’Twas This

I’m not saying they’re right or wrong, because I don’t know anything that’s going to happen, but the unshakeable confidence of people looking ahead to the AI bubble popping any day now, bringing suffering and woe to all their enemies and righteous joy to…

Over at Coyote Yipps, Lou writes to Janet about a guard dog of his acquaintance that doesn’t hesitate to chase or even kill coyotes that try to raid the livestock he protects.

The legendary Comedy Bang Bang has been rolling a lot of reruns on its podcast feed lately, styled as “Bonus Bang” episodes with new, retrospective introductions by host Scott Aukerman.

I did manage to catch the Morgan Library’s fantastic exhibit of Tarot card history and artwork right before it closed, last week.

A shift in my personal political thinking, of late: Rather than try to directly change the minds of culturally entrenched right-wing voters, it may be a wiser expenditure of energy and attention to weary their spirit so that they don’t bother voting at al…

Since discovering it last week I have caught up with Branson Reese’s Swan Boy webcomic, chomping through eight years of daily strips.

When I was a very young reader of Mad magazine I would giggle in horror at its frequent jokes about dog poop all over the sidewalks of New York City, and the sometimes insurmountable challenge of avoiding it as a pedestrian.

Raymond Zhong of the New York Times reports that as Alpine ice vanishes faster than any other place on the planet, hurried away by climate change, at least it’s revealing a trove of fascinating, millenia-old human artifacts, including fragments of skis and

Swan Boy is a webcomic that Branson Reese has been drawing since 2018, and I like it very much.

Today I turned ten Cobalt-60 half-lives old, according to the Mathaversaries calendar I subscribed to quite a while ago.

While I’ve never owned a dedicated e-reader, Nena Farrell’s Wired preview of the Boox Picco—$100 and apparently no larger than a playing card—piques my interest.

In When did Google get so f-ing weird?

Was just reading the Wikipedia article about Funky Winkerbean, which the cartoonist wrapped up a few years ago, after a 50-year run.

I recently dropped into a musical-instrument shop in downtown Bangor, Maine while visiting family.

Publicly accessible LLM-based chatbots receive a ceaseless stream of requests from around the world for custom pornography, which in itself shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The nor’easter currently delaying my flight back home disgorged a chunk of 1884 shipwreck onto a Nantucket beach.

Jason Parham writes for Wired about how people whose identities are “borrowed” for targeted phishing scams often hear from old friends or acquaintances they haven’t heard from in years, checking in to make sure that the email is legitimate.

A brief exchange about Kinky Tail, a Californian coyote seen by local wildlife observers to have birthed and raised nine pups all by herself earlier this year, after the death of her mate and oldest child to the many threats all around them—wolves, probab…

Stacks by Jeff Halter is a modern macOS application for loading and playing ancient and wonderful Hypercard stacks.

In 1986, Bandai produced a dexterity-based board game adaptation of Super Mario Bros.

Explore (and export) all 1,680 low-polygon models from Katamari Damacy, including the sound effects that some of them make when you roll them up.

Australia discovered than an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to a government-run health-statistics website earlier this year.

Adam of Rubbercat.net is bummed that Mario Kart Tour is ending in a few days.

Bill shared this after someone else mentioned Sydney Greenstreet:

Some days—rarer since I left full-time work, but some days—I feel acute, situational depression.

Mimi Smartypants discovers this mid-century cartoon on a coaster in an antique store.

West 79th street, between Amsterdam and Broadway, 8:15 PM, July 11.

After slowly and carefully reading “Starting to understand epsilon-zero” by Mark Dominus, I definitely understand the fundamentals of set theory and ordinal numbers better than I did.

At least half of my enjoyment of Gullet of the Rust Demon, a one-page, system-agnostic tabletop RPG adventure by Dan D., comes from the “establishing shot” of the dungeon exterior at the top of the sheet.

My friend and fellow New Yorker Francisco González launched a Buttondown-based newsletter last year to announce the release of Rosewater, the latest in his long-and-growing oeuvre of independently produced point-and-click adventure games.

Andrew Nesbitt is a software engineer and package-management blogger who also writes excellent satire in the form of standardized industry documents, such as change logs and incident reports.

The Software Freedom Conservancy has published Recommendations When Using LLM-backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions.

I very much enjoy A Most Amusing Bot, a Mastodon bot by Andy Lundell which regularly posts scanned newsprint ads of novelty gadgets from the 19th and 20th centuries.