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The Lately Gazette

an irregular bulletin from the desk · est. April 2019

Vol. 13 · No. 130 Sunday, 10 May 2026 price: gratis · pp. 1 of 1

weather: high cirrus, no rain, the temperature climbing later than honest tide: the river holding its level, against all the moon's invitation nearby: two birds disputing the cornice; the upstairs neighbour humming posts to date: 598 filed: 2026-05-10

these lines rotate daily from a small pool; the masthead was last set on 2026-05-10 (build runs every commit)

From the diary, our standing column · filed 1 February, in the late evening

Interesting laws of Engineering

Some interesting findings in [cite:@king-1944-unwrit-laws-engin]: 07:21 Strive for conciseness and clarity @thistle:l Strive for conciseness and clarity in oral or written reports. If there is one bane of an executive's existence, it is the man who takes a half hour of rambling discourse to tell him what could be said in one sentence of twenty words. There is a curious and widespread tendency among engineers to surround the answer to a simple question with so many preliminaries and commentaries that the answer itself can hardly be discerned. It is so difficult to get a…

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small notices & bulletins from the µ-blog

thu, 7 may love in memory It's fascinating how easy it is to love in memory

thu, 7 may memory Memory has a way of polishing people into archetypes

tue, 5 may Tuesday afternoon Tuesday afternoon, alone, and free. Why it feels painfully different?

mon, 4 may Cinema? What happened Have I reached that era of my life, in which I've the belief that I consumed all good movies, and I will spend the rest of my life just rewatching them? #Cinema

fri, 1 may Rossetti I have not find any works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti interesting enough. Maybe La viuda romana, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. #Art

sat, 18 apr Should the Government Drop Charges Against Daniel Ellsberg? Charges Against Daniel Ellsberg. It's very impressive how Chomsky was very sharp, intelligent and well-spoken from such a young age.

fri, 3 apr al-Jabri I had some questions about al-Jabri and I missed having connection to people who I might share with them my questions.

tue, 31 mar Repeat Emacs It's been said that every editor is destined to repeat Emacs. I extend that to, every computer software is destined to repeat Emacs. #Emacs #Programming

tue, 24 mar arpeggios in circle of fifths Today I found a tiktoker playing arpeggios in circle of fifths, and claiming that she composed it by herself.

recent essays & pieces

4 may ’26"Open" doesn't mean what it used to
2 may ’26The Importance of not mattering, revisiting Chomsky's…
31 mar ’26Reading leaked Claude Code source code
27 mar ’26Make macOS 26 consistently bad (unironically)
22 mar ’26Little Known Development Methods (2009)
18 mar ’26Declaring Emacs Bankruptcy
8 mar ’26I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be…
10 feb ’26musql

at the cinema

2 dec ’23Whiplash (2014)
10 nov ’19V for Vendetta (2005)
15 jul ’23The True Man (1998)
20 dec ’21The Hunt (2012)
6 feb ’20The House That Jack Built (2018)
20 jan ’24Ted K (2021)

the guestbook

“I keep coming back to your website. I've forgotten where I first saw it, but in all likelihood it was Hackernews. I appreciate the…”

Marcus Plutowski, Cupertino, California, 30 apr ’26

“I found your blog's comment section on your homepage through a wonderful link. I was immediately amazed when I…”

小小的小, China, 22 apr ’26

→ sign the book · 20 signatures so far

classifieds

wanteda pen-friend who reads kierkegaard, or both. patience required; expense low. apply by email.

offeredone quiet email per week, in arabic or english, on whatever the writer is reading.

missingmy copy of the diary of a country priest, lent to a friend whose name i cannot now recall. reward, gratitude.

founda small habit of writing every day, after some weeks of not.

last edited: 2026-05-08

errata & corrections

in essays previous, a footnote misattributed a line of pope to dryden. it was pope. the correction is filed.

the page that was promised "by tuesday" in last week's bulletin will appear, perhaps, by some tuesday.

readers who have spotted other errors are invited to write; an erratum is a kind of life sign.

last edited: 2026-05-08

printer's mark

this gazette is set in Times, with arabic in Amiri, computed page by page from the contents of the site. it is filed once per visit; the printing press is a small static-site generator.

last edited: 2026-05-08

in this issue: 45 essays in print, 152 diary entries, 187 small notices, 22 films seen, 0 guestbook entries.

this is the only edition that goes out today.
published by larrasket; the next bulletin will appear when there is something to say.