About Wyrd Smythe
The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.
I’ve been dog-sitting Ms. Bentley Beans since last Saturday. She’ll be hanging out with me until at least the first of October. We’ve been enjoying the fall weather, though it has actually been slightly muggy for late September. Not like the swamp of late summer, but enough to soak my tee-shirt and make Bentley pant a little during our walks.
As usual, I take Bentley’s visits as my own vacation and spend most of the time hanging out with her and catching up on reading and TV.
Sadly, Friday Notes won’t write themselves, so while Bentley snoozes, I blog.
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12 Comments | tags: Ai Safety, autumnal equinox, Bentley, Digi-Comp I, hail, Mandelbrot, Microsoft Windows, Timex Sinclair 1000, Ultra Fractal, weather | posted in Friday Notes
Just for fun, here are a bunch of meme images I’ve made recently. Most of them were for the Notes section of Substack (its version of tweets). They’re all just my version of interesting memes I’ve seen or good lines that I thought deserved a nice image. Enjoy…
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Leave a comment | tags: Albert Einstein, DHMO, Heisenberg Uncertainty, memes, pi, speed of light | posted in Society, Writing
Every once in a while, it’s time to update my 960 Months image:
See Only 960 for an explanation.
Stay ticking, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.
∇
Leave a comment | tags: sun sign | posted in Life
As we slide into leafy glory of Midwestern fall — the Autumnal Equinox, my least favorite day of the year lurking dead ahead — thoughts turn nostalgic for the dying summer and by extension all those long-dead summers that tail behind.
The older we get, the longer our 4D tail back through the years to our first. As different as we become over time, there is a continuity that defines us.
This post, as did the last one, has notes from 40+ years ago — still a goodly fraction more than half my span (thus far), so these are definitely from my callow youth.
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Leave a comment | tags: old notes | posted in Life
It’s hard for me to believe 2025 is already sliding into fall. The leaves are starting to turn — the trees are ending their annual breath. Some geese are heading south — unmistakable signs that winter is coming. There’s been a chill in the air.
Another orbit around our star, another year torn from the calendar. For an old farts like me, it pulls my thoughts backwards through all those discarded calendar pages.
The usual stream of the new pushed aside a pair of ancient note piles (mid-sized spiral-bound notebooks, actually) that date back to college and high school. It’s time to let the new abide a bit and dig up these time capsules (so I can at long last throw away those agèd notebooks).
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1 Comment | tags: old notes | posted in Life
I’m beginning to think this Friday Notes series is a Sisyphean Mission. While I’ve managed to reduce the main pile of notes to almost nothing (or at least nothing I feel like writing about), there remain other piles.
Not to mention the way new notes constantly spring up like mushrooms in the shady damp part of the forest.
Fortunately, I enjoy writing these (in all honestly, because they’re easy to write). For a while, largely because of Substack, I thought they might end up being mostly what I posted here.
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6 Comments | tags: Dell Computers, disenvoweling, HP Computers, Kidde smoke alarms, Lenovo Computers, Leverage (TV series), Substack, weather | posted in Friday Notes
I have a great deal of respect for science fiction author William Gibson and what he contributed to the art but can’t honestly say I love his writing. Gibson and Bruce Sterling are widely viewed as the fathers of cyberpunk (hence the respect), but I find their writing sometimes opaque and challenging (though maybe that’s on me).
In recent years I’ve been revisiting both authors — rereading the few stories I have read and checking out many I never did. It hasn’t moved the needle that much for me, though. Still don’t find them highly engaging.
Which brings us to The Peripheral and its Amazon Prime adaptation.
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7 Comments | tags: adaptations, Amazon Prime, science fiction books, science fiction TV, William Gibson | posted in TV Tuesday
From this blog’s beginning in 2011 until the end of the 2019 season, I’ve written about the Minnesota Twins. But not so much since. One post in 2020, about the COVID-shortened season. One more in 2021, about how I seemed to have moved past baseball. That was pretty much it until this year.
A number of things changed this year, and for the first time since 2019, I’ve been watching Twins games.
Unfortunately, they aren’t having a good year.
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2 Comments | tags: Minnesota Twins, stats, Twins 2025 | posted in Baseball
The previous post, Our Memories, suggested that — in large part because they become faded self-imaginings— we might want to consider not clinging to our event memories as much as we sometimes do. We might want to focus on what we are more than where we’ve been.
Put it this way: What matters is what you are (and can do), not what facts or moments you can recall. Which is likely why I always resisted memorizing dates or formulas I can easily look up.
Which touches indirectly on a counterpoint to what I wrote yesterday…
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2 Comments | tags: cameras, memories, smartphones | posted in Brain Bubble
In another place, someone wrote: “It is memories that make us who we are, that haunt us, that enrich and warm us, that remind us of how to be better.” The place and the someone can be anonymous here because the sentiment is a common one.
In this Brain Bubble, I’d like to push back on that, at least a little. I want to suggest as counterbalance the one memorable line from an unmemorable film trilogy:
“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”
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1 Comment | tags: Kylo Ren, memories, the past | posted in Brain Bubble
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