How another go at keeping a plain text calendar is helping me clarify what goes where Making and using calendars is viscerally satisfying to me. I love the sense of stability and preparedness I get from seeing dates laid out in neat rows! Along with that comes the irresistible idea of writing notes to my future self. This could mean recording tasks that need to be done on or by on specific dates, but it’s much more that that. In as real a sense as I can muster, my calendar is an attempt to…

I came to realize that attempting to wrap up the “Wordcraft” section (as I call it) in Emacs is a fool’s errand. Emacs is Wordcraft. It’s what it’s all about. By the time I finish a draft, a new config or setting changes what I have. This here is an attempt to stay true to my conclusion in the last section. Abbrevs In my opinion, Abbrevs in Emacs is one of its fundamental features. It’s one of those things I’d show someone coming from other word-processing programs to show them the magic of…

Although I’m a semi-professional musician, most days, I listen to far less music than my friends. I generally work in silence, cook in silence, run in silence. When I do listen to music, usually in the evening, I give it my full attention. Everybody is different, and different kinds of music work well in different contexts, but I can’t help feeling that anyone who doesn’t sometimes listen to music the way I do is missing out. The way I do it is like this: lying on my back, wearing headphones,…

A film can survive its disappearance. Preserved in a collection, it continues to occupy physical space while its place in cultural memory contracts to an illegible point. This peculiar interval, where existence persists without recognition, gives Stefano Miraglia’s Donda Retrieved: Inquiry Into a Disappearance its intellectual urgency. The inquiry began in 2019 with a print of Ellis Donda’s Engel und Puppe held by the Collectif Jeune Cinéma in Paris, a surviving work whose author had become…

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So let me tell you how I came to write this piece: the only profile of ccru - Cybernetic Culture Research Unit - written during the group's lifetime.In the 1990s, there was this cool American magazine called Lingua Franca that coveredacademia – rising figures, trends in theory, institutional politics, intellectual fashions. It wasn’t ascholarly journal, though - it was far more readable and widely read, something you could pickup in trendy bookstores or the gift shop at an art museum.When…

11 Rescue | INDEX | 13 Flimsy Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.

This is the first year I’ve tried to grow parsnips, and it was not planned. They went were something else had failed. They grew incredibly well – at least from what we could see. Huge greenery that got so tall, it grew through the higher raised bed cover we had on this bed, because it’s … Continue reading Our 2026 Garden: we have parsnips!

"[Baudrillard's] vision of contemporary society exhibits a careening of growth and excrescence (croissance et excroissance), expanding and excreting ever more goods, services, information, messages or demands — surpassing all rational ends and boundaries in a spiral of uncontrolled growth and replication. Yet growth, acceleration, and proliferation have reached such extremes, Baudrillard suggests, that the ecstasy of excrescence (i.e., increasing numbers of goods) is accompanied by inertia. The…

lingthusiasm:Bonus 115: Behind the Zines - Interview with Leah Velleman | LingthusiasmWe’ve been hearing from people that you’re trying to get others to be as enthusiastic about linguistics as you are, but it can be sort of hard to make the podcasts you’re into leap off your phone and into people’s hands. Zines, small DIY magazines, are a cute tactile format currently undergoing a renaissance (shoutout to anyone who was around for the nineties zine wave, or an even earlier one!). So we’ve made…

Decrepit buiildings crumble in Downtown Leonard, Texas. The post Crumbly appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

My favourite piece of writing I’ve done about motor memory remains “Shift + Shift” from 2018. I have linked to it over the years, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, you might find it interesting. Just this week, I have had another similar moment, and amazing in a slightly new way. How many of you tap ⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3 to switch between tabs? This convention has been there for as long as I remember, and so has been my fingers’s embrace of it. The system works in Chrome and Safari, in the Terminal…

kept his shoes and socks on

Not all asteroids in the solar system reside in the asteroid belt. The main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter does holds most of our solar system’s asteroids, at least several million, but there are many other smaller groups of asteroids. Almost every gravitationally stable region of the Solar System has at least one known object orbiting there – all of them, except one. For example, there are the thousands of known “Near-Earth Asteroids” that orbit, as you might expect, near Earth. Then…

Underlined text has always been a bit of an issue in HTML and CSS. For example: The colour of the underline could only be inherited from the text. The CSS specification doesn’t define an underline thickness, leaving it to vendors to decide how to derive it. The end result was some browsers rendering thicker underlines than others, especially at larger font sizes. The workaround for decades was to eschew (gesundheit) underlines entirely, and use a border as a pseudo underline: a { border-bottom:…

This post is my entry for October’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Marisabel. The infinity concept of a blank page is an interesting one to explore. I’ve heard it in many flavors, but the assertion that a blank page is either terrifying or liberating to a writer feels like a layered point of discussion to the first point. In my case, the combination of these lead to just about every psychological outcome imaginable. The infinite expanse of a blank page is more rooted in the digital realm of…

Lord, but I’m tired of recommendation engines. Tired in my bones. I watched a video of a musician I listened to obsessively in high school, but not much since then. He was playing an old favorite song in a massive stadium, presumably part of some concert recording. After I finished the video, my feed was overtaken by other songs of his. Also stadium performances from other bands I didn’t care about. Also game day highlights from professional American football teams, presumably because stadium.…

Recently, James Hoffmann conducted a coffee fermentation project, along similar lines to his previous decaf project. Since this project was based entirely around caffeinated coffee, and I am quite caffeine-sensitive, I opted to just do this as a risky “drink one cup every few days” thing rather than a formal cupping.What I found is that while there were some slight differences between the coffee varieties, and I’d probably be able to tell the difference between them in a side-by-side cupping,…

It was rainy today so we took the time to put up Halloween decorations. Selfie a day for a year, day 47: Oct 11, 2026 edition.

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant […]

Kate Bollinger “Dreams Don’t Come True” “Dreams Don’t Come True” starts off with a strong late period Beatles vibe with that particular loose-yet-refined feel, but once her vocals kick in the music gets faster and more manic, as though someone accidentally pushed it from 33 1/3 to 45 on the turntable. The double time verses express a lot of desire and anxiety – Bollinger wants affection, but is overwhelmed by ordinary anxieties and prosaic obstacles. When the song snaps back into a more mellow…

Orginal post: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Thomas Abial Cram, son of James and Louisa (Bailey) Cram, was probably born in Trenton, Washington County, Wisconsin1 30 August 1849 and died probably in Burt County, Nebraska 24 February 1904.2 He married at his parent's home in Cuming City, Washington County, Nebraska 27 February 1870, Emma Alberta (Rice) Bailey, adopted daughter of Thomas B. and Ruth Waterman (Fletcher) Bailey.3,4,5 She was born in Washington County, Wisconsin 27 October 1849 and died…

As I have mentioned here a few times, I don’t play a lot of games these days. The last game I completed was Skyrim. I didn’t write a post about that, but at least I mentioned here I was playing it. Actually, can you really complete Skyrim? So, let me clarify: I completed the main quest and some side quests, and after a bit over 63 hours playing the game, I’m ready to move on. Since then I’ve tried Divinity: Original Sin, me alone and in co-op with one of my sons, but it didn’t stick. The game…

It's hard talking to people who don't have agoraphobia sometimes because they just assume existing in public and going places is all fun and awesome and freeing, while I just took a 4-day trip and I feel like I'm still recovering. I feel sick thinking about having to help plan someone's trip or review any of my past ones. There's a blocker in my head — perhaps related to how I don't store location data (because the outside is inherently dangerous?) — when thinking about my past trips,…

Occasionally, fall in Chicago delivers some beautiful days where the temps feel like mild summer and the nights get cozy and chilly. While it was colder out in Rockford, we returned yesterday to mild lakeside breezes, which meant people still walking about and enjoying the things that will be ending soon, like beach hanging and riverwalk dining. The patio outside along the water was packed at karaoke last night, where I tagged along after we got back. While the bar cleared out after a ball…

When I got up early one morning last week to listen for a Great horned owl at a nature area (yes, I heard it!), I enjoyed a gorgeous autumn sunrise with golden colors lighting up the blue sky. And had the added bonus of seeing the waning crescent moon. I learned the waning crescent moon is the last stage of the lunar month. The waning crescent moon rises after midnight and is visible during the day until it sets in the afternoon. It was a lovely moment of peacefulness and beautiful colors…

Alright, home from the urgent care. They said it still seems like the same issue, but they wouldn't have recommended the antibiotic the first urgent care gave me, so I'm on something stronger now. They also recommended an otc med to help with the pain and discomfort. We got the stuff from the pharmacy, got some food, and I've got my first doses in me. They also gave me a doctor's note in case I need it, which is nice. Depending on the relief I get from the otc med I'll go or not. For now I'm…

Happiness is a Day filled with vows and flowers You, my sunlit life This is for Rebecca at Fake Flamenco!

I started the week off with D&D at Luke’s which was fun. The start of a new campaign where I get to be a player 🎉 a reasonable four hour session which we’ll be doing weekly, I’m excited for tomorrow! On the subject of D&D I was really pleased with the session I ran on Wednesday for my FT group. A nice little combat, lots of new world lore, and a little cliff-hanger. Lovely stuff. I’m really enjoying making pen-and-paper battle maps at the moment. On Tuesday I left work a little early on short…