Recommendations

Index

Games

Baba is You (2019)

• Baba is You is a collection of very difficult logic puzzles, which are solved by the player manipulating the laws that govern the environment and objects therein.

• Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has argued Baba is You is an excellent example of how games can be art even when they aren't cinematic and don't have a story—that just pure logic and puzzle solving can become a form of art.

Broken Age (2014)

• Broken Age tells two coming of age stories at once:
  • A young woman being prepared to be eaten as a sacrifice to a monster in a village-wide celebration. It is a village of bakers and her family gives her an elaborate cake-like dress to lure the monster to pick her. It is considered a great honor to be eaten by the monster. Her goal is to get out of this.
  • A young man born and raised alone on a spaceship by AI agents who claim to be his mother and father. He knows everything around him is artificial. Although he is a young adult, his world seems designed for a child. He eats in a space highchair, he goes on fake missions with ice cream and hugs, and he is constantly coddled by his AI mom and dad. He is never given the opportunity to experience anything real. His goal is to get out of this.
• Broken Age is a game that is brimming with visual and narrative ideas. It is a point-and-click adventure, a style of narrative puzzle game generally considered retro in 2014.
• What I like is the art, the music, the ideas and the aesthetic. The story and gameplay take a back seat; they are sort of a art/music/aesthetic delivery system.

Diablo (1996)

• In it's simplicity and iconic gothic vibe, Diablo is kind of a perfect game. Since 1996, I've returned to it every 5 years or so and it always holds up and brings me back.
• You play a swordsman, an archer or a mage who returns to a village terrorized by demons, who have taken over a nearby church. The village is very atmospheric, the forlorn music and visuals have an indelable place in the history of computer games.
• The gameplay is this: You enter the church, kill all the monsters on a level (literally), and go a level deeper where the monsters are harder, but the weapons, armor and gold found are more valuable. Occasionally you heal, buy and sell stuff in town, and you frequently level-up to make your character stronger and compatible with better types of equipment.
• Levels are randomly generated. Monsters, gold, equipment, walls, doors, traps, etc. are all different in each level every time you play. You can't predict where you might find something based on a level designer's logic (e.g. they wouldn't give us a dead end with no power-up), because all the levels are random and make no sense. But this also is pretty charming and is a big part of what makes the game so fun to play over and over again.

Genesis Noir (2021)

• In Genesis Noir you assume the role of a god who takes the appearance of a jazz loving film noir style detective. He travels through space and time altering the development of the universe, organic life and humanity.

• This game really delivers in exploring themes in cosmology, philosophy and religion. The visuals, sound and animation are beautiful and surreal. This game is art in traditional sense.
• This game is a short, aesthetic experience. The actual gameplay and puzzles are pretty straightforward.

Grandia (1999)

• Grandia is a 1999 Japanese role playing game for the original Playstation. I played it as a kid shortly after it was released and it was one of my favorite games—although never beat it. I replayed the game and finally finished it 20 years later in early 2022. Although clearly designed for kids, this is a great game that held up very well 20 years later.

• Aesthetically, the game starts off in a Victorian steampunk 'old world', and ends in a fantasy infused frontier continent (early America mixed with Lord of the Rings). The game tells the story of a young 'adventurer' in the old world who sneaks away from home to board a steamship to the 'new world' in search of adventure. It's a coming of age epic.
• Turned-based Japanese RPGs aren't as popular as they used to be in the 90s and early 00s, and they could be tedious even back in the day. However, Grandia has a rich combat engine where time (how long actions take) and space (where characters are on the field) matter. I love how the combat engine allows players to create and deploy different strategies for different types/configurations of enemies.
• There's an HD Remaster of Grandia that's available on PC and Nintendo Switch. I'd try to stick to playing the original on something like RetroArch since the original art wasn't designed to be high definition, and when modern artists/AI try to make it sharper it can look distractingly weird. RetroArch offers tube TV shaders that emulate the scanlines and distortions found in American NTSC and PAL TVs common in 1999. By projecting the original image onto a emulated CRT display, it can enlarge the game visuals while keeping the art looking the way it's intended to. Compare RetroArch's shaders to the HD Remaster below, and click to compare at higher resolutions.

• According to the game's clock it took me 99 hours and 35 minutes to finish, including the difficult hidden dungeons. Most people can beat the game in about 50 hours if they aren't doing the hidden content and spending extra time leveling. Despite its length it didn't feel long; there's a lot of story and exploration and it really gives the you the feeling of being on an adventure.
• I love that you can have a pretty epic experience in one self-contained off-line game. This will always be one of my favorites.

Planet Zoo (2019)

• A Zoo management game first published in 2019, that has received regular expansions since it was released. You can enjoy the game enough with just the base game, although I have a few expansions.

• It feels like a game from the 90s or early 00s. Like Rollercoster Tycoon or Psychonauts, the cartoony visuals and lighthearted vibe are red herrings—this is a deep, sophisticated game with a sense of whimsy.
• Planet Zoo is an engaging and therapeutic escape. It's got animals, happy visitors, and beautiful natural landscapes and soundscapes. What makes this game exceptional is it calms the nerves without being boring.

Psychonauts (2005)

• Psychonauts is a maticulously crafted exploration/platforming game (gameplay resembles Mario 64) made over the course of almost 5 years. You play a child at a psychic summer camp who can enter peoples minds, explore their memories and the workings of their minds, uncover their secrets, and ultimately treat their psychological disorders and mental hangups.
• Psychonauts looks like a cartoon, it has cartoon-like voice acting; it even has some slapstick humor. However, that is deceptive.

• Behind its lighthearted exterior, Psychonauts is acutely intelligent and can have sharp edges. You come across a fair amount of death and loss as you explore the trauma in people's minds. You find a painful past in a cheerful person, perhaps being the source of the compusion for constant positivity. A woman whose success drove a jealous parent to suicide, and then has to live with that.

• My favorite is this Spanish painter whose mind is overcome by rage, represented by a bull terrorizing his mental landscape. He's got this grandious vision of his heartbreak, where he (a famous painter) loses his wife (a famous flamenco dancer) to a famous bull fighter. But as you explore his mind everything starts to look more and more like a high school. You learn that his mind is fixated on a short failed high school relationship that ended decades ago, and he's trapped in a prison of his own rage about this insignificant event.

• What makes the above story so keenly perceptive is that it is acknowledging a real psychological phenomenom that people don't talk about much—events and loves from the distant past that we can't get over—and presenting it in a way that gives us space to explore.
• In addition to all the story and psychological elements, Psychonauts is very well crafted in general. Every minute you will notice neat touches and examples of attention to detail in environments.
• Psychonauts looks and sounds like a kids game, but it's actually a pretty heavy, and often depressing, work of art pretending to be a kids game. It didn't sell that well in its time, but games like this are still very enjoyable to curious people willing to play an old game.
• Psychonauts 2 was released in 2021, it's a beautiful sequel with vast landscapes and much better graphics, animation and gameplay. While it's a fantastic game—its much more fun—I would still recommend playing the original first, since, in my opinion Psychonauts 2 is not as suprising, subversive and subtly melancholic as the original. The rough edges were literally and metaphorically smoothed out, and its the rough edges that attracted me to the original.
• Both games are loaded with unique visual, musical and conceptual content. They would be good games for a person with writers block.

Stardew Valley Expanded (2019, ongoing)

• When I was in high school, I was obsessed with a Japanese farming/life simulation game called Harvest Moon: Back to Nature (1999) on the Playstation. It was sort of obscure at the time but I put hundred of hours on it.
• In 2016, an American developer single-handedly wrote his own game in the tradition of Harvest Moon. Through deep understanding and appreciation of the original, he really improved upon it. While Harvest Moon games in the 90s were boutique games, Stardew Valley sold over 50 million copies—it was a minor cultural phenomenon by the time COVID happened (the perfect quarantine game).
• Part of what makes Stardew better than Harvest Moon is how much more content it has, and in 2019 a fan made addition to the game added a ton of more content: 27 new NPCs, 50 locations, 260 character events, 27 fish, reimagined vanilla areas, two farm maps, a reimagined world map reflecting all changes, new music, questlines, objects, crops, festivals and more.
• I like Stardew Valley Expanded because it shows how a truly great idea can take almost 30 years, and many different people to become fully realized. It's also likely that the environment wasn't right for Harvest Moon to flourish in the 1990s. Since the 90s, digital distribution systems like Steam became widespread and quirky indie games became mainstream, and these may have been necessary for Stardew Valley to achieve its massive sales numbers.

Stray (2022)

• Stray is a 2022 independent game where you play as a cat. It got internet famous before its release due to its subject matter.

• And it delivers on the cat experience. You get to meow, rub up against things, scratch—and more. The cat you play as moves and animates with great feline realism. However, the game is much more than just that...
• It's also a post apocalyptic science fiction game. Your job is to explore and learn about the humanless world the game is set in. The game takes place throughout a city/fallout shelter populated entirely by robots—designed by humans who embody human characteristics. While exploring you find out exactly how far in the future you're living in, why the surreal landscape is the way it is, and what lead to the apparent human extinction.
• This game was made by a small number of people on tight budget, but it feels very expansive. It was efficiently made and many assets were purchased rather than made from scratch. As a purist, I sometimes notice assets that don't quite fit in, but that efficiency was what made the game possible. It's opened my eyes to a style of game development that I might have been skeptical about when I was younger.
• Like many, I came for the cat game, but stayed for the beautiful, surrealistic Sci-Fi world. This game is a work of art I think will be played and enjoyed for decades to come.

Viewfinder (2023)

• Viewfinder is a physics based puzzle game that allows you to capture scenes in 'photos' and place them anywhere in space, at any rotation. It's like the game Portal but taken to a new extreme.

• The physics puzzles are mind-bending and excellent, but to me what stands out about this game the most is its 'zen' aesthetics and focus on beauty. The story follows the ancient designers of the world of puzzles you explore, and you can listen to recordings of them working out how to make a digital world beautiful. Among the 'founders' are a painter, a gardener and a photographer. There are 'worlds' of stages in the game, therefore, that are photography, gardening and painting themed.
• I like this game because playing it soothes my nerves. Playing it feel like a respite, not a job. Unlike Baba is You, the puzzles are all solvable without hints, yet you won't get them all immediately.

Books and Shows

The Dispossessed (1974)

• A novel by Ursula K. Le Guin that imagines an earth-like alternate reality where a group of anarchists colonized the moon about 200 years before the novel takes place. The planet is pretty similar to earth, but the moon is different than our moon: having breathable air and some basic plant and animal life, but with harsher living conditions than the main planet.
• The story is slow paced and is about exploring human nature in context of the anarchistic moon and the capitalist planet. It follows the life of a physicist anarchist moon dweller who flees the moon to be the first person to return to the planet in 200 years.
• Shevek, the anarchist physicist, has a fairly uneventful life by the standards of sci-fi protagonists. This is not an epic novel or a well fleshed out coming of age story. It is mostly a series of familiar, everyday situations in life (e.g. a powerful figure taking credit for Shevek's work, raising a child as a single parent, bullying, finding a job, etc) and exploring them in the context of anarchism and capitalism.
• I think The Disposessed served as an inspiration for Anathem, since both novels have a lot in common structurally and thematically. In both, you have sheltered characters coming from idealistic alien worlds, entering into a satirical redition of modern American society. The meat of both is dialogue which isn't forwarding the plot, but is exporing ideas, human nature and society.
• I would recommend The Dispossessed to those interested in different political systems and how to make society more just. It's a novel for people who want to question society and explore the ways it doesn't make sense. I really enjoyed it, but I missed the story and spectacle. It's not a novel for everyone, but it will really click for some people.

Films of Hayao Miyazaki

• In early 2024, I systematically watched all 14 Hayao Miyazaki movies, having previously only seen Princess Mononoke and Sprited Away as a kid. All were great, but these really made an impression on me.
  • Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
    • Before Miyazaki fully found his voice and developed his recognizable style, he wrote and directed Nausicaa, an animated movie based on a series of visual novels he wrote. That makes this a deeply "Miyazaki" experience, but without feeling like a stereotypical "Miyazaki" experience.

The toxic spores covering much of the earth are deadly, so Nausicaa must wear breathing apparatus to explore.

• • • The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity is falling to a global takeover of giant insects, fungus and toxic spores. What's left of humanity is broken up into a network of often warring kingdoms, with similar politics to the European middle ages. The technology is a mix between the middle ages, early 20th century weapons and with some sci-fi technology mixed in.

• • • Nausicaa is an actual princess (e.i. her father is king, her late mother was queen) of the Valley of the Wind. As a modern American when you see monarchy represented in fiction it's generally bad. However, in Nausicaa the rulers and their subjects are in perfect harmony. Nausicaa continously puts herself in danger to protect her people, and her people adore her and would give their life to protect her and her father.
    • Another bit of culture shock a modern American may find with Nausicaa is just how perfect she is. It's customary in modern Western fiction for heroes to have flaws that they learn to overcome in their journey. From the beginning to the end of the film, Nausicaa is like Gandhi mixed with Jesus, where her only super power is empathy. Everybody loves her: her parents, elders, children and enemies she spends any time with. How perfect she was annoyed me the first time I watched this movie, but in subsequent viewings it made more sense me. She is meant to be an ideal person, a role model and to sell the power of empathy to viewers. The movie is not just entertainment, it's instructional.

Nausicaa and her glider, her unique form of transportation thoughout the movie.

• • • Although she has no "super powers" she is incredibly skilled at acrobatics and flying with her motorized glider. This makes for some riveting action sequences.
    • Nausicaa is also pretty good at hand-to-hand combat and kills several men (enemy soldiers) to protect her father and in self defense. Something I love about this film: After killing she haunted by it for the rest of the film; she has something like PTSD. It makes her more insane about her pacifism and maybe that is a form of growth in her character that I missed in my initial viewings of this film.

Nausicaa with her fox sidekick and her glider, flying to help and show mercy to a giant enemy insect.

• • • This is not a movie that goes down easy: it requires attention, a few watches, thought and an open mind. But if you can afford to give this movie what it's asking for, it gives you something totally unique, thought provoking and unforgettable in return.
  • Whisper of the Heart (1995)

At dawn, a bedroom of a bookish 9th grader in the mountainous Tama region of Tokyo in 1994, in a middle class apartment complex. Her older sister, a young adult, moved out months ago, so there's bedding on the top bunk.

• • • Impressionism, in painting and literature, is often defined as capturing the feeling of a place rather than just an image. As far as I can tell, no movie could better communicate what it felt like to be in a middle class family in west Tokyo in 1994 than Whisper of the Heart.

In a rush, the protagonist grabs a railing by city stairs and uses it to shift her momentum instead of slowing down to turn.

• • • The animation in this film is stunning impressionism. It doesn't just show you Tokyo in 1994, it transports you into the mind of this girl and her family; it makes you feel what she feels and see the world from her perspective. I think the impressions are filtered through the nostogic lens of the combined memory of its creators: Aoi Hiiragi (who wrote the visual novel it was based on from 1989) and director Yoshifumi Kondo who was heavily involved in the look and feel of this film. Miyazaki adapted the writing of the visual novel to film.

A 9th grader who aspires to be a violin maker works in the basement of his grandfather's antique shop. He lives in a geographically higher, upper class neighborhood where views of the city are visible from the basement—built on a ledge overlooking west Tokyo.

• • • What gives this film its dreamlike, impressionistic qualities while still feeling extremely real, is that most of the places in the movie are places in real life—slightly fictionalized and infused with feeling. Lighting, camera angles, colors, brush strokes, motion, sound and painting techniques take real locations and add an emotional, lived dimension to them. Almost like reliving a childhood memory, where you worry the memory may have been embellished in your own mind over time.

If you were to ride the Keio Line near Shinjuku station at dusk in 1994 and you were in a reflective mood, it would feel like this.

• • • Amid all the ethereal life-like animation and details, it's easy to forget about the actual story and characters in the film. All it tells is a very realistic, lighthearted and somewhat uneventful story of people just starting to date and learning to deal with new feelings. There's a love triangle and dealing with rejection. There's dealing with being at an age where you are supposed to decide your whole future, and being crushed by the weight of that responsibility. A hilarious (to me) theme that shows up in many Miyazaki works—and you see here—is dealing with the pain, trauma and perfectionism that comes with having a lot of creative talent towards something: in this case writing and violin-making.
    • The story feels like unstructured memories a somewhat pretentious real person might have about their early life.

An honest conversation on the roof of school moments after a heavy rain shower.

• • • Whisper is the opposite of Nausicaa in a lot of ways. Nausicaa is an epic story of biblical proportions, whose main character is a messiah. The moral of Nausicaa is that radical empathy can end war and save the environment. Nausicaa is about saving the world.
    • Whisper is about a typical, above average writer in the 9th grade who doesn't actually accomplish anything by the end of the film, expect for finishing a 'pretty good' story and finding a degree of inner peace. But maybe just finding a degree of inner peace is enough to justify a film. By daring to be less, Whisper allows more subtle morals to be heard.
  • Spirited Away (2001)
    • Spirited Away is one of Miyazaki's most famous and successful movies, it is not a deep cut like Nausicaa and Whisper. However, I still think its worth highlighting because its so incredibly rich.
    • Sprited Away built around the fears a child might have. Fear of losing ones parents, fear of growing up, fear of work, fear of strangers fear of not being accepted. A child is forced to face every fear and in the end finds peace, esteem and acceptance.

Novels of Neal Stephenson

• A short review of Stephenson novels I have read:
  • Snow Crash (1992)
    • Stephenson's breakthrough novel and his most iconic one. Many ideas about Internet communities, virtual reality, mementics, capitalism and religion were introduced and explored in this novel. Tech culture wasn't just an influence on this book, it was strongly influenced by it. Its a window into tech culture past and present.
    • But even if you're not a "Tech Bro" it's an entertaining read. There are beautiful, inventive landscapes, entertaining characters and a society that is a dark futuristic satire of our own.
    • When not exploring ideas, it reads like a comic book. Entertainment value is a top priority. This is a particularly nice feature of this novel, since Stephenson's later work gets pretty heady and requires more patience to get through.
    • I've read this novel twice and got a lot out of it both times. Every page is full of creativity and inventiveness. I'm always thinking "How did he come up with that?". The story is also among the most satisfying and traditionally structured of Stephenson's books. Stephenson's other novels have a tendency to end in abrupt and unsatisfying ways, whereas in Snow Crash you get some closure.
  • The Diamond Age (1995)

• • The Diamond Age is my favorite Neal Stephenson novel. It's a little rough around the edges: its story feels erratic, its edgy in a way that feels unnatural outside the 90s, and it's dense and abstract—not an easy read.
  • But it makes up for all that by painting a rich, beautiful, original world. It draws on the long term impact of nano technology in a future with Victorian social values. It's like steampunk but in a much more advanced future.
  • In this novel, Stephenson explores education, society, childhood, class, abundance and technology in a sort of uninhibited, untraditional way that encourages readers to think. Although Stephenson clearly favors the perspectives of some characters over others, he doesn't fully reveal his views and allows readers to reach their own conclusions.
  • What you get out of this book is a vivid, gorgeous world, mindbending thought experiments and a lot to think about. The characters and the story come second—they're fun and interesting, but they're only a vehicle for philosophy and a stunning setting.
• Cryptonomicon (1999)

Alan Turning, a character in Cryptonomicon who is also frequently referenced in Stephenson's other novels

• • Taking place simultaniously in WWII and the 1990s, Cryptonomicon takes readers on a tour of cryptography, the history of computing, early silicon valley, venture capitalism, and Asian culture.
  • This is my least favorite Stephenson book so far because I feel like it highlights his weaknesses. Without sci-fi worldbuilding he is relying on the plot more than most of his other books. But the plot is feels improvised and unfocused, and the history of computing is not as fun as a speculative future to me.
• Anathem (2008)
  • An ornately illustrated fantasy world that bombards the reader with interesting ideas. Some of these ideas are relevant to the story while others are there for their own sake. It's so dense I read again immediately after finising it to better understand it.
  • Set in another universe with a lot of new vocabulary, places and things, the first 100 pages or so are hard to understand and slow. But as the novel goes on it actually became one of my favorite Stephenson novels.
  • Anathem is the story of a sheltered academic monk, young Fraa [Friar] Erasmas, who is ordinarily only allowed to leave the monestary once every 10 years. However, extrodinary events force him to leave his life behind to go on an adventure to save the world.
  • Anathem is about Erasmas learning about how the world works. In the first part of the novel, we learn how the monestary works. Then rest of the novel is about him learning about the world outside of his monestary—a humorous fantasy satire of modern American life (something Stephenson does in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age as well)

Silo (Apple+ series and Novels)

• I watched through Season 1 & 2 of the Apple TV Silo streaming series and I thought it was great: Inspired world-building, original characters and mysteries that you wonder even when your not watching the show. When season 2 ended I couldn't wait for season 3, so I read the trilogy of novels it was based on: Wool, Shift and Dust by Hugh Howey.

• Silo is the story of a society of a little fewer then 10,000 living underground for hundreds of years in a self sustaining, somewhat authoritarian fallout shelter. The mystery of what happened to cause this in the past is revealed over time.
• Reading the novels it's clear that the reason the TV is show is great is directly because of its source material. The show makes a few minor changes adding some subplots, changing the fate and traits of a few minor characters but overall its extremely faithful to the architecture of the plot and world Howey originally laid out. There's an incredibly tense passage in Wool where the main character is underwater exploring ruins and is running out of oxygen. The Apple TV series captures that scene so perfectly from the novel that its a true testament to the craftmanship of those who put the show together.

• Season 1 and Season 2 of the Apple series cover the novel Wool, except for the resolution of the book (the last pages), to make it more of a cliff hanger. The villain is a much more central and nuanced character in the series than the book. I wonder if his fate will be altered? The ending of Season 2 has some significant changes in terms of the order of events.
• Reading Wool after watching the first two seasons of Silo can actually be a little boring. You almost always know what's going to happen next, and the mystery is really what keeps you going. The succeeding novels, Shift and Dust kept me on my toes.
• In most adaptions of novels, visual media abridges the written souce material its adapting from. The opposite is true with Silo, where the series adds a lot of subplots and nuance to the characters, fleshing things out. Wool almost feels like a detailed initial outline for the Silo streaming series. The core of what makes Silo great comes from Wool, but the actors, set designers and writers add much needed richness to the story—because of this I would actually recommend the series more readily than I'd recommend the novels.

• As of now (I'm writing this in early '26), 2 more seasons are planned. Shift is a prequel with new characters, and Dust is a convergent sequel to both Wool and Shift. Will they make Season 3 follow Shift, a season with all new characters? I'm almost as interested in seeing how the creative team for the series continues to adapt the novels as I am seeing where their version of the story goes.
• One theme in the novels, and that is developing in the series is the idea of "the power behind the power" at every level. About 3 or 4 times in the story you discover someone who is supposed to be calling the shots is just a front for a shadowy figure. This happens a lot in real life but is less common in fiction. I like the emphasis on this idea since its probably a good thing for people to consider when looking at real life power and politics.
• Before reading Hugh Howey's Silo trillogy, I had just finished Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon and Gibson's Neuromancer in a Cyberpunk binge. Those are very abstract and are not that accessable.
• If Howey and Stephenson ever worked together they could probably write a a perfect novel, as their strengths and weaknesses as writers are complementary. Cryptonomicon's plot covered way less ground than the Silo trilogy (maybe even one book), yet it has 918k words compared to the Silo trilogy's combined 646k words. Stephenson could benefit from some brevity and focusing more on the architecture and progression of the plot—occasionally curbing diversions and containing the dense beautiful prose. Meanwhile, I think Howey's Silo trilogy would have benefited from some of Stephenson's dense prose, how he ornately paints the inner lives of characters and his more nuanced, academic handling of sociological and philosophical themes. It was refreshing to read Howey after Stephenson because the plot was always moving forward, every page had a larger purpose in the story. Howey doesn't go on 100 page tangents about an idea that doesn't connect to the plot. At the same time I wondered how Stephenson would have approached the sociological and philosophical side of the book.

Podcasts and other audio

It's a Thing

• Podcast hosted by Tom Merritt and Molly Wood about recent trends in popular culture and technology.
• I love finding out about what new things people are doing. Often new things people are into are cool and become things I get into. At the very least, knowing what people are up to gives you sense for which direction the winds of culture are blowing.
• Also, its an interesting podcast to listen to without being about news or politics. It's not boring yet its calming to listen to.
• Tom and Molly are great hosts who I've been listening to since they hosted CNET's Buzz Out Loud from 2005 t0 2010. For context, iTunes added podcasts in June of 2005 (podcasts had several proto-forms birth of the contemporary podcast) and Buzz Out Load launched in March 2005.
• A small sampling of "things" I've learned about ahead of the curve thanks to this podcast:
  • Capybaras
  • BeReal
  • CottageCore
  • Mr. Callahan's Gen Z Dictionary
  • Goldbelly
  • Halloumi cheese
  • Y2K Style
  • Everything Everywhere All At Once
  • Bones or no bones
  • The Queen's Gambit
  • Selena Gomez's Rainbow Knives
• This podcast is a great respite from news and politics.

Chinese Whispers

• Podcast hosted by Cindy Yu about life in China, economic conditions, chinese national politics, global politics, culture and history. Her podcasts typically consists of her interviewing one or more experts (usually established professors and journalists) about the areas of their expertise.
• In my opinion, what makes this podcast special is that I perceive it to be relatively ideologically neutral. I'm interested in China, but looking for information you find there's a creepy tendency for media to be really pro China or really against it. Cindy Yu defends China and tries to present things from a Chinese point of view, while owning up' when things are problematic and invites guests on who are often critical.
• Hosted by The Spectator, which this podcast seems editorially independent from and I don't endorse (it's a British magazine, which, if you're an American, you might understand as being cross between The New York Post and The New Yorker).

Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (BBC Radio 4, 1978)

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) is a legendary comedy science fiction franchise which is often referenced in programming and computer science (for example, when arbitrary variables are assigned as '42', Yahoo's old service Babel fish, and the chat software Trillian).
• I used to believe Douglas Adam's 1979 HHGTTG novel was the original work the franchise was based on. However, a 1978 BBC Radio 4 radio drama, which also written by Douglas Adams, actually predates it by a year and a half.

• The HHGTTG 2 original radio drama seasons (1978 and 1980) are brilliant, and play as well today as I imagine they did when they came out. They're laugh out loud funny, a little bit profound, clever, delightful and I couldn't recommend them enough. They are available for free on Archive.org (if you know how to get and play MP3s on your phone) or you can buy them on Audible.
• The original 1978, 1979, 1980s BBC Radio 4 episodes of HHGTTG
• A famously difficult 1984 HHGTTG text-based computer game, written by Douglas Adam

Upper Middle Brow

• A book club podcast where two friends read stuff (emphasis on sci-fi) and analyze it.
• I've listened to their episodes on several Neal Stephenson novels (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon) and on William Gibson's Neuromancer.
• What makes this podcast worthwhile: 1. The hosts genuinely have good chemistry—making it a pleasure to listen to and; 2. They are both sci-fi curious and somewhat literary, they want something thought provoking even it might be a little trashy—so they are picking out great novels to cover.
• Their discussion of the novel tends to be pretty socratic—they figure out their takes while talking it out. Their opinions are aren't too definative and won't overshadow your own private takes. Often when I am a little unclear or confused by part of a novel I'm happy to hear I'm not alone after listening to their podcast on it.
• The books I've read are very much for the tech community (e.g. tech bros) and these podcasters are sort of Librarian-Core / GradSchool-Core. Stephenson often takes shots at the culture surrounding academia; the podcast hosts pick up on that and take it personally—a funny dynamic. However, despite being offended from time to time, the hosts don't let it discourage them from engaging with—and enjoying—the content.

Products and Services

Bluetooth Media Button Remote

• I listen to audio from my phone a lot when I'm walking and driving, and there's a simple problem: With a touch screen you need to look at your device to pause, play and go back and forward. You need to 1) Activate the screen, 2) visiually locate the button locations on the large smooth surface.
• With a Bluetooth Media Button Remote, you can feel the buttons with your fingers and make pause/forward/back/volume adjustments without ever taking out your phone and activating the screen. With real tactile buttons you can control your audio entirely by feel and muscle memory, never taking your eyes off the road if you are driving or path ahead if you are hiking.
• It lets you manage your audio faster, safer and without interrupting your flow. It's great for audio books and podcasts where sometimes you want to jump back to hear something you missed, or adjust the volume to match the ambient sound level around you.
• I have one on my steering wheel and take it with me when I go on walks. A nice feature is that it takes cell batteries and never needs to be charged—you just replace the button cell once in a while.

Sony MDR7506 Headphones

• These are fairly cheap ($100) wired 'studio' headphones that I've been using since 2012.
• These headphones crispy and accurately reproduce sound the way it's intended to be heard. If I'm watching a Netflix show with these headphones, I feel confident what I'm hearing is pretty close to what the audio engineer was hearing when the sound was being mastered.
• I've gone through 3 of these in 10 years, so these things are cheap and produce high quality sound, but they aren't that tough.

Shokz OpenMove Headphones

• $80 bluetooth 'bone conduction' headphones
• If you hike, walk, exercise or use a laptop in a room with other people, 'bone conduction' headphones will make your life better, because they don't cover your ears at all. With totally uncovered ears you can stay connected with your surroundings when hiking, walking or just using headphones with other people around.
• Sound quality is passible, but not great compared to earbuds or over-ear headphones in the same price range. These won't be anyone's main headphones, but they are unbeatable if you want to listen to a podcast on a walk (and hear bikes coming up behind you) or practice Spanish on your phone while in a room with others (and not ignore them).
• I prefer this cheaper $80 dollar model to more expensive models because I use them everywhere and there's a good chance they'll be lost or broken. They also have a reputation for being more durable than the expensive models, you can charge them with any USB 3 cable, and the sound quality is decent enough for speech and some music if you are hiking or walking in Manhattan

Nulea Wireless Ergonomic Trackball Mouse

• I used to think the Logitech Trackman Marble Trackball Mouse was the greatest mouse ever made. Released in 2004, it was indestructable, you could play games with it, you didn't need to move your arm to control the mouse, and didn't need space rub it around to move it (so you could play it on a desk with no space or on a sofa.

• The mouse was discontinued a few years ago, but the standard replacement for fans is the Nulea Wireless Ergonomic Trackball Mouse. I think the Nulea is even better than the Trackman:
  • It has a scroll wheel (the lack of this was a huge issue with the first one)
  • It's wireless both with USB and Bluetooth (and it can remember two Bluetooth connections)
  • It's rechargable and it lasts for a long time
  • You can adjust the DPI / sensitivity of the mouse

Sweet Maria's Green Coffee

• Sweet Maria's buys coffee from farms and sells it directly to hobbyists for home roasting. Roasting coffee at home is tricky but satisfying, and gets you fresher high quality coffee at often almost half the price of similar high end coffee.
• What really love about Sweet Maria's is how much detail they provide you about every coffee and every farm. Even high-end coffee roasters will rarely include information about a coffee's cultivar (breed), farm (often with pictures of the farm owners), and processing method (dry, wet, honey etc).
• Since green coffee stores well, you can save money and time by buying it in 5, 10 or 20 lb packages. You can by in bulk even if variety is important to you with sampler sets which include a varity of 1 lb bags. On November, 14 2025 I ordered a "Santa Sack 30 pack" with 30 pounds of green coffee from different farmers, of different coffee types and prepared in different ways. It cost $279.99 including S&H and tax, and lasted until late July 2026. It wasn't that expensive for single origin coffee and it made my life a little more interesting.

Software

cool-retro-term

• Whenever I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time in the terminal in Linux, I choose cool-retro-term (CRT) as my terminal emulator. It acts like RetroArch CRT Shaders—adding flicker, glow, curvature, scanlines, and visible pixels to your terminal.
• You would think adding old-timey glitches and artifacts to your terminal would be a short lived novelty, but I have been using cool-retro-term regularly for years. In fact, I usually update my website using cool-retro-term.

• You can get cool-retro-term here

Debian (Linux-based OS)

• After trying many flavors of Linux (including Arch, Mint and Ubuntu) over of many years, I finally landed on Debian for general use.
• Debian follows these principles in practice:
  • Move slowly, don't break things
  • Don't hassle users to use new stuff
  • Avoid bleeding edge software/components
  • Focus on reliablity
  • Avoid for-profit / closed-source software and services unless the user opts-in.
  • Stay free of commercial influences.
• If you don't like being forced to update, pressured to sign up for accounts or cloud-based drives and having AI features pushed on you, Debian is a non-profit oasis from these commerical forces.
• Ubuntu is a bit commerical and tends to push specialized Ubuntu software on you like Snap, which makes me prefer Debian.
• Arch has a cool aesthetic and community, but I prefer "apt" to the "pacman" software package manager and it's emphasis on bleeding edge software makes me a little anxious.
• In Debian, you can live in a computing environment where change is extremely slow and nothing unexpected happens. You rarely will be forced to learn anything new or do anything unexpected. No one will ask to to pay for anything or make any accounts. And yet, it can do nearly anything you can do in Windows or OS X.
• Running Debian gives you the feeling that you truly own your computer, not that you are just renting it.

i3 (Linux-based User Interfaced)

• i3 is a user interface you can install in most flavors of Linux to use instead of the default Windows-like or Mac-like interfaces.
• If a person with no knowledge of i3 sat down at a computer with i3, they wouldn't be able operate it. Memorizing a few keyboard shortcuts is necessary, and once you memorize many shortcuts and add some of your own, i3 becomes faster and more fluid than traditional user interfaces.
• i3 is a "tiling" windows manager, where windows snap to rectangles on a grid, and can be quickly rearranged and resized without using the mouse. Multiple windows can also be stacked on top of each other. Being able to rapidly re-arrange, resize and stack windows without touching your mouse is a key benefit of i3.
• The second key benefit of i3 is deep customization. You need to customize i3 after you install it I add keyboard shortcuts to control screen brightness, control red screen tint for night, to start my favorite apps and a few for capturing screenshots. I make it so different backgrounds appear for each virtual desktop and so I can use a clipboard text reader. Finally I add an easy shortcut to kill programs (bindsym $mod+z kill).
• After installing i3 be sure to follow these additional steps for it to run optimally:
  • To prevent i3 from running slow for now reason... In ~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal/portals.conf include:
    [preferred]
    default=gtk
  • To make i3 look nicer with animations, transparency and blur... Install picom using your system's package manager and use a nice config for it from the internet.

Photomatix

• Photography software that can create neat effects by combining raw digital pictures taken at different exposures (known as HDR).
• I've used this software to create photos like the second below from the first.

Shot 5.11.2008, Canon Rebel XTi

• Photomatix was first released in 2003; I've been using it since 2008.
• I'm a bit stuck in my ways, but Aurora HDR is another competing piece of software that might actually be better.
• Trey Ratcliff, whose moniker is StuckInCustoms, has an influential travel blog where he uses a lot of HDR. He helped popularize the style and apparently had some roll in developing the Aurora HDR software. I think I learned how to use Photomatix with one of his tutorials (long before Aurora HDR existed)

RetroArch

• This software emulates the experience of playing old games on a computer. As a nostalgic aging guy, I often want to play games that were popular when I was a kid. Not long ago I played several of these games (Grandia [1997], Final Fantasy VII [1997], Final Fantasy IX [2000], and Final Fantasy X [2001]) and found the most recent PC conversions didn't feel like authentic representations of the experience.
• I think part of the problem is these games' art isn't intended to be shown on a 4k screen with perfect color. In some games, like Grandia and FFIX the art was upscaled to look better than the original, but in my mind that is like colorizing a classic black and white film.
• A solution that RetroArch—and many other moderni emulators—offer is shaders, which use algorithms to emulate the imperfections you get from an CRT display. This isn't an option with most stand alone modern adaption of these games. See before and after pictures applying my favorite CRT shader, the koko-aio NTSC shader, found within the Bezel directory in RetroArch. Click for full size images.

• Without buying an antique TV, I would say the most authentic way to experience most old games is by running shaders with RetroArch on a modern 4K screen with advanced CRT shaders and a gamepad.

Walking and Hiking

Birch Meadow Preserve

Stamford, Fairfield County, CT

• Website and location -- public access to the preserve is only available through an entrance at the end of Gun Club Road (41.147230, -73.603140).

• A fairly small, generally empty nature preserve hidden deep in a residential neighborhood in North Stamford. Since it's small you'll find yourself going in circles a few times, but really appreciate the solitude that this spot has to offer.
• There's a very old looking stone gazebo overlooking the water a few hundred feet from the entrance (pictured above). I've had a picnic here before, and, I must say, with the view of the water and the seclusion of the area, it's a lovely spot for a picnic.

Marsh Sanctuary

Mount Kisco, Westchester County, NY

• Website and location -- 114 South Bedford Road, Mt. Kisco, NY 10549.

The amphitheater in Marsh Sanctuary. Shot 9.26.2011, 4:16pm, Canon 5D

• I've been visiting this spot since 2011 when I need a peaceful place to reflect.
• I always sensed that this place has uniquely serene quality. This may be partially because you won't see too many people around, except for maybe a teacher and some kids in around the Field parking lot.
• My favorite walk is parking off Route 172 (Brookside Parking), taking the red trail to the Field Parking Lot, then ascending to the hilltop by the water tower (41.190960, -73.713379) on an unmapped trail. It's less than a mile both ways but it's a beautiful mix of scenery (woods, swamp, pond, field, hilltop, vista) and not bad exercise since its got a lot of hills.
• Also check out the adjacent Leonard Park, with a great free disc golf, a pagoda by a pond, free tennis and outdoor seating for picnics.

Yorktown Parking: North County Rail Trail

Yorktown, Yorktown Heights, NY

• Website and location -- 66JC+G9 Yorktown Heights, New York.

Shot 6.5.2023, 2:30pm, Canon 5D

• North County Rail Trail is a beautiful 22 mile long trail. The above link is to a great parking area for the trail, where either direction you go you end up in a pretty picturesque area. If you head slightly downhill you cross a fantastic railroad bridge (pictured above) and if you head slightly uphill, after a few miles you will be in the beautiful downtown of Yorktown. There are many lovely places to eat there.
• This is once of the most scenic places to ride a bike I've found with in an hour of Stamford.