Jerry Towler

Brimstone (Callie Hart)

Tue, 12 May 2026 18:01:30 -0600

Finished reading: Brimstone by Callie Hart 📚

Look, the special girl gets more special!

Seriously, Hart’s worldbuilding and storytelling are massively improved from the first book, and this is a worthy read. (I really want to know who the Hazrax is, and if it’s super obvious, I am prepared to be embarrassed.)

The pacing is still weird, and the writing quality isn’t much better, if at all. (Hint: dropping $2 words occasionally makes your prose awkward, not sophisticated.) There was almost some pathos, but she shied away at the last minute.

All in all, a surprisingly good read. Recommended.

Tue, 05 May 2026 21:28:37 -0600

Finished reading: Cursed by Benedict Jacka 📚

Jacka continues to write fun urban fantasy with a little noir detective thrown in.

My unfamiliarity with London geography continues to make some of this series hard to follow, and the characters don’t see quite as rich as I wish they were. But they’re fun reading, even if Verus doesn’t list himself in the yellow pages.

Day One AI-Guided Journaling: Good, Not Great

Mon, 04 May 2026 13:30:43 -0600

I tried Day One’s “Chat About Your Day” feature today. It’s a conversation about your day, where each turn is a little prompt, rather than a blank journal page.

It went well.

The prompts were very scope limited, encouraging short replies, and they felt apt. The final journal entry was pretty good, although it felt kind of like splicing my words together rather than a coherent entry.

The biggest challenge was that the AI had no sense of when to stop. It just kept asking questions and letting me answer, and that could go on all day.

It needs a sense of “we have explored as far as the user wants to explore, here’s a giant ‘Compile Entry’ button.”

I’ll definitely use it again.

Sun, 03 May 2026 16:35:38 -0600

Afternoon hike at Ghost Falls trail down in Draper.

Three round trips in twelve days (San Antonio, Huntsville, DC) means I need to take every opportunity I have to get outside while I’m here.

Sat, 02 May 2026 11:25:45 -0600

Hop Skud and a burrito bowl at Free Roam in Boerne.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:18:45 -0600

I don’t miss much about Texas, but Torchy’s is very high on the list.

Specifically, the brushfire tacos that were tonight’s dinner and which I can still taste.

Also high on that list: HEB. Other grocery stores should send ambassadors to HEB like Meiji Japan sent ambassadors to the world.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:10:41 -0600

Finished reading: The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden 📚

I finished this years ago, but apparently didn’t blog about it.

This third book takes the calm dark winter fairy tale of the first two books and turns it into an action movie that somehow has the same creepy Russian fairy tale vibe.

An excellent conclusion to a great trilogy. More, please.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:31:09 -0600

Finished reading: The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst 📚

A worthy follow-up to The Spellshop, about Caz’s creator continuing her forbidden magic. Sort of.

I like this world, and I enjoyed seeing another part of it. Felt a bit long in places, but still an easy, enjoyable read.

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:51:51 -0600

First session back on the yoga mat after a three-week business travel extravaganza (I am so tired) was brutal.

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:24:39 -0600

Finished reading: The Lake House by Sarah Beth Durst 📚

Not sure what I thought I was getting—something like The Spell Shop, probably—but this is not that.

Three teenage girls go to a summer camp, but when they arrive, it’s been burned down, the counselor has been murdered, and the campers are missing.

It gets worse from there.

Fun read! Lots of pain and friendship and soul-searching and weakness and strength. Just not what I thought I was reading.

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:26:27 -0600

Finished reading: Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson 📚

Outrageously detailed, as usual for Isaacson, with all kinds of facts and stories I’d never heard, despite having visited Milan’s da Vinci museum.

Highly recommended, with the caveat that, also as usual for Isaacson, it’s a little too positive about Leonardo and doesn’t explore his failures as deeply as I would have preferred.

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:22:51 -0600

Finished reading: Quicksilver by Callie Hart 📚

A quick read with faeries and vampires and magic and gods.

Checks the romantasy boxes: brooding hero, gorgeous magical special girl, companions on both sides.

Some rough prose, but if you don’t expect too much, you’ll have fun.

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:24:10 -0400

Finished reading: Twelve Months (The Dresden Files, #18) by Jim Butcher 📚

A fun palate cleanser. Important plots move forward. A few important bits of lore get revealed. Nothing gets quite enough attention. (Dresden and Lara could have used an entire book to themselves.)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:11:35 -0400

Suddenly it’s winter again in Denver.

Maybe it’s a good thing we brought our skis after all…

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:24:29 -0400

These thoughts from Thought Shrapnel are in conflict:

a Japanese farmer who rediscovered the old ways, and paying more attention to the seasons

and

Essentially, everything is emergent, and all your brain is doing is making links between things. Which is why I don’t have any problem in using LLMs as part of my workflow.

Inhabiting time (“paying more attention to the seasons”) is a kairos-forward approach, and seems to have spooky emergent properties.

Using LLMs to replace, automate, or accelerate link-making is chronos-forward, and, while not bad, is very much not the same thing.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:11:03 -0400

Brazilian sandwich for lunch at The Garage Food Hall before my flight out.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:45:44 -0400

Today’s LinkedIn CrossClimb puzzle used “Patriarch in the book of Exodus” as a clue for MOSES.

Quick, name any descendant of Moses.

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:30:45 -0600

I send you out for exciting new designer drugs, and you come back with… tomato sauce.

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:02:30 -0600

I have worked very hard to eliminate the possibility of infinite scrolling eating my time.

Some days I get to the end of my RSS feed and Micro.blog and start looking for something else to read before I realize:

I have constructed my world this way, so it’s time to get up and do something else.

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:21:36 -0600

The Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and business customers.

Smashing a quasi-IDE into a goofy web browser is so silly-sounding (and unlikely to simplify anything) that I almost believe the WSJ misunderstood what it was told.

Software developers tend to be do-one-job Unix people or do-everything super-app kitchen-sink people.

They both generally think the other group is insane.

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:46:36 -0600

The plural of “doozy” as in, “it’s a doozy” looks weird to me:

doozies.

Why does the singular look okay, but the plural looks so bad I want to write around it?

(Not to be confused with Doose’s Market, the grocery store next to Luke’s owned by Taylor Doose and pronounced exactly the same way.)

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:45:23 -0600

Wow, these plugins look amazing! Years ago I built some of this for Jekyll, but I didn’t take the very hard extra step of publishing them for others to use.

Awesome work, @rscottjones; if you need testing, I’d love to help.

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:35:07 -0600

I love all the breathless stories about data centers in space that seem to forget the biggest problem with launching compute.

You have to read to the very last paragraph of this Payload article to learn that they still haven’t overturned thermodynamics:

Of course, in space there’s no conduction, there’s no convection, there’s just radiation, and so we have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space but we’ve got lots of great engineers working on it.

Earlier, the article claims both “low-SWaP” and also 25x the performance of the H100.

And, presumably, no cooling necessary.

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:34:58 -0600

“This Is Not The Computer For You” · Sam Henri Gold:

He knows it’s probably not the right tool. It doesn’t matter. It never did.

The reviews can tell you what a computer is for. They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.

There are too many great words in this piece about the MacBook Neo (via Daring Fireball) to quote them all, so maybe just go read the whole thing. It’s short.

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:02:12 -0600

When writing that last post, I instinctively went to the Wayback Machine because it’s a post about censorship from the publication being censored.

About halfway through the process I remembered Micro.blog already auto-archives pages. That @manton is a smart guy.