• Want 33,000 classic sound effects for free? Check out the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
  • I am very much concerned about the many, many, many possible negative consequences of nefarious, incompetent, and/or misguided generative AI. Ruining wikipedia should have been on my bingo card.
  • A University College London demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans won an Ig Nobel prize. I always thought blue zones sounded fishy.
  • Ugh. Scientists are worried that persisting cognitive issues sparked by COVID-19 may signal a coming surge of dementia and other mental conditions.
  • Philip Moscovitch‘s Halifax Examiner article Beyond the Link Tax: Journalism and the Changing Nature of the Internet contains some interesting ideas about potentially taxing megacorporations to subsidize good reporting. But what grabbed me was the line, “Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink […]” Sites like Threads, Instagram, Twitter / X, et.al. have a vested interest in keeping you from leaving. They are, in fact, designed to make it more difficult for you to get to the “rest” of the Internet. I have been occasionally combing through old posts here and it is alarming — for someone who’s been blogging regularly for more than a quarter of a century — how many links simply no longer work. And I’m not talking about links from twenty years ago which should work but don’t (because the site’s gone offline or developers didn’t bother to redirect URLs). I’m talking about links from just a year or two ago. The wayback machine has been a fantastic resource to help me find archived content, but it’s not perfect and it’s grossly underfunded for how important it is to anyone who cares. See also: link rot
  • Speaking of being extremely online, you should read Reclaiming Social Media in a Fragmented World. I love the concept of POSSE and it’s been something I’ve really tried to remember the last few years, especially after what’s happened with Twitter.
  • On Ghost Networks: Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after twenty-one phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.
To Have and Have Not

To Have and Have Not

A paper I wrote for ENL 3124 at the University of Florida on February 20, 1996

When I was about twelve, all of the landscaping at our apartment complex changed one day while I was at school. I thought the new design looked really cool and mentioned it to my mom. She said, “I just can’t believe they let a man do this.” When I asked why, she said, “Men always use railroad ties.”
I had no idea what railroad ties were and assumed it was some sort of neckwear and didn’t put two and two together for at least a decade.
I think about this probably more often than I should.

Johnny 99

An analysis of W.H. Auden’s poem “Miss Gee”

What Is This?

davidgagne.net is the personal weblog of me, David Vincent Gagne. I've been publishing here since 1999, which makes this one of the oldest continuously-updated websites on the Internet.

bartender.live

A few years ago I was trying to determine what cocktails I could make with the alcohol I had at home. I searched the App Store but couldn't find an app that would let me do that, so I built one.

Hemingway

You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.