Intro to /now/

/now/^[1] is a monthly updated page that lists some of the projects I'm working on, media I'm engaging, and hobby activities I'm doing.

👩‍💻 Coding

• Mega Man 2: Puzzle Attack - 🦀 Carcinized, a Tetris / Mega Man 2 mashup fan game ported to Rust from the Python version by Mark Pulver
• qwx - a(nother) command line weather app. Displays concise, single-row, emoji based weather details, daily and hourly forecasts, and aviation METRARs and TAFs . In Rust of course
• receipt-logger-website - a website to make it easy to log receipts to our family expense spreadsheet. Ingests photos, pasted text, or manual entry. Uses Google Gemini to automatically parse all data points. In Rust of course.
• fix-mp3-tags agent - A Google Gemini agent to fix the meta data on my mp3s/flac files, download image art, rename and organize the files into appropriate fodler/file structures, and normalize meta data into my preferred genre list.
• Syntax & Scale LLC website

🏔️ Hiking & Mountaineering

• ✅ Monthly family hike on local trail

FIRE

• 2025 Tax Year Planning & Payments

Misc. Projects

• Looking at local schools for my kiddo
• Trying out intermittent fasting
• Organizing a trip to Lego Land
• ✅ Setting up Syntax & Scale LLC
  • Legal counsel
  • registration forms + payments
  • Bank account
  • domain registration
  • email vendor selection and configuration
  • Set up LinkedIn Page + Website

Media

Books

• ✅The Wealth Ladder by Nick Maggiulli
• ✅ Artemis by Andy Weir
• ✅Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
• Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
• The Incredible Years
• Bulletproof Problem Solving

Music

• Encapsulate (fka Capsula)
  • Strange Loops Encapsulated
  • Sense of a Drop
  • Synthesis of Reality

Shows

• ✅Fallout Season 2

Movies

• Warcraft (2016)
• Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
• WALL-E (2008)

Podcasts

• Opposing Bases
• Aviation News Talk w/ Max Trescott
• Improve Something today
• The Pragmatic Engineer

🎮 Video Games

• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erd Tree
• Kirby Super Star

Clipped Articles

Some articles I clipped last month:

on bullshit detection and wallace stevens by janedotx7

1. It is important to cultivate the desire to be right, rather than to be happy. This is hard enough in and of itself to cause the failure to develop a good bullshit detector.
2. It is important to take as little pride as possible in one’s accomplishments. This one is something I have a hard time fully articulating, but I think what I’m getting at is, it is surprisingly easy to do well enough at something, that doing well at X becomes a part of your identity, and it can become harder to incorporate any criticism. Consider the engineers who founded Juicero, who doubtless considered themselves excellent mechanical engineers, but failed to see that their juice packets could be squeezed by mere human fingers.
3. It is important to cultivate a broad base of knowledge. The more you know, the harder it is to get bullshitted.
4. It is important to learn how to see. I’ll illustrate with an example from drawing. Beginners do not know how to see. When they draw human heads, they tend to make the top part of the head too short. They are only paying attention to what they think is important, which is the facial expression. The hair and scalp are not so important, so they fail to draw them properly. But they are not drawing what they see, which is that the human eye is placed approximately halfway down the skull. Something similar seems to happen for most people’s perspectives on reality. We see what we want to believe is true, and not what is actually there.

How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of ‘human fracking’ by D Graham Burnett

History teaches that new technologies always make possible new forms of exploitation, and this basic fact has been spectacularly exemplified by the rise of society-scale digital platforms. It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.

Never Forgive Them by Ed Zitron

You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.

It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.

21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google by Addy Osmani

Twenty-one lessons sounds like a lot, but they really come down to a few core ideas: stay curious, stay humble, and remember that the work is always about people - the users you’re building for and the teammates you’re building with.

The Hunt for Dark Breakfast) by Ryan Moulton

Breakfast is a vector space. You can place pancakes, crepes, and scrambled eggs on a simplex where the variables are the ratios between milk, eggs, and flour. We have explored too little of this manifold. More breakfasts can exist than we have known.