I write things and then put them on the Internet, not because I should, but because I must
As an amateur sketch comedy writer and performer, I’m fascinated whenever the pros reveal a behind-the-scenes look at their work. Of course, Saturday Night Live lore is pretty easy to find . But what’s intrigued me the most recently are original sketch scripts. Not transcripts of the final sketch, but the writer’s raw material that actors and producers work from. Even SNL…
Another year gone! I’ve continued to track my video game completion this year, something that I started last year for 2024 . There are fewer games on this year’s list, as I’ve stretched my entertainment time budget to include more movies, television and anime than I’ve usually watched in the past. (If you want to see my movie log, follow me on Letterboxd !) I think this trend might…
Over in Streetmix world I’d been slowly convincing myself to convert hard-coded configuration data from JSON to YAML , because it’s an easier format to work with if you want to type the minimum amount of keystrokes and move on with your life. Just let the computer do the conversion to JavaScript, ya know? It turns out that switching wasn’t hard at all. Streetmix uses Parcel for…
At the start of 2024 I started keeping track of every video game I was juggling so that I could actually finish something, especially the ones that have always been stuck on my backlog. And the various platforms’ “ year in review” wrapups are nice, but they can’t capture gaming activity on my Analogue Pocket, or on an emulator. So, as usual , I did it myself. When I say “…
It is not far in the future, and you are about to order a pizza in the smartest city in the world, where you live. You don’t actually need a pizza, mind you. A carefully balanced meal tailored specifically to your nutritional requirements had already been delivered to your office, right on schedule—but you ignored it and started walking toward the pizza shop anyway. Once your…
Retrieved on stardate 48556.2 (approximately Earth Year 2374) Have you ever wondered about that ubiquitous device that allows you to converse seamlessly with residents of different countries or alien species around the galaxy with total ease? Whether you’re in Starfleet or a civilian spacefarer, the universal translator is something everyone relies on daily but might not know…
I didn’t always fully appreciate Master of None . It was a bumpy ride of a show, with what felt like some weirdly disconnected vignettes, and some stiff acting that didn’t always fit the quality of the writing, but it got better by the end. Much better, and so I’m sitting here writing about it. So here’s the show: Dev Shah (Aziz Ansari) doesn’t know what he wants out of life, so…
One of the best episodes of Doctor Who is “ The Day of the Doctor”, where the B-story is about shapeshifting aliens called Zygons who are refugees from their home planet. They hide in frozen-time stasis on Earth, waiting for it to become a suitable home (which I presume means we have wi-fi), and sometime around the year 2013, the Zygons awake to discover that their hiding spots…
Earlier this year Mike Migurski posted some notes from Stewart Brand’s excellent How Buildings Learn series , which I recently watched in its entirety. (I still have not finished the book.) All of Brand’s thesis resonates deeply with me as a software and architecture guy (not software architecture , a completely different thing), and it’s a humbling reminder that these were…
When Stephen Hiller was nineteen he designed and built the first coaxial helicopter in his parent’s driveway in Berkeley. He called it the Hiller-copter. Several years later, in 1947, he cofounded a company where he got to build all sorts of crazy variants of all things copter, including the Floating Platform (below), where the operator stood up above the center of a single…