2026-02-09 00:56:00
I haven't been concerned with whether veggie, vegan, primal, or omnivore, etc is "better" or "healthier" for a loooooong time. A long time ago, when majority of people still thought it was weird as hell, I was vegan (before that vegetarian) for years. I was also very politically active. I was certainly a bit too "missionary" in my thoughts and expressions way back then.
Now, for a long time, I eat everything. Having a live-in partner that is vegetarian and at least three vegan friends I see and share some meals with regularly, I eat those ways plenty too nowadays.
Over the years at least on five separate occasions, and years apart, I spent two to six hours reading and learning about different diets, especially vegan, veggy and omnivore I read plenty on. Meta-studies, government & WHO recommendations and much more. Well regarded essays and sometimes books. From Peter Singer to Gary Yourofsky to extremely pro pro carnivore or primal books and documentaries, and a lot or sources in between those two extremes. Read and watched them all.
My conclusion was and remains: it's all somewhat horseshit.
Who, how much, when, what genes, what quality, where do you live, in what climate, how active are you, how much body and muscle mass, how processed is it, how far did it come, what you can easily afford and buy and prepare? Each of those things, and many more. can make such a massive difference, that saying anything akin to:
“The vegan diet or Mediterranean diet is best for everyone! or:
“XYZ (with animal or without animal products) is always bad or even the worst!”
Both are pretty crazy things to say much less advise. Especially unasked or unsolicited.
I've seen people become seriously ill from eating a purely vegan diet for a few years (I lived with very strict vegans for years). Sometimes the damage was not reversible, for example nerve damage due to severe B12 deficiency or a generally less robust immune system.
Yet there are also extremely fit and healthy vegan ultra-marathoners, combat sports professionals and body-builders. They tend to supplement and be very aware of their diet.
I've also seen people who ate a massive amount of, or sometimes nearly exclusively meat and animal products, for 6 to 12 months and become much healthier, lose a lot of weight and get back vastly improved blood-work from their doctors, have a lot of energy, and visa versa.
I have also tried a big array of diets at some point (for a few months to a few years): Atkins, no sugar, Low Carb, water-fasting for a few days, intermittent fasting, Primal, Vegan, Vegetarian, Onmnivore etc. I also really monitored if I felt any big changes in quality of life and health when I did one or the other. In the end, it turned out it made very little difference to me! Whether it was mostly animal or entirely plant-based, barring any extremes, it just didn't matter much at all.
With some of those ways of eating, I was able to lose a lot of weight well, with others less so or not at all, but in the end, the most important factors were always: “Calories in & Calories Out” and whether I had varied food with all the necessary nutrients. Of course YMMV with all of that! I would not presume to make a generalization out of my experiences.
Nobody informed would seriously argue that a vegan diet likely isn't better for animals than a heavily meat-based diet.
However, it is all so pointless to argue about food and health choices, let alone give people a really hard time. I know a friend who almost every other day, writes in a group chat about how:
"People should move more, not drink, eat healthy and eat very little or no sugar!"
One day I asked him why.
"Why are you telling people this in chat group, the same few people, and over and over again for months?" "Do you think they do not know that and have not known that for many years? That what you suggest is likely the healthiest? And have you noticed how almost all of them drink (very) moderately, very likely eat more sugar than you and move a bit less and are okay with that? They are not responding in the chat nor changing. Why not talk about anything else?"
To his credit, he has always responds kindly. And also has very much toned down that rhetoric and repetition since I wrote him.
My conclusion for me personally has always been: do what's good for you, and your body, health (including mental health!) and fits your life and circumstances...
Preferably, try to do better, at least to a degree, for the planet and animals. And that's that.
For the rest: I try to shut up, truly enjoy my food and give thanks,.. and leave others alone!
2026-02-08 17:57:00
There’s never been a shortage of posts about quitting blogging in the blogging community. I’ve contributed a few myself over the years.
It’s been a while since I last did it, so it’s hard to remember what the explanation was. Probably something that sounded wise and understandable at the time.
But was it the right reason? Was it really true?
I don’t know, but I honestly think it wasn’t.
Even though I haven’t actually gone through with it lately, the thoughts of quitting still pop up every now and then. Instead of acting on them, I’ve started trying to understand why they show up in the first place.
It always starts with something that sounds true to me. “I want to spend less time online. I want to focus on other things. I’ve enjoyed blogging, but it’s time for a change.”
Hard to argue with that, if it’s honest. But when I stay with those thoughts instead of acting on them, a different story slowly appears.
The embarrassing truth is that underneath that shiny armor of reasoning, this is what’s really going on. “I spend all this time writing, creating, and sharing. For what? Does anyone even care? Why bother continuing?”
That’s the sad soundtrack playing in the background. That’s the need for validation hiding behind something that sounds reasonable.
It’s a lie.
Yes, I do spend time writing, creating, and sharing. But I do it because I love it, not to be recognized or to make a living from it.
And I know that at least some people care. I see it in wonderful emails, lovely guestbook comments, and links from other bloggers. Thank you.
If you ever find yourself thinking about quitting blogging, don’t reach for the delete button right away. Stay with the idea for a while. Sit with it for a day, a week, or however long it takes to find the honest answer.
Just don’t quit blogging for the wrong reasons.
2026-02-08 04:11:00
Heya!
So, If you've been keeping up with my blogposts for a bit, you probably know about the guestbook service I'm making. Well, it's out now! You can get an invite! Go email me!
Alright, now that that's out of the way, lemme tell you a bit about the current state of things. Here's a list of all the features I've got implemented already:
And here's what's on the roadmap:
That's all I've got to say for now! I'll probably make another blogpost at some point going a bit more in-depth. For now though - have fun!
Oh right, here's the github repo.
2026-02-08 01:53:00
Véronique recently wrote about Bearblog’s discovery page giving her the ick, and its excellent. It feels competitive, and like some people might be trying to find a formula to get posts to the top of the discover list. It’s really the same small handful of blogs that get to the top of the list, some of which are clearly trying to sell something, like life coaching or some bullshit. There are a handful of people with large followings on here that drive the narrative. As Véronique said, “if you don't like it, don't read it.” True, fair enough, and I don’t because it’s really boring. My issue is that it could be really fun! What if the algorithm weighed average number of votes a blog gets per post, and when a post gets above that, it starts to show up on discovery? Just something to allow smaller blogs to get into the top 20 more often. I’d love it if it actually functioned like a discovery feed, as the name would suggest, as opposed to a list of posts by the top 50 blogs in terms of subscriber count or page views.
On the other hand, who cares? Maybe I just wanted to blog about something that isn’t death related. Anyway, here’s a few recent photos.
2026-02-07 09:12:00
This post is a response to Gabby's i can't stop thinking about goodreads' top 100, which I read earlier today and enjoyed.
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On Goodreads you rate books on a star system, with 5 stars the highest rating and 1 the lowest. For me, the rating function is a way to record how much I enjoyed a particular book. That way, when I sort my books by descending rating, I can see all the books I loved or made an impression on me at the top. My friends can use this information to deduce what books I would like or recommend.
I do not use this rating as a measure of perceived quality. There are plenty of classics I have given low ratings simply because I found them boring or unpleasant. (Looking at you, The Bell Jar.) In fact, I'm not sure I can judge objective quality of a book at all, if such a thing exists. (I am not sure it does.)
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Good art often requires work to get into and fully appreciate. Even though I adore classical music, if it were not for me spending most of my formative years in music classes, I'm not sure I would listen to classical music at all. When people tell me they don't like or listen to classical music, I don't interpret this as a knock on the quality of the genre. They just don't know what to listen for.1
I think literature works similarly. Great works demand effort. People wrote and spoke differently and alluded to things we're no longer familiar with, and now the burden is on us as readers to figure this stuff out. Most people (me included, to an extent) can't or won't put in the time and effort to make their way through challenging classics, so it follows that they wouldn't fully enjoy or appreciate many of the greats. (And you know what? I think that's OK.)
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Good art is also supposed to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Because of the topics they deal with and the spotlight they're thrust under, books in the literary canon are often surrounded by controversy. You could probably get most of your assigned books for middle and high school English without even leaving the Banned Books section.
In 1939 Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath to great fanfare, winning him a Pulitzer and a perennial spot on teachers' syllabi. Even he was not immune to the controversy:
In many communities The Grapes of Wrath was banned and burned, both for its occasional obscene language and its general themes. Some viewed it as communist propaganda, and many farmers and agricultural groups were irate that it fomented anger about their labor practices—the book was “a pack of lies,” the Associated Farmers of California declared. Steinbeck received regular threats following the book’s publication, and took to carrying a gun in public, just in case. (source)
The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books. It is a vivid, compassionate look into the lives of Americans during the Great Depression. I can think of no book more American, less "communist propaganda" than The Grapes of Wrath. Yet had Goodreads existed back then, I'm sure it would have received a lot of 1-star reviews. I read somewhere a long time ago that a better way to judge a book on Goodreads is to add the number of 5-star and 1-star ratings and subtract the number of 2-, 3-, and 4- star ratings. The higher this number, the better. I don't exactly adhere to this advice strictly myself, but I think it gets at a relevant truth: things worth reading aren't always going to be the most universally popular. When it comes to great art, controversy comes with the territory.
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On a personal note (and I've written about this before), many of us are made to read these classics at a time when we are perhaps not prepared to or mentally/emotionally receptive to them. I was required to read To Kill A Mockingbird when I was eleven. It did nothing for me then, and I have never felt compelled to pick it up again. There are so many other great books in the world I'm sure I would enjoy more.
i mean surely, classics were classics for a reason? the reason being that they were...good?
This reminded me of a data visualization I came across a while back: What Do We Study from the 1990s?
For Stanford's Literary Lab, Digital Humanities scholar J.D. Porter points out a number of books that were never commercially popular, but have, over time, grown into a dominant force in the literary canon. One important example is the 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
"Before 1970, Zora Neale Hurston was the primary subject author in just 4 MLA articles, and all of her novels were out of print; none had sold more than 5,000 copies. It was famously the efforts of prestigious scholars and writers, especially Alice Walker, that recuperated her.
And it worked: Today Hurston has over 700 MLA articles, and she has more Goodreads ratings than authors ranging from the canon that predated her...No doubt much of the public familiarity with her work derives from its now-common presence in classrooms, but this is precisely the point...a boost in prestige, driven by scholars and practitioners, and mediated through the classroom, led to a boost in popularity. The arc of escape from obscurity pulled her not just up but away."
For the most part, I agree with Gabby about classics being classics because they're good. I myself try to prioritize reading classics for the quality I've found in them and count many of them among my favorites. But being "good" isn't the only criterion for a book becoming a classic. Selection into literary syllabi depends on other factors too, like "pertain[ing] to a topic that the next generation should know," many of which are not necessarily aligned with reader enjoyment. Many classics weren't even the most popular books when they were published (in ZHN's case, not popular at all), and probably would have faded into obscurity had literary critics not picked them up. It's no surprise, then, that many of us don't enjoy some of them now.
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To sum up: in the spirit of playing devil's advocate (or simply the voice of the philistines), I think the reason few classics feature on the Goodreads top 100 is because they are often challenging or controversial, forced upon many of us, and not necessarily selected for reader pleasure. I don't think it's crazy or elitist to be be perplexed by the lack of classics; I too wish there were more on there. But I also recognize some of the reasons why so few feature on there, and why these don't dim the light of the classics in any way.
I recognize that there is likely a genetic component to this: some people will be genetically predisposed to like some things and dislike others. But I think (and some studies have shown) most people like the things they like simply because they were exposed to them at the right time and/or in the right way.↩
