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…
All worldbuilding advice falls into three categories.procedureslushpilecategoriesThe good ones do one category very well. The rest can't pick a lane. Procedures are ordered lists of tasks, ideal for when one has too many ideas to write down.A good procedure is specific and arbitrary. No room for questions or hesitation or reasoning, nothing to distract from the numbered list. Compromise is the enemy: you get a drill sergeant dragging you thru the muck towards the finish line.And waiting for you…
A few weeks ago, following my Dutch Sunday Roast with Hugo Kurk, I came away with several things to think about, one of them being his suggestion that I should apply to BlackBox as a stock footage contributor. So I did. Read on to the end and I’ll show you the result of my application.
Frontier Motel & Cafe – Truxton, AZ – Fujifilm X-T5 – Kodak Vericolor III 160 According to Fujirumors, Fujifilm is delaying the announcement of the upcoming X-T6; however, Fujifilm has not announced that they’re announcing any camera. How can something be postponed that hasn’t even been publicized? Let me put it this way. Let’s say that you are the manager of some office somewhere, and you tell your secretary to pencil in some time and date for a meeting that will take place some months in the…
Going to be pretty sparse about this. There were good parts to think about, and the workbook is useful, but I think this is ultimately a book that should be read in tandem chapter by chapter & discussed as such with a group you're organizing with. I am not organizing currently. I listened to the audiobook and then flipped through about half of the book in text form, but didn't really finish reviewing the text. If I did, there would probably be more to copy and paste here. Basic things I thought…
This post is for people on Bluesky, if you’re not on Bluesky, keep scrolling. I built an app that sends you a daily DM with final scores and today’s game schedule for teams you follow. Looks like this: MLB, NBA, WNBA, NFL, NHL, MLS, NWSL, Premier League, and tournaments. Silence on days your teams don’t play. No login, no app to install. Text only. DM @sportscrawl.app on Bluesky to start.
23:50 - Just got back from seeing The Odyssey. I enjoyed it, despite my raging headache and the loud volume. Everytime I see Matt Damon appear I hear my cousin's voice saying, "I'm Matt Damon," imitating the character from Team America. That was over 20 years ago. And yea I heard it in my head every time so that kind of took me out of the movie.
Phaedra Haywood, the Santa Fe New Mexican: A state district judge in Santa Fe on Thursday ordered social media giant Meta Platforms Inc. to pay $567 million into an abatement fund to address public harm to New Mexico children and teens. Judge Bryan Biedscheid’s ruling resolves the second of a two-part civil proceeding in a landmark case filed in 2023 by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who argued Meta’s social media platforms have led to a youth mental health crisis in the state and…
I am a bit late today, but I decided to keep the Pook-Emu Bee links running with four in a row before our off-day tomorrow (Newsletter Saturday). I bought sugar and yeast at the grocery store last night. 1. Private email is fine, actually (Matthew Guay for Buttondown Blog. August 7, 2026.) I agree. But I my own solution (SimpleLogin) is not specifically listed (they note Proton Mail, which now owns Simple Login, but I have SL separate from Proton). 2. THE MORNING RANT: PepsiCo (Frito Lay) Snack…
Cada vez mais me incomoda a falta de espontaneidade do capitalismo moderno, que cria escassez em troca de previsibilidade. Deus me livre quem simplesmente entra num estabelecimento e simplesmente quer algum serviço. Outro dia, fui tentar cortar o cabelo. Um salão enorme num shopping de classe média em São Paulo. Vários atendentes lá, um monte de cadeiras vazias, o único horário era pra dali duas horas. No mesmo shopping, conseguiriam me encaixar dali a 40 minutos. Cortei no Moa, um sujeito que…
Two features landed in Jolt recently, both of which fell out from loosening the coupling between Jolt and the host runtime. The first is the ability to serialize program images in the style of Common Lisp and Smalltalk, and the second is to have a portable Scheme layer decoupled from the Chez runtime. Let's take a look at what these things buy Jolt in practical terms.Images: a black box for your programIf you've ever had to support a production system like a web application, then you know the…
There was a dude on top of A41 today.
Light posting this summer — a lot of time on the road, for both work and play. Last weekend I rode my bike from Worcester to Provincetown in the Pan-Mass Challenge, raising money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and its research. (I also do a 50-mile gravel ride through the Berkshires each fall for the same cause, so if you support me, you’ll get your money’s worth.) One of the presentations I saw covered the tremendous progress being made against pancreatic cancer — work that’s bringing…
It’s another day, another new package day here. Say hello to django-msgspec, a package of drop-in replacements for Django and Django REST Framework (DRF) components backed by msgspec. msgspec is a C-based serialization library covering JSON, MessagePack, YAML, and TOML, with optional schema validation through typed Struct classes. Its JSON encoder and decoder are several times faster than the standard library’s, which makes django-msgspec a cheap performance win in the parts of Django that…
The space was filled with tributes to Ben, his favorite foods, memorabilia, flowers, photographs and steady streams of people — relatives, friends, sports buddies, coworkers, and some who fit into all those categories.Currently Listening: John Lennon “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”Reply via email
Sleepy day. The short visit from my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter wore me out. We spent much of our time indoors so that my mother could enjoy the wee one’s company, but we also managed to spend a little time in Swift River at a small public beach.
Tura Satana is best remembered as Varla, the merciless leader of a girl gang who kills a man with her bare hands in Russ Meyer's 1965 cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It's one of the most iconic performances in exploitation film history. It's also, by a wide margin, the tamest thing about her actual life. Long before she ever stood in front of Meyer's camera, Satana had survived an internment camp, run with a street gang, danced burlesque under a false name to hide the fact she was...
9:03 – Mon 03 August 2026 12:03 – Mon 03 August 2026 9:07 – Tue 04 August 2026 12:07 – Tue 04 August 2026 9:06 – Wed 05 August 2026 12:05 – Wed 05 August 2026 9:01 – Thu 06 August 2026 12:04 – Thu 06 August 2026 9:05 – Fri 07 August 2026 12:01 – Fri 07 August 2026 Bonus Follow Me As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators happen to…
This case involves two competitors in the vehicle-battery charger industry. The plaintiff calls its offering “Battery Tender” (based on the analogy of a ship’s tender) and claims trademark rights in the term. Believing that the term is generic, NOCO began using the term in reference to its own products. The plaintiff sued for trademark infringement and more. A jury found for the plaintiff and awarded $1.3M in actual damages and $5.75M in punitive damages. The judge added another $12M of…
Wrexham Lager’s name and brewery have been revived, and the story is a rather fascinating one. The revival began in 2011, when the Roberts family brought the historic brand back to life after its original brewery closed in 2000 and production ceased entirely in 2002. The historic Wrexham Lager name was rescued, the brewery rebuilt, and production restarted using original recipes. But what about the history of the original Wrexham Lager Brewery, and its pioneering beer? Wrexham Lager isn’t just…
