2026-04-15 01:08:00
You’re right, your life and ideas probably aren't that interesting.
The number of people who care to know what you’re doing, thinking, and feeling? Very few.
But consider this: historians and scholars today nerd out over old written artifacts. It’s a clean window into the past. Official accounts of the past are often produced with a particular point of view, the heavy hand of the state or the victor looking over the author’s shoulder.
But you? You are free to look and describe things as you see and understand them.
It’s not clear how much that’s on the Internet will persist, or for how long. But there’s a decent chance that your individual perspective could survive centuries even though you're “just a common person.”
What you wore, where you went, how you spent your time, what you worried about, how you lived—all straight from the source, as a gift for posterity.
If nothing else, the people of the far future will be thrilled to hear from you.
2026-04-14 22:44:00
The company I work for uses, like many other companies, NPS (net promoter score) to measure customer satisfaction.
The results are to be taken with a grain of salt, to say the least. On top of that, many customers don't take the survey or just reply: "I never recommend companies."
Every now and then, my boss forwards me lovely replies from happy clients. It's a nice little confirmation, but it doesn't change the way I do my work. I keep doing what I do no matter the score.
I feel the same way about the upvote button. It's nice if a post gets some extra attention, but it's not important. It won't change the way I blog.
Another thing when it comes to upvotes is that they don't say much, really. It's just a small piece of a big pie. You may have 500 readers who love your writing, but never even see the toast button in their feed reader.
I understand that some people choose to hide the upvote button for various reasons. Blogging should feel fun and free. If that toast thingy interferes with that in any way, by all means hide it if it makes you feel better.
But if you hide it just because you feel that the posts don't get enough upvotes, it's probably not the button that's the problem. That mindset will just shift to the next thing: not enough guestbook comments, not good enough stats, not enough reader mail...
Don't focus on collecting numbers, focus on delivering words.
Don't fear the upvote button, but don't praise it either.
2026-04-14 20:19:00
I'm posting this text directly from BearBlog, which is different cos I typically type into Obsidian first, but this is not one of those times.
I wanted to come on here and say was genuinely smiling after reading this post: Bear Blog and the kindness of digital strangers by The Moody Warlock and wanted to share it with anyone who read this blog. This is the exact kind of Small Web culture we need to embrace and strengthen. ■
🎧 Traffic outside my window
2026-04-14 18:48:00
I shared a post on here previously about Jamie Todd Rubin's personal archive system (PAS). I have now started to implement my own. Doing this is something that's always interested me. I feel it's important to preserve details from your own life to look back on. It gives you good and bad memories to reflect on and you can build on these and live a more intentional life. My PAS differs from Jamie's in a few ways.
My PAS is centred on Obsidian. This is the central hub for everything. I use Dropbox for storage and link into Obsidian for things like PDFs, saved email etc. Dropbox provides a unique URL for each file. I then link it in Obsidian like so [descriptive filename](dropbox link).
I use Google Photos for photos and videos. I can then link into Obsidian using links again, using the same markdown URL method I mentioned above.
A key to linking in Obsidian is using descriptive filenames. This is essential for searching, as the actual document is not stored in Obsidian itself.
The choice to store documents externally for the most part is one based on speed. I want Obsidian to remain lightning fast even years down the line. If I bloat it with 100s of GB of documents this will slow it down and ruin the experience.
I want my archive to be available for me on all devices. For this I use Obsidian Sync. This is another reason for the external storage. Obsidian only provides 100GB of storage for their sync, so I don't ever want to run out.
My Obsidian setup is based around the daily note. I use a template for these.
The daily note starts with a weather section. My grandad used to write in his diary the weather each day, just a line, and he said it helped him remember the day. So I have tried to do the same here. This causes me a few problems though. I'm based in Scotland, and we can have all the seasons in a day, which one to put - the snowstorm in the morning, the bright sunshine in the afternoon or the deluge in the evening? I did try and automate this but it was a bit much. I'm looking for other ways to automate this.
Next section is the log. This is where I log my day. What happened, who I spoke to, what I did - anything like that. This section can be fairly detailed or just a few lines depending on the day. This is the most important section for me. I also have a subheading in this section for reflections on the day. This part focuses less on what happened, and more about my thoughts on what happened.
After that comes the links section. Anything linked from Obsidian goes here. I also link other notes made on this day in this section.
Media Consumption is next. This is where I record what I've read for that day. I also use it to record any YouTube videos or podcasts that I've consumed that day. I might jot down a few notes here, or I might make a separate note and put the notes down there if I have more thoughts. I try and link to the article/video from this section too.
And the final section is Completed Tasks. I use Todoist to manage my tasks. I would really like a system where I could have all tasks added, completed and deleted appear in the Daily Note. Unfortunately, I can't find an easy, neat way of doing this. Therefore I settle for completed tasks. I use the plugin Todoist Completed Tasks to manage this. I do import all tasks created, deleted and completed in plain text into my weekly note.
2026-04-14 18:39:13
Some days ago, browsing my RSS feed as usual I got some very weird error in a blog I (now used) to read. A few days later the the same happened, but then after the crash appeared a message to disable my adblock.
If they make the webpage crash because I don't allow ads, I'm better not accessing the site anymore.1 I guess the most I lose is access to comments. The most interesting part which was the link collection they posted once in a while can still be read via my RSS reader.
To make things worse, the post-crash page says the ads are reasonable. They are not, they're the same as every other site with ads.
I also got the same error with another site I found while browsing. I guess I don't need to access that one too.↩
2026-04-14 15:55:00
Spoiler note: This post discusses specific themes, character dynamics, and a few scenes from A Transgender Woman on the Internet, Crying. It is more interested in the show’s ideas but may affect your enjoyment of the show compared to going in blind.
I watched A Transgender Woman on the Internet, Crying five times.
That is probably the clearest review I can give it, but it is also not quite enough. After the first night I left thinking almost immediately "fuck it, I’m buying four more tickets so I can make every remaining show I’m able to make".
At first that was easy to explain. I loved the music, the humour and the staging. The hyperpop energy, the internet language and the speed of it all landed for me immediately. It was sharp, funny, and musically strong.
The deeper answer is that each time I went back the show opened into something else. The first time it felt exciting and validating. The second time it felt sadder. The third time it got bigger. The fourth time it got tangled up with my own anxiety. The fifth time it stopped feeling like just a show I admired and started feeling like proof that some other version of life might still be possible.
Before the show had even properly started it already had me. The graffiti-covered set and the hyperpop playing as people filed in set the tone immediately.
The production is also just smart. The lighting does a huge amount of work. The same set can read as one whole environment and then with one part isolated suddenly become somewhere else entirely. The phone and online communication are staged well too. Streams, calls and digital interaction all feel built into the show rather than awkwardly explained.
And the songs are excellent. That was one of the simplest reasons I kept going back. Even once I started having more complicated thoughts about the show the basic fact remained that I really liked listening to it.
Part of what I was going back for was the room itself.
The lighting was dim enough that I was not hyper-aware of how I looked. The expectations on me as an audience member felt clear. The whole atmosphere felt welcoming to trans people in a way that made me relax almost immediately.
That is not always how queer spaces have felt to me. I had been to a drag show before and spent a lot of it feeling on edge, like simply being there was some kind of personal risk. This did not feel like that. It felt safer, smaller, more intimate. More obviously built for trans people rather than merely open to them.
That matters because part of what I kept returning to was the feeling of sitting somewhere I did not have to justify my existence as much.
The first time was the cleanest. I loved it immediately.
A lot of what I normally only think or half-say suddenly existed in front of me without apology. Not passing, being non-binary and transfemme, different transition goals, the pressure to be seen as valid. Even the Grindr material hit something very recognisable for me especially the ugly overlap between sexualisation and affirmation where part of you can still feel seen by something that is also creepy, flattening, or wrong.
The idea of the “perfect trans girl” landed immediately too. On that first viewing I understood it mainly as a critique of passing politics, of palatability, of becoming the kind of trans woman cis people can tolerate because she is polished, legible and easy to explain.
The non-binary transfemme representation mattered more to me than I expected. Often I feel like the only person on earth who identifies that way, still wants to take significant steps in transition and also likes girls. When you do not see that combination reflected back at you it becomes easy to think maybe you are doing something wrong. Maybe you are just embarrassing.
Most of my friends are cis, mostly straight, mostly men. When transness comes up in my actual life it often feels like I have to carve out just enough room for it. Enough to say something real, not enough to make the atmosphere strange. This show did not feel like that. It felt like it was naming things completely.
That alone would have been enough to make me love it.
And when I left that first show, I did what people do when they know they have found something rare. I bought more time with it.
The second time, my reading of the show started shifting.
By then the “perfect trans girl” material already felt less simple. I started seeing more of the shame sitting underneath that character. More fear, more of the desperate logic of trying to become safe by becoming understandable. It stopped feeling like a clean divide between the right trans politics and the wrong ones. It started feeling more like a story about what different people do when they are forced to survive under the same hostile standard.
Some people get moulded by cis expectations and try to become the perfect trans girl because that seems like the safest path. Some people do not fit those expectations neatly and end up having to fight harder for their experience to be treated as valid. One of the ugliest things the show understands is that the people most shaped by those expectations can end up reinforcing them against other trans people.
That is part of what made the scene where trans people cancel another trans character online as transphobic so important to me. It complicates any easy reading where cis society is the only source of pressure and trans people are simply united on the other side. The show knows that trans people can police each other too. It also knows that this policing does not come from nowhere. People can think they are defending trans people and still become cruel, punitive and flattening in the way they do it.
What I took from that was not that one side was correct. It was that the standard itself was doing the damage.
By the third viewing, one phrase had started sticking in my head:
being read versus being understood.
That is the clearest way I can explain what the internet side of the show was doing for me.
Online you can present yourself more deliberately. You can choose your words, your photos, your communities and the parts of yourself you highlight. You are not always dealing as directly with people who knew you before transition or with the immediate weight of the cis gaze in a physical room. That can make understanding feel more possible online than offline.
But online also makes misreading scale.
You can present yourself more honestly and still get flattened into a trope. You can be sexualised and get a gross little flicker of affirmation from it. You can try to explain yourself and find that people prefer the easier version of you.
One of the sharpest examples of that in the show is the way one character gets categorised as a “heteroflexible boy toy.” That label does a huge amount of flattening in very little space. It turns a person into a role in someone else’s story. It rewrites desire, gender, and subjectivity all at once into something legible, jokey, and consumable.
That stayed with me because it felt very close to a logic I recognise in myself.
Not the exact label obviously, but the compromise underneath it.
Maybe it is fine if people call me a femboy. Maybe that is close enough. Maybe that gives me enough room to wear what I want, to be softer, to be prettier, to move through the world in a way that feels less suffocating. Maybe it does not matter if they do not acknowledge that I actually want to be a woman. Maybe I can keep that part private and still take what I can get.
That is not the same as being understood. It is being read in a way that hurts less than some of the alternatives.
And that is part of what the show got right for me: compromise can feel survivable while still being a loss.
This was also the viewing where the followers started to feel bigger than literal followers. I had started reading them as a representation of society at large speaking through followers. Mostly cis people rewarding a whole package rather than one trait: passing, palatability, straight-coded femininity, respectability, and being easy to understand from the outside.
At the same time the show leaves room for another version of online life too: smaller forms of trans connection that feel less like audience and more like actual understanding. Friendship where you do not have to justify your existence as much. Friendship where you are not immediately being converted into a role.
That distinction mattered to me a lot.
Not every viewing deepened the show in a satisfying way.
By the fourth show, I was so aware of myself being there that I could barely enjoy it properly. I was sitting at the back and every time an actor looked off into the distance it felt like they were somehow looking at me. I know that sounds irrational, it was irrational but it changed the experience completely. I stopped watching the show and started watching myself watch it.
Part of what made that so uncomfortable was the fear of how I might be seen for coming back so many times. I started worrying that the cast might think I had some kind of parasocial attachment to the show or that I was being greedy by taking up space at something other people wanted to see. Rationally I knew I was just behaving like an audience member but emotionally it felt much harder to believe that.
That ended up mattering too.
It stopped being just about a brilliant production I loved. It became tangled up with embarrassment, scarcity, anxiety and the fear of wanting something too much. Even something good can get distorted once you become too conscious of yourself in relation to it.
That is part of the honest version of this story. I did not simply love it five times in a row, at one point I got too in my own head to digest it properly at all.
The fifth viewing was different. I took Valium before going and actually enjoyed it again.
That was also the viewing where some of the family material hit me hardest. One character talking about conservative parents and constant misgendering and the way the other characters supported her was incredibly moving. It made me want that kind of community more than anything else.
It also left me with a simpler thought than I usually allow myself: who gives a shit how I look in a skirt if it makes me happy?
That sounds small. It did not feel small.
A lot of what the show stirred up was already there. It did not invent it. It just made it harder to ignore.
It also made my longing for trans friendship more obvious. Not vague community in the abstract but friendship with people who understand certain things without me having to soften or translate them. Friendship where my existence is not always slightly up for debate. Friendship where I do not have to wonder which box someone has silently put me in.
That part hit even harder because all of my close friends are cis-het. I care about them but it often feels like I have to delicately carve out room for conversations about transness. Sometimes it was nice to go with different friends and point out the little in-jokes or references. Sometimes it was nice to let the show explain something by proxy that I would otherwise have had to explain myself. While waiting for one show, a friend misgendered me while we were in line, and later the show touched on the way non-binary transfemme people can get assumed to be trans women in ways that miss something important. It was a relief not to have to carry all of that explanation alone.
The family material got to me too. One character having non-accepting family and another seeming to have something more accepting or at least more workable made me think harder about my own family secrecy. I know it would go badly but it has become clearer to me that keeping everything in the dark is not neutral. It is one of the biggest things limiting what more visible steps in my transition can even feel possible.
After the final show I thanked one of the actors. I was awkward (as I usually am in social situations) but it still gave me some relief. It reminded me that a lot of the anxiety had been mine, not something actually coming from outside.
The simple answer is that I watched A Transgender Woman on the Internet, Crying five times because I thought it was excellent.
That answer is true, but incomplete.
I watched it because after the first viewing I wanted every remaining chance I could get to experience it again. I watched it because the music and performances were good enough to justify that impulse. I watched it because each return made the show feel deeper, sadder, more complicated and more important. I watched it because for a few hours at a time I could sit in a room where my version of transness still counted.
That feeling did not survive intact once I went back to normal life. It lasted a few hours, sometimes into the next day and then ordinary life closed back over it again.
But it was real while it lasted.
And that has made some things harder to ignore. The desire for trans friendship. The desire to dress more freely. The frustration of family secrecy. The possibility that I might be happier if I stopped treating every step toward being myself like something I need to defend in advance.
So yes, I watched it five times because I thought it was excellent.
I also watched it five times because for a little while it made a different life feel close enough to touch.