Monday, February 16, 2026

0:11: Weekly digest 53: thetangent.space/2026/digest53/

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

20:09: 🔗 404media.co/students-are-being

A worrying look into the future of "education"

20:16: 🔗 theguardian.com/commentisfree/

Big tech = imperialism

20:53: 📖 Finished reading The Circle by Dave Eggers (after previously posting I'd never be able to finish it by the end of February, ha!)

It was okay. It's a satirical dystopia, clearly very 1984-inspired, but the surveillance overlords are a US big tech monopoly. If you're going in hoping for believable characters and plot, you'll be sorely disappointed. But like 1984, everything about this novel is silly and exaggerated, the characters are caricatures, and it is completely devoid of subtlety. if you can deal with this style, it can be pretty fun.

It's interesting in that it takes some of the utopian mission statements of actually existing big tech companies (Facebook's "make the world more open and connected", Twitter's "give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers", Google's "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible", etc) to their dystopian extremes ("Everything must be known"), and it was doing this in 2013 before public opinion really soured on these companies.

The Circle captures the insanity of the hyper distracted and connected mode of life through its exaggerated numbers. Every day the characters are responding to thousands of messages, petitions, surveys, event invitations and friend requests. Political action is reduced to how many millions of "Smiles" or "Frowns" a cause gets, while the characters track dozens of metrics about their health and productivity. No one can hold a normal conversation.

20:59: The final quarter or so got a bit too predictable, the author-insert characters too didactic, and the evil nature of the Circle too heavy-handed. I guess the haters of the book just reached this point a bit earlier than me.

It's an easy-breezy read, on a constantly relevant theme in today's world "how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice for the benefits of increased surveillance (e.g. health monitoring, crime prevention)", so give it a go if that sounds like your kind of thing, but its flaws make it far from an essential read.

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

23:31: 🎮 I finally beat Sekiro, easily the hardest game I've ever beat (and the game with the best swordplay), after many months. I need a break.

Click here for a video of the final battle!

Thursday, February 19, 2026

11:46: 🔗 MPs call to halt Drax subsidies theguardian.com/business/2026/

It's about time, this has been known for years. Drax claimed to be using sustainable wood pellets, but actually was importing tonnes of wood from wild woodland in Canada, making it far from "green" in both source and shipping.

Drax executives should go to prison for this.

Friday, February 20, 2026

7:00: 🏋️‍♂️ the worst part about morning gym sessions (apart from, you know, getting up in the morning to go to the gym) is the weights are like actual ice blocks

Saturday, February 21, 2026

10:52: 🍕 Always get so excited the morning of a pizza-making day. The dough has been proving for a few days, but even on the day it's pretty high effort: preparing the toppings, shaping the dough, getting the stone hot and so on, but it's such a nice way to spend an afternoon

14:51: 🔗 Nice knits

aalgar.tumblr.com/post/8071799

18:00: Content warning:CW: vegan pizza

🍕 a successful bake. Garlic mushroom+spinach, BBQ tofu, and sausage+pineapple (mainly for the kids).

I sprinkle vegan cheese on at the end of cooking as it burns more easily than dairy. I'd like to move away from shop-bought vegan cheese altogether as it is mostly high-cholesterol processed crap, but it always feels a bit risky considering the sunk time and energy costs of making the dough and heating the oven

A spread of three homemade vegan pizzas and homemade chips. A child's hand reaches for a slice

Sunday, February 22, 2026

20:18: 🔗 Why I email complete strangers
goodinternetmagazine.com/why-i

21:13: 🔗 cool page

henry.codes/writing/a-website-

In fact the whole site (and his other sites) are just very cool

henry.codes/

21:16: Never sure if I place a parenthetical before a verb whether the verb should agree with the first subject as if the parenthetical weren't there

21:54: 📖 started reading You And Your Profile by Hans-Georg Moeller (Carefree Wandering on YouTube) and Paul J D'Ambrosio. It's about the philosophy of identity formation in the digital era

21:55: Well, this half-term break has basically been dominated by sick kids (hoping we're now at the end of sick season), so it hasn't felt like much of a break. At least I ate pancakes and made pizza.

Signing off for the week now, all the best