Stuff Jesse Likes

Do you remember when you were a kid and you'd look out the window of the car as you were driving, and it would look like the moon was following you?

That was just cause of parallax, that wasn't me buddy, don't worry about it.

Youtube recommends this to me again about once a year and I'm always happy to see it.

And then years later watching a technical art talk on motion tracking in Blender I learned that it was the same guy.

Alpha Phoenix is a consistently great science communicator on youtube, he builds really cool experiments. Two of my favorites are:

Measuring the speed of light in a super understandable way. There's something just really cool to me that it's even possible for somebody to do this, on earth, with reasonably accessible technology.

Super stunning timelapse videos of trying to grow perfectly aligned ice crystals. Normal ice has no consistent structure, but snow flakes have perfect hexagon based shapes - what happens if you grow ice from a single snow flake?

But his whole channel is great, definitely check his history of videos for anything that jumps out at you.

I've been really loving this game for the last three months. It's in the very niche category of "games about programming", inspired by Zachtronics, another favorite of mine. For each puzzle you're shown a 3d voxel shape and need to write a program that outputs that shape.

The program runs once per voxel (x,y,z coordinate) and returns a color or no color, like a 3d version of "shader" programs in videogames, and can be an animation with multiple frames.

(Photo credit: Semira Menghes)

La Capital Tacqueria

Birria is beef or lamb stewed in super flavorful rich broth (consomé) and usually served with the broth for dipping. I've mostly seen it in tacos with and without cheese and sometimes in tortas. They usually dip the tacos in the consomé and then fry them on the plancha so they're crispy and all the flavor is seared into the tortilla.

Jalisco is famous for it, and I'm learning now from wikipedia that it's a regional variant of barbacoa.

We spent a month in Puerto Vallarta (in Jalisco) and had a lot of birria tacos and consomé, and the best I've ever had is still La Capital in Troy NY.

We love to get two orders of the birria tacos and a burrito, and then pour the consomé into the burrito as we eat it.

Definitely eat it hot at the restaurant if you can, it's still good as takeaway but best hot. I think we liked all the burritos except for the al pastor one.

Credit for the original recommendation goes to Shivon. I then forgot that entirely and excitedly told her about it a year later.

I have an idea for a new holiday I'm trying to make happen: "Mug Renewal Day".

(I'm open to other names! Renewal day? Mug day?)

On the day, everybody picks their least favorite mug from the cubbard and dramatically smashes it on the ground, as a sacrifice representing the things they want to remove from their life, and leading us to think upon the better things we want to replace them with.

Pros:

• This makes room for the new, better mugs that come into our lives.
• Smashing things is fun and therapeutic.
• Gives you a social opportunity to think about renewal in your life, what you want less of and what you want more of.

Cons:

• More consumer waste. (I'm assuming you're inevitably getting more mugs every year anyways though.)
• Somebody might step on or drive over ceramic shards if you don't clean up well.

I guess you could use something representative of a mug, like a mug piñata, but I feel like the shatter is going to be way less visceral.

This is one of my favorite youtube channels, a carpenter/general contractor team that do video series of their full home builds and remodels.

I've been parasocially following along with these guys for years now. It's always fun and educational, if you want to learn about foundations, concrete, framing, inspections and following code, roofing, etc etc.

They do biweekly videos that are super in the weeds, but if you just want to check them out you can start with their edited full build series, that condense months of videos into an hour or two. You can find a playlist of their complete build videos here.

I didn't realize how much nostalgia I had for this very particular type of pizza until watching this. I don't know why I always assumed they got it frozen premade somewhere, it's cool to learn why a lot of the unique aspects of the pizza are due to the recipe being specifically designed for easy mass production by the cafeteria workers.

It's a great game!

You play as a young woman on a desert planet, leaving your tribe as part of a coming of age ritual, to ride your hover bike around the vast deserts, meet people, and figure out what you want to do with your life (by helping people and collecting masks representing roles and jobs you could take on).

Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is one of those books that seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but I think is a real challenge to Democrat politics.

The core thesis is that Democrats are comfortable re-allocating money (health care subsidies, welfare, rent stabilization) but are really bad at building real things in the real world (housing, renewable energy), and the latter is what people need to see to believe democrats are capable of governance.

"Big government is inefficient and bad at doing things" is such a conservative coded critique that a lot of people instinctively feel the need to reject it, but the book addresses it as a very real problem.

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE was part of my inspiration for making a simple static site again.

They have a lot of cool content on sustainable and renewable energy, but the most delightful bit is that their website is hosted on a single home server running on a solar panel and a battery, and if the weather is cloudy for a few days in a row the site can just go down.

They serve small, dithered grayscale images to save on the most expensive part of data transfers.

They also implement a comments section by having people just email in comments and manually adding them to the pages.

I find the idea really refreshing - I was excited to build a hyper optimized personal site using Rust, but turns out it's even more optimized to just serve static html pages, which is what this "Stuff Jesse Likes" blog is. It's a part of a larger critique of modern software, Wirth's Law, that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster, or "what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

I do waffle on the usefulness of some of their specific sustainable energy suggestions - I think the perspective is really valuable, but still hope we could reach a place where renewable energy and battery storage is so abundant we don't need to worry about things like air conditioning and heating.

A few interesting examples:

Bedazzled by Energy Efficiency: To focus on energy efficiency is to make present ways of life non-negotiable.

How to Build an Electrically Heated Table