medeski
Where are they now? Well, Wood started a blues band with his brother. Medeski got his law degree and is now senior partner at Medeski Medeski LLP (no relation). Martin went on to write a highly acclaimed series of fantasy novels
phils web site
RSS FOR PHILS WEB SITE THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN VIEW POSTS IN PUBLISH ORDER WHICH IS CHEATING BUT WHATEVER
Latest posts
Toy Story 5
Man, five of them, huh. Pixar’s initial offering and the first-ever CG feature is far meaner than I remembered as a kid, my own child was put off by its snarling jealous energy for most of the runtime when we watched it recently. Since then, the characters have mellowed out but the pathos has deepened, as the series continues to poke at the central tragedy of this fictional universe: toys are made…
Survivor Season 42
As my death march nears its end, the pace has accelerated and I find myself behind on jotting down my thoughts. If you have been frantically refreshing your RSS reader for the past month, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. This season gives us a unique information asymmetry: the audience has been fully brought up to speed on the new New Era mechanics, but the cast has not. This doesn’t…
Survivor Season 43
I’m gonna be honest, this one went right through me. Whiskered heartsman Gabler “Gabler” Gabler was a cool dude who got a nice clean win. Jesse was a fire challenge away from a creative-idol-play-fueled win, and took his loss hard. Maybe I shouldn’t write these when I’m sick
Survivor Season 41
We arrive at last at the “New Era”, which as I write this is almost 10 seasons in but must have felt very fresh to contestants and audiences alike in the midst of the High Covid Era. A shorter shoot schedule (to account for quarantine), a brutal reduction of basic food and supplies, and new gameplay mechanics like the Beware Advantage and the Shot in the Dark define the gameplay here, and at the…
gopher
Go is a great language for making CLIs, REST APIs, and other intensive applications. Its syntax takes some getting used to, but once I got past its quirks I found that it really matched my mental models and its strong typing and GoLand's autocomplete helped me type with confidence at speed. It's been a lot of fun getting proficient with it. I want to be clear about something, though. The Go Gopher…
Kpop Demon Hunters
After 6 months of Spotify Algorithm Destruction, we finally got to watch the thing that the soundtrack is from (by the way, if you’re not aware, an artist called Bongo Cat has versions of the songs where all of the lyrics are replaced by cat meows). I was expecting to like it based on what I had seen, but hey, this is a real good flick. Probably would have made some money if they put it in…
Survivor Season 40
Ever since All-Stars , there have been a few special “Avengers” seasons where the cast is completely made up of past players, and the heroes of their own seasons get to return and team up with other legends to make a true Television Event. Finally we arrive at Survivor’s “Endgame”, the contest of contests, where every returning player was a grand prize winner of a previous season. Like Endgame,…
Survivor Season 39
Before we get to the Unpleasantness, let us examine the season’s Core Gimmick. There is a mysterious island that contains giant wooden head statues of two well-regarded past players, along with the actual two well-regarded past players, and periodically one of the actual contestants will arrive to get advice and a chance for a game advantage. This is an interesting way to solve two problems.…
Survivor Season 38
I have mixed feelings about Purgatory Seasons , where a player being voted out of tribal does not necessarily get ejected from the game , but there were enough interesting ideas and characters to make this season a winner for me. Previous gimmicks culled the restless dead periodically, but “Edge of Extinction” filled up over the course of the entire season, and for the first time ever the jury was…
Survivor Season 37
I haven’t heard much from the seasons that led up to the Great Reset, so I guess I was assuming they were all kind of meh. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover maybe my favorite season of all time in the upper thirties. I tend to appreciate Tribal Gimmicks, as giving me a collective character helps me make sense of the intra-tribal dynamics, and “David vs Goliath” is a very strong set of…
Survivor Season 36
I have my work cut out for me if I’m going to catch up by season 50, so here we go. Not my favorite season, but the gimmick of bringing back past immunity idols and advantages was fun. The tribal dynamics were pretty bog standard, but I enjoyed the rivalry between Domenic and Chris that echoed the Alpha Male Face-Off of Rob vs Russell . Once Chris was booted, Dom and charismatic wingman Wendell…
stupid-prizes
“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” is misleading. If you catch them with overstock at the end of the day, sometimes they’ll just give you a stupid prize for free This came to me in a dream
monstars
The Looney Tunes are dead. The Tune Squad struggles to be born. Now is the time of Monstars.
Survivor Season 49
Good on the New Era for finally delivering a dud of a season. Too many tribe swaps early on muddied the waters of who was working with whom, and not a lot of personalities stood out. It’s always fun to see a tribe obliterated by challenges, as the blue tribe did this time around, and things started to pick up post-merge. It was very fun watching Sage, a military analyst who likes to talk about…
Joker
idk, I'd watch a period piece where Joaquin Phoenix plays a failed comedian who is abandoned by the social safety net and succumbs to violent madness. The first third of this movie is a tender character study of a pathetic guy who has never once caught a break, and it really stinks when they don't know how to propel that forward. There's some decent raw materials here: the performances, the sets…
Banjo Diaries 1: Boil That Cabbage Down
I have recently come into possession of a banjo. In purchasing it, I was hoping to start a more robust instrument practice than I've done in some time. I make do with a clawhammer-y strum thing on my old beater banjo, but I want to really learn the instrument and participate in a musical tradition, so I've resolved to learn Earl Scruggs-style bluegrass banjo, a 3-finger picking method with…
The Legend Lives On
The PC version of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City had a feature where you could create a custom radio station from MP3s on your filesystem. My song of choice, while aimlessly flying a helicopter through the skyscrapers of a low-poly downtown district, was The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot, freshly downloaded from Morpheus or Kazaa or Limewire or whatever illegal filesharing…
Superman
The Super: Christopher Reeve. This guy's a fuckin star. Carries the movie, like a school bus dangling over a bridge, on his meaty shoulders. He performs admirably as the Caped Crusader, but is having much more fun doing the Clark Kent schtick. Margot Kidder. The original Lois Lane is earthy and funny and vivacious. I’m glad she didn’t plummet from a helicopter to her death. Gene Hackman. I…
big-feelings
Your honor, I may have made some bad choices, but in my defense, I was having some big feelings at the time
chat
explaining to high school english students that the Chorus in Greek tragedies is basically Chat Oedipus says some stuff and then we turn to the Chat for reacts oedipus: *removes eyeballs* chat: he's cooked fr. F
cs-career-questions
/r/cscareerquestions is so funny. it's like if there was a subreddit for people who willingly signed up for the squid game
enshittified
Don’t cry that it enshittified, smile that it provided surplus value to users during its growth phase 💙
jwt
in Philadelphia JWTs are known as JWNs
doing the thing again where i scroll linkedin and just say "shut up" over and over under my breath
monkey-bars
Shocked that my kid, who adores climbing and jumping and monkey bars and obstacle courses of all kinds, enjoys Mario games
moraine
When glaciers start to slow Like old stale pizza dough That’s a moraine
serenity-prayer
Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention, the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do, and the wisdom to know the difference.
sexual-hardware
Got horrible service at Ace Hardware so from now on I’ll be going to their main competitor: Sexual Hardware sorry
Battlestar Galactica Season 1
The miniseries started things off with a nice bang, forcing the human race off of their 12 colonial worlds and onto a series of rickety spaceships, to be pursued, and heavily toyed with, by the robots they created. Season 1 of the show proper takes this exciting premise and does some stuff with it. Some of that stuff is good! I enjoy the human side of this show greatly. These characters are all…
Swept Away: The Avett Brothers Broadway Musical
This sounds like a joke, right? Like a rejected Portlandia sketch or something? But no, it is absolutely real, as I recently discovered when looking at their full discography in Spotify. And it's bad! I've been a fan of the Avett Brothers ever since I saw them play in a barn at the Edinboro Folk Festival in 2006. They had a sort of bluegrass-by-the-way-of-screamo thing going on that was like…
Killing Floor
Jack Reacher is really big and strong and also really smart and he wins every fight and he solves every crime. I've wanted to meet this character for a while after hearing the TV show is peak Dad TV, and I see the appeal now. The preface is honestly the most interesting part of the book; Child, a veteran British TV writer, walks through the process of creating the character based on his decades of…
scream
I scream You scream We all scream
Elio
This is a movie about neglected children. Sure, there’s a Rick-And-Morty-Flavored wacky space adventure, a comedy of errors surrounding a high-stakes diplomatic mission, and a throughline of light body horror. But ultimately, Elio is a kid who isn’t getting the care he needs from the world, and is punished for his loneliness and grief repeatedly. Fortunately for him, he is abducted by aliens, and…
Blue Prince
Contains extremely light spoilers for Blue Prince. I strongly advise you to just play the game and then come back later to talk to me about it . If someone compares a game to Outer Wilds or Myst, that is a precious gift to me, because it means I can buy it sight unseen and go into it completely cold. I had the privilege of doing that with Blue Prince, and it spit me out two weeks later, haunted in…
Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries
contains spoilers to the thing I’m writing about I have begun a journey here. In a cultural trade with Jesse , in exchange for him watching Andor, I am to watch Battlestar Galactica, a show that I somehow completely missed when it aired. Now that he understands that the only way to defeat the United Sta-uhhhh I mean the Galactic Empire is through armed resistance, it is my turn to live up to my…
Survivor Season 35
This season has the same problem as Nicaragua : on the heels of an action-packed, star-studded returning players season , we pick up with an all-new cast, none of whom make much of an initial impression. The gimmick this time around is “Heroes vs Healers vs Hustlers”, which is maybe the weakest tribal composition stunt to date. What is the difference between a hero and a healer? Nothing of…
Survivor Season 34
I always enjoy the Avengers seasons , where we get a full slate of returning players to mix it up with Advanced Gameplay. I watched this the week that the Survivor 50 cast was announced, so I’m getting another one next spring. These seasons are always Bigger than others. The cast was bigger. Every returning players season is full of Survivor’s most memorable characters, but this may be the most…
Survivor Season 48
Spoilers follow for Season 48 of Survivor and seasons 1-6 of LOST I’ve been revisiting LOST with my wife, who’s never seen it. It’s a fascinating parallel dive into early aughts peak TV alongside Survivor, a show that I am approximately 3/4 of my way through binging. Watching LOST and Survivor at the same time makes it very clear that the former was heavily influenced by the latter. A group of…
plausible-text-factory
LLMs have made my job much easier. I work as a foreman at the plausible text and unnerving video factory by the way Originally posted to LinkedIn
surplus-value
Don’t cry because it enshittified, smile that it provided surplus value to users during its growth phase
Survivor Season 32
Another BvBvB , and like before, the Brains are where the fun is at. The best seasons of Survivor feel like moral victories, and new favorite contestant Aubry pulls off something incredible when she convinces spry forest elf Tai to defect from his alliance with a misanthropic bounty hunter and NBA player. His refusal to contribute to a “super idol” (not every idea is a good one) was the turning…
Survivor Season 33
This is another Olds vs Youngs season, with the much more provocative “Millenials vs Gen X” subtitle. The producers boil this distinction down to some bullshit “millennial don’t want to work hard and Gen X does” thing, which doesn’t ring true at all irl or in the game, but at least the cast is stacked. Family Guy writer David has the best arc, growing from a neurotic nerd who is scared of…
founder-mode
I’m going Founder Mode. But founder as a verb. I’m taking on water, listing to port in the harbor. Help. Originally published to LinkedIn
Finding Nemo
For parents: Before you know it, your child will grow from something you need to protect to a person that needs you to trust them, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy and terror. You will fail at handling this transition with perfect grace, but it is your sacred responsibility to allow pain into your child's life so they can learn how to be strong. One day, they will reward you for your trust…
Survivor Season 31
Kelley Wentworth was robbed. After a refreshing number of new cast seasons, it was nice to round up the power players for a best of. The first steal-a-vote, some fun calls in for medical, and world-class idol play (and placement; hiding them in immunity challenges was fun as hell). An all-around great season.
Vibe Coding
2025 has seen the rise of “vibe coding”: using AI tools such as Cursor to hyper-accelerate software development, allowing engineers to enter a purely expressive mindset and delegating the tricky technical details to machines. If you’ve vibe coded, and you’re enjoying the freeform, creative headspace that you can enter while doing it, I have a couple of suggestions to take your vibing to the next…
Survivor Season 30
I like seasons with good casts, and I like seasons where the tribes take on a character, so I liked this season. Survivor has experimented with Class Warfare before, with the big gimmick of Fiji being that one tribe would be better fed and more comfortable, with the results being predictable and not extremely telegenic. This time around, the tribes are evenly matched, but the makeup of each is…
Survivor Season 29
A nice winner and very fluid alliances elevate an otherwise lackluster season. The early highlight was former MLB pitcher and walking Controversy section John Rocker get called out for being not only a famous athlete, but a bigoted piece of shit to boot. After his early exit, his girlfriend quit after getting caught hoarding trail mix at the merge feast.
Survivor Season 28
One of the only seasons in the twenties to not feature any returning players, Survivor Cagayan at least had a killer gimmick. “Brawn vs Brains vs Beauty” is a fun idea: pit a tribe of muscle freaks against a bunch of dweebs, and throw some models and cheerleaders on a third tribe for good measure. More to the point, what happens when one tribe is favored to win challenges, one tribe has good…