OM: Advaitic Songs

Part of my deep dive on metal has taken me into the stoner subgenre (think Kyuss, Red Fang, Sleep, The Sword, or Black Mountain). Though it's not stoner metal, OM surfaced in my poking around thanks to its connection to Sleep via Al Cisneros.  There's no real emphasis on riffs—it's built up from bass and drums—but it shares metal's often impressionistic approach to lyrics. Unlike metal's preoccupations with chaos, externalized forces, and evil, it's more of a hodge podge of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu mysticism. A visit to Genius is often helpful when I feel like paying attention to the lyrics...

Overnight in Eugene

Ben's ride back down to Eugene decided to wait a bit longer before returning, so we took him down last night.   I'm still getting used to the OM-3, but continue to appreciate the in-camera controls on OM System cameras. The in-camera color control is a little more detailed than I can get on a Fujifilm system. Mainly, though, I like the versatility/size trade-off. It's nice walking around with a relatively compact 40mm (equiv) lens and having a decent zoom in my sling if I want it. "Pro" and "chunky" on an M43 lens runs pretty close to "inexpensive kit lens"...

Internet Connection Sharing with macOS and a Monitor

I get bored. The day before the CenturyLink connection keeled over and died I got a Raspberry Pi for messing around. I hadn't even formed a thought about what to do with it, so I started with "make it work," and then "move my Emacs config over to it," and I was rounding the corner on "get a few mount points from the Synology" when everything went to hell and I started living off of iOS/iPadOS hotspots. With a relatively stable "iPad as jumpbox" config going on, the Mac Studio has a consistent connection. The Pi has been sitting on the...

A few thoughts as I wind down an AI governance group

It's not that we've decided not to govern AI, it's that we spent a solid six or eight months asking people to please run their requests for AI-powered applications or features in applications we already had in the portfolio past us, and it's time to treat "AI" (by which we mean things backed by an LLM) as an everyday consideration for our security, compliance, legal, and IT teams. It'll be a small relief. Small, pre-IPO businesses are not fun places to have a review committee. Nobody is  really there temperamentally. In this case, I kind of liked this group because nobody...

Our High on Fire Trip

High on Fire played in Bremerton, WA over the weekend as part of a little tour of the PNW. We drove up the day before the show to poke around Bremerton and visit a work friend. I wasn't sure what to expect. In the world of people who care about acts like High on Fire, they're a big deal. Grammy winners, face-meltingly hard, but definitely an acquired taste. If you get past their sound, there's the whole matter of their lyrics, which are like an old Frank Frazetta painting come to life and dropped into an H.P. Lovecraft diorama. My own...

The trouble with the Oregonian

I used to be in web publishing, did it for a while, and know a thing or two about the kind of pressure website producers are under. I used to be in journalism, did it for a little less time, and also know a thing or two about the pressures news organizations are under. So when the editor of the local paper wrote a plea for people to please buy her damn paper because local news is worth supporting, I was probably one of the more sympathetic readers in her audience.  So I wrote her and enumerated a few issues I've...

Wired iPad mini hotspot

We're having our first major CenturyLink outage in a few years of service. I blamed the EdgerouterX for it until sitting through a troubleshoot with their L1 support and learning that they can't see the ONT. We're dead in the water until Monday, provided all goes well with the tech appointment then. Meanwhile, hotspots for everybody. I was reminded today, after a bunch of mystery failures trying to connect the Mac Studio to my phone, that you can do a cabled hotspot, too. You just have to plug in, accept the usual "do you trust this device" nagging, and then set...

Your friends on Substack are not okay

By bolting on an algorithmic feed, Substack is trying to make a vertical.  There was a brief window where the Notes feed felt sort of like if Mastodon might if your instance was taken over by people with a weird kink for FRED graphs and lefties who are too retiring to go Full Piker, but those kinds of temperaments aren't going to be heard in an environment with algorithmically driven incentives.  Anyhow, one less thing to not graze in the mornings. 

Ocasta, Bremerton

#metal #bremerton #ocasta

Bremerton Alley

#bremerton #photography #omsystem #om3

High on Fire, Bremerton

#metal #highonfire #music

High on Fire - Bremerton

hiatus

We're in the unplugging season. It occurred to be briefly to just turn this off alongside a bunch of services billed monthly, but I bought a lifetime membership. I'm not so much trying to scratch my name off the obelisks as I am disconnect points of outside orientation—the things that crowd my headspace with anticipated reaction. So I just settled for turning off the analytics and posting this note. I'm posting this after I disconnected all the reposting stuff I had set up, so this will only show up for people who've subscribed in some form. It'd be lovely to hear...

Conflagrations leap out of every poor furnace

I came across someone on a site I follow who's very much just themselves in the face of a lot of potential blowback. Some people are just kind of radiant that way, and I admire them. Some of my favorite people are the difficult ones who can neither help themselves nor want to; especially the ones who are that odd combination of cussedness and prickly boundaries. They're usually originals of some kind. I remember when what was going on inside me was in pretty close sync with what was going on outside, and it has, for better or worse, had an...

Eugene Weekend