Last month I set and printed a “certificate of authenticity” that Lisa can attach to her relief prints. I’m happy with the result; it was a fiddly job.

One of the fiddlier fiddly parts was figuring out how to set the “fill in the blank” lines. What I ended up doing is using 2 point line rule, buttressed by 10 point slugs, which conveniently combined to match the 12 point Gill Sans.

The 10 point spacers, by the way, came from the old Prince County Hospital print shop; I store them now, as they did then, in medical specimen bottles. 

Those of you who read my friend Dave Atkinson’s Sunday email newsletter know that Dave frequently writes about picking up spikes on the side of the road.

When I stepped off the bus on Upton Road this morning, carrying my folding bicycle, I was greeted by this sight:

My first thought was “fuck Dave Atkinson and his self-righteous showoffery.”

My friendlier side then stepped forward, my “that Dave Atkinson is a model of civic responsibility for all of us” side. So I picked up the washer.

I kept riding.

Then, as I was pulling my bicycle up to the gym, I noticed something in the corner of my eye. It turned out to be a tiny cardboard box, perfectly sized to my newly-acquired washer.

All hail Dave Atkinson. 

On Friday, I replaced the Ring doorbell camera on our house, one that’s been there for more than a decade, with a Reolink doorbell camera.

The Reolink doesn’t require a subscription, its video streams are end-to-end encrypted, and it can archive video on local storage (rather than Amazon’s cloud).

It does, however, require a MicroSD card that you supply yourself, and when I went shopping yesterday I was shocked to see how steeply prices have risen.

I ended up buying a Kingston 128GB card for $54.99. 

From How to remember and forget by Mike Monteiro:

I worry that we—the big collective we—are forgetting too much already. Recent history is an ongoing seemingly inescapable trauma, and forgetting is a coping mechanism. And while I understand that we are all doing what we can to cope, I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to forget that we survived a pandemic. I don’t want to forget that millions of people did not survive a pandemic. I don’t want to forget that we elected a fascist, moved heaven and Earth to be rid of him, and then elected him again. I don’t want to forget that we threw the people who did the heaviest lifting under the bus. I don’t want to forget that they came for our neighbors, and for our families, and for our friends. I don’t want to forget what they’re doing to the people of Palestine.

Mike Monteiro’s weekly newsletter so often hits deep into the folds of my brain.

You should really buy his book, How to Die (And Other Stories).

From How global logistics got me over my fear of personal agents by Matt Webb:

I gave in, I had to: Claude Code, here you go, have my Gmail. Claude Code, here you go, drive a web browser without me even looking. Then I built an agent to process my email, navigating the FedEx website and uploading worksheets for me when that was the request (all the requests are subtly different), replying to emails from humans and attaching the worksheet when that was what had to happen. I started conservatively, human-in-the-loop as you’re supposed to do, centaur-style, checking the drafts, but there isn’t the time. I admit it, I surrendered.

Matt Webb is not a shrinking violent when it comes to innovation or AI—he developed and sells an AI rhyming clock, after all—but he’s also a person of deep thought an integrity, so when he “surrenders” and allows an AI agent to take over real business processes, with real consequences, it’s worth noting.

From an interview by Stephen Colbert with Steven Spielberg, about his new movie Disclosure Day:

Colbert: There are many moments in this when Emily Blunt’s character, without giving anything away, expresses this empathy toward people and it doesn’t just get them out of a tight bond at times, it actually changes the people to whom she is expressing this inner power of hers and those are some of the most beautiful moments of the film.

Spielberg: I think if you became, if you become the person you’re talking to, even if it’s for five seconds and in five seconds to understand deeply everything this person’s been through throughout their entire life before you come back to yourself, there would be a lot more cooperation between our own species on this planet.

An excerpt from a short story I wrote for young L., back in COVID days, when she was quarantined:

Over the days that followed “it,” both Ellery and Morepeth found themselves, without really thinking about it, without any intention, becoming — kinder? Maybe that wasn’t the word? More understanding? Empathetic? Considerate of other people’s feelings? All of those, really.

Take Sully Gufstason, for example, a kid in their class. A kid who’d been in their class since grade 1. Sully was the kid — there, alas, always seems to be one — who nobody understood. Sully was different, no doubt. Eccentric. (“Interesting” if you were more open-hearted). And he was made fun of, teased. “Sully Guffy” was the nicest of the many names he was called, repeatedly. “Nice hat, Sully Guffy,” the more bullying kids would yell. Ellery and Morepeth weren’t bullying kids. Not at all. But they also sat passively by, watching Sully get bullied.

Until. It. And the — kindness?

Something changed. They started talking to Sully. Treating him like a real person. Which, of course, is what he was. They invited him to their garden to help tend the — many — beets. And others followed in their example. Not everyone. Not all the time. But enough that Sully started to enjoy going to school. Which he never had before.

From I’m Making Strandfall, a Solarpunk Orienteering Larp by Adrian Hon:

Smartphones are anti-enchantment devices. All too often during interactive theatre and ARGs, I see participants fixated on their glowing screens, to the wider experience’s detriment. Smartphones, as traditionally used, have no place in an immersive experience that seeks to bring participants together and get them to talk and argue and deliberate with one another. Instead, we’ve designed our devices to appear closer to scientific instruments, with a custom user interface to match.

This is an explanation for why the game-desitner, Adrian Hon, uses custom-designed pieces of hardware in a Larp, but it could also be a general description of the role of phones in our life: they are, more often than not, anti-echantment devices.

From Epos Daimon, The Antifascist Magic School for Teens by mssv:

Let’s say you want to teach teenagers about the dangers of toxic communities like the manosphere. You could talk about the politics and history of fascism and explain why the Nazis were evil. You could show them a movie. You could even get them to play a live action role playing game (larp), to give them a really visceral, immersive experience.

This is fascinating, and something I’d love have to been able to participate when I was young. There’s a video essay to accompany the post.

Indeed Epos—a Danish school for teenagers that teaches using games—might have been my salvation as a teenager.

(via Phil Gyford)

From Things I Have Learned From Being In Unhealthy Connection by Rosa Lewis:

Healthy interdependence looks like meaningful, nourishing human connection where the whole of you can be present, where you feel appreciated for who you are and where you appreciate the other person for who they are, including the quirks of all this. And being able to have healthy boundaries where this isn’t naturally present.

From How to Travel by The School of Life:

What we can feel at such moments is a basic pleasure at encountering ‘otherness’: practices, customs, habits and vocabularies that are strikingly at odds with those we know from home and which give us a welcome reminder of the sheer diversity and complexity of the world. From a settled vantage point, it’s only too easy to picture humanity as homogeneous and, therefore, a little dull and prescriptive. But this isn’t a view which can survive the first few hours in a new country. We’re quickly reminded that, for all the talk of globalisation, places retain a fascinating, welcome distinctiveness. The smells, the sounds, the bread, the light at dawn, people’s shoes, the way of making tea, the arrangements of the taps and sockets, the light at 5pm… everything is satisfyingly ‘other’. This can become an invitation to explore alternative ways of living and thinking. There may be many more routes to being happy than the ones we’ve explored to date. Perhaps we can make the changes that had felt so impossible before.