Studies originally done for a July 4 online generative art competition, I believe? I can't quite recall.
(Bonus Gallery Page: Fireworks Study Extras)
This was developed as an aid to understanding the dot product function used in Fractal Kitty's There is(Ǝ) – Such that (∋) project.
The dot product is the length of vector A projected on vector B (you can imagine this as the length of the shadow that A would cast on B, if a flashlight were shining perpendicularly at B), times the length of vector B. If the two vectors point in directions 90° apart, the dot product is 0 since neither has a component in the other's direction. If they point in the same exact direction, it is just the full length of A times the full length of B.
Mathematically, the dot product of vectors A and B defined as |A| * |B| * Cos θ, where |A| and |B| are the lengths of vectors A and B, and θ is…
Forgive 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.…
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:
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
<--…
Last year my friends in an Indieweb meetup began to notice that information about them was turning up in LLMs... some comically inaccurate, some uncannily personal. As a group of personal website developers, we knew that much of the information must've been scraped of our website.
It might not be apparent reading my site, but I've always been a little careful about what information I allow about myself on the web. It's near impossible to prevent personal information from leaking out, and my name is unique enough that I'm not hard to find. I had an unfortunate incident with an online stalker a number years ago and since then have always been careful. I also once had a real-life harasser who broke into my home, although that was a much different and more complex situation. But together these made me aware that…
November 27, 2018
I'm staying at my dad's place in Florida right now. I've been on the road for a few months.
It struck me this morning, waking up in Dad's guest room, that this past August I let the 25th anniversary of the day I first quit th' job and hit th' road—August 12, 1993—slip by, unremarked upon.
I realized it today because today is the 25th anniversary of November 27 of that same year, nearly as important a day in my personal canon. I slept the night of November 26, 1993 in my car in a rest area outside of Tacoma, WA, as I'd been doing for the better part of a week, and after my customary free cup of morning coffee courtesy of the local VFW post volunteers at the rest area, I headed over to the Last Exit On Brooklyn cafe in Seattle's University District, as…
Some virtual spectral photography to spookify your Halloween. True fact: none of these AI-generated images had ghosts in them when I prompted them. WoooOOOOoooo! 👻
I believe I originally made these as a Saturday Monster Challenge but I can't recall when. I'll update if I run across the original info.
Amongst my most-used browser extensions is Webstickies by Lawrence Hook, which allows you to leave a permanent "sticky note" on any web page. It's available for both Firefox and (yuck, ptui) Chrome, although I only use it in Firefox.
However, the one thing it lacks is an import/export functionality. For $10, you can get access to "Cloud Sync" for your notes—yes, another unneeded "cloud integration" where local functionality would have been superior.
Consider this side-by-side feature comparison:
Local Import/Export Cloud Sync Transfer notes between browsers or computers ✔ ✔ Allows the plugin developer to make some money selling the use of infrastructure that shouldn't strictly be needed ❌ ✔ Need to literally copy down every single note by hand, one by one, to get them out of the extension ❌ ✔ Email yourself a full copy of your notes for safekeeping ✔ ❌…
Way back in the heady days of the dotcom boom, as a newbie in San Francisco, I fell in with a group of kids trying to revivify the Cacophony Society via the SF-Caco email list, which, for a while, consisted mostly of a bunch of underemployed young adults kidding around with each other and trying to come up with funny ideas. Finally, one day, a young woman who went by the on-list moniker "Drunken Consumptive Panda" threw out a sentence that was to change a lot of lives: "We should have a pigeon roast in Union Square".
The Union Square Pigeon Roast, as it happens, deserves a much longer reminiscence, is it was the start of a remarkable, brief but fun period of activity that lasted a few years. The event itself was ludicrous: we posed as a group called "Bay Area Rotisserie Friends" (that was…
Here’s a guide to all currently available CSS units, with explanations and common use notes. This includes all CSS units listed in MDN Web Docs as of 2025aug15.
Sections:
By Category Angle units
I had an interesting thing happen a few months ago where a troll in a chat room decided for some reason to run my site through the W3C's Nu HTML Validator and apparently was grievously wounded by the validation errors it had—and furthermore, had a big concern with the overall bandwidth consumption of the site, with all its images and heavy pages.
Rather than simply solving the problem by not visiting my site, this person apparently felt some sort of imperative to berate me over these things and not. let. it. drop, making the chat room difficult to be in and necessitating action on my part.
So, rather than try to verbally wrangle with a troll, I whipped up a technological solution. And, of course, the monkey in my soul decided to have a little fun with it.
I. Lassoing the HTML ValidatorNowadays, if…
This demonstrates a high-performance method of rendering dynamic CSS drop shadows from a simulated point light source.
The note and sun light source elements have been made interactively user-draggable by the inclusion of an external draggability package.
Until I have this documented, you can see the code on Codepen at https://codepen.io/kupietz/pen/LEpzJgL.
Update, Feb 2026:This is not my work but it deserves a mention here. I've been completely outdone. Check this demo out. This guy designed an entire css system around physical lighting: https://ambientcss.vercel.app/ Github: https://github.com/kikkupico/ambientcss
"'Literally' is one of the most misused words in the English language. Literally means: exactly as stated. 'I literally rode a horse to get here.' means you saddled a horse and rode it to your destination in real life. 'I literally died laughing' is untrue, because you're still alive." —Siana W., via internet
That's not a question, but I'm going to do my best to answer it anyway.
You're a couple of years behind the times. Dictionaries reflect common language, not the other way around—that's how the meanings of words change over time.
Otherwise "nice" would still have its original English meaning of "foolish or ignorant" (from Latin "Nescire", to be ignorant, also the root of the current but uncommon English word nescience, "ignorance or unknowingness".)
You're in good company, though—Jane Austen mocked the widespread incorrect use of 'nice' to describe things as pleasant in "Northanger…
The LinkedIn Saturday Monster Challenge for July 5, 2025 was '"Too Hot To Handle" Monsters'.
After consideration, I decided not to post this gallery on LinkedIn.
The idea of a "monster"-themes art challenge on a professional site has always been a funny one, and while most people (including myself) usually create work-safe images, the fact is, as a kid raised on horror movies—I was babysat by channel 11's "Chiller Theatre" from the age of 6—occasionally I wind up, just by following my muse, doing something a little more unflinching.
Sometimes some of the images are... well, they're never terribly offensive, but sometimes I feel like they're just a little strong or perhaps a hair darker than I want to post in front of unsuspecting professional networkers or prospective employers.
That happened in this case.
They're not that objectionable, but some of the images were…
I got into a conversation today with some web developers, talking about recent articles about a major password breach.
This got me to thinking—with some prompting from shadowy web standards advocate and staunch info-sharing supporter Tantek Çelik—that this would be useful to document.
Unique email addresses and passwords for every websiteThe basic idea is this: every single website signup gets a unique email address and unique password. This way, if a website is breached and the passwords are leaked, no other accounts are compromised, just that website's.
The trick is to do it in a way that I can remember, or easily derive the usernames and passwords per site, so I don't have to rely on a pain-in-the-posterior password manager, and can log in from anywhere easily.
Obviously I'm not going to give away details of how I specifically do things, but I can…
This week's LinkedIn Saturday Monster Challenge generative art theme was "Deleted Scene Monsters": show the monsters that ended up on the cutting room floor.
And so, I am pleased to present these rare stills from the original cut of "Casablanca" (1942)—starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as star-crossed former lovers in a classic tale of wartime romance set against a background of mind-bending supernatural horrors, when a mysterious event causes the gates of Hell to yawn wide and the inhabitants to amble forth across the living earth. (Original tagline: "From Hell... to Casablanca... to YOUR Town!")
Unfortunately, test audiences didn't respond well, and studio executives said the macabre elements were "distracting" and ordered it recut to emphasize more of the drama and romance, and less of the shrieking souls of the long dead.
The bowdlerized re-cut became the familiar excellent but sadly not-at-all-terrifying non-monster film…
This is a brief demo page for my KupieTools Draggable Elements WordPress plugin, which dynamically adds interactive draggability to any page element, based on CSS class names (or, really, any CSS selector).
Here's some boxes:
Drag Me Horizontally Drag Me Vertically Drag Me Anywhere Drag Me To CornersIf you select "View Page Source" on this page in your browser, you will see that the above four DIV elements, as defined in the page HTML, are just ordinary DIV elements with a single classname, an ID, and some visual styling. The KupieTools Draggable Elements plugin adds draggability to any arbitrary page element, by simply specifying a class name or other CSS selector for it in the plugin. (If you use your browser's Inspector instead of View Page Source, you'll see the current state of those elements, with any changes or additions the plugin created…
The Saturday Monster Challenge on LinkedIn for June 21 2025 was "Eternal Rise Monsters". I took the theme and decided to do Phoenixes (Phoenices? Phoenixen?), as in "rising from the ashes."
In the spirit of keeping up with the Joneses I've finally created an 88x31 button for those wishing to link to this site. I characteristically have two nearly-identical versions which nobody but me will probably notice the difference between, I'm not sure which I like best yet. I may make more.
"Built During An Indieweb Meetup" buttons
I strongly suggest, if you use these buttons, that you use an [code][/code] tag to link them to https://events.indieweb.org.
Download PSD template: 
Inspired by something said during an IndieWeb meetup*, this button is, um, a "Holla Atcha Boy" button... built during an IndieWeb meetup, earning this page one of its own buttons.
*They said, "Holla atcha boy".
"Try CLI Mode" buttons
An unsorted list of words or phrases that I like.
Aposiopesis (pron.: /ˌæpəsaɪ.əˈpiːsɪs/; Classical Greek: ἀποσιώπησις, "becoming silent") - a figure of speech wherein a sentence is deliberately broken off and left unfinished, the ending to be supplied by the imagination, giving an impression of unwillingness or inability to continue.[1] An example would be the threat "Get out, or else—!" This device often portrays its users as overcome with passion (fear, anger, excitement) or modesty. To mark the occurrence of aposiopesis with punctuation, an em dash (—) or an ellipsis (...) may be used.
Monological belief system - a self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs, such as conspiracy theories which are supported by other conspiracy theories.
Resistentialism - a jocular theory to describe "seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects."[1] For example, objects that cause problems (like lost keys or a fleeing bouncy…
Note: This was composted in response to a #thursdaypoetrysociety challenge on LinkedIn to compose a poem in response to the prompt "my opinion on pickles".
My opinion of pickles is deep and profound,
and so sharp it tickles, and so, when around
those ones whose sharp senses are hurt by adjectives,
or dire consequences of spicy perspectives
from one unrelenting in declaring their views,
who so is resenting and quick to refuse,
or, contrary, tickled and shying from not
embracing the pickled, to give voice to thought,
O! Demure, I refrain, in voice moderate,
from declaiming quatrains 'bout some dill that I ate.
'Ere, mute, as I workins, so sensitive ears
of one 'fraid of gherkins may attend without fear,
and, litely, in my dogg'rel day, abstain from prattling on—
opining, silent, in my way, on those dear cornichons.
Just a set of fun leftover from when I was working on a featured image for my Local Color: New York Stories, Which I only now realize are all about petty crimes page. My cousin likes them.
A stylistic experiment inspired by vintage art photography.
#SaturdayMonsterChallenge on LinkedIn for 11 Jan 2024 theme was "Fog Monsters".
.
2020, already a strange year due to the pandemic, had its strangest day, for the San Francisco area, on September 9. The Bay Area experienced a kind of weather that few people ever see.
I woke up that morning thinking it was dawn… from where I'd slept, through the windows I could see the sky beginning to lighten, although it was about the reddest dawn I've ever seen. But I got up and looked at the clock—and it was after 9 AM. I couldn't understand what I was seeing. I literally got dizzy with the unreality of it.
I looked back and forth from the clock to the window several times. Finally I got online to see if the world was ending, and it turned out to be thick smoke from forest first up in Northern CA blanketing the bay area, reducing visibility to dusk levels at midday…
This week's #SaturdayMonsterChallenge on LinkedIn is Lucky Charm Monsters.
I always say, you can tell the lucky charm monsters, because they're the ones hanging out with the people winning at the casino tables, as opposed to the ones slipping roofies into people's drinks at the bar, snarfing up the king crab legs at the all-you-can eat buffet, or hanging out in the bathrooms scaring the bejesus out of you.
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.