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176/365

More thunder storms rolled through this evening. Our littlest panics when she hears thunder. But she does a great Venom impression.

Pride Month Music 08-Follow Your Arrow by Kacey Musgraves

Happy Pride Month! 🌈🏳️‍🌈 As we approach the end of Pride Month, I’m creating lettering pieces celebrating music related to LGBTQIA+ community. My goal is to expose people to good music and artists while also help bringing the community filled with diversity together, since music is like a universal language that can touch anyone’s heart. Follow Your Arrow ⁠is the positive vibe we all need in this world. I love how non-judgmental the song is, simply advising us to follow whatever direction our hearts truly desire. This short life is yours alone, so you should live it honestly and wholeheartedly. Accept who you are and what you want. Stop making choices based on what others say or the societal norms we’ve been conditioned to follow. People will always find something to criticize, so you’re better off following your own path and living authentically. The song also teaches us to be...

175/365

Good morning sun. Good morning river. Good morning traffic on the bridge. Good morning humidity.

obvara firing fun

A warm, no wind day was required for our social and experimental obvara firing recently at the house. Two of my pottery friends, Chris and Stuart, duly arrived ready for an afternoon of fun, armed with hot mulled apple juice and farmhouse scotch eggs. What a combo! The weather behaved itself and came up trumps. No wind is a good start for any raku-type firing as you are using an open flame—air turbulence can make it awkward to get the temperature up because of the fluctuations. And up it must go, to around 800° to 900° for an obvara firing.The whole process starts weeks before the actual firing day though. Pots need to be made out of a clay with ‘grog’ in it (a mixture of crushed and ground potsherds, reintroduced into crude clay to temper it before making ceramic ware). This makes the clay able to withstand the violent...

coming soon... Exeter Craft Festival

I'll be there, (Stand 45), and it's a free event to wander around, so why not pop by and say hello.

Pride Month Music 07-Bobby Sox by Green Day

Happy Pride Month! 🌈🏳️‍🌈 As we approach the end of Pride Month, I’m creating lettering pieces celebrating music related to LGBTQIA+ community. My goal is to expose people to good music and artists while also help bringing the community filled with diversity together, since music is like a universal language that can touch anyone’s heart. Bobby Sox is the song that kicked off this Pride Month Music project. As I was listening to it, I immediately felt inspired to create lettering that matched the energy of this badass track. The song is incredibly catchy yet intriguingly unique.  What makes Bobby Sox special is its universal vibe—a shared celebration for the entire community. It’s the kind of song that makes you nod your head and sing along effortlessly to the rhythm. It definitely deserves a spot on any LGBTQIA+ anthem playlist.For the lettering, I aimed for a mix of punk and...

"The ceiling on my appreciation is high, but the floor is high, too"

Sasha Chapin wrote about How to like everything more, and it made me think about how important it is to cultivate appreciation. A lot of the modern online experience is designed to polarize and perplex, so it takes active effort to resist those tendencies. There's a lot to be grateful for, and there's a lot of enjoyment to be found in the things and experiences we already have available to us. I appreciated the reminder. Here's what I highlighted: “It’s not that I don’t have critical judgement, or favorites—the ceiling on my appreciation is high, but the floor is high, too.” “In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other. This is not how enjoyment is taught—the only tip people typically receive re enjoyment is to “be mindful.” I think this is a suggestion to...

174/365

Some nearby, late night utility work being done.

Monday June 23, 2025

Feel's like a waste not to use this great blogging platform, I need to be lest precious about what I post.  Same problem I have with notebooks!Resurrecting My Canon A-1 I've recently pulled out my Canon A1 SLR that I've had since I was a teenager.  I put a roll of Tri-X through it, just finished shooting the roll today on a mid-day walk.  I also lubricated the reflex mirror’s gears to get rid of an annoying “shutter squeak” that apparently is quite common with Canon SLR's as of this era.  I bought a kit with lubricant, a custom applicator and instructions on eBay and it worked like a charm!  I just loaded up a roll of Fuji 400H, one of the last rolls that I have of this discontinued film.  I’m going to shoot the roll at ISO 125 given its age, curious to see how it turns out! ...

Pride Month Music 06-Gettin' Bi (feat. Pete Gardner) from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Happy Pride Month! 🌈🏳️‍🌈 As we approach the end of Pride Month, I’m creating lettering pieces celebrating music related to LGBTQIA+ community. My goal is to expose people to good music and artists while also help bringing the community filled with diversity together, since music is like a universal language that can touch anyone’s heart. I absolutely love the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and this song is pure genius! I previously discussed the song Gettin’ Bi in a blog post focused on the lettering of the character who sings it, and I still firmly believe it’s the perfect anthem for anyone coming out as bisexual. The lyrics are packed with quick wit and humor, while radiating an incredibly positive bi energy. Beyond being catchy and clever, the song also helps break down misconceptions and challenges common stereotypes about bisexuality.For the lettering, I drew heavily from elements of my earlier work to...

Ouch

This morning I stubbed my toe. Badly. You know, the kind that hurts beyond all reason. The stubbing that convinces you the toe must be broken (it never is). We’re all too familiar with that briefest of delays between the actual physical contact before the searing pain inevitably hits. And it occurred to me, as I was reeling and grimacing, that the exquisitely awful pain was an intensely pure encounter with consciousness/ awareness/ life/ whatever. The crystal clarity of the agony was as perfectly ‘it’ as the glorious relief that slowly came as the pain eventually subsided. As intimate an encounter with being as anything else. The varying flavours of phenomena are all of a piece. Whole, complete and indivisible. None of it can be pulled apart, edited out or separated off from the rest. At a certain point what we want and what we don’t want dissolves into simply...

When I look to see where and what I am I find nothing but everything.

““The two demons are fear and desire. Now, everyone knows that demons aren’t real. That they’re imaginary. So how is it that they exist and persist? There’s no great mystery here. Fear and desire are entirely memory-based. Desire is remembered pleasure; fear is remembered pain. No memory, no problem.”” — The two demons 

173/365

It was a very hot day. Came home early to take my last meetings from here. My office, on the top floor of our townhome, was toasty. The mini-split AC takes a while to work. This little girl braved the heat just to be with me.

just a test

want to see if posting here with an external image works https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54609876152_f1bbce19ce_3k.jpg

Pride Month Music 05-I’m Coming Out by Diana Ross

Happy Pride Month! 🌈🏳️‍🌈 As we approach the end of Pride Month, I’m creating lettering pieces celebrating music related to LGBTQIA+ community. My goal is to expose people to good music and artists while also help bringing the community filled with diversity together, since music is like a universal language that can touch anyone’s heart. I wanted to create a lettering piece as a tribute to Diana Ross’s iconic song, “I’m Coming Out.” This song perfectly captures the spirit of liberation and the pride of expressing one’s true self. The phrase “come out of the closet” holds deep significance within the LGBTQIA+ community and resonates with many individuals. That’s why I believe this artwork will be meaningful and fitting for Pride Month. Since there are a lot of details on this lettering piece that I'm proud of, I'd like to elaborate on my process for this one. ProcessStep 1: Ideation...

Good afternoon.

"I walk slowly on the race track, but I can climb a ladder"

Collin Lysford, in a recent issue of his Desytemize newsletter, eases into a thoughtful discussion about intelligence (artificial and otherwise) through a baking analogy. Here's what I highlighted: “AI does a lot of things that we call “thinking” when we do them slower and worse. The fact it can also do those things should make us humble and curious, not proud and dismissive. But I think it’s equally silly to lump all these capacities together into “intelligence” and say “Intelligence is going up, so soon it will do everything intelligence can do.”” “The way through this dilemma is to notice that the thing you’re looking for is not a skill that’s literally impossible for machines. You’re looking for knowledge that needs to be gathered the slow, iterative human way and not the fast, recursive, copied with perfect fidelity machine way. Allow your humility to say that a machine living in...

📡✨ Linkpost

The idea of having a linkpost blog has been floating in my head for quite some time now. Here is an example from Dave Winer. And here is another one, from Kottke.org. The latter is quite famous. It's a great version of web curation. The thing is: I don't have time and energy to make this happen. I'm barely able to keep up with Hacker News or Digg, even in beta form. I prefer to keep the Ephemeral Scrapbook going instead where you'll find some curated content, anyway.

Treetops

We all take our feelings very seriously but what are they?

What stories are we all telling ourselves this morning?

After a hectic weekend at work enjoying a slightly slower start this morning with coffee and a cool breeze before my late shift tonight.

Good morning.

172/365

Got the car washed today on the north side of town. I forget how built up it is in certain parts of the city. Love the water tower peeking out from behind this apartment building.

Tracing Roots Lost to War

I’ve been wanting to blog about this for a while. This will probably be a long one—and it might even turn into a series of posts around a central theme. My mother—more than me, but me too—has always wondered about her mother’s family. A Childhood Cut Short My grandmother was born in Poland in 1926, before World War II. She was just 13, almost 14, when Germany invaded. According to my mother, my grandmother was at school in Kraków when the invasion happened. She was taken away from her parents, older brother, and sister. The last time she ever saw them was before going to school that day. I just learned this part while preparing for this post: my grandmother was taken to a concentration camp and was “in line for a shower.” She was seen by a German officer, who pulled her out of the line. She was forced...

Pride Month Music 04-dark times by Ben Platt

Happy Pride Month! 🌈🏳️‍🌈 As we approach the end of Pride Month, I’m creating lettering pieces celebrating music related to LGBTQIA+ community. My goal is to expose people to good music and artists while also help bringing the community filled with diversity together, since music is like a universal language that can touch anyone’s heart.“dark times” by Ben Platt is the song I wish my younger self could have listened to. It would have spared me much pain and misery as I was growing up. Just the thought that my future self would smile at me and cheer me on, rather than berate me as miserable piece of shit who does not deserve love or even exist, would have made my life feel more worth living. Hell, even the idea that the future of me actually does exist at all would have been a blessing back then. Just the thought...

• 🐛 Fixed an issue that didn't bring back the correct response when creating drafts via Micropub. I welcome you to give it a try with iA Writer. When posting a draft you now go to the correct page on Scribbles. Pretty nice.

As I get older, I sometimes worry about whether I can keep working the way I used to. I get tired more easily when I walk around, and I often spend my days off resting at home. I know that one day, I may not be able to achieve the same results as before. That’s why I’m starting to think about how to prepare myself before that day comes.

““I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”” — Mark Twain

Pride Month Music 03-I Kissed a Girl by Jill Sobule

Happy Pride Month! 🌈🏳️‍🌈 As we approach the end of Pride Month, I’m creating lettering pieces celebrating music related to LGBTQIA+ community. My goal is to expose people to good music and artists while also help bringing the community filled with diversity together, since music is like a universal language that can touch anyone’s heart. Today, I chose the song “I Kissed a Girl”—no, not that Katy Perry song, but the one from way back in 1995 by Jill Sobule. What I love about this song is how openly and honestly it talks about a woman kissing another woman through such a simple and relatable story: two friends hanging out, sharing drinks, and then sharing a kiss. It’s fun, lighthearted, and sweet, portraying queer attraction as something natural and real—without making a big deal out of it. The song reminds me that it’s okay to explore your identity, to be...

Good morning.

171/365

The daughter bought a new (to her) car today. I went as moral support, but she did her research, test drove, and handled her first car purchase like a champ.

170/365

Vicious thunderstorms Thursday afternoon left a large portion of Old Town without power. We were thankfully spared.

"We only know how to value things that are scarce"

Adam Mastroianni, writer of the unmissable Experimental History newsletter, recently shared some writing wisdom in a piece called 28 slightly rude notes on writing. Here's what I highlighted from the piece: “The Wadsworth Constant says that you can safely skip the first 30% of anything you see online. (It was meant for YouTube videos, but it applies just as well to writing). This is one of those annoying pieces of advice that remains applicable even after you know it. Somehow, whenever I finish a draft, my first few paragraphs almost always contain ideas that were necessary for writing the rest of the piece, but that aren’t necessary for understanding it.” “All emotions are useful for writing except for bitterness. Good writing requires the consideration of other minds—after all, words only mean something when another mind decodes them. But bitterness can consider only itself. It demands sympathy but refuses to return...

📡✨ Finally!

After countless hours trying & experimenting with Elements, I finally came up with something I'm starting to like: "Who Is Numeric Citizen?", my new about page.

📡✨ Rebooting

After seeing some processes taking 10% of CPU (looking at you "controlcenter"), it's always a good idea to reboot your Mac while testing macOS Tahoe, especially with dev beta #1. What a difference it makes! 

ProcessSpy

When troubleshooting system issues or thoroughly evaluating a piece of software, experienced and knowledgable Mac users often turn to activity monitor to get information on memory, CPU usage, power consumption and more. It's often helpful but at times it can be cryptic. The developer of Process Spy has an example. "I was juggling several Java apps, each using a different JDK version — and I couldn’t tell which process was which in Activity Monitor. All I saw was “java”. No version, no path, no details. So I built ProcessSpy — a developer-focused tool that shows full command-line info, version details, environment variables, and more." ProcessSpy has quite a few free features and even more in the inexpensive ($6.99) paid version. Features of ProcessSpy• Advanced tree view -  can show cumulative totals for CPU, Memory and Threads. • Javascript filters - create complex filters with multiple conditions. • Version information -...

“We project our trance onto the machine and find it blinking back. This is the danger: not that machines fool us, but that we fool ourselves—and the machine reflects that deception perfectly. It mimics the self we think we are.” — Robert Saltzman, The Self That Never Was

Pride Month Music 02-Transgender Dysphoria Blues by Against Me!

Happy Pride Month! 🌈🏳️‍🌈 As we approach the end of Pride Month, I’m creating lettering pieces celebrating music related to LGBTQIA+ community. My goal is to expose people to good music and artists while also help bringing the community filled with diversity together, since music is like a universal language that can touch anyone’s heart. This time, we’ll discuss the song “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” by Against Me!—a story about the experience of gender dysphoria, particularly for transgender people. The song highlights the struggle against societal rejection and the pain of not being recognized or accepted as one’s true self. It becomes increasingly difficult to act as if you belong in this world. Some people may even exploit your insecurities, self-hatred, and self-doubt, which only deepens your dysphoria.  Being misgendered is heartbreaking, but the self-hatred that can follow is even more painful. Gender dysphoria disrupts your inner sense of self. At...

Successfully summited the Kilimanjaro last week!