Jeremy Keith

The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier

Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice.

It’s maintenance.

When I was summing up my reading habits in 2022 I said:

I think the lesson this year is: you can’t go wrong with Octavia E. Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin.

I stand by that. But maybe I’d recommend some Ursula K. Le Guin books more than others.

A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea is a good collection of short stories. But it’s not a great collection of short stories. If you’re looking for a great collection of short stories, read The Unreal and the Real.

When it comes to Ursula K. Le Guin, the standard is always going to be high so even when the stories aren’t her best, they’re still better than the output of most other sci-fi writers.

My slight disappointment with A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea isn’t so much with the stories themselves but with the collection.

To begin with, there are four unconnected short stories. That’s fine. It’s a short story collection after all.

But then after that there are three interconnected short stories from the Hainish cycle. They’re the best part of this book. That just makes the preceding stories look like filler.

If those three stories had been released as little collection, it would be a miniature classic. As it stands, you get more of a mixed bag.

But still, it’s worth reading this collection for those three stories alone.

On March 12th, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted Information Management: A Proposal. This would form the basis of what became the World Wide Web.

On March 12th, 2026, Web Day Out happened in Brighton.

Coincidence?

Yes. Yes, it is a coincidence. But it’s a pretty nice coincidence, you must admit.

It was a day dedicated to the World Wide Web. Not just the foundational languages of the web—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—but also the foundational ideas of the web.

“Share what you know!” That was the original motto of the World Wide Web project. That was the motto of Web Day Out too.

Look, I’m biased because I put the line-up together but honestly, all of the speakers were superb! So much knowledge delivered in such entertaining fashion.

I had a blast. And I’ll give myself a little pat on the back for how I grouped the talks into rhyming couplets:

Browsers: Jemima talked about what you can do with just HTML and CSS these days, and Rachel followed up with how to come up with your own browser support strategy.

Performance: Aleth made the case for multi-page progressive web apps that work under any network conditions, and Harry followed up with an impassioned rant about how much time and energy has been wasted on over-engineered single-page apps that ignore what browsers can do.

Styling: Manuel walked us through a whole new approach to writing modern CSS, and Rich followed up with a whirlwind tour of all the great typographic possibilities in CSS.

Standards Jake took us on the standards journey to customisable select elements, including anchor positioning and popovers, and then Lola showed us exactly what it takes to add a new feature to a web browser.

Everything flowed together really nicely.

I was a little apprehensive going into Web Day Out that it would just be preaching to the converted. And sure, there were plenty of veteran devs there who already knew the value of progressive enhancement and making the most of web standards. But I was gratified to also see lots of younger faces in the crowd.

I was talking to one young developer afterwards and she told me what an eye-opening experience it was. Whereas before she would have defaulted to a framework-driven single-page app for everything, now she’s got the knowledge to make an appropriate architectural choice.

Mission accomplished!

If you couldn’t make it to Web Day Out and you want to experience some RAMO, here’s the chatter on Bluesky and Mastodon, lovely photos by Marc, a post by Dave, and a lovely post by Amber.

Thank you so much to everyone who came. I think you’ll agree it was a most excellent day out.

(optional.is) SXSW 02006

Brian takes us back twenty years (which is when we first met):

To gather so many like-minded, energetic people in once place and not have it ruined by corporate greed felt unique.

Gas Town and Bullet Hell – Petafloptimism

Matt has some smart reckons on the relationship between time and technology:

The factory bell, the railway timetable, the telegraph wire, the always-on smartphone — each imposed a new temporal discipline, each produced its own characteristic form of exhaustion, and each was eventually (partially, imperfectly) domesticated through a combination of regulation, design, and collective action.

Stop Sloppypasta: Don’t paste raw LLM output at people

slop·py·pas·ta n. Verbatim LLM output copy-pasted at someone, unread, unrefined, and unrequested. From slop (low-quality AI-generated content) + copypasta (text copied and pasted, often as a meme, without critical thought). It is considered rude because it asks the recipient to do work the sender did not bother to do themselves.

Generative AI vegetarianism | Sean Boots

Generative AI vegetarianism, simply put, is avoiding generative AI tools as much as you can in your day-to-day life.