Maybe there are technical requirements of which I am ignorant, but I find it so annoying that Treasury went this route of paying a private sector vendor for identity and login management when login.gov exists.
Maybe there are technical requirements of which I am ignorant, but I find it so annoying that Treasury went this route of paying a private sector vendor for identity and login management when login.gov exists.
I’m starting to see more think pieces on my feeds about 9/11, public figures are posting outright islamaphobia, I just walked past the Phi Kappa Psi house and they’re hosting some sort of rush activity while blasting Drops of Jupiter by Train. I feel like I time tunneled into 2003.
I think of a sentence I wrote dozens of variants of in the waning days of my content-writing career, which went something like: “These AI tools aren’t meant to supplant the work of humans—instead, by automating routine busywork, they will free your employees up for the kind of creative thinking that actually drives innovation.” Even then I must have known the truth: that your average call center, say, has no use for a customer service staff that sits around “innovating” for half the business day (what would they be innovating, precisely?); that any time saved for the business would translate directly into fewer working hours for its employees (and fewer assignments for me).
It’s a damp and gloomy September Friday, and sometimes that calls for suburban/Warped Tour style emo music that’s so saccharine it could melt your teeth:
RIP Wendell Berry:
For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do? Fill in the following blanks with the names of your favorite evils and acts of hatred.
Berry had a way of cutting through to the core.
This site is the digital equivalent of the junk drawer in your kitchen. An assortment of random items, many of which happen to be incredibly useful in very specific circumstances:
🔖 Bookmarked https://www.normaltools.com/
Open a tool, do the thing, leave. No account, no download, and nothing between you and the answer.
I somehow managed to stumble on to this site this morning. The dev related tools are pretty handy, but I especially liked the band name generator tool. I think I might give it a go when I form my punk band.
Engrossing short-form video documentary on the Phoenix fire department’s efforts to implement new heat related life-saving interventions:
Cities routinely respond to financial stress by pursuing growth even more aggressively. The logic is simple. More homes mean more taxpayers, while more commercial development expands the tax base. If the city is short of money, the obvious response is to grow faster.
Westlund recognizes the flaw in that logic. When each new increment of development creates more long-term expense than it produces in revenue, more growth doesn’t solve the financial problem. It makes the problem larger.
McSweeney’s updating their first draft of history:
We were stuck in line waiting for gas at a Freedom Fuel Station, so this installment is a little late. Apologies! Anyway, you add another 90 atrocities to the list. #LestWeForgetTheHorrors buff.ly/V207e2L
— McSweeney's ([@mcsweeneys.net](http://mcsweeneys.net)) August 27, 2026 at 11:21 AM
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🍎🍏How some people feel about sports teams is how I feel about apple varieties in harvest season: Michigan apple growers expect strong harvest as crop arrives early.
Empathy was a hallmark of Ms. Parton’s songwriting, perhaps nowhere so much as in “Down From Dover” and “Daddy Come Get Me,” harrowing Southern gothic ballads about teen pregnancy and how patriarchy blames and victimizes young women.
Assertive women populated Ms. Parton’s songs, whether through her proto-feminist rewrite of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel No. 8)” or by advocating parity in the bedroom (“Touch Your Woman”) and in the workplace (“9 to 5”)…
“Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast,” she told The Times in 2002. “I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder. I write every day, even when I’m on a plane, in the tub or on the bus. It burns in me.”
Seeing MSU students return always gets me to think back on those early college days when you’re anxiously trying to find some shared activity you can do with others to find friends and a pretense to join lunch or dinner tables.
Corwin Smidt on what mindset you should take into an election booth:
If people are sitting there trying to be strategic with their vote, they’re only going to be unhappy. The vote that makes you happy is the vote that you should make. Trying to be the smart voter is not the way to do things….It benefits you more to know whether you’re going to like the candidate.
Boosting because I’d like to see this plugin become a reality!
Micro.bloggers: I’m interested in turning the link log into a micro.blog app, but I don’t have the skill or the will to make it happen. Where should I begin?
Today marks the 37th anniversary of The Baltic Way (or Baltic Chain) where 2 million people joined hands across 419 miles to appeal for their right to self-governance and to resist authoritarianism. Their movement ultimately succeeded. Resist authoritarianism.
Featured recently on the Library of Congress’s Headlines & Heros blog: The Journalist. @onthemedia.bsky.social before podcasting or public radio.
I consider @zettlr@fosstodon.org the ‘Zotero’ of word processors. They use a Markdown approach in combination with Pandoc/LaTeX for document exporting. Comparable to Obsidian but optimized for academic writing. Integrates with @zotero@fosstodon.org. Check em out!
+++ ANNOUNCEMENT +++
We have just launched a complete overhaul over Zettlr’s aging documentation. It is now based on Vue, much faster, more efficient, and just in general a better experience.
Do you like the new design?
Learn more and share your thoughts on our blog: https://zettlr.com/post/a-new-documentation-for-zettlr
📷 Late summer days. 🍦 by the lake.
Meet me by the Jimmy Dean’s breakfast sandwiches in the frozen food aisle.
Zotero just dropped their update from version 9 to 10 and I am once again in awe that you can just download this software for free and utilize almost every single feature on device or through a self-hosted server.
Announcing Zotero 10, with powerful new features for searching and managing your library, a major improvement to Read Aloud, and a new Reading Mode for PDFs
https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-10/
Seeing photos from the Historic American Buildings Survey makes me wonder what an exhibit of a suburban retail center combination Chipotle+Clearchoice Dental Implant might look like in 150+ years.
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 A historic black-and-white interior photograph (labeled NY-5418-F) depicting a densely packed traditional carpenter's workshop. A long, heavy wooden workbench sits beneath a large multi-pane window, covered in hand planes, chisels, wooden blocks, and hand tools. Dozens of hand saws, clamps, and various woodworking tools hang densely on the exposed timber walls.](https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2026/e9d4f6335a.jpg)
 A historic black-and-white photograph (labeled NY-5418-A) of a two-story wooden clapboard house with a large mature tree in the front yard. Overgrown vines climb parts of the exterior facade and an adjoining wooden shed on the left. A simple wooden picket fence borders the front of the property alongside a paved street.](https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2026/e974a1adab.jpg)
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 An architectural blueprint on graph paper labeled 1st Floor Plan from a Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS NY FN-203) record. The handwritten schematic details the floor layout of a historic structure, featuring annotated dimensions, a central forge, brick hearth, workbench placement, and rooms labeled Main House and South Parlor. Annotations note specific construction details like Seaweed insulation and structural timber posts.](https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2026/0648c46705.jpg)
Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.
Via Ian Leslie, a beautifully designed page on ordinary abundance.
This Fender CEO quote on AI and Music broke me a little bit:
Cole’s philosophy is that AI in music is nothing new. “I think AI has existed in music as long as there’s been recorded music,” he says. While the biggest barrier to playing guitar is the time it takes to learn the instrument, it’s the second barrier, writing songs, where he believes AI plays a part.
“I actually believe cover music has been sort of analog AI for a long time,” says Cole. Those that don’t yet have the skills to write their own songs can play the songs written by their favourite artists instead. “I listened a lot to REM, U2, The Smiths and The Cure, and at some point I got sick of just listening to them. I wanted to play it, so I learned to play guitar.”
🎩 Tip to @theverge podcast for surfacing this. I think a fundamental worldview divide between our techno[would be]-overlords, their enablers, and the rest of us is sincerely believing that a sufficiently complex computer chip or server running the appropriate protocols is fundamentally no different than an embodied human when it comes to consciousness. As if gestalt cognition is what defines human existence.
The five year old is starting to express occasional interest in the music of my youth and its always intriguing what sticks in terms of repeatability. She’s on a Deadmau5 kick right recently.
