Do you feel the allure of becoming a cyborg? Are you one of those people who loves computing, but hates what computing has become? Do you wish to become one with your computing environment, without having to give into an immersively curated dystopian corporate version of computing we experience today? Throw off the shiny shackles of Apple,...
A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky's team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and...
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto, is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon, Sharkey, Peertube, GotoSocial, etc, etc, etc in the present-day fediverse, I often get asked...
I got my MNT Pocket Reform. In short, it's an absolutely gorgeous device and lovely for doing some light hacking or chiptune tracking or etc. It's incredibly built and also feels like it has a lot of potential. It's very clearly upgradeable which is a refreshing change of pace from modern electronics. On the downside, if you get an MNT reform...
Recently I've been making some music in Milkytracker, a decidedly oldschool piece of music tracking software. I've made two songs which I am proud of, one of which is original, the other is a cover.Here's the original piece, titled "A Fairy Leaves Home" (released as CC BY-SA 4.0, source file):I'm fairly proud of this one. It's the first ever...
I appeared on a PBS's NOVA documentary, Secrets in Your Data! (It's also on YouTube and, well, on broadcast television I suppose!) This actually aired a few days ago but I hadn't really had time to write anything about it and well, I still don't, but I wanted to mark the time before too much time passed and I never wrote anything.The documentary...
My moon and my stars Guided me through dark nights My moon and my stars Sang me sweet songs I had found my muse I found my song My moon and stars were there One night the clouds came, darker than before My moon and stars she called for me to help My moon and stars called out How to help, how to guide that which guides you, finds you peace? The...
Making a claim that it's time to reclaim: "sucks" as an insult is over, it's a compliment now!Why are we insulting people who give or receive blowjobs? Let's push back against queerphobia... it's time to change the narrative!You can help. Here are some example uses of "sucks" as a compliment!"Damn this music is awesome, it sucks so hard!""It...
Two and a half years ago I wrote a blogpost coming out as "nonbinary trans-femme". It was a big moment for me, but much has happened since, and I thought I'd take some time to talk about those changes and what my experience has been.To open things, I don't go by "Chris" anymore... "Christine" only. And while I still somewhat identify as...
Today my girlfriend Vivi Langdon (EncryptedWhispers) and I released the music video In Unexpected Places, available on YouTube and on PeerTube both. It's based off of Vivi's song by the same name, available on BandCamp and on Vivi's Funkwhale instance! It features some kind of retro video-game'y aesthetics but its story departs from what you...
Last month I made a blogpost titled Guile Steel: A Proposal for a Systems Lisp. It got more attention than I anticipated, which is both a blessing and and curse. I mean, mostly the former, the curse isn't so serious, it's mostly that the post was aimed at a specific community and got more coverage than that, and funny things happen when things...
Today I made a couple of posts on the social medias, I will repost them in their entirety:FUCK eating "DELICIOUS" food. I'm DONE eating delicious food.What has delicious food ever done for me? Only made me want to eat more of it.From now on I am only eating BORING-ASS GRUELS that I can eat as much as I want of which will not be much because...
Before we get into this kind of stream-of-consciousness outline, I'd like to note that very topically to this, over at the Spritely Institute (where I'm CTO, did I mention on here yet that I'm the CTO of a nonprofit to improve networked communication on the internet on this blog? because I don't think I did) we published a Scheme Primer, and the...
Lo and behold, I've converted the last of the sites I've been managing for ages to Haunt.Haunt isn't well known. Apparently I am responsible for, er, many of the sites listed on awesome.haunt.page. But you know what? I've been making website things for a long time, and Haunt is honestly the only static site generator I've worked with (and I've...
NOTE: This post is out of date. I no longer go by "Chris", I only go by Christine at this point. See my newer blogpost about my transition for more information. I keep this here as a preservation of history and the journey of which I've undergone. I've updated the title to switch "Chris" -> "Christine", but otherwise I've left the rest as it...
If there's one thing that's true about the word "blockchain", it's that these days people have strong opinions about it. Open your social media feed and you'll see people either heaping praises on blockchains, calling them the saviors of humanity, or condemning them as destroying and burning down the planet and making the rich richer and the poor...
Of the deeper thoughts I might give to this moment, I have given them elsewhere. For this blogpost, I just want to speak of feelings... feelings of hurt and hope.I am reaching out, collecting the feelings of those I see around me, writing them in my mind's journal. Though I hold clear positions in this moment, there are few roots of feeling and...
My friend Amy Guy is running for election on the W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group). The TAG is an unusual group that sets a lot of the direction of the future of standards that you and I use everyday on the web. Read their statement on running, and if you can, ie if you're one of those unusual people labeled as "AC Representative", please...
I said something strange this morning:Identity is a Katamari, language is a continuous reverse engineering effort, and thus language is a quadratic explosion of Katamaris.This sounds like nonsense probably, but has a lot of thought about it. I have spent a lot of time in the decentralized-identity community and the ocap communities, both of which...
Note: This originally appeared as a post on my Patreon account... thanks to all who have donated to support my work!Hello, hello! Spritely's website has finally launched! Whew... it's been a lot of work to get it to this state! Plus check out our new logo:Not bad, eh? Also with plenty of cute characters on the Spritely site (thank you to...
I'm delighted to say that Spritely Goblins v0.7 has been released! This is the first release featuring CapTP support (ie, "capability-secure distributed/networked programming support"), which is a huge milestone for the project!Okay, caveat... there are still some things missing from the CapTP stuff so far; you can only set up a bidirectional...
The other day I made a sadpost on the fediverse that said: "simultaneously regularly feel like people don't take the directions I'm trying to push seriously enough and that I'm not worth taking seriously". (Similarly, I've also joked that "imposter syndrome and a Cassandra complex are a hell of a combo" before.) I got a number of replies from...