2026-02-04 15:18:00
On most social media platforms, there is always a "meta" side where discussions revolve around the medium itself. But it is rarely about original content that stems from one’s own thoughts, lived experiences, or hidden desires—the "intimate treasure" of the individual.
Most of the time, this meta-discourse is used to serve performance. People gather to figure out how to hack stats, how to get noticed, how to manipulate algorithms, or how to "take over." There is a deeply utilitarian side to it: how to exploit a platform to extract the most profit.
One of the things I particularly appreciate about this community is that the "meta" aspect is oriented toward exchange, discussion, reflection, self-criticism, and gaining perspective. It is not about the primary goal of exploitation. Everything here feels more organic, more natural, and ultimately, more human.
What are the limits? What things should be preserved? What are the warning signs to watch for? What is my answer to this subject?
2026-02-04 13:58:00
Ye are beautiful, driver of your Tesla.
With your blackout tint, your plaid badge of pride, and your vanity plate.
Step on that pedal, and fly with the rest of your flock down the street in a school zone; silently, and at 70 miles an hour to get around me.
Dash around your fellow drivers with ease and swiftness. They don't understand the power of your vehicle, and you must show them so that one day they might join the ranks of good people. Great people. Tesla owners.
May you and your car weave in, out, and between traffic like a fuckin worm or something fuck you.
Your hubris and penis are unmatched in size and beauty.
And when you finally come to a stop, weather it be at the front of the red light line, or in a burning lithium inferno under the freeway overpass, just know that you were right; what a funny car for cool, ironic people.
I spend around 2 to 2.5 hours in traffic every day.
The pay is worth it, so I continue to do it.
The sense of tribalism has grown so deeply and strongly within me, that I see any car on the road that isn't a Tesla as an ally. When I see one swerve in front of me to get one car closer in traffic, I genuinely become more hateful.
It's the new Prius.
I love the Prius now. That's how bad things have gotten.
The Tesla represents the uber rich buying up all housing, land and jobs, and jacking off into an AI meat grinder to have everyone who isn't in their clique killed for wrong think, or put to work in a farm.
Why have creativity? That inspires the middle and lower class.
Rape that away from them, and put it into an AI product that we can sell back to them. Get them dependent on us so badly, that they can't even cum without their computer pinging our data-center brain.
That car is the culmination of the uber rich appeasing the uber rich or the easily impressed.
The humble shitbox, though it burns petrolium, at least makes a statement that the person is just trying to get to work.
TL;DR you are a boner-head if you drive too fast in front of me and hurt my feelings.
I hope me have a good day tomorrow, I.
Good luck with my desk job, you fruit.
Drink some water so me can outlive me.
Everyting gonna be alright, I.
Drink less beers, and draw more.
Wuv meee!!!
2026-02-04 07:00:00
with good internet magazine's autumn/winter issue in the printers' hands, i thought this would be a great time for me to spend a moment doing a bit of a post-mortem after completing this volume of two issues. (if you haven't seen me talk about it, good internet is a print magazine for hobbyist webweavers and indie web netizens, announced in january 2025.)
here's some things you should know if you want to launch a print magazine these days:
doing this entirely on your own is unmanageable. it's untenable. it's unreasonable. i cannot under any circumstances recommend someone do this alone, even with external artist and writer submissions. not only is it difficult, but you have zero room for anything happening to you, which is exactly what happened when i began having health issues in september 2025. i had no plan, no backup, and nobody able to work on the magazine in my absence. as a result, i fell behind in designing the magazine, couldn't send off final proofs to writers, and ended up providing a less-than-stellar editor experience for those writers—in addition to everything else i feel like i dropped the ball with. you need help: sourcing ethical and independent printers, communicating with them, working and editing with writers/artists, setting up the website/content management system, transferring all the stories into the same format for laying out, fitting them to the CMS, managing email lists and making sure everything works, figuring out subscriptions and gating content correctly... there's more that i won't go into, but i think that illustrates it enough. doing this alone is doable but a) you will miss every deadline you set and b) you will burn out. even if you manage to get out a few issues, it is not sustainable. i'm not saying don't do it—i'm saying don't do it alone.
plan to spend money on your project. while i wish good internet would've broken even—especially with how much i had to charge for each magazine (astronomically priced compared to magazines printed at scale)—i was still having to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket, particularly for shipping to europe and oceania. that was a lesson learned in itself. on the front end, i had costs i knew i'd have to pay for that would never be recouped: shipping weight scale, envelope sleeves, design software (purchased affinity as to try and not use adobe products), monthly stamps.com subscription (to get the lowest postage available to me), monthly digitalocean hosting, monthly mailjet subscription, and domain. having recurring paid subscriptions helped so much with this, though! the postage ended up coming out far more than originally planned with domestic purchases subsidizing the international purchases' postage as much as possible. for the spring issue, one magazine cost around $34 to ship internationally. next time, i think i'll work with a mailing service (or adding it on with my printer) instead of doing it all myself. i initially avoided it because i thought it wouldn't be worth the extra funds ($350+), but magazines would've made it out sooner and into folks' hands sooner if i had done that instead. it was worthy exchange of the labor.
have a plan if going global. finding a european printer for the autumn/winter issue is proving to be better as an endeavor overall, but i essentially will have two sizes for this issue: 8.5"x11" magazine in the US and A4 elsewhere. having to retrofit the 8.5"x11" magazine to fit a larger size was both time-consuming and frustrating; it only added onto my stress in wanting to put out a product worth people's money while battling health problems.
if you build it, some will come. everything is building upon experiences, mistakes, lessons from the past—i come from a journalism background, i've done this professionally—and this was still incredibly hard. do not expect to build something that throngs of folks will flock to. you need people to spread the word for you! talking about this often with others was only part of getting the word out about the magazine, and i wish i'd had more bandwidth to promote good internet more, but on top of everything else, i couldn't manage it.
build systems that work for your workflow. i had to build an internal tracking system for managing purchases and making sure which ones were shipped. if this is handled externally, you would have to deal with this less, but this was still something i had to build on the fly in the middle of handling orders. i also had to make sure automation was set up so that digital editions could be purchased and then be instantly accessible—this happened via email in their inbox, but there are a ton of ways to handle purchases of digital items. i found lemonsqueezy.com to be the best option even though i didn't use them in the end.
plan for downtime, and establish a schedule after you've done it once. schedule breaks. working on a self-guided project without taking sufficient breaks or time away is going to lead to burnout. establish your printing schedule after you've seen how one issue goes. i initially set a pace of quarterly for good internet—that was a mistake. while magazines staffed with dozens of folks can churn out a monthly magazine or a quarterly magazine, a solo endeavor shouldn't be approached in the same way. good internet went down to two issues per year from that first lesson.
establish what your values are early on and stick to them. be able to recite your reasons for decisions you make and limitations you might actually have. it's just important. stick to them.
as for good internet, i'll be reducing the frequency more to an annual issue without more volunteer help. (if you have experience with indesign or affinity publisher, please reach out!) once this batch of magazines is sent out to everyone who ordered one, i can take some time offline, which i'm really looking forward to. :)
i'm so grateful to everyone who has supported the magazine; all of the amazing and talented writers who submitted articles and stories, all of the artists who donated their time and ability—thank you! you've made the magazine what it is. i'm glad i could play a small part.
2026-02-04 04:50:00
I never fail to be surprised and thrilled at what you can do with plain old CSS and HTML these days. It's really come a long way since the noughties!
For example, I was looking at some of my screenshots with the site in dark mode and hated how blinding they were because they were taken in light mode. I could have taken all the screenshots in dark mode, because it's less jarring that way around, but I really do like how light images look on a light background.
So instead I turned to CSS and of course there was a solution (which actually turned out to be pure HTML!) - and it's a super simple one at that.
Try switching between light and dark mode and see what happens to the image below:
Cool huh? That's the book I'm currently reading btw. It's good. :D
If you like it, here's how it's done. You just wrap a <picture> tag around your two light/dark images, specify which one is dark and poof it will display the light image in light mode and the dark one in dark. Like magic!
<picture>
<source srcset="DARK-IMAGE.JPG" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)">
<img src="LIGHT-IMAGE.JPG">
</picture>
I've also had a few people asking me about my Snippets page and how I made it. While I have to manually add content, I do have a nice simple CSS for styling it.
I simply wrap the daily text and the datestamp in a div tag with the class status-post and have this code in my CSS file:
div.status-post {
padding: 15px;
margin-bottom: 15px;
border: 1px dotted #8a79c5;
border-radius: var(--radius);
background: var(--surface);
}
This is how it renders:
Yet another simple, but effective, bit of customisation!
CSS and HTML can look daunting at first, but they're very simple to learn. Once you understand the basic structure, you'll find you can often just guess how things work, and, if you don't know the right language or format to use, the answer is only a quick search away.
Even using a simple platform like Bear allows you to inject your own personality into your blog. There are some amazing personal blogs out there and I encourage you to spread your wings and make yours truly unique too!
2026-02-04 04:48:51
"Treat everyone as if today was your last day alive. Express all the love you have for them. Say what you want to say. Be in the moment. Make it a good experience. Crack jokes. Make it fun."
I saw this tweet today and it made me think…
When did we all become so boring?
Think about when you were a kid.
You just... existed.
You said what you thought. You laughed when something was funny. You got excited about small things. You didn't calculate every word before it left your mouth.
There was no image to protect. No "personal brand."
You were just you.
Now? Everyone's in character 24/7.
Everyone's trying to be mysterious, nonchalant, too busy to notice you.
We've all convinced ourselves that showing you care too much is embarrassing. That being enthusiastic is cringe.
So we all just... exist.
And it's leaked into everything.
The irony is that the people who actually stand out are the ones who don’t care about any of this.
The ones who get excited about their work.
The ones who crack jokes.
The ones who are unapologetically themselves.
Those are the people I actually remember. The people I actually want to be around.
I say this to say…
Stop holding back who you are because everyone around you is pretending not to care.
Stop dimming yourself down to match the energy of people who are too scared to be seen.
Stop playing it cool when you could be playing it real.
You can keep performing, or you can start being yourself again.
Both are choices.
2026-02-04 02:10:00
Look what the cat dragged in.
Yeah, that's right another newsletter.
I figured I'd surprise my 40 odd subscribers who've never gotten an email from me with a little treat. This is a lightweight monthly digest: what I've been working on (accountability so I don't procrastinate) plus a pile of great posts I've read.
If that sounds like something you are interested in and want to get email updates feel free to subscribe!
In this issue
What I've been doing!
In case you missed it my latest posts on the blog:
Since my Mapping the Blogosphere post, I kept working on the graph through December:
The dataset was updated on January 31, 2026, including the first batch of 2026. I'm planning to keep doing updates at the end of each month.
I'm not planning more major work on the graph right now (I'm a little burned out), but two features I'd still love to add eventually:
Submissions for the Bloggies were running throughout January, and I've been busy nominating posts (I think I submitted over 130). I've also been sharing a few nominations each day on Bluesky in this thread if you want even more blog recs.
On Monday, we'll find out which posts have been nominated. Then we'll have a week to read before voting starts!
My favorite blog posts I read this month.
The rest of the month's links. No blurbs (for my sanity), just the good stuff (links).
Scene, events, community posts
Theoryslop, essays, guides
Rules, procedures, drop-in content
Reviews, play reports, oddments
Older banger posts that resurfaced for me this month (one way or another).
That's all! Catch you next time.