A collection of personal essays on film, technology, philosophy, and art—charting the edges where culture, creativity, and critical thought meet.
I recently finished watching the conclusion of Linus Tech Tips's second Linux challenge. Unsurprisingly, much of the series focused on criticizing the overly-aggressive online Linux community. This is by no means a new criticism, but it did become a very central theme of the series. All three of the challenge's participants for example, admitted to relying in LLM's for some amount of Linux…
At the beginning of this year, I decided to leave the quiet comforts of the AUR , Pacman and my purpose built, minimal system for a bit of distro-hopping . I've been using Linux full time for about five years now. That journey began with, and has maintained Arch Linux as a constant for it's duration. So, as any readers familiar with the ins-and-outs of Linux distributions might have guessed, I…
A couple of days ago, Donald Trump’s administration carried out a military operation in Venezuela. A Delta Force unit was deployed to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The operation was accompanied by bombing inside the country, and between the airstrikes and the raid itself, roughly eighty people were killed. By all available accounts, the plan unfolded exactly as intended. Maduro was…
Unless you stalk my GitHub account relentlessly, you are probably unaware of it, but my website was developed using the static site generator, Eleventy (11ty) . 11ty offers incredibly easy web development, not only because of its capability to play nicely with a massive amount of different file formats, but also because of its massive library of NodeJS plugins. Throughout the process of developing…
I got my first computer when I was eight years old. It wasn’t anything fancy, an old Windows 95 box that barely worked. But when my parents decided to upgrade to a shiny, new, Dell Machine running Windows XP, I was more than happy to do whatever it took to get my hands on the old family PC. The deal that I struck up with them took place in early February of my seventh year. They agreed that if I…
What would have happened if, when Rosa Parks made her protest and sat at the front of the bus, no one tried to stop her? No police. No outrage. Just silence. Would we still remember her name? More importantly, would the decades-long civil rights battle that her quiet act helped ignite have ever begun? There are plenty of absurd laws still technically on the books in America—and in every other…
Whatever reigns where Seraphim flame and soar, I beg the, judge not my hand, but what it labored for. No blade was drawn, but wrath still did command, The tears that yearned to guide my violent hand. And I, God help me struck not from hate, But with love inflamed, to seal another's fate. The blood ran hot. It chilled my chest; My brother lived. I found no rest. Weep not for the man who's breath I…
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been laser-focused on getting my finances in order. Like many Americans over eighteen, I’ve accumulated more than my fair share of debt—along with the bad spending habits that come with it. Credit cards, a car loan that’s longer than it should be—everything short of payday loans and collections—I’ve got it. Fortunately, I caught the problem early enough to turn it…
Above is, without question, my favorite painting of all time. Barge Haulers on the Volga is a nineteenth-century work by Russian painter Ilya Repin . It comes as no surprise to me that I was immediately drawn to it, as, like so many others, I’ve long been captivated by the cultural output of the Russian Empire and its many political incarnations: the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, the…
Without a doubt, the best book I’ve read this year is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin . I only opened it because it leads off The Harvard Classics—a 51‑volume anthology I describe in a separate essay—but I was pleasantly surprised by how readable, engaging, and practical it is. The most discussed section is The Art of Virtue, where Franklin lays out 13 qualities he believed make a “good…
Having just finished reading The Journal of John Woolman , I was struck by a few different things, the foremost: just how early an anti-slavery campaigner Woolman was. I knew that the guy wrote about the evils of slavery around the time of the American Revolution. What I did not realize is that Woolman actually died in 1774, 2 years before The Declaration of Independence was even signed. To say…
The first exposure I had to this line of thinking, at least as far as I can remember, was in Nikos Kazantzakis' novel: Zorba the Greek (which, interestingly enough, might have since become my favorite book). The original quote is said by Zorba to the protagonist: "How do you expect to get the better of a devil ... if you don't turn into a devil and a half yourself?" Kazantzakis is far from the…
I can't remember exactly when or how I first came across The Harvard Classics , but ever since that day I have been on a mission to get a copy of the collection for myself. The Classics, originally published as: Dr. Elliot's Five Foot Shelf of Books are an absolutely massive, fifty-one volume collection of novels, poetry, history, philosophy, scientific writing, historical documents, and anything…
Before I start writing any opinions here, I’d like to take a second to talk about why I think I’m qualified to say what the best markdown editor is, and what my criteria in choosing a markdown editor looks like. There is no shortage of blogs and articles out there that seek to answer this very question, so I wouldn’t expect anyone to just be taking my word for it, without knowing if my word has…
I couldn’t exactly tell you why, but I care a great deal about the progress of dark modes on modern software platforms. But I kind of always have hated the way that this feature is baked into software and websites. Almost always, you open a new app or website, and at some point, you realize you’d like to go into dark mode; so you fish around in the settings and menus looking for a button to do…
I just got back from Avengers: Endgame, and it was pretty incredible. It took advantage of its three-hour run time in a way I never expected, and formed itself into a quiet contemplation of the MCU’s past events. But what surprised me about the film more than anything else was the way that no single character felt short shrifted in the film. Of course, the biggest complaint that I heard about the…
If you have read any reviews for the Harry Potter films online, you probably know that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is widely considered to be the best of the films. The praise for this movie is off the charts. It has 91% on Rotten Tomatoes (a score beaten only by The Deathly Hallows Pt.2, at 94%), Roger Ebert gave it 3.5/4 starts, the film has high reviews on basically every movie…