This is (almost*) the entire contents of the site, all articles and blog posts from newest to oldest, with preview excerpts.
- You can see just the articles: on the Articles category page (not to be confused with the /Latest news page, which is more conversational than a list of posts and may include personal news about me in addition to site news)
- Just the blog posts: on the dedicated Blog or nearly-identicalBlog Posts category page.
*Individual movie reviews won't get posted on this page. I write too many of them, it would drown everything else out.
- How I Learned Duane Hanson Isn't Alexander Calder, and Leonard Nimoy Really Is Not Spock (Whitney Museum, New York City, 1978?) • 700 words
- Forever In Their Heart (The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, 1970s) • 350 words
- Her Luminous Eyes (The Mütter Museum, Philadelphia, 2012 • 2150 words)
- Panic At The Explo (The Exploratorium, San Francisco, 1996) • 1200 words
- How A Chance Scientific Injustice Launched My Career As An Author Of Doggerel (The…
Mastodon & BSky followers: I’m closing these current accounts—pls read for updated account info
A note to the very small handful of people who read and occasionally even repost the website blog items and articles that I've been syndicating from my website, where I'm currently writing this, to a small clickable link on a Mastodon post or a somewhat more human-readable excerpt on Bluesky:
As of today I will no longer be syndicating my content to my current Mastodon and Bluesky accounts at @michaelkupietz.com@michaelkupietz.com on Mastodon and michaelkupietz.com.web.brid.gy on Bluesky. This will likely be the last post to those accounts.
The reason I have to retire those accounts is that they're controlled by the syndication service I was using, and I don't actually have full access to them myself. I'm turning off that service, so I can't use them at all.
But, as apparently a small handful of people do have an interest in occasionally seeing links to things I write delivered…
The Monster (2016)
Slightly-better-than-it-should be tale of a mother and daughter breaking down on a lonely road and stalked by a monster. There's nothing here the experienced horror fan hasn't seen before—yet, for an assemblage of vaguely familiar horror tropes, it's a skillful assemblage, and the direction makes it stand out beyond what it might have been. Not a great movie by a long shot, but much better than it should be, but it's got a touch slower pacing and a few more character-driven elements than a b-grade horror movie usually does, both always a plus to me. And, pleasantly, it gets better as it goes along—the third act reflects back positively on the first two, as it goes for a slightly more quiet, thoughtful climax than the loud one many other movies of this sort would have gone for, even if it still never strays far from genre cliches.
And even…
Coffee Among The Top 4 Most Consequential EU Imports
News that seems Indieweb-adjacent: according to a study reported on by investment strategist Joachim Klement, among commodity imports, only oil, LNG, and iron ore shortages have a higher impact on EU inflation than coffee shortages. https://klementoninvesting.substack.com/p/which-imports-really-matter-for-inflation
Source: Consonni and Magerman (2026) via Klement On Investing
No word on whether the effect is more pronounced in Scotland.
New WordPress Plugin: Kupietools Usernote Shortcode Plugin
I've just posted an alpha of a small new WordPress plugin to my Github: KupieTools Usernote Shortcode.
Basically, I wanted to leave myself a note in a post, so I can see it on the front end when I view the post, but nobody else will. Now I can do this with [usernote]Note to myself here[/usernote]. It also allows specifying visibility by username or WordPress account role, like this: [usernote users="alice,bob" roles="administrator"]Note to Alice, Bob, and all administrators here[/usernote]
This is an alpha release, containing just the basic functionality I need this afternoon. In the future it will allow you to set defaults in a panel in the KupieTools admin settings page, like some of my other plugins. Right now you have to change them in the plugin code.
Paradise (TV series, 2025)
Somewhat derivative but reasonably watcable sci-fi thriller. In a world that is "The Walking Dead" with an ecological apocalypse instead of a zombie one, the remains of the government live in an artificial underground town somewhere between "Wayward Pines" and "The Truman Show", where everybody just loves crappy '80s Top 40 music.
The first season is a straight government/secret agent whodunnit thriller with a slight spritz of sci-fi, the second is a little more expansive, showing more of the world and the lead-up to the ecological disaster (refreshingly, a fairly well-done global tsunami and weather crisis caused by a volcanic eruption in Antarctica, not the result of human foolishness.) I enjoyed the second season a little bit more, although they're both decent at worst...
...except...
...for the '80s music. It's intrusive, and initially, very annoying, particularly that many episodes end with gratuitous, grating "slowcore", alt-folk, or dreary…
Hampshire College Is Closing
Coming from an alternative education background, I'm saddened to hear that Hampshire College is closing. I looked at attending Hampshire, and the friend of mine who I heard the news from went to the same orientation as I did and wound up going.
I didn't end up going there but always felt an affinity for the place. I believed in the model and in the need for small, funky schools, offering more self-directed education than traditional schools, for students like myself who didn't thrive in more conventional educational settings. (AKA "underachievers". I believe I'm the only person I know with a C average in high school, a teenage arrest on my record, and a degree in physics. Cowabunga, man.)
Obviously this is the result of bigger economic and societal currents that I have no wish to comment on. But it's a loss.
A uBlock Origin custom rule to hide “Related Videos” (and more) on YouTube
If you're like me, you loathe and despise the toxic mental ordure that YouTube often plasters up and down the right side of each video page, such as POLITICAL DEMAGOGUERY in MIXED CAPS to PIQUE your OUTRAGE enough to KEEP YOU WATCHING YOUTUBE instead of doing something PRODUCTIVE! [insert thumbnail of someone looking amazed here.]
At a certain point, I started to notice that there was more likely to be things I didn't even want to know existed in that section than anything I actually wanted to see. So, I added a simple rule to the uBlock Origin browser plugin that hides that section of the page:
[code]!https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com###related[/code]
And that's it. That's all you need to add. No more "related videos" section.
While I was at it, I added a rule to block the "suggested videos" thumbnails that appear at the end of videos, by…
Detect SYN flood slowing down server with netstat
If the web server is slow, detect a SYN flood by netstat -ant | grep :443 | grep SYN_RECV to show the IP addresses leaving it hanging. Hint: If you're behind a reverse proxy, and that shows IP addresses that aren't the proxy's, then your IP is being hit directly. To find out how many IPs are hanging, do netstat -ant | grep :443 | grep SYN_RECV | wc -l. If you do it a few times and the number is increasing, you may be under attack. If it's over 100, that's suspicious, but manageable and the server can usually handle it, especially if you have SYN cookies activated. If it's over 1000, you're under attack.
Indieweb Carnival March 2026 – The Soap Lady, And Other 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 (see the announcement post, and the roundup and recap of all submissions.)
Like many people, I have many fond memories of museums. Here are some recollections.
Sections:
Bonus Gallery: Museum Memories Extra Images
Here are some additional images I created while working on the featured image for March 2026 Indieweb Carnival piece "Museum Memories".
Article syndication: Fediverse
