Me hard at work
My daughter came to hang out with me for a little bit at work today. She drew this picture of me and it’s great. Got the three screen setup and everything. Very accurate.
Phil is typing...
Recent content on Phil is typing...
Latest posts
“Life of the Record” podcast
This podcast is really great and covers albums that I love. The thing I like about it the most is that the interviewers remove themselves from the conversation, so it’s only the artist’s words.
Final Fantasy Tactics
For me and my brain, this game is absolutely perfect. 10/10. It’s now one of my favorite games of all time. I started playing it shortly after the new remastered version came out (Sept 2025) but quickly hit a wall and gave up, mostly because I didn’t understand how to play and grow your characters. I just thought “damn this game’s hard” but after all my other JRPGing…
Biking around
Nice day here in Seattle! Looking east over 520 while crusing around and running errands
Bruce Bruce - Bless his Heart
This joke is great . One of my grandmas would say this with this exact meaning and tone.
Octopath Traveler
I finished Octopath Traveler, as in I finished all eight story lines. I really enjoyed it and loved the combat system. I thought the story lines and character abilities were all unique enough to be interesting and the graphical style was great. There was one character, I think it was the hunter, who had a Pokemon like mechanic that felt super tacked on. I did do her story line late in the game so…
A favorite from The Onion
Just Wait ‘Til I Get These Fucking Rubber Bands Off by a lobster. Related: A more recent guest commentary by an animal, this time it’s I Work Very Hard, And I Would Like To Try Cake by a horse.
Test post from phone
This is from iA Writer and Working Copy and a bunch of Apple Shortcut glue. Goodnight!
20 Years of Blogging
I was using Claude Code to make some style tweaks to this blog, and happened to notice that my first post was from May 2006. That’s crazy. This started as a WordPress blog, then I migrated to OctoPress, and finally Hugo. This weekend I almost migrated to Zola, but instead I turned Claude Code loose on fixing some appearance things I didn’t like and following Hugo patterns better. The…
Questing for Dragons and Pokemons
I’ve been playing more JRPGs, mostly Dragon Quest games and I love it. So far I beat: Dragon Quest I 2D-HD Remake Dragon Quest VII Reimagined Dragon Quest II 2D-HD Remake Dragon Quest III 2D-HD Remake Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade The biggest reason I love Dragon Quest is playing with my daughter. She didn’t play that much with me but I like being able to comfortably include her.…
It's a JRPG Age
This blog has a lot of posts about SHMUPS but I haven’t played shmups in quite a while, at least with any seriousness. Don’t get me wrong, I still love serious shmup action, but after a long day of work and parenting I just don’t want to sit and grind out trying to get a 1cc. My daughter is old enough to play games now and she likes Minecraft and the games that are in the PBS…
Nightmares on Wax - Echo45 Sound System
Full album continuous mix here . This is probably my favorite album that came out in 2025. I found I can pretty much throw this album on at any time and it just fits the mood. Kiddo around? Sure! Need to focus? Sure! Want to boogie? Sure! Bonus: “Stars” - Version from the Mo’Wax Headz Compilation . My intro to Nightmares on Wax, first heard on a 411VM skate video in ‘95.
Tatsuya Nakadai / Harakiri (1962)
I recently watched the movie Harakiri and it’s now one of my favorite movies. I loved everything about it, the way it unfolds, the acting, the way it’s shot, and that it’s very hard to tell where it’s going. If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it. The Japanese actor who played the main character, Tatsuya Nakadai , passed away recently on November 8 2025. I…
LLM Movie Summaries = Hilarious
My new hobby is to ask “small” LLM models to summarize movies for me. They get things so wrong in hilarious ways and invent entirely new characters, plot points, and events. It’s fucking great. It’s the hardest I’ve laughed in a while. Here’s what gpt-oss-20b told me about some movies. Predator (1987) Give me a brief summary of the 1987 film Predator with each…
Tetris the Grand Master 4
I’ve been playing a lot of Tetris the Grand Master 4: ABSOLUTE EYE and it’s so great. I am by no means great at Tetris, but the TGM games are a lot of fun even if you’re not. In Japan, Sega Tetris was the defacto Tetris game and the rules were slightly different than other Tetris games. Not in a major way but subtle things like how pieces rotate and how pieces lock when they…
Pangolin
For a long time, I’ve used VPN solutions like WireGuard and Tailscale to get into my home network when not at home. They work really well, but recently I’ve been using Pangolin to easily access services I run at home from a web-browser. It’s a reverse proxy that also does authentication, so these sites running on my home network are protected with two-factor auth. It also handles…
411VM
Usually in my life “VM” means “Virtual Machine” but not this time. 411VM was a skateboarding “video magazine” that ran from 1993 to 2005. Some wonderful and amazing person put all the “issues” on archive.org in a playlist that is available here . Skate videos are what I was under the influence of in the 90s. I owned 411VM Volume 11 (1995) on VHS and…
Cleaning up old items in Things
In the past I wrote about having a leaky TODO list and how I implemented that in org-mode. I moved to using Things for tracking my TODO list and wanted to be able to keep cleaning up things that had been sitting in my list for too long. Thankfully Things is scriptable using AppleScript, which is confusing as shit and doesn’t have great documentation but I was able to get it working.…
Kool Keith - 98 Year Old Refrigerator
Kool Keith is a genius and here he talks about buying boring food so that your friends don’t eat it all . I like seltzer water… I mean I really don’t like it myself, but I like it, because people don’t like it. -Kool Keith My favorite Kool Keith album is Dr. Dooom - First Come First Served because everything about it is so absurd. If people can make gangsta rap albums…
No More Emacs
I’ve been an Emacs user since I was in college, which was a long time ago and happened on Sun SPARC machines that had keyboards with Ctrl in the correct spot. It’s just what I learned first and it stuck. I primarily use VSCode for writing code these days, because that’s what most folks use, and it’s pretty good. Emacs has mostly been used for Org-Mode for TODOs, Org-Roam…
Lord Finesse - The SP 1200 Project: Sounds & Frequencies in Technicolor
There’s a new Lord Finesse album out: The SP 1200 Project: Sounds & Frequencies in Technicolor . It’s instrumental hip-hop and it’s real good. It’s the sequel to The SP 1200 Project: A Re-Awakening from 2015 which I really loved so when I saw this was out I bought it no questions asked. Yes, I buy digital music. The SP 1200 is a drum machine that was used in a lot of…
Seattle Waterfront Bike Lanes
Yesterday a friend and I biked down to check out the new bike lanes that opened on the Seattle Waterfront. They’re real nice and it’s great to have more bike infrastructure connecting different parts of the city. We hung out at Pier 62 for a little bit and had coffee, there was a ceremony at 11am and we could see the ribbon they were gonna cut but we didn’t stick around for that.…
Schooly D - PSK (What does it mean?)
I was in a meeting at work the other day reading a document (it’s AWS, we have meetings where the first X minutes are spent in silence reading a doc) and the term “PSK” was used with no definition so my brain had to think about it for a second. The answer was “Pre Shared Key” which made sense it the context of the doc. But the other option in my brain was the classic Schooly D song “P.S.K. (What…
First Try Mushihimesama Original Mode 1cc
Still got it. I haven’t touched my arcade cabs much recently, I’ve been a modern gamer and modern games are great! The new joystick hotness seems to be the “SANWA JLX-TPML-8YT-SK Adjustable Silent Leaf Microswitch Joystick” and I wanted to check it out, so I got one for the arcade stick I use with my PC and one for my vertical arcade cab I use for hardcore shmup action. I…
Frank Stokes
Go listen to Frank Stokes. That’s all. YouTube playlist Apple Music
Speedy's E-Bike Rescue
I joined Speedy’s E-Bike Rescue , which is like AAA for e-bikes. If you break down or have issues in the Seattle area, they’ll come save you and take your bike to your favorite local bike shop. I cruise around a lot with our kiddo on our RadWagon (we recently passed 2,000 miles!) and getting a flat or having some issue would suck so I’m really glad this service exists and am…
Cho Ren Sha 68k v1.10
Happy New Year! Surprise shmup release! Cho Ren Sha 68k , a game originally released in 1995 for the Sharp X68000 Computer, has been updated to version 1.10. 30th anniversary update?! It’s FREE and available here for both Windows and X68000. I took it for a spin and was able to reach stage 2-0 on my first attempt. I made it all the way to 1-6 without dying but then my run fell apart. Such a…
Devil Blade Reboot
This game is really amazing, my favorite shmup released in 2024. I was able to 1cc Easy and Normal modes fairly easily since those modes give you a lot of resources, and bombing gives you a shield. I started working on Hard mode a little bit but it’s a pretty big jump in difficulty. The graphics are excellent, the scoring system is fun, and things explode in a very satisfying manner. A+ all day…
Pretty Eight Machine
This album remakes Pretty Hate Machine using 8-bit computers and consoles. “Head Like I/O”? That’s rad! Pretty Hate Machine was a little before my time. When I was a depressed teenager in high school I did listen to a lot of Downward Spiral though.
Rickey Henderson
Rickey Henderson passed away a few days ago and it hit me hard. I’m not a big sports fan but as a kid growing up in Fremont, CA I was a huge Oakland A’s fan and I totally idolized Rickey Henderson. I played one year of little league but even then I just had to have a green Mizuno batting glove just like Rickey. I can’t really tell you why I idolized him so much, sliding head…
Game Streaming
I’m sitting in a hotel in Grand Junction, CO using my iPad Pro to remotely play games on my gaming PC sitting my house in Seattle, WA and it works pretty damn well. I just played some Mushihimesama Futari , which is a really hard shmup where any input lag is very noticable. Was it noticable with this setup? Yes absolutely, but it was playable. I made it to the middle of stage 3 on Original…
What’s this blog even for?
Whatever I want it to be for! But more seriously, I want to write random stuff and tinker with web technologies. I’ve learned a lot about CSS and how folks deploy web apps by tinkering with this site. I’m someone who learns best by doing, so a lot of this site is that. Writing about things is a good way to focus my thoughts, so in 2025 I want to write more on here about technical topics and little…
MicroTimes archive
Someone put a bunch of issues of MicroTimes on archive.org which is super cool. I used to get this free magazine when going to Fry’s Electronics in the SF Bay Area when I was a kid. Looking through an old issue brought back a lot of memories. We bought a 386DX-25 from Hi-Q in Sunnyvale in probably ‘89, years later I used to salivate over 486DX2-66 machines in all those ads…
Using TinaCMS to Post
I use Hugo for this blog and I like it. It’s static and fast and simple. I want to post more but there’s friction since I need to check in and push some Markdown to GitHub, which is hard to do from a phone. I was looking at Cassidy Williams’ blog and her template which mentioned this thing called TinaCMS that gives a nice web interface for writing posts and will handle the…
Doom Eternal
I recently beat Doom Eternal and have been making my way through the DLC and goddamn I love this game. It doesn’t give two shits about story but focuses on being a fun and challenging video game, kinda like shmups/arcade games. There are even 1ups! It’s hard but it’s fair and it does such a great job of giving you all the tools you need to get through the battles. If you’re…
WSL2 and Nix Flakes
I’ve been using Nix for a while now to manage my dotfiles and all that, which I wrote about here previously . I continue to use it and I continue to like it. I recently got an M3 MacBook Air 15" and Nix made getting things set up really easy. I recently upgraded my development EC2 instance I use for work to a newer generation instance and, again, Nix made this real easy. At home I recently…
Disneyland for Thanksgiving
We spent Thanksgiving day at Disneyland and it was magical! We loved watching our daughter getting her mind blown over and over and seeing the joy on her face. We got to have a nice Thanksgiving meal of churros, cotton candy, and popcorn. There was a nice holiday parade and we got to see Elsa and Anna in person! Rides ridden: Peter Pan Alice in Wonderland Jungle Cruise Chip and Dale Rollercoaster…
AWS Lambda Turns 10
AWS Lambda has turned 10 years old! There was a 10 year celebration livestream that I participated with a great panel of folks. It was a lot of fun and is available here on YouTube . I joined Lambda in 2016 about 2 years after it launched and got to work on interesting things like migrating the compute platform onto Firecracker , delivering a good customer experience around using the OCI Container…
Silent Hill 2 Remake
I really liked this game and found it to be good and spooky. I beat it last night and got the “In Water” ending. I’ve never played a Silent Hill game, but I have seen the two Silent Hill movies thanks to my love of goofy movies. Thankfully those movies didn’t give the plot of the game away. I loved the atmosphere and the simplicity of the action. Comparisons in my head to…
Scared by a Video Game: Dino Eggs
In honor of Halloween and spooky things, I was thinking about the first time I was scared by a video game. This would have been Dino Eggs on the Commodore 64. DINO MOM COMING When the Dino mom came to protect her eggs, a giant leg would come out of the sky and try to step on you. If it crushed you, a loud crazy sound effect played and your dead body laid there smoking. I don’t know why it…
Searing Back Pain Land
I’ve dealt with lower back pain for probably 15 years. It sucks! I’m recovering from of the worst flare up I’ve ever had, which landed me in the ER unable to move. If I tried to lift my heel off the bed I would get insane pain as my back would completely clench up and spasm. They gave me a bunch of drugs but nothing really helped until they gave me an IV drip of Valium. That caused my back to stop…
The Plucky Squire
10 out of 10! This game is amazing! Get it here! I played this with my daughter (~5) and she loved it, I did all the playing but I read all the dialog to her and asked for her help with the puzzles. I’ve been trying to play games a little more with her and this was a really wonderful choice. We read a lot of books, so the format of the story being part of a book was really cute and well…
Until Dawn
Do you like holding up on your controller for extended periods of time? This game is slow, you walk slow, things happen slowly, and the characters are mentally slow. It’s a horror movie where you help the participants make bad decisions, so my main goal was to make them all die. Why would you watch a horror movie if no one dies? My favorite part was the doctor/psychiatrist guy played by…
Cop Movies
A quick review of some movies that either have ‘cop’ in the title or where the main characters are cops. Judge Dredd (1995) This movie is real bad and not enjoyable. Stallone is trying to act so hard and does a lot of having a hair trigger temper where he’s calm one millisecond and the next millisecond he’s super pissed and screaming at someone. I call this “ Pacino…
The Evil Within 2
I finished this game last night and liked it. I thought it did a good job of combining Resident Evil 4 style combat with stealth elements. I also liked that ammo was scarce which forced you to be stealthy and do sneaky kills. I couldn’t tell you what the plot is. I’m in a dream world where my daughter is really important for some reason, “the core” of the world. Why? Who…
The Octagon - Chuck Norris Whispers
Have you ever seen “The Octagon” from 1980 starring Chuck Norris ? You haven’t? Well, it’s a silly movie, but the silliest aspect of it is Chuck Norris whispering his inner thoughts about ninjas. His whispers have a real cool echo/reverb effect too. My favorite is when he whispers outloud “oh my god” and then whispers internally “ninja!” Thankfully…
Steve Albini & Ian Mackaye Interview (2015)
I’m real sad that Steve Albini has passed away. I love a lot of music that guy made or was somehow involved with. Here’s an interview with Steve and Ian MacKaye (from Minor Threat/Fugazi) that’s a great listen. I don’t even know who the interviewer is because they don’t really get involved and it’s basically just a conversation between Ian and Steve. Highly…
King's Quest 1 Speedruns are wild!
This video shows the progression of speedruns for King’s Quest 1 . The amount of optimization and reverse engineering done to get this time down so low is impressive, things like figuring out how the hitboxes work and how you can walk across water. There’s also a prequel to this new video, King’s Quest Speedrunning World Record History if you want more lore. I never really played…
Geinoh Yamashirogumi
Speaking of the Akira anime, the soundtrack to it is pretty amazing. The group that made it is Geinoh Yamashirogumi , and the album they made before the Akira soundtrack is ‘Ecophony Rinne’ and it’s good. The whole album is worth a listen, but the last track ‘Reincarnation’ is incredible.
Akira: Quick Action Recorder
This is some rough animation footage from the Akira anime movie . From here : One of the most notable tools used in the production of the film was the use of the Quick Action Recorder. The quick action recorder allowed the animators to take pictures of individual frames (like a down-shooter) and replay the frames at 24fps (frames per second). This technique was extremely helpful in correction and…