Category: Blog

Where are all the 2A defenders?

What happened in Minneapolis a few weeks ago is an outright tragedy. Ten times as many agents as were deployed to Chicago. Neighborhoods invaded by armed, masked agents. Firearms and chemical agents deployed at schools. It’s sickening enough and needed to stop long before Alex Pretti, Renee Good, and others were killed by these agents.

This community doesn’t deserve this shit. No community does.

The people with the power to dispatch these agents have done nothing to make these communities safer. Indeed, they and their defenders neglect the basic humanity, liberty, and civil rights of the victims.

I remember when Minnesota passed the Personal Protection Act. Tim Pawlenty, governor at the time, said it would allow “the most law abiding of citizens” to fully exercise their rights. His legislative leadership dismissed “fearmongering” counter arguments under the same premise.

At the time of Minnesota’s concealed carry law, there was a opponents of the legislation largely assumed good faith: Its supporters simply had a different, genuine, perspective about how to solve a problem. It certainly seems like the people who made those arguments 23 years ago have suddenly reversed course.

Or maybe not so suddenly. Several police-involved shooting victims were executed on the premise that they had a gun (Philando Castile) or other arms (George Floyd had a knife) legally on their person — not brandished, stowed. All of the defenders of police in these shootings conveniently forget that law enforcement, especially federal, is the government. Killing a suspect is extra-judicial execution! Is this not exactly the kind of tyranny an armed public is meant to protect us from?

Alex Pretti is the case in point. The man was an ICU nurse who legally carried a weapon on the street until he was pepper sprayed, tackled, disarmed, and executed (in that order). Every indoor space around where Pretti was executed could ban concealed firearms on the premises but he’d still have the right to carry it in the middle of the street, even at a protest. The government has no right to disarm you unless you are detained.

Pretti was not detained, yet he was disarmed. He was disarmed, yet he was nonetheless executed. Where are the 2A supporters rushing to defend this law-abiding citizen’s civil rights?

They’re nowhere.

Steven Miller called him an assassin. Greg Bovino said he needed to be executed because he wanted to “massacre law enforcement.” (Pretti had his hands up before he was taken down.)

Kristi Noem said “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” Kash Patel said something similar. JD Vance amplified both of them. (Here’s one. Here’s another. Oh, and here’s a whole bunch! Tony Cornish used to carry on the floor of the MN House.)

Gun Owners of America and the leader of Tennessee’s GOP legislature both defended the victim in the press. But neither seems to have said much since. (Maybe MPR wants to revise that headline from “backlash” to “tepid disagreement.”)

If they had an ounce of courage, they’d demand investigations about unlawful search-and-seizure of a lawful citizen’s firearm by the federal government.

They’d insist on cooperation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to understand how the state’s law was broken.

They’d mobilize their base in defense of the summary execution of someone exercising his 2nd Amendment rights.

None of this has happened.

None of that will happen because all of the people with the power to do it are cowards for whom Constitutional rights only apply to people who use them correctly. They seek only to preserve their own power through fear and coercion.

I don’t think “more guns” is a solution to any problem, or that the 2nd Amendment gives an unlimited personal right to possess firearms.

If it were up to me, ICE and Border Patrol agents wouldn’t be allowed to carry them for most operations. Police wouldn’t be permitted to carry them for most routine house and welfare calls. We’d have ongoing buy-back programs to get unwanted and illegal weapons off the streets.

But laws like MN’s Personal Protection Act are premised on more guns as the only thing standing between freedom and a Stalinist state where the government can just pull law-abiding citizens off the street under false pretenses and ship them to gulags across the country. The same people who supported and defended these laws over the last several decades left out the part about gulags and execution being totally appropriate if you’re on the wrong side of their politics.

For their part, the Democrats could do more than send a fucking text message. They should be in the streets, demanding justice, and showing the public a better way forward. Some are doing this, too many are not.

If you want to see courage, go to the streets of Minneapolis and ask how you can help.

February 11, 2026
Boarding pass to the moon

If you didn’t know, NASA is sending Artemis II to orbit the moon in early February. Like most missions, they’re sending a kit of artifacts along with the crew and cargo, including an SD card with a file containing the names of people around the world who signed up with NASA.

It’s a refreshingly simple form. It asks for a first name, last name, and 4 to 7 digit PIN. There’s no disintermediation of the experience by a third party contractor, no newsletter, or subscription required. It’s an invitation to participate in and educate yourself about a landmark government science project. Nothing more.

Get your boarding pass today.
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January 26, 2026
The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum

We moved to Milwaukee in 2019 and one of the first museums I learned about was the National Bobblehead Museum. It was later featured in one of the Top Chef episodes set here. I still hadn’t been until this week. Matt gave the whole company a homework assignment to visit a museum to elevate our craft through exposure to culture.

Originally I thought I’d use it as an excuse to visit MAM, a short ride on the Hop from my co-working space. But, the more I considered the prompt, I decided to go somewhere I’d never been before. The Bobblehead Museum is a small one perched above the Colectivo on S 1st St in Walker’s Point. It is the largest collection in the world and educates visitors about the history and cultural relevance of “nodding-head toys.” (They’ve been around since at least the 1700s!)

The museum was started by a UW Milwaukee grad who began collecting them after he worked for the Rockford Riverhawks. Today, they have a copy of “The Overcoat,” the first known text to reference “plaster cats which wag their heads.” And the museum does, in fact, have some feline bobbleheads. From the tiniest to the 6 foot tall museum mascot, everything but the shelves they sit on is a bobblehead. One of the docents confirmed: If it doesn’t bobble, it’s not on display.

It’s one of those museums that can only exist in one place and offers a glimpse at a specific piece of culture. I’m glad that one place happens to be right here in Milwaukee. If you ever visit, bobble on in.

January 24, 2026
The edge is a shantytown filled with goldseekers
I just finished Kevin Wilson’s novel Now is Not The Time to Panic, a book I truly couldn’t put down. The book centers around this strange phrase clipped in the title of this post. It means… almost nothing on its own but to Frankie Budge it means everything. It’s a phrase she invented to create a poster with her first crush, Zeke, when they were both 16. This poster would get plastered across their small town, and its bizarre imagery creates a panic that spreads nationwide. For the artists, though, it fuels a euphoric summer of creativity.

This book is a little like the White Stripes song “Little Room.” It’s quick. It seems kinda silly but also deeply serious to the characters involved. Kevin Wilson captures teenage boredom, self importance, and the fearsome importance of the future injected by all the adults in your life, without writing a standard coming of age story.

This book describes more than the nostalgia of tape decks and pre-internet fandom. It describes a manifestation of panics unique to the time. These kinds of things happened in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s. I remember them. Parents would forbid their children from certain kinds of culture because they had inherent evil properties. Industrial music turned kids into mass shooters. Rap music into criminals. Graffiti artists were bound for gangs and prison. These panics would spread across the country.

This book looks at panics on a smaller level. How do people get it into their head that a weird poster was anything more than a harmless piece of graffiti made by bored teenagers? Wilson intentionally does not answer this question. Instead he just kinda plows into it. His characters are more or less unfazed when the evil things people projected onto their art sometimes happen. The adults are the ones who panicked. The kids are just fiercely loyal to each other and their art.

It’s also funny and well drawn. Frankie has all kinds of ideas about how sneaky she and Zeke are that are totally unbelievable. Like so many culturally immersed kids, they have vastly inflated ideas about their cleverness and are infatuated with their own taste; convinced this poster is the best thing anybody has ever made. They also, like so many adults, hang on to those harmless delusions when they become (mostly) well-adjusted grown ups. They’re so sure of it.

In the same way, I, at the age of 16, was sure every small local band that played in my hometown was destined for greatness. All that stood in their way was the great conspiracy run by major record labels and Clear Channel.¹

In all seriousness, though, I loved this book. Go read it.

… we are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
1. Is it not interesting how many of today’s top podcasts are run by iHeart aka Clear Channel who also run all the radio stations not owned by Sinclair? Isn’t it suspicious how they tried to trick us millennials into buying the same old trash! Is it not true that the big record labels and publishers steadily buy up the indies and convert them to imprints? ↩︎
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January 19, 2026
Crying in H Mart

In the interest of blogging more (a perennial goal) I plan to write about books as I read them this year, rather than once at the end of the year. We’ll see if I keep it up.

The first book of the year was Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. It had been on the list for a while and I’m glad I finally got to it.

It’s rare, I think, to read a memoir or biography of a musician like Zauner this early in their career. By that I mean, there are untold numbers of books written about musicians but they’re written about people who are or were already famous. There’s something special about this book showing the creative process that emerges from a young artist encountering immense grief in real time while still trying to figure out what her art is, and how it looks as a vocation.

This book also made me very hungry, which wasn’t totally surprising given the title. Learning to cook, and then cooking, Korean food was a big part of this book and how Zauner connected to her mother and her heritage. These scenes brought back a lot of memories from our own time in Korea, the food we ate and the places we ate it: Kalguksu (knife cut noodles) and seafood by the beach in Incheon. Myeongdong Gyoja. Galbi prepared table-side. Jjigae. Endless banchan and kimchi. Street food on the crowded streets of Hongdae. All of it and so much more textured this book.

If you’re late to the party, go check it out.

January 17, 2026
Books of 2025

I did something I’ve maybe never done before this year: I read an entire series in the same year. Normally I try to spread out a series a bit more, to savor the books and stay engaged with the characters. But this year I read Hugh Howey’s Silo series with only about a month between the books.

I also joined The StoryGraph this year. It’s a Goodreads alternative that is independent of Amazon and, so far, has a lot less review bombing and competition for my attention. It reminds me of what Goodreads was back in the early days. You can follow me there if you want.

Wool, Shift, and Dust: Hugh Howey

I enjoyed this series and I’m glad Apple TV took the time to make the show and improve on a few things. Like a lot of science fiction, I suppose, the characters in Howey’s world are subordinate to the idea propelling the story. In this case, the circumstances and technical detail are well fleshed out into impressive detail. The twists and turns of how exactly people came to live in this silo are fascinating and Howey has a clever way of letting you forget details only to be reminded of them entire books later. The suspense and mystery of the whole world is compelling and had me tearing through these rather long books very quickly.

The Apple TV series improves on a lot of the human elements. Character motivations are more transparent, and the social dynamics more complete. In short, I recommend both!

Little Eyes, Samanta Schweblin

My first encounter with Schweblin and her translator Megan McDowell was Schweblin’s first English release, Fever Dream. I still think about that book often and I suspect Little Eyes will be no different. In its original Spanish, the book is called Kentukis, for the cute little digital friends that are the main characters of the book. They’re sort of like the robots you might see in a movie like Mitchells vs. the Machines or Rashida Jones’s companion in the show Sunny (which I quite enjoyed).

The difference in this book is that these bots are more like pets than friends or helpers, and they’re driven not autonomously, but anonymously: by individual operators you’ll never meet, but who will get to know plenty about you. It’s a fascinating and haunting meditation on surveillance, voyeurism, and anonymity.

A lot of journalists and public intellectuals spill a lot of digital ink these days trying to decipher what AI means for capitalism, the web, and different industries at the intersection of both. An important conversation to have. Here, Schweblin sort of skips all that and understands that people still want something to do, and imagines a fairly logical conclusion for what we’ll do with technology we basically have, how it will liberate us, and how it could imprison us. It’s prescient, creepy, suspenseful and, at times, tragic.

I’m now waiting in horror for Meta to “invent” the Kentuki IRL and convince whole swaths of the world it’s something we need. Go read this book first so you can prepare. Meanwhile, I’ll be digging into Mouthful of Birds.

All Fours, Miranda July

Where to even start with this one. It’s really hard to describe All Fours without spoiling it. Here’s Wikipedia’s attempt:

The novel follows a 45-year-old perimenopausal woman who, after having an extramarital affair during a road trip, has a sexual awakening.

It’s accurate, I suppose, but every word of that pithy summary is doing a lot of work. As my friend Joe put it: it is more and less than what actually happens in the book.

Storygraph’s summay says:

A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Also true. Also not giving the thrill of this book enough credit because as Danielle put it: It’s an impossible book to describe.

So I’m going to instead admonish anybody who might actually read this blog (thanks!) to go read the book. If you like unreliable narrators, messy characters, or just a fun romp through an author’s mind, this is for you. It’s quite a trip.

Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu

This one has been on my list for ages and I’m glad I finally got around to reading it. It’s another book that is difficult to describe without spoiling it. Willis Wu is a delightfully complicated character, trapped and limited by his own understanding of what’s possible as much as he is the real constraints and stereotypes he needs to escape. I loved every page.

There was also a TV adaptation of this book for Hulu. It took the characters in a bit different of a direction, and I enjoyed that as well.

Goodbye Vitamin, Rachel Khong

I think I actually read this book in 2024 but maybe it was early 2025.

Khong takes a topic that refuses to be funny and entertaining — the long death that is Alzheimer’s Disease — and accomplishes both while honoring the tragedy of the experience of living with and suffering from the condition as well. It’s one of those books that can make you laugh and cry on the same page. The family dynamics are well drawn as were the conflicts among and within each character.

Plus, you’ll never see endives at the grocery store without exclaiming “ohn-deevs!” in your head (or, maybe aloud).

Belonging, Norah Krug

Norah Krug is a German-American. She was born in Karlsruhe and grew up there in the late 1970s and 80s. As she aged into adolescence and adulthood she began to realize that being a German in the late 20th Century was complicated by War II. When she moved to New York, her accent gave her away. Eventually, she began a relentless pursuit of understanding her family’s relationship with the Jewish community in Karlsruhe and the extent to which any of them were complicit in the Nazi party’s atrocities, and how it shapes the meaning of “heimat,” homeland.

I loved this illustrated memoir (graphic memoir?) so much. I remember learning in middle school German class that the word heimat was complicated. Something to do with the war, nationalism, and a weaponization of the idea of a homeland by the Nazis. If I’m honest, it didn’t really connect with my 7th grade mind. In 2002 (when American flags flew in multiples from most windows at home) I remember asking my Bavarian host family why nobody in Germany flew a flag. Because of the war, they said, as if they shouldn’t need to elaborate further. This book brings all of that ambiguous discomfort together. It describes how the shame of the past still makes calling Germany a heimat uncomfortable, and how to reconcile feeling and history with calling the place and culture a kind of home.

Get this book. Give yourself time to read it and plan some walks in the woods to reflect on it, with a dog if you have one.

Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

I false started this book once a couple years ago and it’s since sat on our bookshelf staring me down. I just couldn’t get into it the first time I tried. I almost gave up again this time around, too. It’s a slow burn at first with maybe too much establishment in the first hundred pages. After that, though, the book takes of with the familiar Kingsolver richness.

The level of detail she puts into describing the methods, tools, and settings of Dellarobia’s home, community and the occupations of both sheep farming and entomology is incredible. In particular, the parts focused on the work of lepidopterists working in the field read like an ethnography set to prose.

As with many of her other works, she also has some keen observations about poverty and privilege in Flight Behavior. She sharply contrasts the high tech lifestyles of the scientists and college students with the sheep farmers in Dellarobia’s family, who can scarcely afford to keep the land, equipment, and animals they need to earn their living, and live in circumstances designed to trap them in that poverty. Some critics may say she over did it, but I think she handled it with the appropriate humanity and rigor.

Barbara Kingsolver remains one of my favorite writers, and I am glad this was the book I ended the year on. I look forward to reading one of her other books in 2026. Maybe Lacuna? Demon Copperhead?
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January 2, 2026
Facebook in 2025
A few years ago I deleted my Facebook account. Not deactivated. Deleted. Lost all my friends, posts, history, etc. (I took a backup first.) I only signed back in a couple years ago to use Facebook Marketplace to sell things. Anyway, I have a few “friends” (some are actual friends) now but the algorithm is remarkably bad compared to what I remember it being in 2008 or even 2018 when I deleted.

I signed in recently, here’s a list of the first 19 posts. Assume any groups listed are not ones I follow unless otherwise indicated.
1. Post from my wife’s aunt
2. Cycling group
3. Thirst trap reels
4. Baby products group
5. Wildlife group
6. Catholic memes group (?)
7. Cringeworthy neighborhood group I do follow (sometimes under duress)
8. “Mindset space” group(?)
9. A genuine post from someone I actually know!
10. Post from the same aunt
11. Post from one of my wife’s cousins
12. Post from someone I actually know!
13. Post from someone I actually know!
14. Post from someone I actually know!
15. Container construction group
16. Packers group
17. “Underground on top” group (?)
18. Environmental group
19. Thirst trap post group
I really feel like I remember there being more genuine people around there. This stuff must be really compelling but I generally won’t scroll this long to see something useful.
July 7, 2025
Rescuing a Pi Zero
I love my Pi Zero. It’s such a tidy micro-server to have in our house for random things. When we first got it, it was a pi-hole. We deployed it for the same purpose in the office we shared with our friend and neighbor. There, with a little display, it also helped our officemate debug network problems by displaying information without color. It’s so small and low, I powered it off the usb port on the back of the wireless router.

Someone should time-travel back to 2003 and tell my younger self that not only is it possible to have a home server that’s on all the time, it’s also small enough to lose in a junk drawer.

At some point, though, it stopped working reliably. I’d plug it in, and after a while it would crash mysteriously. I checked the logs and noticed it was kernel panicking, not hanging on any particular application or task. The panics would happen reliably when I ran apt upgrade but I couldn’t work out much more befond that.

Last weekend, inspired by a friend’s Zero 2, I thought I’d try to figure it out again. I’ve learned a lot about Debian, SD cards, and how to optimize long running pis in the last year or so. Maybe I just didn’t know what to do in the past.

It turns out the most important thing I had to do was overclock the CPU by a small amount. In /boot/firmware/config.txt I set over_voltage: 2, to give the CPU the ability to use 1.355V instead of the standard 1.35V. (vcgencmd suggests it’s actually 1.400 so ymmv, I guess.)

I’m not sure why this worked, but it hasn’t panicked since.

A few other things I did before I started programming the GPIO e-ink display:
- Uninstalled the NVIDIA and Intel GPU firmware packages.
- Turned off manpage updating.
- Turned on watchdog
- Set the pi to reboot automatically after a kernel panic (helpful when debugging the original problem!)
I linked to Chris Dzombak’s blog a few times above. There’s a lot more I could do to help this lil pi keep itself stable in the long term and I’ll probably keep tweaking based on his excellent Raspberry Pi series. Worth checking out before you burn through an SDXC card.
April 8, 2025
The important thing about 18F

The important thing about 18F is that it was a dream.

Last weekend, 18F, the office I worked for at the US General Services Administration, was eliminated. All 100 or so individuals on staff were fired at midnight (12:02 to be precise) Saturday morning.

18F was a place where people worked. Those people helped other people do their work better. Sometimes they helped large groups of people save money. Some of those people worked to help small groups of people with impossible or herculean jobs. But the important thing about 18F is that it was a dream.

Often, 18F helped people focus on outcomes when the system wanted them to focus on check boxes. (It was also a place to learn that sometimes you have to find a way to do both.) 18F was a place that made a positive difference in how people in the federal government delivered to the public. But the important thing about 18F is that it was a dream.

The people who worked there had the courage to believe in the beauty of the dream. Their customers did too. So did their peers. And so did the giants on whose shoulders 18F stood. Dreams only work if people believe in them. So, the important thing about 18F is that it was a dream.

The future will not belong to the cynics. The future will belong to those who have passion and are willing to work hard to make our country better. The future will belong to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

— Sen. Paul Wellstone

Apologies to Margaret Wise Brown.

March 5, 2025
We have always lived in the castle

A book I left off the 2024 list was We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a 1962 novel by Shirley Jackson. It feels like a fitting day to reflect on it with the death of David Lynch, a filmmaker I have to assume admired this book

(If you somehow found yourself on this blog and haven’t read this book or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, know there are spoilers to come.)
Continue reading this post

January 17, 2025
Books of 2024
This year was full of good books and, as usual, ones written years ago. I only read one new release this year, the next newest was written in 2022, and the oldest was from the turn of the 20th Century.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin

I hadn’t read a book I couldn’t put down in a while, but this was one of two that kept me up at night this year. It’s gotten a lot of well deserved attention for drawing out the beauty in the ars-technica duality of video games, told through the lens of a group of friends stumbling backward into starting a triple-A gaming company, and dealing with the conflicting visions and values that shape any creative enterprise.

Buy Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow from your local bookstore.

The Sentence, Louise Erdrich

I’m pretty sure I finished this book before I published last year’s post. Published in 2022, it’s as if while the rest of us were still coping with the chaos of 2020 (Covid-19, George Floyd in particular) Louise already clearly saw how it changed us as a species — or maybe, rather, how it ought to change us. Among Erdrich’s books I’ve read so far, it’s perhaps the most “auto-fictional” of them all: Set in a native-owned bookstore in Minneapolis, complete with a confessional in the back, that must close its doors but continue to serve its community when the Covid-19 pandemic hits. Also like all her books, it raises questions fundamental to the human condition. In this case, what is a community and how do we show up for it when the world outside of it seems to be telling us to keep to ourselves? And a bookstore is a particularly good setting to explore that question.

Buy The Sentence form your local bookstore, or from Louise herself.

Department of Speculation, Jenny Offill

This book was such a delight. It was another I had trouble setting down in order to fall asleep at night. It’s a relatively familiar story but Offill’s experimentation with form and prose brings a suspenseful excitement that draws out the main character’s (The Wife’s) emotion and psychological state in a unique way. Worthy of all the awards and praise it received.

Buy Department of Speculation from your local bookstore.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, Ananda Lima

Ananda is a family friend, Chicagoan, and a peer of Danielle’s, so I had the pleasure of reading an uncorrected proof of this one. Craft imagine’s the Faustian narrative but as one that’s more of an ongoing, transactional relationship with the Devil. They have sex at the beginning of the book and then he shows up in different parts of the protagonist’s life, and she writes stories for him.

The novel then is a set of loosely linked short stories. One I particularly enjoyed was about a vending machine at a hospital that dispenses tiny Americans, and a nurse who feels guilty about eating, and enjoying, them.

Congrats to Ananda on her fiction debut!

Buy Craft from your local bookstore. (I recommend Myopic Books in Chicago!)

Recoding America, Jennifer Pahlka

This was maybe the biggest civic tech book of 2023 and 2024, but not necessarily the best. I’m glad I read it. We need a reference like this to get people on board first principles like governments and the public deserve better people, policies, and outcomes; improvement in technology is one part of addressing the bigger whole. I only wish Pahlka had gone even further.

Hers is a narrative of how complex benefit delivery systems can be. It begins in California where she was brought in to help scale the state’s unemployment systems to deliver to the suddenly-much-larger number of applicants in the wake of Covid-19. These systems like so many others in government have existed for decades, been touched by dozens of different vendors — all of whom were self interested in ensuring only they could operate the systems, and fail the public and civil servants they’re meant to serve.

As necessary as this book is, it often read extractive: Pulling stories and experience out of weathered public servants. I wanted to see more about how we can start to see the work of civic technology as a core component of civic life. With Pahlka’s experience both in governments and as Code For America’s founder, I hoped to get more of this perspective. Nonetheless, it’s well worth reading.

Buy Recoding America from your local bookstore

Kafka

We’ve had this book of Kafka stories kicking around our house for as long as I can remember. It probably didn’t follow us abroad, but has definitely been on our bookshelf since we got back. I have no doubt Kafka is difficult to translate, which itself is a whole art with its own critical frameworks. This particular one was not my favorite but several of the stories it contained were maybe more affective than Metamorphosis.

Mark Harman released a new collection this year. I leafed through it and it is a much more accessible translation, heavily annotated with more exact definitions or explanation of the literal translation. I’ve thought about buying it at the risk of looking like a scholar, but I’m not sure I need to read another version of these stories yet.

Many of these stories are also online since all of his works are now in the public domain.

“The Metamorphosis” is an obvious one. I’d never read it in its entirety before, only an abridged version in high school. Reading it in full, there’s a new power dynamic I hadn’t seen before where the Samsa family’s community, and especially their “tenants” lead, almost demand, the family to realize to keep Gregor-the-insect alive. I’m really curious to see how Harman interprets this.

Other stories I hadn’t read before but enjoyed maybe more than Metamorphosis:
- “An Imperial Message:” A one page story that defines the term Kafkaesque.
- “In the Penal Colony:” A haunting story of a death penalty administrator who maintains a terrifying (and terrifyingly complicated) device to torture the convicts while slowly killing them. I saw a direct line to Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead” short here, too.
- “The Judgement:” About the conflicts among friendship, ego, and culture over time. I felt like a lot was lost in the translation and hope to read Harman’s soon.
Buy Harman’s Selected Stories Kafka translation at your local bookstore.

I remain pretty worried about the state of literature access in this day and age. We didn’t make much (any?) progress on defending the right to access during the Biden era, and I doubt we move forward in the second coming of Trump. More on that in a separate post.

Finally, we lost a family friend this year: Simon Fiesci, a victim of terrorism and gun violence—one of the 11 survivors of the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo. I thought a lot about Simon while reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It was an honor to know Simon, if only very briefly, and witness his commitment to justice. I hope he is at peace and wish his family the best as they heal and move forward.
December 29, 2024
Webmentions: the new ping/link/traceback

I really enjoy the (maybe slow) return of the personal web. When I was growing up with the web, the idea that everybody could have their own website was awe inspiring. I’ve written about why, with the Muskification of Twitter into X, I’m excited that we’re veering back toward a world where your blog or your website is more important to you and your online social world than a Twitter or Facebook profile. I still think we’re returning to this, and Webmentions is another piece that may fill the sharing and quick, microblogging niche.

I heard about Webmentions from Bill Hunt, but it’s an open web standard to facilitate “cross-site conversations. When you link to a website, you can send it a Webmention to notify it. If it supports Webmentions, then that website may display your post as a comment, like, or other response, and presto, you’re having a conversation from one site to another!”

It’s kinda like Pingbacks or Trackbacks but relies on more standard HTTP requests and protocols. On WordPress, they can be richer comments than the sterile title, date, and excerpt included in the comments from a pingback.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that all these standards should merge into one. Part of what’s exciting to me right now is the controversy: That these conversations are happening at all and engaging wider audiences is a positive development for the open web. I think it’ll be a slow boat of progress but these conversations will gradually make it easier for more people to own their data, their content, and their web experience without being trapped inside a billionaire’s garden unless they really want to be.

October 13, 2024