My 2.3 devoted readers may remember how a deer totaled my 2009 Corolla, forcing me to purchase a replacement vehicle: welcome home, Car Car Car The replacement, a 2015 Prius, is working great, mostly. I'm never going back to a full gas vehicle again. The Prius offers a "best of both worlds" situation for winter...

Spending my work-adjacent time reading the Rochester Provocations, a series of eight statements about AI intended to provoke conversation about how schools respond to generative AI: the Rochester Provocations I feel provoked to converse. In conversations on the AASL listserv, I've come to understand that the...

You ever read one of those quotes that somehow doubles the size of the universe? This morning it was: “Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology *won’t*.” — Stephen Lea Sheppard of...

I’m currently reading Marion Nestle’s What to Eat Now and Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism at the same time (the former for enjoyment and the latter for research). The juxtaposition is convincing me of one thing: We live in a society whose sole imperative is mass resource extraction from the populace to...

Title says it: Over the winter break, I rewatched Season 1 of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers because my inner eleven-year-old wanted to, and I wanted something that required absolutely no thought or insight. Win-win. I was obsessed with this show when it originally aired in the US. More precisely, I wanted to be. We...

One of my students recently got into Fallout 4 (thanks, Prime), and they are talking my ear off about the game. It's actually fun to listen to. I don't play a lot of video games; instead I tend to find a game I like and play it to death. Break the hell out of it. Learn so much lore I qualify as Hopeless. In short, I...

It's a gross, rainy, wet, muddy day here on the World's Tiniest Farm. But I needed carrots and it's about to be a gross, snowy, icy, muddy night and rest of week here, so I picked up my spade and went out to the front garden to get some. (Yes, you can overwinter carrots in the ground. I try to have all mine dug by...

I'm reading back through my journal entries and blog posts for the past year, and two things stand out above all. 1. I really thought that switching to Linux/yeeting oligarch tech/etc. would protect my privacy and data security and generally free me from the broader trends in surveillance, data harvesting, AI...

One downside to working as a school librarian is that we tend to be siloed. I don't even see the other librarians in my district most of the time - let alone any other librarians. So when people hear I'm a librarian and say "yeah, makes sense" or "I would have guessed," I'm always a little bemused - it's not like I...

All the Spotify Wrappeds have dropped, so for the past week I've had at least one student a day show me theirs - and ask to see mine. They get very confused when I tell them I don't have Spotify. They get even more confused when I tell them I don't pay for any streaming services at all. "But...how do you get...

While snowed in over my long Thanksgiving weekend, I started thinking about the stuff online and how it interacts with the stuff in our brains. As requested by absolutely no one, behold: a framework for sorting the stuff on the Internet (and not on the Internet). 0: Slop "Slop" is the online stuff that is less than...

So after I totaled my car and the deer it hit: https://viewfromthepresent.com/2025-11-20 I had to buy another car. I haven't actually bought a car since 2009, when I, a hapless twentysomething, overpaid for a 2007 Toyota Yaris. I loved that car and drove it into the ground before lucking into the Corolla (aka "the...