Monthly Archives: August 2025

August 29, 2025

Friday Notes (Aug 29, 2025)

I’m beginning to think this Friday Notes series is a Sisyphean Mission. While I’ve managed to reduce the main pile of notes to almost nothing (or at least nothing I feel like writing about), there remain other piles.

Not to mention the way new notes constantly spring up like mushrooms in the shady damp part of the forest.

Fortunately, I enjoy writing these (in all honestly, because they’re easy to write). For a while, largely because of Substack, I thought they might end up being mostly what I posted here.

6 Comments | tags: Dell Computers, disenvoweling, HP Computers, Kidde smoke alarms, Lenovo Computers, Leverage (TV series), Substack, weather | posted in Friday Notes

August 26, 2025

The Peripheral

By Wyrd Smythe

I have a great deal of respect for science fiction author William Gibson and what he contributed to the art but can’t honestly say I love his writing. Gibson and Bruce Sterling are widely viewed as the fathers of cyberpunk (hence the respect), but I find their writing sometimes opaque and challenging (though maybe that’s on me).

In recent years I’ve been revisiting both authors — rereading the few stories I have read and checking out many I never did. It hasn’t moved the needle that much for me, though. Still don’t find them highly engaging.

Which brings us to The Peripheral and its Amazon Prime adaptation.

7 Comments | tags: adaptations, Amazon Prime, science fiction books, science fiction TV, William Gibson | posted in TV Tuesday

August 21, 2025

MN Twins: Not Great

By Wyrd Smythe

From this blog’s beginning in 2011 until the end of the 2019 season, I’ve written about the Minnesota Twins. But not so much since. One post in 2020, about the COVID-shortened season. One more in 2021, about how I seemed to have moved past baseball. That was pretty much it until this year.

A number of things changed this year, and for the first time since 2019, I’ve been watching Twins games.

Unfortunately, they aren’t having a good year.

2 Comments | tags: Minnesota Twins, stats, Twins 2025 | posted in Baseball

August 14, 2025

BB #95: Our Documentation

By Wyrd Smythe

The previous post, Our Memories, suggested that — in large part because they become faded self-imaginings— we might want to consider not clinging to our event memories as much as we sometimes do. We might want to focus on what we are more than where we’ve been.

Put it this way: What matters is what you are (and can do), not what facts or moments you can recall. Which is likely why I always resisted memorizing dates or formulas I can easily look up.

Which touches indirectly on a counterpoint to what I wrote yesterday…

2 Comments | tags: cameras, memories, smartphones | posted in Brain Bubble

August 13, 2025

BB #94: Our Memories

By Wyrd Smythe

In another place, someone wrote: “It is memories that make us who we are, that haunt us, that enrich and warm us, that remind us of how to be better.” The place and the someone can be anonymous here because the sentiment is a common one.

In this Brain Bubble, I’d like to push back on that, at least a little. I want to suggest as counterbalance the one memorable line from an unmemorable film trilogy:

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”

1 Comment | tags: Kylo Ren, memories, the past | posted in Brain Bubble