Donkey Kong and Banjo-Kazooie Shrine

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

A while back I decided to let my childhood Nintendo 64 and SNES consoles go. I have so many happy, wonderful memories playing them, but for the last long while they have sat dormant in my closet, collecting dust. With modern emulation and recompilation projects like Banjo: Recompiled, there’s no reason for me to ever return to the original systems when I can play them in a much better way on modern hardware. And knowing that there are people out in the world who would be able to use them and appreciate them for years to come, I let them go.

I’m not really one for keepsakes or sentimental items, but I didn’t want to let go of my Donkey Kong and Rare game cartridges. Instead, I thought it best to put a little bit of money into buying proper cases for them, and storing them in a way that shows how much I value them. The original cardboard cases are incredibly hard to come by, and are brittle. Instead, I opted for custom molded cases that retain a lot of the original artwork while providing more protection and a better visual appearance on the shelf. And thus, my shrine was born:

Earlier this week, I received an email from the person I bought these from on eBay:

Hello,

This message is for anyone who’s purchased a video game cartridge case from my eBay store “The Game Galaxy” in the past 12 months.

I wanted to alert you that eBay has removed all 1000+ cartridge cases I had up for sale after a 3rd party (not Nintendo) complained to eBay about > the cases. 7+ years of work is now gone.

Additionally, I can still provide cases to you if you are interested at any point in the future, simply message me using any listing that is still left in my eBay store. The URL is below.

https://www.ebay.com/str/fastshippingnogames?_trksid=p2047675.m3561.l2563

I’m working on a new website so I can sell the cases there, but in the meantime, message me using the above method and I can explain how we can proceed in the near-term.

Thank you for reading all of that.

I want to sincerely thank all of you for your loyal support over the years. It meant the world to me. It was a dream come true opening and operating this retro game store and couldn’t have done it without all of you.

Be well,

Brian Yourdan The Game Galaxy

I’m not a huge fan of the concept of intellectual property, but knowing that it wasn’t even Nintendo who tried to get them shutdown makes me especially grumpy.

I don’t know anything about Brian or The Game Galaxy other than I bought a set of cases from them a few months back and have been pleased with the result, but if you’re interested in buying cases for your own cartridges I’d encourage you to consider giving them a chance. Then you, too, can have you own closet shrine!

The Graveyard

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

My grandmother and great grandmother (on my father’s side) are buried in a mostly forgotten graveyard on top of a lonely mountain, in the middle of a cow pasture.

To get there you have to make your way up a precarious, single lane road until you reach the gate. From there, you must open the gate, curry favor with the livestock, and trudge through a dirt road strewn with cow patties until you reach the second set of gates at the graveyard.

I did this trek a few days ago, my first time in twenty years or so. I was shocked to see the graveyard in such an abysmal state. Headstones were broken, knocked over, breaking down. The roof of the caretakers shed had been blown off, with only concrete blocks remaining. Tree limbs and debris were scattered over the plots.

And in at least one case, a grave was completely caved in, the outside of the vault clearly visible.

I couldn’t help but think about how sad it was for all these people to be put to rest in a spot that has been neglected and largely forgotten to time. The people here deserve better, of course, but on a long enough time scale this is the inevitable outcome for any of us who are buried. Eventually, the environment will wear down your plot, or the people who took care of it will grow old and die themselves, or the land will need to be repurposed to make way for other things.

There are two ways to avoid this fate. One, opting for a more natural burial, where your body breaks down and becomes part of the environment from which new life can spring forth. Or, your body can be cremated, and the atoms that once made you can be recycled into something new. In both cases, there is a renewal and repurposing. In my mind, this is much preferable to leaving a body behind in a sealed vault to slowly wither away.

I also think it can be a bit harder for people to let go when there’s a physical reminder of you left behind. People feel obligated to come visit, to pay respects, to leave flowers or sentimental items. Or, if they miss you and desperately want to feel near you again, they can come and believe they are closer to you at your graveside.

I don’t want any of that. When it’s my time, say goodbye to me, cremate me, and then let me go. I don’t want to be a burden or an obligation, or a reminder of things long gone.

It is my belief that the secret meaning of life, as much as there is one, is to learn how to let things go.

And the culmination of a life of learning is to finally let go of yourself.

Unpinning Terminal

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Terminal is no longer pinned to my favorites list.

I think I’ve used a terminal basically every day for the past two decades, but that was usually because it provided the most utility with the least amount of friction to accomplish certain tasks.

But we’ve reached the point where not only is it not necessary to jump to a terminal window for most things, it’s usually a less pleasant experience, and in some cases can even be slower than using a dedicated GUI to accomplish the same task.

The Bazaar application is so fast and reliable, I can do all of my app installation and updates through that, without needing to fall back.

The Parabolic app is great at downloading videos from across the web. I know it still uses yt-dlp on the backend, but it keeps me from manually invoking it from the command line and trying to remember all the various flags to capture the formats I want, plus it makes it incredibly easy to queue up a bunch of downloads at once.

Resources reliably shows me what’s running on my system, and killing misbehaving processes (a rarity in the first place) is quick and easy.

Most of my interactions with git can be done with gitg, which is a bit crusty and using end-of-life runtimes, but I’ve heard whispers that it is going to be revamped and updated to use the latest GTK version and Adwaita libraries later this year. I can limp along until then in its current state. It really does make interacting with git quit a bit easier.

The only reason I’ll need to fallback to a terminal is when locally building versions of our documentation at work, but that’s not an everyday thing.

I love that the free desktop is mature enough to not require interacting with a CLI, even for a (relative) power user.

32

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Today I turn 32 years old. There was a time when I wasn’t sure I would make it past 30. Each trip around the sun is another reminder that I’m still here.

I didn’t make it alone. I was supported by a system that helped make sure I got the medical care I needed. That system included nurses (especially dialysis nurses), doctors, surgeons, case managers, insurance specialists, and more. And I was given an incredible gift not once, but twice, thanks to two selfless and generous people.

For the first time in many, many years, I don’t have to spend this birthday feeling sick, or stuck, or sorry for myself.

Instead, I’m spending it by going outside, having a few adventures, laughing with friends and family, and eating at all my favorite restaurants.

I am grateful to see 32, and am looking forward to many more birthdays to come.

My 3D Printing Days Are Over

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0400

It’s finally gone. After years of lugging it between apartments and houses, and begrudgingly fighting with a thousand different issues, I am no longer encumbered by my 3D printer. It has been sold, and is now haunting a new owner. I hope they are able to tune it up and have a nice, easy-going life filled with hundreds of perfect prints, but I am thankful that this pestilence is no longer mine.

I’ve written before how I’m appreciative that 3D printing exists in the world, but how I personally don’t enjoy it or find it useful. I love the idea of it: that you can create, replicate, and share physical things with people across the world. In practice, though, I think 3D printing falls short of its lofty idealistic goals.

There aren’t that many practical 3D prints that you can make. Most prints are purely aesthetic, making plastic trinkets you can put on your shelf and admire. I have no need for these in my life. Occasionally, you can print a spare part to fix something that’s broken or missing. My favorite use-cases that I’ve seen have all been related to repairs, but I don’t want to ignore the fact that the product you end up with has limited function when it comes to raw strength and longevity. Often, that 3D-printed replacement part ends up breaking again, or in some cases causes further damage to the thing you were trying to fix in the first place.

I had spiritually given up on the 3D printing scene a while ago. I haven’t been printing much over the past few years, despite the printer being set up in my garage and OctoPrint being more than willing to accept a print any time I wanted to send one its way. There have been a few exceptions. I designed and printed the cake topper for our wedding, which I was proud of. The process of getting it just right resulted in more than one gray hair, but seeing the final result made me happy. There has also been the one-off thing here and there my wife has asked me to make her over the years. In fact, the reason I kept it as long as I did was to finish a set of Doorable display shelves for her.

But now our walls are full, my list of requested prints is empty, and the time is right. There has been a resurgence of 3D printing demand lately, with lots of folks using them to make bulk batches of Anti-ICE whistles. I can only hope that my 3D printer has gone to a home doing something as socially beneficial and punk-rock as that.

It wasn’t a bad 3D printer. It wasn’t faulty. There have been lots of new features and new innovations that have come out in the decade or so since the Ender 3 Pro was first introduced, but fundamentally it is as capable today as it ever was. It’s just ornery. Because of that, I have no problem setting it free and finding it somewhere new to live.

But I am thankful to be free of the maintenance, free of the tinkering, and free of the clutter. So long!

The Sandwich

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 14:05:00 -0400

For the first time in my life, I cried at a sandwich today.

I suppose it’s depression, or something similar to it, but for a while now I’ve been feeling like I have a difficult time feeling things anymore. Birthdays don’t feel like birthdays. Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas. And most new experiences just feel like watered-down, less vibrant rehashes of things I’ve already done.

But today, that wasn’t true.

Near my parents’ old house there is a small, hole-in-the-wall kind of place that serves burgers and sandwiches. It’s your basic rural American hometown diner kind of place. But it just so happens that they make a club sandwich that is to die for. I used to eat them all the time in my teens and twenties, but ever since my parents moved out of that area, I haven’t had a single one.

Sometimes I crave that sandwich. It’ll be all I can think about. I lust after it. I sit and remember how good it was, and think to myself, it’s probably not that good anymore, or maybe I am just looking back with rose-tinted glasses. Maybe it was never that good to begin with?

Today I decided to take the drive and find out for myself. I walked up to the counter, placed my order, and a couple minutes later they were calling for me to pick it up.

When I first saw it I could have bawled. It was beautiful. Picturesque. Even better than I remembered it in my mind. If anything, this looked more delicious than it ever had before. And once I tasted it? Exactly like I remembered. Exactly as good. Perfect, in every way.

I sat at the table and tried to hold back tears. I failed. This wasn’t just a sandwich. This was a reminder that I can still feel things. And while some things are lost to time, or perhaps not as good as you remember them, there really are things out in the world that are waiting for you to find them again. And when you do, you’ll find you haven’t really lost anything. They say that no man ever steps in the same river twice; for he is not the same man, and it is not the same river. But today, for just a few minutes, I was the same guy I used to be, and that was the exact same sandwich.

eBay

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

For a long while, I’ve been looking for something that could replace Amazon for most of my miscellaneous purchases that aren’t available in brick and mortar stores. It never really occurred to me that eBay might actually be the exact thing I was looking for.

Of course, I’ve been familiar with eBay for as long as I can recall. I’ve used it many times to sell things, but had never really used it to buy things before.

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to buy some cases to protect and display the handful of SNES and Nintendo 64 game cartridges I keep around (some of the few purely sentimental items I allow myself to hold on to), and eBay was the natural choice to look for options. The original cases are almost impossible to find, and those that do still exist cost hundreds of dollars. That said, I found someone making custom plastic cases based on the original box art, and decided to give them a try. I’m happy to report that I’m very pleased with the results.

This little foray into the world of eBay unlocked something in my mind. I decided to look up an item I’ve had on my Amazon wishlist for a while. To my surprise, I found an open box (but new!) listing for less than half the price of what Amazon was charging for a new item.

I repeated this a little later, when I needed to replace a very old (and very basic) multimeter that had finally bit the dust. I searched on eBay, and found a screaming deal on a relatively high quality (for my needs) multimeter.

Now, I find myself defaulting to eBay first, then resorting to other means if and only if I’m not able to find something there (and even then, I only fallback to Amazon as a very last resort).

I’m not sure why I’ve had such a mental block against using eBay, but the past handful of purchases have been affordable and provided excellent experiences! Plus, when you buy open box or used items, you’re saving things from ending up in the landfill. That’s a win-win!

Gapless vs. Euphonica

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

Every music player I have tried on GNOME is lacking in one area or another. Since my perfect music player doesn’t exist, I thought it might be of interest to say what I do and don’t like about the two primary apps that I tend to jump between: Euphonica and Gapless.

Generally, I prefer Euphonica. As someone who likes to listen to entire albums from start to finish, I find that viewing an album and queuing it up for play is a much better experience there.

I also prefer its “now playing” screen. I love that it tells me the quality details about the song I’m listening to. I like that I can shuffle directly from it, and even adjust features like crossfading and ReplayGain. Plus, I like the larger album art. I could take or leave the audio waveforms, but they are a nice touch.

It’s also nice that you can set cover art for an entire playlist.

The thing I dislike most about it is the fact that it requires an mpd server to work. I suppose most folks who use Euphonica are connecting to an mpd sever remotely, but I’ve set one up locally on my laptop (only available to localhost) purely for using with Euphonica. It was a small pain to set up, but what really annoys me about it is that it’s not always consistent about finding or displaying music that should be available. Occasionally songs or albums will be invisible from the library, but they’re so few and far between it’s hard to catch. In some cases I’ll realize an album is missing, but if I look at it through the artist view and then look at the individual songs list, I’ll find an entire album’s songs without the album showing up in the list. I suspect this is a shortcoming of Euphonica itself rather than mpd, but because the two are so intrinsically linked, it would take a decent amount of investigation to figure out.

I also miss being able to just see a flat-out list of every song in my library. I often just like to shuffle through everything, and I’ve not yet found a way to do so here.

Gapless, on the other hand, is a lot more minimal. This is both good and bad. I like that it just pulls from your local music library and handles all that functionality itself without requiring a separate server. So far it has reliably pulled in all my music. It automatically detects my saved playlists in a standard format. The music playback is great.

It’s also wicked fast. It launches almost instantly, playback happens as soon as you click play, and navigating the library has no delays.

It’s just missing the little bells and whistles that I mentioned that I like about Euphonica: the larger album art, the quality/format details, the shuffle buttons, the individual album views, etc.

But what bothers me the most about Gapless is the way that it handles the concept of a queue. When you play an album it pulls those tracks out of a queue, but still shows every song in your library within it. If you try to shuffle all your tracks but then play an album, it’s like it un-shuffles just the songs from the album, so in the middle there will just be 15 songs by the same artist in album order.

Sometimes playing individual tracks will clear the queue. Sometimes it appends. It’s just confusing to me, I simply don’t comprehend how the queue functions. The only time the queue behavior makes sense to me is when I’m playing music from a playlist.

If I could, I’d merge the best of both apps together. I feel like each excels in the exact ways the other falls short, so together it’s a complete experience.

Realistically, I think if Gapless were to make just a few tweaks it would be a perfect app. Whereas I think Euphonica, while my current favorite, is more fundamentally flawed in its library management.

Still, I really like both apps, and use them every single day. Maybe one day I’ll give up on one and settle on a single tool. Today is not that day, though.

Blog Posts Are The Ideal Form of the Written Word

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

Of all the things I read, I find blog posts to be the most enjoyable format.

Occasionally I will read a book that is memorable or even, in rare circumstances, life-altering. Those are usually the ones that manage to fully cover what they set out to discuss, without overstaying their welcome. A lot of books I read have “this could have been an email” energy, where it’s clear that the author had about thirty pages worth of ideas to discuss, but instead they will repeat themselves and pad it all out to fill the length requirements needed to get their books onto store shelves.

I can’t remember where I heard it, but around the time the iTunes store launched and you could purchase songs a-la carte for the first time, someone made the point that the song was the natural form for music. Now, instead of having to buy a full album just to get the one or two songs you wanted, you could just grab the individual tracks you liked.

(I do think we lost a little something in that period, because sometimes the best music that an artist produces is the stuff that doesn’t manage to hit the mainstream or get a ton of airtime — but I digress.)

In the same way, I think the blog post is kind of the ideal form of the written word. Books are big, bulky things that require several hours of commitment from the reader. When the subject deserves something of that length, that’s wonderful, but a lot of what makes it to bookshelves doesn’t fit the bill.

On the other hand, something smaller than a blog post (like a tweet, or a toot, or a skeet, or whatever the hell we’re calling a 500-or-fewer-character social post these days) often feels like a transient thought, and simply doesn’t have enough length to fully explore a topic or flesh out an idea.

But the blog post! What a perfect little medium. It can be short, if needed. It can be long, if necessary. It can be whatever it needs to be, but it usually manages to tell a story or share information exactly the way it needs to. I suppose, at the heart of it, a blog post is closest to an essay in the traditional sense. Whatever you call it and however you look at it, I find that material that takes somewhere between five minutes to an hour is usually just right.

Blog posts have been my favorite medium for as long as I can recall, and as long as you folks keep writin’ ‘em, I’ll keep readin’ ‘em.

The Current GNOME App Landscape, and the Two Apps I Wish Existed

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

I know the popular thing in modern times is to dislike standalone applications, and when it comes to apps on platforms like iOS and Android, I generally agree. More often than not, apps are black boxes that spy on you, rip you off, and in some cases, endanger your livelihood. Not to mention that they often use mechanisms under the hood to prevent you modifying or studying their behavior, and if you try to bypass those protections you can find yourself in violation of section 1201 of the DMCA and facing enormous fines and/or jail time.

But while this is true, using free and open source applications can be a really pleasant experience, and they will often provide you with a better experience than what you can find using a modern web app. I still love apps, especially those written using GTK and Adwaita, and made available via Flatpak through Flathub or other Flatpak repositories.

I’m genuinely amazed at the quality and variety of apps that I have available on my laptop, which currently (and for the past decade or so) is running Fedora with stock GNOME. We’re in a better state than I could have dreamed, and I get more enjoyment and utility out of my computer every single day because of these apps made by (mostly) independent developers all across the world and from all walks of life.

I want to be encouraging to developers, and point out that anyone with the technical know-how can get involved either with an existing project or, with a little determination and willingness to learn, start a project of their own.

At the same time, I think there is an underlying truth about the universe: there are only so many things that humans need or want to do, and for the most part, there are already ways of doing them quickly and easily on the computer.

There aren’t many gaps in my computing where I want to be able to achieve a task, but don’t currently have the means to do so.

From my perspective, there are only two apps that don’t currently exist as GNOME apps that I would love to see: a package tracking app, and an Adwaita email client.

On the package tracking front, I occasionally buy things online, and would really like a package tracker that lists all the different shipments I have in progress and shows me the latest tracking information for each of them, along with estimated delivery dates, and then sends me notifications whenever there is a new update about a package’s whereabouts. On iOS, I use the app Parcels, and it’s excellent (although I find that notifications don’t always trigger like they should).

A while back I teased that I had been working on such an app, and you can see a screenshot of what I have below:

All of the browsing/adding/removing/sorting functionality is in place and functional, but I haven’t been able to finish the rest of the app yet, because I don’t have a way of reliably pulling information from the various shipping providers. Proprietary apps have the advantage of being able to include unique API keys for all the various services, but being an open source app, I’ve not yet found a reliable way of storing said keys in a way that’s inaccessible to the user (and if I did, it wouldn’t really be open source). That means a user would have to individually sign up for developer accounts and generate API keys with each provider they want to use for tracking. What a horrible user experience! I’ve also tried various methods of scraping, but this would be extremely brittle because any new anti-scraping measurements or changes in how information is delivered on the part of the vendors would result in breakages within the app.

The second app that doesn’t yet exist is an Adwaita-based email client. I used to love Geary back in the GNOME 3 days, but as Yorba disbanded and development fell back to the community it started receiving fewer updates, and began to break in various places. I think development is still technically ongoing (and now it is maintained by GNOME itself to varying degrees), but it hasn’t seen a ton of modernization or improvement over the past decade or so.

I’m excited about a new potential app called Envelope, but so far there haven’t been any previews, nor activity in the repo for the past four months as far as I’m aware, so it may be a while yet before this is a viable option.

Still, how incredible is it that in the modern Linux ecosystem, I’m able to achieve almost everything I want to do with the apps that exist! There are thousands of apps in the Flathub “store”, with almost all of them receiving regular updates directly from the developers. It is the best time in history to be a Linux user, and I’m continuously impressed by the work that the Flatpak and Flathub communities have done (and are doing) to make this dream a reality.

Cine is the First Video Player That Can Replace VLC for Me

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

With the exception of a few visits to the cinema each year, every single thing I watch — every movie, every TV show, every online video — I watch on my laptop.

For as far back as I can recall, I’ve relied almost exclusively on VLC for video playback. It’s not because it has the most intuitive interface, it’s just because it’s consistently the best when it comes to playing back the content I want to watch.

Back when I didn’t have a ton of horsepower in my PC, VLC would handle 1080p videos (and then 4K videos) without stuttering or making the CPU hit 100% when other players would struggle. Then, when most of the things I watched starting being 4K HDR video files and needed tone mapping to look correct on my non-HDR display, it was VLC who did the job best (once you switched it to the Reinhard algorithm, that is).

It has supported all the features I’ve needed through the years, including subtitle support, multiple audio streams, and cropping videos when I want to take up my full display. As an aside, I know this is not ideal because a portion of the frame gets chopped off, but for non-cinematic videos I really just don’t care to lose a bit of the content in order to take full advantage of my screen real-estate.

That said, I’ve never been wowed by the UI nor UX of VLC. It is a QT app and doesn’t really fit in with the rest of my GTK desktop. The interface looks much the same as it has for decades now. It doesn’t adapt between light and dark styles correctly. The controls are either attached to the bottom of the window, or hidden with a keyboard shortcut. It’s a very competent video player, with plenty of features, but it just sticks out too much.

I’ve tried other video players throughout the years. For a while I used Totem, but it wasn’t well-suited for the task. As Adwaita and GTK4 became a thing it started feeling more and more outdated.

The new default GNOME video player, Showtime, had come the closest to replacing VLC so far. It definitely feels modern. It has rounded edges, automatically disappearing video controls (er, sometimes), and a great UI. But it completely falls apart during playback for me. It doesn’t support tone mapping HDR videos. It doesn’t allow for crop or zoom. And worst of all, about half the time I turn subtitles off (they are on by default), it either freezes or crashes the app. I’ve filed issue reports to help make sure some of these shortcomings are addressed, and the developers have been very responsive and willing to consider my suggestions. In the future, it will probably be a solid option. For now, though, it doesn’t fit my needs.

Another MPV-based app, Celluloid, has also come fairly close over the years. Recent versions do support tone mapping (since MPV supports it), but I find that HDR videos look darker there than they do in VLC or other places for some reason. It’s also missing a lot of features, like cropping/zoom support, and I’m not a fan of the way a lot of the UI sort of floats in and looks a bit non-standard.

All these apps have been tested, but none have been able to replace VLC for me in my day-to-day usage. That is, until now. Cine is finally the video player that I’ve been longing for.

Cine manages to achieve the really difficult combination of being a deceptively simple looking application, while still providing an absolute ton of options and features. It is rock-solid when it comes to stability. I’ve thrown a lot of different videos and codecs at it, and it has not crashed once. The interface is intuitive, and gets out of your way when it’s not needed so as to block parts of the video.

It gives you the usual playback controls, plus an easy selector for different subtitles or audio tracks. Chapter markers are elegantly displayed across the seek bar, with chapter titles showing up on mouse hover. A settings popover give you a ton of options for the current video, including an option to zooming the video (so it can fill your display), or adjusting individual levels like brightness, contrast, etc.

A preferences menu allows you to enable hardware decoding (while writing this post I just realized that wasn’t enabled — why isn’t that a default?!). It also gives you the ability to adjust subtitle settings, and normalize volume (a handy feature when the movie you’re watching has loud explosions but quiet dialog).

I do still sometimes find that videos are a bit on the dark side (I suppose this is something about how MPV renders the videos), but because it includes brightness controls, I can bump those a couple points and it looks great.

I honestly can’t say enough good things about this app. I’ve used it for about four weeks now, and it has officially replaced VLC completely for me. In that time I’ve watched new movies, TV shows, and a handful of other random video files. It just handles everything without even the slightest hesitation.

I can’t recommend Cine enough. You can grab it now from Flathub.

Cybergnosticism

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

For the longest time, one of my favorite books (even before my own battle with a disease trying to kill me) was “Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens. This is a short collection of essays he wrote after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, up until the moment he passed. In it, he says the following:

It’s normally agreed that the question “How are you?” doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, “A bit early to say.” (If it’s the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, “I seem to have cancer today.”) Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut–wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask… It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.

The phrase “I don’t have a body, I am a body” is one that I’ve thought about a million times since I first read it, and even more often as of late. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not a body.

Some say that the concept of the “self” is artificial, and is an adaptation that has evolved over millions of years as a way of encouraging humans to want to reproduce and further their genes. Perhaps there is a species-level benefit to the concept of the self, but that still doesn’t feel adequate enough for an explanation to me. Perhaps I’m fooling myself, but I do tend to believe that I exist as something more than a collection of cells and a home for billions of bacteria. Then again, maybe that’s what the bacteria want me to think.

After all I’ve gone through with multiple kidney transplants and multiple blood transfusions, I really don’t think of myself as being my body. The closest I can get to that is thinking perhaps I am my brain, or at least, the person that my brain is rendering. But it feels like there’s more to it. For lack of a better word, it feels like a spirit of some sort, but not in a supernatural way. It’s an essence. It’s a feeling, a certain level of knowing and being.

In certain online communities, it’s an established norm to not use the phrase “IRL” (meaning “In Real Life”). The internet really is real life, and what happens there is as much a part of our reality as the air we breathe and the ground we walk upon. Instead, the term “AFK (Away from Keyboard)” is preferred.

In much the same way that I feel like I’m not a body but in a body, I find that when I connect with cyberspace I’m not any less there than I am here. Sure, I’m physically in a chair, but in a much grander sense I’m out there.

The environment that we all come together to build very much exists. When I interact with the systems that others build, that world exists as much as my kitchen does when I step into it. When I read the words that others write, I fill my head with the words that the authors put out into the world, and I construct meaning from them.

The digital systems that we build are very much a part of our lives. And the time we spend online is as real as the time that we spend walking through a park, or sitting on a couch watching TV with a loved on. Online life is real life, as much as offline life.

Because I think of my body more as a vessel, I see it more like a physical device. Much like a computer is just the means to allow you to go places and do things, the body is a way to experience the world, and in a much larger sense, life itself. So when I see people modifying their bodies, or making decisions about how they want them to function, I more and more find myself impressed with their tenacity. If your vessel doesn’t serve the spirit inside, and you have the means of modifying or otherwise biohacking it to bend to your will, why wouldn’t you?

Each of us has but one existence, one turn on the merry-go-round. We are born, we mess about for a bit, and then we cease to be. But I submit to you that your online existence is an extension of your corporeal existence: treat it with the reverence and care it deserves.

10 Random Things I Hate

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:00:00 -0500

Following a recent trend I’ve seen of people listing 10 things they hate, I thought it would be fun (and a bit of a break from the more serious posts I’ve written recently) to come up with my own list.

In that spirit, here are some things I hate:

When people listen to things out loud on a speaker in public.
Trader Joe’s. The food is fine, I suppose, but the store is always so crowded that I end up anxious and panicked trying to move around people and not get in anyone’s way.
People who don’t seed their torrents.
Ranch dressing. Nothing personal, I just can’t stand the taste.
When drivers camp in the passing lane, going at or below the speed limit.
People who talk or use phones during a showing at the cinema.
When people bring pets into restaurants or grocery stores. This obviously doesn’t apply to service animals. I see way too many people bringing their dogs into restaurants and grocery stores, but no one asks them to leave so they keep doing it.
AI generated photos and videos. Oh, and AI generated blog posts. In fact, most AI generated things.
When the plumbers/electricians/technicians don’t show up during their scheduled window.
“The Cloud.” Benefits of instant data backups and easier sharing aside, most of our data can be stored locally just fine, where it doesn’t get leaked/shared with the government to benefit the police state/used for training machine learning models.

What about you? If you end up making your own list, please be sure to link me to it.

Losing Weight

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

For well over a month now, I’ve been making a conscious and determined effort to lose weight.

It is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’ve strugged with my weight ever since I was a little kid. It’s mainly due to the way I was brought up. Living in the U.S. South, you’re part of a culture that values flavor and tradition over healthier options and nutritious living. I fundamentally did not understand nutrition until very recently, and that is mostly thanks to what I’ve learned as part of my various health struggles.

When you’re in kidney failure you have to modify your diet. You have to limit things like phosphorus, potassium, and sodium. I’ve gotten really good at learning to cut things out of my diet, even things that I love. Turns out I have more willpower than I ever imagined.

But when you’re in kidney failure it’s almost impossible to lose weight. You retain fluid. You swell. You get bigger. It’s hard to tell where the body fat stops and the excess body fluid begins.

Now that I have a happy, healthy kidney, weight loss is an achievable goal. Not only is it achievable, it’s necessary. I also have developed some minor heart issues. If I don’t get them taken care of now, I know what awaits me. In the immediate future, it would be an ablation. In the longterm, it would be early mortality. These are just the facts.

And to be honest, I hate being a fat guy. I don’t like the way I look. I don’t like seeing myself in a mirror.

The only time in my life that I was thin was when I was in high school. I started working a part-time job at a local fast food joint, and I literally worked my ass off. I lost 60 pounds (approximately 27 kg) in the span of about 6 months. It probably didn’t hurt that I was also trying to impress a girl. But hey, whatever works.

The weight stayed off for around a year, but it slowly started creeping back up. In college, my “freshman fifteen” (pounds) started being the “freshman thirty”, then forty, then suddenly I was back where I started.

But that all ends now. I’m eating healthier. I’m eating things that have more nutrients that my body needs. I’m eating with more balance. And, I’m exercising regularly for the first time in my life.

The resource that was most helpful to me, out of everything I’ve read or learned, was “The Hacker’s Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition”, by John Walker. In it, he lays out the problem from an engineering/project management perspective, and makes some points I’ve never made time to think about before. Essentially, the secret to weight loss is all about calories. If you eat more than you burn, you put on weight. If you eat as many as you burn, you maintain your weight. If you eat less than you burn, you lose weight. Simple stuff.

Right now my daily metabolic rate is about 2800 calories. If I stay under that (which isn’t all that difficult), I lose. I’m trying to stay below 1800 calories each day. Every 3500 calories you “keep out” translates to one pound of body fat, so with this method I should expect to lose around two pounds each week (which I know won’t work out quite right, since everyone hits a plateau at one point).

I must admit that at first I was disappointed in the results I was seeing on the scale. My face is notably thinner. My hips are thinner. It’s evident I’ve lost a bit of weight. But at first, the numbers didn’t match what I was seeing in the mirror. Then today, I went back and looked at some of the recorded weights from my most recent doctors visits. Turns out, I was way heavier at the start of the year than I even realized. As of this morning, I’m down 18 pounds!

The changes I’m making aren’t meant to be a temporary measure. They’re the new way that I eat, the new way that I exercise, and the new way that I live. It’s not so radical that I won’t be able to maintain it for the long-term. I figure if I keep my actions in check, the results will follow.

Using a Dopp Kitt Every Day

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

I haven’t really mentioned it to anyone, but at the start of the year I had a tiny little hospital stay. It ended up not being anything serious (as far as we know), but I was urinating blood, and when you have a new kidney you can’t really just brush off that kind of thing.

I didn’t have much time to pack, I just had to hop in a car and get a move on toward my transplant hospital where my team would be able to get to the bottom of things quickly. If something were wrong with my kidney, hopefully we could spot the issue and prevent it from causing any serious damage.

I don’t really have a “go bag”, as it were, but I keep most of my stuff in a backpack. If I find myself needing to spend a few days away from home, I just grab it and I am all set. The one exception to that is that I always have to take some extra time and pack the necessary toiletries: a toothbrush, deodorant, maybe a comb, and if I’m really feeling prepared, a razor.

It occurred to me, what’s keeping me from storing all of that stuff in a single bag, too? When I go somewhere I pack a toiletry bag and live out of that just fine for as long as I’m away. Why couldn’t I do the same at home?

So, I researched a handful of bags that can be used as a Dopp Kit, picked a relatively inexpensive but highly-reviewed one, and waited for it to arrive. Once it did, I was able to pack not only the essentials, but literally everything I use on a day-to-day (or even week-to-week) basis. Grooming kits, cologne, shaving cream, the works.

I actually like having all my stuff in one well-organized bag, rather than spread out across a handful of drawers. And if I need to jump in a car and speed off towards a hospital again? I just grab the bag on my way out.