the roamer

University teacher, father, dog walker. A European in England. Posting micro-comments on all things that come my way, large and small. #pedagogy, #taoism, #literature, #programming, #typography, #TeX, #politics, #covid. Kindness will prevail.

Posting about #noAI. #StopTheAICorruption.

Personal long-term strands: #MastodonCulture, #whippet_moments, #Plutarch's #ParallelLives. Regular comments on the #Pepys diary.

Most of my comments come up in conversations. Please view my "Posts and Replies".

Last Notes

2026-07-25 08:59:07 GMT

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@nprofile…vf35
An ingenious Fediverse design idea, fully implemented in the most frugal of hardware setups (in NetBSD). So charming.
Bravo, Stefano.
"The post you wrote is the blog post. Same database, same act of writing, still boostable, still repliable, still part of the conversation on the fediverse side. The blog is just a second representation of the same content, generated automatically."
"As a status, it lives in the fediverse, interactive, part of the conversation, subject to replies and boosts like anything else. As a static page, it lives on the web, durable, indexable, with a permalink, something an RSS reader can hold onto. You don't have to decide in advance which posts deserve to last."
#blogging #MicroBlogging #FediToWeb #FrugalComputing
#StefanoMarinelli #lttleFedi

2025-02-14 01:24:24 GMT

I was 22 when I read the once famous but now long forgotten novel The Titan (1803) by Jean Paul (1763 -1825), Germany's belated echo of England's Laurence Sterne.
The chapters in The Titan aren't called "chapters" like in any other book. Instead each is a "Jobelperiode", "Jubilation period" or perhaps "Joohbilation Period". So having finished say chapter 22, the reader turns the page and enters "The Twentythird Joohbilation Period".
The concept was liberating. Style can subvert. Convention has no claim on any of us.
When I encountered the Jobelperiode I knew there was a role for me as a writer. Not a novelist or poet, but a science writer with poetic urgency. Forty years later, I agree with my younger self. I write mostly for my students. Long notes of precise analytical exposition, with the occasional intervention of the unexpected poetic liberty, the confident breach of protocol. Jean Paul's Jobelperiode has stayed with me.
#JeanPaul #style #writing #Romanticism #Jobelperiode

2024-10-06 20:32:38 GMT

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@npub1zlf…jxfl
Thank you, Rabbi, for this post and for your presence here in the last year.
I have no language to express the despair that comes from the deeds of 7 October and from the betrayals that took place in the year since.
"The weight of this sad time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."
Not sure why and how my heart resonates to these lines from King Lear, but they have given me comfort in the last year. I speak them aloud and hope that the words will come.

2024-03-02 21:09:18 GMT

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@npub1y98…gke7
Rowing and sailing. Rowing with my school, the school's boathouse was at Kleiner Wannsee. On Monday afternoons we often rowed along the smaller lakes to Griebnitzsee. Or across Grosser Wannsee to Pfaueninsel. At weekends, sometimes on the Havel all the way up to Spandau. I loved it!
At the time, the border to the East still stood, so we couldn't go further South toward Potsdam.
I also sailed, a friend and I had a 420 dinghy on Grosser Wannsee. I wasn't very good at it.