Over the course of the summer Salon Records released a series of 3 limited 7s, all of which deserve a mention. The first came from Bruno Pronsato. His “Is Anybody Straight Up” is house. Angular, jerky, but jacking, and held together by a buzzing bass and the reciting of the title. Percussion is thrown in and out, increasing the funk, while the whole track is soaked in synthetic singing bowl textures. “Shelly Plays The Bells” is slower, stranger, its beats and spoken lyrics fogged by gauzy,…

Like Bohdanowicz and D’Ambrose remaking Blair Witch – a research film with cathartic psychedelic ending and good thriller music throughout. “Filmed in gorgeous 16mm” per Hard Light but I dunno, I thought the interiors looked like hell. Mubi: The object is the titular Chronovisor, a device invented by one Father Pellegrino Ernetti that could allegedly pick up signals from long-past events and visualize them, as if translating history from waveforms into a crudely visualized form of TV. But both…

Earlier thoughts Today I noticed someone else’s group banned Heliocentricity. The TaoLing and I had a phone call with Lou W. (who is named in the credits) and he pointed out that it is powerful, but also “unsubtly powerful,” (as compared to the subtle political powers that I don’t appreciate as much because I have much less experience exploiting them). My reframing of his position is that a bonus coast (or Space Force’s freighter movement) is like Military Power in Race for the Galaxy … it is…

It's American cookie week on The Great British Baking Show! But the real work of art was Mo's parrot hair dryer story. Here's my recap!

As mentioned yesterday, I got my Rickenbacker bass in the mid-90s for this one band I was joining. Back then, you could walk into a store and there’d be a couple to choose from. They weren’t really crazy desirable. I picked the best of two. It’s still probably my best-playing bass. Anyway, there were a couple good bands in my peer group, and I just couldn’t get anything going with anyone. I was actively super jealous and not really aware of why I wasn’t getting the calls. Real fussy about it…

The inside! I mentioned a few days ago I was suffering from a shoulder impingement and that I had an appointment to get the ball rolling in dealing with it. The first step in doing that was to get some x-rays, to make sure the problems I was having were not being caused by, say, a broken shoulder bone or some such. And as it turns out, my bones are perfectly fine, which I knew, by the way, trust that if I had a broken bone I would not be in the least bit stoic about it. But that is one less…

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On the morning of December 28, 1998, the day before the game Myth II: Soulblighter was supposed to hit the store shelves, the publisher received a phone call: […] one of Bungie’s overseas publishers called to say that a woman had played the game and then tried to uninstall it. The game software had uninstalled Myth II as it was supposed to--but it had also erased some of the other files on her hard drive. The first reaction was panic […] [Bungie cofounder Jason] Jones and another programmer…

Back in August, I got a Tempest Weather Station. I had been wanting a weather station for some time. Why? Well, that is hard to put into words. I guess the answer is that I really like technology, I am fascinated with self-hosting as much as possible, and I like collecting data and contributing data to something larger without having to pay a subscription. Anyway, I got this Tempest Weather Station for a great price during Prime Day. I put it up and integrated it into a Python weather program,…

Back in August, I got a Tempest Weather Station. I had been wanting a weather station for some time. Why? Well, that is hard to put into words. I guess the answer is that I really like technology, I am fascinated with self-hosting as much as possible, and I like collecting data and contributing data to something larger without having to pay a subscription. Anyway, I got this Tempest Weather Station for a great price during Prime Day. I put it up and integrated it into a Python weather program,…

Interesting afternoon after the weekly Tinderbox (AI) meetup. As regular readers may know, I have a couple of Apple IIcs here in the house. The main machine I use is the IIc Plus, because it doesn't require a power brick, it's 3 times faster than the normal IIc, and I've installed the MegaFlash internal virtual SmartPort HD mod in it. The only downside to using the IIc Plus exclusively is that I can't use 5.25" floppy disks with it, as my IIc external drive is in storage somewhere. My normal…

Every lighthouse in the world with its approximate range, period, and pattern. The visualization is amazing and beautiful, although navigation is a bit rough and I wish there were a filter for just actual lighthouses. But… just sit and watch. This would make a great screensaver.

I’ve been faced with a conundrum of late. In the past, everything I cared about had a VGA (or DVI) interface, which was easy enough to use in a modern context. Today, I have a mix of all sorts of kit that uses: Serial/RS-232 consoles Composite, with or without separate luma/chroma MDA/Hercules CGA/EGA/RGBi S-Video 13W3 with standard VGA (Sun), or sync on green (SGI) D15 VGA DVI and/or HDMI I currently have a setup that works for all of these, but they involve individual components that all…

I personally own well over 100 domains. A select few of them are actually live. The rest? Parked, forwarded, or none of the above. These domains cost me real money. For whatever reason, I've chosen to be loyal to a domain registrar that doesn't have the best prices, unless you jump through some weird hoops with their discount program. I've been thinking a lot about the cost of things, especially the things that realistically have no value in my life. Owning a bunch of domains is a flex of my…

Strands Decider: Why Not an Encoder? Expertise level: exhausted. As I admitted in my last post, I am very much not an expert model developer. What follows is likely to be, at least partially, inaccurate. I have tried to be careful and quantitative, to partially balance a lack of deep expertise. Since we launched strands-decider-2B last week, a couple of people have asked me why it’s a modified LLM and not an encoder (like BERT). Their instinct seems to be that bidirectional (i.e. each token’s…

YouTube is a website that does one thing: allow people to upload videos that they can share with others across the internet. That’s its entire shtick. Of course, that sounds like quite the oversimplification compared to the addictive abomination it is now, but it still holds true. Every now and then, I stumble upon videos with a few thousand views, shot ruggedly and barely edited. It’s someone talking to the camera about a philosophical point of view they’ve been tossing around these past few…

Acorn This fell on to the pavement in front of me the other day. Funny to think that from such a tiny, beautiful seed a mighty oak might grow. Quote of the Day ”Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I’ve seen statues of him on people’s pianos.” Viktor Borge Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Beethoven | Mandolin Sonatina in C Link Just in case you thought that Beethoven was always serious! Long Read of the Day Against historic normalization. Or why AI is not the…

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours The Drawing Room As long ago as 1180, the Drapers in the City of London formed a Guild to protect their interests as small traders and help members who fell into distress. The full title of the company was, “The Master and Wardens and Brethren and Sisters of the Guild or Fraternity of the Blessed Mary the Virgin of the Mystery of the Drapers of the City of London.” More than eight hundred years later, it still exists to administer charitable…

I've never put together my thoughts about t-shirts until this afternoon, after reading this post by EAPL. I used to be a big fan of t-shirts that represented my fandoms. If I saw one with a cassette tape, a vinyl record, or something especially geeky, I had to have it. And my entire wardrobe was black tees, with some very dark ones for variety. Things have changed a little bit in the last 5–6 years, though. I've incorporated more color into my wardrobe, including my former arch-nemesis, the…

you often see the word koku (rich) paired with the word uma (tasty) whenever people are describing a savory foodthey'll say it is "kokuuma"well, I needed eggs for our stash during the last typhoon so I "ran" to Family MartWe are so lucky because Family Mart is only 2 minutes away (180 meters/196 yards) according to the map app that I useThese eggs are rich and tastyFamily Mart's kokuuma egg

Over the past year or more Kino Lorber Studio Classics has released several sets of both French and "Brit" Noir, providing classic film viewers with interesting films which many of us in the U.S. are watching for the first time.As mentioned yesterday, French Noir III is coming soon, and since July Kino Lorber has released Volumes III and IV of Brit Noir.As I continue to enjoy digging into these films, I've now watched THE TECKMAN MYSTERY (1954), which is part of Brit Noir Collection IV.Echoing…

Simple or not, what works for others might be a distraction for you I’ve been using one big text file (OBTF, or 1-N) as a capture point and scratchpad, for more than two years now. I love it! But this week I considered going back to using separate files for my daily notes. Again. They look so cute, sitting there all in a row! And they’re baked into Obsidian, so what’s the problem? Lots of people have used them for years and swear by them. And change is as good as a holiday, right? So I set up a…

This might seem odd for someone who hosts two podcast to say, but sometimes music really is better. I didn’t realise how much anxiety I was carrying around until I put on some of my smooth, upbeat jazz instead of the latest podcast episode when walking around, or sitting on the balcony this morning. I used to maintain a playlist of albums on my original iPod for reducing stress, especially around exam times, or when my late mum was due for a scan. I’d stopped listening to much of it, because I…

Eketāhuna cottage lunch and garden

Things I saw walking in #SanFrancisco Thursday: 20th and Judah: "weird" graffito. You might think I jiggled my phone while taking this pic, but: The graffito was painted to look blurry. 20th and Irving Kal Zakzouk sidewalk chalk art: Guitarist trickster sits on an oil barrel. 19th and Irving: No Kings sticker. There was no flyer attached, but you probably already knew there were events planned for October 17th.

i sit here with my entire core sore after i went to aerial yoga on friday. upstairs that night was a weird ass scientology leader conference. that's life in the city, you can be doing crunches while hanging upside down in a silk hammock and just a stairwell away some old people are plotting some kind of sinister shit. anyway, welcome to my weekly retro! this was the second week of class at sfpc. i made, like, 25 games - we worked in the style of figure drawing sessions where we'd do a game in…

LEENALCHI “Bird” I was considering showing up to Geese’s show at Forest Hills Stadium closer to their set time, but I’m so glad I ended up getting there on time to see LEENALCHI’s set, which sorta blew my mind. I didn’t know anything about them going in, and I think even if I did, I wouldn’t have been ready to see a band merging traditional theatrical Korean music with groovy new wave rock. Basically they sound like a kooky Korean version of The B-52’s. All the songs are immediately catchy and…

lingthusiasm:Bonus 116: Everything is linguistics - The randomest pitches from our inbox | LingthusiasmBonus 116: Everything is linguistics - The randomest pitches from our inboxWe know you’re here for a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, but perhaps you’d also be interested in some tax advice? Or some bridal lingerie? Or some… lithium mining technology? Okay, probably not, but that hasn’t stopped the lovely folks whose job it is to pitch things from sending us hopeful emails trying…