Brian Kendig

I'm in Central Florida and I'd love #solar power for the house. But a few years ago when I looked into it, they showed me a mockup of the front of my house with an ugly mess of panels and pipes on the roof, and said it'll start paying for itself in twenty years.

@skybrian.bsky.social This made me think of you for some reason: www.youtube.com/watch?v=li-y...

I am disturbed by the number of tributes I'm seeing online to Arbor Day and to Earth Day that were written by AI. There's nothing like honoring the environment by contributing to its destruction. Most of the posts I see on LinkedIn are AI-generated, too. Everybody now writes with the same voice.

My company is big on AI and I am finally getting on the bandwagon. Today I took an AI-generated ticket and told an AI to implement the requirements, after which another AI did a code review, and then the previous AI made the requested changes. I am questioning my life's choices.

And, I just found the page where I can see everything I ever highlighted from every book I ever read on Kindle. (It's read.amazon.com/notebook) I am floored. Many of these books I read years ago. My highlights are good advice and clever turns of phrase. It's like past-me left notes to present-me.

I bought a Nintendo New 3DS XL, replaced its damaged shell. put a new battery in it and in our Sony PSP-1000, and jailbroke them both. I have a gaming laptop with an 8BitDo controller and a pile of indie games from Humble Bundle sales. I have all the video games I need for the rest of my life.

My job went from "you're doing a great job with work-from-home during the pandemic" to "we want you back in the office two days a week" to "we want you in this other office that's 45 minutes away through heavy traffic" to "now we want you in that office four days a week." I'm just annoyed, is all.

I've been oddly hungry for baked goods. I tossed some chocolate chip cookie dough from Cast Connection into the oven. I thawed one of Jill's yummy sourdough loaves from Christmas that hadn't risen like she wanted and I rescued them from being thrown out. I even got some munchkins from Dunkin Donuts.

Tonight the temperature is forecast to drop to 23°F / -5°C. This is colder than it's been here in the past 15 years. I have given my landscaping up for dead and am hoping a drip from a few faucets is enough to keep my plumbing from cracking.

Looking for anime to watch; only Frieren S2 on my list this cour. Tried four eps of Vinland Saga and it's not for me. (but I loved same writer's Planetes!) @giggukaz.bsky.social praised Apocalypse Hotel, so I gave it a try. Four eps in and I'm loving it! Feels like a Ghibli story in a WALL-E world.

I'm tired of seeing AI-generated text everywhere. It's weirdly uniform and consistently upbeat. It stands out, and not in a good way. I saw an AI-generated article on a writing forum. I called it out, The author said she only used AI to polish it. I listed the fingerprints. She deleted her account.

Can't sleep. Horrified by current events, and by the wrong-side-of-history response I see in certain circles, even though I'm doing my best to avoid the news and preoccupy myself with video games. Tonight I played Sniper Elite 5, which is all about hunting and killing Nazis.

A year or two after I last played Skyrim SE, last weekend I felt like playing again. Used Vortex to add some interesting mods. Spent the past week in mod hell, trying to get mods to work without crashing, erroring, or malfunctioning. Today I gave up and uninstalled. It needs a dependency manager!

Today was a day of much adulting. We're okay, we're handling everything that comes up, but, like, whew. (Lily Pup is our 14-year-old maltipoo princess dealing with kidney issues. And, Orange Bird is Jill's 15-year-old Honda Element with lower control arm / ball joint boot issues.)

I HATE that the "false alarm" behavior of our smoke alarms is to sound EVERY SMOKE ALARM IN THE HOUSE for two seconds, every minute or two, until I stare at each one of them to see which one has a red light that flashes a bit longer than the others, and that's the one that needs a new battery.

I first visited this park 40 years ago. I'm here this evening with Jill to celebrate my 15th anniversary with the company. My life has been a long, weird road. It's really strange to look back and try to figure out how I got here.

A few days ago was - hard to believe! - five years since I said goodbye to Tooie cat (Toulouse). Jill said, "He loved you so very much." When I think of him, I say: "Please put in a good word for me for when I come join you again someday. I'm counting on you to teach me what I need to know there."

The other rabbit hole I've fallen down: for a good price a coworker sold me their Nintendo New #3DS XL that hasn't been turned in on nine years, and the case has scrapes and paint flaking off, but I'm in heaven - I went on AliExpress and ordered replacement parts cheap and I'm going to jailbreak it.

I was considering picking up a Nintendo 3DS XL. I still have my old 3DS, but I'd enjoy the larger screen, and I want to jailbreak it (but I don't want to risk my original one). Then I saw the current prices. Now I'm considering picking up a Steam Deck instead.

I looked up a movie quote on Google, and Gemini thought I was complimenting it. I looked up a spam email, and Gemini thought I was offering it a piano. I feel like AI overestimates its importance in my life.

A month ago I ordered laptop RAM from Amazon ($97) and received desktop RAM instead. Immediately returned it and got the refund. Today I got email: they "can't process the refund" because I didn't return the item I ordered (duh). Will they charge me again? Must I plead with a human? Hello anxiety!

Joyous solstice!

I met a JW and his two daughters on my front porch this morning. I always respect their courage for not knowing who they'll find, and I enjoy the opportunity to explain that God isn't necessary for a good life and a good world. I told them that if they ever have a crisis of faith, I'm here to help.

I was feeling meh this evening and might have doomscrolled until bedtime, but instead, Jill found the 1962 film version of "The Music Man" on TV. We had a good time watching it together! I love classic Broadway shows and their movie versions!

Someone private-messaged me about a comment I made four years ago on Reddit, to say it "made me think for a few seconds, and that few seconds of thinking stopped me from shooting myself over the very same problem you were talking to him about." That made my day. www.reddit.com/r/self/comme...

I was looking up upgrade the memory in my laptop, but DDR4 SDRAM has become really scarce and its price has doubled over the past few months, and Amazon reviews note a lot of quality control problems. I blame AI for eating up the supply chain. And for generally making a mess of the world.

I miss long-form journaling. So I dumped a bunch of recent thoughts into a blog entry on my site. Warning: it's techy and altogether dull. Welcome to my brain! www.enchanter.net/2025/11/stuck/

I really REALLY wish there were such a thing as a pet-friendly smoke alarm. When ours sound - either a false alarm, or like today when we're replacing them and need to make sure they work - the sound FREAKS OUT our pets. If there were an actual fire they'd run and hide and we wouldn't find them.

My home's air conditioner drains into a 40' nearly-flat PVC pipe that runs through the slab to the opposite side of the house. It keeps getting clogged up with white algae, tripping a sensor and turning off the AC. I am at war. Next round: a CO2 drain blaster and an enzyme-based formula.

I'm being spammed by ads for the "MAGA VICTORY AR-15," a "Custom-Designed Commemorative AR-15 Celebrating the 47th President Donald J. Trump" (a gun in an American flag wrap with the Presidential seal) for $2,997. (A new AR-15 starts under $500.) Every ad has this unusual testimonial on it.

Jill and I often listen to 80s music while we're chilling out at the end of the day. I got tired of 80s streaming station playlists, so we moved on to 80s DJ mixes on YouTube; we ran of of those, so now we're on 80s mashups. This is the best one I've found so far. youtu.be/KfboL5BV9hg?...

What irks me most about Trump: he keeps saying things that are egregiously wrong; the only response is the media later printing fact checking articles. I want someone to ask him to his face: Are your advisors really this bad? Are you really this misinformed? Or, why are you intentionally lying?

I love watching the spam bounce off my mail server rules. Plink! Special honor to simplewellnss.com [sic], who fails many times every day to send me info they feel is personally important to me. Meanwhile when I report iCloud spam to spam@icloud.com, my message is rejected because ... it's spam.

Today is apparently the end of the world (see "Rapture Day"). I am annoyed because I was not informed beforehand and I have things to do.

I'm surprised at how much I'm using my iPad mini these days. For writing (Scrivener), reading (Kindle), gaming (Manic Emu for Game Boy Advance and 3DS games, PPSSPP for Sony PSP games), social media (Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon), drawing (Procreate), &c. It's a great little gadget.

Age verification: I was brian@netscape.com. (I also helped people who sent questions to info@netscape.com, and I replied as Mozilla.)

Random factoid: I like 'in-universe' t-shirts, ones that you could imagine a character wearing. I would never wear an Avengers shirt, but I have an 'Avongers' shirt as seen in She-Hulk. I wouldn't wear one with a picture of a Star Trek: Lower Decks character, but I have a 'Starbase 80' shirt.

30 years ago yesterday, the PlayStation 1 was released. I bought one that night. Today I gave all my PS1 games to a coworker. He'll show his kid what games were like before microtransactions. He saw Jumping Flash and got teary. "This was the last game I played with my dad before he was murdered."

I hate #spam. I set my mail server to refuse all email from American-Express.*@*, Sbi.*@*, or that has "X-mailer: Foxmail 6, 13, 102, 15 [cn]". So far it's blocked about 25 Japanese-language scams in the past two days from getting to my junk folder. I'll take this as a win.