I probably should have read Computer Power and Human Reason years ago, when all this hype really started getting going. Honestly I should probably have read it in college when I was first getting into programming! But the next best time is now, so I borrowed: my mom's inscribed copy a few months ago (which to be fair she has also never read) and got started.

A lot of the first few chapters is fairly straightforward for anyone who has a basic grounding in computer science. Weizenbaum^[1] is walking an odd line where he's trying to explain concepts like "turing machines" and "assembly languages" to a lay audience without sacrificing either rigor or a relatively academic tone. I'm curious how well this works for someone who genuinely has no prior exposure to this material; to me, all of this is review of the basics of the field, and so ended up feeling a little boring.

But then I got to this section which blew my socks clean off my feet (emphasis mine):

The idea that a person can write a program that embodies anything he "thoroughly understands" is at least equally problematical. Understanding something always means understanding it at a certain level. An actuary uses some fairly sophisticated mathematical tools whose fundamentals he almost certainly doesn't understand or care anything about. Everyone who makes change uses arithmetic, but very few people know or care much about the beautiful axiomatic system on which arithmetic is based. In effect, we all constantly use subroutines whose input-output behavior we believe we know, but whose details we need not and rarely do think about. To understand something sufficiently well to be able to program it for a computer does not mean to understand it to its ultimate depth. There can be no such ultimate understanding in practical affairs. Programming is rather a test of understanding. In this respect it is like writing; often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word "because" and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the "why" of something, but discover that we don't. We begin a sentence with "obviously," and then see that what we meant to write is not obvious at all. Sometimes we connect two clauses with the word "therefore," only to then see that our chain of reasoning is defective. Programming is like that. It is, after all, writing too. But in ordinary writing we sometimes obscure our lack of understanding, our failures in logic, by unwittingly appealing to the immense flexibility of natural language and to its inherent ambiguity. The very eloquence that natural language permits sometimes illuminates our words and seems (falsely, to be sure) to illuminate our undeserving logic just as brightly. An interpreter of programming-language texts, a computer, is immune to the seductive influence of mere eloquence. And words like "obviously" are not represented in the primitive vocabularies of…

I decided to rise to this challenge by loading up the list of all games I've ever played on Backloggd, sorting it from least to most popular, and finding the first one for which I felt I had something worth saying that I hadn't already articulated on my old media journal. What I ended up finding was a game I'd played long before I ever thought of tracking my impressions of media. It's sadly now unplayable due to the creeping march of time, but its place in my history and memory is worth writing about all the same:

I've moved all my book reviews, both archival and ongoing, onto the StoryGraph (link also available in the header along with my other media review accounts). If you want to see what I think about books, go give it a follow; if I recognize you, I'll follow you back. As with my other reviews, I'll only be cross-posting the ones I think are particularly good, so you'll have to go to the source if you want to see everything.

I've been searching for a really good book tracking website for a long time, and StoryGraph is good enough. I used Goodreads for a number of years, despite finding its Amazon ownership intensely distasteful, because at the time I started tracking books it was the only option with any amount of traction. In addition to (and possibly because of) its position in the evil empire of booksellers, it didn't seem to have developed a single new feature since 2013. In particular, it had no way to look through one's own books by genre or do other cross-referencing tasks that are a major part of what makes these sites valuable to me.

About a year ago, I migrated everything to BookWyrm on a friend's suggestion. It solved the Amazon issue handily, but was a step back on almost every other front. The UI is so bad that it actively discouraged me from tracking books as I read them; it's ridden with subtle differences between different ways of marking books as reading or read or writing reviews that do or don't show up as separate posts on its inexplicable Fediverse backend, and the frontend itself offers no affordances for basic things like indicating that it's processing a request you made. Its database is itself deeply messy, often with half a dozen versions of a single book with none being marked as canonical and no clear path to helping the admins unify them. On top of all that, it provided exactly none of the features I felt Goodreads was missing, if anything making it harder to organize and cross-reference a collection.

StoryGraph improves on all of these issues. It's not Amazon, and in fact explicitly marketed around the fact that it's better than Goodreads which gives me at least a faint hope that whoever runs it would find it politically infeasible to sell out too badly. Its interface is silly in places (it's possible to rate a book up to 5.75 stars due to idiosynratic the way it handles intermediate scores) but entirely functional. And its collection view allows enough cross-referencing to satisfy my general needs.

The thing I don't entirely understand is this: Letterboxd has existed for fifteen years now. It's well-known, it's widely referenced, and it's excellent from a UI standpoint. Its ability to collate and cross-reference films is smooth and universal: every film links its director, its year, and its cast and crew, and clicking on any of these brings you to a standard "film list" view that covers all…

Hatkirby has been writing a very intriguing series of posts on reverse-engineering For Frog the Bell Tolls, a lovely and underappreciated gem of the Game Boy's library. This is actually just the most recent post; you can read the whole series here (start at the bottom and work your way up). This has a lot in common with my own currently-on-hold reverse engineering projects, and it's interesting to see a lot of the same problems tackled for a very different piece of software with very different tools for working with it.

[This is a repost of this post I originally made on Cohost on 4 October 2022.]

Assembled with the assistance of Zandra and Val. These swamps will be judged on two axes:

• Fun: How enjoyable it is to play through the swamp as a zone in a video game.

• Swampiness: How effectively the swamps invoke a feeling of depression and despair.

Of these, Swampiness is of course the most important, but fun is certainly not a negligible factor. So we begin, in order from least to greatest.

#8: Harvest Valley (Dark Souls 2)

Fun: C+
Swampiness: F

A decent area to walk around in. Full of sexy ladies and big strong men who will suplex you given half a chance. Neat to explore, not too difficult to survive, kind of bullshit in a couple ways but not too bad. However, it's not a fucking swamp. It's just a bunch of poison gas in a mine! It's only even in here because Dark Souls 2 doesn't have any better candidates. Poor show, DS2, poor show.

#7: Bodhisattva Valley Floor (Sekiro)

Fun: C-
Swampiness: C-

This poison swamp is too damn small. It's just a skinny little slip of muck that's both totally optional for finishing the game and easy to grapple across even if you do want to grab the stuff inside. It gets a few extra swampiness points for how demoralizing the elder monkeys are, but they're not even really an intrinsic feature of the swamp. Sekiro may be my favorite FromSoft game, but it's got a crummy swamp.

#6: Nightmare Frontier (Bloodborne)

Fun: C
Swampiness: B

I really hate how this place looks, all yellow and gray and impossible to navigate because everything looks the god damn same. That said, it's easily the swampiest swamp so far, with good and proper mandatory sequences of wading through gruk while trying not to get wrecked by enemies. It's even got some nice goodies hidden within its swampiest nooks. But the real triumph of this area is the presence of the swampiest character in the series: Patches the Spider! His presence alone bumps this up half a letter grade.

#5: Swamp of Sorrow (Demon's Souls)

Fun: D
Swampiness: S

Now we're getting to the good stuff. This swamp absolutely reeks, but in the best way. The all-encompassing misery of trying to navigate this area and getting the shit ripped out of you over and over by goblins and phantoms lowers its fun score and thus overall ranking, but its sheer griminess demands a terrified awe.

#4: Farron Keep (Dark Souls 3)

Fun: C+
Swampiness: B

There's nothing tremendously remarkable about Farron Keep, but it ticks all the boxes. It's got the nasty juice we love to hate, and plenty of it. It's got tasks to keep you moving, enemies to fuck you up, and treats to…

Sorely disappointed that the canon that dogs in the Swan Boy universe are in fact just small humans, as established in the third comic:

...has now been definitively disavowed in today's comic:

Note the decidedly canine dogs in the first panel:

I always thought this gag was quite charming and kept looking forward to it coming back one day, but alas, today my hopes are dashed.

This post has so many interesting tidbits in it!!! I had a lot of fun reading through it, even though I've really only played the first game in the series. I strongly recommend giving it a read.

can't wait for English to redevelop the tu/vous distinction and then lose it again so the only second person pronoun is "y'all"

I'm sure all of you have already read my Apologia for RSS (the very first post on this blog!) and I'm sure you're all reading this in an RSS reader you've chosen for one reason or another. But does your RSS reader show you everything a post contains, or is it hiding the deepest, juiciest quips and chatter from you?

I've been on Tumblr since its heyday back in 2011, and it's now the only social media I can really say I use regularly^[1]. One of the aspects of its culture I appreciate tremendously is the concept of "chatting in the tags". Tags in Tumblr are snippets of text attached to both posts and reblogs, but only the original instance. If you reblog a post, that reblog doesn't include the tags of whoever you reblogged it from.

Although tags were presumably intended primarily for cross-referencing posts on the same topic, Tumblr culture has adopted them as a way of writing sotto voce commentary on posts, visible only to people who are following you specifically without escaping into the larger network. Sometimes people use this to be funny, sometimes to relay anecdotes, sometimes to be catty. Universally, it gives a window into the personality of the person you chose to follow, above and beyond just their curatorial decisions about what to post.

Even on one's own posts, tag chatter provides a means of adding a bit of commentary that's tangential to the post itself, of a different tone, or a little more personal than they want escaping into the wider network.

One of Tumblr's virtues, and in fact one of the main reasons I still use it at all, is that it provides RSS feeds for every user. These are the main way I read the website at all! What's more, these feeds actually contain that user's tags. For the technically-minded among you, the feed entry looks like this:

<item>
  <title>
    gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like&hellip;
  </title>
  <description>
    <p><a class="tumblr_blog" href="https://perfectday1972.tumblr.com/post/792148193180827649/gonna-be-a-lover-for-a-minute-reblog-and-put-in">perfectday1972</a>:</p><blockquote><p>gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like intensely loved like 5 stars on letterboxd LOVED</p></blockquote>
  </description>
  <link>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</link>
  <guid>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</guid>
  <pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:40:35 -0700</pubDate>
  <category>PlayTime</category>
  <category>although todayhat was a rewatch</category>
  <category>most recent new one was Chimes at Midnight</category>
</item>

Those <category> elements are the tags. Neat! But totally useless in practice unless a reader actually displays them.

My…