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I recently saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

Ignoring the advice I often dispense in situations like these, I decided to read the poem beforehand. I originally bought a cheap, used, prose translation by W. H. D. Rouse that I found difficult to get through, so I pivoted early on to Emily Wilson's version and found it much more accessible. I'll likely have much more to say about the experience of reading the Odyssey, particularly since I was in the unusual position, for an amateur, of having two translations at my fingertips at the same time, but that is a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that I read the poem before seeing the movie and it unsurprisingly coloured my experience of the whole thing.

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I run an IndieWeb (Micropub, Webmentions) enabled static website and I admit it's not the easiest thing in the world. Coding knowledge definitely helps.

My static site generator is Eleventy. Posts are published by committing to the main branch. I wrote a basic Micropub server which piggy backs on this mechanism to publish (i.e. it "publishes" a post by committing to the main branch). Local comments are handled with staticman.

I receive webmentions via webmention.io. All the webmentions are pulled down and integrated with the site on every build.

Sending webmentions is a bit more complicated. I have an after-build step to send out all webmentions from all posts that haven't already been sent.

All in all - complicated but fun :-)

"I'm a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman's right to choose is very important, I think that 'well regulated militia' means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn't care less if you decided to dress up in the 'wrong' clothes or decided you'd rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me 'woke', then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race."

As a participant in the IndieWeb, I post the occasional photo on my blog. These photos tend to be unedited and off-the-cuff, often taken from my phone and posted with Quill via my Micropub server.

In addition to these spur-of-the-moment photos, I also take a fair number of more deliberate shots, often when I'm visiting someplace new. These will usually be taken with my standalone camera as opposed to my phone, and it's not uncommon for me to try and clean them up a bit with an image editor before publication. These photos are almost always organized into albums.

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I've previously written about the idiosyncrasies of IndieWeb bookmarks, and how I consider them to be qualitatively different from other IndieWeb posts. The differences boil down to my relationship with them. For me, they are primarily a collection of references, not a way I interact with the world. Unlike notes or articles, sharing them isn't a priority; I don't particularly care about shouting my bookmarks from the digital soapbox that is my blog.

Other people obviously differ here, and I'm vaguely aware of the notion of social bookmarking, and now defunct services like delicious, but that's just not how I use them. My bookmark posts always felt a bit out of place on my website, much more subject to whims of deletion and reorganization than other forms of content.

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I made another book nook!

Yet again, my annual Christmas tree snap

I joined Goodreads in 2012, at roughly the same time I joined Twitter, in what might be called a more innocent age of social networking. The idea of a social network for book readers appealed to me at the time.

Fast forward to 2025, and the world looks different. Twitter/X has turned into a hellscape run by a super villain, and Goodreads, though not quite a hellscape, is slow, dated and run by a company with dubious ethics.

I ended up deactivating my Twitter account - not that difficult given that I never really gained a following. As it turns out, my use of Goodreads as a social network never really took off either - I don't think my friend list ever exceeded 20 people. I used it much more as a log of my reading habits, a record of every book I ever read or wanted to read. That made it easier to think about finding a replacement.

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From what I understand, Dennett's response to the Chinese Room was that we find it unconvincing because we don't think of it in enough detail.

This used to be my position as well, until ChatGPT came along. Now we have extremely convincing syntax generation, without genuine intentionality behind it. So I guess I have to believe there's something more to genuine intelligence here.

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power"

There is something to be said about the connection between ChatGPT, John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment and Dan Dennett's response to it, but I'm not totally clear what that would be. I'm leaning towards Dan Dennet being wrong, though.

It's that time of the year in Montreal, when you have to alternate between wearing your winter coat and spring jacket several times in the same week.

If I have learned anything from the Trump tariffs imposed yesterday it's that we've obviously all been underestimating penguins. Sneaky little devils.

I saw my first cyber truck the other night, "in the flesh" so to speak, and I was unprepared for the level of revulsion I would feel.

I have downloaded an app called "Buy Beaver" and I can't believe it's come to this

I have spent most of my life in Montreal but there was a decent sized chunk in the middle, spanning high school and university, when I lived in Toronto.

I still visit Toronto not infrequently. I have a soft spot for it; at the very least, I don't harbour quite the same level visceral hatred a lot of people seem to lob at the city.

But I haven't lived there for over 20 years. Obviously, a lot has changed in that time. I'm not sure I could live there now. I mean, I guess I could but my life would look very different. The place is so huge, and the housing so expensive, that I'm not sure it would be a good trade.

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I never thought that the law applied equally to rich people and poor people. I never considered myself that naive. I had always understood that rich people could break the law in ways that poor people simply couldn't.

But I had always assumed that the way this worked in practice was that being rich just came with a heightened ability to cover your tracks. I had always assumed that, rich or poor, it was of supreme importance not to get caught, and that being rich simply bought you more options in that regard. Maybe you could bribe a police officer, or a judge, and make the charges go away. Maybe you could afford to hire someone to do the dirty work for you, or take the fall for you if it came to that.

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I've actually been toying with the idea of switching to Hugo to learn some Go and also because the org mode integration is a bit better.

I've been using Eleventy for my blog for the last 3 years or so, and I'm finding the experience...okay? It's more complicated to set up than Pelican, which I was using before, but also a lot more amenable to programming yourself out of problems.

Annual Christmas tree snap

4 photos

This is the year for tech upgrades, I guess. New tiny computer, new customizable keyboard and new smaller external storage.