If you were going to buy clothing, specifically tshirts, from a brand you’d never interacted with before. What would sway you the most? Design? Materials? Story? Price?
I was just reminded of this RC Cola I had in Prague several years back. 
I’m pretty sure this is only made for the international market outside the US or what they call in Czechia, the “HoReCa” market.
My Lenten fast did not go well this evening. Homemade cake at the fish fry at church sent me spiraling as I also finished off some leftovers which happened to be beef.
It’s a good reminder that we need the Lord’s help all the time. Progress not perfection. Glory be…
I’ve been doing some work around IndieWeb and SmallWeb sites and communities. I thought I’d throw together a little app to help folks find their dead 88x31 button links.
If you, like me, spend your day netjacking the cyberlanes to fight against the corpobots, this is your soundtrack:
Five books were delivered to my house yesterday. I duly placed them on the stack of books that have accumulated next my bed. Now things are as they should be. What’s that you ask? Will I be reading them? Oh, at some point, in this life or the one to come, I’ll read them. God willing.
The world of social media advertising is a nightmare. The tooling that these companies (Meta, X, Google, TikTok) expect you to use is inscrutable, buggy, and full of dark patterns. No wonder the companies which make this their business can charge so much to help.
I don’t know if I mentioned it here but Deathless has finally launched. Buy a t-shirt, please!
This Lent, I’m trying to get back to blogging and the universe around Indieweb/Smallweb projects. Letting my creative juices flow a bit more. It’s been great to discover MelonLand and 32bit.cafe among others.
I hit a major goal this morning. I got my weight below 200 for the first time since I was 15 years old. Just in time for my 50th birthday.
If you have access to PBS Masterpiece, perhaps through Prime Video, please watch the show RFDS. It does a great job of using the medical drama formula to tell some great character stories. The acting is excellent across the board.
A while back, I built a little toy to help people have fun and do some introspection: StoicBard It combines the language of Shakespeare with a Stoic outlook. Answer five questions about what you’re thinking and get a bit of advice.
I went to an early morning Mass. It was as full as the Sunday Mass I went to yesterday. Entire families, older couples, people clearly dressed to head to work. There’s a hunger for the hope that Jesus gives us. Sure, it’s Advent season but something else is happening. You feel it and so do I.
Watch Ghostlight
My strongest recommendation that you watch the movie Ghostlight (2024). I watched this movie a couple of weeks ago. It has stuck with me in a way few movies do. Some of that is that I do theater and it’s sort of about theater. But, it’s really more about families (both natural and found) and grief and finding a way forward. It’s a small and quiet and introspective film but hits on some nearly universal human experience. Highly recommended but be warned that you will probably cry multiple times.
It’s May Day (May 1) which in Irish is called “Lá Bealtaine” and often is seen as the beginning of Summer. This song, Samradh Samradh (Summer, Summer), is an ancient Irish song celebrating summer’s arrival. You can read a translation of the lyrics here.
Goodbye Discord
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Discord. I actually love it. But, I love it too much. It was a huge time sink whose payoff didn’t make sense anymore.
Is the Xcode Simulator the only way to build iOS apps? Is there no faster feedback loop?
It’s an awful experience. The networking fails most of the time. I have to restart it repeatedly.
This is what a multi-billion dollar company expects engineers to use?
I’ve been trying hard not to get involved in the day to day, “OMG! Did you see?!” of the current political circus. Instead, I’ve been trying to look at it from a slightly removed strategy and tactics perspective to understand more of the metagame so to speak.
It’s not easy to have that distance.
There’s a very subtle detail at the end of the recent All Quiet on the Western Front which absolutely hammers home the horror of war and World War I specifically.
