Updates from Michael Camilleri : Weeknotes

Weeknotes #351

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 23:30:00 +0900

I finally submitted my visa extension application and was a bit miffed to discover that apparently my ‘application to make an application’ (as I derisively called it last week) finished processing on Wednesday 29 September. I hadn’t realised because I’d been expecting an e-mail saying that this occurred. Would I have been able to submit my application before the fees went up otherwise? I don’t know. It’s frustrating to think that I may well have. Hopefully the processing itself doesn’t take too long. I keep reminding myself that if we were in Australia this would take (much) longer and cost (even) more.
John came down with something during the week and was running a slight fever by Tuesday afternoon. The fever was gone by Wednesday morning but we kept him home just to be safe. He’s had a persistent sniffle but otherwise doesn’t seem too ill. Rowan has similar nasal congestion and, by Friday, Eri and I had come down with, too. The symptoms for Eri and me seem worse than for the boys and so far Emma hasn’t come down with anything. Is this a mild strain of the flu? Eri had heard it had already started to go around so perhaps that’s what it is.
I kept working on Wattle. Is this a waste of time? Probably. A more productive person would stop at where it is now and move on but I can’t help myself, I suppose. I don’t like putting things down while they’re still half-done and Wattle feels half-done, at least in terms of its documentation. So this week I spent time working on that documentation and one of the things I find is that when I write documentation about a software system, it often causes me to see flaws in the design. Perhaps flaws is overstating it. It’s more that I see incompleteness.
Does everyone remember the time before Gmail was broadly available? In order to register an account, you needed to have an invitation from someone who had one. Despite studying computer science in the early 2000s, I didn’t land an invite until it became open to everyone and by that time addresses like michael.camilleri@gmail.com or m.camilleri@gmail.com were long gone. And so I resisted using my Gmail account for Google services (e.g. YouTube) preferring instead to use the inqk.net account I could use through Google Apps For Your Domain (later G Suite, later Google Workspace). That worked well up to the point where Google essentially made that a paid service, at which point I jumped ship and started using an ordinary, Gmail account.
All of which is a painfully long way of explaining that there’re years of video essays that I watched in the mid- to late-2010s that YouTube doesn’t know I’ve seen. And it’s for this reason that this week I found myself watching 8-year-old Lessons from the Screenplay videos. I think the one I enjoyed the most was his analysis of how Jurassic Park used its characters to explore its themes.
Last week I linked to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ and Brandon reached out to mention the similarities he hears between the Grace album and Coldplay’s Parachutes. I can’t say it jumps out as clearly to me but in listening to the album I was reminded again how much I love this era of Coldplay. I linked to ‘Spies’ a long time ago and it’s still my favourite track but ‘Trouble’ is a very close second (Apple Music).

Weeknotes #350

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:00:00 +0900

I had been hoping to submit an application to renew my residency visa before 1 October when new fees that substantially increase the price for applications come into effect. Alas, as you might expect, everyone else also had this hope and I was unsuccessful.
- Specifically, what happened was that I had planned to use the Immigration Services Agency’s website to lodge my application from the comfort of my very own home (I have not forgotten what happened last time). I had been organised enough to visit my nearby government office and get the documents I’d needed. On Monday, I opened up the Immigration Services Agency website and joined the Queue. (The agency had been organised enough to put in place CloudFlare’s waiting room system to ensure that everyone wasn’t simply hammering ‘refresh’ as hard as they could.)
- That took seven hours but I got through and was all ready to make my application. Unfortunately, I had not been organised enough to check whether I was going to need anything else. It turned out that before you can make an application through the website, you have to make an application to make an application through the website. I did that but, as of Friday 2 October, I still haven’t had that application be processed. I’m going to wait a day or two of next week to see if they get it done but if they haven’t, it looks like I will have to make the trek down to Shinagawa again.
Obviously I should have made my website use application earlier. One of the reasons I had not done so was that I’ve been busy continuing work on my fork of Janet. I think that’s sufficiently completed for me to give more details!
- Wattle is a Lisp-like programming language that reimplements Janet (the language I’ve used for most of my programming projects over this decade) in Zig (the systems programming language I’m most excited about) with the syntax of Clojure (my favourite programming language syntax). It’s the language that I have been meaning to make for about six years. I don’t know if it will ever be used by anyone other than me but I am expecting I’ll likely use it for any command-line tools I want to make in the future.
- Because Wattle’s runtime works very similarly to Janet’s, it’s been relatively straightforward to port two of my projects (Blueshift and Predoc) over to it. The most attractive aspect of the language to me is that Wattle lets me write in a Lisp-like language and then generate self-contained executables that can be cross-compiled for different architectures. No longer do I need to worry about having the right version of Ruby installed on both my development machine and my production server. Instead, I can have a single file that I compile on my Arm-based Mac, send over to my Intel-based server and just run. Indeed, that’s what I’ve been doing with Blueshift since Friday. It’s fantastic.
If I’m being honest, the vast majority of Dan Barracuda’s 18-minute breakdown of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ went over my head. But Barracuda is so excited, and so talented, that I think if you like the original, you’ll enjoy the video.
Conveniently, I have not linked to Buckley’s song (Apple Music). How does this keep happening? I really thought I must have linked to something from Buckley by now but no. I apologise for the error.

Weeknotes #349

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:18:00 +0900

It was Silver Week (Wikipedia): a five-day weekend where Monday was Respect for the Aged Day, Wednesday was Autumnal Equinox Day and so under Japanese law, Tuesday was an ‘extra’ holiday.
I was thinking that I didn’t remember a five-day weekend last year and it turns out it’s only in years where you have Respect for the Aged Day be Monday and Autumnal Equinox Day be the Wednesday. This triggers the application of the rule under Section 3(3) of the Act on National Holidays (国民の祝日に関する法律) (a copy of which is available in English). The rule turns an ordinary weekday into a public holiday if it’s surrounded by two public holidays. This doesn’t happen very often: the next time will be 2032.
Does all of that ring a bell? Almost certainly not for you but I did wonder if I’d written about this before and it turns out yes. In this weeknote in 2022, I wrote:

I was going to call the week ‘Silver Week’ but after a quick glance at Wikipedia’s entry) I realised that wouldn’t be correct. Silver Week refers to a rare occurrence where a week in September will have three consecutive holidays. Since the holidays here were on Monday and Friday that doesn’t technically qualify. Instead we’ll have to wait til 2026.
Since it is September, that meant it was time for the Pretty Cure movie, Star Detective Precure! The Movie: The Mysterious Garden and a Secret Pair. For those not in the know, this is the film for this year’s series, Star Detective Precure! (Wikipedia). I took Emma and John to our local cinema on Saturday and, at the risk of sounding far more invested in this series than would be healthy, I was a little disappointed. I thought last year’s film had a story that better resonated with the show itself. This year lacked that and instead really felt like they were going through an obligatory part of the formula.
I mentioned back in May that Eri and I are considering sending Emma to Bunka Gakuen University Junior and Senior High School from 2028. On Sunday, they held their Cultural Festival and I took Emma down there (giving me my first chance to go inside the school). Since it was a ‘cultural’ activity day rather than an observation day, I didn’t see classes being run but I could see the facilities, talk to some of the overseas staff members (who teach the classes in English) and walk around the campus a little. I admit I was expecting to see more biracial children.
The weather for the first few days of Silver Week was pretty miserable but things cleared up a bit on Tuesday and we decided to use the opportunity to take the kids to Ueno Zoo. We’ve gone a few times now and every time I feel like every time I think the same thing: you get a decent look at a lot of the animals but this in part that’s because of how small the enclosures are and that always makes me feel guilty.
Eri took Emma and John back home but I went with Rowan to catch a shinkansen. He’d said he wanted to go on an E5 train but I went to the wrong platform. We didn’t have time to jump on the E7 and so waited for the next train. To my immense surprise (and I’m a little ashamed to admit delight), the train that pulls up next is the E2 (Wikipedia). I could hardly believe it. The E2 is the last active service Tohoku Shinkansen model I’ve ridden and, prior to Tuesday, I’d honestly given up much hope that was ever going to happen. It runs a handful of times a day (maybe it’s only once at this point?) and there’s apparently no easy way to determine when this will be. It was great to be able to tick it off the list.
Speaking of things that are hard to believe, apparently I haven’t linked to Noah Guthrie’s cover of ‘Sexy and I Know It’ before (Apple Music). I’ve now done that, too.

Weeknotes #348

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 23:14:00 +0900

It was my birthday. I have reached the grand old age of 44. I was a little surprised to see that this year Ginza Cozy Corner had Sanrio characters for the seasonal selection box of tarts and cakes it regularly sells. Then I saw that’s exactly what they did last year and I felt even older.
I had completely forgotten about the iPhone preorders starting at 9 pm JST on Saturday (why Saturday this year?) when Brandon messaged me at 8.57 pm to wish me luck getting an order in. That set off a mad dash to my phone to place my forgotten order. Fortunately, I had gone through the pre-preorder process the day before and all the critical information was ready to go. I launched the Apple Store app and (a force quit or two later) put in a preorder for a 256GB iPhone 18 Pro Max in the new burgundy colour for pick-up from the Shinjuku store on Friday. Then, on Friday, I went down, waited about 10 minutes and came back home, phone in hand and money out of wallet. I was busy all day and only got around to setting it up in the evening but so far, it seems very good. Not sure it was worth the price but let’s see.
Speaking of prices, Japan is greatly increasing its visa application fees starting from 1 October. I felt bad about not submitting my visa application back in June before discovering that the earliest I could submit a renewal was 14 September. That said, here we are on Friday 18 September and I still don’t have everything ready to go. Next week for sure.
I got my Zig implementation of Janet to a point where I consider it ‘done’. Of course, that then meant it was time to move to using it as the base for a fork of Janet that I hope I’ll be able to announce in the next weeknote.
I started watching Only Murders in the Building again. The theme song started playing in episode 1 and I wondered why I’d waited so long. The experience of watching it can never be back in 2023 as I felt trapped in that hospital ward but it’s still an incredible amount of fun. I wish the kids were old enough to enjoy it with me. I really think that theme song might be my favourite of all time.
A couple of weeks ago I watched Barry Ferns’ video on Steven Bartlett, a YouTuber who I’m vaguely aware of but have never really paid much mind. I thought it was fine, mostly confirming my priors that this genre is mostly there as a vehicle for advertising. Ferns made a follow-up video, ‘Diary of a CEO Responded to My Takedown. I Wasn’t Ready For This’, and if you’ve got an hour, I recommend it. It goes through the research you may have been familiar with regarding parasocial relationships before developing into something interesting.
If you want something a little lighter, Brennan Pollack (AKA Ego Dip) made one of his reconstruction videos about Arctic Monkeys’ ‘505’. I remember listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare a lot in 2007 while I was working in Mikunigaoka on the JET Programme. I’m old now and didn’t realise that it had apparently become popular on TikTok but I’m glad it did. The song is great (Apple Music).

Weeknotes #347

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:33:00 +0900

We received our first Level 4 flood warning on Tuesday evening at around 9.30 pm. Level 4 is the level at which evacuation is recommended. This is the first warning we’ve had since moving into the house and it was certainly unnerving. I like the area where we live but it does come with a greater flooding risk than any of the previous places we’ve been in since coming to Tokyo. Apparently, evacuation in a flood situation can mean retreat to the upper levels of a building if the level of inundation expected is minor. So, given that Nerima’s official hazard map shows our street as having up to 50 cm of flooding, we decided not to leave the house and instead bring the kids upstairs. A real time-ish measure of the river’s water level indicated the rate had already started to ease at the time the Level 4 announcement was made and, sure enough, over the next two hours the waters fell back down and it all ended without any flooding at all.
Apple’s annual iPhone event was streamed in the early hours of Thursday morning. Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pros and the much-anticipated foldable iPhone, iPhone Duo. There was no mention of the ordinary iPhone 18 (or a successor to the iPhone Air) but the rumours are that those will be announced early next year. I’m not sure what to do. My iPhone 14 Pro Max is four years old and I’d like to upgrade but the new Pro Max starts (starts!) at ¥240,000. My 14 Pro Max cost ¥165,000 in 2022 and, at the time, I was able to trade-in my 13 Pro Max for ¥89,000 which made that price feel a lot more reasonable. My 14’s Lightning Port no longer works and it has some dings on its frame that mean it’s not eligible for a trade-in so if I do upgrade, I’m paying the full price. There’s also the fact that—charging port aside—my phone is actually doing just fine. The battery capacity is down to 75% but the Pro Max’s battery is so large that most of the time, that’s more than enough. I really only notice when I’m out all day with no opportunity to charge—and even then, so long as I put the phone on low power mode, it’s not an issue. If I hold out til February, I’ll likely be able to buy a refurbished iPhone 17 Pros Max for a reduced price; how much less, I don’t know.
I’m not sure how I’ve managed to go this long without having seen this but back in November 2021 Michael Arndt, the screenwriter for Toy Story 3, put up an amazing video on YouTube. It’s a recording of a lecture he originally delivered back in 2011 at Pixar about the lessons he learnt in the writing of Toy Story 3. Pixar famously has an iterative story process where they produce animatics (which they call ‘story reels’) that they screen for their core creative team to watch and evaluate during the development of a film. The amazing thing about Arndt’s video is that he got permission to include a number of these story reels for several key scenes in Toy Story 3 so that he can illustrate how he originally wrote it and then how the finished scene in the film turned out. It is 72 minutes but if you have any interest in story or film, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I was asking ChatGPT what ever happened to 1990s alternative rock band, the Presidents of the United States of America, and after we went back and forth a bit, it recommended that I might enjoy their little-noticed 2004 album, Love Everybody (Apple Music). I’m not sure how I feel about passing on a recommendation from a chatbot but I did think it was pretty good.

Weeknotes #346

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:11:00 +0900

Rowan has always been excited to watch competitive activities. Since he became infatuated with soccer, I’ve been meaning to take him to an actual match. Going to a J-League match would make more sense but I wasn’t sure if it would rain on Sunday so I asked ChatGPT for options and it recommended a 2 pm game between JR East and Honda Suzuka in the annual Intercity Baseball Tournament (Wikipedia). Given the tournament is an amateur competition, the tickets were not expensive and I was able to get three seats (I dragged John along too) right down near the field in between home plate and first base.
It actually turned out far better than I was expecting. Getting into the stadium took a bit of time but we arrived at our seats just as the game was beginning. JR East was off to a quick start, scoring three runs in the first innings. In the third, one of the JR East batters hit a home run. It was starting to look a bit one-sided but in the fourth, Honda scored three runs and forced a pitching change. By this point, the boys were getting restless and since I didn’t want to be home too late, so we made an early exit. JR East won 8-4 in the end (results).
Before the game, I took John and Rowan to the Taco Bell that’s on the outside of Tokyo Dome. This might have been the first time I’ve ever had Taco Bell and I can’t say I’m in an enormous hurry to return.
I mentioned two weeks ago that I had begun a port of the Janet programming language from C to Zig and that it was proceeding well. I was hoping to have more to report in the following week (i.e. last week) and yet observant readers would have noticed I didn’t mention any software projects at all. That wasn’t a portent of failure but it did indicate that the process was taking longer than I had expected. Here we are more than two weeks later and it’s still not done. I now have an implementation that I think basically works but with inadequate documentation. That’s what I’m working on now; we’ll see how that goes.
One interesting aspect of the work has been the clear tendency of LLMs to personify. I’ve gone back and forth across a number of sessions reminding Claude Code not to personify functions, interfaces, runtimes, etc. My friend sogaiu pointed out that the obvious reason this would occur is that so much of the written text the large language models are trained upon is writing by humans about humans.
I liked the YouTube video from Brent Forrester on how he wrote the Simpsons episode ‘Homerpalooza’. I’d like to believe there’s an alternate universe where I became a comedy writer and I enjoy how these videos let me vicariously experience that reality.
Speaking of YouTube, in 2024 I wrote about the (I suppose) infamous video ‘How Star Wars was saved in the edit’ and the epic response ‘How “How Star Wars was saved in the edit’ was saved in the edit (sort of, but not really)’. Video essayist Christopher Bingham is doing a series of videos about Star Wars and he’s made his own, ‘Star Wars Wasn’t “Saved in the Edit”’ that is quite a bit shorter (albeit still 34 minutes in length).
In exhibit 6,382,983 of how long it can take me to warm to an album, I wrote about Beck’s Colors back in 2020 (i.e. more than six years ago). At the time, I said the album hadn’t grabbed me like some of his earlier work. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I love this album now. I try not to repeat recommendations so this week I’m linking to the song (Apple Music) but know that I think you should listen to the whole thing.

Weeknotes #345

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:12:00 +0900

I rode over to the library with Rowan on Saturday to return some books. Just before we were finishing up, the heavens opened up and a torrent of water started to fall. In any other situation, I probably would have waited it out but I needed to get home so that I could pick John up from his programming class. Not feeling there was any alternative, I left Rowan at the entrance, ran out into the downpour, grabbed the bicycle and brought it back to collect Rowan. He got in the (fortunately) covered child-seat and, after making sure he was secure, I took off into the rain. The ride from the library to our house is about 5 minutes and I think the only time I’ve been as wet is when they made us practise swimming fully clothed at primary school.
On Sunday, I got a haircut and then took Rowan over to the Edion in Yokohama I mentioned back in June. When we went last time, we found their toy department had Lego catalogues and while I’m sure they can’t be the only retailer who has copies, I have to admit that I’ve yet to find them anywhere else. The one we got in June was for the January to June ‘releases’ (I’m not sure of the jargon) and I figured that, given it’s almost the end of August, they should have the July to December catalogue. Sure enough, they did and Rowan has been asking me repeatedly which combination of sets he can get for Christmas.
I bought SuperDuper! 4 for some reason and then got a bit stuck trying to work out how I was meant to replicate the way I do my back-ups with SuperDuper! 3. There, I back up to a sparse disk image (Wikipedia) that sits on my external hard disk. I don’t know if this is an especially good idea but it means that I can use my external disk as an external disk for storage. Surprisingly, SuperDuper! 4 didn’t offer any apparent mode to ‘import’ my existing workflow. I tried to replicate it myself but couldn’t work out for the life of me how to set the disk image as a destination. Then I remembered what John Siracusa had said in a recent episode of Accidental Tech Podcast about trying to drag and drop in situations where you want to indicate something to the application and—sure enough—it worked. I dragged the disk image onto the app and it made it a destination. (The disk image itself failed because the disk images that SuperDuper! 3 use aren’t compatible with SuperDuper! 4 apparently but once I created a new disk image, I was able to get it all sorted.)
Emma asked me if I posted to Instagram or YouTube and when I told her that I post things to my own website, she asked me if she could create her own website. I probably should have done more to cultivate this desire but I instead found myself warning that it was quite difficult to make your own website (at least unless you want to host it at Squarespace). I did find an app called Sitely that I thought looked interesting. I loaded it onto her iPad and told her that she can try to create things with it but that I could only offer limited help. We’ll see how that goes.
Casey Muratori has another keynote from the Better Software Conference in the vein of last year’s ‘The Big Oops’. This one is called ‘The Root of the Root of All Evil’ and if the idea of a two-hour lecture on the history of optimising computer programs gets your heart racing, he delivers the goods once again.
Speaking of longer pieces of media, I can’t believe I’ve yet to recommend the Stone Roses’ practically-10-minute 1989 banger, ‘Fools Gold’ (Apple Music). That oversight is corrected.

Weeknotes #344

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 22:47:00 +0900

I’m proud to report that Eri and I are not complete parenting failures. Yes, that’s right: we successfully took the kids to the pool at least once this summer. It wasn’t the nicest day on Saturday. While it’s still miserably hot, the typhoon season has commenced and the sky is frequently overcast. As a result, we didn’t get to enjoy that sublime mix of hot and cold you get when you’re in a pool in summer. Still, it did mean the pool wasn’t especially crowded and we didn’t have to wait in the queue like I recall was the case two years ago.
We then followed that up on Sunday by taking the kids to have another set of shichi-go-san photos taken (Wikipedia). I wrote about doing that back in 2023 when John was five. That’s how old Rowan is now and while Emma and John are technically the wrong ages, it’s nice to have some classy photos of all the children and this is quite possibly the last time we’ll do that with all of them as a group.
I’m burying the lede, though, because the most important thing that happened all week was that I finally finished filing my loose documents. Many were literally years old at this point and should probably just have been thrown out but I feel better having these records organised and accessible on the off chance I ever need them. As an added bonus, our bedroom now looks like a bedroom again rather than the site of an embezzlement investigation.
Rounding things out on Friday was the monthly basketball practice that I started attending back in June. I neglected to write about the practice in July but I went then so this is now the third time. I did get a cramp at one point but the highlight was a steal I made.
After my success making Claret, I decided that it was time to finally see if I could use LLM-based coding agents to tick off another item on my programming bucket list: converting Janet’s C implementation to one in Zig. I regret to report that despite starting this on Monday, it’s still not finished. It’s been intensive enough in terms of token usage that I’ve temporarily upgraded to Anthropic’s $100/month level to make sure I can have it grinding away in a mostly continuous fashion. I think I’m about 80% of the way through and—at the risk of tempting fate—I think it’s going to work. Hopefully I have good news to report in the next update.
Speaking of LLMs, sogaiu linked me to this talk by Gerben Wierda (YouTube). Wierda does a good job, I think, of explaining how the way that LLMs can make it look like there’s ‘comprehension’ when there really isn’t.
I realised I hadn’t watched any episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds from last year (let alone this year) so now I have that on my list of things to watch. Oh, and Ludwig is finally back for a second season.
Charli XCX released her Music, Fashion, Film album in June. I’ve been listening to it on and off for the past month and while it doesn’t reach the heights of brat, I do still like it quite a lot. I’m particularly fond of the melancholy of ‘SS26’ (Apple Music).

Weeknotes #343

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 23:57:00 +0900

As regular readers will have realised, I often try to start these with some comment on the news du jour but I don’t really have much to say at the moment. Last week the U.S. intervened (or implied they would intervene) to prop up the yen which I guess… thanks? (ABC News) I’m not looking forward to discovering the starting price of the upcoming iPhones 18 and anything Scott Bessent wants to do to help me with that is appreciated.
Speaking of the news, I appreciated the most recent episode of Geopolitical Cousins (the podcast by two geopolitical analysts, Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic). I mentioned this podcast last year but to recap: it’s a podcast where geopolitical analysts Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic discuss recent geopolitical events from the perspective of analysts who write advisory notes to investment clients. They’re clear it’s not investment advice (and I don’t use it for that) but I appreciate that it gives their discussions a different flavour to what you tend to get from journalists or academics. They’re also on YouTube.
Tuesday was Mountain Day (obligatory Wikipedia link). Rowan and I ‘climbed’ (by escalator) the ‘metaphorical mountain’ of the new Yodobashi Camera in Ikebukuro to visit their sprawling toy floor. I generally try not to buy toys randomly for the kids but I couldn’t resist getting Rowan the Lego Creator 3-in-1 Aircraft: Race Plane (31160) and then, for Emma and John, the cheapest sets they had from Lego’s Minecraft collection (21583 and 21266). Rowan has now learnt why the sets have different age ranges. His manual dexterity has improved in the past few months but 31160 has a number of small pieces that require a decent amount of finger strength to manoeuvre into place and that’s currently beyond him.
I mentioned last week that I had used LLM-based coding agents to work on an incomplete Janet project and I wondered whether I would use it to work on Persimmon. I did indeed do this and then I moved on to finally making my own Janet dialect. Back in 2020 (!), in the same weeknote where I noted that Joe Biden had won the presidential election (!!), I mentioned that I had written a parser I called Claret that parsed a more Clojure-like syntax into Janet data structures. Well, once I had the persistent immutable data structures available with Persimmon, I decided to make a standalone program that uses Janet’s VM but swaps out Janet’s immutable data structures for Persimmon’s. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea or not but this more ambitious Claret is now up on GitHub.
There’s a version of Lumines Remastered on the App Store and came away disappointed. I tried to play it on the iPad and I don’t think that’s the right way to play it. If you have a game controller you pair with your iPad this might be great but they haven’t bothered to code in support for hardware keyboards.
Anyone who has played the first level of Lumines will be very familiar with Mondo Grosso’s ‘Shinin’’. I wondered if it was available to stream and it turns out it is (Apple Music).

Weeknotes #342

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:39:00 +0900

Somehow it is August already.
They made an Avatar: The Last Airbender movie. I had hoped to watch it with all three children but Emma said she wasn’t that interested and, truth be told, Rowan’s enthusiasm was at least 90% due to the popcorn I had opened into a bowl. I thought the film itself was fine. It was fun to see the characters again but I admit that it’s been less than a week and I’m struggling to remember much of what happened.
It’s perhaps not that surprising given Rowan’s always enjoyed watching me play Rocket League on the Xbox (in a way that neither John nor Emma were) but he saw me watching some highlights from the FIFA World Cup and has become semi-obsessed. Eri is bearing most of the brunt of it; Rowan insists on ‘playing soccer’ with her in the playroom at least once a day. ‘Playing soccer’ consists of him trying to kick the ball into the wardrobe (i.e. the goal) while she stands in front of said wardrobe. It’s got to the point where I am wondering if we need to consider finding him a club. Although, given how he handles it when I lose in Rocket League, I’m not sure that’s going to be much fun for all involved.
I went on a bit of a bender and had Claude and Codex working on multiple Janet projects simultaneously. The main thing I was able to do was finally get Loopy finished. This is an HTTP server that wraps Mongoose v7.0. I’ve had it in a semi-completed state for more than a year but there were a few elements that I needed to fix and I kept putting it off. Then it got to the point where I didn’t really remember how all the pieces fit together. Coding agents to the rescue! Now I’m wondering if this means I might finally finish Persimmon and Watchful. Time will tell.
When I was little, Dad had a prayer that he used to recite with me before I went to bed. I’ve been trying to remember it for years to no avail before realising that of course he would have said the same thing to Monica. I asked her and while she didn’t remember it perfectly, she remembered enough that I was able to track it down. In the extremely unlikely event that you too have been wanting to know this information, it’s called the ’Vesper Verse’ and goes like this:

Lord, keep us safe this night,
Secure from all our fears;
May angels guard us while we sleep,
‘til morning light appears.

More information is here.
John Gruber linked to Brendan Leonard’s excellent comic ‘Do It 14,000 Times Slower With This One Trick’.
Speaking of excellent things, Brent Forrester has such a video on YouTube in which he discusses what makes the Simpsons episode ‘Lemon of Troy’ so good. Lots of people make videos like this on YouTube of course but Brent Forrester also wrote the episode which, you know, lots of people have not done.
I was listening to a Triple J Hottest 100 playlist (as one does) when ‘Dogs Are the Best People’ by Australian alt-rock band, the Fauves (Wikipedia) came on. As I listened to Andrew Cox’s nasally drawl, I realised there was another song on the edge of my mind that I kept wanting to remember. In what is obviously one of the themes of this weeknote, I did a bit of digging and discovered it was 1998’s ‘The Charles Atlas Way’ (Apple Music).