lesser daemon: brent bailey's personal weblog

30

Jan

January Update/Links/Screenshots

After averaging 9 posts a month last year, I have gotten off to a slow start this year. Mostly this is because, at least for right now, I have no daily project to write about. One of my takeaways from writing at such a frenetic pace last year was that it would be nice to actually take my time drafting and editing things, which I've been doing, but is a bit of a monkey's paw: when I don't just immediately hit "publish" after writing something I often end up either deciding it was a bad idea or making tweaks to

4 min read

12

Dec

2025, Wrapped

I have made several stabs at writing this post this week, none of which really felt like they stuck the landing. It is very hard to cleanly capture a year that contained both my marriage and my mom's death. Some days I have felt better than I have in years, some days like I will never see sunlight again. Focusing on one or the other side of it feels like an incomplete picture, but writing an essay about how sad I am that's also about how happy I am doesn't really mesh tonally. So: it's been a hell of a

3 min read

08

Nov

Lotus Farming In Another World

Like many people who live in cities and spend most of their time on the computer, I fantasize a lot about leaving it all behind and touching grass forever. I try my best to be cognizant of just how much of a fantasy this is: I find it easy to get bored in the biggest city in America, so I'd probably go insane within days of moving out to a farm somewhere. Boredom aside, there is a reason manual labor is something people often try to escape, and that the ability to do it in a leisurely fashion is mostly

7 min read

05

Nov

30 days of atproto: hope for an open future

It's a beautiful day here in New York. Zohran Mamdani was elected on a message of hope and change (and significantly more concrete change than the last time something similar happened). This is also the final day of my 30 days of atproto project, which works out thematically quite well. I have a lot of hope for atproto, and while there's a lot of work in front of us (just as there is for the mayor-elect), I am thrilled at the prospect of building something that felt impossible a few years ago, a sea change for how we think about

4 min read

04

Nov

The (Absolute) State of the ATmosphere: 3. Stuff I'm Not Sure About

A shorter post today - it's election day in New York, so I've got other stuff on my mind. This is the stuff in the ATmosphere I'm either mixed on or haven't dived deep enough into to have a strong opinion about.

Feeds
One big selling point of Bluesky is being able to "choose your own algorithm". This is pretty well-trod ground for others, and apps like graze.social purport to make it easier. Clearly people are using this feature and finding workflows that work for them. But my own dive into it was pretty frustrating.

The documentation needs

3 min read