Quick bits:

• I made a snap decision to cash out most of my investments when the market started to nosedive. I avoided the worst but still took a hit. There’s a good chance that I’ll need a chunk of that money soon, and I’d rather be safe than make a profit.

• I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a directory of web sites and video channels that I follow. A bit of personal curation from my end. A bit like ooh.directory but much smaller in scope, and purely for myself.

• I’ve not been making much progress with my fiction writing, but I’m enjoying my worldbuilding, and I’m rather drawn, once again, to interactive fiction.

• More tourists are coming to the area of Berlin that I live in. There already were the frequent boat tours (I live close to the water), but now there are walking tours and I’ve even seen “nostalgia bus tours” in awful GDR-era minibuses in the area.

---

I’m repeating myself, but I hate walking in the area that I live in. The entire area is just shared-use paths (shared by cyclists and pedestrians) which is just so awful.

The other day, I was walking through the park and a cyclist came at me, did not get out of the way, hit me, and afterwards the cyclist argued that it was my fault: he claimed I should have gotten out of the way. He also claimed that this was a bicycle-only path and that pedestrians shouldn’t even be walking on it.¹¹1 Even if that were the case — which it isn’t — then it still isn’t okay to hit people who are in your way. Right? Isn’t that basic human empathy?  Ugh.

Shared-use paths are such a pain. They are an urban planning failure. The planners of my area thought it was reasonable to draw a national cycle route through a newly built-up area on shared-use paths. Just bonkers.

There is nowhere in my area where I can take a relaxing walk,²²2 There are the regular sidewalks, away from the shared-use paths, but sidewalks are frequently used by cyclists too, even if it’s technically not allowed.  and I find that deeply frustrating.

---

I’ve written about my file organization system before:

Isn’t it pretty? Yes it is.

I have two separate locations for files: the storage in my laptop (an SSD), and an external storage (an HDD) which contains all the infrequently accessed and archived stuff. Having two separate locations is annoying, because I need to retain the same structure in two different locations, which often isn’t possible in the moment when I’ve only got my laptop available.

This makes me feel like the concept of “storage device” is a bad abstraction. I wish I could have only one file system structure, and that plugging in my external drive would make all the missing files available in all the right place.

This is exactly what iCloud Drive is… but I’d love to have something like it for my own external storage devices.

I could probably something to work with some fstab and automount magic, but that’d be a bit nasty, and it also doesn’t fundamentally change the fact that the storage drive is at the root of the abstraction. Alas.

---

I’ve been toying with TiddlyWiki, which is a remarkable piece of software. I remember seeing it a while ago and dismissing it, but now that I’m looking at it again, I’m impressed.

I’ve got no plans to replace Bear as my note-taking application. I was looking for a place to collect and organize project-specific information entirely disconnected from my regular notes. Specifically, I’ve been doing a bit of worldbuilding, and a wiki is a rather good place for it.³³3 I could’ve also used Scrivener, though its wiki-like functionality is limited to my liking. 

When I looked at TiddlyWiki for the first time, I didn’t quite understand it. A single HTML file that you have to re-download to save? Weird. But with the TiddlyDesktop app that becomes a non-issue.

What makes TiddlyWiki stand out is how everything is built around tiddlers. Tiddlers are wiki pages — but they are also so much more:

• Tiddlers are used for settings. For example, $:/DefaultTiddlers is the tiddler that contains the list of tiddlers that will be opened at startup. The $:/palette tiddler contains the name of the color palette.

• Tiddlers are used for state. The $:/StoryList tiddler contains the list of stories (i.e. open tiddlers). Usually it is dynamically updated when opening and closing stories, but I can also manually edit that tiddler to open and close tiddlers.

• Tiddlers are used for views. This way, I can create my own implementation of backlinks if I wanted. All the HTML and CSS I can find in tiddlers too, which I can edit to create my own theme.

• Tiddlers are used for tags. I can assign a color to a tiddler used as a tag, and that color will be used for all tiddlers that are tagged with it.

All of it is wildly cool. I’m not explaining it well, and I’m only scratching the surface. It has a Smalltalk-like awesomeness to it, which isn’t surprising given that Tiddlywiki also follows the one-file-containing-everything idea.

With TiddlyWiki it’s also easy to have multiple separate wikis, which is something I miss in Bear. I would love to have two Bear instances! Though admittedly, Bear is not a wiki but rather a note-taking application; there is some overlap between wikis and note-taking applications but they’re also quite distinct.

There are some drawbacks:

• As the wiki itself is just a HTML file, it’s not trivial to extract the information in it to use elsewhere. For example, if I wanted to import data from my wiki into a Nanoc site, then I’d struggle.

• TiddlyWiki uses its own distinct markup language (a dialect of WikiText). I couldn’t find existing parsers for this markup language in other programming languages. This makes interop quite a bit harder.

• There is no mobile app. There is also no syncing possible, as far as I can tell, between two TiddlyWiki instances.

But still, TiddlyWiki is a damn interesting piece of software that is worth taking a look at.

---

Entertainment:

• Delicatessen⁴⁴4 Delicatessen, directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro and Gilles Adrien (Constellation, Union Générale Cinématographique (UGC), Hachette Première, 1992).  and Naked Lunch⁵⁵5 Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, written by William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg (Recorded Picture Company (RPC), Téléfilm Canada, Ontario Film Development Corporation, 1992).  are streaming on Mubi right now?! Get yourself Mubi for 30 days free stante pede and watch that shit.

• Music bought this week: the Fallen London OST (Maribeth Solomon and Brent Barkman, AAR031 (Luche / Laton Raver), and Slam Zone (Ceephax Acid Crew).

• In Factorio,⁶⁶6 Factorio (Wube Software, 2020), published by Wube Software.  I have finally made it to the planet Aquilo.

---

Politics links:

• Trump’s Tariffs Make Perfect Sense (Jessie Gender)

• Trans Athletes (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver)

• Explaining the Trump Tariff Equation (Stand-up Maths)

• CONSPIRACY (ContraPoints)

• Fascists will waste your time. (Thought Slime)

Links:

• Fewer beans = great coffee if you get the pour height right (Jennifer Ouellette for Ars Technica)

• How Influencers Hijacked Stoicism (and what they got wrong) (Unsolicited advice): I’ve now added the word “Broicism” to my dictionary because it’s a very good word.

• Treadmill vs. Real Hill: Which is harder to run (Steve Mould)

Tech links:

• Better typography with text-wrap pretty (Jen Simmons, WebKit blog): Faaancy! I’m already using text-wrap: pretty on my web site and it’s quite nice.