View From The Porch

Saturday, September 05, 2026

Spiders!

Bobbi writes about the giant orb weaver that's taken up residence in the side yard.

Outdoor spiders are one thing, but this morning I went into the bathroom and a large wolf spider scurried off the wall and scuttled behind the toilet.

Welp.

Reckon I’ll go poop in the back yard.

Friday, September 04, 2026

Thursday, September 03, 2026

Tab Clearing...

How about an all-wheel drive shooting brake with a 496 cubic inch V-8?

A shirt to confuse AI-powered cameras and keep them from recognizing you as a human. Another William Gibson book come to life!

Meta wants to replace human low-level maintenance workers in data centers with robots.

Fake Flock cameras used to honeytrap would-be vandals.

Wednesday, September 02, 2026

There's a bunch of handwringing, both in social media and the more regular kind of media, about nukes, especially with word getting out that the Pentagon may be looking at revising the U.S. policy on the employment of tactical nukes as battlefield weapons against peer adversaries.

People should calm down, because the biggest barrier to us employing tactical nukes right now is that we more or less don't have any, unless you count some B61 gravity bombs. The US military pretty much got out of the tactical nuke biz after the Cold War.

As the article linked below explains:

"The first part of this equation is to look at what Washington actually has and does not have in its cupboards. The primary observation here is that the overwhelming majority of the US nuclear stockpile comprises strategic rather than tactical weapons. Because Russia retains a wide variety of tactical nuclear weapons designed for a variety of purposes, it is sometimes assumed that the United States has attempted to keep a sort of parity. This is pretty much not the case.

The general situation is that the USA has, since early 1990s, largely abolished its ability to use tactical nuclear weapons. President George Bush Sr. started the process in 1991 and the Clinton administration carried it forward. Over a period of several years, the USA removed many nuclear weapons systems from the inventory, decommissioned and dismantled thousands of warheads, and demolished many delivery systems. The Army and Marine Corps completely got out of the nuclear weapon business, and the Navy got away from all but submarine launched strategic nuclear missiles."

Lots of good detail on what was still in the US stockpile at the end of the Cold War and when it got de-milled. You should click through and read the whole thing.

These are not tactical nukes.

Midweek Meme Dump!

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

Ominous Sign?

There's gonna be an AI generated Bitcoin "biographical thriller" movie starring Gal Godot?

I better make sure I don’t have any crypto left in any digital sofa cushions because, uh, this has a very “Getting stock tips from the shoeshine boy” vibe.

Meme Dump!

Monday, August 31, 2026

Monday Memes!

Flashback!

Jim Grey just posted about his experiences shooting an old (but new-to-him) Pentax ME 35mm SLR. He mentioned how small and light it is, and that's a fact. The Pentax ME and its successor, the ME Super, are so small and light that they were the main cameras we used when I worked at Sky-Shots back in '91.

Back before the days of RC drones and tiny high-res video cameras, this was the solution to get aerial photos up to two hundred feet from the ground.

Dangling from the bottom of the mini blimp was a film camera on a tilt-and-pan gimbal mount with a small CCTV camera affixed to the eyepiece and a servo to trip the shutter. A cable trailed from the blimp to the control console hung 'round the operator's neck on a padded yoke. The control panel had joysticks, a small black and white screen, and a shutter button.

This flyer was my first experiment in desktop publishing. I guess it was technically my first paid writing gig, too.

Here's 24 year old me with my boss's Pentax in my hands and my own Canon AE-1P over my shoulder, with a press pass doing photography at the 1992 First Union Grand Prix in Atlanta, watching some rookie cyclist named Lance Armstrong win his first big race.

Tab Clearing...

Why Top Gear can't be recaptured.

How to spot a psychopath. (Related.)

Florida ‘Deputy of the Year’ Used Flock to Stalk Ex, Held Gun in Her Mouth, Did a Nazi Salute

Sunday, August 30, 2026

Meme Dump Sunday!

Tab Clearing...

"How were those 'Freedom Fuel' stations selling gas so cheaply?" you ask. Well, you may wanna sit down for this one.

A petri dish of human brain cells is in hell. Sort of.

One of the last great stop-motion animation SFX houses is closing its doors. Check out all the great memorabilia from '70s-'90s sci-fi and fantasy movies in the photos at this link!