Solo parenting for the next five days. God help me, even though I used to arrogantly scoff at any de ...
Solo parenting for the next five days. God help me, even though I used to arrogantly scoff at any dedicated parent who threw up their hands in despair.
My recently installed coworker has been using AI in her messages to me, both email and Teams. Yester ...
My recently installed coworker has been using AI in her messages to me, both email and Teams. Yesterday it was revealed that she let AI rename several of our page URLs to be more SEO-friendly, thus breaking a bunch of internal links.
Been trying to find a special gift for my upcoming anniversary and I did find what appears to be an ...
Been trying to find a special gift for my upcoming anniversary and I did find what appears to be an active arts studio where they make sculptures, but nobody was on the premises. Artists, man.
Hey Microposts. I left you alone for a little bit there, didn’t I?
Uh, updates
* Our dishwashe ...
Hey Microposts. I left you alone for a little bit there, didn’t I?
Uh, updates
* Our dishwasher is broken
* My oldest kid has changed daycares and it makes me anxious, but he seems mostly okay
* My youngest kid turned one recently and he’s getting good at walking. I think his favorite food is pizza crust.
* Talked to my therapist and realized that I have a lot of emotions tied to my supervisor which sabotages my “five year plan”
* Yesterday, I witnessed a Wegman’s manager hassle a guy for sleeping at the table. He asked me for food, so I bought him a sub, tea, and chips.
* I’ve been playing quite a bit of the new StarFox
I was there for the original Raimi films. I was into them. Took my girlfriend at the time for a late night premiere showing of Spider-Man 3, which was awkward for so many reasons.
And when this movie kicked off, I was like, “Oh, we’re so back.” Perhaps some of the best cinematic Spider-Man we’ve ever had. Destin Daniel Cretton proves himself as the right choice for the action and acrobatics of the webslinger. Free of his magnet school trappings, Holland Spider-Man crushes it as a truly street-based hero.
And I was into what they were doing with the Mystery Antagonist. Their first scene with the initial body swaps was very well done. I knew who it was because the internet is a gossipy minefield, but I was into this interpretation.
Where it started to crack was the scene with MJ on the rooftop. I started to feel the screenplay’s mechanisms more as constraints than masterful engineering. We just had a whole action set piece about heroics only to end up here. We lean into the fundamental tension of Peter’s situation – by having MJ and Ned present in the movie, we must tease some sort of development after No Way Home’s conclusion.
But really, *any* fix here undermines the story. The fact that the antagonist lampshades this only further exposes how much the writers have to really tread carefully, befo–OOPS, FEIGE NEEDS 72+ MINUTES OF THIS MOVIE TO BE ABOUT ANOTHER CHARACTER.
And I was fully prepared for this movie to end after the vault scene. Give me a Brand New Day Part 2 where we center the other character more. It gives us room to deal with everything.
Instead, we got it all stuffed right here, as we tick towards Doomsday and have another Infinity War moment where the emotional stakes get processed through a meat grinder in order to give us what is hopefully a juicy burger on the other side. Hey, Endgame didn’t have E. Coli. Maybe Secret Wars won’t either. More reviews on Letterboxd
I’m wondering if there’s ever a point where you have your kids and you don’t feel like you need to keep one of your six senses on them at all times. Like, surely some parents just….let their kids exist, secure in the faith that their kids will persist in this reality.
Sometimes I feel like a fairy tale goblin is just out of sight and looking for an opportunity to steal one of my children. Real Rumpelstiltskin shit. Real David Bowie from Labyrinth vibes.
(My brain tried to protect me from the memory that his name is Jareth, but alas, here we are with another testament to my inability to do things like schedule a medical procedure, but a slightly damaged reference guide to pop culture).
This anxiety I have about my kids getting into trouble or getting hurt. I share this with others, right? But before having kids I thought of them as the overly anxious ones. I thought of them as helicopters. I thought when it was my turn, I could just be.
And when I test a sense of trust, they do things like draw on the couch or crawl up the stairs. The goblin is real. The goblin is everywhere. How do those mythical parents who just veg out and let their kids do whatever exist? I think they exist. Did I make them up entirely?
We all saw it coming, of course. I have not remade my job searching strategy with the goal of getting out of this alienating employment situation. I have not built an amazing recipe book which will save me thousands of dollars and feed my family nutritiously; deliciously. I have not called my parents, sent a Discord chat to my brother, gotten in touch with old friends.
I spent $300 at Costco and watched a Spider-Man movie.
I walked into the cave, which was decorated in a friendly fashion. A nice quilt draped on the rocks with block lettering that read “I’m here to help.”
For the past year, I’d been navigating this network of caves. I’d found the first spirit next to a pool of muddy water. I asked it for clay. It gave me slime. The slime was acceptable.
Then, I found a cave with a goblin in it. The goblin was erratic. Constantly distracted and it peered leerily at me and beyond me as if trying to see what else I had to offer. I asked it for some books and it gave me some scrappy notebooks.
Now I was in the third cave. And this spirit was large and gregarious. He was over-full. Frankly, his gluttony might have been mirroring mine.
Gregiffer runs the Pop Arena YouTube channel and the Nick Knacks documentary series, which breaks down classic Nickelodeon shows with true behind-the-scenes and history-of content. It’s pretty much tailor made for people who watched this content as 7-10 year olds in the 90’s. Impressive stuff.
I wanted to see the movie and my father-in-law had the book to lend. Andy Weir has a gimmick about making his scientist protagonists relatable to the point of not being a person with recognizable interiority. His protagonists in this book and in The Martian think in their private mind the way I believe other people pretend to be in social functions. But I don’t think any human actually thinks this way.
That said, I very much enjoyed this and would take this over the Dungeon Crawler Carl craze happening at the moment. Weir has an excellent sense of tension and stakes in the progression of the plot. He could write some of the greatest sci fi of our era if those moments didn’t come with a “well, that happened” punctuator.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency(1987)
by Douglas Adams
April 2026
The most relevant anti-AI book of our time.
I’m a big Hitchhiker’s Guide fan, having enjoyed my first exposure to proper satire during my lonely middle school days and then discovering over time that almost everyone I liked to interact with had a similar experience.
I’d known about Dirk Gently in theory, but it wasn’t until our book club selected it that I had a chance to read any non-Hitchhiker’s books from Douglas Adams.
The core wit is there and refreshing in how deftly it’s weaved in with a denser plot. Our club had the consensus that the density of jokes is far fewer than the most well-known parts of the Hitchhiker’s series and while I’m a little neutral on how the central mysteries involving the Electric Monk and Gordon Way are handled, one of Adams’ messages resonated with me.
He warned us to not get super reliant on technology and use tremendous amounts of resources to do basic tasks of living.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is an anti-artificial intelligence book written 40 years before the explosion of generative AI and LLMs.
How timely. I’ll read it again.
Escape!(2026)
by Stephen Fishbach
March 2026
Fishbach’s best move since pairing up with Jeremy in Cambodia
Coinciding with a return to a Survivor era of my life, I received this book a couple months into 2025 after pre-ordering it last year. I rarely pre-order books, but Stephen Fishbach promised me more “Blood on the Clocktower” YouTube videos if I did that, but as the show that popularized him taught me: trust nobody.
I can praise Escape! as being a page-turner. Fishbach commits to escalation of plot and introduces a varied enough cast of characters with potential arcs you’ll want to see close out, much like Survivor does. He has flashes of damn good writing, particularly in the final act when his characters are really pushed into moments of existential reflection.
But it’s important to see this as something of an absurdist plot and I wonder how it will play to people who haven’t been following pop culture discussion of “the edit” or even to fans of reality TV that don’t follow survival shows. At times it feels like Fishbach gave in to a thought exercise and the conclusion feels like something unearthed rather than purposefully crafted. Still, a good airplane read, as I made significant progress on my five-hour flight from California to North Carolina.
Wuthering Heights(1847)
by Emily Bronte
February 2026
I’d like to see the full adaptation, please.
I feel like I was told this would not be the stodgy 19th century romance that I expected, but I was still surprised at how much Bronte was committed to writing bad people who do bad things.
I do think my experience was helped by still finding ounces of sympathy for Heathcliff, Catherine the elder, and all of them. Even Joseph. Bronte excelled at setting up the internal motivations and the traumatic experiences that built these people up to act as they do.
I was a little harangued by the narration model and I didn’t care to see the world through Lockwood’s eyes at the beginning. Thankfully, the narrator MVP is Nelly Dean, who I think should have started and ended the whole thing.
Therapist was six minutes late. Could’ve been worse, he’s ghosted before.
I did a lot of talking. So I guess this is the kind of therapy it is, where I’m revealing things to myself and he’s kind of like a sounding board.
We were talking about the tension between the career I have for money, which itself exists to support the liberal capitalist lifestyle I have set up for myself and my family and the activism work I do for very little money.
And he did say one thing that helped me. “They say you should talk about your goals.”
I reflected on the fact that I don’t love talking about my day, because even when it comes to simply putting a post out there on the Internet on behalf of a good organization, that’s not exciting. I bore myself at the thought of talking about that extensively.
But something I could talk about would be the observation I’ve had – of the past activist organizations I’ve worked with, they’ve been heavily reliant on the corporate web as part of their social media strategies: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram – all these platforms actively working against the missions of the activist organizations.
We’ve been monitoring this attempt to break away from the centralized, corporate internet and introduce the world to the decentralized, human internet. Wouldn’t it make sense to work toward platforms that specifically are for activists and people who want to use the Internet without providing DAU metrics for evil tech giants?
The lump itself is that layer of fat squishing through the hernia hole. I’ve literally got everything plugged up. When I eat poorly enough to trigger something like acid reflux, it gets inflamed and pretty painful.
I could get it operated on now, but the doctor’s like “with your BMI, there’s a higher chance of recursion.” So I guess the hole could open back up again. And could you guess what the doctor at the “Duke Metabolic and Weight Loss Center” thinks I should do?
The Doctor recommends a GLP-1 like Ozempic or Zepbound.
And he’s happy to show me his work. He types in my current weight and target weight and he shows me this custom text file that tells me the percentage success rate with GLP-1’s.
I’m seeing what’s happening and I’m thinking of asking him. I’m thinking of asking him The Question. But I don’t have to, because he tells me. “Yeah, this is just something I whipped up with ChatGPT.”
Now my basic stance on GLP-1’s is…okay, that’s interesting. It really seems like they’ve been prescribed with a lot of more frequency in the past five years. But, I’m 38. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could take the resources that would pay for a lifelong medication and direct them toward lifestyle?
Like, let’s at least try, right? Maybe I can talk to nutritionists. Dieticians. Workout coaches. But my insurance won’t pay for any of that. And the funny part is, given the weirdness with insurance companies and GLP-1’s, there’s no guarantee they’ll pay for this for the rest of my life.
And also, like, I probably don’t need to get to BMI 30. I have a sense the odds of my surgery would go up if I lost something like 15-20 pounds. But this guy framed it as if I needed to lose 40 and fast. Is that because ChatGPT tells him to or did he have a cool conversation with a pharma rep?
