• milk
• sugar
• honey
• rainbow sprinkles
• unicorn sprinkles
• dinosaur sprinkles
• dinosaur poop
• dinosaurs
• kittens
• kitten fur
• flour
• baking soda
• eggs
• coffee
• tea 🤔
• water
• almond milk
• soy milk
• kitten milk
• dinosaur milk
• dinosaurs again

“Cheers, Papa!”

The world is amazing. This is Haesindang Park, in South Korea, better known as Penis Park. There are penis sculptures of all sizes, styles, and colors, including gold and silver. People come here to enjoy the scenery and (no joke) wish on the penises for fertility, spirituality, and more.

From BBC Documentary: Not Making Babies in South Korea:

Woman 1: It is very nice, but it seems a little indecent. It’s a bit embarrassing.
Woman 2: Why? It’s very nice, with all the flowers. It’s pretty. I really like it.
Reporter: Do you come here because you get a certain energy about this place?
Woman 1: Well, I shouldn’t be receiving any energy here. I’m done with children.

There’s even a legend! From Wikipedia:

A tragic legend known as the “Legend of Auebawi and Haesindang” shrouds the statues of the park. According to the legend, a woman was once left by her man on a rock in the sea while he worked. The man was later unable to retrieve her because of a storm, and the woman drowned. After that, the village people were not able to catch fish. Some said that it was because of the dead woman. One day, a fisherman urinated into the water and afterward, he was able to catch fish, so it was thought that exposing the deceased virgin to male genitalia pleased her. To soothe her spirit further, the local village people made several phallic wooden carvings and held religious ceremonies on her behalf. After a while, the fish slowly returned and the villagers were able to live comfortably again. The place where the woman died was named Aebawi Rock and the building where the religious ceremony is held twice a year was named Haesindang. The ceremony is still honored today as a traditional folk event.

Truth really is stranger than fiction.

When they asked for suggestions for a 51st thing, I proposed the threaded screw. 🤓

Before it, fasteners were non-standard at best. Nails didn’t last. Others were hard to make or use. How many screws and bolts are made now? A million per person? Truly a key part of the modern economy.

Papa, is I-P-A-D…the iPad?

We’re doomed.

Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

- Mark Twain

(Tummeow; replaceface)

Totally polite and reasonable, btw. I’ll happily comply.

As planned, Facebook turned off some of its key APIs for posting and fetching data on Wednesday, and I disabled Facebook for Bridgy entirely.

It’s a sad day. Facebook was the single biggest reason I came up with Bridgy way back in 2011. I’ve always wanted to own my data online, on my own web site, but my friends and family generally used social networks like Facebook instead. I didn’t care too much about dogma or evangelizing, but I still wanted to connect with them wherever they were, and if they were online, more often than not they were on Facebook.

Social networks are under siege in the press right now, so it’s easy to forget all the ways they’ve made our lives better. Not only have they brought us indispensable tools for day to day life, they’ve also enriched our ties to many real people, not just those we care about most but also entirely new people, across the globe, who we may never have met otherwise.

We regularly look to big social networks for inspiration and motivation in the IndieWeb. We analyze and document features, UI designs, and yes, even antipatterns…but more importantly, we work hard to interoperate. We may try to live on our web sites, but we still treasure and value the relationships we have with everyone else. They’re still on the social networks, Facebook above all.

I’ll still use Facebook directly now and then. Friends will get engaged, colleagues will start new jobs, cousins will have babies. I’ll still expect to see someone at a party whose name I’ve forgotten – you know, we met her at that place, for that thing – and look it up on Facebook first. Embarrassment avoided, life improved. But I’ll use it less. I wish there was another way.

So long for now. See you on the web!

For as long as there’s been love, there’s been heartbreak and pain. But perhaps…it’s in the liminal space between love and loss that we find our shared humanity, and discover our capacity for empathy.

- Brain Stuff, What is the Museum of Broken Relationships?

Data wants to be dirty.

Duplicated data wants to skew.

A while back, I wrote up a design for bridging Microsub clients to traditional feed reader backends. Fast forward to a few weeks ago: I hacked together a bare bones prototype at IndieWebCamp 2018. Fast forward to now: I’m launching Baffle!

Baffle lets you use Microsub reader apps like Together, Indigenous, and Monocle with traditional feed readers like NewsBlur and maybe eventually Feedly and more.

Right now, it only supports viewing channels and timelines. If there’s enough interest and usage, I can add channel management, muting, and blocking. I’d also consider adding Feedly if I hear enough desire.

Happy reading!

But there was no corresponding sunshine in Bertram Wooster’s soul and no answering Twitter in his heart as he sat up in bed…

💯😂

- PG Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves