/reader

path *.txt /content/* /site/* /kirby/* /.*

But what if I want a /robots.txt file? Turned out to be a simple answer, but it took me a while to find it. I’m writing it down here in case anyone else might need it. Here’s the whole block from my site’s Caddyfile:

(kirby) {
    php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php8.3-fpm.sock
    @blocked {
        path *.txt *.md /content/* /site/* /kirby/* /.*
        not path /robots.txt   # <----- Here's the important part
    }
    respond @blocked "Not Found" 404 {
        close
    }
}

With that one extra line, when you add an import kirby line to a server block, /robots.txt will remain accessible.

One morning last week, she looked up at me as she held my hand and asked quizzically: “Papa, can people be tree-planters when they grow up?”

I smiled as I told her that yes, people can be tree-planters when they grow up, and that in fact all kinds of people of all kinds of ages could plant trees, even if it wasn’t their job. Curious, I asked her why she was thinking about tree planting.

Her answer was simple: “when someone cuts down a tree, somebody else has to plant a new one.”

There was no question in her mind that the act of cutting down a tree was accompanied by a reciprocal act of planting one in its stead. She knew we got paper products from trees, so it only made sense to her that we’d plant more trees to keep the cycle intact.

What she reminded me was that in each act of destruction, we need restoration. Simply: when we cut something down, we need to grow something in its place.

We are, to put it lightly, in a world of tumult. I don’t often link to stories and articles about the current political landscape because I know you’re all getting a deluge of them in other ways — I anticipate more than 50% of my reading these days is about the dismantling of our democratic institutions — but I do think it’s important to remember that this tumult, too, shall end. Other tumults will take its place, but this one, through the hard work and tenacity of all of us working against the maleficent actors, will come to a close.

And when things finally change, what will be left for us to do is restore. We need to take the time and effort to see what has been dismantled and destroyed, and come up with ways to grow them back, better than they even were before.

This means we need to take stock of what we have lost, but instead of dwelling on the loss, think about how we can rebuild, what we can recreate from the ashes of what once was.

When this tree has been cut down, we need to plant a new one.

This is what is keeping me afloat as we cope with a political and social environment that is so bent on destruction of what we hold dear: that one day, we will have the chance to restore, and to build again, and build better. And it’s that thought, that aspiration to create things that will help people and build community and make lives better, that I carry with me through all the tumult we have now.

There are other ways to carry ourselves through these times. I loved this take by Anand Giridharadas:

Having, and nurturing, in your life a sphere for joy and connection and community and love and food and music and human difference and living and letting live is everything they are not and is everything they are trying to take away.

Be what scares them. Live lives in colors their eyes can’t even see. Cook food they want to deport. Test the fire code with your parties. Form a scene that meets every Wednesday. Call someone you haven’t in a while. Fight with a smile. Fail and come back. Be weird. Be welcoming. Kiss converts. Refuse despair. Be disobedient. Laugh loudly. Hide someone. Call out. Root down.

They are waging a war on living. The more fully you live, the harder their job will be.

And this rumination on walking as protest by Craig Mod:

A solitary walk, disconnected from the network, is by definition ascetic. And asceticism is most certainly a “protest against the exorbitancies of the passions.”

And this call by Dan Sinker to do one thing:

We are living through a period of protracted awfulness, and the end is not coming anytime soon. Those in power would like nothing more than to keep you exhausted and impotent, incapable of getting anything done (especially the things that will undermine their power). So do one thing.

It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be something. And when that one’s over, move on to the next thing. Some days this will be easier than others (I’ll be honest, today I have been shit at this, in fact this post is my one thing), but do what you can. Do one thing.

And of course, this incredible post by Mandy Brown on keeping moving, and doing things — like organizing, gathering strength, kinwork, experimentation, and making art — that keeps that motion going. I was especially taken by the idea of kinwork as motion:

Now is also the time to kinwork–to reach out to people you know, people whose company you enjoy, whether you’re old friends or new, whether you met on the street or at work or at your local coffee house. As I’ve said before, this isn’t about making a series of transactions, or amassing favors; it’s about making connections, about building and sustaining relationships which grow more strength and agency for you both.

It’s especially important in times of crisis to do the work of making kin: isolation breeds its own kind of discouragement, the sense that nothing can be done. To contemplate lifting a huge boulder on your own is overwhelming; but do it with a dozen other people and the task becomes easy, even joyful. We need that ease and joy, now as ever.

And if all else fails, dream of restoration, of planting new trees. We’ll need creators more than ever when it is time to rebuild.

A poem

The Thing Is
Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Some links

The Hubble Telescope, on February 23 in 2013, took this photo of galaxies in the GOODS-North Field.

This image captures about 15,000 galaxies stretching back through 11 billion years of cosmic history. Hubble examined this part of the sky, located near the Big Dipper and called the GOODS-North field, as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS).

You can find out what photo Hubble took on your birthday here.

Researcher Thomas Vilgis, as well as researchers from Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and the University of Southern Denmark, have created a process to replicate foie gras without force-feeding, using the bird’s own lipases.

Young gay men are often taken to Hooters by their straight fathers and grandfathers, and the amazing waitresses there are often the people who make those young men feel the most safe and secure to just be who they are.

Jaya Saxena did the hard work to investigate why Smartfood — one of my favorite snacks and one that is loved by almost everyone I know — just doesn’t taste as good as it used to anymore.

The idea that congestion pricing makes cities better is one that we’ve known for a long time, but it’s amazing to see all the numbers broken down in this post by Sam Deutsch. Congestion pricing is really a policy miracle, and I’m sad more cities here in Canada haven’t embraced it by now.

Tressie McMillan Cottom on the hyping of “mid” technology: “A.I.’s most revolutionary potential is helping experts apply their expertise better and faster. But for that to work, there has to be experts.“

We’ve all known this, but now there’s well-studied causal evidence: blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being.

I love the idea of the street as a third place, and the idea of stoop-sitting as community-building. It’s one of the things I miss most about living in a more dense, walkable neighborhood.

Ian Bogost reminds us that the assault on universities will be devastating to academia and free thought, but also on a part of university life we often forget: “earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.”

Microsoft celebrates its 50th birthday this week, so the Verge has made a list of their 50 best things Microsoft has made. (As someone who has to work in a primarily-Microsoft ecosystem, it’s hard to think of good things about the company and its products, but there are some interesting additions to the list. )

And to cleanse the palate after a long week, here is a collection of behind the scenes photos of early Sesame Street with the Muppets.

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Sometimes I’ll see a friend riding a wave while I’m paddling out, and the thing I’ll see them do just seems like magic...I’ll think, “How in the world did they just do that?” And then on your next ride you’re doing the exact same thing without thinking but it’s all muscle memory and it’s all in this flow that you get into. That’s a really beautiful state to get into, to do something that feels like a magic trick, like something you shouldn’t be able to do, but all of the sudden you’re doing it.

I’m not a surfer, and I can’t do effortlessly cool. But I know what a flow state feels like.

Johnson’s description reminds me of that feeling when you get a little time on a personal project — riding the wave of working on your personal website.

You open your laptop. You start paddling out. Maybe you see an internet friend who was doing something cool and you want to try it but you have no idea if you’ll be able to do it as well as they did.

And before you know it, you’re in that flow state where muscle memory takes over and you’re doing stuff without even consciously thinking about it — stuff that others might look at and perceive as magic (cough anything on the command line cough) but it’s not magic to you. Intuition and experience just take over while you ride the wave.

Ok, I’m a nerd. But I don’t care. It’s a great feeling, regardless of whether it’s playing an instrument, or surfing, or programming. That feeling of sinking into a craft you’ve worked at your whole life that you don’t have to think about anymore.

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It doesn’t quite rise to the same level, but nonetheless: about halfway through the book, Jenks tells Rosemary the literal story of how I got my name.

“Do you know why Human modders give themselves weird names?”

She shook her head.

“It’s a really old practice, goes back to pre-Collapse computer networks. We’re talking old tech here. People would choose names for themselves that they only used within a network. Sometimes that name became so much a part of who they were that even their friends out in the real world started using it. For some folks, those names became their whole identity. Their true identity, even.”

Obviously, I’ve written about this here—and did so again just recently—and as I said in an email to Chambers, while it might be on a technicality this might be the wildest, weirdest way I’ve ever been seen by something.

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 My star sign is Aquarius. Aquarians are, according to tradition: deep, imaginative, original, and uncompromising. That sounds like a pretty good description of me, right?

Now some of you might be thinking, “Hang on, wasn’t Dan born very close to the start of the year, and wouldn’t that make him a Capricorn, not an Aquarius?” I can understand why you’d think that.

And while it’s true that I was assigned the star sign of Capricorn at my birth, it doesn’t really represent me very well. Capricorns are, we’re told, serious, disciplined, and good with money. Do any of those things remotely sound like me? Not so much.

So many, many years ago I changed my star sign to Aquarius (I can’t remember exactly when, but I’d done it a long while before I wrote the linked blog post, which in turn is over 14 years old…).

I’ve been told that it’s not possible to change one’s star sign.

But really: who has the right to tell you what your place in the zodiac is, really? Just you.

And frankly, people telling you who you can and can’t be is so last millennium. By now, there’s really no excuse for not accepting somebody’s identity, whether it’s for something as trivial as their star sign… or as important as their gender, sexuality, or pronouns.

All of which is to say: I’ve launched a(nother) stupid website, ChangeYourStarSign.com. Give it a go!

It’s lightweight, requires no JS or cookies, does no tracking, and can run completely offline or be installed to your device, and it makes it easier than ever for you to change your star sign. Let’s be honest: it was pretty easy anyway – just decide what your new star sign is – but if you’d rather have a certificate to prove it, this site’s got you covered.

Whether you change your star sign to represent you better, to sidestep an unfortuitous horoscope (or borrow a luckier one), or for some other reason, I’d love to hear what you change it to and how you get on with it. What’s your new star sign?

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