Howard Tayler

Your restraint is heroic. I would have punched a hole in the universe.

Oxoplanet - fun looking typo
Oxo planet - makes gyms
Oxyplanet - probably a world of opioids
Oxiplanet - the whole planet is rusty or on fire
Oxenplanet - In space no-one can hear you moo
Axolotlplanet - dunno, but @ethankocak.com probably drew one already

Apparently there's a company called Oxo Planet that makes things like climbing gyms and other receational park thingies.

I read this so you wouldn't have to click a Substack. The whole "Armageddon" story, as much as I'd like to believe it, is suspicious and comes from an authoritative-sounding but still suspicious source. So it's probably not true. (PS Get off Substack, they are Nazis and gamblers there.)

Or that it could be gifted

A spreadsheet with rows of page numbers and check-boxes with columns for scripting, layout, roughs, pencils, inks, flats, backgrounds, and paints. The only unchecked boxes are for page 10 (paints), page 11 (backgrounds and paints), and page 13 (inks, flats, backgrounds, and paints).

When I stare at the unfinished pages it feels like I'll never be done, but when I check the project spreadsheet I can see that I'm actually quite close to the end.

Everyone be nice to my friends and colleagues at ECCC and buy all of their stuff. Why support big business when you can become an art collector on the cheap? Artist Alley is where stars are on the rise.

How I arrived on BlueSky:

MICROFICTION:

MRS. GENIE: "Honey, have you been keeping the baklava in the same leftover container as the Limberger cheese?"

MR. GENIE (who cannot lie, I guess?): "No, my love. Why do you ask? Does it smell like feet or something?"

"Howard, the genie is out of the bottle. It's too late."

No it's not. Tell the genie we know about his barefoot-in-the-baklava fetish and he'll crawl right back into that bottle for another seven hundred years.

(I'm optimistically assuming someone will be around to rub the lamp then.)

The incongruity I'm experiencing is this: for some reason the focus of the article is "wow, we are seeing some weird stuff in this end-user footage" instead of "Meta employees can watch everything you see through those glasses."

If you're wearing Meta glasses then, per the article, "much of the footage being recorded by the glasses is being sent to offshore contractors for data labeling, a widely-used preprocessing step in training new AI models in which human contractors are asked to review and annotate footage."

The headline reads "Meta workers say they're seeing disturbing things through users' smart glasses."

In a moment of uncharacteristic incredulity I assumed it was badly written. Why would Meta *workers* being seeing things through Meta *users'* glasses?

SILLY ME.

www.msn.com/en-us/news/t...

Not a sentence I expected to write, but here we go.

The world needs more Dagwoods.

ADDENDA + ERRATA + maybe stigmata but only because it rhymes:

GALAVANT is awesome, and ten years old now. Wow.

Aerogarden still has active pages at the MiracleGro site, so I guess it's back. Ours is still broken, though.

I don't like touching dirt, especially indoors. These plants are doomed.

Non-word words I've written today that AI would not write, and which AI grammar tools would freak out at.

Defunctification (the act or event of becoming defunct)
Refunctificated (making something no longer defunct, past tense.)

These are FINE WORDS. You know what I meant. AI is stupid, and slop.

Upon further consideration, I'd be more likely to pay for WDOI if it was a larger program of Pets On The Rink, and if it included a few musical numbers that involved catnip, laser pointers, and a Jorts-alike contest.

NGL, I would pay to watch two hours of Wiener Dogs On Ice. I would also pay to be able to NOT watch Disney On Ice or hockey.

It looks like they still have a website at MiracleGro, so maybe they've been (*checks dictionary, gives up*) refunctificated. Two years ago we stopped being able to get refills or parts for ours, so we assumed it was dead.

"Okay, all you good boys and good girls and best dogs ever, we're gonna have zoomies but there's no stopping because well you'll see"

WT6ActualF does that even mean?

Oh, sorry. Lemme clarify. TWO questions:
1) What does "beautify" mean?
2) What does that slide mean?

I think the answer to #1 is "apply enough (metaphorical) paint that the very shape of the original structure is gone."

No idea re: #2.

Yup.

Neighbor kid wouldn't touch the raita I made (shredded cucumber, Greek yogurt, minced cilantro, drop of mustard) because she has the cilantro=soap gene. But the pork tenderloin roast with cumin & coriander bark was a hit.

(I fed the neighbors because the power was out. Different story.)

The first time I did one of those it was me, Eric Raymond, and Steve Jackson. No topic, just the three of us in chairs with no stage and no table and a small audience of bewildered but enthusiastic folks who, like us, had no idea what we were going to talk about.

All of this is very un-hatched chickens, though. Right now I have cheap pots and fancy wet dirt and seeds poked down to what I think is the correct depth. I haven't even hung the grow lamp yet.

Germination time feels like ordering X-ray glasses from the back of a comic book. (IYKYK).

That said, if the cilantro grows (big if) and I decide NOT to chop the entire plant down for a big batch of raita (bigger if) and it goes to seed, I will absolutely try to turn that seed into bark seasoning for pastrami. After looking up the process and hoping I find instructions, not slop, ofc.

I suspect that the folks who want coriander plant a variety that doesn't necessarily make good cilantro, and vice-versa, but my suspicion is based on the repeatedly-reinforced belief that "it's never as easy as it looks" is one of the Universe's operating principles.

Anyway, I had a third pot for starting things, and I found a seed packet that was labeled "CILANTRO CORIANDER." My first reaction was "well, which is it? Also, don't name your varieties after other foods (looking at you, grape tomatoes)." But further reading revealed that coriander is cilantro seed.

If I were a friendly farmer Wouldn't that be oh so sweet? I'd be planting greens, and lots of beans And lots of things to eat Then I'd plant some eggs, then a couple pigs Then a yummy chocolate cake!

I feel a lot like King Richard from GALAVANT when he sang about non-King career paths for himself. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I poked some seeds into some fancy dirt on the assumption that this is how it begins.

Relevant lyrics (alt text included)

We've planted cilantro before, using the Aerogarden, and my experience was that the amount of cilantro I need when I need cilantro is pretty much the whole plant. I decided to try some grape tomatoes and dwarf bush snap peas instead.

ASIDE: it's been *decades* since I planted actual seeds.

TIL: Cilantro is just early coriander.

Longer version: Ever since the defunctification of Aerogarden I've been wanting to try indoor gardening without a fancy, expensive, high-maintenance, unsupported device. I acquired a nice grow lamp, bought some fancy dirt, and today I started some seeds.