Simon Batistoni

@simon.batistoni.net

390 Followers 525 Following

Curious Enthusiast / A voracious librarian of human ingenuity / Professional nerd for far too long. Proud Californian.

A man in a white shirts and pants standing behind a counter in a 1930s-era grocery store. The shelves behind him are stacked 20 feet high with tinned goods, as are shelves to the side. A sign on the rear shelf reads "Drink POSTUM "There's a Reason""
Bazby, a 10lb sable-colored toy poodle, perched in a dog bed looking out of the window of a car
A panel from the comic "Basic Instructions", captioned "Often, we don't really understand what drew us to our role models to begin with.". The panel features Scott and his downtrodden friend Rick, and the following dialog: SCOTT: I always related to Number 6, The Prisoner. Trapped in a prison disguised as an idyllic village. Fighting to remain an individual despite constant pressure to conform. RICK: Small town life didn't agree with you, did it? SCOTT: No. Why do you ask?
The front page of of alamedapost.com in April 2026. It has a very traditional, straightforward design. At the top of the page is a banner advertising "History Walking Tours with Dennis Evanosky". Underneath are two sections, side by side, "Alameda News" and "Alameda Features". The main news story is "April 7 City Council Preview" with a picture of City Hall. Under are 4 more stories, about parking structure renovation, bike lane upgrades, a "No Kings" protest and a landlord getting prosecuted for $20k. On the features side are 2 images of adorable dogs and a kitten being bottle-fed with the headline "Learn to Bottle Feed Kittens, and Meet Poppa!" (I don't know who Poppa is). Other features: Alameda Restaurant Week recap, Mayor says "Democracy is a verb", MATH PUZZLE and "All Around Alameda - A Scholarly Saturday".
A clip from a news summary email that says "Kid Rock to headline Turning Point's alternative to Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show" and then "President Donald Trump threatns to sue Trevor Noah over Grammys joke about Jeffrey Epstein's island"
A portion of the San Francisco Chronicle's evening headlines email newsletter for Jan 2nd 2026, with two stories highlighted. The first is headlined "'Not a happy message' -- Bay Area birds are struggling, new report finds. The second is headlined "We blind-tasted 17 rotisserie chickens from Bay Area restaurants. Here's how Costco ranked" That's the important stuff; the meat of the joke, if you will. In the interests of completeness though, I'll tell you that the first message is illustrated with a photo of wetlands in front of (I think) the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge; the second story with a semi-horrifying array of deep-brown rotisseried chickens. There's like 12 chickens in shot. Don't get me wrong, I like chicken; had it for dinner tonight, but that's an offputtingly freakish amount of chicken. Descriptions for the two stories: First: "The Bay Area's bird species have seen steep declines in recent decades. Conservation funding cuts by the Trump administration could make the problem worse." Second: "The Chronicle conducted a blind taste test of rotisserie chickens from restaurants, butchers and grocery stores -- including Costco -- to find the Bay Area's best. Here's our list of the top 10. See, that really didn't enhance the joke in any way, but at this point you've also experienced every detail of this jpeg. Oh, except the "Read More" links under each story, but they're not clickable, this is a screenshot, so we're deep into irrelevance at this point.
The album cover for the Lemonheads’ album “It’s a shame about Ray”, featuring a maroon classic car, and fhe torso and lower face of Juliana Hatfield. Ms Hatfield is wearing a necklacke of beads and an emerald green t-shirt.
A quote about Peter Thiel from the Guardian’s website: “Silicon Valley titan desperately tries to detach self from power in amateurish talks attempting to ape his favorite philosopher”
Answers to two questions, from GPT-OSS running on ollama. "What was Margaret Thatcher most hated for? "Explain the geometric concept of the Golden Spiral, in 70 words or less, in a way my 4-year-old can understand." I can't reproduce the whole answers inside the character limit, but the Thatcher answer was generally accurate (Austerity, privatization, miners' strike, Poll Tax, Falklands, lack of empathy) and pretty well-written for an LLM. Here's the Golden Spiral answer, which took 7 seconds of hot markov-chain action: "The Golden Spiral is a special, wiggly line that grows just a bit each time you turn it. Imagine a tiny square, then another bigger square next to it. The line goes from the corner of the first square, wraps around inside, and comes out the next corner. It keeps spiraling, getting bigger like a snail shell or a flower petal, always a little longer than before."
A top-to-bottom view of a compact thunderstorm in the Florida Everglades at dusk, taken from a moving car. The dark lower clouds and billowing upper Cumulonimbus are clearly visible, as is rain at the bottom of the storm, concentrated where the upper clouds are at their highest.
@mattyglesias on Twitter, from Apr 23 2025: "I am sort of open to the idea that we should be a country with a national ID card system and a rule that you're expected to have your papers on you at all times in case your citizenship is challenged. But if that's what conservatives want, we need to create the card."
A picture of the ludicrous Star Trek The Next Generation “baddie” Armus, an oozing tar monster which zapped security chief Tasha Yar to death. It’s on a generic “rock planet” which is either somewhere outside San Bernardino, or a sound stage.
A promotional image of 80s Scottish kids TV character “Super Gran”, riding her trademark flying bicycle.
A waffle made of leftover Thanksgiving stuffing, topped with turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, bacon-wrapped sausage slices and gravy, on a white plate.
A bluesky post from @brendannyhan.bsky.social reading “What could go wrong?” above a deleted quote-post
Arnold Schwarzenegger, wearing a colorful hawaiian-style shirt with a red, blue and yellow pattern involving several breeds of dog, with his arm around the shoulder of Sylvester Stallone, who is wearing aviatir sunglasses and a “preppy” navy shirt and olive sweater. The picture is likely from the mid 90s.