Enjoyed this write-up from Tom MacWright, if only because I spend a lot of my time writing Rails, still, even in 2020-1. It's nice to be reminded by somebody thoughtful, but coming from outside, that yes, there's still a lot to like in your part of the world, that it's not an ideological dead-end. And yes, that the _culture_ around the Ruby ecosystem really is, by and large, a good one. Sure, we don't have strong typing (well, we kinda do now), but we do have lots of great _practice_ around testing, and writing code in the first place. Not having IntelliSense™ is sometimes an advantage. Also, having wrapped a four-month Ruby contract recently, it's just such a nice language to write – and to *think* in.

(I'm with Tom on the whiffiness of all versions of the asset pipeline / webpacker / whatever it is we're doing this week.)

Queerness, masculinity, Icarus, Breughel, Pro Wrestling, David Cage, and fumblecore, wrapped up in a single game, and this marvellous essay by Robert Yang about his latest creation, _Hard Lads_. I love Robert's essays about his own work.

Aha: a course for people who can program already! Good; Python is my Umpteenth language and I can just about bodge it together, but it'd be nice to know it better. Might hammer at this over some evenings.

"…he doesn’t strike me as someone that Hubertus Bigend would hire. He strikes me as somebody that Hubertus Bigend would trick an opponent or enemy into hiring.”

"Finland became the forerunner of understanding and accepting digital culture in general and the Demoscene in particular as cultural heritage. Right before the Easter weekend the Finnish Heritage Agency announced, that the Ministry of Education and Culture listed the Demoscene on proposals from the National Board of Antiquities and the Intangible Cultural Heritage Expert Group as national cultural heritage of humanity together with eleven other cultural practices." Superb.

"In this short post, I will outline how owners of commemorative WoW server hardware treat these objects as mementos of their time in the world of WoW." (And: how. as the systems became more parallel, there was less physical connection between "a single box" and "a single realm", and so the desire to own Your Realm goes down.

Somewhere in there is My Thunder Bluff.

Yeah, this is good / this is roughly the internet I used to know and still know / not everything is terrible.

"Culture is what you celebrate. Rituals are the tools you use to shape culture." This is good, especially the balance not just of 'what you celebrate' but _how_. And thus the stress on using such a ritual to celebrate process, not just success or delivery.

These are very good – and clearly stated.

"At the turn of the millennium, the internet seemed full of heartfelt pitches. Millions of users singing the praises of their favourite things – crowding around them, talking about them, calling for others to recognize their charms. Not the sturm und drang of social media: just clear-throated whoops, and echoes. Strangers like Pedro logging on to share their passions, not just once but every week, long after they had earned their Into the Grove membership rights, as if they couldn't help themselves."

"Specifications and bureaucracies live forever." Or: why a Solid Rocket Booster is the width of a Roman chariot. This is good.

Cracking piece of… technology history and perspective, I guess, from Mike Johnston: a history of the 35mm film frame size, the things that threatened to unseat it, the ways it bounced back, and the ways other inventions embedded it in history. A really good Total Perspective Vortex of the history of a technology.