It’s been a long time since I wrote poetry, honestly too long. When I was writing poetry fairly regularly, I wrote a mixture of free verse and formed verse. Verse forms are fun because they’re an exercise in constrained writing, which provides just enough structure to make the poem a sort of puzzle to be solved. The...

Configuration bankruptcy is someting of a meme in the Emacs community, to the point where there is a dedicated wiki page describing the phenomenon. As a fully-programmable text editor, Emacs configuration tends toward spaghetti over time, at least for many users (including myself). And for many of us, the only...

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree I really enjoyed Travis Baldree’s first cozy fantasy novel about Viv the orc and her non-adventurous adventures serving this new-fangled beverage called coffee. Bookshops & Bonedust is a prequel to that story, taking place all the way at the other end of Viv’s career as...

Let me begin by saying that web bookmarks are great. You can just save links that you find interesting or that you think you might need later, and there they are waiting for you when you need them. I hope that whoever came up with that feature got a good raise or bonus or something. However, they are lacking in one...

Like many millenials, I played a good amount of The Sims as a kid. However, I didn’t really play it for the telling-people-what-to-do part … I was in it for the setup. I still remember my favorite house: it was all propped up on the second story over a pool the size of the lot, and the only way to get inside was to...

Everyone (for some values of everyone) knows GNU nano, the editor that you use when you don’t know how to use emacs or vim (I’m sorry nano lovers). Nano is a fork of pico, the editor integrated with the alpine mail client. Both nano and pico are also SI prefixes, and I think they started a small trend of naming...

I didn’t really read between December and March. I did a little Moby Dick, but mostly I worked on this website and chatting on IRC. I decided I should finally get back into reading again, so I could write this, if I’m being frank. He lost his keys in space by Luke Milton and Lizzy Lang I picked this up knowing it...

Spring has always been my favorite season. New life, green grass, blue sky, flowers, rain—what’s not to love? Of course, it’s not all roses and sunshine: my allergies go nuts this time of year, and when we lived under a mockingbird for a while, we learned that they sing for all hours of the night, and here in...

Madeline [full text], by Ludwig Bemelmans, is rightly a classic of children’s literature. Its iconic imagery and characters have been adapted into numerous other media, and I’d be willing to bet that most readers could finish the second line of its opening couplet: In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines...

This month’s Emacs Carnival, my first participating, is titled “Mistakes and Misconceptions.” This story happened over the past few years, behind the scenes, and was just resolved this month when I posted about an annoyance I had with how I thought eww, the Emacs Web Wowser, just worked. Turns out, it was me all...

Love it or hate it, everyone is talking about AI all the time. It’s so boring. It’s worse than talking about global warming or US politics or anything else, because AI, as a topic, has all the problems of those things—i.e., there are lots of opinions and everyone has their special one and it seems like everyone is...

Over the years since I’ve had this domain, I’ve written a lot of stuff. I’ve also rewritten my website multiple times, and every time I’ve had to port my old content over to the new site. I think this is going to be the last time I do that, but I thought that every other time, too, so who can say. Anyway, I’ve just...