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.
Continue reading →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 with my wife, talking it up with my kids, and now in the blink of an eye it's all over? As soon as it started it's done? It feels unfair. It goes no faster than life at home, and yet I don't spend months anticipating doing the exact same stuff i've been doing the rest of the time.
I hope they look back on these trips with as much fondness as I did as a kid. Spending time with cousins who live far away, going to the beach, eating treats night and day, falling asleep in my arms at a restaurant because they played too hard...
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →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.
Play Ring Fit Adventure every day. I got it for christmas and having played it once today, I found it tiring and oddly compelling. It's not a replacement for something as challenging as crossfit, but until my wife and I can figure out a reasonable compromise, this must be my primary method for staying active.
Buy no new games. I own many games and yet I keep saying to myself, "Maybe this one will be amazing/so fun/something that I love." Occasionally I'm right, but mostly I enjoy them a little and then put them aside for the next thing. I know I won't be able to hold this line, but I'd like to sincerely try.
Play through the Zelda series in release order. I had this thought while watching @headfallsoff.com on bluesky post about their adventures working through the Sonic games and struggling to enjoy Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Hand in hand with #2 above, I hope to exercise restraint through a dedicated task. How exactly will this work? I'm not sure. I don't expect to be a purist (I'll play a remake or remaster as I feel appropriate), but I do want to stick to the release order format, to see the evolution of the series.
Continue to keep up with Shelved By Genre. Because of them (and the energy it gives me), I've read 17 (soon to be 18) books this calendar year, the most of my adult life. It feels really good to make progress, to follow through on these works, to explore new ideas and new thoughts. I've owned Shadow and Claw since 2005 but only cracked it last year because of them; likewise with the Earthsea books past Tombs of Atuan. I'm deeply excited about the Sprawl trilogy, one of my favorite series, and I'm further excited to see where the show goes after.
Write on here slightly more than once a month. The ease of writing on Cohost gave me a fire and passion for both short and long form writing, and I'd like to recapture that. I don't know how exactly, but I think it's doable. I just need to stay a little mindful of the "trivial inconvenience" and push through.
Last but not least, be a better dad. I hope to get the fuck off my phone for good — if I can do that, then I will consider the entire year a resounding success. In lieu of that, I want to be more present and less reactive, more patient and less combative, give them more freedom and more support to be bold and weird, and to apologize way more for the things I do wrong.
Other small things I've thought about, that don't feel discrete enough for the list: speedrun Influx Redux? paint the first floor a neutral color? build all of the shelves and bookcases and cabinets that are piled in the garage? clean out the basement? improve as a sexual partner?
Continue reading →
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, but it's harder to justify paying $3-$5 for 3 oz of drink compared to $4-$6 for 12 oz of coffee. A bit of milk to lighten espresso is great; a bit of espresso to go with my heated milk sucks actually.
I just gotta stop buying lattes, it's almost always a mistake.
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 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.
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 wrote this post last week but i actually came up with the joke back in the fall. i've been mulling it over ever since, and i think i know why it resonates. this might take a moment to write out tho, so my apologies up front.
i will start at the end.
after much introspection, i am not trans. i feel great in my body, i like being seen as a man and by all accounts i experience gender euphoria, i like being "papa" to my kids "husband" to my wife and "son" to my parents, i like my birth name.
Continue reading →Trans Jerry: I have a suspicion that she’s transitioned just for the jokes.
Father: And this offends you as a trans person.
Trans Jerry: No, it offends me as a comedian!
a friend asked me recently about my "poly" status with my wife, and i started to write a short thing which turned into a long thing. here it is as i sent it to her, to avoid editing and nitpicking it into not getting posted.
here's a bunch of pieces that all kind of commingle here, so it's a bit of a mess, but the short version is something like:
- i am poly and can and do experience familial and romantic love for multiple people at the same time.
- i am a human bound by causality and time, so i can only do one thing at a time at any given time.
- conceptually "love" is infinite and i can care about many people without effort, but relationships require time and energy for them to have any depth.
- given that, if i'm going to have a meaningfully deep relationship, i need to put in greater and greater efforts to both achieve and then maintain it.
- at a certain point, i can love multiple people, but i find myself disappointed when i want to have a shared history with someone (my now-wife May) but my history is split across N people. Shared history is an important aspect of relationships, and personally, i find great joy in being able to say "remember when we did X?"
- likewise, when i was single and ready to mingle in 2017, i had basically infinite time to meet people and to spread myself out. that extra time has shrunk bit by bit since and now i have roughly 1.5 free hours before bed every day. if i want more than that in a given day, i am necessarily depriving both my wife and kids of valuable time with me and forcing my wife to do stuff like "make dinner, entertain the kids, put them to bed" alone.
Before I got married, I heard lots of advice about how to handle money in marriage, such as “have separate bank accounts” and “only use one joint bank account” and “as long as bills are covered, you should buy whatever you want” and “every penny must be accounted for to make sure nothing funny is happening”.
Back when we were Dual Income No Kids, I just sent her my half of the bills (as I had moved in with her and they were all in her name). It was easy and simple. Once we had our first kid and she quit her job, there was a question of how to handle spending money. I switched my direct deposit to give me an allowance (personal bills, etc) and then send the rest to her with the comment that she could spend as much as she wanted, that I both trusted her and thought she deserved to buy whatever she wanted.
This seemed fine but after two years, she admitted that she didn’t feel free to do whatever, that because her money was muddled in with the bills money, it felt bad to spend it on herself (even tho she knew I was okay with it).
Continue reading →at this point, i don't know that i can view selling one's company as anything other than an evil act
owning and running a company is already mired in a complex set of circumstances and power relationships that i don't have a firm grasp on, but i at least see an aspect of "thing i built alongside other people and have pride in and want to see succeed as a reflection of myself".
and it's like "yes, get the bag, take the money and run" but also, fucking no way dude, have some pride and dignity. “take the money and run” only applies when no one is reliant on you. once you have staff and people relying on you, you can't just sell out without ruining lives.
my brother responded to the above with:
Continue reading →i watched elemental last night and while i'm still coalescing my thoughts on it, i decided to rank the pixar films. feast your eyes on this and scream at me in the comments and rechosts
descending, so cars is my fave:
cars
toy story 2
turning red
coco
ratatouille
cars 3
a bug's life
the good dinosaur
monster's inc
luca
elemental
onward
brave
incredibles 2
the incredibles
monsters university
toy story