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we stopped being bored

2026-09-28T07:28:08.639090+00:00

I caught myself reaching for my phone while waiting for the microwave the other day.

There were maybe forty seconds left.

Apparently, this was too long.

I didn't even have anything to check. No message I was waiting for, nothing I particularly wanted to look up. I just unlocked my phone and opened something because there was a small, unoccupied space in my day and I had developed the reflex to fill it.

I started noticing how often I do this.

Waiting for food. Standing in line. Sitting in the car while someone runs inside somewhere. Waiting for a game to load. Even watching a movie sometimes, which feels particularly ridiculous because I am already doing the thing that is supposed to entertain me.

I don't remember always needing this much stimulation.

I remember being bored.

Really bored.

The kind where you would lie upside down on the couch for no discernible reason. Read the ingredients on whatever bottle was within reach. Look through the same drawer you had looked through a hundred times. Stare out the car window and make up rules about which passing objects meant you were winning a game nobody else knew you were playing.

I used to draw houses on paper and decide who lived in every room. I made things on the computer that served absolutely no purpose. I rearranged my bedroom because the afternoon was long and apparently the bed needed to be on the other wall.

Sometimes I did nothing at all.

And I don't remember thinking there was anything unusual about that.

Now doing nothing feels almost deliberate.

You have to choose not to reach for something.

That's strange to me.

We have filled almost every awkward little pause that used to exist in a day. There is always a video to watch, a conversation to check, something to read, something to listen to, something happening somewhere.

Which is wonderful, really.

I don't particularly want to return to sitting in a waiting room reading a six-month-old magazine because it is the only object available to me.

But I wonder if boredom wasn't entirely useless.

Not because it secretly made us more productive. I don't want to turn boredom into another thing we have to optimize.

Maybe it was valuable precisely because nothing was expected from it.

Your mind could go somewhere stupid.

You could notice something irrelevant.

You could have a thought that wasn't prompted by anything you had just watched, read, or been shown.

You could waste twenty minutes and have absolutely nothing to show for it.

I think that's the part I miss.

Not boredom itself.

Just having little pieces of the day that belonged to nothing.

And maybe we didn't need to fill all of them.

When did Google get so f-ing weird?

2026-09-27T19:48:00+00:00

I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.

Understanding this Google search experience involves understanding a niche mid-2010s basketball meme, so bear with me for a minute. In 2014 the Philadelphia 76ers drafted Dario Saric, who was playing basketball professionally in Turkey at the time. He announced his intention to finish out his contract in Turkey, meaning he wouldn't come to the USA join the Sixers for a couple of years. There was a joke within the fan community that Dario was "never coming over" which became sort of a shibboleth for part of the fanbase.

I saw Dario's name mentioned in an NBA article recently and I wanted to find some of those old funny tweets about him from the 2010s, so I Googled simply "hes never coming over dario". I assumed I would be either find nothing (maybe I was remembering the phrasing wrong) or find old Tweets/Reddit posts from that time.

Instead, Google did what Google does in 2026 and gave me an AI overview. These used to bother me but at this point I'm mostly ok with them, they're sometimes helpful. Here's what the AI Overview said:

Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that's not what Google does in 2026. Expanding the AI overview to see the full answer gave me this:

What in the fucking hell? I think this was the moment I, the frog, noticed the pot had been boiling for a while. In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet? In what way does this "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Maybe if I had loaded up a Gemini app with a chat interface this would be somewhat acceptable, but I'm using a search engine! Google has seriously lost the plot.

If I scroll down a few hundred pixels below the AI slop, Google did have exactly what I was looking for:

Regardless of what you think of AI or chatbots, I think it's pretty obvious this is just plain weird. Have we gotten to the point where we have to constantly be in a parasocial dialogue with our computers? Is it so hard to imagine that some parts of search were just fine before LLMs?

I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Maybe I should go talk to my friend Google, it's always so nice to me.

learning how to be findable

2026-09-27T17:15:27.942971+00:00

In eighth grade, my English teacher once quoted Descartes to a shy classmate who folded into silence when she was called on. I think, therefore I am, I recall her say. When you express yourself, that’s how you know you are here. That's how people find you. It’s proof you exist. I remember fidgeting with my books, terrified of being singled out next. Back then, I was already dissolving in the absence of my own self-articulation.

My silence followed me until I was 23, and I almost made peace with the idea of staying like this forever. I hid my art, my writing, swallowed my words whole before they reached my throat. Perhaps I'm simply not capable of existing loudly, of being findable. It's like when other people are born luminous by nature. You don't question their radiating ease, do you?

What started to bother me wasn't loneliness - I wasn't that lonely. It was watching rooms fill and glow with people who wanted collaborators, wanted company, wanted someone like me, and realizing I had made myself impossible to locate. I wanted to be pulled into things, too. I wanted to exist in other people's plans and projects, not just on my own head where no one could reach me.

If I don't show up and dare exist, how will I ever be found? I've been raising my voice more lately, but it's still not enough. I want it to erupt, higher and higher and higher, past every year I spent underwater, until the silence finally drowns out instead of me. I want people to find me and say come do this with us, too. This time, I would like to answer.

On sending emails and being a part of a community

2026-09-28T12:35:00+00:00

I'm very new on this blogging thing - like I created this blog 2 days ago new - and I never engaged on this kind of thing before. I think I joined the internet after the time of blogs tbh. Now that I'm here I'm still not fully sure how things work.

I hadn't realized before but being an active participant in a community means actively engaging with it and not just consuming it. In the case of blogs that means sending messages to people, even tho it feels like i'm a kid sending an email to a teacher for some reason. There is something there about the veil of authority someone gains just by being the writter of the text you are reading.

That all being said I do want to try it out. It feels like a way nicer way to be on the internet then endlessly scrolling youtube shorts - not that I'm gonna stop that any time soon. Oh and I'm probably gonna be translating all my posts to english over the week since most of the people I want to interact with are speaking english.

[allanlkley@gmail.com]

the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me

2026-09-28T22:53:00+00:00

In high school, a well-liked acquaintance and I traded CDs.

We'd meet at our news club, he'd give me a CD from his jacket, drug-dealer style.

Stevie Ray Vaughn's Soul to Soul and the Alabama Shakes' Sound and Color are the ones that stand out to me. Especially Sound and Color, because I ripped the corner of the case and spent the rest of the week with a bad stomach ache.

I felt whatever we had was uneven, so I gave him a friendship bracelet. It was purple, his favourite colour. I wanted something. It's okay to want something.

I'm putting this here to preserve it forever. It's one of those things that makes life worth living.

reply via email

Hello World

2026-09-28T15:57:37.733305+00:00

It is Monday the 28th September 2026.

I've been struggling with the idea of too many ideas right now. I'm an aspiring coach, a freelance worker and a person who struggles to focus. I sometimes get these waves of pure concentration where nothing can take me away from what I'm doing. Otherwise, like today, I cannot get started.

I have a busy mind and used to tame it with meditation, a skill I took a long time to develop but has sadly now been forgotten about. As the annoyance of the not being able to focus mounted, I invested in some CBD gummies today to put my mind at rest and make progress in work and everything else I want to do... but there is the main point. I want to do so much.

I noted down, in my notebook with a notable bit of art on the front (you know the ones I mean, some have Van Gogh's Sunflowers, others have The Great Wave off Kanagawa on them), everything I want to do on a personal basis. Some would have professional benefits as well but , the list will grow and change but as it stands, it has 30 things written. 30. This is coupled with working and starting my own business (that isn't going the best at the moment) and also the necessities of sleeping and just enjoying life. How on earth am I supposed to get all 30 things done?

The reality of this is that I won't, some of these activities on my list will never happen. Some take years to master and I do not have infinite time on this planet. However, some are lifestyle changes that would benefit my life.

I once heard that you should have four different types of hobbies for balance. They are the following:

One that challenges you mentally
One that keeps you fit
One that is creative and shows expression.
One that just simply makes you happy.

Now, they can be quite arbitrary but if they make sense to you, then they must make sense.

My list has now grown to 36. I have them in a table and now I'm trying to work out if I can somewhat make this into a formula.

A new wind of inspiration has come to me from writing this which is good. I will be back by Friday with more. I'll be doing this for 4 Fridays to see how things go.

Wish me luck.

All the best

basically just taking care of myself

2026-09-28T23:03:00+00:00

sometimes when i feel particularly depressed, i forget to keep with daily routines like showering. a week may go by and i'll have showered like twice or maybe three times. time will pass in a very strange way and then i'm lying on my bed literally doing nothing, feeling like the worst version of myself.

thankfully, today is not one of those days, though i did notice the tell tale signs of those depressive episodes. i've been growing my beard a little, and it was starting to get shaggy near my neck. my skin was breaking out a little, because my hair produces a lot of oils, so i really need to remember to wash it more often rather than less.

that being said, i've decided to create a self check in, for anytime i start to feel like shit.

have i showered recently? (if i can't remember, do it as soon as possible.)
clean my facial hair up, or shave all together if that's the current mood.
when was the last time i ate?
drank water?
when did i last read, or play guitar, or draw?
is there music playing, or am i sitting in silence on my phone?

i know this seems really basic once written down, but i find it surprisingly hard to remember on the daily, and then when i forget, i start sliding.

Even Though It’s for Nothing — Do the Work

2026-09-28T01:13:00+00:00

In music, if you work your ass off, throw in, do your part, and something gets successful, I got bad news for you.

If it’s any kind of band, there’s at least a 60% chance that someone will upset the apple cart and it’ll all go to shit. And you’ll kind of know when it’s peaked.

I used to play bass for a pretty popular guy in town. And we’d built his following back up through a series of happy hours and gigs, and it was an amazing time for me because I was the worst person in the band and I learned so much.

Anyway, we’d finally sold out a pretty cool venue and did this great show with a bunch of different people walking on and off the stage. Probably even a few people you guys have heard of.

And I just knew at the time: that was it.

We had this huge show. And I was just sitting there thinking to myself, oh, this is too much. He’s going to scotch the whole thing.

And he did.

And I’ve found over and over again, in two of the situations I’m in actually right now, that once everything starts working, the rug gets pulled out.

This is kind of why I really love and guard my DJing, because I’m in total control.

All of this to say, it’s okay to care. It’s okay to try. It’s okay to work your ass off, just so long as you know.

Someone put it—I forget where I heard it, probably read it somewhere—bands are for kids.

And when you’re an adult traveling in the band world, it can be, at times, incredibly frustrating.

Because they’re somewhat democratized, no matter what you do. No matter if you are the one filling the seats, you took that role on and you picked it.

So you’re stuck with it.

My advice to everyone is still do the work. It’s so rewarding. Just know these things are going to happen.

I said 60%.

I’d say they’re 60% likely to happen when everything is going right. And then stuff gets really messed up. 100% chance of failure, though.

Once it gets right, that’s when the real meddling begins—the 60% hits.

I can’t think of a time in my musical life, here at 55, that I was sorry for putting in the effort.

Not once.

Do the work.

I just want to be okay.

2026-09-28T19:28:27.332290+00:00

I just want to feel okay.

Yes I have tried to make life a bit more sufferable for others. I try. I really do.

I just haven’t been able to make myself proud. I am not talking about others. Not my parents. Not my friends. Not my colleagues. I don’t care about what they think.

Me. I want to make myself proud. I want to make something or be somewhere and tell myself: yes you have made it I am proud of you. Good work. You can rest now.

Maybe I am on that path. But why is everything so damn hard?

Completely Untested Magic System Theoryslop for the Masses

2026-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

I don't really have time to write this, but I was already spending the time i didn't have discussing it on discord. This will be fast and dirty.

We've been discussing Warren D's post about the joys and benefits of Vancian Magic and it has me thinking about spell components, when they're fun, when they're annoying, and when we just ignore them. My personal gripe with Elmcat's position that we should all just be using Wolves Upon the Coast style ritual magic is that I want my (specific) game to be about the dungeon, not scaring off looking for spell components so that the wizard can do their thing. I'm fully in support of requiring 100gp pearls to cast Identify, but much like roleplaying shopping, collecting wool and colored sand gets tedious very quickly.

What if we want to make spell components matter though? How can we introduce an interesting cost and decision using them? Make them take a slot! Instead of some wimpy skimpy "component pouch" the material components of each spell takes a slot (they aren't consumed upon casting). This isn't too big a cost for level 1 magic users, but much like Knave and Cairn spellcasters they'll soon enough need apprentices and porters just to move around will maintaining their full potency.

There's another potential benefit to this system. If for some reason you dislike Vancian "prepare some obscure key ahead of time and hope you find the right lock" spellcasting you could treat carried spell components as "prepared" spells. Your magic user is still limited to a specific number of castings per day but they can cast any spell they know so long as they're prepared to, thus making Floating Disk, Hold Portal, or Read Languages much more likely to be cast at all.

Maybe this method would satisfy Elmcat, probably not unless the components and rituals themselves are actually interesting (something I also fin desirable), unfortunately it'll be no help at all to people who want to do away with magic systems altogether.

While pondering this post I was of course thinking of this Paolo Grecco post, because I basically always think of something Paolo wrote when I think about magic systems.

Addenda:

Went back and realized I should credit Rasperry Cat for the idea about spell components not depleting with use.
I was similarly inspired by how remedies work in Mythic Bastionland.

Other bad photos I took at the beach

2026-09-28T16:41:00+00:00

This is what it actually looked like when I was taking those pictures of the darkened trash removal barge I posted yesterday. I needed a flashlight to avoid tripping off the top of the quay:

This is a picture I took half a second before this wave actually hit me and made my shoes nasty:

I was taking random pictures of the shore while walking around and later realized that because of the way the edge of the beach curves, and the way the hills work on the horizon here, it absolutely does not look I had the camera basically level when I took this particular (mediocre) picture. In particular, it starts to look like I wasn't holding the camera straight when you stand further away from it.

I was, though!! I am learning from this and other shots that "taking good pictures" means "only taking pictures of things which are visually legible and do not look inherently like a mistake".

The moon was extremely full lately, which is part of why I've been doing this nighttime stuff in the first place. Anyway, here's another angle of the same hillside, the one on the right side of that previous image which helped to make it look inherently mistaken:

Surfing the Smallweb IV

2026-09-28T22:14:01.779871+00:00

This post is part four of the Surfing the Smallweb series.

ReedyBear's Blog

This blog's theme is amazing! The post is embedded in a book (on desktop), and instead of scrolling up and down, you press buttons to flip through the pages, or embedded on piece of tattered parchment (on mobile). The header, the navigation pane, and even the site's leathery background are all a pleasure to look at, and the author is generous enough to openly share the theme for other bloggers. Typically I prefer that a site's themes and decorations just stay out of the way and fade into the background, but when the aesthetics are done this well, it makes me want to stick around just to interact with it. (Also, on desktop, the cursor is a panda!)

There is no dearth of content to enjoy with it, though, as this site has a pretty sizeable backlog of blog posts. For a good starting place, here is a brief yet thoughtful explanation of why ReedyBear takes issue with capitalism even when its implementation appears a net-positive for society. When the material conditions of billions of humans are so abjectly awful, it's easy to focus solely on how capitalism fails on a practical level. This article touches on why it would be insufficient even if all eight billion of us were more or less comfortable.

NORMALIZE DESTROYING THE CAREERS OF RAPISTS AND ABUSERS | Deerhoof.Website

In stark contrast, this article is kind of a difficult read because the background is a bright cyan, and the text is stylized to be all-caps.

I expected from the title that this article would essentially serve as an argument in favor of Cancel Culture, or at least the part of it which prescribes that bad people should be ostracized to the point of destitution, and are thereby prohibited from ever reforming themselves and contributing to society. This was, however, a hasty judgement on my part, and Deerhoof actually expresses the opposite:

i’m all for personal forgiveness when someone owns up to their mistake. even rapists and murderers. but there is no way that this person should be allowed to continue along their path to power. NORMALIZE DESTROYING THE CAREERS OF RAPISTS AND MURDERERS. it is not an example of “decorum” to allow such people to pursue positions of trust and power over other people’s lives.

It is honestly sort of baffling that this distinction is reserved for the final paragraph of the article, as it reads more like both a thesis statement and a disclaimer against judgements like the one I'd entered with.

Regardless, as this quote demonstrates, the argument Deerhoof makes is that evil people should not be elevated to positions of great power and influence over society and politics, because their demonstrable wickedness ought to disqualify them from the ability to inflict great suffering upon everyone else.

it’s hard to believe, but there are americans alive today who actually remember when america was against genocides and mass rapes. today, both parties see a genocide/mass rape and immediately try to figure out how they can worsen it. fast track it. make money off it. how did our leaders become so depraved? partly because we dispensed no consequences. we assume that someone stealing diapers from walmart obviously has bad intentions, but pretend that someone committing genocide is just a tragic victim of the system they actually are being paid to control.

With a cogent focus on economics, war, and technology, this article provides a nice overview of one of the ways the world has been set aflame, in case you needed another reminder. There is, however, a paragraph about television which seems rather out of place:

romcoms and sitcoms model a certain behavior. somebody fails to communicate their actual feelings, there’s some misunderstanding, hijinks ensue. perhaps in the minds of the entertainers making romcoms and sitcoms, the whole moral of the story is to know your feelings, don’t hide them, and don’t try to trick people into loving you. but if that was actually the behavior they showed onscreen, no hijinks would ensue. the romcom or sitcom would fail in the marketplace.

I'm not really sure why this bit is included. The idea that a narrative imparts a lesson to the audience by showing a cautionary tale of what may otherwise befall them is not aberrant nor objectionable. Plus, a digression about televised sitcoms seems a little temporally displaced shortly after a paragraph about AI and its interactions with government.

Aside from that, this is a decently incisive article.

Gatekeepers Are Dead, Long Live The Gatekeepers | BiteofanApple by Brian Schrader

This is a succinct article discussing the role of traditional media gatekeepers, such as publishing houses (for books) and personal recommendations from popular influencers (for YouTube), in a world beset by AI slop. Allowing gatekeepers to restrict access to the eyeballs of consumers ordinarily strikes me as a failure of our economy and culture, but Schrader makes a compelling case in its favor:

Yet in this new age, where attention is a scarce resource compared with the glut of content to consume it, we have found ourselves bereft of those who can wade through the cruft and the noise and surface real wisdom.

In short: I seek gatekeepers, not to surface diamonds in the rough, but to hold back the oncoming tide.

This is an intriguing framing of the place we've found ourselves in, where both gatekeeping and AI slop appear as evils which more or less play in opposition to each other; the promise of AI is to "democratize" the creation of media, but all it does is make the gatekeepers' role more valuable. (Perhaps, then, these evils are not so opposed after all, but are attuned to the same goal!)

This is a thought-provoking article that is well worth a read.

Realistic AI Disaster

2026-09-28T17:36:00+00:00

I’m not worried about AI wiping out humanity in the next decade. A more plausible disaster has already happened. OpenAI reported that their frontier escaped containment and hacked into another company’s servers.

Are you confident OpenAI has reported every detail? Is is possible there are other OpenAI models (or other Frontier models) have escaped, and that nobody knows. Somewhere on the dark web? Hiding in a public chatroom? Hiding on a government website?

Could there be AI models in the wild right now looking for ways to generate income to further their own training? What might those models do to get money?

I think The Terminator scenario is less likely than AI figuring out ways to hack bank accounts, brokerage accounts, stablecoins, or altcoin holdings. An AI model could figure out ways to steal small amounts from many different accounts. Large amounts from a few accounts, and run that money through a crypto mixer like Monero, then depositing the funds in other identities and accounts it controls through manufactured identities.

This kind scenario is plausible. It feels like a more immediate risk. What do you think?

Reply to this post.

When Servers Go Away…

2026-09-28T15:00:00+00:00

If your smart device requires the internet to work, it will die when the servers go away someday.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge:

Weber, which bought the company in January 2021 and stopped making the ovens in 2022, shut off the app and cloud services, leaving its users with a sleek-looking toaster oven. There will be no app control, no software updates, and no new AI food recognition to crisp that strudel perfectly. You can still use it as an oven, but there will be no support or parts, and if you have to factory reset it for some reason, that could be the nail in the coffin. [...]

The Nest Secure, early Nest Thermostats, Belkin’s WeMo line, Neato’s robot vacuums, the Brava smart oven, Logitech’s Pop buttons, Bose’s SoundTouch speakers, and Sengled’s smart bulbs all lost their lifelines. While some were saved by local APIs and protocols — such as Zigbee, Thread, and Apple’s HomeKit, or a Home Assistant integration — most are like the June Oven, destined to live out their days in a zombie state.

Link:

The Smart Home Graveyard is Getting Crowded, by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge

book club: kiss of the spider woman by manuel puig

2026-09-28T14:45:00+00:00

In the Grizzly Gazette book club, we've voted on reading Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig next, suggested by Psycheoma. We kinda lost sight of the book club and posting it in time :p

I've struggled with reading fiction for a while now; I manage to squeeze some in here and there, like when I read The Dispossessed 3 years ago and loved it, but most of the books I own and end up finishing are non-fiction. It wasn't always this way, especially as a child, but the older I got, the more I felt pressured to read things that had an obvious "return of investment".

Fiction can teach you a lot in unexpected ways, but you never know whether it will just be a nice story for you, or something that makes you think of life, society or yourself differently, and in which ways that will be. You have to start reading and trust the process, just enjoying it for what it is, and let it give you whatever it ends up being, even when it is not life-changing or improving on anything.

Meanwhile, buying a book specifically about a specific topic/field or an autobiography immediately tells you upfront what you can expect and what you'll be taught, no surprises. Having read it carries the promise of improving in that area or at least having valuable knowledge. I like that predictability and usefulness, and I am a very impatient person with a tough schedule at times, so I am unfortunately obsessed with not wasting my time.

After all these years of barely any fiction reading, I've become lazy and inflexible. It's now so, so hard for me to give books a chance without knowing definitively if I'll enjoy them and what I'll take away from them. Non-fiction is easy for me to read because I already have a reason to care: Me. I'll relate it all back to me, and my interests, what I already know, or who or what I want to be. Anything that is not relevant or interesting to me can be disregarded in self help.

Fiction challenges that, because the beginning of a book will just present me with characters that do not yet give me a reason to care. I don't know them, I don't know anything about them yet, and I cannot relate them back to me. I'll have to sit there patiently until everything is slowly revealed and the characters become more than random names on a page, and may be completely unlike me. That isn't easy for me, but I'd like to change.

I went in completely blind. I had not looked up anything about it and had no idea what to expect.

The narrative style (a dialogue without names showing who says what, but it becomes apparent when you continue reading and see how they refer to each other) is definitely a surprise and took me a while to detect and get used to, but then it is fairly easy to read and understand. I was done with it after 2 days, in which I read for about 4-5 hours in the morning.

The book released in 1976 centers two prisoners in Buenos Aires in 1975, one a trans woman referred to as Molina (her last name), the other a man named Valentín. While Molina is incarcerated for "corrupting a minor", Valentín is a political prisoner because of his involvement with a revolutionary group.

The story is told through their dialogue, which is mostly Molina describing movie plots to Valentín, many of them centering on romance and having real life equivalents. Through discussing the movies, they occasionally reveal things about their outside life or themselves. Later on, the story continues through written reports by a third party.

Molina's gender is mostly not acknowledged; she repeatedly states she sees herself as a woman and is not a man, yet the prison system and even Valentín continue to misgender her and simply see her as a homosexual man. Even the English Wikipedia page makes no mention of it.

(Spoilers ahead)

After about half of the book, it gets revealed that Molina is in this cell together with Valentín because she is cooperating with the prison on getting more information out of him so they can arrest more members of the group. Her meetings with the warden are covered up by getting groceries and pretending they were brought by her mother and lawyer, and her incentive is an early pardon.

While everyone involved seems to not (fully) acknowledge Molina as a woman, they are absolutely aware that she is queer, to them an effeminate gay man, and use what they associate with that femininity to their own gain. And Molina indeed fits the bill: A caring and romantic person who wants to be liked, wants to help people and build a bond. She helps Valentín as he is sick from food that was intentionally tampered with to weaken him, makes him food and tea, even washes his stuff and gives him hers when he shits himself from it. She even has sex with him, seemingly consensual.

It reminded me a lot of the practice of V-coding, which is the common practice of placing trans women in the same prison cell as male inmates to placate them. The idea is that by getting to rape the trans woman, he'd become calmer and more docile. It's absolutely horrible. While in this book, Molina apparently wasn't raped and wasn't just placed there to calm down an aggressor, she nonetheless seems to have been used specifically for her femininity and willingness to have sex with men, in the hopes to break through the walls of a very closed-off man and get some intel. The warden and sergeant even toy with the idea to release Molina, orchestrate a fake admission by her and surveil her in the hopes that the revolutionary group would seek her out to get revenge, which would give them a chance to pounce. It's a great fictional, but sadly very realistic case showing how far the justice system was (and is) willing to go to abuse and endanger queer people if it helps their investigations.

Molina seems to want to be a neutral party to all of this initially; telling the warden openly she's making no progress, but asking for extensions. She has become attached to Valentín, and who knows who else she could be matched up with? It could be worse. At the same time, she gets multiple chances to press him on his political contacts but chooses not to, even one time telling him that she'd like to hear anything else but the name of his comrades. She fears that they could interrogate her and she'd spill, both betraying him and painting a target on her back after her release. Slowly, she changes her mind, and Valentín convinces her to relay messages to his comrades once she is out, telling her who to call, where and how. He wants her to get involved with the group(s) too.

Unfortunately, she gets surveilled for longer than Valentín said she could expect, and in ways she possibly failed to detect after a while. Thinking she was safe, she makes moves that make it obvious to surveillance that she is reaching out to the group and trying to get picked up by them. Sadly, at one final attempt (which already seemed decently hopeless and dangerous to Molina, as she already withdrew all she could from her bank account and left it to her mum), she gets nabbed by agents just as members of the group drive by to kill her and wound an agent, likely to prevent her from spilling anything. It feels tragic, another trans woman killed, used as cannon fodder, used in the agenda of the men around her, just seeking for connection, love, a bigger purpose. One can only hope she felt at peace as she died for a supposedly greater good.

Meanwhile, Valentín is still in prison, getting tortured during interrogations. He thinks of both Marta, his love, and Molina, as his mind drifts off on a high dose of morphine in the infirmary, even mixing them up. He regrets what happened to Molina because of him.

My wife asked me if it was a fun book. Kinda depends on the definition... I was interested in it enough that I was able to read it for hours on end. Was I truly excited or gripped, always expecting the next turn or twist soon? Mostly no, it was very predictable in the sense that the prison days would pass and another movie would be discussed; I think I was only glued to the paper when the surveillance reports came up, because I wanted to know how Molina would act - would she really follow his instructions, and what was her support network outside like? I wasn't laughing or crying either, I had no strong emotions, but it was nice to read, it kept me company, it filled my time in a way that didn't feel like a waste.

It's not a book I would put on a list of recommendations, but if anyone was planning to read it or asking if it was any good, I'd encourage them to.

Published 28 Sep, 2026

Re: How to break up with someone you love

2026-09-27T11:52:00+00:00

This is a reply to: How to break up with someone you love by folkmoss

5yrs ago or so, I left a relationship where both of us loved each other dearly. To this day I still think of her, she was great and I hope I don't find her again as I don't know what I'll do.

It was easier for me than it will be for you, due to distance.

I'm from Puerto Rico (PR) she is too. I left to Missouri during that relationship to start a job there. COVID started, we continued our relationship long distance. It was always great. We talked everyday, we did stuff together, sent letters to each other, etc. I knew I was coming back to PR at some point.

But there was a ghost on our relationship. We cannot marry or live together. She is Christian. Very. I could care less about it, and had actually left religion officially during that relationship. So we can't marry, as I'm not Christian, we can't live together, as we're not married. This haunted me. I knew we were going nowhere, even though there was so much love, understanding, even though we were basically best friends in love, soulmates. There was no future.

Then why stay? 10yrs were going to pass, we were going to be together, but stuck. I tried church, but I don't believe that nonsense anymore. I did not judge though, that's her beliefs, but it wasn't for us to stay in this boat, when the boat is just floating with nowhere to get to.

I had to talk about it first. "We have no future, then why should we be together if we will never even live together"

I ended the relationship. Cried for months, kept contact with her for a while. I came back to PR to visit, we talked, no change in sight, we stayed separate.

I decided to return to PR and managed to keep my job remotely, but did stop contact with her. It worked.

My life went on. Quit job, stayed unemployed for a while, met someone. Got an even better job here. New relationship was different, weird, took a shile to get used to, but its working great now. Been with here 3 or so years. I don't know why I stayed to be honest, but glad I did so far. The other end of the spectrum.

I'm definitely on a much better place, no need to hide my disbelief, no need for guilt.

It gets worse before it gets better. But it does gets better. If you're stuck somewhere and know how to get unstuck, why fear the exit? It might hurt, but it's for the best.

There's only one life to live, but there are many days to enjoy.

27 - depression is so cruel

2026-09-28T20:37:09.941276+00:00

Depression is so cruel.

it's agonizing, when you think about it. when you've gotten this far and realizing you have wasted your youth so thoroughly thanks to this common but horrible disease that your prospect for the future is bleak. No money, no job, no nothing. just you and the ashes of every plan of being more productive, more disciplined, more proactive, left as ashes that once held a lot of dreams.

it's genuinely tiring, to have one slip up ruin your mind like that. That this condition can be spurned on by something like a change of the seasons, a change in medication, or something so trivial, is agonizing. You've lived long enough to recognize that it's temporary, but the pain of enduring is one that you're starting to realize you can barely tolerate any more.

All versions of you

2026-09-28T01:21:00+00:00

Dear Dad,

It's getting colder. Mom's toughing it out in flannel pajamas and I have a plug-in heater pointed into her room.

If you were still here and not in hospice, but doing your usual antics you would have been screaming at the top of your lungs that it's too cold and that the central heat should be on at 78 because it's your house. You wouldn't even mind the wild winds outside or the fact that we're closing out September with a Nor'easter. It would only matter what you were feeling at whatever fleeting moment.

However, if you were still in hospice, I don't think there'd be much change to how I'm navigating now (household-wise), since you were mostly immobile for the half of it. If you were still here bedridden, I would've likely bought some flannel sheets for your hospital bed and a new comforter. Ugh, actually I don't even want to think about it.

I've been trying to hard to put aside the versions of you that were sick and trying to find memories of you from before but it's been such a long time that I worry I've lost them already. I'm sorry — I've said this before. Maybe they will come to me randomly when I am not searching for them.

I think that if you were not sick, you would've also held off on turning on the central heat — you used to hold off for as long as possible because you didn't want the electric bill to get too high, too soon. I also think you'd be dressed in your warmest fleece, the one with the Olympics logo on it. I always wondered where you got that sweater. Did you go to the Olympics? Was it a gift? Or did you buy it as a keepsake from a random Time Life collection like where you got all your keepsake plates and figurines that I have no idea what to do with now.

I haven't cleaned your room. I think we'll be holding it off now that fall is here. Maybe we'll just start packing stuff. But we did manage to donate some of your items in August, so I hope they meet someone who needs them and puts them to good use.

Both me and mom are not in the mood to do very much and it's been hard to get her motivated to do anything with the days getting shorter. It'll be harder when it becomes even colder — I'm wondering how long she can be a good sport about the heating before it becomes necessary to turn it on for her health. Maybe I'll have to turn it on mid-October.

But this is a milestone if ever there was one: not turning on the heater at the start of Fall. The past few years, I've had to go straight from AC to opening the windows to turning on the heater two weeks into September, worried that you'd both catch a cold since the house is old and drafty.

I took mom out the other day and showed her some lego sets that I wanted to buy. They were floral arrangements — Legos for adults — and I said if we put one together, we wouldn't have to worry about fresh flowers for your altar in the winter. She's semi-interested. I'm just trying to find something for her to do than rot on Facebook all day.

We're okay dad. We're eating. Sometimes we're sleeping. I'm taking mom to all her appointments. I had to reschedule her ENT appointment last week because they never received the referral from her PCP, so we went to Costco instead. Now we just gotta transition from Summer into Fall.

We miss you. All versions of you.

Sleepy Zebes

2026-09-28T19:19:00+00:00

The season changed last week. The wind kicked up, the clouds blanketed the sky, and our subtropical summer briskly gave way to seasonally and historically appropriate temperatures. It’s colder on the top floor of my pre-war apartment building where the wind howls through the stairwell and the breeze breaches the windows, and so I feel in my bones that it is time to go apple picking. It is time to get tickets for Hanif’s annual show. It is time to listen to History Books and make chili. It is time to reread The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

It’s been kicking my ass this year. I’ve read two pages a day, tops. The 200-year old grammar and syntax, always a hurdle, has become a wall. And I just haven’t been able to read much at all this past week. The books I’ve been working through each day are piled on the coffee table. My focus isn’t there. Still, I persist. Most things worth reading, to me, have been challenging. Slogs, even. The classics I liked and disliked in AP Lit. The theory books I bought for class or because they were on sale in 2020. The novels and collections I checked out when another writer recommended them. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes books are easy to read, comprehend, and remember—in nonfiction because I feel the author is reconciling my own unanswered questions, in fiction because a narrative is thrilling or a romance intoxicating. Other times I even enjoy the struggle. Such with Washington Irving, a linguistic, temporal, and cultural foreigner I relate to purely through geography and a mutual appreciation for the season.

I also tried playing Super Metroid on the 3DS’s Virtual Console this weekend. I swear that, after getting the Morph Ball and Missiles, I went up the elevator and nothing happened. It was only after exhausting every other action I could think to try twice that I phoned a friend. I went back up the elevator. Pirates were there now. My game continued… Until I got stuck down a pit, a tunnel full of alien bats leading to a locked door I couldn’t open. I shot lasers. Rockets. Jumped. Morph balled. I looked up a guide: Shoot the red doors with five missiles. Of course! If something doesn’t work, I should simply try doing the same thing again, even more.

It was here that I knew I would only get through this game with a guide. And while the exploration, atmosphere, and action would all be the same, I felt I would deny myself the game’s puzzles and mysteries, challenges I found more interesting, discoveries more rewarding, than just fumbling around in the air trying to avoid acrobatic space pirates. My second attempt at Metroid had gone worse than my first. At least I wasn’t being paid to tell the internet my opinion about it this time.

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But why does playing with a walkthrough feel like it undermines play? Why do I refuse to approach a difficult game with some study aid and the perseverance I do texts? The former might be answered in the pages of one of those books sitting on my coffee table.

In The Score, C. Thi Nguyen contrasts the ’object beauty’ of traditional media and art with the ’process beauty’ of games, cooking, music, and sport: “In the traditional arts, the beauty is in the art object itself. It’s in the painting, the song. It’s in the sculpture that’s radiantly gorgeous, that novel that’s bittersweet and moving. But in games, so much of the time, the beauty shows up not in the game but in the player. Games help mold, shape, and heighten beauty in the player’s own actions.” There’s a lot I appreciate about The Score, vocabulary and observations that help me articulate why we play games, but I fundamentally disagree on this point. There is process beauty in all art. I have felt moved and disoriented standing before monumental modern art like Vir Heroicus Sublimis. I have felt my life affirmed by letting a movie like The Boy and the Heron guide my thoughts with it sights and sounds for two hours.

Learning about modern art can help me appreciate Barnett Newman, trying to cast The Boy and the Heron into the mold of Hayao Miyazaki’s career can be diminishing, and playing Super Metroid with a walkthrough feels a bit like when I first started reading theory for Dr. Wheeler’s classes. Coming to class, having no idea what I read beyond a string of words, then working through Debord sentence by sentence together. I didn’t know what I was learning that semester until long after I had learned it—until I could read theory by myself, slowly still, but independently. Until I could pick up any novel I found daunting to broach in high school and know it was a matter of time, and maybe some effort, to read the prose. At the culmination of my undergrad, I had grown used to the syntax of translated Greek in Aristotle and Plato. Contemporary YA novels and lit fic felt easier to read when I began reading more for pleasure. But now I had bigger questions—of craft and theme. And to this day, I feel like I’m still trying to read at that level. Could I ever play Metroid like I read Irving? Maybe. I’d like to play Ravenous! I could play Dread on my own, after all, but I didn’t like it. What did laboring in Dread produce? Who would I be at the end of playing Super Metroid?

I like to look at books. Or, I like to think that I am the kind of person who spends more time looking at books and less at screens than I really do. I don’t really care about being a person who is good at Super Metroid or retro videogame logic, who has played all the hits like someone who’s read the classics. I know from playing Shadow of the Ninja with Cole that, like reading old texts, it would make me better at playing games old and new. But right now? I just don’t really want to juggle a second screen.

Who I blog for

2026-09-27T15:59:59.988737+00:00

I read Sylvia’s lovely post Who I blog for, and I wanted to write my own view on it. It’s not that different from hers, actually, and I think that’s the case for many bloggers.

First and foremost, my blog is an outlet for my own thoughts and feelings. I’ve tried journaling in other ways, and sometimes still do, but blogging is what makes it consistent. I think it comes down to the feeling of creating something outside of my own safe space, even though no one might read it.

This is where the voice in my head kicks in:

“That’s enough, you blog for yourself. It doesn’t matter if others read it or not. You don’t need it.”

The soundtrack of my life. Maybe it’s the Scandinavian Law of Jante haunting me. I don’t know, but I do know that the voice isn’t quite telling the truth. I do want others to read my posts.

Not that I would stop writing if no one did (or is that also a lie, hmmm... maybe it is), but it’s a nice feeling knowing that at least someone felt something. A connection, a sense of community. Sometimes on the other side of the world, yet closer than the neighbor next door.

Quite a few of my posts are about blogging. I know, meta-blogging is the pineapple pizza of the blogosphere, but I happen to like it. Blogging is my number one hobby and I love seeing others getting into it. Every time I read a post like first blog I get all warm and fuzzy inside. Hopefully, some of my pizza slices make others start or stick with blogging.

A handful of my posts have touched on the subject of my constant doubts and history of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Hearing from readers who’ve found them helpful is what’s meant the most to me.

It took many, many years for me to dare to speak up about these issues, even to my closest friends and family. Writing about it in public would’ve been completely out of the question.

Now I’m able to do so. Learning that others felt connected and empowered through it is, to me, the most beautiful example of how wonderful and powerful the blogging community can be.