I do not enjoy how the simplest functions of sites and apps are being stripped out and replaced with LLM features. I am being handed a miswired Lazy Gun every time I look for a flyswatter.

In this video you can see a Great Spotted Woodpecker picking through honeycomb and this is the best day ever.

They're newish to Ireland, the only woodpecker you'll see here, and their range extended here from about 2005, coming in on the wing. Tricky to spot though.

Yesterday I'd never seen one. This is so exciting for me.

My camera is charging again 😃

#wildBirds #wildlife #mastodaoine

Once again, I am pondering the fact that the Tumblr algorithm thinks I am Jewish because I have liked and commented on posts about anti-semitism. 🤷🏻‍♀️ It is, as usual, depressing.

Watching a bunch of commentary tracks on movies (thank you, Blu-Ray golden age!) is weird because you end up with an urge to tell your friends “hey, your speaking voice sounds quite a bit like David Fincher’s” but also enough self-awareness to know that is an extremely weird, opaque, non sequitur comment you should keep to yourself. 🤔

Harmless skin #bacteria naturally produce small, stable molecules known as #lipopeptides that can suppress the severe allergic inflammation triggered by #eczema causing microbes.
#Immunology #Dermatology #Microbiology #MolecularBiology #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/05/imgy05142601.html

Pileated Woodpecker

#birds #birding #nature

I’d like to thank the state of California for providing a constant reminder that literally everything is slowly poisoning me.

In most cases, it would be clearer and more accurate to use terms like “rich” and “poor”. And not just slapping “pleb” on something might actually sharpen the writer’s thinking. Who do they actually mean? “Urban poor”? Does the generalization include slaves? Women? Freedmen (often successful business owners!)? Do they actually mean senators and their families? Citizens? Are they actually talking only about one period of the centuries of “Rome”?

(Grumble grumble, get off my portico, et cetera.)

I wish generalist historians and writers would stop using “plebeian” and “patrician” when talking about ancient Rome. I’m a non-scholar Rome nerd and I don’t have all the answers, but I DO know that the usage varied hugely over time: and that in much discussed eras, many actual plebeians were in high office and flush with wealth! By Cicero’s time it was like asking whether your ancestors were in the fashionable cabins on the Mayflower or rode steerage. (1/2)

#petPeeve

"Adding floating solar panels to every federally owned reservoir could power 100 million homes in the U.S." Our #solarpunk future is here, #oregon !
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/12/jackson-county-oregon-floating-solar-project/

It is a little funny to look back at one’s life and realize moments one ALMOST became a birder before the moment it took. One’s “fizzle birds”, if you will!

#birding

Oh, the existential horror of the sound a young indoor cat makes when it sees a strange outdoor cat for the first time. No cat should be out there! Even my people should not be out there! The glass door is for ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!

My headphones have “noise cancellation”; my phone can tell me this is a 2001 cover of terrible 1966 song “Somethin’ Stupid”; I feel like there’s an actual feature here longing to be born! Muzak cancellation WHEN, people?!

Douglas Adams died 25 years ago today. This has made a lot of people very sad. And has been widely regarded as a very bad thing.

https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2026/05/cowlitz-tribe-launches-beaver-family-livestream.html?gift=bc8f2d05-05e0-4003-92f5-a1c6e654b66c
"The Cowlitz Indian Tribe has a new livestream starring a mother beaver and her four babies, known as kits, as they grow, learn to survive and get ready to make their own way in the world."

You still deserve privacy, even if you:

• don't use Linux
• use big social media sites
• aren't "techie"
• are just an average computer user

Looking up historical communist Eugene Victor Debs for the extremely normal reason that I couldn’t remember whether the X-Files lifted his first and middle names precisely for the creepy villain “Tooms” or reversed the order. (It’s the former.)

Kudos to the solicitor who flurry-knocked at my front door at the exact closing line of my audiobook of Haunting of Hill House. Great inadvertent spookiness, dude. (But also, read the sign.)

#amReading

Humans can have second an ibuprofen. As a treat!