Today's post is the start of a new series about something a little different: a dive into Daiso's The Game Series, a hyper-budget collection of CD-ROM games. Daiso is one of Japan's largest chains of ¥100 shops. They sell a little bit of everything: housewares, kitchenwares, small grocery items... and, for a time, video games. For a good chunk of the 2000s, Daiso had its own line of CD-ROM games for Windows that it sold on its shelves the same way it sold its other own-brand goods. Other stores…

I’ve taken up with wearing reflective gear while out for my pre-sunrise walk. There’s some folks that seem a bit groggy when they’re driving to work. Even though I have a flashlight that I keep pointed at the ground when I’m walking, I’ve still had a couple of close calls. There is another gentleman that walks around in the wee morning hours and he tends to wear very dark clothing. He’s also usually muttering German, but that’s neither here nor there. He carries a very high powered flashlight,…

I'm not certain where this list originated, other than it being "The New York Times". A friend on a Discord server shared an image containing this list, and that generated some discussion. All of us found it contentious, thinking some of the inclusions are odd (among them, Superbad), and the exclusions are puzzling (there seems to be an anti-sequel bias). Here's the list! I assume that the numbers are the NY Times' ranking and it's not an arbitrary list. As with any movie ranking, it's…

Oh boy it's October, you know what that means? You guessed it, time to do some thing every day of the month based on a prompt! Will you gain anything from it? Maybe? Will anyone look at it for more than 1 second before swiping away? No! Will it take up more time than you expected and will have to drop out after a week because you have an actual life and work schedule? YEP! I remember when, like, Inktober was a fun thing everyone did. Back when your Instagram/Tumblr feed was just pictures of…

My last several birding outings have been with a single objective: to spot a photograph a Belted Kingfisher. So when I leave without having spotted nor photographed one, I feel as if the entire outing was a failure. I seem to have forgotten that: Nature doesn't care what bird I want to see I can still enjoy all the other birds I encounter I realized that today when I got in the car. I was disappointed I didn't see one, was kicking myself for getting up early all for nothing, and forgot all of…

I can't believe the 30th anniversary of the N64 just happened a couple days ago! That seems crazy to me. It’s especially surreal since, as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m in the middle of moving and reformatting all of my old blog posts over to a different blog, and just this week I’m moved my 5-part N64 week posts, which were celebrating the 10th anniversary of the N64! So now it feels doubly weird, since it’s been 30 years since the N64, and it’s been 20 years since I wrote those darn blog…

Tyler Cowen serves up the questions in “Gita Gopinath on Trade, Currencies, and Economic Transformation” (Conversations with Tyler, September 25, 2026). Gopinath has just returned to Harvard after a stint at the IMF, and as usual is full of interesting and wide-ranging commentary. Here are a few of the many remarks that caught my eye: Because world trade is mostly conducted and invoiced in US dollar, not just in the US but everywhere, changes in US dollar exchange rates have a muted effect on…

We're always being told society is at war, we are divided, "more divided than ever" even. I think this is largely a play to sell newspapers and social media engagement. I don't think it's true. So when I read this article by George Monbiot I went to the group he mentions, Common Ground, and signed up. There was someone else from my area so we got together and have now gone out a few times around the county and talked to people and it's been so great. Basically, we go somewhere and try to stop…

So, I logged into Github with the in-app ChatGPT Work browser, and had it upload all of my pipeline files (which it did in a super weird manual way because I disallowed it from downloading anything … we later made a skill file to correct that behavior) for producing new Lorecore volumes. The book production pipeline has its own repo here. It consists of individual skill files, and some random assets that it made that I honestly don’t even know what they all are. To be totally up front, this is…

I always say that Stephen King has had just as much influence on my poems as Emily Dickinson or TS Eliot. This series of poems began as my NaPoWriMo exploits n the spring of 2020 and I finished it over that summer. The poems later appeared in COLLAPSOLOGIES (2023) , but you can read them all in free e-zine form here.https://heyzine.com/flip-book/7c1a5f23ce.html#page/1

I enjoyed this article on Small Programming Tricks. It mentions using Ctrl + r to search backwards in shell history. (There are a lot of other useful Readline commands to learn.) I remember learning about Ctrl + r. I was sitting in the cubicles for the Spelling team in Building 43. This was soon after I had joined them as a software engineer, part time, while still officially on the Search Quality Analyst team. I had asked to do a 20% project with them, having grown to admire their team through…

It's not possible to write and produce a 2,000-word-plus children's story every single day of the week. I know, because I tried. They were very unpolished, and I went crazy. A new podcast that mimics our name and description has launched, and it's doing exactly that. The stories are polished, and the VoiceOver has no mistakes. It also has absolutely no depth. Or soul, if you like. And the stories generally suck, because it's entirely generated by AI.Why would someone bother? Money. There are…

Philosophy for a rainy afternoon. When I learned Peter Wessel Zapffe was Norwegian, I wasn’t at all surprised. In his 1933 essay “The Last Messiah,” Zapffe suggests that human consciousness has become grotesquely overdeveloped. We are animals made intolerably aware of death, suffering, and meaninglessness. He uses the image of an elk gone extinct because its antlers grew too large. We avoid a similar fate by cutting ours off. We isolate by collectively suppressing talk of death and the…

It really moved me.

This is a story of an old toy webpage that used to entertain kids with hand-drawn animated doodles. Disclaimer: I’m not a computer vision expert, so many of the mistakes might be obvious to the reader, but nevertheless are part of my story. I vaguely remember that in the early days of smartphones there was an app that allowed you to print a grid of squares. Then you scribbled some hand-drawn animated frames in each cell.

Several months ago I attended Computing Within Limits 2026. Well, it was online, so I joined a zoom call for the 3 days. It was as good a time, focused on the overlap of computers and sustainability. Generally I lurk in the permacomputing regions of the web. This conference's workshop format: mixing discussions and presentations was good for pushing me to participate. It was very academic and I'm rarely one to sit and read research papers in my free time, let alone speak up in a discussion…

Hello, RSS reader! 👋 This post has some bespoke art direction you’ll only see if you view it directly. No hard feelings if you prefer to read here, I just wanted you to know! ✌️ It’s 2026, and I’m writing this post on a MacBook Air I bought in 2011. Why? It still works, for one. No dead pixels, no dents or dings in the aluminum shell, no keyboard quirks or trackpad troubles to speak of. At 2.96 pounds, it’s still the second-lightest computer I own. Even the battery (which I could replace) lasts…

When I finished learning how to build an LLM from scratch, I was left with a mystery: my own models were not as good as OpenAI's original GPT-2 models, despite being based on the same architecture. My models all had 163M parameters, and followed the design from Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". That meant that they were pretty much the same as the setup for the OpenAI GPT-2 "small" instance, except that they did not use weight-tying or bias on the QKV…

Happy Spoopy Season, everybody! SPOOPY It’s October, and we have 3 new sandwitches to cover this month, 2 of which are pretty specific and maybe less notable than we’d normally cover, and one of which is so ubiquitous that we’re not sure we can do it justice in a single post. But we’re sure gonna give it a shot! Before we get to the new sandwiches though, let’s take a look back at what the Tribunal got up to in September. We started the month on a very specific Guanajuatan torta called…

Fin whales, the second largest animals on earth after blue whales, can communicate across entire oceans. They are capable of producing extremely low-pitched calls that travel up to 13,000 miles under water. They are also capable of hearing those sounds which means that a fin whale off the shores of Bermuda can "talk" to whales hanging out near Ireland. Mice and other rodents carry on like birds, twittering, chirping, and singing, yet they do so at such high-pitched frequencies that they're…

Taking OmniWM for a spin - https://omniwm.app/

Read New Beginnings now!So I’m of two minds for how this story resolves… on the one hand there’s the “this home, this timeline is where the heart is” on the other, our protagonist feeling incomplete almost feels like a subconscious regret of jumping. Where do you stand on this?For me, this ending became a parallel to both mental illness and the constant wear of working for a job that doesn’t care about you. We sort of lie to ourselves constantly in regards to our work. “If I just get the…

I’ve always had a dream of having a proper workbench — a place where all the tools are in a handy drawer right next to me, and the bench being totally solid and not wobbly at all, and not having to be careful about the surfaces, and being able to just have a place to let half-finished projects just sit there and not having to be tidied away. It’s a beautiful dream. But I’d never thought I had room for something like this. Until I realised that I don’t really use my home office any more — I do…

Mark Gurman, writing about Apple’s upcoming move into more smart home devices, which we may see as early as this month: At the center of the strategy is a smart-home hub code-named J490, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple also plans to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since that device’s 2020 debut and its first new TV set-top box since 2022. … The hub’s defining feature will be its ability to serve multiple members of a household. It is designed to recognize who…

Welcome to my September 2026 Brutally Honest Earnings Report, where the long-term goal remains unchanged: trying to cover all my gear and travel costs entirely through stock income.

My son Jason and I were on Smith Lake this past Tuesday, fishing surface poppers at daylight. The water temps are beginning to fall. Instead of fishing surface temps at 90 degrees, we were fishing a cooler 85 degrees. Fall and spring are my favorite times of year to fish because the fish are much more active then. We were fishing 5wt. 9 ft. Hardy fly rods, which are one of the best lightweight fly rods I’ve ever used. I thought Redington was lightweight, but Hardy is better. It's not only…

I love learning something new that’s core to the JavaScript language syntax! A code exercise I completed today did just that. Via this comma, items is returned. const removeItemAtBottom = (items) => (items.shift(), items); const cards = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; removeItemAtBottom(cards); // [ 2, 3, 4, 5 ] This helps us around the fact that shift() returns the removed item, 1, rather than the list of items that we modified. It works outside a function as well:

Do I have the energy to go through that process? Will it really change anything? Discrimination happens everywhere and all the time — but that doesn't mean we need to normalise it. It's one thing to know how often it occurs, in which forms, and in which contexts. It's another to notice how people react when the affected person speaks up. Can I go to the police and report it? Will they take me seriously? Are there initiatives that really listen? Will the justice system be on my side? Will such a…