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.

My wife and I have started painting our Christmas cards. I’m a big fan of Owen Pomery’s style, it kind of reminds me of Hergé. I copied this from Victory Point

I was telling my wife about the raccoon who broke into a liquor store, got drunk, then passed out in the bathroom. She said, “Sounds like an American racoon”, I guess he truly was living the American Dream.

If your worried, they sobered him up in the drunk tank and released him safely into the wild a few hours later.

My daughter really wanted to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” for our November movie night, you can’t rent it you have to subscribe to Apple TV to get it. This gives me at least 1 month to binge all the Apple shows people talk about. We are working our way through Severance.

Wonderful to see this from James Cameron:

…you’ve got generative AI, where they can make up a character. They can make up an actor. They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. It’s like, no. That’s horrifying to me

He’s a futurist who has always embraced cutting edge technology in his films but only in service of the story, pushing the limits of his creativity and the creativity of those he works with. Generative AI will never do that; because it is not creative. Computers can not produce art.