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  I see that my timeline is going to be full of David Carradine jokes. #monsterdon

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  Here's a #3GoodThings for yesterday: 1. I did my regular bike maintenance. Every hundred miles, I take off the freewheel and pedals so they don't get too tight, and then I clean and re-lubricate the chain/derailleurs. With winter on the way, it might be a while before the next round. 2. I did my very first shrink-wrap! This will help me to sell my #FirstClassFiction postcards in bookstores. 3. My end-of-year postcard anthology is coming along.

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  Searching for some images on Wikimedia Commons. Here's a nice one. Right click, go to 'Copy Link'-- Wait, 'Copy CLEAN Link'? Wikimedia Commons has *un*clean links, like YouTube? What's that about?

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  "I've got a dream, too, but it's about singing and dancing, and making people happy. That's the kind of dream that gets better the more people you share it with. Well, I found a whole bunch of friends who have the same dream. And... that kind of makes us like a family." :'-) https://youtu.be/aHXxveJTJoE

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  John Green talks about his brother Hank Green's "AI" dustup. I thought John Green's response was very thoughtful. I was pleased to hear John say that he doesn't use "AI" in his work, and doesn't see a need to. It's good to see a writer as popular as John Green take a public stance like that. https://youtube.com/shorts/VQUzrdOwnvE

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  I made some improvements to my Commodore 64 bitmap-loading program. Previously, I was loading the pixel data from a binary file straight to memory, and the color information from a sequential text file. Now, I can load both from binaries. In BASIC, the program loads a 320x200 image in just under 25 seconds.

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  New blog post: Today, I visited the hotel where some of this Nantucket Lit project first started. https://nantucketlit.com/blog/2026/09/2026-09-09_a_day_to_reflect.html Back when I was sketching SVG icon ideas on graph paper, I had no idea how many kind, talented, wonderful people I'd meet because of this project. Thank you.

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  A review of Led Zeppelin's very first concert in North America. It happened in Denver, Colorado, on December 26, 1968. The concert venue is now the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. https://www.ledzeppelin.com/image/denver/denver-68-review

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  Cool line from the 2004 version of I, Robot: "Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the earth make you go crazy? Because if so, maybe I am."

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  https://youtu.be/niZY_-e9OI0 A couple videos for today. I saw a statistic that a quarter of people alive today were born after 9/11. A few years ago, I had an intern who asked me about the Iraq war--for a class history report. I thought I'd take a moment to commit my memories of that day to tape. I was ten years old at the time. Hard to believe. I wanted to convey the sense of uncertainty and panic from that morning. I think I underplayed it in this video.

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  Tomorrow, I'll be hosting a #DefyAI writing workshop at Books on Main in Fort Morgan, Colorado. I talk about the places human creativity comes from, and the perils of relying on "AI". https://youtube.com/shorts/oDFkz_ghWbU If you're interested in updates about these workshops, you may email me at njb@nantucketlit.com

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  Man this is fun to share :) A high school teacher in my area discovered a set of tracks from a Tyrannosaurus Rex. https://youtu.be/mEMAvBj2Ew4

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  @amin You ever feel like adding a marquee to Readable.css? X-D People get very misty about the way the web used to be, but I remember that too many website had nonsense like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquee_element

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  https://nantucketlit.com/blog/2026/09/2026-09-13_defy_ai_workshop_at_books_on_main.html New blog post: I had a great time hosting my #DefyAI writing workshop in Fort Morgan, Colorado on Saturday! I got to enjoy their lovely bookstore, Books on Main, where I got to talk about human creativity and the perils of "AI".

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  Yesterday's Denver Zine Fest went very well. I met a lot of like-minded people there, which was very positive. I have too many thoughts about it right now, but I don't want to wait too long to write a blog post. I'll try to work on one tonight.

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  Singapore is paying people to read. https://lite.cnn.com/2026/09/15/asia/singapore-reading-campaign-intl-hnk-dst

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  Bike update: I did some cleaning on my chain, derailleurs, and crank. I also bought a new shifter cable for the front derailleur. The front derailleur on my bike is tricky, because if those pedals aren't moving, the teeth won't bite the chain and I'm in trouble. I might seek help from my local bike shop to understand that problem.

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  Tonight's work music is the soundtrack of my pre-teen and early teen years. Toonami: Deep Space Bass is a techno album by Joe Boyd Vigil. It collects his music from Cartoon Network's afternoon anime block. This music was a major part of Toonami's promos and pre-show segments. https://youtu.be/jnxbreSfQ48 I have no idea if anyone else here even remembers Toonami, before it went back to Adult Swim...

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  I am going to post a big "L" here. I hope I can save someone else from this embarrassment. Beurre de barratte is *not* cheese. It's a butter. I am still learning French, and boy do I know what 'beurre de barratte' means now. I don't know why it was put in the cheese section.

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  I'm having trouble finding a TV stand big enough for my 36-inch CRT, so I thought I'd use a coffee table. Several people told me it wouldn't be sturdy enough. The CRT is back on my moving cart for now. A few options: find the actual stand for this TV, build my own stand, or keep it on the cart.

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  A friend and I were discussing LLMs today. He mentioned a recent news story about Claude making headway on a famous unsolved math problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture If there is anyone in the math(s) field who has heard about this, I'd like to try to understand what's going on. It is difficult to find any information about this news that isn't from the "AI" hype crowd.

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  Some of today's work: - I captured the video footage from last weekend's trip to Delta H Con in Houston. Yes, you can still capture MiniDV on Linux in 2026. - I stained the inside of the back yard fence. That was a lot of paint, but it looks very nice now. - I tried putting my giant CRT television on a coffee table, but I was warned against doing this. - I continued my refresher study of algebra. So far, I'm up to long division of polynomials.

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  I finished watching the first season of Blue Eye Samurai tonight. I highly recommend it. It's some good samurai revenge drama, with very memorable characters and creative action, and a top-notch villain. How good is this show? Let me put it this way: every time I finished an episode, I thought "Dammit, I have to watch the next one!" It was 11 PM, then it it was 12 midnight, then it was 1 AM... you get the idea.

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  ffmpeg is a good way to convert audio files from one format to another. https://www.linux.org/threads/using-ffmpeg-to-convert-audio-files.54583/

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  It looks like gtkpod isn't being maintained anymore. Since I upgraded to Trisquel 12, it's no longer in apt. I could compile it from source... maybe... For now, Rhythmbox is a good way to get songs onto my old iPod. Now I can continue listening to these Redwall audiobooks. Redwall! Woodland critters! Cozy cooking! Murder!

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  @amin@polymaths.social I especially appreciated the descriptions of insects in the wilderness: clouds of flies and mosquitos that almost eat you alive. This is one part of the wilderness that is not pretty. Brian becomes quite rugged during his ordeal, learning to hunt and all that, but the insects bring him to his knees. The only thing that keeps the insects at bay is fire. I appreciated this accurate detail

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  @adafruit@fosstodon.org Zuckerberg ushering in the "ineptus mechanicus."

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  @jetton@mastodon.online That does put the "housing crisis" into perspective.

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  It was snowing in the Denver area today, so I guess it was a day to learn some handiwork. In addition to the bicycle restoration: - Mended some jeans, poorly. - Replaced the center console armrest in my car. The original one acquired an odd ripple defect early on. Replacing it was straightforward.

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  When I was a kid, 25+ years ago, I remember science books saying that one symptom of global warming would be more freak weather events. We had a very mild winter here in Colorado, and now... a snowstorm in May?