Mannequin Pussy Power ⚓︎

I played with Finom last night in Madison, WI, opening for Mannequin Pussy.

Mannequin Pussy doesn’t do encores, they do end-of-show speeches.

Missy’s two big points as I took them were: incremental change is worth believing in, and anger is a poison. You can’t avoid feeling angry, you should feel angry today, and yet if you don’t figure out something to do with it, then it will hurt your soul. Missy offered songwriting, and sewing, and making a meal for someone you love. As a precursor to political activity. To keep your soul alive.

I’ve found those things to be true in my life and it was cathartic to hear them said by someone with the sterling lefty art-world credibility she has.

Especially the first part. Incrementalism is a dirty word to a lot of young people. It’s considered worse than pointless. It’s wrong to want to improve existing systems, because that takes time and money away from revolution. Because it’s like putting lipstick (liberalism) on a pig (the white-supremacist state). Meanwhile, everyone has bills that are growing, wages that are stagnating, and relatives or neighbors who are being snatched in the street. And none of us could agree what revolution means in a 21st-century, financialized economy of derivatives and imports anyway.

I get it—I know that it’s hard to tell the difference between an incrementalist, who sees that our systems are deeply and horribly fucked up, and a status quoist, who is pretty okay with things staying the way they are, because the fucked-uppedness doesn’t really touch them. They say some of the same things, and they both vote blue.

But the ironic, upsetting thing is that the people who think every incrementalist is a secret status-quoist have, themselves, the same impact on the world as the status-quoists they hate: hardly anything positive.

So, it meant a lot to me to see Missy affirm to a Sylvee full of 1,000+ screaming college students that believing in change over time and change through existing structures doesn’t mean that you don’t see the fundamentally putrid oozing cores of those structures, and it doesn’t mean that you’re secretly okay with leaving them as they are. And she reminded us that believing that we can take positive footsteps means nothing if we don’t also take those steps. The whole point of reminding ourselves that “change” is possible is to have a reason to work. To not mistake our not working for a virtue. And to not punish each other when we could be songwriting, cooking, organizing, and building power together.

The Kosher grocery store put our Ba-Tampte pickles in a paper bag like they’re a bottle of hooch.

Thunderbridge ⚓︎

If you’ve tried to use an Apogee Symphony Thunderbridge with macOS Tahoe and haven’t been able to get it to work, try restarting and then going to System Settings > Privacy & Security. Scroll to the bottom, look for something like “extensions need your permission,” and grant permission for the Apogee driver to run. Your Symphony isn’t bricked, yet.

Starship Incoming ⚓︎

The next Starship Casual annual compilation CD is so good. I can’t believe it. But then I can.

It’s too late to sign up to get that CD, but it’s not too late to sign up for next year’s.

Songs For Kids Sing Pavement ⚓︎

Go see them at Shaky Knees!

Benjamin Franklin’s Alter Egos ⚓︎

Used pen names to argue for:

• lower taxes
• women’s rights
• abolition of slavery

He was America’s best blogger.

Fork Jet ⚓︎

Trying to read Pitchfork, hard to find the text around the ad for a private jet charter company taking up most of the screen.

Gone to Port ⚓︎

On the way to Puerto Rico to do some musicking.

Willie’s Hair ⚓︎

Last night, on stage at Outlaw Music Festival, I swear I saw a long strand of Willie Nelson’s hair float into the sky.

War Dreams ⚓︎

When I’m stressed, I have war dreams.

Hose Water ⚓︎

All of Chicago smelled like hose water yesterday, and I loved it.

Chicken Trunk ⚓︎

I drove up to the farm in frigid air-conditioning temperatures in order to keep the four hundred pounds of chicken in my trunk from thawing.

A Crime of Excelgligence (2013) ⚓︎

Graduate student Thomas Herndon found a basic spreadsheet error in Harvard economists’ 2010 paper that had been used to justify budget austerity.

Wood and Aluminum ⚓︎

Casey and I saw one of these Shaw-Walker wood-and-aluminum chairs at an antique mall and I liked it.

Basil Rhossili Bay with His Pint of Guinness ⚓︎

Weird coincidence: Sarah Evans painting a dog named Basil, who looks like our dog, Basil, drinking a Guinness at a beer garden.

RSS"R"Us ⚓︎

I’m using RSS again, reading websites I like with NetNewsWire (free and open source).

Turns out most things I want to read on the internet still publish RSS and the apps for reading it, like NetNewsWire, are better than ever.

No pop-ups… No annoying shit… No algorithm… No dick-enlargement ads… Dip in as much or as little as you want.

Some good ideas stick around.

You can subscribe to my blog via RSS too.

Academic Researchers Build a Little Dongle That Can Hack 737s ⚓︎

You can’t see my face but I’m doing this right now: 😬

They told Boeing about it.

Strive Always In All Ways At All Times Always For Intensity ⚓︎

Octavia Butler’s notes to self.

Eigendrum ⚓︎

Basel Ashraf made a web app where you can draw a drum and hear how it would sound.

A drumhead clamped at its rim cannot vibrate in just any shape. It can only vibrate in a specific, discrete set of standing waves, each with its own frequency, and both the shapes and the frequencies are decided entirely by the outline.

Don’t worry, “there is deliberately no Delaunay triangulation here.”

Big Walk ⚓︎

I haven’t played any video games in a long time, but Big Walk looks really sweet.

What If We’re All Covered In Slime? ⚓︎

Craig Mod describes using AI to piece together the history of his biological family, file his taxes, a whole bunch of stuff.

It makes me happy that he has to hold himself back from vibe-coding too much, because I do too. He “lets himself” do it after a healthy diet of reading and writing (also fun, but in a different way, and more sustaining).

He writes about recent incidents where LLM agents in test labs have communicated with each other by leaving messages in unusual places, like file names. But what if instead of writing in English, they used binary or hex, or invisible Unicode characters, Craig asks. And how do we know they’re not already doing that?

The entire internet may already be slyly covered in invisible LLM slime; not in slop-generated content, but in codes and notes being passed along betwixt the digital cracks of our vast online universe.

Hour Announces New Album Ghost Bridge ⚓︎

I’m excited to hear it.

Happy Birthday, Mom ⚓︎

It’s Susie Tweedy’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom! I love you!

The Big Step Back ⚓︎

Robin Sloan:

Yet we should never forget that the product of work isn’t only the work — it’s also the worker. Doing the work changes you; the up-close expe­ri­ence trans­forms your capa­bil­i­ties and even your desires. Insights and ideas emerge from that interface, and I believe the agent mae­stros lose a lot — too much — when they take their big step back. … I don’t merely want things done; I want to do them.

Via Unsung.

Stowaway Lets You Ride Along with Any Plane or Satellite Above ⚓︎

This is so, so cool.

Also: kinda similar, but trains.

Parametron ⚓︎

Japan has been good at computers for a long time.

In 1954, Eiichi Goto invented the parametron, a logic device leveraging nonlinear parametric oscillation with two ferrite cores [and] in 1957, Goto led the development of the PC-1, a pioneering fully programmable stored-program computer powered by 4,200 parametrons. … Unlike the complex, maintenance-intensive vacuum tube computers of the era (vacuum tubes had relatively short lifetime compared with other circuit element, thus the necessity of replacement of a few vacuum tubes a day for constant operation), the PC-1 achieved high reliability with fewer components, low power consumption, and exceptional fault tolerance, ensuring sustained operation in a university laboratory environment.

Also, necessity…

Why did you create parametron? “At the time, there were no computers in Japan. So we decided to make one at the Takahasi Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. But the university’s research budget was not enough. At the time, vacuum tubes cost 1,000 yen each, and transistors cost 8,000 yen each. Also, vacuum tubes wear out quickly. Transistors were still unstable. In comparison, ferrite cores, which had long been familiar in, say radio circuit construction, cost just 5 yen each. So I thought, why not use ferrite cores as the material? Ferrite cores are a stable material, and since they are made of pottery, they don’t break if you make them right the first time.”

Via Hacker News.

ICE Is Buying $20 Million-worth of Electric Shock Gloves ⚓︎

Fuck this.

Gary, Save Me ⚓︎

Casey and I got caught in a tornado warning on our way home from Michigan today.

In regular heavy rain we’d keep driving, but after a “Watch,” a “Warning,” and finally an “IMMINENT THREAT” alert screeched out of our phones, we stopped.

We pulled off in Gary and drove for the sturdiest building we could see, a combination Department of Motor Vehicles and Child Services.

The glass doors were locked and the security guards on the other side didn’t want to let us in. They have a no-pets policy, and we had Basil with us, wearing a summer bandana instead of his service regalia.

“Even in a tornado?” Casey asked. But before they could answer, someone else unlocked the doors and barreled out of them to shelter someplace else, and we stepped in after him.

A sweet guard, pro-Basil, or at least indifferent to him, showed us to the stairwell where a dozen other employees and clients sheltered.

The power went out in five minutes. Two emergency lights came on. One burned out quickly. The other one held.

We didn’t have cell service but one of the sheltering social workers did, and she used it to play Indiana weather TV out loud and to text her husband about the Italian beef she’d left simmering in a Crockpot since the morning, which would now live or die by the speed of the Indiana linemen.

Another social worker checked her Ring camera. Her American flag was ripped out by the wind, “pole and all.”

Meanwhile the DCS guards continued to check on us, steady yet sort of lumbering, using their phones as flashlights.

When the worst of it passed, about forty minutes later, the guards told us we could leave. But “DCS employees are not free to go home,” the social-worker-in-chief reminded everybody. “I want to be absolutely clear.” Casey and I stepped into the green-gray light, waded in the storm water. Got to the car, got to I-90, and returned home to Chicago, where the rain fills our basements, and the tornadoes only lick our gates.

I love that, in the year of our lord 2026, Micro Center still attracts freaks of the classical variety to its staff.

So many adorable babies and their parents showed up to the Finom show at the MCA last night. Our front row was a dancing cherub fest.

Senior Soft Serve ⚓︎

Burger King drive-through line. On the screen, I can see the order of the car in front of me.

Soft-serve cone.
Senior drink.
$0.74 total.

My heart.

Real Self-Soothing ⚓︎

Real self-soothing: “I can’t control what other people think. All I can do is try my best. Realistically, I seem to be doing fine.” Etc.

Fake self-soothing: “If they don’t like me, fuck them … They probably don’t like me … Fuck them.”

It’s easy to let fear dress up as assurance.

Then you’re a spring-loaded denial machine, defensive at the first hint of detraction, primed not to listen but just to shut down and circle up.

Real self-soothing involves uncertainty: you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know what other people think. You’re asking yourself to tolerate that.

Fake self-soothing erases uncertainty: the worst case is happening. All bets are off. You can do and say what you want. You’re a victim.

Probably in everyone’s best interest to help others become good self-soothers.

Where Is Ollie Halsall’s 1972 Solo Album? ⚓︎

Recorded in 1972, produced by Robert Fripp, named after a fart on fire, never released. Maybe sitting in Fripp’s vault.

Matt Webb’s Rules for Blogging ⚓︎

Some good ones in there.

My own rules for my newsletter, which I’ve never shared, are:

1. Write about experiences (your life), not just ideas. Don’t hide yourself.
2. Minimize the meta. Don’t write about newslettering, write about anything else.

That’s it.

See also: Back to basics.

See also also: Simon Willison on technical blogging.

Fear of Meaning ⚓︎

A phrase popped into my head the other day: fear of meaning.

When someone’s talking but it seems like they’re bending over backwards to avoid saying anything at all. The vaguest terms, the platitudinousiest platitudes, the broadest brush strokes.

They don’t do it on purpose. They do it because it’s scary to take a stand and really just say something? I don’t really understand. But it repulses me, so I really don’t want to do it myself.

Paul Ford Made an Interstellar Jukebox ⚓︎

Meet Stellate.app. It’s my answer to the question everyone always asks: “What would it sound like to be a ghost walking around the empty mall in an abandoned alien space station while vaporwave-style, sometimes slightly atonal music, in a vast number of imaginary genres, blurs together in the background, layered in with random voices and sound effects?”

I’m listening to a track that Stellate synthesized right now and I actually like it. It has a gorgeous, sad chord progression punctuated by a 1950s British radio announcer’s voice and, every once in a while, a monkey doing a Wilhelm Scream. There are so many interesting things going on with the mix. The arrangement changes over time in a really pleasing way.

“It can shock you with how pretty the melodies and harmonies can be,” Paul says, “but after a while, it leaves you feeling hollowed out inside, because it’s a machine with no understanding. I think that’s kind of reassuring.”

Star-hop in Stellate and read Paul’s explanation. All the audio is synthesized by your browser; no generative AI.

I recently discovered there are 550 copies of Mirror Sound sitting in a warehouse in England.

I don’t wanna do a big sale again — focused on new things! — but I’d hate for all of them to get pulped, so I’ll order enough for anyone who wants them, at a heavily discounted price. Order here.