Contrariwise the Wizardly

2026

• Jun 11 I could (and probably should,) write a whole dissertation on the mahjong scene in Crazy Rich Asians.
• May 22 He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare. Hi. Hello. How are you? Good? Fantastic. Look. This is weird. Can I get weird? I’m going to get weird. Welcome to my Want Ad For Friends. You: …
• May 9 Take my wench… Please! I get no fealty. No fealty at all.
• May 6 Presented with the following choice: My dream home and working for “the man” forever. A trailer park and working for myself at my dream job. I pick option #2.
• Apr 30 Step three: vibe.
• Apr 5 an illumination
• Apr 2 Contrariwise is Human and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
• Mar 22 Some Thoughts on AI
• Mar 13 “Stick your chest out and go like — fuck it. Let’s try.” — Bruce Straley, Co-Founder, Wildflower Interactive @ GDC 2026​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
• Mar 7 Tired: Harry Potter houses. Wired: Winnie the Pooh characters. Tag yourself. I’m Owl.
• Mar 6 an illumination
• Mar 5 Lyft died halfway between LAX and Anaheim. The driver only speaks Mandarin, I only speak English. His phone is translating to English for me, my phone is translating to Mandarin for him. He says it’s …
• Mar 2 “why am i like this” Digital Art, 2026
• Feb 16 Did I go to a book store in the gayborhood? Yes. Did they have a Dune tarot deck? Yes. Am I now in possession of a Dune tarot deck? A lady never kwisatz and tells.
• Feb 15 I’ve never been particularly interested in conforming to society’s expectations. I learned to fake it, for the benefit of fitting in. Now, with the benefit of some duly earned confidence, society is …
• Feb 15 The thinnest naturally occurring material is Free Hotel Breakfast Bacon. Much could be learned by studying the processes that lead to such delicate structures.
• Feb 13 It’s an interesting conundrum. The person I actually am trying to build the person I’d like to be, using the constraints of my known behaviors to try to push on the rudder of the behaviors I’d like to …
• Feb 12 For reasons that defy explanation I’ve been watching a lot of Disney channel this week. They happen to be running a Zombies marathon. The cartoon is weirdly compelling. I may become the world’s …
• Feb 1 A Brief History of my Readwise Enrichment Pipeline
• Jan 29 Sister Mary Corita Kent source
• Jan 18 POSSUM: Post Own Site, Syndicate Using MUD
• Jan 18 I Shouldn’t Start a MUD
• Jan 9 If the singularity comes, may it find us doing well. If the apocalypse comes, may it find us doing well. If the end times are nigh, may they find us doing well. Come what may, may we do well.
• Jan 3 2025 Year in Review

2025

• Dec 12 My body is a temple to a dark and ancient god. Older than thought, its wisdom carved in my genes by a thousand and a thousand ancestors. It predates me, it will postdate me. It demands worship through …
• Nov 26 Hobbit Meal 2025
• Nov 23 Big ideas require a big piece of paper. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. — The person who did, in fact, make this rule.
• Nov 17 Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above …
• Nov 9 “Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the …
• Oct 25 “We like imperfection in others, but expect perfection in ourselves.” — Sarah Renae Clark
• Oct 22 an illumination
• Oct 19 Ash: “Put that away.” Me: “What?” Ash: “Your whimsy.”
• Oct 10 I Spend Too Much Money on Magic For Someone Who Doesn’t Play Magic
• Oct 9 Have the audacity. Believe that you can. Do the thing.
• Oct 9 It feels like we’ve developed some kind of histamine reaction to imagination. We are afraid that people will “catch” a bad idea. Well, stupid people are always gonna think dumb things and do dumb …
• Oct 4 Minimum Wage
• Oct 3 Orienting Toward Wizard
• Oct 3 One sentence on each place in Europe that I’ve been, in order of preference. 🇳🇴 Oslo, Norway Perfection. 🇳🇴 Kristiansand, Norway Feels like walking through a storybook about mice that run a bookstore. …
• Sep 30 Stockholm, Sweden
• Sep 28 Tallinn, Estonia
• Sep 27 Riga, Latvia
• Sep 26 Klaipeda, Lithuania
• Sep 24 Berlin, Germany
• Sep 23 Hamburg, Germany Neuengamme Concentration Camp
• Sep 22 Copenhagen, Denmark
• Sep 21 Aarhus, Denmark
• Sep 21 “Hamlet? Is that a sandwich?” — Ash
• Sep 20 Kristiansand, Norway
• Sep 19 Oslo
• Sep 13 My frustration around products that include AI isn’t the AI itself, it’s that I’m already paying for Claude and I’m not interested in paying for seven more copies of Branded Claude. Stop trying to …
• Aug 27 Not gonna lie, when I find someone who’s weirder than me in the ways I want to be weird I get a little jealous but like in a crush-y way? Like let’s be friends, but also enemies. Frenemies. I will …
• Aug 27 My seasonal theme is more thoughtful use of less space.
• Aug 25 Operating at the very top of the game, for any value of game, necessitates a single-minded devotion to the exclusion of all other interests or hobbies. The reason most of the people who are the best …
• Aug 15 “What is soup, but a potion for the soul?” — Ash
• Aug 7 “The French are good at two things: bread. Snails.” — Ash
• Jul 19 “I was complaining about this game two yahtzees ago.” — Ash
• Jun 25 On Productivity
• Jun 20 Is there a service that would let me input the details of a future trip (dates, location, cost,) and let my friends decide if they want to book concurrent trips, and then let me know their details so …
• Jun 9 WAG vs WUG
• Jun 3 Another evening of memes with the wizards. Not saying any of them are particularly good, but we had fun. If intentional living sounds like your jam, take a peek.
• Jun 1 What is a curse if not a dark gift?
• May 27 Makin’ memes with the wizards.
• May 10 The Crossroads Between Need and Desire
• May 2 A Personal Interest Rubric
• Apr 30 Somewhere around five years ago I briefly entertained the idea that I was very seriously going to attempt to be an author. During that time I approached this the way I approach everything: with my …
• Apr 4 The Wizard's Workbench Friday, April 4 2025
• Apr 3 An update on this year’s Theme
• Mar 27 A Journey into TTRPG Thoughtspace
• Mar 25 If you know who this is, we should be friends. Or enemies. Or frenemies.
• Mar 18 Me: “You’re Darmok, I’m Jalad, and together we are at Tanagra.” Ash: “What? Oh, Star Wars.”
• Mar 14 What’s up with me? Oh, just inventing a governance structure for a community of wizards. You?
• Mar 6 The first question: “is he spiders?” There is no second question.
• Feb 23 Working with AI
• Feb 20 A Selection of Wizard Memes
• Feb 1 Shit's Fucked
• Jan 25 Chat, are the vibes cooked?
• Jan 19 Ash: “what’s the cutest mammal?” Me: “are moths a mammal?”
• Jan 6 By age 400 you should have: defeated at least one plant. three orbs, at least one of which is cursed. read half of the 100 Greatest Tomes list. five mortal enemies, two blood pledges, and one kingdom …
• Jan 1 As far as I can tell this is Alton Brown’s journey: “No pasta.” Live and Let Diet, Good Eats S13:E13 “No white foods.” To the media at some point? I can’t find a direct reference, but AB mentions …

2024

• Dec 31 2024 App Defaults
• Dec 29 Introducing HealthOS
• Dec 29 2024 Year End Battle Report
• Dec 13 What is outer space if not a soup?
• Dec 9 Gondor calls for soup.
• Dec 1 The society I happen to have been born into is based on consumption. It tells me that my worth is measured in my economic contributions. That I will be judged by the clothes I wear, the car I drive, …
• Nov 30 “The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond …
• Nov 6 Winter is coming
• Oct 28 Wargaming as a hobby is incredibly cloistered, a series of rituals performed by robed adherents, and the systems broadly share so many concepts that you often draft on one to learn another. This means …
• Oct 25 On Generative AI
• Oct 15 Thinking out loud about the iPad
• Oct 14 From the journals of St. Rev. Dr. McPunch, Dweller, Vault 76 “Reclamation day” my entire ass. The vault has everything we need, and I’ve spent most of my life in it! Everyone else was in a hurry to …
• Oct 10 I’ve added a 100% Human Generated policy to my blog. […] AI is here. It’s going to “win” for many definitions of win, and some definitions of lose. But that doesn’t mean we need to abandon our crafts …
• Oct 10 Things I have recently discovered ChatGPT is good at: jira templates confluence templates pictures of disturbingly happy fruit philosophical discussions about Zeno’s paradox as applied to disturbingly …
• Sep 29 Folsom Street Fair is an anime convention. No, I will not elaborate.
• Sep 24 I might be the only person you know who doesn’t shop on Amazon. That’s not to say I never did. I had prime, many years ago. I even had a couple of those little IoT buttons that could automatically …
• Sep 17 I spent most of last night talking with a dear friend about community and connection in the current age of the Internet. We met, what feels like a hundred years ago, on IRC. I’ve sat here, staring at …
• Sep 5 A few months ago I looked back at my first 30 days of tracking 100% of my time. Now I have about a quarter’s worth of data, and some patterns have emerged. Looking at the data by project: …
• Aug 29 Saving $20 on airport food by spending $30 at Buc-Ee’s.
• Aug 22 I’d like to talk a bit about my favorite Massively Multiplayer Online PvP Game: eBay On the off chance you’re not familiar, eBay is an auction platform. People post the trash they would like to sell, …
• Aug 20 The way I make sense of the world is to talk about it, at length, with anyone who’ll listen. Which frequently means the people closest to me are stuck listening to me as I work out any complicated …
• Aug 7 I updated the main body font for my blog. It’s kind of a kludgy hack, but I think it’s a lot more readable. I’m working on a v2.0 of the theme to roll up a bunch of other fixes, but it was important …
• Aug 5 The Nature of Things (Burmese Classical Poems)
• Aug 5 Establishing a baseline for reviewing things can be difficult. Culturally, it seems like most Americans operate on a rating system that reflects the way that American schools grade. Start with a …
• Jul 31 I have a new blog theme! It’s entirely possible you’re witnessing it right now, with your very own eye-holes. If not, you might want to click through and give it a taste.
• Jul 23 I’ll be moving in roughly 3-4 years. I know what city, but not which suburb or neighborhood. What are some things I could be doing right now to establish a social circle in what will become my new …
• Jul 22 In no particular order, a list of things I need.
• Jul 21 “Is this a problem you have to solve, or can the world solve it for you later?” — Adam Savage
• Jul 21 I’m not “traditionally” goal motivated. What do I mean by that? I mean if I tried to set a goal for a year from now that looked something like this: “in one year I want to have written a book,” that …
• Jul 20 My curse is being incredibly picky about UI and UX but not being very good at implementing either.
• Jul 18 In competitive video games you should expect a 50% win rate. About half the time the other team will be better than you, half the time they won’t. You’re operating at the razor’s edge of your skill …
• Jul 17 I wish there were a way on micro.blog to write different kinds of posts. I forget the terminology but I’ve used hugo in the past to have a few distinct category of records. I want to do something like …
• Jul 9 I really hated the Libre 2 continuous glucose monitor (CGM.) A friend asked for some detail about why, which lead me down a long-winded story about the last five years of my health journey. About …
• Jul 8 I’ve spent the last several weeks using Toggl to track 100% of my time, and the results have been interesting. Reasoning On a flight to who knows where I read Use Strategic Thinking to Create the Life …
• Jun 26 Banh Mi Burgers Important Note #1 - This is a draft recipe. I made it somewhat improvisationally, so the amounts are in many cases a rough guess. Please don’t consider this a bulletproof tested …
• Jun 23 In no particular order, an update on various interests and hobbies. Clocks The mantle clock is running strong, but about five minutes fast per day. It uses a balance wheel, which is a particularly …
• May 14 I had the great fortune to spend the last week or so sailing along Alaska’s inside passage on the NCL Jewel. Being the kind of person that I am, I gave myself a side-quest on day one: eat at and …
• Apr 2 I’m doing what any reasonable person who has not eaten food for the last 48 hours would do and watching nothing but cooking videos.
• Apr 1 Whether I live here for six months or six years, I’ve decided that I am not holding my house in escrow for the future owners. There are plenty of milquetoast plain white interior designs on the …
• Apr 1 My ideal April 1st is one where at no point do I see anything related to “April Fools.” I realize this makes me sound like a buzzkill No-Funsington-Bear. I promise I’m not usually. What I am is …
• Mar 22 The important thing is that dreamers are still out there trying to build something new. There’s nothing the tech giants could think up this fiscal biennium that will excite me half as much as …
• Mar 16 Since I can never seem to pronounce “arnold palmer” correctly when I go to order one, I’m going to start calling it a Ryan Reynolds instead. Relative confusion about what I’m asking for remains …
• Feb 29 Yes I’ve seen the new Dune ornithopter from Lego. Call me when I can build Shai-Hulud; bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him.
• Feb 28 Language is hard. Communication is harder. When someone receives a communication, they interpret it through their own understanding and world view and the message that’s ultimately received may bear …
• Feb 28 The grandfather clock is currently haunted. It chimes randomly, often playing only part. The clocksman’s coming out next Sunday to gather the mechanism for repair, but until then I might not be the …
• Feb 26 Do the children know of bash.org? Who cries for bloodninja’s robe and wizard hat? Who sings the song of hunter2?
• Feb 26 個人サイト管理人に50の質問 50 Questions for Personal Site Administrators Shamelessly borrowed from bikobatanari.art/posts/202… who also provides context on where this trend originated. Please tell us your name …
• Feb 11 I back a lot of things on Kickstarter. Like. A lot of things. Especially during the annual ZineQuest, where indie TTRPG creators are encouraged to take a chance on the small, wild ideas that sometimes …
• Feb 8 Tonight I put frames on approximately 83% of the box of stuff that needs to be framed. Hanging it all will be a project for another year.
• Feb 5 Back at home safely ensconced in my office, wearing the slanket, and it’s time to talk about Hawaii. This is going to be something of a journal post, while also exploring some thought processes out …
• Feb 1 I’m about to say something you might find shocking, so before I do I want to make two things clear: This isn’t a complaint post. The purpose is not to vent. I actually consider this a positive and …
• Jan 26 I finished Roots of Pacha at a little over 50 hours of total play time. I still wouldn’t recommend it. “But random internet wizard, what would you recommend?” I hear you cry. Contrariwise’s Definitive …
• Jan 22 I’ve been away from home the last two weeks, give or take, smushing some personal travel together with some business travel to minimize my “suffering per airport hour” statistic as much as possible. …
• Jan 17 Shipwrecked.
• Jan 15 Sunset on Baker Beach.
• Jan 8 As part of the Year of Scales and Arpeggios I find myself needing to keep track of new things in new ways. The problem is that tracking things, like naming them, is hard. Maybe it’s less hard for …

2023

• Dec 31 It’s the last day of the Year of Time, and I think of it broadly as a success. I’ve cut my commitments to the bare minimum, and for the first time in forever have been making solid progress on self …
• Dec 28 Watching A Goofy Movie as a kid: it’s about a parent learning to understand his son. Watching A Goofy Movie now: it’s about a family learning to understand each other.
• Dec 26 A couple days belated, but last week was primarily about the run-up to Christmas. My routine for the last several weeks has been to wrap up dinner then settle on the couch with my Steam Deck, play …
• Dec 18 I quietly set the goal of spending no money for a week and almost managed to do it. There’s nearly enough food in the house that if I’m clever I don’t need to supplement much to make a week’s worth of …
• Dec 13 An Opinionated Decision Matrix for Which TTRPG System to Use
• Dec 12 I would like to propose the term “corporate dozen” to refer to any time or situation where a company has reduced the standard and customary amount of something in order to increase profits. EX: “Most …
• Dec 10 2024W50 Week in Review
• Dec 1 Had an excellent conversation last night with Jerry Holkins from Penny Arcade about tyranid list building and strategy that has me reconsidering half my 10th edition list.
• Nov 22 I’ve decided to restart my character in www.fallenlondon.com and play it over again. Hello again, delicious friends.
• Nov 18 The first book I’ve read in one sitting in probably two decades. Like being hugged by a warm bowl of soup. A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot Book 1) by Becky Chambers 📚
• Nov 17 I notice that when someone makes a post that micro.blog shortens to a title + link, if that title isn’t descriptive of the content, there’s 0% chance I’ll click through to see what it’s about. Need to …
• Nov 11 Getting ready for next weekend’s retreat by printing off every blog post even tangentially related to the problems I’m hoping to solve so that I have resources I can read and reference without being …
• Nov 11 Updated my version of a “now” page to add podcasts, since they’re the majority of my engagement with both news and media. thewizardly.com/now/
• Nov 6 My dream used to be to have no clocks in the house. To be fully untethered from needing to know what time it was. Probably achievable up to a point. Now that I’ve got all these mechanical clocks I …
• Nov 4 Freshly repaired, cleaned, and polished.
• Nov 4 The cashiers at Trader Joe’s were positively agog over the novelty of a $10 bill from 1993, which they had never seen before.
• Nov 3 I’m currently on the weird part of the internet. Which is to say, the only part of the internet which is still good. I have found a blinking gif which says “soup enjoyer.” It feels like home.
• Nov 2 Also, I would have £600 added yearly for the performance of charitable works, and those things I would not, neither will be, accountable for. — Eliza Compton
• Nov 2 Just discovered home.omg.lol which I don’t think I have a use case for, but it’s pretty cool and you should take a look.
• Oct 31 By Way Of An Introduction