2026 October❮❮prev

5 star:
* Shine (Dolly Parton)
RIP Dolly! I really love this song - Dolly's always amazing and the fiddle and banjo plucking and layered vocals are great.

4 star:
* Ladies First (feat. Monie Love) (Queen Latifah)
nice old school hiphop via Ted Lasso
* Magic Mountain (2025 Remaster) (Eric Burdon & War)
via Tony
* Give a Little Love (Tom Jones)
fun cover from one of the "Fockers" movies

3 star:
* Pressure (Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre & K.A.A.N.)
the hook was used behind this super funny series that has a smooth talking narrator retelling old TV show plots - don't know if Star Trek's Kahn inspired picking a song with K.A.A.N...
* It Was a Very Good Year (Josh Turner)
The Molinari Delicatessen in SF was playing the original, which is a little overproduced for my taste, this version is simpler.
* The Strawberry Roan (Marty Robbins)
mentioned in the book "Brokeback Mountain" - last month i found a version that was weirdly religious, I think this is the version the cowboys in the book would be singing.
* Company Culture (Lambrini Girls)
overheard on the showw "Lost Resort"
* WHERE IS MY HUSBAND! (RAYE)
Friends in Napa Valley had this on a playlist
* Fuck You (Live) (Lily Allen)
from a Lynette Playlist
* Harper Valley P.T.A. (Loretta Lynn)
heard this while listening to a Dolly Parton spotify by Lynette, but I like Loretta Lynn's version better - is that a Sitar?
* Power (feat. Stormzy) (Little Mix)
"Ungapatchka" means "too many elements thrown in" and this song totally exemplifies that. Nothing quite jells. Heard it in "Nobody 2"

Three photos from the neighborhood by Wren who is hanging out with us this weekend. I appreciate how he's developing a stronger sense of what makes an interesting photo.

But also sponsoring this year are Orangina, Barry's Pin Factory, and - "SausageDrop" - a new app which pairs people who have dropped a sausage on the floor with people who don't mind eating a sausage off the floor.

*captain kirk voice* people's refusal to accept the trolley problem and attempt to transform it into a question of logistics is actually a consequence of the nobler impulses of human nature, which demand that we find actual solutions to preventing catastrophe or, if catastrophe cannot be prevented, that we nevertheless fight tooth and nail to be sure that there was no further help coming, no unseen alternative, no recourse, up until the very last moment, and it is the duty of those in command to dismantle every possible fault that led up to such a situation so to answer your question, admiral, perhaps there are some trolleys that simply cannot be stopped, but no starfleet captain should accept this scenario without first doing everything in his power to derail it.

---

I thought this thing on scales associated with different cultures was pretty cool Ha! JP Honk features prominently in this video about HONK! (that's our 2001 Theme into 'Space Cadet' in the background)- plus a neat "training montage" shot of me taping up lights on my tuba.

---

from 2004

---

"READ THIS: The man who was the commanding general of Fort Hood when Nidal Hasan went on his shooting rampage, and who signed the actual death warrant authorizing Hasan's execution, is absolutely opposed to televising the firing squad. He speaks eloquently for himself here."

via

---

prescriptive linguist: agnostic actually means someone whose worldview holds the universe is inherently unknowable. it's completely separate from whether or not they believe in a god or gods

descriptive linguist: most people who use the word agnostic are using it to describe a middle-ground between atheism and theism. that's a valid usage, even if it's drifted from the technical philosophical definition

agnostic linguist: nobody knows what the word agnostic means

---

The problem isn't that robots are taking over our jobs, the problem is that we've created a world where that's somehow a bad thing.

So, I think "intense ambivalence" - in the sense of being pulled in two directions - is the most reasonable place to be about this whole AI thing.

That's kind of a disclaimer - I don't think AI is evil enough to be worth not messing around with, and depending on how things shift, adapting to an LLM doing gruntwork may be a survival skill.

My friend JZ (no not Jay-Z) has been messing around with the AI music maker Suno and I decided to give it a shot... I put in one line of prompt, something about New Orleans Street Band / Second Line style, funky, and got Step On Over. The horns are kinda synth-y, but it's a rollicking bassline, and some of the lyrics are sorta brilliant... I especially like the last line of the chorus "We got room for one more in this song" (although the first line of the chorus "let the good feet roll" is a bit iffy.) Also the final verse during the background is a banger: If your week ran long, come walk it off / If your shoes feel tight, loosen up / Take my arm, we'll find the beat / There's a place for every pair of feet.

Also, a personal friend (and fellow bloger) Shaun McGill set Gemini to make a video summary of his e-book "How did we get to the iPhone" and the result was also pretty impressive.

It's (another, unfortunately) interesting moment in AI. With "Character.ai" filing for bankruptcy, it's easy to wonder if this is the start of a bubble pop - these remix machines have been heavily subsidized for years now, and what happens to the supply/demand curve when and if that becomes untenable?

---

I don't go around mocking people.

---

Hyperoptimized Engineer 2026

---

huh. almost like someone doesn't want to admit how crap their policies are....

[During an argument with an absurdly matriarchal computer personality] Ford slumped against a bulkhead. He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.
[...]
Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying Blood... blood... blood... blood...

Wired.com, the Red Bull Leaks, Revealed: Leaked Chats Expose the Daily Life of a Scam Compound's Enslaved Workforce.Really interesting piece on how "Don't Ask Don't Tell" might actually have been a brilliant bit of actual "5D Chess" from Bill Clinton - (like the piece says, not a good guy on many fronts, but a hell of a politician.) TERFs and other "no really I was liberal but then the dems shifted on me" seem to forget how like, national legal gay marriage is only like ten years old. The bar has not been set as firmly for the rights of LGTBQ+ - even the "classic" "LGB" subset - as they like to pretend. RIP Walter Koenig, aka Ensign Pavel Chekov. "Aye, Keptin!"

---

While Vladimir Putin ignores Mr. Trump's call for an energy cease-fire and continues to murder Ukrainian civilians, the U.S. president claims that Russia "has been fine on Ukraine." This is factually wrong, strategically naive and morally bankrupt. His obsequious accommodation of Russia, rewarding the aggressor with sanctions relief, won't persuade Mr. Putin to stop. History shows that such behavior emboldens Russia's autocrat, who sees it as weakness.

Norway has become a shithouse country, actually.

It's a little astonishing how this guy loves shiny prizes, to the point of feeling a bit pathological. I saw this Economist article Why Gen X is the real loser generation - in part because of being at the bottom of the U-shaped happiness/age curve, in part because of circumstances leading us to be financially less established than earlier and later generations.

I am always amused/annoyed that GenX is the forgotten middle child between Boomers and Millennials, in part because we kind of invented the new "Generation ___" naming scheme.

So I decided to reread "Generation X" by Douglas Coupland. Appropriately enough, I couldn't find a proper e-book to buy and had to make due with a kind of sketchy and broken PDF version.

This blog article showed me a Coupland Gen-X comic strip that predates his book. It also has a collection of the fun neologism definitions that populate the sidebar, along with kinda cool graphic design slogan exercises.

Overall the book didn't resonate for me as much as I had hoped - it now feels more about being a certain age than a certain generation. In a lot of ways the story is mostly a wrapper for a lot of stories the characters tell to entertain each other - including a memorable "what nuclear war would realistically feel like if it happened while you were out grocery shopping story." - I had forgotten how much the fear of nuclear war loomed for us, and how that shows up a few times in this book.

---

---

Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.

---

I wasn't getting much done and was staring at my IBM clone surrounded by a sea of Post-it Notes, rock band posters ripped of construction site hoarding boards, and a small sepia photo of a wooden whaling ship, crushed in the Antarctic ice, that I once found in an old National Geographic. I had placed this photo behind a little gold frame I bought in Chinatown. I would stare at this picture constantly, never quite able to imagine the cold, lonely despair that people who are genuinely trapped must feel--in the process think better of my own plight in life.

2026 October❮❮prev