It's a piece of plastic that has a ribbon of black protruding out of the slit in the bottom, akin to a sound wave. It allows for anything but the sound it mimics, should one put it into the player and press that clunky play button. Instead, a pencil is rammed into one of the twin holes, winding, winding, until everything is right and tight again. This is technology. This is the mix tape. It's a silvery thing with a murky midriff, alcohol-swabbed clean. It's a bootlegger's best friend, the…

It is now 9:30pm. I worked all day, got home around 3pm and started working on my annotated bibliography for my current class in pursuit of my master's degree. Five grueling hours of identifying potential sources for my thesis, formatting those sources correctly, and then having to come up with master's level annotations for each source that define the source's thesis and then how it supports my thesis. I got 3 out of 16 of those done. My brain is goo, and I honestly cannot believe I am sitting…

Saturday was a blast at House of TARG. We missed DJ Shanker, but Gerard Van Herk, and The Reverb Syndicate were a good time. The Gruesomes were superb. Neither of us knew anything about them going in, aside from a quick listen on Apple Music before buying the tickets. They sounded like a band that would be great live, and they didn’t disappoint. There was even a harmonica. I love a harmonica. I also love an interesting crowd, and this one didn’t disappoint. A real variety of characters and…

Claude and I did a session in WT Builder focused on the generated audio for Weekly Thing issues. This was one of the goals i had with the new authoring app. Audio pauses will now fall in natural breaks in the flow. Each functional block of text is generated on its own. Better section announcements and handoffs. Blockquotes “quote” and “end quote” again. Lists are spoken better. I’m now embedding images from the issue into the metadata. If your podcast player supports that you will see them as…

Feast of the HuntFollowing the death of Ser Wess of Caragon, a great hunt ensued to slay the griffon which took his precious life. The hunters returned with the griffon's head and young in tow, and a feast was held in celebration. During the feast, a visiting warrior poet, Jan [Pronounced Yan] the Joyful sang and made merry, so merry that when he awoke from his drinking and singing, he found himself in the back of a cart, pulled by the donkey of two treasure hunters. Ill-fated Thieves"We'll use…

Robert Gober, Plywood, 1987, 94 3/4 x 47 x 5/8 in., verso, via Christie’s I saw this Robert Gober Plywood at Boesky in 1998, and it blew my Gober sink- and crib- and leg-addled mind. Now it’s for sale. Gober was already fluent in sinks and beds by 1987 and was seeking to try to make, he said, an abstract sculpture. “What I ended up making is an extremely realistic sculpture of a more or less abstract object.” The faces are indeed realistic, the kind of rough veneer used to manufacture plywood.…

You've probably already noticed the new book cover with a familiar title just a few inches to the right of what you’re reading now. What’s the story? Glad you asked.When Television Brought Us Together was first published in 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic. Some writers have reported that their book sales increased during a time when people were forced to stay inside and away from others. I was not one of those writers. Sales were slow, and with the passage of time I can see the blame…

I remade the Future Horizon Design logo so the shell now has an inhabitant - a hermit crab.

...to mark the day of infamy ...to finish what has been in suspended animation ...to gather the strands of loosening threads ...to comprehend the rate of ML development ...to wakefully finish what was begun in dream

I believe that art only becomes art when it’s exposed to oxygen, by which I mean, when other people interact with it, enjoy it, comment on it, purchase it, or feature it. So it was an honour to be featured in the most recent Art of Travel book, France: In the Footsteps of the Great Artists. Chuffed!

We’ve given in to using LLMs for writing at work. From emails and Slack comments to full-on documentation, everything is AI-generated. However, I’ve realized it only ever saves me time when I’m being lazy. That is, it’s great at converting meetings into transcripts, summarizing those transcripts into action items, and keeping information accessible. But it’s pretty bad because the result is ridden with invisible errors. But what counts as an error if you trust the LLM and never meticulously…

hiii vibe: nathan and i are sitting at the hotel front patio blogging!! we ate an early 4 pm dinner and nick is walking to a bar to get a beer while we blog/read umm i forgot what happened this week!!! work was awful but my shift won another challenge so we got food. last month we got bbq, this month we got pastas. very yummy!! i love free food!! nick and i went out to eat and got a flat tire which is a very nick and mariah situation we have gotten ourselves into many times. like maybe within a…

Fixed maps in Tanzawa with this PR. Mostly done by OpenCode with local running gpt-oss while I was out playing DragonBall Divers with Leo. Machines doing the grunt work, letting me focus on the important things. Gotta love it.Comment by email

A lunch outing to Brooklyn, Sydney. To be honest I had never heard of this place before, but it wins the distinction of being the "northernmost suburb of Sydney". First up were some welcome swallows perched under the roofs of some shops. And then this white-faced heron. I had never seen these guys in my life before! But apparently common on the waterways in Sydney if you head up north. I couldn't stop at 4, so here's one more for good measure. If we're comparing herons, I'll have to say the…

Selfie a day for a year, day 33: Sep 21, 2026 edition. It’s a Monday. Relaxing on the couch watching a show with my son.

What a horrible cliffhanger from Bravo to leave Below Deck Med season 16 on, especially knowing what we know now about the violence Nathan was convicted of committing.

The weather was comfy this week, not a lot of rain, but the chill is starting to be noticeable. I still haven’t worn anything on top of my regular t-shirts though. These weeknotes will cover September 15 to 21, 2026. Honestly, the stars stars aligned, and I pretty much wrote about every interesting thing happening, or any thoughts that sparked during the week on separate blogposts! Of course, most of the real life events don’t get posts, and those are mentioned here, plus a link here and there.…

A walk fixes almost anything. To slow down my ruminating thoughts, I put on my green Nike shoes and sport clothes, and went to the closest park for my daily walk. But to avoid more overthinking, I added a twist. I choose to pay close attention to the sounds around me. The passing motorcycles, cars honking, kids screaming while playing soccer, some teenagers rehearsing a dance, a priest giving a sermon, or simply my footsteps on the pavement. From time to time, I asked myself “Are you…

It's time for the Folsom Street Fair and we've got quite a lineup! First a bit of an outlier, on Friday the Aniclover folks are bringing some kind of anime maid thing, your guess is as good as mine. But this one is phone-free, which I can certainly get behind. (BTW, if, in your dotage, you ever find yourself thinking that there's no new kink out in the world that can surprise you, check out an anime party. They have such specificity...) Then we do the Full Folsom: Brüt, Bare Chest (sold out!),…

Lore: Buttercup Festival 3-399Originals! Prints! Shirts!Latest on PatreonSept 19th: Submissionland

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 12th June 2026 Rising originally from the ashes of Asphyx, and then continuing in between Asphyx reunions etc in the past few years, Dutch black/doom/death metallers Soulburn are a fascinating proposition. Taking fiery black metal, imperious doom and classic death metal and blending them altogether into a cohesive and balanced whole feels like a challenge that I’d only trust to the longest of long term scene veterans. Luckily, ‘Quantifying Cosmic Doom’ is…

Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Worksby Helen PearsonGenres: Non-fiction, Science Pages: 368 Rating: Synopsis: The remarkable story of the global movement championing the idea that evidence, not opinions, should guide our decisions. Today, more and more people around the globe are using scientific evidence to figure out what works—in health, government and business as well as conservation, schools and parenting. This wasn’t always the case. This book tells the story of the…

Two new additions to my back garden in anticipation of a scorching summer this year. I thought last summer was going to be killer, but I was wrong…it was warm, and sometimes hot, but remained manageable and without the environmental impacts I had (glass-half-emptily) expected. This year is forecast to be different. The developing (super) El Niño is making meteorologists uneasy, with predictions of severe storms and extremely unsettled weather patterns. In some sort of micro-prepping response,…

Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Microsoft Edge Allow Microsoft Edge to pre-launch at Windows startup, ...: Disabled Allow Microsoft Edge to start and load the Start and ...: Disabled Keep favorites in sync between Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge: Disabled Local Computer Policy -> User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System Don't run specified Windows applications: Enabled List of disallowed applications:…

Perfume PosseThe Lost Lutens — El Attarine Hey, guess what?! The three-week plumbing job that could have been done in two days is finished, woohoo! Slowly migrating my possessions back into my bedroom and closet. This place really needs some tidying up since Winter is Coming …… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseThe Lost Lutens — El Attarine

More Iain and Hacker to start today’s recording. Then it’s Dinosapien – The Gate Keeper. Lauren and Kit watch her father’s DVD. He says that the dinosaurs are coming through portals. “The location of these portals has long been known by a select group of Native American medicine men known as the gatekeepers.” “It’s just like we thought. These portals are like doorways from the dino world into our world.” “Maybe it’s the way Enel can find his parents.” “And for me to find out what really…

Teo Blake Beauchamp is a writer, professor, and musician from Los Angeles, CA. He earned his MFA in Sonic Arts from Brooklyn College in 2020. Beauchamp serves as Associate Program Director of Sound Thinking NYC, teaches courses at Brooklyn College, Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, and Montclair State, and contributes to various music publications. Here, he talks to the legendary musician and spiritual teacher, Laraaji, about his new album “Openness”. On a balmy spring day in 2025, producer…

(Continued from yesterday’s post) Adam Smith’s next direct experience with doctors would occur in October 1766 in Paris. Duke Henry’s younger brother, Hew Campbell Scott (pictured below), contracted some kind of illness in the City of Light. Although Hew would obtain the best medical care he could have possibly received in 18th-century Paris, the intellectual and cultural epicenter of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, his sickness so severe that it would take his life in a matter of days.…

Set in 1978 Denver, this is one of those movies where the bulk of the effort was put not into scares or the story making sense, but in lovingly recreating 1978 Denver. Young “Albert” Finney is a bullied baseballer schoolkid with a typically drunk/abusive dad (Jeremy Davies of Spanking the Monkey), when all the kids in town start getting abducted by Ethan Hawke, who then grabs Finney. Now the kid has to escape from the basement before he gets murdered. Best part of the movie is Grabber’s mask,…

For its size, I would classify Brute Fort as maximalist. Which perhaps sounds contradictory, given it’s a microgame that runs on only 18 cards and comes in a plastic cassette case. But each of those details unfurls into something more. The cassette case is double-wide, necessary for holding the synth soundtrack alongside the cards. And the included dice, concealed under the tuckbox, can be used to generate the rooms of a haunted fort in a TTRPG. What’s more, the microgame within is hand-drawn…