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Californios (singular Californio) are Hispanic Californians, especially those descended from Spanish settlers of the 17th through 19th centuries before California was annexed by the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californios Arguello, Noe, Vallejo, Martinez, Peralta; if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you know these names. In 1892, they were the surnames of well-known women, descended from the Spanish settlers of California. Their families left their legacy as place names. Please …

In 2015, I wrote this letter to the Austin Chronicle, it appeared in their January 16th, 2015 issue, hence posting today. In just 4-days, we should have the next Presidential inauguration on January 20th, 2015. Let’s hope so. YOU GET WHAT YOU VOTE FORDear Editor,So, our “Rail or Fail” Mayor Leffingwell reminds us that there are some 860,000 people in Austin, and it’s hard to remember that when confronted by …

Note: this item was provided for review. I have used, owned, and tested/reviewed loads of bags which fall into the general category of a ‘do it all day-to-day’ bag. Something large enough to take to the office, or to travel with, but also small enough you can generally take it anywhere with you. That’s a recipe which is ripe for compromise, and while I’ve liked a lot of the bags …

Charlie Chaplin’s 1916 film One A.M. begins with him portraying a wealthy drunk struggling to exit a taxicab. Filmed on location, this setting has been a mystery for over a century, until Sarah Lagrillière, a brilliant film preservationist and avid visual historian from Finland (!), solved the puzzle. Incredibly, the scene was staged along Hollywood Blvd, almost due north from where Chaplin would later build his studio across a lemon …

As dissatisfaction with the old regime fermented into revolutionary upheaval in late-eighteenth century France, two architects cast off the decorative excesses of the Baroque and Rococo styles and sought out bold, new geometries. Hugh Aldersey-Williams tours the sublime and mostly unrealized designs of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, discovering utopian ideals crafted in cubes, spheres, and pyramids.

~ New in Chrome 133 (which goes stable on Feb 4) is a new method to move an element around the DOM: Node.prototype.moveBefore. While small in size, this method is a very big deal because it preserves the element’s state when moving them around! For example: Iframes remain loaded Active element remains focus Popovers, fullscreen, modal dialogs remain open CSS transitions and animations carry on … ~ The classic way …

With regards to my photographic activities, alternating between the coast and the desert, January 2015 was a rather typical month. Here’s my monthly throwback to ten years ago, with some photos that have passed the test of time. The reason ... Read moreThanks for following Alexander S. Kunz Photography via RSS & keeping independent websites alive. Buy me a coffee? Support @ $3/month. Visit My Print Store. Browse My Photo …

Happy New Year! I have a housekeeping message (which you will see immediately below, if you’re reading this via email), a review on 2024, and then some updates about Bits about Money as a publication. Spoiler: BAM is not going anywhere; I’d be obliged if readers supported it with money.Reminder to supportersAre you reading this in a web browser? Supporters of Bits about Money who got this in an inbox …

Congrats to my “Eno” collaborator @brendandawes for winning the Cinema Eye Honors Award for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Design for the Brain One generative system we created for the film. This project does not exist without Brendan’s creativity and resilience over the past six years since we began working together. Cheers Bren! Brian Eno was also recognized in the “Unforgettables” category as one of this year’s most notable and significant …

Matt Harder is the founder of Civic Trust, a participatory budgeting company that provides technology infrastructure, communications and process methodology to help citizens participate in their governments’ budgeting process.In this episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution, Harder joins host Tiffany Owens Reed to discuss participatory budgeting, a method of getting resident input on how a city’s budget is spent. They talk about the three phases of participatory budgeting, the benefits and …

The American mink is not endangered and lives all across North America in wetlands with the exception of the American Southwest, but the subspecies that occurs in the Everglades is considered threatened. Mink are weasels well adapted to living in freshwater marshes where they prey upon rabbits, rodents, fish, frogs, tadpoles, birds, turtles, snakes, and insects. They often kill more than they can eat because their primitive brains don’t shut …

Plans for hundreds of student rooms in Woolwich town centre have been approved by Greenwich Council – and hundreds more could be on their way. Former council offices at Riverside House that are currently being used as artists’ studios will be redeveloped and turned into 332 student rooms along with a 265-room hotel, with part […] The post Woolwich ‘will be a student town again’ after developments approved appeared first …

Ghost Box Records work and releases often have a very playful element which intertwines with the more parallel world or occult side of things. This is particularly present on the Belbury Poly album New Ways Out from 2016, which was described in Electric Sound magazine as: “…transporting you to those especially daft places only Belbury Poly can – Tizer-fuelled 70s youth club discos with side-rooms for Ouija boards…” That quote …

I’ve had mixed experiences with Rose Tremain’s books, enjoying some and struggling with others. Absolutely and Forever was shortlisted for last year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and as it’s a personal project of mine to try to read all of the shortlisted titles, I decided to read this one despite it not sounding particularly appealing to me. It’s a short book (under 200 pages), so at least it …

Saint Jerome in His Study by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1480) Today’s post is excerpted from Deliberate Practice for Creative Writers by Jules Horne. Do you believe excellence is in someone’s nature—an innate golden gift they were born with? Or does it come from nurture—learning, effort, passion and commitment? Of course, nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy. Born talent and learned talent—in any skill—can’t be separated. They reinforce and inspire each …