During my last vibe check the kids were still in school. Time has flown by. Work-life balance disrupted. Camps attended. Vacations were had. Bank accounts drained. A normal summer routine.
Since the last vibe check I’ve been on a handful of airplanes visiting both work and family. We also had family come to visit. And I logged some hours on Texas highways.
After beaching hard, we’re now back in Austin, where it’s just plain hot now.
My mantra for this year is “No New Projects” and I’m doing my best to abide in that. It’s more about finishing existing projects before taking on new ones, but that’s a mouthful. Naturally, new projects keep spawning like “Project Fix the bass guitar” and “Oh, since you’re done with that, Project Fix the Telecaster too” but chief among the backlog of projects are: Project Grass and Project Rocks.
Years of hot summers and dogs have obliterated the grass in our backyard. We’ve watered, we’ve laid sod, we’ve transplanted plugs, we’ve even fenced off a little area to keep the dogs from trampling. But staring at standing water in my yard after a heavy rain, I started to suspect compaction was our biggest problem.
To break up the compaction, I rented a tiller and it kicked my ass. I’m not sure strapping a lawnmower engine to a rotating blade should be legal. Not because of the dangerous spinny bits, but because it shakes every bone and fiber in your body into oblivion.
After tilling a decent area for a future grass patch, I spread some clover mix seed and prayed to the 10-day forecast which showed rain. Grass did grow a couple times, but the clover won’t survive the Texas heat. That’s part my plan though. I want to let the clover grow and die to hopefully compost some more nitrogen and nutrients in the soil.
It’s been three weeks since I took the photo above and the backyard is officially dead again. Project Grass is on hold until more rains come and the weather cools off, but the tiller uncovered an even bigger project: Project Rocks.
Through tilling, I discovered a previous owner of my house appears to have added a 3ft wide × 1ft deep × 20ft long perimeter of river pebble around my patio. I could see them… but I didn’t know the extent of the problem. Twenty so cubic feet of rocks helps explain why I had trouble growing grass in that area.
Using a shovel I excavated a giant pile of dirt and rocks out of my yard… and put them on my patio. The rocks were out of the yard, huzzah, but the patio was a construction zone. The next task was to sift the rocks out of the dirt and this took forever. After dozens of mornings and evenings of sifting dirt, I separated out all the rocks.
I don’t know what to do with the rocks though, so I piled them up in my side yard. Lots of people say “Post it on Marketplace!” but the logistics of piling up rocks in my front yard hoping someone picks them up doesn’t resonate with me.
Anyways, I finished Phase 1 (Clear Zone 1) of Project Rocks and there’s no more dirt mounds on my patio. I have a lot more work to do in the fall (Finish Office Path, Clear Zone 2, Dispose of Rocks) but I’m waiting until the weather cools off.
In other news, my wife and I joined a band with another couple in our neighborhood. The husband of that couple wrote some songs and booked a gig at a “Rock the Park” event in November. He needed vocalist and a bassist and my wife and I decided to say “Yes” to doing music together. I’d describe the music as family-friendly and there’s even a kids choir on a couple songs.
Since the last update, I’ve read thousands of pages of space manga and that makes me happy. There’s a lot in this list, but if I had to pick a top five (in no particular order), it would be:
But here’s the complete list.
This was my going to bed book, so I read it one page at a time and it took me over a year to finish. Despite putting me to sleep every night, it’s a fun little snack of a book and I see why it’s having a moment. I will confess tho, the first half of the book felt like grinding through a tutorial level and I almost gave up. But glad I stuck with it.
The prequel continues as more and more people are pulled into the war’s grasp. A lot of space drama and the series is really hitting its stride here.
A short little inspo book. I enjoyed it but not a lot of tactical insights beyond “Use a game engine” and “Just do it.” Maybe could have been a blog post.
The final set of stories from the prequel to the original series. Might be my favorite. It catalogs the horrifying start of the Gundam Universe’s central plot line, The One Year War. It’s here you understand that Gundam is not about space robots (although it is very much about that), but a story about people who find themselves in a gruesome war.
We return to the main story timeline with tons of intense combat scenes that are beautifully illustrated and inked. You feel the drum beats of war pushing towards a climatic end of the series.
The tension is building towards the final battle. Based on the title of this edition I thought it would cover more of Lalah’s story arc, but she’s really a minor character… yet her need to be protected shows her importance.
This book raises a few hackles. It is frustrating that names and institutions found in this book who wrought the greatest economic crash in history –names like Carnegie, Lamont, Mellon,Durant, and JP Morgan– are still household names today. It’s doubly frustrating that this seems to be the current Wall Street/AI/Crypto playbook; speculate and wash trade, but they’re “smarter” this time and have the FDIC backstop to prevent bank runs.
The ending of Gundam The: Origin over the last three novels was perfect. Epic Space Battles. Deception. Betrayal. Death. Revolution. Vindication. It has everything and I cannot recommend this series enough if you get the opportunity to read it.
A fun comic, but maybe not my cup of tea. It might be a translation issue. I found the writing very… Americanized. I would probably benefit from watching the Netflix series that picks up later in the chronology or playing the video and/or TTRPG.
Humans piloting big robots. Pacific Rim with a little bit of Evangelion. Great art style.
Technically not a book but a collection of radio broadcasts by one of my most enjoyable authors of late, Oliver Burkeman. Burkeman looks into four modern day phenomenon and offers his thoughts and counter-thoughts:
Alls to say, this was a series I needed right now in my life. I found it very meditative and refreshing. Like a cool breeze.
I love the idea of play as a human right. It’s how we learn. It’s how we adapt. It’s how we explore boundaries. But I got to the part where it reinforced one of the dumbest parenting tropes: “Kids these days! iPads! All I needed as a kid was cardboard boxes.” At that point I nope’d out of the book.
I loved cardboard growing up but I also played a fuckton of Nintendo. I gave my kids plenty of cardboard-itunities and it took me awhile to realize they don’t create like that. My son wants to manage things. My daughter wants to get 10,000 gems and fingernails and spread them out on every available surface of my house. Kids play differently. Adults do too.
Gundam… but let’s give all the robots bigger guns, more shields, and enormous backpacks with jet boosters. This series really drives the “War is Hell” theme of the Gundam Universe.
I’m enjoying this series but this was some of the best space mecha battle art I’ve ever seen.
Good advice from people who understand how writers get blocked. Their advice is basic but comes down to establishing a writing practice and finding out where you’re successful writing. The tactical portion devolves into setting SMART goals which is mid-tier advice to me personally but I think helpful in the context and generally a good starting place for people with no productivity framework at all.
Focus on the main character. Give every scene a purpose. A really helpful and usable framework for organizing the chaos in my brain.
I learned a lot from this book. Birds are wicked smart. It maybe even radicalized me a bit against capitalism. That’s a longer story for another time. But birds are cool.
Pretty great… but with over seventy contributions it got a little repetitive really quick. I may come back to this or pick it up again because there were quite a few gems of wisdom in there. But I was fine to put it down.
After listening to most of How to Write a Mystery, I felt compelled to finally pickup one of the greatest mystery novels ever written. Not that you need my opinion, but it lives up to the hype. The audiobook version had an extra special flare with quite a few international accents being thrown around. Would recommend, even if Poirot’s accent is a bit too thick.
This is a charming series that really makes you rethink happiness.
The character art on this one was noticeably… bad? Thunderbolt character art overall is very Uncanny Valley with spiky-haired edgelord-iness framing soft faces, but the thick lines in this volume were distinctly odd. Good story tho.
This volume does a neat little bit of reverse chronological storytelling.
A wretched season for blogging. There’s a bonafide CSS trick in there, so that’s nice. But most of my free time went to scooping rocks out of my yard (see above) and reading space mech manga (see above).
A workaround for hiding empty slots in Chromium #CSS, #webcomponents
Finding curated public domain images #blogging
I think a lot about writing – even listened to three different books about writing (see above) – but a lot of my writing brain waves go towards thinking about the fiction I want to write.
Movies
I made a significant dent in my watchlist this summer thanks to travel and some lazy weekends.
Beyond that, my son is catching up on the Marvel MCU so I’ve gotten the chance to watch some of the greatest hits with him.
TV
Anime
Podcasts
I declared podcast bankruptcy and unsubscribed from all shows. I was feeling haunted by the unread counts so I’m taking a break. If you love something set it free.
I’ve been 3D printing a lot this summer. I went hard on printing organizers for my office, specifically embracing the Gridfinity system for organizing storage. I’m not “totally organized” yet but I completed Project Reduce and Organize Cables and it feels great and there are a couple of prints that I’m still smitten by. It’s still neat and novel to summon objects out of thin air… and plastic.
I’ve fallen off this horse but I’m feeling the draw to get back on since I’ve been reading tons of Gundam manga.
I bought some new acrylic paints to hopefully finish an experimental kit I embarked on but gave up on. I’m hoping once some other projects get cleared out I can sink back into gunpla again.
A big summer for open source projects I work on but you wouldn’t know about it because I don’t talk about it enough:
Rolled out the new element-scoped view-transitions on my bookshelf. Most people probably won’t notice, but I feel the micro-difference and FPS boost and that’s what matters.
Also on my stories page I rolled out a CSS-only Mini LQIP trick that converts a 6-byte code into a blurry background-image placeholder to reduce CLS. Super happy with the effect.
Behind the scenes I improved my local Jekyll setup with the help of Copilot tackling tasks like upgrading to Ruby to v4, fixing some outdated gem issues, auditing my entire build pipeline, and removing some slower filters (e.g. sassify). In general, it’s going well and I can build my entire site in 2.5s and 0.5s with archive templates disabled.
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