Notices by josef (jk@mastodon.social)

meme ... ... meme...

occasionally i see a video game character where their idle loop has their mouth opening and closing slightly. like if you zoom in and look closely. and ive started imagining theyre quietly saying the word 'meme' to themselves, over and over

three weeks ago now, i was taking a delicious loaf of banana bread out of the oven. it was a really good banana bread. i just wanna put that in there. anyway, as you'd imagine, i was in a hurry to eat it, and my wrist, unprotected by the oven gloves, touched the rim of the hot pan for like 80 milliseconds. that was enough to give me a visible burn that still hasn't really faded. the main thing though, is that because the wrist is curved, the scar is in the shape OF a banana. branded by the bread

for every 1 person who actively comments to let you know they enjoy that <thing> you made, there are at least 9 other people who will, instead of doing that, be at a bar with their friends, probably like twenty years from now, and everyones kinda about to leave, and theyre like "hey does anyone remember <thing>? i loved that so much back in the day" and everyones like "yeah fr" and theyre like putting their coats on and stuff

thinkin about how they kept saying "no, it's pronounced 'moog' as in 'rogue'" for so long that they even put out a synth called the rogue in the early 80s, and people apparently still misread it as 'rouge'. i suppose the lesson here is that rhymes have massive and unchecked power in our society

like. when i want to quickly open the foo panel editor widget menu, am i supposed to quickly recite an entire mnemonic song under my breath until i get to the lines "if the panel of foo is needed by you, you can get there with Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F2, but don't press Ctrl-Shift-F2 or Alt-Shift-F2, because if you do, you'll be in a stew"

i'm jealous of people who are able to remember things that don't make sense. i don't think i can tell the difference between "learning something" and "making sense of something". like today i'm trying to proactively learn some keyboard shortcuts for some software i'm trying out, and there's no rhyme or reason to any of them. no sense can be made, no pattern matching is possible, not even "shift does the opposite" or "the first letter of the thing you want to do"

unfortunately we cannot publish schematics, because this would cause the design to become "open hardware", which may allow water ingress, and threaten the product's automotive-grade certification

ive switched back to pen & paper notes for things like groceries. somehow it just helps me stay organized

2025. you go to a website. you see all the elements on the page pop-in, loading one by one. it's like the 90s again. your internet connection might be hundreds of megabits per second. the web designer is using a 4k video file as a looping background, and that somehow loads quickly compared to all the actual useful elements on the page. three seconds, five seconds, ten seconds. each checkbox and table has to initialize its own software stack of UI abstraction libraries and surveillance middleware

i think that as computers penetrated the mainstream, it became clear that the majority of users only have a few basic things they want. most of the vast and rapidly-expanding potential of the machine would sit there, untapped. a wasted resource. this gap had to be filled with something, which is how we ended up with computers where the user does the few basic things they want, and then the computer secretly does a ton of other different things they don't want

heres a computer i made when i was a kid

probably in this analogy javascript might be a 'prefab stick-frame particle-board sprayfoam-insulation' type of style. a tacky and flimsy scourge? or a forgiving and universally-accessible standard successfully serving millions?

i think i feel similarly about programming language design as i do about architecture. i prefer straightforward, human-scale, vernacular designs that evolve over time in response to the practical, if messy needs of people, over the masterplans of glasswall modernist utopias or imposing neoclassical pastiche. while i am impressed by the stringent engineering requirements of the steel suspension bridge or an impenetrable bunker, i could not imagine it too comfortable to live in one

for our New Years party i have made a doom map of our apartment for the party guests to deathmatch in

i think the human sense of rhythm might come from communal long-distance running

as a non-american, theres a lot of things in The Simpsons which i thought were surreal jokes, but turned out to actually be real and normal in america

as a non-american, for my first few years of internet use, i was confused about why americans were so respectful of veterinarians

listening to a CD right now that’s more than 40 years old. still spinning. looking identical. sounding identical. what an incredible format

please change if necessary