I created what I think is the best workout playlist, using the most anal retentive criteria imaginable. 1. The songs shouldn’t take longer than 5 seconds to get going in some manner, and there shouldn’t be more than 5 seconds of silence, feedback, or any fadeouts at the end. This eliminates a lot of songs, … Behold! The Best Heavy Metal Workout Playlist
The map below is inaccurate, as AllTrails’ UX for recording hikes sucks. There’s no easy way to “stop” the hike recording, and “pausing” the hike recording restarted it after a certain time for some reason, so the app recorded me driving home. Encountering these hiccups in a process annoys me both as a user and … Photos: Deer Lakes Park Blue Trail Hike
From the article “Tech Workers Rebel Against a Lame-Ass Internet by Bringing Back ‘Geocities-Style’ Webrings“: Take Linvega’s LowTech WebRing as an example. A given site connects to two other sites, which connect to two more sites, forming a closed-loop: a ring. Users tout the format as something more like wandering through a neighborhood, reinfusing cyberspace … Decentralize Your Internet
There has to be one millionaire on earth, doing absolutely nothing of worth, who can look into the sorry state of home printer tech. You don’t even have to really get involved—just toss some cash to some engineers and programmers and have them figure it out. They’ll do a Kickstarter or something and pay you … Someone Needs to Do Something About Printers
Expendables 2 A group of for-hire mercenaries race to find a stockpile of Cold War-era refined plutonium before the villain, named Vilain, does. I think every 80’s and 90’s action movie guy was stuffed into this, maybe even more than the first one, so it kind of makes it fun in that regard for middle-aged … Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 25
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace Say what you want about George Lucas, but the man knows how to world-build. Despite this, lot of folks criticized this movie as unnecessary, because you could start with Attack of the Clones and still get Anakin’s necessary character arc. The prequel Star Wars movies were about … Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 24
My Hero Academia, Season 4 This represented a little bit of a departure from previous seasons, because the big battle came early on, and someone actually died. There’s a decent pop rock song in the filler storyline of the school talent show. But really, the soap opera of MHA continues as soap operas do: you … Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 23
The Wolverine Wolverine in Japan. This film was in the middle of the cinematic X-Men franchise getting a little more mature, and it shows here, especially in the dialogue. It would appropriately crescendo, perhaps a little too late, with Wolverine’s sendoff in Logan, but this was the solid beginning. X-Men: The Last Stand The third … Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 22
Easy-to-understand part of a lecture on the ideas. A little bit too Platonic for me, but it can get one on the path of breaking away from purely material causes for things. If there’s a meta-force, not necessarily supernatural, but an in-between level between pure classical physical space and that supernatural domain, then material methods … How Matter is Formed and Other Consciousnesses
Escape from New York Not sure why I think this, but I consider this a sister film to the original Mad Max. They came out roughly the same time, so there was a similar cultural context, at least when the final rewrites and filing occurred. Also crazy to note that the depiction of vector graphics … Sci-fi and Fantasy Movie and Series Reviews, Part 21
The rewards for the Kickstarter were sent out, so I jumped it to the top of my reading list. Hawthorne’s prose is playful. It seems like a lot of the sci-fi emerging out of the retro-futurist, first stages of the industrialization of electricity (whatever you want to call it) had a bright, optimistic bent. How … Photos: The Cosmic Courtship Hardcover
Fist of the North Star Post-apocalyptic 80’s kung fu, with a really dated English dub; Full movie here, with a protagonist so badass, he walks through a building as it falls on top of him, and tables randomly explode when he’s ready to fight. There probably wouldn’t have been JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure if this wasn’t … Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 20
…because it’s probably not aliens that are involved at all with this—it’s all large-scale electromagnetic stuff. I am not for or opposed either way to aliens being at least covertly mucking around; my beliefs aren’t based on what I can perceive and understand. Aliens would be a good story to come across in reality, but … I’m Not Saying It’s Aliens
A.I.C.O. Incarnation A schoolgirl learns she’s not who she thinks she is, and it involves a quarantine zone that resulted from a berserk experiment to create artificial organisms. What’s with trained special forces soldiers who look like Teen Vogue models? At least some series’ lore would explain it away as cyborgs or trained-at-birth/crisis situation scenarios, … Sci-fi and Fantasy Movie and Series Reviews, Part 19
It was the only remaining account I had, besides the one at Goodreads, that was vaguely social or collaborative, that I didn’t really use all that much. I had a few small, personal JavaScript and CSS projects on there that I moved to the UX portfolio page. I don’t code all that much any more … I Am Off GitHub
Well, almost a 15k. This wouldn’t be so bad if I had planned and trained for it; I had originally intended to do a 5k. My wife’s gym organized a casual weekend run at the Westmoreland Heritage Trail. You could do any length of a run, from a 5k (I think shorter than 5k, too) … I Accidentally Ran a 15k
I took my son out on a hike at a local park. Here are some photos. We had an off-path companion for a few moments: This tree had a strange, ugly vine wrapped around it: Pit stop: I really like this one. The sun is in the top center, right in the opening of the … Photos: Spicebush Trail Hike
There are unrelated songs that have been brought to my attention as of late, which are unrelated except for similar experiences when I first listened to them. The first is the title theme of Solstice, the buff wizard 3D-ish puzzle game for the original Nintendo. I played this right when it came out, at 12 … The Call of the Solstice
Except for browser cache clearing, whenever I come to a storage clearing experience, the results range from lackluster annoyances to infuriating. There’s always something the UI doesn’t provide either during the actual cleansing process, or worse yet, before storage gets filled up, as a preventative measure. And there’s experiences like this that are so openly … Storage Space Woes
Mob Psycho 100, Season 1 An unassuming middle-schooler, Shigeo Kageyama, has superpowers that go into overdrive when he’s irritated enough to reach 100%. The anti-shonen shonen series: Mob has no interest in using his powers for world peace, or being the best, or other such lofty nonsensical goals. His greatest struggle is probably running to … Sci-fi and Fantasy Movie and Series Reviews, Part 18