If you haven’t played Venba, I highly recommend it. It’s a story-forward mechanically simple game, and you can finish the main story in under two hours. I recently did just that, and boy do I have some feeling about the story that it tells about immigration and assimilation and its intersection with food. There are several scenes in the game that directly mirrored my own experience, and I want to share that. Read more...

I recently got back from a 12 day, 10 night trip to Japan. The itinerary was as follows: LAX -> HND Four days in Tokyo, including two tours, a free day, and a partial travel day Three days in Kyoto, including a single tour, and a partial travel day Three days in Osaka, undirected KIX -> HND -> LAX First - a mini review of Exoticca We found a package deal from Exoticca (this is not an affiliate link - nor would I ever do such a thing) (also - a somewhat unfortunate name) for $2600 per person that included flights, hotels, tours, and ground transportation, for 5/31 -> 6/11. Read more...

Precis (properly Précis, pronounced “pray-see”) is a extensibility-oriented RSS reader that can use LLMs to summarize and synthesize information from numerous different sources, with an emphasis on timely delivery of information via notifications. Get it here. Technical Details Precis is a FastAPI monolith that serves fully static pages styled by Tailwind CSS using DaisyUI components. It uses some query-parameter and redirect chicanery to fake interactivity. We’ll probably add actual interactivity at some point. Read more...

I like video games, but I don’t consider myself to be an enthusiastic or avid gamer. Instead, I find that I gravitate towards a few high-comfort games that I play at casual pace for a looooong time. Oddly enough, the shared theme for these high-comfort games seems to be that they are primarily sports simulations. I’m sort of a sports fan, I guess, but I have always had the most fun playing these games by myself, not online. Read more...

The purpose of this post is to explain how I like to Do Work and the principles underlying those decisions. This not meant to say that I consider the way I work to be the only correct one, nor that I am unwilling to try other ways of working. However - the impression that I would like readers to come away with is that the way I work is principled, considered, and intentional. Read more...

Most of the posts on this blog are my opinion. The same can be said of most posts on most blogs. Sometimes, however, I like to write a blog post that does the other thing for which we use the internet: conveying and sharing information. This is one of those blogs (but not the only one) Homelab 2.0 Historically, my homelab has been a series of NUCs scattered around my house, connected to nodes in my mesh wifi network. Read more...

One thing that’s very important to me is maintaining a healthy media diet. While I’m not averse to recommendation algorithms, I find that they optimize for engagement and on-platform time, as is required to produce unending growth in ad revenue. As a result, I find that such algorithms sacrifice quality for quantity, or outrage impact, or speed. At its extreme, in the case of the conservative control of mainstream media, this disregard for quality manifests as disregard for truth. Read more...

I regret to inform you that I’ve been playing around with AI art and I’ve been having a great time doing so. I think it’s accurate to say that I’m an AI skeptic. However, over the past weekend I came down sick and so had some free time on my hands, and so I tried playing around with image-to-text models hosted locally. I have a pretty old (i5-4460) desktop PC that doubles as an occasional gaming PC with a GTX 1070 in it, and I installed Debian on it (for minimum overhead) and played around. Read more...

It’s quite easy to find dystopian sci-fi. I think that this is because our current state and path leads us exactly towards one. However, it is harder to find the opposite; while it’s hard to imagine any fully utopian science fiction that provide the stakes, structure, or depth necessary to also make an entertaining book, I think that there are places to find science-and-speculative fiction that is written with better days in mind. Read more...

I’ll say it - AWS Athena is criminally underrated as a platform for processing complex, non-interactive business data workloads. I think that Athena has a bit of a reputation for being more of a json-wrangling, log-querying tool than one for business-centric workloads. However, I suspect that this is largely because AWS loves to cross-promote its products, so Cloudwatch features prominently in the documentation. It is, in fact, equally proficient for business data if you know what you’re getting yourself into. Read more...