2026-03-08 01:38:00
As I was tinkering away on my blog earlier I wondered if my blog will ever be finished, if I will ever feel like it's done... but I quickly came to the conclusion that no, it won't and it doesn't have to be.
A blog is a garden, forever a work in progress.
There's always something to do, some plants to tend to, some weeds to pluck, some seeds to plant, some flowers to admire. A garden is never finished, that's something I learned from my grandparents. They were outside working in their garden almost every day. When I was there it always felt complete to me, like there's not much else you can do, but my grandparents always saw room for new ideas and so the garden kept growing and evolving beyond what I could have imagined. And even if they did not add anything new for a while, there was always maintenance to do. The pond had to be cleaned, the fish had to be taken care of, the plants had to be watered, the lawn had to be mowed. It was a lifelong project that was never completed. And the same goes for a blog, or any other personal project. There is no finish line to rush towards, there are just countless little steps to take and countless new paths to explore. And all we have to do is to choose one at a time, maybe turn around after a while to try another one, to stop and look around for a moment and most importantly:
to enjoy the process 🌱
2026-03-08 00:20:00
I thought I'd continue my series on 'insights into my head'. I've covered a few themes, so here's a new one: Website Groans.
I appreciate everyone is different, and that is what makes us unique and the world interesting, but here are my views:
There are certain features of a website that will usually make me immediately move on, not read, or close down the tab. It would need to be a very compelling topic for me to stick around. I love casual blog reading but I have limits.
There's been enough written about this organisation and its stance on promoting accounts with a heavy ideology towards discrimination and prejudice.
I will never read anything hosted on Substack. I have standards I abide by and do not wish to encourage ethnocentricism.
I appreciate that the authors of sites hosted by Substack usually do not carry these views, but by me visiting I am contributing to the financial gain of Substack via advertising (or subscription). No thank you.
Need I say more. Toxic cesspit of human behaviours. Breeding a society of narrow-minded, and poorly informed individuals.
I was once on FB and a enjoyed the interaction with my friends, but left 8+ years ago. I could see the writing on the wall. FB (and X) now decide what you see, and push virulent content to an unsuspecting audience.
The fact that both services are run by multi-billionaires with the morals of a pile of dog mess just adds to my case.
I despair at the number of small businesses who run their entire operation via Farcebook. In the punch of a few keys, someone in their ivory tower can adjust the algorithm, having an adverse affect on the marketing initiatives of said small producer. I especially cringe when the only way to discover the opening times of an establishment is via a FB page. Get a feckin' website! It's not hard. It's not expensive. It's yours, not an egotists.
"We value your privacy. We will share data we collect about you with our 978 partners.... Click to accept... Dig deep into the options if you want to decline all the cookies"
Honestly, you do not give a flying fig about my privacy if you want to share it with your near 1,000 best buddies in data harvesting.
I immediately leave the website.
I've been on your website five seconds, why do I want to sign up for a newsletter, or rate the site I have only just landed on.
Oh, and hide the close button so that I can barely locate it to get rid of the popup. That's gonna make me love you so much more - not!
I accept that some websites want to make money from people accessing it. They are more than entitled to do so. We all have to make a living.
If you've made a decision to sign up to the Paywall, please do not share an article on socials as I can't read it. Duh!
I know there are sites I can visit to get through the Paywall really simply, but honestly I've lost interest in your shared link.
Hey, I'm getting on in my years. My eyes can't read tiny writing. I love that all you cool kids, just making your way in the world of digital story-telling, are using micro-sized text as you have fresh young pupils and a flexible eye-lens. I need it a little bit bigger. It's nice and easy on the eyes, and helps me stay with you, read more and enjoy your work.
Similar to the above. My middle-aged eyes don't settle well on a black background with purple text. Think about contrast.
I did have a moan about this same topic in August 2025. Sorry for the repetition. I'm six months older now.
So that's an insight into my gripes on sites.
What provokes your flight response when you land on a website?
2026-03-07 01:48:00
When I started using Bear back in 2023, my first request was to be able to set a date range for embedded blog posts. I wanted to create yearly archives without having to use tags.
Yesterday, I noticed that this feature is now available. Given it was my birthday, it felt like the perfect present.
Today, I decided to give it a go and this is how it looks.
I created separate pages for each year and added the date range variable. For example, the 2024 page got {{ posts|from:2024-01-01|to:2024-12-31 }}.
Then I added a list of links for each year on every page wrapped inside a <div class="inline-menu"></div>, and gave it some simple inline styling:
/* Inline menu */
.inline-menu ul {
margin-block: 0 1.6em;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
gap: 0.3em 0.6em;
font-size: 0.9em;
opacity: 0.8;
}
.inline-menu li:not(:last-child)::after {
content: "·";
margin-inline-start: 0.6em;
opacity: 0.5;
}
That’s all there is to it.
Happy blogging, for many years to come.
2026-03-07 00:22:00
Getting old is seeing other people discover as new what is, for you, already a distant memory.
Just today:
I’m sure they knew it already too, this is no shade on them, but for me the whole (re)discovery is in itself a distant memory, it first makes me chuckle reading about it again and then makes me look out in the distance, feeling my slight smile slowly vanishing from my face and set into a serious case of “resting bitch face”.
That, THAT, is what feeling old it’s like, sometimes.
2026-03-06 23:44:21
Democrats, the yin to the Republican yang.
People often seem to be under the impression that if we just let the Democrat win, we would all be peachy-keen and the world would be grand. This has not, nor ever has been the case.
I see people simping for Gavin Newsom and I get to thinking "is this really the best we can do? Establishment Democrats who would rather take plays out of the MAGA playbook instead of actually giving the American people what they want?". Newsom seems to think that the reason people are fed up is because of pronouns... not the fact that we can barely afford to fucking feed our kids.
The DNC seems to think that being "not Trump" is a viable campaign. Being not an evil, racist, pedophile is a bar so ass-fuckingly low the goddamn devil himself could trip over it.
Let me make it perfectly clear, the Democratic party HATES you just as much as the Republicans, they'll just add a #blm and a pride flag emoji at the end of the "fuck you".
The DNC is being funded by the same mega corporations that fund the Republican party. Any detraction from that is seen as an enemy.
You want a current example? The DNC backed ANDREW FUCKING CUOMO over Zohran Mamdani. These fuckers would rather back a sex pest like Cuomo before a grass roots populist like Mamdani who actually wants to enact socio-political change. Hell, they even used AI to run smeer campaigns against Mamdani, like the one of him freeing criminals, and Cuomo's big ad was him basically bullying homeless people. These rich fucks don't care about you or me.
People are fucking tired, and I'm tired of the people who thought Kamala Harris was all of a sudden gonna make our lives better. Shit may have not been as bad, at least not for those in the US, I doubt the Palestinians give a shit if the bombs heading their way were funded by a woman president. All a Harris victory would have done is kick the fascist can down the road a little bit, eventually we're gonna run out of road and the can keeps getting bigger.
The DNC isn't going to save us, they are going to keep playing the same Tom and Jerry politics they have for decades.
Do I miss Obama? Yeah, I miss a president who didn't shit himself in the oval office and actually spoke eloquently. But let's not forget this guy was still carpet bombing foreign countries with drone strikes to the point Trump saw it as a fucking high score to beat.
The antidote to fascism is not status-quo centrism and politicians backed by billionaires. It's the people rallying against the machine that has done so much to distract them from the problem with their culture war bullshit.
Wake the fuck up, Samurai.
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2026-03-06 23:00:00
A few weeks ago I watched a man spot a bird.
He raised his phone, took a picture, uploaded it to an app, and walked away before the bird finished singing.
The whole encounter lasted perhaps five seconds.
Twenty years ago that moment would probably have lasted five minutes. A birder might have watched the bird move through the branches, noted the way it flicked its tail, maybe waited to see if it called again.
Today the rhythm is different.
The goal is often no longer the bird itself, but the act of logging it.
I was reminded of this while watching a documentary called Listers. It follows two brothers attempting a 'Big Year', the birdwatching challenge of identifying as many species as possible within twelve months.
They begin as enthusiastic amateurs, road-tripping across the country in search of rare birds. At first it feels like an adventure.
But as the film progresses something changes.
The birds slowly become secondary to the software. Each sighting is immediately entered into an app. Rankings update. Leaderboards shift. The next target appears.
They aren’t really watching birds anymore.
They are maintaining a list.
The tools that were meant to support the hobby have quietly become its center.
To be clear, the problem isn’t the tools themselves. Platforms like iNaturalist and eBird have transformed biodiversity research. Millions of observations from ordinary people now feed into scientific databases that help track migrations, population changes, and disappearing habitats.
That is an extraordinary achievement.
The problem begins when the tool quietly becomes the goal.
Once that happens, the rhythm of the hobby changes.
Running begins to feed Strava. Reading begins to feed Goodreads. Nature observation begins to feed apps like iNaturalist or eBird.
Gradually the activity itself becomes a mechanism for generating entries, statistics, and achievements.
We have moved from conspicuous consumption, buying expensive equipment, to conspicuous accumulation.
Species. Miles. Books. Badges.
If the observation isn’t logged, the experience can feel strangely incomplete.
This is one reason I keep the digital world at a distance when I am outside.
I don’t carry a smartphone.
In 2026 that decision often seems eccentric, but for me it functions as a kind of firewall.
Because I cannot instantly upload an observation, every encounter with a plant or animal must stand on its own first. When I find something unusual, a moth in the vineyard or a spider beneath a stone, I have to rely on my eyes, my memory, and whatever field guides happen to be nearby.
Sometimes I photograph it with a camera. But the image stays on a memory card until I return home.
There is no immediate reward. No notification. No 'New Species' badge appears on the screen while I am still standing in the grass.
By the time I sit down at a computer, the encounter already belongs to memory.
The map receives the data later.
I still upload observations.
In my corner of southwestern Hungary, the digital maps are quiet. Many species simply haven’t been recorded yet. Adding them feels less like scoring points and more like contributing a small note to a shared scientific record.
Before uploading anything, however, I try to identify it myself.
That usually means sitting with a plant for a while, comparing leaf shapes, checking flower structures, flipping through identification keys. The process is slow, occasionally frustrating, and immensely satisfying when the answer finally appears.
By the time I upload the observation, I already know the organism in a deeper way than a quick photograph could provide.
The app becomes a form of peer review rather than a game.
There is a revealing moment in Listers when a top-ranked birder is asked a simple question:
'If the app didn’t exist, would you still go birdwatching?'
He laughs and answers, 'No'.
That answer is unsettling.
Because the birds would still be there.
They would still sing at dawn.
They would still migrate across continents.
The question, is whether we would still be paying attention.
For me, the 'slow' approach to observing nature is really about protecting that attention.
Not rejecting technology, but refusing to let it rush the encounter.
The map records the sighting.
But the experience belongs to the person who stopped walking.
