i write a lot of my post drafts in the app Drafts¹, but here's some drafts that didn't make the cut or like i forgot or something

i used to have a pretty nightmarish read later system, until kobo said they were going to integrate with instapaper due to the pocket shutdown. then i switched over to instapaper for everything.

i have no idea what the fuck i was cooking with here. this was written about a year and a half ago, while cohost still existed. reading the other paragraph i had here, right below the crop, it seems to have been a post on how you should just use tags or something. i think i was just annoyed at people using mastodon-style content warnings and wanted to write a big callout post complaining about it. probably for the best i didn't finish it.

this could've been something maybe but then pocket shut down, showing i was right all along and pocket sucks really bad. i think the inspiration for this was me trying to upload an article from verso to pocket and i literally could not make it work.

this was when i tried matter after a long break away. matter looks pretty but genuinely sucks, and i was really annoyed at how the core product got so much worse after i was away for so long. if you can't tell, i think a lot about managing and reading links.

anyways that's some drafts! maybe i'll finish some of them, but i'll likely just archive them now that they'll get to live on in some form. thank you for reading and please be sure to comment on which one makes you go like "no wait she's got something there"

that reminds me, i need to write a post about how i handled adding comments to my blog. hoping that someone could point out any limitations and risks before i find them out the hard way

thinking about how my comments stuff doesn't have shadows. the leave a comment box and the comments themselves 😔 it's so tragic.

from https://belarius.neocities.org/bulletin-board-nonsense/post/the-thousand-points-of-light-above-as-below/

netrunner mentioned!!!!!!!!

I’m still working on shared posts and wanted to delay doing this until I finished that, but I have too many links piling up, so it’ll have to happen next time.

from https://belarius.neocities.org/bulletin-board-nonsense/post/the-critics-are-restless/

from https://belarius.neocities.org/bulletin-board-nonsense/post/in-coherence/

from https://belarius.neocities.org/bulletin-board-nonsense/post/a-love-no-less-toxic-for-all-its-chastity/

from https://belarius.neocities.org/bulletin-board-nonsense/post/wheres-the-fun-in-breaking-the-rules-subtly/

from https://belarius.neocities.org/bulletin-board-nonsense/post/can-you-jam-with-the-console-cowboys-in-cyberspace/

from https://belarius.neocities.org/bulletin-board-nonsense/post/are-you-still-there/

Sorry Belarius for not doing my god given duty of immediately rebugging every post you make with netrunner cards with saying “netrunner mentioned!!!” You are free to email me at [email protected] to harass me at any time.

missed a doctor's appointment due to moving stuff and feeling pretty bleak about it 😔

I’m in the middle of moving, so I’ll try to keep this one short, but here’s links!

Mikhail Klimentov: Kill the CEO in your head

Genuinely though. I’ve read so much writing about games that just feels like a press release.

Os Keyes: Beyond Trans Archives, Beyond Trans Medicine

Please, if you only read one thing this week, let it be this. I found it in my read later pile, saved from a recommendation from probably god knows where. It’s a deep and loving look at archival practices, trans joy, and our relationship with academics. It will leave you in tears.

Laura Michet: It's okay to be a certain kind of hooligan

I do not "understand" getting that mad about having to drive slowly behind cyclists for a minute. I never will. It's deranged, murderous behavior. I'm glad to call it criminal.

I love basically everything Laura Michet writes, and this is no different. Read her stuff! It’s good!

jergling: 2026: A Tech Odyssey

You are awakened by a digital chime at exactly 4:00 a.m. Peeling your eyes open, you see the walls begin to shine in a rainbow of RGB waves. Your handheld greets you in Scarlett Johansson’s voice, through the bedside speaker…

A short story about the hell-world we’ll be moving towards 😔

wirewitchviolet: Sudokuvania: Digits of Despair is one of the most impressive works of pure game design I have ever seen.

I’ve been playing a bit of Sudokuvania recently, and it is genuinely impressive how good it is. It is also hard as fuck. I really do recommend it, but please realize you are signing up for many hours of puzzle game where the gameplay is Sudoku. (I love sudoku so this whips to me.)

They say “great artists steal”, and I wanted to showcase how I’ve solved some problems I’ve run into on my site by showing some niche dependencies I’ve picked up. Note that these are mostly files that have originated from other sources that I’ve copied in by hand as opposed to imported.

HAST util from Lezer

I will go more into depth on this on a future article on how syntax highlighting on my blog works, but to summarize: I use a tool called Lezer to handle syntax highlighting. This library is part of the pipeline my blog uses for adding that syntax highlighting. This was written by Joel Gustafson and mentioned in an incredible blog post going into some of the history around syntax highlighting. I copied it into my site basically wholesale, and you can find it in my codebase here (converted to javascript from typescript for some reason). I generally prefer copying code in over importing it, because it helps me understand what the code does, and it allows me to tune the code to better fit the needs of my shitty blog.

Theme Picker

My fancy theme picker was taken from the blog of Jim Nielsen. I thought the concept was pretty solid, and it wasn’t the hardest to bring it over to my site basically wholesale. You can find some more details in his post Building Websites With LLMs. It really checks all the boxes and I think that’s really great. You can also find the code in my blog repo.

rehype-truncate

If I am evaluating a dependency and see that it’s last been updated about 5 years ago, that’s a sure sign that I need to add it in by hand to make sure I understand what it’s doing, because if I run into any issues when using it, I don’t think the developer will ever respond to fix my issue, and I’ll have to fix it myself. If I recall correctly, that happened with rehype-truncate, which powers my read more feature. Like cohost (my beloved), my site tries to truncate my posts after seeing a line break or after reaching some sort of arbitrary word limit. This library does that truncation while avoiding breaking any html tags. You can find it in my codebase here (converted to typescript for some reason???)

if you ever need to update your comment btw just email me at [email protected]

New week new links!

Michelle Starr: Mammals Have Evolved Into Anteaters at Least 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs

Have you heard the news? Eating ants is the next big thing in animals!

Patricia Taxxon: mental health update

I'm just going to soapbox for a second. You might have DID without knowing it. It's far more mundane and common than you think it is. You don't need to hear voices in your head or wake up in random places without knowing how you got there. It can be a kind of depression that makes your memory spotty. A sense that something terrible has happened to you, but that feels like it happened to someone else, leaving you suspiciously unscathed.

This is genuinely just a mental health update from a youtuber I follow, but there's a lot of really good bits in here. I have rewatched it a handful of times, which is impressive when it's only two days old, just to hear the specific ways she phrases stuff. I think that it's a mark of a good writer when even the functional writing sticks with you.

Dr. Devon Price: Is Your Fear of Gender Transition Really the Fear of Aging?

Even the fear of transition regret is a resistance to the irreversibility of time. Life’s options inevitably winnow down as time advances, whether we make decisions or not. It is a loss of exit routes, but it’s also act of cementing and building upon what’s been there before.

Before I ever admitted I was transgender, I kept a log of male style inspirations on my Tumblr that I tagged #boysonas. The “boys” that captivated me were largely effete, soft spoken creative men with greying temples and lines around their lips. People like Ira Glass, Mads Mikkelsen, Rami Malek, Damon Albarn, Anthony Bourdain, Richard Ayoade, and Raul Esparza.

These were not boys, these were forty- and fifty-something men with a tired reflectiveness and a dry, sad wit about them, and they were beautiful to me, just beautiful. I had always wanted to be like them, yet I started to recoil when I saw those same lines and greys on me. Why?

This is the good good writing about being trans I crave. There is a lot of writing on being trans, but what I wish I had more of is writing by trans people for trans people about some of the messier aspects. This is making me think about Maddie's On Being Trans and the Importance of Passing, which also talks about some messy and maybe not fun parts of transitioning. We really need more of this and if any of y'all send some my way (don't forget, there's comments!!!), it'll almost certainly get linked in next week's roundup.

Wendy Brenner: Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife

I have never heard of the Oxford American before I read this, and since I mostly read articles on my e-reader, I didn’t even hear about it until after I read this. It’s one of those stories that make you desire more—more of the writing, more of the world, more of the characters—the moment I finished reading it on the little e-reader, I immediately searched for the article, pulled it up, and scrolled through the whole page again in the hopes that there would be more article that I had missed somehow, hoping for a parsing issue of some sort that would result in me finding out I had a little bit more I could read. There was not.

Horse on VHS: Nothing Doing

I swear I had one more link ready, but I guess I lost it? My backup is reminding y'all of Nothing Doing, my second favorite webcomic. (my first is still Please Forgive Me!!)