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…

So many anarchist principles seems like they would “never work”… because they literally cannot under capitalism, but would work just fine under a different system. One really good example of that is abolishing patents. Patents are silly, actually A patent says a person or company legally owns “an idea” or way of doing things, and no one else can use that idea or approach for many years. If you think about it for a bit, that seems really silly, doesn’t it? How can anyone own an idea? If you talk…

I realised something when I woke up in a panic last night about my hospital visit today (update: the results were perfect): fear only works in absolutes. You either die right away of the disease or you live. Fear doesn’t do in between, and boy, it’s good at doom scenarios. Every time I walk out of the hospital after my quarterly visits I decide not to let my anxieties take over for the next visit in three months. Every time, it sneaks up on me, and I wake up after dreams of horrible deaths and…

When he actually spoke up, I could understand him perfectly, but he insisted on whispering even though the place was pretty noisy and I obviously couldn’t make out what he was saying. The interaction was somehow even more absurd in real life than it is in this comic.

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.

A lot of digital technology is not infrastructure for living. Endless feeds, notifications, commentary, product cycles, arguments, and updates. Remove it, and your life might become less convenient or less "connected", but it doesn't necessarily collapse. It may improve. Habit to send minute updates to someone, banking and other nonsense? 100 EUR smartphone and you can do all of that without friction like you can do it on 1000 EUR machine. Corporations release new products every year. Reviewers…

Long Island woman rescued after plunging into hole in her backyard on her birthday New flavor of quicksand just dropped. My inner Gen X child smiles and nods, vindicated.

For Apple, it's time to move on beyond AR demos with iPads, as Joe Rossignol reports for MacRumors: Following renovations, the Apple Park Visitor Center in Cupertino, California no longer features a 3D augmented reality model of the Apple Park campus. ~ Links: Apple Park Visitor Center Just Lost an Attraction Offered Since 2017, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors Apple Park AR Experience, by AppleInsider, YouTube (2017)

Our interview with Tiff of the Pokémon fansite Pokémon Desert Storm, online between 2005 and 2017.

Yesterday was a lovely day to go to apple orchards and pumpkin patches. I did look for the farm I didn't buy, the farm on the way to the orchard, which I blogged about in this post yesterday. The house no longer exists, and I'm almost sure that the property has been transformed into a housing development called--wait for it--The Orchards.I bought 3 types of apples, and I'll report on the writing assignment tomorrow. I had a vision of buying Pink Ladies, in honor of my grandmother, and because…

Original 1967 snapshot of Peterson’s Rock Garden in Oregon.Rastus Petersen starting building the place (or thing) in 1935 and it arew into a 4 acre environment! He passed on in 1952 and the family took controluntil selling it in 2003. Despite considerable repairs it closed in 2016, but it was added to the National Registry of Historic places and was repaired and reopened in 2026. So it’s still there. Postcards abound, but this was the first actual snapshot I’ve ever seen. It’s a rock…

I drove my son to school this morning. Not something I do often since he catches the bus. But as part of class, they are going fishing and he wanted to bring his fishing rod.1 After dropping him off, I made my way home. Thirty seconds later, I was off the road, forced off by a mom in a white minivan in a school zone.2Not exactly something I had on my bingo card to start my morning. The most ridiculous part of this entire story is the fact this all took place in slow motion basically, at 25 MPH.…

Remember our backyard plum tree, the one felled by Hurricane Fiona? The remediation of the tree to vertical didn’t work out—we followed advice from our Siberian handyman that, untethered, it would find its way back; it didn’t.But the tree is undeterred by its near-horizontal state: after a mediocre plum crop two years ago, this year’s harvest is bountiful, and the tree is filled with beautiful, firm, tart plums like this:I picked a few pounds of plums yesterday, and turned them into a plum pie…

No matter what you call them, Beholders are vile servants of the coastal wizards. But worry not. They have monstrous cousins that can be used to populate (monsterate?) your dungeons. Less common and less popular, perhaps, but not less worthy.MumblersAlso called: Omniphagists, Gabblegob, Chew-OrbsArt by Felipe FariaThis spherical monster levitates through gaseous sacs in its body. Its central cavity is a gnawing mouth of yellow teeth which leads into an extradimensional space (similar to a bag…

Bobcat kittens in North Texas (photo from WIkimedia) 21 September 2026 Another rainy day in Pittsburgh with yesterday’s Flood Watch lasting until noon today(*). So to take our minds off the rain … Let’s watch wild bobcat kittens at play in Connecticut in late July 2025. By autumn they will be able to hunt alone. Though they can stay with their mother for up to a year, they’ll probably leave earlier. Ready for new adventures. video embedded from Jay Cromak on YouTube (*) Flood Watches have…

When you are naming a pen model after after the eight-legged horse Norse god Odin rode in on, you better get it right. Luckily for us, Hinze Pen Co. always gets it right, and the Sleipnir model is just the latest example of their craftsmanship.When you are dealing with a magical creature as inspiration, how do you bring that forward into a pen design? For starters, how about an eight-sided barrel, matching the number of the mythical beasts legs. If eight sides weren’t enough on its own, they…

It’s the economy, stupid.

I have tried diagramming on a couple posts but never had a good workflow because I didn’t want Mermaid.js with a massive payload, but maybe D2 is a contender!? I watched this excellent video: Beautiful diagrams in Emacs by Torstein Krause Johansen and it got me interested in reexamining an easy way to integrate diagramming that is both declarative and tangled out, my Mermaid attempt wasn’t that. Yak shaves I’ve started this blog post as a way to try it out directly in my workflow, so this is…

People often confuse freedom with disorder, and predictability with trust. Autonomy threatens something psychological that obedience doesn't. Human ability to predict the other person. People generally build a mental model of someone: "He's this kind of person. She believes these things. He always reacts like this. She's the funny one. He's conservative. She's difficult. He's against this." Once that model exists, interaction becomes cheap. You don't have to encounter the person anymore. You…

Music I will say one thing about 'America: A Tribute To Heroes'. What was Natalie Imbruglia doing singing backing vocals for U2?Net The Brains Trust watches the Internet reach the parts other global information sources cannot reach...Fashion Marks & Spencer's new print campaign featuring a stunning model in lingerie revisits the Wonderbra's 'Hello Boys' series of the early 90s. But you get the feeling they'll need more than this to turn around the fortunes (especially in the present economic…

I don't believe anything coming out of frontier model CEOs mouths. Their stakes are extremely high, and they have incentives measured in $ trillions to lie, blow out of proportion, or hide information. We are in the middle of a misinformation war. Assume everyone is lying.

The apparent path of the sun crosses the celestial equator southbound at 00:05 UTC today, making this the first day of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and the first of spring in the Southern. This is the time of harvest, when plans come to fruition; it is also the harbinger of the time of rest, especially for Daughters of Darkness like myself who are exhausted and overstimulated by the long days of summer. But even if you’re not a fan of the growing gloom, I hope you can enjoy the cooler days…

Sometimes you’re so excited that it’s persimmon season in Lawrence County you eat persimmon pudding for breakfast.

“But you are wrong; it is useless to cling to the past. Even before the Overlords came to Earth, the sovereign state was dying. They have merely hastened its end: no one can save it now --- and no one should try.” Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke, 1953

As someone who has written a lot about the independent web in the past, then something like the newly-launched Pixel Area is like catnip to me. From the site’s About page1, Oleh Providnyk explains: “Pixel Area is a 100×100 coordinate grid with room for 10,000 websites. Each pixel belongs to a real person and links to whatever they have online: a blog, a project, or just a small site they made. You pick an empty spot, choose a color, add a short description, and visitors find you by wandering…

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 'Notebook' 1842 It’s autumn again. Where did the summer go? Summer was a scorcher of a season here in Las Vegas. We braved the heat, but we were ready for it to end. We’re all stoked for autumn. I’m not fond of the shorter days, bare trees, and all the pumpkin mania that has hit the markets… pumpkin spice this, pumpkin-flavored that. And then there’s all the Halloween stuff right…

First, a little background… There’s a guy who lives a short bike ride from our place who has an ongoing garage sale. It’s not on every day; just on weekends, and sometimes, the occasional weekday:His wares are set up on folding tables and shelves that seem to be set up all the time. There’s no indication that he takes them down or puts them away when he isn’t having a sale. It appears that he does cover the goods with tarps, shower curtains, and large trash bags when it rains. The stuff is a…

(1965) Directed by Mario Bava; Written by Ib Melchior, Alberto Bevilacqua, Callisto Cosulich, Mario Bava, Antonio Roman, Rafael J. Salvia, and Louis M. Heyward (English version); Screen Story by Ib Melchior Based on the short story “One Night of 21 Hours”: by Renato Pestriniero; Starring: Barry Sullivan, Norma Bengell, Ángel Aranda, Evi Marandi, Franco Andrei and Federico Boiso; Available on Blu-ray and DVD Rating: ***½ “Do you know what that mysterious planet in Terrore nello Spazio was made…