FeedCity

Great news! my candle dealer bugs rock is back with a new line for spoopy season! Order now and get these monstrous creations:

• bad apple (plus baby sample powerful enough to spoil somebody’s bunch)
• a sweet hex (feel like Pandora (not the streaming service) as you open the lid! then instead of hope you are left with a sweet candle to burn)
• mischief nite (this moon cannot be obscured, knows what you did)
• evil side up (I guess Sam I Am wanted the ham)

Plus some bugs rock matches and stickers and maybe some little plastic scaries and a temporary tattoo!

As a bonus you can guess which of these made me sneeze a bunch when I opened the box! (I’m fine, my allergies and I have come to an agreement. Thanks for asking!)

https://bugsrock.online/

Newsletter done, time for a nice walk in the glorious late summer sunshine.

Cooling off during local summer

Ein weiterer solider Film der Serie, wenn auch nicht ganz so gut, wie die Vorgänger. Besonders die Songs lassen leider in diesem Teil etwas nach. Aber war ne gute Zeit im UCI.

Runde Nr. 3! Die Lage spitzt sich zu!

Didn't remember the action-laden ending to be this long. But apart from this, solidly funny entertainment!

Ehhh…whattt??? Jesus. This is just bonkers all the way through. It's wild! I don't really know what to make of this (yet).

Eieiei ist das behämmert! Und wenn ich mir die Hälfte der Szenen so angucke, fand das Cast das auch!

Wesentlich besser als Dr. Hasenbein. Dieser hat in der Tat einen Haufen großartiger Dialoge und Szenen. Das Gitarrensolo! Die ganzen Nasenmann-Szenen. Das Erdbeben. Muss man mal gesehen haben!

Voll verhext? Voll in Ordnung!

Dekadent bereits am Morgen geguckt. Mit Popcorn. Es war super!

Loved the pictures in this film. Everything's so beautiful and moody. I have never seen Bruno Ganz younger than here, I believe. And he and Dennis Hopper are simply fantastic (and the support cast, too). At first I thought the plot could've been a bit more tightened up, but honestly, I think it's really fits the movie and its characters. And it's certainly entertaining and also quite funny how clumsy they are at times.

Marieke Hendriksen, of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, told me in a recent conversation that her new junior researcher had “got an allergic reaction and ended up in A&E” as a result of eating too much fermented food. In the past, Marieke added, “beca...

I thought I might get this done two days ago, and then yesterday arrived with an onslaught of Russian spambots abusing the comment form. I think that’s fixed, at least enough to recall the glories of September. Highlights of the months: Got back into the podcast season Loc...

Yesterday arrived with an onslaught of Russian spambots abusing the comment form here, and nothing seemed able to stop them. Cloudflare worked, then it didn’t. Slightly panicked here, I might have slowed the flow by adding a block on 11 IP ranges. And still they seemed to ke...

I’ve been helping the Squeeze update her website to show new work, a lot of which requires me to rightsize the image files she produces as part of her practice. Normally not much of a problem but occasional enormous TIFF files cause all the tools I have to stutter and fail. Fearing I might have to install ImageMagick or similar, I cast around online and found Use sips to quickly, easily—and freely—convert image files. Bingo!

I did one run of a straight TIFF to JPEG conversion and it worked, but the JPEG was still too large. So I actually read sips help and discovered the -Z option to specify a size in pixels for the largest dimension.

sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 80 -Z 1920 "input.tiff" --out "output.jpeg"

Took me down from 251Mb to 862Kb in no time flat. Very good to know.

The Level Up is an indie improv showcase. Join us as we watch amazing New York indie improv talents gain XP on the Magnet stage, unlock new achievements, and reach new milestones. Or do comedy.

Come support Michael as he dons his hosting-duties cap for three exciting indie teams!

• Good Towel
• Sweat Treat
• Hyperkinetic

I’ll be playing in with Michael and the rest of the Level Up!

Looking forward to it! And to seeing you there!! (Yes, you. Come on out!!!)

Saturday October 4th, 2025 @ 10:30pm
Magnet Theater
254 West 29th St (btwn 7th and 8th Ave.)
New York City, NY 10001
Tickets $10: https://magnettheater.com/show/tickets/60022/

Magnet Theater

Naomi Duguid is just one of the writers I enjoy who has succumbed to the lure of Substack. I’ve made my brief pitch to each of them to consider some other place, which generally falls on almost-deaf ears because of the supposed network effects: “the building of visibility an...

This post can also be read in German

Subject: "Re-Design and Promotion Strategy for Dead.Garden"
Subject: "About your Dead.Garden"
Subject: "Errors in your Dead.Garden"

Dear Dead,
your website is not good enough, in fact, it is actively bad.
Don't you know that you need Search Engine Optimization?
What are you, some kind of idiot?
Your site is currently ranked on page 1,000,000 of Google,
and if we know anything (in fact, we know everything),
this means that you are wasting not only your time,
but much more importantly
money.

---

Read more on the site…

For most days of the year, the name of my website – James’ Coffee Blog – is followed by a coffee cup emoji. But, on some days, the coffee cup emoji changes. I have a calendar of events for which the emoji changes, including International Day of Peace (September 21st), Burns N...