A painting of me
  • How Google perfected the web. 

    All about how terrible the Internet is now that every site you read has been built to be scraped by Google’s bots.

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  • Motion Extraction 

    A weirdly engrossing video about viewing the motion information in a video.

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  • I’ve finally recreated (a close approximation of) the bookmarlets I used to use to post links to this site quickly. That’s the idea, anyway. I made a second for making it easier to post short microblogs here as well. Will it change my posting habits? Time will tell!

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  • Craig Mod discusses Aloneness. 

    I’ve been thinking about aloneness recently. Well, I’ve been thinking about it my whole life. It’s difficult to remember a time where I didn’t feel alone or apart or “on my own.” And I’ve spent the majority of my adult life — from 17 onward — living mostly alone, going to bed alone, and waking up alone. Left to my own volition to somehow transmute that aloneness into forward momentum, “output,” (“content” ha ha) and positive habits.

    This issue of Roden is a couple weeks old now, but I was reminded of it again with the launch of his new book Things Become Other Things.

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  • OpenAI’s Misalignment and Microsoft’s Gain. 

    The preamble to this post is already out of date, but it’s otherwise a good discussion of the tension at the heart of everything happening at OpenAI right now.

    Whether or not you agree with the Sutskever/Shear tribe, the board’s charter and responsibility is not to make money. This is not a for-profit corporation with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders; indeed, as I laid out above, OpenAI’s charter specifically states that it is “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”. From that perspective the board is in fact doing its job, as counterintuitive as that may seem: to the extent the board believes that Altman and his tribe were not “build[ing] general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits humanity” it is empowered to fire him; they do, and so they did.

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Funkaoshi: Year 20

   20 November 2023, late morning

When I remarked on my blogs 10th anniversary I said “Ten years is a long time on the Internet. It’s a long time in real life, I suppose.” Twenty years is a really long time. This blog still runs on Textpattern, its layout more or less unchanged for well over a decade. Iconic in its simplicity? Let’s go with that.

I post far less than I used to, but that’s been true for many years now. My D&D blog is far more active. The the old-school D&D scene feels like a microcosm of what could have been when it comes to the medium: people still having long form conversations via blog posts. Waxy, Anil Dash, Kottke, Daring Fireball and few others continue to be relevant and interesting, but they feel like rare survivors of this form. I am always curious if the second coming of blogging is around the corner: perhaps when people tire of video.

This blog remains something I care a lot about. It’s a window into who I was these proceeding 20 years. In some ways it’s terrifying having something like this online: I have said lots and lots of really dumb things on the internet. Some smart things too. I love being able to mine this site for my mood or my interests over the years. I’ve been married to Shima for 20 years now. We had met earlier in the year when I first began this blog. My daughter is almost 13. My mom passed away. This blog has catalogued various milestones of my life. It’s also missed plenty: did you know i’ve taken this year off work? Wild!

The glory days of this blog have likely come and gone, but it will always remain a place for my random thoughts and interests. A blog doesn’t need to be profound: it just needs to be a place to post some text you want to share.

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  • Mick Foley is on Hot Ones! 

    There is some so compelling about Mick Foley, Mankind from WWF. I love seeing him in interviews. He’s so different than his WWF persona, so humble and mild mannered.

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  • Teardrops by Kano. 

    Both leads from Top Boy are famous UK rappers. Kano is foundational in the creation of UK Grime. This video was done by the person who directed The Long Goodbye and is great.

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Top Boy

   17 October 2023, early afternoon

I binged Top Boy like an addict from the show. I’m not sure what got me to start watching in the first place, but a couple episodes in and I was hooked. The series follows two friends, drug dealers, as they try and get to the top of the drug game in Hackney (London). The series was first produced in England, ran for two seasons, and despite its popularity was cancelled. That series is on Netflix now under the title Top Boy: Summerhouse. To say it ends abruptly would be an understatement. Netflix revived the show 6 years later, and did three more seasons. The show is a pretty unglamourous look at the drug game. The two leads are incredible. Kano in particular gets better and better as an actor, till it feels like he’s in the stratosphere by the last season, he so embodies the part. I really love the show, and i’m not sure what i’ll do to fill the my time now. Well, besides listening to some UK rap.

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Ru

   14 September 2023, mid-afternoon

My second film at TIFF was Ru, which I watched alone in the afternoon—one of the perks of being off at the moment. Kim Thúy, the author of the autobiographical book this film was based on, was in attendance as she served as an executive producer on the film. She’s so funny, bubbly, and joyous in real life. Not really what I was expecting after reading her book. The actress who plays her character in the movie also has that same energy, which was funny since in the film she is a force of quiet sadness throughout. The movie was incredible. The sort of film that makes you love movies. Well shot, acted, and scored. It’s such a tightly put together movie. A movie that takes its time with its shots, but never feels slow. I’m off to read the book again.

Watch the trailer for Ru.

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  • Searching for Meg White. 

    It’s been over a decade since we’ve heard from the elusive White Stripes drummer. Could renewed attention over a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination coax her back into the spotlight?

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  • The Dog Days are Over by Florence + The Machine is one of those songs I never thought much about when it came out, but now whenever I hear it I find it quite moving.

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Miyoo Mini Plus

   1 April 2023, evening time

I ordered a Miyoo Mini Plus from Keep Retro earlier this month, which arrived this week. It’s a small portable console designed to play games for older retro consoles. I was keen to play some old NES, SNES and GBA games and this thing fit the bill. The original version of this device is notorious for being sold out all the time, and this new model seems to similarly have stock issues. (The RG35XX is the other fan favourite, that you can likely buy right now.)

The stock OS it comes with is kind of dreadful. I was worried I had made a mistake after playing with it for a a little while. Everyone’s advice is to install an alternative operating system, OnionOS, which improves the performance and quality of the emulators the system runs. Unfortunately that OS isn’t available for the Plus just yet. I opted to install another operating system that is more inline with what I’m looking for anyway, DotUI. It’s a minimalist OS that is removes all the options you probably don’t care about and refines the play experience. I love it.

So, if you end up picking one of these devices upgrading the OS is the first thing you do:

1. Format a new MicroSD card. (I just used the one that came with the device. If you go this route, you should back it up first.)
2. Download the latest release of DotUI from its releases page on Github. For example, I grabbed the zip file for DotUI-20230321b.
3. Unzip your download and copy it all to the root folder of your MicroSD card.
4. Copy any ROMs you want to the appropriate ROMs folder.
5. Put the MicroSD card in your device and boot it up. It’ll just magically do the rest.

Could it be any easier?

I’ve been playing Chrono Trigger, which is amazing. I somehow made it out of the 90s without ever playing it. Of course, pictured above is a screenshot of Final Fantasy VI, the greatest game ever made.

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Singin' in the Rain

   22 March 2023, early evening

I watched Singin’ in the Rain for the first time a few years ago. I don’t recall what prompted me to finally watch it, beyond it being this classic of cinema. I recently picked the film up on Blu-Ray so I could watch it in fancy 4K, and watched it again today. Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen play silent movie stars who must make the transition to the world of films with sound. The catch is that Hagen has a terrible voice! Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor round out the cast. This film lives up to all its praise and hype. It’s an incredible movie. I’m not a big fan of musicals, but this one features such amazing dance numbers. (The most impressive one being this total non-sequitor clearly inserted to show case Kelly’s talent.) Make the time to watch this.

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