MEETING WITH TRUMP IN JUST DAYS! Russia in rage strikes Odesa and Mykolaiv: ports in flames!: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/26/meeting-with-trump-in-just.html
View public domain films for free. No ads, no login, no algorithms, just movies. Maintained by wikimedia folks.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/27/wikiflix-is-like-netflix-for-public-domain-films-with-no-ads-n…
Channeling Revenant Feelings (Eagle Creek, Oregon, 2017)
(Hoping my friends in the US are doing everything in their power to help protect these sacred wilderness places from the onslaught of out of control greed...)
#FootpathFriday #ForestFriday
I don't think I'm ever going to enjoy gifts.
I can get why people would give them to children. After all, children don't have their own budget. However, I'm talking about occasional gifts, not a new toy every second week, because "we must outcompete the other grandparents". But to adults?
Once I've heard that you should gift people with what they won't buy themselves. Well, that's won't work for me. I'm a minimalist. If I don't need something, I don't want to have it. Unnecessary junk is only emotional burden to me.
I can get why you'd enjoy something handmade. But something people bought? If I need something, I can buy it myself, when I need it. And I definitely don't need people to prove to me that they never cared to learn who I am, and just buy whatever they like or whatever is "fashionable"; which usually means exactly the opposite of what I'd prefer (i.e. something minimalistic). Or even worse, I don't need people manipulating me through gifts.
Sweets? Besides my diabetes, I don't really enjoy expensive shit that people generally buy because it's what's advertised. For the money they waste on it, I'd buy three times as much sweets I'd actually enjoy.
Gift cards? Oh yes, "you aren't supposed to give money, so let's just give the equivalent of money that's actually worth less than money". Actual money? And here we reach the true nonsense; we exchange the same amount of money, so it's just pointless gesture. Unless one of us gives less money…
What I'd really like, as a gift? Maybe that people would finally bother accepting me as who I am. The absolute minimum of caring that I hate consumerism, and not fueling it "for me".
#AntiCapitalism #minimalism #ActuallyAutistic
This was written by an old friend and I found it pretty packed with good info. It’s also an example of using NotebookLM for research and content development. I found this inspiring enough to give it a try. I’ve found that it is a “Centaur" enabling tech that helps one to create on their own the overall content and leaving details to the NotebookLM tooling.
——
SLOs Can’t Catch a Black Swan: A Classification Framework for Thinking About Incidents -Geoff White
"Your SLOs can be green, and your systems can still be falling over. That doesn’t mean SLOs are broken. It means they were never designed to describe every class of risk we encounter in complex systems.
I’ve released version 1.0 of SLOs Can’t Catch a Black Swan as an open, living framework hosted on GitHub.
This is not a book you read once, and it’s not something you consult in the middle of an outage. It’s a way to think more clearly about incidents—across the incident lifecycle.”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/slos-cant-catch-black-swan-classification-framework-thinking-white-ybc0c/?trackingId=ShCzMMVCQTChcTi8xT19tg==
An extremely simple syllogism, for which the evidence is ample and has been easily available for over a decade:
ICE : white people in Minneapolis ::
regular police : Black people everywhere in America
If you're saying "Abolish ICE" right now (as you should be) but you're hesitant to say "Abolish the police" then you're okay with the brutality as long as it's reinforcing the racial hierarchy, and that's not a good look.
I understand that "Abolish the police" is a scary thing to think about if *your* experience has been that they keep you safe, but recognize how much of that is myth vs reality, e.g. have you ever personally had a positive interaction with police, or do those all happen in stories? Also, even if they do keep you safe, is it worth it if the cost is brutality to the marginalized? (No, it's not.)
At minimum we can see the following behaviors on both sides of the syllogism:
- retaliation for legally "protected" defiance or even just observation
- random killings, with mostly-nonexistent repercussions for the officers involved
- regular widespread harassment & surveillance
-more that I don't have time to list right now. Feel free to reply with your own examples.
#AbolishICE #AbolishThePolice
Urban Demons VII 👻
城市鬼魂 VII 👻
📷 Zeiss IKON Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Ilford HP5 400 Plus, expired 1993
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite
Followerpower: I want a commandline tool that can do the following: take an SVG file input and produce a square-sized SVG output with the input centered and filled with transparency? I.e., let's say input is 50x100, output would be 100x100 with the input's content shifted 25px to the right.
Sean McVay 'pretty numb' following Rams' NFC title game loss to Seahawks: 'We had our chances' https://www.nfl.com/news/sean-mcvay-pretty-numb-following-rams-nfc-title-game-loss-to-seahawks-we-had-our-chances
Just finished round 1 of #Thanksgiving cooking.
I have extremely mixed feelings these days about a holiday founded on genocide (seriously, official Thanksgiving #1 was "hooray we killed these natives, let's celebrate" which is deeply ironic/horrific given that the whitewashed origin story also did happen years earlier). But I'm a big fan of cooking and feasting, so that's what I focus on.
I'm vegetarian so no turkey.
I made "chiraji sushi" in my heavily bastardized personal style, as well as vegetarian stuffing. Both were pretty successful, although I truly regret forgetting to put nuts in the stuffing. I ended up using "smoky chipotle" flavor "better than bouillon" for the stuffing soup base, which pairs surprisingly well with the chopped persimmons. I tried doing microwave -> pan fry -> bake for the potatoes and carrots, and while they turned out good, they weren't as amazing as I'd hoped for.
The sushi (with stir-fried carrots, onions, mushrooms, and peas, plus fried tofu chunks and fresh cucumber and canned corn) turned out excellent.
Now I just need to decide what to have thirds of.