- Posted inBlog Posts Social blogging & group effortsIndieweb Carnival March 2026 - Museum Memories (Mar 14, 2026)
- Posted inBlog PostsThoughts following "The Colonization of Confidence" (Mar 14, 2026)
- Posted inBlog PostsFinancial news from the bleeding edge (Feb 6, 2026)
- Posted inBlog PostsOddly, this feels like an accomplishment (Nov 26, 2025)
- Posted inBlog PostsBlog Post (Nov 21, 2025)
- Posted inBlog PostsWelcome To My Blog Feature! (Nov 9, 2025)
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Indieweb Carnival March 2026 – Museum Memories
Once a month, someone in Indieweb hosts the "Indieweb carnival", a monthly theme which a bunch of bloggers all write about the same theme, and the links to posts are collected in a page together. This month's theme: Museum Memories click for info. Like many people, I have many fond memories of museums. Here are some recollections. He Really Is Not Spock When I was in about fourth grade, my school's front hall posted photos of various working people posing for portraits: cleaners, carpenters, etc. Mrs. Himmelstein, my art teacher, who let us play records in art class, told us they weren't photos of people... they were ultra-realistic sculptures by Duane Hanson, and if we liked them, there was a whole exhibit at the Whitney Museum. I guess my folks looked into it, and it turned out there was an Alexander Calder exhibit at the Whitney too... it was pretty much a perfect museum double-bill for an 8 year old. Hanson's hyper-realistic sculptures were uncanny. The museum had sprinkled them throughout the building: a tired-looking waitress leaning against a pole in the cafe, a security guard standing by the payphones. More than once my dad got me to go talk to one, thinking it was a person. ("Go ask that waitress where the bathrooms are.") At one point, we looked at one that had a crowd of people gathering around it, an old woman sitting crosslegged on the floor, reading a folded up newspaper. Suddenly, she exhaled, and laughed. She…
Thoughts following “The Colonization of Confidence”
Just read the piece "The Colonization of Confidence" and it reminded me of a few things. What's interesting is that there are strong parallels to things that have happened before. The most immediate thing that leapt to mind is the 8-page '80s Alan Moore comic book story "In Pictopia", which you can happily read in full at Forgotten Awesome, a response to the commercialization of comics, in which the residents of a seedy comic Metropolis full of superheroes and cartoon animals are one-by-one either removed or replaced by slicker versions of themselves, as an ominous dark industrial mass closes in on the horizon. The second is the work of someone you may not have heard of, anticonsumerist Rev. Billy (Wikipedia entry) of the Church of Stop Shopping. Billy's whole crusade—which I encourage you to check out for yourself, as I am a very poor messenger for his ideas—is that corporations like Starbucks and Disney are in the literal business of eradicating the messiness of local culture so they can replace it with a mass-produced, marketing-created, and focus-tested pseudo-culture they can sell more easily and with lower friction. One memory that stands out for me, a few years after I met Billy, is watching a Disney-made TV show in which the theme is that classic fairy tales characters come to life... and, tellingly, one of what they called "fairy tale" characters was Disney's private intellectual property Jiminy Cricket.
Financial news from the bleeding edge
For those curious about how grisly the stock market has been lately, yesterday I got this news alert popup on a stock charting website I follow.
Blog Post
I hate to complain, but, I dunno, just very lately, I'm feeling something I haven't felt in a solid 4 decades: I'm bored. I'm telling you, that hasn't happened since I was 17, and now I'm 56 or 57 or something. I literally forgot all about boredom for 40 years. And now, I'm like, "Why is life like... what is it? Cardboard? Wait... it's boredom! Holy cow, I forgot about that!" Seriously. This is weird. Like, I'm suddenly able to understand why people get married and get jobs and things like that. It must be to avoid feeling like this. Like, ok, what do I do, I've already played my lyre, my saxophone, and my guitar twice today, my website is up to date, I'm too hyper to read, what do I do now? Hey, maybe I should find a girlfriend and get married!" The whole picture suddenly makes sense in a way it never did before. I think I liked it better when it didn't.
Spider-Man — Homecoming
It's a Marvel superhero movie.That generally says it all, in my experience. Somehow these big Marvel superhero movies remind me of Michael Jackson's adult career: get a bunch of big-name luminaries together with a big budget to expertly craft something that screams "blockbuster", and yet still, somehow, manages to be less than the sum of its parts—the writing just isn't exceptional, it's formula dressed up with big names and glitzy production. . And everybody for some reason thinks it's great, except me. Basically watchable, for a special-effects superhero action blockbuster. But for as much talent was involved in making this movie, that's a crime.
Welcome To My Blog Feature!
This post is my very first "blog only" post on this site. This site was originally intended as a static showcase of my creative art, but for while now I've considered adding more social-media-like features to the site. So now, I've added a Blog Feed page under the Home menu, presenting the site in more of a blog format. This will include all articles from newest to oldest, much like the /Latest slashpage and newest articles readout at the bottom of the home page, but also may include what I've called "blog posts", brief or timely posts not deserving to be permanently included in this sites collection of articles. This Blog Feed page is the only place those blog posts will appear. This will enable me to begin to include more social features on the site, probably eventually including webmentions, which will allow this site to interact and engage in conversation with developers and users of other personal sites across the web. It will also be a place I can make "smaller" posts, communications outside of the site's main purpose of showcasing creative works.
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