@JohnBrady 🙏

I still remember the first time I looked up something online using a cellular phone just to satisfy my curiosity. It was while talking to a girl I had been seeing (who is now my wife!) and realizing we both loved the movie My Big Far Greek Wedding (hint hint). Well remembered that the main character’s dad thought this blue cleaning spray was the cure for everything but we couldn’t remember the name (this was in Serbia, where Windex isn’t a household name). This was my moment to shine: I pulled out my trusty Nokia candy bar phone (can’t remember the series) and after a few minutes typing out a google search on the tiny keyboard we had our answer! The world was never the same.

Though I have to say moving to a cottage with no Internet or cellular access sounds appealing in 2026.

@JohnBrady Ashamed to say I had no idea about her music, but will have a listen! The crow was taller than the average human, though not as big as this photo may make you think :)

@JohnBrady Well put. The flip side of the same phenomenon is what Douglas Adams noted in The Salmon of Doubt:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

@jplupp Done!

@JohnBrady @ReaderJohn Having Bowie play Tesla in The Prestige was an inspired choice. Though yes, many of his experiments were out there. Poor residents of Long Island had to deal with Tesla-inflicted earthquakes and of course he was one of the (main?) inspirations for the mad scientist stereotype.

@JohnBrady That’s beautiful :)

@ffmike It is tough to do book-within-a-book inside of a TV show so of course they opted for video-within-video, but that has implications outside of the book’s scope. I may return to it (saw the first episode and balked when I saw how much it diverged from the source).

@JohnBrady @dwalbert OK, now you both got me confused. Was “The Man in the High Castle” written using I Ching or the sequel (that turned out not to be a sequel after all, and which I am yet to read)?

However it was written, “The Man…” was one of the best literary examples of the forking paths problem, and now I wonder if Dick didn’t have Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” as an inspiration. The best non-fiction treatment is of course Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness”.

@jplupp Soon, hopefully this week! Putting some finishing touches to make it a bit more user friendly.

@manton Without a doubt, though if I ever make it public I’ll check with you on the name — I wouldn’t want anyone to think it’s officially supported code.

All the issues I’ve had while making it were due to the aging Emacs way of handling the web, so it took two or three tries to get anything right. Your API was clean as a whistle and Gemini clearly had a good handle on it!