blog on ben's notes

Going Public: The turmoil of publishing a project

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I published the Hugo theme I built my blog with this morning. Early this morning. Late at night, really, if you think of it as I do―I hadn’t gone to sleep yet, so it was still the same day. It’s been open & available to anyone who cared to read it this whole time, of course; the CSS is served up freely, fresh and hot to any comers, and the HTML is right there. All of it’s in one obvious place, but it’s somehow different from being put up in a repo on github. Up to this point―even with the code available for all to see―the mechanism by which this was assembled into coherent documents was still a veiled object, concealed in my private archives. To set it out is to change my relationship with the theme, fundamentally.

In opening up a project to others to access its inner workings, you create a space and opportunity for criticism: positive or negative; wanted or not. That commentary or critique can help the project grow and adapt, but it still involves setting aside some amount of ego and control. In this case, I can choose to circumscribe the space for commentary: limit who can be involved, or else leave it as expansive as allowing all comers. Either option comes with a form of risk, the same one we take on every time we get involved in public projects. As much as I tell myself I don’t care or mind, the truth remains that I do―because I’m human, because I respond so readily to the question of “is it okay that this may get judged harshly?”

This is hardly a momentous project to unveil, but it is, ultimately, an indication of my craft that I’m giving to others, as others provided previously for me. In the landscape of Hugo themes and site structures, I hope to present a literate HTML approach to site design, and in so doing, present my own skill. It’s hardly done, just done enough for my uses. There’s definitely points of extension: a palette mechanism to override the color scheme of the site, for instance. Just because I like the appearance of my blog’s colors doesn’t mean other people won’t have widely varied tastes, nor should this require a fork for what is so straightforward a concept.

AAdmittedly my knee-jerk concern has definitely been buffered by the positive responses I’ve gotten (and the original request that spurred me to actually part out my theme), being clear, but that initial frisson of concern about rejection was strong. Not enough to stop me; just enough to get me to pause, rethink, recheck, and adjust several times. I definitely posted to Mastodon too early about it―gotta have a demo site up, for instance―but I’ll keep that in mind for next time.

Today was an interesting excursion into GitHub Actions and Pages and the not super clear steps to set it up; if I’d known about the local runner, that probably would have helped a lot for testing. The default workflow had a lot of extra stuff that just didn’t make sense for me (no need for SASS or NPM), so clearing that out about halved deployment time. In all, an easy to use system that performs well and makes presenting a theme truly simple.

This is all a long way to say: Meet inTUItive, available at ben-zen/hugo-in-tui-tive.

Letter to the Editor: On “Pluralism”

Sat, 10 May 2025 08:34:49 -0700

I’ve been a reader of The New Yorker since I was a wee lad. Admittedly I mostly looked at the cartoons, and only infrequently found my attention captured by the three-column format they were enfolded in, but as I grew older I found more and more of the articles of interest. The descriptions of shows I could never see, the restaurants that received that vaunted “Table for Two” treatment, and the profiles of interesting people talking about interesting topics all caught my eye. I’ve only rarely found myself disagreeing fundamentally with the articles I read, and more rarely still felt a need to write a response, but in the face of a piece I considered to be fundamentally intellectually dishonest I had to write a response. When I read “The Pluralism Pivot”¹, after I got done shouting at my empty kitchen, I sat down with pen in hand. My actual letter to the editor is presented at the end of this post, but I felt like there was much more to say than could fit in any column inches I could hope to be given.

When conservative pundits like Charlie Kirk and Chris Rufo started shouting about “indoctrination” happening on college campuses, I dismissed it. In fact, Critical Race Theory―the field they set out to demonize―is a long-established field with a well-reasoned body of work behind it. It provides both a theoretic framework for understanding power imbalances and media portrayal of different communities, and a lens through which legal and political actions can be analyzed―and often, hidden motivations discovered. Reactionaries on the far right hate this because it’s an effective way of dismissing many of their wilder claims, and clearly shows how long-term, systemic racism has shaped our society. CRT informed the development of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion frameworks, so of course that had to be undermined as well. I believe that this new concept of “pluralism” was created, using a name otherwise applied to existing fields of research and conversation, to refer to some invention of the Right that they could hold up as a rival theoretic framework―but it has no substance to it.

As far as I can tell, the root of the framework of “pluralism” is, “I have to be taken seriously and you have to admit that you were excluding me.” In any conversation worth having on difficult topics, every party should be outside their comfort zone in some crucial way. The best such environments are where all parties are experiencing similar, but different, levels of discomfort. We grow through adversity. Let’s consider this passage, then:

Pluralism demands that conservative evangelicals who don’t believe in same-sex marriage be welcomed to campus alongside gay students and that political conservatives who oppose affirmative action have fruitful discussions with people of color.

What are the actual imbalances here? All of these students are told, “you need to be tolerant of these people, and listen to them”, but what’s the actual opposing group in each case? For the conservatives, you have gay students (who they believe should be denied rights) and students of color (who they believe didn’t get to their positions by skill and merit). For the students of color, they are being asked to treat (supposedly white, though it’s actually never said) students who believe that they fundamentally do not belong there with respect, but little is given in return. For the queer students, you’re being told that the position that you do not deserve protections, rights, or privileges under law that are granted to others, is on equal footing to your demand for the simple respect of being left alone, to live as you will. In both of these cases, one side is being told to tolerate that another person exists, and the other is being told to tolerate that a person wants to exclude you―from the academy, or from society. This is not the same.

Throughout the article, there’s a significant emphasis on the importance of the feelings of conservative students and conservatives in broader society. Be they LDS (don’t say Mormon) or from other faiths; or just white, rich, and socially isolated; we’re told of how hard it’s been to feel so attacked in recent years. I can understand, really. It’s hard to see constantly demeaning remarks about your community coming from people in relatively high positions in society, be they politicians, university presidents, the media. I know this personally: in 1993, President Bill Clinton enacted Department of Defense Directive 1304.26, establishing the policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”―you could be gay and in the military, you just could never admit to it, and if they decided you were, you would be dishonorably discharged. Watching any sort of media from the 1990s is a reminder of exactly what society thought of gay people; Friends has several notably bad arcs around homosexuality and gender dysphoria. Churches and other religious institutions reject the queer community―the Salvation Army does not provide support to homeless gay men, for instance. (They now claim that’s changed, as of 2019.²) What I’m saying here is, after a span of maybe a decade of real, actual progress on equality and discussions of historic harms, conservatives are now pitching an absolute fit that they’re not being catered to and have to actually confront the realities of the world their ideology and their predecessors helped shape.

It’s also worth remarking that this new “pluralism” is being pushed at a time when these conservative forces feel that they are most ascendant; not only are they in control of the branches of the federal government, they seem to dominate the media landscape as well. Clearly, the far right felt like they had to have an academic movement to counteract their dreaded Critical Race Theory, something they could use to carve out a rhetorical space for themselves. After all, if you have no argument to stand on, academia will cut you down. It’s just disappointing that they landed on a misunderstanding of viewpoint diversity as their means to their end. In discussions about embracing viewpoint diversity, proponents always include recognizing one’s own potential for fault, that your assumptions can be wrong. To the conservatives, apparently, this means that other people must recognize their potential for fault; somehow this requirement does not also hold true for them as well. At no point is the conservative evangelical to be challenged to ask, “is my opposition to gay rights wrong?” just as the political conservative is not to be challenged about the actual purpose and background of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are merely asked to tolerate the people they disdain.

Now, I keep putting “pluralism” in quotes here. After reading Green’s New Yorker article, I wanted to know more about that “pluralism” and … well, starting with Wikipedia I found a bunch of different schools of thought in various fields, none of which seemed quite right:

Pluralism, the political theory: Power is distributed between the government and various non-governmental organizations, which all engage in the political process. We see a form of this play out in the US as the interaction of our political parties, trade unions, and other civil organizations.

Pluralism, the political philosophy: A lasting peace is possible between communities of different backgrounds and experiences in a larger culture by celebrating unique aspects of each culture, while retaining their sub-cultural distinct communities versus dissolving those communities as in multiculturalism or assimilation.

Value pluralism: This one’s the closest in meaning, I think. This theory claims that there can exist multiple competing ethical (value) systems which are each internally consistent, but are externally inconsistent between each other, while all still remaining coherent or morally sound in a society.

This “pluralism” we’re discussing, that competing beliefs and expectations should be given equal weight and courtesy, comes closest to value pluralism―but where it fails is that the value systems in conflict in value pluralism are where individuals’ own value systems seem to be contradictory, but are each consonant with an overall societal value. Instead, this “pluralism” seems to derive more from agonism, a theory where conflict drives progress―but since the far right are whiny babies, their positions must be protected from analysis or deconstruction, while they are themselves allowed to cast aspersions on others’. My desire for rights is, according to their rules, an object suitable for debate, but their desire to deny me rights is, instead, a position that may not be assailed. I remain unamused.

In doing my investigation to write this letter, I realized that Dr. Allen was talking about a very different form of pluralism from the vague assemblage of poorly-thought-out ideas that Green presented as a coherent political or social theory; intrigued, I ordered a copy of her book Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. Unsurprisingly, I found a far more persuasive and coherent argument for pluralism in the political philosophy sense: a single polity formed of multiple distinct cultures in a structure of mutual respect. She writes of the sacrifices each community makes as a part of forming a more coherent overall society; in Green’s writing, on the other hand, one community is expected to tolerate the presence of people who they want to deny rights and privileges, and the other is expected to tolerate being told―and not being allowed to challenge―the assertion that they do not deserve rights, or do not deserve their achievements. I was struck by how little some of this has changed since the photograph of Elizabeth Eckford being turned away from Little Rock Central High School, as Hazel Bryan screams at her; these are many of the same arguments, even some of the same people.

All of this to say, a softball article intended to promote the importance of outreach to conservatives while downplaying their positions’ issues wasn’t really what I wanted to read in a normally incisive and erudite magazine like the New Yorker, and I’m disappointed that such a weakly researched article advancing lazy arguments made it through to print. Possibly the worst part is, most of the people interviewed are discussing real problems: we do have issues around tribalism and an inability to communicate across boundaries, we do have siloing, and we do have a need to provide accommodations for people with different lifestyles, especially on college campuses. However, when those accommodations are being demanded for people who are otherwise used to comfort, and who as a bloc have acted to enforce harms on other communities, there’s something truly off-kilter. The expectation of one’s own comfort should not come at the expense of recognizing that other members of the community either deserve basic rights, or deserve to be at an institution to begin with; until we can agree on that, I see no point in attempting to make my spaces more comfortable for people who want to harm me and mine.

The letter

Sent to The New Yorker by me, and presumably not selected for publication as it’s been several weeks.

After reading “The Pluralism Pivot” (April 21, 2025), I was left to wonder about the critical framework and body of research behind this new “pluralism”—but when I investigated, there wasn’t much. The report by Dr. Allen³ that’s briefly mentioned discusses viewpoint diversity, but doesn’t seem to establish a field on par with, say, Critical Race Theory. That was an established field with significant bodies of work behind it before the conservative pundits descended; instead, this seems to be a wholecloth invention lacking in theoretical framework or substance.

The best discussions come from all participants being pushed to the limits of their comfort, assuming they’re able to remain civil. However, there was an unacknowledged imbalance throughout the article that became more and more evident the further I read. The examples given of pluralistic integration, conservative students opposing gay marriage and affirmative action meeting gay students and/or students of color in cordial discussion, do not engage with the power imbalance or nature of the distinction at all. The conservative student is asked to tolerate the Other, while students of color are expected to be cordial with someone who believes they didn’t earn their place, or who believes that gay students don’t deserve equal rights.

Lastly, since it cropped up here too: the idea that conservatives are against gay marriage, and that’s all, is a fabrication in of itself. It was never just about marriage; in his concurrence on Dobbs, Clarence Thomas specifically cited Obergefell and Lawrence as cases he felt the court “should reconsider”⁴—reopening the idea that sodomy laws should be enforceable, and directly attacking the safety of the LGBTQ+ community from the bench.

Viewpoint diversity requires that all parties be willing to accept that they might be wrong. I do not see such humility in the people demanding it now.

Green, Emma. “What Comes After D.E.I.?” (Published title, “The Pluralism Pivot”) The New Yorker. (2025/4/21) ↩︎
Baume, Matt. Salvation Army Says It’s No Longer Homophobic Out Magazine. (2019/11/18) ↩︎
Danielle Allen & Justin Pottle. Democratic Knowledge and the Problem of Faction The Knight Foundation. (2018) ↩︎
Beauchamp, Zack. Could Clarence Thomas’s Dobbs concurrence signal a future attack on LGBTQ rights? Vox. (2022/6/24) ↩︎

Link Roundup, December (late)

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 22:24:26 -0800

Figured I’d try something new and put together an actual list of interesting articles I found this month. Maybe I’ll try to journal my web browsing a bit more in the future.

Web components, and evolving web standards

I ended up reading a bit about Web Components this week, in part because of a blog post that Alex Russell shared, “Lived experience” which captured much of my feeling about current web development and frameworks–a large part of why this website looks the way it does, too.

It also amused me to no end that, as I was reading this article on The New Stack, I realized that the page’s scrolling was really stuttery, and when I went to look in the inspector, a bunch of elements were just getting animated all over the place… even though they were static and in fact empty (since my adblocker was handling it.)

The experience proves the point.

Recipes and ideas

I’ve been meaning to stretch into new ingredients, and finding a shop that stocks long pepper in Seattle (The Souk, in Pike Place Market) gave me a reason to go on a meander last weekend. I haven’t had a chance to cook with it yet, but I’m interested to see what other peppers are like.

Another thing I picked up was curry leaves; I haven’t had many chances to use this ingredient, so I have no idea how it tastes, and I was casting about for a recipe when I came across Max’s Butter Bean Curry. This dish has a lot of similarities to my coconut & kidney bean curry, but with a different base bean – and now I’d love to give it a try, seeing as I have a pound of dry lima beans from Rancho Gordo.

Wow, popover pans are pretty much all nonstick nonsense now. Given that I crank my oven to 400°F and leave the pan in to get plenty hot first, I don’t want to be using anything coated or anything like that. Instead, I want cast iron, or seasoned carbon steel. Much to my chagrin, nobody is currently making either of those, but Wagner did previously make cast iron popover pans, or what they called “gem pans”. I hunted down specifically a Wagner S mold gem pan with deep, tapered cups. The specimen that I found on ebay had significant surface rust but seemingly no integral rust, so it’s salvageable. I’ll need to refurbish it a bit.

The whole idea here is to preheat the molds up to full oven temp, grease the individual wells, then put just enough batter in so that it can inflate up the sides of the pan, same way a “Dutch Baby” or pannekoeken does. The upside to a popover pan versus a muffin tin is that the deep wells and steep sides of the popover pan induce the popovers to rise further than muffins usually should, since their ideal shape involves spilling over the sides. Popovers should rise up, but not out of a tin.

Much to my surprise on Christmas day, the Yorkshire Pudding recipe I used was more or less identical to my just-linked recipe, with the additional requirement that the batter sit at room temperature for at least an hour before baking. I’m still puzzling over that one but have a desire to make a batch with buttermilk instead at some point and see how it turns out. Once this pan’s in seasoned condition, I’m sure I’ll get the excuse to do it.

Pyrrhic defeat

Imagine not quite liking a beer enough to not sue it out of existence. Olympia Brewing was a sub-brand of Pabst (previously a standalone brewery) which got sued out of existence over it supposedly falsely advertising being made with water from Tumwater. Pabst just decided to stop making the beer instead, which … yeah, that’s a solution. Congratulations, bet you’re the life of the party. (The guy was claiming that he wouldn’t be buying it if he knew it was using water from the San Gabriel Valley; I’m really ambivalent about this, but okay.)

Read James, seriously

I read James by Percival Everett earlier this month. Read it. Just go do it.

The M/V Wenatchee fire

The Washington area has an expansive ferry network, involving Roll-On/Roll-Off ferries run by WSDOT. In 2021, an improperly tightened bolt resulted in the no. 3 engine exploding, and a fire in the no. 2 engine room. The NTSB wrote a report on this, and how the crew responded by sealing the ventilation and shutting off fuel to the engine room, causing it to self-extinguish before it caused any further damage. The report’s great, I highly recommend reading through it, and check out the included logbook pages.

Open letter to my state legislators, re: PSE & the storm

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 20:21:51 -0800

In the wake of the cyclone last week I wrote a letter to my legislators, following the shameful performance of PSE’s grid in the wake of the storm. Four days after, I met with friends who live in Bellevue for lunch, and they were still without power! While I’m aware that there are neighborhoods of Seattle that have been slowly recovering power, by the time I’m writing this blog post (that is, Sunday, the 24th of November) Seattle has nine outages affecting 11 total customers. PSE, meanwhile, has 16,738 affected customers, and SnoPUD has 2,112. I wouldn’t be surprised if very remote areas take significant time to recover, in both PSE’s and SnoPUD’s territory—but the fact that PSE has consistently been behind in every metric of recovery even by any reasonable measure of scale applied cannot be ignored.

The truly exceptional part of this is, a week before Thanksgiving, some five hundred thousand odd customers had to throw out the contents of their fridges! How much additional downstream waste did this failure create, anyways?

Briefly, I believe that PSE has shirked their basic responsibilities as a public utility, preferring instead to send more money to their investors, and betting on being able to pull yet more funds from ratepayers to cover the costs of their malfeasance. Investment firms expect in the modern era to be able to continually extract wealth from the businesses they own, without really putting paid to the first word of the name… “investment” is a continual arrangement, where you offer funds to support a venture, and profit in a commensurate way when the business does profit. That doesn’t mean that you always profit, even if the leaders (who you have supported the selection of) make choices that result in negative impacts.

This has some of the same feeling as Centerpoint Energy after that 2021 cold wave shut down gas facilities in Texas. Customers are bearing the burden of costs that wouldn’t have needed to be imposed if facilities were appropriately managed in the first case. In Washington, we shouldn’t either. If you were impacted by the storm, you should submit a complaint to the UTC.

Letter to my legislators

As I draft this letter on the 23rd of November, I am sitting in heated, well-lit comfort in Seattle. My friends, colleagues and neighbors across Lake Washington are still without power since the windstorm on Tuesday, November 19th. The latest notice we’ve received is that some locations should expect power back by Monday, November 25th, six days after the storm.

While I’m aware that PSE’s territory includes difficult terrain, I also note that Snohomish County is similarly rural or exurban & their Public Utility District already is back up to 99% coverage at time of writing this. Notably, from PSE’s quick facts, they have 1.2 million electric customers, to SnoPUD’s 377k — but as of time of writing, while SnoPUD has around 6k customers still without power, PSE has over 70k still without power. If it were simply a matter of scale, I could understand a ratio of 4, not ten. Instead, in their reports PSE is describing having to make significant repairs to most of their substations—an issue faced by no other local utility, as far as I can tell.

I believe that PSE’s leadership should be required to explain why this recovery has gone so poorly, why they were insufficiently prepared, and what their emergency planning response will be for future significant weather events. If it has indeed been a matter of these executives enriching shareholders at the expense of ratepayers’ service level, as seems to be the case, then an appropriate response should be explored by the attorney general’s office.

The worst aspect of coming out of the storm just fine is realizing that depending on the accident of where you ended up during the storm, your outcome is drastically different. That alone is an indication of the disparity in service level, but if the argument is that a private company like PSE is supposed to provide a superior experience to a publicly owned utility, well, see whose lights are on.

Response from my rep

I sent that email on Saturday. I didn’t expect a reply until Monday, so… imagine my surprise when I looked at my email midmorning on Sunday, and there was already a reply!

Dear Mr. Lewis:

Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the disparity in how Puget Sound Energy served its customers in the aftermath of the bombogenesis cyclone that hit the Puget Sound last week compared to the outcomes of a local public utility district. I think you raise several good and important points, so I am hoping you will share your thoughts with the state agency that regulates this industry, the Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission. I am pasting herein a link that will redirect you to the UTC Consumer Complaint page, though you may wish to explore other sections of the agency website. I will also note that the UTC, as does every state agency, receives public comment on specific rate change requests and at its regularly scheduled meetings. If you wish to offer your comments to the UTC at a future meeting, please refer to this link.

Thank you, again, for reaching out to share your concerns about the management of essential utility services by Puget Sound Energy.

I was in fact already planning on sending the same note, with an addendum, to the UTC. I was still glad to hear back that my rep understood.

Contacting the UTC

Now, I felt like for the utilities commission, I should provide some more context as to why this would matter, especially as I’m not a customer of PSE’s for electricity. Here was my preface to them:

The following is the letter I sent my state legislators; I’m including its text in full in this complaint, with some added remarks. While my home electricity is supplied by SCL, my workplace is in PSE territory and was offline for four days; if I were not able to work from home during the outage, my ability to work at all would have been heavily impacted—and if I were hourly, I wouldn’t be making any money this last week. While PSE has remarked repeatedly that they’re working across an enormous range, I would still note that they are the only utility to have experienced any widespread, lasting outages. Given that the UTC’s mandate & vision is to ensure that investor-owned utilities provide the same outcomes to their customers as public utilities, it’s clear that PSE is failing to do so, and catastrophically so.

If PSE’s leadership were more willing to invest in long term maintenance projects, and in routine maintenance of way clearing around their power lines, I’m reasonably sure they would have seen a lesser impact from this storm than these catastrophic, service-area-wide outages.

If you live or work in PSE’s service area and you were impacted by the storm, you should also file a complaint with the UTC. I’ll update this post if I get a reply from them. I may also revise these remarks further and make a public comment at some point.

Suddenly, Dinner!

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A friend was in town for training for a few weeks, so I invited him over for brunch. Well, maybe, brunch, and then a trip to Pike Place Market. Maybe with a dispensary run on the way home. Well… dinner’s happening, too, and you’re invited.

He was feeling really down the night before, because the part of town he ended up in for training is super tedious to get into and out of. Though it looks like it should be pretty easy to get places, somehow all routes are hard. He had a solid case of the blues, and he was feeling pretty isolated. I invited him to brunch at one something in the morning… just in time for him to wake up and wonder if he should ask me where he could get some pancakes. Apparently my timing’s good. In any event I suggested the Five Point Café and, uh, here’s my review of it on Google Maps:

Okay, so The 5 Point is an Establishment. It’s the sort of place that seems like its presence is a fragment of some core, bedrock reality of Seattle that just happens to manifest as the perfect queer dive bar right next to Seattle Center.

Their portions are daunting for the hungriest hungover post-circuit party bear, and their mimosas are potent enough that you had better get a friend to drive if you don’t have a strong constitution.

We, ah, demolished a pitcher of mimosas. It was a fantastic brunch; their french toast was lovely, their sausages are always good, and their pancakes are excellent, plate-sized diner classics. Most of all, though, I have to note that we ended up comparing reviews to the 1-star and 2-star reviews that a friend read. I get the intense feeling that basically all of those reviews are from people who didn’t fully read the sign― they make careful note of how the place is gonna work, and you’re expected to understand the ground rules.

I didn’t really plan the day further; we had talked about some museums down south, but due to WSDOT shutting down the highways and general chaos, we switched up plans and headed up to Pike Place Market instead. This was also when we invited our friend to stay for dinner, too: I’d had the thought to do so before, but didn’t really vocalize it until we were already on the way to the market.

At that point, the market trip gained an actual purpose and direction. The fun thing about doing your normal grocery rounds at Pike Place is, all of these produce stands have the basics: your shallots, your garlic, your potatoes, but those aren’t the major draw for most customers, so they’re pricing them down. The flip side is, their supply chain is shorter and their prices are competitive with the larger groceries, so you’re getting fresher stuff at the same prices.

Plus, it was fun to buy a pound of shallots. I got a very quizzical response from the woman who was helping me―after all, shallots are usually bought a few at a time. It was around this time that I had an actual idea forming in my mind to serve for dinner–a version of my weekend braise. A chuck roast braised with shallots and potato, then the braising liquid reduced for gravy. I got some little multi-colored potatoes, used potato starch as the thickening agent for the gravy (it was far superior to flour, it’s my new go-to.)

We meandered the market some more, and then took a fairly circuitous route home that left my friend absolutely winded the next day. Oops.

Once everything was in the oven, I thought to check for some sort of bread product… and had to run over to the store to stock up. I haven’t yet run to the store actually still wearing my apron, but one of these days I should just for the laugh.

In the end, dinner was fantastic and a damn sight better than the frozen entrée he’d been planning to eat.

Have some shame, NaNoWriMo.

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the weekend, National Novel Writing Month kicked a hornet’s nest. They posted a statement claiming that any categorical dismissal or criticism of the use of “AI” tools in writing is classist & ableist, and implies some unrecognized privilege on the part of the critic. That’s a strong stance, and merited a robust response, which the community was happy to provide. Many published authors (Chuck Wendig¹, Daniel José Older², and others) jumped in to point out how the tools on the market are built by destroying copyright, but I haven’t seen an angle that addresses the biases inherent in the LLMs & neural networks that are being used for most of these “AI” products. (I’m drafting this longhand & hate writing quote marks, so just imagine quotes around AI anywhere I write it. The tone is going to need to be inferred as well.)

Who the fuck am I to be talking about this subject, anyways? I’m some writer, what do I know about machine learning and artificial intelligence? For some background on me, I work in software for my day job on network protocols, I’ve dabbled in the underlying technologies of LLMs and their predecessors, and my degree included work in applied mathematics. I’ve got a working knowledge of the underlying techniques and research. LLMs in their current form are effectively Harvard Architectures with no NX bit, and that’s a terrifying thing to have decided to ship at a global scale. While some number of readers will have already decided I do not have sufficient background to have an informed opinion on this topic, let’s assume I’m knowledgeable in the topic and move on.

Technology had historically had a blind spot around bias. More broadly speaking, scientific enquiry has historically had a similar gap in its recognition. The relationship between the observer & observed, and what information an observer includes, inherently relies on the discriminating filter of the scientist!

There’s an entire novel on the topic of identifying what facts are worth selecting, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig had a lot to say on Quality, and bias plays a role in defining Quality. To cut a very long discursus short, LLMs are built on data sets that have been filtered for specific stances, and have incorporated some level of bias in their training. This can be seen very literally in an adjacent form of GenAI: when prompting image generating tools like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion with ungendered and racially ambiguous terms, users still got biased output (skin tones and genders for given jobs and social statuses, for instance.) The companies building these tools have done a lot of work to try and suppress this behavior―by making substitutions to users’ prompts to force diversity… which effectively proves the point. They haven’t fixed the bias, they’ve papered over it.

To put it mildly, pervasive bias problems in AI tech have negative downstream impacts on their applications, especially in creative arts. The dearth of material from minority artists, writers, etc. in the training set―much like documented issues in other technical areas―skews their output. Pervasive stereotypes in older works of literature, about any minority or marginalized community, are amplified by the “training” techniques used to tune and build these systems. Like an automatic suspect identification system that can’t distinguish Black men, a system trained on decades of misogynistic, racist books (stolen from their authors, even!) will perpetuate those stereotypes in generated prose and editorial suggestions.

Personally, as a queer writer of queer fiction, I’m concerned what the prudishness of Silicon Valley would do when presented with my writing! What adjectives would it seek to erase, what aspects of my experience would it stifle as a statistical anomaly, under the guise of being an editorial tool?

This is hardly an idle question. Speech to text tools routinely obfuscate swear words, because obviously we need to be shielded from profanity. “Fuck!” gets rendered F*ck! or F***!―neither of which is what I said. Tools like Copilot will often refuse to discuss politics, anything about sex, and sometimes even routine queer social activities or figures! Censorship of minority experiences is hardly new; resources on sex ed and LGBTQ+ experiences is routinely filtered by so-called “porn filters” as “adult” content, even after objections by some of the youth orgs that were hit.

Somehow, we’re expected to believe that tools built by some of the same teams and under the same direction as the people who built biased services, to be fair and correct in their handling of queer issues with GenAI? NO!

Beyond the facile argument in favor of using AI tools, NaNoWriMo’s counter, that my categorical dismissal of the tools is classist, ableist, and indicative of my unrecognized privilege, is downright insulting. This claim twists the language of the oppressed to support a venture capital-funded company’s defense³, who are also funding NaNoWriMo. The claim is clumsy, which is probably its greatest insult: it rejects some of the original goals of the organization and the project, and this leaves it a hollow statement. It wasn’t even made as a blog post, it was put up on their ZenDesk/help pages!

To claim that rejecting AI tools is classist is to ignore the actual cost of using those tools. Paying for a professional license to any of the AI editing tools is a not insignificant cost, for the limited utility of that program―and not a person you can maintain long-term interactions with, building up rapport and shared context! Those tools, too, are built using data taken from users and other sources, generally without or with minimal compensation for their effort. Using them won’t build your writing community, it’ll impoverish it by depriving you and others of connections and directing resources out of your community and into the pockets of the funders of those projects, indirectly enriching their investors to your community’s detriment.

Ableism… I’m not qualified to fully break this one down, but relying on a statistical model is hardly the only way to write, and certainly isn’t the aid these writers necessarily need. This argument is an attempt to claim an entire community as shields for corporate greed, when they don’t want the help.

Lastly, let’s talk about privilege. Again. I’m definitely privileged: my parents are both college educated, I was born in a state which prioritized education & had early exposure to a lot of culture. I first tried my hand at a NaNo in high school, even! I’ve had years of time to develop my craft, and I have a well-paying job that leaves me with leisure time to write. None of that detracts from my criticism, however, and I reject that my privilege is blinding me to the cost or the inaccessibility of writing and editing. Yes, hiring an editor is an expense. I’m still waiting to do that for my first novel, in part due to the cost! But part of the point of NaNo is to learn the tools & techniques of the trade. Yes, editing is a lot like work… isn’t that the point?

Ultimately, the statement from NaNoWriMo feels like the organization is trying to throw their support behind their AI tooling partner, to defend their sponsor from criticism from the community that they had to understand was coming. Unfortunately, the stance they took was so extreme and so directly contrary to the attitude of their community that it was bound to explode. We, artists and writers, are sick of being told how to think in furtherance of commercial interests, and are hardly going to be quiet now. When we’re seeing beloved internet groups like the Internet Archive attacked for improving access to information during an unprecedented geopolitical event and health crisis⁴, this support of commercial interests who are seeking to profit off of broad social goods & communical resources was definitely going to land poorly.

I hope the cash was worth it.

Chuck Wendig posted on his blog: NaNoWriMo Shits the Bed on Artificial Intelligence ↩︎
Daniel José Older posted on Twitter: “Hello @NaNoWriMo this is me DJO officially stepping down from your Writers Board and urging every writer I know to do the same. Never use my name in your promo again in fact never say my name at all and never email me again. Thanks!” ↩︎
In the Washington Post, Chris Banks, the founder of ProWritingAid said: “We fundamentally disagree with the sentiment that criticisim of AI tools is inherently ableist or classist.” I’m sure they didn’t ask for NaNo’s defense, but the whole thing looks bad. ↩︎
Hachette v. Internet Archive is a currently ongoing case (well, the IA lost on appeal by time of writing, but they’ve not run out of appeals yet) in which Hachette is claiming that the IA’s practice of buying a book, digitizing it, keeping the copy in storage, and allowing one person at a time to look at it is a violation of their copyright. ↩︎

Sine die update: jockstraps and all

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Now that the state House and Senate have adjourned sine die for the session, we can take a breather and talk about what all went down. I tried to stay current on Mastodon, but it’s been moving fairly quickly in the past few weeks and I didn’t have time to blog about it. As it is, the end result has been excellent, so I’m not even particularly frustrated about it!

Okay, so what happened here?

Data science, yes please

The LCB’s research arm is assembling a dataset on lewd conduct enforcement over the history of the rule. (I know, it’s the prohibited conduct rule, but … I like this term better.) They’ve noted this is taking some time, due to the numerous different archives they have to integrate–and a desire to make sure that it’s defensible. A focus on data quality is admirable and I appreciate that the agency’s researchers are getting the opportunity.

Meanwhile, rulemaking has been opened and they’re actually planning to address the petitions to repeal the WAC next week. In all, the agency’s following through, and I’m quite impressed.

We really meant it

The original version of SB 6105 didn’t address alcohol at all, really; the substitute bill added rules for allowing alcohol sales but had this funny phrasing so as to keep the lewd conduct rule. However, that was on the 29th–as the community response to the raids was just ramping up. By Wednesday, the LCB was readying a response as the community put forward an extremely large and loud statement. By the time the bill reached the House, we’d gotten an amendment instructing the LCB to strike the rule in its entirety.

Well, after a rewrite via striker amendment, and some additional language-smithing, we’ve got a final bill that established some of the firmest language it could protecting vulnerable workers at strip clubs, and which refines the LCB’s charter to explicitly remove regulating attire or behavior from its remit. This is fantastic; in the end, it seems the LCB’s actions are going to land first, but it’s comforting to see corresponding pressure on the board from the Legislature.

None of this work in the legislature would have happened without the engagement of Strippers Are Workers–Madison Zack-Wu and many other dancers presented excellent testimony, and the group has done the work to gather evidence and supporting data. This bill is, without a doubt, the result of their dedicated effort, and I just wanted to thank them for it.

Now what?

For now? I’m enjoying the attitude that we get from not having that rule looming over us. I love the freedom that we’re getting to see, and I’m having fun on nights out. I intend to keep doing that, especially since there’s a political aspect to them now.

So let’s dance.

The web I want is rough around the edges

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, one of the SDF’s Mastodon instances had its TLS cert expire. My understanding is, the cert had been renewed but the server had to be restarted to pick up the change, and for whatever reason, that just didn’t happen. In the conversation on BBOARD (the SDF’s virtual bulletin board) about the outage, was this post:

TACKER: mcornick (Mark Cornick)
SUBJECT: .. mastodon cert
DATE: 02-Feb-24 19:56:47
HOST: iceland

I really hope that this gets addressed soon, Mastodon is essentially “down” for a lot of people who depend on SDF right now.

As cseiler noted, a new certificate is in place, but the server is still catching up with its backlog.

(my opinions follow, feel free to disregard)

I would advise not “depend(ing) on SDF” for anything. This is not a professional, businesslike service with SLAs or guarantees. It’s a best-effort deal, and SSL certificates are a recurring issue that SDF does not seem to be interested in addressing beyond just telling everyone to be patient. If your use of Mastodon, or any other SDF service, depends on you being able to access it RIGHT NOW when a cert has expired, I hate to say it but you should look elsewhere for that kind of usage. SDF offers a lot of fun stuff, but that’s all it is - fun, not serious.

That resonated with me. These are services run by people, for people, on the timeline that people can keep, not an industry-driven timeline. There’s something amiss when services intended to be for a community, by a community, are placed under industry demands, and I think that how we got here is part of the problem.

I grew up with a web that was a little bit DIY. A little bit stitched together. Somewhere along the way, with the rise of the corporate web, we saw a shift towards five nines availability, the promise of 24/7/365 (and better) uptime of sites, the idea that you should always be able to get the shiny new thing, from a shiny website. The expectations of the commercial world have trickled down into community spaces, and we see it in all the myriad ways people try to replicate large commercial setups for their small, community projects.

I’m coming to realize, I don’t actually want that. I don’t think we need 100% uptime and availability, because that perfection has a real, tangible cost. I see it all around me, and I’ll be honest, it’s just not necessary. We can all deal if a website’s down for a bit, or a service doesn’t update instantly. Capitalism might not like it, but this isn’t about making money. It’s about having sustainable, long term viable communities and services to support them.

Sustainable services

Money talks

There’s a lot of ways to talk about sustainability, so I’m going to start with the most readily quantified: money. An expensive service is inherently less sustainable in the long term, because it necessarily draws more resources from its community to operate. Festivals and feast-days are rare, because they require intense resource allocation that draws from the community’s available funds without replacement in the near term—but they are themselves important. If you operate like every day is a feast-day, however, you’re draining resources constantly.

When looking at operating a high-availability, high-reliability service constantly, there’s a financial burden that grows superlinearly to the rate of availability intended. If you want two instances of a service running in parallel to ensure there’s better service, faster, well… now you’re not only paying to operate two instances of the service, you’re paying for the infrastructure on top of those instances to keep them both maintained, and to enable handoff between them. (I’ll admit, this example is a little weak, as I can easily see a reason to have a cold—or even warm—spare for handoff, but beyond that, you’re headed for commercial ops scale.)

Virtual machines, physical hardware

On top of burning money for a level of reliability we generally don’t need, that overspend means you’re driving many more cores and dedicating more physical resources to the replication; that’s an environmental burden imposed by your desire to be high availability. Keeping the lights on for each running copy of your service means allocating physical machines somewhere to your uptime. Is three times the CPU time worth it?

In the era of blockchains and wasteful power consumption for “proof of work”, it feels like I’m screaming into the void about reducing power usage, but realistically, we can’t just green-energy our way out of the cloud’s power budget. We need to reduce overall CPU usage for the future of our environment, and choosing to run your service just that little bit less reliably may just be the thing to do.

Beyond the monetary and environmental costs, there’s a human cost to very high uptime, which we experience most as burnout and all the social toils of “on-call”. Lots of my friends, if they want to go out on weekends while they’re on call, they’ve got a backpack along. The idea that we should all just have 24/7 jobs once in a while is absurd. By and large, websites are not so fundamentally critical as to require this sort of uptime, and … well, I’m writing this in Notion. Maybe stuff should be designed to work offline, too. (Side note: Notion actually doesn’t work for anything beyond simple note-taking, and this is reminding me why.)

As to how a rougher, somewhat less reliable web benefits its community: it builds in some need for patience, and a bit of concern for each other (and the welfare of the community as a whole.) If you’re petulant because your service is down, that can play out as a negative interaction with your sysadmins, even though you both want the same outcome. That’s no fun for the people doing the maintenance, and the users are mad. If the people using sites understand that the people running those sites are themselves human with their own lives and needs—and perhaps fewer people than you’d imagine run a commercial service (which may itself be fewer than you think)—it’s easier to understand when something isn’t fixed right away.

Simpler websites, lighter footprints

There’s another aspect of the smaller web that I want to touch on. Alongside the unsustainable website cost dialogue, we should also be encouraging site developers to build smaller sites with less tech. Websites simply are too big, too flashy, and most of it’s completely unnecessary. Even my blog routinely has a several kilobyte load size because I want to include a particular font—and I agonize over that. Meanwhile, news sites serve up megabytes of javascript just to … make something bounce as you mouse over it? (And serve ads. Can’t forget the ads, really.)

We live in an era with fantastically capable devices in our pockets. Why does my phone take so long to load some pages, and why are they so hard to read? Web design lost its way, and we’ve never really recovered.

Part of why I’ve built my website to be so minimal is because while I like some styling, I want to recapture some of that TUI look and feel—and I wanted to have a tiny footprint, ideally served by only my host (thank you, SDF). This all results in a site that looks like I want—and which loads in a pretty acceptable timespan, roughly a third of a second on my (admittedly) fast internet. The most embarrassing aspect of it is the fonts. I use Font Awesome Free for the Mastodon and Creative Commons logos, and for the RSS icon; that’s 259kB, more than my entire (un-minified) homepage, and only a little bit more than the Cascadia Code webfont that I include. I’ve considered just abandoning having one specific font and saying “typeset this in monospace!” but… I can have nice things too, right? (Looking at the MetaARPA transfer limits… I might well switch to monospace and minify my Font Awesome setup, honestly. Or see what else I can reduce, that’s pretty heavy.)

Critical services

I’ve been workshopping this commentary for a few days, and there is one argument that I’ve heard a few times: “but this doesn’t apply to critical things!” And that’s true and correct. If lives depend on your service, you should be maintaining that high availability. Medical services, key communications backbones, in some cases financial mechanisms: all of these deserve high uptime. To achieve that, however, those services should be paying enough and have enough staff to achieve reasonable on-call periods. Where teams are globally distributed, follow-the-sun models of on-call can reduce off-hours calls, and where they’re not, either have enough staff to handle shifts, or reduce workload during on-call.

There’s no excuse, in an industry so flush with cash, to have on-call rotations that destroy the people working them. Human effort is one of the most limited resources we have, we should be cautious about needless waste.

Against mediocrity

This is emphatically not a call to accept bad experiences, served in a lackluster manner. I’d argue that the vast majority of the commercial internet is exactly that right now: on a daily basis, I deal with slow-loading sites that have special interstitial graphics just to tell me something is working real hard in the background to load something you want. (The local movie theatre, for instance, took a lot of time to give me showtimes for Dune Part 2 when I was booking tickets yesterday.) Instead, I want excellent, simple, easy experiences that take almost no time to load—even if they’ve got some styling—and that just work. Maybe they’re offline when it’s 03:00 because they have to update a database. Maybe I should be offline at 03:00, too.

Fundamentally, I think the usability and utility of websites can be made better, with far less resource consumption. This isn’t a new gripe or statement, but dammit, I gotta say it myself too. Make the web more human-scale, for everyone.

An open letter to the WSLCB

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 18:19:33 -0800

In light of the active rulemaking on the Prohibited Conduct rule (WSR 24-05-037/“The CR 101”), and based on some of my remarks in my last post, here’s the message I wrote to the rules coordinator.

I’ve seen a lot of anger from people all around me, and a lot of strong passions. What I will encourage everyone who’s looking to comment on this is, there is a clear disconnect between the behavior and actions of the commission and the enforcement division. The commissioners, in every public meeting, have made it clear that they are willing to consider repeal without replacement. In fact, Vollendroff has advocated for repeal at every meeting I’ve observed. With that in mind, I’m willing to have a more conciliatory tone–I think we’ll get what we want best without being too aggressive, just firm.

To the WSLCB Rules Coordinator,

I’m writing as a Seattle-area resident and member of the queer community to encourage the LCB to fully repeal WAC 314-11-050, and remove this outdated stain from the state codes. This is particularly important given the events of the weekend of January 26th, and their continuing fallout.

This code originated out of a desire to control “appropriate” expression by minority communities (and block the sale of alcohol at strip clubs), and today it evidently has continued to be used for that purpose. The best way to prevent future abuse is to remove the mechanism that enables it; if this rule, or something substantially similar remains in effect, we have no guarantees that we will not once again see overzealous enforcement of that rule at some point in the future, long after the current commissioners have moved on.

The main concern of the LCB should be the proper handling of alcohol; the behavior and attire of patrons is fundamentally outside of that mission. Communities can and will have differing standards of conduct in their social spaces; this is fine! There’s a vastly different expectation of behavior in a gay bar or other queer social space, especially during a theme night or party, than there is at a straight bar. The problem arises when a separate culture’s expectations are enforced on that other group–which is what WAC 314-11-050 does–and any substantially similar rule would have the same effect.

At the Jan 31st LCB meeting, Chairman Postman remarked that he doesn’t believe the Board should be in the business of mandating morality. In fact, he noted that the board approves of SB6105 and wants to establish a means for strip clubs to sell alcohol! In light of this, I would encourage the commissioners to act on their initial intuition, and repeal the rule.

I hope that the commissioners of the WSLCB will make the right choice for communities across the state, and repeal this outdated and punitive rule.

I’ll post another update when rulemaking concludes. If you live in Washington, care about the freedom of the queer community to define their own expectations about their social spaces, and you’re reading this before March 22, 2024, I would encourage you to submit your own comment to the WSLCB. Be sure to mention the rule in question (and probably the WSR, I’ve not done this before but I assume that doesn’t hurt.)

Sexuality and Community

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 22:02:47 -0800

It’s been one hell of a week. Last weekend, WSLCB & SPD raided 4 gay bars, supposedly expecting to find some like, truly awful activity. Instead, they saw… a nipple, and jockstraps. We, the community, reacted strongly to these events. Actions like this have often been used to quell our freedoms in other cities, and the Seattle Eagle has had similar raids in the past. Even though this weekend’s “enforcement actions” didn’t ultimately result in citations being issued, they were still a threat to the whole community. In the absence of a robust response, they would have been emboldened to cause more problems for us.

Well, the community delivered in spades on the response. Tuesday’s meeting of the Liquor & Cannabis Board did not have a public comment section, but it was attended virtually by over 400 people. During it, the chairman seemed to be disappointed he was even having to address an issue about “lewd conduct”, and they spent a great deal of time on the formulation of their new mission statement; the wording about public health and safety was extremely important to them.

As a follow-up to the initial meeting, people brought statements on Wednesday, to the tune of 2+ hours of comment. A common theme was how the community could not accept that these were “normal visits”, when there were police shining flashlights on people, spotlighting their attire and then taking photographs. Likewise, the community pushed back heavily on the concept that the LCB was doing anything to improve the health and safety of the LGBTQ+ patrons of these bars; taking photos, which would need to be published, is a great way to out people who aren’t out in their private lives and instead thrust them into public view. As one man–a Marine veteran from the DADT days–said, he was able to get out with his honor intact, but there weren’t people going into the bars and taking photos. By the end of it, I got the feeling that the board was regretting having spent so much time on their mission statement the day before.

(If you don’t feel like watching the whole thing–which is understandable–Vivian McCall at The Stranger did an excellent write-up, and @nullagent@partyon.xyz live-commented both sessions.)

The week culminated in WSLCB pausing enforcement of the “Lewd Conduct” rule. This pause went into effect Thursday night, and by Saturday folks had realized how they wanted to approach this new environment.

One of the funnier side effects of all this to me is the rapid changes to the dress code section of the website for one of the bars in town. The dress code had a “recenly updated” notice on it for a few days, stating that bare butts wouldn’t be allowed; that disappeared within a day of the WSLCB rule change. Jockstraps were back on the allowed list, and a whole lot more besides.

Expectation within a minority culture

What makes a queer bar? What’s “acceptable behavior” really, and how does a historically marginalized community with a culture sometimes standing at odds with the majority culture around it navigate these unsteady waters?

First, I’m going to address the definition of the space. A queer bar is a space operated by, for, and on behalf of any subset of the queer community. Slapping a flag on the door is one thing; having gay, lesbian, or trans staff, and running events catering to those communities’ interests is a more concrete example of doing this. Hosting community group event nights, for instance, is a way to build association with the community. In the case of The Cuff, they’ve hosted SEA-PAH, the Seattle Pups & Handlers, for years. Both The Cuff and the Seattle Eagle host circuit parties, underwear nights, and kink events, all of which cater heavily to the gay community.

Next, let’s take a moment to talk about the social mores of gay spaces and gay events. I think it’d be good to talk about what makes a space uniqutely gay or not, and how it differs from a straight space. One notable difference is the degree of physical contact we see in gay bars and gay communities. If you’re having a conversation with someone at a gay bar, you’re almost always going to end up touching arms, shoulders, and possibly more as a part of the conversation. We’re a touchy bunch–always with consent, and that’s not okay to breach–and we tend to like to have a lot of contact. Along with that heightened contact, there’s an overall acceptance of showing a lot of skin at a gay bar. At an event with a lot of bears, it’s rare to see shirts stay on, just because it’s a lot more fun to be shirtless; this, combined with the aforementioned touchiness, results in a lot of belly-rubbing.

Lastly, there’s a question of sexual appetites and community standards. A bar creates an environment where everybody’s at least 21, and when you combine people with mutual attractions in a safe space to express those attractions, some folks tend to want to express it in a more explicit fashion. Where gay culture veers radically away from straight culture is, sex in a public, but limited space, isn’t really seen as offensive to encounter, and certainly doesn’t rise to the level of causing alarm. When looking at the definition used in Washington for indecent exposure, for instance, being naked in a gay bar isn’t going to cause a reasonable patron affront or alarm; we can see dicks on the TV monitors, why can’t we see them on the people around us? And once it’s out, and given that we’re a touchy bunch… why not play with them, while we’re at it?

So, we get back to the core issue: the WSLCB’s rules are written from a majority culture standpoint, which sees sexuality as something to be ashamed of and hidden (at least in their stated rules) while gay culture celebrates it and incorporates it into the commonplace experiences of the bar. This is part of what makes the gay bar such a core place in our cultural expression; it’s a little, walled-off environment where we exist in isolation from the surrounding culture, allowing us our free expression in an environment without shame or external interference.

Collision of expectations, and where we go next

It’ll be interesting to see how the next few weeks play out. With the pause on the WSLCB’s lewd conduct rule, Fetish Night at one bar got a lot more wild–but really, in ways that are absolutely in keeping with the culture I described. There were by far more jockstraps than usual on attendees, and a number took the opportunity to disrobe completely (barring boots) for the evening. There was a sort of jubilance to the night, and a sense of “getting away with something” that … we’ll see if it sticks around.

The real issue is that while there are actual concerns–things like overservice, improper ID checks–these seem to have been ignored for weird moralistic issues like a bartender’s nipple. We as a community can’t trust that the LCB will do their actual job if they’re so busy trying to moralize to us about how our community should operate, and pursue weird vendettas. If they take their loss and learn from it, and don’t attempt to retaliate, maybe we can start working on a trusting relationship. Unfortunately, that all remains up in the air, and the LCB will be starting from a deeply negative position in regards to the community’s trust in them.

I would appreciate a less antagonistic relationship with regulators, for the community as a whole. They’ve got a lot of growing to do first.

Solstice update

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 03:31:42 -0800

As is tradition, at the winter holidays I set aside time for me, and my personal projects. Like this website, which fell over when the SDF updated something and my old web content just disappeared into the ether.

As it is, I cooked some fantastic things for Christmas this year. One was even an on-site quick prep item! The Eggnog Pie and Honey Glazed Carrots turned out fantastically; every time I make the carrots, I end up making a larger batch. They are inevitably all eaten, so I just make a larger batch than I usually expect.

This is also when I really have some time to think about other projects I’m working on. I think I want to really invest in IRC again majorly, and I’m writing fiction! In all, I’m curious to see where the next year goes.

startup … initializing

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:19:00 -0800

Maybe “ignition” would be a good title, too. I put this site up with a broken, half-baked theme and a few pages of recipes, all because I wanted to have some place to stash them and hand links to my friends. So here it was, in its grimy state. Well, I’ve had some time to put some pieces in order, and now I think the site’s really coming into its own.

The theme was a starting point, not so customized to a purpose as to make personalization hard, but not my ideal either. Most recently, I wanted to use the Mastodon logo () in the footer for my social media identification link… but IcoFont didn’t even have anything for Mastodon! So, instead of keeping two icon libraries around when I’m not liking the one I started with, I jumped over to the one I prefer to use. The usual.

So what else is there to say? The blog side of this site is going to be a mix of commentary on bike & pedestrian infrastructure, cooking, and tech, and as I get around to it I’ll update recipes.