The Man Who Knew Too Much 🔗
The Man Who Knew Too Much is a film of peaks and valleys. There is little argument that it is a good film; whether you place it amongst the highest of [...]
Applied Cartography
Posts
Wet Hot American Summer 🔗
It feels like a long-standing embarrassment that I had never seen Wet Hot American Summer. And the longer I put it off, the harder it became to watch [...]
Notes on Cloudflare Access 🔗
Cloudflare is now in the AWS zone: it has a long tail of useful but under-examined little services that haven't quite entered the zeitgeist the way th [...]
A Master Builder 🔗
Vanya on 42nd Street is, to date, my favorite film of the year. The more I revisit it, the more I suspect it might be one of my favorites of all time. [...]
Tech debt is weird 🔗
Jesse wrote this interesting article on technical debt, which resonated with me spiritually but not directionally -- which is a very weird way to say [...]
Secondhand Time 🔗
It is rare that I review a book before I finish it. Sometimes I do this with bad books that I have not completed — but that is what the Goodreads user [...]
MacGruber 🔗
Letterboxd has an ingenious concept baked into its rating system. You can rate a film on a scale of zero to four stars, and you can also adorn a film [...]
Patch notes 🔗
Earlier this year I mentioned that Slay the Spire 2 had reached the status of needing to be deleted from my computer, on the grounds that it was provi [...]
Adaptation 🔗
Eighteen months ago, I wrote in review of Being John Malkovich: [...]
Near to the Wild Heart 🔗
Two friends, upon learning that I wanted to get into Clarice Lispector, advised me not to start with Near to the Wild Heart. Having now finished the b [...]
op, mprocs 🔗
Two small tooling changes that have been really nice for us at Buttondown: [...]
Best of Enemies 🔗
Last year, I watched The War Room, the documentary following Bill Clinton's first campaign — a film I am remiss for having never written about, becaus [...]
Snacks are cheaper and tastier than ever 🔗
Perhaps the single most consequential essay I've read is Will Larson's Work on what matters. This is ostensibly advice targeted towards staff engineer [...]
Cursed knowledge 🔗
Nick pointed me towards Marcin who pointed me towards immich's list of cursed knowledge the other day, and it has already become a running joke in the [...]
Enough Said 🔗
More by luck than by fate, most of the great protagonists of the last forty years of television have escaped forever being associated with the charact [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]