The fireworks tonight are gonna be rough… I've already got a slight headache and loud noises and flashing lights tend to be what triggers my headaches…

Apparently the new GoToSocial release is officially out now. I'm actually going to delay on this update for a bit since it's a massive one and will have significant downtime and I might need to do more work to get it running. Also I wanna see what bugs are possibly reported and worked out in its first week or two…

Anyway, I'll keep y'all posted on my plans.

@rl_dane

Well, you know my stance:

Write while you can,
Before darkness turns to day.
Write while you know
How wide oceans really are.

While the world tries to fall,
Write a pillar, keep it up;
Write the Moon in the sky to
Pull the tides to the shore.

Write while your fears
Still loom silent out of reach.
Write while your friends
Flee the wreckage of your dreams.

When the end comes at last,
Write to family, write to friends;
Write the last letter ever,
Haunt the void with a light.

https://benjaminhollon.com/writing/poem/1/

If you happen to be a fan of painter Henri Rousseau, you're in luck! The next postcard from #FirstClassFiction has a Rousseau classic on the front.

His painting was the perfect accompaniment to a new poem by @amin. I look forward to writing about it on my blog next week.

If you'd like to receive a free copy of the postcard when it's mailed out, please sign up at https://nantucketlit.com/postcards

Some good things today:

I held a DIY photo shoot for some promotional images. I thought I looked good.

I had an idea for an exhibit of #AppleII art.

More international subscribers for #FirstClassFiction! I you're interested in getting a postcard in the mail with a poem by @amin, go to https://NantucketLit.com/postcards

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed this year.

An extremely talented graphic artist (who is here on the fediverse but wishes to remain anonymous, THANK YOU FRIEND) helped me put these space-junk-for-kids pamphlets together! Here's the version that shows the page order as you would read it

Send me a message if you'd like a version that is formatted for folding!

@joel Also shoutout to @amin for hosting all these cool people and being one of them himself.

Well, a few days late, but #weeknotes are up! https://claytonerrington.com/blog/2026-w26/

FIFA, dashboards, new hosting options on polymaths.page from @amin

I've gotten some lovely emails and replies here and I'm so blessed, y'all! Thank you so much. I'm going to try to go through and reply to them all today. (If you don't get a reply quickly, know that I have read what you sent me and I just need to time to give it and other messages I've received thoughtful answers.)

Things might be fixed for future replies but it is looking like replies from accounts on other instances that I don't follow haven't been making it to my instance? I've replied to those from an alt account and I will check again to see if it keeps happening.

That said, I would as always appreciate replies to this piece via email! And that'll bypass any possible federation issues. ;)

(Seriously, getting an email reply to a blog post always makes my day.)

It appears some replies to this didn't federate to this instance. Trying to figure it out.

I finally finished this blog post, which was very difficult for me to write, but I think it says things I needed to say.

It's about how AI has personally harmed me and has been hurting my motivation to write for years.

If you're a writer, I do have some hope and vision for the future I've written here, and I'd like to share it for you. It's not all doom and gloom.

https://benjaminhollon.com/musings/stop-asking-writers-about-ai/

I look forward to hearing from people what they think. Hopefully this piece helps some people. (Boosts are very welcome.)

I've added a couple other implementations of my urlref concept to my blog post about it!

• @bojidar_bg wrote about his implementation using a bookmark folder in his browser
• @moonsea re-implemented the idea as a perl script to better fit her use case

This is so cool! If you've got your own take or would like to chat about the concept/system with me, I would love to.

Here is my original blog post about urlref, with the new "other implementations" section: https://benjaminhollon.com/musings/urlref/

hey guys i wrote a perl script that's basically a URL shortener/bookmarker for handwritten notes :D

https://tangled.org/katproto.girlonthemoon.xyz/urlref.pl

this was wholly ripped off from @amin's program that does the same thing, but i thought writing my own in perl would be a good learning exercise. so all credit for the idea goes to amin! https://benjaminhollon.com/musings/urlref/

I've just updated Polymaths.social to GoToSocial v0.21.3, "Most Sacrilegious Sloth". Let me know if you have any issues with it.

https://codeberg.org/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.21.3

The proliferation of genAI has made my life

Be the elephant you wish to see in the room.

@irgndsondepp

Getting a 404 right now from http://schafe-sind-bessere-rasenmaeher.de/index.xml again

@orbitalmartian and I have finally solved the issue with Polymaths Pages (I hope), and it looks like my first solution was actually correct but that file permissions should've been 755 instead of 750.

This actually simplifies some of the setup to do it this way, and it solves the problem, so that's the best kind of solution.

An update after more evidence: this actually seems to be an issue with file ownership, not permissions. If you have this trouble try adding --no-group and --no-owner to your rsync command.

As before, let me know if this doesn't work.

cc @orbitalmartian