Chris Vermilion

@verm.me

1498 Followers 1610 Following

Software nerd. Order Muppet. Recovering physicist. Not really that sad of a dad. https://verm.me Be the friend you want to have everywhere.

Bib Fortuna and Salacious Crumb looking your way expectantly
From a bullet list of planned remediations: 3. Add a second AI to review the first AI’s findings (struck through). They agreed with each other, then unionised 4. Remove AI from the security gates (struck through). Vendor contracts run through 2028 5. Update scanner system prompts to instruct them to “be brave about difficult images” (struck through). In testing; early results concerning in a different direction 6. Pin model versions (struck through). Model was deprecated 7. Don’t pin model versions (struck through). Model was swapped underneath us 8. Expand the honeypot dotfiles programme (only intervention with a measurable effect; current owner unknown) 9. Goat farming (waitlist now exists; Karen is fourth)
Joseph Smith
Cover of David Macaulay’s “Underground” a book about subways and utility lines
Screenshot of an email from AOC, subject line “I’ve never campaigned like the establishment says you’re supposed to”. I think it’s probably about vlogging a trip to see some Girl Scouts tonight and not polishing Tom Massie’s automatic rifle but I already deleted it so who’s to say.
Nineteen Star Wars books laid out on a table. The top row has the novels, mostly as paperbacks: the Star Wars novelization, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, Han Solo at Stars’ End, Han Solo’s Revenge, the ESB novelization, Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu, the ROTJ novelization, Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon, and Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka. The middle row has five late-nineties Dark Horse collections of the Star Wars daily comic strip, and the final row is four later Dark Horse Omnibi of the monthly Marvel Star Wars comic. The “Wild Space” volume collects several UK-only items among other gems.
Kagi translate to English (US): “he’s totally fucked”
Screenshot of first track of the new Robyn album, out today. Robyn is shown ecstatic, naked with arms up, cut off just high enough to keep it clean.
Translation of the opening stanza of Pale Fire into “Charles Kinbote”, leaving it unchanged
Dr Seuss: I was a shadow, a bird on the wing, Who hit the glass window—a thumpy-bump thing! The sky looked so blue, but the blue was a lie, So I left a small smudge of my fluff to go by. But did I stop there? Oh, no! Not at all! I kept right on flying, so proud and so tall, Past the glass and the smudge and the windowpane too, In a sky in the mirror, all shiny and new!
Werner Herzog: Yes, you are confronting a void of profound, humid carnality. One must arrive with a vessel and a tool of cleansing for this damp, existential abyss. Surrender the totality of your being to this suffocating, wet darkness.
Phil Hartman in a parody ad for Colon Blow cereal, from Saturday Night Live.
Windows 95 disk defragmenter
Screenshot of a video of the fire a few minutes later, showing scorch marks around the base of two windows.
New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle, with L in the middle plus NVDOUE
Wikipedia search preview: Wallaroo is a common name for several species of moderately large macropods, intermediate in size between the kangaroos and the wallabies. The word "wallaroo" is from the Dharug walaru, and not a portmanteau of the words "kangaroo" and "wallaby", as is commonly assumed…
Fresh lemon pig with cloves for eyes, a penny in its mouth, and toothpick legs. A chipper lad, ready to face the year.
Giant fucking dictionary with a cool swirly pattern on the page edges
Natalie Portman from “Black Swan”, a movie about the ballet “Swan Lake”, which Soviet TV stations would famously play when they couldn’t report the news
Important Reminder About Accessing Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Jan 21, 2026 Office of Family Independence (OFI) and MaineCare staff do not make unannounced home visits or offer in-home help with benefits, including MaineCare, SNAP, and TANF.
Reply from @jtlevy (display name Jacob T. Levy): Theorists: "We will go and view the city of tyranny, and once more take a look into the tyrant's soul." Reply from @williamadler78 (display name William D. Adler): Economists: "Did someone say tax cut?"
They met for dinner. She was 18. He was 52. Instead of working together, they began dating, he said. They got two Maltese puppies and James Thurber-inspired tattoos. “It was marriage-y,” Mr. Olbermann said. “It was very much an at-home-with-the-dogs sort of thing.”
French version of the Sickos meme. A monsieur labeled “PERVERS” is saying “OUI… HON HON HON… OUI!”
A picture of a page from Webster's 2nd. Excerpt from the "flash" entry: SYN.— FLASH, SPARKLE, GLITTER, GLEAM, GLANCE, GLINT GLIMMER, SHIMMER, GLISTEN. FLASH implies a sudden and transient outburst of light; SPARKLE suggests quick, bright flashes or scintillation; GLITTER connotes greater brilliancy or showiness than sparkle, sometimes with the implication of something sinister; as, "Flashed all their sabers bare" (Tennyson); "his flashing eyes, his floating hair" (Coleridge); "The fireflies...sparkled most vividly in the darkest places" (Irving); "the sparkling waves" (Wordsworth); "He holds him with his glittering eye" (Coleridge); "little black eyes which glittered like jet" (Scott); "glittering rings" (Irving); GLEAM commonly applies to light which shines through an intervening medium, or against a background of relative darkness, as, "I see the lights of the village gleam through the rain and mist" (Longfellow). GLANCE implies darting, or obliquely reflected, GLINT, quickly glancing or gleaming, light as "Many a little hand glanced like a touch of sunshine on the rocks" (Tennyson); "An insane light glanced in her heavy black eyes" (Mrs. Stowe); "when the first sunshine through their dewdrops glints" (Lowell). GLIMMER suggests faint and wavering, SHIMMER, soft, tremulous, and lustrous, GLISTEN, faintly scintillating, light; as "Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight" (Gray); "Whiles all the night, through fog smoke white, glimmered the white moonshine" (Coleridge); "The young leafage shimmered like a veil of golden gauze" (M. Hewlett); the landscape shimmered through the heat; "snowy mountains glistening through a summer atmosphere" (Irving); "eyes glistening with heavenly tears" (Carlyle). Cf. FLAME, SCINTILLATE, BRIGHT.
Movie poster for the 1995 Chevy Chase/Jonathan Taylor Thomas vehicle “Man of the House”. JTT is seated in a fancy chair and manipulates a distraught half-sized Chevy Chase like a marionette.
Stuffed Pikachu from Costco the size of a large ottoman sitting on a porch, behind a few decorative gourds and a Boo Bucket containing one (1) potato. He is wearing a felt wizard hat and is staring into the middle distance, contemplating the shit he has seen.
Cover of “De reisgenoten”, the Dutch translation of “The Fellowship of the Ring”. 13 potato-ass companions around a table look aghast at what looks like a ghost of Dobby the Elf. (Presumably Bilbo disappearing when he puts on the Ring?)
screenshot from Spelling Bee puzzle, saying “IMMANENT” is not in their word list
Omar Sy as the modern incarnation of famous fictional French thief Arsène Lupin
Cover of Howl in the classic Pocket Poets design: black border around a white background, black text. HOWL in that unmistakable City Lights font.
A red apple with a heart-shaped patch of yellow-green that blurs at the lower edge. If you squint it looks like the Heartbleed logo.
Otto the inflatable autopilot from the classic film Airplane!, looking calmly pleased with the knowledge that unlike Charlie Kirk he has sexually satisfied a woman.
Cover image from the 20th anniversary reissue of Robyn's "Robyn", one of the greatest albums of all time.
3x3 grid of baseball faces: Edgar Martinez, Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, Trot Nixon, Randy Johnson (with a Diamondbacks cap), Ichiro Suzuki, Curt Schilling (Phillies), Mariano Rivera, David Wells (Blue Jays)
Under “Index of Persons” the entry for “Christ” says “see Index of Subjects”
Beatific Vision. See God Index entry in Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma
Grumpy-looking white cat on a couch. The look of a butler who has just caught an underlying in an act of tomfoolery.
cow in space, reminiscent of Gateway 2000’s cow branding
No results found for “web 2000”
1918: The elephant is very hungry and hangry from having had no dinner. A. Ransome, Letter 28 May in R. Chambers, Last Englishman (2009)
@kashana.bsky.social’s “The Payback”, in real life
An actual piece of internal Bloomberg literature has been in the news recently: a thirty-two-page compilation of various off-color things that Bloomberg said in his early years at the company, which was presented to Bloomberg as a gag gift, in 1990. A former Bloomberg executive who helped compile the booklet told New York magazine that Bloomberg was proud of the book when he received it.
A search for “BLOW JOB” on The New Yorker’s web site. (The UI forces ALL CAPS.) The first result is a story titled “Sick Children Will Be Among the Victims of Trump’s Big Bill”.
Baby Yoda eating an egg out of a glowing fishbowl full of more delicious eggs
Gnarls Barkley - St Elsewhere The Fame (Monster) - Lady Gaga Tegan and Sara - Heartthrob The Killers - Hot Fuss Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Broken Bells - Broken Bells Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood Maggie Rogers - Heard it in a Past Life Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia Passenger - All the Little Lights Taylor Swift - Midnights Sia - This is Acting
“You didn’t fight the system to win, S.P. You fought to show it can be done.” Word bubble from a comic book panel, spoken by the bartender of a fictionalized Stonewall Inn, who is a literal (and maybe figurative?) bear.
Audiobook queue: Patrick O’Brian’s “Reverse of the Medal” Dante’s Inferno Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” (read by Andy Serkis, it’s so good) Danny Lavery’s “Women’s Hotel”
Title page for “Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis”
Salad kit named “Creamy Goddess”
Roadside restaurant sign: WED TRIVIA LOBSTER ROLLS + FETTUCINE ALF FRIED OREOS
A dozen or so people with pirate hats, eye patches, and stuffed parrots, drinking pitchers in Jack Keroac Alley.
A small stack of books, a shot, and a beer, looking out the window of dive bar/Beat museum/tourist trap Vesuvio, in San Francisco.
Soulless, legless Zuck avatar in front of the Eiffel Tower. He, too, dreams of turning warfighters into technomancers.
David Evans, better known as “The Edge”, the behatted U2 guitarist, smirking unwinningly
Bruce Springsteen’s “Human Touch” album cover, famous for including the song “Human Touch”, which was about humans touching.
One of the things that makes package hallucinations potentially useful in supply-chain attacks is that 43 percent of package hallucinations were repeated over 10 queries. “In addition,” the researchers wrote, “58 percent of the time, a hallucinated package is repeated more than once in 10 iterations, which shows that the majority of hallucinations are not simply random errors, but a repeatable phenomenon that persists across multiple iterations.
Bill the Cat from Bloom County, saying “ACK!”
Programming note: Money Stuff will be off next week for spring break. We’ll be back April 21. In recent years, my vacations have often been occasions for Elon Musk to do weird stuff, and that is certainly a live possibility for next week. Also, though, I once took a vacation during which Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Probably nothing to worry about though.
Mulder, Scully, and Skinner all on the phone, each in the bathtub.
Photo of a sign taped to a vending machine: “The light inside has broken but I still work”