Accidentally just put my fountain pen through the wash because I didn't check my pants pocket. Upside: screw cap was on (Kaweco Sport), so it could've been worse; took the pen apart and the ink cartridge was still pretty full and the pen still writes. Downside: not 100% sure the clothes are safe.

Can't speak for the deceased, obviously, but I'd rather not have an article written about my death at all than have one very plainly and publicly farmed out to an MLM. If it's newsworthy, a real human being should be writing and editing it.

Wrong time of day for photos of the falls, so here's some photos of not-the-falls.

Bought a new camera a couple days ago and took it out to some local parks to get used to it. Didn't get much from the park trips, but I stopped for dinner before going home (Marna's in Robbinsdale) and saw this right outside the door.

It's official: Great Lakes Michelin Guide will include Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. Michelin says boots are already on the ground, but we won't get the star ratings until 2027.

BREAKING: Michelin stars coming to Minneapolis and Milwaukee: news conference at 9am CT in Milwaukee - i teased this in my Friday substack. Meet Minneapolis is in Milwaukee for the news, typically tourism boards pay millions over 3 years for this. It’s a big deal for restaurants.

Fortunately, looks like the world isn’t going to end tonight. Unfortunately, I’m still almost certainly going to get stuck in traffic on 494 in a minute here, once the IKEA furniture is loaded up in the car.

Gotta run some errands, including a trip to the south metro, while the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to midnight. At least if it does, I'll be put out of the misery of probably being stuck in traffic on 494.

Went back through some photos I took a couple months ago while killing time before lunch with an old friend from out of town. This one won't be going in the project I'm currently working on (b&w landscapes for my living room), but worked really well in this more washed-out style.

This kind of apocalyptic threat from an erratic president should be treated as crisis news today. As in breaking into programming with updates, analysis of the potential war crimes, and serious consideration of the president’s fitness. This can’t be treated like mere rhetoric.

goddamn, most of the democrats in office are outflanked here too

Got to have a conversation with a younger person who was wondering why “Every 90’s anime and final fantasy was about the end of the world and super Christian coded?” And the strength of will it took to not scream “Who dropped the atom bomb?!” was extreme.

The average Republican voter was mad about a new normal where we took care of our neighbors by taking illness seriously and not casually throwing around slurs, and instead voted for a new normal where an obviously corrupt President goes on early morning rants threatening to end entire civilizations.

If you’re Christian, then He is risen. If you’re Jewish, he’s not divine *and* it’s Passover, so he’s unleavened and will remain flat.

Super Hot is the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years!

FOUND IT! It was actually in the first place I looked; I just didn’t look there hard enough the first time. 😅

Going to visit family in Boston soon-ish. Told family I think my Charlie Card is in my wallet (I’m in Boston enough to just leave it), but I wouldn’t know where to find my Go-To Card (haven’t needed one regularly since pre-COVID). Weirdly enough, Charlie Card’s missing but I found the Go-To Card.

My dad posted about an artist he "wasn't familiar with" but left him "impressed." Sorry, dad, but 70-year-old soul singers with no biography or discography, uncanny valley lighting, and guitarists in the background clearly not strumming the audio track you're hearing aren't real.

Thank you for your attention to this Mahler.

Followed by Beethoven’s Ninth, featuring the Minnesota Chorale and special guest Lady in the Back Row Who Just *Had* to Share Her Opinions *Right Now*.

Sitting in the donor intermission reception at Orchestra Hall, sipping on a San Pellegrino and reflecting on the performance we just heard of Beethoven’s “Ah, Perfido,” an aria for symphony, soprano, and the real deceiver: that one fucking guy who ignored reminder to silence your cell phone.

Rode my longboard for the first time in years. Just a few blocks to a local place to grab some breakfast. Turns out there are some muscles that I don’t have anymore and my feet *hurt*. Breakfast was tasty, though.

Would you look at that. Suddenly my summer calendar just freed up by about 162 days. Weird.

Anyway, everything on my side is as ready as it could plausibly have been with what I thought was 24 hours to spare. Somehow I'm not magically less stressed. Gonna spend a day on professional development (read: mostly lots of reading that I chose for myself) and hope that changes.

Been stressing about an important meeting tomorrow for six weeks. Realized it's not on my calendar. Asked the relevant manager. He was out sick yesterday but responded today that he didn't know where I got the date (a company-wide report on PowerBI) but it's not happening until at least next month.

I remember reading Little House on the Prairie and then taking a field trip to the local (moved from its original location) one-room school house. Also the Field Museum in Chicago not super long after Sue the T. Rex went on display.

In a complete reversal of the usual situation, the local road I live on is down to bare pavement but the county road that runs past my neighborhood is some really slippery snowpack.

House smells great. Three-meat sauce (Italian sausage, beef cubes, ground lamb) has been simmering for a few hours and pasta will be done in a couple minutes.

Sat at brunch this morning next to a guy expressing a level of commitment that I don't think I can ever have in my life: He was doing the Saturday crossword in ballpoint pen.

Wife and I (suburbanites) have been making a concerted effort to go into the city for dinners out lately. The number of places that have been "My folks would really love this food when they visit but really dislike eating it here" is real. Noise/music is the big one, but also overly dim lighting.

Stayed up late playing Resident Evil, then watching the F1 race, getting an 8.5 pound pork shoulder on the smoker in the wee hours, and then realizing “I should go to bed” when 1:59 became 3:00.

If you're ever feeling useless, just remember it could be worse: I just saw a spoiler on a 2003 Corolla.

What’s that? We’re entering another minimally justified war in the Middle East under a GOP president with no strong evidence for our casus belli and/or a casus belli that’s an obvious result of our recent foreign policy decisions? (And congress didn’t even approve it this time?)

Ironically, my wife and I have been talking about replacing our mattress for literal years and keep not pulling the trigger. Maybe we'll finally do that soon.

Coworker said he deliberately avoids being a coffee snob, and now I'm thinking about how "Don't skimp on a matress; you spend 1/3rd of your life in bed" mentality infiltrated other areas of life (coffee, keyboards, TV panels, etc.) as I've gotten older and my career (paychecks) have grown.

For reference, 2015 is also the year people got mad that Halo 5 had no split-screen/couch co-op, forcing online play if you wanted to play the campaign with a friend. Microsoft said the game couldn't hit their graphics target when rendering two players' POvs on one console.

Was going to play through Resident Evil Revelations 2 in co-op with a coworker. Started figuring out a day/time and then she discovered that the main campaign co-op mode is couch co-op only. No online main campaign co-op. In a game from 2015. In a game that is mechanically built around co-op play.

NGL, I live in the west burbs and this jacket goes hard enough that I just messaged my wife "Hey, can I have $150?"

Decided to take the afternoon off. Told my coworkers by dropping this in Teams.

Just finished Resident Evil: Revelations and fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that final boss fight. (In fact, really all of the boss fights. Combat's just a little clunky and those fights run a little long.)

Fuck around: taking up weightlifting again after 10 years and probably going too hard out of the gate. Find out: the orthopedic doc telling me this morning that my shoulder's (at least temporarily) fucked and I need minimum 6 weeks of PT before insurance will approve an MRI to figure out how fucked.

Reading some of my posts today and thinking "Wow, sometimes I write like an AI chatbot," but then I remembered that my technical writing career is older than modern consumer LLMs and it's more accurate to say that they write like me.

I usually invite people over for barbecue for my birthday, but maybe this year will be group taco crawl. Stuck between "find a walkable stretch with a lot of tacos" or "carpool (or rent a stretch limo?) between stops because I live in the suburbs and my favorites aren't next to each other."

For those playing at home, the MLBPA director is resigning after an investigation found an inappropriate relationship with another MLBPA hire: his own sister-in-law.

And with the general lack of spend, we can call this years squad “The Lefty Leftovers.”

On the one hand: USA SHORTY!!! On the other hand: ... did it have to come from the TERF?

Ah, yes, everyone's favorite Latin phrase: "Nullus panis. Solum circenses." Er... wait... how does it go again?

I don't know, I think both of these can be true at once: 1. Trump is an awful president and clearly growing more mentally unfit by the day. 2. The transcription/captioning here doesn't reflect what I heard, and I can make perfect sense of what he's trying to describe from the audio.

US government showing us the ONLY way they know how to solve problems is go in, smash things and ruin people's lives, and leave a huge mess. Minnesota, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam...