In June of 2024, I purchased Pikake Jasmine of Yi-Xin Craft Incense’s floral Faces in Bloom collection. I was immediately impressed with it, but I was suspicious about how the Jasmine fragrance was achieved, and so wanted to see if the fragrance diminished over time before penning a review. I am happy to report...

Content Warning: Misogyny; Mention of sexual assault. Over his storied career, Till Lindemann has been given a lot of grace. Both he, as a lyricist, and the Neue Deutsche Härte powerhouse he fronts, have made some questionable decisions over the years. Many of these missteps might perhaps be chalked up to the era,...

If you haven’t seen this going around the internet, you might be spending too little time on the indieweb! The blog questions challenge asks bloggers to talk about how and why they do what they do. Here’s mine. Why did you start blogging in the first place? # As is common among those with ADHD, I’ve long felt that I...

Some time ago I as I perused the incense display of a nearby Whole Foods, hoping to see the Shoyeido sticks that once graced the shelves, I noticed a range of Indian-style sticks, their otherwise matching packaging in a variety of colors. Listed prominently on each package was the text: “Incense of Auroville.” This...

Looking around the internet, you could be forgiven for thinking that Scribus is dead. These days, FLOSS[1] developers debate the merits of merge requests in public chat rooms, track bugs through GitHub issues, and announce releases through widely-circulated blog posts or sleek landing pages. In contrast, the Scribus...

You might seen my recent toot about the fancy new “How Much of a Linux Nerd are You?” quiz on my website. Some time ago, I realized that I missed taking fun internet quizzes and decided to implement a quiz system on my own site that would allow me to easily make fun quizzes to share. Here’s how I built it with...

The German neue deutsche härte group Rammstein is known for many things. From their controversial lyrics (NSFW) and legally dubious stage antics (NSFW), to their over the top live performances, one thing the group is certainly not known for is conventional merchandise. Far from the usual assortment of posters and...

Trump has been inaugurated; Elon Musk is performing Nazi salutes in public, the U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, the White House Spanish-language pages have been shut down, whitehouse.gov now features some sort of onanistic hyper-nationalist movie trailer, the federal government is officially hostile to...

Update 2025-06-24: You can buy the final extruder, replacement nozzles, and accessories from outside of China via SuperBuy. For a side by side comparison of some of the extruders, see this picture and this picture: the aluminum and stainless extruders are near identical in diameter, but the aluminum model is...

Smoke was the first breath of early civilization, its rising plumes a synonym for human presence. This byproduct of life-sustaining flame has been constant companion to our evolution as a species, changing not only human lives, but human bodies. As the ubiquity of smoke rendered transparent to our ancestors’ noses...

Update 2025-10-01: See the /incense page for additional resources. While I like to post incense builds, I haven’t yet posted on exactly how to go about turning raw ingredients into Japanese style incense sticks. Here’s a 1,000 mile overview of the process to accompany a video I recently uploaded to my new PeerTube...

Plant resins come with varying amounts of water-soluble gum content. Beyond the temperature-reducing aspect innate to resins in combustible incense, these gums can further affect how much of a given resin you can include in a build. As anyone who has burned resins on charcoal can attest, with resins high in gum...