Miscellaneous Essays

This is the main collection of things I write, which are generally unconnected from each other.

In the future, I may migrate articles from here to specialized collections. I do not currently have permalinks, but I will retain a 301 Moved Permanently response at the original link for at least one year.

Articles

  1. Pushing Boundaries ()

    After-action report on a trek in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

  2. Saving Minthara ()

    Baldur’s Gate 3 is an unbelievably cool video game. Here’s a way to break it a little bit.

  3. From Sea to Sky ()

    I migrated my website to a new hosting service for the first time in a while.

  4. This Is The Place ()

    I want to talk about death and what it means to be alive.

  5. 2020 Amazon Letter to Shareholders ()

    A critical (somewhat scathing, somewhat philosophical) review of the 2020 Amazon letter to shareholders.

  6. Industrial Artisanry ()

    I’ve thought a lot about the effects of industrial production on our material circumstances, especially since everyone in my family is an artisan of some kind. Here are some reflections on that.

  7. What’s With the Diæreses ()

    There are more things in language and orthography, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your ASCII encoding.

  8. Bitfields in Rust ()

    A walkthrough of the recent bitfield behavior I implemented in bitvec

  9. Battlestar Astrodynamica ()

    I accidentally got way too invested in the astrodynamics of a complex stellar system and the mechanics of teleporting.

  10. Rust Flow, Part Two ()

    Rust doesn’t have a language-level concept of generic mutability, which makes “method threading” (which take self by some handle, and return it in the same way) hard to write. This article covers how to write in that pattern in a less painful way.

  11. Rust Flow ()

    Rust allows for a very functional style of value “flow” without sacrificing the performance of a more traditionally imperative sequence. Furthermore, the functional flow may offer more clarity about value lifetimes and error handling that the imperative sequence might obscure.

  12. Stop Buying Trucks ()

    An examination of America’s recreational trucking habit, by Klaus Payne.

  13. Rolling My Own RSS Feed ()

    My previous post was about writing blogs. This one is about reading them.

  14. To All the Posts I’ve Blogged Before ()

    A self-involved reflection on why I have this section of my site. Blame Manish.

  15. Adventures with nom ()

    Some things I learned while using the nom library on a parser project.

  16. On Safety, and How Rust Can Help ()

    The Rust community issued a call for blog posts about Rust’s potential in 2018 and this is my response. It’s not very much about Rust.

  17. Solar Eclipse Geometry ()

    Far too much information about why the moon’s shadow does what it does in an eclipse.

  18. Inverted Discourse ()

    I wrote about an event I observed on Twitter and how it pertains to popularity effects I’ve seen in real life and especially amplified on social media.

  19. ASCII-Centrism ()

    An article about a small, small subset of problems with using software tools that have ASCII- and/or English- only syntax elements.

  20. Computers Are Hard ()

    A brief, evergreen note about why sometimes you can’t read my website. Posting it on that website was, perhaps, foolish.

  21. Hermaeus and Simple Tools ()

    I wrote a tool to ease archival work for a subreddit I frequent.