blaugust2024
- IndieWeb Assimilation. So it’s an overview of indieweb/smallweb, but I enjoyed this post because of the sheer number of interesting links to follow.
- PlusWord a new-to-me daily puzzle. Solve a 5x5 quick crossword, then play Wordle with the rows of the crossword to deduce a hidden 6th word.
- Amazing Still Happens. The Incalculable Odds of Clicking My Way Back to Phenix. A fun little story about how the web can lead to surprising connections. And also a reminder to attribute images that you use! I feel like this kind of serendipity could also be facilitated by technologies like Microformats.
- 100 Strangers Porject. Lou Plummer has finished posting his 100 street portraits of strangers. Beautiful images of beautiful people. I have enjoyed following this series immensely and really recommend you check them out.
- Have you played Brogue? (you can play it in-browser for free!)
- Three critical tech podcasts
- Baby announcement post
- Tech Won’t Save Us Paris Marx hosts this Neo-luddite interview podcast. Common topics include the environmental harms of tech, workers exploitation, and why tech billionnaires are bad for society, with a particular focus on Musk.
- This Machine Kills Luddite duo Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr host this discussion podcast, with occasional interviews, in-depth article reads, and discussion of economic trends within the industry.
- Trashfuture A British “techno-pessimist” comedy podcast that pokes fun at the absurdity of the current tech and political landscape. A regular feature is the main host picking a ridiculous/dystopic tech startup, reading some of their marketing blurb, and the co-hosts and guests have to try and guess what the product is.
- Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships by L. M. Sacasas.
- One woman returns by The Void. It’s a crossword, not an article. I learned some new words and failed to get 16a.
- You (and I) can do hard things by Jarrod Blundy. Heartwarming.
- MNT Pocket Reform: first impressions by Andy Piper. Portable mini Linux laptop with build-in ortholinear keyboard. Making me covetous.
- Blog gardening by Jamie Thingelstad.
- Assassin’s Creed Shadows Bigotry Is A Huge Issue by Jaedia
- It’s super convenient. If you have an okay pair of shoes and a backpack, you’re good to go. For weight, you could use a book, a bottle of water, or one of the old bricks every British person has lying in their garden for some reason. I use a couple of weight plates wrapped in towels for comfort.
- The injury risk is very low. The impact on your joints is very small compared with running. In fact, my chronic pain feels better after a ruck.
- It’s perfect for “headspace”. Walking is so natural and doesn’t leave me completely breathless, so I can actually let my mind wander and just enjoy being outside with my own thoughts — while still getting a great workout. This is a serious benefit that should not be overlooked.
Blaugust farewell
Blaugust2024 is coming to its close. This was my second blogging challenge — the first being micro.blog’s April photo challenge (see all entries or my entries). The challenge of writing something daily was much harder than mbapr, for which I had my photo archive to fall back on as well as the means to whip up new entries relatively quickly. Moreover, in mbapr, the prompts for each day are provided.
I kept up daily posting until the birth of my second son. And I found it really tough. Wven shaping my more-or-less off-the-cuff posts into something vaguely readable often led me to staying up later than intended. I mean, shit, it’s not like I posted anything deep or well-researched. Writing is just hard. When my child was born, keeping up the posting was impossible and to be honest, the way it’s going, I expect it’ll be this way until he actually has a reliable bedtime. But that’s fine with me — something would be wrong if it were any other way.
From Blaugust, I’ve learned that daily (or even near-daily) posting is not for me. However, a manageable daily writing practice may well be, perhaps following some of the advice from this site. I’d definitely like to move more toward quality than quantity and push myself with my writing.
As I heard from several Blaugustians at the start of the process, the real joy of Blaugust from previous years is the community, and I’m pleased to be able to validate that. The active Discord server, the Mastodon hash-tag, the various livestreams… a very inclusive and encouraging community. A big thanks to Belghast and his team of Blaugust “mentors” for making it happen. I’d planned to make more posts more specifically engaging with fellow participants as the month went on, but then (new) life happened. I’ll be sticking around the Discord anyway, so I’m sure I’ll get around to that at some point…
Anyway, my site doesn’t have a guestbook or comments (yet), but if you’re reading this and have checked out my site at some point during Blaugust, I’d love to hear from you, even if you have nothing to say other than “hi”. You’ll find an email link at the bottom of this post (if you’re reading from RSS or my site’s homepage you might have to click through to the actual post)
See you all again for Blaugust2025 (but hopefully sooner than that)!
Weekly digest 9
Unsurprisingly, posting has completely fallen off this week. Even this update I’m writing with an 11-day-old child asleep on my chest, while my 2-year old bashes on a toy drum machine a few feet away. I’m not getting a lot of sleep either! But that’s great. It’s all part of it.
Links
On this blog
Nothing! Other than a few updates to my crosswords log.
Weekly digest 8
It’s a brief round-up owing to the fact I have a new baby as of Thursday. He is great, but we are struggling to name him.
Links
On this blog
I added a new page to record crosswords I solve. Currently there is no navigation to this page.
The fact that I now have a page I am regularly updating has spurred me to start adding support for editing pages to my micro.blog plugin for Neovim.
My beautiful second son is born on this day at half past midnight. We’re all happy and well
Three critical tech podcasts
It’s creator appreciation week here in Blaugust-land. Yesterday I suppose I was appreciating Brian Walker. Today, some podcasts.
Capitalism has provided us with a tech industry that seems to lurch from stock buybacks to mass layoffs, bounce from hype-bubble to hype-bubble, and involves billions of VC dollars propping up unprofitable companies, while promising it’s in the process of delivering a high-tech utopia. Mass surveillance, worker exploitation, and downrights scams are baked into the business models.
Here are three excellent podcasts that critique these tendencies of the tech sector from the left, often taking inspiration from the Luddites (who were not against technology per se, but against the wealthy using techmology to dominate ordinary folks). All three podcasts occasionally have each other as guests.
Have you played Brogue?
I don’t post about games very often (though I do play them a lot), but since Blaugust originated in the gaming community I will talk about a relatively obscure game I like.
Brogue is a traditional roguelike originally developed by Brian Walker. A “traditional” roguelike is a turn-based RPG played on a procedurally-generated grid, where the player has only one life. Walker no longer maintains Brogue, but the “community edition” has continued to improve the game with bug, balance, and quality-of-life fixes.
While most traditional roguelikes are part of a long lineage, building on predecessors such as Angband and Nethack, Brogue takes its primary inspiration directly from Rogue. It’s aiming to be Rogue with modern design principles.
As the genre evolved to be played on a text-based terminal, ASCII “graphics” were the norm, a tradition carried on by many modern roguelikes including Brogue. In this article, I’m going to try and convince you to try a game that looks like this:
Forgive me if I have to a ramble about its virtues a little too hard; I can’t exactly show you pretty screenshots.
As in Rogue, the hero must enter the dungeon, descend through 26 levels, acquire the Amulet Of Yendor, and then return to the surface in one piece. A simple enough premise — let’s talk about the gameplay and design.
Weekly digest 7
Blaugust is getting challenging. I’m not fully committed to posting every single day, but if I don’t try to do that, I’ll skip too many.
Did a lot of nice things this week. Saw some friends, went out for anniversary dinner, took the little one to a country park.
Links
Reading
I picked up Chiang’s other book Stories Of Your Life And Others, as well as a collection of stories by Borges, which I’ve just started dipping into.
Watching
This week I loved watching the Olympic climbing. After the women’s final I went climbing for the first time in months.
I also watched the channel 5 documentary on the Lucy Letby case.
On this blog
Reflecting on 10 years of veganism
This month I will have been vegan for 10 years.
How it started
Probably around about 2012 I began to feel bad about eating meat. I tried vegetarianism, but ultimately failed. For one, I was working in a pub kitchen and cashed-strapped. Being able to eat scraps of meat that would otherwise be thrown away was a small perk of the job. But the other reason was that I found vegetarianism too contradictory, knowing that the dairy and egg industries were hardly kind to animals either and — since only female animals produce eggs and milk — deeply intertwined with the meat industry. I perceived veganism to be too difficult and extreme, so to resolve the tension I ended up just eating meat again. I guess the psychology is interesting and fairly common — lots of people I speak to feel reducing animal harm has to be all-or-nothing.
In 2014, I’d just moved to Liverpool to begin my studies, and I generally felt in a mood for new beginning. My journey into veganism began when I started following the comments of a belligerent vegan advocate on Reddit. He showed up in any thread about animals and began arguing with anyone with an opinion about eating meat, and often appealed to his master’s degree in ethics. He was probably everyone’s stereotype of an annoying vegan, but I could not get around the strength of his arguments.
At one point he said “If you claim to care about animals but still eat them, then maybe you’re just a shitty weak-willed person”. Again, a rather abrasive style of argument, but I could not really refute this. I did think it was wrong to eat animals given I could be perfectly healthy without them, and yet I was eating them every day.
Stoicism vs existential commitment
The Stoics, especially Epictetus, teach about not allowing anything that is not under your direct control to have the power to cause you pain. This means not becoming attached to “externals”, as only things internal to us — our thoughts and intentions — are under our control. If we cease to identify our wellbeing with things outside our control, we can be happy.
However, there are certain externals that I assent to causing me pain. I want them to have the power to cause me pain. For example, the death of a family member. According to Epictetus, it is not something I control, so it should mean nothing to me. This is not a reductio ad absurdum against Epictetus — he literally says
If you kiss your child or your wife, say to yourself that this is a human being […] and then, if one of them should die, you won’t be upset.1
By reminding ourselves that that this is a human being, we are supposed to remind ourselves that they are fragile and this fragility is beyond our control. This is right after advising us to remember that the pottery we like is fragile.
Most of us instinctively reject this. If we are not allowing the death of a loved one to cause us pain, in what sense can we say to be loving them? Isn’t the commitment to caring about someone’s life an integral part of love?
This is a central concept in Marten Hägglund’s This Life. For Hägglund, what gives our life meaning is secular faith, which could be briefly defined as “deep devotion to fragile things” — our own lives, the lives of loved ones, projects, moral and political causes. He describes vulnerability to grief as “a common denominator of all forms of secular faith”2. Hägglund’s project is to argue that is it is secular faith, not faith in eternal or unbreakable things, that gives our lives meaning, and from there develop political implications.
The Stoics have a lot of wisdom and advice for detaching yourself from external things that do not matter, rejecting unhelpful thoughts and emotions, and becoming a better person. But I think Epictetus misses the mark with his instruction to detach from all externals; there are some externals I willingly surrender my invulnerability to because they define the meaning of my life.
The horror of teeth
CW: teeth, death
I have always had a mild anxiety about teeth, which I imagine is commonly felt. Unlike other body parts, teeth do not regenerate or heal. They only wear over time, and sometimes break; the damage is permanent. The state of my teeth is a constant reminder of my mortality, that I am a decaying thing and, once my heart stops beating, the rest of my body will meet the same fate as my teeth.
Every filling, chip, and extraction (yes, my teeth aren’t great) brings this process further into relief. The moment a tooth is damaged or drilled I am filled with dread, a sense of irretrievable loss.
I think this is why tooth-loss dreams are so common. They’re an anxiety about losing something irreplacable, perhaps one’s own life or that of a loved one.
Reflecting on one’s own impermanence and mortality is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be motivating, and a reminder to treasure what you have now. Memento Mori (“remember you must die”) is a recurring motif in art and philosophy, often accompanied by the image of a skull, teeth by-necessity bared.
Strangely, this perception may be soon tbe challenged by modern technology. New drugs and therapies are in development that effect the regeneration of teeth, which seems like magic to me. Future generations maybe regard broken teeth like broken bones.
Rucking along
While I’m lucky that my job as a teacher means I’m not usually simply sitting down all day, I’ve always struggled to find the right cardio for me. Swimming is too much hassle. Cycling on these country roads with cars going up to 60 mph feels too dangerous. And I just never could get into running. So while this year I’ve started to take strength more seriously, my cardio health had not been given much love.
That is, until the last few weeks, during which I’ve “discovered” rucking from trainer winny. It’s a simple premise. You put something heavy in a rucksack and then go for a brisk walk. It’s far from a new idea — soldiers have trained in this manner since forever. But in the last decade or so it has surged as a fitness exercise for civilians too.
The advantages of rucking as compared to other cardio activities for me are:
The only real rules seems to be to start small and work up. Ideally the weight should be as close to your back as possible, and high up. Maintain good posture with an open chest — don’t hunch over. You can modify the exercise to your needs by varying the weight, distance, pace, and gradient of the walk.
For me, I’ve settled on 10kg (+ towels), and a fairly hilly 45-minute walk to the nearest village and back, about 3 miles total. The different inclines give me a nice burn in different parts of my legs, and the 10kg feels about right that I’m feeling the benefit but not risking any injury. Usually I’ve not taken my phone, but last time I brought it for some relaxing music. I think I’ll stay away from podcasts though, as part of the value is that mind-wandering time.
Having said all this, I do see the funny side of modern fitness content creators (and me, in this post) promoting the radical idea of going for a walk while carrying something. For all the complex training programmes and exercises out there, sometimes simple really is the best.
My life through 6 possessions
The theme for this Blaugust week is “introduce yourself”, but I didn’t really want to just do a standard “About me” post. I decided instead to share some treasured possessions of mine that say a bit about me. Since each possession came with its own little story, this post has ended up being rather long!
Each item represents a different phase of my adult life, and I’ve tried to order them roughly in order, so it’s kind of a biography. But since these are treasured possessions, it’s quite a one-sided, only-the-nice-parts biography — not that I haven’t been very fortunate; I have.
GameCube controller
The most important gaming community I have ever been involved with is the UK’s Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament scene.
Why blog? Why this blog?
When I tell a friend about this young site, they’re usually surprised. Who has a blog these days? But they can also see the appeal. Mainstream social media did not deliver the goods in the long run, and while most people still use it in some form, they do so with some begrudgement, perhaps knowing the arrangement between them and the platform is not what they’d choose in an ideal world.
I did the social media thing too, of course. As a teen I had MySpace and think I may even have done some cringy teen blogging on there (cringy teen blogging definitely happened, question is where). Then from MySpace to Facebook, which I quit in 2016. I’d wanted to for a while; I was outraged by the Snowden revelations, and also I don’t think I liked the way it encouraged being “Friends” with… well, everyone you knew, once knew, know someone they know, once met while drunk, … I think it was reading Deep Work that finally got me to quit.
After quitting Facebook — and Twitter a bit later during the fierce polarisation that occurred after the Brexit vote — I was happy without social media for a while, but I still wanted some kind of online presence. I tried a short-lived blog about my mathematical studies (thetangent.space, which is a great domain name for a maths blog… maybe I should move back there with this blog…).
At some point I heard about the IndieWeb and liked what I was reading as a real alternative to social media. I didn’t feel I had the time to learn the technical know-how to create a blog that implemented some of the IndieWeb protocols, and it was only when I learned about micro.blog (an indieweb friendly plug-and-play blogging platform) that I finally took the plunge and started this blog, which is my most successful — in terms of longevity and volume of posts — blogging attempt.
So back to the title: why blog? For me, having a personal website or blog is about having “my space” without a MySpace. The stuff I put out on here is for me and anyone else who is interested, not for an algorithm that sees my posts as raw-material (“content”) to weave into timelines to keep that ad-revenue flowing.
In fact, this space is self-consciously in opposition to the attention economy. I’m not trying to gain revenue, create a brand, or display any ads. I collect no analytics. The closest thing I have to self-promotion is linking to the crosswords I construct on MyCrossword. This is the kind of web I want — people connecting as people, not in service of brands and algorithms.
It’s also to push me to be a better writer, and with that a better thinker. A lot of what I post is trivial, and doesn’t represent growth in my writing. But that’s okay. In fact, it’s great. I’ve always shied away from writing publicly because it’s scary. People will judge me and my writing. But the trivial posts remind me not to take it too seriously. I’m just having fun putting things that interest me out into the world; it’s not that important.
Sure, having a blog takes a little more effort and know-how than having an Instagram. But well, I’m a Linux user. I can deal with a few rough edges and friction in pursuit of digital autonomy, and platforms like bearblog, pika, scribbles and micro.blog make it pretty straightforward whatever your level of technical ability. Get a blog, start posting, and be part of the web you want to see.
Welcome to Blaugust
So here we are, ready to kick off the Blaugust festival of blogging. If you’re visiting my site for the first time via Blaugust, then welcome! If you’ve been here before and would like to join in, then there’s still time to sign up here; if you don’t yet have a blog and want to join in, I made a guide to getting started here. This post has links to a list of other participants' blogs and an OPML file for your feed reader.
I’m Sam. I am a 32-year-old husband and father, and I teach secondary mathematics in the UK, though this is a strictly personal rather than professional blog. I post about books I’ve read, things I like, parenthood, my political views, links with commentary, and so on. I’m an unfussy coffee drinker, and rubbish at social media.
There’s more to say, of course, but I’ll save that for next week — the Blaugust theme is introducing yourself.
From Blaugust, I’m hoping to improve my own writing practice, and connect with other writers and readers. Please do get in touch if you’re reading — e-mail, Mastodon, the Blaugust Discord, or even a reply blog post are all welcome. I’m not expecting to hit 31 posts in Blaugust, but I’m going to aim in that direction. Better to aim for 31 and post 15 times than aim for 5 and post 4 times.
In terms of what to expect here, I’ll be loosely following the “official” themes of each week, trying to get at least one or two themed posts per topic. As Blaugust started on a gaming blog and many participants seem to be games bloggers, I might publish a couple of posts about games.
Finally, I should note that at some point during Blaugust, I’ll be having my second child 👶, so who even knows what will happen at that point.