nick

Notes for August 31, 2026

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:17:56 -0400

Everyone could use a little optimism these days. This isn't anything crazy, but I thought it was cute and maybe even a little inspirational. Bob Wertz blogs about switching the fish logo on his blog from an anxious expression to one with an optimistic smirk:

This year, I surprised myself I chose the “optimist.” Don’t get me wrong, the world is still chaotic and disappointing in many ways. I could have chosen the “anxious” logo, or honestly, one of several “angry” logos. But in my personal life, the kids are settling into their new realities and my new job is going well. I’m making progress on my dissertation and I can see the end of my graduate studies. I see at least some signs of progress that make me believe that we’ll get through the global chaos and political bullshit. So I’m choosing to be optimistic about the semester. We’ll see how long I stick with this version.

As shitty as everything is in the world right now, life goes on. One day we might even make it out the other side.

See the income a family needs to live comfortably in every U.S. state

Annnd here's a little pessimism to even things out: in my home state of Ohio, your household income needs to be at least $226k to live "comfortably." We're nowhere close to that at my place but we do alright... aside from the mountain of constantly growing credit card debt that keeps us both up at night. The state with the highest cost of living was Massachusetts at $329,555 and the lowest was Mississippi at $188,000.

Be Afraid! The Silent Role of Fear in Decision Making

Negative emotions sell products:

Fear is a huge factor in our decision making. The fears we’ve listed here are only a few broad ones. There are other strong emotions that prompt users to make decisions. For instance, dating apps capitalize on loneliness, while ride-sharing apps prey on our desire to be independent and mobile.

When I used to sell cars, I remember this big boisterous sumbitch from Texas who founded some scammy company to keep customers coming back to the dealership for service, and ultimately, to trade up to a new car every couple of years.

He had this word track he called "action, good feeling, PAIN."

One example he used was something along the lines of this:

"We have this great Platinum service package I think you'll really like. You said you were taking the new 4runner on your trip to Hilton Head this summer, right? Man that sounds like fun; hanging out at the beach all day, having a few cocktails, living the easy life. Boy, I'd hate to see you stranded on the highway down there in the middle of that summer heat. Imagine having to pay $8000 out of pocket for a new transmission at some hole-in-the-wall mechanic just to get you limping home. That'd really throw a wrench into things wouldn't it? Part of that Platinum package includes a FREE pre-vacation checkup! So just sign on the line here and we'll get you through financing -- it'll only add a few bucks a month to your payments, and you'll get some peace of mind"

I know the linked article is meant to be a lesson in marketing, but companies who have to scare you into buying their product probably don't have a very good product. And if they do, what a fucking shame it is thinking they have to manipulate you into spending money with them.

MapQuest Tops App Store Charts After Refusing 'Lake America' Change

"We took the same approach we did with the Gulf of Mexico: be part of the conversation, and give people an app that keeps the names they're familiar with," said MapQuest general manager Doug Berger, in a press release. "Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right, by downloading our app."

Fear sells, but so does having a spine and not caving to every whim of a delusional dictator. I didn't even know Mapquest was still a thing, but it looks like a real viable alternative to Google Maps even in the year of our lord 2026. I never used Google Maps; Apple's version has been good enough for me over the years. But if I did, I would absolutely be giving Mapquest a try right now.

Update: god damn it Apple. As soon as they get a new ceo they go and pull this shit. Hope this isn't a sign of things to come 😒

How Solitaire Became the Blueprint for Casual PC Gaming - Old School Gamer Magazine

Technology has transformed where and how games are played, but the old lessons remain useful. Start quickly. Let the player understand the goal. Make actions readable. Create a session that feels complete even when it is short. Respect the player who wants only one round as much as the player who returns for ten. Solitaire did not invent every one of these ideas, yet it placed them together in front of an enormous audience. Its legacy is larger than nostalgia. It helped prove that a game could be simple to enter, satisfying to master and perfectly at home on a computer screen.

Twitter.now is still down at the time of writing this. I keep checking every once in a while to see if anything has changed, but the landing page is still just that graphic of an AI bird with a slingshot on top of a dead AI whale saying, "we're already learning the hard way..."

I'm genuinely curious to see if they'll be able to pull off a re-launch with working moderation. At least to the point where it's usable. Not holding my breath though.

To be fair, it's only been three days, so maybe we'll see some kind of update in the near future.

Notes for August 30, 2026

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:45:53 -0400

Cameron Banga's Weblog. · Working with the Iconfactory

I've been lucky enough to work on iPhone apps since 2009, starting a small iOS application development shop right after college. Throughout my time working to build a small studio, the work of the Iconfactory was always something to aspire to. Along with companies like Panic and The Omni Group, they have helped define what makes the Apple ecosystem so special.

Nice post from Cameron Banga on working with the IconFactory to get a sick new icon for his Bluesky client, Skyscraper.

The IconFactory is a hell of a team. They've been around since the 90s and you've probably seen their work whether you realize it or not — they've done everything from the Windows XP icons to a lot of indie apps, and even made quite a few of their own apps like Linea Sketch, Tapestry, Tot, and a ton of others.

I bought a pixel art portrait from them a year or two ago and I was super happy with it — and it looks like they're still offering them on their website to this day.

So many people are turning to AI slop for their app and icon design these days because it's so cheap and easy, but there's no comparing that trash to human-made art.

ⓘ This is not a paid promotion; I just really like the IconFactory, and smaller (human) teams like them are struggling in the age of AI-everything. If you can afford it, when it comes to hand-made vs something a bucket of microchips can shit out, always go team human.

It's Weird that Zoomers are Nostalgic for Beta Minecraft

One can debate the merits of Beta Minecraft. But, it is unlikely that our elderly zoomer ever experienced it. If he did, it was long after the vanished springtime of his life. In general, youthful zoomers did not grow up with personal computers. If we had one, it was probably a locked down school Chromebook. Far more people played Minecraft on consoles or on Pocket Edition. And these are very different games from Beta.

I love this! It makes a lot of sense to me, honestly. As an aging millennial, most of the retro games I've fallen in love with over the years are things that were never on my radar as a kid. We had a NES console with a pretty good selection of games in the 90s, and while Super Mario Bros 1-3 still hold a nostalgic place in my heart, my favorites today are the ones I never had. Castlevania, Bonk's Adventure, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, isometric Sega Genesis games like Light Crusader and Landstalker, and other classics I just never played until adulthood like Secret of Mana and Fire Emblem. The first time I ever saw Castlevania: Rondo of Blood was on the PSP and I wasn't that impressed. Then, years later, I played the original version front to back on PCEngine CD and it instantly became one of my all time faves. There's this raw charm and character you get with older games. Just because the shiny new one looks more polished and adds a bunch of extra stuff, it's not automatically better, you know?

The beta years were definitely the golden age for Minecraft, full stop. It was simpler and more limited in the way of blocks, so you had to get a little more creative, but that also means it wasn't overwhelming like it can get these days. It still ran like shit if you didn't have a higher spec PC, but it was a walk in the park compared to how resource intensive the later versions have become. I could at least play it on my old plastic MacBook with all the graphics settings cranked down back in the day. And best of all, it wasn't owned by a megacorporation yet. It was just a solid indie game that came out when I was a teenager — and that's some true nostalgia for me.

Gen Z kids flocking to the beta version is a lot like my love of retro console games that came before my time. It somehow feels a little sentimental, but more for a simpler time in general than simply reminiscing on the good ol' days.

For what it's worth, the folks on r/GoldenAgeMinecraft have determined 1.7.3 beta to be the sweet spot.

"iT woRKs BeTter in THe aPp!!"

I was there in the early days of phone apps. I built stuff for Symbian, BlackBerry, even the bloody Palm Pilot! The central problem with apps has always been that they are hard to update. Every new bit of functionality - or even a new page - needs to be tested on a thousand devices. Once done, it takes an age to distribute to users. The only way to solve that is to have the app dynamically pull in new functionality from a remote resource. At which point, you've reinvented the Web browser!

Sometimes I still daydream of a world where Firefox OS actually caught on and didn't die a horrible, premature death. I don't think the term "progressive web app" had even been coined yet, but that's essentially what your apps would've been. From what I understand, anyway. I have like four apps on my phone that aren't stock. Everything else I use lives in Safari. That was always the whole point of smartphones for me; a thing with a fully functional web browser that lets you carry the entire internet around in your pocket.

Miniroll - Your blogroll, anywhere

I came across this neat blogroll web app earlier today. You can add each website manually or import an OPML file from your RSS feed — pretty much what I was trying to mimic with my old blogroll, only it looks really slick and it's much easier to manage. On the paid version, you can style it however you want but I'm just using the free one right now because it does everything I need it to do. Some of the links are a little wonky though; I'm getting an error in Safari for random sites:

Safari can't open the page.
The error was: "Navigation was blocked 
by Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy

I think it's because I embedded the HTML directly on my blog and it doesn't jive well with Leaflet, so I just made it an external link in my nav. It's a pretty cool little widget nonetheless.

Mine, by Adam Ouston, a novel length story written as one sentence

That’s Mine, by Hobart based Australian author Adam Ouston, which features one incredibly, outrageously, long sentence of perhaps eighty-five thousand words. No full-stops, chapters, or even a few lines of space to break up the text it seems.

I wanna buy this but I have three more new books to finish on my kindle before I can justify buying another one 🤪

Twitter is dead... again

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:10:33 -0400

I wrote a thing about the new Twitter.now project yesterday. I said I was "cautiously optimistic" but I'm erring more on the side of cautious now. I think the two guys who started this thing might be in over their heads. There was a massive spambot attack going on all afternoon, flooding the feed with thousands of pics of cartoon catgirls and crypto bullshit for hours, and then they finally shut it down when the racist 4chan style nonsense started piling on.

You can still access the landing page, but I'm getting "a server with the specified host name could not be found" when I try to visit the app.

Before the spam started, a user pointed out that it was oozing personal information like emails and birthdays. Someone said you can bypass the fee altogether and create an account for free ~~but I don't remember how and I can't search the post because it's offline~~. Update: @cassidyjames.com posted on Bluesky that you could bypass the signup form and create a free account directly from Firebase. The AI moderation system they called VERA was doing fuckall, so they took it offline earlier that day before everything went down.

It's a whole shitshow over there.

If you do a web search for "Twitter now" you'll still see big news sites running with the story about its launch as recently as four hours ago. None of them mention any of the fuckery from last night.

It's easy to fall for nostalgia. Especially when it's hyped up to be some revolutionary "fuck you" to Elon Musk and promises to bring back that cozy public square vibe we had in the old days of Twitter. The fact that you had to pay for it gave it this sense of exclusivity; you can get in on the ground floor of this awesome new social network. It feels like a crypto scam without the crypto. Maybe that's the new grift? Forget about all the digital ponzi money; just charge users to make an account on a new house of cards and pull the rug after people hand you money for nothing.

To be completely honest, a part of me wants to believe Elon Musk is sitting at his laptop, bundled up in his favorite Snuggie, personally carrying out the spam attacks all on his own — tears streaming down his face and into that stupid fucking sink he carried into Twitter HQ the day he took it over.

In reality though I think it was just a vibe coded fever dream from a guy who knows more about trademark law than software development. Bad actors noticed some big vulnerabilities and went in for the kill.

For a social network that sells trust as its main feature, I don't trust a goddamn thing about it. Of course I'll still follow up and start poking around on there again if it ever goes back online, but it's pretty sketchy right now, to say the least. I would've felt a little better if there was a blog where anyone who paid money for an account could check for updates, or at the very least an email blast explaining why the site is offline and what the plan is going forward.

It's a reminder of just how well places like The Atmosphere and Fediverse are being built; all the planning and security measures that were taken to make sure it won't all evaporate overnight — and that you can't trust every vibe coded app some LLM shits out.

It's also a reminder of why I was so excited to join Bluesky when it was new, and why I've been so cozy over there ever since. If anything, it's a great advertisement for how resilient and well thought out the more established platforms like Bluesky are. I like to see innovation and new takes on social media; I like seeing new things being built on the web. I don't even condemn vibe coding if you're using it as an extension of your own skills, but this... does not feel like that. And I'm no developer either, so this take is 100% an end user's perspective. But as an end user, I expect a thing I paid for to work and not to leak my personal data or let it get to the point of racist shitheads taking over before deciding to do anything about it.

It was almost surreal watching it go from classic 2010 era Twitter vibes to the dumpster fire it became after Elon's hostile takeover, all in the span of two days.

Update, 4:45pm EST:

Maybe this is harsh but I don't think so: it's a bad look to go into a project with such lofty goals, without planning for obvious risks like spam and privacy issues, idk.

It's good they at least posted some kind of update.

I don't know how to feel about this thing but I'm definitely here to watch it unfold 🍿

Twitter, now

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:34:47 -0400

News about Operation Bluebird first broke back at the end of 2025 on Ars Technica.

An attorney from Illinois named Michael Peroff and his business partner Stephen Coates, who used to be on Twitter's general council, got the idea for the project when Elon officially dropped the Twitter branding and switched to X.

In 2025, they filed a petition with the US patent and trademark office claiming the branding had been abandoned:

“The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.’s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,” the petition states. “The TWITTER bird was grounded.”

It's been the better part of a year since that Ars Technica article was published, and Twitter.now has been online for a few days now. You can pay either $20 or $40 for early access, so of course I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see yet another microblogging site start off at the ground floor.

That said, as nostalgic as it feels right now, there are definitely a few areas of concern. For one, it's as centralized as OG Twitter. The Fediverse and Atmosphere are both decentralized; they both have their flagship servers like Mastodon.social and Bluesky respectively, but anyone can break off and make their own instance if they want. Mastodon has thousands of third party servers now, and ATProto is slowly but surely expanding out to places like BlackSky, Eurosky and Northsky.

The whole idea of making alternative microblogging sites was to do it better than Twitter did; to avoid some fuckass space nazi like Elon Musk ever ruining another one of these things again.

Their approach is different; it's being touted as more of a trademark challenge, with the intention to blow up in popularity because of the familiar branding:

“There certainly are alternatives,” Peroff said. “I don’t know that any of them at this point in time are at the scale that would make a difference in the national conversation, whereas a new Twitter really could.”

It feels like more of an outsider's approach at building something for the sake of going viral than something built out of passion and love of the game like Bluesky or Mastodon.

I'm pretty opinionated on that idea; that in order for a social network to be "successful" it has to be this behemoth where everyone you know has an account. I prefer smaller spaces online, so I definitely don't see it as a weakness. If anything, that's a selling point for me.

I have to say, it feels a lot like the Digg reboot — which failed miserably, for the record. With Digg, you could pay $5 for early access and get in on the ground floor as a Groundbreaker. Kevin and the rest of the Digg team took feedback and suggestions from these early backers and, honestly pretty quickly, built an app as polished as Reddit. The problem was that it wasn't an overnight sensation like they hoped it would be and it ended up having a bot problem. So in an ironic twist, Kevin promptly shut it down and turned it into an AI news hub.

And that's another thing Twitter.now shares with the short-lived Digg reboot: AI moderation. It's a selling point here; an AI that filters every tweet for authenticity and weeds out the ragebait that powers places like X. You can set a slider to what kind of trust score is acceptable and it hides anything that doesn't make the cut.

At the time of writing this, the moderation tab has been taken offline for upgrades or something, idk.

All of that being said, I'm still poking around on there and enjoying the familiar experience of joining yet another microblogging startup with only a handful of users.

There's no pressure; post whatever you wanna post. No cliques have formed yet. It’s mostly just the chaos of awkward introductions and cat pics.

The UI leaves a lot to be desired, but coming from two guys who (as far as I know) aren't developers by trade, that makes a lot of sense. I'm almost positive this thing is vibe coded but I'm not basing that on anything but a gut feeling, so I could be wrong.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I would never go all in on something so centralized; I am a total Atmosphere nerd. So many cool things are being built on ATProto there's not even any debate for me. This feels more like someone re-claiming that old MySpace swag and building a nostalgic throwback like SpaceHey than a X or Bluesky killer. Honestly though, if it pisses off Elon Musk even a little bit, or if it can get a sizable amount of people off of there — people who might be on the fence, or maybe someone who has tried Mastodon or Bluesky and just didn't vibe with it, I consider that a win.

~~My handle is @nic over there and you can check it out for yourself at Twitter.now.~~

update: yeah they're definitely going to have to do something about the moderation lmao this is a straight up posting-based ddos attack 🤨

UPDATE 2: jesus christ there's a horrible spam problem on this website. Not worth even trying until they shut down and address the abuse and spam. Absolutely fucked.

Update 3: looks like it's gone completely offline. You can go to the landing page, but it looks like the SSL certificate is invalid when you go to log in, so that's pretty sketchy.

Notes for August 26, 2026

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:38:58 -0400

Sadly, Dolly Parton passed away at 80 years old yesterday. A curious synchronicity people are posting about online today: Tropical Storm Dolly.

@stardustbluepr.com pointed out on Bluesky:

Storm names are chosen from six alphabetical lists maintained by the World Meteorological Organization that rotate every six years.

[link to skeet]

Tim Curry, also 80, left us too. The East Coast might be facing the wrath of Dolly soon, but there's no news on Pennywise popping up out of storm drains anywhere. Yet.

Two beloved icons have left us in the last two days, but these things always come in threes and there's another 80-year-old still among the living — and rotten to the fucking core. I'm not insinuating anything grim here, but it would be nice to see some balance in the universe, you know?

Netflix Announces Norm Macdonald Documentary Directed by Judd Apatow

Norm was always one of my faves. Shortly after he died, we went to the Funny Bone in Columbus to see Nick Swardson's standup, and he was in tears talking about the guy. His dry sense of humor always killed me. It's been ingrained in my own personal sense of humor since I used to watch reruns of SNL as a kid, mostly with no idea wtf he was talking about on the weekend updates because I was a kid. But he remained one of the greats for me into adulthood. One of my favorite appearances was when he did that Comedy Central roast and just read the newspaper the whole time, occasionally looking up to throw out a judgmental, confused smirk when someone cracked a mean joke about him. Looking forward to seeing the new documentary in October.

Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person

This is an excellent long read on that pile of garbage who wrote the wizard books, from the perspective of a trans person. They went from sharing a sense of belonging, with how badly Harry was treated growing up in those books, to burning their entire collection in the backyard. I can't pretend to fully understand how much the betrayal and disappointment stung in finding out the author of your favorite books was a despicable TERF; not in the same way a trans person does, living through it first-person. But I can definitely empathize and this essay really laid it out for me crystal clear.

From r/crtgaming on Reddit: I caught the final moments before my PS2's Graphics Synthesizer died.

I'm not big on posting Reddit links, but I loved this little clip. Someone is playing a racing game on PS2 and the screen gradually glitches out until the console dies, leaving a bunch of monochrome and pink visual artifacts on the screen. It's definitely an aesthetic 🤪

Designer Creates World’s Most Hideous Hawaiian Shirt to Hide From AI-Surveillance Cameras

A while back, I shared a post about a car with an anti-Flock wrap. Thought it was pretty clever. Now someone made an anti-AI Hawaiian shirt that does just as well:

Freshly reported by Dezeen, German designer Simon Weckert designed the hideous shirt to be untraceable to AI-integrated surveillance systems. Using a dizzying blend of colors and patterns, the shirt is ugly precisely because it’s designed to confuse surveillance algorithms — as Weckert explained, it’s the “interplay” of ghastly colors and shapes that hide its wearer from detection.

Honestly, the way everything's turned into a bland grayscale corporate minimalism aesthetic over the years, I totally embrace these loud, nonsensical designs. Especially since they're scrambling the brains of dystopian surveillance systems at the same time.

Life doesn't have to be so creepy and corporate

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:57:21 -0400

You know what I like about smaller social media / indie spaces online? There are no bullshit ads. People can still make money but they aren't going on targeted ad rampages with unlimited cash flow. If, among all the shitposting and jokes, you see a link to something that costs money — something on an online store, a subscription, a link to a game on Steam, a new book, etc. it's almost always for independent artists and creators. Whether it's posted by them or by someone who just genuinely liked the thing they made.

Mega corporations wish they had that kind of organic, word of mouth advertising. But instead they've created an entire industry based around learning more about us than we know about ourselves, all to manipulate us into buying stuff instead of just making cool shit, releasing it out into the wild and letting people decide for themselves if it's what they want.

I don't mind seeing an "ad" for something I like. Not something a bucket of microchips in a data center 1000 miles away predicted I might like based on my browsing history or something I bought on Amazon one time — something that wasn't shown to me based on my activity somewhere else. My purchase history at a store that sells my data, something I searched, something TikTok heard me say when my phone was on the other side of the room charging...

Lately I'm trying to vote with my wallet in a positive way rather than doing it only through boycotting terrible companies that make my skin crawl. That's the other half of the equation, right? There's an incomprehensible amount of cool art you can find in smaller communities. Indie games that play like something you'd find on the Super Nintendo if it was a current-gen console. Books written and published by someone who never went on a nationwide press tour backed by a major publisher. Zines. Yes, zines are still a thing, and they're cool as shit. Independent journalism that doesn't go through the filter of some eccentric billionaire who owns the newspaper.

Life doesn't have to be so goddamn creepy. Imagine a world without marketing directors going on cocaine-fueled ChatGPT sessions in the presidential suite of some upscale hotel in The City, scheming on ways to manipulate the masses into buying more shit that's just going to break or be out of style in a couple months.

There's nothing you can do about billboards or massive LCD screens plastered on every tall building downtown, but you can definitely curate a lot of what you're being shown online through hanging out in smaller, more human-centric communities.

Notes for August 23, 2026

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:51:56 -0400

Higher grades and belonging: New report shows trans students thrive with teacher support

Students whose identities are affirmed at school report a greater sense of belonging and higher grades, and are more likely to participate fully in class, according to a report released Tuesday by GLISTEN and the Trevor Project. Students report similar outcomes when they are able to connect with LGBTQ+ peers at school, see positive representations of LGBTQ+ people in their classrooms and attend schools with inclusive policies, such as those that allow them to compete on sports teams or use facilities that best align with their gender identities.

Wow, it's almost like treating people with a little respect and dignity makes a difference. No one can thrive when they're being talked down to and treated like something's wrong with them all the time. And even if someone's not constantly attacking you, it still makes you feel unwelcome when the norm is to do nothing to make you feel like you're valid. Trans kids are kids. Trans rights are human rights. Protect trans kids.

Fat people cannot win, regardless of what we do. And I’ve had enough | Rebecca Shaw

This is exactly how I feel as a fat guy in the age of Ozempic:

I’m a fat person. We are constantly badgered and tortured by a society that tells us to lose weight, at all costs. If you’re fat, that’s a moral failing: you’re lazy and unhealthy. If you’re fat at the gym, or jogging down the street, you’re an object of ridicule. If you lose weight with drugs, you didn’t earn it. If you’re fat and not self-flagellating at every moment, you’re glorifying obesity. If you lose weight for any reason, it then proves you were never really happy with yourself; it proves that fat is bad, that thinness was always the real goal. If you stay fat, we want you to admit you’re unhealthy. If you say you’re happy, we want to diagnose you with denial. So much of the condescension as well as plain cruelty towards fat people is packaged as “we just want you to be healthy”. If this were true (and if being skinny were the only marker of health, which it isn’t), nobody would be criticising John Goodman or other fat people for using medication, by saying it’s cheating.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. And fat shaming has become the norm these days; it's expected and encouraged by society. Even if you're going to get ridiculed for using a GLP-1 to lose weight, at least you lost the weight and aren't a reprehensible fat fuck anymore, right? It's not enough to simply lose weight; you have to earn your new status through humiliation too.

I've come to terms with being overweight. I'm okay with who I am at this point in my life. I spent the first half of adulthood strung out on opiates and cocaine. I was pretty damn skinny back then, and since I quit the better part of a decade ago, I've gained some weight. I'm not the poster child of perfect health by any means, but I'm doing a lot better than when I was living on a steady diet of drugs and honey buns.

Maybe I'll eventually get my shit together and lose some weight before I face certain death, but for now, I'm okay with just living my life. You'll have to excuse me for not wanting to revert to injecting a drug that makes me slimmer just to fit in with a society of shallow, self-appointed health experts.

Why Erykah Badu made incense with the scent of her vagina in 2020

“Most guys say that my vagina smells like strawberries and gunpowder. So I tried to duplicate that,” she said.

Honestly that's kinda fucking punk lmao get it girl.

A humanoid robot just beat Usain Bolt's 100m record, and roboticists are unimpressed for good reason

A robot built by Beijing’s X-Humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second record. Roboticists point out that speed on a known course is far easier for a machine than folding laundry.

If you think that's impressive, let me introduce you to: cars.

👾 what I'm playing:

Alruna and the Necro-Industrialists by @hallinniklas.bsky.social

Alruna is a compact and high-density Metroidvania, with a focus on sequence-breaking and playing things out of order.

Super fun little metroidvania. The link above is for Steam, but I'm playing it on the Switch. Anyone who knows me knows that metroidvanias are my jam. I've played every classic I can get my hands on, like all of the Metroid games, most of the Castlevania games, and plenty of indie stuff on my Switch and Steam. It took me a minute to get used to the controls and mechanics, but as soon as I did I started having a little anticipatory grief for when I finish it in the next day or two.

Lucky for me, it looks like a sequel just dropped pretty recently!

It genuinely feels like I'm playing a game for the SNES or Sega Genesis, and I respect that in a 'vania. 100% worth a look if you're into the genre.

Update 8/31: found a really useful map on ko-fi.

📖 what I'm reading

Everything Will Swallow You by @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social

I'm one of those dopes who hasn't read much fiction as an adult because I feel like it's "smarter" to read non-fiction. I realize that's really dumb, and I'm working on it. This is the first one of Tom's books I've ever read and the first fiction I've read in years. It's so good!

Eric and Carl live in Dorset in a small white cottage under the shadow of a big cliff. Eric sells old records and antiques. Carl cooks, cleans and crochets. Nearing seventy, Eric is a lifelong accumulator of obscure objects whose easygoing, chaotic approach to life masks some of the unaddressed sadness of his past. The significantly younger Carl is an old soul who has a sophisticated emotional intelligence and likes swimming, mid-century female novelists, fibre arts and Dolly Parton. If you passed them on a walk, you may not pay them much attention. Most likely you would see Carl's long floppy ears, tail and fur and mistake him for a dog.

I read that first paragraph of the book's description and immediately bought it on my Kindle. I saw a skeet from Tom saying he'll send you some post cards, a bookmark and a signed copy if you live in the UK so that's pretty neat. The above link is for the paperback.

Notes for August 21, 2026

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:08:03 -0400

Subscriber rot

Subscriber rot is the idea that while you may have been interesting enough for someone to follow you at one point, they stop being a real set of eyeballs who might see your stuff when you post something. Maybe they muted you, maybe they don't read every single thing and your stuff falls through the cracks, or maybe they just don't use the service at all anymore.

I think about this a lot. I have a little over 3000 followers on Bluesky, but I suspect only 500 - 1000 are actual people who regularly hang out there. I know at least some of them are bots because I look at the profile of almost everyone who follows me and I'll get a handful of obviously fake/bot/spam accounts every couple of weeks.

I have 4,000 followers, but it doesn't feel like I do. Engagement on my posts is fine, but it seems focused on a smaller number of people. Interestingly, Mastodon has a page in settings where you can see all the accounts you follow and that follow you, and you can filter for a few things. There's a "dormant" account status that seems to trigger when someone does not use Mastodon for over 30 days. I enabled that filter and it returned 2,914 dormant accounts. Of those, 2,244 haven't been active in over a year.

I'd LOVE to see a feature like this on Bluesky. Even if I'm not going to unfollow every dormant account, it at least gives you some idea of your subscriber rot status.

I do like to keep following people even when I realize they haven't posted in months or even years sometimes. I do the same thing with my RSS feeds — sometimes a blog will go into hibernation for years and then one day you suddenly start seeing posts from them again. I've been known to deactivate my Bluesky account for weeks at a time every now and then, so I get it. Sometimes you just need to take a break. Or with blogs, there's always the possibility that you get burned out and simply stop indefinitely, like Forrest Gump when he was done running.

All the Things My New Meat Glasses Can Do

I’m so excited my new Meat Glasses have arrived in the mail. I unwrap them and turn them over. Wow, they’ve really done it. You can’t see the camera under the ground beef at all. In fact, they look like high-fashion glasses made of raw, Grade A ground sirloin. Still, Meat Glasses are so much more than that.

Sons of Anarchy Cast Reunites for Very Meta FX Limited Series Starring/Created by Charlie Hunnam

I watched this show religiously. I'm stoked to see a revival coming, but it's not what you would probably expect:

According to the official description, “When the cast of Sons of Anarchy reunites at a fan convention after more than a decade, the line between life and art blurs as the fractured brotherhood finds itself up against a real-world threat more dangerous than anything they ever faced in their show.

This is so on par for modern life. Big burly biker dudes aren't scary. They're just a bunch of hairy middle-aged guys being a menace to the flow of traffic with "Save a life! Watch out for bikers!" stickers on all of their other vehicles. And maybe they do some crime every now and again, but that's only scary if you're a rival ~~gang~~ motorcycle club member. I can only assume right now, but if you ask me, real-life terror comes in the form of delusional, ravenous fans who larp as MC members. Trust me. I lived in backwoods Ohio when Sons of Anarchy was still on the air and every dipshit weekend warrior with a pension, a fully paid-off mortgage, and a Hog had a SoA hoodie from Walmart and thought they were tough as nails. Still a solid upgrade from the standard "if you're reading this, the bitch fell off" tee.

Turnstile Recruit Elton John, Slayyyter, and Panda Bear for Never Enough Remake

Turnstile have “reimagined” last year’s Never Enough with an incredible array of guests, ranging from Elton John to Slayyyter and Panda Bear. Never Enough: Versions, out next Friday, August 28, also features a genre-spanning cadre of producers, singer-songwriters, rappers, and assorted pop and alternative powerhouses such as Four Tet, Oklou, Alex G, Hayley Williams, A. G. Cook, Blood Orange, Nourished by Time, Julien Baker, Floating Points, and Mustafa.

Dude FUCK yeah! This is like a mini The Wall: Live in Berlin moment for Turnstile. They have the soul of a 70s rock band while pioneering their own FX-heavy brand of hardcore music. The first time I ever saw these guys was at the Blink-182 reunion tour after Tom came back. I'd heard a couple of their songs from an old friend back in the day but I never got into them until I saw them live. You really gotta see it live to get it.

For real though. Instantly became one of my top five bands. Brendan's energy is fucking wild on stage, doing spin kicks and crowd surfing while cutting between screaming and spacey clean vocals... it's the most catchy hardcore band you'll ever hear. Just the fact that they were on a legend like Elton John's radar at all says enough about them, but actually recruiting him on the new re-imagining of their latest record is bonkers. Super stoked to hear it.

Watching TikTok and Instagram Reels Videos Deactivates the Brain’s Cognitive Control Network, Study Finds

Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help them stay focused and weigh longer-term goals.

Everyone knows TikTok is bad for you. That's why I prefer text-based media over shortform videos 😎

Notes for August 20, 2026

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:34:58 -0400

Man Nicknamed “Bluntman” Arrested Ahead of Gathering of the Juggalos with 128 Pounds of Weed

The Mid Missouri Drug Task Force had received information that 45-year-old Kevin Jones, appropriately nicknamed “Bluntman,” was planning to sell marijuana during the Gathering of the Juggalos. This tip was confirmed on the festival’s website, where a listing for Bluntman’s One Stop Shop said it had been supplying everything from “blunt wraps to bongs, papers, pipes and lighter fluid” for over 20 years.

I grew up like two miles down the road from Legend Valley, where the Grateful Dead played regularly for years, where Lost Lands is hosted every year and also where the Gathering of the Juggalos has been hosted most of the time for the last two decades. I have definitely bought weed off this guy. It's not in Ohio this year, but needless to say, I've Gathered a lot in my day and it's always a great fucking time.

Obviously in order to be a real music festival, there HAS to be a few sketchy guys advertising various drugs for sale on crusty old cardboard signs. But cruising around in a beat up pickup truck and breaking a bunch of traffic laws all willy nilly is probably not the best way to keep a low profile while you attempt to smuggle in over 100lbs of weed and mushrooms.

The ancient, world renowned philosophers known as Twiztid put it best when they said, "Gimme gimme green leafs laced up with hashish,
When your ridin' dirty, watch for police."

Tiny Pink Springtails Appear to Teleport When They Jump

Japanese nature photographer Pendora shared footage of tiny pink globular springtails launching themselves so quickly that they seem to teleport. These Sminthurides springtails use a forked, tail-like appendage known as a furcula, which snaps against the surface to propel them away.

Honestly I couldn't care less about the teleporting thing; this is the cutest bug I've ever seen in my life 🥰

Driver Cited for "Left Lane Camping" on Highway 101 in Carpinteria - edhat

CHP used the traffic stop as an opportunity to remind motorists that driving too slowly can be just as hazardous as speeding. “Remaining in the passing lane while traveling significantly below the flow of traffic can create congestion, frustration, and increase the risk of unsafe lane changes and possibly crashes,” CHP stated.

If you're going 50-something in the left lane when the speed limit is 65 or 70mph, I'm going to ride your ass so hard we both might die. And as soon as I get an opportunity to pass you in the right lane, I'm going to cut you off so close we both might die. I'm pretty fucking laid back about literally everything else in life but this.

View: Tech faces its Big Tobacco moment, but teens have already moved on

Tech will also have to face a growing disdain among young people toward anything AI-coded. Nearly half of US adults aged 18 to 29 now believe the tech does more harm than good, up from 27% in 2024, a recent Gallup poll showed, even as AI usage among young people has ticked up. Luddite clubs are popping up on college campuses. And it’s not just Americans putting a premium on authenticity: An animated movie is taking off in China this week in part because it’s not made by AI, and instead was done with old-school, amateur 3D modeling by a mother-son duo.

I don't totally hate AI but it does always bring a single tear of joy to my eye seeing kids go full Luddite. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we got way too much tech way too fast. I am all about stopping and poking our heads up for a breath of air; simply living in the moment every once in a while instead of going all in on a world of unlimited growth and never leaving well enough alone. The kids are alright.

Be authentic. Make shitty art. Write bad blog posts. That's my whole schtick lately and it works out alright. There is no replacement for human-made and low-tech things and I'm glad a lot of that is coming back. Zines, blogs, dumb phones, regular old wristwatches, Polaroids, vinyl, even cassettes and CDs. You don't have to be a hipster, but it's fun to check out some of the old stuff we traded away for an always-online 6" rectangle in our pockets.

Man, our fucking basement flooded last night. A lot of places in central Ohio got a ton of rain in a short amount of time last night. I've already been through all the stages of grief and a fifth of Irish whiskey by now. After everything is said and done, I:

Know how to spell 'squeegee' correctly now
own a pretty nice 10-gallon DeWalt shop vac
am actually pretty fucking proficient with a squeegee
understand the mechanics of a sump pump

Life is fucking stupid sometimes. We at least got some quality time with the kids and gave the basement a much needed deep cleaning. Come at me bro; I faced a million spiders and a little bit of water in a dank spooky basement today.

Notes for August 16, 2026

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:53:52 -0400

Does vitriol make you feel special? — Harvard Gazette

Jackson and his colleagues analyzed more than 2 billion comments from 2,150 Reddit communities and found that both threads and communities became more negative over time, and that semantic differentiation drove that trend — that is, negative comments were more semantically unique from what had already been said. They then replicated their observational findings with an experiment that showed that social media users who were primed to be unique posted more negative comments than users who were primed to conform.

Facebook and Reddit both capitalize on rage bait. It's social networking 101. But even if they didn't, we just can't help being negative because it naturally drives engagement and gives us something new and edgy to say. Humans are just kinda shitty 🤷

Quitting alcohol changes the brain and can increase the risk of compulsive drinking – new research in mice

Well I guess I'll have to continue drinking exactly the right amount every day so I don't quit and risk becoming an alcoholic.

UCSF cannabis study finds unexpected heart rhythm results

There's no denying alcohol is terrible for you. Weed, on the other hand...

This study set out to find potentially harmful side effects of cannabis use and found nothing bad to say:

“As far as cannabis is concerned, we did not find evidence of harm in this study. And the possibility that there could be something helpful deserves future research.”

They gave ~100 different stoners a Fitbit to track glucose, heart activity, and sleep, and they found on the days they smoked, they actually showed less signs of what they call a "premature heartbeat" — an early sign of atrial fibrillation.

I've been smoking weed as long as I can remember. Maybe that's a negative in itself, but the only other drawbacks aside from short term memory loss are the munchies and being couch-locked all day. Oh, and short term memory loss.

How "blowing smoke up your ass" was a medical procedure in 1700s

I'm not blowing smoke up your ass. Unless you want me to, you know, for medical purposes 👉👈

Chinese animated movie branded “worse than AI” goes viral after just 200 people see it - Dexerto

According to Shanghai Daily, some viewers said it was worse than AI-generated clips. Meanwhile, other X user claimed that it still holds more value than something made by AI. One user wrote: “I will respect the most dog a** animation done by humans than the most polished animation done by AI.”

Right? At least it's human-made 😆 big Xavier: Renegade Angel meets Seaman vibes.

Notes for August 14, 2026

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:14:57 -0400

But the thing is, this battle doesn't exist. It's a narrative believed by the tech press and by a lot of internet users who don't remember a time before the Big Platforms on the internet, but it makes as little sense when you poke at it as the claim that the local coffee shop is done for because it won't become Starbucks.

Well put. I hate that kind of cringe, "if you ain't first you're last" Ricky Bobby mindset. We need diversity and the freedom to build whatever kind of communities we wanna build. Not everything has to be one size fits all.

Not every coffee shop needs to be Starbucks to be successful. Not every place you hang out online needs to be Facebook or Instagram to be successful. Not even if it's social media shaped. And not just because, as I've argued, your internet can actually be small, and be healthy being small. But because it's actually kind of crazy to think that every digital space must be, or be on its way to being, the One Place Everyone Is.

Yesss 100%. Everyone is different. Why is Big Social so desperate to eliminate freedom of choice? I want different options. I'm not going to spend my life being loyal to one brand per category of thing, you know? I'll drink Pepsi out of a Coca-Cola glass, I don't give a damn. I like variety and I don't want to be on the most homogenized and sanitized timeline. I wanna live in the one where I have an overwhelming amount of choices. I want a federated ecosystem of different cliques and factions on different corners of the web. I don't wanna live in a fucking Black Mirror episode where there's one tv channel, one website, one food product...

Different strokes for different folks.

Ohio ranked as one of the worst states in the country, according to ‘U.S. News & World Report’

As a guy who lives deep within the caustic bowels of Central Ohio, I can attest to this. There are vast oceans of corn as far as the eye can see. Most of the spring and summer smells like cow shit. Everyone's driving around in jacked up Chevies with truck nuts, rolling coal and flicking Pall Mall Red 100s butts out the window with a tattered TRUMP 2020 flag flapping around in the humidity. We're as red as Texas but somehow still considered a swing state. A significant amount of my energy is spent daydreaming about leaving everything behind and running away to Seattle.

PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation

Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year.

This is your periodic reminder to backup your data ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

'Alien Technology': Harvard Scientist Warns Declassified Pentagon Files Reveal Huge UFO Discovery

Renowned Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb evaluated the chilling report, suggesting the anomaly could stem from powerful electromagnetic disruptions, classified government black projects, or potentially groundbreaking alien technology.

It’s always potentially groundbreaking alien technology with this guy.

Astronomers find entirely new kind of object in space

Astronomers think that the object is probably a hugely dense cloud of gas. It is not powered by nuclear fusion, like a normal star, but a black hole at its centre.

Now THIS is some space news I can get behind. Man, that'd be a cool name for a grunge song. "Black Hole Star"... feels oddly familiar but I can't put my finger on it. I guess I'll just file it away in my garden of sounds for now.

Notes for August 11, 2026

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:09:46 -0400

Modder Creates SteamBoy Handheld From The Steam Deck

A user on Reddit called PhyFawkes (thanks SteamDeckHQ) has taken their Steam Deck and done some extraordinary (or sacrilegious things depending on your thoughts) to [it], taking it apart and turning it into a handheld that takes inspiration from the original Game Boy DMG. And it actually works, although mainly as a controller for playing games on your TV for now.

This is sick! I have an Anbernic GBA SP-style handheld, and one of the classic R36S devices, but they're both pretty low tech. They can play anything up to PS1 ROMs though, so that's more than enough for the 90s kid in me. This would be perfect for retro action RPGs and metroidvanias. So many good indie games on Steam I wish I could play on the Anbernic. I'm too dumb to figure something like this out though, and if I had a Steam Deck, the last thing I would ever do is open it up and scramble all of its guts around.

A cybersecurity researcher covered a Toyota in an AI-generated pattern to confuse Flock cameras

The project received its first public test Friday at the Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Swearingen worked with Donut Media to cover a 2009 Toyota Yaris with one of his patterns and drive it past a Flock camera. "We proved it was effective," Swearingen, a cybersecurity professional and founder of SIXCYBER, told TechCrunch.

I would totally deck my Honda out in this wrap 😏

Travis Barker and Tom DeLonge Got So High with Cypress Hill That They Wanted to Go Home

"It was like my body was working, but everything up here was silent, and I was noticing stuff I don’t normally notice,” he said. Apparently, DeLonge wasn’t having much of a better time. Halfway through the set, the guitarist came up to Barker and told him, “I wanna go home.”

"And I was like, ‘Me too,'” Barker continued. “It was so awful.”

Brother, I get too high and have to bail out on a trip to Kroger sometimes. And I'm smoking absolute trash compared to whatever B-Real probably has. I love when someone can actually admit they're too stoned. The kids I grew up with would be like a slab of fucking silly putty stuck to the couch talking about "I don't feel shit bro."

How to Watch the Total Solar Eclipse on a Live Stream, Witnessing the Rare View of the Sun's Corona From Your Own Home

As the eclipse moves over the planet, the European Space Agency (ESA) will stream the event from the Astrophysical Observatory of Javalambre in Teruel, Spain.

Here's the link to the live stream on YouTube tomorrow — and you won't even need to break out your crusty old eclipse glasses from the 90s to watch it.

Notes for August 10, 2026

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:05:06 -0400

Mark Twain wrote a story in 1898 that describes the internet

In the story the device gets wired into the telephone systems of the whole world, and after that, Twain writes, the daily doings of the globe are "made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues."

TIL Mark Twain predicted doomscrolling in 1898.

'Shattered': the most torturous reality show of the 2000s

Man, the UK really took reality shows to the max in the 2000s. Shattered was a show on Channel 4 where the contestants had to make it a week with no sleep to win $100,000. I'm a wreck if I don't get eight hours every night. Living in Tweaker City, Ohio, I've seen people stay up for three days and start believing their family are aliens and the radio is giving them encoded messages on how to get back to their home world. Seven days is absolutely nuts. That said, I would totally watch this if it was on today 🤷

80s treasures we considered luxurious but weren't worth the hype - MediaFeed

Car phones, shoulder-mount video cameras, waterbeds, even the brick phone; I get it. They were dumb and short-lived. But I would kill for a pristine Members Only jacket from the 80s.

Earth had Saturn-like rings 466 million years ago, new study suggests

The researchers estimate that the ring-spawning asteroid would be about 7.7 miles (12.5 kilometers) wide if it were a "rubble pile," or slightly smaller if it were a solid body. Once it shattered after nearing Earth's vicinity, its fragments would have "jostled around" before settling into a debris ring orbiting Earth's equator, Tomkins said.

If You Sleep In The 'T. Rex Position,' We've Got Some Bad News For You

All the good things are bad for you 😞

The Outlaw Chemist Teaching People How to Make Drugs From Scratch

This is my favorite story of the day: some sketchy guy online tells you how to make LSD and DMT, for a Patreon subscription fee. I remember when my ex’s brother was trying to make acid on the stove at 3am one night. It was pink for some reason. And then his mom woke up and promptly beat the shit out of him lmao probably best to leave mind-altering chemicals up to the chemists.

Notes for August 8, 2026

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:17:15 -0400

dotMeow wants to be the purrfect place for a queer and open internet

A few years ago, a few of us queer nerds were sitting in a pub, thinking about what we could do to give our community greater stability. The idea of running our own gTLD came up. Because many people in our community love cats, and because the wilder side of the internet is often associated with cat videos and memes, we soon settled on .meow.

The web is expanding with some new top level domains and .meow will likely be one of them. This is siiiick! No idea what I would use yet another domain for, but I'm definitely adding some .meows to the fleet. I'm already draining my bank account with renewals every year on too many unused domains as it is, but I'm a junkie for this kind of stuff. If everything goes according to plan, they're looking at a 2028 launch.

Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself

By working with living but dormant cordyceps militaris fungus instead, the researchers have been able to take advantage of its biological functions. The result is a material that is self-renewing and responsive to its environment, in ways that could one day transform architecture and clothing – as seen in a prototype dress created together with material innovation company Peelshere.

As long as it doesn't mutate and turn everyone into a bunch of fucked up hybrids between The Last of Us zombies and Jim Carrey in The Mask, this is pretty neat!

Teenage Boy Suffers Temporary Hearing Loss After Listening to Cicadas for Four Hours

Wang noticed that the cicada noises became noticeably louder around noon, but he remained in the forest until evening, when he began experiencing tinnitus and a sensation of fullness in his ears. As the cicadas started going silent, he noticed that he couldn’t hear the chirping of birds, or even the notification sounds of his phone.

And people say I need to touch grass... at least I'm not going deaf sitting on my laptop with a soothing white noise generator humming in the background, enjoying the synthetic breeze of central air.

Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook

In Facebook news today: why in the fuck does anyone still hang out over there‽

Meta was paying out-and-out neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, an investigation from Australia’s ABC News found...“Such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness,” the company added.

From Will Smith to Third Eye Blind — the “hidden” number-one hits of 1997!

Indeed, every Hot 100 leader in ‘97 topped the sales chart, and vice-versa. Below is every official №1 of the year, along with their peak positions in sales and airplay. This means that most of 1997’s “hidden” number-one hits were №1 on radio, but not in sales. Let’s see what they were.

I was six years old in '97. Every single one of these tracks bring back a flood of nostalgia. It reminds me most of going out with my mom and sisters to our uncle's pool in the summer. We spent so much time out there in the 90s. These are the songs that were always playing on the cheap boombox under the shade of the umbrella table 🥲

Notes for August 7, 2026

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:55:24 -0400

Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too

When I first read that article about Anthropic's AI busting out of its cage, it felt like cheesy 80s sci-fi was becoming a reality. But then OpenAI recently claimed their AI broke out and went on a hacking spree too. And of course Meta said "hey wait up, me too!"

Ben makes a really good point:

View post on Bluesky

In the middle of writing this post, another story coincidentally came across my feed:

While American AI Models Race to Commit Felonies, China's Kimi Broke Out and... Just Used GitHub

I'll be honest with you, I didn't even read the goddamn article. I didn't have to. This is so clearly marketing. I mean what are the odds that suddenly, within a matter of weeks, all of the top AI models simultaneously get so smart they can't be contained?

I'm not saying AI can't do a lot of useful shit, but I don't think becoming self-aware and veering off toward its own agenda is one of those things.

Why celebrities from Zendaya to Kylie Jenner are wearing Fecal Matter

The brand name behind recent showstopping fashion moments isn’t quite as delicate as their romantic and otherworldly looks. When asked what an ethereal Zendaya was wearing for the “Odyssey” premiere in New York, her stylist Law Roach responded: “Fecal Matter.”

It's not even funny making Idiocracy jokes anymore... this is our timeline; the dumbest one.

20,000 People Are Publicly Vouching For a Man Accused of Cutting Down Flock Cameras

Wesley? You mean Wesley Jackson? Couldn't have been him. He was 300 miles away in Ohio, helping me nurse a wounded bald eagle back to health all week. A true patriot, if you ask me.

How snails engineer their slime

Snail mucus is mostly water; it’s the mucins (glycoproteins) and complex carbohydrates that give it that slimy, viscous texture. In addition to cosmetics, the mucus holds great potential for drug delivery. In 2020, scientists found that combining snail slime from a common garden snail with gold nanoparticles helped accelerate wound healing and exhibited anti-inflammatory properties in mice. Most relevant to this latest paper is a 2023 study on garden snail slime that identified three distinct types of secreted mucus: a hydrating version to protect its skin, one that acts as an adhesive glue, and a third that serves as a lubricant so the snail can more easily glide across a surface.

letting an LLM write an indie web parody post

There's certain topics and writing styles that do really well on the indie web; especially on Bearblog's Trending page. There are enough joking and seriously annoyed posts about it every now and then. We cannot stop talking about how tech is bad, analog media is good, blogging is good, and how good RSS is.

I was wondering whether LLMs are trained on enough data from here to generate a post that would do really well, and is realistic, while also parodying us bloggers a little.

This hits so close to home lol I spent a lot of time on Bear Blog up until I moved over here to Leaflet. Ava prompts an LLM to write a satirical post in the style of your typical indie blogger.

I can't even tell you how many posts I've written that rehash these same ideas over and over... especially right after I discovered the small web a few years ago.

And you see this kind of stuff from almost everyone who escapes the algorithm. We've all spent so much time on social media for the last decade or more, it really does feel like stepping into an alternate reality where everything is a little nicer when you get here. Shit we forgot about when we all started chasing likes and updoots.

It's easy to get into that whole meta blogging riff — especially when it's your main hobby. You fall into the feedback loop of using your hobby as a platform to talk about your hobby. I'm not shitting on indie bloggers who post this stuff and I know Ava isn't either. It's just funny how accurate it is. Especially since so many of us here can't deny we've written something almost identical, at least a handful of times over the years.

To add a little of my own blogging meta: that's my favorite thing about running a link blog. I don't have to brainstorm new ideas and fresh takes all the time. I just find a few links throughout the day and add my own two cents no one even asked for. It's surprisingly addictive.

Notes for August 5, 2026

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:02:36 -0400

Buc-ee’s sues tiny Ohio minimart over beaver logo

Fuck em right in the Buc-ee. They don't own cartoon beavers. Especially in a town called fucking BEAVERCREEK. It's the American dream though, right? To build a chain store empire and go on a legal rampage against local small businesses just to be a nuisance after you barge in on their territory?

The Phone in Your Hand

Stole this from Kottke, thought it was pretty neat. When I was growing up, if you wanted to tap into cyberspace, you had to do it through a beige tower with components that plug in like giant Legos and weren't even as competent as a $50 budget phone from Walmart today. I definitely take this thing I'm typing on right now for granted. So many impossibly tiny components and other general sorcery going on inside.

Flipping through this, I can't help but think of Terry Godier's beautiful presentation on the Casio F-91W digital watch.

But can your calculator run Linux? - Raymii.org

I'm not really interested in the calculator part. For most calculations I do for my day job, embedded programming, the HP-16C is a better fit. I was interested in this device because I found posts online suggesting it could run Linux and even a Windows 10 port.

My first Linux device was an iPod Nano. Second was a first-gen Xbox. And then I eventually moved on to using it on every laptop and PC I got my hands on after that. It's so capable... it's like a virus that can infect almost any piece of hardware that is even vaguely similar to a computer. And once you get a taste of that, it infects you too. You'll be a Linux nerd forever after that. I've seen people get clunky, pixelated, monochrome ports of Doom running on those Texas Instruments calculators, but never anything like this. Really good deep dive on how to do it if you own a HP Prime G2.

New study deflates right-wing claim that many trans teens later regret gender-affirming care

An overwhelming majority (97.1%) of adolescents who were referred to university-associated clinics in Canada for gender-affirming care continued to identify as transgender or non-binary after an average of 2.4 years. Only 2.9% re-identified as being gender aligned with their sex assigned at birth in that time frame.

New study backs what literally everyone who isn't an transphobe has always known.

Archaeologists Discover 'Perfectly Preserved' 70-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Egg in Argentina

While some may jokingly fear a Jurassic Park-style scenario, scientists emphasize the discovery’s true importance lies in what it could reveal about dinosaur reproduction and development. If embryonic remains are indeed preserved inside, it could provide unprecedented insight into how these fearsome predators evolved, grew, and hatched.

First, gain insight into how these fearsome predators evolved. Then you can maybe resurrect the extinct species from a 66 million year slumber, as a little treat.

50 things you probably never knew about Woodstock - MediaFeed

Nice little Woodstock listicle I found on Fark yesterday. I think just about everyone who went through a hippie/stoner phase at some point knows about most of these, but it was a fun read nonetheless. One thing I had a little bit off though — I thought Carlos Santana just took a little acid, like everyone else at Woodstock. That's gnarly enough...

While they were playing their star-making set, guitarist Carlos Santana was very, very high on mescaline. In fact, he said that he thought he was playing an electric snake.

I knew the snake story but I had no idea he was up there on mescaline lol what a hardass.

Notes for August 4, 2026

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:37:32 -0400

Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible — No One's Happy

Apple requires apps to submit a privacy manifest disclosing what data they collect. The White House app declared an empty array. Zero data collection. Meanwhile, the actual binary contained ten analytics frameworks, including the full OneSignal SDK with a sub-framework specifically for location tracking. The GPS pipeline polled precise coordinates every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and every 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing everything to OneSignal’s commercial servers. A boolean flag in OneSignal’s server responses could remotely enable or disable GPS tracking without an app update and without Apple review.

I didn't know this was even possible if the dev didn't list what data was collected in the App Store. Like I thought there was actually some kind of review process besides "trust me bro" but I guess not. Pretty scary stuff:

Governments are some of the biggest buyers. Military and intelligence agencies purchase location data from prayer apps, dating apps, and fitness trackers. Immigration enforcement uses it to locate and detain people. Police departments buy it to surveil suspects, protesters, and entire neighborhoods — sidestepping warrant requirements entirely. Courts have issued “geofence” orders demanding records on every device near a location at a given time, sweeping up everyone at a political rally, a school board meeting, or a gun show alongside any actual suspects. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, law enforcement used location data to track trips to abortion clinics. None of this required a court order, because the data was commercially available.

I've always said the web is my favorite OS. Beyond the privacy angle, most apps are usually trash anyway. Miniflux is more functional and to the point than any native RSS reader I've ever installed on my phone.

Social media apps are the worst. Tumblr is unusable in app form if you don't pay $7 a month to disable ads every other post. Same with Reddit, only the ads are posing as real posts these days, so I guess it's mostly useless whichever way you access it. I quit TikTok entirely because it still kept running in the background, showing me targeted ads about something I mentioned 20 minutes ago, even with Background App Refresh disabled. There is no web version, so I moved on. Fuck em. If there's a mobile web version of something, that's what I'm using.

Also worth mentioning, half of the places I spend my time online are web-based anyway; Atmosphere apps, Fark.com, Lemmy... Just use the website.

I know I'm rambling at this point, but even back in the day when smartphones first started coming out, the thing I was most hyped about was that you could carry around a web browser in your pocket wherever you go. Sometimes I wonder what things would be like if Firefox OS didn't violently crash and burn.

Jonah Hill's Jiu-Jitsu Training Means He'd 'Annihilate' Anyone Calling Him Fat Guy From 'Superbad'

"My favorite thing is people are like, 'Oh, Jonah Hill, fucking fat guy from Superbad,'" Hill said. "And I'm like, 'I would fucking annihilate you, dude. I'm not kidding you. Try it. If you see me, try it, dude. Bring it. Who's got it?'"

What a tool lol I guess I'll just remember him as the crack smoking business guy from Wolf of Wall Street who thinks he's invincible.

NASA Backs Wild Plan for a Laser-Powered Drone to Explore Giant Caves Below the Moon's Surface

The U.S. space agency announced that it will fund research by Austin-based Stone Aerospace, Inc. to develop a tethered lunar-spelunking drone—powered via laser light that will be beamed through a system of fiber optic cables conjoining it to a lunar rover on the Moon’s surface.

Love this. Maybe the caves will be full of mole people. Who, hopefully, aren't too pissed off about Elon's rocket crash landing there tonight.

New AI Chatbot Turns Out to Be One Overworked Guy Answering All the Messages by Hand

“My answers will be slow. They probably won’t be correct, or maybe they could be, but they’ll be very cryptic,” said Bryant. “You will have a bad experience with ChatTJB.”

This is cute! And it only takes roughly eight glasses of water per day to run.

Pokémon Red/Blue 3D Mod Gets New Features Including Third-Person Camera

Dramatic Shape's Voxel Mod is a game changer. So many people on social media are raving about this mod, and rightfully so. It's easy to set up, runs on a number of devices including your Mac, and makes the original Pokémon adventure feel like a brand new game.

The OG Pokémon games are, what, like 30 years old? And they're still absolutely legendary. Idk how many times I've played through Yellow... but it's a lot. One of the first games I ever got for my Gameboy Pocket when I was a kid 🥲

This mod looks sick! I wish it was a traditional ROM patch so I could play it on my Anbernic handheld, but there's a lot going on here so I get why it's not. And it probably wouldn't run too great on an underpowered emulator console anyway. Definitely going to check this out when I get home tonight.

Notes for August 3, 2026

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:26:43 -0400

I went on a work trip - and realised I'm bisexual

I love a good coming out story. Especially when yourself is one of the people you're coming out to. I was in my mid 20s — around the same age as the author when I came out as bi. I didn't even admit it to myself until then... I just thought I was a little more feminine than the typical truck driving, motor cranking, gun shooting friends I hung out with.

One thing I’ve learned throughout my journey is when living as only part of myself, it was far more exhausting than I realised. Stepping into my full identity brought me a kind of joy that changed everything.

I kinda blindsided everyone when I was ready to come out. I met a guy during a night out at the bar with friends and brought him home to the after party. Everyone was so accepting of it and I immediately felt a million pounds lighter. Well aside from one guy who nearly had an existential crisis when he saw us kissing, but that's neither here nor there. That was almost ten years ago, and even though I've now been with a cis (but also bi) woman for about eight years, it's still an important part of my identity.

How to Find an Elusive Four-Leaf Clover

My girlfriend is surprisingly good at this. She can always find at least a couple four leaf clovers within a minute or two any time she tries and I have never found one in my entire life. Makes a lot of sense. I can't even pick out my car keys from other random junk on the kitchen table half the time.

Can Haptics Improve Typing Accuracy on Smartphones? – Boréas Technologies

The mobile physical keyboard had an 89.6% level of accuracy, the haptic-enhanced touchscreen keyboard had an 80% level of accuracy and the non-haptic touchscreen keyboard registered an accuracy level of only 65.8%.

This is insane. It feels like a life hack. I've been bitching about how bad the iPhone keyboard is for years, but I always had haptics turned off because I thought it would save a little battery. Last night I turned it on to see if it made a difference and my typing instantly improved. So much that I had to google it to make sure I wasn't crazy and that's where I found this article from 2019.

This Just In: Milwaukee Transit Passes

The design of the passes was utilitarian and banal until the 1930s when they brought the production in-house and added color, public-service announcements, information about local events, and illustrated depictions of civic history.

It's easy to forget how colorful things were back then, since we view it mostly through a black and white lens. Would love to see more hand-drawn art with some color instead of the sanitized greyscale corporate minimalism of today.

How headlights got brighter, whiter, and more blinding after dark

These things are a fucking nuisance. I've had to flip my rear view mirror up in the DAYTIME they're so bright. If you're behind me with these on the highway, I'm going down to 45mph until you pass me.

Notes for August 2, 2026

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:18:54 -0400

The glorious burden of stockpiling little glass jars

Who DOESN'T have a few dozen of these lying around?

I ♥ RSS

Originally posted to Hacker News and linked to by the guy who invented RSS before coming across my dash: I ❤️ RSS:

Put the badge on your homepage and submit your URL. Once we’ve checked the link back and found your feed, you’re on the list — and in an OPML subscription list any reader can subscribe to in one action.

It's a blog directory like ooh.directory or blogroll.org kinda. But with an emphasis on RSS feeds, and making it easy to subscribe to the firehose through OPML.

MySpace for iPhone in 2010

Some nostalgia from the liminal space between when the internet was a place you only accessed through a beige tower and the beginning of smartphones.

Jacques Vallée Spent 70 Years Investigating UFOs. His Final Journal Says the Mystery Is Bigger Than Aliens.

This is a really interesting read if you're into the search for ET. But like everything else in that area of interest, we're just left wondering. But that's kinda his point; it's a highly speculative field with little evidence and lots of personal testimony.

His final journal does not solve the UFO mystery. It shows why the mystery has survived every effort to solve it: weak evidence mixed with strong experience, secrecy mixed with ignorance, physical anomalies mixed with human meaning, authentic witnesses mixed with opportunists and a culture that demands certainty before the facts can support it.

we don't shame smart glasses wearers enough

Three are two main things here that are terrifying:

These glasses are also vulnerable to attacks, and I'm sure if nudifier apps are already a thing now, it won't take long for live nudification on the glasses. Them wearing smart glasses is in solidarity with the panopticon we are in, with all the pranksters, pickup artist, street interviewers and other online scum who embarrass, scare and harass strangers (especially women) to generate views on social media, and all the disgusting people who generate nudes of people non-consensually via AI.

[...]

Smart glasses wearers can tell people all they want that they are not like that, but no one should believe that. They rely on people not being able to spot the glasses, not knowing what the consequences are, or not knowing what the recording light is for, and their reassurances are worthless as other wearers modify their glasses so the recording light is always off.

[...]

You have to understand that the wearers are playing a significant part in not only gathering faces in motion (for companies like Clearview.AI), but also training spatial data for AI to act in three-dimensional space - eye, head and body movements, hand-eye-coordination and more. This, undoubtedly, will not only be used in autonomous AI weapons, but any context where bots are supposed to replace humans negatively.

Nudify everyone in Costco while providing training data to kill people with the bravery of being out of range. Got it. You're a fucking Stephen Miller tier creep if you own a pair of these.

America's Kinkiest States [Say It With A Condom]

From NYPost.com:

The new study conducted by Say It With A Condom ranked every state by quantifying everything from how many times residents get it on each week to searches for sexy online content and visits to adult-only stores.

In Ohio, we do it missionary style no more than once every two months, with the lights off. The only states that ranked less kinky than us at #45 were Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and Texas.

Streaming apps killed the radio star

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:20:17 -0400

~~Ever since Napster first came out,~~

I'll try that again:

I haven't listened to the radio much since music streaming services leveled the field.

Before that, like everyone else, I pirated everything. Back then you had iTunes and a massive media library of questionable origins — presumably on an external drive connected via FireWire. Everything from Stevie Nicks to Cradle of Filth was filed away in there. Before that you bought everything on CD. And that's as far back as I'm going.

But discovery was always the radio back then, you know? There weren't algorithms telling us what's Hot and Trending. If you were lucky, you lived somewhere with at least one cool station. At the very least, you had shit on MTV like Headbanger's Ball or whatever else was on in the daytime. Even MySpace was a better way to find good tunes than the front page of Apple Music.

We had a cool station in Columbus for a while called CD 102.5. They played GREAT alternative stuff. I could sit there with a pen and notepad and come up with all sorts of music to ~~download~~ eventually, years later, legally add to my Apple Music library for a reasonable monthly subscription fee.

I have totally been sleeping on radio since CD 102.5 went away. And it's not even just Spotify and Apple Music changing the game. It's algorithms; Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube... it's where the influencers are influencing. And where Content goes viral in ways that weren't even possible until pretty recently.

With radio, you have a person with good taste in music curating good music. If it's a station worth listening to, anyway. That's the spirit of this blog, or at least what I'm going for. Trying to find interesting links and curate them into a daily post for... well, mostly for me.

The other night, I went over to Radio Garden to browse around but I didn't know where to start, so I did some digging online and found my latest hyperfixation: KEXP in Seattle.

And this post isn't an ad for them by any means. I like the music they play, but not everyone has the same taste as me. They play a lot of old alternative stuff, a little punk, electronic, and even some death metal every now and then. It's a little bit of everything I listen to, and a lot of it is bands I've never heard of. Plus, with radio you get DJs adding some banter after every few songs. It feels more alive than being alone with an app for the car ride to wherever you're going.

The biggest thing for me is remembering that there are still some really good radio stations on the airwaves. I like consuming things that are curated by people instead of computers.

I realized pretty quickly that I really have no interest in Radio Garden. One good station is enough for me right now, so I got the standalone app for KEXP and now I can favorite the weird, obscure shit they play when I hear something I really like. For the last few years, I've been listening to the same artists I found on CD 102.5 back in the day, most of the Fat Wreck Chords and Epitaph catalogs, local bands from when I was a teenager, and a few newer artists sprinkled in.

There are so many great things we have access to, and idk if it's just because I'm online too much or if it's the same for everyone, but it's easy to forget about "obsolete" tech. Forgotten mediums like radio or even the small web. All of this shit is so punk. DIY, human-made, community funded. There's a lot more noise these days, but a lot of the old, discarded stuff has never truly went away. You just have to know where to look.

Notes for July 31, 2026

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:58:26 -0400

List of active Forums on the web: Forum Revial Movement - Fight for forums on the internet and maintain knowledge, in-depth discussions & the freedom of speech - Active Forum Directory

Forums have played a big role in making the World Wide Web great in the first place. They acted as a melting pot for knowledge and communication between users around the whole world. A whole culture evolved around forums. Not one, but many. Forums served a purpose. They still do. Forums are meaningful. Still. Since the breakthrough of social media and platforms like Discord, forum usage has been in decline for years now. A lot of forums have died already or are abandoned but there still are very active forums and great niche forums with low activity that need us to repopulate 'em. We really should make a turn as the internet society and start using forums again more often. We as well should download and dump forums to be able to archive what once has been written.

I've been so hyperfixated on blogs the last few years, I totally forgot forums used to be so big. They're just as important to the small web / indie web / open social web movement as blogs, if you ask me. I've been hanging out (mostly lurking) on 32-bit Cafe lately and it's unlocking a lot of old memories of browsing stuff like the ESP Guitar forum, XDA Developers, and other sites I used to frequent back before Discord and Reddit stole all the thunder from forums.

What sucks about Discord or Facebook communities is that they're a walled garden for anyone who doesn't want to go through their KYC process and register an account. And before Reddit became the main content of Google search results, forums were king. I dont know that we could possibly get back to how it was in the good old days, but the Forum Revival Movement is a great place to start.

Another cyclospora outbreak grows, source still unknown: FDA

Oh good. This just keeps getting better. Luckily, my autistic ass has been on a steady diet of McDonald's and other highly processed food products since I was in pampers. I knew ordering my McDoubles with only ketchup wasn't for nothing. I'll pass on the blueberries too, for now.

AT Protocol helps attack a lot of these problems. Not by replacing RSS, but by providing better foundation for the data that RSS currently holds.

I love RSS, but it's a pretty old technology that hasn't changed a whole heck of a lot in a long time. I still use it daily, through Miniflux. And even for my paid podcast subscriptions I always opt for the RSS feed to plug into Overcast instead of paying through Apple Podcasts with an in-app purchase.

I think the Atmosphere could provide a pretty nice upgrade; adding a layer of functionality on top of an already great technology, just like it's doing with the web itself.

Introducing the Forkchop:

View post on Bluesky

Winamp is back, with Deezer-powered streaming

Winamp and Deezer announced a partnership on Wednesday that will let Deezer power a new Winamp premium subscription. Deezer supplies the white-label streaming technology and its global licensed catalogue. Winamp keeps its own brand, its own look, and its own idea of how a music player should feel.

God damn it. I already pay for the Apple Music family plan, now I'm gonna have to try this on top of it. There's no way I could talk the rest of the family into switching to Winamp.

Notes for July 30, 2026

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:34:20 -0400

View post on Bluesky

I'm kinda bummed out I'm just now finding out about Fark. It's one of the OG link-sharing sites, pre-dating both Digg and Reddit. Digg tried to re-launch recently but apparently it had a big AI slop problem, so Kevin Rose promptly shut it down and went all in on AI with the re-launch, unfortunately.

Fark still has that old school web charm and a solid little community. I like Fediverse stuff like Lemmy and Piefed, but Fark just has so much more character... it feels like one of the last places online you can find truly interesting links instead of the standard viral news and cirklejerks you find somewhere like Reddit.

It's definitely worth checking out if you miss the wonder and exploration of places like Stumbleupon, Reddit when it was still good, and Digg in the 2000s. And definitely consider subscribing to Total Fark or dropping a donation if you end up as obsessed as I am. I've been glued to this website since I saw Drew's post last night.

Comcast store punished low sales by smashing pies in workers' faces, lawsuit claims

A Comcast store in Plainville, Connecticut, “had a policy that the highest-ranked Retail Sales Consultant for the prior month was instructed by his or her supervisor—Ms. Peterson, the Comcast Store manager—to tie the lowest-ranked sales consultant for the prior month to a chair in the back office and thereafter assault that person by violently smashing a cream pie in their face,” the complaint alleged.

That's the confidence boost you need when you aren't making ends meet this month at your commission-based job... sounds about right for Comcast.

New Pinterest alternative just dropped on the Atmosphere. It looks really, really good. I played around with it for a minute but I've never been big into Pinterest so I don't fully understand what I'm doing. I feel like I missed the boat on that whole thing. I was already on Tumblr back in the day when Pinterest first launched, so I didn't really have a need for another photo blogging app. Then when Tumblr enshittified I was kinda burned out by then, so I never gave it a chance. Seriously looks like a viable alternative if you're into that kinda thing though, and it's designed to be "enshittification proof."

Terry Godier is rolling out a mysterious new app next week 👀

No idea what it is, but I've been loving his cozy RSS reader Current — not to be confused with the ATProto Pinterest alternative I mentioned above, Currents. It's one of the few that sync natively with Miniflux and it has a peaceful UI that just gets out of the way so you can read. Looking forward to finding out about this new thing next week.

Also worth mentioning, Current just had a pretty big update that fixed a lot of bugs and added Feedly support.

Nowadays, everyone uses the same 3 sites for "content" (mind you, I detest this word) and personally, I feel this leads to homogenization. Everyone is playing under the same "rules", the same algorithm and the same potential user base.

There is much value to being outside the curve. Sometimes, it is good to ignore viral trends and do your own thing in your own pace, even if the former feels more enticing and immediately rewarding.

Authenticity is gold in the age of AI-everything.

iOS 27 public beta 2 feels less like a beta than iOS 26

I installed iOS 27 Public Beta 2 last night. I'm not shy about admitting I'm just an end user, so I never do in-depth analysis or technical reviews on stuff like this. But I've gotta say, as some guy just using my iPhone Air for writing, web browsing and every other typical thing you'd expect from your average user, this is the most stable public beta I've ever tested out since switching from Android to an iPhone 13 about five years ago.

After using it all day, (so far) it feels less like a beta than the latest stable version of iOS 26. Even with all the AI shit indexing and optimizing in the background for the last 20+ hours, it's more responsive and snappy than 26. Noticeably. You can adjust the "liquid glassiness" of the UI from a slider in the settings app. While it doesn't completely shut off Liquid Glass, it looks much less glossy and even the icons feel more flat and less cartoony with it cranked up to the highest opacity setting.

Safari got some minor changes too, like the tab for your favorites, bookmarks, reading list and history at the top of the start page. They tweaked the look of the address bar too; mostly to add a tab button to the right and completely hide the menu. You now have to long-press on the address bar to bring up a hidden menu with all the things you'd expect; add to bookmarks, share, close tab, ask Siri, etc. Tbh it looks like they're trying to mimic the functionality of Quiche Browser a bit, if you're familiar with that.

And the biggest part you'll either love or absolutely despise: the new Siri chatbot. I'm not the biggest fan of AI in general, but I'd be lying if I said it's not something I use sometimes. I have the same gripes as everyone else, but it's so good for researching things you can't find on the handful of good search engines that are still left out there.

Disabling Siri is always the first thing I do when I get a new iPhone. A built in voice assistant sounds good on paper, but Siri has always been notoriously terrible. At least as long as I've had an iPhone. That's no longer the case.

Even in this preview version it's so fucking good. It does use a blend of "private cloud" and local models, so I don't know how private it truly is. But holy shit it's good. I still don't know how I feel about a chatbot indexing everything on my phone; having access to all the personal stuff and whatnot. But if these phones are already shipping with special chips made specifically for AI, I might as well at least try it. I'm just stoked that Siri actually does something now. Aside from being a mostly functionless quirk of the os that usually responds with "sorry, I can't help with that."

I probably won't use it for much other than more involved search queries when I'm researching something. But it's surprisingly good at digging through your photo roll with prompts like "find every picture of me with a black and white cat" or searching text threads like "find the text where Tom mentioned the name of that really good Korean restaurant in Dublin six months ago."

I wouldn't recommend being a dipshit like me and installing it on your daily driver, but so far it feels like an immediate upgrade from iOS 26.

Update: 24 hours later. I fear that Siri and Search may never be finished optimizing.

Notes for July 29, 2026

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:06:09 -0400

I am obsessed with Chainsmoker Cat 🚬😸

Yani is a catgirl with a seriously bad smoking habit. Every time she tries to quit, she becomes weak to the cravings and gives in almost instantly. Behind on her rent and unable to hold down a job, her friends and sister rally around to help her out. But when she’s using her pee to put out cigarette fires, they may just have their work cut out for them.

Reminds me of when I was in my 20s, inhaling more Marlboro red smoke than oxygen. It's so trashy and cute and gross.

We discovered a new variant of Super Mario Bros.

Long read about stumbling across a mostly unknown, late variant of SMB and Duck Hunt. I love obscure gaming history like this.

A thought that I've been having lately, albeit in a larval stage, is that "Art is basically pretty much any human activity that AI managed to ruin." ... This is why I will respect any art from any human artist of any skill level. I will cherish anything my friends and fellow artists make, and encourage them to pursue their ideas even if they are not to my taste. Because art is only as engaging if it tells the story they really want to tell.

AI has oddly helped me with succumbing to perfectionism for this reason. Whether it's writing blog posts, music, a little drawing, or even my shitty handwriting, I'd rather be a little quirky and off than run everything through a chatbot and get something dull and sanitized.

That being said, I don't think you should have to go to extreme lengths just to prove you didn't use AI:

More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’

“I find myself writing less mechanically,” she says. “I have this urge to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader, to show that there’s a human behind the words. Like: What if I just invented a phrase? What if I did something unexpected with my punctuation?”

Sounds like things are getting too spicy for the pepper.

I mean unless you're a professional journalist, I don't think you need to take it so serious. It just needs to be human. Personally, I don't have an urge to make mistakes, I'm just kind of an idiot. And that's okay 🤪

Woman helps husband recover from brain surgery in bizarre fashion

... After a few years of doing this, Song somehow managed to accidentlly bite one of Zhao’s toes. For the first time in years, her husband’s foot twitched.

There's gotta be more to this story lol

Notes for July 28, 2026

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:23:03 -0400

Disney Has Met With Macaulay Culkin About New Home Alone Movie: Report

“I’m either a widower or a divorcee. I’m raising a kid and all that stuff. I’m working really hard and I’m not really paying enough attention, and the kid is kind of getting miffed at me, and then I get locked out,” Culkin explained. “My son won’t let me in,” he continued. “And he’s the one setting traps for me. The house is some sort of metaphor for our relationship.”

Killer whales sink another boat off the coast of Spain — why are they still doing this after 6 years?

The whales are alright 🤙

Stop Talking To Me, Google Search

One thing that bugs me about this is the assumptions these offers make about why I’m searching for something. This is by design–Google wrote in the blog post about its May update that the new search is “[d]esigned to anticipate your intent.”

They're giving computers anxiety as a feature. I don't want a search engine to try and anticipate what I might want to search. I'm not in that big of a hurry. Take your time and relax, little robot.

Jeffrey Inscho

I love the idea of smashing the machines that consolidate power and marginalize swaths of people, but the internet is not the enemy here. If anything, the (responsibly used) internet could be a key enabler and vehicle for growing the movement to smash the machines.

I like this take. There's a balance between high tech AI everything and living in the stone age, you know? I've always been a tech nerd, but I think at some point we need to forget about progress for the sake of progress and just slow down. My favorite video games were all made in the 90s. I like stuff recorded on analog equipment and listening to vinyl. I wear a wrist watch that does nothing but tell the time. I don't even hate AI entirely, I just think we need to slow the fuck down and live in the present sometimes.

Miyamoto was pleased the Switch lasted 8 or 9 years, believes customers ‘aren’t always looking for the best specs’

What draws people to Nintendo consoles, then? Obviously, the unique games it creates. “At Nintendo we always offer ‘styles of play that only we can create,’ and this includes the [hardware] interface,” Miyamoto states. Comparing the Switch to smartphones, he elaborates, “Our console has the benefit of being faster and more flexible [to develop for] compared to smartphones. When creating for general-use platforms, the workload is higher as you have to ensure it is compatible with all versions [of smart device].”

I can't even tell you how hard PlayStation and Xbox people try to convince me not to buy Nintendo products. Before I bought the OLED switch, all of my friends told me it's a waste of money because the specs are shit and none of the good games are available for it. Meanwhile I'm having a blast playing the retro console catalogues you get with Switch Online, all of the Mario games, Borderlands 1-3, and every metroidvania I can get my hands on.

I don't like realistic war simulators, or racing simulators... I don't like any super realistic games tbh. I want to get baked and jump inside of a cartoon. Nintendo has had that locked down since the 80s. I'm going to hang on to my OLED Switch until they launch a Switch 2 with the OLED screen; I literally couldn't care less about specs.

...although I am a little bummed out I haven't been able to play Borderlands 4 yet.

Notes for July 27, 2026

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:38:05 -0400

'Glad the Children Were Not Hurt': A Viral Video Claiming to Show Kids Chasing ICE Agents With Water Guns Has X Divided Over What Really Happened

Wild how sensitive a bunch of nazis are to a little water lol fuck those guys. The kids are alright.

AI-generated fake historic images are destroying our past, present, and future

I could find at least one solid reason every day on why gen AI images are a plague. As a side note, I also think it's a little sus that extraordinary things like "UFO disclosure" didn't start to happen in a meaningful way until AI got good at shitting out pictures that are almost impossible to distinguish from reality. What do we really have left when we can't trust anything we hear or see?

AI-generated ‘doctors’ peddling fake cures on TikTok are a ‘huge danger’, experts warn

I miss when the only medical advice people trusted from online was when WebMD told you it was probably cancer.

How The Watchmen Inspired Comic Sans - Doc Pop's Weblog

Comic Sans is pretty popular lately for whatever reason. Here's a post from Doc Pop on its origins:

Did you know that Comic Sans is heavily based on the lettering of dark, gritty comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns

He renders a few panels from classic comics in the font, next to the original font for comparison. Neat!

Four bytes could freeze any Pentium in 1997

I get all pissy when the supercomputer in my pocket takes five seconds to load a web page sometimes. Reading stuff like this is always a welcomed reality check. Tech has come a long way in the last 30 years.

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

The project, available on GitHub, is called "Audio Cassette Simulation" and uses FFmpeg to transcode audio files to get that "wish I'd bought some decent tapes instead of the superstore's own-brand" sound.

This sounds kind of dumb at first, but I get it. I play old video game ROMs with CRT filters and shaders to make my LCD monitor look like a 40 year old TV set. I listen to music on vinyl for the old school experience, even if I'm pretending it sounds so much better. Never forget where you came from 📼

note: yes I know that's a VHS tape emoji. They didn't have any for cassette tapes 😤