March 22 to 28, 2026

• I've celebrated a birthday. I'm not a big birthday guy, and this birthday in particular feels like a non-entity -- it's past 30 (before which each birthday felt kind of significant) and not a major milestone. But I don't mind if family want to get excited about it, and getting a card and a lego set from my 4 year old was pretty great.

  • I also saw my sister and her partner and she brought my a marvelous cake: white sponge, vanilla bean whipped cream, lime curd, cracked meringue, and fresh fruit. Astounding.

• Toronto's weather seems to be gradually escaping the dying clutches of winter. We had snow on Monday, but melted by the afternoon. Tuesday started bright and sunny, although still cold. Snowdrops and our over-wintered garden box chives are peeking out.

• Also for my birthday I bought Marathon, the new extraction shooter from Bungie. It is wildly out of character for me: I haven't played a FPS seriously in probably... 20 years? It's not my genre, generally. But the lore on this one is interesting (with narrative consulting from the fellows who made Caves of Qud, which I loved) and the soundtrack is by an all-time fave (Ryan Lott of Son Lux, who I first saw in a dingy basement venue with 50 other people a decade ago and who is now composing Oscar-nom'd soundtracks and AAA game soundtracks and still putting out really interesting music).

  • So far I am abysmal at Marathon. Did I mention already that I haven't played this kind of game in two decades? I've been playing in the Solo queue, which basically means I'm dropped into the maps without a team, against others who are also solo (most people are playing in the squad queue, I suspect). My playstyle so far is: sneak around, grab gear to put in my vault or sell, try to complete my faction quest objectives, engage bots and players as little as possible, and then exfil. It is a bit exhilarating and a bit terrifying. When I encounter the aggressive security robots, it's even odds whether or not I survive the encounter (and I managed one run exfil with mere seconds of lifeforce remaining while downed by a bot, drained of my lifeforce by the half-dozen meaty Taser tethers it had attached to my shell body).
  • I've yet to actually encounter another player, and I'm quite anxious about how that will go when I inevitably do. Some extraction shooters (like Arc Raiders) have an internal culture and set of game affordances that seem to encourage occasional collaboration and friendliness. Marathon from what I can read online has yet to demonstrate that tendency. I'm sure I will get absolutely wrecked. But it's interesting that I've not seen anyone yet — I wonder if the Solo queue attracts similar play styles. It reminds me of the Dark Forest hypothesis which posits that we haven't encountered life in the universe because it's all hiding from each other out of fear.

• Work-wise, we're still in Final Report land.

  • As part of this I've sort of backed my way into articulating a broader (missing) GTM and product strategy for a set of related but discrete service / channel models, so that the various teams who are responsible for managing and (separately) selling them can a) have a stronger sense of how they go to market together and therefore what they need to deliver, and b) can tell a common story about how these pieces fit together and cover certain kinds of use cases instead of just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.

• I'm building out a section of this site for gathering up project notes vs. posts, and it's been a good push to think about the various projects on the go, and jot some notes and get a little traction there.

  • In particular, I did some jotting on a research agenda for Project Fulgurite, which is all about home decarbonization, and also for two TTRPG projects I've been chipping away at for a while.

• My dog got quite sick on Friday (she's fine now), which complicated my parents visiting Thursday-Saturday. More birthday celebrations, but abysmal sleep on Friday and Saturday nights.

  • The best part of this rather disordered weekend was another cake: angel food, with a boiled icing on top that is kind of like liquid marshmallow until it starts to harden up on the outside into a meringue-y consistency. The cake had rainbow sprinkles and the frosting was tinted the palest lavender. Delectable and nostalgic and perfect for spring.

• On Saturday night, we watched Sinners.

  • Overall, I thought it was great!
    • There was a post going around Bluesky the other day about "10/10 7/10 movies" vs. "7/10 10/10 movies" -- the former being movies with low ambition to be great art that really nail it nonetheless, and the latter being movies with high ambition to be art that don't quite make it. Anyways I think Sinners is a 10/10 7/10 movie for me -- it's a pulpy horror-action genre flick and the movie doesn't really try to transcend that but instead to just do it really really well and I think it succeeds at that
    • I don't get to watch a lot of movies these days but we did also watch One Battle After Another, which I think I liked slightly more. Sinners was really fun and fresh but One Battle made me think and work a little more and has stuck with me more durably.
      • I also love a Western and I can't stop thinking about One Battle as a kind of subversion of that genre in a lot of ways.