Deep Blue

I’m sitting at Chicago O’Hare airport waiting to board our re-booked flight home after our original flight last night was cancelled, while we were on the plane. Apparently after all the delays, the pilots had been working/flying longer than the legally allowed length of time, and they only figured that out on the tarmac. Anyway, this is as good a time as any to blog.

As I attempt to keep up with how AI is ever-changing the software industry on a daily basis in ways impossible to predict, I’ve been following and enjoying Simon Willison’s blog. Somehow I missed this new term coined earlier this year that resonates with me deeply. Paraphrasing the important bits:

We coined a new term … covering the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.

We’re calling it Deep Blue.

… Spending your teenage years tinkering with computers turned out to be a very smart investment in your future. The idea that this could all be stripped away by a chatbot is deeply upsetting.

I think this is an issue which is causing genuine mental anguish for a lot of people in our community. Giving it a name makes it easier for us to have conversations about it.

I love it. It’s both accurate in terms of color theory (blue is frequently associated with feelings of ennui and sadness) and in terms of AI — Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov in 1997.

Falling Slowly

Glen Hansard died in a tragic accident yesterday. I don’t really know him, never seen Once nor his other acting roles, nor listened to much of his music. But my wife and I are big fans of cancelled-too-early The Last Man on Earth, which is a particular brand of wacky Will Forte comedy. In some later season, he and Jason Sudeikis sing Falling Slowly a toooon —

Maybe time for a third or fourth rewatch for us?

I just want to remember everything I ever saw

Inject this straight into my veins 💉🤤 —

I’ve got some friends that are huge The Menzingers fans. I don’t count myself amongst their ranks, but some of their anthems just hit right. This is speaking to me and my feels right now. I wish it were longer.

It also captures why I was so into photography for so many years — those photos were more for my memories than artistic endeavors.

Now: July 2026

Summer in NYC. It’s hot, the Knicks won the championship(!), the World Cup is underway, I turned 40, and life at the moment is a big question mark. I seem to be at a life transition point with no obvious path. Growing up I don’t think I considered past this moment in time.

We returned from our 🇯🇵 Japan trip in mid-June. It was a bit of a whirlwind vacation, typical highs and lows, but I’m already looking back fondly and forgetting the lows. I engaged in a ~~bit~~ lot of Japanese retail therapy, and have no regrets. I’ve been itching to go back for a decade, and I guess I needed to get it all out of my system. We’re already talking about the next time we go, which I suspect will be a lot more chill. The question is: Hokkaido or Okinawa?

I’ve been considering since the start of this year that I might have to look for auxiliary income after that trip was over, but now on the other side I have very little motivation to do so. I like working on Pika and it feels like momentum. We just shipped The Pika Pulse, I finally finished Tables, and I’m about to get back into Custom Embeds (🤫 if you’re seeing this on Pulse).

But I did make two big life changes this month:

I vibe-coded an itinerary app for my trip to Japan, then binned it

I’m leaving for 🇯🇵 Japan on Monday, and I’m ready to admit that, as much as I want to do it more, travel stresses me out 😓 Between the planning and the booking and the packing and the FOMO and the waiting, I always get so anxious leading up to it. This can sometimes (often?) impact my enjoyment of said trip.

A month ago we contracted a friend of a friend to help with the planning. In some ways this took a burden off me, which is good, and we quickly got hotels and things booked I was procrastinating. I’m thankful. On the other hand, the constant back-and-forth and questions and itinerary creation felt even more heavy with a third party in the mix. I worry our itinerary is now too packed. I suppose I want a more laidback trip than is planned on paper? Was that his fault or mine? (Almost certainly mine.)

One of my stressors is that the deliverable from this contractor is a PDF itinerary with dates and times. It’s not editable, it’s not mobile friendly, and it’s especially irksome that page breaks land in the middle of days, rather than clean breaks (Update: this bit was fixed in the final version of the doc). It’s not going to be user-friendly when we’re there, walking about and checking in from a phone, and wanting to add to it.

DM Vibing: Beyond Lost Mines of Phandelver

My players are having a blast. They fully defeated Venomfang and liberated Thundertree, started acquired interesting and unique magic items, just saved Gundren, and are even starting to have character arcs, highs and lows, connected to their backstory. Every session I can see them anticipating the next session, and considering how they might bring some creativity to their next character choices. It’s definitely fun and motivating to me as a new DM to keep it up.

The problem is LMoP ends soon, after the next chapter. They’ll be level 5, but now highly invested in their characters and wanting to continue their arcs. How do I pull that off? Most of the written modules start at level 1.

The 2024 rewrite of LMoP smashed it together with Shattered Obelisk for levels 5-8, and after reading that I thought it sucked. There’s literally no connection between the two stories, and Obelisk is fucking weird. It doesn’t fit the vibe of this party.

You don’t have to be a hardcore fan to root for a team

I’m not a big Knicks fan, but I am a big New York fan, and it’s really easy to get swept up in the city’s energy when they’re doing so well¹. SidetalkNYC captures this beautifully.

I want New York to win, always. That’s enough for me to root for the Knicks in these playoffs! Though, OG Anunoby’s injury makes me nervous. I know enough to know he’s a quiet but pivotal piece for the team on both ends of the floor.

There’s likely a lesson in here to extrapolate this out beyond sports — it’s okay to root for someone, or some group, or some thing without having to be a lifelong fan. But I’m not here for big philosophical takes, so I won’t do that.

Let’s go Knicks.

Big 🙏 to Every Toilet in New York for taking me to Game 2 against Philly, a hard fought way-too-many-fouls grind of a win.

I’m not a fervent follower of John Goblikon, nor Randy Feltface, but I have found both of them hilarious in the past and thoroughly enjoyed this, what I suppose can be called an episode of a podcast 🤣 —

A little short film about Norm MacDonald, by Aron Fromm —

Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender

So the full movie leaked, and I watched it, and it was SOOO good, omg 🤯

Yes, I’m a huge ATLA fan, and this movie was peak Avatar — the writing, the story, the animation, the characters, the villian, the bending, everything. After The Legend of Korra left a sour note on the series for me (except for S3 and Zaheer, which was amazing, well written and acted), it honestly felt incredible to be brought back so earnestly and authentically to the original gang with a new story. More of this PLEASE.

Look, this fucking sucks for the team and the animators. I should probably feel worse for watching the leak instead of waiting. But Paramount should release it in theaters. I will go!

The shit Matt Tomasello is doing here is breaking my brain 😵‍💫 —

I Iike my iPhone Air (not love, but still worth sharing)

I was reading the article I finally get the iPhone Air by Allison Johnson for The Verge and I was reminded that I’m in the minority, both as an iPhone Air owner and as an iPhone Air enjoyer.

I’ve been rocking the iPhone Air with no case and the ultra-thin Ohsnap Snap Grip v5. This has been an awesome daily carry. I use my phone a lot, but I haven’t had any battery issues, and so far it’s been fine without a case (knock on wood).

I am occasionally annoyed at the lack of multiple cameras and the single speaker, for sure. The single speaker is especially obnoxious as I watch more YouTube on my phone than I thought I did. If those two issues were different while the weight was the same, I wouldn’t want any other phone. However, the extreme light weight for an iPhone is so nice that, for me, it outweighs those issues. Again, for me.

Before I got the Air, I had been feeling pain in my fingers. It’s unclear whether that was specifically the fault of phone use, but I had been crying for years how I wish the iPhone Mini wasn’t dead. When they announced the Air, I was on board no matter what the compromises were.

The initial shock of losing those features was, well, a shock. It took some time. But like Allison concluded in their article, the Air grows on you. I’m not so bothered by the only-one camera and speaker now. More importantly, my fingers don’t hurt!

I know it didn’t sell well, and so we’ll see what’s available and if I upgrade when new phones drop. For me it all comes down to weight.

There is one issue I’ve experienced with the Air and no other phone: it’s so thin that I’ve actually lost the phone in the couch. Not just between the cushions, but between parts of the couch that you’re not supposed to lose stuff in.

Trying the Ricoh GR IV

A photo from my Ricoh GR IV of people taking a photo with their iPhone

A Fujifilm X100 has been my camera companion for well over a decade now. I’ve owned several letter-based iterations over many years. I love its range-finder aesthetic, physical buttons, and unique OVF/EVF viewfinder. In that time, my shooting has evolved from RAWs that took years for me to get around to edit, to simply capturing lovely Fuji-colored JPEGs right from the camera. It’s truly an amazing piece of engineering that has been with me all over the world, helped me get better at shooting photos, and lives up to the hype it developed over the pandemic.

There’s just one problem: It could never beat my iPhone.

Not to say photos from the iPhone were better than the X100—they very much were not, for me. More so that the iPhone was in my pocket at all times, and the X100, even as compact as it is, wasn’t. And because it wasn’t, I only grabbed it before going on vacation, and not more regularly.

You can see this play out in my camera-only not-as-updated-anymore-and-I-need-to-do-something-with-it old photography website, where pre-2015 there’s more day-in-the-life stuff, and post-2015 it’s mostly I-left-NYC albums. And then there’s barely any albums after 2017. I suppose that’s when posting to Instagram hit a more critical mass for me, or when they added Stories, which I use much more readily than regular posts.

It’s been a few years now of going iPhone-only not just daily, but also on vacations and hikes and places I used to bring a better camera, and now there’s a new problem: While it’s in my pocket, I’m not actually taking photos with the iPhone, not to the extent I used to with a camera. And when I do take a photo, it’s kind of a shitty photo, just for the gram. I miss real photos!

Jujutsu Kaisen is one of the most confusing, esoteric stories and power systems I’ve seen in anime, but Season 3, now animated by Mappa, is truly on another level of insane. Constant 🤯 every new episode so far.

Frozen “lickies” as a dog cheat code

Putting wet dog food in treat containers to be frozen — An almost weekly routine — these go in the freezer

I was creating more frozen dog lickies (as we call them) when it occurred to me this is something I could share with other dog owners as a dog cheat code.

We have a Blue Heeler mix who was a lot as a puppy, and we ended up with a few different trainers. The first one gave us this as homework. She made us buy these West Paw Toppl bowls, fill them with wet food, and freeze them. I put them in the plastic bowls just for the freezer, in case the food wants to seep out the front hole before freezing.

Between these and constant bully sticks, it taught our dog that, if she wanted to chew on something (which puppies are always trying to do), we had things she’s allowed to chew on. We’re still doing this ritual 4 years later and it’s her absolute favorite thing. It takes her some time to finish, is good for her, and it gives her something to focus on, so we like it too. They’re also easy to clean.

We’ve tried adding other food to them, like blueberries and other fruit, but our dog is a protein-first sort of dog, I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, I highly recommend this! They don’t take much time to create once a week and throw in the freezer.

The Last Quiet Thing is a beautiful little essay by Terry Godier —

My Casio is on my wrist right now.

It's telling me it's 2:50. That's all it's telling me. It collected no data while I slept. It has no report to show me. It has no opinions about my health, my habits, or my attention. It is, in this moment, asking absolutely nothing of me.

And that absence, the peace of a thing that does what it does and then shuts up, feels like the most luxurious thing I own.

Not because it's retro. Not because it's minimal.

Because it's done.

My parents bought me an Apple Watch years ago and it just never clicked. Too always-on, too much noise, too close to my face. I’m pretty sure that, in the years since, my phone usage has, sadly, dramatically increased, but that’s besides the point.

I fell down the watch enthusiast rabbit hole in 2020, when my silly quartz watch died (again) in the middle of a pandemic. Enough was enough, I needed to try these automatic watches I kept hearing about that don’t have to deal with batteries dying. I’ve not gotten off the ride since. Of course, now my (many) automatic watches are frequently dead, but a quick few turns and they’re humming again. Just beautiful mechanical engineering on my wrist.

This post by Terry is speaking to me today, between a recent love affair for watches, and being a software maker just trying to make good enough software — implicit in that is also software that is done. I wrote a bit about that in a recent post about Letterbird.

Hey Rhodie

It’s the last day of the week dog sitting for a friend. Everything’s copacetic today, excited to go home, but I want to revisit something I wrote on the first night we got here, but didn’t publish:

I’m writing this rant in the middle of my first night here in the Catskills (Kingston), house and dog sitting for a friend. I can’t sleep. When I do sleep, I’m having nightmares. My stomach is full of uncomfortable gas. The Hudson Valley is general beautiful, but the trains at night have always been so obnoxious, and this particular home we’re at has a nice indoors but the yard and driveway are full of mud from recent rain and melted snow—it’s not pleasant.

I’m feeling this way all because the dog we’re watching attacked my dog earlier today. It was quick but scary. I think I had a fight or flight response and my body hasn’t come down yet. This dog is crazy pants, never seen such high energy paired with extreme human possessiveness. My dog doesn’t stand a chance, and now I’m feeling like shit that I brought her to this unsafe location.

Can we last a week?

I didn’t hit publish because, as a not very prolific writer/blogger, I wasn’t ready for my third blog post here to just be an uncomfortable middle of the night rant. But this gives me a chance to revisit it.

DM Vibing: Lost Mines of Phandelver (Ep.4)

Today was a great session. ✨

After a long, grueling, and almost deadly battle at the end of the Redbrand’s Hideout, it was so satisfying to see the party finally breath a sigh of relief when they actually survived, but it was exhilarating to see them all scream for joy when I said “…and you all level up!” I felt like a proud dad!

I’ve been playing D&D since college, but this is my first time being a dungeon master. I’m running Lost Mines of Phandelver on a suggestion from a friend. I’m obviously not great at it, yet, but I get by well enough (I think, at least for my wife and new-to-D&D friends). Doing my best to add flavor to towns, give NPCs personality, and ham it up sometimes, while also not getting too bogged down in unnecessary details. I think I can get better at atmosphere and steering further from the source material, and general voices and role-playing. But I’m not sure they’re noticing?

These friends of mine have been D&D-curious for a bit, and I set them up with my other friend (a wonderful DM) who ran a one-shot not too long ago. They had fun! But they also felt they didn’t get it… and I told them that’s because they didn’t really play the best parts of the game.

I enjoy and connect with this essay from Greg Knaus:

There will be more software than ever, as its production is automated; we are entering the industrial age of the digital age. But less of this code will be elegant, or considerate, or graceful. Less of it will be created by removing what isn’t David, and less of it will be driven by a human understanding of human needs.

That was something I did that mattered. I’ll miss it.

(via Daring Fireball)

Now: February 2026

Moving my personal website over to Pika and elbows deep in trying to make it the best place to blog on the web. Looking at search functionality…

Working on my vibe engineering. Recently switched from Cursor to Windsurf, but also experimenting with Conductor. The majority of my code and PRs are still written, rewritten, or at least intensely scrutinized by me, but I’m a much better Ruby on Rails coder than I’ve ever been. It’s like having an only semi-competent personal senior code instructor.

Trying to DM for the first time. Running the classic Lost Mines of Phandelver for my wife and a friend couple.

Binging Mad Men for the first time with that same friend couple.

Just started Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World. I can’t tell if it’s poking fun at isekai tropes or basking in their sometimes cringy ways. I heard something about watching at least through episode 15.

My Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover band “The No No Nos” have a show on March 26th at The Gutter in Brooklyn (come watch if you’re nearby). We haven’t played together all winter and need to practice.

I turn 40 this year, and to celebrate, we’re traveling to Japan in June. We bought flights, but now the stressful planning begins.