosity.

As a kid in primary school, there was a stationery shop from where I would buy what was needed for my homework. I always went there by myself. My parents trusted me as I was responsible even as a child. At some point, the shop owner told my father that “your son knows exactly what he wants”. I learnt this anecdote many years later and was not surprised with myself. The owner tried to get me interested in all sorts of products, such as that colourful pen and this slightly thicker drawing pad. He did not manage to sell me anything I was not already decided on. This is the same digger trait in action: I picked something, went in depth, and thus knew I had no need for anything else to achieve what I was committed to.

Put differently, I am very conservative about who or what I focus on. Once I make a choice, I stick with it indefinitely and am unequivocal about it. When I lived in Brussels, there was this hairdresser I visited the first time and continued to visit even after I had relocated to the other side of town.

For another example that covers my publications, I started my website in 2011. I keep writing long-form articles as if this is the first time I am doing it. My passion remains the same. It is not enthusiasm, however, as that is short-lived. Mine is inexhaustible zest that comes from the depths of the earth, like a fountain. I write so much yet feel as fresh as ever, like I have not even started.

In English we use the expression “falling in love” to describe the exciting kind of romantic connection. The equivalent Greek concept is erotas (έρωτας), which is distinct from what I would describe as “growing in love”: that is agape (αγάπη). We also say “love at first sight” to speak of erotas. My experience has never been of this sort. Whatever I love is the result of repeated exposure to it; love at the 1000th sight, if you will.

There are many kinds of mind, informed by the uniqueness of each person’s experiences, to produce an incredible diversity among people. My mind does not attach to specificities by default, though it can to great effect. Ordinarily, it shifts towards patterns. When I converse with someone, I discern in them something that is not specific to their person. Same idea for landscapes. I do not merely observe, say, a mountain range but identify in it a scheme of shape, of colour, of rhythm.

This is why I am a philosopher, after all, but also why I have a way of thinking that draws linkages between fields of endeavour that have no obvious connections: I do not fixate on one detail and there is no box that can contain me. That may be described as my artistic side. And I am an artist literally, anyway, given all the poems I write. Though art is as diverse as the people who make it: I am not the flamboyant or virtuoso type.

I could probably do painting and music as well, maybe even at a high level, though these require special practice with the hands. My dexterity is not as finely developed and I do not have enough time to do that as well as what I am already invested in. What is nimble is my thinking faculty, which I continue to improve. Words are my pigments. Meanings form the palette I rely on. I blend them with ease and arrange them into structures that form sentences, which grow into paragraphs that become essays, with a coherent message from start to end, and a shared psyche from one entry to the next. My writings are clear and orderly as a reflection of my inner world.

A professor of mine once told me while we were taking a break from class: “you have a lot of common sense, which is not common”. This describes my brain. My personality, part biology and part second nature that I cultivated, complements it. As I do not commit on a whimsy, I neither get excited nor frustrated, and am very patient as a result, which helps me think things through.

Coming back to fiction, I do not read it because I am aware that I will not fall in love with any of the characters. The kind of reading I do is thus of the impersonal kind, such as on politics, which I also tend to study with the goal of identifying patterns that extend beyond the individuals involved. Opinion pieces I publish will therefore have the quality of commenting on what is yet to be or what is beyond the specifics of the case I am concerned with.

What I do is not special and has no advantages in the grand scheme of things. The world is consistent throughout. No matter where you stand, you witness a singular reality. There is no elsewhere. No outside or inside. No before or after. It is here and there and everywhere the one in the many, the many in the one. If you do not experience as much, it is due to the dizziness you get when you look around without seeing, when you hear without listening.

Cosmic consistency means that the digger and the scrapper are fundamentally exposed to the same experience. I understand one thing so deeply that I can find in it patterns which are present in every other thing. It is thus the same as me touring around the cosmos, while staying at the hut.

The most personal connection is in essence impersonal. Whatever its quality, it cannot be specific to it as it too is an instance of personal connection as such. On the flip-side, the impersonal becomes personal once understood, for it forms part of a connection. And the most profound understanding is the strongest connection which is the most personal one.

Even if you take an irreplaceable relationship, such as with your mother, she is at once the embodiment of a specific person and mothehood in general. In her you identify the general and the particular as an expression of oneness: the mother you have and all possible mothers at once.

This is how the world is. You search for something far away only to realise it was always right in front of you. You keep seeking something and once you acquire it you understand that you never needed it.

Organising physical artefacts - James' Coffee Blog

2026-08-23T00:00:00.000Z

I love admiring spaces and thinking about how they work but, when it comes to the physical spaces I use most or every day – my bedroom, my desk, my bookshelves – I haven’t spent as much time thinking about decoration. When an environment functions, I don’t often think about how I can make it beautiful. Indeed, I have never been particularly adept at decorating.

This evening I had a discussion about organising mementos from trips: museum maps and guidebooks, and all the other little things I have picked up that I don’t already keep in my scrapbook. I have a paper bag from the British Museum in which I keep my museum maps and other paraphernalia, but it isn’t particularly organised; indeed, despite being red, I seldom look through the bag.

This has me thinking about how I can keep some of my physical collectibles – zines, museum maps, clippings, and everything in between – more organised. I made a few immediate choices: to get a letter rack for my zines, to get a new scrapbook because my current one is full. But I would like to do more.

As I said to my friends, somewhat inelegantly but spoken from the heart: “I don’t want to keep all these memories in a bag.” One suggestion was to get a pinboard, which I love. I may also look through my museum maps and order them, so that at least I can remember what I have so I can decide what to do next. I would love for the maps not to be sitting in a paper bag, but to be part of something else. Maybe I could have a space on my bookshelf dedicated to museum maps? (I really need another bookshelf too!)

One thing I love about bookshelves is that all the titles are visible. I can look to my bookshelf and be proud that I have read Moby Dick even though it took a long time, and look at my anime and think about for how many hours and days a particular series has kept me entertained, or to look at my art books and know I can pick one up at any time and look at pictures that will undoubtably make me think. I can recall the memories associated with each book or series. I would like this for physical paraphernalia too. Having shelf space might be just what I need, and a corkboard too.

I love that I can curate bookshelves: by subject, by theme, by space. The more I write the more I realise this is what I want to do with physical paraphernalia too. I also want to move the zines I have made from where they are stored, on a shelf I don’t often look at, onto my main bookshelf, to elevate them in my space because I am proud of making them.

How do you organise physical artefacts you have collected? I would love inspiration! If you have any ideas, please feel free to email me.

email me

Saturday morning - James' Coffee Blog

2026-08-22T00:00:00.000Z

Before I leave this morning, I have to pack some things to read. I picked up a zine and a book on colour and set out to a coffee shop to ease my way into the weekend. I purchased the zine and the book following my reflection on reference works earlier this week, which had me thinking that I wanted to vary the kinds of books on my shelf.

This year I haven’t read many fiction books. Most of my reading has been devoted to textbooks and what I read online: blogs and the news and articles and everything in between. I would love to read more fiction, but I often find it hard to stay focused on longer works, especially when my mind is busy. I used to read often on Saturday mornings, finding comfort in the tradition of some quiet reading times while the world was waking up, but I haven’t followed that tradition in a while. That is, until this morning, where I found myself sitting in a coffee shop, reading my zine and studying my book on colour.

The zine I was reading was called “Books as Art Practice”, a reflection on what it means to create printed works. This zine comes at an apt time for me as I reflect more on what we gain and lose from different mediums and, in turn, come to appreciate each medium in more depth. I love the focus that I feel when I am with a book, but I also love the abundance of snippets from the world that I find on the web. When I think of mediums, I think less about their merits and drawbacks so much as their affordances – what does the web allow that other mediums don’t? What does the web make more difficult that are inherent in other mediums?

When it comes to the web, I have been thinking about time, especially in the context of blogs. Blog posts have published dates. But what if those dates were hidden? Available, but hidden. My thought was that words are already steeped in time, being written in and of a moment. I experimented with a “timeless” mode on my website that hides all the publication dates of works, and I admit I am intrigued. Scrolling through my archives without seeing publication dates, my anthology of self speaks not in years but in moments, in seasons. Presented in this way, my writing is still a blog in that entries are printed in reverse chronological order, but each entry is without a specific date.

ALT

My archive page for the Nature category, listing blog posts without dates. The top five posts, in reverse chronological order, without dates, are "Change; anchors", "Autumn", "Afterflow", "Sunset", and "Eclipse".

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The book on colour that I was reading, published by the National Gallery in London, featured works of art through the centuries grouped by colour. This book was different from most I have read: it was predominantly visual. While engaged with the book, I was moving between reading and visually analysing, between understanding concepts through words and appreciating details communicated through colour and depth and shadow and tint.

I started at the end of the book, on the chapter on monochrome. Works with few colours appeal to me. I love seeing how much detail you can add to a work with few colours. One of my favourite works is mostly monochrome, except for a blue flower in the centre of the painting. And yet despite my love of monochrome works, I also love the Impressionists, among whose defining characteristics is their use of colour.

While I was aware I couldn’t see as many details as I might be able to see if I were studying a painting in a museum, I did enjoy how much I could study each work from its printed version. I appreciated that the book magnified particular aspects of images so I could study features in more depth, like the boats in Peter Balke’s The Tempest that I didn’t discern until seeing them up close.

Closing the book after being immersed in art for some time, I started to think about technology; this is a relationship that pops up every so often in my mind, even when I am not necessarily studying the intersection of the two.

We live in time with a rich visual culture, enabled in large part by technology. The book I was reading was enabled by technology: high-resolution photography, the ability to print with such detail. Indeed, art and technology are not separate; today, many aspects of our visual culture are intertwined with the technologies we have.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

After my reading, I ran a few errands and went for a long walk, listening to a podcast about reading and enjoying looking at the leaves and the trees and the fields and the distance. Then, I did as I do: sat down, with a beverage – in this case, a glass of water, having been sufficiently fuelled from the cup of coffee I had consumed earlier – and looked through my notes of the day, with wonder and curiosity and reflection, ready to start writing.

anthology of self reference works National Gallery in London Books as Art Practice

On values, morals, and doing business - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2026-08-21T16:35:00.000Z

I caught wind of the news that MacStories is back posting on X, the “everything platform”, and that seems to have caused some backlash. I am not a reader of MacStories (because tools are tools and I don’t read about new computers the same way I don’t read about new washing machines) and I’m also not on X. So why do I even care about this news? Well, the short answer is that I don’t. But after the move (I guess because of the backlash?) Federico Viticci, MacStories’ Founder, posted what he called “An Explanation” conveniently, not on MacStories’ homepage and not even on the site at all.

You should go read the whole thing if you’re curious, but there are a couple of things here and there that caught my attention. The first interesting thing is the attempt to separate Elon and his morals from X.

We want to be absolutely clear about something: returning to X does not represent a change in our values, what MacStories or we stand for, or an endorsement of Elon Musk. We abhor Musk’s politics, his rhetoric, his careless disregard for others, and the direction he has taken X. But we also disagree that participating on X means we have aligned ourselves with any of Musk’s views or actions. We reject Musk’s worldview and will continue to treat people with the kindness and respect they deserve wherever they are on the Internet.

I’m sorry, but this is not how things work. By being on the platform, by using it to reach the audience that’s on there, you are directly supporting the man. Because the platform only has value because people are on it, and you being there makes the situation worse, not better.

The main reason why MacStories is back on X is, surprisingly, money. Boring, yeah I know. Quoting from the post again:

It’s not just how we earn a living; it’s one of a small number of independent websites that still cover apps, Apple, and a growing list of topics, including videogame hardware and the automation and productivity side of AI. Readers shouldn’t have to think or care about the business side of MacStories, but we have to, which is why we returned to X.

If that is the situation, be transparent. Show how you run the site, how much money the site is making or losing, and make your case. But simply saying “Sorry, running a site is hard so we’re doing a 180 without telling anyone, not even the people who work here” is a shitty move. Especially because the move is pretty obvious: the amount of AI-related content on MacStories has exploded, AI people are on X, and if you want to try to grab some of that money, you have to play that game. Like, I get it, but at least say it and own it. Don’t try to play the running-a-business-is-hard card. Have the guts to put up a post on your precious website where you explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Tell people you want to chase more AI content, because you think you’re now more of a “builder”. You’re an Apple fanboy; have some courage.

People with strong values and morals seem to become rarer and rarer these days, especially when money is involved, and it’s so sad to see. And this whole AI moment seems to be exacerbating that.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Connect via email :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month

HTML element letter count distribution - James' Coffee Blog

2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z

How many HTML elements are exactly five letters long? This question came to mind in the context of a discussion I had yesterday about what an indie web version of Wordle would look like. We all started to name elements. table, tbody, input, among others, all have five letters.

After the discussion, I wrote a Python script to compute the string lengths of each HTML element. I used the list of HTML elements on the MDN website as my dataset. The MDN list includes some elements (like selectedcontent) that are not Baseline supported yet, but I included them anyway. I excluded deprecated elements.

From my analysis, I found there are fifteen elements that are exactly five letters long. These are:

aside
audio
embed
input
label
meter
small
style
table
tfoot
thead
title
track
video

This means that there are fifteen possibilities for a HTML Wordle. We’d definitely need more words.

Here is a histogram showing the letter count distribution for all HTML elements:

Element Length	Number of Elements
1 chr.	7
2 chrs.	20
3 chrs.	17
4 chrs.	21
5 chrs.	15
6 chrs.	17
7 chrs.	7
8 chrs.	8
9 chrs.	0
10 chrs.	2
11 chrs.	2
12 chrs.	0
13 chrs.	0
14 chrs.	0
15 chrs.	1

The design of this table was inspired by Norvig's English letter frequency counts analysis.

View raw data, with a list of elements that match each count

Element count: 117
String Length | # of Matching Elements | % of Element Count | Elements
-----------
1 7 6.0% ['a', 'b', 'i', 'p', 'q', 's', 'u']
2 20 17.1% ['br', 'dd', 'dl', 'dt', 'em', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5', 'h6', 'hr', 'li', 'ol', 'rp', 'rt', 'td', 'th', 'tr', 'ul']
3 17 14.5% ['bdi', 'bdo', 'col', 'del', 'dfn', 'div', 'img', 'ins', 'kbd', 'map', 'nav', 'pre', 'sub', 'sup', 'svg', 'var', 'wbr']
4 21 17.9% ['abbr', 'area', 'base', 'body', 'cite', 'code', 'data', 'form', 'head', 'html', 'link', 'main', 'mark', 'math', 'menu', 'meta', 'ruby', 'samp', 'slot', 'span', 'time']
5 15 12.8% ['aside', 'audio', 'embed', 'input', 'label', 'meter', 'small', 'style', 'table', 'tbody', 'tfoot', 'thead', 'title', 'track', 'video']
6 17 14.5% ['button', 'canvas', 'dialog', 'figure', 'footer', 'header', 'hgroup', 'iframe', 'legend', 'object', 'option', 'output', 'script', 'search', 'select', 'source', 'strong']
7 7 6.0% ['address', 'article', 'caption', 'details', 'picture', 'section', 'summary']
8 8 6.8% ['colgroup', 'datalist', 'fieldset', 'noscript', 'optgroup', 'progress', 'template', 'textarea']
10 2 1.7% ['blockquote', 'figcaption']
11 2 1.7% ['fencedframe', 'geolocation']
15 1 0.9% ['selectedcontent']

Percentages may not add up to exactly one hundred percent, due to rounding.

If you are interested, here is the code I used to produce the analysis:

# data source https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements

from collections import defaultdict

with open("elements.txt", "r") as file:
    elements = [i.strip() for i in file.readlines()]

letters2counts = {el: len(el) for el in elements}
counts2letters = defaultdict(list)

for el, count in letters2counts.items():
    counts2letters[count].append(el)

num_of_elements_with_each_letter_count = {k: len(v) for k, v in counts2letters.items()}

print("Element count:", len(elements))
print("String Length | # of Matching Elements | % of Element Count | Elements")
print("-----------")

for length, count in sorted(num_of_elements_with_each_letter_count.items(), key=lambda x: x[0]):
    print(length, count, str(round((count / len(elements)) * 100, 1)) + "%", sorted(counts2letters[length]))
    # NB, there are no 9, 12, 13, 14

And here is my list of HTML elements I wrote (by hand) from the MDN list:

View HTML element list.

html
base
head
link
meta
style
title
body
address
article
aside
footer
header
h1
h2
h3
h4
h5
h6
hgroup
main
nav
section
search
blockquote
dd
div
dl
dt
figcaption
figure
hr
li
menu
ol
p
pre
ul
a
abbr
b
bdi
bdo
br
cite
code
data
dfn
em
i
kbd
mark
q
rp
rt
ruby
s
samp
small
span
strong
sub
sup
time
u
var
wbr
area
audio
img
map
track
video
embed
fencedframe
iframe
object
picture
source
svg
math
canvas
noscript
script
del
ins
caption
col
colgroup
table
tbody
td
tfoot
th
thead
tr
button
datalist
fieldset
form
input
label
legend
meter
optgroup
option
output
progress
select
selectedcontent
textarea
details
dialog
geolocation
summary
slot
template

Norvig's English letter frequency counts analysis

About rootlessness and broken relationships - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z

Reading the leftist Jacobin magazine article with the title Toward Simp Liberation? led me to the remarkable investigative journalism piece from The Cut by Ezra Marcus titled Revenge of the Simps. Its subtitle is how a community of porn addicts tried to rescue the teenage camgirls they worshipped from the clutches of a violent webcam pimp.

This crime story is a microcosm of the modern Western world. It has everything from getting rich quick, putting money over people, selling an exaggerated version of oneself through social media personas, producing explicit sexual content of oneself, being a ruthless entrepreneur, understanding male worth as a function of personal wealth and status, thinking of female worth as a matter of looks, seeing women as objects of entertainment, propping up masculinity as a facade for sociopathy, all against the backdrop of broken relationships with their rootless individuals.

In this world, there is a level of analysis in which there are perpetrators and victims. Though at another level all participants share a common set of values. The men qua traffickers who measure their worth by their business acumen are on a continuum with the women who are perfectly fine, at least initially, with selling their body for some easy money, where “modelling” is just an acceptable form of porn. And they are all in principal agreement with the simps who otherwise consume the pornographic material.

From victims to perpetrarors

In both of the aforementioned links there are many references to Andrew Tate, even though he is not involved in the criminal case at hand. Andrew is the embodiment of a wider phenomenon as bully and bullied himself: the victim of dysfunctional parenthood and hostile urban living conditions who becomes the means through which abuse is normalised, propagated, and valorised.

Andrew recycles age-old ideas of manhood while continuing the capitalist practice of commodifying every facet of life. His message internalises the social structures he was raised in and suffered from, blending them with the materialist mindset of incessant grinding for enrichment and upward social mobility at the expense of all intangible values.

As such, Andrew necessarily communicates something that is truthful about his society. Though he does it only as a way of private gain, hence his masculinity merchant gimmick. Fundamentally, he is not interested in institutional reform. Rather than abolish slavery, he is content with being the master of slaves and a god in their eyes. To this end, Andrew fulfils the destiny of the bullied to become a bully as soon as the conditions are favourable.

It is, nonetheless, an analytical error to blame Andrew Tate for what is happening in this case and others. Even if he himself is contributing to phenomena, he is but an instance of wider trends. Communities are broken not because of Andrew’s meme-grade rhetoric but due to the very structure of modern economic organisation.

Cities breed distrust

The vast majority of people in industrialised countries live in big cities as individuals or atomic families, where they are expected to be away from home most of the day while they do some kind of work. At their workplace they are all treated as expendable “labour force” or “human capital” and are thrown under the bus whenever it is expedient for their employer to do so. There is no mutual sense of togetherness. Their everyday experience is thus one of distrust. This is the baseline normality of the modern world.

The perennially jaded individual does not have the time or energy to commit to family affairs, no matter how kind or conscientious they are. Even in two parent households, children do not spend enough quality time with family. More so in single parent families. The lack of quality time with loved ones forces young people to seek connection in imaginary friends, with whom they develop parasocial relationships. Their role models are not actual, flawed individuals, whom they experience day-to-day, but exaggerated figures of seemingly impeccable quality on magazine pages, TV shows, and Internet sites.

The city is an inherently dangerous environment for the vulnerable. In the common scenaria, this includes children, women, and the elderly. Though gangs bearing weapons appear with increased regularity in many countries, meaning that even the strongest man is ultimately just as easy of a prey. No place is safe for kids to play care-free and for parents to get a moment of rest, all while the elderly are effectively rendered irrelevant to social reproduction by being left to wither away in some facility among strangers. Neighbours come and go, as they are typically renting the place they live in. So there is no sense of trusting those around one’s own place either. By extension, one does not know who they are dealing with: everyone blends in with the anonymous crowd and is a potential vector of attack.

Consequently, there always lurks some danger right around the corner, which makes everybody more tense. Parents do not let their children go out while they themselves suffer from chronic stress due to the rigours of work, the disproportionate burden of parenthood placed on the atomic family, and the pervasive sense of threat in their milieu.

Kids staying in closed spaces all day is an understandable protection mechanism, though it still is detrimental for their longer-term adjustment in society. They are not socialised properly, not with friends their age and not with elders in their community. They are trapped in a tiny physical space, which becomes a restrictive mindscape that is an extension of their own fears and overthinking. They are eventually get sucked into the fabricated world of parasociability and concomitant distorted images, whether those originate in legacy publications or online media, and seek happiness in what effectively is some form of pernicious escapism. Furthermore, they have unrealistic expectations about their own self and their relationship with others, which has far-reaching implications for every aspect of social life, including romantic experiences which are pertinent to the criminal case presented in Ezra Marcus’ journalism.

It is not only the vulnerable though. Cities are meat-grinders that make no exceptions. Such is the pace of life they dictate, such is the environment they necessarily create, that everyone eventually falters.

Anonymity and the lack of honour

At its core, the big city is akin to the jungle, for it engenders a default combative behaviour of the individual or tiny group against the rest of the world. The city cannot instil a communitarian, collectivist ethos because there are no such social bonds to be experienced on a quotidian basis. Those bonds occur naturally in the extended family, which incorporates the neighbourhood and the entire village into a singular unit of shared trust and intergenerational solidarity.

Cities do, of course, offer plenty of opportunity. This is the byproduct of the anonymity they enable: you can essentially be whoever you want and connect with those you like, which sounds liberating until you realise that the same is true for everybody else who will now seek to exploit you with impunity. Those who play fair get abused by those who have no such restraint. Which brings us back to the baseline of distrust.

Anonymity makes it so that it is impossible to have an honour-based moral code. Only the law can dissuade people, though the law cannot be enforced to the same effect as a local community singling out one of its members. The law is less efficient because its locus of authority is away from the fray of the action. To put it simply, the police officer is not your relative or immediate neighbour most of the time. The law, in this regard, can only be close to events when the political order is totalitarian (which then creates conditions for ceentralised abuse on a monumental scale).

The lack of honour is the environment in which the vicious moneyman thrives and where the sociopath emerges as the master grifter. There is no incorporation of accountability in one-to-one interactions, which means that the most unscrupulous rise to the top. They are even celebrated for their success in doing so, since this is the ordinary operation of the system—the rules of the game, if you will.

Systemic problems and the importance of hierarchy

For as long as we are seeing the degradation of relationships as a “manosphere problem”, an “Andrew Tate problem”, or in other contexts a “modern women problem”, we are not being thorough in our investigation. There are system-wide forces at play that need to be understood as such and be addressed in a root-and-branch fashion.

In the Jacobin piece I mentioned in the introduction, Evelina Johansson Wilén and Meagan Day discuss events through the lens of feminism. While both of them are insightful, I think feminism cannot appreciate that itself is a product of this structurally individualistic world. In the feminist worldview at-large, hierarchy as such is what oppresses people in general and women in particular, which inevitably leads to individualism even when the discussion is along the lines of building social movements. Why? Because if your extended family, which is dismissed a priori as “patriarchy”, has no power over you, then nobody should: you are a rootless person who only understands the irresponsible logic of “my body; my rules” in all of its manifestations.

Hierarchy, which in a local community that spans generations always becomes patriarchy and matriarchy as one, is how an individual’s innate freedom is harnessed for the greater good. The harnessing is key. In the absence of hierarchy, each person has to rely on their own devices. Political correctness demands that we echo the notion that all people are equally competent at controlling themselves, but experience tells us that some individuals are fundamentally their own worst enemy: give them too much freedom and they will ruin their life together with that of others. The honest person who undestands their propensity for self-harm admits that they are empowered when framed by others. Structure is always—always—what people need: it either comes from within, with unflinching discipline, or in community with other people. The latter is the only reliable arrangement from the perspective of social organisation.

Hierarchy is what holds individuals accountable. If this is not enforced by the extended family and immediate community, then it must be conferred as supreme authority to some nanny state or not done at all, which is where we are nowadays. The social fabric is torn asunder because at the micro level there is nobody to keep individuals in check, even when those individuals are religious or, anyhow, have a clear idea of what their society’s concept of righteousness is. America is a country of deeply religious people, for example, yet here we are commenting on its rampant porn-defined substrate. The issue is more basic, then, and has to do with the defective setup of face-to-face accountability.

In a vacuum of hierarchy, there is no collective power apparatus in place to guard against predators from a position of caring. The drug lord has easy access to your son. The pimp is one social media post away from your daughter. And so on. With the tutelary figures—hierarchy!—gone, what remains is a war of all against all, whose repulsive face we keep witnessing on a daily basis.

A crisis of values

Moving to the text of Ezra Marcus’ reportage, I find that the following quote reveals something more than the details of a human trafficking crime:

Another young woman, Sarah, moved into the lake house a week after her 18th birthday. She’d found the job through a Snapchat ad, which had promised $8,000 a month for bikini photos. She was pressured by Muhammad to quickly sign a contract. After a month streaming naked on Chaturbate, working 11-hour shifts, she had earned only $1,000; Connor told her the shortfall was her fault. One day, a fan sent $32,000 directly to her PayPal. She didn’t tell her bosses, only her boyfriend, Kaiden Kingsley, a recruiter who lived in the house. But word got back to Tyukalo, who ordered Muhammad to take her phone. When she got it back the next morning, her bank account was drained and the contacts for her family and friends had been blocked.

What we read here is descriptive of modern society at-large. Consider these general observations:

Get rich quick? Check.
Find a shortcut to the good life? Check.
The good life is measured in material possessions and luxury? Check.
An exploitative contract from your boss? Check.
Blaming the employee for the lack of business profits? Check.
No tutelary figure to hold teenagers accountable? Check.
The girl boss who sells her body because those are her rules? Check.

What we read here is specific to organised crime, yes, and I do not mean to trivialise it, though we have to learn from the particular in order to appreciate the general. As soon as we abstract away the details of this specific case we realise that what is happening, in terms of values, is business as usual.

The polite society, the one which can no longer understand its political correctness as the shadow play it actually is, will, of course, condemn the crime. Though in reality its moral standing is suspect for as long as it normalises all of the above in its routine workings.

In this specific story, the simps end up helping the victims. Though their capacity as simps is itself part of the structural problem. If you are demanding pornography as a consumer, you are necessarily contributing to the formation of the supply chain for pornography through the incentives you reinforce. And with that comes rampant cruelty.

In this twisted world, where porn is mainstream entertainment and girls are encouraged to “liberate” themselves, your demand for pornographic content means that you have no principled objection to your child, sibling, relative, being on camera. And if you think that you are okay when strangers do it but not your loved ones, then you are echoing the individualist mindset with its attendant disregard for solidarity. This is the crisis of values that brings us here.

Contra feminism as hinted at in the Jacobin publication, I view modernity’s social woes as products of too little hierarchy. Andrew Tate and friends make a mockery out of patriarchy and manhood in general because they are not interested in the pro-social, responsible project of building communities; a project that always happens with women as equal contributors. They only care about maximising their earnings at the expense of everyone else. As such, they leverage parasociability, turbocharge the mindset of victimhood, amplify the latent distrust in society, and encourage people to fight each other as rootless individuals. Put differently they do business as usual minus the politeness.

Change; anchors - James' Coffee Blog

2026-08-20T00:00:00.000Z

I look out the window. Every time I look I notice change: the ambering of leaves that are still green in my memory, the movement of clouds as they go from one end of the sky to the other, the movement of leaves as they sway to-and-fro with the light morning breeze; some mornings I see birds in the trees; yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing a small bird take flight, soaring to another tree.

I look at the trees outside and see the leaves that have been changing colour for a while, and those in the early stages of change. I think back to a realisation I had a while ago about how everything changes at its own pace. The warmth from my cooling cup of morning tea radiates as I think about the morning, and change.

My university textbooks for next year arrived yesterday. I am looking forward to skimming through them – to building the first stages of a mental map. I looked through the reference notes yesterday and saw a mention of an artist whose work I was reading about earlier this week, in what felt like a dialogue between my everyday and my studies. I am looking forward to next year – to all that I will learn. I am on the precipice of change: from one academic year to the next.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

My website has been changing, too: my home page is a now poem, and I continue to sit with the question “how can I make my website more poetic?” I am fascinated by bridges between mediums: the intersection of poetry and hypertext, of essays and the web, of imagery and text. I see more connections between mediums that I once thought of more on their own. I feel the opportunity to make new connections – to wonder how the vocabularies of different disciplines and mediums fit together and differ. Can a web page have a rhythm, like a poem? My thoughts are nascent; it feels both jarring and exciting to be at the early stage of new thoughts. ¹

Connecting between mediums relates to a quote from Picasso that I read this week:

When it comes down to it, all arts are one. You can write a painting with words, just as you can paint feelings in a poem.

Researching this idea further earlier in the week, I found an article in the Guardian titled “If a painting could talk…”, from 2004, in which the author, Grace, noted the affordances of poetry relative to paintings:

The visual impact of a painting can be immediate. We have it all before us: images, colour, forms, a stimulating eye-feast. […]

A poem, though, communicates in a more subliminal way, unfolding through the senses as you go along. Not until the end of the poem - sometimes even later - do we feel its resonance or have its meaning dawn on us.

Related to this, I have been thinking about form: about what writing on a blog means, and how I could use my blog for more long-form writing. How do I build a practice around longer-form writing? What affordances does the blog form have or not have that enables or makes this kind of writing more difficult relative to writing shorter pieces? How do I start to connect the dots between longer time horizons?

In pondering the latter question, I have realised how much I enjoy writing that is of a moment: a reflection of the streams of thought as they were in a given time. This writing, for example, is anchored in Nature – in what I saw when I looked out the window – and all of the ideas that followed from my original observation, including those I have had in my mind for several days or weeks but had not yet written down.

I have the phrase “artworks as anchors” written down on my whiteboard: a textual embodiment of the feeling that I have when I revisit an artwork that I know well; the feeling of familiarity combined with the feeling there is more to see, more to learn. Writing in a stream of thought allows me to put ideas side by side in the moment of writing, to reflect connections as they are made; to create new combinations, flowing from the sentences that precede into words that follow. What does it mean for a piece to be anchored, or to be an anchor? How do anchors help us when we change? I will need to keep thinking about these questions.

One of the themes in my university studies this year has been “crossing boundaries” as it applies to the humanities – physical, cultural, across time, and more. Leading on from this, I wonder: how do we and can we cross boundaries on the web?

[↩]

1 [↩] quote from Picasso If a painting could talk…

The hyperoptimiser’s mechanical keyboard trap - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-08-20T00:00:00.000Z

Mechanical keyboards give you the power to be maximally opinionated about your keyboard configuration. You can choose keycaps, switches, layout, firmware-level settings, and even materials to affect the overall touch and sound. All contribute to an individualised setup that may only work for you—and that is part of the charm.

I have been using a split mechanical keyboard for ~2.5 years already. It is the Iris from Keebio. Over time I have refined everything to be as I want. My preferred keycaps are the Cherry profile, specifically the Keychron Dolch Red set that I have had for ~2 years now. The switches I use are Cherry Silent Black since ~1.5 years ago. And the firmware has the exact mappings I like, which I settled on fairly early on. Details here: https://github.com/protesilaos/qmk/tree/master/keyboards/keebio/iris/keymaps/prot.

My personalised keyboard is the distillation of experimentation that unfolded over the course of several weeks. I tried a tall keycap profile, namely, MT3, as well as a uniform MOA set, only to realise that I prefer the Cherry profile. I further learnt that I am more comfortable with the cylindrical top surface of the Cherry keycaps as opposed to the spherical tops of the other options I tried. With switches, I used linears (Keychron Silver, Gateron Yellow) and a tactile variant (Keychron Banana), to ultimately understand my exact needs, which led me to the Cherry Silent Blacks. I want my keyboard to be quiet and firm to the touch. I had also figured out that I dislike low profile switches/caps, so the MX platform is what I am interested in.

What I have is not a “perfect” setup. If I start thinking about variables with margins for optimisation, I can produce the following non-exhaustive list of items:

reduce the switch stem wobble;
lower the sound profile even more;
have switches that are about 10g lower on the force curve;
have slightly taller keycaps at the topmost row, to make them even easier to reach;
change the case of the keyboard to something more elegant that also affects the acoustics;
use my own colour scheme for the keycaps and even the whole board.

This, however, is a slippery slope. To improve the stem wobble, I either have to modify all my switches by adding film to them or I have to buy new switches. Same idea for the springs to control the overall weight. My first choice would be to do market research in the hope of finding an existing solution. And if I do it myself, I might not like the results, so I will be back to searching for a commercial solution. But would, say, the extra 50+ EUR I would need to pay truly improve my experience? Or would I be buying something that might open up horizons for new optimality gains and thus a renewed commitment to experimentation?

Suppose I eventually lower the bottom out event to 70gf from its current 83gf level. Ceteris paribus, this brings down the actuation point by 13gf, meaning that I must now get used to the slightly lighter touch. I must also hold myself back a little bit so as to not bottom out hard. I can adapt, though it takes time. Imagine this takes me a couple of weeks or maybe even a month of being relatively sloppy. At the end of that exercise, I am left with a slightly lower force curve which, in theory, is less tiresome to type on. So I count that as a longer-term win.

Is it though? What about the restraint I am applying to not bottom out? If I am bottoming out hard, then I am wasting the extra force regardless. Can I reliably measure that marginal change to my setup to have an exact reading of the delta to my efficiency? How exactly to factor in the adjustment time? And if the prevention of injury is my primary concern, why not simply take more breaks here and there? A couple of minutes each time contribute to long-term wellness. Plus, if I do not even have any problem with the existing force curve, I am merely hoping that there are improvements to be made and then act with the wishful thought that I will somehow solve my unknown problems preemptively.

The same kind of thinking applies to every other factor. One tweak addresses a given consideration while creating a new one. Such is the nature of systems. The reason is that the process of optimisation is about finding the set of trade-offs you are willing to live with, given the constraints you have determined or must take for granted. Optimisation does not lead to perfection but only to a notionally imperfect state that meets your requirements. In other words, “good enough” is the closest to perfect you shall ever get.

The hyperoptimiser’s trap consists in believing that they can reach a point of perfection through continuous tinkering. With mechanical keyboards this practically translates into a money-intensive and time-consuming endeavour. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with buying stuff you like (what may be problematic is ruining your finances and other externalities, but that is a different discussion). Though understand that you are doing it because you find it fun, not because you will actually reach perfection.

This discussion extends to the number of keys a keyboard should have. I think the sweetspot is the 50% to 65% range, depending on priorities. Though this too is the kind of mire that you can avoid by accepting the “good enough” state of things.

In principle, I can work with fewer keys as I am adept at switching between layers. Though I can also be equally productive with a full-sized keyboard. This is because what I fundamentally produce on the computer is not governed by the input device: it is in my head and it involves clarity of thought as well as precision of statement. The fancy keyboard is a convenience that contributes, together with the overall desk setup, to a sustainable office arrangement. And, yes, it can be fun!

When I talk to people who are already into mechanical keyboards and who ask me about my opinion on the new custom board they plan to buy, my answer is always the same: admit that you are making a purchase for the thrill of the experience, as what you have is already good enough.

Whether you reduce the number of keys or move things around in your layers, you are not directly improving your productivity. You might add to your sense of comfort, which can indirectly affect your productivity. Though this is hard to measure reliably once we start talking about marginal gains and rigorous scientific methods of understanding them. Again, I am focused on marginality, not the big kind of changes whose effect is easier to notice.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the most efficient implementation is the least adaptable. This is because efficiency can only be realised within constraints, so the most efficient necessarily is that which has best adapted to its constraints. As such, even a tiny tweak to the constraints—constraints qua parameters—can have far-reaching implications, which undo the once present level of efficiency.

To be concrete, if you settle on, say, 32 keys on the assumption that you will be using Vim long-term, this will work well for you for as long as you are on Vim, but may give you trouble if you decide to switch to Emacs-style keybindings because those make heavier use of modifier keys. And if you have home-row modifiers set up, now you might want to reconsider their placement, tweak their timings, potentially rework your layers, et cetera. One small change to the system always becomes more than “one small change”. What once was the most efficient, then, will have to be remade anew (and so, did you actually gain productivity from all those roundabouts?).

In this regard, a keyboard with more keys does not need any further changes. Plus, you do not have to use all the keys, anyway.

This is not to argue for or against a specific choice. There is no clear right or wrong here, as what works for one is unsuitable for another. My point is that there always are trade-offs, diminishing returns, and the illusion of approximating perfection. The sooner you accept this fact, the easier everything will be.

As for buying new hardware, once you admit that you are doing it at least in part because you find excitement in the activity, then you are framing the issue in a way that gives you clarity. It is a consumer choice at heart, rather than the pursuit of some elusive productivity boost. Once it is impressed in the conscience as yet another purchase, you start asking financial questions. Do you really want to spend more money on this keyboard business to ultimately get nothing substantial out of it? What if you saved that money to, say, buy new clothes, or some furniture, or go on a trip abroad, or build a house?

My thinking is consistent for newcomers: you will have to play around with at least some of the variables to figure out what your preferences are. Be mindful of the trap though. Practice thoroughly to give whatever setup a fair chance. You want to get used to the keyboard the way it is so as to diminish the influence your prior expectations have on your present decision-making.

No decision need be final, after all. You might have different requirements in the future, so you can adapt accordingly. Do not make the mistake of trying to anticipate those requirements. Robust future-proofing is the kind of overthinking that can never yield reliable results as you are fundamentally trying to optimise without knowing the constraints. This is why there is no pressure to optimise your initial choices beyond the realm of the immediately knowable.

The appreciation of “good enough” will help you long-term.

For fun, I thought I'd revisit baty.blog - Baty.net

2026-08-19T18:10:44.000Z

I accidentally logged into baty.blog's admin and said, "SQUIRREL!", and spent time taking another look at the site. Who knows, I might start using it again.

Baty.blog runs on Pure Blog, by Kev Quirk. When Kev first announced Pure Blog, I (of course) tried it immediately. We got along well, right off the bat. Pure Blog is written in PHP, so it's simple to install nearly anywhere. It uses plain-text Markdown files instead of a database. It did all the basics that a blogging CMS should do. It aimed to be simple-but-not-too-simple. At the time, I found it to be a little too simple, so I abandoned it, meaning to check on it again, later.

It's later.

A lot has changed since I last used v1.2.0. Kev's been busy! Anyway, things looked stable and it had gotten important fixes and updates, so I upgraded both Pure Blog and my Pure Comments instance. I wired up comment emails, since Pure Comments can now use regular ol' SMTP (it used to be only AWS SES, gross).

I have cleaned up the layout I was using so it at least looks presentable. It seems I'm once again posting to baty.blog. For now. Don't forget, there's an RSS feed.

✍️ Reply by email

28 down, 16 more to go - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2026-08-19T09:50:00.000Z

You might be wondering why I’m already back hiking since I walked more than 40 km just a few days ago. And the answer to that is that I’m not hiking. This was a short stroll to briefly visit a church that would normally be part of the tenth and final segment of this ten-part loop.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the second half of this loop is so poorly laid out that some of the churches require some crazy changes to the main path in order to be visited, and the final segment of the loop in particular makes absolutely no sense. And I tried to figure out a reasonable way to include all churches in my walk, but there was no sensible way to include this one. It’s also so far from the valleys that I don’t even know why it’s included at all.

But there are 44, and I’ll be damned if I don’t visit them all, so off we go, this time with the dog, through the nice path that takes us inside the lovely park that runs near our destination.

As I said, this is not gonna be a challenging hike at all. I’m not even wearing shoes, I’m just casually walking the dog in the park with my flip-flops on. I walked this park many times before, but this time we’ll stay on the outskirts since the church is just outside of it.

The scenery is quite a bit different from my other walks, there are a lot of vineyards all around the area. Also, not many animals, aside from the dog that’s already hating the warm weather even though it’s still relatively early in the morning.

And just like that we have reached the church of san Martino vescovo (28/44) which, to add insult to injury, is inside a private property.

I’m not gonna bother adding extra links to this walk, as I said this was just a quick walk to cross the church off my list. But if you’re curious, the whole walk took just a bit more than an hour and was 3.6 km long. Legs are recovering fine from my previous long walk, so you’ll hear from me soon enough with pictures from more interesting places.

You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.

Share something with me

Prot Asks: Per Nordlöw about his Emacs extensions - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-08-19T00:00:00.000Z

In this ~2-hour video I talk to Per Nordlöw about some of his custom extensions for Emacs. I learn from Per how he approaches Emacs as a tool that can be extended to meet the requirements of one’s workflow. In the process, Per shares his screen to show me extensions for snippet expansions, linting and project diagnostics, and project actions. There is so much more that Per has already implemented. It can all be found here:

Organising my blog categories - James' Coffee Blog

2026-08-19T00:00:00.000Z

My blog categories page has, until today, been designed with a functional mindset: the purpose of the page was to list all of the categories I use on my website. But, this week, I started thinking about how I could improve the page, to make it more of a hub to explore different parts of my site, and to elevate the different kinds of writing I do most.

One of my main design goals was for the page to be organised into groups, each group representing a different topic about which I write. As I started to work on this goal, however, I realised there were many more mini tasks waiting for me: some category pages were being overwritten by static pages I had made, I had a few pairs of categories that were identical (or almost identical) in purpose, some categories had not been used in years and their contents could be moved elsewhere. This led me to start reorganising posts in my categories. These tasks were broken down into:

Creating new categories that I have wanted for a while (i.e. Nature for my nature posts, Monostich for my monostich poems, SSGs for my static site generator posts, Quizzes for my quiz posts).
Consolidating categories (i.e. all the posts in the Programming category have now been moved into Coding, Designs and Design, which had been created with subtly different intents but were never used that way, have been consolidated into Design).
Removing categories that had been unused for a long time and could fit into a bigger category, and assigning new categories to posts under the category that had been removed. I only removed a handful of categories.
Adding new categories to posts that already had a category where the post content may be represented well by two or more categories (i.e. my HTML Day posts now have the Events category).
Changing categories that had been used by accident on a post.
Moving pages that were not really posts into different parts of my site (i.e. I had entries that I used for Breakfast and Coffee, a Webmention-powered wiki I made a few years ago, in my post list, even though they were written as wiki pages; these have been moved to be individual pages, rather than posts. I preserved the publication dates of the pages and made sure the old URL redirects to the new one).
Miscellaneous website changes that were required as a result of stumbling on old web pages (especially interactive ones) that were not working as expected. ¹

All of this work was manual, but it was worth it. I can’t go as far as to say I have organised my website, but my blog categories feel a bit more navigable than they were before. I still have a lot of work to do on backfilling posts into the Nature category, but at the very least I am glad that I have it ready for when I need it.

When I removed categories, I added a redirect to the category into which most or all of the posts had been moved. This ensures that any links to the old category do not break.

As I made these changes, I also worked on my aforementioned main design goal: to organise my category page into groups. I came up with a few super-categories that could serve as section headings under which related categories could be listed. These are:

Life, Art, and Writing, which includes categories like Life, Moments of Joy, Stories, and Poetry.
Web, which includes categories like IndieWeb, Web, and Advent of Bloggers.
Technology and Design, which includes categories like Coding, Ideas, and Technical Writing.
Coffee, which includes categories like Coffee, Coffee Interviews, and Steampunk Coffee.
Miscellaneous, which includes categories like Music, Book Review, Fun with Words.

Items in this list appear in order of the type of writing I do most at the moment and have the most fun writing. Categories within each super-category are ordered by the number of posts in the category. Importantly, more than one category can be assigned to a post, although I don’t do this often. This means that the page doesn’t represent a count of all posts on my site; a post may be tagged Life and Nature, and so appear in both of the respective category counts.

Here is a screenshot of the page as it is today:

ALT

The top part of my categories page, showing the supercategories "Life, Art, and Writing" and "Web" with the accompanying child categories below each heading.

As part of making this page, I did an experiment where I was going to show an asterisk next to the post count for categories to which a post had not been added for at least a year. I ended up removing this because it felt like the kind of design pattern that might make me feel bad for not writing in a specific category.

Separately, I also added an Uncategorised category (and a redirect from /uncategorized with a “z” to /uncategorised with an “s”, given that, even during development, I got them both mixed up, and will likely in the future). This lists posts without a category. Adding this category helped me find several posts throughout the history of my site that were never given a category. I have now added categories to those posts.

Right now, all the posts in the Uncategorised category are my announcements for episodes in my Wonders of Web Weaving podcast. I hadn’t assigned a category to those posts because I wanted the main list of episodes to be on the podcast website. I may make a category though since these I am unsure the extent to which having a separate category page would be a problem since all the posts related to the podcast already link to the main podcast website.

As I mentioned earlier, there is more work to do, but my category page feels like it is in a much better place than it has been before. As a result of the new design, I have added a link to my categories page with the anchor text “Explore” in the left sidebar of my website. If you have any feedback, do let me know by sending me an email.

One of the bigger changes I made was replacing all instances of my email address in a blog post with a link to my /email page, which lists my email address. I made my /email page a while ago to be the canonical page with information on how to contact me, but I hadn’t updated my old blog posts to use it until today.

[↩]

Breakfast and Coffee blog categories Coding Design sending me an email Events 1 [↩] Monostich Nature Quizzes SSGs Uncategorised podcast website

Tuesday, August 18, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-08-18T09:50:36.000Z

Self-portrait / Rolleiflex 2.8D

STATUS: Getting rid of something every day feels really good
TODO: Decide about moving the external drives back to Linux
READING: "Platform Decay" by Martha Wells (Murderbot!)
LISTENING: Everything by Zeal and Ardor

I had a todo on my list for canceling my MagicPages subscription, so I went to do that. Seeing the Ghost version of this site running my custom theme gave me second thoughts. Remember how easy posting was with Ghost? Remember the comments, newsletters, and ActivityPub features? I caught myself before becoming too enamored with the idea, and canceled. If you use Ghost, MagicPages is a great service for hosting.

My writing isn't very good. I know that. It's probably because I don't worry much about how good it is. I just write, you know? One thing, though, is that I'm kind of proud that not a single word is generated using an LLM. What would be the point of doing that?

✍️ Reply by email

Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 15 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-08-18T00:00:00.000Z

The fifteenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 15, I chat with Zoe, the author of zoeloukia.bearblog.dev about, among other things, writing on personal websites, making art from whatever is around, zines, 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.

The fifteenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed Zoe zoeloukia.bearblog.dev

Lawns are stupid - Baty.net

2026-08-17T13:12:47.000Z

Lawns Are an Ecological Disaster

Americans devote 70 hours, annually, to pushing petrol-powered spinning death blades over aggressively pointless green carpets to meet an embarrassingly destructive beauty standard based on specious homogeneity. We marvel at how verdant we manage to make our overwatered, chemical-soaked, ecologically-sterile backyards.

I hate having a lawn. I hate the waste. And I hate that I live where an HOA demands that I fall in line.

Alice Cooper on rock and politics - Baty.net

2026-08-17T12:31:24.000Z

Alice Cooper (2004):

“If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.”

✍️ Reply by email

27 down, 17 more to go - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2026-08-17T12:25:00.000Z

The day is August 16th, the time is 6:42 am, and the temperature is a very enjoyable 16°C. The sun is about to rise over the mountains, and I can see it appearing behind the car I just parked at the same parking spot where we ended our walk back in June.

It’s been a long summer so far, and not a great one when it comes to hiking. It’s been hot. Probably too much. We hit a few records here and there, hitting 40°C more than once and hiking when it’s more than 35°C and with more than 50% humidity is a miserable experience. But I wanted to go hike, I felt the need to be out there moving through nature, putting some steps in. And that’s what I did.

This is going to be a strange hike since it’s part of the 44 churches loop I’m walking, but it’s not going to be a point A to point B hike, and I’m also hitting all the churches of the sixth segment of the loop plus an extra one for reasons I’m gonna explain later. But we have a long way to go, so we better get going.

The first church we’re going to visit is very close to the start, just 1km away, and it’s one I never visited before, even though I drove through this place a million times. Walking along the river this early in the morning is very enjoyable, and it’s nice to start a hike on flat ground, rather than immediately going up.

Barely 10 minutes into this hike and we’re visiting the church of Sant’Antonio Abate (22/44).

The church itself is not all that remarkable, but there’s an interesting plaque on a wall under the porch as a reminder of the history of this place, and also a window was open so I managed to take a picture of the inside.

With the first of the six churches we’ll see on this hike behind us, it is time to work our way up. We walk through a few lovely houses (never been on this part of the town), and we find the trail that is gonna take us up to the second church. Noticed a couple of what used to be houses completely reclaimed by nature and was reminded of a recent podcast episode I listened to during a long drive where they were talking about abandoned places amongst many other things. It’s fun to imagine how these towns and villages would look if we all left for a few decades.

The narrow trail widens up, we intersect one of those service roads, and then we work our way up to a lovely stretch through a series of open fields. I’m glad I’m walking this part of the trail early in the morning. As always, we’ll encounter random Jesuses and Maries throughout the hike. This is just one of them, placed there for who knows what reason.

This part of the loop is very close to home, I walked these fields many, many times before, and I also walked past this cabin so many times and always thought it would be so nice to live in such a place. At some point I should probably ask the owner if he’s willing to sell it. It’s such a lovely place.

Just a bit more than an hour into this walk and we have reached the church of Sant’Andrea Apostolo (23/44).

This is a lovely church, but the whole area surrounding it is quite neglected, unfortunately. There would also be a lovely view of the whole valley just outside its porch, but sadly everything is overgrown. And that’s the reality of this whole area: it has so much potential, but everything is so neglected, and it feels such a waste.

With this church we have also concluded the first uphill part of the hike, it’s going to be mostly flat and downhill for a while before we start climbing back up again. Plus the third church of the hike is just 10 minutes away from here.

And in fact, just like that, we’re outside the church of Santa Lucia (24/44).

The outside is not unlike many of the other churches, but this one has a gorgeous altar. I couldn’t take a decent picture, but there are a few on the site linked above, so make sure to go click it.

We connect back with the trail, and now we have quite a long way to go before we reach the next church since it’s almost 8 km away and we need to go back down this side of the mountain, into the next valley and back up again.

Thankfully this walk is gonna be almost entirely inside the woods because the day is warming up fast. But for the next hour and a half we can enjoy this slow descent into the nearby valley.

A bit more than 10 km into this walk, and it’s about time to start going uphill again, in the direction of the village of Costne and the fourth church of this hike.

I have never been up here before, and it always amazes me how many old and abandoned houses there are in these valleys. I think I should start doing a more comprehensive work of photographing these places just to document how an area slowly dies down. Maybe that’s a project for future me.

We just passed the three-hour mark, and we have reached the church of San Mattia Apostolo (25/44), which I think is the only one so far with 3 bells.

I thought this was a nice spot to take a quick break, eat something, drink a bit of Gatorade and also, since I had phone signal, FaceTime my friend Mattia who was about to hop on a plane for South Korea. I’m walking around the valleys while he’s travelling around Asia at the moment, and if you’re interested in that, you can follow his adventure either on his site or via his newsletter. This 20-minute break was nice, but we’re now moving again, going down for a little bit before starting the biggest climb of the day.

We’re passing close to the village of Tribil, which is where this segment of the loop ends, but we’re headed in the opposite direction, up Mount Hum, a place that’s filled with WWI history, and then down on the other side to reach the fifth church of the hike.

The sign at the base is telling me it’s gonna be a 1-hour hike to reach the summit, but I have different plans. I hiked this mountain before, but it was a lot more slippery back then. Now everything is super dry.

And we’re at the top. It took me 30 minutes. Easily the hardest part of the hike so far, and my HR can confirm that. But that’s behind us, and we now need to go back on the other side before going up again to reach the halfway point of this hike.

We’re down the mountain, back on the road, and I can see the church from here. Been up there quite a few times lately, it’s a lovely spot, especially late in the day.

Final push uphill, and we have reached the church of San Volfango (26/44).

We’re 5 and a half hours into this walk, and we have hikes 20kms so far. It’s time for another quick break to catch my breath and also finish this Gatorade I have with me. Most of the rest of the hike is gonna be downhill from now on, but we have quite a long way to go before we’re done.

So down the stairs we go, through the abandoned—I think—village of San Volfango, onto a very sunny road and back to where we exited the trail out of Mount Hum not long ago. I’ll have to walk back on the same trail for a tiny bit—something I usually try to avoid—because the alternative would mean walking quite a long stretch on paved road and that’s not an enjoyable experience.

On the trail, I stumbled on a big group of people that was taking a break, lying down in the shade, and they all had horses that were also chilling on the trail. Lovely animals. Horse riding is something I’ve never done in my life but would love to do one day. Feels such a great way to experience nature.

Almost 25 km into this hike and we’re about to enter Tribil, where this segment of the churches loop ends. I passed through here just the other day, during a silly walk with my dog, but that’s a story for another time.

And here we are, at the parking spot next to the cemetery where our hike should end, if I was a reasonable person. This is also where the next hike will start. But this time, we’ll keep going, and we’ll make it a full loop, going back to my car. And on our way there, we’ll hit a church that’s part of the 7th segment of this loop.

There are two reasons why I’m doing this. The first one is that I’m an idiot and I like to do silly things. The second is that the second half of these walks all have idiotic routes that make absolutely no sense. And as you’ll see in future newsletters, I had to tweak the proposed paths quite a lot to make them walkable in a decent way. And hitting this extra church today allows me to make the next walk much more enjoyable. But that means today we need to keep going, so down the trail we go.

The trail is mostly uninspiring now, just a long, relaxing, slightly downhill stroll through the woods, as we’re heading towards the village of Presserie, very close to the final church of the day.

We’re out of the woods now, back on paved road, and about to approach the final uphill stretch of the hike. My feet are starting to hurt a little bit. We are a bit more than 30 km into this hike.

Almost 8 hours into this hike and we’re finally outside the church of San Paolo Apostolo (27/44). Thankfully, there’s a fountain just outside of it. I definitely need to refresh myself a little bit.

The only thing left to do now is to walk back to the car. Which means leaving the church behind us, going through a short stretch into the woods, back onto the main road, then through a weird side trail again and then back onto paved road.

We’re down at the bottom of the valley, only a couple of kms left to walk on this sunny road and then we’d be done. With the walk. My feet are now hating me, but that’s a problem for later me.

And just like that, we’re back at the car. The time is 4 pm, the temperature is 35°C, and we have walked almost 38 km and ascended almost 1600 meters. I’m honestly less tired than I thought I’d be and kinda pissed that I didn’t hit 50k steps for the day. But the good thing is that I need to walk the dog later in the day, so we’ll get there. As always, photos of the walk are on the shared drive folder (these are all kinda shitty I have to say, not sure what happened, I definitely need to buy a camera) and the data from my watch is available at this link. See you next time!

You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.

Share something with me

Monday, August 17, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-08-17T11:29:38.000Z

I've been chatty on Mastodon the past few days. What gives? It's probably so I don't have to start any of the important projects on my plate.

"Linux is better for doing things to a computer than it is for doing things with a computer."

-- Me (2019)

✍️ Reply by email

I’m Old Fashioned by Ben Paterson - James' Coffee Blog

2026-08-17T00:00:00.000Z

Ruben and I are doing a writing challenge where we each gave each other three songs and we picked one to write about. From Ruben’s list, I chose “I’m Old Fashioned” by Ben Paterson. You can read about the song that Ruben chose from my list on his website.

The cover of the album on which Ben Paterson’s “I’m Old Fashioned” features, That Old Feeling is what first stood out to me before I started listening to the song. The cover depicts a pianist sitting with their back to the camera, playing a grand piano, in what I think is Washington Square Park in New York City. I visited Washington Square Park two years ago or so but when I was there I didn’t see many people. Whereas in the cover, the park is full: of people, of music. This makes me think about how a place can come alive at different times of day; how, even when a place is quiet, there may be music and life at different moments.

The song itself is delightful. Starting with a piano for the first ten seconds, Paterson then starts singing. The line “I’m old fashioned” sticks in my mind. I found myself singing the line in my head after I had heard the song. The lyrics take up only a small portion of the overall track, but the words all leave a strong impression. I found myself thinking about how I, too, am a bit old fashioned in Paterson’s definition: I love the moonlight and the sound of rain.

After the opening lyrics, there is an instrumental where the piano is the most prominent instrument until around 2:30, where the strings that had previously been in the background take over. At 4:00, a double bass (?) comes in, performing short solos and exchanging the stage with the piano. Then, toward the end of the song, the same lyrics that were sung at the beginning are sung again. I really enjoyed this structure of an opening instrumental, lyrics, a long instrumental, and then lyrics again. The song has a great rhythm throughout, to which I found myself bobbing my head many times.

I usually listen to pop music, and so Ben Paterson’s “I’m Old Fashioned” was a bit outside of my comfort zone. With that said, the song was terrific, and has me thinking about what other old fashioned things I do, and the things I have learned to do and know I should practice more. Indeed, from the title to the lyrics to the rhythm to the imagery on the cover, this song is full of things to analyse.

I’m Old Fashioned Ruben You can read about the song that Ruben chose from my list on his website

Français: Emacs en direct avec Sacha Chua et Abdallah Maouche @ 2026-08-20 14:30 Europe/Athènes - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-08-17T00:00:00.000Z

Cet jeudi, 20 août 2026, Sacha Chua, Abdallah Maouche, et moi nous allons avoir une discussion sur le sujet d’Emacs. C’est encore une opportunité pour moi de écouter et parler en français. En plus, je peux apprendre plus sûr Emacs: c’est toujours intéressant!

Sacha a déjà écrit à propos de cette réunion: https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/08/20-aout-emacs-chat-abdallah-maouche/.