User comments and discussions on the internet have a pretty bad rep these days, to the point where many people have just opted out of online commentary completely, going as far as using a combination of DNS filtering and browser extensions to remove them entirely from their browsing experience. I, on the other hand, have spent the last couple of years refining ways to separate signal from noise in the cacophony of online user commentary, as I have come to believe that the most valuable knowledge I acquire on a daily basis comes from commentary and discussion rather than publishing.

If you find, as I do, the act of physically marking books indescribably (in the literal sense) disrespectful (to the physical book), you probably felt great the first time you realised that PDFs could be digitally annotated. Equally so when Amazon’s Kindle brought eBooks into the mainstream. Unfortunately the story of highlights on Kindle has been one of some frustration and disappointment for me, in large part due to the restrictions placed on liberating highlights from the Amazon ecosystem, and the UX of highlighting on an e-ink Kindle, which remains to this today clunky, slow and always just a little too imprecise.

I don’t think I’m alone in having consumed more documentaries on cults between the years of 2020 and 2022 than I had ever before in my entire life. There were many great documentaries, but the one that sticks out in my mind even today is The Vow: A NXIVM Story. Every time I watch a scene in that or any other documentary about cults in which people are reunited for the first time outside the cult, every muscle in my body feels the reunion that is happening on the screen.

I have previously written about how I unwittingly found myself at the center of an accidental community with a shared desire for a stable, reliable tiling windows manager for Windows. Despite the huge growth of komorebi users, I remain for all intents and purposes the sole developer of the codebase. Several of the most important aspects of komorebi today however are in large part thanks to community contributions. In no particular order:

I am the only deaf person in my family. I’m 24 years old and none of them learned ASL or only took one course. They hardly know the alphabet and can say “bathroom”. I do not go to my family gatherings because no one is able to communicate with me. When they do, they talk REALLY loud and only ask me “small talk” questions. They are hell bent on me coming around, because “we’re a family and we love you”.

It was during the shutdowns of 2020 that I became increasingly frustrated with my Intel MacBook pro. It was slow, loud and hot; all the things that many people, myself included, dislike about laptops. I decided to build a PC. After a month or so spent scouring the internet for parts, I had assembled a PC. I ran Pop!_OS for a while, but this being my first desktop machine in over a decade, I spent a fair about of time dual booting into Windows to play all the video games that I missed out on as a macOS user.

Since my last post back in June, I have been steadily eating at a surplus while focusing my training on powerlifting. During this period I have run three different programmes: Metallicadpa’s Push/Pull/Legs Split nSuns 531 Linear Progression GZCL Linear Progression Metallicapda’s PPL While I was cutting I was running a full body calisthenics-focused programme three-to-four days a week, but I had been wanting to try a split programme which would allow me to train with more frequency throughout the week.

Some time around early May I decided to change up my eating habits. Since January 2016 I have been working on cutting body fat, conquering my appetite and improving my poor eating habits. By May I felt I had reached a point where the returns I was getting from eating at a deficit were diminishing; my stomach was flat, my abs were visible, and my relationship with food had substantially changed for the better.

After switching from an iPhone to an Android device at the end of last year, my content consumption workflow changed significantly. I stopped reading articles on my phone due to the poor experience provided by the Android version of the Instapaper App, and I started checking my RSS feeds once a day on my laptop rather than on my phone. This new approach to getting through my feeds helped me to remove a lot of the noise from subscriptions, and also got me thinking about whether certain topics really required a feed subscription when I was usually being exposed to the latest on those topics either via word of mouth or just through browsing the front page of Reddit.

Background Just over a month ago I decided to start learning Italian. I have previously studied French and Spanish and can speak both languages fairly confidently (though French perhaps more so than Spanish), so I began studying Italian with an idea of what works for me when it comes to the study of Romance languages. I had previously written of my desire to compare my experience learning Italian in 2017 to my experiences learning other languages, particularly Romance languages, in previous years when I was still trying to consolidate something resembling a coherent language learning strategy.