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March was a month of traveling, which may not seem to really distinguish it much from many of the other months in my adult life. But it was a particularly dynamic time. Netherlands became the 30th country I have visited, we revisited some of our favorite corners of Paris and Madrid, and I returned to some of the Spanish cities and towns of my university days: Barcelona, Salamanca, and Ávila. With every new trip I take, I return to some of the same questions I have carried within since childhood, what it means to leave and return, to encounter something new, to visit places across time, with different people, under different conditions.

In lieu of some diary-esque retelling of my latest journeys, I want to instead reflect on a surprise encounter I had on the streets of the walled city center of Ávila--a small picturesque place, like a jewel or a pearl incrusted into the vast, rolling highlands of Castilla y León, which I first became enchanted by in 2017, travelling by train on my own.

Turning a corner on the way to visit the birthplace of the Christian mystic and theologian, Santa Teresa de Jesús, my travel party came across a tall and inviting entrance to what turned out to be a Renaissance-era villa. Within the Superunda Palace, we were further surprised to find an art museum, largely dedicated to the work of the 20th century Italian artist, Guido Caprotti.

Why a museum dedicated to an Italian painter in rural Spain? Why in a Renaissance villa? In none of my previous visits to Ávila had I encountered the museum, nor had I ever heard of Caprotti in my studies of art and art history. So, it was without any prior expectations that we entered the museum and let ourselves be swept up in the life and art of Guido Caprotti.

It turns out that Caprotti arrived in Ávila purely by chance when he was a young 29-year-old painter on commission to make a copy of an artwork in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. A snowstorm halted Caprotti's train from Paris and he was forced to stay in Ávila, where he fell under the spell of the ancient walled city hushed under the cover of snow. Enchanted, Caprotti decided to stay and build a new life for himself in Ávila. Initially hosted by the mayor in an old historical building, he eventually married into a prominent family. Caprotti and his wife, miniatures painter Laura de la Torre, were able to then acquire the Superunda Palace that Caprotti helped restore and now houses an extensive collection of his work. From then on, Caprotti's life continued to be full of twists and turns, including exile, war, and travels to México.

Not only did I really appreciate some of the work on display, as well as some of the antique decor and ceramics, but there is also something about Caprotti's story that really captured my imagination. He had this fresh encounter with the unknown in the middle of a snowstorm, and he embraced it in such a rare, whole-hearted way. In a way that I think contemporary life would condemn as reckless. Today, it feels like there is a collective obsession with exerting control over the trajectory of our lives. Each next step must be carefully and meticulously planned. To do otherwise, is to be irresponsible. We must always be hitting that next professional, educational, emotional milestone. But the most important turning point in Caprotti's life was a bump in the road, not a milestone. In our present day, there is such a rush to completely smooth out any such bumps, particularly with the use of technology. Even small things like choosing where to go out to eat, must be premeditated and vetted via Google Maps or other reservation apps. When we are such in a hurry to single-mindedly reach the next benchmark or destination, we can easily miss those accidents of life that contain, hidden within, true wonder and the possibility for renewal.

- Andrea

Over the past few weeks, I have continued to work on the personal server I mentioned in an earlier entry. It is common to talk about having your own website, or a personal computer, but the idea of curating a server as your own digital home is less common. Yet, I have found that having a server unlocks many cool possibilities. I am currently working on a personal internal website where I visualize and add hypermedia controls to be able to change things directly from my phone. Now, I can build many of the personal tools that I've wanted to have, and that have never worked out before, because I haven't had a good way to sync between my devices. For example, now I can easily add a mobile interface to my todo.txt. I also added custom hyperlink schemes and URL shorteners that work across devices.

I can imagine an alternative future where people curate their own digital spaces, but these spaces would not just be public websites or files on a computer. Instead, they'd be more fluid: like private digital homes where you could easily invite people and select what "rooms" they can have access to. These spaces wouldn't be tied down to pre-built "cloud services" or "social media". Auth would happen on the network level, for example with Wireguard, and users could set up their own virtual homes where they limit access based on virtual IP addresses, which would eschew the need for "auth" portals. The boundaries between what is an app, a social media, or a tool would blur.

- Marc

Last night, we watched Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946). I became aware of this film thanks to Guillermo del Toro's Criterion Closet picks. I then added it to my watchlist, I told Marc about it, we watched the trailer, it left a vague impression on us both, but nonetheless, one thing led to another and we were suddenly watching the film on a weeknight. Without too many expectations, unable to gauge whether it fell closer to The Man Who Knew Too Much or to Vertigo within Hitchcock's filmography, it was us who fell into the path of this film.

I think I was hoping for something more like Rear Window, really. But what did Notorious end up being instead? (Spoilers ahead)

Notorious seems to me now like the bits and pieces of space rock you encounter in the vacuum of space. Miami. Treason. Alcohol. Secret Agents. Rio de Janeiro. Nazis. Lust. The first thirty minutes or so of the film are like stumbling across an asteroid field that scrapes and crumbles against your mind. The result is like collage or collision. And from this mishmash of seemingly unrefined pieces that have come together, a sort of gravity emerges and begins to take ahold of us. The fragments lose their sharp edges as they begin to coalesce into a mass, gaining cohesion and density as our protagonist Alicia goes undercover, sinking deep within a secretive community of German expats in Rio, so obviously out of her depth. At this point, we are wholly captured within Notorious' gravitational field, spinning faster and faster in orbit as secret cellars come into view and keys appear and disappear. A man has been killed, love has been made, all out of view, obscured and contained within a film which leverages the constraints imposed by the Hays Code to shape itself into something dark, heavy, and true, like a spinning mass that has suddenly become so dense that it has no choice but to collapse onto itself. What more could Alicia's epiphany be at that moment in which the poison-induced visions reveal to her the horrible truth we have already anticipated and known? Like witnessing from within a slow motion car crash. Having failed to reach escape velocity, we cross the event horizon into the final ten minutes of the film. The tense escape down the staircase, past the Nazi conspirators, and out the door, fails to feel like an escape at all. Instead, we follow Sebastian back up through the illuminated doorway of the mansion in which he will be killed by his associates and the door shuts close behind us.

- Andrea

Amidst the echoing calls proclaiming the end of times that overlap and jostle with the daily directives and imperatives from the workplace and the marketplace to keep things ticking, I have read some of the best writing and I have seen some of the best films, and I have had some of the best conversations strolling through Valencia's carrers cuadriculados, Madrid's ups and downs, and even across screens. The flowers are blossoming much too soon and I with them.

I also can't seem to shake off this mania for associating everything with everything else, Italo Calvino with Thomas Nagel, Simone Weil with E.M. Forster and the Dalai Lama. I keep coming back to these constellations forming in my mind, that link together disparate pieces of humanity and that I can't help but find beautiful. I have fun picking up each piece, turning them over, admiring them, and then placing them next to each other, and then switching the order around, as if they were cards shuffled into a deck. Or the stones and sea shells that make up my rock collection.

I have often heard that academics dislike teaching because it takes time away from research, but I can't imagine anything funner than having the freedom to put together a curriculum. Now, freedom might be the key word here, since many professors and instructors do not feel free. They are instead compelled to teach things following a pre-ordained sequence: 19th Century British Literature, World History, Introduction to Astronomy. In his essay, "The Loss of Creature", Walker Percy posits that the classroom setting is destined to kill any of the life and spark to be found within a given subject of study. And maybe that's true when lessons and their contents are stuffed together into a semester without care. But I also believe that a curriculum can be such a powerful vector for discovery, play, and reflection. There are some curriculums that, like picking up a pair of binoculars or looking through a microscope for the very first time, have changed my life.

When I was seventeen, I chose my future university based on a curriculum. As lost as I was at the time, I sensed that there was something special about the year-long residential program, Structured Liberal Education (SLE). Over a decade later, I continue to revisit the films, books, poems, and essays that I discussed, loved, barely understood, just skimmed, during SLE. It's a program that has been critiqued and questioned with cause. But I have never found SLE's Western European focus to be a reason to shut it down, rather it is a reason to make many more and different SLEs that feature other texts, other films, other faiths. A curriculum will always be exclusionary and limited and incomplete. I have seen many excellent teachers agonize over this—how to balance the quantity of readings, the limited time of a semester, the almost boundless scope of any truly interesting subject matter, the obligation to evaluate and grade. In my ideal curriculum, I would start by discarding the element of evaluation/grading and then, I would consider that which is perceived to be a weakness (i.e., the limitations imposed by time and attention) to be instead the strength of the lesson plan. Crafting a great curriculum really is an exercise in curation, like setting up an exhibition in a museum or gallery. These limitations, where we decide to start and stop, are what make a journey possible. And there should never be just one type of journey in life, but many different sorts of journeys, charted by all sorts of people.

The curriculum that has been coming together in my mind over the course of the first weeks of 2026 has a lot to do with technological angst of our times. It was not something I set out to do when I picked up the novels, essays, and fragments that have inspired me, which is why I also think it is a curriculum that quickly outgrows the concerns of the times and invites the type of questions that all great works of art contain within them, which are the unanswerable ones.

Driven Out of Our Minds: a mini-curriculum for 2026 and beyond
(work in progress)

• Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
• "The Nightmare That Is a Reality" by Arthur Koestler
• "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster
• "Tracing a Headland: An Introduction" from Wandurlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
• "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God" from Waiting for God by Simone Weil
• "La liberté absurde" from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
• "Material Culture and the Absence of Ritual" from Don't Sleep There are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett
• "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• "The Spiral" by Italo Calvino

Honorable Mention to The Analog Sea Review (No.4), an offline journal that illustrates the power of careful curation; I picked three of the texts above from this volume.

- Andrea

In the debate around parental controls, a counterargument I have heard against many proposals is that "the system is easy to circumvent". When designing systems, we naturally want to build a system that is perfect, and so we think that any system that can be circumvented is broken. But I think that if a parental control is possible to circumvent, this is actually a sign of it being well-designed.

Why? When designing something for the future, chances are we will never get it quite right. There will always be edge-cases, or situations that we have not prepared for. Rather than thinking of imperfections in a system as purely flaws, they can actually serve as checks, as ways to navigate situations that we have not thought of. A way to break the glass, so to speak, when the system is not living up to the intended purposes. Such as when those in power are overreaching.

In any liberal society, systems must fundamentally serve the people. Kids can have legitimate reasons for wanting to circumvent parental controls, or to be anonymous online. If the government leverages age restrictions to censor legitimate information, teenagers should have the ability to find that out. Or if teenagers don't feel comfortable sharing something with their ID attached, they should have a way of doing so.

- Marc

"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds."

During the first week of February, Marc and I read E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" a short work of science fiction from 1909 that imagines a future in which humans now live in isolation, each individual buried away in their own room. Not by force, there are no locks in Forster's techno-dystopia. But, why bother moving when everything can be brought to you by the touch of a button? Food, music, medicine, the voice and image of a friend or child half-way across the Earth. What Forster describes resembles our present much too closely for comfort, even if our detachment from nature is not so complete and perhaps can never be. Still, the droning of Forster's all-encompassing Machine echoes the droning of the voracious data centers mushrooming all over the globe. And even more, Forster is able to foresee the development of a parasitic tech-human relationship, in which technology is no longer a tool to foster connections, improve efficiency, or obtain knowledge. No, to perpetuate itself, the Machine depends on people being incapable of independent decision-making and action. It actively fosters dependencies that leave humans at the mercy of the functioning of a technology they are no longer capable of understanding, nor fixing once it begins to break down.

We collected some of our favorite quotes from the text, which speak to the malaise felt by many now, in the face of numerous efforts to convince us to outsource critical thought and sense of responsibility, which in turn lessens our capacity to make informed and meaningful decisions.

"For a moment Vashti felt lonely. Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere--buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. [...] There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world."

"She made the room dark and slept; she awoke and made the room light; she ate and exchanged ideas with her friends, and listened to music and attended lectures; she made the room dark and slept. Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears. The earth, carrying her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars. She awoke and made the room light."

"Here I am. I have had the most terrible journey and greatly retarded the development of my soul. It is not worth it, Kuno, it is not worth it. My time is too precious. The sunlight almost touched me, and I have met with the rudest people. I can only stop a few minutes. Say what you want to say, and then I must return."

"I am most advanced. I don't think you irreligious, for there is no such thing as religion left. All the fear and superstition that existed once have been destroyed by the Machine."

"Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it."

"To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress. No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. [...] But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over−reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine."

- Andrea & Marc

I made some major changes to the backend of mccd.space. Before, it used Eleventy as its blogging engine and was hosted on Sourcehut. The setup worked pretty well, but I thought it could be even better. I am a fan of minimalism: I don't really like Markdown, I don't really like Node, I am not sure if a revision history makes sense for a blog and I also wanted to support more protocols than just http. Thus, I wanted to build my own blog engine, and I wanted it on my own server.

I think the focus right now in the tech industry is on static, pre-compiled, immutable systems that are exported somewhere to be run. But to me, Lisp, Smalltalk, Plan9 and Unix reflect far more interesting ideas. So, I want this new backend to be thought of not as something complete, but rather an ongoing investigation into how I can combine some old ideas with newer technologies.

For the visuals of mccd.space I faced a dilemma. While I'm fond of minimalism, it seems like every big tech company has adopted a façade of minimalism. Big tech websites are ostensibly minimal, but are actually bogged down by javascript and trackers. So, I got inspired to experiment with a new sort of minimalist aesthetic for the site that stays true to me, but also distinguishes mccd.space from "big tech aesthetics". I am a fan of 16th to 19th century sketches, schematics, cartography, typography. The redesigned front page expresses some of that appreciation.

- Marc

Madrid melts into the dark foggy dawn as we pull away from the city aboard a high speed train. Soon the earth will appear reddish, fields of crops will rise from the crumbling slopes, and thin wispy wind turbines will just faintly emerge from the milky daylight, like the ghosts of the windmills Don Quixote might have slain in battle. And then, we will have left Castilla behind.

- Andrea

This morning, I pushed open a door that was stuck to its frame. When it sprung open, a hot splash of sunlight landed on my face. Or maybe, I was the one who had suddenly landed there, wobbling and stumbling into the path of the sun.

Somehow, the heavy clouds that had just washed the city in a grey rain were already blowing off in some new direction. So many different paths now seemed to sprawl before me, twisting and winding, narrow here, broad and airy there. Bright brass lamps beckoned to the right, and to the left, woven carpets draped the coarse coral walls of the short stacked buildings; all perfumed by the scents of cumin, orange blossoms, and fried fish. And now, my own thoughts also spill and spread in disparate directions.

I have begun and left unfinished Comma Directory entries about: eels and Camus, the persistence of New York City, victimhood in the writing of Paul Bowles and Jean d'Ormesson, food in Japanese film, the depiction of gangs in Latin American and Hong Kong cinema. Instead, I have let myself go deeper into the souks—buying nothing, jumping out of the way of motorbikes, looking at cats, thinking about the improbability of a new year and of Marrakech.

- Andrea

In the past few years, there's been a series of articles talking about how Gen-Z is embracing "slow living", i.e. making more time for hobbies and less hustling. Today, I read an excerpt from an essay by Carl Honoré in The Analog Sea Review (vol. 4) that shows that this is not a new phenomenon. Honoré cited debates from the Industrial Revolution about how "chopping up time into rigid blocks" can make life less humane. Emerging in the late 1700s, the Romantic movement opposed many elements of the modern culture of hustle. Going further back, even the Romans complained about having to get up at a precise time in the morning and the implementation of sundials.

- Marc