This keeps happening:

1. I read a blog post I really like; maybe I found it on Lobsters, maybe it was a link via another blog, who knows. I liked the post.
2. I read other posts on their blog. I read the about page, or look at some projects! This is a cool person!
3. I decide I’d love to keep reading their blog. I look for an RSS/Atom feed, so I can know the next time they post, and the next, and the next!
4. There is no RSS or Atom feed. There is no way to find out the next time they post, short of manually checking every so often, and that is not practicable.
5. Sad.

This happens surprisingly often — “surprisingly” because, if you don’t give your readers some way to actually be “your readers”, you kind of guarantee you will not have any readers! In which case, I mean, it’s cool that you write and all, but see point number 5 above: sad!! I want to read your posts! Please let me!

(I am writing this post partly so that I can include it in the emails I send to folks when I find out they don’t have a feed I can find. If I have sent this to you, I mean no offence, nor do I wish to put work onto you! I’d just like to share that I think your blog is neat, enough so that I felt moved to reach out to you.)

Have been nursing some chest heaviness, palpitations and shooting pains for 10 days now. These symptoms on their own aren’t particularly uncommon, but a week ago some incredible neck and shoulder pain started to flare up on top of it — and get worse, and worse, and worse; like, all day soreness, pretty much trying to knead my left shoulder (in particular) into not-wanting-to-have-it-surgically-removed.

I have been to the ER for a self-suspected blood clot/heart attack/whatever before, and didn’t particularly want to repeat the exercise. Maybe it was just a chest infection with extra steps? After umming and ahhhing about it for a couple days, worsening, I finally book a GP respiratory appointment. Yesterday afternoon the appointment time arrives.

I have to “I know what it sounds like” to the GP a few times, explain my elevated heart-rate on arrival is probably just POTS (since I was sitting in the car waiting for the all clear to come in, not in the waiting room), explain the pain in my legs is probably just the chronic pain I always have in my legs, and after listening to my lungs (all clear) he directs me straight to the ER. I am thankful to my and Annie’s MSA 900s, and it who told me about them.

Chest XR, RAT, ECG, bloods to check for clot or heart damage — nothing. Everything looks fantastic. Maybe it’s pleurisy. Go home, rest, eat lots of vegetables.

So this is where we’re at!

It is phenomenal that, for all the hand-wringing about the wastefulness of Electron apps and bloat of modernity, the industry managed to find a way to take that to the n’th degree, and somehow have ~everyone buy into it, even as the results range consistently from mediocre to outright deleterious, not to mention the frankly insane externalities. May deep shame find its way under the skin of those peddling and enabling this multidimensional clusterfuck of an insult to what is good.

“It could never work. She doesn’t like Nix flakes.”

I’ve just had the pleasure of reading three interesting pieces of discourse.

First up, Alyson Escalante’s 2016 piece “Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto”. There is very little about this I have to disagree with.

Then, her own 2018 response to that work, “Beyond Negativity: What Comes After Gender Nihilism?”. On the one hand, pushing for a more material analysis is excellent, though I feel like all the work is actually done here by Wittig and this merely restates it

On the other hand, what on earth is this ending? It reads just like any other wishy-washy proclamation, missing only a communism,-now!.88x31.gif to slap on your homepage in solidarity. This anti-anti-manifesto is decidedly a manifesto.

The comments, however, conceal a banger which I nearly missed. “blister” (@destroysound) starts, and then wow, they continue. I don’t trust Medium to continue existing for that much longer — or even the Wayback machine (which Medium very carefully tries to break :) love it) — so I’m reproducing it here in its entirety.

There is very little about this I have to disagree with.

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