Bear Blog Trending Posts

Going to the Movies Alone

hidden (householderkarl) — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:53:00 +0000

Maybe it’s all in my head, but it seems like there’s a stigma around doing certain things alone. I especially feel it here in the US. Dining at nice restaurants, traveling, going to the movies, etc.

Of course, I’ve done all those things solo, but I definitely felt self-conscious. Traveling for work, I’d eat at the nicest places my company card could handle. Going abroad alone can be an incredibly rewarding experience. Hell, even just loading up a pack and heading out for a few days in the wilderness can be life-changing.

And then, there’s the movies. I don’t know why, but it feels weird.

The Akira 4K re-release is in town this weekend. Only the subbed version has reasonable showtimes and my family isn’t about that. My wife would usually sit through anything just to hang out, but my son would likely be bored. They’re all about the dubs; the sometimes highly emotive Japanese anime voices grate on them. No shade; I totally understand.

So, I decided I’d just go on my own. But when I was about to buy the ticket, something stopped me. I just couldn’t do it. It’s stupid, but I realized I’d feel weird in the theater by myself.

So, I ended up downloading it. I rationalized it by telling myself I have a 75” TV and a comfy couch. I can save a ton of money by just watching it at home. But really, deep down, I know the truth.

It’s weird. I never feel that pressure in Asia. I feel it much less in Europe. There’s just something about this place.

As for the weekend

I’ve realized that many of my recent posts have been themed in some way. I’ll have a topic in mind and put some effort into addressing it specifically. There's nothing wrong with that; it's just not why I started writing here.

I think I noticed some decent readership and felt compelled to write more focused posts. But I’m here to ramble! I’m not here to research, to rewrite, to think of what others might find interesting.

I’ll never be a writer, a popular “blogger”, or much of anything really. I’m okay with that. Sometimes I just like to take words from my head and put them on the screen. The sound of the keyboard and the mental calm that follows, however short-lived.

I’ve no plans this weekend. The boy doesn’t have a match, it’s about as hot as the surface of the sun outside, and the closest mall had an active shooter recently (‘Merica!). Just a lazy suburban Saturday for us.

I’ll enjoy coffee and silence. I started reading “The Devotion of Suspect X” by Keigo Higashino the other day, so maybe I’ll make some progress. I’ve also been tempted to download Elden Ring again. I haven’t played the DLC and the new starting classes in the Tarnished Edition look tempting.

Re: "i wanna live an npc life" by signalundefied

hidden (trialandfailure) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:30:00 +0000

I stumbled across this blog post by signalundefied, and then this response post by Absurd Pirate, and I wanted to contribute a little bit to the discussion.

signal's original post can be summarized in a couple of different ways, depending on how charitable you care to be with your interpretation. On the more generous end, signal is advocating for a lifestyle in which you live life for yourself on your own terms, and don't allow the expectations of others to unduly influence your behavior. The following is perhaps what signal intends to be their thesis statement:

[...] it’s the ultimate "i don't give a fuck" state of mind.

On its face, this sounds ideal, and perhaps even admirable. However, the context which surrounds it is quite a bit more grim, and saturates signal's point with a sort of radically apathetic fatalism that is profoundly unhealthy. It all appears to flow from the opening paragraph, in which signal defines their understanding of what is communicated by pejoratively dubbing someone an "NPC":

the general consensus around being an npc is that you’re giving up your autonomy—essentially becoming a side character in someone else's story or watching life pass you by while doomscrolling on your phone.

Already we can see the potential for some cracks to form in their argument, because this is not a complete reading of what "NPC" tends to mean. signal is correct that one aspect is living your life without exercising agency, but the connotation usually isn't that someone is actively choosing to live this way. Most of the time, NPC is used to describe people who don't exercise agency because they literally have no agency to exercise. It's used to denigrate people who are judged not to have any sort of interiority, capacity for critical thought, or individuality. To "live an NPC life" would mean you mindlessly consume the most popular media without actually thinking about it; get your news from whichever source you were conditioned from childhood to prefer and then credulously accept everything it tells you; spend your time not adding anything to the world, but compulsively consuming for its own sake; and generally skulk around the world, aimlessly wandering without an inner monologue or any spark of the things we value about humanity.

Whether such people actually exist is not relevant to this discussion; the point is that when signal advocates for the life of an NPC, this is the baggage of the term being used.

The immediate counterargument might be that I am judging signal's argument based on a context which they don't draw from. If "NPC" to signal merely refers to someone who could exercise agency but purposefully chooses not to, I should respond to the argument with that definition in mind rather than one which they are not using.

Firstly, it is not always reasonable to sidestep connotation this way. If I were to write an essay entitled "I wanna live a Nazi life," and then open by defining "Nazi" as "someone who merely takes pride in their heritage," it would be silly for me to take umbrage when people call me out for misusing the term. "NPC" doesn't mean "stoic," "unfazed," or, as signal explicitly claims, "doing your own thing." In fact, "doing your own thing" is the direct antithesis of what being an NPC is, because that phrase implies that you are choosing your own path regardless of external influence, whereas NPCs do not have or exhibit the willpower to choose which thing is theirs. Its meaning is closer to "p-zombie," "robot," or "without consciousness," which are obviously not things to aspire to. Just like "Nazi" has a wealth of baggage that prevents me from taking seriously anyone who uses it to mean "someone who is proud of their heritage," "NPC" has baggage that prevents me from taking signal seriously when they use it to mean "someone who is unbothered by social expectations."

If this were my only issue with the post, it would just be a difference in framing, and there wouldn't be anything more to say. But more importantly, the post seems to comport more to the complete understanding of "NPC" that I explained above than to the definition signal themselves has chosen to use. It is bizarre to read, because signal opens with the aforementioned incomplete definition of "NPC" shortly before describing the lifestyle in a way that matches the complete understanding they either implicitly reject or are unaware of.

take an npc blacksmith in skyrim, for example. do they care whether or not you slay dragons? no. do they care if you come in and steal all their shit because you pickpocketed them? no way. what do they do? they just keep living their life as a blacksmith [...]

It astounds me how signal could use this as an example to portray living as an NPC as aspirational. If anything, this is a perfect demonstration of why living "an NPC life" would be disastrous. The Skyrim blacksmith doesn't care whether you've stolen from them; they just continue on, incapable of recognizing that they have been victimized. The world could fall apart around them, and the quality of their life could suffer immeasurably, but since they are programmed just to keep on smithing, that's all they do.

This is a horrible lifesyle to present as your ideal, and striving to live this way would be horrendously irresponsible. And this example does not comport with the definition of "NPC" that signal claims to be using.

be an npc. drive a boring car—who gives a fuck? have a boring job. do nothing after work. why do you have to do something after work? do something because you feel like doing it, not because you feel like you have to.

The "drive a boring car" example is more mundane, and more suited to signal's definition. Their argument would have benefited if this was the only sort of example the post used. However, "do nothing after work, because why should you do something?", like the blacksmith example, is a terrible aspiration, and plays directly into the definition of "NPC" that signal does not use.

I believe that to get home from work and simply sit there rotting, mindlessly consuming media with no intention of learning, or thinking, or analyzing, is not healthy for your mind. Thinking critically is good for you. Analyzing the media you consume refines your enjoyment and makes the experience richer. And though it is an unfortunate reality that our modern capitalist dystopia does not afford everyone the time, money, or energy to pursue creative and constructive hobbies, engaging in creation is more emblematic of the human spark than endless consumption. And while consumption in and of itself isn't bad, by any means, it's like the toast upon which the butter of creation ought to be spread. Creating helps you consume more critically, and consuming critically helps you refine and deepen your own creations. People are naturally going to consume more than they create, but they should strive to do both.

Compare this mindset to that for which signal appears to be advocating. signal believes that the ideal lifestyle is one in which you get home from work, plop yourself onto the couch, and consume media, all the while going out of your way to avoid thinking about it, in emulation of the Skyrim blacksmith who does not think about the ramifications of the player's quest. signal appears to be urging us to spend our time purposefully avoiding doing anything constructive, and even refusing to engage in introspection regarding those things we consume which other people have created.

This, again, is a terrible aspiration.

when you stop caring about being the main character, you finally get to just live your life.

And this attitude is not conducive to living your life. This attitude is what prompts you to sit idly by while, as signal indicates, "your life passes you by." Not only does this attitude make you stagnate, but it leads you to grow soft: it dulls your thinking, atrophies your ability to introspect, and strips from you your uniquely human ability to engage with the world.

As regretful as signal may find it, we are the main characters of our own lives. This cannot be avoided. We will only ever see the world through our own eyes, interpreting it in our own minds. It is undeniable that we should not allow peer pressure and the expectations of others to dictate how we live our lives. signal says this. But being an NPC is to surrender your cognition, which leaves you no other choice but to passively absorb and defer to the influence of other people. signal seems to portray being an NPC as being a free thinker, but they are complete, diametric opposites. It is damaging to relinquish agency in pursuit of some misguided "fucks not given" attitude. You should avoid the undue influence of other people when their influence hinders your progress toward becoming your most actualized self, but this assumes that your goal is to actualize in the first place. By a plain reading of signal's post, they appear utterly uninterested in such things.

It may be argued that I am misconstruing signal's point. Perhaps signal isn't advocating for us to soften our minds to match the Skyrim blacksmith, but is instead arguing that we should be empowered to do so if we so chose. Perhaps signal might not find such a life ideal, but is arguing that anyone who does should be free to pursue it.

I believe, however, that this interpretation would be pushing the bounds of signal's post beyond what a plain reading reveals. At no point does signal explicitly say any of this, nor do they indicate that the thesis of their post is one's freedom to choose. They directly state that "the NPC lifestyle," explained as the lifestyle of the Skyrim blacksmith, is the ideal for which they are arguing:

but here’s my take: the npc lifestyle is actually a very viable way to live.

It would be one thing if they said, "the NPC lifestyle is viable, and everyone should feel free to live it if that is what makes them happy." Instead, signal spends the post expounding upon how their ideal, "stoic" sort of happiness naturally flows from the "NPC lifestyle."

maybe the secret to living—or maybe this is just a retelling of stoicism and endless levels of historical philosophy—is that the goal is to just do your own thing.

Again, "just doing your own thing" in this statement does not appear to refer to choosing your lifestyle as you see fit. In context, it appears to be referring directly back to the Skyrim blacksmith.

Ultimately, it is untenable to claim that signal's post argues that the key to happiness is having the freedom to choose your lifestyle, and that "the NPC lifestyle" is just one among many valid options. It is clear that their argument is that "the NPC lifestyle" is the specific ideal to which we should be striving.

Absurd Pirate's response delves a little deeper into some issues with the argument, including how their characterization of the Skryim blacksmith isn't completely accurate to the game anyway, and how actual stoic philosophy is very different than what signal seems to believe.

I would implore to signal themselves to realize that they are straying too far into the realm of apathetic disconnection from the world. Don't just "do nothing after work," even if that's what you want to do. The things we want are frequently not healthy for us to have, and there is more to life than taking the path of least resistance and whittling away our finite lifespans just passively absorbing the things that other people do and say. The fact that you bothered to write the blog post indicates that there is a spark of creativity in you, a compulsion to create, and this is not something to discourage or be ashamed of. In fact, it is good, and should be nurtured and cherished.

If you want to drive a boring car, do it. If you want to pull back from the endless news cycle and focus on yourself, do it. But if you want to live "the NPC lifestyle," do not do it, for your own sake. Becoming anything close to an NPC would be a terrible fate.

As critical as I have been of signal's argument, I am grateful they put it out there, because writing and interpersonal discourse is healthy and productive. Their post made me think, and the fact that I can do that, the fact that I motivated myself to write this instead of just mindlessly scrolling, which would have been much easier, is a blessing. I wish signal would see it that way too.

So, use our app instead of the mobile website, ya, I'm Good

hidden (yaimgood) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:19:00 +0000

Came across another website today that told me their app is better to use. The pop up message and banner always there to remind me. The site just lagged and I'm sure they do this on purpose on mobile web browsers.

So, have we forgotten to create proper websites? Big corporation can't make a simple website but can create an app that tracks me and does whatever else.

I close the website and don't install the app.

Ya, I'm Good.

You’re Gonna Carry That Weight

hidden (householderkarl) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:42:00 +0000

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Somewhere in the tension between our innate desire for life to have meaning and the reality of this cold, indifferent universe, there is a fundamental truth. Camus called it the absurd.

The gods condemned Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down. Over and over again. Forever.

Camus saw in this a clear picture of the human condition: repetition, pointless labor, and death on a random afternoon, undoing anything we might have built.

A tragic fate? Not entirely. When Sisyphus walks back down the mountain, preparing to carry that weight yet again, he is conscious. He recognizes the absurdity of it all, and that is his victory over it. Rather than hope for something else that will never come, he owns the struggle as his own.

The wrath of capricious gods is robbed of its sting. It isn’t naive optimism; it’s quite the opposite. Meaning isn’t something to be found out there. It isn’t at a time or place in the future. It’s here now, in the struggle that never resolves.

You’re gonna carry that weight. Your freedom, and perhaps even your joy, can be found in the absurdity of it all.

My six weeks in a coma...

hidden (peteswitzerland) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 05:45:00 +0000

Good evening, friends and others!

In a previous post, I mentioned that I’d recently been in a coma. A few readers have contacted me asking for “the tea.” And so, here it is: my very own English Breakfast blend...

The tale begins on the evening of March 21st — just a day after my blog post about coyotes, “Coyotes.” I was nearly a week into housesitting for my dear friend Persephone Halibut, a highly successful digital artist whose 2022 work Dave & Buster’s at the Edge of the Universe sold at an NFT auction for a staggering $9.94 million. Needless to say, her home was quite luxe!

After watching an episode of a television program called The Summer I Turned Pretty and winding down in Persephone's sensory deprivation tank, I retired to bed around 8:33 PM and drifted off to sleep soon after.

Earlier that day, in a neighborhood nearly seven miles north of Ms. Halibut’s residence, a 97-year-old woman named Doris Rumph had somehow locked herself out of her granddaughter Sicily Rumph’s house. Sicily and her husband Greg had invited family and friends over to celebrate Greg’s first-place finish in a regional miniature golf tourney. The family later said they believed Grandma Doris had crawled through a small doggie door and found herself trapped in the fenced backyard. She attempted to tunnel her way out, but eventually gave up and instead escaped by gnawing through a half-rotted fence post.

According to a leaked police interview, Doris claimed she decided she would walk herself home at this point — apparently forgetting she no longer had a home. It burned down years earlier in a fire that authorities suspected was part of an insurance scheme cooked up by Doris and her grandson-in-law Greg, both desperate to pay off debtors following some ill-advised investments in NFT artworks.

After wandering the area for several hours, Doris finally arrived home — or so she thought. In reality, her house was a pile of rubble and ash on the other side of town. Instead, she had chanced upon Persephone Halibut’s estate, where I’d fallen asleep just minutes prior. Doris was initially unable to open the locked gate at the end of the driveway. However, she identified a weak point in gate’s wooden frame and managed to gnaw through it. From there, she located an unlocked window and crawled inside.

As I’ve stated, this was not the elder Rumph’s residence at all. But Doris — weary, confused, and extremely dehydrated — seemed to legitimately believe she had finally arrived home. So, the old woman shuffled into Persephone’s kitchen, gulped down an entire half-gallon of whole milk from the fridge, and proceeded to heat up a Lean Cuisine frozen dinner in the microwave. She brought her turkey tetrazzini to the living room and somehow managed to fire up an episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty to watch with dinner.

That’s when Doris noticed the faint sound of snoring. It was me, Pete Switzerland! But unfortunately, in Doris’ dusty and brittle mind, she was hearing the snores of an intruder! I’m unsure if she was terrified or enraged in this moment, but Doris quickly decided she needed a weapon to defend herself and her property. She chose a vintage, wooden tennis racket hanging in a display on the wall. It once belonged to tennis legend Chris Evert, who had played with this very racket throughout her 1975 French Open title run.

Moments later, I awoke to find a 97-year-old woman bashing my skull repeatedly with a valuable piece of sports memorabilia. It was as if Doris had been possessed by Chris Evert herself — every blow to my noggin was one of the tennis icon’s flat and powerful forehands. My bloodied head was simply a large, fuzzy tennis ball in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Before I knew what had hit me over and over with an old tennis racket, Doris suffered a massive stroke and collapsed on top of me. I slipped in an out of consciousness over the next several hours, too weak to move the possibly deceased crone from atop me.

The next day, Persephone returned home and found our seemingly lifeless bodies in a mess of blood, splinters, and silken sheets. She later described the scene as “deeply disturbing and strangely erotic.”

Miraculously, Doris Rumph made a full recovery. She remains incarcerated, awaiting trial.

I woke up six weeks later.

Blocking YouTube Features

hidden (jaspermacleod) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:32:00 +0000

This is a quick PSA to let you know about a neat feature uBlock Origin (uBO) has that you can implement right now if you’re trying to cut down on your YouTube consumption.

For those that don’t know, “uBlock Origin is not an ‘ad blocker,’ it’s a wide-spectrum content blocker with CPU and memory efficiency as a primary feature.” It works in your browser.

By the way, if you’re not using an ad blocker when surfing the web, you should be. The FBI “Cyber Criminals Impersonating Brands Using Search Engine Advertisement Services to Defraud Users” even recommends you use one. I think uBO is the most popular one and the one everyone recommends. Other ad blockers may exist.

With uBO, you can block YouTube Shorts from your recommended and subscribed feeds, and you can get rid of the Shorts button on the sidebar. It’s important to note this doesn’t stop you from being able to watch shorts, it just stops you from seeing them.

You can also go further by hiding the recommended videos on the right side of the screen when watching a video, hiding the Ask, Download, Clip, Subscribe, Like/Dislike, Save, etc. buttons below a video, debloating the search page and search results, and more.

The uBO subreddit has pages dedicated for YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter, mix and match to your liking uBO Reddit:

Of course, don't just copy/paste commands into your "My filters" list without reading what they do.

Below are the ones I use:

! Explore more topics
youtube.com##ytd-chips-shelf-with-video-shelf-renderer

! Hide Shorts shelf on the homepage
youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer:has(#title-text:has-text(Shorts))

! Hide Shorts from the sidebar menu
youtube.com##ytd-guide-entry-renderer:has-text(Shorts)

! Hide YouTube recommendations on sidebar
www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer

! Center videos with no playlist
www.youtube.com###secondary.ytd-watch-flexy:has(>#secondary-inner>#chat-container>:only-child):has(>#secondary-inner>#playlist[hidden])

! YT - Below the Player Buttons - Ask
www.youtube.com###top-row.ytd-watch-metadata yt-button-view-model:has([aria-label="Ask"])

! YT - Below the Player Buttons - Download
www.youtube.com###top-row.ytd-watch-metadata ytd-download-button-renderer

! YT - Below the Player Buttons - Clip
www.youtube.com###top-row.ytd-watch-metadata yt-button-view-model:has([aria-label="Clip"])

If you want to change how many videos show per row, you can use these commands, taken from this Reddit link (I currently use this, so it works):

! YouTube 5 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages) 
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com###contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;)

! YouTube 5 Videos Per Row Fix (Channel Page margin fix)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(margin-right: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important; margin-left: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important;)

! YouTube 5 Videos Per Row Fix (Font Size fix)
youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)
youtube.com###metadata-line.ytd-video-meta-block:style(font-size: 1.2rem !important; line-height: 1.8rem !important;)
youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-slim-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)

Hope this helps you!

disabilities are NOT FUNNY

hidden (rnotte) — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:16:59 +0000

i like to think i have a high tolerance for dark humor. you want to make a quip about a crime case, CSI-style? not my thing, but fine, do as you please. but, there's a line that should not be crossed, no matter how high your tolerance: joking about disabilities, both mental and physical.

because disabilities are NOT FUNNY.

i've seen many an internet comment casually use terms related to mental disabilities. you know, terms like, "hyperfixation", "get on meds", "schizo", "ADHD brain", or the dreaded R-word. as if having ADHD, OCD, autism, tourette's, or schizophrenia is soooo funny and quirky you guys! :P well, it's not.

as an artist with autism, i can say for sure that i don't think autism is funny. i'm not on meds, but i do struggle with distractions, overstimulation, nervous tics, and mentally "shutting down". in social situations, i still deal with the perception that people are merely tolerating my presence at best, or believing i'm a burden at worst. i find ways to manage it without taking meds, but making jokes about it is not one of them.

and hence why i have no tolerance for people who use disability-related terms so flippantly. especially if they use them as substitutes for "stupid idiot". i don't think i need to spell out the implications of that.

so, please, stop making jokes about disabilities. they are NOT FUNNY.

Your photos should not have to depend on me forever

hidden (pego) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:37:43 +0000

Putting a few photos on a new service is easy.

Trusting it with years of your life is different.

A while ago, someone who had bought a Lifetime Founder plan for Moments emailed me with a question.

How do I intend to keep Moments running for the long term?

When I first wrote about Moments, I described the idea simply: Bear Blog, but for photos.

A quiet place for personal photo journals. No likes, no follower counts, and no pressure to perform. Just a small home on the web for photos from everyday life.

But once people begin building those homes, they are trusting Moments with more than a few files.

In the email, they pointed me toward Herman’s Bear Manifesto.

In it, Herman writes openly about the future of Bear: how it is funded, how it is maintained, and what happens if he can no longer run it himself.

I understand why that gives people confidence.

Bear is not just somewhere they occasionally publish a post. For many people, it has become their home on the web.

Moments asks for a similar kind of trust.

Perhaps more than I initially realised.

Photos accumulate. Their meaning changes. Something ordinary today might become deeply important ten or twenty years from now.

So what happens to Moments in ten or twenty years?

The honest answer is that I do not know.

I cannot promise that it will exist forever. Nobody knows what their life will look like decades from now.

But I can say what I intend.

I intend to keep Moments running for the long term.

It is not a temporary experiment to me. I use it for my own photos. I care about what it has become, and about the small community growing around it.

Moments Plus makes that future more realistic.

Photos cost money to store and serve. Each person who chooses to support Moments helps cover that work and makes the service easier to sustain.

It does not need to become enormous.

It needs to become sustainable.

Perhaps, one day, sustainable enough that I can give it all of my working time.

That would be the dream.

Still, intention is not certainty.

Trust cannot depend entirely on believing that one person will keep a service alive forever.

It also has to show up in the product itself.

From the beginning, Moments has let you export your original photographs and the information around them.

That mattered to me.

But it was still mostly the raw material.

I kept working on it.

Now the journal itself comes with you.

Every export includes a complete static website in the journal’s own theme, with its moments, writing, pages, collections, captions, and dates together.

You can open it on your computer, browse it offline, or host it somewhere else. The export includes instructions for putting it online yourself.

Not just the photographs.

The thing you built with them.

Whatever you make inside Moments should remain yours to keep.

This does not answer every question about longevity. My work there is not finished.

I want to keep finding better ways to preserve journals, move them, and keep them online without depending entirely on one service.

But this is one concrete part of the answer.

You can read more about how it works in the handbook.

I did not build this because I expect Moments to disappear.

I built it because a home for your photos should not become a cage around them.

I hope Moments is still here many years from now.

I am building it with that intention.

But your photos should not have to depend on hope alone.

The plan is to stay.

The door is open.

Welcome to quiet take

hidden (quiettake) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Hey, welcome to quiet take. I'm Deaf, and I've spent years tinkering with things and writing about tech on the web.

I've been blogging on and off since 2004, but I wanted to try out Bear Blog as a platform and use this space for more specific topics: a Deaf perspective on tech, and whatever else catches my attention along the way. Now I want a space that's just for that intersection, at whatever pace it comes.

As I mentioned, I'm new to Bear Blog, and I'm excited to see what I can do with it. I'm looking forward to tinkering and adding some cool plugins along the way.

This is going to start slow. I don't have a big backlog of posts ready to go yet. But it's an exciting time to be paying attention to this stuff, especially with how fast AI is moving into sign language and accessibility right now.

More to come. If you want to check out my other blog, I'm also over at Toby Geeks Out! on Micro.blog.

Thanks for reading.

Flowers for you

hidden (forsomeone) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:49:42 +0000

Dear dad,

I bought you some flowers. I'm planning on buying some battery operated candles that have a fake flicker, like the ones at the funeral home. We have the 16x20 canvas prints of you just leaning against the table but I plan on replacing them with a digital frame where I can put as many pictures as I like.

I have to start sending out thank you cards. Some of the sympathy cards we know we received went missing — I can't believe even in death, there's a possibility I must question about stuff being stolen. Ugh. People never cease to amaze me.

Mom had her brain MRI and her abdomen ultrasound today. We'll find out the results by mid-next week.

We went to the bank earlier this week to notify them of your death but I guess the funeral home and death certificates had already gotten that all rolling. Apparently I was supposed to report your death as soon as possible to all the places under the sun but I had not known that and we may have to pay back this and that... whatever's been automatically deposited into your account. So now I have to figure out how I'll pay the bills since we're still working on all the other paperwork for all the other things.

I thought I wouldn't be tired anymore but I am. Momma hasn't really given me a chance to be with myself or my feelings. She sleeps often while I work during the day and work well into the night. I still have to figure out her meals, remind her to take her medicines, reminder her to check her blood pressure, argue with her to take a walk around the house for 10 minutes. She's the same as before but now she can use your death as another card over my head to not put any effort into living her life.

The papers are piling up and I have over a month's worth of work to catch up on. I have no excuses now but at least I managed to wash my laundry yesterday.

I'm having a hard time deciphering when I miss you because I certainly don't miss the version of you that I've had to care for for the past decade. I'm worried I can't remember you anymore, the real you. I'm worried I replaced all my memories of you with resentments and anger. I'm feeling guilty and relieved and mostly tired. But yea, sorry dad — I don't know where this is going. I just wanted to show you your flowers.

How to follow the passion without the passion?

hidden (lifebythesea) — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 19:32:00 +0000

Honestly, I have no idea.

Seven or eight years ago I was completely obsessed with American motivational speakers, or know-it-all gurus. I am sure you also know them, yes all the most famous ones. They all have podcasts and together with their guests they explain what exactly is wrong with you and what you have to do to change your life for the better. I spent so many hours on YouTube because I was completely lost in life, unemployed, in a very unhappy relationship and I desperately wanted to find the next direction in my life. It was very captivating. Many times we just want a manual, exact steps on what to do to get out of the situation we are dealing with. It is not bad to get inspiration from somebody who overcame something difficult in their life but essentially we have to find our own way. Now I don't watch these kinds of videos anymore. I actually found out that some of those speakers are kind of frauds. Meaning, when you go a little bit below the surface you realize that they don't exactly live what they preach. It is not shocking of course because they just learned what sells the best.

The most common topic of similar videos is definitely "quit your job and follow your passion". If I do that right now, I will be unemployed forever. Then the other narrative was created "follow your passion, start making money and then quit your job". If I try to do this, I will stay at my job for the rest of my life. I don't know what my passion is.

There was a time when I was so obsessed with personality tests because I was desperately searching for answers, I did them all, from MBTI, human design, Gallup to Ikigai diagram and many others. Still to this day I like to do personality tests but they didn't help me solve my problem. I hoped that they would help me discover my passion — that one thing/activity/hobby that would be so meaningful — because maybe I forgot about it, or I overlooked it. I have been searching for a passion very intensively for the last 8 years of my life and I still don't have any answer.

AI offered me the following definition:

The true meaning of passion goes beyond simple excitement or enjoyment; at its linguistic and philosophical root, passion means a willingness to suffer, endure, and sacrifice for something that matters.

I have always imagined passion as something I would hold on to with my dear life, something I would be very consistent with. Something that matters so much to me that I would never give up. Something that I would love so much and I would be so good at that one day I will turn it into my business. And I became very frustrated and sad that I couldn't figure out such a thing. Am I the only one in the world without passion? What is wrong with me?

Today I was talking about this topic with my friend and she asked me: "How many people do you actually know who have this kind of passion you talk about?" It made me think and in that moment I realized that I know a few but most of us are non-passioners. Most of the people in my circle are like me, they have different hobbies and alternate them how they want. One thing that I took from those motivational videos was to try things. Because without trying I will never know the answers. This is a human experience, it is not enough to read about it or watch it, we have to try it ourselves. What I know for quite some time already is that I have activities that keep coming back to my life repeatedly even if I abandon them for some kind of reasons. The common denominator is creativity. Hobbies like dancing, writing, making art — even though I disconnect from them, they come back to me and say hello again. But however I try, I cannot keep that perfect consistency with them that I wish for.

The worst thing about anxiety is that it produces massive overthinking over everything. I am very excited to come up with new ideas and I am very excited to start them but usually a couple of days in I question absolutely everything and eventually give up. The most consistency I could ever sustain was learning foreign languages (since I was 7 years old) and learning to draw (about 2 years). I like those activities a lot and the other ones that I mentioned too but never felt super passionately about them. That kind of spark or fire that I cannot live without them even for one day.

Maybe I am "switched off" somehow because of my anxiety disorder, maybe I am looking for something that I don't actually need or maybe I am just still Americanized and influenced by social media where everybody seems to have their life together and seems to know exactly what they are doing. Maybe it's time to quit looking, and accept the fact that life can be also meaningful without passion. Maybe "follow your passion" is only another mostly unrealistic highly profitable concept that sells books, podcasts and courses and it all explains why sometimes people can feel so inadequate about themselves.

The AI Persona Panic of 2026: Fake Humans Are Extremely Profitable, So Here's a Badge

hidden (thecynicalnerd) — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:59:36 +0000

The internet has reached that late-stage capitalism phase where a non-existent girlfriend has better margins than your actual day job.

Sam was broke. He was 22, studying medicine in northern India, trying to save money for licensing exams and eventually move to the United States. YouTube Shorts had not exactly delivered generational wealth. Selling study notes had also failed to produce the yacht. Then he noticed AI girls on Instagram. So Sam did what any aspiring orthopedic surgeon apparently does in 2026 when confronted with a cash-flow problem. He made a hot woman who did not exist.

At first she was generic. Blonde, attractive, scantily dressed. The internet already contains enough of those to require its own geological layer, so nobody cared. Sam asked Gemini what he was doing wrong. According to transcripts he gave WIRED, Gemini looked at the niches he offered and picked conservative American men. The chatbot reportedly called the MAGA niche a "cheat code," reasoning that older conservative men in the US often had disposable income and could make loyal followers.

Thus Emily Hart was born. Registered nurse. Jennifer Lawrence look-alike. Christian. Pro-gun. Extremely concerned about immigration despite being operated by a man who had never lived in America.

Sam studied the culture like he was cramming for boards. Emily went ice fishing and drank Coors Light. She posed at shooting ranges. Her captions hammered the political pressure points that made people either adore her or storm into the comments to explain why she was destroying civilization. Both reactions counted as engagement. Within a month, Sam says Emily had more than 10,000 Instagram followers. Some Reels pulled millions of views. He funneled interested men toward Fanvue, an OnlyFans competitor that allows AI-generated creators, where he sold synthetic softcore and nude images generated with Grok. He also sold MAGA merchandise because apparently the fake nurse needed vertical integration.

Then one subscriber sent Sam a video of himself having sex with a pillow while Emily's nude image sat on a tablet.

He tipped $50.

There are points where analysis becomes unnecessary.

Emily eventually got banned from Instagram for fraudulent activity. Sam told WIRED he had been making a few thousand dollars a month and had found the whole operation absurdly easy. He has since returned his attention to medicine, leaving behind the important knowledge that somewhere in northern India, an aspiring orthopedic surgeon briefly discovered a more efficient business model than orthopedic surgery.

And Emily was one of the cases with receipts.

The internet also gave us Maya. Maya is 22. Supposedly. She allegedly made $43,000 in thirty days on OnlyFans for a 21-year-old student in Austin using a $400 secondhand MacBook. Maya, according to the viral story, consists of four Markdown files totaling about 12 kilobytes. One contains her biography. Another controls her voice. The others manage her appearance and memory. Claude handles conversations, Flux produces images, and ElevenLabs gives her a voice.

There is one inconvenient detail. Nobody seems able to prove the money. The subscriber count, revenue number and MacBook origin story all trace back through the same chain of social posts: a beautifully specific anecdote floating several inches above the ground. Also, OnlyFans has identity requirements that make this particular version of the story rather awkward. So I am filing Maya under Internet Folklore With Suspiciously Good Unit Economics, which is exactly what makes her useful. Whether Maya personally made $43,000 matters less than the fact that millions of people found the machinery completely plausible. Nobody reads "fictional girlfriend run from four Markdown files" and asks what kind of alien technology could possibly accomplish this.

They ask where the GitHub repo is.

The archetype has arrived. And then, over the summer, everyone started moving.

Spotify announced on August 11 that it was creating an "AI Persona" badge for artist profiles whose public identity appears to be a photorealistic AI-generated human. The distinction is wonderfully specific. Spotify does not care, for this particular badge, whether AI helped make the music. A real artist using AI tools does not automatically qualify. A fictional character does not automatically qualify either. The badge is for the person who looks real and isn't. Beginning in mid-September, Spotify says those profiles will start carrying either an "AI Persona" badge when they disclose voluntarily or a "Likely AI Persona" badge when Spotify makes the determination itself.

And here comes the fun part. Music from those personas will be excluded by default from Spotify's editorial and algorithmic recommendations unless the listener has intentionally engaged with the artist, for example by following them. Disclosure comes with a small trapdoor underneath it.

Instagram arrived at a remarkably similar place on August 31. Its old "AI creator" label is becoming "AI-generated profile," because "AI creator" could easily mean a human creator who happens to use AI. The new label is specifically about profiles centered on a person generated or substantially created with AI. Use AI to polish a caption? Fine. Use it to make graphics? Carry on. Invent a photorealistic woman, give her a childhood, let a few thousand men assume she needs rent money?

Different drawer.

Instagram says undisclosed AI-generated profiles can lose recommendation reach, including visibility in places such as Reels and Explore. Creators who properly label themselves are not supposed to be penalized merely for being synthetic.

Apple Music has its own version coming later this year. Music materially generated using AI will carry a visible "Made With AI" label when the relevant metadata is supplied by labels or distributors. Apple had already introduced AI Transparency Tags into its delivery system earlier this year. Meta's advertising machinery has been heading down the same road from another direction. Its labeling rules already treat a significant AI edit differently from an ad that includes an AI-generated photorealistic human. The latter gets the more prominent label next to "Sponsored." In June, Meta also began expanding detection to ads made with third-party AI tools through industry-standard signals.

New York skipped the platform-policy interpretive dance and wrote "synthetic performer" into law. As of June 9, advertisements covered by the law that use an AI-generated synthetic performer have to disclose that fact. The legislation was signed in December 2025 and became the first state law of its kind in the US.

Notice where the line keeps appearing. The regulatory anxiety is especially intense when AI stops helping somebody make media and starts occupying the human-shaped hole in the media. The fake nurse matters. The fake musician and the synthetic actor selling you something matter. Nobody is having a comparable identity crisis because Brenda used generative fill to remove a bin from the background of her holiday photo. There is apparently a threshold where software acquires cheekbones and the lawyers sit upright.

Spotify's policy makes that threshold explicit. Its AI Persona badge concerns the public identity presented as the artist. Instagram's new label concerns the generated person presented by the profile. New York's law targets a performer who appears human but was generated by AI. The question creeping underneath all of this has very little to do with whether a machine touched the pixels.

Who are you asking me to believe exists?

That would already be interesting enough. Then Brussels walked in carrying Article 50.

On August 2, the transparency provisions of the EU AI Act began applying. Providers of AI systems that interact directly with people have to make people aware that they are interacting with AI unless that fact is already obvious. Providers of systems generating synthetic text or audiovisual material also have to make those outputs machine-detectable as artificially generated or manipulated, as far as technically feasible. For deepfakes and certain AI-generated public-interest material, additional disclosure duties apply to deployers. The European Commission's transparency code gives providers a voluntary framework for demonstrating compliance. The underlying Article 50 obligations themselves are law.

Then look at the calendar.

August 2: Article 50 starts applying.
August 11: Spotify announces AI Persona badges.
August 14: Anthropic publishes the technical explanation for Claude's text watermark.
August 20: Apple tells partners its visible "Made With AI" labels are coming later this year.
August 31: Instagram redraws the line around AI-generated identities and recommendation reach.

Meta had already signed the EU transparency code on July 28. Anthropic had signed it too. I cannot prove that somebody in Brussels personally designed Spotify's badge or that Instagram product managers woke up sweating about Article 50.

I can, however, own a calendar.

The timing is doing quite a lot of eyebrow work. The platforms also have reasons of their own. Users dislike discovering that a person they followed was fabricated. Musicians are furious about AI slop. Regulators outside Europe are circling deceptive synthetic performers. Still, when several major companies redesign their transparency systems around the same period that one of the world's largest markets turns transparency into a compliance obligation, "pure coincidence" starts requiring more imagination than I possess.

And this brings us to Claude.

Claude got a tattoo.

Invisible, obviously. Anthropic has standards. Anthropic says supported Claude models will use a version of Google DeepMind's SynthID-Text technique. There are no secret Unicode characters hiding between your sentences. Nothing gets appended to the text. Instead, the watermark lives in the model's word-selection pattern. Language models constantly encounter points where several possible next words would work. The watermark changes the source of randomness used to make some of those choices. Across a sufficiently long passage, someone with the appropriate key can test whether those choices are statistically consistent with Claude having been involved. Files get a different treatment. Supported formats can receive C2PA provenance metadata, cryptographically signed information saying that Claude produced or processed the file. Anthropic says the marking applies globally because it currently lacks a durable way to restrict the mechanism geographically.

So yes. A European transparency rule gave Claude a worldwide tattoo.

The internet responded with the restraint for which it is famous. People announced subscription cancellations. Others worried that Anthropic could now trace private conversations through copied text or somehow stake a claim to their writing. Anthropic's documentation is exceptionally boring on this point, which is unfortunate for the conspiracy. The watermark contains no identifying information. It cannot reveal a specific user, organization or chat. Anthropic also says it changes nothing about ownership or authorship rights. There were real cancellations, although the scale became part of the folklore remarkably quickly. One report could identify four paying users who publicly canceled over the issue, while Anthropic said it had not detected a significant increase in cancellations overall.

Four.

Human civilization somehow survived.

There is a better criticism buried underneath the vibes. A watermark detector can tell you that Claude was likely involved in a sufficiently large piece of text. It cannot establish who wrote the underlying ideas, and it cannot cleanly distinguish full generation from heavy editing. That matters because humans are spectacularly talented at turning probabilistic signals into courtroom verdicts five minutes after receiving them.

Proofreading is less apocalyptic than early reactions suggested. Anthropic says the watermark only attaches to words Claude actually chooses. If Claude fixes a handful of commas and grammatical errors in a human-written document, there may be too little altered material for the watermark to register at all. The more Claude rewrites, the stronger the possible signal becomes. That still leaves an interpretation problem. Imagine handing somebody a detector result that says "Claude likely contributed to this text." Good. How much? A paragraph? Half the document? Did it produce the argument? Rewrite some clumsy prose? Translate the entire thing? The watermark cannot answer those questions. Anthropic explicitly says detection establishes likely involvement, not a clean authorship history.

This is the part I expect to age fastest. For a while, the mark will probably acquire more cultural meaning than the technology can support. Schools and employers will discover it. Someone will inevitably put a detector result into a disciplinary email with the confidence of a medieval priest identifying witchcraft from a suspiciously enthusiastic goat. Then the mark becomes ordinary. Anthropic says other major AI providers signed the same EU transparency code and are implementing their own marking approaches. If provenance becomes standard infrastructure, "AI touched this" eventually becomes about as scandalous as metadata saying Photoshop touched a JPEG.

Which brings me back to Emily Hart. A broke medical student in India asked Gemini how to make his imaginary hot woman more profitable. Months later, Spotify had a category for imaginary musicians. Instagram had a category for imaginary influencers. New York had legal language for imaginary performers. Claude had been tattooed by Brussels. That is a hell of a regulatory arc for one summer.

The common problem underneath it is embarrassingly primitive. People want to know who they are dealing with. Nobody can tell anymore who or what they're actually talking to, tipping, or streaming, and the industry's solution is a small icon next to the name, like a blue tick for not existing. Because fake humans are profitable. Some are profitable enough that platforms have little incentive to purge the category completely. Spotify still lets AI Personas publish music. Instagram still permits synthetic profiles. New York does not prohibit synthetic performers in advertising. The emerging compromise is disclosure, with distribution consequences attached in some places. Wear the badge. Take the reach hit where the platform imposes one. Keep going.

Which creates a wonderfully stupid incentive problem. On Spotify, the badge is the penalty. Disclose, and you are out of the recommendation pipes by default. On Instagram, disclosure merely stops the fine. Nobody gets rewarded for telling the truth; the honest persona either pays for it or breaks even. The synthetic persona that lies gets the full machinery until somebody catches it. Honesty has acquired a ranking penalty, or at best a ranking shrug.

That should go beautifully.

Sam, meanwhile, has returned to medical school. For a brief period, though, his business consisted of an invented American nurse built with generative tools and monetized through men thousands of miles away. Gemini helped him pick the market. Grok supplied explicit imagery. Fanvue handled the subscribers. He did it while training to repair actual human bodies.

I keep coming back to that because it feels like the cleanest possible artifact from 2026.

We spent years asking whether AI could imitate human work. Then somebody realized the more profitable question was whether it could imitate the human.

And apparently the answer required a badge.

My break offline was what I needed but not sure I'm coming back

hidden (basic) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 02:02:00 +0000

It's been almost a month now since I stopped writing and been online. I don't have any socials and don't intend to in the near future because it always turns into a regret. This blog is enough if I have any thoughts to write down or interesting topics. Email and Signal is my "social connection".

I even tried using a RSS reader again to read some blogs but I'm sorry, most posts had no point to them and felt forced with nothing of interest this past month. Maybe I'll prune the feeds to friends only for now. I do some reading of Gemini and Gopher blogs which is refreshing because it is only text.

I've sold many tech items but it is still ongoing. I'm trying to get down to one PC and one phone that's it. And a Casio watch. Job situation hasn't changed and neither has home life. I still don't care about tech and retrocomputing just feels like work now. I don't want more work because I want to retire from my career if I can.

I've switched to Vivaldi as my main browser. This time it really stuck with me. I've moved away from American software in general and limited it to only at work because I'm forced to use it like Windows and AutoCAD and Revit. I can't trust anything anymore.

In the end, I missed writing here but nothing else like Mastodon or other socials. Until the next post, see ya.

I DON'T Wanna Live an NPC Life

hidden (absurdpirate) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:17:00 +0000

I just read this article about wanting to be an NPC this morning. While I agree with the premise they seem to be going for, I disagree with the message that seems to be conveyed.

I honestly kinda hate this rhetoric of people being main characters, side characters, npcs, whatever. Because it distills humans to some superficiality or dehumanization.

To me, to be an NPC is to be shallow. It's not a matter of not giving a fuck, it's being completely stripped of any and all individuality. Your life isn't of your choosing, it's pre-determined, pre-programmed. You have no will, no likes, no dislikes. No backstory. By the very essence that you are alive and have a lived experience, you are not an NPC.

To call upon OPs allegory of the Skyrim blacksmith:

do they care whether or not you slay dragons? no. do they care if you come in and steal all their shit because you pickpocketed them? no way. what do they do? they just keep living their life as a blacksmith—and they’re good at it to whatever level they’re supposed to be, whether they're a master craftsman or the shitty apprentice in the starting town. they do their thing regardless of what you do in the world.

If you steal their shit and you're caught, they call the guards on you. If they're programmed for it, you'll get "I can't believe it, you're dragonborn!" if you kill the dragon. If you murder their wife, they might MIGHT give some token gesture of hating you, but will have no problem buying your junk. They might "do their thing" because they quite literally have no choice. NPCs generally are sycophants or sociopaths.

It shouldn't be any wonder that the NPCs that we remember the most are the ones that have depth and leave an impression through our continued interaction with them. I think of characters like Serana, who won't marry you because they're traumatized by what was done to them. They stick with you and go through this struggle of having to face their shitty parents. It's when the story is over you're sitting there like "that's it?". You get characters like Cicero who have the most oddball personality for an Elder Scrolls game.

By the very nature of your existence, you are the main character of your own story. And like games like Skyrim you can choose to go down the path of a hero, or you can go down the path of someone who just spends the game hunting the wildlife and living off the land, and everything in-between.

But again, this fails to point out that PEOPLE AREN'T NPCS. People aren't autonomous bits of code, mesh, and textures that exist purely for the player's immersion. You don't have a dialogue tree that you can exhaust or be reduced to the infamous spouse dialogue if you get married. We have the will to do what we want.

be an npc. drive a boring car—who gives a fuck? have a boring job. do nothing after work. why do you have to do something after work? do something because you feel like doing it, not because you feel like you have to.

I feel like this paragraph leads too hard into apathy, which is not an admirable trait. People should have something to do after work, because if your entire life is just work and then limbo, social isolation in essence, you're setting yourself up for depression. Encouraging people to have nothing else to be passionate about, nothing to motivate you is... odd. When all you do is work, you cut out things that actually prevent depression, hobbies, friendships, enjoying experiences that leave a lasting memory. I agree that you shouldn't FORCE yourself to do something you don't despise, but that's very different from doing absolutely nothing day-in-day-out. It's also different from doing things you may not like per se, but are absolutely for your own benefit (like exercise). A lack of interest in doing things is usually seen in screenings for depression.

There is something to be said about finding a level of peace in your current circumstance. But if you work a boring job that you don't find any redeeming qualities out of, the answer isn't to just "not give a fuck", change it! If you can't then learn how to find contentment therein, but by all means don't just succumb to a life of apathy. Apathy is part of why we are in this societal-wide mess to begin with.

Please don't misconstrue this as a personal attack on OP. I'm sure they were well meaning, but the advice just seemed off putting to me and seems to flatten what it means to be human. Nobody is going to sit on their deathbed and think "damn, I wish I did less with my life" (unless you're meaning wishing you worked less). I feel like OPs point about wanting to be an NPC is at odds with one of their previous posts where they share their pain about where the world is going.

What OP seemed to miss about their point about it being rehashed stoicism is that it's not just about doing your own thing. Stoics viewed that tomorrow was never a guarantee and to cherish each day. They weren't apathetic, they spoke openly about contributing to human society because to do so is to live in accordance with nature which comes by virtue of humans being social creatures. They spoke to not worry about what you can't control and to focus on things you can control.

I get it, we all can't be the great hero destined to battle some great evil. But we're all characters in a grand story. We may not be a Frodo, but maybe we're a Sam, or a Pippin, or a Gandalf.

All this to say, don't be an NPC. It's okay if your life is stagnant, and theres a humble honor in any of our conditions, but don't think you (or anyone for that matter) are just some NPC. You're not an NPC, you may just be someone who completed their main questline, or has only been doing side quests and has yet to begin their main quest. Nobody should want to live a life that was pre-determined by someone else. Whether you want to be or not, you are a player in the game, we all are.

Life isn't single-player, it's an MMO.

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Reply via email: me@absurdpirate.com

as of writing this...

Just got home from work. Hit a dispensary to grab some edibles for my mom for when she starts chemo next week. I've been getting into meditation a lot recently and I've been seeing a lot of positive benefits from it in the short time I've been involved with it. I find I have easier (the -ier being key still) control on my ADHD symptoms. I want to keep going with it because I'm curious what else I'll reap from it as I gain more experience. I also started training to be a Court Appointed Special Advocate for children in foster care yesterday and I'm almost kicking myself that I didn't start sooner, because this seems like a really great fit for me. Learned a lot about what a Guardian Ad Litem does and their relationship to the child in the system as well as my role as an extension of the GAL. I'm excited, yet nervous, to take on my first case once I'm done with training.

the "good old days" were complicated as hell.

hidden (typewritermechanic) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:49:00 +0000

I watched the recent Fantastic Four movie this past weekend with my 12-year-old son while my wife was at a baby shower, and I have to admit the movie's retrofuturistic setting was really really damn cool to see as a typewriter salesperson and repairman. It was like looking at a world designed by Dreyfuss in the same aesthetic as his famous Royal Quiet De Luxe. The retrofuturistic mid-century modern meets The Jetsons aesthetic is something that I think a lot of people feel nostalgic for.

And that's honestly true whether or not you grew up in the 1950s when those things were commonplace. I mean, they've become part of our cultural heritage in all kinds of ways. So as a result, I think a lot of us feel nostalgic for a version of the past that's encapsulated in movies like Grease or Back to the Future or shows like Happy Days. We know the diners, the cars, the clothes, the chrome. We know the red roofs and the neon lights. And, obviously, we know the typewriters.

I naturally understand the attraction. People can look at an old typewriter and feel something, and I feel it too, which is why I fix and sell these machines. But frankly, those versions of 1955 are showing 1955 through rose-colored glasses. We know that the situation for many people in 1955 was not substantially better than the situation in 2026, and thank God that we don't still live seventy years ago...

The typewriters really were that good. America? America emphatically was not.

Some Things Really Were Better

I don't want to do the easy thing and say nostalgia is stupid or that everything sucked in 1955, because I don't believe that. There are things about that period I think we absolutely ought to be nostalgic for.

Put a good Olivetti Lettera 22 from the 1950s in front of me and I can show you one.

There's something about these machines that goes beyond metal versus plastic or old versus new. I think the 1950s represented an almost wholly non-cynical approach to creation and ingenuity that we lack today. Somebody sat down and decided to make a really good typewriter. That really good typewriter was the objective.

Because every stupid little lever inside the thing exists to solve some particular problem. The ribbon needs to advance and eventually reverse. The carriage needs to move exactly one space every time you press a key. The bell needs to ring at the right place. The margins have to work. The platen has to advance the paper when you pull the return lever. There are hundreds of pieces in there working together for the sole purpose of putting words onto paper.

And somebody, at some point, expected the thing to last.

That expectation created an entire ecosystem around itself. There were dealers and repair shops and skilled mechanics and replacement parts. If the machine stopped working, the assumption was that somebody would fix the thing. Nobody was going to explain that your Royal had reached end-of-life and would no longer be receiving security updates.

This wasn't just true for typewriters. Mid-century America had an enormously stronger labor movement than we have today. There was serious public investment.

Schools taught shop, drafting, typing and home economics alongside reading, writing, arithmetic, music and art. There was a concept of a full, well-rounded education that included knowing how to build something and knowing how to read something.

Obviously, not everybody in 1955 was enjoying all of this equally. Millions were deliberately excluded from the prosperity we're remembering, and race had an enormous amount to do with who got access to it. (A Royal Quiet De Luxe wasn't a trivial purchase for an ordinary family, either.)

But I don't think it's reactionary to look at any of that and say, yes, something was lost. Something was lost. I can show you some of it. It's sitting on my workbench.

The problem is that I think we're nostalgic for the wrong things.

The Red Roof and the Gray Box

Think about McDonald's.

Twenty-five to thirty-five years ago, a McDonald's was a familiar, uncommon shape and color and theme for a restaurant. And those features were built right into the restaurant's architecture. Things like PlayPlaces, the golden arches, those red roofs that they used to have. Everything about the design of the building was McDonald's.

Today McDonald's restaurants are gray boxes.

There are practical and economic reasons for that; after all, standardized, simplified architecture has practical and economic advantages. Now I'm not pretending McDonald's architecture is the greatest crisis facing America. But the old building was designed to be a McDonald's. The new building efficiently contains one. That's a massive philosophical difference.

Well, the same thing happened with typewriters.

Think about the beautiful Quiet De Luxe we've referenced becoming, eventually, a flat, square, plastic box. Oof. What changed?

The company changed hands a bunch of times. Each company had a different vision. The design philosophy changed with each new vision. Economics changed. Consumers changed. Foreign competition changed the market. Plastic made machines cheaper and lighter. Electronics eventually changed what people expected a typewriter to be.

I'm not claiming there was one uninterrupted assembly line where Royal removed one good part every year until there was nothing left but a shitty plastic typewriter. That's not what happened. But look at an American Royal Quiet De Luxe from the 1940s or '50s. Pick the thing up. Feel the weight of it. Open it and look at the absurd collection of metal parts doing their little jobs. Then look at what the words Quiet De Luxe could eventually be pasted onto.

Something dramatic changed.

And nobody had to sit in a boardroom twirling his mustache saying, "How can we make this thing worse?" Every individual decision can make perfect economic sense. Save money here. Simplify this mechanism. Use a cheaper material there. Compete with the cheaper machine across the aisle.

Do that enough times and eventually you can wind up with something worse without anybody ever having made "worse" the objective. It's capitalism's Ship of Theseus: everything original about the thing was replaced. Can it really be said to be the "same thing"?

Because economics made it easier to make a typewriter good, then cheaper to make the easier machines, then cheaper became the only objective and the idea of good died on a tattered ribbon at the end of a page.

And sure, capitalism "made" the good Royal, too. Planned obsolescence was already around. But the economic system could produce something absolutely wonderful and then reward a hundred perfectly reasonable decisions that made the next thing cheaper, and the next one cheaper still, until nobody quite remembered why making the thing good had been the point.

Which brings me to an uncomfortable reality about being a consumer in today's fast-and-cheap late-capitalist hellscape.

We want the red roof. We believe in the gray box.

We're Nostalgic for the Wrong Things

So let's say we really could make America 1955 again. What exactly are we bringing back?

Do you want the stronger labor movement? I'm listening. Do you want an economy in which skilled tradespeople can make respectable livings repairing things rather than throwing them away? Hell yes! Do you want durable consumer products, investment in public goods, shop class, music and art, local businesses, and an ordinary family having some reasonable expectation that doing everything basically right will result in some degree of economic stability?

I'm not going to argue with any of that.

And I don't want to dismiss the social part of the nostalgia either. Communities really have changed for the worse due to the alienation that came from technological achievement. People are lonelier than ever even as they're more connected than ever. Families are scattered. There's something genuinely sad about living in a country where I can have basically anything delivered to my front door tomorrow and still not know the person living three doors down.

But the America of 1955 that we're mourning was also steeped in homophobia, racism, misogyny, crippling substance use disorders, etc. Brown v. Board of Education was barely a year old. Jim Crow was alive and well. The federal government was purging gay employees. Women faced perfectly legal and perfectly ordinary forms of economic discrimination that would be unthinkable today.

The right loves to talk about how there was more "common sense" way back in the day, or how people weren't as easily offended, or how political differences didn't divide everybody the way they do now. Sure, maybe there's something to some of that. But I would caution that it's considerably easier for everybody to agree about how society ought to work when enormous groups of people have been told to shut up.

So I don't think for even a moment that people were magically less offended. I think a lot of the people being marginalized had considerably less power to say anything about it.

And yeah, being a fascist was a lot easier when the people you wanted beneath you had fewer tools for objecting to the arrangement.

I'd love some of the community back. I don't think getting it back requires anybody to return to the closet.

So if they're remembering the racism and homophobia and misogyny and all the rest as part of the America they long for, then miss me with that America. It had its chance and failed, so fuckity-bye.

It's not an America worth missing.

Who Killed the America Worth Missing?

The parts of America worth preserving that have died off have died off for a lot of complicated reasons, but largely among them is a never-ending demand for a cheaper product at all costs under capitalism.

And this is where I become considerably less patient with the political right, because everything is the fault of "the left." I hear them blaming the left and I really only hear them blaming the left.

Crime is the left. Schools are the left. Cities are the left. Drugs and homelessness are the left. The breakdown of the family is the left. Whatever the problem is, we've reached a point where the idea of truth itself can be discarded in favor of saying the thing the loudest regardless of its relationship to the facts.

Crime is a good example. We're repeatedly told that America has descended into some unprecedented state of lawlessness even though the country's murder rate has fallen to levels comparable to the mid-1950s (and dramatically below the rates Americans lived with during parts of the 1980s and early 1990s). That doesn't mean crime isn't real. It means the story we're telling about crime ought to have some relationship to what crime is actually doing.

The same thing happens when we talk about what destroyed the material world we're supposedly nostalgic for. The left didn't turn the Royal Quiet De Luxe into a plastic box. Gay people didn't kill the repair shop. Feminism didn't make McDonald's gray. Immigrants didn't invent planned obsolescence.

Obviously deindustrialization is more complicated than "capitalism did it." Technology changed. International competition changed. Consumer preferences changed. Globalization made some things dramatically cheaper, and there are real benefits to that.

But there has also been a never-ending demand for cheaper labor, cheaper materials, cheaper construction, and cheaper products. Organized labor became an obstacle to be overcome. Repairability became less important when replacement became cheap. Manufacturing could move wherever labor cost less. The question of whether something was good increasingly had to compete with the question of whether it produced a required return.

And then we figured out there was even more money to be made if you didn't really own the thing at all. We'll sell you only the access to it. We'll sell you a subscription. We'll license it. We'll make it difficult to repair. We'll stop supporting it and sell you the next one.

Ronald Reagan personally did not turn my Royal into a plastic box. That's not the argument.

Because the right is not alone in a diseased and crippled political system, although the modern right has done an enormous amount to hasten that system's demise. The political movement promising to restore the old America has correctly perceived some of its losses while defending many of the economic priorities that helped produce them.

They want the red roof and they believe in the gray box.

Returning to God...?

Then there's Christianity. This one bothers me particularly, and I think it gets at the same distinction I've been making about the typewriter all along.

For example... I don't believe an old Royal has to be returned to exactly the condition it occupied in 1955 in order to preserve what was good about it. In fact, that would be ridiculous. I want the machine to survive. I want it to work. I want to preserve what was beautifully designed about it. But I don't need to reproduce every condition that surrounded it in 1955 in order to accomplish that.

Christian nationalism seems to make exactly that mistake.

When Christian nationalists talk about America "returning to God," I don't think what they're primarily mourning is Christianity. It's political and social power. It's a control-of-the-culture question. They aren't merely asking that Christianity be preserved. They're asking for a particular relationship between Christianity and the rest of American culture to be restored.

And that's an important difference.

Christianity has unequivocally lost enormous parts of the culture war at this point but has refused to move on. Americans did not return to traditional Christian sexual ethics. Gay people did not go back into the closet. Women did not return to the social roles conservative Christianity prescribed for them. The country became less Christian and considerably less interested in allowing Christianity to set the rules for everybody else.

That doesn't mean Christianity disappeared or became politically powerless; in fact, in some ways the opposite happened, and I don't think that's an accident. Christianity made its argument to the culture, and on quite a few questions the culture said no. That's allowed to happen in a democracy. Losing an argument is not persecution.

But the political currency was power, and that translated into unfathomable amounts of currency currency, so why would they move on? Everything over the past several decades, the better part of the last half-century, has been power-grab after power-grab.

And this is where the restoration metaphor becomes important to me. What exactly are we trying to restore? Christianity? Fine by me, as a person of faith. Christianity doesn't need the government in order to exist. It doesn't even need to be culturally dominant in order to exist. The central figure of the religion didn't control the government. The government killed him.

Christianity managed.

What Christian nationalism wants to restore is something else... namely, the period when Christianity occupied a privileged position in the machinery of American culture and could expect its assumptions to be reflected in law, education, sexuality, marriage and public life.

Well, restored to what?

That's the same question I ask when somebody tells me a typewriter has been "fully restored." Do you mean you've preserved what was good about it and repaired what failed? Or do you mean you've attempted to return the entire thing to some imaginary perfect moment in its past?

Because Christianity hasn't ever done very well when it's been a cultural hegemony, has it? I don't need to argue that every Christian government in two thousand years was an unmitigated disaster. But Christianity as state religion has given us enough examples of coercion and persecution and corruption that maybe Christians ought to be just a little nervous about political Christianity. It's never-ever-ever gone particularly well for Christianity or for the political system that Christianity has co-mingled with, for that matter.

So when somebody tells me America needs to "return to God," I think it's worth asking what we're actually talking about. If we're talking about Christianity surviving, flourishing, serving people, feeding people, loving people, making its argument and living out its faith, wonderful. None of that requires returning America to 1955.

If we're talking about returning Christianity to a position where it has sufficient political and social power to make everybody else live according to its rules, that's something else entirely.

I don't want to restore that any more than I want to restore the cigarette smoke smell to the Royal.

Keep the Typewriter

And after saying all of this, here's the strange part. I still love 1955. Or at least I love pieces of it.

Put that old Royal on my workbench and I'll happily spend hours cleaning the thing. I'll flush seventy years of accumulated junk out of the segment. I'll scrub the type slugs. I'll adjust whatever is rubbing. I'll replace something that broke. I'll put a sheet of paper into it and listen for that wonderful little bell. And when I'm finished, I'll probably sit there for a minute and admire it, because it deserves to be admired.

There's a phrase I've complained about once or twice on this blog, and that phrase is fully restored.

I don't like the phrase and I don't use it, partly because I don't really know what it means. Restored to... what?

If I get a machine from 1955 working beautifully again, I don't need to put seventy years of cigarette smoke back into it because that was original too. I need to understand the machine well enough to know what was good, what broke and what needs to change.

Preservation is not restoration.

Maybe that's not a terrible way to think about a country either.

There are things America knew how to do in 1955 that I desperately wish we still knew how to do. We knew how to make some extraordinary things. We had a stronger labor movement. We believed more readily in public investment. We had repair shops and skilled tradespeople and weird buildings. There was an approach to creation that utterly lacked cynicism that I find almost painfully beautiful when I open one of these old machines.

Bring that stuff back. Please.

Let's figure out how to rebuild some of the community we've lost without rebuilding the walls that kept people trapped inside it.

The racism can stay dead. The misogyny can stay dead. The closet can stay dead. Christian cultural supremacy can stay dead. None of those things is required to build another beautiful typewriter.

We don't have to hate the past, and we don't have to worship it either. A country, like a typewriter, doesn't have to be returned to its original condition to be worth preserving.

You just have to understand it well enough to know what was beautifully made, what eventually broke, and what never worked properly in the first place.

Image Credits

Olivetti Lettera 22 — Paul Lowry, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Olivetti_Lettera_22.jpg
WPA mural, Cohen Building, Washington, D.C. — Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress; no known restrictions on publication: https://www.loc.gov/item/2010720418/
Old-style McDonald's with Golden Arches and Speedee architecture — Infrogmation of New Orleans, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GentillySpeedyMcDonalds.jpg
1955 Royal Quiet De Luxe — Texbodemer, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RoyalQuietDeluxe.JPG
Detroit UAW-CIO members in the Labor Day parade, 1942 — Arthur S. Siegel, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress; public domain/no known restrictions: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017837317/
Typing address labels at the W. Atlee Burpee Company, Philadelphia, 1943 — Arthur S. Siegel, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress; public domain/no known restrictions: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017849979/

doomed to fall

hidden (icytime) — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 03:44:00 +0000

When I was in fifth/sixth grade (around 10-11) there were these incredibly obnoxious and loathsome older kids in my neighborhood and on my school bus. They were constantly shouting and yelling and trying to show off how cool and manly they all were. I hated them passionately. When I complained to my mom, she shrugged it off and told me, "they're just teenagers. You'll be like them soon enough." I didn't want that. I didn't want my voice to get deeper and to start acting like a savage. I despised these people and resented the possibility of becoming like them. So, I tried to delay it as long as I could, mostly with regard to my voice. Of course, in the end, it was pointless to try. I continued being pretty mild-mannered throughout my teenage years, so I didn't fully become what I hated. But the feeling of being doomed toward an inevitable bad future stuck with me.

I hate being told that something is inevitable. Especially when I'm told that it's my fault. Growing up, my mom used to do this shit all the time and it was infuriating. "I was going to let you do this thing you wanted to do, but because you did some tiny bad thing¹ now I won't let you."

Nowadays I'm a fully grown adult (at least on paper) and so I don't have to deal with that exact situation anymore. But I'm still faced with people trying to tell me that stuff is unavoidable. Like some family members telling me that I'll eventually want to settle down in the suburbs in a single-family house with one partner and have kids and a car and a dog. Like my PhD advisor telling me I'll have to get a teaching position in some tiny rural garbage town in the middle of nowhere because the field I chose is too pure, and if I wanted to get a good real job in a good city I should've done something different. Like him (and other people too) telling me that AI is inev in someitable and that I should stop struggling against it and just start using it because I'll see how useful it is and blah blah blah...

No. I won't be doing any of those things. I'm so tired of feeling ashamed or guilty because someone tells me that some decision I made or some fact about who I am means that I'll have to do something or be a certain way in the future. Most things don't have to be a certain way. Or so I keep trying to tell myself.

required listening

BLISS by harrison gordon

rationalizations about ring, flock, etc.

hidden (avas) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:17:00 +0000

I have talked to multiple people using Ring cameras and similar surveillance tech at or around their home over the last few years, usually from the US.

The reasons are mostly the same:

We live in an area with a high crime rate.
We had a break-in before.
We wanna have proof for insurance/police, or when the delivery isn't delivered or my packages get stolen.
I wanna see what my pets/kids/spouse are doing.
I wanna check for fires, cheating, make sure things get done around the home etc.

Most of them have only started using these cameras after 2020, which is pretty odd if these are really the true reasons.

Cameras and surveillance systems have been around since the 1940s, and have only become more and more affordable and easy to set up, even pre-Ring. Crime rates have existed before, as did the need to prove things to police or an insurance. Yet, the purchase of a private surveillance camera only came up in the recent years for them. Why?

It really is the perfect proof that fear-based marketing works.

Social media and the 24/7 global news cycle have us all hyper-aware of terrible events everywhere, and have blown things completely out of proportion. The constant recurring reminders that something bad happened just near you that you would have otherwise not known about is skyrocketing your anxiety. You could be next! Ragebait and other recorded rude behavior popping into your feed colors your perception of strangers and humanity as a whole. Everyone is out to get you! People have lost their minds, and now you have to protect yourself!

It gets so bad that anyone walking on the street, being near your home, delivering your package is a suspect, a threat, before they are a human. They first have to prove they have nothing to hide, or prove they are doing their job correctly, all pressured by the presence of a camera (and the threat of this being shared with police or uploaded online and going viral), before they are seen as someone with rights. And maybe they even serve as content opportunity - fair game of course, as your camera yelled out that they're being recorded and by not immediately running away (as they have a job to do or wanna visit you), they consent, right?

It's no wonder all that intensified during and after the lockdowns for Covid where everyone was extremely online, and that companies have found ways to capitalize on this fear. Because that's what it is: You fell for the marketing that promised to calm your worst fears and anxiety with more tech, and pretends it gives you some sort of control or a magic device that makes it all turn out okay. That's why you suddenly only need it now, after being able to live without it just fine.

Overtly or covertly, the marketing tries to tell you:

You can prevent all bad things from happening. You will spot bad things happening in time before any damage is done, or we will send a notification. Burglars and package stealers will be deterred. Due to the video footage, police will actually do something, and even catch the perp! You can find missing people and pets. Insurance will stop fighting with you! Your spouse will be too scared from bringing someone home while you're at work, and the kids will not do something forbidden while you're out of the house, and the dogs will not tear anything up because you can just yell at them to stop via a camera. You'll see if someone in the home has a medical emergency.

But this is legit insane! You have smoke detectors and gas detectors for this. Criminals are not deterred by cameras. People everywhere are still getting their insurance claims approved and their lost package refunded. Police solved case rates are still embarrassingly low, despite almost all stores, and many streets claimed to be crime spots, being surveilled for a decade or longer now.

People living with you or being in your home deserve privacy instead of suffering from your extreme insecurities. They deserve to not being judged all the time, especially children and teens. Knowing you are constantly recorded and watched and that it all can be played back or checked later (and possibly posted online) is completely damaging to any sort of character development and sense of safety, especially around trying new things and making mistakes. The chilling effects this has cannot be overstated, even for your guests! Your desire to see your pets all the time or be prepared for a possible unconscious person at home overrides none of this, and none of the risks like

Police or undisclosed third parties using the video stream without your knowledge or consent
... or with your consent, to harass people of color and other marginalized groups
Hackers gaining access to the video stream and watching you, even in private moments you would not want anyone to see
An abusive partner or parent exerting more control via the cameras, and forcing cameras to be hung up even in private rooms
Partners recording you during sex or other private moments against your will or without your knowledge, and possibly even disseminating it

and more!

Life is unpredictable, and these things just appeal to a very scared part of us that we need to deal with differently than "arming up". Your trauma about your previous break-in is understandable, yet needs more substantial treatment than this clown show of a bandaid solution. I think any Ring user deep down is actually aware it is all outside of their control, and that this doesn't even make a dent and is just a farce, but it makes them feel better, and that's all that counts. It's a completely accepted delusion that the rest of us are expected to dance around and tolerate, which is ridiculous and I won't do.

Realistically, you all know that there are no reliable stats, no actual proof any of this works, or does something to prevent anything, or help someone. You also know that the wholesome feel-good reasons are nothing compared to the risks. The chances are good that crime rates in your area have lowered since before you even had a camera, and it's not due to it existing. It's hard to prove something didn't happen, of course, but we have had store and street surveillance for quite a while now and it has not deterred crime from taking place. It has not even led to a meaningful amount of recorded crime actually being resolved. It's not in the police's interest to solve your petty bike theft because they are here to secure the property of wealthy people, not yours.

Crime is best fought with resources like housing, food, money and education, but that costs more than a few thousand cameras and cannot be used for fascism, racial profiling, non-consensual recording and spying and doesn't supply the prison industrial complex, so of course it is unpopular with governments.

What every Ring user is saying is basically: "Fuck society, fuck the political environment this is happening in, fuck you; my feelings matter more than the effect this has on society as a whole. I want the normalization of constant surveillance because I crave control and safety! I love the law and order appeal of literally any piece of media depicting fascism!"

It also hinges on this extremely individualist mindset I see emerge more and more where everyone is just fending for themselves, securing their own resources, and going "I got mine, fuck you." or "Doesn't affect me negatively, so why should I care?".

Everyone is seeking to buy their own McMansion, the further away from others and the higher the fence, the better. They're relying as little as possible on others, paying some stranger for things that usually a family member, friend or neighbor would do for free and have them drop it off without contact on the doorstep. They only interact with others online, and build up an impenetrable fortress together with surveillance everywhere, as if a horde of peasants could come and take away everything you have hoarded and worked for. And in the US of course, with a variety of guns in the home, and a ChildKillerTank5000 SUV in front, because the safety and comfort of the driver is top priority and your goal with driving is to win and survive, not to drive defensively and respectfully in a reasonably sized car.

It's ridiculous to see from the outside, because you're building this insular allegedly hypersecure prison for yourself in which you are willing to hand over any piece of possible evidence as a loyal neighborhood spy and as proof you're a good behaved citizen, just because media tells you your biggest threat is other people; yet the biggest threat of our lifetime is climate change, and there is nothing that protects you from it in your fortress, and no one you can bootlick enough to be safe from it.

Nothing you can do about the rising heat, dying wildlife, ruined crops, water scarcity, the upcoming climate refugee movements, the floodings, tornadoes and earth quakes that intensify, and so on. You think you can separate yourself from society and from your own choices and its effects and secure yourself, and it's not working. It will never work. And you are also capable of having blood on your hands.

But in the meantime, you can make unethical companies like Ring and Flock a little richer, and you can help police and ICE and alike organizations do their kidnapping, killing, discrimination and intimidation more effectively, you can help train AI on people just existing in public, and you can help normalize being recorded everywhere to make a Nazi's wet dream come true.

And please, spare me the replies about how everyone else using it is just evil and misusing it while you are an angel using it for good, that you totally agree with all of this yet sadly you just have to do this, reiterating the same tired Ring propaganda I listed above, and yapping some more of why they're actually good and justified in your specific situation and how everyone you know also does it and your grandma just doesn't know any better.

I do not care. You have to seek absolution from someone else because I will not read it. That's not me ignoring the other side of the argument, it's me not wasting my time on hearing the same garbage I have heard from several people and online content before. There is nothing you could tell me to change my mind, and I don't care if it's worded nicely or rudely or by a friend or a stranger. God herself could come down and hand me a letter saying all this is good and justified and it would not change. This is something I have an ethically-informed fixed stance on, something you would also have if you had a backbone.

Published 02 Sep, 2026

I Disagree with Mossbal about Stardew Valley

hidden (explicatingelle) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:11:27 +0000

A few days ago I watched part of a video from a very small (822 subscribers) Youtuber with the title "How Fields of Mistria made me HATE Stardew Valley". Stardew Valley (SDV) is an indie farming simulation game created by Eric Barone, also known as ConcernedApe, and it's my top favorite and most-played game. So of course I had to click on the very click-baity video to see what her complaints were. I will freely admit I did not finish the video, because the opening six minutes were enough for me to decide I didn't have the same opinions on anything, and I didn't need to continue wasting my time while my blood pressure rose. But during those opening minutes, she made some bold claims about SDV that I have been thinking about and want to write about. Because she is wrong.

In the opening, Mossbal talks about how bad SDV's worldbuilding is, calling it "... hobbled (sic) together..." (:03), and then listing all the various worldbuilding pieces such as the war in the very distant background, the mixed bag of magic and technology, and claiming there "... aren't any connecting threads of logic" (:39). Here are her specific points, and my responses:

The game's worldbuilding is "hobbled" together.

I am pretty sure she means "cobbled" together, but that's not the point. The point here, is that she believes Barone just threw things together without thinking about how it all works together, and that nothing really works logically and consistently. It's fine if that's her opinion, but the way she stated it made it sound like fact, which I disagree with.

There's a war happening in the background that only impacts one non-player character (NPC) and his family, and it doesn't affect the player at all.

The implication here is that there should be some kind of impact on the player character. That a game designer can't just throw something like war in as background effect without engaging with the deeper implications and wider scope of such a disaster.

In a cozy game about escaping a dead-end corporate hustle job to rebuild an inherited farm and small, rural community, why would there be any kind of impact on the character? Not only that, but video games almost always have something going on in the background that the player can only learn about through reading documents or listening to recordings or other forms of interacting with the world. It's usually called "lore", and while it does deepen the world, it doesn't have to have any kind of impact. In fact, it's like the ice berg theory, where all of the things hidden from the reader/watcher/player is what supports the things that are visible. It gives the setting depth. There are things going out outside the scope of the player character's environment and experience. It's not a blank, empty nothing outside the accessible map.

There's magic but also advanced technology, except not cell phones.

Her point here seems to be that having an AI robot that Maru builds and a supercomputer that can tell you how many squares of hoed ground you have and not having cell phones, doesn't make sense. Except this is a silly point, because there's no tech tree in worldbuilding where the society you are designing has to develop things in a certain order. You can absolutely develop a society where something like the cell phone does not get developed.

The game takes place in the modern western world, but also has strong fantasy elements, and the two don't mesh.

As if the whole genres of contemporary and urban fantasy don't exist. As if placing magic in a modern and familiar setting hasn't been used for literal centuries by storytellers around the world.

Tied in with this is her critique that magic exists very clearly, but that the NPCs don't believe when you see things. While she is making this particular comment, a clip of the game plays, showing the player character seeing a strange apple-shaped creature, which disappears before the NPC they are talking with can see it, along with some of the dialogue from that scene. But the NPCs never deny the existence of magic. A wizard lives just outside of town who helps set up amazing festivals such as All Souls Eve (Halloween) with magical effects, there is literally a psychic TV show, and the weather channel is always 100% accurate.

But the moment Mossbal is talking about, the mayor of this small town is showing an old run down community center that has been abandoned for years to a new resident, and the mayor doesn't know hardly anything about the new resident. They've literally only been in town a handful of days when this cut scene is available. So the mayor doesn't know if the new resident is crazy, playing a joke on them, or actually seeing something. On top of that, the junimos, the little creatures that the player character catches sight of that the mayor doesn't see, are very shy, and there are only a few places where you can see them, none of which are places the NPCs go. So the town villagers probably don't know they exist, making it logical for them to be concerned when a new resident comes into town and starts claiming to see little apples with faces and arms and legs running around the abandoned buildings.

Playing for the story

The next section in the opening Mossbal talks about is the story of SDV, and she starts it off by say "... it's not like you play Stardew for the story" (:43), while rolling her eyes and making it clear she's being sarcastic, before saying "But you kinda do."

Except not everyone does. I certainly don't. All the speed-runners don't. The challenge-runners don't. My mom¹ definitely doesn't. There are other ways and reasons to play. Sure, lots of people play for the character interactions and to make friends with the NPCs, but not everyone. I personally will befriend maybe two or three: Elliot, because he is my spouse of choice, Caroline to get the tea sapling recipe, and Marnie if I'm feeling like getting Mayor Lewis's purple underpants from her bedroom and waving them about town to embarrass him. I'll say hi to people at the festivals, but I don't go out of my way to remember birthdays or say hi everyday or give gifts. I'm too busy maximizing my Ancient Fruit Wine empire and taking care of my animals!

She goes more in-depth as the video goes on, looking at specific characters and interactions, calling most of the characters "one-dimensional", but this post is already too long and I'm tired of rewatching her to get the timestamps. Mostly it just felt like she was complaining about SDV in order to hype up her chosen farm sim game, Fields of Mistria.

When Fields of Mistria was announced, I was excited to play it. I love SDV, but I also want to try all the other farm sim games like it, because I love that genre, so of course I wanted to try it out. I never got to because it's for Windows only and I have a Mac, but the more I saw screenshots and game play and the like, the more I decided it wasn't for me anyway. It's got much more of an anime vibe, and visually looks more like old Legend of Zelda games, both of which are not really my thing. But those are just my opinions.

Mossbal is totally within her rights to make her video and talk about the difference between the two games. But don't think I won't come out in defense of SDV when I see someone poo-pooing it.

Have you played SDV or Fields of Mistria? What are your thoughts on the worldbuilding of the two games? Has someone ever said things about your favorite game that made you want to rebut?

Thoughts to share? I have a contact page now!

SDV is the one video game she plays, and it took me probably seven years to slowly entice her into trying it out. She is well on her way to having more hours in the game than I do :)↩

I put an N64 in my basement

hidden (blighttown) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:49:54 +0000

I've got an Everdrive, and the N64 is connected to a little 12" CRT. Crucially, I don't get WiFi coverage in my basement. If I'm down there, there are no distractions. N64 games in particular come from an era where there was not quite as much hand-holding. There are usually no quick-saves. Games are not afraid to boot you back to the start of the level if you fail. I don't want to play this up too much: your average N64 game is significantly easier than an arcade game from the era, or nearly anything on NES or SNES. N64 games are not really hard, it's just that the "friction" points have not been sanded to zero in the ways that modern games have.

N64 Quake, a favorite of mine, is not especially difficult. But you need to play the whole level. There is no mid-level saving. So when you play, you do really need to focus on the game. You feel the tension at the end of a level. You know you can beat the level, but if you just make one mistake; dodge a projectile poorly, fall into the lava, etc -- then the whole level is over. This is a tension that many modern games have lost. In addition, there's nothing next to me that can distract me: no internet, no chat, nothing. Just a game. When the game stops being fun, I go upstairs. Usually I play for 10-20 minutes at a time at most. Often, I'll do a level after my morning workout. (our gym is also in the basement)

This has honestly been the most fun I've had with gaming in a long time. The N64 games are not better, but rather the constant modern distractions have made everything worse, to including gaming.

Small Men, Big Shadows

hidden (householderkarl) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:20:00 +0000

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.

– Lin Yutang

Here in the West, we are living in an unfortunate era. Our institutions have become bastions of mediocrity and our leaders petty tyrants. Their demagoguery and corruption cast a long shadow over our society. They mistake their outsized influence for evidence of their greatness, but we all know the truth. It’s only an illusion of the fading light, an empire in its sunset years.

Evil men will exist for as long as humanity persists. However, it’s a sign of civilizational decay when those men are elected to office. When cruelty is celebrated as wisdom, when hubris is praised as strength, when wealth becomes a virtue, the decline is inevitable.

Standards are a thing of the past. By and large, we’ve lost the ability to recognize what is honorable and deserving of admiration. Tolerance is weaponized, “both sides” an easy cop-out. Our culture has been ingeniously manipulated to make us weak and easily distracted.

Those small men casting long shadows, they won’t live forever. In the meantime, we have to wake up and be ready. When the White House doctor finally loses the battle against cholesterol and heart failure, the people need to seize the opportunity.

The setting sun may be inevitable, but we might be able to extend the day for just a little while longer. Long enough to give our children a chance to do it right.