Walter Mason

The footage is from China: a woman is selling cat accessories on the street and is using her black cat as a model 😻. Haha😂, such a cute sight! I’m just curious how she managed to convince the cat 🤔❤️

My royalty check just arrived. I can finally quit my job and write full-time for the next 14 minutes.

Remember green bar computer paper? #1980s

Earlier in my career as a historian of the occult, I coveted mainstream bylines. They were, to me, the cool kids’ lunch table: a mark of pinnacle acceptance. Something nobler was also present. Treating esoteric topics intelligently in legacy media represented a cultural victory. I received many such bylines. The effort was hard-won. It had to end. After a certain point, I discovered that mainstream idiom brought with it not only intellectual limitation—but, in a very real way, compromise if not deterioration. This affects all of us. Subculture idiom determines how we produce and consider ideas. I end this article with a set of principles that offer a better, if lonelier, road out of this problem. First, I explore it. This realization reached me one night on a panel hosted by a book critic from Time magazine. The topic of academic parapsychology—or ESP research—randomly arose. “So,” asked the author-critic, who himself had written paranormal-themed novels— “is all this just garbage?” His remark was not directed at me—but I interjected my point of view, backed by years of effort. No, it is methodologically sound. Guild thought rewards doubt without rigor. Read that twice . . . mitchhorowitz.substack.com/p/why-i-stoppe…

Does anyone remember having to defrag their computer? 😆

You may be old but, are you this old??

I think we have to ask some serious questions about the robustness of the Sydney public transport system. This is the second time in two months I’ve been left totally stranded. There was a 20 minute storm hours ago and the whole train system has ground to a halt 😣

When I have bad nights of pain I have one of these I can retreat to. If I immerse myself in the minutiae of its design I can sometimes trick my brain into sleep

It's nearly impossible to reconcile yourself to death at the end of your life, if you haven't faced it til then. You have to acknowledge it long before, pre-grieve it and make your life choices with its inevitability in awareness. A graceful death can take decades.

Cartographer at work 🎨 DD McInnes

Hate to think of how many students have suffered and job applications have been ignored because the software that does stuff like this basically doesn’t work.

We all have to go on our own Temu journey

Can you come to the NSW State Library to hear me talk to Sheila Ngoc Pham about her research on a fascinating forgotten Australian writer? sl.nsw.gov.au/events/imago-f…

It drives me crazy. If I open your website in a browser, it means I want to open it in a BROWSER, not in your app!

Super disappointed to learn that Mary Shelley used generative AI

Dandyfloss! ✨🌼✨ “Dandelions” (1859) by William Moore Davis

Until the 12th century, most people read aloud Not by convention, but necessity The Romans wrote in scriptura continua: no spaces between words To find where one word ended, you had to sound the letters out Reading and speaking were the same act... Then Irish monks started copying Latin manuscripts It was a foreign language, and they needed spaces to decode the grammar without losing their minds The Benedictine scriptorium had a Rule of Silence If you sounded out every word, you broke it... That workaround created something no one planned: a private self A thought you could have without anyone in the room knowing: Conscience, secrets, heresy, desire all of it was suddenly yours alone Modern privacy was born the day a monk put a space between two words

Chronic illness teaches you to trust your instincts in a way you never had to before. You start paying attention to the beginning of your day. How you woke up. How your body feels. What the energy around you feels like. Because it all matters. Stress isn’t just stress anymore. It’s a trigger. It’s fuel for pain, for flares, for everything you’re trying to keep under control. And sometimes your body knows before your mind catches up. You feel it early, that quiet signal that says, this might not be a good idea today. The hard part is listening to it. 👉 Because you still want to show up. 👉 You still want to be present for the people you love. 👉 You still want to feel like the version of yourself that could handle more. But chronic illness doesn’t care who you used to be. If the day starts off wrong, if the stress is already there, if you’re already using up energy just trying to stay regulated… you’re not starting from zero. You’re starting in a deficit. And when you ignore that, when you push anyway, when you override what your body is telling you… you don’t just feel it later that day. You pay for it. Sometimes the next day. Sometimes for days after that. So you learn. Not perfectly. Not every time. But you learn to pause. To check in. To trust that instinct, even when it’s inconvenient. Even when it disappoints other people. Because with chronic illness, protecting your baseline is what keeps one decision from turning into a setback. How many of you have ignored that instinct… and paid for it after?”