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“Power and safety are not the same thing”

It’s been an awful, heartbreaking October.

I don’t really know what to say about the conflict in Gaza and Israel. Part of it is that I don’t feel like I know enough. Both about all of the micro and macro events that have led up to this, and what’s going on in this moment. And I don’t really feel justified to share my feelings. It seems performative considering I have no personal ties and am many thousands of miles away.

But Eli did a great job articulating his feelings in this post, and I wanted to share that here since it is the one thing I’ve read that most closely mirrors my current thoughts.

It all feels a bit like staring in to the void.

“Tragedy” is almost a meaningless word, with the frequency it occurs.

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@piperhaywood.bsky.social

Finally went ahead and joined Bluesky, @piperhaywood.bsky.social (missed out on @piper, ah well). Thx for the code, Sam. 😘 Definitely not planning to leave Mastodon any time soon, but it felt like it was time to give it a go. IDK, Mastodon has started to feel… very pessimistically cynical? Understandable, but also exhausting. I probably need to refine my follows a bit, haven’t done that in a while.

I skimmed past a New Yorker headline earlier titled “Why The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore”. And yeah, agreed, it’s definitely not as happy-go-lucky as it was in the past.

But I still find it fun! Maybe even more fun in some ways? So many great people are carving out their own niches online (by that, I mean personal sites or newsletters), and that’s where the real fun lies.

In other words: it’s all about RSS, baby! A place to really nurture your braincells away from any prying eyes or algorithms, where you can follow and unfollow with abandon without wondering, “well if I unfollow, are they gonna think insert-ridiculous-worry?”

And I’ve been hearing unexpected folks talking about RSS, family members and that sort of thing. Whisper it: is RSS becoming mainstream? 🤞 A girl can dream.

Will Bluesky also spark that joy? I’m skeptical. Mastodon is close but isn’t *quite* up there with RSS for me. We’ll see!

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Thoughts on search, AI as a rubber duck, and this blog

I’ve been working on a little side project recently that has been in the backlog for ages. I finally have a moment to pull it together, and it’s helping me brush up on a few Next.js 13 features I haven’t had the chance to play with yet.

As part of that, I’m doing a lot of searching around best practices on this that and the other, particularly server side rendering. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve been pointedly trying to use the internet to teach myself something in-depth related to coding, as opposed to finding quick sporadic answers.

Read some rambling thoughts on search 🔍, AI as a rubber duck 🦆, digital gardens 🪴, and the future of this blog 🧠

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Current listening: “Transatlanticism”

Currently listening to Transatlanticism 🐦
 by Death Cab for Cutie.

One of my best friends from college just invited me to the Death Cab + Postal Service 20th anniversary gig at Madison Square Garden on the 20th. I am SO pumped.

Listening to Transatlanticism is giving me major high school flashbacks. Driving home past curfew on cool East Bay summer nights and knowing that I couldn’t possibly want, need, feel, any more than I did.

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Manifesting cake

All of the birthdays in our little family fall within a 15 day period in the middle of the summer. There was a lot of cake around for nearly a month. And then we went to the UK to visit family who kindly wanted to celebrate all of our birthdays, so we did it all over again.

Now, B asks for cake after nearly every meal, sometimes for breakfast. Obviously we’ve been trying to phase it out, explaining that there’s none left. But there have been enough times when he’s asked for it at random moments and it has been around. So there’s no way he’s going to chance not asking for it.

This was the conversation the other day at his Nana’s table during lunch.

“KEHK??”

“No buddy, there’s no cake.”

“… Happy bur-day?”

“No buddy, there’s no cake. It’s no one’s birthday.”

“…… Happy bur-day Nana?”

“… 🤦🏻‍♂️”

It had been my birthday, Sam’s birthday, and his birthday already. But we hadn’t celebrated Nana’s yet, so it was a logical ask to be fair.

I asked him what his favorite song was yesterday, and he started singing Happy Birthday. (This was 100% a ploy for cake, his actual favorite song is “Hey Jude” because he likes to yell the NAH NAH NAH part.)

He’s still getting over jet lag since we arrived back from the UK last weekend, lots of 5:30am-ish wake-ups. This morning, he wandered sleepily out of his bedroom to go use the potty and the first thing he said was, “Bur-day?”

I’m pretty sure he thinks he can manifest cake.

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Not a baby anymore

It’s such a stereotype. But there really is a moment when suddenly they’re not a baby anymore.

You open up your phone to look for particular photo and notice it’s automatically made a memories album of your kid. So you click and watch, and realize you missed the moment, whenever that was. It’s a weird shock that seems so obvious, it’s like you didn’t get to say goodbye to a friend you always knew had to leave.

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Favorite season

My favorite season as a kid was summer (obvi). Then autumn in my 20s, maybe because I actually started experiencing it then. Now it’s spring. You get all of the excitement and anticipation of summer without the humidity and mosquitos. Not sure it will ever be winter, but who knows.