Recently updated blogs

The recent Beeper controversy briefly brought the “blue bubbles vs. green bubbles” topic back into the mainstream. Here’s a brief review for those of you who are (blessedly) unaware of this issue. Messages sent using the iMessage service appear in blue text bubbles within the Messages app. Messages sent using something other than the iMessage service (e.g., SMS, or (soon) RCS) appear in green text bubbles. The iMessage service and …

Here's something fun. If you sign up for my free mailing list, not only will you get updates when I post new comics (Issue #2 of Incredible Doom - Eternal September is about to drop!) but I'll send you a copy of a strange experiment I did a while back and didn't show anyone: A revised edition of my first graphic novel The Charis' Hiatus.This new edition, although mostly the …

Harajuku Street Style Interview: Taiwanese Punk x Japanese KawaiiNew interview with Yen, a Taiwanese punk singer/guitarist who lives in Japan and has become a well known personality in Harajuku’s kawaii fashion scene. She works at the famous Harajuku kawaii boutique 6%DOKIDOKI and will start Bunka Fashion College later this year.Yen on Instagram

Trying to keep on the reading, writing, and painting focus for the year. I have a hard time right now doing extra hobbies during the week. I have been mentally drained from work to do much of anything afterwards. But I’ve gotten a tiny bit of painting done lately. An orange/citrus/yuzu looking fruit. A strawberry. It's so wild how your mind sees the painting differently as you're doing it. I …

I’m writing this on a 30-foot screen on top of a 10,000-foot mountain in Hawaii, at a table in an Austin coffee shop where I’m pretty sure other people are taking photos of me to send to their friends so they can all call me a piece of shit. In the last week, life has gotten weird. My journey to the Haleakalā shield volcano Austin coffee shop began more than …

I'm in Politico today, musing about why British internet regulation keeps hopping in circles on one leg.

A little oddity for you today from 1968, and Radio One DJ Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, accompanied by a 40-strong choir of pre-pubescent boys and girls. Edward Stewart Mainwaring (23 April 1941 – 9 January 2016) was a British radio broadcaster and TV presenter, principally known for his work as a DJ, initially (in the UK at least) at Radio London before joining BBC Radio 1 as one of their first …

Getting a grip on some fundamental survival techniques is a must for outdoor enthusiasts. We will scare you with stastics later but the fact is that everything we do has risks and it’s our responsibility to learn to handle them as best as we can. We owe it to ourselves, our loved ones, and to the random stranger we encounter who is in trouble. This blog post is your starting …

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant […]

I mean… the writing was on the wall, wasn't it? Didn't we, the tech nation desperate to actualise the ten-ecks developer, make our own bed? I know it's the cynic in me that doesn't trust copilot assisted work to produce long term "good code" (aka: code of a reliable quality that can survive time), but at the same time I'm one of those grumpy old hacks that hand codes. One …

It is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age. — Heidegger

It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed. There’s a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their …

When I was in University I had a few good teachers, and I remember fondly Professor Lorenzo Farina. Once, he§ came to class and ranted a bit about some job advertisement he had read: the job was for a software engineer, and mentioned they were looking for someone with a smanettone mindset. Smanettone is an Italian term which in context meant something like “hacker” (in the Jargon File sense) or …

A new paper was published in Science Advances today. Its title says what it is about: “Physics-based early warning signal shows that AMOC is on tipping course.” The study follows one by Danish colleagues which made headlines last July, likewise looking for early warning signals for approaching an AMOC tipping point (we discussed it here), but using rather different data and methods. The new study by van Westen et al. …

I’m thinking its fewer than I’d hoped. But I tacked my discussion onto a (fifteen year old!) geeklist on the subject.