Turns out Cor64 also has covers of Ken's Theme (from Street Fighter 2) and the Rocky IV Training Montage song, so I guess I found a new favorite band today.

Can you imagine a better gig than touring the country playing live covers of Nintendo 64 soundtracks?

This is so cute, clever, and impressive. An easy subscribe for me.

Mary Bruno was the person who introduced me before I delivered my TEDx talk a few years ago. She's an incredible letterpress artist who runs a shop up in St. Cloud.

Anyway, she sent out a newsletter today linking to these excellent perimenopause greeting cards, and it reminded me that she has an entire shop of dope-lookin' art. I am in the process of designing my new office and it may need to feature one of these prints.

Betteridge’s law of headlines unfortunately applies here, but this was such a fun watch.

I also snort laughed at “ROM MAXXING.”

Angela Collier made an apology video for making people feel dumb for not knowing that physicists use LaTeX instead of Word, and it’s so delightful.

I learned that LaTeX is pronounced “Lah-Tech”. I assumed for decades that it was pronounced like the fabric?

I also enjoyed her anti-Microsoft rants peppered throughout the video. As someone who inherited a legacy .NET project, I could not agree more with her sentiments here.

I had the honor of interviewing Tom Greenwood on the Constant Variables podcast a few years ago, and he remains one of my favorite voices in the world of sustainability.

He's got a new book called Overton's Garden coming out in a couple weeks and I couldn't smash the pre-order button fast enough. I highly encourage you to do the same. You can preview the first chapter on his website.

If the rest of the book is as good as that preview, it's gonna be an inspiring read.

In the ’90s, Berkeley Systems’ After Dark screen savers were ubiquitous: Flying Toasters, Fish, and Starry Skylines animated across computer screens in school labs, homes, and offices everywhere. They served a practical purpose in preventing burn-in on CRT monitors, but also entertained, with animations that could be funny, surreal, beautiful -- sometimes gross.

They were works of art.

Running After Dark modules in the present day has involved fussy configuration of Mac OS emulators or vintage hardware. Even then, no single emulator or vintage computer can faithfully run every module: some animate too fast, some too slow.

Afterglow is an emulator built specifically for running After Dark modules -- the original 68k module code, not a remake or port -- with no dependencies on ROMs or classic Mac OS. Created in the spirit of software preservation, it makes After Dark easy to enjoy today and for years to come.

The app uses the Internet Archive to browse After Dark installations, and to my delight, there is a Simpsons one available to use.

Can't wait to watch Homer eat my desktop for the next month!

Thijs de Buck, an MRI physicist based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, recently posted on Reddit that he built a speed and distance tracker for his hamster’s wheel, with the data automatically uploaded to Mollie’s own Strava account. Mollie, his 10-month-old hamster, is now committed to logging nightly runs with distance, pace, and time.

One recent activity showed 6.06 miles in 4 hours and 37 minutes. The next night, Mollie logged 5.55 miles in 3 hours and 56 minutes.

Makes you wonder what other animals we could make Strava accounts for, no?

These word guessing programs need the hysteria of people running around like Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling because it feeds into smoke and mirror valuations that the Worst People on the Planet™ are selling to investors and the media. These guys need the hysteria because their money will run out if they try to sell a word guessing program instead of the almighty, all-knowing digital savior for capitalism and war.

It took me a while to understand that the sky is not falling. The sector as it exists now is not sustainable. The money will run out if we stop feeding into the hype.

LLMs are super useful. But they’re not magical, and they’re not all-powerful.

It’s like in the early 2010s when people used Underpants Gnome Math to describe how their app idea would make them rich.

The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes.

I spent the weekend attending my town's annual summer festival. It was a ton of fun despite being packed to the gills with people, a natural consequence of our town's decade-long explosion of growth.

That growth has manifested in the shape of mcmansions packed together like sardines, distribution warehouses for mega corporations, and data centers for notorious champions of privacy and democracy.

Our town has courted a couple of new gyms and restaurants, but I'd love to start seeing us recruit businesses that provide opportunities for us to commune. You know, things like new dining options, shopping centers, theaters, arcades, churches, pickleball venues! Hell, why not a Puttshack?

Maybe I need to find a way to buy that open parcel of land that's a couple blocks from my house and build a coffee shop on it.

We are told that machines will become like us, but in many ways they demand we become more like them. To let that happen is to lose something immeasurably valuable. That immeasurability is what makes this struggle difficult, but what cannot be measured can be described or at least evoked and valued. It cannot be boiled down to simple metrics such as efficiency and profitability.

Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.