He Is Risen

Got in 7 solid hours of gardening work before the deluge hit. I am pleased. So many bags of rocks and mulch. When people think "gardening" they often think of lady in a hat swanning gracefully among the roses, and it can be that. But very often...🌱

This also happens between the network and showrunners/producers. I’ve occasionally been called in when a show is in trouble or shut down, and you’d be surprised the number of times we’ve identified, if not *fixed* the problem when I ask “what show do you think you’re making?” and the answers clash.

A couple of brave goldfish swimming up the stream

Ok, enough faffing about. Time to get to work. The garden will not garden itself. And thank God for that! One less thing for AI to take from me 😆

I worked with a US-only B2B SaaS company once where we discovered that they were getting one digital lead a month, and it was a junk lead, yet were spending $5k/mo on digital "agency." Turns out agency was running display ads across Google ad network (including in-app game ads lol) w/junk keywords

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An interesting read. Not just bemoaning the current dire state of social media, but offering possibilities for a different kind of architecture and experience.

It's extremely common in marketing circles to farm for clicks; we call it a vanity click strategy; it's very normal. It does not result in sales, but it offers the illusion of social proof and business legitimacy. So if that's a company's goal, that strategy is actually sometimes recommended 🤪

I finished The Stars are Legion (@kameronhurley.com ) yesterday. Woof. Not an easy read, but a thought-provoking one. I can tell I will be chewing on it for months, if not years.

First tulip to bloom in 2026. Fun Fact: This isn't where I planted it. A squirrel dug up the bulb and replanted it... and I never bothered to re-relocate it. 🌱🌷

I had a neighbor come by and offer to weed today, of all things 😆

I always wonder what happens to those "delayed in transit" Amazon packages that sit for days and don't show up and they have no insight at all. Car wrecks? Thieves? I imagine packages just disappearing into the ether. Swallowed by interdenominational portal

For those, like me, who were baffled as to what exactly this view was of, continent-wise 😆 A whole other world view, literally.

This is one of my favorite stories I've done in recent years, and I'm so happy it's reaching an audience beyond my Patreon! (and if you like it... you might like my Patreon)

Classic Ohio sky

This delighted me to no end

the reviews are in

I hope whoever came up with basket accounting steps on a Lego seven times a night every night forever

Social media engagement overall has stalled, even decreased. It's not a single platform issue. In digital marketing, our metric is now "engagement." Not traffic, users, or views. About 30% of social profiles are fake, and 30-40% of web traffic is just bot traffic. www.noemamag.com/the-last-day...

A dog pleased with life (and his toys)

Definitely the real problem!!!

I brought all of Sprocket's toys in from the yard... ... Do you think he needs more toys??? 😆

The last week has been extremely exhausting, all day job related. But now: Mexican food!!!

Oooooo this is actually an interesting discussion! My name has always been styled in all caps, even when my name was super small. And I knew I had Arrived when my name was displayed above the title. But always all caps; it was never discussed, that's just what was presented to me

This speaks directly i think to the devaluing of skill and experience. When you buy a hand painted thing or knit sweater or a book etc you are paying not just for the object, but the years of expertise that created it. Same with hiring a plumber or lawyer etc. Skill matters. Experience matters.

Fascinating (and terrifying) look at how DNA tests are now so sensitive that you can be six degrees separated from a crime scene and your DNA can still show up there thru contact contamination (I also missed the update that Amanda Knox was indeed innocent) youtu.be/9okaPzpVhmM?...

I did! I got this on sale early last year: yardistrystructures.com/products/urb...

Honestly the best thing about being a history major...

😆

You cannot possibly think a person who spends hours and hours writing, thinking about writing, writing about writing, talking to other writers, encouraging aspiring writers...somehow hates writing. There are words and there is subtext and context. Wow.

Moaning about writing is one of those things that is culturally expected of writers. If anything, we love complaining about how hard writing is. That's part of the 'role'. It doesn't mean we hate writing. But we enact the difficulty of writing because, well, it's hard and we validate each other

Oh, god. Another hot take. Listen, writers say they hate writing, but it's a lie. To understand, ignore what we say and watch what we do. To what do we give quality time? What do we moan about? What do we talk about to others? Strangers even? I hate celery. It's good for me, but I don't eat it

Good evening.

"Curated entertainment for the curious." Ok, that wouldn't work for Netflix, but you get the idea. 😆

"Endless entertainment for $8.99!!" is just .. really not a compelling pitch in this day and age, Netflix. If all we're selling is raw entertainment that's endless, TikTok and its ilk are free.

People are hungry for anything that even remotely resembles a free community space

Wondered what made Pretty Lethal feel so delightfully real and realized there was a total lack of male gaze, as well as the creepy meanness than often slithers through work of many male directors, especially in a concept like this (I imagined what Tarantino version of this would be and cringed).

Must be April!!!

I have just gotten so weary of complaining about everything and not DOING anything. Not enough public spaces? Not enough community amenities? I'll make make my own, then. You can too!

I put up a table this year to give away strawberry plants and had a few takers. I will likely continue this later in year with all my plant extras. Giving plants to other people in neighborhood leads to... More plants in the neighborhood! A little free library is on my list, too!

Yes! I have a neighbor I only understood well enough to know that he was extremely concerned with how little I watered my cabbages 😆. He regularly swung by last year to harvest cabbage leaves.

I've now started peeking ahead in weather forecast to see when the weather will be both warm enough and dry enough for a 3-4 day period to paint the house. I can DREAM!! Wondering if this is another year we get an early last frost date (it was April 19 last year).

Had three lovely convos with neighbors today while working in the formal front garden at lunch, two of them new. Everyone is so lonely and delighted to chat. This is like the best social meetup ever. "Hi! Let's talk about PLANTS!!!"

It's payday week, so I splurged on bird food for this sharp looking gentleman

Same for if you use chatbots to "improve" your writing. A chatbot is all about the average. It will smooth all the edges off your prose, the stuff that makes it alive and interesting. Being a good writer is not about being blandly average.

A chatbot is always going to produce a statistically likely sentence. It is always going to tell you what's routine, likely, "normal." It will not help you break out of cliche. It's MADE of things-already-said. It cannot say anything particularly new.

okay, so one of the more interesting aspects of this, is that when you rely on cloning for reproduction, after a certain generation of clones they can no longer mate naturally for reproduction, and that cloning seems to be the only way www.popularmechanics.com/science/anim...