The personal site of R.W. Blickhan
The more things change, the more they stay the same... seven years later, Transamerica Pyramid is still there, as is the office across from it. And now, I work in that office! As of today, it has been seven[^seven] years since I started this newsletter — which also means it’s been seven years since I moved to the Bay Area. In that time, I’ve written 189 posts across 8 “seasons” — though, owing to…
Hello hello once again. This weekend I ascended Lassen Peak — a surprisingly easy four-hour roundtrip, certainly no worse than Vancouver’s awful Grouse Grind — and was rewarded with a lovely view of Mount Shasta , a bit of snow, and a magical number of butterflies. Also, I was dragged to Applebee’s twice. The perils of traveling with Canadians... This week I want to talk about a slightly unusual…
So, I’m supposed to be finishing up the San Francisco Marathon as I write this. I’ve been training — a half marathon a week — for the past month. I organized my whole weekend around spending 5+ hours running this morning. I had friends preparing to cheer me on. I went to bed at 9pm last night. I had even prepared the title for this newsletter: A Supposedly Fun Thing That I Will, On Further…
So, I’ve done it. I’ve climbed Mount Infinite Jest and survived to come down the other side. It was, to paraphrase a great essayist, a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again. And I have Thoughts™️, but also, at some level, not as much to say about it as I expected? Oh well, we’ll see how many words this ends up being... The rest of this newsletter probably won’t make much sense if you don’t have…
Hello from a Twin Peaks themed writing meetup. Yes, there are donuts and strong black coffee; yes, the host is wearing a 1950s-style diner waitress smock; yes, the Twin Peaks soundtrack is playing on repeat in the background. So an article I keep thinking about is Sara Hendren’s “catechesis by camera” , which, like everything Hendren[^hendren] writes, is a must-read.[^mustread] It spring-boards…
Favorites The ones I find myself thinking about a lot... Next time you hear someone say 'he’s such a gossip', understand the statement to be 'he’s such an effective processor of socially-embedded information.' Robin Sloan, "Fresh from Ganymede!", The Society of the Double Dagger In Connecticut, the Governor's council took one look at the sky and decided to call it quits. Go home and wait for the…
A very short newsletter this week, because I spent my time writing up a starter guide to jujutsu , an exciting new version control system, which you can read... here: Russell’s Starter Guide to Jujutsu It will probably only make sense if you’re a programmer, but if you consider yourself a member of that tribe , then I really do highly recommend sitting down to learn jujutsu — even if you, er,…
Jujutusu (or jj ) is an exciting new version control system that has a real chance of supplanting git. You may recall my breathless excitement a few months ago. This is a brief starter guide to jujutsu, intended for practicing programmers with some experience with git.[^model] I’ve been using jujutsu daily for six months now, and thanks to its simplicity, I’m more comfortable with it than I am…
I just got back from a short weekend trip to Mendocino[^1] so this will be a short one. It’s funny how the books that are actually “life-changing” often aren’t the books we’d name as influential. In my case, probably the single most important book in my entire life is, of all things, Dr Sanjay Gupta’s Keep Sharp . It’s a pretty standard pop-science introduction to Alzheimer’s, albeit with an…
The very strange Chinese-themed room at the 134-year-old Shotwell's in the Mission District (otherwise a very lovely bar!) I realized in the past two weeks I hadn’t marked the passing of Marjane Satrapi , author of classic Bildungsroman comic Persepolis . Persepolis is a particular favorite of mine, even though I would probably forget to include it on such a list if asked since it’s not a book I…
So I recently put the finishing touches on the latest draft of my manuscript (!! finally!!). Now we’ll see what comes of that — it needs uhhh at least one more major draft before I’m comfortable sharing it with anyone — but while reviewing / editing I was reflecting on what I like about my own writing — my comparative advantage, you might say — and I came to the conclusion that I am a Character…
You too could make one of these! Read on! So recently I attended one of the Intro to Bookbinding classes at San Francisco Center for the Book . Lovely little class of eight people with a charming instructor, even if what we actually learned[^1] was relatively simple[^2] — I’m definitely interested in going back for more of their bookbinding and letterpress classes, and maybe doing some small…
Bricolage When I was in university, I wandered the stacks of the university library, flipping through volumes at random , building up a mental map of human knowledge via bricolage . This essay, too, is bricolage . There is no thesis, only a loose set of associations between topics. But through juxtaposition, perhaps a deeper meaning can be obtained. Follow the links in each section to explore.…
No more LLMs this week! Back to my usual beat... whatever that is. During the pandemic — a time that even now takes on the tinge of the historical — I decided to read the classics.[^inspiration] I focused mainly on the Western classics — Homer and the Bible and so on — with a smattering of other works. I highly recommend this experience. These books are (mostly) classics for a reason; reading them…
So last week I saw an Amazon flash sale and (being slightly tipsy at the time) decided to pull the trigger on a new toy I’d been eyeing for a while: the Xteink X4 . It’s an approximately-wallet-sized EInk ereader that has no touchscreen and no backlight and as a result retails for just $70 USD normally. The main benefit really is that wallet sizing — it’s about 4.5” x 2.75” and thus certainly fits…
<!-- markdownlint-disable no-emphasis-as-heading --> Well, that was a fun experiment. Unfortunately the results from our three month A/B test just came in and looks like it’s a no-ship. (That’s a joke, albeit an unfunny one.) My goal was to encourage myself to write more fiction — I have a goal to write 12 short stories this year, after all — but I also wanted to write good short fiction, which…
<!-- markdownlint-disable no-duplicate-heading --> These are various “patterns” that I tend to use and reuse in my thinking. This page is inspired in no small part by Jacky Zhao’s “A Pattern Language” and her list of patterns . Is this really accurate to Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language ? No idea, but I find this useful. Chesterton's Fence Before you remove a fence, figure out what it's…
Clearly most trucks do not heed the sign... This week, prompted by a discussion at work, I decided to give Wispr Flow — the Hot New Dictation App™️ — another try. Wispr Flow is a great product , in the traditional sense. They’re using (presumably) the same Whisper transcription model as everybody else, but they wrap it in such a nice package that it’s a pleasure to use, and they find clever…
<!-- markdownlint-disable no-trailing-punctuation --> A short FAQ about myself, which, like all good FAQs, is not questions I've actually been asked but rather questions I felt like answering ... Are you a real person? You use an awful lot of em dashes... Boy, I sure hope so. Otherwise I’m not sure what these fleshy appendages are. I use em dashes fairly consistently (and, I hope, correctly)…
In honor of Jorge Luis Borges’ biblioteca personal , here’s my own list of media that has been deeply influential on me. (Incomplete, but I’ll finish it off later!) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) What can I say? H2G2 is my favorite novel, and I reread it every year for Towel Day. Most of my juvenilia is a faded carbon-copy of Adams, and most of my writing since then has been…
I maintain a list of “slash pages” per Robb Knight’s slashpages.net , and this is the list of them all! /about : A basic FAQ about me! /ai : My policy for the usage of LLMs and similar systems. /canon (aka “biblioteca personal”): Brief reflections on some of the media that made me who I am. /colophon : Brief notes on how this site is made. /glossary (aka /lexicon ): Definitions of terms I tend to…
Once upon a time people had ~ blogrolls ~ Well here in 2026, we have wander pages (a la James' Coffee Blog ). A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Bret Devereaux: Do you like reading about the Roman Republic? Of course you do. Dr Devereaux is (imo) the leading public intellectual on the classic Mediterranean, not to mention fantasy worldbuilding; his very long posts are scholarly but eminently…
Is there really value in personal automation? I wrote a whole essay on Raycast and I’m still not really sure. Even though xkcd has a helpful chart for how much time you can spend automating a task, the joke is that you’re probably spending too much time . But it’s so much fun! I’ve seen this referred to as a worry stone or by the Dutch term prutsen . Sometimes it’s okay to waste a bit of time on…
<!-- markdownlint-disable no-duplicate-heading --> This is my list of TIL (Today I Learned) posts, inspired by Simon Willison's TIL page. Vim Text Objects Most vim commands take text objects. For instance, we can do diw for d elete i n w ord or daw for d elete a round w ord, which includes the delimiters as well. I use w pretty heavily to select alphanumeric words, but there's actually a lot of…
I didn't quite get the shot I wanted here, sad. I've been happy to pick up iPhone photography again, but I do sometimes find it hard to take the time to find something actually worth taking a shot of... So this week, as I continue reading “great works that are often referenced but not often read”[^two-cultures] (is this actually a series? who knows), I finally read Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit…
So this past week I finally read C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” , the paper that you have to cite if you start talking about the sciences and the humanities. It is, in fact, a very good paper! And you can find a PDF right here . Snow was a mid-century physicist who later became a novelist and, as a result, had a foot in both worlds, science and literature — worlds…
Short one this week, because I’ve a.) finally started work, for real, and need brain space for that b.) have been writing a thousand words a day (give or take) as I race to complete my latest manuscript asap c.) am working on a how to jujutsu article that I should also reserve some brain space for. I recently mentioned some of the properties of my oft-repeated core identities of “writer and…
So I didn’t end up taking that outline more seriously and as a result didn’t finish it in time for April — I wish I could say “April Fools”, but I’m seriously not embarking on a new manuscript this month. Sad! But in fairness, work is going to be rough for a while, so perhaps it’s best to hold off. Still, I am hacking away at the outline — well, I actually restarted it, but I’ve made good progress…
Currently listening to: The Loveliest Time , Carly Rae Jepsen[^1] Aight this is a short one — buckle up. Calendrical and Cartographic Thinking It’s a well-known trope that tools shape our thinking (see ”Notational intelligence” , “Notation as a Tool of Thought” , etc). So here’s another example. A friend is coming from out of town next week and we were trying to coordinate lunch. As a result, I…
So, I completely missed March, did I? Oh well, nobody really needed March anyway — certainly, Julius Caesar won’t miss it. I’m writing to you here, from the safe side of April Fools Day, a day which seems to be marked by less and less celebration every year. Perhaps that is how Saturnalia died, slowly petering out, as a generation of Romans decided, “eh, it wasn’t worth celebrating anyway.”…
Let’s get right in to the meaty content! Rooibos![^1] In Which I Wax Nostalgic for My Lost Youth Hello from the other side of a quarter-life crisis! So I recently turned 27 and it feels rather differently than I thought it might. For the past year I’ve been aggressively joking that I’m “old” now, since I’m in my late twenties and have not published even a single best-selling novel, let alone four…
Last month I introduced a 500-word cap. I’ll keep the cap and try to make this newsletter biweekly. Let’s go! Communities of Practice Recently I’ve been thinking about communities of practice (somewhat related to scenius . It’s great to try out a hobby or a side project, but we often underrate how important it is to have a community working on the same hobby. I often find myself gravitating…
Apologies, this will once again be a short issue—pages don’t write themselves, and seeing as how we’re halfway through my (self-declared) NaSepWriMo , I just hit 22k words, which is just about on track. That said, I do have some small musings to share this week. “Ruin by the Sea”, Arnold Böcklin, 1881 Modernism as Global Monoculture We frequently talk of “Westernization”, but it may be more…
48,000 words. Just 2,000 left to go before the rough draft is done! Two essays this week, no miscellanea (didn’t you have enough miscellanea the last two newsletters? 🙂). “The Nightmare”, Henry Fuseli, 1781 How many programmers does it take to fix a lightbulb? Fermi estimation in computer science interviews as discipline error I sat down across from my interviewer, pleasantries already exchanged,…
Hello one and all to this new season of Applied Dilettantery (neé Adventures in Dilettantery )[^1], two weeks early. As mentioned in the last few issues, I’ve been unhappy with the direction the newsletter was going in; it had drifted into a simple log of things I’d read/watched/listened to and, in a certain sense, didn’t have a strong value-add. I do of course respect your time, dear reader, so I…
New experiment: to keep this newsletter fairly lightweight — easy to write, easy to read — I’m going to try capping it at about 500 words. So here goes! Safari is the Lightest Browser A stray thought that wandered through my mind sometime in the past month: Safari is the lightest browser. A choice of software often comes down more to a feeling , a vibe , than a technical decision. Tim Hwang and…
Welcome Hello, one and all! Welcome to season 6 of rwblog , formerly known as Applied Dilletantery! Why a new season? I want to bring this newsletter back to its original incarnation, which can be summed up as “Russell’s take on Robin Sloan’s newsletters ”. I want to bring it back to the weird humanistic intersection between tech, design, anthropology, and the humanities that I like reading about.…
<!-- markdownlint-disable no-emphasis-as-heading --> I was supposed to be writing an outline for the Next Novel™️ that I’m hoping to tackle in April, but instead I found myself bombing through The Sympathizer (one of the best books I’ve ever read, highly recommended) and The Magicians (not one of the best books I’ve ever read, but it does have its moments of poignancy) as well as making some…
Here's some works, fiction and non-fiction, related to consciousness, identity, and neurodiversity that I particularly appreciate. Papers & Articles "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious" , Eric Schwitzgebel "Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness" , Keith Frankish "The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization" , Erik Hoel "Mental illness, attention…
San Francisco Boichik Bagels : The clear winner of the Bay Area bagel game; easily competitive with New York bagels (no matter what New Yorkers will tell you), although you pay for the quality ($3 a bagel or so). They've even available frozen in some Bay Area grocery stores. Schlok's Bagels & Lox : The number two bagel place in San Francisco, though again, you're paying for quality. Conveniently,…
Alternative title: cheap but lovely gifts for a surprise white elephant party. These are some relatively cheap, relatively small things that make life just a little bit better. None of these are affiliate links or paid reviews - I just really like all these. Health & Wellness Loop Earplugs Due to my lifelong tinnitus, I'm religious about hearing safety. I keep a pair of earplugs on my keychain at…
Books Crafting Interpreters , Robert Nystrom The best introductory work on programming language design and implementation, covering a basic treewalk interpreter and a more complicated, but realistic, bytecode interpreter. Notably, it covers language features like closures and object-oriented classes in depth, both of which are usually brushed aside. Also, it's extremely readable and has cute…
This is a little overview of how this very site is built and deployed as of May 2022. Main Setup I use the Publish static site generator , primarily developed by iOS indie developer John Sundell. There are many, many static site generators out there, but I like Publish for a few reasons: It's both written in Swift and uses Swift for HTML templating, which is the programming language I'm most…
Hey folks, in the spirit of “what’s in your bag,” I wanted to do a quick (and by quick I apparently mean 2,600+ word) overview of the tools I use every day outside of work. Most of these are (surprise, surprise) iOS apps. Notes I have become a full-on member of the Obsidian cult. (Shout out to Rob and Susie!) I switched to it late last year when I learned they had introduced a fast mobile app,…
I like to use the command line, perhaps because I "always bet on text" . Here are a few of the command line tools I use the most heavily. Essentials There are a few command-line tools I use so heavily that I'm genuinely not sure how I would be productive without them. git Well, duh. Where would we even be as software engineers without git ? That said, I like to set a lot of aliases in my…
I use quite a few vim plugins, but most of them are relatively simple editing plugins that introduce new text objects or commands. I shy away from more complicated plugins that try to turn vim into a fully-featured IDE. vim should be focused on text editing! If I want an IDE, I'll use an IDE... with the vim mode enabled 😉 vim-plug I use vim-plug for plugin installation and management. Arguably, I…
A few months back, I moved from a mobile engineering team to a fullstack web team. As a result, I also moved from Xcode to Visual Studio Code, which has quickly become my general editor of choice. One of the nicest parts of VS Code is how extensible it is, especially compared to the locked-down-to-a-fault Xcode. I use a number of plugins, which I've documented here. VSCodeVim I've used vim…
Let’s check in on what my default apps are these days. I enjoyed this exercise two years ago, so let’s do it again! Email I have a Gmail account that I’ve used for pretty much my entire adult life. However, I actually access it via Mimestream , which is both a wonderful Mac-native app and a fully-featured Gmail client, including some nice additions like Google Calendar support. On mobile, I use…
Recently I built a site to do full-text search of links I’ve bookmarked. This article explains how it’s built and assumes some basic familiarity with JavaScript and web technologies generally. You can see the full code in the GitHub repo . Evolution So the goal for this project changed pretty significantly over time. I did not intend to create a whole subsite to search everything I’ve read! I was…
About two years ago, I decided to learn how to cook. After much experimentation and reference to The Food Lab , here is what I learned about decent home cooking. Assembling a Recipe Before you cook, you have to decide what to cook. You can just pick a recipe, but it helps to understand why a recipe works the way it does. My framework is that every recipe can be broken down into three fundamental…