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Visual Art » Adventure Photojournals
Battery Dynamite — Subterranean Bunker Urban Exploration

Beneath the Bay Area: Battery Dynamite — Subterranean Bunker Urban Exploration

somewhere beneath the Bay Area, Aug 6 2004

Last July, my late* trubbamaking companion was trying to find a shortcut down to the beach when he noticed a hole in a fence across the road, where someone had cut it away to allow a tree limb to grow through. Characteristically unable to resist, he climbed through it to explore, and, in a fantastic piece of luck, deep in the woods behind this fence he stumbled onto the surface entrances of what we only later learned was Battery Dynamite, a sprawling underground military facility dating back to World War 2. Several weeks later he brought me there, camera in hand, to explore the corridors of this creepy subterranean relic...

*Repeat visitors to this gallery will notice the change in epithet. In summer 2005, my former intrepid trubbamaking companion was killed in a freak dating accident. Don't mourn for him. He knew…

Visual Art » Adventure Photojournals
UC Santa Cruz Porter Caves & the Hell Hole

Subterranean Serendipity: UC Santa Cruz Porter Caves & the Hell Hole

9/30/2005

I was wandering the trails through the woods by UC Santa Cruz, taking some pictures of trees and stuff and trying to shake off a cold, when fate brought me by sheer happenstance onto this intriguing tableau:

 

Click any image to enlarge

Hmmm... a bunch of college students out in the middle of the woods... a hole with a ladder into the ground... me coincidentally carrying a camera... what to do... what to do?

The last in line down the hole invited me to follow them and in a moment I was here... this is the Porter Caves, right there on UCSC's campus.

 

The kids loaned me a spare flashlight, were astoundingly good-natured about the constant firing of my flash, and led me through room after muddy room of this....

While we were down there, one of the guys asked if anyone had been to…

Visual Art » Adventure Photojournals
A Visit to Pearl Fryar’s Topiary — photojournal

Back To The Garden: A Visit to Pearl Fryar’s Topiary — photojournal

In August 2018 my mom and I decided to take a road trip from my sister's home in an un-named southern city, where I was crashing for a few months, to visit Pearl Fryar's Topiary Garden, in Bishopville, SC.

Pearl Fryar is a folk artist, famous for, in the 1980s, having cleared a three-acre cornfield next to his home and, with no training and using "throwaway" plants salvaged from a local nursery's discards, created a fantastic topiary garden, incorporating his own whimsical found-object assemblage sculptures in places, which has become a regional tourist attraction of sorts. As late as 2018, he was still maintaining it himself as he rounded the corner into his 80s.

While visiting, we had the good fortune to meet and chat briefly with Mr. Fryar himself, who came out to tend to the grounds while we were there. Nice fellow.…

Code & Algorithms » Finance
An Excel-based DeFi Uniswap Liquidity Pool/Automated Market Maker Simulator

Untangling Uniswap? Demystifying DeFi? You Tell Me: An Excel-based DeFi Uniswap Liquidity Pool/Automated Market Maker Simulator

For a few years I was in cryptocurrency trading. Eventually, this led me to the wild west of decentralized finance tokens ("DeFi"), an exciting area that I feel has strong potential to be on the cutting edge of technology's potential to fundamentally reshape our society.

Decentralized Finance concept: The "Automated Market Maker"

Among the odd beasts you'll encounter on the frontiers of DeFi is the "Automated Market Maker" (AMM) managing a "liquidity pool", of which the most prominent current example is Uniswap. This is a decentralized algorithm running on the Etheruem network that serves the same purpose in DeFi markets as the large "market makers" and financial houses that retail traders are buying and selling from in the traditional stock market. In DeFi, instead of being privately run, these are open and communal, and operate by strict rules set up in "smart contracts" on the…

Writing » I Can't Believe It's Not Poetry!
“The Radish Is The Noisy’st Root…”

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Poetry!: “The Radish Is The Noisy’st Root…”

The radish is the noisy'st root,
Its vocal tack beyond dispute,
effusive in expounding truth—
so talkative, this verbal fruit.

In ages prior and aeons hence,
have poets, lost in reverence,
e'er had their solemn thoughts disturbed
in comp'ny of this verbal herb,

As, spicy, doth it bide its time
concocting tales in verse and rhyme,
and platitudes, as is its bent,
propounding truth, without relent.

O! Indiscrete and loose-lip'd mustard!
With secrets should it not be trustered,
lest ev'ry private thought and plan,
reverb'rate loud from your garden.

The carrot dreams in quietude,
The yam's indifference seems rude.
The leek a mute, and soon you'll learn,
The 'tato downright taciturn.

Confronted, then, by veggie basket
Minds inquis'tive may well ask it,
"Does none among ye speak…

Writing » Topical Writing
About Sexism In The AI Images On This Site

Hey, You Got Your Social Awareness In My AI!: About Sexism In The AI Images On This Site

A number of the AI-generated images on this site contain artistic depictions of nudity, presented in a way that might seem to reasonably suggest some confusion between real artistic or aesthetic value, and what gives some people, perhaps including myself, some level of simple va-va-va-voom visual jollies.

Put simply: there's a lot of images of naked, topless, or scantily-dressed women in some of the image galleries here, but not so many men. Almost none, in fact.

Although it's in several galleries, this is most evident in, say, "Previsions of Johanna", where the many female figures, and only the female figures, all came out either nude, topless, or wearing a low-cut dress, while the male figures are always fully clothed from neck to wrists and ankles. In fact, the lone arguably male figure in that entire set that is wearing a loose tank top, rather than some kind…

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations » Interesting Leftovers & Bonus Galleries
Previsions of Johanna — preliminary experiments

Work-In-Progress Postview: Previsions of Johanna — preliminary experiments

As I worked on my "Revisions Of Johanna" project, I generated a lot of images I really liked, but which didn't fit into the final project. I decided the best of them deserved their own gallery.

This page is a work in progress, I just kind of threw it up to get me started. I have plenty more images to sort through from this, plus I need to pare down these already posted ones to just the most interesting ones. But, still, you can get a good sense of what went on behind the scenes here, and hopefully, an understanding of why I didn't just want these putative rejects to sit unused forever on my hard drive.

One additional note about the content of these images in the context of social awareness: For anyone interested, I addressed some thoughts about sexism and bias in…

Writing » Topical Writing
Critical Reading of a Flawed Information Source

Watch Your Intelligence: Critical Reading of a Flawed Information Source

Oct. 7, 2023

I had an interesting talk with my father yesterday. He had a 2-for-1 subscription offer to Mother Jones, and we got into a discussion when I told him I didn't like that magazine. Since then, I've been doing some thinking about how I pick my news sources, something I do very carefully, but have never thought about trying to explain. What I told him was, essentially, that Mother Jones is too biased, I don't feel like I can trust them to give the sides of a story that may not agree with their basic worldview, and I wind up feeling like have to do my own research into anything they say to verify I'm getting something like an accurate picture, and it takes a lot of time that I could be spending just reading better commentary.

Unlike a lot of people, I'm not terribly partisan about my…

Code & Algorithms » Web
How to make a completely unusable homepage in CSS3 and <strike>jQuery</strike>Javascript

Usability Hell: How to make a completely unusable homepage in CSS3 and jQueryJavascript

One of my favorite bits of code I've ever written is on the front page of my jiggy, ancient, perpetually-under-construction, virtually-never-viewed old personal website, Life In A Mikeycosm. Eager to make my front page "pop" a little more back in days gone by, I came up with a clever CSS3/javascript hack that caused the page text and logo to slip and slide in three dimensions in response to your mouse movements, rendering the page somewhere between difficult and totally unusable for actually navigating the content of the site. I've always been inordinately fond of this.

I've embedded it below so you can experience the source of my amusement. Actually, if you click through the above link to the real site, at the bottom left there's a "Stop this crazy thing" link that stops the animation and moves the links into rows so they're readable and clickable. I…

Writing » I Can't Believe It's Not Poetry!
Ode to “Ode To A Croaking Man”

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Meta-Poetry!: Ode to “Ode To A Croaking Man”

O! Poem that spoke of a man who croaks,
were you not my own, I would quote you!
I would think that whomever composed you smokes dope,
but I know it ain't so, 'cause I wrote you.

Which poet is it, that constructed you, Ode?
'Twas myself! Though I scant deserve credit.
For a poem's not a poem 'less it stands on its o'en
through my 50 neurotic edits.

And forget let us not, the post-poem note!
Doleful lament upon poem just wrote,
pensively telling of muse that had flo'en.
Though reader, perhaps, was just glad poem was do'en.

NOTE:
The poet wishes it to be kno'en:
It's not his intent to promote or condo'en
the writing of poems about one's other poems.
Do as I say, not as I've do'en.
Writing » Fun & Humor
Misinformation Visualization

Fudging The Facts: Misinformation Visualization

Among my many inconsequential but fondly-remembered ideas was about 10 years ago, when for a brief time, I had a blog called "Misinformation Visualization" (subtitle: "Bringing a world of misinformation to your fingertips"). My goal was to present, with a straight face, the kinds of fallacies and illogic masquerading as science and reason I saw all over the web, and to use the best charts and logical-sounding arguments I could think of to come to ridiculous conclusions.

Like a lot of my best ideas, it was timely, and like many of my ideas of any quality, it almost immediately became more work than the joke was worth, and when the novelty had worn off the next morning, I moved on to other things.

However, I've always been fond of the idea, and wish I had the kind of free time that would have enabled me to give such a silly…

Code & Algorithms » MacOS & Desktop
Terminal-Notifier Bridge For Thunderbird Email Client

Thunderbird Customization: Terminal-Notifier Bridge For Thunderbird Email Client

Hot off the presses. Direct from my Github, a MacOS BASH script to allow customized per-mailbox notifications in the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Following is the README containing full information and instructions, and then the code and license, embedded live from my
terminal-notifier-bridge-for-thunderbird repo on GitHub.

.emgithub-file pre {white-space:normal !important;} .emgithub-file tr, .emgithub-file td, .emgithub-file th, .emgithub-file span {min-width:32px !important;text-align: left !important; margin:2px 4px 0 0 !important;padding:2px !important;line-height:1.5em !important;}

Writing » Topical Writing
A Young Person’s Guide To Common Time Signatures, and what they mean in real life

Infrequently Asked Questions: A Young Person’s Guide To Common Time Signatures, and what they mean in real life

I have some time to kill so I thought I would write a brief overview of the concept of time signature in response to some questions that arose recently from non-musicians.

Just a word, this post was originally submitted to a long-ago fan club email list for an older musician, hence many uses of music from the '60s and '70s as examples, most especially The Beatles, who often kept things both simple enough to be clear, but interesting enough to be useful and well-known examples. That's just how it is.

PART 1: A Young Person's Guide To Common Time Signatures, and what they mean in real life

Ok. When you listen to a song, it has a beat. This is what you tap your feet to, or maybe drum your fingers on a desk.

The most common beat in rock and roll might be written something like this. "boom-boom-BOMP-bum, boom-boom-BOMP-bum,…

Writing » Topical Writing » Mikesplaining (Answers to Infrequently Asked Questions)
IAQs—More Answers to Infrequently Asked Questions

Knowledg Is Poweh: IAQs—More Answers to Infrequently Asked Questions

1. What's the difference between a sauce and a condiment? - Susan W., Tallahassee, FL

A condiment enhances the flavor of food and is used sparingly. A sauce adds an additional flavor or richness of its own to the dish, and may be used generously.

2. Is there a name for that special credit where at the end of a bunch of TV or movie credits you get one that's like "and WILLIAM P. DINWIDDIE as LORD HALFANDHALF?" - Jim S., San Francisco, CA

I'm glad you asked that, Jim. Frequently as part of the negotiations involved in taking a part in a TV show or movie, an agent will include a stipulation that the actor gets a certain special credit in the opening credits or, in the case of a movie, on the poster. They may strike a deal for a…

Workshop » Works In Progress » Visual Works In Progress
Revisions of Johanna — AI-Assisted lyrical illumination

Gallery: Revisions of Johanna — AI-Assisted lyrical illumination

I have to be honest. I don't know about this one.

I set out to do another set of AI-assisted lyric illustrations, this time all of one song in its entirety... Bob Dylan's "Visions Of Johanna".

I got a little ways into it, and it was going well, when a few times in a row the generative algorithm overemphasized cats I had added as incidental background elements in the prompt, to interesting effect. So I had the brilliant idea: let's illustrate the whole song with cats. I backtracked and started over again.

It was an instructive lesson, one that didn't turn out as well as I had hoped.

It's just hard to get a lot of variety out of the Stable Diffusion XL algorithm when the main subject is cats. Turns out, visually, cats are really not a very expressive medium. And especially…

Visual Art » Generative Illustrations
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California Deep Dreaming: “Wild California” Studies

While working on a featured image for Field Report: Briefing On My Weekend, I had the idea of extending the theme to make a whole set of illustrations inspired by my travels around California's natural areas. I wound up doing a whole mess of them. These are experimental, but I like the idea and the way the experiments worked came out, so I may follow up on this. There's a lot of them, I'm going to sit with this a while and probably then cut this gallery down to a more manageable size.

Because these sprung from an effort to illustrate a post with twilight fantasy elements, you may encounter some unsettling phantoms or backwoods beasties here and there. Just make sure to keep all your fingers inside your browser windows and you should be ok.

 

Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Reflective Prose: Fascination, And Dangerous Weather

Springtime hits hard in some quarters. I call this 'dangerous weather'—like, you've got to watch out where you're going. You might trip and fall. Somehow this always coincides with the rise of halters and midriff shirts.

Fascination, you know, is a universal feeling. I hesitate to call it an emotion, it's more than that, it's a condition, a thesis. It's strongly rooted in our biology, I think. I'm sure our closest animal relations feel it the same way we do. It's tough to know what's on a housecat's mind most of the time, but when he's gazing at that fish swimming around that bowl, I know exactly where his head is. And it's not "I'm hungry" or "how can I get that?" or "in a moment I shall execute my plan", as you might think. It's not something that rational, like when he wants something—in that case he meows, shuffles…

Writing » I Can't Believe It's Not Poetry!
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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Poetry!: Ode To A Croaking Man

On a long-ago visit to the hamlet of Acton, MA with my GOAT (that's "Girlfriend Onceupon A Time"—hey, I don't mind if they call me a BOAT), the town was infested with the loudest toads I'd ever heard, so loud I initially took them to be someone hiding outside our window playing a prank. I became enamored of the idea that someone might be prowling the countryside, hiding outside people's windows just to provide this bucolic ambiance. I contemplated this idea for a solid fifteen years until, in a moment of inspiration, this bit of doggerel spontaneously emerged.

Universally condemned among my friends as not especially good, it nonetheless remains one of my personal favorites.

ODE TO A CROAKING MAN

Oh, croaking bloke beneath the moon
so like a toad, it makes me swoon
whence "ChirRUP!" rises like balloon
which euphony just fills me with…

Writing » I Can't Believe It's Not Poetry!
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This’ll Show ‘Em: Verse Upon Bank of America Holding My Checks And Angering My Cat

https://michaelkupietz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/tooncessm.gif"These checks will be held for two weeks", they said,
"because they are very large and from New Jersey"

This much is true
But I am now home and
my cat is angry

He looks up through
his sloth with narrowed eyes
He querulously naiows his consternation

Tonight I will sleep the sleep of a good man
but my cat will not know rest.
Burring hair on his back, whiskers fanned
looking out on the rooftops with disdain and contempt
at spots where other cats have sat
outdoor cats
cats with no collars no names
cats that dig through dumpsters clawing towards the smell of day-old filets
skittering perhaps like a word whispered into a wind
on a moonless night in a dark alley
behind the bank that holds my…

Writing » I Can't Believe It's Not Poetry!
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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Poetry!: Ode To A Curl-Up Bug

O! pity the poor maligned curl-up!
Its form, tho' well designed, inspires many to fear!
But many a curl-up has faced
a cruel and untimely fate
'neath some shoe or sneaker well-placed
So it raises its hackles to have some such footwear come near!

Though 'pill bug' it's properly named,
so low on the food chain, one hides behind cautious deceit!
The 'pill bug's kept secret and dear!
Mere 'curl-up' when others are near!
Lest the higher aesthetic, they fear,
of some higher predator find 'pill bug' deliciously sweet!

In the science museum on a visit,
I viewed an exhibit of insects both fearsome and small.
But one creature displayed, I saw not!
"Unworthy of view, or forgot,"
so I thought, 'til chagrined I did spot
In some…

Writing » Topical Writing
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Marginal Thinking Dept.: You Can Quote Me On That (Other Assorted Short Topical Writings)

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private » Programming Hacks Used In This Site
Adding A Default Featured Image Or Thumbnail In WordPress

All Thumbs: Adding A Default Featured Image Or Thumbnail In WordPress

What's a featured image in WordPress?

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…

Music & Sound » Misc. Pieces, Singles, & EPs
RavineHousesTake12 mp3 image

Demo: The Ravine Houses Are Gone (A Song For Hume, And Wacks, And Dan, And You)

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…

Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Local Color—Seattle: Irene & Sheri

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…

Writing » Life In A Mikeycosm (Thoughts & Reflections)
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Temporal Moronomy: The Contents Of The Rest Of The World’s Dream Do Not Concern Me (or, Why I’m Not Turning 40)

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.…

Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Essay-Length Memoir: Ars Moriendi—Haley’s Epitaph

Disclaimer, 2023

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…

Music & Sound » Misc. Pieces, Singles, & EPs
Yiki·dū·sō (A Dream) digital single by Mike Kupietz cover

Digital Single: Yiki·dū·sō (A Dream)

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…

Writing » Topical Writing » Reviews & Criticism
Fragrance Reviews

Review Compendium: Fragrance Reviews

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.

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Toggle all reviews open/closed
Visual Art » Generative Illustrations
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If You Don’t Live It, It Won’t Come Out Your Cone: Adoration Of The City

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.