Okay we’re almost halfway into November with this one. Sorry, I was waiting for _COSPLAY_, and I’m so glad I did. Highlights: “Echoes”, “Life In This Body”. Minute/Year: > Minute/Year is an automated, process-based, durational work, in which sound is played, recorded, and layered, in a resonant space, for one minute each day. This process has been ongoing, daily, since 2016. Sudan Archives is back with _THE BPM_. Highlights: “DEAD”, “A BUG’S LIFE”. Chuck Wendig has been writing apple reviews. I didn’t know the knobbed russet existed, but wow, what a weird apple. fanclubwallet, known for “Car Crash in G Major”, now _Living While Dying_. “I’m the Owner of This All-Day Café in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Can We Stop It with the Fucking Easels?” Just Mustard exclaims _WE WERE JUST HERE_, wherever that was. This is their first all-caps album, both title and track list. I’ll leave ya’ll with “Flammarion” by Magic Fig, which could easily be the backing track of freeze-frame-into-credits film sequence.

Watched this last night with friends, very good! I liked how they filled in backstory from the show without being annoying about it; many movies tend to over-explain the backstory and I find that so boring. A couple of my friends hadn’t seen the show, and they got just enough to know what it’s about without spoiling the good bits.

David Bushell writes: > It’s weird that my address is unobscured yet I get more spam via the contact form! This is something I’ve noticed too, and over the last few years I’ve been noodling on a theory: Sending emails en masse is less cost effective than spamming contact forms. When you’re ramping up your spam operation, you need a few things: * big, gigantic lists of emails (the more the better) ($$) * “I’ll scrape my own” okay cool, that’s +$$$, and you end up buying lists anyway * a bunch of IPs to send from, with good reputations on both the network address itself and the ASN block it belongs to ($$$$) * “what about my favorite developer-friendly mail service?” much more expensive for little gain, this shit is going to the spam folder most of the time * multiple domains to send from, with the full SFP + DKIM + DMARC + DIRIGIBLE setup * staggered bulk sending times to keep servers at big providers from getting wise (Gmail and others throttle inbound rates from IPs and domains) * more things which cost more money just for the tiny 0.069% chance one of your “Screenshot of errors” (title of a real spam message I personally received) emails get delivered, and the 0.001% chance they make it past the spam folder You absolutely can make this work. There's a virtual assistant company in Las Vegas which makes this work. Every new employee gets the same spreadsheet with my website's email address on it, they run a mail merge, and I reply back with an effin' birds image. I'm an essential part of the onboarding experience over there. But finding and hitting contact forms instead is cheaper, easier to scale, and has a much higher rate of eyeballs hitting text: * Beautiful Soup (a Python library for scraping websites) (free) * a server spun off an image that you can move to the next server when your provider nukes this one in 6–18 months ($) * search terms (uh, “local businesses near me”, haha wow!) * the knowledge that every contact form ever lives at some variation of `/contact` in multiple languages (priceless) * more wonderful knowledge you learned firsthand at Luke’s Wild Website: messages sent by contact forms go straight to the top of the inboxes of eager business owners desperate for tinctures made from the condensation running off the protein-ravaged forearms of this year’s shouty SEO salesperson What about CAPTCHAs? Filtering services like Akismet? Cloudflare? The humble keyword blocklist? None of these are set up by default. The game isn’t getting around these measures; if they’re in place the owners likely aren’t good sales targets anyway. The game is about going after the largest business class by quantity—small-to-medium—which has barely enough money in the marketing budget (if they have a budget at all) to type “web Site?” into the search bar on Fiverr and sort prices low to high. They’re going to get a big pile of WordPress-powered sludge unceremoniously dumped onto the cheapest shared hosting provider their web “designer” can find, and then they’re going to promptly forget about it. These businesses are not going to dig through plugin soup to turn on—let alone pay for—things that make number go down. Contact form emails are _leads_ , and there are no bad ones. * * * That’s my theory. I haven’t ramped up a spam operation before, so take all this with your favorite flavor of atomic number 11 (I didn’t want to say salt but I think this is _worse_ somehow). This is based on observations from years of trying to wear the web design hat full-time and sites I’ve encountered while doing market research. It is absolutely bleak out there! I used to type “local businesses near me” into Google Maps and despair.

Hello! It's been way too long since the last time I did one of these. I had a long train and bus commute when I started this series, but once November hit I started driving all the way down to Hyde Park, which made it _really_ difficult to read articles. Now I've got a train commute again, and I figure I have about two months to continue this series before winter makes that long walk to the train less enticing. I’ve had Wednesday’s new album on repeat since its release on the 19th. It’s been interesting watching MJ Lenderman’s spinoff career after following Wednesday since _Twin Plagues_ , and I’m glad the group is still truckin’ along together. Loved this article about acoustic panels used in Star Trek TNG sets. The new 21p album is good, and yes _of course_ I’m going to mention _Blurryface_ in the same sentence, because that’s the last 21p album I listened to. Are they comparable? Sure. Do I remember anything of substance other than “Stressed Out”? lol no. That’s the thing with 21p; I’ll listen to an entire album of theirs on repeat for a few days, have a good time, and forget all about it. BogdanTheGeek turned a vape into a server. When they lose their vape it returns 404 Not Found. Otherwise it returns 420 Enhance Your Calm. Big Thief has a new album out, the first one without their founding bassist. _Is it good?_ is a question I keep asking myself. Which inevitably leads to, _but what is good?_ Is it good compared to their previous albums? Or is it good in its own right, an album recorded during turbulent times with the band going back to its roots in Brooklyn—whatever that means. “Incomprehensible” is the only track which stands out in my mind, and it’s the first one. I think I’m subconsciously holding out for someone, anyone, to convince me it’s all in my head and Big Thief hasn’t lost it and this new album _is_ good. I can’t decide. Chris Silverman’s iphone notes art series is still going, and this one is my favorite recently. I discovered “prayer for tears” by olllam randomly, which is a music discovery event of increasing rarity. There’s a reed instrument in there I can’t quite identify (flute maybe?) and as someone who failed miserably learning the recorder I was impressed. This track became an obsession of mine during the past week and I’ve had it playing on repeat. Today I discovered some of the Vulfpeck guys are involved and it all makes sense now.

Things have been wild in the Ruby world for the past few days. Joel Drapper has the details.

It has taken six (6) days of turning off every power-saving setting I could possibly find and wrangling cats away from the delicious braided power cord to get Time Machine to do its thing. I think I'm finally ready for the Molten Silica upgrade or whatever they're calling it. This release of macOS shares similarities with OS X Leopard in my mind, what with it being the last release to support a CPU architecture and the big design changes. Remember when operating systems had intro videos with cool music after installation? I think Windows XP's was just music, but that track was by far my most played during my early teens and I still think it goes hard. OS X Tiger had a good one too. I can't remember if Leopard had one, but I do remember I had it running on a G4 with a truly tragic graphics card and I was lucky to see its slideshow of a desktop when it booted up. I can't imagine how awful it would have been to play videos on it. During the summer I ran the iOS beta for the first time in over a decade and was reminded why I stopped running beta versions of anything. Slow as garbage. The stable release feels much faster though, and I'm starting to think I might make it through another year with this phone. 5 years this year! It's close to outlasting all my other phones combined.

Yes we're still unpacking, how could you tell?

I have read nothing tangible about Silksong other than it seems to be causing service disruptions and it's a game, so I'm hoping it's about a traveling bard who journeys down the Silk Road singing songs about the dangers and characters they've encountered while running away from a vague and troubled past. Around Act I they meet their eventual best friend who will die tragically near the end of Act III, cementing our antihero's unwavering dedication to ending medieval capitalism through the power of song

We saw My Chemical Romance at Soldier Field on Friday night. Still reeling from how good of a show it was. At one point the entire stage was on fire, and they had a guy in a fire suit run across. I found out afterwards that at least ten people I know were also there. Friends, coworkers, their friends. Never saw any of them, which is understandable considering the size of the crowd. Devo was the opener and played songs I knew well but had never associated with the name. I'm making a note to check out the rest of their discography though.

Lauren snapped this photo of a very happy bumble bee snoozin’ on the marigolds next door. This little guy has it all figured out.

Discovered Ghost's Recommendations feature has a template shortcode and I rebuilt the blogroll around it. Most of the descriptions are ones that Ghost lifted from the site itself, so a few might look a little off. I'll probably go through and manually change the rest at some point. One thing I don't like is that the favicons are hotlinked—they're getting loaded from the sites themselves instead of being cached on my server. I thought about removing the `<img>` tag entirely but I like how it looks. We'll see. I like having a purpose-built interface for adding sites. And apparently Ghost sends out webmentions to the sites I add, which is neat.

The weather is nice, the sun is out, and the volleyballs are flying.

Ramblings

Things are getting a little more settled in after the move and I’ve had time to curl up on the weird green canvas sectional from IKEA and watch some shows. I have _opinions_ and that means !!!spoiler warning!!! ## Foundation I was and am most excited about Foundation S3. The finale of S2 was SO GOOD, and S3 has been amping up the wide angle shots and cool space stuff. There’s more than a few sci-fi throwbacks in there, including a shot of a planet while a ship passes from above and in front of the camera—à la _A New Hope_ —and satisfying space station docking sequences. At one point Demerzel straight up recites The Three Laws of Robotics, which felt out of place to me even though _I know_ Asimov wrote the Foundation series. Does he mention the Laws in there too? Even so it felt forced; more of a smug reference from the writers than a genuinely compelling philosophical moment. Same feeling with the Randu Mallow meeting, the weirdly long conversation in the apartment rang hollow and honestly made me lose interest in that character entirely. But this was a minor ding on an otherwise fantastic season; I am loving the new storylines and the Mycogen stuff from Friday’s episode has me on the edge of my green canvas-covered seat. ## The Studio Honestly I did not think I was going to like this show at all. I threw on the first episode by sitting on the remote and was like, ok sure, let’s see how it goes. It’s actually good! I’m not a big fan of Seth Rogen but this show is well done. The camera work is incredible, with long shots throughout and smooth constant movement. The soundtrack is jazzy drums that ramp up and down as the scenes progress and add a surprising amount of tension to what’s supposed to be a comedy. And it does deliver on the comedy front, which is a dry way to describe it so I’ll clarify: it’s funny, I’m having a great time, and what locked me in was seeing Bryan Cranston (_Breaking Bad_) and Catherine O’Hara (_Schitt’s Creek_). They took the Hollywood satire from _Bojack Horseman_ and made a whole show of it. ## The Bear I have been putting off S3 of _The Bear_ since this time last year and I’m finally getting around to watching the first episode. I drive by Mr. Beef on my way to work and I figured with the constant reminder I really should get on with finishing the show. Which makes it sound like I don’t want to watch it—I do—but the thing with watching Carmy and co. is I need to be in the right headspace for it. It’s heavy shit. The first episode is good and I’m going to try to get through a couple more episodes today. I’d love to start S4 this fall.

uBlockOrigin's Manifest v3 extension is available for Safari. I've been using Wipr for years but I missed how customizable uBO's filters are. There seems to be less of a page load performance hit with uBO as well.