But What Is It *Good* For?
Today I’d like to talk about AI again. Feel free to come back next time if that doesn’t interest you 🙂 ‘Leibniz’s Calculating Machine’ from Theatrum...
Micromarriages
By popular demand: micromarriages. In risk analysis, a one-in-a-million chance of death is called a micromort. A skydiving jump, for instance, gives you 8...
Matcha Lattes
Lately I’ve been making a lot of matcha lattes. Here’s the recipe I’ve settled on. I heat 8oz (1 cup) of water to 180°F in my beloved OXO adjustable-...
Best of the Rest
After my list of best films of 2024, here’s the best of the rest of media in 2024. Books My reading this year tended more towards non-fiction than previous...
That Was The Year That Was in Movies
In 2024, I watched 68 movies and 20 seasons of television. Here are some of the standouts. Imagine that each one gets a little statue of me saluting them 🫡...
Farmers & Foragers
Have you ever noticed that some writers and thinkers always seem to be arguing, while others are more comfortable raising questions without answering them?...
How to Take Pills
Hello from the second week of a pretty awful chest cold.1 I cannot particularly recommend getting sick. 2 I’ve been relying on Mucinex the last two days....
List of Mysteries
Here’s a few things that I personally still find mysterious. If you have recommendations to read up on any of these, let me know! What is the origin of...
Generic High Fantasy
I was watching the second season of Arcane recently and realized it’s canonizing new “defaults” for the (high) fantasy genre. If you think of the most...
A Cancer on Liberalism
Fascism is eternal. In surveys of the twentieth century, fascism and communism are often presented as twin ideologies — two alternatives to liberalism that...
The Art of Gathering
Mission Bay's new Bayfront Park is now open! Apropos of nothing, here are event or icebreaker ideas I want to pursue: Write all the attendees’ names on cards...
Internet Archive’s Down, Post Links
It’s been a while since I’ve done an old-fashioned linkblog. Here’s some links I’ve liked recently. YouTube recommendations continue to be an excellent...
Hyperkey Second City Scar Tissue
Hello frens, It sure has been a while, hasn’t it? This issue will be more of a grab bag than usual. It turns out the Guggenheim looks a lot like the SFPL...
Cocktail Codex
Recently I hosted a cocktail party. Most of my friends assumed I intended to host a fun night, but actually I just wanted to practice making cocktails, which...
Revenge of the Nerds
I was talking to a friend recently about Star Wars and pointed out that “nerd culture” disappeared over the course of the 2010s, or more specifically went so...
Alien Values
I recently rewatched Alien for the first time since I was in high school. Alien is a still a masterpiece after almost four decades. The production design is...
Typology of Horror
I was recently trying to explain to someone why I feel the horror novel House of Leaves is particularly unique. It’s not just because of its metafictional...
Stop Eating Breakfast
Stop eating breakfast! I hold to few folk mental models, but this is a hill I will, if not die on, then at least be mildly wounded on. A couple years ago, I...
Canine Cognition of Conveyances
Do dogs understand elevators? I wonder this every time the elevator doors close on Rooibos and I, trapping us in a metal box that will hopefully deposit us...
Perplexed with Perplexity
Hello frens, I no longer feel comfortable using Perplexity. You may remember I was trialing it a few months ago. In many ways, it’s an impressive product,...
