Ian Bogost

Today is publication day for The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. Find USA, Canada, and UK ordering links here: smallstuffbook.com The book is about how you got disconnected from the physical world, why it's not your fault, and how to reclaim gratification in everyday life.

Computer-science enrollments have been growing consistently for 25 years, since the post-dotcom downturn ended. We have several generations of CS faculty who have, essentially, no experience with falling out of favor.

To set out a bowl of candy corn invites eating less than it marks a moment on the endless calendar that hurtles you ever closer to death.

This Diplomat TV show is entirely about deeply irritating couples bickering.

I wrote about flying cars.

Nobody who bought what is pretty obviously a deeply messed up Chris McCandless (off-brand) Lego set seems to realize that’s what they bought: amzn.to/4jKhFvl

A rancher of the future

I don't need a touchscreen Mac laptop—but I'd really like a Mac laptop with a USB port on both sides.

When I was a kid, my parents generally didn’t let me get fast food. McDonald’s in particular was held in strong contempt. But Burger King was endorsed, if only on occasion. It was considered righteous by comparison. But…why? The ”flame broiled” thing? Because a Whopper Jr. had lettuce and tomato?

Around the same time Apple announced a set of (confusing!) home devices, it also broke certain types of home-automation actions in Apple Home. To people who are deep into smart-home stuff, this feels like attaching a shiny, new toilet to an old, decaying sewer pipe.

I wrote about the internet-of-things AI-malware risk. This type of exposure is far more likely to be a problem than ~extinction~, but it is also more likely to produce an extremely dumb, broken-computer-world instead of cinematic calamity. A rule: The dumbest future is probably the most likely.

Kind of amazing how "Just put 'wagyu' on it to make it seem good" has become so common.

What a nightmare. Impossible to find anything worth watching on your 5, $15/mo streaming services, but now you can talk to it instead of joysticking around before settling on some godforsaken Lost-alike to lull you into a stupor sufficient to prequel sleep.

I had to dig fairly deep to discover that Apple wants another $130 to mount this silly home hub on a wall with PoE, and you can’t even get it besides.

Very good.

I hope you’ll read my story about AI programming in the context of amateur, personal computing (and to that end, here’s a gift link: tinyurl.com/2hf9hv4v). But this paragraph is the one I’d pull out if I had to choose one.

I wrote an elegy to the Boeing 747, the first jumbo jet, the Queen of the Skies, and the American idea it symbolized.

The perfect meal is Two Burgers. Most people will make one burger then supplement it with sides - big mistake! It's better to make a second burger, that way when you finish your first burger, you've got another burger right there

[Žižek voice] And what is it the hippos were hungry for? The empty, white sphere of fantasy, onto which they—and the children who controlled them—could project their desire. Once captured, each hippo releases this desire, unconsumed, into a pen to contain it, before beginning the search for more.

Rigatoni reminds me of capybara.