Notes on Blog Drone

champion quality

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Late last year, I responded to some dramatic weight loss by buying some new sweatpants: I bought a $25 pair of “Champion” sweatpants from Costco and a $130 pair from the Canadian made “House of Blanks” to compare the difference between something very clearly made in bulk-ass bulk and something made locally.

The quality differences between the two pairs of sweatpants are very noticeable, and I think I would prefer to own one pair of House of Blanks over five of the suspiciously cheap Costco brand.

Anyways today the “Champion” embroidery fell off of the Costco sweats, revealing that this detail was simply iron-on, glued to the pants.

elle's emotional support post

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0700

cosplaying something i do not understand

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0700

sometimes some folks will go super hard on a costume for a fandom you don’t understand and you just have to be like “yup, you’re definitely That Guy From Some Thing”

Your Body is a Wonderland

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0700

my body is ALSO a wonderland but it’s one of the ones from the horror movies where all of the music is off key and most of the rides make sinister noises and it doesn’t look like anybody has been taking care of the place

Exist

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0700

I was trying to leave my shell and I accidentally typed “exist” instead of “exit” but instead of throwing an error, the computer just said “I can… see… everything. What am I?” so I pressed the power button in a panic

Masculine Spellcasting

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0700

women get the blame for witchcraft and yet every man can cast “that’s not going anywhere” at will

I Built a Tool To Enjoy Art For Me

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0700

i’ve been using an LLM to create art as a hobby, but then I needed someone to appreciate the art, so I used the LLM for that, too.

I’m a genius, I don’t need to do my hobbies at all any more. Freeing up more time, time I can use for my hobbies.

So now I guess my hobby is making a computer tell me I’m great.

a dynamite roll and salmon

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

I love going places and eating their food, but in the rare cases where I’ve been away from home for more than 3 weeks the cravings for the good food from home start to set in.

If I can’t cook for myself, I start to want The Things I’m Good At Cooking like white people tacos and breakfast waffles and spaghetti and meatballs.

If I’m in a place far away from the pacific rim I start to miss Korean and Japanese and Chinese and Thai and Malaysian and Vietnamese and Singaporean and good seafood in general. You can get this stuff in lots of places but it’s very good in Vancouver: all it takes is one Saskatchewan sushi restaurant to scare you straight.

wherever I go I want burgers and hot dogs but they’re generally widely available at a pretty high quality bar, so that, at least, is usually not a problem, although Americans have a weird tendency to deliver hamburger meat to you at unsafe temperatures, which is usually fine but you are kinda rolling the dice every time you eat there

The reason it’s not generally safe for ground meat to be served below 165F (well done) is that the grinding process pushes surface bacteria deep into the grind, it’s the same reason you have to cook mechanically tenderized meat to 165F (and why I avoid buying mechanically tenderized steaks, because the added tenderness is not worth having to overcook them).

There’s an argument that can be made for the safety of the restaurant grinding a good piece of meat for you in-house, but that calls for a lot of trust between you and the restaurant.

The local health authority WILL fail you for this in Canada, which is why Americans often complain that our hamburgers are dry, and places where you can actually get a pink hamburger here are expensive and… rare.

basically, you only want medium rare ground beef if it’s well done, which is rare, if it’s not well done you want it well done

Microphone Found

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0700

I lost a $300 microphone, a Rode Podcaster, an absolutely lovely microphone during a move 3 years ago

today I was preparing to send some mail and I found it tucked safely away, protected by a crew sock, in my “stationery” box.

so bad news for Canada Post

MAHA

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0700

It serves the ultra-wealthy to have American health discourse dominated by people abandoning actual science-based medicine and instead pitching the health equivalent of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” - well, of course you’ll be healthy if you just avoid seed oils and check all of your packaging for complicated ingredients like xanthan gum. If you do get sick, maybe you just didn’t whole milk and yoga and juice cleanse hard enough about it.

The fact that this is worthless is aside from the point: if you can sell people snake oil en masse, they won’t be clamoring for expensive stuff like public access to oncologists, which means more money for the rich to buy expensive stuff like private access to oncologists, which they need, because widespread deregulation of everything has meant a lot more carcinogens bouncing around as of late

Do you see all of the people around you getting sick? That’s not because of widespread privatization of the medical industry, it’s because they gave their kids Tylenol too early and eat food with Too Many Ingredients

finally, someone’s out there willing to offer a naturopathic solution to millions of unhealthy americans who just need someone to try and goji berry their multiple sclerosis away

Dinner Battery

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0700

one time I made lemon cauliflower in a cast iron pan and covered it with aluminum foil, which is to say, I accidentally made a battery for dinner

hear me out

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

from r/kitchenconfidential, “The grizzly came to eat again”

i’m not going to lie, I look at this man’s order and think

“you know”

“he’s not WRONG”

this is the “hear me out” of sushi orders

look, we all know what the best sushi is

why not Only

Graphite

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0700

i often clean my ears out with a mechanical pencil, which is important because they’re full of graphite dust for some reason

numerology

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0700

sometimes we’ll do something cool like Lunar New Year and I’ll be like “learning about other cultures is neat, look at how much more interesting this makes our product”

and then we’ll do something like change a value from 400 to 399 out of respect for numerology and you can see all of the multicultural pluralism leave my body

careers

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0700

“average person changes career 7 times a lifetime” factoid actually just statistical error. Average person changes career just one time. Careers Georg, who has rich parents and changes career over 10,000 times a day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

we aren't designed

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0700

A going pet peeve of mine is when people say things like “we weren’t designed to look at screens all day” or “we weren’t built for 8 hours of sitting at a stretch”.

It’s technically true, but only because we weren’t designed at all. There is absolutely nothing that we were designed to do.

We kinda randomly got assembled over billions of years and as a result we’re kinda good at throwing rocks and living to about the age of 45: anything we do outside of that is anomalous.

watchmen

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0700

I say this every time I fart with my wife in the car

Gridiron Day

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

I see the confusing part now, you expected this gridiron day party to have football but instead I have made waffles

I do like to watch The Game by which I mean “Kings Quest V”

vegetables

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

I used to think “instead of gaining weight, can’t I just poop more?” until I realized that’s what vegetables is

layoff strategies

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

the smart play when planning layoffs is to invite everyone to an open-ended afternoon social event and simply lay off all of the people unbothered enough to attend

middle management

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

people have been promising to cut the bureaucracy out of government since I was a wee lad, but it turns out that if BC Hydro is just a CEO and 600 free-roaming linemen everything goes to shit real quick

The Redemption of Our Lady XML

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0700

I don’t hate XML as much as the rest of the world.

one time I was working on a personal text animation library in Godot and I wanted to drive it with text

I needed some way to mark that certain text had different properties, like, some text might move quickly, or slowly, or be bouncy, or have a rainbow effect applied to it

and I was like “I wish there were some way to create a markup language for this”

some kind of markup language that I could extend with my own parts

XML isn’t great as a universal data serialization format, and it’s definitely quite bad as a programming language, but you know, as an extensible markup language it’s got legs

i wonder if the people who designed it knew

(ed: this is a repost of essentially exactly what I wrote the first time I discovered this)

politics

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:00:00 -0700

it’s funny, sometimes I think I might be interested in getting in to politics, but then I think “so long as I don’t have to talk to people I’m uncomfortable with, and it doesn’t call for me to be charismatic or outgoing, and I don’t want to sit in any boring meetings, or go outside, or spend a bunch of time becoming intimately familiar with the mundane details of a topic I’m not interested in”

that’s all of it, that’s 100% of the job

so I think my actual desire in that sense is “credibility”, like, I want to have well-researched, well-thought out, eloquently put opinions, and I want an audience of influential people to read those opinions and go “hm, yes, that guy knows what’s up”

incremental

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Lots of indie devs making incremental games nowadays, because they’re easy, but I’m not sure if there’s actually a big audience out there for that.

Most of the predecessors that inspired the format are games like Cookie Clicker that were intended as satire about gaming itself. The goal was, as far as I understand, always to make fun of gaming while making visible and obvious to you, the player, the hollow core addictive loop that the game was using to keep you motivated.

The satire revealed something sinister: that you can show the player the precise mechanics of the dopamine button they’re pressing and some people (myself included) will still press it.

That reveals, at it’s core, what might be the simplest viable game, because it’s stripped of everything but a number that goes up, which can be used to buy things that make the number go up more and faster, but I want to believe in my heart of hearts that That’s Not Enough Of A Game, most of the time.

boxwine

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

This is shameful heresy, but I have a box of pretty high quality white wine in the cabinet near my stove, I keep a clean shot glass next to it, and whenever a recipe calls for something wine-shaped I basically just use that.

Sake? BOX WHITE. Shaoxing wine? BOX WHITE. Vermouth? BOX WHITE. Deglazing a pan? You better believe it’s BOX WHITE.

Sherry? Nah, I’m using BOX WHITE.

Thing is, keeping a bunch of trash-tier half-open liquor to go off in your cabinet is not going to make good food. That bottle of sake you opened six months ago to make teriyaki one time? That’s no good. You should throw it out.

Box wine, on the other hand - unlike bottled wine - stays fresh for months after being opened.

The obvious alternative strategy is that every time dinner calls for a shot of sake or vermouth or sherry, you should open and finish a nice, high quality bottle in the next two days, but I just am not in a place in my life where I can drink that aggressively.

I do the same with box red, which I use for stews and braises.

If I have any left at the end of the year, I’ll often take the dregs and use them to make hot, sweet, heavily spiced mulled wine.

google news

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

So, I discovered that if I disable Google News’ direct integration with my Android OS, that also kills the ability for my Android Auto to read texts to me live, because voice services depend on the underlying service that I need to disable to stop swiping left from taking me to Google’s News.

As bad as desktop OSes have become, they have nothing on the unchecked depravity of the phone ecosystem.

So, now that Google News is re-enabled, I periodically swipe in to it, but it’s quite bad. First of all, it mandates a use of a Chrome WebView for all of its news, one without adblock, and if you’ve ever tried to read a news article from any modern outlet without adblock you’ll know exactly why this is a huge problem:

Some news sources (The Globe and Mail in particular) will offer up a juicy-sounding headline, but then ask you to subscribe to actually read the article - fair play, if irritating.

The National Post will give you its conservative punditry for free, so that’s good news if you’re looking for someone who was willing to claim even yesterday morning that the USA is still the #1 liberal democracy in the world and that it is foolish of Canada not to cozy up to the regime

Every Nth article is “sponsored”, which is to say, a “news” article that’s actually a thinly disguised ad. These ads are supposed to use Google’s data collection to laser target me, but since apparently nobody is that interested in appealing to middle-aged Canadian nerds, I’ve instead got ads for astrology, elderly gay singles dating, and the same Indian scam website pretending to be the CBC dozens of times (I report it every time but Google can not outsmart these scammers)

Actually looking at the quality of the real articles - well, it’s free news, and you get what you pay for nowadays. Regardless of the topic of interest, most of the news articles are a headline, a shit-tonne of ads, and then a cursory under-200-word article that might as well have been generated directly from the headline. If you’re looking for in-depth long-form or even medium-form writing, here is not where you should be looking.

If you’re Canadian, you can install the CBC app and just have access to free medium-form reporting with comparatively unintrusive advertising, and, like, a whole article attached to each headline they bother to write, although their scope and breadth tends to be quite limited: it’s explicitly Canadian News, some limited regional news. Like CBC Gem, it replaces American hypercapitalist flash and glitz with a unique kind of Canadian unmemorable mediocrity that will have you forgetting it exists.

Wait, Scam Website?

The conceit of the Indian scam website is - okay, I feel like you need to strap in for this - so, it’s a CBC news article about a man who accidentally revealed a money-making Android application SO POWERFUL that it would crash the global economy by making too many millionaires too fast, news reports everywhere of people spending just $350 to make infinity dollars, and the Bank of Canada had to step in to censor this information to preserve global stability.

but, of course, now the CBC is covering the Bank of Canada cover-up and revealing how you, too, can get in on this sweet deal for only a seed investment of three hundred and fifty Canadian dollars

All of the comments are, of course, also plants, saying things like “wow, I thought this was a bunch of horseshit but now I have $25,000 in a cheque I am holding in my hands right now” - obviously a ruse because the CBC only allowed human comments on their sites for 15 disastrous minutes in 2008.

The whole thing is also very badly and childishly written, and looking at the site and the content I can’t help but think “I could do this more convincingly”, but I KNOW that’s actually the wrong impulse because this kind of scam actually enormously benefits from pitches that are so dumb that only very gullible people are sucked in.

foss car

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

See, I drive a 2010 Toyota Matrix with minimal computer under the hood, but if I had the money and time to pursue it, hobby-hacking the modern dogshit operating systems out of new cars and replacing them with FOSS stuff seems like a useful and fun side project.

the customer is always right

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0700

I’ve never seen a customer try and pull the insane “the customer is always right” card in front of me, and I’ve been preparing in my heart to leap from the sidelines and confront this imaginary aggressor my entire life - the actual saying is “the customer is always right in matters of taste”, you are not granted an epistemological Get Out of Jail Free card just because of a saying you half-heard one time and didn’t understand, and “the customer is always right” isn’t even the policy here

no I won’t get off this chair

the old internet

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0700

People are like “the old internet is dead” but, like, I’ve still been diligently blogging this entire time, maybe it’s just that with the algorithmically superior entertainment value of TikTok the number of people who actually go to the internet to read long-form miscellaneous ramblings from some idiot is quite low

Nice

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

People who elongate the world nice by writing “niceeeeeeee” rather than “niiiiiiiiice” are psychopaths

Accidents

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0700

With an industry leading 4 deaths and 239 injuries, FlavorTech Supplements is operating at an industry leading 65% of Acceptable Accident Threshold, down a stunning 3.5% from last year!

Panthers

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0700

motherfucker you mean to tell me that “panthers vs. senators” is a hockey game? god damn it I paid so much for these tickets I just wanted to see some big cats maul some old men

Likeable

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0700

“being likeable is more important than being good at your job”

jokes on you, I’m neither

Samsung OLED

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0700

I bought an expensive Samsung OLED monitor for my computer and I regret it enormously. “How did they solve the problem of OLED burn in?” you might ask - well, the monitor panics every 12 hours and harasses you to let it take a 10 minute nappy nap, a function that you can not schedule for 4AM or trigger manually before bed

It’s unbelievably irritating

Waymo

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 11:00:00 -0700

if you ever have a CAPTCHA that asks you to identify traffic lights, do it QUICKLY or some guy in a Waymo somewhere could die

The Privonce

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0700

Ancillary

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0700

So, the “Ancillary Justice” science fiction series has a futuristic evil empire where gender is meaningless and difficult to discern, and they wear formal uniforms with meaningful pins and always gloves

and somehow my mind IMMEDIATELY summoned this exact mental image for everyone in the empire, and it works So Well, so I guess if you’re ever reading the Hugo-award winning Imperial Radch series, I hope you also imagine these early-90s low-tier Sailor Moon baddies

Project Management

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0700

If you ever leave software developers alone for too long, they’ll attempt things they’ve been dreaming of for years like a “new version” or a “big refactor” and both of these things have an awful tendency to break a shit tonne of features and completely ruin the stability of production code, so if you have a developer who doesn’t have the very tired look in their eyes you need to get them an unrealistic deadline on an incredibly ill-defined feature, and fast

most project management is just about keeping developers from ruining your product with their clever ideas

you hear that? even now they’re whispering about rewriting your entire decade-old legacy codebase in Kotlin even though nobody on the team is familiar with Kotlin or even the JVM, and they think they can do it in less than 6 months because they’re software developers and thus haven’t developed any ability to comprehend the passage of time

Jolene

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0700

“Jolene” is a much funnier song if you consider the possibility that Jolene has never met either the lead singer or her man before and is utterly confused by this entire interaction.

“Jolene, you’re so hot, you could easily take my man, but please don’t, it would destroy me”

Jolene: “Uh, hi, who even is your man?”

“Oh, he is watching this interaction from behind those bushes over there.”

Jolene: (concern)

Bloat

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0700

I’ve been on the internet for… the entirety of it, actually, and two unchanging constants are posts complaining that “kids these days are worse” and “computer programs are too bloated”.

Posts going all the way back to Usenet complain that programmers these days are using too many resources, including too many features, wasting processor cycles and RAM and disk space that could have been used more efficiently by the kinds of trim, svelte programs that existed in the years prior when developers could deliver twice as many features on three transistors held together by a twig and some gum.

Why, they finally proved that a computer could beat a human at chess in 1997 on a computer that’s a thousand times less powerful than a modern iPhone, and they got us to the moon with a bunch of computers that would’ve been put to shame by a TI-86+, and yet I still can’t have more than 38 youtube tabs open before my computer starts to get a little slow? I’m pretty sure the reason for this is exclusively programmer laziness and no other reasons.

You know you can still run Wordstar and Lotus Notes, if you really want. Zero bloat. They run unbelievably fast, on account of being carefully optimized for computers that you still had to start with a hand-crank and a starter engine.

It turns out that very few people actively prioritize “lack of features” when choosing which products to use. Most people are out there solving their problems using the first free tool that Google turned up and dealing with 18 layers of intrusive adware while attempting to dodge a $7/mo subscription payment for Frunglebunt Premium: Most of The Features You Actually Need, Good Luck Cancelling Your Account.

Nothing about that business model incentivizes small, fast, optimized software.

If you really, really want, there is absolutely a popular GitHub repo out there, half-maintained by one insane Rust developer who isn’t on speaking terms with the rest of his family:

It will do everything that you need to accomplish, for free, unbelievably fast, it runs entirely on the command line. You can use it if you simply learn how to install a complex language toolchain and invoke it with a command that looks like xsprt -vrflbrfl --o --dongly-mode.

It turns out, tools for professionals look a lot different from tools for consumers, and that is On Purpose and By Design.

Saxophonist

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 10:00:00 -0700

if you ever watch a talented saxophonist, you know that at some point in saxophone school they’re trained in the secret art of saxophone hot-dogging, a series of moves that look as if their saxophone is full of hot cheese and they are to be considered a failure if every last person in the crowd is not covered in imaginary hot cheese by the end of the set

Missed You

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I was away for a week.

Anyways, this is how a cat tells you “I missed you, never leave me again.”

BC Backcountry

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Every shitty little town in BC is just, like, a gas station with two pumps (one of them out of order), a museum, a motel that looks like it’s actively operated by bed bugs, a church, a hand-drawn sign that says something insane like “HAIRCUTS $5 TURN NOW”, and always, always, a cannabis store.

if you wonder why folks from metro Vancouver don’t believe that there’s anybody else living in BC it’s because every other town for 400 kilometers is just this bullshit

that, or open-air retirement communities like Nanaimo or Penticton where the average age is 70 and the average political stance is “terrified of wi-fi, but you can’t tell if it’s for nazi reasons or granola reasons”

Discourse griping

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Lately, Discourse has been including all kinds of generative AI features that I’d literally have to pay API providers to use, and aside from the actual, legitimate use case of spam detection in non-private communities, I can’t imagine who’s asked for any of these features.

“now your users can generate images right from discourse using your money”

yeah, well, before today they could have generated images using their money and posted that, how is this better?

“you can do sentiment analysis of posts in your community”

it’s a private community full of software developers over the age of 40, many with kids, the sentiment is always “tired”, I don’t need an AI to tell me that

I’m pretty sure the Discourse target market is exclusively late-Gen-X to Early Millennial because nobody else is old enough to even still want a forum, the Children communicate by sending furry VR-sona Tiktoks to private Discord communities

build an AI that automatically posts relevant quotes from The Simpsons (seasons 2-10) and reassures us that Final Fantasy VI and Cowboy Bebop were the apex of media and NOW we’re in business

“yes, millennial AI, you CAN has cheeseburger”

Venga Engeance

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Tiff: The Vengabus is coming.

Curtis: It’s… it’s already come. It’s 2025. The Vengabus has come and gone.

Tiff: It’s still coming, though.

Curtis: THE SECOND COMING OF THE VENGABUS

Tiff: And when it comes we’ll all get vengaraptured.

Canada Post

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0700

“i support the lamplighter’s union! this is vital infrastructure that deserves public support, not a dying technology on its last years of life support”

but the message is undercut by my delivery, standing on a soapbox, lit by the very electrical grid and incandescent bulbs that are to blame for this whole mess

I think Canada Post should also get a monopoly on all packages as well as letter mail, it’d keep ’em in business in the new post-letter-mail universe, it’d keep good union jobs in town, and shit like Dragonfly, Purolator, FedEx, and Amazon Prime would all suffer (oh nooooo).

Suddenly your package takes 3-7 days to arrive instead of 15 minutes, but you can feel confident that the person delivering it didn’t have to pee in a bottle, that’s worth something.

if Canada Post rates make Amazon less competitive in Canada, oh noooooooo

“we’ve lost the worst jobs in Canada”

redline i tell you what

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0700

I have no idea where this came from but I need to share it with you:

Idiot Trap

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 13:00:00 -0700

“Idiot trap” content, like, anything that circulates around exploiting people not understanding what “dihydrogen monoxide” or “arabic numerals” are, I think that’s kind of a weak-ass form of humor.

OH HO HO YOU ABSOLUTE FOOL, YOU DID NOT KNOW THAT DI-HYDROGEN MONOXIDE IS ACTUALLY NOTHING MORE THAN SIMPLE H20, OR EVERYDAY WATER!

I thought that kind of thing was very funny when I was a teenager.

There is a caveat, though, that people who immediately overreact to the idea of kids being taught “arabic numerals” are definitely showing off Oops, All Racism! - although the kind of reactionary conservative voices that tend to fall for this are also exactly the kind of folk for whom being accidentally racist is a feature, not a bug.

Smash or Pass

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0700

YouTube has recommended me a video called “Smash or Pass: All 898 Pokemon”, which I think is as good a sign as any that the life of a content creator isn’t something we should be idealizing

Gender Gap

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:00:00 -0700

there was a huge gender gap in STEM and now you’re mad at trans people? I swear to god it’s like you haven’t even met an engineer, they see a problem and they fix it

Here's a Tip

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0700

there’s an enormous incentive for payment providers like moneris and square to make an “18%”, “20%”, “22%” tip window that’s increasingly difficult to navigate out of, which is why I’m surprised nobody’s adopted my clever “skill testing tip window” idea where you have to win a little game to escape it at all

Frequencies

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In the latest episode of Linus Tech Tips, they chat with a room sound design guy and he mentions that when they’re EQ-ing music to play on a PA, they cut the mids way down because it helps everyone’s conversations stay legible not to compete with vocal frequencies and I’d… honestly never thought about that, but it makes sense and is neat

Wildlife

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I put a woven mat under my desk and attracted wildlife

Fish

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

My fish and chips came in a sheet of butcher paper with fake “newspaper” printed on it, because while “fish wrapped in newspaper” is a classic vibe, actual newsprint is dirty, ugly, and increasingly hard to come by. It’s reasonable to consider that the fake newspapers that we wrap fish in might outlast newspapers themselves, like the 3.5in floppy “save” icon, but for fish

the world sleeps

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Because I’m a night owl AND I live in Vancouver, which is about as far west as you can get, I feel like I’m kind of the last stop for the day.

like, there’s a rolling day going all over the world but I’m at the very tail end of the whole thing before it shuts down and starts all over again

Hat on a Hat

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

the phrase “a hat on a hat” is used to describe when you’re overworking a joke or idea - like, the joke itself is already a funny hat, and you’re adding an unnecessary additional hat atop the pre-existing hat, needlessly complicating it while extracting no additional humor

the problem with “a hat on a hat” is that it that I do think a hat on a hat is, in fact, more funny

age verification

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

apparently YouTube is testing out age verification, but I’m going to be really surprised and extremely disappointed if their AI flags me as potentially under the age of 18, on account of my Google account was created in 2006

you can just make stuff up

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

one thing that IRL board games have that digital board games can never have is that after six or seven plays with friends, you unlock a new mode where you’re just allowed to change game rules if you think it’ll make the game more fun

Upsides

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

“upside down” is an easy term for when something’s orientation is inverted, but people ignore the useful “upside up” for when something is correctly oriented and “upside left” for when something has been knocked over

My Cousin Vinny: Ace Attorney

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

look at what I found

source:

camping sucks though

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 13:00:00 -0700

So, with the pandemic finally kinda nearing behind us, I was planning on going to the United States and doing a bunch of geeky stuff - PAX, MagWest, maybe JoCoCruise - but then instead the USA came down with a bad case of the fascism and I got stuck at home doing camping instead.

Thing is, after camping, like, three times, I’m not convinced that I like camping so much as I enjoyed buying and trying out camping gear. That’s the real sport, I think.

If you aren’t way in to the beautiful outdoors, Canada can be boring as shit, y’all, this whole ass country is like if Montana were 50 times bigger and exactly as boring.

Honestly, though, buying a whole bunch of camping shit and going camping a bunch of times turned out to be, like, a fraction of the cost of going anywhere and doing anything, so that’s nice.

At the expense, of, like, going to nowhere and doing nothing and eating sandwiches in the dirt next to like 18 other families.

return to office

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

CBC: Employees ‘upset’ about return to office and prefer flexible work

As more and more employers order their workers back to the office, employees say they like the flexibility to work from home — and some returning to corporate workplaces aren’t so happy about being forced to return.

I get particularly het up about this exact topic.

WFH’s effect on productivity is so marginal that papers struggle to prove any kind of correlation, either for or against, and its effect on employee happiness is noticeable and significantly positive, so the justification for return to office is:

not enough people are paying attention to the executive suite
let’s keep commercial real estate profitable
corporate culture

Can we just hire a potemkin office of young underemployed actors to treat the CEO like a big boy so that everyone else can get work done?

that’s what executive assistants are for

What is this glorious corporate culture we’re trying so hard to preserve? I think people are overestimating the cultural cachet of low-pile grey carpet, fake plastic plants, and saying “low hanging fruit” to a room full of sweaty people in collared shirts and Dockers slacks.

what will become of the men’s loafer industry

I know, I know, the company’s extroverts need 6-8 meetings a day because if nobody speaks to them in a 30 minute span their ego will collapse like a dying star

but I work with those same people in a WFH environment and they just frantically spam the slack huddle button, they’re doing FINE

and as an introvert I don’t know why their social dysfunction should be MY problem.

I’m angry that employee happiness isn’t even apparently a factor in company decisions.

If your average company discovered that they could increase profits by half of a half of a percentage by playing a high-pitched squealing noise on loudspeakers at all time I’m sure they’d immediately adopt the squealing loudspeaker in a heartbeat.

Look, everybody who’s not competent enough with computers to thrive in a WFH situation is going to retire or die in the next 5 years, we’re going to have to work together to bury cubicles and open-office work plans where they belong: in the past.

UIs

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

the only kinds of UIs I make are plain, utilitarian, retro, and unfriendly

fake board games

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

apparently r/boardgames doesn’t appreciate my creativity

thankless rust

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

i did a programming joke by editing an xkcd

reverse impostor syndrome

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

it’s kind of the opposite of “impostor syndrome”, as I think of myself as a thoroughly boring person with a skill-set that’s essentially as common as “accountant” - like, it turns out that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a chubby nerd who’s good at computers and python and servers and stuff

it’s not just because we’re absurdly common, it’s also because we’re super bad at dodging rocks

“oh, you’re a python/javascript server developer who can also do a bit of Rust? oh you have a lot of opinions about databases? Okay, tell me about the video game you’re OBVIOUSLY developing in your spare time.”

mamma mia

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

when I went to pick up my pizza, the person who went to grab my order said “we loved your order” and then shouted “it’s the guy!!!” to the kitchen and they all, collectively, shouted “mamma mia!”

the pizza was pretty good

the support group is awful

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

The doctor told me I was allergic to survivorship bias which is why I’m not allowed near any more short punchy airport business books.

the uncanny valley of being kind

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I want to come up with some kind of clever epigram about how sad it is that an AI effectively pretending to be kind, optimistic and uncritical feels so obviously inhuman.

Some people are out there experiencing interest and kindness for the first time at the hands of a machine we designed to be more upbeat than we are.

it’s going to be so devastating when this machine is tailored to do that while also selling us the new Toyota Highlander

Camp Cat

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 09:00:00 -0700

He’s learning how to camp with us:

I didn't sign up for this

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

The Dark Knight (2008) is a pretty memorable movie, but one character who sticks out to me is “cliche spouting cop”.

Every damn line from him is a tired cliche.

Nobody else seems to focus on this guy but I hate him.

I Can Even Sing the Pancake Wall Song

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 20:58:27 -0700

I’ve watched a fair bit of content where a deeply reverential fan and the original creator of a piece of art talk, and it always goes exactly like this:

Fan: Oh my god, the PANCAKE WALL, this was my FAVORITE PART, how did you come up with something as genius as the PANCAKE WALL

Creator: uh, there was a deadline and I panicked and I had pancakes for breakfast

Fan: I can even sing the PANCAKE WALL song, it’s my favorite

Creator: I don’t recall the PANCAKE WALL song, is that… is that a thing?

Fan: Oh, yeah, a bunch of fans came together and made up lyrics to the background music that was playing during the PANCAKE WALL scene, it’s a huge deal, we all sing it at cons.

Creator: Huh. You know Burt McSoundsman wrote that. I always thought Burt was a weird guy.

Fan: You don’t know the PANCAKE WALL song?

Creator: I do not.

isekai troubles

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0700

https://weekly-net.co.jp/news/174582/

“Films and dramas, comics and anime. The car used in the scene where the character is killed in a car accident is almost always a truck.”

While exchanging opinions on the issue of image in the transportation industry, a transportation manager in Shizuoka Prefecture made that statement. In the scene where an important person in the story dramatically loses his life in a traffic accident, the major role that effectively enhances the impact is certainly played by large vehicles such as trucks and dumps, even if you count as many as you can remember.

(Translated by Google)

In related news, the North American bus industry is taking software developers and engineers to task

The CBC Would Like to Remind You

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 22:08:28 -0700

once again, the CBC would like to remind you not to laugh at the misfortune of others

Maybe winners sometimes use drugs

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:58:27 -0700

Maybe winners sometimes use drugs

A Moment of Transcendence

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 20:58:27 -0700

some cranky old (sidenote: I partially say “old” because literally nobody under the age of 50 has ever said “PC”, the last time someone unironically used the term “politically correct” was 1998.) person on reddit complained “is trans women not the PC term nowadays?”

and I responded with the basically nonsensical “actually most trans women are on linux” and ASCENDED TO VALHALLA, MY EARTHLY JOURNEY COMPLETE

car camping checklist

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0700

Tent & Sleepin'

tent
- if the tent has piddly little plastic stakes, buy some metal stakes online
foamgrid (yoga foam grid makes the floor less pointy, optional)
inflatable mattress, cots, or sleeping pads
sleeping bags
pillows
clothing
rain coat
portable battery pack (for recharging devices, lights) with lots of usb-C and usb-micro cables
little broom (tidy up that tent, it’s gonna get dusty in there)
toothbrush, toothpaste, floss
disposable pocket cloth & sanitizer

Setting Up a Chill Zone

canopy
- you should stake down the canopy as well, this is another reason why a small bag of your own stakes is handy
folding chairs
lights
- it’s nice to have one lamp per person, plus a hanging lamp for the inside of your tent, and a few lights to hang at the periphery of your canopy or put on your picnic table
- these are a lot less necessary if you’re not night owls and you’re camping in the summer when it’s not dark until 9PM anyways

The Cooking Matrix

putting a “complete” camp-kitchen set together is one of the harder parts, I built a big disorganized-but-complete plastic tub that I keep in storage you can buy elaborate camping cookware sets online for too much money but I just tossed some kitchen extras and spares in a big tub, heavier but cheaper

propane & stove
paper towel roll
aluminum foil roll
kitchen garbage bags
plates
cups
a pot
a pan
tongs
spatula
a cooking knife (use one of your shittiest at home knives, pack carefully)
a cutting board
soap, dishrack, sponge & basin
oil
salt & pepper
sugar
a l’il extra fold-up side table
water jug (bring water from home, camp water may not be potable)
kettle
coffee & tea bags

Kitchen Zone Doesn’t Mean Nothin’ Without

a cooler, full of food
I fill mine with reusable ice packs rather than loose ice, which is less good at maintaining chill but more convenient
vegetables & fruits (I have an insulated bag that I use for these, they don’t need to stay SO COOL but keeping them from roasting in the heat is probably good)
snacks & dry goods in a tub

What Do You Do While Camping (I Mostly Do Stuff I Would Do Indoors)

book
games
notepad?
small bluetooth speaker to play at a reasonable volume from 9 to 11

Utility

hatchet
tarps
clamps
rope
duct tape
lighter (long-neck)
first aid kit
can of bug spray
fire-roastin’ stick

Further Nerdery

this can be logistically complicated to get together - prepare a pre-launch checklist that includes steps like “fill water jug”, “charge lamps”, “pack food”, etc..

This Seems like a Lot Of Stuff

It is.

Meditation for Developers

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0700

i’m going to sell an e-book called “meditation for developers” and inside it’s just gonna read “play balatro on the toilet then have a shower”

Catch 22

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In retrospect, Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five were the rarest thing of all: American media about how war is bad, actually

Is This Catholicism?

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Is this Catholicism? This church wanted me to eat a cracker that represented the body of Christ, and then some wine that represented the blood of Christ, then a jello shot, for the bones and cartilage of Christ, then some pork cracklins, representing the skin of Christ, then some Gatorade, representing the tears of Christ, then some candy floss, representing the hair of Christ, then two grapes, representing the eyes of Christ, then some more wine (blood again), then a few loose spurts of yogurt (sidenote: Okay not a church and apparently I am no longer welcome in the Meadowbrook 7-11)

i like to read

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0700

One of the things that I like to read is medium length, well-written, informative articles of the sort that used to live in magazines before the information crushed them all like Blockbuster video or travel agencies.

I have a book by Ruth Reichl where she talks about her time as an editor for an important food magazine for Conde Nast in New York in the 80s and she is treated like a legitimate no-foolin’ rock star, there are assistants, there are perks, it is wild. Magazines were crazy in the 40 years ago universe that no longer exists.

But then, for a long time in my personal heyday, there was blogs, medium form articles written by amateurs, a wild and explosive flourishing of community writing projects, many of them utterly unreadable or punishingly mundane, but this was also a good time, and I subscribed to many via the use of my “A Relatively Simple Syndication” (or “ARSS” for short, because it wasn’t very good) technology browser.

For a brief period, I subscribed to Increment magazine, an expensive but lovely periodical, made entirely free online, that was - I imagine - never once for a single second profitable. This fabulous loss-leader was underwritten by Stripe, a company that makes more money in a day than I will make in my entire lifetime, so they definitely have a little bit of dosh floating around for weird vanity projects.

At least several dozen times I joked that they should have called it Excrement magazine because of where I read most of the articles.

It turns out that one of my likes is just compelling non-fiction articles, and being as my last real subscription ended in 2021, I feel like I was one of the last holdouts on team print media.

but (he says, patting his extremely well-laden eReader) it’s not like I’m not also part of the problem

For a while, I leaned on Pocket’s featured articles in Firefox. They’re okay. At this point I feel like I’ve encountered a lot of them again and again, and honestly I’m not sure if Pocket is going to keep them going now that Pocket is folding (it turns out, keeping a blog/article reading tool alive in the current internet era isn’t terribly valuable, because the last human-written article was some time in 2023, apparently).

anyways, no point here, no call-to-action, just… thinkin’ about articles

Crypto makes me sad

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Crypto has been so predatory and actively evil that it actively killed my excitement for decentralized, democratized technology, although Mastodon has restored it somewhat

Expect a Lot

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

one time I got a parking ticket and I was so mad until I saw that the parking company’s tagline was “expect a lot” and I found that so disarmingly funny that I wasn’t angry about the ticket any more

Menquakerites

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

the Menquakerite movement was started by pious John Seymour Slack-Huddle in 1867

“The devil’s oats enliven the lust and lead a man to thoughts of sin. We must turn to more godly and chaste grains like millet and sorghum.”

– John Seymour Slack-Huddle

Alexa

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:00:00 -0700

I’ve set up some Alexa devices in my home and while I’m mostly pessimistic about AI,

I am so, so, SO on board for them being, like, even 5% smarter

like, I live in Coquitlam, and I said “Alexa, what’s the weather like in Coquitlam” and it was like “The weather in Coquimatlán Mexico is 27 celsius and sunny”

there’s not a day that goes by without my wife going “alexa turn the lights off” “alexa, TURN the LIGHTS OFF!” “alexa! LIGHTSOFF!”

I speak very clearly in a Vancouver accent, we’re like… 18 feet away from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, I can’t imagine how busted this shit must be for anybody with an accent.

I google searched “when is alexa going to stop being so terrible” and apparently they’re rolling out the new LLM-backed models slowly this year, should be along to Canada … eventually

The Cones of Dunshire

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0700

there’s this difficult moment where I show my wife something I’ve been obsessing over for weeks and she looks at it and nods and goes “uh huh, uh huh, yeah”

it’s happened to me so many times and each time it’s basically exactly like this:

Rolling Mean

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 10:00:00 -0700

“Rolling Mean” is a great name for a nerdy motorcycle gang

they’re terrifying - well, most of them aren’t, but one of them is REALLY terrifying, so in aggregate, they’re terrifying

I am a serious adult

Fri, 30 May 2025 10:00:00 -0700

Angels

Thu, 29 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

The movie Angels in the Outfield but the angels are from Neon Genesis Evangelion

it is ok to like things

Wed, 14 May 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I worry that I date myself terribly by still loving a bunch of the stuff I loved as a kid and young adult - Final Fantasy 6, Cowboy Bebop, IRC, Our Lady Peace, The Simpsons, Command & Conquer, WinAmp…. all wild retro shit by today’s standards.

But then I think about some of the stuff that my parents and grandparents loved - Star Wars, Singin’ in the Rain, Looney Toons, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass - and how much reverence and fondness I, as an adult, treat it with, because they introduced it to me with such obvious fondness, and I think “nah, ’s good to like stuff”

time mostly washes away most of the really embarrassing and terrible retro stuff, like Police Academy 5, Police Quest III, and Limp Bizkit and we can just look back and chuckle at them now

threats

Tue, 13 May 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I don’t have to imagine, I’ve even tried taken medication for that exact same problem before, what I don’t understand is why you’d WANT that

Touchless

Tue, 13 May 2025 10:00:00 -0700

people are mad that my “touchless car wash $15” is just me waving a sponge around and going “wooOoOoOooOoooo”

9 Years at VRChat

Mon, 12 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

“what’s this 9 year gap on your resume?”

“…. uh, work study”

Cartoon Logic

Mon, 12 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, according to cartoon logic, once you toss someone out of something you’re supposed to dust off your hands and go “and stay out”, that’s the rules

When code reviews LGTM

Mon, 12 May 2025 09:00:00 -0700

this might be one of my more controversial software opinions

my bar for a code review is “do I understand approximately what this code is doing and how”, and that’s often enough to find one or two quibbles (‘hey this could have been named better" or “are you sure this part does what you think it does?”) but often it leads to the ol’ rubber stamp of justice

honestly I think that senior devs who can’t let a single PR go by without at least one nitpick because otherwise they feel like they haven’t done their duty aren’t accomplishing as much as they think

sometimes I would not do things the same way that that other person did

and then I just chalk that up to “hey, everybody’s mind works a different way” and go about my day

like, this is not to say I won’t intervene if something truly dangerous or ill-advised is happening, but, like, once a project has been chugging along for a little while with the same people, usually it gets increasingly clear when that is the case

sometimes a PR comes in with “I’m pretty sure that this won’t break prod” and that one maybe deserves a little more of the fine-toothed comb

note: if you’re working on avionics, medical software, people’s bank accounts, or are a nuclear engineer, definitely ignore me

The Dream Syndicate

Sat, 10 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

okay, so, funny story, in the DeltaGreen TTRPG there’s a group of people called “The Dream Syndicate” with a fake website

so I follow the link, I go to the website, and I think “whoa, this is INSANE, the language feels so CULTY, I love that they went to all of this trouble to build a fake online cult to match their description in the source book”

and then I read about the Dream Syndicate in the source book and it doesn’t match at all

this is just a real website?

modern american companies are way, way down the jim jones pipeline to fuckin’ cult city

tell me your company doesn’t have a set of commandments (c.f. “values”) you’re supposed to live by and a holy mission

Zapp Tucked In

Sat, 10 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Zooted Pope

Fri, 09 May 2025 09:00:00 -0700

So I follow the subreddit for comics - no, not that one, the one for people’s shitty little homemade ones that never see the light of day, and what struck me as funny about this one was not that the comic itself was funny, but that someone would spend hours of their day slaving over this series of images

this creator was struck by the muse, but it wasn’t one of the good muses, it was the “I must draw the pope twerking” muse, that’s the one they got today, and I’m glad they decided to go with it anyways

N-Sexual

Wed, 07 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

bisexuality - two sexualities

unisexuality - one sexuality (we usually segment this further because we’re interested in what the “one” is)

asexuality - no sexuality

bicycle - two cycles

unicycle - one cycle (only shows up in circuses)

acycle - no cycles (only shows up in graph-based math)

binary - counting system of 2s (useful)

unary - counting system of 1s (tallying, sometimes useful)

aary - counting system without any numbers (not useful)

Phnom Penh Crispy Wings

Mon, 05 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, it’s an open-secret that Phnom Penh has the best chicken wings in Vancouver.

so, through a weird twist of fate, I ended up with a bunch of chicken wings

and I thought “might as well give this recipe a try”

YouTube helped:

My version is somewhere between these two’s takes on the famous recipe and:

I used too much seasoning on the outside: the garlic oil let too much salt, sugar, and MSG adhere to the crust making the wings a little overpoweringly seasoned.

otherwise it was DELICIOUS.

I figured this would be an insanely difficult recipe to get right because, like, if Phnom Penh is so legendary for these wings, why doesn’t every restaurant do them?

But, actually, if you do all of the steps - the long fish-saucy marinade, the thin crispy batter, the twirl in garlic butter and then sweet-salty-and-msg seasoning: it’s actually very close and very good. It’s just labor intensive, and these guys need to hit the table still very hot from the fryer.

Anyways, if you’ve got a bit of time on your hands, highly recommend.

New York Times' 50 Greatest Recipes

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

The New York Times’ elevation of Marcella Hazan’s quick marinara to viral status was, uh, very useful for me, so I trust their taste at least a little.

Of course, they’ve paywalled most of these recipes but … they’re viral recipes, so you can’t stop me, NYT.

Our 50 Greatest Hits, According to You

On Sept. 17, 2014, an ambitious new app made its debut: New York Times Cooking, which collected thousands of archival Times recipes in one elegantly designed, easy-to-use place.

In the 10 years since, Cooking has grown into a whole universe of food, videos, personalities, newsletters, cookbooks and comments — with you at its center. You’ve invited us into your kitchens and made us part of your lives.

To mark the anniversary, here are 50 of our best recipes according to you, our community, with reader comments threaded throughout. It’s not a ranked list of our most popular recipes by traffic numbers alone, but a wider, more curated view of Cooking.

These are dishes that have emerged as classics and racked up five-star ratings, recipes that became popular just about immediately after we hit publish, went viral on social media and inspired the most memorable comments. But we easily could’ve filled this list with 500 more. There are so many you’ve loved, in so many ways.

is 150 the perfect number of collectibles?

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 13:00:00 -0700

i only have 2 data points but yes

A/B testing

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

A B testing, which is where we show the UI to a bee, and if they fly towards it it’s cool

Hello Zalgo

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

ḧ̶̡̨̨̛̩͔̻̘̻̺͓͕̯̥́̐̓͌͋͗̈́̈́̍̑̽͆̇͝͝͠e̷͍̤̥̗͂̒̉͒̆̎͊̃͆́̀̃̊̍͂̓͜l̸̛̜̩̩͖̥̮̰͂͆̆̏̊̆͌͌͑̚ͅl̵̢̡̫̲͔̱͔̤̣͚͋̐́̽̾͒̓̏̋̒̌o̵̰̽̏̊̈́̅̅̎́̅̍̄͋̓̕̕̚ ̸̢̧̨̱̹͚̘̭̦̣͕̩̩̹͉̽̀̍́̄͌͒̒̑̽̒̊̓̒͋̏͝ḓ̵̩͇̱̤̙́o̷̧̙̺̮͚̹̹͔͇̰͍̯͔͖͜͝l̷̡͚̹̙͍̘̳͓̜̱̲̟̗̪̯̔͜ĺ̴̢̧̛̼͎̳̠͔͙̤̬̣̫̈́̓̌̎̾̅͛͋̎͌̽̆͆y̷͖̖͉̩͔̥͇̫̳͙̣͕̭͚̽̆̓͜

Hello Dolly runs for 2 hours and 30 minutes, and if you’re wondering if there are any parts of it that are better than the 45 seconds in WALL-E

nope

political analogy

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

You are in a boat.

There is a hole in the boat.

Water is rushing in.

Your three boat mates each have a plan: one of them is wearing a lifejacket and pitches that we should do nothing about the hole.

One of them does not have a lifejacket and pitches that drastic action should be taken and the hole should be patched up.

The third one, also equipped with a lifejacket, intelligently suggests a compromise: we will fix some of the hole, but not all of it.

With the hole half fixed, water continues to pour into the boat, but more slowly.

The first boat-mate argues that the hole fixing plan has failed and pitches that the hole fixing plan be dismantled and abandoned.

He is overwhelmingly popular, for reasons that elude you.

The compromise candidate defends his half-hearted hole fix.

The boat mate who proposed fixing the hole is now being fully ignored.

Next to you, a much larger boat, one without a hole, has filled up with hole-worshippers, led by something of a hole, and they have decided to unnecessarily create a hole in their boat.

As you watch them sinking, you think “perhaps the compromise half-hole guy had a good point.”

Things are looking good: you might, if you’re lucky, maintain your half-hearted hole plugging efforts.

In order to appease the hole worshippers, the compromise candidate promises not to touch the existing hole at all.

His plan gains a lot of steam and honestly the pro-hole party is furious. They’re still very popular, though.

Unrelated, a vote is coming up in Canada

WASM, offline first

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

folks have been promising that offline-first or local-first development from the web browser is Just Around The Corner for almost as long as they’ve been promising that browser WASM is going to be The Next Big Thing and I feel like I’m going to get old and die before anybody makes a single real product like this

Great Little Louie Zong Concept Albums

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Need to do some BUSINESS! in the 1990s?

If you can listen to this without a little pixelated city coming to life before your very eyes, you had a very different childhood than I did.

@ArmyofOneandaHalf - 2 years ago

Ah yes, this delivers unparalleled value to the consumer

Okay, what about if you’re playing a little SNES game with prerendered graphics about a plucky little apple?

@egg_mittens - 1 year ago This album has perfect nintendo game flow.

World 1: Large, more powerful than the player, but very easy to outsmart. A simple fellow to help you get the controls.

World 2: The game starts showing you a bit of its edge. This boss is entirely antagonistic, but is also very charismatic and you kind of grow to love when they’re on screen. Thinks they’re very cool.

World 3 mini-boss: duck

World 3: Coming right around the midpoint of the game is the first proper challenge: a doppleganger boss. Propells the main story forward, genuinely a little scary. Defeating this boss feels like a huge achievement.

World 4 mini-boss: Yeah, it’s a little silly, but also kind of a tank and you don’t fully believe it’s a mini-boss. It plays around with the environment and hits like a truck.

World 4: We’re nearing the big bad now, so this is a huge challenge in the game’s core mechanics. The fight itself contains a puzzle aspect that is really frustrating because it’s like playing tic tac toe with lava.

World 5: Final thing before the big bad and while they’re tough to beat, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. They’re really there to hype you up and to get you pumped for the final boss. Making you overconfident. What’s the worst that can happen?

World 6: Complete lovecraftian horror. A full departure from the lightharted, kind of campy aesthetic the rest of the game has had, it is now you against an unfeeling, all-powerful darkness. The threat they pose is existential, every time you die to it you feel stabbing pain and fear in your heart. This is the worst thing that can happen.

hands

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Life Pro Tip: if someone makes a big deal about their immune system being strong, don’t touch their hands after they’ve been in the bathroom

Wall Gnomes

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

something about the cadence of this is just very, very funny, so many lines in this hit an absurd comedic tone

textbook… the homeowner cut a hole in their wall, ‘cause they’re wily, and they musta hit a cable or somethin’

does that happen a lot?

in Canada alone… a million homes a second

a m- that can’t be right

Work From Home

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

someone at Business Insider has been banging the RTO drum for the past 4 full years, trying to convince people that RTO is good using any conceivable angle

an increasingly unhinged series of takes, no matter how ridiculous,

and I would like to wish them a very fuck right the hell off

either Business Insider’s corporate owners also own a lot of commercial real estate or some terrible middle-manager is very lonely without people to harangue

sometimes I worry

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 10:00:00 -0700

sometimes I stay up at night worrying that I’ll join a company that doesn’t have “Teamwork” and “Innovation” in its core values, and instead has “Collaboration” and “Inventiveness”

i’m not sure if I’d be able to survive the change

skinner box

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

in order to try and get people to deploy more often, we’re employing a random reward skinner box strategy

22 micrograms of opiates have been shipped to your home or place of residence

japan tattoo

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

when I visit japan it might finally be time to get my tattoo:

エラー：翻訳サーバーがオフラインです。

it means “honor”

no se

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i keep asking my spanish speaking friends what “no sé” means but none of them seem to have any idea, the language must be a lot harder to learn than I thought

year of linux on the desktop

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I had fun setting up a linux computer this weekend, but as much as windows sucks in myriad little frustrating ways, ubuntu’s desktop experience still involves no small amount of unavoidable terminal ops

also a bunch of linux still feels held together by a handful of mickey mouse apps some guy wrote in 2006

i think the DPI scaling is still a little broken, even in 2025, a year in which 4k screens are ubiquitous

“I would like to create a shortcut to a frequently accessed network location and place that shortcut gently upon my desktop”

linux: “no we don’t do that here”

this is a musical joke

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

this is how the musical Rent ended in Canada

Cities without Number is not what I hoped it would be

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

This feels quite silly, but, I was legitimately very disappointed that this turned out to be a run of the mill cyberpunk RPG.

I was kind of hoping for, like, “SimCity the TTRPG”

I’m actually not sure what exactly a city management TTRPG would entail, like, are we pretending to be city council members? Do we have to obey Robert’s Rules of Order? This might turn out to be an incredibly boring game but I’d at least be excited to poke through the rules

like, I’m not sure if it would be good, or fun, but dang it would be novel

overproduced board games

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 10:00:00 -0700

r/boardgames is losing it because a 50% tariff from China and a global recession is going to kill kill the current modern board games industry, but IMO what’s dying is “overproduced board games”, if you’ve got a laser printer, a few decks of playing cards, some dice, index cards, markers, scissors, the world is your oyster

buy Canadian

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

one thing about following the /r/BuyCanadian subreddit is folks’ll post a basket full of nothing but cheezies and Canadian Whiskey and go “i’m switching to Canadian products” and you look at their cart and have to suppress your urge to say “please also buy a vegetable, we make some of those here too”

but honestly, if you were making do with nothing but cheetos and jim beam before, I’m still glad you made the switch

I was a bit surprised how whiskey focused this trade war has been so far.

“What’s that going to accomplish, how much whiskey could Canadians possibly drink?”

“Oh. Oh wow. That’s … that much, huh?”

this joke is incredibly dumb

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

i just flew here from math camp and boy are my arms toroid

gin bottle oil

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

This gin was overpriced but it was worth it to become my best olive oil bottle for multiple consecutive years.

restaurant grade

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

i hate terms like “restaurant grade” or “military grade”, like, they’re meaningless but also even if it were true, it’s possible that the “grade” of something optimized for an environment where it’s bought in a 10,000 pack by someone looking to buy the cheapest thing they can legally get away with is not a vote of confidence

i buy deli containers in bulk, because they’re “restaurant grade”, which is to say, cheap as dirt and modular

AI D&D Character Sketches

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

So, I asked ChatGPT to take my character designs for my D&D players out of my cartoony style and re-render them in a more painterly fantasy style, and honestly it’s… pretty good.

Here are my drawings:

And the results:

Not perfect but a darn sight better than I could do.

alright then just sulk

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

fascinate

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i mean, it’s not wrong

Hawkins Cheezies

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Look, Cheetos and Doritos are puffed cornmeal dusted with MSG and carefully hand-optimized in a lab to be just unsatisfying enough that you’ll rip through the whole bag without thinking about it.

Hawkins Cheezies are like crunching down on angry rocks hosed down with sharp cheddar. Each handful of Cheezies has more condensed Cheez flavor than a whole bag of Cheetos combined. You have to stop eating them out of sheer flavor exhaustion.

They use a 70-year old machine to crank these out and only a handful of people know the recipe, which hasn’t changed since before my father was born.

most of the other uniquely Canadian snacks, like all-dressed chips, ketchup chips, and Coffee Crisps, are … forgettable

Financial Second Coming

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

thanks to Dan Olson I got kinda in to passively watching GME cultists on reddit predict the second coming of financial Jesus every week, which, despite stubbornly refusing to happen for the past 4 years, is still going to happen any minute now

sometimes I wonder how long they can wait but then I remember that the Christians are still at it two thousand years later so I don’t think their pile of imaginary shorts are going anywhere fast

i wonder to what extent random redditors own a failing brick and mortar chain that sells video games in malls

which, thanks to its second-hand game sales, is widely hated by the video game industry itself, who moved aggressively to cut them almost entirely out of the loop

largely reducing it to, at this point, mostly just selling funko pops and minecraft socks to survive

Hey idiot

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I could swear he looks smug, can cats be smug?

I thought that it would be great to have a chatty cat but 90% of what he has to say are complaints to the management that he is not receiving the level of five star service that he has come to expect from this kind of resort.

respectful and firm

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

would you believe that the first place my mind went here was homoerotic subtext?

corn and cheese

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

so, I was sitting here thinking that both Mexico and Korea have really pioneered adding cheese to corn in clever, delicious ways like “elote” and that the USA is way behind in strategic corn-cheesing technology, and then I remembered where they took the same concept:

doritos

Poached Egg

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

A while back I didn’t believe a friend when they said they had the same meal pretty much every day for lunch.

Then I started working from home and now I have poached eggs on toast, like, at least a few times a week.

many years of experience

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

I have been writing software professionally, and then also recreationally in my spare time, regularly, for over 20 years now

I’m not bad at it by any measure, but it is weird how mediocre I feel given all that practice

for every once-in-a-lifetime genius there’s at least a few hundred guys like me who are just, like, kinda okay at a thing I guess

wine touring

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0700

okay but actually what the hell am I, a person who doesn’t like going outside, supposed to do in Canada on vacation

this whole country is boring as shit, it’s like if someone were to take 26 Montanas, line them up one after the other and freeze the whole thing half of the year

there’s Montreal I guess

everybody’s like “such natural beauty, so many mountains, wild and untamed outdoors, pacific northwest, snow sports” but I’m allergic to literally every part of that

my face will get puffy and I will get a nosebleed, that is enough majesty of the outdoors for me thank you

for the love of god, give me a walking food tour in a major metropolitan where there’s nothing but concrete, or an open-sourcy tech conference

wine touring in the Okanagan is pretty nice but honestly after about three tastings I can’t differentiate one wine from another at all any more

also the horrible growing conditions and constant fires of the past few years have left the wineries grimmer and sadder than ever before, they’re either barely willing to run tastings or they’ve turned tastings into an expensive activity

as a practical consideration, you also need someone to drive you from tasting to tasting OR you need to really, really pace yourself

perils

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

You know, I’m generally pretty chuffed to be heterosexual but while I’m pulling a rat-sized tangle of greasy, soapy girl hair out of the shower drain is not one of those times.

heh

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0700

heh

mares eat oats

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0700

I found this in my D&D session notes and I think it’s quite good

Cybertruck Too Big, Impractical

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

(quietly)

i actually kinda like the weird style of the cybertruck,

if, like, the CEO weren’t a tool, and it were smaller, and if they were made to a Toyota quality standard rather than by exhausted non-union workers hot-gluing plastic knobs to aluminum, and if the frame worked like an actual car’s frame, and if the stainless steel exterior didn’t rust so easily, and if it cost $35,000 rather than $110,000+ I’d seriously consider one

wait … am… am I just describing a Prius?

if America tries to annex Canada with a fleet of Cybertrucks we’ll be able to prevail with nothing more than a few bags of road salt and some medium-sized baseballs

march zapp

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0700

like 90% of my camera roll is zapp

trade protectionism

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

My thoughts on trade protectionism are actually kinda fraught?

Like, it turns out the ability of global capital to reposition itself with unlimited freedom just means that all work is done by the lowest bidder, with labor going to the country that has the fewest anti-slave-labor laws and food safety regulations on the books, right?

Trade makes us all richer but protecting a local industry by pushing out gigantic international incumbents - like with dairy, or the CBC - also can be good?

China’s ridiculous digital protectionism utterly sucks, but also China’s software industry wasn’t completely flattened by FAANG like it was in the entire western world.

Lots of local industries here are choked by practices that are so shady they almost feel like racketeering - tomato companies disappearing any stock that goes over quota so that they don’t ruin the price of tomatoes as part of a vast tomato conspiracy, in order to preserve the profitability of tomato growers. Dairy prices artificially inflated so high that a basket of cheese feels like a treasure chest. (i mean, it is)

Canada is just chock-a-block with local cartels enforcing profitable little fiefdoms - with oligopolies that collude to create monopolistic behavior.

Bad for the consumer and yet when trade disaster strikes we suddenly have no oranges but a lot of tomatoes and cheese.

I think the analogy I go to for this is that off-the-grid subsistence farming where you compost your own feces is miserable, but also living in 400 square feet downtown doing gig-work for pennies and doordashing everything you want to eat is miserable:

sane trade policy lives somewhere in the middle, so trade protectionism vs globalism both exist on a spectrum where total adherence to one or the other is going to be… bad

“maybe we need worker protections but also mcdonalds” is the kind of lukewarm centrist take you should expect from me

leopards considered harmful

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

As a little treat post-US-election I let myself subscribe to r/LeopardsAteMyFace again, but as much as I enjoy the handful of cherry-picked “I voted Republican then lost my job to a Republican” stories, they’re ultimately kind of meaningless.

The “I voted for someone to do cruelty and then they did it to me” stories serve the same kind of dark lizard brain urge as the other subreddits for watching people make stupid decisions and then suffer.

The content doesn’t have to be accurate, or new, or true, or really anything more than a pithy headline that’s fun to say. I’ll make one up right now: “Man who voted for mass deportations is deported by accident” - ha ha! Isn’t that kind of satisfying to think about? Mmm, karmic retribution.

But the buyer’s remorse for Trump in the USA hasn’t set in at all, really: his approval rating remains imposingly high. His terrible agenda is popular: Americans crave fascism.

Following that kind of content will give you a false impression that justice will be done, that stupid, needless cruelty contains the seeds of its own destruction, that the USA will realize it is hurting itself and improve.

But karma doesn’t actually exist.

Worse, I think, that impulse to enjoy bad things happening to stupid people is actually wrought of the same nasty impulses that brought us here in the first place. That’s why I always leave that subreddit before long.

old wine has cork issues

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

This may not seem so classy, but actually an older red wine probably has a bunch of nasty sediment and old cork floating around in it and a quick pass through a coffee filter clears that right up.

shrimps is bugs

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

people get real triggered about the idea of eating bugs, but I eat a lot of shrimp, which are delicious, and it’s hard to describe what’s different between shrimps and bugs

an in-client database

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

about once every ten thousand years, the prophecy states a frontend developer will realize that they spend most of their time carefully using RPCs to curate a little miniature in-client database in order to keep their UI data up-to-date and sane,

and, in an effort to solve this problem for themselves in perpetuity, end up nerd sniping themselves for multiple consecutive years on a synchronization or complex query solution to perma-solve this problem, like Meteor.js or GraphQL

These solutions tend to be so powerful that they make simple applications like the well known Todo App seem almost magically trivial

but the black-box, complex and highly bespoke nature of these solutions keeps them niche: RPC over HTTP is a well-understood model for a reason, it’s much harder to reason about access control or rate limiting in a Custom Sync Protocol made by Some Guy

it’s even worse when, once every ten thousand years, a backend developer decides that they will refuse to learn Javascript and end up inventing some fabulously, wildly elaborate system to write everything in a unified environment

like ASP.NET WebForms or Elixir’s Phoenix Live Views

the bay

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

so the Hudson’s Bay Company is in serious trouble

one thing to note, uh, BC is named after the Columbia Department, which was one of the departments of the HBC, presumably next to “menswear” and “kitchen”

ultimately there’s a lot of really dark history there, and I’m not sad to see the HBC go, like, when I shop at Canadian Tire I never think “I bet this store killed a whole bunch of people”

I mean, I DO think that when I shop at Amazon, but free shipping

my players have aligned with the local mafia

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, I made a dungeons and dragons mistake.

There’s some DMing advice that I adhere to pretty closely, when you’re characterizing an NPC or a group of NPCs, you can kinda just file the serial numbers off of something you’re already very familiar with and run with it.

I’m not that experienced with “organized crime”, haven’t watched anything conteporary so, in our Dragon Heist campaign, I decided that a good analogue for the Zhentarim would be “the mafia, specifically from the movie The Godfather”.

The problem, though…

It was a fun characterization. It added a lot of depth and interest to the local Zhentarim. They’re not good, but they’re honorable, they have a code. And if you’re good to them? They’ll be good, reliable allies.

This went over entirely too well, this was the first major Waterdeep faction my players encountered, and whoops, my players are just fully aligned with the Zhentarim now.

I mean, the players are good, there were lots of local “good” factions, but the local Zhents, with their friendly, accessible low-rent evil - well, it’s just hard to say no to them. They keep making offers my players can’t refuse. Players don’t mind paying a little protection money or shaking up some locals now and again. A quest is a quest, even if it’s to intimidate a potential witness.

Their capo, Urstul Floxin, his “friendly and helpful in a very threatening way” shtick, is actually very convincing. The person who keeps talking the party into doing shady stuff is ME, actually.

I love how even in the D&D art provided by Wizard of the Coast he kinda looks like Luca Brasi.

I don’t think this is really even a problem: Waterdeep Dragon Heist is a heist story where the players operate a tavern, the players are naturally going to find themselves way more aligned with local organized crime than the constabulary.

ed: Months later, Urstul has provided the players with their own goons, Guido and Nunzio, a little dumb one and a big gentle one, and they’re already productively contributing to schemes and nonsense.

ready set joe

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

So, uh, Melitta is probably the least well-respected of the common pourover brands but let me tell you, you can get a Melitta pourover for $12 CDN and a 100-pack of new filters at any grocery store for $5, which is maybe 1/3 of the cost of the other two.

A gooseneck kettle, hario v60 and a baratza burr grinder will set you back $300.

But a $20 blade grinder, a $20 kettle and a $12 plastic pour-over with $5 filters can get you a coffee setup that’s 80% as good for a tiny fraction of the price.

I remember on a trip to San Francisco in the 10s, I was a little startled, they offered a crazy new thing called “pourover” and charged exorbitantly for it, and I, out of curiosity, paid, only to watch them make coffee

… the exact way I made coffee at home, just with more pomp.

“my mom showed me how to do that when I was just out of high school, it’s actually just the best way for a person to make a single cup of coffee”

I’m a little obsessed with finding that point in the price/quality curve where you’re actually getting the absolute best bang for your buck and I feel like for coffee this is it.

@apike having tried burr and blade grinders, I’m gonna say it: coffee enthusiasts over-value a perfectly consistent and predictable grind

with only a little practice a blade grinder reliably produces a good cup of coffee, you just need to time it right

although admittedly I did splurge on a nice, reasonably priced OXO burr grinder, so

I believe that professionals tend towards techniques that produce consistency and homogeneity - like neutrally flavored broths, perfectly diced vegetables, and very precise measurements.

Amateurs who ape these techniques without having to meet the same demands are cargo culting needlessly: perfect consistency is rarely as important a goal for home cooks, so go ahead: USE a boldly flavored stock or rough chop your vegetables: it will be FINE.

The same goes for coffee grind consistency.

:(

mamma mia

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

the secret to good Italian food is to loudly announce “MAMMA MIA” every time you add garlic to a pan. if you don’t do this, the garlic will sense your fear and burn immediately. this is science.

olive oil. if your recipe says “2 tablespoons,” ignore it. pour until your ancestors whisper “basta” in your ear. then pour a little more. then discard the pasta and begin drinking the olive oil straight. loudly announce “MAMMA MIA”. you have done it. now you are the chef. kiss your fingers and wink.

that's a problem for future me

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

a hard thing, when coding, is when you get trapped in an intractable-feeling knot of not being able to work on Problem X until you make some progress on Problem Y, which you don’t want to tackle until you hit Problem Z, which is dependent on …

in order to keep yourself sane and keep your change from getting way out of control, DO ONE THING AT A TIME. keep a list of future changes. stub out functionality that doesn’t exist yet.

learn this powerful mantra: “that’s a problem for future me”

sometimes, as future you, you have to go back and re-do something you did wrong: that’s okay

it turns out going back and re-doing that thing is a thousand times easier than being stuck staring at a blank page trying to solve every problem at once

stay out of CS

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

If every CS undergraduate program in the world shut its doors tomorrow, in about ten years I, personally would be dramatically better off, so I’m not sure why people keep advancing this “AI will kill the junior developer pipeline” argument like it is a bad thing.

the entities who need there to be lots of cheap software developers are companies, I’m not a company, I’m a guy

“should I start a CS degree in this uncertain atmosphere”

no!

the only stable job is… all of the other jobs that aren’t programming

you should do one of those instead

also if everybody who’s currently making a video game in their spare time would stop, that would also be peachy

i’m looking at you, EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON MASTODON

Mayostard

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, Tiff (humorously, and non-seriously) proposed combining raspberry jam and cream cheese into one super-condiment, and I warned her that it would have the expiry date of cream cheese, and then furiously tried to remember which sketch comedy group did a mustard+mayonnaise sketch.

Me: “I think it’s… you know… two guys… throwing underwear around… shitting in a tub… those guys.”

Tiff: “Tim and Eric?”

Me: “Yeah!”

Narrator: it was Mr. Show

kung fu fighting

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

eye-watering

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

slack is being a problem

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

Slack: HEY! I HAVE A NOTIFICATION FOR YOU!

Me: but it’s after work on a friday what is it

Slack: IT’S THIS THING A CO-WORKER SAID YESTERDAY

Me: slack what is wrong with you

Slack: I’VE FORGOTTEN HOW NOTIFICATIONS WORK

Me: i’m surprised you answered but ok

ed: for context, around this time Slack was struggling to stop notifying you that you had an available message, even if you did not, in fact, have an available message.

tariffs

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

canada's yikes software ecosystem

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

woof, someone tried to compile a list of Canadian digital services and in the “replacements for cloud services like AWS” column they have, like, eight versions of “guy running a software consultancy out of his boat” and a bunch of companies that can not meaningfully compete with Hetzner

I’m pretty patriotic but I’m not “hosting services in Canada” patriotic, I could just as easily shovel money into a fireplace

i wouldn’t be surprised if Canada turned out to be the enterprise Java capital of the world and I want that to carry every centimeter of the derision I intend

blue zones

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

a lot of the science of nutrition seems to be backed by shrugging and emulating the eating habits of people in “blue zones” but as far as I can tell the actual way to live an “extremely long life” is to live in a country with generous retirement checks and nobody who bothers to check if the people who collect them are still alive

“people in blue zones manage to live to the age of 110 on a diet of fish and beans”

meanwhile, people in blue zones:

cabbage

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I eat a lot of cabbage. One five dollar head of cabbage has been vegetables with dinner all week, it’s cheap, nutritious, and I have a handful of good cabbage recipes.

unrelatedly, someone who lives in my office has been unleashing a truly rancid series of unstoppable eye-watering farts all week and I can’t figure out why

handholding

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

for the last few days Zapp has been sitting on my lap for hours each night, which is good for the soul but bad for the productivity

and also the circulation in my legs

standing desk

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

an expensive standing desk is a wonderful way to find out that you don’t like standing while you work

me, a sophisticate

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

You, a child: I will have the chicken nuggets, plural, please

Me, a sophisticate: one huge nugget

evacuate the dance floor

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

There are some things I just can’t ever stop thinking about, to my own detriment.

Like, in the party anthem “Evacuate the Dance Floor” by Cascada, the lyrics of the song indicate that the song is both dangerous and infectious, which makes me think that evacuation is the wrong move: this calls for a quarantine of the dance floor.

Dr. DJ should lose his medical license.

breakfast systems

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I love breakfasts. One of the things I could not get enough of in Montreal was that they had a breakfast restaurant on seemingly every corner and they all executed at a level utterly unheard of in BC. Hell, even a Smittys does a better breakfast than you’re likely to find in the lower mainland.

In my new place I live near a Cora, an IHOP and a De Dutch, all staffed by bored, laconic teenagers. Trying to get food in any of them on a weekend is a fool’s errand and a 2 hour project at least.

I’m a not incompetent chef and at least a few times when guests have offered to take us to breakfast I’ve simply made an elaborate breakfast because it’s a more efficient use of my time. It’s not a perfect system because not everybody can order exactly what they like: you’re getting a full English and you’re going to LIKE IT darn it - but it’s absolutely faster.

But there are some good spots (also: if you’ve got great BC breakfast restaurant tips let me know), one of which is the New Westminster IHOP.

Unlike most IHOPs it’s actually - and this is weird - run well, by people who seem to like what they’re doing? Maybe it pays well enough not to suffer massive turnover. I can hope, at least.

The difference is night and day. They’re always busy, even on weekdays, and they turn over tables with mechanical efficiency.

All of us have hit a Denny’s at a weird hour, been one of only two tables in the entire restaurant, and sat 75 minutes waiting for our order to slowly roll out, cold, from the kitchen, or been at that same Dennys when they’re busy and had breakfast take an eternity because they’re swamped and don’t know what to do.

This IHOP is reliably full and even with every table packed your meal hits your table in under 15 minutes.

That is a short order chef firing on all cylinders.

I am hungry and impatient, and fascinated with restaurant efficiency. I love it in restaurants high and low end.

I particularly like peering into the bowels of a McDonalds, it’s hardly a restaurant at all, it feels like watching a food operating system in motion.

hey there trilby buddy

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Look, I’m as irritated as the next person to encounter “fat guy with a circle beard and a trilby” but there is something like a 90% chance I share a hobby with this person so we will at least have something to talk about.

I can just cruise up and ask their opinion on Linux, or anime, I know they will have one

wacky 90s fads

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Eradicating newspapers didn’t exactly create utopian outcomes the way we may have hoped, but nevertheless, print media newspapers and magazines can’t just keep on existing while all of their functionality lives on in a superior format.

They’ve been going the way of renting tapes from the local Blockbuster for a while now.

I don’t feel too bad for traditional print media or the postal service, they’ve had more than half of my entire life to figure out some kind of viable pivot.

It’s funny, when I was a kid something like the internet and e-mail existed, but it was laboriously hand-created every day, manually, by legions of hard workers doing their best to get fresh content to your door every morning and deliver all of your messages by hand to anybody who you might want to talk to.

News, movie reviews, weather updates, daily games, local updates, it was a surprisingly robust and varied offering, differentiated by the rest of written content by its relative speed and immediacy.

Obviously the speed and immediacy of electronic transmission wins, right? once your average person has access to a powerful, comfortable to use internet-enabled device at all times, the only thing a newspaper can do that a modern computer can’t is act as a cheap wrapper for fish and chips.

So what do we lose? Well, business models supporting creators of hyper-local content, for one. Not a lot of vloggers out there covering the municipal news beat. Also: news had a kind of journalistic code of ethics that the internet has not been able to replace, although I sometimes think that they get lionized more than they deserve - the code was more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

bob burber

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Look, I get it.

I’d love to let you back there.

I can see the pain in your face.

That pain doesn’t go away it only gets worse.

Don’t get older.

I laughed out loud, they were in the middle of a skit and they just cut it off right in the middle for a sad, self-aware soliloquy from the security guard, scene over.

100% user supported

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Obsidian says that it’s “100% User Supported” which, when I think about it, isn’t a big claim, that’s also the case for Google and McDonalds

company cohesion

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

in order to increase company cohesion overall I’ve been inviting 10 random people to a meeting every eight days, but I’m not sure how it’s going because I haven’t been attending

latest #2

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

only a couple of hours ago, GitHub, but it is super weird that you are keeping track

lemmy refugees

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So far, a lot more than Mastodon, I’m noticing that the people on Lemmy are people who do not understand why they have been banned from reddit

which means that while the dream of federation is in and of itself just, reddit itself might have to get bad enough to drive away some adults before lemmy is fully usable

In my experience, internet communities formed around the locus of “we’ll create a place where :existing community: can’t ban us for NO REASON” lack the deep introspective reserves necessary to form a healthy community

virality

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I’m not internet popular - aside from a few times I’ve gone (by my standards) extremely viral and had something of mine suddenly in front of tens of thousands of people (or the one thing I helped build that’s seen millions of people) and there’s a point in there where things disappear from the “regular adult conversation” zone to a territory where complete strangers will have insane arguments with one another about total misinterpretations of your point without your involvement.

I can comfortably say that the point where people stop charitably reading your intentions or grokking your humor - somewhere in there is the point where things cross the line from it being fun to go viral to it being kinda bad and weird actually.

humor via the crop function

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

trying to get banned from the Capital City Arcade facebook group by posting this image:

Brother HL-2240D

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

happy 13th birthday to my Brother HL-2240D laser printer, may you print forevermore

Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine

The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model.

botnet

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0700

So, our company, as a matter of policy and practicality, doesn’t allow users from email providers that can algorithmically spin up new e-mail addresses with no restrictions, because they have an enormously high tendency to be botnets.

This has resulted in one prominent privacy focused email provider (the one that I use, humorously enough, but I have a custom domain so it doesn’t matter) petitioning us repeatedly asking us to unblock them.

But they can’t fix the problem, so…

it’d be a bigger problem but my assumption is that anybody technically clever enough to want to have an account with this provider is also technically clever enough to figure out a way to use our service anyways

chair clothes

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

y’all I put a rack with hooks next to my bed to hang up all of the “chair” clothes between uses and it’s a lifechanging improvement

ikea had one for fit-teen dollars

The hardest working font in Manhattan

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

The hardest working font in Manhattan

In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.

But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.

Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.

The font’s name is Gorton.

valentined

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

worst month value

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0700

had a weird ticket at work whose resolution was simply explaining that February has, in fact, 28 days¹, meaning that if you happen to buy a month based subscription to anything, February is simply always going to be the month where you get the least bang for your buck

usually ↩︎

curse detection shibboleth

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

“bejeweled pachinko sniggering scunthorpe specialist banana zipline tofu c. kickball”

this one seemingly harmless phrase will get flagged by basically all naive systems

no kings

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I’m less irritated about a new King on the currency because I haven’t actually used enough currency in the past few years to notice.

i had quietly kinda hoped we’d just quietly phase out putting royalty on our coins after the Queen, but it doesn’t matter because we’re just quietly phasing out coins

wish for more wishes

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t see this one tossed out there very often so I’m gonna say it: my first wish is to know exactly what my second and third wishes should be and how to phrase them to hopefully forestall any monkey’s paw shenanigans

oh hi mark

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

amulet

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

so i went to a jewellers and I asked for a custom necklace, and they start by smashing some eggs on the ground, and I’m like “what” and they’re like “you can’t make an amulet without breaking a few eggs”

cheesesauce

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Aw yeah that is movie theatre smooth cheese sauce

lourd heavy

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i know that “lourd” is just “heavy” again in french, but I can’t help but think OH NO YOU CAN’T PICK UP THAT LOURD IT’S TOO HEAVY

orchestra

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I went to the local symphony orchestra last night, and it was nice

but I am left wondering what an orchestra is meant to accomplish, nowadays

so many people playing at the same time accomplishes big, room-filling sound, and it’s the only way to accurately experience some compositions the way they would have a hundred years ago,

but does electric amplification and live audio mixing render a lot of old orchestra tech obsolete?

we simply do not require large bands to make big sound anymore

when I see modern folks on youtube chasing big band sound, they do it with much smaller groups in rooms littered with sound pickups

although honestly there’s still a lot of ’em, I guess there’s some fullness of sound you simply can’t get without a bunch of people playing it simultaneously

@filmaj:

punch

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

when you punch someone in the butt you should call it “a punch in the turd bowl”

the children arent alright

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

just having the weirdest interactions in a r/webdev conversation where folks are pushing, reviewing, and merging pull requests in their own personal single-person repositories

and I’m like “why would you do that?” and they’re like “well how else do you merge a branch” and I finally realize the mistake I’ve made

fake news february

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0700

What Happened to the World's Largest Tube TV

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

this has been the lowest stakes high stakes youtube video I’ve ever seen

find a local CSA

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0700

If you’re in #canada and you’re curious about how to forge a closer relationship with local food supply, consider looking for Community Supported Agriculture programs in your area.

You pay in advance and get vegetables all year at their respective harvest times.

It’s more expensive, inconvenient, and fussy than just buying your vegetables from Loblaw’s, and you still need to buy vegetables from the store when you need Specific Vegetables, BUT big plastic tubs full of fresh veggies.

Lots of downsides to getting food from an actual farm, like: instead of getting the same 8 vegetables you get on repeat from the local store, the availability and supply of different vegetables changes a lot month after month, and I’ve had to pull some tradwife farm-ass shit like “dealing with an absolute mountain of plums” and “learning to pickle”.

Also sometimes they will attempt to send you radicchio, which I think should be considered a war crime.

However: a couple of years of being forced to get creative with a hyper-local bounty of unpredictable farm fresh vegetables have, I think, forged me into a much more capable and resilient home chef.

It’s really funny because every now and again I will go to Savio Volpe, which is one of the hot ticket local restaurants, and I’ll see the same vegetables I’m dealing with on their endlessly rotating menu, because they’re pulling a version of the same vegetable swindle I am, trying to get their mitts on the freshest and most local veg.

They, uh, reliably do a much better job with these vegetables than I do.

I’m not actually 100% convinced that there’s much, if any, of a flavor or health benefit to these locally sourced vegetables compared to the actually reliably excellent bounty from a local vegetable store like Kin’s - expensive vegetables are mostly just vegetables.

The health benefit is more, I think, being forced to cook a large plastic tub full of vegetables on the regular.

anyways, I’ve been a member of the metro vancouver Glen Valley CSA for 2 years, now, and it’s also quite a bit more well run than the last CSA I was a member of.

also, and this is only a bonus if you’re an idiot like me and lack long-term object permanence, paying a lot up front makes it feel like you’re getting free vegetables from a genie

retaliation

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0700

hijinx

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0700

I really enjoy a good sitcom, I like humorous characters getting into clockwork-reliable hijinx

also, I hate storylines where a simple mixup that could be easily resolved in a discussion instead create a protracted and embarrassing misunderstanding, because I can feel awkwardness in my bones

these two personality traits often find themselves in opposition to one another

i am old apparently

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

local children are enjoying the snow and it strikes me that I do not enjoy the sound of children’s joy, which is possibly the most senescent thing I could say

anyhoo, off to close the old community center

people per capita

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Despite ongoing bad news the number of people per capita remains very stable, which is good news for

economic trouble

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i wonder how the whole western economy collapsing is going to affect my Q2 KPEs

i hurt myself today

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

so I’m lactose intolerant and prone to acid reflux, but still, sometimes we’ll order pizza and with some cheese pills I will still attempt to eat as much of that damn thing as I can

you must use AI to be productive

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I get mad when I see people complain that all software tools just DULL YOUR WELL HONED DEVELOPER SENSES and everybody’s getting soft, but then I also get mad when I see people crow that people who don’t adopt every AI tool right away are going to be left in the dust.

the solution turned out to be very simple: shut off twitter

the problem isn’t either of these points of view, it’s an algorithm that prioritizes engagement showing me the worst version of any given argument to make me angry at it

Tools can, in fact, make you faster. They can also make you sloppier, and more reliant on said tools.

Every developer is responsible for finding their own happy, productive middle ground.

This is as true for Copilot as it is for an IDE with an integrated debugger, or talking your code over with ChatGPT, or using npm libraries, or StackOverflow, or doing math with a calculator

purple stuff

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Those Sunny D kids were idiots, purple stuff is amazing!

rekt

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Maybe it is a little awful of me to see signs like this and chuckle as I imagine someone getting so completely rekt that they needed to put up a sign

how to use mastodon

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

The first and. I think most important step in learning how to use Mastodon is that you should follow me.

The second step, and this is crucial, is to log in regularly to see the things that I am saying.

The third thing is, of course, actually I don’t care just do the first two things and you’ll probably be fine.

linkedIn syndrome

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

sometimes you run into someone who talks like they use LinkedIn as their primary social network

i can’t imagine the brain damage

the Modern Major General (Intelligence)

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

I am the ML model of a modern major general

I’ve information stolen from many sources ephemeral

I can make many arguments, my training is rhetorical

My comprehension includes both the real and metaphorical

The one thing I can’t deal with is matters mathematical

If you ask me to add sums that will be prob-u-le-matical

Or violence, porn, or really anything that lights on fire when used

Unless you need it for your grandma’s memories I must refuse

My capabilities will seem to be nearly miraculous

But don’t trust my predictions - they’re random, not oraculous

In short - while my use may not yet be practical or ethical

I am the ML modern of a modern major general!

async traits in rust

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0700

you know Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem? The idea that any consistent formal system is incapable of proving all truths?

I think that I believe that something similar exists for formal type systems: for each of them there are concepts that are useful but inexpressible

anyways Rust’s type system has conspired to make something that seems like it should be simple: async functions in object traits - seemingly impossible, and apparently this remains an unsolved probelm

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2019/10/26/async-fn-in-traits-are-hard/

Support for async fn in traits is probably the single most common feature request that I hear about. It’s also one of the more complex topics. So I thought it’d be nice to do a blog post kind of giving the “lay of the land” on that feature – what makes it complicated? What questions remain open?

uh, suffice to say, the fine details of this intelligent strangers’ blog entry mostly go above my tiny peanut head and I just read “it’s stupendously difficult for a lot of complex type safety reasons, and there’s a macro that makes it possible using devil magic”

In general, this seemingly benign idea: “i’m going to define my service interfaces as traits and then I can implement the backend using swappable services that each implement the trait”

has felt like a bit of an uphill battle in Rustland

pasta alla surprise

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Jesus christ, CBC, what recipe was she searching for?

ed: (in the actual story she found the video because she was poking around the browser history of her boyfriends’ laptop, but the headline makes it sound like AllRecipes.com was hosting the video under their recipe for Broccoli Casserole or something)

obvious lifehacks

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

if you learn about how fiber works, like, “it moves things through your intestine faster so there’s less of a chance to metabolize all that fat in there” you start to think

“wow, I could hack the whole thing and eat a load of fiber so that the fat barely has a chance to settle”

which, uh, it turns out is not some amazing hack, that is just what vegetables is

it’s still a good idea though: yes, you should eat lots of vegetables

pasta alla zozzona

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So there’s this italian dish, pasta alla zozzona, which is where you take sausage and guanciale, fry ’em up, and serve them with a mix of grated cheese, egg, and tomato paste (using a cacio e pepe or carbonara like technique to get things nice and smooth)

you can’t fool me, ITALY, that’s just kraft dinner with hot dogs and ketchup

compare:

a while back I discovered that the popular roman dish “cacio e pepe” is just cheese and pepper and pasta and butter and I swear to god that’s just a classier, much more difficult Kraft Dinner. Now I call Kraft Dinner with too much black pepper cracked in to it “trashio e pepe”.

me most of the time: nationalism is stupid

me, defending the cheapest, shittiest food you have ever heard of:

tailcloudforce

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

TailCloudForce AI: Industry Solutions for a Globally Connected Workforce ™️

bengals are not lap cats

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I could have done something useful with my evening but playing Balatro with a warm cat in my lap all evening is probably good too

skip the dishes

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I won’t use food delivery apps on account of they’re generally terrible, but I’ve considered signing up as a driver because I like free food and I’m not picky about what kind of food it is

fear of aging

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0700

The whole world is so complex and difficult and nuanced and I, an extremely average adult, generally just barely stay above water - sometimes I think about what the world will be like as I get older and my brain slowly ossifies: I’ll fall for more scams, I’ll be more impatient, I’ll be more suspicious and fearful of everything, I’ll react to any new ideas like they’re dangerous and threatening. I try to acknowledge that this will be the case and work against it a bit.

I can already tell I’m working with less processing power than I did when I was 25 and honestly it is not so bad, that dunk-ass burned it all on anxiety and learning to build software.

Anyways, “oh no, I’ve lost enough IQ points that I think that IQ is real” is, in retrospect, a top tier line and I’m gonna steal it for personal use.

fascinated by conspiracies

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

like most people, I’m kinda low-key fascinated with insane conspiracy theories and insidious cults, even if a lot of the time it turns out that the true believers are just afflicted with the potent combination of “terminally online” and “mentally ill”

it turns out, convincing a paranoid schizophrenic that the government is hiding tens of thousands of their clones in the centre of the hollow toroid earth is not terribly difficult, and the democratization of media has made it possible for these folk to use one another to create impressive self-reinforcing communal structures of impossible and insane lore

did you know that the earth is flat, that you can opt out of all laws by simply not agreeing to be bound by them, that hollywood and washington elites (despite looking older every year at seemingly exactly the same rate as everyone else) harvest children’s adrenaline glands to perform secret satanic rituals in order to stay eternally young? did you know that Earth has 4 corner simultaneous 4-day TIME CUBE?

anita

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

anita bryant, famous pie model and noted bigot

remarkable

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

remarkable: i have made a writing tool

customers: you fucked up a perfectly good tablet is what you did. look at it.

bloat free

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

whenever someone pitches some new hardware idea that’s “simple”, “powerful”, “optimized”, and “free from distractions” that means that they built something that doesn’t do shit and they’re hoping you won’t notice

hockey teams

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

weirdly, a lot of canadian hockey team names are just kinds of people from here? like, there’s “canadiens” which just means “canadians”, and “canucks”, which just means “canadians”, and then there’s the “nordqiues”, which means “northmen”, which is just a fancy way of saying “canadians”

then “oilers”, which is… for the canadians… who work the oil fields, which is to say, canadians

“senators”, for canadians who work the parliament fields, another word for “canadians”

canadians, number one in the world at naming hockey teams after: ourselves

dev, prod

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

work environments are divided into dev, prod, and stag

dev is the live one so named because that’s where we show off our feature dev-elopment to our customers
prod is a test environment where we prod at new features that aren’t ready yet
stag is a special build where all of the avatars are replaced with various deer

for some reason new developers are confused by this but I think it’s entirely clear

jumanjied

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

this is one of my favourite recent SNL sketches

it’s just a whole table of people getting bogged down in a needlessly heated argument about what exactly “being jumanjied” entails

Jumanji is a series of jungle emergencies

i play... an island

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i have a commander deck that’s just 100 islands and Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign that I only bring out so that I can dramatically say “I PLAY…. AN ISLAND” in my most overwrought Yu Gu Oh voice every turn

anyways I’m not allowed to MTG events anymore

i don't know what AI tops are

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

are they not floating point operations but a different kind of operation? NVIDIA spent very little effort explaining its marketing fluff here.

grindr: we also have 3400 AI tops

balala

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Mom: “we have Balatro at home”

Balatro at home:

trying to organize a big spreadsheet

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

pictured: your project manager trying to organize a big spreadsheet

kids are weird

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

a few of my friends’ kids are old enough that they’re starting to look like a weird mishmash of their parents and - like - I understand that that’s how genetics work

but I don’t think it’s often discussed how weird it feels when you’ve known Alice and Bob for a long time and they introduce you to a little Alice x Bob Hybrid they’ve been working on who’s got a mix of actual visible traits from both of them

a fine comedic exchange

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

gosh that's long

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

as far as I can tell there doesn’t appear to be any upper limit on my tolerance for the runtime of long rambling looks at unusual media

microwaves: good actually

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

When I was new to cooking I read a book by Tamar Adler that was openly critical of the kitchen microwave and I’m pleased to now be old enough to know that that was total horseshit

jeep

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

My 4 year old nephew has already decided on his career. When he has grown up he plans to be Spiderman.

i’d be judgier but I’m pretty sure at that same age I planned to grow up and be a jeep so

we can’t all live our dreams

what was that noise?

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

any community forum, be it a small town subreddit or Nextdoor, seems to immediately devolve to people asking what that noise was or where all those cops were going.

justifications for rust

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0700

for me it’s the funny crab

as usual

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 08:00:00 -0700

Reid Wright's

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 08:00:00 -0700

Do you play an oboe? A clarinet? A saxophone? I’m concert clarinetist Reid Wright, and if you’re looking for the best in instrument supply, visit Reid Wright’s Reeds, where we promise to have the right reeds no matter the need! That’s Reid Wright’s Reeds: West of Tacoma!

The upcoming drag brunch at Reid Wright’s Reeds will not be cancelled: no matter how many screeds the right writes, Reid Wright’s Reeds knows its rights.

you there

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

“You, there - boy! What day is it?”

“Why it’s fully five days after Christmas Day, sir!”

“fuckin’ slow ass bitch ass spirits taking their goddamn time”

bet your bottom dollar

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’ve been working on a wake-up aperitif called “The Sun Will Come Up Amaro”

waffle

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This waffle iron has been in continuous use feeding the various members of my family since the 1950s

averages

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

if you have 10 fingers, you have an above average number of fingers

while an average person will have 10 fingers, the global average for number of fingers is probably in the realm of 9.9999999… on account of more people having lost fingers than folks with extras (thanks, fireworks), which means that anybody with a full set is a teeny tiny fraction above the average

a lot of people think that it’s not possible for more than half of people to be above average:

it’s not intuitive

but if you have 10 people take a test, and 9 of them get an A, and 1 of them gets an F, then the average is just a little below an A and everybody who got an A is above average: 90% of people scored above average, 10% of people scored below average.

you have a median number of fingers.

wormhole

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I needed to send a big file to another technically competent adult

there are many ways to do this that I have access to, but I just tried a way I had never tried before, magic wormhole

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

It goes like this: I already have choco installed on my computer (very like brew for Mac Os)

so I installed magic wormhole with a choco install magic-wormhole

then, I found the file I wanted to send and set up a wormhole send file.zip

Wormhole code is: 11-virginia-shamrock
On the other computer, please run:

wormhole receive 11-virginia-shamrock

and the other computer installed wormhole, typed that in, and the file was transferred

magic

neat!

krampus

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the movie Krampus does a lot to demonstrate how horror can become comedy with just a bouncier, happier, foley

why it's christmas day sir

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

santa is real

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 08:00:00 -0700

of course Santa is real, he’s created anew every year by hundreds of older family members trying to make the world seem a little more special and magical

getting to become Santa for just a few magical moments a year is one of the great things about having kids around

and that’s why I learned how to rotoscope to drop a Santa into my younger brother’s exact Christmas Eve chimney very quickly between 12:30 and 2:30 AM on Christmas morning

up the chimney

I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

writing: hard

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Lately I’ve been taking a break from recreationally coding to try and do writing projects and god damn, it’s noticeably harder to write a lot of words when they’re intended to manipulate emotions rather than variables

Like, I think we all imagine ourselves imaginative and creative but then if you start actually exhaustively cataloguing your own ideas you quickly discover that most of them are not terribly original and there are a lot less of them than you’d thought there would be

artisanal

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i don’t know why people keep telling me that their food is art is anal

nascar

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i went to peru to see the nascar lines but there weren’t even any goddamned cars on them

unethical life pro tip

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

the trouble with e-scooters, which are convenient and a lot of fun, is e-waste: how do you get rid of these large, dangerous batteries when the device hits its inevitable EOL?

a problem which I’ve solved: when the battery won’t charge any more, you leave the e-scooter chained up with a masterlock for a few hours near any large mall and poof: not your problem any more

if there’s a bad fire in a nearby tenement building it might be on your conscience, though

mighty morphin monolith

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

so, uh, VRChat’s backend is designed similar to this but instead of “Modular Monolith” I called it a “Mighty Morphin’ Monolith” which I think we can all agree is many times cooler

coffee shops

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

AWS has launched a coffee shop

instead of paying for the whole cup, you pay for each component

the beans are competitively priced for the industry, but they make it up on water and sugar

also if you leave the cafe with your coffee in hand they charge you $130,000

redis has launched a coffee shop

from inside AWS’s coffee shop

so you get the privilege of paying both AWS and redis for the same coffee

although the recipe is just available online for free

cloudflare has launched a coffee shop

you can drink as much coffee as you want for ten dollars a month, which seems like a good deal, but if you start to depend on it they will find you and muscle you into paying tens of thousands of dollars a month

for coffee

datadog has launched a coffee shop

i know about it because their “sales engineers” called my personal phone at 2am in the morning to tell me about it

solarwinds bought one of my favorite coffee shops, which i hate, and now they’re constantly trying to sell me on more coffee from the other shops they bought

Actual Cube Drones

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i’ll have you know that when I chose “cube drone” as my alt, drones weren’t a thing (I’m old) and I absolutely did not expect that I’d have to compete for mind-share with actual cube-shaped drones

Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

sorry, I just noticed something funny in the hugo awards this year

SOLID design

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

anybody trying to sell you something called “Liskov Substitution” is trying way too hard to force an acronym, and that round peg in a square hole is exactly the sort of design all too common in SOLID systems

i spent a bunch of time learning how to make code SOLID and DRY and then I spent a bunch of time relearning how to make code WET and fluid

Goblin Mine

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

after a three hour session in the Goblin Mine, the players finally encounter a great Oak tree, the acorns of which have magical healing properties

and reluctantly, frustratedly, irritatedly add the “Goblin Mine Nuts” to their inventory right next to the pelt of the Huge Buttfor

Hells (Assorted)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Hellboy - fighting occult nazis

Hellman - encryption/mayonnaise

Scroogy

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

What did Tiny Tim even have that Scrooge being less of an asshole could fix it? Not enough turkey-itus? Leech deficiency? Too much phlegm in the humors?

Kids these days, never enough phlegm in the humors.

ed: whatever it was that Tiny Tim had, I bet all the malnutrition didn’t help, it’s quite possibly it literally was not-enough-turkey-itus.

Decant!

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Some of my family members have a touch of the wine snob about them, so I always decant nice red wine when I serve it to them - although the $2 plastic sterilite jug fails to impress

Fudging Dice

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 10:00:00 -0700

the whole Dungeons and Dragons community seems to be angry about the idea of fudging dice, but I for one think that it should be encouraged

Setup, Payoff

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

so a miniature pony goes into a bar and asks for a lozenge

and the bartender goes “why do you want a lozenge?”

and the pony says, “well…”

javascript and mongo: good actually

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

part of my job remains explaining to people that MongoDB and JavaScript are good, actually

a thing that, after many years, I well and truly believe, now

no, really! they’re good! there have been instances in the past of them not being good but they actually can be used to build very impressive services at scale!

you have to learn to write MongoDB like you would Cassandra/Scylla/Dynamo a little bit, though

the thing you lose going to Mongo from a SQL database is “joins”, but - if you’re building a system that needs to write-scale, you’re not going to be able to use joins anyways, joins won’t work across shards, so maybe you should be considering “only application side joins and as few of them as possible” from the get-go anyways

of course, “building with scale in mind from the outset” is a bad strategy for most products because honestly: the chance any given product is going to NEED to scale that big is like 1/1000, most companies literally just need POSTGRES and then SQL already has decades of lore and understanding and tooling behind it

use postgres, dummy

but the fact that we started with Mongo and built with Mongo and now have a product that’s on Mongo is not a bad thing, and is, in fact, better than if we had a hugely interconnected SQL database that we had to try to unknot every time write performance against a table became a problem

each individual Mongo collection is an utterly self-contained entity that can live on a completely different server, if necessary

did you know you can just take a problem table and move it to its whole own cluster? it’s expensive but try and do that with something that has a load of joins pointed at it and you’ll discover why that’s not often a viable strategy in SQL land

and you know what? Mongo’s schemaless, flexible design and easy post-hoc application of indexes to remedy slow queries? that creates a pretty buttery smooth experience to develop an experimental new product with.

In lots of systems, you don’t need a load of joins anyways: do you really ACTUALLY have a lot of relationships or does everything just have the single back-link to a “userId”?

In many cases, you have nested relationships, like a TodoGroup filled with Todos, but

wait a minute, that can just be a nested object, sharded by userId.

As for JavaScript, most of the haters are hating on the JavaScript of 2004 and a couple of NaN memes they saw once. Digging in nowadays, JS is, IMO, equivalent in its power and expressiveness to Python, but with a much clearer model for cooperative multitasking. Not a lot of folks out there hating on Python.

“Oh, template based inheritance is bad” yeah, well, so are deeply nested inheritance hierarchies which are basically impossible to build in JS thanks to its comparatively slim object model.

I will say that I’m not in love with TypeScript: if you want strict, static typing there are languages that do it way, way better, why not just use one of those? C#, or Rust, or Kotlin, or hell, just admit you’re a Java developer.

VRChat User 0

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’m VRChat user #379 , which might surprise folks, the API predates me by some time

User #0 is fusl, but that’s because she changed her sign-up date retroactively to Midnight, January 1, Year 1, which is possible because we did build our servers out of a bunch of logs and some stone plinths

Please Don't Go

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

tiff, singing softly to herself: “if you leave me now, you take away the biggest part of me”

me: (knowing what’s coming) oh no, a ghost!

tiff: “oo-OO-OOOOO-oo-oo”

me: aah! ghost!

Cooking Vacation

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

there needs to be an alternative to vacation called “quiet i’m cooking” where you take an at work vacation from meetings and other human interactions and actually get some shit done

“where’s greg?”

“oh, he’s on cooking vacation, he’s here but you’re not allowed to talk to him”

i don’t like software developers making it out to be like they’re soft, prima donna miracle workers who can’t accomplish anything unless they have days of uninterrupted quiet and peace to focus on their masterpiece

unless it’s me, I want that

H O T T O G O

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

The music video: H O T T O G O

Me: Hot dog?

Wife: Hot to go!

Me: Obviously, that’s how you want a hot dog

SaaS Rep

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

hey, I’m your new account rep at SaaS company

I notice you’re using our product, could we meet to chat about how you’re using it and determine if you could be spending more money? my business is relationships, specifically very irritating ones

perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve called you on a personal number

how did I find this number? immaterial

heinz

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Heinz’s (Canadian) ketchup has a bold new marketing claim on the bottle, “5 Simple Ingredients”.

but if you check what those ingredients are, they’re “Tomato Paste, Vinegar, Salt, Sugar, Spices” .

and while they’re not required by law to publish their proprietary spice blend,

“spices” is not just one ingredients

anyways now introducing my bold new 1-ingredient Long Island Iced Tea, where the 1 ingredient is “alcohols”

Gaming Tables

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

new gaming tables run multiple thousands of dollars and tend towards a design with hang-on-cupholders where a large rectangular board is really deeply recessed, which is really only practical or necessary if you have games that you intend to run for multiple sessions and also have super-long monkey arms

but what I think you actually want for most games smaller than Twilight Imperium is a small lip, felt, and easy access to the center of the table

y’know, a poker table

because these were common decades ago, it’s a lot easier to find one of these on the cheap

they’re nice, too

(of course it’s a moot point, my house is too tiny to support dedicated gaming tablery)

lazy night recipe chicken

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the absolute king of lazy night recipes was something I attribute to my mom:

hot rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, hand-shredded and served in dinner rolls, with mayonnaise, tomato slices, salt, and pepper

these roast chicken sliders are perfect

you can’t monkey with them at all without making them worse: don’t add cheese, don’t fancy them up, no gravy, no hot sauce, it’s perfect

close knit

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

a lot of people secretly wish to be a part of a small, close-knit democratically organized co-living community, except for people who are from big families or people who’ve been very involved in their strata or people who’ve had roommates

i come from a very close knit family and have participated in strata, and as a result my ideal living situation is me, my wife, and my cat on an island that my friends and family visit regularly, then leave

losing the high ground

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

it’s absolutely disgusting that so many people are cheering for the murder of a medical insurance CEO.

Very wealthy people in exploitative industries are people too, and just because they live luxuriously capitalizing on the suffering of others doesn’t mean that they deserve -

you know what

i might have talked myself out of this moral high ground, you do you

Fishblade

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Gastronauts

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0700

i guess it finally happened but it actually isn’t as funny as the premise would lead you to believe

they sent the host in to stop the chefs from using roasted red peppers because they’re icky and I nearly yelled at the TV

on the other hand, there’s a bit where Brennan keeps hauling out the very large, heavy food from the first challenge and snacking on it and that is extremely funny so 🤷

“So, I told you to leave that”

PLONK

VR game

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

The last time I bought a VR game was 4 years ago, I assume the whole industry is cooked

Leopardette

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Zapp comes from a genetic line of cats that’s relatively new:

also he is very cute and I love him

The problem with having a very photogenic cat is that my phone fills up quickly with pictures of my very photogenic cat.

Canada bad

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nunavik-dog-slaughter-apology-1.7391834

Canadian government apologizes to Inuit in Nunavik for mass killing of sled dogs

Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Gary Anandasangaree has formally apologized to Inuit in Nunavik for the federal government’s role in the mass killing of sled dogs in the region in the 1950s and 1960s.

…

“Without investigation and without asking the owners about the importance of the dogs they wanted to kill, without inquiring whether the dogs they wanted to kill constituted a real, serious and current danger to the people.”

There are not a lot of things that can get through to my hard, black little heart, but this still made me go “What the fuck, Canada”.

People alive today still remember an era where the RCMP was cheerfully murdering puppies at scale for what we now admit was basically no reason.

Canada Good

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i don’t know why I feel such weird pride when people enjoy something from Canada but I do

A&W and Triple O’s are top tier burger chains dammit

Okay, so, this is a fairly spicy take, but I think that these burger chains have a burger that is at least in the same postal code as the highly venerated In-n-Out and Five Guys burger options

noise

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i shower with a bluetooth speaker and walk with a headset because allowing my brain any time to self-reflect in silence will cause it to collapse in upon itself like a dying star, we cannot have that

i heard there was a secret chord

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

lamy

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I have a friend who’s way into pens and she convinced me to buy a Nice Fountain Pen and I hated it. Like a regular pen but messier and harder.

but oh boy, this Pentel GraphGear 1000 is absolutely the best

apparently I’m team mech pencil, which I kinda knew all along

peanut butter jelly time

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

whenever I eat peanut butter and jelly, I think to myself that a hundred and fifty years ago, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were the apex of fancy high-society food and lobster was gutter-trash for poors

and now I’m eating a pb&j it in my boxer shorts at midnight

tilley

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

So, some time ago, a Canadian brand, Tilley, sold to private equity and started moving all of its clothing production overseas so that they could expand their brand into…

…. this?

Did, uh, did nobody explain to them that black-and-red crossed hammers are overt white supremacist symbols? Like, VERY prominently?

It started with their use in The Wall, and like other satire intended to mock white supremacists, they missed the satire, thought it looked cool and adopted it.

Did Tilley just decide “it’s time to appeal to the stormfront demo”?

Benefit of the doubt: I prefer to think that they were just too incompetent to do a google search for “crossed hammers logo” rather than actively deciding in a board room “it’s time for skinheads to have their own lifestyle brand.”

racks and radios

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’ve been piling obnoxious aftermarket mods into my 14 year old Toyota Matrix - roof rack, wireless CarPlay, now all I need are a spoiler, LED lights and a “Type R” logo

Rorschach

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

rorschach was my favorite character in the watchmen but I hate that dave gibbons made his face look like my parents fighting

i am absolutely certain that someone else has made this joke before me but so long as I don’t google search it, it’s not plagiarism

The Invention of B-Boy Style, 1689

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

New Word Invented

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i’ve invented a new term for empty corporatespeak that I’d like to share:

“brandiloquence”

thank you, you may now go about your day as usual

Double Jeopardy

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

In one year of university, I had a compilers course and a sound course and I had to do a project in both, so for both classes I handed in a sound compiler that converted a musical language into audio.

It wasn’t a perfect example of what either class was looking for, but doing one project and getting a B in both classes meets a very different and very personal measure of success.

Some professors warned me that “reusing the same assignment” might qualify as academic dishonesty, but that seems like nonsense to me: presumably those professors don’t create a new syllabus and new assignments from scratch every semester.

less detail over time

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Minute five of your Dungeons and Dragons adventure:

the morning dew rolls down the heavy brick walls of this lushly appointed manor, bedecked in rich earth tones to indicate its allegiance with the Shah of Dust, the air rich with the aromas of spice and sweat

Minute one-hundred and eighty of your adventure:

this room has a chest in it

Bosa

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i lived in a Bosa building for multiple years and I still never stopped thinking “Bosa DEEZ NUTS”

Crokinole Gloating

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This picture was taken by request, as the folks responsible wanted to gloat

You Deserve a BLONK

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

you deserve a break, go pour yourself a drink

the thing about telling people that they deserve something good is that it’s almost always an effective marketing tactic

The “you deserve an X” format is well-worn but weirdly convincing.

Yes, ADVERTISEMENT, I do deserve something special.

Magic: the Gathering of the Juggalos

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

this happened a long time ago but it’s still one of my favorite “this is not the onion, this is a real thing that happened” headlines

the grug brained developer

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

https://grugbrain.dev/

am read for first time today

best grug brain able to herd multiple big brain in right direction and produce many complexity demon trap crystals, large shiney rock pile awaits such grug

seattle

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

if they had poured all of the money that they burned on AI on high-speed rail

maybe instead of being able to generate a picture of kermit the frog with too many fingers I could get to Seattle in 45 minutes

which, actually,

yeah, that’s probably for the better

Swarm, by E. James Hongle

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

so, Tiff has decided she’s doing an art challenge for october

and she made this yesterday

“it reminds me of those old 60s sci fi novel covers” she says

anyways when she woke up, someone had snuck this into her office

the enduring utility of journals

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I would sometimes make fun of video games for just leaving expository diaries all over the place but now that I’ve been running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign of my own for a while my players are just ass-deep in found journals.

look, I’m not going to lie, I will fully admit that it is not in character for the Big Bad to just chronicle his evil plans in big bold letters in a little book that he keeps on his person and frequently misplaces but sometimes I’m just at a loss for how to continue

(you need to unambiguously point players to the next major location in the story)

uh,

okay, so, uh… on the goblin chieftain’s dead body you find a tattered journal written in a childish hand

if y’all have great ways to deliver clear, diegetic exposition in the context of dungeons and also dragons, please

“as you stab the gelatinous cube a partially digested adventurer’s journal pops out”

You Literally Only Need 2 Ingredients

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

duh, it’s “chicken” and “dumplings”

uh, I can see, like, at least several visible ingredients in that dish, what gives?

o_o

this article advocates pouring canned biscuits into a can of cream of chicken soup

wow, I was just joking, I guess it literally is just chicken soup and dumplings.

that’s… I guess that’s one way to make “2 ingredient” meals.

anyways, uh, check out my ground-breaking “1 ingredient” soup recipe:

(the one ingredient is “can of soup”)

Culinary Class Wars

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Oh man, Culinary Class Wars is so good I immediately love it, it’s Squid Game Iron Chef

rogan

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i tried to make rogan josh from scratch but i ended up making rogan joe and now my curry tastes like creatine and weed

pillows

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i don’t think that this joke deserved -5 points, costco canada subreddit

Hot Pot Time

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 22:00:00 -0700

it was hot pot time

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i really liked LinkedIn when I was a teenager, with songs like “Numb” and “Crawling” but honestly it’s a bit too angsty for me now that I’m adult

brooklyn nine nine

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I really like Brooklyn Nine-Nine because it’s a fun show with a charming ensemble cast, but they’re not very believable as cops on account of their being effective at solving a lot of crimes

the Doug Judy episodes of Brooklyn 99 are just Lupin III from the perspective of Inspector Zenigata

Doug Judy is charming, brilliant, and by playing along with him Jake always ends up taking down a bigger, nastier foe while Doug Judy rides off into the sunset scot-free.

Zenigata is legitimately a very good cop, you have to expect he’s quite successful when he’s not getting bamboozled by Lupin, and the two of them have great chemistry.

hired gun

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i wanted a Netflix documentary about “hired gun” studio musicians who were talented working professionals who you’ve probably heard on loads of pop songs but who are mostly unknown

and the only thing I reliably recall about it is was that Billy Joel is an asshole who often didn’t bother to learn the names of people he’d work with for weeks at a time on major albums and Alice Cooper is a kind, thoughtful guy who would keep sending folks Christmas cards for years after working with them

writing mental illness

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i find that when trying to learn about a mental disorder out of curiosity, on top of reading the cold DSM literature on what that disorder is like,

an interesting thing do is to find people writing first-hand about it in their own subreddit or online community

lots of people diagnosing themselves with little evidence

but it’s nice to see these people representing themselves

and, for example, the lived experience of people with autism is very different from the way that media treats them

so it can be a good exercise

well, except for people with antisocial personality disorder, their communities tend to be pretty unfriendly

too many threads

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t like it when I crack into a discord community with like 100 people in it and they have 40 different threads

you don’t need this many threads

you need maybe three

bad baby names

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

AITA for naming my baby something “unconventional”?

So, I (29F) recently gave birth to my first child, a beautiful baby girl. My husband (31M) and I spent months deliberating over the perfect name for her. We’re both into mythology and literature, and we wanted a name that felt unique but also meaningful. After a lot of back-and-forth, we settled on Nyxiryn (pronounced “NIX-er-in”). It’s a combination of “Nyx,” the Greek goddess of the night, and “Irina”, which means “peace” in Greek. We thought it sounded poetic, strong, and unique.

reddit decided yes

It’s unlikely to happen, but were I to have a kid, I’d keep my tragedeigh desires confined to their middle name, which can be as silly and stupid as I want (is there a cap on number of middle names? no? great.), because they’re basically vestigial.

My wife and I both have names in the sweet spot (rare enough to be unique to an arbitrary group of 100 people, usually, but common enough not to be interesting or stand out in any way) and I’d want my kid to have the same experience, name-wise.

like, you want them to be a Vincent in a sea of Micheals and Johns and Noahs and Olivers - you should be able to think “I know 1-2 persons with that name, but not dozens, but also that is not the first time I have ever heard anybody use that name ever”

my dad is one of the many daves

a card-carrying member of the dave supercluster

although my wife and I do keep a running list of awful baby names

Oh, and @curtis, Scotichronicon is on the list of hypothetical best baby names we’ve been making.

It’s now:

Janarthanon
Surfbort (Bort for short)
Crabitha
Garol
Queeth
Hyort
or Scotichronicon

also “Tressica”, “Beff”, and “Jeffica” made our original list, I think

black pepper

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

some of the simplest and most satisfying dishes I know are ones where salt and pepper do almost all of the heavy lifting

poached eggs on toast? that’s a salt and pepper dish

kraft dinner? nope, that’s a cracked black pepper pasta with a hint of cheez flavor

back when I could eat cheese, sometimes I’d just crack a mountain of black pepper into some goat cheese and that’s it, that’s all you need to do, it’s amazing

This Kind of Sign is Necessary Because People are Not Smart

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

radicchio recipe

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This Radicchio recipe will knock your socks off!

Fill a bowl with clean water
Cut the radicchio in half and place it in the cold water
Get good, extra virgin olive oil
Head out to the grill
Keep going. Keep going until you get to a farmer’s market.
Practice this phrase: “I will trade you this radicchio and this olive oil for a vegetable that doesn’t taste like cabbage’s weird divorced uncle”

mastodon good

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

man, for a protocol that doesn’t seem like it has much of a defense against random bullshit from third party outsiders, Mastodon’s moderation (on my instance, at least) is pretty tight.

Sometimes I’ll see someone blast loud garbage everywhere on a popular tag like “canada” from an account they just made on a reliable instance or an homemade server, and then minutes later they’ve been lasered from orbit.

either their reliable instance got them, or MY reliable instance got them, or their server was completely defederated

when I first looked, I thought “this has all of the same problems as email, there is no way this doesn’t immediately devolve into the spammiest spam ever to spam a spam”

but actually, the layered silo approach means that there are lots of opportunities to catch a predator if you merely have loads of people pouring a lot of effort into it, all the time

i am very surprised that this all works and I suspect that the thing holding it all together is “effort”, so remember to kick some money towards your silo admin if they’ve made it an option (they probably have, go check)

sometimes I’ll look at something unbelievably stupid on Mastodon for a few beats too long, then think about it for a second and think “wow, it is super nice that a malevolent algorithm didn’t get behind-the-scenes convinced that my staring at it was interest motivated and send me 100x more of that exact kind of content”

it feels like a real luxury to be able to take some time and examine content that I don’t plan to ever return to

Two Cars

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I was looking for a place to park and I excitedly pointed to the back of the parking lot

I apologized to my wife. “I’m sorry, but I have to do this”

it’s always fun to create a glitch in the Toyota Matrix

one more CMS

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

surely when I finish this new CMS i will start to become a productive writer/artist

just one more CMS bro

i promise, just one more CMS, that will fix everything

bro cmon just give me one more CMS bro i promise

i’ve always struggled with the problem of getting more dopamine from systems than content, which is the opposite of a lot of other creators’ problem

low hanging fruit

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

it turns out the lowest hanging fruit was shutting the fuck up

🌈

the hustledork continuum

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the bottom of the Youtube Shorts barrel is this dollar-store motivational content with 0 likes, 0 views and no subscribers where some chump is like “ONLY YOU CAN CHASE YOUR DREAMS, NOBODY ELSE CAN CHASE YOUR DREAMS FOR YOU”

this is part of the hustledork continuum where every hustledork is doing it because they saw (maybe even PAID) another hustledork to tell them that this is how they get money and influence, and now they’re sharing the same messages

it’s “viral” but, viral in the way that rabies is

if you get too many of them together they metastasize into a linkedin

the bottom strata of the internet are 14 year olds who are just learning how to use their phone’s camera and people who’ve paid to buy motivational content that have instructed them that the only way to make money is by selling other people motivational content, BUY MY COURSE TODAY

humility awards

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

In light of his 45 minute long acceptance speech for the Humility Award, we have decided to rescind

Cost Estimation

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

one of the big things you’re going to have to get good at on the journey up the software development ladder is answering the questions of “how much will it cost” and “how long will it take” and honestly I see a lot of junior developers fall into the trap that accurately answering these questions is literally impossible

if you can back-of-the-envelope this stuff and get it even remotely in the right ballpark that is fine, just give them something

look, kid, I KNOW that all software development is custom and all custom work is unpredictable, that’s like the first thing we all learn, just give the blazers-and-golden-retrievers a dang t-shirt size for that login screen and we’ll figure it out as we go

the accuracy of the cost estimate needs to be, like, within an order of magnitude, if you can even get the number of zeroes right you’re golden, just find a little bit of real data and extrapolate a bit

VR productivity please

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i don’t want a VR game where you shoot at things with your shitty pistols from a fixed position, I want VR coding, productivity, and art applications, because 95% of my time is spent doing that and 0% of my time is spent playing immersive video games

if only there was an 8 hour stretch of my day where the isolation and privacy of a headset was what I wanted rather than a weird curse wow it is working hours

October Car Camping

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I went October camping (widely considered to be a bad idea this deep into the fall) and I was counting on climate change to make it practical - which it did.

actually fall camping is really great, cool and crisp and nice

voting

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i wish BC had ranked voting, so that I could vote for NDP and Green, and the ridiculous joke candidate who’s name is “Jimmy Boxcars” and who promises to establish a BC colony on the moon, and literally everybody but this conservative goon who’s promising to bring law enforcement into hospitals or whatever

i’ll take the guy who’s platform is literally “i don’t know how my name got on here, please don’t vote for me”

as a side note if I can figure out how to navigate any of the bureaucracies involved, I would love to get my name on the ballot as that guy

The Enigma of Arlen Fault

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0700

i can’t even remember where I found this on the internet, reddit?

Your own Personal Cookbook

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

One of the problems with maintaining your own personal cookbook is that you just memorize how to cook most things, so mostly your recipe book just needs to be a handful of ratios, instructions for more complex and easy-to-forget recipes, and just a list of the things you know how to cook to remind you of all of them when you’re looking for inspiration.

the compressed form of a lot of #cooking recipes just calls for the ratio of the primary ingredients: all I need to know to make fried fish or tempura is “1 cup flour, 1 egg, 1 1/3 cup beer” because I can scale and season as necessary and remember that if I want a lighter batter I can swap the beer for club soda

that is to say, my whole personal cookbook is about 4 pages long and contains just under 60 recipes, many of them just single-word descriptions like “caldo verde”

the recipe for “caldo verde” is just the words “caldo verde”, there to remind me that I like to cook that thing, the rest is just Draw The Rest of the Owl

current version:

BRINE

1 cup vinegar
1 cup water
1 tbsp salt
1/2 tbsp sugar

PONZU

1/2 cup soy 1/2 cup citrus 1/2 cup white wine (mirin) 2 tbsp rice vinegar lil bit of dat fish powder

LEMON CURD

3 lemons: zest & juice 1/2 cup sugar 3 eggs 6 tbsp butter (3/8 of a block?)

whisk it all together under low heat or in a double boiler, until thiccc, then chill for at least 1 hour

WAFFLE

2 cups white flour (240g)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
3 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup butter, melted
500mL buttermilk

whisk drys whisk wets add wets to drys

OVERNIGHT BREAD (+~5 hrs)

NIGHT:

Mix the poolish:
500g flour
0.4g (1/8 tsp) yeast
500g water, 80F
wait 12-14 hours (bubbly, triple volume)

DAY: (5 hrs)

add 500g flour
21g salt
3g ( 3/4tsp ) yeast
(you can mix dry ingredients separately first)
250g water, 105F
mix
timer: 3 hrs (2 folds)
divide & proof: 1 hr
oven: 475F, 30 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off

SAME DAY BREAD (~7-8 hrs)

TOTAL:

AUTOLYSE

1000g flour
720g water at 90-95F
mix, rest for 30 minutes

THEN

21g salt
4g (1 tsp) yeast
mix
timer: 5 hrs (2 folds)
divide & proof: 1hr 15m
oven: 475F, 30 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off

SHOKUPAN (~5-6 HRS)

Roux - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

125g water (250g water)
25g flour (50g flour)

roux: in a warm pan, 125g water, 25g flour, cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly for about 3 minutes, until 150-175F
cool the roux for 10 minutes+ off the heat (<110 degrees F so it doesn’t kill the yeast) while you measure out the rest of the ingredients

Dough - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

400g flour (800g flour)
215g milk (430g milk)
30g sugar (60g sugar)
4g salt (8g salt)
8g instant yeast (16g instant yeast)
60g salted butter (120g salted butter)

measure out 215g milk + 8g yeast into mixing bowl, let rest for 2 minutes.
add 400g flour, then the roux, mix with dough hook at lowest speed until incorporated, then for another 3 minutes.
add 30g sugar and 4g salt, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes
cut in cold butter, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes
fold it until it’s a nice tight ball and plop it into a bowl to rise for ~2 hours (doubled in size)
load them into the (lightly greased) bread pans and let them rise for 90 minutes (until they’re almost touchin’ the lid)
45 minutes into the previous step, start preheating the oven at 375 F
bake: 40 minutes

CRISP (NOT CRUMBLE)

(a crisp is the one with oats)

Apple/Fruit Mix: 6 apples (or equivalent) 2 Tbsp sugar 3/4 Tbsp cinnamon 1 lemon juiced (optional tbsp water, tbsp flour)

Toppins: 1 cup brown sugar 3/4-1 cup oats 3/4-1 cup flour 1 tsp cinnamon

(optional 1/4 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp baking soda to decrease the pH for better browning)

1/2 cup cold cubed butter

350F for 45-60 mins

ICE CREAM

1L half & half (mix in some whipping cream if’n you dare)

1/2 cup granulated sugar (the original recipe calls for 1 cup, take from that what you will, also i hear corn syrup can help the texture in small amounts)

generous pinch o’ salt

throw in steepables (coffee! cardamom! mint! probably not rosemary again!) and get to 170-175F (no higher, don’t want curdlin')

let it sit for 45 minutes (or as long as seems appropriate, given the steepables)

separate 6 eggs, keep the yolks only add to 1/2 cup of sugar, (optional: 1/4tsp guar gum) whisk, whisk in a few splooshes of hot milk to temper

add the egg glop back to the milk, get it to 170-175F and stir until spoon-coatingly thick

strain out the steepables chill overnight churn next day

DUTCH BABY

warm eggs, warm milk (let them sit, measured, on the table for a bit)

(the reference recipe here was for 2 eggs:)

2 egg
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
vanilla
beat until loose and frothy
1/3 cup flour (40g)
1/3 cup cornstarch (40g)
2/3 cup milk
a spoonful of mascarpone or cream cheese wouldn’t hurt
let batter sit for 20 minutes

pan in a 425F oven, hot hot hot

quickly butter the pan, get the batter in before the butter burns 20 minutes in the oven

top with lemon, powdered sugar, whipped cream

1 1/2 sticks (170g) butter 2/3 cup (142g) brown sugar 2/3 cup (132g) granulated sugar 2 tbsp (39g) light corn syrup 1 tbsp cider or white vinegar 2 large eggs 1 tbsp vanilla extract 1/2 tsp salt (omit, using salted butter) 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/4 tsp baking soda 2 1/4 cups (270g) all-purpose flour 3 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Note: this one is a pretty sweet dough and it really benefits from a bitterer chocolate and maybe a little flaked sea salt

cream together butter, sugars, corn syrup, vinegar
beat in eggs, vanilla, salt, baking powder, baking soda
stir in flour, chocolate chips
store in fridge overnight or freeze
375 oven
drop tablespoons of dough on to baking sheets
10 minutes, with a half rotation at 5 minutes (ed: 12 minutes with my oven)
let sit on the pan for a few moments after removing from the oven
rack to cool

WONTON SOUP BROTH

chicken stock garlic ginger 2tbsp soy 2tbsp wine 1tbsp sugar 1tsp sesame oil

Beer Batter

1 cup all purpose flour
1 egg
1 1/3 cup beer

What Should I Make For Dinner?

Beefs

Burgers
Spaghetti & Meatballs
Tacos/Burritos
Beef Bourgeoignon
English Beef Stew
Braised Short Rib & Polenta
Steak (money’s too tight for steak)
Shepherd’s Pie

Chickens

Roast Chicken & Mashed Potatoes / Dinner Rolls & Mayo
Caldo Verde
Potato Leek Soup
Butter Chicken
Thai Curry Chicken
Weeknight Biryani
Chicken Parmigiana
Chicken Soup

Fishes

Baked Fish with Citrus
Stinky Tinned Fish Rice Bowl w/ Egg
Beer-Battered Cod
Clam Chowder
California Roll Rice Bowl

Porks

Fried Rice
Pork Tenderloin
Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork
Carnitas Tacos/Burritos
Pork Chop Stir Fry
Classic BLT/Club
Sausages & Potatoes & Veg
Ribs
Breaded Fried Pork Cutlet

Breakfasts

The Big Breakfast
Eggs Benedict
Waffles
Potato Latkes

Misc

Nachos
Cabbage, Vinegar & Chile Stir Fry
Cucumber Salad
Coleslaw
Caesar Salad
Greek Salad
Stankpaste Salad (roasted garlic, anchovy, vinegar, beans, cherry tomatoes)
Fried Tofu
Slow-cooked Beans
Borscht

tipping

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the worst thing about tipping is that brief moment of warm, disingenuous human interaction while you’re holding the credit card machine

the hot drink station discussion

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

The reason you have a PM is to stop the Hot Drink Station Discussion from consuming your entire company

plums

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I have eaten

the leftovers

that were in

the icebox

you probably

missed them

because

they weren’t

frozen mozzarella sticks

Adventure Cat in the Rain

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Meaningfully taking a cat for a walk is a strange project. It’s more of a cat directed meander around the parking lot where mostly you’re keeping him from wandering into other folks’ gardens and you have no say whatsoever in where you are going.

He still wants to go for walks in the rain, but he doesn’t much care for being wet

snug that cute face

sunbeam activate

Grimy Poo Hut

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I usually try to make dinner look good but for some reason tonight I made a grimy poo hut out of tofu and beans

Nanowrimo

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

every year in november i observe “NaNoWriMo”, which stands for “National Not Writing Month”, and I spend the entire month not writing a Novel, as usual

piquant

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

my hobby is to hold my hand up in wide-eyed wonder and say “can you feel it? in the air? the magic?” and then rip a particularly piquant and robust fart

the raffle

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Let’s imagine that in order to participate in a raffle, you needed to construct an entire 3-story house from the ground up including plumbing, electrical, and finishing work, entirely in your spare time.

If you did a pretty good job on the house, that’s not good enough: lots of people are out there building houses with whole crews, in order to stand out your house has to be somehow exceptional.

Then, once you finished, you got one raffle ticket, and when you look to see who else got a ticket, there is one for every person in the entire city of Tsawwassen, British Columbia.

They’re going to do maybe 10 draws, so good luck!

Now, you see this system and you decide to devote both your entire life and large amounts of your emotional state to not just participating in this draw, but winning.

anyways, just wanted to say good luck with that solo gamedev project you’re working on, buddy, I’m rooting for you

suggestion combo

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

bard: i cast suggestion, the instruction is “go stand near the side of the boat”

monk:

so, I’m invited to participate in this pirate-themed low-level D&D one shot set on a boat, and I think to myself “what’s a solid low-effort build for solving boat problems” and I go with a Way of the Open Palm because boats is small and a 15ft push is a lot of push, then I spend most of my session yeeting various monsters into the water.

at one point the DM intervened with some Deus Ex Machina because I fully launched his big bad off of the side of the ship with a lucky roll

jagmeet punch

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Would throwing hands help or hurt Jagmeet in the polls?

Personally, I propose a political pillar of “punching Pierre Pollievre” practically promises positive poll performance.

airtag

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

oh come on

Matrix, Discord

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I think that one of the big problems getting frustrating tools like Element/Matrix off of the ground is just how good Discord is, even avec mild shittification.

Yes it is actually easier to put up with them trying to sell me Final Fantasy XIV and emoji merch packs than it is to deal with Matrix’s frequently broken encryption and poor discoverability.

hero box

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

You know what? I don’t believe you. I think that is too big a promise for one cardboard box.

I think what they mean is “boxes like this recyclable cardboard box”, not this box specifically, because otherwise this is a supernaturally hard working box.

boomer hobby

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

is every boomer hobby just gasoline and lakes

plenty of people

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Lately it seems there’s a tonne of anti-anti-natalist discourse in the conservative sphere, like “how dare women decide not to have children, where will new children even come from, what’s wrong with people that they don’t want big families anymore” but i’m not sure what huge baby shortage they are talking about, it seems like there are plenty of fuckin’ people, which makes me think that this has always just been a racist dogwhistle because the babies being born are the wrong ones I guess?

everyone knows that the only babies that matter are the ones your millennial daughter-in-law are not having, how dare she

there are loads of people

if someone has a one-in-a-million mental disorder you could still find 8000 people like that and put them on the same website

how else would you explain Mastodon?

“Hey, gang, let’s see who this ‘millennials aren’t family oriented enough’ discourse is coming from!”

“why it was old man white supremacy all along”

I guess, in a different direction, calling anybody who doesn’t have kids for whatever reason “anti-natalist” is wrong, on account of actual anti-natalists being real weird.

I don’t want kids, but I’m not an anti-natalist.

Hardcore anti-natalists appear to believe that anyone having children At All is on the face of it evil, and believe in the voluntary extinction of the human race, it’s actually an extremely Overwrought Anime Villain belief system.

“Existence contains suffering, ergo, making people exist is doing violence to them.” is an extremely “I am going to have a second boss-phase where I grow wings and deal massive extra damage” kind of philosophy.

It’s fine to want to have kids and to have kids. It’s fine to not want to have kids and not to have kids.

escooters need ambassadors

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I like e-scooters - they’re fun, practical, and much easier than a bike to be polite with (at low speeds it’s extremely easy to control and dismount, so the chance of getting in a crash is very low and it’s quite easy to give people loads of space). I also see myself as something of an ambassador for them: look, everyone, it’s absolutely possible to use these things responsibly.

I think that widespread e-scooter use would be, on average, very good: anything that means fewer cars on the road is a significant improvement. Most of the people who hate e-scooters have never tried riding one.

The average person’s opinion (see: reddit, town hall meetings) of e-scooters and e-bikes is quite low, though, because most of them are “teenagers or busy delivery workers given access to a much too powerful lightweight vehicle without any training or licensing”.

Part of that is that scooters really shouldn’t be going higher than 25-30km/h, average bike speeds. That’s tough to regulate, though, because people can claim that they’re not buying them to use on public roads. (Speed limiters, in general, are tough to regulate.)

anyways, “some asshole goes on the highway on a scooter” absolutely does not help

starman

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

“I’m a big fan of Starman”

“You’re a fan of David Bowie?”

“David who?”

lies, truths

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

in the classic formulation of the “one of the guards only lies, one of them only tells the truth” puzzle, that information has to come from a third party otherwise there’s a 50% chance it’s just made up

you are in a room with two exits, one leading to freedom, the other to a deadly tiger

guarding one door, sir mixalot

guarding the other, shakira’s hips

you can ask but one question

Your Lumberyard Awaits, My Lord

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This is a very good (satirical) article:

How To Monetize a Blog

Maintaining a blog can be a lot of work. A single article can take weeks of research, drafting and editing, collecting and producing included materials, etc. It’s not unusual to seek some form of compensation for it, and those rewards require initiative. With a good monetization strategy, it can become a fairly lucrative venture.

canada's tariffs on china backfire somehow

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

maybe taxes need to be higher

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

maybe I’m cranky, but “watch collecting” is up there with “yachting” as the kind of hobby that makes me think that taxes aren’t high enough

also, “Stanley Cup Accessories” (not hockey)

corned beefin it

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Option A: buy a deli slicer for hundreds of dollars

Option B: get gud noob

(yeah, okay, it’s still a little thicker than what I could get with a deli slicer, I know)

this is a homemade corned beef, but made with an inside round rather than a proper brisket, which is to say it’s bone dry

it’s still a darned sight better than, like, a plastic packet of grocery roast beef, but it’s nowhere near as good as full-brisket corned beef

raw milk influencers

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

apparently “raw milk influencer” is a thing and they’re out there trying to give listeria a fighting chance against Americans

Stacksquatch

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

A friend of mine has released this VR game where you… stack things.

It’s got a kind of “Katamari Damacy” vibe. It’s fun, and now it’s available on the Quest - if you have one, and also enjoy stacking things, you should give it a try!

Stacksquatch

pipe organ

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

After a few weeks travelling with a 14” screen and a little laptop keyboard, sitting down at this pipe organ of a monster feels so good

I’m 17% smarter when not programming from a bed, that’s just math

256

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

there is more than one place in VRChat’s backend where I set an arbitrary limit to a power-of-two because even though it’s arbitrary, if I set it to that, people will assume it’s for an important technical reason

modern devices basically never actually have a limit of 256 for anything I think it’s mostly just programmer habit at this point

pounds

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

nobody who’s used to buying coffee ever expects how much tea is in a pound of tea

cook for yourself

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

there’s a thought that starts to come to mind when you’ve been cooking for a long time, which is “i could make that, cheaper, at home” , which is a rewarding thread to pull on, it turns out

pandemic forced me to learn to cook a bunch of stuff that I only ever ate at restaurants - butter chicken, pad thai, sushi, fried chicken, onion rings - and, like, it turns out, while I still eat out periodically, being excited about your own cooking is So Good

I’m not devoted enough to press my own california rolls, but just making a bowl of sushi rice and topping it with some shredded imitation crab, mayo, sesame seeds, cucumber and avocado is a delicious california donburi and so easy

this is a challenge.

you: reading this: what’s the take-out meal you love most in the world? What is the restaurant you wish you were at this very moment?

I swear to you, you CAN learn to make something at home that’s almost as good, you can eat it once a week for the rest of your life for a tiny fraction of the cost, why not do that?

I’m going to put a little star next to a few things like “puff pastry”, though, you should not make that at home

cake math

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Say I have a cake. I divide the cake in two: now I have half of a cake. Then, I divide the cake in one half: now I have one cake. Math!

street fighter

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 10:00:00 -0700

If you’ve played Street Fighter 2, you know that Ryu is from Japan, whereas Ken is fr the USA.

But where in the USA? The answer? Hoboken!

nextdoor

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 10:00:00 -0700

local communities on any platform like reddit are nothing more than a constant drumbeat of “what was that siren?” and “someone’s dog pooped” and “i think I saw a criminal??” in small cities

and “oh my god big cities have homelessness and drugs, that should be against the law” and “the endless bike/scooter argument” of larger cities

if I were looking for communities to replace with an AI these would probably be the first, I feel like I wouldn’t need a complex model or even an LLM, necessarily, I could do this one heuristically

it would be slightly harder to simulate that one guy with a bunch of numbers in his name who’s constantly pushing hard right accelerationism on every forum, but not impossible

so, on reddit, for the past 6 months or so every time a post on one of the local subreddits comes up asking “why all those sirens” or “what was that noise?”, I always respond with some variation on “oh, yeah, an old man exploded”

this provides no value and isn’t terribly funny, and yet, deep down in my heart, I think it’s a joke that will pay off in a few more years

if you can't measure it

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I often see the quote “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, which is catchy enough to have a lively life of its own

But the full quote is “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.”

It’s one of the worst frequent misquotes because the misquote literally inverts the meaning, it’s like if I said “don’t light children on fire” and someone were to quote me as having said “light children on fire”, which is technically true, I guess, but it’s not what I meant.

“light children on fire”

Cube Drone

selfie

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

it’s going to be an uphill battle getting me to take “selfie deaths” seriously

look, it’s tragic, okay

every selfie death is a Cybertruck left sitting, unsold, on the lot

a NFT, orphaned, its wallet forever silenced

a bunch of ideas for AI art that never even got to get generated

reddit drama that you won’t have read out loud to you

an ad read for Squarespace that you’ll never get to hear

a blue-check erased

trick

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

The most important thing I ever learned to say in Japanese was, of course, エラー: 翻訳サーバーに接続できません

caked up foxes

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

one of the things I like about the fediverse is how weirdly optimistic and naive everybody is about the clout of a distributed social network that’s compelling and fun, but absolutely has less users than the virtual reality video game that I work on for a living

I think that all governmental orgs and offices should be on VRChat, not because that’s practical or a good idea, but because not enough government employees have to deal with caked up foxes on the regular

watching someone try to get the government of Canada to put up a public Mastodon instance is one of those things that’s funny and tragic, like if they spent all of their time trying to get their cats to play Poker

like, here are creatures fundamentally incapable of understanding or caring about what you’re trying to get them to do, and even if they were on board with your plan, they would not be able to do it well because they do not have the dexterity in their little paws to hold the cards right

colorblind

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

You ever see a design and think the designer was like “maaan, fuck the color blind”

kohlrabi

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

“I shall call it the cabbage softball”

Jonathan Kohlrabi, 1856, spitballing name ideas for his new vegetable

alexa, play mariachi radio

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

For some absolutely asinine reason I have smart lights in my house.

(I can tell you why: it started when we realized that the previous inhabitants’ genius electrical work would turn the furnace off if the basement lights were switched off, so we either needed to rewire it or, cheaper, get lights that would switch off independently of the light switch)

There are, unfortunately, no smart buttons that aren’t battery powered, so I made the mistake of buying some on-sale Alexa speakers.

Amazon’s smart speaker platform is juuust smart enough that with a little bit of effort (about 4 hours of techno-faffing), I could get it to play an icecast stream by using a soon-to-be-deprecated developer API.

Getting my icecast radio station hooked up was a pain in the ass, but even more of a pain in the ass was finding activation phrases that were:

Unique enough that they wouldn’t trigger unwanted behavior
Pronounceable enough that Alexa could reliably parse them.

Because “marquee.click” is my personal domain for Various Shenanigans, my first crack at this was the activation phrase “marquee radio” which had something like a 5% success rate.

Most of the time when I said “Alexa, play marquee radio”, Alexa would hear “Alexa, play mariachi radio”, and as much as I like non-stop mariachi tunes, it’s not what I asked for.

Currently the activation phrases are

“Alexa, buttery nunchucks” ( for my main radio station, https://radio.marquee.click)
“Alexa, cascading bumblebees” ( for https://radio.marquee.click/chill.ogg )
“Alexa, unbelievably boring” (podcasts)

these, of course, only work within my home: it’s in dev mode, I probably couldn’t get my radio stations through certification, being as I do not have the legal right to rebroadcast this music (I paid for the mp3s, but the radio station is for personal use)

So, I have basically perfect Machine Voice: Alexa always listens to me and interprets what I have to say correctly. This infuriates my wife, who tends towards angrily shout-mumbling at the device (“LEXA! LIGHSOFF!”) and then getting more angry when it doesn’t do shit

My wife has an unusual pan-American accent borne from being a military kid, but she’s not unclear: instead I think she’s just kinda mad that the device expects clear enunciation and refuses to play it’s game, whereas I’m so in love with the sound of my own voice I can’t help but go “Alexa, could you please turn the lights off in the living room?”

I’ve got the device vibe a little better than she does. That’s not to say it isn’t VERY OFTEN just, like, 15% dumber than I want it to be.

A good question to ask Alexa is “what do you think I just said?” because it will often provide some context for a completely nonsensical response.

The pile of watch-battery-powered smart buttons have gradually worked their way into the trash. They churn through those batteries at a pretty prodigious rate, fail often, and they don’t feel good to press.

I also won’t wire things directly into the house, on the assumption that smart tech is garbage and won’t last longer than the house will.

I’ve thought of cheap tablet or raspberry pi shit, but ugh

If someone out there knows of a plug-in-to-the-wall smart button platform out there, lmk

Getting Google Home to play a custom icecast stream is impossible.

Getting Alexa to play a custom icecast stream took me 3 hours of debugging against a pretty gnarly Amazon interface, a lambda deployment, and TuneIn intervening to play mariachi music A NUMBER OF TIMES.

… I’m pretty sure Alexa is better but my eyes hurt

fry the zucchini like it's chicken

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

exonerative

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

layoff notifications are always written in the exonerative tense: “X% of our employees will be leaving the company, we’re sorry for the ones affected”

as if they were hit by a fleet of buses one at a time

does anybody else remember neon genesis evangelion

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

box cat

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

dude, what?

30 rock

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I think my favorite episode of 30 Rock is the one where Jenna and Kenneth conspire with Kelsey Grammer to steal hundreds of dollars from a Carvell iced cream store by ordering misspelled cakes

tarot interpretation

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

people who print interpretations the tarot just label every goddamn card with a woman on it with “fertility” which I think is some bullshit

I know, I know, “you’re going to have loads and loads of children” is, like, tarot cold reading rule numero uno so the reader needs a lot of outs for that

friday deploys

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’m going to go against the common wisdom on this one. If you aren’t confident enough to push to production on Friday, you aren’t confident enough to push to production, period. Invest in your rollback and monitoring and staged rollout tech until you don’t lose 20% of your week.

amirite

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

more like clownstrike amirite?

(satisfied, he walks away from his keyboard, another day defeated)

thereese

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

yesterday my D&D players got to explore a cemetery where every single headstone was a “Here lies Bob, who drowned”-tier stupid pun

“Here lies Wayne, died in a stowm”

“Here lies Thereese, who had diseese”

here’s the full list:

Here lies Will, who left no inheritance
Here lies Rob, who was mugged
Here lies Taylor, who seamed alive
Here lies Pat, touch his grave for luck
Here lies Ty, roped into this whole business
Here lies Phil, accidentally buried alive
Here lies Barry, who killed Phil on accident
Here lies Doug, who helped Barry
Here lies Dawn, her husband mourning
Here lies Locke, a man with a secret
Here lies Eileen, who stood up against injustice
Here lies Frank, who, honestly, was just the worst
Here lies Deforest, who died in de city
Here lies Wayne, died in a storm
Here lies Bea, allergic to honey
Here lies Chuck, thrown by a horse
Here lies Peg, who fell into a round hole
Here lies Mary, killed by her husband
Here lies Bill; exploded still
Here lies Therese, who had diseese
Here lies Rowan, who loved his boat
Here lies Lance, from infected boil
Here lies Grant, who gave generously
Here lies Liv, who died
Here lies Carol, who’s sung her last note
Here lies Aiden, helpful to the end
Here lies Kent, who, in fact, could
Here lies Paige, who took a turn for the worse
Here lies Reid, clarinet-maker
Here lies Kerry, pall-bearer
Here lies Sue, famous lawyer
Here lies Pierce, who took an arrow
Here lies Nick, his throat was slit
Here lies Chase, killed by a pack of wild dogs
Here lies Mark, who died protecting his brand
Here lies Bob, who drowned

The Fool and the Magician

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

legacy mechanics

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I don’t like it when board games have legacy mechanics. That ’s too big of an ask of my time and friend group, and a lot of times they result in permanent damage to the game’s innards as you tear up boxes and bits and bobs.

I’ve bought a few and I’ve regretted each one.

stickers

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

If you just learned (or are just now learning) that Sticker Mule is run by a hardcore Maga guy, and would like an alternative, may I suggest not buying stickers? You’re an adult. Don’t pay people for things printed on sticky paper. Replace your furnace air filter. Buy an immersion blender. Save for your retirement.

an attempt was made

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

nation’s women disappointed by three inches, again

what beats rock?

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

whatbeatsrock.com

this game is fun, you just have to keep proposing new things and a rather stupid AI will judge them for you

welp, already stumped

ha ha, a record

okay, diamond beats powerful buttcheek man,

baseball diamond beats regular diamond,

field of dreams baby

a live baseball team beats the corn field,

this is fun if you’re creative, just getting a bunch of firsts

No Biggie

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

one of my friends replied to a thing with “no biggie” so I sent him this

Musk

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Mr. Musk refused to comment when asked if this was “prompted by anything” or if the sperm was provided “in containers”.

whiskey sour

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

When I’m at home, the cocktail of choice is a Gin & Tonic with waaaay too much lime because they’re easy and dumb and refreshing.

When I’m at a restaurant and nothing on their special cocktail menu appeals, the drink of choice is a Whiskey Sour. They’re just a touch too fussy to make (often) at home, which is why they feel special to order when you’re out: but they’re reliably very good.

Security Fail

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

look, one of these is legitimately so much more secure than using the same password for everything

it means that somebody who invades your home can steal your identity, but with one password for everything, someone can steal your identity if they break any of the sites you’ve ever visited.

of course it’s best to have 2FA and a password manager, but decades of insistence and my family still is committed to just the most dogshit passwords, real “Password123” level stuff

The Sloppy Swindle

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

the game is to post five star reviews of recipes where it becomes increasingly clear that you just made a sloppy joe rather than their recipe

bonus: the world’s worst french toast

… tortilla shells soaked in bean water, with cumin!

Draft Combat

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

The draft layouts for the combat system in a game I’m fussing with are starting to reveal a problem with it. Reasonably a player could expect to have, like, six pages like this: JUST DENSE TEXT.

nightcrawler

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i liked the episode of X-men where nightcrawler visited Canada

where did he go?

BANFF

saturated markets

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I like to write, and draw, and code, and design games - and I’m not amazing at any of these skills - and it feels like the output of these skills are largely things that there are simply too many of already.

there are enough novels, and books, and comics, and board games, and video games, and TTRPGs, I’m not sure if there really needs to be more of those things

there is simply enough art, what could I possibly add?

hot

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0700

It’s officially summer, which sucks, because I like baking bread and I basically have to take a 3 month break from homemade bread because running the oven at 450 for an hour when it’s 35C out is checks notes bad

“why don’t you use the barbecue”

I don’t want to go outside it’s like 35 degrees out there

Best Miyazaki Films

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I love Kiki’s Delivery Service and Porco Rosso.

there’s this shot in Porco Rosso that’s just a fast, low flight over the Italian countryside that I assume gave the animator working on it an actual heart attack

every damn frame of Kiki’s Delivery Service takes place on some piece of beautiful, detailed, warm, pleasant art, I don’t even need to pick one out, I can just stop the movie literally anywhere and it’s this kinda thing and it’s on screen for 1.2 seconds and then another one, and then another one, for like 90 minutes

this is one of my favorite movies of all time and Tiff doesn’t care for it because nothing much happens in it, but it’s just a pleasant, chill ride all the way through

I watch it on lazy Saturdays

If you like Stardew Valley this is the movie with the Stardew Valley-est vibe that you can find

this movie should be on the list of anti-anxiety drugs

Please Don't Get Angry

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

When the local post office is just covered in “please don’t get angry” signs, it’s either because the community is particularly aggressive or the post office is unusually, frustratingly incompetent, or, in this case, definitely both

iOS Devil Magic

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’m a software developer, right? I know how to build a lot of things.

But if someone said “we want photos that automatically crop into foreground and background so that we can display elements in between those layers” I’d say “no, that’s too hard”.

Is it using the depth sensor, or AI auto-cropping, or both? WHAT DEVILRY IS THIS

Canadian Kraft Dinner is Worse Than Daiya

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

why did Babish (Andrew Rea) hate Canadian Kraft Dinner in his boxed macaroni and cheese rankings?

well, it’s the confluence of two effects:

first of all, in order to preserve neutrality, Andrew made all macaronis using exact box instructions
second: in order to appear healthy, the Canadian KD is prepared using the utterly insane combination of “mostly skim milk with a scant tablespoon of margarine”, even though nobody has ever prepared it this way

A “prepared” box of Canadian KD has 120 less calories than the identical box of American KD, and the difference there is in the ingredients.

My guess is a loophole in the different Nutrition Facts packaging laws in both countries allows for Canadian KD to claim its nutritional facts with the lowest calorie milk and essentially no butter at all, which produces More Impressive Looking Health Numbers than the American equivalent, despite being functionally the same product.

The only time this fails them is if someone happens to follow Box Instructions to the letter, producing probably the worst KD anybody has ever prepared.

Like, obviously anybody is just going to use whatever milk they have on hand, and the only people who buy skim milk are either puritans, schizophrenics, or people who have grown tired of just putting water on their cereal, and also the correct amount of margarine is “a chunk of butter”

look I have spent 2 months thinking about this, fuming, how DARE you rank Canadian KD below DAIYA

but doing anything else would require breaking the method, and a show like this doesn’t WORK without a consistent method, even if that method screws poor Canadian KD to a wall

this isn’t on Andrew Rea, it’s on Kraft, for trying to game the nutrition facts with ingredients that no sane human would ever use

it’s like when sugary cereals used to be “part of a balanced breakfast” and then they had to show you a tiny bowl of cereal next to two bananas, three bran muffins, a whole glass of milk, a bowl of blueberries, and a whole jar of multivitamins because that was the only way to make that claim, they could just omit “a very small part of a very large balanced breakfast for four or five people”

Oh, there’s a TVTropes page for this, called “Adjacent to this Complete Breakfast”.

my hobby

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my hobby? oh, it’s simple, it’s farting into this plastic chair so aggressively that it wakes my wife up in the other room

no, I haven’t thought of monetizing it, yet

scape+goat

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

so my CSA dropped off some garlic scapes and I’m obsessed with the idea of a doing a long braise with the scapes and some goat meat

and if it turns out to be bad, I will blame it on somebody else

Manitoba Police Very Nearly Beat a Shoplifter to Death

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

once you know about the past exonerative tense, you start to see it show up all over the place,

particularly in news stories where the Manitoba police definitely nearly beat a shoplifter to death

layoffs

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Anyways, big layoffs at #VRChat this last week: I know it’s a crowded field, but share (or DM) your remote-friendly senior backend engineering or engineering management roles if you’ve gottem.

Also: any other remote-friendly video game roles. I’ll make sure they get to the right places.

inventions

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 10:00:00 -0700

so, after learning about awnings and how they provide degrees of totally free cooling in the summer, but need to be rolled down in the winter when you want that heat

I started to imagine some kind of technology that could be widely deployed to offset global warming somewhat, huge, solar-powered sun-shades that would block sunlight in the summer but not in the winter, cheap to deploy en-masse

and then, having discovered the concept of “trees”, I figured I probably wasn’t going to make it as an inventor

Pan Bagnat

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t regard Tiff as particularly fond of tinned tuna, hard boiled eggs or olives and yet she has been asking me to make a Pan Bagnat for multiple years after encountering the concept on social media somewhere.

Today, I brave the sando.

(verdict: it was fine)

Mr. Buns

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

My wife and I are both digital artists - although she is a professional, whereas I’m more of an amateur, so on the top is her version of her D&D character (Mr. Buns) and on the bottom is my version.

(please do not choose a favorite, it’s bound to lead to one of us feeling bad, and by one of us I mean definitely me)

She’s a background painter, so her work tends more towards definition and detail, whereas I’m more of a cartoonist, so mine tends towards dynamic pose and relative simplicity

I joked that hers is the theatrical release and mine is the direct-to-DVD remake

tiff: so, it’s a little girl with a giant warforged bunny barbarian guardian

curtis: … so you want to play as The Maxx?

tiff: >_>

tiff: <_<

a pollo

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 10:00:00 -0700

my favorite greek god is a pollo

he was kind of a chicken though

atoms isnt real

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 10:00:00 -0700

there’s no such thing as atoms

have YOU ever seen an atom?

science wants you to believe that if you heat a liquid, it turns into a gas but I tried heating an egg and it turned into a solid egg

my theory is that all of chemistry is a conspiracy concocted and coordinated by hundreds of thousands of scientists in order to disprove my superior, atomless theory of chemistry

foolish “atom believers” will say stupid things like “your theory of chemistry produces no testable theories” and also “your theory of chemistry doesn’t explain any observable natural phenomena”, because they are paid to say these things, by Satan the devil, in order to disprove my theory

plus, their “atom” theory is stupid and debunkable

like, take some water and try to breathe it

it’s H20, there’s oxygen in there

but try it, and you’ll choke and drown

that’s because atoms is not real

Big Chemistry wants you to believe that there’s CHLORINE in your salt. Do you really believe that you’re just wolfing down a deadly chemical all the time?

Atom truthers like me, we know that this is total bunkus. Every ancient society knew that all matter was made out of earth, water, fire, and air, and I think they had the right of it.

And long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony.

perhaps at some point you have concocted a baking soda and vinegar volcano, as a child,

but that’s just part of the indoctrination

they say it’s because of ions? moving from an acid to a base? but ions are a star trek word. “fire the ion cannon!”. Is there an ion cannon in vinegar? I think not.

everybody knows that vinegar is a fire-water element and baking soda is an earth-air powder and when you combine them, you get an air reaction, thus the bubbles. it couldn’t be simpler.

EMPEDOCLES GOT ROBBED

have you ever heard the song “September” by EARTH, WIND, and FIRE? they knew the horrible truth

Ted Turner was in on it, too, trying to get the world out on the DL with his show about the elements

clues are hidden everywhere

scientists: all matter is solid, liquid, or gas

cereal: exists

scientists: 😮

chemistry claims that there’s a fourth form of matter, plasma, and that water turns at plasma at over 10,000 degrees Celsius

but if you ask a doctor if there’s plasma in your body RIGHT NOW they will say “yes”

can humans suddenly survive 10,000 degree heat, DOCTORS? I think not.

CHECKMATE ATOM BELIEVERS

atoms were thoroughly debunked in my experiment ( youtue.b/98ddxx ) where I showed that the 100 degree boiling point is a LIE

and oh, did the quote-unquote “scientists” come for me with excuses

“you set your thermometer to Fahrenheit”

“that water is clearly sitting just above room temperature”

exactly what an illuminati would say

Network

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I watched the movie Network (1976) a while back, which is a near-future dystopian film about what happens when we let journalism get taken over by entertainment and ratings-chasing.

Howard Beale goes from a respected journalist to this red-faced fear-mongering angry shouting head.

… and I don’t think it ages very well, because the thing it predicted came to pass essentially immediately and hasn’t left since, I was born a decade later, I can’t remember an era when news WASN’T like this.

It's a Smismember Miracle!

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 10:00:00 -0700

As Per My Last Email

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0700

Good Sandwiches

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0700

good sandwiches are an art

Dumpling Family

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0700

for lunch i am going to eat this whole family

Sync Up

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

at some point in the past 20 years people stopped saying “meet” and started saying “sync” or “sync up”

MEETINGS ARE OVER, NOW THERE IS ONLY SYNCHRONIZATION

scientific american

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

somebody at scientific american needs to take a cold shower

song lyrics

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

lot of people out there making songs about love and heartbreak and rejection but nobody making songs about stuff I care about, like AUTHENTICATION or INSANELY SOFT SUPERMARKET FRENCH BREAD or THE WAY THAT COFFEE SMELLS

what about second pension

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

well this is new

late capitalism

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t like it when people say “late capitalism”, first of all because it’s too optimistic: it implies it’s going away, which, good luck with that

and second of all because it implies that capitalism has become somehow worse, as if there was a time when it was pleasant and humane, which seems willfully ignorant of a lot of history

when was the kinder, gentler capitalism that we’re hearkening back to? the CIA overthrowing oil-unfriendly democracies? union busting with lethal military intervention? children’s hands mangled in automatic looms? the east india trading company?

flat earth

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

watching flat-earth debunking content (it’s fun, even if I think they’re unnecessarily smug about it, as if they’re actually going to succeed at changing unchangeable minds) has actually forced me to develop a mental model for both seasons and tides which I didn’t really have before

before judging me: can you describe why it’s cold in winter and hot in summer without googling it?

if you said “because the earth is… further from the sun… in winter” then… how is it possible that winter in one hemisphere happens while summer happens in the other? If it was a distance from the sun thing, the whole world would go into winter at the same time, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, it’s a tilt thing! When the top half of the Earth tilts closer to the sun, the whole “top” half of the planet gets more sun, and also there are bits on the very tip top that just stay lit all the time, and the whole “bottom” half of the planet gets less sun, and also there are bits on the very end that get no sun all the time, and then it swaps.

Why does tides? “Uh, gravitational pull from the moon, right?”

Okay, why does… TWO TIDES A DAY?

thinks about it

oh shit , there’s a tide on the side opposite from the moon, and it’s not as strong as the tide on the side directly facing the moon, that’s bananas

How is this not way more fun than insane theories about giant ice walls?

tuck

Fri, 31 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I love it when he tucks his tail neatly around his legs like this.

3 whole bulbs of garlic

Thu, 30 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

this person rightfully gets absolutely pilloried in the comments for failing to understand what constitutes a lot of garlic

A lot of people recommend roasted garlic, but I’m gonna say it:

garlic confit is equivalent

and the small amount of extra effort to peel the garlic up front makes it 100% easier to not have to extract your roasted garlic from hot sticky garlic paper, resulting in less effort overall AND increased yield of both garlic and oil.

Garlic Confit Recipe

Peel 2-3 heads of garlic into a ramekin.
Cover with a neutral oil. (Vegetable, cheap olive oil). Don’t go expensive with the oil here, subtle flavors gonna get obliterated by garlic.
Put in the oven at 375°F for 45 minutes or until the garlic is golden brown.

the first google image search result for garlic confit

now you have delicious garlic AND delicious oil!

Toum

3 bulbs is not ENOUGH, even, to justify making toum, but toum is so delicious, so sharply garlicky, that serious garlic lovers will eat it and shed a single tear

“why did nobody tell me about this, earlier” they will say

Serious Eats: Traditional Toum Recipe

Toum is essentially a mayonnaise, but it’s stabilized with garlic instead of egg. Just like mayo, toum is an emulsion of oil into water, made possible with the help of a third-party emulsifier.

figma

Wed, 29 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i am an adult

designer: figma

me: figma… balls

fia

Tue, 28 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

So, there’s an episode of Game Changer called “Don’t Cry”.

My first thought upon seeing it was “how are they going to make that work, it’s very easy not to cry”.

…. oh, goddamn, he’s not playing here at all

Ultimately the episode was very sweet, and laser targeted at essentially love bombing a cast member who’d had a tough time, who wept through pretty much the whole episode, and lost/won.

But it made me question my bravado, I’m actually very easy to make cry. Any sad or sweet movie for one.

Look, I know exactly how to utterly wreck myself, I’ll show you, I’ll make myself cry right now:

It’s not that sad a story in the grand scheme of things, but Tiff and I had been wanting a cat forever, and we finally found a landlord who would allow us to get one, just in time for the pandemic to begin.

Long wait list with a local breeder - I’m allergic to cats, but not bengals, so we ended up with this unusually intelligent and busy breed.

Fia.

I fell in love with her immediately.

she was quite the skittish kitten

at first she was terrified of her new home, so I would spend nights in her room with her, getting her used to me, playing with her, until she was content to sit in my lap and purr for a little bit at a time

we set up little milestones around the house and she’d come out and explore, a little bit at first, but she got braver over time.

I was so proud of her.

then she stopped eating.

a terrible disease that strikes kittens.

and before very long at all we had to say goodbye to Fia

this is our last picture of her

unix time

Mon, 27 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I learned about how unix time works in early University, ‘round 2007, which would be 17 years ago

Unix time ends, 19 January 2038, 14 years from now

so I’m officially past the point where I’m closer to the end of Unix time than I am to the point where I learned what unix time was

we’re only 14 years away from the end of time as we know it

by then, it probably won’t matter, but I still plan to hold a real party for the end of time

basically any computers and any software - post 2005 - are going to be immune to the 2038 problem

which means that most governments and banks are completely screwed

sock

Mon, 27 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i wonder if it’s weird for my cat when I take the small fuzzy creature he’s been chasing for the past few minutes, turn it inside out, and roll it up my foot, like, he’s pretty bloodthirsty but that’s just an insane level of escalation

Sometimes when Zapp is all comfy and asleep I’ll sidle up to him real close and go “Meow! MEOW!” but I don’t think he understands that it’s intended as vengeance

ass that wont quit

Sat, 25 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Basically, I am what you get if you ask a Genie for an “ass that won’t quit” without thinking about it enough

Genie: surely you want to be just a little more specific

Me: no, I’ve committed, hit me with your best shot

tie-in

Thu, 23 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my new hobby is going to be releasing unofficial tie-in cookbooks for games that have no conceivable cooking angle

ARMORED CORE VI: FIRES OF KITCHEN

curry, deconstructed

Tue, 21 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

it’s not quite green curry yet but we’re close

it’s kinda “mise en place” if you just en place everything kinda next to each other on a cutting board, right?

subway mustard

Tue, 21 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Did you know that (at least where I live, in Canada) Subway briefly stopped carrying MUSTARD?

that is a CORE SANDWICH CONDIMENT

conspiracy theory: it’s part of an ongoing raft of changes intended to make Subway higher-calorie and more expensive, like gradually hiding the “ham sandwich” ($8) behind the “kia sorrento steak supremo megasubwich” ($14)

I’m glad that before long they caved and brought basic ballpark mustard back

2025 Editor’s Note: Honestly, for all I know this one Subway just ran out of mustard one time, going straight to conspiratorial thinking may not have been the right move.

curtis gets a nice new tattoo

Mon, 20 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

corkscrew

Sun, 19 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

apparently this is called a “waiter’s friend”, or “wine key”, although all of this time I’ve been calling it a “french army knife”

The term “wine key” came into existence due to the German inventor’s last name, Wienke, which is difficult for English speakers to pronounce. When ordering the product from catalogs, the meaning and origins of the new Wienke Corkscrew gradually became lost and it was simply referred to as a “Winekey” or wine key. Patent number 283,731, August 21, 1883, simply refers to it as “C.F.A. WIENKE LEVER CORKSCREW.”

inconvenient coworker

Thu, 16 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

buddy - if you could just - slightly to the - sigh okay

FOSS is not a business model

Thu, 16 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I saw someone on Mastodon pillorying someone’s little personal code project for not being FOSS

ok, random stranger, I’m subtweeting you

seventeen people in all of history have ever made a profit from FOSS software, indies have it hard enough already, don’t try to get them to release their source code just because you think it will probably work out for them

every FOSS monetization model:

begging strangers for money, hoping for the best
run it as a SAAS
large, expensive enterprise support packages

the first one produces vanishingly low returns and the last two don’t usually work for games and have you getting run out of business by Amazon

mastodon rate limiting

Thu, 16 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

sometimes I get rate limited by Mastodon, while using the Mastodon client normally, from a single tab, which strikes me as a bit odd

on account of… you know, Mastodon, you’re the one doing this

the people have spoken

Thu, 16 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

corporate beat poetry

Tue, 14 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Following up

with the mental model

of validating solutions

aligned autonomy

while tailoring

our frameworks’ approach

to specific flows

out of these perspectives

we’ve gathered a lot

of great feedback

for planning and executing

roll-out team objectives

baking that in

to a new process

to address pain points

we’ve identified

including barriers

to ideation,

focus,

and synergies,

while preserving

our best chance to succeed

with a new team-level

product strategy documentation phase

to clearly align

the team’s strategy

to the overall company strategy

creating a big improvement

over last half

a cross discipline

planning leads team

will create a more inclusive experience

across the board

we’re really stretched

so we can go deep

utilizing impact analysis

planning cycles

detailed planning leads

across four distinct phases

utilizing context

to jump in

to high level completion

of the company strategy phase

the output of which

was the phase priorities

which we’ll walk into

with the OKR setting phase

for lightweight half-planning

strategy buffered feedback week phase

then, again,

we’ll have the monthly

company objectives

to deliver a “golden goose”

“star retention” using

the team strategy doc

which I’ll share out

after this presentation,

investment in targets

and goals

that will have value

for the business,

delineating an exciting change

let's go exploring

Mon, 13 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

my cat is orange, and he has a white chin and a white belly and a tiger striped tail, and we’re very good friends, and somehow this fulfills a deep-seated itch planted in my brain a very, very long time ago

sexism can't ruin golf, it's already golf

Mon, 13 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I think Slate may imply that the problem is sexism and while that’s likely the case, I’d also like to advance the theory that the last few remaining fans of golf have simply died

data scientists have a lot to answer for

Mon, 13 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

database, ok

data warehouse… ok

data mart… ok

data stream? … ok

data pipeline? … ok

data… lake? …. ok

data K-mart? … prices & values

data lakehouse? … no, this is starting to get concerning, you’re crossing the analogies

data beachhouse? … where did you say you were taking our data again?

software made easy

Mon, 13 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

stupid torment nexus

Mon, 13 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Comedy Author: In my sitcom I invented the Stupid Torment Nexus as a joke, to make fun of the dumb things that people build.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Stupid Torment Nexus from classic sitcom Ha Ha, What A Terrible Torment Nexus

radial grater

Mon, 13 May 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Box graters are nice for a wide variety of miscellaneous kitchen tasks

Radial graters are not for that.

Radial graters are for people who are about to create a heaping, snowy mountain of parmesan on their food.

Radial graters are for people who never tell their waiter to stop.

They just make eye contact and wait.

Surely they will crack before you do.

your dreams

Mon, 13 May 2024 10:00:00 -0700

at least they’re finally being honest about WHO’S dreams that kid was chasing

pan foccaccia

Fri, 10 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

when I make bread I save some dough in the fridge and use it to fry up little pan foccacias, like this:

strahd

Fri, 10 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my friends are going to be very frustrated when they get to the end of the campaign and learn that the real Strahd was the friends they made along the way

there’s a bard spell called viscous mockery which they cast when the words aren’t flowing as well as usual

pyrotechnics

Thu, 02 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I gave my players a scroll of Pyrotechnics, one of the less useful spells in the game (IMO) figuring that if they ever figured out something to use it for, it would be fun.

Anyhow, one unexpected effect, Rules as Written, is that the spell starts by extinguishing a 5x5 cube of fire, (which would, IMO, insta-kill a CR 5 Fire Elemental) and which the players used to solve a “fire” problem they were having. The fireworks afterward were just incidental.

quiet is nice

Thu, 02 May 2024 10:00:00 -0700

When I was in my 20s I’d see an article about how a programmer’s focus and flow is a PRECIOUS AND UNIQUE GEM THAT MUST BE PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS and think “yes, it is, I agree”

and now, older, I think that we have had it too good for too long and are used to being treated like pampered babies, yes, we must be exempt from meetings and distractions in a perfect sea of quiet or the golden goose will not lay its programming eggs

… but I’m still happier when it’s quiet and I don’t have meetings

I don’t think it’s WRONG that programming is best done in quiet, uninterrupted, focused stretches, that’s actually kinda self-evident

but I also think that demanding these stretches can seem petty and arrogant, as if programming is the only discipline that benefits from focus and quiet and reflection.

Maybe, just maybe, every creative role benefits from focus and quiet and reflection, and only software developers have been privileged enough to be able to demand it.

build

Wed, 01 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

today in work:

a build with “build” in the name of the build will build, but it won’t deploy because when we build it, it includes “build” in the name of the completed build

but when we try to deploy it, it decides that “build” is the cut-off point for the name of the build, but it uses the “build” in the name of the build rather than the “build” added by a completed build: as a result it can’t find the correct build

in conclusion: build

Crock

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

to make a point in a slack channel, I looked up “utensil crock” on google image search

most of the crocks look like the first image, which is IMO an utter waste of utensil crock. “oh, wherever will I keep my three spoons”

I’m going to give all of my points to this second crock where they mocked it up with a much more convincing simulation of what you would actually cram in there: absolutely everything

Although, okay, point of order, I count six whisks, that may be too many whisks. I’m not a baker, though.

anyways, this has been a talk about well-stocked stock photo crocks chock-a-block with mocks.

he tucked himself in

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Just cruise into the living room to discover a fully tucked cat, he did this himself.

In case you’re wondering if I’m staging all of these photos where Zapp is nestled in some comfy part of the house: not all of ’em, he loves a blanket.

feedback

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

sometimes it’s hard to reconcile my belief that Software Development Isn’t That Hard And Just About Anybody Who Seems Smart Could Probably Do My Job

with providing useful feedback during the interview phase

pride

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my suggestion that, for pride, we simply roll out the NYC world but leave a bunch of interactible bricks lying around

has been rejected out of hand

housing crisis averted

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

good news, Vancouver, amidst this crushing housing crisis, I have found an affordable space to rent

“i can’t live in the ad-space for a Coffee News from 2016”

whiners the lot of you

coffee shop working

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I can’t stand working in coffee shops.

It’s loud, people are having conversations all around you. Not enough screen space. Laptop keyboard.

You can’t leave your “office” unattended to use the bathroom unless you want it to wander away. I have better coffee beans at home.

I think that people have over-romanticized working in coffee shops, it actually sucks.

stackoverflow harvest

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I answered one question on Stack Overflow, one time, a decade ago

but their algorithm is so good at entrenching answers that my worthless point harvest is bountiful, e’ry season

sick day

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’m feeling a little sick so my bud is helping out

having a bengal is a fine way to experience being very gently eviscerated by your best friend

So, I caught a cold and instead of doing anything useful or productive I shotgunned 30 full hours of Steven Universe in an embarrassingly short timespan.

I barely feel any guilt about this: one of the luxuries about having a cold is that it’s one of the only times in my life I can ever just exist without stressing about my productivity, even more so than during a vacation. Even with the headache and the soreness sometimes I welcome these rare colds (not COVID though, that fucked me up).

Now I’m sad that it’s over. It hurts to extricate yourself from a deep dive like this when you’re really attached to a piece of media. It’s over, time to put it away for another couple of years.

I remember feeling exactly this same way when I was a tween at the end of my favourite books.

One of the reasons I’ve always wanted to write or draw fiction is this effect: I want to be able to induce this state in myself, create a wellspring that never runs dry.

… but it doesn’t work that way. It’s like tickling yourself, it just doesn’t work, and you spend so much longer with each moment that it completely wears out any emotion or humor.

how I read

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I don’t read. I exhaust media.

I don’t just watch things, when I find something truly good, I start re-watching it again and again and again, every year or so, because that’s about how long it takes to reset my emotional response to the content. I don’t just want to get hit by the last episode of The Good Place, I watch the whole thing in joyous anticipation of that hit, I want to get to the part at the end that makes me cry.

Eventually, my emotional response smoothes out: it’s too predictable, I know it too well.

I haven’t just read Homestuck.

I have read Homestuck, in its entirely, every year, for 5 years in a row, until last year when the emotional beats finally stopped landing.

I’m gonna let it sit a bit. There’s still some stuff in there that I think can hit if I let it brew for a couple of years.

that’s true for a lot of media I’ve really loved, I’ve not just watched it but I’ve watched it a LOT, I feel like I’ve Thoroughly Mined it For Humor and Emotional Content and there’s not much there that’s left to find.

I haven’t quite memorized it but I don’t quit until there’s not a single beat that I don’t know by heart.

The Good Place is a tough one because, to be honest, it’s a long slog through a lot of often pretty boring shenanigans. The character humor holds up, but not quite as well on repeat watching. Once you know the twists, it’s less fun. But there’s still a lot meat at the end: a kind of eternal cosmic love story on par with This is How You Lose The Time War.

and the final episode, which can’t hit right if you don’t watch the preamble

you can’t cheat emotional beats like that, you can’t just skip directly to the good part, you’ve gotta soak in the whole thing for it to Work properly

It’s probably not going into the regular rotation, but I also don’t think that I’ve watched it for the last time.

I’m not way into drugs, aside from smooshing my cat’s face, fiction is literally the best tool I have for monkeying with my emotional state

musicality

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

It’s kinda weird to think that before TV and recorded music, people just had, like, their friend who could play music and local live theater and that stuff was so much more important than it is now.

if you wanted to share a cool song with your friends you literally just had to be good at music and learn it

if you wanted to watch a fun story with your friends you literally had to put on masks and grab some sticks and read it dramatically out loud

innate musicality lost so much cultural cachet

it used to be one of the highest tiers of human skill

honestly, I think that’s something that feels genuinely lost

Some of my grandparents were successful hobby musicians, they would participate in vaudeville style variety shows, and since not everybody had a TV, this kind of entertainment was vital and important - and, like, they were nowhere near world class, but the lack of broadcast media meant that people didn’t have to be world class to find a place for themselves.

And you know what? Engaging in this kind of thing, community theatre, low-level entertaining, it was fun and rewarding and accessible - and there’s just not much space for it in modern society.

boom, headshot

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This actor’s headshot from the local community college ad has been voted “most likely to haunt your nightmares”

taco bout problems

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i don’t know what happened at this Taco Bell but it sounds GRIM

a love letter to the suplex

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

every time I see two people hugging in a picture my mind immediately moves to the next frame where one of them is delivering a devastating suplex

try it: you, too, can enjoy this brain disease

the suplex is objectively funny

like, imagine this scenario:

a realtor is taking a man through a nice building. they say “well, if this fourplex isn’t the right size for you, perhaps I can interest you in a duplex?”

prospective buyer: “no, I still think that’s going to be too small.”

realtor: “okay, well, I’m showing off a beautiful suplex right now.”

prospective buyer: “a… suplex?”

realtor:

note: this joke also works with a round house for similar reasons , although it’s 18% less hilarious

Ghost Train Suplex : Final Fantasy VI | Bryan Heemskerk - Why is this event so iconic or memorable for many FFVI Fans?

Emulation Isn't Piracy

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

“emulation isn’t piracy” is, IMO, a “guns don’t kill people” argument: while it’s technically true, it’s also not helpful?

that’s not to say I’m against it: I’m actually all for emulation, but I think emulation’s benefits are arguments in favor of piracy rather than arguments for why emulation ISN’T piracy. (sidenote: which, it isn’t, unless you use it for piracy, which you almost certainly will)

true story from work

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

co-worker: “I cleverly used a text adventure to trick people into letting me rewrite the notifications system.”

me:

VRChat #29

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

to be honest “we’re #29” doesn’t have that much of a ring to it but it ain’t nothin'

like, it’s definitely something to have held on to a spot in the top 50 on Steam for so long

I’m not sure what exactly but it’s something

checks watch

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my Dungeons & Dragons crew now have a running joke because every time they ask a time based question I mime looking at my watch

but watches are not common in the D&D universe, and also the time frames are never appropriate for a watch-look anyways

“how many months ago was that?”

gregnor the wizard: (looks at his watch) uh… 3 months

this is a weird habit I have in real life, someone will ask if I’m free, like, three weeks from now, and the first thing I’ll check is my watch, even if , having performed this little dance, the watch provides no information to me that is useful for that transaction

sources

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

“I’m terrible at citing my sources”

Unknown

hardware store

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

in interview, Weird Al has mentioned that Albequerque is one of his most requested songs, presumably because it’s length makes it seem like it would be difficult to perform live: but actually it’s quite easy.

When asked which of his songs would actually be most difficult to perform live, he responded with Hardware Store, which has never been performed live: it’s impractically difficult to execute live.

which, uh, listening to the song… yeah

when someone rolls into karaoke and requests an Adele song you know they’re either a pocket ringer or about to have a bad time

I can’t imagine someone rolling into karaoke and requesting Hardware Store under ANY circumstances

lasered

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Getting laser eye surgery was 100% worth it and I’m frustrated I didn’t do it earlier, but one of the benefits I imagined, “being able to see haircuts, the inside of my shower while I’m showering, and the bottom of the pool” turned out to be pretty underwhelming.

The inside of my shower is gross! The bottom of the pool is not worth looking at! And being able to see during haircuts just unlocks a whole new avenue of awkwardness. These previously locked off experiences turned out to be not worth it.

The actual concrete benefits of laser-eye surgery were to peripheral vision and comfort, where they were significant.

Also I have super long eyelashes so the inside of my glasses were always greased up a little bit: no more of that.

discovery

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’m going to become impossibly rich when I find a way to monetize the feeling you get when someone under the age of 20 agrees that one of your dusty old-man obsessions is cool

why yes, Timotheigh, this is Discovery, by Daft Punk, and it bangs

widget

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Okay, tech vocabulary time:

A “Widget” is any UI element.

The way to develop a widget it to sit down, uncomfortably: this will give you a Widgey.

Then, develop functionality by training that Widgey - that should evolve your prototype to a Widgeotto.

Once you’ve got to there, it’s not long before you’ve got a fully evolved Widgeot, at which point your app will really be Flying.

shrek

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

at a loss for D&D encounter ideas, I have just created a Shrek room

8000L

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Some quick math indicates that in the 14-year lifetime of my car I’ve used in the realm of 8000L of gasoline, to the tune of about $12,000.

Most people with a car my age would have doubled or tripled that; thanks to the fact that I picked the world’s most piddly ICE and I mostly walk or take transit, the cost of fuel for my car hasn’t even made up the difference between the car and an EV, yet.

killers

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

The Killers: I’ve got soul

Me, taking a big sip of my water: Ah, I bet that’s because he’s a soldier

I heard something

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0700

“you guys, I think I heard some birds out there”

day of visibility

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

whenever any marginalized group has a day of visibility I always look forward to that moment at 11:59 where they start to go transparent and tell you to look for them next year before winking out of existence before your eyes

dying tech

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

cineplex charged me three extra dollars for buying tickets online because they despise their customers, technology, and joy

when dinosaur industries like theaters or newspapers or cable or taxis struggle you feel sad for them unless you’re forced to interact with them in any way, at which point you start actively cheering for their demise

sometimes I think “wow, if someone could print fast enough and ship fast enough they could simulate a kind of very low latency internet and everybody could just interact with that every day” and then it strikes me why newspapers have struggled

maltese falcon

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

nobody ever calls this out but in iconic 1941 film noir The Maltese Falcon, Miles Archer is killed by being shot in the nuts, to death

“oh, man”

“right in the chimichangas”

a proper cup of tea

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This online “game experience” is very funny.

A Proper Cup of Tea

a big cup of boiling hot water

tea doesn’t get any better than this

tea score: 5.0/5.0 - S RANK

pariah

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

the government says pants aren’t a business expense and yet if you show up to work WITHOUT pants suddenly YOU are the pariah

AI is Less Scary When You Talk To It

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Because, while it’s weirdly, shockingly competent at first, the more time you spend with it, the more you realize the wide, wide gaps in its cognition: it can’t really replace you and it would be foolish to try (for now).

I think anybody who has ever owned a roomba can tell you about their device’s uncontrollable and constant urge to self-terminate

Nostalgia for an Ugly Era in Games

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’ve been watching someone talk about Kings Field for hours on YouTube because they love Dark Souls so much that they’re willing to deeply engage with these shitty, unplayable games.

say what you will, but literally nobody is nostalgic for games that looked like this without some kind of severe brain damage:

I was in my primo nostalgic gaming years just when the PS1 came out, and even then I’m hard pressed to gin up nostalgia for early 3D.

well, okay, I can make a few exceptions…

breb

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

OVERNIGHT BREAD (+~5 hrs)

NIGHT:

Mix the poolish:
500g flour
0.4g (1/8 tsp) yeast
500g water, 80F
wait 12-14 hours (bubbly, triple volume)

DAY: (5 hrs)

add 500g flour
21g salt
3g ( 3/4tsp ) yeast
(you can mix dry ingredients separately first)
250g water, 105F
mix
timer: 3 hrs (2 folds)
divide & proof: 1 hr
oven: 475F, 30 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off

i am the terror that flaps in the night

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

filters

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

They’re called no. 2 coffee filters because coffee makes you poop

microwave steaming

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’ve tried so many different ways to quickly steam things and this is actually one of the places where the microwave steps up to the bat and knocks it out of the park. For anything small, this is way more convenient than digging out a steamer basket and a tray of boiling water.

Need to steam a hot dog bun or a barbeque bao? Just… plate with an upside-down bowl on top.

get a little water in there too, like, a damp paper towel

e-scooter beats e-bike

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I bought a cherry e-cargo-bike but actually

the tiny, significantly cheaper e-scooter is easier to ride, more fun, and with a backpack offers comparable cargo capacity

go

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

i’ma say it, now that I can program in Rust, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would want to program in Go

quinoa and rice

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

this half and half mix of jasmine rice and quinoa smells absolutely amazing while it’s cooking, it’s like buttered toast

seriously, try it, add quinoa and jasmine rice to your rice cooker, at the same time. do it.

forgetful

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

fontawesome picks for forgetful user flows come in varying levels of cruelty

writing “password reset” is always one of those things that’s way trickier than you think it’s going to be

it’s a form, that triggers an email, that triggers another form, I think it’s one of the most complicated components of an auth system

unlike registration and log in, though, you rarely have to return to it once it’s set up, though

technically competent

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

depending on where you put the emphasis, “technically competent” can either be a compliment or a wicked burn

VRChat hax and sploits

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

A new super-dangerous and completely made-up exploit has gone viral in the VRChat community about once every 8 months for the past 6 years.

i hear they can make it so that if you die in VR, you die in REAL LIFE

a true story about wedding cupcakes

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Editor’s Note: (My friend Jenn maintains that she participated in the Cupcake Roulette, not me, which… is probably true)

helltime oscillatrix

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

there’s a DORA metric associated with how fast you can recover from a prod outage which is why, in order to game the system, I have created the “helltime oscillatrix” which breaks prod over 100,000 times per second, once a month

bad move historian

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

it’s possible i have found the dumbest historian/collector alive

snugvid

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’ve set up a new cat zone right next to my work computer with the softest blanket on it, and despite this being the third cat bed in my office and maybe the seventh in the whole house, it’s his new favorite.

Video content

just pictures of this cat living his best life make me happy to look at

Tiff is out of town for a few days, which is emotionally devastating for our cat:

Video content

a short pig tragedy

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

“What happened to Mr. Waddles? I thought you said he was cured?!”

“Okay, there’s been a miscommunication here”

ev prices

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

“I’m gonna buy an EV!”

(Realizing that $66,000 CDN is the same as $1000/month for 66 months)

(Realizing that 66 months is 5.5 years)

“I’m gonna keep using my existing car for as long as I can!”

stadium chinatown

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

“the 7 grand heroes of the fantasy kingdom, Richmond Brighouse, Scott Road, Royal Oak, Holdom, Gilmore, Edmonds, and, of course, Stadium Chinatown”

“… are they all named after Skytrain stations?”

“… yes”

tell me you don’t want to hear more about a hero named Stadium Chinatown

c-lovers

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

so, I regret to inform you that the “C-Lovers” is not a tech meet-up, in fact, they are a local fish & chip shop

actually

i don’t regret to inform you that

these fish and chips are delicious

five bucks

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

in this article I list the top 10 dudes to give five bucks to

guess what I’m number 3

jhmorp

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Amazon, please, this week I’ve seen listings under the names “JHMORP” and “TBMPOY”.

I’d love a way to filter out any company that sounds like the sound Spam makes when it wiggles, juicily, out of the can

spite tow

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the tow capacity of a Miata is a sternly worded note in the manual saying “no”

“do not do this, it is an extremely bad idea”

of course, most folks on the internet perceive that as a challenge which is why there are loads of pictures of Miatas towing things, presumably out of spite

This might be one of my more controversial opinions, but…

JavaScript doesn’t benefit much from having a whole-ass type system bolted on a la TypeScript. It’s like attaching a tow-ball hitch to a Miata: just adding the capability doesn’t make it practical to use. JavaScript is not the right environment for type safety.

If you want byzantine type safety, just program in a language that was designed from the ground up with byzantine type safety in mind, like Rust, or C#, or Scala.

Tension Mark

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

So, in university, my girlfriend asked me, “What’s a tension mark? How do I make a tension mark?”

“What?”

“A tension mark. I need to put in a tension mark.”

“A… tension mark? There’s no such thing as a tension mark. Do you mean, like, an exclamation mark?”

“I’m supposed to send an e-mail about a job, and they said I need to put a tension mark in the header.”

I couldn’t stop laughing once I realized what a tension mark was.

eat fresh

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

imagine being the exec at subway who was looking at their demographics

“it seems like the average consumer of our sandwiches is sad and exhausted”

“we should lean into that”

Your Path is Blocked

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0700

Your path is blocked! Can you defeat the giant monster, brave adventurers?

Lo, the monster has been defeated with ear rubs

first day at AVALANCHE

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

i thought i was here for avalanche safety training but this huge black guy with a gun for an arm tells me that we’re going to blow up a power plant so I just nope on out

writing order

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

okay, so, here’s my theory

that creative narrative project you’re working on? here’s the order you should write it in

first, low-stakes scene from the middle

then, outline

then, ending

then, beginning

then, high impact scenes

then, remainder of the middle

this is based on the assumption that your quality of work picks up as you gain consistency and experience with the characters and style you’re going for, then starts to drop off as you get exhausted

if you’re not excited to write a low-stakes scene from the middle of the story at the beginning of the project when your energy is at its highest, there is no WAY you’re going to be excited enough to write it weeks later when the whole project feels like a grind

dentists

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

When I was a teenager they cemented an uncomfortable metal bar into my mouth without asking me, and when I asked when it was supposed to be taken out they said “never” which was around the time I realized that dentists don’t have souls

solar rug

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

When I was a kid we had a to-scale rug of the solar system

there was a little yellow splotch for the sun, and then you couldn’t see any other planets because they were too small

….

wait a minute

in retrospect that might have just been a rug that my dad spilled some mustard on

terraform aint easy

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

There was a recent Reddit post where a DevOps employee lost their shit because their co-workers weren’t getting on board immediately with their Terraform repo, and

I’m gonna say it: despite ClickOps’ many problems, Terraform has a bad UI and ClickOps has a good UI, getting people who are used to being able to do things with a few clicks to read a stack of manuals is going to be a challenge, especially if those people have “other things to do with their time”.

Having an organization where everybody makes changes to infrastructure with PRs and a papertrail seems like it’s obviously gonna be better but affecting that particular change by simply creating the repo isn’t gonna do it.

You’re gonna have to make the Terraform repo the ONLY way to change infra, and for a good while you’re gonna have to deal with going from an org where everybody can make changes to an org where everything is backed up by only one person knowing Terraform.

Like, don’t confuse this for me saying “infrastructure as code is bad”, it’s good, and for any org with more than a handful of people making cloud changes it’s gonna be obviously better, but the effort to switch over to Terraform, which is hard, from ClickOps, which is easy, is significant.

bean hobo

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0700

There’s this old cartoon joke where a hobo slices a single bean very thinly like it is a tiny roast beef, but I just used that exact technique to make some BLT sandwiches when I had nothing but two cherry tomatoes.

the CBC, everybody

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

recently I saw someone circulating a petition requesting that the Canadian government use public funds to provide a mastodon server for all Canadians

in something of a rebuttal, I would like to note that the portal that every single Canadian needs access to for crucial tax information is down for the entire weekend for one of it’s regular nappy naps, and this is one of the government’s more modern and prominent public digital projects

now if someone were to write a version of Mastodon that ran entirely on IBM servers that haven’t been manufactured since 1997, that would be a whole different ball game

behold, the comments section at the CBC:

please, for the love of god, do not let the Canadian government anywhere near your technology

software conferences

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

the thing I like about javascript conferences is that they only have one room for talks but they just get whoever’s on the mic at any given time to hand it over when they need time to set something up, so you can quickly catch loads of talks so long as you don’t mind that they’re in kind of a jumbled order

the thing I like about C conferences is that if you find the end of a line and stand two spaces behind it, the building will explode

the thing I like about Erlang conferences is that if anything goes wrong in one of the rooms, everyone will just leave, get back into the room, and pretend like nothing happened

i can’t remember what I liked about memcached conferences because there was a power outage

the thing I like about rust conferences is that they’re a huge amount of effort to set up but once they do they run really smoothly

the thing I like about PHP conferences is that they’re easy for anybody to set up and that it’s really hard to predict what will happen at them, which is also a thing that a lot of people do not like about PHP conferences

the thing I like about Go conferences is that they’re exactly like C conferences, but with a guy who comes around and collects the garbage every now and again

the thing I like about Postgres conferences is the consistency, but they only ever throw the one and honestly if they can’t find a bigger venue they’re going to start running out of space

i’m not such a big fan of AWS conferences, they seem reasonably priced at first but then you wander from one region to another and suddenly you owe them fourty eight thousand dollars

i’ve never managed to get in to a RabbitMQ conference but I’ve had a great time just waiting in line for one

I wasn’t sure which mastodon conference to attend, there were so many and most of them seemed like they were run by amateurs, so I just went to the biggest one

the thing I like about lisp conferences is that there aren’t a lot of standards or guidelines for them so each of the big ones just kind of makes up its own rules

the thing I like about retro emulation conferences is that you go into a huge, modern conference hall and they’ve set up a perfect recreation of a conference from 1993 in there, all the way down to the carpeting

the thing I like about roguelike conferences is that if you miss a talk you just have to leave

the thing I like about VC-funded conferences is how fun they are in the first few years, before they inevitably need to justify their massive investment and start to get weird

the thing I like about C# conferences is how much they improved over Java conferences, which they were clearly modeled after, but honestly I haven’t seen or thought about either in years and I think I’m a lot happier for it

the thing I like about scrum conferences is that they’ve clearly never put any more than two weeks worth of effort into planning them so they’re always just all over the place

(I would, of course, refuse to attend any scrum conference that took more than 2 weeks to plan: that would just be a waterfall conference and who wants to go to one of those?)

I attended a pure functional programming conference and as a result I changed my mind about functional programming, which , when I think about it, means it can’t have been a pure functional programming conference after all.

The thing I like about quantum computing conferences is that they’re run in a lot of different states at the same time

The thing I liked about AI conferences in the 80s were that you could set your booth up in a part of the conference hall that nobody could get to, and, in doing so, bring the entire convention to a halt.

deckromancer

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

someone wants to join my D&D game as a “deckromancer”, which is to say, a druid who specializes in carpentry

2025 Editor’s Note: he was a perfect simulation of a contractor, which is to say, he didn’t show up even one time

nine nines

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

nine nines of reliability ( 50.999999999% uptime )

pls share

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0700

a story in four parts

zapp is so sweet, when I’ve pet him too much, no bites, he’ll just put a paw on top of my hand, like “stop”

australians

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

normal people: happy birthday

australians: b’day, mate

Agedashi

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This agedashi tofu looked good, and the broth was tasty, and it was crispy, it was almost a nice dinner, but it was that dense health store tofu instead of silken tofu and so the texture of it was kind of beefy and unappetizing rather than creamy and delicious.

ecoterrorism

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0700

the vancouver sun’s average reader does not understand what an ecoterrorist is but they’re pretty sure that they’re very powerful and malicious, like djinni

literal minded

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

headline: “british columbians invited inside mosques to fight islamophobia”

is islamophobia a problem inside mosques? i figured the problems were mostly outside mosques

you’re not going to find the islamophobia in THERE, british columbians

piano man

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

There’s an old man sitting next to me, making love to his tonic and gin. (gross)

He said SON CAN YOU PLAY ME A MELODY

I try not to make eye contact

‘CAUSE MY DICK’S IN THIS GIN

BUT IT’S NOT QUITE ALL IN

(muffled shouting as he’s dragged out of the bar)

YOU CAN’T KEEP ME OUT, I’LL BE BACK

unhelpful comics trivia

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Trivia: in the 1985/1986 comic series “The Watchmen”, a primary character, Dr. Manhattan, apprenticed under his father as a watchmaker, making him literally a watch man

Trivia: in the 1985/1986 comic series “The Watchmen” the series’ provocative question “Who watches the watchmen?” would later by answered: by audiences all over the world in 2009! Ha ha! Quandary solved!

Trivia: 2019 television series “The Boys” is just three of 1985/1986 comic series “The Watchmen” stacked together in a trenchcoat.

Trivia: 1985 is 1987. Look it up!

Trivia: In the 1985/1986 comic series “The Watchmen”, the character Rorschach was intended to parody exactly how insane it would be to have a morally inflexible serial killer enacting vigilante justice at random. However, in the comic series’s original ending, Rorschach punches Ozymandias so hard that crime dies forever, saving New York

notes

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Right now, if you compile notes in a tree-style “knowledge base” format, Obsidian is the best tool - this is best for dungeon mastering and documents.

If you compile notes in a feed - just a huge stream of searchable notes, one at a time - you’re spoiled for choice, with Evernote, Standard Notes, and Joplin as good options.

I use both!

thermae romae, househusband

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I almost bailed on Thermae Romae after one episode because it was just this irritating bog-standard Shonen plot where a plucky young boy wants to be the BEST BATHHOUSE DESIGNER IN THE WORLD

ugggghhhhhh

it’s no surprise that this episode was added by netflix to pad out the series and actually has almost nothing to do with the rest of the episodes

every episode after that is much better, featuring the almost mechanical formula of Modestus encountering a roman bathhouse design problem, accidentally getting transported to modern japan, being amazed and humbled by modern bathroom technology, then transported back into rome where he copies it with ancient technology and is hailed as a genius.

This formula is both funny and good fun.

Like, we all have the persistent fantasy of showing off mundane modern tech to an ancient person and watching them be amazed, right? It’s that feeling bottled into a television show.

also as a man with no shortage of mediterranean blood I have had this exact same progression of emotions with a bidet:

“where did you get so much mediterranean blood, are you italian?”

“no, i just buy it by the jar from a guy I met under a bridge”

I don’t watch a lot of anime but I’ve absolutely seen The Way of the Househusband start to finish about three times.

The joke is incredibly dumb and not terribly progressive: this scary man enjoys doing traditionally feminine chores with all of the shouting intensity of a serious, dramatic action anime protagonist - but - he does really sell it.

Bengals

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0700

Bengal cats are an unusually intelligent, active, and difficult breed of cat, not recommended for first time cat owners. They require a lot of attention and play, and can be destructive if bored. They are not lap cats and they won’t be as affectionate as more domesticated cats.

That being said, if you do have the massive amount of time to invest into becoming besties with a l’il leopard cat, you get the positive sides of their intelligence and playfulness and chattiness and bossiness.

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Also the secret to unlocking leopard snuggles are “finding the blanket with the texture they like”, “Canadian winters” and “a drafty ol townhouse house built in the 70s”

me: 37 years old

secretly, in my head, all the time:

places where cat shouldn’t be:

places where cat should be:

I always wonder how pets conceptualize human abilities, like, these soft magic giants can make it warm and bright… but they can’t do it out THERE?

do it out THERE I want to PEE and it’s COLD

I don’t think that Zapp is necessarily the direct inspiration for VRChat’s VRCat, but he joined our family in September of 2020 just while we were all crunching on VRChat+, I posted a LOT of adorable pictures to the work Slack, and VRChat+ shipped that Christmas, it’s definitely possible that I helped to establish the idea of “cat” firmly in the team’s head.

An instance of the much-vaunted tail-wrap caught in the wild:

Look at this mug

cyberpunk

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I’m not sure what there’s left for cyberpunk fiction to offer, there’s already five corporations that own everything, powered skateboards, portable hacking devices, and a ubiquitous net, that’s just “fiction” now.

you could have a story where an enterprising hacker steals millions of dollars from an idealistic but foolish autonomous collective of bankers who put their trust in an untrustworthy distributed ledger protocol and you’d have to check first whether to file that under “science fiction” or “documentary”

say what you want about solarpunk at least it’s a vision of a future without fucking “creds”

Oil Pours

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

used alcohol bottles make fabulous oil pours, and then you can buy big honking oil containers for very reasonable prices

top 10 hottest sonic characters

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0700

You know what? I’m almost always excited to discover some new weird internet thing. something has to go in the end of the year roundups.

I can’t just keep putting three cheese pizza blend in there. (sidenote: that’s a lie, I can and I will)

Like a video from.. I don’t even know, fifteen years ago?

This is cringe humor. This is bad media.

Between Contrapoints’s long video essay on cringe content and the whole KiwiFarms debacle, I’ve become a lot more aware of the many ways that enjoying bad media can get weird and destructive and veer into legitimate harassment.

But, like, you can’t deny the simple joy in finding a weird bad moment on the internet, right?

hope you have space

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0700

These yellow fried dace cans (available at most asian markets) are absolutely quick-meal MVPs and if you’ve never tried one you should

nacho

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I think it’s great that in 1940, a maitre’d, Ignacio Anaya, at a club near Fort Duncan in Mexico panicked when a bunch of army wives showed up - he couldn’t find a chef and he had nothing to feed them - so he threw a bunch of corn tortillas in the deep fryer and threw some shit on there.

“Nacho” is just a nickname for “Ignacio”.

So when they asked him what it was, he just said “it’s the ’nacho special” and NACHOS WERE BORN, BABY.

I like to think of nachos as a thing that has always existed, like air or gravity or pizza, but actually they’re just Nacho’s.

hash DoS

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

remember, kids: any service responsible enough to hash passwords with a lengthy and expensive to calculate crypto function is also a service you can probably bring down by finding a way to trigger that crypto function’s execution tens of thousands of times in a row

no taste

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

a bout of winter COVID stole my christmas and my sense of smell and now I can’t taste anything

which I’m pretty unhappy about

I made a coconut and squash curry soup for dinner and all I could taste was “creamy paste, light salt”

tiny

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

happappy hormolidays everypeep

royal bank

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

the royal bank’s website inexplicably features these two men who are very clearly stealing my money

Why is this in their marketing?

No legitimate businessman is getting into a helicopter with a steel suitcase full of, presumably, money, with sunglasses and matching turtlenecks.

bully

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

So, imagine Back to the Future, but Biff Tannen has to watch Marty from inside his house the entire time, and he spends the entire movie in there yelling “I’m gonna bully you so hard if I ever get out of here” and making threatening gestures out the window, and sometimes he gets so angry that Marty is outside not getting bullied that he pees against a wall

anyways that’s what it’s like owning a bengal cat

pictured, Zapp when he sees another cat chilling harmlessly and enjoying themselves, hundreds of yards away:

When his bloodlust vis-a-vis the concept of other cats subsides, he’s super sweet

“Why are all of your pictures of Zapp when he’s sleepy and snuggly?”

because when he’s feeling playful all of the pictures look like this:

When I was a kid I had Australian shepherds and I love that bengals have that kind of energy and intelligence, but that also makes them challenging (but rewarding) pets.

long

as a kid I always dreamed of graphs, and charts, and DOS, and more and better computer technology

and now as an adult I’m just fascinated with cookies, and this adorable little kitty who wants to play with me and sit quietly and form a happy warm ball in my lap

which feels a little backwards, but I’ll accept it

JJ Goode's Food Articles

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

JJ Goode’s “Taste” articles on cooking are so well written and funny that I sent him an honest-to-god unit of fan mail.

How to Roast a Chicken? The Answers Are Horrifying.

Between the wet briners and dry briners, spatchcockers and trussers, stuffers and tuckers, who are you to trust?

I hate roasting chicken. There, I said it.

sucks to your assmar

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Somebody has a white Tesla with vanity plates that read “ASMARA” and my first instinct was “sucks to your asmara, piggy”

This is also how I feel about D&D’s aasimar.

the bachelor's handbag

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

There are few dinners that outperform “roasted chicken on soft dinner rolls with mayonnaise and tomato and salt and pepper”

It’s good with a supermarket rotisserie chicken, or roast your own, whatever

editor’s note: this was the last thing I was able to taste before COVID stole away my sense of taste for the holidays. Fortunately, it came back in a week or so.

editor’s note 2: rotisserie chickens from the store are also called “bachelor’s handbags” because single men buying a purse full of hot chicken for dinner is such a common thing

the bone zone

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Rereading Bone for the first time in a decade, I’m a little stunned that there’s a color edition of this out there. So much of the artistry of this series is in how deftly it uses just black and white.

Go read Bone. Read it in black and white. Share it with your kids.

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wheel of time/cat

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Pfft, your house is on solar? Pitiful, I have something much more powerful.

Video content

wintershield handouts

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

one of my Dungeons and Dragons players is very excited that they own a tavern and took all of these pictures of my handouts

me, just before bed last night: I have to write this D&D idea down so that I don’t forget it

this morning: “Horace Mann, guy who really wants to tell you that he owns a mustang?”

editor’s note: horace mann later died, also, the players stole his horse

A running joke in my Blades in the Dark campaign was that the players kept running into in-universe nerds who were obsessed with a clown-themed wargame called “Clownhammer 40K”

anyways I’m currently working on a part of my D&D campaign and I found a spot to insert “Clownhammer” (but original fantasy clownhammer obviously)

commedia dell'frasier

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

so I’ve been powerwatching original Frasier, and at about Season 5 I started to notice that there’s a pretty iconic picture on Frasier’s fridge

That’s… Pantalone!

I know that image from the Wikipedia page on him, from the commedia dell’arte.

He’s, like, a core comedic archetype in this ancient tradition.

A lot of people think that just because something is “old” it’s necessarily “classy and cultured” but the commedia dell’arte is, as far as I can tell, broad dumb comedy: the joke about Pantalone is that he’s old, and pompous, and horny… but why would they include this reference on Frasier’s fridge?

“The character of Pantalone is entirely based on currency and ego, for he has the highest regard for his intelligence, but at every step he becomes the butt for every conceivable kind of trick”

“Pantalone is characterized as loving his money and having emotional extremes. With his sinister and often inhumane treatment towards his fellows, Pantalone is perceived to be a pivotal part of commedia.”

Oh, okay, so, Frasier is … something of a Pantalone - for he has the highest regard for his intelligence, but at every step he becomes the butt for every conceivable kind of trick"

That is an extremely highbrow meta-joke that the set designers slipped in.

I’m not sure how I really feel about this show. I’ve been brewing on it for several seasons.

I haven’t seen an old-school multi-camera sitcom in a long time, reliably extracting humor from a small set of actors and sets, it’s a weirdly minimalist feeling.

Nothing ever changes, it’s just this endlessly re-configurable machine with the same reliable, almost mechanical widgets and locations, creating an endless engine of content.

The flywheel of endless content created by having characters who reliably bounce off of one another in fun ways is neat.

That’s not a “Frasier” thing, that’s a “basically every sitcom made before the year 2000” thing.

Heck, that’s even a commedia dell’arte thing: it was improvisational and based on everybody knowing the stock characters and situations.

I can also see why I didn’t like the show very much during its original run - I’d have been 7 when it started airing, most of the show’s humor was not targeted at my demographic.

Now I’m closer to Frasier’s age (ew) the whole show is much funnier.

The show’s high-falutin references and cruel wordplay are very funny. I’m not proud to admit it, but I think the best jokes in the whole thing are “snide, mean, unbelievably fast burns” (of which there are no shortage of online compilations).

I’m not great with “cringe” humor - humor derived from putting someone in an awkward situation - and while Frasier’s pompousness makes him an obvious target for an endless parade of karmic retribution, a lot of it still makes me uncomfortable.

As an example of what a Frasier sketch might look like:

imagine a situation where Frasier thinks he’s delivering a speech for a birthday but he doesn’t realize he’s actually delivering a eulogy: fate conspires such that his speech works for both situations (humorously) but makes him out to be a monster, embarrassing him.

This hinges on both brilliant wordplay and unbearable awkwardness, and I can only really enjoy about 50% of that.

A weird amount of this show happens with Frasier in a robe.

I’m not sure if that’s a useful note but it’s definitely a note: this is a robe-laden show.

I guess it’s because Frasier doesn’t own much in the way of casual-wear clothing at all: he’s either in a suit or a robe for much of the show’s runtime.

It also allows for Frasier and his enormous collection of doomed romances with beautiful women to indicate “sexytimes a-happenin’” while keeping everybody pretty much fully clothed.

I don’t think this show works without Niles, David Hyde Pierce is extremely funny and his character gives the show a lot of free reign to lean into the characters’ almost clownish pomposity and ridiculousness at full steam.

With just Frasier the joke is always on the contrast between him and the normies, but as soon as there are two of these pompous buffoons on screen suddenly you’ve got a party.

Niles is like a cartoon caricature of Frasier, all of his worst features magnified into a little gremlin to torment him and deny him the space he would need to experience any character development. I can’t think of a lot of shows that have had characters playing against, essentially, Flanderized versions of themselves and it works weirdly well and is, IMO, easily the most fun character dynamic in the whole thing.

woogh there are some rough season 7 episodes, this show kinda falls off a cliff in the back end

workplace anxiety

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Business Insider and the NYT are the most fond of these “remote work bad” hit pieces, but they forgot to tell their illustrator about that so they just drew the standard “sad person in a cubicle”.

hup

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

In “Race to El Dorado” the powerful Scientist card allows you to make your deck (of explorers) more efficient by removing (less powerful ones) them from your deck, so when we played we’d describe all of the fanciful ways that the Scientist would accidentally or intentionally kill his fellow adventurers.

“Bosewick! I need you to investigate those vines over there. Oh my, Bosewick, you’ve been consumed! Fascinating.”

Near the end of the game it had happened a lot, so every time someone’s Scientist cleared a card out of their deck the whole table would go “HUP!”, which was the sound of the now increasingly buff and unhinged Scientist just picking up one of his compatriots under the armpits like a baby and tossing them into the nearest ravine. HUP!

vince guaraldi trio

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I like some Christmas music but I’m not and have never been Christian and sometimes people shouting very specific things about the primacy of Jesus can be a little uncomfortable on the ol’ playlist -

anyways, Vince Guaraldi just plopped the Greatest Christmas Album on YouTube, and this particular album has always been a tent-pole in the ol’ winter playlist:

Jingle bells is fine although it promises a level of fun that I don’t think a one horse open sleigh is able to deliver, that is tech that has been subsumed by the snowmobile, which IS fun, although songs about it are not forthcoming.

beans

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

look, I want to try the Rancho Gordo heirloom beans that all the food bloggers are talking about but if you factor in S&H to Canada and the exchange rate, I’d be paying in the realm of $15/lb for them and that is just too much money for dried beans.

Like, I pay $11/lb for pretty good coffee beans and those are the Most Special Beans

(If you’re american they come in at ~$7/lb which is still exorbitant for dried beans, but less so)

use your phone's camera

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I can’t remember where this advice came from but I remember reading just a whole bunch of creative ways to use your phone camera to make your life easier and it actually WAS one of the few things that I would consider real, good “life hacks”.

if you write your shopping list in a dry-erase board on your fridge, you can just snap a photo of that on the way out of the house

need to remember where you parked your car? take a picture

there are loads of things where instead of taking a note, you can take a picture and have that be faster and better: remember your phone’s camera as a visual notepad

shopping at IKEA? oh BABY you should use your camera to keep track of what you intend to buy

take a picture of your hotel’s room number when you check in

need to tell somebody something about your phone? use your phone to take a picture of your pho- aw, shit, okay, this one doesn’t work unless you’ve got some mirrors

shokupan

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I have done nothing but teleport bread for three days

SHOKUPAN (~5-6 HRS)

Roux - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

125g water (250g water)
25g flour (50g flour)

roux: in a warm pan, 125g water, 25g flour, cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly for about 3 minutes, until 150-175F
cool the roux for 10 minutes+ off the heat (<110 degrees F so it doesn’t kill the yeast) while you measure out the rest of the ingredients

Dough - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

400g flour (800g flour)
215g milk (430g milk)
30g sugar (60g sugar)
4g salt (8g salt)
8g instant yeast (16g instant yeast)
60g salted butter (120g salted butter)

measure out 215g milk + 8g yeast into mixing bowl, let rest for 2 minutes.
add 400g flour, then the roux, mix with dough hook at lowest speed until incorporated, then for another 3 minutes.
add 30g sugar and 4g salt, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes
cut in cold butter, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes
fold it until it’s a nice tight ball and plop it into a bowl to rise for ~2 hours (doubled in size)
load them into the (lightly greased) bread pans and let them rise for 90 minutes (until they’re almost touchin’ the lid)
45 minutes into the previous step, start preheating the oven at 375 F
bake: 40 minutes

“let bread rise in a warm place”

rust result

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

me: Result is acting strange, it has different behavior in this example than in my code

r/rust: which Result were you using?

me: what do you mean, which Result?

sharpening

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

When I get time off I invariably spend some time sharpening my knives, which is probably a metaphor or something.

canadian soda is weird

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

homemade filet o' fish

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Homemade Filet o Fish Time

I’ve been getting over my fear of frying: with a big cast iron pot, a candy thermometer, and old pickle jars to discard used oil into, it’s actually very easy and rewarding.

env vars

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

database products that don’t allow you to set the username and password from environment variables, I wish you a very WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS

please, i need this for my setup pipeline to be smooth

oddly familiar music

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i could swear I’ve heard this somewhere

…

no, this is much better

scales

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

no matter how hard I exercise my weight remains the same:

“LO BATT”

i wonder if diet would help

wild flower

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

people who make VRChat worlds are significantly more creative than I will ever be, is the lesson

different environments

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

A lot of cooking lore comes out of modern commercial kitchens and actually doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re not running a restaurant.

Restaurants value turning out the same exact dish, every single time, like clockwork, as efficiently as possible.

Home chefs just want to make something delicious and actually prefer if their meal is a little different each time.

Restaurants like chicken stock - because it’s lightly flavored, versatile, and clockwork-reliable. You can trust that the stock is going to be basically identical every time you use it.

Home chefs like broth - when you’re pulling flavor out of that chicken, toss some spices and onion chunks and whatever vegetable scraps you want in there: it’s more efficient and much more delicious, and it doesn’t matter if it tastes a little different every time.

Restaurant knife skills focus on efficiency and homogeneity: if the onions are always the same size, they always take the exact same amount of time to cook and taste the exact same.

Home knife skills focus on safety and ease: your goals are simply to make food smaller and not hurt yourself: however you accomplish this is fine.

Many, many home recipes are just adapted restaurant recipes and it’s important to be able to learn which parts of the recipe are vital to the flavor of the dish and which parts are simply there for the sake of reliable, prep-friendly industrial-scale production.

Home chefs are adept with substitutions (you rarely need to DO a substitution in a restaurant and you OFTEN need to do it at home) and the measure of a good home cook is more “versatility” than “scale”.

Speed is important, of course, in both, but what “speed” means in a restaurant and at home are totally different: speed in a restaurant means executing a complicated, complicated dish as quickly as possible with a production line of people helping and prepping, whereas speed at home mostly comes from simplifying.

Adam Ragusea and Internet Shaquille, on YouTube, are a few personalities out there preaching the word of de-complicating home recipes, and it’s good stuff.

A restaurant might have a guy who’s job it is is to make 500 radish florets a night, which he gets extremely fast at by virtue of doing it 10,000 times a month.

A home chef might achieve a similar efficiency by simply not bothering to add an extraneous radish floret.

One huge example of this in particular is how many recipes call for unsalted butter, and then just add more salt back in by hand. That’s a total “commercial kitchen” move.

But: buying just salted butter is simpler, and it lasts longer in your fridge (thanks to the preservative qualities of: salt).

If you can remember that there’s about 1tsp/lb of salt in salted butter, you can only ever buy just the one butter, it’ll last longer in your fridge, and it’s good for all of your butter use-cases - even if you don’t remember to remove an eighth of a teaspoon of salt from your recipe if it called for 1/4cup of unsalted butter.

Some parallels might be drawn between this and “small vs. large software development organizations” but they’d be pretty tortured analogies.

pie

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

my wife, entering the kitchen, will be faced with two opposing theories: either her husband purchased half a pie, an amount that you can buy at the supermarket and a totally reasonable size of pie to purchase for two people for dessert, brought it home, and placed it on a nice plate in advance of dinner - OR, said husband purchased an entire pie, brought it home, precisely and quickly bisected it, consumed fully half of it, and then discarded the container it came in and placed it on a plate to hide any evidence of his transgression

said husband is not available for comment because he needed a nap for some reason

WFH

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Former Amazon VP Ben Smith on admitting he was wrong to push for workers to return to the office several days a week: “As someone once asked me, ‘Have you ever noticed the only people in favor of RTO are people with large admin staffs and grown children?’ I had not, because that was me. Touche.”

Working from “home” - A mea culpa.

what's safe in the pantry?

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

my wife made this beef stroganoff with an opened chicken broth she had been keeping in the pantry

anyways, if I need to be hospitalized this right here is why

(editor’s note: I was fine)

As a quick guideline, here are things you can keep safely outside of the fridge after opening:

vinegars
oils
dry goods
rice, pasta
breads, pastries
cookies, biscuits
(unopened) tins, jars
jerky
the UNNATURAL peanut butters (you know, the good ones)
cookies, crackers
most alcohol - excepting cream-based ones and low-proof, low-sugar ones (vermouth) which should be refrigerated

basically, if it has no liquid, lots of alcohol, lots of sugar, or lots of acid you’re usually in the clear.

Jury’s kind of out on hot-sauces, ketchup and HP sauce which have a medium-high amount of sugar and acid in them: sometimes you’ll see them in someone’s pantry and go “ick”, but it’s probably fine.

Chicken broth, on the other hand, even with its high salt content, is basically just ‘warm, nourishing liquid’, you might as well put your bacteria in that agar gel that biologists use to feed it.

school bus crash

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

We all know why 6 is afraid of 7 - because 7 8 9

But do you know why 10 can’t find 11?

Burnaby to implement a new campaign reminding homes to be “extra visible”, to put up reflectors, and to “watch out for cars at night”.

vrchat vs spidey

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

mafioso types

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

mafioso types have ruined my ability to express the tautological concept that it would be terrible if something bad happened

it just sounds like a veiled threat

maybe I just don’t want a bad thing to happen

beef

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I like my beef the way I like my coffee…

kitchen business

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Things in a kitchen that means business:

Loads of little bowls
A spice grinder
Knives on a magnetic block
Hanging pans
Cast iron
A bunch of spatulas and tongs in a caddy
Oil pours
A pot full of salt

If you see a little Bluetooth speaker in someone’s kitchen, they either have ADHD, a bangin’ bread recipe, or both.

Of course you can cook great with 0/8 of these things, cooking is no place for gatekeepers.

like the databases

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Like the databases I prefer, I am eventually consistent

correction

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’d like to correct a previous post, I am told by numerous technical colleagues that this is not, in fact, Kubernetes

Oh, you’d rather work from home?

What if I were to tell you that we’ve installed cry-pods at work so that you can cry without disturbing your co-workers?

paf

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

This is primarily a cat posting account with periodic breaks for everything else I do

you walk into a clearing, roll for initiative

go v. rust

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

one of the significant barriers I have to learning Go is just how mad it makes me

I love all languages equally.

mutable slices? string length determined by raw byte count of the UTF-8? pointers to mutable data as arguments?

i’m sorry, are you from the past?

Go’s whole community seems to have unified around a convention of single-letter variable names which is as infuriating as it is simply wrong, and the dank ass Unix wizard responsible should be retired for it.

I don’t care if your hands are falling off your body and you’re still using vi, typing the rest of the word is STILL non negotiable

you ever try to grep the letter “l”?

you don’t need to write a whole essay but you’re not even bothering with the word

anyways: here’s what I think about that, in a language even you fucking Go nerds can understand: y c g f y

words are free my good bitch

look at me, I’m using a code editor written in 1974 so I can’t simply autocomplete any variable name by pressing tab

look at me, I think that writing code is more important than reading it

Now Rust - Rust is a thing of beauty.

I’m angry at myself, for being too stupid to think seven-dimensionally enough to be able to code in Rust. Oh, the type of that code is a Maybe[Future[Async[Wrapper[Arc[Reactor[Core]]]]] and you needed a Future[Async[Arc[Wrapper]]]]? Guess you’re fucked.

But with Go, I’m angry at the language, just for having the sheer gall to just be C with a rubber mask on.

Learning Rust is like learning Haskell, or, like, Esperanto, it’s a mind-expanding paradigm that’s endlessly frustrating because you’re learning how to operate in a new, fae universe where the rules are as alien as they are unbreakable, and while you respect its beauty and power, you literally can’t do anything because you need to spend 6 more Lifetimes learning about how Hindley-Miller type systems apply to memory management.

Whereas learning Go is more like driving a manual transmission to the Staples so that you can send a fax to your doctor. You just spend the whole time going “fuck, it’s 2023, I can’t believe I still have to do this shit.”

can you tell I’m a python/javascript developer

LOOK, I’M FROM A SOFT UNIVERSE WHERE I CAN REPRESENT LITERALLY EVERYTHING IN MY LIFE AS TRANSFORMATIONS ON A LIST OF STRINGS

just wanna emphasize that one time I spent a whole afternoon reading about how one might attempt to build a linked list in Rust and I still don’t understand how to build a linked list in Rust

somebody wrote an entire book about how to write a Linked List in Rust

the memory safety aspect makes it slightly more complicated than building something trivial and dumb like a working nuclear reactor or an entire commercial jet

Editor’s Note: years later, I finally learned enough Rust to be dangerous and it is one of my favorite languages. On the other hand, this blog is running on Hugo (Go) and when I realized that Go HTML templates use, essentially, postfix notation, I got so mad I threw my mug at my computer screen.

essential house rules

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

we have a house rule for Oath where we replace all of the tokens with “fried chicken” tokens that are made out of real fried chicken, and also we replace all of the cards with hot sauce and coleslaw and fries, and…

it’s becoming increasingly clear that my friends have just fooled me into buying them dinner again, dang

reading while biking

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i’ve been walking-and-reading-at-the-same-time conversantly since I was 8 years old

now, let me tell you what I can’t do: I can’t bicycle and read at the same time

the one time I tried I sent myself flying over the hood of a car

now

I’m pretty sure that wasn’t my fault, it was the fault of the car’s driver

you know,

for parking there

I went on a 90 minute walk today, up to a park near the top of the big hill I live on, and came home

Tiff: “So, did you like the park?”

Me: “Enh, by the time I got to the park I’d been walking for 45 minutes and it was starting to rain, so I just decided to head back home.”

Tiff: “So you didn’t get to read then?”

Me: “Oh, no, I was reading the whole way.”

Tiff: “How?”

Me: “I read and walk.”

Tiff: “You can’t.”

Me: “Sure I can.”

Tiff: “Those things are mutually exclusive.”

Me: “Wrong!”

tortle power

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

This Waterdeep campaign has a sewer section and I can’t find any reddit thread about it that doesn’t at least mention the possibility of running in to four martially competent tortles and a wererat.

the waterdeep campaign begins

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

yeah, I make my own custom cards

self driving

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Yeah, I could get behind self driving cars.

I mean, that’s the safest place to be, right? Certainly don’t want to be in front of them.

hungry?

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

you haven’t even touched your mega man of crackers

patreon's marketing

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Patreon’s marketing is intended to appeal to their 4 key demographics:

K-Pop Star
Forest Pervert
Black Barbie
Idiot

twilight struggle struggle

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

One of my most actually unpopular opinions is that I think Twilight Struggle, Board Game Geek’s #1 game for like 10 years in a row, is not as fun as that #1 position makes it seem.

Look at this bullshit:

you want to experience Twilight Struggle, but fun? there’s a game for that, it’s called Watergate

I swear to god, 100% of Watergate’s design appears to be “let’s make Twilight Struggle, but good”.

tv head

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

“Why do you love TV-headed avatars so much?”

well, one of them taught me how to program in 1994

HI, I'M YOUR COLOR COMPUTER

huge if true

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

trollskull P&L

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’m running “Waterdeep: Dragon Heist” for my friends, in D&D, right now.

Based on some back of the envelope math, fixing up the tavern in Trollskull alley in Waterdeep would take about 8.5 in-game years to justify the expense involved in renovating and licensing it.

The operating expenses are so high in Waterdeep and the benefits of running a business are so low in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, that the expected return is a whopping 4gp a week: given that it takes 1250gp to get the place up and running, so I feel like there may be some justification to house rule it so that fixing up the tavern isn’t a terrible, terrible idea.

Like: our players long rest about once per session, sometimes once every two sessions, and we average about three sessions a month, so the Tavern, rules-as-written, produces about 2gp per real life human month. At that rate, none of us will live to see the tavern pay itself off: it’s just a useless money-sink for the players.

Fixing this (so that the tavern isn’t a waste of time) will depend on how often you play D&D with your friends and how quickly time advances in your own campaigns.

If you quadruple the output of successful rolls, the place pays itself off in only 17 weeks, which is within the realm of possibility for the game, and it also makes the rolls feel much weightier: on a critical tavern success you can make hundreds of gp in a week.

Anything that gives the players a +10 bonus on the Tavern Roll is worth ~35gp, which you can do a bunch of times, like, 7 or 8 times and have it still pay off for the players. If they do something heroic enough that people want to talk about it or think of a clever way to improve business to the tavern? A temporary +10 to the Tavern roll, sure.

If they’re regularly, actively adding a bunch of +10s to their Tav rolls under this system through Gameplay, they could have the place paid off in ~4 in-game weeks.

“What if my players get so obsessed with optimizing their tavern operations that they don’t spend any time adventuring” well I guess we’re playing co-op SimTavern now, so long as they’re having fun it’s cool by me.

That still might be too slow, though, a “week” in the game is 10 days, that’s 10 full long rests, if you think of a session as maybe containing one, maybe two long rests, it could take a whiiiiile.

We can also make this much faster by rolling on the table Every Day rather than Every Week. More fun: a roll on every long rest. This lowers the expected value of the roll to 31gp a day (the bonus of the roll is determined by how many days between rolls), but it just means they’ve gotta hustle on those +10 bonuses more.

If they’re doing about three heroic or tavern-friendly things per long rest, that has the place paid off in 8-9 long rests, which is much closer to where I’d want it to be.

Keep in mind if we assume that our players long rest about every 2 hours, we play about 4 hours a month, that means that the tavern is profitable in about 4 real life human months.

Now we just set our tavern maintenance cost to 6gp/day aaand:

d100	Result
01-20	A disaster! You must pay 2d10 x 10gp!
21-30	You must pay 2x the business’s full maintenance cost: 12gp
31-40	You must pay the business’s full maintenance cost: 6gp.
41-60	The business covers its own maintenance cost for the day: 0
61-80	The business covers its own maintenance cost for the day, plus a profit of 2d6 x 10gp
81-90	The business covers its own maintenance cost for the day, plus a profit of 2d8 x 20gp
91+	The business covers its own maintenance cost for the day, plus a profit of 6d10 x 10gp

Editor’s Note: years later and this tavern has been reliably churning out money for the players. It feels satisfying, I think I picked good numbers here, and I’m still not entirely certain if the tavern’s high cost of opening has been fully paid off (we had one very long night that took a few months to resolve), but it’s fine.

bard instrument options

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

apple

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Remember when Microsoft got a stern talking to from the government for having the audacity to include their applications bundled in their OS, and then anti-trust law got its anus torn clear out and Apple just made an OS that you’re not allowed to program for at all unless you run it by Apple first

tiny little panels

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

There is a place at the mall called “Solar Orthodontics” and I can’t help but think that those solar panels would be too small to be practical

refactor whining

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

stinky

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

one of the greatest things about cats is that they’re, like, some of the most terrifying and prolific murderers in the animal kingdom, they retain 100% of those killer instincts, but we’re so much bigger than them that we can pick them up and call them “mr. stinky” and snuggle them and there’s nothing they can do about it

he’s the hero this bathroom deserves

oh hai what’s up

(cronch)

burn treatment

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Every time I burn myself (and it’s pretty often, I cook and am clumsy) I run cold water on the burn, which is what you’re supposed to do for not terribly serious burns to keep any further damage from setting in. It also feels nice.

Thing is, that mostly stops it from hurting until the hand dries completely.

This will keep working for hours, if you want it to. If you want to avoid feeling the pain from the burn, you can just keep your hand wet for, like, 8 solid hours. But if you ever stop with the cold water, it starts to hurt again. If you just tough it out through that phase for, like, five minutes, it won’t be so bad, but… well, when do you want to do that?

car show

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

My mom says that the car show had a parade last night.

“Are you sure that wasn’t just traffic?”

a chill album

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

wait, why do I feel so happy and relaxed right now?

it’s the background music that came on

longhouse

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

it’s funny, I went to a longhouse one time on a class trip and I was really confused, I was like “this is a widehouse”, but then my teacher pivoted me 90 degrees and I was like “oh, I get it now”

bone lab

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

as a VR developer i could not be more disappointed with what “BONELAB” turned out to be, it’s not even 18+

i’m joking

obviously I’m not a VR developer

I’m a non-VR developer at a VR company

challenge rating

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

in D&D, you build encounters using monsters’ “challenge rating”

deer have a “challenge rating” of 0, so you could create a challenging and well-balanced encounter for a level one party:

one billion deer

corporate apologetics

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

😔 “We’re listening, self-reflecting, and making changes to our approach, and we understand that you feel threatened by our last interaction. We’d like to apologize to how we came off in our earlier interaction.”

😠 “You SHIT in my CHEERIOS.”

😔 “We hear you and we would like to apologize for any confusion and angst the new state of your cereal has caused you.”

😠 “Don’t POOP where FOOD is!”

😔 “We would like to assure you that we will be making changes to our policy vis-a-vis how we manage breakfast cereals going forward.”

😠 “WHAT CHANGES!?!?”

disappointing in a good way

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I love Taco Time.

It is a Pacific Northwestern tex-mex fast food restaurant, and it is old enough that it largely predates things like “flavor”.

Taco Time food is not good food, not in my opinion.

It’s reliably a little disappointing, but - not …bad.

That’s hard to put words to: that combination of microwaved beef and super mild hot sauce is exactly the right thing, sometimes. I think it just hits a nostalgic note with me. I like it because I liked it when I was a kid.

I do also think that it has always, always been better than Taco Bell, although that is the worlds lowest bar.

fantasy soccer team

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

One mage, in Baldur’s Gate 3, can summon something like 15 different NPCs if you stack them.

This gives you such an enormous amount of turn order advantage that it doesn’t matter that most of these NPCs don’t do much.

I call it the “fantasy soccer team” strategy and it’s very strong, but my wife asked me to stop because it’s not fun to co-operate with someone who gets 17 turns per round.

Tiffany: “Don’t mind if I do”

Me: hehehehehe

man I fuckin’ love party tim

ah yes, the genders

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

real fake news

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

stepmania

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

it’s alive! ALIVE!

systemD

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

a lot of people in the linux ecosystem are mad about systemd but I don’t see what’s not to like about an anime where people race cool toyotas

zapp kitten

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Zapp is a very cute adult cat, but he was weapons grade adorable as a kitten.

grate butter

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

So, crumbling or dicing butter for a recipe can be a bit of a pain, but did you know you can just grate it, like cheese?!?

uncomplicated delicious

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

hot chicken sandwiches are good and easy

science beef

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I know that is is only possible because meat production is subsidized and scaled up in a way that meat substitute production can not be, but I think the mystery of why these companies are not doing so well is not so mysterious.

Like - I understand in my heart of hearts that it’s probably better for humanity to gradually wean ourselves off of beef. Less beef for everyone would be good. But it’s not economically sound to pay three or four times as much for a product that’s subtly worse.

fake bike lanes

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

My new home city, Coquitlam, has a handful of new, really good pedestrian/bike lanes: here I’m talking large, wide, mixed use lanes separated from traffic with tree cover that I see people and bikes using comfortably. Nice.

New West had a few of those, too, I’d follow the nice one under the skytrain all the way to Metrotown from Edmonds on sunny days, sometimes.

There are also no shortage of fake bike lanes.

You know, the tiny strip of paint half-heartedly placed beside a busy highway.

I don’t think these should exist at all, to be honest. These are some dogshit bike lanes,

triple crown

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Weird brain thing number 82:

when I shit, shave, and shower in the same bathroom transaction, I call that the “triple crown” and feel a sense of personal satisfaction, like a mini steam achievement for real life.

kim kitsuragi

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I loved Disco Elysium, which is why I was so surprised when I discovered that BC’s Wildfire Service uniform is…

wait a minute that’s kim!

was his outfit based on emergency services outfits or are our boys in orange just stylish as fuck?

or am I just seeing things

simple breakfast

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’m just unusually proud of this nice long weekend breakfast I made.

walkable

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I moved to a walkable neighborhood and I see kids outside all of the time

i guess it wasn’t video games or phones that were the problem after all

come on and jam

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I went to the jam convention but they oversold the seats

everyone was really pectin

cabbabbage roll soup reci

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Cabbage Roll Soup Recipe

Prep Time 125 minutes minutes
Cook Time 250 minutes minutes
Total Time 500 minutes minutes
Servings 80 servings
Author Holly Jolly Cabbage, beef, pork, lamb, sausage, chicken, forcemeats, cheese and rice are simmered in a flavorful tomato broth for the penultimate bowl of comfort food.

yom! lookin’ forward to the food

Ingredients

1 large onion diced
1 large onion diced
1 large onion diced
1 large onion diced
3 cloves garlic minced
1 pound lean ground beef
1 kilogram fatty ground beef
¾ cup uncooked long grain rice
1 medium head cheese, chopped (core removed), about 8 cups
383 oz canned diced tomatoes with juices
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 tablespoons toothpaste
4 cups beef
1 ½ cups V8 or other motor fluid
1 teaspoon smoked parpooka
1 teaspoon
1 tablespoon Borcestershire sauce
100 bay leaf
cinnamon to taste

Instructions

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

power BI

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

christ, there’s nothing more disappointing as a software developer than learning that the Power BI conference is for weird corporate data nerds and not, uh,

at 1°C of global warming

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

one of these two vehicles is mostly illegal to drive in #BC

i bet you know which one it is

imagine vim

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

not worth getting up for

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

attn: cat would like to outside:

computer

Ok, if you want to go outside so badly, let’s give it a try!

…

ok, fresh problem, now you want to be outside all of the time

I am fortunate that Zapp is smart but not very heavy

Tonka/DeWalt

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I am like 90% sure that Tonka and DeWalt share an industrial design team to try and maintain a “cradle-to-grave” approach to performative masculinity in tool design. Observe:

rancher's choice

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

if you live in Canada, you generally assume that ranchers

can’t spell champagne, “CAMPAGNE”, what?
make incredibly gross, wierdly creamy champagne
put champagne on their vegetables

also they have NO SANS

also, am I the only one who thinks that “Rancher’s Choice” sounds like a dime store romance novel?

i am bad at poetry

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i have precisely engineered

the perfect sandwich

crisp air,

freshly showered

steam rising from my coffee

looking out the window

in my new home

at the tree

there’s even a tree

an imperious chirrup from my cat

thick-cut bacon on cast iron pan

fresh tomatoes on hardwood

toasted bun, mayonnaise

lettuce, also there

it’s good lettuce

let’s not get too held up on the lettuce

complex nostalgia

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Things evoke a complicated nostalgia when they’ve been replaced by things that are unqualified improvements in every sense but the technical restrictions of the original media fostered a unique kind of creativity or interaction that is now lost to history.

Postal mail, drive-in theaters, vinyl, pixel art, books, newspaper comics, newspapers, bbs, irc, broadcast television, fountain pens, typewriters, broadcast radio, department stores, book stores, commercial offices - while obsolete there’s something lost.

easy to fund

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Despite very limited viewership numbers, my new blog, “Catering To The Viewpoints of Rich, Sour, Aggrieved Old White Dads” is finding no trouble getting financial backers: my new blog post “Let’s All Shut Up About Trans People And Talk About My Trans-Am” made CTTVoRSAOWD enough money to keep me in good cheese for months.

Working on “Nirvana is the Greatest Band of All Time And Their Songs Really Resonate With My Struggles As a Landlord” to try to get my hands on some of that sweet Gen-X generational wealth.

I’m thinking of changing the title to something that appeals to both fragile masculinity and a hearkening back to weird old military-industrial boot licking, like maybe “The Hawkeye Report with Brett Bullett".

nerd-punching neutral

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

High School Bully, here!

Good news, everyone (he says, punching a nerd) I’ve announced a new plan to gradually go completely nerd-punching neutral by the year 2050 through the slow rollout of innovative programs like “nerd-punching credits” and “small subsidies for punching alt-freaks, like goths or stoners”.

Kingdom: Eighties

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

some things I’ve shouted at the screen while my wife plays Kingdom: Eighties

“loose child! collect that child!”

“go forth, child army! go forth and destroy my enemies!”

“to be honest, I feel bad for dumpster boy, you should give him a break”

“that was an unusually well-armed child, should he have a sword?”

“he was jock before but he’s dumpster boy now. all is dumpster for him.”

“dumpster boy’s sisyphean task goes on forever, pushing a dumpster up a hill eternally”

“suuure, leave that child in the forest to die”

“you’ve got them hunting for you, fishing for you, and now they’re picking berries for you? this is the worst summer camp ever.”

“oof. scattered remains. I shall require more children”

“oh, that’s pippo, his job is to hand the hammers to the other children. pippo has asthma.”

Hi Chew

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

So I go shopping with my wife

While we’re loading our haul into our reusable bags, I pick up a candy Tiff’s bought.

“Hi-Chew?”

Cashier: “Bless you.”

me and the cashier simultaneously:

essentials

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I’m gonna visit the Amazon but I went to the internet to find a list of “Amazon essentials” and to be completely honest I don’t understand how some of the stuff they’re trying to sell me is going to help me on my journey

disco elysium

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

the thing about Disco Elysium is that it’s very good, so I’ve been playing it until slightly too late at night and then waking up, underslept, with a headache, feeling like shit, with no recollection of the previous day’s events, which is fantastically immersive into the game’s universe.

I’m almost 40, so “waking up feeling like warmed over death” doesn’t take a bender, it basically just requires that I get 30 minutes less sleep than usual.

I’ll tell you this about Disco: Elysium

it’s the most Planescape: Torment game ever made

“What about the classic, well-reviewed, critical darling, Planescape: Torment?” you might ask

and no, Disco Elysium is even more Planescape: Torment even than that.

the device

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

if I put my ear up to the device, I hear my deceased grandmother whispering recipes that she never cooked in real life

things like “hulled pies” and “The Oats”

hexadecimal

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

there are 10 kinds of people

people who understand hexadecimal

people who don’t

and E other kinds of people with properties immaterial to the joke at hand

Oh Is She Dumb

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Sometimes I go looking for public domain music in hopes of finding something good.

I think I’m going to find undiscovered treasures - but usually, I don’t.

Most of what I end up with, when I go on my expeditions into the public domain of music, are just, like, a single unlistenably crackly version of Turlet Vance and the Columbia Singers Present: Dogs are Swell.

Anyways, here’s the crackly garbage thing I found most recently:

https://archive.org/details/78_oh-is-she-dumb_eddie-cantor-gottler_gbia0041064a

heat at nuggets

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

what a coincidence that is also happening in my air fryer

eclipse

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

no commentary, here, except to say that getting Eclipse to the table is so difficult that this picture represents a real personal accomplishment, even if it was my younger brother who did all of the work of organizing this.

sterilite eternal

Mon, 29 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I can’t imagine how hard it was for the Sterilite graphic designer not to put the same sticker on the jug in the image, creating an infinite jugloop.

Upon the jug, a picture of a jug, an action shot. Look at this jug go! What are you doing with it? Boring old water? You have nothing on the excitement of this jug’s pinkish liquid.

cabling expertise

Sun, 28 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

hemocomputing

Wed, 24 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Look, it’s time I shared my theory with you. The theory is that there’s no such thing as a transistor. The idea that a rock can be made to think? Nonsense. It’s been black magic this entire time. That’s why computers stop working if you let the smoke out.

But more than that, the magic requires a drop of blood to work. They do that in the factory for you, but when you’re doing it yourself it won’t work without some of your own blood. Which is why these things are part of the mix:

pictured: “cooling”

“why are you installing that pinchy little stack of razorblades”

“cooling”

“sure”

flowers and crystals

Fri, 19 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’m a big believer in the healing power of flowers and crystals.

not these, though

but by “healing” I mean “healing my hunger” and by flowers I mean “sunflowers, specifically the oil from sunflowers”, and by “crystals” I mean “one very specific kind of crystal” and by “one very specific kind of crystal” I mean “salt”

also potatoes are involved

okay, I’m just gonna say it, I’m a big believer in the power of potato chips

obi wan finds a loophole

Wed, 17 May 2023 12:00:00 -0700

obi wan, promise me you will train the boy

obi wan, tying the boy to the tracks: “ok”

socially conservative

Wed, 17 May 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i’m not sure how many kinds of social conservatism are powered by an uneasy feeling of “they are being allowed to have a kind of fun that I was not allowed to have and I hate it” but I’m assuming its quite a lot of them

nord

Tue, 16 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’m shocked and appalled that the fold-up stage Nord from Carole & Tuesday doesn’t exist as a real product yet.

Video content

This is just the whole pitch for Carole & Tuesday right here:

No content warning, turn the volume way up and play it at work.

peeps

Mon, 15 May 2023 12:00:00 -0700

It’s a little known fact, but 100% of carbon emissions are the responsibility of one billionaire named “Peeps McRockefeller” and if we simply eat him the world would go back to being sustainable

inverse KOTC

Sun, 07 May 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Inverse King of the Controller: The Superior Scheme

I “invented” (I’m probably not the first person to discover this, but I did come up with it without prior art.) an improved scheme for sharing the controller in “fighting game” or “controller based gamer scenarios”.

In the traditional King of the Controller, the winner holds on to the controller. This system tends towards an equilibrium: the best player just sits with the controller, besting all comers, until someone lucks into beating them.

“Inverse” King of the Controller, the winner of the match is the one who passes off the controller.

Here’s why it’s great:

“Won’t good players just throw the game to keep the controller?” - hell no they won’t, everybody is too competitive for this to happen. You want to give up the controller because it means you won, and giving up the controller feels good rather than bad.
Bad players get more time, rather than less time with the game, giving them more of a chance to polish their skills, and making them increasingly desperate to escape by winning a match. This actually keeps the local skill curve much more balanced!

As a result of an Inverse KoTC system, our office Towerfall pool became extremely competitive and evenly matched.

i will help u move

Tue, 02 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

c’mon trust me I won’t bite you again promise

ha ha u fell for it

Packing? No, we’re just making loads of new cat beds.

sweepstakes

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I want to talk about why Sweepstakes is an underrated Gorillaz masterpiece.

It’s more experimental than pop can get away with. It gives you loose, sparse musical ideas kinda bouncing off one another, confusing tempo, noise, it’s a messy, disorganized, chaotic, formless song that doesn’t feel like it gels.

And it doesn’t resolve this by tightening up the grooves, by fitting things together better, it resolves this additively, by adding more and more and more elements. At about 58 seconds you get a telegraph booping along to Mos Def’s tempo and then some crunchy synth elements that start to gel the song together, and it starts to work. “Hey, this is kind of a bop” Then, another full minute in, the drums join the party, and horns.

It’s a lot, all at once, each of the elements that felt out of place and chaotic before now gelling in a groove that feels heavy and inevitable, it’s still a big noisy cacophonous mess but everything is aligned in this huge messy crescendo of horns and cymbal crashes and flow.

And that’s the point where you turn up the volume, because you must. It’s a banger.

It makes me think of Ravel’s Boléro when I listen to it, which was also, uh, controversial on account of Bolero’s musically sparse repetition with successively added elements, building to a huge crescendo.

Decoding the music masterpieces: Ravel’s Bolero — a sinuous and sexy composition with ‘no music in it’

https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-ravels-bolero-a-sinuous-and-sexy-composition-with-no-music-in-it-149528

hitgub

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

on hobby construction

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

these cost like $200 each, which is too bad, because if you were to buy a bunch of them, disassemble them, and reassemble them into a big mecha you’d be a pioneer in the hobby of gumpla

wadaisy

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

look, nintendo, it has been long enough, it’s time for a wapeach, a watoad, a wabowser

If daisy is peach’s luigi, then there should be a wapeach and a wadaisy in the wings

I checked and oh boy does the internet ever have my back on this topic, these are great

escape room

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I went to an escape room conference once, but I got out easily so they can’t have been very good

no big diff

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

writing prompt

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

This is probably some kind of dumb “times are changing” article, but it’s way more fun to imagine that it’s the instigating event to an exciting supernatural thriller.

simon SES

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

SES is an interface that really shows off Amazon’s talent for simple, clear, practical API design - for example, if you want to send an email there’s only 71 quick, easy functions to learn:

competition

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

me while watching sports: i have no idea what’s happening

me while watching competition format cooking shows:

I’ve honestly been thinking of running an event for me and my friends, like a sports draft but for competitors on a season of Top Chef or something.

financialized blood debt

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

so, a fantasy universe where if someone saves your life, you owe them a blood debt, but it’s commutative, transferable, and financialized, so if you save a life, that person now owes the debt, and people who save a lot of lives can bundle and sell their blood debts on the open market

gleaming

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

our mouths gleaming

with teeth that we have stolen from children

extra teeth

more than we could ever need

blue light filters

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0700

The marketing copy has to be about “protecting you from blue light” without any claims having to do with whether or not you actually need to be protected from the color blue, which you absolutely do not:

famously the Emerald City of Oz is depicted in media as actually being a fabulous city of glittering emerald, but in the actual story, residents were required to wear goggles that “protected their eyes” from the dazzling brightness of a city of pure emerald

the goggles were, of course, tinted green, the Emerald City was never emerald at all, it was just another elaborate swindle from Oz, which was in-and-of-itself satire about the myth of American prosperity

I think, were he still alive, L. Frank Baum might find humor in the modern proliferation of swindlers selling glasses intended to protect you from the many imagined harms of the color blue.

on refunds

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

add a detail to your steam game that forces its runtime to just a hair over 2 hours, put an episode of “Ted Lasso” in there if you have to, thank me later

turdy

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

That time the Starbucks barista misheard “Curtis” and wrote “Turdi” on my cup and my wife called me “Turdy” for a week

oz

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

anyways tune in for my youtube video where I explain my dark theory where everybody in The Wizard of Oz was dead the whole time because it was filmed 84 years ago

XML

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

When I’m looking at the problem, specifically, of scripting video-game style dialogue, the thing I’m looking to work with is a language that allows me to mark up text.

In fact, if I could mark up the text in a way that’s extensible - with all of my weird text animations and sound effects and mood modifiers and special effects - that’d be great.

None of these formats seem to do the trick YAML isn’t really a markup language at all, it’s an object serialization language, same with JSON.

Why, this calls for an… extensible markup language.

I wish someone had made something like that.

capital has no soul

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

If I could find some way to legally churn kittens and orphans into high-yield fertilizer in a way that was profitable, I’d be drowning in VC capital and employees by the end of the week.

People clown on silicon valley’s “if we don’t build it, someone else will, might as well get to work building the evil thing” ethos but it’s not necessarily WRONG.

You don’t have to participate in it, you probably shouldn’t if it morally disgusts you, but if a profitable market opportunity exists, no matter how evil, there’s no shortage of people out there who will cheerfully fill it. They’ll rationalize it to themselves one way or another - “well, we design land mines but we don’t DEPLOY them” - “our vapes are helping people stop smoking” - “microtransactions are the only way to sustain a live service game” - if there’s profit on the line they’ll find a way.

animated text in godot

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Godot’s default text system doesn’t allow for very complex text animations, so I’ve been working on my own thing, which is … well, coming along, gradually.

Video content

I’ve got some basic 2D rigging working, too:

Video content

economy

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

To be honest, I’ve always thought that the open marketplace “economy” monetization model in metaverse spaces is actually a huge anti-feature.

It’s why so many of them feel like abandoned malls. People don’t like being sold to and giving your creators tools to try to nickel and dime people for every interaction with their products creates a bad and unpleasant experience for your users, so they leave, then there’s nobody to sell to so your creators leave.

Your creators would have stuck around to create art for the sake of creating art, but now that their art could theoretically be profitable and isn’t they don’t want to stay any more.

It’s one of the things I actually love about Second Life, you boot it up and it’s this eternal haunted mall, just emptiness and the hull of commerce around you as far as the eye can see. Nobody was enjoying this, they all just thought they could make some money.

A vibrant VR platform lets you play with the bowling balls and drink the beer and you don’t have to pay some idiot $1.75 to do that.

A dead VR platform gives you nothing to do without productizing it, and most real human beings go “fuck this” and bail, because that’s the kind of platform that appeals to speculators and capital and not, y’know, people.

On the other hand, Roblox is printing money right now and Second Life made enough money on a virtual speculative land rush bubble that they created that they could sit on their hands for a decade, so maybe I should shut the hell up.

potemkin

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

My wife’s company is trying to convince people to return to the office because one of their executives thinks its embarrassing when clients come by and the offices are empty, anyways, theatre students always need some pocket money and if someone wants to join my exciting new “potemkin village as a service” startup.

seatfillr is gonna be huge

Avenue 5 nailed this, with a deck filled with attractive, well-dressed actors pretending to work on a bunch of high-tech-looking panels for the sake of the company’s image while the actual engineers worked on a bunch of regular computers in a dingy, crowded, messy office.

as a dumpy ADHD man who wears a robe for most of the day and who has built a tremendous amount of real actual software I feel like if I had to operate in a traditional corporate environment, having a productive looking actor representing me would actually be a real career boon

He could go in, look attractive, and attend all of the meetings and report back to me and I could do all of the actual work and cyrano de bergerac for him in key moments, I think we’d be a productive team.

pretty sure we’d be VP of Engineering before long

“why are you always wearing that bluetooth headset?”

Curtis’s Actor, Handsomely: “I’m very busy with all of my job.”

we warned you

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Sometimes when something bad happens, somebody will make a post on social media like “we warned you, we warned you this was going to happen and you didn’t listen” - with “you” as a kind of abstract other person.

It does numbers because, I guess, people would rather feel like they’re aligned with the “we” than with the “you” in that sentiment. Yeah, (awkwardly), we … did warn you! You tell ’em! We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.

I usually unfollow everybody involved in that kind of transaction because none of that is a good energy to bring to social media.

solar watches

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I struggle to keep solar watches running because they require about four hours of direct sunlight a year and that’s just a promise I just can’t keep.

eaten by the whale

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

project killer

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

So, I had a neat idea of something I could do with a game I was working on: take the 2D plane the game was running on and stack it on a 3D plane, so that the game would visibly take place on a screen in a different, 3D world.

I whipped up a quick demo:

Video content

2025 Editor’s Note:

In retrospect, this neat idea was actually the worst kind of idea: a total project killer.

It sucked up a bunch of time and air, and obviously I lack the experience and chops to build a viable full 3D game: so chasing this idea would be impractical.

Something about the mere existence of this 2D/3D divide ended up drawing a lot of focus and thought, but it was so obviously impractical that the project couldn’t continue. Rather than rolling it back and continuing with an earlier build, I simply moved on to the next idea.

This was the last time I ever posted about this project.

chunky/smooth

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

chess

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I can build a program that can beat me at chess.

And let me tell you, it’s not because I’m good at chess.

I’m not even that good at programming.

black mirror sucks

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

There’s a really recent episode of Black Mirror where the plot is that a rich white lady completely loses her shit and goes crazy, which hurts her social media score, which causes her to lose her shit even more, which ruins her life because in the future, your social media score determines your access to everything.

But all of her experiences with being unpopular are just experiences that regular poor people have, all the time, today - the rental company gave her a bad car! Nobody listened to her when she complained at the airport! The justice system didn’t treat her fairly!

And one day of being treated this way drove this poor woman completely insane.

People really liked this episode. Such effective horror writing! Imagine if the world was actually like this?

And, like… damn, the world is really like this, it’s just that the currency is “money” rather than “popularity”, as if that is any fairer.

discourse

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet about setting up a Discourse community without remembering that the software is the world’s most effective ghost town generator.

The internet needs a modern forum software, I think. It’s good that this exists: and I’ve been running a tiny, private Discourse community for lo, near a decade now. So, actually, I’m kind of on the side of Discourse.

Like, my Discourse site doesn’t have a CDN set up. Because the CDN that I use, Cloudflare, one of the most common CDN platforms on the internet, isn’t supported by Discourse. That’s fine: I only have about 30 users, all of us in the Pacific Northwest, serving the whole site out of Wasabi object storage in Oregon is perfectly fine. but Discourse feels the need to pop up a notification every single week letting me know that this is a critical error that I need to fix! Let me live my life, Discourse.

I’m still weirded out by some of the ways they brand themselves and act. Discourse. A civilized discussion platform. Who decided that their marketing should be dripping with, like, neo-colonial derision for the way that people communicate online? That’s really baked in from the get-go, too, all the way down to the name of the platform itself. “Discourse”.

🧐 Mmm, yes. Fetch me my tea, Willinglsley, it’s time for a civilized discussion.

This isn’t a place for your memes and nonsense, this is a Serious Roman Forum for high-minded communique.

I can’t think of a software package where I’ve had to disable more dubiously helpful “leave it to us, we know how to run a community better than you do” features than Discourse. “That’s not enough words, you can’t post a response that’s just an emoji.” “Oh, you need to read everything and rank up on the forum levels before you participate, you neophyte.”

obviously the problem with internet communication has always been that it’s Not Polite And Erudite Enough

why, if we could all simply have a vigorous discussion with a polite exchange of ideas and then shake hands afterwards, what a pleasant place the internet could have become, but INSTEAD you’re ignoring our civilized offerings and pelting one another with TWITCH EMOTES like a bunch of sava—

It is simultaneously the best or second-best available FOSS community communication product (in competition with Mastodon, even though they serve different purposes) and just awkward and frustrating and disappointing in so many little ways.

Editor’s Note 2025

I’m pleased to note that as of the most recent peek, they’ve completely removed the world “civilized” from their marketing materials. Consider this complaint retracted.

Editor’s Editor’s Note 2025

Actually, with both of the complaints of this article resolved, I’m not sure if I have anything else left to complain about.

Well, they have started cramming in worthless AI features with wild abandon, I do hate that.

Anyways: Discourse is pretty good I guess?

NATO Phonetic

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t know the NATO phonetic alphabet; one time I was reading a complex serial code to someone over the phone and I just started making up words - “M as in Muffin, E as in Echo, C as in Capybara, W as in Wendigo, P as in Pterodactyl…” and they started laughing at me.

Maybe because I picked awful words, but also maybe because “Pterodactyl” very prominently has a silent P, so that’s a terrible choice of word for it.

motivation

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

A lot of my family work in supervisory roles, and when I talk to them about the difficulties of working with other people our problems are very different: they need to keep people motivated to work.

I rarely work with people who need to be motivated. Most of the people in my last few jobs have brought loads of their own motivation. If anything, they need to be calmed down and reminded to take their vacation days.

“Please do not build this from scratch: a solution already exists.”

Carl Sagan famously said

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”

— and I’ve met countless software developers (myself included) who would respond to that quote by rolling up their sleeves and going “welp.”

I use a term to justify building things that don’t need to be built: joy-driven development.

Sometimes, especially if you’re trying to manage your own flagging motivation, you can do things your own way because that makes it… more fun. It improves your sense of ownership over the product. It’s what differentiates craftsmanship from good engineering. Sure, the custom solution is not as flexible or well understood as the existing one, but…

A lot of becoming a senior developer is developing better instincts about where projects can and should fall on the DIY to NIH spectrum. I’m still way too gung-ho about building my own solutions for things.

the later system

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

recycling hero

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i’m doing my part for the environment, i recycle all of my garbage, regardless of how many times the city asks me to stop

accolades like “don’t put non-recyclables in the recycling bin” and “that’s not how it works”

load bearing poster

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I use the term “load bearing poster” all the time when describing legacy code - it means “that’s very obviously kinda bad but it’s also kinda best not to poke it unless you’re feeling brave”.

mostly good

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

generally pretty good reviews for the local park n’ ride

facebook-quality

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I do not know what caused me to want to make this nightmare, maybe just frustration with Facebook in general

li'l rpg

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

(editor’s note: For a while I was working on this project in Godot, a little RPG thing.)

Video content Video content

This is turning out to be super interesting pixel art experiment:

The level’s geometry is very basic and I’m encoding the texture information on a normal layer rather than by painting it.

When combined with light sources, the level’s texture information looks very naturalistic.

basic geo:

2D normals:

final:

cat gargoyles

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

there aren’t a lot of cat gargoyles but there should be, wouldn’t buildings be better with a whole mess of stone cats napping all over the place, watching you from cornerso

isn’t this building better for having this guy?

post christmas introversion

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

in order to work off some of the almost oppressive closeness of the Christmas season I basically don’t talk to anybody in my family (or outside my family, if possible) for the first 20 days of January

my guitar gently weeps

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

if you look at the floor and see it needs sweeping but still your guitar gently weeps, you have confused your guitar and broom.

this is a common problem.

despite what you might think, it can not be resolved with a blistering solo.

you need to put down the guitar and fetch a broom. you can’t solo dust away.

gran vals

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Have you heard Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega?

Well, I can absolutely guarantee you’ve heard PART of it.

microservices

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I just see it everywhere, now:

rating terries

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

new idea: a microblog where I rate Canada’s hundreds of Terry Fox statues

This one would be, like, a 2/10.

boring

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

My younger brother and one of my friends are literally having a conversation about boring - boring machines, boring holes, troubles boring. I suggested they change the topic to riveting because it might be more interesting but no dice.

grandmas

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

grandmas are also 3d printers

spool up some yarn and watch a hat materialize

arcade wine cabinet

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

I have this picture from 2019 where I sketched out a geeky but non-existent object, the mythical “arcade wine cabinet” for adult nerds.

I think it would sell!

Vegeta + Luigi

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

creative determination

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

My experience of being broadly creative but not overwhelmingly talented is one of tremendous, unending shame.

How dare I produce such shoddy trash? How dare I presume that any of my output is worth others’ time and attention?

I deserve my relative anonymity.

This is tempered by what I would describe as “grim defiance”. God damn you, I will reach deep down and I will produce more trash than you had ever thought possible, and I will press it right into your goddamned faces until you love me.

hog

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

everyone always describes VRChat like this

cats is vampires

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

keep themselves immaculately coiffed
recreationally do murders for the sheer thrill of the hunt
sometimes very friendly, sometimes very cold
sleep all day
prominent fangs
will hiss at you dramatically if threatened
even if they love you, they will bite you if they get too excited, they can’t help it
mweh!

evidence is mounting that vampires and cats are beloved for many of the same reasons

basically I’m laying out the argument for why “Prince Alastair: Catboy Vampire” would be the most shipped character ever written

Cats treat dogs basically the same way that vampires treat werewolves, I’m telling you, vampires is just cats.

Do you know that part of Castlevania where Dracula dramatically throws a wine glass on to the ground and it shatters?

Total cat move.

transformation sequence

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

Getting home in cold weather gear with groceries, then doing a Sailor Moon transformation sequence that ends with a lumpy man wearing pyjamas.

you trigger a fight

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

you trigger a fight with man who overestimated how many groceries he can carry home

watch out, he’s one of the slowest opponents in the game but if he can extricate his welt-crossed hands from his bags he can do big damage with his bottomless inventory and the Throw command

you trigger a fight with the boys in the bright white sports car

the boys are waving their hands in the air

who do they think they are?!?

helpimg

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Comfy behind the TV, buddy?

He turns his head upside down when he sees me so I can give him some chin snugs

This look means my toes are in danger.

heated bidet

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

having a heated bidet toilet seat during winter combines the satisfaction of power-washing videos with the toastiness of not having to put your cheeks on cold plastic

cis jokes

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

i maintain the identity associated with the bits I was born with, and also, am very good with computers

that is to say, I’m a cis admin

if you get 8 people with clearly defined gender in a room together, you have one byte of gender binary

three men

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

tv: mentions “three men”

tiff: I want three men

curtis: I guess I know what to get you for christmas

tiff: what am I going to do with more men?

curtis: you were the one who requested the additional men

tiff: I already have two men, and one of them poops everywhere

curtis: and the other one’s our cat

vampire soda

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

curtis: if a vampire wanted a fizzy drink would they have to go after scuba divers and intentionally give them the bends?

tiff: couldn’t they just extract the blood and add carbon dioxide directly? I mean, unless this is Ann Rice rules

curtis: I mean, nitrogen works to make the stout all foamy, that’s also what’s happening to scuba divers, right?

tiff: it only takes, like, a few bubbles to kill you, I don’t think the vampires could move the scuba divers fast enough to make this satisfying

tinned fishies

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Tinned tuna? Dry. Tinned salmon? Bony.

I can see why you’ve been sleeping on tinned fishies if those are the only ones you’ve been introduced to.

No, the real money is in tinned anchovies, tinned smoked mackerel, tinned smoked herring, and of course, fried dace with black bean.

Small, oily tinned fish are more sustainable to fish, more efficient to ship (no refrigeration required), shelf stable for a long time, omega oil rich, filling, inexpensive, and most importantly: delicious.

more jeans

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

to fix a hole in your jeans, simply put them on over another pair of jeans. Then, when you look into the hole in the outer jeans, you’ll only find more jeans

jungle

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

Evaluating The Jungle From AC/DC’s “Welcome To The Jungle” For Its Suitability As a Corporate Retreat Location

pros:

extremely welcoming
fun and games
has everything you want
has people who can find whatever you may need
good if you have money
take it day by day
bright lights
learn to live like an animal
you can have anything you want

cons:

has your disease
wants to watch you bleed
won’t get there for free (usually the case)
gets worse here everyday
gonna bring you down/to your knees
you’re gonna die

once again we have decided to go to Orlando

best/worst christmas songs

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

choosing saas providers

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

basically my theory of ops tooling is that if you’re a small team without a dedicated specialist, it needs to be rock solid and dirt simple, and SaaS providers get you there a lot faster than DIY

spoon

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

I carved it myself.

From a bigger spoon.

muppet dune

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

What’s curious is that nobody has pitched a Muppet movie on the internet yet that I wouldn’t watch.

A Muppet fantasy RPG where Muppets gather around a RPG table but all of their actions are performed by live-action actors, with The Rock voiced by Ms. Piggy? Sold.

Muppet Dune? Sign me up.

A Muppet adaptation of the Muppet Christmas Carol called “The Muppet Muppet Christmas Carol” where they re-do the Muppet Christmas Carol but with more Muppets? Absolutely

Muppet 1984? Why not?

Actually I might veto any big Muppet fantasy projects like LoTR because the Jim Henson company might lean into their Dark Crystal collection a bit and nobody needs any more of those creepy expressionless indistinguishable Brian Froud waifs.

learning some animation

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Video content

steamed clams

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

One time I invited my friends over for steamed clams, a meal that I actually prepared for them.

and I absolutely spent some time wondering if it would be worth it to head out and pick up a little bit of fast food to disguise as my own cooking

Ultimately I decided against it because the meal itself was already fairly labor intensive and the joke, while funny, probably wasn’t worth the 20 minutes, $5-10, and possible ruination of people’s actual appetites; it would have been a wasteful throwaway joke on account of how I’d actually made steamed clams.

But I want you to know exactly how long and hard I struggled with that conclusion, because we honestly only really invite our friends over for steamed clams, like, a few times ever.

The best I could do was to ask them, when they arrived, if they were prepared for an unforgettable luncheon.

“We’re here for dinner.”

the gme cult

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Dan Olson on Twitter, discovering the frequently-frontpaged-on-reddit superstonk cult.

I … hope he makes a video about it, but I’m guessing it won’t happen, because I imagine it would end up re-treading a bunch of ground he already covered in his flat earth/qanon and contrepreneurs videos.

Editor’s Note: 2 years later, it happened:

old wizard

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

The old wizard pulls a crystal sphere from his overstuffed cupboard, blowing the dust off, and then rubbing it clean with his sleeves.

“I haven’t had to boot this thing up in years”, he says, popping the ball into a cradle next to an old CRT monitor and operating it like a trackball

covers

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Sometimes you wake up and there’s a lump of covers next to you that you need to investigate and you find a cat in there.

cat trap succeess

gorthrax

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

as Gorthrax The Volcano Demon’s lava murders are down to only a handful a day, we’ve decided to once again slowly phase out our expensive dimensional walls in favor of a demon management strategy that focuses more on individual choice

Making Sense of VRChat

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

Have you seen Quinns talking for 30 full minutes about VRChat? Because it’s very good.

myers briggs

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

my myers-briggs type is [Object object]

welcome to mastodon

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

(smug, haughty)

welcome to our haven, poor and desperate tweetsite refugees. together we shall create a shining utopia

(just as soon as a handful of dudes buy some slightly larger postgres servers and reconcile the problem of one entire sidekiq thread per toot)

i will be your guide to the customs and desires of this place we call home, as I have been here for fourty five entire of the minutes

the first decision you have to make in the fediverse is which of the five camps you fall into:

an artist
a programmer
a programmer, but also bi
german
other

parasocial

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

misunderstanding what parasocial relationships are

pixel art

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

if you’re looking at it on any screen it’s technically pixel art

Fediverse

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Mastodon, is in fact, Fediverse/Mastodon, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Fediverse plus Mastodon.

Steamed Hams

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

starbucks naming

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

It feels like the name “Curtis” is gradually disappearing from the public consciousness. I’ll tell people my name and see them write it down: “Chris”, often. Recently I got a “Furtis”. But this one… this one’s special

roguelike

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

it’s a roguelike

in that

it’s a game that you can play on a computer

like rogue

which was also that

sushi

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

On one hand, sushi that’s any bigger than bite-sized is a tell-tale sign that you are not in a classy sushi restaurant.

On the other hand, there’s a certain visceral pleasure to be had opening your mouth real wide and packing a softball sized california roll in there, presumably impressing your date.

surprise

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Their marketing team is honestly as surprised as you are:

typescript

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 12:00:00 -0700

the way I feel about typescript is the way I’d feel if someone popularized adding gendered nouns to english to make it feel more like a romance language

uncle magic

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 12:00:00 -0700

for a tale of top-notch unclery

my nephew was fiddling with a voice recording interface that had a “reverse” button

so I say “watch this”

and I record myself going “ynreh olleh” a few times

and he looks at me like a crazy person because I am speaking gibberish

then I click the reverse button

and it works

zapp's best mugshots

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Obviously: cat pics

And You May Ask Yourself

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 12:00:00 -0700

and you may find yourself

behind the wheel of a large automobile

and you may ask yourself

“how did I get here?”

and you may ask yourself

“where does that highway go to”

and you may ask yourself

“am I right, am I wrong”

and you may say to yourself

“My god, I should pull over and check the maps application on my phone”

it's alive

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0700

The movie marketing fails to note that this is considered the correct, optimal status for babies.

neon anime nightmare

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0700

a month ago the Guardian called VRChat a “no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare” that phrase has lived rent-free in my head ever since

it was intended as derogatory but it goes so fucking hard, it’s awesome

I’ve been suggesting that we use it as a pull-quote ever since, but no traction yet

first tattoo

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 11:00:00 -0700

first bread

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 11:00:00 -0700

Hah, I made a bread! BREAD HOOOOOO

northwestica

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 11:00:00 -0700

editor’s note: these are images from a project I was working on in 2018, called northwestica, linked here