July 2026 – Page 2

Taking A Dive

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Dan Q / Curious Cones, in Taking A Dive

I had another submission accepted to Curious Cones last month; it remains one of my favourite silly niche blogs. This time around, it was this traffic cone seemingly about to take a dive from the low board at an outdoor pool (at which the younger kid and I were taking a respite from the heat!).

Not-accepted, but shared here for your enjoyment, was a photo I took while at West End Live in London the other week. I spotted a traffic cone on a shelf in the left luggage room at our hotel! I took the pic quickly and the room was dark and the photo came out blurry, so it’s fair that it didn’t make it onto the blog, but it’ll remind me to keep an eye out for cones in the most-curious of places!

Ramming speed!

Trouble brewing at the village carnival’s decorated-bike competition as, for perhaps the first time in history, a viking longship rams and boards an X-wing of the Rebel Alliance.

A postcard from a distant friend

Last year I got myself a PO Box and started asking Internet strangers to send me a postcard, if they liked, rather than plain old email and contact forms. Since then, I’ve enjoyed an occasional surprise “postcard from the Internet”, and I’ve been collecting them on a page of their own.

It was extra-surprising to receive a postcard from an in-real-life friend: somebody who knew my actual address¹!

Close-up photo of the face of a kererū (New Zealand pigeon) with a blurred background of green foliage. — What’chu looking at? I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but this bird actually gives me “Ele energy”.

Ele and I met back in the early 2000s when she started studying at Aberystwyth, and we quickly hit it off over a shared love of terrible movies. She moved away from the area to find work, but we’d still see each other from time to time.

She drew some breasts for me at my thirtieth birthday, for example… which I’ll stress isn’t how she got appointed official Christmas Card artist of my nonprofit Three Rings, that same year, but it looks like a weird coincidence whether I point it out or not so I might as well own it.

I haven’t seen her in person since… 2022, I think? She came to my summer party that year… right before she emigrated to the other side of the world! We still keep in contact through other means, but it’s not quite the same.

Anyway: it was a delightful surprise to receive this (Yyou can read the full text in its entry on my postcards page). Technology may make the world feel smaller and us all more-easily connected, but there’s something still something magical about a handwritten note.

Circular sticker featuring nine New Zealand birds, stuck to a laptop under a sticker that says 'read gay; do crime'. — Also, because she put her postcard in an envelope – perhaps to save extra space on the card to write! – Ele was able to include a sticker featuring a variety of New Zealand birds, which now takes pride of place on my laptop!

Footnotes

¹ Not totally without precedent, though: my mum sent me a hand-painted “cold giraffe” postcard this way too!

You don’t have to blog like me

You don’t have to blog like me.

You don’t have to differentiate by post kind.
You don’t have to put full contents in your feed.
You don’t have to keep a library of “maybe-some-day”
drafts so long that you’ll never reach the bottom.

You don’t have to have a comments form.
Or reactions. Or webmentions.
Or a guestbook. Or drawings?
(But give me some way to say “hi, you’re cool!”)

You don’t have to have a feature image.
You don’t have to keep posts up forever.
You don’t have to have tags.
You don’t have to syndicate to the socials.

You don’t have to stick to one topic.
Or three. Or seventeen.
Or be able to answer “what’s your blog about?”
It’s yours, and that’s enough.

You don’t have to post on a schedule.
You don’t have to use your real name.
You don’t have to have a podcast.
You don’t have to tell everybody.

You don’t have to use any particular tool.
Bloggers who spend their time arguing
About vs vs ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ vs
Could be reading and writing instead.

You don’t have to have a plan to “monetize”.
You don’t have to write your own theme.
You don’t have to be run your own server.
You don’t have to make every post your best.

You just have to blog.

The Internet is ours.
It belongs to the humans.

Not to the companies and the robots.
To us.

And every human voice.
Every single human voice.
Makes the world a little richer.

You don’t have to blog like me.
(You don’t have to use “blog” as a verb.)

You just have to blog.

And if you mention your blog in the comments, below, I promise I’ll go read it.

Garbage for humans

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

On reflection of Cloudflare’s announcement of “Markdown for machines” in February, a feature that provides simple, clean Markdown versions of web pages to AI agents, unstory dryly observed:

You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript.

…

Machines get the clean version.

unstory, in Garbage for humans

I enjoy this take. If there’s a “clean version”: something simpler, easier to read, lower-bandwidth… why aren’t we giving that to the humans in the first place!

Though I’ll tell you what: if this pattern becomes widespread, I’ll absolutely use (or implement!) a browser plugin that spoofs being an LLM, so that I can get the clean content, and then Markdown-to-HTML converts it back so my browser can display the “readable” version of the page.

And what a world that would be. Humans, pretending to be robots, that pretend to be humans! We live in interesting times.

Doggone Gorgeous

Dad Joke of the Day came to me early when some fellow dog walkers coming the other way said “Hello, gorgeous!”

“Ooh, thank you!” I replied, nonchalantly tussling my hair and striking a coquetteish pose.