Case Duckworth's personal web page

I cleaned out my dead links

2026-09-14T22:09:00Z

I cleaned out the dead links on my site today. The internet is a great place, in no small part because of its ephemerality. I heard about the dead link checker somewhere online and thought, what the hell, let’s see what it says.

There were, broadly, 6 classes of dead links:

Links that had never existed, like my fediring and hotline webring links, or the most confusing link of the bunch, https://gary.onl/i-finally-finished-the-internet/, from my Junited 2026 post. I half-remember reading this post and liking it, but as far as I know onl isn’t even a TLD. Weird!
Links that did exist but were behind some kind of anti-bot firewall like Cloudflare, Anubis, go-away, etc. This was the bulk of the “dead” links. This one, I get, I mean I had to update my robots.txt to allow the deadlinkchecker bot to crawl my site. Scraping is a scourge, the internet is dead, you know.
Now-defunct sites, like linklings.club. I only wrote about them in my May bookmarks post, so it’s a bummer to see them gone so soon.
URLS that had moved. I and noa were the biggest offenders here; we’ve both apparently moved pages from /name.html to /name/.
Weird typos and copy-paste errors when I authored, including this one that, because of where it’s linking, worked out anyway.
Lots of git repos that were apparently taken down or hallucinated completely by me for my SI editors post. I did get to find a new fun little editor though!

In some cases, I tried to find an archive of the page on the Wayback machine; in others, I moved the URL; and in a few, I simply deleted (well, commented out) the link. They say that on a quiet night, you can still hear the ghosts of the dead links calling out across the Web …….

I should do this every year or so, like spring cleaning.

PS. My favorite dead link fix

Oh, and my favorite: I had linked to a Sam Altman tweet for my Human made badging post, of course using xcancel instead of actual twitter because Elon Musk can suck eggs.

Of course, in the intervening period xcancel was itself canceled, so the link quit working. I did a cursory search and found a page recommending the Wayback machine, to which I said, of course!

But did I wayback twitter? No :) I wayback’d the xcancel post, hehe.

Skins

2026-09-12T22:09:00Z

Skins are the best parts of any fruit. I say this partially as a political statement: one’s skin is one’s interface to the world, the barrier between what is and is not … one (this britishism is awkward, let me change to the more conversational you) … Your skin is both how you perceive and how you are perceived. In this way, it is one of the more important parts of your body. (And of course it’s permeable and more complicated, but my point is elsewhere.)

Fruits’ skins are the same; why wouldn’t they be? Ditto their other internal parts: seeds, core, pith. Most parts of most fruit are edible; take, eat!

I remember being about seven years old and eating the granny smith apple skins my mom peeled off the fruit as she was putting them in our lunches. I remember trying some orange peel, raw, and blanching (it’s quite bitter!). Reading Parker’s post (and the reply), I was frankly surprised that neither of them had eaten the kiwi skins before. That’s like, the whole experience to me, and now that my kid asks for kiwi a lot I have more opportunity to think about kiwi skins than I have in years.

Skins are complicated. My mother-in-law hates peaches because of their fuzzy skin. She likes nectarines; it’s just peaches that she shuns. My wife hates muscadine grapes because of their thick, tannic skins. I love them for the same reason. When I ate meat, I ate shrimp with the tough shells—their skins—on.

Maybe it’s how I grew up. My dad would call the pizza crust—a skin in a way—the “bone;” he said it was the best part. Nowadays I agree. I remember very well the one Bill Nye bit where the kid is just stuffing this bread in his mouth, stuffing it and stuffing it (without the crust), and his parents are like “Eat your crust,” “Eat your crust Billy,” and he doesn’t, and then there’s a huge earthquake and I imagine they all die. Maybe that’s why I eat the crust, really, to not kill everyone I love.

Some things form a skin when cooking, like pudding and tofu. I’ve never had tofu skin, but pudding skin is kind of good.

Anyway look. The point is, skins are liminal. They delineate but they also permeate, negotiate. They are the biological borders of the universe. I say, let’s taste those skins! They tell us so much about what’s inside of them.

Stroke sorting

2026-08-27T00:08:00Z

I apply stroke-based sorting to the Roman alphabet.

Publishing your salary can hurt your future salary

2026-08-14T00:08:00Z

Kev Quirk writes about people who’ve published their salary history online, and worries how it might skew readers’ perceptions in a keeping-up-with-the-joneses type way. Their article reminds me of that instagram effect where, because everyone posts their best selves and you know your whole self, it makes you feel bad. It’s an aspect of salary publishing I hadn’t considered, and I’m writing this response because Kev missed the aspect I had considered:

Publishing your salary can affect your future career.

I used to work at a career center in a public library, and one of the biggest pieces of advice we gave out was not to answer the salary expectation questions if at all possible. Ditto to the salary information for past jobs as well.

The reason is simple: posting your salary gives companies an opportunity to pay less, because they think you’ll expect less. Or they’ll think you’re not experienced enough, or too experienced or expensive, given your previous salaries. Basically, you don’t want to give the game away before it’s even started, especially in a negotiation that’s already so unevenly matched.

I suppose that if you’re comfortable in your job and think you’re fairly compensated, and your compensation has steadily increased over your career, you might not be at risk of what I’ve outlined above. But then you’re running into the problem that Kev brought up, so.

Ultimately, like Kev said, it’s your life, your career, your site. Do what you want. I don’t think I’ll be posting my salaries, even though I think the world would be a better place if we all did.

The Dozen Variations

2026-08-12T00:08:00Z

Over in the #tildetown IRC we were discussing the dozen and its variations. Along with the traditional baker’s dozen, skalnik mentioned the long dozen and metric dozen. Here is a full listing of the dozens variations.

Half-dozen: 6. Self-explanatory, really.
Baker’s half-dozen: 7. Gotta throw in that extra one (see baker’s dozen).
Metric dozen: 10. Blame the French.
Short dozen: 11. Don’t bring up its height, it has a complex.
Dozen: 12. The original: often imitated, never duplicated.
Baker’s dozen: 13. Bakers threw in an extra to avoid heavy penalties.
Long dozen: 14. Webster lists “long dozen” as 13, but it’s already got a name. Besides, 14 is longer.
Texas dozen: 15. Everything is bigger in Texas.
Dobizen: 16. Like kibibyte for 1024 bytes.
Gross: 144. A dozen dozens. I like to think it’s like Terry, not disgusting. Unless you eat that many donuts, I guess.

This page will be updated as more dozen variations are discovered. Have you found one? Contact me!

Copying files ... with style

2026-07-31T00:07:00Z

The venerable cp command is well-known to any Unixer. Whether you want to copy one file or a whole tree recursively, cp is always available and always ready to help.

However, as with most things in life there is more than one way to cp the cat. In this article, I’m going to explore some alternatives to cp that you can use … if you dare.

Copying single files

Copying files to other files, or into a new directory, is fairly simple. All you need to do is ensure that the bytes in file A are replicated in file B, creating B if necessary. Copying multiple files from one directory to another is a little more complicated, but only a little.

File → File

In each of these examples, FROM is the source file and TO is the destination file:

dd if=FROM of=TO — you can even add status=progress to see how much is copied at a time!
cat <FROM >TO, cat FROM >TO — cat isn’t just for text files.
curl -o TO file://localhost/FROM — curl isn’t just for http(s), ftp(s), dict, gopher(s), imap(s), ldap(s), mqtt, pop3(s), rtsp, scp, sftp, smb(s), smtp(s), telnet, tftp, or ws(s); it can do files too!

You can also use the shell itself … if you’re copying a text file. There might be a way to copy binary files this way, but I don’t know it.

:>TO
while read -r line
do prinf '%s\n' "$line" >> TO
done < FROM

Files → Directory

To copy multiple files to a given directory, you can use any of the above methods in a for loop. The only real complication is getting the filenames right. Here is a template using the dd method above:

mkdir TO_DIR
for F in FROM...
do dd if="$F" of="$TO_DIR/${F##*/}"
done

Recursively copying directories

Honestly, I mostly use cp -a to recursively copy directories, and that’s only when I forget about rsync -zaP. This is an area where a purpose-built tool is what you want to reach for; recursive copying is pretty complicated.

However, if you don’t have cp or rsync, but do for some reason have tar, this’ll work (it works for moving multiple single files to a new directory, too; just specify multiple FROMs):

tar cf - FROM_DIR | (cd $(mkdir -d); tar xf -; mv * TO_DIR/)

How else can you copy a file?

I’m going to keep updating this page as I come up with new ways to copy files without using cp. If you have found one I’ve missed, please email me and let me know! I’ll copy it to this page posthaste.

I don't really like the "Human-made" badging trend

2026-07-23T00:07:00Z

I just came across the Done by Humans “movement,” which appears to similar to not by AI: both offer badges to display proudly on your human-made website after some kind of vetting process. I don’t understand the appeal of sites like these or what they offer, and I think it’s possible they represent a new way to mislead people about AI use on the web.

There are three main reasons I am wary of these efforts.

1. They’re unnecessary

I don’t use AI on my website: I’ve coded it all by hand and I write all the words. I have a little hand-made badge on my front page that says as much, and it’s really easy to find other badges—or make your own—online. So the badges provided by Done by Humans and not by AI aren’t needed.

Also, because of the way the Internet works, if you want to use one of those sites’ badges—regardless of your AI use—you just download and re-host them.

Tangent about finding the badges

... OK, so I was going to add the badges here, but at least DBH have made it a little more complicated to get a badge. Or they don't actually provide badges? I don't know, but now that I'm digging just a little deeper it's pretty clear the whole project is bunk. Some certificates point to websites that don't, and can't exist, while others point to archive.org pages, presumably written by the author listed in the site? Regardless, it seems as though none of the submissions are properly vetted, so the value of having one of these badges seems pretty thin.

… OH! yes they do. I finally found this one on like, the eighth site I clicked on:

As for the not by AI badges, they want your email and possibly payment for the privilege of using their badges. And while the example badge at the bottom of their page isn’t right-clickable (and it’s just in English), it’s not hard to yoink it too using the advanced hacking technique of view-source:

2. They don’t mitigate the cause that AI overuse is a symptom of

While I don’t like it when people say “AI is a tool,” it is a tool in the sense that when it causes problems, it’s not the AI per se but the people using it. AI (over)use is a symptom of late-stage runaway capitalism with its perverse incentives to maximize profit at the expense of every other metric, including human dignity, a healthy environment, etc. Putting a little badge on your site doesn’t mitigate those facts at all, and that’s true for my hand-made one as well.

“So why bother at all?” you might say. “While these sites don’t help anything, they don’t hurt either,” you might also say. “You admit a badge does nothing and yet you still have one; curious,” you might further intone.

I agree with each of these points. The point I’m trying to make here is subtle. Yes, no-AI buttons are equivalent to doing your own recycling (the overwhelming majority of waste is caused by industrial processes and individual recycling solves a vanishingly small proportion of the problem). Yes, something isn’t nothing (doing a little bit, like showing you personally care about not using AI, is better than doing nothing at all).

However, I think that having a third party verify (or not, apparently) whether you’re using AI in your personal site is endemic of the commodification of everything under late-stage capitalism. If you don’t use AI on your site, just say so. Make a dumb button yourself, or use the one on my site (don’t hotlink it, please!). It doesn’t have to be this big production.

3. They don’t actually mean what they say

Finally, the most baffling thing about these sites for me is that they aren’t actually against AI use.

not by AI clearly states that you can generate up to 10% of your content with AI, and that

You can freely use AI for inspiration purposes, supporting legal documents, non-user facing content, or looking for grammatical errors and typos.

Done by Humans takes a little more digging, but both of its founders are in the AI business (emphasis mine):

In 2020, [co-founder Pedro Favuzzi] founded KineticLab, a technology company developing accessible AI-powered biomechanics and kinematics tools to help bike fitters and movement specialists access high-quality analysis technology at affordable prices.

[Co-founder George Kovalev] is the founder of Barcelona Code School, where since 2015 he has helped hundreds of students transition into careers in software development, UX/UI design, game development, and AI engineering through intensive bootcamps and mentorship.

I’m not quoting these to “debunk” anyone, and I’m not making a value judgment outside of (A) I don’t personally like AI use at all and (B) I think it’s strange that a company claiming to champion things made by humans was founded by people who don’t seem to understand the serious ethical, economic, and aesthetic problems that modern AI tooling causes.

Human-washing and the future of “content”

I’m writing this in the middle of 2026. I’m not sure if history will see this period as the height of the AI bubble, or the beginning of … something else (I think the concept of AGI is completely nonsensical, but who knows what businesses are going to do and/or claim).

I also read “Why I stopped ‘creating content’” by Michael Lynch yesterday, which I think makes good points about the commodification of creativity starting in the 1990s.

I think that, just as we’ve seen greenwashing to commoditize the environmental movement and pinkwashing for the Pride movement, sites like the ones I’ve showcased here represent “human-washing:” companies catering to the anti-AI crowd will have an incentive to claim their work is not created by AI, regardless of the veracity of that claim.

Done by Humans and not by AI aren’t the only sites offering badges, either. A quick search turned up By Human, Not AI, which at least empowers the user to build their own badge and doesn’t require you to register anywhere, and a Created with human intelligence badge that’s related to some substack, a platform I cannot pretend to understand or care about.

Anyway, the point is that handmade work is valuable, so capitalists will try to capture that value and subjugate it to their own ends. I’m purposefully avoiding a call to action here, because I think that the solution rests with all of us just talking to each other. That’s really what all art—writing, drawing, sculpting, websites, and the rest—is about.

Name days

2026-07-20T00:07:00Z

My birthday is coming up, so I’ve been thinking about birthdays. For the past three years or so I’ve also had a “Casemas” holiday on my calendar for the third Wednesday of July, since I was born on the third Wednesday. I don’t remember quite what the conversation was, but noaks and I must’ve been discussing it at some point since he invited me to the original event.

This year, I realized that what I’ve been calling “Casemas” would be more accurately “Casegiving,” since Christmas is on the same day every year but Thanksgiving is on the fourth Thursday.

And that got me thinking about what other name days there could be. Here is a non-exhaustive list. I’ll use my name and birthday (July 25, 1990) in these, but of course you should feel free to adapt them to your own life.

Casemas: July 25

My birthday. So apparently, Christmas was originally calculated by figuring that Jesus died on the day of his conception, then counting forward 9 months. I don’t know the day I will die and I don’t want to think about my conception, so I’m just going to use my birthday.

Casegiving: the 4th Wednesday of July

Like how (American) Thanksgiving is celebrated on the 4th Thursday of November, Casegiving is celebrated on the same week/day of the month I was born.

Variations include Canadian Casegiving, the 2nd Sunday of June‍—calculated by subtracting 1 from the month, 2 from the week number, and 3 from the weekday of American Casegiving—and Case-Franksgiving, held one week earlier than Casegiving on the 3rd Wednesday in a misguided attempt to provide an extra seven days of holiday shopping.

Caseter: 101 days after Easter

Easter is a famously complicated date to compute, falling on the Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring equinox. However, the full moon is not an astronomical full moon, but rather a Pashcal full moon, the 14th day of a lunar month. Similarly, the equinox is not reckoned according to reality but rather to ecclesiastical tradition that fixes it to March 21.

Apparently, it’s further complicated by the fact that the lunar months follow a 19-year metonic cycle that has been variously calculated throughout history. TL;DR: it’s lunar-solar calendar confusion and really, you’ll be best to contact your local Pope to learn when your name-ster is with any real theological accuracy.

Further (wikipedia) reading:

Casedi Gras: 61 days after Easter

It’s a little-known fact that only 325 days belong to the year (the other 40 are Lent). Casedi Gras marks the beginning of the Casenten period. Technically, Ash Caseday marks the beginning of Casent, which makes Casedi Gras a great opportunity to get all the sinning out of the way before the period of reflection. The day is marked by parades, excessive drinking, and Case Cakes, especially in New Orleans.

Case Duckworth Day: the 4th Monday in July

Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which was the Monday before MLK’s birthday the year he was born. This is a good day to observe your birthday for time-off purposes. See also the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.

Caseoween: May 31

Caseoween is the day before All Case’s Day on June 1. Over the centuries, it has eclipsed the other day in observances and relative importance, probably because it’s simply a lot more fun.

In modern times, Caseoween has begun marking the beginning of the Caseoday season, though the more traditionally-minded still adhere to Casegiving and the day after, Black Caseday.

Roseanne Barr Day: July 25

While researching this article, I learned the funnest fact that my birthday, July 25, 1990, is the same day that Roseanne Barr sang the national anthem at an MLB game.

The San Diego Tribune labeled her performance a “Barr-Strangled Banner” in which she screeched an off-tune performance with fingers in her ears over a chorus of boos. She capped it all with a crotch-grab and spit before leaving the stadium altogether.

Celebrate your own Roseanne Barr day by finding out what she was doing on your date of birth, or by finding out what national embarrassment you missed out on because you were busy being born.

P.S. Movable Feasts Are Hard

Now that I’ve published this post and have been sharing it around, noaks notes (on IRC):

21:55 <noa> the one sentence i take slight issue with is the “I realized that what I’ve been calling “Casemas” would be more accurately “Casegiving,” since Christmas is on the same day every year but Thanksgiving is on the third Thursday” 21:56 <noa> because im not sure the suffix is tied to how the date is calculated 21:57 <noa> originally i went with casemas because i was under the impression that christmas meant “the coming of christ” which i am no longer sure about, and birthday was already taken by the original holiday

In pondering these points, I realized that the 25th would never be the third anything in July, and lo and behold it was the fourth Wednesday I was born. So the mystery of the original Casemas deepens further.

Writing my own markup language

2026-07-15T00:07:00Z

The article you are currently reading has been written in a markup language of my own design, called JAMES. It’s a line-based language that borrows ideas from Gemtext (itself inspired partly from Gophermaps and Troff though it’s not a programming language like Troff is but a markup language.

The rest of this article discusses my motivations for a new markup language and provides a tour of JAMES syntax. You can read the source code of this page and the JAMES program online.

Why another markup language?

There are already so many markup languages—from the featureful (LaTeX) to the lightweight (Markdown, Gemtext); from the procedural (roff) to the declarative (HTML). Before I began writing JAMES, I made great use of gemtext; in fact I think it’s nearly perfect for my needs.

However, the operative word is nearly. Gemtext is not quite flexible enough to be an everyday markup language due to a few lacking features:

The spec explicitly requires line-wise parsing. I’ve written parsers that relax that requirement so I can hard-wrap paragraphs, but that feels kludgey.
Inline links are, IMO, important for accessibility and readability. Gemtext doesn’t allow them, leading to ugly layout or ad-hoc workarounds that I don’t like.
The spec is famously vague in a few key areas, for example verbatim blocks.
I appreciate inline markup like bold, italics, or code.

More recently, I’ve been interested in the *roff family of languages for their simplicity of syntax and expressive power. I tried to write a roff-like language that could output HTML (the groff html output is, like many GNU productions, baroque), and even made some progress—but I realized that I don’t actually want to program my documents.

In looking for a happy medium, I’ve been working on and off on what eventually has become JAMES for around a year. The final thing that made the syntax “click” was processing lines based on whether they begin or end a paragraph, or continue a same-tagged or differently-tagged one. (More on that later.)

While I’ve only written a few things in JAMES so far, I’m enjoying it. In my opinion, it’s a good combination of the best bits of gemtext and groff: it’s more expressive and extensible than gemtext, while not requiring me to fully program my documents like groff. The balance between simplicity and expressivity is tricky to strike; with conditional output and verbatim tags, I think I’ve provided an okay “escape valve” into more complex markup while allowing most of my writing to stay easy to write and read.

For example, at one point I sketched out an image tag like

^ <url> ^ <alt text> ^ <title>

but realized that, instead of adding parsing complexity to handle this line type, I could just write

'<img src="<url>" alt="<alt>" title="<title>" />

and be done with it.

To sum up with this why section: I wrote JAMES partly out of dissatisfaction with existing options, partly out of NIH syndrome, and partly (maybe mostly?) to have fun. It has been a success in all three areas!

JAMES syntax

JAMES is line-based in that it reads input line-by-line, then dispatches output based on each line’s first character, or tag.

So far, so similar to gemtext, gophermaps, and groff. However, JAMES adds block-level semantics that I think provide a richer markup language. In broad strokes, JAMES

Splits text into paragraph separated by one or more blank lines,
Determines the paragraph’s tag by examining its first line,
And determines each line’s tag by looking at its first character.

This means that when you denote a header with # a hashmark, the entire paragraph is part of that header. In addition, each tag has two meanings: a “paragraph-level” meaning and an “inline” meaning for when it’s not the first line of the paragraph. I’ve tried to keep these two meanings closely related, but there are a few exceptions, notably # for headings and bold text and * for lists and italic text.

Lines

The main semantic unit of JAMES is the line. The program reads its input line-by-line, then formats and outputs each line depending on its position within its paragraph:

An opening line emits the paragraph’s opening markup.
Subsequent lines emit their “inline” markup.
The final line (strictly, the first blank line after the final line) emits closing markup.

As an example, the first header in this article was written

## Why
* another
markup language?

The initial ## marks the paragraph as a subheader. On the next line, the * denotes italics because it's continuing the paragraph. If it were the first line of a pararaph, it would be rendered as a list item. The last line is a plain-text line and is emitted verbatim. Then, the whole thing is closed out (think <h1>..</h1> in HTML).

Inline processing

For fun, I also wrote JAMES to do some limited processing within lines: It encodes HTML entities including < (<), > (>), and & (&), and can “fancify” quote marks and dashes. That is, -- is converted to – (en dash), --- is converted to — (em dash), `...' is converted to ‘...’ (single curly quotes), ``...'' is converted to “...” (double curly quotes), and (this is silly) -> is converted to → (right arrow).

The Backslash — `\`

The backslash has three uses in JAMES:

At the beginning of a line, denotes a plain-text line:

\# this isn't a header

→ # this isn’t a header

In the middle of a line, it separates in-element text from post-element text:

* some italic text\ and some not italic text

→ some italic text and some not italic text

At the end of a line, it tells JAMES to elide the spacing after it:

This lets you do (\
* parentheses\)

→ This lets you do (parentheses)

You can escape a backslash by doubling it anywhere:

\\So many back\\slashes!\\

→ \So many back\slashes!\

JAMES tags

Below, I take you on a quick tour of the current tags for JAMES. In theory, JAMES is extensible—adding a tag is as simple as writing a function—but I don’t know how this translates in practice. I mean, it’s not even a proper application yet!

Plain text — `\`

Good ol’ plain text. Even though it’s not as simple as it looks it’s the classic we all know and love from decades of computering.

A plain text paragraph doesn’t require any tag, but a \ can escape a tag character at the beginning of a line, which makes it a plain text tag in practice. You can also use it at the beginning of a paragraph that you want to begin with a tagged line, e.g.

\
# bold text

→

bold text

Link — `@`

The humble link is the element undergirding all of the modern internet. It’s what makes hypertext hyper. In JAMES, its syntax is

@ http://example.com like this.

Intraparagraph links look as you can see above, and if you start a paragraph with a link you’ll get a list of them:

Heading/bold — `#`

When beginning a paragraph, the octothorpe denotes a heading, “Markdown-style.” That is, the level of heading is denoted by how many ’thorpes start the line: the heading above is preceded by three, for example. Intraparagraph octothorped lines render as bold text.

List/emphasis — `*`

Paragraphically, the star renders an unordered list:

one
two
three

This tag, and the list of links above, are unique in that their contents must be completely on one line. This means that list items (and link list items) cannot contain other intraparagraph markup like other paragraph types. Figuring out how to fix this satisfactorily is on my list.

When used within a paragraph, a star italicizes text.

Quote — `>`

Inspired, again, by Markdown, the right angle bracket signifies quotation. When used within a paragraph, it renders as a quoted phrase, but when used as the basis of a paragraph, it’s a block quote:

[A] quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business. ~ A. A. Milne

Code — `=`

Equals for code is an Org-mode idea. I considered using the Markdown-style ` but I think I’m going to leave that open for another possibility. Code does what you expect, both intraparagraphically (=intraparagraphically) and otherwise:

(defun fib (n)
  (if (< n 2)
      n
      (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))

I’m not interested in syntax highlighting, so there’s no way to specify the language. Though having some way to specify parameters might be a good idea. ...

Special tags

The following tags are all processed before the others, so I’m calling them special. Here they are:

Verbatim — `'`

This is the “escape valve” I mentioned in the beginning of this article. Any lines—this tag does not work on paragraphs—starting with ' are passed through verbatim to the output (sans the starting quote, of course).

When paired with the next special tag, the quote can be quite powerful.

Command — `/`

This is a late addition to JAMES, but one that I think is necessary for its goal of producing correct output in multiple languages. It’s a late addition because it opens the door to programming documents—which if I wanted to do that, I’d just use groff. I hope to keep the number of commands small.

The only one I’ve defined for now is if, and the only condition I’ve defined is is. It allows, along with the verbatim tag above, structures like

/if is html
'<div style="border:1px solid;">box!</div>
/if is ms
'.BX "box!"
/end

→

box!

I’m still thinking about this feature, and whether using a command structure or something more purpose-built isn’t better, like

?html
'<div ...>

I could even elide the quoting, maybe, from the in-between lines. I’m not sure.

Continuation — <space>

Continuation tags mark lines that are continuations of the one before. How does this differ from the end-of-line backslash? A continuation line is combined with the previous before parsing, so you can keep line length manageable without sacrificing anything. For example:

@ http://example.com/long-url
  A (not really) long url\.

→ A (not really) long url

as opposed to

@ http://example.com/long-url\
  A (not really) long url\.

→http://example.com/long-url

Comment — `;`

A language would be incomplete without comments, wouldn’t it?

Conclusion

Now that I’m re-reading this essay, I’m not sure if I answered the question posed by its title. I’ll try to do that in a few sentences (or bullet points) here.

Why did I write my own markup language?

I was unsatisfied with the extant markup languages
I was fascinated by the idea of the line as a semantic unit, and wanted to try working with streams
Parsing is simply a good time
I thought it would be fun!

The result is JAMES, a fairly simple line-based markup language that I hope is sorta flexible. So far using it, it’s comfy—partly because if something isn’t comfy, I can change it.

I unironically love Nicolas Cage

2026-07-10T00:07:00Z

I don’t like talking about Nic Cage movies, because every time I do I get this nudge-nudge-wink-wink “yeah Cage is so great right?” thing where I know my conversation partner means no he’s actually not. Or they express their dislike and think I’m doing an “I like Nic Cage” thing for the bit.

But no, I actually really like Nicolas Cage as an actor. I like his bombastic style. I like his funky choices, even that he made bad ones like Ghost Rider. I like that he owned a haunted house in New Orleans for a while, and is generally just a weird guy.

My favorite rom-com of all time is Moonstruck, in no small part thanks to Cage’s acting. The man overacts, but I think he uses it to his advantage much of the time. He knows who he is and leans into it.

Honestly, I should watch more Nic Cage movies. I haven’t seen that many, actually, looking at his filmography. Also, damn this man is getting a lot of work these days, good for him.

I don’t really have a wider or bigger point than writing a fan post about my favorite nephew of Francis Ford Coppola. I will leave you with a quote about his acting style, Nouveau Shamanic:

The process itself is about: How do you augment your imagination in a healthy way? So that you can believe you’re these characters… You don’t feel like you’re acting, you feel like you’re being.

Colbert Questionert

2026-07-07T00:07:00Z

I like Colbert, even though I quit watching him around oh, 2012? Just lost the habit of tuning in the Report every night, then with what all happened in 2016 and beyond I just lost interest in pretty much anything news-shaped. Anyway, he apparently has a Questionert now, and since Sunbird answered it I will too.

What’s the best sandwich?

This one took me a second; I love sandwiches so much. But I’ve got to go with my order from Jimmy John’s: a #6 (Veggie), add pickles, onions, fried onions, peppers; sub mayo for Kickin’ Ranch®.

What was the first concert you attended?

It was a Casting Crowns concert with my youth group when I was about 14. I don’t really remember much about it, honestly.

What is the scariest animal?

The one that I dread the most, that sits brooding at the back of my mind, biding its time, waiting to infect me with something deadly, is the mosquito.

Mosquitoes already cause the most human deaths of any animal. Malaria, for example, is not eradicated—it’s only not a huge deal in the US because of mosquito control. West Nile mosquitoes are moving northward due to climate change.

Scary stuff!

Apples or oranges?

Depends on my mood. I love a crisp red apple or one of those little mandarin-style oranges. Honestly the one I choose tends to be the one I have in the house, or if I have both, the one I didn’t eat last.

Have you ever asked someone for their autograph?

I saw Future Islands once at a bar in Chattanooga, while they were touring for On The Water. (Jesus, that was fifteen years ago!?) I got all of them but one to autograph my CD case.

What do you think happens when we die?

I like Kurt Vonnegut’s thoughts on the matter as given in Slaughterhouse V (emphasis mine):

[Billy’s] attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn’t anybody else there, or any thing. There was just violet light—and a hum. And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which was red light and bubbling sounds.

I think if anything is outside of our lived experience, it’s something like that. I don’t believe in heaven or hell or any kind of afterlife. Reincarnation is aesthetically pleasing, and I wouldn’t mind it, but I don’t think it’s real.

Of course, my hottest take is that all any of us can be, underneath everything, is agnostic—so if god or someone came and told me differently, I’d believe them.

Favorite action movie?

Does Princess Bride count? Har har. But other than that, the only action movie I can think of right now is Die Hard.

Window or aisle?

Window, always.

Favorite smell?

Oh gosh, I don’t know. Smells are so great, aren’t they? I like so many of them, and besides, I’m bad with favorites.

Anyway, for today my favorite smell is tea tree, I think.

Least favorite smell?

You know that fake apple-cinnamon smell they have in some stores? I can’t stand that smell. I have to leave the room.

What is your earliest memory?

I had this nightmare when I was, oh, 3 or 4. My mom was going somewhere and I couldn’t go with her; I had to stay with my cousin at home. I remember waking up and running into my parents’ room.

Cats or dogs?

Dogs! I like cats, but I don’t know if I want to live with one.

You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it?

Does a symphony count as a song, or just one of its movements? If the whole symphony, Beethoven’s 9th.

If only a pop song: “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody),” by Talking Heads.

What number am I thinking of?

Four.

Describe the rest of your life in 5 words.

Enjoying time with my family.

Connecting online

2026-06-16T00:06:00Z

My first web presence was in sixth grade on this website called the express page. It was one of those websites where you could make your own little html page, like an off-brand geocities I guess (I never used geocities). They had some stock gifs too: I remember I really liked this one juggler guy.

My biggest memories using expage were the time when we found out it was not expages.com (that was porn) and the time I was updating my site in my sixth grade classroom and my teacher (who, I realize now, was probably in her mid-twenties) said “shit.” As you can imagine, that was hilarious to me and my friend Andy.

I used myspace, but honestly I don’t remember much about it.

I joined facebook in high school, somewhere between 2004 and 2006. I was at Andy’s house and he said, “hey there’s this new website like myspace, you should sign up for it,” and we set it up using his relatively-fast internet. I still remember my first profile picture, though sadly it is lost to the sands of time—it’s a real doozy.

The main things I remember about using facebook is playing a lot of Farmville in college and doing this thing where I’d “poke” all the suggested pokees on the “poke” page, then re-poke anyone who poked me and also the suggested pokees. Oh and I would “hack” friends’ accounts and change their birthdays, which IMO is the best way to “facebook hack” people.

Anyway, I don’t have to tell you how it got bad. I stopped browsing facebook … after graduate school, I think? and deleted the whole account maybe during the covid pandemic. I don’t remember specifics because the actual deletion was a formality; I’d stopped logging in years before.

I’ve had two reddit accounts, because I deleted the first one to try and quit the habit before crawling back some time later. Then I deleted the second one. And I still browse reddit, though without an account now, just the front page. I don’t feel good about it and would love to stop, and at some point I’m sure I will.

The only mainstream social network I’m currently on is linkedin, which I’ve been browsing more lately while searching for a job. It’s utter hell—maybe worse than facebook when I quit facebook, and it’s got the weirdest ads on there too. Once I get a new job I’m going to go back to checking it as little as possible.

finding connection

None of the mainstream social networks really offer much in terms of connection. Facebook did provide updates on my family and friends, as well as event invites, but the rest of it—the ads, the misinformation, the algorithm—nullified any benefits.

The places that I’ve connected to people online have been smaller and … more focused? Not necessarily focused in terms of topic (though many are), but in terms of vibes. I guess the right word would be well-moderated.

The first place I remember really having community online, like totally online, was the crunchbang forum (RIP). I actually made a facebook friend from there!

The linux/open-source community continues to be the best place I’ve found community online. Nowadays, I’m mostly active on the tilde.town irc network, where I’ve made many friends (and even met up with a few irl).

For the less tech- or libre-software-oriented (nearly everyone I know irl), I stay connected with a mixture of sms, email, and whatsapp. I’d love to get everyone on xmpp or something bridgeable to it, but I haven’t been able to generate much interest in switching to what is, really, just another chat app. Which is fine. The important thing is the communication; while I’m philosophically opposed to the profit-seeking actions of the google/apple/meta chat hegemony, I’m also a pragmatist. I’m no rms, after all.

digital minimalism

I don’t consider myself a digital minimalist. However, I think that being mindful about my computing is healthy, both for my body and my mind. So I try, to varying levels of success.

These days, I’m tired a lot—a toddler and a newborn will do that to you—so I’m scrolling more. My part-time front desk job means the same.

The thing about scrolling, doom- or otherwise, is that it’s passive consumption, like watching tv. What I’ve been trying to do lately is read more blogs. While before I was pretty much stuck with hacker news and lobsters for blog aggregation, bubbles town, powrss, and the like have been really good for finding new things to read. They’re also how I’m participating in this blog carnival!

I also like planets, like planet emacs. I need to get around to making my own from a list of rss feeds. I’d love it if more of my friends and family had blogs, but until then, I’ll just text them.