The Garden of Earthly Delights invites you to dine on delicate delights.
I was gone, and now I'm back. Things are really good with me. I'm working on a video game that's a version of Rollercoaster Tycoon but for Wolt/Lieferando/Doordash delivery drivers. I just got my period for the first time in two months. I've been spending a lot of time asking ChatGPT about my personal life. I'm running around town sweating and crying (I'm not crying; I'm just sweating from my…
I've been spamming a lot of raffle contests lately on Instagram, trying to win free stuff, which is how, by way of a very generous DM, I was offered a press pass to the design conference FORM/FUTURE a few months ago. The very generous DM dissolved almost as soon as I received it – she may have finally read my blog – and the press pass never came through, but I was determined to go anyway and ended…
In Guangzhou, China, after Brittany had left, Dani and I spent a beautiful, quiet evening walking along the balmy waterfront, gazing at the Canton Tower. This tower is very tall and takes several iPhone photographs to capture its full height from up close. On the Canton Tower's Wikipedia page, it is listed as the second-tallest tower in the world and the fifth-largest freestanding structure. At…
Throughout all the ages, there have been only four degrees in love: The first consists in arousing hope; The second in offering kisses; The third in the enjoyment of intimate embraces; The fourth in the abandonment of the entire person. These aren’t the rules of some dilapidated club in the city where I live where everyone is obsessed with reinventing what it means to love, but lines from a…
As a professional software developer working in open source, I spend most of my day on GitHub. GitHub is essentially a UI wrapper for Git’s core version control system, with a few added features for team planning. The irony? GitHub, a platform that preaches the gospel of code review, doesn’t seem to apply it much to its own front-end. Here is a short sample of UI errors on the site that make me…
I watched a Netflix documentary a few weeks ago about a Carnival cruise ship that caught on fire. The documentary is called Trainwreck: Poop Cruise . Typical of Netflix's oeuvre, the production quality of this 55-minute program was so bizarre and eerie that it left me with more questions than answers, including, how common are fires on cruise ships anyway? Briefly about the documentary: the engine…
When I was seventeen, I read a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn that I found on my twelfth-grade civics teacher's bookshelf. Quinn suggests that the biblical tale of Cain and Abel is an allegory for human division that began with the development of agriculture. Before agriculture, hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the laws of nature, but agriculture brought the desire to create and control…
One of the first algorithms any programmer interested in mathematics learns is the sieve of Eratosthenes. This is a simple algorithm that determines which numbers in a given range are prime, and it forms the basis of many more complex algorithmic problems. Given a list of consecutive integers starting from 2 up to a chosen maximum value n , the algorithm selects the first number in the list (2)…
While inside during the pandemic, you may have played a map-based puzzle game called Worldle . Worldle 's premise is simple: every day, you are given an outline of a country, and you have six guesses to guess what country it is. For example, what country is this? I got this one, no problem. I'm a bit of a geography buff because Dani has a quiz app on her phone that we play while drinking beer at…
"It 𝓈𝑒𝑒𝓂𝓈 dumb, but it’s 𝕤𝕦𝕡𝕖𝕣 smart” is the slogan of Friends with Benefits (FWB), the organizer of a three-day cryptocurrency conference / music festival that took place last year in Idyllwild, California. I couldn't go because I was getting married, again, that weekend, but I caught the full recap on YouTube. Friends with Benefits calls itself "a new kind of social network made up of…
When YouTuber Brett Conti isn't photoshopping larger muscles on video thumbnails or "swapping lives" with billionaires for his 900,000 subscribers, he escapes to Bali. It's cold in December in New York City, and an açaí bowl can cost up to fifteen dollars. Whereas, in Canggu the coconut tastes like it fell from the tree that morning. In Conti's recent video, What I Spend in a Day Living in BALI ,…
A 2022 report studying social media posts about Meghan Markle claimed that 70% of all negative posts online come from just 83 separate users. In Markle's interview with The Cut that same year, the magazine considered this report proof of a conspiracy against the ex-princess. Save for a dangerously outspoken minority, Markle is not nearly as unpopular as it appears online. But, as someone who's…
The seasons are changing, and I've found myself at home more in the evenings lately, relaxing on the couch. I thought I'd do a little update on everything new going on with me. A couple of my websites got picked by more prominent blogs recently, so I've had a spike in traffic and a bunch of subscribers to my newsletter. I created a newsletter form several months ago but haven't sent anything out…
As this is a developer blog, it is important I show off my aliases. Over the years, I have developed strong opinions about what makes a good alias. The most important component of a good alias is memorability. The alias has to be significantly easier to remember than its command. It should solve a memory problem, not create one. I'll start with an example of what I think bad aliases are. Bad…
On the ballot this November, among other things, a proposed new city in Solano County, California. I don't live in the Bay Area anymore, but I found out about the idea through the popular blog of someone I used to go to high school with. After a very successful early career in tech, Devon Zuegel is now a relatively influential tech personality. She and I intersected in high school at the same…
In 2017, I went to a talk about gravitational waves at a hacker house in San Francisco. A year prior, LIGO had first detected gravitational waves, and a young post-grad came to talk to a room full of novices about the science behind the discovery. I knew a little about the topic already, probably from some YouTube video, because I had recently developed a new ambition to work in the space…
Last weekend, it was raining and Dani was sick with a cold, so I spent a lot of time looking at weird YouTube videos. Fate led me to a seven-year-old video called Evening Routine with Tim Ferriss . If you don't know who Tim Ferriss is, he is the author of the mega-popular book The 4-Hour Work Week , which inexplicably made him a legend in the tech scene. Millennials love him. Ask any millennial if…
My friend Headless Horse and I built a sustainable website called Overbrowsing a few months ago. Before we started the project, I was skeptical. Greenwashing is a hot topic in web development, and I was unconvinced that making a website more sustainable could make a significant enough impact to be anything more than a marketing gimmick. I discovered that user volume was the crucial variable. At…
At printer_scanner, I spend a lot of time playing with Random Number Generators. From an artistic standpoint, it adds a lot of interest to projects I'm working on because when you offer a choice to someone or something in the creation of an art object, I become more than an author in the creation of that object; I am also an observer. But what are Random Number Generators anyway? And is…
The name for The Garden of Earthly Delights came to me as a joke while I was coming up with ideas in my journal for my blog. It took me a few months to remember that the name is from this 16th Century painting by Hieronymus Bosch. A few months ago, I spend a long time looking at the high res version on Wikipedia . The triptych depicts a surrealist Garden of Eden, the perils and joy of life's…