2026-01-28 21:00:00
One of the blogs I’ve been paying closer attention to over the past few weeks is patrickrhone.net since he’s doing a great job in commenting and sharing both the awful things that are happening in Minnesota, where he’s based, but also some of the positives that are coming out from a moment this tragic.
Reading through his posts made me appreciate how important it is, in moments like these, that we still have the ability to share snippets of reality directly with each other.
Most people will likely remember when mainstream social media could be used as a force for change at a societal level. The Arab Spring is an obvious example. But that was more than a decade ago, and the social media landscape is very different right now, different to the point where I suspect something like that would not be allowed to happen again.
But the existence of personal sites, run by people who are willing to live and share their experience of what’s happening around them, remains an incredibly valuable tool in the context of digital resistance.
Judging by the reports I saw, there are attempts to crack down on Signal groups and the other ways people use to communicate and organize, so I think the more spread out, the more distributed, the more decentralized these movements are, the harder it becomes to keep them under control.
And maybe this is probably the best use case for something like Mastodon, where a multitude of instances can go online easily and make it very hard to censor them all. It might not have the same reach as the mainstream platforms, but I think it’s a lot more resilient and harder to silence.
Countries always have the option to go nuclear and block the entire Internet; we’ve all seen that happening before, but I suspect that’s harder to do in places where most of society needs the Internet to function properly.
And related to this, the other day Seth shared on his blog a link to macrowave and the first thought I had was that this—or similar ones—could become another incredibly useful tools in the context of organized resistance.
All this to say that if you have enough knowledge to set up a personal site, a forum, a Mastodon instance, or any other way to help people share what's happening and connect with each other, that’s probably something worth doing at this point in time.
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2026-01-28 00:40:00
Even though he again misrepresented the point I made in a previous post and he also attributed me things I never said, I'm still going to share this post by Baldur Bjarnason, because he touches on many important topics worth thinking and talking about, especially at this specific moment in time, considering all the shit that's happening in the world.
I'm not gonna attempt to correct him, because I don't think it matters at this point. He's free to think I'm a nazi apologist, or sympathizer, or whatever else he thinks I am (and since I'm Italian, you should also assume I'm a Fascist while you're there). I’m not gonna lose sleep over that, but I will point out something that is important to me:
Not assuming ≠ tolerating. Not assuming ≠ excusing. Not assuming ≠ allowing something.
And one more note:
Because you absolutely should judge people based on the books they like. That’s what talking about books is for.
Why they like a book is as important, if not more important, than what book they like. That was the whole point of my post. And by knowing what book one likes you don’t also know why they like it, unless you engage in a conversation. As you said, that’s why we talk about books and why we talk about things in general. Because if we don’t talk, then we just assume.
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2026-01-25 17:50:00
I already wrote a follow up to my previous post but while that was happening Bix wrote something on their site and in there there’s a perfect passage which illustrates way better the point I was attempting to make (not hard to do, considering I am not a great writer) and I’ll quote it down below:
The real example to use here more naturally would be people still liking the Harry Potter franchise despite J.K. Rowling being a fetid, rancid TERF. In that actual situation, there are nuances. For example, if the books (or movies) meant a lot to you and you still own them and you still revisit them, you aren’t actually giving Rowling any more money or visible support as a human being. If you’re continuing to buy, rent, or attend any of her work, you actively are supporting a fetid, rancid TERF. It’s valid for people to judge you on that.
For the sake of this discussion, (and this is a hypothetical, Baldur), let’s pretend I tell you that my favorite book is Harry Potter. Now, you tell me, based on that information you have just received, how do you determine in which one of the two camps proposed by Bix do I fit in?
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2026-01-23 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Ryan, whose blog can be found at laze.net.
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Hey there, I'm Ryan. I'm originally from South Jersey (as in southern New Jersey) but live now in Northern Virginia with my wife, two kids, dog, and rabbit. I'm well out of school by this point, but I was a computer science major over half a lifetime ago. I've been a web developer for many years, though my current professional role is less well-defined for various reasons.
I've built fun little projects on the web since 1994, most of which were pretty low-key or niche. A couple got some nice acknowledgement in large media outlets or went mildly viral for a bit, but my favorites have always flown under the radar and garner just the rare "thank you!" email.
I'm passionate about genealogy/family history, the personal web (duh!), music/movies/books, radio archiving, personal preservation, running, animal rights, and trying to be less of a jerk each day.
I launched my first personal web site on my college's server in December of 1994 (only the second student to have done so), but my first blog post, of sorts, was on April 20, 1998 shortly after I'd moved to a proper web host and my own domain. I had a changelog for a while with updates about the site, but then I started a page with a changelog for my life--a blog, though the word wasn't widely used at that point.
The blog grew more important and eventually got its own name, "twist of fait accomplis." It ran through 2020, though slowed down quite a bit in the mid-2010s. Over that time, I did a lot of personal blogging (the type of stuff that would later be appropriate for social media), linkblogging, commentary, and longer essays. I had a few posts gain traction over the years, somewhat unexpectedly. Like the one where I wrote about seeing The Maury Povich Show in person and watching Maury embarrassingly misgender an audience member. It blew up when people got to the post through Google and thought that I was Maury and started telling me their life stories in the comments (often with PII). That post got over 700 comments before I had to turn them off. Sadly, Maury himself never reached out to do a collab. laze x Povich could have been great.
In 2020, I was using a Wordpress security plugin that was (ironically) compromised and ended up injecting sites I ran with malware. I got fed up with Wordpress and had already been growing weary of the state of the personal web, so I pulled my site down and replaced it with a single, unindexed web page that I would quietly update every few months.
By 2024, I started re-engaging with the IndieWeb (or whatever you want to call it) and felt a hankering to bring my site back in some way, so I did. Since then, I've fallen back in love with blogging and tinkering with my site. The current incarnation features selected posts going back to 1998 from assorted sites I've run over the years as well as a nice dose of new posts.
I've decided that in the current iteration of my site, I'm simply letting my interests guide me. Sometimes, that means I'm writing a post about an album I've been listening to, other times responding to someone else's post or writing about a project I've been working on or a topic that's been interesting me. Sometimes I just write about my experience getting older.
Some of the posts (like one I wrote about heart disease and lipoprotein(a)) I put some time into researching, which can make the process a bit slow. I've got one post about a pretty esoteric piece of train history that I've been working on-and-off for months on because I feel like there's more good info out there I need to find before I can hit publish (even though only ten people will end up reading it).
I have a Writing folder in Joplin where I keep all my drafts. It's a nice way to write, as I can switch between a rich text editor and straight markdown, and then copy the markdown directly into a micro.blog post when I'm done. I do any proofing and corrections myself before posting and inevitably even more after posting. I try not to be too precious about it, though. It's my site and though I don't want it to feel sloppy, I'm human and make mistakes. I'm at peace with the occasional typo or awkward sentence.
Like most people, I like to have a quiet space to think and write, perhaps accompanied by some non-vocal music. I do most of my writing in my home office/guest bedroom looking out the window on my small backyard. It's quite pleasant during the summer to see all the greenery, but even during the winter months, I appreciate the light that comes through. Writing on the front porch in nice weather or by the fireplace in the winter are nice alternatives when I need to mix things up.
I don't have as many "I'm going to sit down and write for 30 minutes"-type moments as I'd like. More often, it's "I can probably snag ten minutes now for a paragraph or two." I take what I can get, which can result in fragmented prose that requires a good deal of massaging before it's ready for public consumption.
I've gone through so many blogging platforms and web hosts over the years, but laze.net is currently hosted at micro.blog, which I use more as a traditional CMS than as a microblogging or POSSE service as it was intended. It's Hugo on the backend and deploys as a static site, which I like.
I'm at the point where I don't want to worry about managing deployments, updating software, configuring servers... none of that interests me at this stage. I find more joy in thinking and writing than I do in tinkering with what's running the site.
(I run other sites where I'm more involved technically, but we're talking about laze.net here.)
I've started and restarted too many blogs and where I've settled is this: I aim to keep things as simple as possible (while also appreciating a degree of flexibility) with a well-designed CMS on the back end that pushes out a static site on the other. I'm happy with the way things are now.
I love that there are so many options out there now, whether it's micro.blog, Bear, Pika, or any of the other services Manuel outlines on his blog platforms page. There's a service out there for whatever level of involvement one might want to have with their site's appearance or functionality.
I'm on the micro.blog premium plan, which is $10/month. My email is hosted at mxroute, which I subscribed to a while ago for some deal, so let's call that a buck or two a month since I host other domains' email there as well. The domain registration costs about $13/year. So, I'm able to run the site for around $15/month.
I don't monetize the site. Nothing against anyone who does with theirs, though.
Some of these folks may have been featured here before (and indeed this may be where I found them).
I have a proper blogroll, too, that I'm always adding to.
I've always got a few side projects going on. I've got one dedicated to a pet cemetery in the Nevada desert. I do a good bit of radio archiving (and wholeheartedly support unimportant archiving). I've also got a digital garden dedicated to genealogy, but it needs some tending. And a pal and I have a very slow joint blog where we post once a year, alternating years between us. Anything new (or old) that I may be up to, I try to add to my "projects" page.
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2026-01-22 19:20:00
Yesterday I wrote something. It was, as it often is, the result of reading something I didn’t agree with. If you have read anything on this blog before, you probably know I like to make stupid and extreme examples to illustrate the point I’m trying to make in a specific post. And I already wrote about how sometimes my examples can cause confusion.
Since it happened again, I think it’s worth reiterating a few things here. The point of an example is to be, well, an example. It’s not the core of the post. It’s there to help illustrate a point.
In case you need this spelled, no, I never in my life read the Mein Kampf the same way I never read many other books. And in case you also need this spelled, to clear the eventual confusion, I do think Hitler was bad in ways that are beyond comprehension. I visited the Risiera when I was in elementary school, and the signs of those wars are very much still visible here. But that’s beside the point.
The thing I find the most interesting, looking at that whole thread, is that it appears that almost none of the people are discussing what the post was about. Instead, I see a lot of arguments for what “favorite” means in this context. And look, I’m not a native speaker, I don’t claim to possess the most articulate vocabulary: should I have used another term to make that example? Maybe? I don’t know. It was an example.
Should I have used Harry Potter and being a transphobe rather than Mein Kampf and being a nazi? Maybe, but again, it was a goddamn example. And I even explicitly stated that, literally, the line below:
This is obviously Godwin's law in action, and I’m using an extreme example to make the point clear, but it applies to all sorts of more nuanced scenarios.
The problem I see is that there’s no winning here: if I use an extreme example, someone will get stuck on the extremeness of it, and if I use a nuanced one, someone will get stuck in the small details. But that’s precisely the point I was making in my post: rather than assume straight away, you can engage in conversation and ask questions. I repeated, ad nauseam, that my inbox is open. There’s a link to it at the bottom of every single post. If you read that post and were perplexed by it, why didn’t you engage in conversation then?
Heck, suggest me a better example if you have one. Or, I don’t know, write an answer and share your own thoughts, and add to the conversation. Isn’t the point of all this public posting to have conversations?
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2026-01-21 20:50:00
One of the things that irks me the most when it comes to human interactions, is seeing people judging other people based on moral false dichotomies: you said you enjoy some piece of creative work, that creative work is related to a creator who might have said or done something awful/despicable/debatable/whatever, therefore you either don’t care about the broader issue the creators is involved with (and that’s bad) or you support their awful/despicable/debatable world views (which is worse).
I have no doubt you have seen this happen plenty of times if you have frequented any type of space online and paid attention to discussions and debates happening in those spaces. Here’s the thing, though, the only information I really have when you say you enjoy something is that, well, you enjoy that thing. That’s it. If I decide to assume things about you and the person you are, based on that information, that’s on me.
Now, some preferences can raise eyebrows: if I tell you my favorite book is the Mein Kampf, you have every reason to be perplexed and ask follow-up questions. But if you just assumed, based on that, that I’m a Nazi sympathizer, that would be wrong. Because you don’t actually know what. This is obviously Godwin's law in action, and I’m using an extreme example to make the point clear, but it applies to all sorts of more nuanced scenarios.
Assuming something about someone else, based on your own worldview and without asking questions, is intellectually lazy. And it also prevents people who might have different views from engaging in conversation and exploring differences.
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