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Sun May 31 10:00:01 UTC 2026 ======================================== Slept from eleven-thirty to eight-thirty. Woke briefly a couple times in the night. Mostly sunny. Highs in the mid 70s. Southeast winds up to 5 mph, becoming west around 5 mph in the late afternoon. Blue moon (second full moon in one month). * [x] run MacBook backup * [x] install RAM in (possible future) home server ThinkPad * [x] install FreeBSD on ThinkPad * [ ] walk * [ ] hack on Secret Base * [ ] play with solo Shadowdark Ars Magia stuff * [x] study something * [ ] D&D Lament game prep... What does the plane saucer need? * [ ] maybe the giant robot (and its parts) _are_ the MacGuffin of Vecna? * [ ] instead of written instructions, maybe the Void Entity explains stuff (insufferably) * [ ] Clear instructions saying "This is a ship that can navigate the planes and here's how to operate it." * [ ] A way to find descriptions and directions to interesting locations on the planes. (Or maybe that's on the beholder's ship?) * [ ] read The Count of Monte Cristo Read more of Treasure Island. Started reading Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine. https://www.personalcanon.com/p/research-as-leisure-activity > A few years ago, I came across a particularly evocative description of the website Are.na. I’ll describe Are.na in the plainest possible fashion first: it’s a website where you can privately or collaboratively save images, text, PDFs, website links, and more into “channels.” It’s kind of like Pinterest for artists, researchers, and academics. This is a useful description, but not a beautiful one. The beautiful description was written by the librarian Karly Wildenhaus, who described it as: “Research as leisure activity.” > But this isn’t really about the software. It’s about what software promises us—that it will help us become who we want to be, living the lives we find most meaningful and fulfilling. The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas. > On the decidedly informal and amateur end (I use the term amateur lovingly and respectfully!)…I’d also say that the best content on the internet is created by people who have turned research into their leisure activity. When I was a young teenager on tumblr, basically everyone I followed and looked up to adhered to the following archetypes: > > * A woman who just wanted to buy a bra and ended up becoming an expert on Edwardian corsetry (and, by extension, early 20th century sartorial techniques, the labor struggles of the English garment industry, and all kinds of vaguely related topics) > * Someone who started off posting scans of obscure Japanese fashion magazines and ended up, essentially, becoming an amateur archivist of 1990s fashion editorials that are exclusively preserved on an obscure tumblr or Livejournal > What’s also striking to me is that autodidacts often begin with some very tiny topic, and through researching that topic, they end up telescoping out into bigger-picture concerns. When research is your leisure activity, you’ll end up making connections between your existing interests and new ideas or topics. Everything gets pulled into the orbit of your intellectual curiosity. You can go deeper and deeper into a narrow topic, one that seems fascinatingly trivial and end up learning about the big topics: gender, culture, economics, nationalism, colonialism. It’s why fashion writers end up writing about the history of gender identity (through writing about masculine/feminine clothing) and cross-cultural exchange (through writing about cultural appropriation and styles borrowed from other times and places) and historical trade networks (through writing about where textiles come from). https://www.are.na/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are.na > Are.na is an online social networking community and creative research platform founded by Charles Broskoski, Daniel Pianetti, Chris Barley, and Chris Sherron.[1] Are.na was built as a successor to hypertext projects like Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and as an ad-free alternative to social networks like Facebook, forgoing "likes," "favorites," or "shares" in its design. Are.na allows users to compile uploaded and web-clipped "blocks" into different "channels," and has been described as a "vehicle for conscious Internet browsing," "playlists, but for ideas," and a "toolkit for assembling new worlds." Given the issues with rsync lately (the rsync author has recently make a lot of AI-assisted commits that have introduced a lot of bugs), I switched to openrsync (written by OpenBSD and shipped with macOS). `rsync --version` shows which version is living at `/usr/bin/rsync`. Noticed a raccoon hanging out in the gutter of the neighboring building. Maybe eating something or just napping in the sunshine? My little pepper plants look healthy, filling out with new sets of leaves. The chives are still tiny, but at least three of them came up. Servings: grains 2/4, vegetables+fruit 5/5, dairy+meat 4/4, nuts+beans 1/0.5 Brunch: salad, coffee Lunch: cinnamon bun Afternoon snack: left-over pizza Dinner: salad

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