text-based media

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:13:59 -0400

I’ve never had a spam problem with linking to my email on my blog, but I forgot to enable whois privacy protection on a domain name for like one week and my inbox has been getting blown up for months with sketchy emails trying to sell me custom apps and websites for my new domain 😵‍💫

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:04:07 -0400

We are going to kill “unalive”

Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you.

Algorithms are bleeding into the real world, dictating how people talk even offline. Terrible things happen sometimes, and using silly euphemisms like “grape” or “unalive” is so odd and obnoxious.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 10:04:40 -0400

Bluesky is applying for a TLD:

A little scoop before Oct 7, when ICANN publishes 1,000+ applications for new top-level domains: one of them is .bsky! It’s a long road (18 to 24 months), but if it goes through, handles like alice.bsky become possible.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:56:38 -0400

I’m taking a break from Reddit

You see Reddit and to a larger degree YouTube give me the false opinion that I’m learning something. I’m doing deep dives. I’m taking away educated content. The reality is I’m doom scrolling through engineering and AI subreddits while likely reading incensing things directly from bots talking to bots talking to bots feeding into my brain.

I made a hard exit from Reddit for similar reasons a few years back. But I ended up going back, in short bursts. I’ll re-subscribe to Narwhal, feel bad about wasting $4 on a one-month subscription to a Reddit app, use it for a couple weeks, and cancel it. Then two or three months later, I’ll do another month.

Lately, I’ve been sticking with Micro.blog and Bluesky, and then when I’m stoned at 11pm I’ll reblog a few things on Tumblr.

Stuck in Apple's ecosystem

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:49:47 -0400

I bought Brave Origin shortly after it came out, but I’ll be god damned if Apple’s ecosystem doesn’t keep pulling me back in.

Leo AI is pretty good for stupid little questions, and Brave Search is the best search engine I’ve ever used. Siri AI feels better to me than Leo though, and it’s built right into my homescreen.

It can summarize web pages too, but only from Safari. I would think Brave would be able to do the same thing with Leo, but there’s no setting I can find for it.

On top of that, I’m an iCloud+ subscriber, so I get Private Relay as part of that. Only works in Safari though, naturally. I could pay for Brave VPN on top of the $60 I paid for Origin, but then I already have Private Relay, don’t I?

Also, as a side note, I make a lot of link posts on my blog. I set up a Shortcut to capture links in markdown, with an optional markdown quote for any selected text — exactly like the Drafts app for iPhone.

But that’s another thing that only works in Safari — even Drafts’ quick capture Shortcut. As far as I know, there are no third party browsers that share enough of a webpage to make a Shortcut like that work. Simple to make for Safari, but a huge pain in the ass to go without it.

I use Brave on my Debian laptop, and it’s at least a great way to sync accounts on websites I log into a lot. Because with everything on my phone, I use Apple Passwords. There’s obviously no Linux port of that.

I used 1Password before that but I was already pissed off enough about the rate hike that I was out of there by the time they decided to go all in on Nazi Linux.

I tried Bitwarden for a while and it felt like some guy’s weekend hobby project, so I just decided on Apple Passwords since I’m on my phone most of the time anyway.

It’s definitely a pain copying some of the crazy long random-generated passwords by hand from my phone onto my laptop browser, so I really like having a few sites I frequent in Brave’s passwords.

But I’m right back to square one: torn between some really good open source software, and the slightly more convenient Apple software that comes with my closed-source, proprietary phone. I wouldn’t be caught dead with a Google Ads phone though, so I guess I’ll just make myself comfortable in the undertow of Apple Island. But I’m keeping Brave installed too.

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 13:02:18 -0400

Casio’s Crystal G-Shock Is the Most Expensive Ever Made

The flagship model, and by far the most expensive, is the $80,000 MRG-D5000, the first-ever retail G-Shock with an outer case and bezel hewn entirely from blue sapphire crystal.

I like G-Shocks, but this is a little excessive 👀

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:12:58 -0400

We ported the original Doom to SQL

We ported the original 1993 Doom’s game logic and renderer to SQL and ran it inside a database. The game loop runs at the original 35 FPS, while the renderer produces the complete 320x200 frame buffer at up to 60 Hz on my Laptop.

Speak of the devil…

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:14:16 -0400

Google Wants to Send Data Centers to Space

In space, these energy monsters can take full advantage of the sun. The near-constant sunlight there can provide up to eight times more solar power than on Earth, according to the statement.

Seems like a much better place than Earth.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:13:38 -0400

Cobalt: I Put Bluesky on a Wii U

Cobalt didn’t start with a product brief or a market analysis. I wasn’t trying to solve an important problem. I looked at a Wii U and thought it would be funny if Bluesky ran on it, then I started building it.

Down for the cause. It’s like the more useful version of running Doom on an iPod or some other weird obscure tech.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:38:10 -0400

Pope Leo tweets about ai:

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.

I’m not religious, so I don’t tend to care what the Pope has to say most of the time, but I agree with him here. At least when it comes to art. I might snap if I see another generic AI flyer for a company outing.

Coding, on the other hand…

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:03:19 -0400

Former Rockstar dev believes Grand Theft Auto VI on Switch 2 wouldn’t ‘even make sense’

Does it make sense for you to go out of your way to probably have the risk of delivering a subpar experience because it does not run exactly the same and so on while you know that anybody will buy a PS5 to get your game?”

As someone whose favorite console is the Switch, I agree. Nintendo has always been my favorite game company, but even Minecraft is virtually unplayable on Switch. I’m assuming it runs a little better on Switch 2, but GTA VI is a behemoth compared to anything Nintendo has ever put out.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:27:06 -0400

Fark.com is the only website I use with no dark mode so it’s my default flashlight when the led is too bright

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:57:17 -0400

Finished playing Ori and the Will of the Wisps a couple days ago. Hands down one of the top five metroidvanias I’ve ever played. The characters are cute and the storyline is excellent. I needed a new side scroller so I got the Axiom Verge 1 & 2 bundle on sale through the Switch store just now.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 01:09:33 -0400

Curious about changedetection.io with Reddit dropping rss feeds soon. Set up an instance on Pikapods to tool around with. I only watch a couple of the feeds in Miniflux anyway. Luckily, it looks like I’ll still be able to use Narwhal:

Narwhal is thankfully not going anywhere! Reddit reached out to me today to let me know that Narwhal will not be affected. This could of course change years down the road, but I hope that Reddit will continue to offer some form of an API that Narwhal can use.

Edit: well it looks like ChangeDetection is a no-go, so I’m checking out some feeds from Lemmy, Lobste.rs and Hacker News to see if I can’t reproduce something close to what I had with the few Reddit feeds I used to follow.

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:42:28 -0400

ModRetro Partners With OpenAI To Help “You” Make… AI Retro Games?

Most people, especially retro gamers, do not want to buy or experience AI-generated games that steal from the very creatives that make retro gaming so damn good. We want to experience new, remarkable games, made by humans who have genuine passion for game development, and I am disappointed to see ModRetro put so much marketing and effort into promoting a tool/partnership that goes against their very core demographic’s values.

ModRetro founder/owner Palmer Luckey is pretty much the Alex Karp of retro gaming already, so this isn’t that surprising.

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:09:54 -0400

1996 chat room simulator connected to Win95 and System 7 web desktops

A zero-account browser chat room mimicking mid-90s online services. The state runs on Upstash Redis and is shared across three different frontends (React/Vite deployed on Vercel): * The standalone chat interface (https://lolchat.rip) * A Windows 95 simulator (https://56k.rip) * A Mac System 7 simulator (https://dialup.rip) Users dialing in from the Mac desktop and users on the Win95 machine end up in the exact same rooms talking to each other.

Hits all those nostalgic early web buttons, right down to the dial-up modem sound when you’re connecting.

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:28:08 -0400

The Weirdest Game I’ve Ever Made

Broken Files is now available (for free)! This game is a series of personal firsts. It has voice acting. It has a character, and she does dialog to you. It seems like the sort of thing that would feel at home on itch.io, so it’s there too. And it contains no code, so it runs on everything – in fact, it doesn’t run at all.

This is so cool! It’s an ARG-style puzzle where you have to edit hex codes using clues in a .zip you download from her site. I know that might sound a little sketchy, but she’s the dev behind the ad blocker I use, Wipr 2, and she also uploaded the game to itch.io, so I trust it. I won’t spoil anything, but I will say I made it to the shrine and learned a bit about hex editing in the process.

Worth noting: it’s not an impossibly complicated Cicada 3301 level ARG, so don’t overthink it!

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:24:56 -0400

Get over your ivory library

Audiobooks make stories available to people who are driving, working, visually impaired, dyslexic, exhausted, or who take in spoken information better. Calling them “not real readers” doesn’t protect literature. It turns enjoying books into a purity contest.

I feel dumb a lot of the time when I admit I read something via audiobook, but I really shouldn’t. My attention span is shit so I usually get sidetracked when I try to sit down and crack a book. I do love my Kindle, and I’ve been reading a lot on it lately, but I’ve got a backlog on Libro I need to tend to.

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:24:26 -0400

Non-detection at traffic lights in the United States

Traffic lights that do not service traffic due to non-detection may not meet the federal legal definition adopted by most states for a traffic control signal, which is any device “by which traffic is alternately directed to stop and permitted to proceed”.

Did not know this was a thing. The abomination of a stoplight that leads to my street does this sometimes. I’m running the fucker the next time it misses my little car.

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 21:06:05 -0400

I Can’t Imagine Being This Desperate for Attention

I recently got shared a post from a friend about this blogger revealing they were the mastermind behind some shitpost ragebait blog that a collective 5ish people gave a fuck about (didn’t stop him from thinking he’s “talk of the town”), hell I hadn’t even heard of this blog before. But golly gee does this yutz want you to know it was him all along like some unaired Scooby-Doo villain.

I won’t post the actual blog either, but I’m 100% sure I just came across this same person on Bear Blog lmao. Big this guy energy at 0:32.

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:21:34 -0400

I’ll Keep Writing Like Me, Thanks

In the ’90s, I used — and … in HTML to produce em dashes and ellipses, respectively. In the early 2000s, I happened upon the Alt + keypad shortcuts for entering all sorts of characters in Windows.

I love how easy it is to type an em dash and ellipses on an iPhone keyboard. You could even just set a text replacement rule for two hyphens or three periods. I did that for the interrobang — when I type an exclamation point and a question mark it bangs out one of these bad boys ‽

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:27:41 -0400

Ed Sheeran’s Concerts at Gillette Stadium Cancelled Due to Severe Weather Forecast

“The decision was made with the safety of fans, staff and everyone involved in the shows as the top priority. Refunds are available now at the point of purchase. Ticketholders who purchased through Ticketmaster will be automatically refunded.”

You can’t make this stuff up lol imagine if he simply would’ve had a spine. The outcome would’ve been the same either way, but at least his reputation would still be intact.

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:19:44 -0400

Just realized I never paused my Libro.fm subscription when I thought I did, so now I have nine credits sitting in my account. I guess I should find a few audiobooks to listen to.

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:01:09 -0400

The Turning: How Fall Color Moves Across North America

Fall is my absolute favorite time of year. I’m not sweating 24/7, the bugs are going away and, most importantly, it’s spooky season. This site gives you a cool visual timeline of the changing colors across North America this time of year.

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:54:41 -0400

Bonnie Blue claims she sold her baby’s name for £1,200,000

However, the winning bid came from the online betting company BetBolt. The self-described ‘Crypto Casino‘ reportedly paid over a million pounds for the right to name the content creator’s baby, and thus, the child was named BetBolt, according to the video.

This has got to be rage bait. Right? RIGHT‽ That poor kid.