Notes

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 - 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”

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

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

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.

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!

the movie Krampus does a lot to demonstrate how horror can become comedy with just a bouncier, happier, foley

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

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.

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

i don’t know why people keep telling me that their food is art is anal

i went to peru to see the nascar lines but there weren’t even any goddamned cars on them

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

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

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

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

sorry, I just noticed something funny in the hugo awards this year

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

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

Hellboy - fighting occult nazis

Hellman - encryption/mayonnaise

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.

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

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

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…”

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.

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

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!

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

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

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’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”

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)

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

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

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

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

The last time I bought a VR game was 4 years ago, I assume the whole industry is cooked

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.

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.

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

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 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

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

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.”

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 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

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

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.

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

i lived in a Bosa building for multiple years and I still never stopped thinking “Bosa DEEZ NUTS”

This picture was taken by request, as the folks responsible wanted to gloat

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.

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

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

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

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

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,

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”

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”)

Oh man, Culinary Class Wars is so good I immediately love it, it’s Squid Game Iron Chef

i tried to make rogan josh from scratch but i ended up making rogan joe and now my curry tastes like creatine and weed

i don’t think that this joke deserved -5 points, costco canada subreddit

it was hot pot time

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 Radicchio recipe will knock your socks off!

1. Fill a bowl with clean water

2. Cut the radicchio in half and place it in the cold water

3. Get good, extra virgin olive oil

4. Head out to the grill

5. Keep going. Keep going until you get to a farmer’s market.

6. 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”

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

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

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

it turns out the lowest hanging fruit was shutting the fuck up

🌈

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

In light of his 45 minute long acceptance speech for the Humility Award, we have decided to rescind

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

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

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

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

i can’t even remember where I found this on the internet, reddit?

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)

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

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

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE

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

the worst thing about tipping is that brief moment of warm, disingenuous human interaction while you’re holding the credit card machine

The reason you have a PM is to stop the Hot Drink Station Discussion from consuming your entire company

I have eaten

the leftovers

that were in

the icebox

you probably

missed them

because

they weren’t

frozen mozzarella sticks

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

I usually try to make dinner look good but for some reason tonight I made a grimy poo hut out of tofu and beans

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

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

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

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

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.

oh come on

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.

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.

is every boomer hobby just gasoline and lakes

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.

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

“I’m a big fan of Starman”

“You’re a fan of David Bowie?”

“David who?”

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

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.

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)

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

apparently “raw milk influencer” is a thing and they’re out there trying to give listeria a fighting chance against Americans

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

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

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

nobody who’s used to buying coffee ever expects how much tea is in a pound of tea

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

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!

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!

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

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

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

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

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

You ever see a design and think the designer was like “maaan, fuck the color blind”

“I shall call it the cabbage softball”

• Jonathan Kohlrabi, 1856, spitballing name ideas for his new vegetable

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

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

dude, what?

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

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

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.

more like clownstrike amirite?

(satisfied, he walks away from his keyboard, another day defeated)

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

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.

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.

nation’s women disappointed by three inches, again

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

one of my friends replied to a thing with “no biggie” so I sent him this

Mr. Musk refused to comment when asked if this was “prompted by anything” or if the sperm was provided “in containers”.

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.

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 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!

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.

i liked the episode of X-men where nightcrawler visited Canada

where did he go?

BANFF

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?

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

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

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

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

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? 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

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

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

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.

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

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)

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: <_<

my favorite greek god is a pollo

he was kind of a chicken though

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

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.

good sandwiches are an art

for lunch i am going to eat this whole family

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

somebody at scientific american needs to take a cold shower

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

well this is new

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?

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.