🍿 Wake Up Dead Man (2025) was a better murder mystery than Glass Onion with a more poignant message than either of its predecessors. Rian Johnson has an uncanny ability to pick the right topic to pick on, and the theme of religious revival was spot on.

📸 Day 7: Solstice.

These stone pillars at the Kadinjača monument in Western Serbia are not exactly Stonehenge, but maybe they do align with the stars? Incidentally, the Yugoslav World War 2 monument architecture is the only kind of brutalism I can get behind.

HBO not renewing Scavengers Reign was bad enough, but I recently learned that the news was even worse. Netflix, too, had passed on the opportunity even with the Season 2 teaser being everything I could have hoped for.

Time for Apple TV to pick it up! How do we make it happen?

📸 Day 6: Sparkle.

You don’t have to wait for the holiday season to light some sparklers. This one was from a trip to the Outer Banks, cropped to protect the innocent.

• V.H. Belvadi: Working with the end in sight. ⊕ ᔥPhil Bowell, who also noted the beautiful site design. Matches my own experience with Zettelkasten/Slip-box systems, in that none of the very productive people in academia I know actually use anything close to them. Belvadi is sticking to markdown files edited in BBEdit; I am partial to DEVONThink and TinderBox although both of them can also punt text files to BBEdit, which is on my list of should-learn apps.
• Andrej Karpathy: Chemical hygiene. This list of sensible advice for managing our own environment appeared in my RSS reader as part of the Bear blog discovery feed, with small-a “andrej” listed as the author. Since I found myself nodding along to most of it The risk of chemical exposure while handling paper receipts is overblown unless you work at a cash register, in which case you really should wear gloves. I clicked through to check out this andrej’s other work and lo, it was Andrej Karpathy. Unsurprisingly, his 2025 LLM Year in Review was also quite good.
• Brooklyn Gibbs: how to use the internet again: a curriculum. ⊕ ᔥThought Shrapnel, with a much better re-title. Online literacy for adults and children alike. Note in particular that there exist things outside the web: see Project Gemini for an example of a cozy part of the Internet that is very much distinct from the World Wide Web.
• Matthew Haughey: Recent camping and travel discoveries. We will have a fourth-grader in the household next year which means a National Parks pass for the whole family, so this may come in useful!

📸 Day 5: Beard.

The owner of the beard is Father Damien of Molokai, a 19th century Belgian Catholic priest whose statue stands in front of the Hawaiʻi State Capitol. He cared for leprosy patients on the island for more than a decade until himself succumbing to it, age 49.

In today’s episode of Dithering Gruber and Thompson are mystified that Shadowrocket was the second most downloaded paid app in the US App Store, because why would so many Americans want to hide without VPN? The answer, of course, is that those “US” App Store customers are actually Chinese.

• Elizabeth Stice: You Think This Machine’s Your Friend, But It’s Not. A reason to rewatch You’ve Got Mail (1998), which I remember as being significantly worse than the movie that inspired it, The Shop Around the Corner (1940). (ᔥJohn Brady)
• Janan Ganesh: When business and democracy don’t mix. Ganesh agrees that capitalism and democracy are in fact at odds, as noted in the last paragraph of this blurb on Enshittification.
• Doc Searls: Shitting Us Not. Similar topic to the above, with a delightful new (to me) word: fecosystem.
• Bryan Vartabedian: Medicine as the last uncompressed profession. On the unmeasurables of medical practice. Of course, medicine is not the last such profession as any live performer can tell you, it is just one of the last ones that is still in demand and for a list of the others still standing I recommend the wikipedia page on Baumol’s cost disease.