#1

Revamp – Ok, so... I've fallen down a rabbit hole. It's currently midnight, I was supposed to quickly go through my links saved over the month to finish this article, and instead I've spent almost 5 hours reading loads of stuff on loads of blogs, with each article I open leading to 10 new tabs, I have articles, entire categories of articles, articles that list articles, I even have two authentic, handcrafted blogrolls, painstakingly updated as the blogs cited are born and die...

As a result, I have a thousand ideas for completely changing my blog, I want to tear everything down and start again, to overhaul everything, I want to get started right now... BUT I know it's a trap, I know how long it took me the last 1,443,764 times.

And at the same time, I feel an effervescence that I haven't felt in years, because I've stumbled across lots of ‘old-school’ personal blogs, and I miss this Internet terribly.

So I created a page in Obsidian, wrote down all the ideas I have, all the things I want to copy (sometimes identically, sometimes not at all), and I'm trying to sort out what really fits with my way of doing things (I swear one day I'll manage to write an article that's less than 7,560,484,056 characters long), and I'm going to let it settle a bit before I get started.

I think the biggest change that's going to happen is that I'm going to allow myself to have an imperfect and incomplete blog.

Let's be clear, it already is, and I know it. The difference is that I try to avoid it — as if that were possible — so I end up spending months writing an article that is a huge, indigestible wall of text because I'm afraid of missing a single small thing, and I can't help thinking it could be better.

I have articles that have been 80% finished for two years 🤡

Anyway, I'll hate myself when I'm on my third night of tinkering with Kirby blueprints and templates, modifying CSS and trying to fix the responsive design, but that's okay, tonight I feel like I'm on the web in 2007 and it's so cool 😊

Edit: It's currently 5 a.m., I haven't let anything settle at all (who's surprised, honestly? I'm not.), but I've made lots of little changes to the blog, and I've added a whole new section to the site. I'll probably write an article to clarify all this, iand I'll try to not let it sit for 18 months before publishing.

#2

Addiction – I really liked Héroïne, le temps des seringues, 4 episodes of La Série Documentaire. It's not the most fun thing you'll hear this week, but it's very good.

#3

Medias – Libérations en Israël/Palestine : le deux poids, deux mesures bat son plein, a short article by Acrimed that highlights the unequal media treatment between Israeli ‘hostages’ and Palestinian ‘prisoners’.

#4

Music – I just discovered Sarah McCoy's music, and I absolutely love it, especially her album Blood Siren, but I love all her songs, to be honest. I'm just a little disappointed with her latest album. I feel like she's drowned in the music, and songs like Go Blind, which really move me when she sings them live (I've linked the Arte concert video below), end up sounding pretty but nothing more. In any case, her voice moves me, and I hope you'll like her too.

#5

Typo – Knit hello is a font made to be easy to knit. I like the idea, and I love the scarf pattern 👀 (via Biou)

#6

Justice – I highly recommend watching the video don't talk to the police. The first part is an explanation by a law professor of all the reasons why it is never a good idea to talk to the police (regardless of whether you have done anything wrong or not); the second part is confirmation by example from a police officer.

#7

Wandering – What if you could search every visible word on New York City’s streets? Yet another very cool project by The Pudding. I won't spoil the surprise, go see by yourself!

#8

Amitié – An Existential Guide to: Making Friends. This article is terrific. I want to extract a thousand quotes from it, here's a few: A friendship is mostly b-roll. , If a relationship comes with a Patreon tier list, it’s not friendship, it’s artisanal loneliness in monthly installments., Do not go looking for replacements; understudies are for musicals and grief is not a production.

#9

Abortion – I saw recently the movie Annie Colère, released in 2022, which tells the story of the struggle waged by feminists between 1972 and 1975 to give women the right to choose abortion freely. It tells the story of the MLAC, women who have abortions, women helping women to have abortions, doctors who help but find it difficult to relinquish their power and position of authority, and the fact that the legalisation of abortion was not a complete victory (abortion had to be paid for, minors had to have their parents' permission, foreigners were not entitled to it, etc.), that it caused a loss of knowledge and power among women... It's a really good film for reflecting on the subject. It's still fiction, of course, but it tackles the subject head-on, and it does it well.

And I was deeply moved by the first abortion scene we see, where Rosemary Standley (the singer from the band Moriarty) sings a version of Les Enfants du Pirée in Greek and French, which is absolutely beautiful.

There's also a great article on slate on the topic: La méthode Karman, une histoire oubliée de l'avortement illégal en France. (litt: The Karman method, a forgotten history of illegal abortion in France)

#10

Homecoder – An app can be a home-cooked meal. I read this article a few months ago, and I just stumbled upon it again. The first time, I focused on the part of the article that talks about the app itself, because I think the concept is cool, and it's great that he was able to replace it with a homemade solution when it shut down. This time, I focused on the part about the type of programmer he is.

« For a long time, I have struggled to articulate what kind of programmer I am. I’ve been writing code for most of my life; I can make many interesting and useful things happen on computers. At the same time, I would not last a day as a professional software engineer. Leave me in charge of a critical database and you will return to a smoldering crater.

Building this app, I figured it out: I am the programming equivalent of a home cook. »

I can relate to that quite a bit. I started my career as a web integrator and a wannabe-PHP developer, one of my managers even tried to turn me into a JS developer (😬), but then I decided that instead of being a bad developer, I'd be a good project manager. Professionally, it was the right choice, and I have no regrets. My ‘technical’ background makes me a better project manager and facilitates communication with the developers at my company and with clients.

I have no desire whatsoever to return to professional development, but I spend my time testing new things on my website, adding details in CSS and even trying to add a little JS. I sometimes try things out in Python, which is fun, and I recently did a bit of bash for git pipelines at work, purely out of curiosity (and I managed it all by myself 💪). The label ‘home coder’, similar to ‘home cook’, seems perfectly apt to me.