Some mighty nice sidewalk chalk art at Presidio Wall Park today, celebrating Phillip's birthday. I dunno know who did it; it's unsigned. Maybe, like, Phillip's grandma or something?

patch of sidewalk covered with little chalk drawings. Kind of an optimistic cartoony line art look, idk i'm not an art expert

sidewalk-chalk art: face of a smiling cat

2026-07-19T20:32:41.410581

On my way home from the grocery store, I saw some Flower Power sidewalk chalk art on Irving St at 8th Ave. "I 🌼 SF" #SanFrancisco (In related news, I have replenished my supply of celebratory bubbly and am repeatedly refreshing the news page.)

kinda dusty shelf with chili garlic sauce, pasta sauce, and featuring a bottle of sparkling apple cider kept on hand in case of sudden celebration occasion

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2026-07-13T15:16:17.293886

At Kezar Stadium, figure I have a few months to workshop some equine/vine wordplay.

view through fence of a garden decoration, a wire-frame donkey(? or mule?) with flowering vines just starting to crawl around it

But, first an another such project urgently emerged. Uh, "Elegy for L.G.: Burn in Hell, G."

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2026-07-12T14:43:36.266324

It's happening again. Anyhow, I got a selfie. #SFPursuit.

fisheye camera view of seemingly-suburban-but-actually-just-urban street. A tall person kneels on the sidewalk holding a phone up to the camera. His head is out of frame. A ways back on the sidewalk, another figure stands, hands in pockets, also head out of frame. Behind him is a street. Behind that is a grassy plaza. Barely sticking up behind my arm is a little sticky-out thing. That's the gnomon of a big sundial

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2026-07-11T20:28:44.140321

Suddenly had a good guess at who made those Mario-themed drain covers on Page St when I saw this DraINvader cover on Baker St. #SanFrancisco #StreetArt

sewer drain cover made of 3D-printed plastic. bright yellow background. pixel art with Space Invader under a rainbow over spectrum-colored dots by signature draINvader

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2026-07-10T15:12:41.507259

Sidewalk chalk art at 22nd and Irving St in #SanFrancisco in front of Uncle Benny's donuts, where, miraculously,* there was no line this morning.

Maybe(?) it's supposed to suggest a bagua? I'd expect more, uh, mid-octant U-turns where there are straightaways to really get something bagua-like. ~~Maybe I'm just jumping to a culturally-insensitive conclusion based on the presence of Chinese characters at the bottom which I can't even read.~~ That would go well with the "Laozi" in Chinese characters at the bottom, legendary author of the Tao Te Ching. (Many thanks to Paul Masson for translating those characters.) I suppose that Pac-Man on top would be handy for harrying evil spirits a la one of those feng shui mirrors or something.

Maybe(?) by Kal Zakzouk who I vaguely remember making some Pac-Man mazes when he was drawing on Judah sidewalks but hoo boy not sure how well I trust my memory back that far.

sidewalk chalk art: overall, it's a labyrinth shaped like an octogon. on top is Pac-Man

sidewalk chalk art: zooming in on the Pac-Man on top of the octagon

*Maybe miraculously or maybe a large fraction of the Uncle Benny's regulars weren't sure whether it'd be open on Independence Day.

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2026-07-04T22:24:20.159953

I saw some things on my walk in the #SanFrancisco Upper Haight this morning.

Page Street, across from the International School of SF: Sewer covers decorated with Mario things. [Update Jul 10]: I bet these are the work of DrainVader
A block west, near 1260 Page: Sidewalk carp. Jeremy Novy trying a new color scheme? Eclair Bandersnatch going ichthyic? I dunno, I just snap pics.
Haight Street: Infinite love! sidewalk chalk.

patch of sidewalk with some sewer covers. they're usually made of metal and often stolen. a couple of metal ones have been replaced by ?plastic? decorated to look like a Mario Goomba and question mark

patch of pavement painted in orange and blue with carp, bubbles, and seaweed(?)

sidewalk chalk art: two hearts placed point-to-point to suggest a ∞ infinity lemniscate symbol. Within one heart is written Infinite; in the other, Love

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2026-07-10T14:57:59.356217

We sometimes forget to pass along the classics. I posted this old word puzzle on a discord today and it got more of a reaction than I expected; I guess the kids today don't know:

a few letters in a strange layout. There's a big letter G. Inside the G are 3 letters: ST together, and then under that an M.

I think I first saw it back in the 1980s. Maybe clued with something like "caused more conflict than anything else in history"?

Games Magazine published puzzles like this called "Wacky Wordies." @Algot@mastodon.art occasionally posts them, calling them "Wicked Wonderful Wordies."

Here are rot13'd clues and solution in case you're stuck:

Ubj jbhyq lbh qrfpevor Z'f cbfvgvba eryngvir gb gur bgure cvrprf?

Gur nafjre vf bar jbeq.

Gur jbeq raqf va vat. Nf va: gur Z vf "va t".

Gur nafjre vf z vf haqre fg naq va t.

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2026-06-28T15:31:50.170654

Book Report: 😂 Face with Tears of Joy 😂

It's a history of emoji. Quickly moves past early pictographic writing on up to little pictures on early Japanese pagers and smartphones. I was kinda familiar with a lot of this history. For a few years, Unicode emoji changes would make the news; I remember reading about such things at the time. But reading about them all together shows some trends that weren't so obvious year-by-year.

Reading the first couple of chapters, I was kinda worried. I read this as an e-book. The first few bits talk about ancient pictographic writing systems. The book talks about various specific characters… which my e-book reader's font apparently doesn't support. So the book would say something like "The ancient Sumerian squiqqle П which evolved into a similar Hebrew character () and as well as an Egyptian glyph (◻)" and I couldn't make sense of it until I realized it was failing to display not-often-used-and-thus-omitted-from-the-font symbols. On the one hand, it's kind of a shame: I bet the author had to do an hour of research to figure out each of those symbols, and I couldn't see the result on that research. OTOH, what are the chances that I'd actually retain memory of those specific symbols a day after reading about them? (darned low) Can I imagine a Hebrew character that could have evolved from a kinda-arch-looking symbol? Sure.

Kinda sad to learn that lately many apps have been so eager to expand their choices of emoji, stickers, etc, that they've largely left the Unicode set behind. On the one hand, it's nice when a Discord lets me react with a little "thank you" graphic instead of an ambiguous 🙏. (Did he mean "thanks" or "praying for you" or…?) On the other hand, it's a pity that there's no way to copy-paste that little "thank you" graphic from Discord to anywhere else, instead just leaving around little unsupported-character graphics (◻).

Now I wonder if I keep using the phrase "on the one hand…on the other hand because I was thinking about the 🙏 emoji. Anyhow.

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2026-06-23T17:15:45.774453

While waiting for the supermarket to fail-to-open-for-mysterious-emergency-reasons on Saturday, I stopped by 20th and Irving in #SanFrancisco to check for new Kal Zakzouk sidewalk chalk art and was not disappointed: some sort of demon-hunter magician contemplated a couple of imps.

sidewalk chalk art: zooming in on the symbols

sidewalk chalk art: zooming in on the mage's head and torso. oh, the headband is an SF Giants scarf

sidewalk chalk art: zooming in on one of the imps. pretty fierce facial expression

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2026-06-22T14:54:00.054550