šŸ“ July 2026 Blogroll: Share your blog posts!

It feels like I don’t deserve the help, because theoretically I could do everything myself. I’m constantly comparing myself to this idealized version of me.

Y’know, this exact sentiment reminds me of a post I saw a few weeks back:

You’re being haunted by people who never existed. The artist you would have become, the relationship that would have worked, the version of you that would have made all the right decisions. […] But have you noticed something? Those versions of you never age. They never fail. They never experience consequence. Because reality never got the chance to happen to them. […] And no matter how good your life becomes, a fantasy will always look cleaner than reality.

I imagine having chronic pain and being able to do ā€œlessā€ than ā€œnormal peopleā€ makes this feeling worse, (i have other friends with chronic pain who’ve told me similar sentiments,) but you can’t beat yourself up for doing less. Even if you were perfectly healthy, and even if you were not disabled, you would still be allowed to do fuck-all and be ok with that.

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Started typing up a response and it got long enough that I made it its own post

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Okay, good point, but comparing the Avatar by Netflix and the originals, you can see the huge difference in storytelling. Avatar from Netflix’s interpretation is a more mature version by their words, but the use over explanation much more as a driving force for storytelling then the originals. And yes, some may say it’s because of length, but the length is pretty similar for both versions.

And not touching teens media, for example Game Of Thrones, last season’s had also used a lot of over explanation rather than showing viewer the story.

I liked this post a lot. I am not native to the south but have spent a lot of time there recently and confess that I can relate a lot to the stereotype about feeling a perhaps condescending sense of pity for teachers (& adjacent professions) in the south. Actually what I have seen in the south is that teachers, social workers, and so on are undervalued basically everywhere in the US—so trying to frame it as a regional issue is a mistake. (Perhaps teachers in Coastal City make 2x more than Rural Area, but the cost of living difference just about washes that out.)

The most troubling thing for me about the south, and what (I confess) makes it hard to shake the stereotypes that underlie the sense of pity, is just how frequently I see/hear completely unrestrained racist comments—like, no sense of shame or apology about it. In the north they at least try to provide a rationale like ā€œI try to be colorblind, so don’t take it the wrong way when I say this, but ā€¦ā€

But you are right to point out that observing this doesn’t mean we get to stop caring about people who live in the south or generalize the stereotype to the victims.

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I made a bearblog!

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Thank you for getting it. It’s hard, and after being up here and going back home it upsets me so much more viscerally. I teach in a majority-Black school in a majority-Black city and I feel such visceral disgust at the racism I saw - I also think the worst of my people are feeling emboldened right now to do and say things in places like doctor’s offices that they wouldn’t dream of saying twenty years ago. But the racism in this ā€œnorthernā€ city is and alive and well. I always remember the only Klan rally I’ve seen was in Maryland, and my fellow MD people don’t love hearing that.

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Quilts, projects, the human need for a real break

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The Weekly Wrap Up is posted! Links this week include cheese theft, a rabbit hole of small web sites and the digitised notebooks of Charles XII which are filled with doodles. I finished another cross stitch project, more postcard club mail has arrived and, like the older person I am, I talk about the weather. Plus, as usual, I listened to, read and watched things.

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Catching up on the last three months of what i"ve been up to…

Quite a lot in three months :)

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Can’t wait to read this cause that’s an absolute fact

hear hear, local idiot cuts all of his fingers at 9:25 pm

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I know what that’s like. That’s why I used to use ā€œchristineā€ as the hostname of one of my old Linux machines. Damn thing was out for blood.

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Wow I’ve been writing a lot recently

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FWIW @shellsharks has shown off a lot of the cool CSS shenanigans you can cram in inside a plain RSS feed

I read this post by @olly a while ago, and have come back to it a number of times and have shared a few thoughts of my own on the matter

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This week’s tiara is an interesting Georgian oddity - Micromosaic Bugs (and Dove) Tiara

This isn’t directly relevant to your post, but when I go to bookmark stuff I read online, the first thing I do is hit ā€œview sourceā€ and check the <title> element so that I can get both the post title and the website’s name for attribution. But I noticed that you don’t put the site’s name in the <title> element. A matter of preference, perhaps?

No worries. Do you mean on the individual pages generated for my /bookmarks/?

I do these through Linkding, when I enter a URL it retrieves the Title and Meta description if it exists. I won’t append anything to the title. If the title includes something like ā€œ | fLaMEdfury.com the baddest site aroundā€ I’ll usually remove that and just keep the post title (if I’m paying attention).

Does that make sense?

I meant on posts like your reply to Olly. But like you and my wife Madam Catastrophy would say: no worries. I know what your site’s called, so I add it myself.