Recently updated blogs

The CeMar Trail is ready to be connected!Linn County Trails' cheery Facebook post today serves a reminder of Cedar Rapids's ever-improving trails network. Many of these projects fix connections at a specific location, but by the end of next year there will be some dramatic changes apparent to even the most casual trail user (cf. Peffer 2024). Arguably the most dramatic will be the completion of the CEMAR Trail between …

1. It turns out colds might really be because of cold. 2. Fire has impacted three small businesses in Alexandria, including what had briefly been the area's first romance bookstore. 3. This story of a train trip from Chicago to Miami (which I have funnily enough done in reverse) was fascinating.

Sparker, To love is to be inconvenienced. I worry sometimes that we forget we are supposed to be inconvenienced by one another; that’s what it means to live in a functioning society. We’re meant to take turns bearing the burden so that others show up for us when we need it — and that means that we have to show up, even when we don’t feel like it. Maybe especially …

Human vs. Hamster, Max's new reality competition, delivers exactly what its title promises, and it's a freakin' delight, reminiscent of both Holey Moley and Double Dare.

Members of the Washington family -- as in Denzel, Malcolm, and John David -- are playing a major role in preserving the literary legacy of the late August Wilson, at least on screen. It has been eight years since Denzel Washington directed and starred in Fences, but the deep connection between Wilson's material and the Washingtons continues. For the latest entry, The Piano Lesson, Denzel Washington serves as one of …

This year, the Open Fields Conference, part of the RIXC Art Science Festival in Riga, addressed symbiotic senses and explored how each of us depends on interactions with lives and intelligences that are often radically different from ours. The keynotes and dozens of talks by researchers, artists, curators, media theorists, philosophers and scientists from different fields illustrated how these complex, albeit often invisible, connections challenge us to reassess the boundaries …

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Nicola Griffith’s Menewood is a magnificent, immersive sequel to one of my favorite historical novels, Hild. The New York Times wrote of the …

My eldest nephew Austin recently became a high school student. Since he’s been old enough to stand on a chair, he’s been helping his parents in the kitchen. These days,... Source

Find the net elevation change over the lifespan of a famous deceased person: (net elevation at death) – (net elevation at birth) (via Net Elevation ) … but why?

On the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the forests around 4,000 feet in elevation are excellent places to enjoy a wide variety of birds and other wildlife. The mid-montane coniferous forests of this "lower conifer zone," as it is known, occur at elevations just above the oak woodlands and chaparral of the foothills, and just below the upper conifer zone. Here, at this meeting place of plant communities, pockets …

Recently I traveled to Portland, Oregon to speak at the PDX People’s Digital Safety Fair, meet up with five groups in the Electronic Frontier Alliance, and attend BSides PDX 2024. Portland’s first ever Digital Safety Fair was a success and five of our six EFA organizations in the area participated: Personal Telco Project, Encode Justice Oregon, PDX Privacy, TA3M Portland, and Community Broadband PDX. I was able to reaffirm our …

For my oldest WIP, at least.I started with roughly 82-84k, but during my revisions, whittled that down to a solid 80k. Not bad, considering I've chopped and/or added more to previous books. This one needed a bit more work, as I have undergone several drafts to shape the story where it is today. There are still a few issues I need to address during the editing phase, but I'm much …

This blog post is more of a collection of notes than a cohesive article. I wrote it to help guide my own thinking on the subject (I find writing to be a good way to clarify my ideas and identify the things I want to look into further). As such there are no conclusions — this is a studio journal, not a scholarly research journal — but there are several …

A new set of image generation capabilities for FLUX models, including inpainting, outpainting, canny edge detection, and depth maps.