September’s been a busy month with lots of moving parts, but there’s been some fun stuff along the way. This week, my wife got to meet a cousin from her father’s side of the family that she connected with through DNA testing. This was the first in-person meeting with anyone from that side of the family in many decades. It was a really cool thing to witness.

Our daughter turned 20 and my dad also celebrated his birthday this month. Time marches on like the pain in the ass it is.

Rex the rabbit has been battling some health issues, but seems to be doing pretty well after his most recent vet visit. I tell you, this dude is the best but man, I was not fully prepared for the level of work (and money) involved with a rabbit. But with that face (see below), how could we not do everything we can for him, ya know?

This month, I declared Podcast Queue Zero, moving my entire batch of 602 queued episodes to a separate playlist. It’s nice to know it’s there to dip into when I want, but I don’t feel the stress associated with having a 20-day long queue (!!).

I tried date seed coffee for the first time. Not a bad alternative to decaf! Nutty and a little smoky, though thinner (if you strain it) than regular coffee.

The movie I was an extra in 20 years ago is now streaming on Tubi. Find me on the right side of the screen about five minutes in by the guy with the megaphone.

Have a good last few days of the month!

Some Links Worth Sharing

• The Flattening (Phonezilla) - “I can spend many hours researching a specific type of backpack. Things that may have been one guy’s fan site in the past are now hundreds of people who have researched and analyzed every aspect of every backpack to the nth degree.” Missed this the first time around. Good stuff.
• I Don’t Like Passkeys (Ethan Hawksley) - They are, honestly, a pain in the ass and I have yet to be convinced otherwise.
• Canyon Groove - A pretty nifty project inspired by the grooves in a vinyl record, turning other much larger grooves (like the Grand Canyon) into music.
• Love Anyway (The Marginalian) - “You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.”
• Static Site Generators for Beginners (brennan.day) - Fantastic history and tutorial about SSGs.
• We Must Create the Shit Machine (McSweeney’s) - “For as long as humans have created SHIT with our BODIES AND BUTTS, we have been asking this FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: What if there were a COMPUTER that could ALSO SHIT?”
• We have fact sheets for many health conditions. Why isn’t there one for ‘What to do on the day your loved one dies’? (The Guardian)
• We’re all reading the same five things (Mehran Khalili)

Media Notes

Podcasts

• ‘How We Disappear’ is a Stanford historian’s take on our personal archives - A discussion about “the small pieces that form our identities, a concept historians called “original order” and why How We Disappear is really a book about entropy.” I’ve already put this book on hold at the library.

Music

• Eleven76’s A Day of Unrest is a heavy funk soundtrack for a spy thriller that doesn’t exist. So good.
• Plumb by David Murray, ?uestlove, and Ray Angry is headphone listening at its finest.

Movies

• Equalizer 2000 (1987) was one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a while, even with that amazing cover.
• Kaili Blues (2015) was a really amazing, meditative film that you can never quite get a handle on. There’s an astonishingly beautiful one-take tracking sequence that goes on and on and on and will stay with you for a long time. Bi Gan seems like such an interesting director and I’m looking forward to watching some of his other films.

Some good videos

• Ravi Coltrane Teaches Us How to Listen to his Father’s Catalog
• Starting from Scratch: A Stroke Nearly Silenced DJ Shortkut
• Philadelphia police, FBI investigating possible serial killings - Crazy story that takes place just a few blocks away from where my dad grew up.
• Cassandra Wilson - Death Letter - JAZZ OPEN STUTTGART 1996 - RIP.

Site Notes

• I bumped up default text size on the site because it always seemed a bit tiny for me. I think it’s better?
• New post: Writing About Talking About Running
• New post: Platter chatter! Teen chatter!
• Added a tiny link to the home page pointing peeps to the /start page.
• A number of minor updates to the Digital Garden
• As noted earlier, set up a new mailing list mechanism.

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I paused, because considering the context, this was an odd question. Did Miles and I look like we were practicing for a dog show?

But then I thought, “I bet I’ve talked to this guy about running before.” There are a few folks that I’ve had one-off conversations with over the years because they’ve seen me out-and-about in the neighborhood racking up miles. They know me well because they see me running by but I really have no idea who they are because, well, I don’t see them. I’m also not great with names/faces/contexts with people that I only meet once or twice, so I’ll generally try and fake it a bit if I get into a conversation with someone that seems like they know me.

There have been a number of times that running has led to discussions with seemingly random people. Once, a woman came up to me in a coffee shop and said, “It’s weird not to see you running!” I had never met her in my life, but apparently I run past her frequently. Another time, a woman stopped me while I was running in the evening to tell me, “I’m so proud to see you out running at this time of night!” and we chatted about how she was just beginning to train for a marathon. And there are plenty of neighbors and friends I would hardly ever see if it wasn’t for my hitting the pavement since I’m a pretty solitary person in general.

As the bike guy (we hadn’t exchanged names yet) pulled over to talk, I told him, “Not really. These days I really only do a race or two a year. Mainly just a charity 5k, though I’ve run up to a half-marathon. I mainly run for health… and mental health.”

We went on to discuss recent news stories about movement and how simple walking or running can help stave off many of the health ailments that proliferate today. I told him that since I sit so much during the day, running is a form of self-preservation, particularly with a family history of heart disease (don’t worry, I didn’t start talking to him about lipoprotein(a)… yet).

He let me know where he lives in the neighborhood and I returned the favor. We exchanged names and went about our days.

I’m still not totally sure if we’ve chatted before or not, but it was a nice little diversion this morning with a neighbor. It’s kind of funny to think that a quiet solo run in the neighborhood can actually be a social activity that introduces me to people without me realizing it because the other person is in their car, looking out their window, or mowing their lawn.

Some stuff broke with my Occasional Weeknote mailing list when I moved to Netlify, but I think it’s all fixed now. If you’re one of the few that got these posts via email before, this one should be the first one in the last couple of months that gets sent. We shall see!

Apartment move-in for the older kiddo and starting high school for the younger kiddo both went well. Moving into an apartment is miles easier than moving into a dorm, so while I still think dorm living helps shape one’s college experience, as a parent, I’m not going to complain about the easier move.

George the cat is in his new home and reportedly doing well!

Otherwise, life continues to move forward. Nights are starting to cool just enough that autumn is feeling close. Evening runs have felt less oppressive and as a result, my pace has picked up a bit. Plus, sleeping with the window open… that’s possible again.

And with that, I’ve got a lot to share this time around.

Some Links Worth Sharing

• On Hardcore Kindness (krrd) - Being “kind” and being “nice” are not the same thing.
• What does it mean to be ‘underground’ in 2026? (Dazed) - When no one has heard a song by a “mainstream” artist and “underground” artists are selling out stadiums, what does the term even mean any more? Interesting look at the shift in the terminology’s evolution.
• In Praise of “Wordy, Old Prose.” (Or, F*ck Your AI Reading Buddy) (LitHub)
• Woke What? Let’s Be Fucking Serious (Organizing My Thoughts) - “The fact that people had ideas about how to transform that government with leftward momentum—to create a world with less state violence, where more public needs would be met—did not create the dystopia we are living in. Nazi ideologies and a neoliberal status quo too weak and pathetic to fight off fascism did that.”
• Tea as a Cure For Brainrot - “Vinyl, espresso coffee making, gongfu tea, all of these require you to take a moment and slow the fuck down.”
• A history of Wu-Tang Clan and Philly - WXPN’s piece from last year gives my man G the flowers he deserves for helping Wu-Tang from day one.

Media Notes

Reading

• Read Nick Drnaso’s Beverly, a graphic novel.
• Read Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story by Julia Wertz, graphic non-fiction. Really liked this description of the “golden hour,” which she wrote about in not-such glowing terms: “It’s the kind of light that makes you pause and take stock of your life. If you’re in a good mood, the leg is calming and makes you feel like you’re exactly where you should be. But if you’re not where you should be, it’s a harsh light that creates dark corners and shadows. It makes you feel desperately lonely.”
• Started the audiobook of Karen Russell’s The Antidote.

Podcasts

• 1537: “Against Melancholy” by Nathan McClain (The Slowdown) - “Joy can startle us. It asks us to tip the scales in one direction, knowing how sharp the come down can feel afterward. […] I’m beginning to understand that joy doesn’t exist separate from pain, but in spite of it.”
• How Social Media Makes Our Lives Smaller (Galaxy Brain) - A chat with Kathryn Jezer-Morton “about how authentic has become something different from true, and how people’s arcs on social media tend to point only upward.”
• Maria Popova on Turning Matter Into Meaning (The Nature Of with Willow Defebaugh) - I’ve been loving Popova’s new book Traversal every bit as much as I loved Figuring. She really is one of the great thinkers of our time, able to connect history, literature, and philosophy unlike anyone else.
• The Latest Research on Gen Z’s Reading Habits (Book Riot) - Gen Z’s reading a lot, just not necessarily a lot of books (though, of course, there’s plenty of that going on, as well, perhaps more than we give them credit for).

Music

• A few weeks ago, driving to drop my daughter off for her sophomore year of college, I revisited the amazing Spinbad Rocks the Casbah: ’80s Megamix by DJ Spinbad. It’s an astonishingly good mix of 80’s pop tunes blended up in a hip-hop style with plenty of zigga-ziggas and pop culture samples dropped in. A pure delight, especially for heads of a certain age. Sadly, Spinbad passed in 2020 at the age of 46, but thankfully his full mix is still available (I listened to a CD version, which is just a shorter version of the full mixtape version linked here - I have not confirmed this linked version hasn’t had any audio dropped from it).
• On the jazz front, the new Linda May Han Oh album Beneath Lifted Skies is a fantastic album with saxophonist Melissa Aldana covering jazz “standards, bebop classics, free improvisations and solo meditations.” I’ve only listened once, but I think this is going to end up being one of my favorites of the year.
• My cousin Brandon passed away three years ago this week, so I listened to an anthology of his music, in his memory. He was really talented.
• I revisited Cassandra Wilson’s Blue Light ‘Til Dawn for the first time in years. I remember hearing her first on WRTI in Philadelphia in the early 90s and being taken aback at how different her take on jazz was. The album holds up and still gives me that dark, haunted feeling I had when I first heard her music.
• Half Pint’s got a new song out!
• Enjoyed the new Linda Lindas album on first listen. They go extra hard on tracks like “Blood On Our Hands” (where they drift from punk to metal).
• The August 5th episode of CKUT’s Jazz Euphorium is a good one.

Movies/TV

• If you’ve got Dropout, don’t miss the Don Hertzfeldt Collection.
• For some light viewing, I enjoyed Steve Carrell’s new show, Rooster, on HBO Max. Nothing groundbreaking, but just some solid, post-work, “I’m tired, what to watch”-type TV.

Some good videos

• Stretching with Superfoot - Whatever Steve was paid, it wasn’t enough.
• M. Piečaitis: Catcerto - A Lithuanian conductor leads his orchestra to accompany a video of his cat playing the piano.
• 1970’s Worst Toy Ever Made Commercial # 1 - The 70s were so weird.
• I’ve been sleeping on ESPN8: Men’s Pillow Fight Championship: Leo Carvalho vs. Leandro Apollo and 2026 Slippery Stairs Races tell me I need to pay more attention.

Site Notes

• Added a /start page telling visitors where they can, you know, start.
• New mixtape added: The Gold Tape.
• Added a page with 10,000+ of my favorite songs. These are the songs that drive my Random 10 page. This is exactly the kind of stupid stuff I love seeing on personal web sites.
• Added a newly archived mid-90s house mix tape called Eat More Flush by my cousin Greg.
• I added a handful of old posts to the archive. See if you can find ’em! (Mostly in the 2008-2011 range.)

It feels like life rarely gives us time to pause and breathe these days, but I think I’m just in one of those waves of life where you put one foot in front of the other and keep it moving forward. Things will ease up a bit soon as we get back into the school year routine.

Hope y’all are well.

Some Links Worth Sharing

• Why I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi for browsing - Thoughtful overview of why he switched to Vivaldi, noting the quirks and issues as well. As I’ve said before a million times: I started using Opera back on version 2.12 in 1996 (!) and stuck with it for a really long time, switching over to Vivaldi not long after Opera’s core team moved on.
• show respect - name things correctly - “When you are saying you are “basically vegan, but still eat xyz”, you are making things complicated for others, and reduce the lifestyle choice to merely food intake.” Hard agree! The “almost vegan” thing always strikes me as a way to say “I’m like you, but not quite as crazy about it all!” Which, ya know, is kinda’ insulting. I’d much rather someone say, “I’m vegetarian, working towards being vegan” or “I’ve cut back on how many animal products I eat.”
• Library, An Adventure - “I grabbed a couple of books in the first bookcases, and stumbled up to the volunteer at the desk. I trembled as I placed the books on the counter and the library card on top.”
• Workism, AI and Vocations - A nice response to the “Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?” article in Noema.
• The Latest Elegy for Music Journalism and Middle-Class Musicianhood - “Why can’t we reframe [a side hustle] as a radical act of autonomy, to essentially be your own patron? Why do we always assume the grass is greener? Or that every job must involve our creativity, as if it’s going to disappear should we save some for ourselves?”
• Ordinary Abundance - Can’t even express how delightful this is. (via Joe by way of Ashur)

Media Notes

Reading

• Read Why Bushwick Bill Matters by Charles Hughes and two recent Billy Collins collections, Water, Water and Dog Show
• Finished Ryōkan’s This and That: Selected Short Poems of Zen Master Ryokan
• Finished Robin Sloan’s Moonbound

Podcasts

• Endless Thread: “The Lost Loophole - “In 1947, [Kurt] Gödel told [Oskar] Morgenstern and Einstein he had identified an inner contradiction in the U.S. Constitution while studying for his citizenship test: the type of loophole that could plunge the United States into a dictatorship not unlike the Nazi regime Gödel had escaped when he immigrated from Austria. So, what was the loophole?”

Music

• Thanks to Mike Lupica at WPRB for turning me onto the Death Valley Girls. I love their 2020 record Under the Spell of Joy and have listened to it a number of times over the past few weeks. Some great party rocking surf punk.
• I saw the Jeff Cosgrove Quintet at a local library recently and loved their avant-garde left-field free jazz vibes. It was pleasantly surprising to hear something challenging and not Ellington covers for the 100th time (Ellington’s great, but I appreciated the covers being Ornette Coleman and Andrew Hill this time).
• It’s kind of weird to listen to the Geto Boys in my middle age, but after reading the book on Bushwick, I wanted to revisit the music that engaged me so much in my teens. It was a good listen, but obviously a bit problematic and complicated.
• I continue to enjoy exploring my physical collection and re-finding gems. This week it was the 1994 collection The Music of Vietnam, Volume 1.1.

Movies

• Rewatched the excellent Mon Oncle. Tati is the absolute best.
• I’m not much of an anime guy, but I really enjoyed On-Gaku: Our Sound.
• The Librarians was a good look at what these heroes are going through with the stupid attacks on free speech and thought by conservatives.
• Rewatched the amazing time capsule Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Zebraman is just amazing (in the follow-up 20 years later, he’d moved on from metal to country music). (Free on YouTube.)

Some good videos

• Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne Draw (and Roast) Each Other - This new series from PBS where folks draw each other during a short interview is a lot of fun. Has also featured Sarah Silverman and Brett Goldstein so far.

Site Notes

• Added a local archive of all my posts on Mastodon back to 2018 (and Twitter from 2008-2019). Updates daily.
• Scanned: an MEI/Micro Center catalog from 1990.
• Added two 1985 mixtape entries.
• Two posts: Happy 150th to Andrew and Three Cushion.

Is the guy on the left aiming to block the shot of the guy on the right? Or is he also aiming for the red ball, but has poor vision? What is the guy in the white suit (Isao, I assume) hoping is the outcome of this particular battle? Does “Three Cushion” mean something that I don’t know?

The back cover creates more questions rather than providing answers:

Isao Suzuki was a bad ass bass player. His album covers were nearly as bad ass.

Interestingly, that shot was taken on the farm he purchased from the family of Robert Purvis, an active member of the Abolitionist movement in Philadelphia and the only African-American to lead a major abolitionist organization. He was a key figure in the Underground Railroad (along with William Still), president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery society, and at the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln was going to have Purvis head up the Freedmen’s Bureau (though Purvis had to leave the post when President Johnson gutted the Bureau during Reconstruction).

In the barn, one of my great-uncles found a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Many years later, he was reading about an upcoming exhibition in Philadelphia at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum called ‘‘Of Color, Humanitas and Statehood: The Black Experience in Pennsylvania Over Three Centuries.’’ As he went through the article, he recalled the painting in the attic. It had been sitting there, untouched and dust-covered for decades. He had a “gut feeling” that the portrait belonged at the exhibition and said to himself, “Beautiful. It’s the 300th anniversary [of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia], these are the people that should have it.”

When the curators saw the painting, they were taken aback. The painting was by African-American artist David Bustill Bowser, who was already known for one portrait of Lincoln as well as one of abolitionist John Brown. Charles L. Blockson, a historian who was the exhibition’s project director, was thrilled by finding of this long lost painting, “We knew Bowser had painted two Lincolns, but we never knew what had happened to this one.’’

Oil on paper photo, laid down on honeycomb paper, mounted on canvas, 1865. 710x560 mm; 28x22 inches (oval). Inscribed "Original Photo in Oil by D. B. Bowser, July 3, 1865" in oil on verso.

The painting was valued in 2012 at between $60 and $90,000 (it was long out of the family’s possession at that point).

What’s crazy is that none of Andrew’s grandchildren had ever heard about this story until I uncovered stories about it in newspaper research!

Fascinating stuff.

Anyway, happy birthday to Andrew: immigrant, leather factory worker, shoe repairman, and farmer.

(The original version of this post appeared on Mastodon.)

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I wrote a bit about it on the site already, but I thought I’d comment a little more about the process here. Since I was moving from a service that had Hugo on the backend, I decided to stick with Hugo as an SSG, figuring that the content migration would be easier (it was, mostly). However, while I’m fine dealing with code changes locally, I didn’t want to only write my posts and pages locally and have to deploy them from my laptop. I wanted to be able to write or make quick edits on my phone from elsewhere.

To solve that issue along with “where do I host this thing?” I decided to go with Netlify’s free tier and tack on the Sveltia CMS as a front-end GUI for content. This means I post via Sveltia’s GUI, it saves the change to the content folder in Github¹, then Netlify runs Hugo to build the static site, which is hosted on their servers. Since I’m so used to using either a hosted service or the traditional “FTP your site up to a shared server on a webhost,” it admittedly took me a little bit to wrap my head around the workflow, but it all makes sense now and the process forced me to learn a little more about Hugo.

What surprised me most was that I didn’t mind screwing around with this stuff. For the last few years, I did everything I could to not deal with app updates, managing servers, installing extensions, mf’ing repos, blah blah blah. But I think this gives me a little more flexibility without being too complicated. And it’s a little more hardcore (eventually).

Some Links Worth Sharing

• Last Purchases (Paul @ Phonezilla) - On shifting what’s important in one’s life.
• What’s not to like? (Barrett Hathcock) - A good exercise in remember that there’s a lot to like.
• Switzerland has turned its train tracks into solar power plants (GoodGoodGood) - Dropping solar panels between otherwise unused space between railroad tracks as an experiment in generating power. Good stuff. (via ResearchBuzz)
• Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web (Zeldman) - “And just like that, a decade of your life becomes a page of 404s.”
• stop asking writers about “AI” (Benjamin Hollon) - “If you’re a writer, I beg you: never stop writing. I will say as many times as I have to that I would far prefer reading anything you write, no matter how terrible you think it is, than anything an “AI” spat out.”
• AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop (404 Media) - So dark and depressing (though bookshops are doing well so… yay?).

Media Notes

Reading

• Finished:
  • Flying At Night: Poems 1965-1985 by Ted Kooser
  • The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions by Ruth Ozeki
  • Weathering the Storm: Navigating the Anti-Social Justice Wave by Tiffany G. Townsend
• Started Traversal by Maria Popova

Podcasts

I’ve been digging Hank Green’s Humans podcast recently. I’ve only listened to the John Green and Ze Frank episodes, but both are really good, thoughtful discussions.

Music

I haven’t done a good job keeping track of the music I’ve really dug over the last month, so let me use this space to tell you to go see my man (and occasional music collaborator) DJ Ragz on tour with the Bumpin’ Uglies!

Also, there’s some good music down in the video section below.

Movies

• The Queen of Black Magic is a batshit early-80s Indonesian horror flick with several unexpected jaw-dropping moments. For fans of out there folklore-based horror. (In a similar vein: Santet.)
• Watched Obsession with the teen and was impressed. One of the better horror movies of the last decade, for sure.
• Re-watched Wildwood, N.J., perhaps the most New Jersey of documentaries, it focuses on teens at the shore town of Wildwood during the summer of 1993. I spent tons of time in Wildwood at that time, but this was a very different crowd than the one I hung with! Love that this is female-directed and focuses primarily on the experience of women at the shore.

Some good videos

• Digital Underground: “Blue View” - A video for a song that was only available for a short time about a decade ago. The song itself will change what you think about Shock G (RIP) and DU’s music and the video is pretty entrancing.
• So Imagine: Kickboxer
• TRADWIFE Explains What Happened To Good Christian Conservative Men - The Onion is already doing good things with their new InfoWars brand.
• Barrington Levy - Summerjam Festival 2026 -ARTE Concert - Barrington is still one of the best voices in all of music.
• Tiny Desk: Napalm Death - Saw them live in 2001 with Isis, Soylent Green, Decapitate, and Diecast. It was a slightly different experience than a 2026 Tiny Desk concert on TV.

Site Notes

• Added a local version of my People & Blogs interview from January.
• Posted about some old school gaming (the only kind I really do these days): Eyes Without a Space Invader.
• The Junited post is complete (it has been for almost a month!) with 30 IndieWeb posts for you to dig into.
• Posted about typewriters and computer keyboards and how my Safeway club card is older than my adult child and George, our neighborhood cat.
• Posted my first Mid-Run Minute in over a year.
• My mailing list/newsletter thing (where Weeknotes are sent via email) is now managed by a different service. The four of you that were subscribed were moved over and I’m sure you’re thrilled.
• New project on the way!

The next day, I was outside chatting with my next-door neighbor when a woman drove by asking if we’d seen two loose cats. I said, “No, but our neighbor down the block found one yesterday.” I connected them, and the woman happily took her cat back home, thanking us. She’d just gotten two cats from a friend. The other was still missing, but she was glad to have this orange one (who my neighbor decided to name “George”) back home.

One morning a week later, I came downstairs  and there was George, hanging out on our porch. He’s a super sweet cat, so he relished the attention I gave him. I picked him up and brought him back down to his person’s house. When I knocked on the door, she answered and kind of waved me away, saying, “No, no… he’s an outdoor cat now. I found my other cat and he’s inside.” I clarified that she was letting him live as an outdoor cat and she confirmed. It all seemed a bit off to me, but there wasn’t too much I could do at that point, so I went home and just figured I’d keep an eye on things. Maybe the two cats didn’t get along and this was her way of dealing with the issue.

Over the next two weeks, George made our porch his new home. He was there for 3/4 of every day. We had water out in bowls, laid out ice packs for him to lay near, set up a small shelter, and started feeding him because though he looked happy and generally healthy, he was a little skinny. We couldn’t bring him inside to hang out, unfortunately, as our dog is extremely reactive to cats and was already losing his mind that one was living on our porch. But we loved sitting outside with George and he loved our attention. He was super sweet, always greeting us with this cute little meow, rubbing against our legs, and trusting us fully to pet his belly when he rolled onto his back. Just a joy.

Yesterday, we noticed George had a small cut on his head and some goop coming out of his eye. It was at this point we realized that we needed to check in with his people again. We knew George wasn’t chipped and wasn’t fixed. I also highly doubted that he was treated for flea and tick prevention or that he’d had any vaccines. So my wife went down and chatted with the woman and this time the woman said, “No. We’ve never had cats before and I can’t deal with two. We already have this one inside. You take the orange one.”

Our jaws hit the ground. Turned out that not only had she not gotten this cat all his shots, she also hadn’t been feeding him and basically just let him fend for himself. If we hadn’t started feeding him, this poor cat would have been a complete mess.

We called our other neighbor that had originally found George and she took him in. George is getting a vet visit today and they’ll likely foster him for a couple weeks until he is either adopted or can be fostered by another volunteer. We’ve got a potential adoption lead.

We’ve all grown to love this little dude over the last few weeks and though we miss having his daily porch visits, we are happy he’s on his way to finding a forever home where he can get all the attention he desires.

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My initial “comeback” a couple of years ago was predicated by a desire to have a site but not be a sysadmin. I didn’t want to worry about build pipelines or CMS maintenance or any of that. I just wanted to write. Over the last couple of years, though, I’ve ended up tweaking things and doing customizations that reminded me that going beyond just writing can still be fun. So, now I’m running Hugo locally (with a Sveltia front-end) and deploying to Netlify. Seems kinda OK.

In an attempt to not blog about blogging too much, I’m not going into any other motivations behind my move.

Let’s see how this goes.

I’m not sure how many of the typewriter shops on this early COVID-era list still exist, but there have to be at least a handful that remain, clacking away and doing their thing.

It occurred to me that, even moreso than typewriter fanatics, there are scores of people obsessed with computer keyboards, especially when you get into mechanical and gaming keyboards. Where are all the computer keyboard shops?

I’m obviously not the first person to ask this and, indeed, there’s a whole keyboard store map, but from what I can tell, these are all manufacturers or online shops rather than physical shops where you can go try the wares out in person. I’m sure some general purpose tech stores (a la Frys, RIP) let you type away at some keyboards, but how great would it be to have a dedicated shop? Maybe even combined with a typewriter shop, so you can invite all the clackers (that’s what I’m going to call the collective group of keyboard and typewriter enthusiasts, OK?)¹ into one space. Get your typewriter repaired and your custom mechanical keyboard made in the same location.

I feel like there must be one of these somewhere in NYC. If not, entrepreneurs: there’s an idea for you to run with.

I never bothered setting up a new card when we moved, so for the last 26 years I’ve been using the same Safeway Club Card. And despite the fact I can’t recite my daughter’s current cell phone number, I still remember the landline we had almost three decades ago for a mere 18 months.

This amuses me greatly and makes me wonder just a bit what might have gotten pushed out of my head to make room for that fact.

Timeline Arcade's couches and consoles

I’m not much of a gamer these days, but I have fond memories of time in arcades back in the 80s, so I tend to drift towards machines from that era when I’m in these sorts of places. There were three games that caught my attention this time around and I spent some time with.

First up: Phoenix, from 1980, a fixed shooter game (think Space Invaders, Galaga, etc.) It’s basic stuff: you’re shooting at ships that are coming at you in a variety of speeds and patterns and you’re armed with your guns and a limited force field shield to protect you in urgent situations. It was fucking hard and quickly frustrated my few attempts. I made it past the first level once on one credit. (Play Phoenix on the Internet Archive.)

Second: Timber, from 1984 and by the same developer that created Tapper, which I was familiar with (the one where you’re a bartender sliding beers–or later, root beer–down a bar).¹ The goal of Timber: chop down trees while avoiding bears that throw beehives at you. Very simple but frustrating because it was a pain in the ass to position yourself in the correct position to chop down the trees. And I kept walking into the trees which, rather than just stopping you from moving, knocked you to the ground so you had to wait a couple of seconds to stand back up again. (Play Timber or Tapper on IA.)

Lastly, the one I enjoyed the most: Eyes, a Pac-Man inspired maze game from 1982 where you shoot dots (rather than eating them) and are shot at by creepy floating eyes (instead of ghosts). Very simple gameplay, but super enjoyable. Levels get progressively harder because the pursuing eyes wait less time to shoot at you while also increasing their number and speed. I managed to get to the second level on one credit during my initial few plays. This is the one I’ll be trying again from home. (Play Eyes on IA.)

(Hey there! Thanks for reading this via RSS... RSS is great. But, just as a reminder, it's sometimes nice to swing by laze.net to see the content in context, along with a bunch of other stuff that's not available via RSS!)

Last week, I had my second ER visit of the year (I’m fine, but learned what it feels like to pass out… it’s weird and disorienting). I’d be OK with no more ER visits this year.

I’ve been doing a lot of jumping around from one thing to another, deciding what to digitize next, especially now that I’ve got a way to digitize vinyl and 8-tracks without having to move any equipment around. Beyond digitizing, I’ve been feeling that pull to new projects, but I’m trying to pull back a bit and make sure I refocus attention on some existing ones I had a goal to finish this year.

Hope your summer is off to a good start.

Some Links Worth Sharing

• Jan. 6 DOJ Archive - Lawfare was able to archive the vast majority of the thousands of documents related to Jan. 6 that the DOJ has disappeared.
• Total strangers mocked my selection as Princeton’s valedictorian | Opinion - I could feel myself getting so angry reading this. I long for the day where African-American studies being mocked is far, far behind us.
• The Handwritten Blog - Every part of the site is handwritten (with a reMarkable 2), including the headers and nav (via)

Media Notes

Reading

• Finished four books:
  • Transcription by Ben Lerner
  • All Blood Runs Red: The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard―Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy by Phil Keith with Tom Clavin
  • (after two years!) Jacques Tati by David Bellos
  • Leavings: Poems by Wendell Berry
• Started four really engaging books:
  • Moonbound by Robin Sloan
  • Weathering the Storm: Navigating the Anti-Social Justice Wave by Tiffany G. Townsend
  • The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki, her first book of short stories, based loosely around a minor character from one of her novels.
  • Flying At Night: Poems 1965-1985 by Ted Kooser

Podcasts

Have I told you that you should be listening to James’ “Wonders of Web Weaving” podcast where he chats with IndieWeb folks? You should. It’s slow, thoughtful, and downright pleasant.

Music

Listened and re-listened to a handful of really good records over this past month, outlined on my album log page. Three jazz albums from 2026 that were among them:

• BlankFor.ms, Jason Moran, Marcus Gilmore: Shards - I haven’t heard this trio’s first outing, but I really enjoyed this one, particularly the glitchy loopiness of “Tape Loop A Echo.”
• Kiri Ra!: nen - One of those hard to define records that comes at the genre from multiple angles. When it’s at its quiet best, it’s sublime in its subtlety.
• Harry Skoler: Echoes - Enjoyable quartet work with Skoler’s warm clarinet leading the way through . Frisell’s fantastic on guitar (duh) and Dezron Douglas on bass makes me want to search out more of his work. Recommended: “JW, Michaelangelo, & the 40 Cent Burger (for James),” “Marian (for Marian).”

Movies

I watched The Exorcist and The Shining with my 14-year-old this month, both by his request. Love that he’s wanting to see some of the classics.

Some good videos

I’ve been getting into longform videos of people talking about their favorite records. The series I’ve been digging the most recently: Patrick the Pack Rat’s “Record Rooms” series.

Site Notes

• “Media Consumption” became just “Media” in the main nav and now has a subnav.
• Additionally, there’s now a sparse Movies page.
• Updated my Random 10 page to show just a text list by default and then allowed you to toggle the J-Card view (which is cool, but can be a little wonky, particularly on mobile).
• Handful of new posts:
  • Ray’s photos: Car racing in the 1930s - Photos my grandfather took of dirt tracking in the 1930s.
  • Finding maximum friction in your music listening - Listening to 45s.
  • Garbage Bandcamp pages - Some mysterious spam/scam pages flooding Bandcamp.
  • Junited (updated throughout June) - I’ve recommended a post from the IndieWeb every day this month.
  • Productive weekend - Sometimes, the best thing you can do is write about fixing a washing machine for $8.

My grandmother said he raced in Pennsylvania, where he would drop her off at a dance and he would go to race. She didn’t know for the longest while that that’s where he went after dropping her off.

The family story is that he stopped racing after seeing one his friends killed. My grandmother noted that he appeared in a magazine of some sort during this period.

I’ve been told these cars were “spirit car” dirt track racers, a kit car popular for dirt racing in 1930’s (essentially a modified Ford Model T).

Original photos are approx 2x2" prints. I’d like to find some more detail about these cars, the possible location, and maybe even the people involved.

(ETA: Thanks to Jessamyn for pointing out some 1937 Philadelphia area articles about time trials with Durst Specials and Riley Specials. Those were not car names unique to the driver, but car models (so you might see several Riley Specials in one race). Timelinewise, this would match up when he was dating my grandmother. Jessamyn also shared a 1933 article listing my grandfather in the graduating class of an automobile mechanics course.)

Over the past week or so, I’ve decided that there may not be a more friction-filled way to play music in our modern age than grabbing a stack of 45s and listening deeply. Not only do you have to get up and flip the record to the other side, you need to do it after every song. And those songs are rarely longer than three or four minutes long due to the physical limitations of the medium. (Of course, this wasn’t news to me–I know how 45s work–but I was thinking about how people that are looking for intentional friction when playing music are probably not looking for that much friction.)

Recently, about 150 7"s were offered up on my local Buy Nothing group that I happily snapped up. I was told they came from an estate sale (and they seem to have originated from a DC radio station), but I could tell they were well cared for. As I flipped through, even though a lot of the music was not in my wheelhouse, I have still learned to approach collections–especially ones that are well cared for–with respect for the person who originally curated it. Music collections are an intimate window into a person’s life.

I listened to a few of the records by artists I didn’t recognize and was pleasantly surprised at not only how physically clean the records were, but at how I was digging the music. Music, that if it came on streaming, I might not have given a second thought to. Since I was taking the time to give attention to the physical artifact and take time with it, I examined the label and sleeve design, looked up the record (“Huh, this one’s going for $15 on Discogs”), and gave a good, honest listen to the song. After working my way through a few singles from the estate sale, I went back to a box of polka 45s my wife got me for my 45th birthday a few years back and did the same thing, reminding myself how polka is such a joyful music.

I don’t often listen to 45s. My turntable requires lifting the platter off and manually adjusting the belt to switch speeds (!!) which isn’t difficult and takes all of 30 seconds, but it’s traditionally been enough friction to keep me from doing it very often. And when I do, I leave it set to 45 for a while and just work my way through a batch for a week or two. That’s where I am at the moment, rediscovering and enjoying these singles.

To give them some extra love, I ordered some poly-lined sleeves for ones I want to keep in extra-good shape and a batch of sturdy plain paper ones for the records that have been sitting unprotected in my collection for years. Hopefully some time in the distant future when my collection passes onto someone else they will take a look at these 45s and say, “Wow, this guy cared about his music. And also, what the hell was he listening to? He was clearly a weirdo.”

The sorting continues.

What’s funny, though, is that I never expected a random tape I self-released in 1997 (and re-released on CD in 2003) that literally maybe 15 people have a copy of would wind up as one of these garbage Bandcamp pages.

I present you with the fake Lyrical Prophets: Flipyawig page (linking to the Wayback Machine version since I plan on reporting the regular version soon). Since pretty much no one will know this, my DJ (Qwik-Cut) and I (Laze) recorded as the Lyrical Prophets from 1992 until 1997 and put out a handful of self-produced, self-released demo tapes. Interestingly, across the ocean at the same time, there was a German group with the same name and, super coincidentally, had a DJ named LAZee. Also, they’ve got a fake album page on Bandcamp, too.

I got a real kick out of the text:

Grab the Flipyawig re release by Lyrical Prophets - ya need this hip hop heat. Listen online now, no excuses. Got beats that slap and rhymes that don’t quit. Download it fast before your ears miss out. Bonus tracks? Oh yeah, they threw those in too. Old school vibes, fresh feel. Wait… did I just hear a flipyawig? Weird name, fire album.

Pretty generic. Definite AI vibes.

But it goes on with a more in depth “review”:

alright so i finally gave the 2003 re-release of Flipyawig by Lyrical Prophets a proper listen and honestly? it’s kinda slept on. not gonna lie, i only checked it cause i stumbled on it in a dusty bin at a thrift store in berlin. looked cool. german hip hop from sylt? that’s random as hell. but i took a chance. first thing-this ain’t your typical stateside rap. it’s got that late-90s underground eu vibe, raw but not trying too hard. the original dropped in ‘97, this version’s got two bonus tracks and came out on Urban Ambiance, which… yeah, never heard of ’em either. but props for keeping it alive. the album kicks off with “Flipyawig” - that title alone sounds like a sneeze. but the track? solid. heavy bass, Laze spittin’ with this calm confidence. not flashy, just real. he’s the main voice here, handles lead on all tracks, and you can tell he’s the backbone. production’s mostly him too, except track 4 which is Qwik-Cut-different flavor, more chopped-up beats. kinda stands out, not always in a good way. “Born of the Earth” and “Stuck” are the bonus joints. i actually liked “Born of the Earth” more than half the main tracks. deeper vibe, almost spiritual. like if you smoked a joint and walked through a forest at 3am. “Stuck” feels a bit repetitive, though. good rhythm, but doesn’t go anywhere new. some tracks like “Look Over Your Shoulder” and “Ear 2 Ear” hit hard lyrically. they’re talking about real stuff-identity, street life, the grind. not just bragging about kicks and cash. i respect that. “Cracking Teeth” is aggressive in a good way. short, punchy, no filler. love that. but not everything lands. “Supa Man” tries to be anthemic but feels forced. like they wanted a single and overcooked it. and the “Intro” and “Outro”? bare. minimal. could’ve been cooler. felt like afterthoughts. also, the whole thing’s only about 45 minutes. short, but maybe that’s why it doesn’t drag. no track overstays, which is rare these days. only real gripe? the mix is a bit muddy on lower-end speakers. you miss some of the nuance. but on decent headphones? it opens up. little scratches, layered vocals, subtle samples-yeah, it’s there. look, this ain’t Illmatic. but it’s not trying to be. it’s a crew from northern germany doing their thing, staying independent, spitting truth in their own accent. and that’s cool. funny part? i showed it to a friend who’s into grime, and he thought it was british. never guessed it was german. says a lot, honestly. would i recommend it? yeah, but not to everyone. if you’re into raw, no-budget hip hop with soul-def check it. just don’t expect polish. sometimes the cracks let the realness shine through.

So, um, yeah. Weird, right? It goes through and mentions things about specific tracks and the comments are all pretty generic, but I’ve boldfaced a few of the sections that are just otherworldly odd.

There are some downright falsities, too. First of all, I promise you, this album isn’t by the German Lyrical Prophets. I mean, I know because I was there when I made it. Yet, this entire review seems based on that assumption that the album is German. The track listing is also all out of order (“Intro” is apparently the sixth track, lol) and the production mentions are screwy.

Even with all those mistakes and a detectible “style” (mention song and then have quick, descriptive sentence fragments, all lower-case except for track titles, no actual specifics unique to the songs or quotes of lyrics), it still manages to feel kind of human. Running it through two AI detectors, I got literally exact opposite results. Quillbot said it was a 0% chance of being written by AI whereas Pangram said with “high confidence” it was 100% AI written. I side with Pangram.

It goes on to list some similar albums:

Flipyawig re release by Lyrical Prophets similar albums

1. Sorry by Peter Silver - (link removed)

1. Madvillainy by Madvillain - real smooth flows and dope beats, kinda like Flipyawig but with more weird vibes.
2. The Infamous by Mobb Deep - dark, gritty, and raw. If you like the serious tone on some Lyrical Prophets tracks, this hits hard.
3. A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory - jazzy beats, chill raps, easy to vibe to. Feels like a cousin to that Flipyawig re-release energy.
4. Dilated Peoples - The Platform - underground feel, strong lyrics, reminds me of Lyrical Prophets’ style.
5. CunninLynguists - A Piece of Strange - moody, layered, with a mix of introspection and skill. You’ll catch the same thoughtful wave.
6. J Dilla - Donuts - short loops, soulful cuts, perfect if you dig the production quirks on Flipyawig.
7. Atmosphere - God Loves Ugly - emotional, raw, and real. Not the same sound, but same heart.
8. Black Star - self-titled - Mos Def and Talib Kweli spittin’ truth. Feels like a late-night version of what Lyrical Prophets do.
9. Hieroglyphics - 3rd Eye Vision - West Coast underground unity. The crew energy is strong, like Lyrical Prophets’ posse setup.
10. Aesop Rock - Labor Days - dense rhymes, vivid stories. If you like digging into lyrics, this one’s a treasure. Funny how some of these albums never blew up big time, but they still hit harder than half the stuff on the radio.

Can’t complain about being compared to Dilated Peoples, even if the site itself is a total sham.

Rather than hosting any actual music on the Bandcamp page, it points to the oh-so-legit sounding ivault.quest domain to download or stream the album (even though the page is clean according to Virustotal, no chance I’m linking to it):

Gee, I wonder if downloading will result in malware or not

ivault looks to be tied to crypto nonsense and Bandcamp is littered with fake albums pointing to it. Still, I’m wondering how my album in particular got targeted, given that it’s really not mentioned anywhere online these days.¹ Like, literally: there are zero Google results for it. And in case you want another example of how shit AI is for search results, Bing’s Copilot basically regurgitates solely this fake Bandcamp page as if it were fact with mind-numbingly stupid sentences like “Released January 1, 2025, this is the 2003 re‑release of the original 1997 Flipyawig.”

Oh, AI, how you're enriching our world

As stupid as this all is, I do kind of wish someone really had found a copy of my silly little demo from 30 years ago in a Berlin record shop and then decided to bootleg it.

This post will be was updated throughout the month of June 2026 and I’m attempting to not I didn’t feature any person more than once. Last updated: June 30, 2026.

(Thanks to Eula for tagging one of my posts, which nudged me to create my own.)

1. A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS (CD-ROM Journal) - A fascinating trip through a functional mid-90s BBS that was archived on a CD-ROM.
2. Imagining human-oriented online posts (Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden) - Fun thought experiment about what humans might do to differentiate themselves from LLM-generated content. Each one I read, I thought, “Oooh… that’s good.”
3. The Archivist (TWOGOODEARS) - Super nerdy audiophile post about a bonkers looking new turntable. I didn’t understand half of the post, but still the type of thing that’s best about blogs: obsession and detail delivered with love.
4. The email, social media, and IndieWeb Node I need (that will probably never exist), that I think authors would love (The Fantastic Site of Lord Matt) - Detailed and well thought-out piece about a mash-up product he’d love to see made. Thought experiments like this are another thing blogs are great for.
5. Volume is not depth (unstory) - Bold Slovakian blog (in English) that says only what needs to be said and nothing more.
6. The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book (Brain Baking) - I need to start tagging posts like this with “ems” for “extremely my shit.”
7. The Weird Way I Found Out About the Insidious San Francisco ‘Civic Joy’ Fund (Quailblog) - Finding a 12-year-old picture of yourself on a post is certainly one way of finding out about news I hadn’t considered.
8. Fuck|Thank you (Paweł Grzybek) - I sense a new IndieWeb trend in the making with this “thank you” list.
9. I want my friends to have blogs too (DoServer) - Pre-social networking, more of my IRL friends had blogs, and I kind of liked that. The early days of social networking were similar in that it gave us a taste of what it would be like if our wider social circles published online. And then that went to shit and sadly most IRL friends no longer blog. So, yeah, I get what Daniel’s saying here.
10. our workplace LLM mass delusion (ava) - “The employee bonuses that should go to all the hardworking employees, and the money to further support our work, is going to grifters, security risks, bad workshops that are not teaching anything remotely usable for our work, and technofascists.” … “How did this befall us so quickly? There is never money for anything, but this unreliable tech with a huge upfront cost got through immediately?”
11. The Jqwik Anti-AI Affair (My Not So Private Tech Life) - A developer of over four decades adds a single “disregard previous instructions” line that sends agentic AI tools (and their supporters) into batshit mode. (via smallcypress)
12. TASCAM recovery (inkdroid) - How Ed Summers recovered audio of his recently deceased brother’s voice and music from proprietary Tascam 788 CD-R exports. A rare post that’s both touching and technical.
13. I made a thing (Ruben @ kedara) - The internet is good when people just share things they make without pretense.
14. A Town Square for my site (cauenapier) - What a unique, playful idea for adding interaction on a web site. This post is from a month ago, so also read up on the launch and how it’s been going since then.
15. You can tell it’s a personal website because it has personality (Newsonaut) - I could use more visual personality on my site, honestly. But I hope the content is kinda filling the void?
16. Odds and Ends from Recent Genealogy Research (Climbing My Family Tree) - Marian writes that she learned about Alabama being the “quickie divorce capital of the America” at one point, requiring only 24-hour residency to be eligible for a divorce.
17. Banned Book Library (Rick’s Blog) - How to repurpose a smart wifi light bulb to be a Little Free Library of banned books. <– A sentence that wouldn’t have made much sense 25 years ago.
18. Blogging Saved My Life (brennan.day) - “I do not know what the future holds for me, or for any of us. I hope and believe there is revolutionary liberation in our lifetime. But regardless, so long as I have pen and paper, a plain text editor and an Internet connection to transmit my walking wall of words, that will always be enough for me. I am not wanting of anything beyond this.”
19. Wow… so Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder is Real (Brandon’s Journal) - I’ve long wondering if I was weird for tending to get more depressed in summer months than winter, but apparently it’s a thing.
20. The Kid Is Not My Son (A. Jesse Jiryu Davis) - Heck of a dharma talk about fatherhood, non-lying, and living a true life.
21. Too much Friction on the Internet (Forking Mad) - Sometimes friction is good, sometimes not as much.
22. Ghost signs (What the Fran) - “Ghosts all over our buildings, selling us soap.” (via)
23. Textrovert (willowbl00) - “Are relationships that are almost entirely text based real?”
24. “NOOOO, WHAT IS THAT?”: I Got Diagnosed at 30 and Cried in Three Different Emotions at Once (dylan) - About receiving an ADHD diagnosis as an adult.
25. Announcing the Launch of the 84000 Doors Oral History Project - An oral history project about the experience of Buddhists in Texas.
26. I prefer writing into the void rather than shouting into an algorithm. (Kia) - Simple thought, and one that I agree more with every day that passes.
27. Chorus-Reinterpretation Country Songs (Jeff Kaufman) - Looks at a common verse pattern used in country music.
28. LEFT INSIDE: Ancient Sherlockiana & German Post Card (Pretty Sinister Books) - Stuff left behind in old books will always grab my attention.
29. Vivaldi made a post supporting LGBTQ rights; people were not happy (moonwriting) - Makes me even prouder to rely on Vivaldi as my browser.
30. Rebuilding the computer room (Alex Chan) - You can always count on thoughtful posts from Alex, and this one on introducing useful friction in the form of a standalone “computer room” like we all used to have.

I started Saturday by heading back to my alma mater for a reunion brunch with former college newspaper staff. It was a nice, chill gathering that let me catch up with some old friends I hadn’t seen in a while as well as meet some new folks that I just missed overlapping with at the paper. One was a former editor-in-chief that we discovered works indirectly with my wife.

The event was a reunion, sure, but also a ruse to get former newspaper advisor and journalism professor Steve Watkins there to present to him a fantastic surprise: a new scholarship in his name, funded by former newspaper staff and students. I have fond memories of the one credit Practicum in Journalism class I took every semester when I was writing for the paper. We’d take time each week and he’d critique the previous week’s articles. When he got to mine, Steve would inevitably say, “Big surprise, Ryan wrote another hip-hop review and I don’t know what to say about it, so good job I guess?” I wrote feature articles in addition to entertainment pieces, of course, and always appreciated his feedback on my more substantive pieces. He stood behind his students and would go to bat for them against the administrative, defending their first amendment rights.

Steve’s written 15 (!!) books. I already have his latest (co-authored with his wife Janet) on my TBR pile and picked up a copy of The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an American Corporate Empire, a book he released to great acclaim when I was still in school in 1997. It’s about “the largest racial job discrimination class action lawsuit of its time” and is one I’ve meant to read since it came out (oops, sorry, Steve). Check Steve out (Substack link).

On Sunday I managed to get a lot of things checked off the to-do list, including burying a squirrel that had been in our neighbor’s yard, fixing the washing machine I mentioned in the most recent Weeknote (the $8 part did indeed fix it, but I needed to spend another $25 for because the dry/wet vac didn’t come with a wet filter), editing a podcast episode, and running to close out the month.

Monday ended up going a little bit awry (and why this post about the weekend is coming on a Tuesday) as I helped my wife deal with a lost phone and also cleaned up after our washing machine overflowed onto the floor. I’m glad I a.) had that wet vac on hand and b.) recently installed some water leak detectors right by the washing machine. It could have been bad. This leak, of course, meant I had a little more work to do on the washing machine. I had fixed the initial issue on Sunday, but when closing the thing back up, I pinched the tube that led to the pressure switch, meaning the water just… didn’t stop (until I unplugged the washer). Thankfully, it was an easy fix after the clean-up was done.

Today’s been a bit lighter and slower. And I’m not complaining.

And on the topic of replacement parts, if you had a Whirlpool refrigerator with a pull-out drawer and you were looking into replacing a broken drawer top (just the top), how much do you think it would cost to replace? Probably like $15 or $20 tops, right?

$150. Lol. No.

Weatherwise, we’ve had a couple of beautiful days in a row here after over a week of rain.

Random fact I learned: spotted lanternflies reproduce at seven times the “normal” rate in the invasive Tree of Heaven (which we have three of in our backyard).

Hope y’all are well.

Some Links Worth Sharing

• Old-timey radio interface for streaming radio
• Japan’s Tourism Troubles Are Being Fuelled By Social Media Assholes (Aftermath)
• Scrolls - An enjoyable weekly-ish newsletter about the IndieWeb by Mike Sass.
• Dharma Voices for Animals - “Uniting Buddhist Principles with a Better World for Animals.”
• last.fm is Now Independent - I’m breathing a little easier about the future of the site now that they’ve decoupled from CBS, which has gotten progressively shittier over the last year or so. I decided to subscribe to Pro for a bit to throw a little financial support their way.
• record.club - Paul tipped me off to this Letterboxd-for-music service. Trying to decide still how deeply I’m going to get into this, but if I can work it into my Album Log workflow, I may stick with it.

Media Notes

Reading

• Started and finished On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV) by Solvej Balle (trans. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell). Book V in November!
• Started and finished Transcription by Ben Lerner.
• Started Leavings by Wendell Berry.

Music

I revisited a couple of remix albums I had in my collection but hadn’t touched in a decade plus. First up was the Gummy Soul remix of Souls of Mischief’s ‘93 Til Infinity album titled ‘93 Still. Remixing a classic album like this, one of hip-hop’s best ever, is a risky move. But these remixes pull samples from familiar sources of the era, resulting in a really dope, jazzy album with remixes that are true reimagining rather than just random beats behind accapellas.

The second was The Secret History of Underground Rap by Anticon’s Sole. It’s about 20 years old, but wow, what a listen. The remixes are dark and soooo far from the original tone of so many of these tracks, but that’s totally OK here. Remixes of Saafir’s “Light Sleeper,” Organized Konfusion’s “Bring it On,” and OC’s “Time’s Up” give you an idea of the vibes you’ll catch here.

I went record shopping with my daughter last weekend. We hit up an antique/thrift mall that has a really good lesser-known record dealer there who prices his stuff pretty sanely. I grabbed a 2010 repress of an Ornette Coleman record and a white label test pressing of Charles Lloyd’s Moon Man, a pretty oddball little record from 1970. It came with all the promotional material it was originally mailed with.

Also enjoyed over the last few weeks:

• DJ Chief-One: 1991 Mixtape - A four-hour mix of hip-hop from 1991. Masterfully done and good for those who like when the DJ lets the tracks play through rather than cutting after just a verse for each song.
• Sonny Rollins: A Night At The Village Vanguard (The Complete Masters) - RIP to the master. Hadn’t listened to this date in a long time, but it’s a really good one.
• Błoto + Ion D: “Mobbing (feat. DJ Eprom)” - Błoto AND DJ Eprom? In this economy?

Movies

• Come See Me in the Good Light - Keep a box of tissues nearby for this documentary about poet Andrea Gibson’s final months with cancer.

Site Notes

• Scanned and posted a 1988 Epyx product catalog with all those great games from childhood.
• Added a bunch of capsule reviews going back to 1997 to the kinda massive album log page on my site - over 1600 reviews and still going. It’s funny to see my opinions on music going back to when I was 21.
• New post: That time I interviewed a civil rights leader and anti-rap activist (refers also to the newly archived interview audio and transcript).
• New Post: All at once
• Fixed up my books page.

(Hey there! Thanks for reading this via RSS... RSS is great. But, just as a reminder, it's sometimes nice to swing by laze.net to see the content in context, along with a bunch of other stuff that's not available via RSS!)

"I felt eight and eighteen and forty-five all at once..."

It evokes that feeling that you are well beyond your youth, but so much of that “you” from early adulthood filled with bold confidence is still within reach, at some level, inside of you. And at the same time, you’re still feeling remnants of the unsure child who feels like he should know more than he does, who feels like he’s the only one that doesn’t have things figured out (except now he knows that being an adult doesn’t necessarily help you figure things out).

If that, there, doesn’t sum up what life as an adult feels like, I’m not sure what does. I wonder if that feeling persists later in life. When you’re 70 or 80, does your 50 year-old self linger in the background? Does the 18-year-old self finally start to disappear?

*Mary Washington College Bullet*, Fredericksburg, VA; February 15, 1996, page 5.

Here I was, a young writer and obsessive (white) hip-hop fan, about to interview the woman who had marched alongside Dr. King at Selma, founded and chaired the National Congress of Black Women, and led the effort in Pennsylvania to be one of the first states to pass the ERA. Also, “[a]s Chief of Elections of Pennsylvania, she was a leader in instituting a voter registration by mail and reducing the voting age from 21 to 18 years of age.”¹ But she was also the woman leading a campaign against “gangster porno rap,” which I took great offense to. So what did I do in the six minutes I had to chat with her?

I went right in, not wasting any time.

“A lot of the hip-hop community has taken offense to what they consider to be generalizations that you’ve made, and by looking at the actions of only a few artists, do you feel you’re dwelling too much on the negative side rather than when the overall music is generally positive?”

I mean… OOF. Lead up to it slowly, man. Learn your trade.

Earlier today I posted the audio and transcript of my interview from three decades ago.² Whether I was the proper person to be doing this interview is certainly a valid question, but in the final piece (which I haven’t been able to find) I tried to give voice to people who deserved to be heard on the issue.

Looking back 30 years later at that extraordinary opportunity, my view has matured. I mean, I still feel that her approach of attacking rappers rather than directing most of her ire at the primarily white record label execs was misguided. And I question whether she really had demo tapes by “positive artists” being submitted en masse to her because a.) who would send hip-hop demos to C. Delores Tucker? and b.) I don’t recall her ever promoting specific artists or music she considered “positive” during the course of her crusade. 

But… being older and having a little more insight, I realize there was more nuance to it than either her “gangster rap music go” or Tupac’s response of “C. Delores Tucker, you’s a motherfucker/ Instead of tryin’ to help [me], you destroy a brother.”

Sytonia Reid wrote an interesting piece in 2023 titled “Revisiting C. Delores Tucker’s War on Rap: Too Much Smoke, Not Enough Flowers” (warning: Substack) where she noted:

Today, that campaign still seems to be what Tucker is best known for. As I’ve come to learn more about Tucker’s life at least one thing is clear to me: although some of her actions were fairly questioned and critiqued, her overall contributions to Black freedom and consciousness movements deserve just as much space in our collective memory as her controversies.

…

The progressive value of Black women leading a divestment campaign from an industry that degrades Black women and men alike, and devalues Black consumers and artists alike, is perhaps clearer today than it was back then.

And that’s precisely what I can see more clearly now. Tucker was coming from a place of love. She wanted to combat stereotypes rather than perpetuate them while encouraging “political empowerment for our people.” This was a woman who brought more women into government and fought successfully for women’s rights and voting rights throughout her career. Even if I disagree with her methods and the people she associated with in her later years (like William Bennett and his conservative Parents Television Council³), I can at least appreciate she was a complex figure struggling to figure out how to advance her causes in a world that became increasingly hostile towards her.

(Interesting side note: After Tucker’s death in 2005, NPR used an uncredited clip of my interview (17 seconds in) in this brief piece they did about her life.)

In other news, I’ve been enjoying two limited edition Waterloo flavors currently available: Root Beer and Apple Pie a la Mode. Even my kid’s been enjoying the root beer one. It really delivers the flavor and vibe of root beer without the 40 grams of sugar.

These next few days have me in full parent mode, working the concessions at an 8th grade dance tonight and moving my daughter out of her dorm early next week. Time marches on.

H got me a fun fidget toy recently that’s shaped like a cup (bowl) of matcha. Picture at the end.

Happy Mother’s Day to all moms!

Some Links Worth Sharing

• showing up for my illnesses is hard (Ava) - “Being chronically ill and having a doctor’s appointment feels like you keep being a victim reporting similar crimes over and over again to the police, and you have no influence over whether you’re believed and whether they’ll catch the perp.” An interesting way to think about chronic illness that gives me a deeper understanding of what people might be going through.
• Do I belong in tech anymore? (Ky) - “AI use is only one part of broader social trends within tech that leave me questioning whether I should remain here.”
• Slower Than Slow: 16 RPM Records - I remember the 16 rpm setting on the turntable I had growing up but never actually seeing an 16 2/3 rpm record in the wild. Turns out, there’s an interesting history behind them involving radio stations, audiobooks (especially the bible) for the blind, car-based record players, and South African music.
• Friendster is coming back - To friend someone, you must physically tap phones. After a year without contact, the relationship “softens” and you’re encouraged to reconnect in person.

Media Notes

Podcasts

• The Importance of Joy (Undefended Dharma with Mary Stancavage) - The first half of this, in particular, really hit for me, outlining the idea that joy is not the same as pleasure or avoidance. Many people feel that they need to be in a constant state of worry, anger, or concern about the way things are so its evident that they care, but joy can absolutely exist right alongside these things in an equanimous way.
• We Watched all of Bea Arthur’s Shoppers Drug Mart Commercials! (Out on the Lanai) - A fun episode of the original Golden Girls podcast digging into Bea’s hilarious commercials for the Canadian drug store chain during her run on GG.

Music

• Sister Rosetta Tharpe- “Didn’t It Rain?” Live 1964 - The mighty Sister Rosette Tharpe rocks the shit out of this song. Love the set, too.
• Nostalgia 77: When the Lights Gone - Nostalgia 77’s The Sleepwalking Society is one of my favorite albums and this latest is super enjoyable, too. Very relaxed vibes and it’s so nice to hear Lamdin teaming up with Yosa Peit again.
• Karolina Cicha & Bart Pałyga: Płyta Tatarska - I dipped into some modern eastern European folk this week, and this was one album that I really dug. Cicha makes music with an ear towards Polish minority groups while Pałyga adds throat-singing (both Kargyraa and Sygyt-style). Some really fun stuff here.
• Also on the eastern European tip, Atalyja is a Lithuanian folk-rock band. A good starting point is “Sakalas,” which immediately makes me think of Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda.” (You hear it, too, right?)
• Puuluup live on KEXP - In another great KEXP performance, this Estonian duo describes their music as “original creations impregnated with tradition, references to punk classics and romantic neo-zombie post-folk with educational content.” Their deadpan humor between songs is also very endearing.

Movies

After many, many months I finally finished Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). It took me so long, I felt like I couldn’t even accurately rate it, so I didn’t.

Some good videos

• Rasta Driver (SNL) - The whole “white guy as Rasta” territory has been well-tread comedy material for decades, but I do want to give Andrew Dismukes props for his spot-on take on early-90s dancehall reggae. His intonation and the way he hits the emphasis on the right words is spot-on.
• Do You Like Me? (Sesame Street) - Bert & Ernie bringing the feel-goods from back in the day.
• Documentary: Rocking the Horse - The Unmade Podcast - I’ve been a fan of The Unmade Podcast since the very beginning and love this culmination of years of inside jokes and weird suburban Australian references.

Site Notes

• At the bottom of the home page, you will now see what I’m listening to at this very moment (and it will refresh automatically). If I’m not listening to anything, you won’t see anything and it won’t refresh.
• New post: The nightmare of changing your internet bundle

It makes this delightful clicking noise when you "stir" and the whisk looks like it's actually whisking. Pro tip: don't use when unmuted on a Zoom call.

1. Increase our net to gigabit,
2. keep the home phone,
3. completely ditch cable.

After struggling with their terrible web site upgrade options, I reached out via chat to our provider of 25+ years, Verizon Fios, and laid out what I wanted for the rep:

Hi - I’m starting a chat about my account because the web experience is SO BAD in terms of trying to find the package/offer I want to go with and getting the actual, real price nailed down.

Right now we’re on an expired package deal of 300/300 internet + preferred TV with DVR + home phone (landline). Our prices went up a lot after the initial commitment period, so I want to see what we can do. We’ve been with Verizon for over 25 years, so I’m hoping we can find a good deal.

We really do not need the TV/DVR package at all at this point. The only reason we had it was because it was cheaper to get a three-item bundle deal. Ideally, I’d like:

* 1 gig internet upgrade
* no TV
* keep the home phone (no voicemail, etc., needed)

What can you offer?

And thus began the epic battle.

“Sonia” came back with what looked to be a pretty decent offer. It was much lower than what we were paying, took out the TV service, and upgraded our Internet. I could very easily have just said, “Looks good!” and moved ahead. But I looked closer at the wall of text she had cut and pasted in the chat window. I saw this:

Verizon Home Device Protect
NEW
$25.00
Additional discounts
$25 Internet Loyalty Discount thru May 6, 2027
NEW
-$25.00

My first thought was, “Wait… WTF is Verizon Home Protect.” The answer to that it gives you “24/7 support, in-home visits and protects your eligible electronics in your home. With Verizon Home Device Protect you get all of this support, protection and security. In addition, you will receive free repair or replacement service up to $5,000 per year, with a maximum of $2,000 per claim. This coverage extends to both your current residence and an additional residence.”

In other words, nonsense I didn’t want.

But the $25 discount right after that made it almost look like I would be getting it for free for a year. Still, though, I pushed.

“What would the price be without the Verizon Home Device Protect because I don’t need that.”

Sonia replied, “Since we have created a recommended deal for you which is as per usage details so I would recommend you to give a try to Verizon home device protect since it is a highly recommended deal with super amazing benefits and I am sure you will love it.”

I pushed. “But what is the price of the same plan without the Verizon Home Device Protect?”

She replied, “[This] is the best price for the plan I have shared with best recommended deal and bundle discounts. So I would recommend you to try the deal. […] Are we good to proceed with the order?”

I pushed again. “I really don’t need it, though. I’d like to see for comparison what the price is.”

She replied, “Since the above recommended deal is suggested as per your usage details and this is really at a better price for you. So I would just suggest you to give it a try !”

I began to think Verizon was going to send someone to my door to rough me up if I didn’t “give it a try.”

I stood my ground. “I don’t need it and don’t particularly want to get locked into $25/month I didn’t want to spend. Can you please provide the price without this item?”

Finally, she replied with what I think was a bit of dejectedness, “let me customize the deal for you and check for better price.”

A few minutes later, she came back with another wall of text. No more Home Protect and the loyalty discount was still in place, but since it was still a lot of text, I formatted it to be more readable. And I spotted this:

Unlimited Individual Cloud Storage
NEW
$10.00

I wrote, “Thank you… but I do see what you snuck in there! Can I get the price without the cloud storage?”

She replied:

That is a recommended deal I have shared with you

With Unlimited Cloud Storage, you’ll have all the space you need to easily back up your photos, videos and documents and access securely from your smartphone, tablet or .computer.

This is a recommended option , if you wish I can opt this for you as well

She then offered me a bunch of “perks” like Netflix/HBO Max bundles, etc. I declined those and asked for a final quote without the cloud storage.

“Sure ! I will help you with the deal as per your requirement”

Finally, finally, finally I was provided a quote with no “perks” I didn’t ask for and just what I needed. The loyalty discount only applies for a year, but in 12 months I’ll be having another chat to see if it can be extended.

“Are we good to proceed with the order ?”

Yes, Sonia. Yes, we are.

It involved opening up my Lear Jet H-300, poking around a bit, and finally determining it was just a belt that needed replacing. I hadn’t played anything on it since 15 years ago, so it’s not a surprise it needed replacing. Thankfully, the always awesome Turntable Needles was there for me and hooked me up with a new one. I had to measure the belt path with a string and then use calipers to measure the width and height of the belt in order to find the right one.

Now that it’s working, I’m tempted to record some of my own songs to a blank 8-track and to fix up some of the tapes I’ve got where parts have started to degrade. It’s all totally pointless, but enjoyable.

Some Links Worth Sharing

• Ways of Moving (Mandy Brown) - “The difficulty isn’t in naming something we would like to spend our time or energy on. It’s in finding the match between how we would like to be and what capitalism will permit us to do while still keeping a roof over our head, and food in our bellies.”
• Our Longing for Inconvenience (Hanif Abdurraqib)
• Discovering Prince, Ten Years Later (Anil Dash, of course)
• Your blog is a radio station (Jim Grey) - “Every time you publish a post, you are programming your station. You are choosing what goes into rotation.”

Media Notes

Reading

• Finished Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir by Craig Mod
• Started All Blood Runs Red: The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard―Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy by Tom Clavin

Podcasts

• How the Internet Became Hell (with Whitney Phillips) (404 Media) - What a great conversation about how we got to this point, including some angles I hadn’t considered before.

Music

The Bill Evans Trio’s Sunday At The Village Vanguard is a truly beautiful album. No wonder it’s considered a classic.

Movies

• The Burden (2017) - Dope animation and I definitely felt the message.
• D’Wild Wild Weng (1982) - Do yourself a favor and just watch just the first two minutes.

Site Notes

• New posts: Replanting and Used Computer Locator - April 1990
• New page: Random 10 - A ten-track playlist randomly chosen on each page load from my 10,000+ favorite songs.
• New review: Courageous Chief’s Warpath from 1991.
• New list: “Jazz Formations, Ranked.”
• I’ve added a handful of new seltzers recently.

Used Computer Locator billed itself as “The National Guide to Used Computers and Surplus Electronics.” One of dozens (or hundreds), I’m sure. The content was primarily want ads and larger ads, but also had some articles reprinted from other newsletters, like “What Are You Giving Away?,” a pretty technical piece on how to truly wipe your drives before selling or donating them. Judging from this post from January 1990 by the future Editor-in-Chief Ken Wilkinson, this is one of the first issues.

There’s some good computer hardware history here, of course, but there’s some fun to be had, too, in the “Personals” section:

These couldn't have been real, right?

Additionally, this ad for “The Video Resume” caught my eye:

Would the call be free? Or would you get hit with a giant fee? No one knows!

First of all, a 1-600 number? Looks like 600 is currently used in Canada for “specialized telecommunication services,” but this only goes back to 1993. I couldn’t find any other information about 1-600 numbers and if they were toll free like 800 or pay like 900 and 976 numbers.

Secondly - a video resume, huh? Unfortunately, there’s not enough in the ad to find much information about the company thanks to the generic name. I bet the samples were as cringey as some of the old video dating VHSes that pop up on YouTube from time to time.

MacManus writes:

I’m calling this activity “replanting” — because it feels like moving a neglected plant, perhaps crowded by weeds and eaten by bugs, into a new garden, where it will be cared for and nurtured again.

He takes a slightly different approach, offering a screenshot of how the post originally looked, wherever it was published, but otherwise his approach mirrors my own. MacManus’ original Read/Write/Web posts are getting a new life on his site after the originals either became neglected or lost to time and now my old interviews, music year-in-review posts, writings on tea, and other assorted silliness can live on.

It may not be the full archive of everything I’ve ever written–something I would have aspired to have here when I was younger–but it’s serving as a good representation of what I think is worth keeping around for the long haul.

Instead of giving a summary of what I’ve been up to, I’m going to share a couple sentences from Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things that I liked:

When I was nineteen, moving to Japan may have felt temporary, was a somewhat arbitrary choice, but over time it has become an emigration, not an expatriation. Today, I feel nothing like an “expat,” that word of extreme privilege applied to Westerners moving east, a word charged with connotations of asymmetric power, of non-permanence, of elevation above and immunity from local laws and customs, of your “home” being better, a place to which you’d obviously return. (p.56)

Some Links Worth Sharing

• When Not to Break Rules (annie) - “I am against the pattern we seem to have developed as an intelligent but oh so emotional people of feeling bad as a way of bearing responsibility.”
• The Big Problem with Lovable That No One Is Talking About (Pootlepress) - You don’t know have to know much about what Lovable is (it’s a vibe coding thing). “You don’t know if it will still be there in five years.” This is a problem we’ve been seeing forever, and it’s even more the case now that everyone can throw an app together. Whenever I’m trying a new platform (or app), I automatically assume it won’t be there in a year or that there will be some massive security breach. Then I decide if I really want to use it based on those assumptions.
• The Old Internet is Still Here (Tyler Gaw) - “We’re still making stuff we care about and sharing that stuff on our websites. We’re making it for ourselves first, but we’re also making it for you.” (via ResearchBuzz)
• Endgame for the Open Web (Anil Dash) - “The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited [by AI companies]. Those people who maintain open source software? They’re hardly getting rich — that’s thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup.”

Media Notes

Reading

• Finished reading The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. 450+ pages going way back in history, looking at the many uses of notebooks and how they evolved through the years. I honestly didn’t think that much could be said. Interesting read, but it did take me a good six months to get through.
• Started and finished A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie. Nice, short book on wabi, sabi, and a plenty of other design aesthetics I was aware of but didn’t really know. Richie’s knowledgeable on all things Japan, though I still really question the choice of cover art for his book on Japanese cinema.
• Started Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir.

Podcasts

• Not a specific episode, but I’ve started listening to The Empty Bowl cereal review podcast recently. It’s a calm, quiet podcast about cereal, so… yeah. It’s a good one to snooze to.

Music

• Amerigo Gazaway: Bonus Beats, Vol. 1 - A straight-ahead head-nodder from top to bottom.
• DJ Ragz: Puzzle Dust - My pal DJ Ragz’s new project is a fun scratch record over beats by producers he respects. Ragz did all the mixing and engineering as well as cover design. Not on streaming, except for Bandcamp and it’s available on limited edition cassette.
• Groove Professor: głowa do głośnika - Absolutely loved this beat record from Polish producer Groove Professor. Give me more.
• Flea: Honora - The RHCP bassist delivers a thoroughly interesting and enjoyable jazz record. He’s good on trumpet, too!
• Aaron Shaw: And So It Is - Really engaging and personal new jazz album recorded as Shaw learned of a difficult health diagnosis that affects his ability to play.

Movies

• Videoheaven is a nearly three hour cultural critique and history of the video store as told through appearances in movies and TV clips of the era.

Some good videos

• SNL: Twinings Extreme - This old cut-for-time SNL sketch was a good one.
• Tiny Little Lip Balm - BDG back on fire.

Site Notes

• New post: On the guilt of quiet days - “I’ve heard so much about how people in their 40s or 50s learn, finally, to stop GAF about what other people think. But maybe we need to apply that to ourselves a little bit, too. … Should we stop giving a fuck about what we think of us, too?”
• New page: Album Log - I’m getting back in the habit of jotting down a few notes about an album as I listen. Figured I’d share it as I go. And just because, I imported 1500+ capsule reviews I wrote on ADDreviews between 2001-2009.
• Updated my 100 Favorites list on Album Whale since a few more of them are now available on streaming. Only eight are not.
• Added a running page, inspired by Yordi’s.
• Updated the “audio gear” section of my uses page.

Days where you don’t foist the “need-to-dos” on yourself. Days where moments of sitting outside and listening to the birds or feeling the wind blow make up the majority of the day.

When reading a book or listening to music or writing a blog post or rearranging a room or taking a nap or just… thinking is what defines your time as “productive” or “useful.”

These days can be hard to come by. Giving yourself permission to allow things to be simple for a day is challenging, especially when there’s so much that “needs” doing. It feels weird to consider trying to schedule these days like appointments in your calendar.

Maybe the fact it feels weird to schedule or that “relaxation” puts a pit in your stomach can be an inflection point. There are always going to be things that are largely out of our control, but what if we took ownership of that small amount of worry, that nagging need to be productive, that guilt that comes with relaxing?

I’ve heard so much about how people in their 40s or 50s learn, finally, to stop GAF about what other people think. But maybe we need to apply that to ourselves a little bit, too. Is that judgement we make of ourselves really real? Can we stop being performative to ourselves like we often are for others? Should we stop giving a fuck about what we think of us, too?

(Thank you for reading as I try to remind myself it’s OK to take this Sunday to not do anything of great import amidst a laundry list of things hanging over my head, some of which I’ve delayed attending to for too long already.)

How about we just get into a few links and things?

Some Links Worth Sharing

• The State of Black Bookstore report
• ‘human oversight’ is a meaningless buzzword - ava: “If anything, the human intervention here is for the companies - making sure that the AI didn’t accidentally rank someone top that is completely unfitting for the task. It’s not there for you. No one will notice if your perfectly fitting application has been disregarded by AI for no discernible reason, and no one will find it as part of the oversight process in the hundreds of other applications to make sure.”
• 25 Years of iPod Brain
• Mutual Aid Means We Will Save Us - Fantastic issue from W. Kamau Bell. (Substack, tho’.)
• The Last Quiet Thing - Owning something now means we’ve become its IT department required for ongoing maintenance.
• Your Dog Still Exists - *sniff*

Media Notes

Music

• Ishamel Ali: “Every Circle a Moon” - Funky free jazz.
• Paul Nice & Phill Most Chill, Fabreeze Brothers featuring Oxygen: “Golden Crown” - Solid throwback rap about crate digging.

Site Notes

The only thing I’ve done recently is move a bunch of pages that were filling up my footer to a specific /slashpages page.