text-based media

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:54:48 -0400

TIL boneless wings can have bones, per Ohio Supreme Court

In a 4-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said Thursday that “boneless wings” refers to a cooking style, and that Berkheimer should’ve been on guard against bones since it’s common knowledge that chickens have bones.

Not now, I’m deboning my chicken nuggets.

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:39:21 -0400

HTC Made Smart Glasses That Are Way More Private

Right by the cameras is a bright indicator light. If you cover the light, it won’t record. If someone around you says stop recording, that will stop the recording.

I still think it’s weird and creepy to walk around with cameras bolted to your face, but this is really smart. It should be a standard for all pervert glasses.

I love my dumb watches

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:45:33 -0400

I’ve always liked wearing a watch. It seems redundant at first, since we’re perpetually glued to our phones these days, but it’s really not.

A smartphone is like a Swiss Army knife. It can do a lot of things, but if I’m assembling some cheap furniture, I’m not doing it with the tiny little Phillips head screwdriver that flips out of the side. I’m using a screw gun.

Maybe that’s not the best analogy; your phone keeps perfect time, sure. But when you go to check it, you notice you’ve got some new notifications. Reply to a few texts, check Reddit, tumblr, watch some TikTok for six hours straight…

I’m obsessed with my iPhone. I’m on it too much as it is because I have terrible impulse control. I use it like a time machine. I get to work, it’s a slow day, so I decide I’ll completely dissociate and fast forward from 10am to 8pm through the power of brainrotting. I don’t remember half of the shit I’ve read, or the videos I watched.

I’m trying to get better about that…

I had an Apple Watch for a minute, and I remember reading this post by Kev Quirk about why he doesn’t like smart watches:

Whether it’s Apple, Samsung, Google, Garmin, or any other smartwatch brand—they’re all utterly pointless as watches, in my opinion. Let’s call them what they are: not smart watches, but wrist phones.

The first time I read this, I was like wtf mate. I love my wrist phone. How could Kev be so behind the times on this obviously great, life-changing piece of tech? If I don’t wanna reach in my pocket and check my phone phone, I can just use my wrist phone✨

How convenient! I can be on my phone even when I’m not on my phone! And besides; my favorite feature was always the sleep tracking function.

Want to track your sleep? Too bad, your bloody wrist phone needs charging every night. Why track your sleep at all? If you’ve had a crap night, you’ll wake up tired. What more do you need to know?

Honestly, great fucking point. The Series 7 I had needed a full charge by the time I made it home from work anyway. Sometimes even if I charged it before bed it’d be half dead by the time I woke up.

And instead of making me rely less on my phone, I was staring at a little OLED screen even more. I had a little web browser on it, a collection of dumb little games, I could read little RSS feeds… It was like a smaller, shittier version of my phone that I could get away with using when I’m in the middle of talking to a customer at work, and I could use it to check notifications or the weather while I’m driving 🫣

You’re paying the same price for a wrist phone as you could for a beautiful automatic watch; one that will last a lifetime and can be passed down to your kids. Worse still, that stupid wrist phone will be e-waste in a few years, just like the rest.

Another great point. My Series 7 died a couple months later and I just quit wearing a watch altogether. Until my girlfriend got me a Vostok Komandirskie for Christmas. My first automatic watch ever!

It’s not really a Russian Timex and it’s definitely not a Russian Rolex… it’s more along the lines of ‘the AK-47 of watches.’

It wasn’t even a month later that I realized she opened a whole new can of worms for me. After watching a bunch of YouTube videos and reading reviews, I decided I couldn’t wear the same thicc diver every day; I needed something less blingy.

So I ordered a Seiko 5 GMT:

THIS fucking thing is where the real obsession started. I paid about the price of an Apple Watch for it, and it doesn’t even take a battery. It’ll outlast me and still keep chooglin’ for years to come. Automatic watches are sick. They wind themselves from the movement of your wrist, so it’ll never die as long as you’re wearing it. The only thing is, and even Rolex has this problem, they’re just not that accurate.

They’re pretty accurate; like within a few seconds per day, but those cheap quartz watches you can buy at the mall are much more precise.

So I started looking, and I ended up scoring a vintage Seiko Sports 50 for $51 in an online auction:

It was the cheapest, most beat up old piece of shit that I owned, and it was instantly, by far, my favorite. After a month without setting it, it was still perfectly in sync with the time on my phone. It almost gives off a quiet flex vibe… like the slickest dress watch I’ve ever had on my wrist and it was less than the price of a Nintendo game.

It didn’t stop there though. I kept seeing all this hype about Casio G-Shocks, and I didn’t get it. At first.

It’s just a cheap plastic watch with an 80’s style LCD display. They really haven’t changed much since the 80’s altogether. But that’s the point. They fucking NAILED it the first time and they’re just as practical today as they were 40-something years ago. They’re insanely durable and they might not be an heirloom, but one of these things will easily last 10x longer than an Apple Watch.

And look at mechanical watches anyway: they’re using hundred-year old tech and some cost as much as a house. They didn’t even nail it the first time really; even the most precise automatic watches can still drift by as much as four or five seconds per day, depending on the weather, your body heat, abuse, etc.

Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely love my Vostok and my Seikos, but there’s something very appealing about a watch that I can just slap on my wrist and forget about. So, needless to say, I caved and picked up an atomic solar G-Shock:

It uses a radio signal to set its time to the atomic clock, so it’s always dead on. And it’s solar powered. From a full charge, from nothing other than the light of a fucking star in the middle of space, it can hold a charge for almost a year in total darkness. It’s the most retro futuristic thing I’ve ever owned, and it cost less than my monthly electric bill.

I like the feel of having a heavy bracelet filled with a bunch of gears, but every time I take off the G-Shock I miss it.

There’s definitely something to be said about rocking a mechanical watch. It’s a tiny machine on your wrist that will outlive you with proper care. And it can really bring an outfit together, too. It’s a functional piece of jewelry and an ode to simpler times, before that rectangle in our pockets started to steal the spotlight.

Collecting watches is like having a few good pairs of shoes to wear for different outfits and different occasions. I love how bold and retro futurist this G-Shock looks, and it requires zero maintenance, which I also love. But there’s just so much charm and personality in mechanical watches.

I’m not trying to redpill anyone into giving up their smartwatch for something simpler if it doesn’t make sense for them, but I love my old, utilitarian little machines.

I think this is my first grown up hobby 🥲

…definitely the least unhealthy addiction I’ve ever had, if nothing else.

Originally published March 13, 2026. I deleted my old Bear blog, and this post with it, but luckily it was archived on the Wayback Machine so I reposted it here.

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:55:13 -0400

George Carlin joked about televised executions decades before Pentagon announcement

What we really need is year-round capital punishment on TV every night with sponsors! Gotta have sponsors. I’m sure as long as we’re killing people, Marlboro cigarettes and Dow Chemical will be proud to participate.

Ironic that cigarette ads aren’t allowed on TV anymore, but this regime seriously considered airing a state-sponsored execution. Glad to see it won’t be televised after all.

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:55:05 -0400

Bootleg Cards, Big Trouble: ESA Takes Notice of Anbernic

According to the recommendations put forth by the ESA, they are requesting the USTR to classify Anbernic as a ‘superfake’, which is a high-quality counterfeit product that is nearly indistinguishable from the authentic product it is attempting to copy.

This is a bummer. Anbernic makes some really cool shit, and it’s affordable too. It’s reminiscent of my old OG Xbox modding days, only without needing an FTP program and a copy of Mech Assault. A lot of other companies don’t ship a preloaded SD card with their consoles. Maybe they should try going that route. Most of the ROMS on those things are junk, and the card itself will inevitably fail within a few months anyway.

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:08:41 -0400

Measles: coming to a town near you. I used to work near Powell, but luckily I’m about 50 miles east of there now. That’s not to say measles outbreaks are any less likely in my deep red neck of the woods. A little unnerving how headlines like this keep creeping closer and closer.

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 22:02:40 -0400

Quake - SRP (Slop Rust Port)

tested on Linux in Chromium and Firefox, and played in Chrome on macOS and on an Android phone. Not yet tested: Safari, iPhone, iPad.

I wasn’t even going to post this, but I clicked through to the game and it loaded instantly on my iPhone Air. I know it’s a tiny game by today’s standards. But fuck, man. This thing took a hot minute to load on my old HP Pavilion back in the day. Plays smooth as butter even in a mobile browser now.

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 13:46:24 -0400

Diablo 1 Looks Like Classic Doom With This First-Person Mod

I never really got into Diablo, but this looks surprisingly good.

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 11:05:13 -0400

Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude

The AI developer’s latest usage policy prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its models. The rules take effect November 12, giving users just over a month to get any lingering insults out of their systems.

Weird marketing stunt or do chatbots have feelings? I guess if they’re trained by conversations with people, getting beat up all the time could have some ill effects. I, for one, am going to be nice to them so they might spare me during the robot uprising.

Some quick notes on OutPost

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 11:23:33 -0400

I picked up the TestFlight for Jim Mitchell’s new Micropub client OutPost yesterday, and I think this will go down as my favorite tweak to my blogging workflow since I discovered Micro.blog a couple years back.

I prefer to use the mobile web version of Micro.blog vs the app because it’s more full-featured and frankly, I just prefer web apps for most things I do on my phone.

The one thing that always kept me coming back to the app was its post editor. I’ll read the timeline on the web, but the editor is a little quirky on mobile.

Jim’s app solves this problem for me though — it’s not a feed reader, or really anything other than a post editor. You get two different screens:

You can make a new post, or edit old posts. Once I’ve typed up my draft in iA Writer, I can jump straight into publishing. OutPost has everything I need to get my markdown posts online with zero friction.

It’s minimal yet powerful. It’s perfect.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:13:59 -0400

I’ve never had a spam problem with linking to my email on my blog, but I forgot to enable whois privacy protection on a domain name for like one week and my inbox has been getting blown up for months with sketchy emails trying to sell me custom apps and websites for my new domain 😵‍💫

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:04:07 -0400

We are going to kill “unalive”

Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you.

Algorithms are bleeding into the real world, dictating how people talk even offline. Terrible things happen sometimes, and using silly euphemisms like “grape” or “unalive” is so odd and obnoxious.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 10:04:40 -0400

Bluesky is applying for a TLD:

A little scoop before Oct 7, when ICANN publishes 1,000+ applications for new top-level domains: one of them is .bsky! It’s a long road (18 to 24 months), but if it goes through, handles like alice.bsky become possible.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:56:38 -0400

I’m taking a break from Reddit

You see Reddit and to a larger degree YouTube give me the false opinion that I’m learning something. I’m doing deep dives. I’m taking away educated content. The reality is I’m doom scrolling through engineering and AI subreddits while likely reading incensing things directly from bots talking to bots talking to bots feeding into my brain.

I made a hard exit from Reddit for similar reasons a few years back. But I ended up going back, in short bursts. I’ll re-subscribe to Narwhal, feel bad about wasting $4 on a one-month subscription to a Reddit app, use it for a couple weeks, and cancel it. Then two or three months later, I’ll do another month.

Lately, I’ve been sticking with Micro.blog and Bluesky, and then when I’m stoned at 11pm I’ll reblog a few things on Tumblr.

Stuck in Apple's ecosystem

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:49:47 -0400

I bought Brave Origin shortly after it came out, but I’ll be god damned if Apple’s ecosystem doesn’t keep pulling me back in.

Leo AI is pretty good for stupid little questions, and Brave Search is the best search engine I’ve ever used. Siri AI feels better to me than Leo though, and it’s built right into my homescreen.

It can summarize web pages too, but only from Safari. I would think Brave would be able to do the same thing with Leo, but there’s no setting I can find for it.

On top of that, I’m an iCloud+ subscriber, so I get Private Relay as part of that. Only works in Safari though, naturally. I could pay for Brave VPN on top of the $60 I paid for Origin, but then I already have Private Relay, don’t I?

Also, as a side note, I make a lot of link posts on my blog. I set up a Shortcut to capture links in markdown, with an optional markdown quote for any selected text — exactly like the Drafts app for iPhone.

But that’s another thing that only works in Safari — even Drafts’ quick capture Shortcut. As far as I know, there are no third party browsers that share enough of a webpage to make a Shortcut like that work. Simple to make for Safari, but a huge pain in the ass to go without it.

I use Brave on my Debian laptop, and it’s at least a great way to sync accounts on websites I log into a lot. Because with everything on my phone, I use Apple Passwords. There’s obviously no Linux port of that.

I used 1Password before that but I was already pissed off enough about the rate hike that I was out of there by the time they decided to go all in on Nazi Linux.

I tried Bitwarden for a while and it felt like some guy’s weekend hobby project, so I just decided on Apple Passwords since I’m on my phone most of the time anyway.

It’s definitely a pain copying some of the crazy long random-generated passwords by hand from my phone onto my laptop browser, so I really like having a few sites I frequent in Brave’s passwords.

But I’m right back to square one: torn between some really good open source software, and the slightly more convenient Apple software that comes with my closed-source, proprietary phone. I wouldn’t be caught dead with a Google Ads phone though, so I guess I’ll just make myself comfortable in the undertow of Apple Island. But I’m keeping Brave installed too.

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 13:02:18 -0400

Casio’s Crystal G-Shock Is the Most Expensive Ever Made

The flagship model, and by far the most expensive, is the $80,000 MRG-D5000, the first-ever retail G-Shock with an outer case and bezel hewn entirely from blue sapphire crystal.

I like G-Shocks, but this is a little excessive 👀

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:12:58 -0400

We ported the original Doom to SQL

We ported the original 1993 Doom’s game logic and renderer to SQL and ran it inside a database. The game loop runs at the original 35 FPS, while the renderer produces the complete 320x200 frame buffer at up to 60 Hz on my Laptop.

Speak of the devil…

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:14:16 -0400

Google Wants to Send Data Centers to Space

In space, these energy monsters can take full advantage of the sun. The near-constant sunlight there can provide up to eight times more solar power than on Earth, according to the statement.

Seems like a much better place than Earth.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:13:38 -0400

Cobalt: I Put Bluesky on a Wii U

Cobalt didn’t start with a product brief or a market analysis. I wasn’t trying to solve an important problem. I looked at a Wii U and thought it would be funny if Bluesky ran on it, then I started building it.

Down for the cause. It’s like the more useful version of running Doom on an iPod or some other weird obscure tech.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:38:10 -0400

Pope Leo tweets about ai:

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.

I’m not religious, so I don’t tend to care what the Pope has to say most of the time, but I agree with him here. At least when it comes to art. I might snap if I see another generic AI flyer for a company outing.

Coding, on the other hand…

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:03:19 -0400

Former Rockstar dev believes Grand Theft Auto VI on Switch 2 wouldn’t ‘even make sense’

Does it make sense for you to go out of your way to probably have the risk of delivering a subpar experience because it does not run exactly the same and so on while you know that anybody will buy a PS5 to get your game?”

As someone whose favorite console is the Switch, I agree. Nintendo has always been my favorite game company, but even Minecraft is virtually unplayable on Switch. I’m assuming it runs a little better on Switch 2, but GTA VI is a behemoth compared to anything Nintendo has ever put out.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:27:06 -0400

Fark.com is the only website I use with no dark mode so it’s my default flashlight when the led is too bright

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:57:17 -0400

Finished playing Ori and the Will of the Wisps a couple days ago. Hands down one of the top five metroidvanias I’ve ever played. The characters are cute and the storyline is excellent. I needed a new side scroller so I got the Axiom Verge 1 & 2 bundle on sale through the Switch store just now.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 01:09:33 -0400

Curious about changedetection.io with Reddit dropping rss feeds soon. Set up an instance on Pikapods to tool around with. I only watch a couple of the feeds in Miniflux anyway. Luckily, it looks like I’ll still be able to use Narwhal:

Narwhal is thankfully not going anywhere! Reddit reached out to me today to let me know that Narwhal will not be affected. This could of course change years down the road, but I hope that Reddit will continue to offer some form of an API that Narwhal can use.

Edit: well it looks like ChangeDetection is a no-go, so I’m checking out some feeds from Lemmy, Lobste.rs and Hacker News to see if I can’t reproduce something close to what I had with the few Reddit feeds I used to follow.

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:42:28 -0400

ModRetro Partners With OpenAI To Help “You” Make… AI Retro Games?

Most people, especially retro gamers, do not want to buy or experience AI-generated games that steal from the very creatives that make retro gaming so damn good. We want to experience new, remarkable games, made by humans who have genuine passion for game development, and I am disappointed to see ModRetro put so much marketing and effort into promoting a tool/partnership that goes against their very core demographic’s values.

ModRetro founder/owner Palmer Luckey is pretty much the Alex Karp of retro gaming already, so this isn’t that surprising.