Federating with that dolphin instance.

https://www.gocomics.com/realitycheck/2026/07/08

Should be very nice driving on a road that has road left on it, although I am going to miss those nice NASA engineers testing out moon rover gear.

They are, decades after it was first obviously needed, repaving the street outside and it's a great deal of noise and fuss but on the other hand: big industrial machines doing stuff, which is _always_ fascinating stuff to see.

Fygar.

Wow, pretty wild to see sneakers making it this late into #tfTuesday without a clawsplosion.

"Anyway no CW because this is important."

https://www.gocomics.com/bob-the-angry-flower/2026/07/06

Tragedy: you notice a co-worker whose judgement you respected is reading _9 Chickweed Lane_.

I know it happens every year but it's still weird seeing pictures of Anthrocon and all I can see is, that's Pinburgh but there's no pinball to speak of.

Genuinely don't know whether we saw the city's fireworks for today because there was a brief fast-moving thunderstorm right before the scheduled start time, and then there were a bunch of fireworks from about the right location, but very few of them quite cleared the treeline from the park we watched from, when the city's usually do, and they kept going off for like an hour when the city usually wraps up in 20-30 minutes.

Y'know, it's really only in the United States that it's called the Fourth of July. Most of the world refers to it as the Julyth of Four.

Huh. Every View-Master reel ever made, 1939 - present, is compatible with every View-Master viewer ever made.

(Necessary footnote: there are View-Master _projectors_, for putting an image up on a screen or wall, which won't display some View-Master reels that were made under licenses only for individual viewing.)

Still, however much Harold Hill improvised cleverly and rapidly to keep his scam going until it made good, you have to say, River City Iowa was suspiciously-well pre-adapted to his whole thing.

This isn't to say you can forego actually picking up the instrument and playing until The Big Show, of course; you need the feedback to correct the difference between what you imagine and what the real thing is. But thinking about how you do a thing can help you do it.

So, like, if you want to draw better and can't think of anything you want to do, watch a video of someone drawing and try imitating their arm movements. Want to play guitar but roommates hate listening to you? Put your earphones on, watch a video of someone playing it, and air guitar along. It far beats not practicing at all.

Other wild thing about _The Music Man_ is that, as part of his scam, travelling salesman Harold Hill tells the students whom he doesn't know how to *actually* teach to play the musical instruments he's selling that they should use 'The Harold Hill Method' of _imagining_ themselves playing their instruments as practice, until that moment they actually can.

Thing is, _this actually works_. If you concentrate on carefully --- and honestly --- envisioning yourself doing something, you *do* get better at it. You have to be careful not to skip over the boring parts; you have to do your best to think out how this will feel, what the timing is, what you'll hear, what you'll see. But if you can't get actual practice time in on something? Imagine doing it well. This was demonstrated in sports psychology first (so far as I'm aware) but, like, training your mind and body to what 'right' looks like extends to other fields.

I have no idea if Wilson was aware of this --- as a longtime professional musician he'd probably had the experience of rehearsing what he would do when he had his instrument out again --- or if he just went with writing a thing that made sense for the character and accidentally hit on good advice.

Gotta kind of feel for Meredith Wilson. After decades working in radio and movies he sits down and writes _The Music Man_, an iconic musical, one of the instant all-time classics, every song a banger, endlessly re-staged and referenced and imitated. It's almost the template for a particular style of Broadway musicals; if nothing about this delights you, you're probably just not into the kind of musical Broadway made from around 'Oklahoma' through 'Cabaret'.

Then for his next act he writes _The Unsinkable Molly Brown_ that's ... certainly got a great title and I can remember one song from it? I think? Probably it got turned into a Simpsons episode at some point but mostly it contributed to making NASA Headquarters so angy they stopped letting astronauts name spaceships for half a decade.

His next work? A musical adaptation of _Miracle on 34th Street_ that I guess ran for the better part of a year but who cares?

And then his last musical was a bio-pic about historical super-bastard Christopher Columbus trying to fund his expedition, that closed in tryouts in San Francisco without ever reaching Broadway.

It's a heck of a downward trajectory but, I mean, _The Music Man_ is a *heck* of a masterpiece so he always had that for consolation.

Spending the day the appropriate way, watching 'The Music Man'. You know, it's a pretty good musical.

All of my mutuals are one of these two.

https://comicskingdom.com/rosebuds/2026-07-02

Oh hey retrocomputing number on FurAffinity, nice!

Anyway here's the tiny juvenile #rabbit I saw last night, alongside a grey squirrel (in black pelage) to give you some sense of how small this bunny was.

You know more US Presidents have died on the 4th of July than any other day of the year?

And there's even one whose death could be dated to the 4th: Zachary Taylor, whose death is attributed to contaminated fruits and chilled milk, had those as refreshments while enduring excessively long ceremonies in the hot sun during a heat wave on the 4th of July.

So you know, just, _interesting_.