Larry Hosken: New

Arty things I saw on my #SanFrancisco walk this morning:

Cement infrastructure for the "Naga" sea serpent statue going in at Rainbow Falls. The statue is sinuous but it's easier to make rectangular cement forms. So…depending on whether you're near or far, you might think this thing was gonna be all right angles or serpentine. (I walked up the path to the creepy Celtic cross so I could take the far picture, please clap)

Well Done Signs sign painter's van with woodpecker logo promising "Always Hand Painted." (Looking at the web site, I guess this van is visiting from Portland, OR.)

Sidewalk chalk art at 20th and Irving (alas, pretty scuffed by the time I got there) asks a very American question: Pay your bills or buy your pills?

cement supports in a drained pond. Individual parts of the supports are rectilinear solids; but they're arranged at angles to each other cement supports in a drained pond, seen from above with an annoying tree in the way. Individual parts of the supports are rectilinear solids; but they're arranged at angles to each other Sign painter's van with text promising 'Always hand painted' and a woodpecker logo Faded chalk art on sidewalk. Art depicting a dog and cat surrounded by text in many languages I can't read and further surrounded by English text: 'Pay your bills?' / 'Buy your pills'

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2025-06-29T16:29:30.959040

Book Report: The Swimmers

A swimming pool develops a crack. A mother develops dementia. Everything you ever cared about, everyone you ever cared about will wither, decay, and fade away. You will wither, decay, and fade away. One character in the book, a swimmer, says "Everything is loss." She wasn't wrong; piece by piece, it all vanishes. I loved this book and recommend it and say: Brace yourself. I also noted the passage "And the time that your other brother, the lawyer, went after her boss, Dr. Nomura, when he tried to cheat her out of her 401(k)…." If that's based on a true story, then I'm glad that brother knew what to do.

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2025-06-22T00:00:16.753381

As I walk around the city for exercise and errands, I like to play walking-around games on my phone: games that that use GPS* to move my little guy around in the game. I just wrote a new such game. It runs in a web page: Walkzee. (Because Apple hates the web, if you visit Walkzee on your iPhone and you, like 99.9% of iPhone users have the default web browser and haven't turned on the enable geolocation setting, the game will do nothing.) I'm still tweaking the game. I play it as I walk around; then sit down and fix bugs when I get home. As of today, it might be of more interest to Mystery Hunt players than walkers: there are no instructions, so half the challenge is figuring out how to play.
Screen shot of a web app. There's a big green square that has dice scattered across it. Down below are some buttons,some of which have die-face titles; others just have black dots. It's very mysterious

Why am I writing yet-another walking-around phone game? The previous such game I wrote ran on top of Google Cloud Services. You might remember a few months back, I switched my backups to not use Google servers, run by a will-abet-genocide-for-$$$ division within Google. Some days ago, I wondered: "Why is Google still billing me?" My little walking-around game didn't make Google's servers think very hard—it almost squeaked under the threshhold to run for free. But it was a little over, and thus Google was billing me.

I wrote this new game so that it does all of its thinking and data storage on the phone, not on some server elsewhere on the net. Then I shut down my old game that was running on Google's computers. Now I won't send money directly to Google's pro-genocide division. This means giving up some server-y features. In the old game, when my phone broke, my score was still saved on some Google machine; so when I got a new phone and resumed play, my big ol' score showed up. In this new game, if I get a new phone, I'll have to start all over building up my score. <sarcasm>oh no…</sarcasm>

(If you do care about scores and furthermore you read this blog mostly because you're into puzzles, have you tried https://huzzlepub.com/? At Huzzlepub, you can paste in your daily Wordle, Toddle, Raddle,… uh, all those daily puzzles, you can paste in that "share your score with your friends" thingy, and it will let you compare your scores with your peers, thus reminding you that Tyler Hinman is still better at crosswords than you are.)

No, I don't think this will change Google's behavior. I'm imagining some Google exec: "We were willing to toss out 'Don't be evil' to get that $$$ military contract, but Larry shut down his app and that little app pays for a cup of coffee every four months, so—uh, make that five months, I want to leave a decent tip or else the barista will spit in my drink." Yeah, no, this isn't changing anything important, aside from me being able to look myself in the mirror; well, OK, that's kinda important.


*Yes, I mean geolocation using GPS and other means.

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2025-06-16T13:41:07.929880

Book Report: Show me a Hero

It's a history of the struggle to build and inhabit public housing on the white side of Yonkers, NY, USA in the 1990s. (If that sounds familiar but you're sure you didn't read the book, maybe you saw the HBO miniseries?) It was a pretty interesting, albeit aggravating read. Why aggravating?

Yonkers' NIMBYs were national-news-level notable. In Yonkers, they were very stubborn. Ordered by a judge to build public housing on the east side of town, city politicians got elected by promising to just not build that housing. Faced with fines, they stuck to their guns. When the fines threatened to bankrupt the city, when the city had to fire workers, when… Their appeal went up to the US Supreme Court.

The book isn't written from the NIMBY point of view. I suppose the NIMBYs didn't want to sit down with the author and recount their tales of hurling racist epithets back in the good ol' days. But you feel their presence in every chapter: Voting out the sane politicians; making death threats; hurling those epithets.

Instead we hear about the ousted Yonkers politicians and the outside-Yonkers politicians who were trying to figure out how to make the city comply. Do you fine the city? Seems bad to make city workers lose their jobs just because the city council got taken over by racists. Do you fine the city council members? They can declare bankruptcy, and then get re-elected by pointing out their sacrifices.

And we hear about the people who moved into the new public housing when it was finally built. None of these people thought of Ruby Bridges like Yep, that's the lifestyle I'm looking for. But they had to learn how to get along with their new neighbors, how to stand up for themselves. There are some real moments of inspiration in there.

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2025-06-11T14:06:03.061026

Some photos walking around #SanFrancisco 's Marina District (and the bus ride back home):
a mostly-torn-down flyer on a utility pole. The scrap of paper reads: (Pe)ter Thiel is Evil northern entrance of SF's Palace of Fine Arts building with some big tentacle balloons on top graffito on big wall over the old Lucky Penny. It depicts a BART train busting through the wall

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2025-06-09T00:53:32.936325

Still wrapping my head around the new reality: My cousin quit his job with the federal government and went to work at a startup, thus increasing his job security.

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2025-06-07T17:00:00.099403

This SMRT COW "smart cow" smart car impressed me. Yep, that's a nose ring.

[Update: When I saw this car again in late June, it no longer had the Texas SMRT COW license plate, but a message-less Calfornia plate.]

front view of a smart car painted with a jersey cow pattern. it has horns on top and a shiny nose ring in front. its license plate is Texas SMRT COW rear view of a smart car painted with a jersey cow pattern. it has horns on top. its license plate is Texas SMRT COW

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2025-06-27T19:52:32.539409

A few things I noticed on my #SanFrancisco exercise walk this morning.

The Whale's Tail, a.k.a. the summer weekend beer garden in Golden Gate Park is set up again, sorta. Looking for info, I found a bunch of obsolete pages saying it's closed; and one page that says this is indeed opening weekend, and you can check the schedule to see when it'll be open (many weekends between now and October-ish).

Irving Street sidewalk things: The drain near Nomad Cyclery; a pretty geometric construction for the math lovers out there.

a big lawn with some temporary wooden picket fence set up; some of that fence has been blown over sidewalk curb with a "Nomad" carved in it where you might expect a street name e.g., Irving sidewalk chalk art: hexagon filled with a grid of triangles constructed from circular arcs rendered in colored chalk with a gradient heading out from the center. Tucked in the corner: "8647"

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2025-05-25T16:41:20.205441

As I walked around the corner of the California Academy of Sciences on my morning exercise walk, I was surprised by a roar. There was an animatronic dinosaur (T-Rex?) swaying in the side yard. This was part of Dino Days https://www.calacademy.org/exhibits/dino-days . I dunno if they leave the animatronics running 24/7, but it was going as of 8 this morning.

The animatronics were moving kinda slow+stately; not exactly what I'd expect of bird relatives. I dunno if this motion reflects how we think dinosaurs move vs. slow so that the animatronics don't fall apart from flopping around too much for a few weeks.

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2025-05-17T16:31:29.210847

I snapped a couple of pics on my morning exercise walk today:

Wondering why a normally-open section of pavement in the Golden Gate Park panhandle was fenced off with some strange angular shapes inside, I used my phone camera as a periscope. It looks like the Bay to Breakers organizers are preparing to deploy a fleet of Cybertrucks.

I saw a construction crane pointing at the moon and took a pic. I tried to get my phone to auto-focus on the (faint, faint) moon, but it could only do it on the crane.

some dumpsters surrounded by a temporary fence; some trees loom in the background. A piece of paper taped to the closest dumpster reads: Bay to Breakers in the foreground, cropped view of the intersection of Haight and Shrader streets. You can see the restaurant Cha Cha Cha, a couple of its neighbors, and street signs. In the background, behind the buildings, are a couple of orange cranes building the new hospital at UCSF Parnassus. Above one of the cranes is a faint white circle; it's the moon, I promise

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2025-05-16T14:21:24.418030

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