Stuff Jesse Likes

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

https://www.octopuspie.com

This might be my favorite comic series ever? It's funny and thoughtful and deeply human.

It originally ran from 2007 to 2017, I think I picked it up in college or soon after, so I've always been following the ages and experiences of the characters a few years behind them.

The author, Meredith Gran, has since made two adventure games about growing up on fire island and then going to college in NYC. I haven't played the second one yet but it's getting really great reviews.

If you're looking to cut Spotify out of your life for being evil and increasingly shitty, so far Tidal has been a great less evil and less shitty alternative.

https://enclose.horse/

A delightful little daily puzzle about placing a limited number of walls to enclose your horse with as large a pasture as possible. Over time they've added fruit (extra points), bees (negative points) and portals. They show a daily leaderboard and let you see what the optimal solution is.

The outro is pretty jarring and I wish they'd release a version without it.