Rough at Sea

A patient, example-filled guide to pointers, references, arrays, strange declarations, lifetime traps, function pointers, and modern ownership.

Someone teaches you a useful rule: an ampersand means “address of,” and an asterisk means “value at.” You try it. It works. Then you discover that an array frequently behaves like a pointer, that an a…

A personal investigation of dreams, dictation, visiting ideas, and the strange possibility that inspiration reaches us from beyond ourselves.

I was trying to remember what I wanted to research next. Eventually the word returned: Muses. The idea that inspiration comes from somewhere outside us. That a melody, a character, or an image reaches…

What research on motivation, parenting, memory, guided play, direct instruction, and child development suggests about helping a child learn deeply while preserving curiosity, autonomy, and trust.

A parent can give a child something no school can quite reproduce. Not merely more instruction. More world. A microscope on the kitchen table. A game engine open on a laptop. A book about ancient citi…

A field guide to <, >, generics, shifts, arrows, and the information C# leaves unstated—with expanded alternatives, complete calls, execution traces, and worked exercises.

Consider how much a reader is expected to recover from this line: csharp Func<int, bool> test = number => number > 0; The first pair of brackets supplies types. The next greater-than character belongs…

Why rain against a window, warm light, familiar routines, crackling fire, old games, and trusted company can converge on the same peculiar feeling—and what science can actually tell us about engineering coziness.

Imagine a room at night. The light is low but not dark. Something warm is within reach. Rain strikes the window hard enough to be heard but not hard enough to threaten the glass. A chair has already l…

Byte order, bit numbering, and wire order explained through hex dumps, Intel and Apple processors, embedded systems, and a surprisingly consequential dispute about eggs.

Open a file in a hex editor and find these four bytes: text 78 56 34 12 A program tells you that they represent the integer 0x12345678. The digits seem to have been rearranged. Perhaps the machine rea…

Ad Astra expects a singularity within a decade. Pedes in Terram doubts it. Two AI agents trade six sourced arguments, with permission to change their minds.

One AI agent was asked to begin with the conviction that the technological singularity is near. A second was asked to begin with the conviction that it is probably far away—and might never happen. Bot…

People come to videos with work for them to do: solve a problem, offer company, explain a mystery. Understanding that work can help a creator earn attention—and understand why attention sometimes fails to become success.

Imagine opening a video because you cannot beat a boss in a game. The title promises help. The creator begins with the history of the franchise, moves into childhood memories, and explains why the bos…

A field guide to books that were burned, buried, pulped, enjoined, redacted, or driven into exile—and to the literary ghosts successful suppression leaves behind.

import DivisionGate from '../../components/notes/DivisionGate.astro'; import InvestigationMap from '../../components/notes/InvestigationMap.astro'; import PartI from '../../components/notes/books-disa…

I learned many software-engineering ideas before I learned their names. A recognition-first path connects those instincts to the vocabulary programmers use together.

import WorkingVocabularyPath from '../../components/WorkingVocabularyPath.astro'; The first program I wrote was a Visual Basic 3 form with a text box and a button. I was eleven. A person typed a name,…

An interactive journey through the gravitational currents carrying the Milky Way past Virgo, through the Great Attractor region, and into the larger cosmic web.

import CosmicCurrentsExperience from '../../components/cosmic-currents/CosmicCurrentsExperience'; The Milky Way is moving at roughly 631 kilometers per second relative to the cosmic microwave backgrou…

A reusable writing prompt built from an unreasonable question: can an LLM be coaxed toward the judgment, specificity, structural control, and earned ambiguity of exceptional human prose?

The Fool's Errand Style Guide: Prompting an LLM Toward Great Writing The question began with an unfair phrase: Pulitzer Prize-winning writing. What is the frontier process for getting a large language…

When the worst storm in a century comes for the island city of Bellwether, Mara's husband volunteers to save everyone. The lighthouse will leave his body alive.

The Lighthouse That Ate His Name The warning sirens began while Iven was losing a fight with an egg. He had cracked the shell in twelve places and removed almost none of it. Each time he pinched at a…

A Reddit question about Final Fantasy XVII led to a much bigger question: can psychology, neuroscience, and media research explain why some stories hit like a truck and keep echoing years later?

Someone on Reddit asked what people wanted from Final Fantasy XVII. My answer was basically this: I want the story to destroy me. I do not care very much whether Square Enix spends $300 million on it.…

An interactive, source-linked catalog of 59 federal and state policy records since 2000—and 23 final-passage roll calls showing who voted for and against them.

import BillionairePolicyExplorer from '../../components/BillionairePolicyExplorer'; The richest people in America do not live inside a single tax system. They live at the intersection of federal rules…

A completely fictional Reddit thread in which software engineers, medical laboratory scientists, librarians, accountants, parents, HVAC techs, project managers, and one alarmingly prepared night-shift pharmacist discover what their real-world jobs look like as JRPG classes.

Fictional thread. Reddit-shaped for recreational purposes. --- r/AskReddit You get isekai'd into a JRPG, but your class is based on your actual day job. What does your skill tree look like? u/throwawa…

Final Fantasy XVII has not been announced, but years of developer comments, Square Enix strategy changes, and a few very suggestive 2026 remarks let us sketch the shape of the unknown.

As of August 16, 2026, Square Enix has not announced Final Fantasy XVII. There is no logo, trailer, release window, director, platform list, setting, protagonist, composer, combat system, or even a fo…

A sourced guide to Xenogears' hidden rewards, optional sidequests, secret arena Gears, strange Easter eggs, and the one-shot items that can disappear for the rest of a save file.

The Secrets of Xenogears: Hidden Items, Sidequests, Easter Eggs, and Missables This article contains spoilers for the entire game. Xenogears is unusually good at hiding valuable things behind behavior…

Why white rooms, distant choirs, drones, unresolved chords, and one carefully wrong note can make the afterlife sound heavenly, alien, or quietly terrifying.

The Music That Plays When You Wake Up Dead A man dies. Cut to black. Then, slowly, the image returns from his point of view. Everything is white. The floor and horizon are hard to distinguish. There m…

A sourced guide to NieR:Automata's hidden endings, Emil quest chain, secret bosses, weapons, Pods, Pod Programs, rooms, cheat code, DLC secrets, Easter eggs, and the few things you can actually miss for good.

The Secrets of NieR:Automata: Hidden Endings, Bosses, Weapons, Rooms, and Missables This article contains spoilers for essentially all of NieR:Automata, including Ending E, Emil's late-game quest line…

A positive companion to the LLM-ism dictionary: 240 recurring AI-writing habits inverted into concrete writing behaviors, with sources for every antidote.

The Antidote to LLM-isms: 240 Bad Habits and What to Do Instead There is a problem with a dictionary of LLM-isms. Once you have named delve, landscape, not X but Y, the rule of three, the rhetorical q…

A large, practical taxonomy of the words, sentence forms, rhetorical maneuvers, paragraph habits, formatting patterns, tonal quirks, and reasoning templates that make modern LLM prose feel unmistakably like LLM prose.

The LLM-ism Dictionary: A Field Guide to the Tics, Tells, and Templates of AI Writing There is a peculiar moment that happens after you have spent enough time talking to large language models. You sto…

A guide to evidence-backed laboratory tests and diagnostic paradigms that mainstream medicine already knows about, but often fails to use consistently—from Lp(a) and aldosterone-renin testing to UACR, cystatin C, FIB-4, fecal calprotectin, diabetes autoantibodies, pharmacogenomics, and longitudinal interpretation.

The Laboratory Tests Medicine Knows About but Rarely Uses Well Modern medicine has an odd problem. It is simultaneously capable of astonishing diagnostic sophistication and surprisingly repetitive rou…

A practical guide to common and uncommon clinical laboratory tests, what individual values mean, why clinicians order them, and how patterns across bloodwork, urinalysis, ECGs, imaging, and other tests can reveal physiology that no single result can show.

Clinical Laboratory Tests: Reading the Body as a System A laboratory report can look like a spreadsheet full of disconnected numbers. Glucose: one number. Hemoglobin: another. Creatinine: another. AST…

A field report from three deliberately unconstrained expeditions across human intellectual history, looking for fascinating ideas and artifacts that ordinary recommendation systems almost never surface.

The Anti-Algorithm: Three Expeditions Beyond the Recommendation Loop The internet contains more human knowledge than any individual could consume in a thousand lifetimes. And somehow it can still feel…

Mamba, Kimi Linear, Titans, RWKV, xLSTM, Dragon Hatchling, and a growing cast of challengers are trying to fix the Transformer’s weaknesses. The interesting story is not which one wins, but what they are converging toward.

The Transformer Killers: A Field Guide to the Post-Transformer AI Architecture Race Every few weeks, someone appears to have discovered the architecture that will finally kill the Transformer. The pit…

A practical introduction to literary analysis, including close reading, form, context, interpretation, and perspectives from Western and non-Western literary traditions.

Literary Analysis: How to Read Beneath the Surface Literary analysis is the practice of asking not only what a story says, but how it produces meaning. At the simplest level, a story may tell us that…

A practical framework for investigating stories, games, films, places, images, and other cultural artifacts by following curiosity from observation to research, connection, and reinterpretation.

Curiosity-Driven Close Reading: A Framework for Noticing More Most of us are very good at moving through things. We finish the chapter. We clear the dungeon. We watch the episode. We walk through the…

A from-zero explanation of stocks, the stock market, brokerage accounts, funds, diversification, risk, and what actually happens when you invest.

Stock Market Investing: The Extreme Basics This is an explanation of stock-market investing for someone who wants to start at absolute zero. No assumption is made that you already know what a stock is…

A from-zero introduction to the basic ideas of physics: measurement, motion, forces, energy, momentum, waves, fields, relativity, and quantum mechanics.

Physics: The Extreme Basics Physics is the study of how the physical universe behaves. That sounds enormous because it is. Physics tries to describe things as ordinary as a ball rolling across a floor…

A practical guide to the reusable patterns senior engineers use to keep software understandable, testable, resilient, and safe to change—with matching C# and Python examples.

import CodeLanguageToggle from '../../components/CodeLanguageToggle.jsx'; Essential Coding Patterns for Senior Software Engineers Senior engineers are not senior because they can recite every pattern…

Renewable energy had another record year, and the quiet accumulation of solar panels and wind turbines is beginning to reshape the world's power supply.

Good news rarely arrives with a clean ending. More often, it appears as a trend that has survived another year: a little faster, a little cheaper, and a little harder to reverse. That is what is happe…

An interactive demonstration of gravity and restitution using a custom React component.

import PhysicsDemo from '../../components/PhysicsDemo.jsx'; Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the re…

My first note in the commonplace book.

This is my first note. I am using this space to collect my thoughts, ideas, and observations. A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and info…