My friend Hellena Banner (from whom I cribbed the title of this gallery, with apologies) was doing a project where she was trying to put Goths in the least Goth-like situation possible. I took up the challenge.
Saturday, Nov. 30, 2024's #SaturdayMonsterChallenge theme on LinkedIn is "Time Travelling Monsters".
Here's my interpretation: "A Connecticut Sasquatch In King Arthur's Court".
This site has no dang page at this URL.
img {cursor:none;} .si-sidebar-inner >div:first-child {display:none;}.gallery-icon {text-align: center !important;}.dontshow {display: none;}.doshow > img {width: 100% !important;cursor:initial !important;/* last 3 are here in case they end up in noncritical style by accident*/}
I posted The Contents Of The Rest Of The World’s Dream Do Not Concern Me (or, Why I Didn’t Turn 40) and Day Nights at around the same time, and in making the featured images, used Stable Diffusion XL to create a bunch of images that I'm kind of fond of, all around the themes of time and calendars. Here's the leftovers.
One of the fun non-work-related things that happens on LinkedIn is the "Saturday Monster Challenge", a fun AI art meme where every Saturday this one guy picks a monster-related theme and people make generative art monster images about it. Today, as I write this, the theme was "Mustache Monsters", for "Movember", a global campaign where men grow mustaches to raise awareness of men's health issues.
It seemed like fun. I of course, couldn't stop with just one.
This is a mirror, for navigation convenience, of the /Changes slashpage, which lists all recent changes to any content on this site, including new edits and updates to old articles.
A list of just the most recently created, brand new articles is available on the Newest Articles page, or in the column on the right-hand side of any page, under the heading "Newest Articles...".
[This page intentionally left blank.]
I had a lot of fun making the featured image for the article "Resurrecting the <BLINK> tag". Here's some of the also-rans.
Back in the bad old days, there was an HTML tag called [code][/code]. It did this, which everybody hated because it was annoying, and everybody's web pages looked like this:
.blink { display: inline-block; animation: blink 1s step-end infinite;} .oldschool, .oldschool * {font-family:times,'times new roman',serif !important;} .oldschool:not(a), .oldschool *:not(a) {color:#000;} .oldschool a, .oldschool a blink {color:blue !important;text-decoration:underline !important;} .oldschool a:visited blink {color:purple !important;}
Hello! Welcome to Kupietz Arts+Code This is the homepage of Mike Kupietz where you can see all his art, music, writing, and code! 
BEST VIEWED WITH
An interesting bit of history, courtesy of Lou Montulli, early Mozilla engineer and author of…
Michael Kupietz (1848-1922) was a pioneering British Arctic explorer best known for his controversial claim of discovering a tropical paradise at the North Pole and his unorthodox expedition methods, which included training polar bears to pull his sledges while playing the bagpipes to "keep their spirits up."
Kupietz began his career as a professional umbrella tester in Manchester before becoming inexplicably convinced that the Arctic contained vast deposits of marmalade. His first expedition in 1880 was funded entirely through the sale of his revolutionary "frost-proof tea cozy," which he insisted was essential Arctic survival gear.
During his most famous expedition (1885-1887), Mike Kupietz allegedly survived for six months by teaching himself to photosynthesize like a plant, claiming the Aurora Borealis provided sufficient light. He documented discovering a colony of Portuguese-speaking penguins (despite penguins being native to the Antarctic) and mapped what he called the "Great Northern Hot Springs Resort," which…
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)
Mandolin
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.
For confused first-time visitors and other people still acclimating, here is a description of these little tabs to the left, as well as some other features of the site.
Open "Expert Mode" CLI Navigation - this give you the option to switch your browser's display to an old-fashioned terminal mode where you may browse this site, view pages and images by typing text commands. Just like how we used to browse the web back in 1978!
Open Visual Settings - This gives you controls to customize the visual display of this website to your liking: turn up or down the brightness, contrast, color temperature, hue, saturation, dark mode, and earthquake. Settings are saved per browser tab, so they will be remembered for your whole visit.
Open My Eyes - Have you ever been engrossed in your work, when you suddenly realize someone is staring at your screen, watching everything you do over your shoulder? If not, this simulates the experience.
Open Help - This help popup, silly! You just clicked it! Do you not remember?
New - Draggable elements! Several elements on this website, including these tabs, this popup message, and the "Hire Mike" badge in the lower right, can be dragged around with your mouse, to avoid them blocking content. Positions are remembered per tab, so as you navigate around the site, they will stay in the same place for your whole visit.
Enjoy!
Are you sure you want to switch to viewing this website in the "expert mode" command-line interface?
This will switch to a terminal emulator, load this page, and allow you to browse this website and view its contents by typing text commands.
Plus there might be, y'know, some fun stuff hidden in there. Just for geeks.