Blog

It's been a month. The first half of the month was frigid, we got some warmer weather mixed in along with several significant snowfalls. Tess loved the snow, but I'm glad to have some milder weather coming.

There's a lot of talk going on around AI and how it's things become faster and easier to create and build. Now instead of spending the countless hours at the keyboard typing out the next great American novel, you can open up ChatGPT. Digital art more your thing? Don't worry it can do that too, and if you're lucky, any humans will have 5 fingers. It's depressing, really. So much AI slop is now out there, everyone is trying to sift through all the junk to find the real stuff, the stuff we want to read, want to look at, want to admire. And none of this even begins to factor in the environmental costs to all of it. Well I have one thing to say to everyone grumbling about that, keep doing your thing, keep creating.

If you go to my bookshelf, movies, TV, or video game pages, you'll notice I'll use a five star rating system. I thought I'd share what I generally mean when I use each rating to make it a little more understandable.

My laptop is a 2020 13" M1 MacBook Pro. The thing is 6 years old, but it's still running great. I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon if I can help it. Lately though, looking at Apple and Tim Cook cozying up to Donald Trump, combined with how well Linux Mint has been running on my desktop, my stretch of Apple laptops might be coming to an end.

I know there's been some pushes to VS Code, Zed, Cursor and others, but for so many projects I work on, I've been sticking with the tried and true, Sublime Text. It's fast, it's light-weight, and it's still my go-to 14 years later.

Substack has a Nazi problem. Though I'd say their actual problem is that they're okay with that. Because of this, my policy has always been that if you have a Substack, I'm not subscribing to it. Not on a paid tier, not on a free tier. It hasn't always stopped me from reading the occasional post or sharing one. I am now changing that policy.

The other day, Discord announced it was going to require a face scan or ID in order to continue using it as an adult. This is only another domino in a line of dominos that have already fallen.

A little while back I was perusing a Reddit thread where someone was trying to figure out the best lifting routine for themselves. They were relatively new to lifting and were going back and forth with others trying to determine the optimum routine. As someone who has bounced around a bit with lifting routines, my primary advice is this: just start lifting. The advice is good for exercise, and can also be good for a lot of other things in life.

First off, I loved Far Cry 5. I thought it was a fantastic game and I loved the open world environment and how beautiful the world looked. It really felt like you were in Montana. The plot was captivating and the battles were fun. I rated it five stars for a reason. This post will contain spoilers to the game, so be warned.

January was a cold month. It's been a while since it's been this cold for this long. We also got more snow than we have in years past. Tess loved the initial snow, which is always cute. Other than that, it was mostly a quiet month.

I mentioned in my last week notes that I went to a Menzingers concert in Allentown on Saturday. What I didn't mention and what I have been trying to process is that during the show there was an incident prior to The Menzingers coming on that stood out to me. A fucking nazi asshole came out and started giving the nazi salute. I still sometimes can't believe I witnessed that.

For a first-world problem, this is probably pretty up there, but I have a small complaint about Apple Mail.