You’re sitting in your favorite café.
The kind with mismatched chairs and a shelf of lending library books near the door — dog-eared paperbacks, a few hardcovers with cracked spines, the occasional journal nobody claimed.
The numbers appear on the screen.
Five of them. Then they’re gone.
Three seconds. That’s all you get.
Then a joke shows up — something about a bear with no teeth or a seafood diet — and by the time you’ve read it and smiled (or groaned), the numbers feel like they belonged to someone else.
It happened.
A robot — a Tesla Optimus, to be precise — walked into a classroom somewhere in America, flanked by cameras and the First Lady, and the whole thing was presented as a vision of the future of education.
The Pentagon has a new name.
Well, an old name. The Department of Defense is now officially the Department of War again.
Two sketches had been sitting on my desktop for months — separately, doing nothing.
One generates rugs: deformed tangram grids, each cell filled with hatching, colors drawn from a random palette, tile edges warped by a slow sine function so the grid breathes instead of sitting still. The other draws mandalas: radial curves that follow the mouse, a handful of parameters controlling how the arms splay and bend and spread.
The CDC has been tracking COVID-19 by measuring RNA concentrations in sewage.
No, really. Public health departments collect wastewater from treatment plants, test it for SARS-CoV-2 genetic material, and publish the data. The idea is that people shed the virus in stool days before symptoms show up — which means wastewater is an early warning system that doesn’t depend on anyone getting tested.
Last month the snow was still thick on the ground when Bella and I pushed through my favorite cafe, Brew Haha’s door.
Let me be honest about something up front: I’m not really a piano student.
I’m a keyboard student. There’s a difference, and it matters.
The desert did not applaud their arrival.
It did not rustle or bow or shift to make room for them. It simply continued being what it had been long before paws and pickup trucks and good intentions. A vast, pale ocean without water. A silence so complete it felt engineered.
In Is Generative Art Now Quaint? I ended with a question dressed up as a statement: I’m genuinely curious what’s possible now.
