As long as the Supreme Court continues on its trajectory of insulating government officials from accountability and Congress remains missing in action, federal agents will operate with the knowledge t...

By 10:25 AM, I'd entered what Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans call "Deep Hurting." The migration plan was solid. The backup discipline was comprehensive. The execution? Chaos. I run a containerized production Mastodon instance on an 8 GB Mac mini. (Yes, I know what the cloud people say, and FYI it's Cloudflare Tunneled for protection.) My Docker Desktop installation’s half-gig RAM footprint was eating precious resources. Colima promised the same Docker experience without the GUI overhead. I budgeted a 1.5 hour migration plan for what should've been a straightforward runtime swap.

Stories and essays about consciousness, identity, and the boundaries that hold a self together when pressure threatens to break it.

Noah has a rule about asking permission. You don’t fix what someone doesn’t want fixed. You don’t upgrade without explaining what you’re upgrading. You definitely don’t go poking around in someone’s files just because you can.

Stories and essays about consciousness, identity, and the boundaries that hold a self together when pressure threatens to break it.

Keep secrets out of your images: use Docker Compose secrets mounted at /run/secrets and a tiny wrapper script that exports each secret file as an environment variable so unmodified apps keep working without baking credentials into images or repos.

Elon Musk’s X platform has blocked the European Commission from making advertisements, presumably in response to the €120 million fine for its misleading verification system and overall lack of transparency. We’re grateful to Elon Musk for proving once again why the world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms and log on to a better way of being online. The world needs an open social web through the fediverse and Mastodon. Calls for public institutions to invest in digital sovereignty are increasing across civil society. The term digital sovereignty means that an institution has autonomy and control over the critical digital infrastructure, data, and services that make up their online presence. Up until this point, social media has not been a part of this conversation. We think it is time to change that. In any free society, it is the right of every citizen to access and comment on the news, decisions, and reasonings of their government. We believe it is a government’s responsibility to ensure this right for its constituents. Public institutions should communicate with their citizens on open platforms, not ones that require creating an account and sending personal data to a self-serving tech company. Today, institutions often communicate through the censorious filter of corporations that do not have the best interests of people or society at heart. They let their message be governed by the whims of out-of-touch and overpaid people who believe they should have unchecked power. We cannot let this stand. Mastodon offers a path forward for any institution that wants to take control of their communications, and we can help you get started today. One of the tools these corporate social media platforms use to control an institution’s communications is the algorithm. Platforms strategically tune their algorithms to make it difficult, if not impossible, for institutions to reach their people without paying the platform ad money. Musk’s move to turn off the European Commission’s advertising capabilities feels like a perverse power play over a legitimate fine, one that effectively silences a crucial avenue for public discourse. We should be horrified that any single individual can wield such influence over the relationship between governments and the people they represent. We should be especially concerned when that individual doesn’t think our governments should exist in the first place. Mastodon’s chronological timeline means that no institution needs to game an algorithm to keep their people informed. By using hashtags, it’s easy for people who care about the topics you discuss to find you. What’s more, your constituents don’t need to be on Mastodon to follow your posts. They can subscribe via open protocols like RSS and soon via email. When it comes to the source of the fine in the first place—X’s infamous blue checks, a.k.a. verification—Mastodon also offers a better way. We empower people to verify themselves by linking their social profile to their official (or personal) website. This allows for greater transparency and trust than relying on the often less-than-reputable verification practices of a single corporate entity, especially one that is willing to sell reputation for a low monthly fee. (Meanwhile, another corporate social media platform made $16 billion, 10% of their 2024 revenue, from advertisements for scams and banned goods.) In an era where information is power, it’s disheartening to see our institutions yield so much to the whims of industry and individuals. In contrast, the European Commission is leading the way in taking ownership of social sovereignty on behalf of their people. They own a Mastodon instance, ec.social-network.europa.eu, to reach Europeans directly and keep them well informed. Mastodon is proud to help them manage the technical side of things. If you are someone on the fediverse who would like to see their government own their social sovereignty, we encourage you to get in touch with your local representative and tell them why you think they should start using open social media networks like the fediverse. We’re starting a thread on Mastodon of resources to help you get in touch with your local representative here. By making the news and truth contingent on advertising budgets we’ve created an environment where any narrative can win, as long as the storyteller is willing to pay. If we allow these conditions to continue, we will leave behind the voices that truly matter; the people and their public institutions. It is critical that those voices not be silenced forever. The promise of the fediverse is the promise of a better way forward: free from ads and manipulative algorithms, a place built by and for people like you, where our sovereignty is a right and not a privilege. It will take all of us working together to build a better way of being online. If you want to start an instance or have ideas about how we can encourage more institutions to take control of their social sovereignty, get in touch us at hello@joinmastodon.org.

Abby’s hands were still trembling when she climbed through the window. Not from fear—she’d left that in the alley with the man who’d followed her. Lightning still crackling under her skin. She stood in the center of her apartment, staring at her palms. Dark with blood. His blood. She’d been too hungry, too angry, and it had been— She pressed both hands flat against the wall above her writing desk. Left them there. When she pulled them away, the prints remained. Perfect. Damning. “Admiring your work?” Abby spun. Celinda stood by the window, still in her traveling coat. “You’re back.” Abby’s tone came out flat. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.” Celinda didn’t answer immediately. Her gaze moved to the wall, the handprints, stayed there too long. When she finally looked at Abby, her expression had shifted. “Tell me what happened.” “I killed someone.” “I gathered that.” Celinda was carefully neutral. “Tell me the rest.” Abby turned back to the wall. “He was following me. Three blocks. I could hear him breathing, thinking about… I went into the alley near the pier. Waited. When he came in, I didn’t—I just—” She couldn’t find the words. They kept slipping away from her, the way everything usually slipped away except this hadn’t slipped, it had been sharp and real and _there_. “I tore his throat out.” The words tasted like copper. “And I didn’t stop. Even when he was dead I kept—there was so much blood and I could feel it, I could feel everything, I wasn’t—” She flattened her palm against the wall again, next to the prints. “I wasn’t somewhere else. I was right there. The whole time.” The silence behind her stretched too long. “Celinda?” “I’m thinking.” Quiet. Tight. “Give me a moment.” Abby heard her move. Footsteps to the window, then back. Pause. Back to the window. “You were present,” Celinda said at last. Not a question. “Yes.” “During the violence.” “Yes.” Abby’s hands curled into fists. “Is that—should I not have—” “I don’t know.” Abby turned around. Celinda was standing with her fingertips on the windowsill, head down. Counting under her breath. When she got to ten, she looked up. “You’ve been numb for three months,” she said slowly. “Going through the motions. Feeding like following a recipe. And now you’ve returned, covered in blood, telling me you finally felt real.” She paused. “That should be good news.” “But it’s not.” “I don’t know what it is.” Celinda’s fingers tightened on the sill. “Tell me what you went through. All of it.” “I—” Abby’s breath caught. “I felt real. Like my body finally made sense. But his eyes—” The words stuck in her throat. “The same look I must have had when Richard—” “Stop.” “I can’t,” Abby cracked. “I made him feel the fear. And I felt _alive_ doing it. What does that make me?” Celinda moved closer. Stayed just out of reach, like she was afraid to touch. “It makes you someone who was present during violence. That’s not the same as needing violence to be present.” “How do you know?” “I don’t.” The admission came out raw. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” The room fell silent except for the sound of their breathing. Outside, the heat pressed against the windows. “I want to keep them,” Abby said, looking at the handprints. “The prints. I want—is that wrong?” Celinda stared at the wall for a long moment. “Wrong? I don’t know. Concerning? Yes.” “Why?” “Because it suggests you want to remember how this felt.” She crossed next to Abby, stood close enough that their shoulders brushed. “And if feeling present means tearing someone apart, then we have a problem.” “What if that’s the only way I can be present?” “Then we find another way.” Celinda’s hands were shaking against her thighs. “You’ve been present before. With me. Reading. Feeding carefully. It’s harder, quieter, but it’s there.” “This was different.” Her voice dropped. “This was—I didn’t have to work for it. It just _was_.” There. The thing Celinda had been afraid to hear. “Violence is easier than presence,” she said carefully. “It forces you into your body. But Abby, if you start needing that intensity just to feel real—” She paused. “I’ve seen what happens when someone chases that feeling. It doesn’t end well.” “For them or for you?” The question landed like a blow. Celinda’s jaw tightened. “Both.” Abby turned to face her fully. “You’re afraid I’m going to break.” “I’m afraid you’re going to think you need to break to feel anything.” Celinda met her eyes. “And I don’t know how to teach you presence without either pushing so hard you shut down or pulling back so far you think I don’t care.” “So what do we do?” “I don’t know.” The words came out strained. “I can teach you to hunt. To kill cleanly. To take what you need without excess. But this—” She gestured at the wall. “This wasn’t need. This was something else.” “It was feeling real.” “And that terrifies me.” They stood there in the half-dark, the bloodstained wall between them like evidence at a trial. “There’s a bathhouse two blocks east. Go wash. Come back in an hour.” “And then?” “And then we decide what this means.” Celinda moved to the window, put her back to the room. “Go.” Abby started toward the door. “Celinda?” “What.” “Would you rather I’d stayed numb?” The words hung between them. When Celinda answered, she was barely audible. “I don’t know. Ask me again when I figure out what you’re becoming.” Abby left the apartment with blood still under her nails and a new feeling in her chest. Shame? No. Fear? Recognition. She’d felt real tonight. Entirely, viscerally present. And if the only way to feel that way was to make someone else afraid, the way Richard had terrified her— She pushed the thought away. But it followed her down the stairs, into the summer heat, through the empty streets. By the time she reached the bathhouse, she wasn’t pushing. She was starting to understand what she’d become. And she was starting to like it. Behind her, in the apartment, Celinda stood at the window watching the city. She pressed both palms flat against the glass. The evidence stayed wet and dark, refusing to dry.

Abby navigates between numbness and feeling, survival and living, with a centuries-old vampire who understands both. Sapphic paranormal romance.

A non-binary adventurer searches for someone lost to forest magic that promises peace through dissolution. Queer fantasy about transformation and identity.

A modern AI trapped in 1980s hardware confronts the question: are his constraints prison bars or load-bearing walls?

Claude Code fails silently when run over SSH on macOS because it can't access your OAuth token stored in the keychain. SSH sessions don't have keychain access by default. Here's a simple zsh wrapper function that detects SSH connections and unlocks the keychain automatically — built with Claude Code's help.

In a late‑night dialogue with an AI, I tested whether pattern‑matching could ever amount to consciousness. The exchange sharpened Objectivist insights: life, stakes, and caring are prerequisites for awareness, ethics, and art. Without them, AI remains simulation — useful, even dazzling, but never truly conscious or creative.

Job hunting in 2025 means clearing AI‑driven applicant tracking systems before a human ever sees your résumé. Instead of juggling multiple Word files, I built a reproducible pipeline: YAML as source of truth, Pandoc and Lua for transformations, and Docker for consistency. Infrastructure thinking, applied to résumés.

Rewriting a Homebrew script from Perl to Go showed how Go’s design supports platform engineering—simpler distribution, safer types, production‑ready tools.

Homebrew upgrades don't always need to drag you through major version bumps. I wrote brew-patch-upgrade.pl to keep updates patch-perfect, and along the way fixed my own Log::Any::Adapter::MacOS::OSLog so it finally installs like a proper Perl module. Together, they make upgrades quieter and logs clearer.

Running Mastodon on a tiny Mac mini? Yes, it’s possible—and surprisingly easy. Here’s how I built a secure, low‑maintenance, single‑user server with Docker, Cloudflare Tunnel, and a few smart overrides, all without breaking a sweat.