Category: Family

Ahiru no omocha

March 22, 2025 /

While I’ve never managed to finish my long-incubated and sprawling essay about large language models and Alfred Jarry, I think that if you know me, you already know my attitude toward the proponents of the former. Nevertheless, at the request of my employer, I have tried out a couple ways of using them in my work. I tested out cloud-driven code-completion interfaces long enough to learn that they hinder me more than they help, and anyway I don’t like constantly feeding our clients’ intellectual property back into someone else’s text corpus. And even if those things weren’t true, my concerns about the intake and exhaust of the server farms involved would have been enough to make the experience undesirable.

I have also tried running some open-weight models directly on my laptop, where I know my data will remain, and where I can observe that the power draw involved is not vaporizing any rivers. The results are slow and of middling quality, but good enough for things like “just tell me what fucking regex I need.” (I do still google things first, but at this point, I’m not sure using their search service is any more virtuous than using an LLM.)

It wasn’t so long ago that the people promulgating the ascendance of statistical models were attached to the term “machine learning.” Machines cannot learn, but humans can, even me. One of the things I am learning, along with Kat, is Japanese. I’ve made use of textbooks, mnemonics, evening classes, and apps to this end, and I’ve made a lot of progress, which is to say I’m about 1% of the way to being able to converse with a preschooler. Japanese is hard.

Textbooks are challenging to use without an instructor, and while I appreciated working with such an instructor for a remote course through our local cultural center, the video-call medium is pretty painful in a class setting. Apps are nice for building a habit and refreshing myself, but as I’m sure you know, they more or less all run on a model of drilling by way of quizzes. Like many people who were praised for youthful conformance to school standards, I retain the test-taking skills that were hammered into me at a formative age. That means my brain is tuned for using process of elimination and context clues to answer quizzes without learning anything new, which is a whole other essay I will never finish, but anyway this is why the apps yield only grudging progress.

I know enough about my own capabilities, and about general educational theory, to understand that if I want to learn something in a persistent way then the most valuable exercise is trying to explain it to someone else. When software nerds do this to solve a problem, we call it rubber-ducking. I don’t actually own a rubber duck. But I do have a laptop with an LLM runtime on it. You can see how I got here.

“The thing is there’s so much basic vocabulary to learn,” I told Kat, “and a lot of it is English loan words, but then a lot more isn’t. And so many of the words sound alike but mean such different things. So I thought, hey, I can just tell the computer to have a conversation with me, and I’ll have to explain the differences between the words and what they mean, and even use them in sentences. It’s a proven technique. I think it might actually help!”

Kat, who I believe I mentioned is also learning Japanese, gave me a steady look and replied: “or you could just tell those things to me.”

Sometimes the problem I solve by explaining myself aloud isn’t even the one I knew about.

We got a dog and his name is Max

November 6, 2024 /

Hello, friend. My opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer, but over the summer we got to meet the best dog in the world. Our friends were fostering him from a local shelter, so we had a few opportunities to get to know him, and each time we loved him more. When we bought a house (oh, also we bought a house) and moved out of our apartment, we adopted him as soon as we had a place to put his bed.

Max is a small chihuahua derivation of uncertain age, probably around 10 or 11, and shortly before we took him in he was relieved of most of his teeth. He is friendly, quiet, sleepy and calm. He is not a lap dog, but he loves to take the center seat on our couch and place his small warm flank against a person’s thigh. Then he will nudge his little head under that person’s hand and insist on having his scalp massaged.

I am relying on Max quite a bit for mental health support of late. He did not apply for this job but he bears it with grace. Here are some photos of him.

August 9, 2024

“When you’re young, you think there are probably not that many people privately beating themselves up, but actually, there are tons of us. We walk every kind of life path, united by the sheer brutality of our self-deprecation. The most confident-seeming people are often screaming at themselves inside their own heads! This might be you. Or maybe you’re a lobster. Lobsters are so zen.”

Two Books

November 10, 2023 /

I became a fan of actor and writer Jo Firestone because of her role on someone else’s perfect television show, and when Kat made me watch her documentary Good Timing I became… uh, even more of a fan! Also, last month Kat and I went to the Grand Canyon. We saw this bird.

A bird perched on top of a tree in front of a vista.

We also got up early to see the sunrise and looked sleepy, which was accurate.

Brendan on the left, Kat in the middle, Grand Canyon sunrise on the right.

But to the point of this entry, on the drive to and from the canyon, we listened to almost all of an audiobook, and specifically an audiobook written and read by Jo Firestone. It’s called Murder on Sex Island and it lives up to its title. Also, it’s free to listen to! You can just put it in your podcast app and get the whole thing right now! And then you should pay for a copy also, because it is very good.

In news about books I have not read, but have purchased nonetheless, my longtime and dear friend Holly has her debut novel coming out next spring! It is called The Husbands and I am really excited to obtain and review it. It will be a positive review, so don’t expect me to be objective or anything, but it will be an accurate review too. Accuracy is the surprise emergent theme of this blog post.

In praise of the starship ceiling

January 20, 2022 /

The ceiling of the bridge on the Enterprise 1701-D has not, I feel, had sufficient love bestowed upon it. I am very fond of all the purplish-gray, padded-upholstery, conference-hotel interior design elements of TNG, but their relationship with the progress of aesthetic trends in this century has not been entirely amicable or graceful. But the ceiling I’m talking about doesn’t seem dated or even retro, perhaps because it started as retro: I’m no expert, but to me this design reads as pretty much straight Art Nouveau.

Perspective from the view screen of the Enterprise-D bridge

That’s actually from the rebuild they did for Generations (1994), but it’s the best view I can find from an actual photo. Most of what shows up in image searches now is from fan CGI recreations, but I think the quality of light and material you can see there are an important part of what I’m talking about. It’s of a piece with the rest of the set, but it also looks like something set apart. Here’s a partial perspective from an actual episode.

Side view of the rear portion of the Enterprise-D bridge.

I noticed this angle while watching “Descent” with Kat, whose enjoyment of TNG is mild and reserved largely for the characters of Lore and Hugh. It was the first time I’d realized that the center of the ceiling is actually a porthole with stars in it. There’s a helpful writeup about the origins of the design on Forgotten Trek, but it focuses more on the production history than on concept artist Andrew Probert’s thought process.

Charming marker-art concept sketch for the bridge

It doesn’t address this either, but I suspect that the production function of the ceiling as a stage light was pretty helpful. While it looks like at least in the first season, they did set up lights for each individual shot the way one normally does on a soundstage, the show’s primary set also had a built-in hemispherical softbox! The crew could bounce flattering light on multiple sides of an actor’s face without having to do anything special or worry about lamp stands getting in the shot. Meanwhile, the science station alcoves in the back are shielded from that soft light by the overhang and can be lit by monitors, from underneath, for increased drama whenever Geordi tells the captain that teching the tech tech is worth a shot.

I really wonder if Ron Moore was thinking about the soft light of that design, two shows later, when they came up with the layout of the Battlestar Galactica CIC.

I say this with love: it is an inferior design, at least in terms of pure spatial reference. I watched every single episode and webisode of BSG, and I never had any idea what the horizontal axes of this room were supposed to be, or what most of the people on screen were doing. The nice thing about having all the chairs turned in the same direction as Picard when he points at his big tv-windshield and says “go” is that, as an audience member, you don’t have to guess whether that’s the front of the spaceship. Sure, maybe it makes military sense that the CIC would be buried in the deepest and most armored part of a battlestar, rather than having a big round window on top of it. But in effect it often felt more like they were sitting around somewhere underground, not charging into the fray or leaping through the fracking galaxy.

As pieces of functional stage go, though, the CIC poetically inverts the bridge in a way that works well. Its ceiling is a pit of darkness; almost every light on set faces upward or bounces off the floor, casting faces into shadow. Maximum drama at all times! In Star Trek, the captain can always look around and see the face of someone who’s going to give him a suggestion for the problem at hand. But in BSG, everyone keeps their eyes down, because they all know none of their answers are going to be good ones.

This is a content warning.

June 30, 2021 /

Last year I wrote about an Ars Technica article that appealed to technical experts for help perfecting every last possible system involved in emulating the Super Nintendo. I think it’s clear from that post that I felt a certain envy of the sense of purpose conveyed by its author, byuu, who also went by Near and by Dave. But I remember thinking, too, that their saying “I’m getting older, and I won’t be around forever” was a little surprising to read from someone deeply invested in a video game system from the 1990s. I’m getting older too, but not quite to the point of hurrying to put a capstone on my legacy yet.

Near was indeed not much older than me, but they meant what they said. This week, after years of organized and escalating cruelty directed at them and at their loved ones, they took their own life.

The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of the internet is in part to publish and distribute a unique and valuable life’s work. The purpose of the internet is also, in part, to torture people until they die. Sometimes it works.

Everybody I talked to in the course of reporting this story said some variation on “I hope Isabel is okay.” And she is. Sort of. In the months I’ve spent emailing Isabel Fall, she’s revealed herself to be witty and thoughtful and sardonic and wounded and angry and maybe a little paranoid. But who wouldn’t be all of those things? Yet I’m emailing with a ghost who exists only in this one email chain. The person who might have been Isabel has given up on actually building a life and career as Isabel Fall. And that is a kind of death.

Emily VanDerWerff, whose writing I have long enjoyed, has a piece of extraordinary nuance, precision and grace there. I’m grateful that Kat nudged me to read it. If you haven’t read it already, I would take it as a personal favor if you do.

Reverse Anniversary

March 21, 2021 /

As of yesterday we were supposed to be married.

I didn’t even want to wait that long, really. After I proposed, Kat pointed out that a standard year of engagement and planning would put us right back in a Chicago winter, which offers logistical difficulties; I said, okay then, why can’t we just go ahead and get married in the fall? But Kat’s season is really summer. We settled on what is, often though not always, the first nice weekend in spring. We knew it was a gamble on the weather, but we didn’t know quite what else the stakes comprised.

It’s very beautiful outside right now. That die came up lucky. But late in the summer of 2020, with no coherent leadership and no clear timeline for when it might be safe to see our loved ones again, we took a deep breath and told our ceremony venue, our reception venue, and our caterer to kick us down the road to March 2022 instead.

There are few things I have ever wanted as much and as long as I have wanted to be married to Kat. I really hope this year won’t be quite as long as the past one, but it won’t be short. I’ll be forty before my wedding instead of after. It’s an arbitrary number, but it still brings home, to me, the cost of a lost year of one’s life.

Last night we got dressed up for a delivery dinner of fancy mushroom buns and congee, and Kat brought me a bouquet of flowers, surprising me the way she does every single time. Today we sat in the sun six feet from two of our closest Chicago friends and raised plastic cups of champagne. I still don’t feel quite to the point where I can even start grieving our losses. But oh, God, despite our shaggy hair and hollow eyes and aching hearts, I feel the sheer luck by which we have stayed well and safe this long as a weight upon me too.

Love Me