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From the Plantation to the Thicket: Juneteenth, Black Freedom, and ‘Marronage’ in Texas by DaLyah Jones.
Problematic Authors: Can We Separate the Art from the Artist? by Naomi Jacobs. "In chronological order here is what we know about these problematic writers." Content note: Some of your favorite authors might show up on this list.
How playgrounds reinvented childhood by Frank Jacobs.
A solar farm was built to make energy, but the ground beneath the panels quietly began doing something no one planned for by Carlos Albero Rojas.
Language learning methods that actually work #1: The binge.
Kruunuvuorensilta, the new icon of Helsinki.
[P]rior to 1865, many Afro-Texans reclaimed their sovereignty and autonomy well before the federal government acknowledged their basic humanity, though there’s a dearth of centralized information about Black placemaking in Texas from this time. This reclamation was called “marronage”—a term borrowed from French for this act of antebellum self-emancipation.
Problematic Authors: Can We Separate the Art from the Artist? by Naomi Jacobs. "In chronological order here is what we know about these problematic writers." Content note: Some of your favorite authors might show up on this list.
How playgrounds reinvented childhood by Frank Jacobs.
Playgrounds helped transform childhood from participation in public life into preparation for adulthood. From now on, childhood would be supervised and sanitized, zoned into a designated area and limited to a sandbox. No more pirate play on the Mississippi — for better or worse.
A solar farm was built to make energy, but the ground beneath the panels quietly began doing something no one planned for by Carlos Albero Rojas.
These two sites were different by design. Instead of bare gravel or closely mown grass, the panels were raised higher off the ground, leaving room underneath for something to grow.
Then the builders did something unusual. They carefully chose native grasses and wildflowers and planted them right under and around the rows, hoping to rebuild the habitat that used to be there and to hold the soil and water in place.
Language learning methods that actually work #1: The binge.
Speaking as a linguist who has read the literature on second language acquisition and understands 4 languages, I’ve always maintained that Duolingo is a trap; it will keep you spinning on wheels and feeling as if you’re learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours on it and fully gold a tree and you’ll get nowhere. [...]
When in reality, what you should have been doing is to spend all day browsing memes on French Instagram, or playing Animal Crossing in French.
Kruunuvuorensilta, the new icon of Helsinki.
The new Kruunuvuorensilta bridge connecting Korkeasaari and Kruunuvuorenranta is the longest, tallest and longest-standing bridge in Finland – and it is also globally exceptional as bridges of this size have not been built for the sole use of public transport, pedestrian traffic and cycling. The bridge thus becomes an interesting attraction not only due to its size, but also due to the advanced traffic thinking behind its design.
RAADS–R test for autistic adults. Free and anonymous. As usual, I get "kinda?" results.
Added later: I forgot I had this Am I German or Autistic link stashed. My results were "Why not both?"
Your [Android] phone is about to stop being yours.
Normalization of Deviance by Dan Luu
How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight by Alistair Davidson.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple HTML by Terrence Eden.
British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres by Christopher Winslett.
Who it’s for: Adults (16+) who suspect they may be autistic, were missed earlier in life, or relate to autistic traits.
Length: 10–30 minutes
Statements: 80
Purpose: To identify patterns in four areas related to autism traits in adults.
Added later: I forgot I had this Am I German or Autistic link stashed. My results were "Why not both?"
Both involve systematic thinking, a preference for precision, and difficulty pretending small talk is acceptable. The question is which one explains it.
Your [Android] phone is about to stop being yours.
Starting September 2026, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID.
Normalization of Deviance by Dan Luu
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative examples.
How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight by Alistair Davidson.
It is not acceptable to bounce users on old browsers, users with bad network connections, users using assistive technologies. Certainly not from a monopoly public service. A lot of hype and noise is pressing us to extend the cowboy, wild-west phase of the software industry’s expansion. We should set that aside, and take ourselves seriously as a mature industry. Build a web application that works on a playstation portable on a 3G connection - if you do, it will work for all your users, and it will still work 30 years from now.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple HTML by Terrence Eden.
Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you've created?
British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres by Christopher Winslett.
On March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time. In March, they did the spring forward one hour with their clocks to UTC-7, but they won't fall back to UTC-8 in November. Going forward, the UTC offset for America/Vancouver timezone is permanently UTC-7. [...]
If you stored timestamps in a UTC-based column for British Columbia-based appointment in 2026 and beyond, your November through March appointments may be off by an hour!
Hopefully not overambitious plans today...
- Fronch toast with strawberries, blueberries, and whipped cream (done)
- smoke bacon, duck proscuitto, and red-hot sausages for dinner (started)
- bake a cherry pie
- make pretzel buns for aforementioned red-hots
- Exchequer reporting
- bills
The air conditioning unit that cools my great room died a few days ago, and it's been very very hot in there ever since. The HVAC people say they can't come till late next week. Fortunately, the three other units that cool the rest of my living space have been working great.
Today I was out walking and I passed by that dead condenser unit, which gave me the idea to take a look at it and see whether there was a tripped breaker in there. I started trying (and failing) to open the unit up when I noticed the "Danger: High Voltage" sign and decided I should probably go trip off the breaker in the house before trying to tinker with the unit.
You might see where this is going. The breaker in the house was already tripped off. Somehow that possibility had never occured to me. I turned it back on a couple of hours ago and my great room is icy cold, just the way I like it.
Today I was out walking and I passed by that dead condenser unit, which gave me the idea to take a look at it and see whether there was a tripped breaker in there. I started trying (and failing) to open the unit up when I noticed the "Danger: High Voltage" sign and decided I should probably go trip off the breaker in the house before trying to tinker with the unit.
You might see where this is going. The breaker in the house was already tripped off. Somehow that possibility had never occured to me. I turned it back on a couple of hours ago and my great room is icy cold, just the way I like it.
his week's Resolution Recipe: Garbanzo de Aguachile Verde.
"Aguachile is a Mexican dish usually made with raw seafood in a spicy marinade. We tried a version with garbanzos and dang, it works!"
( aka chickpea ceviche )
"Aguachile is a Mexican dish usually made with raw seafood in a spicy marinade. We tried a version with garbanzos and dang, it works!"
( aka chickpea ceviche )
For anyone who lives in or is planning to visit California, offer good until July 6, pass lasts through the end of the year.
I had to try it in several different browsers and I think I went through the account creation process twice, but this finally worked on Firefox to get a free California Parks pass for the rest of the year.
News Release
Free pass link
I had to try it in several different browsers and I think I went through the account creation process twice, but this finally worked on Firefox to get a free California Parks pass for the rest of the year.
News Release
Free pass link
I was traveling for most of June in Spain and the Netherlands, it was awesome, but I am really tired.
* A video interview with me by Jean Marie Ward, from 2019 and never posted until now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bI94yU7J-k
* Story Oracle, a fundraiser for Clarion West: https://www.clarionwest.org/story-oracle/
* This was originally posted a while back and there might be new people who haven’t seen it: Feelings Redacted: What Happens When Murderbot and ART talk to Instagram
https://reactormag.com/feelings-redacted-what-happened-when-murderbot-and-art-talked-to-instagram/
* A short (non-spoilery) podcast interview about Murderbot with Paul and Chris Weitz and Alexander Skarsgard
https://nextbestpicture.com/the-next-best-picture-podcast-interview-with-murderbot-star-alexander-skarsgard-and-writers-directors-executive-producers-chris-paul-weitz/
* A video interview with me by Jean Marie Ward, from 2019 and never posted until now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bI94yU7J-k
* Story Oracle, a fundraiser for Clarion West: https://www.clarionwest.org/story-oracle/
* This was originally posted a while back and there might be new people who haven’t seen it: Feelings Redacted: What Happens When Murderbot and ART talk to Instagram
https://reactormag.com/feelings-redacted-what-happened-when-murderbot-and-art-talked-to-instagram/
* A short (non-spoilery) podcast interview about Murderbot with Paul and Chris Weitz and Alexander Skarsgard
https://nextbestpicture.com/the-next-best-picture-podcast-interview-with-murderbot-star-alexander-skarsgard-and-writers-directors-executive-producers-chris-paul-weitz/
I happened across these questions and they sounded fun to answer.
1. What is something you like to do that other people would consider weird?
Balkan singing and dancing.
2. What's the best piece of advice you've ever gotten?
When my massage therapy business wasn't paying the bills and my savings were about to run out, I was thinking about getting a psychology degree. A friend from computer science grad school said, "Use the degree you already have!" It was a great piece of advice at the time, when I found a part-time programming job to pay bills until the business got off the ground. It continues to bear dividends now that I'm back programming full-time, despite what's happening in the tech industry these days.
3. What is your most memorable birthday?
For my 30th birthday, I invited everyone I knew to a party at Fenton's Creamery, figuring most of them wouldn't be available on a Tuesday evening. But they all came! It was really fun and also overwhelming and I've stayed away from big parties since then for the most part.
4. When do you feel like you're the most authentic version of yourself?
That's an interesting question. On the one hand I tend to be fairly direct and honest and do my own thing most of the time, and on the other hand there's a lot I don't talk about in the emotional realm. I think there are a lot of authentic facets and they're not all visible at any one time.
5. Where is your favorite place to vacation?
Staycations in the Bay Area are always fun! Most frequent in the last few years has been Portland, OR because I lived there a long time and have been going back to see friends. I guess favorite in terms of nostalgia would be Yosemite, and I'd like to make it back there sometime now that I'm back in California.
1. What is something you like to do that other people would consider weird?
Balkan singing and dancing.
2. What's the best piece of advice you've ever gotten?
When my massage therapy business wasn't paying the bills and my savings were about to run out, I was thinking about getting a psychology degree. A friend from computer science grad school said, "Use the degree you already have!" It was a great piece of advice at the time, when I found a part-time programming job to pay bills until the business got off the ground. It continues to bear dividends now that I'm back programming full-time, despite what's happening in the tech industry these days.
3. What is your most memorable birthday?
For my 30th birthday, I invited everyone I knew to a party at Fenton's Creamery, figuring most of them wouldn't be available on a Tuesday evening. But they all came! It was really fun and also overwhelming and I've stayed away from big parties since then for the most part.
4. When do you feel like you're the most authentic version of yourself?
That's an interesting question. On the one hand I tend to be fairly direct and honest and do my own thing most of the time, and on the other hand there's a lot I don't talk about in the emotional realm. I think there are a lot of authentic facets and they're not all visible at any one time.
5. Where is your favorite place to vacation?
Staycations in the Bay Area are always fun! Most frequent in the last few years has been Portland, OR because I lived there a long time and have been going back to see friends. I guess favorite in terms of nostalgia would be Yosemite, and I'd like to make it back there sometime now that I'm back in California.
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Folks may have noticed that the site has been slow for logged-out users over the last while. This is partly because we separate traffic by logged-in, "logged out but have visited the site before", and "logged out, never visited the site before" and assign the fewest resources to the last category (because we're pretty confident the overwhelming majority of it is bot and scraper traffic, even if it's often impossible to say for sure). The flood of garbage traffic is a plague and a scourge the entire internet is dealing with, and it's hitting small sites the hardest as operators get better and better at cloaking their requests to look like real, authentic use. We long ago hit the point where adding more resources is a possible solution (because they just eat them up as soon as we do), and splitting traffic lets us keep the site usable for our actual users without wasting too much server power on garbage.
We've now, lucky us, reached the point where the "logged out, have never visited the site before" path is just flooded all the time, and the "logged out but have visited the site before" path is suffering some of the overflow. We've made some changes to the routing to try to improve things for logged out users who have visited the site before and keep it at "it may be a little bit slow, but at least it works" instead of "it keeps timing out", and we've seen some improvements, but if you're accustomed to browsing the site while logged out, I'm really sorry but it may continue to be a little miserable.
You will get the fastest page loads and the best performance by browsing the site logged in. If you are having trouble loading the front page to log in, bookmark the direct login page. We can't route the front page to the "more power" server pool, because it's a common target for garbage traffic, but we've switched /login over to "more power" and we'll try to keep it there as long as we can unless it starts getting slammed, too.
We've now, lucky us, reached the point where the "logged out, have never visited the site before" path is just flooded all the time, and the "logged out but have visited the site before" path is suffering some of the overflow. We've made some changes to the routing to try to improve things for logged out users who have visited the site before and keep it at "it may be a little bit slow, but at least it works" instead of "it keeps timing out", and we've seen some improvements, but if you're accustomed to browsing the site while logged out, I'm really sorry but it may continue to be a little miserable.
You will get the fastest page loads and the best performance by browsing the site logged in. If you are having trouble loading the front page to log in, bookmark the direct login page. We can't route the front page to the "more power" server pool, because it's a common target for garbage traffic, but we've switched /login over to "more power" and we'll try to keep it there as long as we can unless it starts getting slammed, too.