- I was rewatching the 2025 National Dog Show video for the Toy category and had forgotten that an absolute GENIUS decided to play Still D.R.E. during the entrance. Gawd, I laughed so hard.
- I wonder what it would be like if policy were a bit more like software. In that they had built in triggers to re-review their usefulness and effect on citizens. I was imagining a type of system that nonpartisan groups and individuals could declare and have the onus to prove that the trigger happened. I feel it's not a great solution, and more of a thought experiment, but I never believed that policy should be stagnant, and reviewing the origin and net effect of major laws would address Chesterton's Fence. Of course, this would imply that people that gain from our current processes were to allow quietly a system more rooted in fairness to all citizens, which I know that humanity is not logical. If we were we would every single one of us see that income ≠ intelligence. *cough* like Mark Suckerberg... I mean... Zuckerberg
- I've been thinking a lot about politics lately, and I don't feel at ease with partisan anything, truth be told (I lean liberal but I get irked by many Democrats). I feel betrayal to the citizens are perpetrated by both liberals and conservatives. If a group's goal is to protect the status quo at all costs, then in my eyes they are inherently untrustworthy. I was listening to an interview with Catherine Liu and she articulated so well the things I've noticed are, at a high level commonalities between both major political parties here in the US. No binary will ever hold nuance. That being said, we KNOW which US party holds the record of most assholes, making my feelings about the Republicans more rage than a gentle disdain.
- I put a birdfeeder in my yard and they're starting to visit! I learned to check if they are there before bursting outside and scaring them. I saw a female northern cardinal, and I think a mockingbird. The possible mockingbird was funny, because I quietly walked outside, only to see a gray bird chilling in the grass in my yard, which made me all soft and uwu of course.
- I was watching a video on the history of Nintendo menu music. It struck me that given how memorable their menu music is, through most of the Nintendo's history of releasing consoles, they had no menus at all. I guess for me it goes to show how iconic they were. On a related note, after I watched the video, I have come to put a name to the legend that gave us the Wii Shop, Wii Mii Channel, and Wii Sports songs. Kazumi Totaka. If you check him out, he has a LONG list of amazing game music composed throughout his career.
- It's funny, AI is a power hungry tech, but had we as a country enacted policies that consistently supported modernizing our grids and integrating renewable energy better, we probably would still not have enough electricity, but perhaps the situation would have been better. I wonder what pressures the grid operators have now that AI and data centers are such a big demand. I read about the erosion of Anthropic's Claude as demand scales, which is funny, because my company execs have a huge Claude fever now.
- I just remembered a fascinating post where a Japanese person asked why do save icons look like a vending machine with a dispensed drink. You know, the floppy disk icon? It goes to show how visual language evolves in time. When the internet was making it into the mainstream, people needed the floppy disk to build their understanding of the concept of saving something (like submitting form inputs into a db). But as technologies gain traction, metaphors can be abstracted and the old, skeuomorphic ones lose meaning. Here's a cool article about it.
- Current Obsessions: chattering cats (which is not really "cute", since it's a bird hunting thing but it's never not funny to me to see it), Spider Solitaire. Knitting while watching video essays (thus explaining the uptick in quirky history videos I link to!) Plants vs Zombies, binge reading cozy fantasy, and baking honey cakes.
Man does not live by gut alone. Reaction is not action. Novels of despair are intended, most often, to be admonitory, but I think they are, like pornography, most often escapist, in that they provide a substitute for action, a draining-off of tension. That is why they sell well. They provide an excuse to scream, for writer and reader. A gut reaction, and nothing further. An automatic response to violence—a mindless response. When you start screaming, you have stopped asking questions. Despite all disclaimers, it is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb, and then puts its hands over its eyes and says, My God, what have I done? When art shows only how and what, it is trivial entertainment, whether optimistic or despairing. When it asks why, it rises from mere emotional response to real statement, and to intelligent ethical choice. It becomes, not a passive reflection, but an act.
– Ursula K. Le Guin (The Stalin in the Soul)
