I found myself remembering the first nightlight that I had in my childhood bedroom, depicting Pinocchio and a goldfish. Perhaps there is only one image of it on the internet, but DuckDuckGo nonetheless led me quickly to the website of Jack’s Mart, a store in Japan that specializes in 20th century Americana. Whoever writes up their item-description pages puts some real care into it, enough for search engines to send me to the Jack’s Mart page about the nightlight.

I was especially delighted by the attached image, which demonstrates how dimly the light shone when it was plugged in; that vague orange glow was all you got. I had a few night lights like this as a kid, all fashioned from a weak bulb behind a chunk of white plastic with stuff printed on it. This resulted in a small, dim, irregular blob floating in the darkness of my room, not recognizable as anything, and illuminating nothing beyond itself. And still, its presence was a comfort.

An inscribed paving stone found in the East End neighborhood of Portland, Maine:

IN MEMORIAM
This pavement is a gift to the
St. Lawrence Congretational
Parish by the children of
Charles L. Thompson
in memory of the father who
watched with interest the
erection of this house of
worship and who died
on the day of its completion

Posting this amidst a two-week vacation in Freeport, on the Maine coast. I can report that the 1901 Maine flag, with two simple shapes on a plain background, is ubiquitous on souvenir merchandise here. In shop after shop I see it embroidered on caps, screened onto T-shirts, and carved into coasters. People here are proud of the design, and visitors clearly love it too, buying every sort of representation to take back home. I shall be among them.

I do not see the official post-1909 state flag anywhere, with its “DIRIGO” motto and its much busier design, aside from its obligatory installation outside of the Freeport city hall. But that’s the only flag I knew during my part-time childhood and full-time young adulthood as a Mainer in the 1980s and 1990s. The movement to re-establish the 1901 flag only started gaining steam after I moved away in 2000. In 2024 it made it all the way to a general referendum, where it lost a popular vote.

I first saw the 1901 flag last year in my old home city of Bangor, just before that vote. It flew from poles, glowed from windows, and flickered on animated LED signs all over town. I do prefer the updated 2024 design from the referendum, with a more realistically rendered tree—but judging by the shop shelves, Mainers seem to prefer the original, simpler style. I am more struck by how they resoundingly choose this design as the symbol that they show visitors, rather than the flag that’s flown over the state house for longer than any Mainer’s been alive. I was sad to learn of the referendum’s defeat, last year, but cheered to see today that the Mainers who had chosen their true flag have not abandoned their choice.

I am slightly obsessed with this video clip of unknown provenance featuring three minimalist electromechanical puppets bopping and lip-synching to Madonna’s “Into the Groove”.

I found it on HELL Yeah! Bot, a Mastodon account that reposts a lot of milennial-coded memes and other nano-media, so I assume this is of circa-2010 vintage. I’d love to know more about its source!

Andi McClure posts several times per week to a personal Mastodon thread of interesting audio.

Most posts focus on clips of someone sharing sounds or patterns that they’ve discovered through a synthesizer, but the thread dips now and again into recorded music that has piqued McClure’s interest that day. She always includes an explanatory paragraph, such as today’s:

The musician says this emerged from setting up a new synthesizer, so what I imagine happened: They were trying to make that “chonkchonkchonk” noise from reggae, stumbled into an amazing-sounding semi-repeating pattern, went “I have to stop everything and find a way to make this a song” and built a life support system around it. Result: Lovely little ambient meditation over a 128bpm heartbeat. If ur bored stop at ~5:00.

(h/t Monica)

I’ve been aware for many years now that YouTube comments attached to videos that I enjoy are a fairly consistent source of wholesomeness from complete strangers. The comments attached to “Doodles”, the video that I linked to in my previous post, are just one example: a vertical scroll of notes, from people all unknown to one another, sharing how the cartoon emotionally resonated with them, or pointing out subtle fun details, or just praising the animator’s taste and talent.

This stands against the long reputation of comments sections attached to media usually stinking like a cesspool—certainly still the case, with online news articles and such. But YouTube comments used to be so remarkably bad that an early XKCD skewered its comments sections in particular. I remember thinking, at the time, how bitingly true this satire felt, and referring back to that cartoon for some time after.

That was in 2006, which I need to remind myself was nearly 20 years ago. I suppose that social media stole that particular thunder soon after. But how odd that YouTube comments would respond to this shift by greening over. More often than not, scrolling down a video’s comments is something like strolling through a well-kept cemetery, filled with emotionally potent notes and remembrances from people who passed through just before me. It really seems like the opposite of how these digital spaces usually decay in quality over time, doesn’t it?

A three-minute animation by Its ok koy, set to the catchy “Doodles” as written and sung by Rose Betts. We tour an art-museum exhibit of the narrator’s lifetime of regrets. One of our fellow visitors is the spirit of the narrator’s younger self—more willing to forgive than the obsessive adult, and to reset things a bit through some creative doodling of her own.

I was surprised at how deeply this funny little cartoon touched me.

DSEG is a font project by the GitHub user keshikan that includes three typefaces emulating segmented LCD or LED displays, as one might see in an ancient or low-cost calculator.

The DSEG seven-segment typeface was brought to my attention because of its similarity to the famously obtuse displays on Roland music devices, a tradition that the company proudly continues to this day. The attached image, taken while I was following a YouTube tutorial, shows my T-8 beat machine trying to say “Bass waveform” on its four-character, seven-segment display.

DSEG doesn’t map perfectly to Roland’s seven-segment abuses; my T-8 cheerfully mixes up “I” and “1” or “5” and “S”, for example, and its implementation of “U” versus “V” are reversed from how DSEG does it. Regardless, all the shapes are there, including that audacious “W” solution seen in my photo.

Recently my friend KAdam facilitated my acquisition of a used Roland T-8 Beat Machine. This device emulates sounds and functions from several genre-foundational drum and bass synthesizers, and it’s the first bit of dedicated electronic-music hardware that I have ever owned as an adult.

After I picked up the little box, KAdam gave me a quick-start lesson at a bar under the Williamsburg Bridge—he brought some portable speakers, you see—and then sent me home with an example tutorial video by the folks behind Electronic Music Pedagogy. I submit the following video as evidence that I have been toured through enough of the T-8’s dizzyingly obscure menus and functions to have recreated the core rhythm of Benny Benassi’s 2002 club hit Satisfaction:

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.