mini-posts

2025-07-11

i was gone for a bit and touched grass, and apparently in the ensuing moments a lot of stuff happened.

one of those things was a discourse on bluesky about free buses, something i have advocated for in the past, perhaps stridently. i think it’s good policy, period.

i can only speak for nyc transit, where the bus is a secondary form of transit to the train, and where most people outside of staten island get around by transit. from what i recall, most of the scholarship around “free transit” look at jurisdictions like luxembourg where fares were dropped in the hopes of promoting transit modeshare among a population that mostly drove. the goal of the free bus program are clearly not to promote transit use per se, but rather to reduce the costs of bus commuting in communities not served by the train. it’s not for nothing to point out that $6 (the rounded-up cost of two bus trips) is a lot of money actually. it can buy you lunch!

free fares also means that the “crime” of “fare evasion” is categorically eliminated, which means less conflicts with transit employees and less time wasted on something that has no effect on public safety.

fare free buses means no time spent collecting fares, which opens up opportunities for multi-door boarding, which can speed up buses.

and finally, i think that the richest city in the world can afford to allocate more funds toward operating a public good like transit! i think the moral argument for free fares is a great one actually.

hmm. perhaps i should go back to touching grass, actually.

2025-07-06

there’s been a lot of malignment of the em-dash recently. (some of it from me!) so i’ve tried to use it more consciously. as a form of punctuation, it really helps paragraph text flow—especially as we now read on variable-width screens. but overusing em-dashes (or bullet points, or even clichés such as “X is not just A, but B”) all actually have something in common: they are cheap ways to break up and altering the pace of the writing.

who am i to rally against cheapness per se? if it’s cheap and does the job, why care? and yet, no one decides consciously to turn good things bad. rather, they just cut one small corner one at a time, and they get used to that so they cut more, and more, and more. do not confuse economy with cheapness.

i feel like my social anxiety has been supplanted by an overall Weltschmerz which, um, seems bad? perhaps i am acclimating to my lack of control (as an individual) in this world. no one really does exert full control over their environment: otherwise, the tyrants who run the world would be able to conceal their insecurity and their bereftitde of interiority.

2025-07-01

i’m not sure who reads my blog (possibly no one), but i’ve decided that if you do, i want you to feel like it’ll be worth it to dedicate your attention to a blog post. this is not really a new idea at all—a whole variety of blogs did this—but in each new post going on forward will be a plain summary that i think accurately describes the contents and mood of the post following it.

this isn’t a “tl;dr” (which is more like putting the conclusion of a piece of writing at the front) nor is it a “teaser” (i want the summmaries to be the opposite of engagement bait) but it’s also not meant to be an abstract. think of my philospohy behind summaries as signposts toward a destination, should you proceed to read the post. and needless to say, i write these by hand.

2025-06-30

there’s an interesting phenomenon of inversion that happens with language, at least the english language of the united states. “awful”, formerly a synonym of “awesome”, became its antonym; “lifting yourself up by your bootstraps”, an impossible act, became a common utterance in the united states and the driving philosophy of american conservatism; nonperformative speech has most recently become re-labeled as “performative”—in other words, the term “performative” became its precise opposite.

there are probably so many other examples of this phenomenon, but the “nonperformative” to “performative” shift has been particularly pernicious because it’s distorted the notion of performativity (i will elaborate on nonperformativity in a later post, i hope.)

my collection of anecdotes of people using a technology are trustworthy because they’re from competent experts at the technology, and are encouraging signals of emergent behavior, in fact. but, you see: your collection of anecdotes of people developing severely adverse effects from using a technology are actually invalid because those people using it are incomptent at using the technology and perhaps predisposed to incompetence. plus it’s behavior one can simply patch away.

2025-06-17

thinking of moving this away from neocities tbh. i feel like i am cluttering up a global activity feed somewhere, plus the toolchain to deploy this is both anti-neocities and baroque

i have no autocomplete and i must scream

in ceramics, tap centering (a somewhat stochastic process) is, once mastered, a great boon to keeping you in a flow state when it comes to trimming ceramics. you have to be prepared to completely reset your piece if it’s about to fly completely off the wheel.

so i learned to tap-center. it’s pretty cool. it helps me a lot, personally, because i think i have poor spatial reasoning. but of course, some of the most talented ceramicists i know don’t know how to tap center or haven’t bothered to. flow isn’t everything, and intention matters just as much, if not more.