The Art Of Not Asking Why

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:20:58 -0400

Still working with Claude on my Emacs settings as a reference. Need to start a new session, so asked it to write a summary with instructions on how I like it to help me. It wrote this:

I know it’s complementing me on purpose, but that emphasized why? That’s why my blog is called this way 😉

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:21:20 -0400

Say you go jump to a header in org-mode somewhere with C-c C-o. Did you know that you can go back with C-c &? And that it has history, so you can keep going back??

Years of isearch-backwards… wasted. Mind blown. 🤯

A Quick org-mode Internal Links Reference

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:55:12 -0400

As I mentioned yesterday, I started organizing (and cleaning) my Emacs config. What may have seemed like an annoying and boring task has proven to be fun and addicting (reminds me of this, which is part of this video 😂).

I’ve already discovered a couple of new improvements to my current config as I was researching individual settings and why I have them, and as I said I do plan to share it. For now though, one important section I added to my config is a quick org-mode links reference. This is actually the first time I figured out the difference between radio links and “regular” plain links and how to use them.

Here it is, slightly modified:

Org-ID

We know about links to other files using org-id: You give a header an :ID: property (this is generated automatically¹ when you link to a header) and you get a slug, usually a UUID (for me it’s something slightly else, more on that soon below). This stores the links in org-id-locations, which in turn points to a local file with all of these unique IDs. This is good for linking between headers in different files.

Custom-ID

We can set a :CUSTOM_ID: property for a header, and it’s only active in that file. Kind of like a table of contents in a book, with chapters (= headers) listed. If you don’t have the book, you don’t have its table of contents, so you know nothing about it. To point to a header that has a custom ID: [[#custom-id-value][description]].

Plain Target and Radio Target link

These are buffer-specific only (no cross-reference between files). In this case, the links are tied to words (anchors), not headers. There are two kinds.

The regular plain target link works when we set the anchor first with <<an anchor>>, then call it again with [[an anchor]].

Its more “magical” brother is a radio target link, where we set an anchor like so <<<very special anchor>>> (three angle brackets) and then all we need to do is type very special anchor (no brackets this time), and it works. Note though that when you create a radio target for the first time, you have to revert the buffer or M-x org-update-radio-target-regexp for it to take effect.

Footnotes

¹ : this can be done with a function, org-id-get-create. For a deeper dive into how and why I set my org-id with a date format (not UUID), look here.

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:14:31 -0400

Thought my Emacs init file needs a bit of cleaning - it contains configs from maybe 5 and 6 years ago. It’s a nostalgic learning experience. More fun than I thought. More to come soon 🤓

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:57:22 -0400

Every time I go get coffee around West Village, I feel like I’m in a different city. The contrast between our quiet neighborhood with the trees and birds in upper Manhattan and this is striking and fun. 📷

auth and curl

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:04:39 -0400

Yesterday early in the morning, with the help of Claude, I finally figured out what prevented me from logging into indieweb.org. It was something stupid really, one of those things that most people who register their own domains will probably understand.

IndieWeb uses IndieAuth for members to sign in. IndieAuth, to put it in simple words¹, uses your website to sign in rather than the usual username/password combo that we see everywhere. IndieWeb is all about folks who build their own websites, so it makes sense to use your own indie website to sign in to their site.

Obviously the simple words above are too simple to explain how this actually works, but the core idea is that you add a specific HTML tag (it’s called a REL tag, or a rel HTML attribute) to your main page on your website and then IndieWeb knows it’s really you.

The problem I had was that I tried to sign in using my website’s URL, www.taonaw.com, instead of taonaw.com. I wanted to use the www, because that’s the actual website, right? World Wide Web and all of that?

Ehh. Not quite. Everything gets complicated when you look a bit deeper. The www part is what’s called a subdomain², and it’s not really the website. The website is at the root domain; in my case, it’s taonaw.com. When you register your own domain, you essentially forward people from www.whatever.com to whatever.com. Your browser does it in a second, so you don’t even realize it, but for IndieAuth, there’s no website at www.whatever.com, because well, there isn’t.

What was interesting was the way Claude proved it to me. It suggested using curl, a command we’ve all seen thousands of times around the internet, to get this information. Or, specifically: curl -sI https://www.taonaw.com which will show a few things (the index of the URL), but particularly location: https://taonaw.com/, where it redirects to.

“Huh?” I asked myself, “Isn’t curl used when you want to download something?” Well, yes, sure. That, and as it turns out, many other things.

I got curious (I don’t have anything much better to do at four in the morning when I can’t sleep) and went to read about curl. Turns out it has quite a history, a website, and a lot of bait-click tutorials on YouTube. It’s one of those things I always knew about but never explored.

Footnotes

¹ : My simple words here are too simple. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, and I don’t have a good grasp of it yet myself, actually. Learning in progress. IndieAuth is based on OAuth, which is the commercial brand that usually comes with OpenID, which is all the “sign in with Google/Apple/Facebook/Whatever” stuff you usually see.

² : See the above, same here. There’s an A record and a CNAME record when you register a domain, and I remember I knew more about them at one point when I registered the domain. A record points to the actual IP, and a CNAME points to a subdomain (the www, but it can also be blog.website.com, or whatever you’d like).

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:30:41 -0400

Is there a rule somewhere that says that if half your workday is spent in meetings, you can’t be expected to produce a whole day’s work? Just makes sense, right?

I’d go further and say, you can’t even do half a day of work after that. Meetings mean:

Can’t take a break (You have to mute yourself taking a piss, jeez)
Have to keep notes and track what is being said (unlike emails which you can come back to)
Have to follow up later on new issues that are becoming emails…

Yes, they’re needed. But oh boy. Now, if I could get a cent from anyone who agrees with me… 😆

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:22:00 -0400

Two quick apps I’m trying to write about, but I keep getting pulled away:

Crucial Tracks: You saw me testing here on the blog. Found out about this thanks to Lou Plummer. It’s a slow-paced social network/microblogging network where you can write about your favorite songs.

The service offers a quick prompt for the day (“what song makes you think of your best friend?” or “a song you used to listen to growing up?” etc.) combined with a quick search that finds the song with the artwork of the album. This is federated and free, which means it plays nice with the IndieWeb (that’s us, if you read this on your RSS feed) and offers a bunch of other options for embedding and playing directly from streaming services.

I already have it integrated with Micro.blog using Micropub, which they also support now.

Moments: Think of Glass, but a free and less “meant for serious photographers” kind of platform. Not that you can’t be a serious photographer on it, but it just welcomes everyone. The idea is to blog through your photos and tell a story.

I mentioned it briefly, and sadly didn’t get the chance to get around to it (photos require more editing and playing around with than a quick post about a song), but it looks polished, and the guy behind it, Peter, reaches out to new folks to help them out at these early stages. Didn’t reach out to Peter yet to ask about IndieWeb support, but I will try to.

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:30:46 -0400

Is it Friday yet?

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:50:46 -0400

Has anyone figured out how to sign into Indieweb with microblog, via IndieAuth? When I use my website URL, I get forwarded to micro.blog’s platform, with a message that “I’m already signed in as JTR.” What am I supposed to put in there?

Appreciate if anyone has it written down somewhere.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, 2019 - ★★★★★

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:17:03 -0400

Some of the best movies I've seen earned four or four and a half stars because I wanted to reserve the five-star rating for the perfect movie. You know, the one that will change how I think of movies, something with a unique and amazing story I haven't heard before - a true masterpiece.

I was content with this choice ever since I started reviewing movies on Letterboxd, until I watched this movie last night.

When I woke up, this movie was the first thing I thought about. It's not that I can't get it out of my head - I don't want it to get out of my head. I don't want to start my work week, yet another Monday, after watching it. I want to explain why, but I can't. I guess going to make a few futile, miserable attempts. Where the hell do I even start? Maybe I shouldn't.

Maybe I should just tell you to watch it and decide for yourself. It will click for some of you. For others, it will be just a pretty romance flick, and others yet still will just shrug and move on.

But I hope some of you will end up in tears. Tears that come from just feeling. Being human. Understanding an ultimate language that we just know on some level, somehow. If you believe this langauge exist above (or below) words, if you've listened to its whisper before and nodded with confidence without full understanding on a cognitive level, then yes, maybe you will also be angry that rating systems exists and that things such as this movie need to be chopped down, broken, and shoved into a logical boxes so we can communicate to each other in conceptional way.

I'm not trying to write a dramatic introduction for this film on purpose. It's a good movie, sure. The cinematography is amazing; each shot is a lesson in lighting, angles, and colors. The audio is rich with background details you can pick up without taking away from the main dialogue, whether it's ocean waves, birds, or, somehow, even the air itself. I'd say the same for the dialogue, but I don't speak French, and as a bilingual person I know firsthand how much is lost in translation.

This movie, in my opinion, needs to be in the syllabus of any professor teaching film classes. I can say all of this and more, but I'm butchering it. I'm forcing it to be something that it's not. I'm not being dramatic; I'm just feeling this movie, and I wish for you to feel it too.

There's one moment when Marianne looks at Héloïse at the beach. Marianne, tasked with painting Héloïse without her knowledge or consent, tries to capture the details of her face so she can later secretly draw her. She looks at Héloïse's face, who's looking at the ocean; this makes Héloïse's turn to look back at Marianne, who, you realize, is staring at her. Marianne immediately looks away, not wanting to get caught. That's when I said my first "wow" to myself watching this film.

This scene is captured from a side angle that allows you to see one's face only when the other turns hers. It's a thoughtful shot and a genius storytelling taking place without a single word.

Much later, when the two lay in bed and ask each other when they knew they wanted to kiss each other, I was frustrated they didn't bring this moment up, but I realized that they probably didn't know that when it happened - not yet.

The movie is built on moments like this, on the constant play between the layers of what we (and they - Marianne and Héloïse, and possibly Sophie) know needs to happen and what we want to happen. It could make the movie sad, yes, but the fact that they met and managed to spend precious few days together doesn't let sadness linger. Further, it's not the time they spent together, but what they created together. The memory that will be cherished forever, and no sadness (or arranged marriage) can take away. It's not a cliché, not in this film. You see it happen toward the end, after... well. I will let you see for yourself.

And there's so much more. Everything is a symbol, or a metaphor, or a sign. One of the most obvious ones is when Héloïse's dress catches on fire, and she notices it, but can't avert her eyes from Marianne; and Marianne, who watches Héloïse's dress catch on fire, does not respond either, because she can't; she's locked in the same magnetic force field that paralyzes them both. It's a beautiful scene (does this movie have any bad scenes? I don't think so).

I will need to watch this movie again (and again?) to catch more of these moments, but I don't know that I can, now that I know how daunting it is. Simply put, It's not the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday night before another workday Monday.

🎶 Creep: Stone Temple Pilots

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:27:47 -0400

When I was in college and got a dorm room through a scholarship, I had a friend who dealt more closely with the grunge of life. We were both part of the staff of the college’s newspaper, often working long nights that stretched into tired mornings of drip coffee and cheap Chinese food.

When it was time to head back to my room, KU would go to the parking garage, where he’d sleep in his car, or if it wasn’t too late (and by that I mean to early in the morning), in the office under one of the desks. Going back home was a long drive to South Jersey, and since he was ready to crash anyway at this point, he shrugged it off as a better option. At one point, I remember someone opened a drawer and saw his toothpaste and toothbrush and people got worried that he had nowhere to go. I guess he understood it was “weird,” but to him it was just a thing to do. No biggie.

In college, KU was tough but approachable. He quickly became one of my best friends, whom I always respected. He was a true-to-life example of “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

He was so good at it that he didn’t stop to perceive the lemons as lemons; he always saw the lemonade he could make. An excellent writer with a sharp mind, he worked his way up to the head of his fraternity, landed an internship at NASA, and became an astrophysicist.

STP was one of his favorite bands, and I imagine Creep was one of his favorite songs. I didn’t know this until I researched the song today, but according to Scott Weiland, Creep is about “the idea of being a young person somewhere, caught between still being a kid and becoming a young man. It’s that youth apathy, that second-guessing yourself, not feeling like you fit in.” Wow. Nailed it. I don’t know whether KU knew that, but this song was written for him:

I’m half the man I used to be

(For as I feel as the dawn, it fades to gray)

Well, I’m half the man I used to be

(For as I feel as the dawn, it fades to gray)

I’m going to write him an email.

View entry: www.crucialtracks.org/profile/j…

Crucial Track for July 2, 2026

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 22:38:16 -0400

"Rooster" by Alice In Chains

Your browser does not support the audio element.

I'm testing this out. What a great idea. Here's a song I haven't listened to in a while.

View JTR's Crucial Tracks profile

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:49:37 -0400

Someone posted my little rant about restarting my Mac on Hacker News, and it went viral. As in more than 10,000 hits. 10… thousand… I don’t even know what this number means.

To be fair, it’s mostly the discussion taking place (over 300 comments over there) but.. still… whattttt???

Bloggers Should Shake Fists at Clouds and Say the Obvious

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:00:51 -0400

Jim writes how blogging can feel like being the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, a feeling I often encounter myself:

You feel like someone gone mad: “Is anyone else seeing the same thing I’m seeing? And we’re just ok with this?”

Very often, those are the best posts I read from others.

Indeed.

Back in college when we used to run a newspaper, I had a column about the Middle East, and I had a blog about the same thing. At that time, I was a journalism minor. We had a teacher whom I feel weird calling a professor, as he didn’t have a PhD or even a doctorate; he was simply a professional journalist. He used to say journalism was dying, that he was one of the last dinosaurs, and that he advised me to “stay the hell away from this profession” if I cared about my soul.

Much of the energy I feel in Jim’s posts stems from the same place. We don’t bother with well-known facts (like ads flying in our faces left and right, as his article mentioned on Daring Fireball) because we all know them, so what’s the point?

But shrugging and moving on is accepting the crazy as our new reality. Yes, there was a time when Google was actually good, without ads (can you believe it?); paywalls were fewer and belonged to big publications, which charged for their printed newspapers anyway.

I already shook my fist at some well-known clouds in this blog. The state of owning movies and books and encouraging piracy. Dating in the age of dating apps. And of course, social media being a hoze of recycled crap that has little to do with facts, if at all.

I feel like Jim captures the essence of this, and I’m in agreement. I promise to keep being a grumpy old man yelling at clouds then.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:55:35 -0400

You know how you have a busy day, task after task, meeting after meeting, and your spouse/partner/significant other (whatever you have) messages you with a single line or a short video, and you laugh and everything seems easy and bearable again…?

I might be grumpy, but I’m also thankful 😆

My Inspiration Checklist for Writing Blog Posts

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:56:39 -0400

My blog maintenance/inspiration template has gone through a couple of changes since I first created it, and while I mentioned the new list recently, I didn’t really explain what the different items are. Why not expand on it?

I’m a checklist guy. I like to have a good checklist for anything I do more than a few times. Some of the items don’t fit nicely in a category (and a few come up twice), but, it does its job and gets me unstuck (or just out of boredom) often.

I have my checklist in front of me right now, so let me copy-paste it and then explain below. Here we go:

Maintenance

check blog email
tinylytics
- most popular posts in the last month
- Insights can be interesting
new webmentions
“On this day” if exists:
- check for typos
- check for links/broken images/missing emojis
check plugins (updates?)
delete old bookmarks (Micro.blog)
photo page (add 📷 to posts)

Checking emails I get from other bloggers has become a routine, so it’s mostly something I can remove. In the past, emails were infrequent and I needed a reminder. I leave it here because it’s always nice to open my blog’s email and see what discussions I’ve had with others.

Tinylytics is a nice and small analytics tool that gives me just the information I need. Popular posts used to be emacs/org-mode related, but that has changed lately with bubbles, where some posts get a lot of exposure. It’s also interesting to see what gets more traction organically (without bubbles or something similar blowing those up), as I barely tend to “advertise” my posts on social media these days¹.

Webmentions is something I keep forgetting to check. Micro.blog has those built-in (though if I’m not mistaken you do need to turn them on somehow in your theme). A few months back, I learned that there’s someone on lemmy.world who seems to link to my post on a regular basis. I don’t know who because that requires logging in, and my old account wouldn’t work, and I get too lazy to sign to yet another social network… so if you happen to be that person, hey! Say hello if you’d like. Sometimes other bloggers end up here too, like Jack and Dan, who link to a post of mine directly. Thanks guys!

My On This Day process is something I explained before - an opportunity to check past posts for errors and fix those if needed.

Checking for plugins doesn’t happen too often (it’s not a big deal if I’m a version or two behind; this is not WordPress). As new updates are introduced, I try to go through them carefully as some can break the website at times.

Bookmarks is Micro.blog’s “read it later” feature, which I use often. I go through the list there and delete what I’ve already read and delete old articles that I don’t need. I don’t have to do that, but I like knowing that what I have there is new and waiting for me to read, not an archive of old stuff.

My blog has a Photo page and photos are basically automatically added when I use the 📷 icon (there’s a bit more of a process behind it that has to do with how Micro.blog works, but that’s for another time). This here is a reminder to comb through my more recent posts, give or take the last month or so, and add this icon to posts that contain photos that should end up there. I just added a couple while doing this post.

Inspiration

Check old blog for posts to grab
Journal
Bookmarks (in Micro.blog)
RSS feeds!
Fosstodon (org-mode column)
BlueSky (check for Emacs, and see followers)
Kagi small web (in browser) for sites
Take a random picture

My old blog, which I used to run through GitHub (and later GitLab), Hugo, and Netlify, contains posts I like to bring over to my current blog sometimes. It’s a good way to reflect and write updates as well. This is why this blog, if you go to the archive page, sometimes has only a few posts from before 2023: these older posts are manually moved over from the old site.

My journal is another good place to find posts in the making. Sometimes all I need to do is to take out a few names and specific information and make a post out of what I wrote there; at other times I need to wade through a brainstorm I’ve had to understand what the hell I was grumping about, but it’s almost always worth it. You can’t get more personal on a personal blog than this.

My bookmarks were already mentioned above, but here it’s a reminder to actually read them, instead of deleting old articles and tidying things up.

RSS feeds are too routine to be reminded of here now. I read through my RSS feeds at least once a day, bookmarking things, making notes to write emails to others… there’s always someone who’s wrong (or right!) on the internet, somewhere.

Fosstodon is my Mastodon server and the only social network I still like. I have dedicated columns for org-mode and digital gardens I check, and a list of some folk who post there and don’t have a blog yet (at least not that I know of).

I said Mastodon is the only social network I like and that remains true: Bluesky is too angry for me and has too many “literally” and “friendly reminder” kind of passive-aggressive posts. A few folks post there that I care about, but I think it’s not going to make it when I revamp this list the next time.

Kagi Small Web is pretty good, but I feel like they made it a bit too big recently. Some of the blogs there tend to belong to small businesses or to people who think like businesses. Still, it’s a very good place to go and find new blogs. It’s also a good way to see how people present their blog and get inspired by CSS and themes quickly, if you keep clicking “next” for that purpose.

And finally, a personal favorite: just snap a picture. I go out of my room with my phone, look around, and take a picture - often while taking a walk. When I’m in this mindset, I don’t look for anything special - quite the opposite. I’d take a picture of ordinary things that are boring otherwise.

Footnotes

¹: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “second place” posts, those that are popular but not the most popular, tend to be facts about my life or random “glitches” in my human programming. The more people follow me, the more popular these become, and I tend to get interested in the same kind of posts on other blogs. This is what makes us the indie web, yes?

Sisters, 1972 - ★★★

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 22:59:23 -0400

An indie horror movie from the 1970s, with very fake blood and everything.

It had an interesting story, though I'd say some of the concepts of the time didn't age well - tropes of mental disabilities, conjured twins, hypnosis, etc. Still, it was fun to watch, a nice trip from that era.

Subnautica: A Great Game That Deserves a Better Ending

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 19:23:00 -0400

Some games are over before the official ending(s). Sometimes it feels like the developers ran out of ideas or perhaps they never planned to go byond a certain point, but whatever it is, it feels cheap: You reach a certain point and there are endless hordes of enemies who just keep coming to make things harder, or a final boss who has an unfair advantage for no real reason, or the end of the story seems rushed and out of nowhere. It’s particularly disappointing when it happens to a good game, one that you’ve enjoyed for weeks and spent time on. For me, that happens in Subnautica.

Before I go on, two disclaimers:

I’m going to vent about the final stages of the game, so if you’re playing it or want to play it, there are spoilers ahead, so keep this in mind. This brings me to:
Subnautica is still a very good game. I loved playing it and enjoyed it in a way unique to this game. If you haven’t played it, stop reading this post, go play it, then come back.

OK then! Let’s dive in.

If you follow the plot, you arrive at the Lava Lakes (the last and deepest biome in the game) in search of the Primary Containment Facility. This is where you find the Sea Emperor Leviathan, which, as you learned, is connected to the cure for the disease that plagues you and the rest of the planet.

You find the Sea Emperor in this facility soon enough, as well as several portals that can transport you instantly to several locations in the world. It’s a sort of fast travel, something that Subnautica doesn’t have besides one very special connection that happens early on between the two islands. To me, these portals were the first warning sign that the developers wanted to hurry things up and go home.

These portals (which can be hard to find and are part of the exploration part of the game) cannot be activated up to this point, at the end. Instead, you have to use whatever means of transport you have, which is usually the Cyclops at this point. It is a huge sub, acting as your portal base; it’s loud and slow, much like an alarm bell screaming your location to any nearby scary leviathan on the way and inviting them to take a bite. Sure, you can choose to take the fast and sneaky Seamoth, but if one of those guys catches you along the way, it can merely crush it in one bite and grant you a jump scare that will make you yelp loud enough that your partner comes to check on you.

It’s one of those core elements of the game that you learn to be better at. Going from point A to point B is usually risky, no matter how you do it. It’s also why the game is frustrating in a way: you almost always miss one important piece of something you need to craft the next important gizmo, which means you have to go back into the darkness to hunt for precious shiny stuff.

The portals basically eliminate this problem. They send you to different locations around the world that either have what you need or are close enough to it. Suddenly, after 95% of the game behind you, there’s finally fast travel. And you need this fast travel, because the next part is pretty much grocery shopping for Enzyme 42, AKA the cure.

To craft it, you need components from the four corners of the world, conveniently located at the destinations of these portals. And when I say convenient, I mean literally as soon as you exit the tunnel where the portal is - It’s right there in front of your face. So my question is, why bother at all? What’s the point of getting these components if traveling to them takes mere seconds?

There’s another phase of more tedious grocery shopping that has started to feel like a struggle for purpose. At some point I even wanted to put the game away and be doen with it. The Neptune Escape Rocket.

This one is also a bit my fault: I didn’t have to wait until this point in the game to start building the rocket; I could have started much earlier. The game prevents you from launching the rocket until you get the cure, so building the rocket alongside the story, as you get access to more minerals, makes sense - and in retrospect, this is what I would recommend to people new to the game. Since I knew the rocket meant the end of the game, I left it alone until I had found the cure. That was a mistake.

If getting the ingredients for the cure was an annoyance, building the rocket felt like a chore. Each of the five parts of this big rocket requires unique materials found in specific biomes, and while, yes, I had the portals at this point, the game does not tell you which components you need for each part until you build the one before it.

This means that you go grocery shopping five times, each time for the next part once you learn what you need. This is the only blueprint in the game that is handled this way. For some reason, with the rocket, you just “know” how to build each part after you build the part before it, which effectively prevents you from planning and gathering everything you need at one go. Why? What’s the point of this? And how do you know to just keep building this Rocket?

Luckily for me, there’s the wiki that I used in my links here. It gave me the list of ingredients for each part. I mentioned it in my previous post about this game - a little cheating here and there improves the gaming experience.

The way the rocket building is handled goes against what you’ve learned playing Subnatica up to this point - that is, you get blueprints is as part of exploration and dealing with your fears. I couldn’t find any in-game reference that explains the rocket is different. In other words, you can spend hours going crazy trying to find the next parts of the rocket’s blueprints, which is exactly what the game has trained you to do up to this point, before you finally give up and just build the first part. In my opinion, this is lazy end-game design.

Lastly, there’s the story. This is more forgivable and can pass as a cliche or a plot hole, but it’s worth pointing out because the story thus far was interesting. It’s the fact that the adult Sea Emperor dies at the end game, mere minutes once you get the cure. This is bullcrap.

The parent (I think they are supposed to be sexless creatures in this game, but they gave the Sea Emperor a woman’s voice, and it lays eggs and needs them to hatch - they make it pretty obvious, contradicting themselves, but moving on) has been living in captivity, in that aquarium you find, for thousands of years. It got whatever it needs to survive all this time, just for the chance that one day someone will show up and concoct the enzyme that would hatch its eggs. Then, once the “younglings” hatch, the parent claims that it’s time for it to die, and basically does exactly that. Why can’t it live another thousand years? Or, more logically, why can’t it be dead already when you get there (the game tells you previous attempts to grow these creatures in captivity didn’t work), so you have to figure out how to hatch the eggs yourself? I don’t know. This whole part of the game just made me roll my eyes with the Lion King’s “circle of life” stuck on repeat in my head.

There are games that make me annoyed enough to just quit because of things like that. But with Subnautica, I just wanted to see if the ending was as bad as I thought. And yeah, in my opinion, it pretty much was.

As I said though, Subnautica is still awesome. I still love it enough to jump right into Below-Zero. It feels like it could use a message from the developers when you meet the Sea Emperor: “Congrats, you pretty much finished the game. The next parts are grocery shopping and a cliche ending. Continue at your own risk,” or something of the sort.

Have You Restarted Your Computer This Week?

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 06:54:20 -0400

I like restarting my Mac on Saturday mornings. It’s a silly thing really. You don’t really need to restart computers anymore unless some update takes place or there’s something wrong; shutting down on purpose is even more rare. Which is exactly why I like it.

I could just close all my windows and have a clean desktop environment, and I could probably write a script for it or find an app for it, but I enjoy the manual process. Maybe I’m a bit weird, but I like seeing all these warnings: “You have unsaved work! Are you sure?” Yes, I’m sure, I’m not working today, take this document and shove it..! “Microsoft Edge is preve…” Bam! Force quit! Kill kill kill!

Yeah, it’s probably not the smartest way to do this, but sometimes you just need to throw responsibility and reason to the wind. Just for a bit.

Most of my work is saved to the cloud anyway (OneDrive)¹, and most of my personal stuff is saved periodically in Emacs, where it’s synced to my various devices, so I don’t really lose anything. Besides, I think anyone who’s been dealing with fixing technology would tell you that the reset option is one of the best ways to resolve many of your computer’s problems. It also gives you a chance to go to the bathroom or grab a cup of coffee.

Have you restarted this week?

Footnotes

¹ Every time I write how I save my work to the cloud, or using Microsoft apps, I like to remind myself and my readers: it’s not my choice. It’s work. They make me do it.

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:54:20 -0400

Well, I did it. I finished Subnautica. Next, Sub Zero, and then in a few months (I guess?) Subnautica 2. Or… not. There are other games as well. 🎮

TP quest: Switching Back to Who Gives A Crap Because Amazon Basic's is... Crap.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:16:26 -0400

About two years ago, I learned that I’m not just being a grumpy “back in the good old days…” style about toilet paper. The article I read was good, and if I recall correctly, I emailed the author and also learned from him that something similar is happening with our sweaters.

The takeaway is thus: toilet paper is expensive, and manufacturers are using less and less paper. The result is that it runs out more quickly and tears more easily.

My solution to this problem was to start buying my toilet paper from Who Gives A Crap. Back then, it solved two problems:

First, delivery. Toilet paper packages are big, especially if you’re buying for more than just one person. As a city dweller without a car, schlepping with a big box takes away all the space for other groceries.

Second, the quality for the price. While WGAC is not exactly the cheapest, the convenience of delivery + subscription and the nice packaging (I liked the different colors of the wrappings and the lack of plastic in the packaging) were nice.

But then, the internet shenanigans started, and eventually made me give up on them. Amazon was available, quick, and cheap — so I went for it.

Now, after a year and a half of buying Amazon Basics TP, the crappy quality (sorry, couldn’t help myself) caught up to them. The toilet paper is bad enough that we run out of a roll within a few days (we’re two adults here, that’s a lot), and it’s thin enough to be basically see‑through. If your business is a bit… er… flowing, you can almost spend half a roll cleaning up because the damn thing basically dissolves on contact.

So I decided enough is enough, canceled the subscription, and went back to WGAC. I’m not sure their quality hasn’t diminished over time, but at least they offer a bamboo option, which, according to my earlier research, is less affected. And yes, I know I can probably find something else on Amazon and subscribe to that, but I did like WGAC, and I want to give them another chance.

Now I want to watch some Beavis and Butt-Head 🧻 😆

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:02:05 -0400

This morning, I read a couple of posts on Reddit that I liked and wanted to reply to the community. Mistake, as usual:

No big deal, it’s only 10 minutes down the drain. My account is several years old and has a lot of “karma.” I am not behind a VPN this time. There was no bad language or any adult content in my post.

Yes, I know I’m not telling you anything new, and it’s my fault for trying to entertain myself to actually use Reddit for - gasp - posting something. But this is still where most folks (non-techie that is) go to. They don’t have anywhere else. Barking on how everyone should move to Mastodon (I wish) or Lemmy or whatever doesn’t work.

Wondering if anyone found a way to satisfy Reddit’s filters, whatever the hell they are, because they sure don’t make sense to me anymore.

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:13:14 -0400

Today started just right so far. Sleep was sufficient, draft writing, a lot of fun with Subnautica (the first one, I’m finishing it up…), and now farmer’s market with River. Good stuff.

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:50:11 -0400

Moments looks good.

From Peter:

Moments is a quiet photoblog for people who take photos as part of life.

It is not social media. There are no likes, no follower counts, no rankings, and no pressure to post often.

Moments are simply organised by time, because time is enough. Newer moments come first. Older ones slowly move down.