I Made a Coffee Sandwich

...I used to speculate about what a “coffee sandwich” would consist of every time we went past the place. It took may years but I decided this month to bring some closure to this idle speculation. I based my prompt on the dessert sandwiches I ate on our recent trip to Japan. Typically, those sandwiches consist of a fruit and whipped cream filling served on fluffy Japanese milk bread called Hokkaido (北海道). I guess I could have invented a savory coffe...

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Escaping the AI Vampire Castle

...simultaneously generate and read this textual nonsense leaving us all more time to garden, handcraft chairs and go for long walks. But that’s not, of course, the way things will work out. AI will likely just put already vulnerable people out of work. As for predictions of an AI apocalypse, what I fear more is a grinding idiocy. I’m really getting fatigued with seeing AI generated images that are just a kind of summary of the most uninteresting “il...

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When Mushrooms Attack

...ngerous, AI generated mushroom foraging books, this seems like the perfect time for this blog to point towards the Japanese kid’s show Ultraman Taro, specifically episode 31, “Danger! The Poisonous Mushroom of Lies”. The episode opens with a giant, ambulatory mushroom, named Mushra, destroying a Japanese city. Ultraman Taro, a sort of size-shifting superhero, defeats the monster but not without a release of spores. After the battle the main protag...

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Weekend Linkages: A Geodesic Thanksgiving

...It’s time again for my most cherished #Thanksgiving tradition: Revisiting the time millions of kids had to witness Barney the Dinosaur collapse to the ground and get stabbed to death by cops during the 1997 Macys Parade.💫 pic.twitter.com/doSv6xWMBW — Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan) November 25, 2021 A cardboard geodesic dome for your cat The true costs of driving Fall flowers: Which marigold is right for you?...

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Conspirituality

...any members of the “wellness” community. This is especially worrisome at a time when we need people to get vaccinated to stop this horrible pandemic. Here in Los Angeles there’s been so many Covid deaths that they’ve suspended air quality rules so they can deal with the cremation backlog. But do you lead people out of conspiratorial, anti-vax movements? Successful rhetoric, in my opinion, doesn’t involve belittling people or telling them they’re s...

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