Media diet this week. I’ve been reading:

• I finished The Tainted Cup, and thought it was fun and interesting. I’ll definitely read more in the series.
• Listening to Circe. It’s excellent and the audiobook reading is perfect.
• Started reading Metal from Heaven

And some TV:

• Season 2 of Severance is here. I re-watched Season 1 a couple of weeks ago and was struck by how tight it was, how specific and articulated its vision and its characters are. The first episode of Season 2 hit all the notes I would have wanted: It surprised me and promises so much.
• We finished the final season of Loudermilk. It walks a fine line between jokey and sincere, and I think ends as a really moving story about found family and addiction, while managing to frequently be really, really funny.
• American Primeval is very violent depiction of a violent era in the American West, and centers on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It’s well done; I don’t know if I’d recommend it.

And some music I’ve liked:

• The Weather Station, Humanhood
• Rosali, Bite Down: I really like this album
• MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks

I made some updates to my RideShare app (which produces nice, shareable images of Peloton rides) that I’m really happy with: More flexible output image sizing and the ability to select from the image types that the Peloton API provides for more interesting visuals. I wrote this up over at the data blog.

Phase one after a really hard spin:

Lo, I am a being of pure heat, deeply calm and still after furious expression of will and strength.

Phase two: why does my house have all these staaaairrrs and why don’t we have any baaaggeells

Closing Tabs, part 4 – The final chapter (for now): Here ends my selective curation from among the four hundred tabs that have lived in Safari on my phone for the past two to three years. I skipped legions of old GitHub pages; and I closed without close review a pretty good-sized catalog of then-cutting-edge Covid resources, the re-scanning of which gave me a weird sense of unresolved trauma and a pit in my stomach.

For my troubles, here’s the last half dozen or so links that, for one reason or another, I thought I’d share.

• mhoye/moderntools: a collection of updated tools that “should be a standard part of a modern unity distro”. There’s so much good stuff here.
• Freeland Spirits bourbon: Tasty
• Forza Horizon 5 - Summer Information Thread - Series 1: If you were playing Forza Horizon 5 a couple of years ago (you should! It’s fun! Though FH4 remains my favorite by many miles) then this might have been a useful resource.
• Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory by Mike Davis
• NPR’s list of The 123 Best Songs of 2023: Never too late to revisit this?
• The smoke-colored Vero cappuccino cup: My favorite coffee cup

Here’s my latest installment of Closing Tabs (vol 3). I’m really moving fast, and only posting maybe one in ten of the old tabs that I need to close out. Feels good to scour out all this digital history.

• rmcelreath/stat_rethinking_2020: Statistical Rethinking Course Winter 2020/2021
• Twilight Song by Speak the Sky; this is a really contemplative, cooperative tabletop storytelling game.
• Marginal Effects, Marginal Means, Predictions, and Contrasts • marginaleffects
• Agile and the Long Crisis of Software
• The untold story of the Pacific Northwest’s nuclear past - High Country News
• Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests – Simon Willison maintains this absolutely incomprehensible pace of building and writing. Just wow.
• Carbon | Create and share beautiful images of your source code

danah boyd:

Of course, there’s power in pretending like this is about free speech. Or good business. Or wise politics. Even to oneself. And I have to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg and those who are surrounding him have countless self-justifications for their actions. But I still cannot imagine sitting in a room writing a script for explicitly justifying hate speech and harassment directed at a specific population with religion as the explicit excuse. Who was in that room? How were they justifying the text they were creating and publishing? Did anyone recognize the echos of history here?

Time for Closing Tabs, vol. 2, in which I once again dive deep into the hundreds of open Safari tabs on my phone and unceremoniously close them. Today’s offerings to the cache gods:

• Ethnographies of Datasets: Teaching Critical Data Analysis through R Notebooks by Lindsay Poirier, UC Davis.
• Modern Plain Text Computing, another very good resource from Kieran Healy
• Several best-of lists of board games to check out:
  • The Best Board Games of 2024 Will Excite Players of All Ages | Smithsonian
  • The best board games of 2024 so far | Polygon
  • The Best Board Games of 2024 - Paste Magazine
• Friday Night Meatballs: How to Change Your Life With Pasta
• This great piece modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics:

One of the other options Omniverse suggests for moving off of its service is self-hosting, which is akin to telling me to go fuck myself. Self-hosting is great if your hobby is self-hosting things. Mine is not.

• ggview, which helps generate canvases of the right size for ggplot output

Closing Tabs, you don’t have to get read but you can’t … stay … here.

Family are out for an after dinner walk, so I’m listening to some music, sitting on the living room rug in the speakers’ sweet spot, with the volume at Slightly Unreasonable.

Welcome to Closing tabs, vol 1: In which I cull neglected open tabs from my mobile browser.

I have too many tabs on on my phone. Today I’m rapidly scrolling and closing, but finding some curiosities that might, might be worth noting.

• Here’s the Southeast Seattle Tool Library where I searched for a hedge trimmer. I should still go check them out sometimes. Tab closed.
• Fifteen or so totally different tabs with view of last summer’s Posit conf. Tabs closed.
• Do Photo a book about practicing photography. Tab closed.
• I was looking for a new backpack last summer.
• Vicki Boykis’s What Are Embeddings. Tab closed. (PDF saved)
• All 50 Security Drone Locations in Destin 2 Season of the Seraph. Tab closed. (Drones got)
• How to open a file in Emacs. Tab closed.
• Deb Chachra’s wonderful essay Care at Scale: Bodies, agency, and infrastructure.

Trying to be a tiny bit more intentional about capturing and annotating things, I’m experimenting with a link/dev/snippet log – new, (again) over at the datablog. One entry so far; let’s see where I take it.