object dot computer

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:39:26 -0700

Finished reading: Excession by Iain M. Banks 📚

Week note - vi

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:05:04 -0700

Another late update. I took last week off of work to deal with my shingles. It turns out shingles last longer than I was expecting and I spent much of that week in pain and cranky about it. I’m hoping things start to take a turn for the better soon.

The week was spent mostly watching movies, playing video games and doing some light chores I’ve been putting off for ages.

Things I Liked

From the IPA, 2026 photo award winners

There’s so many fantastic photos. These are a few of my favorites.

David Hockney by Frederic Aranda

City Pop by Nicolas Damiens

Pink Donut by William Mark Sommer

From Jay Zuerndorfer, “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once”

A moving exploration of the grief experienced when losing a pet.

From Signore Galilei, “The two Christian saints who are secretly the Buddha”

An interesting read that speaks to the way religions have exchanged ideas over time.

The story of Barlaam and Josaphat first shows up in the Christian tradition in the 10th century, in Georgia as the Balavariani. It seems to have been derived from an Arabic version, the Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf. The name “Budhasaf” in turn comes from the Persian version “Bodisav”, and thence from the Sanskrit “Bodhisattva”. Somewhere over the successive retellings, the Buddha’s story morphed into a Christian one.

From Capable, adversarial design based privacy clothing

[Their technology works by]translating AI-interfering patterns into knitted textiles that can influence how selected AI perception systems interpret visual information in real time. When worn, the textile pattern may lead selected object detection systems to detect animals or other objects instead of a person, while remaining fully visible to human observers. Performance depends on the AI model, software version, and environmental conditions.

This is cyberpunk as fuck. It turns out I don’t like living in a cyberpunk reality though.

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:03:19 -0700

Making dumb bumper stickers is my true passion and art. I’m selling some. If you’re not in the Portland area, I can ship them for a few bucks.

Legally speaking, the Unipiper owes me nothing. The Pickle is a goddamn thief though.

www.facebook.com/share/1CA…

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:54:13 -0700

Thank you {{pharmacy_name}}.

Week note - v

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:34:50 -0700

This is a note about travel and illness. Two things I try hard to keep separate.

Last week was the first full week of our annual Sierras roadtrip. It did not go according to plan. At first it seemed like several nights on a sleeping pad had tweaked my back. By the time we finished up in Coos Bay, I was sore and a dull pain started throbbing beneath my right rib. When we arrived in Lassen Volcanic National Park the throb transformed into a sharp and rhythmic pain.

I spent my time in the Park working from my van perched in position that would rather upset my physical therapist. When I wasn’t working, I practiced convincing myself that this was, in fact, a very normal and every day sort of stabbing pain. Nothing a good ignoring couldn’t fix. I, gracefully, declined to do much hiking while in the Park to give my beleaguered body time to heal from a surely treacherous but only mundanely strained back.

Wednesday we began the next leg of the trip with a four hour drive down to Tahoe. I was not much fun as far a road-trip co-pilots go.¹ I only survived through willpower drawn from knowing a real bed awaited me at its end. When we arrived I climbed in and allowed myself to feel optimistic. That night I took my partner out for dinner², both as a thank you for all the extra effort she was taking on for us and to (hopefully) mark a change in the tenor of the currently strained vibes of our trip. The meal was fantastic. I was certain that a night sleeping on a real bed would set things right. We popped on a movie and I took a muscle relaxer. (Some things can be left to fate, others require pharmaceutical intervention.)

Shortly after the movie finished, I woke up in the (confusing) throws of pain. The dull throbbing I had attributed to the spasms of my unhappy back muscles had transformed into a ceaseless stabbing pain that drove me to tears. I woke my partner and explained we might need to make the drive back to Portland tomorrow. (I did not want to die in California.) She, the love of my life, held my hand gently, offered kind words, and then popped in her ear plugs. Before rolling over, she explained, “if I’ve got to do the drive, I need to sleep and I can’t sleep through all your sniffling and moaning without these.”

Unlike her, I did not sleep much that night, though I did manage to experiment with every possible arrangement of pillows, furniture and abdominal placement in the vain pursuit of comfort.

The next morning, in the light of a new day, I decided I felt a bit better after all. Only a spot of muscular agony that’d be on its way out now that I was bundled in man’s greatest achievement—the king sized bed. I resolved to spend our Tahoe time recovering so that I could complete our planned backpacking trip that weekend. As a humble man, I met with my doctor over Zoom and accepted their prescription of a mild painkiller and muscle relaxer—a familiar cocktail that had helped me weather previous episodes of mundane and non-life threatening back pain. The day crawled on. The pain did not abate. My partner made a chili on a hot plate. I cried while watching cable TV, ever turning like a Sisyphean rotisserie chicken in pursuit of relief just beyond my grasp.

Consultations with Dr. Google had me doubting my original diagnosis. It turns out sharp pain under the right rib cage was a sure sign that a variety of (arguably vestigial but certainly conniving) organs might be preparing to explode and, subsequently, kill you. (Killing you seeming to be their modern, remaining purpose.) We watched movies. I anxiously tracked the dwindling window of open hours of the one urgent care clinic in town, knowing when it closed we’d have to make the long schlepp to the ER in Truckee. There I would have to eat the exorbitant cost of American emergency medicine for something I was equally sure was either a routine pulled muscle or my appendix trying to strangle the life from me.

Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. Not the slow painful revolutions of ceiling, cable TV, bed. Nor the thought I might become one of those men who died, stubbornly, moments after saying something full of bravado and worthy of capture on a tombstone like, “it’s probably gas.” We made the drive to the clinic.

After waiting what, in retrospect, was a very short amount of time that only felt like an inhumanly cruel amount of time, I was seen a kind nurse who listened to my story (long and requiring help from my partner), checked my blood pressure (pretty good) and mercifully allowed me to lie down flat on the exam table (quite nice.) Before the doctor saw us they bravely sent in a second nurse. Some kind of pinch hitter whose mission was to prepare us for the reality of the situation. She explained it could be, in fact, a lot of different things inside me hellbent on rupture and my imminent death that were causing this pain. And, with heartfelt apologies, they lacked the imaging equipment that would identify the traitorous organ. I’d probably need to go to the ER in Truckee (ideally very soon) but the doctor would confirm. In her opinion it was an awful shame they didn’t, themselves, have this technology on hand. What with the expansion and all they could be, just about, a standalone ER themselves if they set to it.

I was saved from this fascinating deep dive on the economics of small tourist town medicine by the doctor.

Sadly, the doctor’s initial take wasn’t much more positive (though it made it up for it by not containing a large amount of unrelated exposition.) She listened to my experience and then dutifully poked parts of me to gauge my relative and proximal suffering with a practiced but medically dispassionate finger. That was followed by some grim nodding that confirmed, to me, my imminent and unfortunate demise.

As a matter of procedure she asked me to raise my shirt to check my abdomen (hairy but in my opinion otherwise unremarkable), took in my flank in an equally dispassionate manner, gave a appropriately doctorly “hm” and then proclaimed, “ah, it’s shingles.” Before me and my partner (herself having had shingles a few years back) could stop laughing I’d received a shot in the ass and a long list of prescriptions to dutifully retrieve from the lakeside CVS across the street.

I recovered another day with the aide of my warmest friend, opiates, and then we made the journey back home in two parts. First a sprint to Klamath Falls, OR where we celebrated another day’s victory over my viral enemy with gas station Indian food, before a final sprint back to Portland the next day closed (one hopes) the chapter on my shingles adventure.

I’m doing better, though the opiates have run out, and I’m taking this week off to recover. No organs, vestigial or otherwise, have managed to kill me. I’ve mostly spent my recovery watching movies to salve the bitterness of having my favorite trip of the year ruined. At least I did not die.

Things I Liked

From modern science, Hydrocodone

Being in pain really sucks. The opiate epidemic is worse. I’m glad we have a bit of a middle ground where I didn’t just have to take more Tylenol even if I find myself wishing they had prescribed me a little more than the handful they did.

From Merck, Zostavax the shingles vaccine

The shingles vaccine is only available in the US to folks above the age of 50. This is a goddamn travesty. Incidents of shingles in people under the age of 50 having been rising dramatically. Shingles sucks. Let people get the vaccine.

My contributions to our chat were mostly insightful additions like “oh fuck” and some longer (though ultimately not moving) exposition on why it would be okay to kill me. ↩︎
We had venison tartare, scallops & pork, and some ravioli that was incredible. The view from this place is the main selling point and if you find yourself in Tahoe City you should check it out. ↩︎

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:02:54 -0700

I’ve had a sprint of sci-fi novels (a brief obsession with the Inquisitor trilogies by Dan Abnett & a run of Culture series novels) I’d like to read some recent literary fiction. Any suggestions?

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:39:30 -0700

Using my recovery time to watch movies and do LEGO. I’ve owned this, unfinished, for an embarrassing amount of time. I’m excited to find a place to hang it.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:23:42 -0700

Belated #caturday post. What with the holiday and all… or something. Labor resting and all that. Just look at my cat. His name is Jinx.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 11:28:02 -0700

We’re calling our trip off early because the back pain I’ve been experiencing turned out to be shingles. Happy it wasn’t my gallbladder or something. Here’s a few photos I managed to catch.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:13:13 -0700

Currently reading: Excession by Iain M. Banks 📚

Week note - iv

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:10:49 -0700

This week was the lead up to and start of our road trip. I enjoy road trips a lot. Driving through Oregon and Northern California is a delight. It’s. been just about 7 years since I’e moved here from Connecticut and I will never stop being awed by the natural beauty it has: volcanic mountains, misty rainy forests, the powerful forces of coast, and the starkness of the high desert.

Our trip takes has taken us, first, to the southern Oregon coast. I love it’s small towns and long lonely stretches. I really enjoyed seeing In A Landscape once again.

Since I am working from the van this week, my note is a bit shorter. This counts as my last post for Blaugust.

Things I Liked

From the Culture series novels The Player of Games and Use of Weapons, my favorite ship names

I am reading the Culture series per my brothers recommendation. So far I’ve really enjoyed the books. I’ve just finished Use of Weapons and am starting with the next.

One aspect I’ve enjoyed so far is the names of the ships. Below is a list of my favorites to far:

So Much for Subtlety
Just Read the Instructions
Congenital Optimist
Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence
What Are The Civilian Applications?
Sweet and Full of Grace
Size Isn’t Everything

Ships in the series are sentient beings with full and equal rights as all other sentients in the Culture. Ships (or at least the Minds, which are their sentient AIs) choose their own names. They seem to have a wry sense of humor.

From the podcast What Went Wrong, “The Lord of the Rings (parts 1-3)”

I think the Lord of the Rings is my favorite film series. They came out between (for me) the ages of 11 - 13 and they were incredibly pivotal piece of art to me. I’ve seen all the extended editions so many times and was lucky, a few years ago, to have experience a marathon viewing where a friend of mine cooked meals from the film.v

Hearing this detailed history of its making only increased my appreciation of the films and how lucky we are to have them. Definitely a good way to spend ~3 hours while driving.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:21:46 -0700

Currently reading: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks 📚

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:21:20 -0700

Finished reading: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks 📚

Week note - iii

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 16:26:45 -0700

I love baked ziti. Growing up in Connecticut every event called for a baked ziti. It is the east coast equivalent of the midwestern hot dish. Your neighbors invited you to a backyard barbecue? You can count on a tinfoil tray of ziti next to the burgers. Going to a pot-luck with your coworkers? Phil from accounting got that zeet.¹ Italian-American food is my comfort food and ziti is, among them, uniquely nostalgic for me. It is simple to make and beloved by almost everyone.

Over the past few weeks my partner has been making lasagnas for Lasagna Love, a program where folks volunteer to (as you might imagine) make a lasagna for a neighbor in need. Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of time hovering around the kitchen as she makes delicious found I can’t have. This sparked a conversation about our shared love for baked ziti. Meaghan grew up on Long Island immersed in the same cultural ziti-geist in her childhood.

Driven by nostalgia we decided to make each other a baked ziti, inspired by our experiences back home. She made hers last week and it was fantastic, just what I’d expect from a chef’s daughter. As I write this, my own ziti is baking in the oven. I tried to recreate it the way that my mom made her’s when I was growing up. She was a single parent with limited income and two boys who ate staggering amounts of food, so cheap and simple meals that made a large quantity were a staple in house.

My mom’s approach didn’t have a recipe from grandma or begin with hours prepping a sauce from scratch. Most of the time it started with a jarred sauce she’d zhuzh up with ground beef (or whatever was on sale), pinches of dried spices from the cabinet, and some sautéd garlic & onions. A typical Sunday meant cooking up a huge pot of sauce, and rolling meatballs, eventually assembling a baked ziti and a pile of spaghetti that my brother and I would eat for the rest of the week.²

Sometimes it’s nice to have a taste of the past.

Next week my partner and I start our roadtrip. For the last three years now, at the end of the summer we pack up my old Japanese van and make our way south down to the Sierras. We camp, backpack and stop wherever calls to us and it’s one of my favorite trips each year.

A photo of our van on our inaugural road trip near Bishop, California.

I’d never thought much about the Sierras. A few years back my partner had read The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson.³ She was immediately enamored with the author’s experiences hiking and backpacking through it. So much so she planned our first trip out there just a few months later. After that trip I felt much the same.

This time we’ll begin our trip with a stop in Coos Bay on the Oregon coast to attend In A Landscape. In A Landscape is a traveling music series that features pianist (and creator) Hunter Noack performing on a temporary stage surrounded by the natural world. Attendees are given a pair of headphones, connected to a powerful broadcasting antenna, that enables the audience to wander afar and encouraged to experience nature accompanied by his music. Noack has been staging In A Landscape for a few years combining classical piano performances with the awe inspiring natural environments of the pacific northwest. I’ve been lucky to attend one before and I couldn’t think of a better way to kick off our trip.

Afterwards, we’ll head south to Lassen Volcanic National Park. During our first road trip we had the opportunity to stop at this less frequented National Park for a night and fell in love. This year we’re excited to be able to return and spend more time in the park.

On the next leg we’ll continue south making stops in to visit Lake Tahoe and then backpack near Rush Creek in the Inyo National Forest. Before heading back up north we’ll spend a few days near Mono Lake with day trips to nearby Mammoth Lake, Yosemite or whatever calls to us.

A photo of Meaghan sitting on a rock outcropping in Sequoia National Park during our first trip.

Our final stop takes us back up to Oregon where we’ll stay at Diamond Lake Resort, a stones throw from Crater Lake National Park. Our original plan had us meeting friends here to join Ride the Rim, an annual cycling event that allows folks to bike around the lake’s rim roads. Unfortunately the event was cancelled this year but a few of us (mostly those of us who had already made a non-refundable reservation at the anachronistic resort) are still planning to get together for a few days. It is rare for us, even though we make our home in Portland, to find ourselves out that way and I’m happy for the excuse nonetheless.

Things I Liked

From Terence Eden, On Civic Hygiene

Terence takes the title of this piece from a quote by Bruce Schneier and expands upon it. Written in 2013 I find it prescient now more than ever.

It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. - Bruce Schneier

I think this bears rereading and repeating, especially by those who in far away 2013 scoffed at the idea. It's relevance is widespread. You don't have to work at Palantir to be contributing to workthat will be used for harm. When I've discussed this with friends or colleagues in the past, so often I would hear some version of "it doesn't matter because if I don't do it, someone else will."

But it won’t be me.

We have to be careful that the apparatus we build cannot easily be misused for evil purposes. Sure, even an innocuous toaster can be weaponised if someone is willing enough, but we should not fall into the trap of making systems which can easily be turned against the people.

Folks living in the US might be more afraid of their government now than ever, but remember that Terence was living in a different world in 2013. But the world of today is built on the foundations of the decisions made then. We’d all be wise to reflect on his foresight.

Civic hygiene isn’t about saying we distrust our current government - it’s about not trusting the next government.

From the BBC, Why travellers are obsessed with foreign supermarkets

Monuments reveal how a country remembers its past, but a supermarket shows how it lives today.

Every time I visit a country I stop at a grocery store. I do this primarily because cooking a few meals while you’re on a long trip helps save some money, but also because I really do enjoy the experience.

I am fascinated about the mundane differences in day to day lives of folks abroad. I am particularly interested in grab-and-go or ready-to-eat meal sections. They’re a peek into what is familiar or comforting to the people there.

From Mastodon, the Simple Sabotage Manual bot

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual is a document written by the US Office of Strategic Services in 1944. The manual was declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2008. The manual was distributed to OSS officers in foreign countries in order to help them train "citizen-saboteurs" in German-occupied Europe.Wikipedia

From Jim Mitchell, The IndieWeb is Punk

A blog is a zine with better uptime.

During college in the 2010s I was fascinated with the zines of the 90s. I felt a sadness that I had missed out on a such a raw art that connected people but had fallen out of the cultural zeitgeist. I was, of course, totally wrong.

First, because print zines are a thriving art that continued then and to this day. And also because I was participating then and now in a descendant of that same ethos online, even if I didn’t know it. Whether it’s an online garden that collects the minutia of their niche hobby or a blog that guides folks on how to create resilient connections online, the IndieWeb has the power to communicate ideas and make me feel the same way those old zines did back then.⁴

Editor’s note: Originally I titled this post “Week Note - iv” when this is, in fact, only the third week note. This is because I can’t count.

If you’re lucky there might even be two. ↩︎
If we’re being honest it rarely lasted more than a few days. Sorry mom. ↩︎
I had only known Robison as the author of the Mars trilogy, a favorite of my sci-fi fanatic father. I was happy to learn he was a passionate outdoorsman. My partner was surprised to learn he was known for anything else. ↩︎
And still do. I wish I had been a little more curious about the wonderful zines people were making then as I had been about the 90s. I missed out on a lot of cool stuff. ↩︎

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 09:45:33 -0700

Finished reading: Ravenor Rogue by Dan Abnett 📚 — I think that’s enough Warhammer books for a while.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:06:55 -0700

I think I have to admit defeat again with Orion as a browser as a daily driver. The 1Password extension continues to be unreliable, which is very frustrating. On top of that it seems like I am getting more frozen tabs and poorer performance than my initial go around. Back to Safari for now.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:57:15 -0700

I visited Minneapolis for the first time over the weekend and I have to admit I was jealous of their cycling infrastructure. So many protected bike lanes. My jealousy was tempered by the fact I was constantly drenched in a thin layer of sweat from the humidity though. Jealous perspiration.

Week note - ii

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:28:31 -0700

I flew to Minneapolis for a wedding this weekend and only got back home to Portland last night, so this post is a bit delayed.

This was my first time experiencing Minneapolis and we stayed just a few blocks away from the site of Alex Pretti’s murder. It’s hard to put into words how I feel about what was done to him and the terror that has been inflicted upon the community by the state.

Alex was a nurse whose life focused on helping others. Alex was murdered for doing something righteous. As the horrors continue to build up around us, threatening to extinguish in us the voice that compels us to do what we know to be righteous, it is important that we don’t give into the despair. We owe it to Alex and so many others to continue the work.

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Awards speech, 2014

The wedding was beautiful.

This Week’s Collection

From Wikipedia, “Frederick William Gunn"

Frederick William Gunn (October 4, 1816 – August 16, 1881) was an American educator, abolitionist, and outdoorsman, who in 1850 founded The Frederick Gunn School (formerly known as The Gunnery), an independent school in the small town of Washington, Connecticut, and America’s first summer camp.

I grew up in Connecticut where elite private prep schools are common. In the 20-odd years I spent there, I never heard of The Frederick Gunn School (prev. The Gunnery) or it’s founder.

Gunn was a moral beacon for the wider community accepting girls, African Americans, Native Americans, and international students into his school. Among his first students were the children of abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe.

He was also referred to as “the founder of leisure camping” in America. He was known to have had his students march 40 miles from Washington to Welch’s Point in the town of Milford, CT where they camped. He believed that a love of nature and physical fitness was core to education.

A brief look at some of its recent notable alumni doesn’t inspire much confidence that his core message is being instilled in its students today.

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation, their art library

All of their art is CC BY 2.0 licensed if you’ve ever needed something to fill out a blog post.

“laptop-spying” by EFF Photos, CC BY 2.0

From TechCrunch, “Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy”

She argued that many of Silicon Valley’s “charismatic or not-so-charismatic leaders” — especially Elon Musk — seem to be ushering in a future pulled from misread pulp science fiction and comic books. “But what’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs.”

The techno-capitalist class are happy to co-opt the aesthetics of science fiction, without caring for the meaning. They’re of the same mold as self-identified “right-wing punks.” The disconnect exists in companies that draw names from Tolkien’s work like Palantir, Anduril and Mithril Capital.

The underlying message, no matter how clear it is, is irrelevant to them. They only want to emulate power or perceptions of grandeur. At the worst end up the spectrum they revel in the perversion of the thing.

I love science fiction and the ability it has to grapple with possible futures and to give us create better ones. Some people love science fiction for the fantasy of power and war.¹

“I believe that all organizing is science fiction — that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” - adrienne maree brown

I’m currently reading my way through the Warhammer 40k Inquisitor trilogies, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. ↩︎

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:05:03 -0700

I demand that PDX start selling merch with the absolute banger characters they’ve created. I would fight a person for one of the giant sticky notes featuring these little weirdos they hung during the construction.

Even this serene donut dude on the wifi landing page is great.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:27:15 -0700

Look I know there’s a lot of bad things happening in the world right now, but what really grinds my goat is email apps in 2026 defaulting to adding a “sent from phone” type line to your signature.

No one receiving it cares and nobody sending it wants it. Stop it. This is crime.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:02:48 -0700

Lately I’ve been enjoying more newsletters. Some favorites include Dense Discovery, Citation Needed, and (rip) Naive Weekly.

I’m always looking for weird and interesting newsletter recommendations if you’ve got any to share.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:40:46 -0700

One change I’ve made is trying to replace my doom scrolling habit with Kagi’s small web tool. It’s a spiritual successor to StumbleUpon that takes you to a random indieweb page. It’s been fun to see so many personal sites I’d otherwise never encounter.

kagi.com/smallweb/

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:36:11 -0700

I pulled the trigger on a Kagi subscription and moved my browsing back into Orion. Orion still has rough edges, but Kagi’s search is a superior product. The biggest hurdle was psychological. My brain’s knee jerk insistence that search should be free.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:25:58 -0700

I’m pleased with the latest design changes I made to my blog. I’ve been collecting inspiration from other small web blogs for a while and finally implemented a few vanity features. My favorite: switching my footnotes to a “marginalia” style.

object.computer/colophon/

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:59:36 -0700

Watched: Over Your Dead Body 🍿 - 3/5