We made it up to the northernmost stanza stone with B. He wasn’t thrilled about the whole walk, but he did love squishing his boots in the mud and chowing down on a vegan Greggs sausage roll. During lunch one day, we heard an insane screeching in front of my sister-in-law’s house … | Continue reading
People think that serial / “Oxford” commas should be an optional style thing. But if you’re writing for the web, please use it. Here’s an example of a sentence without a serial comma: Please bring Jack, your brother and your uncle to the party And an example of a sentence with a … | Continue reading
Updated my Now page, contents below for posterity. View past presents. Since the last update in April 2022: In broader, non-personal news, for posterity’s sake: 🌻 the terrible war in Ukraine continues, 💔 Roe v. Wade was repealed, 🐦 Twitter was bought by a … | Continue reading
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The entire tree was covered in rows of these woodpecker holes, head to foot. I’m pretty sure it’s a crabapple. Supposedly sapsuckers drill these holes and come back for a sweet drink every once in a while. These holes are probably old, there shouldn’t be any sap flowing yet this … | Continue reading
EL and KT came over for dinner last weekend and brought cake. WHAT A CAKE. It was a chocolate coffee crunch cake. I asked EL, basically it’s this chocolate cake with coffee whipped cream and honeycomb as per this Serious Eats recipe. It was insanely good. Super decadent, but also … | Continue reading
Even though I’ve said to you that she hardly ever wrote a full-page poem, I know of one that I think relates to writing. And I’d like to read that if I could. I happen to have a copy of it. As far as I know it’s never been published, but I’ve kept Ursula’s poems… | Continue reading
Quick tip: If you hang your toilet paper the “wrong” way around so that the newest sheet hangs down the back rather than the front, it’s a lot harder for a kid or pet to idly spin the roll and unravel the whole thing. Guests will think you’re unhinged, but it’s a small price to… | Continue reading
I read somewhere that poor balance is heavily tied to memory loss later in life. Wish I could remember where… Now I stand on one foot while brushing my teeth. The right foot and right side of my mouth for the first minute timed by my electric toothbrush, and the left foot / side … | Continue reading
BTG “got looped in on a project that’s trying to understand how microgravity impacts bone healing by comparing earth and space station mice”. (My friends are much cooler than me.) She said that most of the mice that go to space are female since the male mice usually kill each oth … | Continue reading
We all caught norovirus. About 24 hrs of it was probably the worst time we’ve had since B was born, and the rest of the time wasn’t much better. I won’t go in to the gory details, but here’s a few tips for future me who will inevitably catch it again (because daycare). Apparently … | Continue reading
Reading recs from Gem: 📕 The “living autobiography” series by Deborah Levy 📖 Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel 📖 Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (though she did say I might find this tough, I have a hair-trigger emotional core since B was born) … | Continue reading
Yesterday was… eventful. Anyways, I now have a decent technique for thoroughly cleaning Jellycat stuffed animals! Note that the Jellycat cleaning tag specifically says to spot clean only. But that doesn’t cut it if, for example, one happens to get covered in vomit. I’d probably u … | Continue reading
Two small changes on this site. Just added RSS links to many of my categories. They’ve always existed, I just figured it would be nice to include them in the category description. See my RSS page for more info about RSS in general and category-specific RSS. And I added an “attrib … | Continue reading
Check out WAI’s alt Decision Tree. Really useful for considering how alt text should work against any image. And more broadly, their tutorials seem great, super practical and succinct. Don’t know how I’d missed them before. The whole WAI website is an unbelievable resource, we’re … | Continue reading
So CommandR hasn’t been reloading my VSCode window. But the “Reload window” command in the palette (ShiftCommandP to open palette) shows that it should work. Charles told me how to fix it! To sort it out, click the cog icon next to the “Reload window” command in the palette to op … | Continue reading
I am LOVING my new Kobo Clara 2E. Just wild that all of Brooklyn Public Library’s e-books are at my fingertips at the click of a button. I just need to figure out how to get my old Walthamstow Library card set up too… B seems to have become a whole new little person over… | Continue reading
Thanksgiving this year was verrrrry small. We had a few options to celebrate with friends / family, but ended up just sticking to the three of us at home. I’ve been sick for almost two weeks now and was not about to give this to someone else. 💀 Plus that meant we could mo … | Continue reading
Good enough for now, and safe enough to try Yesterday, Gemma gave the SuperHi community a great talk on her work with Common Knowledge, a not-for-profit worker cooperative of technologists, designers, researchers and facilitators. She mentioned sociocracy, a governance framework … | Continue reading
To read: “Let a 1,000 flowers bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots.” by Peter Seibel Peter Seibel was the lead of Twitter’s Engineering Effectiveness group. This 2015 essay is an extended version of a talk that he gave on the same subject. The TL;DR as he describes it: “a … | Continue reading
Graphic designers Kaisa Lassinaro and Maeve Redmond have designed READING LIST, a series of t-shirts that reference books, which they have selected, from the Glasgow Women’s Library catalogue. All of these books (and many more!) are free to borrow from Glasgow Women’s Library. So … | Continue reading
The most recent edition of Blackbird Spyplane really made me laugh, about how “being yourself” can be terrible advice, especially when it comes to style. Why does this advice irk me? The easiest way to problematize “be yourself” is to recognize that, while it contains within it a … | Continue reading
So. I finally got Covid for the first time a few weeks ago. I went to a gig with a friend the night before I started having obvious symptoms. Thankfully David Geffen Hall was still requiring masks, otherwise I might not have been wearing one. I didn’t know I had it, and realistic … | Continue reading
So Mastodon’s getting a lot of love! If Musk’s Twitter purchase is what ends up making Mastodon a mainstream thing, then hey, silver linings I guess? I’ve been on since 2019 as @piper@vis.social but other than a brief flurry of activity, I haven’t used it loads. The main problem … | Continue reading
A friend of mine is having a baby imminently and asked about my experience having an induction, so I opened up Apple Notes. I spent much of my extremely limited and precious “me” time in those early post-birth days writing a long note about my experience, knowing I would want to … | Continue reading
To read: Rest of World We document what happens when technology, culture and the human experience collide, in places that are typically overlooked and underestimated. We believe the story about technology is as big as the world that’s using it, and that everyone — from those buil … | Continue reading
B is like a cat. He wants up, then immediately wants down. Hands me something, like my clog, and then immediately wants it back. Then he’ll run around with two sets of tongs for a while. (To be fair, I don’t think cats can do that.) He’s started learning animal noises. “What does … | Continue reading
To read: The “Your Face Tomorrow” trilogy by Javier Marías I found this tribute in the Guardian incredibly interesting. I don’t often come across an author that I have 100% never heard of but also seems so very up my alley. I think my FIL would also be super in to his stuff, migh … | Continue reading
Couldn’t care less about going to bed covered in salt as a kid, now I have to wash it off. B was nuts about the waves. | Continue reading
Really need to make a habit of reading something that makes me giggle before bed. It sort of sets the day straight. I’m reading He Used Thought As A Wife, Tim Key’s first lockdown book. It’s perfect. Funny, poignant, captures so many of the absurdities of the first lockdown in th … | Continue reading
Life has felt kind of hard recently. Water running through my hands. So many things backed up in my “Blog stuff” folder in Notes, things I didn’t want to forget but wasn’t able to sit down and put in a post. Here’s a bunch so they don’t languish there forever. Oldest to newest. I … | Continue reading
We finally took B to the UK for the first time after two forcibly cancelled visits. Just got back on Wednesday night quite late. We had plans pretty much every day we were there, which was pretty nuts, but we got to catch up with so many people. There were a lot of firsts: B’s… | Continue reading
A quick disclaimer: This is NOT an article about how to find a full-time job. There are a million posts about that online. And anyways, beyond the general advice1, I’m not sure how useful those articles usually are anyways. Every person’s path to a job is super different. This is … | Continue reading
Improvised Life is a blog maintained by Sally Schneider. Sam introduced me to it recently (specifically, to her post on tailoring clothes quickly with extra buttons and magnets), and I was delighted to realize that she actually wrote my favorite cookbook as well, The Improvisatio … | Continue reading
Anyhow it seems a pity to have a built-in rite of passage and to dodge it, evade it, and pretend nothing has changed. That is to dodge and evade one’s womanhood, to pretend one’s like a man. Men, once initiated, never get the second chance. They never change again. That’s their l … | Continue reading
So the SCOTUS struck down Roe v. Wade recently. Abortion rights are now up to the states. This is inhumane, in my opinion. I have a lot more to say on it but lack both the time and the clarity of mind to articulate the injustice. In lieu of that, I wanted to record this… | Continue reading
Both Hokusai and Jack Butler Yeats hit their artistic strides in their 70s, their output just exploded at that point in their lives. How many other artists did the same? I can’t think of others, but surely many. Let me know. Came across Yeats via this RHLSTP episode with Dara Ó B … | Continue reading
I’ve had a post languishing for years in my drafts folder, return to it every once in a while but never feel like it’s quite right. For one thing it feels way too long. It’s about cynicism, about how I feel like it’s one of the most toxic, pervasive things both on a very personal … | Continue reading
We took B to the cottage for the first time. The weather was a bit grey and cool, but it turns out we were lucky. A huge storm ripped through right after we left which took down a tree and made it impossible to reach, also knocked out the power for two days. Followed by… | Continue reading
Fried sweet plantains have no right being as good as they are. They are perfect, a little caramelized, a little tangy, sweet. Ridiculously simple to make. Keep trying to make them for B while he’s asleep for a future snack, but I eat them all before they make it to the fridge… To … | Continue reading
If you live in the US and want to give B🌱 a great first birthday present, the perfect present, here’s what you can do. Use the link below to find your congress members using your zip code (to find your full nine-digit zip code, visit usps.com): https://www.congress.gov/me … | Continue reading
This is my custom bash prompt, as defined in my profile (~/.bash_profile). It includes a custom character for the prompt, the path, and the Git branch name (if any). The whole thing is colorful to make it a bit easier to identify the prompt in a sea of characters. When I’m workin … | Continue reading
I wish I had the camera. I have never seen blossom that looked so unreal. | Continue reading