benjamin wil (antisocial)

feed backfilling

2026-07-03T12:17:34-07:00

so my website has two main feed sources: the main weblog, and this antisocial feed that came into existence via rss club. until now they’ve been fully separate things, but i noticed:

other rss clubbers generally have a single unified feed.
based on some emails i’ve received, it seems like some readers here just don’t know about the main weblog feed.
from the feed reader’s experience, it could be a bit much to subscribe to me twice; i am not very important (positive).

so i decided to update this antisocial feed to also include posts from my main feed. i apologize if this update caused you any displeasure due to your feed reader marking some old-ish posts as unread or something. (the main feed will continue to exclude these all-lowercase antisocial entries.)

if you’d prefer, the classic antisocial-only posts atom and json feeds continue to live on at new urls:

all of this is actually helping me make the design of my static site generator better. in making this change i uncovered a bug. my rss feed builder supports building both atom and rss feeds. when i created this new selection of weblog and antisocial entries, i failed to ensure both canonical entry collections were set to use the atom format. this caused some entries to be missing encoded html in the built feed. excellent win for me, since my current development focus is making arbitrary entry selections, and feeds for those selections, a better experience.

taking the summer off work

2026-06-16T13:29:28-07:00

after deliberating for a while and doing some budget-math, i decided to take the summer off of work and attempt to recover from burnout. maybe i’ll write about that more over the next few months.

this is the first time since i was fourteen that i haven’t either been doing school or doing work (or doing both). as much as i know this break is necessary, i’m not looking forward to it yet.

as an adult, i have been risk averse when it comes to employment and money. i’ll be living leaner this summer, but i’ll be okay.

my intention this week is to create a calendar. i want to ensure that i’m not just rotting away in my apartment full-time. i’ll plan out things i want to go out and do; milestones for personal projects i want to make progress on; and well-defined chore goals (i’ve been putting off some things).

if you’re reading this and have experienced burnout, or are getting close, hello there. feel free to send me a message. :-)

admitting defeat (re: android development environments on guix)

2026-04-26T13:26:28-07:00

for over a month i’ve spent a weird amount of my free time trying to set up an android development environment (via react native, and then nativescript) on my laptop running the guix linux distribution. i even had a bit of help thanks to some writing about this topic done by franz geffke:

unfortunately, i couldn’t take franz’s configuration verbatim and make it work. and beyond that, i also got nerd-sniped trying to make his setups more ergonomic for me. (i am slightly allergic to having to remember to manually open 2-5 shells, source a bunch of stuff, and then start a bunch of processes manually.)

on my own, i went down some rabbit holes, asked some questions in the #nonguix channel on libera, and attempted setting up my own bespoke environments via guix fhs containers, docker, and even a qemu virtual machine. the closest working environment was the qemu machine. that one at least did not require a bunch of harnessing to appease guix’s declarative, immutable nature. if even allowed me to connect to my physical android device without too much ritual. i abandoned that strategy, though, because it became a guix-related time-sink to learn how to set up a non-virtio filesystem so i could continue to run a code editor, etc. on my irl, non-virtual host machine.

could i get any of these strategies to work? with enough time, i think yes. but the personal-enjoyment accounting is already starting to be fucked up. this blog post is me surrendering and trying to not feel horrible about all of the time i have just admitted to losing.

no hate directed at guix here. i appreciate it the more i learn it. but i’m bummed out i couldn’t get the guix container with fhs emulation working with my physical android device. the core of the issue was that the adb server required for communication with a physical android device could not be run from within the container no matter what environment shit i told the container it could have access to. and running adb on the host didn’t “just work” with the processes inside of the container. with enough time, maybe i could get there. but at this point, i also just don’t know enough about the android sdk tooling to really be effective at creating the developer-harness.

new light colourscheme

2026-04-05T15:10:38-07:00

it’s a bit weird: yellows and blues and reds. what do you think?

my notetaking system, early 2026

2026-04-05T14:37:58-07:00

the process is still evolving, but i’m going to describe my notetaking system as of right now. i started from zero in novemberish last year and am getting happy with the cadence and quality of my notes as of starting this new system.

the biggest change that comes with the new system is that i’m now paper first, even if i’m sitting in front of a computer. the procedure for taking and processing paper notes is on a weekly cadence:

at the beginning of a week, start a new page with the date as a header.
create two sections on this page: consumption and todos. (usually consumption takes up two-thirds of the page, and todos one-third.)
create a third section starting on the next page: notes.
write down the titles of media consumed over the week in the consumption section. if i have additional thoughts or context to add for a piece of media, then an endnote indicator (a superscript number like ²) is added. then, the additional notes can be added to the notes section.
write down tasks to be completed for the week under todos.¹ if additional context for a task needs to be written down, the task gets an endnote, just like consumption media items. if/when i complete tasks, they get an X.
and then the notes section is pretty freeform, where each distinct note has a heading and/or references the endnote indicator from its antecedent consumption log or todos task.
at the end of the week, digitize all of the notes and save them to my personal wiki, where notes may get incorporated into blog post drafts, longer private articles about things i’m learning about, or emails i intend to send. by “digitizing” i mostly mean “type out”.
if i think an uncompleted todo items are important enough to carry forward, they get added to the next week’s todos section.

that’s kind of it for now. it’s a very lightweight process i don’t have to think about. i think the next refinements to occur will be on the processing/digitizing side of things.

because i tend not to live by task lists, i only write down aspirational tasks that i’d like to complete for the week, not every boring thing i need to complete to continue living. ↩

you're allowed to be uninsightful

2026-03-21T10:43:12-07:00

i’ve published two (small) non-antisocial blog posts this month, which is about one more than usual:

the topics probably aren’t interesting to most people, let alone most rubyists. but lately, i’ve been inspired by some authors and creators (rss club members included), and the edges of wikipedia, that are pleased to publish “the boring” information. i’m not trying to denigrate anyone by saying this. writing what you know, for yourself, to clarify your own thinking, and to present information clearly to the maybe one someone somewhere who needs to absorb it, is a good instinct.

said another way: i have relearned that we don’t have to write something that’s interesting to a giant venn diagram of people. most of us aren’t the new yorker and don’t need to be.

i know many of you reading this who write already know this. maybe one of you, like me, needs to be reminded.

one of the creators i’ve been inspired by is the biblical scholar dan mcclellan. to quote his bio:

his research focuses on the languages and history of the bible, as well as on the conceptualization of deity, of scripture, and of religious identity through the methodological lenses of cognitive linguistics and the cognitive science of religion.

he has made over three thousand videos now. he isn’t afraid to repeat himself. he says lots of boring stuff that scholars in his field know quite well. as someone with no credentials in this field, i appreciate that one of his goals is to better communicate what the consensus view of scholars is when in comes to controversial social and/or theological issues with regard to christianity in the west. he also is skilled at “stitching” videos that spread misinformation about christian shit and dunking on the content creators. sometimes he can get pretty mean.

i am not interested in many of the videos he publishes, and i definitely don’t watch them all, but seeing how consistent he is in form, content, and message, and how he bravely repeats himself in such a tireless way, gives me hope that i can continue to be at least as prolific as i’ve been this month.

cheers to us boring people.

oscar predictions 2026

2026-03-13T21:14:30-07:00

these are not the things that i necessarily would want to win, but what i think will happen. (i’ve got nothing better to do.)

best picture: Hamnet

best actress: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

best actor: Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme

best supporting actress: Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value

best supporting actor: Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another

best director: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

best original song: “Golden” from Kpop Demon Hunters

best original score: Hamnet, Max Richter

best animated film: KPop Demon Hunters

best international film: Sentimental Value, Norway

best documentary feature: Mr. Nobody Against Putin

best casting: Marty Supreme

best sound: F1

best cinematography: Train Dreams

best original screenplay: Sinners, Ryan Coogler

best adapted screenplay: Bugonia, Will Tracy

best live action short film: Butcher’s Stain

best animated short film: The Girl Who Cried Pearls

best documentary short film: Children No More: Were and Are Gone

best visual effects: Jurassic World Rebirth

best production design: Sinners

best film editing: F1

best makeup and hairstyling: Frankenstein

best costume design: Frankenstein

your mime type is showing

2026-03-04T23:21:54-08:00

hi. rss club showed up in my feeds today, and then i remembered that this feed is linked there and i haven’t used it in a while. and then i clicked on the feed and realized that nginx was rendering the feed with a mime type of text/xml rather than application/rss+xml. so i fixed that.

text/xml will likely tell your browser to render the feed as an xml in the browser. whereas application/rss+xml, application/atom+xml, and so on, will tell your browser to use whatever application is configured to be your feedreader. on my ios device, for example, clicking a link to this feed now results in a dialog modal. “open this feed in reeder?” it asks. this is much nicer than the browser rendering a fucking unstyled text file.

i noticed some other rss club feeds have similar issues, so if you’re reading this and your a clubber, do consider checking out your feeds.

on my main feed (html, rss) i succeeded in my informal goal of posting one-ish thing per month in 2025. i intend to keep it up, and maybe i’ll even throw some more stuff in this antisocial feed this year, too.

bye.

prefers-color-scheme: dark

2020-09-16T12:00:00-07:00

i decided it was time to make a dark colour scheme for this website. i haven’t touched the styles on here in a while, and it was weird to go through them and see how my brain had decided to organize them.

i didn’t do a bad job. but, i dunno, definitely a younger version of me did it.

there’s no way to “toggle” the colour schemes on the website itself. it depends on you telling your browser (or in some cases your OS) which colour scheme you prefer: either light or dark.

assessing my role in software freedom advocacy

2019-02-24T19:11:02-07:00

over the last year i’ve become increasingly conscious of how my life and work intersects with free and proprietary software. notably:

i spent the better part of a year enabling midsize companies’ ability to “make money” using an open source ecommerce framework.
i went from working a contract at a small consultancy – who invested a substantial amount of money into that ecommerce framework – to joining the consultancy and being acquired by… a very large company using the framework.
i became increasingly wary of people who make money via the internet.
i started thinking about other potential career tracks?
i switched from using arch linux full-time at work to using macos.
i saw some silly news stories about dicey open source software licenses.
i joined tilde.town and witnessed many people learning about and experimenting with free software – and it’s worth noting that there is a wider (still expanding) tilde subculture.
i’ve relied on amazon to provide me with many of my basic needs and convenience purchases, and i haven’t felt incredibly bad about it even though i think their existence is a net-negative for the world and the open web.
i reduced my reliance on google services – specifically g suite for email, calendar, and file storage, but i also started using duckduckgo as the default search engine in all of my browsers.
i started managing my own private git remote/server. it’s not impressive, but i’m always learning something.

this list is rambly, and it’s not clear what i (let alone you) should be taking from these experiences. today, this list is telling me my role in software freedom advocacy is too small. i say this as someone who isn’t interested in being a professional advocate of any kind, but as someone who loves computers, software, and the potential of the internet (which becomes undermined a bit more each day).

i can make my role larger by contributing to free software projects more and more often; by choosing to use free and open source alternatives to proprietary software (ahem, lucidchart); and by advocating for diy solutions to problems that big companies solve if you’re willing to throw money at them. most importantly, i can socialize the idea of software freedom when i speak to people inside and outside of the tech industry: i can write about it more, i can write about why i feel it’s important, and so on.

recently, i was introduced to the oggcast/podcast free as in freedom – which relaunched at the end of 2018 after a two-year hiatus. it’s hosted by bradley m. kuhn and karen sandler who are professional free sofware advocates. if you found my rambly thoughts on this topic semi-interesting, i’d recommend listening to the following (recent) episodes:

how to move into a new place

2019-02-06T18:04:22-07:00

i’m moving this month, and so far it’s going smoothly.

in the last nine years, i’ve moved ten times. most of the time, i only had to worry about my own things – but on one occasion i moved with two other people. i can’t yet call myself a moving expert, but i’ve become increasingly efficient at moving. i want to offer you, readers, some tips.

some of these are uninsightful, common sense tips – but things to hold close to your heart. when you’re moving: things get stressful, and common sense becomes… uncommon.

without further adieu:

don’t procrastinate

spend at least a week thinking about the move. and prepare to spend at least two days moving (if you’re able to take two days).

write out an inventory

and don’t inventory by room – rooms are too big. create zones that you need to pack, and use this to better plan your moving-tetris.

i super-recommend writing the inventory down, on paper or using a to-do list app on your phone.

plan to get rid of things

while you’re inventory-ing, make a list of things you no longer need – or need to replace. you could go the extra kilometre and make a list of things you don’t have but would like to.

again: write this plan down somewhere. it’s no good to you if you forget half of the plan.

plan to move the large things last

your small objects (books, records, kitchen objects, etc.) are the heaviest and most time consuming things to pack. get them packed and out of the way. these are also the easiest things to tetris and put into a moving vehicle.

overcommit

this can apply to your moving experience in a number of ways. for me:

i make sure more than enough family members/friends are available to help move (and that none of them would have to do too much work)
i make sure i have lots of time to deal with the move, and lots of time with moving vehicles, elevator keys, and what have you.
nothing is held together with paperclips. my boxes and bins work, and won’t fall apart.

alright, so these are my initial moving tips. as i continue this next moving process, i may need to amend them.

using jekyll collections for a secondary, rss-only feed

2019-01-21T23:17:12-07:00

this post outlines how i’m generating this feed as a separate, secondary feed using jekyll collections. this is completely possible using the current version (as of this post: 0.11.0) of the jekyll-feed plugin. this plugin is included in all new jekyll projects that have been generated with the jekyll new command.

the main blog feed for this site is at the default location:

https://benjaminwil.info/feed.xml

and the feed you’re reading from now is at:

https://benjaminwil.into/antisocial/feed.xml

collection names

there is one caveat: jekyll-feed doesn’t provide a way to set a custom name for your secondary feed. any other feeds you make use basic site metadata:

your site.title or site.name variable’s value
a pipe character with some spaces around it ( | )
and your collection name – with the first letter capitalized

this can look a little bit stupid if you aren’t careful:

Cool Website | My-new-collection

yeah, that’s the feed name that would show up in your friends’ rss readers.

i have a pull request open on the jekyll-feed repository that fixes this. but if you want custom names right now, you’ll have to use my fork of the jekyll-feed gem.

step one: update the jekyll-feed gem

when you create a new jekyll site using the jekyll new command, the version of the jekyll-feed plugin included is ~> 0.6. to create a secondary feed, you need to manually update your Gemfile to use jekyll-feed ~> 0.11:

ruby # Gemfile ... group :jekyll_plugins do gem "jekyll-feed", "~> 0.11" end

and add this git argument if you’re comfortable using my fork of the plugin (until my – or another similar – pull request has been merged):

ruby # Gemfile ... group :jekyll_plugins do gem "jekyll-feed", "~> 0.11", git: https://github.com/benjaminwil/jf end

step two: create a new collection

in your site’s _config.yml file, you need to add the name and metadata for the collection you intend to use for the feed. in my case:

yml # _config.yml ... collections: antisocial: output: true permalink: /antisocial/:name

output: true ensures a separate file is generated for each item in the collection (the permalink page), and the permalink: setting is probably familiar to you: use it to set your collection post’s uris.

the jekyll permalinks docs include a list of available collections permalinks variables. the variable i’m using (:name) just attaches the filename to the uri.

your new collection can be created in the directory _collection_name (unless you’ve set a custom collections_dir: in your _config.yml). in my case: _antisocial.

step three: pick a layout

you can either use your standard post layout or make a new one. if you’re a jekyll user, you likely know all about layouts: so i won’t go into any more detail here.

you can either set a layout: value in the frontmatter for every collection item, or you can set each collection item’s layout globally from your _config.yml:

yml # _config.yml ... defaults: - scope: path: "" # an empty string here means all files in the project type: "antisocial" values: layout: "your_preferred_layout"

this is some ugly yaml, but that’s what is has to be according to the front matter defaults docs.

step four: configure the feed

we’re pretty much done now. we just have to configure the secondary feed information using the provided jekyll-feed configuration settings.

again, in your _config.yml:

yml # _config.yml ... feed: collections: antisocial: path: "/antisocial/feed.xml"

where antisocial: is the name of your collection and the path: value is a string with your preferred feed location.

now that you’ve configured the feed, you can start to add new posts to your collection directory.

note that if you’re keeping a blog you still need to use date: front matter to ensure your posts get to the feed.

intro to antisocial feed

2019-01-17T17:01:34-07:00

test.

i’ve been made aware of a thing called rss club and i am interested in it. not just because i’m a feed junky, but because i’m nostalgic (even whimsical) for the web as i experienced it as a kid.

so, i’m calling this antisocial feed not to be antisocial towards you, reader. and not to be reactively anti–social media.¹

i’m calling it antisocial feed because of me: if you knew me, before we hit 201x, you’d know that i used to be social: i used to have curiousity, attention, and so on. i used to (think i had been) thoughtful about my (multitude of) interactions with strangers online.

i participated in forums: about video games, japanese rock music. i wrote collaborative poems with my friend staxu. these are not things i feel up to doing anymore, probably because i feel anxious about them: it’s vulnerable, or unprofessional, or exposing; i worry that i’d be misunderstood.

are there like-minded people out there? willing to communicate with me, even in passing? sometimes other people seem inaccessible to me. sometimes i am worried that the only people left are trolls or deluded alpha-male wannabes.

sorry – what an intro. i haven’t really made it clear what antisocial feed is going to be. for now, expect posts about the following topics:

how to (and how not to) communicate with others.
a ruby on rails-based personal journal platform i’m building: maeku.
irc, gopher, and free software in 2019. <3
movies that are okay. (i’m yet another rss club person on letterboxd – nice!)
why i’m not writing poetry for a living, even though that’s what i went to school for.

postscript

yeah, thanks for reading this far. i’m writing this on a static site generated by jekyll, and there’s no html view for this yet. it’s also separate from my main feed. more about this later.

reprise to self: all literature and media is inherently a little social. ↩

backfilling my weblog?

2010-03-20T19:25:00-07:00

how do you feel about this idea? this is something i did today: i ported all of the reviews from my letterboxd account to my main weblog, here, on benjaminwil.info.

it’s something i’ll continue to think about: it kinda looks like i changed history, after all. that said… it is content that i wrote on those dates. i could add notes to the posts to contextualize? but my blog isn’t important or widely read anyway.