Jim Leftwich @JIMWICh@sfba.social

The waxing moon illuminating the cloudy storm sky at 1:00am last night was spectacular. My iPhone made these somewhat brighter than it looked to the eye, but it was magical nonetheless

Turns out our Milky Way’s central black hole is a big crappy wuss - only a measly four million solar masses.

Our black hole is like one ordered from Wish. It’s a Great Value™ black hole. It’s like we wanted a black hole and Mom said, “We’ve got a black hole at home.”

M87’s black hole on the other hand, weighing in at six billion solar masses, now THAT’S a black hole.

Good advices

“Impossible Burger,” (2019) - a pattern designed for a baby blanket.

The yellow rockets are coming out all over. Barbarea vulgaris, also called wintercress (usual common name), or alternatively herb barbara, rocketcress, yellow rocketcress, winter rocket, yellow rocket, and wound rocket, is a biennial herb of the genus Barbarea, belonging to the family Brassicaceae.

Thresher Series - Digitally-colored series of four illustrations of a hay thresher from a 1930s book on the care and maintenance of farm machinery.

A later, colorized version of CyberPort.

This did catch the eye of Gareth Branwyn and Mark Frauenfelder and I was soon working on the HyperCard deck, Beyond Cyberpunk! And contributing to the ‘zine bOING bOING, turning into lifelong friendships and collaborations.

Cyberport, the desktop wallpaper I made in 1991 (using Studio8) for my Mac IIfx and a 19” SVGA (1024 x 768 pixels) Sony Trinitron monitor. Icons from diskettes, and the trash can (I made a custom icon resource for it that had a radiation symbol on it) showed up in the little ports on the right side.

It was my conceptualization of the visualized data spaces we’d be having and working with by now (sigh - the Silicon Valley has been a giant, greedy, slow-ass, uncreative disappointment).

Welp, Missouri’s skies are on drugs again…

"In UKRAINIAN FARMY, you can experience being one of the scariest combatants on the Ukrainian battlefield - the Ukrainian tractor driver. Challenge yourself against time and "high-precision" artillery bombardments, and capture as many Russian tanks, trucks, and APCs as you can."

https://ukrainian.itch.io/ukrainian-farmy

Pixel Throwback - MacPaint on the original 128k Macintosh during the digital Pleistocene. Back when New Wave 80s graphic tropes walked the Earth, and you had to do everything in the most tedious way possible. Was probably listening to R.E.M.’s Murmur and Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain while creating this. Good times.

There are few artists/makers that resonate with me and thrill my sense of wonder and amazement more than Theo Jansen and his amazing wind-powered locomoting Strandbeests.

Here’s a show reel of his current creations.

https://youtu.be/C97kMKwZ2-g

While learning how to set my toots to public so that I could link to them I was reminded of one of the pre-web icons I made as part of my iterative exploration and development of the SPARCworks back in 1990. It was a programming suite of software development tools for Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, California (very near to where Google’s headquarters now resides). We didn’t use this, but I still think it’s the best possible icon for Link Manager.

After watching Ken Burns’ latest documentary series on Benjamin Franklin, I needed to ponder the mix of feelings I had about his legacy. Clearly brilliant, and instrumental in our nation’s founding, but f’ed around on his wife, and was also racist af, and baked accommodations to slavery into our Constitution.

Finally, it dawned on me that Franklin was our nation’s first Tech Bro. And it all makes a lot more sense now.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-ken-burns

Bonfire tonight in the barn lot of limbs I collected from the yard and trimming of the wild rose bush. Beats working in my office, though I was enjoying listening to a big playlist of dark/moody surf guitar bands.

I love Twitter, it’s like a nature preserve. If by nature preserve you mean a thunderdome crammed full of angry possums all hissing at one another.

It seems to have been designed deliberately to fuxx0r communication, discussion, nuance and considered thoughtfulness.

Perhaps if our planet was populated only by Dorothy Parkers, Lao Tzus, James Baldwins, Mark Twains, and poets, such imposed constraints would produce more gems.

Hopefully Mastodon’s community model will produce better outcomes.

I love endless series of movie sequels. My favorite was Grapes Of Wrath VII: Revenge Of That Bulldozer Operator

Though I was disappointed in the much-ballyhooed GOW IV: MANBONES! I was expecting a noir desert suspense thriller and, well, that just wasn’t what it was about at all.

Hello Mastodon and the greater Fediverse! I’m @JIMWICh and I’m looking forward to my participation amongst you.

The journey of a kajillion posts begins with a single toot.

This is that toot.