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It was our tenth anniversary this month. Sunday the 25th, specifically. We're actually not sure what day it was that we got together, which we both think is very funny. We know it was late in the month, so a few years ago we decided to split the difference and officially call it the 25th. We do still just sort of celebrate 'anniversary month', which is equally fun.

Anyway, I feel old now. Ten years is long time and it feels like we've only just begun accomplishing any of the goals and dreams we had in our minds back then. Some of theirs have changed over the years, but that's for them to write about. Mine haven't really changed. The shape of some has morphed a little, but I'm still chasing the same old things.

At the end of the month I'm crashing headlong into a massive deadline at work that I'm barely ready for, having been horribly short-changed on time to complete it, and I'm essentially doing it solo at this point because my team keeps getting picked off for other things. I also lost the client I was doing some consulting/freelance work for because they sadly folded, so work has just been constant and sometimes uncompensated stress.

In order to get my thoughts back together, I've taken up bullet journaling again with a passion. I find bullet journaling (or my own flavour of it) to be extremely successful, but I end up failing to stick with it or truly commit to certain parts of it. I decided to sit back and examine why: knowing myself, it's almost never a lack of desire, but rather a systemic block. I just have to design a better system.

I'll give you an example: I put some 2B lead in my favourite Rotring 600 pencil recently (going from 2H). I have sat and sketched almost every single night this month, which is up from not at all in December. I'm not a gear head for the sake of the gear, but rather because I cannot abide friction, and sometimes it takes a while to figure out exactly what's causing it. Sometimes it's as simple as changing the lead in a pencil and sometimes it's as complicated as rebuilding my entire way of thinking or the entire workflow that plumbs my tools together.

I wrote up some of the basics of this new bullet journal system, which mostly consists of simplifying everything. I also somewhat guiltily retail therapy'd myself a little with some new stationery, because January is my absolute worst seasonal depression month.

In my own time, I'm making slow but steady progress on the painting app, which is good news, but I'm deathly tired of reading thousands and thousands of words about digital colour, colour science and spaces and graphics APIs and all other kinds of fun stuff. It's like putting myself through an MA in computer graphics without being certain it's going to pay off and every now and then that anxiety gets to me. I guess skills are skills though.

To get a little break from this, I picked up a little prototype for a game I've wanted to make for a long, long time. It's a puzzle game about water and plants, set in a robot city. I used Forest to quickly build up the basics of the system, then constructed a sequencing tool, animation and tweening systems and a very basic editor. I've not done a terrible amount of art on it in this time because I want to get some puzzles built out in grey box form before I expend too much more effort; I've got plenty of historic sketches and visions for the aesthetic. I'm an animator at heart though, and I couldn't resist making a handful of quick animations while stress-testing the animation scheduler with different reactions to the player character's movements; stopping at different speeds, gracefully changing direction, and a handful of little idle animations which are randomly dropped in when standing still. I need to introduce more life and reaction into these movements, but it's a good start.

There were also some smaller wins worth mentioning —

• I got internet! My ISP was convinced that my new apartment was a business, something which should take a phone call to fix, but actually took two months fighting several layers of bureaucracy. I now, finally, have 900Mbp/s plumbed directly to my workstation, which is both the fastest my internet has ever been and making my work life so much easier.
• I managed to play and finish a bunch of brilliant games. My partner and I played through What Remains of Edith Finch, Return of the Obra Dinn (100% solved!) and finished Hollow Knight, which were all fantastic.
• I joined 0dd Company, a collective of makers and artists started by MVU, who was also the one to invite me (thank you!) It's hopefully a great excuse to get more work into the world with the encouragement of like-minded people.

Everything I tended to this month —

• Added bullet journal
• Added composting

Interesting links and reading —

• Ink in the Stomach.
• This is an old one, but it illustrates precisely why I'm making my painting app: It's easier to rewrite the nomenclature of an entire scientific discipline than get Microsoft to make software that works.
• Emily Hare's updated website shows even more of her her beautiful work.
• A wicked deep dive into ASCII rendering with some novel methodology from Alex Harri.
• A beautifully-made essay about the design of RSS readers that's also about so, so much more.
• This is for Everyone, a small celebration of various efforts to reclaim the web from big tech.
• Studio Ghibli publishes 400 still frames from their films. I'm including this because of the Miyazaki quotes. For better or worse, everything that man says resonates with me.
• A study on dementia's effect on writing and language using linguistic analysis of Terry Pratchett's Discworld across the known timeline of his diagnosis. This is both fascinating, terrifying and has potentially huge implications for early diagnosis of dementia.
• A tiny webserver in a tic-tac box.
• Mastodon thread: a hilarious love letter to French motoring.

Some interesting and atypical resources on colour I've collected this month too —

• Mitchell Charity's blackbody temperatures mapped to RGB values.
• Randall Munroe's most common RGB monitor colours, a sample of human colour interpretations from real-world monitors.

It's December. Where did that go? I've badly neglected my writing, both personal and on this site over the past two months, mostly because all of October was spent recovering from illness and trudging through paperwork, packing, moving and figuring out how to merge two households for the first time.

After a few hiccups on the exchange/complete process, we got the keys to our apartment and first home on the sixth of November. It's taken about eight years to save up for it, so I'm pretty proud. For both of us, it was a roughly 400 mile move from two different parts of England up to Scotland, in a beautiful little town south of Edinburgh.

I took this photo a week or so after moving when my chair arrived. I've wanted an armchair reading nook surrounded by my books since I was a child. I finally have one! There will be more pictures and plants (and books) when I get them all moved up here.

We have taken some time out to go to Edinburgh a few times, and we definitely made the right choice. That city is cool.

On top of the minor and in no way complicated process of moving countries and setting up a new home, I've also been working day and night on some big projects at the day job and on client projects... so yeah. Everything else went out the window for a bit.

The only other thing I have managed to do is tap away on my painting app project. I'm trying to get the brush engine up and running to my satisfaction before I start sharing more progress on it, but it's already packed with so many cool features and I'm super excited to talk about it — it's just still in that crummy in-dev state where nothing looks particularly impressive yet.

Hopefully I'll be back to regular programming soon. I want to get back to art (in my new office/studio!) and even more projects with my partner, now we can finally work side-by-side.

Changes to the site —

• Added some modding notes for Hollow Knight because I've picked it up again amid Silksong hype.
• Added some of my notes for the Fish shell. I started building up all my programming notes in October and then just as I started putting it together, the apartment stuff and work went crazy.

I've amassed a lot of links since September, so I'm putting them all in now —

• The Colonization of Confidence, a brilliant and brutal piece about generative AI.
• The day my smart vacuum turned against me. Some reverse-engineering tomfoolery that revealed potentially horrible security risks and possible privacy violations by smart product companies, with our author dishing some revenge by effectively open-sourcing their product.
• Nano 2, a reboot/sequel for Nanowrimo by some of the original team.
• The Stallman Paradox, a deep dive into the economic inequity of open vs commercial software development and the trend of extractive 'open source theatre' by megacorps.
• Paloma Kop's Runicon Cypher. A cool experiment in asemic writing, world-building, and font making.
• Some notes on probability judgement, a great post about the psychology of statistics and polling (and misleading information).
• Modern Illustration Archive
• A threat model for accessibility on the web
• Hi it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

It's a short one for September. It's also a day late and a dollar short, but today is one of the first days I've felt almost completely normal for a while.

• I bought an apartment this month. It's mine and my partner's first home!
• I fell brutally ill with an inner ear infection that nearly killed me.

Incredible stuff. My pet theory is the universe was like 'Buying a house before they're thirty? We gotta slow this idiot down'.

No but seriously, an ear infection?! C'mon dude. I went into hospital with a 40°C temperature that had started shutting down my internal organs, all of which was triggered by, essentially, tinnitus. I didn't know my right ear hated me so much.

I've been unable to walk properly until just recently — balance issues from the infection — and with a seized digestive system, eating hasn't been particularly fun either. I had nearly two weeks off work and didn't sleep much for that entire period with a perpetual migraine that nothing could shift for six days, day and night, and I kept fainting and having horrible hallucinogenic fever dreams that either stopped me from sleeping or made it feel like I hadn't.

It's all right though, because I didn't have any really important mortgage paperwork or solicitor's questions to answer or other complex house-buying related things to do. Seriously, I had my 'finalising everything and doing all the verification stuff' mortgage meeting the morning after I was discharged from hospital and I think that was actually the closest to dying I've ever been. I certainly wanted to.

Anyway, I'm very excited about my new apartment (it's gonna be so expensive) and my partner is too. We should be moving in early November, which is awesome and exclusively a product of it being in Scotland. Scotland is much better at doing housing than England. In England my move-in date would probably be, like, March 2026.

I couldn't read or write (or really do much of anything) for most of the month because my brain was all broken and feverish or filled with migraine, so the changelog and links are all super sparse and boring. I was planning on building out some programming pages and publishing another whole new section and it did not work out.

Changes to the site in September —

• Added Programming
• Added Sous Chef Documentation

And a single link —

• You don't need JS

I did some more consultant work this month: I gave a small team a very nice website they can pick up and run with by themselves, which they desperately needed. At the day job, there's a big trade show coming up, so there's been tonnes of design and photography work to get shot/built/designed/printed in the creative half of my job. I also need to prepare to migrate a massive backbone system to the EU this coming September, so the sysadmin half continues to please.

I picked up the Make Your Own One-Page Roleplaying Game zine from Exeunt Press, which was super inspiring. It put me onto a bunch of indie outlets, solo creators and tiny RPGs I'd never seen before, all of which got me fired up and made me want to pick up my dormant, tentpole TTRPG project again. Fortunately, I've held off on because I have other things I need to finish. I did indulge in some one-page design ideas, with one I really like, but I didn't let myself get too distracted by it. To tide me over, I wrote out some design notes on some of the new systems I read about, which is a good way to trick a hyperfixation phase into not letting you rabbit-hole too far.

Koriko and Orbital from Jack Harrison's Mousehole Press are the two I'm super interested in at the moment. I love their premises and I love the No Dice, No Masters ruleset Orbital uses. A mechanical system for GM-less and RNG-less collaboration designed, almost entirely, for telling stories about marginalised or fringe communities and the lives of their inhabitants is a hell of a premise and I can't wait to devise some of my own stories with it.

Also, Koriko and Orbital resemble Kiki's Delivery Service and Record of a Spaceborn Few respectively. Kiki needs no introduction, but Spaceborn Few is part of the wonderful Wayfarers slice-of-life sci-fi series by Becky Chambers. Just read Becky Chambers, you won't regret it. Oh yeah, and Koriko was illustrated by Deb Lee, whose work I adore, so I'm pretty sure Jack Harrison is just making games for me, personally.

I bought a Steamdeck this month in a fit of pique. It was a lapse into retail therapy because I was having a pretty bad time in the middle of this month, but I don't regret it at all. I struggle to sit at my PC to play games these days because something about sitting in the same chair I work in all day makes playing through my games library feel like a job. Now, I've not only finally got a handheld to sit somewhere comfy and play the twenty-something indie titles I desperately want to finish, but I'm also emulating a number of N64, GameCube, PS2 and PS3 titles on it that I either haven't played for nearly twenty years or never got to play at the time.

Finally, I refurbished my Obsidian vault and wrote about it, because I've been delving back into building a toolkit around myself to help with my mental health, daily happiness and productivity. I went to the doctor, started something of a diet, made a new habit tracker (currently not in Obsidian, but I'll probably merge it in at some point) and got recommended or sought out some new resources to try and help with my mental energy levels, focus and anxiety. I've been climbing out of a very deep, black hole for a long time now and I've stalled repeatedly this year... but I feel like I'm ready to push for some more progress.

I'm a bit bummed about summer coming to an end, but I also thrive in the cold weather. The forests around me have just recovered from being absolutely butchered by forestry management — I'm assured the trees had it coming, but I'm not so sure. It felt like a dead place for a while, but just this past week, it's been lovely to walk in them all dense and overgrown again. In some places, you'd never even know what had happened just months ago. I'm going to enjoy the dying days of the season there.

Everything I tended to this month —

• Added Human
• Added Obsidian
• Added Tabletop RPGs
• Added Publishing Software
• Added Lena documentation
• Added Meander documentation

I've made a hundred tiny design tweaks, including a version one dark mode that launches with this post! It doesn't automatically enable itself yet because it's not 100% there, so you'll just need to find the button for it. Regardless, I'm getting really happy with how this site looks now, even if it's not 100% what I envisioned. I'm just going to keep iterating on it and trust the process.

A final surprise right before publishing this was getting accepted into the XXIIVV webring! I've been super inspired by all of its members, and especially its founders, for a long time, so it's something of an honour to be there. Devine Lu Linvega's personal wiki is what inspired me to write Spindle back in 2019, thus beginning my dark descent into the inescapable hobby of tinkering on the small web.

Some links and interesting reading from August —

• Why you need a WTF notebook, some brilliant advice I used on that gig this month. It was very useful when I discovered a bunch of pre-work I was expecting hadn't been done.
• From Atlas Obscura, the Aarne-Thompson Uther Fable Index, a brilliant resource for understanding European folk tales and their history. The full index has made for some fantastic reading.
• A collection of programming examples for UXN, Hundred Rabbits' virtual machine and a constant permacomputing inspiration. These exercises happened to introduce me to the concept of 'literate' Programming. While I won't be making it my primary way of expressing code any time soon, it did inspire some notes on interesting programming styles.
• AI robots.txt, a comprehensive list of bots to add to your robots.txt file. A fair few of these will still ignore them, necessitating other server-level defensive tools if you really want to prevent bots from scraping you. Sadly, these are just more damage we're seeing happening to the open web, from bad corporate actors and legislators alike, and it sucks. I hope the bubble pops soon.
• In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in the Microwave. Just read it.

I've upgraded this site's tooling a little for publishing microwiki-style documentation of my software projects.

I take documentation seriously and for some projects, like Meander, it's super unmanagable; I actually maintain three separate sets of Meander docs, and this site will technically be a fourth. One is the GitHub readme, one is a Fountain document that will ship with the next version — so baby's first Meander document is also a copy of the docs you can print out, which I think is kinda neat — and also the internal help command system, which is equally comprehensive.

I need to think about streamlining this down, so I'm going to start POSSE-ing it on this site. I'll still be keeping documentation alongside the source code, because it annoys me immensely when projects don't ship with their own notes, but having just one source of truth instead of like, three, is going to help immensely. I've written a new checklist procedure to follow for publication so I don't get into the 'oops I forgot to change X in that location', which happens to me all the time, even with simple projects.

I've started with the Lena API documentation as of today, but I'll be adding some soon for Meander and also Spindle, which is entirely undocumented online because I keep changing it. I might document Forest here too, but as it's going to remain closed-source for a while, I also might not. We'll see!

Another month goes by and quite frankly this whole time business is really starting to annoy me.

I was going to publish a rant about the Online Safety Act, which came into force in the U.K. this month, but I ran out of time to complete it with the correct level of research. Long story short, it's an absolute shitshow. You'll get to see it soon, hopefully.

In better news, I discovered the game Moonstone this month after a trip to a nearby town with a handful of little independent gaming shops. My partner and I both got four or five minis each, which we've been painting whenever we get the chance here and there, mostly each Saturday since. My Bristlenose the troll is coming along nicely. I need to git gud again before I try some of the much finer detailing on the others though. Bristlenose is large — 50mm against the standard humanoid 32mm — which is great for someone who hasn't painted a 40K mini since they were a teenager, and it's made me very grateful that my eyesight is still perfect. Hopefully I'll have him done this coming weekend because I didn't manage to do it in time for this post.

I had a week off in the middle of the month to do a consulting gig, taking a small non-profit's I.T. infrastructure from a company who was — as best I can tell — defrauding them with a horrendous vendor contract, and replaced it all with simpler self-managed solutions. I took their costs down to less than 10% of what they were paying this company with off-the-shelf solutions they could run themselves. A large portion of the maintenance and hosting charge (thousands of pounds) turned out to be for the difficult task of providing a total of ~400GB of shared storage.

Anyway, while the experience was gratifying because I enjoy proving a point (I.T. isn't expensive or particularly complicated in a small business if you're sensible and also fuuuuck contractors and vendors who prey on the computer illiterate), I don't think I want to repeat the process of suggesting to modernisations to people's workflows any time soon. Imagine XKCD #763 but in ten or fifteen different places. I don't really mind how people do things, but the problem was that some of it was so bizarre and convoluted, or relied on software that was no longer supported, that I couldn't easily reconstruct it. To be clear, I'm a software longevity person, but this wasn't 'this software is super important and it's a disaster it's been discontinued', it was more 'someone told us to use this tool twenty years ago and no one has stopped since to see if we still need it'. I poked the hornet's nest by designing far, far simpler and more productive alternatives; half of the team recognised the improvement, but the other half decided I had been sent by the Devil to destroy their ability to do their jobs. It was an interesting few days.

I also built a macropad for my new laptop because Krita is bad at being a touch app. It's inspired a bunch of new design ideas for my in-development painting app because I want it to work flawlessly on tablet PCs without needing a keyboard, despite the fact that I designed it keyboard-first. I've got what I think is a really cool piece of design that I'm excited to implement, but I've got a lot of work — mostly still foundation-laying — to do before I get to that stage.

Finally, I've just started reading the Stanisław Lem short story collection Mortal Engines, which I'm really enjoying. It's of a similar era to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, if not in exact year of creation but definitely in tone and style of science fiction. I love reading any genre fiction from an era before it became saturated and codified its conventions and congealed around a set of tropes. I especially love old science fiction; there's something about the carefree nature of worldbuilding in sci-fi of the thirties to the sixties that I love, and I equally love the dramatic changes in the styling of retro-futurism over that period.

This month's links and interesting reading:

• Mike Hall's impressive 128Kb page load, a brilliant breakdown of a project to get webpages served fast over the Edge network in Africa. If you've seen all the fawning over McMaster-Carr's (excellent) website this past few weeks, this is worth a read.
• A plea for lean software, a manifesto for something very dear to my heart because I hate bloated software with slow startups, splash screens and a thousand DLLs. Almost all of the software I make is single-binary and run-anywhere for this reason. The painting app will be too.
• Lena, a short story about human brain imaging that filled me with more dread than I was prepared for. Also my introduction to its author, qntm, whose bibliography has become a large chunk of my future reading list.
• Nikhil Suresh's brilliant rebuttal to an AI bro's thinkpiece, as recommended by Ed Zitron, who feel like the only people actually talking about the AI industry's thorough lack of clothes.
• On the history of Modern Monetary Theory, well worth reading about how we got into the global financial state we're in, and perhaps what we can do about it.
• Long live Linux audio, Alison Wilder's in-depth exploration of the state of Linux audio. It's another piece of evidence to add to my 'Are we Linux yet' exploration, but I do find some of the solutions — just get rid of your plugins that don't work, who cares? — aren't real solutions. For me it's not mixing and mastering tools, it's samplers and high quality instruments I can't recreate or have access to without spending 10x the cost on a single day of a musician's time.
• CyberChef, a useful toolbox of different utilities which can even perform jobs requested directly by URL. I've been using a few of them for things at work.
• Flexflex, a dynamic typeface with extreme and incredible variations.

My Framework 12 is here!

Overall I'm pretty pleased with it, it's my new best friend for travelling and working away from my desk. I've needed a laptop really, really badly for a long time now and been stuck with an iPad, which has somehow become more useless as time goes on and everyone developing for it realises it's a dead-end platform.

I posted a quick review of it on fedi, which I'll reiterate here quickly with a higher word count.

Upsides

1. A well-built lil guy: the surface finishes are all super nice and it's delightfully chonky.
2. It looks cool as hell, especially in this colourway: everyone who's seen it, including my non-savvy family, have been like wHAT IS THAT? SHOW ME!
3. The repairability of it is awesome: it took less than a minute for me to install all the parts I'd bought myself. The interior is tool-less and the case closes with captive screws using the included screwdriver.
4. The modular I/O is how every portable computer should be doing it. I have two USB-Cs (mostly for charging on either side), a full size SD card reader (finally!), and then a rotating cast of HDMI, ethernet and USB-A if I need it. I also have an expanded storage card that doubles as a massive thumbdrive — amazing for handing to people in a pinch.
5. The buying experience is excellent: don't need a charger? Is RAM cheaper where you live? Cool, don't buy it. 10/10.

It was around £300 cheaper for me to buy some of the parts locally, including the SSD, RAM and charger — I just picked up a really nice slim GaN charger with international plugs on it instead of having yet another black plastic transformer in a drawer. Also, due to a quirk of dynamic pricing, I was able to get a 48GB SODIMM kit for the same price as the kit I originally wanted, so this little laptop has more RAM than most people's workstations, which is very fun.

Downsides

1. The screen is lovely, crisp and bright, but it's a bit washed out colour-wise. I'm 90% sure it's the same panel as some of the lower end Surface tablets, which was a big fear that has come true. The best way I can describe it is this: the first time you look at it after a while, you think 'night mode' must be on, but it isn't. It's just off gamma and tone-wise. To be fair, I am also very spoiled by my fancy desktop monitor.
2. I haven't had a chance to try a pen with it, because despite being compatible with my partner's Surface pen, I haven't been able to get pressure working, which doesn't bode well for any non-MS pens. I'm thinking of getting a Penoval USI pen because the Framework's first-party one isn't yet available for some reason. I was hoping it would appear before the laptop pre-orders fulfilled and I could add it to my order, but here we are.
3. Intel sucks: it runs hot and the CPU isn't powerful enough to be kicking out this much heat while idling.

I definitely think Framework should have offered something more efficient out of the gate and I'm frankly annoyed they didn't, instead choosing to stick with a company whose CEO just publicly admitted they're not very good at semiconductors any more... and yeah, I can see that.

Anyway, for its initial faults... I still do really like it, and I trust — hopefully I won't regret this — that they'll offer sensible generational upgrades as they have for previous models. The Framework 12 is specifically designed with an easily repaired display panel that separates from the lid, so I'm hoping for newer, higher quality panels down the line.

I think the thing I like about the idea of the Framework laptop is having a device with the same modularity as a desktop PC. I love my PC because every part of it is modular and I can change and upgrade it without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I can change my screen or graphics card or speakers or audio interface and it's not glued together by some asshole to sell you a new device in eighteen months when this one inevitably dies. Framework, faults and all, are doing something to correct that. That's worth something.

Moving forward

I name all of my machines after different satellites and moons of the solar system because it's easier to track them. We're on Saturn at the moment, so my workstation is Hyperion and this new laptop is Pandora... something about being box-shaped and opening.

I've been setting up these two machines to work almost entirely seamlessly together, so I can just stand up, walk away and keep working on most tasks, with a focus on admin, writing and painting/sketching. It's not particularly clever in any way, but I do like the simple, local-first and entirely cost-free way I've achieved this. I've written about this in workflow.

I've also updated my notes on Windows machines, because Hyperion is now five years old and started on Windows 10, and anything I'd written down from that time is long out of date. In light of some new stuff I learned, I'm going to factory reset Hyperion soon and get both machines on the same footing.

It's July already? Yeurgh.

There's not much to report this month. I've been trying not to expire in the heat. It's been over 30°C here in the UK and I live and work in a house that was built for -5° winters and 15° summers fifty years ago.

I posted a new artwork this week; I recently saw this big red-brick hotel with all this amazing ivy in the sunset, but I didn't have my camera on me, so I captured the vibe of it digitally instead. I think it came out pretty good.

Oh I applied for a job too — a life-changing dream job, for a variety of reasons — but I can't talk about that just yet. It has, however, dominated the back-half of this month in terms of stress.

Other than that, I've just been plugging away at work and plugging away at projects trying to stay afloat. Good things are coming soon!

I'll end with a collection of interesting links and reading I came across this month:

• Libreture, a live list of bookshops and sellers of DRM-free ebooks, comics and RPGs.
• Food Plant Solutions, a charity working on devising lists of native edible plants — and guides for growing them — for every place on Earth to combat food poverty.
• Usborne's free-to-download collection of old computing books for kids. I remember reading these in the school library as a kid and it sent a wave of nostagia through me poking through some of these again
• Hayley Morris and Nerd Productions' amazing stop-motion Octopus for the documentary of the same name.
• I deleted my second brain, Joan Westenberg's manifesto in opposition to the personal knowledge management status quo. Ironically, I'm writing this in Obsidian, but I've never run my second brain the way most PKM/Zettelkasten people do. It always seemed like far too much work for too little reward.

I just published a bit of an update, finally getting my website into a state I like to start building on top of. This version of my website notably adds:

• visual — a proper gallery of artwork, photography and other such projects.
• garden — a digital garden and the starting point for publishing my notes and essays.
• microfeed — yeah, this one!

Some digital garden notes worth highlighting:

• Uses — my tools and processes.
• Colophon — how this site works.
• Zibaldone — snippets and miscellany from literature and beyond.

A round-up for the end of the month of May, with all the most interesting things I read.

• The Era of the Business Idiot, another in a long line of Ed Zitron pieces reporting on the actual state generative AI rather than the puffery of its CEOs.
• Frank Kunert's brilliant miniatures, via Colossal.
• Urban Bees!
• Andrea Chu's award-winning article on the problematic work of Hanya Yanagihara, via Vulture.
• Noel Berry's post about the latest version of his engine, which was immediately slotted into my upcoming essay on atomic dependency.
• Just a QR code. I can't tell you how much I hate QR code services, but this one is good.
• Behind the scenes of Casper's real-time animatics, via Befores and Afters magazine. It reminded me of old stop-motion framegrabbers with CRT monitors and markers on the screen.