A Heart Built of Error Messages

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Arthur J. Heller

I’ve been getting a lot of (unsolicited) advice lately about how I need to start embracing AI. I am informed that it can streamline my workflow, optimize my productivity, refine my emotional patterns, and, presumably, align my chakras via Bluetooth. The people telling me this (by which I mean “companies that make AI products”) all swear that handing over various aspects of my life to a swirling cloud of math is the secret to happiness… or at least to remembering where I left my sunglasses.

For my part, I have resisted.

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A Betrayal of Potatoes

Posted on November 29, 2025 by Arthur J. Heller

I would like to enjoy an occasional baked potato.

Not that I do enjoy them, I merely aspire to. Baked potatoes and I have a complicated relationship, the sort you’d file under “irreconcilable differences” in a divorce court. Everything about making one feels like a high-stakes investment: long cook times, blistering temperatures, and the looming possibility that the only two potatoes I’ve got left will betray me spectacularly. They say you can bake potatoes in a microwave, but I tried that once and what came out of the microwave was more “carbonized neutron star” than it was “potato”.

There might be another way to do it, though.

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Guns, Knives, Rhinoceros Intimacy, and Fairy Cake

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Arthur J. Heller

“I want to be intimately involved with a black rhinoceros.”

Remember that sentence. No, really… commit that sentence to memory. We’ll get back to it in a little bit.

Remember back in the early aughts, when the National Rifle Association — led at the time by the late, and ever affable, Charlton “Bright Eyes” Heston — was getting their plus fours collectively bunched up in response to a proposed mandatory background check and two-week waiting period required before purchasing a firearm? The proposed legislation — which I don’t think ever happened, or maybe happened and was later repealed — was being pushed by bits of the government largely in response to things like the Columbine tragedy and the Waco siege.

Back then, in those heady days past before Patrick Roy‘s retirement sent Colorado avalanching to Sucksville, the pro-gun/anti-legislation people were angry because they felt that a two-week waiting period was way too long to have to bide one’s time before getting a gun. They wanted to be able to walk straight into a store, pick out the four nickel that best accentuated their eyes, and walk out that very same day, whistling a merry tune. And don’t even get them started about the background checks. Background checks equated solely with breaking into your bedroom and rifling through your private drawers. How DARE they violate your extra special parts!

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Heartbreak is a Lasagna

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Arthur J. Heller

I don’t like Pyrex.

I’m not an real big fan of formal “cookware” in general, actually. I prefer those cheap, aluminum foil-based roasting pans you can get at the supermarket for like three bucks. They’re inexpensive, bend rather than break, you don’t have to clean them afterwards, and they have a low carbon footprint.

Wait, those things are recyclable, right?

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Traveling Cramps

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Arthur J. Heller

Traveling is awful.

Occasionally, like most modern humans*, I have to travel places for one reason or another. For the sake of convenience or necessity, this travel often takes the form of a commercial airline flight. In fact, I’m writing the draft of this on a 737 somewhere between Baltimore and San Francisco and, though I’d much rather drive (or fly) myself, my car is far too elderly for 3,000 miles in one shot, and I haven’t got a plane at my disposal, so a commercial flight is really the only way to go.

The only thing I can say about this is: good grief.

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Mysterious Guy Friend

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Arthur J. Heller

I just learned that Traci Nobles, an otherwise entirely unremarkable cheerleading coach from Georgia, has published an entire book based upon the fact that she received text messages from Anthony Weiner. I’m not kidding about that, either… an entire book has been contrived around a tweeted message of Anthony Weiner’s, er… Anthony. And this brings me to one conclusion:

I think that I need to get involved in a sex scandal.

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Suitable for Framing

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Arthur J. Heller

Something weird is happening in my photo collection, and I don’t think I’m the only one it’s happening to.

First, some background. I got my first digital camera in 2003. It was a bit out of date even for the time as it was all of 1.3 megapixels, and it didn’t even have a screen on it: you had to wait until you got home and copied the pictures onto your computer before you even knew what you took a picture of. Awful as it was, though, it got me in the habit of taking lots and lots of pictures of entirely paltry things and, before long, I’d established  a decently sized photo library.

Two years later, the march of progress (and the fact that I dropped my old camera in a lake) dictated that a new camera was in order, so I upgraded to one with 3 megapixels, almost twice what my original had. That camera tended to take much better images, and the increase in quality across my burgeoning photo library was hard to miss. In 2007, my camera technology updated once again, this time to 8.1 megapixels.

Then a curious thing happened.

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Cracking the 2012 Pot

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Arthur J. Heller

Harold Camping is a bit of a crackpot.

For those blissfully unaware (or outside of the United States, where people seem largely immune to this sort of ridiculosity), Harold Camping is an undead, five hundred-year-old Christian fundamentalist preacher who predicted that, on May 21, 2011, some two hundred million people would be “raptured” and rise, hilariously nude, to heaven while most of us would remain, clothed, on Earth to suffer God’s wrath and eventually die horrible (and presumably still clothed) deaths.

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The Starbucks Boycott

Posted on July 25, 2001 by Arthur J. Heller

Recently, people have been asking me why, specifically, I’ve been boycotting Starbucks for the past two years. I have insofar managed to not tell the story, on the grounds that it gets rather long and winding, is comprised of a nearly unbelievable series of events and, really, doesn’t have all that much to do with Starbucks. With the latest query to be delivered to me, though, I figured I’d set the record straight, or at least less crooked than it was, on my one remaining boycott.

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Slugfest

Posted on September 9, 2000 by Arthur J. Heller

I walked outside earlier and I saw a slug on the sidewalk. He had been there since the night before because I’d seen him then too… except that, rather than being the young, vibrant and healthy slug he had been then, he was now little more than an overcooked french fry.

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