Daily Eclectoid

I'm making an effort to post  something  every day. I've been fostering a daily writing habit outside of this platform, and when I miss a day I start to feel a creeping withdrawal. I need to write something. Anything. Even if it's a list of links to what I read that day. I'm also prospecting a quieter internet: building a life free from algorithmic control. The articles I'm posting here are surfacing from my old-school RSS feeder I've built and continually retool using Bazqux . BQ charge a nominal yearly fee and even offer lifetime subscriptions. Here's what I sunk my teeth into yesterday: Anthropic CEO Says Company No Longer Sure Whether Claude Is Conscious   (Frank Landymore, Futurism )   Microsoft Added AI to Notepad and It Created a Security Failure Because the AI Was Stupidly Easy for Hackers to Trick   (Victor Tangermann ,  Futurism ) Undoing as Remaking: How Abraham Lincoln Drew Poetry and Power from His Suicidal Depression (Maria Popova, The Margin...

Ever-present on my mind lately: the shuttering of digital spaces, the silencing of voices, and the cartoonish absurdity of the big tech internet landscape of 2026. I'm reading accordingly. Death isn't the end: Meta patented an AI that lets you keep posting from beyond the grave (Sydney Bradley,  Business Insider ) Blundering Husband Asks Claude AI to “Organize” Wife’s PC, Accidentally Erases Her Life’s Work (Frank Landymore, Futurism ) News Publishers Are Now Blocking The Internet Archive, And We May All Regret It   (Mike Masnick, Techdirt ) Google Says People Are Copying Its AI Without Its Permission, Much Like It Scraped Everybody’s Data Without Asking to Create Its AI in the First Place   (Victor Tangermann, Futurism) It's not you. It's me. (Taking a break from Mastodon) (vkc, Veronica Explains ) Predictably, I've returned to Mastodon (vkc, Veronica Explains )  

Today I decided to read only manga, so I pulled two disparate titles from my shelf and one from my stack of mail.   Dragon Ball Super, Vol. 6: The Super Warriors Gather Why pull a random volume of Super ​​​? I’d read through all of Super years ago as the Moro saga approached its climax. At least I think it was nearing the climax. Dragon Ball can be kind of interminable with the planetary/universal threats. Turns out this was the perfect volume to read on a lazy day. Classic “let’s round up the Z-Warriors” story with the added benefit of the adversarial universes gathering their own fighters. Not much action, but what’s there is cleanly drawn and entertaining. Cracking this one open was an exercise in Why am I continuing to read Dragon Ball? but after one chapter, I remembered why. It’s fast. It’s dumb. It’s fun. And now it can grace the shelves of a little free library. Kaiju No. 8: Relax, Vol. 1 Never read a gag manga before, and this seems a good place to start. I a...

Back again. Not so much a Daily Eclectoid as a When I Feel Like It Eclectoid. That's okay. I logged every album I listened this week. Kind of. Each day, I wrote down every album I listened to. If I listened to half an LP one day and finished the following day, I didn't log it. If I listened to something on separate days, I logged it twice. That didn't happen this week, but it will. I'd like to log Mondays to Sundays, but I started last Sunday, so you get a bit of everything. I'm making this up as we go. Here's Sunday 12.07 to Sunday 12.14: Sunday, December 7, 2025 In Nigeria (1985) - Yusef Lateef Ella & Louis Christmas (1960) - Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong Butterfly 3000 (2021) - King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Give Love At Christmas (1980) - The Temptations Poppy Seeds: An International Benefit for Mutual Aid in Gaza (2025) - Various  Monday, December 8, 2025 Club Nostalgia (Special Edition) (2024) - Minuit Cafe Groove Memories (Japanese...

Happy Labor Day. Many of you labored on Labor Day. I hope this wasn’t the case, but if it was, I hope you had a good soundtrack. It’s not quite the end of summer, but it might as well be. Hence a playlist that transitions from hyperpop to neo soul. Sure, it ends with some forgotten funk, but something reclaimed from the dustbins of the early 80s is bound to contain some wistfulness that’s settled into the sound. We start with a six song block of Kero Kero Bonito, spanning the entirety of their output. The first tracks are as poppy as possible and the final two tracks give us a glitched social media freakout (“Only Acting”) and visions of wildfires fueled by human carelessness (“When the Fires Come”). That’s certainly a summer to fall arc. KKB hasn’t released a major project since 2021, so hopefully they’re in their winter stage and not permanently closed. Lemuria’s “Christine Perfect” feels like the perfect fall throwback sound. Something Letters to Cleo never released. Let’s throw “He...

No posts since October 2024 and then four since August 24? One of these posts is a random playlist and another is review of a Conan the Barbarian eBook? What’s going on around here? What’s the point of this blog? Practice is the point. I love writing, and I never write. I love creation, and I never create. So this is an exercise in commitment. Not that I have commitment issues. Rather, what I regularly commit to rarely fulfills me. I commit to my job, but if I didn’t have to work it, I wouldn’t work it. Two hours a day on the commute circuit? Two hours a day of poisoning the atmosphere and wearing down my body? No thank you. I commit to cleaning the house. To building habits and routines. To feeling productive. But that’s all a racket. True commitment is creating. It’s loving. So here I am, in a hotel room outside of Princeton, New Jersey typing these words and learning more about myself than I knew five minutes ago. I need to commit less often to the arbitrary. I need to commit less ...