2026 January❮❮prevnext❯❯

My 13th Annual One Second Everyday,
Featuring cameos from (in order of first appearance)
Jon (Torso and Marimba), Lynette, Myles, Duke, Eslam, Maria, Kyle, Me, Don White, Jim, John, Swans, JP Honk incl Dom and Ben, a Cement Mixer, Julie, Matt, Susan's Frottoir, Porter Sq's "Gift of the Wind", Cindy Scott, BABAM incl Rayyan, School of Honk incl Josh, JP Honk incl Tim Dan Declan Lindy Steve Leigh, Yamato Taiko Drummers, Gibbs school band, First Friday incl Carrie, Wren, Chas, Aurora, a Covid test, Glenn, Rebirth Brass Band, Reena, Matthew, Kellie, Anna, JP Honk incl Tom and Duane, Not Art, First Friday incl Max and Nyle, Arun, Liz, Tesla Takedown incl Marie, Dig Dug, Scott, Geese, Krista, Lisa, School of Honk incl Timothy, Fish, my beard, Linda, Donald Duck, José Carioca, and Panchito Pistoles, Joe, BABAM incl shola, Wake Up the Earth, Karen, JP Honk incl Sam, 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, ADubbs' legs, Juggler, Susan, Lena, Kelda, SoH incl Nat and Kaleb, a kitten, David, Adam, Tractors, Roxanna's memorial, Olive Garden, Mom, Cousins incl Lauren , Ken, Ron, Aunt Susan, Maurie, Terry, a bunbun, Roman, Anisha, Romane and her mom, a doggo, a cardinal, Improv Asylum, Blue Man Group, Agnes, Mia, Aaron, Portland Sea Dogs, Brent, Lucas, Lincoln, Clawdette Smm Smm, JPHonk incl Diego and Malia, Extinction Rebellion, Kyle, Tom, Dylan, Sarah, Abby, Emma, Todd, Alpacas, a squirrel, JP Honk incl Matt, Marsha, Cathleen, Karen, Jordan, Cordelia, Eva's Relish Recipe, Elio's oyster shucker, a horse, a tapdancer, Minuteman crosscountry track, Middlesex Activist Band, Arthur, Dalia, stiltwalker, tumbler, Alien Bill, Sophie/Zoot, a spooky skeleton, John Lochiatto, a Red Rebel, T-rex Skeletons, T-rex Clowns, another cardinal, Diego, a kitty, a windup insect, Car Gurus, Charles, Andrew Pinard/Jonathan Harrington, an anti-ICE Eagle, Bethlyn, Calvin, Chloe, Puck (RIP), Bard

---

Don't let the powers that be bury Jack Smith's testimony about Jan 6
Ten was the number this year, shoehorn these into 4 galleries: my favorite overall, ones involving people I love, ones involving creatures, and then just generic "visuals"

---

We don't have the right to force regime change in other countries, and I think Trump said he wasn't going to be this kind of interventionist.

Friends that lean left, do read Maduro's wikipedia page. There was a lot not to like about this guy. (I still trust the process of Wikipedia though the coverage almost seems slanted but maybe he was that bad.)

Folks who lean right, do think about Trump and his promises not to be this kind of screwing with other countries president. And how convenient a smokescreen this is for a guy with incredibly low popularity numbers right now. Media I consumed last year... 4 star in red, 5 star red and bolded...

---

oldie but a goodie

A while back the physicist Edwin F. Taylor headed a "science and spirituality" group (one that I co-lead for a while after) at the First Church in Belmont (UU). He knew of my interest in dealing with morality and asked me for notes on his own ahead-of-time eulogy essay he was writing, If We Did Not Die

December was light in new music but pretty good... "Tambourine" is such a banger for me acoustically. And for the Tom Waits, I just love the line "Come down off the cross, we can use the wood"

4 star:
* Tambourine (Eve)
* Come On Up to the House (Tom Waits)
* Sock It to Me Santa (Bob Seger & The Last Heard)

3 star:
* Pianomaniakks (Intro) (Levi.Sct)
* To All the Girls I've Loved Before (Albert Hammond)
* 'Zat You, Santa Claus? (The Heavy Remix) (Louis Armstrong & The Commanders)
* Old Folks Boogie (Little Feat) Was thinking about this video, ninja kitty cat jumping and dodging down a hallway...

---

Philosophers are generally expected to display wisdom and calm in the face of existential questions. I am just not one of those philosophers.

---

Someone has forgotten that we have laws not kings.

With my band BABAM, (behind my friend Sophie), via the NY Times on Anti-ICE protests

It is clear that the ignorance of US citizens of federal laws and law enforcement duties, procedures, and limits of authority is getting to the point where it is deadly. I spent probably 3 hours watching and re-watching, and finding every single video and angle I could of the situation in Minnesota yesterday and came to one immovable conclusion based off of what I saw, and what I know from a professional standpoint. This is long, but please at least give it a read.

As a former officer, let me make something clear: ICE agents ARE NOT police officers, deputy sheriffs, or troopers. They are not local/state law enforcement. They are not federal criminal law enforcement. They have an INCREDIBLY limited scope of authority, and that scope of authority exists in detaining and arresting with probable cause and/or SIGNED WARRANTS those investigated and suspected of being in the US illegally.

This ENTIRE situation in Minnesota was outside of the scope of legal authority from the get go. None of it was done within the scope of authority of ICE. Every single behavior those agents made was procedurally incorrect, done without proper authority, and was based off of intimidation and the assumption that people do not understand the law and their rights in regards to interactions with ICE.

On no planet should an officer, agent, or any human being ever step in front of a car in drive that is actively trying to leave, and use their body as a shield to prevent a person from LEGALLY LEAVING a situation in which they are not legally being detained. It takes maybe a week into any kind of actual law enforcement training to understand that in NO CIRCUMSTANCES do you ever place yourself in front of a vehicle in drive. That agent had every single opportunity to simply take two steps to the right and not be standing directly in front of a vehicle attempting to conduct their legal right to drive away.

You can see the wheels are turned, [Renee] backed up and turned them to the right, moved forward a bit to leave, couldn't because an agent was standing in front of her, and continued to try to leave by TURNING HER WHEELS TO THE RIGHT and moving forward. He continually chose to stand there and not allow her to legally leave as she had every single right to do.

The officer pulling on her door and banging on her window and swearing at her had ZERO authority to order her out of her vehicle or attempt to make entry into her vehicle. None. A single day of actual training and regard to legal scope of authority and the LAW would've prevented that from happening.

You now have a frightened citizen being blockaded by immigration agents, with another person in her vehicle, who had zero obligation to follow legally invalid orders from that agent, being blocked in and having a fully grown, masked man attempting to make entry into her car. If this were reversed, every single person would immediately feel she had every reasonable expectation to fear for her safety. It doesn't matter if she knew it was ICE because the agents weren't even acting in their scope of authority anyway.

Whether or not she made the right decision by very CLEARLY, based off of how hard her wheels were turned and how low and to the driver corner windshield that shot was fired, trying to drive to the left of that agent, is IRRELEVANT in the picture as a whole.

None of this would have happened if those agents had done even one single thing correctly. Not just correctly, but within their legal scope of authority. Every single moment of that interaction was escalated by untrained, unprofessional, procedurally inept "agents" who not only had zero control of themselves but everything around them. And not because they are helpless, but because their actions that did not fall under their scope of power CAUSED this. Their tempers, lack of training, and knowledge that they can get away with violating their own scope of authority caused this.

I will always be the first to defend law enforcement when lethal force very clearly is required. But this was not even remotely the case, and as an actual TRAINED professional in that field with experience and understanding of both the law and procedures, there is no justification for this- and it would benefit EVERYONE to actually read up on the laws, scope of authority, and use a single shred of common sense to see that this situation was started, escalated, and caused these events to transpire by the ICE agents involved. I have zero respect for those in power who are ignorant to their authority and abuse it at the cost of lives around them.

RIP Scott Adams, his cancellation not withstanding. Or his advocacy for when "only persuasion matters, not truth" and other pro-Trump idiocy.
I will always appreciate his comic on how consciousness is partially just a post-decision rationalization -
Also his line about Sisyphus, which I badly paraphrase as "Sisyphus has a sense of playfulness [...] you have to look at it from the rock's point of view." I do like a good collection of tumblr posts

---

I admit this made me laugh.

20 'Star Wars' Characters Ranked by How Bad Their Breath Probably Is from Scott Mitchem on FB: AHAHAHAHAHAHJAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA*SOB*

what a g'damn infant we have running this country,

Machado 'presented' her Nobel Peace Prize medal to Trump, both leaders confirm
or how excited he is by a car with his face on the side... (which is just a dab of quid pro quo, there... Or stuff like how FIFA's head piled him with a golden trophy Or you know, a new 747. Jeez. My 11 year old nephew independently discovered a kind of fun art technique I made up for myself a decade ago - using layers to draw over a photo, and then using the eyedropper tool to grab a flat color and then apply it to a larger region, resulting in a nice illustrated/cel shaded look.

Being a life long doodler myself, I bought him an iPad and an Apple Pencil last year to encourage this kind of play, but was curious that he ignores the Pencil in favor of the fingers nature gave him. This sort of surprised me; when I doodle on my own iPad I NEED the precision of a good stylus... with a fat opaque fingertip it's too hard to make lines meetup. And his lines were fine!

But I put on my UX researcher hat and observed - and in a minute the answer was clear - he pinches and zooms in ALL the time as needed to where the imprecision of a finger doesn't matter. And not just zoom, but rotate to get a more convenient angle for the coloring motion of his fingertips.

Stodgy old me, growing up with pen-on-paper, this wasn't an option. And I never was comfortable with how some iPad art programs made it "too easy" to rotate. (Heck, my current favorite doodle pad Apple Notes doesn't even have zoom in!)

But this next generation - they're touchscreen native in a way I will never be... The kids are alright.

---

America has blown 80 years of accumulated goodwill and trust among its allies, our American moderator was told. A rock-steady assumption of allied defence and security planning for literally generations has been that America would act in its own interests, sure, but that those interests would be rational, and would still generally value the institutions that America itself worked so hard to build after the Second World War. America's recent actions have destroyed the ability of any ally to continue to have faith in America to act even within its own strategic self-interest, let alone that of any ally.

The officer then said that even a swift return of America to its former role won't matter.

Because "we will never fucking trust you again."

---

Was pondering the difference between my buddy Scott's love of AI summaries of articles and books - a powerful tool in a text flooded world, but I worry about glossing over nuance - and my historic love of pithy quotes.

Superficially they're similar modes- a lot of information presented in a compact way. But I was pleased when I thought of this framing:

A good summary captures the essence even at the cost of some detail, but a thought provoking quote is able to invoke MORE detail, provoking the thoughtful reader's imagination. It can evocative and invite unpacking, while a summary is bit more drably utilitarian.

---

This Greenland thing is fricking INSANE.

What right do we think we have to Greenland?

Destroying NATO... what a dream for Putin!

(As my FB friend Mike points out Not to mention for China and Xi Jinping - between justification for whatever they want to do in Taiwan (and the USA less likely to say boo about it) they get to the be the beacon of stabilty and predictability, a reasonable partner when we've become a America First/America Alone/We Don't Care loose cannon.)

Nothing is more beautiful than shadows.

---

about right. I'm sure folks on the right will do their stupid "haha" faces, and the smarter ones could even quibble on a few of the particulars, but the broads strokes are correct

This is some 25th Amendment level frolics. "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace." is some mad villain sounding shiznit.



I was curious about his "I've stopped 8 wars claim", like if he actually did a lot thats been ignored. Looking at Snopes/ back when the claim was 6 wars in 6 months , Armenia and Azerbaijan is probably the one significant claim.

And uh, doesn't justify wrecking NATO over Greenland. This guy is some kind tool for Putin.

---

The post also had PDFs of the 2024 vaccine schedules which shouldn't be too hard to find.

Amazing to think we're a society voluntarily making ourselves worse at preventing illness, including some deadly ones I've seen people die from.

---

the 2024 vaccine schedules: via

---

Orwell gets mentioned a lot but a leader starting World War III because they didn't win a peace prize is the most Kurt Vonnegut ending to humanity I can possibly imagine.

"Greenland is SO BIG it covers up 99% of the Epstein files."

---

like my one buddy Sean says
"Gonna be hilarious when europe dumping their US bonds causes a financial crisis that makes everyone wake up and realize that AI is a bullshit shell game and we trigger a greater depression." I'm most of the way through the book "Tiny Habits" by BJ Fogg. One of its "life hacks" is to unabashedly have a microcelebration - a fist pump, victory song, happy dance, whatever - when you accomplish a little something. (And another life hack the book is based on is to start with bite size, trivially-doable versions of more daunting tasks.)

It's meant as a form of self-programming; an example Fogg gives is, think of a baby's first steps. The parent's delight and happy feedback is such a strong and fundamental message for the baby to keep going, this is good. (The baby's certainly no track star yet!) And the same principle sticks with us as we age.

But it's easy to be skeptical, right? We're not babies! What if it's just a TINY accomplishment? Won't we just be goofuses, happy morons cheering ourselves on?

Like....OH NO! You mean we might seem happy and energized for No Good Reason? GASP! What an awful life THAT would be.

(I mean, if we can be feel blocked and procrastinatory for insufficient cause, and we have the ability, why NOT lean into the opposite for equally insufficient cause?)

I think the other fear, that easy celebration somehow demeans or diminishes our ability to rejoice when we tackle larger scale tasks, is a canard as well. Another part of us will still be able to discern when larger scale accomplishment has been made.

---

Walking is a behavior that is repeated until it becomes second nature. And parents clap and cheer for their babies. This is a natural reaction from parents around the world, and it serves a purpose: Celebrating at the right moment helps their babies learn more quickly.

(a repeat for me, but beautiful)

---

Trying to follow Trump math.


After people pointing out , no you can't actually discount anything more that 100%, Trump walked it back

"Under my most-favored nation policy for drug prices, the cost of prescription drugs is coming down by up to 90%, depending on the way you calculate. You could also say 5-, 6-, 7-, 800%. There are two ways of figuring that."

for better or worse that article tries to follow what he's probably thinking:

* He *knows* that price increases and decreases are opposites. Therefore, if a price jump from $10 to $100 is a 900% increase, then a price drop from $100 to $10 must be a 900% decrease. It's just logic.

* If you were selling him something and agreed to lower your price from $100 to $10, he would call it a 90% decrease, not a 900% decrease. If he were giving you the same discount (ha!), it would be a 900% decrease. The numbers he uses are whatever sound best to him at the time.

It's the same kind of depth of thought that makes him so follow shiny gold things...

---

I hate when my fellow Kirks turn out to be idiots

https://apple.news/AB-AB102FQd649m3fSNSQog
militarizing the police and other domestic enforcement is bad One of my favorite posters on tumblr is prokopetz... I recently found his microfiction tag...

---

"My bargain with the Other Gods has granted me powers beyond human comprehension!"

"Like what?"

"I have no idea."

---

"... and that's why I need you to rescue me as soon as you get this message."

"What else is new?"

"Well, I'm sorry saving my life is such an inconvenience for you."

"Wha – hold on, I thought this was a recording!"

"It is. You're just extremely predictable."

---

"Look, could you please stop commenting 'horny on main' every time I post a selfie? Like, yes, we get it – I have horns. Ha ha."

"You also tagged that you want Keira Knightley to use your horns as a steering wheel."

"*One time*."

more from prokopetz' microfiction tag...

---

"No, I'm not *in* a cult. I'm a service provider *for* a cult. It's different."

"How is it different?"

"I get paid."

---

"Come on, pull it together – she's messing with your mind!"

"Oh, I know."

"You know you're being mind controlled?"

"Well, yeah. It's kind of hard to miss!"

"I mean, you don't seem terribly bothered by it."

"Of course. If you're gonna control somebody's mind, naturally the first thing you're gonna do is make them not care that you're controlling their mind."

"I... see."

"To be honest, it's always bothered me when people in stories aren't aware they're being mind controlled. Like, the sheer number of things you'd have to command them not to think about to stop them from realising that their actions are out of character – it'd be a wonder if they could function at all!"

"So you don't care that you're being mind controlled, but you still have the capacity to be annoyed by logistically inefficient depictions of mind control?"

"This is me we're talking about."

---

> Maybe we don't like living in the past

"I can't help but feel you're not treating your god-granted powers with the gravity they deserve."

"I have no idea what you could possibly be talking about."

"You smote Steve for eating the last brownie."

"That's in the past."

"It was ten minutes ago."

"Ten minutes ago is the past."

---

"I just can't help but feel I'm not being given a fair shake, you know? It's not like I've done anything to deserve this kind of suspicion."

"I mean, you are a parasitic fungal hive mind wearing a human skin-suit."

"An *ethically sourced* human skin-suit!"

---

"You ever think you might be part of the problem?"

"I think if I were the sort of person who'd know whether they were part of the problem, I wouldn't be part of the problem."

---

[on Nintendo's Kirby's recurring antagonist King Dedede]
"I've lost fights to a child. And have you seen the kind of fights that child *wins*? Gods and monsters. Thing you can't even imagine. And then there's me. Just little old me. Yeah, I lose, eventually, but I make him sweat for every victory. Do you understand?"

"I–"

"A king may yield before a god, but he remains a king. Let me show you what that means."

---

understanding the "landlord special" aspect of the US economy looking ok-ish.

---

I bid farewell to my beloved car "Puck", aka "Hoss", aka my 2004 Scion xA.

Didn't want to post a photo from yesterday, with the indignity of being under a pile of snow in the mechanic's lot. Here's a photo from happier, earlier times:

(Such a baby I was still waiting on the hubcaps from the dealer.)

Such a fun car. So easy to park. Fun to drive and bop around especially if you did the overdrive thing. Could hold a tuba in the backseat. Great stereo system. Reliable. (Later years not withstanding, distinctly less waterproof... having to scrape off ice from INSIDE the windshield... and in summer no AC...)

I remember early years, when I would sleep over at my girlfriend K's family's, and noticing it patiently waiting for me curbside. It made me think of a cowboy's steed, which is when I gave it the secondary nickname "Hoss" and programmed the stereo display greeting to say "howdy".

I've only owned two cars, both new. (Kermit, the '96 Civic, was a fun hatchback as well.) I might hold off for a bit on a replacement, I can borrow Lynette's car. Maybe I'll need to get a new one once band stuff unthaws. Looking to buy my first used car, probably a Honda Fit or Toyota Yaris. They don't make 'em like they used to, literally.

---

Murph was nice enough to take a photo for me so I could check the final mileage.
(side note: I think the gas was about full when it started having gas tank issues that led to me calling it. And it got towed around and barely driven since.)

---

The podcast Retronauts usually talks video games, but Episoe 744 Dartmouth Time Sharing System and the Birth of BASIC is worth checking out. It's so weird to think of the era just before that, bringing stacks of punchcards to be run. 80s kid don't even know how easy we had it, access to programming platform wise.

---

We need to make big changes in how things work based on having our limits tested and the guardrails broken, bringing us to the brink. We should be talking about that before the journalists turn this into a debate about what the next election should be about. It must be about everything. Nothing clever. This is what happened and this is what we have to do. For example -- Increase the number of Supreme Court judges, and give them terms of five or ten years, and have an age limit. The Justices must have a personal stake in the decisions they make. They should feel like servants, not gods.

---

'Hope,' he said. 'Damn thing never leaves you alone.'

Didn't like this book as much as I'd hoped... it covers some neat topics in terms of AI, genetic updating, and some similar stuff but didn't quite hit.

---

On a related note... I'm annoyed Amazon swapped up the colors it offers for highlighting in the Kindle App (and the devices that support color.)

Like the colors had meaning that made sense to my brain in a synesthesia kinda of way - yellow "plain old highlight", blue "quote this on the blog" (blue being the color of links), red "I disagree or it makes me annoyed" (red being associated with anger), leaving orange which I used for "I want to go look this up"

These are the new colors, and "Aqua" replaces Blue and "Pink" the old version of Red. Like the colors are close enough that there's not too much conclusion, but it's annoying to have the new palette retroactively applied to all my years of past reading. (I wonder if the choice is aesthetic or has some accessibility concerns I'm unaware of.)

---

The problem with wanting to design a villain whose look is military chic but *not* wanting the result to be too obviously fashy is that basically the entire conceptual space of "military chic but not obviously fash" is occupied by high school marching bands, and you need to decide for yourself whether you're okay with that.

Recently I saw an ad for Wes Iseli's "flip" coin magic trick (the algos have figured out I kind of like 'magic exposed' videos) and went to google up more on it and found this blog boston.conman.org entry

So I was tickled to see a link to my own blog, kirk.is site on the side

(And then a link to flutterby - another long running blog site, even more aggressively rooted in the page layout tropes of an earlier era.)

I realized that the only reason I could reach out to the first link was because of an oldschool mailto: tag - and that my own site didn't have any "contact me" info. I probably avoided putting my own email up because of spammers, though that fight has more or less moved on. (Also there's a kind of half-wise, half-dumb assumption that most people who view my blog actually know me IRL)

Still, it's nice to see fellow old-school-bloggers still at it. There's probably a kind of mental hangup that keeps us at a pursuit for over two decades... but owning a little piece of the 'net that way before Web 2.0 moved everything onto other people's sites is still kind of fun.

---

AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation – particularly in safety-critical domains.

---

Slate on Psychadelic Therapy I have always been intrigued by the potential for psychadelics in therapeutic ways. There are reports that they can be like a head reset so you can actually do what you know you need to do, like give up smoking.

But between the difficulty of research of not really legal things, and as this article points out the startlingly powerful placebo effects... it's tough to know if there's anything actionable to be done right now.

---

NYC's controversial toll program hasn't just sped up trips inside Manhattan, a new paper finds. It's easing traffic in outer boroughs and neighboring counties.
Huh. I think this goes to show how it's not really possible to accurately predict emergent effects and unintended consequences from making changes to complex systems

See also: Jevons' paradox, where increasing a resource (say, highways into a popular place, trying to ease congestion) actually increases use so much that the problem ends up worse than before.

---

Average Ukrainian soldier whose killed dozens of people in largest war since WW2:

*Wears a Pikachu patch and another that says "ZSUHub," never issued a unit patch*

ICE Agent:
*Patch has a dagger through a skull dripping blood on an ace of spades with crossed M4s behind it*

We watched the movie "The Virgin Suicides" the other night. One thing I liked was some of the opening credits-like scenes, where they played with handdrawn fonts: I used to do that so much as a kid, I think it benefited me later on with design stuff. (Also stuff with graphpaper, which influenced both the main title and the icons of my blog kirk.is

2026 January❮❮prevnext❯❯