phils web site

rip to a real one

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

in about 45 minutes i’m going to tie off one more loose end of my being shitcanned, which is to ship my work laptop back to wherever laptops go. this was very important to my former company, who sent me an email immediately after telling me I was out to thank me for my service to the company lol jk to let me know that instructions were forthcoming for sending my equipment back.

I should be more upset at the utter disregard for my humanity in their priorities, and the way I was dropped like a sack of potatoes without warning, but truth be told i’m mostly sad right now that I can’t use this computer anymore. it was a big part of the reason I was happy to be working there in the first place.

In 2020 Apple announced a processor architecture migration away from intel and toward their own chips, similar to the ones in iPhones and iPads. Having spent a decade figuring out how to wring performance out of mobile devices with small batteries, the Mac chips were stupid good, a generational leap in power and, more interestingly, thermals. laptops are supposed to make noise and get hot when they’re working hard, but phones and tablets don’t, and neither did these new Macs. some of them didn’t even have fans, some of them did but just never used them.

The MacBook Pro announced in 2021 came with this new architecture, plus it reversed half a decade’s worth of stupid decisions around ports, keyboards, and size to deliver a beefy monster that you could hook anything up to. I watched the announcement event on my phone while driving around a church parking lot with a sleeping infant in the backseat. I wanted one of these things, and then when I got a new job I got one.

You know when you anticipate getting something a long time and then it turns out the waiting was more fun than the having? and then you know the other times when it is actually fucking kickass to have the thing? That’s what this was. I went a little nutty and bought some ludicrously expensive monitors and crafted a desktop setup that I don’t think additional money could have improved. it was perfect.

As I type this, that poor Mac is sitting in its box, saying Hello in every language it knows for its next owner, hopefully someone on my former team that is still stuck on an intel machine. I’m using a different computer, an Intel MacBook that another company I worked for forgot to ask for back, to look for a job that might reunite me with an old friend. the only noise in the room right now is my fingers on the keyboard, and a FUCKING LAPTOP FAN

i am an engineer (apparently)

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This picture keeps coming up in my photo widget and every time I see it I think, unbidden, “this is a guy who in 15 years will be paid for his ability to think vigorously.”

I did ok in STEM stuff in high school, but by the time I graduated there was a strong pull, assisted by music and drugs and my near-total lack of executive function, toward the arts and humanities. When double majoring in music and CS because logistically impossible, I chose music, because I liked music, and surely studying it would make me like it more. right?

A disastrous semester that saw me briefly join the Square Root Club (members have a GPA whose square root is greater than the GPA itself) and move back home in disgrace created an opportunity for a reset. I took web development and Java and Linux courses at the community college and prepared to transfer to a larger school to finally finish my CS degree. And then whoops, I discovered tarot cards and the emerald tablet of hermes tresmegistus and switched my major to religious studies at the last possible moment.

Then I worked a bunch of nontechnical jobs at technical companies, and I realized my skills were not valued very highly and easily replaced. plus a lot of service industry jobs sort of get super old after a while. a visit to an art museum in Baltimore triggered an inflection point of extreme dissatisfaction with my material conditions and a desire to grow again, and this coincided with my wife hearing a boot camp ad on the radio.

It’s a cool experience to wonder how things would have been different if you did x and then you just do x anyway. Like timelines converging. Only now that I’m here the long way around, I’m very glad that’s the way I came. It turns out that the humanities help you to be a human, something that people studying exclusively computers their entire lives can forget about. I discovered /r/cscareerquestions, a cursed place that has 2 main types of post: “How do I direct every aspect of my life toward maximizing total compensation at a big 5 tech firm” and “help I make 3/4 of a million a year at google straight out of school and my life fucking sucks.” It turns out that you need social skills and political savvy and a working knowledge of how business works to thrive here, a fact that makes hardcore engineers mad but really helps level the playing field for people like me.

I’m not good at this work. I still feel like a toddler playing with Duplo blocks any time I show my work to my peers with a decade of experience. But I’ve crossed the chasm. I am a wizard, speaking secret incantations to conjure SAAS products from thin air. it’s an amazing stroke of luck that i entered this field at the perfect time and i’ve accrued enough tricks and resume bullet points that getting laid off, a nightmare scenario in other fields, doesn’t feel too scary. Even in a shitty economy, everyone needs wizards.

phil's web site

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

in the fall of 2021, when the web3 buzz was its loudest, and momentum seemed to be inevitably propelling us (with the backing of every venture capital cash firehose) toward a future of unescapable wallets and microtransactions and content gating, i tweeted:

Web1 was a bunch of pages with names like “Dan’s Web Site” made from raw unstyled HTML and it contained a 16x16px gif of a shooting star and 3 paragraphs of bright blue text about Nickelodeon shows and people keep trying to convince me that things have improved since then

on my old realname account it was maybe the most engagement i ever got, scoring a fav from a new york times tech reporter and making waves for a day or so. it was fun to reminisce but what's dead is dead, the corporations won and now we do all of our posts on a handful of mega platforms and that's it. maybe it'll all be tokens soon, who knows.

but then twitter began to crumble into a pile of dust and some people started to wonder where they should post if the chaotic maelstrom at the center of the internet ever stopped spinning. sure, mastodon is a thing, but many of us started to think back to the web1 days and dream of owning our experience once again.

it's been beaten into the ground that if a web2 product is free, the product is you, but that's not the complete picture. sure, your eyeballs are important resources to sell to advertisers, but your content is also critical for getting more eyeballs. so you make content that brings more eyeballs and are rewarded with updoots and retoots and maybe a boost from the algorithm to put your very nice content in front of more people, alongside an ad. infinite growth is the name of the game in this economy, so once the dopamine wears off you build a following and start to monetize your audience and they smash that subscribe button and up their patreon and at the peak, companies just give you cash directly for posts. so that's a thing you can do, if you want.

of course these market pressures are toxic and antisocial at every level, incentivizing individual actors and companies to maximize attention at all times, leading to truly bizarre behavior. large platforms now have entire enterprises devoted to pumping out content designed to frustrate and confuse you, because you might hate it but you'll watch til the end and then complain in the comments. so what exactly are we doing here?

web2 started innocently enough. facebook just moved dorm room social webs online, and presented a more polished interface than myspace, who for one shining moment got teenagers to learn css. twitter fully backed into realizing that people want to post "ate a sandwich" and became the hivemind of the internet, and reddit absorbed digg and every web1 forum in epic bacony fashion. they all run on the same resource: we want to express ourselves and be heard and meet new people and feel connected to each other and the world. we want to learn fun facts and see cool pictures and hear awesome music and laugh at funny jokes and partake in human culture. we want to love and be loved. and a bunch of public companies zooted up on infinite financing took all that and alchemized it into stock buybacks and yachts. we got something out of it, but it was more often than not a crude facsimile of the thing we thought we were getting.

so anyway. it seems good and right to not just jump to another huge platform where the experience is controlled by people working at cross purposes. mastodon is a step in the right direction, but you're still at the mercy of the mods, and the whole "fediverse" (i beg you think of a better name for this) introduces friction to the experience. the secret sauce of the web2 value prop is the simple signup form. no credit card required (unless you want 2fa) and if your username is unique you're in. it gets more complicated the farther from big central platform you get, and many have given up on mastodon at the first mention of "server instances". but if it gets more complicated as you decentralize, why not go all the way?

it is not free to make a website. there is a wide spectrum of cost, with one end being easy and quick but expensive, and the other being almost or entirely free of charge but with a massive amount of time and effort required. i chose the latter, and it took getting fired from my job to find the time necessary. not everyone can take this step, but maybe we can build some tools to help. web3 is running a parallel track, and following the spectacular crypto/nft collapse of 2022 i have found them to be much more friendly on the back foot. but the goal is the same: harnessing miraculous technology to give to and get from each other true connection and purpose.

so welcome to my web site. i'm going to continue to build it and put things on it and link to other web sites i like and i hope you come and visit. you can even subscribe to my rss feed if you want.

shooting star gif to follow

Help! My Survivors Have Unionized!

Wed, 08 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Spoilers follow for seasons 1 and 46 of Survivor

Please forgive me for being a quarter century late to this cultural moment, but I just finished watching the first season of Survivor.

My cohost and coworker Jesse had me over to watch the premiere of the latest season earlier this year, and I was extremely game to check it out. The show is kind of a beautiful mess; only someone dumb like me would jump in at this point, so there is no effort to explain anything that is happening. People are searching for hidden treasure in the jungle, and regularly squandering the immunity it apparently grants. One contestant is challenged to put 20 previous seasons in order, which is a very funny thing to ask someone who is starving in tropical heat to do. There’s something called a Shot in the Dark. Who knows!

But watching the alliances form and break, as people maneuver themselves and each other toward a spot on the dwindling cast, is very compelling. Reality TV is basically putting bugs in a jar and making them fight, but when the bugs show up and they understand the assignment and they are putting on their bug-fighting smile while they get ready to enter glorious combat, you can’t help but be charmed.

Because I am a cord-cutting millennial, I’m not used to waiting a week between episodes, so I decided to check out the very first season, which aired in 2000 (I was 13 when it came out), and see how the very latest season compares to the very earliest. I was very aware of Survivor when it hit the airwaves; there was no way not to be. But all I had ever osmosed from the talk about it was that people were voted off the island, one by one, and that there was a guy who insisted on being naked a lot that everyone was mad at.

It’s amazing how much of the DNA of the modern show survives intact: a much-younger Jeff Probst lays out the rules every episode for people tuning in for the first time, explaining that tribes participate in challenges for food and “immunity”, and every three days the non-immune tribe votes one of their members off. Eventually the tribes merge, different individuals gain immunity during votes, and once there are only two contestants left, a “jury” of the hungry ghosts of recently kicked-off contestants returns to judge a winner by whatever metrics they wish. The winner gets a million dollars (and a brand-new Pontiac Aztek!).

But the feel of the show is very different. The first season is figuring out what it is as it’s being made, starting as sort of a mashup of The Real World and a survival documentary and a gameshow. People are primarily focused on, well, surviving, setting up camp and finding food and assigning responsibilities, and the camera follows them as they navigate the unique situation they find themselves in. No one is thinking about the “game” aspect yet. Resentments begin to form immediately. In one tribe a “corporate trainer” interrupts people diligently working to say that they need to come up with a better system. I immediately dislike this person and hope that they are eaten by a Gila Monster.

But here’s where it gets interesting for me: Richard, the corporate trainer who seems at first blush to be attempting to be a middle manager to this group of castaways, immediately pivots to spear-fishing (!!!) instead to provide tangible benefit to the group, and quickly susses out tribemates who would be good candidates for an alliance. He appears to be the only one on the show who has grasped that voting is the core game mechanic that determines if you stay in the game, and that a single group voting en bloc has tremendous sway over a larger group that is made up of individual agents. This is basic game theory (Russell Crowe’s A Beautiful Mind wouldn’t come out until 2001 so no one knew about game theory yet) and it immediately catalyzes a chain reaction that ignites the entire season.

One by one, this alliance picks off their tribemates, and when the two tribes merge, members of the former opposing tribe are carefully pruned, starting with those holding a leadership role. It’s like something out of a CIA playbook. The opposing tribe is whittled down to nothing, causing increased consternation and despondency among contestants who feel like they are being subjected to the cruel whims of a tyrant. Two of them wear protest t-shirts to a vote, complaining that they are clearly next on the chopping block. But they don’t do anything about it!! At a point where the remaining contestants have the numbers to pick off an alliance member, probably Rich himself (it turns out he’s also the naked guy!), they never consider an opposing alliance and turn on themselves. One guy decided he was going to vote each member alphabetically to be fair. The producers do their best to add uncertainty and tension, with episode titles like “Crack in the Alliance” and “Death of an Alliance”, but the plan goes off without a hitch. The final four contestants, who face off in the season finale, are four that entered into their terrible pact in the early days of island living. I assumed Rich would eventually lose out to Kelly (I remembered someone named Kelly winning some reality TV thing but I was probably thinking of Kelly Clarkson) in the final round but he ended up winning a narrow gender-line vote to take it all.

I was enraptured by this proceeding, and was rooting for exactly the outcome that unfolded. And I think the reason why is that it is such a great illustration of the power of collective action. Maybe I’m reading into it too much, but in the last days of the Clinton administration, when union membership was approaching an all-time low and economics was taught as a series of independent agents creating market consensus from the pursuit of their own best interests, it was so refreshing to see even a slightly organized group presence cut through that vibes-based miasma like tissue paper. People were voting based on who they were friends with, or who they perceived were useful to the group, and were gobsmacked that there was a semi-unknown faction voting instead based on who would be useful to eliminate to advance the interests of that faction. “I didn’t come here to make friends” has become a reality TV cliche, and it may have been uttered for the first time in this very season, but it’s true! If you want to win the game you have to make the best possible actions according to its rules! It’s like getting mad that someone captured your bishop.

Reality TV is real to extremely variable degrees, and part of the magic of that moment is that it was unexpected and probably never happened again. Surely the cast of the second season saw forming voting groups as a winning strategy, and the game was never the same again. In the latest season, it’s a part of the fabric of the game, with factions and alliances rising and falling as the season proceeds, and most of the action is on the human dynamics at play, rather than the survival aspect. Curiously, it seems there’s a popular perception that backstabbing your allies at a crucial point is good to have on your resume at the final jury, so there’s a lot of “blindsides” of people who considered themselves safe, and it keeps things interesting. But it makes it all the more impressive that the original alliance managed, with some hiccups, to drive the entire action of the show until it had eliminated all outside threats.

At a time when union power is finding its feet again against corporate interests with unlimited resources, and students are undergoing incredible systemic violence to make their cause impossible to ignore, it feels of a moment to see some game show contestants realize that they collectively possessed a resource of incredible power, that not even the producers appear to have considered, and band together to wield it to victory. If they can do it, so can we.

Solidarity forever!

albini

Sat, 11 May 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Steve Albini died this week

I learned about a session he did with Songs Ohia in 2003. For their album opener, Farewell Transmission, he got the band and vocals and string instruments and everything hooked up live, and most of the musicians had never played the song before and were winging it and the part at the end when the frontman says "Listen" was him literally cueing the band and what Steve got from that room, in a single take, was this perfect track:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=malJUMz2A9Y&ab_channel=PhilBebbington

Listening to that, I can't help but think that was so good, why didn't he go for a second take. it would have been so much better

my chemical romance

Mon, 13 May 2024 04:00:00 GMT

i'm taking the last sips of the last can of caffeine free diet coke in the house. i want to stop drinking this stuff and i think i need to treat it like quitting smoking where you can't just "have one" later and not get sucked into a full-time habit.

I don't like how much I caffeinate when I want to indulge. I don't like how I pick restaurants based on their ability to provide an endless fountain of brown chemical. I don't like whatever it's doing to my taste receptors and blood sugar and dopamine ecosystem.

But man do i love diet coke

It tastes like science. Its flavor is Chemical. It confounds the human tongue until, overcome by repetition, it relents and adapts. It tastes like bubbles and brown and Aspartame.

There is no real-world equivalent anywhere. It's the diet variety of a Coke that no longer exists. Coca-Cola Zero Sugar is the spicy brother that fits with Coca-Cola Classic. It is a ghost of a ghost, connected to nothing and no one. A singularity.

I know from experience that I will experience physical withdrawal, most acutely blood-sugar crashes and drowsiness. I'll probably be cranky for a while too

But kicking this chemical dependency feels like a necessary prerequisite for doing more diet work, and I do not like being addicted to things.

Farewell, my sweet prince. Thanks for turning my blood to formaldehyde or whatever

talking-heads

Wed, 22 May 2024 04:00:00 GMT

I truly don't get why everyone loses their mind at this album cover. They made it in imgur meme maker and covered their faces with MS Paint. Who cares

big-kids-at-the-playground

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Here’s to all the big kids at the playground, clipping through walls and corrupting memory to get on top of the monkey bars, inspiring the next generation of toddlers to make their own fun. But maybe at the same time not setting the best example

Riven

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Myst, for many years the bestselling PC game of all time, has been subjected to like a dozen remakes with more and more realistic graphics, but the core experience doesn’t marginally improve because the world is not meant to be seen in that high fidelity. Its visual design and aesthetic fit nicely with the rendering capabilities of a 1992 workstation. Why is there a rocket on the island? IDK, it’s mysterious. And it has a piano in it, who cares. The rocket that does nothing and the giant gears that do nothing and the pirate ship that does nothing do not need 10,000 polygons from Unreal Engine.

Real heads know that the real prize is Riven, the 1997 sequel that takes the raw creative breakthrough of Myst and refines it into a thoroughly considered, expertly rendered, beautifully scored experience. Where Myst is basically a collection of escape rooms, elevated by sheer power of vibes, Riven introduces a large, interconnected world, thoroughly alien at first but slowly revealing itself through exploration and experimentation. You spend most of the game pondering your vague objectives, and fiddling with the systems of the world until the whole thing falls together in your mind, a Swiss watch of intricate and exacting design.

I bought Riven as a school-age child and didn’t manage to finish it without considerable help, but “beating” it was not super high on my priority list. You go to Riven to hang out. There’s shady jungle paths and cool roller coasters and golden elevators emerging from the water. THIS was the experience I wanted to see enhanced, one that looked so good in the late 90s that one of my friends was convinced it was shot on a set instead of rendered.

Returning to this world, fully rendered in 3D, I expected to feel elation, but that’s not it exactly. It was more like a feeling of peace, my mind sighing in relief, validated by all of the gaps it filled in between static slides. This game knows how much anticipation there is to fully explore every nook and cranny of the tropical islands and various other locales, and rewards exploration at every turn. The greatest joys come from peeking around corners you couldn't previously access.

The entire team returned for this remake, after scooping up a fan effort that spent like 10 years trying to rebuild the world themselves (the original 3D assets were lost, which is one reason why it took so long). I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not a dogmatically faithful re-render of the game but that the experience has been redesigned, in ways big and small. A major redesign (lore and mechanics) of the mysterious spinning domes that dot the islands make the mechanics of a big puzzle more clear, and make backtracking easier. The core puzzles of the game have been tweaked, making them more accessible and intuitive, without losing the magic of having to synthesize multiple sets of clues across 5 islands to know how to solve them.

Riven’s puzzles remind me of a Souls game. You can’t brute force them, you have to sit with them and forget about them and go salsa dancing with your confusion while your mind connects the dots as you ponder the shape of a leaf or something.

As someone who constantly wishes I could Eternal Sunshine myself to play this game fresh, I was grateful to have some new things to chew on. The Moiety puzzle now incorporates a doohickey of sorts that you pick up early on, and I was not a big fan at first, but it really won me over after several hours discovering the hidden messages from a rebel faction. I know from repeat visits to the original game that I’ll be back, because even once the puzzles are solved, starting over to marvel at the production values and the design and the art and that fucking golden elevator is always a worthwhile experience.

The only complaint I have is that the CG characters are a major step back from the full-motion video of the original, but thankfully they don’t look nearly as bad as the ones in the most recent Myst remake. If that’s the tradeoff to get everything else fully 3D, I’m on board.

meltdown

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 04:00:00 GMT

it’s not a true toddler meltdown unless your watch gives you a decibel warning

tropes

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 04:00:00 GMT

how have I seen two movies this year where a pregnant woman ingests a dangerous substance, gifting her unborn daughter with the power of foresight

Ratatouille

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 04:00:00 GMT

The best Pixar movie about the raw power of human creativity. Next time make Remy fall into the kitchen of Carmine “Carmy” Berzatto

yoshi

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

to the tune of "Yoshimi Battles the Pink by Robots"

his naaaaaame is Yoshi

he has a green dinosaur body

when he eats the bad guys

he lays eggs that are spotty

Lady and the Tramp

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

disney put the "sorry for the racism" card in front of this one for the Siamese cats, but there's lots of fun to go around! Some other stuff that jumped out:

parents have a baby, immediately leave to go on vacation
a scene featuring full-on dog fighting
a dog pound where we watch a dog walk away to get shot
a horse-drawn coach falls on top of a dog, crushing it. another dog unsuccessfully attempts to revive him and then mournfully howls as the scene fades to black (later the dog is revealed to be minorly injured. phew!)

oh yeah and the climax of the film is when the titular dogs stop a RAT FROM KILLING A HUMAN BABY

all of this shit went over the 3-year-old's head, so she watched a pretty chill movie about talking dogs and then the dogs eat spaghetti. 3 stars!

Survivor Season 5

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Great locale (Thailand) and some great contestants (Robb the goth bartender, Shii Ann the corporate recruiter, Helen the diving instructor) that got voted off in favor of the two laziest dudes in the bunch

Survivor Season 6

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

The best survivor thing is when a coalition who thinks they have the game locked up are betrayed from within, and their leader is obliterated in council with 0 warning. That happened twice this season. Pittsburgh native Jenna squeaked out a win but the final group of contestants were all very charming. Third place finisher Rob, who now has a podcast about survivor, was an endless font of whiny, incel-tinged misogyny, but mfer knew how to form and break alliances. Wonder if we've seen the last of him.

Survivor Season 7

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMT

An all-time great hero in Rupert and an all-time great villain in Jonny Fairplay. The dead grandma gambit was devious, and I went from hoping Jon would get voted off to hoping someone would, I don't know, torture him. But his defeat in the final immunity challenge, frantically begging for a deal while scout leader Lill calmly rebuffed him, was extremely satisfying. Lill and Sandra were the final 2, a fantastic outcome for a season that could have swung a number of different ways. Also, the pirate theming was fun and a lot less icky than the usual "exotic native" fare. 5 stars

Survivor Season 8

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMT

All-Stars was fun having seen the previous 7 seasons, like an Avengers team-up of survivors come and gone. This was the ascension of Boston Rob, who used his dark charisma to get to the final 2 with Amber. They became a couple while filming, and his proposal at the finale was either a heartwarming show of loyalty, or a scheme to get half of the million either way. Maybe both. Jenna quitting to make it home before her mom died was very sad, and Sue's meltdown after Richard was too nude was very weird and bad.

Paw Patrol

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMT

You know, I was really primed to hate this show. A hyperactive Nick Jr show about dog children, one of whom is a cop, sounds like the sort of thing I want to keep off the TV, but we were snagged by an errant hotel room cable session, and now Paramount+ is being used to binge TWO shows.

The more of it I catch, though, the more it grows on me. It reminds me a lot of Power Rangers, which I enjoyed vociferously as a 7-year-old until I flying sidekick'd my little brother into a pile of boxes and lost my viewing privileges. A group of youths is doing some fun thing until they are summoned to a command center, briefed on their mission, and transformed into cool heroes to save the day. Only with Power Rangers 100% of the problems to solve were "there's a bunch of aliens we need you to go beat up." Paw Patrol deal instead with real-world mishaps: missing animals, stranded vehicles, weather-related damage. There are no Bad Guys really; most of the crises are accidental in nature. There's a humanistic message baked into the heart of the show: society exists so people can help each other. If this sounds like the sort of dangerous communist rhetoric that is antithetical to American values, you'd be right: Paw Patrol is Canadian.

And Chase is fine. He does not possess a service weapon and doesn't perform arrests or prosecute crimes in any way. Mostly he puts down traffic cones and directs traffic and sometimes pulls a thing with a winch. Model policing. Also, the budget for his department (1 pup treat per job well done) is equal to that of fire, air, municipal construction, recycling, and water rescue. Correlation or Causality: Adventure Bay does not have any poverty or crime; the only mischief performed is by the mayor of a neighboring town. Clearly these dogs are doing something right.

I would be remiss if I did not ding it for the music. Shows like Bluey and Pete the Cat spring big on Spotifiable soundtracks, but Paw Patrol has 5 songs: the theme song, DDR background music "Pup Pup Boogie", a beach song that is a reggae version of the theme song, and sped of versions of the first two. All of them feature "Paw Patrol" heavily in the lyrics, as if children will forget what show they're watching. I'm begging you, give my poor ears some variety.

Survivor Season 9

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMT

A gender war season, not too notable except for winner Chris's incredible run after the men were whittled down to just him. He played his ass off against 6 women, beating them all by being very good at lying. This season featured two highway construction workers, both of whom made it to the final 2. My favorite job title so far, Mechanical Bull Operator, didn't fare as well.

Survivor Season 10

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMT

One of my favorites so far, for location, challenges, game mechanics, and personalities. First, it satisfied my curiosity for a rules-based edge case: what happens if a tribe loses every immunity challenge?

It turns out that they get whittled down to 1. Instead of a vote at 2, there's a fire building challenge. Then the remaining member is folded into the other tribe, in lieu of a merge. The tribe is said to have been "defeated". Interesting!

The remaining member was Steph, who became the Main Character midseason and I was rooting for her deeply to step into a fractious receiving tribe and connive her way to victory. Alas, power players immediately realized how much of a narrative threat she posed and ejected her immediately, but not before someone got tired and quit to keep her in one more round.

Stoic firefighter Tom is the kind of guy you need to kick out so he doesn't win the whole thing, but they didn't so he won the whole thing. And killed a shark with a machete. Tom ally Ian was also a novelty: not a villain per se, but just a someone who is bad at playing Survivor who made it to the endgame. His inept lying and bad alliance maintenance came back to haunt him every episode, and even though he redeemed his honor by throwing a challenge after 12 hours to sacrifice his chances in the game, why did you have to wait 12 hours to do that, man?

Survivor Season 11

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMT

middling cast is elevated by a stunning Mayan temple setting and the return of Steph, who is the most Main Character a contestant has ever been. Giant loudmouth Judd was the only other standout. Steph inexplicably made it to runner-up, would have been nice to see her take it but she made it much further than she should have. A fun gimmick but all new cast next time plz

Survivor Season 12

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 04:00:00 GMT

a heavily reused location and a dumb Exile Island/hidden immunity idol gimmick that went nowhere, boosted by back-to-back triple crosses orchestrated by Cerie, Terry's run of immunity challenge wins, and an all-time great crazy in Shane, a 3 pack a day smoker who reminded me of Trevor from GTA 5. Hope we see him again.

Survivor Season 13

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

A great season, after getting past the iffy "race war" pretense of having tribes of white people, black people, asian people and latin American people competing in tribes. things got very good when a mutiny left the Aitu tribe outnumbered and they stood their ground until the merge, where they overcame a 5-4 advantage by peeling off a betrayer and then systematically ground everyone to dust. Aitu survived intact until the final four, and refused to turn on each other even then. Some interesting hidden idol play, where winner Yul got it early on and used the public threat of it to preserve his power base. Yul was a master tactician, Ozzy was a challenge beast. I hear we see much more of a few of these contestants later on, and I can't wait.

Survivor Season 14

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

I'm given to understand that this is not a well-liked season for the fandom due to its "class war" gimmick (following the "race war" of season 13), but I enjoyed how it confirmed basic material analysis: the tribe that was well-fed and well-rested had the energy and willpower and morale to dominate every challenge. Unlike the diversity season, which demonstrated that different cultural backgrounds are valuable (and which led to more diverse contestants from that point forward), American audiences were not thrilled to discover that the poor tribe could not simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Elderly computer engineer Yau-Man was the star of the show, with his correct playing of a hidden immunity idol and trading his car for a deal for future immunity being iconic moments, even if season Rat Boy "Dreamz" reneged on his end of the bargain. Earl is the kind of winner you like to see: no drama, solid alliances, and just the right amount of betrayal at key moments.

Survivor Season 15

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Oops, All Villains! This season ends with a boring alliance run but starts with the best drama so far. This is the red meat of reality TV: people with major personality disorders put under duress and starting screaming matches that never end. The standout villain is Jean-Robert, a lecherous "professional poker player" with the thinnest skin on the planet, followed closely by control freak Dave. Here's to an era of weirdos dawning

christhile

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

a long time ago, a young Chris Thile cast his gaze to the heavens and resolved to find out if it was possible to become too good at playing the mandolin

gas-station-tv

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

one of those nights, man. long day of work, kid needed a lot of my attention. brain fully fried. think I'm gonna walk down the street to the Sunoco and stand in front of the pump and just watch celeb news clips and inane trivia until my eyelids start to get heavy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6smZ95QIPc

stand-to-reason

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Why do we call them Rationalists and not Stans to Reason

Meritocracy

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Ah, what a beautiful morning. This is a great day to take a deep breath, sip my coffee, and participate in the Meritocracy

Let us all reflect on the beauty of a system that assigns rewards in perfect proportion to our efforts

Let us gaze in wonders on the leaders of this system, who self-evidently deserve to be there by virtue of having done the most work, and who graciously hold the door open for the rest of us to follow

Let us avoid the fallen, who must be tainted by indelible moral rot to have been assigned such a lowly status by such a fair system

Let us strive ever daily for more rewards, for surely they are so close we can touch them, and only a modest increase in output will unlock this wondrous bounty

Onward! Onward! Onward!

The Little Mermaid

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

An all-timer. The world building and love interest are a bit flimsy but the surplus space is given to excellent character development for Ariel, Sebastian, and Ursula. Part of Your World is a once in a generation song, and when Arial whispers "I love you daddy" at the end I fall to pieces for unknown reasons.

git

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Ironically, “Git” is exactly what I would shout if I encountered an octocat in my home

Survivor Season 16

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMT

The "Fans vs Favorites" format is basically All-Stars with red shirts. The most ruthless bastards of the past few seasons return to face off against, and then use as human shields, superfans who think they are immortal. Hijinks ensue, including a cavalcade of injuries, 2 Medevacs, one quitter, and some of the tastiest blindsides yet. The "Black Widow Brigade" quickly emerged as the alliance with all of the power, and I was ready for a predictable conclusion, but thankfully "Ice Cream Scooper" Erik won a bunch of challenges and then allowed himself to be talked into giving up his immunity necklace, one of the dumbest things I have ever seen. Great stuff all around.

Survivor Season 17

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Gabon provided exquisite scenery and the challenges and merge shenanigans were great, but it was the social game, and larger-than-life characters, that put this one over the top. This is the story of Sugar, and the men she came to know.

Billed as a “pinup model”, Sugar was the kind of bubbly young woman that is often underestimated on Survivor, and who usually does better than anyone expects.

Her first man was photographer-with-dubious-British-accent Ace, who lovebombed her into being a reliable vote. Ace was a master of flattery, and expected Sugar to remain his loyal minion all the way through the game. She was the key vote in his blindside.

Randy had it out for Sugar immediately, but then again Randy had it out for every woman and person of color in the cast. One of the most viscerally unpleasant people on the entire show, it was clear to everyone that Randy had tissue-thin skin and a deep inferiority complex, which led him to dismiss the game of anyone who he considered to be inherently unworthy due to their identity. When Bill-Nye-Assed Motherfucker (dude used a buff as a bowtie) Bob made a fake immunity idol to bluff with, Sugar convinced him to give it to Randy because, and I quote, “it would be hilarious.” It was.

The season’s Rat Boy, Kenny, was at the time the best person on the planet at playing Marth in Melee, and grew out of his incel nerd roots into a likable underdog when he teamed up with hulking Olympian Crystal and used a series of inventive alliances to grind the dominant faction into dust. Ken was liberal with the truth, and this ended up being his undoing. An early exaggeration about Ace’s statements about Sugar got back to her, and when Ken set up an overly hubristic and elaborate scheme to knock out a threat, Sugar used the opportunity to play her hidden immunity idol. She had been exiled over and over due to the assumption that she would never find the idol, due to being blonde or something, and when she found it on the first night no one bothered to find out. She ended up handing it to alliance-mate Mattie in a show of force, leading to Crystal’s ouster instead. Kenny was soon to follow.

Amazingly, both of her idol plays were unnecessary. In both cases, the votes were there for the eventual outcome, but where’s the fun in that? Sugar had an eye for theatrics.

None of these moves endeared her to the jury, and based on their reactions to her I can only assume that she was personally annoying in the camp. But she played a great game, and her knowledge that the jury was poisoned freed her up to see her game through rather than cave to political pressure in pursuit of the grand prize. Two men gave her the respect she deserved, and she rewarded them each in kind. Mattie got her idol, and Bob, who became a surrogate father after the recent passing of her own, survived what should have been a vote to remove him due to a last minute switch from Sugar, and ended up winning.

I am given to understand that she was widely considered a villain of the season, but you know I have a soft spot for the misunderstood. We’re entering a golden age of this show, and I’m ready for it.

Stable of Delivery Professionals

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Please browse our stable of DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS.

Enjoy their dappled PATTERNS. Note the glossiness of their COATS, which indicates good health. Compare their STATS.

If you see a DELIVERY PROFESSIONAL you like, approach slowly yet purposefully, making gentle eye contact. Offer a TREAT like a CARROT STICK or a handful of OATS.

In time, you will learn to mount your DELIVERY PROFESSIONAL. Use gentle mouth sounds and subtle reining to guide them to their new JIRA BOARD.

By default, your DELIVERY PROFESSIONAL will move at a leisurely pace. Increase VELOCITY by applying a firm kick to their side. You can build up considerable VELOCITY, but be careful; too many kicks too quickly will lead to BURNOUT, and you will need to wait for your DELIVERY PROFESSIONAL to recover their STAMINA.

Your DELIVERY PROFESSIONAL will, in the course of their work, produce fetid piles of TECH DEBT. Clean out their CALENDARS regularly and you will build LOYALTY, which creates greater THROUGHPUT per SALARY POINT invested.

With the right tools and attention, your DELIVERY PROFESSIONAL may become a lifelong friend.

Upon successful exhaustion of their services, consider DESTROYING your DELIVERY PROFESSIONAL to access their BYPRODUCTS.

Gordon Goose

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

turns out some nursery rhymes have a very particular meter

Survivor Season 18

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

At the beginning of my Survivor journey, when I no longer could bear waiting a week between episodes and my jaw unhinged to the floor, ready to consume more content, Jesse told me to watch Tocantins. I just rewatched it and it is undoubtedly a classic season. There's no tribe switching, no idol plays at all, and most of the cast is pretty forgettable. But you have an all-time face and an all-time heel in JT and Coach.

JT, the Alabama cattle farmer, has maxed out his charisma. He is warm, charming, and fights hard in challenges. When his tribe hits the merge they are down 6-4, and then are reduced further to 3 after a medevac. Against what should be insurmountable odds, JT, his right hand man and skinny nerd Stephen, and singer/NFL wife Taj form an alliance so strong that they take control of the game and pulverize the opposing tribe.

This is possible because the other tribe has Coach on it. The human version of the eye roll/jerk off gesture, Benjamin "Coach" Wade is a familiar type of guy on here: thin-skinned, domineering, and blinded to all but his own glory. But the details really set him apart. A peak spiritual bypasser, Coach has Hebrew tattoos and does "a secret tai chi that you can only learn in an Asian monastery" and quotes Marcus Aurelius and talks about samurai a lot. He is a compulsive and prolific liar, and insists that he has never lied in his entire life. All of the ego boosting reveals a fundamentally weak character; at one point he literally follows JT through a maze to maximize his chances of winning, which is not very Warrior Code. At his final challenge he fakes a back injury to explain why he lost.

JT is happy to feed Coach's delusions, and whispers sweet nothings while systematically removing his alliance structure. JT goes on to win unanimously, and you are thrilled because you've been rooting for him. Outside of a particularly tasty blindside early on of Tyson, a particularly mean mormon guy with the build of a stick bug, this one rides on rails to its inevitable conclusion, but who doesn't love to see the good guys win?

Survivor Season 19

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

This season has two very different halves.

The theme of the first half is “off the rails”. The most chaotic and uncontrolled the show has ever been, it features camp sabotage, unapologetic racism, two medevacs, a week straight of rain and insufficient shelter causing players to cower in crooks of trees for a shred of dryness, a player getting thrown out of a challenge for repeated illegal moves, and a challenge getting shut down halfway through because one of the players appeared to die on his feet.

The theme of the second half is “Russell”.

I’ve identified the Rat Boy archetype before. Think Johnny Fairplay, or the Rob that has a podcast. This guy (it’s always a guy) is not particularly strong or charismatic, but has an animal cunning that allows him to sense social opportunities. He’s usually in the middle of big faction changes and is able to capitalize on strife and mistrust to get very far in the game. He almost never wins, because he’s bad at challenges and no one likes him very much. Sometimes he spews incel-coded invective about women as a fun bonus. There’s usually one every season.

Russell, a self described “oil company owner”, is on another level entirely. He looks like Richard Hatch was melded with Oddjob from Goldeneye. He’s a physical beast, and has a forceful charisma and an eye for group dynamics. He is the show’s first ever Rat Man, and he changes the game utterly and irrevocably.

Reality shows have “villains”: people who are proudly antisocial in pursuit of the prize or the fame that comes with being on TV. Small-time shit. Russell is on another level: already independently wealthy and with nothing to gain, he’s competing to prove that he can easily win the game using maximum deceit and cunning. To quote the Literal Joker, “It’s not about the money; it’s about sending a message.” He’s an actual supervillain, forcing the American public to watch him destroy a show that aims to celebrate virtue and achievement, and teach a dark lesson on the human condition. I am yearning for him to fail.

On the first night, he pours out all the water canteens and burns everyone’s socks. The following day he promises everyone in his tribe a secret and powerful alliance that will carry through the game. If anyone begins to detect the font of lies and blasphemy flowing from him, he targets that person for removal via Tribal Council. At any given point, he is either scheming with person A against person B, scheming with person B against person A, or bragging to the camera about how much he is dominating. Only one speed on this guy. And then, he goes down in Survivor history by locating a hidden immunity idol without getting a single clue.

Just by deducing that there is one in the game and that it’s probably near camp, he clips out of the game world entirely. Like Richard Hatch before him, he is seeing the matrix code of the game, forever changing it in his image, and he gears up for an unprecedented reign of terror on the other contestants.

Perhaps as a result of the low morale caused by open sabotage and deep-seated mistrust (Russell the oil executive teaming up with Ben the racist “hillbilly outlaw” to sow division is a too-perfect distillation of Republican politics), Russell’s tribe sucks at challenges. Going into a merge at 4 members versus the competing tribe’s 8, it’s looking like a blowout and an early end to Russell’s insidious ascent.

But the opposing tribe is well-fed and comfortable, and have too many members. Deep divisions surface immediately, and Russell is there to exploit them. Ex-marine Shambo, who sports the world’s greatest mullet and suffers from prophetic dreams, is an early defection. Power players on the other side use Russell’s squad as a well of votes to settle personal scores, and their advantage starts to become less lopsided.

After flushing Russell’s idol (it became an open secret that he possessed it), they were ready to deliver the killing blow, but Russell just went out and FOUND THE MOTHERFUCKING IDOL AGAIN. In one of the most cathartic tribal councils ever, he revealed his ace in the hole and sent another enemy packing. Of course, he is able to find the third idol with a minimum of information, and dares people to take another swing by wearing it around his neck. At this point, he is untouchable.

This is the start of an absolutely insane run, where Russell and his tribe manage to conquer an enemy force twice their size, banishing them one by one to the Jury. At this point it is impossible to root against Russell. He’s still a conniving bastard, but with a group of people to look out for and an underdog position, you want him to overcome the odds. And he ends up playing the perfect game. After the last remaining holdout refuses to go down in a series of immunity challenge victories, Russell finds the inner strength to best him head to head and ensure that the final 3 are the people he picked on day 1. He thinks no one has a chance of beating him; he taught a masterclass in Survival strategy and permanently changed the game. He simply wants it more, and the other two contestants in the running got there by cowering in his wake.

And then he lost.

The jury, it turns out, did not have to hand it to him. Seeing his megalomaniacal entitlement, they used the power they had to deny him what he felt was owed to him. At the end of the day, the supervillain was undone by his hubris, forgetting that personal beef is as valid a motivation for a juror than any “objective” assessment of what constitutes a good game.

What a ride this guy took me on. The face of entitled capital, begging to be rooted against, ends up being one of my favorites players of all time. And yet, the ending is perfect. He ultimately was proven wrong. Sometimes the people in the boats don’t blow each other up, and we go on fighting another day.

mermaid-unicorn

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

parenting advice: preschoolers love surprises. use one to lure your child somewhere they don't want to go, like outside or their bedroom. the object of the surprise can be actually cool, or just a fun piece of trash you find on your way to the car. the feeling of surprise at this age transcends whatever the object in question actually is. they get to experience the mundane and the present moment as holy revelation, and you get to exercise your improvisational skills.

the other night I was trying to get kid in the bathtub but she was in a running away mood so I told her there was a surprise. that got her attention but I had nothing. the words 'mermaid unicorn' entered my mind unbidden and I quickly GIS'd a picture of a mermaid unicorn. it was very well received.

Moana

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

This one really just fires on all cylinders. A pacific island buddy adventure flick featuring Lin Manuel Miranda at his least annoying, exactly the correct amount of Dwayne Johnson, and the eponymous lead voiced by a real teenager. Lots of Disney flicks look great and have stellar soundtracks, but only one has Jemaine Clement doing his Bowie impression as a giant crab.

My first viewing I called it Wind Waker The Movie, as a compliment, and that still feels right. A plucky youth leaves their tiny island home, becomes friends with their boat, dodges flaming projectiles on rocky barrier islands, and makes big discoveries about hidden identity. The ocean is everything here, a literal character that moves things along and has a genuine sense of humor. There’s swells and storms and pirates and marooning and monsters and everything you’d want in a maritime tale.

The ocean likes Moana, probably because she takes after her grandma, the village crazy who is actually a powerful mystic. This film does something very smart in the way it depicts the culture of Moana’s people. Tradition binds them to their island, reinforced by generational trauma. But leaving the island to chase the horizon isn’t the “progressive” move, it’s actually conforming with a deeper tradition that is all but forgotten. Moana moves her people forward by taking them back, and reconnecting them to a proud legacy.

Moana not only benefits from not having that “friendly character turns out to be a secret villain” trope that seems like it was in every other movie from its time, but it has the reverse: the horrible monster that has been set up as the Big Bad is, in fact, a hurt and misunderstood creature. What annihilates me every time I watch the ending is that Moana wins by seeing clearly, extending compassion, and righting an old wrong. The climax turns into a slow-motion, intimate, deeply felt moment between two women, and then all of the knots just fall apart. THAT’s what I keep coming back for.

Survivor Season 20

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

I’m really trying to avoid having my viewing experience tainted by “fandom” consensus opinions, but there was no escaping the knowledge that this is considered one of the best seasons ever. And once I saw how absolutely fucking stacked the cast was, I knew I was in for a ride.

The “Heroes vs Villains” gimmick worked very well here, giving each tribe a very clear character and giving contestants a moral identity to embody, or defy, or play around with.

The heroes showed some nice solidarity setting up their camp, and in challenges they tended to dominate the physical portions, but Christ almighty alive did they suck at puzzles. Despite having a full roster of proven performers, many of whom won their seasons, their story is that they were dumb and weak, destined to be grist for the mill.

The REAL action was always going to be in the villain camp, and the strategic showdown between Survivor royalty Boston Rob and bloodthirsty newcomer Russell was the beating heart of the proceedings. Neither of these men could feel comfortable with their standing while the other was in the game, and it was written in the stars that they would gun for each other. The beach scene before Tribal when each is considering the other’s moves, formulating countermoves, and then countering the theoretical counter-counter moves that may then arise, was some of the most riveting television I’ve ever seen. In the end, Russell pulled off a brilliant headfake and played his idol on Parvati to send Rob’s chief lieutenant home, with Rob following immediately after. As previously stated, Russell is Heath Ledger’s Joker, and Rob is one of the mob bosses gaping in horror at this newcomer who doesn’t understand that there’s a DECORUM to all this.

My favorite minor character this season was Coach, who really grew into a 3-dimensional character. He spent all his time in Tocantins in the dominant faction, and his unique style of obliviousness made him a very entertaining blowhard bully. Here, he’s a man without a faction (a Ronin, perhaps), and he is constantly trying to find honor where there is none. He is Michael Scott, a guy desperate to find some approval from the people he looks up to, and an inability to see the many ways he gets in his own way. His flirting with OG villainess Jerri was extremely cute, and Rob refusing to shake his hand upon his ouster was extremely devastating. When Coach told a contestant in the final voting booth that he had misjudged them, and that they were in fact a True Warrior, I inexplicably teared up. Fascinating guy.

From the merge, we are treated to another installment of The Russell Show. Russell has a supremely unfair advantage this season, in that seasons 19 and 20 were shot back to back for budget reasons, meaning no one competing with him had seen him play. I have a feeling that in an alternate universe where he was truly known to his tribe-mates, they would have voted him out immediately, but he was allowed to pursue his grievance-riddled campaign of savagery again. The grizzled veterans of Survivors past weren’t exactly the tissue paper that he was competing against in Samoa, but they squandered many opportunities to get rid of him. Russell’s alliance with Parvati was a lot of fun, though; their constant bickering like an old married couple contrasted with their absolutely effective campaign to clear the playing field.

In the end, Russell showed that he only has one way to play: advance to the end by any means necessary, and then lose the jury vote because you advanced to the end by any means necessary. Parvati should have won, but her proximity to Russell tainted her and Pearl Islands winner Sandra picked up another check. The morning of the final council Sandra burned Russell’s prized trilby, not even realizing that the first thing Russell did in his first season was burning everyone’s socks. Sometimes the universe uses you to bring justice.

It feels like Russell actually winning the game would break some cursed seal and unleash Hell upon the world, so I’m glad that he keeps getting held in check. A fascinating player, but I’m very glad he’s not in the next one.

Moana 2

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

I hold Moana Episode IV: A New Hope in extremely high regard, and would have loved for it to stand alone. It ends perfectly; her people revitalized by their drive to explore, they abandon their home island and sail into the sunset. But franchises gonna franchise, and what was supposed to be a Disney+ series (???!!?!?!?!) is now a direct movie sequel. It’s ok.

The music is probably the weakest point. Moana teamed Lin Manual Miranda up with Polynesian rhythms and instruments, and that inexplicably worked really well. I read on wikipedia that his contribution for the songwriter duo of this movie was to give them a, and I quote, “stack of books”. Thanks, man. The songs, like the plot beats, constantly and self-consciously reference the originals, making the whole thing feel like a rehash.

But the details are fun. Moana has a crew this time, and they all have big personalities and enjoyable little arcs. There’s some great dialogue during the “we’re all just hanging out on a boat” scenes. The water and light effects are awesome, there’s a huge clam, etc. The Kakamora—coconut pirates...?—return with some surprises, and the final boss fight, less against a guy than a force of nature, works really well. It doesn’t all add up but that’s ok.

I’m grading on a curve, because this was officially the first movie we saw in theaters with our kid. She was enraptured, and I had more fun watching it through her new eyes rather than my old and jaded ones. I will never forgive the film, though, for including a new character, Moana’s little sister, who is approximately the age of my daughter and just as expressive (not as cute, though). At one point, Moana has to leave her behind, and both have to wrestle with some strong feelings, while I have to compose myself during what is supposed to be a fun kid’s movie. Scenes like that should be illegal.

Survivor Season 47

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

A few years back, for pandemic and budget reasons, Survivor announced a “New Era” change in format. The show, which used to jump around exotic locations around the earth, would be shot in the same location in Fiji season after season. The iconic 39 day playtime would be shortened considerably. Seasons are referred to by number only, without any other sort of description. The runtime of each episode is lengthened from 60 to 90 minutes. These tweaks add up to make it a completely different game.

I’m in an awkward spot because I entered the new era in media res with Survivor 46, and I’m now 20 seasons into the Old Era, which has given me a lot of context for the show overall, but not much that is relevant for evaluating the most recent run. But I can compare this season to the last one, and to all of those I’ve now consumed. And I have this to say: it was very good.

No matter the location, the challenges, the gimmicks: ultimately a season of Survivor lives or dies by its cast. Interesting people, mixed up and forced to do interesting things, will produce fun, emergent, unpredictable behavior, and that’s what we’re tuning in for. In the New Era these people are pros: Survivor nerds who have analyzed every player and episode and are bringing their own ideas in to advance the metagame. This is different than the raw performances of the early show, where players express genuine resentment and hurl invective. These new players are like the old Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog cartoons: ruthless rivals who are totally cutthroat in the game, then clock out and give each other hugs. It’s not always as fun in a trashy voyeristic way, but it’s healthier, and makes it feel more like a sport than a Big Brother-style reality show.

Rat Boy Rome flames out early, coming in way too hot and getting burned. But we have a rare Rat Girl in Genevieve, a schemer from Canada who does her big move too early and spends the rest of the game scrambling for credibility. Rachel is a born hero, with some amazing immunity wins, idol plays, and a novel use of the Shot in the Dark. But Andy was the one to watch. In the first episode, he has a heat and dehydration-triggered panic attack, raving to the entire cast about how he knows everyone hates him and that he’s going to be voted off and his life ruined. This maximum cringe should have sealed the deal for him, but instead, and I cannot believe this is a thing I get to type, Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett was voted off instead, and Andy becomes an underestimated power player.

This is a Cousin Greg-coded performance, where Andy presents as a grade-A doofus to everyone, while subtly driving votes. This isn’t a terrible strategy: people are looking for weak players to stand against at the end, and a surprise reveal of a master strategy might get a friendly Jury to give him the game. The problem is he’s too good at playing a grade-A doofus, and so one is taking him seriously. In a poetically satisfying scene near the end, he confides to Rachel, about to be voted out for her stellar gameplay, that he is the true threat in the game, hoping to prime the Jury for his argument. Instead, Rachel plays a hidden idol and he goes instead.

What I noticed more this time around (and maybe it’s because I’ve leveled up my Fan Rank to become a listener to the official tie-in podcast) is that the producers and editors are doing an amazing job at storytelling. I really enjoyed the episodes where there’s a single challenge early on, and the extra runtime is used to really get in the players’ heads as they concoct scheme upon scheme upon scheme. Tribal Council is a segment optimized for dramatic stakes, and the crew does such a good job getting up close with players to wring every drop of catharsis from these moments. It’s an achievement, and very easy to not even notice.

What makes me bullish on the New Era is that these guys are total pros, and the culture of excellence they’ve built up over 25 years includes a robust impulse to experiment. Not every segment hits, but they’re constantly figuring it out, and that’s an amazing achievement for a show almost 50 seasons in.

Silo (Book Series)

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

After finishing up the Dune series (boy I wish I had had a place to review those at the time), I was looking for something that felt more like a good book, and less like a weird boring slog. Thankfully there’s a lot of buzz around the TV adaptation that is currently airing, and I’m a sucker for being the guy who says “actually, the book....”, so off we go.

Wool is an astoundingly good sci-fi novel. Published online as a series of short stories, it peels its layers back bit by bit, revealing an astounding talent for worldbuilding and some great character work. The plot whips by, but there’s enough time to live in the eponymous silo and wonder about the lives of people trapped forever in an underground tube. Of course, the tube is us all along, and the big twist that the REAL power behind the proceedings of the Silo is not the mayor’s office, but the IT department, is remarkably prescient for a 10-year-old book. Juliet kicks hyper ass, and her story, once it gets around to being hers, makes the pages fly by until the very satisfying ending.

Shift gets around the many structural challenges of writing the middle novel of a trilogy by refusing to move the plot forward at all, instead focusing on the backstories of a handful of characters, expanding the world laterally and catching it up to the ending we’ve already earned. I’ve never seen Godfather part II but it feels very Godfather part II.

Dust brings it all home, and it moves along nicely after a slower start. Once again, this guy knows how to please readers. The conclusion of the series (minus a short story that serves as tragic coda) is as happy and fulfilling as the conclusion to a story about the survivors of multiple genocide events can be.

This was a joy to read, and I’m happy to recommend it to others, because the author finished it before dying, and wasn’t zooted on coke the entire time.

Survivor Season 21

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

After an incredible run, it was almost a relief to get a total dud of a season. Starting as a young vs old contest, the tribes were shuffled quickly and a long, annoying slog to the finish line was begun. At least we got a sneak peek of Jack Black’s Gulliver’s Travels!

At the end, there was a real danger that the Jury would award the grand prize to a man named Sash, but thankfully, affable himbo “Fabio” got it instead. There were slim pickings for fun characters this season, though professional cheerleader turned master strategist Brenda and elderly Carolina hog farmer Jane get nods. There was even a man named Jimmy Johnson, famous for coaching the Dallas Cowboys, for a brief minute, but thankfully he was voted off once people started referring to him as “Coach”. Benjamin Wade would like a word, sir.

But the standout this season was NaOnka, perhaps the most singularly unpleasant contestant to date. Physically combative, endlessly argumentative, and willing to steal and sabotage for no discernible reason, NaOnka felt to me like someone who was accidentally swapped from a different reality show. Not that I’m an expert in the genre, but her style would be better suited for a Real Housewives or something. What bothered me about her demeanor, I ultimately concluded, was that it was so uninspired. A one-note reaction to every circumstance. It speaks to an effort to put on a show, but if you are in that position you simply need to try a little harder. Where’s the variety? The passion?

NaOnka ended up giving up and quitting mid-season, along with someone named “Purple Kelly”. Shortly after, during a Tribal Council, Jeff has to coach 3 people who are on the outs with a 3-person alliance through realizing they have the numbers to do, idk, something, to no avail. It was a telling moment; the impression I have of the entire season is that of the producers poking the cast with a stick, begging them to do something interesting.

The Book of Love

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT

I heard this song for the first time a few weeks ago, and it's been rattling around my head ever since. I don't usually sing in this register but it's a fun change of pace. I'm messing around with GarageBand more, I want to get better at their drum tools but this'll do for now.

Survivor Season 22

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Besides a very stupid mechanic twist, this season was a character study of two Survivor power players. Russell Hantz and Rob Mariano had a legendary showdown two seasons ago, and both men wanted a rematch. Two seasons later, they emerge from a helicopter as surprise contestants and are assigned to different tribes. The way things shook out ring true to their characters and playstyles, even if it was not always riveting television.

Cheese Play

Let’s talk Starcraft. A notoriously difficult game to master, Starcraft tasks players with setting up supply lines to assemble an army and destroy the opponent’s base. You can spend a lot of time mastering the fundamentals and practice against worthy opponents, or you can cheese it. The most famous example is the “Zerg Rush”: playing as the swarmy insectoid Zerg, you flood out a relatively large number of cheap units early in the game and send them over, hoping to catch your opponent off guard. You can win games against very skilled players by doing a cheese move, but it doesn’t make you a good player to do it. By definition, cheese plays are all-in; if your gambit fails, the game is over. Skilled players will look for telltale signs of cheese and react accordingly, and they will absorb novel strategies into a comprehensive playbook instead of using one or two as crutches. Cheese also fares poorly in the metagame: if enough people pull off a cheap move, the player base will learn how to counter it, forming a collective immune response.

The more I watch Russell, the more I think of him as a cheese player. He came in SO HOT in Samoa, proving to be a tenacious and ruthless player, and his presence was captivating. He made it to the finals and was hoping to win over the jury by glaring at them. Then he lost and immediately came back and played the exact same game again. It’s commendable to make it to the end of the game twice in a row, but his total lack of remorse and inability to show any chill made the jury vote a hard wall. I speculated that a cast of players that had actually seen him play before would yeet him immediately, and his tribe took the first opportunity to throw a challenge just to get the chance to get rid of him. How’s that for an immune response?

Russell only has one speed, one mode, and while it was riveting to see his novel idol plays and loose-lipped wheeling and dealing the first two times, I get the sense that we’ve seen it all. He claims to respect the game, but I don’t think that’s true. His emotional departure was all frustration that the game wouldn’t bend itself to coronate him. I hope we’ve seen the last of him.

The Boss

On the other hand, Boston “Boston Rob” Rob recovered from his early exit from Heroes and Villains to play a perfect game, giving Russell a thorough education in expert Survivorship. It’s clear that there’s respect for Russell’s contributions to the metagame; Rob was caught off kilter on his previous appearance by the use of hidden immunity idols, a mechanic that was introduced after his last outing. Learning from Russell’s cheese play, he makes a concerted effort to get one, and when he obtains it, he holds the secret close and uses the threat to build up a wall of unassailability.

Rob is an authoritarian. The value proposition for his alliance mates is simple: be loyal to Rob, and Rob will advance you. In the early game, he powers his team to victory and spins his web. After the merge, he brilliantly axes one of his own tribe who was thinking about flipping, instead of going for the opposing tribe. He enforces a rule that no one in his alliance can talk to outsiders without another alliance member present. He observes any close friendships outside and inside his alliance as potential competing powerbases and nukes it. His alliance echoes Borneo in the way that it systematically mows down its enemies.

In the late game, Rob is just flexing. Each alliance member has been promised by Rob an exclusive deal where, in return for unshaken loyalty, they will be carried to the final three. Survivorship bias ensures that this feeling is reinforced for the people who Rob keeps, and the people whose promises were broken are ejected from the game. As a final show of power, Rob svengalis his most loyal minion to vote off her best friend in the game, just to prove that he can.

Rob takes with him to the final a literal teenager who did nothing without his permission, and Philip, a bizarre and thin-skinned weirdo who constantly humiliated himself and alienated every other castmate. I was wondering if there was a competitor named Phil, and unfortunately, Philip is not representing. Sporting a hawk feather headdress and horrible saggy pink underwear, repeatedly invoking his past as a Special Federal Agent (the producers add a question mark to his job title, which is hilarious), and starting bitchy catfights with everyone over nothing, Philip is an immediate addition to the pantheon of weirdos, and the perfect person to carry to the end, if you can get him there without pissing off everyone else. Rob brandishes him like a specimen before the Jury; if he can pull off keeping Philip in the game, is there anything he can’t do?

More importantly, and unlike Russell, Rob understands the function of the Jury in the game, and delivers a masterclass performance, alternating between flattery, responsibility for polarizing actions, and emotional vulnerability. His competitors can only praise his game, and one juror even forgoes questioning to sell Rob to the rest of the jury. It was a coronation, and richly deserved. Rob famously figured out how to share the prize money of All-Stars by marrying the winner, but his gameplay that season revealed a natural talent. I’m glad he got to pitch a no-hitter, and I wonder if we’ve seen the last of him.

Redemption Island

I hate this mechanic. When a contestant gets their flame snuffed at the end of a season, it is a Death Allegory, and their departure is somber and final. When players come back from the dead, like Lill in Pearl Islands, it gets weird.

Redemption Island is a purgatory realm for dead players, to battle each other for eternity in the hope of being returned to the land of the living. There are nuggets of good ideas here, but my main gripe is that it ruins the dramatic flow. When a torch is snuffed now, it doesn’t really mean anything. Early in the next episode, a challenge determines if a voted off player is truly eliminated or kept around for a further indeterminate amount of time. Eliminated players get to make a speech and people golf clap as they burn their buff and leave. Rancid vibes.

I’m glad, though, that the stupidest and funniest possible outcome of this mechanic happened: poor Matty, eliminated early and sent to purgatory, wins duel after duel to remain in the game, and is allowed to return to the tribe at merge. Due to some poor choices on his part and a lot of politics that were out of control, he is IMMEDIATELY banished back to the spirit realm, where he once again doggedly fights off challenger after challenger, and then at the final challenge, where he can once again rejoin the players, he loses. lol

Survivor Season 23

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 05:00:00 GMT

A mechanical rehash of the previous season, “Survivor South Pacific” (it’s Samoa again) brings back two returning players and keeps the Redemption Island gimmick that allows players to return from the dead. It seems like the show is really leaning on its stable of characters in this era, and I appreciate how they give each tribe a focal point and Main Character. I spilled a lot of ink on Russell and Rob last season. This time around, the returning contestants are Coach and Ozzy, and I have less thoughts.

As previously stated, Redemption Island is stupid, but Ozzy is a perfect match for it. Not only does he twice claw his way out of Hades, like Kratos from the OG God of War games, but the first time he asks to be voted out so he can strategically knock out the current occupant and rejoin the game. It’s a phenomenally stupid plan, but by God, it works. Ozzy’s stats are so imbalanced; he’s a horrible alliance leader and social player, but man oh man is he good at challenges and fishing. The platonic Physical Threat. Because of Redemption Island he was voted out of the game three times in a single season, and each time he whooped and broke out into a sprint, as if he was Mario headed to the next level after doing a sick flag stunt. I was not a fan of his tribal politics arc, but fortunately he spent most of his time living alone and kicking people’s asses in challenges, and he grew on me considerably.

Coach, on the other hand, curdles on his third outing. A powerful alliance in Tocantins let him be a blowhard samurai idiot, but his time on Heroes and Villains was a tragicomedy of a man who claims to hold to a strict honor code forced to make morally compromising decisions, over and over. History repeats, but once again Coach is in the driver’s seat of a formidable 5-way alliance, and this time it’s very clear he wants to win. His gameplay is remarkably similar to Boston Rob’s no-hitter the previous season, but Coach isn’t ready to own up to his tricks.

The word “cult” is thrown around a lot when a charismatic contestant centers themselves in a gaggle of loyal alliance-mates, but the religious overtones of this season were very weird. Coach made sure everyone was always loudly praying, and conversations often turned to what God wanted for a given player. It does not surprise me that people bring their spirituality to the game, or that a riveting island adventure would take on a spiritual dimension for someone. But the constant scripture quoting and Most High-invoking ruffle a lot of feathers, and hurt a lot of feelings.

The chief casualty is Brandon, who has the misfortune of being a Hantz. The Scrappy Doo to Russell’s Scoob, Brandon is trying to restore the family name by playing a cleaner game, and spends his time haunted by what seems like a pretty gnarly past. Right off the bat, he attempts to eject a player for being too hot, making it her fault that he is Thinking Impure Thoughts. Every tribal, he bursts into tears, throwing everyone under the bus and wrestling with deep-seated shame (a meeting with his dad late in the season lays to rest questions of where this all comes from). Coach takes this baby bird under his wing, and they do a lot of clasping and praying and making promises. Brandon ends up being betrayed, and we find out at the reunion that his family is disappointed in his performance. This poor guy really needs to catch a break.

John “Cochran” Cochran is the only other standout player, that annoying kind of self-consciously awkward nerd who forces his nickname and gleefully takes the Rat Boy slot for the cast. His tribal betrayal opens the door for the Coach Faction to run the game, and Coach returns the favor by teaching him Tai Chi and then voting him off at the earliest possible opportunity.

In the end, Coach chooses the wrong goats, and comes in second to one of them. He did an admirable job getting his alliance to the finals, but unlike Rob, he wasn’t able to mollify the jury or own his game. His stated desire to get to the end with Honor and Integrity kept him in the driver’s seat of his alliance, but burned the very people he needed to vote for him at the end. Like Russell before him, he walked away from the game for a third time with the grand prize eluding him, his theory disproven. I don’t know if we’ve seen the last of Coach, but I’m not sure if there’s any more story to tell.

Survivor Season 24

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Not much to say about this one. Winner Kim played a nice clean game, the men vs women tribal setup led the men to an absolute rout, helped along by their boneheaded decision to forego immunity in order to vote one of their own out.

This was only possible because this is “Survivor: One World”, where the tribes spent a majority of their time on the same beach. Sure, they split off for a few days after a tribe shuffle, but at merge they were right back together again. I appreciate the Survivor crew constantly experimenting, and in this case proving that they had the exact right setup from day 1 of Borneo.

The One World setup also gave Colton a chance to try to defect to the women, who absolutely did not want him around. Colton reminds me of NaOnka, a villain as ridiculous as they are one-note. A self-described gay Republican, he clearly developed a thick skin growing up in the South and used his meanness to play status games outside of the game. Inside, he was a schoolyard bully, tossing out whatever slurs came to mind and destroying the self-esteem of his tribemates, both to their face and in his talking heads. He would have been mutinied at some point, but thankfully for all of us God struck him down with Appendicitis before he could really get rolling.

We were blessed with a man named Troyzan AND a man named Tarzan this season, the latter of whom got into an extended argument about if his underwear was poopy, but also loved his wife so much that he made everyone cry. Please, cast more weird old guys.

god-hp

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Whenever you see a picture on a site and try to copy paste it but it pastes the url instead, God takes 100HP of damage

Survivor Season 25

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Another season with a sprinkling of returning players, which is a very good way to get some in-depth character studies on top of the base game. Results are mixed this time around.

Featuring contestants that were previously medevac’d, we have the less-common three tribe setup, and this leads to one of my favorite mechanical outcomes: one tribe loses every challenge and is completely destroyed before merge. This has only happened once before, and this time the tribe is ostensibly led by Russell (not that Russell, though they did debut on the same season). He was pulled from the game previously for appearing to drop dead during a challenge, and his reputation before then was that of an affable and motivating leader. Would that he would have left that reputation intact. Here, he is a desperate and insecure control freak, and is dropped by his tribe after realizing that despite being built like a brick shithouse, he wasn’t actually that great in challenges.

The final two people from the “decimated” tribe, a sex worker named Denise and a strong guy named Malcolm are split between the remaining tribes. Denise ends up on Jonathan Penner’s tribe, and (through no fault of her own that I can tell) the constant immunity losses follow her. Penner is putting on a better show here than he did as the Rat Boy of Cook Islands. You can tell that he’s so charming that Jeff and the producers are all his friends, and he scrapes his way far longer in the game than he should have been able to. Alas, everyone on the island is aware of his persuasiveness, so he is snipped before he can reach the Final Tribal.

After the tribes merge, Michael Skupin’s tribe is dominant, but they are still untouched after 3 weeks and thus have not been able to use Tribal to cull unhelpful members. Skupin was maybe the most dramatic medevac in series history, having fallen into a fire in season 2 and severely burning his arms. Here he is charming, grateful for the second chance, and blasé about strategy. He would have been rootable had I not looked him up on wikipedia and learned of his horrible crimes.

Abi, a Brazilian “business student,” is the villain of the season, and she sticks around long enough to really get in everyone’s craw. She would have been one-note fare (extremely judgmental and hotheaded, inexplicably hostile to everyone) were it not for a brutal tribal when everyone aired their grievances and she broke down, apparently unaware that everyone thought she was so mean. Mayhaps some future personal growth?

Anyway, Skupin and former Facts of Life star Lisa make it to the end with Denise, who holds the distinction so far as the only contestant to ever attend every single Tribal Council in a season, and she wins.

This was not the most riveting season ever, but I appreciated the mechanical novelty, the nuanced and emotional social game, and the grace that everyone (not you, Abi) showed each other as they played a competitive game. Good vibes suit this show.

cat-poop-saas

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 05:00:00 GMT

I have two cats, and so I have two litterboxes. I am the litterbox guy in my household, so I spend a lot of time scooping their waste out of them.

I never paid much attention before, but for some reason this week I noticed a pattern that had escaped me before. I assumed that the two cats would either claim a litterbox for their own, or would use them interchangeably.

But no. It turns out that they do all of their poops in one box, and all of their pees in the other.

If there is a lesson about scaling SaaS businesses in this story, discovering it is left as an exercise for the reader.

Originally posted to LinkedIn

helper-functions

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 05:00:00 GMT

mr rogers taught me, when i'm looking at a total disaster of a codebase, to look for the helper functions

Survivor Season 26

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 05:00:00 GMT

The back half of this season is a solid season, with a great arc for the winner and some nice alliance shakeups. The first half is a disaster.

A return to the “Fans vs Favorites” format, a tribe of returning players are handed shotguns and directed toward a barrel of new players. This matchup is unfair, not just from the experience gap but because one tribe thinks the other tribe are royalty, making it just about impossible for a fan to end up in a dominant position. Thankfully, to round things out, each tribe gets someone who is too unstable to compete on the show.

The fans get Shamar, who is an Iraq War veteran who is clearly still dealing with what he experienced over there. He’s loud and combative and annoying and is clearly lashing out because he’s in a bad place. He begs his tribe to ax him, and instead, naturally, he is kept around for several rounds as the perfect smokescreen for blindsides. I’m not sure if the cornea injury that got him medevac’d was real or some face saving, but he should have been blocked by casting from setting foot on the beach in the first place.

Worse, the favorites get Brandon “Scrappy Doo” Hantz, who spent his first outing being haunted by the demons of his past, crying at Tribal, and being berated by multiple family members on national television. This kid was left off even worse than when the show found him, and they had the audacity to bring him back to ruin himself again. Brandon develops a murderous rivalry with Philip (a very normal man that I am always happy to see) that culminates in him dumping out the tribe’s entire food stash, leading the favorites to forfeit the next immunity challenge. Brandon gets so worked up while they’re standing on their little challenge mats that Jeff summons him over to give him a shoulder massage and declare him out of the game right then and there. No doubt a necessary move; if Brandon was allowed back to the beach there would have been blood shed.

The tribal merge closed the book on all of that nonsense, and Philip’s Stealth R Us alliance was in control. Then we got a fun play where the Three Amigos alliance, a trinity of himbos who were on the outs for their athletic threat, managed to win the immunity necklace and play two idols during tribal, forcing the dominant alliance to scramble before the vote. They ended up calling the idol bluff to keep the peace, but it was tremendous television, and saw Philip ejected. From there, Cochran “Cochran” Cochran somehow became a challenge beast and walked away with a unanimous jury vote.

I really didn’t like Cochran during his first outing, where he played up his awkwardness and relished in being the Rat Boy. This time around he mellowed out, and so his moments of triumph were much more fun. A scrawny Harvard law student could win this game without winning challenges, but Cochran outplayed his rivals physically as well, and had a great talking head commentary going the whole time to boot.

Survivor Season 27

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Up to this point in the show, Survivor has gotten the most pathos from its Loved Ones segments, where late in the game contestants would get to hear from home. Originally this would be in the form of letters, but a lucky challenge winner would sometimes get a surprise visit in person. The logistics of this setup meant that several loved ones were flown out, with only one allowed to interact with their contestant if they won their challenge. At that point, you might as well bring them all out, so the show quickly pivoted to flying out one loved one per contestant and having them all compete in a challenge together or something, with more face time for winners (Modern seasons have reverted to letter writing, presumably for cost saving reasons).

Making your starving, paranoid, unkempt contestants cry when they see their parent or their spouse or their sibling is tremendous television, so it was only natural that we eventually arrive at “Blood vs Water”, where each returning contestant is paired with a loved one, who will play the game alongside them. The twist, naturally, is that the loved ones will form a tribe to compete with returning players. This mechanic, alongside the reintroduction of Redemption Island (a Valhalla Realm for dead players to fight for a chance to return to the game) gave everyone an acute conflict of interest, and to top it all off, any time a player was voted off, their loved one had an opportunity to take their place in Hell. If you’re guessing this led to some messy gameplay, you’d be right, but I was surprisingly into it.

There were two mother-daughter sets, and in head to head challenges the moms kicked the daughters’ asses (hell yeah), but later in the game a daughter had to vote her mom out, and a redemption island challenge saw a parent pull ahead of their child and wobble on if they wanted to eject their own kid from the game permanently (they did). A returning player who lost their redemption duel openly speculated that this experience was going to make their boyfriend, a Big Brother winner that they had brought along to play, break up with them. Right off the bat, fan favorite Rupert ejected himself to save his wife, putting her on a hostile team for the remainder of her gameplay. Shit got weird.

The loved ones, being new to the game, got their asses handed to them again and again, and a dominant alliance led by professional footballer Brad Culpepper ejected not weak players, but those who would possibly entice strong players from the opposing tribe to sacrifice themselves. One of these players was Tyson, a gangly mormon who sneered his way through Tocantins and played a more subdued game with a major strategic error on Heroes Vs Villains . When his girlfriend was ejected, and he decided not to switch places with her to keep her in the game, he had the motivation to win the whole thing out of spite, which he absolutely did.

Of all the villains the show has crafted, Tyson is the one who is most putting on a show for the cameras. He definitely has a mean streak, which came back to bite him during Jury deliberations, but subsequent outings make clear that his first was subject to an edit that deemphasized his class clown demeanor and focused on his stinging commentary on other players. This time around, he was cool as a cucumber, knowing when to press his alliance for loyalty, when to scramble for an idol, and when to play it cool and let the game play itself. After the merge, anyone with a loved one still in the game became a target, and Tyson’s core group took the lead and ground down any and all opposition, with the only real resistance being a Hail Mary rock draw that backfired. Tyson brought his core alliance all the way to the end, owned his mistakes, and showed his softer side, and the game became his.

girlies

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the Situation Room, Mr. President. Here's what we're dealing with: at approximately 5:32 AM Pacific Time, the girlies started fighting

this came to me in a dream

Survivor Season 28

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 05:00:00 GMT

One of the only seasons in the twenties to not feature any returning players, Survivor Cagayan at least had a killer gimmick. “Brawn vs Brains vs Beauty” is a fun idea: pit a tribe of muscle freaks against a bunch of dweebs, and throw some models and cheerleaders on a third tribe for good measure. More to the point, what happens when one tribe is favored to win challenges, one tribe has good strategic play, and the third can run a stellar social game?

Well, the answer is that the brains biff it immediately. They can’t even do puzzles! A professional nuclear engineer destroys the tribe’s entire rice supply during a temper tantrum, and Team Genious keeps her around to blindside others. Savvy move, Poindexters. They hit a tribe swap with only three members left, but thankfully these three know how to play the game and put up a hell of a fight. My favorite player of the season, no-nonsense lawyer Kass, was a brain, and the way she broke alliances knowing that there was a lot of game ahead was very refreshing.

At merge the beefcakes reigned supreme, and they got to work decimating the pretties. Beefcake-in-chief was Tony, a hyperactive and paranoid cop who charmed and lied his way to victory. I have gone in depth on the differences between all-time Survivor heavyweights Boston Rob and Russell, and Tony is like a weird hybrid of the two of them. He inherits Russell’s absolutely shameless penchant for lying, and obsession with finding immunity idols prematurely, but he has the charm and magnetism of Rob. Tony left his own mark on the game by constructing a “spy shack” out of palm leaves next to the water well to listen in on private conversations. Evidence is shaky that he ever actually made use of it, but you gotta love where his head is at.

Survivor Season 29

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 04:00:00 GMT

A nice winner and very fluid alliances elevate an otherwise lackluster season. The early highlight was former MLB pitcher and walking Controversy section John Rocker get called out for being not only a famous athlete, but a bigoted piece of shit to boot. After his early exit, his girlfriend quit after getting caught hoarding trail mix at the merge feast.

Survivor Season 30

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 04:00:00 GMT

I like seasons with good casts, and I like seasons where the tribes take on a character, so I liked this season.

Survivor has experimented with Class Warfare before, with the big gimmick of Fiji being that one tribe would be better fed and more comfortable, with the results being predictable and not extremely telegenic. This time around, the tribes are evenly matched, but the makeup of each is determined by players’ job titles. The White Collar tribe is corporate freaks, the Blue Collar is made up of salty laborers, and the No Collar tribe is pure vibes.

Even before individual characters emerged, each tribe had a pronounced set of strengths and weaknesses. The white collars were experts of the strategic game, but chronic overthinkers and bad at camp (no one to delegate to!). The No Collars were very good at the social/emotional gameplay (standout contestants Joe and Jenn win the “I would have a beer with them” award) but flighty with alliances. The Blue Collars were challenge beasts, which gave them overwhelming advantage at the merge, pulling along a few defectors from the other tribes to create a juggernaut majority.

The blue collars were also emotionally stunted, with a very mean streak. Several players said some not great things about women, and one was so bad that Jeff devoted an entire segment in the jam-packed reunion show to it. You do not want that to happen. The effect of this was that players I didn’t necessarily like, like zealous oil driller Mike and “I’m going to walk around with just a bikini top” Yahoo exec (?!!) Shirin, became the underdogs agains a deeply unlikeable dominant faction. Rodney, a dumb loudmouth Bostonian contractor, was a primo Rat Boy, using his dead sister to form early emotional bonds in a nakedly opportunistic way and complaining that no one would give up their reward for him on his birthday. At the end, Mike used challenge wins and an idol to make it to the end, and thankfully saved us all from having to watch one of those doofuses win.

Vibe Coding

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 04:00:00 GMT

2025 has seen the rise of “vibe coding”: using AI tools such as Cursor to hyper-accelerate software development, allowing engineers to enter a purely expressive mindset and delegating the tricky technical details to machines.

If you’ve vibe coded, and you’re enjoying the freeform, creative headspace that you can enter while doing it, I have a couple of suggestions to take your vibing to the next level:

Vibe Drawing: Get some printer paper and a pen (if you’ve got colored pencils or oil paints, even better). Using pure vibes, apply lines, shapes, and textures to the paper in a way that comports with your inner state. Share with your family and friends, and display in a prominent household location, like the refrigerator!

Vibe Writing: Freed from the syntactic constraints of code, take this opportunity to write about whatever you want! Open up a fresh Markdown file, or use the pen and paper from the previous exercise, and let your imagination run wild. You could tell an imagined audience about something you’ve thought or experienced, or perhaps arrange a series of words that sound cool when spoken aloud in a way that stirs emotion. You could even make up a completely fabricated story, featuring people who don’t even exist!

Vibe Sounds: It doesn’t get vibier than this. Find something that will vibrate surrounding air particles. There’s a set of membranes in your larynx that will get the job done, but there are also a number of machines expressly designed for this purpose (ask Grok for more info). Once you get the hang of creating the vibrations, practice producing frequencies that differ from the original tone according to a series of precise ratios, or experiment with making sounds over regular intervals of time. Don’t worry too much about thinking about your intentions; remember, it’s all vibes!

Originally posted to LinkedIn

Survivor Season 31

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Kelley Wentworth was robbed.

After a refreshing number of new cast seasons, it was nice to round up the power players for a best of. The first steal-a-vote, some fun calls in for medical, and world-class idol play (and placement; hiding them in immunity challenges was fun as hell). An all-around great season.

Finding Nemo

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 04:00:00 GMT

For parents:
Before you know it, your child will grow from something you need to protect to a person that needs you to trust them, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy and terror. You will fail at handling this transition with perfect grace, but it is your sacred responsibility to allow pain into your child's life so they can learn how to be strong. One day, they will reward you for your trust with more love than your heart can bear.

For kids:
There are fish and the fish can talk. One of them says dude and one of them says they're going to touch a butt.

5/5

founder-mode

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 04:00:00 GMT

I’m going Founder Mode.

But founder as a verb.

I’m taking on water, listing to port in the harbor.

Help.

Originally published to LinkedIn

Survivor Season 32

Tue, 13 May 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Another BvBvB, and like before, the Brains are where the fun is at. The best seasons of Survivor feel like moral victories, and new favorite contestant Aubry pulls off something incredible when she convinces spry forest elf Tai to defect from his alliance with a misanthropic bounty hunter and NBA player. His refusal to contribute to a “super idol” (not every idea is a good one) was the turning point of the season, and a fantastic payoff to Aubry’s subtle emotional game. An extremely injury-laden season left Aubry with comically few allies, and another gimmick removed her #1 from the jury, so despite making it to the end she was robbed of a victory that she absolutely deserved. I wonder if we’ll see her again.

Survivor Season 33

Tue, 13 May 2025 04:00:00 GMT

This is another Olds vs Youngs season, with the much more provocative “Millenials vs Gen X” subtitle. The producers boil this distinction down to some bullshit “millennial don’t want to work hard and Gen X does” thing, which doesn’t ring true at all irl or in the game, but at least the cast is stacked.

Family Guy writer David has the best arc, growing from a neurotic nerd who is scared of everything to a neurotic nerd who is scared of most things but also a master strategic player. A shaky set of alliances make for a great endgame, and Adam, whose mom cancer story is devastating, sweeps the finals. Adam’s relationship with rival Jay is illustrative of the more modern show finding its form: these two guys are on opposite alliances and gunning for each other, but they also discover and nurture a deep respect for each other. I’ve always been icked out by interpersonal strife on camera, and it’s very gratifying to see that we’re largely leaving that era behind.

plausible-text-factory

Thu, 29 May 2025 04:00:00 GMT

LLMs have made my job much easier. I work as a foreman at the plausible text and unnerving video factory by the way

Originally posted to LinkedIn

surplus-value

Thu, 29 May 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Don’t cry because it enshittified, smile that it provided surplus value to users during its growth phase

Survivor Season 48

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Spoilers follow for Season 48 of Survivor and seasons 1-6 of LOST

I’ve been revisiting LOST with my wife, who’s never seen it. It’s a fascinating parallel dive into early aughts peak TV alongside Survivor, a show that I am approximately 3/4 of my way through binging. Watching LOST and Survivor at the same time makes it very clear that the former was heavily influenced by the latter. A group of castaways needs to form a rough society in the jungle! Factions break out and fight over resources, and castaways are brutally eliminated! The first season increasingly centers around a Hatch! The signs are there. I have no doubt that “Survivor but fiction” was somewhere in the original ABC pitch, and it turned out pretty well.

This time around, I am watching LOST alongside reading A.R. Moxon’s incredible companion series, an ongoing and seemingly novel-length dialectic examination of the central themes of the show that I recommend to anyone who theorycrafted and watercoolered in the later Bush years. Moxon provides a very useful scaffolding for examining a show that, even at its best, suffered from shaky pacing and inconsistent mystery management. One hanging thread is The Numbers, six integer values that I still look for in fortune cookies, whose presence in the show are all-encompassing but whose ultimate purpose is never explicitly revealed. I like Moxon’s theory, based on vibes but as good as any, that the central game between the entities known as Jacob and the Man in Black has spanned billions of parallel or sequential universes, and that the Numbers act as a “dimensional constant” anchoring the universe we are witnessing to its iteration number: 4,815,162,342.

On the other show where an omnipotent entity, at turns benefic and malign, manipulates a chosen set of candidates to either reach their ultimate potential or perish in the process, we are on iteration 48. Prior to a retooling of the show in 2020, each season was referred to by a name, either the filming location (Borneo, Guatemala, the hilariously vague “Africa”) or to some gimmick that shook up team composition (Brain vs Brawn vs Beauty, Millenials vs Gen X) or game mechanics (Exile Island, Redemption Island). As the show settled in Fiji as a permanent home in 2016, it entered its “Oops All Gimmicks” era, where each season upped the ante in an attempt to game viewership through Twitter virality. The New Era reboot was a big reset in game design, but maybe the most obvious change was in the nomenclature. Each season is now referred to solely by its season number, a mark of confidence that no additional hook is needed to get viewers to tune in. We know what kind of social experiment is being run, let’s put the cheese in the maze and get to work.

No matter what the rest of the game looks like, as previously stated, a season of Survivor lives or dies by its cast. It is clear that incredible care is put into choosing exactly the right people to play a good game, and we got some incredible personalities this time around. I was immediately taken with David, a gigantic stuntman with an abiding love of chocolate milk and a sort of clueless pathos about him, like a really jacked Tim Robinson character. Another early-season standout was a guy who worked for a pizza shop in Boston, who compared any gameplay moment he experienced to his work in said pizza shop, and who wore a t-shirt that simply said “Pizza” on it. His name is unimportant; we just called him Pizza.

<div style="text-align: center; font-style: italic; margin-top: -1rem;">Pizza.</div>

Unlike many shows in the Reality genre, and unlike its own early seasons, Survivor loves its players. These people have a deep respect for one another, and the production team does not shy away from capturing their foibles but also makes every effort to celebrate moments of brilliance. In what I believe to be a series first, there were not one but two moments of contestants providing their own diegetic music, not unlike Hurley’s Discman sequences. When sales guru Star starts freestyle rapping about her precarious position in the game, she earned a full-on musical number. Not to be one-upped, mercurial debate professor Shauhin lays down a tribal chant during a challenge, and the composers and editors take the cue and blow it up into a transcendent smack-talk montage sequence. Survivor’s production team works very hard to remain unseen, but I’m glad that they had some fun here.

The solid cast, along with Shauhin’s chanting, would have made this a standout season for me. But going back to the very beginning, the group dynamics are where the magic happens. 16-20 people in various stages of tribal warfare can form an infinite number of structures, like how the simple rules of Conway’s Game of Life can create surprisingly complex emergent behavior (Kamilla, a software engineer, can probably tell you more). And despite there being alliances and voting groups and betrayals and the usual Survivor fare in 48, ultimately this season was a study of that most basic social building block: the Power Couple. When the dust settled, this season ended up being the story of two pairs, one overt and heartwrenching, and the other stealthy and calculating. Obvious and occluded. Two couples. Two strategies. One is light, and one is dark.

The Overt Dyad is Joe and Eva, an extremely intense fire chief and an athletic PhD student, who join forces early on and become the collective beating heart of the season. Eva is the first contestant who is openly on the Autism spectrum, and joins the game knowing that her neuroatypicality will attract unique challenges, specifically around reading intention and regulating strong emotion. She needs to find someone who she can put her back to, and she finds Joe, who instantly sees his children in her and swears without a second thought to protect her as one of his own, which made warm stuff come out of my eyes. An early tribe switch leaves Eva without her support system, and in one of the most emotionally intense moments of the entire series, she is forced into a challenge scenario that overwhelms her. She heroically overcomes her extreme distress and beats the table challenge from Hell, but now she is so worked up from the challenge that she can’t regulate herself. Joe is given permission to cross tribe lines and give her the touch and words she needs to come back to herself, leaving everyone, including our stoic host, overcome with love and awe for getting to see something so beautiful. Eva and Joe really made something special together.

Of course, an overt power couple is a pretty large target for elimination in a merged tribe, but Joe especially played extremely cannily in the late game, running a Boston Rob-slash-Tony-styled play from the top strategy that demanded loyalty and kept him and his ward in the pole position. It’s an extremely tricky feat, but he was helped by David’s appetite for an alliance of beefcakes, and even though David himself was an early casualty of infighting, the Stronk Alliance (including Shauhin and Kyle, who wasn’t on the flight manifest) was the dominant faction to the very end. Against the odds, Joe and Eva made the final 3 together, and Joe in particular was on track for a well-deserved victory.

But they were all of them deceived.

The Occulted Dyad of Kamilla and Kyle, you see, were actually running the show the whole time. Early on they instantly bonded over their shared Guyanese ancestry, and when they were shuffled into a minority position during a tribe swap, they pulled off something truly incredible: they somehow convinced the majority faction that they weren’t close, that each would be thrilled to see the other gone, and that they would be a number to make that happen. This required absolute trust and very efficient information exchange when they got a second to touch base. In the end, they correctly sniffed out the larger group’s intention and hid an idol long enough (surviving even a bag search!) to turn the tables and yeet one of their assailants instead.

This was an amazing heist, and it served as a microcosm for the rest of their game; Kyle was drafted into the Alliance of Beef People, and Kamilla was on the outs with the reject group. While Eva and Joe formed the heart of the season, Kamilla and Kyle were the nerve center, able to combine their intel in the brief moments they had together into the most complete picture anyone had of the state of play. Kyle grated a bit while he deliberated over the right timing for them to use their collective advantage, but when the time came, it was a clean kill shot: an idol rumor, a rock solid shared story, and a little fanning of paranoia was all it took to get Joe to do the dirty work of getting rid of Shauhin, and no one saw the assassins in the shadows.

But the endgame was the most impressive feat of all. Eva and Joe were loyal to each other, so of course they wanted to take each other to the very end. Kamilla and Kyle one-upped them, though: each recognized that the chances of either of them winning diminished if they were both there, so they turned on each other at the final challenge, and when Kyle won immunity and Kamilla lost the fire contest, it was down to one. But unlike other secret power couples (Maria and Charlie from 46 spring immediately to mind), these two continued to play a shared game. Kamilla ventured into the underworld to preach the Good News to the jury, and even teed Kyle up during final tribal when he whiffed his first chance to lay out the extent of their master plan.

In any other season, Joe or Eva would have been a satisfying winner, but the Jury gave it to Kyle. If you want to know what I think, the vote was just as much for Kamilla as it was for her partner, and for the exemplary skill and novel play that they brought to their game. I hope that he buys her a few beers.

Survivor Season 34

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 04:00:00 GMT

I always enjoy the Avengers seasons, where we get a full slate of returning players to mix it up with Advanced Gameplay. I watched this the week that the Survivor 50 cast was announced, so I’m getting another one next spring. These seasons are always Bigger than others.

The cast was bigger. Every returning players season is full of Survivor’s most memorable characters, but this may be the most stacked the cast has ever been. My girl Aubry returned and once again schemed her way into the late game. Sandra was finally defeated after back-to-back wins. Tony had a mini-Russell arc, where he was deemed too dangerous to keep in the game after the reign of terror that got him the victory last time around. Everyone was bringing it.

The character arcs are bigger. One of the most interesting this time around was for Brad “Fuck You Brad” Culpepper, who played the redemption arc much more successfully than Colton but let his inner control freak out at the very end, which tanked his final tribal. Winner Sarah was the other cop with Tony during their first run, and her ability to detect that Tony was a cop helped send her to the jury early. This time she decided to actually play the game, letting her inner criminal run free, and it worked out extremely well for her. I hope she returns.

The game mechanics were bigger. In a series first, perpetual late-gamer Cirie was eliminated from the game without receiving any votes, due to immunities and advantages protecting every other player.

Finally, the controversy was bigger. In a moment of television that absolutely went down in infamy, Season 2’s Jeff Varner attempts to smear wily newbie Zeke by insinuating that because he was transgender and had not shared that fact with his tribe, he was inherently untrustworthy. This was a very dumb thing to say, and seeing Varner deflate like an old sad balloon as everyone instantly turns on him was satisfying at least. IDK, it’s 2025 now and I’m not sure what that would have looked like now, but in the late TwentyTeens at least every other contestant and the show’s host really dug in and stood up for Zeke in a way that was as Faith in Humanity Restored as it was embarrassing for Varner. It seems like he learned something from the whole ordeal, which is the best you can hope for.

Survivor Season 35

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 04:00:00 GMT

This season has the same problem as Nicaragua: on the heels of an action-packed, star-studded returning players season, we pick up with an all-new cast, none of whom make much of an initial impression. The gimmick this time around is “Heroes vs Healers vs Hustlers”, which is maybe the weakest tribal composition stunt to date. What is the difference between a hero and a healer?

Nothing of consequence happens in the first half, but post-merge this turned into one of my favorite seasons. A dominant alliance of two tribes (again, doesn’t matter which) forms to take out the other, but a sub-alliance forms to flip the game and use the stragglers as a vote to blindside an intra-group threat. Here’s the interesting part, though: PTSD-riddled Marine Ben goes double-agent mode, pretending to be on the wrong side of the vote so he can be grouped in with the rejects and gather intel. The following tribal he is able to blindside them once again by flipping his vote back to his real alliance, who briefly considered getting Ben out instead, due to his fantastic gameplay. They probably should have.

This season oozed with idols and advantages, but Ben kept the idol he found by chance a secret, while everyone else brought their trusted crew in on their finds. This ended up backfiring for the whole crew when mid-game shifts put former allies on the outs with each other, and in a particularly messy tribal, all secrets were flushed, except Ben’s. He played his idol perfectly to save himself at a time when his angry tribunates wanted an easy vote to get rid of what was becoming an insurmountable threat.

THEN, motherfucker finds another idol and plays it at the following tribal. And THEN HE DOES IT AGAIN! This is some real First Blood Part One shit, a haunted veteran realizing that he has no one in his corner, taking on the world. He has Russell’s work ethic and nose for idol hunting, but unlike Survivor’s Joker, he also has a compelling story and a charming affect. Once the idols are up, Ben was saved once again by a change in format that decides the final 3 by fire-making challenge. Former ally Chrissy went on an insane immunity run and would have been a worthy winner, but Ben pulled off what Russell couldn’t: he dared the Jury to deny his superior gameplay, and they couldn’t. I wonder if he’s coming back.

Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 04:00:00 GMT

contains spoilers to the thing I’m writing about

I have begun a journey here. In a cultural trade with Jesse, in exchange for him watching Andor, I am to watch Battlestar Galactica, a show that I somehow completely missed when it aired. Now that he understands that the only way to defeat the United Sta-uhhhh I mean the Galactic Empire is through armed resistance, it is my turn to live up to my end of the bargain. I was helpfully guided to the miniseries, an extended pilot for the show that sets the whole shebang in motion. Let us now dispense with the bears and beets and get to it.

BSG is a Syence Fyction show about a bunch of guys on a spaceship. Unlike that other show with a similar premise, this is not a show about discovery and diplomacy and forming a more just Galactic Society. Galactica is a naval vessel, the last surviving military unit of a human colonial society that was just wiped off the map. The dastardly Cylons, a race of machines built by the humans who rebelled decades before, annihilated all 12 Zodiac-themed colony worlds in an attempt to eradicate the species. Conveniently for the special effects team (they do a great job within their budgetary constraints, giving the whole production a charming Doctor Who feel), the Cylons often take the form of humans, and their disguises are so convincing that it’s possible (and indeed is the case) that there are Cylon spies aboard our eponymous vessel.

The Cylon attack feels a lot like “Space 9/11”, with the familiar beats of shock, anger, and grief. The show does a lot to make the stakes of the casualty toll real, including more than one instance of violence against children, which I didn’t care for. Our two leaders, military commander Adama (played by “picture you see when you look up ‘Grizzled’ in the dictionary”’s Edward James Olmos) and designated survivor’d civilian President Roslin, start their uneasy relationship by getting the whole “military coup” thing out of the way. Adama defers to Roslin’s authority, for now, and radiates President Bartlett energy in between bouts of dealing with his surviving Large Adult Son.

Outside of Gaius, a Sam Altmanish tech guru who got honeypotted into betraying the human race and is still haunted by the specter of his robot girlfriend, the ensemble cast are mostly crew members of the Galactica, making this a workplace drama. Before the show goes full disaster mode, we get to know our character by watching them work, fight, meet cute, and secretly make out. It’s been observed that more recently media has basically forgotten that people get horny, and it was refreshing to see, in a show that is at least partially a meditation on what it means to be human, a full spectrum of human emotions, reactions, and behavior.

Speaking of days gone by, the series opens on a spectacular continuous camera shot that zips and twirls through a series of hallways and rooms, including the Galactica’s command deck, flexing their cinematography and their big, beautiful set. Just like the crew of the Battlestar, the crew of this show are young, scrappy, and fanatical about doing good work. In the much stupider AI apocalypse we are actually living through, experiencing human handiwork that oozes with love and care is always welcome.

Blue Prince

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Contains extremely light spoilers for Blue Prince. I strongly advise you to just play the game and then come back later to talk to me about it.

If someone compares a game to Outer Wilds or Myst, that is a precious gift to me, because it means I can buy it sight unseen and go into it completely cold. I had the privilege of doing that with Blue Prince, and it spit me out two weeks later, haunted in the night by dreams of corridors and hallways, with 10+ notebook pages full of scribbles, questions, clues. I had achieved the ostensible goal of the game (locating the 46th room in a 45-room mansion) and rolled credits, but there are still dozens of locked safes, distant doors, and whispers of the history of an entire fictional continent to draw me back in.

The roguelike structure of the game initially threw me. It can be frustrating to learn of a path forward that relies on the RNG spitting you the exact set of circumstances you need to explore it. But over time I warmed to this structure. The game throws so many clues and paths and patterns at you that I almost never felt like I wasted a run. Other puzzle games may take you to a single locked door, and no further progress is possible until you wrack your brain and solve the puzzle that opens it. Blue Prince doesn’t have this structural problem; it branches out fractally in every direction, layering mechanics one on top of the other, so you’re usually pushing your awareness outward, or reinforcing glimpses of a larger picture. This game rewards careful observation.

Early on, the main character’s great uncle, who sets the stipulations of the challenge before you, warns that the task will be difficult, but that he has full confidence that you are worthy of it. This game is tough, but it is not cruel. I fiddled with some tricky puzzles early on, and far later I discovered rooms that laid out some of the rules to those puzzles that would have made them easier. The in-game library includes what is fundamentally a Prima Strategy Guide for the game itself, laying out dozens of pages worth of tricks to assist in the fundamentals of room drafting.

I’ve put Blue Prince back on the shelf for now, but it has easily landed a spot on my Top Five Puzzle Games list, and it will draw me back someday, desperate to turn over every stone and unlock every door.

Elio

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 04:00:00 GMT

This is a movie about neglected children. Sure, there’s a Rick-And-Morty-Flavored wacky space adventure, a comedy of errors surrounding a high-stakes diplomatic mission, and a throughline of light body horror. But ultimately, Elio is a kid who isn’t getting the care he needs from the world, and is punished for his loneliness and grief repeatedly. Fortunately for him, he is abducted by aliens, and meets another lonely kid who needs more from his elders. That that kid happens to be a 6-foot-long space larva, and that this works so well, makes this film pretty special.

There are the usual and expected emotional climaces, as lonely people get less lonely and frustrated adults learn how to take better care of the children in their care (one of these, which involved swaddling, was particularly devastating), but what really got me was another third act breakthrough, when the day is saved—not by all-powerful alien technology, but by a network of hobbyists from around the world. People connect and organize and help each other spontaneously, all the time, with no profit motive and with limited time and energy. Elio implores us to find our people, with whom we can make things and geek out about what gets us excited, and maybe then we won't feel like we're alone in the universe.

scream

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 04:00:00 GMT

I scream

You scream

We all scream

Killing Floor

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Jack Reacher is really big and strong and also really smart and he wins every fight and he solves every crime. I've wanted to meet this character for a while after hearing the TV show is peak Dad TV, and I see the appeal now. The preface is honestly the most interesting part of the book; Child, a veteran British TV writer, walks through the process of creating the character based on his decades of experience crafting story, his sense for audience needs, and where to zag when the rest of the industry is zigging, namely by creating deeply flawed, neurotic protagonists that eat shit the entire book. Jack doesn't have that problem. The middle third of the book is detective work by day and then going out to listen to blues music with a pretty lady by night. You get the Sherlock-esque detail-noticing, but you also get the Vin Diesel "contractually obligated to never lose a fight" action scenes. There are over 30 of these novels. I'm going to read another one.

Swept Away: The Avett Brothers Broadway Musical

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 04:00:00 GMT

This sounds like a joke, right? Like a rejected Portlandia sketch or something? But no, it is absolutely real, as I recently discovered when looking at their full discography in Spotify. And it's bad!

I've been a fan of the Avett Brothers ever since I saw them play in a barn at the Edinboro Folk Festival in 2006. They had a sort of bluegrass-by-the-way-of-screamo thing going on that was like anything I had ever seen, and they absolutely killed. This was my one moment of "hipster cred", where I got to go back home and tell my friends that there was this band they HAD to check out, well before they were well-known. I loved their first four albums but started to fall off when they signed with a major and teamed up with Rick Rubin. Their early stuff is foundational to my musical education and I love to dip back into it.

So imagine my surprise when I discover that they went and made a full-on musical, featuring songs heavily pulled from their early catalog! I spun the whole thing on a road trip and came away very disappointed. It starts promisingly, where lyrics are changed to set up a story about ill-fated mariners (their second album, Mignionette, is named after a ship that wrecked, forcing the crew to resort to cannibalism to stay alive), but once it gets rolling, there's not much to the plot. Some guys go on a boat, it crashes, they die. Along the way, they sing a bunch of Avett Brothers songs, which—to be fair—are often about boats or death. But it's a pretty threadbare skeleton to hang a musical on. Mama Mia has a real plot, at least (and, it should be said, female cast members, bafflingly absent from this show).

Maybe it works better with the rest of the script, but what I was really excited for was to hear how the music might be adapted for a Broadway music ensemble and professional stage singers. This is where it really fell apart for me. The lead has a vocal timbre uncannily exactly between that of brothers Scott and Seth, and his rural North Carolina accent is delightfully over-the-top, but the vocals and music both struck me as very uninspired. The Avetts are virtuosos harmonizers, having had two decades as a band (plus another two just as brothers) to come up with a unique vocal style that makes use of clever intervals and very specific vocal flourishes. To hear what I know were thrown-off takes be recorded as a Book and sung very faithfully is weird, and the guitar and banjo parts similarly felt uninspired. The whole thing had Disney live-action remake energy, if I'm being honest.\

In the pit, it sounds like we have the instrumentation the brothers use for their live shows, plus maybe a few more violins. The guitar and banjo players are too rigid, and the whole thing feels like it needed to move more in the direction of a traditional score to work. Some artists lend themselves to covers. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen wrote songs that had good bones, and other artists could combine the base layer with their own style. My worry with the Brothers A is that their songs are too tied up in their unique style to make it easy to extract the underlying structure and make it your own. Just like it's impossible to do a good cover of Stairway to Heaven, most of their ouvre is songs that only they can play. For a minute I imagined that what I wanted instead was a show where they play in front of a full symphony orchestra, like Ben Folds or Gregory Alan Isakov, but then I remembered that they record and tour with a piano and half of a string section, so they're kind of already doing that.

My friend watched Across the Universe, the Beatles musical film, and his only comment coming out was "idk, I wish I had just listened to the Beatles instead." That's how I feel here.

So I didn't like Swept Away: The Avett Brothers Musical, but I'm also fascinated with it. It's such a bizarre cultural object (and it's also a sign that you are getting old when the punkish band you enjoyed as a teen does something like this). It's sort of special when something that's ill-advised from the start makes it across the finish line anyway. I don't think it's my last time listening. If you enjoyed the Carolina Twins as much as I did, I encourage you to check it out too! We can compare notes.

Originally posted to LinkedIn

Battlestar Galactica Season 1

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 04:00:00 GMT

The miniseries started things off with a nice bang, forcing the human race off of their 12 colonial worlds and onto a series of rickety spaceships, to be pursued, and heavily toyed with, by the robots they created. Season 1 of the show proper takes this exciting premise and does some stuff with it. Some of that stuff is good!

I enjoy the human side of this show greatly. These characters are all deeply human (even the ones that are secretly robots), and both the interpersonal moments of connection and strife and the larger sweep of politics and diplomacy are very fun. The tension between civilian society and military might comes to a head at the end of the season, and a populist rabblerouser continues to pop up his head and cause shenanigans. It’s also fun to see the logistical issues with keeping this haggard spacefleet fueled, fed, and watered. The standout characters at this point are stoic commander Adama, hotshot pilot Starbuck, and bumbling techie Gaius Baltar, who continues to fail upwards into real power despite being constantly sexually harassed by a hot imaginary robot lady.

What isn’t landing as much is anything involving the Cylons themselves. The show teases that they have “A Plan” at the start of every episode, and like the other show about a group of survivors building a society in the wilderness and discovering their destiny, Galactica needs to keep their Others from spilling all the beans out of the mystery box too quickly. As a result, these mfers are Enigmatic, constantly saying weird shit that means nothing to us now. It’s annoying. There’s a whole storyline on irradiated Caprica that stretches over the entire season and ultimately isn’t very interesting that ties into the Cylon Master Plan, whatever it happens to be.

The Cylons are fervent monotheists, while human society is some weird pagan mashup, and I’m starting to suspect that this story will end with the remains of humanity populating Earth and becoming the Jews (ugh). There’s a bunch of Prophecy as well, which seems like it’s going to become increasingly important. As long as this stuff is balanced with the real human interest side of things, even if it ends up being extremely stupid, count me in.

big-feelings

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Your honor, I may have made some bad choices, but in my defense, I was having some big feelings at the time

chat

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

explaining to high school english students that the Chorus in Greek tragedies is basically Chat

Oedipus says some stuff and then we turn to the Chat for reacts

oedipus: *removes eyeballs* chat: he's cooked fr. F

cs-career-questions

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

/r/cscareerquestions is so funny. it's like if there was a subreddit for people who willingly signed up for the squid game

enshittified

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Don’t cry that it enshittified, smile that it provided surplus value to users during its growth phase 💙

jwt

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

in Philadelphia JWTs are known as JWNs

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

doing the thing again where i scroll linkedin and just say "shut up" over and over under my breath

monkey-bars

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Shocked that my kid, who adores climbing and jumping and monkey bars and obstacle courses of all kinds, enjoys Mario games

moraine

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

When glaciers start to slow Like old stale pizza dough That’s a moraine

serenity-prayer

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention, the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do, and the wisdom to know the difference.

sexual-hardware

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Got horrible service at Ace Hardware so from now on I’ll be going to their main competitor: Sexual Hardware

sorry

Superman

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 04:00:00 GMT

The Super:

Christopher Reeve. This guy's a fuckin star. Carries the movie, like a school bus dangling over a bridge, on his meaty shoulders. He performs admirably as the Caped Crusader, but is having much more fun doing the Clark Kent schtick.
Margot Kidder. The original Lois Lane is earthy and funny and vivacious. I’m glad she didn’t plummet from a helicopter to her death.
Gene Hackman. I remember hearing that the evil plot in this movie was a real estate scheme and that felt a bit low-stakes, but we have unfortunately seen that wiping out millions of people to develop on beachfront property is something that extremely bad people love to do IRL, so, you know. Gene was having a lot of fun chewing the scenery here and I’m glad to see that he returns with the classic Luthor chrome dome configuration.
Lex Luthor’s bumbling minions. Where have all the bumbling minions gone? Hapless goon Otis deserves his own 19-film arc, and John Williams does his best work scoring him with a piece that I’ve taken to calling “Tuba Doofus”.
The Krypton stuff. Great miniatures. I love when baby Kal-El’s spaceship hits the ceiling and wobbles like a model on a string. Marlon Brando is certainly a guy who does stuff.

The Pooper:

Pacing. It’s a 3 hour movie, and we spend a lot of time with Krypton and then with young Kent. You can feel the presence of the studio note demanding that we see the fucking super-suit in the first hour when Kal-El flies out of his Ice Palace at exactly 59 minutes, and then it’s another 20 minutes or so until we get the actual Boy Wonder. The climax of the film drags and has way too many moving pieces.
Speaking of, I’m not clear on the rules here. Superman has nigh-unlimited power but I’m not sure that they sold him stabilizing a major fault line by lifting some hot rocks. But what REALLY irks me about the earthquake scene is that after the tremors are over, entropy seems to reverse, as buildings right themselves and debris even returns to its origins. Couldn’t the earthquake, you know, still have happened?
I hate that Superman flies so fast that he reverses time and/or travels back in time to save Lois. What the hell is that. Write a different ending
For some reason, the infant Kal-El ages several years during his trip to Earth and when he emerges from the spaceship he is a small boy who is not wearing any clothes. Why does a blockbuster film meant for family consumption feature a shot containing a small boy’s nude penis.
A lighthearted scene where Superman rescues a cat from a tree and gives it to a little girl ends with the girl telling her disbelieving mother and then getting audibly struck. Child abuse, lmao
Several jokes are made about, and one person actually perpetrates, sexual contact with an unconscious person. The 70s!
I’ve reserved my hottest take for last: the main John Williams theme rips off his own Star Wars theme from the year prior. It’s such a parody that I’m not sure I could tell it apart from the Spaceballs theme. Especially when it gets to the B part, you could overlay the two. Try harder, John!

The Legend Lives On

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

The PC version of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City had a feature where you could create a custom radio station from MP3s on your filesystem. My song of choice, while aimlessly flying a helicopter through the skyscrapers of a low-poly downtown district, was The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot, freshly downloaded from Morpheus or Kazaa or Limewire or whatever illegal filesharing software I was using at the time. It was the only song I uploaded so it played on a loop.

I picked it because I thought it would be funny. This is an earnest and plaintive sea shanty, a song about a bunch of sailors on a boat named after some guy dying in a storm, and that vibe slices neatly through the carefully cultivated neon slickness of Miami in the 80s. Lightfoot was a relic by the standards of the retro-set game I was playing, let alone the modern day of twenty-some years ago when I was sitting in the Computer Room. This was an early expression of what we might call “Millenial detached irony” or some such, but despite the comic juxtaposition I enjoyed, this song choice was an expression of genuine love on my part. Now it is fifty years to the day since the eponymous Ed met his watery end, and I’m playing the song on repeat and misting over. There’s been a bit of “Fitzgerald Fever” online as we approached the semicentennial, and it’s been heartening to see a new generation pass the story onward.

I recently played the song for my four-year-old daughter, whose taste in music is specific and strongly expressed, and thirty seconds in she declared that “this is my favorite song in my whole life.” I get it, kid. My brain rarely processes lyrics on the first pass, so for all I knew the song was about different grades of corrugated cardboard, but it still dug its way deep on first listen. The melody, which repeats without interruption for 6 1/2 minutes across vocals and guitar, is hypnotic, and the chord changes underneath propel you endlessly forward. The meter of the verse also lulls you into a trance, and I discovered recently that it shares its DNA with many nursery favorites. I truly think you could listen to this song forever. Unlike some people I know, Lightfoot strips his song bare, keeping the tune and structure steady so that it belongs to anyone who wants to sing it themselves.

With the lyrics, Lightfoot elevates a midwestern tragedy to myth. It occurs to me on one of my listens today that none of the humans in the story are named. Lake Superior is the main character, striking down the men who dared to cross her waters. This is a story of man making the mistake of thinking nature conquered, and Lightfoot cleverly contrasts the mundane world of steel mill logistics with the wisdom of the people who lived by the lake before we did: don’t fuck with Gitchee Gumee in November. There’s tragedy here too: with just 15 more miles behind ‘er, Big Eddie might have been spared the full extent of the lake’s wrath. The storm also struck unseasonably early, a freak occurrence that devastated those who weren’t expecting it, guaranteeing that it will be a story that resonates more and more.

When I recounted, voice breaking, the story of the shipwreck at the dining room table, my wife was surprised that it happened so recently. Having only heard the song in passing, she assumed it was about, like, a pirate ship or something. I suspect that this is an intentional effect. Part of the horrible milieu we find ourselves in is alienation not only from our institutions, and from each other, but from the past; people did things very differently before phones and computers and even factories and printing presses. Folk music is special to me because it weaves an unbroken tapestry, back to the mists of prehistory.

They say that, in their time, epic stories like the Iliad were sung, the story encoded as both tune and verse and passed from singer to singer. The songs sung around the fire are chosen to reinforce a group identity, and to remember the triumphs and losses that reverberate through the generations. The music is sung by a particular people, tied to a particular place and a particular time. This is maybe what feels the most alien when we all have access to the same music catalog and have been conditioned by mass media for over 100 years. Music today doesn’t occupy the same place in our society as it once did, but it can still wield that power. Every day, a youngster hears Edmund for the first time, and their heart is stirred by mysterious forces that they can’t explain. ChatGPT cannot summarize this experience; it belongs only to the mysterious recesses of the human soul. These youths express themselves the way that people their age do: with memes and short-form videos. Like me, they are amused at how “out of left field” this song is, but captivated by it all the same.

A very long time ago, word got out that an incoming freshman was seen unloading an upright bass at a dorm building at Allegheny College, and an invite was extended to join the Allegheny Folk Federation at the campus coffeeshop for regular sessions of pickin’ and grinnin’. That freshman was me, and my initiation into the traditions of Bluegrass and Old Time changed my life. The on-campus sessions were fun, but there were truly special nights when a few of us would pile into a junior’s beater and head the next town over, where a bar hosted jam nights and plied the musicians with pitchers of Yuengling. Critically, they didn’t card. I got to hold it down on the low end with a bunch of middle-aged strangers, deep in the hills of Northwestern Pennsylvania, and sit at a hearth that had been burning for hundreds of years. I learned a lot of the standard tunes the old fashioned way: by ear and with heavy repetition. I wish that I still had access to a place like that, and that others got to experience it. Having such regular access to people and community and music would fix a lot of things.

Shit sucks. Online spaces have become overtly hostile. The explicit and stated goal of the services we trusted to connect us is to serve a billion feeds of personalized slop to keep us scrolling forever. We are lost in a system that is giant and malevolent and uncaring. We are conditioned by forces beyond our control to trust each other less, to learn from each other less, to create things together less. So I’m moved to tears when I listen to a song about wind and water and dying, and when I see others discover the love and care that Gordon Lightfoot wove into his masterpiece. May we follow his example, and turn our stories into songs that will be remembered forever.

Banjo Diaries 1: Boil That Cabbage Down

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 05:00:00 GMT

I have recently come into possession of a banjo. In purchasing it, I was hoping to start a more robust instrument practice than I've done in some time. I make do with a clawhammer-y strum thing on my old beater banjo, but I want to really learn the instrument and participate in a musical tradition, so I've resolved to learn Earl Scruggs-style bluegrass banjo, a 3-finger picking method with fingerpicks and all. This is my first recital, an arrangement of an old standard as instructed by Eli Gilbert's excellent 30 Days of Banjo YouTube series. More to come!

Joker

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 05:00:00 GMT

idk, I'd watch a period piece where Joaquin Phoenix plays a failed comedian who is abandoned by the social safety net and succumbs to violent madness. The first third of this movie is a tender character study of a pathetic guy who has never once caught a break, and it really stinks when they don't know how to propel that forward. There's some decent raw materials here: the performances, the sets and costumes, the cinematography make it feel like a film proper. But Arthur Fleck ultimately becomes a weird and unpleasant guy, in a way that doesn't feel connected to his interiority at all, and the movie doesn't know how much to root for him. So the end is just a bunch of violence that accomplishes nothing. Next time I'll just watch a Batman movie.

monstars

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:00:00 GMT

The Looney Tunes are dead.

The Tune Squad struggles to be born.

Now is the time of Monstars.

Survivor Season 49

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Good on the New Era for finally delivering a dud of a season. Too many tribe swaps early on muddied the waters of who was working with whom, and not a lot of personalities stood out. It’s always fun to see a tribe obliterated by challenges, as the blue tribe did this time around, and things started to pick up post-merge.

It was very fun watching Sage, a military analyst who likes to talk about poop and farts (?) have to deal with Shannon, a hippy dippy Spiritual Bypasser. Shannon blessedly didn’t make the merge, and Sage blessedly made it to the final, along with winner Savannah and blue tribe refugee Soph. Also among the highlight was a genuine medical drama when an early contestant was bitten by a highly venomous sea snake, and we got to go behind the scenes to the medical tent at base camp to see how that all shook out.

This year the Rat Boy shared his name with the famous Muppet. Rizo reminded me a lot of Rome early on, with his swagger dial set to 11, and I was sure that his big mouth would get him ejected quickly. But I underestimated him; a 9-tribal idol bluff is a true achievement. Rizo and Savannah are headed to the upcoming Avengers season as the only two people who haven’t had their game studied by the other players, so they have an opportunity to make some moves.

stupid-prizes

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 05:00:00 GMT

“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” is misleading. If you catch them with overstock at the end of the day, sometimes they’ll just give you a stupid prize for free

This came to me in a dream

Survivor Season 36

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 05:00:00 GMT

I have my work cut out for me if I’m going to catch up by season 50, so here we go.

Not my favorite season, but the gimmick of bringing back past immunity idols and advantages was fun. The tribal dynamics were pretty bog standard, but I enjoyed the rivalry between Domenic and Chris that echoed the Alpha Male Face-Off of Rob vs Russell. Once Chris was booted, Dom and charismatic wingman Wendell ran the game, and it got very interesting at the end when, despite Dom’s best efforts, Wendell fought his way into the finals. This led to the first tied final vote, leading to the remaining finalist tipping it to Wendell. This was very cool.

I like superstition on Survivor. The artifacts created by their stellar art department hold real significance for players who grew up watching them on TV, and are infused with meaning by the people who wielded them. I would love if these Holy Relics made a future appearance.

Survivor Season 37

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 05:00:00 GMT

I haven’t heard much from the seasons that led up to the Great Reset, so I guess I was assuming they were all kind of meh. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover maybe my favorite season of all time in the upper thirties. I tend to appreciate Tribal Gimmicks, as giving me a collective character helps me make sense of the intra-tribal dynamics, and “David vs Goliath” is a very strong set of archetypes to play with.

You root for David, of course, and we have some very rootable players on the loser side. Gabby is shrewd and big-hearted, Nick is a simple country lawyer with a heart of steel, Davie distracts castmates by doing a weird sword dance. But the casting revelation here is Christian, a præternatural puzzle expert who also has a keen eye for human dynamics. Christian’s unabashed nerdery is delightful when contrasted to Cochran’s insecure self-effacing schtick during his first season. This is a guy who knows who he is and what he wants. Possessing the appearance, vocal timbre, and physical demeanor of Last Jedi-era Mark Hamill, Christian tore up every tribal, beat down school bully Alec in an epic endurance challenge partially by talking nonstop for several hours, and correctly sniffed a blindside to play his idol perfectly. Christian flew a bit too close to the sun to make it to the end, but he’s one of my favorite to ever do it.

The Goliath tribe, aka the kids from Camp Goldmountain across the lake, are all killers. Angelina has incredible “went to Yale” energy, John is a literal pro wrestler, Dan’s day job is “SWAT Team”. But Survivor found one of its best villains in Natalie, a publishing CEO that acts like one would expect a small-time business tyrant to act if you stranded one on a desert island. Natalie has not talked to someone else without implicit hierarchies playing a role in some time, and clearly has forgotten what egalitarian conversation even sounds like. Natalie was so unpleasant her tribemates incurred a numbers disadvantage just to avoid dealing with her anymore. This move was masterminded by Mike “Ned Schneebly” White, who went on to White Lotus all over the place and who wisely played up an aw shucks persona while executing a fantastic social game from the shadows.

There are some great idol/advantage plays in this season, made possible through sheer cunning on the David side and sheer predictability on the Goliath side. The latter season got interesting as tribal lines gave way to an all-out shankfest at the finish line. In the end, the last remaining David claimed the prize, but we all made a lot of friends along the way. More like this, please.

Survivor Season 38

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 05:00:00 GMT

I have mixed feelings about Purgatory Seasons, where a player being voted out of tribal does not necessarily get ejected from the game, but there were enough interesting ideas and characters to make this season a winner for me.

Previous gimmicks culled the restless dead periodically, but “Edge of Extinction” filled up over the course of the entire season, and for the first time ever the jury was composed of every survivor that got got. There’s a lot to like here: we get a better sense of the interplay between survivors and jurors, and we get to keep following our favorites even if and when they are eliminated from the game. On the other hand, one of the interesting things about Survivor is that the cast of characters is winnowed down over the season, and that never really happens here. The editors do their level best to balance all of these locations and stories, but it’s a tough gig.

In the top half, it’s a “some returning players” season, with four repeat castaways that are all favorites of mine, and have all been called out in previous writeups. One half of \bkell\w*y\s+w\w*worth\b Kelley Wentworth, my TV best friend Aubry, nervous screenwriter David, and hirsute lunk Joe represent the Survivor royalty, with two each going to the new tribes. Long story short, they are dispatched one by one by a fierce set of newbies who correctly assess the threat level of letting any of these people anywhere near the finals. The arc from “Fans vs Favorites” is clear: new players went from being stomped by the returnees to being the (much more populous) stompers. Now that the metagame immune response has taken hold, I wonder if the producers will bother trying this format again.

But the second half belongs to Rick Devens. A charming news anchor who was very quickly voted out in the early days, Rick joined the rest of the unquiet dead on Edge of Extinction to—and I’m simplifying slightly here—sit around and wait for something to happen. At the midpoint of the game, Rick wins the first of two opportunities to claw back into the game, and the producers gift him with an immunity idol to give him a fighting chance. This kicks off an absolutely wild chain of events, where Rick forms alliances of convenience, wins immunity challenges, finds idols, and creates fake idols to keep himself in the game, and the longer he lasts, the greater his threat level, leading to even more desperation to eject him. I’m reminded of Rachel in a more recent season.

In a cruel twist of fate, another contestant is ejected from Hell right before the final challenge, gets immunity, and then gives it up to make the entire season a showdown between the two Lazari. This extremely risky gambit pays off, and Rick becomes the final juror. This is disappointing for two reasons: Rick was a joy to watch (his giddy laughter while everyone was finding his fake idols was incredible) and played an unbelievable game. But also, the ultimate champion was someone who basically sat on a desert island with nothing to do for the vast majority of the season. My guess is this: if Rick had won, we would have seen this format again, but given the maximally bizarre way that things shook out, we won’t.

Survivor Season 39

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 05:00:00 GMT

Before we get to the Unpleasantness, let us examine the season’s Core Gimmick. There is a mysterious island that contains giant wooden head statues of two well-regarded past players, along with the actual two well-regarded past players, and periodically one of the actual contestants will arrive to get advice and a chance for a game advantage. This is an interesting way to solve two problems.

First, it is increasingly difficult to put a player like Sandra “The Queen of Survivor” Diaz-Twine or Boston “Boston Rob” Rob into a cast of newbies. As recently as the previous season, we have seen that alumni are correctly viewed as eminently dangerous and ejected as early as possible, and it’s possible that as a result the game is permanently done with the “some returning players vs some new players” cast makeup. But what to do with your growing stable of Survivor talent? Maybe you remove them from the actual game, but bring them along to dispense sage advice and spy on Tribal Council from an official Spy Shack.

This works sometimes, but it feels underbaked. Rob and Sandra have good rapport and their organic interactions with the new cast are fun, but you should not hire Rob Mariano to read words off of a script. The Island Idols didn’t make much of a mark on the game, and left before it ended. I doubt this kind of thing will be attempted again.

But the other problem it tried to solve morphed, as watchers from the future will know, into the Journey: a player is removed from their tribe, taken to a remote location, and subjected to a game that will bestow a boon or a curse. What this does for the producers is generate some good story content, which is needed to pad out early episodes and inject something dramatic into what may otherwise be pretty ho-hum camp life. Nowadays, this role is occupied by the show itself, in the form of unattributed written communication. This works far better than having someone who is not Jeff Probst explain the rules and the stakes. (It also makes me wonder who takes the mantle when Probst retires; I’m not sure if Survivor has a Ken Jennings: someone who is respected for their performance in-game but who also has the showbiz chops and charisma to take on a very heavy hosting role.)

But of course we must talk about the game itself, and unfortunately for everyone, the emergent theme of the season was “sexual harrassment”. At the height of the #metoo movement, at a moment when powerful men were facing overdue reckoning for their treatment of women in their employ, Survivor decided to cast Dan, a Hollywood talent agent who bore passing resemblance to another disgraced Hollywood figure who was in the news at the time, and Dan made short work of being handsy with his female tribemates. Analytical power-player Kellee did not enjoy this attention, and talked it out with Dan in the first episode, but he continued to paw at contestants incessantly. It got so bad that during one of Kellee’s talking head segments a producer pipes up that they might be able to do something to help. Gee, thanks! A title card tells us that producers intervened at this point to warn Dan, and the timing of the edit tells us that Dan doesn’t think we know that when he professes to be hearing about all of this for the first time during Tribal. Naturally, everyone votes out Kellee for rocking the boat. Jeff likes to say that Survivor is a mirror to society, and in this case, it was a perfect reflection of the fact that power structures and material incentives can cause people to tolerate and obscure horrible behavior, even if it threatens them.

This storyline reached a further nadir when middle-aged lifeguard Janet was bamboozled by two younger women into making a move against her game interests due to their own allegations against Dan. These allegations turned out to have been manufactured (or at the very least greatly exaggerated), and Janet had to contend with the fact that for at least two contestants, it was considered valid gameplay to take advantage of people’s heightened sensitivity around sexual harrassment. Janet laboriously dragged the lies out in open air, and managed to hold on until the final vote. Dan was ejected shortly before the finale (the first and I believe only contestant to receive this dishonor) due to further allegations by a crew member, and the edit goes to great lengths, even including footage outtakes with camera crew in-shot, to lay Dan’s many offenses before audiences.

One interesting aspect of watching this show well after it aired is that I am seeing what was on screen without the accompanying discourse milieu, but the live finale sometimes offers morsels of what the public was talking about during the lead-up (we are at this point extremely close to the end of live reunions, so I will enjoy it while I can). I was happy to see from Jeff’s lengthy solo segment with Kellee and profuse apologies on behalf of the entire crew that I wasn’t the only one with a sick feeling in my stomach this entire season. There were a lot of things I enjoyed this time around, particularly Karishma’s journey of self-discovery and confidence and Jamal’s beautiful exchange with Jack about race relations after Jack said something really dumb. But Dan’s icky reign of terror, accompanied by the bizarre semi-presence of Rob and Sandra, make this a season I doubt I will revisit.

Kpop Demon Hunters

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 05:00:00 GMT

After 6 months of Spotify Algorithm Destruction, we finally got to watch the thing that the soundtrack is from (by the way, if you’re not aware, an artist called Bongo Cat has versions of the songs where all of the lyrics are replaced by cat meows). I was expecting to like it based on what I had seen, but hey, this is a real good flick. Probably would have made some money if they put it in theaters.

Sony Animation continues their run of “they stuntin on us” animation quality, where the comic book influences of the Spider-Verse films are replaced with anime flourishes, and the action scenes have a madcap Looney-Tunes tempo. The design is full of vivid color and larger-than-life concert venues. The voice cast is incredible, both for spoken dialog (they somehow got Sun and Jin) and the singing, which is out of this world. Golden is the rare That Thing You Do-esque pop song that is a hit both in the movie world and the real one, and the other tracks are appropriately fun or moody or menacing.

I wasn’t expecting Kpop Demon Hunters to provide any sort of In These Times experiences, but we watched the movie as a family the day after Alex Pretti was gunned down in the streets of Minneapolis, and I don’t know, the idea of a demonic army that preys on isolation and insecurity to feed on its hosts, and a protective sustaining network of human souls, lashed together by art and love, hit me pretty hard for some reason.

Survivor Season 40

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 05:00:00 GMT

Ever since All-Stars, there have been a few special “Avengers” seasons where the cast is completely made up of past players, and the heroes of their own seasons get to return and team up with other legends to make a true Television Event. Finally we arrive at Survivor’s “Endgame”, the contest of contests, where every returning player was a grand prize winner of a previous season. Like Endgame, which was in theaters when this season was filmed, Winners at War ties up an immense number of storylines, bids farewell to many of its biggest characters, and caps an entire era to lay the groundwork for the next.

You have a lot of heavy hitters here, including Yul “Mr Spock” Kwon from the race war season, Tony “Spy Shack” Vlachos and Sarah “Now Known as Lacina” Lacina of Cops R Us, and of course the Idols of the Island of the Idols. Immediately after declaring that Sandra and Brob had transcended gameplay to live as wise sages on a Pacific island for the rest of their days, the head honchos jump back in, with Ambah in tow.

As previously discussed, big players are big targets, but if everyone on the island is a big player, then maybe the Tysons and Parvatis of the game will be on even footing. Nope! The more recent winners prioritize getting the royalty out as soon as possible, where they go to the Isle of the Gimmicks to continue to be on camera. I don’t like the gameplay ramifications of purgatory seasons, but I get why they don’t want to miss out on talking to the all-time greats as much as possible. This season also tries to implement an economy, with “Fire Tokens” being distributed and spent on various advantages. I’m very interested in a game with economic game theory, but I don’t think Survivor is it. There are lots of exchanges between castaways and exiles that have to be carried out off-camera by the crew, and only Yul seems interested in figuring out what the optimal token strategy is.

Sandra fucks up an idol play and is the only player to quit rather than starve on a desert island for a month (good for her). Rob goes out early by trying his mob boss system on players who fully resent him for it, and Tony picks up the slack. The middle of the season isn’t very interesting gameplay-wise as Tony goes full Hatch and runs the game from the middle of a tight alliance. A series of unfortunate advantages, immunities, and Natalies (freshly ejected from the underworld after being voted out first, twin sister-style) whittle the core alliance until only Tony remains. Hats off to Adam, who evolved from his aw-shucks playstyle to become a Rat Boy worthy of the season. His self-incriminating jury management, brazen flip-flopping, and tribal council crashout make him one of the best to ever do it.

The finale brought out some surprising and touching behavior from the finalists. Maybe it’s because each of the contestants already claimed the ultimate prize, or maybe because they were already pretty financially stable, but it was heartening to see people realize that the friendships they made on-island transcended the prize money. Ben offered Lacina pre-forgiveness to vote him out for her resume, after being inspired by her speech on gender (a very active subject of discourse at this time). Most affecting was the relationship between Tony and Lacina, who had each backstabbed the other in previous seasons and this time resolved to go to the end or die trying (their face-to-face fire challenge was riveting and devastating when Tony ended up on top).

The most bizarre part of this capstone season was the sudden intrusion of Covid, not an issue during filming but very much an issue during the live finale, which Jeff hosted with a shitty bluetooth mic from his garage. The New Era was shaped in part by the very real logistical concerns around contamination in the early 20s, and its presence is now baked into the show’s DNA (I thought that this would be the last live finale, but that too ws cut for health reasons). Like Endgame, this is likely the last time we see some of these players compete, but you never know who will be RDJ’d back onto the island with some sweet talk. As I prepare for Survivor 50, my death march is near its end.

gopher

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

Go is a great language for making CLIs, REST APIs, and other intensive applications. Its syntax takes some getting used to, but once I got past its quirks I found that it really matched my mental models and its strong typing and GoLand's autocomplete helped me type with confidence at speed. It's been a lot of fun getting proficient with it.

I want to be clear about something, though. The Go Gopher is a loathsome, horrid creature. I detest its cloying bug eyes, I resent its tiny limbs. I desire strongly to kick a field goal with it. If it dared to darken my doorstep, I would not hesitate to set it on fire. This rancid vermin is not welcome on my computer.

Originally posted to LinkedIn

Survivor Season 41

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

We arrive at last at the “New Era”, which as I write this is almost 10 seasons in but must have felt very fresh to contestants and audiences alike in the midst of the High Covid Era. A shorter shoot schedule (to account for quarantine), a brutal reduction of basic food and supplies, and new gameplay mechanics like the Beware Advantage and the Shot in the Dark define the gameplay here, and at the outset it’s fun to see the contestants react to the revamp. At some point the episode lengths get stretched out to a meaty 90 minutes, and I was surprised that that was not present at the outset.

The cast is good: enthusiastic, cunning, vulnerable. Evvie was an early favorite, but they played too hard and didn’t make it very far past merge. Shan, the pastor with an evil streak (I always love it when contestants provide musical cues to the composers, and Shan’s hummed “evil song” was a great addition to the score) assembled a dominant alliance centered around four black contestants. I’ve noticed that in recent seasons, there is a commendably diverse cast, but for one reason or another most of the black players get voted out after merge. This was the case here, with Deshawn opening up about the experience of being a minority contestant while also playing both sides. Ultimately it came down to Xander, an athletic App Developer, vs Erika, an unassuming marketing professional, and Xander squandered an opportunity to knock out his biggest threat and let her steal the title from him at final.

I enjoyed the production team opening things up a bit, with a blink-and-you-miss-it shot in the premiere showing the massive crew setup for the initial boat challenge. This show does such a great job of keeping a focus on its players by hiding the massive team that makes the whole thing run, and we usually only see them when someone gets hurt.