This is a preserved copy. Listed announces it will shut down December 31, 2026, after which public blogs disappear. Everything published at listed.to/@dickie has been archived and is served here. The original remains live for now.

96 posts

A record of things that didn't ask to be understood. Signals, systems, fragments of news, economic weather, technical artifacts, philosophical residue.

2026

• Never Again: Terms and Conditions Apply

  September 23, 2026

  

  What is a genocide warning system for when the warning signs are already present but the legal verdict is years away? Gaza, and the promise of Never Again.

• The Holocaust and genocide

  September 13, 2026

  

  Six million is an estimate, and estimates invite questions. The hard test is recognizing warning signs while they are happening, not remembering 80 years later.

• Nick Cave Jokes

  September 7, 2026

  

  Twenty jokes about Nick Cave: the baritone, the ruined mansions, the black shirt, and the coat he refuses to surrender.

• Listed Is Shutting Down. Cloudline Press Was Built for This.

  September 7, 2026

  

  Listed shuts down Dec. 31, 2026. An unplanned test of whether a publication can outlive the press it was made on.

• No longer whether Israel wants Palestinians out of Gaza, but how

  September 3, 2026

  

  What was dismissed as speculation is now being discussed by Israel's defense minister: moving Palestinians out of Gaza by sea.

• When flying a kite becomes a military threat

  August 26, 2026

  

  Israel's army warned families in Gaza that flying kites could bring airstrikes. The warning, and the reaction to it, says more than the order itself does.

• How Watermelon Became a Personal Mythology

  July 28, 2026

  

  How a Lenten fast turned into a watermelon obsession: tourmaline, refractometer readings, a database, dropped-melon recordings, and a rind kept in silica gel.

• Text art tools for people who think Photoshop has too many pixels

  July 20, 2026

  

  A directory of tools for making art out of characters, from ASCIIFlow to dithering, and an argument for why a limited medium produces better work.

• AI Coding Agents Need a Driving Test, Not a Beauty Pageant

  July 9, 2026

  

  AI coding agents benchmarked on a multi-million line codebase. The useful question is not which sounds smartest but which one fixes code without burning money.

• Danner Tachyon 8-inch Black Hot

  July 3, 2026

  

  Finding wide boots is less like shopping and more like checking whether any company remembers that feet come in different shapes. Notes on the Danner Tachyon 8.

• Secure the border

  June 28, 2026

  

  Open borders and mass deportation are both slogans rather than systems. A case for securing the border first and punishing employers rather than workers.

• Public Education

  June 8, 2026

  

  Public schools cost money whether a family uses them or not, so homeschooling means paying twice. On what one family gets and the other does not.

• Watermelon’s Origin Story Got Weirder, Smaller and More Interesting

  May 28, 2026

  

  A 2021 genome paper traced the domesticated watermelon back to a bitter Kordofan melon, which makes its origin story stranger and smaller than the familiar one.

• 🍉 Watermelon Scoring System

  May 8, 2026

  

  A three-layer method for scoring a watermelon out of ten: pre-cut selection, cut quality, and a perception factor, with weights, formulas and a worked example.

• A watermelon is never just a watermelon. 🍉

  May 8, 2026

  

  The plan was a different mountain. Somewhere on the drive north it became Old Speck, and a watermelon came along for the reason watermelons always do.

• Cooper Spring and Mount Mica: Where Tourmaline Began in North America

  April 10, 2026

  

  A roadside pipe on Mt. Mica Road where people line up with jugs and bottles, and the hill above it where North American tourmaline was first found.

• “Message to Pretty” – Meaning and Breakdown

  April 10, 2026

  

  Love's Message to Pretty runs under two minutes and feels unfinished by design. A breakdown of what the interlude on Forever Changes is doing.

• No Secretaries, No Exceptions

  April 10, 2026

  

  A firm career conclusion: no job with Secretary in the title, even with a corner office, a pension and a ceremonial pen set. A case for the refusal.

• easter

  April 3, 2026

  

  Easter is a movable feast. How its date is worked out from the first full moon on or after March 21, and why the rule differs between East and West.

• WATERMELON SELECTION

  March 21, 2026

  

  A field manual for choosing a watermelon: field spot, density, rind and sound, each treated as a pass or reject signal with no partial credit.

• Lobster Radio Node

  March 18, 2026

  

  Documentation for Lobster, a Raspberry Pi audio node that plays scheduled WAV files and Spotify through a low power FM transmitter on a timer.

• Evil vs. Evil, Civilians in the Crosshairs

  March 15, 2026

  

  Every side in the Middle East describes its own war as defensive and its enemy as genocidal, while civilians in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon keep dying.

• Lobster Audio Beacon Node

  March 7, 2026

  

  How a headless Raspberry Pi broadcasts a DTMF beacon and a spoken announcement through a low power FM transmitter, and how the audio chain is mixed.

• Edwin Armstrong Tower

  February 20, 2026

  

  A proposal to preserve, document and reuse the Edwin Howard Armstrong radio tower site on the summit of Mount Washington, submitted to the summit commission.

• The Yankee Network: How Mountaintop Towers Carried FM Across New England

  February 20, 2026

  

  In 1937, eight men built a radio tower on Mount Washington for Edwin Armstrong, one link in the most ambitious FM relay system yet attempted.

• barbed wire fence telephone networks

  February 19, 2026

  

  In the late 19th century, farmers strung telephones along barbed wire fences to build cooperative networks with no central exchange and no monthly bill.

• 📟 128 Entry DTMF Phrase / Location Dictionary

  February 7, 2026

  

  A 128-entry dictionary of DTMF tones for phrases and locations, from OK and CONFIRM to INJURED, TRAPPED and RESCUE UNDERWAY, grouped by purpose.

• Mount Washington: A Great Mountain, or the Greatest?

  February 6, 2026

  

  Mount Washington needs no advertising. What the 6,288-foot summit has been to science, to winter travellers, and to the people who broadcast from it.

• Why Python Is the Best First Programming Language

  January 28, 2026

  

  Choosing a first programming language shapes how you think about problems. Why Python still makes the most sense for a beginner in an age of AI assistants.

• It Must Be Nice to Have a 24-Hour Security Detail

  January 28, 2026

  

  Comments from a president about a fatal shooting, and the widening gap between political leadership and the lived reality of everyday Americans.

• When Silence Replaces Faith

  January 27, 2026

  

  Jesus came first for the Jews, literally rather than as a metaphor. What modern Christianity loses when it quietly stops saying so, and what fills the silence.

• Gaza, the pier, and the unresolved question of a future for civilians

  January 26, 2026

  

  The destroyed city, the temporary US pier, restricted access and parallel diplomacy, and the unresolved question of whether Palestinians can stay in Gaza.

• Two Things Can Be True at the Same Time

  January 25, 2026

  

  The official account of a fatal shooting does not add up. When explanations strain credibility, skepticism is necessary, and accountability must follow.

• This Is Not a Reconstruction Plan

  January 23, 2026

  

  Skyscrapers, new cities and a redesigned coastline are described as rebuilding Gaza in two or three years, while families survive in tents and ruins.

• Bringing Printing Back Among the Clouds

  January 22, 2026

  

  Postcards stamped Among the Clouds carried proof that you stood above the weather. Bringing that summit printing tradition back to Mount Washington.

• The Crime of Noticing

  January 22, 2026

  

  Noticing used to be where understanding began. Now it is treated as evidence of guilt, and observation is the thing that makes people uncomfortable.

• This Is How Ceasefires Die

  January 21, 2026

  

  A Reuters report on forced evacuations from eastern Khan Younis, and why ordering civilians out of their homes is how a ceasefire stops being one.

• Temporary Means Temporary: Why Immigration Honesty Matters

  January 19, 2026

  

  Compassion and enforcement are not opposites. Why a country that refuses to say temporary means temporary keeps causing human damage.

• Archive.ph: A Digital Time Capsule for the Web

  January 18, 2026

  

  Archive.ph saves a permanent snapshot of a page so it survives edits or deletion. What the service is, and when to reach for it instead of a link.

• Convenience Is Not Freedom

  January 16, 2026

  

  Convenience removes friction, and freedom is about agency. Why the two get confused, and what you give up when decisions disappear on your behalf.

• If Voting Doesn’t Work and Violence Doesn’t Either, Then What?

  January 14, 2026

  

  Voting does not reliably produce justice and neither does violence. What is left when both of the answers you were handed dissolve at the same time.

• Maine e-Filing system User agreement analysis

  January 14, 2026

  

  What the user agreement on Maine e-filing actually commits you to, read clause by clause before you accept it at the login screen.

• Odyssey File & Serve Usage Agreement

  January 14, 2026

  

  The Odyssey File and Serve usage agreement as Tyler Technologies serves it to Maine filers, reproduced in full for reference.

• Intervention Talk, Supplied Bombs, and the Body Count

  January 14, 2026

  

  Officials float intervening in Iran over the killing of protesters, while supplying weapons to a campaign that killed roughly 70,000 Palestinians.

• Coerced Procedural Consent (CPC)

  January 13, 2026

  

  Courts now run filing, scheduling and payments through digital platforms, and consent to those is procedural rather than real. A name for it: CPC.

• Manufactured Risk, Bad Policing, and a Tragic End in South Minneapolis

  January 11, 2026

  

  Video and context from the January 7 ICE shooting in south Minneapolis point to avoidable escalation and manufactured risk rather than a split-second ambush.

• Not the Most Expensive, Just the Best: Silver as Jewelry

  January 10, 2026

  

  Why silver is the most aesthetically effective jewelry metal: the highest reflectivity of any metal, a neutral white brilliance, and a surface that ages well.

• Silver: A Deep Dive into the Ultimate Conductor

  January 10, 2026

  

  The most electrically conductive metal is not gold. What silver's conductivity and crystal structure mean in practice, and where the metal is actually used.

• 42mm Silver Cube

  January 9, 2026

  

  A 42mm cube of silver weighing 777.7 grams, and what its mass, density and surface tell you about the metal before you ever put it on a scale.

• oh, ahoy!

  January 9, 2026

  

  A short piece about connections that open without ceremony, systems running on habit, and the feeling that something important happened earlier, offscreen.

• The Minneapolis ICE Shooting

  January 8, 2026

  

  The fatal ICE-related shooting in south Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, and why the public argument skipped the factual middle ground for moral certainty.

• So what? Who cares?

  January 7, 2026

  

  Every idea eventually faces the same two questions, and they are clarifying rather than dismissive. How to test whether an argument carries meaning.

• When Ethics Lose the Plot: Why “Fewer Humans” Is the Wrong Question

  January 6, 2026

  

  Fewer humans is always better sounds compassionate until it meets real lives and choices. Where that logic breaks, and what a better question looks like.

• Conway’s Game of Life: a simple system with endless behavior

  January 4, 2026

  

  Conway's Game of Life has no players, no scores and no decisions. How a few simple rules on a grid produce patterns that keep surprising people.

• How I Almost Burned Down Cowboys Stadium and Proved the Demo Worked

  January 4, 2026

  

  A clustered storage demo built in an HP lab, crated up and shipped to VMworld 2009, and the moment it nearly proved the wrong point in public.

• Electric Artist

  January 1, 2026

  

  Notes on working electrically rather than electronically, and what pushing a QR code until it stops being readable teaches you about looking at systems.

• When Certainty Comes Too Fast

  January 1, 2026

  

  A bar fire in Crans-Montana killed about forty people on New Year's Day. Certainty about the cause arrived faster than any answers did.

2025

• 🍉 F

  December 31, 2025

  

  A short fragment consisting of one decorative QR code, drawn in green and pink rather than the usual black and white.

• QR Codes

  December 21, 2025

  

  What QR codes are, where they came from, how error correction lets them survive damage, and what each version's grid size is good for.

• Telephony Glossary

  November 10, 2025

  

  A glossary of telephony terms, from ANI and BORSCHT to CPC and DTMF, for anyone reading phone-system documentation.

• The Payphone as Correspondence: Error 48 and the Silence of Incoming Calls

  October 31, 2025

  

  In Swedenborg's language of correspondences a payphone is a parable: the handset, the coin slot and the wire each stand for something about reaching each other.

• The Grafton Notch Proposals: A Swedenborgian Reflection

  October 31, 2025

  

  Grafton Notch as a correspondential landscape, and two proposals made there: one shared over watermelon, one remembered for cliffs and waterfalls.

• Swedenborg and the Doctrine of Correspondences

  October 31, 2025

  

  Swedenborg held that every material thing has a spiritual counterpart. An introduction to the doctrine of correspondences and how to read by it.

• A small card that carried the world

  October 31, 2025

  

  Before texts or phone calls, thoughts travelled on open cards anyone could read. The postcard's history, and the first one ever mailed.

• Johnny Appleseed, Swedenborg, and the Pink Flamingos 🦩 of Leominster

  October 30, 2025

  

  Two American originals from Leominster, Massachusetts: an apple planter and a flamingo maker, and the Swedenborg thread between them.

• Public Interest Payphone Directory: Northern New England

  October 30, 2025

  

  Dial-in results from 27 public interest payphones across northern New England, sorted by what each line does when called: modem tone, ringing, busy, or dead.

• Cease-Fire as Cover: The Gaza Truce and the Erosion of Humanitarian Law

  October 30, 2025

  

  A ceasefire carries an expectation of silence. In Gaza the truce has instead become cover for continued operations and an erosion of humanitarian access.

• Maine public interest payphones

  October 28, 2025

  

  The list of Maine public interest payphones, with locations, towns and numbers, from Stockton Springs and Lamoine to Madawaska and Mt. Vernon.

• WTF NETWORKS – Payphone Inspection Checklist

  October 22, 2025

  

  A field checklist for inspecting a payphone: physical security, enclosure damage, handset, dial tone, coin path, and the notes a technician actually needs.

• Evacuation Orders, Famine and Targeted Strike Raise Fears of Mass Displacement in Gaza

  September 9, 2025

  

  Orders for nearly a million Palestinians to leave Gaza City, famine conditions and strikes during ceasefire talks, read as a push toward permanent removal.

• The Egg

  September 7, 2025

  

  A short story that reframes what a single life is for, posted with only its opening line. Best read without knowing anything else about it.

• Raised Catholic, Shooter Turned on Faith and Its Children

  August 31, 2025

  

  The Annunciation Catholic School shooting is investigated as a hate crime, and for parishioners the betrayal runs deeper: the attacker was raised in the faith.

• Worse Than Nazis

  August 25, 2025

  

  The Nazis acted before the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute existed. Governments acting now do so knowing the laws that were written because of them.

• Women Present at the Crucifixion

  August 14, 2025

  

  The women who stood at the crucifixion, named and unnamed, with the gospel reference for each and what their presence there fulfilled.

• Circumcision as a Divine Test of Mercy, Not a Command for Harm

  August 14, 2025

  

  A theological paper arguing that the command to circumcise in Genesis 17 was a test of the heart rather than an enduring instruction to do harm.

• Brutally honest judgment

  July 30, 2025

  

  What is happening in Gaza is a catastrophic moral failure, and it indicts the international system that permits it as much as the government carrying it out.

• Grateful for Hypocrites: How Their Contradictions Clarify My Path

  July 28, 2025

  

  Watching someone say one thing and live another is infuriating, and also clarifying. What hypocrites taught the author about his own values.

• ✝️ A War Cry from the Remnant

  July 22, 2025

  

  A traditionalist argument that the Second Vatican Council was a surrender rather than a reform, written as a war cry from the remnant.

• The History of the Mount Washington Cog Railway

  April 29, 2025

  

  Sylvester Marsh proposed a train that could climb Mount Washington after struggling up it in 1852. The history of the world's first mountain cog railway.

• Otto’s Birthday Pie (Vegan Pecan Pie with Spicy Pepitas)

  April 21, 2025

  

  A vegan pecan pie with a mosaic of nuts and spicy pepitas on a rich maple filling, written for Otto's birthday.

• Metaphysical Properties of the Family Rosary Materials

  April 18, 2025

  

  The stones and metals chosen for a family rosary, and the symbolic meaning each one carries for a parent and their eight children.

• You've Ruined My Evening/You've Ruined My Life

  March 29, 2025

  

  Two poems by Tom Raworth, posted as found text, where the emphasis shifts between readings and the actors bow gently.

• Lent Therapy

  March 26, 2025

  

  A structured practice for Lent combining fasting, prayer and meditation, with the reasoning behind each part and how to keep to it.

• ChatGPT scheduled task testing

  March 14, 2025

  

  A test post: three numbered lines, used to check that a scheduled task reaches the blog.

• A Fairy to Stay

  March 11, 2025

  

  A link to an archived children's book, posted for the record so the copy stays findable.

• Orange Pond Rock

  March 11, 2025

  

  A summary of what is known about a rock from Orange Brook, New Hampshire: its size, weight, density, banded texture and mineral layers.

• How AI Sees Me

  March 3, 2025

  

  A desk as an image model read it: a travel mug with steam, a Baby Nessie tea infuser, a beaded rosary and a jar of cashew butter on the floor.

• Progress Report: 04202030 Commemorative Cannabis Strain Development

  January 6, 2025

  

  A progress report on a breeding project for a commemorative cannabis strain, with the parent lines, the aims and where each of them stands.

• Holocaust remembrance

  January 3, 2025

  

  Why the prominence of Holocaust remembrance in the United States, for an event that happened in Europe, is worth questioning rather than assuming.

2024

• Genital mutilation denial

  December 9, 2024

  

  A critique of the phrase used to defend male circumcision: the same tissue removed without consent is called mutilation on one body and tradition on another.

• css test

  October 10, 2024

  

  A test post for a CSS motion blur effect on a box element.

• Long string of characters

  September 15, 2024

  

  A test post consisting of one long string of characters, typed to check how the blog handles unbroken text.

• Description

  September 15, 2024

  

  A note from the early days of the blog, working out how long a description can be before the post preview cuts it off.

• RACIST ASCII ART

  September 15, 2024

  

  Why a cow, revered in Hindu culture as a symbol of non-violence, is the wrong figure to carry hate, and what the contradiction exposes.

• Test image

  September 14, 2024

  

  A test post with a linked image: a green frog sitting at a table, looking at a plate of empanadas.

• testing testing 123

  September 10, 2024

  

  The first post: headings, a quote, a nested quote, bold and italic text and a footnote, used to check that the blog rendered all of it.