A Tale of Two Kindle Collections

On 2026-10-20

Some time ago, years now, I sorted my ever growing Amazon Kindle collection of ebooks — then probably around 500 books total — into a small handful of broad collections: Speculative, Mystery, Horror, etc. I made the mistake of treating each collection as unique. A book, for me at that time, could ever only fit into one collection at a time and a lot of it came down to vibes. I have sense fixed this mentality but it dominated for years.

There was a slight issue and that was how to sort both bigger collections and bigger sets of collections. Take a trip with me, if you will, to the now defunct Kindle World Blog of 2011.¹ I got the snapshot from around the time the blog was last updated so you can see the history of comments…

The long and short was that the Kindle has strikingly been inadequate for sorting through large libraries for a long time. Doubly-so back in the era when you had to manually click the button and wait a few moments for the screen to refresh. A dozen or so pages could be a commitment. Write off your whole afternoon.

To get around the issue of getting through several collections and then having to get through several pages of a collection to find the books I was currently reading or wanting to read, I created a special collection called “CURRENT.” That’s where those books went. At least at first.

For various reasons — a fear of “losing” a book into the clicks and the fear of sorting a book into the [*gasp!*] incorrect collection — I started eventually adding a significant percentage of every book I purchased on Kindle into the CURRENT collection. Which meant it did not take long before it hit 100-200 ebooks and was now a problem in and of itself. I’m still having to click for half a minute. Some of these books I barely remember. I get new books all the time and just read those instead. CURRENT, eventually “1. Current,” became too sizeable to use.

This year it hit over 600 books and I realized that I had to either delete the whole thing (and let chaos reign) or try and come up with a solution. Here, then, is my plan.

I have now renamed the collection to “2026- TBR” as in “The To Be Read Pile from 2026 and Before”. I took out the books from that collection that I am actually currently reading, reading the series, or hoping to read very shortly and put it in a new “1. Currently Reading” collection. The numbers at the start help to sort these to the top.

There are currently 30+ books in the latter. Note I am not actually “currently reading” that many but I do have a quite a few I am thumbing through here or there or need a reminder of where I am in the series without having to search a few times over.

My goal is to empty the 2026- TBR collection by end of 2027.

There are various ways to do it: read the books (obvs), decide I don’t care to read the books any time soon and just send them to the limbo zone, or (probably more than I care to admit) just shunt them to the forthcoming 2027+ TBR collection.

All the while, just hoping the one day Amazon starts treating organizational behavior of its Kindles as something that can be solved with about…three or four extra flags and maybe some tags like dates. College student made music players have more sorting options than the world’s largest e-reading platform and that’s sad.

And yes, there is a non-zero chance I am just going to fill the new currently reading collection until it becomes unusable.

In an echo of my recent post about being survived by our online presence, it seems that the Kindle World blog is defunct because the creator died. She has some fascinating stuff out there, still living on in her absence. ↩︎

There will come soft catfishing…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-19

In Internet, Technology

Current Musical Mood: NMIXX’s Strange Muse.

Adapted from: *Photo by Iván Antonio on Unsplash*

I assume that most people reading this have some notion of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.” If not, there is a Wikipedia link. It’s worth it, finding a copy. One of THE (definite article) stories.

It got a bit of a boost recently because the date in the story is possibly 4 August 2026 (assuming the system is working). Which meant we just survived one of the fiction nuclear winters. Good for us.

You might have less a notion that the title and theme comes from an anti-war poem by Sara Teasdale about how if people wipe themselves out in a war that nature will not care. It’s a bit wrong, the poem, because humans are part of nature and our passing would have some side-effects. I’m going to quote it in its entirety because I think the sentiment is valid. The thing that cares most about humanity’s survival is humanity and our ability to trick ourselves into thinking that’s a lie is madness:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

While the Bradbury story is perhaps mildly prescient about how fast mankind could destroy itself¹, I can’t help but feel that some of the horror people face while reading it is that some aspects of our technology will keep working after we are sand and ash. We will be survived by something we consider wholly subservient to us that no longer cares. Piles of plastic trash if nothing else. Miles and miles of destroyed forests and all those extinct species that will never return to the universe. Look upon us, distant and ancient stories, and tremble in dismay…

…because we are colossally stupid.

WHICH IS ONE HELL OF AN INTRO TO THE MAIN POINT OF THIS POST, sorry. Digression is my middle name. Heh, “Dougression”…

The point was story about me reading a reddit thread about a man being soft catfished² and giving everything away to try and be with a woman who did not exist and how that might constitute a “teaching moment” for the rest of us³. If I am confusing with you, that is ok. It is a confusing time to be alive. There was as Brazilian influencer who did not exist. A man who did exist, according to an article which was not written by a human, gave away his… look, here’s a poem:

Yesterday, on the line
I met a woman who wasn’t mine
She wasn’t mine again today
I guess I’ll give everything away
Just to move some 2000 miles
only to learn she never existed, all the while

I am not linking to the story or the thread because the story was definitely written by AI. Something folks started noticing…

Here’s a legit crazy thought that does not keep me up at night but often makes me go, you know, hmmmm…

…is that a non-zero number of anti-AI reactions are written by AI. AND, I suspect that “non-” portion of non-zero is a number a lot bigger than zero.⁴

While I could go on and on about the fact that no one’s lonely uncle is going to be safe, anymore, it was actually the Bradbury story I thought about first.

That if somehow people just ceased to be in a way that did not wreck the infrastructure (aliens, I assume, or mutant bigfoot attacks) that there would be at least a time where a bunch bots just responded to bots and wrote articles for bots and music for bots. Think of the millions of thumbs up and posts on Youtube going “2091, anyone?” with no one left to read them.

If only some author had written about the danger of giving over our creative and emotional processes to unfeeling things and how it would leave the earth a barren place, eh?

Just to be fair, Body Snatchers and its OG movie are all about the importance of feeling and creativity and messy emotions and how being replaced by an “rationally arguably correct” but callous way of living will leave the earth a barren place… and a lot of folks have assuming it was an attack on Communists.

We don’t exactly need AI bots to come up with terrible takes.

The important take away is that our stuff is going to survive us. Especially the plastic bits. Sorry, Ozymandias.

It does seem a bit off that a nuclear blast close enough to eradicate a family in a flash would leave their edifice to capitalism and modern convenience standing. Sounds like engineers needed to use that blast-proof tech to protect kids and not just sell expensive smart-houses, eh? ↩︎
“Chatfished” was my clever neologism I was going to use but other people have used it so I have decided it is dumb and childish. Follow-ups included “cAItfished” but frankly “soft catfishing” allowed me to work in the Bradbury story. ↩︎
We are going to leave aside the fact that the non-existent woman almost definitely didn’t invite him to do it, according to the badly written article, meaning the man just…stalked someone who did not exist. Maybe some Brazilian paper has a better version of the story but it is frankly secondary. ↩︎
Just look at all the hype around the attack on the datacenters and people claiming it shifted the arguments online and such. That story feels immensely and quickly overblown. That it helps to dehumanize people who disagree with us online was a bonus feature. ↩︎

I’m annoyed it took me this long to get the pun, but that atomic breath yo…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-11

In Movies & TV, Tokusatsu

The “second” trailer (which is really like the third or fourth trailer including a couple of teasers) for Godzilla Minus Zero and I finally realized the pun of the title (hint: mGRuOTcG = LOzsltT vtTO ) after all this time and frankly, I’m a little annoyed at myself.

But that atomic breath (around 1:08 in the trailer)…

…hot damn.

Mrs. Green Apple’s “Kyohan” [MVP #28]

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-08

In Doug's Daily Music Video Pick, Music, Music Video

The current record holder for most viewed video in my Music Video Pick series to date, I am pretty sure, Mrs. Green Apple’s “Kyohan” (「共犯」):

Not only does the video already have 8.6 million views (across 5 days), but Mrs. Green Apple just recently released “A Posteriori” a few days before and that one has ALSO hit 8.6 million views. Good for them.

To give you an idea of how fast the video is climbing, I saw these posts back to back this morning when I was catching up on Youtube posts:

If Mrs. Green Apple’s POPS doesn’t win a small stack of awards this year, I would be surprised.

This video is an absolute joy to watch a few times and note all the little things. Here are some of my favorites:

0:09 – Postman is iconic
0:20 – We see the letter A and a newspaper with the headline “More than a festival, a renewed Riverton” followed by the first blink storm
0:29 – We get our first pair of twins (and near-twins). The video is full of duplicates [and oversized food].
0:43 – On the left we have the cop-twins [with childish gun] and on the right we have the sun + moon twins.
0:47 – The dancers go through a range of emotions and might be happy or distraught depending on the particular shot. I also just love the way their dance is delightful but also just slightly offputting.
1:36 – Postman is our first slip out of joy at the start of the second section
1:47 – Guys carrying the umbrella are absolutely struggling while over on the left we get green-coat lady with double ballons [like the theme is starting to glitch]
2:00 – The Band is playing whimsical instruments that do not really match any real world counterparts. It’s a good touch.
2:22 – In a video of duplicates and pairs, we get the genius touch to expose the audience right at 2:22. It doesn’t take long before we realize who the audience is… We also see Studio B.
2:27 – The cut back to the “video” has the movements even less human while to the left we have a guy with a pink beard and a bald head that stands out.
2:46 – As the audience starts participating (becoming “complicit”) they become more animated. Feeling like part of the system.
3:22 – The word play is pretty exquisite around this part.
3:53 – In the last 10 seconds or so of the actual video, we see another audience (and the letter C). Turns out participating is just another spectacle, eh?

The play between complicit as both condemnation and something hopeful is so well done. It is bright and beautiful but also terrifying.

Easily my second favorite video of the year. I think I need to share #1, tomorrow. The two combined are some of my favorite videos of all time, as well.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.

You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.

Five Suggestions to Fix Junior’s Toy Hunt

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-08

In Internet, Technology

EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn’t me…I realized after the fact that it might sound like I’m fishing for my own upvotes…

Good job, Duolingo… your fun event went over so well your volunteer community managers over on the subreddit are having to cut out complaints (while allowing multiple posts of people posting about how they only had to spend 2k gems to win back 5k gems).

Thinking back to yesterday’s post where I ranted a bit about it and how awful gacha based “fun” actually is, I was thinking of a few suggestions to perhaps fix it if you don’t want to turn the whole thing into a pointless misery-fest.

Keep in mind Suggestion 0 is always this: never use gacha.

No One Can Use Gems to Get Pieces

Absolutely most important.

Easy enough. Some countries (and maybe some people) can’t use gems to buy pieces — and therefore get gems back — so make it where no one can.

I cannot stress this enough: no one buys pieces with gems.

Too many people online seem to be forgiving the game because they can cash out and get everything. Everyone should suffer equally if you want honest feedback because gacha players lie about being free to play and nothing wrecks a gacha fan base like FOMO. Make it so everyone is free to play and the truth shall set us all free.

No Gem Prize

Likewise, absolutely no gem prize at the end. Maybe, if you insist, give people 200 bonus gems a day for unlocking all that day’s nodes. At the end, people end up with 5k gems even if they don’t get all of the suits.

In fact…

Add in Too Many Suits

There needs to be more suits than any one can win even if they are absolute God-Tier in their luck. No one can collect them all. Everyone will have gaps.

As it stands, Duolingo has incentivized people — in most countries — to spend gems and wear the same two or three top tier suits which negates any reason to have those top tier suits. Hell, I imagine most players will have discarded wearing the suits in a week or two and it is basically just way for some people to game the system for a few free gems.

If you have it so that there are 10+ suits and people can only likely get 6+ then it means someone might miss the unicorn but get the Hawaiian Shirt and that is way better.

Duolingo Needs a Better Dupe System

Duolingo’s biggest sin after the allowing some people the chance to spend gems to make gems was the duplicate system.

Rather than getting five pieces to unlock a new piece which is probably a low tier piece that you will just get the next day and then it goes into the dupe pile itself you should…

either (a) Allow people to cash in dupes at a later date to give them some control over it,

or (b) [preferred] allow people to spend dupes directly on the suits with lower tier suits being something like 20-30 dupes while the upper tier suits maybe costing 50-60. This way folks eventually get the one or two suits they want.

Suit Pool That Returns

If you are going to emulate better and more profitable gacha, steal a core mechanic: you have more styles/suits/characters than anyone could win or ever need and most of them return in subsequent iterations.

This means the unicorn, etc, will be next time probably at a lower tier.

Duolingo’s Junior’s Toy Hunt Was an Absolute Mistake

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-07

In Internet, Technology

I would never suggest that Duolingo is anything like vital to anyone wanting to learn a language but it can be fun and helpful especially if you are also learning a language in another way. On its own, it gets a lot more variable depending on the language.

Then, this past month (give or take), they decided that what we needed was for them to add in a whole gacha mechanic. You play every day and then you unlock a certain number of pieces which then might unlock suits. There are six suits (+ 1 bonus if you get the rest) and from 1 through 6 they get a bit rarer and harder to get.

The suits are fun and whimsical and pretty optional and it doesn’t really matter, right? Just bonus content?

No.

And let me tell you why not.

Gacha mechanics in games are all about abusing human addiction-forming tendencies. They primarily exist to make money off people by triggering FOMO. People have suffered from gacha enough that I am generally never going to approve it being added.

Duolingo already uses multiple gamification metrics. Adding gacha is an awful choice on top of the stack.

I cannot imagine a proper gacha-centric system that would actually make game play more user friendly because the definition is that someone people will be lucky and some will not. Even if all it takes is time to complete, random chance means some will spend less time than others. This is BEFORE we get to the real world expenditure of some currency to speed up the process [which this, of course, has].

Like in this case where you need two “gold pieces” to unlock the rarest suit, the unicorn:

You have a 2% chance of getting a gold piece. There are, I think, 4 you need in total (could be 3, hard to tell at a glance at this point since I’ve already unlocked the majority). I’ll talk about this in a second, but I could personally get 4 pieces per day for I think 30 days. 120 pieces. At 2% odds, I can’t get there without luck being on my side and there is no guarantee that the gold piece you get won’t just be one you already have.

There is the standard stupid gacha duplicate system where every fifth duplicate you unlock a guaranteed-to-be-new piece. This improves the odds and makes it possible, but still not guaranteed. In the above, the purple pieces have a roughly 20% chance of showing up. Purple as rarity, not individual. I have something like seven days left so 28 pieces which should mean around 5 purple pieces. There’s no guarantee at ALL that it will be the purple pieces I need. Statistically, they will not be.

At this point, without getting at least one new purple, maybe two, I have no chance of winning.

“But, Doug, in this case, it’s just…”

No. Absolutely not. Because in this case it is like every other stupid gacha system and the lucky folks will get 5000 gems on top of their “just cosmetics” while others will not:

And sure you can earn gems on the daily by all sorts of things and in a few weeks (or months?) build up to 5k, but you know how else you get 5k of them at once? Cash…

Completing this month-ish long gacha event is the equivalent of spending around €15 in game (minus the gems you spent before going on reddit and claiming to be “free to play” because I have no idea what is up with gacha players and that pretense). All or nothing. You can miss a single piece and you are just as unlucky as someone missing 10 or refusing to play at all [unless you really want to dress as a lava lamp and frankly I respect that about you].

If they had cut the gem prize out and just said, “Hey, here are 15 suits and no one can win them all but if you don’t win your favorite then you can spend €2-€3 to unlock the one you want,” then I would have considered it more user friendly. It could have been comical just to see what kind of horse or sheep you end up getting.

It is also feels like some sort of test to figure out mechanics to be implemented elsewhere.

Some people (like me) can get 4 pieces a day but cannot buy additional pieces [probably thanks to Belgian law]. Some people seem to only only get 2 or 3 pieces per day (no clue why this might be). A lot of people have the ability to spend gems to get pieces (which seems to be the default). Some people started days later than others. There are a variety of glitches where people aren’t getting all their pieces.

This means you have all sorts of sub-pockets. Will people spend gems on such things. Is 5k worth it for the 4-per day crowd? How about the 2-per day crowd? There will be a PowerPoint slideshow about this presented at a board meeting.

Wave to the board, everyone!

HEY, DUOLINGO HEADQUARTERS, IT IS ME: SEMI-ANONYMIZED USER!

We have two options:

It is a real gacha and there will be some portion of the user base¹ too unlucky to win the 5k gems and all seven suits OR
It is a fake gacha and eventually everyone should win which means anyone who spent real gems, and possibly real money, lost.

In this case, option #1 is technically better but it’s also pretty damned awful for any company to be injecting into their games. I have no doubt that someone is already typing up a report if this should be a new regular business model for them to try and use despite it having to be a failure.

This simply cannot win them any new customers.

I refuse to believe that people on the fence about language learning or who have never heard of Duolingo installing it to play for the toy hunt but there will be people who ABSOLUTELY will leave the app because of it.

They only way that Duolingo wins is if enough people either become more entrenched into the app because a unicorn avatar cost them time, possibly money, and effort OR if enough people bought/spent gems to get bonuses pieces that it triggered a slight uptick in monetary gain that outweighed the folks who are now unsubscribing or just putting put off by it.

That and/or selling addiction-forming-behaviors data to other companies who are trying to figure out how to gamify daily tasks while making profit.

Oh, by the way, buying pieces does not guarantee you won’t just get duplicates. For around 5k of gems spent, you are only guaranteed 3 new pieces, total. But hey, at least some people have the option.

*snagged from u/wistfultyrant on reddit, used without permission*

Someone came up with an app to predict if you should spend gems to complete it [if you have avoided gacha your whole life, you might be surprised to see such dedication done for free by fans but you get used to it…] and right now it puts me around even odds to finish.

I did get the two I wanted (Rex and Mech). Even getting the two suits I wanted just makes me kind of distrust the game, though. And once the “learning app” adds in a game like this and makes it front and center, it is clearly defining itself as edutainment over education.

The tool I share below that sentence but above this footnote calculates actually the majority won’t complete it even if they do their lessons like a good little userbase. ↩︎

Heh, boingloings…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-06

In Humor

Tweet reads: "Once I was telling Julia how I felt dysphoria over not experiencing periods and that I seriously wouldn't mind feeling the pain and she said 'I have an idea!' and kicked me right in the boingloings."

Moon + Planet though perhaps I should have waited one minute…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-06

In Daily Life

Kaz sent me a message to go out and look at the moon because there was a planet hanging out right nearby. I snagged this shot on my phone…

Didn’t occur to me until later that if I had waited I could have possible caught the contrail moving up from the bottom more centered into the shot as a whole.

Ah well, it was still a very pretty Belgian sunrise. I love the sunrises, here, this time of year.

I should find my actual camera and tripod and try taking some more proper shots.

For a second, I thought they were announcing the Third Impact…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-06

In Discoveries, Humor

I’m not going to lie, when I first spotted ScienceDaily’s article about an Australian experiment on tree thinning’s impact, I was pretty much convinced Google News was announcing the Third Impact…

No? Ah, well. Better luck next time, eh?

And another one…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-05

In Internet, Rants

Current Musical Mood: Mrs. Green Apple’s POPS [LGT: YT Music].

UPDATE (2026-Oct-06)

Since I posted this, Renegade Studios has responded and offered folks who felt caught off-guard a chance for a refund. Also, quite a few folks who had a more positive response have joined the thread and pointed out some things I talked about here: the shipping was transparent, etc.

Again, my primary complaint is the timeline (I knew it was coming, had planned roughly accordingly, and was still caught a bit off-guard by the timing).

I’ll leave the discussion about if people could have saved money for certain tiers by waiting and ordering later. Probably. Almost definitely. I don’t think I could have saved money since I was all-in. Still, there will be some.

Original Post

I talked about, not that long ago, withdrawing from crowdfunding. It’s been brewing. And, in the immortal words of DJ Khaled: there’s been another one.

Now, before I continue, I do want to say that I do not actually hold Renegade Studios culpable for [most of] this. In fact, without burying the lede, here is an extremely relevant screenshot of a pair of graphics still up on the Backerkit page that, as far as I know, has not been altered from the time period when I backed it:

Shipping is relatively high and relatively variable. And it tells you that taxes (VAT) will be applied at a later date. This was honest, upfront, and for shipping broadly accurate.

Here is where I do hold Renegade Studios more culpable: I got an email this weekend that said, “We have just now added the total of shipping and VAT to your pledge and you’ll be charged Sunday/Monday,” and if you glance across the Belgium line you can get an idea that we are talking about at least double digits. +VAT. Because there was a glitch that caused the prices to not show up until around 48 hours ago and shipping was charged, for me, around 8 hours ago.

The minimum time to prep should have been one week.

The screenshots at the top of the page show some of the responses to this. Thread is up to 285 messages. Some are repeats. Some are in support. Most are complaints.

Folks were finding out they were going to be charged on Monday (message actually said Sunday but my bank was waiting until Monday) for an amount that we found out on Saturday (or Friday, depending on time zones).

That is a problem. Even if RS was very upfront about what it was — and shipping was technically cheaper than above (maybe around 10-15% cheaper, give or take).

And for people in the US it almost sounds like they could have pre-ordered it from Amazon, gotten a fair number of the items at roughly the same price, and saved on shipping at least if they weren’t going all in. Even the Renegade Studios website might give free shipping over certain amounts.

I’ll let others do the math.

THIS IS ALL TO SAY that it just gets added to the stack of the many ways I’ve seen confusion, dismay, and issues crop up even with otherwise open and honest companies handling crowdfunding when said crowdfunding could have been pre-orders through existing storefronts.

It’s not on them, but I miss the days when crowdfunding felt a bit more energetic rather than expected.