April Distractions
This is a log of some of the distractions that sidetracked me while using the computer this month. I got the idea for a log of distractions from a list of writing prompts from The Paris Review. This is NOT an exhaustive list. I'm profoundly distractible, and probably forgot to add things to the log more than I remembered. I might continue this though, it was oddly a fun time.
Learning jujuitsu version control [2026-04-05 Sun]
I was reading this article about jujuitsu and how bookmarks are similar to git branches. The article mentioned a jj alias that some folks use to manage the issue of updating a tracked bookmark to the latest hash colloquillay known as `jj tug`.
I immediately opened a tab and started looking for it before I finished the article.
How many keystrokes before EOL? [2026-04-05 Sun]
I was in the middle of writing a blog post and started thinking about how my laptop is starting to near the end of its life and how much typing I must have done on it over the years. I started to look up if Linux had any sort of mechanism to report on keystrokes over the lifetime of an intstall.
I didn't have the Fedora distribution installed on this machine its entire lifetime, but I think I could extrapolate the earlier parts of its life based on my time using Fedora.
XSLT and RSS feeds [2026-04-07 Tue]
Had a discord discussion with some web nerds about RSS and the usability issues it has from the perspective of publisher as well as from the perspective of a consumer. Most of us in the chat publish an RSS feed for a blog or two and consume the feeds of many others.
One of the main concerns we all shared was that stumbling on an RSS feed sort of sucks if you don't know about RSS. An XML file will just be displayed in your browser in a source view by default leaving people no doubt confused about what they are supposed to do next or worse thinking they did something wrong.
We started discussing the use of XSLT to transform the feed XML into a styled HTML view if the feed XML is fetched via the browser. This is a really cool technology and extremely useful for this specific circumstance: where one needs to create a human-readable version of a machine-readable format. In the middle of the discussion we all discovered that Google was pushing for the removal of XSLT transformation support from chrome as well as the HTML standard.
In a fit of distraction I read the entire issue thread from the WHATWG on its possible removal, and got myself very mad at the same time.
Philosophical Zombies [2026-04-11 Sat]
I was reading "The Future of Everything is Lies, I guess" at aphyr.com which is a fantastic series of posts about AI, LLMs, their current effects on us and how we work, and more importantly about the possible futures that their effects could contribute to.
One of the articles mentioned the notion of "philosophical zombies" - with a hyperlink somewhere - and that was too enticing not to click on and try to read about.
I tried a few times to describe what exactly a philosophical zombie is, but I don't understand the concept myself. They are a tool of philosophical argument exploring the nature of consciousness. A zombie is just like a regular person where they percieve everything we do, but they do not [feel]{.underline} it. They can react to pain, but they do not feel the pain.
Reading the wikipedia article just left me very confused. I find this kind of philosophy very difficult to follow. I gave up and went back to the aphyr.com article.
NATO Alphabet [2026-04-14 Tue]
I was reading a comment thread on some website and overheard a phone conversation my gf was having in a different room where they were trying to read out a confirmation number to someone on the phone while trying to identify the trickier letters with a word. "'I' as in 'Iceberg'" for instance.
I stopped what I was doing and looked up the NATO Alphabet on wikipedia.
HTTP 433 Foreboding [2026-04-17 Fri]
Made a joke that they (the people in charge of such things) should create an HTTP status code for "foreboding". The server you are contacting is experiencing bad vibes at the moment; try again later.
I spent a little time looking up what an actual HTTP spec RFC looked like and decided just how committed to the joke I actually was: not enough to actually write a joke RFC in the spirit of the infamous Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.
I did find out how to draft a spec and submit it though.
Rain Bombs [2026-04-20 Mon]
I was doing a creative writing project for myself and was trying to think of ways to describe clouds that really captured the sublime nature of a cloud against a landscape. I was really struggling and got completely and utterly distracted watching a PBS Nova documentary I came across when reading about thunderheads. It was a documentary about a phenomenon called "rain bombs" where a very powerful storm releases a torrential amount of rain in a highly localized area.
It was pretty interesting. You can find the "rain bomb" documentary here.
Saturation Diving [2026-04-23 Thu]
I am doing a play through of a solo TTRPG adventure called Thousand Empty Light based on the Mothership 1e system. The story of the adventure has the player character travelling underwater to work inside an underwater structure something like 100 meters down. I had heard of saturation diving where divers that have to work at extreme depths will basically live in pressurized conditions while doing a multiple week long dive shift so they don't have to continually undergo compression and decompression.
I wanted to figure out if the depth of the underwater structure would mean the player character would have to be "pressurized". Reading the wikipedia article on Saturation Diving, and it appears that yes that could be a possibility. I could ignore this aspect of the adventure but it might make things more interesting narratively.
I plan to publish a play through on my blog so making the narrative more interesting with additional hazards like compression/compression/saturation could be fun.
1979 Alien Graphic Design [2026-04-27 Mon]
I am playing through Thousand Empty Light - a solo TTRPG based on Mothership 1e - and the game supplies its own symbol language inspired by the 1979 movie Alien. I think this is extra as hell and I love it.
I took a break from the game and got thoroughly distracted reading this article from Typeset The Future on the typography used in the movie Alien. They take a look at the symbol language for the movie developed by Ron Cobb they called "Semiotic Standard For All Commercial Trans-Stellar Utility Lifter And Heavy Element Transport Spacecraft". Cool.
If you're an Alien fan at all, definitely check out that Typeset the Future article. It is a really fantastic deep dive into all the design that went into the movie.
What was I doing again?
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