Don’t Trade Your Original Voice

Somewhat to be expected when you repopulate your RSS reader with blogs after months of abstaining from attention paid to the blogosphere, as the links come in you end up reading a lot of blog posts about blogging, because whatever else this, that, or the other blogger posts about they’re nearly always also t some point blogging about blogging.

Boil Me, Mash Me, Stick Me In A Stew

The first thing that struck me about this research on gender was the person who supplied her gender as “meh”, because I once toyed with listing my pronouns as “meh/meh” but I was afraid people would misconstrue it as a pointed, wrongheaded criticism of providing your pronouns.

On Second Person Birds: From Shipyard To Library In Just Eighty Years

It’s 2003 and you’re coming up on the end of your first full year of “stand-alone journalism”, doing independent reporting and commentary on Portland entirely by blog. You’re visiting an independent bookstore run out of a church in South Portland, where friends of yours work. It has a particular focus on Western Americana, and while wandering those particular stacks you spot a plain, unassuming spine: green cloth, gold embossed lettering: “THE FINGER” and “OCT. 9, 1942 - JAN 3, 1944”.

Live By The Human Sacrifice…

The question of celebrating aside (it’s the primary discourse on Bluesky right now, as both Jay and the service’s safety team warn against “glorifying violence or harm”), you certainly don’t need to give a single fucking shit that Charlie Kirk is dead.

Oh, We Are Having The Em Dash Discourse

We’ve done this a least twice in the last few months over on Bluesky, and it seems the part of the blogosphere within my six degrees of separation is taking its turn: what do we do about things getting flagged as having been written by large language models just because of the use of the em dash?

On Being Incomplete And Messy

The Curve

Why You Should Not Be Updating Old Blog Posts

When Is A Vulcan Not A Vulcan?

You Might Fill With Laughter Until You Break