Bubbles of the Week

The siren song of social media exerted far less pull on me this week, and I think a fair amount of that is because I’ve turned to Bubbles.town much of the time instead. The service’s own About page explains it quite well, and Jem’s post Bubbles, and the old web also articulates a lot of what I appreciate about seeing a new blog directory take off.

If you’re more into the whole “brevity” thing, it’s an aggregator of personal / indie blogs, pulling in posts from RSS. Readers can upvote posts (but not downvote them!), plus there are various views. It also offers daily or weekly “briefings” of the most voted posts, each of which also has its own RSS feed.

As the site’s tag line explains, “Good stuff bubbles up.🫧” If your browser has been too still, or your social media feeds too weighted down, maybe you’ll also appreciate some fizzy lifting goodness?

More Sentences About Buildings Blogging and the Social Web

With an enthusiastic nod to both the Talking Heads and Carl Craig, it’s time to talk more about Blaugust2026 and the Knowledge Commons Knowledge Quest!

Blaugust2026

The sites I’m encountering through Blaugust2026 have been delightful! It’s great to see people using Bear blogs, Pika, and the new-to-me Pagecord platform. The discussions and support participants share in the Discord have also made me quite glad to have found & dipped my toes into this community.

Knowledge Quest

I’ve been on Knowledge Commons since 2017 and massively appreciate that service. It’s a wonderful, openly-accessible way for academics to communicate, make their work freely available, and create personal or project sites.

They’ve got so much going on that it’s not always easy to discover all it provides, or to find other users. In a delightful echo of Blaugust, Knowledge Quest is running for five weeks. It’ll not only provide structured ways to explore the infrastructure & community at Knowledge Commons, it’ll also festoon your profile with badges if you complete the weekly activities.

Site Refinements of the Week

Reverse Chronology at Last

I finally took the time to make the newest posts appear on top (i.e. reverse chronological order) for both my Posts by Category & Posts by Tag pages!

For an overview of how I made this happen, see my /changelog entry for 2026-08-16.

Assemblages are now Rewinds

I’ve been doing occasional weeknotes since 2015. “Assemblage” sounded like an apt description for them for quite some time, but for the last year or more it’s started to feel more and more awkward. So while I’m embracing a period of flux and tinkering with my site, I figure I’ll try out the more simple “rewind” for the next while. At the moment it seems like it’ll stick—but I don’t want to break all the old URLs. So I’m thinking I’ll likely create a new “Rewind” page that contains both categories in a single view, once I’m certain I like the new term.

It’s 2026-08-15, and here’s some of what I’ve been doing.

Professional & PhD Stuff

• learning a little more Python (and especially Beautiful Soup) as part of our ongoing In the Library in the Lead Pipe journal migration project.
• serving on a couple statewide committees related to a new Teaching and Learning with Technology Committee. I’m always glad to work with Jonathan Lashley & Liza Long, as well as other thoughtful folks from across the state.
• helped sort out a few account issues that popped up as the ISU Pressbooks instance was merged into the a statewide one. Now most people will log in at the Idaho instance.
• progressing more slowly than I’d like through my exam reading lists, but still making progress!
• attending online events like OEN Engage! 2026 and the Clover Park Technical College 2026 AI+OER Institute.
• preparing the conference buddy program for OpenEd26 (it’s mostly small refinements on what our team did last year).

Fun & Personal Stuff

• participating in Blaugust2026—this will be my fourth post this month, and I’m aiming for five! (I also highly recommend you check out all other folks participating this year.)
• I’m also aiming to do 100DaysToOffload this year (especially if I start doing smaller posts related to my PhD project).
• enjoying our backyard-grown herbs, peppers, and strawberries.
• still doing “Daily Pages” (that’s my evolving sort of “Morning Pages”-inspired thought processing journal) throughout the day on most days.
• really appreciating the Watch Duty folks, whose web app and on-device apps have provided constant information about wildfires and air quality this smoky summer.

Bonus Page Refinement

While writing this post, I noticed & fixed a small accessibility issue with my /now page!

For accessibility and semantic purposes, it’s best to have only a single H1-level heading per page. However, because this page automatically loads the content of the most recent blog post in my “Now” category, that posts’s title automatically produces an H1 level heading on this page as well. So I made a new Jekyll layout that basically duplicates this page’s previous layout, with the difference being that this Now page’s title is rendered as an H2 (but styled to look like an H1).

Hurray for continuous improvement!

“Rannalli”, printed in a hand writing-style script in an oval, flanked by two checkerboard flags and a background of jagged shapes, remains deeply lodged in my mind.

The Rannalli logo and name haven’t become deep lore among other skaters from the 1980s in the way that Vision, Sana Monica Airlines, or Gordon & Smith remain revered, however. And the heavily pixelated image above isn’t mine. It’s an ebay image found linked from this Vintage Longboards post. From what I can gather in an hour or so of searching, Rannalli were better known for making wheels and trucks, possibly for roller skates, than for decks.

This Rannalli logo was on top of my first skateboard, meaning I saw it every time I looked down while learning to ride. The board was a birthday present. If I remember correctly, my folks bought it as a “complete”—all the parts were put together and sold as a set, not ones I chose separately myself.

It definitely felt like “my” skateboard while I was learning to ride. But my subsequent boards all felt like they were “mine” in an entirely different way, as by that time I was sufficiently opinionated and felt sufficiently informed to select and assemble my own parts. (Almost always a Powell Peralta deck, wheels, and bearings, and usually with Independent trucks.)

When my dad would watch me press the bearings into the wheels or attach the trucks to the deck, he’d almost always marvel at how “handy” I was teaching myself to be. It wasn’t super complex to bodge the various bits together, but it certainly felt empowering.

Blaugust2026 Group Project

Yes, this is indeed also about my first blog.

The same nuanced, changing feeling of “mine” pertains to both.

Tumblrs, Plural

Although I believe I briefly had a LiveJournal and a WordPress site, I can’t remember precisely. Which implies that I didn’t use them frequently.

Tumblr, on the other hand, definitely felt like “my” blog at the time. I could lightly change the theme, and typically did. I eventually knew other people on the site, and we even would meet up at library conferences. It was right in-between being a standalone blog and a social media site, which made it quite engrossing as a platform.

But—much like the difference between how my Rannalli board and my subsequent ones felt like they were “mine” in distinct ways, I’m realizing that I now think of this Jekyll site as “my first blog” even though I’ve had it since 2014.

Jekyll, Or 12 Years Behind the Command Line Prompt

Twelve years, huh? That’s a long time to have any blog, let alone a “first blog”!

The main Minimal Mistakes theme has evolved throughout the years. As I’ve learned more about the underlying technologies (Jekyll, GitHub Pages, Liquid, Ruby, and related tools like Bundler), I’ve eventually adapted elements.

I’ve gone through periods where I seriously considered switching to a different static site engine (like Hugo, or more recently Astro or Quarto), but I keep using Jekyll in part because it’s one of the best-documented systems and therefore I feel like my site can be an example for other non-“programmers” and humanities folks who might want not only a site of their own, but one that they can truly, deeply make their own.

If you’re interested in Jekyll and GitHub Pages in particular, Amanda Visconti’s Building a static website with Jekyll and GitHub Pages is an excellent introductory lesson. If you’re wanting to go beyond a solo blog, Amanda Visconti, Brandon Walsh, and Scholars’ Lab Community’s Running a Collaborative Research Website and Blog with Jekyll and GitHub does a great job of discussing how to collaborate with others.

If I were considering making a brand-new Jekyll-based site right now, I’d consider the Al-Folio theme as well as my own site’s Minimal Mistakes theme.

Finally, if you’re on a Mac, you might find this Moncef Beylamani’s long post The fastest and easiest way to install Ruby on a Mac in 2026 a helpful resource. Parker Moore, one of the maintainers of Jekyll itself, also has a post recommending that you use a ruby version manager.

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week 2026-W31 is the week of 2026-07-27/2026-08-02.

Backyard Bounty of the Week

Over the Fourth of July weekend we picked up a few herbs and other plants for our backyard container garden.

It’s now a (notably smoky) month later and the pepper plant (named Pablo, naturally as it’s a poblano) has already doubled in size. It’s now at least a foot above the tomato cage it’s been climbing like a ladder. We’re letting the two delicious-looking peppers keep growing, although we might soon pick them because there are a bunch of new flowers and we’re not sure if Pablo will send resources to them (leading to additional peppers) while the two main fruit are still attached. It’s our first time growing poblanos, and we’re not extremely familiar with growing any type of peppers.

This is also my first time growing strawberries, and I finally understand why strawberry planters aren’t actually just “hen & chicks” succulent planters! The strawberry has grown at least as robustly as Pablo, only it’s been sending out tendrils in various directions and putting roots down in those soil pockets. There are also at least 5 berries growing, and even more flowers! We’re going to have to keep an eye on those and grab them before the neighborhood squirrels decide to see whether these weird soft acorns might be as sweet as they look.

The herbs are also popping off like it’s peak hours on a busy dancefloor. We’re looking up pesto and other recipes that can help us use up a bumper crop of basil.

Since my plans to take lots of early morning walks this summer—Boise being the high desert, it typically cools off 20º F / 11º C or more overnight in summer—has been stymied by this month’s wildfire smoke from the Claremont fire as well as fires in Oregon and Washington, I’ve been slowly getting more stir crazy / cabin-feverish without consciously realizing it. Watching the backyard edible garden spring into action despite the skies’ apocalyptic vibes has definitely been a small respite from that, even if I myself am not outside as much as I’d like.

Attending and Viewing

The OEN Engage! 2026 conference was easily one of the best conferences I’ve attended in a while. The OEN folks were a delight, and their presence definitely came through. So I’m glad that the videos are already popping up on YouTube to re-watch and to share with others.

This week we finished Season 3 of Love on the Spectrum, plus started Season 6 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza

I read about the Earthborne Rangers board / card game through Mita Williams’ University of Winds newsletter and am totally enchanted. It sounds like a great blend of a deckbuilding game, a light roleplaying game, and a sort of Ursula K. Le Guin hopepunk post-apocalyptic setting. Although I haven’t ordered it quite yet, I expect I will before long. (We’ll almost certainly use the printable demo, if we don’t just spring for a copy.)

I also learned that Indigenous folks are leading important efforts to protect white sage. Apparently there’s a ton of poaching of wild plants from parks and elsewhere in California—that linked page has a photo of a pickup truck with hundreds of pounds in enormous duffel bags, all taken from the Etiwanda Preserve not from from where I used to live in Riverside. (Although it’s not obvious, I’ve long named the color themes for my website “citrus and sage” as an homage to the Inland Empire corner of Southern California where I grew up.) We’re intentionally planting native, pollinator-friendly plants when we can in our yard here in Boise. If you’ve got a yard yourself, you might consider devoting a part of it for native plants as well. You might also consider learning about the Native folks whose communities have long taken care of the land where you live, and research whether there are ways you can support their efforts.

TWI(R)L

Recently I (re)learned… 

• the #100DaysToOffload challenge exists. I’ve seen lots of posts on Mastodon or Bluesky with that tag from other people, and this year seems like a good time to give it a go.
• the word “irenic” from “Your AI Is Not a Tool” newsletter post
• the term “grass widow” from Catherine Jurca’s White Diaspora book

I’d quickly noticed that a lot of the people in the Blaugust Discord post about gaming or describe themselves as gamers, but I assumed that was likely because of the generally-strong connection between gamers & Discord, or that there was some other personal peculiarity that made some high-frequency posters also happen to be gamers. (Put differently: ADHD game recognizes ADHD game, while I’m not a “gamer” myself.) But now I’m realizing how much Belghast, its initiator, was a gamer, and how much that influenced the emergent community.

Rearranging and Recommitting

While drafting this post, I also took a break to rearrange the books in my living room. I’d started to accidentally accrue a bit of a book pile fortress on our table, as I’ve been keeping my exam reading list books handy without having enough space on our living room shelves. So in the spirit of consciously beginning anew with a small ritual, I took some books I know I won’t be using off those shelves and down to another bookcase in our tiny basement “home office” / “music room”.

As I was traversing the stairs, the term “reginning” came into my head to describe this flavor of small ritual of renewal & recommitment. And just like that, a neologism & concept got their wings!

Names and Categories

As if that wasn’t meta enough, looking over this year’s list of participating blogs, I noticed that my own is one of the few without a title—which made me wonder just when & why I’d stopped calling my own blog “Info Fluxus”.

Looking at the Wayback Machine, I can tell that I changed it near the start of 2020. I certainly remember wanting to make the navigation menu less wordy when I was also working on adding my digital garden section, so maybe that influenced dropping the name? Or maybe it was just that titling the blog on a personal site felt unnecessary?

Anyways, I now have a category of the blog that I call Semi-Schematic, which is where I intend to start publishing most of my more “professional” or “academic” posts. It’s still Jekyll-based and available via a RSS feed, but I’m cheekily calling it a “newsletter” because services like FeedRabbit let people receive posts as emails, without having to do all the things that I’ve read Molly White do when self-hosting Ghost. So… if I’ve got one titled collection / dedicated feed of my blog, will going back to having another make the differences more clear?

I’m increasingly thinking I’ll resurrect that title, then also add an “essays” category for the more well-developed ideas I put in the world via this site. There’s also still a slight chance I might start using something like Quartz so that I can maintain my digital garden through Obsidian rather than Jekyll, but I’m wary of how heavily Quartz relies on client-side Javascript. While I’m not quite pursuing a permacomputing level of small site footprint, my general “reduce, reuse, recycle” orientation makes me gravitate toward just continuing with Jekyll.

Tinkerings To Be Continued

So stay tuned to see whether “Info Fluxus” comes back—I’ll almost certainly leave it off the navigation menu, but somehow add those words to a few page templates.

I’m also toying with the idea of adding an email contact form, at least for this month.

Ask anyone who’s seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: the film’s most vivid image is a crumpled envelope lying on a bed in the Bates Motel.

This envelope, of course, bulges with $40,000 in cash that Marion Crane has stolen from her job in Phoenix. True to Hitchcock’s visionary genius, the film provides multiple shots of Marion looking over at the envelope. Janet Leigh’s eyes convey a jumble of desire, regret, resignation, and resolve. Will she keep the cash and take it to her lover? Or will she return it, and her own guilty person, to Phoenix?

If you’re familiar with Psycho or Hitchcock in general, there’s a good chance that you’ve already seen through my ruse. The envelope is in fact not the image most people will remember, nor will most remember those elements of Psycho’s story.

However, that stolen cash certainly is, for my money, the paradigmatic example of what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: an element important to the story and characters, but ultimately unimportant to the viewers. The MacGuffin provides a compelling and convenient on-ramp to caring about the story and characters.

To put it differently: I’m going to be participating in Blaugust this year!

Blaugust2026

Much like AcWriMo, Blaugust is an event where people challenge themselves to write throughout the month. I’ve read and appreciated entries from other people’s Blaugust participation before, without ever feeling called to do so myself. But when Juha-Matti Santala’s On blogging, Blaugust and challenging yourself showed up in my RSS reader a few days ago, I instinctively felt I should give it a go.

I’m in the midst of reading for my Ph.D. qualifying exams and could absolutely benefit from a structure that helps me move from scribbling marginalia to writing thoughts developed beyond the length of a social media post.

So that’s my motivation for Blaugust participation this year: it’s a convenient MacGuffin that should help me commit both to more regular writing and sharing of my thoughts in progress.

Based on some of the drafts or working notes percolating in my other digital files, likely coming attractions include:

• an overview of my Ph.D. project
• enthusiastic posts about things I’ve been listening to, reading, or watching lately
• accessibility
• open educational resources
• pedagogy
• zines
• my zine about accessibility & pedagogy
• an example of something I’ve recently automated without using any generative “AI” platforms
• reflections on how I encountered “open educational resources” before the term “OER” existed
• write-ups of how I use tools like Obsidian or Pandoc

First, Know Thyself

The canonical, classic challenge of Blaugust is to publish 31 things during the 31-day-long month of August.

This challenge is ambitious.

I’m more in need of something akin to Brandon Walsh’s Couch to Paragraph Writing Program—a scaffolding to help me make writing and sharing my thoughts a more routine occurrence. I also know that I have high expectations and a tendency to nope out early if I feel like I’m not producing something I’m comfortable putting out into the world, so I plan to set my own expectations drastically low.

If I post 5 things during August 2026 (the organizers’ own “Bronze Award” level), I’m going to consider it a success. (Yes, I initially started to type “a modest success” and had to catch myself.)

I’ll almost certainly spread these posts across both my more “professional” category of posts (that’s my Semi-schematic Newsletter) and my regular blog posts. I might also end up tinkering a bit throughout the month with how my site’s categories and RSS feeds handle posts… but if you’re subscribed to the all-inclusive main feed, I don’t anticipate that you’ll miss anything.

Extending an Invitation

Have you been meaning to start a blog, newsletter, or some other way of sharing your thoughts? Do you have a website gathering dust, must like mine has been the last few months?

You’re clearly welcome to sign up for Blaugust 2026 as well!

If you’ve been toying with the idea but don’t have a site of your own, here’s a few free platforms that I’d consider using if I didn’t already have this site:

• Knowledge Commons, which offers free WordPress-based sites, among other fantastic services
• Bear, a lightweight blog platform
• Leaflet, a blog platform that uses the the same social ecosystem as Bluesky
• Neocities, a free place to make an “old school” style website or blog
• Al-folio, a GitHub Pages theme. This is by far the most technically-inclined of these suggestions, but if you’ve already been interested in blogging with Jekyll or GitHub Pages, it seems like one of the best-maintained options at the moment, particular for anyone interested in a combination portfolio / CV / resume and blog site.

Here’s to all of us having a good August, whether we’re writing, reading, or otherwise just being together in the world.

Here’s a bit of what I’ve been up to lately (specifically, I’m writing this on 2026-02-19).

PhD & Professional Stuff

• participating in a Library Publishing Collective webinar on Developing AI Policies for Publications
• being a guest at the Open Education Network’s Tea Time on peer review models
• participating in an Open Education Association webinar on OER & Title II Accessibility Compliance: Separating Myths from Facts
• reading lots from my teaching & instructional design reading list
• participating in a Faculty Learning Community on Universal Design for Learning
• collaboratively facilitating a Faculty Learning Community on “Ethical Frameworks for AI”
  • This is part of what’s spurred me to add an /ai page to this site.
  • I’m still very keen on avoiding “ethics-washing” regarding these technologies. This means I frequently bring up already-extent consequences of commercial AI, such as what we know from the NAACP’s Stop Dirty Data Centers campaign or the error-prone rollout of AI-generated alerts in health care.

Fun & Personal Stuff

• reading Moby-Dick along with people on Bsky
• adding resources to my new Shaarli-based bookmarks page
• watching The West Wing for the first time
• appreciating Focumon as a pomodoro timer that also lets you perceive growth through the growth of your little pixel art monster buddies, rather than just starting anew every day
• slowly building a modified “Daily Pages” practice
  • Specifically, I’m doing an adapted version of “Morning Pages” where I aim to journal at least 500 to 750 words throughout the day. (I rarely am able to journal first thing in the morning, which is my understanding of the the canonical Morning Pages practice.)

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Sunday, so ISO Week Week 05 is the week of 2026-01-26/2026-02-01. (But as this is my first weeknote of the year, I’ll touch a bit on all of January, too.)

Site Refinements of the Week

Footer Fanciness

I did a lot of digital puttering over the weekend, mostly customizing the footer by adding some links and a couple buttons: one associated with the People Pledge and another from Andy Carolan of a smiley face and the words “Made By a Human”. (It took a bit of time toying with image color dropper tools and WebAIM’s color contrast checker to determine that the light blue background has by far the best color contrast—and that sadly neither the green nor the orange had high enough contrast for me to use them.)

An /ai Page

That “Made by a Human” links to a new /ai page here, which outlines How I Do—and Mostly Do Not—Use “AI” Tools. It grew from being a simple “nope, none here” to a more substantial mini-essay about what I think are some necessary contexts for thinking about AI use.

In particular, I’ve been thinking about considering AI use symptomatically for a while now, as well as thinking about this moment where more people are inclined to be curious & attentive to the technology they use as moment charged with opportunities for people to advocate more for what I’m calling “small tools, sociably made”.

(Or perhaps that should be “…sociably produced”? I feel like the first version is snappier, but the second emphasizes processes of production more; I of course appreciate emphasizing processes. I’d be thrilled to hear which resonates more with you, if you feel so inclined.)

I’m sure I’ll be writing more little essays about those topics soon enough, especially since I’ll be co-facilitating a “faculty learning community” on developing a framework for use of generative “AI” tools this semester.

Slashes & a Changelog

Beyond those, I also added a /slashes page and a /changelog, where you can find out even more of what I’ve been tinkering with and changing on here lately.

For, as Ethan Marcotte memorably put it, “let a website be a worry stone.”

Viewing, Reading, and Listening

The West Wing

We’ve been watching The West Wing, having started it back in December. It’s my first time watching it beyond a few clips, and I’m certainly enjoying it. Some of the episodes are truly phenomenal—most recently in our viewing, I’m thinking of “The Long Goodbye” in particular, which I think could easily work viewed all on its own, without any necessary context.

Groundhog Day

We also watched Groundhog Day. I haven’t seen it in probably more than a decade, and my spouse doesn’t think she’d ever seen it. I couldn’t remember the way it ended, only a few tidbits here and there. I also had totally forgotten it was a Harold Ramis film!

Moby-Dick

I’m about halfway through Moby-Dick, which I began reading along with a group of people on Bsky organized by Jacobharr.is.

Although I’ve owned a copy for a while, it’s my first time actually reading it. I equivocated about putting both it and Benito Cereno on my exam reading lists, but ultimately decided that they were a bit too early for the time period I really wanted to cover. (There’s a good chance that they’ll each sneak into the dissertation itself, of course.)

The Norton Critical Edition asserts that the name “Davy Jones”—as in the phrase “Davy Jones’ locker”—comes from the Black Caribbean word “duppy” (i.e. “ghost”) and “Jonah” (i.e. “the Biblical person who met with the insides of a whale and lived to tell the tale”).

That’s not a etymological lineage possibility I’ve ever encountered before, but it strikes me as very plausible—at least as plausible as the OED’s assertion that “Davy” is likely from Welsh sailors invoking St. David. In any case, it’s fascinating to learn another possible taken-for-granted Black Atlantic connection.

Anyways, about midway through January, Life Happened To Me and I decided that keeping up with the other Bsky readers was less important than a couple of other projects, so that reading has taken a back seat for the last week or 10 days. The group read was a very productive intervention in my daily patterns, though, helping give me a place to focus my attention when doomscrolling beckoned (and here I’m referring both the book itself and the feed of reactions or insights from other readers).

Tin Man’s “Hidden Acid”

The Hidden Acid four track release deftly negotiates the lines between techno and house, plugging along with a pleasant motorik pulse. If you’re a fan of 303 synth leads, you’ll find lots to enjoy—and if you don’t have a clue what “acid” or “303” might refer to here, these tunes are wonderful introductions.

Focumon

Sometime over the last couple months—most likely in the Betwixtmas, somewhere between Boxing Day and New Year’s—I thought long & hard about which pomodoro-style timer I might prefer to keep in the new year. I’ve used & liked LlamaLife & Focus—they’re both great, and Focus especially so if you have an Apple Watch.

But I realized that with each of them, every day felt a little Groundhog Day-ish, because neither really promotes the sense that your focus & effort is adding up over spans of days, weeks, or months.

I’d seen Focumon mentioned as another alternative and decided to give it a try. Having used it over the holidays and all through January, I can say that it’s definitely a solid contender. It’s working well enough that I stopped my other subscriptions and will be using it this year, as least though my exams. (I appreciate that the developer promises it will remain free to use, and it’s already been useful enough that I’m actually paying for an account.)

Getting to see the development of the little pocket monsters and have them build up the strength to take on bosses on different levels provides just enough long-term growth to help me recognize that I’m building toward larger goals.

The minimal co-working in other people’s “training centers” also provides just enough sociability to keep me on track.

LlamaLife, Focus, and Focumon are all solid choices, each slightly better at some things than at others. If you think that you could benefit from extra reinforcement that your daily efforts are adding up to something larger over time, I’d certainly suggest watching the Focumon “About” FAQ video and gauging whether it’s worth trying out. (That’s not an affiliate link, by the way!) The same FAQ page also has product comparisons tucked away at the bottom, such as this comparison with Habitica.

Whether or not these three options are up your alley, I hope you find something that works for you!

It involved stitching together patterns gleaned from posts like Darek Kay’s Style your RSS feed and Rees’ Using jekyll-feed + XSLT with GitHub Pages.

Andrew Stiefel’s How to Style an Atom Feed with XSLT is what I’ve currently adopted/adapted. Doing so means switching from using the popular Jekyll-Feed plugin to Andrew’s Liquid-based feed generators.

(No matter what I tried yesterday, my attempts to style the Jekyll-Feed plugin’s output either left the feed entirely unstyled or it was generated with styles, but the styles introduced validation errors that prevented the feed from actually displaying with content in the browser. There’s a good chance that these problems are ultimately due to user error and only “wrong” in my development Jekyll environment… but having spent hours trying to sort it out, switching seems like the path forward.)

So that brings us to this post! I’m checking whether the new approach:

• displays nicely in the browser when truly published to my public site
• includes post content when viewed in a feed reader
• preserves the previous feed links (i.e. doesn’t introduce breaking changes to where the feeds live or what they’re called)

Put on your goggles and PPE, everyone! The test is about to begin!  

Update: 2026-01-12

Yesterday’s attempt worked nicely—but I noticed an important difference between the preview visible in the browser and in NetNewsWire! Each post’s title was visible in the browser page, but it wasn’t there in NetNewsWire.

I’ve just updated the Liquid-based logic on my feed pages with the <entry> code used by Jekyll-feed. It starts at line 72 and ends at line 126 in their current code.

For the Semi-schematic feed, which contains just a single category of this blog’s posts, I added another Liquid if statement so it would output only posts assigned to that category. That’s at line 21 of this site’s feed-semi-schematic.xml file. Just sharing in case anyone is digging through this site’s source code and trying to figure out how to adapt this for your own site.

The best titles, like the best jokes, don’t need explanation. “Semi-schematic” feels almost self-explanatory, but at the risk of being overly didactic, I’m referring to:

• mental schema, or mental models of understanding and experience
• semi-schematic diagrams, which blend realistic elements into abstracted representations
• Schema, a delightfully odd musical side-project blending members of Stereolab and Hovercraft

This series of posts will be akin to a professional newsletter, focusing on education-related topics like learning, teaching, instructional design, education technology, and human uses of information. These posts already have their very own Semi-schematic RSS feed!

In addition to my own thoughts, you can expect me to amplify or respond to other people’s work. Education—by which I mean both our institutionalized and self-lead systems for learning—are undergoing myriad changes and challenges. We’ll all likely understand what’s going on far better if we share our insights and perspectives.

I’ll also mention activities like the Navigating Privacy Issues with Generative AI Panel I participated in, or attending the Open Education Conference.

Fun Fact

Fun fact: I almost called this newsletter “Buttoned Up”, since I’ll likely also post “wrap ups” amplifying other people’s works, it’s the most “professional” or “buttoned up” I’m likely to be on this site, and because Buttondown is one of the platforms I’d consider use if I were ever to start using an email newsletter platform instead of just adding a category of posts to this site.

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 36 is the week of 2025-09-01/2025-09-07.

Webmentions Experiments

This week I’ve been experimenting with Webmentions, using the Webmentions for Jekyll gem. Reilly Spitzfaden’s A Quick Guide to Everything I Know about Webmentions has proven incredibly helpful and encouraging—thank you so much for writing up this tutorial, Reilly!

As far as I can tell through the Webmention.rocks test suite I’ve got Webmentions working. These webmentions can be displayed automatically, but having seen very nasty abuse, in addition to your garden-variety spam, via pingbacks, I’m still keen to moderate everything that might show up on my site.

I’ve connected Webmentions to my HCommons.social Mastodon account, meaning that I’ll be informed of likes, comments, or reposts of any posts I put there with links to things on my own website. The service that enables this connection, Bridgy, also makes it possible to automatically publish a Mastodon post when I publish something on my website—and as cool as that is, I’d prefer to post things manually, at least for the moment. I’d probably feel different if I wanted to connect my site to more external social media platforms.

Viewing, Listening, and Reading

Love, Untangled

Love, Untangled is a sweet, gentle, and (mostly) fun high school story set in late ’90s Busan. (I write “mostly” because there are brief depictions of domestic abuse and suicidal ideation; proceed accordingly and take care of yourselves, friends.) Awkwardness, unexpected honesty, unprovoked meanness—it definitely reminds me of my own high school memories, more compellingly than most similar stories.

10 Years of Acid Test

The 10 Years of Acid Test compilation has been the main soundtracks on our speakers and headphones this week. As far as I can tell, the songs on it are exclusive—and fantastic, provided you like squelchy electronic rhythm box jams.

Foucault’s The Order of Things

I’m re-reading The Order of Things for my exam lists and dissertation project, having read all but a couple chapters of it in a graduate seminar about 20 years ago. So far on this re-read, I’m already able to better see how Foucault’s project fits conceptually into both his own trajectory and alongside other thinkers of his time. A very good feeling!

TWI(R)L

This week I (re)learned… 

• the word sagittal, via Foucault’s The Order of Things
• the word volute, via Foucault’s The Order of Things
• the word glebe, via Foucault’s The Order of Things

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 35 is the week of 2025-08-25/2025-08-31.

Tiny Experiment of the Week

As much as I’m a huge proponent of digital notes, this week I’ve been keeping a 3.5” x 5” notebook open as I read books by Chu, Benjamin, and Foucault. I type so much more quickly than I write that having a keyboard at hand invites me to quote extensively, while the relative friction of a paper notebook helps me instead make bullet points of my condensations, summaries, and reactions.

This strategy might be what Sönke Ahrens would call “fleeting notes”—although perhaps not exactly, since I do plan to keep these little notebooks. In any case, the experiment certainly seems to be helping me read faster, and focusing less on each individual detail and more on the overall structure or argument.

We’ll see how well this works going forward.

Listening of the Week

The new-to-me music I’m digging this week is definitely Tin Man. In particular, I’ve got DrippingAcid on replay. (I sort of stumbled onto him via Acid Test Records, which I almost certainly encountered because it’s the label that releasd Om Unit + TM404’s collaboration In The Afterworld.)

Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza

Ellane on One-Page Notebooks

Speaking of paper notes, I enjoyed Ellane W’s The Surprisingly Powerful One-Page Notebook That’s Always With Me. She sings the praises of folding up a sheet of paper into a one-page notebook (1PN) to tote along as an intentionally constrained alternative to any more substantial notebook you might use.

I often do the same thing, only I tear out the middle seams to make a one-page mini zine-style booklet. (I initially started doing this to reuse discarded misprints at my former library job. Knowing only one side of the paper was usable might be why I got in the habit of adding the zine-style tears?) I particularly like Ellane’s suggestion of digitizing whatever you find useful in one of these one page notebooks (or 1PNs). The brevity definitely helps you remember to move from paper to digital sooner than with longer pocket notebooks!

Tracy D’s Big Questions

Tracy Durnell’s What to read? Big questions as filter and frame helped me re-think how I’m approaching my own reading. It also makes me want to start writing down my own big questions. Maybe I’ll end up making public pages of these here, much as she does?

Franklin S’s Staying With the Trouble

Franklin S’s weekly note—which thinks with both Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin—is not that far off from this type of “big questions”.

It’s exciting—moreover, it’s heartening and encouraging—to read Franklin’s musings on what he’s thinking through during his sabbatical and to see him share with thoughts-in-process, the things he’s working through and with as he’s trying to address his questions.

Maybe this kind of “big picture” framing happens at the beginning of the academic year, for those of us who live on that kind of cycle?

TWI(R)L

This week I (re)learned… 

• the word “etymon”, via Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology
• the word “heteroclite”, via Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things
• how much I enjoy using Llama Life—although I still do wish it more reliably put prominent notifications on my watch and phone. Maybe I’m just still learning how to work with it?

Site Refinements of the Week

I noticed that the screen reader text for each of the heading links was visible on this site. A few minutes of digging in the Minimal Mistakes theme repository’s “Issues” area let me know what had changed and how to fix it for my own site.

Although I use the remote theme method for my site, I’ve edited the CSS files enough that I had to add the changes into my own local version of that file. (With the remote theme method, any local versions of a file override the remote theme’s version.) I might eventually take the time to move all my customizations into a different file so that my site will better pull in this kind of fix—but even with the time spent realizing the issue and manually fixing it, I’m a big fan of this approach to maintaining a site and of the maintainers whose labor makes it happen.

Here’s some of what I’m currently doing, as of Spring 2025. (More specifically, I’m writing this on 2025-05-08):

• Wrapping up co-teaching a course on Literature and the Natural World. This is the second teaching internship I’m doing in my Ph.D. program. Among other things I’m learning, it’s been fascinating to see how student writing has changed after the rise in generative language tools.
• Diving deep into the realm of how to make Modern Language Association (MLA) style citations with Pandoc and CSL.
  • It turns out that some things work far better when your bibliography is stored in CSL YAML than Biblatex, especially now that MLA uses a mental model of “containers”.
  • I’ll almost certainly write one or several blog posts about this. I’ve made local edits to the MLA CSL file you can download from the main CSL styles repository, making it so the titles of special journal issues are included correctly in the citation. Additionally, MLA’s way of storing some information will make it difficult to cite in APA or Chicago style… and this ease of switching is one of the main draws of using this software. So I’m also devising an opinionated set of terms to help make sure that my bibliography file can output to the citation styles I’m likely to use when writing for LIS journals.
• Continuing to read (and take notes on!) the books on my exam lists.
• Beginning to get into the wide world of Korean dramas, now that we’ve finished our Star Trek “ViewingAlpha”. So far, Crash Landing On You, Business Proposal, Forecasting Love & Weather, The Potato Lab, and Mr. Queen have been engrossing and often a ton of fun.
• Figuring out new tricks with Liquid on this website.
  • For instance, I taught my note on the Binti trilogy how to count & display pages across all the included books, just by updating that single line that starts with progress_current.
  • It’s super nerdy—but this sort of handy, predictable, debuggable automation is precisely what still makes computers good sometimes!

She asks (and answers):

if you went to college

1. what was your career goal when you started?
2. your initial major?
3. if you changed majors, what did you change to?
4. what do you do now, professionally?

 

1. i was interested in genetics but unsure
2. History
3. Never changed
4. Writer/creating writing prof

Here’s my response, which not only demonstrates my usual predilection to wrap social media posts up in tidy little bows, but also contains enough durable insight that I felt it worth sharing here:

1. I didn’t truly have one yet? I was just thrilled to be at a school where people wanted to be at school‽?!
2. Philosophy (not sure I ever declared it as a major, but I got it as a minor).
3. English Lit.
4. Instructional Design (i.e. helping students & professors continue wanting to be at school).

Then I added:

(Aaand because I’ve mostly done Cultural / American Studies, I know how many structural problems higher ed as set of institutions is oriented toward perpetrating.

But it’s also one of the best places, outside of social media, for creating an undercommons for our collective study toward liberation.)

If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of The Undercommons, the link in this sentence takes you to a freely downloadable version of the book.

Assuming that I remember correctly from when I first read it, I found The Undercommons both a deeply frustrating and very useful work. Fred Moten, one of the authors, is a poet and a critical theorist. I suspect that the book’s avoidance of early definition of terms is an intentional provocation to keep you reading (and also, perhaps, to avoid making it come across as alienatingly “theoretical” or “fixed”). Rather than closing off potential paths, it feels like the authors deliberately chose to leave enough space for readers to find resonance, ideas to play with, and mentally collaborate as they wish.

If you’re sensing musical overtones—particularly of a jazz improv variety—then just let me share that In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition was the first piece I read by Moten. That, plus having seen him speak once or twice at UC Irvine and elsewhere in Southern California, probably influence how his works resonate in my mind.

Invitations to an audience; provocations to take up the pieces and do something with them; these very much speak to atypical aspects of instructional design and teaching where one tries to maintain an open space for collaboration and connection, rather than just delivering static knowledge.

I’ll be re-reading hooks, Freire, and Giroux this year—as well as many newer people who discuss pedagogy and instruction from complementary perspectives—and I’ll keep trying to trace these connections and echoes as I find them.

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 03 is the week of 2025-01-13/2025-01-19.

Ghosting of the Week

People I follow on social media started widely discussing Substack’s Nazi problems anew this week. I’m going to do a more substantial dive into the problems & the alternatives in another post—but the clear winner in terms of newsletter-based alternatives has been Ghost.

It has been really encouraging to see how many people have been thinking about ways to move themselves away from the sturm und drang and churn of social media toward spaces that they can control better, both as readers and writers!

If you’ve recently started a newsletter or website—or if you’ve begun posting anew—please let me know! There are many ways to participate in what might be called the cozy web, the personal web, the IndieWeb, the lowercase indie web, etc., and I’d love to read whatever you might be making.

The Extended Pomodoro Technique

Sometimes I rediscover and readopt techniques that have worked for me in the past, and although I can’t recall just why or how, I was lead to re-acquaint myself with what I’d call the extended Pomodoro Technique this week.

In addition to timing myself working in bursts (what many people consider the Pomodoro Technique), I also have started listing the tasks that I’m aiming to complete in a day, then tracking how many timed bursts those selected tasks take me.

Me being me, this is mostly happening in my daily bullet-journal style notes in Obsidian—but I’m also using and enjoying Llama Life for the timer part of this. It syncs to my phone and has a web view that plays extremely nicely with Rectangle, the window position manager I adore for Macintosh.

The Twilight Zone

I’ve always enjoyed The Twilight Zone, and my admiration for Rod Serling grows whenever I learn something new about him and his ethos. Up until now, however, I’ve only ever watched The Twilight Zone randomly, such as being assigned an episode as part of a film / television / media course, having a friend want to watch, or just landing on it while flipping channels (back when channel-flipping was Very Much A Thing).

After recently concluding our ViewingAlpha of Star Trek, my spouse and I have been looking for something with vaguely similar vibes. Although The Twilight Zone is far more episodic than later Star Trek series, it has a very similar “logic puzzle” to the original.

So we’re embarking on a first watch of all of the original series of The Twilight Zone. If I come up with a clever name, I’ll add it retroactively—and I’ll post about (or at least mention) any episode highlight as we come across them.

I’m impressed by how rapidly it hit its stride, with some of the most famous episodes happening within the first 10—including time travel, a deal with the literal Devil, a nuclear apocalypse, a convict living on a remote asteroid, an android, and various encounters with fate. As a slice of late 1950s America, an evolutionary moment within television, an overview of sci-fi/fantasy/horror, and legal/criminal/psychological/social discourses, it’s a profoundly rich series already!

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 02 is the week of 2024-01-06/2025-01-12.

Aspiration of the Week

Even though I’m writing this on Jan 19th, a full week after Week02 has ended, I do think I’ll be ridiculous enough to aim at posting 100 things this calendar year, as I shared in last week’s weeknote. I’m realizing that, despite how much time I spend on social media, I find myself far happier after spending time reading short-form writing on blogs and digital gardens than spending the same amount of time scrolling an endless feed.

So I’m hoping that writing my own posts will give me a similar sense of fulfillment and community, as well as help me contribute reasons for others to spend more time in RSS readers (should that similarly suit them).

This means I’ll aim to average writing a weeknote and just one additional note each week this calendar year, which isn’t that big of an undertaking if I choose to think of smaller, breezier increments instead of larger, heftier chunks.

“Rally pace” always springs to mind when I think about this sort of mile-marking. I’m doing similar calculations for how many books or articles I’ll need to be reading each week in order to get through all my reading lists, which is another reason to steer myself towards sharing my own thoughts more frequently.

If you’re doing something similar, I’d love to hear about it—especially if you’re just starting out with a blog or other space of your own online!

Viewing

This week we watched more movies than in a typical week.

We saw:

• Dan in Real Life
• Downsizing
• 10 Things I Hate About You

Even a week later, I keep thinking of snippets of each of them.

Downsizing surprised us the most, since Netflix’s preview card led us to anticipate it primarily being a Jason Sudeikis joint, when the biggest role actually is performed by some dude named Matt Damon. Despite (or due to?) not being at all what we expected (most likely some kind of midlife crisis Honey I Shrunk the Kids meet the Good Place), it’s the one that has stuck with me most vividly.

Reading

I finished Hayot’s Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. this week, as well as starting Richards’ The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire.

Humanist Reason

Hayot’s Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. feels like something we’ve needed—or at least I’ve needed—for quite some time to help us explain the actual processes we perform, and the beliefs attested to by our behaviors, when doing work in the humanities. I’m planning to write more about it in the next few weeks.

I’d highly recommend it to anyone who cares about human knowledge, whether or not they think they care about those disciplines called “the humanities”.

The Imperial Archive

As I’m writing this, I’m about halfway through Richards’ The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire—and I’m very grateful that Past Me chose to put it on my lists.

Librarians and archivists have well-earned skepticism toward people who write about “the archive” without much engagement with actual archives or archivists, but I think that reaction would be displaced here.

Richards does an excellent job of explaining that he’s analyzing the cultural work performed by the fantasy of “an archive” of knowledge allied with the (British) state, and the influences of this primarily-imagined network. I’d also recommend it to anyone interested in knowledge, archives, or information networks, but it’s likely not to feel as groundbreaking as Hayot’s for most readers.

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 01 is the week of 2024-12-30/2025-01-05. (Yes, this includes a bit of 2024, as confusing as that is. Time, am I right?)

Revelation of the Week: Vacation

It had been a very long time since I’d taken a substantial enough vacation to truly disengage from work! I finally dislodged my mind from work over the holidays, though, thankfully.

Having re-learned the crucial necessity of rest by gaining some distance from work, I’m going to try bringing a better sense of proportion & perspective into the new year.

I also made some physical progress charts for my reading lists, hanging them in a place where I pass by them constantly. Seeing this little reminder has already been motivating in a way that feels like self-led accomplishment rather than shame. That’s another revelation!

Viewing and Reading

Viewing

• We finished the last couple episodes of ST: Prodigy on December 29th, wrapping up our ViewingAlpha of Star Trek. (Of course, I’ll be re-watching parts before long—particularly as I have a season of Deep Space 9 on one of my exam lists!)
• Over the holidays, watched a lot of holiday-ish movies, including Die Hard and Miracle on 34th Street for the first time.
• Started watching The Twilight Zone.
• Saw Barbarella, Encanto, & Ant-Man for the first time.

Reading

As far as books go, over the break I read:

• Extra Focus
• Policing the Crisis
• Humanist Reason

100DaysToOffload

Over the break, I also was reminded of the 100 Days to Offload blogging challenge, via Stefan Bohacek’s Recurring creative challenges site. I think I’ll try this “post 100 things on your own site, no matter how small” challenge this year as a way of encouraging myself to do far more frequent, smaller chunks of writing.

Let the experimentation begin!

It’s fairly nerdy and detailed.

And if that description also applies to you, hopefully this note arrives just in time to add it up before you kiss off this year!

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 47 is the week of 2024-11-18/2024-11-24. (And I’m publishing this a full week later than I usually aspire to for a weekly round-up like this!)

PhD Program Progress of the Week

The biggest update this week is that I’ll be doing my second teaching internship next semester! My PhD program requires two supervised teaching internships (or externships, although internships seem more common).¹

This internship will let me work with Dr. Curt Whitaker on teaching an asynchronous online Gen Ed course on ecocriticism, or how human relationships to the natural world have been represented through literature. My pedagogy-related readings with him will also focus on how instructors can adapt their assessment strategies in light of GenAI.² I’m really looking forward to it!

Viewing, Listening, and Reading

Interstellar

Perhaps it was because I had ecocriticism on my mind, or perhaps it was because we actually decided to start watching a movie early enough to choose a long one, but we finally watched Interstellar for the first time.

Although it’s not already on my exam reading lists, there’s a strong chance I’ll end up writing about it in my dissertation or somewhere else, as it’s a very clear example of framing “information” in deeply humanistic ways.

Mean Girls (2004) & Mean Girls (2024)

We also managed to watch both the original Mean Girls (2004) and the 2024 movie musical version. It’s fascinating to see who returns from the original cast (hey, Tim Meadows! yep, Tina Fey, too!), as well as how much more inclusive the writing and casting have become. Thankfully, there are far fewer fat-shaming jokes. The songs, performances, and choreography are all wonderful additions as well. And—omg—because we’ve been living under a large boulder the size of a small boulder, I did not realize who Auli’i Cravalho is until after we finished it. Such a delight to see the voice of Moana in a live-action production!

Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza

• Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies: A Quickstart Guide is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece that, as the authors write, “extends on our disciplinary knowledge in rhetoric, writing, and composition studies, digital rhetorics and literacies, computers and writing, and technical communication”. It’s well worth your time, whether you embrace GenAI or eschew it.
• The thing about the Kobayashi Maru is a great slice of criticism presented as fan fic. It probably won’t make much sense if you’re unfamiliar with the Kobayashi Maru training scenario that’s referenced throughout Star Trek series… but if you’re interested in representations of military thought or instructional design, the episodes that reference that training scenario might be great places to start with Star Trek.
• Hannah Alpert-Abram’s Finding Your Purpose workbook crossed my social media at some point this week, and I’m grateful for it. I’ll probably be working through this workbook throughout the month of December. Did I mention that it’s 🔓Open Access with a CC BY-NC license, so you can read and share it as well?

Site Refinements of the Week

Inspired by Thomas Rigby’s It’s Hard to Give Recognition blog post, I’ve added Tinylytics to my site.

It’s taken a bit of tweaking with Liquid code logic and page layouts to get the “kudos” feature to show up appropriately, but it feels well worth the time.

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 46 is the week of 2024-11-11/2024-11-17.

Languaging Is Not Knowing

It’s been rolling around in my mind for a while, and this thought finally took a succinct form:

Languaging about something is very different from knowing about something.

This isn’t a groundbreaking insight to those of us with rhetoric, composition, media, communication, or cultural studies backgrounds, but it definitely does seem to be a novel insight to far too many people who uncritically teach information literacy or generative artificial “intelligence” tools.

“Language” as a verb can encompass everything from the media frames examined by Cultural Studies scholars through to what rhetoric and composition studies scholars like Asao B. Inoue have examined at length. (A relatively short and engaging example is Dr. Inoue’s Chair’s Address from the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication: How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?.)

Accomplishments of the Week

Internship Proposal

I wrote & submitted a proposal for the second of the two internships required for my English PhD program! (There’s a reasonably strong chance that I’ll need to revise the proposal, as it’s an atypical course, but we’ll see.)

If it works out, I’ll be asynchronously teaching an online course about Nature in Literature with Dr. Curt Whitaker, with whom I’ve previously taken a graduate seminar on Ecocriticism in the Renaissance. This internship course’s readings will be quite different, as it’s a Gen Ed elective and the bulk of the works are from last 100 years or so.

In addition to the literature, I’ll be reading & discussing recent research into generative artificial “intelligence”. This will be both from the angle of assessment of student work and of more broadly how these “GenAI” tools might fit into education.

Journal AI Policy

I’m on the editorial board of In the Library with the Lead Pipe, and we’ve been working for a while on crafting a policy that reflects our concerns about generative AI while also recognizing that there are a range of uses for these tools.

We published the journal’s AI policy, and have thus far received a warm response from our readers. That’s really heartening. I’ve also gotten some useful feedback on how the policy might be improved, too, which I’ll be sure to share with the other editors as we continue making refinements.

Viewing and Reading

Hot Frosty

Yep, we watched Hot Frosty. It was fun; very Encino Man meets The Knight Before Christmas, although the main character is played with more of a Manny Jacinto vibe. (It’s honestly a shame that the main character wasn’t actually played by Manny Jacinto, now that I think more about it.)

Policing the Crisis

I read another few chapters of Policing the Crisis, and it’s both disturbing and enlightening how applicable much of the analysis continues to be to our current times.

I’m increasingly glad I chose to add it to the first of my Ph.D. exam reading lists, the one about information control and making meaning.

Heartstopper

We’ve also been watching Season 3 of Heartstopper, which is fantastic and—as anticipated—somewhat heavier than the previous seasons.

Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza

• Jessamyn West’s The mining of the public domain communicates insights earned through her deep experience with public domain repositories and some of her go-to searches when evaluating a new tool.
• Someone shared Ian’s Shoelace Site as a fantastic example of a single-topic deep-dive website, and I think it’s equally a fantastic example of earlier eras of websites that are still going strong.
• Another someone shared Moira Donegan’s excellent essay-slash-book-review Baby Talk: On pro-natalism and motherhood after Dobbs. It’s a great, if heavy, essay on what too many people continue unduly expecting of women—and although Donegan doesn’t expressly mention social reproduction theory, this piece definitely makes me want to find more resources that examine this same conundrum through that particular frame.