Week In Review 2026-08-01
This update covers Sunday 07-26-26 through Saturday 08-01-26 (icon Glossary, if needed).
LIFE
- 🈁 Funny how one small suggestion can snowball into something larger.
- 📕 The heat sapped a lot of my energy and willpower this week, so much of it was spent indoors.
- 📜 I didn’t plan to spend any time administering my website this week, but...
- ❤️🩹 Met with a vascular specialist on Monday 07-27, who found no issues with the circulation in my legs, but wasn’t sure I would find anything with a neuropathy appointment either ¯\(ツ)/¯ . Swam at night with L. on Sunday 07-26 and Tuesday 07-28. Went on a brief post-work neighborhood walk on Friday 07-31. Kept close to home due to serious summer storms on Saturday 08-01.
EXPLORE
- 🎨 As mentioned in a recent Randoming, I was contacted by Steven Hoefer on Mastodon about the mailto: links at the bottom of my posts. The address listed was the default “you@example.com,” which I thought I updated when I pasted the Bubbles code into my CSS template. After I corrected this error, other ideas for my site started to pop in my head, and before I knew it I had winnowed down my post tags, changed the source of my font import away from Google to bunny.net (thanks to Exa, discontinuous anomaly from an old thread), and finally sunsetted my /now page as my weekly updates cover the same ground. In its place is a /someday page with an appropriate title: “When will you finish?”
- 🔬 No OS updates, app installs, or app deletions this week.
- 🪟 The heat early on in the week kept activities indoors. Swam twice in the evening, as mentioned above. I worked remotely at a Kia dealership and at Living Room on consecutive days, Wednesday 07-29 and Thursday 07-30, respectively. I also made a couple trips to Savers on Thursday and Friday 07-31 to find a couple extra short-sleeved shirts. Beyond that, I was mainly indoors or close to home this week.
MEDIA
- 📰 In the Age of AI, the Analog Restaurant Feels Radical, Eater. This is more about the aesthetics surrounding anti-AI design than anything else, some of which will undoubtedly become coopted by AI itself sooner or later. I still appreciate the efforts to look less polished and more "real," even when "real" itself is in a state of perpetual flux and doubt.
- 📰 User Interfaces of the Demo Scene, {datagubbe}. I knew folks in the late 90s who were avid demoscene followers, and it absolutely blew my mind to see what could be done with only 1.44 MB of data (aka the equivalent of just one 3.5-inch floppy disk). The article shows off the programs used for programming sound and graphics, most of which required assembly language programming to understand. Had my ancient professor at college made an effort to showcase demoscene output in his Assembly Language Programming class, I may not have dropped out of the class, and I may have actually completed a Comp Sci degree!
- 📰 Built to converge / Designed to isolate, mmalc X Machina. Apple Park reads like trying to merge the worlds of an office with an art gallery, then asking folks to conduct business within. Based on what is written here, I would react poorly to working within Apple Park, and I would probably adopt a more feral appearance that's more akin to what's described in the Eater article. Both the cleanliness and isolation within Apple Park would cause me to react...badly.
- 🎬 Dancin’: It’s On!, RiffTrax. I never wrote about this film, huh? Take a successful dancer and choreographer, who decides at one point he wants to direct films. Very few of the films he directed became successful or well-known, with the possible exception of Space Mutiny achieving a sort of infamy via MST3K. This film features folks who competed in "So You Think You Can Dance?" and to give credit where due, they are all talented dancers. What they aren't, though, are skilled actors, and the acting-to-dancing ratio does them no favors. Throw in numerous promotions for Panama City, FL, oddly-specific music that sometimes bolsters the plot and sometimes confuses it, and special effects that were likely generated by an iPad app, and you will have yourselves a time both well-spent in laughter and agony at the same time.
- 🎬 I'm 33, living in Osaka. Today is payday 💴🇯🇵 | Don Quijote & sushi, Mr & Mrs Japan - Daily Life. A day-in-the-life video of a youngish married couple in Ōsaka, showing how they handle their pay day. It's instructive that the first step shown is the Mrs. withdrawing money from an ATM, as Japan is still a cash-first society even in its largest cities. Also instructive is just how damn cheap sushi is in Japan, as it's more or less everyday food instead of something on the higher end as in the US.
- 🎬 Low Culture Podcast: The Ploughman’s Lunch, The Quietus Low Culture Podcast. Finally, tying together everyday food with less-polished aesthetics, here's the traditional British ploughman's lunch, consisting of bread, cheese, and onions (with pickled items as an occasional accompaniment). It's not a pretty meal, but it never was supposed to be. A ploughman's lunch often shows up in British pubs, given the well-worn pairing of cheese with beer, but this combination is a relatively recent addition that came about due to post-WW2 rationing. The podcast dives into the history of this meal, from its origins in the Late Middle Ages to how it has become yet another symbolic cultural flashpoint for a changing society.
WORK
- 🏥 A relatively chill week, given that a new quarterly release of Epic is imminent, and that summer vacations are in high swing. Nice to have some quiet moments at work.
OTHER
- 🗣️ When this post goes live, I will be a month and change away from turning 55. *mind blown*
NEXT
- 🔮 I have one last task to complete for my late mother: posting an online obituary, as paper obituaries are as dead as, well, name your 19th-century technology. What would have been her 77th birthday will be on Saturday 08-08, which is when I hope to have completed this final duty.
PICTURE
- 📸 Back on July 30, 2020, L. & I were on a road trip that was in response to the COVID-19 lockdown. We decided to go to places where few people lived, which is how we ended up in central and western Kansas for a while. From there, we drove to Oklahoma to visit my brother R., as he was about to start teaching as a full-time faculty member there. Much of our return trip from OKC saw us either parallel or drive on old US 66, including numerous routes and attractions in and around Tulsa. The Catoosa Blue Whale, one such roadside attraction, can be found just northeast of Tulsa, so here's a commemorative photo for both the 6th anniversary of this trip and for US 66's 100th anniversary.
