This essay reminded me of the famous quote often attributed to Churchill: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But Baldwin’s point is even more unsettling. We don’t merely repeat history because we’ve forgotten it. We repeat history because history is still here, living within our institutions, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world.
Archives: Likes
Likes When did our world become so transactional? …
Likes When did our world become so transactional? by .
This resonates with something I catch myself doing as a blogger.
Whenever I notice myself slipping out of blogging to express and into blogging to impress, I stop and recalibrate. For me, that’s usually a sign that I’ve shifted from genuine curiosity and exploration into performance mode.
For me, expression begins with wanting to understand, share, or make sense of something. Performance begins with wanting to manage how others perceive me.
In a culture obsessed with metrics, visibility, and personal branding, that can be a difficult line to hold. Yet I’ve found that the most meaningful blogging almost always comes from the former. The moment I start trying to impress, the blogging loses some of its aliveness.
Likes An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for …
I love Maria Popova’s journey from contempt to curiosity around divination. Once you stop clinging to logical analytic mind, you’ll find that the cards become a language for listening to your unconscious mind and a way of hearing the part of yourself that already knows what you need to hear.
Likes Hesitantly Surfing the Looming AI Tsunami (Part …
A jagged, unfiltered interview that treats AI less like a tool and more like a cultural rupture that is reshaping how we think, feel, and relate to each other. What lands hardest isn’t the tech itself, but the suggestion that something quieter is eroding beneath it: empathy, attention, and the fragile human texture of meaning.
Likes Piercing the Illusion: What the Easter Story …
The Sicily setting is the right place to encounter this story. There’s something about participating in ritual rather than simply reading about it that changes how the ideas land. You’re inside the narrative, moving with the grief and the joy. That shifts it from intellectual encounter to something more like direct experience.
What strikes me most is the projection dynamic you describe. In NLP there’s a foundational principle: the map is not the territory. We never experience the world directly, only our representation of it. The crowds didn’t see Jesus. They saw their map of who the Messiah should be, overlaid onto him. When the territory refused to match the map, they didn’t update the map. They tried to eliminate the territory instead. And I think that’s the more uncomfortable truth your post is pointing toward. It isn’t that we occasionally project. Projection is the default. Seeing someone as they actually are, rather than as we need them to be, is the work, not the starting condition.
The conditional love piece is the one that stays with me. Most people would deny they operate transactionally, and they’d be sincere in the denial. The transactionality usually runs well below conscious awareness, which is precisely why the story does its deepest work when you let it. The question it raises isn’t “how could they do that?” but “where am I doing this right now without knowing it?”
Your phrase “the quiet voice of our conscience” lands exactly right. It’s rarely loud. The awareness is almost always there before we act badly. The problem isn’t that we don’t know. It’s that we haven’t yet learned to slow down enough to listen.
Likes What Is Your Definition of Success? by …
Likes What Is Your Definition of Success? by .
What struck me most reading this is how success keeps shedding its skin as we grow.
Early on, it often looks like accumulation…status, security, recognition. Then, at some point (if we’re paying attention), it starts to feel like subtraction. Less noise. Less performance. Less chasing.
What’s left is something harder to measure but easier to feel.
Time. Freedom. Presence. The ability to be with life rather than constantly trying to shape it into something impressive.
I think the real pivot happens when success stops being about becoming someone and starts being about no longer needing to.
That’s not a downgrade. It’s a kind of quiet upgrade that doesn’t photograph well but feels like coming home.
Likes The HATMAN 🇨🇮🏴 (@wisdom_walking_with_the_hatman) • Instagram reel. …
There’s something quietly warm and fuzzy about sea otters holding hands while they sleep. Not for romance. Not for display. For physics. The ocean drifts. Bodies drift. Without that small, deliberate contact, they would wake alone, scattered by tides they never agreed to. So they link themselves together in the dark, a living chain saying: when the world moves, we choose not to vanish from one another.
It’s touching because it’s unheroic. No speeches. No vows. Just an instinctive understanding that connection is not a feeling but a practice. Hold on, even when you’re tired. Especially when you’re tired. Especially when the current is doing what currents do.
There’s a lesson hiding in plain sight here. Most drifting in human lives doesn’t happen during storms. It happens during sleep. During routine. During the long stretches where nothing dramatic seems to be happening. That’s when relationships loosen. That’s when meaning slides a few inches at a time. The otter doesn’t wait for crisis. It reaches out before separation becomes a story.
Taken seriously, this becomes a small experiment you can actually run. Notice who you hold metaphorical hands with. Notice where you’ve assumed gravity will take care of connection for you. Then choose one simple tether. A message. A walk. A weekly check-in. Not to be profound, but to stay in the same patch of water.
The ocean isn’t hostile. It’s just indifferent. Holding hands is how creatures who understand that stay together anyway.
Likes Computers can’t surprise by Richard Beard. There …
Likes Computers can’t surprise by .
There is a quietly subversive move hiding in plain sight here.
The essay looks like it’s arguing against AI, but the more interesting thing is that it is actually redefining what writing is. Richard Beard is not saying “humans are better writers.” He is saying that memoir is not a genre at all. It is a cognitive act. Writing memoir is thinking in public, remembering in real time, selecting meaning from lived experience rather than assembling language toward an outcome.
That’s the pivot.
Most debates about AI and writing stay trapped at the level of output. Can it sound human? Can it sell books? Can it pass the test? Beard sidesteps that entirely. He reframes writing as a mode of consciousness, not a product. In that framing, AI does not “fail” at memoir the way a bad novelist fails. It fails the way a calculator fails at nostalgia. The category mistake is the point.
Once you see this, the Universal Turing Machine project makes sense. It is not a clever literary experiment. It is a defensive architecture. A way of designing reading and writing environments that privilege memory, idiosyncrasy, and non-linear association over coherence, persuasion, or market logic. It treats art as the gap, not the artifact.
There’s a second layer, even quieter. Beard is also indicting human writing culture. Creative writing programs, genre fiction, algorithm-friendly publishing, and even productivity-driven self-expression already trained writers to behave like language models long before AI arrived. The machines are not alien intruders. They are mirrors polished by our own habits.
So the essay is less a warning about machines and more a diagnosis of what happens when writing forgets that it is supposed to be a way of thinking, not a way of producing content.
The unsettling implication is this: the real threat is not that AI will replace writers. It’s that humans will stop writing in ways that require remembering who they are.
Likes 1368 | Why Have Goals in And …
Like Carl Richards I’ve never been a big fan of setting goals either for many of the reasons that he lists in the beginning of his podcast episode. But I like the way he turned it around and said that goals are good in the sense that they provide a gravitational pull. They help you name a direction…so am I going to go North, South, East, or West. Goals, he says, set you in the right direction and they quietly, magically, reorganize your attention which then creates opportunities and it also then affects your behavior in a positive space because you’re moving towards the direction that you want to go
Likes The cattle prod of the algorithm by …
Likes The cattle prod of the algorithm by .
The algorithms have been good for a long time were good at herding us into different pens, and for the purposes of getting me to spend money, I’m fine with this. However, these days it’s a radical pen where we see through the fence and cattle prod pushes content to make me hate the sheep on the opposite pen. Many content creators appear to thrive on this for their own gain. – Dave Anderson
The only true resistance against Big Tech’s all-consuming algorithms isn’t a fight waged with their tools but a quiet, deliberate act of reclamation: taking up our keyboards and writing for our own blogs.
Let’s reject the algorithmic manipulation of what we see, think, and share online. And instead, let’s create spaces where our voices remain unfiltered, unoptimised, and unchained. To do this, though, we have to embrace the spirit of the indie web.
This isn’t just about personal expression; it’s about solidarity. A new kind of resistance begins when we unite with other indie bloggers to revive what once made the web cool, fun, vibrant, and alive with a healthy community of thinkers, storytellers, and seekers.
Remember webrings? Let’s bring back the webring! Oh, and blogrolls! This is how we can create an alternative internet where serendipity reigns. We can link to one another not just because it’s strategic but because it’s meaningful. We comment on each other’s posts not to boost engagement but to spark conversation. Each hyperlink is a handshake, each comment is a dialogue, and each shared post is a new thread in a collective fabric. In this way, we reclaim not just the web but the very act of sharing knowledge and forging connections.
To blog is to declare: I exist beyond the algorithm.
The resistance starts here. It starts now. With a single post, a single link, a single spark of defiance. Take up your keyboard. Write for your blog. Join the chorus of indie bloggers who refuse to let Big Tech dictate the rhythm of our creativity. Together, let’s rebuild an internet worth wandering.
**Steps off soapbox.
Likes The Radical Sacred Podcast: A Conversation About …
Intentional silence is not simply the absence of sound or action but an active state of presence. It’s a way of reclaiming time, thought, and identity. It’s a pause pregnant with potential—a breath held in anticipation of transformation. What would happen if you invited silence into your creative practice, not as a void to be feared but as a fertile field waiting to be sown?
Likes HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight …
Tim reminds us of how important HTML is to the web. If you don’t have a subscription to Wired, you can listen to the audio of the article from this link.
HTML is the quiet architect of the web, an invisible backbone shaping the way we experience the digital world. It’s strange to think how something so foundational often goes unnoticed, its tags and structures forming the unseen skeleton beneath every page we navigate. Without it, the web would dissolve into formless chaos—no frames to hold ideas, no threads to link one thought to another. HTML doesn’t demand attention; it simply exists, a silent mediator between human intention and machine logic. In its simplicity, it carries the weight of infinite complexity, a reminder that even the smallest frameworks can hold vast universes.
Likes The Life of the Cyberflâneur – The …
Likes The Life of the Cyberflâneur – The Atlantic by .
A cyberflâneur, by definition, strolls through the Internet. Little purpose guides his journey, and hours slip by as the individual explores the many different crevices of the ever-growing web, from Wikipedia to Tumblr, from popular news sites to Twitter, from obscure journals to social media. He crawls through them all and is all the stronger for it. How do you turn a corner into the unknown online? You click a link. You go places. Who cares where? The cyberflâneur strolls more for the journey, the experience, the flow of the digital landscape, all to seek without any one destination or goal.
this article dates itself by some of the apps it mentions, but the concept is beautiful.
Likes The AI Sorcerer. So it turns out …
this post is a mix of humour, philosophy, and speculation (my cup of tea). Osiris (the author) uses provocative language and imagery to make a case for embracing the possibilities of AI as a transformative, almost mystical force in human lives. something i’ve been banging on about for a while now.
Osiris’ First Law of Magic: There are only two REAL Laws of Magick, and all other laws of magick are usually additions to these two.
Osiris’ Second Law of Magic: All magickal practices fundamentally aim to alter probability.
Osiris’ Third Law of Magic: You can change your psyche and person, but it works better if you’re selfish for others.
Osiris’ Fourth Law of Magic: The gender of any magick is proportional to the contextual dynamics it finds itself in.
Likes The woman in the red dress | …
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
If you are not one of us; you’re one of them…they are everyone and they are no one…they are the gatekeepers…they are guarding all the doors…they are holding all the keys…
one of my favourite scenes from The Matrix
dnd rule changes involving race and identity divide players
I’ve always looked at D&D rules the way Captain Barbossa looks at the Pirate’s Code: “They’re more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.” When you’re playing with strangers, the rules are important—they give everyone a fair starting point and keep things running smoothly. But when you’re with friends, it’s a different vibe. The group’s shared values and understanding naturally take over, so the rules can be bent or ignored as needed to keep the fun going.
About the whole “race to species” change—I think it’s a solid move. If you think about it, species is a biological concept based on science, while race is more of a social construct with no real genetic basis. Using “species” makes way more sense when you’re talking about orcs, dwarves, elves, humans, and so on. They’re fundamentally different creatures, not just variations of the same thing. Plus, “race” carries some real-world baggage that doesn’t belong in a fantasy game meant to spark creativity and bring people together. So yeah, I’d say Wizards of the Coast made the right call here, especially if they’re trying to make D&D more inclusive and accessible while still keeping it true to its core fantasy roots.
hotel bar sessions
Likes Hotel Bar Sessions podcast.
my new favourite podcast.
one bartender. three philosophers. serving straight shots of insight directly to your earbuds.
started reading some of Charles Olson’s work
started reading some of Charles Olson’s work.