Bear Blog Trending Posts

The absolute lottery of Random on Bear

2026-06-26T19:46:00+00:00

On the Bear Blog discovery page, I'd mostly frequent Most Recent and check out what was Trending when I first started my blog. It was addicting to see in real time what someone else had posted. I forgot about this feeling!

But one day, I was like... "what's Random going to show me?" And my gosh, what a trip. It's now a daily ritual of mine to always check it at least 5 times.

So many abandoned sites.
Domain names that don't register anymore.
Blogs dating back years — like more than Bear Blog has been alive! And I can only assume previous blogs were migrated over but still.. wow.

Sites with literal #FF0000 as it's fucking background color! My eyes!

Blogs about sandwich reviews! Video games! Art!
Blogs in other languages!
Blogs that were started in 2020 and have no other posts than the first 'Hello World!' one where it's content is simply, "I'm going to start blogging!" and they never ever write another post every again!

I just found a blog that personalizes your skin care! I can't find any other posts on it, I'm so lost! I want to see all posts!

Ugh, sorry — I don't even realize I'm ending all my sentences with an exclamation mark... the Random section just makes me feel excited!

When I click on 'More random posts' at the bottom, I'm hit with a rush of wHaT's-It-GuNnA-BeEeee... and I'm met with more poems, self-reflections, photos of travels + food, neon green text on a dark blue background, codes and tech stuff I don't understand, a Barbie movie review, people who curse as much as I do, and now pages that haven't been updated since last year. Are they still stuck doing the same thing?

Every few clicks, I come across a site where I know the person's a CSS-God/Goddess/HIGHER BEING... and I stay on their page for much longer because I'm looking at how pretty their fonts are and clicking away on all the links, looking at what pages they have, and wondering why they chose to make the site width this big or how they made it look like I'm stuck in a computer from 1983!

And then more blogs using the default themes, with no more than 4 posts since 2021. That makes me sad and I wonder how they're doing?

I especially wonder about the folks who's domain names are no longer connected and hope they're well.

But I also see the past posts of blogs who are still very active on Bear Blog and I'm glad they're here in Random!

More Than Email

2026-06-26T16:31:00+00:00

At first glance, Tuta Mail seems like just another email provider. It isn’t.

It’s one of the few services I’m aware of that has consistently prioritised privacy and security for protocols that were never designed for that purpose. Within the constraints of email, Tuta makes things about as secure as they realistically get.

One of the most interesting choices is how it handles push notifications.

Rather than relying on Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Tuta chose to switch to using Server Sent Events to deliver push notifications way back in 2018.

This might seem like a small implementation to an email application, but the potential issues with push notifications were already something people in the privacy community were aware of, and the team working on what was then known as Tutanota were clearly ahead of the curve on.

It’s a topic that has only increased in severity and scale since then but what's common knowledge now is that:

Push notifications can reveal far more than people tend to assume.

The change Tuta made in 2018 brought several benefits: reduced metadata leakage, the complete removal of Google Play Services for the app to function, and most importantly, full control over the notification pipeline in-house.

Notifications are sent over TLS and each one is intentionally minimal, exposing nothing more than the fact that something has been updated in the Tuta app.

Some of the issues with push notifications are explained in more detail in this article from the EFF.

There have already been countless real-world examples of push notification exploits that have affected between hundreds of thousands and millions of people (that we know of), but the one that made mainstream news most recently was the FBI iOS Signal Exploit.

In retrospect, the decision Tuta made back in 2017/2018 feels less like a minor optimisation and more like a design choice that anticipated how things would unfold in the future.

Another feature I've not seen from any other email provider is Full Contact Integration being fully built into the same service that you receive your emails and calendar alerts on, but that's exactly what Tuta added in 2024.

It's a great feature but particularly if you run GrapheneOS or another De-Googled OS on your phone, as it completely removes the need for additional services like DAVx⁵ to sync your CardDAV / CalDAV.

Again, this may seem like a minor feature to some, but we now have a single app for Tuta Mail.

That single app manages email, contacts and calendars. Secures and encrypts everything that can be encrypted and keeps it synced in real time without the need for any Google services whatsoever.

There is actually a dedicated Tuta Calendar app for power users of calendars, but I find accessing the calendar via the Mail app more than sufficient for my needs.

Tuta's long-awaited; zero-knowledge, end-to-end encrypted Drive is currently in closed beta and due to be released as pubic beta soon I think.

I've been using Tuta Mail, calendar and contacts sync on GrapheneOS, multiple Linux distros and web browsers for around four years and it's been great, it's just as simple as any other email provider but with the added benefit of not having to use two additional apps for contacts and calendar.

If you're interested in how Tuta works under the hood, Tuta’s breakdown of their tech stack and encryption model are both worth a read.

Their blog is also a good read in general as it's more of a tech news, privacy and security blog than just occasional posts about Tuta, it's updated regularly with various interesting content. https://tuta.com/blog.

Rest assured, this is not sponsored content. I have no influence, no audience and no agenda. I made this blog yesterday and haven’t used social media for over a decade.

My Saturday afternoon was spent thinking about key derivation functions, push notification architecture, and hardening a fresh Fedora install.

How to stand against high temperatures

2026-06-25T20:04:00+00:00

I've been reading about the heatwave in Europe and I'd like to point out some things we do in warmer countries to keep everything livable without relying on a/c. I posted about this once on cohost [RIP] and it got a bit popular, so I think it can help some people out there if I post it again. For context, I'm from a Brazilian city where it's 30ºC almost year-round, day and night (except in winter, when it drops below 10ºC for a few weeks), but I've lived in Europe for 8 years and dealt with the heatwaves there, including some that got to the 40ºC range.

So, here are the tips:

Cover your windows during the day. From the outside, preferably. Don't let the sun hit the glass and then hit inside, or it will turn your home into an oven. Windows in the shade, facing away from the sun, can even be left open to create an air flow if the wind outside is not warm.
Open your windows at night, when the temperature drops. This also brings fresh air inside.
If it's too hot, put a cold compress (or a towel draped around ice cubes) on your head or the back of your neck. The insides of your wrists are a good place too.
Take frequent showers (there's a reason, beyond extreme good hygiene, why Brazilians take multiple showers a day) to lower your body temperature, and let your body dry naturally (or sit in front of a fan). I know the water in Europe generally has a lot of sediments that can cause dry skin, but there are filters easy to install for that.
Use fans to create air currents in enclosed spaces. If you're sweating a lot, point it to you to help evaporate the sweat and lower your body temperature.
If it's too humid, sweat will not evaporate and your body will not cool down, so dry yourself frequently in whatever way you can. If you're in an enclosed space without natural air flow, a dehumidifier turned on can go a long way. A fan can help too, as long as you stay in front of it.
STAY OUT OF THE SUN.¹ Even if you're in a cold body of water, stay out of the sun. If you're in an open field, use an umbrella to create a shade for yourself (some even are UV-graded).
Always wear sunscreen when going outside. This will not only protect your skin, but it also reflects a bit of the heat away instead of letting your skin absorb it. And apply it to every exposed body part, not only to your face. And yes, that includes your hands.
Drink cool beverages in the shade. Avoid alcohol (at least, avoid drinking too much of it).
Drink water. Always.
Wear clothes made of natural fibers, as they have better airflow and let your skin "breathe". They usually are better at reflecting heat, and can also absorb sweat, which is good.
If you absolutely need (or want) to go outside, don't do it while the sun is overhead, wait until it's down a bit. The time will change with your latitude, but weather apps usually have the UV index for different hours of the day, and the lower it is, the better.

When it's hot like this, the sun is your worst enemy, so standing in open fields or places will not help in any way unless you're in the shade and drinking water. Meanwhile, your home, having thermal insulation (something common in a lot of buildings in Europe), is a great place to be as long you can avoid letting the sun heat it up. Glass windows without any cover are your worst enemies when staying inside. Remember: thermal insulation works both ways, so it keeps the home warm during winter, and it can keep it cool during summer. Take advantage of that.

Seriously, I saw so many Northern Europeans in Portugal staying in the sun until they were lobster-red and acting as if it was normal that it freaked me out a bit. My skin gets darker when I stay in the sun and I still try to avoid it, but there we had these milky-white people going around with most of their bodies exposed trying to get free cancer without any care in the world.↩

Please don't use an LLM to communicate with other human beings.

2026-06-25T20:00:00+00:00

Please don't use an LLM to communicate with other human beings.

I keep seeing people drafting documents, messages, and emails with some LLM, and it makes me sick. I experimented myself with the writing capabilities of the agents, and every time I felt something was missing from the text... I was missing.

Communication is a fundamental skill, no matter the work you do! Being able to articulate your thoughts and deliver them in a way that is understandable by your audience has an impact in every aspect of your life. Stop delegating it to a machine. Put in the effort, for God sake.

I understand that your wording won't be perfect, there will be typos and maybe some errors in the grammar: that is totally fine. I don't care. No one cares. I prefer an "imperfect" (whatever that means) writing with your own style to a flawless but aseptic, soulless, and always-sounding-the-same piece of text.

Let me feel you in your message.

What I Learned About Relationships After Being With My Wife For 8 Years

2026-06-25T14:25:00+00:00

Today marks the day Mrs. Pirate and I have been married for 4 years, and have been a couple for 8. In that time, I've learned SO damn much about what it means to love and be loved. I've learned what an effective partnership is, and how to keep said relationship growing. So, I'd like to share some of that.

For start, don't chase the "honeymoon phase". You're not gonna feel the way you did when you first started dating your partner. At the start, everything is new and exciting, and you're probably hot and heavy for one another. That's going to naturally fade away over time as you fall into familiarity and routine. Love is companionship, being happy in that person's presence. Love doesn't always look like 2 people jumping each other's bones all the time, it more often than not looks like 2 people sitting on a couch watching TV and holding each other's hand. Love is about being content with living a pretty boring life with that person.

Get in with a couples counselor early when you start being really serious. I'd say a good time to consider this would be after you and your partner start living together. Mrs. Pirate and I started doing couples counseling right around the time we moved in together, and it was probably one of the smartest things we did. Therapy helped us iron out kinks before they became actual problems. There's kinda a stigma around this, you tell people you're going to couples counseling and they think your relationship is over. It only becomes an issue when you go to counseling when it's already too late. There's nothing wrong with building strong foundations.

Values are more important than personalities. My wife and I are borderline polar opposites when it comes to interests and personality. Mrs. Pirate and I are the living example of "opposites attract". She's the collected organized type, and I'm the spontaneous energetic type. You should always have SOMETHING you both enjoy doing together, but at the end of the day what matters is where you are aligned in terms of core values. Helping others, how you want to raise your children (if you plan on having any), approaches to house management, etc. You can have all the same interests you want, but if one person thinks spanking your kid is okay and the other hates the thought of it, you're gonna run into a lot of issues.

Attraction transcends looks. As Mrs. Pirate and I have gotten older, we went from fit teens to having mom/dad bods and I'm sure that as we get older our looks will fade. That's just what happens. However, attraction and love transcends looks. I know old couples who still think their person is the sexiest person they've ever laid eyes on. When you're attracted to someone, like truly attracted to them, they're beautiful regardless of age and superficialities. If you can't imagine loving that person when they're 89, wrinkly, and flabby, you don't love them enough.

When you're committed to each other, all money is "our" money. When you start living together and are formed in a long-term partnership. Combining finances is a pretty good idea. It stops a lot of fights because it stops becoming "your money vs. my money" and more "this is our money". This becomes critical if one side, for one reason or another, takes up most of the domestic labor. I work full time and Mrs. Pirate is a housewife. My labor is financially compensated, but hers isn't. There has to be that manageable balance. So finances become a joint operation, rather than a yours vs. mine. We've negated so many fights that my parents had (who did separate their finances).

Sometimes their needs come before your comfort. I've held Mrs. Pirate's hair as she threw up into a bowl repeatedly post hip surgery. She's gone out to the store and cooked me comfort food when I'm sick. In sickness and in health and all that. You're there to support each other, and when they're at their worst, you step up for them.

If you're not in a relationship with your best friend, you're in the wrong relationship. Your partner should be your best friend, they're the person who catches you when you fall. They're the person who builds you up and keeps you grounded. I always found it annoying when people say they don't wanna date their best friend because it'll ruin the friendship, but if you're not married to your best friend then who the hell did you marry?

For the love of god, talk to each other. Communication is key and a lot of couples are really fucking bad at it. Most problems stem from people not saying what they need. My wife has learned that I am damn near incapable of taking a hint, so if she needs something or have something done a certain way she has to tell me. Once we got that figured out, the fights in that realm stopped... for the most part. She still gets annoyed at how oblivious I can be sometimes. Sometimes you just wish the other person could read your mind.

Things get a lot easier when you get along with each others in-laws. There's a stereotype of the in-laws that hate each other. It happens often. Shit happens, and sometimes one side just doesn't have a good relationship with their parents. But life is a lot easier when you get along with your partners parents, and vice versa (within reason). You don't have to be best friends with them, but having a positive relationship with them makes life a lot less stressful.

Things change when kids enter the picture. One of the things that separates a relationship from one that will go the distance from one that doesn't is how the couple operates after a kid enters the picture. Mrs. Pirate and I's marriage and partnership only got stronger after our daughter came into our lives. When a child enters your lives, there's gonna be a lot of chaos initially. This is where the foundation comes in and where partnership becomes crucial. When my daughter was born, I would spend hours figuring out proper breastfeeding positioning because it was causing my wife a lot of pain initially, and we figured it out. My daughter slept with Mrs. Pirate a lot the first year or so, and when nights got hard and she got restless I busted out the guitar and played until she settled down. When I was getting into an overstimulated meltdown Mrs. Pirate came to my rescue. We supported each other when things got hard, and that's what mattered most.

Anyway, it's been a long adventure with Mrs. Pirate. We started dating when we were both teenagers. We're not kids anymore, we're not the same people we were 8 years ago. Through that though, our relationship has only gotten stronger. We've gotten through long-distance, her parents' divorce, death of loved ones, arguments, having a child, and more. We've gone through a lot together, and have always come out on top. I'm grateful for her, and look forward to the rest of our lives together.

If you're reading this, honey, I love you. You are my favorite person. Happy anniversary.

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Reply via email: me@absurdpirate.com

Thoughts on the heatwave

2026-06-25T10:39:53.108705+00:00

It's day 2 of the UK heatwave and I have a few issues on my mind that I need to discuss. In the run up to this I was monitoring the discourse online about it because I am a masochist who wants to combat climate change disinformation. So against my better judgement I started actually reading social media comments. I'm not sure if I have recovered from the psychic damage I took from this but I think there are a few issues to point out.

First up are the usual comments I have seen on the various posts from the met office, BBC and whatever other semi reliable news outlets have been posting warnings to the public. The most common seemed to be the "1976 summer heatwave which was much worse so whats all the fuss about?", next was "its just summer so calm down" and finally the more conspiratorial responses about net zero being a scam or HAARP or fearmongering about green energy. I dunno man things got weird the further I looked.

I could spend an entire post about how these are all just wrong in soooo many ways but I don't have time to debunk outlandish claims like this. These are past the point of logical explanations. I do want to address the fact that the mainstream media has probably not done itself any favours by pushing this story in its usual sensationalist style. I know there is a need for the deep reds to accurately convey the seriousness of the heat impacting the country. I also feel that it has the opposite effect with climate change deniers. It furthers their beliefs because it comes across as sensationalist which when combined with the general practice of the mainstream media doesn't help drive the point home. It's actually really difficult to express this opinion in a way that is measured and unbiased so I hope the previous bit made sense.

Second, climate deniers won't believe any data they see so trying to get the point across with a visual graphic won't really help. Ideally the ones who are on the fence will feel the actual temperatures and maybe come to their senses but the more extreme denialists most likely won't. So here we are in a situation where a serious news story can't be reported on with the seriousness it deserves because it comes across as an over reaction.

I want to say this is a vocal minority but I recently started cross posting my stuff to substack, sorry indie web, as a way to maybe put more positive discourse towards the issues I care about. A quick aside but substack is not great and is very social media like. However I have spotted some serious grifters operating in the space and they have a big following. One example is this doctor/professor of earth science who claims to be in exile, because of course they are. He recently posted that and I quote " Europe is supposedly warming faster than any other continent. Maybe that's true. But does anyone else find it odd that the region with the highest concentration of climate activists, climate policies, climate conferences, climate taxes, and climate emergency declarations is also the place allegedly warming the fastest?". This post has over 500 likes with 69 comments of equal lunacy.

I guess my overall point here is that our modern media landscape is unable to properly convey the nuance of climate change to people. There is also very little trust in these news outlets as well as the scientific bodies that produce the knowledge on these issues. The only way for those who don't believe is to feel the actual effects of the climate changing and by then it will be too late.

I was thinking about this yesterday while walking outside and like most things it made a lot more sense in my head. I'm still practicing getting more complex ideas across via the written word so I do truly hope that I have managed it here

I <3 Little Free Libraries

2026-06-24T05:16:00+00:00

I am so grateful to live in a neighborhood that has a Little Free Library every few blocks, if not more. There are so many in my area, in fact, that I am postponing shepherding my own until I live somewhere that needs another.

Not only is there an abundance of these cute little book homes, but the turnover is rapid. I usually check a few particularly close ones every day on my walks, and I always see something new, or the absence of something old.

I am happy to be surrounded by such literary neighbors and I hope that this movement continues to spread.

Check out the Little Free Library map to see if you have any in your area! If not, consider starting your own if you have the means to.

we don't need facebook

2026-06-24T19:52:15.826689+00:00

we don't need facebook. we netizens were doing just fine without it for years.

we have indie web creators who build their own forums, chatrooms, and blogging platforms. not for monetary gain, but for connection, just like why the old forums and blogs were built. we still have them, and we still use them on the daily. we don't need facebook.

we have neocities, nekoweb, and bear blog for anyone who wants to build a website. personal pages were everything back in the day, and they still are now. more people are getting into personal website design than ever before. we don't need facebook.

facebook has single-handedly ruined the big web. the centralization of all web traffic onto 3 or 5 platforms became the norm, and more and more people are getting sick of it and jumping ship. you need only look at bear blog to know what i mean. we don't need facebook.

we just don't. never did.

I made an HTML quiz maker!

2026-06-25T19:15:00+00:00

Heya!

So, James recently made a blogpost opensourcing the python script he used to generate his various personality quizzes! (Blogger Archetype quiz, what microformat are you, etc.)

At the end of the post, he says this:

And if you feel inspired to make a better generator that gives someone HTML they can use on their own site (rather than being an embedded service), please bring the idea to life.

And, yeah, I did feel pretty inspired!
I had actually wanted to make a personality quiz like the ones James did for a while myself, ever since he published the first one. At the time his blogpost came out though, I didn't have access to my laptop, or any other computer I could run the script on. So, I really wanted a quiz generator website at the time as well.

Long story short, that's what I made. You can go and check out the quiz maker over here.

Had a look at it? Great!
Alrighty, time to talk about it for a bit.
So, I actually ended up using alpineJs for this project, which is a bit unusual for me because I'm not the biggest fan of javascript. In this case however, it was pretty much a perfect fit.

James quiz generator works by taking a bunch of JSON and then using that to generate the script. And alpine JS with its x-data directive is pretty dang good at creating a responsive UI from JSON. I can just do whatever operations I want on the big stupid JSON object that James' quiz script needs anyways, and it'll just work™ and update the UI correctly without me really needing to care much about state or whatever. It is so nice.

I didn't exactly write amazing alpine code or anything, due to it being my first time using the framework, but even then, the speed at which i could get this done was so, so much faster than if i just did all this stuff by hand - and like a billion times faster than if i used something like react.

Anyways, there's not much here left to say. I might go a bit more in-depth into the code behind this in another blogpost, but in all honesty, parts of it are fairly clunky due to this being the first thing I've actually made in alpine. Still, it works, and it works well, so that's nice. I could also explain how to use the quiz maker, but I feel like that's fairly intuitive. Go and mess around with it for a bit, have some fun. If you wanna copy the code for your finished quiz, go click the "Show code" button in the corner. Also everything auto-saves, so you don't have to worry about accidentally refreshing.

So, that's it for now! I might make another blogpost about this at some point, but for now, have fun! Go forth and make some quizzes. Also, again, thank you to James for taking care of most of the CSS for me. It looks really good.

Cya next post!

I Have Small Boobs — No, My Boyfriend Is Not a Pedophile.

2026-06-24T12:30:00+00:00

I believe most people who are somewhat interested in fashion and beauty are aware that being thin is making a comeback, but of course it never really went out of style. And if you've noticed the trend, you've probably also noticed the flood of content reacting to it, most of it worried. I've watched my share of videos warning that "thinspo" and "heroin chic" are back, and we've even coined a name for the latest version of the look: the "Ozempic face".

This post today is not about making a similar observation. Rather it is about acknowledging that there is content out there that, while it is supposed to serve as a tool against unachievable female beauty standards and 'the male gaze', in reality perpetuates them because it highlights precisely what it tries to reject.

I saw a video titled approximately as follows: "Female beauty standards that are rooted in pedophilia". It listed off some specific qualities that I myself would agree stem from the perspective that for women to be beautiful, or perhaps better said desirable, they should portray the image of youth. Women are more desirable when they are naive, hairless, small, petite - childlike. While I would tend to agree that some of these features are narrowly associated with a 'childlike' being, what this video however also mentioned was having a lack of curves.

As a woman with a smaller than average chest (#ittybittytittycommittee), I have been made aware of this my entire life. I have been called flat, a pancake, or a board. And while not all of the comments were with malicious intent, they were always frivolous and comedic. Normality is sacred, abnormality disdained. And perceiving my abnormality, I internalised what all the comments seemed to allude to: a real woman is supposed to have breasts.

So when this video appeared, it echoed what all the comments from before had told me. What it is trying to say is: don't curate your appearance around harmful beauty standards. Instead it tells me that if someone is interested in me, the only truly sensible explanation for this is that that person must be a pedophile. Diversity of beauty is preached, yet when diverse beauty is appreciated we rationalise and justify it.

I have small boobs,
I am not a child,
I am a woman,
and my boyfriend is definitely not a pedophile.

My First Month on Bearblog (Obligatory New Blogger Post)

2026-06-24T06:47:00+00:00

It's been more than a month on Bear for me now, and I've been having a very good time actually. As many people do here, I want to reflect on my first month here, since it's my first time ever blogging. When I was younger, I always wanted to start a Youtube channel, and I made a few but never really stuck with it. Making videos is just hard. I also used to stream on Twitch for a while, playing Guitar Hero and speedrunning Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. That was also fun for a short while (I also had a WR in a single THPS mission for a few hours, which was beat immediately). But I wasn't really a person that goes out of their way to talk to strangers online, so it didn't stick with me. Writing on the internet was something I never considered for myself and I am really glad that I found bearblog to get started.

When I started this blog I was really inspired by other Warhammer blogs like Plastic Craic. I always felt like I had a great time getting people into the hobby and thought maybe I can use this as a way to share my knowledge about this whole hobby and maybe demystify it for some people. Warhammer and tabletop wargaming is really hard to get into in general, and Games Workshop (which is basically has the tabletop wargaming monopoly) doesn't seem to do much about this for some reason. The on-ramp seems to be difficult and expensive, but it actually doesn't need to be if you just want to roll some dice and shove some toy soldiers around with your friends.

This lead me to writing my first post about running your first mordheim campaign, since there really wasn't any content on this topic anywhere. Most people playing Mordheim want to play in a campaign, but just like in Tabletop RPGs: No one wants to run the game/campaign. I have run at least 2 wargaming campaigns and had some insights for people, who might be a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of doing this. I posted this post on the Mordheim Subreddit, and people seemed to like it. Lot's of people visited the post and I was pretty happy about putting something out there that might have helped someone.

This "success" kind of led me to believe that I really want to blog about this wargaming niche here, and try to help people get into Mordheim and other smaller games. Also to talk about other more meta things like running leagues and campaigns. But this feeling of needing to write "helpful" posts all the time really got to me. I only have been doing this for two weeks and already was a little stressed about what kind of good posts I could write here. The analytics page also didn't really help my feelings about this, since I really do check it way more than I want to admit. I tried hiding the link and using Sylvia's CSS hacks to hide the metrics, but I am a very persistent person when it comes to these blockers. Needing to go to the settings and deleting that section from the dashboard CSS is not enough of a deterrent to get me to not look at the numbers which give me happy chemicals.

I wrote another post about how to get into Mordheim with some one box starter warbands, and that also did really well on Reddit. That also was the last time I tried to write some sort of guide here. Helping people is really important to me, but it was a bit exhausting to come up with that helpful content. I think I am just better at it, when I talk to people in real life, than writing some post for the every-person online.

Which is when I started just writing about whatever is on my mind and what projects I am working on at the moment. This felt way more like writing from my heart, instead of forcing myself to create something insightful. It really stopped me from stressing out about this whole thing and led me back to what people actually do here: write about their weird lives and their weird hobbies and their weird projects, (hopefully) without a care if anyone really reads it.

This makes bear a really cool place to find all sorts of articles. I love going through the newest posts and seeing all this humanity in this world full of AI slop¹. Seeing all this stuff, that isn't curated to me as a person makes me see a lot of things in this world, that I might have never discovered. I mean Bear still attracts a certain kind of person, so the people here are at least a little like-minded. Also the people here are very kind. I only had a few email exchanges coming from here, but they were always with cool and kind people.

I am still really surprised that this blogging thing stuck with me for about 6 weeks now and I don't see myself stopping soon, unless something drastic happens to me. Never thought that writing is a form of expression that I really enjoy.

Thanks for reading my silly thoughts on starting this silly blog with a silly goblin on the homepage.

"AI bad" mentioned. Instant Bear trending post lmao↩

the industry of hopelessness is not working anymore

2026-06-24T12:30:00+00:00

THANK YOU NEW YORK VOTERS FOR SEEING THROUGH THE GASLIGHTING

“VOTING YOUR CONSCIENCE IS UNREALISTIC” SAYS THE DEMOCRAT WHO JUST LOST

“THE WORD SOCIALISM SCARES THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS” SAYS THE REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT POLITICIAN WHO'S ACTUALLY THE ONE WHO'S SCARED OF SOCIALISM

“YOU AND I MIGHT LIKE SOCIALISM BUT JOE BLOW DOWN THE STREET WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND” SAYS THE ESTABLISHMENT DEMOCRAT OR BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA PERSONALITY WHO ONLY GOT RICH OR POWERFUL BY MANUFACTURING HOPELESSNESS IN OTHERS

“THE GREATEST THREAT TO LIFE ON EARTH IS IRAN, LEBANON, AND PALESTINE” SAYS THE POLITICIAN WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS WHO FEELS THAT LAWS GOVERNING THE USE OF FORCE DON’T APPLY TO THEM

“SOCIALISM WILL CRASH THE ECONOMY”SAYS THE POLITICIAN WHO INVESTS YOUR MONEY IN A TANKING FOREIGN GOVERNMENT THAT COMMITS LITERAL GENOCIDE INSTEAD OF INVESTING IT IN SOCIAL PROGRAMS THAT HELP PEOPLE

THANK YOU NEW YORK FOR SHOWING THAT BILLIONAIRE-BACKED GENOCIDE CANDIDATES ARE NOT OUR ONLY OPTION

THE INDUSTRY OF HOPELESSNESS IS NOT WORKING ANYMORE

My Neighbour tells me I am Crazy!

2026-06-23T18:22:00+00:00

She may well be correct, but let's have some context.

I live on the outskirts of a small village, which has one road in. There's no out unless you want to drive into the sea, so you turn around and come back the way you came to leave the village.

My house is off this road, and my driveway is just over 500 feet (155 metres) long. At the end of this are two houses -- my own and an elderly couple.

Bin day is a Tuesday morning. I trundle the wheelie-bins down on a Monday evening; they are emptied around 8am Tuesday; I bring them back some time mid-morning depending on what I am doing.

Occasionally our elderly neighbour wanders down and collects them. I prefer to do it, but she likes to do her bit.

Scene set, and now to this morning.

She beat me to it

While I was still faffing around in the morning, she did the deed and brought the bins in. I immediately sent her a text message proclaiming that was my job. She messaged back, "haha, beat you to it".

I showered, dressed, and decided I would continue the japery.

I sent her the following message:

Dear Mrs xxxx

We regret to inform you that we are terminating your probationary period at The Bin Collectors Association.

As you will appreciate, we aim to maintain a high standard of service.

In reviewing your recent work, we noticed that there was wilful disregard to deliver the standards we expect. This included clear evidence of abandonment and reckless disregard for the rules of placement. An image of your work is attached for reference. (Photo of her bin at and angle, and not quite back in its usual place).

We thank you for your efforts to date, however, it is felt that your skills are better utilised elsewhere.

We wish you well in your future endeavours.

Kind regards
The Bin Collectors Association.

Her response

You're crazy. I love it. That made me laugh out loud.

It's good to have a laugh and not be too serious about life.

Related Posts: Apparently I am Mad!

A short pause

2026-06-23T16:43:00+00:00

One thing people won't accuse me of is talking too fast.

I think "too long" and talk "too slow". I get interrupted all the time, and I always feel that there's not enough time to finish my thoughts and sentences.

No one has ever told me that I think too long or talk too slow, but I can see it in their eyes and body language. They've got one foot in the future.

One thing people sometimes say, though, is that I'm good at telling stories. I've never understood why. I mean, I just tell it like it happened. Where's the magic in that?

Then again, maybe it's the slow pace that makes it special. A pause, a moment for the listener to envision what's being told.

Not a great strategy if you're an auctioneer or telemarketer, but in storytelling the nothing can be the everything.

Maybe our hasty society sometimes needs a short pause.

A moment of silence cutting through all the noise.

The Age of Faith

2026-06-23T08:53:00+00:00

We are exiting the age of reason and reentering the age of faith.

In 1651, in the aftermath of a century of religious war, Thomas Hobbes set out to end the age of faith. Leviathan would swap the quarrelsome authority of priests and prophets for a single secular sovereign. It did this by recasting the human being as a piece of machinery. Man became matter in motion. The commonwealth became an artificial man, and sovereignty its artificial soul. Hobbes stands at the dawn of the disenchanted West, the world we have inhabited for roughly two and a half centuries.

The wheel he set turning has nearly closed its arc. Some call it the Age of Reason, and some call it the industrial age. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin named it the Sensate age. By any title, it is exhausting itself, and on every front at once. And the clearest signature of that exhaustion is the return of faith. By faith I mean something broad. The return of the transcendent, if you will. A search for meaning that runs straight past material progress. And the slow reenchantment of a world that three centuries of science and commerce had so carefully drained of it.

The dominant story of the modern West runs in a straight line. Auguste Comte gave that line its cleanest form in his law of three stages: humanity hauls itself up out of the theological, works through the metaphysical, and lands in the positive or scientific stage, where Comte expects it to remain for good. Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now is the same line again, only redrawn with the data of our own moment.

Against it stands an older and stranger tradition that sees history as a tide. Giambattista Vico described a corso e ricorso, a recurrence through the ages of gods, heroes, and men that ends in collapse and a return to the divine. Oswald Spengler gave the pattern its seasons and gave us the term for our moment: the Second Religiousness, the resurgence of faith in the winter of a civilization, after its money-driven megalopolis has burned through its vitality.

Sorokin made the cleanest case of all. Cultures, he argued, swing between the Ideational, which draws its truth from revelation, and the Sensate, which draws its truth from the senses; and the late Sensate phase decays into materialism and sensation-seeking before the pendulum swings home. We are, on his reckoning, very late in a Sensate age, and the evidence is now visible in the very places the modern world was proudest of.

First, the economy. The industrial revolution had its heroic builders, men like Ford, who put a nation on wheels, and Rockefeller, who consolidated an industry and then turned to founding institutions; whatever else one says of them, they made things. The energy of that age has since thickened into something more extractive, a genius for capturing rent in place of a genius for making the new. Joseph Schumpeter named the mechanism in 1942, predicting that capitalism would be undone by its own success as the entrepreneurial spark routinized into bureaucracy and the cold, calculating spirit of the system dissolved the loyalties of faith, family, and nation that had once sustained it. Max Weber had already supplied the governing image. The Protestant faith built capitalism; capitalism then outlived its faith and hardened into what he called the iron cage, a machine that runs without belief and offers none.

The same shape shows in our technology, though we are trained to see only acceleration. Robert Gordon's history is more sobering than the marketing. The century from 1870 to 1970 was a special century, he argues, the age of electricity and the internal combustion engine, of running water and sanitation, the telephone and antibiotics, a transformation in the texture of daily life that is unlikely ever to repeat. What has come since clusters in the narrow channel of information and entertainment, and Gordon's provocation, hard to unthink once stated, is that indoor plumbing changed human life more than the smartphone.

We went from silence to telephony, and then from Netflix to TikTok; the marvels keep arriving and keep mattering less. The culture that consumes them shows the classic late-Sensate symptom, a falling return on stimulation, more screens and images and sensation answered by a population that reports itself more exhausted and less nourished than before.

The most telling exhaustion is in science itself, which was the cathedral the modern world raised in place of the old one. At the frontier, the cathedral is cracking. Pharmaceutical research labors under its own grim law, sometimes called Eroom's Law, Moore's Law spelled backward, by which the number of new drugs per dollar of research fell by half roughly every nine years for decades, so that we must run ever harder simply to stand still. (In honesty, mRNA vaccines, the GLP-1 drugs, and AlphaFold suggest that law may now be bending the other way, and an essay worth reading should say so.)

Fundamental physics tells a stranger story. Its grandest theory, string theory, has held the field for two generations while producing not a single prediction that anyone can test, and critics from inside the discipline, Sabine Hossenfelder among them, describe a physics that has begun to prize mathematical beauty above the discipline of evidence. Here is the irony that gives this essay its title. When physics cannot test its highest theories, some of its theorists have proposed loosening the requirement of testability itself, Karl Popper's falsifiability, the very rule meant to divide science from faith. At its furthest edge, science drifts back toward the thing it was built to replace.

Two of the modern world's sharpest minds foresaw this. Kant, marking the boundary of what reason could ever accomplish, wrote that he had found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. And Nietzsche, usually misremembered as faith's executioner, understood that the executioner was himself a believer. The will to truth that drives the scientist, he argued, is the last and most refined form of the ascetic ideal: it is still a metaphysical faith, he wrote, upon which our faith in science rests. Even the godless anti-metaphysicians take their fire from a flame lit thousands of years ago by the conviction that truth is divine. Science was always a faith. Only now, as its frontier runs short of testable ground, is the faith becoming visible again.

When a civilization's central faith fails, the space it held does not stay empty. Nietzsche understood this as well; his madman runs into the marketplace crying that God is dead and that we are his murderers, and the announcement lands as a wound whose consequences are still in the post. The twentieth century spent that inheritance, and what returns now, in the aftermath of the spending, is the old hunger in new dress. Charles Taylor described our secular age as a condition in which belief has become one option among many, where the closed and disenchanted frame keeps generating its own counter-pressures and a nova of new spiritual options blooms in the vacuum. There are early signs of such a turn among the young, a sense across the culture that the long tide of unbelief has reached its high-water mark. The strangest of the new options grows from the very technology that was supposed to have buried God: the dream of artificial general intelligence has taken on the shape of an eschatology, with its coming superhuman power, its day of judgment, its hope of salvation and its answering dread. The movements gathered around existential risk and the far future speak, when you listen closely, a theological grammar of sin and salvation, prophecy and election.

The honest objection to all of this is severe, and it is better to raise it oneself. Karl Popper, whose falsifiability the physicists would now abandon, spent a whole book, The Poverty of Historicism, arguing that precisely these grand cyclical schemes, the Spenglers and Toynbees and Sorokins, amount to unfalsifiable narrative: patterns the mind presses onto the past and then mistakes for law. He was largely right. And here the argument folds back on itself in a way at once uncomfortable and clarifying. The forecast of a coming age of faith is about as testable as the forecast of a multiverse, and the tide-theory of history shares string theory's vice. To predict the return of the sacred is itself an act close to faith.

Set the machinery of cycles aside, and a more modest claim survives that needs no philosophy of history to stand: the progress narrative, the story that material and scientific advance is the engine of human meaning, is loosening its grip after two and a half centuries. Denied transcendence through progress, people look for it elsewhere, and they are looking now. Whether the right name for what they find is faith, or re-enchantment, or simply the return of the sacred, the long arrow of the modern age is bending back into a circle. Lecturing in 1917 on science as a vocation, Weber would not say what lay on the far side of disenchantment; he would only wonder whether new prophets awaited us, or some great rebirth of old ideas.

A century on, his question is still open, and it has stopped sounding rhetorical. Somewhere within it, Hobbes's great machine, the artificial man with its artificial soul, is finally and audibly running down.

Uh Oh, Steam Frame?

2026-06-23T02:18:00+00:00

With the price of the Steam Machine now known to the world (ouch!), I can’t help but feel sad about the inevitable price of the Steam Frame which I was really looking forward to. However, it does put into perspective that refurbished laptop I was eyeing...

Do we still think about other people?

2026-06-23T01:19:00+00:00

A couple of weeks ago there was a conversation at my book club that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

We had just read 'Yellowface' by R. F. Kuang, which follows the story of a middling author who takes her dead friend's unpublished manuscript about Chinese labourers and publishes it, passing the work off as her own. At each book club we discuss the book for an hour or two and then we go around the circle and give the book a rating out of five. This time someone came up with the idea that along with giving our rating we should share whether or not we would've stolen and published the manuscript.

I was a 'hell no' for touching that manuscript. As someone who journals and whose worst nightmare is someone reading said journal, I couldn't shake the idea of it being a lot like doing that to someone else. It also just felt wrong. The idea of taking someone else's work and taking the credit for it didn't sit right with me.

A lot of answers from the group were along the lines of: "I'd be too worried someone would find out" or "it'd make me too anxious/paranoid".

I couldn't stop thinking about how all these answers focused on the way the perpetrator would feel - their anxiety or their worries, not the feelings of the person they did that to or whether it was the right thing to do.

The difference in approaches to this question really amazed me, and it made me wonder if we still think about other people these days?

It reminded me of a lot of internet discourse I've seen over the last year or two about how people want community in the way it existed 20 years ago or how community just doesn't exist anymore. It also reminded me of a very individualist mindset I've seen popularised online by sayings like "you don't owe anyone anyhing".

I don't agree with any of it.

I think community does still exist, but people aren't willing to make the sacrifices having it requires. Community isn't always convenient. In fact I think a big part of it is inconvenience - you have to be willing to consider others before yourself and do things that benefit the community even if they aren't convenient for you. I think in a world where modern technology has made everything convenient (e.g. online shopping, food delivery, streaming services, instant messaging across a variety of platforms) people aren't as willing to be inconvenienced anymore.

I also think that we do owe people something. I think we owe the people around us (even, or especially, strangers) a certain level of kindness and respect. Otherwise we all just have free rein to be shitty people.

The conversation at book club made me wonder if modern convenience, the rise of social platforms and the technology we have today is making us more individualistic. Are we thinking of ourselves more? Do we still consider other people? Has the amount of time we spent on our phones changed the way we think?

I grew up in a family where we were taught to treat others the way we wished to be treated. I also grew up with parents who, throughout my entire life, have volunteered in numerous community groups - giving up weekends to help run markets or joining the volunteer fire brigade to protect the homes of others during bushfire seasons or scoring community sports games.

I now think I'm incredibly lucky for this because I think this upbringing and the example they set has shaped my entire outlook on life and community.

I'm not saying that the answers given at book club were wrong, or that the people are selfish. I don't think that at all. I'm just fascinated by the different ways we think and I'm more curious than ever about whether there really is a link between our use of technology/rise of convenience and the way we think (or don't think) about others.

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about lately.

Friends Pay Full Price

2026-06-22T14:44:05.690571+00:00

A few friends of mine operate their own business. Whenever I can, I will support their establishment. All the time, I insist on paying the full ticket price. I do not demand any discounted price or deals. My philosophy is to support my friend's business; therefore, I pay full price and don't bargain. Most of the time, I ended up with deals better than market value.

To support a friend's business, we should pay the full ticket price and not ask for the best deals. They already getting squeezed by competitors and other clients. By paying full value, it helps their business to go a long way. Many times, the business owner will reciprocate with values that are higher than what we paid.

Summer is here and so is my new theme

2026-06-22T13:43:00+00:00

Yesterday marked the official start of summer. With that, I decided to refresh the look around here a bit. Went very clean this time. Especially considering my previous wacky pomo design. I love maximalism, but it’s time to reset.

Speaking of that previous theme.. it seemed to be a huge hit within the bearblog ecosystem. It immediately became one of my most popular posts and views skyrocketed when I launched it. Others apparently enjoyed the silliness of it as much as me. I even got a couple emails from some very nice folks complimenting the aesthetic.

That’s why I’m going to offer up the CSS code to anyone who wants to use it or tinker with elements to craft their own wacky pomo theme.

I want to take some screen shots and put it together in a more pleasing manner, which I simply can’t do right now. I’m writing this post from my phone. So, I will package it up in some way the next chance I get and make it available to all.

Until then… hej då!

Why blog?

2026-06-26T17:50:00+00:00

I had an interesting interaction these days.

While I was in class waiting for it to start, I opened Bearblog (the class happens in the “computer room”), and the girl who sits by my side asked what I was looking.

I told her it was a blog, and she was excited because she used to have one back in school but did not remember the name or login. I told her how I had a blog and posted in english and she was surprised.

She started to ask many questions, what platform I used, if I knew how many people read my blog and things like that.

But then she asked, “Can you earn money with a blog?”

I was surprised and kinda sad. Blogging is a hobby, why would I want to monetize it?

I remembered this image:

Original TikTok

It’s kinda sad that nowadays everything you do, even your hobbies, has to earn you something.

This is my first blog (and who knows? Maybe I’ll use it forever?) and I never wrote here for anything other than my own enjoyment.

I said to her I didn’t know, but probably yes on another platform, and the conversation died there.

I put the title as “Why blog?” so I’ll answer: to have fun!

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Friends Pay Full Price

Summer is here and so is my new theme

Why blog?