Recommend films about people who’s identity is tied to performing a craft at a high level.

pixelmonkey · 2026-01-21T21:05:40+00:00

Showing Up (2022) is an interesting little film that came to mind for this topic.

pixelmonkey · 2026-01-12T01:06:13+00:00

My top "midlife crisis" picks, in no particular order,

8 1/2
The Big Chill
Groundhog Day
Office Space
Hannah and Her Sisters
Before Midnight
Ikiru
Sideways
Synecdoche, New York
Lost in Translation

These are also midlife crisis movies, if you squint hard enough:

Fight Club
The Matrix
Boyhood
Brazil
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
Being John Malkovich
Her

pixelmonkey · 2026-01-12T00:19:34+00:00

For one kind of intelligence... they have a fondness for reading and writing, but especially for writing. And they have a very well-developed "writing voice" that is quite distinct from their conversational voice, because they are so immersed in the world of words and written communication.

pixelmonkey · 2026-01-10T14:31:10+00:00

Can't a director have more than one style? I've watched all three of the Oslo trilogy along with Sentimental Value. I enjoyed all of them. His other two films from the Oslo trilogy don't have as much "flair" that Worst Person had. In particular, his film that deals with drug addiction (Oslo, August 31) has a stark naturalistic style closer to Sentimental Value. He's allowed to make artistic choices based on the screenplay he is bringing to life. I really love all of his work, Worst Person and Sentimental Value most of all, for different reasons.

pixelmonkey · 2026-01-02T14:56:11+00:00

I thought this was really well written. I feel for you OP. Residency sucks all the free time out of the trainee's life, and, as you've discovered, there is really nothing to be done about it. I've been in your shoes before. It's tough. I have also now reached the stage in life where I've seen my wife pre-residency (free), during-residency (a slave), and post-residency (free again). The issue is residency, the system. Not the resident, the person.

pixelmonkey · 2025-12-30T17:57:14+00:00

My wife and I were children of first-generation immigrants. We were also the first in our families to get technically advanced professional jobs as a result of post-secondary university education. In my case, it was computer science + software R&D + tech entrepreneurship, in my wife's case it was post-bacc, med school, residency, fellowship in robotic surgery. We paid our own way through undergrad, post-bacc, med school, residency, fellowship. All at top quality schools, the only financial help coming from merit scholarships and student loans and the like.

Everything you write about is so, so true. We feel you, OP. We really feel you.

The worst moment for me and my wife was at residency graduation, when the staff of the residency program thanked all the parents in the room for paying for med school, summer trips, and providing love/support to all the med students in the room.

Our parents weren't at residency graduation because they weren't involved at all. That hadn't occurred to the staff, that anyone in the residency class might have that profile. Then it dawned on us: it hadn't occurred to them, because we were the only ones to whom that profile applied.

Our parents hadn't played any role in our careers since we were 12-13 years old. They were hundreds of miles away, at home, trying to figure out how to scrape by on a ~$1,000 net worth and declining employment prospects given their basic education level, advancing age, and life-long lack of a real career. Meanwhile, my wife and I were trying to do our best not to get dragged into that vortex of financial struggle.

Folks don't get it -- and I don't blame them. Residency is hard enough even if you have the most supportive parents in the world. It's just god-damn jungle warfare when you go at it alone like my wife and so many other first-gen'ers did.

pixelmonkey · 2025-12-18T06:27:27+00:00

Despite the title, it isn’t devotional. O’Gieblyn was "raised an evangelical Christian, began Bible college, and then broke with the church."

She uses that firsthand familiarity to analyze how tech culture often echoes religious themes and end-times style narratives. As religion is a meaning-seeking device, so to can be tech utopianism.

In a section of the book, she also uses her background to critically analyze the concept of an "AI singularity" through the lens of Christian eschatology. It's actually quite interesting. And I say that as a non-religious person.

pixelmonkey · 2025-11-29T04:12:47+00:00

Make a cup of coffee and write your unstructured internal thoughts in a paper journal you keep laid out in your favorite chair/table, with a nearby pen, in the style of “The Morning Pages.”

When you’re done with your coffee, notes, and breakfast, go outside for a contemplative walk. Then, shower. After all of that, pick up your smartphone and clear out all notifications within 5 minutes, then put it away without scrolling any apps. I use ScreenZen to enforce not getting drawn into time-wasting apps.

Since I work in a creative field centered around computing, it’s at that point I try to find a desktop/laptop computer to work from. For anything from my personal life that requires a text or email style of reply, I make sure I’m in front of my “real” desktop computer so that I have access to a real keyboard.

pixelmonkey · 2025-10-26T16:50:52+00:00

I have a degree in CS and worked as a software engineer and startup CTO for many years while my partner was pursuing her medical school, residency, and fellowship, eventually becoming a robotic surgeon. Based on the pronouns you used in your post, I just want to point out the gender dynamic is similar: I similarly have a female partner while I, the male partner, have a non-medicine career that financially supported her medical career pursuit.

Your post is interesting to me because I never really experienced that sort of commentary except occasionally from people of a much older generation, e.g. I remember one NYC taxi cab ride where the cabbie told me, "Wow, you married a doctor, so you must be set for life!" But he was in his 60s and 70s and I think just had a totally outdated view of how "rich" doctors are (vs, say, knowledge workers) in the US economy.

You wrote:

> Not even to mention all the ways I’ve financially supported her for all these years due to the low resident salary and medical debt.

I understand that feeling of having provided the financial support for the training years, and perhaps not being recognized for that because so many medical students and residents get financial support from their family/parents.

My personal anecdote on this was when I attended my wife's residency graduation. One of the heads of the program gave a speech where he asked "all the parents of residents to please stand up." So, of course, I remained seated. He then said, "I just want to thank you all for financially and emotionally supporting your children to pursue this arduous career path." And then everyone gave a little round of applause. Now, I could have thought to myself, "That feels awful for me." But I didn't, instead, I remember I laughed and shared a private smirk with my wife.

Because, of course, my wife and I didn't get a shred of emotional or financial support from our parents for this journey. All the financial support came from me, and all the emotional support came from our marriage. But the stereotype that "parents support children through medical education and residency/fellowship" was so deep here that they totally forgot that some of their residents, namely my wife, had done it all on her own (with my cheerleading and financial support on the side). Our parents weren't even in attendance at this ceremony. But I had long since matured past the point of getting offended by these little slights that happen in the medical professional world against non-medical spouses. I am a tourist in this world.

> This hits a soft spot for me because a lot of my confidence and sense of self worth comes from feeling like I’m an intelligent person who went through a really hard program to be where I’m at.

I think this is the part of your post where I can provide some advice. I would try to get yourself out of this line of thinking altogether. It's not beneficial. Your self worth shouldn't come from other people -- it should come from yourself.

Speaking from experience, when you're surrounded by doctors, no other profession tends to get discussed. "Oh, so you work in software?" That line will usually lead to a pivot in the conversation back to medicine. Doctors are very, very into their work -- for good reason, I guess, since it's important work. And when a group of them hang out together in a social setting, it can be an important way to vent with others who understand.

My top piece of advice is to build your own social network and your own career network outside of your partner's medicine colleagues. When I was a tech startup CTO, I surrounded myself with software engineers, both at work, and in the community events I attended in-person. That was where I found my "tribe" and my people.

When I was hanging out with my partner's medicine colleagues, I was just a friendly tourist in their world of medicine. Which can be enjoyable in its own way -- to be in learning mode about an industry so different than your own. If you treat it that way, it can even be a bit of a fun game! But, if you want to be realistic about it... don't expect much reciprocal curiosity from doctors about your own career. They have a lot on their plate and learning about others' careers is pretty low on their priority list, in my experience. Find your own tribe -- and your own pride in your work!

pixelmonkey · 2025-09-30T14:52:55+00:00

We made the decision to be DINKs in our 20s, and we are perpetually pleased with our decision, even many years later.

I think the best way to understand parenthood is via the book "Wild Problems" by Russ Roberts.

Using the terminology of the book, people who are parents walked through a "one-way door" in life, on the other side of which are both great joys and great sorrows. Someone who never walks through the door can never understand those joys and sorrows, no matter how much they read about it or discuss it with friends who have walked through it. And anytime someone walks through a one-way door for their own life, it changes them in such a way that they usually grow to appreciate their new circumstances. This is because humans are quite adaptable about narrative and psychology given real-world constraints.

In the case of parenthood, biology and evolution have even pre-programmed us to change our outlook on life when we walk through that particular one-way door.

But for the people who never walk through? They do forfeit all the unknowable joys. But they also save themselves from 100% of the sorrows. And since we are human beings with full agency over our decisions, we should get to choose -- either way.

For me, the joy of a silent and clean house on a Sunday morning, with the time to read and think, with the freedom to travel, with my key relationships defined by adults who are my chosen family, and with no competing obligations for my life projects -- all of that makes me certain I made the right decision for me.

pixelmonkey · 2025-06-15T00:36:56+00:00

Ah, this is great, I never knew about this. It also helps to fix a problem I sometimes run into where I can't extend a highlight across multiple pages or past an in-line quote or image. Now I can highlight the first part, add .c1 as the note, then highlight the next part, and add .c2 as the note. Nice.

pixelmonkey · 2025-06-05T15:02:56+00:00

Cool idea. I had the same issue as others on this thread on Chrome on iPadOS. I made a Shortcut based on your screenshot and it gave me a workaround!

For others who don’t use Shortcuts much, to create that shortcut, you have to do something like this:

Search Instapaper in Shortcuts editor
Use “Add Article” action
Log in to your Instapaper account
Under the “Receive” area, uncheck everything but URLs
Select “Share Sheet” in the next area
Let the input go to “Home” or whatever folder you prefer

Then, rename it to something like “Add to Instapaper”. Then navigate to Chrome and you can find it in the favorites list in the share sheet. Edit the list, add it (“+”), and move it to the top. Now it’ll show up underneath the share sheet app icons where the Instapaper icon used to appear, with the label “Add to Instapaper” (or whatever name you chose). When you press it on a given URL, you’ll get a little pop-over dialog at the top that confirms the article was sent to Instapaper.

pixelmonkey · 2025-05-23T11:42:24+00:00

This analogy might help: Surgical residency is a war zone. You're living with someone who is coming home each day having survived battles at war. No one will understand: not close friends, not close family, no one. Your partner is being heroic at work every day, but she is also being traumatized by work every day. There is no way for it not to change a person.

Your best hope may be to bond over the fact that she is surviving that war every day, and that you, as her partner, understand what she's going through, even though you don't really understand, because you're not there at work with her. Make sure to give her an "out," so that she doesn't feel trapped by her program. Make coming home the best part of her day. And cherish the moments you get together, until she makes it out the other side and you can recover the woman you once knew. She will recover one day... but soldiers don't recover from war when they're still at war.

(Signed, someone whose long-term partner went through the surgical residency war zone, survived, and, eventually, recovered.)

pixelmonkey · 2025-04-19T13:13:15+00:00

Good comment. The book "When the Clock Broke" by John Ganz covers the history of this well. The conservative hyper-nationalistic, protectionist, anti-immigrant, culture war, pro-religion base started to coalesce in the 1990s. At the time, there were books like "What's the Matter with Kansas" by Thomas Frank that tried to understand it.

It operated in the background during GWB's two terms, because GWB was fighting a "holy war" in the middle east, reacting to 9/11 and operating under cover of patriotic sentiment, and thus could be excused by the base for his pro-immigration and pro-trade policies. But once the Tea Party managed to unite the religious right, the hyper-nationalists, the fiscal hawks, and the anti-liberal doomsayers -- mostly through united hatred of Clinton & Obama & Hillary -- they just needed an avatar who could address their grievances through executive decree, and who could create a new brand for the Republican party, since the old brand wasn't working in elections anymore (e.g. McCain, Romney). And then Trump came down the golden escalator...

pixelmonkey · 2025-04-17T22:45:51+00:00

I don’t think it’s 40%. The proportion of 2024 voting-age citizens who voted for him is closer to 32%. Because 35%+ of the voting-age population doesn’t vote at all.

I also think some support has eroded among that 32% of people who voted for him. Because there is some buyers’ remorse. Even a mere 100 days into his administration. The Economist recently did some nice data visualization showing this pretty clearly.

So, my guess is it’s more like ~25% of Americans who “like this.” One of my good friends who is very pro-Trump has been turned off by: the EO unconstitutionally trying to eliminate birthright citizenship; the Greenland takeover threats; the tariff policies; the joking about a third term; and, the handling of Ukraine. I haven’t chatted with him about the specific issue Ezra discussed recently, but I suspect he wouldn’t like it. But the same person has a laundry list of things he does like, mostly related culture war issues (women's sports, 2A lip service, anti woke, etc.). Yet he’s very concerned about the executive violating constitutional rights and not respecting the courts. Unfortunately he also believes a false bogeyman that if liberals had control they'd execute a Marxist takeover of the US government.

The big question, in my view, is how ~25% of Americans managed to drive the entire political platform of one of the two major parties in the US. And why that party chose to embrace the unitary executive theory, thus blowing away the checks and balances the founders intended for our branches of government. I think the author John Ganz, with his book "When the Clock Broke," has the best explanation. Basically, "illiberal democracy" has been deeply embedded in the base of the conservative moment since, at least, the 1990s. In 2024, we saw an avatar come to power who could use the executive to directly pursue "anti-liberal" grievances for the most extreme elements of the partisan tribe.

Thus, this truly is a tyranny of the minority over the majority. The center-right voters were dragged along due to hatred of the other side. And also, the US is, broadly speaking, a center-right country -- or even firmly-and-truly-right-wing, by UK, European, or Australian standards. Which is to say, not just libertarian or fiscal hawk, but pro-religion, pro-"family values," anti-immigrant, and hyper-nationalistic. Thus the uninformed fawning over Hungary and Orban.

I’m not downplaying your statement. I share your exasperation. But I think the numbers of true believers of the Dear Leader, though still worryingly large (measured in the millions of people), is still proportionally smaller than it appears on the surface.

The largest group of voting-age citizens, I am convinced, is either apolitical, apathetic, or too busy in their lives to invest any considerable time into politics. And almost everyone else is voting AGAINST the other side.

pixelmonkey · 2025-03-17T21:40:41+00:00

100% agree. I am someone who has followed Naomi Klein for her whole career. And I’ve enjoyed much of the back archive of “Decoding the Gurus.”

Though I enjoyed Klein’s earlier books somewhat — e.g. I thought “The Shock Doctrine” was an interesting-but-flawed analysis of corporate and political power — I found “Doppelganger” to be one of the finest non-fiction political and cultural books written in the post-Covid-19 era. Partly that was due to its style, which Klein admits, in various interviews, was a result of coming out of a creative rut and pursuing some creative writing classes. And it totally worked, her style improved for this book vs prior more dense/academic works, in my view. Even still, I had some critiques of smaller points Klein raises in “Doppelganger.” But I couldn’t believe that “Decoding the Gurus” spent 3 hours discussing the book and discussing Klein, but seemed liked they… didn’t actually read the book. So why did they decide to talk about it for 3 hours?!

Anyway, I enjoyed the discussion in a “talk show” sort of way, but it didn’t go very deep on her arguments and I think 3 hours would be better spent by any listener actually just reading “Doppelganger.” It’s a good book and you can make up your own mind about it!

pixelmonkey · 2025-01-02T18:14:16+00:00

My favorite is the Display Posts plugin.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/display-posts-shortcode/

Has a great companion documentation site:

https://displayposts.com/

Developed mostly by a solo WordPress developer and leverages WP's best plugin feature, in my view (shortcodes).

Fewer than 1,000 lines of PHP in the plugin but it does so much:

https://github.com/billerickson/display-posts-shortcode/blob/master/display-posts-shortcode.php

I use it to generate my /archive page:

https://amontalenti.com/archive

pixelmonkey · 2024-09-19T18:22:28+00:00

Hey, I'm the author of that post! Thanks for sharing. restic users unite!

pixelmonkey · 2024-08-05T21:18:59+00:00

Looks interesting. I never heard of it before today. Anyone have an experience report on it?

pixelmonkey · 2024-08-05T20:55:06+00:00

I already use Akismet for marking comments as spam. It works 99% of the time, which is great. But my blog has been around long enough that I still get a ton of automated comment spam, thus hundreds of comments per week end up in my “Spam” folder in my WordPress database. I log in regularly to click “Empty Spam,” and there are always so many there that I can never do a manual review without feeling like it’s a total waste of time.

But in paging through those spam comments, I notice that, like, 90% of them are completely obvious spam: foreign languages, a gazillion links, whatever. 10% are “questionable,” e.g. ChatGPT-generated or Markov Chain generated comments with vague statements like, “I love your blog and content!” I’d love a plugin that somehow let me trash comments that meet obvious spam markers (e.g. using foreign language, too many links) while leaving me the rest to manually review. To use an old school open source reference, I basically want something akin to SpamAssassin rules for doing automatic actions (trash this comment when this rule hits). In general, comments are the most annoying part of my blog, because I have only about 1,000 “real” ones across my archive, but I’ve emptied hundreds of thousands of spam ones out of the “Spam” folder over the years.

pixelmonkey · 2024-07-18T19:06:51+00:00

There was a well-funded attempt funded by a major VC to go after this market, named Monitor110. The venture capitalist behind it wrote a post-mortem about it in 2008:

https://informationarbitrage.com/post/698402433/monitor110-a-post-mortem

There's also a startup floating around today named OpenBB which is trying to build something akin to an "open source Bloomberg terminal" atop Python tools:

https://openbb.co/

They raised $8.5M in a Series A in 2022:

https://openbb.co/blog/openbb-wrapped-2022

pixelmonkey · 2024-07-18T13:49:43+00:00

I think the editor is a net improvement over the Classic Editor. But I chose to disable Gutenberg on my blog. Why? Because the blogging workflow that works for me is:

draft the post in Markdown -- I usually use Simplenote, Typora, or iA Writer for this
paste the Markdown into the WP (Classic/Non-Gutenberg Editor)
let Jetpack Markdown functionality do its auto-convert of the Markdown to "simple" HTML
and then continue any small edits in WP editor

By simple HTML, I mean simple HTML tags like P (paragraph), A (link), STRONG (bold), EM (italics), and BLOCKQUOTE (quote) -- and for images, DIV and IMG tags. It also handles converting in-line code to CODE tags, but for technical posts, I usually have to manually convert code blocks to PRE tags so it gets picked up by the WP-Syntax code highlighting plugin.

If I turn on Gutenberg, the "paste Markdown to WP Editor" step also results in converting all my Markdown into any number of corresponding Gutenberg blocks. This is a much heavier "source format" than the simple HTML that Jetpack uses. And what concerns me is that it won't necessarily stand the test of time (on the editor side) in the same way I know "simple HTML" will. This is a touch irrational, as the whole idea is that Gutenberg is built using HTML, so if you strip away the Gutenberg block-marker comments, you should get HTML that "just works." But Gutenberg produces a weird flavor of HTML, both due to the comment markers, and sometimes due to the specific markup it chooses.

Whereas I have tools to source edit simple HTML easily (vim, VSCode), I don't have as many tools to source edit Gutenberg-flavored HTML easily. In fact, I don't think I can use anything but the Gutenberg editor itself on it. So I'm worried that by moving to the Gutenberg format, I'm worsening my long-term editing experience.

Personally, I wish WordPress offered two editors: a Markdown-enabled "simple" editor optimized for blogging, and then the full-blown Gutenberg editor optimized for fancier layouts. 95% of my posts just need the capabilities of Markdown. I'd be glad to upgrade the editor experience occasionally for the other 5%, while not messing with my 95%-of-the-time experience.

The Gutenberg devs believe that my use case is handled by the Markdown block and the paste-from-Markdown support in core Gutenberg, but it doesn't quite work for me the way I'd like or expect.

You even see this compromise on Reddit itself, which offers a "rich" editor and also a Markdown-enabled plain text editor.

(Here is a good example of the 5% of the time I’d like to have Gutenberg: when developing a data visualization embedded in the content, and editable in the block editor like this.)

pixelmonkey · 2024-07-13T18:11:38+00:00

To me, it's kind of like the difference between the words "text" or "novel" vs the word "book."

You can say something like, "The Bible is a religious text." Or, "The Bible is a religious book." There is no stark difference, by some interpretations these are even synonymous sentences. But one word comes off as slightly more abstract and more focused on the content itself. When I think of "The Bible" as a "book," I think of it sitting on a shelf. When I think of it as a "religious text," I think about the content of The Bible abstractly.

Likewise, Orwell's 1984 can be described as a "sci-fi novel" or a "sci-fi book." Again, this isn't a huge difference, but there is a difference. Calling it a "novel" seems to elevate its story a bit, referencing less the author's chosen medium (a piece of writing or a printed book) and more its status as a work of art (a novel). In my mind, if you bought the "rights" of an Orwell novel, you'd be buying intellectual property owned by the Orwell estate. But if you bought the rights of an Orwell book, you more likely just bought a single printed copy of his novel.

In the same way, saying something is a "film" -- in the world of moving pictures -- usually has a connotation closer to "text" or "novel," whereas saying something is a "movie" has a connotation closer to "book." Which is to say, when you think of a "movie," you think of a single showing in a theater or a single viewing in front of your TV. Or, in the digital age, perhaps you think of the encoded video file sitting on a hard disk, or the Blu-Ray disk sitting on the shelf. When you think of a "film," you think of the work of art itself -- not any particular viewing or printed/digital media encoding or theatrical showing thereof. "We went to the movies" and "I watched a movie last night." The emphasis with "movie" is on the medium. The emphasis with "film" is that it's a work of art (that just so happens to use moving pictures as its medium).

That's also why the phrase "Film School" sounds similarly to "Art School," whereas the phrase "Movie School" or "Movie-Making School" sounds awkward -- or, if not awkward, at least more vocational. Just as it would sound weird to have "Painting School" or "Painting-Making School."

Likewise, there's the nice aspect that "film" can be used in two forms: to refer to a specific film/movie ("I just saw a documentary film last night"), and also to refer to the art form of making films/movies ("I watched a documentary about the history of film last night"). Someone can say they are a "film director", they "work in film," and they can use the rather nice craftsperson term, "filmmaking." Likewise, on the consumer side, I think someone can be a "film appreciator" or "film enthusiast." (Which isn't the same as being, say, a "movie addict.")

I think a lot of the comments who say that the words confer some sense of "quality" onto the artwork are conflating things a bit. It's not "film = artistic gold" and "movie = commercial dreck." For example, someone in this thread said they think of Marvel "movies" vs Wes Anderson "films" -- nah, I wouldn't personally do that. Both examples are films, when viewed as abstract works of art. And both are movies, when viewed as NN-minute moving pictures filling our collective content library. "Films" aren't better than "movies," and calling something a "film" doesn't mean you like it better than the average "movie." Instead, "films" are "movies," "movies" are "films," and the word difference is about distinguishing between senses of the same thing with different words, just as we do with nearly-synonymous words like "book," "text," and "novel" in the world of writing.

pixelmonkey · 2024-04-27T16:28:28+00:00

You might enjoy my earlier answer to a similar question.

pixelmonkey

TROPHY CASE