Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie 🔗
No matter what, you're going to have a great time watching this movie. It is funny and audacious and handcrafted, which is a quality that feels increa [...]
Applied Cartography
Posts
Check the status page 🔗
As I've covered somewhat extensively in prior writing (see A month of OpEx quick wins and Self-hosting our GitHub Action runners), this year has been [...]
How the media library works 🔗
I've received a number of questions as to how the media library part of this blog works, and I figure it's worth a bit of time to explain — even thoug [...]
Wings of Desire 🔗
When I try to describe this film, I keep fleeing from the word strange toward poetic — because there isn't much strange about it. If you accept its co [...]
Notorious 🔗
I think this might be the first Hitchcock that just didn't really work for me. The premise feels unlike so much of his output: dated and strained. [...]
Two hundred decisions 🔗
This week, after a little under two years of having adopted the practice, Buttondown has minted its 200th decision log. This is a practice very simila [...]
June, 2026 🔗
June, like any month in which I neither write very much nor read very much, feels already cryptographic in retrospect. [...]
Jay Kelly 🔗
I was young. I wanted something very badly and I was afraid that if I took my eye off it, I wouldn’t have it. And I was right. There was no other way [...]
Denormalization 101 🔗
I have had exactly two conversations this week about denormalization, which is a sign that it is time to write a blog post. If you already know what d [...]
Peggy Sue Got Married 🔗
I envy you. You have your whole life ahead of you and you know exactly what you want to do. But forget the rat puke; write something beautiful. [...]
Indeterminate / Squash 🔗
The hardest part of gardening is not correctly timing the seedling transfer, or deciding when a plant is a goner versus when it just needs one more we [...]
The Man from Earth 🔗
One interesting thing about films, relative to — say — writing within video games, is the demarcation of amateurishness. (A description I don't mean t [...]
Victory is a lossy compressor 🔗
Update, July 2026: Bill Mill kindly pointed out that the Cavs' head coach is Kenny Atkinson, not JB Bickerstaff — who coached Cleveland until 2024 but [...]
Back to Overcast 🔗
In what is certainly the least consequential update in this blog's history: I have boomeranged back from Apple Podcasts to Overcast. [...]
May, 2026 🔗
There are two mental models about work and fatigue which, like my brief dalliance with Roshe Runs, I have loved and outgrown: [...]
Self-hosting our CI, three months later 🔗
A couple of folks have written in over the past month asking how my experiments in self-hosting GitHub Actions runners have held up. And three months [...]
Let Them All Talk 🔗
This was a film that I found, in some order, slight, confounding, sweet, clever, and — above all of these things — reaching but not yet grasping. [...]
The Best and the Brightest 🔗
I started this book on the recommendation of Scholar's Stage, who I would describe as one of the few deeply interesting and serious conservative histo [...]
ccusage 🔗
Inspired by a recent Simon Willison post, I just ran ccusage on my laptop and learned that over the past thirty days, on my sole subscription of $200 [...]
The In-Laws 🔗
It was fifteen minutes into The In-Laws that I suspected an uncanny feeling of déjà vu, and thirty minutes in that I confirmed my suspicions with an u [...]
Murder by Death 🔗
Murder by Death is a film that is easy to laugh at and easy to like. It is something like Clue meets Knives Out — a broad farce, lovingly rendered, th [...]
What matters 🔗
As I often do after finishing a movie I loved, I have spent the past few days burning spare compute (as they say) turning Network over in my head and [...]
Network 🔗
It is perhaps embarrassing to admit that I had never seen Network, and this year — its fiftieth anniversary — felt as good a time as any, especially c [...]
Be careful what you make easier 🔗
I have found much peace this year going offline to shelter myself from the whiplash of LLM companies jockeying for mindshare by cosplaying as DevRel. [...]
Screen record more 🔗
One of the things I miss most about working in an office is osmosis: the ability to absorb information from coworkers purely by peering over their sho [...]
Buttondown no longer runs Redis 🔗
Buttondown no longer runs Redis! [...]
Just aim the cannon correctly 🔗
James Shore has a post I found myself nodding along to until the very last step, where he loses me. The thesis is clean: [...]
Sweet Smell of Success 🔗
At its core, Sweet Smell of Success is about two men. At the beginning of the film, you think — while similar — one is decent, just desperate, and the [...]
LLMs and Buttondown 🔗
Buttondown has grown a lot in 2026; some of that growth is uncomfortable. I've talked to enough people about this in real life that it felt worth writ [...]
On self-updating screenshots 🔗
Nick sent me a great post from one of the engineers at Goodenough, the fine folks behind Jelly, on the topic of self-updating screenshots. It is near [...]
April, 2026 🔗
I had hoped and expected that the chaos which had marked the start of the year — floors, termites, sickness, fires, ACL surgery — was largely behind u [...]
What's Up, Doc? 🔗
What's Up, Doc? is, I guess, just a perfect film. [...]
Slay the Spire 2 🔗
I have played Slay the Spire 2 for around thirty hours. I am, after writing this review, uninstalling it from my laptop and praying my resolve is stro [...]
Four years in the maelstrom 🔗
A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly, there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son? [...]
Masters of Doom 🔗
One way to approach writing about Masters of Doom is to talk about its outsized influence. Just off the top of my head: two pretty meaningful pieces o [...]
Write as you want to be heard 🔗
If you have ever chatted with me in real life, you know that my writing style here closely reflects my speaking manner. My writing, just like my speak [...]
Eyes Wide Shut 🔗
If you men only knew. [...]
Columbus 🔗
What he's offering is a critique of a critique. But in its place, he identifies a different kind of crisis. Not the crisis of attention, but the crisi [...]
L.A. Confidential 🔗
I'm not sure why, but this movie was not at all what I thought it was going to be. I don't just mean in terms of quality — though it certainly was bet [...]
Vanya on 42nd Street 🔗
This is, as far as I can tell, the first movie I've ever watched on the strength of an algorithmic recommendation — and the fact that it is now one of [...]
Software never had a soul 🔗
Ryo Lu recently wrote: [...]
March, 2026 🔗
The chaos is finally — but not totally — starting to fade. In early March we moved back into our house, replete with new floors and a sense of somethi [...]
A month of OpEx quick wins 🔗
I spent the past few weeks chasing quick OpEx wins for sport, having felt a nagging sensation that the orchards of our org were a little too-laden wit [...]
Why I'm a film blogger now 🔗
I have written more words about film in 2026 than I have about technology and business. This has not escaped your attention — so much so that real-lif [...]
Mistress America 🔗
I'm sorry, I know you liked Brooke. He told me that she worships you, she kept talking about how smart you are, how interesting... [...]
Stop Making Sense 🔗
A polite man is driven to murder. He becomes a prophet and screams manifestos on love, war, and the increasingly alarming impact of technology and pro [...]
What I would be doing 🔗
Tanvir asked me a few days ago what I would build today if Buttondown didn't exist and I was still keen, fully employed elsewhere. This is a fertile q [...]
Archiving the roadmap 🔗
Pour one out for Buttondown's transparent roadmap, which I formally archived yesterday evening after a year or so of informal archival. This felt like [...]
21 Bridges 🔗
A derivative, predictable, competent crime thriller. If you read that sentence and think "good," then you will like this film, and the opposite is tru [...]