Jake Ponders 'n'at

Among the illustrations that caught my eye initially was this one, also appearing on lipatov's deviant art page, and dated as posted in 2009:

titled KIEV dieselpunk hovercraft.

Today I'm scrolling across deviant art and I see this:

on the page of BadJoselelereleAI, from 2026, also on deviant art. Posted on July 17th, 2026, with three variations in background ('cause "AI" art).

I said "Waaaaaait a minute, I recognize that image!" I had saved an (attributed, mind you) copy, compared the two, and then (re)found the artist's name; sure enough, the original is still on lipatov's deviant art page.

The backside of the storm system that pushed the wildfire smoke away from town. I'll enjoy the good AQI readings while they last.

Took a lot of photos, but these do a pretty good job.

Hilary Beaumont for The Guardian in conjunction with The Grist. The activists, who were focused on ExxonMobil and what the company knew of climate change, found themselves subject to hundreds of phishing e-mail attempts, some of which were successful. The hackers were apparently attempting to gain access to what the activists and the U.S. Justice Department were doing in litigation against ..."one of the world’s largest oil and gas corporations, with headquarters in Irving, Texas."

Details about who ordered the hacking operation have long been a mystery. But this spring, the extradition and arraignment of the Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit in a US federal court in New York sent shock waves through the American climate community. With Forlit now facing hacking and wire fraud charges, court documents allege the hack was ordered by a firm representing Exxon itself.

Serious: Emma Graham-Harrison has the story of Anna Liedtke, who is suing to have an investigation into her having been raped in an Israeli prison. Liedtke was on the aid flotilla to Gaza in October of 2025, and was taken, with 100 others, into custody in international waters.

The abuse and violence directed at flotilla participants in Israeli prisons, including rape, was intended to intimidate, Liedtke said. “It’s clear they want to break our will and silence us, making this so traumatic that we will never talk about Palestine again,” she told the Guardian. ...

By refusing to be shamed, Liedtke has transformed the attack into part of her activism, becoming a voice for those still in Israeli jails or who might be targeted in future. She said: “I don’t think [speaking out] will lead to the end of rape in detention. But as a political woman I feel a responsibility to talk about it and with that, fight against it.

And -- seriously?

Marina Dunbar writes of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's announcement that testosterone would be a "thing" in the U.S. military.

Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the Department of Defense will offer testosterone deficiency screening for soldiers 30 and older.

The US defense secretary unveiled plans for a new screening program for testosterone deficiency among troops that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels” to perform at their optimal conditions in a video posted to X.

“I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best,” Hegseth said in the video.

and as much as I like a Full Moon as much as the next lunatic, it's always the Waning Moon for me:

by Lucy Mangan

The [1970s] series was of course based on the books (and named after the third in the series, which was published in 1935 and hasn’t been out of print since) by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They in turn were an account, shaped for a young readership, of her childhood spent moving across the American West...

Now, as the US celebrates – or at least, given the current difficulties under which it labours, marks – its 250th birthday, the TV series has been rebooted. It has kept the original name, and in all other respects is exactly the same. ...

By which I mean: imagine Little House on the Prairie remade for a mainstream audience in 2026. It is exactly like that...

It is exactly the revamp you would expect. The new LHOTP is a precision-tooled and well-oiled machine. All children’s and most adult problems are solvable within a one-to-three episode arc. ... the vibe is the one we recognise: faith, hope and the American way will carry us cosily through. ... You may take that as a promise or a warning as you wish.

----------------

From: The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz:

"Our image of the self-reliant pioneer family has been bequeathed to us by the Little House on the Prairie...which almost every American has read or seen. What is less well known is that these stories, based on the memoirs of Laura Ingalls Wilder, were extensively revised by her daughter as an ideological attack on government programs. When Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, failed to establish a secure income as a freelance writer in the 1930s, she returned to her family home in the Ozarks. Here, historian Linda Kerber reports, "Lane announced that she would no longer write so that she would not have to pay taxes to a New Deal government." However, "she rewrote the rough drafts of her mother's memoirs...turning them into the Little House books in which the isolated family is pitted against the elements and makes it--or doesn't--with no help from the community."

10 years ago, on my second serious road trip, I was just east of Ashtabula, OH, and I took this photo:

and looking at it today, I thought "Hmm, it looks like it was abandoned even then." Turns out, it was, apparently, 'cause on the google you can see this:

where the site is under re-development as the Ashtabula Industrial Park:

I wonder what it looks like "IRL:" there's no telling when the satellite went over, or when the street view car drove by; coulda' been a couple years ago.

Yet another instance of my road-side photos becoming historical documents. What a strange realization.