Engrossing short-form video documentary on the Phoenix fire department’s efforts to implement new heat related life-saving interventions:
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.
Omg, @flotisserie you should absolutely turn this into a @micro.blog plugin because I would love to use it, but have neither the time nor technical skill to do it myself!
Computah: Make it a link: flotisserie.micro.blog
The judges aren’t contending that state voting rolls can be inaccurate, nor are they arguing that the DOJ isn’t a key player in enforcing federal election laws. But they are saying that the DOJ does not have the authority to compel states to hand over protected voter information that the states themselves created…
…Hidden beneath the DOJ’s losing streak is an important reminder about federalism, especially when it comes to elections in the US. Federal elections are purposefully decentralized. State and local governments are tasked with carrying them out in adherence to the federal protections and requirements Congress has deemed necessary. As we’ve seen, it can be a messy arrangement, but one that protects all of us from a federal government — and president — who wants to take over the process.
I don’t know what else to say about this other than this video is basically just thumbing through my CD carrying case circa 2008.
In a world where so much of the retail reviews genre are AI slop or optimized for algorithms you can rely on Brains Report to be a human driven resource for making good home related purchases (I also think its great that they are Lansing, MI based):
You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy.
