Tales from the Feed, January 2026

People allegedly liked my Cohost compilation posts at the time and I think it's good to share sometimes. Though since this isn't Cohost anymore, I'm slow at looking at my RSS feed, and I hate looking at bsky, probably just going to be way fewer/smaller posts on these. Oh well. Also didn't think to start doing this until a few weeks into January but whatever.

Please comment with anything else you think was good, I am going to naturally miss so much stuff*

By now it is clear that you won't save the world in these games. I mean you will, but only in the short-term. The motion of history that burned Belka to the ground marches forward and razes Usea. You can stop Stonehenge, but Megalith is being built by people still caught up in the fever of patriotism. You can even stop that, too, but what of Arkbird? Solg? As long as the world is divided into nations it will be united in warfare.

Greer grounds his criticisms in the history of the US after the Civil War, a war that demonstrated the industrial superiority of the North and bound together as a coherent class those whose efforts were key to creating that superiority. They were the seeds of a “techno-nationalist elite” that went on to make the US the preminent world power and create the modern world we take for granted, a world so different from what came before that in retrospect we can see the year 1870 as the “hinge of human history.”

The amount of chaos that locals have been putting up with is completely insane - there are stories in that article about people waking up to find a car almost sliding into the back of their house, or to find injured offroaders threatening them in their back yards. It sounds completely nuts. I have no idea if it's gotten better or worse since 2022, but if you want to imagine what I was experiencing this week, just imagine me going further and further up the hill and noticing more and more deep deep tire tracks and thinking, "oh boy, this isn't maintenance!!"

It's uncomfortable that some skills I've honed over years are becoming less valuable. But code has fussy syntax, boring parts, and boilerplate. It's exciting to have agents that can take my code on its afternoon walk.
It's more uncomfortable to be able to skip the understanding. For me, that’s petting the dog.

Though English remained in written use through the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, it may not often have risen to high style. Lawman (Laȝamon) seems to construct something of the sort in his Brut, but I suspect that for a writer like Thomas of Hales, high style was a matter for Latin and perhaps French.

But, spending the time to search for sites, or get lost down rabbit holes, is something that's like a muscle - you need to work on it to get better at it. It's a hard change at first, especially if you're more used to TikTok. But, god, I think it's worth doing. It makes the web such a nicer place to be.

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