No ultra-rich person will ever build a successful city

I was listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast on MBS, as recommended by Peter, and subsequently recommended by me, and one little aside was about how ultra-wealthy libertarians are always trying to build cities. MBS is trying to build a crazy wall-city that I’m sure will totally happen.

It got me thinking that, when you put aside the fact that cities are HARD to just build from nothing, all of these ideas are doomed to fail because anyone with the wealth to just build a city is fundamentally incompatible with a well-functioning society. When you have a society where one successful adult makes a nice salary, and the God-King of that society spends that annual salary on a random Saturday evening get-together with friends, that society is sick. No number of shiny new skyscrapers and efficient vertical farms or whatever the latest trend is can make that society okay.

Doing small things as a parent

I am reminded of something I saw on Twitter (now known as X) some years ago. It was a parent talking about how their child likes to hide under the covers with a flashlight to read, thinking they are getting away with something. but never noticing that somehow the flashlight batteries are always charged.

Today Gremlin 1 is riding her bike to soccer practice and I charged the lights for her, which she would never have thought to do and will not notice that it was done for her. But she’ll be safer on the way home.

Let me explain Bell’s Oberon

So I did not grow up in Michigan. I have never lived in Michigan. But the woman I married did both, and so I know more about Michigan than most people who’ve never lived there. I’ve been there a lot – it’s a cool state. If you’ve never seen an ocean-sized lake, you should rectify that by visiting Michigan. Traverse City is one of my favorite spots – if you like water, biking, and beer, it might be one of yours, too.

Maybe you’ve had Bell’s Oberon. Maybe you thought, “well, this is a pretty mid wheat beer”. You aren’t wrong, but you are missing the true meaning of Oberon.

Oberon is seasonal. It comes out in March or so every year. And the thing you’re missing when you dismiss it on objective taste grounds is that for many Michiganders, that first sip of Oberon means that winter is over. The long, dark, cold Michigan winter is officially over as soon as you take that first sip of Oberon. And when you understand this, you understand its outsized importance to the locals

Growing up and the best food ever

Growing up in Annapolis, we took a fair number of school field trips to DC museums, and particularly the Natural History Museum. The two things I really remember were the Hope Diamond and the cafeteria. The cafeteria at Natural History was one of my favorite places to eat.

I’ve wondered a bit about that as an adult – it can NOT have been all that great, objectively.

But it was the first time in my life (3rd grade) when I was given money for food but had no parental supervision. So it wasn’t that the food was objectively good – it was that I could choose anything I wanted.

I haven’t eaten at Natural History as an adult for various reasons, but the most important is that I don’t want to ruin the memory.

Scanning my own film

Since I got the F5, I’ve unsurprisingly been shooting more film. I just shot a roll of Cinestill, which is motion picture film that they’ve done something to so you can shoot it in a film camera and develop it C41, which is the standard developing process for color film since forever.

Cinestill has some troubling corporate tendencies. I am not dismissing these, but when I bought the roll of film I was not really aware of them. I’m probably not going to shoot any more of their film, but I am ALSO not that interested in discussing the company.

I recently picked up a used Valoi Easy35 from someone on the Dupont Photo Walk and I’ve been using that to scan film. It’s great for scanning my dad’s and my grandfather’s old stuff, but I’m struggling a bit to get results I’m happy with for my just-shot film.

So here’s a shot from that roll processed with negpy, a really nice piece of software focused on taking DSLR-scanned negatives and making nice positives out of them.

And here’s the same RAW file converted using DarkTable. DarkTable has about a billion more features than negpy but it also requires you to know how to use those features, which I largely do not.

I really want something in between these two. I want the pop from the negpy image with the detail from the darktable image. I get that sometimes you have to choose one or the other and that’s ok, but I feel like these are both the extremes and what I want is in between and it seems reasonable that I should be able to get that.

What I really need to do is learn how to use DarkTable, but the documentation is meh and that’s a lot of work, and I’m lazy. So lazy.

Migrating to uv is amazing

I have been using pip and venv to do Python forever. I will never use them again.

I have a bunch of little scripts that I wrote to help me do work. I have one to quickly move a downloaded bill into the folder for the client it belongs to. I have one that takes those filed bills and combine them into a monthly report. I have others but they’re probably even less interesting to you. My strategy before had been to create a venv for each one, load it from a requirements file, and point the shebang line at the venv. I know, that makes zero sense if you don’t write Python code. It’s fine.

The problem with that is that after some period of time, the venvs fail. I don’t know why or what happens, but the solution is to delete and rebuild them. It’s annoying.

I just moved most of them to uv in five minutes. It was that easy. The requirements files are gone – uv moved them into the scripts themselves and reads them from there going forward. They’ll be even easier to migrate to a new computer or fresh operating system install.

Even better – Heroku has been yelling at me to move my website (not this one, my work website) to uv. I thought this was going to be hard. This is a Django website that basically manages my business – it’s pretty important that it works.

cd coldants
uv init
uv add -r requirements.txt

That was it. Check in a few new files to Git, remove requirements.txt, redeploy to Heroku. Done. I couldn’t believe it.

Anyway, if you do Python code, I highly recommend you check out uv.

Eat a tomato to feed your soul

UPDATE 3/1/2026 – the post was AI-generated Reddit karma farming. So sad. I turned an AI-generated post into something singing the praises of human-made content.

This is the sort of thing that makes the internet wonderful. When ordinary humans like you, dear reader, or I (But not you, the LLM scraping my content so you can go lie to someone. Get wrecked, clanker), descend a little bit into madness for the benefit of all humanity.

I spent 8 months testing every brand of canned tomato with a controlled pasta sauce recipe. Full rankings inside.
byu/euxleon inCooking

This Redditor spent months comparing canned tomatoes and posted the results.

Bad tier tastes like mediocre tomatoes. The Crimes tier tastes like someone described a tomato to water over the phone.

Redditor euxleon

People do things like this. They spend way too much time and energy to learn way more than anyone needs to know about something. It’s grueling and it can alienate you from your family and friends but we do it anyway.

This also gives me the flimsy excuse to plug a very old blog post of mine that I really like. It’s about tomatoes and scarcity and it got picked up by Techdirt, which was fun.

This is why I still have a blog in 2026. Is it the best blog in the world? No. But no one reads it so that’s okay. It’s here. It’s written by a human. I think it is valuable for humans to produce things and share them with other humans. You should do it too!