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the university where we buried my daughter’s umbilical cord in the garden. image image

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not understanding half the slang younger people use anymore.

people really underestimate american food. you always hear that the u.s. does not have great cuisine, but honestly, american bbq is some of the best food in the world.

and speaking of bbq, terry black's was one of the best meals i've ever had in my life.

the line was around 30 to 40 minutes, but completely worth it.

i paid about $150 for this tray three years ago. imageimage

america's mythical rabbit with antlers.

the funny part is that nature occasionally gets surprisingly close. a real virus can cause rabbits to grow hard, hornlike keratin growths around their heads. so the jackalope is fake, but biology apparently liked the idea. image

a system where elections still exist, opposition parties still campaign, and people still vote, but the playing field around the ballot box is no longer genuinely equal.

turkey is a useful example. elections can still produce real surprises and opposition victories, but state resources, media power, pressure on opponents, and weakened institutional independence can heavily favor those already in power.

that is what makes electoral autocracy interesting. the government does not need to abolish elections.

it only needs to make sure democracy happens on increasingly uneven ground.

the ballot box survives.

the ecosystem that makes the ballot box meaningful slowly erodes.

this story is honestly hard to believe.

thousands of world war i veterans went to washington in 1932 because the great depression had left many of them broke, and they wanted the government to pay their promised war bonuses early.

instead, the army was eventually sent in to clear them out.

so you had american soldiers, under douglas macarthur, moving against american veterans who had already fought for the country. camps were burned, tear gas was used, and people were injured.

there is something especially ugly about asking people to risk their lives for a country, then treating them like a problem when they come back poor and desperate. imageimage

i’ve tried all kinds of meat in different cities and countries, including organ meats prepared in all kinds of ways.

but this summer, i had the best meat i’ve ever tasted in my life. image

apparently they made a movie about his life.

my personal take is that a phone without face id already feels like a downgrade.

i'm sure apple will refine the hardware and software over the next year or two and turn it into a much more polished device, but i have no interest in being an early tester.

i also don't feel like i need a foldable phone, so i'm not convinced i want such a radically different user experience in the first place.

expo invited me to contribute as a guest author on their blog and gave me the chance to write about udictio. here's the post: building a native-first social platform with expo

apple's big september event is happening today at apple park.

iphone 18 pro and pro max are basically the main event, but the interesting part is whether apple finally shows the long rumored foldable iphone.

new apple watches should be there too, along with final release dates for ios 27 and the rest of the new software.

basically one of those apple events where the regular iphone upgrades are expected, but everyone is waiting to see if they actually pull out the foldable.

"hard times create strong men. strong men create good times. good times create weak men. and weak men create hard times."

that quote pretty much captures social cycle theory in one sentence.

the idea is that societies rarely move in a straight line. they rise, stabilize, prosper, get comfortable, fracture, decline, and eventually rebuild into something new.

you can see versions of this throughout history. rome went from republic to empire to fragmentation. chinese dynasties repeatedly went through unification, prosperity, corruption, rebellion, and replacement. even modern societies seem to swing between periods of stability, crisis, reform, and backlash.

history obviously isn't this neat or predictable, but that's what makes the theory interesting. civilizations separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years somehow keep falling into strangely familiar patterns.

the gym’s way of asking how attached you are to breathing normally.

(see: electoral autocracy)