Nic Babarskis

Michigan State University had a campus wide power outage from Saturday afternoon through the remainder of the weekend. Electricity has been restored but the steam system that handles hot water and HVAC for much of campus remains disabled. It’s a bracing reminder that we take a lot of (literally) submerged infrastructure for granted till it fails.

From the university webpage with info on the restoration work:

The T.B. Simon Power Plant converts energy from natural gas into steam and electricity, which is used for building functions such as heating and cooling. Steam for use in HVAC and electric power are transmitted through a steam distribution network, which connects to more than 100 MSU buildings.

As a consequence of the extended outage, condensation built up in the steam distribution system, affecting the ability to deliver hot water to campus. Roughly 80% of the square footage of buildings on MSU’s campus rely on steam for hot water, including residence halls and dining facilities.

Worth noting briefly that it’s PFAS awareness week here in Michigan.

📷 It’s gettin wet out there.

Due to a @josiahhawthorne.bsky.social post I have to once again update my incredibly niche meme.

Guide to wildflowers from the Historical Book Images site:

I made an extremely niche meme about The Christian Post publishing an opinion piece condemning Christian Nationalism. Worth noting this was the default position of the politics editor they cancelled half a decade ago.

A Grain.Social find I like

Perusing the Library of Congress’s September 11 research guide this morning.

No Man’s Sky releasing yet another feature rich FREE update. Good god, will it ever end?

YouTube Video

The digital corner of evangelical Protestantism I occupy has been contending with a prominent apologists Trinitarian theological errors and how best to describe the Doctrine’s essence, so far this has been my favorite primer on the topic.

📷 Enjoying the late summer bloom at the MSU Botanical Gardens.

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.

Daniel Kolitz:

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:

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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:

YouTube Video

Strong Towns:

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

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— McSweeney's ([@mcsweeneys.net](http://mcsweeneys.net)) August 27, 2026 at 11:21 AM

🍎🍏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.

From NYT’s Parton obituary:

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?