also born on this day, go figure

https://mastodon.social/@workingclasshistory/113733763757962621

upgraded the pizza oven to the new ‘max’ ooni, which is insanely huge, so that I could do this: make an NY style pizza with slices that are the “correct” size, and feed the family one-and-done.

throwing out the dough to 20" was easy, launching was easy, etc.

I set my expectations low but am very impressed w/ the first bake even though I dislike the dough I made, mostly nits with the fermentation, and I launched too hot

photograph, finished extra large new york style pizza with sauce, cheese, basil, and pepperoni on a wood peel on a counter, a pizza wheel is laying next to the pizza on the left

photograph of the underside of the pizza tilted up from the peel, displaying bubbles of varying sizes from very small to half an inch burst and leapoarded, larger bubbles merely lifted as cavities, w/ a near black ring around the outer edge of the crust

photograph of one slice on a paper plate and two slices on a second paper plate, both on the peel(the paper plates are actually melamine and we re-use them every friday for pizza night because it sets the vibes correctly)

macro of one plated slice, finished w/ shaved parm, red pepper flakes, and oreganothe very thin crust is visibly bubbled and a burned bottom layer has pulled away from the rest of the crust in waves

the november Clarkesworld was particularly fun, and I specifically liked the opener, https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/nelson_11_24/, the second one https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/spires_11_24/, the third one https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/auslender_11_24/, and the last one https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/swanwick_11_24/

I was also surprised to find that pest control (I assume) includes cats someone or some group takes care of out there.

photograph looking up at the street signs on the corner of 20th street and Maryland street on a gray cloudy day

Photograph of an industrial building covered in vertically oriented corrugated steel, behind a chain link fence. Scattered between the fence and the building are half a dozen white cat houses facing various directions in no particular apparent organization

a closer photograph of one of the cat houses situated between a sidewalk curb and a chain link fence with narrow panels slotted through the fencing, confirmed to be a cat house by the open empty can of cat food in front of it next to an empty water bowl

🚶🏽‍♂️

🏁 what I’m considering Mission Bay and Dogpatch.

Being from Maryland, I wondered where Maryland Street, once I found, many years ago, that most of the state-named streets, are along the eastern side of the city here. Maryland St. specifically is right on the waterfront. But you can only get to a few blocks at a time between all the industry.

A map of San Francisco, 101 on the left, 280 in the center, soma to the top and Islay creek along the bottom. All of the visible sections of the Mission, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, and Dogpatch streets (and most alleys but not all the weird driveways and private sections of old streets which are slowly returning) are marked with a purple trail.

solidarity with all the parents of little kids who would be hitting their winter break stride right now if they had a moment of peace but won’t until school starts up again, ten of the longest days of the year from now, and oh btw it’s been raining the entire week

so hot on my wishlist I got it in fully modulated stereo

Two identical paperbacks of David Byrne’s “How Music Works”, which is bright orange with all caps grotesque title over author’s name, one word per line, with very simple sign for a speaker radiating music up at the title between the two.the books are both laying face up on my kitchen counter.HOWMUSICWORKSDAVIDBYRNE.

https://www.ubu.com/sound/dj_food.html

this mix was so fun when it dropped that I went and read the paul morely book ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_and_Music:_A_History_of_Pop_in_the_Shape_of_a_City ) strictly kev later connected it to and expanded it against

10th anniversary: https://www.djfood.org/raiding-the-20th-century-is-10-years-old/

now 20th anniversary: https://www.djfood.org/raiding-the-20th-century-expanded-version-20th-anniversary-release/

artwork from the 10th anniversary blog post in the style of the Sgt. Peppers album cover but black and white w/ a 20th century fox movie intro over the top.

p funny going through bad twenty year old posts on my silly old website converting them to their fourth or fifth text markup language this holiday break and running into so many broken links and embeds.

onion-on-belt taboos against both hotlinking and mirroring completely made sense at the time, but, now, guess what silly, it’s all gone, we should have hard mirrored entire things we liked, if we liked them, even if only as time capsules

a 20-something tailgated me through one of the new door sized bart gates this week, clearly waiting for the right person to follow, and I knew exactly what to do, keep listening to my podcast, acknowledge nothing, even with the stupid new turnstile, which is slow and annoying, beeping behind me.

hell yeah, we’re doing the moves, fare dodging, and we’re walking down the stairs like nothing happened, gg

(fwiw the tone is a solid beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee for idk how many seconds)

ah, the boys sang Pocket Calculator in Italian for Italian TV

love the tiny instruments on this

got a barcode, will be in DC Thursday through Sunday 🤗

I don’t go to security conferences much anymore but a friend not on here and I were both on sg-dc and lived in DC in 2004, so, when the CFP got posted there ( https://marc.info/?l=sg-dc&m=109509914217942&w=2). It got his attention.

I didn’t end up getting a barcode until November 30th. I walked to and from the con at the Wardman each day from my place in Adam’s Morgan.

One of the nights, we got dinner w/ @webjedi (his boss) and a few months later I quit my IT job started working for 'em as a security engineer.

So.

oops, forgot to try for a shmoocon barcode one last time

might do lobbycon anyway, it being the last one and all that

junior on working through some math (addition of single digit numbers, kindergarten-appropriate):

“it’s like there’s a teacher in my head, teaching me, all the time”

math-knowers in chat have pointed out that I should have parlayed this into quarto equis on account of dos times dos producing that quatro, but this is one of my locals and I can’t get quatro equis every time I go to keep in order to service that charade

ordred some tacos and a dos equis at the tacqueria last night, clerk rang me up, I paid, he turned around and handed me my tacos and dos dos equis.

what a scam, but I’ll be drinking that second one that’s in my fridge now eventually anyway I guess

this hot tip was solid, Eric Isaacson had a lot to share and I’m pretty glad we went even if we ended up not getting home to relieve our high-school aged babysitter until after 9:30. “It’s OK, tbh I stay up until midnight anyway.”

The tour winds down in Fort Bragg and then Bolinas: https://www.mississippirecords.net/calendar-2024

Also: check out the 4 Star, which is also a record shop

I never make it out the Richmond so I guess this rec is for people like me and not like, some sort of personal insight

this kinda stuff is better thought of as sets of idioms* in the it “cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements" sense than as whatever adjectives advocates like to throw around like “simple” or “clean” and so on

it is a skill to be able to onboard and adapt various idioms, I’m just coming at this pile of them a little cold I guess

https://www.wordnik.com/words/idiom

having been futzing with it for a few weeks now, 11ty pathing and globbing as seemingly intended in the current reference setup https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog is still pretty befuddling, specifically how “Images can be co-located with blog post files" is done.

the example “home” index doesn’t include any post contents, just titles and dates. if you want to include content, that’s easy, but it won’t be able to find the images

weird. anyway, https://gravely.pizza lives again

ASTRONUT.BMF

https://mastodon.art/@clipart/113631784683328453

reminded of all the places I’ve tagged with my kid before they could write and make me stop.

i’m down to the last few months before their reading catches up with this nonsense, I gotta get back on my game

I think this was in john wayne airport five years ago

a toddler (my kid) under two years old wearing red shoes and black pants and a black shirt stands with their back to us in front of a giant magnetic easel with rainbow colored plastic magnetic letters scattered over it, including: G r A V E L Y across the middle in red, purple, red, orange, blue, and green

dang!

sunrise over the mission, the center, most distant bands of clouds are bright orange, the nearest high clouds are white and blue

sunrise over bernal heights, the left and right, most distant bands of clouds are bright orange, the nearest high clouds are white and blue

can we not?

can we not "can we not?”?

can we not ‘can we not "can we not?”?’?

can we not can we not 'can we not "can we not?”?’?

can we not… ah jeeze I’m all out of quotation indicators

got 'em

for a publication called The Atlantic, they sure go way out of their lane posting about stuff that happens on the various continents a lot

ninja posts would also be nice, when I’m just moving stuff around to make pinned posts

Greetings

Books

Why: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/110011601484725615

2023: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/109661276920611083#.

2024: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/111681527425154217

2025: TBD

Walks

https://mastodon.social/@gravely/111433245331859281

caught a hot tip that “A People’s History of North American Music" is rad, in Berkeley on the 11th and SF on the 12th https://www.mississippirecords.net/calendar-2024/west-coast-tour-a-peoples-history-of-north-american-music, have plans the 12th I might cancel or not and go the 11th, tbd

sf being a small town, it went like this

“and for this one I got a few days ago, it’s Sun Ra so you know I gotta get something that sparkles”

"what night did you go?” another customer asks

“saturday”

"I went friday”, he says

“right on”

“sparkles, what are they like ABBA?" the frame shop worker asks

“no, kinda the opposite of ABBA" says the other guy

“more like jazz I guess" I say

“afro-futurism" he says

“uh, OK" the frame shop guy says

Getting another @paulrickards piece framed at the same time as the @SunRaUniverse poster I got Saturday at the show.

I wanted to get the plotter piece with ornate yellow cope in the top right corner but it would have been 10x the cost so I lowered my sights a little to the one on the piece. 🖊️☀️

And the Sun Ra Arkestra poster absolutely had to be sparkles, but again the ones pictured around it are eye-poppingly expensive so I went with a smaller, finer grit, but still sparkle, not pictured. 🪩🤗

a pen plog on paper, and a larger poster, on a work table at the frame shop on the left is a medium sized yellow and orange pen line plot (done on a computer plotter) of a sun with rays casting outon the right is a Sun Ra Arkestra poster illustration of abstract green, orange, brown, and pink shapes over a gray square that takes up most of the poster, which has a creamy white background

every morning I crack three eggs into a non-stick pan on medium heat, slide them off to a plate sunny side up when they are ready, return the pan to the stove, raise the heat to medium-high, and fry spinach and a few cherry tomatoes in olive oil which spatters oil all over the place

today after having made a mess, oh idk, probably a thousand times or so over the past few years, I plopped the spinach on top of the tomatoes once it wilted a little and it prevented the spatter mess entirely. gdi.

logging on

https://beige.party/@RickiTarr/113549771635080860

standing in the back of the club wearing a kn95 and earplugs wishing mask precautions weren’t a thing anymore and that i hadn’t stood where i did the entire j mascis (Witch) show in baltimore twenty years ago

also my phone just reminded me it’s almost bedtime

photo of the marque of The Great American Music Hall in SF, the Sun Ra Arkestra is playing tonight, i'm inside

when I was a energy company security person back in the 00s my intrusion detection system hit on a VNC signature and I had a network capture running so I went and carved it out and replayed the video of it and it looked just like this and I panicked a little (I had no idea what our actual control systems looked like) and then called the worker who I saw on the other end of it

they were doing volunteer work for their local ice skating rink

https://fedi.computernewb.com/@vncresolver/113515876167083817

and someone from the parks service walked over and gave us three huge trash bags and asked that we make sure to clean up after ourselves, which of course we had planned to, and did, but that was nice

someone approached and asked how we booked the spot because they wanted to do the same thing so I got to relate that story, then they took a picture one of the grills we were using, which I thought was weird, but I guess people just do that anymore

the picnic was a success, we used two of the grills, four or five of the tables, and some of us grabbed e-bikes back to work downtown from the parking racks up the street because the ride from Chase to the Ferry Building is pretty nice even on a cool day

i should be allowed to drop some words in some sentences and some letters in some words

It’s a secret to everybody. I put my sourdough starter in the little closet under the stairs where my home server and network gear is when I feed it on weekends in the winter.

so I’m finally going back to 1999, running it for myself only, on my home internet connection. kinda nice tbh

the actual work of getting it to build was mostly fighting with the cruft of fads and new-things (shtml, textpattern, wordpress, octopress, etc) and incredible journeys ( https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/) and stuff I’d divested from over whatever reasons seemed sufficient at the time. Oh, we are all protest-deleting our github accounts now? Ok, I can do that. Oh, flickr got acquired and is being weird? Cya. tumblr too? bummer.

most of the content is even more personally embarrassing than it was when I blew it away last time, six years ago. No one should have to reconcile with specific texts of their own teens, twenties, or thirties, which was the explicit reason I used to keep it up, until I didn’t believe it anymore: the unexamined life, blah, blah, blah

got my old 1999-2011 blog ( https://web.archive.org/web/20170709060307/http://archives.grantstavely.com/ to build with 11ty ( http://11ty.dev ) during idle time over the past few weekends. I don’t know if it’s even possible or coherent to rebuild the 2011-2018 tumblr ( https://web.archive.org/web/20180330002228/https://grantstavely.com/) I replaced it with

anyway, 11ty seems nice

someone who knows better has a hot tip that there is in fact a bathroom up the steps next to harmonic in thrive city (“yea, I’m going to the city next week”; some local “hey, we don’t say “the city” you sound like a damned tourist, we say whole ass name [enunciating carefully] Thrive city, c’mon.”)

need to investigate this claim

I can hear this hooky Newmanesque chorus (or a much better one probably) getting played at Giants games and everything

Oh, San Francisco

Oh, I gotta go

planning a picnic and intending to use the grills at the new bayfront park ( https://www.sf.gov/news/mayor-london-breed-celebrates-grand-opening-bayfront-park-mission-bay) and it looks like, oops, no bathrooms there?

why does LA get a randy newman and we don’t?

those jerks at HBO better not disrespect Steve Huey, JD Ryznar, David B Lyons, and Hunter Stair with all that is going on with the world right now

:22 second mark, phew ok, we’re gonna be ok

the lower clouds this morning were as much fun as the sky itself, like fog sneaking off to the bay instead of burning off like it’s supposed to

photograph of san francisco in the mission looking southeast at sunrise this morning (some dox) the sky is streaked with orange-lit clouds over a blue sky backing, but low at the horizon and heading east, a thick gray cloud bank roils slowly

dorothea lange bot is posting my neighborhood!

https://mastodon.ozioso.online/@DorotheaLange/113465438690782374

screen grab from the matrix where Mouse runs to everyone else to say that morpheus is fighting neo

Clarkesworld Issue 217 ( https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/issue_217/) was pretty solid all around. I think I left 216 in a hotel room (d’oh!), so I’m going back to finish the last two stories of 215 and then I’ll check out 216 on the web.

I particularly liked "Midnight Patron” by Mike Robinson ( https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/robinson_10_24/)

if you are in line to vote for trevor chandler stay in line

the network stack on os x sequoia sucks, wish I hadn’t upgraded

a little late for Halloween 2024 but this Sun Ra tune, "The Forrest of No Return” just came my way and I’ll be bringing it back next year for sure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt6WLWnMTAU

edit: https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/pink-elephants-on-parade

anyway, so bogomil, probably had the usual baggage, but I bet this specific bit didn’t work out too well for them

![wikipedia screenshot, text:Doctrine [edit ]оучать же свою си не повиновати са властелемь своимь; хоулаще богатым, царьненавидать, рягажть са старбишинамь, оукарніть болары, мрьзькы богоу мьнатьработа жщаю цьсарю, и вьсакомоу рабоу не велать работати господиноу свомоу.ucetu je soja si ne povinovati se vlastelem svoim; xuleste bogatyie, cari nenavidet, regajot sẹ stareisinamum, ukarjajot boljary, mriziky bogu minetu rabotajosteje cesarju, i visjakomu rabu ne veleti rabotati gospodinu svojemu.They teach their followers not to obey their masters; they scorn the rich, they hate the Tsars, they ridicule their superiors, they reproach the boyars, they believe that God looks in horror on those who labour for the Tsar, and advise every serf not to work for his master. 32]- Cosmas the Priest, Treatise Against the Bogomils](./113448223430456892.png)

Link uses the term manichaeism in this interview and I don’t know it but didn’t look it up because I wanted to keep reading. then this morning I’m reading https://inthesetimes.com/article/former-left-right-fascism-capitalism-horseshoe-theory and it’s got manichaeism used too.

Dang. so I go pop open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism and from there eventually land on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogomilism, which, haha, explains the last Link novel’s name for one of the characters, “Bogomil.”, which I let slide when I read that.

I’m a very, very credulous reader. "Oh, ok, whatever.”

flipping the OBS scene from “face cam” to “footage”, the increasingly tangential pop-documentary archival clip style that has replaced burns-style photo-pans-and-zoom of actual subject matter with abstract and completely unrelated stock that, at best, is period correct or ironically untrue to the nonsense I’m spouting as I go into a big monologue to staff about getting our reports done on time

looking up the chicago school of economics building to make a house of leaves jokes in chat and unsurprised to find it looks like a god damned church

was in the mood for more Kelly Link and landed on an interview ( https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2023/12/15/kelly-link-kevin-brockmeier/ ) instead. it starts off strong talking about this fun idea of nighttime logic, daytime logic, and dream logic, then they compare book lists fitting each.

warning: it’s pretty dangerous if you have a growing-the-to-read-pile-habbit, I picked up three of the books in their lists.

violet, fuscia, deep orange, sunshine yellow gradient. that’s pretty.

https://botsin.space/@CALandscapeBot/113439510288765240

it’s really clever how oven makers put the big stock pot burners on the back so’s when you accidentally pull your entire salt cellar out of the upper cabinet next to the stove with an errant finger while trying to get a pinch in a hurry for something else and about two cups of kosher salt dump all over the stovetop, counter, floor, etc, none of it gets in the stock pot with dinner in it

what will it take to connect this all the way to Mission? I want to understand

alt-text for quoted image: a street design displaying proposed changes to a bike lane in san francisco

https://carfree.city/@sfmtadocsbot/113409728354860618

https://missionlocal.org/2024/10/in-a-new-era-of-local-politics-some-democratic-clubs-fight-to-stay-relevant/

The _________ (corporation name) Political Action Committee Democratic Club

that the added text is in parenthesis is specifically great

“Persons will HOB NAILS BOOT! ARE FORBIDDEN IN THIS OFFICE [By Order of Postmaster].”

delightful effort made here at professional hand lettered sign making, jaunty !, etc, then ruined (or improved further) with an answer to the presumed "says who?” that looks like it was added when the sign was already on the wall by someone with a felt-tipped marker

https://mastodon.ozioso.online/@DorotheaLange/113356285657110012

looking at linkedin from time to time is like wandering into the wrong church where I don’t know any of the rituals (which for me would be any church, but I do know one set of rituals I don’t practice, at least) and seeing random people I know there, doing some of the moves

damn you’re here? where is here? oh, they left. huh.

hey, want to come to dinner? no? this is so weird

the only robot i want in my life but can’t have is a chrome plated smokers robot

https://octodon.social/@Taweret/113354194527885031

Ultimately it’s a fun read and a break from the John and Zoe books and pretty mad at the same stuff a lot of people are on mastodon are mad about re: the other social networks, so, I’m glad I read it.

cw: mens rights nonsense

my point: so if you feel like you don’t need some old guy rubbing your nose in a “deuteragonist" (I had to look up the word for that) “hey look at this kid who is a twitch streamer who is kinda black pilled, don’t be lame like this”, because you yourself are also over that, maybe skip this one

a few of my favorite very-online writers—but I’m think of Pargin and Jeb Lund (who for all I know don’t know each other at all) specifically here and not like, uh, Lockwood—are pretty good about using their veterans-of-forum-wars (or at least that era of online) past to be pretty strong voices for not being assholes on the internet.

this is a lot of that

25: “I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom” by Jason Pargin ( https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/starting-to-worry-about-9781250285959/)

I was gonna have a visual aid of a real pirate treasure map for this but it seems like real pirates merely wanted real maps, which were hard to come by back then

makes a lotta sense I guess!

an elaborate rude metaphor in which every landmark the dashed line loops around on weathered parchment before it eventually reaches the X-marks-the-spot is a pivot in virtualization stacks by the freenas people trying and failing to lose both the the annoying virtualization (jails, docker, kubernetes, etc) janitors inhabiting each landmark and the actual pirates who use their projects to power their NASs 🏴‍☠️

convincing myself that my bad posts in chat, that even the people who used to reply to, have stopped replying to, to me, are still worth doing, for the lurkers

Pressing the bubble on pop-°-matic® TROUBLE® is now AI.

it would be nice a la “smoking or non?" at restaurants if I could make a reservation for outdoor dining and not arrive to find “outdoor” to be four walls of clear vinyl and propane

kinda worry that sonos is never going to re-add direct stream urls to their first party apps or even fix the players to load the ones that are already there, and that think the fix is going to be a DIY sonos service app and not entire DIY controllers, which, unfortunately, seems to be the bias

they are, otherwise, goldilocks pieces of hardware for my specific preferences, so broader alternatives are not interesting

doodling on maps with satellites

screenshot crop of a mapped walk in Strava detailing that I walked p much every path in the south-west corner of City College this morning, which means lots of doubling back, looping, taking each meandering path back to the same spot, each set of stairs on all sides of and round buildings, in the fog

wtb a nudie cohn suit (or suits) for halloween and general casual wear

🚶🏽‍♂️

🏁 what I’m considering Sunnyside (including City College like https://sunnysideassociation.org/the-neighborhood/ does seems greedy)

City College has so many damned pathways that it’s going to take a bunch of tedious human pen-plotter meanders that I’m going to consider it its own thing, like I did w/ Laguna Honda which I already walked but Strava paused as I put my phone back in my pocket from the top of the trailhead so I gotta go do again at some point.

Bonus, I can start from Balboa Park BART for a while now.

A map of San Francisco, Balboa Park BART along the center-bottom, Glen Park BART in the top right corner, 280 bisecting along the two, and the entirety of Sunnyside’s streets (and most alleys) marked with a purple trail. I’ve also decided to walk the front paths of City College rather than loop down to Ocean Ave to square off the ‘hood because it was prettier.

lol at the worldbuilding you get mid-book explaining why multiples are absolutely taboo:

a planet colonized libertarians who named their planet Gault gets invaded by a another libertarian who keeps cloning himself and militarizing until he’s taken over, and nukes the first ship to come see what’s going on

The nearest other planet realizes they have to nip this in the bud and sends a ship into Gault at .9 c.

cya shitlord

24: "Mickey7”, by Edward Ashton ( https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250275035/mickey7)

picked up after a friend who had already enjoyed it linked https://x.com/mickey17movie/status/1836197947668860958 in discord, very fun, read it in a few days.

Discord chat log review from a friend, who, now that I’ve read the book, I’m not sure I agree with re: “its about capitalism”, but it’s definitely about a guy whose job sucks, and it gets a pretty good chapter-long jab in at libertarians which is always vital to the revolution.Screenshot reads:Mickey 7 is a fun read, it's about capitalism and a guywhose job sucksI mean the director did Parasite

(yeah I know all about the ol’ harry connick jr video, but if you don’t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI-CU2VTVic)

my recall for the scales is fine even in every other common CAGED position

the tempo is fine

playing with a metronome clackin’ on the 2s and 4s is brutal! I feel like someone trying to jump rope just slamming themself in the leg.

metronome: clack clack clack clack clack…

me, trying as hard as I can: clack THREE clack ONE clack THREE clack TWO clack FOUR clack FUCK

metronome: clack clack clack clack clack…

if I manage to come in on a correct one I’m fine and it feels fine

have been watching a pile of Harris’s student’s. TILFBH specifically gells with me, and so I’ve watched and re-watched the first few https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebepc8lYrKs without an instrument, or with an instrument but not a metronome, just kinda singing or playing along as I watch, trying to hear the secondary dominant (the C#), and the Major stuff and so on

today I felt ready to pickup a guitar and dig out my metronome for the first exercise here, the blues

23: "Moonbound”, by Robert Sloan ( https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/)

p good! kinda Y.A. and a little slow to start but w/e, fun ending

The cover of Moonbound, by Robert Sloan s I read it. An illustration of a red clouded sky has a tear in it through which the moon and night sky are visible over a green earth

does it like 00 flour and salt? sure looks like it

photograph of a 6qt fermenting tub this morning with neapolitan pizza dough (100% 00, 65% hydration) I used sourdough starter instead of my usual SAF instant. The dough isn’t exactly flat but it’s at about .75 qt? maybe .5?

photograph of the same 6qt fermenting tub this evening, 11 hours later, risen to just over 2 qt.

my intent here, from the get go, was to use the starter for pizza dough but the bread was good enough and easy enough that I’ll probably also be making it on the regular too (I’m already looking forward to having a loaf on hand the next time I make coq au vin)

I’ve already got a never-miss “water the house plants” Sunday morning ritual to add the starter to, and almost all of the equipment and techniques from pizza making transferred well

made my first sourdough country bread ( https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/pain-de-campagne-country-bread-recipe, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL6ogX38NcY) yesterday after following instructions from King Arthur to make my own starter ( https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/sourdough-starter-recipe), after @skinnylatte mentioned how good PJ Hamel’s recipes are ( https://hachyderm.io/@skinnylatte/113105640187688460)

plenty of room for improvement, but very much not bad!

photograph, top down, of a round loaf of sourdough bread sitting on a medium oxo plastic cutting board which is itself on a white kitchen towel w/ a blue stripe on it. the loaf has three vertical slashes and two horizontal slashes and is a dark brown to black in places, just how it should be afaik

sitting at chase center eating dinner at Gott’s the night before last and U.S. football was on the giant wall TV and I couldn’t exactly follow what was going on but it included a timeline of a player’s multiple concussions over the past few years, seems bad, idk

to the tune of I Should Be Allowed to Think

I should be allowed to ninja edit my posts

this morning’s spooky:

on my third walking tour of Sunnyside, listening to the excellent https://cocaineandrhinestones.com episode on Rusty and Doug Kershaw ( https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/rusty-doug-kershaw-cajun-way) which in a surprise twist to me ends up being very much also about Neil Young’s On the Beach and Tyler Mahan Coe, the host, opens with a brief history of the acadian people and what’s my first turn on the walk? Acadia Street. Whoa.

screenshot of pocketcasts on my phone that I took as I stopped to turn on Acadia

a photograph of a concrete sidewalk ending at a concrete curb. to the right are the yellow bumpy ramp sidewalk cut that SF deploys everywhere, and at center, the concrete is stamped with the street name, as SF deploys these stamps at all intersections:ACADIA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uMNrujMdJU watching this old Barry Harris lecture w/ a jazz group he’s teaching or rehearsing, and I’d always heard he was engaging but, wow. Not much chance I’m ever going to use this stuff but it has held my attention the entire time

this one is mostly about coming in on the and, not rushing, using triplets, and other things.

‘jazz used to be about dancing’

22: “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World”, by Naomi Klein

Another one that I waited out thinking “eh, probably great but maybe I’ll pass” and then people I follow just kept citing it months and months later, so onto the pile it went. My first and not last Klein book, about significantly more than I expected.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138505710-doppelganger

the cover of doppelganger, as i read it (in hardback, with the dust cover set atop the to-read pile). All cover text is a white grotesque over a full color author photo that is glitched (kinda like my own profile photo) into a few dozen horizontal bands and distorted along red, green, and blue shifts our of horizontal sync to the left and right. DoppelgangerA TRIP INTO THE MIRROR WORLDNaomiKlein

I tend to buy clothes on ebay rather than dealing with retail—like thrifting with less effort and better selection (especially for bright colors and patterns). On the way to getting some other thing, I ended up impulse buying a pair of broadcloth pajamas and now I’m Ricky Ricardo morning-or-evening-scene pilled

they are made of the same-ish material as bed sheets and the fit is very oversized so it feels like being in bed still. definitely beats the old sweat-pants-and-a-t-shirt thing i m o

Realistic only very large.

https://botsin.space/@NoveltyBot/113163637569597391

photograph of a tree in san francisco in bernal heights changing fall colors presenting us with a lovely gradient from the top, where the leaves are golden orange with red edges, to the bottom, where they are still a vibrant green

huh, I wonder if I can walk down here

photograph of san francisco looking north-west from 100-ish Coleridge St downhill, from the same vantage point as the prior photo, but zoomed in on the two foot high letters and that spell out PRIVATE PROPERTY along the fence at the bottom of the driveway. it’d be cool if there was a zip line / gondola across to noe from somewhere along this dumb route.

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises [Movement 6]

dang, this is still really great

Look so-and-so, i know I’m being a complete stick in the mud here but I refuse to subscribe to a paper that runs editorial board opinion columns I disagree with on a regular basis, and it isn’t on principle, it’s discipline, it’s a boycott, that sort of thing

[turning to break the fourth wall] that’s why I send my money to mission local and joe esk

looks like we found the trail 2 ur moms house

by corollary, managers who do that are actually saying “hey, hey. will you play with me?”

I need to find a band to play with, picking up a guitar at home just gets junior’s attention and then breaks the impulse to pick up the instrument in the first place, like a dog or cat vectoring in on the one person who isn’t into one or the other (which is also me usually), or like a helicopter manager ignoring the headphones and full screen doc or IDE for a “hey, do you got a second?”

well, I didn’t, but I guess I have all day now, because, welp!

making stuff once a week with perishables has really upped my kitchen hygiene; I p much don’t touch anything with my fingers anymore that I’m not about to cook and eat immediately, with the exception of salt

blah blah blah “kindly" blah blah blah

your foster parents are dead, lets go

was still thinkin’ about that marg from a few weeks ago, and a then a friend in Marin gave us a few tomatoes from her garden.

this one is topped with additional chiffonaded basil, and smoked sea salt

I had pan fried some hot italian sausage (intending to pair with red onion slices and provolone instead of mozz) while the first two baked, for a third pizza, but this one was so good I didn’t even bother with it, and so I tossed the extra dough ball in the freezer

Grandfather Hot Dog Stand

https://botsin.space/@oldroadside/113091581104915225

as a life-long “why on earth would I do that to myself?" and "what are they running from?” sayer coasting on the metabolism and cholesterol levels of youth, I finally, when I don’t need one, have a real excuse to not like running

Worked my way up to a jogging a full mile over the past few weeks and, I guess my form was wrong, or my body wasn’t ready in spite of all the walking I do. I didn’t notice any one bad move but when I tried to repeat the mile jog a few days later and couldn’t make it a block.

By the weekend, I had to bail a mile into a simple walk, and I’ve paused walks and strength training for at least a week while whatever is going on calms down.

21: “Family Furnishings", by Alice Munro

The later, somewhat darker, more explicitly autobiographical half of Munro’s anthologies of short stories.

Munro’s characters tend to (I know this reads like a horoscope) move on from situations for the next thing without a plan, or to be a little selfish before getting back to being serious, if they ever do. She’s always putting characters on trains, or in cars, or on buses.

Previously: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/110531577683425679, https://mastodon.social/@gravely/112440630402434626

the cover of A Family Furnishings, selected stories: 1995-2014, originally published as Selected Stories. green on white water color text under an illustration of (I assume) the author, somewhat older than in the previous anthology

two “fun facts" (my kid picked up that phrase and has been using it arbitrarily, so now I do)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble “Barnes Dances”

I forgot David Byrne wrote about biking, so now that is is on the list of shit to read http://davidbyrne.com/explore/bicycle-diaries/about

texts like this are like the inverse of gell-mann amnesia, and the best ones (which this is? Idk I’m not that well read to say!) do so w/o degrading into the easier and tedious "we’re all failing and need to do better” conference keynote gimmick simulation of it.

anyway, by which I mean, you read about an area of focus in another field and see the author clearly knows what they are talking about and moreover that the grievances they have align w/ the same grievances you have in your own field

20th book of 2024: “Killed by a Traffic Engineer”, by Wes Marshall ( https://www.killedbyatrafficengineer.com).

Lots of people read this last year when Marshall published it and the title was so catchy, I thought about it after the last few accidents in SF, which made me think I should go back and actually read it.

80+ three page ideas, lots of overlap with the incident management side of my day job, casually written (if a little too pop, even, but I guess that’s ok).

Every field is like this, it seems.

“daddy I thought we were supposed to be playing legos?”

“this is playing legos!”

batman was not impressed.

photograph of a stack of 10 lego legs or "pants" in a rainbow with fire mario on top standing on a small green platform facing a gray lego figure with like 20 heads stacked on top, the top one has long hair and is wearing a red hard hat. head-lord is taller than leg-lord by a few heads. a dumb old gray batman lego figure (normal height) stands between them looking up being mad about everything

inspired but in no way meeting the bar set by the amazingly incredible early girl tomato marg I had at the pizza, bagel, and beer fest last weekend

photo of a Neapolitan pizza w/ sauce, cheese, and basil

macro photo of a Neapolitan pizza w/ sauce, cheese, and basil from crust to crust

macro photo of a Neapolitan pizza w/ sauce, cheese, and basil, sliced, showing off the crust

😬 a lil’ nervous, I have an appointment with a stylist this afternoon, my first since February 2020, when I was forced to end years of an every-three-weeks wash and style scissor-cut booking near the office (a luxury). I, eventually started cutting my own.

I found “very short” to be pretty easy to DIY, but decided to let it go nearly two years ago and started growing it out long, w/ DIY maintenance.

6 months in: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/109928979027718696

another year in (2 months ago): https://mastodon.social/@gravely/112696371678091310

check it out, shadows of the tower in the fog

also the interior panels seem to have a much fresher coat of orange paint than what we typically see from the rest of the city

a photograph of a large radio tower, Sutro Tower, in san francisco at a dutch angle with the sun centered opposite, shining through the tower supports with fog throughout. the upper spires of the tower are casting long shadows in the fog

selfie more or less under the tower of a large radio tower in san francisco, or at least as close as it can be approached without working there

the tower from the western woods, a very muddy singletrack leads straight away in the bottom left in a green, sun-dappled forest, while the red and white tower looms to the rear in the top right

🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️

🏁 what I’m considering “the rest of Eureka Valley”, Clarendon Heights?, Upper Market, and Midtown Terrace. I’m gonna have to come back for the interior of Laguna Honda.

I’ve bee consistently pecking away since my last post in April, but for most of them I need to “get there” first which makes it harder to do in the morning. I’d rather bike when I have that much time. Then summer break started, vacations, etc.

Next idk, maybe Dogpatch and Mission Bay?

A San Francisco street map centering the area around Twin Peaks, bound by 17th street along the north, Noe St. to the east, Portola to the south, and 9th ave on the west. Surrounding Twin peaks, most streets have a meandering purple GPS path I’ve logged on it, generally completing (in order I walked it) Eureka Valley, Clarendon Heights, Upper Market, and Midtown Terrace.

logging on

https://tvwatch.party/@ryan/112972381931044700

Announcer: Thirty parents in SF agree.

Parents: [in unison] The Junction in Mill Valley is ideal!

Parent gravely: They have a damned pirate ship!

[The parents all nod in agreement]

Unnamed older parent: The beer garden vibe is also nice.

[The parents nod in agreement and toast their drinks]

Parent gravely: It’s a too bad there’s nothing like it in San Francisco!

[The parents continue to nod in agreement]

Announcer: Thirty parents in SF agree, The Junction in Mill Valley is ideal!

19th book of 2024: “Sourdough”, by Robin Sloan ( https://www.robinsloan.com/books/sourdough/).

Re-using my comment on Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: “Fun, light, very quick read. Very weird to read something so connected to ~2017~ techie-San-Francisco and get 100% of the references and roll my eyes at a few of them.”

Started Sloan’s newest, Moonbound, immediately afterward, and it’s very different so far.

I think fauxtesting kinda sucks but this one cracks me up every time I walk past it because I also think scoldy and bossy signs also suck.

A fake road sign in the window of a house in san francisco that says:PRIVATESIGNDO NOTREADI'm sure on the backside, it didn't say nothing, etc., etc.

and so on

oh word, which one was that? don’t worry, I got you

(previously: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/107848168559145930)

Moved a few afternoon meetings to make the last hour and a half of Kid Koala at SF MOMA’s ‘Art of Noise’ exhibition. I’m a huge fan from way back, was amazing!

Normally a phone-in-pocket-guy at shows but, he put on on John Carpenter’s soundtrack to Big Trouble Little China to play a bit of “Pork Chop Express” and I had to send proof back east to brag.

photograph of Kid Koala at SF MOMA's ‘Art of Noise’ exhibition in front of a knee-level table of fancy audio gear, with stacks of records, probably 60 or 80 or so, leaning against the table, and Kid Koala standing on front of it, looking at the back cover of John Carpenter’s soundtrack of Big Trouble Little China trying to decide what song to play for us

nice, sometimes, when the fog is just right, as the sun sets, you get a rainbow through it

cropped photo of a rainbow over the mission in san francisco from the center bottom of the frame to the top 1/6th from the right-edge, a power line crossed 1/6th across the bottom edge and the top two stories of building in the bottom left face west and reflect the sunset in its windows. the sky is mostly cloudy with some blue

cropped photo of a rainbow touching down on the golden (dead) grass of bernal heights, the saturation is maxed out as is the luminance or something like that. A utility pole, trees, and buildings on 26th street fill the bottom 1/6th of the grame

I’m three stories in to my first paper copy of @clarkesworld ( https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/) after subbing a week or two ago and all three are great, the print format is great, no regrets, would recommend, etc.

just finished “The Best Version Of Yourself” By Grant Collier ( https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/collier_07_24/) and it’s particularly good i m h o

(my friday pizza bake is threaded so that you can mute it)

inspired by the "Bitter & Smokey” I had for lunch at Tony’s Napoletana yesterday, but too lazy to go buy ricotta or pancetta or broccoli rabe, I did the thing every online recipe commenter does and subbed the heck out of it with what I had on hand, but this time it turned out delicious, even with the left over frozen dough from a month ago that I used

I pre-cooked the broccoli in a carbon steel pan in the pizza oven, as one does

A screen grab of the menu from Tony’s NapoletanaBITTER & SMOKYbroccoli rabe,smoked pancetta,smoked mozzarella,lemon, ricotta,crushed red pepper$34

Photograph of the pizza before baking, topped with smoked provolone, mozz, red pepper flakes, grilled broccoli, and olive oil, on a bamboo peel resting on a stainless steel tabletop under an Ooni Koda 16 gas pizza oven. The flames of the oven are visible at the top of the photo as high as they get, and the oven is about 1000 degrees, the stone in the 800-900s, Fahrenheit.

macro photograph of the pizza from inches above looking from one crust to the other, plated and sliced into quarters; the cheese has bubbled and browned in spots, the broccoli is charred a bit, and there’s a lemon wedge in the center, and the crust is browned with leopard spots

“pedestrian activity is that intuitive factor"

in other word, infrastructure is people!

https://sfba.social/@LukeBornheimer/112893746759026176

have a great evening y’all

the purpose of a bollard is what it does

I’m aware of and have tried the half-onion pan fried in butter approach to a simple red sauce and the subtlety of it is completely lost on me.

our house spaghetti recipe was O.P. last week. I need to start making this sauce for pizza, I think it’d work fine.

garlic cloves from an entire head, enough basil, stem and all, to fill the rest of a small sauce pan, and a healthy pinch of red pepper flakes, frying in a quarter cup of olive oil

reserved sauce from a 22 ounce can of whole peeled san marzanos, add with finishings for brightness or earlier if the tomatoes start to burn, or split the difference

whole peeled san marzanos from a 22 ounce can and a pinches of red pepper and salt flakes frying in a few tablespoons of olive oil. turn to taste, once it’s where you like it, carefully use a wire potato masher or bladed dough cutter to break up the tomatoes, reduce heat to a simmer

pre-warmed heath commune ceramic shallow bowl full of al dente spaghetti noodles finished in the oil (use a fine mesh strainer and discard or re-purpose the garlic and basil) and tomatoes from the other photos with a tablespoon of unsalted butter, another tablespoon of olive oil, and two tablespoons of parmesan, topped with more parmesan and chiffonaded basil

for mom and junior: mozz and pecorino over sauce, pep all over for junior, and add basil and olives on the other half, for mom

for me: tomato sauce, pecorino, basil, smoked provolone, hot Italian sausage

top down photo of the hugest oxo cutting board with two 12” neapolitan pizzas on it. top right is the sausage and cheese, bottom left is all pep, half olives

ECU photo half pep, olives, basil, half pep only, all over mozz and sauce - the red, green and black is on the left half of the photo, the red and white on the right half

ECU, sausage, leopard spotted smoked provolone, basil, w/ huge crust bubbles in the bottom-left corner

photo of plated slices, showing off the crust bubbles in the sausage/provolone pizza. p good tonight!

people who contain their aspirations (never demands) to what is immediately achievable think the rest of us are annoying as hell, but, in a surprise twist, guess what

finally checked biking up twin peaks off my list after a friend suggested I head up via glen park instead of the usual routes. it’s the same climb (and I hate climbing) but gradual over 5 miles instead of bunched up in the last mile and a half.

then, since I was already in spandex (very rare!), I tacked on a normal bay loop for the miles

photo from Christmas Tree Point in San Francisco, looking down on a switchback of Twin Peaks Boulevard in the bottom half of the photo. The entire top half of the photo contains downtown San Francisco, in theory, but is solid gray with fog

Selfie in a black and white giro helmet, transition glasses which are full tint black at this point, and a black cycling jesey with little red polka dots and a bright red zig zag across the front. My bike, a red and white gravel bike, is behind me, leaning up against the pink metal railing at Christmas Tree Point in San Francisco.

a photograph of the golden gate bridge, in san francisco, taken from below, in the parking lot of Fort Point, through a chain link fence. A black sign with yellow left and right hand prints at high-five height labeled HOPPERS HANDS is fixed to the fence as a touch point for people who walk, bike, hike, or whatever, to get here and then turn around as it is a dead end

Screen shot from Strava of my route, a red line over a map of san francisco through the mission, glen canyon, twin peaks, down 17th, across cesar chavez, and up around the bay to the golden gate bridge, then returning through the presidio, golden gate park, the wiggle, to the mission

tonight’s pizza*: tomato sauce, pecorino romano, capers, black olives, anchovies, pepperoni, chili crisp, olive oil

kenji’s neapolitan w/ bob’s red mill 00 (which is very good imo) and SAF instant

two slices of neapolitan pizza on a white plate topped with tomato sauce, pecorino romano, capers, black olives, anchovies, pepperoni, chili crisp, olive oil

[flicks the light on] whoa! look at all these cockroaches in here! holy shit this is now how we behave! do better!

[my friends and I scurrying away, unkillable, but diving for cover anyway] “shut up! shut up! get out! get out! turn the lights back off!”

dudesl love to not post for weeks at a time and then right as the eye doctor’s dialation drops kick in, get brain foam they have a scrape away immediately while squinting and blinking at their dumb phone in a dark room

pedantly explaining to the fourth wall that i can get away with it because i’m in the third panel, after the person in the second panel pedantly explaining to the fourth wall why people who say what I said can’t get away with what Zi am getting away with because they are in the only other panel than theirs, the second panel of two

feeling matchy-matchy, might lean

follow friday: https://botsin.space/@bestpizzaintown

https://botsin.space/@bestpizzaintown/112775780386387788

would honestly prefer to give whoever needs it (this morning, an optometry office) a social security number equivalent and my public-persona handle rather than 1) the name I go by (which happens to be my middle name) and 2) my last name-including-how-to-spell-it, and then 3) disambiguating that from my full legal name, which has a different first name as well as a suffix

the full ritual as we perform it is too close to a cultural conflict and wildly inefficient. let me give you a guid

my eyes also just kind of slide off of paragraph length posts on this website as I scroll through it but I’ll keep posting that shit anyway I guess

thanks to discord’s hokey use of a command for command-K, officially “Find or Start a Direct Message" per their docs, I am always constantly narrowly avoiding direct messaging someone I do not know who has the last name of Jerke who I assume also idles in an open source community server I idle in, when I try to switch to the chat I made for talking about anything but games on my friend’s gaming-oriented community server which they immediately renamed and locked to #jerk_factory for me

18th book of 2024: “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore”, by Robin Sloan ( https://www.robinsloan.com/books/penumbra/).

Fun, light, very quick read. Very weird to read something so connected to ~2012-techie-San-Francisco (I was here by then) and get 100% of the references (and roll my eyes at a few w/ 12 years of hindsight).

The paperback cover “Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore”, by Robin Sloan, as I read it. Nine rows of yellow blocks stamped alternating between four or five stacked on their back and four or five upright like books on a shelf but leaning left or right at random. The title and “A Novel” and author name are in hand written script over the entire front.

I think if cars and car parts were stollen at the rates bikes are in U.S. cities, deployed technical controls would look a lot more like off-site valet parking than like racks on the sidewalk, and the compensating control would look a lot more like car insurance than like adding the car to your home insurance policy, and nothing at all like whatever the latest video from some guy in NYC posting how to use three specific locks in very specific ways

17th book of 2024: "The Book of Love”, by Kelly Link ( https://kellylink.net/books/the-book-of-love, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157981682-the-book-of-love).

I kind agree w/ the haters on this one but maybe not very strongly?

the hardback cover of “The Book of Love” by Kelly Link, as I read it. Title in mixed case mixed case THE BooK oF LoVE” and author’s name upper case, both in black over a solid red background. Four rows of five moons line the cover in gold: crescent, waxing, full, waning, crescent. Alternating left and then right waning first, then waxing moons have silhouettes of faces instead of earth-shadows.

lovely weather to bicycle across the only bridge we can.

maybe some day, the other will be opened up!

photo from the visitor’s lot on the north side of the golden gate bridge on a clear sunny day. the nearer, lower two-fifths of the photo contain a near stone wall, with my red and white steel frame gravel bike leaning against it on a gravel path. the distant, top three-fifths contain the san francisco bay, city skyline to the left, golden gate bridge to the right, and sutro tower in the distance

a photo of the golden gate bridge from below, taken from the parking lot at Fort Point, an old military (US Army) base under the southern end of the bridge on the san francisco bay shorline

photo of the Bay Bridge to Treasure Island and Oakland beyond, taken from the southern bay shore approach, on a clear sunny day

☺️ aww, a man gave up his parking spot* on valencia at 23rd** for me***

double parked in the bike lane with two empty car spots to his right

** sfmta is committed to not putting in a protected bike lane here to Mission St because of nonsense complications

*** to ask me, after he caught up with us, what I’d said to him

🤗

🫱🏼‍🫲🏽 Hall of Justice Juror Group On Standby 601 🫱🏼‍🫲🏽

https://www.worldchasetag.com/ WTC is on the TVs on the patio at the Yankee. I’ve never heard of it. Seems like one of the most pure of sports and the most lefty-spectacular. 🏃

recently returned from two weeks spent in NC, SC, and MD and if I hadn’t been at the beach, bay, or poolside every other day (and sure of imminent return to the bay) I would have a buzz cut right now

full length mirror selfie, red/white-stripe high top vans, maroon levis corduroys, black/white thin-hoirzontal-striped shirt under a black jean jacket with ‘gravely’ embroidered in cursive above the the left pocket, nearly-shoulder length hair parted on my left, flipping up at the ends in a mess because I haven’t touched it in a long time

I love that Joe Esk is bird dogging Mark F.'s (hiss) listing on the ballot as a ”small business owner" ( https://missionlocal.org/2024/06/ballot-designation-marandidates-small-business-owner-superbooty/).

I also noticed today that Mission Local’s excellent “Meet the Candidates” (e.g. https://missionlocal.org/2024/06/meet-district-5-candidates-week21-safe-consumption/ ) series puts “Job” at the top of the bio-list.

kinda funny how much this Gene Clark tune from 1967 sounds like it has Tom Verlaine circa 1977 on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjyO6DsYjEU&list=PLJQhzJ0-uTmYI6jNwU1tNSUl_Z4HmOY76&index=4

chef’s travel tip: many folks out there in the wide wide western world consider little black dots on their food to be a delicacy

to achieve this effect, find the little shaker container labeled “P” (why P? no one knows), tip it over, and shake vigorously over food to sight

Back east visiting. Took a walk and passed a bar that used to have live music where a band that was ok with young people sitting in had a weekly — a thing I tried exactly once. I sucked. The bar has been renamed and the bandstand is gone.

I win.

from a cab we had a 5:00AM alarm to catch: oh, lol, it pretty much was. Cesar Chavez and Valencia

photo of an intersection covered in tire rubber left by cars and motorcycles doing donuts, taken from my cab on the way to the airport

riding my bike over sideshow rubber elsewhere in the city from time to time: eh heheh hehe

laying in bed at 3 last night listening to a side show that sounded like it was in our alley: 😦

lovely bit of dark tower lore

https://mastodon.art/@MichaelWhelan/112576076603050189

super neat paper

https://hachyderm.io/@mononcqc/112552422086316478

16th book of 2024: “You Like it Darker”, by Stephen King ( https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/201242757-you-like-it-darker)

There are a few authors I simply pre-order without question—Jason Pargin, Kelly Link, Emily Wilson in the past year alone, but always King. I was going to save this for vacation in a few weeks but ended up with more time on my hands so it came off the pile.

I particularly liked "The Answer Man”

The hardback cover of “You Like it Darker” by Stephen King, as I read it. Author name over title in a pale yellow all-caps futura variant with a few pointed descenders and an interesting capital K specifically (more like a leaning V with a tail stollen from the letter Q?) over a photograph of an island with two palm trees in dark browns and blues.

15th book of 2024: "White Cat Black Dog”, by Kelly Link.

I particularly enjoyed the last one, “Skinder’s Veil”

I’ve never actually read any actual Brothers Grimm, nor have I read (or even heard of) Lang’s “The Blue Fairy Book” which I just learned about in a review of these Link stories, so I think they have to both go on the pile.

junior’s TK teacher gave him a old craft mobile in a book from 1983 (when I was his age)

a photograph of the assembled mobile hanging over my kid’s bed. the wall behind the bed is a light blue, the ceiling and window trim are white

Homer still holds up because he repeats this same narrative echo in the form of advice over and over:

“Hey, lesser God, go and give that mortal these instructions.”

“Sure thing. Hey, you! Zeus says, ‘instructions’ (verbatim).

“Gee thanks. Hey, wife or friend or whatever, Zeus says ‘instructions’ (verbatim), what do you think?”

“Damn, you better follow ‘instructions’ (verbatim).”

Reader: You fool!

“I’m no fool!” [disregards instructions, dies]*

except for Priam.

14th book of 2024: “The Iliad", by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson.

I really enjoyed Wilson’s “Odyssey” and “Oedipus Tyrannos” translations and had hoped to get to this last fall when I put it on the to-read pile. Alas.

I’ve never read any The Iliad before, and it does kinda go on a bit (really? that’s your thoughts on the Iliad? sure why not, is “it was good” better?).

Wilson manages to sneak in some slapstick amid all the brutality.

(previously: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/103030875431089669)

RIP Alice Munro

I’m a few stories into “Family Furnishings, Selected Stories 1995-2014”, the companion to “A Wilderness Station”, which I read a year ago, and expect to finish it before summer is out.

muni fare enforcement at the inbound 27 / 12 stop on Cesar Chavez at Valencia

the cool sierpinski

https://fedi.astrid.tech/objects/c59e6af6-bdf5-4d0c-907a-3d0bf3956e32

ah, jeeze, this listener-supported streaming rock station doesn’t erase the rock music that came out between my junior year in high school when music “went to shit” and my junior year in college when I started listening to listener-support streaming stations and they weren’t playing “that new stuff”

The New York Trilogy was on the reading list for a Detective Fiction course I took in college (lovely course!) and, because it’s so great, I’m sure I don’t have that copy on my shelf anymore because I foisted it on someone with "you have to read this” after one of the re-readings I’d given it since then.

RIP Paul Auster.

Previously: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/111047297740981549

photograph of the Paul Auster books on my shelf, which are mostly heavily sun-faded Penguin paperbacks with a few hardbacks intermingled, including:Oracle NightMr. VertigoMan in the DarkThe Invention of SolitudeIn the Country of Last ThingsLeviathanThe Music of ChanceinvisibleThe Book of IllusionsHand to Mouth4 3 2 1

bored, looking at property listings for decorating ideas while holding a Geiger counter modified to detect and measure the wrongness of refrigerator door hinge swing and handing pointed at the screen the entire time

one problem with giving your casual industry pals chat a name with all the series business labels* as a joke is that you end up posting your weekend plans all casual like to the actual serious business chat

ACP, FOUO, Confidential, SECRET, etc

aside, while i’m mad-posting about cars

in the fall when I started these walks I was able to make up for morning routine interruptions by ending my day with a walk instead.

I had to knock that shit off after daylight savings because it is even unsafer than normal to be a pedestrian crossing streets as soon as the sun begins to set, and that just gets worse and worse hour over hour until the sun comes back up

“Hi, welcome to the Munizza! How did you travel to our store today? Uh-huh? That’s great, and from about how far? Thanks so much, uh, what can I getchya?”

probably incredibly naive, making almost no attempt to map what I want to achievability, what I’d prefer is a municipalized neighborhood services plan where districts can establish their own priorities for rubber-stamp retail distribution so that I can open my pizza parlor as a city worker and union member (well, I’d be in management, so idk)

implementation could box rent seekers out out by acquiring all the retail property in neighborhoods and then sprinkling planned retail back into them

I simultaneously A) dream about getting out of big business and opening a tiny pizza parlor and/or coffee shop as a worker owned business and B) have absolutely no respect for the “small business owner” class I would join doing so and don’t understand why anyone else does

it seems like cartels all the way down?

heather k, please help

our small business owners are being fattened on ice cream sugar cones, fudgesicles, rainbow sherbert pops, swirl lollys, and pastel mints and then gobbled up by witches whose houses are painted with those delicious treats and nobody is talking about it

please amplify this for your audience at the new yawk times, thanks in advance

—concerned in bernal

photograph of the garage door of a pink stucco house with white trimthe garage door panels are white with illustrations of an ice cream sugar cone, a fudgesicle, a rainbow sherbert pop on the main panels, and swirl lollys, and pastel mints on along the smaller top panelssomeone tagged the fudgesicle kinda clumsily in white spraypaint but at least used a heart in it so that’s nice I guess

injured my left lat and/or trap yesterday lifting weights doing this compound move incorrectly

that’s right, i hurt myself shrugging

a screenshot of fitbod.app video instructions for a compound deadlift move that ends in a shruga man in black shorts, a black shirt, black tennis shoes, and black socks holding dumbbells in both hands is paused mid-shrugunder the photo, the app describes this move:Demo & InstructionsDumbbell RomanianDeadlift to Shrug

kinda annoying (to me, of me, and of-me-to-me) to read a great story and think “ah dang this was originally published in so-and-such maybe I should just subscribe to that to see those stories as they come out” but it always ends up being the atlantic or the new yorker or some other nonsense I can’t tolerate reading.

thanks for funding the arts, jerks!

13th book of 2024: “Bliss Montage”, by Ling Ma ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60243188-bliss-montage").

I forget why this got my attention but I will cop to the “by the author of Severance” blurb helping more than somewhat, not realizing that it’s a novel that predates the show by four years and is completely unrelated to it.

What a lovely mistake! The stories were excellent and I will probably grab the novel too. Warning: maybe check the content before starting on the first two stories?

saw Bill Frisell’s solo show last night in Berkeley and it was pretty trippy for me that he opened his 8PM set with You Are My Sunshine, which is the song my wife sings to our kid at his bed time, which is 8PM. it’s like I hadn’t left home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBtjKTEHKUM his performance of it last night had a lot more skronk on it, but, this, generally

https://web.archive.org/web/20240413115023/http://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-traffic-ticket-decline-data-19383950.php

doomed

infrastructure cannot be corrected by process controls

I’ve never used a modal single-letter keyboard command in Slack on purpose.

Screenshot of the context menu for a message in slack scrollback detailing all the mistakes you can make if you put Slack the message-in-scrollback mode, specifically consisting of these accidents:Mark unread URemind me about this > Forward message... FCopy link LPin to channel PStart a huddle in thread...Edit message E

it’s only coq au vin, small shallots will do

mise for coq au vin: a cutting board with diced carrots on top of a board scraper, quartered mushrooms, smashed garlic, peeled shallots, minced parsley, and diced potatoes (for a side). left to right behind the board: a few cups of broth with gelatin in a measuring cup, a peeler, a bottle of red wine, a compost container, ands a chef knife

gravely googling: reliable source of pearl onions in sf fresh or frozen

pave, Pave, PAVE.

https://alt.pavethe.earth

12th (I am not tryna spell "twelth?f?”th, these stories deserve to be 13th, alas) book of 2024: “Magic for Beginners”, by Kelly Link ( https://kellylink.net/books/magic-for-beginners-old, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66657.Magic_for_Beginners). Yep.

Goth surrealist tangential punny folklore ghost stories? Idk what the hell I just read and if it was a TV show I’d turn it off but I can read stuff like this all day long (and just did).

me: time to read a creepy story with bugs in it

bugs: ugh, hey, hi, so, uh, am i in that one?

me: 🙄 yes

not helped by this 🐝 being 🐝what i was reading at the time https://kellylink.net/books/magic-for-beginners-old/the-hortlak

had to move the adirondack i was sunning myself in about fifteen feet into a clearing because the trees above where it was initially are so full of bees that every other thought i had was “buzz”

photo of a Sequoia grove to me east, the rising sun above, blue skies behind

eleventh book of 2024: “Trust”, by Herman Diaz. ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58210933)

Insulting to anarchists. “Obama liked this!” should have turned me away, but i was a fool.

Meh. Almost DNF’d about ⅔ of the way through but I’m on vacation and had an hour to slog through.

On the bright side, when I drop it off at one of those little free libraries maybe someone will have left a classic I can trade up for.

The paperback cover of "Trust", by Hernan Diaz, as i read it, except my copy as the pulitzer prize winner seal on it.

🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️

🏁 what I’m considering Glen Park and Diamond Heights, bound by Portola, Diamond Heights Blvd, San Jose, Bosworth, and O’Shaughnessy Blvd

🏁 what I’m considering Potrero Hill, bound by Division, 280, Cesar Chavez, and 101

A San Francisco street map centering the area bound by Market, 3rd street, 280, and Twin Peaks, on which most streets have a meandering purple GPS path I’ve logged on it, generally completing (in order I walked it) Noe Valley, Bernal Heights, the Inner Mission, Mission Dolores, the Castro, Eureka Valley, Glen Park, Diamond Heights, and Potrero Hill.

tenth book of 2024: “Pnin", by Vladimir Nabokov. Nice.

unexpected tiling window manager bonus: image popovers immediately get tiled to the same size

I never really got into these things because I guess it never occurred to me that they would have pleasant margin options for single app configs, which for some reason I kinda prefer (tiled round rect windows and drop shadows at 0px margin and padding look weird, to me)

I’ve used Moom ( https://manytricks.com/moom/) for years, it’s great.

now I’m playing with Amethyst ( https://manytricks.com/moom/) instead.

screenshot of a computer desktop with the mastodon application Ivory open and filling nearly the entire screen. floating over Ivory’s main window is an image open in a window about 1/3 the size of the main window by volume, which seems to have been the default way to “show image” since lightbox.js ten or fifteen years ago or whatever.

the same image loaded on the same computer with nothing changed except that Amethyst is running and instantly yoinked the image to fill the entire screen, which is always what I wanted when I tell the computer to “show image” or whatever, instead of lightbox.js style nonsense

took junior to hike the sign

that’s right

SOUTH

SAN FRANCISCO

THE INDUSTRIAL CITY

pretty nice, always wanted to do that.

it’s a little 2 mile loop with a steep stepped shortcut up from the bottom to the top. also, you can walk on the letters. also also, if you bring cardboard you can slide on a few of them even.

wide angle photograph looking up hill at the huge ‘L’ from “INDUSTRIAL”

haven’t cut my hair in over a year except for one straight DIY shear pass mid-year on the back to de-mullet

everyone who asks and finds out what I’m doing is all “I couldn’t get through the awkward phase" and I’m all “well, tbh? it’s all awkward, with brief OK phases"

beat

also everyone who has ever had long hair when I complain about it: “well you could always cut it off, I don’t regret going that at all" and I’m like “you are right.”

beat

so I think I’ll keep growing it out another year

i just wanna inbox-zero from the oldest message, folks, is that so bad [I get hit in the chest w/ a tomato thrown from the audience] no, not that one, the one below it [a shoe flies by, the entire crowd is hissing and booing, an anvil drops from the stage lights and crashes to the floor just to my left] see if I press ‘y’ google is all ’n’ and imo that’s [a giant hook enters from stage right] a huge ‘L’ [the house lights come up, a google bus crashes into the venue, workers start pouring ou—

in gmail on web with the preview pane enabled for a sorted mailbox:

archiving the first (top) message causes gmail to select the message below the archived message

archiving any non-top messages that aren’t the ultimate (bottom) message causes gmail to select the message above the archived message

archiving the ultimate (bottom) message causes gmail to select the message above the message above the archived message.

🤷🏻‍♂️

wanted to read Chekhov but wasn’t sure what translation to look for, learned that Nabokov had a dislike for Constance Garnett, remembered that Nabokov was also on my todo list, started Pnin, and right away, he’s doing the moves, dumping on Garnett 🤗

i’m constantly flip flopping things in my imagination and honestly it’s kinda intrusive and annoying but also some people clearly do not and cannot and it’s so weird imaging their world

the typical stuff:

looking at a young person and imagining them older, even much older

seeing an old person and reminding myself that they were once my age, once in high school, or elementary school

gender presentation alternates

etc

I still spin my phone the same way I did twenty years ago with my thumb on my blackberry’s thumb wheel and middle finger on the back of the phone

important follow up disclaimer: signs are but a small part of activism, one person’s shame and action is not the actual sole or specific expected result, there is almost always a larger strategy, there isn’t a “right way” to protest, etc

shameful-bystander-“they oughta”-comment

using (protest) signs to shame a (shameless) mayor in a major U.S. city about traffic infrastructure when (ineffective) signs are their preferred compromise, for the same reasons, even (they are cheap, easy to put up quickly), sure is something

F

screenshot from https://sf.courts.ca.gov/divisions/jury-services/jury-reporting-instructionsGroup Numbers: 606, 611, 616, 618 and 624Please report in person on the following date, time and location:Date: Friday, March 29, 2024

feeling pretty isolated and lonely this evening, so much that socials are downright off-putting, I can’t get into the book I’m reading, and there’s nothing to watch that is appealing at all. oh, I do have an American Master’s to finish, let’s see

https://www.pbs.org/video/hopper-an-american-love-story-faeahk/

ah, christ, this guy!?

I forgot to check on this last night! Phew, we remain on standby.

🫱🏼‍🫲🏽 Hall of Justice Juror Group On Standby 611 🫱🏼‍🫲🏽

🌈

a cropped and oversaturated photograph out of a window of a rainbow over the mission in san francisco.

ninth book of 2024 (is counting like this annoying? idk, it’s all one mutable thread, so, whatever): “Get in Trouble", by Kelly Link ( https://kellylink.net/books/get-in-trouble).

More great stories, some of which, but fewer than those in “Stranger Things Happen” would fit right in with those collected in “Black Water” ( https://mastodon.social/@gravely/110403938932091902) and “Black Water 2” ( https://mastodon.social/@gravely/110899731695137550).

eighth book of 2024: “Stranger Things Happen", by Kelly Link ( https://kellylink.net/books/stranger-things-happen-old).

So good, I’m grabbing another collection of Link’s, "Get in Trouble”, immediately.

the paperback cover of “stranger things happen”, by Kelly Link, as I read it. A mid-century lookin’ color illustration of a blonde woman in a blue blouse, tan skirt, and black heels carries a flashlight through a dark wood.

seventh book of 2024: “Titanium Noir", by Nick Harkaway ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62052321-titanium-noir). What it says on the tin and knows it. Spoonfuls of chewy metaphors.

cover of “Titanium Noir”, by Nick Harkaway, as I read it, hardback (which is black). Black block stencil TITANIUM along the top over a black stencil fedora containing a shiny metallic head, dripping onto more black stencil NOIR over a brilliant green field. The authors name and other blurb elements including a quote from William Gibson are in a monospace console font.

this coat is reversible and I’ve been liking it both right-side-out and inside-out so the collar is permanently in cooler-than-me casual rebellion

iphone selfie of me in our wall length mirror by the front door in a pink and blue flannel lined jacket over a sneppy t-shirt (fake snoopy), jeans, pride rainbow / white hi-top vans, in front of a joan cornella booty-poop print on the wall. there’s a huge red wall calendar for march taped to the door and an eames color-ball coat rack full of coats and masks next to me

I love views of downtown as I enter the city afar, and from hilltops and rooftops in the neighborhoods. But I always also imagine the following dialog with myself:

"Wow, hard to believe people built all that over there”

"Yeah, pretty neat! Do you want to go there? Maybe into one of those cool buildings?”

“Nope.”

“Do the people who live there like it?

"Nobody lives there.”

“OK, but at least the buildings are used to good stuff? Right?"

“No, not really.”

laying in bed “watching tv” on my laptop, but about to close it and go to sleep. it is 8:50PM.

🏁 what I’m considering Mission Dolores, Castro, and Eureka Valley, bound by Market, Valencia, and 20th.

Glen Park next for real this time, I think. Or Potrero Hill. Maybe both.

just learned that I’m supposed to have an ascending-horn-punctuated introduction of my achievements and a. k. a.s, fml https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3hnm4Shybg

it’s still fun to be surprised my own browser word replacement filters. I’ve got half a dozen going right now, loving it.

hiked Bayview hill yesterday, today was very much a “I want to go down there” result

photograph, view south from the top of bayview hill to oyster point and SFO Airport

photograph of the parking lot for the now demolished Candlestick Park stadium from the Bayview Hill Trail

Photograph of San Francisco from the initial climb of the Bayview Hill trail

Photograph of Bayview Hill, reversing the second in the series, above from the parking lot of Candlestick Park. Most the actual lot and “Hunter’s Point Expressway” around the hill at this point are just a fenced off lake and are inaccessible.

another nice day to try SFMTA recommended bike routes ( https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/pdf_map/2021/06/sfmta_recommendedbikeroutes_0.pdf), so this time I went southeast: Chavez to Illinois to Cargo, side-quest out Heron’s Head Park and Hunter’s Point, back on the route to Mendel, Palou, Keith, Carrol, out to Candlestick Point, reverse back to Jenning, Paul, Bayshore, and Chavez home.

Lovely!

picture of the SFMTA pdf of recommended routes of the southeast corner of San Francisco

sixth book of 2024: “How Infrastructure Works: Inside the systems that shape our world.”, by Deb Chachra ( https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/).

I feel like more than a few people I follow posted about this over the past year so I eventually followed suit. More memoir (again!) than I’m normally into but just enough history, novelty, and new-to-me theory to be pretty good after all.

this is a qt of https://social.lol/@spotlightonpod/111952783201740255

so after reading this I thought of a monthly “new artists” CD mailer subscription I had in the late 90s that I coulda swore had a Marley track one month, which is weird, right?

so I checked my Plex for Marley, picked Catch a Fire, saw “Midnight Ravers”, which was the chorus I was thinking of, but not it.

ddg for a remix and found it: Bill Laswell’s “Dreams Of Freedom (Ambient Translations Of Bob Marley In Dub)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8sDYYwu2t8

neato.

Learning from 500songs.com ( https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-116-where-did-our-love-go-by-the-supremes/ ) that the Supremes were called “the no hit supremes” within Motown and made to do stuff like “The Rock and Roll Banjo Band” until Holland, Dozier, and Holland had a say in matters, smdh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJer8U5WtWk

🏁 what I’m considering the inner mission, bound by 101, Cesar Chaves, and Valencia

A San Francisco street map centering the area bound by 101, Ceasar Chavez, and Valencia, on which every street has a meandering purple GPS path I’ve logged on it. (I tried to walk Erie St a few times but it’s been under construction each time.)

fifth book of 2024: “A Wizard of Earthsea”, by Ursula K. Le Guin ( https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-wizard-of-earthsea).

After enjoying every single story in the “Hainish Novels and Stories ( https://www.ursulakleguin.com/hainish-novels-and-stories), I figured I can’t go wrong tackling Earthsea for the first time by just reading all of them in the similar “The Books of Earthsea" ( https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-books-of-earthsea).

🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️ 🚶🏽‍♂️

one tell that this is good is that I immediately shazam’d it off of NTS’s “Expansions” mix ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmpgnzoFwNQ, which I now assume is named after the track (or suite) of the same name after this one on record), paused the mix and listened to it again, and then the everloving wife stormed over and asked when my music changed from good to bad and shut my door.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, “Black Mystery Has Been Revealed”, from “left & right”, 1968 ( https://www.allmusic.com/album/left-right-mw0000661555)

good morning

fourth book of 2024: “Mismatch” ( https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539487/mismatch/ ) subtitled “How Inclusion Shapes Design” by Kat Holmes ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39644200-mismatch).

I grabbed this one after landing on a Don Norman piece ( https://www.fastcompany.com/90338379/i-wrote-the-book-on-user-friendly-design-what-i-see-today-horrifies-me). I enjoyed “The Design of Everyday Things" so I followed Norman’s suggestion to read Mismatch.

Pretty quick read, and full of things so obviously correct that I got impatient with the author’s patience? Good stuff.

The paperback cover of Mismatch as I read it. Black helvitca on white title, subtitle, author, foreward author, left-aligned-on-center, top third. a design that reads like the 70s/80s trend of “generic” stuff, The bottom half is a black swirl stroke broken into 8 textures: blot, spikes, dots, bands, checkerboard, circles, stripes, and brush.

complimented on this “clean ass jacket” within five minutes of wearing it out for the first time, while waiting for a train to berkeley

selfie in an elevator mirror wearing a new rock band jacket, black with white sleeves, green striped cuffs, collar, waist, and pockets, with a green two headed snake running up the sleeveI was on the way to see a doctor about a thing that cleared up the day before and two hours after I confirmed the $75-cancellation-fee appointment that I'd made three weeks prior

selfie in an elevator mirror wearing a new rock band jacket, black with white sleeves, green striped cuffs, collar, waist, and pockets, with a green two headed snake running up the sleeve, "Queens" stitched along the rear shoulder

jiggled!

Speaking of the continually amazing 500songs, episode 76: “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price ( https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-76-stagger-lee-by-lloyd-price/) is absolutely fascinating and one of the best.

“Ah you mean the Nick Cave song? Isn’t that a ‘traditional’ tune?" There’s so, so much more to it.

Supplemental music should you choose to read the transcript rather than listen, or just want to hear even more: https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-stagger-lee/

third book of 2024: “Particle Theory", a collection of stories by Edward Bryant ( https://reanimus.com/store/index.cgi?author=Edward%20Bryant).

I started this a while ago after reading an interview with Ted Chiang (maybe this one? https://www.sfsite.com/09b/tc136.htm).

I really, really like Ted Chiang’s stories. Ted really, really likes Bryant’s stories. Some of these were quite good, some just OK. I stalled on it a few times.

”giANTS”, the one about ants, is one of the good ones ( https://nebulas.sfwa.org/nominees/edward-bryant/).

(🐜 🐜 🐜 https://mastodon.social/@gravely/110209784638054304)

Second book of 2024: Glyn Johns, "Sound Man” ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20949444-sound-man)

Two memoirs to start the year. Weird, I never read memoirs.

This one was quoted in some video I watched chasing Chris Scruggs stuff ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeR2yZ2pWCw what a great band! that steel player?!) that I probably landed on looking up a https://500songs.com (which I’m 90 episodes into) citation, so I found myself reading it.

It took me about two years and a half years, but I’m caught up with This Old House.

got this lovely new-to-me @paulrickards http://shop.paulrickards.com/large-plots/ large plot “20191020055321” back from the frame shop.

while i was at it, I used off-the-rack frames on the rest of the stuff.

photograph, 24" x 36" watercolor pen plot, impressionistic swirls in pink, yellow, green, purple, in a bright green frame, hung with-in a wall of vitsoe bookshelves full of books

plot detail in purple, pink, green, yellow

for additional framed plots laying on a counter

coming up with a plausible but even more frustrating syntax for plain text markup

bold: ddoouubbllee eevveerryy lleetttteerr, because that’s how you made letters bolder on a typewriter.

_underline_is_easy_but_lets_not_be_sloppy:_no_spaces

italics are not supported, that’s what underline was for

hyperlinks? _underlines_with_a_octothorpe #, # footnote the link at the bottom of the file

just.kidding, hyperlinks are not supported

our cane plant has flowered this month after I moved it away from the sliding glass door into a distant corner and it is very, very fragrant — neato, had no idea it flowered!

photograph of a cane plant with two primary branch tops, flowers peaking out to the rear, in a 2’ round pot in a corner beside a leather sofa and behind a marble end table, in front of a wall of books on the left and a pale pink wall on the right

macro photo of the flower strand growing out the rear of the lower top can plant with 20 or so white 1” bursts of flowers on short green branches on a 3’ long green stalk

🏁 what I’m considering bernal but which is a bit more I suppose? Bound by Ceasar Chavez, 101, Alemany, and 280, and which I’d already had a head start on.

A San Francisco street map centering the area bound by Ceasar Chavez, 101, Alemany, and 280, on which every street has a meandering purple GPS path I’ve logged on it.

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

I’m going to write my own mail server.

All right.

I like this thai basil recipe ( https://shesimmers.com/2012/05/pad-ka-prao-%E0%B8%9C%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%94%E0%B8%81%E0%B8%B0%E0%B9%80%E0%B8%9E%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B2.html) better than the one i used to use because it calls for fish, light soy, sweet soy, and oyster, instead of just fish sauce.

still a wimp with the birds tho

photo of cutting board with shallot, garlic, thai peppers, green pepper, and basil, bottles of sauce lined up to the rear

First book of 2024: Ellen Ullman, "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents” ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/486625/questions).

I don’t know how this made it onto my pile but it was a quick read (I started it yesterday). It’s so weird to read 90s tech memoirs. People were still sorta building stuff back then, weren’t sure where things would end up, and so on.

2023’s thread: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/109661276920611083

Why I post these: https://mastodon.social/@gravely/110011601484725615

The paperback cover of “Close to the Machine” by Ellen Ullman, author’s over title over subtitle in black sans caps on a flat yellow background with a red USB-A cable serpents up from the bottom right corner to the top center. a black snake’s tongue flicks out from the USB cable connector.

Mastodon posts from 2024

https://just.kidding, hyperlinks are not supported