The algorithm is showing me candy-making videos, and I have no idea why, but this is not a complaint. They are exceedingly cool. Each one starts with a full frontal shot of a hip northern European guy dispensing a giant cauldron of hot sugar syrup onto a table and announcing the candy of the day. Syrup gushes lavalike across the table, filling a flat rectangular frame, while the candy maker upends the cauldron and lets gravity work the last sticky strands loose. Once the syrup lies out on the table like a sweet, becalmed, half-inch-deep ocean, already crystallizing like ice-nine, the candy maker adds his flavors and colors. Red blue green yellow, they come in long-necked, alchemical-looking beakers, and when he pours then into the syrup they boil and bubble up, a witches’ brew. He stirs them in and smoothes them out with a small wooden spatula, each color in its own square. The ocean now resembles a painting by Mark Rothko. Then he takes his long, sharp, blue-handled shears and snap snap cuts up the painting and suddenly we are doing ceramics, pushing and smooshing, pulling and turning the rapidly cooling melt, hand molding the sugar clay into logs and rolls and slabs that get assembled in such an order to produce upon stretching into thin, stripey snakes whatever candy cross-sections the customer ordered up: ducks, suns, hearts, lemons, baby names, wedding welcomes. The finished candies are struck one by one off the ends of long, solidified bars with a tool you could use to spackle sheetrock. They pile up at the end of the production line like gemstones. The confectionary term is hard crack. I want one.

How to make sun candy, Rocks & Rolls Candy, Kapellestraat 21, 4524 CW Sluis, Netherlands.

“Something long range is taking place; in each individual — sometimes — behind the mask of this foolish person, this foolish lifetime, we see the Bodhisattva-figure who is both brilliance and compassion working for all beings. In all of us.”

— Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold, 1969

“Everyone babbles about God but I saw God this morning just as
The bus slowed down for the stop at Maple Street. God was six
Girls and one boy with a bright green and purple stegosaurus hat.”

— Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder, 2019

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness.”

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 1670

Thanks to Ellsworth Starring for gifting me a mysterious box of unidentified fossils that were in his basement for decades, many of which are from South Dakota (Pierre Shale, probably) and some of which may not be.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “I, Claudius, The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2026, page 61.

The writer goes to Anthropic and meets Claude. The chatbot is just about as weird as we are. A good read if you are trying to keep up: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude-anthropic-doesnt-know-either

Próspera, officially known as Próspera ZEDE, is a charter city on the island of Roatán, Honduras. It is one of three Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs) in the country, operating under a distinct fiscal, legal and regulatory framework that grants it autonomy from the national government. The project is led by Honduras Próspera Inc., which itself is funded by venture capitalists and has a veto vote in Próspera’s governing council. (from Wikipedia)

Prospera is a controversial, privately governed charter city and special economic zone on Roatán island, Honduras, backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists including Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan via Pronomos Capital. Aimed at creating a libertarian “startup city” with low taxes and autonomous regulations, it faces intense legal challenges from the Honduran government, which repealed the enabling law. (from Google AI Overview)

“Luxury accommodations, offices, and laboratories were planned for the ZEDE, but one of the selling points of living in Próspera was also that you didn’t have to live there — no more than Próspera’s investors lived in the Cayman Islands, where their fund was registered. Proponents of the start-up society insisted that the twenty-first century city was not made of concrete and glass so much as out of laws. … For what one scholar calls ‘roving capital,’ laws are selected and combined à la carte. The VC firm funding Próspera, for example, was registered in Wyoming. The business itself was registered in Delaware. These jurisdictions were portals to what Oliver Bullough calls Moneyland, where people can select whichever laws ‘are most suited to those wealthy enough to afford them at any moment in time.’ “

— Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and
the Dream of a World Without Democracy, pages 195-196

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Richmond Point, Riverside: baseline icicles February 25, 2026

Frost heaves, road salt + patterned ground: Burke Street area, Riverside.

One day, early in January, we drove over to Exeter to visit a grave: Mercy L. Brown, who became infamous after her death from tuberculosis in 1892. Neighbors suspected she was a vampire who was staying alive in her casket by sucking the blood of other family members. This was the theory. They dug her up to check, and because she wasn’t as decomposed as she should have been, they cut out her heart and burned it and fed the ashes to her sick brother. It did not help him. Mercy’s grave is in the cemetery behind Chestnut Hill Baptist Church on Route 102. You walk down a short dirt track, and it’s on the left under some sort of evergreen tree. Her stone is regularly decorated by visitors, just like Jim Morrison’s gravesite in Paris. We found it piled with dozens of pebbles, shells, and coins. The stone itself, a slab of slowly eroding limestone, is bolted into the ground with an iron collar, apparently to prevent anyone from stealing it. One imagines how that might happen. I left a penny. We stopped at the public library, which has a special box placed outside the front door for recycling flags. Then we had lunch down on Nooseneck Road at the Middle of Nowhere Diner, where the baked apples side dish is delicious and highly recommended.

“Already I was considered heterodox if not treasonable, and I was keenly alive to the danger of my position; nevertheless I could not at times refrain from bursting out into suspicious or half-seditious utterances, even among the highest Polygonal and Circular society. When, for example, the question arose about the treatment of those lunatics who said they they had received the power of seeing the insides of things, I would quote the saying of an ancient Circle, who declared that prophets and inspired people are always considered by the majority to be mad; and I could not help occasionally dropping such expressions as ‘the eye that discerns the interiors of all things,’ and ‘the all-seeing land’; once or twice I even let fall the forbidden terms ‘the Third and Fourth Dimensions.'”

— Edwin Abbot, Flatland, 1884