You should not be able to avoid pregnancy if you engage in sex. You should not be able to avoid parenthood if you become pregnant. You should receive no assistance raising a child. The child is fully responsible for their lot in life, regardless of circumstance of their birth.

Also, children born to rich parents should be guaranteed the ability to inherit all the wealth and advantages of their parents. Anything else would be immoral.

I think I just summarized the so-called pro-family, pro-natalist agenda of the American right.

Jiminy Cricket.

Some how I forgot about the song Digging My Own Grave by Thrice, and I may have a new favorite song to sing and play acoustic. Oozing soul.

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

– Kurt Vonnegut

Found in John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, haunting me.

Very excited to be on a panel, “Examining Child Poverty, Equity and School Finance in Baltimore” tonight. But also, damn I’m hungry.

I will never stop being mad when I see that ActiveRecord didn’t make a proper foreign key relationship in the database.

I am the age where I can’t tell if TV shows are fumbling, inelegantly and awkwardly only kind of correctly using slang, or if I’m just completely out of touch.

Facebook is planning to rebrand the company, because we all know that Alphabet was a success and the public doesn’t just keep calling you whatever it believes your name is.

As for this “metaverse”, I sure am struggling to believe now is the time. It feels like folks have been jazzed about how VR was going to change everything (again) for a decade (this most recent time), and yet, it remains incredibly niche.

Hill I will die on: your “deck” would be better as a memo.

Personality tests are total pseudoscience bullshit, humans are all unique, but also just read about enneagram 5s if you want to know my deepest self.

“Like humans, Canada geese usually mate for life, although sometimes unhappily.”

— John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

Every time I see people complain about SQL formatting standards, I just think, “pgFormatter exists, it’s available everywhere, and it’s fine.”

Coming Soon

Having hard conversations has not become easy, but I feel more equipped to have them because of the work I’ve put in with my therapist, my partner, my manager, my mentor, and my coach, among others. And I feel no anxiety about long term impacts of necessary, direct confrontation.

Murderbot may have killed my average page count, but catching up kicked my reading into gear this year.

I find these posts looking at a broad set of indicators on where the economy is to be both interesting and persuasive— sure looks like we’re spending money we have catching up to where we would have been.

I had a weird thought in Walgreens today about looking forward to being able to take off my mask. I didn’t even do that during the few weeks without a mandate in Baltimore. It’s clear I’m feeling fatigue— I’ve never compulsively thought that this whole time.

e-bikes that go 37 mph seem pretty revolutionary, though I think it’s quite reasonable to be concerned about safety. Bet it’s a hell of a ride.

Sometimes you wake up and have a song in your head and can’t quite remember what song or what group it is, you just have that one guitar part caught in your head.

This morning I was able to find my ear worm, and it’s as good as it was in my mind.

I finally read The Why of Newsletters by Robin Rendle. A great, quick, and beautiful read. You should click on the link and spend a few minutes and then come back, but if I were to summarize the piece:

1. Newsletters are easy to write.
2. They have an automatic notification system.
3. They have a built in payment mechanism.

Websites are missing all three, but that is a choice. There are solutions to (1) that could be popularized. We all know RSS is great for (2), but maybe it needs to be built into a place we already go, like the browser, to have the same advantages of email. But I think (3) is trickier and the solutions further off–for some reason, we’re perfectly ok with an email model where folks can and do forward paid newsletters all the time (and often have a weblink that only offers security through obscurity to read a copy of a newsletter), but afraid to have website payment structures that are as easy to circumvent.

The unspoken part of all this is the impact of Google Reader. I still know very smart people who loved Google Reader and have refused or bounced off of other RSS-based reading systems. That includes folks who are not using social media as an RSS replacement. I don’t know that solving (2) and (3) in Google Reader would have worked, but it sure feels like mainstream weight behind RSS in the form of Google Reader had power. I have often wondered if Firefox had kept marketshare and used Pocket less as a “save this part of the web” and more as a “read the web better in a stream” if that may have helped.

I’m frustrated by the rise of newsletters. I’m thrilled to be able to read great content and follow an author ¹. But I really don’t want your writing in my email inbox. The design of all newsletters is very same-y and lacking in personality, although at least they all tend to have an ok reading experience. The length of newsletters feels all wrong–I feel as though many paid newsletters feel the need to write significantly longer pieces to justify their cost. I’d prefer shorter pieces, even if it meant more of them. My own blog is chronological within a day, because I think of my writing here as an ongoing journey within a day of what I’m dong and thinking (a… web log, if you’ll indulge me), and I’d rather read a few ordered 250-500 word thoughts than once a week be hit with your 3000 word news magazine think-piece that would never be bought by a news magazine. And lastly, I can’t say that I think any of the common middleware providers here, mostly Substack, are places I want to spend a lot of money. I’m disappointed more people aren’t using solutions like Ghost. I hope that Automattic would do some cool stuff with Tumblr in this direction.

I guess it doesn’t really matter to me in the end–I use a funky email address provided by Feedbin, which gets all those newsletters into my RSS reader of choice (Reeder), and I get to enjoy more writing from people I’m interested in following. But it is bizarre to see the writing revolution happening from within closed, centralized platforms using a weird open platform (email) for distribution while the web is sitting right there.

I’m sure that it’s just super hard to do, but I wish more SFF authors took the lesson of Murderbot and Gideon the Ninth— make your narrators dark, sarcastic, and hilarious and I will devour your books no matter what.

A thing I thought for the last ten years: “we’ll use our phones to scan our bodies and get great fitting clothing.”

A thing StitchFix taught me: nah bro, answer like 8 questions and we got you.

I got a Ring doorbell, cheap, before the “Ring is actually evil,” shit came out. I want to replace it, but need a doorbell that:

1. Can use existing power and not battery and integrates with my chime.
2. Has digital chime you can add (we have four floors)
3. Is HomeKit compatible

Help?