All's well here at The Dispatch. The snails have started making spaghetti from scratch. It's an arduous process and takes up a lot of time and space in the kitchen. But they have been having a lot of fun doing it, so we're happy to buy them the ingredients and let them cook for us. The spaghetti is actually very good and their sauce is getting better every night. We're starting to get tired of the same meal every night, but it is really nice not to have to cook dinner, so we'll let them keep feeding us until they inevitably get tired and move on to another project. They want us to say "yes chef!" whenever they address us and we're not doing that.

Game Boy 👾

• Magic: The Gathering
• Alan Wake II
  • It got good reviews, is the same devs as Control, and was spooky season vibes so I bought it when it came out
  • Really cool graphics, similar mechanics to Control but much broader-feeling, and feels like a an actual story comparable to good TV

Links 🔗

• Set up a Pi-Hole for the home wifi
  • wrote the image for ubuntu v22 onto a pen drive and installed ubuntu from the pen drive onto my old Dell Latitude laptop
  • installed Pi-Hole onto the machine using this walkthrough
  • set the Dell to not lock on idle in the Ubuntu settings and followed this StackOverflow post to get it to not fall asleep
• System Design 101
  • Thought this was about design systems initially, but still pretty cool
  • Infographics explaining different systems in web development
  • Didn't dig super far into it, but seems like it'd be cool to revisit
• Running a latent consistency model on your Mac
  • Cool-looking walkthrough on installing a Stable Diffusion-like model on an M1 MacBook and apparently generate images from a prompt in around a second
  • Would be cool for making placeholder art for any dev project, but I'm thinking of custom Magic cards

Albums 🎧

• "Javelin" by Sufjan Stevens
  • three times this week
• "The Age of Adz" by Sufjan Stevens
  • twice this week
  • has become another essential Sufjan album
• "RTJ4" by Run The Jewels
• "Fleet Foxes" by Fleet Foxes
• "Sun Giant" by Fleet Foxes
  • almost required follow-up listening to the album
• "Trick" by Alex G
  • twice this week
• "i,i" by Bon Iver
  • continuing the high-school era Fleet Foxes / Bon Iver vibe
  • remembering that this Big Red Machine song exists
• "22, A Million" by Bon Iver
• "Jenny from Thebes" by The Mountain Goats
  • Surprise sequel to All Hail West Texas over 20 years later
  • Production way more polished, like most of their newer stuff
• "Cousin" by Wilco
• "Isn't It Now?" by Animal Collective

Podcasts 🎙️

• Not Another DnD Podcast
  • Continuing to cruise through the Short Rest episodes and they've been good background