I am not:
There's probably more, I'll update as I figure it out.
This site allows you to get the content of posts and pages by adding either /embed/ or ?embed to the URL, optionally including the post title, author, and/or tags.
This was inspired by a discussion in an Indieweb Homebrew Website Club Europe/London online meetup. I want to say shadowy web standards advocate Tantek Çelik brought it up, so, as these things tend to happen, I coded it up here while we were talking. It's discussed on Indieweb's wiki at https://indieweb.org/embed.
What do you mean, 'Embed'?Well, for instance, this post's permalink is https://michaelkupietz.com/?p=10887. You can see just the text of this post's content, without the sidebar and menus and other web page "furniture", at https://michaelkupietz.com/embed/?p=10887 or https://michaelkupietz.com/embed/?p=10887&embed, so you can theoretically include this page's content on your own site (long as you…
In college, I once won an ice cream flavor naming contest with "Cannibal Crunch Surprise".
I have solved a Rubik's cube in 40 seconds. I solve it in under 60 seconds pretty consistently.
Enough people have seen me play guitar on youtube to sell out a 2-week engagement at Madison Square Garden.
I have been 14 miles away from the nearest paved road. I walked there.
The longest straight stretch I have ever lived solely on what I could carry on my back, including all food, shelter, and supplies, was 3 weeks.
The longest straight stretch of nights I ever slept outdoors in a tent was 3 months.
The longest straight stretch of nights I ever lived on someone else's couch was 6 months.
The longest straight stretch I have ever been without a fixed address or direct phone number was 7 years.
I…
An incomplete list of my favorites of various sorts of things.
Movies Musicians Popular:
This is a true thing that happened to me. And better, it happened to me and a friend together, so there's a corroborating witness.
Back in high school, me and my friends Chris, whom I call Gene, and Scharf made plans to hang out at Gene's house after school. Gene and I both had 9th period free, so we met at the beginning of 9th period in the SWAS room. Scharf had said he'd meet us there at the end of 9th period, the last period of the day.
I was in an alternative education program, School Within A School, in high school. It was in a big room with couches instead of desks, no grades, etc., it's a whole other story. But SWAS met for the first few periods of the day, and after that, the SWAS room, full of couches, was a…
Many years ago, around the turn of the millennium, as I was simultaneously just breaking into and away from the San Francisco underground art scene, some folks I used to run with said elusive phantom stranger John Law had called for a bunch of us to meet up for mysterious purposes, as he was wont to do.
Hopping into some cars that night, we caravaned out along the twisty road into the Marin Headlands, parking some distance from Hawk Hill and walking there under cover of night. Once we arrived at the observation platform on top of the hill, someone produced a shovel and began to dig in the dirt, down a foot or two until hitting a rock. We pulled the rock out, and, to my surprise, underneath was an overturned 5-gallon bucket. We pulled out the bucket, and under that, to my…
Once, I was a man like most others—a worldly man, seduced and jaded by material things. These are some of those things.
Musical Instruments GuitarsBe aware, as a Mac user, sometimes I am stuck with what software is available. Inclusion in this list doesn't mean I recommend it, it just means it is the least bad of all the available alternatives.
Slashpages are common website pages, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /contact, /about, or /uses, usually giving basic factual information about the site or the individual behind it. They are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb, a loose organization of web site owners and developers dedicated to cultivating independently owned, interoperable web sites and services, free of the data silos and walled gardens of the big, corporate-owned sites and technologies. Slashpages.net lists a bunch of common slashpages.
I will tell you, as I am in the process of gradually getting slashpages set up, some of them replace pages I already had up. I haven't reconciled this yet so there's some duplicate content.
Here's the current list of slashpages on this site:
These are my musical skills, roughly in descending order of competency:
Guitar (Acoustic & Electric, flat-picked & finger-picked)
Keyboards (Electronic, Piano, Organ)
Recorder & Chalumeau (Garkleit, Sopranino, Soprano, Alto, Tenor)
Bass (Electric)
Vocals
Saxophone
Clarinet
Hand drums
Lyre (24 string)
Harmonica
The secret is out!
I'm some sorta guy, I have no fucking idea what, at this point. Actually nowadays I feel more like a bug than a person—a specimen, not an individual. I'm good with it, though. My burrow is cozy. I am a zen insect.
Right now, the site feed is live at feed://michaelkupietz.com/feed. It doesn't validate properly—I'm working on that—but it does work in my FreshRSS reader, so it should be ok.
Alternatively you can see the most recent site updates listed in the browser on /changes.
h-feedI've got this site's front page "hero" (featured posts) section and all archive pages—that's all pages listing articles on this site by any kind of category, tag, or author name (of which there's only me) tagged with the more modern h-feed microformat for reading in h-feed readers (such as, for example, the previewer at https://monocle.p3k.io/preview). This is a microformat (a set of codes added to a web page) recommended by the Indieweb folks that allows modern feed readers to directly read your web pages…
While I'm still transitioning to using default slashpages, this is just a mirror of info on my main Bio & Contact Info page.
If you have any questions or concerns, I'm absolutely here to help. To get in touch, come to San Francisco and walk down each street shouting my name.
Here's a map:
Kidding.
Your best bet to reach me about my creative work or issues about this site is email.
If you email me: As an anti-spam measure, you're going to have to make sure your subject contains "email re website", or my mail filters will assume you're a spambot and trash it without me seeing it. Also…
Primarily as an interim measure as I adapt my site to using slashpages, this page largely repeats things you can find written about at greater length and in a way less exhausted state elsewhere on the site's About menu.
This site runs at home.
This is served by Wordpress running on a Debian 12 VM running in VMware on a 2012 Mac mini in my living room (then routed for protection through some things I won't name and then, out on the internet, some reverse proxies and CDNs and caches and other stuff. But you know that because you already ran a traceroute. I saw you coming.)
The theme is an extremely customized version of an obsolete, apparently abandoned wordpress theme called Sinatra that looked good when I started but I have since discovered was written really inefficiently. I've changed huge chunks of…
I've never eaten at Chipotle, so I don't really know. People actually eat at that place?
I guess pick me up some nachos. With meat. Make sure there's jalapeños. Hard to go wrong with that.
My everyday carries are pretty simple:
1. Keys, chained to my belt so I can't lose them.
2. Cellphone, currently 1st generation iPhone SE as of this writing.
3. ID & similar wallet stuff, carried loose in a pocket so I can't lose them all at once.
I'm a pretty simple guy.
Optional - things I frequently carry but not always:
4. Pen knife (when traveling/camping, often a pen knife and utility knife... different tools for different uses.)
5. Rubik's cube or similar twisty puzzle.
6. USB phone charger and USB cable.
7. Tobacco pipe & pouch of tobacco, as an aid in self-destruction, but not as bad a one as I used to use.
Thrilling, huh.
Let's make this easy. Here's my OPML file from my RSS reader.
Some links or feeds may be obsolete. Inclusion in this list does not imply endorsement, just some sort of possibly perverse interest.
Download OPML OPML HTML Links"La flauta es dulce": recorder is sweet » Feed: RSS Url web page
Abnormal Returns: RSS Url web page - Forecast-free since 2005
A Druid Way: RSS Url web page
AdventuresInCapitalism | Small Companies–Big Upside: RSS Url web page - Small Companies--Big Upside
AI Alignment: RSS Url web page - Aligning AI systems with human interests. - Medium
Alice Bradley — Finslippy: RSS Url web page
All Articles on Seeking Alpha: RSS Url web page - © seekingalpha.com. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed…
Note: This page is a mirror of my about/contact page at a href="https://michaelkupietz.com/?p=9103">https://michaelkupietz.com/?p=9103, just for consistency with the other slashpages. You should probably just read it there.
Back before I first became the global success I am today, I began looking into investing. Among the things you can't miss when you enter that world looking to learn is the endless promotions from a company called The Motley Fool, advertising their subscription service, in which they give you a stock pick or two a month, and which they trumpet as having a stellar average return, far in excess of the market average and most common benchmarks like the S&P.
Welllllll there's just one thing. I noticed one word...
'Average'A lot of dishonest people try to slide things by others, in life in general, by showing great "averages", because "averages" are easily inflated by rare outliers.
For instance, consider this series of stock returns of hypothetical investments:
Investment 1: -2% return
Investment 2: -1.1% return
Investment 3: 0.7% return
Investment 4: 58% return
Some assorted reminscences of characters I occasionally run across in my day.
Working on a featured image for my writeup on How the Section 174 Tax Code Changes Caused a White-Collar Job Crash, I tried to create an artistic representation of tech businesses being crushed under tax code changes. Along the way, I generated some striking images that didn't quite fit what I wanted for the post, but which I nonetheless liked enough to tuck away in this gallery of leftovers. Here's the also-ran images for that article.
Here we have a interesting relic of how the creative process can mess with you.
My perpetually unfinished magnum opus "Five Themes In Uncertain Times" has been through a lot of variations over the years I've been tinkering with it.
Throughout that, I've always kept coming back to this original demo, from before I really had more than a vague idea of what I wanted it to be. This was my first experiment with the serialist ideas that album was built on, already at this early stage very similar in fundamental composition to the current forms of "After Work, The Metronomes Unwind" and "The Cadavers' Pavane" on the present version of the album, but much less orchestrated.
In some ways, the minimalist simplicity of these early versions works for me in a way my later attempts at fuller orchestration didn't. Somehow, the atmosphere holds up as…
Over the past few years I accumulated a range of inexpensive but beautiful-sounding equipment: a '94 Standard Stratocaster, both Xtomp and Ampero modeling effects pedals from Hotone, and a Fender Champion 20 modeling amp, the latter three of which, as digital modeling hardware containing hundreds of software models emulating vintage analog signal processors, amps, and speaker cabinets, enable the budget guitarist to achieve a range of guitar sounds and timbres previously requiring equipment costing thousands of dollars.
Over time, and in an effort to revive my once-popular GuitaristInProgress Youtube channel, I began occasionally posting videos of my various efforts to wring maximum guitar tone from a setup that cost me, including everything, in total about $800. While I'm pretty far behind in posting, I still update it occasionally.
Here, for you tone aficionados, are what I've posted to date.
Mostly sticking this placeholder into the "works in progress" section to remind me to pull all my recipies together and work on my cookbook.
At a certain point in my bachelorhood, I realized I was subsisting, in my home-cooked meals, on almost the same 5 ingredients. Tough to recall at this late date what those ingredients were... I think there was tuna fish in there, mayonnaise, ramen, I can't remember the other two. I had this idea at the time that it would be fun to put together a bachelor's cookbook of all the different things I made out of those few ingredients.
Over time my culinary palette grew, horizontally if not in terms of sophistication, but the idea never left me. Now there's an air fryer on my counter (or, as I call it, the "meat microwave"), probably more than 5 things I use regularly on my spice shelf…
Painted faces, paintings of faces — an exploration of fantastic portraits and fantastic art. (Titled with apologies to the shade of David Bowie.)
This website address is: https://michaelkupietz.com. It is the showcase website for creative works by artist and technologist Mike Kupietz, the owner and author of this site, hereinafter referred to as "Mike".
I. Mike's Commitment To Your Privacy And Right Not To Be Abused For Commercial PurposesThis site is noncommercial and intended 1.) primarily for Mike's entertainment; and 2.) secondarily for yours. No commercial use of your identifying information or resources is ever knowingly made by Mike. Those information and resources are never knowingly shared with others by Mike, except as necessary to resolve technical issues hindering the proper functioning of this site.
II. Information About Site Functions Coded By Mike.Much of this site runs on code personally authored or audited by Mike. The guarantees in this section II pertain to that code.
What Information About You Mike's Own Authored Code Collects…
Just some photos from my cross-country vacation.
Funny how different vacation photos sometimes are from how you remember things being. Guess I should have used a camera instead of an AI.
Still, some of them really are surprisingly accurate to how things really were.
Michael Kupietz's obsession with the unknown began on a moonless night in 1952, when as a ten-year-old boy in rural Montana, he witnessed what he would later describe as "a dance of lights that defied every law of physics." This experience, combined with his discovery of his grandfather's extensive collection of astronomical observations and unexplained phenomena reports, set him on a path that would eventually revolutionize the field of extraterrestrial research.
Growing up in proximity to several military installations, young Kupietz developed a keen interest in distinguishing conventional aircraft from more unusual aerial phenomena. His mother, a librarian, encouraged his methodical approach to research, while his father, a meteorologist, taught him the importance of eliminating natural atmospheric explanations before considering more exotic possibilities.
After earning degrees in physics and atmospheric sciences from MIT in 1964, Kupietz pioneered the use of multiple-sensor arrays for tracking unexplained aerial phenomena. His innovation lay…
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