Blog Intro
Yes, here it is! I have started a blog page for thoughts a little too timely to be perserved as articles but a little too long-form to be spewed in Indieweb chat.
Nothing on this site is open for public comment because I don't want to deal with spam, but for now, if you have your own website and are set up to send webmentions to reply to anything here, these posts accept them, with my manual approval before they're made public. We'll see how that goes. But, either way, it means I have finally rejoined the social web for real.
As this page will be my social nub, for now, please direct any site-wide webmentions to this page, https://michaelkupietz.com/blog/. The homepage doesn't accept them.
Blog Post Categories
- 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…
The Paradox of Prescriptivism
May 24, 2026
Michael Kupietz, chief Kwit @michael · Follow
The paradox of well-meaninged prescriptivism is that it tends be tedious for the recipient. Moderation may be advisable.
1:58 AM · May 24, 2026
1Reply Copy link
How to remove your email and phone number from voter registration (San Francisco county only)
May 15, 2026The county handles voter registration. San Francisco residents can remove info such as your phone number and email address with the form on https://sfelections.org/tools/regupdate/regupd.php. You can check your CA voter registration status at https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov/
Burning Love
May 13, 2026I know why some artists burn all their material near the ends of their lives.
I know when I go, I'm tempted to take everything with me. You see some sort of value in anything I did, you should given me some sort of good cheer for it, something I could take some satisfaction from in return, while I was alive. Otherwise, when I go, it goes.
Not that I'm thinking about checking out anytime soon. Or that I'll definitely delete everything before I do.
Perhaps feeling a bit unappreciated, though. I don't do much for anyone's approval other than my own, but enough shows of disinterest from the world at large do occasionally drag even the most self-sufficient of spirits down a bit. And lately, there've been a few.
And as I round the further corners of middle age, still feeling, rather more keenly than I'd prefer, the difficulty…
Indieweb Movie Club May 2026 announcement: Network (1976)
May 3, 2026Forgive the delay while I dithered whether to choose "Network" or subject you to a dizzying double-feature of "Resolution" and "The Endless", two little-known indie flicks (which I've only learned just this second were consecutive films from the same director and writer—do I know how to pick them, or what?) about desperate people traveling to remote locations in southern California where the time/space continuum doesn't work as expected.
I have decided to go with "Network", figuring mentioning the other two and leaving you to your own devices would be sufficient.
"Network" is my favorite movie, full stop.
This 1976 movie by Sidney Lumet ("12 Angry Men", "Dog Day Afternoon", "Serpico"), a pitch-black tragicomedy about a media conglomerate capitalizing on the unraveling mental health of one of its news anchors, predicted so many real-life media trends before they happened that it's astounding.…
This is a test.
April 29, 2026Once upon an Indieweb dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten CSS,
While I coded, nearly hacking, suddenly there came SYN ACKing,
as if packets gently attacking, attacking at my firewall ports,
"'Tis some webmention", I muttered, "SYN ACKing at my firewall ports,
only this and nothing less."
Eagerly, I wished the morrow, for in vain, I hoped to borrow,
from #Cafe, surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost IPv4—
For the rare and radiant spec whom the angels name IPv4—
This is only a test, please ignore.
Mastodon & BSky followers: I’m closing these current accounts—pls read for updated account info
April 27, 2026A 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)
April 26, 2026Slightly-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
April 22, 2026News 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
April 19, 2026I'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)
April 18, 2026Somewhat 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
April 14, 2026Coming 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.
Indieweb Carnival March 2026 – The Soap Lady, And Other Museum Memories
March 31, 2026Once 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:
Gmail Pushing My Emails Out Of The Way To Tell Me What My Emails Say
March 16, 2026Well, this is a new one. Today my gmail has started moving my emails out of the way to prioritize giving space to "AI Overviews" telling me what the email says. The summaries are longer than the actual email.
Imagine I started this three-sentence post with a "summary" that spent four sentences telling you what the post says. That's about how this strikes me.
Thoughts following “The Colonization of Confidence”
March 14, 2026This is a draft. Almost done. Check back in a few days.
I just read the piece "The Colonization of Confidence", a short story by Robert Kingett about the homogenizing effect of relying on technology for "cheap, fast, and easy" artistic expression, and it reminded me of a few things. What's interesting is that there is a strong parallel here to things that have happened before.
The most immediate thing that leapt to mind is the 13-page '80s Alan Moore comic book story "In Pictopia", which you can happily read in full at Forgotten Awesome, a response to that era's 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…
Financial news from the bleeding edge
February 6, 2026For 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
November 21, 2025I 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…
Spider-Man — Homecoming
November 9, 2025It'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!
November 9, 2025This 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…
Forgive Yourself For Your Misadventures
November 25, 2024Someone said this to me a while ago, I wish I could remember who, but it’s helped me deal with a lot of adverse circumstances.
A lot of us are going through hard times right now, and I’m sure a lot of people, like me, are feeling helpless. But there is one thing you can do for yourself pretty easily, even when you can’t seem to change your situation:
You’ve got to forgive yourself for your misadventures.
That one piece of advice has helped me a lot. Because even when you can’t change a negative circumstance, it’s all too easy to internalize it: blame yourself, think you somehow deserve it, Identify with it as if it’s a part of you.
This advice has often helped me reframe things so I don’t take them personally, making it easier to carry on. Something really bad happens? It’s not “me“. It’s…
AI Doesn’t Innovate
November 25, 20242024nov25 — I was really struck by this tagline on Canva's new 2025 design report, saying "motion elements, dreamy textures, and AI innovation" would shape new design possibilities.
As an AI skeptic—which is to say, I'm extremely optimistic about the things AI has proven it does very well, and the things it's given strong indications it's moving towards really doing well, but deeply impatient with all the hype about speculative functionality outside of those—this really put a fine point to me on part of the problem. Not with AI, but with what people expect of it, what they spend money expecting it to do.
AI DOESN'T INNOVATE. AI is specifically engineered NOT to innovate. It specifically attempts to create something that matches what it previously ingested. If it deviates from that, innovates, we call that "hallucination", and it makes AI less useful, not more. This is because AI is…
Kupietz’s Law Of Infoavailability
September 15, 2024Where technology is concerned: "Information needs expand to fill available bandwidth."
Where we used to have to fill in a one-page form, when automation arrived to make it quicker for us to fill in that form, very soon a ten-page form was required.
Reference: AI’s False Time-Saving Promise. Or Why AI Is Like The Vacuum CleanerBy Martin Gutmann, forbes.com, Nov 11, 2024. An article about how new "time-saving" technologies, such as vacuum cleaners, then computers, email, and now AI, increased workloads rather than reducing them.
Also tangentially related is Jevons Paradox, in which technology that increases efficiency creates an overall increase in resource consumption, rather than a decrease.
You’ll love this entry.
September 20, 2023I've finally nailed what bothers me so much about those Upworthy headlines. It's that they they tell you what to think about about the video, instead of telling you what it's about.
The most suggestive term in telecommunications
September 20, 2023The 90 days after the creation of a new area code in which either the old or the new code may be used to dial that area is called the permissive dialing period.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine
September 17, 2023I have an idea about what happens after you die. I think when you go to heaven, St. Peter lets you in, they show you to a room. You take a sauna, somebody brings you a plate of cookies or a slice of cake. Then you take a nap.
Later on, when you're ready, they take you to a huge room, and everyone you've ever met is there. And everybody gets together and tells each other exactly what was going through their fucking heads. Then you all have a good laugh about it all. I see lots of back slapping and smiling eyes.
Wouldn't that be a great thing to look forward to?
Vocabulary: That Vu That Yu Du So Well
September 11, 2023Déjà vu: a false sense that something new has been seen before
Jamais vu: a feeling or impression that something familiar is unfamiliar or is being seen for the first time, like when you repeat a word so many times that it suddenly loses meaning and sounds alien
Presque vu: the illusory sense of having something on the tip of your tongue, or that a mental epiphany or breakthrough is about to occur
I wonder if the French have a word for the strange feeling that something wonderful has just happened, but you don't have any idea what?
Like Butter
September 11, 2023You know, it's funny... the other day I just plugged in a backup hard drive that I haven't used in about 4 years. I looked at all the stuff was working on again, none of which I have thought about since and most of which I hadn't even remembered, and realized, "Wow, that was a really long time ago."
So I think the frequently-noted sensation of time seeming to pass more quickly as you get older has more to do with how often we think of something. The more often you think of something, the more recent it seems; but be reminded of something actually relatively recent but which you haven't thought back on even once since it happened, and the full weight comes to bear of just how long it's been, just how much time has passed since things that were even far more recent than long-ago things that…
Man’s Fate: Stone antennae waving
September 10, 2023Link: A Geologist Investigates a Mass Extinction at the End of the Permian Period
A friend commented on the above as a warning.
Well, I do believe we need not to treat the world like an infinite resource, or to assume we can't push things past the tippng point, but the good news is, the Permian extinction event was both unusually catastrophic and very fast as these things goes... it took only about 60,000 years, or, roughly 12x as long as recorded human history. And whatever happened, it was very bad — the trilobites had ruled the world for nearly twice as long as the dinosaurs would when, in a geologic blink of an eye, they, along with 96% of the other plant and animal species living at the time, vanished forever. But despite it, 250 million years later, here we are, in full flower, and…
The Advice For All Seasons
September 10, 2023An Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be always true; in all times, and in all situations; in sadness, and in happiness; in adversity, and in prosperity.
After a lengthy period of debate amongs themselves, at last they presented him with the words:
"If you lived here, you'd be home by now."
Man’s Fate: The Beaked Shall Inherit The Earth
September 10, 2023I believe after humans wipe themselves out a generation or two from now, the eventual next dominant species on earth will be descended from corvids. Most people think it'll be cockroaches, but corvids are already as intelligent in some ways as human children and comparably good at problem solving, they have the biggest brain volume per body mass on earth except for humans, and, they can fly away from danger. Sounds to me like a recipe for success once the hairless apes with the guns are out of the way.
Linguistic Reminder: A Kudos For Your Many Agenda
September 10, 2023Remember: 'Kudos' is singular. 'Agenda' and 'data' are plural.
'Nachos' is also singular. There is no such thing as one 'nacho'.
The Common Sense Conundrum
September 9, 2023It seems to me that a frequent problem with most people's talk about "common sense" is not that it isn't really so common. It's that it isn't really sense.
Truth is Unknowable, Truth is Apparent
September 9, 2023Truth is unknowable, because we can only know with our minds. I mean, no, of course truth is knowable.
I'm sure, to an ant, truth is apparent: follow formic acid trails, dig in soil.
To us, probably the same—the truth of whatever is our own equivalent of formic acid and digging. Broader by comparison, of course, but equivalent in terms of being constrained by limits we know nothing about, out there on the impenetrable edge of our own capacities.
I wonder what an ant makes of the beach, the shore, the ocean. The sky.
An ant works in the daytime, but I don't think it questions where the light comes from.
What don't we do?
Humor: etruscanmingle.com
September 9, 2023Time to renew again, and I just can't decide. I really thought this was going to be the domain I sold for a million bucks.
What can I say? Everything was different before the pandemic. I thought they might be coming back.
Business Idea: The Behavioral Marketing Dance Club
September 9, 2023This originally was posted in my blog Sloth And Dignity.
I just had a great entrepreneurial idea. With things opening up again, this might just be the jackpot.
Open a dance club. But, the twist is, there's bouncers inside. Only good dancers will be allowed to stay on the dance floor. If you're out there, and you're not a visibly good dancer, you're just bopping your head or lazily doing the white boy shuffle... you'll get a firm tap on your shoulder, and be asked to return to the bar area. Eventually, you have a dance floor full of really great dancers, and a crowd of looky-loos buying drink after drink because alcohol happens to be an efficient solution to a number of the mildly uncomfortable aspects of that situation.
Once this gets some buzz, I'm telling you, it would be hot as hell. It checks every…
Conversation: Music And A Higher Power
September 9, 2023via text message, 2/28/21.
Me: "Sometimes listening to Bill Evans I get a flash that those 12-step people are right, like there’s something out there much, much bigger than me."
MMcC: "Oh yeah. For sure. I have more to say about that than I can text."
MMcC: "Some things are really only knowable because of him."
Me: "It’s amazing. I’ve been listening to him on Pandora all morning, and, you know, they won’t stick to a single artist, so it’s a lot of piano jazz trios, and every time they flip from him to someone else or back it’s like a night and day difference. I was having a daydream, what if I could go back to being about 12 years old, and I thought, I’d probably ask my parents to get me a bunch of Bill Evans records. And then I thought, could 12-year-old me even begin to really…
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