~hedy's blogroll - BlogFlock

Trying a new Emacs config - Baty.net

2026-09-06T19:38:20.000Z

I'm typing this in Emacs using a completely new config and it's so weird. I've been running Emacs v31 everywhere and thought I'd try leaning on more of the built-in completion behavior, and it spiraled out of control.

I ended up looking at emacs-solo because it's a fancy configuration that only uses built-in packages. It was easy to try out, so I did. And I liked it. I added the necessary-for-me missing components of my old config.

My favorite part is that I went from 143 installed packages to 49 and got rid of hundreds of lines of config that I didn't really need. Also, my startup time was cut in half and is now under 1 second. Nice.

It'll take a minute for everything to burn in and shake out, but so far I don't hate it.

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Mount Plauris - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2026-09-06T07:15:00.000Z

I’ve been thinking about this mountain for more than a decade at this point, for reasons I’m gonna explain later. I wanted to hike it a few weeks ago, but there was a raging wildfire not too far from it on a nearby mountain, so I had to wait. Wait for better air conditions, because hiking with ash and dust in the air is not a smart thing to do, but also wait for a colder day.

Yesterday wasn’t exactly a cold day, it still got up in the 33° to 35°C range, but we—me and a friend—decided we were going for a hike anyway. We were out of the car at around 8:30 am and thankfully we got blessed with an overcast day which made the hike A LOT more enjoyable.

This is one of those quintessential mountain hikes; if you look at the elevation profile, you start walking, you go up, and you keep going up till you basically reach the summit. There were pretty much no flat spots longer than maybe 10 meters, and there was only a brief downhill part because we had to go through a mountain pass before going up again to the summit.

We had to gain almost 1500 meters of elevation in roughly 5.5kms and the climb averages at about 26% incline with stretches in the 75-80% range. From a purely physical perspective, this is not an enjoyable walk.

The trail starts on a stretch of concrete road, since there is technically a service road that goes up to the nearest mountain hut, but then turns into a lovely trail into the woods and I love walking into the woods. This area would also be a perfect spot to hang a hammock and just chill.

Roughly an hour and 500 meters of elevation gained we reached the Elio Franz Hut, a lovely, lovely mountain hut that is incredibly well maintained and clearly well loved by the people here.

It’s free to use and very well equipped, and I felt compelled to leave a small donation since there was a donation box inside it, even though we didn’t even stop here. But people who do this type of work deserve to receive some love. This is where the service road ends but the trail keeps going, first through the woods and then it hugs the side of the mountain with a trail that is everything but easy, with slippery rocks, loose rocks, rocks that are falling down, rocks that are falling away below you, sections with steps so high that I found myself with knees in my mouth (and I don’t have short legs).

About 2 and a half hours in, we’re at the mountain pass, we have gained about 1100 meters and the summit is in front of us. Thank god is overcast because climbing up this trail with the sun hitting on us would have been absolutely miserable.

Down we go through the only tiny downhill stretch of the whole ascent and this is where I stopped taking pictures before getting up to the summit. And that’s because the final stretch is bad.

It’s a scree, but not one of those where you have a clear trail marked or those where everything is soft enough where you can just sink your feet in firmly. No, this is probably just the result of rocks that must have recently fallen down. You can’t stick your feet in it, there’s not enough material and the rocks are too big. You can’t properly walk on top of it, because everything is incredibly loose, and you can’t even properly scramble your way across it, because there are stretches where there aren’t even big rocks to use as an anchor. And it’s steep, 50 to 60% grade. So if for some reason you slip, you’re going to slide down quite far and there’s nothing stopping you.

So we had to slowly and carefully find our way through this final stretch, trying to figure out the best way to go up this mess, and we eventually did. Boy was this not a fun thing to do.

The final bit to the top is a short, fairly exposed trail but that’s easy compared to what we just passed. On the summit, 3 people were enjoying the view. We learned that they came up from the other side, where there’s a much easier and shorter trail. Maybe I’ll do it one day.

The view from the top is very enjoyable, the sky full of clouds that are moving at a significant pace. A lovely spot to take a break before starting our descent. From up here, I can clearly see a place that’s stuck in my memory.

You see that green-ish dot, down at the bottom of the picture? That’s the roof of another hut I slept in 10 years ago, in August 2016 when with another friend of mine I first attempted hiking this mountain. Back then the plan was to do the first part of the hike, sleep, and the following morning summit the mountain. But I arrived at the hut that I was so tired, so exhausted, that we didn’t go up and for 10 years I kept thinking at this damn mountain.

And here I am, 10 years later, at the top, looking at that place from above. And I’m not even tired so take that 27 years old me. We’re getting better with age!

After spending almost an hour enjoying our time on the summit, it was time to go down. And again, not many pictures. The trail was so bad that we took almost as much time going down as going up, and that’s not usually the case. But we survived the long, long descent unscathed.

I am glad I finally hiked this mountain. I’m glad my adventure of 10 years ago can finally have a proper closure. But I don’t think I’ll ever do this trail again. This was not exactly enjoyable walking. It’s doable, clearly, but definitely not fun.

From the Summit, quite literally

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Complements: Art history, writing - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-06T00:00:00.000Z

Earlier this week I was chatting with a friend about the skills I am learning from art history. One of the most influential concepts I have learned is to “look closely”. The idea is to spend time with a single thing – to study it closely – and think about what you see in more depth. This helped formalise an experience I was already having in galleries: I didn’t want to see every piece as fast as I could, rather I wanted to slow down.

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Galleries, and the works within them, feel as if they have a certain magnetism, that magnetism sometimes varying over time. For instance, I was recently fascinated by a work of still life painted in the National Gallery of Scotland. I don’t usually gravitate toward still life paintings, but on that day I wanted to explore them more: to spend time with a genre with which I was less familiar, and to see what I could see.

Similarly, there are paintings that, no matter how many times I look, I see something new and beautiful: paintings that I only need to see in the corner of my eye before I stop and know I have to go over and look at the work in more detail. This year, the painting that has caught my attention the most is Turner’s sunrise over Norham Castle. The colours are transfixing. The scene is beautiful. The art is infinitely intriguing. I must have spent at least half an hour over several visits looking at this painting, and longer thinking about it.

I am studying both art history and creative writing next year. This is perhaps not as common of a mix as, for example, English Literature and creative writing, but mixing the study of art history and the theory and practice of creative writing feels right to me.

I haven’t coalesced a complete vision of the complements between these two subjects but, today, as I write, I feel like the concept – and application – of looking closely lends itself well to both my studies in art and my writing. Art history has helped me look closely. In writing, I similarly need to look closely at the world and capture as many details as possible, everything I see in the rhythm of the world, in Nature, in cities, and everything I feel, being a potential detail to use in a story.

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Studying art has helped me refine my visual description skills. This starts with thinking about the artwork. The kinds of questions I may end up answering are things like: What do I see? What is the art about? How do I know? How is a work composed? How do different parts within a work of art relate? How does the work at which I am looking compare to others I have seen? As I think, I enjoy writing down what I see. Other times, I enjoy just looking at a work, knowing that I don’t need to write anything to get something out of the experience.

These visual description skills blend in with my writing: the more I know what to look out for, the more details I know that I can write down, and the better I can incorporate those details into my writing. This connects with my creative writing where details about what I see can be an integral part of both life writing (an introspective kind of writing, which I enjoy) and creative writing (poetry, fiction, and more). Using written descriptions of art as part of storytelling even has its own term: ekphrasis.

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Art galleries have also helped me wander more: to slow down.

When I am in a gallery, I like to go towards whatever stands out, and spend time with it – to wander a room and see what works appeal to me, to get up close with a piece and spend time with it, to walk closer and further away from a piece to see what I see. In many cases, I can see specific places I have seen paintings, my memories of the spaces being so vivid. Perhaps this is because I like to slow down in galleries. ¹

Slowing down complements the pace at which I write and code. When it comes to writing and coding, I am often moving quickly: capturing ideas on paper, thinking about and formalising logic in code. I am moving fast because I love making things. In contrast, studying art invites me to slow down. Indeed, one of the most delightful experiences in galleries is when I have been looking at a piece for a few minutes and I notice something new. It is delightful to feel the process of seeing new things as you spend more time with something.

I am excited for the next year of my studies as a time to refine my visual description skills, to learn more foundations of the history of art, and to see and feel how writing and art history combine for me.

If you are curious, I am the sort of person who likes to diligently look at every piece one by one in an art gallery, moving through the space slowly. I like slowing down.

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ekphrasis 1 [↩]

Welcome to my world, which is your world - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-06T00:00:00.000Z

This is an entry from my journal about kindred spirits.

When you read my articles, you gain access to my expansive thoughts. I write at length on a variety of topics. Sometimes I amuse you, at others I trigger you. At all times, I make you think. And if you pay close attention, that thinking will take you much more time than you initially expect, because what I write is a distillation of considerably more words than those you receive.

You will eventually notice that there is a consistency to my thought, whether I am commenting on colour themes, politics, dogs, mechanical keyboards, everyday life issues, or abstractions with no obvious application. This is my integrity of thought, which is a reflection of my character: focused while also capable of moving in many directions.

There is a pattern that identifies me. It is my creativity, whose vital force joins thoughts into coherent structures, which form greater architectures, each with a world of its own. My publications are mere footprints. They hint at my adventures. You know where Protesilaos was. You might feel the calling to check out at least some of those tracks to learn where might they lead to. Perhaps you will find me sunbathing by a fig tree.

You might read about one facet, expecting that it is self-contained. Therein you will inevitably discern hints of my multifacetedness. There is a river of conscience running through entire continents of words. You drink from its waters, yet you can tell that what you get downstream is coming from high up the mountains. There you can find me again, hiking where the eagles fly.

You too can explore the space I have covered. The portal I have opened remains accessible. I call it “my world” but there is nothing about it that I can keep to myself. I have no exclusionary power over it. The moment I speak of it, I transfer it to the collective awareness. If I keep it private, I have still incorporated it in my broader thinking, which I will eventually hint at by virtue of talking.

As soon as I say something—anything!—I will make you realise that I am an iceberg. This I cannot hide from you. So I instead give you as much as time allows. Were you to ask me, I would share even more. No matter how much you drink, you will not deplete this fountain.

This world can be yours to occupy. You are welcome to inhabit it. I have taken care to leave plenty of fruits around. You do not have to do the hard work to acquire those. Though if you stay here for long, you will become me and so you will assume the habit of collecting fruits for others to enjoy.

I could stay there to tour you around. I could even hold your hand, if you were unsure about what lies ahead. But I probably should not. I will instead hide in plain sight. If you wish to find me, you will and then I will join you, friend. Our paths shall converge.

Until that moment, you will be there and I will be someplace else. That place might be too far for you right now. It may appear inhospitable and uninhabitable. There are no monsters though. I am the only dragon in these parts and I am benevolent. If you have already felt welcome in any one part of my world, you know that the same spirit that guided you here will bring you there. Follow the flying fairy.

My world is how I connect to the cosmic mind. This is where I have met you countless times already. We have never talked and I have not seen your beautiful face. Those eyes I could stare at for a lifetime. You know I mean it because you sense that I do not build anything on a whimsy.

I already know a lot about you without ever hearing your name. My thoughts have anticipated you in all of your manifestations. I saw you in me as potentiality because I had the courage to look inside. I then encountered you everywhere I went, a pair of eyes in a crowd of strangers. I hereby take a fistful of soil and raise my hand towards the sky to signify that the two are three, which are one, which is two, which are three.

If there is me and there is you, there necessarily is a space that envelops us. The two are three. If there is such a space that can envelop the two, it has in it a quality which is shared by all of them. It is that quality which is common in the multitude. So it is one. And the one is many. My world is your world, your world my world, this is our world. Do you understand where we are, dear?

You are me, yet another mind connected to the cosmic mind. Entering my world means that you are either already aware of our connection or shall figure it out soon. You do not know what is the ulterior end. It is not for you to know. Your embodied presence conditions you to a life of constraints. I will be there, walking beside you, even though I have stayed at the hut this whole time. Such is the capacity of the mind to transcend the boundaries and to visit you wherever you are, shape-shifting as stray cat to remind you that far and near are bound in togetherness. Should I hold your hand now?

The lie of socialist feminism - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-05T00:00:00.000Z

In light of Gloria Steinem’s death, Jenny Brown writes in Jacobin how Gloria Steinem Was the Godmother of Neoliberal Feminism:

The establishment’s favorite “radical” feminist, Steinem worked with the CIA to promote reactionary propaganda and helped direct the women’s liberation movement into a corporate-friendly, anti-socialist direction.

Jenny tries to emphasise the shortcomings of neoliberalism by commenting on its feminist manifestation. She juxtaposes neoliberal feminism with the supposedly benign form of socialist feminism. The notion of a socialist feminism sounds appealing until we think it through, at which point we uncover the familiar individualism that undermines society.

Collectivism or individualism

The essence of socialism is its collectivist ethos: the group is above the individual. This does not mean that individuals do not matter or that they have no rights, but only that the common good takes precedence over the individual interest in cases where the two are in conflict. This is the basis for arguing that, say, a billionaire should not profit at the expense of society.

The consistent collectivist cannot subscribe to a view of the world where the individual has inalienable rights. Such jurisprudence necessarily reifies the singular person as the supreme good and, by extension, does not recognise any social body as an agent of political will.

To the collectivist, all individual rights can, in principle, be forfeit, including one’s life, if the common good demands as much. This is because the individual is ephemeral, whereas societies—and, by extension, cultures—subsist through intergenerational solidarity.

There will be cases where this tension is necessarily oppressive from the perspective of the individual, should the individual be pulling towards a certain extreme away from the midpoint. Such are the demands for the society qua organism to survive long-term: it has to maintain its integrity, which is a function of the roles it enforces among its members, the rules it embeds, and the hierarchies it establishes.

An organism cannot be heteroclite. Indeed, organism essentially is the spirit that is discerned as the organising principle which sets together the otherwise disparate parts into a system. “System” literally means “jointly standing”. There is a superordinate goal of resisting entropy for as long as possible to which everything else is subordinate.

A society, then, forms an organism through the organising principles it generates. The national interest, the want for energy and resources more broadly, the cultural expression… These reveal the overarching objectives which no longer account for the feelings or wants of individuals. Each person is subject to the workings of the whole, whether they like it or not.

The individualist does not recognise any body that is superior to the individual. In its most honest expression, individualism fully rejects collectivist thought, for it does not treat anything as a public good. There is no group whose interests are above those of the individual.

The individualist will be in principal agreement with notions of inalienable rights, such as human rights or a very strong conception of property rights as the foundational codex of collocation. Consequently, the billionaire is not a problem in principle: that is just shrewd entrepreneurship.

A country of individualists inevitably develops into an association of marauders and pillagers, who will seek to exploit other lands to make up for the fact that they are living beyond their means. They do so because they put private interest above anything else and, as such, think only of short-term gain.

The group, then, is an aggregation of selfish opportunists. It cannot be allowed to have a life of its own, the way an ethnic community does, as that gives rise to the collectivist ethos. The individualist must actively sever ties and break roots to remain individualistic.

The common good starts with the extended family

To the collectivist, the common good is understood as concentric circles that extend from the family, to the local community, to the homeland, to the nation.

The collectivist will argue, for example, that someone may not cut down the oak tree that lies within their property, since cutting down trees will be harmful to the community long-term. Monoculture begets disease and endangers the ecosystem, for instance, while the absence of trees and other vegetation makes soil erosion more likely and floods more devastating.

In this example, the individualist will cut down the trees indiscriminately because the only relevant person and thus the supreme good is that of oneself. Their own short-term interest reigns supreme. The individualist cannot live in harmony with a tree’s lifespan, which often goes on for centuries. “Whatever can happen, must happen now, and may the others be damned”, is their rationale.

The common good starts with the extended family in present time as well as intergenerationally. The elders, for example, will plant trees whose shade they will not sit under. They do it for their grandchildren as well as for all the children that may live in that land. Their plans concern the long-term, which is no longer about their individuality. They are interested in the conditions that may favour the next several generations.

We may describe this longer-term outlook as “patriarchal” or “matriarchal” or, simply, “responsible”. Within the confines of a single extended family, the patriarch and matriarch are the masculine and feminine tutelary figures who together uphold and pass on the cultural norms. They are examples to be followed. Through their leadership, which happens in a spirit of love, they give life beyond their own by creating the environment for social reproduction: reproduction in biological terms within the framework of a culturally defined society, else ethnicity.

There is no patriarchy that is opposed to matriarchy. The two complement and invigorate each other for there to be ethnic continuity. What the man does, the woman cannot emulate, and what the woman does the man is incapable of doing. Both are necessary for the collectivist ethos to be understood through one’s sense of duty to the commons. The man is a good man when he tends to his family instead of, say, gambling away his money. Same for the woman whose attention is on her offspring instead of various kinds of plastic.

The common good starts by sacrificing the individual interest. One’s own convenience has to be set aside for the collective to prosper. The parent must for a while accept fewer hours of uninterrupted sleep, for example, so that the baby may survive. The child, in turn, must learn that not every capricious want of theirs is satisfied because those can be self-destructive once realised. Children conform with the norms of the society and are not allowed to do only as they wish.

Whatever good, then, may be experienced at the local level is made possible by the good of the wider space in which locality is understood. There has been a past for there to be a present and this cycle continues into the future through responsibility. The collectivist thinks about the homeland and the nation at-large, not merely their parochial gain.

The individualist is not conditioned to serve any common good. They will continue to pollute the environment, for example, because fundamentally they believe that whatever happens to the planet long-term is not their problem to deal with.

Such is the midpoint of our modern world, especially in Western culture. Its values are individualistic, its real god or moral lodestar is the ego, whence come all the patterns of behaviour that are detrimental to longer-term wellness.

There cannot be a socialist feminist in earnest. There will come a time when they have to decide whether they are socialist or feminist, else collectivist or individualist.

To the feminist, family is hell

Which brings me to the lie that is socialist feminism. Consider the following statement from the 1972 publication Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement. Emphasis is mine.

Many analyses have identified various institutions (e.g., the family or sexual relations) as the crucial contradiction of sexism. However, these contradictions reflect the social relations of a sexist society, or institutions in which sexism occurs. Eliminating these “prime factors” would neither eliminate sexism nor necessarily create supportive alternatives for women. As the factory may be the locus for capitalist exploitation, it is not the basis of that exploitation. Private ownership and profit is the basis, giving rise to the class relations. Similarly, the family is a crucial locus of sexist oppression but it is not the basis of that exploitation. Control by men over women and the relegation of women to secondary roles is the basis of sexism, giving rise to a sexist society.

This is the irreducible storyline of the feminist narratives. According to it, men are oppressive qua men, men effectively enslave women, and the immediate domain of their tyranny is the household where family life happens. This family life is dismissed rhetorically as “secondary roles”. It follows that the emancipation of the woman comes at the expense of the household, familial ties, and manhood as such.

By extension, the most free woman is the one who is not under the control of any man and recognises no family. If the woman has children, even if she is a single parent, she still has duty towards them, so children will become a problem as well that needs to be externalised for the mother, now the individual who matters above all, to be free.

What will the woman do once she gets rid of the “secondary roles” of the household? She will pursue the presumably primary role of the girl boss, or socialist agitator, or, if she is so inclined, will find an inadequate outlet for her maternal instinct in the form of some ideology that seeks to rescue the forlorn; an ideology that will sooner or later be her own enemy, though her bleeding heart will not let her recognise the danger ahead of time.

Feminism is insipid poison for society. It is the ideology that seeks to render shameful and eventually eliminate the single skill women are peerless at: motherhood. It works to make the woman an enemy of the man, which will not only destroy intimacy or reduce it to a ruthless transactional exchange but also tear asunder the social fabric. Once the ground is saturated with enough toxicity, there will be no family, no communities, no nation, no hierarchy whatsoever.

Feminism effectively argues that the problem for women is womanhood, which consists in the fact that they are endowed with the disposition to raise children. Feminism treats womanhood as the core evil and encourages the woman to effectively become a lesser man in pursuit of some stupid “primary roles”.

The feminist only thinks of children as a burden to be managed through deferral to some impersonal “childcare”, which supposedly relieves the woman of her maternal duties although it actually encourages her not to bother with children at all. Continuing from the same publication:

A second problem we faced was in our understanding of our oppression as women. We knew that childcare was an issue for many women, but failed to take into consideration the problems such women face. The very women we hoped to involve (those with young children) were among the least likely to ever be active in any kind of social movement. They simply don’t have the time (because they don’t have childcare), are less mobile, and don’t think of themselves as active community members. The prevailing notion that women need something to do after their children are in school also makes these women less likely to consider becoming involved.

Later we find other snippets, like:

With material changes such as children, a mate, a home, one often becomes more circumspect because such a person must be able to provide for others (by law and social pressure).

So the women could not be activists, which presumably is the apogee of this vaunted freedom of theirs, because they were performing the vital function of motherhood. The publication goes on to argue for some superficially socialist scheme by which funds are directed towards childcare. Make no mistake though, the essence is not socialism, else collectivist ethics, but to sever the mother from her children in phase one, to make her detest motherhood in phase two, and to render her a rootless individual in phase three. Socialism is just the vehicle by which hardcore individualism proceeds.

The feminist enterprise dehumanises both men and women. To the woman, it denies her of her nature by making her think of her potential of motherhood as innately burdensome and of her femininity as proof of the fact that she is not man enough. To the man, it treats him as inherently malevolent, owning to his propensity to enslave women. The man cannot escape his manhood to be seen as something more than a penis with a penchant for tyranny. The composer, the poet, the painter, the engineer, the philosopher, is still a man, after all. Whatever intellectual qualities and sensitivities he is endowed with, no matter how pro-social his integrity and discipline are, he still is the primordial enemy. When it comes to manhood, the feminist tends to interpret everything as a phallic symbol of power and control.

The feminist must have never heard about the mother-in-law, for example, or never met one of the countless men who are wrapped around their girlfriend’s or wife’s little finger. Only men do the controlling and the abusing. They must have never heard about the lengths men have gone to in order to be seen favourably by a woman. As such, they have not bothered to understand the psychosynthesis of the common man; the man who finds fulfilment only through female validation and who lives broken by self-loathing while he is single—not because there is anything wrong with him, but simply due to how nature makes him seek out the female counterpart as the ultimate end. The man who is strongly independent is a rarity in this regard and effectively irrelevant to any discussion about numbers.

Yes, there are men who are tyrannical and abusive, just as there are women who would rather destroy society than accept lifelong duty towards others. But we cannot reduce everybody to a simplistic “men/women are bad” kind of formulation.

The gist of the aforementioned is that “socialist feminism” is a walking contradiction. Once we read past the generic socialist talking points we find gendered individualism that teeters on sociopathy. In present time, this gender talk also comes from the side of men, as in the case of Andrew Tate and friends, that I have commented on recently in About rootlessness and broken relationships (2026-08-21), as well as to a lesser extent On the war in Ukraine and social expectations of manhood (2026-07-20).

Family is the natural unit of solidarity

The collectivist ethos is about serving the common good. Put differently, it is expressed as solidarity in the form of people supporting each other.

The natural unit of solidarity is the family. Within the family exist bonds of blood which are held together by mutual feelings of love. The vitality of the family culminates in solidarity between generations: the elders are in the same space as the children and all are enveloped by a community of such extended families who know each other’s lineage. They have a defined homeland for their clan with a culture that is preserved across the centuries. Put differently, they are not rootless and will seek to grow roots even when forced to emigrate. Solidarity is thus organic.

In the countryside of Cyprus where I live, there is a growing number of people of Syrian Muslim background. They found refuge here from the civil war of the 2010s that sent their country into disarray. There were only a few of them back then. Now the women have five children each and are young enough to have another five. They support each other and live close together, from the little ones to the elderly.

These communities are the only ones which are vital in the Cypriot hinterlands. By contrast, the locals are walking dead. Old people whose posterity daydreams of the princely life that Hollywood promised them away from the countryside; a posterity that has turned radically individualistic and thus only finds excuses to not have children and to not take on the mantle of social reproduction.

The Syrians are neither rich nor are they enjoying some legendary “childcare” that was brought about by the socialist reconstitution of the state. They thrive under the prevailing conditions and their future is bright regardless. They simply understand that you have to put the common good above the personal interest: you submit to the authority of the collective.

Here, the Syrian man makes a basic salary by working in the construction sector. He spends his day at the construction site. He labours under the punishing Cypriot sun to provide for his loved ones, which he returns to as soon as the workday is over. The woman stays at home with the rest of the extended family, tending to matters of the household and keeping everything together. She is the cornerstone of the community. Her work is not “secondary” in any way. She is best person to raise her children together with her relatives and, while doing so, to instil in them a strong sense of honour so that they too go on to do the same.

These people do not outsource the most important of duties to some faceless “childcare”, nor do they have faith in the abstraction of the nanny state. They make things happen through the resilience of their collective character. Their meagre income is enough to raise several healthy children, all of whom have good manners and are eager to provide a helping hand to their neighbours. By contrast, the zombie nation of the Greek man and the Greek woman, and of the Western man and woman in general, finds it too bothersome to even have a single child and will complain to no end about it.

Muhammad was a supremely gifted leader because he understood the essence of religion as a framework of rules for life on earth. Forget about the angels: Christians have plenty of those too. Muhammad’s project aims, in practice, to have strong communities whose vitality is intergenerational. Whereas the Christian world gradually turned religion into a private escapist affair about one’s relationship with some effectively voiceless father in the sky. This has transmogrified into the various brands of individualism that are ravaging our societies.

Muslims are going from strength to strength because they accept that the collective is above the individual. They will lose their momentum as soon as they forget what grants them vitality. Christianity, on the other hand, is becoming the spirituality of the undead; people whose last hope is that there exists a better afterlife, as this life they have already forsaken.

The particularities of the Muslim quotidian paradigm need not be emulated. The collectivist essence is what matters. I cannot cosplay the Arab man. I can, however, seek to rekindle the essence that we had only a few decades ago, the essence I was raised in, and which have since been sacrificed to the altars of overabundance, of individual profit at the expense of rapid ethnic disintegration.

morning - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-05T00:00:00.000Z

rabbits leaping, birds tweeting,
the sun rising, hills welcoming,
breeze blowing, paths winding,
potential painting, colours calming:
skies awakening, day breaking.

autumn, winter - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z

colours shimmering,
sun lowering.

leaves leaving,
seasons deepening.

trees lightening:
branches preparing.

winds cooling,
time wintering.

I wrote this poem with reference to a series of key words in the first edition of Planet Persephone's Go Offline zine. I used "lightening", "time", "shimmer", "colour", "deep", "leaves", "wind", and "winter".

Planet Persephone's Go Offline zine

Emacs: doric-themes version 1.3.0 - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z

These are my minimalist themes. They use few colours and will appear mostly monochromatic in many contexts. Styles involve the careful use of typography, such as italics and bold italics.

If you want maximalist themes in terms of colour, check my ef-themes package. For something in-between, which I would consider the best “default theme” for a text editor, opt for my modus-themes.

Package name (GNU ELPA): doric-themes
Sample pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/doric-themes-pictures
Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/doric-themes
Backronym: Doric Only Really Intensifies Conservatively … themes.

Below are the release notes.

Version 1.3.0 on 2026-09-04

New theme screenshots

All sample images are updated to the current version and cover all the Doric themes: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/doric-themes-pictures.

New `doric-lilac` and `doric-borage` themes

I drew inspiration for both themes from plants that exist around my house. They both use the same colours in different shades and sequence. doric-lilac has a light background while doric-borage has a dark background.

More commands to load a theme

The commands doric-themes-rotate-light and doric-themes-rotate-dark are convenience wrappers of doric-themes-rotate. As their name suggests, they are restricted to one kind of theme in the collection.

Similarly, doric-themes-load-random-light and doric-themes-load-random-dark are variants of doric-themes-load-random.

Thanks to Lucas Jiménez for making this suggestion in issue 28: https://github.com/protesilaos/doric-themes/issues/28.

Broader face coverage

The following packages have some new faces or I tweaked them to look better with the rest of the theme.

completion-preview
elfeed
erc
flymake
gnus
mu4e
query-replace

Minor refinements to palette values

I made several small tweaks to several themes. The changes are probably too fine to notice or they should now look correct enough to be unnoticeable.

Thursday, September 3, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-09-03T11:05:16.000Z

Good catch. The blast radius is genuinely load-bearing, but let me confirm before guessing.

...or...

Let me verify the fix empirically rather than just assert it.

Reading Claude Code's output is exhausting.

If you think that unsubscribing from a few software services is "fighting fascism" then we're going to lose.

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Poem: Rolling pine cone - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-09-03T00:00:00.000Z

Rolling pine cone
to the birthplace of the goddess
Ionian sea salt you bring
and alpine cold of a northwestern wind
hoping to understand
how the surface
can differ from the depth

Morning impressions - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-03T00:00:00.000Z

Opening the window, a vivid dancing shadow of the trees between the glass and the sun appears the wall, illuminating yesterday’s ideas written across my whiteboard. The shadow is a temporary, moving work of art, detailing the contours of leaves and, when I stand in front, the stray hair from my head still unbrushed from having woken up half an hour prior. As the minutes pass, the impression of the trees becomes hazier, more abstract: the sun is moving. The limited conditions that made the art possible fade by the minute.

I think of all the possibilities of morning: of the songs to be sung by the birds – on the forefront of my mind as I hear the soothing, familiar call of a pigeon outside – and the way the light wakens both outside and inside. The artwork is intensifying again; perhaps one of the clouds outside was obscuring it temporarily. The trees once again dance, moving with the September wind. I stop and notice a faint breeze coming from the window; I, too, feel the September breeze, a cooling touch after a warm summer.

I take a sip of my warm tea whose temperature contrasts with the cool air outside, and, a moment later, look out the window, seeing amber leaves and rainy roads, and the peace of morning – essences of Day. I look forward to the day ahead.

fishing - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-03T00:00:00.000Z

trees and canopies
shelter for the fisherman
stoic as a river: he is still
in movement
engaged like a painter
watching the moment.

This poem was inspired by Jules-Louis Dupré's "Willows, with a Man Fishing".

Willows, with a Man Fishing

Wednesday, September 2, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-09-02T14:56:11.000Z

After a couple of lazy months, I finally got back into the darkroom this morning.

I bought the UGREEN NAS as a way to store files and host Plex. That has evolved somewhat. I'm still putting files there, but the number of hosted apps has grown.

Miniflux (RSS reader)
Navidrome (Music server)
Forgejo (Git repos)
Vaultwarden (Passwords)
Immich (Photo library)
JellyFin (Media streaming)
Readdeck (Read-later service)

All accessible only via my Tailscale network. Sure hope nothing breaks :)

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Time - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z

Flowers fade into fall. Every day brings us closer to autumn. I walk around for a while, admiring details I have seen a hundred times and yet, each time, find something new to see, and then stand for a moment and watch as people wander in the park, or sit and spend the moment solo, or together. Time seems to slow down here: we meander rather than rush, we have space to pause and breathe and gaze out into the grass ahead with nothing in particular in our minds. In parks, I can sit with the motion of my day while not feeling like I have to prepare to do something else.

Looking ahead, I think about distance, a concept that has been on my mind for the last few months – distances through spaces, time, distances from memories, distances to moments up ahead to which I am looking forward, the distance between the writer and their stories, how spaces create distance, or, indeed, bring people closer together. With that thought in mind, I start thinking about distance in terms of closeness – how parks and museums and trains and music and stories and towns and cities bring us together. These words bring you closer to a moment in my life, when I gazed out onto a green park with people wandering up and down paths, and when I felt like I could stand still.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

“Romance & Reality” is written on the directions on a white plaque on a white museum wall. Walking ahead, I feel the granite floors beneath my feet, and see the Grecian, and apparently also Roman, decorative features. I notice the Latin inscription on a plinth in the hallway.

Walking in, I am immediately attracted to a painting that always seems to catch my eye. One glimpse makes me want to walk closer. The magnetism of this painting derives from and is embedded in its colour. I look forward onto a hazy riverscape and look around to see a painting I always remember for its fidelity of reflection, in a room that marks the beginning of my journey today.

The hazy river has reflections too – the yellows of the sun and the deep blues of the castle are reflected in the river. Reflections can be conveyed even in a haze: there is a spectrum of reflection; from haziness to definition. I look at the castle in the centre of the painting and wonder how paintings encourage us to look at a particular point, reflecting on colour and position and precision and tradition.

The light of the sun is cast over a distance in the painting, from the near centre to the periphery. In the centre the sun and the castle exist together: Nature and the built environment, co-existing.

I take two steps back. I feel like I am seeing a new painting. White hues enter the foreground of my newfound impression of the work. Are these hues a heavy mist that has not yet dissipated? The title of the work states the painting depicts a sunrise, so such mist is possible. I think back to the beautiful fogs of cooler mornings where the droplets of water suspended in air disperse slowly with the burgeoning sunlight. I think about how the painting in front of me brings a haze to life, with all the colours of morning.

I feel the softness in my breath as I reflect on how calm galleries make me feel.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

When I visit galleries I sometimes have an idea of what I want to see. Today I wanted to see a still life painting. I remembered exactly into what room I would need to go: a lowly-lit space in the back of the museum. When I entered, I saw a single still life with fruit and a lobster on one wall.

Looking at the painting, I saw Nature and colour and wealth and light and shadows and time and ethics and detail and contrast. I am standing looking at a moment, just as I was when looking at Turner’s painting, except this one has been clearly arranged for the viewer. Artists capture time. Am I capturing time with these words, a timeline of moments that become a written work?

I see the ephemerality of wealth in the still life. The expensive fruits will one day age. I think back to a CharliXCX song. Nothing lasts forever.

There is meaning everywhere: in the choice of material for the walls, in the art, in the existence of museums themselves. Here, I have space to be with and to interpret time.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Romance & Reality — In McCulloch’s waterfall, one of the first paintings to welcome me to the Scottish art section of the building, I see movement and change and seasons and Nature. What must it be like to hear the water fall? Does the water glimmer with the moonlight?

The colours of the crevice between the tall hills in the background reminds me of a rainbow, even though it is likely not intended to be a rainbow. I see this every time I look at the painting.

Looking at the waterfall, I see, as with other paintings, moments suspended in time, moments that become alive alive with our observation and imagination. I think about how many rainbows have been seen at waterfalls. I think about the building on the edge of the water. Is it a mill? It is so close to the end of the waterfall.

The plaque says the scene is “probably imaginary”. I think about how galleries both let us visitors imagine and let us see the imaginations of others.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Is that a Renoir? This painting had a magnetism too. But it is in the Scottish art section. A lady stands in front of the painting studying it in depth. The information plaque informs me the piece, alive with greens and drops of sunlight carefully painted by the artist, was painted by Sir Guthrie. The piece, “Midsummer”, “epitomises Scottish Impressionism”. I stand transfixed before the painting for a minute or two, imagining what it must be like to be in the garden the painting depicts.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

I think of how paintings can capture beauty: of Nature, of people, of places, of time.

I Don’t Have a Smartphone… - Ploum.net

2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z

I Don’t Have a Smartphone…

…or, at least, I wish I didn’t.

"I don’t have a smartphone," is what I tell people and professionals nowadays. This allows me to cut the crap about companies insisting that I install their app or restaurants wishing that I scan a QR code to access their menu on a small screen.

"I don’t have a smartphone" is, according to my experience, the easiest explanation, the shortest way to force people to get their shit together and take the required actions to allow me to live without being glued to a small screen dependent on a huge American megacorporation.

When I buy something, from a small kitchen appliance to a car, I’m now forced to get formal confirmation by the seller that I will be able to use it without installing one, two or three different apps. I kept the count: in the last year alone, I had to argue against the installation of 18 smartphone apps. Just in my toilet, I’m supposed to have an app for the seat, an app for the flush and one for the ventilation.

It is quite fascinating because if you assume using each app for only 3 minutes per day (which basically means opening, closing and does not include doing the upgrade every other day or debugging some problems), that’s nearly 1 hour of your day! 22 full days of your year (assuming 16 waking hours per day).

What installing your app means

When you ask someone to install your app or to scan your QR code, you make the following assumptions:

1. That person owns a smartphone (which is at least a couple hundred dollars).
2. That person has the smartphone on them right now.
3. The smartphone is in working condition.
4. It has enough battery to install your app, use it then finish the day.
5. It has enough storage left for your app.
6. It has enough network coverage.
7. That person has enough data left on their data plan.
8. They have a valid and connected Google account (or, an Apple one).
9. They are comfortable with taking out the phone and dedicating some time and attention to the screen right now while not paying attention to all those notifications that the phone surely gathered since its last use.
10. They are willing to accept all the conditions of your apps, including sending you personal data, registering an account, etc.

When you think about it, this is an awful lot of assumptions.

Just regarding point 8: your Google account could be terminated right now, without reason. It happens every day. It could happen to you. Or an American president could decide your country should not have that service anymore.

Et si vos comptes disparaissaient demain ? (ploum.net)

If only one of those 10 assumptions is false, for whatever reason, the person will not be able to use your app. You will have to deal with it.

People always tell me I’m weird for not installing the app but, looking at this list, I find it weird that you even find people to install it in the first place!

But here we are… Those 10 assumptions have become the new commandments everyone should obey.

Why I will tell you I don’t have a smartphone

Ten assumptions that are a bit too long to explain to a vendor or a worker. So, instead of arguing about the time lost and my quest to be Google free, I took the stance of answering, "I don’t have a smartphone."

Reactions vary. Pure salesmen try to convince me that you can’t live without the app, that I need to do the mandatory "update" Why? If it’s connected, it can do its update alone. If it is offline and it works, it doesn’t need any update and updates have a higher probablility to worsen my situation than to be helpful. If it is offline and it doesn’t work well, why should I buy it in the first place?

On the other hand, real workers, those with dirty hands, often smile at me and tell me I’m right or that they wish they could not have a smartphone. On one occasion, a worker installing an appliance told me: "Oh, we will get along well!"

Which tells you something important: nobody wants the app. People install the app because they believe it is mandatory in some sort of way. Because they are afraid of missing out on something. Because they are told so by the salesman. But they just don’t want it. In fact, when pressed, most salesmen even have a hard time justifying why I should install the app.

So "I don’t have a smartphone."

But it is not true.

Mudita Kompakt, my not-so-dumb-phone

My main driver is a Mudita Kompakt, a small minimalist smartphone with an e-ink device. I’ve spoken at length about it in the following piece:

Une vie sans notifications (ploum.net)

The main point is that, despite being an e-ink device and being totally Google-free, the Mudita is an Android smartphone. I can install apps and, yes, I love the smartphone concept for the tools I choose. I have Signal (well, I use Molly to connect to Signal). I also have the app of my bike GPS. I don’t use it often but when I’m lost far from everything and it starts raining, I launch the Komoot app, ask for the shortest way home and upload it to my bike computer.

That’s very useful innovation!

I also use Comaps, an online calendar and the local train schedule app.

So, seriously, I do really like the smartphone idea. It’s just that I don’t have any browser or "social" app on it. And I don’t want anything else than what I have.

I wish I could say it is all I have, that I’m a true minimalist.

But it is not true.

The secondary desk phone

Somewhere on my desk, I keep an old FairPhone 3 that I repaired after it took a deep plunge into the ocean. It runs the Google-free /e/OS operating system.

But why? The reason is simple: sometimes, you are forced to use an app. Those apps may even check if your phone truly uses Google. So /e/OS has a solution to fake it (microG). The main use case is banking apps.

I highly prefer to do banking on my computer. But, having been brainwashed enough by Google, banks think I cannot be trusted to do banking on a computer I own while doing it on a small piece of glass that I keep in my pocket is "safe." Logging in on banking websites requires me to authenticate on a smartphone that checks for Google services.

It is not only banking: this secondary phone is very useful to test apps without cluttering my main phone. I’ve learned, thanks to my teenagers, that Strava will not launch without Google services. But it will also refuse to login with the fake microG. The solution is thus to launch Strava with microG enabled, to disable microG while keeping Strava running, to log into the app then to re-enable microG. A similar problem happens when using filters on Snap. Living without Google is not always painless.

At least, I can say I’m Google-free.

But this is not true.

The third, real android phone

I still keep in a drawer an old OnePlus 5 I bought in 2017 with a pristine Android system. The screen is cracked, the USB connector is wobbling but it works. It is still connected to a Gmail account I created in 2001 (invitations were still required!) and that I didn’t even open for the last 10 years.

This phone is sometimes necessary. Like when a known bug in /e/OS prevented my banking app from working for several months. Anecdotally, this phone is also the thinnest, the lightest, the best screen I’ve ever seen. Il also takes the best pictures (without any AI). It demonstrates that current smartphones are worst in every aspect compared with those of 10 years ago. The only exception being the CPU: that phone has a very hard time loading Anubis-protected webpages. Everything else is fine. It is hard to have this phone in your hand and not consider we are heavily scammed when we buy a modern phone.

In my country, businesses and governments are pushing hard to mandate the use of "Itsme", a proprietary authentication app developed by a commercial joint venture with the explicit intent to extract personal data and sell them commercially (yes, that was explicit in their conditions when they launched the service). I’ve always refused to register and use that service but it is becoming incredibly hard to find alternatives.

New EU regulations may also push more apps to check for the "Google Play Integrity" to ensure that they are running on a true Google owned Android.

I’m fighting hard but I foresee a moment when we will all be officially forced to have a Google account. If you have children, you are also forced to have a Meta account as everything school related now happens through Whatsapp.

So I’m living Meta-free because my wife volunteered to handle the Whatsapp groups. I’m living Google free because, deep in a drawer, there’s still a solution for the day when I could not work it out without Google.

Who could have predicted

I’m European. The whole continent is assumed to have a Google and a Meta account. To always have in their pocket a Google or Apple certified and remotely controlled piece of hardware. It is even sometimes assumed to have a Microsoft account (like that time when the platform to be reimbursed from a cancelled ticket assumed a Sharepoint login).

This is frightening. We are putting all our eggs in the same basket. And our milk, our water, our house, our furniture and our loved ones. In an electrical-auto-closing basket remotely controlled by a foreign entity that openly spies on us and wants to extract as much money as they can. For some reason, it is considered weird not to like the basket.

At least, some are trying to build alternatives

At the same time, European politicians are focusing on "not seeing" this elephant in the room while dedicating huge money and effort to promote "European AI" or "European Blockchain." Seriously. They are so blind to easy, innovative and existing solutions (Peertube, Mastodon, European mail hosting,…) that I’m starting to suspect that being dumb doesn’t explain it all, that they are truly corrupted.

In the meantime, I do my small part. I defend my small hill. I’m an Offpunk.

Offpunk Manifesto (blog.ayom.media)

And when requested anything about an online service or a smartphone, I answer:

I don’t have a smartphone!

Picture of a broken phone by Ashwin Kumar

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!

Tuesday, September 1, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-09-01T15:00:48.000Z

Charlevoix in the morning (2026). Leica MP.

Sorry, I can't right now. I'm too busy vetting every goddamned company even remotely attached to every single piece of software and hardware I use or am thinking of using. Why does everything have to suck, now?

I'm sure everyone will be selling their MacBooks and iPhones and canceling all Apple services now that Ternus is on X. I wanted to post this on Mastodon but I really don't feel like starting a fight I don't have the energy to finish :)

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Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 17 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-01T00:00:00.000Z

The seventeenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 17, Mike interviews James, the author of "with words, wonder" (formerly James' Coffee Blog) about, among other things, identity and personal websites, writing on the web, communicating the potential of personal websites, 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.

James Mike The seventeenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed

Fixing the Framework's Wifi on CachyOS and Orbi - Baty.net

2026-08-31T11:34:09.000Z

I spent several hours yesterday trying to get Wifi to remain up on the Framework after installing CachyOS. It was not easy. I had to drag Claude Code in to help. I'd have never been able to find and fix it, otherwise.

Flaky Wifi is a commonly-reported problem with the Framework 13. In my case it was related to the Orbi mesh, so I don't know if this helps anyone else, but I'll leave it here, just in case. It's working for me.

TL;DR is pin wifi to a 5 GHz BSSID so the 6 GHz band doesn't get in the way.

Here's a slightly edited version of Claude Code's summary:

The fault. The Framework connects, gets a DHCP lease, and stops passing traffic about two minutes later. The link never drops — =iw= says =Connected= throughout, the AP keeps acking frames, signal is fine. What dies is ARP: ping starts returning Destination Host Unreachable from the machine's own address, which is the kernel giving up after its ARP entry expires at ~60s and cannot be refreshed. The "two minutes" is the ARP cache lifetime, not a coincidence — and that is why every log looked healthy.

The cause. The Orbi's 6 GHz radio is the mesh backhaul. It accepts a client association and acknowledges frames but does not bridge that client to the LAN. The MT7925 is Wi-Fi 7 and can see 6 GHz, so it sometimes anchors there and is then deaf. Every Wi-Fi 5/6 device in the house is immune because it cannot see the band — which is exactly why this ThinkPad sat on the same AP all day without a hiccup, the comparison that finally cracked it.

Measured, same machine, same AP, minutes apart:

6 GHz primary — stalled in 21 seconds
2.4 GHz — clean for 11 minutes
5 GHz anchored — over an hour, and survived a suspend/resume, which had been a reliable trigger.

The fix. Pin 802-11-wireless.bssid to a 5 GHz BSSID so it can never anchor on 6 GHz. MLO still attaches 6 GHz as link 2 and that is harmless; what matters is which band anchors the association. Costs roaming — the machine stays on one unit.

Here's the wifi-pin.sh script.

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Blaugust 2026 in review - James' Coffee Blog

2026-08-31T00:00:00.000Z

I am sitting with a cup of tea by my side as I have been on many mornings this month. This morning, my tea cup, instead of being precariously balanced on the arm of the chair, rests between the right arm of the chair and my right leg, keeping me warm. I love being cosy.

In “Countryside; Blaugust”, I noted how much seeing my friends participate in Blaugust encouraged me to participate. This year, the minimum requirement to participate was to write five posts in the month. I didn’t write down a specific commitment, but in my mind I had a private goal of trying to write every day. I didn’t want to write this down in case something came up that made it harder. I was able to achieve this goal. I technically published a blog post every day except for last Tuesday, when I saw Lorde perform ¹. On that day, I wrote most of the observations that, on the next day, I developed into my Summer Sessions post.

My contributions to Blaugust embodied a mix of genres. At the start of the month, I thought about trying to write about Nature every day, the goal being to have a log of writing that represented how I saw Nature this August that I could look back on. With that said, my writing naturally gravitated toward lots of different genres. I followed this rather than my goal to write about Nature every day because, as long as I was writing and content with what I was writing, I felt good. This month, I wrote about art, music, organising, code, HTML Day, Nature, and more. I wrote a tiny bit of fiction and poetry too.

I thoroughly enjoyed the secondary Blaugust goal of trying to write posts that involve collaborating with others. This month I did art and music exchanges with Thamara (art, music) and V.H. (art, music), where we each chose pieces of art and music for each other to write about. I did a music exchange with Ruben, too, and an art exchange with Thomas. I also did a title swap with Zachary, where we gave the other titles for a blog post that we had to write (tailored to our own interests), and a blog post swap where we each wrote a piece for each other’s website. Indeed, the spirit of writing with others is what made this Blaugust special. I definitely plan to do more writing with friends in the future.

With that said, this month was challenging. Blaugust is supposed to be a challenge so this is by definition, but certainly there were days when I was pushing myself to try and come up with a topic to write about. Trying to come up with new ideas every day and develop them was hard, and I was starting to feel a bit less motivated toward the end of the month. Since this academic year is starting to wind down I had more free time to work on blog posts so there wasn’t as much pressure, but certainly I did feel under pressure to write at points. I had other stressors that made it harder to write on some days too. I could have “saved” posts to publish on future days, but I had the personal goal of writing something every day.

This month made me think how I do write every day, but I don’t publish everything I write. On almost every day I write notes. I may only write a few sentences, but they are writing nonetheless – thoughts, observations, ideas, records of my days. These notes often grow into blog posts, but sometimes they don’t: not all ideas are compelling to enough to develop further. This feels like part of the practice for me though. Sometimes things stand out that I want to write about; other days, I need more time to think.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

One of the highlights of Blaugust this year was not only writing more, but also being able to read what others wrote. It was a delight being able to read more from writers whose writing I enjoy reading. In particular, I read a lot from Frances, Juhis, Jedda, Tantek, Naty, Thomas, and more.

I have lost track of how many blog posts I have read this month, and across how many sites. With that said, I do feel like I spent more time reading blogs this month. On that note, I finally wrote down my thoughts on reading as participation in the indie web this month. Reading others’ work was definitely an important part of how I participated in Blaugust this year.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Today is the last day of Blaugust. I am looking forward to taking a little bit of a break, even if that break is only the breathing space that comes from realising I can take a day off. With that said, Blaugust 2026 was a delightful experience. I am sincerely thankful to Mark Temple (rest in peace) for starting Blaugust. I am thankful too for all people who helped organise this year's event, and to everyone who wrote a post on their website in the spirit of Blaugust.

I did publish an announcement of an episode of Wonders of Web Weaving on the Tuesday, but those are more standard so I don’t include it as a contribution for the month.

[↩]

Mark Temple Naty Frances Juhis Countryside; Blaugust blog post swap HTML Day poetry fiction music music exchange with Ruben music art art exchange with Thomas title swap with Zachary code art Summer Sessions post organising reading as participation in the indie web music art Nature 1 [↩] Blaugust Jedda Tantek Thomas

Sunday, August 30, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-08-30T13:19:16.000Z

Busy day ahead, all self-inflicted:

Replace Fedora with CachyOS on the Framework using the Runbook I made yesterday
Update Emacs to 31 everywhere (it's default on Cachy, but macOS and Fedora need work
Process/Scan a roll of 35mm (test on both SilverFast/macOS and Vuescan/Linux)

UPDATE: That took WAY longer than expected. The Framework's Wifi would drop every few minutes. Had to send Claude Code in to help. Even that took hours. I think we got it, finally. The trick was to pin the Wifi connection to a specific interface/channel and force it to use v5 first and ignore v6. Something to do with the Orbi mesh, I dunno, it works now.

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~hedy's blogroll - BlogFlock

Trying a new Emacs config - Baty.net

Mount Plauris - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

Complements: Art history, writing - James' Coffee Blog

Welcome to my world, which is your world - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

The lie of socialist feminism - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

Collectivism or individualism

The common good starts with the extended family

To the feminist, family is hell

Family is the natural unit of solidarity

morning - James' Coffee Blog

autumn, winter - James' Coffee Blog

Emacs: doric-themes version 1.3.0 - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

Version 1.3.0 on 2026-09-04

New theme screenshots

New doric-lilac and doric-borage themes

More commands to load a theme

Broader face coverage

Minor refinements to palette values

Thursday, September 3, 2026 - Baty.net

Poem: Rolling pine cone - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

Morning impressions - James' Coffee Blog

fishing - James' Coffee Blog

Wednesday, September 2, 2026 - Baty.net

Time - James' Coffee Blog

I Don’t Have a Smartphone… - Ploum.net

I Don’t Have a Smartphone…

…or, at least, I wish I didn’t.

What installing your app means

Why I will tell you I don’t have a smartphone

Mudita Kompakt, my not-so-dumb-phone

The secondary desk phone

The third, real android phone

Who could have predicted

About the author

Tuesday, September 1, 2026 - Baty.net

Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 17 - James' Coffee Blog

Fixing the Framework's Wifi on CachyOS and Orbi - Baty.net

Blaugust 2026 in review - James' Coffee Blog

Sunday, August 30, 2026 - Baty.net

New `doric-lilac` and `doric-borage` themes