Reposted by Jonathan CroweSmooth Dunk @smoothdunk2.bsky.social · 20/09/2026when ai leaves u behind 74255179550
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 13/09/2026Got 14 of these emails yesterday, 12 on Friday, a handful before that, through both my personal and @maproomblog.com contact emails. The spam filter has done its work, but I’ve set my email to delete these unread. 011
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 10/09/2026In the latest newsletter, an update on the radon situation, the tension between vintage tech and perfectionism, where the Mandalorian movie falls short, and a whole pile of links that I have been accumulating over the summer. buttondown.com/jonathancrow...buttondown.com‘The beauty of life is found in all of these subtle imperfections’Radon mitigation worked much better than expected in the end. Because of our house’s rather particular construction (wood foundation, two levels of basement,... 010
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 18/08/2026Thirty hours after installation, the radon mitigation is working somewhat better than expected. 030
Reposted by Jonathan CroweErin Biba @erinbiba.bsky.social · 21/03/2026Once you know the formula for narrative non-fiction it’s hard to enjoy reading it tbh because it’s often just watching a story check off bullet points in a specific order. Some people are great at making it feel organic but many, many people are not. 1247771
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 01/08/2026I was all set to buy an ebook this week until I found enough OCR transcription errors in the *sample* that I decided it would be more prudent to track down a used paper copy at 2-3x the cost. (The book is 20 years old and appears otherwise out of print, or at least stock.) 010
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 23/07/2026I wrote a thing about AI and mapmaking. www.maproomblog.com/2026/07/gate... 0198
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 10/06/2026Musings on the relationship between asking questions online and AI chatbots, an update on what we’ve been dealing with, plus the usual panoply of links, in the latest issue of my newsletter: buttondown.com/jonathancrow... 020
Reposted by Jonathan CroweTerry Godier @terrygodier.com · 05/05/2026📢 New Essay: The Boring Internet The internet you grew up on isn’t dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. www.terrygodier.com/the-borin…terrygodier.comThe Boring InternetThe internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. A visual essay about what actually persists. 12258108
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 30/04/2026She wasn’t a baby when I got her on May 30, 1999, and she was small for her species, so her age is uncertain—best guess is 29 or 30, roughly twice what I’d reasonably expect from a corn snake. She outlived snakes considerably her junior, including every one of her cagemates. (2/2) 011
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 30/04/2026Pretzel, our corn snake, has passed. Not a surprise: she’d been declining and eating intermittently at best for the past year. She was our oldest snake, and my first after getting back into snake keeping as an adult. (1/2) 111
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 25/04/2026That is a very good location for you. Close to transit, only a couple of blocks from my old university (students = sf readers). Also not far from where a major indie bookstore used to be, so it feels right. 140
Reposted by Jonathan CroweBriardene Books @briardenebooks.bsky.social · 25/04/2026Paul Kincaid on Awards: ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2026/04/25/a... 073
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 21/04/2026The technical debt involved in maintaining too many devices and 30 years’ worth of user accounts, plus a review roundup, a bird update, and links. The latest newsletter is here: buttondown.com/jonathancrow... 010
Reposted by Jonathan CroweThe New Yorker @newyorker.com · 17/04/2026People are pining for old technologies—CD players, VCRs, Walkmans. What’s behind our longing for inconvenience? www.newyorker.com/culture/essa...newyorker.comOur Longing for InconveniencePeople are pining for old technologies—CD players, VCRs, Walkmans. What’s behind our longing for inconvenience? 529554109
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 18/04/2026Here’s my review of THE UNIVERSE BOX, the latest collection of short stories from Michael Swanwick. www.jonathancrowe.net/reviews/the-... 110
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 15/04/2026We were 20 km from the epicentre. The house got a solid minute of shaking and rattling. 000
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 14/04/2026If I learned the geological explanation, I've forgotten it. At any rate earthquakes aren't rare around here. We had a 5.1 that broke buildings a few years back. 110
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 14/04/2026Magnitude 3.9/4.0, but the epicentre was only 19-20 km NE of here. earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/... www.earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/recent/2026/... 100
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 14/04/2026Just went through a fairly serious earthquake here in Shawville QC. 220
Reposted by Jonathan CroweLibreture - your personal ebook & comic storage @libreture.com · 10/04/2026Despite Amazon's news, remember that your old Amazon Kindle is still perfectly good for reading ebooks! While the Send to Kindle feature will no longer work on these older devices, you can still transfer ebooks to them over USB. It's how I transfer my ebooks from Libreture to my old Sony Reader. 133
Reposted by Jonathan Crowekottke.org @kottke.org · 08/04/2026“I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession.” [gilest.org] 28824
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 06/04/2026I wonder if it’s how locals pronounce Ontario, California. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario... 110
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 05/04/2026A Star Trek gif for First Contact Day.media.tenor.coma man in a blue scrub top stands in front of a wall with three buttons on it that say ' power 'Alt: An animated GIF from the Star Trek episode “Spock’s Brain,” in which Dr. McCoy says “His brain is gone.” Apropos of no one in particular. 061
Reposted by Jonathan CroweLori Emerson @loriemerson.net · 25/03/2026OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚 562686776
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 20/03/2026A combination of mandatory voting and the preferential ballot makes base-turnout messaging unworkable. 000
Reposted by Jonathan CroweTexas Observer @texasobserver.org · 10/03/2026J. Frank Dobie himself occasionally found reason to look on rattlers with a more reflective eye: “I addressed him thus: ‘Fellow citizen … I prefer being in your company to being in that of the governor of the state of Texas.’”texasobserver.orgConsider the RattleIn a state that still hosts grisly “rattlesnake roundups,” human Texans should learn to see something of themselves in their ancient, slithering kin. 06717
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 06/03/20261. Canada leaning hard into our “we’re not Americans” schtick. 2. The replies from Americans to this post provide evidentiary support to this post. 100
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 01/03/2026This northern shrike has spent most of the afternoon hunting in our front yard. The finches and sparrows, usually plentiful, knew what was up and made themselves scarce. So far it’s caught a vole and left its half-eaten, disemboweled corpse outside our bedroom window. (Standard shrike behaviour.) 000
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 01/03/2026I am tremendously fond of this weird little book and you should grab it. (Rights are reverting to the Gorodischer estate; I’d be shocked if they didn’t put it back in print again at some point. Still.) 032
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 19/02/2026“A man in his sixties from Norfolk”—that sounds like the first line of a limerick. 011
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 18/02/2026In today’s newsletter: Is a slow performance of Schubert’s impromptus bad or merely wrong? And what do a John Wayne western and the Star Wars special editions have in common? buttondown.com/jonathancrow... 010
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 03/02/2026How words are sometimes hard (at least for me), how some resort to AI when they don’t want to do the art, and how a 65-year-old movie seems awfully pertinent all of a sudden. Plus links. All in my latest newsletter: buttondown.com/jonathancrow... 021
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 14/01/2026Seeing a lot more mourning doves this winter. At noon today we had more than a dozen of them on our driveway, front yard and street. 010
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 15/12/2025Subscribing to the newsletter means you won’t miss an issue: buttondown.com/jonathancrowe Here are the web archives, in case you did: buttondown.com/jonathancrow... There’s also an RSS feed: buttondown.com/jonathancrow... 000
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 15/12/2025Adventures in geriatric snake care, and confronting some assumptions common to many hobbies. Plus the usual collection of interesting links. All in my latest newsletter: buttondown.com/jonathancrow...buttondown.comA firehose of assumptionsPretzel, our oldest snake (and last remaining corn snake), is somehow still with us. This past summer she started refusing meals, which when a snake is at... 110
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 01/12/2025For me it’s been classical music concert livestreams. Watched too much of the Cliburn and Chopin competitions via livestream, and Wigmore Hall streams concerts free on YouTube. Also subscribed to DG's Stage+, which costs but there’s at least one concert/opera a week plus back catalogue. 020
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 18/11/2025Sites I’ve tried to visit so far that are affected by the Cloudflare outage: Bookshop, Daring Fireball, JetPens, Kottke, Lightspeed Magazine, MetaFilter, Reactor, Uncanny Magazine. 110
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 17/11/2025But if it’s just a matter of loosening up sticky keys, that’s a user-accessible repair. Involves swabbing the segment with isopropyl alcohol (or acetone for the hard cases). Plenty of how-to videos on YouTube (start with Joe Van Cleave, Phoenix Typewriter). (2/2) 110
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 17/11/2025I know a guy. He took a swing at some of our more difficult machines a few years ago. His listing isn’t up at the moment but we’ll see if he’s still in business. Stand by. (1/2) 110
Reposted by Jonathan CroweNaomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 15/11/2025Extract from my new book in the Guardian today! www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...theguardian.comDon’t argue with strangers… and 11 more rules to survive the information crisisFeeling overwhelmed by divisive opinions, endless rows and unreliable facts? Here’s how to weather the data storm 1219563
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 15/11/2025A blue jay foraging in the mess below the bird feeder. 041
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 29/10/2025Last year our cactus had a single flower. This year it has ... more. Spending the summer outside seems to have agreed with it. 130
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 20/10/2025This brings to five the number of frog species physically found on our property (American toads, gray treefrogs, spring peepers, green frogs and wood frogs; we’d only heard treefrogs in the area prior to this). 010
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 20/10/2025When it’s warm and wet, we get frogs—even in October. Yesterday we heard at least one spring peeper calling, and this morning we were surprised by this good-sized gray treefrog on our bedroom window. Not the greatest picture, but the best I could manage with my phone in the pre-dawn darkness. 120
Jonathan Crowe @jonathancrowe.net · 18/10/2025Most people who encounter an adult red-bellied snake think it’s a baby snake. No, that’s an adult; it’s just a really small species. THIS is a baby red-bellied snake: flic.kr/p/2rjBmTz (Photo: SBC Wildlife Photography)flic.krRed-bellied snakeThis minuscule snake is one of North Carolinas smallest snakes, and when newborn, is possibly the smallest of the bunch! This little guy was stuck on the road inside a tire mark. Lucky for him I spott... 0142