I have been a bit whiffy on Kobo’s e-readers in general. I don’t know what it is. They should align a bit more with my philosophy and I like some design choices but they also don’t spark joy in the way even something like Calibre’s reader if only we could get a truly blank-slate e-ink device. Maybe we can. The technology seems to bounce around pretty hard. Still…
Reading Good e-Reader’s article “Everything you want to know about Kobo Stack” further failed to spark joy. It allows you to share extra-Kobo documents across all your devices and allows for mark-up and potentially some other things.
I think it was around this part of the article where I sighed, though:
If you stop paying for the Kobo Stack subscription, you get a 60-day grace period. After that, the notes and annotations stored in Stack are permanently deleted, and so is anything else living only in the Stack cloud. Books already on your device stay, and so do your Kobo purchases. Kobo itself tells you to export your notes and download your files during those 60 days.
Blah.
Another perpetual subscription just to keep your own creative output.
I decided to dig a little deeper and have now included a “bonus” section at the end where I look into the wider spread of this as an example of… well, I’ll save it so there are no spoilers. enragement posting [I phrase I like to use where posts are made to increase engagement through enraging the viewer]. I also had written mochi towards the top because that was the phrase that showed up a lot on the reddit post and I was trying to get to that portion.
Back to the original post… [with a couple minor edits]
THEN, spend a few seconds to a minute just thinking your thoughts about what your impressions about is happening and the aftermath. It seems silly, I know, but I have a point to make with this. The important thing is that I want you to watch it without any comments, descriptions, or other calls to action. Just take it as you feel it outside of a social media ecosystem.
Note this is the first time I have played with embedding a video directly. If that embed doesn’t work above, hopefully the link above it will work. I do not know the source of it since all attribution was stripped when it was posted, but here’s hoping.
A few sample screenshots with names redacted is included below. I’ll pull a few quotes for those that don’t want to click on the thread and can’t read or see graphics but I will not copy/transcribe everything. Keep in mind that it is a live thread so this means it could be different a little or a lot by the time you click on it. Or gone.
“It’s the smiling afterwards that pisses me off” [this was given 20 awards]
“I’m British but live in SE Asia now and this reminds me of young single western backpacker women who think the entire region just exists to serve their ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ journey of self discovery. I once saw a woman destroy a small independent travel shop window display after she dropped her $1 chap stick down the back of her seat and took the shop apart trying to find it.” [1 award]
“While I can’t say they are not assholes, smiling and laughing is a natural reaction to shame and danger. There was a great lecture of a local psychologist that got stuck in a boat with a local after a tsunami in Thailand 20-ish years ago. That was the scariest and funniest time of his life simultaniously [sic] because humor thrives in the area of discomfort. The thing in this video that makes me bring this up is the fact that the local owning the rice pounding thing appear to also be happy and could have been the one making the tourists loosen up and laugh it off. I don’t think people should be to quick to judge…[cut early for space]” [this one got 6 awards]
“Not one ‘I’m sorry’.” [4 awards]
“Take one look at this dude, why would you expect him to do anything athletic?” [4 awards]
I won’t type them all out but several “That’s a guy?” and “That’s a they/them” and such.
[in response to this being the sort of person picked last for gym] “Picked? No no. This is the one that doesn’t get picked at all, and by default goes to the team that has a space remaining – even then, that team is disappointed to have them. They’d rather just be one man short rather than have this person that lowers any sized groups average level of athleticism by 75%.” [1 award]
“You break you buy!” [1 award]
Redditor posting “Worse that Epstein!?” graphic to mock the other comments.
“That old man was PISSED!”
“The rage of his ancestors was in his eyes”
“Does he not seem to be smiling when he’s talking to the other guy? Maybe a bit aghast at the awful form but it seems like he might not be as mad as everyone thinks. I think that everyone is projecting their rage at the embarrassed tourist not having the appropriate reaction onto the older guy.”
“Are 95% idiots or bots in the comments. In a tourist place a tourist had a tourist activity and an accident, which most likely happens from time to time, happend. [sic] Do you all really think some tourist came up to an old guy pounding rice dough, stole his mallet and broke it?” [1 award]
Not pictured, but in response to that to the response about the old man laughing underneath: “Thanks, I didn’t realize he was laughing. At first glance I thought he was just standing there in disbelief and despair. It does look like he’s laughing and he’s okay with the situation which makes the tourists behavior more acceptable.”
“Why is everyone acting like the old guy isn’t smiling and everyone around them isn’t laughing? It’s a tourist spot with a replaceable piece of wood, not ‘😲 super sugoi ancient Japanese ritualistic temple like in my animes! How dare evil invader they/them ruin senpais 300 year old mallet😡’ it’s like the 30 year old male nerd version of a pick me girl”
Doug Reacts to Reddit Reacts…
To ape the meme: First off, what the fuck?
We have sexism, racism, transphobia, and a stack of what could at best be called “self-hating redditor behavior.” The glorious rendition of the “Expat hates tourists” genre. Even allowing that (a) it is reddit where people get votes largely by going with the flow and will absolutely dogpile a pile of trash thinking it is a dead horse [e.g., the pre-release discourse about Odyssey], (b) some redditors watch videos without sound so might have missed some of the aspects, and (c) there are going to be some bots there: it is one of the strangest reactions I have seen in a year where just about every online reaction seems so very strange.
Even with (d) the fact that a fair number of people were pointing out the flaws in the discourse [usually with much fewer upvotes/awards and some downvotes].
I’ve said many variations of this, but reading online discourse this past year or so has started to make me feel like I have some form of the condition formally known as Asperger Syndrome. Or worse, that my ability to process reality on a fundamental level is so flawed that these extreme, deep-seated-well-of-anger type responses are justified but I cannot see it because I’m hallucinating a reality that is less harsh. More humane, perhaps, while less human.
Keep in mind that (in principle) reddit awards cost real-world money [presumably you can once again get them through premium]. Multiple people (20 as of the last check, maybe more now) spent some variation of real world money to upvote “the smiling is pissing me off.”
FUCK.
Maybe your take on the video matches the negative quotes above, but let’s give you my take.
Doug’s Watching of the Video
Person swings the mallet and greatly misses. It’s unfortunate. You can hear multiple people laughing, especially whoever is holding the camera. Person’s companion looks a bit shocked and immediately embarrassed. Person looks a bit confused but is kind of laughing along with the crowd.
Older man running the stall is laughing a bit. Person is saying something to the man. A few people say “awwww” but we can’t hear whatever is being said. Tour guide/translator comes up and talks a bit. Person walks off and gets a bit of comfort from Companion who seems to downplay and then Person waits and keeps talking [face now somewhat obscured by the flag].
It’s an accident. A goofball moment where people are actively laughing both with and at the Person. We don’t see any aftermath to know if Person paid for the damage or any wider pan to see the group.
Even if I watch it without sound and miss the group laughter and chatter, I can still see Person talking, not just standing there smiling.
Take Care of Your Very Online Folk
This is getting brought up as an example to a particular call to action by me to you: Take care of your very online folk.
Have a coworker who suddenly is convinced that the RAM shortage is a massive conspiracy to destroy white people? Have a family member who is absolutely furious about a teacher in Iowa despite you having no connection at all to Iowa? Someone you know just suddenly deciding now is the time to talk about trans folk? The stock market? Some bullshit conspiracy theory?
In more general terms, have you seen someone start spending more and more time online, possibly losing more and more sleep, because their ability to handle stuff around them seems to be deteriorating? Echoing bot-like comments? Trying to assign everything a thumbs-up vs thumbs-down style response?
Maybe, if you can, just reach out a bit. I’m not saying to tell them to touch grass. I don’t know them. But maybe just a bit of encouragement to try and center themselves on something at least outside the internet. Movies and books without feeling the need to read comments to know if they should like it. Walks where there is no one to talk to… move away not only from the brain rot, but specifically the kind of brain-rotting aspect of online discourse where everyone feels they have to have a response to everything.
Sometimes people just glitch out and break a rice mallet. Doesn’t mean anything. It especially doesn’t mean your anger issues about the way your sister broke your favorite CD were justified. You know who you are.
Don’t just say, “But it’s REDDIT!,” while the person you know is drowning in such a place. It cannot be healthy and it cannot take too long before someone takes upvotes and downvotes [from bots, bot-like comments, extremely online people, trolls, paid agitators, stealth marketers, and all the like mixed in to varying degrees with more legit discourse] as some sort of indicator of personal sense of worth.
A personal sense of worth that can and has historically lead to pretty massive things.
It’s like the meme/joke about dreaming something and then being mad at their partner. Only it’s a significant portion of some folks’ every waking moment.
Just a couple of days ago I saw a person say that we need to eat more fiber because of rising colon cancer rates in the relatively young and it took about one gorram reply before a commentor went off on an hour long rant about how “eat more fiber” was downplaying COVID. Responder eventually started calling OP “ChatGPT” [despite OP not in any way sounding like an AI-bot and being fairly anti-AI] and constantly moving goalposts about the conversation. “You are calling COVID just a cold” [OP wasn’t] got changed to “All I was saying is that some forms of colon cancer might be caused by COVID” [responder absolutely wasn’t “just” doing that, at least not at first].
It is easy to get into a place where you see someone saying “eat more fiber” as a personal attack but like…take a damned second.
BONUS: The Comments on This Short
Go to this Youtube short and find the comment that I highlighted [second from top for me, right now] and click to read that reply chain:
I’m not sure if it’s because people think everything is content or if people think everything is a game to be won, but holy hell.
The Next Day Update, aka: Worse than I Thought. The epidemic of enragement posting.
I posted the original post on 10 November (2026) and now it is 11 November and, as I do, I spent a half second just double checking my post and making sure yester-Doug wasn’t a complete asshole and off the mark. Yester-Doug did make a few mistakes (like what kind of rice cake was being made) but overall the biggest error I made is under-assuming how widespread this must have been to even make it to reddit to start [the former “front page of the internet” is…well, less so…].
There’s more. A fair bit more. Expect for there to be a STACK more in the coming days as channels with names like REAL_NEWS_72 post it with some information about this is… I don’t know. It’s Madlibs, right? “British tourist smashes Vietnamese heirloom” or whatever bullshit. All with the same repetitive echoes of “White people!” and “TOURISTS!” and “I’M SO MAD I CANNOT BREATHE I AM LITERALLY DYING OF ANGER HOW DARE!?” and so forth.
This is a perfect example of what I have started calling ENRAGEMENT POSTING[engagement + enrage]. Fake bullshit meant to keep people doomscrolling. Keep them feeling like life is a game to be won and they can be on the winning side. All the damned nerds getting to feel like bullies for a change and loving it.
It’s the other side to the WHIMSY POSTING coin. Stuff where AI shows dogs playing with elephants by a waterfall or whatever.
And yes, the original video might be AI [as some comments are started to screech2] but that doesn’t matter. It could be hand drawn or a cave painting. I’m talking about the way people are being manipulated to assume the absolute worst in these situations.
This follows a lot of patterns I have seen with such. A caption that tells you what to think [the last one in the gallery is chronologically the first one I found and note that it was played off as comical before the replies went negative and the tone shifted]. It gets posted with various edits to various platforms all within a few days of each other. You get a relative lot of people flooding with the same few comments.
A lot of times new information is added but it is absolutely not based in anything like fact. While some of that is bot-/like activity, or trolling, some of that is going to be that thing where a few people don’t seem to realize that just because they can think and type a fact it doesn’t make it true.
187 upvotes/likes on the one claiming the man wanted 20USD and the person refused. What in the f….. calm. I’m calm!
People who might watch the video and NOT agree with the general wave might end up spending minutes or hours reading comments [like I did, for science].
That parasocial need to feel like part of a movement is easily manipulated. We are losing. Hell, we might have already lost.
Either the person is mad at the original content, mad at the hashtags that tell them to be mad, mad at something else and just jumping in, or mad at themselves for being so confused.
ON REPEAT. ON CYCLE. ALL DAY LONG AS LONG AS THEY ARE SCROLLING THROUGH ENDLESS REELS.
Don’t tell me you have “hand-cultivated” your feed to only show you better stuff. You don’t own that feed. You barely own your own content on those platforms. You as sure as shit aren’t beating The Algorithm™.
The only way to win this game is to get out. Cultivate the “feed” that is your IRL daily experiences.
Bonus fun fact, the third image in this new gallery that says, “America is underhated,” looks to be a scam channel to sell you the promise of sexy images. Some uncle absolutely fell for that. “I also hate America and love boobs!” Power be to that uncle but hopefully he can find a better source of both.
Originally I called it a “mochi mallet” because that was the language used. That was all wrong of me. Apologies. I was trying to talk about the bigger issue of enragement [enrage + engagement] farming but it’s not nice to just parrot fake information. ↩︎
My new pet conspiracy is there is a non-zero number of AI bots who are trained just to comment “Looks like AI” on everything so the term loses all meaning. ↩︎
Didn’t really chat it up before hand on this blog but we decided to host an American-style Halloween party for Barbara and her friends. Most of who had not really done the standard Halloween things before (at least not on any scale).
We carved jack-o-lanterns and you can see the outcome of that. Good job everyone. Though the pumpkin gore was a bit more extreme behind the scenes…
Blurry because of fairly low light, but take it as you will.
Not pictured was costumes, bobbing for apples, watching Hocus Pocus, getting so wired on too much candy that society’s rules started to crumble, and a little mini trick-or-treat where they kids handed out candy to each other.
It was very loud, I was very tired, but hearing 9-/10-year-olds scream at handling pumpkin guts for the first time made it all worth while.
BONUS fun was the next night, November 1, we got a knock on the door at around 8pm. It was a group of older kids, teenagers, all in costume. They said Trick or Treat and everything. I got them a few big handfuls of candy.
They seemed almost confused it worked but I’m glad it did.
Signs point to an American style trick-or-treating growing every year here in Belgium but having a kind of organic version of it like that was a highlight.
It does look a little like Kagutaba [LGT: Google Search], eh? I’m probably a goner.
Though to get all the evidence ready for the inevitable Youtubers cashing in on my ghostly demise, here’s a “subtly” enhanced version they have my persmission to use:
That is a strange handprint on the upstairs bathroom mirror which showed up around 2.2m off the floor. By “showed up” I mean I first noticed it tonight while getting ready for bed.
No clue, but that’s a hell of a thing to see on a foggy night before Halloween.
There is very few things, bordering upon zero, that would make me want to rejoin any social media account.
What joy I might ever get from them I get from just doing a little random browsing. And the way reddit is going, they will have blocked that as soon as they can figure out how to block it AND still sell the data on the side.1
Can’t turn your users into blood for the blood gods without pretending to care about the children, or some shit.
BUT, one thing that might inspire me make at least a “DumbStuff1849” style account is the ability to auto-block everyone who has marked their profile hidden. All posts. All comments. Hell, even all the upvotes and engagement. Let me see the “non-hidden-profile-reddit” stats only.
I’m not going to post anything so they can see my profile all they want. I don’t care. Or I can make a half dozen alts. Like the old days.
I like user privacy. I largely demand user privacy. This feels like something else. At least in practice.
A lot of the weirdest stuff comes out of those accounts. People generating 100k+ karma per month and you see their post and it’s just something racist, nationalist, sexist, or…just kind of this odd milquetoast “Yeah, things are shit, what about it?!” thing that reddit does so well.
You might know what I mean, where you complain about anything or brag about anything or just feel joy or hate or anything about anything and there are strings of comments about how it doesn’t matter, it all sucks, and you know what…you are a piece of shit for having feelings on it. The default state of reddit being nowadays, it seems.
The more obvious that sort of thing is, the more likely it will be a hidden profile. 200k karma. 3 months old. Moderator of two low-quality subs that often smash through to the front page despite posting nothing that isn’t some general “aren’t things stupid now” kind of vaguepost. AND WHY? Why do the bots care? I can at least get why the [REDACTED] guys pretending to be American-hating European teens might want to stay hidden so folks don’t realize they are not from a dozen different countries at the same time.
Then you add in the those that hide their posts and to mark the profile “mature” so you have to be signed in, having 18+ posts allowed, and then just see you can’t actually see anything.
Look, I know. You have reasons to want to hide your profile. That’s fine. I’m not judging you.
You do you, boo.
To clarify, I mean the way a lot of social media sites are actively trying to stop people from being able to even browse for any length of time without having an account. For reasons. ↩︎
Taken around 22.00 on 2026-10-27 with a phone camera.
We’ve had the kind of weather where it will rain and get very moist here in Grimbergen and then clear up so that you can see the stars and the full moon for some portions.
For instance, right now (mid-afternoon) it is very sunny. It may or may not be later. I could check but I’ll save some mystery.
Due to this, though, I’ve gotten a few fun shots of a rain/humidity soaked window with clear sky behind it. I figured I’d start with “Full Moon Through Rainy Window” and then maybe share a sister photo in a day or two.
As of yesterday (around 1:45pm CST, give or take), Kaz and I have been married for 22 years. It’s a long time. A good time. Some of it a bit rough, sure. All of it worth it.
