Opens with convincingly real and unrehearsed news interviews, which they empasize are real and unrehearsed, but is the interview guy not aware that he’ll be in a movie? Why’s he gotta be so dry? From this drab beginning, the movie gets increasingly brutal, as the local casino runs a terror campaign against the voters, press, and church. Edwards stops John from killing a casino boss, too bad: John (Pickup on South Street) comes home to Phenix with his girl, has been there a half hour before…
This is such a niche topic, but can we combine our knowledge about the drinks packages on cruises? For those of you who are where I was ten minutes ago: it seems that cruises charge extra for drinks such as soda, interesting coffee (anything other than pouring it from a Church Fellowship Urn and adding your own cream and sugar), and booze. You can pay for those drinks individually, again and again all day long, or you can buy a “drinks package” where you pay a lump sum per day to cover a whole…
The “Yentervention” is the key to understanding everything at stake: Matt Dines takes us through the carry trade, Treasury demand, Fed liquidity tools, and Japan’s role in the next U.S.-aligned AI and industrial system.
It’s pretty rare for me to find an anthology in which I love every story, but this one really hit it out of the park! Here are my per-story reviews: Intro: Getting Martha Wells to write the intro is an amazing get! She also does a great job pointing out what we are saying about ourselves (humanity) with our AI/robot stories. (Mostly related to slavery) It reminds me A LOT about recent discourse about alien invasion narratives and what that says about collective guilt about colonialism.…
⚠️ This review contains spoilers! Book review for Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. I rated it 4 stars. Yesteryear follows a woman named Natalie who is raising her six children on a farm, while broadcasting her family's more traditional way of life to millions of Instagram followers. The book kicks off with her in the middle of a wildly successful social media career, with flashbacks to her college days and the events leading up to her marriage.
A little nostalgia ramble and a tidbit about today's song.Currently Listening: hey, nothing “Arteries”Reply via email
Simon Hanselmann is a skilled creator of comics. Many of his works involve the witch known as Megg, the talking cat, Mogg, and their roommate (in some continuities), Owl. Oh, and good ol' Werewolf Jones. Sometimes Hanselmann's yarns with these characters are outright hilarious ("Crisis Zone,"), but they can be incredibly dark and depressing too. His works are often quite edgy, however, with this latest release of the single-issue/one-shot, "Being Alive," providing plenty of moments I laughed…
I’ve loved dinosaurs ever since I was a kid. I find it fascinating that millions of years ago, these gigantic, colossal creatures actually walked this planet. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps. I think it all started with The Land Before Time movies, which were always on TV, or maybe with the dinosaur craze of the ’90s brought on by Jurassic Park. Fun fact: the movie is set in my home country. Another reason is that every kid likes dinosaurs. We had Barney, and somehow all the coolest…
The Short Leash AI Coding Method For Beating Fable The author describes staying in the loop as the AI writes code, steering constantly. One thing I’d add to their toolkit: ask the AI to produce diagrams. ERDs, state diagrams, sequence diagrams – whatever the task calls for. Just by drawing them, it often finds bugs in the design, before I even review them. DON’T YOU MEAN EXTINCT? If we are at the cusp of a paradigm change, it makes sense that we need to evolve. To adapt. Just like the…
I'm a huge John Carpenter fan. I mean, Halloween pretty much created my horror fandom at a young age, and for that I'll be forever grateful. I had a blast exploring his movies through my teen years, and revisiting them over and over again. Some have aged well, The Thing, Escape from New York, some have not, Ghosts of Mars, Village of the Damned, but I appreciate the vibe and especially the music that all of his films possess. For those that don't know, John Carpenter's father was a music…
I use GBoard on my Pixel 10 Pro. I’ve been a GBoard user for several years. It has all the smartness that makes typing a breeze. However, it’s missing one setting - smart punctuation. Let me explain. Whenever I type fast and keep hitting space, GBoard both autocorrects and also inserts space after the corrected word. When I try to type punctuations, the space end up before the punctuation. For example, I’d end up with a phrase like “how are you ?”, instead of “how are you?” (notice the space…
Join me for tea and cakes freshly baked to recipe of 1720 served in a 300 year old house. Click here for tickets for next Saturday’s tour of Spitalfields . You only walk in the alleys if you have a strong stomach and stout shoes, if you are willing to ignore the stink and the sinister puddles for the sake of striking out alone from the throng of humanity coursing along Bishopsgate. This whole place was once characterised by the warren of alleys and yards which laced the streets. And, when the…
Met up with friend Leonard Since we didn't know where to eat at, Leonard suggested we go to Et Al, Foodland's restaurantLeonard had their burger : Honolulu Meat Co. beef patty, La Tour sesame bun, fontina, Maui onion bacon jam, gochujang aioli, fries He enjoyed this but wished they hadn't over cooked thisI had their Greens & Grains Bowl : MA'O sassy mix, forbidden rice, crispy fried
Abbe Lane, the singer and actress who performed with her husband Xavier Cugat and appeared in both movies and on television, died on April 25, 2026 at the age of 93.Abbe Lane was born Abigail Francine Lassman on December 14, 1932, in Brooklyn. She was raised in Manhattan. Her show business career began when she was only four years old, and a child she appeared on both radio and in the 1938 Vitaphone short "Toyland Casino." She also did some modelling. She attended the High School of Music and…
Look, it takes a while to get used to new technology. Even the mighty Ron Burgundy experienced that problem, when some joker or jokers repeatedly added things to the teleprompter script, knowing he would read whatever appeared there. Great Odin’s Raven, that was embarrassing—once he realized what he’d done, which took a while. Something similar happened in the New Brunswick Legislature in June, when legislator Bill Oliver got up to deliver a speech. The speech lasted a total of 40 minutes, the…
It’s high time I made a start working through the Past Doctor Adventures series as put out by BBC Books once the Doctor Who novel licence was wrested away from Virgin. As I noted in my first review of their Eighth Doctor Adventures line, the novel landscape for the BBC Books-led fraction of the Wilderness Years ended up being somewhat more complex than the Virgin-led segment, where once the New Adventures got up to speed they (and, once they started, the Missing Adventures) kept a consistent…
My review of The Incredible Hulk.
If you've heard of this game, it's probably due to its presence on various "worst Dreamcast games ever" lists. However, it doesn't look too bad in screenshots, and it's a Dreamcast racing game, so I assumed it couldn't be as bad as people say. Plus, the old timey setting was a pretty appealling gimmick, so I gave it a try. And at first, it seemed like everyone was being too harsh on Spirit of Speed: it's a little clunky, but initial impressions are of a mediocre racing game that might provide a…
Whatever you’ve been writing to me to ask if I’m aware of: yeah, I’m aware of it. In particular: I’m aware that, as announced by my former student (and now superstar professor) Lijie Chen, an internal OpenAI model has solved ten more significant open problems in math and theoretical computer science. One of them is parallel repetition for arbitrary quantum games—something that my good friend and colleague Henry Yuen worked on when he was a student of my wife Dana; you can read Henry’s comments…
I completed Dishonored 1, plus both the story DLC, and wanted to wax on about how darn good this game looks
My review of Iron Man 2
I’m going to say something that may be controversial… An ebike might be better for fitness than an acoustic bike. We already know that ebikes allow people to ride more. Folks on ebikes tend put in more time riding, and cover more miles, than they would if they were riding acoustic bikes or not riding at all. And we know that they can be assistive devices for people with bad knees, or other health issues. There are a number of online support groups for ebike riders over 50, over 60, etc. I read…
I've written about encapsulation many times, but I've never written a post about encapsulation specifically. "Encapsulation" can mean a lot of things, both because it has many aspects and because we sometimes mean slightly different things when we discuss it. Good encapsulation can mean: That subsystems are communicating only through well-defined, appropriate interfaces; That responsibilities are divided among subsystems appropriately and, specifically, that one subsystem is not responsible for…
This book was helpful, and I thought I would take time to write proper longer notes on it, but many months have passed, and I'm understanding that it's just not going to happen. If I ever reread it, maybe then. Ironically, because I didn't take proper notes, I cannot quite remember what exactly helped change my brain chemistry, but I do know that it helped me rethink shame and that occasionally I think of random snippets that I believe are from this book. Anyway. Bullet points for future me if…
For years now I have been aghast at the terribly impolite behavior of some bots who spider my site. It is extremely common to see many successive requests to the...
Although I have a tendency to ask questions in the titles of my posts, my goal is usually to go as far as I can to answer those questions. Today, however, I have come up short and am bringing this matter to you in hopes you can fill in some blanks.Perhaps you can solve a mystery. In the early 1990s, Squaresoft did such a good job selling me on RPGs that my attention soon drifted to efforts by other companies. This list included Breath of Fire, Soul Blazer, The 7th Saga, Arcana and, shortly…
It's not unusual for a family to go through a crisis. But what if every day presented a crisis of some sort? I ask the question by way of introducing Olmo, a movie about a Mexican-American family living in Las Cruces, N.M. in 1979. Aivan Uttapa plays the title character, a young man who is often called upon to care for his quadriplegic father (Gustavo Sánchez Parra). Burdened by the need to work, Mom (Andrea Suárez Paz) relies on Olmo and his sister (Rosa Armendariz) for help around the house.…
Photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless…
I didn't find reading this. It was interesting, and I'm sure the content is useful, but it doesn't feel like it was really formulated as a proper book and lacks a lot of anecdotes that would've been useful to explain points. My sister went to an organizing conference where she got the copy of this book, and she listened to the author's talk and reported back that the things I mentioned basically just sounded like the powerpoint slides put into a book. My guess is that the talk is better and…
NB: This isn’t about crypto. I don’t care about crypto. Chris messaged me the other week asking if I wanted to implement zero-knowledge proofs. I initially was not interested, but then he said: What if I told you there’s a version of them that has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies? What if I told you it involves graph theory? What if I told you there’s a 30 line implementation? Now that was interesting. The idea of a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is that there are two parties: the prover and the…
