For Your Consideration

This video is excellent. Jackie’s songwriting and performance is utterly captivating. It sounds timeless in a way. Jack Stratton’s introduction at the beginning is indeed generous and apt.

As best I can tell, this 2019 post was my last substantial report on the video games I’ve played. It’s been seven years, and my outlook on games hasn’t changed much. I still prefer inventive, moody, narrative- and puzzle-heavy games that capture the imagination. They represent self-contained stories that don’t require dozens of hours of investment to enjoy. Yet, I’m beginning to write this post while staring at an Xbox that has remained off for what might be months now. ...

I ran another trivia night for our friends back in San Francisco. This is my fourth trivia night (one in-person, and three remotely while in Connecticut), and I believe this was both my fairest and cleverest session yet. I’m particularly pleased with my gimmick for the music round, and the Disambiguation Page theme in Round 5. Fall 2026 Miracle on Splice IIInvitational

A quiet August night teems with sound. Drowsy birds chirp in the twilight while a motley choir of insects let their faint buzzing overwhelm the warm air once one pays them attention. An occasional croak rises into overt awareness, rumbling its way above the rustling of squirrels and chipmunks in trees overhead. What else is out there? I know not, safely perched as I am on a porch with lights and devices to expel the most unsavory of small characters this evening. ...

The tags page on my blog breaks my writing into self-assigned categories. My tagging system isn’t complex or granular. I rarely add new tags, sticking to big buckets over the years. I’ll sometimes use multiple tags, so the following numbers don’t add to the total posts I’ve written. Personal: 139 posts Technology: 105 posts Sports: 85 posts Writing: 83 posts (about to be 84 once this is added) Math: 54 posts Reviews: 54 posts Books: 29 posts Politics: 25 posts Games: 24 posts Education: 24 posts It falls off from there: ideas, media, music, satire. I skipped “Blogmas” since that’s not really a topic. ...

I grew up just on the other side of the Dot Com Bubble. I didn’t spend time on forums or online bulletin boards. I never had dial-up internet as a kid. But I’ve watched Wikipedia grow from a highly suspicious source into the default first-pass place to go for basic, accurate information. More pertinent to us all, I’ve gone from using a 2005 Baseball Encyclopedia bought at my local bookstore to, well, not doing that because of sites like Retrosheet, Baseball Reference, and FanGraphs. ...

I had the pleasure of running a brief summer seminar for the online private school I’ve contracted with the last five years. It was a total of six sessions spread across three weeks, each only thirty minutes. The topic was Choose Your Own Adventure, and the handful of kids sure did exactly that. My intention was for them to create a second-person narrative in Google Slides, allowing them to easily link to different scenes within the deck. It’s a low-effort way to begin that narrows the focus on the mechanics of their story. We would have planning time, some writing time, some revision time, and cap it off by getting a quick demo of whatever they had made. We loosely followed that core plan, but what the students chose to create during this time was all over the place in the best way. ...

Almost by definition, the driving acumen I’ve experienced in the United States is in the fat middle part of my perceived bell curve of lawfulness. The northeast has been by far the worst, and quiet towns in Minnesota among the best (ignoring the pickup trucks), but all within a tolerable range to which I could adapt. I’ve learned to blast down California freeways and pay attention to lane-splitting motorcycles; I cut in front of oncoming traffic in Connecticut but hold firm at the numerous “No Turn on Red” signs; and I can sit patiently in nominal Minneapolis traffic as drivers camp in the left lane to exit onto I-35. ...

Is this the most important aspect of Paris I noticed, its lack of a Hard Rock Cafe? Hardly. But it’s nominally emblematic of the city’s confidence. Paris is a city that tourists love because it’s Paris, and Parisians believe in that draw more powerfully than any visitor. They don’t need to stoop to catering directly to tourists beyond the sidewalk postcard shops and speaking a bit more English than they might otherwise prefer. ...

Months ago, I spent time poking through newspaper archives to see what had happened on my birthday in Connecticut in years past. I started with my precise date of birth, and found a fantastic article. You can access a clipping here (click the “down” arrow to read the full article), but the lede in Malcolm Johnson’s article in the Hartford Courant is all you really need: “It’s… different,” said the woman, hesitantly, but incisively, when asked her opinion of “Mark Twain — The Musical!” during intermission of a near-disastrous opening night at the Hartford State Armory." ...