In June, West Side Rag published a story about a weird guy bothering women at a local cineplex. The Rag is an independent online newspaper that has covered street-level goings-on in my neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper West Side since 2011. Its story topics range from profiles of fresh political contenders to galleries of historical UWS photographs to rumors about new bagel shops. But something about the movie-pest story really struck me: it’s a good extremely-local news story, of the kind I remember growing up with in the previous century, reading in the local paper or watching on the local evening news, to name two things that don’t really exist any more in much of the country.

It’s well-sourced, with statements from multiple women as well as a movie theater representative, all told directly to the reporter instead of just lazily plucked from social media. (The reporter did discover the story through social media, and says as much, but then contacted people directly for comment.) It’s about a local institution that I’m quite familiar with, and whose relevance is limited strictly to the local community. And, yes, it centers on a frisson of lurid danger, but in this case I came for the Ew, gross and stayed for the Um… this… this is a very good news story, there used to be so many like this, where did they go, and this feeling has lingered well after the credits have rolled by and the lights have come up.

A complete archive of Hooting Yard on the Air, hosted by the Internet Archive. Bizarre and beautiful short fictions, presented as half-hour radio shows, written and presented by Frank Key. Sort of a drily deranged Prairie Home Companion, with its locus in the murkiest boroughs of London.

Paul Byrne (29 January 1959 – 13 September 2019), who used the pseudonym Frank Key, was a British writer, illustrator, blogger and broadcaster best known for his self-published short-story collections and his long-running radio series Hooting Yard on the Air, which was broadcast weekly on Resonance FM from April 2004 until 2019.

I enjoyed the show contemporaneously in the aughts, including its celebrated three-hour read-through of the Jubilate Agno. Something brought it to mind recently, and I found that its old RSS feed is still up, but contains only a handful of recordings from the end of Key’s abbreviated life. It still confirmed for me that his work is entirely timeless. I’m glad that the Internet Archive preserves the lot of it.

Also: An archive of various Hooting Yard-related text, including transcripts, illustrations, and a full episode index.

Five months after my last post announcing the revival of my notes blog under a new title, I re-revive it with a new goal: a commonplace book, kept by and for me, but readable by the public. This is what can differentiate notes here from posts on Fogknife. To this end I’ve added a tags page, and will start tagging my ’Twas This posts as of right now.

That lack of demarcation was half the reason I didn’t write here. The other half was technical: various Linuxy bits and pieces had stopped working on the ancient server that runs jmac.org. I had a long conversation with an AI chatbot about this, across two calendar days. In the end, I finally understood and fixed the problem. (It was all about 32-bit versus 64-bit computing architectures, confusingly commingled.)

This might be the tidiest experience I’ve had of approaching a chatbot with a complex problem that had a simple goal, and succeeding—and, crucially, coming away feeling like I understood why I succeeded. And it made me want to share the fact in a space that feels more appropriate than the extremely AI-skeptical lands of Mastodon or Bluesky, and it brought to mind a recent epistolary post from Merlin Mann:

Given how much even my dearest friends can barely conceal their free-form anxiety slash unbridled gamer rage about how Computers Do A New Thing Now, I’ve started to feel fully ashamed about how relentlessly my low-friction interactions with a weird robot in the sky have been improving my life in improbably wholesome ways.

Much as Mann’s post is actually about finding sources of grace in an unbalanced and combative world, let ’Twas This be my own safe space for exploring my own evolving thoughts about generative AI, as well as whatever other purposes I might bend this blog towards.

I spent last night reviving my old “notes blog”, intended for posts that feel too light for my main blog, but don’t feel quite appropriate for writing directly on social media, either. I started it as a lockdown project in mid-2020, and pursued it enthusiastically for only a few months thereafter. Something about the present environment moves me to return to it.

This blog launched with the name Jots, Scraps, and Tailings, but I’ve renamed it to ’Twas This, after a panel in a Jim Woodring comic book. The name struck me while I walked around last night after making my first new post in several years, and successfully POSSE-ing it to Mastodon and Bluesky, neither of which existed back in 2020. It seems an apt title for a self-publication where I might not always hold myself to my usual standards of length or flow.

There remains an RSS feed, whose link you can find elsewhere on this page. I do intend to POSSE all my posts to social media, and then have interactions there show up here, by way of Brid.gy and Whim.

I wish there was an ACK symbol in the Unicode emoji set, for slapping a “I receive and comprehend your message” reaction on a text. “👍” implies more assent or agreement than I necessarily want, and “🆗” often seems sarcastic outside of certain specific contexts.

Hello, what’s this: ␆ Why, it’s Unicode symbol U+2406, “SYMBOL FOR ACKNOWLEDGE”. Gee, not very legible in most typefaces, is it. When I just now texted it to a friend, they read it as a somewhat misshapen 💤 emoji. On my Mac it renders as a microscopic, horizontally arranged “ACK”, like Cathy might emit if she just fell down a well.

No matter! It’s going right in my Character Viewer favorites list, which I didn’t know I had, and which only has one other thing on it, which is ★, U+272D “BLACK STAR”, and which I bet I “favorited” in January 2016.

“Hello. My name is Jason. I like to be called jmac. Any pronouns. Standard time.”

For a variety of reasons, I slowly come to comprehend a growing personal conviction that only professional drivers should operate motor vehicles.

But that I could drive a wooden stake through the oily heart of every privately owned engine block. I would, I would.

The rise in Black American voices, year by year, shifts and widens the message-legacy of MLK. I think it helps me understand the historical Jesus a little better.

Both of these men were subtle but radical revolutionaries who freaked out the powers they spoke truth to. Both died young for it. And both had their legacies claimed, subverted, and simplified by the powers that rose after their deaths.

But no amount of cherry-picking erases the whole of their recorded work. The truth of it remains for all with the attention to spare for it.

I plan to attend this Wednesday’s IndieWeb U.S. meetup. It’s been many months since the last time I did anything like this, and I look forward to talking about the independent, open web with knowledgable folks again.

I have officially retired The Rolandizer, a silly bit of CSS that I wrote in 2014. It transformed one’s Twitter timeline into an experience not at all similar to reading the 11th century epic poem The Song of Roland, other than the insertion at apparently random intervals of the poem’s mysterious trigram “AOI”.

Naturally, this stopped working some years after that. The Rolandizer depended on Twitter using HTML in a certain way, and when it finally changed the way that it renders tweets, it ended this project’s silly song. Thus, I set its Github repository to read-only.

For obscure reasons, I spent a couple of hours today seeing if I could make it work again with today’s Twitter. I did get some approximation off the ground, but the joke just doesn’t land as well in 2020 as it did six years ago. Back then, one’s Twitter timeline was still largely little snatches of text, one after the other, with an occasional static illustration. Today it’s a multimedia extravaganza, and the Rolandizer gag—even when it does work—just looks like weird noise instead of a fun, occasional surprise to break up the rhythm of one little tweet after another.

It was a project of its time, and I’m glad that it worked for a while. AOI.