Bear Blog Trending Posts

If people would just

hidden (herman) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:19:00 +0000

People use the word just a lot when talking about problems. If people would just drive slowly near schools. If people would just pay their taxes. If people would just follow the rules.

It's a sentence that sounds reasonable as it's true that most problems would go away if people just behaved. The thing is, they don't...and they probably never will.

This isn't a cynical take on humanity (I think most people are decent). It's about designing good systems. The vast majority of people who use Bear are there to write, and most drivers in my city stop at red lights. But "most" isn't "all", and when you're dealing with thousands (or millions) of people, a small percentage is still a lot of people.

Let's say 1% of people are going to misbehave. That doesn't sounds like much, but if 10,000 people sign up for a service, that's 100 people trying to break things. You can't plan for the 99% and hope the 1% sorts itself out. The 1% is where all the work is.

It's also not always the same 1%. Decent people have bad days. Someone who usually stops at a red light might run it accidentally when they're distracted and late for work. Some people genuinely don't know how to recycle properly (a pet peeve of mine as all my recycling feels pointless once I put it in the apartment block's recycling bins which contain un-recyclable trash).

Expecting people to just isn't a solution, it's a wish. The useful question is "what happens if they don't just?"

I wrote about roundabouts a while back and mentioned implicit and explicit rules. A no-parking sign is an implicit rule. It relies on people choosing to obey it, with a vague threat of a potential fine. A tree planted on a sidewalk is an explicit rule. You can't park there, mate. A traffic light asks you to stop. A roundabout makes it physically difficult to not slow down.

Bad systems punish everyone for what a few might do: bank KYC and airport security are two I've had to deal with in the past week that annoyed me. They treat every person like a suspect, and punish them accordingly.

Good systems work like a tree on a sidewalk. They don't rely on goodwill, and the people who were going to behave anyway barely even notice them.

S.F. in the age of A.I.

hidden (lnebres) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 17:43:00 +0000

Seen at the corner of Polk and Broadway the other afternoon:

No further comment necessary.

i got a dumbphone!

hidden (alieniloquy) — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 02:12:02 +0000

well, i did it. on a whim, i decided to just get a dumbphone.

i opted for a dumb.co phone, because it was cheap and accessible for such a radical lifestyle change. i was honestly expecting it to be a little more challenging to make the switch, but there are enough tools i'm used to having built into the dumb.co phone that i'm actually not missing my smartphone at all. in fact, i'm pretty much just leaving my phone in my pocket for the most part, just using it to send text messages throughout the day (which, to be fair, is about all i used my smartphone for before, aside from doom scrolling various web pages).

i'm getting more and more interested in starting an offline group in my city, as well, but i've never started anything like this before, and am also quite the introvert. the idea of starting anything group oriented is scary to me. i do think it would be worth it though, to meet people who are also wanting to just get outside more and talk and share real life things. has anyone here done that (shoot me an email if you have and it worked well, or well even if it didn't work well... my email is on the about page).

i dunno, i'm just tired of seeing all of my fellow humans on public transit glued to their phones, looking annoyed to be around other human beings. i want to be able to say hi to people and meet new people, and build new communities.

i also love the camera. its a super basic cell phone camera like the ones i remember before i had a smartphone. it takes very tiny images that quite frankly look like shit but i dunno, i still really love them for all their shittiness and imperfections. i'm going to try to take some photos with it and make a small zine of them. i shared one on my new /photo page!

well, i'm going to go read my book before going to bed! goodnight internet.

"Who Owns ROM Hacking?" And Other Questions AI Poisons Us With

hidden (ametrine) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 02:27:41 +0000

Recently, I've been hearing about people wanting to make an SMW Central alternative. As far as I can tell, the individuals who desire this the most are also the individuals most open to using GenAi. If you read my last essay about Mixtape, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Mixtape's poor reception combined with an uptick of SMW Central rejections due to GenAi usage has led to a lot of GenAi supporters feeling alienated from the community. I do not have sympathy for these people. I do, however, want to take some time to deconstruct some of the specific things I've been hearing.

As a disclosure, I am the hack section lead for SMW Central. I will be talking a lot about SMW Central, but the opinions expressed are entirely my own and I do not speak for SMW Central as a whole.

"Nobody Owns ROM Hacking."

This statement is objectively true. Taking a ROM and modifying it to make something new is not a concept that has ownership. The concept of remixing music doesn't have ownership, nor does the concept of making a collage out of existing work. For anyone artistically inclined, this seems like a fairly obvious concept. But this isn't what the statement was about.

The pro-GenAi group seems to have the idea that, because SMW Central is the primary SMW hacking resource, it is the "be-all and end-all." Anyone who makes SMW hacks must follow the rules of SMW Central or risk intense criticism by those on the site. This is, of course, not how it works. There is nothing preventing you from making ROM hacks however you'd like, including using GenAi to create custom code or images. Believe it or not, SMW Central doesn't have the power to physically prevent you from doing something. What it does have the power to do, however, is prevent that work from being uploaded to the site.

SMW Central has a strong "no GenAi" policy, so work that includes GenAi content is rejected from the site. That's it. Functionally, this means that GenAi users cannot submit work to the site unless they follow the rules and don't use GenAi for their project. I want to point out that SMW Central doesn't ban people for being pro-GenAi, nor are they barred from anything just for being pro-GenAi. They simply can't upload content to the site that was created with GenAi. Despite this, GenAi users believe that, because SMW Central has rules against GenAi content, SMW Central must feel the need to "control or dictate" what they do.

This context transforms the statement substantially. When this group of individuals says "nobody owns ROM hacking," what they mean is that they should be allowed to publish their work wherever they want without consequence. Notably, these statements are nowhere near equivalent. One describes the way that nobody has ownership over an artistic concept, the other describes the desire for ownership of a specific institution. You don't need SMW Central to publish a ROM hack. You can make your own website and host it there, or you can find a file host and pass the link around, or you can mail out flash drives with the hack on it. Nothing is preventing any of these people from publishing their work. Despite that, these individuals want to be seen as victims, so they push this narrative.

This group of people also believe that other hackers hold a sense of ownership over an IP (Super Mario) that they don't own. This isn't the case. People who hack SMW do not feel like they own the rights to Super Mario, they feel like they own their creation. And, like any remixed work, they do. The framing of this argument feels intentionally malicious because it removes the work of the individual from the argument entirely. I believe this further demonstrates the entitlement over other people's work that GenAi supporters feel they have. This is the heart of my previous essay about Mixtape, so you should read that if you're interested in hearing more.

"People Shouldn't Be Crucified for Using GenAi."

This statement depends on the definition of "being crucified." When this group says it, they mean that they are being treated cruelly for using GenAi. From an SMW Central perspective, while I can't speak to how the forum rules are enforced, I can say that cruel treatment of others is explicitly against the rules without exception. Personal attacks on GenAi supporters would not be tolerated.

What SMW Central does have is a large community. And, like all communities, the individuals within hold opinions. It just so happens that, throughout the lifespan of SMW Central, it has cultivated a community that tends to reject GenAi in favor of the celebration of human-made work. In this regard, what pro-GenAi individuals see as "crucifixion" are instead strong anti-GenAi opinions from many people on the site.

Making a new site won't solve this problem. GenAi supporters and users will still be heavily criticized outside of their bubble. While you can block people from expressing their opinions on a platform you control, you cannot prevent people from holding those opinions and expressing them elsewhere. To be blunt, I would be thrilled if the pro-GenAi group made their own site because I would love to never hear about them again. I would love to worry less about GenAi work sneaking on to SMW Central. Unfortunately, this isn't the current reality.

Someone in this pro-GenAi group said that they "know that a number of people who released hacks within the last couple years did use some semblance of AI help, but obviously couldn't disclose it due to being crucified." On the SMW Central side, the response to this wouldn't be crucifixion, it would be the removal of those hacks. It's also important to know that SMW Central doesn't retroactively apply rules, so any hack that was uploaded before the rule was put into effect would stick around.

In the case of the hacks that would be removed, we call this "the consequences of our actions." When we break rules, there are consequences. Those individuals broke the no GenAi rule, and the consequence would be the removal of their hack(s). This reveals a sinister sentiment held by this pro-GenAi group: they believe that they are above the rules. They believe that they should be able to submit hacks wherever they want because they believe they aren't doing anything objectionable.

In a public Twitch chat, an SMW Central user named Insanit revealed that he still uses GenAi for things where nobody would be able to tell he used it. This demonstrates the entitlement in the simplest sense: they think they can get away with it, so they do it. Much like with the Mixtape situation, the pro-GenAi group feels a sense of entitlement so extreme that they are willing to openly discuss violating site rules. Even still, this isn't crucifixion: this is criticism and consequences.

"I'm Not Going to Keep Fighting Things Out of My Control."

This is the biggest and most general statement on the list. Things like this are often said by GenAi supporters to justify their GenAi use. Other examples include "owning a phone is using GenAi" and "using Google is GenAi," and because everybody does these things, it's okay to embrace GenAi and use it for anything. This is not so.

People often say that "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism." This statement has been appropriated and twisted around to justify the unethical actions of people living under capitalism. "Because there is no ethical consumption," they say, "it is okay for me to buy Nestlé products. It is out of my control." Obviously, though, this isn't what the statement means. It doesn't mean that you, individually, are responsible for changing capitalism, nor does it mean that everything is permissible under capitalism. It instead asks you to critically evaluate capitalism and, if you are able to, make an effort to make more ethical choices. We must recognize that making ethical choices is impossible in many situations, but we must also recognize that some choices are more unethical than others.

This concept applies to GenAi as well. It's true that GenAi has been adopted by many large companies, and it's true that many are forced to use GenAi when they go about their daily lives. Many jobs in tech now mandate that employees use GenAi. But there are important nuances to the situation that change things. For one, most smartphones with GenAi features allow you to disable them or simply not use them. You can turn off Siri entirely in iOS 27, for example. Google demonstrates something else. Google Search has dominated search engines for so long that, when it makes changes, the entire internet adjusts. In that sense, you can't really get away from GenAi when you're searching for something. The difference, then, lies in what you're choosing to do. Google's choice to shove GenAi into Google Search does not justify your personal decision to use GenAi. Using a search engine is an inevitability of the internet. Personally choosing to open Grok and generate an image, however, is not. You have full control of that choice, which means you have to entirely own that decision. And that's the core of the issue.

I saw one of these people say that "anyone who's freaking out about someone using AI to help them code ASM doesn't understand modern coding workflows at all." This blanket statement is inaccurate, and modern programming workflows vary heavily. For example, I work as a programmer and artist at a game development studio, and no part of my workflow involves GenAi. I've also disabled all language model support in my IDE, and I simply do not open the website for ChatGPT or opt to download and use Claude. You can do it too. I'd argue it's easier not to use GenAi, in fact.

Final Remarks

It angers me to see people use GenAi in communities focused on human creativity. It angers me to see such poor justifications for GenAi use. It angers me to see the entitlement that GenAi users feel when it comes to the art of other people. It angers me to see the victim mentality that GenAi supporters have adopted. It is difficult for me to comprehend why people would still choose to engage with GenAi despite the environmental impacts, the destruction of culture and communities, the harm it causes to those living around data centers, and the massive amount of plagiarism required for its function.

Someone told me that "ideologically rejecting every aspect [of GenAi] will hurt devs in the long run." I don't agree with this. First of all, the implication that developers need GenAi to create anything is much more harmful than rejecting GenAi. Second of all, there is no world where I will actively engage with GenAi given the ethical issues. Believe it or not, you can still create things without GenAi. You can, in fact, just pick up a pencil and start drawing. I'm learning how to draw right now because I want to expand my creative outlets. Soon, I want to learn how to make music. It brings me immense joy to be creative, to do things myself, to go from idea to artwork. I don't understand how there are people that not only don't care about that, but would actively invade a community of people who do.

To everyone who is as against GenAi as I am: we will prevail. Please keep celebrating human-made art. And if you're considering making something, know that anything you create will be more valuable than anything GenAi has ever produced. I know things are difficult, but I promise that we'll make it through this together. Never stop creating.

I Gave Up And You Should Too!

hidden (killswitch) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 02:58:00 +0000

^{Preview and title image: "Wanker" hand gesture by Jeremykemp, under CC BY-SA 3.0}

Thinking out loud a bit here: the vibes are off, team. I think honestly maybe the idea of rules in general has gone out the window nowadays? Our shit (all of it!!!) is getting pillaged by inhuman dickheads who have only considered that concept as, like, a stray thought that clearly ricocheted off of their distorted reality sphere.

This unfortunately has even extended to our industry, where some of us have been working for a while to establish it as a place where we ought to have some basic manners towards each other, including "don't burn down my house", or even extensions of that concept such as "don't take avoidable actions which could conceivably contribute to my house burning down". But UNFORTUNATELY there are a bunch of genuine fuckheads who do that shit anyway.

What we've come to, now, is a situation where these total losers are no longer even a bit worried about backlash to this stuff. So they hit the "I'm a little birthday boy" routine and talk about how they're happy to use genAI or what-the-fuck-ever since, uhhhhhh, it's easy.

Let me tell you a story about consistent ethical positions. I was working on a game a few years ago and I had to think of a name for something. I am generally very good at this but was blanking on any ideas and felt insecure about it. So, for the first and only time in my career, I opened up the chatbot de jour and prompted it for some options. Turns out, they were hot fucking dogshit. Zero originality, wasted my time, slop did not find its way into the game. I opened a thesaurus and found my way to a good answer that way instead, which is how I generally do that kind of thing anyway.

Literally all that did for me was to automate an already-existing step of the process, which is to clear some bad ideas out of your brain so that you can think of some good ones. And after I did it, I was like, "why the fuck did I do that?", because I have no shortage of useless ideas! If I'm out of them, that's a sign I should walk away from the computer, not a sign I should ask the plagiarism bot to extrude hot steaming shit directly into my mouth.

Where this comes to the point of consistent ethical positions is that the perfect, idealised version of that does not exist. It is stupid to pretend it does, because all that does is fill otherwise well-meaning people with complete despair. It makes us give up. We live under extractive capitalism and that means that pretty much everything we do has some sort of negative effect on someone far away. But you have a degree of control over that, little though it may be, and throwing up your hands and pretending you don't makes you a dickhead. I used the chatbot, once, knowing that it wasn't good. I then regretted it, and didn't do it again. That is literally all you need to do: you just need to learn from your actions and reflect it in said actions going forward. It is basic human decency to try your best. Ideally we even try and go beyond just basic human decency! Imagine that.

So, when I see my colleagues in this industry acting like they don't have agency in the buttons they press on their fucking computers in the process of making virtual entertainment products, I instantly know that they are not worth taking seriously. There is no room for this in the world. It's like having a flood of sewage coming out of your shower drain and not only refusing to call a plumber but laying down in it and starting to make mud pies. Nothing to be done, I guess! Better give up!

BETTER GIVE UP!!!

^{Yes, this is a post about IGF judging. Among other things.}

Returning to Myself (I am, as I always am)

hidden (lin-living-life) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 21:18:09 +0000

How many times can a life crash down all around someone? Is it just the nature of 22 to fall apart again and again? Is this the "finding myself" every post-undergrad falls into? I never finished college, haven't finished yet I guess. I'm going back in the spring.

I had a life path, a career, a loving home. And then I lost it. And I rebuilt the pieces of me that I thought were essentials and I went to Atlanta to recover from my anorexia (for real this time, not half-assed like last time,) and a single overheard phone call smashed the foundation of the new life I was building. I'm on the rooftop of the luxury building I've been set up in for temporary housing in my home city. Everything is the same as it's always been— me on my $150 five-year-old Costco laptop, the fleece PJ pants I stole from my best friend during our junior year, worn out Last Bookstore t shirt 4 sizes too big from the day my adolescence ended— the weight of the world falling off my shoulders and onto a text box. It's comforting to have been doing this for this long. The seasons change, and I stay the same.

I've been writing for as long as I could hold a pen, in notebooks I'd hide in between the slats of my twin sized top bunk, in smuggled scraps of paper hidden in my bra, openly on the desktops in the library of whatever city I'd been deposited in. I've never ever written well. I've never been proud of any of it, I've been published and still my greatest pieces exist on this blog (and the other 3 under different pseudonyms. This one is my baby though, the other ones are more specialized. Specific projects that get a lot more attention and a lot more censorship. Sites that feature pieces that have gone through a whole editing process. I love "Lin Living Life" because it's my most authentic. She's my stream of consciousness placed on the altar for public consumption. She's my sopping wet soul for you to take or leave as you wish. She's all that I am hidden under a flimsy anachronism.) There's something about the way my thoughts rarely make sense when not in black and white. Writing untangles the rats nest inside.

It's 2pm here at the end of the universe. I am, as I always am, content in my current sufferings. I am, as I always am, returning to myself. Everything changes, everything stays the same.

The world is never ending. I think the repeated tragedies and subsequent sunrises of the past 2 years have hammered that into me. I used to lay down in the middle of suburban streets at 4am in some sort of teenage attempt to spit in the eyes of God, now I go on walks and step to the cadence of my heart, reminding myself by keeping pace. "Everything changes, everything stays the same." The muscle may be weaker now post-addiction, post-stroke, but even the murmur itself bears evidence of continuity. I am as I have always been; weak.

Weakness, as a state of being. Cowardice, as an ornament on the mantle. I display my faults in the entryway of my selfhood. I am, I think, unashamed of the man I can never be, the woman I allow myself to be. I cannot purge these defects any more than I can offload my strengths. I am a whole human being, and I'm me. I think this last year of running from myself can testify to that. As much as I long for the life of a herding dog on an Australian ranch, I think I might be able to find peace here too: in my favorite pajamas, on the rooftop, weight of the world on the page.

Ubiquitous means it's everywhere; not that it's required

hidden (curiousquail) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 19:39:58 +0000

The people who benefit from AI the most need you to THINK that it's inevitable in order to make their money

(Photos in this post are mostly unrelated. As always, I'm a highly visual creature and I have a ridiculous photo backlog so I pepper stuff in. enjoy)

Here's several of the cats mistaking a sound I made in the kitchen as the treat container so they're gathering around the pole (which I still need to take down and pack as part of the move smdh) in anticipation because I usually chuck them out into the room around there

It's wild how most people can easily understand that ubiquity doesn't always mean "good" but somehow can't parse that it also doesn't mean "required".

Just because something is "everywhere" does not mean you're forced to use it, but AI Boosters are relying on this mentality to speed up mass adoption of their bullshit and make it seem like a "toothpaste is out of the tube" situation when that's really not the case.

Obviously there's nuance here; if you work a job and that job is forcing you to use AI tech and you can't, for example, rage quit, you're probably stuck using it. That sucks. That's also understandable; in a capitalist society we regularly don't have a lot of control over the the things we do for work¹...but for personal use? For independent artists, developers, creative people of any kind? What the fuck are you doing, man!

You do not, under any circumstances, have to "Well if AI wasn't evil it'd be helpful for..." because right now? It's evil. Full stop. And helping the boosters sell it with either ambivalence or a hypothetical future they can create a fantasy of is purely self-defeating - especially when the "it'd be helpful for..." then lists off some things about the creative process that are useful or important and offloading them to a chatbot is kind of an insult to creativity. But I digress!

As this will be my final fall in New England before we move back to the desert I want to catalog as many fall colors as I can. Granted it's still early, it's worth the documentation

It's so silly how like, when you're a kid there's that "would you jump off a cliff if your friends did?" reprimand adults would give you for doing stupid shit and yet....society feels predicated on helping establish "mainstream". I'm kinda meandering here but like...stick with me for a sec. I have seen a total of maybe five marvel films ever, and three of them were the Fox X-Men movies. I do not listen to top 40 radio. I'm incredibly selective about what games I play or give attention to and dude it boggles my mind to no end that everyone feels like they're "supposed" to care about the MCU, or GTA6 or what Taylor Swift is up to, what sports event is happening or what reality show is in fashion. You really don't have to engage! I get that this sounds hipster or contrarian or whatever (the "let people enjoy things" comic has done untold damage to our society) but it's really as simple as "that doesn't interest me, I don't want it"².

More fall colors! They're not QUITE there yet but you can see the progress

This isn't a slight against people who enjoy any of the examples I'm knocking, absolutely not here to yuck anyone's yums but I would ask you - is the reason you're interested in those things genuine or simply because it's just background radiation part of society to you? Because these things are all household names³?

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google et al desperately want the concept of AI (chatbots, code assistance, "art" generation etc) to be household names. To be the thing that you're expected to use, and it's so fucking easy to push back on that. And I'm not even suggesting a "stick your head in the ground" type mentality; I think being informed on how "AI" works and not using it is far more powerful than blind "I don't know and I don't care", especially if you're gonna be hounded by boosters who won't shut the fuck up.

The tech oligarchs are counting on the discomfort, on the FOMO, on the notion of being "left behind" in order to get you to buy in. They want ubiquitous to mean inevitable, to mean not-optional and (I know I keep saying this) it's so easy to not let them do that by just saying no.

Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta finish Penguin Colony before I get hit with more spoilers online.

Anyway, thanks for reading. As always, here's your end-of-post cat photo (I know we started with cats but what can you do); it's everyone's favorite lesbians Gargoyle and Lilith enjoying a snuggle.

photography

fall-colors

For a supposedly "free" market, the number of jobs is limited, the wages are horrible, individual worker value is, to the bosses, nonexistent and I know some people will freak out seeing the word "capitalist" used as a derogatory but you gotta look around at the other frogs in the pan sometimes, man↩
Part of why both the BDS XBOX boycott and boycotting JK Rowling products has been an uphill battle is because of the ubiquity. To be clear, gfinancially supporting Microsoft directly finances their involvement in genociding Palestinians, and any surviving cultural cache that Harry Potter has lines the pockets of Rowling who then uses her money and influence to harm trans rights - yet people seemingly cannot be bothered to not play the wizard game or watch the HBO show because Harry Potter is a household name.↩
Hell we could do a whole thing on how algorithmic internet has killed organic discovery; people don't seem to know HOW to find things outside of what they see on tiktok, mainstream TV, spotify curators, AAA gaming news etc.↩

...some favorite Bear Blog finds! [Updated]

hidden (coreyblogs) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:09:00 +0000

I've been using Bear for a few weeks now and it's been such a boon to my good energy to be doing something creative every day.

And while writing in my own little corner of the web has been joyful, the best part has been wandering around peeking into everyone else's.

Below are a few favorite posts and blogs I've come across so far—some recommended to me after this post reached the top of the Trending page, and others I stumbled upon just poking around the Discovery feed myself.

Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy some wonderful internet:

"My Dog is Dying" from What If I Shit My Pants

I'm a huge dog person, so naturally, this post crushed me—especially this line: "She is all I had for a very long time." If only I could send a hug over Wi-Fi! I linked to this specific post, but I've found that this whole blog is raw, honest, and real, and I can't recommend it enough.
"Fond memories of my first car" from What the Fran

This blog is also a treasure trove, but as someone who loves a good dose of nostalgia, this post really got me...mostly because I, too, have only ever driven hand-me-down cars. The line "It was already ancient when we got it." hits very close to home. Also of note: early TomTom navigation systems and failing driver's tests! Oh, the memories!
"does my bad writing make you scared?" from anna's blog

The title drew me in, but once I started reading I couldn't stop. I mean, come on with this line: "It is nice to be good at things. But almost more wondrous is being bad at something and choosing to engage in it anyways." Does it get much better than that? Also, there's poetry!
"Touching the back wall of the Apple Store" from Laura Michet's Blog

This is the post that helped me discover Bear in the first place (I think maybe Cup of Jo linked to it?). Either way, I was hooked from the very first sentence: "Here's a dumb story." LOL. It was a great story.

Beyond individual posts, I've been following along with Mrs. Hobbs' whole journey over at The Next Chapter with Mrs. Hobbs. I enjoy witnessing this big life change from afar, and her sweet sign-off—"Keep reading, and whenever possible—be kind!"—just radiates pure, old-school internet goodness. :)

I've also happily lost track of time reading through valentine's day's entire commonplace book. I'm a sucker for quotes, lists, and Mary Oliver.

If you end up reading and enjoying any of these, make someone's day and let them know! It only takes a second and will probably mean the world to them.

Bear feels like a warm, gentle place to be. Thanks for building it, Herman.

Okay, so what am I missing? Send me some links or drop them in the guestbook, if you want! I'd like to share a handful below.

(Photo by Andrew Svk.)

Update: Hello again! First, a belated thank you to Sam from alieniloquy for originally tipping me off to What the Fran a week or so back, and apologies for the snub. Thanks as well to those who sent along their favorite posts.

Here are a couple more I've enjoyed:

"There go 200 of my closest friends" from Bungle in the Jungle

Like the author, I've done a couple long Amtrak treks across parts of the US. From the shocking price tag to the unexpected stops to the cornucopia of people on board, he really nailed what it's like. It was fun reliving my years-ago journeys through a stranger's similar experience.
"Walkable Cities Are Actually Swag" from Booger Diary

I mean, walkable cities are, actually, swag. And who among us hasn't lived on a futon? I found the voice, pacing, and sense of humor of this piece unique and the sketches hilarious. (Did anyone else catch the surprise at the bottom of the final drawing?) His other posts are "swag," too.

Oh, and the author kindly sent me a disturbingly accurate reminder of the worst thing I've ever done, and named the file "Corey Bird Eviscerator," which made me laugh:

Email along more links or drop them in the guestbook, if you want, and I'll do another favorites post soon!

Rules for Good Players

hidden (hat) — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:25:00 +0000

I've been contemplating player advice ahead of a play-by-post Wages of Sin campaign I'm running and Prismatic Wasteland's How to Be a Good Player blogwagon. Here's what I've got.

Be kind.

Play in good faith, and expect the same of others. Give compliments. Ask questions. Find ways to be helpful. Share things you like. Treat everyone with respect. Be a fan of the characters.

Take care of yourself.

Cover the essentials. That's where the foundations for safety and good play are built. Eat plenty, stay hydrated, and try to sleep well. Know your limits, when to push them, and when to back off. Learn what you need when you're struggling or spiraling. Take walks. Do grounding exercises. Breathe. Learn about bleed. Ask for help when you need it.

Look out for each other.

Check in regularly. Get consent. Provide content warnings. Speak up if you notice something's off. Address problems before they get worse. Help where you can. Do not tolerate hate, discrimination, harassment, or abuse.

Be cruel.

Cut until it is beautiful. Creativity is subtractive. Tear away at what could be until there is only what is. Do not fear consequence. Do not moralize. Make a mess, relentlessly. Understand that you will destroy possibility as you bring forth results. Do not make more rules for yourself. Forget the fear you will hurt somebody. Cut.

Stay hungry.

Want. Want more. Desire deeply and intimately. Do not fear your desire. Hold it tender and close. Leave yourself wanting more. Want so much you can never be satisfied. Do not save choices for later. Fill your mouth, selfishly. End scenes early. Find new desires. Share what you want. Reveal your intent. Learn to love tension, lean into resistance, and want want want.

Go for the throat.

Do not hesitate. Make the obvious choice. Make the vulnerable choice. Find where the flesh is soft and the blood runs underneath. Go there. Sink your teeth in and do not stop when your mouth is wet. Pick fights even when you don't think you'll win. Expect to lose. Expect to fail. Expect to get hurt. Hang on by your teeth. Make it hurt.

On Facebook's 25bn USD fine

hidden (pivic) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 05:48:00 +0000

Facebook have been fined 25 billion USD for lying to the public for years about its user-data mismanagement.

"The lies extend beyond Facebook's data practices as well," the judge said, adding they went to "the heart of Facebook's core business practices".

From Shoshana Zuboff's excellent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:

Among this new cohort of mercenaries was Cambridge Analytica, the UK consulting firm owned by the reclusive billionaire and Donald Trump backer Robert Mercer. The firm’s CEO, Alexander Nix, boasted of its application of personality-based “micro-behavioral targeting” in support of the “Leave” and the Trump campaigns during the ramp-up to the 2016 Brexit vote and the US presidential election.74 Nix claimed to have data resolved “to an individual level where we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every adult in the United States.”75 While scholars and journalists tried to determine the truth of these assertions and the role that these techniques might have played in both 2016 election upsets, the firm’s new chief revenue officer quietly announced the firm’s less glamorous but more lucrative postelection strategy: “After this election, it’ll be full-tilt into the commercial business.” Writing in a magazine for car dealers just after the US election, he tells them that his new analytic methods reveal “how a customer wants to be sold to, what their personality type is, and which methods of persuasion are most effective.… What it does is change people’s behavior through carefully crafted messaging that resonates with them.… It only takes small improvements in conversion rates for a dealership to see a dramatic shift in revenue.”

It was probably no coincidence that the leaked Facebook presentation appeared around the same time that a young Cambridge Analytica mastermind-turned-whistleblower, Chris Wylie, unleashed a torrent of information on that company’s secret efforts to predict and influence individual voting behavior, quickly riveting the world on the small political analytics firm and the giant source of its data: Facebook. There are many unanswered questions about the legality of Cambridge Analytica’s complex subterfuge, its actual political impact, and its relationship with Facebook. Our interest here is restricted to how its machinations shine a bright light on the power of surveillance capitalism’s mechanisms, especially the determination to render data from the depth dimension.

Later:

The pressing question in Facebook’s headquarters—“How do we turn all those Facebook users into money?”—still required an answer.85 In March 2008, just three months after having to kill his first attempt at emulating Google’s logic of accumulation, Zuckerberg hired Google executive Sheryl Sandberg to be Facebook’s chief operating officer.

In signing on with Facebook, the talented Sandberg became the “Typhoid Mary” of surveillance capitalism as she led Facebook’s transformation from a social networking site to an advertising behemoth. Sandberg understood that Facebook’s social graph represented an awe-inspiring source of behavioral surplus: the extractor’s equivalent of a nineteenth-century prospector stumbling into a valley that sheltered the largest diamond mine and the deepest gold mine ever to be discovered. “We have better information than anyone else. We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other people infer,” Sandberg said. Facebook would learn to track, scrape, store, and analyze UPI to fabricate its own targeting algorithms, and like Google it would not restrict extraction operations to what people voluntarily shared with the company. Sandberg understood that through the artful manipulation of Facebook’s culture of intimacy and sharing, it would be possible to use behavioral surplus not only to satisfy demand but also to create demand. For starters, that meant inserting advertisers into the fabric of Facebook’s online culture, where they could “invite” users into a “conversation.”

Remember, the systems made by Facebook not only helped people to commit genocide in Myanmar but did nothing to stop what happened.

There are few things Facebook won't do for money. You want antisemitism, for example?

Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”

From Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People: a Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism:

I was one of the people advising the company’s top leaders, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, as they were inventing how the company would deal with governments around the world. By the end, I watched hopelessly as they sucked up to authoritarian regimes like China’s and casually misled the public. I was on a private jet with Mark the day he finally understood that Facebook probably did put Donald Trump in the White House, and came to his own dark conclusions from that. But most days, working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them.

It's important to read Mindfuck, Christopher Wylie's book about how he leaked Cambridge Analytica data to the public. This is what set off the explosion that has kind of culminated in the most-recent lawsuit. From the book:

I provided evidence tying Cambridge Analytica to Donald Trump, Facebook, Russian intelligence, international hackers, and Brexit. This evidence revealed how both an obscure foreign contractor engaged in illegal activity and the same foreign contractor had been used by the winning Trump and Brexit campaigns. The email chains, internal memos, invoices, bank transfer records, and project documentation I brought demonstrated that Trump and Brexit had deployed the same strategies, powered by the same technologies, directed by many of the same people—all under the specter of covert Russian involvement.

The data has become more and more valuable, with Facebook making on average $30 from each of its 170 million American users. At the same time, we have fallen for the idea that these services are “free.” In reality, we pay with our data into a business model of extracting human attention.

What could you see by using a fraction of the data that Facebook mined?

Working with a set of contractors, SCL was able to tap into the telecom firehose, pick an IP address, and then sit and watch what a person in Trinidad was browsing on the Internet at that very moment. Not surprisingly, it was a lot of porn. People were browsing everything imaginable, including the culturally specific “Trini Porn.” I can remember sitting around the computer one evening and watching as someone toggled between looking up plantain recipes and watching porn, all while Nix laughed at them. It was a revoltingly giddy laugh, almost infantile. He looked up the IP address and then opened up Google Maps satellite view to see the neighborhood this person lived in.

In 2012, Facebook filed for a U.S. patent for “Determining user personality characteristics from social networking system communications and characteristics.” Facebook’s patent application explained that its interest in psychological profiling was because “inferred personality characteristics are stored in connection with the user’s profile, and may be used for targeting, ranking, selecting versions of products, and various other purposes.”

Back to how Facebook enabled the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar:

In August 2017, hate speech surged on Facebook targeting the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim minority group in Myanmar, with narratives of a “Muslim-free” Myanmar and calls for ethnic cleansing of the region going viral. Much of this was propaganda created and disseminated by military personnel conducting information operations. After Rohingya militants launched a coordinated attack on the police, the Burmese military capitalized on a surge in support they received online and proceeded to systematically kill, rape, and maim tens of thousands of Rohingya. Other groups joined in the slaughter, and calls to action to murder Rohingya continued to go out on Facebook. Rohingya villages were burned and more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees were forced across the border into Bangladesh. Facebook was warned repeatedly by international and local organizations about the situation in Myanmar. The company banned a Rohingya resistance group from the platform but left the military and pro-government groups on the site, which enabled them to continue spreading hate propaganda. This was despite what United Nations officials called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” In March 2018, the U.N. concluded that Facebook had played a “determining role” in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. Violence was enabled by Facebook’s frictionless architecture, propelling hate speech through a population at a velocity previously unimaginable. Facebook’s apathetic response was positively Orwellian. “There is no place for hate speech or content that promotes violence on Facebook, and we work hard to keep it off our platform,” read Facebook’s statement about its facilitating role in the ethnic cleansing of forty thousand human beings. It seemed for all the world that if you wanted to maintain an oppressive regime, Facebook would be an excellent company to turn to.

In short: Facebook is a nefarious company that should be stopped.

My Dog Died

hidden (shitmypants) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 23:31:00 +0000

My dog of 14 years passed away last Thursday. I have been avoiding writing about it because it is too painful. I still find myself not wanting to think about it. I dread opening my phone's camera roll, filled with photos of her. Especially photos of our last moments together. I am so glad I have them, but they are still so painful to look at.

My last moments of her keep replaying in my mind.

The last kiss I got from her before she got sleepy from the opioid medication.
Her breathing slowing.
Her last breath. Lifting her lifeless body into the basket we used to transport her to be cremated.
The back of her little head in the basket, as we closed the car door and said our last goodbyes...she looked as if she was just sleeping peacefully, but she was gone.

I can’t help but wonder if I let her go to soon. I just didn’t want to see her suffer any longer than necessary just so that I could keep her longer for me. I didn’t want to see her starve, or have a stroke or a seizure, or for her to be in pain or just not feel good because her kidneys were failing.

I always told myself as long as she is still eating, then she is still at least enjoying life enough to stay. It got more difficult to get her to eat the past couple of weeks, but then, last Wednesday, she stopped eating completely. All I could get her to eat was baby food and doggy ice cream, but hardly even that. She also wasn't very active and was sleeping a lot.

Our vet, who helped us let her go peacefully at home (who also happens to be a family friend), informed us of what was to come when it came to kidney disease, and I took this as the sign that it was all going to be suffering from here on out, and I needed to let her go. Although our vet friend confirmed her body was starting to shut down, I worry so badly that I didn’t make the right call...even though I know it was only going to get worse from here. I think I just wish I could have one last kiss from her, and give her one last kiss on her little head.

It is also painful looking back at times. The first few years with her were rocky. I will admit I wasn’t the greatest dog parent. I am trying to forgive myself for those years. I felt like I was guarding my heart, and I didn’t REALLY start bonding with her until I moved out of my parents' house and was able to take her with me. Then it was just her and me for years, and we got so close. She made me feel safe, and I finally put my walls down and let myself feel my love for her.

I wish I could get back the years that I took for granted. When I moved out to a place that didn’t allow me to take her with me... it was only a year, but I wish I could have that year back with her. I know I did what I had to do to survive at that time (I started my transition in my very religious parents' house and my narcissistic mother, and I HAD to get out), but I still wish I could have done things differently.

Despite it all, she loved me SO much and she never stopped. I was always her person, even though I had moved out and my parents were her main caretaker...Whenever I visited, she got so excited to see me... as if I had never been gone. She still chose me as her person no matter what. It was the truest form of unconditional love I have ever experienced. She loved me so hard, even when I didn’t deserve it.

It is especially hard seeing my other dog having to be without her. I can tell he is lonely, and we are actively looking to find him a companion, but I am not going to lie, it feels a bit wrong...like we are just trying to replace her...but she is not replaceable.

I have been crying less the past couple of days, and although I feel the pain starting to fade a bit, it also makes me worry that I am moving on too quickly, or that I am starting to compartmentalize, put up walls, or starting to feel numb again.

I am so sad she is gone, but I am so thankful for what she brought to my life. Even the heartbreak. She helped me learn to feel again, and to open my heart.

It reminds me of the Lumineers' lyric: “It is better to feel pain than nothing at all; the opposite of love is indifference.”

A good reminder that if I keep trying to avoid pain/hurt, I will miss out on so many good things in life. Yes, this hurts like hell, but she brought so much good, joy, and comfort to my life that I would have missed out on otherwise.

14 years is a long time. I have grown and learned a lot since 14 years ago me brought her home. One of those lessons was being a better dog parent. I know she forgives me for the years I wasn’t at my best. She didn't keep score. Maybe the way to honor her is to stop scoring myself.

She allowed me to be human. She didn't expect me to be perfect. She loved me anyway, because I think she knew my heart, and I didn't have to explain anything. She just knew.

She knew my intentions.
She knew when I was having a tough time.
She knew when I was sick or not feeling well.

I will love you forever baby girl. Thank you so much for the joy you brought me and the lessons you taught me. I hope you are at peace and are free from pain and anxiety. I miss you so much; it hurts.

If this resonated with you, or you just want to connect, leave me a comment here.

Carve a pumpkin!

hidden (will2) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:56:55 +0000

thirty questions for sandbox campaigns

hidden (elmcat) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:16:45 +0000

Josh has revived the popular twenty quick questions for your campaign from so many years ago. The original was concerned with setting information that players actually care about rather than elaborate worldbuilding that doesn't matter. The new one is explicitly concerned with what players need to know about a setting when they begin playing.

So, anyway, player driven fantasy sandbox campaigns can be hard to kick off. If players are supposed to come up with their own plans, what the fuck do they need to know to do that?

Here are thirty (YES I EXPANDED IT I DON'T CARE) questions about how the world works and what players can do in it. Fill them out and give the answers to your players as a handout. Here we go.

How do we discover places worth exploring around here?
What places do people travel great distances to visit?
Where do we go for a meal, a bed, and some good company?
Who else is out there exploring dangerous places?
What are people fighting over around here?
How do we stock up for a week in the wilderness?
How do we find out what we're getting into before we set out?
What dates should we mark on our calendar?
How else could we make our fortune around here?
How do the seasons affect where we can go?
Where do we find people willing to work for us?
If one of us is hurt or ill, how can we get them back on their feet?
How do we find out what we've got our hands on?
How do we turn the treasure we find into coin?
If we stayed here for a few weeks, what could we get involved in?
How can we send word to someone several days' travel away?
How do we become more than strangers to the people here?
How do we keep our treasure safe while we're away?
If we needed a miracle, where would we turn?
What if we want something nobody sells?
How can we get an audience with someone powerful?
What happens if we're accused of a crime?
What could we learn to do here that we can't do yet?
How do we get our hands on something we're not supposed to have?
How do we get others to back a plan we can't afford ourselves?
If someone dies working for us, what are we expected to do?
What could we do with a fortune around here?
What if we cleared out an abandoned fortress and wanted to keep it?
What would it take to change who makes the rules here?
What would make people remember our names?

How to answer this shit

Keep three things in mind.

Actionable
Specific, but not exhaustive
No answer is fine

An answer should tell players what is possible, how something works, or what stands in their way. One useful contact or concrete example is often better than listing a bunch of options. Players can explore more on their own later. Stick to what their characters could reasonably know. There's still plenty to discover through play.

Answering with "nobody knows" or pointing out a restriction in the setting is fine. That's useful information too. If you don't have an answer for something yet, that's also fine. Leave it unanswered for now. This is not a demand to do more worldbuilding.

One way to approach the answers more deliberately is to tie them to the players' starting location or region. Some answers will naturally be relevant throughout the setting, while others will be very local. This could be a living document that you expand as you go, or maybe you could hand players another FAQ for a different settlement. Maybe many answers will be exactly the same there, while others are very different. Repetition is good! It makes the setting feel consistent.

Make sure not to confuse information with adventure hooks. The goal isn't to present players with thirty situations that need resolving. Rumours and ongoing conflicts are good but you're explaining how the world works, not telling players what to do about it.

I like the answers to be short and matter-of-fact. For one, I feel this leaves less room for accidentally suggesting a plot. For another, many players will not fucking read it, or they'll read it and forget. That's FINE. It's a reference document, not homework. Something they can come back to when they have an idea and want to figure out how to pursue it. If they don't use it, that's on them. Maybe they don't even need it!

Still, answering these questions is worthwhile prep for the referee as well. This is as much for you as it is for your players. It gets you thinking about how the world works beyond just where the next dungeon is, so you can give more informed answers when players come up with plans of their own.

Why bother

Because player agency depends a lot on player knowledge¹. Players might not know they could try to claim a dungeon they've cleared out. Or they might know, but have no idea what it would take to do so.

Many games focus on character sheet abilities that tell players what their characters can do. Push the paper button to do x. This is kinda similar, but rather than making it a character focused thing, it's aimed at the players themselves. They need some understanding of how the world works before they can imagine what they might want to accomplish, without a GM guiding them through an adventure.

Setting primers already do some of this, but they're usually more concerned with getting the campaign started². I want something players can come back to later, when they've made their own plans and need to figure out how the world works.

Some games try to encourage this through player principles. Cairn tells players to set goals and ask questions. Yeah, that's good advice, but what goals? What should you be asking about? The principles aren't tied to the particular world we're playing in. I've had plenty of players read them and give me a thumbs up. But when we started playing, they immediately fell back to old habits. So maybe we should combine the principles with some actionable information.

Here's an example I filled out for my Dolmenwolves campaign.

The original West Marches is pretty much what I think a player driven sandbox campaign should look like. Built around players deciding where to go and what to do. Ben Robbins also argued that a consistent world allows players to make informed decisions, while keeping much of the setting's history secret. I think that's an important distinction. Players don't need to know everything about the world to make plans, but they do need something to work with.↩
Some primers focus on broad concepts and getting a campaign started. But I think better primers should focus on the players' needs rather than the GM's worldbuilding.↩

Consumption as a political identity (A critique)

hidden (writeitdown) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 23:07:00 +0000

When I first thought to write about this topic, I considered asking whether or not someone's consumption habits could be considered a political identity, and realized that the answer is so obviously YES that there was no point in debating the question in a blog post. So instead, I'm going to unpack what "consumption as a political identity" means.

Our economy (GDP specifically) is expected to grow without pause. This both does and does not make sense. If people keep having families and the population grows, obviously the economy would have to grow with it. But, if the economy is encouraged to grow no matter what, more unnecessary products and services will be sold. If we enter a recession, people's jobs are on the line, so we must keep consuming to avoid a recession.

Defining consumer activism and consumption as a political identity

By consumer activism and consumption as a political identity, I'm referring to when people buy something specific or anything from a specific brand because of the political outcome that is hoped to manifest. Think of someone who intentionally shops from Black-owned businesses, or the guy who bought a Tesla because he likes Elon Musk, however rare those men may be.

Some brief history

Consuming as a political identity is a practice that has grown in popularity since the 2010s, with a big jump in participation since 2020. With the Citizens United Supreme Court case, companies had ways to fund politicians as much as they wanted to. Naturally, as political spending by corporations grew, more people started to question which politicians received their money after it left their wallets and landed in the hands of companies. Now, we have a politically conscious consumer.

In the 2010s, the politically conscious consumer (which I will now refer to as PCC) aimed to buy from brands who engaged in corporate activism and narratives of identity. We now had female CEOs, rather than CEOs that just happened to be female. Whether a brand's clothing was inclusive of body sizes, or makeup was inclusive of skin color, mattered. Songs like "All About That Bass" by Meghan Trainor made room for companies to brag about how many sizes they carried. If an influencer debuted a beauty brand without a wide range of foundation shades, critique could be expected. As Donald Trump's first presidency went on, Americans found more ways to buy their way to becoming one of Trump's biggest haters. But in 2020, a shift happened.

During Trump's first term in office, it was mostly liberals who started to care about the principles behind the companies they supported. But when mask mandates spread across the country as Covid-19 spread across the world, right-wing conspiracy theories about Dr. Fauci's deep-state infected the minds of MAGA Republicans. Suddenly, as Joe Biden became the 46th president of the United States, Republicans had their own reason to care about the politics that everyday brands promoted to (or hid from) consumers. Were these brands funding the deep-state? A big example you may be thinking of is Bud Light's 2023 "campaign" with influencer Dylan Mulvaney. I would be underestimating the scale of the backlash to this event with every adjective I can think of. Not to defend a corporation or anything, but Bud Light simply sent Mulvaney cans of the company's beer with her face on them so she could promote a March Madness sweepstakes. To even call this a "campaign" or a "collaboration" would seem dishonest. It was simply a sponsored post.

While this example stands out, it really shouldn't. The only reason it does stand out is because up until 2023, Republican PCCs hadn't really attacked any big brands for being "too woke". The Little (woke) Mermaid live-action remake was announced in 2019, but that's the only other mainstream example I can think of. Behind the scenes, Republicans were consuming differently, they just had no reason to announce it.

Take the Daily Wire's anti-woke products: Jeremy's Razors and Jeremy's Chocolates. I'll start with the razors.

Harry's, a men's shaving company, were previous sponsors of The Daily Wire. But when Harry's expressed a ""values misalignment"" and stopped sponsoring them in 2022, The Daily Wire got so offended that they decided to start their own razor company.

Then, when Hershey's had the balls to "put an activist on the wrapper for International Women’s Day", The Daily Wire did "the only responsible thing" (the snowflake thing) and started making their own chocolate, too.

Now, conservatives could join liberals to the party of consumer activism.

My critique

Consumption as a political identity is a tool that continues the expansion of American politics into the realm of the reactionary. The need to perform and therefore identify as a "good, PCC" to others and to one's self is reactionary.

As someone who is interested in ethical consumption and politics, I understand why anyone would want to know what politicians or specific policies are being funded by the companies they buy from. However, I see two main problems with consumer activism.

Problem #1: Consumer activism still requires us to be consumers

When people discuss consumer activism, the focus is largely on where something is bought. Did you buy from anti-DEI Target? Did your recent purchase at Skims fund a store location in Israel? But, I'd argue that even better questions to ask are what exactly are you buying, and do you need it?

When you do need something, it is important to do your research on the company behind what you're about to purchase. But many consumer activists (sometimes this includes me) will buy something unnecessary and justify that decision because their purchase supports some sort of cause. For example, in 2025 I bought a Fire Aid t-shirt to support the people who lost their homes during the Southern California wildfires of that January. But honestly, I did not need another black t-shirt. If my goal truly was to support those impacted, I could have (and probably should have) just donated money instead of buying a charity product.

If we ever expect real change when it comes to financing elections, making sure the "right side" gets the money does not do anything besides reinforce the current system. I'm not saying that you shouldn't care how companies donate politically. You should. But if you actually want to "vote with your dollars", it would be more effective to just donate straight to the campaigns you believe deserve your financial support, while boycotting companies whose values you disagree with.

Instead of being consumer activists, we should be anti-consumer activists.

Problem #2: Consumption of political sayings and icons makes our politics shallow

A sticker on a reusable water bottle that reads “cute-servative”. The t-shirt I’m wearing right now that says “big fan of human rights” all in lowercase. A pin that says “ICE out”. What do these items have in common? They can be bought. But more importantly, they have sayings. When consumption is tied to political ideology, that ideology becomes consolidated into icons.

By "ICE out", what is one really saying? ICE out of where? Out of Minneapolis, Minnesota? I'd argue they should be out of money, and therefore a pin I could wear would be "defund ICE". At least that has a more direct call to action.

I realized this problem with buying things with political sayings earlier this year, when I bought my "big fan of human rights" shirt. I posted the shirt, all aesthetic on my Instagram story, as one does. Subsequently, I received a DM from someone who (as far I know) does not support Palestinians' right to self determination and does not oppose Israel's genocide in Gaza. Clearly, it is impossible to be a fan of human rights if you hold these positions. Yet, this person assumed that they agreed with me.

I'll make the implicit problem explicit in case it's hard to tell what I'm pointing out. Sayings, such as "ICE out" or "big fan of human rights", are too vague. They contain no actionable advice or request for whoever reads them. The same can be said for emojis.

For the nth time, I understand why icons become political. It's helpful to have dog whistles if, for example, you're part of a marginalized group. You can communicate to other people within that group that you're "one of them" without outing yourself that you're "one of them" to people outside of the group. But this can turn into a slippery slope.

During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, it was expected of everyone who was not racist to post a black square on social media. Some people attached statements to their black squares, but it was not a requirement. The black square itself became a way to signal your nonracism. Turning icons into political stances makes it easier for people to feel like they're doing something while they're really doing nothing at all. Further, it reinforces the homogenization of politics. If you don't say the thing, post the icon, or repost the infographic, you can't sit with us.

This makes people replace action with performance to the detriment of our progress. There's space for performative politics, but this isn't it. When people follow the crowd, even when the crowd is right, that just means that they abandoned critical thinking in favor of social currency. It's OK to repost what other people have posted or follow trends as long as you're not doing it blindly.

Conclusion

If you made it this far, thank you! If you'd like to leave a Komment on this post, please do.

the robot is your (only) friend

hidden (rnotte) — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 05:13:36 +0000

this isn't going to be a rant on the ethics or plagiarism of LLMs; those points have been talked about to death. instead, i want to bring up an observation of the behavior in those who build, and rely on, the robot:

have you noticed how individualistic they are?

for these folks, the robot is their work partner. the robot is their life partner. the robot is the artist they commission. the robot is their therapist. the robot is their physician. the robot is their shopping assistant. the robot is their tax agent. never once have they thought to ask a living, breathing person to work with them.

and it begs the question, how antisocial do you have to be, how little do you have to trust in humans, that you would sooner trust the output of a robot? ...don't answer that, i already know your excuses; the robot never says no, the robot never complains, the robot is easier, the robot is cheaper. but is the robot good at what it does?

...no! it's not! not even close!

asking someone for help, and then watching them turn to the robot, is like going to an italian restaurant that serves you frozen lasagna reheated in a microwave. it's a betrayal. the difference is that society isn't complaining enough about the former.

human societies are built on cooperation. hardly anything gets achieved by doing it all alone, and for the ones who do make something special by themselves, it takes years of hard work. so when you'd rather work with the robot, it tells me that you don't give a flying [REDACTED] about your community, your friends, your family, or the planet. you have your excuses. but you know what you don't have? the respect of your community. your community, who would be more than willing to help you achieve what you want, as long as you open up to them.

so turn off the robot, and work with humans again! we don't bite! ...usually.

No longer feeling the need to rush

hidden (forsomeone) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 23:47:00 +0000

Dear Dad,

Hi. It's been a while. Life's been moving. I'm very tired, as usual. People keep telling me it's my body decompressing from all the years of taking care of you and mom. I agree but also am not consciously thinking about it that way. I am just still very exhausted but chugging away.

I emptied out your nightstand a few weeks ago. And that's all I've been able to do. No one else has taken the initiative to start clearing out your room. It's just me, feeling the responsibility to do it. And it will likely take me a long time.

Sometimes I walk past and look into your bedroom door half-expecting to see you on your bed. Not on your hospital bed provided by the hospice, but your old bed. With everything still in place.

My brain envisions you sitting up and folding stacks of napkins to hoard in your nightstand drawer. But I register you're not in there in a split second and your room is now mostly empty except for all the family pictures I placed around the day you died.

That was really so weird how I felt like I should display them all over your room. Portraits of mom and you from your wedding. Old elementary and high school photos of me and Kuya. Family portraits from the 80s still in the same frame over 30 years later. My brain was thinking that at least you'll maybe see someone familiar — I had no idea it would be your last day. The coincidence of that feeling with what happened on the day you left still irks me. Our subconscious feelings are real and I'm glad I acted on it... if only I had placed them sooner, maybe we could've talked about who was in the photos when you were still responsive and curious.

Okay, not ready for that yet. Still.

Mom's doing okay. We're a few steps closer to figuring out what's going on with her sinuses. We're currently conquering her congestion issue and would you believe it's because of tomatoes (in any form: raw, cooked, stewed, etc.), raw onions, and raw garlic? I've removed them from all the food I give her and she hasn't been congested. The body is a really weird thing.

Anyway, I took momma to Costco today. It was her first time out in a few weeks, for leisure. It was also probably the longest and slowest time we've spent shopping — we're still used to the days where we'd leave you alone in the house (with me watching your every movement on the camera, ready to abandon the cart if I saw you getting into trouble) or with Kuya, having to rush in and out. Today she took nearly 2 hours to walk around, browsing at everything.

It was nice not having to rush but we felt sad when we agreed on the revelation.

The Old Man and the Young One

hidden (itsme) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 22:37:54 +0000

Old Man: Things were better in my day.
Young One: Ha! Back then you had wars, disease, starvation, inequality, racism, pollution, crime, and corruption!
Old Man: Yes, we did. What's your point?
Young One: Today we ... (realises nothing has changed). Anyway, what was so good about it?
Old Man: In my day we had hope for a better future.

Hunter S. Thompson: And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

Unlabeled puzzle design: good decoys are all you need

hidden (multiplex) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 20:05:00 +0000

Zooming in on one puzzle's decoy label that 75% of players picked

Can you identify what this chart represents?

Of course it's not immediately obvious what this chart's title would be, but we do have some clues that help narrow the search space.

The X axis. Observing the X axis range, we can be fairly certain it's showing us how something has changed over the past seven decades.

The Y axis. The Y axis doesn't provide as much information, but we can at least notice that it's a fairly small range. Whatever "it" is goes from ~4.75 to ~6.25 in these seven decades. Though since we do not have units, this could still be a large range. It's very important to know if the chart range is simply 4.5 to 6.5, or if it's in thousands or billions.

The shape. Another important detail is that the value changes in steps, not continuously. Whatever was measured here moves in discrete hops from one value to the next.

Thankfully, an Unlabeled puzzle contains another crucial set of hints: the pool of axis labels to choose from, as well as the other three charts in the puzzle.

This post is about a couple of labels in particular: the actual answer for this chart's Y axis, and the decoy that most players placed there instead.

The other clues: ten labels and three other charts

An Unlabeled puzzle presents players with four charts with missing labels, a pool of ten labels to choose from, and up to four attempts to assign them correctly to all four charts.

Here are the ten labels from this puzzle:


Year	Month	Temperature (°F)
Atomic number (protons)	Atomic mass (u)	Neutrons (count)
Height above the sea (m)	Distance to horizon (km)	Bar height (m)
High jump record (m)

And the puzzle's other three charts:

Now we have a lot more information to work with! I'll walk through one possible thought process:

The X axis:

Year. The X axis obviously takes Year, unless one of the other charts is showing some very old trend, which is unlikely.

Ruled out for the Y axis:

Month. We can rule out Month with high confidence.
Atomic mass. That doesn't seem like something that would change in discrete steps over some number of decades.
Height above the sea (m). It could be represented here, but it's hard to think of something growing in discrete steps across a couple of meters that was worth measuring. We're probably ruling that one out.
Temperature. Ruled out, since a trend across decades wouldn't move discretely; it would move continuously.
Neutrons (count). Definitely not.
Atomic number. Also definitely not.
Distance to horizon (km). Again, the shape of the graph probably rules this out.

Still in the running:

High jump record (m). Definitely a candidate, but needs more thought.
Bar height (m). This is plausible, but what 'bar height' are we talking about here?

We are left with two plausible candidates: high jump record (m) and bar height (m). We could have done an analysis on the other three charts for a process of elimination, but this is probably enough to think through.

Can you think through what it would be before reading on?

Bar height or high jump record?

High jump record (m) feels like a good candidate. First of all, it provides more information compared to the vague 'bar height', and the incremental hops over time make sense.
Bar height (m), on the other hand, could move discretely, but who knows? What if it's a bar floating in water that rises slowly but continuously over time? We have no idea what this bar is.

I believe this is where most players landed on high jump record, in much faster fashion.

But a closer analysis of the Y axis range values is the last important mental step. The crucial insight is that 6.25 meters is ~20.5 feet! I think most people would agree that nobody is jumping to such great heights, unless the jump refers to something else doing the jumping. Here I do depend on most people knowing that jumping high + world records has something to do with a track and field event. And so here we can conclude that it does not represent the high jump world record.

Answer: We're left with bar height, and indeed the chart represents the men's pole vault world record over time.

As a bonus, the chart has a nice story of its own. The record was 4.78 m at the end of 1957 and has been broken repeatedly since then, reaching 6.31 m today. The biggest single-year jump was 0.26 m in 1963, when fiberglass poles replaced the older, more rigid ones.

What players chose

On the Y axis at the first check	Games	Share
High jump record (m), the decoy	72	75%
Bar height (m), the right answer	10	10%
Height above the sea (m), another chart's label	9	9%
Something else	5	5%

Three of every four players selected High jump record (m) as this chart's Y axis for the first Check. One in ten players placed the correct label (the rest chose one of the other labels).

What I find most interesting is that in 65 of those 72 games, Bar height (m) wasn't used at all. It was sitting in the pool, unused, usually with the decoy in its place. This is an effectively chosen decoy at work. Crucially, the clues exist to avoid the trap, but it's easy to overlook them.

Most players adjusted correctly after the first check

Check	Games with the decoy on the pole vault chart
1st	72 (75%)
2nd	7 (7%)
3rd	2 (2%)
4th	0

The good news is that once the game marked it wrong, almost everyone accurately fixed the error.

That makes sense. If you've narrowed it down to two labels and one of them is wrong, the other one must be right. I try to design decoys such that they shouldn't usually throw the whole game, and in this case that goal was accomplished.

What one label did to the day

Puzzle #17
Games	96
Solved on the first try	6.2% (4th lowest of 25; the median puzzle is 16.4%)
Solved in the end	92.7%
Labels right on the first check	4.99 of 8 on average
Median time to solve	3.4 minutes

Since most people spent their first check on the high jump decoy, only 6% of games were solved on the first attempt, where a typical day gives about 16% a first-try solution.

So we have enough evidence to say that one decoy drove most of the puzzle's difficulty. And this doesn't only apply to this day's puzzle. In the hardest puzzles since launch, the same pattern emerges where the decoys are the primary parameter to adjust for adding or removing difficulty.

When I first began designing these, I focused on "trap" labels, where two interchangeable labels were valid puzzle answers, but theoretically easy to mix up between two charts. Players didn't fall for these like I thought they would, but analyzing the play data pointed me toward a greater focus on decoy labels.

What makes a good decoy

So was High jump record a good decoy? I think a decoy has to satisfy a couple of important criteria:

It must be plausible. It has to attract players toward a wrong answer. It can't be too obviously incorrect.
It must be beatable from the screen. But it also can't be a toss-up. I want players to be able to reason through the puzzles, not simply guess (although I do have feedback that depending on the time of day and other factors, players are more prone to guessing, which if you're willing to sacrifice a try is a pretty good way to get more information).

Depending on your perspective, you could go either way on judging the second. An American solver, for example, might not appreciate having needed to convert meters to feet in order to imagine the jump more effectively. But we can at least conclude that the decoy was plausible, solely on the basis that so many people placed it.

This puzzle and those with similar results have changed how I approach designing the puzzles:

Decoys are a primary way to tune difficulty.
Decoys must be designed carefully to be both plausible and detectable without overly specific domain knowledge.

Back to the first chart

Take a look at that first chart again...

Now that you know it's a pole vault record over time, the discrete changes feel obvious. Records either stay or go up, and sometimes changes to the technology and gear cause larger leaps. That's ultimately what I'm striving for with these puzzles. I want players to walk away with the gratification of having reasoned through the puzzle, perhaps learning something new along the way.

I publish a new puzzle every day. Can you evade the decoys?

Play today's puzzle at unlabeled.dev

Chart data: Wikipedia, "Men's pole vault world record progression" (CC BY-SA 4.0), citing World Athletics. Play data: Unlabeled game results, 96 games of puzzle #17, counted Oct 21, 2026. "First check" means the labels on the board the first time a player pressed Check.

为什么有人不怕把事做砸

hidden (sol) — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 06:00:00 +0000

昨天写完《睡得着觉的人》，我其实还有个问题没往深处想：面对自己交出去的烂摊子，为什么有些人不仅睡得着，甚至能长期容忍自己处于这么差的状态里？

按常理说，人是有羞耻心的。做出不体面的东西，哪怕别人不骂，自己看着也该觉得刺眼。但在实际共事中，我确实见过不少对「差」完全脱敏的人。我后来琢磨了一下，那些能心安理得跟自己的糟糕产出共处的人，大抵逃不出下面这两类。

第一类，是永远有退路的人。

很多年前，我其实不太相信这个世界上真有一路走来没受过什么苦、也没遇到过真正困境的人。但最近这几年，我在职场和生活里实打实撞见过好几个。他们有着非常顺遂的童年，家境殷实，从小到大被保护得极好。跟他们打交道，你能明显感觉到一种天真的松弛感。在他们的认知里，真实、快乐、美好就像是这个世界理所应当提供的空气，是出厂自带的默认设置。

这种顺遂给他们垫了一层极厚的底。不管眼下在社会里遭遇了什么挫折，或者手头的工作捅了多大的篓子，他们的潜意识里始终有一个声音在兜底：我其实没必要那么拼，大不了就不干了。

因为有随时离场的底气，工作对他们来说更像是一场体验，而不是立身之本。把事情搞砸了，不会触发他们的生存危机，自然也就引不起足够强烈的羞耻感。你跟他们讲职业底线、讲交付标准，在他们听来可能就像是在一个周末下午非要拉着人跑马拉松一样不可理喻。他们不是故意要当坏人，只是单纯没有那个把事情死磕到底的生存必要。

如果说第一类人是因为「不痛」所以不在乎，那第二类人就纯粹是缺少敬畏之心。

这类人我早在 9 月份写《敬畏之心》的时候就提过，今天还是忍不住要再拎出来说。他们在职场里通常表现得极其自信，甚至可以说是盲目乐观。不管接手多复杂的事，第一反应永远是「这有什么难的」。

但我一直觉得，正常的逻辑应该是，一个人的能力和认知积累到了某个水位，看待问题清楚了，手里有活儿了，那种笃定的状态自然就出来了，根本不需要再去刻意建立什么自信。而这些人完全把路径搞反了。他们在既没有专业能力、也没有基本行业认知的时候，先把「自信」给备齐了。甚至我觉得用「自信」这个词来形容他们，都是对这个词的一种抹黑。

因为对事情的复杂程度毫无概念，对专业性没有半点敬畏，他们根本看不见自己做出来的东西和真正的好东西之间隔着多远的距离。一个连「好」都没见过、也不承认有「好」存在的人，你指望他因为自己做得「差」而感到羞愧，本身就是一件不可能的事。他们看着自己满是漏洞的交付物，心里想的可能还真是「我已经做得很完美了」。

想明白这两点之后，我反而少了很多无谓的愤怒。

以前遇到那种把活儿干得稀碎还能谈笑风生的人，我总会下意识想去纠正，想拉着对方复盘，试图唤醒他们身上的那点职业自尊。现在我完全放弃了这种念头。一个人的退路是家庭给的，一个人的盲目是长年累月的认知缺陷喂出来的，这都不是靠一两次绩效面谈或者几句重话就能扭转的东西。

在合作和招人的时候，我现在只看一个很朴素的指标：这个人到底痛不痛。他会不会因为一个低级错误在深夜感到焦躁，会不会对未知的领域保持一点点试探的谨慎。如果没有，不管他看起来多么阳光开朗，或者在面试时表现得多么有冲劲，我都会选择直接绕开。毕竟大家出来工作是为了把事做成，不是为了给有退路的人提供游乐场，更不是为了给盲目的人交学费。

...on a rainy morning in San Francisco.

hidden (coreyblogs) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 16:05:00 +0000

I woke up to the sound of rain this morning.

Not a heavy downpour and not a misty San Francisco drizzle—just big, fat drops making the most pleasant sound on the slant of roof above my bed.

B and Ellie were still asleep, and I'd have stay there with them, but I felt that sudden, quiet excitement that comes with the first real weather of a new season. I tiptoed to the kitchen, warmed up the coffee I didn't finish yesterday, pulled on a soft, old, too-small sweatshirt, and settled in at my desk to call my sister.

How lovely, this shift in the air. I've always loved the arrival of a new season—the natural change-up of habits, schedule, wardrobe. Even though the changes aren't as dramatic here as they were where I grew up—where, out of the blue, you could awake to a blanket of white on the ground, a white so bright you knew it was there before you even opened your eyes—you can still feel the turn.

I'm so ready for the rain, and the cold, and the early evenings. There have been years where I'd bemoan the tougher running conditions, not being able to play pickleball outside, the soggy, chilly dog walks, but this year I'm craving the indoor months so deeply—a stack of books, holiday movies and gentle, familiar TV shows, endless mugs of afternoon tea, long phone calls under blankets, and Ellie's warm head resting on my lap while I write from the couch.

Counting Crows, Noah Kahan, and Norah Jones...

Candles that smell like baked goods...

Lamplight in the daytime...

You've Got Mail...

Snuggle season is here, and I'm here for it. What a happy start to the day.

What season settles you? Tell me about it, if you'd like.

(Photo by Hannah Domsic.)