Author: dtpennington

Propaganda, The National Faith

From “The Zero” by Jess Walter
PermaTech

Last weekend I finally got out the tools and replaced the keyboard on my Microsoft Laptop 2. I picked up the laptop years ago to use as a traveler and it served me in the capacity it was designed to. When the machine started to slow down and failed to keep up with the photo…
Notes on: Tools

You probably won’t own the means of production, but it doesn’t hurt to have a decent toolkit on hand. We are in an age of repair instead of replace. Tools are anything that allow you to extend the ability of your brain/ hand connection. The mechanical advantage of human capability. Code is just as valuable…
Notes on: Hanging Out

Hanging out is tough when you’re 40. Even more so when you’re at a loss of the “third space.” When you’re younger, in the 20s, hanging out at someone else’s house or apartment made sense because everything was cheaper and usually the party had no where to go. Also, you didn’t care so much about…
15 Hours

Taking a Severed approach to working with a single goal: keep things to a 15-hour work week.
Riffs on: Floods

Another day, another sheaf of headlines about flooding throughout the American Southeast.
Read Lately – January 2025

Some notes and comments on books read in January, 2025.
Decentralizing Your Media

The more you have in universal mediums, the better off you will be in the long term. I like BlueSky, even though people behave the same as they ever did. The lede: Bookshop is now selling ebooks, and the proceeds from ebook sales goes to local, independent booksellers. Supporting indie brick-and-mortar’s has always kind of…
Riffs On: Shadow Libraries

Last year I read Syria’s Secret Library, and then dug into the reporting behind the book (permalink), a project of love in a time when Darayya – just outside Damascus – was under siege. “In many cases we get books from bomb or shell-damaged homes. The majority of these places are near the front line,…
Hibernation for Humans

Via Katherine May’s Substack: https://katherinemay.substack.com/p/the-art-of-hibernation May is also the mind behind the great book, Wintering Humans, of course, do not actually hibernate; the only primate to do that is the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, which lives in Madagascar. But we do know that our bodies respond to colder weather and darker conditions in a variety of…