nick

Everyone could use a little optimism these days. This isn't anything crazy, but I thought it was cute and maybe even a little inspirational. Bob Wertz blogs about switching the fish logo on his blog from an anxious expression to one with an optimistic smirk:

This year, I surprised myself I chose the “optimist.” Don’t get me wrong, the world is still chaotic and disappointing in many ways. I could have chosen the “anxious” logo, or honestly, one of several “angry” logos. But in my personal life, the kids are settling into their new realities and my new job is going well. I’m making progress on my dissertation and I can see the end of my graduate studies. I see at least some signs of progress that make me believe that we’ll get through the global chaos and political bullshit. So I’m choosing to be optimistic about the semester. We’ll see how long I stick with this version.

As shitty as everything is in the world right now, life goes on. One day we might even make it out the other side.

See the income a family needs to live comfortably in every U.S. state

Annnd here's a little pessimism to even things out: in my home state of Ohio, your household income needs to be at least $226k to live "comfortably." We're nowhere close to that at my place but we do alright... aside from the mountain of constantly growing credit card debt that keeps us both up at night. The state with the highest cost of living was Massachusetts at $329,555 and the lowest was Mississippi at $188,000.

Be Afraid! The Silent Role of Fear in Decision Making

Negative emotions sell products:

Fear is a huge factor in our decision making. The fears we’ve listed here are only a few broad ones. There are other strong emotions that prompt users to make decisions. For instance, dating apps capitalize on loneliness, while ride-sharing apps prey on our desire to be independent and mobile.

When I used to sell cars, I remember this big boisterous sumbitch from Texas who founded some scammy company to keep customers coming back to the dealership for service, and ultimately, to trade up to a new car every couple of years.

He had this word track he called "action, good feeling, PAIN."

One example he used was something along the lines of this:

"We have this great Platinum service package I think you'll really like. You said you were taking the new 4runner on your trip to Hilton Head this summer, right? Man that sounds like fun; hanging out at the beach all day, having a few cocktails, living the easy life. Boy, I'd hate to see you stranded on the highway down there in the middle of that summer heat. Imagine having to pay $8000 out of pocket for a new transmission at some hole-in-the-wall mechanic just to get you limping home. That'd really throw a wrench into things wouldn't it? Part of that Platinum package includes a FREE pre-vacation checkup! So just sign on the line here and we'll get you through financing -- it'll only add a few bucks a month to your payments, and you'll get some peace of mind"

I know the linked article is meant to be a lesson in marketing, but companies who have to scare you into buying their product probably don't have a very good product. And if they do, what a fucking shame it is thinking they have to manipulate you into spending money with them.

MapQuest Tops App Store Charts After Refusing 'Lake America' Change

"We took the same approach we did with the Gulf of Mexico: be part of the conversation, and give people an app that keeps the names they're familiar with," said MapQuest general manager Doug Berger, in a press release. "Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right, by downloading our app."

Fear sells, but so does having a spine and not caving to every whim of a delusional dictator. I didn't even know Mapquest was still a thing, but it looks like a real viable alternative to Google Maps even in the year of our lord 2026. I never used Google Maps; Apple's version has been good enough for me over the years. But if I did, I would absolutely be giving Mapquest a try right now.

Update: god damn it Apple. As soon as they get a new ceo they go and pull this shit. Hope this isn't a sign of things to come 😒

How Solitaire Became the Blueprint for Casual PC Gaming - Old School Gamer Magazine

Technology has transformed where and how games are played, but the old lessons remain useful. Start quickly. Let the player understand the goal. Make actions readable. Create a session that feels complete even when it is short. Respect the player who wants only one round as much as the player who returns for ten. Solitaire did not invent every one of these ideas, yet it placed them together in front of an enormous audience. Its legacy is larger than nostalgia. It helped prove that a game could be simple to enter, satisfying to master and perfectly at home on a computer screen.

Twitter.now is still down at the time of writing this. I keep checking every once in a while to see if anything has changed, but the landing page is still just that graphic of an AI bird with a slingshot on top of a dead AI whale saying, "we're already learning the hard way..."

I'm genuinely curious to see if they'll be able to pull off a re-launch with working moderation. At least to the point where it's usable. Not holding my breath though.

To be fair, it's only been three days, so maybe we'll see some kind of update in the near future.

Cameron Banga's Weblog. · Working with the Iconfactory

I've been lucky enough to work on iPhone apps since 2009, starting a small iOS application development shop right after college. Throughout my time working to build a small studio, the work of the Iconfactory was always something to aspire to. Along with companies like Panic and The Omni Group, they have helped define what makes the Apple ecosystem so special.

Nice post from Cameron Banga on working with the IconFactory to get a sick new icon for his Bluesky client, Skyscraper.

The IconFactory is a hell of a team. They've been around since the 90s and you've probably seen their work whether you realize it or not — they've done everything from the Windows XP icons to a lot of indie apps, and even made quite a few of their own apps like Linea Sketch, Tapestry, Tot, and a ton of others.

I bought a pixel art portrait from them a year or two ago and I was super happy with it — and it looks like they're still offering them on their website to this day.

So many people are turning to AI slop for their app and icon design these days because it's so cheap and easy, but there's no comparing that trash to human-made art.

ⓘ This is not a paid promotion; I just really like the IconFactory, and smaller (human) teams like them are struggling in the age of AI-everything. If you can afford it, when it comes to hand-made vs something a bucket of microchips can shit out, always go team human.

It's Weird that Zoomers are Nostalgic for Beta Minecraft

One can debate the merits of Beta Minecraft. But, it is unlikely that our elderly zoomer ever experienced it. If he did, it was long after the vanished springtime of his life. In general, youthful zoomers did not grow up with personal computers. If we had one, it was probably a locked down school Chromebook. Far more people played Minecraft on consoles or on Pocket Edition. And these are very different games from Beta.

I love this! It makes a lot of sense to me, honestly. As an aging millennial, most of the retro games I've fallen in love with over the years are things that were never on my radar as a kid. We had a NES console with a pretty good selection of games in the 90s, and while Super Mario Bros 1-3 still hold a nostalgic place in my heart, my favorites today are the ones I never had. Castlevania, Bonk's Adventure, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, isometric Sega Genesis games like Light Crusader and Landstalker, and other classics I just never played until adulthood like Secret of Mana and Fire Emblem. The first time I ever saw Castlevania: Rondo of Blood was on the PSP and I wasn't that impressed. Then, years later, I played the original version front to back on PCEngine CD and it instantly became one of my all time faves. There's this raw charm and character you get with older games. Just because the shiny new one looks more polished and adds a bunch of extra stuff, it's not automatically better, you know?

The beta years were definitely the golden age for Minecraft, full stop. It was simpler and more limited in the way of blocks, so you had to get a little more creative, but that also means it wasn't overwhelming like it can get these days. It still ran like shit if you didn't have a higher spec PC, but it was a walk in the park compared to how resource intensive the later versions have become. I could at least play it on my old plastic MacBook with all the graphics settings cranked down back in the day. And best of all, it wasn't owned by a megacorporation yet. It was just a solid indie game that came out when I was a teenager — and that's some true nostalgia for me.

Gen Z kids flocking to the beta version is a lot like my love of retro console games that came before my time. It somehow feels a little sentimental, but more for a simpler time in general than simply reminiscing on the good ol' days.

For what it's worth, the folks on r/GoldenAgeMinecraft have determined 1.7.3 beta to be the sweet spot.

"iT woRKs BeTter in THe aPp!!"

I was there in the early days of phone apps. I built stuff for Symbian, BlackBerry, even the bloody Palm Pilot! The central problem with apps has always been that they are hard to update. Every new bit of functionality - or even a new page - needs to be tested on a thousand devices. Once done, it takes an age to distribute to users. The only way to solve that is to have the app dynamically pull in new functionality from a remote resource. At which point, you've reinvented the Web browser!

Sometimes I still daydream of a world where Firefox OS actually caught on and didn't die a horrible, premature death. I don't think the term "progressive web app" had even been coined yet, but that's essentially what your apps would've been. From what I understand, anyway. I have like four apps on my phone that aren't stock. Everything else I use lives in Safari. That was always the whole point of smartphones for me; a thing with a fully functional web browser that lets you carry the entire internet around in your pocket.

Miniroll - Your blogroll, anywhere

I came across this neat blogroll web app earlier today. You can add each website manually or import an OPML file from your RSS feed — pretty much what I was trying to mimic with my old blogroll, only it looks really slick and it's much easier to manage. On the paid version, you can style it however you want but I'm just using the free one right now because it does everything I need it to do. Some of the links are a little wonky though; I'm getting an error in Safari for random sites:

Safari can't open the page.
The error was: "Navigation was blocked 
by Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy

I think it's because I embedded the HTML directly on my blog and it doesn't jive well with Leaflet, so I just made it an external link in my nav. It's a pretty cool little widget nonetheless.

Mine, by Adam Ouston, a novel length story written as one sentence

That’s Mine, by Hobart based Australian author Adam Ouston, which features one incredibly, outrageously, long sentence of perhaps eighty-five thousand words. No full-stops, chapters, or even a few lines of space to break up the text it seems.

I wanna buy this but I have three more new books to finish on my kindle before I can justify buying another one 🤪

I wrote a thing about the new Twitter.now project yesterday. I said I was "cautiously optimistic" but I'm erring more on the side of cautious now. I think the two guys who started this thing might be in over their heads. There was a massive spambot attack going on all afternoon, flooding the feed with thousands of pics of cartoon catgirls and crypto bullshit for hours, and then they finally shut it down when the racist 4chan style nonsense started piling on.

You can still access the landing page, but I'm getting "a server with the specified host name could not be found" when I try to visit the app.

Before the spam started, a user pointed out that it was oozing personal information like emails and birthdays. Someone said you can bypass the fee altogether and create an account for free but I don't remember how and I can't search the post because it's offline. Update: @cassidyjames.com posted on Bluesky that you could bypass the signup form and create a free account directly from Firebase. The AI moderation system they called VERA was doing fuckall, so they took it offline earlier that day before everything went down.

It's a whole shitshow over there.

If you do a web search for "Twitter now" you'll still see big news sites running with the story about its launch as recently as four hours ago. None of them mention any of the fuckery from last night.

It's easy to fall for nostalgia. Especially when it's hyped up to be some revolutionary "fuck you" to Elon Musk and promises to bring back that cozy public square vibe we had in the old days of Twitter. The fact that you had to pay for it gave it this sense of exclusivity; you can get in on the ground floor of this awesome new social network. It feels like a crypto scam without the crypto. Maybe that's the new grift? Forget about all the digital ponzi money; just charge users to make an account on a new house of cards and pull the rug after people hand you money for nothing.

To be completely honest, a part of me wants to believe Elon Musk is sitting at his laptop, bundled up in his favorite Snuggie, personally carrying out the spam attacks all on his own — tears streaming down his face and into that stupid fucking sink he carried into Twitter HQ the day he took it over.

In reality though I think it was just a vibe coded fever dream from a guy who knows more about trademark law than software development. Bad actors noticed some big vulnerabilities and went in for the kill.

For a social network that sells trust as its main feature, I don't trust a goddamn thing about it. Of course I'll still follow up and start poking around on there again if it ever goes back online, but it's pretty sketchy right now, to say the least. I would've felt a little better if there was a blog where anyone who paid money for an account could check for updates, or at the very least an email blast explaining why the site is offline and what the plan is going forward.

It's a reminder of just how well places like The Atmosphere and Fediverse are being built; all the planning and security measures that were taken to make sure it won't all evaporate overnight — and that you can't trust every vibe coded app some LLM shits out.

It's also a reminder of why I was so excited to join Bluesky when it was new, and why I've been so cozy over there ever since. If anything, it's a great advertisement for how resilient and well thought out the more established platforms like Bluesky are. I like to see innovation and new takes on social media; I like seeing new things being built on the web. I don't even condemn vibe coding if you're using it as an extension of your own skills, but this... does not feel like that. And I'm no developer either, so this take is 100% an end user's perspective. But as an end user, I expect a thing I paid for to work and not to leak my personal data or let it get to the point of racist shitheads taking over before deciding to do anything about it.

It was almost surreal watching it go from classic 2010 era Twitter vibes to the dumpster fire it became after Elon's hostile takeover, all in the span of two days.

Update, 4:45pm EST:

Maybe this is harsh but I don't think so: it's a bad look to go into a project with such lofty goals, without planning for obvious risks like spam and privacy issues, idk.

It's good they at least posted some kind of update.

I don't know how to feel about this thing but I'm definitely here to watch it unfold 🍿

News about Operation Bluebird first broke back at the end of 2025 on Ars Technica.

An attorney from Illinois named Michael Peroff and his business partner Stephen Coates, who used to be on Twitter's general council, got the idea for the project when Elon officially dropped the Twitter branding and switched to X.

In 2025, they filed a petition with the US patent and trademark office claiming the branding had been abandoned:

“The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.’s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,” the petition states. “The TWITTER bird was grounded.”

It's been the better part of a year since that Ars Technica article was published, and Twitter.now has been online for a few days now. You can pay either $20 or $40 for early access, so of course I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see yet another microblogging site start off at the ground floor.

That said, as nostalgic as it feels right now, there are definitely a few areas of concern. For one, it's as centralized as OG Twitter. The Fediverse and Atmosphere are both decentralized; they both have their flagship servers like Mastodon.social and Bluesky respectively, but anyone can break off and make their own instance if they want. Mastodon has thousands of third party servers now, and ATProto is slowly but surely expanding out to places like BlackSky, Eurosky and Northsky.

The whole idea of making alternative microblogging sites was to do it better than Twitter did; to avoid some fuckass space nazi like Elon Musk ever ruining another one of these things again.

Their approach is different; it's being touted as more of a trademark challenge, with the intention to blow up in popularity because of the familiar branding:

“There certainly are alternatives,” Peroff said. “I don’t know that any of them at this point in time are at the scale that would make a difference in the national conversation, whereas a new Twitter really could.”

It feels like more of an outsider's approach at building something for the sake of going viral than something built out of passion and love of the game like Bluesky or Mastodon.

I'm pretty opinionated on that idea; that in order for a social network to be "successful" it has to be this behemoth where everyone you know has an account. I prefer smaller spaces online, so I definitely don't see it as a weakness. If anything, that's a selling point for me.

I have to say, it feels a lot like the Digg reboot — which failed miserably, for the record. With Digg, you could pay $5 for early access and get in on the ground floor as a Groundbreaker. Kevin and the rest of the Digg team took feedback and suggestions from these early backers and, honestly pretty quickly, built an app as polished as Reddit. The problem was that it wasn't an overnight sensation like they hoped it would be and it ended up having a bot problem. So in an ironic twist, Kevin promptly shut it down and turned it into an AI news hub.

And that's another thing Twitter.now shares with the short-lived Digg reboot: AI moderation. It's a selling point here; an AI that filters every tweet for authenticity and weeds out the ragebait that powers places like X. You can set a slider to what kind of trust score is acceptable and it hides anything that doesn't make the cut.

At the time of writing this, the moderation tab has been taken offline for upgrades or something, idk.

All of that being said, I'm still poking around on there and enjoying the familiar experience of joining yet another microblogging startup with only a handful of users.

There's no pressure; post whatever you wanna post. No cliques have formed yet. It’s mostly just the chaos of awkward introductions and cat pics.

The UI leaves a lot to be desired, but coming from two guys who (as far as I know) aren't developers by trade, that makes a lot of sense. I'm almost positive this thing is vibe coded but I'm not basing that on anything but a gut feeling, so I could be wrong.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I would never go all in on something so centralized; I am a total Atmosphere nerd. So many cool things are being built on ATProto there's not even any debate for me. This feels more like someone re-claiming that old MySpace swag and building a nostalgic throwback like SpaceHey than a X or Bluesky killer. Honestly though, if it pisses off Elon Musk even a little bit, or if it can get a sizable amount of people off of there — people who might be on the fence, or maybe someone who has tried Mastodon or Bluesky and just didn't vibe with it, I consider that a win.

My handle is @nic over there and you can check it out for yourself at Twitter.now.

update: yeah they're definitely going to have to do something about the moderation lmao this is a straight up posting-based ddos attack 🤨

UPDATE 2: jesus christ there's a horrible spam problem on this website. Not worth even trying until they shut down and address the abuse and spam. Absolutely fucked.

Update 3: looks like it's gone completely offline. You can go to the landing page, but it looks like the SSL certificate is invalid when you go to log in, so that's pretty sketchy.

Sadly, Dolly Parton passed away at 80 years old yesterday. A curious synchronicity people are posting about online today: Tropical Storm Dolly.

@stardustbluepr.com pointed out on Bluesky:

Storm names are chosen from six alphabetical lists maintained by the World Meteorological Organization that rotate every six years.

[link to skeet]

Tim Curry, also 80, left us too. The East Coast might be facing the wrath of Dolly soon, but there's no news on Pennywise popping up out of storm drains anywhere. Yet.

Two beloved icons have left us in the last two days, but these things always come in threes and there's another 80-year-old still among the living — and rotten to the fucking core. I'm not insinuating anything grim here, but it would be nice to see some balance in the universe, you know?

Netflix Announces Norm Macdonald Documentary Directed by Judd Apatow

Norm was always one of my faves. Shortly after he died, we went to the Funny Bone in Columbus to see Nick Swardson's standup, and he was in tears talking about the guy. His dry sense of humor always killed me. It's been ingrained in my own personal sense of humor since I used to watch reruns of SNL as a kid, mostly with no idea wtf he was talking about on the weekend updates because I was a kid. But he remained one of the greats for me into adulthood. One of my favorite appearances was when he did that Comedy Central roast and just read the newspaper the whole time, occasionally looking up to throw out a judgmental, confused smirk when someone cracked a mean joke about him. Looking forward to seeing the new documentary in October.

Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person

This is an excellent long read on that pile of garbage who wrote the wizard books, from the perspective of a trans person. They went from sharing a sense of belonging, with how badly Harry was treated growing up in those books, to burning their entire collection in the backyard. I can't pretend to fully understand how much the betrayal and disappointment stung in finding out the author of your favorite books was a despicable TERF; not in the same way a trans person does, living through it first-person. But I can definitely empathize and this essay really laid it out for me crystal clear.

From r/crtgaming on Reddit: I caught the final moments before my PS2's Graphics Synthesizer died.

I'm not big on posting Reddit links, but I loved this little clip. Someone is playing a racing game on PS2 and the screen gradually glitches out until the console dies, leaving a bunch of monochrome and pink visual artifacts on the screen. It's definitely an aesthetic 🤪

Designer Creates World’s Most Hideous Hawaiian Shirt to Hide From AI-Surveillance Cameras

A while back, I shared a post about a car with an anti-Flock wrap. Thought it was pretty clever. Now someone made an anti-AI Hawaiian shirt that does just as well:

Freshly reported by Dezeen, German designer Simon Weckert designed the hideous shirt to be untraceable to AI-integrated surveillance systems. Using a dizzying blend of colors and patterns, the shirt is ugly precisely because it’s designed to confuse surveillance algorithms — as Weckert explained, it’s the “interplay” of ghastly colors and shapes that hide its wearer from detection.

Honestly, the way everything's turned into a bland grayscale corporate minimalism aesthetic over the years, I totally embrace these loud, nonsensical designs. Especially since they're scrambling the brains of dystopian surveillance systems at the same time.

You know what I like about smaller social media / indie spaces online? There are no bullshit ads. People can still make money but they aren't going on targeted ad rampages with unlimited cash flow. If, among all the shitposting and jokes, you see a link to something that costs money — something on an online store, a subscription, a link to a game on Steam, a new book, etc. it's almost always for independent artists and creators. Whether it's posted by them or by someone who just genuinely liked the thing they made.

Mega corporations wish they had that kind of organic, word of mouth advertising. But instead they've created an entire industry based around learning more about us than we know about ourselves, all to manipulate us into buying stuff instead of just making cool shit, releasing it out into the wild and letting people decide for themselves if it's what they want.

I don't mind seeing an "ad" for something I like. Not something a bucket of microchips in a data center 1000 miles away predicted I might like based on my browsing history or something I bought on Amazon one time — something that wasn't shown to me based on my activity somewhere else. My purchase history at a store that sells my data, something I searched, something TikTok heard me say when my phone was on the other side of the room charging...

Lately I'm trying to vote with my wallet in a positive way rather than doing it only through boycotting terrible companies that make my skin crawl. That's the other half of the equation, right? There's an incomprehensible amount of cool art you can find in smaller communities. Indie games that play like something you'd find on the Super Nintendo if it was a current-gen console. Books written and published by someone who never went on a nationwide press tour backed by a major publisher. Zines. Yes, zines are still a thing, and they're cool as shit. Independent journalism that doesn't go through the filter of some eccentric billionaire who owns the newspaper.

Life doesn't have to be so goddamn creepy. Imagine a world without marketing directors going on cocaine-fueled ChatGPT sessions in the presidential suite of some upscale hotel in The City, scheming on ways to manipulate the masses into buying more shit that's just going to break or be out of style in a couple months.

There's nothing you can do about billboards or massive LCD screens plastered on every tall building downtown, but you can definitely curate a lot of what you're being shown online through hanging out in smaller, more human-centric communities.

Higher grades and belonging: New report shows trans students thrive with teacher support

Students whose identities are affirmed at school report a greater sense of belonging and higher grades, and are more likely to participate fully in class, according to a report released Tuesday by GLISTEN and the Trevor Project. Students report similar outcomes when they are able to connect with LGBTQ+ peers at school, see positive representations of LGBTQ+ people in their classrooms and attend schools with inclusive policies, such as those that allow them to compete on sports teams or use facilities that best align with their gender identities.

Wow, it's almost like treating people with a little respect and dignity makes a difference. No one can thrive when they're being talked down to and treated like something's wrong with them all the time. And even if someone's not constantly attacking you, it still makes you feel unwelcome when the norm is to do nothing to make you feel like you're valid. Trans kids are kids. Trans rights are human rights. Protect trans kids.

Fat people cannot win, regardless of what we do. And I’ve had enough | Rebecca Shaw

This is exactly how I feel as a fat guy in the age of Ozempic:

I’m a fat person. We are constantly badgered and tortured by a society that tells us to lose weight, at all costs. If you’re fat, that’s a moral failing: you’re lazy and unhealthy. If you’re fat at the gym, or jogging down the street, you’re an object of ridicule. If you lose weight with drugs, you didn’t earn it. If you’re fat and not self-flagellating at every moment, you’re glorifying obesity. If you lose weight for any reason, it then proves you were never really happy with yourself; it proves that fat is bad, that thinness was always the real goal. If you stay fat, we want you to admit you’re unhealthy. If you say you’re happy, we want to diagnose you with denial. So much of the condescension as well as plain cruelty towards fat people is packaged as “we just want you to be healthy”. If this were true (and if being skinny were the only marker of health, which it isn’t), nobody would be criticising John Goodman or other fat people for using medication, by saying it’s cheating.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. And fat shaming has become the norm these days; it's expected and encouraged by society. Even if you're going to get ridiculed for using a GLP-1 to lose weight, at least you lost the weight and aren't a reprehensible fat fuck anymore, right? It's not enough to simply lose weight; you have to earn your new status through humiliation too.

I've come to terms with being overweight. I'm okay with who I am at this point in my life. I spent the first half of adulthood strung out on opiates and cocaine. I was pretty damn skinny back then, and since I quit the better part of a decade ago, I've gained some weight. I'm not the poster child of perfect health by any means, but I'm doing a lot better than when I was living on a steady diet of drugs and honey buns.

Maybe I'll eventually get my shit together and lose some weight before I face certain death, but for now, I'm okay with just living my life. You'll have to excuse me for not wanting to revert to injecting a drug that makes me slimmer just to fit in with a society of shallow, self-appointed health experts.

Why Erykah Badu made incense with the scent of her vagina in 2020

“Most guys say that my vagina smells like strawberries and gunpowder. So I tried to duplicate that,” she said.

Honestly that's kinda fucking punk lmao get it girl.

A humanoid robot just beat Usain Bolt's 100m record, and roboticists are unimpressed for good reason

A robot built by Beijing’s X-Humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second record. Roboticists point out that speed on a known course is far easier for a machine than folding laundry.

If you think that's impressive, let me introduce you to: cars.

👾 what I'm playing:

Alruna and the Necro-Industrialists by @hallinniklas.bsky.social

Alruna is a compact and high-density Metroidvania, with a focus on sequence-breaking and playing things out of order.

Super fun little metroidvania. The link above is for Steam, but I'm playing it on the Switch. Anyone who knows me knows that metroidvanias are my jam. I've played every classic I can get my hands on, like all of the Metroid games, most of the Castlevania games, and plenty of indie stuff on my Switch and Steam. It took me a minute to get used to the controls and mechanics, but as soon as I did I started having a little anticipatory grief for when I finish it in the next day or two.

Lucky for me, it looks like a sequel just dropped pretty recently!

It genuinely feels like I'm playing a game for the SNES or Sega Genesis, and I respect that in a 'vania. 100% worth a look if you're into the genre.

Update 8/31: found a really useful map on ko-fi.

📖 what I'm reading

Everything Will Swallow You by @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social

I'm one of those dopes who hasn't read much fiction as an adult because I feel like it's "smarter" to read non-fiction. I realize that's really dumb, and I'm working on it. This is the first one of Tom's books I've ever read and the first fiction I've read in years. It's so good!

Eric and Carl live in Dorset in a small white cottage under the shadow of a big cliff. Eric sells old records and antiques. Carl cooks, cleans and crochets. Nearing seventy, Eric is a lifelong accumulator of obscure objects whose easygoing, chaotic approach to life masks some of the unaddressed sadness of his past. The significantly younger Carl is an old soul who has a sophisticated emotional intelligence and likes swimming, mid-century female novelists, fibre arts and Dolly Parton. If you passed them on a walk, you may not pay them much attention. Most likely you would see Carl's long floppy ears, tail and fur and mistake him for a dog.

I read that first paragraph of the book's description and immediately bought it on my Kindle. I saw a skeet from Tom saying he'll send you some post cards, a bookmark and a signed copy if you live in the UK so that's pretty neat. The above link is for the paperback.

Subscriber rot

Subscriber rot is the idea that while you may have been interesting enough for someone to follow you at one point, they stop being a real set of eyeballs who might see your stuff when you post something. Maybe they muted you, maybe they don't read every single thing and your stuff falls through the cracks, or maybe they just don't use the service at all anymore.

I think about this a lot. I have a little over 3000 followers on Bluesky, but I suspect only 500 - 1000 are actual people who regularly hang out there. I know at least some of them are bots because I look at the profile of almost everyone who follows me and I'll get a handful of obviously fake/bot/spam accounts every couple of weeks.

I have 4,000 followers, but it doesn't feel like I do. Engagement on my posts is fine, but it seems focused on a smaller number of people. Interestingly, Mastodon has a page in settings where you can see all the accounts you follow and that follow you, and you can filter for a few things. There's a "dormant" account status that seems to trigger when someone does not use Mastodon for over 30 days. I enabled that filter and it returned 2,914 dormant accounts. Of those, 2,244 haven't been active in over a year.

I'd LOVE to see a feature like this on Bluesky. Even if I'm not going to unfollow every dormant account, it at least gives you some idea of your subscriber rot status.

I do like to keep following people even when I realize they haven't posted in months or even years sometimes. I do the same thing with my RSS feeds — sometimes a blog will go into hibernation for years and then one day you suddenly start seeing posts from them again. I've been known to deactivate my Bluesky account for weeks at a time every now and then, so I get it. Sometimes you just need to take a break. Or with blogs, there's always the possibility that you get burned out and simply stop indefinitely, like Forrest Gump when he was done running.

All the Things My New Meat Glasses Can Do

I’m so excited my new Meat Glasses have arrived in the mail. I unwrap them and turn them over. Wow, they’ve really done it. You can’t see the camera under the ground beef at all. In fact, they look like high-fashion glasses made of raw, Grade A ground sirloin. Still, Meat Glasses are so much more than that.

Sons of Anarchy Cast Reunites for Very Meta FX Limited Series Starring/Created by Charlie Hunnam

I watched this show religiously. I'm stoked to see a revival coming, but it's not what you would probably expect:

According to the official description, “When the cast of Sons of Anarchy reunites at a fan convention after more than a decade, the line between life and art blurs as the fractured brotherhood finds itself up against a real-world threat more dangerous than anything they ever faced in their show.

This is so on par for modern life. Big burly biker dudes aren't scary. They're just a bunch of hairy middle-aged guys being a menace to the flow of traffic with "Save a life! Watch out for bikers!" stickers on all of their other vehicles. And maybe they do some crime every now and again, but that's only scary if you're a rival gang motorcycle club member. I can only assume right now, but if you ask me, real-life terror comes in the form of delusional, ravenous fans who larp as MC members. Trust me. I lived in backwoods Ohio when Sons of Anarchy was still on the air and every dipshit weekend warrior with a pension, a fully paid-off mortgage, and a Hog had a SoA hoodie from Walmart and thought they were tough as nails. Still a solid upgrade from the standard "if you're reading this, the bitch fell off" tee.

Turnstile Recruit Elton John, Slayyyter, and Panda Bear for Never Enough Remake

Turnstile have “reimagined” last year’s Never Enough with an incredible array of guests, ranging from Elton John to Slayyyter and Panda Bear. Never Enough: Versions, out next Friday, August 28, also features a genre-spanning cadre of producers, singer-songwriters, rappers, and assorted pop and alternative powerhouses such as Four Tet, Oklou, Alex G, Hayley Williams, A. G. Cook, Blood Orange, Nourished by Time, Julien Baker, Floating Points, and Mustafa.

Dude FUCK yeah! This is like a mini The Wall: Live in Berlin moment for Turnstile. They have the soul of a 70s rock band while pioneering their own FX-heavy brand of hardcore music. The first time I ever saw these guys was at the Blink-182 reunion tour after Tom came back. I'd heard a couple of their songs from an old friend back in the day but I never got into them until I saw them live. You really gotta see it live to get it.

For real though. Instantly became one of my top five bands. Brendan's energy is fucking wild on stage, doing spin kicks and crowd surfing while cutting between screaming and spacey clean vocals... it's the most catchy hardcore band you'll ever hear. Just the fact that they were on a legend like Elton John's radar at all says enough about them, but actually recruiting him on the new re-imagining of their latest record is bonkers. Super stoked to hear it.

Watching TikTok and Instagram Reels Videos Deactivates the Brain’s Cognitive Control Network, Study Finds

Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help them stay focused and weigh longer-term goals.

Everyone knows TikTok is bad for you. That's why I prefer text-based media over shortform videos 😎

Man Nicknamed “Bluntman” Arrested Ahead of Gathering of the Juggalos with 128 Pounds of Weed

The Mid Missouri Drug Task Force had received information that 45-year-old Kevin Jones, appropriately nicknamed “Bluntman,” was planning to sell marijuana during the Gathering of the Juggalos. This tip was confirmed on the festival’s website, where a listing for Bluntman’s One Stop Shop said it had been supplying everything from “blunt wraps to bongs, papers, pipes and lighter fluid” for over 20 years.

I grew up like two miles down the road from Legend Valley, where the Grateful Dead played regularly for years, where Lost Lands is hosted every year and also where the Gathering of the Juggalos has been hosted most of the time for the last two decades. I have definitely bought weed off this guy. It's not in Ohio this year, but needless to say, I've Gathered a lot in my day and it's always a great fucking time.

Obviously in order to be a real music festival, there HAS to be a few sketchy guys advertising various drugs for sale on crusty old cardboard signs. But cruising around in a beat up pickup truck and breaking a bunch of traffic laws all willy nilly is probably not the best way to keep a low profile while you attempt to smuggle in over 100lbs of weed and mushrooms.

The ancient, world renowned philosophers known as Twiztid put it best when they said, "Gimme gimme green leafs laced up with hashish,
When your ridin' dirty, watch for police."

Tiny Pink Springtails Appear to Teleport When They Jump

Japanese nature photographer Pendora shared footage of tiny pink globular springtails launching themselves so quickly that they seem to teleport. These Sminthurides springtails use a forked, tail-like appendage known as a furcula, which snaps against the surface to propel them away.

Honestly I couldn't care less about the teleporting thing; this is the cutest bug I've ever seen in my life 🥰

Driver Cited for "Left Lane Camping" on Highway 101 in Carpinteria - edhat

CHP used the traffic stop as an opportunity to remind motorists that driving too slowly can be just as hazardous as speeding. “Remaining in the passing lane while traveling significantly below the flow of traffic can create congestion, frustration, and increase the risk of unsafe lane changes and possibly crashes,” CHP stated.

If you're going 50-something in the left lane when the speed limit is 65 or 70mph, I'm going to ride your ass so hard we both might die. And as soon as I get an opportunity to pass you in the right lane, I'm going to cut you off so close we both might die. I'm pretty fucking laid back about literally everything else in life but this.

View: Tech faces its Big Tobacco moment, but teens have already moved on

Tech will also have to face a growing disdain among young people toward anything AI-coded. Nearly half of US adults aged 18 to 29 now believe the tech does more harm than good, up from 27% in 2024, a recent Gallup poll showed, even as AI usage among young people has ticked up. Luddite clubs are popping up on college campuses. And it’s not just Americans putting a premium on authenticity: An animated movie is taking off in China this week in part because it’s not made by AI, and instead was done with old-school, amateur 3D modeling by a mother-son duo.

I don't totally hate AI but it does always bring a single tear of joy to my eye seeing kids go full Luddite. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we got way too much tech way too fast. I am all about stopping and poking our heads up for a breath of air; simply living in the moment every once in a while instead of going all in on a world of unlimited growth and never leaving well enough alone. The kids are alright.

Be authentic. Make shitty art. Write bad blog posts. That's my whole schtick lately and it works out alright. There is no replacement for human-made and low-tech things and I'm glad a lot of that is coming back. Zines, blogs, dumb phones, regular old wristwatches, Polaroids, vinyl, even cassettes and CDs. You don't have to be a hipster, but it's fun to check out some of the old stuff we traded away for an always-online 6" rectangle in our pockets.

Man, our fucking basement flooded last night. A lot of places in central Ohio got a ton of rain in a short amount of time last night. I've already been through all the stages of grief and a fifth of Irish whiskey by now. After everything is said and done, I:

1. Know how to spell 'squeegee' correctly now
2. own a pretty nice 10-gallon DeWalt shop vac
3. am actually pretty fucking proficient with a squeegee
4. understand the mechanics of a sump pump

Life is fucking stupid sometimes. We at least got some quality time with the kids and gave the basement a much needed deep cleaning. Come at me bro; I faced a million spiders and a little bit of water in a dank spooky basement today.

Does vitriol make you feel special? — Harvard Gazette

Jackson and his colleagues analyzed more than 2 billion comments from 2,150 Reddit communities and found that both threads and communities became more negative over time, and that semantic differentiation drove that trend — that is, negative comments were more semantically unique from what had already been said. They then replicated their observational findings with an experiment that showed that social media users who were primed to be unique posted more negative comments than users who were primed to conform. 

Facebook and Reddit both capitalize on rage bait. It's social networking 101. But even if they didn't, we just can't help being negative because it naturally drives engagement and gives us something new and edgy to say. Humans are just kinda shitty 🤷

Quitting alcohol changes the brain and can increase the risk of compulsive drinking – new research in mice

Well I guess I'll have to continue drinking exactly the right amount every day so I don't quit and risk becoming an alcoholic.

UCSF cannabis study finds unexpected heart rhythm results

There's no denying alcohol is terrible for you. Weed, on the other hand...

This study set out to find potentially harmful side effects of cannabis use and found nothing bad to say:

“As far as cannabis is concerned, we did not find evidence of harm in this study. And the possibility that there could be something helpful deserves future research.”

They gave ~100 different stoners a Fitbit to track glucose, heart activity, and sleep, and they found on the days they smoked, they actually showed less signs of what they call a "premature heartbeat" — an early sign of atrial fibrillation.

I've been smoking weed as long as I can remember. Maybe that's a negative in itself, but the only other drawbacks aside from short term memory loss are the munchies and being couch-locked all day. Oh, and short term memory loss.

How "blowing smoke up your ass" was a medical procedure in 1700s

I'm not blowing smoke up your ass. Unless you want me to, you know, for medical purposes 👉👈

Chinese animated movie branded “worse than AI” goes viral after just 200 people see it - Dexerto

According to Shanghai Daily, some viewers said it was worse than AI-generated clips. Meanwhile, other X user claimed that it still holds more value than something made by AI. One user wrote: “I will respect the most dog a** animation done by humans than the most polished animation done by AI.”

Right? At least it's human-made 😆 big Xavier: Renegade Angel meets Seaman vibes.