V
Bill shared this after someone else mentioned Sydney Greenstreet:
’Twas This
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The stuff
Some days—rarer since I left full-time work, but some days—I feel acute, situational depression. And I know I’m in the thick of it when I have an almost physical awareness of sadness being ladled over me, running from the crown of my head and over and through my body, pooling at my feet. And other days, just as uncommonly, I feel its opposite: “situational joy”, perhaps. And the feeling is more…
Your monkey’s on fire
Mimi Smartypants discovers this mid-century cartoon on a coaster in an antique store. She writes how she was initially stopped short by its seeming complete nonsense , and then decoded it with some amount of effort and deep-cultural recall—but at the risk of it all falling apart again if you analyze it too far past that point.
Manhattanhenge 2026
West 79th street, between Amsterdam and Broadway, 8:15 PM, July 11.
Mark Dominus talks about ordinals
After slowly and carefully reading “Starting to understand epsilon-zero” by Mark Dominus, I definitely understand the fundamentals of set theory and ordinal numbers better than I did. But I must admit that the theory dances out of my grasp just before reaching the conclusion promised by the title. I don’t think that’s the article’s fault!
Gullet of the Rust Demon
At least half of my enjoyment of Gullet of the Rust Demon , a one-page, system-agnostic tabletop RPG adventure by Dan D., comes from the “establishing shot” of the dungeon exterior at the top of the sheet. The tufts of grass and single, stray flower, cartoonish as they are, do so much to suggest where some adventurers might come across this minimalistic dungeon’s entrance, and how quietly,…
Project Lion
My friend and fellow New Yorker Francisco González launched a Buttondown-based newsletter last year to announce the release of Rosewater , the latest in his long-and-growing oeuvre of independently produced point-and-click adventure games. Having played and enjoyed that one over the intervening winter holidays, I was delighted to see Francisco start to use the newsletter as a development blog for…
<em>Incident Report</em> by Andrew Nesbitt
Andrew Nesbitt is a software engineer and package-management blogger who also writes excellent satire in the form of standardized industry documents, such as change logs and incident reports. I have discovered his fiction by way of Incident Report: CVE-2026-LGTM , a hilariously brilliant story of countless autonomous AI agents responding to a malefactor in the stupidest way possible, eventually…
Best practices for LLMs and open-source contributions
The Software Freedom Conservancy has published Recommendations When Using LLM-backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions . This article represents that nonprofit’s official stance and guidance regarding the use of genAI coding assistants when contributing to open-source software projects—and, by extension, the use of these assistants in general. Some of the article’s more generally…
All grow fat from laughter
I very much enjoy A Most Amusing Bot , a Mastodon bot by Andy Lundell which regularly posts scanned newsprint ads of novelty gadgets from the 19th and 20th centuries. And I like the very eerie note that this one ends on.