2026 May❮❮prev

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Woke up thinking about SCOTUS and their chicken shit way of pretending A. racism is dead and B. ensuring a partisan gerrymandered fractured landscape forever.

For both sides, depending on locality, parlaying potentially temporary political advantage into quasi-permanent impregnable districting is a path to that party never having to listen to the voters en masse, which is an obvious boon for authoritarianism and a system that only has to pretend that votes count.

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from the 3000 odd photos we took in Sicily, a collage of cats and dogs, and some street art and then doors

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New to music playlist. Very anemic month, but some of that's my fault - I ran into a pile of cool music in Sicily but decided to stockpile it...

4 star:
* Out West (Meels)
Rollicking country song.
Meels opened when we saw the Nitty Gritty Dirty Band farewell tour, and she was great. Excellent Dolly Parton vibe...
* Do I Ever Cross Your Mind (Chet Atkins & Dolly Parton)
I'm delighted by Dolly Parton's giggles. Interesting how it sounds like "May the Circle be Unbroken" at parts.
Meels covered this song, actually.

3 star:
* Both Sides, Now (Joni Mitchell)
Strong Songs had a episode unpacking this one.
* invisible string (Taylor Swift)
I'm not a big Swiftie but she's a good songcrafter. I appreciate the "isn't it pretty to think so" Henimgway reference.
mentioned in the Olivia De Recat
* I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler (YACHT)
More of an interesting video than a great song.

In this new world, you're the head chef of a world-class kitchen. As such, you don't personally dice every vegetable, sear every steak, swish away every cockroach, or plate every dish. You have sous chefs and line chefs for that. But when a meal leaves the kitchen, it's your reputation on the line and your Michelin stars at stake. When the customer sends back the fish because it's overdone or the sauce is broken, you can't blame your sous chef.

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To do anything, we often feel like we have to know everything about everything, all while everything is changing. As one example, at the time of this writing it's fashionable to ridicule the complexity of JavaScript development. Let's peek at why.I To build a web app, you might need to understand this daunting list (which is probably already outdated):

-package managers (npm, Yarn)
-bundlers (webpack, Rollup)
-transpilers (Babel)
-task runners (gulp, Grunt)
-testing frameworks
-CSS preprocessors
-build toolchains
-deployment pipelines

And that's before so much as glancing at modern JavaScript language features. Each of these components has many available contenders. Some depend on each other, some conflict, and it's almost impossible to navigate the graph of what works with what unless you live and breathe that ecosystem every day.

It keeps going. Because of the DevOps philosophy of "you build it, you run it," you also need to learn Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform, not to mention a whole host of AWS, GCP, or Azure services. If you're especially cursed and your company is multi-cloud, you might have to learn two or more clouds.

Thanks to these "advancements," you can now find yourself simultaneously worrying about how to center a div element on a web page, while you struggle with Docker networking issues because your CI pipeline broke after you tried to change to Terraform scripts.

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Superior pilots use their superior judgment to avoid situations which require the use of their superior skill.

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Dr. Dan Sturtevant and his colleagues did research that showed how developers working in tangled, non-modular systems are 9x more likely to quit or be fired

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(And, as the saying goes, you can't un-blend two frogs.)

Hey heard about this Hantavirus Cruise Ship Thing?

Unearthed reports reveal that RFK Jr. fired every full-time CDC cruise ship sanitation inspector ahead of the Hantavirus cruise ship outbreak.

Almost as much fun as bringing back deadly Measles with Encephalitis. Y'all are so smart.

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Headline of the moment:
Trump Is in His Ozymandias Era

Wow. Leave aside the idiocy of the idea that "oh we're such a not racist nation that any districting that even thinks about race is ipso facto racist and can't be allowed" and just think about "oh courts can't say boo about partisan gerrymandering"... that once a party has any kind of edge, they are free to redistrict, ignoring any logical geographical or community idea in order to ensure a quasi permanent minoritarian rule. How is that any kind of justice? This is disenfranchisement in the most blatant scale imaginable.

"Stop the steal" my ass.

Gerald Ford's economics is the worst thing that's happened to this country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking.

My high school had the arcade game "Vigilante" in the rec room, and for 30 years this "I'm a BIG" billboard has lived rent-free in my head:

(via this page that has a few other weird billboards from the game...)

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Historian of abolition here, history tells us how we got here, to put it succinctly "John Brown was hanged for treason and Robert E. Lee was not."

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my favorite thing i've learned in college is that way back in ancient china there was this poet/philosopher guy who wrote this whole pretentious poem about how enlightened he was that was like "the eight winds cannot move me" blahblahblah and he was really proud of it so he sent it to his friend who lived across the lake and then his friend sends it back and just writes "FART" (or the ancient Chinese equivalent) on it and he was SO MAD he travels across the lake to chew his friend out and when he gets there his friend says "wow. the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake"

was thinking about that story, except instead of "the word FART" and "across the lake" it's "the most mildly challenging task" and "up to go get a drink of water or at least pace a bit"

"That hot dog did exactly what you asked it to do. You asked it to feed you, and it fed you. No more, no less." Garvey held out his hand. "Pass me a hot dog."

Cole pulled another one from the cooler and handed it across the flames. Garvey took the hot dog carefully in his hands and examined it. "This is a fine hot dog," he said. "The finest I've seen all day." Carefully he slid it onto the stick. He started humming. Soon Edwin hummed along. For ten minutes they hummed the melody over and over. All the while, Garvey patiently turned the hot dog over the coals, careful not to burn it. Finally, when the hot dog was a glistening, crispy brown, Garvey drew the stick back from the fire. "The song we hummed is a song of friendship," he explained.

"What are the words?" Cole asked.

"There are no words because each person makes up his own. That's how friendship is." As Garvey spoke, he rummaged through the cooler, pulling out salt and pepper, cheese, a plate, cups, and a tomato. He leaned a bun against a rock near the coals to let it toast lightly, then wrapped it around the hot dog.

"You going to eat that thing, or play with it all day?" Cole asked.

Garvey smiled and kept working. He cut the hot dog into three pieces on a plate and lightly shook on salt and pepper. Next he cut slices of cheese and tomato and put them on top. With a flair, he added a small circle of ketchup to each. Last, he poured three glasses of water. He handed one to Cole and one to Edwin. "This is a toast to friendship," he said, raising his glass.

After taking a drink, he handed Cole and Edwin each a piece of the hot dog he had prepared.

"That's your hot dog," said Cole. "Yes, it is, and I choose to share it," said Garvey. He began eating, savoring each bite. "Eat slowly," he said, raising his cup again to toast. "Here's to the future." After each bite, he raised his cup for a different toast. "Here's to good health." "Here's to the sun and the rain." "Here's to the earth and the sky."

When everybody had finished eating, Garvey turned to Cole. "How was my hot dog different from yours?"

Cole shrugged. "You shared yours and acted like it was a big deal."

Garvey nodded. "Yes, it was a big deal. It was a party. It was a feast. It was a sharing and a celebration. All because that is what I made it. Yours was simply food, because that is all you chose for it to be. All of life is a hot dog. Make of it what you will. I suggest you make your time here on the island a celebration." Cole scuffed at the dirt with his shoe. "What is there to celebrate?" he asked. "Discover yourself," Edwin said. "Celebrate being alive!"

A little bit of co-opting of native american vibe but some wise seeming stuff about rage, redemption, restorative justice, and breaking cycles of abuse.

2026 May❮❮prev