I was out for a run not far from the house when I fell. I turned the corner past an intersection and saw a slow pedestrian not far ahead. Rather than slow down, I tried to pass around a traffic light control box. Just as I did, I lost my footing and slapped down onto the concrete. I wasn’t badly hurt—just scrapes on my hands and an inexplicable shoulder bruise—but I was stunned. For just a moment, I stayed down, felt my body’s weight on the dirty sidewalk, leg hanging over the blacktop, head resting on concrete. Then I picked myself up, literally dusted myself off, and went on with my run.
Everyone falls, has fallen, will fall again.
Little kids—especially the really little ones—fall down all the time. Most of the time, they are fine. It can be hard to tell which falls they’ll happily toddle away from and which ones will require comforting and bandaids, and even those are usually unworrying in the end. When they have love and support, kids are resilient, mentally and physically. When I learned to ski in my 30s, I envied the little kids I shared the bunny hill with for their ability to fall hard and pop right back up unfazed. Learning to ski is a good way to reacquaint yourself with falling if you’re out of practice as a grownup.
Young children can achieve a kind of falling-drunk ecstatic state. I’ve seen it. Sometimes, when they’re playing at something that causes them to fall a lot, they’ll abandon the game and just start falling down for the sheer joy of it, spreading like contagion. Hurling themselves on the ground again and again, laughing uncontrollably, they fall every way they can imagine: tumbling headfirst, flopping like a ragdoll, sliding longways, jumping for hangtime, clutching each other to land in a pile.
Some unlucky kids get hurt in a fall, but I estimate that most don’t come to understand the potential for injury until they’re much older, maybe teens. By then, the simple geometry of bigger bodies makes falling a riskier proposition. I remember taking a couple of painful bumps at that age, but looking back now, it’s almost comical how quickly my body recovered from those injuries. They were painful enough to remember, but largely not serious enough to scar.
Most teenagers have gotten pretty good at the mechanical aspects of staying upright, which greatly mitigates one of the major reasons people fall. Falling at that age is usually the result of mental error. Kids largely figure out their bodies relatively early, dealing with the rest is the work of a lifetime.
A fortunate thing about middle age is that falling hasn’t yet taken on the grim implications it has for the elderly. Still, I’m somewhere on that road. Unless something else takes me out before I get there, it’s the destination I’ll eventually reach, where the prospect of a fall is persistent and life-threatening.
For now, at least, I’m fortunate enough to be able to get back up after a brief rest on the pavement. I’m still green enough to take bumps and learn from them, and in so doing avoid more dire falls later on. Scrapes and bruises (even inexplicable ones) don’t heal as fast as they used to. The little aches seem to last longer, too. But I’m on my feet, one after the other, picking up speed down the sidewalk. I’ll slow down before I go around the next signal box, and I’ll feel my feet steady-sure to the ground.
Paged Out! is, in its own words, an experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks), hacking, security hacking, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics. I just got turned on to this, but I am really loving the most recent issue, Issue 7, which came out last month.
The Boston Public Library has posted digital copies of its M. C. Escher prints, and they are really something to behold. I remember a high school art project where my teacher, Mrs. Allard, asked the class to create something inspired by Escher. I did a transitional pen-and-ink pattern-filling based on Day and Night, and I’ve had a soft spot for his work ever since.
I have been thinking about game design a lot lately, so Raph Koster’s latest post, titled “Game design is simple, actually,” is very timely for me. Despite its trollish title, it covers a lot of ground laying out the complexities of game design, but in a very well structured way—better structured, in fact, than I think I’ve ever seen applied. There’s a ton of depth here; he’s not kidding when he says each of the 12 items could be (indeed, is) a whole shelf of books. I expect I’ll be returning to this for quite some time.
Imagery
Context-Free Patent Art: Probably more accurately “Patent Art Taken out of Context,” but close enough.
Is it me or do the issues from this complete collection of Swedish IKEA catalogs look way more interesting than the American versions of the same? At least the ones from the late 90s and early 2000s, which is when I would have seen them.
Adam Aleksic wrote recently on the similarities between the harms we popularly attribute to social media and those attributed to television. I grew up squarely in the midst of the moral panic that Baby Boomer parents felt over the malign influence of television on their children. No doubt influenced by their own tender years spent in front of the “boob tube,” there seemed to be endless hand wringing over not whether but how much TV would damage kids’ brains. I see the parallels between that shared freakout and today’s panic over the impact of social media, even as I harbor plenty of concern myself.
The first and most obvious parallel to me is that so much of the anxiety seems to be displaced from parents to children. That is, the young parents of the 70s and 80s represented the first generation of children who grew up with TV in the house expressing worry about its influence on their own children. It’s not hard to see how much of that concern seems motivated by fear of the damage their own exposure to television may have caused. Likewise, today’s young parents come from the first generation of social media users, and one way they are grappling with the harms they experienced is to express worry for their children. Like many parents, I’m not only trying to minimize my daughter’s exposure to social media, I’m also minimizing my own.
I think Aleksic’s notes on the similarities between TV and social media should prompt those of us who see the harms as distinct to be more clear about what those differences are. Two immediately come to mind for me:
The first is accessibility and ubiquity, as noted in his piece. The availability of social media on personal, portable, handheld devices greatly increases its reach, and its ability to send urgent-seeming notifications and alerts allows it to interrupt non-social media activities and colonize more of our time and attention. Television, much as its critics may have complained about its supposed inescapability, could never have such direct, immediate, and intrusive access to its viewers.
The other is the very tight feedback loop of individualized, algorithmic adjustments these apps use. Any individual TV channel was (and is) the same for all viewers. But modern social media apps learn from their users, reading both overt and subtle, implicit behavioral cues to shape their behavior. It’s critical to remember that social media apps are designed with a goal in mind—almost always to encourage more and more time and “engagement” in app—and are designed to achieve those goals by constantly tweaking the way they work. These adjustments can be so effective because they are based on a direct stream of individualized behavioral data (each user’s activity within the app), and they do not need to compromise their effectiveness by targeting more than one individual at a time. In other words, it poses no problem if the thing that would make your social media feed maximally engaging to you would be extremely distasteful to me, because I’ll never see your feed.
The propagandists of the mass media era had to develop grand theories of messaging and communication to underlie their efforts to manipulate public sentiment, because they could only address their messages to the collective public. (e.g., Propaganda by Edward Bernays) Modifying behavior through social media requires no larger framework to inform what works and what doesn’t. Its infinitely granular addressability and adaptability simply requires the diligence to conceive of and execute as many experiments as necessary to achieve the desired result, because the effectiveness of each can be easily and directly measured.
This effect is magnified by how much tighter the experimental iteration cycle is in the social media world than it is in television. In just a few seconds of scrolling through a feed, a social media app may run dozens of experiments to gauge a user’s engagement and adjust its behavior in real time. The amount of time it takes to produce a piece of television media, broadcast it, gather audience feedback, and incorporate changes into more content is better measured with a calendar than a stopwatch. And this means that even if each refinement has only a tiny effect, the overall impact is much greater because refinements can be made in much greater volume.
It is certainly instructive to consider modern attitudes toward technologies like social media in the context of earlier generations’ reactions to media innovation. It’s important to remember that, in their day, the invention of the novel and the spread of mass market paperback publication were both considered socially harmful by at least some concerned authorities. But it’s also important to identify what’s distinctive about new media technology and consumption, and to be able to articulate how those distinctions might represent new risks. It’s far harder to mitigate or manage unidentified risks than those we assume intentionally with good information.
With the state of American news media today being a very live concern, I was reminded of two films I saw a few years ago describing the production of news in another era. The two films were both produced by the Encyclopedia Britannica, whose film output was previously unknown to me, and both are named “Newspaper Story.” The first is from 1950 and describes a seemingly fictional local newspaper in a midwestern town. The second, from 1973, documents the production process of the Los Angeles Times.
I find both of these films fascinating. One reason is the approach to gathering and reporting on news described in these pieces, which strikes me as speaking for an optimistic American post-war media consensus, idealized and imperfect as it is. The other is the amount of effort that went into the physical production of the papers themselves. The advent of near-instantaneous digital communication completely restructured these enterprises and shifted media companies’ primary efforts away from what was previously the thrust of their work: producing some physical product, whether bundles of printed pages or towers that beam radio signals to receivers.
Both of these are great watches, but if you’re only going to watch one, I recommend the LA Times film from the 70s.
I already link to Bracket City, a daily word puzzle, from my links page. But I haven’t yet linked to the Bracket City Dispatch, the newsletter that for some reason hasn’t moved over to The Atlantic with its namesake game. It’s an interesting word-of-the-day newsletter. I’d really love to find something to replace the Paul McFedries’ old Word Spy newsletter, which focused on neologisms, but for now, this will do.
Speaking of daily puzzles, I recently discovered Doople, in which players find pairs of words that link together to build a chain. It’s a lot like Puzzmo’s Circuits, which came out just a month or two ago and uses the same core puzzle concept with a more variable structure.
They don’t make it (software) like they used to
I have seen a bunch of good essays and blog posts from technologists trying to grapple with the weaknesses of LLMs without sliding into facile dismissal or doomerism. One that really helped me with my own thinking on the matter is Why your boss isn’t worried about AI by Boyd Kane, which does a good job breaking down key ways LLMs don’t work the way software typically does. It’s hard to emphasize enough how important determinism is for programming, and the way LLMs rip away that assumption (possibly irrevocably so) is extraordinarily disorienting. But, as this piece lays out, that’s not the only assumption being broken.
The Great Software Quality Collapse: I look at this as a kind of companion piece to Boyd Kane’s essay. Even traditional, non-LLM software is going through a crisis of quality. It would be very difficult to argue that commercial software hasn’t become a profligate resource waster. The headline example in this essay, the MacOS calculator app leaking 32GB of memory, is a grievous example that should be a wake-up call for the industry. Not because of its cost—for better or worse, memory is cheap these days—but because of what it says about how the industry is failing to do quality work. Wasting 32GB of memory, especially for an app as simple as a desktop calculator, is hard, and actually shipping such an enormous flaw should make everyone think twice about how risky software is.
No seriously, they don’t make it like they used to
This charming little training film illustrates the way people thought about bringing computer technology into the enterprise almost 50 years ago. One of the bitterest ironies in the state of computing today is that there are still plenty of corners of the business world that could still benefit from adopting very basic information technology, but that’s not where the money is right now.
Generally speaking, these collections of links point to things out on the broader Web, but I reserve the right on occasion to highlight my own stuff. Earlier this week, in a fit of early-aughts nostalgia, I recreated a web toy that had been a very popular feature of my ancient, defunct blog: The Potty Humor Name Generator. Rebuilt from scratch as a client-side single page app, this little amusement will help you, too, relive the joy of pointless Web tools featuring the comedic stylings of the Captain Underpants series of kids’ books.
After you’ve wrung all the enjoyment out of my own humble contribution to making the Web fun again, which shouldn’t take long, some more worthwhile ways to use your time could include the new (launched today!) daily game Tiled Words, an interesting cross between a crossword and a tile-laying puzzle.
There is also the 10,000 Drum Machines project, whose name describes its goal better than its current state. Still, 55 Web-based interactive drum machines (as of today) is a pretty impressive collection. I love these kinds of creative tools and really want to see more of them.
Things To Think About
I was recently thinking about contronyms, which are words that can be their own opposites. One classic example of this is the word “dust,” which can refer both to removing dust (e.g., “he dusted the bookshelves”) and adding dust or powder (e.g., “he dusted the counter with flour”). In my case, I was thinking about the word “deliver,” which means both providing something (“deliver the package”) and taking something away (“deliver me from evil”). In the course of my wonderings, I happened upon the phase “skunked term”, which to me captures not only the specific linguistic experience of a term’s usefulness diminishing because of changes in its usage but also something larger about the experience of trying to communicate more generally as semantic drift seems to accelerate in these first few decades of the millennium.
Things To Watch
You think you know about bowling, but do you know about duckpin bowling? What if I told you there are a whole bunch of YouTube vidoes containing full telecasts of duckpin bowling matches just waiting for you to watch? When I was a kid, it felt like this stuff was on local TV all the time, and honestly, we’re worse off without them.
And as a bonus this week, a modern classic of the YouTube Poop genre, especially for Columbo superfans such as myself:
The years when my musical taste really formed were somewhat later than Gang of Four’s prime creative period in the late 70s and early 80s, but their influence was clearly legible in many of my favorite bands. This live TV performance of “He’d Send in the Army” is such a perfect rendering of Andy Gill’s unique approach to the guitar within the driving groove and urgency of the subject matter (sadly still all too relevant over 40 years later).
It happens so rarely that a recommendation algorithm brings me good new music that I take note when it happens. Most recently, The Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio happened across my feed, and I have been hooked. They play a kind of small-combo funk that really lands for me, and while their studio recordings are great, you can also find some excellent videos of their live sets, one of which I’ve included below.
(Non-Musical) Notes
Ian Leslie’s notes on growing older: For something that happens constantly to every living thing, it’s strange how little we talk or write about aging. If the theory here is that we’re all in a state of collective denial, that can’t be contributing to a healthy society.
Adam Aleksic’s notes on slop: I’m still chewing on this list, but one major takeaway for me has been to remember that we had slop before we had AI to create it for us. I think the impact of algorithmic feeds and automated content generation are only beginning to be felt, much less reckoned with.
Podcast
I’ve already written two posts inspired by episodes of PJ Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni’s Search Engine podcast, but this recent episode with Ryan Broderick discussing the “Dubai Chocolate theory of the internet” is I think a very illuminating look at the path an idea takes through social media to ubiquity. The number of highly specialized influencers (e.g., hot women eating food on camera) and their reach, combined with the incentives at play (e.g., people can’t taste food through social media, so it has to be visually striking—not necessarily in a good way—to become popular) are elements that drive culture, even for people who don’t participate in them directly.
This is a site and a YouTube channel I happened across that catalog all kinds of games invented for physical education classes in schools. I have fond memories of playing floor hockey and matball, especially when it was too rainy to use the fields, and I found myself unexpectedly tickled to see such a collection of games invented by gym teachers for their students. Some of these games look pretty good!
A few months ago, I laid out a plan for slowing down posting on this blog for the summer. That break has gone largely as I expected it would, giving me the chance to focus on a couple of other projects. Throughout September, when I had originally planned to get back to regular updates here, I was instead preoccupied with getting one of those projects over the finish line. Though I didn’t quite manage to complete it—and I’ll write more about it here when I do—I am close enough at this point that I’m ready to get back into more regular Stray Thought updates.
Here’s the Posting Plan
I intend to write here on a regular schedule for the rest of 2025. About every other week, I plan to post a piece along the same lines as the other bits and pieces on the site.
I’m also going to start a new series of posts. Each week, I plan to post a collection of links to things I find interesting. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I don’t want algorithmic social media feeds to drive everyone’s experience of the Web, I should try to provide an alternative, even if only in some small way.
So, over the course of the week I’ll keep track of worthwhile articles, videos, podcasts, interactive tools, and whatever else I happen to come across, and then drop a little bundle of goodies on the site. Human-curated online content for human consumption, just like an old-fashioned weblog. I haven’t decided on the best day to post those, so I may play around a bit at first, but I’ll get the first one up this coming weekend.
Topics to Look Forward To
A few topics I kicked off 2025 with will likely be making repeat appearances sometime around the New Year. I plan to do the Advent of Code again this year, and while I don’t think I’ll post through that event, I will gather my thoughts into a wrap-up post afterward. I’ll also be posting a 2025 ludography reviewing my board gaming activity.
That’s in addition to some reflections I hope to share about the side projects I’ve been working on over the summer. Right now I’m too engaged in the “doing” to be doing much “reflecting,” but I’m fairly certain that there will be something worthwhile to write when the time comes.
Thanks
Thanks for sticking with me as the site grows through these seasons of activity. I’m feeling recharged after the break, and it’s so fulfilling to share my renewed creative energy with you.
It can be hard to perceive the subtle and gradual ways I change over time. Rationally, I know it’s happening, but until something specific tells me otherwise, I tend to think that whatever is true about me today was true about me in the past and vice versa. Evidence of these long, slow changes can be hard to come by. There are obvious things, of course: I have no shortage of pictures that prove I don’t look like I did when I was younger. But it’s not every day that I’m confronted with a way my moral intuitions have shifted.
It came up unexpectedly, as moments of self-realization often seem to. My daughter and I were watching an episode of Mythbusters. If you’re unfamiliar with the series, it aired on Discovery from 2003-2018, and its original idea was for a crew of special effects experts to film experiments confirming or disproving urban legends and other popular folklore. Early on in the show’s run, it expanded its focus to include movie scenes, internet rumors, news stories, and more.
The specific episode we watched was “Paper Crossbow” from 2006. At this point in the show’s run, most episodes have a two-story structure. The original hosts, Adam and Jamie, test one myth while the “build team” works on another, with the edit cutting back and forth between the two. In this episode, the hosts tested whether they could build a lethal crossbow from newspaper while the build team experimented with household uses for vodka.
As a side note, we watched this episode as a family not long after we ourselves used some cheap vodka to get the smoky smell out of some clothes and camping equipment that had been too close to a fire burning uncured firewood, so we already knew firsthand the result of one of the myths tested in that episode.
It was a different vodka myth that caught my attention, and it wasn’t the result of the test but the experimental setup that was striking. The build team tested whether vodka would act as an insecticide if sprayed on bees. They got bees from a beekeeper, divided them into two ventilated acrylic boxes, and sprayed the contents of one box with water and the other with vodka to see which would kill more bees. Now, with a little bit of thought, it’s clear that even if no bees were killed by the vodka or water (and, in fact, only two of the bees in the water box died during the experiment), all of the bees were going to die. Honeybees depend on their hives to survive; removed from the hive, they die.
Don't worry, they're only sleeping... for now
I have no doubt that when I originally watched this episode, I had no problem with it. But now, it strikes me as needlessly cruel to treat bees this way. Insofar as this change is part of a larger shift in my moral intuitions around the treatment of animals, it’s not a very large shift. I still eat meat, though perhaps less than I did 20 years ago, and I am not shy about killing bugs in my living space. But I can say with some confidence that if I had been part of the Mythbusters build team in 2006, I would have seen nothing wrong with the experiment, while I would object to running it in 2025.
It’s possible that some of this shift has to do with the bees themselves. Not long after the episode originally aired, I, like many other Americans, started to learn about colony collapse disorder and the ecological and agricultural importance of honeybees more generally. Being aware of those issues certainly makes me wonder what the beekeeper who provided the bees was thinking, but I don’t think it explains how my reaction changed. After all, I’m experiencing an intuitive response to the experiment on moral terms, not a calculated analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of killing important and valuable animals for a science education show.
Seriously, what were you thinking?
Instead, I think this is just an example of an imperceptibly gradual change at the heart of the way I see and judge the world. I hope it’s for the better: I would like to think that I grow more attuned to suffering and more willing to speak and act against it as I get older. Or, maybe the duty of care I feel for the world applies to a larger set of things than it did before. I don’t know for sure, but I can say that I’m clearly not the same as I was when I watched this show back in 2006. And that’s a bit of valuable self-understanding.
I encourage you, too, to consider how your moral orientation has changed over time, and how it hasn’t. Just as you might look at your picture in an old yearbook, consider how the passage of time has deflected your moral compass. Don’t just think about when you have been most comfortable—it’s almost a cliche that the worst people lose the least sleep over their behavior. Try to find these points of difference and explore them. Because the deeper truth about the way time changes us is that it reveals we are never finished products. There is always more change to come.
