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Blaugust Got Me Out of My Cave

2026-08-31T17:18:00+00:00

Participating in Blaugust this year got me out of my cave.

I haven’t really written in quite some time, for a variety of reasons, but I wanted to push myself to start again this month. I din’t have a goal, at least not one that I said (or wrote) out loud. Knowing myself, deep down I wanted to write 31 posts, but I wasn’t going to pressure myself to do it. I’m already weighed down by a lot of other things. I didn’t want this to become one more thing.

I had absolutely no plan coming into this. I didn’t even do any of the prompts, including the intro one, which I typically do and have done in the past. If you stumbled upon my blog during Blaugust, I’m sorry I didn’t properly introduce myself. I hope you got to know me some other way.

I wrote every single post the day of. Sometimes I’d have to backdate (or back time?) a post when I was writing about something that happened that day because I didn’t have time to publish it. I didn’t plan ahead. I didn’t have drafts waiting to save me. I just wrote.

And wrote.

The central theme of my posts this month was grief, because I am currently surrounded by it. I probably will be writing about it for days, months, maybe years to come. I know that it will ebb and flow. I’m still learning how to carry it within me.

When I wasn’t writing about grief, I wrote a little bit about my days. I shared more photos on this blog than I typically do. Those usually live on August Morning, but I haven’t posted there in a while. That may change after this month. We’ll see.

This month, I processed my grief over losing Cocoa. I still am. In August 2025, I started processing the loss of my job, and what I thought was the loss of my identity along with it. I am hoping August 2027 will not be about loss.

I don’t think I’ll be continuing to post daily, but hopefully I’ll continue to just post. I’ve still got a lot of words clanging around inside my head that I need to let out.

This is just the beginning.

♾️ Related: Notes on the last day of Blaugust 2024

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Wide Not Tall

2026-08-31T14:50:00+00:00

I wonder when "people" will realise that taking videos (and photos) on your mobile device should be done in wide mode, rather than tall.

So many News websites now utilise crowd-sourced video content when reporting stories, but the content can be so awkward on the eye. Taking a video in portrait (tall/vertical) results in the content moving erratically from side to side as the operator attempts to capture the full scene. Not only do we have to endure the wild panning, but the scene is generally 50% sky, or other content, adding nothing to the action taking place.

Imagine if they simply took a second to turn their mobile and capture a wide shot, encompassing far more of the scene.

TVs and computer monitors are not tall, they are wide. Mobile phones are built tall but can easily be turned; you can't spin your TV screen!

Take everything in wide

Surely it is better to take almost all your images and videos in wide mode. After all, if you are viewing it again on the phone you can easily turn it.

There are some cases where content benefits from tall mode -- often because the imagery was designed for social media (like Facebook, and TikTok). However, wide works most of the time.

Look how much more of a scene you capture.

Let's try and build a new habit of mostly keeping it wide.

💌 Newsletter #015 - "Watermarks" in Chatbot Output; Meta settles; "It's Just a Tool?"

2026-08-30T14:40:00+00:00

✨ In This Edition ✨

📟 Short-Form Content: Random word choice watermarks in chatbot output; Getting "opted in" to Google scanning your stuff; Meta settles; Books are destroyed to feed the chatbots; EU mandates driver-facing cameras.
🌞 Good News!: More transparency in online shopping; Mastodon 5.0; AI-free, digitally sovereign document editing; Your old phone as a NAS.
📯 The Post-Script: Reading There's no such thing as Just a Tool by Iris Meredith.

Original image by Natalia Y. on Unsplash, glitched and edited.

📟 Short-Form Content

Chatbots ("AI")

OpenAI's Head of Ethics has left the company, after less than a year in the role. "There currently is no replacement lined up, suggesting shifting priorities at the company." That's probably a good sign of what's to come. Right?
Google now scans your emails and attachments. Apparently, if you use Gmail, you were "opted in" automatically. Here's some tips on how to opt out. Reminder that there are email services available that aren't google.
Anthropic is going to start "watermarking" its chatbot output. How will it do this? By "subtly altering the word choices" such that the watermarking will be "indistinguishable to readers."
- This only sounds like a reasonable and normal thing to do if you assume that synonyms are exchangeable in all contexts and senses, which is, unfortunately, not how language works. Or writing. Or words. Not that the tech dudebros care about any of that if Line Go Up.
NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face. Certainly not the case that the "AI economy" is the same $5Tn or whatever many trillions of dollars going round and round.
What at first was just a hunch that booksellers had when strange bulk orders came in has now been confirmed: Yes, AI firms are buying up tons of rare books - only to train their chatbots on them. Destructively. Destroying knowledge to train a chatbot that makes people cognitively dumber. You can't make this up.
- McSweeney's article on this, by Jack Loftus, is once again solid gold:

The older books are my favorite because they arrive with such rich history. Thick leather covers, gold inset lettering, the musty smell of age, and sometimes a handwritten note from 1894 that I don’t bother to read, and the scanners largely skip since it’s not integral to our performance KPIs.

A medical transcription chatbot claimed that a patient was doing drugs (of the illegal kind) - when she wasn't. A serious error with potentially grave consequences, not only in terms of the medical diagnosis and treatment patients receive. This quote by the patient, Ms Green, stuck with me - AI involvement, such as AI transcription, is presented to us as the "default" (despite it being horrendously inaccurate), and opting out feels like being difficult or "annoying":

"I don't want to be in her bad books or be that annoying patient who takes up more of her time," she said.

Microsoft's Copilot was asked about its protective mechanisms - and "eventually revealed undocumented URL parameters and protective measures," which enabled the researchers to build manipulative URL's.
The province of Alberta, Canada, is hosting multiple Town Halls around AI data centres, which could make power in Alberta even more expensive than it already is. The company, of course, disputes that.
- Anyways, Albertans have shown up and they have been very clear, via jeers and boos and comments and heated questions, that they're not interested in seeing AI data centres in their province.
- There is also this handy Alberta Data Centre Watch website, where users can explore planned projects.
Very unsurprisingly to anyone that's been paying attention even slightly, and has a passing understanding of how capitalism works, AI is not getting us closer to that shorter work week. Gasp!
So this is one way that your data can end up somewhere completely different from where you thought it might end up: Google buys crashed airline Spirit's data at auction, because AI. This includes "over 100 million emails, 30 million recorded phone calls, reams of stuff from Teams, Oracle, and SAP."
On Bank Robbing Robots, by user @lproven@vivaldi.net:

I invented a robot that can rob a bank. Of course, it robs these banks on its own, so I can't be held legally responsible when it robs a bank. I mean, all I did was invent it, it's not my fault if it works exactly the way I intended. Also, I get to keep all the money from the banks it robs. Sorry if any of that money was yours, but now that l've invented the Bank Robbing Robot, the Bank Robbing Robot is inevitable.

Non-Chatbots

The big thing this week is of course the settlement in Meta's trial revolving around harms to its young users. You're probably wondering why, when Meta is going to pay up to $18bn, as well as going to implement restrictions that, for example, allow only two hours of Instagram and Facebook per day, this isnt found in the Good News section. It is partially good news, but: The amount of settlement money is a drop in the bucket given Meta's earnings - and the settlement means that months of evidence will not be heard. Meta has also denied wrongdoing.
In times of natural disasters, when people are trying to exchange valuable (and at times life-saving) information with each other, turning to a "walled garden" may not be the way to go.
Google is introducing its "extended sideloading flow," essentially adding hurdles to "sideloading" apps. "Sideloading" meaning "installing apps from anywhere that isn't Google's store." Which is kind of wild, actually, when you think of desktop computing. Really, it's just "installing software" - except there's now this added layer of some corporation getting a say in what you install on a device that you own? It's all in the name of avoiding risk and danger, of course.
- Somehow we're also supposed to rejoice that they walked back their original plans and we now "only" have to deal with a one-time 24hr waiting period. Uh-huh. Talk about anchoring. Here's an earlier article on the original plans.
As part of the EU's General Safety Regulation, every new car and van sold in the EU is now mandated to have a cabin-facing camera - as in, a camera that watches the driver. Primarily, these are meant to ensure the driver is not engaging in distracted driving, for example by emitting warning sounds or buzzes if the driver glances away for too long. That is probably a good thing, seeing the epidemic of drivers focused on the phone in their crotch instead of the road, or what is going on around them. That said, any recording of this kind carries privacy risks (and, to a certain extent, "normalizes" surveillance) - there are strict rules around what this camera is allowed to do, as per Reclaim The Net:

"The system cannot use facial recognition or any biometric identification of the people inside the car. The data it generates is not allowed to leave the vehicle, and it cannot be passed to third parties."

Let's hope that this will remain true.

🌞 Good News!

A German court has ruled that online shopping platforms need to be more transparent in regards to their recommendation systems - such as which factors significantly determine the selection - as well as to make it easier for users to de-personalize their feeds.
Mastodon 5.0 will have a host of great new features, such as a redesigned composer, a reworked visibility/discovery settings section, and DM's being distinguished better from regular posts. If you're not on Mastodon yet, give it a try - unlike BlueSky, which claims to be decentralized but actually kind of isn't?, Mastodon definitely is.
LibreOffice is still around, doesn't use any generative AI, and is a very decent office suite. I use it for all my local document writing and spreadsheeting needs. The difference between, say, Word and Writer feels like this little meme.
- Also, reminder that "The Cloud" is "someone else's computer," and if that computer happens to be under the purveyance of someone who isn't completely rational, that could be a problem. File under: Digital sovereignty.
- ... especially since also, someone can, in fact, just turn off your cloud, leaving you without your data.
- On a completely unrelated note, getting off of US tech, especially of the cloud persuasion, is probably a good idea, now more than ever. Fore more ideas on that, check this excellent article by Paris Marx.
This is a neat idea, especially in light of the skyrocketing RAM and storage prices, which are of course necessary to keep Line Going Up and so that upper management can have emails summarized that someone else used a chatbot to write: Your old phone as a NAS! (Note that I have not tried this myself; as always, use caution when installing new apps/features on your devices, both in terms of security but also your saved data.)
The Fairphone 6+ is now available in Europe and the USA! Fairphones are cool because they are highly modular and repairable - the camera breaks, you can just replace the camera module. By yourself. By only purchasing the new camera module. Repairability and sustainability, heck yeah.

📯 The Post-Script

Reading There's no such thing as Just a Tool by Iris Meredith (@iris_meredith@mastodon.social). It has it all: Philosophy, urbanism, software development, AI. Something for everyone. You should probably read it.

It's quite possible for a tool to be used for good things, and in fact for it to be necessary, but for the viewpoint that it fosters to nonetheless be one that we shouldn't encourage.

[W]hen I hear a tech person say that something's "just a tool", I can't help but read it as an unwillingness to take responsibility.

Follow this blog via RSS | Find me on Mastodon | Bubbles

writing and reading on the small web

2026-08-31T16:54:00+00:00

I love it here on the small web. The simplicity and minimalist nature keeps me focused on creating and frees me from the cumbersome clutter found on large sites and blogs.

Because of the nature of the small web, people (including me) have the latitude to write about what they want, without concern for likes or follows. When I write in this space, I don't feel the need to remain in a proverbial "topic box." Yesterday I wrote about sharing a doughnut with my dogs. Who cares? Maybe no one, but it didn't keep me from writing about it.

I find reading on the small web fascinating. When people aren't writing to promote themselves, or products, you are able to see a glimpse of who they really are. What they enjoy. Their passions and interests. People are into a lot of really cool things. Here are just a few interesting reads I found last week.

I set-up a blog(post)roll to share finds like these. It is a work in progress.🚧

If you are writing on the small web, keep writing. If you are reading small web articles, share what you enjoy. It's a great community!

Cheers! 🎉

Blaugust's Counterattack

2026-08-31T20:09:00+00:00

You can change your future¹

No, it's cool Possum. Make yourself at home up there.

We did it, friends and foes! Another year of Blaugust behind us and I'm kinda thrilled to say that this year felt even more natural than last.

2025 was not only my first Blaugust, but effectively the first anniversary of blogging period, so I had some nervousness out the gate at doing it. Turned out to be unfounded though; it was a little stilted but when an unexpected family emergency sent me across the country that I thought for sure would be an end to my attempt, I ended up getting into an OK spot and finding my feet for blogging every day.

This year, other than the continuing plan to get moving back to the desert (which is taking significantly longer than I'd like but it is what it is) I had no such emergencies and as I woke up each day, I never had an "aww shit I gotta blog today" moment². Not once! I'd go about work or packing or home stuff and an idea would hit me and then I'd just start writing.

Like, what the fuck it's that easy?? Blogging can be anything!

We covered a lot of topics this year! From Birthdaversary (of course), to unexpected berry plants, excitement and then disappointment about celestial bodies, rat racism, quitting my job in protest of AI, ranking unloved kickstarter projects, and so much more. It's a good haul, I think. Obviously I'm biased but I think this is the one where I'm allowed.

Gargoyle says I'm allowed and like, do you wanna argue with her??

Writing this, I can reflect on where I'm at with being on the internet: 2024 was coming to terms with Cohost ending ["COHOST MENTIONED" ALARM SOUNDS] and starting to blog. 2025 was getting into a groove with blogging and hitting a few pitfalls, but 2026? Fucken second nature, man. In fact, it's kinda been the year of Bubbles and in particular RSS in the way I'd hoped 2024 would have been before all the initial spark of post-Cohost blogging started to die down. I don't fault anybody cuz it's a lot to maintain a blog but it make me so fucking sad to see that of the significant number of RSS feeds I subscribed to in the months following Cohost's closure, maybe 3-4 of them are still active. If even that.

My relationship with social media sites has continued to dwindle (emphasis on posting here and sharing there, which is not great for staying in those ecosystems) but I'm honestly ok with that. I do have hope and faith in the Website League but it's had its own set of troubles and currently I get more out of being a weird blogger than posting a lot on there - and even if I did become more active a 'poster' in / on the league, I'd still wanna be blogging primarily because at the end of the day, this is my place. I don't have to worry about this space disappearing.

And hey - neither do you! You're stuck with me for as long as I keep doing it.

Anyway, thanks for being here! I mean it! Here's your end-of-post cat and all I have to say is:

No, it's cool Possum. Make yourself at home up there.

blaugust

Since last year's final blaugust post was loosely "End of Eva" themed I figured I'd keep up the bit and you get Char's Counterattack for this year.↩
This was helped by making the smart decision to put my daily pokemon drawing on hiatus lmfao, I think trying to do both would have killed me.↩

I saw a fancy pigeon today and want to share it with you

2026-08-29T12:00:00+00:00

As the title says. I saw a fancy pigeon today, never saw one like this before:

An odd, but cute, pigeon.

I researched a bit and this is called a "piebald". Basically meaning that there are un-pigmented spots around due to cell-stuff which I am entirely unqualified to talk about. Here's a Wikipedia article going into more detail: Article

Gosh, Who Would Have Thought That Google Is Run By Cowardly Bootlickers?

2026-08-30T16:23:00+00:00

So Google has put their tongue to the Presidential boot once more, and renamed "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" (joining their previous bullshit of renaming the "Gulf of Mexico" to the "Gulf of America").

Yes, names on a map are really just some collectively arbitrary kind of thing that really don't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. But something that does matter is our corporate overlords continually bending at the knee in order to placate a mad king's spurious and childish demands.

Coincidentally, the book I'm writing at the moment takes place on the shore of Lake Ontario, and I can absolutely guarantee you that I'm not going to be changing the name of the lake in the story to go along with this recent act of stupidity.

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Latest 3 posts

01 Sep, 2026 What Blaugust Has Taught Me About My Blogging
30 Aug, 2026 Gosh, Who Would Have Thought That Google Is Run By Cowardly Bootlickers?
30 Aug, 2026 Another From the Portfolio

Older Posts I'd Like You to See

05 Nov, 2024 Election Night, Anxiety Night
03 Jul, 2024 Every Cat's Got a Bit of an Asshole in Him
17 Jun, 2024 Popeye as a Role Model

observing right-wingers for twelve days

2026-08-31T19:56:00+00:00

I’m the kind of person who is very interested in far-right movements, but never interested enough to follow them directly. I let others do such masochistic rituals and then digest them for me on camera. So almost twelve days ago to the dot, I made the decision to create an X/Twitter account for research purposes and cut the middleperson. I was curious to see the American far-right’s rhetoric directly how it is broadcasted on that platform and see how it affects me as a marginalized person.¹ What I was also curious to see was how X/Twitter today (especially within the EU) measured up to other microblogging alternatives.

I’ll address the latter interest first: Despite initially following many right-wing extremists shortly after account creation, my algorithm still showed me the wokest posts you can imagine. My feed is filled with left-wing people arguing about things in a left-wing way. If a right-winger shows up, it’s because they’re being discussed or debunked by lefties. I was surprised to see that! I saw a lot of Nazis in comments when their ideas were being attacked, sure, but honestly not much more than on Bluesky. I expected worse based on all the information about X/Twitter (which I never used prior to its acquisition) I received on Mastodon. Based on my experience, I would say that X/Twitter allows for about as much hate speech (in the EU at least) as I’m familiar with on Instagram and TikTok. I haven’t used either after they changed their moderation policies, so my reference point is how they were up until 2024 (when Trump won).

That made me understand why this many left-wing people, who made up my algorithmic feed, stayed there despite the changes sparking various migrations. I imagine someone with an established presence to have a web of contacts sufficient enough to rarely encounter the worst of what X/Twitter contains (which I’ll get to in a second), while still benefitting from its mass appeal leading to more perspectives being represented on the platform, whereas Bluesky and Mastodon in comparison are extremely white to the point they’re obnoxious to use. Now that posts get automatically translated to the host’s language, it’s effortless to converse with anyone speaking any language and barely notice it.

For all its moral superiority, Bluesky is 90% what X/Twitter is right now, including the bots. A lot of the criticisms directed at X/Twitter are propped up in the alternatives because they want to remain familiar to migrating users. From context collapse to dogpiling, that’s all just part of the short form text format and the abstraction of the person behind the post to an avatar. You can still have your posts break the containment of a familiar audience by going viral on Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads, and then you will be confronted with people pinging you to death with things they wouldn’t say had they spent a few minutes browsing your profile instead of jumping to baseless conclusions. Mastodon, the microblogging platform I’m most familiar with, just never found the pseudo-mass appeal that Bluesky found, so it’s stuck in a sort of hippie phase. It’s about 60% what X/Twitter is right now (a higher percentage if you’re an English speaker).

So now that my platform assessment’s done, I want to get to the heart of my project: observing right-wingers. I created a Far-Right list and pinned it at the top of the interface after initially following those accounts, then realizing that I’d like to follow others that are separate from this project. The list includes 19 accounts that encompass some Hasbaristas (Israeli propagandists), Manosphere influencers, bigoted projects like Gays Against Groomers and Libs of TikTok, some brain-fried (internet) celebrities, and right-wing politicians and pundits. Every day, I browse this list for about ten minutes at most in a single sitting—because I cannot tolerate it for longer than that. I do this a couple of times throughout the day to get the most out of their posting schedule. Because I cap my time spent on this list at around ten minutes, there’s only so much I can see until my inner siren announcing the apocalypse goes off, so if I don’t check in frequently, I’d miss out on a lot.

On the Hasbara side, it is interesting to note the difference in tone in my tiny pool. Some are more for stirring up frenzy while others exploit that frenzy to instill completely warped views of reality. This is the case for every group on my list, however, it’s most pronounced in the Israeli propaganda department. Noa Tishby, Israel’s most sophisticated influencer, usually posts calm, measured videos of her “explaining” things about Israel to clear up any “misconceptions” of it. In one video, she explained how Israel is “so democratic, it’s almost ungovernable” (instead of “one person, one vote,” Israel has “one person, one party,” she claims); quoted a Kalshi graph as “polling;” explained the contested policies; and kissed Netanyahu’s ass. It wasn’t necessarily what she said that presented itself as a goldmine of easter eggs, but how she said it and the imagery aiding her tale. She explained all this as if she was talking to children which stands in stark contrast to others sharing her role like Lizzy Savetsky. Lizzy Savetsky posts videos of herself evidently completely coked out and freaking out over things that don’t matter to anyone but a racist, straight from her West Village penthouse. They complement each other in how Lizzy Savetsky provides the shock while Noa Tishby is the sedative that draws on the impressionable, post-shock mind.

Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers post largely the same things with Libs of TikTok simply posting more frequently. It’s wild how expertly they exaggerate things to skew the image of whoever they’re defaming to fit a stereotype. They make sure to pick an image to put beside their heavily editorialized videos that depicts the person they’re defaming in a way that would generate the most outrage. While Libs of TikTok goes after any marginalized person (Chaya Raitchik now covers more than the “alphabet mafia”), Gays Against Groomers focuses their defamation efforts on queer people who aren’t masculine gay men or feminine gay women (for now). End Wokeness, however, is the furthest from reality out of the bunch. It’s convinced that there is an ongoing white genocide, posts that Elon Musk routinely reposts. Its comment section contains outright genocidal and capital-n Nazi symbolism and talking points. Whereas top comments under Gays Against Groomers and Libs of TikTok’s posts are often people insulting them, End Wokeness’ top comments take the posts’ talking points up a notch. This is likely because the default comment ranking on X/Twitter sorts by “relevance” and I’m choosing to believe that End Wokeness has special tweaks to that algorithm applied to boost the Nazi stuff, seeing how close the account is to Musk. I have nothing to prove my claim with other than pure suspicion.

Speaking of Elon Musk, he and JK Rowling are relentless in their posting. They’re walking proof that obscene wealth is also harmful to those hoarding it. They are posting non-stop about various issues that you’d think were existential dangers to them. Elon Musk frequently invokes the hallucination of white genocide, but switches it up by pseudo-intellectualizing about tech and spotlighting people agreeing with him. JK Rowling, on the other hand, is constantly posting her transphobia. I’m talking multiple times a day every day, often conversing with nonexistent ghosts compared to her.² In truth, she was the reason I went ahead with this project. I was watching a video about her defamation campaign against Imane Khelif in 2023 where the creator commented on her relentless posting about this singular issue. I didn’t think it would still be occupying so much of her mind in 2026, yet it is. It makes you wonder whether people like Elon Musk or JK Rowling aren’t experiencing something akin to a psychosis as a consequence of being jobless, terminally online, and fed so much self-serving propaganda that their minds live in an alternate reality.

As if JK Rowling wasn’t enough transphobia for any timeline, ever, I added Brianna Wu who I personally believe is a social experiment. I stumbled upon her when it came out that she was the most blocked person on Bluesky. Ever since, I’ve been fascinated by this viciously transphobic trans woman whose policy suggestions are thinly veiled trans- and homophobia. She has also taken it upon herself to call out anti-Zionist Jews various antisemitic slurs because “she’s been invited to so many Shabbats,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. She’s going after every minority and still claims to be a liberal which, to me, exposes that there is a pipeline of liberals slowly becoming fascists because anything farther left from them questions the classist, oppressive society and the inherent injustices of its economic system, both of which they’re a part of, which is uncomfortable for them. So they look to simple solutions provided by fascists like blaming specific minorities as the root of all evil because they’re easier to digest without threatening their entire world view.

For Manosphere accounts, I followed the three currents: Nick Fuentes, Clavicular, and Andrew Tate. The funniest thing I noticed is that Andrew Tate has been reposting the same videos from over a year ago daily, ranting how the UK judicial system was corrupt because it was pursuing him on sex trafficking charges but not immigrant rapists for like at least the duration that I’ve had him on my list which would be about a week. They’re two to three minute long videos of him ranting like the lunatic he is in various contexts, often in his car. Clavicular’s niche seems to be to comment on people’s looks in his pseudo-scientific ways and/or beefing with people over their looks. So absurd. Nick Fuentes occupies a curious niche of antisemitic, bigoted rhetoric based on his “America First!” world view. He doesn’t post or interact as often as the others, though. You can tell he doesn’t enjoy this format and prefers shouting at people or into the mic.

Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens fall in the self-styled pundit camp. It seems, like everyone else here, they’ve made Israel-Palestine one of their main issues, if not the one and only. Shapiro posts a lot about who is a Jew and who isn’t in relation to their position on the matter. “A Jew is someone who Ben Shapiro deems a Jew” is all one can take away from his rants. My most esoteric knowledge of the Shapiro family is that Ben Shapiro’s sister, Abigail Shapiro, pioneered the tradwife movement when she made misogynistic videos about being a subservient Jewish woman minding her place in society. She flopped because at the time, this content mostly appealed to men and men preferred to hear their misogyny from Manosphere influencers. Now tradwives have a female audience.

Like Brianna Wu, Candace Owens was a woke liberal until she put out a concept for surveillance technology that uncovers people’s identities and ostensibly combats bullying. Ironically, she was rightfully bullied for her proposal and then “became right-wing overnight.” Still on Shapiro, when I came across Candace Owens for the first time in 2020, she was working for Ben Shapiro. She quit her work with him in 2024 because Ben Shapiro refused to allow her to be antisemitic on her show at The Daily Wire as his employee—because all kinds of bigotry are endorsed except the kinds that affects him—and then went on to work for Charlie Kirk. Now she’s independent and has her own show where she livestreams for multiple hours every day. Considering she streams as much as she does, she is a busy woman and doesn’t post that much. She’s not really part of anything which makes her so much more dangerous, in my opinion, because that means she can’t wrong someone that ostracizes her. She has her media empire and her reach as a black woman, that legitimizes her racist rhetoric to black people, shouldn’t be underestimated. When she posts on X/Twitter, she is usually milking her past association with Charlie Kirk or pushing her incomprehensible conspiracy theories about anything and everything. If you have a question, Candace Owens most certainly has an answer and it’s likely she made it up on the spot.

What all of these influencers have in common is that they treat America as the absolute center of the universe with everything else only peripherally existing as is relevant to America. Their rhetoric is often contradictory and employs misinformation as it befits the moment. Their power doesn’t only lie in what they choose to spotlight, but most crucially in what they choose to omit. Every single one of the 19 accounts on my list (even the ones I found too uninteresting to mention) banks on sensationalizing what they know will dominate people’s consciousness for a while because of their cultural leeway and the media’s unquestioning reporting on them, allowing them to steer the discourse however they wish. They fight in the gutter and thus cannot be held to any reasonable standard because they’ve missed it from their inception in the public eye. Their entire existence definitively strikes down any illusion of cancel culture’s purported power. Cancel culture doesn’t exist because if it did, we wouldn’t be here. If cancel culture ever existed, it died when the alt-right began building their alternative infrastructure to the liberal mainstream as we were celebrating each one of them being kicked off our spaces.

As for how I was affected by this experiment, reading hateful comments that promise or claim necessary to wipe out entire groups of people based on inalienable characteristics hit me harder than anticipated. Every time it felt like a pang in the gut. I thought I had a thicker skin than this, but I also wasn’t prepared to see this many accounts say such hateful things that are elaborated on by others agreeing. Of course, such comment sections might be botted, but I didn’t look closer. Looking closer would’ve distorted the image I was after which was my organic reaction as a passive attendant of a nazi fest. I am horrified that such rhetoric exists in a public space anywhere, but still stand behind my observation that this rhetoric is limited to certain accounts participating in American political discourse that sometimes seeps into queer people’s comment sections, but doesn’t dominate. These forces are negligible on posts I saw from Spanish or Portuguese speakers. Yet that doesn’t lessen the damage to my psyche.

My case study, if you can call it that, focused on top down rhetoric for the most part. The next step for me is to populate my list with a specific subset of bigotry spouted by smaller accounts in comment sections to observe their relationships to each other, similarly to how I’ve been observing Elon Musk’s relationship to End Wokeness. I’m already so damaged by what I’ve done so far, so I’m not sure whether I’ll continue with what I just described.

If you got this far, thank you! I hope this was interesting for you as the reader as it was for me to go through, damage notwithstanding.

I opted for excluding local far-right movements out of care for my mental health as those would be hitting too close to home.↩
Meaning accounts with a couple of followers that wouldn’t get this much attention, were it not for her. The attention is usually negative because she effectively sends her transphobic followers after the person she’s quote-tweeting.↩

finished blanket!

2026-08-30T06:44:00+00:00

I finished my crochet project! I am very happy with how it turned out. I'm debating whether or not to add a border, but the single crochet foundation around the unfinished edges was giving me some trouble so I decided to leave it for now. I still have time. I finished this in 3 weeks! That's so much faster than I expected. Here's the pattern I used if you're curious.

I've also still got a lot of extra yarn, so I made a little baby hat to match. This worked up really fast. Pattern here. I made the 3-6mo size so hoping it will fit.

17/100

reply by email

Hi!

2026-08-30T07:56:00+00:00

I always have the big urge to express myself and talk about the things going through my head. So I decided to make this a place where I can put all the thoughts in my head into words. Maybe other people will read them and maybe they won‘t. That’s not the point of this blog, I really just want a place where I can get the words out, judgement free

I’ve had a bookstagram account to do just that for 2 1/2 years and I’ve decided to step back from it. It can be such a toxic place and I’d rather just yap about my books in peace (I also don’t want to have to take an aesthetically pleasing picture every single time I want to share a review)

But I want this place to be more than just book reviews. My head is full with so many things and I don’t want to push myself into just one single niche

So a quick introduction:

My name is Lara, I’m from Germany, I’m 25 years old and I work in childcare. I love working with kids so much but it’s also exhausting as fuck, considering I work with a lot of socially disadvantaged families.

Considering my bookstagram account, it's probably ovbious that I mainly read romance and romantasy books, with the odd thriller every now and then. I've read 128 books so far this year, I think it's safe to say I like to read a lot.

I have several medical conditions, the big one being Crohn’s disease. I was diagnosed when I was 13 so I’ve lived most of my life with it. I have diagnosed ADHD and suspected autism so I tend to get some intense hyperfixations (my current one is astronomy and astrophysics, I will make a post about this soon, I guarantee it)

Hence my big urge to talk about things, I just can’t keep these thoughts inside and I always feel like I need an outlet

I live with my boyfriend (let’s call him M.), we’ve been together for 5 years on September 21st. He’s also the reason I made this blog. So I want to end this post by sending you to his blog, maybe you’ll find something worth thinking about: unwissen.blog

Various stupid quotes i found on the internet and then put on my website

2026-08-30T19:03:00+00:00

Heya! So, a while ago, in this post, i talked about some random quotes which you can view in the random quotes widget on my other website. So, since I have nothing better to do, I might as well share some more of my favorite that I've collected over the years. So... Here are some more quotes, along with some context on where i found them!

Stop using rats to push your feminist agenda

Insane comment left on the comment section about a youtube short of someone talking about their pet rats

Speed dating with an audience is absolutely the first group activity in hell.

A youtube comment on a video about a shitty reality TV show. I'm sure you can figure out what that show was about.

Building in Minecraft has no positive effect on testosterone

A very bad instagram reel

Jumping a pregnant woman and delivering divine judgement on ed sheeran

An accurate description of the contents of hit novel Lord of Mysteries

Women are good to craft sandwich

Comment on a youtube video, possessing truly unmatched eloquence.

I'm going to play devils advocate for omitting waluigi's nipples. His legs are so long and his head is so big compared to his torso, I cannot imagine a size or position of nipples that wouldn't look out of place. I can't tell where his pectorals begin and end, and I'm scared for what we will will learn if Nintendo gave us a definitive answer.

Comment on this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=525cOfXztZw

You just turned this elevator ride into a reddit AMA of emotions

Quote from a shitty tumblr ad about "feminist pickup lines"

This music is inherently gay. This is a statistical fact.

Some guy called mkultra23456, complaining about the music choice in a youtube video about cute bunnies

Alrighty, that's it for now! I may return at some other point with more stupid quotes. I've collected a fair amount of them at this point, so this list isn't exactly exhaustive.

Psychonautica

2026-08-30T13:19:00+00:00

Back in the days of lax law enforcement and youthful immortality, I fancied myself a bit of a psychonaut. I idolized the old acid-heads of the 60s, firmly believed in the visionary intensity and prophetic wisdom of poets like Rimbaud and Blake, and supported organizations like MAPS and Erowid. I still have a dog-eared copy of Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” somewhere around here.

Some suggest that our brains create our reality. We have an evolution-approved paradigm that keeps us sane and procreating. The electric meat in our skulls acts a bit like a reduction valve, limiting the depth and breadth of perception for the sake of survival. I've always been fascinated by the prospect of not just opening that valve a bit more, but bypassing it altogether. To know. To see (for lack of a better word) things as they really are.

I’ve also wondered if our brains are more like antennas. What if it isn’t creating a shared vision of reality, but rather, tuning into this particular realm of experience. Receiving, rather than creating. Like a frequency on an old radio, when dialed in just right everything comes through loud and clear.

In between stations? Static and chaos. But how many channels might there be? What if another nudge to the left or right on the dial tunes in to a reality unfathomably different than this one? Every culture has something like a shaman, a mystic who transcends the mundane. Perhaps they are just people who can change the channel.

I miss the heedlessness of yesteryear. I had a terrible trip that ended my explorations. That’s worthy of its own post. But still, I sometimes find myself wondering what’s just behind the veil. It’s possible I’m forever barred from finding out in this life.

On Anarchism

2026-08-29T14:15:00+00:00

The goal of this article is not to wax lyrical about the potential of pre-existing anarchist societies and projects, I will not be discussing Rojava, the Zapatistas or Chaz. Indeed, Benn Jordan and The Pondscum Collective have both done such a topic more justice than I ever could. My goal instead is to use examples from the society you currently live in to convince you of the premise at the very bones of anarchism. The philosophical conceit that people are inherently well meaning, and will do good things without financial incentive or a legal mandate, even if they are mundane or difficult.

Example 1: Wikipedia

It is in fact, very easy to to grief a Wikipedia article. There is no real punishment for it either, if you get banned you can return from a new account, if the page gets locked, you can ruin the hard work of an entirely different community. Almost no one ever does this though. As a species, we have no interest in burning down things for no reason. Indeed, the continuation of Wikipedia as a real world Library of Alexandria, the most reliable means of finding information in a web now dominated by algorithms and SEO optimisation, is a wonderful argument for the productivity of anarchism.

Wikipedia is maintained entirely on donations, there is no data collection and no price of entry. It exists only because people know that it is a public good. Likewise, Wikipedia articles and pages are built by volunteers, without financial/legal incentive. The process of maintaining and creating pages like this is one I have engaged in, it is often mundane and time consuming, but we do it anyway because we recognise it is for the public good. No money changes hands and no one is legally compelled to do any of it.

The most reliable information comes from the goodwill of people willing to do what's boring for the greater good.

Example 2: Open Source

Open Source software is software that you could copy and paste and iterate on yourself at a moments notice. Fully decompiled code made publicly accessible for free, the digital world is one that is truly post scarcity, and open source is post intellectual property. Open source developers also make and maintain things via donations, with each project being iterated on by a fully fledged community. It is a group of people designing valuable production tools like FFMPEG or OBS without financial incentive, with only the collective goal of a better world with better software. These tools are often industry standard, and there is beauty in a production industry so dominated by ghoulish models like Adobe's still having to rely on the collective altruism of volunteers when it needs to convert a file. It is that collective altruism that creates the best and most unanimous software.

It is a world without money that creates the best tools.

Example 3: Local

Some of you might know me as the "football leftism" guy and I wanna elaborate on one of the projects that really pushed me towards this philosophy. In my youth I played for a Little League that provided free football for children of all abilities and ages. My Dad kept managing teams after I left, and roped me back in. I am now a player co-ordinator and manager in this project, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Unlike most Little Leagues we do not ask for any fee at all, we are ran entirely on donations, all staff are unpaid, and of course, we have one more method of funding. Volunteering. Parents are encouraged to volunteer their time once a year to do shifts in a cafe that provides the vast majority of the League's funding. The managers (and by extension referees at lower age groups) are also volunteers, usually parents. Entertainment for hundreds of children every Saturday morning is provided with nothing but goodwill and time.

There is no real penalty for not returning the kits we hand out, or not volunteering in the cafe beyond social ostracization, and yet there doesn't need to be. People turn up anyway, people are willing to volunteer their labour, and their time, to keep the league running because they know it provides an innate social good. They are not paid for their time, they are not arrested if they decline. The innate pro social instincts of the average person is enough to keep this miniature society running.

Equipment is also donated locally, boots that could be sold for more capital are donated so that parents who can't afford them can buy them for a pound. Parents build connections to their local community otherwise severed by atomisation and financial struggle. Children build vital connections in their formative years despite living in a world that financially incentivizes them to stay inside and do nothing. The world is built on good people who want to help others.

The best things come without incentive and without threat.

Oh, Dolly! Oh, Rocky!

2026-08-30T22:32:20.145870+00:00

Public domain photograph of Dolly Parton in 1970 via RCA Records and Wikimedia Commons.

Look, I know a solid portion of the planet has been sharing their love of Dolly Parton, but damn it, in this instance, it’s the right thing to do. When a bedrock of true humanity is taken out of a world that seems ever less humane, reiterating what was good about her is a form of trying to keep that goodness alive, and finding the determination and support to try and go about it.

Less caught up in the hubbub is Tim Curry, who died a day after Parton. Though he was a star of stage and screen, he was far less of a public presence. And yet, strange to say for someone who tends not to have much of an idea of or opinion about celebrities, much less be influenced by their coming or going, the death of both forced me to pause for a beat; both Parton and Curry left their stamp on different stages of my life.

You might say the pair bookended my childhood. The former had been in the background long before I appeared in the world; I grew up after all in Texas, where at the time, even if you tried to block out country music, it would seep in through the cracks. The songs of Parton’s that I really knew came to me via the films in which they were featured. 9 to 5 was paramount here, and it wasn’t just because of the catchy title tune. Even as a girl too young to fully grasp the intricacies of how gender played out in workplaces in the ‘80s, playground interactions with boys and run-ins of all sorts with male authority figures, from pastors to doctors to teachers and the places they occupied on the spectrum running from paternalistic to misogynistic to outright pedophilic, made me well aware that something stunk here, and it had to do with which set of chromosomes you possessed. The film’s clerical staff takeover proved that self-initiated justice was possible, and that not only did it not have to be grim, unforgiving, or unattractive; it could be fun and filled with music. And definitely too young to grasp what was going on in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, what I do remember (hopefully accurately) is that the girls of the house were assumed to be worthwhile, sympathetic human beings—not untouchables who’d fallen into a life of sin about which they had no choice and desperately wanted to escape or be saved from. Instead, it was the TV moralist who was the bad guy there. Neither movie was representative of great cinema—but without Dolly Parton, I’m betting both films would’ve been just OK at best.

Public domain photograph of Tim Curry in 1979 by Larry Williams, via A&M Records and Wikimedia Commons.

On the other end of my growing-up years, Tim Curry was the icon of a certain sort of possibility. His Dr. Frank-N-Furter was like nothing I’d been offered as an option for personality development, desire, acceptable attitude, or even just fashion. By my junior year of high school, The Rocky Horror Picture Show had become a standard part of my weekend, with one of my friends taking on the role of Frank-N-Furter in the live cast as the film played on screen. I’m sure acting the part helped to convince him a couple of years later that it was OK to come out, something that hadn’t really been a conceivable move at our high school. And for me, the film was the right balance of harmless and edgy, hosted by, let’s face it, a theater full of fellow dorks—but dorks who welcomed anyone who wanted to join in the theatrics.

A channel for a while for my aimless dissatisfaction, weekends in that torn-up theater were just fun, especially in those days where no one was threatening to bomb the place because a “gay” film was trying to turn the youth into godless gender-benders. It was a breeze to get the high school choir to go with me one night, the football types having just as much fun as the wispy drama boys—and I also managed to get “The Time Warp” included in my senior choir extravaganza. It left the audience of parents and families entirely puzzled, but then we moved on to a number from Fiddler on the Roof or Beauty and the Beast, and the odd little dance was forgotten. So yes, the film was central for a while to letting me see something beyond suburban high school dreams of success—but as was the case with 9 to 5 and BLWinT, it was Tim Curry and his interpretation of the sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania who made that film worth its cult status. Sure, he’d go on to scare the crap out of us as Pennywise, or play the upright submarine officer in The Hunt for Red October, and so much more—but for me, he was always Frank-N-Furter, ready to don a bustier and thigh-highs no matter what anyone said or thought about it.

Fast forward a decade, and what Tim Curry did for my high school friend, Dolly Parton apparently did for one of my grad school colleagues in Nashville. A gracious run-in with her in the parking lot of a local liquor store—“She is DIVINE,” he asserted with deadly serious tone and gaze—somehow convinced him that it would be possible to live in the South as an out gay man, and that staying in the place that had always been his home was worth it, because Dolly Parton had provided evidence that some fellow Tennesseans, at least, would treat him as a full member of humanity. I only gradually learned about her literacy, healthcare, and other “philanthropic”¹ work—partly because she didn’t blare her good deeds all over the place; she just did them. But by the time the much-anticipated Covid vaccine came out and she had herself streamed online getting jabbed, essentially inviting conspiracy theorists to suck it, I was coming late to the understanding that this woman was any number of rare and fantastic things at once, and that it was simply part of who she was.

It would have been absurd had I cried for Tim Curry, whose one character was a beacon for me in a past life. But I’ll admit that Parton’s passing hit me surprisingly hard, in a way that the death of no other celebrity had done before. I didn’t follow her singing or acting career, and other than her version of “Mule Skinner Blues” and a duet with Porter Wagoner (“Please Don’t Stop Lovin’ Me”), didn’t put her songs on regular rotation. But every time in the past twenty years I saw her speak or give an interview, or just witnessed her carrying herself and treating others with grace and good humor and good will, even in situations in which a lesser mortal might have legitimately reacted with outrage, and especially as the world and the rest of us in it seemed to turn ugly and bitter, I developed an odd level of respect and affection for this person I’d never even met.

But no—not odd, and not shameful that I did shed actual tears when I thought about her being gone. What would have been odd, and maybe shameful too, was just shrugging at having learned that something irreplaceably good had gone out of our world, especially at a time when we’d rejoice just to find public figures and news and so much else that’s merely not horrible. If the Dolly Parton talk goes on for a while, then, I’m all for it; maybe in sharing all that sad celebration, we can actually build up to something concrete and hopefully lasting that would honor her memory, and the best in ourselves as well.

^{1. “Philanthropic” in quotation marks, because that sounds like too transactional or distant an adjective to describe the very personal, involved ways that Parton seemed to approach what she did.↩}

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obituaries DollyParton TimCurry

AI ruined some of my most precious accessibility tools.

2026-08-28T22:05:00+00:00

Originally a post on the Fediverse.

CONTENT WARNING: This post contains mentions of ableism, AI, feelings of shame and struggle with accepting my disabilities.

You don't have to expose yourself to things that hurt you. Stay safe. ♥

I used to depend on text to speech and speech to text technology. AI took all of that away from me. It feels like all of these things are AI based now, they all depend on some horrible models that have been unethically trained on stolen data. I struggle to read long series of texts, I have to re-read things multiple times before my brain registers the information, I find reading exhausting and extremely energy intensive...

I don't know if it's the ADHD, the brain fog, having been exposed to so much video based content that my brain has turned to mush or maybe a form of undiagnosed dyslexia. I've been questioning myself about dyslexia for a long time now, but my list of disabilities is getting so ridiculously long that I'm too afraid to bring it up out of fear of being shamed.

But to cope with that, I sometimes asks my girlfriend to read things for me, because I process things a lot better when I hear them. And I used screen readers but they were often painfully unreliable and now, since the AI boom? I find them even more complicated to set up than before, you need to go get your own voice models and so on, and these are all horribly unethical. Getting one that sounds pleasant to listen to is very hard. When Mozilla shutdown #Pocket, I've lost the ability to listen to articles as podcast with a voice model that was really pleasant for me, and I've been missing it ever since, I feel like a core tool of my life was taken away from me.

These new voice models all became locked behind paywall, the ethics of how they were trained dubious at best, blatant stolen voices at worse. They get stuck on words, they fuck up in the strangest ways. Instead of sounding like a robot trying to sound like a human, they sound uncanny and genuinely freak me out. And the whole thing became a pain to set up. I gave up, being overwhelmed by options and the obtuse setups.

Same thing for speech to text. I used to depend on it because between the ADHD and the dystonia, typing is difficult. I often think way too fast and type too slowly to keep up, and I tend to get cramps from typing too long on a keyboard. Typing on glass on my phone sends me into spirals and sometimes full on anxiety attacks regularly because I'm just too hypersensitive and the feeling of typing on glass is absolutely horrible to me.

In some ways, speech to text was better for me before the whole AI boom. What both Apple and Google offered was actually fine, and on my Android phone, I'd use the Google Speech Synthesis thingy and cut off internet access to it, it was fine. Then, "AI" happened. And FUTO unveiled their keyboard, with great speech to text, it was powered by Whisper, but fully offline.

That worked really well but the cracks were already there and I feel like somehow, things have only gotten worse. I was still depending on this until around two months ago where I got fed up with it and stopped using it all together, on a whim. I was sick of it mutilating my sentences, changing words to things that made no sense after having written them correctly, just changing things last minute.

I would send the message without re-reading it no matter how much I tried to think about it, because again, ADHD. Then I would find myself rushing to edit what I wrote because none of it made any fucking sense because of how poorly dictation had botched it. Sometimes, it made so little sense that I couldn't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place and I was forced to improvise. It made it even more mentally intensive than typing, because I would have to painstakingly re-read everything. After multiple passes, I would still find sentences that made no sense whatsoever.

But the most frustrating part and the thing that kept creeping up on me to remind me of the origins of these models, is how it couldn't resist adding a "Thanks for watching!" at the end of all that I was saying. It was a constant problem, a constant thing that I had to delete. Later, it got worse, when it started adding stuff like: "(Subtitles by opensubtitles.org!)" that kind of things.

It frustrates me so much that I've had multiple heated arguements with people trying to defend AI, by explaining to me that "AI might be bad, but it has benefits for accessibility!" Using the very disabled people being thrown under the bus by AI as a shield, when my quality of life has substantially worsen ever since AI turned up everywhere, because I've lost access to all the good accessibility tools that I use to depend on, all of which were replaced with the most unethical and unreliable shit out there.

Thank you for reading.

what does that look like?

2026-08-30T05:17:56.040084+00:00

it's the thing i do right most consistently, I think. to be clear, I get way more stuff wrong when I'm refereeing, and in fact I'm experiencing a bit of a slump with it overall -- haven't run a game where I felt really successful in a while now -- but these days it's second nature to be inquisitive towards my players when they pull something off.

'i cast fireball.'

'i disarm him.'

'i go around town looking for a hireling.'

'what does that look like?'

this could be misconstrued as a storygaming or improv exercise, but to me it's not. I don't ask to prod my players into being more imaginative. I ask because I genuinely want to know.

I think it is important to cultivate curiosity in all things and dnd is of course no exception. I referee because I am curious about the world that the characters inhabit. I want to see what they do, how they react and interact.

What does that look like? I want to know. I am interested, friend. I am listening to you. Tell me.

rose ▪ bud ▪ thorn - august 2026

2026-08-30T07:30:00+00:00

rose

I met Suliman!
I'm having a good time playing FFXIV; made it to Heavensward now, excited to play more.
My wife gifted me the new Hello Kitty Island Adventure DLC (Tea Garden) and it's been very sweet and calming :)
We had a great date day on which we tried out a vegan kebab we had never eaten before, went to a few manga shops, Build-a-Bear, a cinnamonroll shop, and more.
My matcha order surprisingly arrived without notice, just in time, when I had used up my last bit of the old an hour or so prior.
We went to Gamescom and I found merch of a Sanrio character I like that barely gets any or is never included anywhere; a Mocha plush, and I even pulled Mocha (or rather, Cinnamoroll dressed as Mocha) out of a blindbox too! Plus I paid less than the price tag said for something.
The way my wife looked at me when I pulled the small plushie out of the blindbox brings tears to my eyes. It was just so overtly, shockingly full of genuine love and joy for me. I can't even describe how it feels to see someone look at you like that when finally something good happens to you. I think remembering that look will sustain me for the rest of my life.
Saw a full rainbow in a pink sky while looking out the window.
I got back into journaling for joy, and using up some of the stickers I had accumulated in the months of not doing so.
I felt really grateful for a friend reaching out that I hadn't talked to in months and how supportive he was when I told him about my struggles. He independently remembered specific upcoming days I was worried about, and then checked in with me on them to see how I was doing. I am still so surprised that anyone would do that for me, unasked.
Generally received kind messages and emails of support, which I am thankful for.
Started feeling more like myself again towards the very end of the month.

bud

Getting back into my gym routine that I had to pause for health reasons.
Regaining my sense of purpose, re-establishing parts of my life that give me a sense of security, a plan to follow, something to work towards.
Studying for my degree. I've really fallen off this semester.
Finishing up my blog post drafts. There's so much I wanna put out there, but time just keeps running through my hands like fine sand.

thorn

This has been the worst month of the year for me... yet. What happened this month cannot ever happen to me again.
I've had 20+ high heart rate notifications via my smartwatch this month because of anxiety, stress, panic attacks and rumination, mentally spiraling while sitting there doing nothing. I don't usually mention it when I talk about my illnesses because for the past few years, it genuinely did not affect me at all after treatment with EMDR, but I was diagnosed with (C-)PTSD years ago. Something in my life recently triggered it again pretty badly, so this is the fallout. I've spent most of this month trying to exit this hypervigilant state, this feeling of always being in danger or hunted, even when I know I am safe, and trying to implement the coping mechanisms I had learned.
It has also made some some other mental health issues reemerge that were never officially diagnosed, and I might need to get on that. Unfortunately, Germany is currently completely gutting psychotherapy...
All of that is the reason it's been quiet and I have been very behind on answering emails.
I've endured some really weird and off-putting behavior from multiple different people this month; some friends, some acquaintances, but also strangers.

☁️☁️☁️

pics

Published 30 Aug, 2026

nobody has principles anymore

2026-08-29T03:59:37.576997+00:00

A few years ago I started feeling icky about giving away so much of my personal data. To Google, mostly. The feeling intensified when Google stopped being an ostensibly chill and cool place (although it probably never was) and started being overtly evil, as happens to all corporations under capitalism. I started partially using Protonmail and looked into self-hosting as a replacement for Google Drive. Neither of these solutions work that well. (I can't email anyone from a protonmail address without them thinking I'm a criminal, and I don't have the resources to run my own network-attached storage or anything like that.) But I still care very much about privacy, and try to use privacy-friendly alternatives whenever I can.

And what does it get me? Mocked by everyone I know. A few years ago I tried to get my family and close friends to start using Signal, because I got worried about the privacy of SMS/MMS. I got people to start using it, but I eventually realized that they were ONLY using it to talk to me, and not other "normal" people.

I'm not trying to be preachy, but I can't understand why people don't care about major social problems like this. I gave the example of online privacy, but also climate change, supporting blatantly evil corporations like Google, Spotify, Meta, Amazon, every streaming platform, every AI company. But here's the thing. I just answered my own question. Everything is evil now. You can do what I do and spend ungodly amounts of effort to partially reduce your reliance on these companies at the cost of a great deal of convenience, or you can ignore all the bad stuff.

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I can't ignore it. It just feel so gross to give my money or data to people I know are doing horrendous stuff with it. So I'm trapped between this gross feeling on one side and risking coming across as eccentric at best or insufferably sanctimonious at worst.

required listening

I Wish You Every Success by Fashion Tips

Re-entered a tunnel for better pictures and less chaotic urbex safety

2026-08-31T06:14:00+00:00

I recently posted about going on a walk into a tunnel. Well, I went back into the tunnel recently with a different group of people, but this time I was "in charge" and my safety rules were the ones we were using. It was a much better experience!

With fewer people and less chaos I was also able to take the time to take better pictures. Here are some of those pictures. Warning: the final picture is an image of two roaches sitting right next to an itty-bitty bat. If you don't want to see a fairly large image of either of those things, do not navigate past the picture of barn swallows.

An incredible muck deposit which has calcified(??) over the years, then got graffitied. It's the best art in the tunnel, but the tunnel is so narrow that it's difficult to photograph.

In general you find that the tunnel is full of the kind of political or ideological graffiti you never see above ground. I strongly believe that people come to write their heart's true cry in the tunnel because the tunnel is secret and nothing they say here has to be defended in public. You can write your own journey into your soul on these walls and walk away, never forced to confront it again, if you prefer. More private than a bathroom stall, but the same vibes. We saw a lot of graffiti which was fairly desperate, psychosexual rambling about holograms and false realities and vaginas. It was interesting!! I have left those writers their privacy. However this was the funniest sexual graffiti in the tunnel:

"IT'S 2016 EVERYBODY EATING ASS NOW A DAYS / MAN ASS"

Some calthemite deposits, formed by lime leaching through concrete for decades and decades undisturbed:

The tunnel vibes, in general:

"WORSHIP SATAN - RESPECT WOMEN"

Here is the image of barn swallows. The image after it is two roaches and a bat chilling together:

my august '26

2026-08-31T18:02:00+00:00

On my bookstagram account I started doing monthly dumps/recaps at the end of each month. I like thinking about everything I did each month, everything I read, listened to or watched. Everything I thought about and how I felt. I don't know why but I like to take a moment to reflect on everything that happened in a month so I can move on to the next month.

On Instagram I always felt like I needed to cut myself short on these posts. I mean who would actually read all that? But on here I'm gonna put every single thought down. That's literally what this blog is about. I don't know how long this will be and it will probably be a bit messy, so bear with me.

M. and I started August with a little trip to Berlin. It was a very fun, short trip and I'm really happy we got to go away, even just for three days. I got to go to quite a few bookstores and I visited an all romance bookstore which was a big highlight for me!! Every single wall and shelf was pink and they had a cardboard cutout off Connor Storrie!!! FUN!! M. wrote his own blog post about this trip (it's in German though).

Not so fun was the fact that I really noticed my Crohn's disease on this trip. I was EXHAUSTED and I did almost have an accident... not just once. The rest of the week before I had to go back to work I decided to just recover and rest a bit.

One of my co-workers used to be a tattoo artist and she loves to randomly ask me if I'm free after work so I can get a few of the tattoos I've got planned. Obviously I say yes every single time (I've gotten 5 new tattos and touched up 3 since she started working with me and that's only been two months). I finally got a tattoo for Sleep Tokens song 'Euclid' and I also got "there is no linear time" in heptapod from the movie Arrival around my elbow.

M. and I watched Project Hail Mary on a random Saturday and that was the start of my intense hyperfixation on space and astronomy. Everything about the communication between Ryan Gosling and the alien in that movie VEXXED me. I studied English at uni and I'm very interested in linguistics so that movie was incredibly frustrating for me. To make up for that and to calm me down, we watched Arrival straight after. I had watched Arrival before but it's been a while and I had apparently forgotten how phenomenal that movie is. It completely made up for how infuriating I found Project Hail Mary.

However, Project Hail Mary reminded me that I've always had this very deep respect and fascination for the universe and I craved more of that. We watched Interstellar the very next day and that was it. I wanted to quit my job and start studying physics so I could get a master in astrophysics (mind you, I've always hated maths but suddenly I was very eager to learn and learn I did). M. and I started watching different astrophysics videos on Youtube every single day. I learned so many things about star constellations, gravity, different planets, black holes, spacetime and honestly so many more things. I spent my break at work researching. There is so so so much more to learn, I haven't even touched the surface.

My mum lives in a small town so there's not as much light pollution there, we visited her one weekend and just spotted star constellations one night. We also saw a few shooting stars from the perseids. The sun eclipse couldn't have come at a better time! I could go on and on, I think I probably will in a different blog post. Thinking about space and the universe makes me feel some type of way, I can barely describe it. I think I have to stop talking about this now or I fear I never will.

I read 17 books in August, 5 of which were audiobooks (AUDIOBOOKS COUNT AS READING!!! Thinking otherwise is mean at best and ableist at worst). I like to use StoryGraph to track what I'm reading so feel free to befriend me on there if you're interested in seeing the different books I read my StoryGraph account

After the start of my astronomy obsession, I wasn't really interested in reading about anything else. But I'm also someone, and this might sound silly to some people, I just NEED some sort of romance in my books. Otherwise I literally can't concentrate on it, there are very few exceptions to this (mainly when I decide to read a thriller).

I decided to start re-reading some books by Ali Hazelwood (also because the The Love Hypothesis movie will be out soon and I wanted to do a re-read anyway). Love on the Brain and Love, Theoretically kind of scratched that space itch, but not really. I found a reddit post with recommendations for romance books that have space or astronomy themes. My absolute highlight was Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I only finished it yesterday, but my god!!!! That book completely tore me apart. I will post a full review of this at a later date.

I also decided to read Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu as I really enjoyed the Netflix show. I don't think I would have enjoyed the book as much if I hadn't watched the show and knew what would happen but I also didn't NOT enjoy this book by any means. M. wants me to read the second book before the second season comes out so I probably will read that as well. We will see.

For now I'll be spending every free minute finding more romance books set in space or space related fields.

If anyone's read until the end, I appreciate you, I hope you have a lovely september <3