Life does not need to be organized according to an idea of how it should be. Morality and ethics are tools of social control to keep the herd predictable. To domesticate you. Society invented "good" and "bad" so you would police yourself out of guilt. Values are disease designed to make you an obedient cog for society, not to help you function in reality. Nature has no values. A lion tearing apart a gazelle is biology, not evil. But humans are terrified of being just another animals, so they…

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The right place to ask why Oktoberfest starts in September, and how Lo-Fi music snuck into your cookingHi there! On September 19th, Oktoberfest began in Germany, which literally means "October festival." So, naturally, it starts in September.It reminds me of Russia's October Revolution, year 1917, which by our calendar actually happened in November, because the tsars were still running on a different one.Two perfectly mismatched facts to sum up the disorientation…

it's weird that ai got too dangerous to keep advancing right around the time money got more expensive to borrow— dr. rich traditions, JD (@helldude.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 11:37 AMAt a time when everybody seems to be criticizing AI and particularly the large frontier LLM base models of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, it is helpful to distinguish between the different schools of arguments.The group which initially dominated the coverage but which seems to be losing ground is the…

Work hard, study well, and eat and sleep plenty! That is the Turtle Hermit way! An apt quote from our beloved Master Roshi. If Dragon Ball has taught me anything, besides that screaming your lungs out during strenuous work does in fact make you stronger, it’s that rest is as important to one’s success as the hard work you build around it. Rest of course, is earned. There’s an obvious difference between someone who is bone idle and someone who rests because they’ve worked hard or is feeling…

Mad Max: Fury Road is a great movie. I was thinking of it again today in relation to our current economy.

I returned home from an afternoon swim the other day and saw a juvenile cat literally eating the heart out of a bird’s chest cavity. She growled. Cats will stiff-arm each other over dry cat food, but they growl and viciously defend real meat. The ravenous cat ate her meal on some pine straw under an old holly bush near my front door. I could not identify what species of bird the cat was devouring–an unusual failure for me because I’m very knowledgeable about local wildlife. The bird was white…

This morning while I was doing my morning routine of drinking my coffee. That routine is setting up the weather page for the current day. Sure, I could automate it, but it takes little time to do it by hand, and I’d have to edit the markdown file anyway to put in the summary. I actually do glance at it, and today I glanced at it out of curiosity to see what yesterday’s rain total was. Normally I would have looked at the Ambient app, but I had this page open, so I scrolled down to look. I…

Via Newspapers.comThis account of your basic friendly neighborhood monster appeared in the “Mexico Weekly Ledger,” December 13, 1883:MEXICO, Mo., December 8.--The neighborhood of Hopewell Church, near this city, is much excited over the appearance in the locality of a strange creature, which is thought by the credulous to be a ghost, and which is a puzzle at least to the most skeptical. The apparition is simply that of a lean monster man, between eight and ten feet in height, wearing a long…

I’m not gonna bother with the preamble about how I got to part six in this series1-5. You can read […]

Mexican long-nosed armadillo loping across a field (photo from Wikimedia) 23 September 2026 Three years ago, in April 2023, I wrote that Armadillos Are On Their Way to Pennsylvania. Since arriving in Texas in 1849 they’ve expanded their range north and east in the U.S. nearly ten times faster than the average rate expected for a mammal. In 2023 they were two states away in Indiana. Not anymore! The first documented naturally occurring armadillo was found as roadkill near Oxford, Ohio. video…

1:4 It’s like a curse… on the first matchday after the coach was fired, the guys (finally) scored 2 goals and beat Fortuna Köln at home to nil, only then to concede 3 goals at home against Duisburg within 15 minutes of the first half just 4 days later. OK, MSV is currently at the top of the standings and on a hot streak, but the ease with which they outplayed our defense was shocking. Like a hot knife through butter. Although the 1-3 goal just before halftime and the team’s determination early…

By Close ReaderOriental Mandarin LegendOSELevels 1-2 In order to thank the PC for killing the monsters in his territory, the Boold[sic] Baron invited the players to come to the bright Red castle he built on the Wild Eagle Mountain. This 28 page adventure presents seven-ish rooms in a scripted human sacrifice ceremony dungeon/scene/event. It has both EASL issues and is overly scripted. Disclaimer: I think this is a difficult review to write. I suspect strongly, based on the chinese characters in…

Lucky 13th Sept! A great day out. Maybe another last good day of Summer, although I think we must be into Autumn by now. I decided to visit Saltoun Big Wood again. This time I thought I'd risk the 113 bus and jogged up to Abbeyhill (rather than Carlton Terrace stop) because there is an electronic sign that says when the next bus will be along. (Yes I know there is an app but the built in redundancy of my iPhone can't download it.) Anyway the sign was temporarily fritzed and of no help. However…

I've been big into meditation lately. While I like to do mindfulness meditation/focus meditation for about 10 minutes or so, there's nothing wrong with a soft-meditation that you can do for longer periods of time. Really anything can be used as a meditation, chores can be meditative if you're doing them with low stimulation and with intention. Dishes are meditative for my step-dad for example. For some it's laundry. Pretty much anything you do in your day-to-day as long as it's low-stim and…

I met with a friend yesterday and the conversation got to what the next hype might be after the current bubble pops. We live at the height of the “AI”-hype and bubble, the hype that took over from the short Metaverse hype which in turn came after the crypto bubble. And the main actors are often the same. The same folks who told us crypto was the future now tell us that “AI” is. Tech these days is built less around actual products but hype, less around building actually functional solutions but…

Hi, baby. I'm 18 weeks pregnant today. 16 weeks ago, you were a single cell with two nuclei, about to mix it together and make a new human. Look at you now: a tiny baby curled up in a foetal position. Sometimes it feels unreal. I can't grasp how lucky I am to have you in my belly. I think it will be easier when I'll really feel you move. For now, I'm always afraid that you might disappear, even though I feel my uterus stretching to give you room to grow. How does it feel? Are you comfortable?…

John Ottman is one of those filmmakers whose résumé is almost ridiculously varied. As a composer, he’s probably best known for movies like The Usual Suspects, X2: X-Men United, Superman Returns, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Nice Guys, and Valkyrie. Horror fans will also recognize his work from Apt Pupil, Lake Placid, Eight Legged Freaks, Gothika, Hide and Seek, and Orphan. He even directed Urban Legends: Final Cut. In 2019, Ottman won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for his work on…

From 2020, a random photo I took of a 1931 garage on Lafayette Street: In case you’re wondering, it looked much the same in 1940, although better maintained: Garages, in general, are not great works of architecture. Most of them in Manhattan are very plain and built in the mid-1900s. Some have nice brick facades, and those tend to be converted stables built before 1910. This one is something slightly different: a garage that has a facade that isn’t just a featureless box but was never anything…

What have you recently finished reading? I finished two books last night, which I was very pleased with — two very different books, as is my wont, ahaha. One was Brandt & Stein’s Worst Man, which is a fun and ridiculous graphic novel in which one character is trying to make his best friend’s wedding amazing, and the other one is trying to ruin it (only, of course, he changes his mind). I love the art, the faces are so expressive and there’s a lot of comedy that arises from expression and…

My library in progress #3So happy with this! After playing with the flat version, I decided to apply the logic to individually cloned shelves, about 5 hours later this is the result! #blog #pixels #website #redesignThank you for following my feed! ♥ Leave a reply here.

Ian Holloway has posted about the Ghost Signals book at his Wyrd Britain site: “This, the latest collection of writings from Stephen Prince, the man behind the always excellent ‘A Year in the Country’ blog, takes us on a tour of various obscure televisual gems from ’68 to ’95… he’s a digger extraordinaire so alongside old favourites there are… tantalising treats of programmes I had no idea existed – ‘A Pattern of Roses’, ‘Shades’, ‘The Plant’ – and his analysis are ever cogent, and insightful,…

President Donald Trump (Wikimedia commons)(9/17/2026) On September 24 I will present the concluding lecture in a four-part series on "The History of the Presidency" at Coe College. The history ones were easy, because "hindsight is 20/20." The present and future of the presidency are complicated, so the concluding talk needs some sorting out, which I will try your patience by attempting to do here.Donald Trump turned 80 this summer, and given his age, physical condition, and public approval in…

What’s a song you’ve had on repeat recently? Recently? Ever since I first heard this I can’t listen to it once. Love the flow, the beats, the attitude, the lyrics, just love her voice in this too. Plus it’s only 2:39 long so easily repeatable. Seriously, how catchy is this track? Been 2 years and I still hit that repeat button whenever it comes on. “DENIAL IS A RIVER” by Doechii Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Listen to Gordon McLean's Apple Music playlist…

thinking cap onStarted to think about this last night at my desk. Chopping the 8 slots for the table clips wasn't that appealing. Thought of gluing a bearer at each corner and then screwing up through it into the top holding it down. Should work, shouldn't it?This is all I got done in the AM session. I had my final chemo cocktail party today and I am now in the monitoring phase. Every 3 months I'll get a CT of the lungs and have it reviewed by the oncologist. Fingers crossed that is a long time…

2026-09-11Hello!I've analyzed my preferred focal length for casual photography, my preferred exposure technique for monochrome images, and now I want to talk about my preferred composition.I've mentioned before that the edges of the frame must not contain any distractions, and that's still the most important principle for me in photography. It's such an eyesore and separates my good work from my awful work.When I forget to do that search, as is often the case, I crop out the distractions in…

Stairs on the Galveston, Texas, Seawall lead to the frothing surf of the Gulf of Mexico. The post Froth at the Foot of the Stairs appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

What am I doing? Not a Masters (NaM) Unit 1: The Stories I Tell Myself The Assignment Technology & Pop Culture vs. the Ancient Archetype — Where has tech and pop culture reshaped or commodified or flattened an ancient archetype? Think about the algorithm, influencer culture, AI, our current branding of “authenticity,” etc. Is anything gained in all this reshaping? Who cares that the Tech Bros have decided that they are the embodied merge of the archetypes Master and Mystic? Who cares that on…

Every now and then, I find myself fascinated by the concept of game glitches. For example, yesterday, I watched a video showing some unused content from the 2nd gen Pokemon games that. In this specific case, the unused content was a house with a woman (and a Pokemon in it). It still exists in the game's code, you just can't get there because the entry tile to the house has been moved to an inaccessible location and "turned off", so you can only reach the house by using cheats. Whenever I…

The first Interesting Assemble is a week today. Tickets are still available and still free.And, excitingly, we can now announce a very special guest for Interesting Assemble II - the return of Dave 'Funkypancake' Simpson.Old school interneters will remember Dave's work with enormous affection. He pioneered a genre of noticing the world with a camera which would go on to be a staple on social and algorithmic media. Dave spotted and shared the unregarded and the odd, the quotidian things that…

🔖 Read Seasonal Living Isn’t Just A Wellness Trend — It’s How We Were Designed To Live by Dr. Jaclyn Tolentino (The Good Trade). 🍂 It’s fall according to the light and the temperature is obliging, too. Time for cardigans, sweet potatoes, and days that feel like the golden hour all afternoon.