Wrote a short essay about my frustration with the pop culture appreciation of Pope Francis: https://davidbaunach.com/writings/pope-woes.txt

So I stepped way out of my comfort zone, and tried to figure out adding rss to my site. I found a few examples of the minimal viable xml file, and gave it a go. Here's what I came up with:

davidbaunach.com

And it works! Or at least, sort of. I tried it out on Akregator, and everything works beautifully. But then I tried it out on BlogCat and it completely breaks the reader. I'm open to any thoughts or corrections or directions! My goal is to keep it as simple as possible, but if there one or two other tags that need to be in there to make it work for more feed readers, I'm fine adding a few things.

Made these (re-imaginings of a few of the Stations of the Cross) last year during Lent, unfortunately all three are still relevant: Nothing new under the sun.

Been in a bunch of meetings recently, so some doodling had to happen. Mixed a few different techniques I've used before, I'm digging the mix:

Wrote a 'getting started' guide for Tilde Friends, one of the two maintained clients for SSB, this guide is for the Android version: https://davidbaunach.com/writings/tilde-friends-startup.txt

Came across some cool stuff about nomadic foragers recently, did a write-up on my website: https://davidbaunach.com/writings/the-hoop-and-nomadism.txt

Cool article about the practical stuff when switching to a dumbphone, covers a lot of the pain points:

the Guardian

You don’t need a smartphone: a practical, personal guide to downgrading your device

Want to switch to a dumbphone but worry about things like two-factor authentication or map apps? These are my best tips and workarounds

A test crosspost from Openvibe to my Mastodon, Nostr, and Bluesky accounts

In my smolweb explorations, found that all browsers I tested will render a txt file. This is interesting to me for many reasons, but the main one is it makes it easy to run a handwritten website where regularly changing stuff is just txt files linked by the homepage. So far, I've updated the Homilies section of my website (davidbaunach.com), all my homilies in one txt file, new ones added to the top (whenever I remember). But it's just text, even with ten years of homilies, the file would remain small. Text is best.

Had to turn the most metal line from the second reading today into some art:

Been working on making my own clothes for over a year (a more general post on that here:

Adventures in Clothes Making: Finished? - Saint Maker Forum

A forum run by Techpriest_Baunach to discuss Saint Maker stuff.

A related part of that quest, has been coming up with an alternative to the clerical suit I used to wear. And I think I've done it! Here's a not great picture of what I've come up with: The base layer is a Greek style square tunic, and the second layer is a medieval style apron, with a square of white fabric at the neck to mimic a roman collar. The tunic itself is incredibly comfortable, and the apron seems to give it more of a defined shape. The whole getup is lightweight, which is good in the hot and humid southern part of Missouri where I reside.

Been working on and off on this the past few weeks, think it's polished enough to share at this point. It was published first on my wiki, link to that at the bottom of the post: # Initial Findings in my Studies of Anarchism-The Human Mycelial Network I'm not going to be citing sources for everything here, this is just where I'm at in my thinking as I continue on this now year-long quest into studying Anarchism. However, I will say that the main influences for my overarching comprehension, rely on the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, as well as the book I'm currently working through, 'The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia' by James C. Scott. In the background are the various other authors I've read in the past year, including Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, and then stuff I've read further back that I'm now seeing in a new light by Belloc, Chesterton, Tolkien, and my all time favorite, Illich. And I suppose that I needed to fit these new ideas into some framework I already had, and that ended up being the Omega Point. That there is a procession happening over the course of history, a progression towards an inevitable perfection. This allows anarchism to fall into a necessary place within the organism of humanity. Anarchism (and thus the voluntarism, mutualism, conviviality, and personalism contained therein) precedes the development of the state, and it continues to this day, growing like the weed that pokes through the concrete and grows in the paved wasteland. It cannot only be found on the edges and peripheries of state oppression, but right under it's very nose. Whenever two people voluntarily decide to help each other, anarchism exists. And thus it makes sense that it is only so recently in our history as a species, that we've begun to explore this phenomenon. Only the ever-growing reach of states into the lower levels of the human network, made the study of this thing necessary. We needed to describe the thing that we knew should be there, but was being diminished. And the closest analogy I can use to describe it, is a mycelial network. Anarchism is the human network, moving nutrience and information around, because that's what human beings do. Not through greed or duty or coercion, but just through the fact that we're human. This also makes it obvious that the state has some role to play. Like a tree benefiting from the mycelial network, and also benefiting it, especially when it dies; a state can only exist because of the underlying anarchic network, and when it dies, it gets incorporated back into the network. This fits into the framework of the Omega Point, because an evolutionary growth that has been around long enough, even with it's many integral evils, must be playing some part in the overall development of humanity, even if that part is only allowed to remain in order to purify the whole. So while the state may eventually become vestigial, at least right now, it is doing something for us. Even if all that is, is teaching us the importance of anarchism.

techpriest_wiki

Initial Findings in my Studies of Anarchism-The Human Mycelial Network

techpriest_wiki - Initial Findings in my Studies of Anarchism-The Human Mycelial Network

Just a fun post today, noticed where I've got the cat beds set up, looks like my armour is watching over them as they cat nap:

Been testing out Garnet for roughly the last week, and oh boy, XMR tipping is such a good feeling! Even though I've got my lightning wallet hooked up as well, I've just completely stopped using it. Why give BTC, when you can give XMR? Now obviously using a mainchain comes with some tradeoffs, but those essentially got fixed in the last update of Garnet, since you can now use external wallets for tipping. On the Monero chain it takes roughly 20 minutes for a transaction to be fully confirmed and thus you can't send another transaction for those 20 minutes. So with the one built-in wallet for Garnet, that was one tip per 20 minutes. But now that I can use my external wallet, where I have a bunch of sub addresses, I can pretty much tip non-stop. For those waiting before trying something so new, I can report that I've had a bug-free experience thus far (I'm sure now that I've said that something will happen!), it just works like Amethyst. And also I haven't really seen this discussed, but my tipical Monero tip has been 0.001, which is about $0.16, which seems enough for a micro transaction. If you want to try it out here's where to get the apk:

GitHub

Releases · retrnull/garnet

A fork of Amethyst with Monero tipping support. Contribute to retrnull/garnet development by creating an account on GitHub.

#garnet

Had a dinner party last night and made a deconstructed beef Wellington. I am now convinced it's the best way, every ingredient gets to reach perfection without being held back by the others.

Got my fall/winter/spring garments ready: a pair of wool pants, and a denim tunic/robe type thing. I decided to go with a bag instead of pockets, which I'm liking so far, though pockets may happen eventually. The patterns for these two garments are zero waste, pretty much all rectangles and squares. I cobbled them together from various things I found online, and I am working on drawing up what I ended up doing, but it's not ready for posting yet. It's insanely comfortable, kinda just want to wear it now, even though it's over 90 here. The sleeves are the best part, baggy sleeves are the way to go! I want to make some straps in the sleeves to tie them up into short sleeves, and I've got a few other little details to finish, but it's finally wearable! #handsewing #sewing #zerowaste

The Gospel today seemed particularly poignant.

# SSB: King of the Mountain This began as an appreciation, and I wanted to just focus on the positives of SSB, but it is difficult to express those without expressing the negatives that throw those positives into sharp relief. So to begin, the main problem: being online and server first. I'm going to talk about Nostr and the Fediverse together, since the former is an improvement of the latter. They both suffer from the same critical problem, data is stored in a central location. For Nostr: the relay, Fediverse: the instance. It's someone else's computer. And when that computer goes offline, it breaks the network. A central point of failure. Now here's where Nostr pulls away a bit, I've seen plenty of projects aimed at providing a local relay to serve as a backup, which is cool. But the fundamental problem, is that the structure is thus that a central server is where the data lives, and the intermingling of accounts happen. This server is going to get fat, it's admin will have to consider legal issues, and due to it's necessity for the network to function, must minimize downtime. SSB had the same problem at first: pub servers. Essentially an SSB account, that followed other accounts, thus keeping a complete copy of their posting history on the server. New accounts could connect to this pub and easily get integrated into the network, updates were quickly propagated, but again, everything was in one place. Now, that wasn't as much of a problem for SSB. Accounts can sync over a local network, so even if a pub server went down, the network could still function, it would just be slow, and literally peer to peer. This was solved with room servers. They don't store any data, just facilitate the handshake between peers so they can sync directly with each other. The legal problem was taken care of for room runners, the necessity of being constantly up was already lessened, but now that it was cheaper and easier to run a room server, there could potentially be more rooms than there ever were pubs, thus granting a redundancy not previously possible. But technical capability and resilience cannot overcome burnout. There's a handful of SSB passion projects still in development, but all the big ones have died out, for various reasons. The major reason is you can't make a living doing good stuff for humanity. It's tough getting funding for something that will make people less reliant on corporations and governments. Crowdfunding can only get you so far. And yet, SSB still wins. Despite how difficult it is to work with, being offline and local first is going to win every time. There are other reasons as well, one of my favorites, is community moderation. I'll see a flurry of block events from people I follow, and go to check out the offending account to see if I should block it as well, and there's already nothing there: it was blocked out of replication range. This leads to small, (sometimes) interconnected, communities. There are pockets of the network I will never see, and those far outside the norms of my community, who will never see mine. It brings the noise to signal ratio down to manageable levels, spam gets swatted fast, trolls get blocked so they can be in their own community of one. True freedom of speech, in that you will suffer the consequences of your words.

Finished another hand sewing project, used an old bathrobe for a pattern, though I added buttons and changed how it closed in the front. Wanting to do some cool sort of wide belt to finish it off, but will need to explore fabric options for that first. On this project I also did 99% of it without a table, seated and sewing on the floor. I can't figure out how to lay the fabric out and cutout the pattern pieces without a table, though I guess the answer there is the floor as well. I have a feeling the cats will make that a nightmare. #handsewing #sewing