daverupert.com

Tag, you're it

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 22:34:00 +0000

I’m a bit behind in my RSS feeds and I didn’t realize Susan tagged me to answer a series of questions about my blog. I’ve read dozens of these and to be honest was feeling a little left out, so thanks Susan for including me! (Susan’s one of my favorite bloggers and crafters, be sure to like and subscribe.)

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I published a zine in high school with my best friend Mike. Our zine Wimpkiller was a creative outlet for all the composition notebooks we filled up over a bottomless cups of coffee at IHOP. We’d print out stories on Mike’s computer, chop ‘em up, glue ‘em together, and then scam copies after midnight with the help of the friendly late-shift worker at Kinko’s. I enjoyed that thrill of self-publishing then as much as I do now. It felt like the garage band of writing. You may not be good or ever get famous, but you can brute force some art into the world.

In college blogs became a trend. I created a blog as I graduated from college to chronicle my entry into the corporate world and ended up chronicling my move and life in Japan. It served as a form of catharsis and outward processing as well as keeping my friends and family up to date on my adventures. That blog died after I came back from Japan and had to get a job and start a career.

Meeting Jeffery Zeldman at SXSW was the inspiration for this edition of the blog, if you can believe it. A brief encounter but my key takeaway on how I could become more like my web development heroes was to write more. They write, and writing begets books, and books begets conference talks. It seemed like a template I could follow and I started self-publishing again. Over time, I wrote enough to where I got to write on Jeffrey’s blog and speak at his conference a handful of times. I guess the plan worked out.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I started on WordPress but I moved my blog to Jekyll in 2012. I chose Jekyll because I was into Ruby at the time and fighting with WordPress for good performance was exhausting me. I wanted a simpler authoring and development experience. The simplicity of building with markdown files on localhost still resonates with me.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I’ve used Blogger, MovableType, WordPress, and Jekyll. There’s also an ill-fated Eleventy branch on my site that never made it to production. I’m sure Jekyll will implode and I’ll need to find something else, but switching platforms would be a distraction for me at this point without some obvious benefit or process improvement.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I write my posts in a giant Notion kanban. It’s overkill but it’s my overkill. The organization capabilities and “markdown-like” aspects of Notion made it a good fit over a folder-o’-files. Before publishing, my posts go through a series of pre-publishing rituals. With those processes combined I maintain a level of quality and throughput that I’m happy with.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I find time to write after the kids go to bed. If there’s time during the workday, I may spend a lunch break jotting some thoughts too. My blogging is very work-dependent to the extent that sometimes when I’m productive at work, I’m most productive at blogging. But often, I’m too tired or focusing on other tasks to craft a well-reasoned blog post.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Most of my drafts simmer for weeks if not months or years. From time to time I’ll do a one day turnaround on a post and that’s rewarding, but it’s inconsistent. At the time of writing I have 22 active drafts where ”active” means I’ve updated them at least once in the last six months. If I increase the scope to one year, there’s 41 drafts in my kanban.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

I’m a generalist at heart and enjoy writing about technology generally. If you look at my archive it’s pretty rare that two consecutive posts will be thematically similar. I write about specific technologies like CSS but also about game development or the capital-W Web. And of course prototypes, which I’m convinced are the not-so-secret sauce for building great technologies.

One direction I’m slipping towards in my mind is futurism and speculative fiction (e.g. sci-fi). Writing about current technology limits you to existing capitalist and corporate structures. Imagining the future and the potential fallout allows you to think without the confines of “Good because make money” which so much of our discourse is today.

Who are you writing for?

Woof. Good question. 90% of the time I’m writing to get ideas out of my head. Transfiguring ideas into text works wonders for me. I also tend to write for an abstract audience, people who are curious about the web and technology yet crave more from it; a person who considers themselves a technologist, but also factors in morality and other cosmotechnics.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

Quick Thoughts on Chips (2023) is up there but I feel like Responsive Deliverables (2013) aka, the “tiny bootstraps” post, is a level of quality, thoughtfulness, and timelessness that I don’t achieve often. I’d like more “timeless” pieces like that, but I don’t exactly know how or if it’s worth trying to bottle that magic.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I’m pretty comfortable with my site, but I have a couple changes in mind:

Use named grid lines
Blowout my tag pages with custom art direction
Make my mobile layout perfect
Write more shitty sci-fi
Switch from Notion to Obsidian

Some of those will happen over the course of a year, some in the dark of night, some never.

Tag ‘em.

What a responsibility to add people to this chain letter! Susan told me if I don’t forward this to 10 people, my grandparents will die! That seems extreme but okay. I’ll tag the following people who I think haven’t written one yet:

Jeffrey Zeldman - it feels fitting to pass the mic back to Jeffrey.
Eric Meyer - another blogger that inspired me in my early days
Melanie Richards - a multi-talented person and another one of my favorite crafters.
Jenn Schiffer - talented artist and consistently way funnier than everyone else in the room.
Eric Bailey - one of my favorite web thinkers and also has the most interesting newsletter out there.
Blake Watson - deliverer of home-cooked applications
Josh Collinsworth - thoughtful blogger and word puzzle game developer

Shoot. Only seven. Sorry, memaw and pepaw. Hopefully some unnamed individuals will answer the call.

Unnecessary

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 15:07:00 +0000

It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only. Read more about RSS Club.

Yesterday, my daughter was in Dallas for the NCA Cheer Competition. My wife sent me a text letting me know her team won! Yay! My daughter is a national champion at age 9. Ten minutes later, the next text I get is that there’s an active shooter and they’re in lockdown. Panic consumed the 30,000 people in the convention center. Kids trampled in the stampede to get out. Families and teams separated. Youth running across a 10 lane freeway to escape, traffic screeching to a halt. Horrifying.

The actual cause of the incident was some cheer parents getting into a fight which knocked down some metal poles. The whole situation is sad. Unnecessary trauma because some dumb parents lost their ability to be civil. Unnecessary trauma created through our lax gun laws and inability to stop this uniquely American horror. An unnecessary situation. Thankfully no one was critically injured and the shooter wasn’t real… this time. We’re living inside a lit powder keg at all times and its exhausting.

I don't like sand

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 18:03:00 +0000

Happened upon a good example of the problem with AI generated alt text. It’s a gif of the infamous scene from Star Wars Episode II where Hayden Christensen playing Anakin Skywalker tells Natalie Portman’s character Queen Amadala, “I don’t like sand.” It’s the first phrase in the worst lines of dialogue in cinematic history. And here’s how the computer interpreted the gif…

The AI said “a man and a woman are sitting next to each other and the woman is saying I don’t like sand.” Not only does this miss the context that it’s from the world famous movie Star Wars, it gets the speaker entirely wrong. It OCR’d the text fine, but missed relaying the entire context.

Context. That’s what alt text is. I’d hypothesize that context is probably one of the biggest reasons why language evolved. A caveman could yell “AHHH!H” to alert others of dangers, but I imagine after a couple rounds of those others would begin asking, “Ok, Grog, I understand you think there’s an AHHH!H out there, but what kiiiiiiind of AHHH!H?”

My ears are starting to perk up when I hear the word context. I hear all the time that “You have to give the AI more context and it will give you a better answer.” AI has a lot of vectorized text and image processing nodes, but it’s short on context I guess. Will AI one day have every frame of the expensive-to-license Star Wars franchise indexed in its brain like I do? Or are we the gatherers and keepers of context? Does our capacity for empathy (which allows us to project and inhabit other contexts we don’t necessary have) set humans apart?

I hate to leave on such an open-ended question, but I think we can all agree… that woman doesn’t like sand.

The only way to know for sure... is to build a prototype

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 17:30:00 +0000

I’ve mentioned Mark Brown’s channel Game Makers Tool Kit many times before. Well, I’m back with another banger about “How to find amazing game ideas”. The whole video is great but I specifically want to highlight something Mark said during the last ten seconds of the video as the credits and video thumbnails started to roll…

And then the final question to answer is… is the game idea actually fun? Because the truth is… our brains are terrible video game simulators. Almost every idea seems fun in our heads. But once we actually make it we’ll realise that it’s boring, that it’s too complicated, and that it has disastrous unforeseen design problems. So the only way to know for sure… is to build a prototype.

The answer again –and I cannot stress this enough– is prototypes.

“Our brains are terrible video game simulators.” Woof. This is a powerful sentiment and I regularly encounter this. I feel this is true with websites as well. I can make the best fantasy website – so beautiful, so perfect in pixels, so incredibly evocative people will throw their wallets at me – but if I haven’t put prototypes into people’s hands, I’m introducing a huge amount of risk.

That’s all. Prototypes. I think the rest of the video applies to where you can find ideas for amazing websites:

Other websites - ~~Stealing~~ Borrowing good UX is a great start for an idea
Genres - Follow the rules or offering an interesting twist on an existing genre (like ecommerce)
Mechanics - Adding interesting iteractions or gimmicks can add distinction
Experience - Go hard on experience and ambiance!

Mark also raises some important questions at the end and I wanted to highlight two of those because I think they’re important.

“Can you make it?” - Be honest with yourself, do you in your personal capacity have the capability to deliver the idea? I often succumb to making ideas in my head that are so big and complex that it becomes impossible to build and maintain.
“Will it stand out?” - In the sea of websites or podcast people come across each day, will it be unique or will it join the cacophony?¹

And wouldn’t you know it, those are the types of questions that prototypes help to answer.

Personal websites are exempt from this question. I think “It won’t stand out” is one reason people avoid making one. The world (more than ever) needs your unique perspective. Don’t let uniqueness be a reason not to try and make something. Get to the first checkpoint, make your idea, get the first draft in people’s hands. Then over time find what makes your idea unique and breakaway from the default template. ↩

Vibe Check №37

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 19:40:00 +0000

As the weather in Texas flip-flops weekly between sunny Spring and snowy Winter, I’ve been dealing with a bit of personal health this last quarter. From my ADHD diagnosis, to trying meds for the first time, to back-to-back sicknesses, then constant migraines, and then I think I got the Norovirus on New Years. A debilitating time for me, but in January it started to turn around when I got some good news…

“It’s not a tumor, it’s a deformity”

In December I saw my primary care physician about a pain in my ankle that was causing me to hobble and at times preventing me from walking in November. It caused a lot of other issues as well; a fire-like pain in my thigh and a bump on my heel.

My doctor thought it might be Chondroma, which is a bit scary to look up, but is like a tumor made of cartilage. That tumor can either be on the surface of the bone or inside the bone. Yikes. I got an x-ray and followed up with an orthopedic surgeon who gave me some good news that it’s not a tumor, but Haglund’s Deformity also known as “pump bump” because a lot of women who wear heels often get it. The pain comes and goes based on how the tendon rubs against the bone spur.

Because I’m not in pain right now, the plan now is to take a non-surgical path and use anti-inflammatories to keep it at bay, saving surgery as a Plan B.

The side effects of ADHD meds

Last time I said I started on Qelbree, a non-stimulant ADHD medication. Non-stimulants take about five days to build up, so there’s no lightning bolt moment of clarity with non-stimulants that others describe when taking Adderall or Ritalin. It’s hard to know if it’s working, but in time I started to feel the effects.

The most notable one was that I was almost immune to environmental triggers like clutter and noise that overwhelm me. Whenever I encountered a mundane task like take out the trash or wash the dishes, I found it a lot easier to pick up and do without a 30-minute prep talk with my brain. That part was great… the side effects though… not so great…

One of Qelbree’s listed side effects is insomnia. Sure enough, I’d wake up every night at 2 AM and be awake for hours. Not quite night-brain anxiety, but just… fully awake. To combat this I read the first four books of the Murderbot Diaries back-to-back. If life hands you lemons, make emo robot lemonade.

The insomnia wasn’t great and I was having horrific headaches, so I switched to Atomoxetine, another non-stimulant SNRI that’s more common. My insurance also said they weren’t going to pay for Qelbree, so that worked out. The also don’t pay for atomoxetine, but it’s 10x cheaper so… I guess that’s a good deal? Lol.

I’d say “the mox” –that’s what we, the moxxers, call it– is working evident by the fact that I’ve been able to focus on some long mundane tasks at work. That’s been helpful. But it’s not without its side effects either. Weight loss is a welcomed side effect (-5 lbs) but another side effect is extreme dry mouth. My mouth is dry, y’all –how dry is it?– my mouth is so dry I’m putting lotion on my gums. My dentist said I need to buy that gel old people use to keep my mouth moisturized.

I guess I’ve been lucky in my life thus far because this is my first time navigating meds and side effects. What I’d like to avoid is taking more meds to counter meds, although my gum lotion already crosses that line.

The rest of the story

This has been a candid personal health issue of Vibe Check magazine. Behind the scenes it’s been less adventurous. A busy new year at work as my team sprints to deliver an “intra-source” design systems project. It –and the 1,000 token sidecar project– have consumed a lot of my brain and time.

My daughter’s mid-way through her competitive cheer season. I’m not the most extreme cheer dad, but I’m a proud one. Cheer has a lot of cross-over with child beauty pageants, but it’s a team sport where kids do flips. And it costs about 5-figures a year.

Hoping this bad health spat is over for now –he says as an ominous storm cloud appears above my head– and I can start employing my hands and brain to do more interesting tasks.

Stats

💪 Wellness

Navigating new medications

📖 Reading

My book consumption is becoming athematic and uninspired (except for emo robot). I’m feeling the urge to double down on sci-fi and manga.

Finished

Rogue Protocol - Emo robot
Exit Strategy - Emo robot
Being Wrong - Super recommend. We’re all wrong. A lot. It’s how our brains work.
Feel Good Productivity - A productivity book I’d maybe recommend.
Super Mario - The history of Nintendo and how it grew its video game business. I loved the inside look at important moments like shifting strategy to react to Sega, Sony, and Xbox.
The Power of Habit - A bit like Malcom Gladwell on steroids focusing on the singular issue of habit formation. One good takeaway around harnessing, hijacking, and leveraging the Cue → Response → Reward loop that habits depend on.
Disrupting the Game - Reggie Fils-Amié’s autobiography, more Nintendo.
The Customer Is Always Wrong - A humorous’ish critique of work, capitalism, customer service, and bullshit jobs.
The Startup of You - Self-help in “entrepreneur of your own life” form.

Started

Network Effect - Emo robot
Exhalation - Off to an interesting start with time travelling Iraqis.

📝 Blogging

An okay blogging era…

Twenty Twenty-Four - Year in review
Making “this” less annoying - A silly editor experiement
My website has been gaslighting you - I’ve been playing a big ol’ goof on you for some time.
American Hearts - A new American anthem.
Raycast Focus works really well - A great product
A story about pans - A metaphor that a lot of folks didn’t pick up on and they wanted to mansplain pans to me.
15 Minutes - A punchy anti-capitalist song.

📺 Media

The Earliest Show (YouTube) - Ben Schwartz’s improv morning show. Perfect in every way. Watched hours of bloopers and cut scenes too.
Very Important People S2 (Dropout) - This season is a little rough, not gonna lie.
Make Some Noise S3 (Dropout) - Always makes me smile.
This Aged Great (YouTube) - Ruining my childhood’s favorite movies one video at a time.
The Mentalist (Hulu) - My entire family has decided we all like this B-rate CSI clone.
Mantracks (YouTube) - Creationism, lies, and doubling down on lies.

Anime

DAN DA DAN (Netflix, Crunchyroll) - Classic nerdy boy meets cool girl high school romance wrapped up in a warm tortilla of magic demons vs weird aliens. The mother’s flashback mini-sode in Ep7 deserves whatever the anime Oscar is, I’ve never been more moved by a piece of television.

Podcasts

The End of the World with Josh Clark - Are we alone? Why explore the universe? How can it end?

🎙 Recording

ShopTalk

🧶 Crafts and Models

Too busy to sit down and hobby, but made one fun piece…

AK-47 rubber band gun - My brother got me a balsa wood AK-47 fully automatic rubber band gun. It’s a thoughtful gift and mixes three of my favorites: modeling, soviet history, and trolling my kids and their friends.

⌨️ Open source

Awesome Standalones is becoming more valuable thanks to David Darnes’ involvement and 11ty-ification.
Fluent Web Components V3 is close to RC1
Intra-source design system

👾 Video games

Balatro (Steam, Switch, iOS) - Absolutely hooked on this thanks to the ShopTalk D-d-discord.

On government efficiency

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 14:16:00 +0000

It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only. Read more about RSS Club.

I used to believe that the goal of the government should be efficiency. If the government was more efficient (waves hands broadly in the air), you could get rid of waste (again, waiving hands) and you’d need less taxes, and that would trickle down (more hands) as more money in people’s pockets, and you’d need less welfare (again, hands), less red tape (hands), and less bureaucracy (hands, hands, hands), et cetera.

I’ve changed my thinking on the subject. I now think the goal of the government should be to absorb inefficiencies.

As efficient as the fabled invisible hand of the market might be at lowering the costs of goods and services ¹ and creating jobs² … there are often non-economic inefficiencies that arise from rapidly scaling to produce cheaper goods in the infinite money machine. Rather than ignore those inefficiencies, I think the government should understand the ways the system breaks and invest in longer term ideas than making the stock market go up during the next quarter.

Here’s a short list of market inefficiencies where I think a government helps:

Social Security and Medicare. Unpopular opinion, but I sort of do see social security as a Ponzi scheme; younger people at the bottom fund older people at the top who “got in first”. But you know what’s a bigger problem? Elderly adults retiring with no retirement plan. In our “Buy the latest iPhone” society, people are statistically bad at planning for their own future.

The Environment. The free market doesn’t nudge companies towards making responsible environmental decisions. Even though electrification is 3× more efficient than carbon, the invisible hand is taking its sweet time moving over to it. Probably because the invisible hand gave too much money to the oil companies. We spend billions in aid for “once in a lifetime” acts of God that happen every year now. The “more efficient” act would be to kill carbon. We need a government to protect the non-monetizable resources that give us life like oceans, lakes, rivers, underground reservoirs, the air we breathe, and our forests.

Healthcare. I hate the American healthcare system. We pay too much for too little. We don’t pay for healthcare, we pay for insurance company lawyers to haggle about medical codes. Doctors hate it. Patients hate it. Insurance companies reek of greed and corruption. And each of us “doing our own research” isn’t a great because you end up with people turning themselves blue from colloidal silver. We probably need real doctors. And because most folks don’t need a doctor all the time, we probably need health insurance. The current system is a handful of state-by-state monopolies. But we know (according to Metcalfe’s law) that the value of a network is proportional to the number of connected users on the system. It would seem the best way to dodge insurance marketplace inefficiencies like rising costs and low quality care would be to have the biggest network possible (say, 330 million people?) to create the best safety net. The market is not getting us the best price.

Defense. Every American owning their own personal tank and missile system would be an inefficient stupid way to defend our country. It’s probably best to centralize the cost of Defense and hire trained armed service members for that purpose. I’m not advocating for more military –I’d personally prefer less– but security is a core need and it manifests at a nation-state level.

Transportation. I don’t think individuals should plan and build their own highways. I’d like a government to do that. I also think every American owning their own car that sits parked 95% of the time is a waste of money and space, even if it does make the GDP chart go up. You need a big extra room to store cars at home and a downtown filled with concrete ramps to store cars at work. Or an enormous parking lot to store cars at the store. Is this not a form of waste? There’s no way a train makes money and is a profitable business… but more trains equals less traffic. We know adding new ten million dollar a mile lanes to an already impossibly wide interstate creates more traffic, more road rage, and more traffic deaths. That is folly and an inefficiency governments can step in and solve.

Education. Education is a big expense. But you know what’s more expensive? Everyone being stupid. That’s a joke… partially. What is more expensive is everyone sourcing and paying for private schools; most parents would not do it. You’d end up with a future labor force with a lot less education. I think my biggest takeaway from school closures during COVID was how glad I am the public education system exists. Parents can work jobs, do commerce, and it allows kids to learn and play with other kids from a cross-section of incomes, ethnic groups, and special needs. The 1:20+ teacher-student ratio couldn’t be more efficient in regards to childcare. If anything we need more teachers and classrooms to keep that ratio as low as possible so education quality goes up. Oh, and school breakfasts and lunches are super efficient too. You can feed kids for like $1/kid, there’s no way I can hit those numbers at home. I can’t believe this is contentious. Let kids eat.

Scientific Research. Space is expensive to get to, only billionaires can afford it. Isn’t it nice that the government sometimes foots the bill for scientists to also go? Beyond space, efforts like curing cancer, computer research, or finding a new species of spider… these are not an ultra-efficient use of funds but those discoveries power innovation. The market doesn’t fund Science unless it makes money in an A/B test. We’d end up with more patent-pending boner pills instead of understanding of our universe. Real science is a bunch of inefficient question and answer seeking that changes the course of human history.

Human Rights. One way to drive down costs under Capitalism is to hire labor at the cheapest rate possible. Historically, our great nation has relied on slaves (yikes!) and children (yikes!) for cheap sources of labor. You’d have to work long hours for low pay and then a machine would cut off your arm and your employer would say “Well, you can’t work here anymore” and kick you out. Isn’t it great to have a government to correct this moral inefficiency? It didn’t happen overnight, of course. Countless churches and patriotic do-gooders were fine with justifying and upholding the old system. Even fought a war about it.

I could keep going, but there’s a billion and one jobs a government can do to improve the life and well-being of its citizens. Old habits die hard, I guess, because I’m still thinking about efficiency… but from the opposite angle. A government is perhaps best-situated to absorb inefficiencies at scale. Will there be inefficiency and waste and kingdom-building within a super-system like a government? For sure. Systems should always seek to improve. To begin fixing those problems you need data and transparency.

The more you understand Capitalism, the more you understand it’s a game. It’s a game with an enormous exploit. I’m talking Blanka in the corner levels of bullshit. The government should exist to fix those systems and curb those bad actors. But the system continues to reward them and heap tax break after tax break as a reward to their fellow co-conspirators in exchange for campaign contributions and lavish trips. Talk about inefficiency. Dumping piles of money into the hands of people who already have money. Sheesh.

Except the hand stops working whenever a Democrat is the president? ↩
Except when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to combat inflation, bank buyouts, and economic collapses caused by Republican presidents ↩

15 Minutes

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 14:40:00 +0000

This might be my favorite song of all time. It’s by a slightly obscure Chicago punk band called The Broadways, made up of a couple members from the more well-known ska band Slapstick. It’s got everything you want in a punk song. Palm mutes, open meedly-meedly parts, yelling, speed, a half-time breakdown, and impeccable synchronicity. I listen to this song when I’m sad, when I’m frustrated, when I’m in traffic, and when I need to inject high octane fuel into my veins. The soaring octave chords will always pick me back up again.

All on the streets, the signs read
Cheaper and better technology
This capitalist vision is my nightmare

Put up a sign in my face
What the fuck happened to this place?
I think we made a wrong turn
Look at the lovely concrete

I drove to my stupid job today
Got stopped at an intersection
Fifteen minutes of my life just rolled away

Looked at the guy next to me
He didn't look too happy
No one's happy, but everyone's too busy to see

Let's go shopping today
Drive our fancy cars to the fancy malls
And for lunch we'll have Big Macs

I wish I could turn the clock back
Back to when I was ten
When I wasn't scared of everything
And everything wasn't so fucking crowded

And I wonder if my kid will ever see the horizon
Untouched by billboards and shopping malls
And I wonder if this crazy world
Thinks I'm the one that's crazy

What if I'm the one who's crazy?
What if I'm the one who's crazy?
What if I'm the one who's crazy?
What if I'm the one who's crazy?
I'm not crazy, just frustrated

WIthout a doubt, this song from my teenage years subliminally shaped a lot of my views on what’s wrong with the world. Capitalist intrusions. Eyeball monetization. The always upgrade tech cycle. Why I hate crowds. And traffic. Life evaporating at a stop light seems like a criminal waste of humanity to me. This may subconsciously be part of why I work from home.

I’ll never live up to my punk rock ideals or my teenage self, but this song takes me back to them. Not to “when I was ten”, but to “when I was seventeen” for sure. Driving through big city Houston at night. Going to Food Not Bombs near the abandoned hospital. All it takes is the first verse and BOOM! I’m transported through time and I can see the world through my old anarcho-tinted glasses. It makes you want to smash systems and break concrete.

A story about pans

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 14:26:00 +0000

The other day I sent my wife a link to a new set of ceramic pans and asked, “What do you think?” assuming she’d be as impressed as I was of the picture of eggs sliding off the pan. Her response: a grimace. Using my sixteen years of husbandly intuition, I surmised that we were not on the same page about kitchenware.

For context, my wife has had the same stainless steel pans that her parents bought her since we met. They’ve outlasted the fancier non-stick pans we’ve auditioned. Her opinion of the pans is that they’re high-quality because they’ve lasted so long and still work. And from that perspective she’s right, they technically still work… but not without some downsides.

When you use stainless steel pans instead of non-stick pans, you’re committing to stickiness and having a harder time cleaning your pans. I can accept that as an incurred cost. I think my bigger issue is that ALL our pans do this. Even our cast irons which we’ve made thousands of batches of bacon with but still aren’t seasoned. If you make scrambled eggs, about two eggs worth of material forms a brown sheet of crust on the bottom of the pan that I must scrape off but NOT using soap per the laws of properly seasoning a cast iron pan.

Anyways, my wife and I aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the pans and I’m kind of struggling to see why. I think there’s some frugalness afoot and possibly some sentimental attachment to items that were gifts. And then she –with her Deanna Troi, betazoid-levels of empathy– said “You probably think we need new ones because you do the dishes” and that was our ah-ha moment!

In our house I’m the self-appointed dish-master because I can hyperfocus on them while listening to an audiobook, pairing something I don’t like with something I do like. My perspective on the pans is that they’re a lot of work to clean up every night. Scraping and scrubbing the charred chunky bits off so we can ruin them the next day. Essentially, I operate at a different end of the “stack” of dishes than she does so we see the situation differently. I have bigger feelings about the stickiness of the pans because that’s the part that I interface with the most. I would like to apply non-stick technology to improve the dish-washing process. Where she sees something that works okay and we’ve had for a long time, while I see a maintenance burden.

Now we have an end-to-end/cross-team perspective of our pans and that is valuable. We understand each other’s needs on a micro-level (the pans are too sticky) and the macro-level (one side of the stack inherits more burden with our pan choice) and that’s helpful for framing future conversations about pans. That said, I don’t think we’re getting new pans any time soon. Such is life. Not all decisions are technical ones.

Raycast Focus works really well

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 01:31:00 +0000

This week Raycast released a new feature called Raycast Focus. This hyped up the Raycast superfans in my social sphere, so I tried it out and I must say that I’m impressed.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Earlier this week I tried out a handful of browser extensions that would add some friction to social media sites. I have a bit of a bad habit where I open a new tab and instinctively type my favorite social sites: elk.zone, bsky.app, and of course youtube.com. These are mega time-wasters for me. As someone with ADHD these sites are basically dopamine tar pits for my attention.

Videos are an obvious stumbling block, but my biggest pain point is clicking on articles and filling up a couple browsers worth of tabs such that it occupies my brain RAM and I can’t focus on my next task until I clear out my tabs. Even with medication, when the attention ship turns, it can be difficult to steer it back on track. Self-control is great, but the easiest way to avoid distraction is to cut the dopamine off at the source; turn the faucet off at the wall and put child locks on the cabinet. You can still turn it back on, but adding friction to the process makes it a more intentional act of defiance.

Raycast Focus adds the right amount of friction. When you enter a session you can choose what types of apps and websites you want to restrict. If you try to open a tab you’ll get a friendly roadblock. You can still enter the site if necessary but you have to click and hold a button for 3 seconds which is enough time for your brain to reassess if this visit is necessary.

Another positive of Raycast Focus is that it’s an OS level tool. I don’t need different tools to limit apps and websites, it’s all under one roof. I already have muscle memory using Raycast to launch apps so it’s easy to add Raycast Focus to my workflow. And there’s something nice about my distraction launcher also being my distraction governor.

Your mileage may vary, but Raycast Focus is working well for me (almost too well). I feel more productive and sometimes you need to feel productive for your own sake, not your employer’s. Whether it’s your process, your tooling, your calendar, or your own brain working against you, it’s worth finding new strategies to improve your workdays. I’m even using it right now to focus on finishing this blog post and… uh… it worked!

American Hearts

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 19:54:00 +0000

Today I want to share with you a song that has stuck with me for a couple decades and has been a source of catharsis for shaking off that existential dread. I’m talking about Piebald’s 2002 single American Hearts. (video)

[Hook]
HEY! You're part of it
YEAH! You're part of it
HEY! You're part of it
YEAH! You're part of it

[Verse 1]
I walk the streets of a Carolina
Watching people pushing shopping carts
And there's a guy above me
And he's washing windows
Making ten bucks a pop
And he says to me...

[Hook]
HEY! You're part of it
YEAH! You're part of it
HEY! You're part of it
YEAH! You're part of it

[Verse 2]
And I say, "Sir, well have you heard that this country is unequal still?"
History continues itself
Continues itself
History continues itself
And I did not create the rules

From all I've heard
And all I've seen
This place has broken
My American heart
From all I've heard
And all I've seen
This place has broken
My American heart

[Hook]
HEY! You're part of it
YEAH! You're part of it
HEY! You're part of it
YEAH! You're part of it

From the first snap of the snare to the final piano chord the song grips you for the whole ride. The staccato bass line powers the song and surrounds itself in an envelope of noise from the dual guitars and a cacophony of drum hits. The lyrics and chord progressions are simple but together they produce something bigger. The song only has two major parts, but the way they drop instruments in and out it feels like four. And best of all, it makes you want to punch a hole in the sky.

Every so often – out of nowhere in the middle of my day when I’m feeling frustrated by a situation beyond my control – I’ll shout to myself “HEY! You’re part of it” as a little mantra to remind myself that, yes, I’m a participant in the democratic capitalist American experiment. I’m a participant in the prosperous parts as well as the unjust parts. I’m part of it. And due to America’s broad empire-like influence, you’re probably part of it or impacted by it too. And it breaks your heart at times.

My website has been gaslighting you

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:35:00 +0000

I have a confession to make. You probably sensed it, but weren’t able to articulate what was happening. Your loved ones think you’re losing your grasp on reality. For the last six months I’ve been incrementally changing the color scheme on my website every single day. I boiled you like a frog! Mu-wa-ha-ha. Don’t believe me? Try for yourself…

At the center of this CSS-trick is setting a --hue variable and rotating the hue about 1deg each day to make it 360º around the color wheel over the year. Because I like blue, I set the default --hue to 196 and add the current day’s --hue-rotate value to calculate my final --rotated-hue value.

--hue: 196;
--hue-rotate: <Floor ( CurrentDayOfYear * 365 / 360 )>; /* Math goes here */
--rotated-hue: calc(var(--hue) + var(--hue-rotate, 0)); /* Rotate it */

The math for the --hue-rotate isn’t that complex, but since CSS doesn’t have a Date() function, I set the initial --hue-rotate value inside my Liquid template when I generate the site with Jekyll.

{% assign yearProgress = 'now' | date: '%j' %}
<style>
  :root {
    --hue-rotate: {{ yearProgress | times: 360 | divided_by: 365 }};
  }
</style>

But I don’t post here every day, so I also update it with some JavaScript in the footer…

const dayOfYear = date => Math.floor(
  (date - new Date(date.getFullYear(), 0, 0)) / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24)
);

const yearProgress = dayOfYear(new Date()) / 365;

document.documentElement.style.setProperty(
  '--hue-rotate', 
  Math.floor(yearProgress * 360)
);

Now my --rotated-hue value nudges itself every day starting from the base hue.

Background hue over time

I put --rotated-hue inside an hsl() and it worked okay, but was decidedly boring. I needed a way to make it more dynamic.

The next bit of magic was to use a slightly more complicated calc() function for the saturation value. Using some of the new CSS math functions, I take the cos() of the --rotated-hue to get a value between 1 and -1, then multiply that by 45% which is my “base saturation” for my light mode theme. That gives me a value between -45% and +45%, so I double it and add another 45% to avoid the gray zone of negative saturation.

:root {
  color-scheme: light dark;
  --hue: 196;
  --rotated-hue: calc(var(--starting-hue) + var(--hue-rotate, 0));
  --hue-rotate-deg: calc(var(--hue-rotate * 1deg)); /* Convert to degrees */
  --hue-rotate-wave: cos(var(--hue-rotate-deg)) /* Magic */
  
  --bg: hsl( 
      var(--rotated-hue)
      calc(45% * var(--hue-rotate-wave) + 45%) 
      96.5%
  );
}

That creates the following effect over time…

Background saturation over time

For my dark mode I wanted a darker website, so I lowered the base saturation to 25% …

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  :root {
    --bg: hsl( 
      var(--rotated-hue)
      calc(25% * var(--hue-rotate-wave) + 12.5%) 
      18.5%
    );
  }
}

Astute readers will notice I don’t add the full base saturation back to the value. This was intentional because as I slid the --hue value around I came across an ugly “background radiation” zone when --rotated-hue enters the green color space (h=75-115). For a month or two my site looked like dogshit. I minimized the undesired effect by letting it dip down into the gray in dark mode.

Dark mode background saturation over time

As you can see in the chart above, lowering the base saturation creates a less dramatic wave function dipping below the 0% saturation. The resulting effect is that my light and dark mode now share the same --rotated-hue but have pretty different vibes. When I plot the two background saturations next to each other, you can see the relationship.

Light and dark mode background saturation over time

If someone asked me today “What color is your website?”, I sort of love the fact that I don’t know. In fact, I’d almost have to consult a chart on any given day…

Hue, saturation, and lightness for light and dark mode over time.

Ah yeah. It makes perfect sense. It’s materialized color operating on the 49th vibration, you would make that conclusion walking down the street or going to the store.

Updating my accent color

The final step was improving my accent color. Finding a static color that had proper color contrast and worked well with every background color was difficult. I was hoping to find a shortcut but all roads led to making my accent color dynamic as well. How do I pick a color that works with every color? After some experiments, I leaned heavily on some third-grade art class color theory.

I found that rotating the --rotated-hue another 240º to get a triadic tone on the color wheel gave the accent color the best chance at standing out in both light and dark mode. You can see the relation to the background and accent hue when I plot them next to each other.

Background and accent hue over time.

I decided to use oklch() instead of hsl() for my accent color because I wanted the vibrancy that can only come from the p3 color space.

--accent: oklch(
    75% 
    0.18
    calc(var(--rotated-hue) + 240) / 1
);

I tinkered with picking the color by hand so that I could try and maximize the number of days my accent color punches up into the p3 space.

The oklch color graph from oklch.com for the accent color hue and chroma values

It’s more art than science here but I feel good about the results.

Accent Color (OKLCH)

Rotating colors is fun but not without its challenges

As far as challenges go, accessibility and proper color contrast is a concern. Contrast checkers don’t work the best with p3, but I’m sure that’s solvable. One challenge was my button text which I set in #FFFFFF in attempt to maximize contrast. It’s not perfect but it’s right more than its wrong. This is one place where Safari’s CSS color-contrast() would be welcome to have in all browsers.

I’ve also scoped my theme to two dynamic colors; adding more is difficult. I re-did my syntax highlighting theme and it’s doing okay (I used the other triadic tone), but more colors is more problems and the complexity balloons quick. Having some shades of gray in the style of Open Props would be helpful, so I may pursue that.

I’m happy with how it turned out but there’s plenty of room for improvement. I doubt I will ever stop obsessively tweaking the color formulas to get it juuuust right. One thing that bothers me now are the puke yellows in my accent color (like today’s) and the greens in the background color aren’t my favorite. I’m embracing the randomness, but I’d love a yellow like Piccalilli’s website. It might be possible to bump up the oklch() brightness in certain parts of the color journey, but requires more math.

It would also be awesome to figure out how to change colors over a custom gradient as opposed to the hue wheel. Could I use a step-frame animation but grab a point on a conic gradient? Hm…

Was it worth it? Did anyone notice? Yes, one person noticed. My coworker John is the only person who said anything. Good eye, John.

All said and done, I like my little rotating color scheme. It’s fun waking up and wondering what color my website is today. If you’re having fun with color on your website I’d love to see it. I want all the p3 inspiration I can get.

Making "this" less annoying

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 01:41:00 +0000

Now that I have a job where I’m writing web components full time, I see the this keyword more than I ever have in my whole life. It’s not a problem, per se, but you can see how it’s a little repetitive. I started wondering what my options were to fix this minor annoyance and the ShopTalk Discord helped me find a simple way and an over-the-top way to fix my issue.

Simple way: Overriding VS Code theme color tokens

By default my Github Light theme makes this a bold dark blue color. I didn’t want to roll my own theme though to scratch this niche itch, so I dug in and found out you can override single tokens in VS Code. Handy. The documentation is a bit opaque but here’s what you need to do:

// settings.json
"editor.tokenColorCustomizations": {
  "textMateRules": [
    {
      "scope": "variable.language.this",
      "settings": {
        "foreground": "#b0b0b0"
      }
    }
  ]
},

Now my this looks like this…

It’s a calming sensation for me to have repetitive noise dimmed. I liked it so much I dimmed comments to match as well. I may even dim TypeScript because sometimes I wish I could hide the syntax, but keep the squiggles.

Over the top way: Replace `this` with a custom glyph

Changing colors is cool… but what if you could go one step further and replace this with an icon? What would an icon for this even look like?

I asked the ShopTalk Discord and got some interesting ideas like the “☝️” emoji, which I think is funny in an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt sort of way. Andrew Walpole took it to the next level and designed a custom glyph:

Alan Smith then figured out how to use Glyphs Mini to add a custom ligature to an open source coding font. Andrew riffed on Alan’s work and exported a custom version of Fira Code with his custom glyph as a ligature. The last step was to install the font update my VS Code settings:

  "editor.fontFamily": "'Fira Code Ligged', monospace",
  "editor.fontLigatures": true

Now my code looks incredibly futuristic…

Abusing typefaces to remove the repetitiveness of programming languages is fun. After seeing the icon in situ, the idea might be a smidge too wild for me due to reduced legibility. While I don’t use the custom glyph on the daily, this experiment does spark a deep desire in me to create a bunch of custom glyphs for common keywords so I can make JavaScript an entirely rune-based programming language.

Custom ligatures with CSS?

A wild idea, but it would be neat if you could create your own custom ligatures in CSS to avoid the need to re-bake custom fonts each time you have a niche typographic need. Here’s a pseudo-syntax of how that might work:

@font-face "Dave Hijinks" {
  match: "this.";
  replace: "☝️.";
}

@font-face "Cloud2Butts" {
  match: "cloud", "AI";
  replace: "butt", url(fart.svg);
}

body {
  font-face: "Dave Hijinks", "Cloud2Butt", sans-serif;
}

Anyways, it’s a thought. Not a serious proposal. This was a fun rabbit hole to travel down with some friends.

Twenty Twenty-Four

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 15:20:00 +0000

For last year’s check-in, I foreshadowed a year of changes for ol’ Dave Rupert and boy was I not kidding. New job, new car, new pets. But before we get into all that – for accountability’s sake – let’s check in on my resolutions from last year and see how I did…

Activate an active lifestyle - Nope.
Write more shitty sci-fi - Nope.
Draw more - Nope.
Write for other publications - Yes, I wrote for Frontend Masters’ Boost blog and Wilto’s Multipage Version zine.
Survive the 2024 US Election - Yes, but what a disappointment.
Make a video game? - Yes, I made and released a few but also went beyond video games a bit.

Final score: 50%-ish. That’s better than I expected. What did I do with the other 50% of my time if I wasn’t crushing it on my SMART goals? Let’s see…

A month-by-month recap

Jan-April - Unemployed, interviewing for jobs 👎
April - Saw the solar eclipse 👍
May - Went to South Dakota for my nephew’s graduation 👍
May - Started my new job at Microsoft 👍
July - Went to San Diego - first week 👍, second week whole family got sick 👎
Aug - Adopted two dogs 👍, they are a handful and I’m allergic 👎
Aug - Frostapalooza 👍
Sept - Wife had knee surgery 👎
Oct - Deleted my Twitter account 👍
Nov - Went to Redmond and met my coworkers IRL for the first time 👍
Nov - Bought a new car 👍
Nov - Moogs passed away 👎
Nov - Diagnosed with ADHD 👌

Finding a job dominated the first half of my year. After some ups and downs I ended up in a good place at Microsoft. There’s a lot of positives going from self-employment to the corporate world (hey! actual benefits! stocks even!) but also a lot of organizational bureaucracy that I’m not used to navigating. I’m happy with the work I’m doing and feel lucky to get to work on web components each day.

My wife and I’s trip to Pittsburgh for Frostapalooza was a big crescendo for the year. Months and months of practicing culminating in one big night. It’s hard to describe it other than some kind of nerd-flavored camp reunion but with guitars instead of computers. We had such a good time and the amount of music filling our house on a daily basis has increased ten-fold this year. For that I’m thankful.

I often judge years based on if we hit our health insurance deductible and we hit it again this year. A lot of medium grade background stress: job hunt stress, new job stress, healthcare stress, election stress, etc. Thankfully – and I could be basking in the limelight of a good Christmas holiday and a week off from work – I hardly remember that stress anymore. It feels like I’ve shedded those layers of anxiety.

Stats for 2024

With all the qualitative out of the way, let’s get more quantitative about what we did this year…

52 books - Still in the book-a-week club. I’m comfortable here but need to mix it up. I’m becoming cynical when I hear the same ten facts and sociological studies regurgitated to meet some new popular science zeitgeist. Political biographies are all the same five liberal or conservative party tent poles supported by some personal anecdote. I think I’m going to lean hard into sci-fi “snacks” – short, easy books – for the next year while supplementing with beefier book recommendations from trusted peers.
61 blog posts - Not a record but I’m happy with that number. Over a post a week is a good pace for me, doubly so if you consider that I fell off a blogging cliff since going corporate.
9 gunpla - Way down from my 2023 peak.
3 releases - Mundango, Pentablaster, and Hard Code & Soft Skills. My previous record was one, so this is stellar.
49 episodes of ShopTalk - I love hanging out with my friend Chris.
3 guest appearances - Bad @ CSS, Smashing Hour, and Changelog & Friends.

A pretty good year for me and it’d be great to maintain that pace next year. To be totally honest, my actual goal would be to do less next year. Sounds crazy, I know, numbers should only go up and to the right. But hear me out… what if they didn’t? Have we considered that option?

I didn’t play video games as much as I would have liked to this year, so I’ll need to remedy that. I’ve got a backlog brewing but I’m having a good time making games and that’s a time tradeoff I’m okay with. But from a “great writers read” perspective, I should play more games. Related, I had to quit late night gaming with the boys because it effected my sleep and stress levels, but I want to get back to that. AAA gaming is in a rough state though.

Hopes for 2025

There’s five focus areas I’d like to pursue next year and I already have traction on most of these feel achievable, But I’ve been wrong about that in the past.

Seize work opportunities - It’s been a great first 7 months at Microsoft but I have some big projects shipping in the next quarter so I need to shift out of my “learning the ropes” mode into a more melee combat ready position.

Hunker down and be creative - I’m not excited about the state of the union right now, so I’m going to trust my instinct to burrow. I’ve got some apps, games, and shitty sci-fi ideas that I’d be happy to work on instead of doomscrolling the news. I feel okay about pursuing those ideas rather than getting mired in political headlines.

Slow down to 1x mode - The ability to consume books, podcasts, and videos at 2x is a super power but I feel a nudge to take life slower. Slowing down would hopefully increase the time-cost and make me more discerning about what I choose to consume. The fact that I view listening at 1x as a challenge tells me I should probably pursue it.

Join a club - Inspired by the documentary Join or Die, I think I need to join a club and participate in IRL more. Clubs give me an opportunity to burst my personal/internet bubble and meet people who don’t share my background, income, or political beliefs. But I can’t even think of what I’d want to do. Perhaps something hobby-related? Join a lodge? Volunteer at a food bank? I feel woefully unprepared that I don’t even have the beginning of an answer here.

Understand myself - Beyond work and side projects, the biggest project I’ll be undertaking in 2025 is going to be… me. Since the Summer, I’ve been on a mission to understand myself at a clinical level. Last year I lost a lot of weight, more than half of it has come back without much change in diet. I want to know what’s in this mountain of flesh and bones and brains that God gave me. I want to begin to untangle the Gordian Knot of Anxiety, Weight, and ADHD. This has meant seeing a new doctor, getting blood work done, seeing a therapist, evaluating medication, and a whole lot more. I even made it a “Project” in Notion so I’d actually follow through on it. My ideal outcome is to come up with a plan to get through the next five, ten, fifteen, thirty years and beyond. In the immediate future an unexpected medical malady has presented itself and I’ll probably have to undergo surgery next year.

We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne

I know some had an awful 2024. I’d say mine was hard but good over the long haul. 2025 seems primed to bring its own existential challenges and I hope you find shelter. Tech is still in shambles right now but I’m starting to see hints of the icy job market thawing, but I’m unsure if it will ever go back to “normal”. And politics… oof. We’re already seeing the outputs of the self-inflicted chaos machine. Keep in mind that chaos is the goal; chaos to exhaust and disarm us, to flood the zone with shit. So hold fast to your principles and conserve energy for the long haul. Keep your hand on the plow and keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.

Vibe Check №36

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 19:54:00 +0000

Hottest October on record. November weather was much nicer, but lacked the much needed rain. We now pass the solstice and crash into the new year without so much as a sneeze from the gods of winter. My son’s team took second in the Fall baseball championship game. My daughter’s cheer team won their first competition gaining them a bid to nationals in the spring. Exciting times in Rupert family sports, I tell ya.

Three major holidays have passed since the last update so I’m sure it’s going to be too much to distill, but I’ve tried to blog through the bigger vibes like my cat passing away, my ADHD diagnosis, and releasing some games. So with those abstracted out, let’s reminisce on the recent past…

A trip to the mothership

The biggest event was my trip to Microsoft in November. It’s been nearly a decade since I’ve been to the Microsoft campus, but notably this is the first time I’ve met my new coworkers in person! I’m happy to report that my coworkers are all great people. Thankfully my small engineering team as well as the larger design organization is high functioning when it comes to hybrid/remote work, so I don’t feel left out of the on-premise centralized loop that I’ve felt in previous Microsoft engagements. My team made it easy to <slot> (!!!) in and feel welcome.

An example, my sweet coworkers hung up a print out of my avatar in one of the conference rooms with a little speech bubble that says “I‘m here with OPINIONS” which I find endearing. The side bonus is that Teams the app sees the avatar and thinks its a person and will zoom-in on it in every meeting. My avatar is an ever-present participant in a lot of meetings to the extent that five different people walked up to me said “Oh, it’s the guy from the conference room!” which is probably the biggest payoff to a long running gag that I’ve seen in my lifetime.

We spent most days strategizing in conference rooms but also did morale building events. One highlight for me was our studio’s tour of the Microsoft Inclusive Tech Lab where I got to talk with Dave Dame. I’ve been a fan of his for awhile now, he has a way of communicating the need to reject “other-ism” that sticks with you. He shared with us some of the challenges he faces as a person with limited mobility and how AI is impacting his life for the better. One night a group of us remote and local employees went out for dinner and ate grasshoppers. Another highlight was sneaking into a demo day event where designers at Edge were prototyping in the browser with web components. This grinch’s heart grew three times that day.

Everyone apologized for the rain while I was there but I loved the soggy weather coming from six months of Texas heat. I found it nothing but charming. Redmond has grown up considerably in the decade since my last visit, and the Microsoft campus is almost unrecognizable to me. Redmond used to be a bunch of small one or two story buildings but now it’s all enormous five story buildings. Redmond was wooing me pretty hard though I won’t lie; next to my hotel was an outdoor mall that had an izakaya, a games shop, a guitar center, and an upscale Hobbytown with Gunpla! It felt like my own personal Disneyland generated from my search history.

Spent a lot of time with work folks, but I caught up with a couple old friends while I was there. One night I met up with Kyle who was the other engineer at Luro who now works at Amazon. We were long overdue to celebrate in person together and close a chapter on the two years of intense sprinting we did together at Luro. Then I got to see Kelly and Charles who I worked with through multi-year engagements on microsoft.com, it’s great to know other people at such a big place like Microsoft. And one night I snuck over to Fremont for a memorable night of playing vintage and indie arcade and pinball games with Adam Argyle. It’s good to have good friends from the internet.

All said, I think the main purpose of my trip – firm handshakes and letting my coworkers know I’m a real person – was a success. Hopefully, I’ll find myself in Redmond more often.

Other major happenings

A speed run of other notable events but in the interest of time we’ll keep it brief:

In October I deleted my X account. I call it X because that’s it’s new name and it’s a stupid name for a stupid website. I put 14 years into that site and it’s surprising how easy deleting my account was. Over time logging in felt icky and the “heartbeat of the internet” parts have been co-opted by Russian bot farms. I don’t thrive on the self-created chaos Elon brings and I don’t want to support whatever flavor of white male supremacy is flourishing there. Bluer and calmer skies over on Bluesky and (my favorite) Mastodon.
Halloween was a hit. My block does it pretty big and we’re lucky to have hundreds of kids roaming on my street.
I only drive about 20 miles a week and I wanted those 20 miles to be fun, so we bought a Jeep. It’s a whole vibe to be honest. You can even make “Jeep” your entire personality if you want. I’m not there yet, but having fun exploring the space.
Thanksgiving was low key and bought the Whole Foods pre-made dinner for four. That made prep-day simple and no one got overwhelmed.
The last weekend in November our elderly cat Moogs passed away.
I got diagnosed with ADHD and started taking meds.
We stayed in town for Christmas and that was pretty wonderful. Mrs. Claus did a great job getting presents for the kids.

Recapping three whole months isn’t fun, but spinning off some of the major events into their own posts was pretty efficient so I should do that more.

The more quantifiable parts

🧠 Learning

I’m sure this list is incomplete, but went down some rabbit trails researching health issues like my ADHD but a couple non-health issues as well.

ADHD and the different medication options
Intermittent fasting and the effects of glucose spikes and insulin resistance.
Tone.js - In my side projects I got to play with Tone.js a bit and I love it.
Soviet Central Planning - I’m curious why soviet central planning failed. This overlaps with to Stalinist communism, World War II, Russian cosmonauts, and Kremlinology.

🚀 Releases

I got hellbent on releasing some projects this quarter and feel accomplished even if they are small in scope.

Mundango - A game about noticing life’s small things
Pentablaster - An instrument with no wrong notes
Hard Code & Soft Skills - A workplaced themed RPG

I wrote about my little games workshop more in depth if you’re curious about the why or my process. I’m also play testing a game with the ShopTalk Discord and am slowly iterating towards a release.

📖 Reading

Read a lot more than I expected. After multiple recommendations I finally started reading The Murderbot Diaries and holy cow, what a great series. Each book is like a little 150-page snack that I get to enjoy. It feels good to read (e-)paper books again too, not just audiobooks.

Finished

Humankind - Finished this book for the second and it’s as great as I remember. I probably need to buy a physical copy that I can highlight up.
It’s not you, it’s Capitalism - Marxist communism wrapped in a “You go girl!” blanket. Not for me but a good critique of the capitalist system is in there.
Lost in Austin - The history of Austin, as told by an Englishman, focusing on the rapid growth tech boom town era from the early 2000s to present. It’s an ever present fear that Austin is changing too much, but this book makes a good argument that what made Austin cool can’t live in the new upscale downtown and high rents.
All Systems Red, The Murderbot Diaries No.1 - A sassy and depressed robot built for murder finds a new life after it hacks its governor module.
The Psychology of Money - I thought this was going to be a book about understanding money from a psychological perspective; instead it was a book about how rich people abuse the system and it made me mad.
Artificial Condition, The Murderbot Diaries No.2 - Another great sassy robot read.
Play Nice - The rise, fall, and collapse of Activision/Blizzard. As someone who plays games by this company, I found it cathartic.
Thinking in Systems - I went in hoping for design system inspiration but got mad about the incoming Trump administration because it’s a lot about incentives and guardrails, which will soon flip upside down.
Koguchi Magazine #1 - A sci-fi kickstarter comic I backed… not my favorite.
Koguchi Magazine #2 - Issue #2 of the sci-fi kickstarter comic I backed… was a little bit better than the first.
Life in the Fasting Lane - A book on the benefits of intermittent fasting… not my favorite
Fair Play - A subject I care about, the inequality gap between men and women when factoring in all the “glue work” and homemaking tasks that (typically) women absorb as part of their duties… but the husband in this book is such a cringe asshole it’s hard to think a card game is going to solve their problems when what they need is marriage counseling. I don’t want to be in the middle of that relationship so I didn’t finish the book.
Glucose Revolution - Either this book is the holy grail to fixing all health problems in America… or it’s a book by someone who took a simple fact (glucose spikes aren’t great for your body) and extrapolated that to be the cause of all health problems ever. I think it’s the latter.
Rogue Protocol, The Murderbot Diaries No.3 - More sassy robot. Great.

Started

Exit Strategy, The Murderbot Diaries No.4

📝 Blogging

Where web components shine - A post celebrating web components.
Hammers - A post about hammers and nothing else.
Goodbye, Moogs - A tribute to my cat who passed away.
I got the ADHD, too - A diagnosis! A plan!
Intermittent fasting - A new diet I’m trying out.
Every token is a feature - A post about design systems.
CSS wants to be a system - A post about CSS.
My little games workshop - A post about how I’ve been making games this year.

📺 Media Diet

Let’s take a look at what was on the ol’ boob tube.

Movies

Join or Die (2024) - Documentary about Robert Putnam’s life work analyzing civil decline. Warning: this will make you want to change your life a bit.
PLAY! (2024) - A classic Japanese sports team story but this time with kids from remote Shikoku forming a Rocket League eSports team. It’s not rated well on Letterboxd, but I enjoyed it. Caught this one on a plane.
Jingle All the Way (1996) - Rewatched this Christmas classic… and it’s super unhinged.
The Best Christmas Pagent Ever (2024) - A sweet Christmas story if you’re into the whole “true meaning of Christmas” message.

Interior Chinatown (Hulu) - An all-star cast headed up by Jimmy O. Yang from Silicon Valley. Half procedural cop drama, half Truman show, it all comes together in a way that produces a wonderful commentary on seeing people and cultures that act like background characters behind the scenes.
Very Important People S2 (Dropout) - Vic Michelas is as it again.
Make Some Noise S3 (Dropout) - This show is really stepping into its own.
Ranma ½ (Netflix) - I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered it… and I’d say yeah. Not for kids tho.
Skeleton Crew (Disney+) - This is Goonies in Space and I’ll take it. I haven’t been able to get into any of the extracurricular Star Wars shows but this one hits with me because I think it knows what it needs to be… a Star Wars story that can exist and play in that universe, but break away from the classic Star Wars tropes.

Podcasts

The Adventure Zone Abnimals - I don’t know about this one, but is growing on me.
Maintenance Phase - Re-listening to a lot of favorite episodes
If Books Could Kill - Such a fun look at popular culture through the lens of books. The “shitty person says something shitty” formula is getting tired but… nonetheless.

🎙 Recording

Recorded some great episodes of Shoptalk, chief among them was a live action role play episode of ShopTalk.

Hard Code & Soft Skills - Chris, Alex, Ben, and Miriam play an RPG game that I devised.
Chris Person on Forums, Reddit, and Cooperative Reporting - Forums rule.
Approachable Open Source with Brian Muenzenmeyer - Is open source without burnout possible?

🤖 Gunpla and modelling

Cooled off on Gunpla but have got the bug to pick it back up as work becomes less busy. Exhausted by the slower process of the master grade format, I decided to go back to high grade models to get the passion back.

MG Red Frame Astray - stalled
Beargguy III - completed
AK-47 Rubber band gun - my brother got me this wooden model of an AK-47 rubber band gun and I’m about half way done and it’s been pretty fun.

🌱 Digital Gardening (née Open Source)

Renaming this category because technically work is open source a bit and that’s confusing, so I thought I’d make it more about growing and maintaining web objects.

Tinkering on my website in subtle ways
Making little web components, per usual
Attended some Web Components Community Group meetings.

👾 Video games

Spent more time making games than playing games. My PC had a catastrophic BIOS update failure and the verdict’s still out but I might need to rebuild the whole thing.

Brawl Stars - this game is a treadmill I don’t need to be on.

Got an Anbernic RG35XX Plus pocket emulator for Christmas, so hopefully my vintage game plays list will grow.

My little games workshop

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 21:17:00 +0000

I always promised myself that if I was ever unemployed that I’d make a video game. When life dealt me an unpaid work hiatus though, the last thing I wanted to do was code in my spare time¹. I worried I would have to let that dream, that part of me, die on the vine. But as interviews started going well the desire to try my hand at making a game came back. And in true adult ADHD fashion I didn’t focus on one game, but rather made a half-dozen different games in different formats and three of those games have made it to the release stage. Here’s an overview of those games and a little background on how I manage to make them.

Mundango, a bingo game about life’s small things

During my unpaid hiatus I found myself getting a lot of pleasure in the small things; seeing a cool bird, staring at trees, or watching animals be animal-like. To not lose sight of those moments and with a desire to replace my social media addiction, I made Mundango, a bingo game about noticing life’s small things.

The icon is a chill turtle because it invokes the feeling of going slow. The font is a playful little handwritten sans. And there’s a (Japan-inspired) minor pentatonic scale that plays as you check items off. I hope you enjoy it but more importantly I hope it nudges you (and myself) to stop doomscrolling on our phones so much and to start looking outside the windows a bit more often.

Hard Code & Soft Skills, a workplace adventure

In January, the unemployment got to my head and I got inspired to make a role playing game called Hard Code & Soft Skills. It’s a workplace-themed² clone of Lasers & Feelings, a one-pager by John Harper. The original game is loosely based on Star Trek, where you can use lasers or diplomacy to solve your problems. I wanted to flip that a bit and have the game world be a startup because tech needs to realize that soft skills are as valuable as code, so that’s my big social commentary.

It wasn’t labor intensive to clone the original game, but I put a lot of time into building a little one-page website with a character generator. It’s Astro and web components, if you’re curious. I also put a lot of mental energy in planning out the first episode of Hard Code & Soft Skills on Shop Talk. It went better than I could have imagined and what a thrill to get it out the door.

Pentablaster, an instrument with no wrong notes

The pentatonic scale sound effects in Mundango were a hit with some folks, so I dug in and built a whole instrument that only plays pentatonic scales and called it Pentablaster! It took about a week and I’m pleased with how it turned out. It’s jammy and a little unique. I extended it to allow you to change the key and to choose which pentatonic scale you want to play.

There’s some features I’d like to add, but worry it’ll enter the “so complicated I don’t want to work on it anymore” paradox. I’ll park it for now, but I learned a lot about Tone.js in the process.

An unreleased solitaire game

I went on a short bender learning about Solo RPGs (like Ronin) and that sparked an interest in trying my hand at making one. I challenged myself to prototype the game on pen and paper first to prove the game mechanics. After an evening of brainstorming, I devised a game system based on a standard 52-card deck of playing cards as a prototype. I play-tested it with my son and we both thought that I should make a mobile app version. After some nights and weekends, I had a rough alpha prototype.

I play-tested the game with friends in the ShopTalk Discord and I got great, actionable feedback. They confirmed my suspicion that the RNG (randomness) was too high, creating a lack of decision making agency and thereby ruining the fun. I made some tweaks and the second round of play-tests went much better. It’s feeling pretty good now, but I think there’s one more ingredient needed to tie it all together before public release.

An unreleased Playdate game

Since acquiring a little yellow wind-up boi, it’s been a small dream to write a game for Playdate and I picked the idea that seemed like the easiest and most PlayDate’y and descoped the hell out of it so that I’d have an achievable goal. It’s an office-themed³ RPG type game.

After playing with Playdate’s web-based game editor Pulp and trying PulpScript, I felt the chafing of limitations and wanted to get closer to the metal. I watched every one of SquidGod’s Development Tutorials and decided to download the Playdate SDK and write the game in Lua. This is my first time writing Lua and it’s been interesting because everything in Lua is a table: Arrays are tables, Dictionaries are tables, Objects are tables… tables all the way down. That takes some “undoing” of prior programming best practices to feel comfortable but after awhile you learn to embrace the chaos and for-loopedness.

To short cut some of the player controllers and level building I picked Cotton, a Lua-based framework for Playdate. Cotton uses the LDtk map editor for easier map making and that was a feature I was looking forward to using. However, I encountered a bug somewhere between the framework and LDtk. If I updated the map, my player could no longer get to a different room. Insecurity started to set in:

Is this bug because I don’t know Lua?
Is this bug because I don’t understand LDtk?
Or is this a bug somewhere in Cotton?

Feedback from the Playdate Dev Discord was “Last commit is 2 years ago, project’s dead” and “Use [Framework X] instead”… 😮‍💨 Ugh. I thought only JavaScript dorks did this but apparently Lua dorks do it too. I understand they’re trying to be a version of helpful; but this is terrible advice for someone who is learning. “You need to start over” or in video game parlance “The Princess is in another castle” kills the dopamine rush needed when learning something new.

But I didn’t give up. And after many shower thoughts, I mustered up the energy to do some good ol’ fashioned debugging. The first step was step-by-step isolation where I manually diff’d thousands of lines of JSON line-by-line. That one step taught me there was a change in the exported JSON somewhere between the version of LDtk that Cotton used (v1.3) and the latest version of LDtk (v1.5.3). The primary key for joining map tiles no longer exists in v1.5.3. Then I followed the breadcrumb trail of how Cotton imports LDtk files and I fixed the bug by creating a new table (because Lua) to act as a join table for the neighboring map tiles.

I was able to finish my core game loop and I’m proud of that, but fixing a framework level bug cut the wind out of my sails. I may PR the bug fix… but it’s more of a patch job than a holistic fix and I’m unsure if the author of Cotton is even interested in supporting that on their abandoned project.

Will this game ever come out? I hope so, but it’s emotionally hard to pick up after fighting with it so much. If I buckled down, built some assets, and wrote more NPC dialog I bet I could finish it in a couple human weeks of work. Perhaps I could outsource the asset creation.

How the sausage gets made

I make my games after the kids and spouse go to bed or while the TV runs mindlessly. In some ways I’m borrowing from my own mental health staying up late tinkering with little apps that I’m going to give away for free. But these ideas all occupy brain RAM, so it feels good to chip away at ideas and get them out the door, to make room for more ideas, to chip away at ideas, to get them out the door… it’s a vicious cycle, but I think a net positive for my mental health.

To hedge against wasting my spare time, I get prototypes out for review as soon as possible to gauge interest and invest accordingly. Shopping prototypes curbs emotional over-investment in an idea. Time builds attachment to bad ideas, making them seem good and grander in your head than reality. If you build in secret too long, it ends in disappointment when the public doesn’t understand your genius you spent all your time on.

I default to web tech because it’s what I know best and staying in your wheelhouse means you can move faster with less mystery roadblocks (like the LDtk map issue above). But I’d like NOT WORK to not feel like work and see value in that, so this may change going forward.

At times I create artificial limitations (e.g., limit myself to a single asset pack) because if the scope is overly broad and infinite, that guarantees failure. Having rules, even if arbitrary, allows for play.

The last tool in the toolbelt is scoping the hell out of my ideas. When attention is your biggest limitation (e.g. ADHD) then keeping checkpoints small and achievable are critical. Then once you have the foundations established, do as much as time and ambition allow.

Unsure of what’s next… or how to book all of your free time from now until death with no promise of financial gain.

I have dozens of ideas kicking around in my head at all times, so my main issue is prioritization. Here’s the ideas that occupy a lot of brain RAM:

Finishing my son’s Zelda-like
An ambitious battle royale that would take a hundred developers a hundred years to finish
A platformer with a slime mechanic
A local multiplayer game that has a Mario Kart vibe, but isn’t a karting game.
A Solid Snake stealth game but for escaping awkward social situations
A horror game parody
Tim McGraw’s What-if? Trucks: Fates
A space shooter / medical sim
A Contra-like with a dumb twist

That’s a sampling of what’s going on up in the ol’ electric meatball. Not to be too macabre, but I’m not sure I have the lifespan left to get through even half of that short list. Hopefully there’s a banger billion dollar idea in there that allows me to retire and work on all the non-profitable dumb ideas.

While doing this for a living is far off and/or will never happen I am at least pleased that I lived up to the promise to myself to make games if I had spare time. I made games, smaller in scope than what I had originally imagined, but I’m comfortable with that given the timelines. No regrets there.

Risky as it may be, I may jump to a 3D engine because I’ve had a lot of fun building in environments like Unity in the past. That balloons the scope and raises the level of difficulty beyond my current expertise and it has never worked in the past… but perhaps this time it’ll be different! 😂

I had some big work emotions and burnout to process ↩
I’ve already established that yes, I was processing some work emotions. ↩
Again, processing some work emotions over here. ↩

CSS wants to be a system

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 23:03:00 +0000

I’ve realized something obvious again, this time about CSS; that CSS wants to be a system. At the core of CSS is a series of cascading rules and classes marrying and mingling in an elegant symphony of style application. Dozens and dozens of declarative instructions for painting pixels on the screen come together in under a millisecond. Sometimes it creates magic, other times it creates memes.

At its core, CSS wants to be a system and – besides its quirky selector power ranking algorithm – it doesn’t come with one out of the box. CSS wants you to build a system with it. It wants styles to build up, not flatten down. It even has layers as a feature! You can start small with a minimalist reset or satisfy your inner typenerd with a typographic default and build up from there. You can make your own reset. You can establish your own naming convention. You can decide to nest or not. You can use IDs. You can use only-classes. You can even dip a toe into the Shadow DOM if you crave the dark arts. Hell, I encourage you to use !important just to feel something.

Not everyone wants to conduct that symphony and I understand that. A nice thing about that CSS is that it’s sharable! Plenty of pre-built systems exist to let you offload that skill. Through the magic of copy-and-paste, you too can have high quality design! But don’t mistake a shortcut as the only valid option. We as humans and technologists like to compare objects and declare winners – to be kingmakers! – but it’s a mistake to shop at only one store and only eat meatballs despite the ubiquitous appeal of Scandinavian design.

CSS wants to be a system and it’s not an impossible task to make your own. Will there be mistakes and bad assumptions? Yeah. Will there be a junk.css file? Probably. Will you commit CSS crimes? Indubitably. Is CSS just thousands of key-value pairs with random collisions implemented in an uneven distribution among a handful of different browsers? It sure is, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

In all my years of programming I have never loved a language more than CSS. There’s no other programming language that sparks my brain and lights up my imagination like CSS. Even after thirty years, there’s a rush of adrenaline when I see a complex design and I wonder “How am I going to make that happen?” which leads me to “And how am I going to make that happen on a phone and older browsers?” That’s the fun part of the job. And it’s good to know that there are other people out there who are great at CSS, people who can build up and tear down these systems with ease, people I can siphon knowledge from and build up my own skills when a new challenge arises.

So cheers to the CSS folks, the tinkerers. Your obsessive animations, pixel pushing, and system building – both delicate and strong – are fun to see and experience.

Every token is a feature

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 15:12:00 +0000

I’m in the middle of a design tokens project and I thought I’d share something I’m learning that is probably obvious to everyone else; every design token is a feature.

A token is a magical contract between design and engineering, if we agree to use the same name to abstractly refer to the same value, it will produce a desired outcome. That bridge alone is probably worth the investment, but tokens solve even more organizational problems. The mobile app and the website can look the same by sharing a single JSON file. But wait, there’s more! If the blue a different team chose is not blue enough for you, you can make your own blue and apply it at the global scope or the individual element scope. Tokens as an organizational feature are a powerful concept but there’s tons of nuance packed behind it.

Like features, too many tokens can bloat your system. I recently learned –because I’m lucky to work with people who work on browsers– there’s a not-so-theoretical limit where the browser starts taking a performance hit based purely on the number of CSS variables. There’s no hard upper limit on the number of variables (we drew a line at ~500) because the limit ultimately depends on the size and the depth of your DOM. Style recalcs and tree walking are expensive problems for a browser. Alias tokens like --foo: var(--bar) compound the problem and the more static you can be, like --foo: #bada55, the better. Infinite customizability and peak performance are often at odds.

Like features, too many tokens can create organizational problems! This is the opposite of what I said above, how can that be? It’s possible to generate enough tokens that they become their own hyperobject, impossible to comprehend from the outside, so well-meaning people eject from the system. Detached instances. One-offs. Snowflakes.

Like features, tokens can create little piles of technical debt. “Is anyone still using --color-beefcake-primary-2?” you shout into the void of the team chat. No one responds because no one knows. The person who does know left the company five months ago. Alas, we’ll bolt on more until we find time to fix it. Always adding. Never subtracting.

Like features, some tokens are going to have a massive payoff if implemented and some tokens the user benefit is less clear. You’re passing organizational complexity on to the user. Like features, you can build over-complicated machinery around a simple concept like sharing values. Like features, people will build every part without considering whether they actually need each facet.

Generally speaking, if someone wants to implement hundreds or thousands of little features in an application, that’s probably a red flag. If-statements are expensive over their lifetime. But from my experience, a good system of tokens inside a cascade of meaningful componentry can make a product resonate with consistency across many surfaces, while providing just enough customizability to differentiate when necessary.

Intermittent fasting

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 04:10:00 +0000

A doctor told me to look into intermittent fasting. Not for weight loss, but for ADHD. There’s some new data that suggests a link between ADHD and insulin in the brain. Based on that science, intermittent fasting or a ketogenic diet –which can help improve insulin resistance– might help my brain. I’m a week into it and am seeing some weight loss, but it’s hard to tell with the ADHD without measuring my brainflorps per second. I might be more focused, but hunger and “hangry” bring their own distractions.

I’m skeptical, to say the least. Intermittent fasting makes frequent appearances in my YouTube shorts with balding Joe Rogan clones dressed in all black selling workout supplements. It has a whiff of being a cure-all. To counter that skepticism, I read a book called Life in the Fasting Lane co-authored by Dr Jason Fung, who was specifically recommended to me. It’s a mix of doctorly advice and testimonials from advocates who have had success with fasting. As scientific as the book tries to be, it undoes its own credibility pitching intermittent fasting with all the hallmarks of a fad elimination diet:

Lose weight in 30 days
Reduce cravings
Live longer
Reverse diseases
Helps you focus at work
Improves your sex life
Big pharma doesn’t want you to know about this one weird trick!
Used by ancient civilizations. Ugh. The appeal to history (ancient, therefore good!) is a major pet peeve of mine.
And my least favorite: It doesn’t cure cancer, but it cures obesity, which causes all different kinds of cancer… so we’re not gonna say it cures cancer because that’s a douchebag thing to say, but it doesn’t not cure cancer if you catch our drift (wink).

I do appreciate that the book calls out “Calories-In/Calories-Out” as a myth that works 1% of the time. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that eliminating meals or days worth of food isn’t a macro-version of calories-in/calories-out, where you measure calories in weeks instead of per meal. I suppose the key difference is the duration between meals allows my body to enter ketosis (read: a starving state) which will consume my excess fat stores instead of my morning breakfast tacos adding to those fat stores.

To be honest, I’m a good candidate for this fad diet. I can sustain myself on a couple meals a day. I could skip lunch most days. Skipping breakfast though is hard. Not putting creamer in my morning coffee is hard. Not having a little after dinner snack with the kids is hard. Not eating is not my favorite, but I’m going to trust the process for a bit and hopefully it’ll help a weary brain like mine.

I got the ADHD, too

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 15:29:00 +0000

This month I got my official diagnosis for Adult ADHD. It’s fun to share experiences with friends. While ADHD presents some new waters to navigate, it isn’t exactly news to me. Thanks to Dr. TikTok, I’ve suspected this outcome for a few years now. It’s nice to have a proper diagnosis though. If I’m struggling to focus or feeling overwhelmed, I know the probable root cause is how my brain processes dopamine and norepinephrine impacting my executive function.

There are different flavors of ADHD, so I can only describe my experience:

I crave “optimal stimulation” – 1 task = too little. 3-5 tasks = perfect, ideal. 6+ tasks = uh-oh, all the spinning plates come crashing down.
I experience periods of hyperfocus – I often will lock in on an interesting problem and work for hours and forget to eat.
Difficulty with tasks when overwhelmed – When overwhelmed (which is always, I have some generalized anxiety too), I’m unable to summon focus for even the smallest of tasks.
Sensitivity to messy environments – Related to optimal stimulation, cluttered and messy environments (a common ADHD issue) creates a feeling of overwhelm for me.
Sensory-seeking behaviors and fidgeting (classic restless leg syndrome)
I don’t have the hyperactive part of ADHD.
I’m pretty attentive and a good listener… until I’m not.

I’ve developed a lot of coping and masking strategies over the years that have allowed me to maintain a decent level of productivity. In my 20s I used to manage this by brute force and caffeine. But now that I’m in my 40s with a lot more responsibilities and spinning plates, I feel the reins slipping a bit. To help with this, I’m trying out a non-stimulant sNRI medication that tries to repair that norepinephrine processing. It takes a week or so to fully activate so it’s not an instant fix, and to be honest I don’t quite know what to expect. I’m excited to see if it makes a difference but even if it doesn’t I’m happy to be on a journey.

Anyways, cheers to unique brains.

Goodbye, Moogs

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 03:08:00 +0000

The people who found you in the alley called you Cowboy. We called you Moogs, Moogers, Moogerton, Mr Moogs, Meesta, Two Meestas, Beef, Roast Beef, Roast Beefy Weefy, Kitty, Kitty cat, Long cat, Kitty kitty, Pretty kitty, and Meow meow. Those were all your names.

Today we had to say goodbye to our cat Moogs (pronounced “Moo” like the cow says + “gs”). He was nearly 19 years old, which is about all you can ask for from a great cat. A senior cat with a thyroid problem – so his passing is not an incredible surprise – but he took a sudden downturn over the weekend. He died in his sleep.

My wife adopted him before we were even dating in 2006. I never had a cat, was more of a dog person, and I made it my mission to befriend the cat to win her over. I succeeded in my goal and he let me hold him like a baby. Little did I know he would spend the next 18 years of my life with him sitting on my body for warmth and waking me up at six in the morning.

When we lived in LA he would perch majestically on the sills of the open windows basking in the warm sun’s rays because that’s how LA’s perfect weather works. He’d hop in-and-out of the house, hunting, cruising, and getting into tussles with the other alley cats. We paid a lot in vet bills but he had a good life jumping along the craftsman rooftops.

He didn’t enjoy moving to Austin, he howled the whole 1400 mile journey and when we got to Austin, he hid himself in the exposed soffit of our mid-remodel kitchen. After two weeks he came out and got used to the new home and got comfortable being an indoor-outdoor cat again. He’d spend days in our neighbor Cleo’s wisteria bushes hunting small birds. He was there when we adopted our dog Rudy and learned to hold his own against dogs. And he was there when we brought our babies home from the hospital and he learned to tolerate toddlers.

When we moved a second time to North Austin, he didn’t like that move either. He quit going outside as much and I think after that his quality of life started to decline. Three years ago, I noticed he was losing weight, felt like a skeleton with fur, and was extra ornery about food. The vet diagnosed him with hyperthyroidism and he needed to be on medication.

Moogs was sweet and friendly – well, as friendly as cats can be. When guests came over he would saunter into the room and find the person most allergic to cats and nuzzle them. He had an uncanny talent for that. He was social, but not. He would give an affectionate little headbutt whenever he wanted attention. He’d knead his claws into your thigh when you tried to watch television. And he’d prowl the house at night and wake you up with a butthole to the face. Cats, man. Cats.

Moogs was an incredible cat. My first and probably only cat, to be honest. I won’t miss his howls for breakfast each morning, but I will miss the soft brushes against my legs to say hello. He was a part of our family from the beginning, it will be different without him.

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Unnecessary

I don't like sand

The only way to know for sure... is to build a prototype

Vibe Check №37

“It’s not a tumor, it’s a deformity”

The side effects of ADHD meds

The rest of the story

Stats

💪 Wellness

📖 Reading

📝 Blogging

📺 Media

🎙 Recording

🧶 Crafts and Models

⌨️ Open source

👾 Video games

On government efficiency

15 Minutes

A story about pans

Raycast Focus works really well

American Hearts

My website has been gaslighting you

Updating my accent color

Rotating colors is fun but not without its challenges

Making "this" less annoying

Simple way: Overriding VS Code theme color tokens

Over the top way: Replace this with a custom glyph

Custom ligatures with CSS?

Twenty Twenty-Four

A month-by-month recap

Stats for 2024

Hopes for 2025

We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne

Vibe Check №36

A trip to the mothership

Other major happenings

The more quantifiable parts

🧠 Learning

🚀 Releases

📖 Reading

📝 Blogging

📺 Media Diet

🎙 Recording

🤖 Gunpla and modelling

🌱 Digital Gardening (née Open Source)

👾 Video games

My little games workshop

Mundango, a bingo game about life’s small things

Hard Code & Soft Skills, a workplace adventure

Pentablaster, an instrument with no wrong notes

An unreleased solitaire game

An unreleased Playdate game

How the sausage gets made

Unsure of what’s next… or how to book all of your free time from now until death with no promise of financial gain.

CSS wants to be a system

Every token is a feature

Intermittent fasting

I got the ADHD, too

Goodbye, Moogs

Over the top way: Replace `this` with a custom glyph