Book Report: The Mills of the Gods

It's yet another speculative-history fantasy novel by Tim Powers. In this one: Of the famous creative folks living in Paris after WWI, why were so many interested in bullfighting, of all things? One might guess "It's just a coincidence" or "This was before we had video games, so they didn't have better choices." But: What if it's because they were mixed up in the cult of the pagan god Moloch?

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2026-09-19T20:36:35.583665

Some new-to-me sidewalk chalk art by Kal Zakzouk:

sidewalk chalk art: sidewalk at street corner. chalk art: a big purple flower with things coming out of it

sidewalk chalk art: big purple flower with things coming out of it. a sort of lady. some imps. Daoist-adjacent symbols

sidewalk chalk art: bagua surrounding a triple yin-yang.

sidewalk chalk art: magical lady. she looks up at the sky, with a mask rising off of her face. but the back of her head has another face, a death's head mask, looking down. she has two arms, two human, two kinda skeleton-armor-y, reaching down

If it got you thinking "What's up with that triple yin-yang in amongst the eight trigrams?" Wikipedia had some related ideas: Tricolored Taeguk, Tibetan Gankyil. (or could be artist noodling around with designs, who knows (Making fun of wanna-be billionaires in search of "three commas"?))

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2026-09-12T16:52:50.493766

MRW Halowe'en decorations are already up at the supermarket.

supermarket display case above which are some Hallowe'en decorations: skeletons, gravestone, witch silhouettes, etc

image meme. Its base is the Jumanji 'What year is it?' meme. But it has been edited: the word 'year' has been mostly-covered by the word 'month'

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2026-09-07T13:48:15.772289

A couple of things seen on my morning walk in #SanFrancisco:

Apollo's Dog Library, 6th Avenue between Fulton and Cabrillo.
Sidewalk chalk art near Hippie Hill: lemniscankh. uh, infinite life symbol or something

planter area in front of a house with no plants, just dirt. there are a couple of crates, one with tennis balls and one with sticks. there are a couple of signs. One says that this is Apollo's Dog Library. The other says Take One, Leave One, Have a Great Walk

sidewalk chalk art: a couple of ankhs drawn with their loops touching to form a lemniscate, an infinity symbol. also part of another piece, a geometric construction of circles, hexagons, and triangles

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2026-09-05T16:26:44.289412

Rejoice, for I have updated the scored phrase and word lists at https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/frivolity/prog/phraser/, a.k.a. the Phraser project. I fed in recent data from Wikipedia, IMDB, the puzzles wiki, the Spread the Word crossword list, etc so it now knows of recent phenomena, e.g. that the odyssey is a thing. Oh, I guess it already knew about that one? But you get the idea; it has newer, fresher data.

It also has some old data that I couldn't get my hands on for a long time: the administrators of the Grand Theft Auto game fandom wiki exported data after several years of not doing that. Thus this version of the phrase list knows about character franklin clinton. I guess he's kind of a big deal in the game's story? I dunno, I don't play those games, and thus I rely on this phrase list if I want to fill in the blanks for f _ _ _ _ _ _ _ c _ _ _ _ _ _ (football coaches, Filipino cuisine, flathead catfish, Fanshawe College, Franklin Clinton).

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2026-09-04T17:16:44.736247

Saw some new-to-me Eclair Bandersnatch #SanFrancisco #StreetArt on #PageSlowStreet at Lyon (except the one on a yellow background was on Baker St). There's more to see here, but my blessedly clever phone switched over to "night" mode without me noticing, d'oh. Uh, sry, I'm not going to try to write alt text for these; summary: lots of cool stencil art.

either says 'deeds not words' or 'decals not words' but i am not sure which

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2026-09-02T16:51:36.063314

Book Report: Chasing Shadows

It's a history of The Citizen Lab, a team of academics and hackers at U. of Toronto who investigate when bad guys hack the phones of journalists, activists, and the like. It's also a history of the rise of hack-for-hire mercenary groups.

I'd read about about a lot of this in individual articles over the years. But this book put it all together and pointed out some long-term trends.

When the Lab started out, they didn't think they'd be tangling with hack-for-hire groups. They thought they'd be detecting when governments blocked off access to parts of the internet. I guess that's back when China's Great Firewall was in the news. If China was blocking net access to some some sites, maybe other countries would do the same?

Maybe there was some of that going on. But when Lab folks actually went and talked to journalists, activisits, etc—net access wasn't their urgent tech problem. Activists' phones were acting funny; their friends were getting arrested. Activists wanted to know: were they being surveilled by their phones?

The Lab thought they were going to look for network interference, so they applied those techniques. They looked at how an activist's phone used the network. Weeeird, the phone was sending a lot of data to someplace on the net at strange times; turns out, it was sending the activist's theoretically-private data to someplace bad. The Lab knew networks, so they again applied that knowledge: they queried DNS servers and checked timing data to figure out where else in the world activists' phones were sending data to someplace bad. If you're looking at a Guatemalan reporter's phone that's been hacked to surveil them, you kinda expect other Guatemalans' phones to be hacked. And some were. But strangely, they saw that phones in other countries were also sending data to the same someplace-bad.

They published reports on what they found. They talked to reporters, helped to spread the word. They got kind of famous. They attracted some new recruits, and thus got more knowledge about phone hacking, not just internet-networking smarts.

They were up against mercenary hack-for-hire groups; the archetype of these is NSO Group. These groups figured out how to hack for several countries each. Kinda like how SalesForce provides customer databases for many companies; or Google provides spreadsheets for many companies; these hacker groups set up systems to hack phones and store stolen data in such a way that several countries could use them.

NSO group claimed they only sold their services to governments with good human rights records. But that turned out to be a lie; they did secret deals with dictators; they abetted murder, harassment, theft, etc. (While I was reading the book, some articles were coming out figuring out how the deals were done thanks to records newly made public.) It took years of Citizen Lab, Access Now,+Amnesty International finding NSO Group software spying on various activists, associates of activists, etc to drive home that these weren't one-off mistakes, but business as usual.

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2026-09-02T15:55:34.550257

New Kal Zakzouk sidewalk chalk art at 20th and Irving in #SanFrancisco: an enlightened rainbow being orbited by some demon 🎭️masks🎭️ that look frowny/smiley depending on whether you view them right-side-up or upside-down. Because I don't know how to talk about image-y things, only wordplay things, I want to call those masks semordnilaps, but I bet there's a better word for them.

sidewalk chalk art. human figure. wearing a sort of shawl that might be made of strips of paper over a sort of rainbow glow. orbited by masks

sidewalk chalk art. one of the masks. kinda demonic blue with horns. has two faces, one of which makes sense if seen right-side-up, the other upside-down. they share a mouth which frowns/smiles depending on how you look at it. each face has two closed eyes and an open third eye

sidewalk chalk art. upper left of the artwork. view of one of the masks plus the figure's head. She wears her head in a bun held together with a knife through a skull. She wears a mask, but slung around the side of her head, not covering her face at the moment. The mask isn't, uh, semordnilap-ic; uh, i mean it isn't meant to be turned upside down

sidewalk chalk art. upper part of the figure, can see most of the three demon masks and her head. also between two of the demon masks, you can see, in faint black, the remainder of the previous artwork: kind of a pudgy feline imp figure

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2026-08-31T18:20:55.592034

My parents told me about a library for dogs on 6th Avenue between Cabrillo and Fulton (I think?): a box of tennis balls. Take a ball, leave a ball. That seemed like a better idea than the library for dogs I was familiar with on Waller near Del Mar. It was clearly labeled for sticks. But good-sized sticks kinda sprawl out of the box. This morning, I went back to the Waller St. library and saw: In addition to a couple of stubby sticks, people were putting tennis balls in this library, too. Even though the label clearly read "sticks." Welcome to Waller Street; some documentation may be out of date.

Nearby at Downey: A couple of DraINvader Space Invader drain covers.

a couple of 'libraries' out in front of a blue building. The bigger one has books and is labeled for children. It is painted blue and styled with a fake bay window and other deco to resemble the building behind it. There is also a red box, a library for dogs albeit not obviously because you probably can't read the label from this far away

red box labeled 'stick library and treats'. Half of it is covered and latched. I didn't check, but I guess that's where they keep the treats, with a latch to keep out raccoons. The other half is open. It contains a couple of stubby stick fragments; also a couple of tennis balls

patch of sidewalk with a couple of covered drains. instead of the usual plain drain covers, these are brightly colored with raised pixel art reminiscent of the old Space Invaders game. They are signed @draINvader

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2026-08-31T19:32:05.466485

moved code from github to codeberg, wrote a phraser helper

I wrote a little helper script for working with phraser and crossword lists. Phraser wants spaces; some people who maintain crossword lists don't bother to use spacesandjustruneverythingtogether. guess_spc.py guesses where to add spaces.

Having written this handy script, I thought I'd copy it over to where I share the phraser source code. That should be pretty easy, right? oh whoopsie nope

I'd heard that Github was having a lot of outages since they started using AI-generated code. I shrugged and thought "Gee, I only use Github once every few months. Surely they'll get their act together by the time I try to use it next. Of course I won't be stymied while trying to copy over a such a simple change."

Alas.

I'd already created a user account over at codeberg so I could report an important (ahem) issue in the word list of a daily puzzle game. Today, I got my act together and copied my code over to https://codeberg.org/lahosken/misc . Here's hoping I can go back to not thinking very hard about where to share code.

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2026-08-28T21:13:36.070257