Month: April 2026

The Tale of Two Kindles

On 2026-04-21

On the left is my Kindle Colorsoft. On the right is my Kindle Voyage. I thought about cleaning them up for the shot but I think it drives home just how often the two devices are used.

A Brief History of My Kindle Usage

My first Kindle (Gen 2) was purchased in 2009. One of the older, “clunkier” models with the big side buttons and the built in keyboard. I used it a good bit. Kept it largely on airplane mode and “side-loaded” it from downloaded content.

When the storms hit Huntsville back in April 2011, that Kindle was used to keep track with the outside world and I used a mixture of it and a old flip phone to order equipment we needed to survive.

In 2012, I upgraded to the Kindle Paperwhite. Looking on Wikipedia (LGT: “Amazon Kindle Devices”), seems like I would have gotten one of the first ones.

For five or so years, the Paperwhite was my primary reading device though I honestly do not recall how often I read from it. Often, I would say. Around here, somewhere, I probably started to read Kindle books as often on app and website.

Voyage and Colorsoft

I got a Kindle Voyage in 2017. Oddly enough, it was the Oasis that caused this. I was interested in a new Kindle and Oasis was getting a lot of hype but for whatever reason, the Oasis simply did not gel with me and I ended up with the Voyage as “a replacement.”

For the next eight years, it was the center of my reading life. Now, this was also the time after Barbara’s birth and then COVID and then the accident so it was kind of a weird time for me to read. I read pretty frequently, but we’re talking about maybe thirty books per year compared to three times that a few years prior.

I really liked it. It was often in my bookbag to pull out when I wanted to read for a bit. It also has a bit of personal history for me:

Got to love the cat hairs just baked right on in, eh?

That sticker, I think, came from one of the last outings before the accident made it hard for me to go to such things [and roughly impossible to carry Barbara around on my shoulders]. We were going to see some test launch in May 2022 and I don’t recall what it is because of reasons [a couple of months before and after the accident are only skeletal in my thoughts, the trauma kind of melted most things away] but I snagged a sticker promoting the then upcoming Artemis mission.

I might be conflating two different events, but that’s ok.

Here’s one of my favorite pictures and B and me…

I was absolutely enjoying the heck out of the Voyage with possibly two complaints:

It had 3GB which seems like a lot of space for an e-reader but my ebook library [not including all the comics and definitely not including all the RPGs] is around 6-7 +gig. Tossing in comics and RPGs and it’s 60+ gigabytes [maybe 100+ gig]. I was already having to decide which books to keep and which ones to delete.
It was a bit sluggish, really. It was clearly meant to handle smaller amounts of books without a lot of on-screen manipulation.

Still, the inertia of having to reload 1000s of ebooks kept me uninterested for years, until finally Christmas 2024: Kaz bought me a Kindle Colorsoft as a gift.

Around here, we were already planning to move to Belgium so I held on to it. After the move, once I confirmed it would work and I would not just be bricking a device, I started using it. I cannot buy a new Kindle [if I wanted to, which I don’t] and have it shipped due to geography-lock but it seems like setting up one already bought with an already established account works ok. For now, at least.

For the past year, it has been an astounding e-reader. It works more or less like I expect an e-reader to act. Nearly every complaint I have about it is based on Amazon’s own stupid restrictions to handling non-Kindle content. The enforced ecosystem stuff is dumb.

Which has started to be a problem because there are some books here or there from other sources I’ve been trying to read and I end up having to use various work-arounds to avoid using the Send to Kindle feature which works ok but is awful in the metadata (and oopsie-boopsies the covers because, I assume, of entirely petty reasons and nothing else).

Then…something occurred to me.

The Return Voyage

You know things are bad when Youtube starts recommending videos about jailbreaking Kindles to you. Like, out of the blue. I didn’t go “how jailbreak kindle pls?!” or anything.

Seeing how much they are pushing AI to be pre-loaded on the newer Kindles, maybe soon. Not yet, though.

It did get me thinking. I like the e-ink display. I considering Amazon’s Ember to be my favorite e-reading font [fun fact, I just realized while writing this post that I could download Amazon’s Kindle fonts]. I have been using ReadEra for my phone but something about the interface was missing a little bit. I like it a lot but I missed the vibe of an e-ink book.

Sure, there are Kobo e-readers. Those are a pretty big deal here. Just…you know, more gristle for the pig-farm. Also, via BOL.com I have picked up a few Kobo ebooks and having them locked by third party DRM is not in any real way an improvement. At this point you can’t even say something like “But they are more customer supportive!” because no company likes customers anymore. They only time they pretend to like customers is when there is a bigger fish is in the pond and the pretense of customer service is baked into a business model. Everyone is just waiting to sell out to said bigger fish so the cycle can continue.

What I want is an e-ink reader that jumps straight to KOReader and 100%, absolutely, is not primarily a storefront masquerading as a device. Not necessarily a e-ink display tablet that can also do my taxes. Just like…locked the hell down to launching KOReader. That sort of thing. Let me pay €200 and get 64GB + e-ink + an app that can read pretty much all the “open” ebook formats.

Yesterday, I finally realized that thanks to Calibre, it is relatively trivial to convert any of my ebooks to a format that a 2017-era Kindle can read and a 2017-era Kindle is from the time when Amazon was still considering side-loading to be a primary access point. They may have started discouraging it by that point, but they were mostly fine with it. Books were stored on the device with names like

The Shadow King of Lancelot Book 17 (Light Novel The Shadow King of Lancelot Series)

As opposed to things like

BR1922298Q1521_azw

I got my Voyage out, got out an old charger, and then spent a fair amount of time recharging it. Let it get through all the stuff it needed to get through to wake back up after a year of not being used. Relatively updated. Relatively synched. All that.

Then I told to say goodbye to mama.

Turned on Airplane mode, hooked it up to computer, and viola. Spent last night reading the back half of a Reggie Oliver Book. Today will be finishing up The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (may I recommend StandardEbooks version if you would like a free copy?).

It made me very wistful for a time when companies like Valancourt and Tartarus Press would just sell you ebooks directly instead of having to go through Amazon. I assume a variety of reasons drove such a thing.

It is madness how much ebooks have been tainted in such a short period of time.

Over time, I’ll probably remove most of the Kindle books off of the Voyage and just it exclusively for other ebooks without going through send-to-Kindle [not least because I just assume Amazon is gobbling those up to support its AI].

It’s a terrible boorish workaround but it is nice to bring back my Voyage without it simply being “yet another Kindle” in my collection.

Once support officially ends for the pre-2013 Kindles, might be time to start properly hacking my old Paperwhite. Just to see.

At this time, not really planning on getting another Kindle unless something big changes in their ecosystem. Let’s see how long these two last.

De kleine, gele spin die me gebeten heeft

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-19

In Daily Life, Health

After a rainy afternoon yesterday, we had a pretty sunset in Grimbergen.

This is not a post about sunsets. I just did that to be nice for those who twitch at certain topics.

This is about spiders, spiders upon my person, and the things which happened next. Only continue if you can handle such things.

A spoiler if you are unsure: l 5Yg SIa SP 5xYa l YggptQ 5Yg Y PQ99q5 gYj gkI3QV 9Yga 7IJxa. la xpVa, Y73 TI73 qR gaI99 xpVag, Spa gxqp93 SQ qT.

Why Duolingo Perhaps Requires a Bit More Caution

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-18

In Daily Life

I won’t really go into great or mighty detail about the ins-and-outs of Duolingo. But, there is a regular exercise where you repeat back a phrase it says to you — and has shown on the screen, as above — and then it…judges. I’m not precisely sure how, but it highlights a number of words that you said right versus not and then if you get a certain percentage of words or certain key words correct then it passes you. It’s something that can be very useful to practice while learning a language.

But, it’s often quite buggy. At least on my phone. Sometimes it fails me before I can speak. Sometimes I get a pass despite mumbling. I have occasionally had to figure out how to say the word incorrectly in the “expected” way to get it to register I was speaking.

THEN, Space Pilgrims, we have the phrase: Zij is zeventien.

It’s one of those Dutch phrases that I think is pretty immediately understandable by folks who can read English, but let’s save that for half a second down the road.

It failed me with that a week or so ago. I passed all the other glitches and mistakes I made, but not that phrase. There’s a place where you can visit your past mistakes and correct them — it’s a bit odd since you tend to do that in the lesson itself, but it’s a nice way to see things that maybe tripped you up — and it has sat there the whole time. No matter how I say it, it doesn’t register. I have recorded Duolingo itself saying it. I have used translation text-to-speech apps to say it.

I even one day, this past week, reached a near breaking point where I just shouted it in a variety of pronunciations.

Zij is sayvayteen.
ZAY ES SEVENTY!
ZI AS ZEBENTAN!

Etc.

It was only after I had had my several minute shouting match at my phone that I realized that my windows were open, and drapes pulled back, so it was quite probably audible to anyone walking by on the street (and our neighbors) that I am shouting variations of “Zij is zeventien!” on loop.

Which meant I was shouting, in Dutch, “She is seventeen!,” on repeat. For minutes. And anyone who glanced into the window would have seen me holding my phone while doing it.

I would like to apologize to my fellow Americans abroad that I am doing absolutely nothing good to improve our relationship with the lovely Belgian people. Whoops.

Bonus fun fact, though: If I tell Duolingo that “I can’t speak right now” it auto-passes the exercise for 100%. Which I 100% abuse on almost daily basis to get all the dang Daily Missions speed cleared.

Amazon Is Within Its Rights, But Eh…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-12

In Technology

tl;dr: Old technologies die and companies drive profits by pushing new ones, but at the same time, the warning of this is less about a specific company and more about a whole mindset. Kindles are fine, but you should have back-up plans.

Above screenshot is from the top of ArsTechnica’s article: For the first time ever, Amazon is cutting old Kindles off from the Kindle Store. Which seems…strange. Not that they are doing it, but I thought they had already done something like this for older Kindles. I’m getting Mandela Effect’d in real-time.

Anyhow, says AT references an article from Good-E-Reader: You can no longer buy e-books on Amazon Kindle made in 2012 or earlier.

Technically that’s [sic], as far as I know, since the purchasing seems to still be possible for the next month or so, but it’s a minor correction.

Another possible source if you just like to see various talk about the same tech news is not-shockingly the same way:

There are a variety of specific points brought up but it seems like consensus for the actual impact is:

You will not in any way lose your library, just the ability to connect said library to devices over 14-years-old.
The “bricking” they talk about seems to be more about books being associated with your account…
- …which in some context is the same as “losing” them but there are mitigations.
- …but in principle you could factory reset and still have a functional device by transferring books via cable.
A big impact seems to be people who use some variation of local public library collections and maybe [/maybe not] Kindle Unlimited type services, who might very well lose access to those.

My “first take” [for some definitions of first take, after spending an hour reading up on other takes and such] is that:

Amazon is 100% in their right to remove support for old technologies and hardware not up to date with current standards and future-plans, but at the same time PHHHHBBBTTTT.

Amazon is only going to lose (a relatively small amount of) face by this, no matter the reasons and this demonstrates the danger of the ownership-free future The Algorithm Class have been pushing.

[in 10 years you’ll still be hearing people talk about Amazon just stops supporting Kindles left and right much like how the 1984 incident back in…2010?…is still quoted as though it happens on a regular basis despite other bookshops being more prone to it]

Look, 2012 was a lot of time ago. Stuff that was brand-new in that era like Nintendo’s Wii U and Microsoft’s Windows 8 have already been sunset at this point (the former in a way no doubt similar to the what the early-Kindles are going through, still functional just not connectable to a shop or receiving device specific content). Computers and TVs from that era are different. Phones are completely different. Stuff changes and tech stuff changes significantly across 1.5 decades.

If anything, it’s a testimony to how well the old Kindles were built that the devices are functional enough that people are still attached to them…¹

The fact that it is almost trivially easy to access your Kindle library through your phone or tablet or browser or through a computer app also factors into my somewhat lack of ire about this, though I still have ire.

Outside of the simple truism that old technology eventually gets forgotten [digital files last forever or five years, whichever comes first] my broad assumption that the DRM-wars are a big part of this decision. For whatever reason, we are in a world where ebooks are one of the most protected technologies and, in principle, harder to crack than music [often sold with zero DRM] and at least physical movies [which, if nothing else, can be played on a variety of players before you even get to ripping data from them].

Ebooks, especially Kindle-proprietary formats, and audiobooks [ditto, but Audible] undergo a constant push to innovate where a lot of the innovation is simply to stop people from breaking the DRM on the books they bought.

Piracy is real and has a real impact, but this confuses me to no end.

That is where absolutely any sympathy from me for any company, author, or anyone on the side of Amazon in this case ends. You should not have to rely on a third party to maintain your library and then be expected to buy upgrades to technology or sign away more rights just to re-read a book you bought [a lease to read] years ago. If you don’t want to maintain the library without snatching increasing amounts of personal data to build up into personas you sell to other entities, let us maintain our own. Books do not need DRM. If you are relying on anti-consumer tech to swim above piracy the sharks have already won.

All this being said, here are a few things that are semi-contradictory but I think are true enough to wrap up this kind of going-nowhere besides to take more pot-shots at the anti-ownership-driven future:

Promoting piracy in retaliation for this is a terrible argument. I’m old enough and been on the internet long enough to know that pirates are going to promote their auto-response to everything like it’s a…well, an auto-response. “Netflix increasing its prices? Pirate all the movies!” That kind of stuff. “Content creators barely get paid anyhow!” is the old workhorse that has been used in various forms for years and it remains as ignorant now as it was back then.

I 100% support anyone who uses technology to get around DRM to back-up their own library. Zero qualifiers. Don’t care about any contract or license or what have you. I don’t necessarily think they should have any rights to share it [but…] and especially not to make money off it but I should, and you should, have the right to make a copy of those files that does not require a specific device.

Promoting other ebook readers or even physical books is not precisely the answer. Books break. Folks who read 3-4 books a week will slam shelves full of books pretty quickly. Libraries and bookswap stuff is nice [I donate a lot of physical books] and I support that. Still, physical books are not necessarily going to have the advantages that some ebooks have even though they trump ebooks in other ways.

Other ebook readers are definitely an idea but if it involves simply buying into another ecosystem? Eh. I’d rather promote 100% open ebook readers or apps for common devices that can access all your libraries. See my second point.

I still like my Kindles. Though I am somewhat not in the target audience for this outrage since I tend to update my Kindles semi-often, every three-to-five years. I put them through a lot of wear and tear. Also, I’m the sort who would rather update my ebook reader than get a new gaming console or even a new phone.

Technologies will continue to die by design and a shift towards anti-ownership will continue to try and strip of your rights. Full-stop, the end.

…even though a non-zero and possibly non-minority of the loudest complainers are folks who absolutely do not use old Kindles for various reasons. ↩︎

Chewing on a Proper “Self-Hosted” Web-Sphere: Very Early Thoughts

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-07

In Internet, Rants, The Algorithm

It wasn’t technically Daniel Sell’s “How to Stop Jumping Ship” that made me start thinking about the topic of this post, but that is a linkable resource that has some of the information that has filtered into my brain space:

How To Stop Jumping Ship
08 Mar, 2026

Almost all of us have been on the internet long enough to have had one of our essential community hubs go flying off into oncoming traffic. MySpace, G+, Discord (world weary sigh)? Facebook and Shitter's decent into I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream? Dead and dying, the lot of them, and they take what little community they generated down with them every bloody time. I'm tired of wasting energy on rebuilding community ties over and over again, it's not an especially good use of our time and it means that those of us who are most comfortable with, or benefit the most from, a fractured, chaotic wider community benefit and rise to the top. Behold, the world.

Important bit from slightly below that:

So I propose…we just toss it all in the bin and go back to the beginning. Blogs, newsletters, IRC, mailing groups, and, sure why not, Usenet, go nuts…These things are time tested, functional even in the face of overwhelming lack of interest from the general internet, and are, most importantly, utterly unbreakable. A specific blog, irc etc etc might disappear, but that won’t take anything besides that one facet of a larger whole with it.

What actually started it was an email which was sent out to the Melsonia email list. Same sort of information, a bit more pithy:

Do You Have A Blog Yet?

'Cos you should. Social media is poisonous, drains all your finer impulses. Wastes energy you could spend being happy. So I made a webring and a blogroll to make me happy.

How To Be Happy Too
Go make a blog now. Even if all you do is post your campaign notes up on it, I wanna see it.
Join a webring. Yes, like in the 90s. People will find your blog and you don't have to do anything other than be you.
You can even add a blogroll to it, just like in the Google Plus times.
Post. Read. Post. Read. Delete social media. Post. Read.

Really, it's that easy. You don't need to be good or popular or cool. If anything, they're the worst people to have blogs. The uncooler the better, I say.

Pretty much everything in that image is in the above linked post, though one addition is very much in-line with the stuff I talk about here, which I’ll quote:

Social media is poisonous, drains all your finer impulses. Wastes energy you could spend being happy.

He includes a link to Bear Blog which I won’t include because I’m sure it is fine but this is not an endorsement of a particular product over the other and at a glance, the software seems to violate a couple of principles I’ll talk about in a minute.

If anything, this post is absolutely an anti-endorsement of anything that might be considered a product. Websites/Apps-as-products are killing us. Killing the earth. Killing creativity.

I Digress All Over The Algorithm

One caveat creeps up almost immediately: Sells and I are at least partially concerned about two different things. He seems to be largely talking about (a) moving towards a platform where ideas exist outside The Platform® and are not beholden to the constant drive towards enshittification and profits AND (b) coming up with something that trumps the Algorithm Class’s version of a good time. I like both of those things, both fit strongly in my Reclaim Ownership concept I have been discussing here or there on the blog, but I think for me there is something else brewing in my brain:

Stop treating the Algorithm Class like your friend: you are a commodity to them and the current internet is designed to take resources from you and feed your resources into their bank accounts [money they use to take more freedoms from you].

We are witnessing the death of ownership and are being manipulated into thinking we need them. In 2026, The Algorithm tells you you are bored, that you are unhappy, that you are worthless without The Algorithm, that your replacement worth is derived from the dopamine you get from participating in a rich-person’s profit margin. And we believe it…

Come and share! Like and subscribe! Upvote! Get your five-year streak!

We live in a world where we give third-party companies all the content that makes the platform worthwhile but then you give up increasing rights to your own creations as they rapidly change the rules. They don’t even ask nicely. They just have your college friends’ content being held hostage and you are lonely.

AI amoebae demanding access to our creations. Less control over what we can share versus keep. Free-fall user unfriendly design based around selling digital baubles. Digitally engineered loneliness and disease. All the other terrible aspects forced upon you while specialists in behavioral modeling outsource whitepapers to tell the owners of the servers how to maximize profits from your work.

It’s Big Tobacco all over again. Paying experts to make things more addicting while telling us they are just giving us a product we really want and rumors of your own addiction are greatly exaggerated.

With the bonus that it’s not only our creations, but often the core of our friends and family groups being held for ransom. “Keep smoking and you can keep talking to your mom back home!”

THEN, they take extra data from you and sell it.

It’s like the worst possible version of the peer-review process. That process has volunteer writers being edited/scored by volunteer editors and volunteer peer-review committees. Then the output is given freely to scientific publishers who generate substantial profit off making it available. With the consequence of not publishing can include missing out on tenure and promotion.

Only instead of contributing to the ever-expanding world of valuable science, we are simply trapped in a loop where in leaving a billion-dollar money maker we have no control over ends up with being branded as anti-social and distant. No party invites without social media. Missing out on collector’s items by our favorite brands because people on X got first dibs. How in the hell do we know what Florida Man is doing this week unless we spend hours each week doomscrolling through made up posts about Florida Man?

“I can’t leave Instagram, what about all my friends!?,” we say over and over as our data is stolen and the money generated from it is spent to lobby for war crimes. Taking your joy of expression and turning into AI slop generated in data centers so environmentally unfriendly they are altering ecosystems while unwriting decades of copyright and intellectual property law.

Don’t say, “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer.” That’s tired. Sad. Ignorant. You can pay for it all day long and to The Algorithm Class you are just money and never enough.

Besides, you are very much paying for it and its the most expensive purchase you have ever made.

Like cats, there is no free social media. We are collectively paying billions of dollars to avoid going to bed on time. Our tax money spent to subsidize The Algorithm Class. In return, The Algorithm Class buying out a large portion of our governments for their needs. Every lost ecosystem and plot of land to build data centers. We are spending generational wealth indirectly to look at ads on Facebook.

And the saddest thing is that for all this money, you and your creations are worthless to them individually. Sold for pennies. A penny today so they can buy congressfolk to not pass privacy laws and make a dollar tomorrow.

That’s the thanks you get. Being sold for $0.03 on loop with no protections just so hackers can get your national ID numbers and ruin your credit while the data hoarders say, “oops,” and face no consequences.

There is no ceiling that will stop folks from generating profit off of your hard work and there are very few protections to keep you from suffering the laziness of their vibe-coding neglect.

I DIGRESS.

An Early Thought Experiment Towards Doug’s Ideal Web-Sphere

The point is that reading Sells’ post made me think about how hard it would be for me to actually get any of my friends and family on board with creating a web-ring or similar. I could probably get two or three signed up but the siren call of the wide-open for-sale web would hang there. We are two decades into the social-media-and-search-engine revolution that has stripped us of a properly free internet.

This means this is all in the heady realms of though experiment, so taking that as an act of freedom rather than problem, I was thinking of things I would like to see if I could back and shove Myspace off a cliff.

An actual emphasis on creator ownership, not just virtue signaling. No caveats or catch-EULAs where you give up the rights.
An emphasis on self-hosting or hosting done by entities where you pay them real world money to host your data and in exchange they treat it as hands off for any other use unless they pay you to use your data.
Related to above, but you are free to take your data whenever and wherever you please. Zero retention in a third party and absolutely no “a third party sold your stuff to another third party that has no contract with you explicitly” unlike the current real world problem.
“Censorship” and moderation are generated at the hands of the end-user through tools easy to read and use.
No advertisements unless the content creator is getting paid a substantial portion of the fee [let’s say 80+%] and at their behest [yes, this means content creators will have to pay to post stuff].
Multiple media streams — text, microblogging, video, audio — can be handled by servers optimal to them, each chosen by the content creator.
No addiction-behavior models. Discovery layer predicated by the needs and desires of the end user rather by a creation of any sort of presumed force.
In fact, there would be optimally many many end-user tools that have their own approach to discovery and moderation.
Anonymity vs ID exposure decided by content creators.
Absolutely NO Upvotes and, perhaps most controversial, probably NO comments posted to your own data stream [they would be posted to the commenter’s data stream]. The idea is to break apart the Skinner Box variation of the internet [as described here or there by Cory Doctorow]. You will not get algorithmically friendly shiny cookies. You share data and information and art: others can read it and watch it and enjoy it. SEO is the mind killer. SEO will pass right through you. When SEO is gone, all that remains will be memes.

In other words, something where people create content streams through many different self- or creator-focused-hosted methods and something — webrings, RSS/Atom feeds, metadata chunkers, your own eyes and fingers — will handle this and there will be no fake digital commons generating billions of dollars in revenue as long as you keep playing ball and getting your grandma to sign up for an account.

No lectures from AI-generated moderators about how you need to tweak your content to maximize conversions.

Hell, there would be no conversions. Death to the trust-economy. No product of The Algorithm Class has earned the right to addict us and constrain us to the information/data/consumption-complex they have chosen.

You decide what you want to read and no one knows what you do with it but you.

The Easter Sink Incident

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-07

In Daily Life, Home Care

I am a big fan of home repair. I’m not saying it’s easy. Hell, it’s often quite hard. There are plenty of times when you want to call a professional. Still, I like home repair a lot.

It’s one of the Tiers of Ownership that I believe in. A bit of control. A realization of what you have. Like cooking. Or posting your content to a resource that you have actual stakes in upkeeping.

This is a story about when home repair goes wrong.

On Easter Sunday, 5 April 2026, I was doing one of those gnarly-but-necessary tasks: cleaning out a deep fryer. I needed to refresh it because I was going to cook some vegan nuggets to go with our usual Sunday waffle meal.

I went into the water closet downstairs to wash my hands and a few seconds later noticed the sink was not draining. To clarify, it was draining but only if really full and only a small amount until it got about 1/3 full and then stopped.

We had some clogs upstairs in the shower and Kaz had worked on fixing those — later I realized the clogs are less like a traditional clog and possibly a mechanical aspect causing a bit of a vacuum/pressure problem but I have not solved that yet — and we were convinced that this new problem was somehow a child of the old problem. I tried plunging. We tried running water up to near the top of the sink to see if we could some pressure to release. Nothing was working.

Kaz unscrewed the screw holding in the drain guard. Let me illustrate with a picture.

The screw there in the middle. We wanted that out so that we could try and see what thing might be blocking the water flow. Past that part of the sink, you get this:

Something like a p-trap but not quite. I mean. We tried using a couple of tools to see if we could figure out where something was blocking the flow from the sink through this device.

Nothing was working.

We put a weak-but-potent-enough mixture in there to help break up clogs but had the problem that water simple wasn’t flowing enough. I would fill the sink up and let it slowly drain to the 1/3 mark. Did this on loop.

After maybe an hour or so, a time when I should have 100% been working on making Sunday dinner, there was no real progress.

Kaz had committed to running to a shop — few were open on Easter Sunday, as you can imagine — and while getting ready for that, I decided to reach under and feel around to try and figure out if there was supposed to be someway for us to access the piping system.

At that point, the whole under-pipe just fell completely out and dumped a sink full of water+chemicals all over me, the wall, the floor, and the tools we had been using.

Luckily, Kaz had not quite left yet and so I had helped wrangling cats and cleaning up a hell of a mess.

Turned out the pipe had a lot of soap-scum built up, along with the other bits such pipes accumulate, and they had somehow wedged into the section right as it goes into the wall.

I had no idea how I was able to effectively rip the pipe from the sink with barely a touch. Like finding out you have super-strength.

ONLY, you might have guessed it, but it was foreshadowed earlier on: turns out the screw that holds the drain-guard into place also holds the pipe in place. In fact, we had been massively lucky that it hadn’t dropped out earlier while we were waiting and possibly causing even more damage.

At any rate, we were able to take the pipe and get it completely cleaned out and get everything re-installed and cleaned up and working possibly better than has since we have moved in.

Never did make waffles, though. Sunday dinner ended up being cold cereal and sandwiches.

Did get the deep fryer cleaned. There’s that.

The Tower of Babbling Replies

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-01

In Internet, Rants

There are a few “Explain the Joke” subreddits on reddit and most, probably all, are trash-tier karma farming circle jerks. Just absolutely awful.

The same easy-as-shit jokes or rage-bait memes are posted over and over with people showing up in the thousands to comment. Sure, some of the replies are just bots joining in on the blatant karma manipulation. Which is fitting since it is likely mostly bots posting them. Bots and people trying to farm a few easy k karma to kickstart a reddit account so they can then sell it to bots.

In fact, you could probably automate a script to block every person who ever makes a post in one and trim a fair number of crap from your reddit experience.

Some of the replies are just going to be people who can’t help correcting others or sharing their thoughts, even when the same posts show up once a week or less. It’s weaponized tribalism versus default redditor behavior.

It is especially painful because posts from a couple/three of these subreddits frequently drift to the popular feed which dirty little no-accounts like me are forced to browse without extensive bookmarks: which might be the point. Let the shit float so people are forced to make an account just to have the tools to block them. Eh. Every day is a gift.

HOWEVER, you do occasionally get gold despite the massive attempt by gravity to pull sanity off a cliff. Like this one asking about the Tower of Babel made in [not-]LEGO [look at me violating my “never link to reddit or any social media” rule].

Pardon the proximity to a pun, but my brother in Christ, what could we possibly explain? I can get folks posting references to obscure-but-knowable things with a bit of a gate-keep to even knowing search terms. Sure.

Things like the Tower of Babel might not be universally known but when the immensely searchable words are right there….

At any rate, like all good circle jerking on reddit, the scant pretense of actual joy is people running with it and the replies are full of people posting answers [some on point] in various languages….and some people then trying to argue about the true meaning of Babel. Which is like the true meaning of Dollar Store kitten calendars. It’s aliens, my man. All aliens. All the way down.