Bask in the glow

Do you remember A Softer World? This is one of their comics that sticks with me.

asofterworld.com/index.php

This is delightful. Open it in your browser and enjoy the beautiful pixel art.

New research backs up what gamers have thought for years: cozy video games can be an antidote to stress and anxiety.

Screenshot of pixel art and the title and subhead of Cozy comfort. New research backs up what gamers have thought for years: video games can be an antidote to stress and anxiety.

This is a beautiful piece about local art museums.

The Wonder Of The Regional Art Museum

Visiting a small art museum on Maryland’s Eastern Shore led me to a university art museum for an embroidery exhibition it and another in Roanoke, VA earlier this year.

Every museum in is its own treat.

Roast some really good chick peas tonight. Washed. Dried thoroughly Then roasted for an hour at 400. Olive oil and salt. Spices are for later. Once I get the timing down.

They came out very crispy and I can’t stop snacking on them.

Junk Journalling has given me a place for all my scraps and stickers and neat things I’ve wanted to keep but didn’t have a home for.

An open book displays an illustration of a bird with human legs, titled “EXTREMELY ACCURATE BIRDS” and “ANATOMICALLY PRECISE BIRDS.” Nearby, there’s a jar with pens and a partially visible yellow page with handwritten notes.

It’s also a great place for last year’s calendar photos.

The crows left their marks today. With the other sparrows, wrens, finches and grackles.

Bird tracks create patterns in smooth, untouched snow under dim lighting, suggesting a nighttime setting.

Bird tracks crisscross snow, indicating movement across a flat, snowy surface. Nearby, a few scattered pine needles add texture and contrast to the scene.

A brown leaf rests on a snowy surface, surrounded by bird tracks and scattered twigs, in an outdoor setting.

I got a whole $7.44 from Equifax doing something illegal on a virtual debit card.

I went to Amazon and bought a gift card for $7.44 and sent it to myself.

Redeemed it minutes later and now the money is somewhere useful.

And I completed the dumbest sequences of events.

My $5 from Verizon is next.

One sandwich. One new video game. One new TV show.

Today has been such a peaceful day where the highlight of it was buying a nice sandwich for lunch trying out a new video game and finding a new show to watch with my wife in the evening by the fire.

Jersey Mike’s was the provider of my sandwich. A Club Supreme which is Roast beef, turkey, swiss, applewood smoked bacon and mayo with lettuce, onions, pickles and oil.

Overthrown in early access was the video game which I really enjoyed. It’s open world city building with a silly twist of being able to pick up anything in the game.

Portrait Artist of the Year on Sky, which we watched via YouTube is the TV show. We picked a couple episodes at random and just seeing different people‘s art styles and how they choose to paint where they have four hours to sit and paint or draw or carve in some cases there model Was really enjoyable to watch seeing their process seeing how the work came together.

Now I am sitting by the embers of the fire under a blanket not wanting to head up to bed because that means today is over and tomorrow will be coming.

🎮 Portal Knights (2016)

Portal Knights poster

Played this for a ton of hours with my wife back in the Laurel and Yanny time period. Picked it back up today and started to relearn it. It’s a good alternative when I get burned out in Stardew Valley.

Eulogy for the last fun social media

I’m going to miss TikTok.

It’s light years ahead of any other platform for storytelling. Mixing videos together. Allowing conversations via stitching.

I will miss 8 musicians coming together to play a single song from their own rooms.

I will miss the absolutely unhinged skits. I will miss the funny stories, stupid trends and the general positive vibes of every comment section.

And for all the selling, a relative lack of ads.

TikTok was a platform of “dancing girls” until you sign up and create an account.

I watched the service try out content on me to see what I responded to.

It learned quickly and served me what I can only call a truly “for you” page that I built brick by brick.

On the best of days it was like attending a live screening of your favorite podcast over and over.

A comedy show. A Moth Radio Hour. A poetry slam. And a thousand views of The Eras Tour. And I watched them all.

I never posted I only consumed. But there is nothing out there like it.

This week has been like watching the series finale of your favorite TV show.

It was the most fun social network. The comments were full of support and jokes and positivity.

I never saw spam comments. I rarely saw mean comments. The ability to respond to a comment with a video and to shame the trolls into deleting their accounts and slithering back under their rocks likely helped

YouTube is informative. But it’s not fun. Instagrams Reels… are reruns of TikTok’s. And the comments are mean and rude and often trying to tear the creator down instead of being in on the joke, they’re just mean.

Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are as different as LinkedIn and Facebook. The vibe is just off. Hostile and cruel.

And the ads. The amount of garbage ads I see and the “recommended” content.

For all of Meta’s collected data on me, why do you offer garbage? Same to YouTube. I’ve given you far more hours and years of data.

Why does TikTok outperform you with showing me what I want?

If you’re going to slurp up every last byte of data on me, at least do a good job giving me what I want.

But I know it’s not about me. It’s about you. Trying to push me towards what you want to show me. It was never about what I want to see.

Tiktok served the viewer. TikTok learned what I wanted to see and pushed me to people and content I enjoyed.

Instagram serves AI slop and ads. YouTube serves you pizza after you order pizza. Twitter doesnt deserve a mention.

I’ll miss my friends on TikTok. Their stories. The snippets of their lives.

It’s been a fun ride. Maybe the US can create something fun that won’t be bought, ruined or both.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Today has been a rough day. Birds help to brighten it.

A small brown bird pecks at the ground, surrounded by dry grass and fallen leaves, in a natural setting.

A small dark bird pecks at the ground amidst fallen leaves and green plants. It’s surrounded by patches of grass and dried foliage.

Four mourning doves peck at the ground, surrounded by dry grass and scattered leaves. They stand near flat, gray stones in a natural, outdoor setting.

A small bird perches on a green bird feeder filled with seeds. It is set outdoors, surrounded by blurred green foliage in the background.

A small bird pecks at seeds in a hanging green bird feeder. Nearby, other feeders are visible, with trees and foliage in the background.

🎵 The Only Exception - Paramore

It’s hard to find songs from snippets in TikTok when you wake up with them in your head. But I did and it’s this chorus.

🎶 I’ve got a tight grip on reality But I can’t Let go what’s in front of me here I know you’re leaving in the morning when you wake up Leave me with some proof it’s not a dream 🎶

The more AI startups I start to see trickling into my work email with their breathless hype-riddled emails, the more I fear that if using Ctrl+F or CMD+F was more widely used, they wouldn’t be in business.

I don’t need to chat with my document or my tabs when I can search them. Then read them.

We got our first bit of snow today that stuck.

Colorful light decorations line a snowy walkway in a residential neighborhood. Snowflakes fall steadily, covering lawns and houses, with leafless trees and overcast skies in the background.

Snow lightly covers a backyard with birdfeeders on poles, bordered by a yellow house, white shed, and trees, creating a serene wintry scene.

A spiral light structure glows warmly in a snowy front yard, surrounded by colorful path lights. Bare trees and bushes are covered in snow during an overcast winter day.

Home Screen going into 2025.

I’ve been putting off making changes to the apps I don’t use anymore. The muscle memory was stronger than desire for change.

Both photos are my own. My wife sitting in a rose garden in New York and a sunset from Hawaii.

Decided to try dark mode icons. Onward!

A person sits on a wooden bench, smiling, amidst vibrant pink roses. Surrounding them is a garden with informational signage. The screen displays the time as 7:32 and a temperature of 38° with other phone data.

Smartphone home screen displaying various app icons like Reader, Kindle, Reminders, and Spotify. Notifications appear for Reminders and email. Background shows a serene ocean sunset with a search bar. Time reads 7:32.

Visited the National Gallery of Art’s Impressionist exhibit. I quite enjoyed the faces of these two paintings.

What’s the monk up to? He’s scheming. 😏

A seated man with a white beard rests hands on a knee, wearing glasses and a dark hat, set against a forest background inside an ornate gold frame.

A bearded monk chisels a wooden figure in a workshop, surrounded by religious statues, tools, and crucifixes. Latin text partially reads: “a dextris… nec pomæ… pedum…” Artist signed: “J. E. Dantan, 1874.

Easily repackaged as dunks - by Ryan Broderick

You simply just don’t have to figure out how to fit the newest global crisis into your creator niche. It’s alright to sit one out.

You don’t have to have an opinion on everything. You don’t have to figure out where you stand on every single issue in the world. You can be silent.

This is even more important going into 2025. There’s going to be so many things to have an opinion about. Or not. By the time you form an opinion on in the latest outrage, there will be a new one.

Visited the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC for a Basquiat x Banksy exhibit. But fell madly in love with the Laurie Anderson room and the work of Flora Yukhnovich.

A vibrant, abstract painting features a skeletal figure with outstretched arms alongside a dog-like creature. The background is a chaotic mix of bold colors. Text: “Basquiat” at the top.

A woman walks through an art installation featuring black and white wall murals with intricate text and drawings. Prominent text includes “Laurie Anderson,” “REMIND,” and “John Cage.

A painting shows two police officers frisking a graffiti-style figure with exaggerated features, while an alert dog stands nearby, set against a plain wall. “Banksy” is written above.

Painting depicts abstract floral forms in pink, orange, and green, blending seamlessly. Located in an art gallery, signed “Flora Yukhnovich” above. The brushstrokes are fluid and dynamic.

A large, textured abstract mural stretches across a curved wall, featuring layered horizontal strips of colorful paint. The setting includes a patterned floor and overhead spotlights. Text reads: “Mark Bradford.

Offering a choice isn’t empowering when the choice isn’t understood

Dear Apple,

Install Rosetta for people with Apple Silicon computers.

It will prevent so many questions and so much confusion about what Rosetta is and why I need to install it. Providing a choice is not empowering if the maker of the choice does not understand what they’re choosing.

If you insist on asking people, as if they can make an informed choice, then provide them context written in plain English, what Rosetta is and why you need it. And I mean very basic, easy to understand language that doesn’t rely on other technical knowledge. If you can’t, then install it.

For those curious, Rosetta will let your printer driver or older versions of software work with your new Apple computer.

Rosetta works automatically in the background whenever you use an app that was built only for Mac computers with an Intel processor. It translates the app for use with Apple silicon.

But if you have to ask the user to install it, they may never benefit from it.

For those curiouser, here’s what Apple says about it. If you need to install Rosetta on your Mac - Apple Support

Hawk perched on a wooden frame looks sideways, surrounded by blurred branches and foliage in a garden setting.

Hawk perched on a wooden fence, surrounded by leafless branches and green foliage.

Keeping on brand as I have opened an Extremely Accurate Bird calendar and a Birds in Shoes calendar.

A Red Shouldered Hawk caught my eye across the street in a neighbor’s tree then fence. It was hopping down into their yard then back to the fence like it was hunting a mouse or something tasty.

Christmas movie plots of the 80s/90s rely on “the big promotion” or “the big bonus”. Then the inevitable loss of the expected money.

What is the modern day equivalent?

Is it all big city woman returns home to small town for Christmas?

Brookside Gardens of Light

Visited Brookside Gardens for their Gardens of Light for my wife’s birthday. The lights were beautiful. But the attraction that made me gasp was the bubbles sticking to the tree branches from the children’s area. Magical little bulbs in the night. Some of them were filled with mist that puffed out a tiny cloud when popped. 🫧

Illuminated flamingo-shaped lights stand by a pond at night, casting vibrant purple reflections on the water amid a dark, tree-lined background.

A light display features a wolf-shaped figure and trees adorned with white lights, set against a night background.

A single illuminated bubble in sharp focus against a blurred backdrop of multicolored lights adorning bare tree branches at night.

Multicolored lights blur background behind a bubble on a twig, creating a bokeh effect in a lit garden at night.

If you are a child of Looney Tunes or Monty Python please enjoy Hundreds of Beavers.

www.hundredsofbeavers.com

How much money is a commute into an office worth?

A two-tiered, oval window bird feeder holds assorted papers, set against a sunset view through a screened window, with a silhouette of a house outside.

Finally installed my in-window bird feeder. Added to a second story window to hopefully prevent the squirrels fromm parkouring into it.

Will it work? Only time will telll tell.