I could sub this in with countless moments from Andor or Mandalorian or the action scenes from Acolyte, but gotta give Skeleton Crew some love too! This one got a belly laugh out of me despite seeing it coming. The Kathleen Kennedy era made me into a Star Wars fan.

I loved @alexandermfreed.bsky.social’s latest Star Wars novel (“The Mask of Fear”) and it’s really stuck with me, so I just had to write about it. TLDR: if you liked Andor, you’ll definitely like this book! It’s more of *that* kind of Star Wars. polhem.us/posts/book-r...

There you go. A real plan for those who want someone to #DoSomething

WHO GIVES A DAMN? It’s a public service, right there in the name. It exists as a public good for all the people in this country. It’s not supposed to turn a profit, you dolts. Go audit the Pentagon and see what kind of return on investment we’re getting there.

Know a young progressive candidate running for state or local office in 2026? @runforsomething.net is accepting endorsement applications. The full process & criteria is online here. Share this far & wide! runforsomething.net/run/candidat...

I’ve been sitting on the sketch for this for four years but I FINALLY turned it into a painting last night! #art #pokemon

Saw an interesting piece of advice recently: ask the AI search engines for an answer in a field in which you are very knowledgeable. The results will make it clear just how much they get wrong, and how brazen they are about it. Now, apply that to every subject in which you are NOT an expert.

Open call to sign, and link to donate. Please spread the word.

He’s so good at this.

Just finished reading Timothy Zahn's novel "Thrawn". My first Star Wars book ever, and I really enjoyed it! Felt like a nice companion to some of the better Star Wars shows of late, particularly Andor (with lots of thematic parallels) and Ahsoka (given the title character is actually in that one).

Imagine DOGE opens your mail and finds your household electric bill. To eliminate this cost, they burn your house down without warning. Then they total up the bills that, as a homeless person, you will never again pay. On its website, DOGE boasts about the money it has saved you.

18F did things like making online government forms (like filing your taxes or submitting VA claims) easier to fill out, create text message notification systems for govt agencies, and streamlining internal data sharing. They were literally making govt more efficient & user-friendly. This sucks.

Your regular reminder that the more often you own your mistakes, the easier it gets. It is like any muscle-- work it more and it gets stronger. All people mess up, and sometimes we do so publicly. It's not the end of the world to acknowledge that we missed the mark; it's how we clean up.

If you see this, post a Spider-Man.

In my latest blog post, I unpack the Jewish value at the heart of Spider-Man and what it can teach us about activism and justice in the present moment: “Whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world.”

"I called it ethnic cleansing. But when I saw the images of starving babies in Gaza I had to upgrade my language." By Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Joe Sacco www.theguardian.com/world/pictur...

TRUMP AND MUSK TO AMERICA: DROP DEAD.

33% of registered voters in the country voted for this clown. The rest of us need to do something. It's all hands on deck.

🚀 Want to try building on AT Protocol but not sure where to start? I've got you covered with this lil' @glitch.com app. ✅ Log in using OAuth ✅ Read & write data using official API client ✅ Custom lexicons Check out the source code, play around with the live demo, or remix it to make it your own! 🙂

No one voted for Elon Musk. An unelected billionaire is trying to raid the Treasury Department and take money from the American people. This is a constitutional crisis and we choose to fight. We’re taking action to stop the Trump-Musk power grab this week. Join us: www.mobilize.us/indivisible/...

Just posted a new article to my blog, basically gushing over Bluesky's AT Protocol as an antidote to the social media walled gardens we've all been stuck in for the past decade-plus and how exciting the project is as both a software engineer and a proponent of the open web.

Spider-Man is really important to me. For all intents and purposes, Spider-Man is my religion. I am super non-religious--really more anti-religious. But in discussion with people who like religion, all the things they say they got from it that were good things? I got those things from Spider-Man.

"if you could have dinner with any scientist, alive or dead, which one would it be?" "Schrödinger"

I won’t spoil the guest appearance but if you’ve listened to basically any comedy podcast in the past decade you will HEAR his lines out loud in your head.

A heads up that some states & cities with 2025 local elections - especially those who vote in the spring - have filing deadlines as soon as THIS MONTH. It’s not too late to get started - @runforsomething.bsky.social will help. runforwhat.net

Realising more and more that my role as a principal engineer is to set a vibe Architecture? Vibe Tech direction? Vibe How I respond to incidents? Vibe Attitude in meetings, especially when the whole team is there? The most direct form of vibe setting one can do

Doesn’t become president *again*. It pains me to make that distinction but I can’t stress enough that we know exactly how this plays out when decent folks remain complacent. He told us who he was the first time around and far too many people simply refused to believe it, willfully or otherwise.

Sometimes Spider-Man comics make you cry. I wrote about how a speech from Aunt May helped me process the grief from losing my Mom: polhem.us/posts/grievi...

Make a band milder: They Could Be Above Average In Height (alternatively: Probably Windmills But Who Knows)

Wrote a little thing about the push and pull of ambitious software engineering teams vs. their inevitably mounting technical debt (and what to do about it!) polhem.us/posts/managi...

I’m giving blogging a try, my first post is a tutorial on how I built my new site as a headless WordPress thing (because I’m still better at coding than I am at writing): polhem.us/posts/buildi...

Just saw a dolphin

What’s the cool thing to do when you’re freshly unemployed these days? Is it still all about redoing your portfolio site in a bespoke and over-engineered manner, or should I be filming “day in the life of a former startup schmuck” content for TikTok or building a half-baked LLM UI for the App Store?