2026-04-16 14:29:00
For the last year or so I've been tracking this bizarre product, a "Gen Z" water, which appears in a specific grocery store on the west side of LA. I have seen it nowhere else.
One of the funniest things about Gen Z Water is that its website is doing that "Gen z/a nostalgia for millennial youth" thing... by looking like an old web page.
I assume that these kinds of things happen here because I'm in LA and LA is full of bizarre and unpleasant rich person products and hobbies. Rich people in LA are always launching preposterous products which appeal to nobody. Every once in a while, one of them becomes a sort of Goop, but that almost never happens.
However, this water's been at the grocery store for a surprisingly long time. Either these six bottles have been here for nearly two years, or someone's actually buying it. I can't imagine who. Maybe a parent for their child? I don't think that I've often seen anyone under the age of 40 at this particular grocery store.
I have never bought the water because I'm certain it just tastes like water and because I do not want to support whatever deranged rich person hobby this turns out to be. I do check up on it every time I see it, though!
2026-04-16 13:02:04
weather: ☀️ no complaints
critters: monarchs; mourning cloaks
during COVID, S told me he blocked all instagram ads and sponsored posts on sight. the more he blocked, the weirder the ads became, until he got ads for things like sex toys and mexican dwarf wrestling. "that one almost got me," he said.
my baseline for determining whether the algorithm knows anything at all about me is cat content. if the thing doesn't know i'm a cat person, we're not on speaking terms. i think sometimes we're encouraged to personify the algorithm as a semi-friendly wizard's daemon (or some of us get notions). i have made a game of guessing what the algorithm is "thinking" when it does something weird. i've never gotten ads or content as weird as what S gets from his carpet-bombing campaigns, but some of the daemon's thoughts give me a little pause.
strange algorithm decisions ranked in order from most to least explainable:
not so strange--'tis the season. turbotax delenda est.
i hate cleaning, but this one might just be about being in my thirties. a certain gerard donelan comic may also apply if i think the algorithm is being rude.
the robot wants me to buy tools every day of my life. and at the rate i lose line levels, maybe i should.
the machine knows vaguely that i enjoy this stuff, but it also seems to know my clicks almost never lead to a transaction.
i choose to characterize its ongoing push of such content as hope. it waits for me to have mediterranean cruise money, and it hopes.
i wouldn't say i'm interested in ghosts or crime or conspiracies on their faces, but on a meta level, i absolutely am--i like to think about the meaning-making in which they're all engaged. why do people want to believe in things that scare and disgust them? what are the sociological reasons some ideas stick in the public mind for decades? what is the role of paranoia, or the role of insider feelings? do these things inevitably lead to witch hunts?
certainly the audiences for these things have overlap with gossip, which is what i'm actually interested in. anything about the latest fifteen-minute celebrity or bizarre scandal that requires three explainer videos and one google doc to fully elucidate. but it needs to have a gloss of intellectualism and CuLtUrAl cOmMeNtArY or i feel icky and close the tab. the algorithm must never make me confront my voyeurism, nor my snobbery...never!
algorithm has detected a male. beep boop, now serving a silly old spice ad. wait. female. beep boop, now serving a makeup tutorial. wait. a queer? beep boop, now ✨SERVING💅 a makeup tutorial, drag edition, sandwiched between trixie and katya clips. wait. johnny depp dior sauvage ad? wait. glossier ad? wait. low-cost PrEP? ED pills? tampons? wait. algorithm almost has it. please give algorithm a minute.
the daemon mistakes my play for affection.
despite being in southern california, just about every ad i get is in english. the only spanish-language ads i get are for booze.
the vibe is a little like adults trying to be circumspect around dogs by spelling out W-A-L-K. "watch out," says the machine. "he can't know about cerveza."
me and homestuck fans are gay on the internet. other than this, we seem to live in completely different worlds.
i've played deltarune. those guys play deltarune, right?
is this because i'm american? i'm gonna throw the algorithm into boston harbor.
2026-04-16 05:58:00
It probably shouldn’t be a surprise given the growing number of viral and semi-viral videos on the indie & small web revival on YouTube over the past four years or so, but I have been getting a surprising amount of questions about starting a blog.
And not even:
"Uh, why would you?"
Or:
"A blog? In 2026?"
But:
"Oh, what’s that Bearblog thing? Why’d you choose that one? Tell me more about it!"
So here we go: Over the past, I don’t even know how many years, but like a decade plus, I’ve been going through this cycle: about once or twice a year I’d think “I finally want to do something with my website” that has been an underdeveloped, “temporary” splash page since about 2015.
That wasn’t my first personal website, I made one about ten years prior, back in film school, under a different url, that was a little less barebones but the design was also always “temporary”. That one died around 2010 or 11 though. And I’ve made some project based websites, typically using Wordpress, but don’t even get me started on Wordpress.
In most recent years, basically since I started using Obsidian, whenever that urge hit me to do something with my website “but this time for real”, I got more interested in the various options of markdown to static website generators. The proposal sounds very promising, you just create the folder structure for your website inside Obsidian, you write there, in the markdown you're used to, which is what I am doing right now, and converting that and pushing it to your website is all automated. Sounds easy enough, Microsoft's database management system Access had a publish to web button back in 1997 that would turn your database into HTML & CSS. (Just a little titbit I picked up watching a Dylan Beattie talk on YouTube today, though I don't remember which one.)
The initial setup, though, was always a bit less straightforward than I had hoped for. Not that hard, not that complicated, but that hump was always just high enough that my momentum wasn't enough to make it over it. So back on the shelf until six months later, or 12, and who would care about my site existing or not anyway, right? Don't get me wrong, from all I can tell these are great tools, they just, repeatedly, haven't worked FOR ME. This is very much a me thing. Just not for me.
Now with Bear it was different. I wasn't actively looking to revive my website when I came across Bear Blog last month, I just randomly ran into someone's blog (don't even remember which, how or where) and clicked on through to check out the platform.
"A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform"
Yeah, that sounds interesting...
"No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words."
Okay, you got my attention, speak on...
"Shun the bloat of the current web, embrace the bear necessities.
Bear necessities, okay, yeah, whatever. Most of the rest sounds nice, forever is a long time though, that certainly needs an asterisk...
I don't want to go quoting and commenting on the Bear Manifesto point by point, best go read it yourself, just the main "promises" here:
"Bear won't shut down. Bear won't sell. Bear won't show ads. Built to last."
In another blog post Herman also wrote about growing slowly and staying small
That all sounds nice 'n all, and I very much agree with the philosophy... it also sounds a bit naive. If someone showed me that as their "manifesto" for their upcoming platform I'd say: "okay, let's talk again in a year or two." But this was written in 2025, and Bear's been around since 2020. It's not someone going into something all starry-eyed before being confronted with reality.
Bear is built on Python & Django - old and boring tech. Old and boring is exactly what you want for longevity. There's apparently a succession plan in place, because, you know, bus factor, which is more than you can say about most one-person businesses. Or big ones.
Forever is still a long time and anyone who thinks the internet is forever has never tried to follow a link on a two year old blog post. But I'd rather put my money on someone who at least tries to accomplish this and seems to have put the right amount of thought and preparation into it.
I like the philosophy behind all this and the limitations and capabilities hit just the right sweet spot for me where limitation breeds creativity. You can do a lot with modern vanilla CSS, and "no JavaScript" actually means "some JavaScript", at least on the paid plan, which is also nice for some edge cases. (Though I like the challenge of viewing it as a last resort).
Speaking of upgrading to the paid plan: Bear takes purchasing power parity into account, which doesn't do a lot for me, but is great for people in lower income countries. But on a personal note there:
A day or two after stumbling on Bear blog I got the yearly electricity bill and my return was about 2 bucks off of the cost of the lifetime upgrade...
Now, I don't believe in signs, but as a, once, in another life, storyteller I do believe in narratives, and that does make for a good one.
So, I dunno, did I choose Bear, or did the Bear choose me?
BTW: does anyone know if it's possible to edit your 404 page? I've always wanted to put "anyone who thinks the internet is forever has never tried to follow a link on a two year old blog post" on a 404 page. If you do hit me up on Bluesky or Mastodon or something.
2026-04-16 04:25:00
"You just describe what you want built. It literally writes the code and builds it for you."
or
"It's like having a junior developer on call 24/7. You give the brief, they build it. Simple."
Whew. Now, that's a great way to sell somebody a course on vibe-coding in a week. Who wouldn't want to create another clumsy, bug-ridden tool for themselves, right?
Except, none of these courses—or people parroting about how cool vibe-coding is—are tell the whole picture: that they won't teach you thinking, the most important piece of the puzzle.
Learning to "code" was never a problem, not even before LLMs. It's the same issue over again as with those JavaScript & web-development bootcamps that promise to get you going faster than the speed of light.
The hardest thing about doing development is not using the tools. It is to think. And so far, I have not seen a single course on thinking.
2026-04-16 03:10:00
I recently noticed that I miss what YouTube communities used to look like. I miss the authenticity of barely edited videos and people sharing their views on things they truly care about. I know it still exists, but I guess it's not as natural to the platform as it used to be. I miss people caring about sharing things just to share them and not to grow an audience, build a brand or earn money. I honestly miss it the most about me.
I used to upload videos to YouTube all the time to share my thoughts, opinions and music even if I didn't have a lot of followers and/or knowledge about video editing. Quality didn't matter that much. Passion did. Sharing did. But now… making content on YouTube became in my eyes a thing professionals do, not average people like me.
If I want to share something, I DON'T NEED TO think about my brand, the audience, what would bring me views and money… I also DON'T NEED TO worry about the quality of my camera and my editing skills (or lack of thereof).
But I do.
I do think that and worry about that.
And I hate it.
I feel like YouTube is no longer about sharing and building communities mainly because I'm not participating myself.
I made friends on YouTube. I even made friends with people that had tens of thousands of followers. There were no boundaries back then. We were all just normal people building a community.
I learned a lot from watching videos, but I also taught others myself. Me talking about challenging experiences let people know that they weren't alone. Me talking about how I tackled a problem inspired others to do the same and to share their knowledge. Me sharing my process of making music allowed others to learn from it and make their own music1.
I miss this more than I can say.
And so… to encourage and simplify this type of community building and communication on YouTube, I just launched an old Video Response feature2 in the form of a new browser extension – ReTube3. With it you can:
You just put a re:ORIGINAL_VIDEO_ID in your video's title and a reference link appears above it for your viewers to see what you're responding to. Then just comment the original video with re:YOUR_RESPONSE_VIDEO_ID and a video card with its thumbnail, title and channel info appears for others to see and click.
It's intentionally very simple so even if people don't have the extension installed, they can still understand what you're doing.
I know I am a 30 years old boomer and this extension may build no communities at all and bring back nothing. I might have wasted the $5 I paid Google to upload this extension to their Web Store. Maybe this changes nothing for others. Maybe no one uses it. But I don't have to worry about it. I shared it just to share it because I authentically care about it. And that was the point.
Happy community building!
Xiya recently talked about it in her vlog too. I highly recommend you watch it – why you need to vlog your boring life by xiya chang↩
It's been 20 years since the feature was released. You can read what YouTube had to say about it themselves back then Video Responses @ YouTube Official Blog↩
Firefox version is still awaiting review on April 15th. Safari's will probably never be easily installable as I don't want to pay Apple the $99 for a Developer Account. I'm (not really) sorry.↩
2026-04-16 02:11:06
This kind of thing is infuriating because it's so stupid and facile. Hey guys, we know that everything is too expensive and no one has enough money to live the lives they want, especially people at the bottom who are just scratching and clawing to survive. Do you think this impacts their happiness?
Like, what the fuck do you think? Who reads this and has a lightbulb moment other than the dumbest people alive?
We were promised jetpacks. Instead we got this.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch
🌳 grass
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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