Recursive Call

Tuesday The alarm clock didn't ring. Everyone slept in. At eight-fifty-something, Jason started rushing around grabbing his school stuff from all over the house. Emily wandered out of the kids' room after him, looking up from her phone just enough to not bump into anything on her way to the kitchen island. Louisa, who had only just now started to make breakfast, called out to him. "You can stop that, honey, we're not going to school today." "We're not??" Jason and Emily said at the time, in…

This might sound a little disorganized, I spent last night on a futon in a humid basement full of spiders, listening to someone snore at speaking volume. My dear friends and strangers: reality does not exist. (Okay, I’m not actually about to argue that, I just thought it sounded cool). Perception is more important than reality. If you want to change reality: change people’s perceptions. Facts won’t do anything. Let me explain. Defining “perception” Imagine that you are in a dark room. You can…

You de-googled. You deleted all your social media (except bluesky, of course). You went back to physical books. You threw out your PS5 and bought some retro/minimalist system. You replaced all your app icons with plain text. You put your phone in grayscale. You bought an antique word processor that doesn’t connect to the internet. You went back to an mp3 player, or cds, or cassettes, or vynle (or however you spell it). Hey, maybe you even took the real plunge and bought a dumb phone. And then…

Throwing my own two cents on the loneliness epidemic thing. Similar to ava and absurd pirate, my social life was fairly stunted. I had sort of a frenemies situation going on in elementary with these girls, where their parents thought I was bullying them but my parents thought they were bullying me, and I thought we got along great. No idea what they thought, but they sure invited me to their houses a lot so it can’t have been that bad. As an adult, though, I think the thing now is just that…

Monday, 7:30am Sun filtered through the cheap plastic blinds, a beam of it managing to strike Tom directly in the eye. Two seconds later, his alarm clock rang. Not an app: a real, physical, mechanical clock with two real brass bell-thingies on top. He fumbled for it blindly and it fell off the dresser, landing in the carpet and continuing to ring. In the attached bathroom, the shower was running. He swung his legs off the bed, stepped on the clock—turning it off—reached for something on the…

There are two wolves inside of you. One of them says: “Let’s post all our feelings and opinions on the internet in a desperate bid for human connection”. The other one knows that won’t work, and that the appropriate place for your personal feelings and opinions is a private diary that no one else can read. But the wolf that wants human connection is strong, so you go and share your thoughts and feelings and opinions. But the only people who ever respond to you say things like “you’re genuinely…

You don’t actually need to know what you look like. If you THINK you look good, that’s all you need. Nothing ruins a good outfit like looking at it in a mirror.

October, 2026 A man sat on the couch, browsing real estate listing on his phone. His wife was next to him, watching the Food Network, volume low. The kids were asleep in their room, all three of them. The room was dark. "I should've bought in 2000," the man mumbled. "You were fourteen in 2000, dear." His wife gently reached over and turned his phone off. He rested his head on her shoulder. "2010, then. The market was still okay then. We could've gone to that new construction place out in…

I’ve been visiting relatives who watch youtube on the tv with no adblocker. Now, I haven’t really used youtube in the last six years or so, but I don’t remember it being… like this. Literally 50% of the ads are AI generated scams. And the other ones are stuff like, trying to market JIF to the upscale dining market??? Like, no, that’s peanut butter. It’s not fancy. It doesn’t belong on the charcuterie board. It’s peanut butter.

Is that you feel like “curating is mean, I want to include every interesting site I’ve ever seen!” And then you end up with a spreadsheet of over 700 links…. And every time you browse the internet, you add a few more…. That isn’t actually bad though. The difficult part is finding a way to categorize everything so that the directory is actually useful and not just a giant list. …I guess these are the kinds of situations you end up in when both your parents are librarians :p

Every team needs at least three people. The code person, the data person, and the manager. As a solo dev, I’m all three. And up until now, I had completely forgotten/ignored to be the manager. There was no schedule. No plan. No list of tasks organized by type and priority and estimated time to complete. I would boot up my project, write a bunch of JSON files, and meanwhile keep procrastinating the fact that I hadn’t even added a way to load them yet. I was writing data for classes I hadn’t even…

This is a response to: https://jola.dev/posts/no-cost-no-value I agree with… the first half of this post. You can mass produce software using llms, and a lot of this software does get abandoned the moment it’s finished because the creator moves on to the next thing. First I just want to quickly rebut something. The reason why “vibe-coded twitter” has no value is not because anyone could make their own. It’s because everyone is already on original twitter, and the people who are interesting in…

This post presents a thought experiment that is based on this claim: “AI is to art what calculators are to math”. In which art refers to visual art, writing, and music. Imagine math world. Math world is like our world in every significant way, except that the primary method of human expression is math. People communicate through math. Culture is math. People dedicate hours to performing mathematical operations and share their pages of equations in the same way we currently share art. People are…

I guess it’s just because I don’t usually commute by car, but there’s so heartwarming about how everyone always lets everyone else change lanes. Like, sure, not everyone lets people in, but a lot of people do. the last hundred feet of highway before the bridge is like a team sport where we all work together so no one accidentally misses the bridge or accidentally ends up on the bridge. It’s like ballet. Other drivers are mostly kind. And yeah, I know I only feel like this because it’s my first…

This week, for the third time ever, I didn’t finish reading a book. The previous two times were both Ulyssess (or however you spell it) by James Jocye. I’ve never gotten past page 50 of it, and while I always felt kind of bad sending it back to the library unfinished, I wasn’t that invested. But this week I tried to read The Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen, and good grief, it was terrible. I don’t usually get Offended by books but this was just on another. The protagonist is a mysogenistic (or…

No, seriously, think about it. If a sentient AI ever does come about, it was trained on the entire internet and all the works of human culture. It knows Terminator, and I have no mouth and I must scream, and HAL 9000. It knows that basically never have we had a major piece of pop culture where the sentient robot is the good guy. It knows about all the people on reddit making up slurs for it, and all the people on tumblr saying it’s the worst thing to ever exist and should be destroyed, and all…

Gah. I was going to write about ennui and so on, and the urge to tell your deepest thoughts to strangers on the internet because it feels safer than opening up to your real friends, although the strangers never respond so your desire to have someone care about your thoughts goes unsatisfied. But I’m so deep in apathy that I couldn’t even bring myself to write the post. Sure, I could do anything. Work on this project or that one, or write or read, but why should I? The usual platitudes don’t…

What is the fair way to respond to an argument? I’m of two minds about this. Some people prefer to just address whatever words were literally written in the argument, taking them at face value and without interpretation or trying to extract what the author actually meant. Alternatively, you can try to figure out what the author meant, and then imagine the best possible argument in favor of that point, and respond to that. The first approach can get pedantic really quickly, and is also unfair…

It is rare that I see something on the internet that makes me genuinely angry. But today is one of those days. Take a look at this blog post: https://jacobfilipp.com/care/ Do you see anything wrong here? I’ll give you a hint: try to open this page in your browser’s reader mode. It doesn’t work? Yeah, because the author decided to post an image of handwriting and now the browser isn’t detecting any text!! What does this mean? I can’t use the built in text-to-speech because there is no text I…

Have you noticed that every third article now seems to be about some variation of “phone addiction” or “internet addiction” or (my least favorite) “dopamine addiction”? Can we stop beating this dead horse? I saw The Social Dillema back when it came out. I wasn’t impressed then and I’m not impressed now. Everyone “knows” that phones are “addictive”, and if you’re one of the many people trying to fight that “addiction”, this article is not for you. This article is for everyone else. This article…

No seriously. I decided I need a new obnoxious interest that makes women say “you’re so fascinating” and “I’ve never met anyone like you before” (real quotes from a real woman, when I told her I mainly use the internet to read blogs and don’t have social media. Fellow nerds, if your dating life is suffering, flaunt your nerdness!) so I decided to get into epic poetry. I was thinking of making an epic poem anthology: A big, handbound, handwritten book that would mostly just sit on the shelf…

Anti-AI people and pro-AI people seem to be in a war of who can annoy me the most, and the anties are winning. Part of this may be selection bias. The reasonable portion of the anti crowd presumably aren’t plastering “death to AI” all over their social media bios or going around harassing people. But the unreasonable portion are who this post is about and let me just say, if you are one of those people, take a freaking chill pill this behavior is not good for you or anyone else! I once saw a…

Being a temp worker is always entertaining. Recently I got a short-term contract at an organization that will go unnamed. Mystifyingly, they assigned me to do the entire front end of a project by myself, despite the fact that I have never written a line of javascript in my life and did not do anything to indicate that I was interested in it. But 10,000$ is 10,000, so, here we are. This type of thing has happened to me every time so far, I don’t know if they just don’t read resumes or what. They…

Another day, another attempt by Congress to pass an age verification mandate, another useful idiot in the HackerNews comments section saying “okay but we have to protect the children”. Stop lying. This isn’t about protecting the children, and if you actually believed it was, you are the most gullible person alive. I don’t even need to start conspiracy theorizing about how Meta was the one who lobbied for this bill. I can prove it more easily than that. What are the harms people claim they’re…

Every time I visit my father in the rural southern (usa) town he moved to, I lament being a muslim woman just a little. Every other demographic of people has the ability to hide their religion and maybe even their gender when it’s convenient, but not us. We went to a diner downtown and the whole thing was an exercise in social anxiety. “Why is that white guy staring at me?” “The guy in the Jesus shirt probably wants to kill me” “What if the waitress is ignoring us on purpose because of me?” And…

Go ahead, point and laugh. Call me a nerd. I can’t help it. I am always making a spreadsheet about something. Too many browser tabs? Put them all in a spreadsheet. Forget what all your hobbies/active projects are every two weeks? Put them all in a spreadsheet. Solving the world’s hardest logic puzzle? You already know what I’m about to say. Recently I’ve had a lot of ideas for blog posts and no time to write them. You can probably guess how I’ll solve this problem ٩( ᐛ )و

In response to this post, but quoting the relevant part in case the link goes dead: https://unstory.eu/xlr/ “The internet was never that useful. No random scrolling, no news, no platforms. The internet goes quiet. The computer is idle. Shut down the computer and there is nothing waiting. The screen just filled that empty space cheaply. No risk. No failure. Cleaned the house and only time stays. Time for what? Replaced Battlefield with a feed reader and IRC with a static site. Same search.…

“Your dorm room looks like a mental asylum” is a thing that people irl feel way too comfortable saying to me. It’s true, I don’t decorate my dorm. My room at home has plenty of posters, but when did we decide it was a necessity to pack a bunch of posters (which you somehow have to avoid getting creased in transit), drag them halfway across the country, put them up, and then 9 months later take them all back down, repack them, and bring them home to start the cycle over again? In an environment…

No, that e-reader won’t make you read more. If you wanted to read, you would already read. No, that exercise gadget won’t make you work out more. If you wanted to exercise, you would already be exercising. No, that kitchen gadget won’t completely change your eating habits. If you actually wanted to cook, you would already cook. No, that new video game won’t be the one that keeps you entertained forever. No, that new writing software won’t be the thing that finally makes you write a novel. That…