pig-monkey.com - general

Just Another Saturday

2026-01-06T00:00:00-08:00

Two weeks ago I lost power from about 14:00 till about 21:00. This had negligible impact on my day. I took out my lamp and continued with the itinerary. My time was spent:

Drinking tea¹
Lifting Harambe
Reading Flaubert
Pursuing satori

It was just another Saturday afternoon.

I threw Lee and Brian at judo today. Lee is 14, and Brian is 13 but taller and heavier.

I told Sibylla & she asked what my teacher had said. I said he had said it was very good.

Sibylla said that didn’t sound very character-building. I said most authorities on child psychology said a child should be given encouragement and reinforcement. Sib said Bandura and who else? I said everybody else. I didn’t say that the authorities also said a parent had to be able to set limits because I was afraid she might suddenly decide to make up for lost time and set a lot of limits.

Sibylla said: Well just remember Richie, becoming the great judo champion is not the end of the story.

I said I didn’t think I was the great judo champion just because I could beat Lee and Brian at Bermondsey Boys Junior Judo.

Sibylla said: It isn’t a question of beating X and Y. What if there’s no one you can’t beat? It’s a question of perfecting your skill and achieving satori. What on earth are they teaching you in this class?

I said we mainly concentrated on learning how to throw people to the ground. Sib said: Must I do everything myself? She was grinning from ear to ear.

Helen Dewitt, The Last Samurai

Notes

↵ Of course I had to boil water on my gas stove like a savage instead of using the electric kettle.

Concerning the Tawashi

2025-12-29T00:00:00-08:00

I scrub my dishes and kitchen counter tops with a Kamenoko Tawashi. The palm fiber of the Tawashi is stiff enough for a good scouring, but does not scratch anything. It doesn’t hold onto food scraps the way some other brushes do. It dries relatively quickly when hung from its wire loop or placed in a two-piece soap dish, thus supporting my war on sponges. I use the #1 size, which is small enough to fit comfortably in my hand and to be shoved into drink ware. It is the perfect kitchen brush.

I use the same brush for about two years before replacing it. Every few months I toss it in the kitchen autoclave. I could keep them for longer, but I give my Tawashi enough unintentional haircuts when cleaning knives that I’m usually ready for a new one after a couple years.

The only other brushes I use in the kitchen are a bottle brush and straw brush. I also have one of those chainmail scrubbers for my cast iron, but the Tawashi gets used much more often.

The Tawashi, my Sal Suds spray, and my pink Mamison gloves complete my kitchen ablution armaments. (The pink color is critical for maximum cleaning.)

Tawashi are made by a number of manufacturers. Many are garbage. Those from Kamenoko are consistently good. I avoid it if it does not come in the orange wrapper with the picture of the turtle on it.

Link Log 2025-12-28

2025-12-28T00:00:00-08:00

Library of Useless

To Oil or not to Oil

The Woke Right Stands At the Door

The Smart Lifter’s Band Training System

The unpowered SSDs in your drawer are slowly losing your data

Rx Inspector: ProPublica’s New Tool Provides Drug Info the FDA Won’t

The Hero We Need

2025-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

Influencer is mistakenly billed as a horror film, but is actually an inspirational story of a young woman using her murder island to try to make the world a better place by pruning the insta-face-twat-tok-tuber population.

I eagerly awaited the sequel, and can now report that Influencers is even better than the first one. I am here for the Influencer Cinematic Universe.

Whoever composed the score clearly spent a lot of time listening to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack (and who among us has not). Specifically they seem to be a big fan of track 4.

A Gentleman's Calling Card

2025-12-04T00:00:00-08:00

To my great surprise, my stock of calling cards is running low.

I had a batch of calling cards printed last December. I explicitly wanted calling cards, not business cards. Something with just my name, telephone, and email address. Nothing else. I ordered samples from the typical on-demand business card printing websites, but I didn’t like any of them. Most were too glossy or printed on too thin a stock. I knew I wanted something I could write on with a fountain pen (for this is what separates us from savages), in case I desired to share information in addition to what was printed on the card.

Eventually I realized that what I wanted was a letterpress printed card. I found a letterpress printer, requested samples, and confirmed they were perfect. Tasteful thickness, subtle off-white coloring. I placed an order.

This was done mostly as a joke. Who actually needs calling cards today? I figured the batch would last me years. Two weeks ago, as I was restocking a jacket pocket before going out for the evening, I was shocked to find the box mostly empty. It turns out, as a gentleman, a man about town, a bon vivant, calling cards are actually useful.

Anyway, I have my calling cards printed by Hoban. They sent out a holiday coupon today, so I reordered another batch.

If you see me at a soiree, ask for a card.

Link Log 2025-11-24

2025-11-24T00:00:00-08:00

Thumbs Up

Gunther, Christine and Otto

All that is solid melts into code

The Mass Shooters Are Performing for One Another

The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality

America Surrenders in the Global Information Wars

The respective roles of Ninja and Shinobi

This Corrosion (Lisa Cuthbert, 2012)

How to Dance Goth

Your browser does not support the video tag.

There's this leather daddy I keep running into at different shows.

2025-11-23T00:00:00-08:00

He’s about 8 ft tall and dresses like Brian Eno circa 1974 but with more makeup. Anytime I go to a show that I know nothing about, I look around to see if I spot him towering over the crowd. If he’s there, I know it’ll be a good show.

He should publish an iCalendar feed.

Resistance Regime

2025-10-23T00:00:00-07:00

For the past four months or so I’ve been doing push, pull, and leg days with my Harambe System. This differs from the push and pull days of the standard Harambe and X3 programs (both of which are mostly the same) that I had been doing previously.

Push: Bench press, overhead press, tricep extension (standing, seated, or lying depending on my mood)
Pull: Deadlift, bent-over row, bicep curl (Ferro and drag)
Leg: static lunge, front squat, back squat, calf raises

I cycle through the days over the course of the week.

Monday: Push
Tuesday: Pull
Wednesday: Leg
Thursday: Push
Friday: Pull
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: Rest

For a time I did a second leg day on Saturday, but I found this negatively impacted my riding. I ride a bike seven days a week, and usually I’ll end up doing a longer ride on Saturday or Sunday. I don’t consider riding a bike to be exercise – its just how I get around – so I count both Saturday and Sunday as “rest” days, even though really every day is leg day. But when I did a focused leg day with the bands over the weekend, my legs would never get a chance to recover.

I don’t intentionally vary the resistance from day to day. Mostly I’ve been doing two sets to fatigue. I generally aim for 12-15 full reps, and 3-6 at diminishing range. If I can do more than 20 reps in a set, I take it to mean I need more resistance. The exception is for calf raises, where I prefer to go lighter and do around 30 reps in a set. If I am pressed for time I’ll go back to the standard one set to fatigue. Sometimes, just to mix things up, I’ll do three sets of 10-10-max (as in Harambe’s PPL program). In that case, I aim for my max on that last set to be 10 to 12 reps. If I can do more than that it means I should be stacking more bands.

Two months ago I bought the discontinued Travel Plate when Harambe was blowing it out on sale. I now stack this on top of the Cyberplate when doing bench press and deadlift. This effectively shortens the length of the bands. When bench pressing, it allows me to have resistance as soon as the bar leaves my chest (actually there’s a little resistance even with the bar just lying on my chest). When deadlifting, it means I’m pulling resistance as soon as the bar leaves the foam block. It makes both movements more difficult. I had to step down to a lighter band configuration for both. I don’t find it useful for any of the other movements, but I like it for those two. (And it should be mentioned that in both cases, the bands do not contact the upper plate at all, so the fact that I’m using an actual UHMW plate is irrelevant – one could accomplish the same thing with a piece of plywood or a cutting board.)

Huysmans on Social Media

2025-09-16T00:00:00-07:00

… he discovered the free-thinkers, those bourgeois doctrinaires who clamoured for absolute liberty in order to stifle the opinions of other people, to be nothing but a set of greedy, shameless hypocrites whose intelligence he rated lower than the village cobbler’s.

J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature (À rebours), translated by Robert Baldick

Link Log 2025-09-15

2025-09-15T00:00:00-07:00

Everything is Fine, Exit Through the Casino

Why I prefer human-readable file formats

XPath Scraping with FreshRSS

my anarchist notebook

Four Theories of Meta

no shorts

Typing Nightmare

2025-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

I was reading someone blogging about blogging, wherein the author critiqued using a static site generator for a blog by exclaiming “you can’t even post without a computer!” This statement implicitly proposes the possibility of publishing a blog post with something other than a computer. I assume the unmentioned alternative here is a telephone. For me this is nightmare fuel.

You know how sometimes you’ll have a dream where you need to run, and then suddenly the air is molasses and you can only move in slow motion? I’ve had dreams like that, but instead of needing to run I need to type a message, and instead of the air becoming molasses I find I only have a phone. Nightmare.

I don’t understand how people internet without a keyboard. My thumbs don’t work like that.

For To Hesitate Is To Risk Losing the Day

2025-08-07T00:00:00-07:00

Kern’s laptop bleats, and in the moment of waking he is up, though his body aches, as it always aches, for to hesitate is to risk losing the day. Dizzy with sleep, he is stretching his shoulders when, at the laptop’s signal, the espresso machine – spoil of an unlocked condo – winks on, huffs loudly and begins to steam.

The low room is dark but for the faint glows from the light well and from his laptop’s screen, just enough to illuminate the espresso frothing into his one chipped cup. The room is cold, this early, except near the space heater, salvage from the landfills, wired to a fuel cell with a shiny spot where the serial number once was, the severed stubs of steel bolts gleaming rawly.

He sips coffee, tells himself it makes him feel more awake. The phone he took from the mark is on the floor by the laptop. He dreamed he heard a voice from it, perhaps a woman’s, but it’s not possible – there’s no signal this deep under the surface. Later, when the sun is down, he’ll run it over to Lares, get paid.

Before he’s ready, his laptop chimes, and it’s time to work the heavy bag. The bag hangs from the ceiling on a rusted chain, swaddled in silver duct tape, mottled with dark stains, a mass of shadow. He circles it, poised on the balls of his feet, hands by his temples, his weariness subsumed in the familiarity of the stance. The laptop chimes again and he shuffles his left foot to the side and pivots on its ball as he turns his hip and throws his right leg at the bag, his technique unfolding effortlessly. A moment of sweet stasis, awareness of the bag’s mass, the room’s emptiness, his own exhaustion, and then when the kick lands the bag spasms, and there’s a sharp pain in his shin, but less than there was a year ago, and the books say that in another year the pain will be gone. He’s just recovered his stance when once again the laptop chimes and once again he kicks.

…

Yet another chime. He remembers Kayla singing to him. Is she still up, he wonders, and does she have a new lover, and does she ever think of him? He wrenches his thoughts back, chastising himself for wasting even a moment, and for having failed already, so early in the day. He kicks the bag hard enough to crush a rib cage – his shin feels shattered, but the bag caroms into the wall.

Five hundred and ninety-six kicks later, his vision greying, his breath ragged, the laptop chimes twice. He staggers away from the bag, but neither sits nor puts his hands on his knees. He doesn’t feel like vomiting, this time, which is progress. When he can breathe through his nose again he scrapes himself dry with a towel already stiff with dried sweat.

Eyes closed, he runs through the move in his mind, correcting the subtleties of balance, the nuances of technique. Soon the laptop will chime again, and again he will attack the bag with a narrow technical ferocity, coming another step closer to total purity of spirit and keeping out the void that’s all around him.

Zachary Mason, Void Star

Link Log 2025-07-31

2025-07-31T00:00:00-07:00

Bikerouter, BRouter, and BRouter-Web - What’s What?

Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot

How to Surf the Web in 2025, and Why You Should

Patrick Leigh Fermor (South Bank Show, 1989)

Objects should shut the fuck up

Vavrek (1973 - 2024)

GifCities

Link Log 2025-07-20

2025-07-20T00:00:00-07:00

What’s in my bike bag after cycling six years the world?

My 10 Years World Tour Bicycle Setup!

how to place your desk in Feng Shui?

Lateralus (Summer Woods, 2025)

Dublin (Nine Inch Nails, 2025)

How to Brush Teeth

2025-07-17T00:00:00-07:00

As a result of reevaluating my dental ablutions I have adopted the modified Bass brushing technique. With this technique one grips the toothbrush similar to a pen, places the brush head such that it is half on the tooth and half on the gum, and tilts the brush to about a 45 degree angle. Then it’s your standard circular movement with very little pressure. Other variants use short horizontal strokes instead of circles, or add a sweep away from the gumline when finishing a section. I’m told that some version of this is the most effective technique. It requires fine motor control, which probably explains why none of us were taught it as small children. But, better late that never.

One of the nice side effects of this technique is that doing it right takes about two minutes. Previously, when just mindlessly brushing without attempting to apply a specific technique, I would divide the mouth into quadrants and try to spend about 30 seconds in each so that I’d reach that 2 minute target that everybody says should be the goal. But that does not necessarily result in an even distribution of the work. Trying to target a specific time is dumb. Timers, whether standalone or integrated into the toothbrush, are dumb. No magic results from simply having the brush in your mouth for 2 minutes. Instead, adopt the correct technique, apply it properly, and let the time take care of itself.

Useful demonstrations, which helped me as I was trying to figure out the motion and its variants (while the “Bass technique” is a specific thing, the “modified” in “modified Bass technique” seems to mean different things to different people), are here and here and here.

The guide published by Curaprox is a helpful summary of how to brush one’s teeth. I first used their toothbrush last year and could not figure out why the handle was shaped the way it is. Then this year I learned how to properly brush my teeth. Turns out their design is actually pretty good. But I haven’t come across anything that makes me think one particular model of toothbrush is any better than the other. It just needs to have soft bristles and fit in your mouth. Since moving to this technique, I have found myself preferring a smaller head than I did previously. The Curaprox CS 5460 and Nimbus Compact both check those boxes for me, but I’m sure there’s about a billion other models out there that do as well.

The Future Without Future

2025-07-16T00:00:00-07:00

I listen to 65daysofstatic and their generative noise program Wreckage Systems. My favorite advertisement for Wreckage Systems is on the Debris album (a blind stumbling through the cratered landscape of the musical-industrial complex):

The future without future. The ceaseless turmoil of now. A world of fog and foreboding. Wreckage Systems are the lamp by your side. The stranger who walks beside you. The hand in the dark. Wreckage Systems is the scaffolding that we erect to stop the crushing wave of the heavy sky falling down and around us, dissolving into the ocean that is already lapping around our ankles. Join us and help the dedicated team over at 65LABS expand their noise as together we strive towards utopia.

No future.