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re: Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts?

2026-06-15T18:35:00+00:00

Original post: Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? | Michael Harley

Overall I agree with Michael's premise: blogs need better titles. I agree; I think I browse Bubbles and Bear's discovery page in much the same way. You can't read everything, and titles are a good shorthand way to guess if it's something you'd be into¹.

Where I disagree:

I think this one might be a bit unpopular but I do not like the round-up posts. You know the ones. They're titled Week Notes, Week in Review, Weekly Links and the like. When I'm cruising Bubbles, I do not click weekly notes from randos. For bloggers I know and have followed, I do often scan them.

This one probably is less write better titles and is more write better posts. I think many people use these posts as a writing tool to exercise their writing muscles. I'd suggest a better tool is the age-old favorite of writing blog posts about blogging, like I'm doing here.

People like doing weekly recaps and link round-ups, and that's not a problem. They're usually very identifiable and easy to skip if you don't want to read them. Michael, I think you're right on the nose about that being an unpopular opinion. Your second paragraph is also assigning judgment on what makes a "good" or "bad" blog post. We (collective "we", as in a blogging community) don't need to discourage people from writing if that's what they want to write.

In addition, I will sometimes click through on random week notes from people I don't know; sometimes that's a good way to get a quick summary of who the person is. Secondly, it brings me to their blog, where—if I find their post interesting enough to skim through—I will find other things they've written and decide if I want to add their feed to my RSS reader.

Anyway. I'm procrastinating from work; earlier this afternoon I lamented that I have a lot of thoughts but couldn't put anything to paper. I was supposed to tackle my to-do list but I opened Bubbles and started reading. Woops!

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The good thing about Bubbles is that if you click through the Bubbles listing, you at least get the first few sentences of the post.↩

we should be having parades about the fact that clean water comes out of the sink

2026-06-14T20:23:03.663848+00:00

Today I went to get some water from the sink. We’re in a heat wave, and the water ran warm for a couple seconds before going cool. As I stood there, I was struck by the realization that this is absolutely unthinkable for the vast vast majority of human history (and I’m sure to millions of people right now).

Clean, safe water whenever I want it??? Right there in my house????? And it’s even COLD???? I think this is the basis for every sliver of human progress up to this point. It’s insane to me that I just have this every day. Why aren’t we all constantly walking around in awe over this? I think we should at least do parades about it.

Fail more, coward 🖤

2026-06-14T14:53:00+00:00

Dedicated to Weird Writer and her black heart,
who knew better than to hesitate.

Are you the person you’ve always wanted to be?
If not, do you know how to change?
If you don’t, are you unsure how to learn?

My favorite secret I ever learned is that you don’t actually need to know how to improve to improve. You can instead fail faster. The world is complicated. There are more correct answers in books and blog posts than you could ever hope to learn. Failure teaches you the relevant questions you must answer to improve.

Failure is cringe, and understandably avoided. However, the extent to which most of us avoid failure has more to do with pride and loss aversion than a rational weighing of pros and cons. It is childish to believe that successful people literally only succeed. Why do you think yourself too good for failure? Do you think any intelligent adult will believe you if you pretend you never fail? Hesitation upholds your competency kayfabe at the cost of making you less competent. Are your favorite stories about perfect heroes who never lose? Do you admire people who win, or do you admire people who try?

It is good to fuck up one evening in exchange for knowledge that will pay dividends for the rest of your life. It is good to risk an awkward silence for the chance at a story you’ll remember forever. Comfort is atrophy. Time is killing you. Why are you so focused on today’s pleasure, today’s pain? Don’t you realize how quickly today will leave you?

You have to try to be the person you’ve always wanted to be before you are ready. It is not possible to live a fulfilling life absent profound, terrifying risk. And that’s good! Addict yourself to that intoxicating tension, that thrilling risk! When the odds are against you, roll as many times as you can. One day you will get lucky, and on that day your failures will not be top of mind.  

this is (probably) about you.

2026-06-14T13:34:00+00:00

There are so many people here writing such beautiful things. So many poets and painters and programmers and tellers of their own personal truth that move me. Sometimes there's a guestbook or an email address that makes it possible for me to say so in a place it might be seen. Just as often, there's no way to connect, and all my words die in the womb.

I guess I've never wanted to be a quiet voice in the void. There's always been this hope of hearing someone else singing at the end of the hall, however distant they might be. Most of the time I end up singing to myself. Trying to find a melody that feels like synergy to me.

A lot of the connective tissue of life is just this: a series of near-misses and moments of grace that are stumbled into as often as they're built by our own hands and heads and hearts. As bittersweet as that can be, maybe it wouldn't mean so much if we struck gold every time we tossed a stone in the stream and hoped to see it hit something more than our own face reflected and refracted by the same soup that spawned us.

If you're reading this, chances are I love what you do. Even if it's just having the courage to be yourself in a world that's largely forgotten what a gift that is.

Buying Coffee Has Become Controversial? OK, You Can Now Buy Me Coffee

2026-06-14T00:09:00+00:00

A couple of days ago I, like apparently the entire Indie Web, came across that "No, I Won't Buy You A Coffee" blog post, and, oh boy, did that hit me at the "right" time.
In it the author complains about the "rampant capitalization and constant advertisements" they see reflected in those "if you liked this post, you can buy me a coffee" messages at the end of otherwise ad- and monetization-free blog posts.

First, let me say that I actually agree with a lot of the sentiment here. I'm sick and tired of opening a news article on my phone and 90% of it being covered by ads. The constant interruptions of every video I watch, especially longer music sets. All the "messages from our sponsors". Just today I was listening to one of those "build your own website with Triangle Hole and use our promo code OurAudienceIsForSale"-podcast segments that was itself inserted into a completely different podcast as one of those dynamically placed ads. Not a different episode of the same podcast - an unrelated podcast by unrelated hosts! Like WTF?!

It seems that, on the mainstream internet, you're at all times either selling something or being sold to. And it sucks. On a personal level it is annoying, from a bigger picture view it is a travesty that this is the only way we have figured out to make the web sustainable(-ish).

Where I differ from the author is that I don't see giving your readers a way to send a little tip your way as part of the problem, but part of the solution...

Quick anecdote: I first became aware of indie games and indie developers when they started hitting the mainstream on Xbox360 via Xbox Live Arcade. One time I bought a game on sale that was made by a solo developer in their spare time while working as a dishwasher. I liked this game. A lot. I declared it my game of the year that year. I liked it so much that I started feeling bad for not having paid full price. In fact, I went out of my way trying to find a way to give the developer more money. But there wasn't one. The only thing I could do was to buy some wallpapers for my 360 and avatar pictures. Neither I had any real interest in - I've never bought these kinds of cosmetics before, or after, but I did this one time, just to throw the dev some more money. Did the developer need my extra three bucks? Probably not, I think that game did quite well, and was the start of a, as far as I can tell, successful career, but it had given me more than I paid for and I wanted to rectify that.

The unwillingness to pay for things that provide us value, as demonstrated by the author of above blog post, is a big part of the reason why we are all getting blasted with ads, and are being spied upon, everywhere we go. It's not about giving one person a tip, it's about the sustainability of the net as a whole. About choosing a different route than the ad-driven system. About taking the web back from the claws of surveillance capitalism.

The author says they think "it's shameful that programmers get such higher compensation compared to artists, but this is not the place to equalize it."

No. This is exactly the place to "equalize it"! Every blog should have a way of tipping its writer, whether they need the money or not. Not to normalize asking, but normalize giving. Starting with this very post I am going to add a little message linking readers to my newly created "capitalism"-page, where they can find all the ways to give me money (currently still a work in progress), ordered by how much of that money actually ends up with me. This isn't financial advice, I am certainly not competent to give any of that, but hopefully this can also serve as a resource for others looking to set up one of these services for themselves. At least to get a board overview where to start, what to look into. And for good measure I am not just going to link to spu.io/capitalism but other causes, projects, and people to support.

Which leads me back to the beginning of this post and this hitting me at the "right" time...

The full truth here is that while, yes, this is the first post where I'll be asking for tips, it isn't because of the not buying coffee post. I've started setting up the capitalism slash page last month. Now, regular readers might think "he's been absent for over a month and the first post coming back is him begging for money?"
Yes. Those two things are actually related. I've had a bit of a mental health tumble caused by a financial blow that let to this absence. Been working on a blog post about this for weeks now, but it's... hard.

And asking for tips is hard. Asking for money is hard. Asking for help in general is hard. Especially for people with self-worth issues.

As someone who's been making free things all over the internet for longer than I'd like to admit, and longer than some of you reading this may have been alive, I've converted my PayPal account to a business account and created a PayPal.me address well over a decade ago, but I've never used or even promoted it. The Ko-Fi account isn't quite as old, and I've used their bot on one birthday Twitch stream, but it felt weird, so I deactivated it again.

After this most recent visit of the black eyed dog in the early weeks of May I swore to myself to finally set this up. Actually for real this time! No backing out. I'm not known to be easily swayed by the opinions others, or for caring too much about those opinions (one of the feats of being on the autism spectrum). If anything I'm known for the opposite, but I gotta be honest here: seeing the title of that blog post, "No, I Won't Buy You A Coffee" and it getting enough upvotes on Bubbles to be reposted into my Mastodon timeline by the Bubbles boost bots, that made it harder to go through with it. Because it was telling me exactly what my brain has been telling me for 10+ years: to not do it. The post itself on the other hand, as discussed above, didn't make much of a convincing argument.

Now, while I do fear that there could be someone out there more impacted by seeing a post like that in a situation like mine, I don't think there should be hard feelings towards the original poster or anyone upvoting or agreeing with their post. It is a valid opinion, even if it is one I don't share, and a topic that needs to be discussed and revisited from time to time. The Line between Brennan's Mutual Aid and HakkerMan's Rampant Capitalization is a blurry one. And given all the "Pro-Coffee" reaction-posts, there's been more positivity than negativity. HakkerMan has since published another post doubling down on their take, but the majority of that post is actually unrelated to this topic and is speaking up for feminism, let's also acknowledge our common ground here.

Okay, I need to come to an end and I don't think I have the energy to give this another night's sleep and proofread in the morning as I might back out of publishing, or even revisiting this. So in the, slightly adapted, words of Blaise Pascal: please excuse the quality of this post, I did not have the courage to write another draft.

If this rambling mess has for some reason convinced you to want to open your wallet: let me remind you that it is still pride month so please consider supporting the TOWNSQUEER gamedev.lgbt zine and games bundle, or a similar cause, before anything else - you'll even get a bunch of games and zines!

If you want a more coherent version of the point I've been trying to make here - full of facts and references and stuff - have a look at Brennan's Yes, Buy Them a Coffee: Support and Mutual Aid on the IndieWeb.

And if you want even more to read this month is also Junited - a celebration of blogs on the indie web! Due to my absence I haven't been able to join, but you can find a list of participants on Robert Birming's blog.

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If this post was of value to you please consider doing a capitalism or getting the Townsqueer game bundle.
I have no connection to the latter, but supporting queer indie game devs during pride month makes you incredibly cool.
If you can't support either without jeopardizing your personal finances, don't worry about it, you're still cool, and you can
reply via: email, mastodon or bluesky

Zen and the art of being a mid skater

2026-06-14T13:58:00+00:00

I work in tech, the industry of optimization, monetization, efficiency, and frictionlessness. I’m generally opposed to what it 'stands for', but I love the work and I appreciate the money.

My job makes being a mid skater and writing/reading poems a hallowed act. What I love about skating and poems is that they are commercially dead-on-arrival (skateboarding can be lucrative but not if ur mid.) When you do something that cannot easily be converted into money, you're free. You're cast out into the uselessness and beauty of personal meaning and play.

I am not a ‘bad’ skater. I can do a heelflip and ollie a ten-stair. But I’m certainly not in a position to ever profit from it in any way. I’m scared to kickflip gaps or do anything but a 50/50 on a rail, despite having been at this since I was very young (though I am one of those people who, in high school, when asked, would say I’d only started a year ago to attempt to conceal my mid-ness.) I definitely still get that flash of dread before dropping in.

As for writing poems, there just isn't a real market. I am grateful for this every single day. It is good to perform for an empty arena. It reminds you who you are: another bozo on the bus, among the millions of others, all of us preoccupied worrying someone’s gonna notice the coffee stain on our shirt.

Skateboarding is about a strictly interior glory: you throw yourself against the indifferent pavement of your own hesitation and fear again and again to impress upon yourself that you are more unpredictable, daring, and childishly hopeful than you thought you were.

My wife is pregnant and we’re having a son. I hope to teach him to skate, but if he doesn’t like it, I’ll encourage him to fish, or do ballet, or build gleaming, architecturally defiant LEGO structures. Something he can practice for hours alone in his room or a garage or floating on the placid surface of a lake at dawn, surrounded by nothing but his own imagination.

If we have more kids, I’ll try to teach my daughter or my next son how to skate. And if they bounce off that we’ll both go hunting for some other source of inspiration that no one can take from them (middle school bullies will try but fuck em).

I like to skate in the very early mornings in my driveway or sometimes, when it’s snowing or raining, in my basement. I like to write poems three coffees deep, sweating in the boundless loneliness of 4am. I like to write and then stop and look out at the street in front of my house, vacant as an ocean, before its subsumed by the uncomprehending business of commuters.

All of this is for nothing and no one. But it keeps me more of what I like about myself and less of what I don’t.

My One Gripe About Forums Dying

2026-06-13T21:41:23.174208+00:00

I just read vidknights' post "I feel that the internet gotten too close" and I really agree with the message. Forums were awesome. A great organized way of chatting and sharing information. Also they were great for finding said information.

I am really into getting better at games, because I want to be an at least "interresting" opponent instead of being a sandbag. Well I'm not that old, but I still remember going onto Smashboards, MTG Salvation or The Source to read up on the newest tech or how to play certain decks or characters. These websites were indexed by search engines, and the forums were usually well organized. You could reasonably find what you needed in these forums.

Nowadays all this information is hidden in Discord servers. When trying to find something for Warhammer Age of Sigmar as an example: The thing you want to know might be hidden in the depths of your factions channel in the AoS Coach Discord server. Good look finding that with the search function, while having no clue what you are actually looking for. Also this stuff isn't indexed by any search engine. Also Good Luck trying to find a working Discord invite for more niche topics.

Discord also seemed to be the death of people writing primers on different decks/characters/armies/strategies. I loved reading a quick overview of a strategy.

I would love if forums were revived just for that reason, but I don't think people will move on from Discord.

Just human

2026-06-13T20:01:00.904493+00:00

I was at a graduation lunch party today. It was great. Good food and nice people, some that I hadn't seen in a long time.

When I got the invitation, I immediately made sure to book tickets for the movies the same day. Not because I expected the party to be boring, but because I wanted an excuse to leave early.

That's what I always do, no matter how exciting something sounds. 2-3 hours, that's the limit. After that, it's like I shut down, unable to take anything more in.

It's not like I get restless, on the contrary. I get drained, exhausted mentally. There are so many impressions — old and new faces, stories and questions, tastes and sounds.

Everything happening everywhere at the same time.

No empty space.

Like reading a long text without a single period. Like constantly breathing out without a chance to breathe in.

I don't really see it as a bad thing. Not a good thing either. It's just the way I am.

It's also something I try to remind myself of when I meet someone who is totally the opposite. It's the way they are.

No right or wrong, just human.

The Unhappy Web Person

2026-06-15T19:42:00+00:00

The smallweb draws a certain kind of unhappy cynic. Chronically online, this kind of person sees evil everywhere. Probably depressed, fatigued with the state of the world, and able to find something wrong, immoral or reprehensible in most things. This is the kind of person you are likely to find on Reddit. Here's an example.

I'm on the 32-Bit Café forum, where someone started a thread about Cauenapier's Town Square idea on his blog, which he describes like so:

You open the site and see a few other visitors wandering around at the bottom of the page. Maybe someone says hello. Maybe nobody talks at all. Either way, the site feels inhabited. It's a little space on the internet where people can chat, like a small café, or a small town square.

Naturally, an Unhappy Web Person (UWP) had a criticism:

But I kinda wonder if these kinds of ideas “belong” on the small web. These are all trying to help us “feel” the presence of others online, which I think is also a goal of the small web, but the small web partially achieves this by rejecting algorithms and, thus, limiting a site/person’s reach on purpose.

According to this UWP, a goal of the small web is to help us feel the presence of others online. This is partially achieved through the rejection of algorithms. And this rejection results in purposefully limiting a person's reach. OK, so now you have a person with a digital presence, namely a personal website or blog, a space where creative individuality is as boundless as its creator's imagination. And there's a rewarding feeling in finding this digital space as an act of serendipity, a lucky link, an ongoing conversation or helpful guide which brought us to this person's home on the small web, what the UWP calls a "dark forest" later in their comment. OK, that's cool. But there's no virtue in obscurity. Are we really to believe that being purposefully hard-to-find on the internet supports the small web's mission of helping us feel the presence of others online?

To cherish fortuitous discovery is not the same as purposefully limiting a person's reach online. Nor should obscurity be an objective, considering it's the default state of everyone creating a personal website. A project like Cauenapier's Town Square (which is a small interactive component near the footer of his website) is neither antithetical to the small web nor direct support for algorithms. It's just a human being adding a fun widget to their personal website. And the small web is really nothing more than that, just people having fun on the internet by cultivating personal spaces without seeking economic profit.

i don't know how to be creative

2026-06-13T01:01:25.051769+00:00

I'll keep this short.

It's come to my attention that I'm in my washed-up artist era. Every attempt to get back into my creativity has failed miserably. Y'know why? Because apparently, creativity is not a hobby for me. I can't just put it down and pick it back up. It's my way of life. It's how I process the world around me, how I express myself, how I connect with others. But somewhere along the way, I've decided that being creative means being able to draw really well.

I haven't made a finished art piece since 2021-2022 ish (???). And I can't. It won't come out of me. No matter how hard I push. And that frustration has conflated what I think is possible as a creative.

I'm now aware that limiting my definition of creativity to ONE (1) medium of art is actually insane. But idk where to go from here.

Signed, Susu ⋆˙⟡

Go Home

What the Fuck Happened to Nerds

2026-06-12T14:08:00+00:00

I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends are former coworkers. I've also encountered the most egocentric, delusional, irritating personalities imaginable in tech.

It is a mixed bag, like anything. But increasingly, the egomaniacs are not only taking center stage at the most influential tier of their respective companies - whether as 'founding engineers' or founders/CEOs/CTOs/ETCs or 'GTM engineers' - but they're also talking about themselves incessantly online.

That is not good for any of us.

This blog is long so here is the short version: the technology industry spent forty years accumulating a very specific kind of trust and mostly had boring motives, which made us appear trustworthy and largely benign. Over the last decade and change, its leadership discovered that this trust could be liquidated and converted into a different asset, attention, at what looked like a great exchange rate. The problem with liquidating an illiquid asset though is that you don't find out the real price until you try to buy it back. The Founder's Fund Mafia video is the most egregious example of this. If there are any founders out there considering doing their own version of the Mafia video, please don't. Instead, focus on publicizing your core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility re: how you present yourself to others and talk about your accomplishments. This will probably catch on slower and be less viral, but it will pay off in the long-run once people 'turn against' tech founders as reality stars, which they eventually will.

The charming & visionary nerd trope

Ten years ago, the cultural idea of the technologist was still basically Jobs and Wozniak.

Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.)

But people admired him anyway because the products he made worked well and were more tasteful/subtle/beautiful than any consumer electronic that had come before it. When Jobs was cruel, in the public's memory at least, he was cruel about kerning or whatever. The cruelty was presented as if he was cruel for our sake - for the sake of the customer. You could model him as a man who wanted the customer experience and the legacy of his business to be perfect, and that's exactly what we want our CEOs to do.

Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth. He gave away early Apple stock to colleagues because he felt weird about having so much and went back to teaching fifth grade. Woz was the proof of concept that you could be at the absolute center of the most important industrial transformation of the century and still not clamor to be famous for it. Instead, you could just do what you loved and make great money and share ideas about what you'd learned.

Together they told this story: the people building your future are, at worst, perfectionist jerks, and at best, gentle obsessives, and in either case their attention is mostly focused on their work, not at 'the world' with its glamorous sins.

Whether this was accurate or not is irrelevant. It is what the public thought. We trusted those people partly because they didn't seem to want our attention. They were nerds with money who mostly just wanted to be left to their projects, and it made sense that they were in charge of our digital experience.

We have strayed pretty far from that.

A short history of how tech leaders went from charming nerd to terrifying overlord

I'm going to massively simplify the transition from 'helpful, obsessive nerd who makes bank' to 'tech oligarch from hell who people joke is not human' into 3 phases.

Phase one (late 1970s to 2007): the founder as charismatic, mysterious byproduct. Founders appeared in media, but the coverage was mostly centered on what they were building. There was a mythology to them and they'd take photos in their garage surrounded by sparkling machinery, and they'd do keynotes and magazine interviews, but they were always orbiting around their products and companies vs. boastfully putting their own identities as rich/influential people center stage. We heard from them at regular intervals, but they were reasonably spaced apart so we didn't feel 'surrounded'. They never got too personal with us. Even Bill Gates, the era's villain, was on the cover of every magazine but we knew little about him beyond that he was competitive and well-read, which is true of all CEOs.

Phase two (2007 to 2015): the founder as parable. TED talks become a fun and popular way to learn new things and find interesting thinkers, The Social Network is a huge commercial hit, and the beginnings of 'founder' as an identity starts to sneak into the cultural mainstream. Starting a company becomes a viable career path thanks to YC, and the founder-as-protagonist narrative became the recruiting funnel for the entire industry. This phase was fine, because the parables were about innovation: products were still appended to founders, but now the founder was the central fixation culturally, and the product was proof that they deserved our admiration and curiosity.

Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent. The digital commons of 2026 is defined by its grifters. So it's not purely tech's fault that its now seen as a sort of avenue for getting rich quick and amorally, even if you are an otherwise ordinary person. But it is our fault that many of our 'figureheads' are leaning way the hell in on this. Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this, but he almost doesn't count because he is in his own tier of ridiculously self-promotional and attention hungry.

But beyond Elon, we also have OpenAI acquiring TBPN, a founder-circuit podcast. That is, an AI lab buying a talk show.

Then there's Founders Fund, which installed its chief marketing officer as the editor-in-chief of his own media outlet and now, as we'll get to, a game show host. So, smartly, these companies and funds have learned that becoming media firms is a lot easier and more efficient than buying ads in existing media outfits, who are typically held back by something like journalistic integrity. The theory is correct short-term, but it ends in a vast humiliation of media. Our media outlets are already hanging on by the skinniest thread. With endlessly wealthy and powerful tech companies turning their 'big cyclops eye' onto sucking up share in the attention economy, I can only imagine the illusion of objectivity is going to deteriorate further.

And so, the founders attention has pivoted, in the eyes of the public, from their seemingly sacred work on nerd shit to an obviously shallow pursuit of power, money, and fame.

The Founders Fund Mafia video

Eight years ago, the Jobs/Woz image was wobbling. Five years ago the first long crack appeared at the base of tech's reputation. Fast forward to today and the facade has shattered into tiny pieces to reveal 10,000 snakes.

The snakes really got loose IMO with the Founders Fund Mafia Game video. This shit is fucking insane.

This is Peter Thiel's VC firm creating a slickly produced show in which Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Bryan Johnson, Moxie Marlinspike, Dylan Field, Ryan Petersen and a rotating bench of the firm's favorite 'characters' play a party game about deception!!!!!! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!!!!

Even if it goes well short term, you are setting yourself up to be a punchline down the road. If any of these guys are involved in a Cambridge Analytica-level scandal in the future, people are going to point to this and be like 'see, he's a good liar', or 'he was hiding how good he is at deception here.' This is so dumb it's blowing my mind.

It's hosted by Mike Solana of Pirate Wires. The debut episode is titled "Can Tech Legends Find the Liar?" They filmed it at Tosca Cafe, the same San Francisco bar where the PayPal Mafia posed for their famous 2007 gangster photo shoot, so the self-mythologizing is out of control.

Obviously, commenters called the cast a "nightmare blunt rotation."

One critic revealed what the format is for: reality TV is a 30 yr old laundering technology, they said. It takes someone you'd keep at arm's length and makes him a recurring guest in your living room until the strangeness wears off. Ozzy bit the head off a bat so MTV made him the lovable bumbling dad who couldn't work the remote, and he became a lot more likeable. If the video editor and PR team can make enough smart cuts in post, everybody comes off pretty damn charming.

Applied to this cast, this strategy becomes undeniably sinister. One of them runs the most consequential AI lab on the planet and a side project to biometrically enroll the species. One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon. Between them, the principals hold the capital, the weapons contracts, and the line to the White House, and the show's function is to make you fond of them despite all this. (The shrewdest casting decision is Moxie Marlinspike, who doesn't have our future in his hands as explicitly, and is one of the most respected privacy engineers around. His presence at the table makes this all seem above-board. He is the equivalent of the beloved indie band on the festival poster, and the fact that the format needs him there tells you the producers understand exactly what their true goal is with this content.)

It is a charm offensive, in the technical sense: an offensive, conducted with charm. And even if it racks up some views and convinces a few people who already ride for Sama that tech CEOs are cool, it will disturb the rest, at least in hindsight.

You can still be a public founder, just remember who you are

There is no reason founders should disappear from public life. There are too many advantages to building in public to ignore it.

We just need to be a little smarter about how we present founders and tech workers in general to the public. It's extremely simple to do it the right way. Just remember who you are: a smart kid, often alone, tinkering around with hardware or on your computer, trying to understand how things work and see what you can make yourself.

What I'd recommend for founders and their top-level teams is:

Be transparent about your goals. Launching a reality TV show as if your aim is to entertain and help people 'get to know' your partners and portfolio founders is deceptive and creepy. You're trying to humanize people who have fucked their reputations in a covert, dopamine-laced way.
- So if your goal is to promote some product or talk about yourself, just keep it a buck fifty. See Jason Fried's social presence for proof of what this looks like when you go about it with some semblance of humility and authenticity. He is fine and not a clown show. He and DH Hansson have retained the nerd-dom that made tech interesting/fun/curiosity-driven/charming for an audience with a certain taste in the first place. With them, it at least 'feels' like what you see is what you get. That does wonders for your reputation.
Keep your ego as balanced as possible. Obviously, being a founder is aspirational, there are tons of material benefits, people think you are cool, and you have probably done interesting or admirable things. But just try to be chill about it if possible. Resist the urge to flex incessantly. Even though YouTubers do it, and even though it does result in impressions and views and likes from people who want to work at your company or be like you, it is cheap, flimsy attention that doesn't have a ton of staying power. The harder, slower work of winning admiration and attention through the strength of your product decisions, business acumen, and customer value is worth the effort.

Founder brands are necessary now. But they do not have to be as cringe and occasionally disturbing as they've become. Rather than projecting an obsession with wealth and power, trustworthy founders must instead focus carefully on projecting an obsession with core nerd values: enthusiasm about niche interests, obsession with technical pursuits, a love of learning and curiosity, and a deep-down humility and skepticism of the spotlight.

Call me Sarah!

2026-06-12T12:01:00+00:00

A few days ago I was introduced to someone. It was a brief encounter while I passed through a room of people with a friend.

My friend introduced me: "Hi Colin, nice to see you again. This is my friend David"

Colin: "Ah, good to meet you Dave".

I immediately stepped in, "Hi Colin, please call me David".

I've never liked Dave as a name for me. I just don't think I am a Dave, or cool enough to pull off a Dave. haha

It often happens that people naturally shorten my name, but I always politely correct them and establish my name is David.

Colin's response was, "Oh, I always shorten David to Dave. It's my thing".

Me, looking at him with some disbelief: "Ah, ok that's cool because I always shorten Colin to Sarah."

He took a moment to process my retort, so I used the pause to bid my farewell and left his air-space.

I don't think Colin/Sarah and I will ever be chums. His loss.

take pride in your neighborhood

2026-06-11T22:51:00+00:00

i had been complaining for the past few weeks about the litter that has been accumulating outside of the large grocery store next door, as well as the dog poop owners have neglected to pick up. i was getting increasingly annoyed every time i walked past a fresh, untouched pile of crap, or saw that the litter still remained and no one had done anything about it.

i realized that neglectful pet owners would not suddenly decide to start cleaning up after their dogs, nor was the city coming to clean up the local litter. if i want to live in a neighborhood that i'm proud of and excited to come home to, i need to be part of what makes it better.

so, this morning i decided to walk to Ace Hardware and buy some gloves and a grabber, and do the dirty work myself. it was particularly warm today, as we approach the summer solstice, and i found myself quickly becoming sticky with heat. but i wouldn't let that stop me.

i spent the better part of an hour walking around my humble block, picking up trash and dog poop, and smiling at passerby's. i wondered if they thought i was doing court-ordered community service and then i wondered if it mattered. did i need them to know that i was just a neighbor, trying to improve our neighborhood? was i doing this to be seen? no, i reminded myself, i was doing this because i wanted to live in a space that is clean and whose occupants tend to each other. i didn't need to stop them and say, "hey! i'm doing this because i'm a good person! no one is forcing me!". i was above that.

in the end, i filled two trash bags with miscellaneous rubbish. when i got home, i separated the recycling from the landfill waste, in case you were still doubting if i'm morally superior.

i suppose the point of this post is: if there is something in your neighborhood you want to see changed, be the one to implement the change. stop waiting for someone else to do it, because they probably won't. if your neighborhood is dirty, spend some time helping to clean it up. maybe others will see you and be inspired. if you wish your neighborhood had a library or access to more books, buy a Little Free Library and set it up outside your house. if you wish there were more community events, plan one and go door to door to hand out invitations. set up fix-it-clinics, float the idea of a neighborhood-wide garage sale, play guitar on your porch, have a potluck. in times that are increasingly trying to separate us, find ways to come together.

Drinking Beer with Mom

2026-06-11T21:04:00+00:00

Yesterday, I visited my mom at her senior living community. We drank some alcohol-free beer, talked, cried, and had a good time together.

That isn’t something I take for granted. If you had asked me two months ago whether I would ever enjoy spending time with her again, I would have said no.

After my dad died, she slowly let herself go. No exercise, no doctor visits, increasing isolation, and several mental breakdowns. It all eventually ended with a stay in the Emergency Room because of everything she had done, or failed to do, to her body.

After two weeks in the ICU, she was transferred to a geriatric ward. From then on, things slowly started to improve. She was finally put on the right medication, received an oxygen device, and learned to walk with a walker, something we had been asking her to do for years.

Now she’s living just around the corner in a place where she’s in good hands. My mind and body are slowly learning that I no longer have to live with the constant fear of finding her unconscious, or worse. I can visit her because I want to, not because I have to.

Her grandchildren can finally visit her again and play board games with her.

For the first time in years, our relationship is becoming healthy again. And little by little, I feel like I’m getting my mom back.

She’s 80+ now, and she proves that it’s never too late to get your shit together.

Wow. Writing this down feels good. At the same time, it feels a bit weird to share something this personal on the blog.

Then again, maybe this helps someone in a similar situation. Or maybe you can relate because you’ve been through something similar yourself.

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11 Jun, 2026 Drinking Beer with Mom

blogging as therapy & repairing my attention span

2026-06-11T14:04:00+00:00

A moment ago, I deleted a post mid-draft because writing led to a personal realization, the content of which I didn't think was of particular value to ~the blogosphere~. I wonder how often this happens with other bloggers. Perhaps it was cowardly of me to delete it.

I have a problem with overthinking, which is usually thinking-about-thinking, which leads to talking about everything in abstract terms and "losing the plot." I often delete "I think" from the beginning of sentences unless those sentences are transmitted by iMessage or Discord, in which cases my friends are subjected to repetitive bullshit.

I've noticed that I am less likely to bullshit when I have a hyperfixation, and those hyperfixations can only be supported when I'm not doomscrolling or otherwise wasting my time on the popular internet. But it's not sustainable to eliminate the popular internet from my life, I need to develop better habits instead.

So to cut down on distractions and "repair my attention span," I'm doing the following on a trial basis:

No scrolling first thing in the morning. The only things I'm allowed to do on my phone before coffee are turn off my alarm, check text messages, and play Wordle/Connections/Parseword.
After (or during) coffee, I will write in any of my notebooks. This includes my dream log, personal journal, planner/commonplace book, etc. I've never successfully kept up with "morning pages" (ala Julia Cameron), so I think physically writing anything in general is a fair replacement.
I'm allowed to check social media/Discord as many times as I'd like (after coffee/writing), but only in 15-20 minute increments.
If I'm watching anything at home (movies, TV, YouTube), I am only allowed to pause it to respond to text messages, look up something on Letterboxd, or anything else occurring "in real life"/off of my device. (I have a bad habit of pausing something to scroll and then I get lost in the scroll and suddenly a couple hours pass me by.)

We'll see if I can stick to this plan for a week and adjust accordingly if not. I'll post about this again next Thursday. I imagine it will be easier to do once I'm back home (I'm still out of town) and thus much busier etc.

Coffee Through Divine Intervention

2026-06-14T14:06:00+00:00

For the past two years or so, I've been mistakenly getting emails from a church somewhere in Virginia. I've never been to this town, let alone this church. (For the record, I'm not really religious either, haven't been to church since I was a kid). It looks like its somewhere out near the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I'm still not sure how they accidentally got my email. My guess is that someone who is part of that church has a very similar name or something. Anyways, for these past two years, I've been politely writing the pastor and informing him that he has the wrong email and I would appreciate being taken off the list. Every time, he replies with something along the lines of "I'm so sorry, I'm trying to figure out how to get you out of my computer". Its only a light annoyance, as they all go to an email account I don't really use anymore, so I don't really care either way, but more and more I just feel for him, as I watch him clearly struggle to figure out how to do something that I think is so simple.

So when I received another of these emails the other day, to my surprise, it came in the form of a gift. I was certain it was spam at first, and was hesitant to look at it, but when I deduced that it was in fact real, and came from a real address, found a $25 Starbucks digital gift card with the note Thank you for your patience, I can't seem to get you out of my computer! Just for fun, because I still didn't believe it was real, I decided to go to the Starbucks down the street from my apartment (something I never do, as I've always been pretty anti-Starbucks) and try to use it. I picked out 2 lbs of coffee, about $30 worth, and brought them up to the barista to pay for them. I noticed immediately that the barista's name was also Sam, which felt uncanny, a good sign of some sort. I kept my story of coffee through divine intervention to myself though, and just hoped that this digital gift card would work. It did. I ended up paying the difference of $4 or so, and wrote back this pastor thanking him for the gift.

Now I'm sipping the special 1971 roast from Starbucks, and thinking about my entire life as a barista, delivery person for roasters, all the years I spent being very pretentious about my coffee, and remembering drinking very similar tasting Starbucks coffee and Peets coffee in my pre-barista teen years in the 2000s. It feels very much like I've come full circle, and now, especially with the price of coffee being out of control and every specialty roaster doing their own takes on the latest trends like anaerobic naturals and various new processes to make decaf coffees excellent, I have a rekindled appreciation for just buying a bunch of relatively cheap coffee, and enjoying it at home on a weekend, off from work, feeling generally like I did 15 or 20 years ago.

I won't go on about why I love cheap coffee, because well, I already did, but felt this was a really interesting story to share. I no longer feel annoyance from getting these emails from this unknown church somewhere in the foothills of the mountains of Virginia. When I see the emails now, I'll feel a little less annoyed and a little more grateful knowing that this is a congregation of probably pretty decent people, and I'll remember when he graciously bought my coffee for a good few weeks.

Let's be easier with each other. Let's remember that even though something is easy for us, like taking a name mistakenly added to an email list off said list, someone else may feel like that is akin to pushing a Sisyphean boulder up a mountain.

This is a sentence uttered to me in real life

2026-06-11T21:07:00+00:00

My wife teaches undergrad art, and I was talking to one of her students, who is hilarious, about making your own website. She had some experience with that kind of thing, but still felt like she didn't really know what she was doing. I was answering her questions, and then she stopped, and said that she wanted to find more people who wanted to make websites, because she mainly talked about it with fellow art students. She said something like "When I talk about programming with art students, sometimes I feel like I know what I'm doing." Then she said the following thing, which made my brain pinwheel:

but really I'm just a dumb child in dog school.

After my brain came back online, and after unpacking it with her, I knew that this phrase would be with me for the rest of my life.

technology

Why blogging daily feels easier

2026-06-11T14:54:00+00:00

Today it was time again. A task at work I only do like once every three months.

I always feel a bit uncomfortable doing it. Partly because it involves a lot of secrecy, but mainly because I don't do it regularly.

It never becomes routine. It's like starting all over again each time. If I did it daily, or at least a couple of times a week, it would be a whole different story.

That's why I write every day. It's easier.

I write like it's meant to be a blog post. It doesn't always turn out that way, but the intent makes me more motivated to write. I also feel that it makes the writing more thoughtful.

It sounds weird. Writing a daily blog post being easier than writing every now and then with no pressure of anyone reading it. But it is, at least for me.

𝚒 𝚞𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚋𝚎 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 | 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚔 𝚢𝚘𝚞, 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 ♡

2026-06-11T03:48:53.321316+00:00

Needed a place to talk like we used to. I guess Angelfire is gone. I'm too old for this internet and somehow still a beginner here... Substack gives me imposter syndrome and I always feel the need to explain...

I don't mind the ring lights and the 5G and the ultra crazy super hi-fi definition of everything... I just don't need the super reality. I get enough of that... everywhere.

I miss the internet as a haven. The place where I curated my interior. The place where I came with my real truth... but never from a beige palace... never with all the tapping. I miss not needing to be an expert. I miss our blurry photos not because I didn't love "Real", but because I already had a REAL WORLD to deal with and this was where it was my movie... this is where we could show how it would look if we could make it that way...

I miss talking about something without proclamation.

I am a little afraid that the only people in these corners are a part of some -osphere or another that I'm not invited to. Or welcome in. I'll be honest. I didn't even do my due diligence. I found a free blog site and crossed my fingers. I typed a title and jumped in. Old school.

I hope this isn't another wrong space, or worse, a space that hates me. I'm a creep. I'm a weirdo.

I want to process whatever is happening without a 30-day plan or hacks. I want to create and commune. I want to make music with other people who make music. I want to meet people in real life again and find them at concerts and around dumb camp fires like we did in '03. I wish it could be new again. I wish we'd get it right. I wish we'd keep the capitalism out and each other in. I wish we were still giving each other somewhere digital to be when the analog heart couldn't find anywhere out here to belong.

I lost that internet. And I miss it.

I'm 42 now. In some rooms, I'm ancient. In some, I'm still just a poseur manic pixie nightmare who didn't figure it out. I lost most of my metrics for how to do this wild and precious life thing.

I turned to the internet and I know it's happening. Running away in RVs and soft anarchism and Instagram homesteads... but I forget what's trust-funded and what's photoshopped and designed to sell me one more answer I can't afford. Anyone certain is selling something certainly or something. Ha.

I'm not a writer. I'm not handy with code. I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me.

But somewhere between all the em dashes and optimization plans and politicized everything, I see meaning-making. I see ethics I respect. I see community. I see humans. It's just strange how little of it is anywhere I was told I could expect it. Certainly I thought our histories had been more fact-checked. I thought the people in charge were mostly good. I thought someone had the whole world in his hands.

I grew up in the Midwest with no small amount of religious confusion, so it was natural that I was unsure WHO had the whole world, but I was definitely being assured constantly by the grown-ups in the room that someone had this whole thing under control. Don't worry. I'm not still there.

I've got grown children now. That means I have experienced the singular pleasure of knowing my teenage child can articulate my generational trauma (and appear to understand it clinically) and plethora of diagnoses better at 16 than I could at 35 on hour seven-hundred-something of therapy... the language was there. Don't mind me. I'm just learning. We all are. Some of us quickly. Some of us with a fair degree of deprogramming to do. I'm one of those.

I don't have many days without some shadow of someone's disapproval or my own shame or some neurodivergent urge to only feed wolf number 16 because that's the motherfucker that gets things done (a little IFS humor for my babies in the back)...

I don't belong here. I don't know if I belong anywhere.

But I need to write in a way that isn't... allowed? Gosh... I am not here with any horrifying ideologies or anything. It's just... it hasn't always been a clean story. I've lived what's amounted to a staggeringly ordinary human life, so it's always stung a little when some part of me that was just true got marked restricted or called something it wasn't. Compressing my "self" into something easy to scan and incomplete.

I feel too big for the internet. Not like a megalomaniac. Like a pair of not-stretchy jeans from before my hips changed... like with this new shape... I'll never get back in... but here's to trying.

Is there anybody out there?

let's talk about your digital remains!

2026-06-15T15:50:00+00:00

"When I die, delete my browser history." — Unknown

When you die, there are lots of processes in place to deal with your body, your burial, your physical possessions, subscriptions and bank accounts. But what about your digital accounts and possessions?

As our lives become more and more digital, taking these into account when tying up the affairs of a dead person is increasingly important. Think about it: This can involve e-mail accounts, social media accounts, messengers, LLM conversations, hard drives, cloud storage, crypto wallets, websites, your digital media licenses, intellectual property you released (like four (F)OSS projects, for example), and more. In a broader sense, you might count browser history and other metadata, too!

What's interesting is that so many of these do not fall under the laws you might expect them to, like succession/inheritance law or privacy law.

Services that offer you licensed content (like Steam) have made clear in the past that family members are unable to inherit the accounts or licenses, like they would with physical items.

In terms of privacy and data protection, the GDPR applies only to living people, so you lose these rights upon death; the task of legislating the rights of the dead in these regards has been given to the Member States, which results in quite a patchwork of rights¹. This patchwork makes things difficult, because it means your European country can have different laws than another, and companies will have to see how to comply with them all.

France, for example, has one of the most developed post-mortem data protection regimes in Europe. The French Data Protection Act (the Loi Informatique et Libertés) actively considers death in data protection and explicitly allows a person to give instructions regarding the retention, deletion, and communication of their personal data after death and appoint a person responsible for implementing those instructions. It mandates that controllers must follow the deceased's valid instructions, and heirs can obtain access to data necessary to settle the estate, to identify assets and liabilities, or to close user accounts and manage digital affairs.

Germany, on the other hand, is pretty much the opposite: Protection of deceased persons' data arises from a combination of post-mortem personality rights (postmortales Persönlichkeitsrecht) concluded from civil law and constitutional law, inheritance/succession law, confidentiality obligations and possibly some sector-specific laws. It's a lot more complicated and full of holes for specific types of digital data. I wish we had a law like France has!

Regardless of when we might have a European law harmonizing this aspect across Member States, it's still important to ask yourself: Who is allowed to have access to your accounts and data after you pass?

You might still want to give your younger sibling access to your Steam account later, or you need your spouse to be able to log in and keep a personal website up and running, or save pictures from the cloud. For this, you should make sure that the correct people can have access to your accounts in case of death, and know what to do with them.

How you do that is up to you: You might set up something that automatically notifies them about how to access your accounts in times of death when you don't check in for a while, or you tell them a physical location where they can find the device passwords and the Master password to your password manager. I personally mention it in my when i die page. Remember to keep this information updated!

Some companies and services, like Apple, Google and Meta, offer settings about what should happen after your death (usually called Digital Legacy tools, Inactive Account preferences, or Memorialization). You're able to set a successor/manager, deletion preferences and more, depending on the service. You have to dig a little in the settings, but if you're reading this right now, I encourage you to go find it. Good to know: Despite setting someone as a legacy contact, these companies might still request additional documents to prove that you really died.

On the other hand, it's also okay to want things to be deleted, either by family members, or automatically by the platform itself. At CPDP 2026, I participated in a workshop about digital remains, and my discussion partner said that her Instagram feels so personal that it should be deleted upon her death, but something like a LinkedIn she'd keep up.

So decide for yourself: What accounts do you want deleted, which ones can remain up/dormant? You should communicate this clearly in a way the people tasked with your digital legacy can see it, and talk to these people about it beforehand, if possible, or set it up in the settings. If you want to keep data up, is there a maximum retention period you want to set so that the data would be deleted afterwards?

As a next step, you have to think about the future. The world will move on without you, and even right now as you are reading this, we are building tech that promises to bring people "back to life" via AI. Even just a decade ago, you likely couldn't have foreseen where we are at the moment with tech being trained to impersonate you. So where will we be decades down the line? That may require the restraints you set in a will to be more on the tech-agnostic side instead of just banning very specific processes and products.

This is not just about the recent Meta AI thing; there are several companies in this space, as it looks to be a profitable new market niche: Bereavement tech.

So, how do you want your data to be processed? Do you want tech to be trained on it? Do you allow the platform, or your relatives, to train AI on your accounts and other data and media they have on you? Your account might keep posting for you as if you were still alive, generate selfies or videos with your likeness, or it will respond to messages people send to it so they can keep chatting with "you".

Side note: Does this truly help the grieving process? I guess we'll have to find out. A physical removal of items, telephone numbers going out of business, and a burial help saying goodbye and accept the finality of it all. Yet social media accounts can exist visually unchanged for years afterward, as the platform may nudge you to message them, reminds you of their birthday, or shows memories from a couple years ago out of nowhere on your feed. If we soon have the option to have people posting as if nothing happened to them, they stay stuck how they were when they died forever. If you never have to deal with the deafening silence from the other party, do you ever really have to grapple with death? And will the person die a second time for you when they stop offering the model? Maybe that's something you wanna blog your thoughts about :)

It doesn't have to be so personal and focused on social media platforms as well. How about archives? Museums?

You might laugh at the idea, but most stuff in museums is by ordinary people; we might not even know their name. Some people become famous after their death and their possessions and likeness are displayed for people to learn about them (for example: Anne Frank). We get great insights from the things they left behind that they thought no one would read, and if we're honest, likely wouldn't have consented to be out there. This will increasingly happen with digital means. How okay are you with a holo-you or virtual avatar greeting people in a museum?

You might not care about any of this at all - if you're dead, then what does privacy and the data matter? It's not like it can still affect you! And that's fair. The views on this can be pretty diverse. Others see the digital remains as a digital version/informational "body" that should also be untouchable and remain undisturbed, and that there should be a general right not to "become a bot".

Reading papers and studies about this topic is interesting, because it seems if you belong to the current older generations, you are more in favor of deleting it all, while the younger generations want to keep it up². This makes sense: They might have way more online friends they'd wanna keep this up for. Women seem more in favor to deleting everything than men are², which I can totally see; women tend to make a lot of negative experiences online that center the loss of control over their data and misuse of it. Death, without being able to lock down or delete anything based on developments online seems like the biggest loss of control of all. There are country and cultural differences as well.

Unfortunately, unless you control the data (your own Mastodon instance, your self-hosted personal website, etc.), you are reliant on these services to heed your/your loved ones' requests about this. As the big social media companies' business model relies on data harvesting and using existing data for new projects and growth, this might be a hard fight in the future, as they see it as their property. Companies can hold the data hostage because of a lack of laws in your region and no goodwill from their side. There have also been cases already where the companies have refused giving access of a deceased's account to the relatives until a court decided they had to. How many would just give up?

conclusion

For good digital hygiene, we should remember death and make it as easy as possible or sensible for the people we leave behind to get the access they need to manage our stuff how we want them to.

Organize your data well (maybe you also want to do some recurring digital version of Swedish Death Cleaning?), leave instructions, set emergency/legacy access when available, include digital assets in your will, decide how your data is allowed to be used after death, especially around AI replicas. Families should talk about this openly, and relatives and nurses should learn to ask affected parties about these things.

Previous related entry: plans for your blog after you die

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Published 15 Jun, 2026

France is very invested in this aspect and its data protection authority (CNIL) has made it one of their main points and even wrote a paper on it.↩
The CNIL paper has some study summaries about this on page 15. Generally speaking, another good study to read is this one.↩