“This…is Devlin St. John.”
Thursday, August 13th, 2026
Recently, comedian and TV host John Oliver has made guest appearances on two different soap operas. For his “Days of Our Lives” stint, he even brought his own wig, and it is magnificent:
[Photo credit: Days of Our Lives]
I like to think that if I were a celebrity, this is the kind of nonsense I’d get up to.
Ah well. The price was right.
Wednesday, August 12th, 2026
After running a 5K last week, I was pleased to receive an email letting me know I had complimentary race photos available. It read as follows:
You crushed it at the Shoreline 5K! Your complimentary photos from MarathonFoto are ready to download and share.
It was 85° and sunny at race time, and while I was happy to land in the top 100 out of 1500+ finishers, I most certainly did not “crush it”. I was more than two minutes slower than my personal best, and in such a short race, that’s a lot. Nevertheless, I’ll happily snag a few photos from the race. Free is a much better deal than usual.
When I clicked the email link to grab my pictures, I was taken to a gallery of 11 images. Did MarathonFoto provide a way to download all my photos at once? Don’t be ridiculous. Technology hasn’t advanced to the level where that sort of convenience would be possible. Maybe someday.
For now, I was able to click the “Free Download” button on each photo, which turned into “Download Now” on hover. Rather than actually downloading the image, that took me to a second page featuring just the photo in question. There, I could click a “Download” button which finally did download the photo. After that, I could click “Back to Gallery” to repeat the tedious process ten more times.
Anyhow, let’s have a look at what the course photographers captured. Here’s a pretty nice shot of, apparently, stranger-to-the-site Ramgopal V. :
It is not so hot of a photo of me, though. I’m the out of focus guy in the blue hat, someone you’d retouch right out of there if you were Ramgopal:
There we go. Now it’s a great shot of this man who is unknown to me. I hope he finds it and enjoys it.
What else have we got? Well, here I am, once again on the left and out of focus:
Folks, level with me. Am I just naturally blurry, like Bigfoot?
The lousy photos above do demonstrate something notable. While race photos formerly keyed solely off OCR with a runner’s bib number, that’s changed. I recall being confused the first time one of these systems presented me with a photo where my face was visible, but my bib was not. I quickly surmised, however, that they were employing facial recognition. The future can be a real creep show.
Facial recognition wasn’t needed for our final photo though, nor even any use. Please enjoy this winner:
I think I’ll print that out and get it framed.
Chill out, orcas.
Tuesday, August 11th, 2026
Humanity may deserve having killer whales sink our boats, but I don’t think sunfish deserve to be rammed so hard they explode.
He has no malice in his heart.
Friday, August 7th, 2026
I fear it’s been a bit of a negative week here on OFT, so let’s end it on a higher note. There’s good news, as all “Chuck Norris Facts” are now about this Chuck Norris. He is very clearly the superior specimen.
Christ, what assholes.
Wednesday, August 5th, 2026
Thanks to the New York Times for alerting me to something more odious than a yacht: a yacht with a snow room.
As the changing climate wreaks havoc on the four seasons, some people with means are fashioning their own. They are equipping their homes (and even their yachts) with indoor winter wonderlands, aided by companies like the Italian snowmaker TechnoAlpin, which blasts snow onto ski mountains, and an American company, the Spa Butler.
I’m sure these snow rooms are lovely places to relax and wait for the lower classes to come with the pitchforks.
The “terrible twos” are different now.
Tuesday, August 4th, 2026
Today, we have a terrible headline coming from Wildwood, New Jersey: “Two-year-old boy overdoses on cocaine on the Jersey Shore”. Fortunately, the child didn’t die. That’s good, but given that, the use of the word “overdose” there sort of implies there’s some quantity of cocaine that is the correct dose for a 2-year-old.
They did say it’s hard to see, not hard to hear.
Monday, August 3rd, 2026
HOW WOULD ANYONE EVER BE ABLE TO TELL THAT THIS DRONE IS THERE?1
Footnotes:
Be sure to have your speakers on when watching the linked video. That video is also archived here. ↩︎
In a modern takeover, the criminal is let in AND the owner is locked out.
Friday, July 31st, 2026
As a pilot, Ryan Pettit understands that having a single point of failure in an aircraft would be a very bad thing. Through hard experience, he’s now preaching the perils of a single point of failure in digital systems as well.
No aircraft I have ever flown is permitted a single point of failure: every critical system carries a backup, and often a backup for the backup, so that no single fault can bring the plane down. Redundancy is the first principle of any system that cannot be allowed to fail. And yet millions of people carry their entire financial and personal identity on exactly one such lock, and think nothing of it.
This is a horrifying read, one that has me reassessing my own digital security.
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