posts from 2025 / 01

1. gonna call this variety of slop post-labor-impressionism

   

2. 😮😮

   

   

3. 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.”

4. (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!

5. 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

6. ““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.

   

7. as the women arrive at the house I put on Portishead’s self titled, this one needs spooky music.

   

8. 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.

   

9. 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.

10. 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

11. 😮

    

    

    

12. 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.

13. 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.

    

14. have a great saturday y’all

15. 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.

    

    

16. 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”

    https://youtu.be/EatDR9uHD3g?si=Igocu38O9ZWDsFKj 😆

17. 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!

18. 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

19. I wonder what the folks at the bottom of coso on precita did to get their new bollards installed?

20. 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!

21. 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

    

22. tag yerself

    

23. heck yeah, sprung for a nice ticket to this one ( https://www.sfjazz.org/tickets/productions/24-25/julian-lage-duet-for-guitars/)

    

24. grumpy postjng about the pass it on media campaign

    

    

25. very mild shenanigans, nice.

26. 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.

27. At ShmooCon for the weekend.

    

28. 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?”

    

29. Rival Self // Prog Rock, Psych, Breaks and Loops on Vinyl and Cassette

    via dj food

30. the e in e/acc is specifically about the trompe l’oeil of the tunnel painted on the wall.

31. evolution keeps producing crabs (php web forums) for a reason, but I’m sure your not-crab thing will be great too, glhf

32. stop looking at the sunrise reflecting off an entire block of buildings in the distance challenge

    

33. 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.

    https://digipres.club/@discatte/113777327346806881

34. 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.)

    

35. gravely started reading The Wrestler’s Cruel Study

    

36. Christmas gift

    

37. musical breaks are the mayonnaise of kid’s movies.

38. 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.

    

    

    

    

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. 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.

42. 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.