Friday Night College Basketball.

Tonight's game of choice in the Roscoe-verse has the (2-1) Illinois Fighting Illini men's basketball team (ranked #3 nationally) hosting the (2-1) Sam Houston St. Bearkats. With its scheduled start time of 6:00 PM CT, and this being Friday, there's a very good chance I'll be able to hear the whole game before sleep sends me to bed.

And the adventure continues.

The bottom is falling out of the world as we realize how big tech companies have over the last decades repackaged and cheapened everything that makes us humans and sold it back to us. As we try to recover these emotions and modes of interactions, let's recognize that they are still there. And that the practice of using a proprietary slick presentation to take away simple, but rugged modes of life has started way early.

Ask yourself this: Why do we need Word documents, and why do we need PDF files? We do we need vendors to sell us platforms that store mostly text and image files? Most of what we share can be simple text, maybe with some markdown decoration, or simple image files that can be shared freely and in almost any way you like. Yet almost nobody even realizing that anymore showcases how firmly our routines have been co-opted and channeled into the pockets of Microsoft or Adobe.

Next time you are about to start a Word document (or Google Doc, or LibreOffice document), ask yourself first: Could this just be plain text? And then (learn to) open and edit a text or markdown file instead.

Easier and harder than you'd expect!

A number of years back, I had written a guide of sorts for a clean Fedora Silverblue install on the then-current generation Dell XPS 13. I covered the basic installation steps I took, packages I stripped and/or layered, Flatpak repositories, and some fixes for driver issues. Now, I’m doing the same for the current generation XPS 13, and it seems not much has changed! Installation is easier than it’s ever been and honestly not the important part. That being said, let’s dig in…

Installation

Prerequisites

There’s a few important steps we want to do before popping in that USB stick and proceeding with the installation. The first, clearing the internal SSD and configuring the appropriate Secure Boot settings. By default, the XPS 13 ships Windows 11 and only accepts Windows’ Secure Boot keys. I use the secure erase function via the system UEFI menu. This ensures that there’s no data on the internal SSD, though this isn’t strictly necessary, it makes it easy not to worry about potential errors when the installer tries to read partitions on the drive. As for the Secure Boot settings, enable “custom settings” and enable “Microsoft UEFI CA”. This will allow the system to recognize the keys that Fedora will provide/use. I spent a looong time troubleshooting this, and some distributions will just not work at all, but Fedora seems to have things dialed in properly! The actual Installation

Plug that USB drive into the system and power it on. It should boot into the right device as there’s no longer an operating system on the internal SSD. Alternatively, you can always smack the F12 button to get to the boot device menu! Select “Install Fedora 45” at the top, and hit Enter. After a few moments, the system should eventually boot into the new web-based installer. It’s nice, clean, and fairly self-explanatory. Most of it is just a matter of hitting next/continue until it’s done. The only settings I really advice paying attention to are the disk encryption option (ENCRYPT YOUR INSTALL, THERE IS ZERO REASON YOU SHOULD BE SKIPPING THIS!) and setting the system hostname, which by default just tries to guess based on what your network assigns to it. Continue until the last step, wait until the system finishes installation, and hit that beautiful blue “Reboot” button!

The actually interesting and opinionated part!

Creating an account and installing updates

The first thing you should be greeted with is a popup window that allows you to choose some basic system settings including creating a user account and setting a password. This is all fairly straightforward and I can’t really tell you what your username should be, but I’m partial to ‘schykle’ for pretty obvious reasons!

From there, you’ll be tossed into your actual GNOME session! Skip the tour because you’re clearly too cool for that, and open up GNOME Software. Ignore the popup to install additional third-party repositories and head straight for that Updates tab.

By now, the system should already be processing an update in the background. In this instance, you really do just have to wait a bit. You should eventually see two categories for updates. One is going to be a Secure Boot database update, and the other is going to be updates for your operating system and its components. Do both! Then use the restart and install/restart and update option to reboot your system.

Yoinking out Fedora Flatpaks and Firefox

There’s a lot of heavy opinions about Fedora including and defaulting to their own Flatpak builds with Silverblue. We can skip the details there because my opinions have already been documented! Pop open a terminal and let’s clean it up. Here’s what I typically do to resolve this and remove the existing filtered Flathub repo:

rpm-ostree override remove firefox firefox-langpacks fedora-flathub-remote && flatpak uninstall org.fedoraproject.MediaWriter org.gnome.Calculator org.gnome.Calendar org.gnome.Characters org.gnome.Connections org.gnome.Contacts org.gnome.Decibels org.gnome.Extensions org.gnome.Logs org.gnome.Loupe org.gnome.Maps org.gnome.Papers org.gnome.Snapshot org.gnome.TextEditor org.gnome.Weather org.gnome.baobab org.gnome.clocks org.gnome.font-viewer && flatpak remote-delete flathub

From there, restart your system!

In the past, I used to just remove the Fedora Flatpak repository entirely, but there are some provided libraries and resources that are worth keeping it for, even if we’re going to install all of our actual apps using Flathub.

Other extraneous packages I remove...

If you’d like, there’s a few other things I remove as someone who does not use GNOME extensions or the classic session. I also remove the Fedora Bookmarks package, among a couple of other things. Similar to the initial section of the previous command block, these would be removed with rpm-ostree override remove.

Packages I remove:

fedora-bookmarks fedora-chromium-config fedora-chromium-config-gnome gnome-shell-extension-apps-menu gnome-classic-session gnome-shell-extension-window-list gnome-shell-extension-common gnome-shell-extension-places-menu gnome-shell-extension-launch-new-instance gnome-shell-extension-background-logo gnome-system-monitor gnome-tour yelp

My reasoning for removing the GNOME System Monitor and Yelp are that I prefer the Resources Flatpak instead of GNOME System Monitor, and I never really use the Yelp/Help application.

Re-adding the real Flathub

Pop open a terminal and run this command to re-add the Flathub repository:

flatpak remote-add flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

From there, Flathub should now be available in GNOME Software, and when you search for apps to install, whether it be Firefox, Calculator, etc., you’ll have the option between the Fedora Linux Flatpak repository or the Flathub repository. It is almost always beneficial to just use the Flathub repository.

Should you decide you actually don’t care for the Fedora repo at all and want to remove it so Software always uses Flathub, run this command:

flatpak remote-delete fedora

This will remove the Fedora Flatpak repository and any of the packages installed from it.

Uh-oh! My system keeps hanging!

Driver issues with Intel Xe graphics? I’ve got you.

One of the fixes I’ve had to apply to my system is disabling a couple of power saving features for the display. Namely, self refresh and panel powersaving state. To do this, you need to enable a couple of boot arguments using our old friend, rpm-ostree! Pop open a terminal and enter the following:

rpm-ostree kargs --append="xe.enable_dc=0" --append="xe.enable_psr=0"

From there, reboot your system and enjoy stability!

Some tweaks I recommend!

Shutdown on lid close

One of my favorite tweaks is setting my laptop to shut down when I close the lid. I do this for two main reasons. The first is just the peace of mind that when I close my laptop, it’s in a state where it’s most secure: powered off and encrypted. The second is that I’m far less likely to have closed it and forgotten it in sleep mode for extended periods of time. There’s very few instances where what I’m doing can’t be easily picked back up by opening closed tabs, or just whatever apps I typically use anyway. Here’s how to do it!

Edit or create the file /etc/systemd/logind.conf using nano (because it’s the best), and ensure the following contents are present:

[Login]
HandleLidSwitch=poweroff
HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore
HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=poweroff
LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=no

Save the file and restart. These settings mean that if the lid is closed when on battery or plugged in, it will shut down. However, when docked, it will not, in case you’re plugged into external displays and accessories where you’d likely not want it to be open while using it! It also includes a line that tells it not to ignore processes that typically stop shutdown (like background updates).

You might be wondering… “But, what if I ever want to put it to sleep?” Fear not… You can still put the laptop to sleep by typing “Sleep” or “Suspend” into GNOME search, or by pressing the power button (just make sure you set that to trigger suspend in GNOME Settings!). You can safely close the lid when the device is asleep and it will remain in sleep state and resume when opened. Poweroff will only be triggered if the device is awake.

Recommended apps

I have some recommendations on apps that you should probably have and are available from Flathub! 1) Resources — A modern system monitor 2) Pika Backup — A backup application using Borg on the backend 3) Apostrophe — A simple yet powerful markdown editor 4) GNOME Weather — Integrates into the notifications center for forecasts 5) GNOME Clocks — If you’re someone who manages things across time zones, setting world clocks lets you see them in the notifications center at any given time

Aside from these, some of the best apps for Linux and GNOME in particular are on the Apps for GNOME website!

The conclusion you’ve all been waiting for!

Look, I’m not going to tell you that there’s only one way to set things up, I’m just going to tell you the best way. (Just kidding… unless…) These are just the steps I’ve taken to have a really clean and suitable install for my needs. Getting Secure Boot working properly was actually the biggest hurdle for me. This laptop does not seem to play nicely with third-party certificates, and thankfully Fedora seems to have been blessed because it works the way it should! Getting just about everything installed as a Flatpak is honestly the way to go. Rely on Toolbox, the built in container system, for software that you need to run that isn’t installed on the core operating system, and limit the number of packages you layer on the core operating system as much as possible. For all things good and true, do not layer Steam, use the dang Flatpak!

Enjoy!

I’m pleased to see the UK holding some of its sexual predator celebrities accountable. They’re definitely ahead of the US, where we only hold sexual predator celebrities accountable if they’re Black. (Or more accurately, only the Black ones face legal proceedings. Okay, Harvey Weinstein. Name another.)

But Russell Brand’s imprisonment and David Walliams’ exposure (definitely the most exposure he’s ever had here in the USA, where if they ain’t on Taskmaster, Derry Girls, or Great British Bakeoff, we don’t know ‘em) has me thinking about all the people who enabled them.

Brand has faced legal consequences and Walliams has faced career consequences, but what about all the many, many people who knew and never did anything about it. Now I’ve seen the Katherine Ryan video, and I understand that you can’t just go denouncing people with a ton of money lest they sue you for defamation. BUT. You don’t have to work with them. You don’t have to hire them. And you don’t have to hang out with them.

Which brings me to Matt Lucas, David Walliams’ longtime comedy partner and Great British Bakeoff co-host and Taskmaster Contestant. (See, this is why I know who he is!). I’ve seen the comedy awards video too, where a guy who’s never been on Taskmaster makes a joke about “these awards are 15 years old and drunk! They’re going home with David Walliams!” Ha! Oh, is there a richer comedy vein to mine than the sexual abuse of children?

Anyway, Matt Lucas is right next to David Walliams in that clip. He knew. Why did he continue to work with him? Has anyone asked? Do we still want to watch him on Bakeoff (disclaimer: I do not enjoy that show, but it’s on in my house a lot) being the kind, cuddly host knowing he looked the other way while his friend was being a sexual predator?

Kenneth Branagh put Russell Brand in a movie in 2022. Granted nobody saw it, possibly because it also featured alleged cannibal and sexual predator Armie Hammer, but everybody knew what Russell Brand was about by 2022. And Kenneth Branagh chose to employ him. Now, you can look at someone down the cast list—say James Schofield, who played “German Soldier #1” and go, “well, that guy really can’t control who he’s in a movie with,” but Kenneth Branagh sure as shit can. Ridley Scott produced that movie. Do you think he doesn’t have the juice to blackball a rapist? Of course he does. He just didn’t care.

We need to start asking people who associate with predators the hard questions about what they knew and when they knew it. And, furthermore, we need to stop giving them a pass for looking the other way at bad behavior. I was doing some research about celebrity bad behavior and came across this disturbing account of a child actor being at the home of Justin Long and Jonathan Togo and being assaulted by Jonah Hill. (And said child star also says her friend was raped by Togo). Now, Justin Long hasn’t been accused of anything except for giving alcohol to underage girls. Which, BTW, is a crime, but more importantly, he knew what was going on. He knew the kind of danger those girls were in. The child actor also says that some other celebrities at the party took her aside and warned her to be careful, and I’m sorry, but that’s not nearly good enough. If you are a grown adult and see a drunk 16-year-old at your party, you put them in a cab. You tell them they need to leave, and if they refuse, go to the host and tell him to make them leave. And start taking pictures and videos. “Oh, but then you might not get to hang out with Justin Long anymore!” Wow, yeah, that’s a terrible consequence. I can see why you wouldn’t want to risk that.

For the record, Long says he didn’t know about all the creepy sex stuff, which strains credulity, but he did know he had drunk underage girls at his party, and he had a responsibility as a human being to take care of people more vulnerable than him.

And so, for that matter, do we all. I could go on listing celebrities who have enabled other bad celebrities (Okay, okay, one more: Judd Apatow worked with James Franco, Jonah Hill, AND Russell Brand. He’s either dangerously oblivious or else a piece of shit.) (And people KNEW Neil Gaiman was creepy. For YEARS), but sadly this shit is not limited to celebrities.

If you know more than four men, you probably know one who has sexually assaulted someone. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but those one in four women aren’t sexually assaulting themselves.

Aside: something that gets lost in the conversation about men protecting other men who are predators is that the kind of men who like to exercise non-consensual power over women’s bodies as adults were very likely the kind of boys who liked to exercise non-consensual power over other boys’ bodies by beating them up. Boy culture is shockingly violent, and boys learn at a young age that calling bad boys out gets you beaten. The same rules may or may not apply to adults, but that aversion response is coded very deep for people who grew up as boys. We need to find the courage to overcome it, to say, “well, I’d rather get punched in the face than have that woman get raped,” but it’s not easy to silence the reptile brain telling you to flee.

Anyway, we all of us need to be more discerning about the company we keep. I’ve written about this before, but let us remember that there is no legal standard for declaring someone a piece of shit that you don’t want to hang out with. Women are better at this than men. So, like, if you identify as a man, imagine this scenario: a man and woman you know just got divorced, and she’s made it clear that he was abusive. But he was your friend first. He calls you up—do you wanna hang out?

I think I know what most men would do in that situation. I know from experience that it’s not easy to cut off a friend who behaves in a problematic way. But if you don’t, then you’re enabling the bad behavior. Forget legal proceedings for a minute—people need to see creepy men facing social consequences in their own lives. Will this stop men being creepy? Probably not, but it will, hopefully, convince men who have creepy impulses that being creepy is not worth the risk. Clearly none of the above celebrity predators ever thought, “I better not do this, or I could lose everything.” But they should. And administering the social consequences is up to us.

I’m a big fan of Linux-based operating systems and I have been since I first started using Linux on the desktop back in 2015 with Xubuntu. Over the years, I’ve bounced back and forth between various distributions, spending the largest amounts of time with Solus, elementary OS, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. In recent years, convenience and lifestyle changes have put a halt on my interests in Linux and open source as a whole. Until now.

About that purple rat… I actually think it may be a raccoon of some sort? Either way, I quite like it! I’ve started using Linux again after spending a short amount of time trying to find a suitable Windows laptop I would be capable of running Overwatch on since it doesn’t run on mac OS due to software compatibility limitations. And as usual, I’ve rediscovered the massively disappointing first-start experience of any Windows machine. Over an hour of setup and reboots just to apply a list of updates that continued to grow instead of shrink with each boot. Uninstalling a plethora of apps and services Microsoft and the OEM (in this case, Dell and HP as I tried a couple of laptops) decided would be in my best interest to have.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my desire to play a single game is far lower than my desire to use an operating system that doesn’t feel like it actually hates me. I quickly shifted my focus from debloating and reinstalling clean versions of Windows, to installing an operating system I have very fond memories of: Ubuntu. Knowing that I wouldn’t be pleased with using a gaming laptop for normal tasks, I ditched the clunky Alienware laptop I had purchased and went down a rabbit hole of attempting to use multiple laptops from multiple OEMs. Not everything went as smoothly as I had hoped, but to some extent, much of this was my fault. Here’s a short and sweet recap that omits a few attempts…

Firstly, the laptop I genuinely wanted the most; a Dell XPS 13 (model DX13260). I was thrilled to have found a really thin and light laptop that was well-built and had a modern Intel processor. I assumed that I would have the smoothest experience with it and Linux, particularly when it comes to features like Secure Boot and TPM-backed encryption. I was wrong. After multiple attempts to get this working by disabling, re-enabling, clearing, restoring the relevant settings in the UEFI, this feature was consistently unavailable for enablement in the Ubuntu installer. I really wanted this feature to be available and functional, so despite loving the hardware, I ditched the XPS and moved on to an HP laptop.

I applied the same logic with this attempt, opting for a high-end HP laptop (model D3KN6U) that was relatively standard and featured an Intel processor. In the past, I’ve had the most seamless experiences with Intel processors running Linux. Again, swing and a miss! This time, I just could not get it to boot consistently with any Secure Boot features enabled. But what if maybe this model was fine, I just needed to try another processor? So that’s exactly what I did!

Here I go, fresh USB stick, fresh download of the latest Ubuntu release and some hopes that AMD may just be my savior here! I power on my wonderful new HP laptop (model D3KU2UA) and go through the UEFI to configure the proper settings. Clearing, restoring, disabling, enabling all of the relevant keys and settings multiple times to no avail. Nothing worked the way it should! At this point, I was genuinely becoming quite frustrated because I remember this being so much easier when I daily drove Linux in the past. Incidentally, I experienced a quirk where I could boot Ubuntu 26.04.1 just fine, but without Secure Boot ever working or being visible to the OS. and 26.10 wouldn’t boot at all… until I unplugged the laptop? At that point, 26.10 would boot but alas, no Secure Boot.

By then, a new week rolled around and a new set of retail sales were live at my local Best Buy. I figured since I was already this far down the rabbit hole, I may as well try one more! Off I go to make the swap and I brought home a Dell laptop (model DS14265) that I had been eyeing anyway. I wasn’t expecting anything to work at this point, so I just popped in my Ubuntu 26.04.1 install media, went through the UEFI to tweak the appropriate settings as I usually do, and restarted the machine.

Great success! Bingo! Voilà! Presto! (insert any other number of phrases that you see fit…) It worked. Secure Boot was visible to the system. Not only that, the Ubuntu installer also allowed me to select TPM-backed encryption during my installation and gave me absolutely zero trouble! It just worked as it should. No fuss, no muss. Which concludes the “short and sweet” recap of devices I tried (and failed) to use and begins my praise of a wonderful little raccoon I may only be able to describe as “resolute”!

I cannot express enthusiastically enough just how refreshing the Ubuntu first-run experience is, especially after coming from a Windows device. Logging into my system for the first time, I was greeted with a “welcome” application that served me a few important options like whether or not to enable location services, device telemetry, and the option to enroll in Ubuntu Pro (a service that is free for personal use and includes some pretty awesome features). Aside from that, just a quick mention of where to get apps and that’s it! I wasn’t forced to sign in or create an account, nor was I required to have internet access at any point during setup. As with any system, one of the first things you should do is update it. On Windows, this is a process that could take up to an hour to complete. On Ubuntu, it was as simple as opening the software updater and hitting install. The process took less than two minutes and a single reboot. That’s all.

The next thing I did was get my apps installed. What good is a computer without the software you want to use? There was a period of time in the past where Snaps could be a point of friction in regards to the speed of app opening, or fairly common functions breaking due to confinement. Now? I opened up the App Center and installed a bunch of apps I needed like Signal, Discord, Tailscale, Telegram, etc. All of them installed without a hitch and opened exactly the way you’d expect. No awkward pause as an app icon bounces after you click on it… Firefox opened instantly and may I just say is far smoother and more beautiful than it has ever been for me in the past (great work, Firefox folks!). Aside from a few quirks like Taildrop only allowing me to send or push files from within the ~/snap/tailscale/ directory, every one of my apps has been working remarkably.

It has been a remarkable experience to open up my laptop and have it work exactly like it’s supposed to. I haven’t been spammed with advertisements about gaming subscriptions, cloud storage offers, office suite subscriptions, or had “sponsored” apps and games show up in my launcher. The only downside I’ve really experienced is that I have not been able to get my audio output to work at all. I currently have a “Dummy Output”, which I believe is just a placeholder when there isn’t an audio device available. Something I’ll try to work on at some point, but will manage without since I rely on my AirPods for listening anyway. Another thing which as worked wonderfully, by the way. Bluetooth connection and playback via my AirPods has been flawless including volume and playback controls. Even performance controls have worked wonderfully and my battery life has been wonderful. Brightness, keyboard backlight, resolution and scaling are all working perfectly.

These may seem like fairly simple things to get excited about, but mind you, the Linux experience is often claimed to be terminal-first hackery and yet I’ve not had to touch it once. That’s not to say I don’t have some critiques… My desire to use TPM-backed encryption is an oddly specific one, but one that should work reliably for people as it is effectively the new standard for how people use their machines. It’s a far more elegant solution than typing in two passwords with every login and certainly more desirable for the everyday user. There’s clearly work to be done on making sure that gets better moving forward. In the meantime, standard installations pretty much work in most situations. Unencrypted and LUKS encrypted installs worked just fine for me (I had done this on multiple machines just to see if I could at least get that going, even if Secure Boot failed) and would still provide the same, clean experience that puts Windows to shame.

This is the first time I can ever remember choosing to use an LTS version of Ubuntu when a new standard release is available as I typically chase the newest of the new. Now I don’t even feel like I need to. Things have been fast, reliable, and so gosh darn easy. I think if I was in the mood for deep and involved tinkering, I totally would think about getting on the interim release, but that’s for future me to deal with! There’s a reason I’ve chosen to type this all up on my laptop rather than hopping on my Mac to do it. The fact that unlike every piece of commercial software in deployment right now, this operating system is made by a talented group of thousands of contributors from around the world, many of which are unpaid volunteers, and yet they choose to contribute code and testing time to making it all work together. I love my Mac, but I certainly wouldn’t say it excites me in quite the same way, and Windows is in such a state of disrepair that it isn’t even worth considering.

Installing Ubuntu on this laptop has been a real treat. No doubt I’d do it all again if I was starting fresh!

I want to give a massive shoutout to the folks I’ve met and made friends with over the years of me dipping my toes into the Linux world as they’ve been a source of assistance, inspiration, and camaraderie. In every community there is disagreement, but the passion in the open source community has ultimately also been its strength and the glue that has held it together across the globe. Thank you!

A door full of sand, a forbidden book, and onion rings.

We go to a meeting in Russia. No car. No money. Grey and dusty. Is this Chernobyl?

I manage to get a car I found running. I have to hide it (and us) in an old concrete plant.

The first place I find, we access by taking an elevator. Sarah Tvedt is there, bitchily snooping. She doesn't want us to have a car. She wants us to suffer like she does.

Bitch.

I hide it deeper, under this iris thing. It's cool, like the Batcave. Rusty and industrial.

Now that I have a car, I go out adventuring.

I find a bookstore or library. The sign is garbled, like it was designed by the same AI that made spaghetti-eating Will Smith.

It's an upstairs-downstairs situation. Upstairs, you sit, eat, and read your books. I notice everyone has big, glorious stacks of books, but I only have my one.

I ask another patron, and she tells me there is another level, but it's only for Chinese.

“Not for you,” she says, eating pizza and gesturing at her eyes.

I go down the stairs.

It's yellow and wood, with shag carpet, like the '70s.

The clerks downstairs are helping another customer, and I approach the door in the small room as if I belong there.

When I turn the handle, it's firm and refuses to turn. I try to turn it with my mind, visualizing the parts inside the lock, but all I can see are rocks and sand.

The clerk gets my attention and tells me the door is for employees only.

I ask for a different color book, and she says I cannot read it.

And I tell her how hungry I am.

“You want onion rings?” she asks.

I answer in the affirmative.

Then a little man comes out and gives me the biggest plate of onion rings I've ever seen.

They are glistening and warm, fresh out of the fryer.

As I carry them up the stairs, I'm back in the garage of the concrete plant where the car is stored.

Then I wake up to the sun making the room glow a golden yellow.

---

#dream

I've noticed a troubling trend lately. RSS feeds seem to be disappearing from a lot of business, news, and even personal websites, and the trend seems to be accelerating. Now Reddit is pulling its RSS feeds. This isn't a new trend. Twitter (now X, and I hate that name) discontinued its official RSS feeds back in 2013. Years later, services like Nitter and XCancel came along, offering alternative ways to follow Twitter/X content. These were great services, but they have since been discontinued following legal threats from Elon Musk's X.

Earlier in 2026 I was noticing RSS was making a comeback. I was reading about Dave Winer, one of the inventors of RSS, doing things with it (namely his rss.chat). I use RSS to read the sites I want to follow without having a lot of browser tabs. When I find a site that interests me, I subscribe so I have an easy way to follow all the sites I want in one place. I will visit sites again via the RSS feed if the full post is not there. RSS seemed to be enjoying a resurgence, only to suddenly appear to be going out of vogue again, especially business-related ones.

For some business examples, there is Samsung Community, where the RSS feeds I used to follow are no longer available after its recent platform upgrade. I used them to keep up with trends and other information that might affect my phones and laptops. Another one was Food.com. Its RSS feed stopped working in the same month, October 2026.

A few personal bloggers I follow have stopped offering RSS feeds. I'm not going to mention them because I don't know whether it was their choice or the result of a platform or hosting change that no longer supports RSS or has it turned off by default and it isn't my place to question how they run their sites. I did ask one person I follow about it, and they hadn't really thought about it. They ended up adding a native RSS feed. You can use OpenRSS.org to follow sites that don't offer RSS, but OpenRSS has limited resources.

And apparently, I'm not imagining the broader problem. A recent study by RSSLY found that only 24% of the websites it examined had a discoverable, working RSS feed. It also found that 57% of the websites in its historical comparison that advertised feeds in 2016 no longer advertised them in 2026.^[1] Another study by Mark Nottingham identified more than half a million RSS and Atom feeds, but found that only 38.1% had evidence of being updated within the preceding year.^[2]

I just wish more websites would remember that RSS is a simple way for people who actually want to follow them to keep coming back. Hopefully, this isn't really a trend, and it's just me coming across sites whose owners, for one reason or another, didn't realize their RSS feeds were gone. And for businesses, please stop. You generate more goodwill by keeping RSS feeds than by removing them and becoming totally closed off, and it can't be costing you that much in business or resources to provide a feed.

Footnotes

1. Vlad Fedoniuk, "The State of RSS in 2026: We Checked the 10,000 Most Popular Websites," RSSLY, November 4, 2026. Researchers attempted to examine 10,000 popular domains and successfully analyzed 6,459 websites. They found that 24% had discoverable, working RSS feeds. Their historical comparison also found that 57% of websites advertising RSS feeds in 2016 no longer advertised them in 2026, although some feeds may still function without being publicly advertised. Source

   ↩

2. Mark Nottingham, "Web Feeds in 2026: A Survey," May 10, 2026. Using Common Crawl data, Nottingham identified 534,195 parseable RSS and Atom feeds. Only 38.1% showed evidence of freshness within the preceding year, although some feeds may lack reliable date information. Source

   ↩

#opinion #rss #technology

A Year Without You

In Loving Memory of My Brother, Aaron

---

A year ago today, you left this world.

And somehow, the world kept turning.

The sun continued to rise. Seasons changed. People went to work, children kept on playing, and life carried on with the quiet indifference of time.

But somewhere in that continuing world, there was an empty place where you had once been.

And nothing can ever fill it.

I've been thinking about what it means to lose someone.

Not simply the moment of their passing, or the sorrow that follows, but the strange realization that life continues to unfold without them.

There have been changes in my life this past year, Aaron.

Doors have closed. Others have opened.

I've walked away from things I once thought would always be part of my life. I've found new beginnings in places I never expected.

I've experienced moments of sadness, moments of uncertainty, moments of joy, and moments when I wished I could share what was happening in my life with you.

And through it all, you've remained my brother.

Death didn't change that.

It changed what was possible between us.

There will be no new conversations. No unexpected phone calls. No opportunity to make another memory together.

But there is still a lifetime of memories that death cannot reach.

And there is still love.

I've come to understand something about grief.

It isn't always loud.

Sometimes it is simply the quiet recognition that someone is missing from a world that continues to move forward.

Sometimes it's remembering your face.

Your voice.

A moment that seemed ordinary when it happened, but became precious because there would never be another quite like it.

And sometimes grief is simply speaking your name.

Aaron.

A name that belongs to a life.

A life that mattered.

A life that cannot be reduced to the day it ended.

I don't know what I would say if I could sit with you one more time.

Perhaps that I bought a house and when I picked up the phone to tell you, it broke my heart that I couldn't make that call.

Perhaps we'd simply talk about ordinary things, the way brothers do, without realizing how extraordinary those moments really are.

But I know this much.

I'm grateful you were here.

I'm grateful that somewhere in the story of my life, our paths were joined not by chance, but by blood, by history, and by the simple truth that you were my brother.

And although this past year has taught me that life does not wait for grief to finish its work, it has also taught me that moving forward does not mean leaving everyone behind.

Some people travel with us in ways the world cannot see.

In our memories.

In the stories we tell.

In the love that remains after goodbye.

So today, I won't measure your life by the year you've been gone.

I'll remember the years you were here.

The person you were.

The place you held.

And the brother you will always be.

Rest peacefully, Aaron.

One year has passed.

You are remembered.

You are deeply loved.

And there will always be space for you in my home.

With love,

Your brother.

#ArchitectureOfGrief

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© SilentSentinel, 2025. All rights reserved. Excerpts may be shared with attribution.

I celebrated Diwali for the first time today. It feels weird because it doesn’t feel like my culture, but at the same time I understand that it’s not like I’m white. I’m at this weird middle ground of a race, but I always think about how I do have my culture of growing up online that I go with and I do value.

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photo “Herbst auf Asphalt” by @brigeh@pixelfed.de, licensed under CC BY

Money is leveraged into power, and power is stored as money. Remember this. It is the autopoietic cycle of domination within capitalism.

If we want to break the fascist machine, we need to choke the engine of power by draining the fuel. In their scramble to consolidate power, the fascists have left a lot of victims. They have broken families, injured people, and murdered them, directly and through stochastic terrorism. Their terror has been helped along the way by those who are enthusiastic about the cause of injustice, and by those who have more greed than morals.

While I don't believe that punitive “justice” works to prevent most humans from doing bad things, since humans aren't really rational actors, there absolutely is a group for which the fear of retribution does work. Companies do make cold financial calculations when they decide to carry out evil or not. The ultra-rich tend to be rich because they use those same calculations.

This is why a key part of de-Nazification in Germany (which, as we can see, should have been far more aggressive) involved fines. Companies and rich people make decisions based on risk calculations. Certain people looked at Trumpism, and they saw an opportunity to make money, others bent the knee because they thought that the risk of not doing so was greater than the reward of resisting. If we don't want this to happen again in our life times, we have to make the consequences of collaboration with fascists so dire that no one ever considers doing it again.

I'm not going to pretend it wouldn't be gratifying to see Trump, Musk, and the whole group up against the wall or hanging upside-down. Sure, it might actually put the fear back in the fascists. But, from a strategic perspective, there's something far better. When you kill a fascist, you remove one fascist. In the long run, they are replaceable. You haven't taught them to stop. You've taught them to be more careful. If you actually want to destroy fascism, as an ideology, you have to interrupt Its cycle of reproduction. You have to interrupt that autopoietic cycle of money to power and power to money. You do that by taking the fucking money.

Fascists, like Trump, Musk, and Thiel are relying on the American capitalist ratchet. That is, it only turns one way. Once you turn power into money, the money is safe. It's the way Neoliberalism works too. Once you privative something, the 5th amendment keeps it from being returned to the people. When fascists loot the coffers, they protect their loot with that clause of the 5th amendment:

nor shall any person […] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

But this looting, from Trump and others, has been carried out largely by hurting people. Those people should be compensated. Congress has the power to create a reparations fund for victims, and to use it's power to fill that fund by seizing the assets of the perpetrators. Not only does this remove power from fascists and change the calculus for future collaborators, it directly shits power (in the form of money) to those most directly harmed by Trumpism.

Many of the Trump deportations were illegal under international laws and treaties that are also codified in US law. Deportation in spite of a withholding of removal order is illegal. Everyone involved in that crime can be held financially accountable (meaning that shit isn't protected by the 5th, motherfuckers). This includes everyone from the President, with all his billions in crypto bribes, down to every penny paid to CBP and ICE agents who hunted people down. Every massive signing bonus taken by every ICE agent belongs in the pockets of the families of the survivors of their victims.

A lot of ICE agents are Nazis. I don't mean this as a derogatory term; I mean it as a technical description. Patriot Front is a Nazi organization that can be traced back to Vanguard America through various re-brandings. Why did they re-brand? Because the Nazi who murdered Heather Heyer was a member of Vanguard America. Patriot Front had this tactic that might be familiar. See, they'd load into a moving van so they could get somewhere without being noticed, and load out for a sunrise march. Oh, that's an ICE tactic? Yeah, after the big ICE recruitment push Patriot Front stopped doing that and ICE started. Weird coincidence, isn't it?

ICE recruiting Nazis isn't just about ethnic cleansing. It was about power. It was about transferring public money into the pockets of small-time fascists. Those fascists can then turn that money back into power. There it is, the autopoietic cycle again. Fascists helping fascists, the circle of life.

Congress has the power to break that cycle. There needs to be an immediate investigation into deportation, freezing as many as possible, getting as many people back as possible, and compensating the families of those who have been tortured and killed during these illegal deportations. American citizens have been deported. People with withholding of removal orders have been deported. People have been murdered by ICE agents. This all needs to be investigated. ICE, as an agency, needs to be abolished and every single person employed by ICE should be forced to repay their last two years of compensation.

But this machine was also supported by tech. Just like IBM was forced to pay for their collaboration with the Nazis, so should the tech companies that materially supported ethnic cleansing in the US under both Trump administrations. But the IBM fines obviously failed. They failed because they were too small. A company can simply calculate the potential losses versus gains and, like IBM, decide that the risk is worth the reward. They lost that gamble, but it didn't ultimately hurt them. No, we must make a real example today. We must make sure no company ever makes that calculation again. We must liquidate all companies that were complicit in America's ethnic cleansing. Size the stock, nationalize them, strip them and sell them for parts. Make the investors scream until they vote responsibly. (And when it comes time, we do the same for those complicit in the genocide in Gaza, to pay the survivors and the displaced.) I'm talking about Palantir. No fines, simply the corporate death penalty. Expose all internal documents, open source any software worth saving, sell off all the hardware, and fine their infrastructure vendors every penny they've made by working with such a company.

And let's go back to that stochastic terror. I was shot by a fascist who was radicalized by far right media. I'm not alone. I've met dozens of people, and know of dozens more, shot, stabbed, and run over by unstable people who consumed fascist media. Sure, Tucker Carlson should flee to Russia while all the assets he can't physically carry are seized and sold to pay survivors of right wing terror. But, like so many other terrorists, my shooter was radicalized on Facebook. Facebook has been complicit in genocide in multiple countries. It's not enough to fine them. Meta must be liquidated. All company stock must be seized, the company dismembered, and all assets sold to pay the victims (not only American victims, but international victims).

Fascist tech is a reservoir of power, both in terms of capital and simply as it is. Twitter is a tool of Nazi radicalization and a place for Nazis to organize. Seize it and liquidate it. DOGE was a criminal enterprise organized and run by Musk. Cuts to USAID alone are calculated to have killed almost a million people already, with millions more to die over the few years. Elon Musk must be forced to pay, out of pocket, to fix everything he broke. No amount of money can bring back the dead, so every single penny that can be squeezed out of him should go to those he's killed and to preventing more deaths. Liquidate Twitter, liquidate Tesla, seize SpaceX, nationalize it, and give the whole thing directly to Ukraine. Size every crypto asset he has and sell it for pennies.

The cryptocurrency industry has been a big supporter of the fascist cause for a long time. The fun thing about blockchain is that it's not really as anonymous as it seems. You can trace transactions from wallet to wallet. If you seize someone's computer and can get access to their files, you know their wallet iD and therefore every wallet they've paid and been paid by. When fascists use cryptocurrency to launder money, you know who has been involved.

Any asset directly owned by Musk can be seized, if he can be captured. But if you can capture enough people linked to him, you will eventually get that wallet ID anyway. From there, you trace the money. Any wallet with a transaction that has come from a wallet associated Musk, Trump, or any of the fascist looters can be identified. Wallet IDs can be advertised with associated funds amounts, and anyone with the wallets can either pay back the funds or have the wallets deemed illegal. Anyone caught with an illegal wallet can be fined the value of the ill-gotten property, and their assets can also be liquidated to pay for their complicity.

Congress doesn't need a super majority to begin this process. They can begin setting up the commission to investigate, to calculate the harm, to codify the actions that need to be taken, and to figure out the strategy. They will need a super majority to remove every supreme court justice who ruled in favor of Trump in Trump v. United States.

But that may well be possible, and becomes more possible if the investigation focuses on the involvement of remaining right wing congress people have been complicit in Trump's corruption. Investigate each of them personally, and expose their financial crimes. Expose how many were invested in Geo Group when they voted to give money to ICE. Find out how many of them have made money off of Trump's crypto scams. Make it public record, so that it's available to their challengers in two years. Identify those who could be removed earlier to push closer to that 2/3s majority. (I bet you can find 11 House Republicans who could be impeached, for which failure to do so would put the other 33 in a challenging place next cycle.)

But you can start the whole thing with individual ICE agents, sizing all their assets to pay for their crimes. Bring Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez before congress and hold them accountable for the murder of Alex Pretti. Take their money, all of it, sell everything they have, and give it to Pretti's family. And then, do it again for Renee Goode. Then Salgado Araujo. Then Joan Sebastian Guerrero. And keep going. Investigate the illegal deportations, and hold the officers personally, individually, liable for their crimes. Fire them all. Liquidate their assets, give the money to the victims. Find the people who enforced the “Zero Tolerance” policy in 2017, and hold them accountable. Individually. Personally.

Over the next several years, starting as soon as possible, we must systematically take capital from powerful fascists and give that money to the marginalized people they hurt. Then we should go harder. Pardon everyone who fought Nazis in the streets. Send a clear message: if you are doing the right thing, even if it is against the law, you will be safe in the end. Anti-fascists are the immune system of a society. That immune system needs to be strong. Often that work can be done by simply exposing fascists. But occasionally, fascists need to be hit with baseball bats or bike locks. Sometimes fascists need to be afraid for their lives. Because when they aren't, millions of people die. Pardon everyone who fought fascists in the streets so they can do it again, if needed. Pardon them, and pay them for the time they spent in prison. Pay them back for their legal fees. Pay back the communities that defended them.

This is not about revenge. These are simply the steps you take to make the fascists think twice, to sear this into their memory, so no one tries this again as long as any of them are alive to tell the story. And they should be kept alive. You want the fascist to be a reservoir of terror. You want them to spread fear within their networks. You want them to warn everyone they know to not whisper a word of their beliefs to anyone, for fear of further retribution.

You want that fear in their networks, because that fear prevents them from restarting the autopoietic cycle. You want a living, speaking, warning their network to never invest in fascist power again.

Bubbles, my fish. is probably the only thing in this house that doesnt make me feel like ive ruined something just by existing near it. not just in this house, but in general. hes a funny little fish, ill give him that. anyway, my housemate came to speak to me yesterday. he’d recieved a call from the doctor. he told me everything was fine with me. Oh, is that right? so what the fuck have i been doing for the past couple of months, then? vomiting for entertainment? is that it? have i been making a hobby out of it? all the blood and pain and all that fucking weight ive lost. imaginary. brilliant. alright let me get this straight. so all of this vomiting was just a hallucination? great. the pain too? imagined the blood? imaginary. the weight ive lost? oh, come on, ive probably misplaced it somewhere. should check the cupboards. perhaps ive hallucinated the food as well. wouldnt that be something? all this time ive been convinced im eating and throwing up, when oh, what are we talking about? ive probably been just sitting around imagining the entire fucking thing. what a fucking idiot ive been am i right? maybe i should start hallucinating some money while im at it. a functioning body would be nice too. since we’re just having fun and making things up now, might as well get something useful out of it. let me just drop the sarcasm for once and get a clear answer. what the fuck do you mean everything is fine? i would like to know which part of this looks fine. seriously. which fucking part? because ive missed something. ive missed the part where losing weight, being unable to eat properly, throwing up half the things i consume and feeling like absolute shit suddenly became a sign of “excellent health!!” please. i didnt even get to hear it from the doctor himself, no. someone else got a phone call and thats it. case closed. ahmed is fine and everybody can go home.

Im just so fucking tired of this. im tired of feeling so awful then having someone to tell me theres nothing wrong. im tired of having to exlain that something is wrong. what else am i supposed to do? start vomiting in front of everyone? would that be convincing enough? whatever. ill stop complaining. wouldnt want to disurb the genral consensus that im perfectly fucking fine.

Sincerely, The imaginary patient.

I just got off the phone with my guy. I'm debating whether I want to get out of bed or go back to sleep. I'm usually a very light sleeper. I either missed his initial message or it didn't ring. I gave him the most obnoxious ringtone ever to make sure I'd hear it no matter what. We've discovered multiple times that I don't always. Luckily I did hear my alarm ten minutes later.

It's too that point where I'm starting to count the days until I will get butterflies at the airport. Long distance sucks! I'm admittedly nervous about our planned dates as so much can go wrong weather-wise. It will be a most exciting start to the year though. Then if all goes well and we decide to really go for it, 2027 will be a year of high stress and equally high joy. The logistics of it all does put me into a mild panic when I think about it. As does all of the paperwork and finances.

I'm looking forward to snuggling in our sleep. One of the best feelings in the world is being wrapped up tight in a pair of strong arms while spooning. That is home. He's a foot taller than me, so the envelopment is most blissful. On the other hand, I know from experience that he snores. My brain doesn't really ignore snoring. I will have to find some sleep pods, again. I'm not big on dampening my hearing when asleep, but we'll see.

I feel both the anxiety mentioned above, excitement, and a very comforting calm. I'm certainly nervous. We're very different in many ways while similar in many others. I jokingly tell him that he's a wee bit ocd with his routines, though I can see why he almost has to be. Where as I am much more lackadaisicle to an extent. He's very minimalistic decor ways, and I'm a libra. Enough said.

I am nervous about the space changes. Where I currently live is less than half the size of where I lived before. That took a lot of adjustment. His current place is smaller than what I currently live in. It makes me feel claustrophobic just thinking about it. Still, adjustments happen. Plus we will probably search for something else once settled. No closets is still such a peculiar thing to me. That's ok. I'm looking forward to proper public transportation and walking distances.

I guess I'm nervous about a lot, but also quite excited. It will not just be a new adventure in life, it will be me back in a place where I feel like me. It also means aspects of my personality I have placed a hard pause on will get to explode in all their glory. I'm admittedly looking forward to that quite a lot. As well as those small intimacies that occur when living with someone. And then, after we're all settled and have had a wee bit of time alone, we'll head off to the shelter to find a few cats and our family will be complete!

With both of us being over fifty, time does make me nervous. I am hoping that we will both be gifted with many more years and decent health. I look forward to discovery. Things are so much different at this age. Maturity. Wisdom. Patience. Appreciation. At least that is the hope. It is my hope to truly drink in and devour every second. There are many more hopes, but that is the biggest one. I hope that we unfurl spectacularly. Hehehe, the world should watch out!

Really, I just hope merging our lives will be less bumpy and more smooth, and that each morning we wake up smiling. Whatever it brings, I'm looking forward to it. That is where my mind is at this morning. This message may self-destruct because it feels too personal, but it is actually where my thoughts are and writing them down wraps me in peace.

Of course, it could just as easily all go up in flames along with the rest of the bloody world, but let's not think about that, shall we?

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.