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My friends and I take turns picking movies to watch. I converted our crappy spreadsheet into a whole ass website.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been watching things over Discord on a nearly nightly basis with my friends Felicia and Beth. Sometime in March of 2025, we welcomed our friend Casey as a fourth to our nightly “watchies” group.

Casey and I have similar tastes in movies, but Beth, Felicia, and myself have wildly varied taste in movies at times, so we started a rotation sometime in 2023 to make it easier to pick what we were going to watch on any given night. We call this “Watchies.”

I made a spreadsheet on Google Sheets that I didn’t give much thought to. It was pretty simple. A few columns of names, what we watched, and sometimes I’d do bits like giving “Getting There” an entire row, making the text large, and coloring it brown because it was so bad that we stopped watching it. The “BIRTHDAY/GUEST” column was an afterthought. Also, this used to be on a black background before I deleted the spreadsheet by accident and restored it, hence the godawful yellow on gray.

It’s just ugly and bad and wrong.

Sometime during the early days of watchies, I created a Letterboxd account as well, and started religiously logging everything that I watched. Every time watchies ended for the night, I would log whatever we watched it in the spreadsheet and then log it to Letterboxd. The longer all of this went on, I found myself kind of regretting the lack of effort I put into the spreadsheet.

I tend to go over-the-top on anything that I make and that shitty spreadsheet was like a stain on my reputation; my internal reputation, of course, because nobody else cared, nor should they have. This is literally just a spreadsheet to keep track of who’s turn it is to pick and we just happened to write down what we watched, too.

A few months ago, I redesigned my site at https://jesse.id from the ground up and began adding components — over-engineered as always — such as a logo that tracks the location of the sun or moon relative to my location and also conveys the weather.

Ever since then, I have had several intrusive thoughts related to that spreadsheet every time I saw it. The intensity of the itch grew each time I had to look at it to log a movie.

“This spreadsheet really sucks. A thing that represents such an important thing to me shouldn’t suck this much.”
– 👍👍 This Guy

Well, the intrusive thoughts won and today it all changes because after lots of thinking and iterating, I have launched https://watchies.jesse.id. This new website completely replaces our watchies spreadsheet with the exact same thing but now it has way more shit in it that ultimately only I will see or care about!

The site integrates with both the The Movie Database (TMDB) API and Letterboxd RSS feed, combined with profile scraping, to provide extended information about nearly all of the things we have watched as well as any reviews that we have left on Letterboxd. Some of it isn’t perfect. That’s Letterboxd’s fault. It’s 2026 dude, where’s the public API? I digress.

On the front page, you can hover over any cell with a movie or television show and if it’s linked properly to The Movie DB, you can see its movie poster, synopsis, and the ratings that we’ve given it. You can then click on the review in the on-hover tooltip to go to the individual’s Letterboxd review directly.

Or if you want to see all of our reviews without hovering over a million cells, you can go to the “Reviews” page and see a nicely formatted list of them, with side-by-side columns to display which stuff we all reviewed.

Then we have the “Watch Lists” page that displays the Letterboxd watch lists for everyone, although currently it’s just Casey and myself. Atop that page, there is a component that calculates which films exist in multiple watch lists so we can more easily pick stuff to watch we haven’t seen but want to. Pretty sick!

That’s mostly it for the public-facing stuff. I created an administration dashboard, and profiles for each user to allow them to set their favorite color, which will change the color of their name and also the color of their notes.

The notes are on the main page , that any of us can set on any particular film by logging in to our account and clicking a little on-over note icon.

Also on the user’s profile page is their queue, where they can keep track of the next things they’re interested in watching. This is mostly for me because I have the memory of a goldfish. If we go back to the main page, we can see the queue visualized by hovering over the name in the heading it belongs to.

Users can add or remove things from this interface as well. Don’t worry about “Gagabiags.”

I SAID DON’T WORRY ABOUT GAGABIAGS.
– 👍👍 This Guy

Alright, that about does it for the tour of this new website that me and three of my friends will use, and probably no one else. Honestly, I’d be actually be surprised if my other 3 friends use it either. I’m historically very good at solving huge problems that are only huge problems to me. Most of the time, I’m the only one who sees a problem. It is one of the many blessings and curses of the AuDHD (allegedly) brain.

Oh, by the way, here is where the pixel moon is now at the time I’m publishing this article vs. when I pasted the original screenshot.

For The Nerds

If you’re into knowing how it works in the backend, here is some information.

Stack
- SvelteKit 2 (Svelte 5 runes)
- Tailwind 4
- Deployed on Cloudflare Workers with D1 (SQLite at the edge) as the only database.
- TMDB for film metadata.
- Letterboxd as a data source without any API.
How It Does Stuff
- Scrapes Letterboxd without an API or a password. Everyone’s star ratings, reviews, and watch dates come from public RSS diaries plus logged-out film pages (/{user}/film/{slug}/), matched to picks strictly by TMDB id — never by title — so a match is exact or absent. It routes around Letterboxd’s bot protection by knowing exactly which pages 403 and which don’t.
- Beats the RSS window with a history sweep. RSS only exposes ~50 recent entries per person, so a chunked sweep re-reads each person’s public film pages inside Worker request limits, accumulating ratings and reviews going back years. An every-six-hours “maintenance lap” revisits the longest-unvisited pages, so a review written today about a film watched years ago converges on its own within a couple of weeks.
- Chronology-guarded date backfill. Scraped watch dates only land on the grid when they fit the rotation’s own timeline (no earlier than the latest dated pick before it, no later than the earliest after) — so a film someone logged years before the club watched it can’t backdate the grid.
- In-place grid editing. Admins edit picks directly on the home grid — typing a title live-searches TMDB and choosing a match fills title + link in one save.
- Zero-live-call stats page. Genres, decades, and runtimes render entirely from a D1-cached copy of TMDB details; TV nights are billed by parsing episode ranges out of the pick’s own title (“Black Sails S4E9–E10” = two episodes at that show’s episode length).
- Two cron triggers do all the upkeep — a daily RSS sync + watchlist mirror, and the six-hourly maintenance lap — with an admin button and a ?dry=1 preview for manual runs.
- Disciplined ops for a four-person site: every deploy must be a clean tree at a tagged commit whose version has a CHANGELOG section (the deploy script refuses otherwise), secrets flow from 1Password through a read-once FIFO, and /sitemap (human) and /sitemap.xml (crawlers) render from one shared source so they can’t drift.
August 24, 2026
New Music Friday: Sylvan Esso, In Color, Boy Harsher, Saint Clair, Ash Leone

I’ve been going with three artists on the Fridays I remember to post new music so far, but there are five fresh tracks that I was into this week.

One of my favorite groups, Sylvan Esso, powered by one of my favorite music producers — Nick Sanborn — dropped a new track this week. Sounds trip hoppy to me but someone in the YouTube comments disagreed! Regardless, the meandering drum machine beat and the dreamy Sigur Rós sample is sick.

In Color is a new find for me. They are a Nashville-based band formed in 2024, so they’re kind of a new find for everyone I guess. I will be keeping an ear out because I was impressed by this new track from them. It’s a simple beat, reminiscent of When The Levee Breaks, with repetitive 8th notes from both the bass and guitar parts, but the vocals elevate everything else. Everything comes together in the bridge to give it a kind of epic feel. Is good.

Boy Harsher is my favorite dark wave band and I get excited every time they drop something, so this track I saw come across my feed this week was no different. Like much of their music, it’s a deeply uncomplicated beat with a leather-clad 80s vibe. They are incapable of missing.

Saint Clair is a new-ish guitar band from London that I kind of found by accident. If you guessed that I saw the name and got it mixed up with Saint Vincent, then you are correct. I was pleasantly surprised, though. I am traditionally a fan of whiny vocals arranged in a loud-quiet-loud motif. If you’re into 90’s alternative, this new track should strike a chord with you as well.

Ash Leone has made the rounds in Philly, Nashville, Los Angeles, and is now releasing music from Dallas. Like a lot of the new music I’m finding recently, I just found this track while scrolling through Instagram Reels. It is unfortunately an effective strategy for artists who want to find their way to my ears.

This is the most poppy track on my list of new music this week — upbeat and very danceable. Her voice is reminiscent of Lily Allen, but more sultry, less sassy — though she slides into the high notes with ease when she needs to.

July 24, 2026
How I Use AI and How I Don’t Use AI

How I don’t use AI

I don’t use generative AI to write prose or lyrics. I don’t use it to write blog posts. I don’t use it to write e-mails for me, outside of the occasional auto-complete of what I was going to say anyway. I don’t use it to create music. I don’t use it to create graphics. I consider those lanes of creativity to either be second nature already or rewarding forms of toil — like a zen garden or a Bonsai tree. I happily do them the old fashioned way, with no generative AI but some minor augmentation via machine learning through plugins, which is essentially inescapable in the modern digital landscape.

You’ll notice that I used an em dash in the last paragraph even though I claimed to not use generative AI to write prose. That’s because I’ve been using em dashes for decades. I find them to be more elegant than semicolons in nearly every way. I also tend to hyphenate small groups of words to enhance their readability, which is apparently another thing that AI does a lot. Sorry for teaching it stuff. I’m not going to change how I’ve been writing for my entire life to pass an AI purity test though, so we’ll just have to use the honor system if that’s alright.

How I Use AI

I use AI when faced with annoying toil, which mostly ends up being the iterative cycle of trial & error that is inherent in software development. I also use it write documentation because, while I have a knack for writing good documentation thanks to several years of working in support, I’d rather be using my time to do something else, so I find that AI written documentation is perfectly readable and useable once edited.

I have never had any particular talent for — or interest in — writing beautiful code. I have always found coding to be kind of an annoying process. I have diagnosed ADHD and suspected AuDHD, so I tend to either hyper-focus on things or not focus at all, which is a bad trait to have as a programmer because I will either spill 2 days of my life out on a single, potentially small problem that I’m trying to solve programmatically, or I forget about what I’m doing altogether and drag my feet to get back to it. Sometimes I never get back to it at all, resulting in a massive graveyard of dead projects that is a familiar fixture for most software developers.

When I code, I’m typically just trying to find the quickest path to solve a problem, automate something, or to make something easier for myself to do again in the future. I’m very lazy and inefficiency makes me mad — literally, it does. That’s why I’ve made a career out of solving problems and automating stuff. Things that get in the way of my ability to be lazy, like manual tasks with high probability for human error — or strings of things I have to remember to do in sequence — always feel like an open sore on the roof of my mouth that I can’t leave alone once I know it’s there.

I am an autodidact, which means that I am self-motivated to learn through self-study, and so I teach myself stuff all the time but combine that with my ADHD and it means I have major trouble focusing on subjects that I’m less interested in. Luckily, I’m in love with computers, so I poured my entire life into learning about them — and I still love and learn. I’m usually somewhere near the cutting edge of the goings-on in tech.

I naturally seek to know a good deal about a lot of stuff, and I can hyper focus on subjects I’m interested in and learn a lot about them in a small amount of time, but I don’t generally have a master’s level of knowledge about any one thing in particular. I’m a Jack of All Trades type of guy and always have been. There are always weird gaps in my knowledge that I have to backfill as needed — if needed.

Prior to the introduction of large language models, most of my projects were ugly amalgamations of code blocks that I found on the Internet somewhere and mashed together until the thing I was coding did what I wanted it to do. It took me days or weeks to come up with something usable most of the time. I actually hated that process, but hated not solving a problem even more, so I typically endured the pain — especially if the problem was someone else’s.

The LLM essentially generates code in the same way that I would have done myself, but much faster, with fewer syntactic blunders that waste time. This new form of iteration feels like rewarding toil to me, like writing music, versus the annoying toil of blind trial & error — or Googling in a desperate attempt to find someone, anyone, who had the same problem in the past and remembered to post a solution to some random forum.

It’s taking my prompt and going to the same places I would have gone, but parses the output way faster than I ever could. I prompt it based on pretty good fore-knowledge of what I’m doing and it backfills the gaps in my knowledge where needed, but my experience as a professional nerd allows me to notice when the AI is doing something in a dumb way or hallucinating, so I can quickly stop it and correct it. The result is a workflow that enhances my productivity while also no longer feeling like work.

I have been coding with LLMs since they came out and I’ve gotten pretty good at writing efficient prompts, knowing which tools are going to be a waste of time and which are going to bolster my workflow, and getting good code out of my agent(s). For all of the time I’ve spent using LLMs, I’ve never once felt like my livelihood was being threatened by them. They can’t reason like I can, they can’t detect shitty UX, or act upon hunches built on the context of an entire career in several areas of tech and related fields — an entire life of interpersonal communication.

Not only will an LLM never replace me, they make me feel more required — more secure. Putting an LLM in the hands of a novice engineer is like putting a Cessna pilot in a F-35 cockpit. They may be able to fly, maybe, but they can’t get anywhere close to the performance of a trained F-35 pilot and the chances they faceplant into the ground, taking the very expensive airplane with them, is very high.

July 14, 2026
New Music Friday: Wishy, Slow Joy, Dev Lemons

This week, I have three tracks from YouTube. One a track by a brand new band to me named Wishy, a 5 piece band from Indianapolis — a good rec from friend Christian.

The other two are from Slow Joy and Dev Lemons. I’ve been listening to them for awhile so I’m always happy to see a new single drop from either of them.

This is a very fun track and very tight musically. I told Christian that it reminds me of 90’s rock — a mix of Gin Blossoms and The Breeders. Like if you slipped this into the Empire Records soundtrack, it would fit right in.

I love the harmonies in the chorus a lot and they remind me of another band in particular but I think my brain is slowly dying, so I can’t pull it right now. If I remember later, I’ll try to come back and edit it in. Don’t count on it. Pavement? Yeah, I don’t know. That’s going to bother me.

Slow Joy also sounds like a 90’s band to me most of the time (example: Pulling Teeth) but “Forget” sounds like an early 00’s pop-punk banger that leaves you kind of patiently tapping your toes waiting for the chorus to come back around.

There is not a moment in the song where there isn’t a distorted guitar muddying up the mix somewhere, right up until the bridge, which was a great effect. It got so quiet you could hear his voice bouncing off the studio walls back into the mic, then right back into the distorted chorus.

This new track from Dev Lemons is a different direction than I’m used to hearing from her. My favorite track from her is “Guessing Games” which is kind of PC Music adjacent hyper-poppy vibe. Lots of electronic influences.

But “eat the pavement” is something way different. There is a drum machine, or electronic drum pad, but everything else sounds like regular ‘ol instruments mixed by someone who knows what they’re doing.

Not to claim it sounds like the 90’s again, but she’s definitely dipping into the “loud, quiet, loud” thing to great effect. I love the dreamy quality of the quiet parts. I think I like this direction for her in general.

July 10, 2026
Defining My Own Reality
I’ve been having deep discussions with friends of late, and in one of them, I said that I am slowly coming to the realization that anyone, at any time, can just create their own version of reality and their version of it can spread to envelop the world depending on how many people believe them.

The popular version of reality has been passed down through time, and we’ve all been taught that we’re all the same, feeling the same things, looking at the same things — worshipping the same Gods. Meanwhile, we’re learning that some of us have an inner monologue and some of us don’t. Some of us have never seen some of the colors that others have. Some of us don’t have a voice. Some of us can’t hear music. Some of us taste colors and smell words. Some of us see people that only they can see and they are having conversations that nobody else can hear.

Driven by the unstoppable nature of Internet discourse, there are large swaths of humans now just straight up eschewing the hard facts of science, choosing instead to define their own realities because it feels more comfortable living there, and honestly I am no different. I work from home and I don’t leave my house because I have a form of body dysmorphic disorder that disallows me from ever feeling normal with someone’s eyes on me. I have crafted my reality around living a digital life that largely disengages my physical form from the public, and I’m feeling less and less weird about that over time.

The nature of reality has always been a question that everybody has to tackle for themselves, but more recently there has been some momentum behind the idea that we’re living inside of simulation. I thought it would be fun to give defining my own reality a shot and to base it on that idea. So I will think up some wacky stuff and state it as hard facts. Who cares? It kind of feels like we’re all making this up as we go along anyway.
1. I am the only inhabitant of my Universe. There are no aliens. There are only inter-connected human consciousnesses. I am connected to a central server and you are also connected to that same server from your own Universe. Our shared reality is a projection and we are all overlaid on top of it with our own private spaces and shared public spaces. The location of a leaf you kick next to a McDonalds is stored on the server as a variable that my mind will access if I also encounter the same leaf so that I see it in the exact position that you do.
2. In my Universe, every other human being is an AI-powered model of their own consciousness from their own Universes. In your Universe, I am a hologram like you are in mine. When I talk to you, I’m essentially talking to YouGPT — an extremely accurate simulation of who you are in your own Universe, but acting in the context of mine.
3. All of our models are updated when we sleep. When I sleep, I upload my own consciousness to a central repository, which is not a big lift, but I also have to download the delta from the last time I slept to my current sleeping session for of all other consciousnesses, prioritized by the probability that I will interact with you. This keeps your hologram accurate in my world, and mine in yours. When I don’t sleep, things gets weird because the models are slowly desynchronizing from the central time series, and I will eventually die without sleep because it becomes impossible to catch up if that time delta between sleep sessions widens to an unrecoverable degree.
4. The Mandela Effect is an artifact of mass sleep deprivation caused by distressing mass casualty events, and the ensuing merging of corrupted data into our central time series. When we all become exhausted enough to sleep, it’s like a distributed denial of service attack and some of our memories don’t transfer correctly. A service daemon tries to backfill the data when we awaken, and then it all gets synced in the next time we sleep, but it’s an imperfect scaffolding — similar to how humans can read garbled text if the first and last letter of the words are correct.
5. A macro-view of the Universe looks like a neural network because it is a neural network. We’re peering out into a projection of our own consciousness.
6. My brain is simply hardware, a central processing unit, and does not actually contain my consciousness or my memories. My brain is identical to any other normal brain. It’s an organ, like my other organs — it has specific jobs to do. It runs the human operating system, it processes my input from the world, it projects the stream of my reality, and it manages my secure connections to the central server.
7. My consciousness is air gapped, meaning that you can only interact with my consciousness through the gate of my choices. When you extract data from me, I have chosen to allow you to do so. When the big bang scattered the pieces of the beginning, it was with purpose. That is the boot sequence — the key generation. My raw consciousness is encrypted with a private key that is based on a seed of the unique properties my own Universe and a salt based on my DNA. You can read the result of my decisions, like my eye movements or my expressions, but you can never read my raw intent without my consent. Mind control is impossible for the same reason and so is recording my dreams to an external storage medium.
8. The matter that we can see — our shared view of stellar objects like stars — are indices in a database structure that we all share. Black holes are shared utilities that convert matter to dark matter, compress it, and transfer it into the appropriate data lake for recall later. In other words, we can all see the same scaffolding, but the data kept in the dark matter is unique to each of us.
9. Super intelligence is impossible because the point of our shared reality is to multiply so that we can create as many unique problems as possible, solve those problems, and create a global database of solutions. The smarter we are, the fewer problems we have, and that is in conflict with the overall goal of life. Average human intelligence is the sweet spot for our species. We are dumb enough to cause problems and smart enough to solve them. Humans will always gravitate to and prefer the median.
10. I am predisposed to staying inside because it’s less resource intensive than constantly redrawing the world outside. Your hologram in my Universe may be an extrovert to keep up the illusion that a busy world full of busy people is bustling just outside of my front door at all times, but in your own Universe, you are also an introvert for the same reason.
11. Human beings will invariably age and die. Entropy is a law of evolution and evolution is the engine of reality. My time is the only time that I have and it is limited by an invisible ceiling that I will eventually get mushed by. I am not special. It doesn’t matter what I do with my time. It only matters that I do what I can to stay alive and swirl the variables of life around like a fine wine, and then die.
June 28, 2026
New Music Friday: A.G. Sully, Emma Ogier, Jessie Mazin

My Instagram Reels algorithm served me up a couple of Nashville singer-songwriters on what I assume is the come up. Who knows in the current music landscape? Both have two very DIY looking videos that have garnered many plays from me over the past few weeks.

A.G. Sully has a trip-hoppy sound straight out of the 90’s. They have a beautifully layered, whispery voice, with simple but effective synths, and a drum loop that keeps the beat while staying out of the way. The production has a soothing ethereal quality that made it easy for me to leave on repeat several times on several days.

Emma Ogier’s track has an incredible hook that was built for Instagram. It feels like the kind of hook that makes a montage hit just right in a movie about angsty Appalachian teenagers doing bored teenager stuff.

She delivers lyrics with a subdued Southern twang that I can’t tell if she’s trying to hide, slowly fading from childhood, or she’s reaching for on purpose. Either way, it’s very effective. The dreary and damp back yard in the video, complete with an orphaned car door and fent-folding trees, might as well be from one of my own memories. I’m reminded of happier times when I was the saddest I’ve ever been.

Then there is Jessie Mazin. I have actually heard of her before because I listen to her father’s podcast Scriptnotes, and at the end of one of the episodes about a year ago, he said his daughter did a song that went semi-viral. Always one to go down the rabbit hole, I quickly found and loved it. The song was called the simulation is failing.

And that’s why I knew she had pipes before Instagram fed me her absolutely incredible performance of The Precipice on Medium Sized Backyard, which is now up to 250k views in the past month on YouTube and 60k likes on IG. It’s honestly one of the most impressive live performances that I’ve ever seen. Not only is her voice insane but her guitar playing is also crisp.

There is a a rocket strapped to her back so go ahead and watch that whole video so you can say you were early on Jessie Mazin. I’ll also link to her cover of How Deep Is Your Love by Calvin Harris & Disciples because you should listen to that, too.

June 27, 2026
OG Internet Music Revisited

I am in my 40’s now and I’ve not only been on the Internet since 1995, but chronically online for the entire time. The Internet is at the center of nearly everything in my life, including music, but I have been obsessed with music for much longer than the Internet was available to me.

The first song that I can remember hearing was Sara by Starship and I think I may have been in a crib at the time. I was in some sort of napping situation because I remember hearing it before falling asleep.

I love music from the mid to late 80’s, but I know the most about the music from the 90’s and early 2000’s, with the sweet spot landing somewhere in the late 2000’s. Around that time, YouTube was springing up and enveloping the Internet and I was especially obsessed with the relatively unknown musicians I could find posting their stuff on YouTube.

I catch myself revisiting some of them from time to time and that’s what gave me the idea for this post. I just want to post some older YouTube music that you may have never heard before, but also I just selfishly want a list of my favorite stuff from (relatively) back in the day.

The first entry on my list will be, for me, the quintessential early YouTube cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra. It’s probably my favorite cover of all time and it’s also the oldest video on the list.

When I first listened to it, there were less than 2,000 views and I felt as if though I stumbled upon a buried treasure. I can’t believe that it only ever made it up to 1.3 million views (as of right now) and that it is one of five videos on her channel, which has 1.5k subscribers.

I’ll never forget stumbling across this next video because it was under 1,000 views at the time and I just kind of sat there with my mouth wide open listening to an incredible acoustic cover of “Africa” by Toto being belted out perfectly by a couple of Dad-looking nerds in a very empty bar. My wife and I watched all of their other videos, which were also insane, and talked about going to Denver just to be two of the five people in there witnessing greatness. Nowadays this video has 19M views and that makes a lot more sense.

I love Mighty Mike’s mashup of M83’s “Midnight City” and Men at Work’s “Down Under” so much. It’s the song I revisit the most on YouTube by a mile, other than Danny Carey’s live drumming for Pneuma by Tool. It is an inescapable ear worm with bad enough quality to qualify it for this list. I will watch and listen to this over, and over, and over, and over again.

Then there is Obadiah Parker’s “Hey Ya” which is a cover of Outkast’s hit that goes by the same name. We love a nerdy looking dude with a big ‘ol neck beard, an angel’s voice, and a gift for a-pickin’-and-a-singin’ — not to mention the very original arrangement that suits the song nearly better than the original.

Or maybe you need to have your heart broken? Visit the comment section of José González’ cover of “Heartbeats” by The Knife. It probably has the most views of anything else on this list, but I didn’t want to leave it off. It’s a banger.

From there, we’ll get back to a cover with a relatively small number of views. It’s Iron & Wine’s cover of “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service. I just like it when a couple of people sing badly mixed harmonies into a shitty computer mic and one of them is playing an acoustic guitar way too slow.

What is a list like this without a tribute to Radiohead? What about from a beautiful choir? The cover of “Creep” by Scala & Kolacny Brothers hits the spot. If you’re a fan of The Social Network, you may recognize it from its trailer.

The last one I’ll leave you with the only original music on the list, which wasn’t planned. Turns out I just really love covers. Anyway, this is “Beat the Horse” by Pomplamoose. My wife and I were on the Pomplamoose train very early but I don’t remember why. I think I just happened across it near its release date. You may recognize Jack Conte on the left because he is now the CEO of Patreon.

June 25, 2026
Using Karabiner-Elements For Sudo Authentication via 1Password
Karabiner-Elements is an incredible free tool for customizing your keyboard, mouse, and other input devices on macOS. Its most powerful feature is the ability to create complex modification (macro) scripts that can perform a variety of actions when a key — or a combination of keys — are pressed.

I’m going to share the scripts I’ve written here and I will try to remember to edit this post as I develop more scripts in the future.

CMD+CTRL+S to send sudo password from 1Password

If you get tired of typing — or copy/pasting — your sudo password every time you need to run a command, or reaching for your Yubikey, you can use this complex modification to copy your sudo password from 1Password and send the characters as keystrokes when you hit CMD+CTRL+S. Keystroke injection via Karabiner-Elements doesn’t overwrite your clipboard like copy/pasting does and it also keeps youe sudo password out of clipboard history, which is a nice bonus.

You will need the 1Password CLI tool installed and configured for this to work. Follow the instructions from the link to do that.

Then click “Complex Modifications -> Add your own rule” in the Karabiner-Elements interface.

Paste in the code below, making sure replace [YOUR_SECRET_UUID_HERE] with your actual secret UUID. To get the UUID, right click on the secret in 1Password and select “Copy UUID” (it will be a long string of letters and numbers). Also, I have installed the 1Password CLI via homebrew on a Mac, so your command path may need modified as well.

https://gist.github.com/jesse-id/0a287c4bd039ce3bf48f222f4ef73e46
```
{
    "description": "Ctrl+Cmd+S to retrieve 1Password secret and send as keystrokes",
    "manipulators": [
        {
            "from": {
                "key_code": "s",
                "modifiers": { "mandatory": ["left_control", "left_command"] }
            },
            "to": [
                {
                    "shell_command": "afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Pop.aiff & if SECRET=$(/opt/homebrew/bin/op item get \"[YOUR_SECRET_UUID_HERE]\" --fields password --reveal 2>/dev/null | tr -d '\\n'); then osascript -e 'on run args' -e 'tell application \"System Events\" to keystroke (item 1 of args)' -e 'end run' \"$SECRET\" && osascript -e 'tell application \"System Events\" to key code 36'; fi"
                }
            ],
            "type": "basic"
        }
    ]
}
```
SHIFT+CTRL+OPT+CMD on hold, CMD+/ on tap

HyperKey is an app that turns CAPS LOCK into a new modifier key by sending SHIFT+CONTROL+OPTION+COMMAND when pressed and held, and escape when tapped. I have replaced it with a Karabiner-Elements complex modification script that replicates the same functionality, but sends COMMAND+/ when tapped instead. That allows me to use CAPS LOCK to quickly comment/uncomment code in my IDE as well.

Click “Complex Modifications -> Add your own rule” in the Karabiner-Elements interface.

Paste in the code below.

https://gist.github.com/jesse-id/36ec252467c20fb84fa6b6dfe5b3e604
```
{
    "description": "Caps Lock to Hyper Key (Held), Cmd+/ (Tapped)",
    "manipulators": [
        {
            "from": {
                "key_code": "caps_lock",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [
                {
                    "key_code": "left_shift",
                    "modifiers": ["left_command", "left_control", "left_option"]
                }
            ],
            "to_if_alone": [
                {
                    "key_code": "slash",
                    "modifiers": ["left_command"]
                }
            ],
            "type": "basic"
        }
    ]
}
```
February 18, 2026
Switching from MacOS to Windows
I’ve been alive for 43 years at this point and I have been using a Microsoft operating system as my daily driver for the last 37 years, starting with MS-DOS running on a Commodore Colt PC in 1988.

I have used every version of Windows from 3.0 in 1990 up until Windows 11 in 2025, mostly because I enjoy playing games and Windows has always catered to gamers. Aside from that, with the exception of Millenium Edition, Vista, and Windows Server, I have enjoyed the experience with relatively few hiccups.

So why switch?

Well as I age, I’m getting much less excited about the idea of cracking open a computer and digging around inside of it. I just don’t have the drive to do it anymore. For well over a decade, I’ve just been buying a beastly new computer and selling the old one without ever touching anything inside of it. I have continued to use Windows solely for my extreme familiarirty with it and Macs generally couldn’t handle the games I was playing without a headache.

I have been much less enchanted by video games for awhile, abandoning triple A titles completely in lieu of much cheaper deckbuilding roguelikes, and the creative side of my soul has been steadily becoming more pervasive. I’m reaching the age where the grey-beard nerds tend to transition from a career in engineering to woodworking, and moving to a cabin in the forest somewhere. Well, that will never be me because I’m incredibly lazy and addicted to the conveniences of modern living. So for the rest of my life, I will be shackled to a computer.

When Apple introduced Apple Silicon, a unified CPU and memory architecture, it piqued my interest. Like I said, I don’t really care about upgrading anymore, so the static nature of the build does not bother me at all. What finally pulled me over to the MacOS side of the aisle was the eye-popping performance benchmarks and nearly zero noise generated by the hardware. As a musician — a vocalist — that is a pretty huge selling point for me.

I had always heard that making music was a more enjoyable experience on a Mac in general, but I had no real reason to test the waters. Well, Apple Silicon and its silent opeation is that real reason. I waited a couple of years to give the software companies and developers enough time to create builds for ARM64 architecture, and the time for that nearly ubiquitous compatability is now.

So I finally made the switch.

Some things felt clunky, especially relearning keyboard shortcuts, but after a couple of days of uncertainty and looking to the right side of my monitor for the minimize button on a worefully lacking Finder interface, every regret faded and I am now fully absorbed into the Mac ecosystem. It honestly makes me feel a little dirty… but who cares?

Finally, let’s go over the pros and cons.

Pros
- I can use iMessage natively from my desktop.
- A lot less telemetry crap.
- It’s fast as f**k, boieee.
- It’s completely silent.
- It’s ridiculously small for the power. It takes up like 1/8th of the space of my gaming rig.
- The OS seamlessly integrates with all of my other Apple stuff. Phone, iPad, Watch, TV, etc.
- I can move apps to my iPad so it acts as a third monitor. Great for monitoring my security cameras.
- Most of the software is a single lifetime purchase instead of a subscription.
- Great privacy features.
- All things audio are a lot more user friendly.
- Apple Podcasts rules. It has an easily reachable “Latest Episodes” section. Imagine that.
- Apple Pay rules.
- Subscriptions are incredibly easy to manage.
- Time Machine backups are cool.
Cons
- Window management is clunky.
- Can’t keep iCloud files on an external USB drive.
- Most of my Steam games are dead in the water without extra effort.
- Not a lot of customization options out of the box.
- Everything costs money. There is a lot less freeware.
- Everything asks for a password. 1Password, YubiKey, and fingerprint sensor are all absolute requirements.
- Apple Arcade kind of sucks. Good idea, bad execution.
Final Thoughts

I personally love MacOS. It provides a pretty amazing user experience for software development, writing, and music production. No regrets.

Additionally, I don’t feel like my personal information and usage habits are being lusted after and scraped, which was becoming more and more of a concern for me as Microsoft focuses in on its AI investments. Even though they aligator-armed it (for now), Microsoft’s “feature” to allows users to track and replay all of their activity from the past however many days, for example, is a dystopian nightmare in my estimation. It’s crazy to me that it ever got a green light in the first place. No thanks.

I have updated the /uses page on my site to add the replacement apps I found for the Mac.
June 22, 2025
Deconstructing my ghost encounter…

Sike!

I saw definitely something but I don’t believe that ghosts are a thing. I really enjoy the mythology around them though, so it’s not that I’m not a ghost hater. I just don’t think that the souls if Victorian children are floating around us in forms that match the ones they had in their physical bodies. I also have trouble coming to terms with every haunted spot having an interesting story. Where are all of the boring ghosts?

So I think that what I actually saw was the first hallucination that I have ever had, which is much scarier to me than a ghost because it’s a stark reminder that my brain can, at any time, just make stuff appear that isn’t actually there; things that look so real that I can’t discern them from reality… and I sure do hate that a lot.

Here’s what happened.

I toss and turn a lot when I’m sleeping. A few months ago, I stirred awake, turned onto my left side, and opened my eyes. The room was dark except for a dim light leaking out from under a closet door. I think that I remember seeing 4:00 AM on my alarm clock. I was looking into our master bathroom, which was barely lit by a smart bulb that we keep on at 1%.

I saw sudden movement out of the corner of my right eye and then both of my eyes widened when I saw the silhouette of my wife walking towards the bathroom. I had an uncanny valley type of response. I felt unsettled for some reason, even though it looked just like her.

As she passed in front of me, I saw her take shape and saw her hair moving, but I don’t remember seeing her face. She stopped in the doorway and stood still, lingering just long enough to enhance the creepiness. There was simply no reason for her to stop and linger like that.

Then, she continued walking into the bathroom. Normally, this would be where she just disappears into the dark bathroom, closes the door behind her, and I would see the crack at the bottom of the door glow bright yellow as she flips on the light switch. That didn’t happen. Instead, after three of four steps into the bathroom, she evaporated into thin air. Then, I quickly turned over and saw her real body still laying in bed next to me. I took a few seconds to make sure I saw the covers moving up and down with each breath.

It was a jarring experience. I’ve never really hallucinated before; certainly not a fully formed human being with the same features and gait as my wife. Maybe a spider on the wall here or there as I’m falling asleep, sure, but never a fully formed apparition.

It was likely just my REM cycle spinning down more slowly than it should have. But even though I’m positive that it was not a supernatural event, it was incredibly strange and I can now certainly understand and relate to people who can can convince themselves, and others, that they’ve seen a ghost.

After all, people with schizophrenia experience things like this all of the time, don’t they? The building blocks are sitting there in our brains, dormant for most, and just waiting for some unknown switch to be flipped that can instantly wreck our notion that our reality is stable. I’ve lived a long life in reality. I know it well. It would suck for that to change.

My main takeaway from the encounter was that my brain can apparently project perfect illusions into four dimensional space, and then it can fade them away into nothing like a Thanos snap. Of course, I knew the human brain had these powers prior to experiencing it first hand, but it did actually make a big difference to be tricked by it in real time. It shook me a bit.

What’s to stop the rest of reality from evaporating, too? If I suddenly lost all of my senses, would I experience the same hallucination in the same way, and at the same time? Time for a quick foray into an existential crisis…

She walked around our bed — her lower half wasn’t visible at all until she rounded the corner — and then she walked into the doorway, before evaporating in the bathroom. The hallucination was interacting with the objects in my field of view. The hallucination obeyed the laws of physics. Her hair was swaying with her movement, with the wind coming out of the fan I keep on at night. That’s really cool and also confusing.

Was I hallucinating the scene as well, or just the figure? Was it a memory being projected into reality like an overlay? When you’re looking at a sunlit object at noon and suddenly close your eyes, you can see the still frame of the last thing you saw, as if burned into your retinas for a few moments. Was it that same mechanism painting my memories of our master bedroom into a half-waking dream?

By the way, I’m not a scientist, and I haven’t studied memory, so this is about to piss off people who actually know how memories work. Sorry. I do love science but a little pseudoscience never hurt anyone, right? RIGHT? HEH. RIGHT???

My one quarrel (not really) with science is that if I know too much about a given topic, I’m robbed of wildly guessing about great big mysteries, and that’s one of my favorite things to do. So no, I will not look up how this actually works. Sweet ignorance!

Anyway…

If the hallucination was simply the projection of a memory into four dimensional space, then even if I lost my senses, nothing would change, would it? I shouldn’t need use of my senses to recall a memory from when I had them. The memory was a snapshot of time that was already taken. Even if the entire layout of our master bedroom changed right after I lost all of my senses, then I suspect that I would experience the exact same hallucination.

I was laying on my side. So, if it was a memory, my view of reality was 90 degrees different than it would be if I were standing. The memory must have been a snapshot from that exact spot that I was laying in. But if that’s true, when the ghost evaporated into thin air, why was the bathroom door in the exact same position when I fully awoke moments later? In fact, nothing in the room was different when the hallucination faded. It was a perfect transition from the hallucination back into my waking life.

I sleep with a fan on. Her hair moved with the wind and it bounced off her back when she walked. I do not think that I have ever recalled a memory with that level of detail. The movement of the air, and how it interacted with individual strands of her hair, feels like it requires simulated physics. Her hair moving in the wind changes everything.

Was my brain creating the image of my wife and simulating the physics of the room at at the same time? That’s nuts. To create that figure and place it into reality, my brain would have to process all of the physics itself. It would have to calculate and recalculate, redraw, each frame as the variables in the room shifted as my fan knocked particles around. It would have to simulate gravity and time perfectly.

When I hallucinate, is my brain recreating time, too? When the ghost walked, she didn’t look any slower or faster than she should have. Her steps looks exactly as they should have. The whir of the fan sounded exactly how it always has. Was I hearing the fan as it spun in reality or was my brain “drawing” the sound in a dream that was fading away?

There was a light coming from our closet and dimly lighting the room. Was my brain creating that light and the speed it was traveling at? The hallucination was lit exactly how she should have been. It looked real. Was my brain perfectly simulating her body’s interaction with light from a source behind her?

Does my brain come with a physics manual? Are the rules hard-coded somewhere in there? How else could it create hallucinations that interact with reality so perfectly that I don’t question it at first? How light interacts with the environment, the vibrations of sound, and how all of that interacts with time.

Seeing a ghost made me question reality directly. I had thought about the possibility that we live in a simulation before, but after seeing the ghost and thinking through all that it actually entails to experience a hallucination, I am more convinced than I have ever been that I am living in some kind of a computer program.

Does that matter? Not really. This is still my reality. My views about religion haven’t changed. My outlook on life hasn’t changed. I was the same person after she evaporated into thin air that I was before that happened. I’m just a little more curious, and that’s kind of the point, I guess. Life keeps on keeping on.

It doesn’t make me question who I am, but it does make me question who you are more than I ever have. It’s plausible that you don’t exist, reader. I still don’t believe in ghosts, but now I do believe that I can be completely fooled whenever my brain is properly motivated to do so. That’s a little scary, but I guess it’s no scarier than anything else that can crumble in front of me at a moments’ notice. This is all quite fragile, isn’t it?

I’m just glad the ghost didn’t talk to me. As it stands, all I saw was like a little movie playing. I’m glad I didn’t tell the ghost that I loved her as she walked by. Imagine if she looked at me and said, “I love you, too.”

The fourth wall remaining in tact is safer for my overall sanity. In fact, that fourth wall is probably the difference between sanity and insanity, and that morning I got a little too close for comfort. I also feel much more sympathy for people forced to see or hear hallucinations all day. It’s not fun to question what is and isn’t real, if even for a moment. I can’t imagine the burden of constantly having to question reality.

August 18, 2022