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Mortmain
For some reason, English has tended to borrow words related to death from French. Not directly related to somebody dying, for the most part — just some possibly unexpected connection to death in general. The most common example is of course “mortgage”, which is borrowed from French where it means “dead” (mort) “pledge” (gage). Continue reading
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Yarn
Midwinter is the time when people look for more layers of cloth to wear to stave off the cold. Literature and fabric are (ahem) woven together in a number of ways. “Spinning a yarn” can mean “telling a tale”, for one thing. Nobody is quite sure where that phrase came from, but it’s been around Continue reading
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Considering Elizabeth
It’s been a minute and the hysteria has moved on to other things, so I thought I’d take a minute to reconsider Elizabeth Holmes. What a strange story it is, almost like it’s a puzzling myth looming out of antiquity to make us wonder. It might be any of several stories. A technically adept undergraduate Continue reading
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Welcome
If you’ve arrived from either my Happened or Hills and Water newsletters, welcome! All the same content will be here, but no longer cluttering up your email inbox. There may still be some rough edges; this is a WordPress site and I haven’t used WordPress in ages (and it seems they’ve upgraded it). Pay attention Continue reading
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Helpfully Hoping
November, 2022 It feels like there’s less hope in the world lately. Politics is nastier than it’s been in decades. European wars are back, and in the rest of the world many of them never left. We’ve changed the climate in ways we won’t even know about for years. People with fewer resources are finding Continue reading
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The American Dream…scape
July, 2022 The American dreamscape. A strange topology beneath the moon that our oddly faceless icons walked on, then abandoned, an issue suddenly as dead as the dust under their nasa boots. We Americans inhabit stories and myths, not reality. We’re fictional characters who believe ourselves to be real, but disbelieve the real world. We’re Continue reading
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Born Today: July 5
If you think you might like a comic with characters named for “a 16th-century theologian who believed in predestination” and “a 17th-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature,” let me direct you to Calvin and Hobbes, which was drawn during the 1980s and 1990s by Bill Watterson, who was born July 5, 1958. Continue reading
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Value Parasites and How to Avoid Them
Originally published May 2023 A couple of years back, Cory Doctorow coined a word, “enshittification,” that’s a perfect summation of why we can’t have nice things. Enshittification is the process that takes a service, or a system, or a tradition, or even an institution, and degrades it to the extent that it’s just no good any Continue reading
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Hard Boiled Carrot
It seemed like an ordinary day in the forest. The breeze stirred the leaves around. The river flowed. The plants grew. But then Hare heard a knock on his door. It was an ordinary knock; just a quick rat-a-tat. But something about it gave Hare a bad feeling. On his way to open it he Continue reading
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Thrasonical
Around 1616, Shakespeare finished “As You Like It,” in which Rosalind mentions “Caesar’s thrasonicall bragge of I came, saw, and conquered.” Likewise, Thomas Carte’s “A General History of England,” from 1754, points out that “It is too thrasonical to deserve any credit.” I don’t know what he meant by “it”. “Thrasonical,” though, is quite clear, Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.
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peterharbeson@me.com