Essay on Aneesh Sathe

Blaugust Begins

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I decided it was time to firmly exit the platforms. At first I was going to do some kind of cross-posting but most don’t have an exposed API or any kind of application password type setup. So right now, my blog only cross-posts to Bluesky and Mastodon. But what I’m finding more and more is that maybe I don’t really even need those.

I’m coming to a rather happy realization that bloggers who still blog are a particularly shaped kind of people. What I’ve gathered so far is that they value freedom along multiple axes, some easy ones to spot:

Masks in Redshift

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:21:23 +0000

This is my first month participating in the “IndieWeb Carnival” where the prompt for this month is “Masks, Identities & Cosplay”.

With age we learn to hold memories and thoughts at a distance. As if on a shelf across the room or in some other part of home. Age gives you the luxury of making furniture of history where you can safely stow away parts of your world. On such a shelf I keep my masks.

On Thickets, Enclosure, and Leaving

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few months I have discovered and written about the idea of thickets and have been wondering what the practice of thicketing looks like. At its core the idea behind thicketing is to create and dwell in systems that resist capture and defy legibility. Weirdly this is not some anti-establishment move but a simple desire to just be and return to a state where you had your own corner, your friends, and your thoughts. Over the past few hundred years, with the ascent of modernity, legibility and legibilizing have been treated as the norm and a default good thing. However the pattern which has emerged (not just on the internet) is that systems position themselves as commons, invite people to enjoy themselves and slowly initiate capture mechanisms under the guise of some or the other security. Not all of this is bad, much of the modern world would not function without security and minimal enclosures.