Here’s the latest edition of my newsletter for early-stage growth leaders, Leading Thinker, which I also shared at LinkedIn: TL;DR: When you start a new blog or publication, your metrics will disappoint you. That disappointment leads to doubt, and often kills a content practice before it has a proper chance to make an impact. A more useful signal in the first few months is author satisfaction, and it’s something you can actually pay attention to. I write about content strategy, and I’ve helped…
For pride month, straight critic Ben Miller takes a look back at a gay film he otherwise would have never seen Watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle during pride month, I caught myself being drawn into the idea of what pride means. The outward appearance of the gay community has constantly been perceived as unabashed confidence with "we're here and we're queer!" Living out and proud might be the goal, but it certainly wasn't something that happened for most gay people overnight. Before…
What pre-1985 science fiction adventures have you started this summer? Any great reads? Disappointing ones? Intriguing discoveries? Here’s the April installment of this column. In a conversation on Blueksy (my primary social media after the fall of Twitter/X), someone asked for my history of science fiction recommendations including a few general surveys. I scoured my shelves and came up with an all-too-large pile (with some notable volumes I wanted to include but could not find) of favorite…
A roundup of interesting links I have enjoyed recently. An 8-page, printable zine maker: dirtylittlezine.com A 3D tour of the Criterion Closet: the-criterion-closet.vercel.app Global freedom and democracy indices: amos.design/the-civic-atlas Simple, self-contained wikis: feather.wiki A searchable database of David Attenborough’s work: attenborough-100.vercel.app Actions to combat the empire of AI: airesistlist.org An encyclopedia of women philosophers: ecc.historyofwomenphilosophers.org An…
After seeing this in an email from Meta today:"The setting to disconnect your off-Meta activity is going away."... I was reminded that I should finally delete my Facebook and Instagram accounts, so I guess that setting isn't the only thing going away.I'm posting this because I want a public record of it. I'm sorry if it comes off as performative. I'm also sorry that it took me this long.
People asked how I build projects in Lovable or with any other vibe-coding tools. I share my approach here.Vibe-coding is the build stage in my workflow. More thinking before I open a coding agent helps me reach a minimum lovable product (MLP) faster.I prepare the work in a structured way before I write the first build prompt. The next section explains the three inputs I use.I mention Lovable because it is the most approachable option for non-technical users. I use the same approach with other…
I've been collecting physical media for over 5 years at this point. It started as exclusively games, then became music, and then movies. However, my love of collecting has kinda dwindled or has made me outright anxious, which means I'm doing something wrong. I got to a point where I was kinda collecting whatever, albums that I wanted to listen to, but after listening didn't really care for. Owning games that were hot collector items, but ones I'm not super passionate about. Buying games that…
Who are you?Hello there! I am Shadra Strickland, author/illustrator and Chair of Illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art.What do you write?I write picture books and poetry for now.Though I’ve been illustrating books since 2009, my writing didn’t take off until years later. My mother was an English teacher, so reading and writing were a part of my childhood daily life.The stories that I have published are big, loud rallying calls to play and center around joy and community. Most…
A classic full-wall variant appears in Chapter 51 (dir. Tyler Shields, 2025).
There’s a bunch of travel reports from folks visiting favorite shops around the world, mid-year reflections and lots of creative ideas this week. I think my interest in more collage-y, art journaling projects is that these can be created with things I already have — reuse and repurpose — in a time that making something beauitful on a budget is a great way to spend time. Pens: Fill Me In! A Guide To Fountain Pen Filling Mechanisms (Part One) (via Pen Boutique Blog) Jinhao 20 (via Crónicas…
In Saskatchewan, there’s a sandwich with many names–or at least many variants of the same name. Some menus in the area spell it Frajolaki, as I have; others spell it Frazolaki. Still other restaurants spell the name Fratzolaki, a spelling that seems to be more common in Regina than in Saskatoon. It might also be called a “Fragolaki” (I’m looking at you, Flamingo Restaurant in Melville, SK) or according to at least one report, a “Fraggle Rocky.” “Fratzolaki” may be the closest to being…
In today's video I speculate about the future of AI
I want to tell you about the hum. Not a literal hum. I’m not talking about tinnitus or the fridge or the sound my old PC made before it died. I mean the background noise that ran underneath my entire life from at least high school onward — this low, constant, just-out-of-earshot signal that said your brain does not work good. Not “you’re stupid.” I knew I wasn’t stupid. The hum was sneakier than that. It said: the thing that is easy for everyone else is, for some reason, a knife fight for you,…
The eight book of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey. Spoilers ahead. I’ve recently realized that I kind of spend too much time summarizing things without spoilers, but I’ll just share the summary from the website and then share my thoughts about stuff, I guess? By now, eight books later, you are not, or you should not, be reading this review unless you are already with me, or you read the book and want my thoughts, so yeah, whatever. Tiamat’s Wrath finds the crew of the Rocinante fighting an…
Francisco Trujillo at The Conversation: We have developed what we call an ultrasonic espresso: a room-temperature brewing process that uses high-frequency sound waves to extract the flavour, oils, aroma and caffeine from coffee grounds. The result is an espresso-strength coffee made in under three minutes, but needing far less energy than the conventional method. I can’t wait for James Hoffman’s take on this. —Thanks for keeping RSS going! I’d love to hear your thoughts. Send me an e-mail to…
Welcome to “how hot is it outside right now?” The only game show where everyone loses and nobody’s happy.
Meta Has Created a Prediction Markets App - The New York Times The app would be independent of Meta’s other social media offerings, although sources told the paper that those social sites could direct users to engagement with the app. Oh sure, why not. I suppose they’ve already ruled out selling vapes or meth, or at least haven’t added those business units to their annual filings yet. I truly wonder if Meta’s Downfall as a Service umbrella has ever rejected an idea as being too detrimental to…
It’s nice that Baby Yoda and Mando got their own movie, but I think it’s one I’ll leave to the small screen. It would be awesome if things could go the other way — from the small screen to the big. Imagine seeing Andor on the big screen! Two or three episodes at a time over a few weeks. The final three episodes are just so amazing and moving. Watching them with an audience on the same wavelength would be wonderful.
The Mock Orange next to the house is in full bloom and the bees have found it, though not in the numbers they used to. In the past, I would hear the bees before seeing them. Still, it’s always a pleasure to watch them industriously flitting from flower to flower, collecting pollen and nectar. Posted for Terri’s Flower Hour. See more responses here.
SML-XL - Big Ears, The Old Greyhound Station, Knoxville, Tennessee, March 28, 2026As I think I’ve mentioned, Aquarium Drunkard is celebrating its 21st anniversary this year. If there’s a music/culture website that deserves to legally buy a drink, it’s AD. At this late date, it’s hard to remember what the internet landscape was really like back in 2005 when founder Justin Gage hit “post” for the first time — those were different times! But while most other similarly styled online destinations…
There's a common saying that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's apathy. It holds true in every domain. Hating someone is a display of emotion. Emotional people aren't reliable in crunch situations. They aren't necessarily bad. They simply can't be trusted to hold the fort when the time comes. They will most likely offer you a justification for why their emotions mattered. This is why hatred belongs in the same bucket as love. Both are emotional responses. Except hatred is worse. It consumes…
Scammers used Mike Huckabee’s name and image to hawk CBD products in Facebook ads. I’m not in the ad’s target audience, so it blows my mind that anyone would buy anything because Huckabee touted it (or was falsely claimed to). The question in this case is whether Facebook is liable for the scammy ads. The lower court dismissed the case due to the scienter requirements of Arkansas’ publicity rights statute. At the same time, the lower court rejected Section 230 due to the atrocious Anderson v.…
We drink a LOT of tea in Turkey. Happy? Let’s drink tea. Sad? Drink tea. Tired? Tea. Relaxed? TEA. I also enjoy brewing tea in the evenings, especially when we have guests. But I was very frustrated with the inconsistency of my tea brewing. One day I decided to apply what I’d learned from brewing coffee to brewing tea. This is for brewing Turkish-style black tea. I’ve never applied it to other types of tea like rooibos or oolong. What you need to brew Turkish black tea with my method: Your…
Time now to shape the neck!Also, I have a brief chat about the tools needed for this process. After running through the shaping process, I start the clean-up in preparation for setting-up the mandolin, “in the white.” Cheers Gary
Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “One Creature Devouring Another” by Alicia Lim. Alicia is an artist, writer, and labor organizer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared in KHÔRA. She is currently obsessed with horseshoe crabs and bog bodies, and has recently become completely enamored with ceramics. You can find her artwork at alicialim.com. Boar With Wolf by Alicia LimI. Night falls, spreads. A woman with dark…
TALKIN SHIT (Fun sidenote, I learned that this little fucker is called the "Gray Catbird" and I love it so much) I-guess-this-is-just-gonna-be-a-format-I-use-from-now-on photography
Scans from a 1776 atlas of the Americas, published in London as the American revolution was getting under way, have been posted by JSTOR. The story from JSTOR Daily: In the summer of 1775, shortly… More
WebKit, to quote its website, “is the web browser engine used by Safari, Mail, App Store, and many other apps on macOS, iOS, and Linux.” Obviously, Safari uses WebKit to display web pages, but did you know that Mail app uses WebKit to display email messages? This is true not just for HTML emails but also for plain text format emails. There are a couple of ways to reveal the presence of WebKit in Mail, both of which may be bugs. If you disable “Auto-play animated images” in the Accessibility…
Nolan Royalty (@eieio.games), writing without the assistance of generative AI, in a post entitled "Legibility of Effort": What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work. First of all I cannot emphasize enough how much I appreciate that this was a blog post and not a tweet. The dense hypertextual writing in itself suggests some greater degree of effort. But as Nolan points out, even…
