What I’m reading vol. XII

Caoimhe ⬥ 30th of January 2026

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII

Oh it is has been a while since I posted one of these and I have built up quite a backlog of links.

Musical accompaniment for this volume chosen mostly to cause psychic damage against my partner.

Da Web

Interesting insights here into how the uses of text to speech for sighted and blind people are fundamentally different and how functionality for the latter is usually, unfortunately an afterthought.

Supertonic is slightly faster, as it can stream result audio as it becomes available, whereas Kitten TTS cannot start speaking until all of the audio for the chunk is fully generated. But for use in a screen reader, a text to speech system needs to begin generating speech as quickly as possible, rather than waiting for an entire phrase or sentence. Users of screen readers quickly jump through text and frequently interrupt the screen reader, and thus require the text to speech system to be able to quickly discard and restart speech.

A tale of two Webs — Oblomov

A lot of the development efforts (both creative and destructive) in web browsers in the last decade+ has been going into fostering the “web app” vision of the web, to the detriment of the “web of documents” vision. From the removal of native support for RSS and Atom feeds to the introduction of JavaScript APIs like WebUSB or the Web Environment Integrity attempt I already discussed in the past, nearly all work done on browsers has been in this direction.

I feel this a lot. The web of documents now lives in the margins of the web of apps and with Google’s capturing of standards has made maintaining a web browser to keep up with the former impossible without the backing of Google or other huge companies who are increasingly hostile to users having any agency. I feel similarly about operating systems at this point, too. I abandoned Windows on my home computer years ago and since then it has become ever more hostile to users having control over what their machine does. This isn’t new, simply an acceleration of trends that have existed for a long, long time.

As much as I want the “A.I.” bubble to burst I do wonder if the push for “agentic” systems might actually stick simply from the obscene amounts of money being powered into trying to make users handing over nearly all agency and control of their machines to chatbots actually work or be desirable. Currently Windows still does allow itself to be used as an actual desktop operating system, but clearly Microsoft at this point want to push everything towards locked-down, controlled and monitored black boxes, possibly even worse than phones possibly are. How long till they think they can get away with amputating the shrivelled lump of the desktop operating system, cut off direct user access to the filesystem outside of what you have in Dropbox that you pay a subscription for and lock everyone into software from the app store for everyone but enterprise customers who can pay through the nose? Or at least just keep breaking core parts of the operating system until they’re barely useable.

On a more positive note this article also prompted me to add metadata to the site that will work with the Website Navigation Bar addon for Palemoon if you’re using that because I thought it was cute and it was easy to do as I was already using that information to render on-page navigation elements anyway.

And speaking of the web of documents…

Consider Making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website! — The Virtual Moose

I know I’m going to be preaching to the choir with the kind of people who are reading a personal blog already, but still.

I think it’s also just fun to see what old posts still get traffic. My most popular posts on here are very old ones about how to play the late 90s MMO Asheron’s Call today, ttrpgs based on video games, and the late 90s Microsoft puzzle game Pandora’s Box. It’s more useful and permanent than an unwieldy thread of posts on bluesky or mastodon too, where you would have to refresh it for anyone to even come across it again.

Stolen Focus — Luna

I do still have to catch and reset myself with various bad computer and social media habits every once in a while. It’s easy to fall into when you are tired and sore and everything that would be interesting or engaging or useful just feels like a massive hump to get over.

By this time, however, I had become once again hopelessly addicted to social media. I wasn’t getting notifications, and I wasn’t fixated on numbers any more, but I was still compulsively checking and refreshing, desperate for the feed to give me another hit of dopamine. I lost hours each day to flicking through TikTok any time I had a quiet moment — rather to flood my brain with stimulation than have to sit in uncomfortable silence even for a moment. A partner and I would engage in a habit we called “TikTok time”, where we’d screen-share the videos we’d Liked recently with each other. Increasingly I was finding I had little to show for the hours I’d spent scrolling the feed. It had become akin to a slot machine; I kept scrolling and scrolling in the hopes that maybe the next video would be something I wanted to see — whatever that was.

Payment processors were against CSAM until Grok started making it — Elizabeth Lopatto

What else is there to say?

So why is X different? It’s run by Elon Musk. “He’s the richest man in the world, he has close ties to the US government, and he’s incredibly litigious,” says Pfefferkorn. In fact, Musk has previously filed suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate; in a now-dismissed lawsuit, he claimed it illegally collected data showing an increase in hate speech after he bought the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Games (general)

Horses Is Tame — Chris Person

But of course, if you want to make art…

This is a hegemony of American prudishness, applied globally, incoherently, unevenly, and unseriously. Anybody responsible for these decisions would be vaporized in seconds by a Pinku movie from the 1970s, and if a single person in this chain of command has an arts degree they are pretending they don’t for the sake of an ill-defined idea of business.

Alternative Games From The Fringes Of Cyberspace — Nathalie Lawhead

And a somewhat more hopeful view on being considering unmonetisable.

The games that exist outside the mainstream, and I think the type of personal empowerment they represent, is what makes them “controversial”.
Especially under the scope of mainstream culture where everything needs to sell, satisfy a commercial value, be consumer centric, or live up to such capitalist standards.

Unmonetized self expression is an act or resistance in today’s tech landscape.

Why we are making Jank — Brendan Caldwell

Games journalists Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Graham Smith have launched a new games site called Jank that fails to live up to its name by functioning well and not being bloated with ads, tracking, affiliate links, chatbots and other crap that turns sites into a churn of advertisement-friendly sludge.

Perhaps less obvious is the kind of writing that disappears in the process. Articles about new games, niche games, and experimental work don’t get traffic, so off they go. Deeply researched columns from subject matter experts don’t get traffic, so they’re cut. Not many people read interviews, unless you can get someone to say something controversial and pull it out as a news story, so it’s rarely worth talking to developers about their work. Articles designed purely to entertain with daft jokes, such as diary series, don’t deliver numbers at scale no matter how much their readers adore them.

Will this work out? Can they make enough money doing this to actually make a living? I don’t know but I hope so, and I hope they make enough that they can round up a few other Rock, Paper, Shotgun veterans as well. They are also trialling a partnership with the Total Playtime podcast which I am a fan of as well. Supporting one will give you access to the membership perks of the other, at least for the next few months.

The gamers hate generative AI — Laura Michet

Gamers rise up.

I’ve assumed for a while that gamers would have mild distaste for genAI material, in the same way that they have distaste for asset store assets and, for some reason, the Unity engine. It turns out that I was wrong - they hate it a lot more than either of those things.

Games (specific)

“interest sources”, contextual interactions for NPCs in Sleight of Hand — Joe Wintergreen

On the more technical side of games I always like reading Joe Wintergreen’s breakdowns of how systems work.

A scenario I’ve found useful to expose a lot of edges cases is a guy pissing against a wall and leaving a puddle of piss. Support this scenario with no aberrant behaviours and you are doing okay.

Abstraction in Rhythm Doctor — Blueberry Lemonade

How are layers of abstraction perceived? What expectations do they set? At what point do U.I. elements stop being representational and start to become part of the fiction itself?

It sounds small (and it is), but it was a firm example in my mind of how the game was changing the longer we worked on it. Instead of characters simply appearing and disappearing in abstract space whenever they were needed for gameplay, we were now introducing the idea that they are real characters standing in real rooms that are connected to each other. They can walk, or run, from one place to another. They’re living lives of their own when they aren’t being treated.

The Great Celeste Race 2026 — Caoimhe³

Caoimhe wrote a much better narrative of the annual Celeste race than mine.

This part was a delight. Ruby and I swapped the lead as we often did, but with microscopic gaps becoming the norm. A single death in a puzzle would swap the lead, and hesitating would throw away any advantage we may have had. I lose the lead at the end of the 1500 metres section, at a puzzle I know I hate, and pull it back cleanly at 2000 metres. At 2500 metres, I had a small lead, but here is where the dream ends.

list animals until failure — Vivian

Here is a new blog with a strong, realistic, game plan for updates and a fun post about the suffering involved in defining how many animals there.

If you’re an entomologist, or an evolutionary biologist, you might say “well, bees and ants are just wasps, really”, and I respect that. But colloquially, bees and ants aren’t wasps. If this game insists on a purely phylogenic approach, then it’s like, come on, I can’t get a point for saying wasp and ant? That’s unreasonable. If I ask a 2-year-old to list animals and she lists wasp and ant, I’m not gonna break out the DNA sequences like “Ohh well evolutionarily ants are technically wasps”. I’m gonna say yeah, good job, that’s two animals.

Serious stuff (trans)

‘A Directive From Above’: Former NYT Editor Lays Out How The Paper Pushes Anti-Trans Bigotry — Billie Jean Sweeney

A look into how hatred and transphobia gets pushed down from above in the media.

She assigned it to a UK correspondent, who wrote it in the context of UK politics, talked about it being very contentious, talked about the criticisms of its findings. Cass was talking about them herself, this isn’t jumping to any conclusions at that point. It really put it in the context of being this very contentious, very political sort of document.

When I saw it, because we’re a few hours behind, there were 600, 700 words written. I had a pretty good sense of how the story was going to turn out. But within a few hours the story was to the top New York editors, and I don’t know who exactly it was who did that. I assume it was Carolyn or her intermediary. They said ‘oh no, we want the science desk to do that,’ specifically that was Azeen [Ghorayshi], who had been a key reporter in a lot of the other anti-trans coverage.

I bear the scars of a healthcare system that fails trans people — Jenny Maguire

And another article on the Loughlinstown gender clinic being awful to throw on the pile.

“Oh wow,” she said. “Did you do this yourself?” Immediately, I felt her fingers running through my curls, as if I was a glamorous dog being poked and prodded. Still, I put on a smiley face and went along with this condescending charade. I knew what I needed, and I was not going to cause a fuss — as if I had any choice.

Serious stuff (general)

Outlive The Bastards — Caoimhe³

May we.

There’s been several eye-opening moments for me in the past few years. Realisations that we can simply do things never before imagined. These rolling revelations haven’t stopped. I can live and love in ways I was never able to before, and nothing can stop this.

So we live. But only in a way that works for us. We dictate how we breathe, how we act, how we medicate, how we live and how we die. How long did I spend dancing to other peoples’ tunes, hoping and begging to be given basic respect, only to be thrown aside? Never again.

TrAPPed: Arrested by Phone — Anand RK, Suparna Sharma & Natalie Obiko Pearson

Bloody fuck.

shit i keep seeing: “conflict resolution” via gaslighting — Joe Wintergreen

I fear that I may been this person before but I know I have definitely worked with a guy who did this.

I guess what I’m seeing is guys who’ve never learned to resolve conflict, only to “win”, overcorrecting and becoming what might be termed “conflict-avoidant”, but their avoidance strategy is pretending, the moment there is a conflict, that there isn’t one. If they can get this past everyone in the moment, face is saved and they’re off the hook for a true resolution.

We Don’t Need Any More Renewables — Adapt : Survive : Prevail

I am endlessly frustrated by people thinking that if we just have more renewable energy then everything else about our suicidal systems of exponential growth and resource extraction will be fine.

So in plain language, here is the actual claim: “We have no choice but to meet all electricity demands and doing so via renewable energy increases greenhouse gas emissions by a lesser amount than fossil fuels.”

Now that we have clarity on the actual claim, we can break it down. The reality is this: 1) We absolutely do have a choice because demand is politically, economically, and socially constructed, and 2) The choice between renewables and fossil fuels is a false binary, like telling a healthy person they must chose between losing an arm or a leg.

Meaning, Memory and Christmas in Ireland — Seán MacBrádaigh

A brief dive into the complex place of Catholicism in Ireland.

A new state, born of revolution, civil war and counter-revolution, sought stability through moral uniformity. In doing so, it aligned itself closely with a powerful and highly conservative Catholic hierarchy, outsourcing social order, education, health and morality to the Church. This was not a neutral partnership. It produced an official vision of Irishness that was narrow and exclusionary - defining virtue and respectability in rigid Catholic terms.