by Jonathan Blaustein Taryn Simon has been one of my favorite photographers for a while now. I used her seminal book, “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” as a teaching tool for years, during a lecture about photo books. For the uninitiated, Taryn Simon is an investigative artist, with a team of researchers, (and access to the Upper Class via multiple routes,) so her ability to gain entry to places inaccessible to the rest of us, and put financial and human resources towards…

I found it funny that the people who are lined up on the street to get into the restaurant are kind of forced to watch the people already in the restaurant enjoying their meals in the front window. That window is like a TV for those outside. This is Patati Patata, a tiny diner on Boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal. We were walking by after a day exploring and I liked the colourful graffiti and stickers, the people eating in the window, and the people waiting on the sidewalk. The graininess of…

This is satire … and like all great satire, it exposes the truth but it's not real. Not written by me either. I just copied it into the page. I didn’t know who wrote it but I know now. Peter Girnus (you can easily look him up).“I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.I know. I know. I think about it on the…

I’m not sure if I’ll ever have the same delighted confusion as I did in 2009 when my company, Six to Start, won SXSW’s Experimental award for We Tell Stories. The website for Penguin Books had launched the previous year, a showcase for its authors to tell stories in unusual, online-only ways, like Charles Cumming’s Google Maps-based The 21 Steps and Nicci French’s two-handed live-writing story Your Place and Mine. We were ushered out of the main auditorium to do press interviews for just a few…

Back in early June I blogged about my summer fitness challenge. The two main goals were to lose some weight—from 89.6kg to 85.3kg, the oldest measure I had on record from late 2015—and also to get back into a better shape than I was a decade ago. The weight goal was easily quantifiable; I still have the same exact scale I was using 10 years ago and so it was only a matter of jumping on it every morning and track the progress. As for losing weight, I didn’t really have much of a plan other than…

Feels like we should be knee-deep in scary season and instead we're getting jumbo-sized docs, unlikely restorations, and a couple new versions of things from when I was in college. The biggest new version looks to be Georgia Oakley's take on Sense & Sensibility with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, who give off a great sisterly vibe in the trailer although, boy, does the Ang Lee version

There is a scene in the movie Hurt Locker, where Jeremy Renner's character, Seargeant William James discovers an improvised explosive device in a Baghdad road. He locates a wire and begins tracing it to it's destination, brushing away dirt until he exposes the tip of a buried mortar shell. Sgt. James then retraces the wire in an effort to locate a power source. In doing so, he finds a connection with more wires. With dramatic effort he pulls up on the junction of the wires as an additional four…

this is a collaborative post: concepts and words by Jamie Martinez and josh martinez.Today’s post is the 300th on be the future! I published my first essay here way back in 2019, a time when everyone thought things were the worst they could ever get. My husband Jamie has supported this outlet and my work from the very beginning. They helped me celebrate be the future's 300th post the same we celebrated the 200th and 100th post before it: by co-writing a film essay!For our first essay, we wrote…

After our online shop crashed and burned this afternoon, it seems to be back in action. Let me know if you try to buy something and it explodes.

Pamiętacie tę scenę z pierwszego aktu The Big Short? Oczywiście że pamiętacie, to ta scena ze wstawką z Anthonym Bourdainem mówiącym o jedzeniu trzydniowego halibuta. Jared Vennett: You want me to really blow your mind? When the market deems a bond too risky to buy, what do you think we do with it? Take a guess.Vinnie Daniel: I don't know. You tell me.Jared Vennett: Alright, you think we just warehouse it into the books? No. We just repackage it with a bunch of other shit that didn't sell and…

My lovely wife spotted this at our Walmart Neighborhood Market in Lynnwood, Washington. That place is literally like a meat locker – it’s cold in there. Really cold. So cold I couldn’t handle being in there – no clue why – I’d think it’d be expensive to keep it so damn cold. Anyways, ramen snack mix. Let’s do this. Great Value Ramen Flavored Snack Mix – United States Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Looks to be meat free but check for yourself. To prepare, open bag, grab some of the…

Dead kids. I carried a rifle through a desert. Dismissed the other as inhuman for their barbarism, their pederasty. Bacha bazi and beaten wives. Not in my AO. Not while I still had control. And then I come home. Pedos in charge. Kids shot in classrooms. Now I sit in a generic suburban home. Armed, suspicious, and powerless. A cog in a machine generating wealth for technocrats and chomos. The news cycle continues. More dead kids. This is freedom. This is God’s plan.

Organising your notes is the thinking itself, not a chore you get out of the way first. When you decide that one note belongs next to another, or that an idea fits one topic rather than another, you have to ask yourself what it means, what it clashes with and what it is good for. Only you can make those connections, because they grow out of your context: what you already know and what you care about. That is why handing the job to AI costs more than it seems to save. The machine gives you back…

"Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good," said Socrates, according to his student Plato, "I am better off than he is -- for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know."This is one of his most famous assertions. Whether it's true or not, can be debated. Self-evidently, he knew more than nothing. My mother used to say, whenever I thought I'd caught her in an inconsistency, "All wise people change their…

A synopsis can’t do it justice, really—and so, while I’m the sort of person who usually scoffs at the Spoiler Police, consider yourself warned: I think you really do have to see Digger cold, which means you have to go through the rug-pull move around a third of the way through and stay with it. (I was warned in advance that there was a rug-pull, though not of its nature—and it was still jarring, but mostly I think in a good way? But I can well believe that a lot of the negative reviews I’ve…

A pair of Bluespine Unicornfishes cruise through clear waters off the Kohala coast.

When I was in my 20s, a mentor asked me to envision what I wanted my 30th birthday to look like. What would be the first thing I did? Where would I wake up? Who would I spend the day with, and what would we do? What I thought I wanted turned out very differently from my actual 30th birthday. My aspirations had changed. As you learn more, gather more information, and shape your values, the things you want to get out of life will change as well. It’s useful to constantly check in on your…

OverviewRemote-support appliances, VPN gateways, firewalls, email security, document collaboration, Windows, backup software, refrigeration controls, and the advertising supply chain all failed in ways that turned trusted infrastructure into an attack path this week. Most of these incidents did not begin on an ordinary user workstation. They began in systems allowed to broker credentials, inspect traffic, deliver updates, or manage physical equipment.That changes the response order. An…

The GNOME Foundation seems to be ...kind of a train wreck. And that makes me sad because it represents such a vibrant group of people who make cool shit and give it away for free. Every time I stop by the GNOME forums I come away grimacing. The community always seems to be in some state of discontent. One day it's feature requests that devolve into "feel free to see yourself out". Another day it's a former director airing dirty laundry about being unduly banned. Most recently there's been a…

A great little collection of accessible interactive components: dialogs, tabs, accordions, stuff like that. Best of all, the components come with documentation: what problem is solves; when to use it; when not to use it; where to use it, and more. adactio.com/links/22803

A classic string board appears in Coyote vs. Acme (dir. Dave Green 2026). ▲ Coyote vs. Acme (dir. Dave Green 2026) ▲ Coyote vs. Acme (dir. Dave Green 2026)

I’ve never really swum before. I know how to swim, breaststroke only, but I’ve always used that skill exclusively to not drown, never to actually work out. Last year, I went to an outdoor pool with Anna and swam a couple of laps for the first time ever. But this was my first proper “Let’s go to the Olympic-sized pool and do this as a sport!” kind of swim. Anna does this all the time, but I chose running as my go-to workout, so this was completely new to me. And exciting! And, somewhat…

Recently, Wirecutter published an article about 118 Things to Do Instead of Doomscrolling. I’ve been trying to reduce my phone time and all things subcription-based, alogrithmically-based and “social media”-based so I was curious about their suggestions. Some suggestions are exactly what I would pick but others still have an internet component. Like the suggestion to find a new recipe it says “Research a new-to-you recipe.” with a link the NYTimes Cooking section. Instead, I think it should say…

Done! What next?

I had been feeling a bit two-dimensional. Coding agents, too many attention-hungry algorithms making my feeds a bit predictable. Maybe (finally) fallout out from video games. Distractions (apps and social media) too close at hand. Indicators of doom in our daily news. I wanted to find more shape, variety, and liveliness in my life. Keep the coding, technology, writing, and reading. Add more of the city and novelty and exploring. Bring depth and pacing back to my life. Spoiler alert, I have…

Monday was Sports Day (Wikipedia). In the spirit of endurance and overcoming obstacles, I went and saw Christopher Nolan’s the Odyssey. In the process, I discovered that it’s really easy to ride the bicycle to the cinema, at least for later sessions. There’s a huge bicycle rack in front of the shopping mall that’s on the other side of the road and at that time, it’s almost completely empty. At ¥2,000 a pop, a movie ticket is still something I hesitate to buy but I can imagine seeing more films…

Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: October 2026It’s about that time … again! I’m back on the dublab airwaves this Sunday at 4pm PST with a fresh edition of Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard to help you relax and float downstream as the weekend comes to an end. This particular episode of RFAD is bittersweet, because my brother-in-internet-radio Chad Depasquale is taking a break after October; he’s got a kid on the way and will need all the spare time he can get. It’s been a blast sharing some space with…

I've been getting weird e-mails for quite some time now, and this got me thinking about the future of the internet. LLM-generated e-mails are becoming harder to spot, and some of them are landing in my inbox. We are at the point where generating such messages is cheap, and a lot of people think it is a cool idea to spam you with personalized messages that were not written by a real human. Their agents gather some info about you from the internet and make them look personalized. What happens…