Notes

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?

I love it when he tucks his tail neatly around his legs like this.

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

1. Peel 2-3 heads of garlic into a ramekin.
2. Cover with a neutral oil. (Vegetable, cheap olive oil). Don’t go expensive with the oil here, subtle flavors gonna get obliterated by garlic.
3. 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.

i am an adult

designer: figma

me: figma… balls

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.”

buddy - if you could just - slightly to the - sigh okay

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

at least they’re finally being honest about WHO’S dreams that kid was chasing

when I make bread I save some dough in the fridge and use it to fry up little pan foccacias, like this:

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

This actor’s headshot from the local community college ad has been voted “most likely to haunt your nightmares”

i don’t know what happened at this Taco Bell but it sounds GRIM

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” 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)

co-worker: “I cleverly used a text adventure to trick people into letting me rewrite the notifications system.”

me:

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

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

“I’m terrible at citing my sources”

Unknown

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

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.

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

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.

at a loss for D&D encounter ideas, I have just created a Shrek room

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.

The Killers: I’ve got soul

Me, taking a big sip of my water: Ah, I bet that’s because he’s a soldier

“you guys, I think I heard some birds out there”

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

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

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”

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

the government says pants aren’t a business expense and yet if you show up to work WITHOUT pants suddenly YOU are the pariah

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

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…

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

They’re called no. 2 coffee filters because coffee makes you poop

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

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

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

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.

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

depending on where you put the emphasis, “technically competent” can either be a compliment or a wicked burn

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

Editor’s Note: (My friend Jenn maintains that she participated in the Cupcake Roulette, not me, which… is probably true)

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

it’s possible i have found the dumbest historian/collector alive

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.

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:

“What happened to Mr. Waddles? I thought you said he was cured?!”

“Okay, there’s been a miscommunication here”

“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!”

“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

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

in this article I list the top 10 dudes to give five bucks to

guess what I’m number 3

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

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.

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.

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! Can you defeat the giant monster, brave adventurers?

Lo, the monster has been defeated with ear rubs

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 of reliability ( 50.999999999% uptime )

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”

normal people: happy birthday

australians: b’day, mate

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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”

used alcohol bottles make fabulous oil pours, and then you can buy big honking oil containers for very reasonable prices

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?

These yellow fried dace cans (available at most asian markets) are absolutely quick-meal MVPs and if you’ve never tried one you should

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.

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

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”

happappy hormolidays everypeep

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.

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 “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.

more from this author

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.

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

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.

Pfft, your house is on solar? Pitiful, I have something much more powerful.

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)

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

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”.

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!

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.

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)

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

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)

1. roux: in a warm pan, 125g water, 25g flour, cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly for about 3 minutes, until 150-175F

2. 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)

3. measure out 215g milk + 8g yeast into mixing bowl, let rest for 2 minutes.

4. add 400g flour, then the roux, mix with dough hook at lowest speed until incorporated, then for another 3 minutes.

5. add 30g sugar and 4g salt, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes

6. cut in cold butter, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes

7. fold it until it’s a nice tight ball and plop it into a bowl to rise for ~2 hours (doubled in size)

8. load them into the (lightly greased) bread pans and let them rise for 90 minutes (until they’re almost touchin’ the lid)

9. 45 minutes into the previous step, start preheating the oven at 375 F

10. bake: 40 minutes

“let bread rise in a warm place”

ok

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?

When I get time off I invariably spend some time sharpening my knives, which is probably a metaphor or something.

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.

see also: this chicken parmigiana:

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

i could swear I’ve heard this somewhere

…

no, this is much better

no matter how hard I exercise my weight remains the same:

“LO BATT”

i wonder if diet would help

people who make VRChat worlds are significantly more creative than I will ever be, is the lesson

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.

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

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.

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.

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”.

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

I like my beef the way I like my coffee…

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 I prefer, I am eventually consistent

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?

This is primarily a cat posting account with periodic breaks for everything else I do

you walk into a clearing, roll for initiative

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.

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

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!”

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.

yeah, I make my own custom cards

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.

you haven’t even touched your mega man of crackers

Patreon’s marketing is intended to appeal to their 4 key demographics:

• K-Pop Star
• Forest Pervert
• Black Barbie
• Idiot

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”.

“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

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:

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.

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

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

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)

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?

My mom says that the car show had a parade last night.

“Are you sure that wasn’t just traffic?”

wait, why do I feel so happy and relaxed right now?

oh

it’s the background music that came on

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”

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

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

😔 “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!?!?”

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.

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

it’s alive! ALIVE!

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 is a very cute adult cat, but he was weapons grade adorable as a kitten.

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?!?

hot chicken sandwiches are good and easy

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.

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,

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.

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

I’m just unusually proud of this nice long weekend breakfast I made.

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

I went to the jam convention but they oversold the seats

everyone was really pectin

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)_/¯

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,

one of these two vehicles is mostly illegal to drive in #BC

i bet you know which one it is

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

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:

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 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

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.

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".