We’ve moved on from the “Israel has a right to defend themselves” phase to the “Israel has a right to develop beach front real estate” phase and still most world leaders are silent about this.

Remember when the tech world solved racism by renaming master to main branch?

Finished reading: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 📚

It’s the first book I’ve read this year, so calling it “the best book I’ve read all year” would be true, but to lump this in with last year and the say the same may be true as well! Keegan’s voice is incredible, this book was pure poetry, effortlessly capturing both the highs and lows of human emotion. Although, it takes place 40 years ago, the financial worries and dreary outlook generally feel like they could be ripped straight from 2026.
The emotions I felt reading this book were not unlike those I feel reading A Christmas Carol, perhaps it was the Christmas time setting, or the newfound or recovered morality of the lead character but I think the writing itself was really that good.

I’ve tried to eliminate the weird echo chamber of HackerNews from my life as much as possible. Interesting to see from the most 1000 discussed books only ~50 were written by women. This is exactly the sort of reason I’ve moved on from the orange site.
kottke.org/26/01/004…

Pretty quiet on here over the holidays, partially due to illness and partially just wanting to be offline as much as possible. I’d still like to get some end of year wrap-ups together.

Watching a bit of the 2009 adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which I haven’t seen before but its bad… like really bad. Wild to think that Pixar’s Up came out the same year.

Looking through my zsh configs today, all sorts of hidden and forgotten gems. Notably clobberass for recompiling Rails assets: alias clobberass="rails assets:clobber && rails tmp:clear && rails assets:precompile"

You would think the name would have made this unforgettable!

First big snow

Another Christmas card

Every year I get pumped for Advent of Code. Then however long the first day or two takes me I start to think of all the other things I could/should be doing with my time and it peters from there. Sigh, I love the idea of it, maybe sometime I’ll take a sabbatical in December and dedicate myself to it.