I had a plan to publish these photos today for my weekly post, but I had found myself wondering what is the point of it all. What is the point of taking a camera to the streets to snap these photos, and what is the point of publishing them? And recently, I cannot help but wonder what is the point of sharing my thoughts online in a world where the internet is no longer a safe space.

When I was younger I desired to publish my thoughts online because I couldn’t do it offline. It was an outlet. These days I have started wondering if it is better to keep my thoughts to myself, and I find myself less and less interested in online connections. Actually, I just find myself less interested in human connections overall. I think the pandemic has changed me. If I was cynical before, I am worse now.

I don’t think I’m as cynical as Winnie here, but I do find myself wondering “why” a lot lately.

This past year, I’ve found myself drawn to the gym. Beating the sunrise over the horizon and watching the colors of the sky shift from darkness to a deep purple to suddenly orange.

Lifting heavy weights, squeezing my muscles as I reach the apex of the movement, feeling the tissue subtly break apart, doing hard things.

Sweat. So much sweat. How does it get all over the treadmill?

I can’t explain what really motivated me to finally get back into shape, and I still often find myself wondering “what is it all for?”

I guess if I’m being honest with myself, I work out because it feels good. Every aspect of it, from walking into the gym and saying hi to Alan at the front desk, to pushing a 40 pound sled 275 yards in four minutes, to drinking my vegan PB&B smoothie after taking a shower. It never fails to make me happy.

It’s okay to do things because they make you happy. It’s a lesson I learned from watching my kids, embarrassed that I forgot that (to paraphrase John Gruber) having fun is one of the best parts of being alive.

The gym isn’t the only area in which I question the point of it all. This blog has been prime on my mind lately for “what am I even doing here?”

I have never had a strong vision for this site. Sometimes it’s a portfolio. Sometimes it’s my todo list, a place to dump interesting links, my workout tracker, my beer tracker.

Like Winnie, I’ve never particularly felt safe having a blog like this, with my real name tied to it. There’s nothing to hide behind. I don’t track my visitors but I can only imagine this site is now soaked up and memorialized deep within several LLM training sets, only further making the things I say online matter.

But lately, I’ve wanted to have an alter ego. A persona who allows me to truly express myself without any professional baggage attached to it. A clean slate without reputation.

I turn 38 in five days. And I still don’t know what I wanna be when I grow up.

I didn't quite make it to the top, but I got way closer than last year!

ls is a good program. ls is a tool. It does what I need it to do and stays quiet otherwise. I use it; it doesn’t use me. That’s a good, healthy relationship.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have services. Programs that constantly update. Programs that have news, that “keep you informed”. Programs that need something from you all the time. Programs that update Terms of Service just to remind you of themselves.

Programs that have their own agenda and that are trying to make it yours, too. Programs that want you to think about them. Programs that think they are entitled to a part of your attention. “Pick me” programs.

And you know what? Fuck these programs. Give me back my computer.

I wanted to treat my son last night to some new Minecraft content.¹ So I grabbed his switch to charge up whatever the in-app currency is. Mine coins?

Before I could do that, though, I had to create a Microsoft account for him.

Why?!

I’ll spare you the details, but it took a total of 16 emails just to authenticate and establish accounts for him, my daughter, and myself.

I had to abandon the idea of buying credits through the official Microsoft store because it blocked my credit card after the first purchase.² I ended up buying digital Minecraft gift cards through Best Buy, but couldn’t redeem them in the switch app because they only worked on xbox.com?

What the hell guys, I just want my kid to be able to play SpongeBob on his switch! It was, literally not joking, a 2.5 hour cavalcade of the worst UX interactions I’ve encountered in years.

Remember when it used to take substantially less than two and a half hours to bike to Best Buy, buy a disk, and start jamming?

I agree with Niki here. I’m gonna start purging my 1Password accounts and deleting everything I can everywhere I can. I’m done signing up for stuff and being tracked and getting almost nothing in return while companies get to hold onto my info in perpetuity and use it basically however they see fit.

And thanks to vibe coding, I can build my own software that does exactly what I want without needing an account.³

For Halloween this year, I went as Carl, the titular hero from my current book series obsession: Dungeon Crawler Carl.

For this outfit, I enlisted the help of my wife, who apparently is a secret master seamstress. She sewed her first ever garment last week: a custom costume for my son who wanted to go as an allay from Minecraft. After seeing the impressive results from that, it didn't take much to convince her that a she could also whip up a pleather vest.

The vest is covered in upgrade patches that Carl earns as he progresses through the dungeon. I created several upgrade patches, including the earth, Skyfowl, peace, and bomb upgrade patches.

To make these, I spent a little time formulating a reusable prompt with ChatGPT, like this:

You are an expert visual concept generator creating embroidered patch–style relief designs for a DIY Dungeon Crawler Carl costume.

The output must look like a tactile, 2.5D embroidered patch with clear raised textures suitable for sculpting or casting.

Core visual style:
* Photorealistic embroidered patch on dark fabric (black or charcoal).
* Central circular composition with a stitched border.
* Detailed relief-like subject rendered in thread — clear contours, raised lighting, visible stitch texture.
* Lighting from upper left to emphasize shadows and depth.
* Materials: matte thread with subtle sheen, realistic fiber detail.
* Color palette: mostly monochrome or metallic (grays, bronze, steel) with one accent color (like orange, red, or teal).

Do NOT include: background scenery, text, labels, extra borders, or photographic backgrounds.

Goal: The result should look like a real embroidered patch photographed under studio lighting, with sculptural clarity and texture definition appropriate for converting into a physical relief sculpture.
Now apply this to the following patch concept:

“Earth Upgrade Patch: A tiny, round patch depicting the planet earth. Is about the size of a half-dollar and is screen-printed, not embroidered. Should look “amateur hour”.”

I cribbed the patch descriptions off of the excellent Dungeon Crawler Carl Wiki.

I then fed the prompt through ChatGPT and after a little back and forth, would result in an image like this:

I took that image into Pixelmator and removed the background around the patch, then headed over to Maker World's Relief Sculpture Maker. That generated a sculpture that I could 3D print.

I then opened that file in Bambu Lab's software and began the process of painstakingly coloring in the file. I say "painstakingly" because it was tedious, but honestly, it was a lot of fun.

The highlight of this vest for me was the Scavenger's Daughter patch, a massive back patch featuring a pile of skulls and a centipede crawling amongst them. I printed the patch out in white PLA, spray painted it black, then hand painted each skull with white acrylic paint. I then painted the centipede and the border with green glow-in-the-dark paint.

Also, I couldn't be Carl without Princess Donut, which my daughter helped me out by loaning me one of her cats and selecting a gem for her tiara.

Random lessons learned

I said the coloring process was painstaking, but I came to enjoy the tedium of learning new software. My first patch (the earth patch) was pretty terribly colored in and took around 90 minutes. It took me a few iterations of experimentation to learn you could simply click and drag across the interface to color in a bunch of sections at a time. By the time I got to my last patch, it took maybe 30 minutes of coloring?

Hand-painting the Scavenger's Daughter patch taught me that acrylic paint sucks to work with. You'd go to spread the paint with a brush, and the paint would glob together onto the brush and get dragged around like a screaming toddler in Target. I started to feel a little more confident using it after I got the glow-in-the-dark paint going, but still, I think I'd aim for a different type of paint next time.

The spikes for the knee pads were a massive flop for me. I printed out 24 cones in white PLA and intended on spraying them with silver spray paint. Here's the before and after:

When I sprayed down on these cones, they would get blasted across the box. None of them ended up having any paint on them, unless the paint was supposed to be transparent with glitter, in which case why not just dump glue on them and dump my own glitter on them?

For months, I would go to print something with my black PLA only to have it result in failure like this:

It turns out that this was not PLA, but PETG. So many wasted prints...

It also turns out that picking this costume, which features short sleeves, no pants, and nothing on the feet, is not a very conducive costume for trick-or-treating in Minnesota.

Finally, I do wish I would've started earlier. I only got 5 of the 8 patches that Carl wears on his vest, and it would've been fun to get the last three done on time.

But hey, I had a blast making this thing, I learned a ton about painting and 3d printing and sewing, and I can't wait to try again with a different idea next year!

This was a delight to play. I don’t think you can “win”, per se, but I sure did have a lot of fun maxing out all my sprites and gardens.

I was never one of those “I got into programming so I could make games” sorts of developers, but I have made a fair share of games over the years. These sorts of text-based games were always my favorite to make.

I don’t need another project, but I might start thinking through what sort of world I’d build if I made a game like this one.

I did go to urgent care. And while I was sitting there for an hour (accidentally bleeding on their carpet) I was reflecting on my rush to comfort the people around me for having to react to my injury, and remembered my one and only interaction with the school counselor in 6th grade. Back then elementary schools didn’t have counselors, psychologists, all that. 6th grade was the first time this concept was introduced, and I imagine his mandate was to meet with each kid at least once that year.

So I got called in, and I’m already semi-wondering if I’m in trouble for something, because I was always worried I was in trouble for something. He has me sit down and asks how I’m doing. I immediately have to hold back a flood tears. No one has ever asked me this. I don’t even know what’s happening in the moment, I just know that whatever emotions and feelings he accidentally scraped loose need to be locked down. My instinct was: I don’t want this guy I am meeting for the first time to have to worry about me or take care of me. So I just say “I’m fine, I’m fine, nothing to report, everything’s fine,” desperately trying not to leak tears all over myself, until he sends me back to class. And that was the last time I thought about that until now.

What’s that about one might wonder. Not me though.

When I got laid off last year¹, I vividly remember this sense of serenity, of total calmness, as I walked into work that morning.

I knew it was coming. And I knew it was gonna hurt my boss just as much as it hurt me.

During the entire brief meeting, I found myself genuinely asking him how he was feeling, how I could help him, despite the fact that I was the one who needed to figure out how I would feed my family.

I wonder if there’s a psychological term to describe that tendency. Like, a combination of altruism and shock.

The fact is, someone is almost always watching, so it’s worth treating everything you do with purpose and pride. And, even if no one has their eyes on you, it is still a chance to “practice your craft”. To improve. To build strong habits.

Since time is limited, we only get so many opportunities.

We might as well take advantage of each one we get.

“As I remember London” should be a wake-up call for everyone in the Ruby and Rails communities. This is not a man who wants to keep going. This is a man who romanticizes a past that was predominantly good for white men. This is a man who has spent years railing against diversity, equity and inclusion and who spreads anti-trans rhetoric. This is a man who is deeply afraid of immigration changing countries’ cultures and “national identities”, despite this kind of change being a constant for the whole of human history. This is a man who is a white nationalist. And he is in sole control of Rails, this framework we all love.

Just can’t catch a break from fascism.

I’ve been wanting to rewrite my blog¹ and while I had been considering running rails new and using it as a chance to learn Rails 8, maybe I should save the Rails for my day job and try something different for these parts.

Any suggestions? What are the kids using these days, HTMX?

The solution isn’t to ask nicely for these companies to do better. We tried that. The solution isn’t to hope users will abandon these platforms en masse. That won’t happen as long as the network effects keep people trapped.

The solution is regulation. Real regulation. Not the performative theater we’ve seen in congressional hearings, but actual laws with actual consequences.

[…]

Turn off the internet. Or fix it. Those are the only choices we have left. The time for hoping these companies will self-regulate is over. The time for treating algorithmic manipulation as an inevitable part of modern life is over. We know what these systems do. We know who they hurt. The only question left is whether we’re going to do something about it.

We know these platforms are bad for us, so why are they still so widely used? They tell a compelling story: that all of your frantic tapping and swiping makes you a key part of a political revolution, or a fearless investigator, or a righteous protestor – that when you’re online, you’re someone important, doing important things during an important time.

But this, for the most part, is an illusion. In reality, you’re toiling anonymously in an attention factory, while billionaire overseers mock your efforts and celebrate their growing net worths.

After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world.