Month: February 2023

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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