All's well here at The Dispatch. The snails ordered a full-blown in-home massage table off of Amazon and we sent a couple of evenings trying to put it together. It was a pretty tedious endeavor because the snails insisted on being part of an assembly line to deliver the nuts and bolts to us (who they kept referring to as the "muscle"). We eventually got everything in working order and have received a few snail massages from them, which don't feel great.

Game Boy 👾

• Magic: The Gathering
  • Still playing a lot of Magic Arena daily
  • Going to make some proxies of pricier cards for Commander so going in on an order with some friends and using mpcfill.com for the proxies
• Valheim
  • Now on the Xbox Game Pass
  • Played this solo for a couple evenings
• Skyrim
  • Also on Xbox Game Pass
  • I downloaded and tried out some mods for higher quality graphics and other updates
  • Was having fun for a couple evenings and then lost interest pretty quickly

Coding Corner 👨🏻‍💻

• Typescripting the technical interview
  • The kind of programming as secret arcane symbolic stuff that I love
• Article about AI as a tutor
  • An interesting take on the influence these AI chatbots are going to have on education, where it might actually be helpful to have a personalized assistant to teach you things
  • Versus the common take that AI is going to make cheating so much easier for students that they won't ever learn anything
  • The premise seems to hinge on the idea that students would learn outside of the traditional school model, which seems idealistic; it seems like the actual bigger takeaway is that standards-based learning with evaluations and tests isn't great in the first place

Albums 🎧

• "A Beginner's Mind" by Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine
  • an easy-listening zone with familiar soundscapes
• "songs" by Adrianne Lenker
  • more easy-listening, feels comfortable and natural
• "God Save the Animals" by Alex G
  • becoming a classic; each song is its own little ecosystem
• "It's Almost Dry" by Pusha T
  • work music to get the last task done
• "Capacity" by Big Thief
  • haven't listened to this in a while but this album is a band with an already fully-realized sound; picking up on Fleetwood Mac vibes
• "Masterpiece" by Big Thief
  • rougher sketches but the titular single is a perfect song
• "U.F.O.F." by Big Thief
  • that same nature vibe from her "songs" album (and some of her songs from her solo album)
• "Two Hands" by Big Thief
  • if U.F.O.F is a tree, this is a boulder
• "The Creek Drank the Cradle" by Iron & Wine
  • soothing and predictable; easy to harmonize with physically and emotionally
• "Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You" by Big Thief
  • finishing off the Big Thief catalogue; a victory lap

TV Shows & Movies🍿

• The Last of Us
  • Season finale was pretty good, but ended at a weird spot
  • Felt like it was doing nods to the video game, but I haven't played it so I felt out of the loop
• Attack on Titan
  • Gotten to the "final season", which notoriously is around half of the show
  • But the story has opened up and developed in really interesting ways so I'm excited to see where it goes next