Brian King

I put away my Playdate console for like… five years. I'm just looking at the ecosystem for the first time since and can't goddamn believe how good developers have gotten at it.

People in the Nazi bar fading out of existence like the photo from Back to the Future.

Jenna left her bag in a restaurant. I barged back into the place and said "we left a brown purse in here". In hindsight, I should have worded that more carefully.

I was telling somebody about being horrible with faces, and then continued the conversation with a similar looking man in a similar shirt who had just gotten a haircut. He was super confused while also immediately understanding. I've worked with both of these guys for two years.

I really don't want to bail on the firstname.lastname google account I've had for 22 years, but I'm now getting dozens of spam "you left something in your cart" messages daily. Might have to burn it all down.

I finally sat in a Rivian R2 and put a $100 reservation fee down for one. They can't even give me a timeline, so the shame of my current car will live on until 2030-ish?

It's a shame to see a product, know exactly what it was supposed to be named, and then imagine the horrible corporate meeting that stifled the joy.

A polished and produced radio ad with a radio VO person could say "Brian King, we have found a cure for your rare and annoying food allergy" and my brain would still completely tune it out because goddamn that format of advertising is so dead. @theverge.com I'm talking about your ad breaks.

Today on campus, the Zelda 40 nerds had a turf war with the Star Trek 60 nerds. Meanwhile, nobody gave a shit about the Internet turning 50.

Four-year-old nephew is Paw Patrol-pilled. Everything is a gun, every pretend character is a cop. I've been telling him that guns are illegal in California, and that his toy chicken is actually an Ophthalmologist. Uncle is radicalizing his ass.

Father-in-law is visiting and just requested an A.I. Pastor Taco from our local taco truck.

Trying to put my finger on why podcasts back in like 2006-2010 felt so much better and more relatable than they do now. At least partially: It was just a thing people did for fun and not a scheme to amass followers or sell shitty DAI ads for pet insurance.

I'm thankful that among the untold daily horrors, the internet can still deliver small wonders.

Prediction: People start to see more/better attention for vibecoded apps with fully custom, "aesthetic", and weird UIs. These do numbers for a while, then fall off a cliff when people realize that maintaining a custom UI is super complex. All the while, accessibility features are fully ignored.

Consuming any media without hearing about 9/11. Challenge level: impossible.

Trying to figure out what caused me more body dysmorphia: actors in superhero movies, or the girl I liked in 7th grade saying I had smaller muscles than her cat. Anyway, this morning was a 2K row at 2:00 per 500, KB swings, Turkish getups, strict bb presses, squats, and toes-to-bar until I dropped

Love to see one of the biggest paid podcasts in the world using stingers that shipped with GarageBand in 2006. Damn, guys, do better.

Notable mistake I made today: pounding a 12oz bottle of pure, cold-pressed pineapple juice immediately after a 20mi bike ride. Don't do that.

The current YouTube search result for "GitHub for designers" is a terrible, terrible place.

Also at opensauce: somebody in a fursuit handed me a playable 3D-printed violin. It was a perfect encapsulation of the event.

The symbology of skeletons and bones will always be cool, right? Doubling down: dicks and farts will always be comical. Bones will always be cool. It's just a constant of being human.

My one thousand day Duolingo streak just failed me in calling a Mexican restaurant to ask if their carne asada meat had citrus in it. I could have spent those hours watching plumbing videos on tik tok.

Kind of sad to see the internet be this unkind to the memory of Lindsey Graham, when he deserves so much worse.

Watched a US border patrol dog bust a guy with a loaf of bread from Amsterdam. I know ACAB, but he was so cute and excited to sniff the dude's backpack.

Hei, Norway.

Wearing a band's merch to a band's show is 1000% a celebrated thing here.

Going to a photography exhibit is like going to a photographer's concert. Seeing those perfect, lit, carefully arranged prints is so much better than swiping jay-pegs.

Flew to Sweden just to experience twenty hours of daylight.

Inside, I shit you not: a child wearing an Oculus headset in an otherwise empty room.

Flew to Sweden just to experience a Third Space.

People with hair: you have no idea how many spider webs you're walking through.

Even a few years in, the transition from having the most online job (self-employed creative guy) to an actively anti-online career still feels weird. What do you mean, my portfolio and reel need to stay frozen in 2021? That hurts my soul a little bit.

For international trans day of visibility, I did my best to get some pink, white & blue on TV for the NASDAQ opening bell ceremony.

For my birthday, my wife got us tickets to see System of a Down in Stockholm and also stepped foot into a Hot Topic. A++.

Every five years or so, I get excited about another film-emulating camera app.

Did not successfully keep my cool for this year’s Christmas dinner table argument with That One Aunt. I can blame sobriety for that, right?

I’ve been making an effort to not touch my phone while walking. The feedback loop of being more observant and watching people swerve around while scrolling has reinforced how messed up of a habit it is.

Billionaire founders who mismanage their startups into the ground shouldn’t be able to walk away unscathed as billionaires. Especially if employee comp packages were heavily RSU-based. This post has nothing to do with my previous job.