Author: westyreflector

The Last Repair

Meta Meat Team Mate

Ford Kharkey sat behind the wheel of his immaculate repair van, eyes scanning the road ahead. His assistant, Cleave, a lumpy nug of rich red and pink ground beef, sat shotgun, upright in a plastic tub secured by a metal O-ring lashed to the passenger seatbelt. Just south of Belle Glade on Florida 27, they drove in silence for a while, punctuated by the intermittent sounds of love bug splats and wipers against the windshield.…

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low-priority throttle

This Terminal command to disable MacOS’s default “low-priority throttle” has been indispensible while backing up with Time Machine of late:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

Leaving it on (“=1”) shunts the backup to the last in line for the CPU no matter what. My backup process, however, is a VIP club goer.

Would that I could control, with one simple line of code, the throttle on my darkest thoughts.…

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random fr(ai)day: a pile and a poll

Prompt Pile 202302a

“an analog stereo receiver knob that expands space.”

”Kandinski’s ‘Regret’”

“The last musician on Earth, photographed by William Eggleston.”

”A guitar pedal that controls space and time.”


Punch Line Poll! How does an AI keep a secret?
  • In a database!
  • Co-located on a global network!
  • “Recently” deleted!
  • Alphabetically, by date, time, and user!


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(xtra)terrestrial vacation

The idea that alien life forms would conform to our dimensional perspectives and physics, and yet still leave themselves vulnerable to human weapons and hate, is naive.

“An Earthland vacation this light-year? Really?”

“I heard it’s pretty, and I always wanted to go.”

“Okay, but just remember to bring ‘sion-block-“

“Yes, I packed ‘sion-block!”



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70-year shutter click


My IRL family, Maplewood, NJ, 1981 [me: 2nd from bottom left; paternal grandparents Ida & Morris: top row left; self-timer composition, Kodak stock, format unknown]

Down in Florida last month, I began to organize my parents’ 6 bins of photographs, the earliest of which reached back into the 1880s. Aside from being an invaluable record of my family history, the trove also provides, upstream, a fractal of the entire era of mass manual photography.…

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The No Net Kids

“Hey Westy, when you grew up with no internet, what on Earth did you do for fun?”

Action Park, Vernon, NJ 1982

Caracas, Venezuela 1980

Myrtle Beach, SC 1981

lol. Wouldn’t trade my 80s childhood for all the TikTok in China.

upon a glass road reflection

Artist Ward Spring paints The Glass Road to “Upon A Child’s Doll Reflection [disquiet0180-matryoshkamusic]” off my 2015 record Sunrise Highway.


YouTube Liner Notes

Puddles everywhere. Certain angles are nice to ponder. The Upside Down. Although I am now dogless, I still go out for “dogwalks”. This scene was 7AM yesterday in the Union Bay Natural Area.



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Alley Flights

Youtube user Saboruchan takes us on a journey through a “virtually untouched” abandoned bowling alley in Haikyo, Japan, that opened in 1973 and closed in 2018. Through the modern miracle of a cc-by-sa-nc Creative Commons license, the scene is soundtracked with “Chasing Flight” off my 2016 record Almost X.



Saboruchan’s affection for the abandoned-in-state space and its lost localised grandeur resonates through the video.…

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Slope ’n Cheese

Park Slope is the mac ’n cheese of nyc neighborhoods. And not an artisanal macaroni and cheese, either. More like a boxed pasta with the powdered cheese packet, where the most adventurous thing that happens is the addition of a few drops of Cholula

Don’t take this wrong. Boxed mac & cheese is far from a damaged or morally bankrupt dinner.…

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