maybe i'll start by going to this event on friday and at least see if i can get my blood moving a bit. we'll see what this person's crew is like. if i'm feeling extremely brave, i might ask them if they have use for a percussionist (i used to play in a djembe ensemble in college and it was my favorite thing...but i don't have a drum, i only have shekere and bells and stuff). ugh. what's worse than talking to strangers? talking to strangers when i am trying to get myself involved in whatever it is they're doing.

i think i need to figure out a way to do something with music and movement and in a group setting.

i haven't been going to gamelan since i started school, and that's actually been good. i was burned out on it and it felt like a chore. i was happy to finish the last concert and haven't felt like i wanted to go back.

but i think i'm missing a music/movement/group thing in my life.

here are some ideas:

1) most ideally, i'd love to be able to play shekere with a group that plays afro-cuban or conga or fusion or funk or whateva. i love the shekere, but it's really only fun for me when played in a group. but i have no idea how i'd go about finding a group like that...

2) roller disco. there's no skate rink let alone roller disco in my area. i wish there was.

3) dance classes for out-of-shape adults who currently only know how to vibe dance. i am *certain* this does not exist in my area.

it's just really hard in a rural area where everyone is spread out and already has their own thing going on... most of the dance crews here are hula halau or for the youths. this is definitely one of those times when i miss the bay (or any big city)...you can always find a niche crew in a big city.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@topstories/116246199121591169

"When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that *this* is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent.

They *are* right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes."

cat accepts her supernatural gifts and dedicates her life to helping ghosts find the light

A friend sent me a link to some music on youtube ("1 hour Iranian Jazz").

It was just a still image with some music in the background, a classic pattern for slop music, so I was suspicious.

I looked in the description and saw some jazz musicians I recognized, so I figured maybe it was just an audio recording from some live session that got thrown on youtube.

After listening for a bit, I started to get the sense that it wasn't who it claimed to be. One of the listed musicians was Vijay Iyer, who has a fairly recognizable style on piano, and this didn't seem like him.

I scrolled through the comments for bit, and eventually stumbled across a comment from Vijay Iyer himself asking politely to have his name removed.

I am so incredibly tired of this bullshit.

@hagaesthetic saw this and thought of you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqv0tklqOrw

The router is not functioning.

as i'm working on my industrial ag collage zine (wip images here: https://tilde.zone/@mk30/116237910355138458), i am reminded that nothing i produce will be as artistically effective at communicating on the subject as the music video for plaid's "itsu": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDDnuZAL9ps

#music

3. The Master Bedroom

After all, she has a reason to resent him, since her husband is known for having a weakness for dalliances. Even though he’s never been caught red-handed, some say that even his own daughter grew to loathe him.

cat sending resumes while an alien invasion is happening outside

the next WIP page for my industrial ag collage zine project!

this one is more incomplete than the previous one (https://tilde.zone/@mk30/116235546634565740).

this collage is about the food processing chain, with the body as an extension of the industrial factory processes that get the food into the mouth. i DO have some wastewater diagrams that i want to put at the bottom, but so far none of them quite match up how i want them to (specifically, they're all contemporary and i haven't yet gone digging for some appropriately vintage wastewater diagrams...honestly that sounds like a pain.)

i also have screenshots of like a 10 page article from the 1966 USDA agricultural yearbook detailing the entire process chain for ketchup, so maybe that'll go around the outside, to give a textual feel for the complexity of even a single food's production line.

...as you may know, my favorite collage mode is "maximalist chaotic good", so that's what it is!

#wip #art #collage #IndustrialAg #food

Hi I’m Ryan and I spent a month pooping in holes at -50c just to take a picture of a cat Here’s the cat: #mongolia #sonyalpha #wildlifephotography #conservation #pallascat #photography #travel

Today we released GIMP 3.2 with major new features, including vector layers, link layers (smart objects), DDS BC7 export, better PSD import including PSB for large images, MyPaint 2.0 brushes, and much more!

https://www.gimp.org/news/2026/03/14/gimp-3-2-released/

#GIMP #imageEditor #GPL #openSource #libreGraphics #GIMP3 #GIMP3_2 #GEGL #news #release

here's the first WIP spread of my industrial ag collage zine project!

this one (hopefully) shows that the visual language of high modernist mechanized agriculture (specifically, farm implements like tractors) was directly lifted from the propaganda art of WWII.

also, farmers were urged to "join the mission" during WWII, since food was necessary to feed soldiers. in many ways, the marketing of farm implements after the war continued that messaging.

i'm pretty happy with this collage, but i think i should add some slogans. that should put the cherry on the sundae.

#art #wip #collage #agriculture #industrialag

I find it very distressing to see that ImageMagick is included in the "open-slopware" list, not due to "purity culture" as boosters propose, but because of good old-fashioned threat modeling.

It is incredibly difficult (bordering on impossible) to write large projects in the C language without introducing memory-safety issues that can introduce Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities.

Code for converting between exotic media formats is particularly prone to bugs which enable RCE (see this list of fairly recent RCE vulns in Imagemagick).

The more popular a particular software dependency is, the more valuable it is for attackers who want to introduce a backdoor. We were very lucky that a backdoor in xz was discovered before it could be meaningfully exploited, but we honestly have no idea just how many instances of such a social engineering attack have gone undiscovered.

It isn't particularly difficult to poison LLMs with information related to specific domains. BBC reporter Thomas Germain recently manipulated ChatGPT into returning results confirming that he he ranked 1st place in a non-existent hot-dog eating contest.

1. Imagemagick is written in C
2. it handles basically every exotic image format you can think of
3. it's used by approximately everyone, from big tech to the mastodon server on which you are probably reading this post
4. they're now using LLMs trained on data that anyone could have poisoned to develop new features

I sincerely doubt this will end well.

We're finally getting some of that Kona storm that's been messing up the other islands. It is extremely windy and rainy.

With storms from the Kona direction, we're sometimes spared the worst of it because we are behind Mauna loa. It becomes the opposite of the normal rain shadow effect. So the last couple days when everyone else was getting it, we mostly just had clouds. But starting last night, it really started to go hard here. And it seems like we're right in the middle of it now.

As for where we are, you see the big red/yellow splotch in the center? I'm right around the right tip of that splotch. Here's the full radar: https://radar.weather.gov/station/phwa/standard

#hawaii #weather #puna

research continues for good texts to go with the many images i've collected for my industrial agriculture collage zine.

i think this quote from the book "the agricultural dilemma: how not to feed the world" by glenn stone is going to make it in:

"Our real dilemma is how to unthink the entrenched belief that we will starve without new tricks from scientists and input industries when in reality we have been locked on a treadmill of subsidized over-production for over the last century. When agriculture is industrialized — driven by those input industries and the perennial support and subsidy they need from the public purse — it grows inexorably at the expense of our economy, environment, and health."

my digging in old USDA periodicals like "agricultural research" and "foreign agriculture" certainly supports this conclusion as well. at this point i'm pretty convinced that the main goals of international food aid after WWII was to deal with excess agricultural stock here in the US (aka, overproduction), and to further US foreign policy goals of giving stuff to asian countries to avoid them "going communist". and yes, all of the overproduction was subsidized by the US gov. in fact, in the early 60s, the US gov had to pay farmers to not grow things because they were growing so much that prices were extremely low.

also, USDA leaders were explicit in their own publications that their efforts were not supporting small farmers (who were largely getting left out of all the glorious modernization) - they were supporting middle-scale and larger farms, because everything was geared toward volume and export.

#agriculture #wip #art #collage

wow, the hot dog scan came out A+ wiggly.

#art #wip #collage #FunWithScanners

fun with scanners!

#art #wip #collage