I remember my first pair of over-the-ear headphones, Sony, sometime in the 90s. In my memory, nothing has sounded that good since. The reality is they were just my first good headphones. My current AKG K371s feel plastic as hell but sound just as good.
Watched: I Love LA Season 1 📺 Entertaining show. The writers and cast know how vapid, obnoxious, ludicrous but somehow endearing the characters are. The scene where True Whitaker’s nepo-baby character Alani starts speaking Elvish as a threesome falls apart got a startled laugh out of me.
Influencers. A bigger, messier sequel that loses its way in a pointless romance arc, but CW remains a compelling villain and the franchise still has legs.
There have always been 996 types, 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, and I’m seeing more firms advertise that culture openly. But the pool of people who can actually sustain it is small. Add an in-office requirement and you’d better be offering equity.
Russia’s shadow fleet is rerouting along the Irish coast to dodge Royal Navy seizures. Ireland’s military intelligence are talking about the consequences. Ireland might need to dust off some mythology.
Europe’s best-case future looks a lot like Venice at its peak. Set the standards, control the market, project soft power. Just don’t repeat the ending.
AI is like databases. They started on the mainframe, now you have a half dozen on your phone. The same shift is coming for AI models.
Artemis is an ugly looking rocket but it’s majestic at liftoff. Safe journey to the moon and back, Artemis II crew.
Babylon 5, the complete series on Blu-ray. This is a lot of discs containing not-so-state-of-the-art 90s CGI and DTS-HD Master Audio with the bass turned up too high. It’s going to be great.
Tonight Ireland moves into summer time. I enjoy the grand stretch in the evenings over the coming months. Ireland usually only gets about 3–4 hours of bright sunshine a day on average, and that’s usually diffused by clouds, but that stretches out to 5–7 hours in May and June. Bring on the sun.
I built an AI summariser for my newsfeed, then realised I didn’t want to read the indie writers I enjoy through a summary. So the indies get their own app, and the corpo outlets get crushed into a cube by AI.
A bit of a lopsided EU-Australia trade deal signed today, with a solid defence partnership to go with it. At first glance, the EU, Australian miners, and EU car makers did best. Australian gov did okay. Australian farmers didn’t. The EU doesn’t want more meat but does want Australian minerals.
Greece as a major European energy hub wasn’t something I expected. Net electricity exporter, massive LNG agreement with the US, pipeline transit agreements with Azerbaijan, an interconnector project with Cyprus and Israel. All backstopped by a capable Greek navy.
I’ve been playing Curse of Strahd with my D&D group online for several years. For a book over 250 pages long, I’m surprised at how empty the map feels. Points of Interest outside the plot are work for the DM.
Crimson Desert asks you to hold down the trigger and controller button on the same side of the controller at the same time. The first thing they need to patch in is a control scheme that won’t give you claw hand after a few hours of gaming.
Watched: Ridicule 🎬 In a movie about the court at Versailles lacerating each other with their wit for the monarch’s favour, the real performance is in the eyes. The leads are handsome, the costumes as flowery as the words, but what engaged me was every pushback against the cruelty of the bored.
Finished watching: Project Hail Mary. Project Hail Mary is worth seeing on the largest screen you can get to. I didn’t read the book but enjoyed the film. Science and friendship in the loneliest environment imaginable.
Roku is the kind of company that gets no credit because it doesn’t have a charismatic (blowhard) founder at the helm or a culture war to fight. It just works and your parents can use it. That’s why it pulls in a fortune.
My fitness tracker died slowly, then all at once, within warranty. A webchat, a replacement, two blissful days of not being monitored. Then the new one arrived, paired with my phone, and immediately told me to go for a walk.
Dark Side of the Moon is a cliché on every prog rock fan’s best-of list. Then late one night you put on good headphones and it’s this luscious, rolling tapestry of sound. Imagine creating something that extraordinary and never quite getting back to that point again. It must feel like being cursed.