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    • I had a bad time with Smile 2 even after having enjoyed the first one in theaters four years ago. Mild spoilers, but I just really had it with the concept that the antagonistic entity could make the protagonist perceive whatever it wanted to, creating what I called in my spoiler-filled Letterboxd review “an epistemological dead-end.”
    • Update on Fortune’s Weave: I’ve gotten past the initial hurdle of uncomfortable differences with Three Houses to at least make this a good time-spender. But there’s still some layers of annoyances:

      Fortune’s Weave is a game centered on a city hub – all your team recruitment and team building activities happen here. So anything leading up to the city of Daigson is a prologue. As a result, Fortune’s Weave has multiple prologues. There is set-up as your avatar character and then there is set up as whatever Flame Lord you have selected. Once you’ve completed one Flame Lord’s “Part One” and select another, you *actively know you are in a prologue until you get back to the city.*

      So it’s a pacing issue, where the game has you go through a lot to get to all the systems, but for a basic completion run, you need to do this four times. And then there’s the question of the systems themselves.

      This does form the addictive game loop – finding quests to do, doing “weekly” tasks to improve your characters’ stats, and then completing the quests for rewards. And this easily constitutes more hours than the battle maps themselves; the whole reason you’re playing Fire Emblem in the first place. This is definitely an inherited and magnified trait from Three Houses, but without the conceit of a whole academy where there’s a story reason for training your units up in the first place.

      I’ll have more thoughts. I completed Leda’s part one and am currently doing Cai’s. Both characters that I like, but I also am past 40 hours and really should be further along in the main plot than I am.



  • LinkedIn Brain and “You Can See Everything”

    LinkedIn Brain and “You Can See Everything”

    Last night I made the time to watch one of the most acclaimed documentaries of the decade, You Can See Everything from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. The documentary’s premise is that the crew has been invited to document the last weeks of freedom for Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of defrauding investors through her healthcare company Theranos. The unique layer is that Nathan Fielder isn’t a traditional journalist, but more of a surrealist comedian whose most recent work pokes and prods at the concept of artifice in “reality-based” media.

    This post won’t get into the second part of this movie which reviewers and audience members are trying to keep spoiler-free from the uninitiated. What I will say is that I actually don’t think the alleged turning point of this movie is all that game-changing, especially for someone who’s seen Fielder’s television show, The Rehearsal. You can know the details of what happens in the second half of YCSE and still be taken in by the plot and the filmmaking. Still, we won’t discuss it here.

    I want to make a note of a specific scene in the first half. There’s a montage of Holmes and her partner, Silicon Valley startup-bro Billy Evans, animatedly speaking to at least one investor to raise funds for their next business venture, which is yet another medical diagnostic company purportedly built on “revolutionary” technology. After the montage, you get a short scene of Holmes dressed up for a run and looking honestly as thrilled and elated as you ever see her. She says something along the lines of “I feel so alive” and “[that’s] what I was put on this planet to do.”

    Subsequently, she starts to reconcile how she can do the technology venture from the realities of prison. She talks about sketching notes and diagrams on napkins and showing them to Billy for his regular prison visits. She’s really focused on how she needs to constantly be “inventing.”

    Scenes like these unlocked part of the mystery of Elizabeth Holmes for me. Because there’s a fundamental tension of the movie compelling the audience to question whether Holmes is consciously lying to other people or always lying to herself. (The third option – that she’s the victim of other people’s lies and is fundamentally an honest person doesn’t seem to merit much scrutiny).

    And seeing her get jazzed, not about any breakthroughs in medical science or positive impact of her work – but from pitching to someone with money and getting them on board an idea with the slimmest chance of success – made me recognize her. “Oh. She has LinkedIn brain.”

    I was describing this to my wife when I got home, who was blissfully unaware of the concept. LinkedIn Brain is the person who views the mechanisms of knowledge work and career advancement in the age of the Internet as the highest of priorities. Whereas the average worker reports to their job and might get some satisfaction out of actually doing things well or simply endures demands on their time for a paycheck, the LinkedIn Sycophant, infected with the mold of entrepreneurial flim flam that has bolstered Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk, is very intent on crafting and experiencing a narrative of hyper success.

    Holmes has a lot of social quirks and the movie gestures at some potential trauma that might inform how she operates. So there’s moments that again allude to Fielder’s previous work that start to call into question whether Holmes is neurodivergent and thus has a different relationship to communicating than most in the audience. But to me it’s not as interesting to question whether she is uniquely wired for dishonesty. I think the most interesting scenario is one in which she is like many other “regular people” who are fully bought-in to a story inspired by the myths of entrepreneurial giants.

    Holmes is not a scientist. She’s not an executive. She’s not even necessarily the most gifted fundraiser or diviner of the markets. She’s a storyteller, just as Nathan Fielder is. She feels most alive when she can tell a story on her terms.

    So she can’t be explained as a singular monster whose work, had it continued unchecked, would have led to actual death and medical mayhem. (As far as I know, the only death that can currently be linked to Theranos is one of the lead scientists who committed suicide before his deposition). The chilling idea is that there are millions of Elizabeth Holmes’s on the world’s most popular professional social network whose harbored wish is to fulfill a destiny of career revolution. The facts at the center of their career trajectory are malleable. It’s not really important what happens as long as they are the ones who come out as the successful protagonists.

    It is kind of a horror movie, isn’t it?

  • A Fact Run-Down from NPR on Food Prices

    A Fact Run-Down from NPR on Food Prices

    Direct quotes and links from today’s NPR article on factors raising food prices, by Joe Hernandez.

  • Movies

    Recent Movie

    Caught By the Tides (2025) | Jia Zhangke

    An experimental movie that I would have benefited from seeing in a theater with my full attention, Caught By the Tides pulls off that Boyhood conceit of having its actors age alongside the characters over a 20-year spread. The interesting angle here is that the archive and outtake footage from before 2022 weren’t shot with the intent of making a modern narrative film. Acclaimed director Jia Zhangke is assembling material from various projects, including footage from the production of recently lauded films Ash is the Purest White and Still Life.

    The result is intriguing to me, but just as with Boyhood, part of me feels uncouth in not appreciating the slow, methodical nature. I’ve been trained for decades to appreciate how movies can condense time, stitch it all in the screenplay and the editing room from footage over a period of months. Playing in the border between documentary and narrative needs the fictional part to be compelling and the temptation would be to manufacture the drama, but – this is to his credit – Zhangke wants an organic story that reflects a ponderous reality. As a result, I really have to be in a certain mood. Maybe I’ll find this again in a better space for it.

    Recently Watched

    FS pretty much watched Cars start to finish on a Sunday evening, which has he technically only ever done before with Flow.

    Cars was one of the famous early Pixars, along with Finding Nemo, that taught me I wouldn’t be universally enthralled by the oeuvre. This time around, I’m really grappling with the question of whether “saving Radiator Springs” is worth all the story.

    Still, it’s a better movie than Hoppers, which features a protagonist whose character flaws are all a result of internalized angst. At least Lightning McQueen is a genuine jerk, you know? Gives you something to dramatically change, as opposed to starting muddled and ending muddled.

  • Microposts

    October 6, 2026 11:12 am
    Reunion weekend is over and I’m glad I got to see the friends I did, but I will note that the …
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    #frontpage #social #work
    September 17, 2026 8:34 am
    I had a dream sequence about this upcoming 20th high school reunion that was both exciting and a lit …
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    #frontpage #movies #sociallife
    September 4, 2026 10:56 am
    Tried to share my feelings at dinner last night. FS is off for a Labor Day break. We’ve made c …
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    #career #frontpage
    August 31, 2026 9:56 am
    Yesterday was the birthday party for FS’s 3-year-old friend from his old daycare. A pool party …
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    #frontpage #parenting
    August 21, 2026 9:32 am

    Gonna try to watch Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma today.

    #frontpage #movies
    August 4, 2026 9:50 am
    Day one of solo parenting in the books. I went to Costco. I thought I could spend under $200. Ha. Ha …
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    #frontpage
    July 10, 2026 6:32 pm
    Been trying to find a special gift for my upcoming anniversary and I did find what appears to be an …
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    #frontpage
    July 8, 2026 1:50 am
    Hey Microposts. I left you alone for a little bit there, didn’t I? Uh, updates * Our dishwashe …
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    #frontpage

  • New York Students Presented with Excerpts Read Fewer Novels, Go Figure

    New York Students Presented with Excerpts Read Fewer Novels, Go Figure

    Another week, another hand-wringing session about how children can’t read.

    New York Focus, as shared to me via Chalkbeat, interviewed several New York area teachers about children and reading and brought up two of the most conventionally feared boogeymen when it comes to child literacy. One of them I believe should be scrutinized and the other is overblown.

    NYF’s Melissa Manno frames the issue a lot through the lens of the New York state and city curriculums which prioritize getting kids to learn excerpts of full works and then, per my impression, relentlessly quiz them on it using stupid online tests.

    But they also brings up the spectre of social media and technology, a popular Jonathan Haidt style narrative when it comes to attention spans.

    The article does this point of comparison regarding the number of novels English classes work through these days. It opens with these examples: The Giver, Wonder, and Freak the Mighty. At one point, Manno quotes a high school teacher who can’t get through three novels with her juniors and seniors after teaching “five novels and a Shakespeare play” in the 1990s.

    But this kind of sounds like a self-degrading concept – the more teachers believe kids can’t get through five novels, the fewer novels they’ll bother with, especially when competing with must-read textbook excerpts for the standardized tests.

    My position on the “tech is ruining kid’s ability to read” is that we’ve been going through this song and dance for generations. Music television and Total Request Live were allegedly what high schoolers in my era were interested in rather than reading. The teachers assigned five-plus novels a year, but only a minority of us read them and even fewer of us understood them.

    I maintain that at the very least, kids on social networks have to exercise *some* reading and writing interaction in a way that kids just watching Carson Daly at home did not. Social networking apps and the dominance of short-form video are two of several problems, but our fallacy is thinking of past generations as completely literate, when in fact, Americans in particular usually learn how to fake reading comprehension.

  • An expert talks about the history of autocracy

    An expert talks about the history of autocracy

    This came on my desk through my Scientific American RSS feed. It’s an interview framed by Tim Vernimmen and it originally came from Knowable Magazine.

    Source: This Guy

    Gary Feinman, archaeologist and MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He’s done a lot of research of civilizations in southeastern Mexico.

    Summary as I understand it

    We are being taught this popular narrative that the development of agriculture in humanity’s history was deterministic and that with the rise of farming came a lot of the inequality of our world. Essentially the idea that centralized and location-based human civilizations can’t be free in an anarchist sense.

    The interview introduction feints to the narrative that many people see agriculture as the source of autocracy. In this narrative, democracy as practiced by the Greeks was sort of an antidote and the model upon which organized and settled nation-states can resist autocracy, even when prominent successors like the Roman Empire fell to it regardless.

    Feinman says the archaeological record gives evidence for settled civilizations that were not autocratic by nature and instead had thriving bureaucracies that distributed sources more equally. He draws from findings in Mexico and China.

    (more…)

  • After Me Comes the Flood

    After Me Comes the Flood

    Regina Spektor – “Après Moi” – Begin to Hope (2006)

    Be afraid of the lame
    They’ll inherit your legs
    Be afraid of the old
    They’ll inherit your souls
    Be afraid of the cold
    They’ll inherit your blood
    Après moi, le déluge
    After me comes the flood

    The phrase “Après moi, le déluge” is supposedly something Louis XV said, interpreted to mean “I am rich and important and everybody else can drown once I’m gone for all I care.” But I’m sure some historian out there would tell me that I’m being uncharitable.

    Regina Spektor was introduced to me by my friend Alexis somehow in our first summer back from college (and she always had good taste in music). It was songs from this album, Begin to Hope, with my favorite “On the Radio.” She would pop up again here and there throughout my college music days. I eventually saw her in concert with Ben Folds at Wolf Trap on an early date with Erin.

    You’ll hear her use Russian fluently in the song above. She was born in the actual to goodness Soviet Union and grew up for nine years there but her parents brought her to New York when I was in diapers.

    I’m almost sure she’s said something problematic and I want to say it’s concerning Israel. I don’t know specifically what she’s said regarding Gaza in the past few years, but I’m hesitant to look it up because of how much I like her songs.

  • ‘Vacation,’ Day Three

    I’m wondering if there’s ever a point where you have your kids and you don’t feel like you need to keep one of your six senses on them at all times. Like, surely some parents just….let their kids exist, secure in the faith that their kids will persist in this reality.

    Sometimes I feel like a fairy tale goblin is just out of sight and looking for an opportunity to steal one of my children. Real Rumpelstiltskin shit. Real David Bowie from Labyrinth vibes.

    (My brain tried to protect me from the memory that his name is Jareth, but alas, here we are with another testament to my inability to do things like schedule a medical procedure, but a slightly damaged reference guide to pop culture).

    This anxiety I have about my kids getting into trouble or getting hurt. I share this with others, right? But before having kids I thought of them as the overly anxious ones. I thought of them as helicopters. I thought when it was my turn, I could just be.

    And when I test a sense of trust, they do things like draw on the couch or crawl up the stairs. The goblin is real. The goblin is everywhere. How do those mythical parents who just veg out and let their kids do whatever exist? I think they exist. Did I make them up entirely?

    We all saw it coming, of course. I have not remade my job searching strategy with the goal of getting out of this alienating employment situation. I have not built an amazing recipe book which will save me thousands of dollars and feed my family nutritiously; deliciously. I have not called my parents, sent a Discord chat to my brother, gotten in touch with old friends.

    I spent $300 at Costco and watched a Spider-Man movie.

    We all saw it coming.

  • Thing I’m Working On

    I walked into the cave, which was decorated in a friendly fashion. A nice quilt draped on the rocks with block lettering that read “I’m here to help.”

    For the past year, I’d been navigating this network of caves. I’d found the first spirit next to a pool of muddy water. I asked it for clay. It gave me slime. The slime was acceptable.

    Then, I found a cave with a goblin in it. The goblin was erratic. Constantly distracted and it peered leerily at me and beyond me as if trying to see what else I had to offer. I asked it for some books and it gave me some scrappy notebooks.

    Now I was in the third cave. And this spirit was large and gregarious. He was over-full. Frankly, his gluttony might have been mirroring mine.

    “Hello, Phil!” The spirit smiled.

    I looked down at my shoes.

    “I would like….a website,” I said.