I took in my first figure drawing class last night, and I was all ready to work with ink, but realized I’d forgotten my brushes. I started out really well, but got too much into my own head as the night went on, and my quality dropped off so I left 1/2 hour early.
No word from the roofing guys yet; I’m going to call them tomorrow and find out what the damage will be. Then, I suppose, I’ll call a few more to get some comparison pricing. I’m having them bid on asphalt replacement instead of slate; we just can’t afford new stone up there and the clock has run out. In the meantime, I’m doing some preliminary car shopping to see what I might be able to get for a Slattern replacement with four doors. So far I’m considering
A Honda Fit: 31-38MPG, full hatchback, and about a million airbags
A Honda Civic: larger interior compartment, roughly the same cost for a comparable Fit
A Honda Accord: Even larger than the Civic with almost comparable gas mileage.
I’d like to say I enjoyed the latest DJ Shadow album (after sampling it on Spotify), but I didn’t. Pitchfork says:
…whether The Less You Know was intended to reestablish Shadow as a musician, as a producer, or even as someone with decent taste, he misfires on all counts.
I’d agree with their opinion that the beats are, as always, top-notch. Everything else falls flat, and the annoying insistence on finishing all of the tracks with a faux CD-skipping loop sealed it for me. I don’t need another …Endtroducing; I just want something good.
I invited our neighbor over on Saturday evening to observe as I brewed a kettle of beer. This time everything seemed to go a lot smoother, excepting some wonky readings with Jen’s candy thermometer as we cooled the wort down. This time I boiled it right around 200° and made sure not to let it burn at the bottom of the kettle, as well as making sure the final wort wasn’t too hot to kill the yeast. Once it was in the fermenter, the entire basement filled with the scent of hops as it started bubbling. The krauzen is much thicker this time, and there’s a layer of hops at the top, which tells me it’s working hard.
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.
Andy Baio has made many amazing things for the internet, one of which is/was called Belong.io, which was a tool using the Twitter API to scrape interesting links from the feeds of a bunch of interesting people daily. With Phony Stark blowing up the service and charging for the API, he’s shut the whole thing down:
Truth be told, it was already dying as those interesting people slowed down their Twitter usage, or left entirely in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition and a series of decisions that summarily ruined it as a platform for creative experimentation.
bummer.
The Washington Post did a deep dive of the dataset used to train popular AI models like ChatGPT, and as you might expect, the big websites got crawled heavily. Interestingly, IdiotCentral here didn’t show up at all, but billdugan.com ranks 1,078,227th.
Songslikex is supposed to be a tool to suggest other songs you might like based on something you suggest. I’ve put in a couple of slightly off-center suggestions and it’s returned a list of songs that were OK, but I don’t know that I’d put them all in the same category. I don’t know how they’re developing their list, but I guess it’s OK.
