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I had completely forgotten about this post, written more than 20 years ago, even though I went on to write about exactly this topic for Wise Bread for years.

This post was about the difference between playing at being poor (which gives you a bunch of psychic benefits) versus actually being poor:

Playing at being poor means living in a cheap apartment, eating cheap, healthy food prepared at home, having only one car (and not a new one), and so on. It’s really only a matter of giving up stuff–and not even all stuff. You can easily justify an extravagance or two. You might give up cable, but have a cable modem. Give up movies, but go to plays. Give up coffee shop coffee, but buy Jamaican Blue Mountain for home. In many ways, it’s the way I live now. But I try not to be smug about it. I know the difference between what I’m doing and being poor.

Being poor isn’t frugal or safe or healthy. Being poor means skipping an oil change because the alternative is skipping lunch for ten days. Being poor means living in a dangerous neighborhood. Being poor means wearing shoes that hurt your feet.

The difference is a matter of capital. Having capital is frugal. If you have capital you can play at being poor and actually live more cheaply than a real poor person. A frugal person’s car lasts a lot longer than a poor person’s. You can buy when things are cheap, instead of paying whatever price they happen to be when you simply can’t do without them any longer. Similarly, it’s safer and healthier.

Source: 2002-03-06

There’s a bit more if you click through.

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Me (giving empty electrolyte supplement to my wife to carry back to the kitchen): I had foot cramps in the night last night.

Jackie: You had [mumble mumble]?

Me: Foot cramps.

Jackie: Oh. Okay. That makes sense. I thought you said foot prints.

Me: You mean, like foot prints at a murder scene?

Jackie: I hadn’t thought of that. I was thinking maybe muddy footprints on the carpet.

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My brother and I are creating an on-line magazine called Elegant Lich.

Our plan is to publish science fiction and fantasy stories. You can read our planning blog here: https://blog.elegantlich.com/

We spent some time looking into creating an Illinois LLC, but are currently leaning against that idea. It would be a lot of work to get it all done and to keep the paperwork right going forward. And although (in Illinois) it wouldn’t be too terribly expensive, it would still cost a large fraction of the cost of putting out an issue of the magazine. So instead we’re thinking we just won’t call it a business, but rather just a hobby. There are some things we wouldn’t want to do if it’s just a hobby (such as sell stuff), but it’ll save us time, money, and trouble.

Our tentative cover art is by Hermann Paul, who did this woodcut as well:

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=197103640

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Normally I want to respond to every report that suggests that cannabis has very few studies backing up its effectiveness to point out, “That’s because doing such a study was illegal for most of the past century.” But this time I’ll just say, “Point to a few approved drugs with ‘real benefits’ that aren’t ‘limited to only a few conditions.'”

A major review finds medical cannabis widely overestimated and potentially risky, with real benefits limited to only a few conditions.

Source: ScienceDaily

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I’m not so sure that there isn’t some hay to be made around insisting that AI firms should be distributing half their profits to the writers whose works they stole to train their models, but I also agree with Cory that it’d be a mistake to do that in a way that broke using the internet to provide citations for dictionaries.

If you’re interested, like I am, in how and why copyright might not be the best tool for helping writers make a living writing, you’ll definitely want to read Cory’s latest at Pluralistic:

The AI copyright fight isn’t being fought to protect your wages – it’s being fought to see whether your lost wages end up in the pockets of a tech boss or a media boss.

Source: Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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My brother @stevendbrewer, (who shared this with me) and I are not AI natives, or even AI immigrants. I guess we’re AI foreigners. Maybe AI refugees.

(My brother warns me “People get offended when you say ‘refugee,'” so I was all, “Ooh! I’ll post that immediately!” He claims to be more an AI refusenik, while suggesting that I’m more AI-curious.)

Oh, the humanities!

Source: Michał “rysiek” Woźniak · 🇺🇦: “I am shocked. Nobody could hav…” – Mastodon 🐘

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That’s the only thing that a podcast is. If it’s not an RSS feed, or if doesn’t link to MP3 files, it’s not a podcast.

Most especially, a YouTube channel is not a podcast.

There are a lot of reasons for that, but here’s the biggest:

And now, our YouTube channel—with 26,000 subscribers—will be disabled just in time for my book launch.

Source: YouTube Moves to Ban Nerd Reich Podcast

If you have a podcast, no one can disable it. You can host it anywhere, and if your host makes you stop, you can just get another host and point your URL there. Anyone can listen to it. All they need is a podcast app. Or even just a web browser. No one can stop you from posting episodes, and no one can stop your listeners from listening to them.

But that’s only true if you have a podcast. If you have a YouTube channel instead…. Well, in that case, YouTube can stop you.

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We wet dog staring at the camera with its ears back

It rained yesterday, but not all the time. I was able to get Ashley out in the gaps pretty well. After raining all night, it seemed it was going to rain all morning as well.

I offered Ashley a chance to go out on the patio, and she declined. A bit later, after she indicated that she really wanted to go out. I put on my raincoat and put the leash on her and tried to take her out the front door, but she wasn’t having it. Just a few minutes later, she came and told me she needed to go out, so I tried again, and this time I actually dragged out out the door, into the rain. But No. She went about three feet out the door, then solid turned around and headed right back.

It was a classic case of Ashley wanting to go outside, but not to the outside that actually existed. She wanted me to take her to some other outside.

So I went back to my laptop and my third coffee (twice set aside, but still warm enough) and waited for the rain to let up a little. And it did let up a little, and I got Ashley out then.

We saw an opossum! He was a Very Handsome fellow, with a white face, a naked pink tail, and sleek counter-shading on his body, (I think the sleekness may have come from being very wet.)

Ashley, of course, wanted to play with the possum, and we chased it back and forth (the possum going through the shrubs next to the building, and us going around the shrubs). At some point the possum managed to get out of sight long enough for me to drag Ashley away.

By then the rain had gotten hard again, so Ashley let me take her home, where I did my best to dry her off. But as you can see, my efforts were only partially successful.

A damp dog lying on a bed

There is a flood warning. I’m always a little amused by flood warnings in Central Illinois, because it is so, so flat here. Yes, it is flooding. The little creek is over its banks, sorta. But as soon as it gets over the top of its banks, the water just spreads out. Before it could get high enough to threaten my house (a few feet above creek level), the water would have to flood literally thousands of acres all around us.