BTW, there are plenty of relatively low priced tickets available at the Pacers arena for the May 10 game when the playoff heads to Indiana . This is one of the Knicks fans' favorite tactics. Since there are so many New Yorkers, spread out all over the country, and we're pretty much all Knicks fans, this can create a demoralizing effect for the opposition players who assume their hometown crowd will be rooting for them, not the other team. It had a pretty adverse effect on the Sixers a few days ago. I was chatting about this with fellow Knicks fan NakedJen during last night's harrowing game, and said this might be a good tactic somehow in the election, if every time the opposition had a rally they discovered that most of the attendees were actually in favor of democracy and abortion rights.
Since I write so much about the Knicks here, I need to tell you that the Knicks won their first round playoff series against the Philadelphia team last night. Almost all playoff series that aren't sweeps are intense, but this one was especially so. So we're on to the next round, starting Monday, back in NYC, against the Indiana Pacers, an excellent team this year. And Doc Searls, who is also a Knicks fan, now lives in Indiana, so he is somewhat justified in believing the world revolves around him. I've always had that sense about Doc.
RSS > ActivityPub. I agree with this. And RSS is not exclusively polling based. If you support rssCloud protocol, as WordPress does, you can have instant news with RSS. It's built into FeedLand of course.
The other night, I was lying in bed looking over some photos of Jupiter
when I noticed a little animal icon at the top of my photo. I assumed it
was Apple's way of tagging a specific animal to make it easier to find
photos of it, so I tapped the button and glanced at the settings. I was
intrigued because it listed Jupiter as a Snowshoe cat. I chuckled to
myself, "Oh, Apple and your stupid image scanning... you're so stupid.
She's a Siamese mix or something, not a snowshoe... whatever that is."
Then I did a quick search and I realized Apple wasn't the idiot, I
was.
I'm not the most versed in cat breeds, but I feel like I can hold my own
in a conversation. With that being said, I'd never heard of a snowshoe
cat before, but it only took a couple of pictures to see the
resemblance.
Boring Standard Picture of a Snowshoe Cat
So, what is a snowshoe cat? Well, it's a rare Siamese mix formerly known
as a Silver Lace. Wikipedia states, "the Snowshoe is a short-haired
bicolor colourpoint breed" which is fancy talk for it has two colors
that transition from light to dark across the cat's body. It was given
the name snowshoe, because the cats have little white paws.
My little bugger licking the double sided tape, because yea she doesn't care
The breed is rare, because it’s difficult to get the right markings and
patterns (due to a reliance on recessive genes) to conform to the breed
standards. Even Jupiter, who would be considered a "pet snowshoe"
wouldn't meet the criteria, because she has too much white on her back
legs.
So, my little gutter kitty is a rare snowshoe cat, how
cool is that?
Liberal societies, I want to suggest, are those that offer refuge from the very people they empower. The reach of this formulation will become evident when we allow ourselves to use “refuge” in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, so that institutions and practices can offer refuge from a powerful person as much as a fortress can. […]
Because liberal societies offer within them different sorts of refuge, they should not produce many refugees fleeing elsewhere. The United States does not generally produce large refugee flows, but those it has at times produced — as when enslaved Americans fled to Canada before the American Civil War — have offered good indices of weaknesses in its liberal credentials. Liberal societies themselves should by their nature appreciate the plight of foreign refugees and err on the side of welcoming them, but the facts do not allow us to say that liberal societies are always more welcoming than nonliberal societies. The crucial indicator of liberalism is whether a society produces refugees. A society becomes more liberal when it reduces the reasons that people have to flee — not by converting all people to one outlook or identity, but by offering them the chance to find refuge internally. Liberal societies aim to generate no exodus.
It is in this sense that many of the recent developments I have regularly decried on this blog — surveillance capitalism, panoptic governance, coercive administrative practices (especially in academia) — are straightforwardly anti-liberal, sometimes consciously, sometimes blindly. I like the framing of refuge. From Florida’s “Stop WOKE” law to the anti-bias “teams” and “task forces” that populate American campuses, the common theme is: You have no refuge from us. Resistance is futile.
Garsten’s essay is trying to do a lot of things, and I think he gets tangled up at times, in interesting ways. For instance, on page 143 he moves seamlessly from celebrating the founding of cities to celebrating the spread of markets, in a way that suggests that he thinks that the reason we have cities is to spread markets. There are other views on that point. But the major themes involve certain claims about healthy societies. Such societies
do not generate many refugees
are hospitable to refugees from elsewhere
provide means of exit from their internal systems and structures
provide means of exit from the society altogether
Thus the conclusion:
Some critics worry that if we are given the choice to flee evils in the many ways a liberalism of refuge protects, our mobility will turn us into “rootless” beings. This concern has been given too much weight since Heidegger and Arendt. We are not trees who flourish when deeply rooted in the soil. We are human beings with legs, meant to explore. What we need to flourish is not roots so much as refuges from which we can venture forth and to which we can retreat. Often, we end up returning to where we started with new insight or appreciation, like Odysseus gratefully coming home. Sometimes we do not, or cannot, return home, and so we begin again and find, in those beginnings, a distinctively liberal adventure — the noble work of building a new society that refugees know so well.
I have reservations. For one thing, whether “building a new society” is “noble work” depends on the kind of society you’re building. (See: the Taliban.) More important: Is “exploring” the main thing that legs are for? Again, it depends on why you’re exploring. If Garsten had said that legs are for exploring to find food for your family and community, and to bring that food back to those who hunger, I’d have been happier. And in general, I think it’s more important for our minds to explore than our legs, even if when doesn’t create new markets.
In general, Garsten’s vision is a libertarian one, whereas I prefer anarchist models. In my view the primarily difference between libertarianism and anarchism is that the former wants to expand the scope of individual freedom while the latter wants to expand the scope of collaboration and cooperation. What if we were to re-frame “refuge” and “exit” in anarchist, or at least communitarian, terms?
An interesting book in this regard is Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, and especially the character of McPhee. McPhee is basically Lewis’s old tutor, William Kirkpatrick, AKA Kirk or the Great Knock, and I have always found it touching that Lewis sought to find some way to offer that dour atheist the blessings of Christian community, but without as it were forcing him into a false conversion.
The community of St. Anne’s — an attempt by Lewis to embody the themes of his great essay “Membership” — is not quite anarchic, and I say that not because it has a Director but rather because no one else but Mr. Fisher-King could be the Director. Still, it is a collaborative and cooperative endeavor, and no one is coerced into participation, nor is anyone who wishes to belong excluded — though they may not choose their own roles: the community strives to make charitable but honest assessments of what its members are capable of, and especially what risks they can be expected to take.
No community is perfect, of course. When the people of St. Anne’s become aware of the gifts of Jane Studdock, one of them goes to far as to say “You have to join us” — but that is immediately recognized not only as counterproductive (Jane flees at the first hint of coercion) but also contrary to the character of the community. One must enter freely or not at all, and the damage done by that moment of impulsiveness is almost irreversible.
St. Anne’s is of course an intentionally Christian community or “body” through and through, which leads to the question: Why is McPhee there? He is no Christian, and for all his respect for the Director, he believes the man prone to nonsensical words and thoughts.
The answer is that McPhee is there because he wants to be. Eccentric though he is, the community gives him refuge — indeed, it would violate its character as much by exclusion as by coercion. He is given tasks appropriate to his abilities, though he cannot participate directly in the spiritual warfare which, in this story, comes to be the chief business of St. Anne’s. As one who does not believe and therefore does not pray, he lacks the protection he needs against supernatural Powers. He cannot — as the Apostle, or John Bunyan, might say — “put on the armor of God.” If McPhee resents this, he doesn’t say much about it; after all, he has found a place where he is respected and loved, and where his service is welcomed with gratitude. And what better refuge can any of us hope for?
This is the 36th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Cory Dransfeldt and his blog, coryd.dev
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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
My name is Cory Dransfeldt and I'm located in Camarillo, California (a suburban town north of Los Angeles and where I grew up). I studied business in college and minored in economics. At the time I thought it was a practical choice and I was also terrified of the math involved in studying computer science. In hindsight, I wish I'd made a different choice, but don't necessarily regret the one I made at the time.
My first job out of college was working on the website of the local newspaper (I started as a freelance employee during college and became full-time after). This role was focused on updating the website with content the night before the print edition became available and was done in a utilitarian, but reliable Django-based CMS. I picked up some basic front end development knowledge working on multimedia projects and building my own tools to make the job easier.
I began to learn JavaScript by writing themes for Bowtie and Ecoute as part of the MacThemes forum community. I expanded my web development knowledge by volunteering to build websites for metal bands I remain a fan of and friends with like Cynic and Augury. I gained a lot of knowledge and ended up with merch, concert tickets and some really great experiences out if it all.
I've built a career out of being a self-taught frontend-focused developer and have worked at startups, nationally recognized retailers (I've worked on every eCommerce stack short of Shopify) and several different SaaS providers. The backend developer I worked with at my first startup told me to learn languages and pickup frameworks as needed — that advice continues to serve me well.
Unsurprisingly, programming and blogging remain my favorite hobbies, along with searching for and discovering new music (I enjoy everything from artists like Tom Waits to punk acts like NoMeansNo and myriad death metal artists like Carcass, Autopsy and newer groups like Tomb Mold). If I'm not at the computer, I'm spending time with my lovely wife of 9 years, our two children and our 4 rescue dogs (all terrier/chihuahua mixes). I also mentor via Underdog Devs and help organize the Eleventy meetup. I've been getting tattooed more over the past few years and am in the process of completing a sleeve on my right arm but am not sure that qualifies as a hobby.
What's the story behind your blog?
I started blogging after I graduated from college in 2010 and have managed to recover posts dating back to 2013 that I've imported into the current iteration on my site. I was inspired by blogs like Daring Fireball and MacStories, though I don't follow them quite as closely as I once did. I viewed blogging as both a creative outlet and as a way to continue practicing web development by having my own project to experiment on and iterate with.
I started out on Tumblr, before moving to the first version of Kirby, then on to Statamic, Jekyll, Next.js, omg.lol's weblog service and now, finally (and quite happily) Eleventy. All of these presented me with an opportunity to learn new languages, frameworks, tools and development approaches. I love the simplicity and flexibility of Eleventy and adore the community around both it and omg.lol. I like the simplicity of blogging under my own name and settled on a domain name that reflects both that and the development/technology focus.
What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?
My creative process tends to be very informal — I read a lot of articles via the blogs I follow through RSS and enjoy both audio and written books. I'm interested in web development, the state of the industry and music, so my posts typically center around those topics (and, occasionally, how they connect or overlap). I'll often write a single draft, edit it for clarity, brevity and correctness before my confidence in the post wanes and publish it.
I want to grow into doing more research-focused writing to compliment these briefer pieces and am excited about that approach as an area where I can grow as a writer.
I write posts in markdown using Bear and then insert Eleventy frontmatter that I store as a snippet in Sublime Text.
Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?
I typically write in an office that I share with my wife — I work from home and have a corner desk with my personal machine (a typically docked M2 MacBook Air), work machine and a lightly-used TV in between. I struggle to concentrate in silence and will typically write and program with death or black metal playing. I find the music helps me focus and the lack of intelligible lyrics keeps it from distracting me.
A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?
My blog is hosted at Netlify and I pay for the pro plan while staying well under its limits, but this allows me the piece of mind to rebuild the site regularly to update my now page and other dynamically populated elements like my links page.
I moved my domains to DNSimple last year after Gandi was acquired.
The code for my site is versioned and available to view at GitHub. I use a GitHub action to trigger hourly rebuilds of my site, another to post content from a feed that combines my blog posts, shared links, read books and watched movies to Mastodon, another to add my blog posts to my README, another to test my site's performance using a Speedlify instance and yet another to retrieve and cache the chart data for music I've listened to over the last week from the charts I derive from Plex (this is then syndicated to Mastodon via the aforementioned feed and action).
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?
If I were to start a blog today, I suppose I'd start from where I've arrived at now, but I don't think I could've arrived here without the experience and discovery I went through along the way. I'm not a particularly great designer, so I favor simplicity and performance in presentation and, from a technical perspective, 11ty really lends itself to that. I think I've found a set of tools and a community that I deeply enjoy engaging with.
Financial question since the web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?
The expenses to run my site are fairly straightforward: hosting (Netlify), analytics (Clicky) and feed hosting/analytics (Feedpress). A quick estimate for a given year would be around $400 which I'm happy with for something I enjoy so much. There's also a tiny fee monthly for a Backblaze B2 bucket I use to cache JSON used to populate my links page (they're fetched from the Readwise Reader API which is paginated and rate-limited — this allows me to persist link data and puts less of a burden on their service).
I'm not opposed to bloggers monetizing their sites, but I appreciate when, say, content is clearly marked as sponsored. I have a Buy Me a Coffee link in my site's navigation, but nothing outside of that — if someone wants to send something along I appreciate it and, if not, that's totally fine too!
I support a few larger publications that started on and have since left Substack. Among my favorites are Paris Marx's Disconnect and Garbage Day.
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?
I'll start off by saying I love the resurgence of blogs and personal sites we're seeing. I have a blogroll on my site with some of my favorites (they're also bundled into a .opml file that you can download). Robb Knight's blog remains one of my favorites — the design is stellar and he's constantly experimenting with and adding new features. I also thoroughly enjoy Adam Newbold's writing and seeing what he's working on for omg.lol. I could go on and on I love Keenan's writing, Mayank is a gifted developer and similarly talented writer, Sara Joy is exceedingly kind and has created awesome projects like RS.S JOY.lol dev. The internet's changing and seeing everyone writing and building makes me so happy.
Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?
If you want to mentor some great, deserving folks, check out Underdog Devs. If you're building with Eleventy we'd love to have you present at the meetup. The best book I've finished this year has been NoMeansNo: From Obscurity to Oblivion — they're my favorite band so, naturally, I'm biased, but it's a fun read and is built around interviews with the band, their friends, family and other popular musicians.
I don't have any active side projects at the moment (but I'm kicking around some ideas) — fitting everything in is tough! I'd love to build something that makes it easier for small bands to quickly build lightweight websites that they can host anywhere and really bring my journey full circle — a static site generator as a service with portable code and easy CMS integration? More robust than LinkTree, with less overhead than Squarespace and more open than both. I'm more interested in supporting musicians than I am in monetizing anything I suppose.
I'm also excited to see what Robb Knight is cooking up with EchoFeed.
Thanks for reading! I post a lot on my site and on Mastodon so come say hi!
This was the 36th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Cory. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
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Well, of course it’s great, even fantastic - for Adobe. They can lure you in with low prices, then gradually make the subscription more expensive, and then move the features you use to the “premium” tier where you have to pay even more. Not to mention that they can remove features on a whim if they feel like it, or charge you even more if you want to keep them. And if you want to keep access to your files, you have to be subscribed until the end of time - “nice pictures you have there! It’d be a shame if you couldn’t open them because you decided to opt out of our subscription model, wouldn’t it?”
I dislike subscriptions. I rage-quit everything Adobe a few years ago in a huff about subscriptions and, well, I don't love Adobe. However, I'm once again paying a subscription to Lightroom Classic and Photoshop.
Why? First, because the product is, overall, more appropriate for me than the alternatives. And second, in seven years of subscribing to the Adobe "Photography" plan, none of the things Andreas mentioned have happened. The price is the same (I'd happily pay double). They've only ever added features (I don't remember a single feature being removed. Has there been any?) If I cancel my subscription, I still have 100% access to my files (I just can't make additional edits).
I'm not trying to single out Andreas. His post just reminded me that these "What if...?!" doomsday scenarios have guided way too many of my decisions. What if [SOME APP] stops being developed? What if Apple behaves even more badly? What if some "proprietary" (usually sqlite, so not really) database becomes corrupted? What if I can't read [FILETYPE] in 50 years?
Of course these things can happen, but how often do they? Basically never, has been my personal experience. And if they do happen, there's almost always a reasonable way out.
Why suffer using something we don't love, on a just-in-case, instead of something we do love and find immediately more useful, because "what if!?"
Stumbling on a post by an American author that I highly respect reignited my doubts about a dominant growth at all costs culture from the US.
While expressing my thoughts about minimalism sold as a product, I indulged on the uncomfortable question if I was biased against the supposed (by myself) American tendency to commodify everything. Back then, the only feedback I got from people living in the US was a passive-aggressive post on Mastodon that ended with a meme, smugly invalidating any opinion about American values that might come from abroad.
A few days ago, on one of my favourite blogs Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity, a post about travelling on a budget airline contained the following illuminating thought:
For some reason, the American mindset is endless growth. Everything must get bigger, everything must get better, and more, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it. But the truth of the matter is, nothing natural undergoes infinite growth, other than some cancers.J.P. Wing
J.P. is an amazing writer, and I share an awful lot of his attitude, fully respecting his opinions the rare times when they don’t align with mine. He’s American. So here I go again: why most of this growth-at-all-costs destructive culture seems to be coming from there?
I’ve recently decided to stop reading The Conversation, after two consecutive posts were openly accusing Europe’s investors of not doing enough to be more like Silicon Valley. I’m seriously confused: how can anyone really believe, in 2024, that their business model is anything close to being sustainable? The mental slavery that parts of Europe still seems to be having towards the rot economy fuelled by a type of capitalism not integral to the continent is truly bewildering.
In a recent Washington Post newsletter, he (Ron Charles) marveled at the actress Judi Dench’s astonishing ability to recite most of the lines from her long-ago parts in Shakespeare plays. He wrote:
“Such memorization is a lost art, and much substance was lost with it. In high school and college, I used to memorize hours of stage dialogue and long passages from the Bible, which were a great comfort to me in times of stress. These days, only the stress remains. Most nights, staring at the ceiling for hours, my mind is a tangle of bits of string, and all I can come up with is something like: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff?’”
For those of you not fluent in Fleetwood Mac, that last sentence is a lyric from the song “Second Hand News.”
Since I write so much about the Knicks here, I need to tell you that the Knicks won their first round playoff series against the Philadelphia team last night. 
In a recent Washington Post newsletter, he (Ron Charles) marveled at the actress Judi Dench’s astonishing ability to recite most of the lines from her long-ago parts in Shakespeare plays. He wrote: 
