The Universe of Joshua Blais
The Universe of Joshua Blais
Joshua Blais
Welcome to my Hub on the Worldwide Web. It serves as the central and canonical point of truth for all activities, writings, videos, works, and content.
Latest Posts
In 2019, I started using DOOM emacs as my main emacs “distribution”. A decision which I figured I’d stick with for many years to come. In late 2023, I switched back to neovim for some time, and finally came back to the light early last...
“What we do in life echoes in eternity.” Maximus Decimus Meridius When I look around, the hardest thing to find is a person who cares. I see people doing the bare minimum, value-extracting, and overtly ‘screwing over’ their fellow man to...
Back in 2014, I was on a cruise with family (boomer parents, I don’t actually like cruises) - and I did not have my phone or internet access for 17 days. This was in the time when internet access out at sea was exorbitantly expensive,...
As a heavy emacs user, Guix system seems to be the logical place to rest one’s head in the perpetual distro hop. As an all-or-nothing type guy, I’ve been running NixOS for the better part of a year now, but Guix seems to philosophically...
With the Pope’s Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas recently posted, I have seen some of the worst takes online: All from people that have not read the thing they are critiquing. They will see a short soundbite from the Vatican’s meeting with...
The Vatican has just released Leo XIV’s Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and I figured I would read through and give my commentary on such a pivotal document in the era of “AI” and the continual lockstep toward dehumanizing all of...
I just got off the phone with my bank, wasting about 30 minutes of my ever-shortening life to be told that I need not worry about the email that came in this morning and nearly gave me a heart attack. Opening my email inbox this morning,...
“All of man’s miseries stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal When I think about the challenge of living in the modern world, the constant that continually crosses my mind is that we are so unable to...
I never thought I would reach 5k subscribers on Youtube, so I owe everyone a massive thank you! To all of my new friends and the support over the last few years, it’s been an awesome time. Here’s to 50,000 in the future! People have...
“The measure of love is to love without measure.”— St. Francis de Sales Our second child came into the world a few days ago, and I recall a conversation I had with a good friend of mine (also a dad) about how it would be possible to love...
If you only use social media and video hosting frontends - getting fed by algorithms and visiting the same 5 sites everyday on constant doomscroll, then the internet has never been alive for you. That experience is perhaps ~3-5% of what...
When people talk about the “internet dying” - what they are really talking about is slop overtaking the algorithm - of social media becoming unuseable because it’s all bots. But that is not the internet, not by a long shot. If you live...
In my ever-increasing desire to use emacs as my sole computing environment, I have started to take browsing the web inside it far more seriously. Where I previously had thought EWW to be a niceity but far from capable, after using it for...
While Org-mode is fantastic in its core functionality, there is a lovely little extension that creates a way to build a wiki for all personal knowledge, ideas, writing, work, and so much more: org-roam. A “clone” of ROAM research, if you...
I recently discovered Meow as a modal editing replacement for evil-mode, and it has become a mainstay in my recent vanilla emacs configuration. Meow piggybacks on the Kakoune/Helix style of editing (of which I had never used prior, and I...