Somebody keyed my car really bad, and my stoicism is being tested right now.
Hello,
I'm Axel.
I'm a Design Engineer living in Hermosillo, Mexico. I've been
working in the software development industry for pretty much my
entire adult life, in roles related to both front-end development
and design. I lived through the browser wars, the web standards
movement, social media becoming mainstream, and the decay of privacy
online. Today I'm very much into the indie web and the small web
movements. This website is my hub on the web, from work to hobbies
and everything in-between.
Content Timeline
This timeline shows the 20 most recent posts across the blog, the stream of consciousness, memories, and links sections.
-
-
I was trying to fine-tune cross-posting for this blog when a thought hit me in the face: why the fuck do I need to automate all this shit? What for? Do I care that much about Bluesky and Mastodon to make sure I dial everything to perfection?
No I don't. And in the cases when I do, I can perfectly go and type the thing and hit send like a fucking human being and not a robot.
-
We saw Carlos Ballarta's new hour last night. Definitely, easily, the best stand-up comedian we have in latin america.
The whole show is him talking as if he's gossiping, with seamless transitions between subjects and covering a range of subjects from toxic nostalgia for old media to Israel and Palestina, racism, quiting smoking and alcohol, among others.
To reach a level where it seems that you're just talking from the top of your mind must be really difficult, but the guy does it masterfully.
👏👏👏
-
The Comfort of Constraints
Something that has proven beneficial for me, as an adult with ADHD, is to isolate activities. My brain works better in single-task mode, and I stay calm and more focused. I'm also more productive when I do these things, but that's not really the point. The point is that they make me calmer. I'm relaxed when I get shit done.
-
Just as a quick meta note: I added a new setting: switch to a simple (single-column) layout, for those of you who prefer to go straight down with not too many distractions. Can't do much about the distractions, but with the straight down I (now) got you, boo.
Those are the settings, in case you haven't noticed them before. They're right up in the header :)
-
The Comments Rabbit Hole
This past Saturday I was fighting the comments embed on this site, trying to adjust it for some changes and make it look like it belonged with the rest of what I have going on here. At some point I looked at the giant list of overrides I was maintaining just to make it feel somewhat integrated and realized it didn't make much sense.
-
emdashcms.com
A WordPress for the modern era. I tested it, and it's blazing fast. I want my 10 years managing WordPress back.
-
I'm seriously considering switching my current comment system (EchoThread) for an email form. Taking it slower. Actually, writing it here just made it feel like a better idea. I want something that integrates more naturally with the rest of the website, and I value deep connections way more than immediacy. Let's get to work.
-
Publishing Photos
I've been thinking a lot about publishing photos for myself and my close circle, and in a second iteration of memories. The principal lines of thought are these:
-
The Headphonist Refresh
A couple of nights ago, I was about to post a song on The Headphonist, my music journal, when I decided the design I'd put up a couple of months ago wasn't doing it for me anymore. And because who needs sleep?, I went ahead and started hacking together a whole new structure for the website.
-
Every time I dare to use an em dash—like this one right here, a thing I've loved since I learned of its existence, I'm very self-conscious that somebody somewhere is going to declare with total self-confidence that the text was generated by AI. Because using punctuation isn't human anymore, apparently.
-
My Favorite Thing
Back in 2019, before the world ended, I was trying to learn JavaScript. Serious JavaScript, not just hiding and showing things like I'd always done for microinteractions in websites.
As one of my exercises, I published an app to collect people's favorite things. It was centered around a single sentence saying "My favorite [a] is [b]". There was no purpose other than having fun, it was totally anonymous, and I didn't know what I was doing at all, so as soon as it started breaking apart I had to put it away.
-
Taste as Resistance to Algorithms
Taste dictates what music you listen to, your favorite food, your drink of choice, your clothing style, the books you read, the TV series you follow, the movies you watch — and rewatch. How you speak, how you flirt, how you react to other people. How you present yourself to the world.
Beyond that, taste dictates who you're friends with, and that's either because they match what you value, or because you appreciate their own taste. In some wonderful cases, it's both of these things.
Social media goes against all that.
-
I need to find new podcasts. I used to eagerly wait for Hard Fork every Friday, but lately they sound more like AI shills than journalists. That, and the sensationalism in every note they cover about LLMs going rogue. I might still be mourning Reply All, four years later.
-
Comments
A few days ago I stumbled upon this blog post by Matizeta where he talks about "the alive internet" and shares several ways to bring humanity back to the web.
-
Taking a piece of Instagram with me
For years I've been having a love-hate relationship with Instagram. I'm still there because I value the interaction with my friends, some of them remote, but I'm always annoyed by the quantity of ads that show up in my feed.
Now that I'm fully coming back to the small/indie/personal web, I'm trying to take with me some of the activities I use the corporate web for, and it occurred to me that taking a piece of instagram with me would be a great idea.
-
The current blog and indie scene on the web is like a dissident community in a decaying world. Rough on the edges, with organic paths, unexpected surprises, beautiful, and very much punk. It's Zion from Matrix, and The Resistance from Terminator. I love it so much here.
-
I've always had a thing for monospaced fonts, and today I switched everything in this site to IBM Plex Mono. I'll give it a week and see if it doesn't gets old. If it does, I might consider adding a user preference to change it to a sans-serif, or even a serif (woke up sassy today).
-
terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/
“The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.” An essay by Terry Godier.
-
Web Rings
I participate in several IndieWeb and SmallWeb webrings.
If you don't know what a webring is, you're probably too young and/or too cool. Here's an explanation.
-
IndieWeb Webring
A webring to find (and be found by) other folks with IndieWeb building blocks on their sites.
← Previous • Random • Next →
-
Generation Lissa
People who started making websites in the late 90s/early 00s and are still here.
← Previous • Random • Next →
-
CSS Joy
A webring for people who take joy in messing around with CSS.
← Previous • Random • Next →
-
Retronaut Webring
"Some of us miss the messy old days of the Internet where we tried to get along and we'd link to each other's sites and it was all so much fun."
← Previous • Random • Next →