last month was my 39th birthday. i did't feel any particular urge to celebrate it, so instead i want to celebrate my wife.dear wife, you have been the greatest partner, parent, lover, co-conspirator, adventurer, and cook. i am blessed beyond belief that you found me and chose me, that you have stuck with me all these years, that we've built a life together, and that every day i get to wake up next…
i got 1/5 of the way through in the event of love and then it was time to return it to the library and i felt no urge to check it out again. this kind of story is great for a movie that only requires 2 hours max, but drawn out in a novel, it's much harder to dedicate a full 16 hours of attention.the problem comes from needing to set up the main character as something of a mess, where she's knocked…
turns out, i am trans, a late-in-life lady.what happened? didn't you just change your pronouns last post?like a dripping faucet filling a bucket, the compounding feelings broke through and i could no longer ignore them.
after commissioning a bunch of sapphic art in may, i was feeling intense gender feelings while sitting in the san fransisco airport, waiting to board the plane home from my cousin's wedding. i'd read all of "bury your gays" by chuck tingle on the flight out, which felt pretty cool, so reading a whole second book seemed both possible and pleasurable.i wandered into the "books, inc" and browsed the…
my 39th birthday is day after tomorrow. instead of a midlife crisis, i'm having Gender Feelings and will be changing my pronouns to they/he (they/them preference, he/him in a pinch).thanks in advance.
there's "male socialization" discourse on bluesky, and it has been making me reevaluate my life and my experiences of malehood. i've wondered about that idea before, didn't come up with a satisfying answer so i let it be. but after reading lots of posts, i've been reconsidering my own experiences, the ways i was inculcated and hazed and rejected by men in my life, mostly found wanting or lacking…
Sometimes, the prose felt inspired, marvelous and deft, and I luxuriated in it. Rufi made me laugh, made me worry, peppered little insights about humanity and art in here. And then the prose would shift into a didactic passage, like an informational segment on PBS, and I would recoil like a spider jumped on my face.I liked the story overall. I wish she could have figured out how to write about…
I have commissioned an erotic piece of art. (You can see it in the brand-new Gallery.) As seen there, I previously commissioned a profile pic from Flynn Nichols, which I still use 3 years later and love dearly. Erotic art is different, however. I have a lot of mixed up feelings with sex and I've been struggling to untangle them.I think the crux of the issue is that I am an erotic being, a bag of…
ImportantEDIT: I WROTE ALL THIS FUCKING SHIT AND FORGOT TO CREDIT THE AUTHOR OF MY JAVASCRIPT CODE! FUCK MY STUPID LIFE! I'M SORRY JONATHAN!The javascript & css for the bluesky comment support from this post by Jonathan Moallem at Caps Collective. I modified it lightly for my purposes but otherwise it's copy-pasted from inspecting the source code of that page. I claim no ownership and thank him…
For the last year, I've been driving a 2025 Toyota Sienna, a boat of a minivan. It's got all sorts of fancy features that I won't get into right now, but the big one that bothers me the most is a "lane drift" sensor that makes the steering wheel vibrate if you start to leave your lane (without a turn signal) and will actually turn the wheel/redirect the vehicle for you if you drift too far.…
Every 2 years I enter a state of frenzy, where I become obsessed with the Olympics. I grew up watching the Olympics in prime time with my mom. The whole family and friends would watch, but my mom cared the most and so I did as well. I took many years off of watching for various reasons, missing 2006-2016, and each year since 2018 I've increased the amount I watch. This year is the most yet,…
saw credits in 25 hours.i finished god of war and it was fine. a perfectly reasonable use of time but nothing inspiring or compelling, tbh.
Vacations are hard. A lot of work to make happen, filled with joy and stress throughout, and the ending which hangs heavy. Another one has come to an end in our family and I'm left with a familiar poignant ache, mourning the loss for my children as well as for myself.It's hard to handle how sharp endings are, the finality of it all. I've spent 5 months looking forward to this trip, planning for it…
cohost made it very easy to post. bluesky makes it easy to post but posting there sucks. even tho cohost was public, it gave a wonderful illusion of being out of sight (if not actually private) which enabled more freeing posting. the nicer post editor helped too. it's hard to imagine posting shorter things here but where else should i post them?blogs feel so weighty compared to microblogging.
spoiler warning for the ending of jedi survivor.i finished the game and thought the ending sucked ass. i wrote a bunch to some friends and have adapted it to a longer rant here.
I began to update the Now page and realized that because it's ephemeral, I should put all of my transient thoughts in a post first.
NoahTheDuke BACKERreviewed Star Wars OutlawsCompletedonPlayStation 5 The greatest Star Wars game ever made.The way the "open world" is built in Star Wars Outlaws lends itself to a style of storytelling that is both supported by the game and open for player interpretation. As a player, I can feel like I am inhabiting a well-rendered character (Kay Vess) and also have ownership over her story…
NoahTheDuke BACKERreviewed Blue PrinceCompletedonPlayStation 5 A really pleasant way to spend time with my wife. We played it almost every night this last month; we took notes together, talked about it over meals and during our kids bath times, planned our next session, experienced the heights of elation and the bitter disappointment of failure.Many times I found myself frustrated and disappointed…
I have some plans for the new year that I'd like to put to paper as a small measure of accountability and internal pressure to follow through. I don't expect to do all of these, all goals are transitory and cannot account for future changes, but I do plan to hold these in mind as I move through the year.
NoahTheDuke BACKERreviewed Super Mario Bros. WonderCompletedonNintendo Switch Finished main levels after 15 hours, only minor effort put into getting all purple coins and wonder seeds.I think this game has some fantastic ideas, really clever levels and fun wonder sequences, but most of it left me feeling bored and listless. The game was not very hard but occasionally very frustrating, the levels…
Every so often I decide to get a latte from a coffee shop instead of black coffee (pour over preferably). It is nearly always a mistake. I like the taste of black coffee, especially if it's a good bean like a single origin Ethiopian or Guatemalan. Lattes have a nice flavor on first sip, but they tend to sit heavier and don't go cold as gracefully.The other issue is that lattes want to be cortados,…
I'm trying out Working Copy on ios to post from mobile. It's more cumbersome than Cohost's excellent editor, but I'm hopeful that in the long run this will suit me. Because the number one change I felt over the last two years was a freedom to post when I had the urge, which is traditionally hard with static sites.Previews??? who needs em, i know what i'm doing 🥲
Conspiracy theory: Parks and Rec was a psyop to make people hate Hillary Clinton-era liberals.Yes, my wife is rewatching Parks and Rec, why do you ask?
my wife is preggers again and we're back on that grindset, trying to find a "boy" name(i know, don't at me lol).if you had to name a kid born with a penis, what would you choose?
My current blog system uses Cryogen and compiled all markdown into html when I ran it locally. This sucked, so I've switched to relying on Github Actions to deploy the generated content to the pages site. Thankfully, it's much better now.
NoteI wrote this hours before the website https://cohost.org closed.i have never blogged so much, made so many dumb jokes, or engaged so fervently and honestly. i've made some friends, learned some things, and found that it feels good to share without having to self select or edit my thoughts (compared to facebook, the previous site of my mostly honest thoughts).i've enjoyed no numbers, the css…
i'm still playing blasphemous, trying to finish it, and it's a grind in part because there's no quest markers or log or anything. i don't remember characters, i don't know what i'm supposed to be doing, i'm just going around trying to unlock new portions of the map, and exploring old stuff.it's frustrating to climb to the highest point in the map, see that i'm supposed to going further up but that…
but it feels incredible to play. movement is precise, dodging and blocking feel good, the art is some of the best, the music is haunting. i remember enjoying it but i don't remember enjoying it this much. I did play it immediately after playing Ori and the Blind Forest so many maybe that was my problem. i almost want to restart just so i can remember what the hell is going on in the story.
i'm up to 19 hours in a week and I won't stop until i've liberated the whole galaxy. i am bursting with enthusiasm about it but idk how to write about it without falling into cliche. the available tools allow for unparalleled artistry when executing a plan or recovering from an alarm.idk it's great. it was opaque and dense and hard as hell at first but now i'm pulling off tricks, clearing a room…
4 year old, interrupting my bed time song: cows are made of meat. are humans made of meat? me: yes, we are made of meat. her: do we eat human meat? me: no. her: why not? me: well, it's complicated, but there are 3 primary reasons...i ended on telling her about prions and how scary they are and she was like "i'm not gonna eat human meat" and i was like "that's smart, please don't"
NoahTheDukereviewed Elden RingShelvedRetired at 75 hours I might have put this at 4.5, but I took a full star off for every 15 hours past where this game was worth continuing to play. Limgrave was excellent, 10/10, and then the rest of the game was a steady decline of interesting or compelling stuff to do, and by the time I quit in the final area, I was so over it that I only feel annoyed and…
I've written a converter to translate a selected number of my posts from the now-defunct blogging platform and social media website https://cohost.org. They're poorly converted to markdown and I don't plan on doing much with them except host them for personal posterity. A few will appear in my main feed, most will not. They can be viewed here.I have decided to remove this and purely rely on moving…
Big feature: Safety and AutocorrectionEvery rule has been marked as safe or unsafe. Safe rules don't generate false positives and any suggested alternatives can be used directly. Unsafe rules may generate false positives or their suggested alternatives may contain errors.Rules that are safe may also perform autocorrection, which is tracked in defrule with :autocorrect. Rules may only perform…
https://clojure.org/news/2024/09/05/clojure-1-12-0I'm excited as hell for this one. The qualified method syntax along with treating Java methods as first-class values means that writing interop will be much nicer. :param-tags letting you differentiate between overloads is killer too. The longer I've spent in Clojure, the more Java I've had to wrangle, and these have been big pain points.
Started playing Jedi Survivor after burning out on Elden Ring again.This game is a blast. The grappling hook feels great, the writing is fun, Cameron Monaghan's voice acting is a little subdued for my tastes but that's okay. new force powers are odd, still getting used to them, but the split blade is sick.there's freaking battle droids in this one, so we get their chatter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10/10…
NoahTheDukereviewed Uncharted 2: Among Thieves RemasteredCompletedonPlayStation 4 A perfectly fine way to spend some evenings. The action/adventure sequences are fun, the set pieces are still beautiful, the occasional funny quip, but the rest is forgettable.Mushy controls, worse combat, threadbare stealth, along with another Nathan Drake story that didn't hold much weight. I played it on easy…
me when i have a job: i think i'm just naturally happy. i don't get sad often or for long periods and i easily roll with the punches of day to day life.me when i don't have a job: maybe i should kill myself.
On twitter, someone asked: "But seriously, what changes would you make to OCaml which would worth it to break backward compatibility?"I replied with: "Borrow from Clojure! 1) Make (=) / polymorphic equality work on values (not structure). 2) Make "functional updates" of records nicer. 3) Change ref to work like clj atoms, add swap! as a built-in function. 4) Remove the mutable keyword, make ref…
after drink the sea (nearly perfect), i went in with such high hopes and yet even 10 years later, love death immortality just fucking sucks dude. not a single good song, almost none of the things that made me love drink the sea, just a complete abdication of their sound and style.
The --only cli flag is one I've been meaning to implement for a while but just hadn't gotten around to. It's really only helpful when you're zeroing in on a problem rule, but there will always be uses.The rule lint/duplicate-case-test is already checked by case's expansion, but I think it's good for static analysis tools to verify that stuff too. And lint/locking-object should help uncover subtle…
I know it's not the style, but I like to think of Ocaml like a Clojure that has more syntax, and just wrap everything in parentheses. Every function call, every assignment, every if block, everything.
I played and beat Lacuna this week. Incredible little game. I guessed the big revelation during the prologue so that didn't hit so hard, but the rest was a delight. The way the cases and sheets are filled out was at first really hard and then much easier and more fun as the game went on. I thought i'd gotten everything right and then learned that I missed whole branches because i'd some early…
i dropped my iphone nearly a week ago, busted the screen just enough that it no longer registers touches. so i swapped the sim into a flip phone and have been living an offline life.lemme tell you what, it's a pretty sick life. i'm slowly losing the sense of "i'm bored for 2 seconds, lemme look at my phone" which has been the bane of my adhd-riddled existence for 15 years.the flip phone uses KaiOS…
(I wrote the below in a comment on the original post)I work in enterprise and hobby Clojure, so I have some experience with this question.This is probably the primary issue with Clojure at scale. You have to either be strict in what kind of objects you create (peer review, extensive testing), or you mimic a type system in the runtime with assertions and validation checks. Both of these can be…
watched the final season after taking a year off. what a good fuckin show.i loved every happy ending, tbh. felt perfectly inline with the show for everyone to live happily ever after.this is the best show matt groening has ever done, by far.
idk how to write it. i'm not a poet, i was raised by a writer but words don't come easily to me so when i feel these feelings, all i come up with is stuff like "she's so fucking hot" which is true but also shallow.it's like...every texture of her body is built to electrify me. each line, each curve, each shadow pulls me in. i feel suffocated by her, like she enters the room and my lungs fill with…
if you are part of any decision making process that forbids trees and/or grass from playgrounds, i hope you fucking [violates facebook community standards]if you are part of any litigation against owners of playgrounds related to the presence of trees at a playground (a kid got hurt climbing a tree etc), i hope you fucking [violates facebook community standards]if you think that barren…
you know those cooking shows where they travel to some remote countryside place and interview a woman who's been making a certain bread for 50 years and is now old and frail but she's still got it, by god.and they're like "what's your secret?" and she's like "i've been making this bread every day for fifty years" and they're like "there you have it, folks, the secret is the kind of flour she…
wife: i'm putting this away because you keep doing what i've asked you to not do. your actions have consequences, [daughter].4 year old: no! they! don't!!!!!!