It was a good year for television! Or for my clearing the backlog, as some of these came out years ago:

• The Last of Us, which I have to thank for making my wife interested in something video game-related. Because Pedro Pascal is in it, to be clear, but I’ll take it.
• Severance would have been even better if played at 1.25x. The office party scene was masterful, though, and at the right speed.
• Slow Horses, Season 2 and Season 3 were the best 12 hours of live-action TV this year.
• Ted Lasso, Season 3 was a disappointment the more I think about it, so I try to think about it less.
• The Bear, Season 2 was the opposite of Lasso and I look forward to Season 3.
• Guy’s Grocery Games was a bad habit which we broke shortly after I wrote about it.
• The Afterparty, Season 2, which was… fine, but a bit too West coast for my taste. Unlike…
• Only Murders in the Building, Season 3, which hit just the right spot. The soundtrack is still a hit with the family on our rides to school.
• Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake was the perfect sequel to the original.
• Bodies were a nice surprise, although Primer (2004) is still the only one with time travel that makes sense.
• The Great British Baking Show, Season who-knows-which had some of the “worst” contestants to date — quotation marks here because they were all good both in personality and baking skills — but some of the best moments, so one of the better seasons overall.
• Scavengers Reign were the best 6 hours of any TV this year. Not for everyone, to be sure, but I hope it will be for enough people for their flaky Warner/Discovery corporate overlords to order another season.

Last year’s list is here.

My podcast diet has become stale. I work from home more, commute less, and have decided not to wear AirPods when others are around, With a family of five this means no more than 30–45 minutes in the early morning before anyone else is up. And those minutes are filled with the usual suspects, which continue to be fine, but they are also two elderly economists with similar views. Where’s the variety?

So, here is an aspirational list of things I will try out in 2024. Be warned: a few years ago I put Lex Friedman’s podcast on a similar list, and apologized profusely after realizing it was a good cure for insomnia and not much else. As always, caveat lector.

• Who Killed JFK looks like someone was playing podcast Mad Libs. (Seasoned journalist) Soledad O’Brien and (B-list celebrity) Rob Reiner discuss (a controversial topic) the JFK assassination. I vaguely remember O’Brien from The Site, back when MSNBC was trying to live up to its first two initials and went all tech all the time. What strange turn of events got her to host a conspiracy theory podcast?
• The Vergecast got on the Maybe list after the POSSE episode. I bumped it up to the Regulars after their In Memoriam to Twitter. I foresee many skipped episodes — 1–2 hours twice per week feels exhausting — but I also skip plenty of ATP and still get enough out of it to be a member.
• Life and Art from FT Weekend is the audio version of the second-best part of FT (the best being the daily Big Read), so how couldn’t it be good? I’m about to find out!
• Conversations with Coleman is what I imagine Tyler Cowen’s podcast would be if he weren’t an old white economist. I also think it’s time I finally started listening to a podcast by someone significantly younger.
• Greatest of All Talk is already on my list, so this is a bit of a downgrade. While I enjoy listening to basketball talk, three hours each week is just too much. This is the year I’ll decide whether to cut it off completely.

If the links above were not explicit enough, here are my actual regulars: ATP, EconTalk, Conversations with Tyler, with a sprinkling of The Talk Show and Dithering. They all feature prominently in years past: 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one.

I consider myself to be a fairly proficient user of English as a second language, but there are some things I will never get right:

• Using a “W” when a “V” would do (like in woodoo voodoo; and yes, just like Chekov).
• Pronouncing “iron” correctly.
• Understanding whether “substituting X for Y” means that you used to have “X” and now you have “Y” or vice versa.
• Using em-dashes without—yes, without—any surrounding spaces.

The first two are entirely my fault, the third runs contrary to most other languages, but the last one is just dumb and that rule should be abolished.

⊕ Spoiler alert.

A funny thing happened while I was reading Wanting, a book about mimetic desire: micro.blog started the September 2023 Photoblogging Challenge and I had sudden urge to unlock that 30-day pin.

I went for tangential over literal interpretation of the prompts, and for (mostly) archival photos over daily snaps. While reviewing old photos I realized that, among the many things wrong with my late iPhone Xs Max before the digitizer died and I had to replace it, was the lens stabilizer: most of the photos shot while it was on its last legs are smeared. I was oddly at peace with that, my own photo quality standards having slipped considerably in the last decade as my spouse became the family’s photographer of record.

I also tried to add a link or two wherever possible, because if a piece of online text doesn’t link out to anything else then what’s the point? ⊕ Seriously, X now allows verified users to post walls of text in a single post and still has no hyperlinks. The mind boggles why anyone would write anything there that’s more serious than their thoughts from the shitter. In that spirit, here are all the prompts, linking out to my entry for the day:

• Day 1: abstract
• Day 2: buildup
• Day 3: precious
• Day 4: orange
• Day 5: forest
• Day 6: well
• Day 7: panorama
• Day 8: yonder
• Day 9: language
• Day 10: cycle
• Day 11: retrospect
• Day 12: panic
• Day 13: glowing
• Day 14: statue
• Day 15: red
• Day 16: oof!
• Day 17: intense
• Day 18: fabric
• Day 19: edge
• Day 20: disruption
• Day 21: fall
• Day 22: road
• Day 23: a day in the life
• Day 24: belt
• Day 25: flare
• Day 26: beverage
• Day 27: embrace
• Day 28: workout
• Day 29: contrast
• Day 30: treasure

Solvitur ambulando is my new favorite Latin phrase, for now. (ᔥRobin Sloan)

For some reason, I have been stumbling upon more and more good personal blogs recently. The recent detwittefication Which is a term I just coined. Please feel free to suggest alternate spellings. of the Web may explain some of my new finds, but many started long before the several more recent exodi. Here are a few:

1. Kwon.nyc from Rachel Kwon, who has the best first post I have seen in a while (about leaving surgical residency), thoughts on and digital gardens similar to mine, and identical thoughts on optimization. So yes, confirmation bias.
2. Matthias Ott has good advice on blogging, great recommendations on what to watch, and I also get to learn some CSS.
3. (The?) Longest Voyage, which, who doesn’t love a good travelogue of an American in Japan, who arrives to Tokyo in January 2020. Also, Corona virus. Crazy, right?
4. The Scholar’s Stage by Tanner Greer is unlike the other three in that — the title kind of gives it away — the articles are more scholarly and there are few if any personal topics. And while I agree with some of the theses (or takes, as kids these days call them, and the day when graduate students will be instructed to submit their “takes” on a given topic is coming sooner than you think), others leave me cold, but I’d rather read a well-argumented article with which I disagree than an echo chamber listicle.
5. In that vein, Tipsy Teetotaler and Why Evolution is True are once-a-day (for the most part) lists of interesting things from around the internet from an Orthodox Christian and an atheist respectively, and while I am far from agreeing with either on many, many things, I also find the thoughts they share valuable, and the websites they link to interesting and engaging. So there.

P.S. This will do well as an appendix to my blogroll, which you can also check out.

P.P.S. I intentionally omitted the many, many micro.blogs I have been following, about which more in some future post — there's a cliffhanger for you.

Apps and/or services I have tried and dropped so far this year:

• Arc
• Ulysses
• Rewind
• Wavelength

The one that stuck:

• Microsoft Edge

Yet again, Microsoft is eating everyone’s lunch. Back to the 1990s it is.

Here is a list of appliance lifespans from our new home owner guide:

• AC: 15 years
• Dishwasher: 9
• Dryer: 13
• Heat pump: 16
• Stove: 13
• Refrigerator: 13
• Water heater: 11

To me, born and raised in 20th century Serbia, these seem awfully short! Have things become unrepairable?

After a few months of intermittently kicking the tires on Dave Winer’s FeedLand, I’ve finally had the time to port over a few feeds from my preferred RSS reader. The wonderful thing about FeedLand is that you can easily follow my feed categories and read posts without having an account (which is fortunate, since new signups on Winer’s own server are on hold). The full list of feeds is here. There is even a feed of posts I liked! It’s feeds all the way down.

The Science category has your usual suspects but I had to dig deep for Medicine since many of the blogs I follow haven’t been updated in years and others have turned into HuffPost-level text mills. Fortunately, Substack enabled a resurgence of medical writing, with feeds enabled by default.

Did I mention NetNewsWire is a free, open source RSS reader available on MacOS and iOS, and can sync via iCloud? For the anti-Apple readers, Feedly is there, I guess?

…and the scary/great thing about middle age is that you forget that you have, in fact, made a blogroll not two years ago, listing amongst others the two blogs included in your lamentation about not having a blogroll.

In other news: the old blog is now transferred to micro.