I wrote 38 posts this month (counting this one) and yet I feel like I’ve somehow failed Blaugust because most of my posts were:
Running
Birding
Random photos
These are all “easy” posts for me and unless you’re really into (me) running, the running posts aren’t even that interesting (though one running post did get me an email–which delighted me!)
Still, I’m glad to have participated. A year from now, I don’t know if I’ll be blogging here in WordPress or somewhere else, but I’ll still be blogging and I’ll do Blaugust again. And I might remember to use the tag more often, too.
Now I need to read through some more of the Blaugust posts from others.
The more I try to think what to write, the more the thoughts run away, nimble and free.
But I remain hopeful that I’ll find my way back to waxing poetic/inanely on whatever wanders into my mind.
In the meantime, here’s a photo I took of a pile of gravel, with all kinds of filters applied to punch it up, a reflection of the artificial times we live in.
And for fun, the original as it looked straight from my phone (what a weird thing this would have been to write in 1980):
Here are two things I saw and wanted to share here about the death of Dolly Parton today, at age 80:
And an editorial cartoon:
Celebrity deaths don’t usually affect me, but Dolly Parton radiated such tremendous goodness, intelligence, compassion, and generosity. She was also funny as all get-out.
In brief because I can only remember slightly less than an elevator’s pitch worth of description for each.
I’m fighting crazy cult women. I think it more a game of wits than a physical battle. I cannot recall why I was fighting them or how I fared.
Running along a scenic mountain trail. If I remember correctly, this started with me walking with a friend then transitioned, as dreams do, to me jogging alone along a trail that ran through bare trees that suggested winter or fall. As I kept running, my speed increased, first to an impressive sprint, then to something absurd and impossible, where I had to deliberately apply the brakes when jogging around a corner to prevent the momentum from flinging myself off the mountain. I wish I could move like that. Or maybe I don’t. It seems dangerous.
The last dream was in some kind of meeting room. I was sitting at a conference table. Across from me was Elon Musk. He was jacking up his office chair super high while sitting on it, laughing, and saying how he could do things like that. I said I could do the same thing and didn’t need a billion dollars to do it. I then threw a pink eraser at him. I have no idea what happened next. Hopefully I left.
I feel like people checking recent posts here are going to leave, thinking, “This guy is really into birding and running and not much else”. But there’s more to me than that. I have other hobbies! I have opinions! I write lists!
But I have been going through some interesting times that have pushed me away from writing about other stuff here on the blog and I’m hoping to add more of that back so it’s not all 5K runs and here’s a Black-capped Chickadee. (Though I feel part of it is the desire to share and mull things over in a public space has withered away a little, though I can’t articulate exactly why this might have happened.)
In the meantime, here are some semi-random posts of mine you may find interesting. I have a certain, specific sense of humour and if it doesn’t match yours, some of these links may not do anything for you, but if you’re a nostalgia nerd, some probably will.
I will put an update at the top of this post if I add more links later.
Most of the fiction comes from writing prompts and these are essentially first drafts, so they may be a bit unpolished or even unfinished (I note the unfinished ones).
Why? Because I was looking at my tags (all 100 million of them) and Nic noticed one that was so long it wasn’t wrapping properly in a column. I said it was probably for a review of the movie 2012, which I remembered correctly. Then we reread the review and Nic pointed out I had said the fissure in the Sistine Chapel appears between God’s finger and David, when it is, in fact, Adam. So I fixed it. The post was written on November 14, 2009.
I have a quote by journalist James Fallows at the top right of my blog which reads:
In my experience, what anyone serious about writing likes is having written.
Now, it’s entirely possible that Fallows came up with this on his own, unaware of Parker’s original quote, and the tone is different–appropriately, Parker’s version is more direct and cutting.
I’m unsure if I should keep the Fallows quote, switch to the Parker one or maybe put something else completely different in that upper right corner. Maybe I’ll put my own quote there. Or a cat. I will ponder.
Today, Instagram updated its logo wordmark. CNET had a nice image of the before and after, presented below as after and before:
Instagzam vs. Instagram
Although I don’t think AI was used in the creation of the new logo, it still smells of it in the way AI messes up things, like:
Goofy kerning
Goofy mix of cursive and non-cursive letters (apparently trying to call back to the previous logo the same way someone riding a bike off a picnic table and crashing calls back to Evel Knievel)
Goofy letters (notably the R, G and S. Someone on Ars Technica commented that the S looks like a side boob and now I can’t unsee it.)
Despite all the above, still looking limp and bland
My take? Yes, it’s bad. The old logo is instantly recognizable, legible and stylish. The new one is a graceless “reeks of committee” thing. It’s also exactly the kind of logo I’d expect a big (and awful) tech company like Meta to produce in 2026.
This led me to other logo redesigns of recent years, such as the also awful one for Pringles:
Here, I think they really hit it in 2009, though 2001 is pretty good, too. The flattened, gormless 2021 redesign is so bad that the longer you look at the face, the less it looks like a face and just a set of weird shapes. It also inspired me to do this:
I am your nightmare.
You’re welcome!
Another good (bad) example is Jaguar’s recent logo redesign:
Cool cat vs. A mix of letters
It went from instantly recognizable to something absolutely generic that says nothing (it’s still way better than Instagram’s, even at that).
In conclusion: Logo design is a fine balancing act between art, character, and image (the type you project). We live in an era where almost every logo out there is being flattened, simplified and stripped of all character and identity (see also: Jaguar’s impressively bad update). The only reason I can think why this is happening is companies are going cheap by making logos so simple they can be slapped on anything at any size with no need for adjustment. If it’s not this, then somehow bad design has become good design, the same way 2 + 2 = 5.
With more people talking about the idea of a dead internet, I find weird comfort in the gaming site Blue’s News, which served as my homepage over 20 years ago and looks pretty much exactly the same now as it did then:
You can almost smell the HTML.
I still don’t get the three lines at the top, though.
Like a lot of people, in 1990 I bought Queensryche’s fourth album, Empire, because the song “Silent Lucidity” was such an effective clone of that big, spacey Pink Floyd sound. I’ve said before that if you dropped the song onto either of the post-Waters Pink Floyd albums, no one would have batted an eye.
But Empire is more than just “Silent Lucidity”. It also features the title track, which is about the usual decline of urban America, its descent into violence and guns, guns, guns (“Got an AK-47 for his best friend/Business the American way1“).
But there’s a spoken word section that recites the following:
In fiscal year of 1986 to 1987, local, state and federal governments spent a combined total of 60.6 million on law enforcement. Federal law expenditures ranked last in absolute dollars and accounted for only a sixth percent of federal spending. By way of comparison, the federal government spent 24 million more on space exploration and 43 -times- more on national defense and international relations than law enforcement.
This seems like a pretty clear statement of “more funding for police = better!”, which was naive in 1990 and in 2026, with police in most American cities being very well-funded, and ICE terrorizing citizens, the reality is that well-funded law enforcement has created a de facto police state in America. And solved none of the issues that the song “Empire” speaks to. Whoops.
But “Silent Lucidity” is still a very nice Pink Floyd homage.
If the lyrics had been more openly sarcastic, they would have worked better, but that might be just me. ↩︎
View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: It doesn’t look hotter, but it’s hotter.
Today’s run was the opposite of Monday’s: hot and gross. Monday it started out at 19°C, which was nice. Today it was 24°C and I felt every one of those five extra degrees.
It started out seemingly well, with an initial pace of 6:08/km, but I slipped to 6:18/km and after that it was Slog City™ to the end. I stopped twice, once at the Nature House to hydrate at the water fountain and again just after entering the Conifer Loop, because I was tired. I didn’t stop for long either time and I don’t think they had any real effect on my overall result, except for allowing me to push on just a bit longer.
I also did a short loop and made it tighter than usual so I’d have less walking to do on the way home. That part worked well!
No particular highlights on the run, of course, and near the end some dope passed by on an electric scooter. I told him they weren’t allowed on the trail, but he probably heard it as, “Why does that sweaty man who looks like he’s dying mumbling at me?”
Anyway, I started late and paid the price. Lesson learned (in theory). I’ll start earlier on Friday, I totes promise.
Brunette River, pre-run: I was too tired to take photos after.
Stats:
Run 1,053 Average pace: 6:20/km Training status: Productive Performance Condition: +0 Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW, short loop) Start: 11:39 a.m. Distance: 5.03 km Time: 31:50 Weather: Sunny Temp: 24°C Humidity: 55% Wind: light BPM: 151 Weight: 170.0 pounds Total distance to date: 7,070 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 265, Samsung Galaxy S26, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: Scarpa Golden Gate ATR 2 (50/108/158)
