What goes here in daily notes and what goes into separate /notes? No idea. Maybe I should kill the idea of /notes and just make everything a regular post. Messy for readers, but cleaner for my brain? Dunno.
I spent hours today making sense of my wiki content using Claude Code and it was a frustrating blast. Sorry, I brought up AI, again. I’m not supposed to do that.
I've been watching The Dropout on Hulu. It's hard to watch at times, because the main character of the show, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is such a horrible person. She lies to everyone about everything, but she's cute and the VCs like her, so they pump hundreds of millions of dollars into her startup, Theranos, which was a real company, and made a product that never worked, but she doesn't get around to telling anyone that, including the board of directors, until long after it's too late. I haven't reached the end yet, but I know how it ends, because it's based on a true story. She ends up in the same prison that Ghislaine Maxwell is in, in Texas. The only reason I mention it is that in my tenure in Silicon Valley, about 30 years worth, I saw everything she did, done by other entrepreneurs and VCs, in real life. Only now, in the second Trump administration, its craptitude is maxed out far beyond anything I saw personally. They're selling the biggest lie yet, that they've invented machines that think. This is not true, and it's so big a lie, its too-big-to-fail quotient is far higher than anything we've seen before. ChatGPT should stop pretending to be human because that will destroy real humans who believe it. But the euphoria is so great, they're probably going to continue to insist it is capable of thought, and that leads to something far worse than Theranos, or any of the other billion-dollar scams they have foisted on us previously. #
I want to switch cell providers, so I used ChatGPT to figure out that Consumer Cellular is the best choice for me. I finally get around to filling in the form, and it complains about my zip code. "No service." Yes I know, there's no cell coverage where I live. I still need a freaking cell phone. Called them, the sales person says maybe it's a problem with your computer. Geez Louise. It's a problem with your computer. How many years have they had to fix this stupid bug. I could see if I was buying a landline. But this is a mobile device. That means it moves. To places with cell coverage.#
What if you made a social network out of RSS? Then your blogroll would be the list of people you follow. Their updates would show up in a reverse chronologic list of posts that would look like something from Bluesky or Twitter. You could view a list of the people you follow, and expand each person to see their most recent five posts, summarized, with a link to each to read the whole thing. Since there are no limits to the length of a post in RSS there would be no limit to the length of one of these posts, but of course you wouldn't show all the text in the timeline without the reader clicking on something.#
Well, I was born in a small town
And I live in a small town
Probably die in a small town
Oh, those small communities
—John Mellencamp
Earlier this year when I moved the blog to Eleventy, I mentioned that in putting together this most recent incarnation of things I’d used a longrunning Tumblr theme called Nyssa as its design base. It’s a theme I’d used more than once when I was using Tumblr for one thing or another, and as they say in real estate it has “good bones”.
At the time, I’d emailed the theme’s author to see about permission rights for such a remix, but then ran into a prior Q&A about that very thing and so just charged ahead and got to work with my modifications for use here.
Anh emailed a reply overnight; as it turns out, I’d used an old address not much in use anymore. No harm no foul, since she reiterated to me the previous permissions given to other people.
The funny thing, though, is that she notes coming across my blogging anniversary post in which among other things I responded to a particular blog challenge that had been making the rounds. Turns out, she’d responded to these, too. As I noted in my reply back, I guess I forget that even in 2025 the blogosphere is still kind of small. Or, perhaps it’d be more accurate to say that it’s small again, now that we’re past the Twitter-era explosion of content marketers who overwhelmed the form and drove so many people away from it.
I’m compelled also to note that her about page is based on the idea of having multiple versions of oneself, something I’ve written about here several times over the years—such as when I’d riffed on Rachel on her name, where you can probably find links to those several other times. I do wonder to what degree personal websites tend toward inevitably reaching certain subjects such as this, persons after all being stories which tell our selves over time.
In the middle of the night on the morning of July 4th, a storm parked over the Texas Hill Country and caused the Guadalupe river to rise more than 25 feet in two hours. 135 dead, including dozens of children from summer camps along the river. As a parent, this is the greatest tragedy you could imagine. My heart goes out to the families and friends who lost a little one that week.
As a Texan, this is yet another tragedy in a growing list of rare but forecastable tragedies where federal, state, and local officials failed Texans. I’m tired.
With that event casting a dark shadow on the summer acknowledged, here’s a recap of the last couple months.
A trip to the Grand Canyon
In late June my family stole away for a quick trip to Arizona. My in-laws bought a vacation place in Flagstaff to escape the Phoenix heat. We wanted to check out the new place and figured we could do something American and tag on a quick trip to the Grand Canyon.
On the morning of the second day we arrived at Grand Canyon National Park early. We found a good parking spot steps from the canyon’s edge and told our kids to get out and see the view. I’ve been to the canyon a couple times but nothing can truly prepare you for the enormity and pastel grandeur you’re about to see. I enjoyed re-living the first glimpses through my kids’ collective gasps of awe… and after about 10 minutes they were ready to go home and get on their iPads.
We milled around the park for nearly two hours making frequent stops. We stopped at the Devil’s Watchtower on the way out of the park which I’d recommend. All-in-all, we saw something truly remarkable together and my wife and I felt like we checked off a big “This is good for you and you’ll thank us later” parenting checkbox.
The next day the kids rode back with the grandparents to Phoenix while my wife and I took a short detour to go see Sedona. All these years visiting Arizona and I’d never been. We don’t buy into all the energy crystal woo-woo the town advertises, but it’s a beautiful and inspiring piece of America with incredible vistas and sculpture-like red stone mountains. I’d like to spend more time there.
We had a couple days in Phoenix to hang with cousins and celebrated my great-nephew’s second birthday. He’s a cool dude. Mid-week we headed back to Austin to send the kids to summer camp. That week could have been a great one for my wife and I to enjoy an empty house, but I ended up (over-)working all week.
Trip to San Diego
The day after the kids got back from summer camp we packed our bags again and headed to San Diego with my wife’s entire family. The next four days were beach days; digging holes, playing guitar, hitting the smashball, dozing off to books, and chasing a toddler around. I stayed in my solar fortress most of the time to avoid my enemy: The Sun.
But it wouldn’t be a Rupert Family Vacation without some calamities! On the second day my son got the worst sunburn of his life; no blisters, just red. He’d survive… but he didn’t know that. I sympathize because I had tons of sunburns as a kid. When it itches, it sucks.
And then there’s my daughter…
At the end of the week we tagged on a couple more days and visited Austin friends who spend the summer in Encinitas. Our daughters who have been besties since daycare slotted right back into their brand of silly lip sync routines and giggling. To soak up more beach time, we hiked down the cliff to Beacons beach and set up some chairs in the rocks while the girls boogie boarded their hearts out having the time of their life until…
My daughter comes to us holding her arm crying. When she reached for the loose boogie board leash she slammed her hand down and said she felt something fold over her arm and sting her. We walked over to the lifeguard stand and got the bad news, “That looks like a sting ray.”
The untold irony here is all week long my daughter was telling anyone who would listen that her two greatest fears about the ocean were: getting caught in a rip current and getting stung by a stingray. We tried to diffuse those fears but she kept talking about it. And here we were, the prophecy came true.
“I can call a lifeguard truck to meet you at the top of the hill but you have to take care of it now.” Uh-oh. That’s when I knew we were in a serious situation. We said no to the lifeguard truck but needed to submerge her arm in 115ºF water (hot tap water) for 30-90 minutes to neutralize the proteins in the venom. We hiked back up the cliff and walked the three blocks to the house. Tears the whole way.
After a couple hours everything was sore but stable. She’s a tough kid and that was a difficult situation. What a champ.
We survived: A skunk attack
Late one night my daughter (who has a sensitive smeller) said “Something smells like skunk!” I caught a faint whiff of it and thought “It’s probably some neighbors smoking weed” and opened the back door to assess the situation and in rushed my two mutts, one of them covered in skunk juice! Yikes!
We did our best to corral them to the garage where we washed them with an internet-recommended concoction. I can’t even describe the degree to how awful this was. The smell infiltrated our house and sulfur burned in the eyes and nose all night long. We spent the next day Fabreezing and disposing of any rogue object the smell might have transferred to: the backdoor mat, collars, one kids sandal, the dead skunk near the trash… Ah, gross.
A skunk attack is not a situation you can control (dogs being dogs) but it’s not one I want to relive any time soon.
Another school year begins
This week we strap ourselves into the bobsled and push the sled downhill on an out-of-control course where the breaks do nothing and it sends us crashing into Christmas. Feeling optimistic about this year, but there will be more homework for both our kids which is historically not a strength we operate in as a family. Lord help us.
Stats
Here you go, number perverts. All the dopamine deep-dives and drive-thrus I collected over the summer.
🧠 Learning
Sovietology - Based on a space race analogy I heard at work I made a deep-dive on the Soviet space program which led me to Sovietology and trying to understand how the Soviet central planning system (“cybernetics”) failed its fellow comrades.
ADHD - Been watching a lot of videos on ADHD and trying to understand it more
Minimalism and decluttering - ADHD videos lead me into minimalism and decluttering videos and it makes a difference if you view clutter as stimulus. If I could just get the rest of the family on board…
Drawing - I’d like to be good at drawing, so I spent a lot of learning about shapes, perspectives, sketching, and more
Studio Setups - Because ShopTalk has a YouTube now, I’ve become a little bit obsessed with optimal YouTube setups but I haven’t done anything… yet
Budgeting - After all our summer trips and feeling spent (physically and fiscally), I sat down one weekend and did some budgeting and ingested a lot on the subject.
❤️🩹 Health and wellness
A lot of updates here but still untangling the Gordion knot of stress, anxiety, weight, and ADHD. I’m talking to doctors and making some changes and I believe they are helping even if it’s not fully realized yet.
📝 Blogging
Over a dozen posts over two months with some vacations in there, that’s about all you can ask for.
Behind pace for the Book-a-Week Club and that’s fine with me.
System Collapse ★★★ - The last book in the Murderbot Diaries. This one was a slog, to be honest. The action at the end was good but the crescendo right before that, the big group project… was disappointing.
The Wrong Stuff ★★★★★ - A great book about the relative failure of the Soviet Cosmonaut program compared to NASA even though the USSR had many “firsts” they did so without regard to the safety and stability of their program and rockets.
Space Battleship Yamato ★★★½ - Got this from Kinokuniya to satiate my retro space manga obsession. It delivered on the space opera promise but had a lot of the early-days manga pitfalls. That wasn’t a deal-breaker for me but could be for some I’m sure.
Red Plenty ★★★ - A historical fictional narrative about site managers and scientists under Khrushchev’s rule. It paints a nice picture about the economics (“cybernetics”) and central planning of that time, but sometimes the narrative was too thick (like Dostoyevsky thick). Reaffirming I’m a non-fiction guy.
ADHD and Us ★★★★ - A good book for people in a relationship where one or more partners are neurodiverse. Recommended by my psychiatrist.
A Different Kind of Power ★★★★½ - Jacinda Arden’s autobiography is a bit hard to read because of how calm, cool, collected, and capable she seems compared to her American contemporary Donald Trump who was nothing but chaos and incompetence.
Moral Ambition ★★★★ - I enjoyed Bregman’s other books more, but this book certainly is challenging. It asks you to consider how you can make the biggest, moral, positive change and adjust your life towards that goal. That certainly tugs at my heartstrings but is a tough call to action in uncertain times.
28 Years Later - Good movie. Lots of zombie dong, or… it’s more accurate to say one notably huge alpha hog.
Superman - I enjoyed a DC movie; a Superman movie! Unbelievable. Has James Gunn saved the DC cinematic universe? Hopefully.
K-Pop Demon Slayers (Netflix) - An wonderful animated film and you can see the foundation of fun from the creative and technical teams come out. Great job Sony Animation.
Fantastic Four: First Steps - The art direction in this movie is incredible… fantastic even. A real cinematic feat. Worth seeing in theaters.
TV
Welcome to Wrexham S4 (Hulu) - Up the town. Unreal ending.
Murderbot (Apple TV) - Loved the books… and uh… you can watch the show, if you want to, it’s fine I guess.
Mythic Quest S5 (Apple TV) - Not for everyone but feels algorithmically generated for me.
Streaming
Game Changer S7 (Dropout) - This season of Game Changer has managed to outdo itself and that’s an incredible a feat.
Anime
Mobile Suite Gundam Gquuuuuux (Prime)
Podcasts
I purged my podcasts and abandoned some of my favorites (like The Adventure Zone), but I think I’m better for it. Now I can focus on the ones I enjoy.
If Books Could Kill…
Maintenance Phase
Living Planet
ATXplained
🎙 Recording
ShopTalk
🤖 Gunpla
This hobby isn’t dead yet! I’ve got five or so in the backlog but three of them are practice kits for a larger project I have in mind. In service to that project, I tried my hand at anime cel-shading an Entry Grade RX-78-2. I tried half-a-dozen application techniques and didn’t find a way that I liked. I need to do more research and keep trying.
🌱 Digital Gardening
Made my homepage tie-dyed for funsies. It’s based off the accent color and changes a bit every day.
Built some automation for my vibechecks, will hopefully post more later.
Added more pentatonic scales to Pentablaster… it’s in a messy state right now but I wanted to play with Ethiopian scales. I have plans to fix it up.
Regenerated cover images for my stories page using Midjourney. I think I did better this time around.
👾 Video games
Mostly puzzles, but I did go reopen the door to a city builder.
Cities Skylines - I hooked up SteamLink to play my PC games from the shed inside the house on my Mac. Trying to play enough Cities Skylines 1 to justify buying Cities Skylines 2.
Balatro - The joker addiction continues. Feel like if I beat one more stake I’ll be happy and can quit.
Clues by Sam - A daily caper! If you’re not playing this you should be.
The summer is waning, you can feel it in the mornings, the dog days are over, and it’s getting noticeably darker earlier in the evenings than just a month ago. Leaves are starting to fall in the streets outside.
It was amidst this stretched out summer heat and sunshine, that I had a bit of a topsy turvy week this week. Sprints of intensity, calls deadlines, meetings etc, immediately followed by fallow afternoons of noting. Just noodling on my own creative projects, feeling guilty I wasn’t actually sitting down and grinding. But its been so hot so i’ll let myself off!
We booked our xmas holiday this week though so thats something to work/look forward to. Also exciting, but to a much lesser extent that booking a holiday, my Cardyhedron arrived!
Cardyhedron Dice features a card-shaped design, matching the size of a standard credit card and measuring just 5mm thick. It consists of six spinning wheels for d4, d6, d8, d10/00, d12, and d20, each embedded with micro ball bearings to ensure a smooth and long-lasting spin. At the center of each wheel, precision markers clearly indicate the result, making it easy to use in any setting.
I’m really excited to take it out with me and play some SoloRPG journaling games in a notebook in the coffee shop, or on the train etc. Such a cool little thing. A must for anyone that plays a lot of RPGs I think!
The main news this week is that I printed, cut, folded, and posted Issue #14 of my zine!
Issue #014 of SSRZ is about my firm belief that ‘you can just do things’.
The essay reflects on the end of the conclusion of 301 and who it’s taught me that the distance between ‘idea’ and ‘upload’ should be as short as possible.
I also talk about the difference between knowing and capital-K (K)nowing. and that you really don’t need to ask anyones permission to create something and share something online.
The ‘the dream’ and ‘the doing’ of creative work are for you. The ‘done’ is for everyone else.
This whole ‘sending people things in the post, instead of sending people more email’ thing, is really starting to work out I think. I’m very grateful to people who have subscribed since I concluded 301 recenty! It’s been such a clear gesture from people who, want to see and support what is coming next in my creative life.
If 17 year old me back in 2002 knew he was gonna have a per-zine that after was going to have this sort of print run, and a radio show (podcast) with the audience I have, I don’t think I would have believe it. Nevertheless here we are. Printing, cutting, folding, writing addresses on envelopes, sticking stamps on, and stamping my return address on the back is *a whole operation* now. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. Every single issue over the last 3.5 years has had a bigger print run than the previous one. And this issue has been no exception. A real boost in confidence that more closely tying the zine to the show a little closer is the way to go in the age of post social media and newsletter saturation.
There are very few bits of software that have achieved such lasting cultural immortality as Clippy.
To examine its status as an OG “little guy,” we must consider three separate things: his vision, execution, and location. All three still have downstream effects on AI Agent design today.
This post contains also this unhinged graph, which I’m quite please with!
Recorded Neomania pod with YIB Robotson, out soon.
Locked in the date/time to go back on wolf pod with Eddie, we are going to be talking about 301 permanently moved as a ‘completed’ creative project.
As I said above, I finished my post on CLIPPY. And more importantly defined the 2×2 in it.
Still slowly trying to ‘Degoogle’ my life. Ran into a bit of a road block using a local whisper model rather than Pixels voice note recorder app for transcriptions.
I added about 3k words to the Interactive fiction i’m working on.
Lots of meetings at work, before I take a break for a bit.
Reading towards questions gives purpose to my curiosity. Curiosity comes in two styles: receptive and directed. Receptive curiosity is openness to learning; directed curiosity is more active, and invites you deeper. Allen Pike observes that the internet primarily serves our receptive curiosity:
By occasionally picking things to go deep on, you balance out the otherwise broad information diet we all get by default by being on the internet, consuming media, and just kind of being a modern human.
My big questions coalesced out of my receptive curiosity reading; I identified my first big questions in 2023 by reflecting on what I’d been thinking and writing about and looking for overarching themes. I first listed off a bunch of smaller questions within that theme, then worked backwards to find a bigger question uniting them all. Defining these questions made me enunciate for myself exactly what it was I was wondering, a process I found helpful in itself.
Chinese automakers now control 70% of global EV production. Their average vehicle age is just 1.6 years, compared with 5.4 years for foreign brands. Product development cycles have compressed to as little as 18 months, while Western automakers still operate on traditional four-to-five-year timelines.
Tech companies may assume that the public is so habituated—or even addicted—to doing everything online that people will put up with any amount of risk or unpleasantness to continue to transact business and amuse themselves on the internet. But there is a limit to what at least some of us will take.
New research published in Psychological Reports indicates that people who frequently experience spontaneous mind wandering also tend to be more preoccupied with the online world and use their smartphones more for social purposes.
I’m still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr and Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing Pain by John E. Sarno. Both are really good. Though its a bit of a weird axis to turn on jumping backwards and forwards between the two!
I finished No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard C. Schwartz. Absolutely fantastic book. Can’t recommend it enough. I sort of feel that psycho-threaputic healthcare is going to be totally transformed by Jungianism 2.0 inside of my life time.
Forgive the pun but there appears to be ‘Zero’ information about the band Computer online. The band’s Bandcamp only says that they are from New York. Regardless of geographic provenance, Computer play mid-west emocore and do it very very well.
Remember Kids:
When a reader shares a weblogger’s general worldview, he can rely on her to point to articles and websites that will interest him.
Specific tools and familiar ingredients combined in different ratios, different molds, for different purposes. Like a baker working from the same tight set of pantry ingredients to make a hundred distinct recipes. You wouldn't turn to them and say "enough with the butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, and eggs already!"
Getting the same few things right in different ways is a career's worth of work.
Mastery comes from a lifetime of putting together the basics in different combinations.
I think of Beethoven’s 5th and its famous “short-short-short-long” motif. The entire symphony is essentially the same core idea repeated and developed relentlessly! The same four notes (da-da-da-DAH!) moving between instruments, changing keys, etc.
Beethoven took something basic — a four note motif — and extracted an enormous set of variations. Its genius is in illustrating how much can be explored and expressed within constraints (rather than piling on “more and more” novel stuff).
Back to Jason’s point: the simplest building blocks in any form — music, code, paint, cooking — implemented with restraint can be combined in an almost infinite set of pleasing ways.
As Devine noted (and I constantly link back to): we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what we can do with less.
If someone manages to create a content blocker for MacOS/iOS that prevents all the content that mentions either AI or vibe coding to reach my screen, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. I am so goddamn tired of reading about AI, GPT models, and people vibe-coding. I get it, it’s fun tech, but it’s exhausting. It’s the crypto/NFT craze on steroids.
The other day, I mentioned that I’ve started a new photo blog.
I’ve now finished moving photos from both current and past challenges over there. I’ve also put together some other albums. At the moment, these are the ones available (with more to come):
I also plan to add tags using MB’s handy AI keyword feature. That way, photos can be categorized automatically based on the criteria I choose. A search feature will be added too.
At some point, I might include the photo blog in the main navigation on this main blog of mine. But for now, it’ll live a life of its own, with new entries being cross-posted to Micro.blog, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Pixelfed.
Now, back to working on my new notes blog…
Update: Despite being skeptical about it at first, I’ve now added a link to the main navigation. I think it might actually work quite well.
I've been watching 
