The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
DLC for story-based games is lost on me. I played through Cyberpunk when it was a crappy mess and enjoyed it. Phantom Liberty came out, I played it for half an hour and never went back. The game was over, I saw the ending. Make a sequel.
Had Soylent Green on in the background. The film sets New York’s 2022 population at 40 million; the source novel, set in 1999, gave it 35 million. The actual figure, in either year: about 8.5 million. We’re not running out of space, we’re running out of people.
Quibi was an expected failure but vertical video is a real business now. What will the first mega hit show be? I think it’s on the way.
Spider-Noir with Nicolas Cage looks delightful. Shot for both black and white and Technicolor, pick the mood you’re in when you watch. If you have a 4K OLED, you win either way.
Watched: Tag: The Assassination Game 🎬 A mongrel genre movie mixing satire, noir, thriller and campus comedy that never commits to any of them. Not worth seeking out but fine if it’s on. Linda Hamilton has a great time.
Apple announced on-device natural language search across your data at WWDC 2024. Nearly two years later, it still hasn’t shipped. Missed Spring 2025. Missed Spring 2026. Third time lucky?
For all the negativity about season 3 of Euphoria, leave it unwatched for a day and you’ll pick up your phone to find the closing scene spoiled. It’s television people talk about.
Finished reading: Moonraker by Ian Fleming 📚 Bond in the novels is a tool of the state. He is precise, observant, cruel and has a remarkable ability to tolerate pain. But he has no ambition beyond the system. His opponent, Drax, is nothing but raw ambition. It makes their exchanges good to read.
Watched: The Drama 🎬 Some call this a dark comedy but it’s a tale of relationship disintegration. The characters are under so much pressure they vomit. Uncomfortable to watch, but the leads are great. I won’t watch it again.
I enabled Trickplay (those little preview images you see when you fast-forward) in Jellyfin and then remembered it has no GPU. Oof. It processed some feeble number of media files on the CPU until I enabled the generate-from-keyframes option. Performance has shot up.
I bought a hybrid seven years ago after finding exactly one working EV charger on my longest drive. The charging infrastructure has improved since, but the hybrid has come into its own during the Iran war. You don’t realise how fuel-efficient it is until you see the price at the pump today.
I’ve started using Apple’s Downtime feature to put some friction between work-related apps and me. If I don’t, I’m in Slack all weekend. I’m not a surgeon and don’t need to be that available. The implementation is coarse, but it’s sort of working.
We’ve moved on from warm halogen bulbs to an array of LEDs. Hopefully tonight’s Lumie Bodyclock sunset will be more golden than the fluorescent white I’ve been putting up with.
Token-based billing for AI is inevitable. The subsidies won’t continue. With the drive to use AI where I work, I can’t imagine the token bill versus the payroll. If interns start becoming a thing in tech again, it’ll be because they’re cheaper.
The Commodore 64C took a four-year-old motherboard and put it in a nicer box. Anonymous beige, beautifully so, wrapped around the same clapped out guts. Now they’ve found the original moulds and dropped an FPGA inside. Took me ten seconds to to preorder one.
The worst thought about dropping off my old electronics for recycling is they end up in a landfill in some other nation. But European law seems strict on this. Now to wipe any lingering personal data first. If they’ll even power up.
