Bill shared this after someone else mentioned Sydney Greenstreet:

Some days—rarer since I left full-time work, but some days—I feel acute, situational depression. And I know I’m in the thick of it when I have an almost physical awareness of sadness being ladled over me, running from the crown of my head and over and through my body, pooling at my feet.

And other days, just as uncommonly, I feel its opposite: “situational joy”, perhaps. And the feeling is more like my body has become a full vessel, and happiness sloshes out me, making just as much of a mess. But now the source is internal, not external.

I feel like this now. For the moment, and not for any single reason, things are just clicking. I feel many-threaded and well-aligned. I know it’ll pass, and that fact doesn’t upset me. I just want to pause and acknowledge it. And wonder: do I imply that it’s all the same stuff, somehow?

Mimi Smartypants discovers this mid-century cartoon on a coaster in an antique store. She writes how she was initially stopped short by its seeming complete nonsense, and then decoded it with some amount of effort and deep-cultural recall—but at the risk of it all falling apart again if you analyze it too far past that point.

West 79th street, between Amsterdam and Broadway, 8:15 PM, July 11.

After slowly and carefully reading “Starting to understand epsilon-zero” by Mark Dominus, I definitely understand the fundamentals of set theory and ordinal numbers better than I did. But I must admit that the theory dances out of my grasp just before reaching the conclusion promised by the title. I don’t think that’s the article’s fault!

At least half of my enjoyment of Gullet of the Rust Demon, a one-page, system-agnostic tabletop RPG adventure by Dan D., comes from the “establishing shot” of the dungeon exterior at the top of the sheet. The tufts of grass and single, stray flower, cartoonish as they are, do so much to suggest where some adventurers might come across this minimalistic dungeon’s entrance, and how quietly, temptingly anomalous it would appear.

Discovered this one after DJ of Planets & Monsters reviewed it, which was brought to my attention in turn by Lusunati on the His Majesty the Worm Discord.

My friend and fellow New Yorker Francisco González launched a Buttondown-based newsletter last year to announce the release of Rosewater, the latest in his long-and-growing oeuvre of independently produced point-and-click adventure games. Having played and enjoyed that one over the intervening winter holidays, I was delighted to see Francisco start to use the newsletter as a development blog for “Project Lion”, the public code name for his current work-in-progress.

He’s updated the newsletter with spoiler-free notes, screenshots, and other tidbits about the upcoming game once a month since then; I just read the June issue. As someone who has let the BumpySkies newsletter sit idle since March, I find this inspirational and motivating.

Andrew Nesbitt is a software engineer and package-management blogger who also writes excellent satire in the form of standardized industry documents, such as change logs and incident reports. I have discovered his fiction by way of Incident Report: CVE-2026-LGTM, a hilariously brilliant story of countless autonomous AI agents responding to a malefactor in the stupidest way possible, eventually “succeeding” by accident, and all written up an an after-action report.

I consider this work a legitimate sci-fi comedy, and I reflect on how I seem to have a soft spot for sci-fi written in the form of archival documents adhering to some real-world standard, rather than traditional prose narratives. The epitome for this presentational trope, for me, is qntm’s Lena, a startlingly good horror tale written as a Wikipedia-style entry.

The Software Freedom Conservancy has published Recommendations When Using LLM-backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions. This article represents that nonprofit’s official stance and guidance regarding the use of genAI coding assistants when contributing to open-source software projects—and, by extension, the use of these assistants in general.

Some of the article’s more generally applicable principles make a deep impression with me, such as this one:

Do not overuse LLM-gen-AI, or allow your skills to atrophy. In our discussions with the FOSS community about LLM-gen-AI, there seems to be one universal conclusion: the systems are most effective and help the most when a very experienced FOSS developer sits at the prompting helm. LLM-gen-AI systems should complement existing skills and tools, not replace them. Developers should remain curious about why software acts the way it does, and this curiosity should extend to the LLM-gen-AI outputs — and even the system itself.

I also find the article notable for coining and consistently using the term LLM-gen-AI to describe this technology. Since departing the land of corporate style guides I’m left without a standard shortname for this stuff, so I’m interested to see what others are settling on.

I very much enjoy A Most Amusing Bot, a Mastodon bot by Andy Lundell which regularly posts scanned newsprint ads of novelty gadgets from the 19th and 20th centuries. And I like the very eerie note that this one ends on.