increasingly, while sitting at restaurants waiting for my food, especially when I’m sitting outside in the cold, I finely sharpen a hatred of the very existence of “to go” orders and the people who place them, places that take them, and the various services and go-betweens who enable them.
everyone else is mad about qr code menus, but I get even madder about this.
when I make a to go order myself, I’m a very special boy and would like my food please and thank you.
only fitting that, having destroyed every pair of side cutters I’ve ever owned on guitar strings, I initially used a d’addario string winder/trimmer to cut the pins.
It was insufficient and I finally broke down and caught a bus to the hardware store for a little pair of kleins to finish the job.
got one of those neato pdp11/70 kits ( https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11-get-one) for my birthday. I am shoddy with detail work and managed to only botch two soldering pin-throughs which were easy enough to correct.
idk how people who are able are not constantly, when at home, slinking around quiet as a mouse, from activity, to task, to seating, to get a snack, and so on, idk how they live.
“how quietly can I operate this latch? How softly can I close this door?” I think to myself.
"how delicately can I step–no, pad–across the room without dragging or stomping my feet. how can I coordinate my limbs like a little dancer?”
then the parents stay with us for the holidays.
no application responds more quickly or irreversibly to keyboard shortcuts than the one you mistype into while thinking you are posting.
while i’m making requests, it would be neat if there was somewhere to buy residential quantities of swiss american pepperoni. molinari seems to have a vice grip on the city and it is boring a f.
totally possible i’m being too hard on myself when I use it, I’ve never made a pizza I didn’t complain about while I was enjoying it. for all I know swiss american and molinari are different labels of the same sticks. But what if?
"try a fanc—“ bzt, I want commercial prop 65 junk, not delicious snacks.
I made this before we went out for dinner in the spiral mixer, let it proof on the counter until we got back from a show, tossed the fermenter in my "server room” overnight, balled it up ~350g balls at 10AM, and launched the last one into an 800F oven around noon, leaving me three balls to spare for lunch this week, now cold fermenting.
Rainbow has great flour in bulk but it would be neat if there was somewhere to get residential quantities of spelt or hard red wheat or bolted wheat.
decent crumb!
20% wheat, 70% 00 , 10% bread (I was out of 00), sourdough levain, overnight ferment and bake.
visited a friend this summer who I haven’t seen in person in ten years or so, but stay in touch with over email (ha!), so I know where they work and so on but not much else
anyway, I remembered that someone who might in theory work relatively close to them at their job was in a social space I was in, who posted in chats I ignored and meant nothing to me but I thought to ask “oh hey, (saying something like this paragraph out loud)” do you know this person?”
[squints at my phone]
“Yes.”
while writing this, my mac had no idea how to help me spell a word that was wrong in two very normal ways to be wrong, a doubled letter and a wrong vowel. 🤭
this calls for a yes or no decision, nothing else will do. are you with us?
step right up, yes, you, out of the crowd, step right up, this elixir will celebrate and elevate your very atomic individuality, blah blah
right off the bat we’re making the world a better place instead of trying to pay the rent and participate in life. "this is nice but I could make it better.”
but what’s this? with the rise of, or emergence of, or I-just-learned-about-this of capital deploying a canceled scam with a new name? golly, they aren’t falling for it, what to do?
https://gameboat.org/the-resonant-computing-manifesto/
nice.
the entire mode of discourse of the RCM, which I probably unfairly credit and think of as “wired house style” after my exposure to it in wired magazine in the 90s, says very little to me and I distrust people who use it. It is a childishly modey-mode. "here is some rhetoric.”
Every word and phrase choice is ad copy obscuring some other thing. Passive things are presented as active and primary things. active things are presented passively as inevitabilities.
ebay’s “look at this stuff you bought” notification and my last two purchases seem to a theme.
The shirt worked out well for my kraftwerk halloween costume.
I wanted a gravy boat because my kid loves rice with gravy or s&b golden curry or masala sauce, or whatever. We’ve been using an oxo pyrex thing forever. Anyway, it arrived washington football team maroon.
Ceramics must not photograph well, as I had the same kind of “huh” experience getting some cappuccino cups from loveramics. Oh well.
discord and slack and sure, your znc-in-mosh, if you are cool like that, I’m not anymore, could probably have an advanced setting to strip get parameters of pasted URLs on input, and/or on display, without breaking more clicks or unfurls than are already broken by missing microlink views (or whatever they are called).
for one thing, bare urls look better, and for another thing, it might discipline ad networks.
Fun twist on time travel, but also I think this might have worked better as a novella in some places, a play in others, a few short stories, an X-Files episode or something like that, etc. I don’t remember why I picked this up, used (in retired-library-book plastic sheathing even) or when. It’s been on my “to read” pile for a year or so. I’m probably going to drop my copy in a little free library rather than keep it.
this is really neat to me. Back in the 00s I made this a feature of my personal site and the leftovers make for weird historcial artifacts now 20-25 years later.
I irreversibly destroyed the entire archive in a imagemagick shell script mistake at some point but I still have a few that survived elsewhere.
https://xoxo.zone/@waxy/115634168572254301
Sat in a chair I don’t normally sit in while reading a book and was reminded that I took our nazar eye (🧿) that my sister picked up for us while visiting Turkey and brought it downstairs, attached a metal hook to the sliding glass patio door, stashed the nazar somewhere to keep safe while the adhesive bonded to the door, and have been unable to find the nazar ever since.
The hook is still there, with nothing attached, a few years later. I’ve looked everywhere. Gonna buy a new one.
[sitting at Hi-hat having a slice of Jersey Tomato Pie and a beer while the Giants/Saehawks(??) game is on]
If it’s called shotgun formation, shouldn’t the center snap two handfuls of miniature footballs to the quarterback at once instead of just the one normal sized football?
I think between you and me, or whatever, but, I think that it is weird that people post paragraph long preambles in chat linking to positions they are hiring for or that would be on their team without naming the company the job is at a single time.
It really seems like a majority of people do this. Like, I get why greenhouse refuses to include that in the unfurl, I think. I hate it, but I get it. I don’t get OPs who do it. Main-character syndrome?
“don’t you have to leave?”
“Nah, I can make it downtown in fifteen minutes. Oh. Oh, shit, I gotta leave.”
Every time.
so funny that my take away is always and forever will be that after speed walking to BART, skipping steps on the escalators in a panic, hopping through train car doors I was worried were going to close (never actually closing doors, that’s gauche), skipping steps up all flights at the Embarcadero, speed walking to my appointment and just making it on time, that "I can make it downtown in 20 minutes, maybe 15?” and not any of the luck or urgency required to make that happen.
one of those nights where I sit with a guitar in my lap and iReal up on my phone and try to figure out what key willie is playing in on one of his records of standards (tonight, the “That’s Life” record, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq_-vz_qOd0&list=PLM_eo-srGT72vo-aOuegEnA3jSJr3qaDI&index=1) so that I can play rhythm for it before the song gets through the A section.
Sometimes it takes me the whole dang song.
have started tracking macros of what I eat for the first time and participating in the family budgeting spreadsheet for the first time beyond paycheck contribution.
it turns out that both fit in the same brain slots as computer janitoring and were easier to add to the routine than my many-years of putting-off-the-very-concept-of-even-trying suggested.
jeans
jeans
jeans
[alt text for quoted photo, a woman stands behind the counter of a carnival game sh’e running where you throw something in a basked to win a prize. 1 in wins. throw for 25¢.
Prizes include foam dice in red, green, or blue, or a gray mystery stuffed animal. Above on the wall are giant teddy bears in red, brown, blue, and yellow.
the woman is wearing a white t-shirt w/ rings on the collar and sleeves that says 'jeans jeans jeans’ on it]
welcome to mastodon [points to the sign]
poster dossier update opportunity: Lately I’ve wanted to add a few apps to amethyst’s (the Mac tiling window manager I have used for the past year and a half) float exception list and it doesn’t work afaict (also the menubar icon isn’t always there like it should be?) so I’ve switched to Rectangle ( https://rectangleapp.com), which has its own quirks and is less capable in some ways but meets my needs.
Opinion Sections: the highest stage of liberalism.
six good “logging on” images (none with alt-text, unfortunately) https://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/post/799224734511480832/from-my-art-blog-newsletter-walter-molino-master
[keynote speaker at the big annual laundry basket engineering conference podium joking to a slide of a top view plan of a standard basket with red dots all over the handles.]
[next slide]
next up is a slide with a table on it titled “Mean time to handle failure for handles 1, 2, 3, and 4 for rectangular baskets produced in 2024” with a little side diagram explaining for first timers that these are the top, right, bottom, and left handles in standard orientation. the speaker continues…
idk, pentagon reporters should just wear neck gators pulled up to their eyes and generic media-surplus PRESS badges and claim to be from media that signed the loyalty oath
all week I thought I’d really messed up my left elbow doing some exercise with a cool name like skull crushers (which I hate but do) or something and then the kid asked for a piggy back ride tonight and up he goes and instantly I saw a flashback of the last time I did this like it was an infomercial before-product clip and billy mays (RIP) was about to come on and convince me that I needed to place an order on installments
everloving wife asked for a cappuccino even though, to her, coffee only smells good but does not taste good, because I’m still NYC jetlagged and waking up at 04:30 which she does not like.
so I got one of her fancy tea cups she never uses out of the credenza (lol who has a gd credenza? this old guy I guess) for the occasion and accidentally got an appropriately spoopy one.
logging on
kinda neat engineering (I have no idea what I’m talking about and am pretty credulous, but, neat to me for sure), the entire thing is an archtop with no sides or back ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbBzabnNJhk), ultimately compromised to move units / be a little more practical built with a bunch of 90s stunts like carbon fiber and stainless steel and lasers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbBzabnNJhk
I thought I wanted to do 3D stuff when I grew up and so I taught myself 3D Studio (R2, for dos. Layers, lofts, and tweening.) in ‘94 or ‘95 by, among other things, mocking up a Fly by eyeballing an ad for them in Guitar Player Magazine of Gabrels holding one.
As soon as I was making any money, about ten years later, I bought one https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/parker-fly-classic/.
RIP Ken Parker https://kenparkerarchtops.com
Reeves Gabrels playing a Fly w/ Bowie and on his own The Sacred Squall of Now solo record was my north star of cool in high school in the mid-90s to such an extent that I just learned he passed when a high school friend heard and thought of me to pass along the news.
Ken’s Youtube is also great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDuWp2Bg7MQ
just got back from three days in Manhattan [NPR foley sample of the white noise of car traffic and honking, and of scaffolding being put up or town down] and had pizza for lunch all three days; Patsy’s in Harlem, Prince Street, and Sofia.
Each was incredible in its own way. Sofia’s slices are so, so thin, but still have that perfect crunchy/soft "wow” that it practically melts in your mouth.
valley-poster, a “broadly”-to-“like, “ browser extension. Now with "broadly speaking”-to-“like, totally, “
dualism is the evolutionary crab of philosophy
kinda funny in a non-ha-ha way that wearing a mask indoors now says “I have covid" in addition to saying “I’m a debbie downer” but I’ll keep wearing these damned things
We gave our now-refurbished stand mixer to a friend who bakes very well, very regularly.
While I carried it from our condo to her car, the glass bowl tipped off of the pins it rests on and smashed onto the ground into a million pieces. The mixer still works but now I need to find her a bowl.
What a move, sheesh.
I tried to find the last time I posted about something a lot like this happening to me before on mastodon but it predated social media, 😆: https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/sellhhhh-drop-a-tv/
Often Repeated in the Same Conversation, Sometimes Immediately
The grandfather said to their grandson, “….” The grandson, unable to context switch when spoken to casually, said “What?”
The grandson said to their grandfather, “….” The grandfather, unable to hear when spoken to casually, said “What?”
Lo Pan
Little China Before Burtonism
junior (seven next weekend!) is up in his room playing legos and singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” which he knows on account of how often I have https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/pink-elephants-on-parade on, he’s got not other association with it at all.
tempting to look for bootlegs that this hints exist. it sure would be nice if they were already collected into a volume 2 re: “there are countless ad hoc recordings of Ra performing Disney tunes”
(this post is completely unrelated to television shows)
let muni trick out a low-rider '94 New Flyer articulated trolley coach
still loving that strava can do this nonsense but not ask me, “hey, are you on a bus right now!? this was supposed to be a walk.”
“there’s a Cheers story in it” set me up to expect lighter stuff but these are pretty damned serious stories. I particularly liked “Exit Zero”, “Can Only Houses Be Haunted”, “The Ecstasy of Sam Malone”, “Flowers and Their Meanings”, and “Viola in Midwinter”, which is nearly half the stuff here.
pointed at “smoker (current or ex)" (it’s true!) on the excuses list to get a covid booster today at Walgreens after getting a flu shot this morning at my local.
they did not make me prove it by demonstrating that I can roll my own, light one with a single match in heavy wind, blow rings, or french inhale but I would have been willing and able if required.
gravely finished reading Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
Read along with Hubert Dreyfus’s “Philosophy 6” Berkeley lectures (archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_461120619) from 2007, which helped motivate me. Before I started, I wasn’t sure I would continue through and finish the comedy. Having read this Inferno, I’m pretty sure I will.
tfw you’ve been through hell AND purgatory
one of our fiddle leaf’s started dropping leaves as they do a month ago and eventually dropped 90% of it’s leaves with the exception of three healthy branches. it looks terrible after like four years of amazing fitness in the same place.
it took me another month to remember that I on a whim used some “indoor house plant fertilizer” prior that I found under the sink on all the house plants prior to this happening.
Oops.
and it’s funny to look backwards on cause-effect that I just disregard in realtime by applying the fundamental attribution error to myself
I sprained my right wrist and started doing a no-numbers body weight cut around the same time two weeks ago so I’ve been more clumsy (lack of calories) and handling things funny and bumping into things when I carry stuff w/ my dominant hand that has a sprained wrist so, no surprised that I eventually made a mistake with a kitchen tool with it.
very funny having the same injury that will take a month to heal a second time because I get to skip all the treatments that don’t work, and skip learning to not bump into it constantly, I just stop using that finger for anything.
Bespoke ace wrap over cloth >>>> any sticky band-aid for my skin type, band-aids just fall off and varieties only improve when not if.
some of this was made easier by walking the weekend of SF Pride, so that I could walk alley to alley across the numbered streets near Market with impunity because the roads were all closed.
I really want to walk the Portola but I’m gonna have to learn the bus transfers to even get there, so I’ll probably work through Hayes, the TL, FiDi, and North Beach first instead.
🚶🏽♂️
🏁 what I’m considering SOMA, Rincon Hill, and South Beach loosely and not accurately bound by 16th Street, Market Street the Embarcadero, and Mission Creek.
I don’t get to SOMA very often, and when I do it’s from Muni or a BART or whatever so it was mentally just a bunch of islands.
Lots and lots of half-block alleys to dead ends, and in fact I left the dead ends of Welsh St. from Fifth and Morris unwalked. Oh well.
Next: starting on the north side of market.
https://mastodon.social/@gravely/114529945329729737
mad libs
“things too many people have that nobody wants”
I’m _(reason)not_drinking_so_much anymore so I’m getting rid of my all of my _(hobby)beer_home_brewing_gear all at once, so if you know anybody in (city and/or county)san_francisco who wants to _(ambitious and unlikely outcome)_come_pick_it_up, let me know.
was looking to see if i had posted about how i managed to injure myself while prepping dinner a few years ago then, because last night i did it again, in almost exactly the same way.
well it turns out that i don’t think i posted about it, but this wish-it-was-a-ligature finger wag that i made up for some other thing was in the search results for “finger”
⃔ ☝🏼⃕
nominative determinism
Fun page turner alt-history of an American dropped into a world without the west. Almost YA, and much of it’s time, and I’m unsure how it would survive critical analysis today, but I liked it.
every time I walk past this house I’m like “Damn, I didn’t think people actually used More Windows (high color)”
My third Waldrop collection, and as a completionist confonting a best-of, I ended up skipping a few stories I’ve already read in “Howard Who?” and “Going Home Again.” Still a must for Waldrop readers. I particularly enjoyed “Night of the Cooters” and “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll.”
My first exposure to Waldrop, via a Kelly Link interview and small beer press opens with a bang, “The Ugly Chickens,” but I think my favorite was “Man-Mountain Gentian” about the Waldrop-invented world of profeesional zen-sumo wrestling. I immediately started to seek out the rest of his work.
I particularly enjoyed “The Sawing Boys” and “El Castillo de la Perseverancia.” Waldrop’s unique voice has me working through all of his (often overlapping) story collections, and makes me wonder if I should start going to SF cons to hear the current generation’s readings of their own works.
I also started the night with two 100% cold fermentation 18" NY styles for the kids. Both were supposed to be 90% bread flour, 10% whole wheat, but I forgot the whole wheat in one of the dough balls so I labeled the tub on that side to see what difference it would make. I do the flour split calcs just in time, so they both had the same flour by weight, the only difference is which kind.
Wheat made a big difference, look how big it is!
it’s a running joke in chat that we don’t own mandolines and anyone who uses a mandoline needs to be wearing safety gloves the entire time they handle the things and I’m pretty damn accident prone so I simply chose to never own one.
Well, I really wanted to try take on this zucchini pizza so I bought a safe-design one ( https://bydash.com/products/safe-slice-mandoline) instead of a benriner and gloves.
It does the job! You end up with ovals where I guess you could get circles from a benriner. Oh well?
Ah, jeeze, I see now that my take on the sweet corn pizza was missing thinly sliced (probably mandolined) red onion, that’ll totally fix it. Welp, I know what I’m doing next Friday!
Also, I made a batch a chili oil with simple red pepper flakes simmered in olive oil a while back and keep it in a deli container, it’s a big lift for anything it goes on.
Had a bunch of people over yesterday and tried to replicate what we had at Oobatz. I went w/:
90% zero zero
10% whole wheat
65% hydration
1% sourdough starter
8 hour warm fermentation with bowl folds between meetings when I remembered
48 cold fermentation, 4 hour counter warm
the zucchini pizza was incredible (not Oobatz incredible but, close maybe?), the sweet corn was missing something, maybe simply parsley (I forgot it), unsure.
Fleur de sel on the crust is a pro move.
bonus if you don’t follow the wheat producer link, this fun infographic of wheats in a population what that looks like a @paulrickards plotter postcard
home again, researching Oobatz’s pizza maker, Dan Pearson, who took a neat path to Oobatz and in which I learned that I probably need to buy a mandolin to slice properly (boo, I’ll probably shoot my eye out), and that in addition to using 100% sourdough, he uses population wheat, which I’d never heard of, explained by this unrelated producer: https://wakelyns.co.uk/yq/
warning: apple podcasts link, linking only because it has a text transcript, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/106-the-american-baker-dan-pearson-behind-the-best/id1225708803?i=1000591392995&r=36
had pizza at Oobatz ( https://www.oobatz.fr) in Paris this week.
Holy moly it was great, like, wow, maybe my favorite pizza ever? I’m definitely going to try these tooping choices at home.
we asked the server if they could give any hints at the what the “surprise” pizza tonight was, and no, they could not. great concept.
I really wish every recipe, but especially when fermentation, searing, boils, and active stirring are involved, were presented in expert tables of activity, duration, attention, and finally instruction, all preceded by plating time estimate. I keep all of mine in AnyList and I’m going to start appending this kind of information to the top of each, starting with when I need to have started today’s focaccia.
"Begin $interval prior to serving.
Bowl fold, two minutes, attentive, blah blah blah."
noticed a fav new spot (Hi-hat in SF, be warned, a little on the pricey side) uses a lot more sauce than I do, I leaned that way tonight, the fam liked it.
anchovies, mozz, san marzano, olive oil, salt
could have doubled the anchovies
had nearly 5 hours of meetings this afternoon with no time to ball tonight’s neapolitan pizza dough, which I haven’t made in a month or two because Iv’e been working on 20" NY styles, but I did get it out off the fridge in time to warm up
so as per, the first one I mindlessy stretched like it was tight and instantly had a razor thin 16" mess I couldn’t even get on a peel
the second one I was “careful” and holed in the oven
the third and fourth I just patted flat and baked and they were OK
it’s so funny to me how “broadly” seems to have become the serious poster’s defense against getting nit picked
Lovely mix of music and art history, theory, biography, and music business insight.
silly workaround for passively seeing who you muted in slack without unmuting them is to paste a link to a muted post in the message window, hit space, and let the preview unfurl to yourself and only yourself, where it reveals all to you even though you have the poster blocked and can see neither the poster nor the post in chat
🤷🏻♂️
obviously not gonna happen but i should be able to take a drivers license equivalent exam and road test to earn the right to roll down the lower windows on muni buses and ride with my elbow hanging out, maybe stick a hand out to wave it in the breeze, and so on
we lose sun on our western-oriented patio around 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon this time of year but the summer sun sets just north enough to tag from around the other side of the building and hit the farthest northwest patio corner from 5:30 to 6:30PM before we lose it again and that sun patch is like my secret book nook to escape out to for one month a year. I love it.
so stoked about the martian I didn’t notice spiderman
it was kinda nice to get to civic center and not really find any electeds going on about some nonsense on a PA system, it was just like, well we’re here, that was nice, there’s the avakian revcom weirdos [wayne’s world wayne seeing-stacy-face] there’s the people from salt tabling, ok, well let’s walk back up market and see how long it is, wow this is a lot, very cool
ah well I guess that’s it, ok, cya, I’m gonna go get a beer, ok cya I’ve got plans, yeah cool, later
relaxing this morning after breakfast reading a bit before heading to the Dolores Park to Civic Center “No Kings" march later today and I get to Inferno III ( https://archive.org/details/dante-dantes-the-divine-comedy-the-inferno-2012-dante-alighieri-robert-hollander-jean-hollander/page/n61/mode/2up), beginning with the famous “abandon all hope, you who enter here” gate of hell, and where Dante and Virgil encounter the damned for the first time, in the vestibule, who in life were neutral and never took a side.
😬. Well, ok then.
![Annotation in Hollander’s Inferno translation (https://archive.org/details/dante-dantes-the-divine-comedy-the-inferno-2012-dante-alighieri-robert-hollander-jean-hollander/page/n603/mode/2up) cropped to the note for lines 34-36, which says:34-36. For the history of the interpretation of this tercet, nowgenerally understood to indicate the presence in the "ante-inferno," orvestibule of hell, of the neutrals, those who never took a side, seeMazzoni (Mazz. 1967.1), pp. 355-67. And, for the existence of exactlysuch a "vestibule" in hell in the apocryphal Visio Pauli, describing St.Paul's descent to the netherworld, see Silverstein (Silv.1937.1). InPaul's vision (for the most recent text see Silv. 1997.1) there is a riverof flame separating "those who were neither hot nor cold" (Revelation3:15-16) from the other sinners. [return to English / Italian]](/.11ty/image/?src=content%2Fmastodon%2F2025%2F06%2F14%2F114682436859760655.png&width=1140&format=webp&via=transform)
![Annotation in Hollander’s Inferno translation (https://archive.org/details/dante-dantes-the-divine-comedy-the-inferno-2012-dante-alighieri-robert-hollander-jean-hollander/page/n605/mode/2up) cropped to the note for lines 52-57, which says:52-57. Dante's essential technique for indicating the crucial moralfailures of his various groups of sinners is here before us for the firsttime. The neutrals, who never took a side, are portrayed as anorganized crowd following a banner: exactly what they were not inlife (e.g., the neutral angels who neither rebelled directly against Godnor stood with Him, but who kept to one side). And in this respect theneutrals are punished by being forced to assume a pose antithetic tothat which they struck in life. At the same time, the banner that theyfollow is the very essence of indeterminacy. Not only is there noidentifying sign on it, it is not held in the anchoring hand of anystandard-bearer; it is a parody of the standard raised before a body ofmen who follow a leader. Elsewhere we will encounter other suchsymbolic artifacts. In Dante's hell the punishment of sin involves theapplication of opposites and similarities. This form of just retributionis what Dante will later refer to as the contrapasso (Inf. XXVIII.142).[return to English / Italian]](/.11ty/image/?src=content%2Fmastodon%2F2025%2F06%2F14%2F114682437218051784.png&width=1132&format=webp&via=transform)
as a bonus, this helps me feel ok not passing along second-hand “advice" or information, or even posting much at all anymore
I kinda remember being mad like twenty years ago that every other move needed to be considered with an “in my experience, __” prefix and this is how long it took me to connect it? wild
a move I’ve noticed cool hip with-it conflict-avoidant people do which I’ve decided to try to do is to make more claims about my own experience than I normally would because it feels redundant or just a lot of work to do all the time
so instead of “you should __" or “people should __” I try to go with with “I have __ and here’s how it worked out for me, to me.”
I picked up the inferno (this hollander one https://archive.org/details/dante-dantes-the-divine-comedy-the-inferno-2012-dante-alighieri-robert-hollander-jean-hollander ) off my now two-shelf long to-read, half-read, and probably dnfing pile because I’m about to get to it in the Berkeley philosophy lectures I I’m listening to on walks anymore (Dreyfus mentioned previously, https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_461120619) and it’s in the form canto, commentary on canto, canto 2, commentary on canto 2, and so on
ffs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Fire#Interpretations fascinating takes.
The Botkin theory is very plausible, and these critical essays from Boyd on the Nabokov mailing list is also a fun read (i’m on 3 of 9, made possible by reader mode in my browser, the archive newlines are a little weird).
(you know you are reading some real lore when you see the old “name-l” listserve decorator)
“Brother, can you spare securing the existence of our people and a future for wh—“
“Sorry friend, I don’t carry cash.”
gravely started reading The Inferno
I never have any urge to post what I think about people like stephen miller on here because it would feel like bad smalltalk, just casual observations of a shared banality.
for some insane reason I instead am constantly not posting the same nonsense on linkedin, a website I don’t understand and dislike the need for, because “they” (??) need to hear it.
Delightful, ridiculous companion to Pnin,. I’m confident I missed a lot (I only occasionally referred back to the lines of the poem referenced in the commentary) and still enjoyed it.
sun ra’s nuclear war is a form of if it sucks hit da bricks with a better refrain:
oh what you gonna do (oh what you gonna do)
without your ass (without your ass)
working on learning to play Pancho and Lefty this with thumb and fingerpicks like Townes turned into "I wonder if there’s any Townes stuff on bandcamp?” (there is, including this Live at the Old Quarter release) turned into falling in love w/ the label, Fat Possum Records,’s ( https://fatpossum.com) motto (p good merch too):
“We’re Trying our Best."
Shirley Jackson with theater kids. Mostly stuck the landing but idk.
took my DSLR to junior’s graduation, was annoyed at myself for not changing my speedlight batteries while trying to get piñata shots under the shade of a tree so I changed them when I got home.
the batteries I took out were dated 2011
a few of the people I follow are on a years-long usually dormant thread with a few dozen people that just post the most wild schematics and infographics at each other and if I could follow a thread I would follow that thread and if I could find it I would break my usual “don’t be a reply guy” lurker mentality and post this amazing graphic at it even though I don’t know any of them and don’t know what the thread is for so i’m just gonna post it here and maybe start a new one for myself and you
expert guidance, as with all things: “get good.”
we are third in line so we know we already lost and are only staying to learn how to scam our way to success on the next attempt, which we both have to do, in person, together, to get junior a passport
another case proclaims:
PHILATELIC INFORMATION
cool
i would have misspelled this on assignment
maybe a silly thing to get excited about but every single time I’m all: “Wow! Look at it go!”
Tomorrows 20" NY style pizza dough, which I made a few days ago using 10% wheat, 90% bread flour, and cold water, mixed in a food processor until the center of the dough read in the high 70s F (about 75 seconds), and then immediately cold fermented for a few days.
https://carfree.city/@sfmtadocsbot/114581531126178751
curious what effect this is having / will have on the robots
pictured: joel engardio himself, as seen from Sunset Dunes
did a little 20 mile bike loop from the mission mission to glen park, lake merced, sunset dunes park, gg park, doubled back to the pump track + skills track to meet the fam (the plan all along)
jr pushed his scooter around the skills track boards for a bit, we hung out on the logs further north, then they went home and I continued on through GGP and the wiggle
just by a rough eyeball count of blue “stand with joel” vs yellow “recall engardio” signs on the houses facing the GH, joel is doomed
at the picture shop a few days ago getting a julian lage sf jazz residency poster framed (I caught the solo acoustic show and the duo with marc ribot, who is just the coolest 😍) and while I was trying to decide on a ready-made or not, the other table became the center of attention w/a full size (huge) star wars poster, which looked mint.
the owner helping him says he worked at lucasfilm in the 80s and that this was one of two sizes or something? he was very excited
at least a band famously hostile to tapers (or passive to Peter Grant) and infamously noted for onion-on-belt songwriting credit lag didn’t profit off of tapers I guess? weird decisions.
also, it is full of stock footage cultural contextualization, which, as a device, ugh, the worst dreck of romanticism imo.
the high school fan in me was pretty disappointed w/ the “becoming led zeppelin" thing that just came out. I bailed.
the second half is full of neat ‘68, '69, and ‘70 film of the band live, but not with the definitely available and in some cases highly regarded audio of those shows. Instead, studio or bbc session releases for completely different songs, and not even particularly good songs were used.
"Living Loving Maid”, to pick one they used, sucks, and was never in their actual live sets.
half way through nabokov’s “pale fire” and istg every aside story in the commentary about stuff in zembla reads like a wes anderson scene
'Let ‘Em In’ by Wings ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re61B8sKQWk) has been in the rotation lately on mellotron ( https://www.lemellotron.com/) which I listen to on a JBL clip on the bike all the time.
I didn’t grow up hearing much Wings so it’s just a delightful little pop thing w/ a good pedaling bass line to cycle to for me and not a Wings song I’ve heard a million times (some of those are great too of course) every time it comes on.
and I’m like, sure, makes sense, whatever, but this was a chance to reject all of that nonsense and use a computer driver to force-daylight both crosswalks and get rid of right on red and we didn’t do it.
damn.
watching a waymo creep in a crosswalk on howard parallel to me like a human would, even with probably-misplaced confidence that it is doing to so to
get a right on red, but for my walk
not be blocked by peds crossing when the light changes
drive more like a human so that the human drives behind it don’t lose their god damned minds that the person in front isn’t off the line on the green
because it is probably ultimately more efficient overall for the system
training
So, I upgraded my pocketcasts subscription to a tier that supports hosting arbitrary files, downloaded all of the mp3s from the archive, uploaded them to pocketcasts on the web, found them on my phone (profile, files, sort by name) and off I go.
A little tedious and so-close but not there with just advanced search.
Alas.
I am a few classes into Hubert Dreyfus’s 2007 ”Man, God, and Society in Western Literature” Berkeley lectures ( https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_461120619).
The Internet Archive’s advanced search can return RSS which podcast apps understand, but it seems like it it’s for subscribing to new collections, not for turning collections into podcasts.
So I think this is the best I can do? https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=identifier%33Aucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_461120619fl%5B%5D=identifier&sort%5B%5D=&sort%5B%5D=&sort%5B%5D=&rows=50&page=1&callback=callback&save=yes&output=rss
🚶🏽♂️
🏁 what I’m considering The Excelsior.
Lovely neighborhood of sidewalk gardens and views. Dipping into McLaren Park for the final few east side walks was a nice bonus. Getting there on the 14 or 49 or BART was convenient but the time it took limited how often I could get any miles in on weekday mornings. Luckily the buses stop a block from my house and are running by 6AM those mornings.
Next: Outer Mission, or Portola?
a marxist analysis of people posting computer generated action figures of themselves still in the packaging in hyper-mint condition
fresh mozz margs and proper (whole foods deli) peperoni for jr. trying to go as fast as I can: launch, go back inside, shape, go outside, turn, go inside, sauce, go outside, pull, etc.
~75-85 seconds at 900F
Also I got a bunch of aluminum plates at the right size for these so that I can to set the full size oven to warm and rack these as they come out so that and everyone gets warm pizza instead of cold
The Muni Potrero Yard trolleybus tour was super neato. I’ve been bike commuting past this station for fifteen years off and on (less so the last five) and it was a special treat to tour around inside where some of the lines I ride the most call home before it is rebuilt into a modern facility.
https://mastodon.social/@gravely/114449902629389095
took the fam to the Pulgas Temple via the Sheep Camp Trail, saw flowers, saw water, saw lizard, saw deer, saw snek, not bad for a 'burbs hike!
the first time I came out here in '17 we took a more boring route and saw none of these things save the water, go figure.
![photograph of the pulgas temple, a (pasting from wikipedia) a circle of fluted Corinthian columns surmounted by a large masonry ring bearing the inscription "I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people" [from Isaiah 43:20]. There is a reflecting pool lined with cypress trees.](/.11ty/image/?src=content%2Fmastodon%2F2025%2F05%2F12%2F114492717867858438.jpeg&width=2494&format=webp&via=transform)
One of the author quotes on Folk’s website (www.katefolk.com/home) blurbs these as “if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror” and yeah, pretty much. I’m too much of a ninny to watch Black Mirror, and if someone made this book of stories into a show I would be too much of a ninny to watch it, but I enjoyed each of these little tales of mostly single women, mostly in SF, dealing with some pretty strange things. Body horror, as promised.
Franklin’s lectures are no less relevant in 2025 than they were when she added the final three chapters in 1999 to texts delivered as lectures in 1989 conceived as early as in the 1970s with respect to a a gem of fascinating sets of dialectics regarding what she calls the real world of technology. Holistic and prescriptive work, planners and planees, environment and nature, liberation and exploitation, time and space.
edit: oh, this one that caught my eye but it isn’t the only one, see: https://pixelfed.social/p/DocPop/806269366762456744
original:
have a great weekend! (pardon the ascii noise to follow)
@ <
⎺UU⎺
totally thought I’d licked the entire time change thing until the everloving wife pointed out that I had made dinner an hour late every day this week. I went back to cross reference the last post I made in chat at work and even that was an hour later than I normally work.
what the hell? I’ve been getting up around 5AM like I normally do and then just disappearing an hour somewhere to fall back?
just got around to ordering prints to go in the the mat we had everyone sign at our wedding 18 years ago, from the dvd the photographer burned us, which I’d eventually lost, but only after uploading them to flickr which I eventually deleted but had exported first, 9 years ago, which I only just imported to apple photos from my file server.
✅ can you order me a print of this picture? [a data warehouse of crossed out due dates]
the sonophone ios app has a delightfully responsive volume slider but the navigation confuses me so I can’t get into the habit of using it exclusively.
this home assistant hack can’t do search, which is a bummer.
honestly plexamp continues to be the most delightful but they’ve chosen to deprioritize and kill http streams too, and its speaker targets are limited to airplay and bluetooth, and both stink.
this is all so stupid. I assume accessing http streams and favoriting them is not a revenue opportunity and thus prioritized somewhere below first party enlightenment sound daemon support, so the “new” mobile app hard-rake-staircase-ollie 🙄 (the designers did a great job, the engineering decisions worry me) still can’t do what I’ve been doing for nearly fifteen years.
home assistant can, clumsily, so I faked up the old UI with four sonos cards each locked into single mode.
Everloving wife and I used to call the corner grocery, Duc Loi (r i p), "the dl”, now a few years into having moved and Casa Guadalupe being our default, I’ve finally managed to stop saying “the dl” by saying “the gl.”
recology sanitation engineers have an off-the-books, for-charity, annual, competitions (regional and national), and one of the events is a timed wheel-can storage race (faster is better) judged by how interlocked the lids can be.
when any one lid can’t be opened on account of the engineer’s clever interleaving of a neighboring can’s lid’s lip, they call it “captured lid locking” (the technical term) and, they are scored on how many lids they can lock.
as in all sport, doping is a problem.
wtb a home assistant automation that will play theater bell chimes over every (sonos) speaker in the house five minutes before dinner is ready, again one minute before plating, and again as the ushers (me) close and lock the (imaginary) doors to the the dining room as I sit to dine with whoever has joined me for dinner.
entering my Townes Van Zandt era even though lyrics normally pass over my smooth brain like the colored smoke over an efficient wing in wind tunnel tests reminds me of getting into Elvis Costello years ago and telling a hipper friend of mine “wow, did you know his first few albums are like, incredible?” and getting in response a very deadpan “yes, that is generally the consensus.”
late-mid-century texas and bakersfield sounds are my jam lately, catching me by surprise.
[incredulously] Who did this!?
top of rack sourdough preferment and folds, bottom of rack primary fermentation overnight, easily more than doubled, let’s go.
🥹🥹🥹
Here’s how I plot out a potential walk before I go, sometimes: I use CityStride’s map pathing.
Other times, of course, I just wing it. But I’ve been bit by missing a block mid-neighborhood in places before and my sense of completionism drives me to go back, so this helps.
I’m also not completing every citystride “segment” so I ignore that mechanic - it includes a few alleys which aren’t actually open to the public and paths that don’t exist anymore.
area man who has been muted the entire video conference waves goodbye before closing the window even though his stream is hidden among the “+8" set of other people who have also been muted the entire video call
if the skin ain’t broke, you should not poke
being the adult in this tête-à-tête and, after feinting a few times with the fork in my right hand, simply plucking up the pan fried cherry tomato with my left hand and popping it into my mouth.
it is p funny to me that the dumbest people on earth who respect no one and no thing who bumble through life with least effort reactions damning all consequence are still participating in the meritocracy of J.D.s and Ivies and so on.
feels like every day we learn ”oh, so and so idiot is now the head of blah blah" and it’s their lawyer or something.
why the pretense? just appoint whoever, who cares at this point?
S. J. W.s at this playground?
Oè!
Just read the first chapter of Ursula Franklin’s Massey Lectures ( https://monoskop.org./5/58/Franklin_Ursula_The_Real_World_of_Technology_1990.pdf) because it was recommended by @Mer__edith in this old Politico interview ( https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2023/12/01/5-questions-for-meredith-whittaker-00129677) and it’s excellent.
Ordered a paperback ( https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-real-world-of-technology-ursula-franklin/9995479?ean=9780887846366&next=t&next=t ) to finish the rest.
on my bullshit—in Denver—not nearly my first time here, just visiting friends for the weekend and had a kid-nap-time time to wander.
p nice!
“Blah, blah blah. But, blah blah, blah.” — a billionaire.
😮😮🙂↔️
“whatya mean, I’m not turning on reactions?”
gonna call this variety of slop post-labor-impressionism
😮😮
Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf And Was Told By The Farmers On The Embankment, Oh, You’re Surprised There’s A Wolf? You’re Tending Sheep, Didn’t You Read that Article In The Atlantic Last Year About This? Here Is A Link It Will Only Take You Fifteen Minutes To Read Oh By The Way It Looks Like The Wolf Ate Your Whole Flock, That Is Really Unfortunate And We Sure Do Hate It.”
(not knocking the book, it’s a sign of a good recipe imo when there’s more than one way to do a thing instead of trying to elevate technique over outcomes)
the beans were good!
making chilean sea bass and dry fried green beans and right off the bat the book I’m using ( http://www.fuchsiadunlop.com/books/the-food-of-sichuan/) for the beans cops that while you could dry fry them, most people deep fry them, and for another thing, you can also just bake them and then stir fry them, which is what I’m doing because I’m feeling p lazy this evening
““How weary one gets of this constant pounding,” Theodora said ridiculously. “Next summer, I must really go somewhere else.”
“There are disadvantages everywhere,” Luke told her. “In the lake regions you get mosquitoes.””
— Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House, p. 147
A fun break, finished in a day, deserving of it’s reputation.
as the women arrive at the house I put on Portishead’s self titled, this one needs spooky music.
Runyon’s gangsters have more in common with Benya Krik than Hammett’s, who gets a cover blurb, to me, but those characters are only in the first few stories—the rest are about a jewish boy’s (the authors?) childhood in Odessa. I enjoyed them, but I’m going to put off starting the second Babel collection I’ve got for now.
I’ve got a date-night sitter booked tonight but my date is out of town so I looked at event calendars for the usual haunts and, hey neat, Robert Cherny presents "San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919 to 1958.”, 7-8:30, at Bird & Beckett ( https://birdbeckett.com, https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?mode=week&src=r5o3loovr013c5rftpv75lji18@group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Los_Angeles).
Baring any complications (my kid has a cold that could but probably won’t escalate), I’m there.
o/ to the product manager or whoever is responsible for apple’s “Reactions” menubar feature inventing or using a new and immature notification flow to tell me when my browser turns the feature off, we see you and appreciate you
😮
w/ the right latin music, the construction work outside can just join the percussion section https://youtu.be/8AGrQaH9Qlk?si=2h8QeM6WcaGbwRMg.
You’ve got your drummer, your conga player, and your certified skid steer jack hammer / breaker operator.
Covering 2010-2020ish, this caught me up on a lot of the struggle I had been oblivious to before 2016 and been distrusting of various sources since. Pretty remarkable work. Bevin succeeds, to me, at detailing the process and outcomes of what seem to have been predominantly anarchist movements he’s sympathetic to.
have a great saturday y’all
we have potted plans from at least three friends who left SF (and CA, it turns out), and one is an orchid that I never figured out how to do much with beyond keep alive for two years.
so we asked at the garden center and they suggested orchid food (sticks and spray) and sure enough, when fed, the primary sprout poked back up and grew 12" or so in the past few months and now we’ve got maybe four flowers to look forward to.
idk if/how we could have helped the first four buds which died off.
was catching up on the O.G. after suggesting this doc to a friend and found out / was reminded maybe/why Donald Fagan’s response to being asked to be involved in any way was to say "fuck you”
standing in a band labeled 30-80lbs that is wrapped behind and around the parallel bars of a chin up bar getting ready to do the 8th and final chin up of 3 sets of 8 when the band slips off my heels and thwaps me across the shoulder blades like only a 2" wide rubber band supporting my entire body weight can thwap
oof!
my lynch story is that a friend convinced us to fly to LA for one of his film festivals where this premiered (or at least was shown?) in a full theater of his fans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BSgM56SSJ0 and the next day I got to ride in an elevator with Blondie who was also at the festival
anyway RIP, F, etc
I wonder what the folks at the bottom of coso on precita did to get their new bollards installed?
last week or w/e, a car drove into the corner store at 26th and guerrero
a car, just now, drove into the dover at 26th and valencia
stores and bars are for people, not cars!
strava’s AI features which upon announcement already motivated me to delete my account and I’m merely waiting or a fedi or or similar open source self-hosted equivalent to move to before I do so, reads like the FBI S.A. assigned to monitor me’s updates to my dosier
tag yerself
heck yeah, sprung for a nice ticket to this one ( https://www.sfjazz.org/tickets/productions/24-25/julian-lage-duet-for-guitars/)
grumpy postjng about the pass it on media campaign
very mild shenanigans, nice.
walked past the place I lived 20+ years ago at Kalorama and Champlain: it’s still there, hell yeah. saw three different people slip on the same ice patch on 18th near Florida. that sucks.
saw clusters of tents on the grass along the southern eastern side of the end of rock creek parkway near the bridge as you pass that gas station past the watergate which are both still there, on the taxi ride in. it is 20F and last weeks snow is still on the ground.
At ShmooCon for the weekend.
What a strange little book. Kinda a rehash and very abridged version of Levy’s Hackers that begins in WW1 and ends post-snowden. Especially strange to finish on hackers fighting back against the government and corporate attempts to run “the internet” as I was descending to land at DCA to attend the last ShmooCon in DC.
I’m still team Evgeny Morozov re: “what’s the Internet?”
Rival Self // Prog Rock, Psych, Breaks and Loops on Vinyl and Cassette
via dj food
the e in e/acc is specifically about the trompe l’oeil of the tunnel painted on the wall.
evolution keeps producing crabs (php web forums) for a reason, but I’m sure your not-crab thing will be great too, glhf
stop looking at the sunrise reflecting off an entire block of buildings in the distance challenge
At a client of mine’s in the early 00s:
“Wow, hotdog stand. I’ve never seen anyone choose this, do you like it?” I asked.
"No. I don’t know why it’s like that. I came in one day and there it was.”
"Do you want me to change it back to normal colors?”
"No, don’t change it!” they demanded, weirdly urgently.
“OK.”
They were later fired for conspiring w/ an IT support worker to embezzle a bunch of money. The IT worker even went to jail.
That client? Novavax.
Starting the year with the slimmest book on the pile, and a memoir to boot, worked well the past two years. I forget why I wishlisted this one — I thought I’d read another Adolph Reed Jr. book but I see shelving this now that it was his son, Touré, whose “Toward Freedom” I’d enjoyed (and just added to Bookwyrm.)
gravely started reading The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
Christmas gift
musical breaks are the mayonnaise of kid’s movies.
took a guest through Glen Canyon up Twin Peaks new year’s eve, toured Philosopher’s Way with junior today. enjoy the green while it’s with us.
Very small sample size but: I overshot kneading on one of two dough balls by 10 degrees to mid-80s F, so when I placed them in my fermenting tray (and flattened them out given I had so much space to work with, so that they would cool more evenly), I marked that one.
After cold fermenting, the too-warm dough was slightly smaller, visually, than the correctly kneaded dough.
Go figure.
Maybe counter-inuitive but someone posted (I don’t remember who or where, probably on pizzamaking.com) that bulk fermenting dough like this at room temperatures effectively insulates the dough from dropping to fridge temps when you later cold ferment, what with all the bubbles.
The dough should already have warmed up from both the cold strike water equalizing with the other ingredients to a target temp, and the kneading further raising the temp.
Just throw it in the fridge immediately.
I’ve been struggling to land on a good dough process without doing a bunch of math.
Lucky for me, I found a modern Lehmann calculator (named after a forums poster, so you know the approach is good), and have had great luck with it, using bakers percentages a bit more like Kenji’s at 60% hydration, 2% oil, 2% salt, 1% instant yeast.
I use cold water from the fridge and mix it using a food processor until it registers mid-70s F on a thermapen, then cold ferment.
Had a few friends over for a holiday party this week and made two extra large New York style pizzas to feed everyone a lot faster and with a lot less work than my neapolitan process.
For the kids, a half-pep/half-mozz. For the adults: smoked kalamata olives (holy moly, amazing), red onion, mushroom, basil, pecorino, mozz.
