Things I found this week 12/08/2026

A few months ago, I became really disillusioned with search engines. Google fully shed its imaginary cloak of useful consumer tool, and decided that being awful at search wasn't far enough, and that everything had to be AI generated. DuckDuckGo was returning irrelevance time and time again. Therefore, fed-up of ad-laden shite, I took a chance on paid search; I went to Kagi. The advantage is obvious from the get-go: I pay them ~£5 per month and get 0 adverts in my search. I just get the results I want.

For the sake of clarity, I am not paid by Kagi or anyone else, so when I say it's the best move I made in a very long time, what I'm saying is that this is most certainly worth one less corporate coffee each month. And it gets better.

One of Kagi's other offerings is Small Web, which takes you to a random website, owned and operated by real people, and not any kind of social media platform. It feels how the internet felt in the 90's/2000's, where you didn't know what site you were going to stumble upon next. You can somewhat filter it, so it shows you more sites that are of interest you, and you can even search just for Blogs or Comics.

Which bring me to this post. This is what I've been finding on there over the past week (with a few things I've had for quite a while):

• RandomBoo - this one I found during the Makerfield by-election, and I've kept coming back to it as there's lots of fun and interesting things to play around with and read.
• Chris Nevard Model Railways & Photography - again, another I found a while back, and while it's a little bit Ronseal, the wonderfully comical stories that come with the excellent photos are well worth a few minutes a week.
• PlotLines - I made a mistake and closed the tab on the blog I found this on, but this fantastic GitHub site lets you follow the journeys taken by the character of classic literature. I've only explored Dracula and The War of the Worlds so far, but this is a fun project that adds an extra dimension to some classic novels.
• learn.japanology.nl - randomly served up to me yesterday and I instantly fell in love with with. The page it took me to, the most recent, was "The Kanji for Creation Is a Knife Wound", and honestly the description is beautiful. I fear I may lose days getting lost in these pages.

創 means creation. Old shops carve it on the signboard for the year they were founded. Yet the character is a cut in flesh.

• How Diplomats See the World - an article for Asterisk magazine written by U.S. diplomat Abi Olvera, I linked here from a very short bearblog post. A fascinating insight into the actual work of diplomacy and the Foreign Service

The diplomat’s goal is to build a correct, if boring, model of the world, continuously update it, and prepare decision-makers to hold to that model with the right level of confidence. 

• Coram Fratribus Intellexi - the personal website of Erik Varden, Bishop of Trondheim. I was taken to the Notebook portion of this site, to the post "A Good Priest", a short piece in which the Bishop uses a lovely poem by Dietrich Vowerk to describe what a good priest is/should be. Now, I'm and agnostic atheist humanist, verging on anti-theist, but there's some beautiful writing and meditations on life and the world here that might enrich your day more than you expect.
• grumpywelshman.com - "Why the Robots Think I'm a Robot" is a great blog post about a failing of current AI that perhaps hasn't been accounted for. The rest of his site is also worth a look.
• anselia - something about the writing on this rather intimate, personal blog pulled at my heartstrings. There's an aching here I'm sure we've all experienced, laid bare for all to connect with

Make sure you have a browser that can handle multiple multiples of tabs, or a decent way of organising your bookmarks and come back to them. Small Web is an absolute gem hiding on an internet filled with plastic.