Jake Bauer @jbauer@merveilles.town

Hello!

I've admired this community for a long time and I'm very excited (and honoured) to join the town.

I've been on a bit of a journey to figure out who I am and what I want to do with my life for a short while now and I feel like this is a great place to explore that, given that y'all have inspired me a ton over these past two years. I've written a bit more about myself in my bio.

Thank you for welcoming me into your community

#theLobby #introduction

There's much more in this essay. But it's full of these good tidbits; catchy lines; punchy statements.

Well worth a read.

> And we see that develop into the web as we know it today. [...] The “conversational web”. A web obsessed with arguing points. A web seen as a tool for self-expression rather than a tool for thought. A web where you weld information and data into your arguments so that it can never be repurposed against you. The web not as a reconfigurable model of understanding but of sealed shut presentations.

> So a year ago I would have thrown the link to Twitter with a damning summary of the study, and everyone would have known I was a good liberal and retweeted it to prove that they were good liberals and if you listened closely you could hear our collective neurons harden.

https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/

I think the best thing about webrings is seeing the sheer variety and creaitivity of website styles.

So many people put a ton of care and effort into their designs and it's really awesome to see.

(But also, it's totally okay if you use a pre-fab theme, not everyone is good at/has time for web design).

I need to get back to learning French

My reading comprehension is surprisingly good (as long as it's not colloquial) but my active vocabulary is all but dead.

If someone says "bonjour" to me in an elevator I will freeze up and stammer even though I know exactly how to respond.

I regularly swap back and forth between never wanting to own a car and very much wanting to own a car 😩

On one hand, cars are expensive and loud and annoying.

On the other hand it makes personal travel outside of the city core so very much easier since we don't have a great train network here in Canada. Also I think I would enjoy working on my own car (ideally something from the 80's-00's), but I could get that from a bicycle or three too.

I absolutely do not regret moving with my speakers and amplifier.

Also a BlackBerry makes a good MP3 player 😄

#np Birds With Broken Wings by Ben Caplan
https://store.bencaplan.ca/album/birds-with-broken-wings

I've published an update to my Now page

👉 https://www.paritybit.ca/now

This update is pretty long and a bit more personal, but I wanted to put the stuff in writing since writing things down helps me process things.

I'm also hoping to turn it into some kind of monthly log thing, but we'll see how that goes ^^. Perhaps I'll also create an RSS feed for it.

If anyone is looking for a good RSS reader, I highly recommend yarr (https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr)

It's a statically-compiled Go binary that you can either run locally or on a server. You can import/export OPML feeds, organize feeds into folders, have it auto-refresh, and view content directly in the app instead of having to go to the website directly (assuming the feed doesn't just contain summaries).

I've found it much better and easier to use than alternatives like newsboat.

I fixed our fan! 🔧

Feels good to fix something and keep it out of the landfill. Luckily it just needed some lubricating.