Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) — 6/10
2. Letterkenny S04–S11 (2017–2023) — 7/10
3. High Plains Drifter (1973) — 6/10
4. Hercules (2014) — 5/10
5. The Lost Prince (Il Principe Dimenticato / Le Prince oublié) (2020) — 7/10
6. Zombieland: Double Tap (2019) — 7/10
7. Mystic River (2003) — 8/10
8. The Red Shoes (1948) — 8/10
9. A Winter’s Tale (2014) — 6/10
10. Space Between Stars (2018) — 8/10

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) — 6/10

I watched... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Fist Fight (2017) — 4/10
2. Pacific Rim (2013) — 9/10
3. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) — 6/10
4. Equalizer 3 (2023) — 6/10
5. Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow (1994) — 3/10
6. Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) — 8/10
7. A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) — 6/10
8. Talk to Me (2022) — 5/10
9. Equalizer 2 (2018) — 6/10
10. Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020) — 5/10

Fist Fight (2017) — 4/10

I really like Charlie Day, whom I know... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Dante’s Peak (1997) — 9/10
2. Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) — 7/10
3. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) — 8/10
4. Jane Goodall: The Hope (2020) — 7/10
5. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) — 8/10
6. South Park S27 (2025) — 9/10
7. O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) — 10/10
8. Woman at War / La Donna Elettrica (2018) — 8/10
9. Richard Jewell (2019) — 8/10
10. Prigione 77 (2022) — 8/10

Dante’s Peak (1997) — 9/10

Volcanologist Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan)... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Art,... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. The Walk (2015) — 7/10
2. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) — 6/10
3. Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teacher’s Lounge) (2023) — 7/10
4. Arcane S01–S02 (2022–2024) — 7/10
5. Jurassic World Dominion (2022) — 7/10
6. Black Adam (2022) — 5/10
7. Time Bandits (1981) — 7/10
8. The Phantom of the Open (2021) — 7/10
9. Asterix & Obelix im Reich der Mitte (2023) — 4/10
10. Dinner with Skinner (2025) — 8/10

The Walk (2015) — 7/10

I wasn’t quite sure about... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) — 6/10
2. Death Becomes Her (1992) — 8/10
3. Superman (2025) — 4/10
4. Plane (2023) — 6/10
5. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) — 6/10
6. Secret Headquarters (2022) — 5/10
7. Outbreak (1995) — 8/10
8. John Rambo (Rambo) (2008) — 7/10
9. The Running Man (1987) — 6/10
10. Invelle (Nowhere) (2023) — 8/10

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) — 6/10

I can’t tell whether this movie is just cheesy or whether it’s the motion... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Big Mouth S08 (2025) — 8/10
2. The Outside Man (“Brutale Schatten”) (1973) — 7/10
3. Toy Story 4 (“Alles hört auf kein Kommando”) (2019) — 7/10
4. Pirates of the Carribean − Fremde Gezeiten (“On Stranger Tides”) (2011) — 6/10
5. Love, Death, and Robots S04 (2025) — 7/10
6. Chief of War S01 (2025) — 8/10
7. Fack ju Göhte (2013) — 5/10
8. La dégustation (2022) — 6/10
9. Warlord (2025) — 4/10
10. Two Tickets to Paradise (2022) — 6/10

Big Mouth... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Constantine (2005) — 10/10
2. Romancing the Stone (1984) — 8/10
3. Mr. McMahon (2024) — 7/10
4. Fast X (2023) — 7/10
5. Kung Fu Panda (2008) — 9/10
6. Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) — 7/10
7. Das Krokodil und sein Nilpferd (1979) — 4/10
8. Gaza Doctors Under Attack (2025) — 8/10
9. Bad Words (2013) — 8/10
10. Mythic Quest S01-S04 (2020-2025) — 8/10

Constantine (2005) — 10/10

I watched and reviewed this in 2013. The rating stands.

Romancing... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Biking Borders (2021) — 8/10
2. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) — 7/10
3. The Age of Innocence (1993) — 8/10
4. Oppenheimer (2023) — 8/10
5. Star Trek: First Contact (1996) — 8/10
6. Madame (2017) — 6/10
7. Habemus Papam (2011) — 7/10
8. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2009) — 7/10
9. The Staircase (2004–2018) — 4/10
10. Louis Theroux: The Settlers (2025) — 9/10

Biking Borders (2021) — 8/10

This is a film about two... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Godzilla (1998) — 7/10
2. Our Friend (2019) — 5/10
3. Hulk (2003) — 7/10
4. Black Mirror S07 (2025) — 9/10
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) — 8/10
6. Morbius (2022) — 7/10
7. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) — 9/10
8. T2 Trainspotting (2017) — 8/10
9. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) — 4/10
10. L’immensità (2022) — 7/10

Godzilla (1998) — 7/10

The introductory credits play over atom-bomb explosions interleaved with... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Bill Burr: I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (2014) — 10/10
2. Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at the Lowry (2024) — 9/10
3. Mank (2020) — 9/10
4. Bobby Yeah (2011) — 8/10
5. Midnight Express (1978) — 8/10
6. The Infernal Machine (2022) — 7/10
7. Shrek the Third (2022) — 5/10
8. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) — 4/10
9. Everest (2015) — 7/10
10. Die Another Day (2002) — 6/10

Bill Burr: I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (2014) — 10/10... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Rocky III: (2017) — 6/10
2. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar: (2017) — 9/10
3. Happy S02 (2017) — 7/10
4. No Other Land (2024) — 8/10
5. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985) — 4/10
6. Plane (Absturz im Dschungel) (2023) — 4/10
7. The Holdovers (2023) — 9/10
8. Bastille Day (The Take) (2016) — 7/10
9. Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen (2001) — 7/10
10. Masters of the Universe: Revelation (2021) — 5/10

Rocky III: (2017) — 6/10... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. The Devil Wears Prada (2006) — 7/10
2. Boss Level (2020) — 7/10
3. Better Call Saul S06 (2022) — 9/10
4. Footloose (1984) — 7/10
5. The Creator (2023) — 6/10
6. Police Academy (1984) — 6/10
7. Papillon (2017) — 9/10
8. Divergent (2014) — 5/10
9. Severance S02 (2024) — 6/10
10. Terminator Renaissance (2010) — 6/10

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) — 7/10

This is a film that is tediously trying to convince us that Anne Hathaway is a mousy doormat... [More]

I have some time off and I’ve been working through a backlog of writing that I’ve wanted to copy-edit and finish for a long time. I have hundreds of pages of book citations, half-written book reviews, nearly draft movie reviews, and hundreds of articles in varied fields all “mostly” ready to publish but lacking what I consider to be a final polish.

About five years ago, I partly addressed this by inaugurating my weekly notes, a place where the flurry of writing, notes, thoughts, responses, and... [More]

The article Prompt caching: 10x cheaper LLM tokens, but how? by Sam Rose (ngrok) included the following hypothesis,

“[…] what if we had a problem where we didn’t know the formula? What if we just had this mysterious table of inputs and outputs below?”

Table of inputs and outputs

The author wrote,

“I will say that ChatGPT figures it out straight away if you paste a screenshot into the app.”

Holy shit! Really?

I opened up https://chatgpt.com for probably the first time in my life and pasted the screenshot and asked, “What function produces... [More]”

I had never thought of an if statement as a type-check until a Smalltalk programmer explained it to me in this video. She explained how Smalltalk has six keywords—according to Wikipedia, they’re true, false, nil, self, and super, but her list had thisContext on it as well[1]—and you can get rid of conditions and turn them into message-passing instead, as God intended.

RailsConf 2015 − Nothing is Something by Sandi Metz on May 1, 2015 (YouTube)

From the official video description,

“Our code is full of hidden assumptions, things that seem like nothing, secrets that we... [More]”

I was recently allowed to observe as a team discussed the benefits and drawbacks of using an IOC container.[1]

I was asked not to directly participate because it was a team-building exercise; the team needed to convince itself based on the merits of its own arguments. If those for the technology were unable to articulate their convictions sufficiently, then it wouldn’t help for an outside authority to dictate the answer. I assisted in the background, with clarification and alternate explanations.... [More]

I very much enjoy the podcast TrueAnon, hosted by Brace Belden, Liz Frantzak, and produced by Yung Chomsky. They do very high-quality research, have an encyclopedic knowledge of trends, sports, history, culture, and politics, and are funny as hell. I’ve been listening to them for years. I very much enjoyed their last few shows of the year.

Episode 508: Southern Strategy (Patreon)

This show discusses “the new National Security Strategy, Machado, oil, and Trump’s attempts to instigate a war with Venezuela.... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

A friend forwarded me the page called Books I’ve read by Derek Sivers, which is a long, long list of books. I perused it with the default ordering, from highest-rated to lowest-rated.[1] I didn’t see a lot of overlap with my own reading interests. We’d read only one or two books in common—out of hundreds!—and almost none of his books are on my wishlist.

A cry for help

There were a what I would call a disturbing number of financial self-help books, like You Can Negotiate Anything, The Entrepreneur Roller... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is my second Murakami book. While the subject matter is very, very different—this one’s a love story whereas Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was a sci-fi, crime-novel, philosophical excursion—the coolness of the protagonist and the mood of the writing is the same. And I loved both the protagonist and the mood. This book relaxed me.

This is a book for people who read and people who listen to music. It is a book of its time, written and published a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Cover ArtThis was my first book by Murakami. I very much like the writing style that bleeds through the translation from the Japanese. The world, though Japanese, feels comfortable and familiar to me. It would, of course. Though it is set on the other side of the world geographically, in an ostensibly completely alien culture, it is temporally congruent with my upbringing, with my so-called formative years. Having been raised in the U.S. in the 80s, and Murakami seeming to be an... [More]

I watched/listened to 35 videos, each between 20 and 30 minutes long, and each listed below. I’ve grouped them but retained the order in which I watched them. I’ve left the notes mostly as I wrote them, which is kind of stream-of-consciousness, kind of snarky.

Some videos that I didn’t like got a lot of notes, some videos I liked got fewer notes. It might seem like I hated the video from my snarky notes but I still ended up rating some of them as 🆗, which means that I thought that either... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

I’ve sourced it to Lapham’s Quarterly but the original source was The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Wikipedia), which I read in 2005.

The title is a play on the expression, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Donald Trump pumps his fistThe following one-hour video is a serious, though entertaining and humorous, look at “[…] every way Trump is using the presidency to make him and his family billions.” It is historically exhaustive but not repetitive, despite the lack of imagination on Trump’s part.

Why be inventive when just telling obvious lies to get people to give you money seems to work just fine? Trump’s motto is now and seems to have always been, “do no more work than you have to.” The picture to the right of Trump... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

The short Crutches by Amy X. Wang (The Baffler) was surprisingly good. There is no good way to cite it to give you a flavor of it. It is unique. It is raw. It is unflinching. It is kind of about love. There are dogs in it. There are misunderstood and psychotic friends. There is devotion. It’s weird but good.

B the three-legged Chihuahua

“At the animal shelter I said, Give me the worst dog available, which turned out to be an oafish, fecal-brown Vizsla missing a back leg. But of course B doted on him. She found endless excuses to come over. She took a... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]