function toggleAll() {isOpen = document.body.querySelector('.entry-content details').hasAttribute('open');document.body.querySelectorAll('.entry-content details').forEach((e) => {(isOpen)?e.removeAttribute('open'):e.setAttribute('open' ,true);});}Toggle all open/closed
In the Nov. 10, 1988 edition of Bard College school newspaper "The Bardian", for whom I occasionally wrote as a cub reporter, the Campus News section was led by my groundbreaking first full-length investigative feature article, a probe into reports of campus supernatural sightings of the ghost of late king of rock and roll Elvis Presley.
ELVIS IS EVERYWHERE
by Michael Kupietz
Campus News - The Bardian, November 10, 1988
The ghost of Elvis Presley has recently been reported to be wandering the roads and buildings of the main campus of Bard, singing songs and stealing food.
It is speculated that Elvis has been attracted to our campus by the plans to name the trailer campground by Cruger village "Little Graceland", and the individual trailers "Elvis", "Priscilla", and "Lisa Marie".
Several students, security guards and maintenance people have reported seeing…
WordPress, the software this site runs on, works by allowing authors to enter web page content (sometimes officially called 'posts', as in a blog post, and which I often colloquially on this site refer to as an 'article') which it then formats nicely to display in web viewers. When you enter a post, it lets you specify a bunch of other information pertaining to it: category, some additional tags, a custom summary to show search engines, etc. Among the things it allows you to specify is a 'featured image', or 'thumbnail', an image representing that post.
You see featured images all over the site: in the backgrounds of individual pages, as tiny squares next to the menu entry for a page in the menus up top, on the "Related Posts" entries at the bottom of a lot of pages, or in…
I wonder how many of even my guitarist friends will appreciate the above photo. Maybe some of you Seattle musicians, or Ventures fans. I found a set of vintage Mosrite guitar picks on Ebay, which isn't that hard, but, I found a set including the white one, which is ridiculous.
For those not in the know, the Mosrite/Bakersfield (same pick, different branding in different decades) white .74mm guitar pick is the best guitar pick ever made, and extremely difficult to find anymore. Mosrite/Bakersfield picks were kept alive by solitary enthusiasts for 30 years because there was no substitute, selling the tooling to one another and hawking them via mail and to local guitar shops, until, in 1997, Jim Dunlop purchased the brand just to put it out of business.
I was jamming at…
I'll tell you about Texas. Back in '95, me and my friend Haley went down to his Dad's timeshare in Port Aransas, Texas, a little beach resort town about 45 minutes south of Corpus Christi, for a week of sportfishing on the gulf. So, the first night in town, we go out on the town, hit a bunch of bars. We come to this one bar, where they tell us they haven't got their liquor license yet, so, by some strange twist of Texan logic, all drinks cost $2.
So we go and have a drink. And behind the bar, there's this girl, it's not politically correct but I can only describe this girl as a "Texas honey"—pretty, curly blond hair, cowboy hat. And we're there a few minutes, and this older guy starts hassling us, making drunken accusations, saying we're with the liquor board or something, and the only…
May 28, 2007
On May 27, Christopher Hume's parents met up with my friends Dan and Wacks at Bard College, and they went down to the on-campus waterfalls on the Sawkill Creek, where Chris and I had spent so much time back in school, to scatter Chris's ashes. I was going to go but decided at the last minute not to, because I was too angry at Chris's family, for reasons I won't go into here.
My phone rang at about 9:30 that morning, and all I heard was a burst of static for a few seconds.
Later on Wacks & Dan called me from the falls. After the ceremony they had gone to the beverage distributor where we had bought so many sixes of Genesee Cream Ale way back then, bought a six of Genesee Cream Ale, brought it back to the falls to drink…
Originally posted on my old site. I'd have called this "New York After Dark", but the souvlaki guy story happened in the middle of the afternoon.
Back in the '80s & early '90s New York City was much different than it is now. Filthy, violent, and the meat packing district was a not a place you went after dark. I used to jot down my day-to-day experiences there. I truthfully didn't realize, until I collected a few of them together on this page, how, uh, bad it was. (And I'll tell you what, these are the milder stories that are fit for public consumption and won't scare my mom if she reads this site. Take me out for a beer sometime and I'll tell you some real stories.)
Looking out for the homelessAfter a night of shooting on a small movie I was doing sound…
This was originally posted on my old website, Life In A Mikeycosm.
Before you read this, I should warn you. This story contains one of the grossest things I've ever heard. By the end of the story, things improve and it winds up as one of the funniest things that has ever happened to me... but if you're at all sqeamish, if you're the sort of person who just can't watch some of David Cronenberg's best movies, you really might want to skip this one.
This is all true. I swear to you. This has not been exaggerated or distorted for the sake of a good narrative... no embellishment could supersede the actual events. Although, one change I made is to divide what happened into three acts, for narrative purposes. It didn't happen that way originally, it was just one thing and then another, one long…
I gotta do something about them day nights.
I was just walking home from the store, bopping down the street at 11 PM, a time that I grew up believing was a sensible time to be in bed. 1 AM used to be alien terrain, exotic, strange. 2 AM—well, that might as well have been a million o'clock. It was like the furthest frontier. The night might have gone on forever beyond that, for all I knew, ending only when the last human had decided to go to bed before we could all wake up in the daylight again.
Nowadays the small hours of the morning are familiar to me. More than familiar—ordinary, 1 AM no more mysterious than 1 in the afternoon (and probably not as mysterious as 10 AM, a time I haven't seen in many months but that somehow still fails to hold a fascination for me.)…
A few years back, my friend Al Katkowski was something of a success with his "Question Of The Day" iphone app and subsequent book. This was a question from the book.
Question of the day: When was the first time you noticed someone cheating at something?
Actually, the first person I noticed cheating would be myself. I totally figured it out on my own before ever seeing anyone else do it. I think I got my first inkling when I was 4 and tried to tell my friend Stephen Axeman I was 4 1/2, not 4, because I thought it made me sound grownup. Somehow he knew I wasn't 4 1/2! So when I turned 4 1/2, I told him again, and he said, "Yes, today you are." I never found out how he knew exactly when my half-birthday was, but it was an epiphany that mysterious means…
Look; I'm a Star Trek fan. Don't talk to me about "Picard" or "Janeway" or "Archer" or whoever. Even the movies barely qualify as "Star Trek", and they have the original cast. I'm not talking about some chick flick where they spend more time talking about feelings than getting into swashbuckling adventures with fearsome aliens on what was supposed to be a routine planetary survey of Gamma Hydra II***. I saw an entire episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where Picard lives a whole secondary life in which he did nothing but drink cosmopolitans and gossip with Charlotte and Miranda. I bet he's never even once been trapped in a cavern lit by creepy red and purple klieg lights and cloned against his will by a scientist who sacrificed his essential humanity when he transferred his mind into an eternal, physically perfect android body. So why would I want…
I originally wrote this essay shortly before my 40th birthday, after which I posted it on my blog and a number of other places.
December, 2008
For the record, I was born on Dec. 11, 1968. I turned 39 last year, on Dec. 11, 2007. I can't say I thought about it much, at least at first. But a month or two ticked by, and I thought of a number. The number 40. Just as I had thought of the number 40 on December 11th of ten years previous, in 1998, it having arisen unbidden following a brief consideration of the number 30.
Nine years before that I thought about the number 21, 18 three years before that, and five years earlier still, 13.
According to conventions of the religion I was born into, I became a man at 13, amidst much fanfare from my family.…
An Afternoon At The Races, Unplanned
So, last night I was standing on Mission in South of Market with my phone out, trying to find a nearby hardware store, when off in the distance, maybe a block behind me, I thought I heard a voice yell, "Stop!"
My mind went off into a daydream for a second—what if there's a thief coming my way, and I get to trip him up? But wait—what if the "thief" is actually a victim in danger, being chased by a criminal, and I'd be helping the criminal by stopping him? What should I do? I didn't have time to think more than that, though, because from a half a block away, clearly now, I heard a panicked man's voice: "Stop!"
Now, I had my phone in one hand, which is chained to my belt, and my very heavy briefcase slung over my back, so…
What's the best day of the week to take off if you work a 4 day 10 hour work day? -Jeannie F, Marin County, CA
Thursday. Trust me, being self-employed I've done a lot of experimenting.
The ideal 3-day workweek is easy: that's MWT — Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. It makes Monday easier, because you know you have the next day off. You arrive Wednesday feeling like it's Monday, except tomorrow is Thursday, which is Friday for you! Then, every week, you get a three day weekend to cap it off! It's ideal, and I recommend the MWT work schedule for everybody.
Working a 4-day workweek, especially 4 10-hour days, is more complicated. The entire dynamic changes. The ideal 4-day workweek is MTWF.
You have to think in terms of psychology: three 10 hour workdays in a row is easy to handle, it just feels like a heavy-duty, but abbreviated, 3-day…
This is (or, will be) a meta-post listing all posts I've written about the techniques used to create this site.
Since they're not always clearly displayed on the front page or in every post, for convenience, this is an automated scrape of all original "featured images" (the background or front page image for a post) on the site.
An early viewer asked some questions about the art I use on my site, so I thought I would put together a page of Q&A about the site and the materials on it.
I'm Mike Kupietz. You can be forgiven for not knowing who I am. Although I do have to admit I privately hoped I'd make more of a splash. I'm a musician, artist, and by day a FileMaker consultant and web developer based, strictly due to an accident of fate, in San Francisco.
Mostly all the images on this site are my own art. There are a few public domain images on this site. As of this writing the images I didn't create are:
- the poo emoji on the BS…
Having come a long way from the days related herein, I thought for a while before reposting this 26-year-old piece of writing, originally posted on my old website.
I think it has merit as a piece of my own writing and as a remembrance of someone I liked and cared about, despite how difficult he sometimes made it. But now that I'm doing things online under my real name, I do have to stop occasionally and think twice about how some of the less conventional anecdotes from my youth might be misinterpreted. I lead a very quiet life nowadays, but when you do business with people, sometimes you find yourself in an unwanted relationship with someone who loves dirt, reasonable or not, and you'll get painted as a bad guy by certain of those people only because they feel it may profit them to do…
This digital 0", originally hosted on my Bandcamp page, contains a track that sat unfinished on my hard drive for far too long, now finally having had the burrs filed off and rough edges sanded down for safe general listening. It's an experimental techno sample manipulation exercise exploring the text of a meme video that went viral about 10 years ago.
I got some nice kudos for this piece when Intelligent Arts, an organization publishing ebooks on music and technology run by the late composer Joel Chadabe, an old mentor of mine, included it in a series of online articles on "Word Music / Text-Sound", the use of spoken words as a component in musical compositions, alongside pieces from luminaries such as Steve Reich and Kurt Schwitters.
Also included…
Unbeknownst to anybody except Dan Sonenberg—in fact, practically unbeknownst to even myself—I occasionally write fragrance reviews. These are those. Some people enjoy them.
Those of you with the nose can find me on Fragrantica.
function toggleAll() {document.body.querySelectorAll('details').forEach((e) => {(e.hasAttribute('open'))?e.removeAttribute('open'):e.setAttribute('open',true);});}
Toggle all reviews open/closed
This is a series of generative art images I am paticularly fond of. Originally these were going to be part of my RobGAN Hitchcock project, but they kind of stand on their own. Created with Stable Diffusion.
For some reason, I've always been particularly moved by a sense of loss. It's the sole valuable observation I ever got from a kindly but not particularly effective therapist I saw for a while in my 30s, one of the few deep and profoundly true things about myself I hadn't already excavated on my own in my decades of frequent navel-gazing before that.
I've always written a lot—although I never considered myself a writer, so much as just someone who writes things down a lot—and in my 20s I had started occasionally writing longer essays, when I felt moved to. At a certain point, a few years after writing this one, I believe, I realized the longer pieces that I always felt were the most successful, the ones I had labored in love over and really eventually did manage to express what I had set out to…
Hey there! Thanks for visiting my online showcase. I'm Mr. Roarke, your host. Welcome to Fantasy Island.
But seriously, folks...
I've had a personal website for about 20 years, as well as an ancient blog, neither of which ever got many reads. But I've had it in my head for a while to put together something a little nicer, as sort of a portfolio, something which could accommodate my longstanding habit of getting projects 98% finished, often almost presentable but for my perfectionist tendencies, before getting distracted by something else while the final work on them dragged out for years.
As a consequence of this habit, my hard drive has become a repository for tons of mostly-finished art, music, and writing that nobody ever sees, not to mention a bunch of work scattered across the internet under whatever alias it amused me to use at the time. Not…
This site uses the "Sinatra" free Wordpress theme as its base. Sinatra includes a single "Hero Header" the row of 3 animated featured posts on the home page which changes background images as you mouse over post titles within it.
I wanted this to be multi-row, a grid instead of just one row. The code natively contained an option to include up to 12 featured posts, which could easily be made to wrap around to new rows, but the problem was, the background of the entire section containing all rows changed when you moused over a post, not just the single row, and I wanted not just a row-by-row background, but I wanted potentially unlimited rows.
I moved the code that generates the rows into a function, and then called it repeatedly, once for each row I want. At some point I may make it automatically add as many rows…
For a while, I had a Twitter account, @robGANhitchock, where I was posting AI illustrations of Robyn Hitchcock lyrics I created using a Generative Adversarial Network ("GAN"). This was an interesting project, because when it started I knew next to nothing about generative art; as I worked on it I learned more about crafting prompts, and more and better tools emerged, so over the course of the full set, you can see the progression of experience and improved generative algorithms: from the first few in VQGAN, then FreewayML,…
Here's a fairly old repost from my consulting site, where it got no traction whatsoever.
The Bad Statements Detector is a specialized search tool designed to aid in online research and to help prevent people from passing along nonsense on the internet, by making it easier to look stuff up on fact-checking websites like Snopes.com, Politifact, FactCheck.org, and other myth-busting websites all at once.
It works very simply: drag a “Detect BS” button to your bookmarks bar to create a "bookmarklet", a javascript bookmark that opens a tool when clicked. Then, while you surf the web, you can drag your mouse to select text on any web page and click your “Detect BS” bookmark link. This will return no-nonsense links from a multitude of reputable fact-checking and science websites that tell you if the statement you selected is well-known BS (plus offer you some sharing options right from the popup.)
…
If you don't want to read the introduction you can skip straight down to the reviews.
IntroductionA number of years ago I started jotting down summaries of movies I've watched, just to keep track of what I'd seen. As the years went by, the list grew, and occasionally (but not often) I was moved to write more, until finally I wound up with hundreds of them, mostly very short summaries but occasionally a little more in-depth for movies I particularly liked or loathed. There's a brief section of favorites and honorable mentions, then below that they're indexed by movie title, click a letter to see the titles starting with that letter.
By the way: this list is extremely heavy, although not exclusive, with horror and science fiction films, because that's what I watch most.
A word about my terminologyAs I wrote these reviews just for myself, I…
Back in 2009 my old ex-friend Rick Abruzzo, whom I'd met some years earlier during a mutual effort to resuscitate the soggy corpse of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, invited me to come down with my guitar and fill some airtime on Baghdad By The Bay, his show on San Francisco's Pirate Cat Radio. A few unruly friends tagged along to egg me on, and in addition to going out live over the wires, the ensuing off-the-cuff, improvised hour of chaos was recorded for posterity on Pirate Cat's state-of-the-art low-quality direct-to-mp3 recorder. This is that chaos. It may or may not have passed for showmanship—you be the judge.
This is basically a nearly-finished live album, warts and all, and creeping up on 15 years after the fact it just awaits on a little bit of final production gloss and mastering for me to…
I quit Twitter a while back, and sometimes even just glancing at FB consumes a full day, so I have no outlet for my amusing social-media-worthy passing thoughts, except to just think them privately to myself. And that's so 20th century.
So this page is my new one-person social network, "Kwitter", a place to post thoughts, which I call "Kwits". Anyone who is me is invited to register and post.
Commencing herewith are the understandings and conditions (hereinafter referred to as the "Terms Of Use") to which you must agree to be permitted to access, view, or use the whole or any constituent part of michaelkupietz.com's technology, data, resources, contents, privately-owned intellectual property, visual pages or media, electronic files, and RSS or other author-published data feeds (all hereinafter referred to collectively as the "Site"), whether accessed by michaelkupietz.com or any other domain or means by which any part of the Site may be accessed. You must immediately close and and terminate whatever means you are using to view or access the Site if you do not agree with the Terms Of Use in full.
The below interstitial numbered section titles in blue text are intended only for amusement and to facilitate easier reading, and are to be taken merely as visual page decoration and not as part of the…
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.