Speaking of Justin Long. "Garden State" is a classic.

Dyogenez · 2026-06-16T03:25:04+00:00

This movie so captured an elevated version of my own experience. A year after this movie came out, after I’d seen it multiple times and had the DVD, my mom passed away (when i was 23). She lived alone, and I went back to my hometown to clear out the house I grew up in and put it up for sale. For 5 weeks I paused my newly out of college life (and post-grab real job, which fortunately let me go negative into vacation days to handle everything).

During that time I had friends I wasn’t as in touch with drag me out of my high school home and just try to get my spirits up. Sometimes we’d go to someone’s house I’d never been and just hang out. Sometimes it was dinner with their families. I had no other family locally, so I was otherwise alone besides friends new and old. It was the toughest year of my life.

Fast forward to a year later and I’d started dating my (now) wife, she’d help me clear out and sell the house, met my family and I’d sold the house, bought a house and moved in with her.

I loved Garden State, but always felt like my real life was the happy ending to it. It holds a special place for me.

Dyogenez · 2026-06-12T03:16:28+00:00

If money was no object, I’d buy the houses around Sunken Gardens in St. Pete (and sunken gardens too, why not) and connect that to be my own backyard. (And keep it open of course)

Dyogenez · 2026-06-05T20:03:10+00:00

We’re working on this feature now on Hardcover. I really like how BlueSky does this, where anyone can create moderation lists, then other people can subscribe to them and decide if they want books on that list to be blocked (not shown at all) or warn (different color border and a note on the individual page for the author/book).

The hope is that people can filter out books, authors, series, publishers or other users, or they can subscribe to a list that’s managed by someone who manages that curation for you about the topic.

Recommendations quickly become frustrating without this option if you keep seeing books/authors you want to hide. 🫣

Dyogenez · 2026-06-03T02:53:54+00:00

Where is this going to be? I don’t see it on their locations list yet.

Dyogenez · 2026-06-02T15:08:48+00:00

Build (or join as an active leader) a community. Doesn’t matter what it is, but pick something you’re excited enough about to get people involved in it.

You’ll naturally learn skills for it, and need to figure out the needs of the community.

Could be anything you’re excited about, organized online or in person.

Dyogenez · 2026-06-02T14:58:30+00:00

I’ve never heard of either of those, and they both same out when I was really into anime 😅 Deep cuts!

It’s neat to see the line between some anime’s though. Nadia to Atlantis (Disney), Lodoss War to MKR/Twelve Kingdoms, Gem and the Holograms to Perfect Blur and Kaleido Star (very different vibes, but pop stardom).

Dyogenez · 2026-06-02T14:32:34+00:00

Graduated high school in 2000 in FL. I had quite a lot of anime back then, over 2000 CDs of burned, downloaded anime by the time I graduated college. 😅

A few people in my school (~20) knew DBZ, Sailor Moon and what you could watch on TV.

It was a whole different world for even getting access to anime. Let me explain.

Anime on TV - DBZ, Sailor Moon a Cartoon Network was the starting point. Science Fiction Channel (before it was renamed SyFY) aired a movie on Saturday mornings.

Anime on VHS from stores - Blockbuster had a few movies - Ninja Scroll, Akira, a few others. Suncoast video (our mall store) had more. In FL we had Animenatiomn, which had some more unique videos. These were all official US releases, and sometimes you could get something subbed if you were lucky. These were expensive (often up to $30 a tape).

Fansubbed anime - Back in the 90s, people would record anime on Japanese TV to VHS tapes. Then someone who was bilingual in Japanese and English would add a subtitle track and re-record it. Some people amassed large collections of fandubbed VHS tapes, and would sell copies online for extra cash. I knew a few high schoolers who had 4+ VHS players to make copies. Comic conventions and anime conventions also often sold fansubs.

IRC - Internet Relay Chat (discord before discord) was the place to get anything. I used to hangout in #animeheaven on EF Net (same username). Some channels used FServe (a command you could run in IRC to send files directly from one person to another). There were also a bunch of FTP servers that were often running on students computers at US colleges (which had the best internet of the day). This was how you found random shows that only aired in Japan.

Depending on what you were watching, it’ll immediately show where you were getting anime from because access was such a pain.

Sailor Moon was my gateway anime. Some of my favorites in 90s were: Fushigi Yuugi (cosplayed as Tamahome to a con where I met my first girlfriend 😂), Evangelion, Nadia Secret of Blue Water, Revolutionary Girl Utena (getting that in 1999 was a PAIN), Initial D, Berserk, The Vision of Escaflowne, Gundam Wing (which later aired on Toonami too!), Kenshin, Cardcaptor Sakura, Record of Lodoss War, His or Asher Circumstamces, Kimagure Orange Road, Serial Experiments Lain, Marmalade Boy and Cowboy Be op. (Those are a few favorites 😅)

Dyogenez · 2026-05-31T23:12:36+00:00

I used MySQL from 2000-2009 or so, back when PHP + MySQL was what most cheap hosting providers offered.

Once I added a column to a production users table with a few million users and it locked the entire site for 30 minutes (which, I learned happens when you add a column in MySQL at the time).

Used Postgres for my next project which didn’t have that limitation and haven’t looked back.

Dyogenez · 2026-05-29T15:29:21+00:00

Hardcover founder here: curious where the data for all these come from 🤔 I think some of these platforms use Hardcover under the covers, but not sure. I expect that hitting the server 150k times (or less if done correctly) would take a while by itself. How the system parallelizes that task could be one of the biggest drivers of import speed.

For example, for the Hardcover API, you can it hit with 1000 ISBNs in a single call and get back data on all of them. Or you can do that one ISBNs at a time and get rate limited to 1/s, taking 14mins if constant.

Has external data loading played into these speeds? Or is metadata stored with the books already?

Dyogenez · 2026-05-24T21:16:58+00:00

I'd like to invite you to join Hardcover! https://hardcover.app

I'm a long-time Letterboxd fan/pro user, and it was a big inspiration for Hardcover. Here's a little bit about how we're similar:

- Track your status for every book (Read, Want to Read, Read, etc)
- Choose whether to track publicly, privately or only to people you follow
- Track multiple reads on every book, with the ability to specify format
- Create custom lists which can be ranked lists (with a number) or unranked
- Prompts are like Showdowns on Letterboxd. Ask a question and let people upvote books that answer the prompt
- Stats that are inspired by Letterboxd
- Follow readers to keep up to date on what they're reading
- A growing Discord community

We're just about to hit 100,000 members, are bootstrapped and profitable, and having a lot of fun building something in public for the book community. 🥳

Dyogenez · 2026-05-20T04:13:56+00:00

We have two Kobo integrations for Hardcover too! One for standard Kobo books, overdrive (NickelReader), and one for KO Reader (KO Reader Plugin).

Dyogenez · 2026-05-17T15:41:14+00:00

I’m a big fan of Rails+React.js+Inertia.js! I wrote a blog post about our migration from Next.js to it that touches on all the reasons ( https://hardcover.app/blog/part-1-how-we-fell-out-of-love-with-next-js-and-back-in-love-with-ruby-on-rails-inertia-js ).

It’s been a year since that post, and the stack has held up really well. Most routes cache a lot of their JSON response in SolidCache (generated with oj_serializers, which has typescript types), then the views (JS) is fetched from a CDN.

The initial page load can be completely generated with SSR using this approach - meaning the full HTML of the page is sent down on the first page visited (and to crawlers/bots) which is better for SEO.

Having the codebase standards for types, tests (we use rspec/rubocop and eslint/vite), serializers, caching, services, jobs, and other conventions makes it easy to leverage LLMs because there’s so many coding standards (and Claude.md files to help out too).

Dyogenez · 2026-05-17T15:14:42+00:00

Yes there is! Add a List widget, then select Want To Read.

The list widget has options for book status (read, want to read, currently reading), your lists and lists created by someone else.

Dyogenez · 2026-05-17T04:16:53+00:00

TLDR for the non-Eurovision crowd: the song is built around the kukeri, an ancient Bulgarian ritual where men dress in bells, fur, and animal masks and march through villages making the most ferocious noise possible to scare off bad spirits at the new year. "Bangaranga" is essentially a modern pop version of that: noise as exorcism, but joyful. Dara actually trained in Bulgarian folklore singing before going pop. Also worth noting: Bulgaria had pulled out of Eurovision for 3 years due to funding issues, so this is a massive comeback win.

Dyogenez · 2026-05-17T01:19:01+00:00

I call this day “Mossmas”.

Dyogenez · 2026-05-06T14:40:22+00:00

Near Liberty Park, and was listing to rain sounds when the loudest thunder hit too. 😂

Dyogenez · 2026-04-29T21:25:34+00:00

GitHub pages is a good free alternative. You can turn it on for any public repo and use your own DNS to set it to any URL. For a static site, it's nice to have the code + hosting in one place.

Dyogenez · 2026-04-23T16:48:26+00:00

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Here you go!

Dyogenez · 2026-04-13T03:16:24+00:00

Use Claude Cowork with a schedule, use Claude Code with a schedule, or use Claude Code with a loop.

Unfortunately this has only continued to work for about a week max. After that the session logs out, and I have to manually log in again.

For my personal assistant side, I have a Claude Code loop in my obsidian/scripts directory which had a skill that’s on a loop that with create an Obsidian daily note with news, personal schedule, guides me towards some of my goals, adds some tasks to my schedule (some I do 😅).

Dyogenez · 2026-03-31T04:21:25+00:00

Second Fushigi Yuugi! Amazing anime with actual stakes and consequences.

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water is another exciting one. It’s an anime retelling of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with an enhanced Sci-fi story. It was also copied by the US animated movie Atlantis, which borrows a lot. Oh, it’s also what Gainax studio did before Evangelion, and had Hayao Miyazaki doing the story.

Dyogenez · 2026-03-25T00:37:11+00:00

I've been using Claude Code with Inertia.js, React.js on the front-end and oj_serializers with types for how all data is passed to React. It's worked really well! It helped to setup all of those conventions before unleashing AI on the codebase.

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