daniel.industries

A few of my students were deported. It’s happening everywhere, and we talk about what we’re allowed to in the halls between our training sessions. The kids I lost were some of my best artists with great families who tolerated my compliments of their kids’ work in my poor Spanish. I’ve screamed a lot. And felt sad and still, then screamed again. TPS ending has been devastating to our communities. broken tamagotchi feels I held my hands the way your voice held my mind. to love the cosmos ⤥…

Preface Now, we all know that LinkedIn has been a bountiful Lolcow for years and years, but this recent timeline that we’re in has seen it transform into a true hellscape. Nowhere else on the internet has in sloppification been more wholly embraced. It’s really hard to decide where to even begin with this platform. But we can’t talk about this new era of LinkedIn cringe without talking a little bit about design. Now, I swear I hardly ever see this kind of stuff out in the wild, but on LinkedIn,…

this neutralization of difference is crucial to capitalism, a flattening that allows otherwise-diverse objects to be brought into the realm of exchange value. The glamor and vibe some branding company worked so hard to imbue is dulled by the cardboard and tape and shredded packing paper. How am I supposed to fetishize this wrinkled blouse torn only moments ago from a recalcitrant plastic pouch? This is where the aesthetic decanting and TikTok restocking comes in. It’s a piece of theater that…

obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition) (Apologies for a substack link but this one is worth it.) Quit your phone and change the nature of time and the universe! What amazes me so much about these notions is how similar they are to discourses from the beginning of modernity, when our perception of time, disconnected from the rhythms of the world, became abstracted, seen as a meaningless container shuttling from moment to moment leaving it up to…

…the discomfort with temporal uncertainty that manifests as false certainty about the future has, I’ve come to realize, an equivalent in the unease about ambiguity, complexity, contradiction, and opacity that manifests as the urge to stuff reality into airtight categories. Categories are inevitable—language itself is a collection of categories—but their leakiness and limits should be recognized…Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act…

(1,910) (2,002) The browser tab’s title on Madeleine’s 7-year-old laptop dutifully ticked up. Checking on my order from July 20th… Just wanted to find out if my order a month ago went through or if I should try again. It showed up on my PayPal. Madeleine’s muffins were made in a small commissary space well outside the purview of the health department. It had two main doors with keypad locks, and each of the individual units had their own keypad locks. Madeleine’s was just four ones, but nobody…

I meant to write something else and this is what came out. It is very weird to be writing about this again. Title from The Homebound Symphony’s sprawling along the way: a polemic and an exhortation What characterizes the hopeful Christian, Thomas says, is the status viator – the state of being a wayfarer. Thus Josef Pieper refers to “the wayfaring character of hope.” Wayfarers know their destination but aren’t sure how to get there; all along the way they look for signs indicating the best…

Notes MRM. We’re in this liminal space between the date Margot Rose was born – July 23rd – and the date she died – August 13th. July 23rd we arrived at the lake. Carissa brought mini cupcakes and we had cupcakes and sang happy birthday on the dock at sunset. I said, “Are we going to sing?” Carissa said, “I don’t really want to,” but then led the singing. Grief is so multivariate, but it is almost always awkward. I missed July’s IndieWeb Carnival. Despite having an idea and a to-do from approx…

I like my family. Even when I can’t participate in all the fun. I can play plenty of pool. 🎱

I’m 38 and I Can’t Support Myself Anymore The ideal person under capitalism is tireless, independent, resilient, endlessly capable of overriding their own limits in service of output. You may be severely injured and anemic but don’t you dare skip gym day. When you become chronically ill or disabled, you begin to understand how deeply this ideology has embedded itself into the psyche. The shame of no longer being able to work consistently feels personal. As though my body’s inability to keep…

Inspired by Robin Rendle’s post Sinistral Hands, I made my titles left-leaning italics. Since I use free fonts from CDNs, I did it with CSS transform: h1 { font-size: 2.1rem; transform: skewX(12deg); font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; } I don’t know how many browsers this will work in. I switched the font while I was at it. I tried Geist for a minute but ended up choosing Bitter, which is a lot like the previous one, Aleo.

It started from a newsletter from the beautiful, kind Lowland Hum, who have done an episode of the new-to-me podcast Podsongs, an episode I still haven’t watched/listened to because I immediately noticed an episode with Peter Rollins, and I’m a big fan and still maybe two degrees of separation from based on my intense (pushy, IRL) research into the UK-and-adjacent alt-worship scene of the early ’00s. I’ve mentioned Peter quite a bit on this blog, more so in the late ’00s and early ’10s,…

😫 🤷 😡 😭 🫠 It has been 202 days since I broke my hip in a freak bike accident. 6 months, 2 weeks, 5 days. My last update on this series of unfortunate events was at 80 days on March 13th. That is because not much has changed. I gave up on the original orthopedic surgeon’s office, Texas Joint Institute, the one I had three or four appointments with over the course of the first few months of the year, always with a PA, always met with a big shrug. Except for the second visit, at the end of the…

I haven’t finished many posts lately, but I have been deploying small style updates the last few weeks. I had updated the background of the header/menu a while ago with this vector leaf pattern, and changed the highlight colors from a green palette to a pink one. Then I changed it to cover the whole homepage. It was actually the pink in this image that inspired the color change. I’ve removed drop-shadows from images, as they did not look as good in dark mode. I rarely use dark mode (bad eyes)…

📺️ There Is No AI, Really (It’s Just People), with Jaron Lanier Part of the ideology that makes AI into a creature instead of a collaboration also wants to think of bits as being this ethereal thing that’s free and infinite… You show me a bit that didn’t involve work. You show me a bit that didn’t disperse heat…Look at data centers. When you make enough bits, they take up more energy than anything. Information is physical or it’s nothing. You can think of large language model AI as a whole…

📺️ There Is No AI, Really (It’s Just People), with Jaron Lanier Part of the ideology that makes AI into a creature instead of a collaboration also wants to think of bits as being this ethereal thing that’s free and infinite… You show me a bit that didn’t involve work. You show me a bit that didn’t disperse heat…Look at data centers. When you make enough bits, they take up more energy than anything. Information is physical or it’s nothing. You can think of large language model AI as a whole…

Bukowski said, What matters most is how well you walk through the fire, and what we didn’t realize is that it’s all fire, all the time, and how we walk through it is how we live, how we keep living… This is it Linked within: In which poetry saves my soul I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic and she said yes I asked her if it was okay to be short and she said it sure is I asked her if I could wear nail polish or not wear nail polish and she said honey she calls me that sometimes she…

Photo by Max Muselmann Bukowski said, What matters most is how well you walk through the fire, and what we didn’t realize is that it’s all fire, all the time, and how we walk through it is how we live, how we keep living… This is it Linked within: In which poetry saves my soul I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic and she said yes I asked her if it was okay to be short and she said it sure is I asked her if I could wear nail polish or not wear nail polish and she said honey she calls me…

I am very slowly making my way through old archives of this site, occasionally finding something I’d long forgotten about. This was an album review I wrote for an indie web magazine1 in 2001. Here is the wayback machine link to the original. I would later record a cover of I Radio Heaven from this record. Over the Rhine Films for Radio Virgin/Back Porch 2001 11 Tracks/57:03 I think maybe this recording, this collection of songs is about internal worlds, about the dialogue that runs inside all…

I am very slowly making my way through old archives of this site, occasionally finding something I’d long forgotten about. This was an album review I wrote for an indie web magazine1 in 2001. Here is the wayback machine link to the original. I would later record a cover of I Radio Heaven from this record. Over the Rhine Films for Radio Virgin/Back Porch 2001 11 Tracks/57:03 I think maybe this recording, this collection of songs is about internal worlds, about the dialogue that runs inside all…

Image from stewartcopeland.net Last night I took Milo to see Stewart Copeland entertain a sold-out Kessler with stories starting with his childhood in Beirut through his recruiting of Sting to be in The Police, to meeting Andy Summers and Summers inviting himself to join, creating the band we’ve all known and loved since 1978’s Outlandos d’Amour. I was introduced to The Police by my babysitter in the early 80s. He thought they were the best band in the world. I was skeptical. At first. You…

Appearing Productive in The Workplace A meaningful share of my current role has become sitting across from account directors and go-to-market leads who arrive with AI-generated projects and argue them. What they are proposing, in most cases, is a dashboard or website that displays the status of a process that is not ready to be automated, built to track a workflow that does not yet warrant tracking. The tool has not solved a problem; it has driven its user to identify a problem worth solving,…

The Homebound Symphony: Rowan Williams on solidarity …in what is really in many ways the heart of Rowan’s argument, the history of the term “solidarity” that links it with labor movements becomes essential. The solidarity of labor is based on the idea that if we have a common work, then we have a common cause. In a way, Rowan is reversing that: He’s saying that if we have a common problem — the failure to acknowledge the full humanity of others — and if we have all, in one way or another,…

Aboard Newsletter: But I Love Stochastic Parrots! For a lot of people, AI is here to take their livelihood. I get that. For others, it’s here to replace the entire economy and they plan to become billionaires. Okay. But for me, it’s the most hilarious possible continuation of many decades of continual exploration of what it means to simulate thinking through language—and I never believed things could ever go this far with mere language. I used to be a pro writer for a living, and trust me, no…

This is an article written in 2002 by the late Mike Riddell for an online magazine I co-created and curated. The original can be viewed here on the wayback machine. I’ve thought about republishing it here for many years; today I am. Early in 1997 my job as Lecturer in Practical Theology at a New Zealand Baptist theological seminary came to a nasty end. I was pressured to resign because of the impending publication of a novel which I had written. The book, The Insatiable Moon, was a work of…

This post is for IndieWeb Carnival May 2026: Write a love letter Oh I need a letter, ooh I need a letter Oh I need a letter but not that kind I don’t need a letter to help me remember What is not, what was never mine Ooh I need a letter, oh I need a letter Oh I need a letter but not that kind Love letter is delightfully anachronistic. Who writes letters anymore? I do send cards. I sent one recently and the recipient’s first words to me the next time he saw me were, “You have really nice…

📺️ Why toxic positivity is making us miserable When I got cancer, people often told me that everything happens for a reason, and what they meant was that I will learn important lessons that will eventually enrich my life if it doesn’t kill me. But some things happen for no good reason. Sometimes in life we have to step up to the edge of the great mystery and in the face of mystery we can’t always say, we will know why. If we don’t have a wider range than a toxic positivity, we threaten to…

Illustration by Resource Database The first chamber was larger than the second. Wren heard and felt the pneumatic doors close behind them and was careful to place one foot next to the other, in a stable stance, and took hold of the handrails. They felt their boots lock onto the walkway. The loud, mechanical horn blared its single warning and clouds of thin white mist filled the room. Wren stared straight ahead but could see in the peripheral vision possible through their helmet’s visor the…

I finished Accelerated Growth Environment a couple of days ago. I enjoyed it. It is a good length–sometimes a too-long story can result in a DNF for me–but the first third is pretty slow and then from the end of the slow part it is very fast, to the point I saw the progress indicator and wondered how it was going to wrap up (what I actually thought was “This book must have almost no falling action,” which is basically true). It also didn’t wrap in any particularly clever way, which isn’t a…

Gustave Thibon, in the intro to Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil. I’m assuming the quotes are Simone, and have italicized them. Creation reflects God by its beauty and harmony, but, through the evil and death which abide in it and the blind necessity by which it is governed, it also reflects the absence of God. We have issued from God: that means that we bear his imprint and it means also that we are separated from him. The etymology of the word to exist (to be placed outside) is very…