# Applied Cartography

> Essays and media reviews by Justin Duke. Written by Justin Duke, CEO of Buttondown and partner at Third South Capital.

Every page is available as Markdown by replacing its `.html` extension with `.md`.

## Essays

- [Befuddlement](https://jmduke.com/posts/befuddlement.md): It is a common misperception that the worst possible outcome of a feature launch is the noise of crickets — and that, more than anything else, the success co...
- [The new look](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-new-look.md): As you may have noticed, the site has a new look. I don't think of it as a new version of the site, in no small part because the structure has not changed at...
- [Vue](https://jmduke.com/posts/vue.md): The most common follow-up question I got about the post I wrote on Django last month had nothing to do with Django at all. It was about a comment I tossed of...
- [Engineering produces wisdom](https://jmduke.com/posts/engineering-produces-wisdom.md): A software organization can generate competitive advantage in many ways: network effects, branding/counter-positioning, switching costs, etc. One historical...
- [Slack workflows as duct tape](https://jmduke.com/posts/slack-workflows-as-duct-tape.md): A workflow we've wanted for a long time at Buttondown: throw a random paper cut or complaint into a Slack channel, and get a nicely formatted Linear issue ou...
- [Talk Easy](https://jmduke.com/posts/talk-easy.md): A running joke between me and a few friends is the inevitability of all podcasts — or really, all interview mediums — to curdle into anodyne pablum as they g...
- [It's just a model](https://jmduke.com/posts/its-just-a-model.md): I, like many people, have witnessed and felt the whiplash between the seemingly-orgastic highs of the Astra launch and the experience of using the model. Whe...
- [Hiring and firing a DBA](https://jmduke.com/posts/hiring-and-firing-a-dba.md): Hiring our DBA For the past sixty days, Buttondown ran a scheduled LLM invocation once a day. Every morning it would look at the previous few days of databas...
- [/shuffle](https://jmduke.com/posts/shuffle.md): I'm here to tell you about a hidden feature of sorts that I built for Buttondown. Go to buttondown.com/shuffle and you will be served a completely random arc...
- [Fable 5.1](https://jmduke.com/posts/fable-5-1.md): Anthropic released Fable 5.1 this week. My initial reaction to the release was this comment I made in the Third South Slack: > More seriously: I'm excited to...
- [BB, Grok Bot](https://jmduke.com/posts/bb-grok-bot.md): Another month, another field report from testing some vaguely interesting tools: this time, BB and Grok Bot. --- BB is a tool from the folks who built Terrag...
- [EPUB is not that scary](https://jmduke.com/posts/epub.md): In a prior life, I worked on Kindle — specifically on content pipelines and data processing. This either excuses the fact that I had no real idea what EPUB w...
- [Notes on Cloudflare Access](https://jmduke.com/posts/cloudflare-access.md): Cloudflare is now in the AWS zone: it has a long tail of useful but under-examined little services that haven't quite entered the zeitgeist the way the flags...
- [Tech debt is weird](https://jmduke.com/posts/tech-debt-is-weird.md): Jesse wrote this interesting article on technical debt, which resonated with me spiritually but not directionally -- which is a very weird way to say that I...
- [Patch notes](https://jmduke.com/posts/patch-notes.md): Earlier this year I mentioned that Slay the Spire 2 had reached the status of needing to be deleted from my computer, on the grounds that it was proving too...
- [op, mprocs](https://jmduke.com/posts/two-tooling-changes.md): Two small tooling changes that have been really nice for us at Buttondown: 1Password CLI A long-standing annoyance has been dealing with secrets and coordina...
- [Snacks are cheaper and tastier than ever](https://jmduke.com/posts/snacks-are-everywhere.md): Perhaps the single most consequential essay I've read is Will Larson's Work on what matters. This is ostensibly advice targeted towards staff engineers, but...
- [Cursed knowledge](https://jmduke.com/posts/cursed-knowledge.md): Nick pointed me towards Marcin who pointed me towards immich's list of cursed knowledge the other day, and it has already become a running joke in the Slack....
- [Check the status page](https://jmduke.com/posts/check-the-status-page.md): As I've covered somewhat extensively in prior writing (see A month of OpEx quick wins and Self-hosting our GitHub Action runners), this year has been marked...
- [How the media library works](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-media-library.md): I've received a number of questions as to how the media library part of this blog works, and I figure it's worth a bit of time to explain — even though there...
- [Two hundred decisions](https://jmduke.com/posts/decision-logs.md): This week, after a little under two years of having adopted the practice, Buttondown has minted its 200th decision log. This is a practice very similar to RF...
- [June, 2026](https://jmduke.com/posts/june-2026-roundup.md): June, like any month in which I neither write very much nor read very much, feels already cryptographic in retrospect. Part of this was due to significantly...
- [Denormalization 101](https://jmduke.com/posts/denormalization-is-caching.md): I have had exactly two conversations this week about denormalization, which is a sign that it is time to write a blog post. If you already know what denormal...
- [Indeterminate / Squash](https://jmduke.com/posts/squash.md): The hardest part of gardening is not correctly timing the seedling transfer, or deciding when a plant is a goner versus when it just needs one more week. The...
- [Victory is a lossy compressor](https://jmduke.com/posts/victory-is-a-lossy-compressor.md): Update, July 2026: Bill Mill kindly pointed out that the Cavs' head coach is Kenny Atkinson, not JB Bickerstaff — who coached Cleveland until 2024 but as of...
- [Back to Overcast](https://jmduke.com/posts/back-to-overcast.md): In what is certainly the least consequential update in this blog's history: I have boomeranged back from Apple Podcasts to Overcast. None of my gripes with O...
- [May, 2026](https://jmduke.com/posts/may-2026-roundup.md): There are two mental models about work and fatigue which, like my brief dalliance with Roshe Runs, I have loved and outgrown: 1. The first is the fungibility...
- [Self-hosting our CI, three months later](https://jmduke.com/posts/self-hosting-ci-three-months-later.md): A couple of folks have written in over the past month asking how my experiments in self-hosting GitHub Actions runners have held up. And three months seems l...
- [ccusage](https://jmduke.com/posts/ccusage.md): Inspired by a recent Simon Willison post, I just ran ccusage on my laptop and learned that over the past thirty days, on my sole subscription of $200 a month...
- [What matters](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-matters.md): <div class="teleplay"> <p class="character">Toby</p> <p class="dialogue">I turned it on just as they got to the scene when Richard, Geoffrey and John were lo...
- [Be careful what you make easier](https://jmduke.com/posts/be-careful-what-you-make-easier.md): I have found much peace this year going offline to shelter myself from the whiplash of LLM companies jockeying for mindshare by cosplaying as DevRel. Every n...
- [Screen record more](https://jmduke.com/posts/screen-record-more.md): One of the things I miss most about working in an office is osmosis: the ability to absorb information from coworkers purely by peering over their shoulder f...
- [Buttondown no longer runs Redis](https://jmduke.com/posts/no-more-redis.md): Buttondown no longer runs Redis! I added it years ago for the same reason almost every Django app has Redis: that's just what you do. Workers wanted a queue,...
- [Just aim the cannon correctly](https://jmduke.com/posts/difficulty-scores.md): James Shore has a post I found myself nodding along to until the very last step, where he loses me. The thesis is clean: > Your AI coding agent, the one you...
- [LLMs and Buttondown](https://jmduke.com/posts/llm-born.md): Buttondown has grown a lot in 2026; some of that growth is uncomfortable. I've talked to enough people about this in real life that it felt worth writing som...
- [On self-updating screenshots](https://jmduke.com/posts/self-updating-screenshots.md): Nick sent me a great post from one of the engineers at Goodenough, the fine folks behind Jelly, on the topic of self-updating screenshots. It is near and dea...
- [April, 2026](https://jmduke.com/posts/april-2026-roundup.md): I had hoped and expected that the chaos which had marked the start of the year — floors, termites, sickness, fires, ACL surgery — was largely behind us, and...
- [Four years in the maelstrom](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-maelstrom.md): > A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly, there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son? > And at one point, I n...
- [Write as you want to be heard](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-i-write.md): If you have ever chatted with me in real life, you know that my writing style here closely reflects my speaking manner. My writing, just like my speaking, is...
- [Software never had a soul](https://jmduke.com/posts/software-never-had-a-soul.md): Ryo Lu recently wrote: > The web was the same. Personal sites were genuinely personal. Blogs felt like letters. Forums had regulars. You knew who made what....
- [March, 2026](https://jmduke.com/posts/march-2026-roundup.md): The chaos is finally — but not totally — starting to fade. In early March we moved back into our house, replete with new floors and a sense of something once...
- [A month of OpEx quick wins](https://jmduke.com/posts/opex-quick-wins.md): I spent the past few weeks chasing quick OpEx wins for sport, having felt a nagging sensation that the orchards of our org were a little too-laden with low-h...
- [Why I'm a film blogger now](https://jmduke.com/posts/film-blogger.md): I have written more words about film in 2026 than I have about technology and business. This has not escaped your attention — so much so that real-life and i...
- [What I would be doing](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-i-would-be-doing.md): Tanvir asked me a few days ago what I would build today if Buttondown didn't exist and I was still keen, fully employed elsewhere. This is a fertile question...
- [Archiving the roadmap](https://jmduke.com/posts/archiving-the-roadmap.md): Pour one out for Buttondown's transparent roadmap, which I formally archived yesterday evening after a year or so of informal archival. This felt like the jo...
- [Self-hosting our GitHub Action runners](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-i-saved-100.md): The impetus Buttondown's CI runs on Blacksmith, which is a great service that I am still happy to pay for (see also this note). But our January bill was $300...
- [The road to Pydantic V2](https://jmduke.com/posts/pydantic-v2.md): Around 18 months ago, I wrote: > Cursor did both! ...and then it choked on some more complicated feature work that spanned multiple files. Which is fine: a t...
- [Ascensions](https://jmduke.com/posts/ascensions.md): Most procedurally generated roguelikes have a concept of ascending difficulty levels designed to test the mettle of players who have wasted the most time mas...
- [February, 2026](https://jmduke.com/posts/february-2026-roundup.md): Last month's Wednesday update, I recorded from a train headed to Middelburg. This month I write closer to home temporally and otherwise. I am en route to the...
- [Unshipping Keystatic](https://jmduke.com/posts/unshipping-keystatic.md): Two years after initially adopting it, we've formally unshipped Keystatic. Our CMS, such as it is, is now a bunch of Markdoc files and a TypeScript schema or...
- [Scattered thoughts on LLM tools](https://jmduke.com/posts/five-observations-ai-tools.md): 1. Claude Desktop is a poor app in bizarre and inexplicable ways — stale table view cells, constant reauthentication requests, a markedly worse harness and r...
- [Golinks](https://jmduke.com/posts/golinks.md): If you've never encountered golinks before: they're short, memorable URLs that redirect to longer ones. Instead of telling a coworker "the dashboard is at ht...
- [Improper nouns](https://jmduke.com/posts/improper-nouns.md): Myles wrote a great post about standing up and scaling our nascent recommendation engine. Buried in the middle is an aside which, as you might suspect, is ne...
- [Changelog mornings](https://jmduke.com/posts/changelog-mornings.md): A new addition to my routine has been to start every morning writing out our changelog from the day before. This is mildly surprising to people who assume th...
- [More weird tests](https://jmduke.com/posts/weird-tests-2.md): It has been a while since I wrote about weird tests. This is not due to lack of enthusiasm — if anything, I think my passion for them has redoubled over the...
- [Maybe use Plain](https://jmduke.com/posts/maybe-use-plain.md): When I wrote about Help Scout, much of my praise was appositional. They were the one tool I saw that did not aggressively shoehorn you into using them as a C...
- [Subpaths vs. subdomains](https://jmduke.com/posts/subpaths-vs-subdomains.md): If you want to have user-level namespaces on a single domain — such as company.com/justin — you have two options: namespacing via subpath (company.com/justin...
- [Outgrowing Django admin](https://jmduke.com/posts/outgrowing-django-admin.md): For a bit of dessert work this week, I'm working on a full-fledged attempt at replacing the majority of our stock Django admin usage with something purposefu...
- [Notes on "Harness Engineering"](https://jmduke.com/posts/harness-engineering.md): I find it useful and revealing to perform very close readings of engineering blog posts from frontier labs. They seem like meaningful artifacts that, despite...
- [The death of software, the A24 of software](https://jmduke.com/posts/death-of-software.md): Steven Sinofsky recently published Death of Software. Nah., arguing via historical case studies that AI will not kill software any more than previous technol...
- [Better tests](https://jmduke.com/posts/good-tests.md): What makes for a good test? I feel like there is a dearth of useful literature on this subject, perhaps because a lot of the content which ostensibly aims to...
- [Notes on "How I'd Grow Buttondown"](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-id-grow-buttondown.md): A friend sent me Andrea Bosoni's How I'd grow Buttondown, a great and thoughtful piece. It's fun to read someone else do the exact intellectual exercise you'...
- [One status field per model](https://jmduke.com/posts/one-status-field-per-model.md): Any sufficiently old application starts to succumb to a pernicious form of technical debt known in street parlance as shitty data modeling. Sometimes this ma...
- [RIP XSLT](https://jmduke.com/posts/styled-rss-feeds.md): If you visit feed.xml in your browser, you will see that I have done the Cool Kid thing and added styling to it via XSLT. This was originally something I've...
- [Building a data greenhouse](https://jmduke.com/posts/insourcing-your-data-warehouse.md): A conviction I've held for a while now — one that has upgraded from idiosyncratic to prescient — is that you should insource your data warehouse. Pull all ex...
- [In praise of actions](https://jmduke.com/posts/in-praise-of-actions.md): When I first encountered all of the concepts that I'll describe as controllers or actions or services, I would try to adhere to them with the logic of consis...
- [January, 2026](https://jmduke.com/posts/january-2026-roundup.md): This is not, if I'm being honest, the simple, structured start to 2026 that I had in mind. Rigor and early workouts have been replaced by pulled floors and s...
- [Maturing your support function past a single engineer](https://jmduke.com/posts/maturing-support.md): It feels a little odd to be writing about scaling support as if from a position of authority. But I had two recent conversations around the same topic—going...
- [LLM as advance team](https://jmduke.com/posts/llm-advance-team.md): My first foray into using git worktree-style development — spinning up multiple workspaces and having LLM agents attack different problems in parallel — was...
- [Brief notes on migrating to Postgres-backed jobs](https://jmduke.com/posts/postgres-jobs.md): It seems premature to talk about a migration that is only halfway done, even if it's the hard half that's done — but I think there's something useful in docu...
- [Recent forays into developer productivity](https://jmduke.com/posts/llm-devprod.md): I've written before about my posture around LLMs being mostly summarizable as design your systems and abstractions to accommodate an infinite number of junio...
- [Every model should have a notes field](https://jmduke.com/posts/notes-field.md): Production data, like real life, is messy. Your database — or at least the projection of the world as expressed by your database — will become riddled with e...
- [Pure strategy](https://jmduke.com/posts/pure-strategy.md): The goal of a build tool is to take a bunch of disparate inputs and compile them into an output: zsh $ rustc main.rs <pre class="mermaid"> flowchart LR subgr...
- [Refactoring a product is tricky](https://jmduke.com/posts/refactoring-a-product-is-tricky.md): It's easy to talk about refactoring at the codebase level because there's a reflexive definition: a refactor is a change to the codebase that preserves all e...
- [Migrating to PlanetScale](https://jmduke.com/posts/planetscale.md): First off, huge amount of credit to Mati for migrating our database to PlanetScale. I highly recommend reading the blog post. He does a good job talking abou...
- [Uses (January 2026)](https://jmduke.com/posts/uses-january-2026.md): A few updates to my Uses page: Software: I switched from Cursor to Zed. Zed is fast, native, and the editing experience is snappier. I've also been using Con...
- [Obsidian for internal docs](https://jmduke.com/posts/obsidian-for-internal-docs.md): I've grown cautious of my proclivity to prematurely review a tool. The most important quality of any tool meant to be used regularly is the ease with which y...
- [Terragon, Conductor, PyCharm](https://jmduke.com/posts/failed-experiments.md): I was sad and unsurprised to get an email from Terragon announcing that they were sunsetting the product. I was a happy user for the two or so weeks in which...
- [10 questions](https://jmduke.com/posts/10-questions.md): Inspired (as so many things are) by Behzod: 1. How do I carve out time and energy to be a better friend? 2. What is Buttondown's strongest medium-term source...
- [Big Brother](https://jmduke.com/posts/big-brother.md): ![](/img/big-brother.png) Telemachus has been with my parents (a fifteen minute drive away) for the past week, a fact I was reminded of three minutes ago as...
- [Bauhaus, by science or magic](https://jmduke.com/posts/bauhaus.md): !Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are funding a new aesthetic --- Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are funding a new aesthetic: > We're more than a quarter w...
- [sitemaptorss](https://jmduke.com/posts/sitemaptorss.md): In the waning hours of my Christmas break, I've launched a new project: sitemaptorss. It, like caltorss before it, is hopefully well-described by its name: i...
- [mise hooks](https://jmduke.com/posts/mise-hooks.md): I've written before about having a standardized set of commands across all my projects. One of the things that helps with that is mise hooks. I've actually b...
- [Avoid single-use variables](https://jmduke.com/posts/single-use-variables.md): After all these years programming, it's fun to catch myself changing my style preferences in real-time. Here's a change I find myself getting very aggressive...
- [Dotfiles](https://jmduke.com/posts/dotfiles.md): Fernando convinced me to publish (and, therefore, clean up) my dotfiles: > I’m interested in people who customize their experience of computing. This is ofte...
- [How LLMs change my codebase](https://jmduke.com/posts/llm-changes.md): Fewer dependencies. I've always been suspicious of pulling in a library to accomplish what a few hundred lines of code could also accomplish. Now, that senti...
- [2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/2025.md): (You may be interested in 2024 as well, which was last year's annual review.) Family Lucy is now fifteen months old; I think my previous writing (two-weeks-o...
- [Uses](https://jmduke.com/posts/uses.md): A living document of the tools and gear I use. See also: Buttondown's stack and my Uses This interview. Hardware | Item | Notes | | -------------------------...
- [GitHub Actions' pricing changes](https://jmduke.com/posts/blacksmith-github.md): GitHub announced pricing changes for Actions: > TLDR - On January 1, 2026, we are lowering the price of hosted runners, and beginning March 1, 2026, we are c...
- [Site 2026](https://jmduke.com/posts/2026.md): Welcome to the latest version of my website. Continuing my annual tradition, I've rebuilt the site with a new platform and design—this time by developing my...
- [October, 2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/october-2025-roundup.md): How are you doing? Are you doing well? October's been very fun, as evinced by the length of things I am remiss in writing about: EntryThingy 2.0, Long Live T...
- [Eucharist](https://jmduke.com/posts/eucharist.md): Lucy, watching with a curiosity bordering on frenzy as I slowly fry her a single egg in the French style (which is to say drowning in butter); her wary gaze...
- [Picnic](https://jmduke.com/posts/picnic.md): Picnic is an app that can be described in one sentence: > Every day, you see all of the photos you took on that day in previous years, and you decide which o...
- [Cheetah II](https://jmduke.com/posts/cheetah-ii.md): I wrote about cheetah two weeks ago and appreciated the multiple people who quietly whispered in my ear after publication that it was, in fact, a Cursor mode...
- [Vercel's abstractions](https://jmduke.com/posts/vercel-abstraction.md): use workflow is cool. I admire Vercel for many things, but in particular for what I will phrase charitably as a steadfast refusal to shackle themselves to th...
- [Business as authorship](https://jmduke.com/posts/authorship.md): When Buttondown was a smaller company, the goal was to, quote unquote, stick around. That mostly meant making: 1. enough money; 2. providing enough value; 3....
- [Someone built it; someone has to build it](https://jmduke.com/posts/someone-built-it.md): This afternoon I stumbled upon this ticket from Tom Forbes about a faster bulk update mechanism in Django. Django's ORM workings can be complex, but the conc...
- [Cheetah](https://jmduke.com/posts/cheetah.md): My usage of LLM tooling has plateaued — a word I use deliberately. I feel like I've developed a pretty solid sense over the past three months of what these m...
- [Adding imports to the Django shell](https://jmduke.com/posts/django-shell.md): I was excited to finally remove django-extensions from my pyproject.toml file when 5.2 dropped because they added support for automatic model import. However...
- [Fixing CSS variables in Superhuman](https://jmduke.com/posts/superhuman.md): Part of running a business like Buttondown is spending more time than you'd like installing esoteric email clients and trying to debug odd rendering behavior...
- [Hidden coupons](https://jmduke.com/posts/stripe-intangible-coupons.md): Much of our work at Buttondown revolves around resolving amorphous bits of state and cleaning it up to our ends, particularly state from exogenous sources. T...
- [September, 2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/september-2025-roundup.md): The last of summer's grip finally loosened its hold this September, and Richmond began its annual transformation into something gentler and more contemplativ...
- [Weeknotes 2.0](https://jmduke.com/posts/weeknotes-2.md): Once upon a time, I wrote weeknotes for Buttondown. I’ve started them up again—the first edition is linked below. I’ll spare you the navel-gazing about wheth...
- [Pulumi](https://jmduke.com/posts/pulumi.md): I'm spending a lot more time lately using Pulumi. This is for a handful of reasons. The two biggest ones are as follows. 1. First, we're ramping up our inves...
- [Another reason our pytest suite is slow](https://jmduke.com/posts/slow-pytests-2.md): I wrote two days ago about how our pytest suite was slow, and how we could speed it up by blessing a suite-wide fixture that was scoped to session. This was...
- [Why our pytest suite is slow](https://jmduke.com/posts/slow-pytests.md): The speed of Buttondown's pytest suite (which I've written about here, here, and here) is a bit of a scissor for my friends and colleagues: depending on who...
- [63 postcards](https://jmduke.com/posts/63-postcards.md): We have wrapped up the formal portion of DjangoCon. DjangoCon is not Buttondown's first conference that we've sponsored, but it is the first one that we've a...
- [Django forever](https://jmduke.com/posts/django.md): Tomorrow, I am taking a very early morning flight to Chicago to attend DjangoCon US. Buttondown is sponsoring, less as an exercise in lead generation and mor...
- [Onboarding survey, one week in](https://jmduke.com/posts/onboarding-survey.md): One extremely compelling form of blogging, both for the reader and the writer, is the admission of defeat. Seriously: whenever you find yourself faced with a...
- [Goodwill](https://jmduke.com/posts/goodwill.md): !Morrowind is made much easier when everyone you talk to has an 80+ Disposition! One of the amazing things about Morrowind is that it's a combat-rich game in...
- [August, 2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/august-2025-roundup.md): The summer heat in Richmond clung to everything this August like a second skin, broken only by afternoon thunderstorms that sent Telemachus scurrying to his...
- [What follows GitHub?](https://jmduke.com/posts/github-next.md): It seems fairly clear that, as far as product lifecycle goes, GitHub is in its “Azure metered billing” stage. I don’t mean this as a negative value judgment...
- [Ashland, 2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/ashland.md): Trundle is not quite the right word. When I hear trundle, I think of layers, of wool and dampness, of hitting the road before the sun does, wrapped in a blan...
- [Three apps that will not change your life](https://jmduke.com/posts/three-apps.md): After what has felt like a long winter of habitual reliance on my existing tools, I’m finally playing around with some new ones. This is a healthy habit—so l...
- [July, 2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/july-2025-roundup.md): Telemachus turned five, two weeks ago. He did not have a great July; Richmond's been roiled by storms (ten nights in the past two weeks have ended with him h...
- [Have you at least tried asking?](https://jmduke.com/posts/have-you-tried-asking.md): My wife got sick this past weekend, and as a result we had to cancel or at least postpone a trip to Seattle that we had been looking forward to. She's feelin...
- [Are calendars underrated?](https://jmduke.com/posts/ics.md): When talking about the power of open formats, discussion generally gravitates to one of two ends of the same spectrum: 1. SMTP, which by all accounts has bee...
- [Post-Watch](https://jmduke.com/posts/post-watch.md): There was a point in my life where I was excited about the Apple Watch. I think in no small part because it represented a new frontier in consumer technology...
- [The year of mint chimichurri](https://jmduke.com/posts/mint.md): This is the fifth summer that we've stayed in Richmond since moving back east, and therefore also the fifth soilday of our backyard garden. Our garden is not...
- [VC-subsidized tokens](https://jmduke.com/posts/uber-for-tokens.md): Simon Willison writes about the recent Cursor changes: > Firstly, the era of VC-subsidized tokens may be coming to an end, especially for products like Curso...
- [June, 2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/june-2025-roundup.md): We are officially in H2, gang. I published fewer posts than I had hoped: | Post | Date | Genre | |------|------|-------| | Black Bag | June 18 | Thriller |Fi...
- [Nine months in](https://jmduke.com/posts/nine-months.md): - Many people have asked me what the biggest surprise has been, now that the dust has settled: I politely inform them that the dust has never been more unset...
- [Justfiles are great](https://jmduke.com/posts/justfile.md): One of the first things I did when setting up whisperglass was to create a justfile. I have grown older. I've either gotten worse at context switching or bet...
- [Whisperglass](https://jmduke.com/posts/whisperglass.md): ![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GupfIchXAAAEJMM?format=jpg&name=large) I spent a couple hours this weekend resuming work on Whisperglass, born from some of t...
- [Colocating your pytest fixtures](https://jmduke.com/posts/pytest-for-clean-freaks.md): pytest is, in many ways, the Age of Adz of the broader Python ecosystem: a rewarding idiosyncratic departure from convention whose quirks and foibles are qui...
- [Replacing screenshots and videos with iframes](https://jmduke.com/posts/iframe-docs.md): Scattered throughout the Buttondown docs site, you'll see the fruits of the latest experiment I'm running: getting rid of outdated screenshots and videos by...
- [Spring, 2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/spring-2025.md): Hello! I have so much to catch up with you about. The time has flown. Reading (and watching) As you might have surmised from the radio silence, less to share...
- [Aqua Voice, text-to-speech, non-determinism](https://jmduke.com/posts/aqua.md): ![](/img/aqua.png) While I've been impressed with the advancements in software engineering LLMs over the past six months, it's hard for me to say that anythi...
- [Fatherhood](https://jmduke.com/posts/fatherhood.md): ![](/img/fatherhood.png) I'm emerging from what already feels like, in retrospect, the hardest two months of my career and the hardest I've worked since I wa...
- [Performance improvements can be obvious and silly in retrospect](https://jmduke.com/posts/perf-obvious.md): One of the most useful and janky internal tools we have in Buttondown’s codebase is a codegen pipeline called “autogen”. There is nothing “auto” about autoge...
- [Smoke test your Django admin site](https://jmduke.com/posts/django-admin-changelist-test.md): <div class="addendum">3/14/2025: Updated the snippet to include imports and remove some unused stuff. Thanks, Andy!</div> Here is a confession: I am a very s...
- [Recursive filter schema](https://jmduke.com/posts/filters.md): When we added support for complex filtering in Buttondown, I spent a long time trying to come up with a schema for filters that felt sufficiently ergonomic a...
- [Does that dependency spark joy?](https://jmduke.com/posts/thin.md): If there's been one through line in changes to Buttondown's architecture over the past six months or so, it's been the removal and consolidation of dependenc...
- [HQ1](https://jmduke.com/posts/hq1.md): !A picture of HQ1 during what we will look back fondly as 'the early days.' After many wonderful years of working out of my home office (see workspaces), I'v...
- [Naughty vs. nice](https://jmduke.com/posts/naughtiness.md): I love this bit from Paul Graham on pattern-matching founders: > Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical g...
- [YOLO-squashing our Django repository](https://jmduke.com/posts/yolo-squashing.md): Buttondown's core application is a Django app, and a fairly long-lived one at that — it was, until recently, sporting around seven hundred migration files (f...
- [Humane Inc.](https://jmduke.com/posts/inhumane.md): Humane Inc. started in 2018; it raised around $250M over five years before coming out of stealth mode with an AI pin that people did not like very much, and...
- [What Gives](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-gives.md): Matthieu asks: > Since you do a lot of things (investor, dad, owner of a "small" business, blog writer) I was wondering what you don't do to keep up with thi...
- [February, 2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/february-2025.md): What a start to the year! January was a bit more flat-packed than I think Haley and I would have otherwise liked, but all with great things. (Highlights incl...
- [What's in a name](https://jmduke.com/posts/whats-a-name.md): Guillermo posted this recently: > What you name your product matters more than people give it credit. It's your first and most universal UI to the world. Des...
- [Three Problems](https://jmduke.com/posts/three-problems.md): When Lucy was two weeks old, we had our greatest test as new parents. She woke up at 3:30 in the morning—not a time we considered particularly unusual—and we...
- [Vibe coding your way out of a SaaS contract](https://jmduke.com/posts/vibe-coding-saas.md): There is, I would argue, too much discussion online about the demise of smaller SaaS vendors at the hands of LLMs. A lot of these conversations go roughly al...
- [Truncating timedeltas in Django](https://jmduke.com/posts/django-extract-epoch.md): Consider a fan-out-ish model that you want to aggregate a bunch of: likes on a post, for instance. python class Post(models.Model): createdat = models.DateTi...
- [January, 2025](https://jmduke.com/posts/january-2025.md): Hello, 2025! (As always, Death Cab remains the soundtrack by which you should read this.) Headlining this month was my annual review; everything else is flot...
- [2024](https://jmduke.com/posts/2024.md): (You may be interested in 2023 as well, which was last year's annual review.) Family Haley and I welcomed our first child, a daughter named lucy, on Septembe...
- [Order, Tailwind, DRY](https://jmduke.com/posts/order-css-tailwind.md): (Order in the CSS rule sense, not the metaphysical sense.) The time has come to begin exfiltrating some higher-traffic, higher-leverage parts of Buttondown's...
- [Linear](https://jmduke.com/posts/linear.md): I invited nickd to join our Linear instance yesterday, which reminded me that I had a slew of notes I wanted to publish on our own experience of migrating fr...
- [buttondown.com/alternatives](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-alternatives-page.md): Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page: > This is how I want all my tools to be. There is a ton of room in these markets for hea...
- [Hypermodern Django](https://jmduke.com/posts/hypermodern-django.md): I've been on the hunt for a new way to dogfood Buttondown for the past month or so, and I've finally found it: Hypermodern Django. At this point, all of my/o...
- [Bluesky is good](https://jmduke.com/posts/bluesky-ii.md): Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al, in which I walked through the various platforms vying for the dubious title of "Twitter's successor" and landed on B...
- [November, 2024](https://jmduke.com/posts/december-2024.md): Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved, without fanfare or closure) cough and a dearth of time to...
- [Letters to a Young Bartender](https://jmduke.com/posts/young-bartender.md): Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly consumptive hobby that in some small part defines their twenties...
- [Hidden settings are for cowards](https://jmduke.com/posts/hidden-settings.md): At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags, which were meant to be explicitly temporal (temporarily split-testing traffic; r...
- [Fathom](https://jmduke.com/posts/fathom.md): I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly good reason to do so until the news broke that Paul Jarvis...
- [Klarna: nineteen years, twenty billion kroner](https://jmduke.com/posts/klarna.md): I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay (RIP), Klarna, et al — not for any particular sin I feel that...
- [A good H1](https://jmduke.com/posts/h1.md): Buttondown was kindly featured in H1 Gallery last week, and Ryan asked me to opine a bit on how we arrived at our current iteration, which is the anodyne yet...
- [Shipping is capturing value](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-is-shipping.md): This great essay from Sean Goedecke went viral two weeks ago, drawing fury and fervor alike for a Moral Mazes-esque analysis of how engineers at large compan...
- [VC does not guarantee PMF](https://jmduke.com/posts/vc-pmf.md): Two companies that I started following (with no small amount of envy) back in 2021: - Hype (fka Pico) sold to an MMA-themed holdco earlier this year. Raised...
- [October, 2024](https://jmduke.com/posts/november-2024.md): Hello! Lots of writing in October (what early parenthood takes away in terms of deep flow, it gives back in terms of twenty-minute pockets of time and though...
- [Bozos](https://jmduke.com/posts/no-bozos.md): Kevin Twohy has a list of heuristics for new projects/clients, and my favorite is simple: > No Bozos. Simple policy. No exceptions. You know it when you see...
- [Meta's two assets](https://jmduke.com/posts/meta.md): (Epistemic disclaimer: there are few Extremely Big Tech Companies to whom I feel apathy more vividly than Meta. I had a Facebook account in high school and c...
- [Projects are things with steps](https://jmduke.com/posts/projects-are-things-with-steps.md): Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked so frequently that I decided to write about it. > Why is...
- [Notebook as marketing primitive](https://jmduke.com/posts/notebook-as-marketing-primitive.md): Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this brilliant marketing-slash-documentation idea from SingleStore — notebooks as a first-party page! There are a handful...
- [My approach to GTD and PKM](https://jmduke.com/posts/pkm-gtd-2024.md): One pernicious thing with writing about productivity and knowledge systems: you only change systems that aren’t working, and you tend to write about things d...
- [Consider the data product](https://jmduke.com/posts/data-product.md): The advice might seem dated these days, but I think the stair step approach to bootstrapping is evergreen: > It’s much easier to sell an add-on to an existin...
- [You should build this:](https://jmduke.com/posts/project-ideas.md): A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that I'd like to build. This was a good idea and useful in its...
- [Migrating to Django 5](https://jmduke.com/posts/django-5.md): The total LOC delta to migrate Buttondown from Django 4 to Django 5 was +143, -150. (I was incentivized to do so because our search right now is quite slow,...
- [Talking to customers](https://jmduke.com/posts/talk-to-customers.md): > You say that these numbers mean dial it down. I say they mean dial it up. You haven't gotten through. There are people you haven't persuaded yet. These num...
- [Notes on Zed, revisited](https://jmduke.com/posts/zed-2.md): A little over six months ago, I wrote Notes on Zed. My conclusion at that time was that Zed made a lot of great choices and felt really good to use, but lack...
- [Two weeks of parenthood](https://jmduke.com/posts/two-weeks-of-parenthood.md): We've had lucy for two weeks, which qualifies us as experts, which means it is time to write about parenthood. (In all seriousness, consider the below descri...
- [September, 2024](https://jmduke.com/posts/october-2024.md): In descending order of importance: - I had a daughter, Lucy, the light of my life. - I launched a tiny side project, handbook.directory. - I cautioned agains...
- [Vendor outages](https://jmduke.com/posts/vendor-outages.md): Postmark had an eight-hour outage due to an SSL certificate expiry. Buttondown was not affected; we send a lot of our custom domain traffic through Postmark,...
- [Bluesky et al](https://jmduke.com/posts/bluesky.md): The state of play Much of the discussion about Twitter’s slow death — or, if not death, metamorphosis into a place where I prefer not to spend my time and en...
- [Always use an enum for your status field](https://jmduke.com/posts/enums.md): When I was first starting my career at Amazon — even more bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked than I am now — I was thrilled by the concept of an "architecture revi...
- [Why your marketing site should be separate](https://jmduke.com/posts/marketing-site.md): In Notes on buttondown.com and How Buttondown uses HAProxy, I outlined the slightly kludgy way we serve buttondown.com both as a marketing site (public-facin...
- [MD5-based uniqueness constraints in Django](https://jmduke.com/posts/django-md5-unique.md): Yesterday, I was trying to set a unique constraint for comments in Buttondown to prevent accidental double-commenting, and I ran into a problem that I hadn't...
- [RSS in Next 14](https://jmduke.com/posts/next-14-rss.md): We finished Buttondown’s migration from MDX to Markdoc last week. It went swimmingly, except for one little hitch: our RSS feeds, which sat on top of getServ...
- [Notes on 'Founder Mode' / Lieutenancy](https://jmduke.com/posts/lieutenancy.md): In Paul Graham’s latest essay, he writes: > The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airb...
- [Keeping a technical edge](https://jmduke.com/posts/keeping-an-edge.md): Someone emailed me in response to two-years, in which I wrote: > I miss of being at a large company, which is dealing with deeply cutting-edge technical prob...
- [How Buttondown uses HAProxy](https://jmduke.com/posts/haproxy.md): There are few technical decisions I regret more with Buttondown than the decision to combine the author-facing app, the subscriber-facing app, and the market...
- [Notes on buttondown.com](https://jmduke.com/posts/buttondown-dot-com.md): We spent $85,000 for buttondown.com in April; this was the biggest capital expenditure I've ever made, and though it was coming from cash flow generated by B...
- [Using Cursor to port Django tests to pytest](https://jmduke.com/posts/cursor.md): When it comes to AI tooling, I am equal parts optimist and cynic. I have no moral qualm with using these tools (Supermaven is a pretty heavy part of my day-t...
- [Improving Django's default pagination performance](https://jmduke.com/posts/django-pagination-perf.md): Buttondown's API calls are very fast, and one of the reasons why is that we've removed every single possible database query that we can. The most recent was...
- [Peak Newsletter](https://jmduke.com/posts/peak-newsletter.md): A handful of folks sent me this quip from Nate Silver a few days ago: > Slightly against interest to admit this (I don't want more competition lol) but I thi...
- [Incumbency](https://jmduke.com/posts/incumbency.md): Andrew Rea with an interesting and increasingly familiar take about how AI will disrupt software-focused private equity: > Distribution and brand moats can p...
- [Content debt](https://jmduke.com/posts/content-debt.md): There’s a nascent trend of releasing ostensibly-private material (changelogs, public wikis, handbooks, etc.) to the public as a bit of a marketing push. This...
- [Against Against Innovation Tokens](https://jmduke.com/posts/against-against-innovation-tokens.md): Glyph (whose writing and contributions to the Python ecosystem I am deeply grateful for) wrote Against Innovation Tokens yesterday: > In 2015, Dan McKinley l...
- [Pytest: test for print statements](https://jmduke.com/posts/print-test.md): Inspired by Adam Johnson's test for pending migrations, and of course in conversation with my own love of weird tests, I offer a similar concept: a test for...
- [Typesafe routes in Vue](https://jmduke.com/posts/typesafe-vue-routing.md): I watched Gary Bernhardt's talk on static routing back a few years ago and — I'm not sure if I would call it formative, but it stuck in my craw as a platonic...
- [Notes from May](https://jmduke.com/posts/may-2024.md): Lots of writing this month: - Why you should use Rails - A reminder that things take time - How shadcn/ui's previews work - Why I hate that 1.01% meme - A lo...
- [The taste of beer](https://jmduke.com/posts/beer.md): > Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. --- There’s a relatively famous line from Bezos, circulated first at...
- [Git one-liner: get the earliest commit from X hours ago](https://jmduke.com/posts/git-oneliner.md): I wanted to get a commit that was temporally some distance back as part of my experimentation with git cliff. This took some time to do, but here's what I en...
- [Why can't you just...?](https://jmduke.com/posts/why-cant-you-just.md): Buried in a snarky thread about why Google Calendar doesn’t support calendar syncing is a long, detailed explanation of why shipping this sort of thing is ha...
- [Notes on ActivityPub](https://jmduke.com/posts/activitypub.md): - By far the single most-fruitful tactic has been "just look at raw GET responses from Mastodon and see what things are shaped like." I know that "ActivityPu...
- [Auth.js + Square](https://jmduke.com/posts/authjs-square.md): Internal tools and small, well-scoped projects are a great avenue to tinker with technologies on the periphery of your understanding, and a Third South proje...
- [Au revoir, Invoke](https://jmduke.com/posts/au-revoir-invoke.md): It's not quite interesting or noteworthy enough to warrant a full-on essay, but yesterday we unshipped the last remaining Invoke commands and ported them ove...
- [Grace notes](https://jmduke.com/posts/grace-notes.md): I'm not loving Unreasonable Hospitality, but it did supply me with a phrase that I've been looking for: > Eventually, that gesture became one of our steps of...
- [How shadcn/ui examples work](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-shadcn-ui-works.md): I’m increasingly convinced that for developer-first tools, a really good docs experience is a durable, non-trivial advantage. Part of this thesis is that Rea...
- [Things take time](https://jmduke.com/posts/things-take-time.md): Things take time. - Nintendo fairly famously was born in 1889, and the modern incarnation — Yamamuchi Nintendo & Co., LTD — was established nearly fifty year...
- [Use Rails](https://jmduke.com/posts/rails.md): I have a good number of people ask me what software stack they should use. I always have a two-part answer: 1. Use what you're familiar with. If there's some...
- [Notes from April](https://jmduke.com/posts/april-2024.md): Welcome to spring, bona fide and humid. Lots of writing this month: - I wrote about spending the past two years as an independent technologist. - On the medi...
- [Finding null JSON values in Postgres](https://jmduke.com/posts/postgres-null-json-values.md): Postgres' JSONB functionality is fast and useful but when I find myself dropping down from the Django ORM into SQL to do weird things, the syntax strikes me...
- [You need to be frictionlog-maxxing](https://jmduke.com/posts/frictionlogmaxxing.md): Lots of people have spent the past few days discussing the perceived increase in difficulty in getting an entry-level programming job relative to the halcyon...
- [You gotta be able to taste the kool-aid](https://jmduke.com/posts/koolaid.md): Cognition, a six-month-old startup in the AI coding space just raised $175m at a $2b valuation: > Despite the skepticism surrounding Devin’s launch, the AI c...
- [Stripe Sessions 2024](https://jmduke.com/posts/sessions-2024.md): Stripe held the keynote for Sessions, their annual WWDC/re:invent-esque conference, this morning. I wanted to jot down some thoughts while they’re still fres...
- [Two years as an independent technologist](https://jmduke.com/posts/two-years.md): This week marks two full years since I left Stripe and started what in retrospect is a new (and likely) final phase of my career as an independent technologi...
- [Weird test: internal link checking](https://jmduke.com/posts/weird-test-keystatic.md): I wrote last month about using weird tests. Here's another example: checking for broken internal links in our upcoming docsite redesign! js const extractInte...
- [New words](https://jmduke.com/posts/words.md): When I was in high school and even more insufferable than I am now, a friend and I started a tumblr called "sun words". The concept of this was to collect wo...
- [Why Buttondown isn't OSS](https://jmduke.com/posts/why-buttondown-isnt-oss.md): A number of people have asked me in the past week why Buttondown isn't open-source, given: 1. the love and overt financial commitment we have to open source...
- [defineModel is dope](https://jmduke.com/posts/define-model.md): I find myself spending very little time enjoying Vue. Which is not to say I hate it, but that I don't have a lot of fun with it — I've reached a sort of inte...
- [Tailwind black magic: swallowing all pointer events](https://jmduke.com/posts/tailwind-black-magic-pointer-events.md): I wrote two days ago about a real and useful application of Tailwind black magic; here's another. Buttondown has a dropzone component lets folks drag-and-dro...
- [Tailwind black magic: styling paragraphs within tables](https://jmduke.com/posts/tailwind-black-magic-prose-tables.md): The new version of the Buttondown docs site is all in on Keystatic, Markdoc, and Tailwind's typography plugin — which makes it really easy to author beautifu...
- [Why should a company?](https://jmduke.com/posts/why-should-a-company.md): For a long time, my goal with Buttondown was largely around failure avoidance: "I want to get my first paying customer so I know it's not a fake product"; "I...
- [Are monopolies bad, actually?](https://jmduke.com/posts/monopoly-value.md): One of the more interesting theses advanced by Zero to One is that monopolies are good to the extent that they afford companies the agency and comfort to eng...
- [Is cool enough?](https://jmduke.com/posts/is-cool-enough.md): Via HN I ran into not one but two extremely neat and pleasant-looking libraries for URL manipulation. They look like great libraries, and a prior version of...
- [PSA: mess around with Keystatic](https://jmduke.com/posts/keystatic.md): We've been using Keystatic in Buttondown for around six months now: we migrated most of the content on the marketing site (which is backed by Next) from MDX...
- [On techno-optimism](https://jmduke.com/posts/technooptimism.md): I consider myself, in a literal sense: a techno-optimist; while technology in of itself is an amoral force, I think it’s pretty hard to disagree with the not...
- [Globals in Histoire](https://jmduke.com/posts/globals-in-histoire.md): Histoire, like so many other tools in the Vue ecosystem, is a bit of a neglected younger sibling to Storybook — a little bit uglier, with worse documentation...
- [Notes on Zed](https://jmduke.com/posts/zed.md): I was late to the VS Code zeitgeist, and as penitence I try to go out of my way to try new editors whenever I see them — which is why this morning I installe...
- [Use weird tests to capture tacit knowledge](https://jmduke.com/posts/weird-tests-tacit-knowledge.md): Working on Buttondown — or any mature, complex codebase — effectively and quickly requires a lot of tacit knowledge that I've done a hitherto-poor job of doc...
- [PSA: mess around with Kolo](https://jmduke.com/posts/kolo.md): I had bookmarked Kolo many months ago to try out and finally got a chance to integrate it with Buttondown — a process that I expected to take a couple hours...
- [Years are magic wands](https://jmduke.com/posts/years-are-magic-wands.md): A couple folks wrote in responding to Vibes and Years asking how I did annual planning. I start with a question: "if I had a magic wand, what things would I...
- [Vibes and years](https://jmduke.com/posts/vibes-and-years.md): XH asks: > How do indie developers/small teams keep track of and prioritize long-term roadmaps? > > I've been basically work off my gut + Feeling of the Day...
- [11ty](https://jmduke.com/posts/11ty.md): - .njk as the default templating language is an odd choice, and I find myself stubbing my toe on it a good amount. Maybe that's a me thing! - It is extremely...
- [You should use Helpscout](https://jmduke.com/posts/helpscout.md): Was digging through old issues of the personal site and found this draft snippet: > I was evaluating HelpScout as a potential first step in a series of many,...
- [Great essays](https://jmduke.com/posts/great-essays.md): Programming - Parse, don't validate (2017) - Pipeline-oriented programming (2019) - APIs as ladders (2022) - Scaling Sidekiq at Gusto (2022) - Heroku HTTP AP...
- [Buttondown Analytics 3.0](https://jmduke.com/posts/analytics-3-0.md): Working on a new analytics engine — a scant eleven months after the previous 'new analytics engine'. Calling this 3.0 is a bit of a misnomer: most of the cod...
- [Gosling’s Old Rum](https://jmduke.com/posts/old-rum.md): Virginia has draconian liquor laws, which means I have to get interesting bottles shipped from [REDACTED], a site on which I am very prone to judging a book...
- [Migrating someone who's on Stripe Connect Express](https://jmduke.com/posts/express-connect.md): Most Stripe accounts on Substack are “Standard Connect”, which essentially means that: 1. the author has full agency over their account and is the merchant o...
- [Mass renaming files in fish on macOS](https://jmduke.com/posts/mass-renaming-files.md): One of many two-liners to come as I migrate things from the old site onto Obsidian: brew install rename rename "s/.mdx/.md/" .md
- [Postgres batch enqueuing in ten lines of Django](https://jmduke.com/posts/postgres-batch-enqueuing.md): It hasn't failed me yet: python BATCHSIZE = 100 def batchproess(queryset) -> None: count = queryset.count() if count == 0: time.sleep(10) return with transac...
- [Befriending the Goon Squad](https://jmduke.com/posts/goon-squad.md): TL;DR 1. The single biggest asset that side projects and "nights and weekends" businesses have on their side is near-infinite runway. 2. If you have near-inf...
- [Spoonbill (2016—2023)](https://jmduke.com/posts/spoonbill.md): The start I would be lying to you if I told you I remember exactly what was going on when I came up with the idea for Spoonbill. I know I was still in what I...
- [Bottles of Veuve](https://jmduke.com/posts/veuve.md): I struggle with commemorating accomplishments. The hedonic treadmill of modernity makes it difficult for me to sit back, look at my current state of affairs,...
- [2022](https://jmduke.com/posts/2022.md): 2022 in review Hello! My name's Justin. This is my annual review for 2022. You may also be interested in last year's. Health I am, as I write this, in the be...
- [2021](https://jmduke.com/posts/2021.md): Personal <div class="my-4 lg:my-8"><div class="border-subtler rounded-t-lg bg-subtler border-solid border border-b-0 uppercase font-bold text-sm py-2 px-4">C...
- [2019](https://jmduke.com/posts/2019.md): 2019 was pretty great. here are the highlights: 1. found someone i loved 2. we moved in together 3. into a house that i bought 4. got promoted 5. at a job th...
- [Customer Support for Side Projects](https://jmduke.com/posts/customer-support-side-projects.md): I have been running a bunch of reasonably successful 1 side projects for a couple years now. Here is a (unfortunately, very much truncated) list of support e...
- [Generators are dope](https://jmduke.com/posts/generators.md): (This is also readable as a gist, if you prefer.) I love generators. They’re one of my favorite features in Python, and criminally underrated. (Or underused?...
- [Enthusiasm](https://jmduke.com/posts/enthusiasm.md): Here’s a sentiment with which I strongly agree: > I say this occasionally to normalize it: > > I’ve never put code on GitHub > I’ve never done coding in my s...
- [A month with the AirPods](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-month-with-the-airpods.md): Tags: technology I bought them, you see, despite my better instincts. I already had BlueTooth earphones that worked (albeit not well). I already had a pair o...
- [How I cut my Webpack bundle size in half](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-i-cut-my-webpack-bundle-size-in-half.md): > In the fall, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of front-end performance. When I initially built out Buttondown, I was focused on two aspects ab...
- [Not The Keynote You're Looking For](https://jmduke.com/posts/not-the-keynote-you-re-looking-for.md): I hate to be in the position of defending Apple evangelists, but there have been a lot of weird takes about the Apple leaks the past few days. Here’s one: >...
- [Turning 25](https://jmduke.com/posts/turning-25.md): This week, I turned 25. I spent my birthday doing the thing I want to spend every birthday doing: I reverse seared a filet, bought a nice scotch, and watched...
- [Creating a password validator component in Vue](https://jmduke.com/posts/creating-a-password-validator-component-in-vue.md): Sometimes you procrastinate one feature by writing another. Even if that other feature is pretty small and inconsequential. 1 For me, that other feature — if...
- [Side Projects: July 2017](https://jmduke.com/posts/side-projects-july-2017.md): Revenues Source USD Advertising $70 App Revenue $680 Consulting $4,000 Total $4,750 Expenses Source USD Advertising $0 AWS $0 App Store $200 Apple Developer’...
- [There are still dragons everywhere](https://jmduke.com/posts/dragons-everywhere.md): I’ve been programming for the better part of a decade, and I’ve been programming in Python for the better part of that better part. As loathe as I am to assu...
- [App sizes are under control, they just aren't under scrutiny](https://jmduke.com/posts/app-sizes-again.md): I wrote at the first of last month about bloat in apps, in response to a thoughtful piece by Ben Sandofsky about how he minimized bloat in Halide. I had some...
- [The best podcasts](https://jmduke.com/posts/podcasts.md): First, some background and context, because I’m a super persnickety podcast listener: 1. I think podcasts, like anything else, need to be interesting and tim...
- [A nice little list of valid and invalid email addresses](https://jmduke.com/posts/email-addresses.md): I’ve been spending a lot of time working on Buttondown lately and, as you might expect for a newsletter app, lots of this work revolves around dealing with e...
- [So good it makes you angry](https://jmduke.com/posts/so-good-it-makes-you-angry.md): Sometimes there are things that are so good it actively makes me angry, because it presents a version of the form that seems unimpeachable. Money Things is l...
- [Response Times](https://jmduke.com/posts/response-times.md): Jakob Nielsen wrote in 1993 about the three important demarcations in response time. This is a terrific article that I come back to every year or so and see...
- [Simply put](https://jmduke.com/posts/simply-put.md): Chris Eidhof tweeted a good thing: > The word 'simply' can often create a huge distance between the author and the reader (when the reader doesn't understand...
- [Code Reviews](https://jmduke.com/posts/code-reviews.md): I’ve seen three different iterations of “code review culture”, and all of them have been positive with minor tweaks and changes. What follows is a general li...
- [In praise of bloat](https://jmduke.com/posts/in-praise-of-bloat.md): Ben Sandofsky, the creator of Halide (and erstwhile lead of Twitter’s iOS/Mac apps) wrote a worthwhile piece about getting his new app’s size to a mere 11MB....
- [What Vue needs next](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-vue-needs-next.md): I’ve been using Vue a lot recently on a few test projects, and most notably on Buttondown. Buttondown’s frontend is 100% Vue: around twenty screens (which ar...
- [namedtuple](https://jmduke.com/posts/namedtuple.md): Namedtuple programming Fri, Dec 20, 2013 We’ve all been there - working on a one-off script or personal project where you deal with lots of tuples: maybe poi...
- [Forcing functions in everything](https://jmduke.com/posts/forcing-functions.md): Tags: development Kelly Sutton wrote a great article about how TDD impacts software design: > Design Pressure is the little voice in the back of your head ma...
- [Be a better employee, not a better programmer](https://jmduke.com/posts/better-employee.md): Tags: productivity career André Staltz wrote an article making the rounds, entitled The single tip that made me a better programmer: > As a programmer, you m...
- [Developer experience is the ball game](https://jmduke.com/posts/developer-experience-is-the-ball-game.md): Tags: development I’ve read two bad takes recently on how “faux native” technologies are considered harmful. The first is alarmingly titled Electron is flash...
- [Shooting the Messenger](https://jmduke.com/posts/shooting-the-messenger.md): Tags: design When Facebook launched Messenger for iOS in 2011, I was a little skeptical – this was before the brief and mighty wave of unbundling – but grew...
- [A bigger pan](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-bigger-pan.md): Here’s an old joke (or story, or fable, or whatever you want to call it) that I’ve heard some variation of a dozen times. > The new Jewish bride is making he...
- [Time is money, friend](https://jmduke.com/posts/time-is-money.md): Tags: personal Cushion, a SaaS for freelancers, has a transparent log of its running costs and expenses that recently got posted to HN and spun up a lot of p...
- [Waking up early](https://jmduke.com/posts/waking-up-early.md): Tags: personal Ever since I got back to Seattle after Christmas, I’ve been waking up early. Not, like, super early, but 6-6.30 am. This is a big deal for me;...
- [Burnin](https://jmduke.com/posts/burnin.md): Tags: personal productivity Of all the talk of burnout in the technology industry, sometimes I feel like the opposite is a more apt descriptor: > With phosph...
- [Skyrim](https://jmduke.com/posts/skyrim.md): Tags: personal media So I finally beat Skyrim. Well, I’m using a flimsy definition of the word beat. Skyrim, if you’re unfamiliar, is an open world RPG with...
- [How liberal arts matters](https://jmduke.com/posts/liberal-arts.md): Tags: personal The idea that a liberal arts education is better for a software developer than a traditional engineering education is increasingly in vogue. T...
- [My favorite things of 2016](https://jmduke.com/posts/favorites-of-2016.md): Tags: personal Here are the ten best things I discovered this year. It covers art and content. You should take my word for it – these are very good things an...
- [A month with the new MacBook](https://jmduke.com/posts/new-macbook.md): Tags: technology I have been using the new MacBook Pro (fifteen inches, in what I guess is space gray?) for about a month. It’s my primary laptop now. Below...
- [Floradora](https://jmduke.com/posts/floradora.md): Tags: personal projects development Last week I released Floradora! It’s a tiny little Mac menu bar app. This gif explains it easier than words: ![](http://f...
- [My walk home](https://jmduke.com/posts/my-walk-home.md): Tags: personal I used to work at Amazon. When I worked at Amazon, I got to walk to work. Walking to work is amazing. I think it has spoiled me to the extent...
- [Hidden elevators](https://jmduke.com/posts/hidden-elevators.md): Tags: personal A couple months ago, Seattle expanded their light rail to Capitol Hill. ![](http://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/LinktimetableNBFal...
- [A long week](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-long-week.md): Tags: personal Last week was a long week. I hesitate to call it a bad week. I’ve had bad weeks, and this wasn’t one of them: Bad weeks are the weeks when you...
- [liquid-trinkets](https://jmduke.com/posts/liquid-trinkets.md): Liquid Trinkets programming Thu, Jul 30, 2015 I’ve been messing around with a lot of Shopify development the past couple months. It’s a pretty neat platform...
- [Why we redesign our blogs](https://jmduke.com/posts/why_we_redesign.md): If you are reading this — and have read things on this site in the past — you may notice that this site has a new design. This is not particularly uncommon:...
- [The Chipotle standard](https://jmduke.com/posts/chipotle.md): Tags: personal Chipotle, for me, is the platonic ideal of a meal. I mean that literally: it is the meal to which I compare all other meals. It’s by no means...
- [cottage](https://jmduke.com/posts/cottage.md): Your week in an Irish cottage You will be in this remote Irish cottage for seven days. First, let’s define remote: you are a mile away (on foot) from Innisha...
- [ambience](https://jmduke.com/posts/ambience.md): Ambience creations Mon, Mar 9, 2015 I have just launched my second app, Ambience. It’s free. You should download it. Ambience is a simple app – a very simple...
- [A month with the iPad Pro](https://jmduke.com/posts/ipad-pro.md): Tags: technology I thought about writing this blog post on my iPad Pro. I’m not — I’m writing it on the same place I write everything else, my MacBook Pro. B...
- [Listening to Chance](https://jmduke.com/posts/chance.md): Tags: personal The summer before I went to Seattle, I probably had my peak mix CD of all time (an artifact which, sadly, has been lost, victim to a shitty De...
- [Rome](https://jmduke.com/posts/rome.md): Tags: travel There are ten things you will know about Rome: 1. You will look up the weather in Rome before you pack, you will note that it is projected to be...
- [Notes for a younger programmer](https://jmduke.com/posts/notes-for-a-younger-programmer.md): (A living document.) If you are faced with a question to which you don’t know the answer, spend fifteen minutes looking for the answer yourself. Then ask som...
- [Subscription pricing is for valuable products](https://jmduke.com/posts/valuable-products.md): Tags: marketing Jakob Egger, who created a number of great apps that I use daily (like Postgres.app and Postico wrote a post entitled Subscription Pricing is...
- [Voice interaction and muscle memory](https://jmduke.com/posts/voice-interaction.md): Tags: design Little by little, I’ve been letting voice interaction (Echo and Siri) into my life. What started as a trinket and novelty (“\Hey Siri, where do...
- [Only compare you to you](https://jmduke.com/posts/you-to-you.md): Tags: personal I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like an imposter: I look at brilliant developers at work who started coding in middle school and think I’ll n...
- [Having written](https://jmduke.com/posts/having-written.md): Tags: personal I remember the first time I wrote for pleasure. It was the second grade – we had a bunch of vocab words and could choose between writing out a...
- [UX Slang](https://jmduke.com/posts/ux-slang.md): Tags: design > slang (n.) — a type of language that consists of words and phrases that are regarded as very informal, are more common in speech than writing,...
- [Books of 2015](https://jmduke.com/posts/books-2015.md): Tags: data I read around thirty books this year. I was shooting for one a week, but fell a little short: still, this is the most I’ve read since I was in mid...
- [Packing as premature optimization](https://jmduke.com/posts/packing-as-premature-optimization.md): Tags: personal development You are getting ready for a trip to Florida. It’s your first vacation in forever, and you couldn’t be more excited; no work, no st...
- [Snippets from Virginia](https://jmduke.com/posts/whatvirginiais.md): Tags: personal I spent the week in Virginia with my family. I’m writing this as I fly back, which has become something of an informal tradition for my trips...
- [Your legacy code matters](https://jmduke.com/posts/legacycode.md): Tags: development Craig Hockenberry tweeted about some stuff a couple nights ago: > That site was built with using 1997’s state-of-the-art HTML and CSS. Eigh...
- [Why podcasts feel good](https://jmduke.com/posts/podcasts_are_good.md): Tags: technology > I think they are part of a constructive and fascinating conversation that has, by and large, a relentless positivity, a sense of wonder, t...
- [What I miss about video games](https://jmduke.com/posts/videogames.md): Tags: personal Like most of you, I used to be into video games as a kid. There was the requisite Warcraft and Starcraft in high school, often squirreled away...
- [On a plane](https://jmduke.com/posts/on-a-plane.md): Tags: personal Planes used to seem so mystical to me. When I was a kid, I would fantasize them constantly: cross-country, international, just across state li...
- [22](https://jmduke.com/posts/22.md): I turned 23 yesterday. It was cool. I wanted to think about all the stuff I learned and did when I was 22. Looking through what I said I learned last year, I...
- [What lies under the bandaid](https://jmduke.com/posts/bandaid.md): Tags: personal > “It’s like ripping off a band-aid.” ~ people who are bad at metaphors I’m really bad at confronting things. My second internship ever: I was...
- [In defense of keys](https://jmduke.com/posts/in-defense-of-keys.md): Tags: design I’ve been going through The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman over the past couple days, which has been an absolute revelation and tran...
- [Two weeks with the Amazon Echo](https://jmduke.com/posts/two-weeks-with-the-amazon-echo.md): Tags: technology (Obvious disclaimer goes here: I work at Amazon but not on the Echo team or any team that remotely touches this product. I’m writing this as...
- [porting-barback-to-swift](https://jmduke.com/posts/porting-barback-to-swift.md): Porting Barback to Swift programming Mon, Sep 22, 2014 On Saturday, I finished a project that I started this summer – as you might guess, it was porting my c...
- [Two weeks with the Apple Watch](https://jmduke.com/posts/two-weeks-with-the-apple-watch.md): Tags: technology > Guy walks into a doctor’s office. > > “Doc,” he says, “I’ve got an issue. I used to urinate two or three times a day and that was it. Now,...
- [Moving](https://jmduke.com/posts/moving.md): Tags: personal First, the all-too-common apology: sorry for not writing more. There’s been a lot going on in 2015, and some new habits have displaced old one...
- [Vine Street Market](https://jmduke.com/posts/vine-street-market.md): Tags: personal I have an awful confession: I don’t really care about buying local. Like, I think buying local is great in an abstract sense – objectively, th...
- [Tumblr](https://jmduke.com/posts/tumblr.md): Tags: technology I’ve been using Tumblr a lot lately – or, at least, more than I have have before. 1 It’s been pleasant, and kind of weird, and as solipsist...
- [Coalesce](https://jmduke.com/posts/coalesce.md): Tags: projects I made a theme for Tumblr! It is called Coalesce and I’m fairly proud of it. It’s running live on my own thing and open source on GitHub. I’m...
- [An average day](https://jmduke.com/posts/an-average-day.md): Tags: personal (Originally prompted by this HN thread. I didn’t get enough magical internet points to sate my positive feedback mechanisms, so I decided to e...
- [Dieter Rams’ 15 questions](https://jmduke.com/posts/dieter-rams-15-questions.md): Tags: design ![](https://d2lsod3xpjaepj.cloudfront.net/files/assets/1000/141/crops/3502x.jpg) Disciples of the Rams I am not a designer. There was a time whe...
- [barback-v23](https://jmduke.com/posts/barback-v23.md): Barback v2.3 creations Fri, Dec 5, 2014 As I write this post, Barback v2.3 has been marked as Waiting for Review in the App Store. This means that it’s gonna...
- [2014](https://jmduke.com/posts/2014.md): Tags: personal The year of Murakami I read a lot of Murakami this year. I read Kafka on the Shore, then I read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, then I read Colorl...
- [Crawling Tumblr with multiprocessing](https://jmduke.com/posts/crawling-tumblr-with-multiprocessing.md): Let’s say you want to crawl Tumblr. I’m choosing Tumblr here because it’s a relatively interesting example: unlike Twitter, which is super transparent about...
- [Coach marks and onboarding](https://jmduke.com/posts/app-smells-coach-marks-and-onboarding.md): According to my iTunes history, I’ve downloaded 312 apps. 44 of those have been purchases, with an average purchase price of just under two dollars. 27 of th...
- [Simple empty states for UITableViews](https://jmduke.com/posts/simple-empty-states-for-uitableviews.md): Even if you’re not familiar with the term, you’ve probably run into empty states before in apps you’ve used: ![](http://cdn.pttrns.com/pttrns/3259/small/IMG0...
- [Using webassets with Pelican](https://jmduke.com/posts/using-webassets-with-pelican.md): Tags: development pelican If you are like me, you are an idiot. More specifically, you are an idiot about how to handle static files with Python stuff – comp...
- [Ten lines of code](https://jmduke.com/posts/ten-lines-of-code.md): Working in a big company is about depth. It’s inevitable, given the math: given X thousand programmers, your individual work as a programming generally avera...
- [Everything new is old again](https://jmduke.com/posts/everything-new-is-old-again.md): Tags: personal > Life 1 starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald If you’re reading this and you’ve read something on this s...
- [automating-app-store-screenshots](https://jmduke.com/posts/automating-app-store-screenshots.md): Automating App Store screenshots Things I knew would be bad about iOS development, going in: XCode. App Store’s draconian policies 1 A general malaise accomp...
- [21](https://jmduke.com/posts/21.md): An abridged list of things I have learned in the past year – the unabridged one is a lot longer, I promise, but I culled it for the exciting stuff (which mea...
- [IDK](https://jmduke.com/posts/idk.md): Tags: development As of this month I’ve worked for an entire year as a ‘real’ software developer. I want to preface everything I’m about to say about it with...
- [Three stages of consumption](https://jmduke.com/posts/three-stages-of-consumption.md): In which I navel-gaze 1 a little about how content works. Largely speaking, there were district three ways we have listened to music on our computers, each m...
- [python-inline-shenanigans](https://jmduke.com/posts/python-inline-shenanigans.md): Python Inline Shenanigans programming Thu, Jul 10, 2014 You are likely already aware of most of Python’s inline greatness, like ternaries: value = x if a > 1...
- [Swift is like Frasier](https://jmduke.com/posts/swift-is-like-frasier.md): Tags: swift personal Swift is like Frasier. … Still reading? Okay, let me make my case: When I was a kid, I spent more than a few hours at my grandparents’ h...
- [My favorite robots](https://jmduke.com/posts/my-favorite-robots.md): Tags: technology If you ask someone what their favorite robot is, there’s a good chance that their answer is one of the following three: The robot that can a...
- [barback-v22](https://jmduke.com/posts/barback-v22.md): Barback v2.2 creations Wed, Nov 5, 2014 As I write this post, Barback v2.2 has been marked as Ready for Sale in the App Store. There’s of course a strange de...
- [How to make $10 on the App Store](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-to-make-10-on-the-app-store.md): Tags: marketing development One of my New Years’ resolutions was to make $10 on the App Store – and, as of last month, I’m happy to say I can check it off my...
- [visualizing-seattles-911-calls](https://jmduke.com/posts/visualizing-seattles-911-calls.md): Visualizing Seattle's 911 calls <!DOCTYPE html> Okay, so how did I do it? Getting the data This part was actually the quickest of all. The city of Seattle re...
- [48 hours in Iceland](https://jmduke.com/posts/iceland.md): Tags: travel 9.28pm Hurling across the Atlantic 1 buried under my peacoat and an Iceland Air blanket. Watching The Great Gatsby and taken with two things: th...
- [Trends in AV Club reviews](https://jmduke.com/posts/trends-in-av-club-reviews.md): Tags: data I love the AV Club, probably to an unhealthy extent. It’s one of my favorite little corners of the internet – one where people swap Twin Peaks ref...
- [better-beer-snobbery-through-data](https://jmduke.com/posts/better-beer-snobbery-through-data.md): Better beer snobbery through data Ever since moving to Seattle, I’ve felt that I needed to step my beer game up in a very serious way: gone are the magical,...
- [Old books in new places](https://jmduke.com/posts/old-books-in-new-places.md): Tags: personal Something that’s always struck me as a difficult reconciliation is my love for old books – you know, the ones with bent corners, the ones boun...
- [making-caves-with-cellular-automata](https://jmduke.com/posts/making-caves-with-cellular-automata.md): Making Caves with Cellular Automata programming Mon, Mar 17, 2014 So, I play a lot of Dungeon Crawl, and one thing I’m consistently impressed with is the qua...
- [visualizing-nfl-point-differentials](https://jmduke.com/posts/visualizing-nfl-point-differentials.md): Visualizing NFL point differentials Yesterday, the New England Patriots posted a 43-22 victory over the Indianapolis Colts, which is the first time that fina...
- [analyzing-the-price-of-legos-with-python](https://jmduke.com/posts/analyzing-the-price-of-legos-with-python.md): Analyzing the price of Legos with Python Legos are perfect. I liked them as a kid, I liked them as a slightly older kid (even while pretending that I was too...
- [2013 in review](https://jmduke.com/posts/2013-in-review.md): Tags: personal Shit, what a year. 2013 has been easily the best — and most hectic — twelve months of my life thus far. To point out the highlights: Graduated...
- [How to send emails through Python and GMail](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-to-send-emails-through-python-and-gmail.md): (I apologize in advance for the robotic tone of this blog post.) This is a quick blog post about sending emails through Python’s builtin SMTP library, using...
- [Analysing Pitchfork using Pandas](https://jmduke.com/posts/analysing-pitchfork-using-pandas.md): I spend a likely-unhealthy amount of time on Pitchfork, its where I get my music news and I can usually rely on their reviews to decide whether or not an alb...
- [How to make $800/mo with three lines of code](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-to-make-800mo-with-three-lines-of-code.md): Tags: marketing Even if you’re not a frontend developer, you can probably guess what the following line of code does, right?: .feature { background-color: ff...
- [the-state-of-tech-recruiting-in-2013](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-state-of-tech-recruiting-in-2013.md): The state of tech recruiting in 2013 data Fri, Nov 15, 2013 !Tech demand for riffs and ninjutsu is nearing an all-time low. But will it last? Recruiting is a...
- [A gentle introduction to itertools](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-gentle-introduction-to-itertools.md): itertools is pretty much the coolest thing ever. Despite a vaguely technical name and a decreased emphasis in most introductory Python materials, it’s the ki...
- [2003 and things](https://jmduke.com/posts/2003-and-things.md): Tags: personal It’s hard to believe that 2003 was a decade ago, right? That the difference between 2003 and now is the same as the difference between 1985 an...
- [Depth and whitespace](https://jmduke.com/posts/depth-and-whitespace.md): Tags: development I got to write the following unit test this week at work: @Test public void testIsWhitespace() { Word weirdWhitespace = new Word(" "); asse...
- [A mindset of abundance](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-mindset-of-abundance.md): Tags: personal I woke up early this morning thinking about a great piece by Jack Cheng. He describes his reading of The Miracle of Mindfulness: > The letter...
- [The John Byrd EP](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-john-byrd-ep.md): Tags: personal My favorite record is The John Byrd EP, by Death Cab For Cutie. It’s a live album — snippets and recordings from their tour in the spring of 2...

## Reviews

- [A Month in the Country](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-month-in-the-country.md): > Ah, those days...for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of...
- [The Sting](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-sting.md): The Sting belongs in the pantheon of films I'm deeply embarrassed to have not watched earlier. Not just because it's a great film — and it is — but because i...
- [State and Main](https://jmduke.com/posts/state-and-main.md): > Go, you Huskies! > It's not a lie... it's a gift for fiction. For all of his foibles, Mamet can write dialogue like no one else, and the chance to hear his...
- [To Live and Die in L.A.](https://jmduke.com/posts/to-live-and-die-in-l-a.md): To Live and Die in L.A. is a movie I find remarkable in its ability to drown you with positive and negative qualities — so many of each, and so evenly matche...
- [The Pale King](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-pale-king.md): I came to The Pale King with the same skepticism I brought to infinite-jest — for different reasons. With Infinite Jest, it was that book's thick popular pla...
- [10:04](https://jmduke.com/posts/10-04.md): > Art has to offer something other than stylized despair. Something I hadn't really considered before reading 10:04: my experience with autofiction has been...
- [Flirting with Disaster](https://jmduke.com/posts/flirting-with-disaster.md): An odd little bird of a movie — one that, in retrospect, kicked off a fairly solid career for David O. Russell, and one littered with great performances from...
- [Coffee and Cigarettes](https://jmduke.com/posts/coffee-and-cigarettes.md): The relative scarcity of anthology films contributes to an unease with their lack of narrative cohesion in much the same way someone reading a collection of...
- [Conjury](https://jmduke.com/posts/conjury.md): A difficulty I have when reviewing Slay the Spire-likes is a certain anchoring bias. It can feel unfair to judge an otherwise good game, even partially, by d...
- [Soulstone Survivors](https://jmduke.com/posts/soulstone-survivors.md): M&Ms tend to trigger in me a kind of existential crisis if I have more than a few. A small handful is no problem, but any more than that and I abruptly come...
- [Everybody Wants Some!!](https://jmduke.com/posts/everybody-wants-some.md): The single most pleasurable movie of all time is Soderbergh's ocean-s-eleven, and it achieves that status in order to try to convey what makes filmmaking uni...
- [The Man Who Knew Too Much](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-man-who-knew-too-much.md): The Man Who Knew Too Much is a film of peaks and valleys. There is little argument that it is a good film; whether you place it amongst the highest of Hitchc...
- [Wet Hot American Summer](https://jmduke.com/posts/wet-hot-american-summer.md): It feels like a long-standing embarrassment that I had never seen Wet Hot American Summer. And the longer I put it off, the harder it became to watch — like...
- [A Master Builder](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-master-builder.md): vanya-on-42nd-street is, to date, my favorite film of the year. The more I revisit it, the more I suspect it might be one of my favorites of all time. So dis...
- [Secondhand Time](https://jmduke.com/posts/secondhand-time.md): It is rare that I review a book before I finish it. Sometimes I do this with bad books that I have not completed — but that is what the Goodreads user base c...
- [MacGruber](https://jmduke.com/posts/macgruber.md): Letterboxd has an ingenious concept baked into its rating system. You can rate a film on a scale of zero to four stars, and you can also adorn a film with a...
- [Adaptation](https://jmduke.com/posts/adaptation.md): Eighteen months ago, I wrote in review of Being John Malkovich: > The worst thing a piece of comedy can do is, in the process of not taking itself seriously,...
- [Near to the Wild Heart](https://jmduke.com/posts/near-to-the-wild-heart.md): Two friends, upon learning that I wanted to get into Clarice Lispector, advised me not to start with Near to the Wild Heart. Having now finished the book, I...
- [Best of Enemies](https://jmduke.com/posts/best-of-enemies.md): Last year, I watched the-war-room, the documentary following Bill Clinton's first campaign — a film I am remiss for having never written about, because it wa...
- [Enough Said](https://jmduke.com/posts/enough-said.md): More by luck than by fate, most of the great protagonists of the last forty years of television have escaped forever being associated with the character they...
- [Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie](https://jmduke.com/posts/nirvanna-the-band-the-show-the-movie.md): No matter what, you're going to have a great time watching this movie. It is funny and audacious and handcrafted, which is a quality that feels increasingly...
- [Wings of Desire](https://jmduke.com/posts/wings-of-desire.md): When I try to describe this film, I keep fleeing from the word strange toward poetic — because there isn't much strange about it. If you accept its conceit a...
- [Notorious](https://jmduke.com/posts/notorious.md): I think this might be the first Hitchcock that just didn't really work for me. The premise feels unlike so much of his output: dated and strained. Asking Car...
- [Jay Kelly](https://jmduke.com/posts/jay-kelly.md): > I was young. I wanted something very badly and I was afraid that if I took my eye off it, I wouldn’t have it. And I was right. There was no other way to do...
- [Peggy Sue Got Married](https://jmduke.com/posts/peggy-sue-got-married.md): ![](/img/peggy-sue-got-married-still.jpg) > I envy you. You have your whole life ahead of you and you know exactly what you want to do. But forget the rat pu...
- [The Man from Earth](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-man-from-earth.md): One interesting thing about films, relative to — say — writing within video games, is the demarcation of amateurishness. (A description I don't mean to carry...
- [Let Them All Talk](https://jmduke.com/posts/let-them-all-talk.md): This was a film that I found, in some order, slight, confounding, sweet, clever, and — above all of these things — reaching but not yet grasping. It is inter...
- [The Best and the Brightest](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-best-and-the-brightest.md): I started this book on the recommendation of Scholar's Stage, who I would describe as one of the few deeply interesting and serious conservative historians o...
- [The In-Laws](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-in-laws.md): It was fifteen minutes into The In-Laws that I suspected an uncanny feeling of déjà vu, and thirty minutes in that I confirmed my suspicions with an unlocked...
- [Murder by Death](https://jmduke.com/posts/murder-by-death.md): Murder by Death is a film that is easy to laugh at and easy to like. It is something like Clue meets Knives Out — a broad farce, lovingly rendered, that gath...
- [Network](https://jmduke.com/posts/network.md): It is perhaps embarrassing to admit that I had never seen Network, and this year — its fiftieth anniversary — felt as good a time as any, especially consider...
- [Sweet Smell of Success](https://jmduke.com/posts/sweet-smell-of-success.md): At its core, Sweet Smell of Success is about two men. At the beginning of the film, you think — while similar — one is decent, just desperate, and the other...
- [What's Up, Doc?](https://jmduke.com/posts/whats-up-doc.md): What's Up, Doc? is, I guess, just a perfect film. I can remember exactly one other movie of its ilk that I watched with sheer glee — amazed by how contempora...
- [Slay the Spire 2](https://jmduke.com/posts/slay-the-spire-2.md): I have played Slay the Spire 2 for around thirty hours. I am, after writing this review, uninstalling it from my laptop and praying my resolve is strong enou...
- [Masters of Doom](https://jmduke.com/posts/masters-of-doom.md): One way to approach writing about Masters of Doom is to talk about its outsized influence. Just off the top of my head: two pretty meaningful pieces of art a...
- [Eyes Wide Shut](https://jmduke.com/posts/eyes-wide-shut.md): ![](https://cdn.theasc.com/Eyes-Wide-Shut-A.jpg) > If you men only knew. At this point, Eyes Wide Shut has so thoroughly permeated the zeitgeist that it's ha...
- [Columbus](https://jmduke.com/posts/columbus.md): > What he's offering is a critique of a critique. But in its place, he identifies a different kind of crisis. Not the crisis of attention, but the crisis of...
- [L.A. Confidential](https://jmduke.com/posts/l-a-confidential.md): I'm not sure why, but this movie was not at all what I thought it was going to be. I don't just mean in terms of quality — though it certainly was better tha...
- [Vanya on 42nd Street](https://jmduke.com/posts/vanya-on-42nd-street.md): This is, as far as I can tell, the first movie I've ever watched on the strength of an algorithmic recommendation — and the fact that it is now one of my fav...
- [Mindwalk](https://jmduke.com/posts/mindwalk.md): > Let us know how the water rises. The right way to understand Mindwalk is that it's one of the greatest education films ever made: meant not to be consumed...
- [Mistress America](https://jmduke.com/posts/mistress-america.md): > I'm sorry, I know you liked Brooke. He told me that she worships you, she kept talking about how smart you are, how interesting... ![](https://film-grab.co...
- [Stop Making Sense](https://jmduke.com/posts/stop-making-sense.md): > A polite man is driven to murder. He becomes a prophet and screams manifestos on love, war, and the increasingly alarming impact of technology and progress...
- [21 Bridges](https://jmduke.com/posts/21-bridges.md): A derivative, predictable, competent crime thriller. If you read that sentence and think "good," then you will like this film, and the opposite is true as we...
- [Paterson](https://jmduke.com/posts/paterson-2016.md): ![](https://film-grab.com/wp-content/uploads/photo-gallery/Paterson059.jpg?bwg=1569600758) Paterson is a film about art being a sinew in our life. Paterson h...
- [Past Lives](https://jmduke.com/posts/past-lives.md): ![](past-lives.jpg) I am legitimately struggling to articulate why Past Lives did not quite resonate with me the way it did with so many others. I found it b...
- [Singles](https://jmduke.com/posts/singles-future-islands.md): I learned of this band, as many people did, through the Letterman performance. And it is as stunning as the internet commentary leads you to believe. The alb...
- [Somewhere](https://jmduke.com/posts/Somewhere.md): !Somewhere Somewhere is a film that on the surface level feels and sounds like a complete retread. The log line is as cliché as it gets: a famous but unhappy...
- [What Happened Was](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-happened-was.md): Two of my absolute favorite films of all time, albeit for very different reasons, are My Dinner with Andre and Before Sunrise. Both of these films, which I h...
- [Perfection](https://jmduke.com/posts/Perfection.md): > They did for money now what they used to do out of passion. This was a fact. From this fact they concluded that they had turned their passion into a job. T...
- [On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)](https://jmduke.com/posts/on-the-calculation-of-volume-book-i.md): I was ready to wash my hands of this book very early on. I've seen enough vaguely auteurist time loop art like Palm Springs or Russian Doll to consider mysel...
- [The Family Fang](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-family-fang.md): > You might not believe it, but I studied at my university. I studied in the experimental theater wing. So your parents are just two of the most important av...
- [Heaven or Las Vegas](https://jmduke.com/posts/heaven-or-las-vegas.md): I'm not sure how to politely accuse the entire genre of dreampop of having ripped off this album in particular. It is perhaps the recency bias. I think of Hi...
- [The Rip](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-rip.md): The Rip is a deeply simulacric movie, not just in the Netflix action thriller sense, but also in the sense of it largely existing in the context of all the c...
- [Rope](https://jmduke.com/posts/rope-1948.md): There must be something about wintertime because almost exactly one year ago I finally watched North by Northwest, a film that is unsurprisingly terrific and...
- [The Double](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-double.md): > A person can get really sick by just floating by. More than anything, I'm surprised this film doesn't have a bigger following. The constellation of its cha...
- [The Hudsucker Proxy](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-hudsucker-proxy.md): When does an indulgence become sour? I ask this because indulgence is the word that most immediately comes to mind at the finish of this film. And largely in...
- [The Killer](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-killer.md): !The Killer "If you are not able to endure boredom, then this work is not for you," the Killer tells us—and then immediately falls asleep. (Or, to quote Gene...
- [A Shadow Intelligence](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-shadow-intelligence.md): I don't know where to begin with this. I feel like I have less of a through line of analysis and more an assemblage of unordered reactions and observations....
- [Ocean's Twelve](https://jmduke.com/posts/ocean-s-twelve.md): > This might not be the perfect time or whatever to talk about it but I've been doing my homework and I'd really like to play a more central role this time a...
- [The Pigeon Tunnel](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-pigeon-tunnel.md): !The Pigeon Tunnel I knew three things about this movie going into it: it was about le Carré, it was by Errol Morris—who I hold in very high esteem via The F...
- [Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)](https://jmduke.com/posts/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-2011.md): There is much to love about this film. The aesthetic, production design, and cast are unquestionably immaculate. There is a clear sense of place and country....
- [Levels of the Game](https://jmduke.com/posts/levels-of-the-game.md): It seems fortuitous that my McPhee reading spree coincided with having watched Challengers. Like Challengers did sixty years after the fact, Levels of the Ga...
- [Go](https://jmduke.com/posts/go.md): ![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZTY5N2U2MWMtMTk2Yi00NWRiLWI0MDktNjU3OGI1ZjJjYzA0XkEyXkFqcGc@.V1FMjpgUX1920.jpg) > You know what wakes me up in th...
- [The Diplomat (Season 2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-diplomat-season-2.md): > If you're representing the interests of 300 million Americans whose healthcare is failing, whose planet is burning, whose future mighty get a little bit be...
- [tabula-rasa-vol-1](https://jmduke.com/posts/tabula-rasa-vol-1.md): > And then Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton start off on foot from a country inn. As they walk across a meadow and through rising woods and across high open field...
- [Eternity](https://jmduke.com/posts/Eternity.md): > Love isn't just one happy moment, right? It's a million. And it's bickering in the car, and supporting someone when they need it, and it's growing together...
- [Cameraperson](https://jmduke.com/posts/cameraperson.md): ![](/img/cameraperson.webp) It seems fitting that, to close out the year I finally watched Koyaanisqatsi, I also got to watch Cameraperson — which is in many...
- [Marcovaldo](https://jmduke.com/posts/marcovaldo.md): Marcovaldo is a very fun and inconsequential collection of short stories. I struggle to recommend it to anyone who isn't a Calvino completionist. Not because...
- [A Rainy Day In New York](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-rainy-day-in-new-york.md): In much the same way that people enjoy Christmas-time Hallmark movies or YA romances, I find myself drawn to the predictability and warmth of mediocre late-p...
- [Sleuth](https://jmduke.com/posts/sleuth.md): ![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58f16439b3db2bed6e933fb5/1612149817730-82YK1WK18PY2KKGM5S7J/Sleuth+%281972%29.mp4.00044926.Still001.jpg?for...
- [Paris, Texas](https://jmduke.com/posts/paris-texas.md): ![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/janusstills/6285-/1502id0000PTX09(c)WWSw1600.jpg) Why is it that the more I love a movie, the harder I find...
- [Kiss Kiss Bang Bang](https://jmduke.com/posts/kiss-kiss-bang-bang.md): This was a really fun, silly movie—one that, had I watched it in high school it would have become my entire personality. About halfway through, I found mysel...
- [Wake Up Dead Man](https://jmduke.com/posts/wake-up-dead-man.md): ![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTdkNGE2OGEtNmE4ZC00MmI0LWJhOGEtNWIwYzhkYWZkOTlhXkEyXkFqcGc@.V1QL75UX776.jpg) There are three ways to evaluate Wa...
- [The Quiet American](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-quiet-american.md): > When he saw a dead body he couldn't even see the wounds. > I have read so often of people's thoughts in the moment of fear: of God, or family, or a woman....
- [Anywhere](https://jmduke.com/posts/Anywhere.md): Yawning Portal has produced one of my favorite songs of all time, which is a very ambient remix of Cut to the Feeling. The EP which included this remix had a...
- [Challengers](https://jmduke.com/posts/Challengers.md): One of the things that may be apocryphal—because I’ve never bothered to actually look it up, just kept it kicking around in my head—is David Foster Wallace’s...
- [Syriana](https://jmduke.com/posts/syriana.md): It’s easy to dismiss Syriana for a variety of reasons. It follows two films that are, on the whole, better and more interesting—Traffic and Michael Clayton....
- [Slacker](https://jmduke.com/posts/slacker.md): Inspired by my rewatch of Before Sunrise, I decided to turn on Slacker, which was Linklater's directorial debut, and considered a gem in its own right. It is...
- [Before Sunrise](https://jmduke.com/posts/before-sunrise.md): I watched Before Sunrise for the first time around a decade ago, and I appreciated it then for what it was on the surface: a straightforwardly terrific and b...
- [Conclave](https://jmduke.com/posts/conclave.md): I briefly and incorrectly thought that Conclave was a serious film in the style of, say, The Young Pope. This is not the case. The plot is deeply unserious,...
- [Parenthood](https://jmduke.com/posts/parenthood.md): ![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNmMwODY0MWUtMzdlNC00ZTNiLWJiYTQtOTM0YTFmODhhNTY1XkEyXkFqcGc@.V1QL75UX646.jpg) > My whole life is "I have to." Ste...
- [Slow Horses (Season 5)](https://jmduke.com/posts/slow-horses-5.md): This time last year, I wrote glowingly of Slow Horse’s fourth season: > It is rare and difficult for a long-running series to reverse a downward slide. There...
- [Breakneck](https://jmduke.com/posts/breakneck.md): I, like so many other people in the Tyler Cowen / Stripe Press extended universe, have deeply enjoyed Dan Wang's annual letters over the past years. And I wa...
- [Fracture](https://jmduke.com/posts/fracture.md): Even within the genre of trashy, hyper-masculine crime fiction, there's room for being interesting. Indeed, one of the saving graces of bad art is that it of...
- [Sneakers](https://jmduke.com/posts/sneakers.md): !https://share.cleanshot.com/gKFQRTKf > Cosmo: What's wrong with this country, Marty? Money. You taught me that. Evil defense contractors had it, noble cause...
- [Long Story Short](https://jmduke.com/posts/long-story-short.md): Long Story Short, feels like in many ways a synthesis of everything Raphael and Lisa have been trying to do and say, packaged in a slightly more mature and r...
- [SABLE, fABLE](https://jmduke.com/posts/fable-sable.md): I have been going through a certain kind of reckoning with my previous self and the things that I loved back when I was an undergrad with fewer things on my...
- [From Up On Poppy Hill](https://jmduke.com/posts/from-up-on-poppy-hill.md): ![](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F64.media.tumblr.com%2F1a31fcf317efe4b9e2fe31d8141405ab%2Ftumblrnk0ed9x3Lk1qh4fopo101280.jpg&f...
- [The Firm](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-firm.md): ![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BY2ZiYTI0MTAtMjhjZC00YjI2LTkxNzAtODVhY2JlYjY0MGQyXkEyXkFqcGc@.V1.jpg) I have been a little bit guilty lately of wa...
- [Broadcast News](https://jmduke.com/posts/broadcast-news.md): !Holly Hunter, William Hurt, and Albert Brooks in the newsroom > What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams? / Keep it to yourself. God, we used...
- [The Bourne Legacy](https://jmduke.com/posts/bourne-legacy.md): At this point, Tony Gilroy is probably best known for a different project—one where he uses the trappings of a beloved IP to Trojan-horse his ideas and sharp...
- [Liberal Arts](https://jmduke.com/posts/liberal-arts.md): !I cannot believe this is an actual still from the movie > Any place you don't leave is a prison. --- Ebert wrote: > Liberal Arts is an almost unreasonable p...
- [STAR LINE](https://jmduke.com/posts/starlite.md): In retrospect, I think there are two really noteworthy things about Chance the Rapper's career: 1. The first is that he was both the vanguard and the dying f...
- [Air](https://jmduke.com/posts/air.md): ![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDUyOWE1ZjItOTc2Ny00MWJhLTk2MWItN2ZhNTkzNzY4YzFiXkEyXkFqcGc@.V1FMjpgUX1280.jpg) > "I mean, if we're going to make...
- [Zodiac](https://jmduke.com/posts/zodiac.md): > I don't know. I moved onto a boat. You know we work in the daily business, right? As in, today? What do you think we were doing back then? Do you know more...
- [Bodies Bodies Bodies](https://jmduke.com/posts/bodies-bodies-bodies.md): ![](https://imjeffreyrex.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/3xbodiesmovie.jpeg) More than anything else, Bodies Bodies Bodies is a perfectly reasonable and delig...
- [Capote](https://jmduke.com/posts/capote.md): ![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYzI4ZGUwYjYtMjZhOC00NGUyLWFjN2MtMDk5NzlkOWVkOTI3XkEyXkFqcGc@.V1QL75UX1640.jpg) Part of Capote's genius is that it...
- [Clerks](https://jmduke.com/posts/clerks.md): ![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/571e7cc14c2f859b347c0167/c6c35ec8-5da8-41a2-8416-672428eb989b/Clerks.jpg?format=1500w&content-type=image%2Fjpe...
- [The Thomas Crown Affair](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-thomas-crown-affair.md): > Thomas Crown: [smirking] I trust myself implicitly.<br /> > The Psychiatrist: But can other people trust you?<br /> > Thomas Crown: Oh, you mean society at...
- [Black Bag](https://jmduke.com/posts/black-bag.md): There's a (likely apocryphal) quote from Soderbergh about Ocean's Eleven, one of the greatest movies about America: > I love seeing a movie does what it does...
- [The Rehearsal (Season 2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-rehearsal-2.md): It's useful and fitting that yesterday I wrote, in reference to Secret Mall Apartment: >Which, to be clear, is fine — and charming in its own way. Were these...
- [Secret Mall Apartment](https://jmduke.com/posts/secret-mall-apartment.md): ![](/img/qc.png) I can't quite remember how I got into it, but in high school I was a big webcomics guy, mostly pixel stuff. But the one I loved the most at...
- [Diner](https://jmduke.com/posts/diner.md): ![](https://orgasticfutures.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/diner.jpg?w=640) > Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we d...
- [The Ghost](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-ghost.md): > All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books...
- [Deathtrap](https://jmduke.com/posts/deathtrap.md): A fun romp that I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of sooner (thanks owed to The Big Picture’s 1982 Movie Draft pod) and it checks all of my boxes: a simultaneous...
- [White Lotus (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/white-lotus.md): ![](https://www.tandfonline.com/cms/asset/9431d41a-7f8f-4965-b2a5-a79cb1c65453/gqrfa2150507f0001c.jpg) I’m coming at White Lotus a little bit after the zeitg...
- [Working](https://jmduke.com/posts/working.md): > Everything you’ve been doing is bullshit. Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you’re in a democracy and the power in a democ...
- [That Thing You Do!](https://jmduke.com/posts/that-thing-you-do.md): > Ain't no way to keep a band together. Bands come and go. You got to keep on playin', no matter with who. --- > I'm Guy Patterson, I'm from Erie, Pennsylvan...
- [Scaling People](https://jmduke.com/posts/scaling-people.md): > A strategy should hurt. / Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. First, let my biases be explicit: while I didn’t work closely with...
- [The Flamethrowers](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-flamethrowers.md): > “Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.” > All you can...
- [Pantheon (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/pantheon.md): ![](https://tvcdn.fancaps.net/11077217.jpg) There are a handful of brilliant-yet-relatively-obscure works whose relative obscurity I ascribe almost entirely...
- [Wild Things](https://jmduke.com/posts/wild-things.md): ![](https://crookedmarquee.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/wildthings2-1024x678.jpg) I have a soft spot for these sort of twist-within-a-twist-within-a-twist...
- [They Came Together](https://jmduke.com/posts/they-came-together.md): In retrospect, the early 2010s era of UCB/Second City-dominated comedy will go down as my favorite, and one that seems impossible to reproduce — the joy in a...
- [Between the Lines](https://jmduke.com/posts/between-the-lines.md): > You don't want to write. You want to find an excuse not to, and I'll just be one more thing to blame if you don't. Beneath the decidedly seventies surface...
- [North by Northwest](https://jmduke.com/posts/north-by-northwest.md): > In the world of advertising, there's no such thing as a lie. There's only expedient exaggeration. I wrote last week about Family Plot saying that Hitchcock...
- [Being John Malkovich](https://jmduke.com/posts/being-john-malkovich.md): I had held off on watching Being John Malkovich for a while, mostly because I think I had a pretty good idea of what it was and, while I wanted to watch it a...
- [Family Plot](https://jmduke.com/posts/family-plot.md): > I told you about danger, didn't I? First it makes you sick, then when you get through it, it makes you very, very loving. Every review (contemporary or oth...
- [Primal Fear](https://jmduke.com/posts/primal-fear.md): Of course Primal Fear's legacy is (justifiably) dominated by Edward Norton's insanely talented debut performance , but what I came away most surprised by was...
- [Catch Me If You Can](https://jmduke.com/posts/catch-me-if-you-can.md): > Dear Dad — you always told me that an honest man has nothing to fear, so I'm trying my best not to be afraid. I floated the idea of a TBS canon when writin...
- [Book of Clouds](https://jmduke.com/posts/book-of-clouds.md): > Before reaching cruising altitude the plane sliced through a thick layer of cloud and for a few seconds there was nothing but white outside the window and...
- [Becoming Trader Joe](https://jmduke.com/posts/becoming-trader-joe.md): (Shout out to Red Queen Podcast for introducing me to this book.) Becoming Trader Joe is, more than any other business book (certainly any other business mem...
- [We Own This City](https://jmduke.com/posts/we-own-this-city.md): The passage of time and the monotonic accretion of accolades makes it difficult to remember with total clarity and honesty the sins and virtues of The Wire,...
- [Bringing up Bebe](https://jmduke.com/posts/bringing-up-bebe.md): One reason I love An Everlasting Meal is that even more than its ostensible didactic value, Tamar Adler's writing and humanity compels and enchants you to co...
- [Planes, Trains, and Automobiles](https://jmduke.com/posts/plains-trains-automobiles.md): > You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better. I'm an easy target. Yeah, you're right, I talk too much. I also listen too much. I could...
- [Luck Be a Landlord](https://jmduke.com/posts/luck-be-a-landlord.md): It might be premature to write this review: I'm sure I'll play this game for another ten hours over the next month, and maybe by then (as is often the case w...
- [Case Histories](https://jmduke.com/posts/case-histories.md): > And she was crying because she didn't believe in Jesus or dog heaven and no one was ever going to lie in bed with her on a Sunday morning and read the pape...
- [The MANIAC](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-maniac.md): One third of the way through The MANIAC, I found myself wondering why this book was not more popular: it seemed to be a perfect storm of formalism and postmo...
- [Monster Sanctuary](https://jmduke.com/posts/monster-sanctuary.md): Here's the rough pitch on Monster Sanctuary: - Take the general framework of a monster collecting game (Shin Megami Tensei V is a good comp). - Plug in a ver...
- [The Anderson Tapes](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-anderson-tapes.md): > ...I always hammer on locked doors. > What's that supposed to mean? The Anderson Tapes was released in 1971, placing it a decade after the original Ocean's...
- [Trust](https://jmduke.com/posts/trust.md): Whenever I really struggle with a book, I try to start from a place of authorial intent: what did the writer wish to accomplish with their writing? I find th...
- [Slow Horses (Season 4)](https://jmduke.com/posts/slow-horses-4.md): It is rare and difficult for a long-running series to reverse a downward slide. There are simply too many sources of gravity: writers run out of obvious plot...
- [Wolfs](https://jmduke.com/posts/wolfs.md): One of the many parts of Ocean's Eleven's terrific legacy is the mistaken notion that all you really need for a film to be smooth and pleasant is a sufficien...
- [Creation Lake](https://jmduke.com/posts/creation-lake.md): Whether you enjoy Creation Lake or find it odious depends, I think, entirely on how credulous and interesting you find Sadie Smith, Kushner's unnamed and unm...
- [High Output Management](https://jmduke.com/posts/high-output-management.md): At risk of further succumbing to accusations of self-Flanderization, I'm compelled to draw comparisons between High Output Management and Final Fantasy VII:...
- [Cable Cowboy](https://jmduke.com/posts/cable-cowboy.md): Cable Cowboy is a rollicking read that serves better as a primer for a fascinating industry than as a legitimate profile (or hagiography) of the man from who...
- [Le Samourai](https://jmduke.com/posts/le-samourai.md): I am sure all of my brightless praise of Le Samourai — a film that, in retrospect, I should have watched a decade or so ago — has all been said before, time...
- [Wizrobe](https://jmduke.com/posts/wizrobe.md): Incremental games are tricky beasts. I think the best ones are like Farm RPG and Melvor Idle, which share a handful of common traits: 1. An emphasis on pathi...
- [Sundial](https://jmduke.com/posts/sundial.md): Enough time has passed for me to admit that I thought Room 25 was a poor album. I suspect there's a lot of Trump-era literature that will age poorly in much...
- [Farm RPG](https://jmduke.com/posts/farm-rpg.md): I can say, having finally played enough to burn out / quit, that Farm RPG is pretty much the ideal idle game for me. It is simple, pleasant, non-predatory, a...
- [The Unicorn Project](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-unicorn-project.md): I loved The Phoenix Project, this book's spiritual and literal predecessor — while I quibbled with the prose and characters, I deeply enjoyed not just the co...
- [Ted Lasso (Season 2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/ted-lasso-2.md): When I look back on the critical and popular fervor for the second season of Ted Lasso — and remember that it came out in the first year of a global pandemic...
- [Cromartie High School](https://jmduke.com/posts/cromartie-high-school.md): Hard not to draw parallels to Azumanga Daioh — a show that I think Cromartie edges out as the funniest anime I've ever seen. Whereas Azumanga feels sweet and...
- [Find Me Falling](https://jmduke.com/posts/find-me.md): I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an anodyne, predictable rom-com. I am fully baptized into the Church of Ephron: there are few autumnal traditions m...
- [Ted Lasso (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/ted-lasso-1.md): Gilbert & Sullivan would have loved Ted Lasso — absurd and friendly and ever, ever obsessed with having its pathos and eating it too. I write this in a perio...
- [Team](https://jmduke.com/posts/team.md): Who is the target audience for this book? The most charitable answer I can give is "people who are productive individual contributors that have literally nev...
- [Cloud Atlas](https://jmduke.com/posts/cloud-atlas.md): It’s tempting to compare Cloud Atlas to its obvious metafictional forebears, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, The Years of Rice and Salt being chief among...
- [Spy Line](https://jmduke.com/posts/spy-line.md): How do you view a series of books — or any periodic work, like a long-running TV series? Do you let a single work determine your view of the series, or must...
- [Spy Hook](https://jmduke.com/posts/spy-hook.md): Spy Hook forms the start of a second trilogy of books in the "Bernie Samson" series by Len Deighton; the previous book, which ended the first trilogy, was Lo...
- [Snack Shack](https://jmduke.com/posts/snack-shack.md): A really fun and pleasant movie that was never surprising and extremely fun, start-to-finish. This is a by-the-numbers bildungsroman — two teens, a cool girl...
- [Profit-First](https://jmduke.com/posts/profit-first.md): Here is the entire gist of the book: use envelope-based budgeting (as made famous by, at least in my life, You Need A Budget) for your business. Allocate, sa...
- [The American Friend](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-american-friend.md): A deeply real and viscous sort of thriller. There were so many naturalistic fluorishes — long, languid shots on our two protagonists in deeply grimy places,...
- [The Diamond Age](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-diamond-age.md): First of all, a bit of context-setting: I am not quite yet a father of a daughter, but I am four months out from becoming one, and I suspect my reading and e...
- [The Fall Guy](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-fall-guy.md): So much of the discourse about this movie was in the meta-sense of "big, vaguely selfaware action rom-com starring two of the leads from Barbenheimer that is...
- [Hit Man](https://jmduke.com/posts/hit-man.md): It's fascinating to see that this is a Richard Linklater (of Everybody Wants Some!! and Before Sunrise) fame, as this feels in many ways so much more like a...
- [Legend of the Galactic Heroes](https://jmduke.com/posts/lotgh.md): It took my brother two years to watch this from start to finish, and it reminds me more than anything of trundling through The Romance of the Three Kingdoms...
- [Godzilla Minus One](https://jmduke.com/posts/godzilla-minus-one.md): I wrote a bit in Everybody's in L.A. about the constraint of evaluating the merit of something that's in conversation with a genre you don't really care for...
- [Frieren: Beyond Journey''s End (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/frieren.md): The anime Frieren reminds me most of is Ousama Ranking — Frieren plays with the convention and narrative arcs of JRPGs (or high fantasy in general) in much t...
- [Presumed Innocent](https://jmduke.com/posts/presumed-innocent.md): A very solid little thriller that does not reach the heights Bakula did with The Parallax View, but was still a very successful example (and, in some places,...
- [Pokerogue](https://jmduke.com/posts/pokerogue.md): The last two Pokemon games I played were in 2022: Pokemon Gaia (which I loved, truly loved, and felt like it delivered exactly on the promise of "the core ga...
- [Everybody's in L.A.](https://jmduke.com/posts/everybodys-in-la.md): I rant often a lot about how it's important to judge any sort of artistic endeavor first and foremost by how much it accomplishes what it sets out to do. Thi...
- [The Club Dumas](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-club-dumas.md): I am perhaps disqualified from really opining on the quality of The Club Dumas, given that I’ve never actually read The Three Musketeers. And so much of the...
- [Sugar](https://jmduke.com/posts/sugar.md): One of my biggest complaints with Blue Eye Samurai (a show that I liked and enjoyed overall) was that in its fence-straddling between wanting to tell a meani...
- [HIT ME HARD AND SOFT](https://jmduke.com/posts/hit-me-hard-and-soft.md): An underwhelming and inert repetition of her previous few albums, and the good individual singles (Chihiro!) do not make this any more substantial as an albu...
- [Unreasonable Hospitality](https://jmduke.com/posts/unreasonable-hospitality.md): It's good — better than I expected, worse than it could have been, useful all the same. I learned a good amount, such as the terminology of grace notes and t...
- [Ripley](https://jmduke.com/posts/ripley.md): Chalk this one up right next to Scott Pilgrim Takes Off in the annals of "okay, maybe recycling IP isn't that bad after all", though I think the Tom Ripley p...
- [Work Clean](https://jmduke.com/posts/work-clean.md): I started Work Clean with the expectation that it would be like so many of the mediocre pieces of airport bookstore fodder in its ilk: "here's how this somew...
- [Murderville](https://jmduke.com/posts/murderville.md): This could have been a much better show (and I suspect that the British show which inspired it very well might be), as I love the premise — half whodunit, ha...
- [The Parallax View](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-parallax-view.md): I admired and liked klute but did not quite love it as much as I loved The Conversation, which I thought tackled the coming battleground of large-scale surve...
- [Cribsheet](https://jmduke.com/posts/cribsheet.md): A follow-up to Expecting Better focusing on the first few years of parenthood and what some combination of data, studies, and rational rigor tells us about c...
- [This is Personal](https://jmduke.com/posts/this-is-personal.md): One of the trickiest tightropes for an author publishing a business book to walk is: "how deftly do I tip my hand that this is all part of a greater lead gen...
- [Superforecasting](https://jmduke.com/posts/superforecasting.md): I have no qualm or reservation with the general concept of "superforecasters", and find myself predisposed to agree with the author's screeds against 'expert...
- [Attack on Titan (Season 4)](https://jmduke.com/posts/attack-on-titan-season-4.md): Moments of the final season were exciting and cool: the timeskip had interesting moments, the budget was well-spent on some terrific action sequences, the pr...
- [Austerlitz](https://jmduke.com/posts/austerlitz.md): I can count on one hand the number of books I've read in the past decade that immediately overwhelmed me with how obviously and singularly great they were, n...
- [The Late Show](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-late-show.md): As one might surmise from the tagline, The Late Show attempts to combine the cynicism and cinema of chinatown with the wit and bonhemie of The Thin Man; unfo...
- [Dune: Part 2](https://jmduke.com/posts/dune-2.md): Hard to come up with a more trenchant or accurate summation of my thoughts than: "movie owned", because that's where I really ended up with this — this was n...
- [Zero to One](https://jmduke.com/posts/zero-to-one.md): Zero to One, not unlike other books in its zeigeist/self-caricature orbit (sapiens, Infinite Jest, and so on) is often so much treated like a referendum on t...
- [Devs](https://jmduke.com/posts/devs.md): It's hard to watch this series and not feel like Garland had a couple lynchpin scenes and concepts in mind — the general monologue about determinism, for ins...
- [Scott Pilgrim Takes Off](https://jmduke.com/posts/scott-pilgrim-takes-off.md): One of the strongest, strangest memories of my post-college life was the weekend I spent binging through Questionable Content, a comic that was one of High S...
- [Blue Eye Samurai](https://jmduke.com/posts/blue-eye-samurai.md): I wonder how much more I would have liked this show if the ending wasn't so aggressively telegraphed for a second season (as compared to another great Maya E...
- [London Match](https://jmduke.com/posts/london-match.md): A satisfying but non-revelatory ending to the trilogy started by Berlin Game and Mexico Set, whose lack of true satisfaction in its ending both feels earned...
- [Mexico Set](https://jmduke.com/posts/mexico-set.md): I described this book's predecessor, Berlin Game as "deeply, thorough competent" and I meant it in the highest possible terms (in the same way our protagonis...
- [The E-Myth Revisited](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-emyth-revisited.md): This book, more than others in the "how to do business" genre, is both: 1. legitimately valuable, and probably scores the highest of any such book in terms o...
- [Balatro](https://jmduke.com/posts/balatro.md): A really fun game and truly impressive indie effort that suffers from many of the same flaws (albeit less so) as Dicey Dungeons — a slow early-game, a sense...
- [Berlin Game](https://jmduke.com/posts/berlin-game.md): A deeply, thoroughly competent MI6 novel. The last spy novel I read was Red Notice, a truly poor piece of fiction: one which had me concerned that perhaps I...
- [Mr. and Mrs. Smith](https://jmduke.com/posts/mr-mrs-smith.md): Blew my expectations away. Borderline-pornographic direction and aesthetics courtesy of Hiro Murai, and a surrealism reminiscient of atlanta in many ways — t...
- [Killers of the Flower Moon](https://jmduke.com/posts/killers-of-the-flower-moon.md): I am not a devotee of Scorsese — I have seen many but not most of his films, and I like but do not love them — and so it is perhaps a little naive to describ...
- [Homicide](https://jmduke.com/posts/homicide.md): A fascinating film, and one that I think in many ways had more weight than House of Games (which I enjoyed but found flat and relatively inert) and The Spani...
- [The New York Trilogy](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-new-york-trilogy.md): Aster wrote three novellas: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. Together, they form The New York Trilogy. I certainly didn't love the first two novel...
- [Broadchurch](https://jmduke.com/posts/Broadchurch.md): It was funny to learn that the creator of this series is more widely known for their work on Doctor Who because I very much got the impression during the fal...
- [The Holdovers](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-holdovers.md): A well-executed and competent film with a couple truly lovely moments; its greatest sin is that I probably won't think of it at all in a few months.
- [Fargo (Season 5)](https://jmduke.com/posts/fargo-season-5.md): There are things I didn't like; almost all of them were outweighed, in retrospect, by the absolute battleaxe performances of Juno Temple and Sam Spruell, cul...
- [Slow Horses (Season 3)](https://jmduke.com/posts/slow-horses-season-3.md): Still tremendously entertaining, though the back half felt a little mandalorian-y with how absurd the action sequences were in a way that undermined the grim...
- [The Outsiders](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-outsiders.md): Very sympathetic to the core theses of capital management advanced by the author, but I do not feel like I garnered much insight that hasn't already been abs...
- [Slow Horses (Season 2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/slow-horses-season-2.md): Not as great as the first season; still tremendously entertaining television, with more than a few twists that I couldn't predict and an underlying thread of...
- [Tiny Rogues](https://jmduke.com/posts/tiny-rogue.md): Deeply fun and aesthetic in a way that made it more satisfying and interesting than brotato (which I think a little too-quickly wore out its welcome.) There'...
- [Slow Horses (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/slow-horses-season-1.md): A pretty tremendous series of television, whose economy in storytelling, propulsion in narrative, and sheer production value leaves little to be desired. It'...
- [The Name of the Rose](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-name-of-the-rose.md): Ah, so this is where pentiment gets so much of its richness.
- [Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated](https://jmduke.com/posts/scooby-doo-mystery-incorporated.md): Beautiful animation (for a children's show); pretty funny (for a children's show); and a surprisingly good overarching plot (for a children's show).
- [Lush Life](https://jmduke.com/posts/lush-life.md): Masterful, and yet I found myself wishing it were over quicker.
- [The Game](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-game.md): Absolutely entranced for the first two acts, and then the wheels start to come off a bit, and then you realize that if you think too hard about any piece of...
- [Brotato](https://jmduke.com/posts/brotato.md): Fitting to have picked this up a year or so after Vampire Survivors, a better game in almost all respects but one that is also a bit more difficult to get in...
- [No Way Out](https://jmduke.com/posts/no-way-out.md): Terrific thriller in the vein of The Conversation and klute (albeit with a more political bent.) What elevated this from good to great for me was the excelle...
- [Expecting Better](https://jmduke.com/posts/expecting-better.md): Really good book, and one I would recommend to anyone thinking about family planning. Nothing coy or clever to say; just thought it was solid, actionable, an...
- [The Woman Called Fujiko Mine](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-woman-called-fujiko-mine.md): Does it take some time to get over the seemingly gratuitous nudity? Absolutely. (Does the story — which, it perhaps warrants calling out, was written and dir...
- [Croupier](https://jmduke.com/posts/croupier.md): A terrific character study (and understandable in that it put Clive Owens on the map) that also does a good job of (pun not intended, I promise) revealing it...
- [The Other Guys](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-other-guys.md): Probably can be viewed in retrospect as a bit of a pivot point for Adam McKay going from “dumb comedies” to “smart dumb comedies”, right? I watched this for...
- [The City & The City](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-city-and-the-city.md): China Mieville is an author that I have heard mentioned and recommended in comparison to many writers I like — Borges, Calvino, Jemisin — and yet had never r...
- [The Nice Guys](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-nice-guys.md): I will start with a proviso that I did not realize that this was a distinct film from The Other Guys, which in many ways feels like a spiritual predecessor t...
- [Destiny](https://jmduke.com/posts/destiny.md): Another banger.
- [Kids on the Slope](https://jmduke.com/posts/kids-on-the-slope.md): The music was fantastic and there were some real moments of beauty (the first big jam sesh; the school talent competition; the final scene in the church). Bu...
- [Out of Sight](https://jmduke.com/posts/out-of-sight.md): Very early Soderbergh, and you can see a couple blueprints here: his penchant for crime/heist stories with jump-cutting timelines, his love for Clooney (who...
- [Three Days of the Condor](https://jmduke.com/posts/three-days-of-the-condor.md): Is Robert Redford the most attractive actor of all time?
- [State of Play](https://jmduke.com/posts/state-of-play.md): What's not to, if not love, at least deeply enjoy? A legitimate political thriller with a strong cast who act competently, sincere and interesting direction,...
- [High Flying Bird](https://jmduke.com/posts/high-flying-bird.md): I was very surprised to neither like nor love this movie, given the amount of affection I have for all of its constituent parts: Soderbergh, Zazie Beetz, spo...
- [The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-three-stigmata-of-palmer-eldritch.md): I am starting to get a sense of PKD's entire thing being "what if you fell asleep, and had a dream, and then woke up — how do you know you're not still in a...
- [GUTS](https://jmduke.com/posts/guts.md): Best collection of 2023 bops.
- [Night Moves](https://jmduke.com/posts/night-moves.md): Okay, I'm all in on Gene Hackman (now after The Conversation), I'm all in on that closing shot of the boat circling aimlessly, an ending grimmer and more poe...
- [7 Powers](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-seven-powers.md): I think there are two good things about this book: 1. The delineation and description of the seven powers 2. The distinction between "statics" and "dynamics"...
- [Klute](https://jmduke.com/posts/klute.md): A terrific, terrific film, with a great performance by Jane Fonda (insert quip of "the film should be called Bree!" here.) I think some of the noir aspects f...
- [No Hard Feelings](https://jmduke.com/posts/no-hard-feelings.md): It is hard to find much positive to say about this movie. Jennifer Lawrence performed capably — certainly not to the standard of a true A+-lister, but capabl...
- [Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri](https://jmduke.com/posts/three-billboards-outside-ebbings-missouri.md): It is kind of funny to watch this film, six years after its release (and subsequent kerfuffle re: Sam Rockwell's character and what it means to write a redem...
- [Hijack](https://jmduke.com/posts/hijack.md): Committed performances and occassionally great direction do not do enough to rescue this series of terribly written plot points and character decisions, the...
- [House of Games](https://jmduke.com/posts/house-of-games.md): In retrospect, I shouldn't have watched this so quickly after The Spanish Prisoner and No Sudden Move; I think this kind of heist/neo-noir is, as much as I l...
- [The Spanish Prisoner](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-spanish-prisoner.md): I really, really, really liked this film, and my only criticism of it is that the cool distance with which it operates makes it hard to love. Steve Martin is...
- [The Conversation](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-conversation.md): One of my all-time favorites, and one that I'm excited to rewatch in the years to come. Hackman with a terrific, gripping performance and a subject matter th...
- [The Man Who Wasn't There](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-man-who-wasnt-there.md): This was not great cinema, but it was solidly good. The Coens feel a bit like Murakami when you watch a number of their works in succession: you start to rec...
- [Intolerable Cruelty](https://jmduke.com/posts/intolerable-cruelty.md): This felt like the Coen brothers trying to do their version of Adam's Rib (and George Clooney doing his version of Spencer Tracy). I certainly liked it more...
- [What We Do In The Shadows (Season 4)](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-we-do-in-the-shadows-4.md): Wonderful and silly, like a very low-stakes live-action anime: there's a rich and inconsistent (but delightful) world, an emphasis on laughing with over laug...
- [So We Read On](https://jmduke.com/posts/so-we-read-on.md): Well, if it's not biography; and it's not literary criticism; and it's not scholarship... what is it? And the answer appears to be poorly structured, ramblin...
- [Lessons from the Titans](https://jmduke.com/posts/lessons-from-the-titans.md): Don't let the anodyne title fool you: dry, nuanced, interesting stories about big companies (largely in industrials) and the processes that helped and/or har...
- [The Vinland Saga (Season 2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/vinland-saga.md): I thought the first season of this anime was good and entertaining but certainly not anything to write home about, a slightly tropey anime with interesting c...
- [Chop Wood, Carry Water](https://jmduke.com/posts/chop-wood-carry-water.md): I don't mean this in a mean or negative way: this books is a bunch of self-help essays designed for teenagers. (There is also what feels like a bit of Orient...
- [Across the Spiderverse](https://jmduke.com/posts/across-the-spiderverse.md): It is very gratifying for me to see all the praise for this movie, some of it feeling overdue from the somehow-underappreciated Into the Spiderverse. And, to...
- [Chess Story](https://jmduke.com/posts/chess-story.md): It is hard for me to imagine a more perfect novella, or a novella that takes more advantage of its economy and delivers everything you want: spare, surgical...
- [I Think You Should Leave (Season 3)](https://jmduke.com/posts/i-think-you-should-leave-season-3.md): Something I don't think I fully appreciated about the first two seasons of this show, that becomes more obvious in time, is how well the truncated runtime (e...
- [Jury Duty](https://jmduke.com/posts/jury-duty.md): What was the goal of the show? What were we supposed to think about as viewers? This was a thing I struggled with a lot while watching this half-mockumentary...
- [So Shall You Reap](https://jmduke.com/posts/so-shall-you-reap.md): I was hoping that this would be something more akin to a Christie: lots of deep character work, atmospheric Europe, and a solid whodunnit. This book was, wel...
- [Ways of Seeing](https://jmduke.com/posts/ways-of-seeing.md): A terrific series of essays that barely show their age after fifty years, and whose only criticism could be a lack of persuasive cohesion across their conten...
- [Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves](https://jmduke.com/posts/dungeons-and-dragons.md): I felt deeply cynical going into this movie after The Super Mario Movie, an enterprise so deeply rooted in its inherent commercialism. I am pleased to report...
- [Heaven](https://jmduke.com/posts/heaven.md): I picked this up last year on a lark, having recognized the other from Breasts and Eggs which I generally enjoyed. This — well, I certainly didn't enjoy it,...
- [The Night Manager](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-night-manager-2016.md): We watched this off of the heels of another (albeit more oblique) homage to le Carré, The Ipcress File, and it's remarkable where this succeeds and where thi...
- [Ori and the Blind Forest](https://jmduke.com/posts/ori-and-the-blind-forest.md): It is incorrect to describe this game as a melange of celeste and gris because of course this game predates both of them. But that is where my mind went — th...
- [First Person Singular](https://jmduke.com/posts/first-person-singular.md): I think I've written once or twice that at this point in my life I find Murakami's short stories more interesting and engaging than his novels, and I think t...
- [Ubik](https://jmduke.com/posts/ubik.md): I am still digesting this book — I know that I liked it a lot, and I think it managed to succeed at almost every level besides having more-than-workmanlike p...
- [The Super Mario Bros. Movie](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-super-mario-movie.md): Why does this movie exist? The answer is obvious: it is a commercial, not artistic enterprise, and by those standards it is a success. It is a 90-minute comm...
- [A Silence Shared](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-silence-shared.md): Grateful as I am to Elena Ferrante for her work alone, I'm equally grateful for the appetite (either assumed or real) she's aroused in the English reading pu...
- [The Ipcress File](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-ipcress-file.md): In retrospect, one of the things that you really have to appreciate about le Carré is his steadfast refusal to keep a character alive longer than is realisti...
- [A Wild Sheep Chase](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-wild-sheep-chase.md): In retrospect, it's a little funny that I read Dance Dance Dance before this book, its ostensible prequel. (There is something about Murakami's work that mak...
- [Novelist as a Vocation](https://jmduke.com/posts/novelist-as-a-vocation.md): Funniest part of this book by far was Murakami talking about how he would never, ever write a book because an editor asked him to — such corporate interests...
- [Pattern Recognition](https://jmduke.com/posts/pattern-recognition.md): It was funny to read 2002-era reviews of this book, which universally bemoaned the "tres hip"-ness of Gibson's brand deployments (iBooks! MUJI!) as a flaw th...
- [Party Down (Season 3)](https://jmduke.com/posts/party-down.md): (This writeup is just of the third season; I watched (and liked very much) the first two seasons back when they originally aired close to a decade ago.) "Why...
- [Desk Set](https://jmduke.com/posts/desk-set.md): We came across this having looked for other Tracy-Hepburn vehicles after being disappointed by Adam’s Rib. What we found was delightful, in no small part bec...
- [Russian Doll (Season 2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/russian-doll-season-2.md): I thought the first season of Russian Doll was a small joy: inessential, artsy television with a clear sense of direction, self, and purpose. The second seas...
- [Mob Psycho 100 (Season 3)](https://jmduke.com/posts/mob-psycho-100-season-3.md): I wrote of season two: > This show is still not in my top tier of anime — I think it's going to be hard for a seinen to ever really hit that — but it's still...
- [Good Services](https://jmduke.com/posts/good-services.md): This is a simple, straightforward, and true book: all of the principles Lou Downe espouses are good ones, and there's little I disagree with. It also... is f...
- [Liberation Day](https://jmduke.com/posts/liberation-day.md): I think he is correctly diagnosed as schmaltzy and precious but at his best, there is nobody who writes towards my philosophy of love and purpose quite like...
- [The Forgery](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-forgery.md): I picked this up on a lark at Eliot Bay visiting in early 2023; I am a sucker for short-run translations and promises of Spanish magical realism. I was not d...
- [Poker Face](https://jmduke.com/posts/poker-face.md): Two pithy "damning with faint praise" reviews of this show: 1. There are shows that are Very Good, and there are shows that are very Good, and this is the la...
- [Cunk on Earth](https://jmduke.com/posts/cunk-on-earth.md): I have recommended Cunk on Earth a lot to friends over the past week, which was exactly how long it took for Haley and I to devour the five-episode miniserie...
- [Varieties of Disturbance](https://jmduke.com/posts/varieties-of-disturbance.md): My review of Break it Down, a much earlier entry in Lydia Davis' ouevre, last year was a bit of damning with faint praise: > Very solid and nothing but that....
- [Adam's Rib](https://jmduke.com/posts/adams-rib.md): I was surprised to discover how, upon completing this movie, how much I disliked it given how obvious it should have been a personal hit — Spencer Tracy and...
- [The Faraway Nearby](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-faraway-nearby.md): (Thanks to Roman Kudryashov for recommending this!) The Faraway Nearby exists in a lineage of personal narrative and art criticism that I identify most stron...
- [The Case of the Golden Idol](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-case-of-the-golden-idol.md): It is almost impossible to review this game without comparing it to Return of the Obra Dinn, a game which I felt in many respects the exact same about as I d...
- [The Woman in the Dunes](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-woman-in-the-dunes.md): Let me start with what I loved about this book (a book that, before anything else is said, I enjoyed and found worthwhile and would recommend reading with so...
- [Blue Hours](https://jmduke.com/posts/blue-hours.md): Felt like a softer, folkier version of Frightened Rabbit. Will revisit once it is colder out, because this is definitely an autumnal album.
- [The Godfather](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-godfather.md): It has taken me far too long to watch The Godfather, and having finished it I find myself slightly deflated — because it is a tremendous movie, worthy of its...
- [Do Revenge](https://jmduke.com/posts/do-revenge.md): Half-Mean Girls, half-Strangers on a Train, all loving homage to as many teen comedies as you can think of, with a pair of passable lead performances (Maya H...
- [Trouble in Paradise](https://jmduke.com/posts/trouble-in-paradise.md): Haley wanted an "old-timey comedy", and we have run low on them, so I had to do some crate-digging for this one. And I'm glad I did! This movie — a svelte 82...
- [Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro](https://jmduke.com/posts/lupin-iii-castle-of-cagliostro.md): I don't have anything profound to say about this movie: - It is a rollocking good time, a classic family-friendly adventure story that feels nostalgic and (p...
- [Industry (Season 2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/industry-season-2.md): I liked-but-did-not-love the first season of this show: I thought it was a show that wanted to be like Mad Men but was largely the first season of Mad Men (w...
- [Much Ado About Nothing](https://jmduke.com/posts/much-ado-about-nothing.md): It is always fun to watch older films like this, that seem sort of like a cinematic supergroup in retrospect: Denzel, Emma Thompson, Robert Sean Leonard, Kea...
- [Stardust](https://jmduke.com/posts/stardust.md): Very pleasant, airy covers of Kind of Blue. Not as good as the OG, but a solid remix.
- [Fletch](https://jmduke.com/posts/fletch.md): I watched this three months after Confess, Fletch and am shocked to discover that I like the original more! Shocked is perhaps overkill — mildly surprised, p...
- [Attack on Titan (Season 2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/attack-on-titan-season-2.md): I ended my review of the first season with the following: > I'm enjoying the story enough to want to continue; I wish the story was delivered with more speed...
- [What Money Can't Buy](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-money-cant-buy.md): I was pretty excited for this book based on its blurb! I am a sucker for deeper introspections into the financialization of our society, for better and for w...
- [Mob Psycho 100 (Season 2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/mob-psycho-100-season-2.md): This was a very strong second series, having liked the first series a lot after getting used to the show's warmth and humor. It felt like it was at its weake...
- [Designing for People](https://jmduke.com/posts/designing-for-people.md): The kindest and strongest praise that you can give this book is that it was written in 1955 and neither its praxis nor its theory has aged a day. A lot of ex...
- [See How They Run](https://jmduke.com/posts/see-how-they-run.md): I am not sure what made 2022 the year of the lighthearted whodunit, but between this film, Confess, Fletch, and Glass Onion we clearly have ourselves the mak...
- [Avatar: The Way of Water](https://jmduke.com/posts/avatar-the-way-of-water.md): Can a movie's sheer visual spectacle outweigh three otherwise glaring flaws: its runtime, its paint-by-numbers plot, and its sheer lack of characterization +...
- [Home, Before and After](https://jmduke.com/posts/home-before-and-after.md): Absolutely nothing wrong with this record except that it is very boring and treads nothing new for an artist with a lovely voice, solid lyrics, and unrealize...
- [Honestly Nevermind](https://jmduke.com/posts/honestly-nevermind.md): I have a distinct impression that this is going to get panned, but you know what? This is the most interesting thing Drake has done in a long time, and I don...
- [Time Skiffs](https://jmduke.com/posts/time-skiffs.md): This was dreamlike and nice, but I think I'm at the point where I simply cannot care about Animal Collective. I've tried for two decades and it's time to giv...
- [Chainsaw Man (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/chainsaw-man.md): I had heard of Chainsaw Man for a while from following some folks on Twitter who are much more plugged into the manga scene than I am , and to say I was dubi...
- [Return of the Obra Dinn](https://jmduke.com/posts/return-of-the-obra-dinn.md): The thing I respect most about Obra Dinn is how obviously realized it is. I complain a lot about pieces of media that feel more like collections of things th...
- [Glass Onion](https://jmduke.com/posts/glass-onion.md): Glass Onion is not a particularly good murder mystery, but is an extremely fun broad comedy. In that sense, I think it's a natural sequel to Knives Out, whic...
- [Pentiment](https://jmduke.com/posts/pentiment.md): I am going to do a disservice to this game by leading off with an unfavorable comparison to Disco Elysium, for which I wrote: > The core gameplay is... extan...
- [Net Gains](https://jmduke.com/posts/net-gains.md): This book really wants you to think it is an airport bookstore book: vague handwaves about "digital transformation" and analytics and a mix of rigorous analy...
- [Mama Said Knock You Out](https://jmduke.com/posts/mama-said-knock-you-out.md): Around the Way Girl is an absolute banger; this is probably five songs too long.
- [The Swimmers](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-swimmers.md): This book is structured as a number of short stories about the dignities and indignities of age and memory, all centered around a woman who finds herself in...
- [The ABC Murders](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-abc-murders.md): It was interesting to see a non-David Suchet attempt at a Poirot story, given how utterly smitten and enchanted I am with Suchet's portrayal. With respect to...
- [Vampire Survivors](https://jmduke.com/posts/vampire-survivors.md): I don't mean to be glib or insensitive with this comparison, but it is hard to get out of my head and is a conclusion arrived at not just by myself but by ma...
- [Love Hard](https://jmduke.com/posts/love-hard.md): This was a bad movie but a pretty good Christmas movie. I laughed more than once (which, again, grading on a curve!) and the entire production had a sense of...
- [Amp It Up](https://jmduke.com/posts/amp-it-up.md): Amp It Up is not a good business book. It is, in book terms, quite bad: there is no through-line, no overarching theme, no clear message. It reads as if Fran...
- [Cult Classic](https://jmduke.com/posts/cult-classic.md): I can't find where I wrote this, but I described Crosley's writing persona (having read her other two books) as that of a friend you run into at a party who...
- [Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic](https://jmduke.com/posts/gilgamesh-a-new-translation-of-the-ancient-epic.md): This is my first reading of Gilgamesh (my understanding of the epic really came from Final Fantasy and Wikipedia-tier summaries), so it's hard to know how mu...
- [The Supper of the Lamb](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-supper-of-the-lamb.md): Wow. Move over An Everlasting Meal (which is still a great book), this is my favorite book on cooking. This is going to be a short review because I don't hav...
- [The Nightmare Before Christmas](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-nightmare-before-christmas.md): My reaction during this movie (a lithe seventy-six minutes) was that of a near-perpetual maniacal grin, one that bounced between "what the hell?" and "hell y...
- [Hocus Pocus 2](https://jmduke.com/posts/hocus-pocus-2.md): It seems ridiculous to say that this sequel — 29 years after the fact, a naked cash grab to play on nostalgia and juice Disney+'s subscriber numbers headed i...
- [Boom Town](https://jmduke.com/posts/boom-town.md): This book has two sides and two parallel narratives: - one broad narrative of the founding, settlement, and growth of Oklahoma City - one relatively narrow n...
- [Economic Fables](https://jmduke.com/posts/economic-fables.md): A very fun, informative book with a comfortable rhythm: 1. Here's an interesting part of economic theory. 2. Here are some ways in which it has been applied...
- [Tunic](https://jmduke.com/posts/tunic.md): You should play Tunic. Let me lead off with that: it is a beautiful game, rich in texture and metis, filled with joy and detail and surprises that rank up th...
- [Confess, Fletch](https://jmduke.com/posts/confess-fletch.md): What a pleasant surprise! I heard absolutely nothing about this film leading up to or including its release, only discovering it on my brother's Plex account...
- [White Noise](https://jmduke.com/posts/white-noise.md): My immediate analysis of White Noise is that it's a bit of a Magic Eye painting. Any individual patch of prose is fairly unpleasant and incoherent; unfocusin...
- [Mob Psycho 100 (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/mob-psycho-100-season-1.md): It took me a little time to get keyed into the idiosyncratic humor & ethos of this show, but once I did I really did. It's very much a shonen, but a shonen i...
- [Attack on Titan (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/attack-on-titan-season-1.md): What I liked: - The titan designs, which manage to be consistently bizarre and terrifying in a way that I really appreciate (and also abhor) - A sense of leg...
- [The Colossus of New York](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-colossus-of-new-york.md): I learned of this book from a beautiful quote from my friend Kunal and am generally a sucker for at least the idea of city-focused essay collections (Horizon...
- [The White Album](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-white-album.md): As you might guess from the name, this book of essays is [meant]() to be in equal parts a rejection and a transcendence of the sixties that came before it —...
- [The Three-Body Problem](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-three-body-problem.md): I'm not sure there's any book I've heard more about that I haven't read than The Three Body Problem: a fairly wide swath of folks I know and/or follow have r...
- [Archer (Season 11)](https://jmduke.com/posts/archer-season-11.md): I loved Archer in my college years, and I've been spending a lot of time with H. Jon Benjamin during Haley and I's months-long marathon of Bob's Burgers, so...
- [Dina ögon](https://jmduke.com/posts/dina-ogon.md): Beautiful spring/autumn music. Feels like a soundtrack to a movie I wish I was in.
- [Pokemon Gaia](https://jmduke.com/posts/pokemon-gaia.md): I was really, really tempted to give this game a rating of five stars. I think it is a perfect ROM hack: it is polished, nuanced, and you forget very quickly...
- [The Rehearsal](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-rehearsal.md): As many people have mentioned, this show owes a lot to Synecdoche, New York (a film that I have very strong memories of and for despite having only seen once...
- [The Cult of We](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-cult-of-we.md): I think there are two genres of this kind of retrospective expose on a company’s rise and downfall. You can have a unique and esoteric look at a company from...
- [Irma Vep](https://jmduke.com/posts/irma-vep.md): What a delightful show. I did not know where it was taking me; I do not think the show knew where it was going. I don’t mean that even to be coy, or to avoid...
- [Murder, My Sweet](https://jmduke.com/posts/murder-my-sweet.md): This was my annual birthday movie (a nice hard-boiled noir to be enjoyed alongside an unhealthy amount of scotch and a good filet), and while I realized arou...
- [Industry (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/industry-season-1.md): I think the pitch I had internalized about this show, having learned about it from The Watch (whose taste in television I once treated as sacrosanct, and sti...
- [Tower Heist](https://jmduke.com/posts/tower-heist.md): This was a very bad movie, and what makes me particularly stung by it is that it had appearances of at least being a competent bad movie, the kind of heist m...
- [The Bear (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-bear-season-one.md): What a good show! I knew after like three episodes that this was a good show (not pretending to be particularly iconoclastic with this take), and when I was...
- [The Batman](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-batman.md): The good: Robert Pattinson was great, the core plot was pretty interesting, the direction was pretty solid, and there are very few pieces in the film that I...
- [Reset](https://jmduke.com/posts/reset.md): Animal Collective meets the Beach Boys (meant as a compliment, but not as something I necessarily want to listen to.)
- [A Farewell to Arms](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-farewell-to-arms.md): What is it about Hemingway that you read him and think that he's the closest we've got to an objectively correct style of writing? Anyway. This was my first...
- [Chinatown](https://jmduke.com/posts/chinatown.md): Well, that was probably the most depressing final sequence I can remember in a film (especially one so devoted to realism, or at least its brand of plausibil...
- [Licorice Pizza](https://jmduke.com/posts/licorice-pizza.md): A movie that to its benefit and detriment tries to traffic solely in good vibes. Something like a chimera of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (not just in terms...
- [Klara and the Sun](https://jmduke.com/posts/klara-and-the-sun.md): This is so clearly an Ishiguro book. It is soft and subtle and uses the voice of a wonderful protagonist whose blissful naivete (sometimes deliberate, someti...
- [Silverview](https://jmduke.com/posts/silverview.md): A satisfying little puzzle box of a book (read in around three hours across two days) that I would consider more of a beach read than the kind of weighty, gr...
- [God and Golem, Inc.](https://jmduke.com/posts/god-and-golem-inc.md): This is a book in three parts whose first two parts seem — how do I say it gently? — a little cranky, or a bit handwavy. I was interested more in reading wha...
- [Passage of Power](https://jmduke.com/posts/passage-of-power.md): I realized something around six hours into Passage of Power. I was enjoying the book less on its own merits (though it has many!) and more in the same way th...
- [H of H Playbook](https://jmduke.com/posts/h-of-h-playbook.md): This book is unfiltered Anne Carson: playful and serious, deep and accessible, flippant and reverent. It contains beautiful prose and a legitimate argument:...
- [Spy x Family (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/spy-x-family-season-1.md): This show harbors no illusions about what it is or what it's trying to be, and I really admire it for that — this is a crisp season of silly, saccharine tele...
- [Coventry](https://jmduke.com/posts/coventry.md): When reviewing Second Place, I wrote of Cusk: > And there are moments of beauty! I think, at the end of the day, Cusk should be an essayist, and perhaps this...
- [In The Mood for Love](https://jmduke.com/posts/in-the-mood-for-love.md): This for so long had been a bit of an "amateur film buff bingo" film for me; I have been recommended it so many times, by so many people with disparate taste...
- [The Gray Man](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-gray-man.md): It’s going to be hard to top the following description of Gray Man, a film that I was excited to watch without knowing many details based purely on an A.V. C...
- [The T-Shirts I Love](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-t-shirts-i-love.md): This is a pretty funny book — not, like, the prose (though I llked the prose!), but the sheer chutzpah of taking a bunch of very lightweight magazine article...
- [People From My Neighborhood](https://jmduke.com/posts/people-from-my-neighborhood.md): It's hard not to compare this book to an anime — something light and detached like Azumanga Daioh with a hint of mushishi's deep and largely amorphous/unexpl...
- [Tokyo Vice (Season 1)](https://jmduke.com/posts/tokyo-vice-season-1.md): Okay, I'm a little heated. I don't know why exactly, but I assumed this was a miniseries in the typical HBO vein: eight episodes of a book adaptation, straig...
- [The Other Side of Make-Believe](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-other-side-of-make-believe.md): Yeah, file this one under "DALL-E-generated rock album",
- [The Secret History](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-secret-history.md): I loved this book. Loved it in a deep, personal way that I don't think I've felt about a piece of written fiction since idaho, which had a similarly profound...
- [The Listening](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-listening.md): I was perhaps over-excited after listening to The Minstrel Show — a 10/10 album for me, and the first I've run into in a while — and had to start binging the...
- [The Minstrel Show](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-minstrel-show.md): Wow. This brings me back to two albums in particular: Camp Lo's Uptown Saturday Night and Kanye's The College Dropout — less in terms of sound and production...
- [Far Side Virtual](https://jmduke.com/posts/far-side-virtual.md): Weird and fun without being more weird than fun, which I think is a tricky balance for a lot of the late-stage vaporware acts.
- [Barbarians at the Gate](https://jmduke.com/posts/barbarians-at-the-gate.md): This book is meticulous. It has an incredibly clever cover. It was eye-opening (not in the "oh, LBOs are bad!" sense , but in the "oh, industrial multination...
- [GOLD](https://jmduke.com/posts/gold.md): This might be more of a loungey record that rewards a listen when I'm sitting and reading or milling about as opposed to being in a bit more of a flow mode,...
- [To Catch A Thief](https://jmduke.com/posts/to-catch-a-thief.md): Here is the actual tagline for this movie: watch Cary Grant and Grace Kelly be charming in the French Riviera. That's really all you need to know about the f...
- [Interior](https://jmduke.com/posts/interior.md): I liked-not-loved this. It was fun and a little bit vibe-y and would happily listen to it again, but I would be hard-pressed to recognize it out of a crowd.
- [Mercury](https://jmduke.com/posts/mercury.md): When I listened to Potential six years ago I was absolutely blown away: in retrospect, it was my first house album, but it was a sort of album that felt simu...
- [Everything Everywhere All At Once](https://jmduke.com/posts/everything-everywhere-all-at-once.md): All I knew going into this movie was that a number of my friends and acquaintances (most of whom, it should be said, do not know what “A24” is) instantly cal...
- [Frost / Nixon](https://jmduke.com/posts/frost-nixon.md): There are exactly three scenes that disqualify almost any criticism about this movie: 1. The drunken, unhinged rant from Frank Langella which tie the two lea...
- [MUNA](https://jmduke.com/posts/muna.md): Silk Chiffon is so good a track it almost singlehandedly rescues what is a fairly flatline album (or perhaps a particularly flatline back half of an album)....
- [Rounders](https://jmduke.com/posts/rounders.md): This was a lot of fun. Edward Norton being an absolute shithead; Matt Damon playing a very prototypical Matt Damon role; John Malkovich chewing up more scene...
- [Goldfinger](https://jmduke.com/posts/goldfinger.md): It’s interesting to read some of the contemporary reviews of this film, which peg it as perhaps a too self-serious Bond film with too dark of a subject matte...
- [Working Backwards](https://jmduke.com/posts/working-backwards.md): Maybe it’s useful to preface this review with a statement of my obvious self: I used to work at Amazon (and left with fond memories, albeit an order of magni...
- [Interior Chinatown](https://jmduke.com/posts/interior-chinatown.md): I absolutely see why this won the National Book Award, and deservedly so: the criticisms, so trenchant, wrapped in a postmodern fantasy, so clever, and deliv...
- [DRILL MUSIC IN ZION](https://jmduke.com/posts/drill-music-in-zion.md): I feel like Lupe has done a pretty poor job balancing his lyricism and his scrutability; he does an incredible job of doing that here, and alongside what mig...
- [The Merry Wives of Windsor](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-merry-wives-of-windsor.md): This performance by the Quill Theatre was very cute. Outdoor setting in Agecroft which was food-and-drink friendly; made the whole thing feel like casual din...
- [Middlemarch](https://jmduke.com/posts/middlemarch.md): For a while, I thought my take on Middlemarch was going to be a simple one: “this is a very nice piece of literature that clearly paved the way for a certain...
- [Sunday at the Village Vanguard](https://jmduke.com/posts/sunday-at-the-village-vanguard.md): I am not sure what live jazz is supposed to be if not this.
- [Superstore](https://jmduke.com/posts/superstore.md): The good news about this album — really a collection of sketches, as hinted by the album art — is that if you don't like one track you just have to wait a mi...
- [Azumanga Daioh](https://jmduke.com/posts/azumanga-daioh.md): My understanding is that Azumanga Daioh is the ur-"cute girls doing cute things" anime, and I 100% get why it spawned an entire subgenre unto itself. There i...
- [Teeth Mark](https://jmduke.com/posts/teeth-mark.md): Spare, beautiful folk music.
- [Dorohedoro](https://jmduke.com/posts/dorohedoro.md): By far Dorohedoro's greatest strength is its incredible and unique world, which feels grimy and lived-in and unlike anything you've seen before. The closest...
- [No Time To Die](https://jmduke.com/posts/no-time-to-die.md): The set-pieces were really good. Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright were really good. Ana de Armas was exceptional. I had a fun time! And yet. Movies with the r...
- [From Capelton Hill](https://jmduke.com/posts/from-capelton-hill.md): This is very much an album about what it means to have spent twenty years making music that is almost entirely about being in your late twenties and feeling...
- [Vertigo](https://jmduke.com/posts/vertigo.md): I’m surprised that this movie is held in such high esteem relative to other Hitchcock films. I liked it, and I thought there were very good parts of it, and...
- [Top Gun: Maverick](https://jmduke.com/posts/top-gun-maverick.md): I went into this movie equipped with two pieces of baggage: 1. I had watched the predecessor the night before, so the plot beats, overt propagandizing, and r...
- [Top Gun](https://jmduke.com/posts/top-gun.md): This is no retrospective of a beloved childhood film through adult eyes or anything like that: I know this movie for its myriad backwards-references, and I k...
- [WE](https://jmduke.com/posts/we.md): The Lightning II is an absolute banger but this feels a bit like a cover band (or, a more modern version: a DALL-E rendition of an Arcade Fire album).
- [Waltz for Debby](https://jmduke.com/posts/waltz-for-debby.md): This, to me, is what jazz is, perfect and timeless.
- [Butterfly Blue](https://jmduke.com/posts/butterfly-blue.md): My only memory of Mallrat was listening to For Real a few hundred times back in 2016, so this album was not really what I expected — wavier and dreamier. One...
- [So Far So Good](https://jmduke.com/posts/so-far-so-good.md): Shocked to discover that Pitchfork liked a pop EDM record more than I did. This wasn’t bad, but there are just way more entertaining takes on the pop crossov...
- [Come Home The Kids Miss You](https://jmduke.com/posts/come-home-the-kids-miss-you.md): I think the Pitchfork review was a little harsh and felt somehow like punching down, but...yeah, the album's not good. The production is fine but milquetoast...
- [Severance](https://jmduke.com/posts/severance.md): I'll start with what the show does obviously and unequivocally extremely well: the staging & cinematography, the acting, the set design, the sound design. Ot...
- [Un Verano Sin Ti](https://jmduke.com/posts/un-verano-sin-ti.md): Some fun beats but the thing felt discohesive and overlong to me. (AKA: it failed the "can I tell that the album is over and it shifted to random songs" test.)
- [Dance Fever](https://jmduke.com/posts/dance-fever.md): I'll be honest — I forgot how fun Florence + The Machine is.
- [Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers](https://jmduke.com/posts/mr-morale-and-the-big-steppers.md): My "Sing About Me / Dying Of Thirst is the greatest passage of hip-hop in the 21st century" take is potentially being updated to "Auntie Diaries / Mr. Morale...
- [Belle](https://jmduke.com/posts/belle.md): This is more than a well-animated (though it is extremely well-animated, and the marked contrast in style between the real world and the digital world is imp...
- [Master of the Senate](https://jmduke.com/posts/master-of-the-senate.md): I’m going to dispense with the usual reverence for Caro — not because I don’t think this book merits it, but because I think I’ve covered that enough in my p...
- [What We Do In The Shadows](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-we-do-in-the-shadows.md): (We watched seasons one through three.) Wonderful and silly, like a very low-stakes live-action anime: there's a rich and inconsistent (but delightful) world...
- [Multitude](https://jmduke.com/posts/multitude.md): He continues to have the bops!
- [Triangle Strategy](https://jmduke.com/posts/triangle-strategy.md): This game could have been something special. I really think that. It feels like for every great decision that went into it, a poor one had to follow. Let's s...
- [It's Almost Dry](https://jmduke.com/posts/it-s-almost-dry.md): "Like Brady, gets better with time / Didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, just a better design" sums up this album. It lacks the heater-heater brutality of Day...
- [Visual Explanations](https://jmduke.com/posts/visual-explanations.md): Listen, I’m as deep a Tufte groupie as I think you can get, but this felt inessential. This is a book ostensibly about “pictures of verbs” and it feels more...
- [Hadestown](https://jmduke.com/posts/hadestown.md): It was delightful to get to see — or, really, listen — to this live, with the original recording cast and everything. Reeve Carney's Orpheus was the lowlight...
- [Duplicity](https://jmduke.com/posts/duplicity.md): Nothing wrong with this one, and it's a clear descendant of the Ocean's Eleven school of thinking: get a really talented cast, add some espionage, and let th...
- [Humble Quest](https://jmduke.com/posts/humble-quest.md): Pitchfork describes this album as "matter-of-factly masterful", and I think that's apt! This is need something that breaks out of its country-pop confines, b...
- [Drive My Car](https://jmduke.com/posts/drive-my-car.md): The movie is really long. Three hours long! You know that I do not particularly enjoy overlong movies. This one felt like three hours: the opening credits, c...
- [DFTK](https://jmduke.com/posts/dftk.md): I didn't love everything in the album, but the opener is a banger and it feels sonically much more interesting than the median Young Thug-lineage album. Ther...
- [Death on the Nile](https://jmduke.com/posts/death-on-the-nile.md): This was...perfectly competent. Branagh was okay as Poirot but could not match Suchet (who can?) The acting and cast were stellar in terms of renown and serv...
- [Crest](https://jmduke.com/posts/crest.md): Nothing wrong with it, but simply...boring tonally, unexperimental, not doing anything for me at all.
- [Ousama Ranking](https://jmduke.com/posts/ousama-ranking.md): This felt like the best possible version of a bildungsroman anime: incredibly sweet, memorable characters and a penchant for surprisingly deep characterizati...
- [Portrait in Jazz](https://jmduke.com/posts/portrait-in-jazz.md): Utterly delightful and maasterful.
- [Glitch Princess](https://jmduke.com/posts/glitch-princess.md): Weird without being precious and esoteric without being unpleasant. This feels like an order of magnitude stranger (and in a good way!) than the XCX experime...
- [Fantasies](https://jmduke.com/posts/fantasies.md): It's embarrassing that listening to the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World version of Black Sheep was the forcing function to get me to finally listen to Metric aft...
- [Lilac](https://jmduke.com/posts/lilac.md): Fun and light and probably my favorite pop maximalist album that I've listened to this year.
- [How I Met Your Father](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-i-met-your-father.md): I can’t find the exact tweet, but someone described this as “a weird experiment where you take people in the year 2022 and you force them to make content wit...
- [peace places: kenyan memories](https://jmduke.com/posts/peace-places-kenyan-memories.md): There's a there there, for sure, but it feels to nebulous and atonal and disparate for me to enjoy listening (or to try to enjoy listening through future rou...
- [Crash](https://jmduke.com/posts/crash.md): Opens with a bop; ends with a bop; good and quick and I will absolutely relisten, but hard to say I liked it more than any of her previous albums (most of al...
- [Tana Talk 4](https://jmduke.com/posts/tana-talk-4.md): Nothing wrong with it, but incredibly underwhelming.
- [No One Writes To The Colonel](https://jmduke.com/posts/no-one-writes-to-the-colonel.md): I really thought this collection had two halves: 1. the self-titled novella, with which the collection opens, which is something like One Hundred Years of So...
- [West Side Story](https://jmduke.com/posts/west-side-story.md): I wanted to watch this movie first and foremost because of the long-take gymnasium scene that went viral on Twitter, knowing little about the original beside...
- [Things Are Great](https://jmduke.com/posts/things-are-great.md): Sure is a Band of Horses album! Sure does remind me of commuting to a shitty internship in 2011! Sure kinda feels more like a facsimile than something new, b...
- [Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō](https://jmduke.com/posts/yokohama-kaidashi-kiko.md): I struggle to think of analogues for this — four short, sweet episodes about “the evening of the world”, a quiet and blissful post-apocalyptic slice-of-life....
- [Fairy Tale](https://jmduke.com/posts/fairy-tale.md): Alternate universe VGM-y nujabes. Nothing world-shattering, but extremely good vibes.
- [Hotter Than July](https://jmduke.com/posts/hotter-than-july.md): 🔥🔥🔥
- [Damaged](https://jmduke.com/posts/damaged.md): Not my biggest cup of tea but it's objectively really fun and well-done. And Rise Above is a killer opener.
- [Sincere Sunset](https://jmduke.com/posts/sincere-sunset.md): Pleasant and utterly forgettable Nujabes rip-off. (Good background music, at least!)
- [The Great Beanie Baby Bubble](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-great-beanie-baby-bubble.md): This book was a marked contrast from The Everything Store which I read immediately prior to it, and largely disliked (or perhaps more accurately — was intens...
- [The Everything Store](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-everything-store.md): Halfway through this book, I wrote: > i haven't finished quite yet, but The Everything Store is thus far the worst book i've read in the genre of corporate h...
- [Harold and Maude (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)](https://jmduke.com/posts/harold-and-maude-original-motion-picture-soundtrack.md): This was quiet and cute and pleasant and little else. The dialogue samples are a nice touch
- [A Visit From The Goon Squad](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-visit-from-the-goon-squad.md): Wow! I am shocked that I had never heard of this before. This is mostly ignorance on my end (it won a Pulitzer, it's not like it's this hidden gem). I tore t...
- [Super Squats](https://jmduke.com/posts/super-squats.md): This was more of a booklet than a book, but it was short and convincing. Gonna try and start at 135x20 and work my way to 225x20 over the course of the six w...
- [Once Twice Melody](https://jmduke.com/posts/once-twice-melody.md): This is an album that is 100 minutes long that sounds 1000 minutes long, and not in a good way.
- [You Can't Take It With You](https://jmduke.com/posts/you-can-t-take-it-with-you.md): This was a saccharine and fun movie that of course shared a lot of DNA with It's A Wonderful Life, including a "everyone puts money in the basket" scene (in...
- [The Shop Around The Corner](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-shop-around-the-corner.md): It is hard not to view every scene in this movie in direct competition (or perhaps more charitably, in direct contrast) with You’ve Got Mail, a classic Nora...
- [Sidelines](https://jmduke.com/posts/sidelines.md): I feel like if I was in college I would treat this with the reverence with which I treated The Head & The Heart's debut LP. Unfortunately, I am not in colleg...
- [Rear Window](https://jmduke.com/posts/rear-window.md): I'm not sure at what point it dawned on me that the setting & vantage of Rear Window was going to be a fixture of the entire film, and not just a cute way to...
- [Drukqs](https://jmduke.com/posts/drukqs.md): Avril 14 aside, this was still fun and interesting but way too long and erratic for me to enjoy listening to. (My previous praise of Aphex Twin sounding time...
- [Selected Ambient Works 85-92](https://jmduke.com/posts/selected-ambient-works-85-92.md): How the fuck did this come out thirty years ago?
- [Fantasy](https://jmduke.com/posts/fantasy.md): Rainy, ethereal breakbeats & post-rave. I wish this was twice or thrice as long; as soon as I feel like I'm getting into it the album is over.
- [Emily in Paris (Seasons 1-2)](https://jmduke.com/posts/emily-in-paris.md): Two things I will share about Emily In Paris, a truly bad show: 1. It is at least an entertainingly bad show. It has no illusions about being good, and it is...
- [Valdevaqueros](https://jmduke.com/posts/valdevaqueros.md): Very solid "night-time pop", and perhaps the sole thing of redeeming artistic merit of Emily in Paris, as I was alerted to its presence by the show's use of...
- [The Tragedy of Macbeth](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-tragedy-of-macbeth.md): Boy, I loved this. This was really really really well executed: a moody, bare, opinionated take on what a film adaptation should be. I can't think of a singl...
- [Break it Down](https://jmduke.com/posts/break-it-down.md): I thought it was extremely good, which is to say — very solid and nothing but that. The flash fiction pieces were my favorite, and every single piece was ext...
- [Super Mario 3D World](https://jmduke.com/posts/super-mario-3d-world.md): This was comfort food. It was not as great as Super Mario Odyssey, but it felt like someone played Super Mario World and said "okay, what if we updated the g...
- [Sick!](https://jmduke.com/posts/sick.md): The first album of the year that just did absolutely nothing for me.
- [Piano Ten Thousand Leaves - 5th Selection](https://jmduke.com/posts/piano-ten-thousand-leaves-5th-selection.md): Beautiful and sparse piano instrumentation. Very good for cold mornings with coffee & a crossword or focusing on writing.
- [Magic](https://jmduke.com/posts/magic.md): I have absolutely no qualms with this album. The rhymes are great, the production is classic (if a bit overly nostalgic), and it doesn't outstay its welcome.
- [The French Dispatch](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-french-dispatch.md): I wasn't expecting to love this movie as much as I did, but it's my favorite Wes Anderson. It grabbed my head and my heart by the collar and refused to let g...
- [Fragments](https://jmduke.com/posts/fragments.md): Reminds me a lot of, well, other Bonobo albums, but also Thrupence. I'll be giving it a couple more listens as it is perfectly reasonable and nice coding mus...
- [Dawn FM](https://jmduke.com/posts/dawn-fm.md): You know, the concept is really cool, and I think I might try a couple more times to see if it grows on me, but I simply could not give a shit about the prod...
- [Means of Ascent](https://jmduke.com/posts/means-of-ascent.md): This was the follow-up to Path to Power, which was perhaps my favorite book of 2021. (And of 1982, I guess!) I liked this book much less, and I think Caro ex...
- [Cowboy Bebop (2021)](https://jmduke.com/posts/cowboy-bebop-2021.md): This was neither as bad as I thought it could be nor as good as I hoped it might be. The vast majority of the blame I think has to go towards the scriptwriti...
- [The Makin' Magick II Album](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-makin-magick-ii-album.md): Okay, now we're talking. Less moody than The Other World and captures the same surreal verve as charmed. Definitely will be revisiting many many times this y...
- [Fiat Lux](https://jmduke.com/posts/fiat-lux.md): More academic than listenable, but undeniably beautiful.
- [Lover Come Back](https://jmduke.com/posts/lover-come-back.md): The good: "Vip" is an incredible bit with a pretty solid payoff; the Hudson-Randall chemistry is impeccable (even if the Hudson-Day chemistry is less delight...
- [Shin Megami Tensei V](https://jmduke.com/posts/shin-megami-tensei-v.md): This game poses a simple question: how good is a game with excellent gameplay and terrible plot? And make no mistake — the gameplay is excellent. This is the...
- [Subconsciously](https://jmduke.com/posts/subconsciously.md): This was a pleasant and samey album almost the entire way through, but the final four songs — starting with Ready For You — elevated it from "forgettably mel...
- [The Other Realm](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-other-realm.md): Lacks a bit of the pure verve of charmed, which is a fundamental album to me, but still boppy & an easy way to lose yourself for a
- [Dune (2021)](https://jmduke.com/posts/dune-2021.md): The film is beautiful and appealing in every sense: the CGI and direction is masterful, and the audial design (both the soundtrack and then backing effects)...
- [Akudama Drive](https://jmduke.com/posts/akudama-drive.md): I think this was a classic case of high highs and low lows. The animation & aesthetic is incredibly fun, even if it's only "cyberpunk" at a visual level (big...
- [The Grinch](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-grinch.md): This movie didn't have any reason to exist, but if the previous animated Grinch didn't exist, I think people would like this one a lot! It was well-animated...
- [Big Sleepover](https://jmduke.com/posts/big-sleepover.md): A couple fun productions (Can't Sleep's hook is incredible!) but the verses feel a little dialed-in and I'm at the point of time where I am not particularly...
- [Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!](https://jmduke.com/posts/keep-your-hands-off-eizouken.md): This is a very sweet, fun, imaginative, delightful show. I'm not really sure what else to say about it: it did not change my life, but every single episode m...
- [X-Men: Days of Future Past](https://jmduke.com/posts/x-men-days-of-future-past.md): Some things were good: the "go back in time to change the future" conceit was surprisingly unmuddled (and, despite the conceit's ubiquity, it felt...unadorne...
- [Live!](https://jmduke.com/posts/live.md): This is so much fun, and the fact that my fiance called it "muzak" is honestly grounds for divorce.
- [The Brightness](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-brightness.md): This is a nice album, and it is fun to listen to Anais suss out some of her work and get a glimpse into her maturation (Hades & Persephone made it all the wa...
- [30 Rock](https://jmduke.com/posts/30-rock.md): I've watched the thing front to back three times, including once during the show's initial run. There are things that haven't aged well — much hay has been m...
- [It's All Smiles](https://jmduke.com/posts/it-s-all-smiles.md): The production is too glitchy & clever to be pleasant or interesting, which in of itself is not a huge deal except that the lyrics & vocals are so featherwei...
- [DJ-Kicks](https://jmduke.com/posts/dj-kicks.md): ???
- [Infinite Jest](https://jmduke.com/posts/infinite-jest.md): I chose this book because I simply had heard so much of it — both good and bad, mostly bad — that I had to devote some time to it. I knew it was about tennis...
- [Balsams](https://jmduke.com/posts/balsams.md): I don't think I was quite in the right headspace to listen to this, which was airy and minute without hinting at any sort of deeper beauty. Will probably try...
- [Hadestown (2021)](https://jmduke.com/posts/hadestown-2021.md): It's not a masterpiece like the 2010 original, but — separated from its musical trappings — feels like something of a well-executed live action reboot. There...
- [MP Da Last Don](https://jmduke.com/posts/mp-da-last-don.md): 106 is too many minutes for almost any album, let alone one as rambling & repetitive as this. There's a lot of nice moments, and at its height it feels like...
- [Salt](https://jmduke.com/posts/salt.md): Relatively upbeat and fun, but a little too — what's the word? Estoeric? Weird? — for me.
- [Red (Taylor's Version)](https://jmduke.com/posts/red-taylor-s-version.md): Nothing wrong with this, but it is interminably long and I do not think it is interesting enough to justify two fucking hours of runtime, except perhaps to s...
- [An Evening With Silk Sonic](https://jmduke.com/posts/an-evening-with-silk-sonic.md): Yes, it's 70's cosplay, and it's a little sterile, but who cares? It's fun!
- [Voyage](https://jmduke.com/posts/voyage.md): Nothing wrong with this album, but it just makes me feel old as shit.
- [How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-long-do-you-think-it-s-gonna-last.md): Mostly a reminder that Anais Mitchell is perfect and I need to listen to her more often. Less glibly, I thought this was as good-not-great as a side project...
- [Makin' Magick](https://jmduke.com/posts/makin-magick.md): It just doesn't hit the exultant highs of Charmed, and I just can't really see myself listening to this over again due to the length compared to Charmed.
- [Baccano!](https://jmduke.com/posts/baccano.md): I wanted to like this one so much. It seemed tailor-made to what I love in anime: interesting, anachronistic setting; weird alchemy stuff; a huge slew of cha...
- [Parnassus on Wheels](https://jmduke.com/posts/parnassus-on-wheels.md): This was a very sweet and inconsequential novella that felt like a progenitor to something distinctly Nora Ephron-esque — half love-letter to the written wor...
- [Screen Violence](https://jmduke.com/posts/screen-violence.md): This is the worst Chvrches album, and it’s still compulsively listenable — but besides the commitment to a bit of a horror-movie aesthetic it doesn’t have an...
- [Shade](https://jmduke.com/posts/shade.md): This is 'experimental' and not in a way that I find fun or rewarding.
- [The Murdering of My Years](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-murdering-of-my-years.md): This is a deeply lazy book filled with unserious soliloquies — a sort of primordial countercultural BuzzFeed listicle — which I could excuse, at least a litt...
- [Poirot and Me](https://jmduke.com/posts/poirot-and-me.md): This was a sweet and formulaic and ultimately bad book that I still enjoyed listening to because a) it is narrated by David Suchet, who wrote it b) I love Su...
- [Cheese](https://jmduke.com/posts/cheese.md): It is firmly worse than anything that came after it, but still kind of catchy!
- [Promare](https://jmduke.com/posts/promare.md): This movie is entirely style over substance, but — what style! It is so fun to watch. The visual motifs are really, really well done, and the script is pueri...
- [Halloweentown](https://jmduke.com/posts/halloweentown.md): I don't begrudge people who like this movie, and I can understand why, but watching it for the first time as an adult....I mean, at least Hocus Pocus had Bet...
- [Floating Mountains](https://jmduke.com/posts/floating-mountains.md): This failed the "can you tell when this album ends and Spotify transitions to Discover Weekly?" test three times in a row.
- [Summer is Over](https://jmduke.com/posts/summer-is-over.md): God help me — this is not good music, it is uninteresting, but I love it so much. It is tailor-made for me.
- [Talk Memory](https://jmduke.com/posts/talk-memory.md): Feels a little too atonal & uninteresting for my tastes.
- [Cave Story](https://jmduke.com/posts/cave-story.md): For a game that is mostly talked about in terms of influence (having kicked off the indie developer revolution, or at least made a significant dent into that...
- [Sometime I Might Be Introvert](https://jmduke.com/posts/sometime-i-might-be-introvert.md): Opening track might be my favorite single track of the year, but the album is a bit too interlude-heavy and all over the place for me. Probably worth reliste...
- [Star-Crossed](https://jmduke.com/posts/star-crossed.md): The obvious and deserved comparison is with Evermore/Folklore — a stripped down, mellower version of the author's ouevre. While I think Taylor's latest outin...
- [Our Bande Apart](https://jmduke.com/posts/our-bande-apart.md): This is the first time in my life I have thought about Third Eye Blind in a way that isn't just "Semi-Charmed Life" and..this album is pretty sonically fun?...
- [Fingers Crossed](https://jmduke.com/posts/fingers-crossed.md): This is exactly the genre of music I have spent a long time being obsessed with, and I am almost wistful that I am finally listening to this album now that I...
- [Moment Bends](https://jmduke.com/posts/moment-bends.md): Pleasant and defanged.
- [The Emperor's Soul](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-emperor-s-soul.md): My tweet-sized review of this book was “an interesting high-fantasy narrative about a distant dystopic empire in which multi-dimensional characterization is...
- [Steamworld: Quest](https://jmduke.com/posts/steamworld-quest.md): "Indie gem" is a cliche that I've grown to hate across genre & format these days, but this — this is an indie gem! It is perhaps biomechanically engineered t...
- [Nastavi, Calliope](https://jmduke.com/posts/nastavi-calliope.md): Too much angst, not enough sonic.
- [Path to Power](https://jmduke.com/posts/path-to-power.md): I am still digesting this book. It was huge, and of course only the first volume of a larger saga. But it is perfect: I can't think of how to improve it. It...
- [Space 1.8](https://jmduke.com/posts/space-1-8.md): Quiet and unassuming but pleasant enough to want to listen to a second time
- [The Day I Saw The Rainbow](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-day-i-saw-the-rainbow.md): Beautiful.
- [Demon Days](https://jmduke.com/posts/demon-days.md): I'll be honest... I don't get it? I liked the DOOM verse! It didn't sound bad! But it was not particularly fun or interesting.
- [Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack](https://jmduke.com/posts/mobile-suit-gundam-char-s-counterattack.md): I think I was a little spoiled by Life is Short, Walk On Girl which took everything that the show did and amped it up to ten, rewarding (but not mandating) y...
- [Mobile Suit Gundam: War in the Pocket](https://jmduke.com/posts/mobile-suit-gundam-war-in-the-pocket.md): This is the first Gundam show I've watched since my Toonami days, and it was — excellent. There was nothing silly or sophomoric; it was a mature and frankly...
- [Baduizm](https://jmduke.com/posts/baduizm.md): Very relaxing and pleasant and simple and great. Nothing revelatory but I see myself coming back to this over and over (and finally understand the Badu hype.)
- [Bayani](https://jmduke.com/posts/bayani.md): Yes, it's clearly a record of its time — 2007 backpack rap through and through. But it's fun! And it's good! I am a sucker for all of the Seattle references,...
- [Danganronpa: The Animation](https://jmduke.com/posts/danganronpa-the-animation.md): It is rare for me to complain that I wish a show was longer, but: I wish this was longer! The tropey interplay was fun but there wasn't that much of it becau...
- [In A Lonely Place](https://jmduke.com/posts/in-a-lonely-place.md): This was very, very well done. The Grahame-Bogart interplay was fantastic on both sides: the one shot of them in the throes of lust, sharing a cigarette at a...
- [DONDA](https://jmduke.com/posts/donda.md): I found it more consumable and interesting than anything post-Yeezus, but does it have to be so fucking long?
- [Loki](https://jmduke.com/posts/loki.md): What a weirdly unsatisfying season of television. I did not love WandaVision but it was something that was obviously meant to be television: episodes were se...
- [Solar Power](https://jmduke.com/posts/solar-power.md): Hard to resist the Folklore / Evermore comparisons, and both of those album — while milquetoast — at least to invite enjoyable listening. This felt like it w...
- [An Everlasting Meal](https://jmduke.com/posts/an-everlasting-meal.md): This is a beautiful book. I do not know how much it will change my life — half of the recipes do not really fit my ouevre, and the focus on soups and salads...
- [Anjelitu](https://jmduke.com/posts/anjelitu.md): Funky feels like an apt word to use for a short, fun, weird EP that ends with a great Aesop Rock collab.
- [Medium Raw](https://jmduke.com/posts/medium-raw.md): I loved Kitchen Confidential. It was fun and interesting and raw and — I know this is a trope amongst my writing at this point — delightful. I think the best...
- [leon mode](https://jmduke.com/posts/leon-mode.md): A bit too glitch-y for my tastes, but it's fun! Not gonna beat the VGM sunshine of his previous work.
- [The Vinland Saga](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-vinland-saga.md): A bit of a slow-burn start with a few too many tropes, but I think the back half of the season — once we got into an interesting and multifaceted cast of cha...
- [The Album](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-album.md): I would forgive the simplicity of the bubblegum or the datedness of the production or the very short runtime if any of these songs were bops but...they weren...
- [Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night](https://jmduke.com/posts/take-the-sadness-out-of-saturday-night.md): I don't mean this in a bad way, but boy is this a Bleachers album. I mean, maybe a little bit of a bad way.
- [Shoe Dog](https://jmduke.com/posts/shoe-dog.md): This was better than expected for a hagiographic business memoir! First off, I learned a lot about Nike. I didn't realize that it had its origins as a shoe r...
- [moment l.p.](https://jmduke.com/posts/moment-l-p.md): Nice J-Pop, even though I was hoping for something more DJ Okawari-esque given that I discovered them via the Nujabes collab!
- [Bae](https://jmduke.com/posts/bae.md): Just...straight up less boppy and interesting than Bae 5 (which I listened to yesterday). Good for Yung Bae as growing and improving as an artist!
- [Bae 5](https://jmduke.com/posts/bae-5.md): It's fun!
- [Disco Elysium](https://jmduke.com/posts/disco-elysium.md): Wow, this game is tremendous. I debated a lot whether or not I wanted to give this a score of 10 or 9. There are a lot of arguments for a 9: the game is, fra...
- [Sob Rock](https://jmduke.com/posts/sob-rock.md): Alexa, play "mi
- [Deep Work](https://jmduke.com/posts/deep-work.md): This book is awful. It has all the same sins of Digital Minimalism but without the grace I afforded it for being the first of Newport's books I written: it i...
- [Yasuragi Land](https://jmduke.com/posts/yasuragi-land.md): No! I hate it! This is weird! No!
- [Ham on Rye](https://jmduke.com/posts/ham-on-rye.md): Well, for starters, boy does Bukowski love talking about jerking off. There's a lot of what feels shocking in this book, and I almost wonder what it was like...
- [Space Jam: A New Legacy: Soundtrack](https://jmduke.com/posts/space-jam-a-new-legacy-soundtrack.md): I mean, it certainly wasn't good, and some of the Looney Tunes references were truly awful, but I didn't hate listening to it!
- [Riot!](https://jmduke.com/posts/riot.md): This album slaps, and it's very fun to imagine a world in which I got obsessed with this singularly rather than From Under The Cork Tree. How different the l...
- [The Kingdom](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-kingdom.md): Hmmmmm. This book reminded me a lot of Postwar. That feels like an odd comparison to make; the only thing I think you can accuse both books of sharing is a s...
- [The Life of Pi’erre 4](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-life-of-pi-erre-4.md): Same-y, boppy hiphop. Not consequential or memorable (besides the production tag) but fun!
- [Night is Short, Walk On Girl](https://jmduke.com/posts/night-is-short-walk-on-girl.md): This was really good. It was a great rom-com, for starters. It is in the style of Linklater's comedies: a long epic bender of a night filled with weird and e...
- [Blue](https://jmduke.com/posts/blue.md): Seems like a nice album! Sounded great! Just didn't care! (I know, this makes me a bad person.)
- [Oddtaxi](https://jmduke.com/posts/oddtaxi.md): Perfect series. The Bojack comparisons are obvious, but what this show really demonstrates is a warmth and humanity for every character in its orbit (okay, w...
- [F9](https://jmduke.com/posts/f9.md): What is the goal of this movie? I like bad movies whose goal is to be entertaining and they succeed at it; I hate good movies whose goal is to elevate and th...
- [Atomic Habits](https://jmduke.com/posts/atomic-habits.md): I have no qualm with this book, it simply....was not useful to me? I don't think, as far as productivity books go, it was bad — it was actionable, relatively...
- [The Tatami Galaxy](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-tatami-galaxy.md): Incredible, incredible anime. The visual aesthetic alone is terrific, and the core premise is fun-if-not-revelatory, but the show's sense of humor and chaos...
- [No One Is Talking About This](https://jmduke.com/posts/no-one-is-talking-about-this.md): The first half of the book is a vacuous and entertaining Sporcle quiz of 2016—2018 Twitter zeitgeist; the second half of the book is sweet and wonderful and...
- [Second Place](https://jmduke.com/posts/second-place.md): Why do I keep doing this? This, of course, meaning "reading Rachel Cusk". I think the answer is because I find her writing to be interesting and unlikeable,...
- [Space Struck](https://jmduke.com/posts/space-struck.md): I haven't been reading enough poetry lately, and so this might be a bit of a grading on a curve, but I thought this was lovely and light — funny without bein...
- [The Murder of Roger Ackroyd](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-murder-of-roger-ackroyd.md): It was, at the end of the day, an Agatha Christie, but I went in thinking "boy I hope this isn't just straight-up worse than the BBC adaptations" and it wasn...
- [Bastion](https://jmduke.com/posts/bastion.md): First off, the game is great. It’s great on its own merits, and it’s also great as a clear spiritual predecessor to Hades — which is a better game. They shar...
- [epiphany](https://jmduke.com/posts/epiphany.md): I gotta stop taking album advice from Pitchfork. This was fine but why am I listening to this?
- [Jubilee](https://jmduke.com/posts/jubilee.md): This was a pleasant album to listen to that had absolutely no lasting effect whatsoever.
- [Killing Eve](https://jmduke.com/posts/killing-eve.md): The first season was messy and a bit spottily plotted but glorious: the acting was top notch, the subversions were all there, and it was just joyous. The plo...
- [Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil](https://jmduke.com/posts/midnight-in-the-garden-of-good-and-evil.md): What is the goal of this book? What is its thesis? You might argue "it does not need to have a thesis or goal, it merely needs to be true" — but this book cl...
- [Changephobia](https://jmduke.com/posts/changephobia.md): Felt...forgettable? I need to spend some more time with it.
- [Trials of Mana](https://jmduke.com/posts/trials-of-mana.md): Oh, this game should have been catnip for me! I love ARPGs. I have been waiting literally 15 years to play this game. I wanted something pleasant and smooth...
- [Yasuke](https://jmduke.com/posts/yasuke.md): Incredible music and some very fun (if more than a little MHA-inspired) character design but good lord is the plot stale. The soundtrack is really really del...
- [Off the Yak](https://jmduke.com/posts/off-the-yak.md): Pitchfork described this artist as being one of the best to come out of a theoretical "rap battle" and boy did that set some wrong expectations for this very...
- [The Secret Life of Groceries](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-secret-life-of-groceries.md): A lot of the negative reviews of this book were based on the fact that it is not exactly so much about groceries & the supermarket (which is fair!) and that...
- [Summer Wars](https://jmduke.com/posts/summer-wars.md): This was not a great movie, but it had one transcendent piece and one very nice piece that elevated it a bit in my mind: 1. A depiction of a Second Life-esqu...
- [SOUR](https://jmduke.com/posts/sour.md): Hard not to resist the girl in red comparison and boy was that album more interesting, more fun, and more pleasant than this one!
- [Transcription](https://jmduke.com/posts/transcription.md): I was quite prepared to love this book, and to think of Atkinson as my treasure of the year — having loved Life After Life and having gotten to the climax of...
- [The Off-Season](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-off-season.md): Some legitimately great lines and production and also some of the corniest lines I have heard in years and it's hard to disentangle the two.
- [Start Small, Stay Small](https://jmduke.com/posts/start-small-stay-small.md): This was a good book! I wasn't quite the target audience for it, but that's on me: I'm further along in my software journey (post-launch, post-traction) than...
- [Music for Living Spaces](https://jmduke.com/posts/music-for-living-spaces.md): Music for Airports for the 21st century. Perfect music, gentle and lilting and quiet.
- [Girt](https://jmduke.com/posts/girt.md): The book is unabashedly fun and humorous and I felt like I learned a decent amount about a subject about which I knew nothing — Australian history. The autho...
- [if I could make it go quiet](https://jmduke.com/posts/if-i-could-make-it-go-quiet.md): Very-good-bordering-on-great pop-punk bordering on the style of Charly Bliss. A little uneven but the highs are very high, and I see myself listening to this...
- [Joy at Work](https://jmduke.com/posts/joy-at-work.md): It’s not obvious to me how to even try to charitably review this book, which at least is very earnest in its intentions — a blatant mashup of two authors who...
- [The Fellowship](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-fellowship.md): I am a sucker for all things Joseph Shabason at this point, and maybe it's fair to call this album a little too reminiscent of his prior work, but — who care...
- [The Grinder](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-grinder.md): A one-season show that was not exactly a wonder, but it knew exactly what it was: low-prestige silly television. It had a terrific commitment to bits; Rob Lo...
- [Dance Dance Dance](https://jmduke.com/posts/dance-dance-dance.md): Tired as I am with Murakami at this point, I think I'm finding more success and heart in his earlier work. This is of course quintessential (what isn't of hi...
- [Deltron 3030](https://jmduke.com/posts/deltron-3030.md): I feel bad not liking this album that much...? The first two tracks are iconic and the production is so fun but man it is just not that interesting to listen
- [Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex](https://jmduke.com/posts/ghost-in-the-shell-stand-alone-complex.md): I knew the film more than the series, and a lot of what I was expecting is colored by that lens. The first season in particular was less cerebral and more, u...
- [C-GIRL](https://jmduke.com/posts/c-girl.md): The vocals were a bit too aggressive but overall the same pleasant, unmemorable-but-solid pop vibes that the rest of her albums entail. It's not live changin...
- [Islah](https://jmduke.com/posts/islah.md): One of my favorite albums in a while, and definitely one of my favorite tracks in a long while (Two Phones). I am not at all embarrassed to say my introducti...
- [St. Elmo's Fire](https://jmduke.com/posts/st-elmo-s-fire.md): The piece of work that this reminded me most of was Friends From College, which recency bias aside makes a lot of sense — both are pieces that are centrally...
- [The Life and Death of Great American Cities](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-life-and-death-of-great-american-cities.md): I think I liked this book more as a cultural artifact than as an actual piece of reading material that I could usefully recommend to others. I say that comin...
- [Nurture](https://jmduke.com/posts/nurture.md): I liked the singles more than the gestalt and I had already listened to all of the singles already :(
- [Motel of the Mysteries](https://jmduke.com/posts/motel-of-the-mysteries.md): This was a very cute novella — or perhaps not quite a novella. It felt more like, in terms of substance & depth, an SNL short or New Yorker humor bit blown u...
- [Celeste](https://jmduke.com/posts/celeste.md): Of the games whose gameplay I truly love, my overall sentiment towards them scales based on their level of ludonarrative assonance: how well does the story f...
- [Gnosia](https://jmduke.com/posts/gnosia.md): This game was really fun — the word inventive is what immediately comes to mind. It is single-player Mafia (also known as single-player Among Us, or single-p...
- [FEVER DREAM](https://jmduke.com/posts/fever-dream.md): Wow they got generic quick!
- [Haram](https://jmduke.com/posts/haram.md): Features aside, I just wasn't super engaged. Might try another few listens to see if it sticks.
- [Fiesta & Fiascos](https://jmduke.com/posts/fiesta-fiascos.md): I am not enough of a Craig Finn diehard to have enjoyed listen
- [Friends From College](https://jmduke.com/posts/friends-from-college.md): A remarkable show (in the literal sense.) Clearly a talented writer's room that learned way too late that the plotting and characters they had set up were ab...
- [Bravely Default II](https://jmduke.com/posts/bravely-default-ii.md): - Obvious tuning and quality-of-life issues. Magic was consistently underwhelming; the sidequest system was largely annoying padding; performance was just st...
- [Hamnet](https://jmduke.com/posts/hamnet.md): It was weird to listen to a book and feel my regard for it slipping away with each hour. I thought mining Shakespeare's life would be interesting and novel,...
- [To See The Next Part Of The Dream](https://jmduke.com/posts/to-see-the-next-part-of-the-dream.md): This is the kind of album that you respect rather than you like.
- [Ponyo](https://jmduke.com/posts/ponyo.md): I loved it! It was warm and sweet and gorgeous and there was nothing not to enjoy about it. The voice cast was solid, I loved all of the characters (even the...
- [Before the Dawn Heals Us](https://jmduke.com/posts/before-the-dawn-heals-us.md): I think I would have loved this album a lot more if I was 1) in high school (not a knock against the album!) 2) ignorant of all the other M83 albums that hav...
- [Steins;Gate: The Movie](https://jmduke.com/posts/steins-gate-the-movie.md): It was cute and nice but felt straight-up like a three-episode epilogue of the main series. In contrast, the Cowboy Bebop movie felt like more of a distillat...
- [Omoiyari](https://jmduke.com/posts/omoiyari.md): Inconsequential and pleasant!
- [WandaVision](https://jmduke.com/posts/wandavision.md): What to say about this show that isn’t damning with faint praise? The first three episodes were terrific, and amongst the best things Marvel has done. Every...
- [Muldrew](https://jmduke.com/posts/muldrew.md): This just doesn't do it for me! Too weird! Too atypical! I wanted nice glitchy jazz!
- [Glass](https://jmduke.com/posts/glass.md): 5 Wagon is an absolute banger, and the production is fun, but the back half feels a little lyrically vacuous.
- [All These Perfect Crosses](https://jmduke.com/posts/all-these-perfect-crosses.md): I just don't really care about B-Sides albums. This is fine! The horns version of God in Chicago is great! But I don't care!
- [Harlecore](https://jmduke.com/posts/harlecore.md): This is too much for me!
- [Tidvatten](https://jmduke.com/posts/tidvatten.md): Very downbeat and forgettable house music. (Calling it House might be incorrect; it's ideologically and aesthetically more similar to something like Tycho.)
- [Juvenile](https://jmduke.com/posts/juvenile.md): Just incredibly buttery, fun, exciting EDM. I love it!
- [Steins;Gate](https://jmduke.com/posts/steins-gate.md): The show owns! I liked the back half much more than the front half, but the transition from silly slice-of-life to thriller was really well done, and the "wo...
- [The Queen's Gambit](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-queen-s-gambit.md): This was a very well executed show. Great acting, direction, and cinematography. The plotline was predictable and each little twist and turn felt a trifle on...
- [Open Door Policy](https://jmduke.com/posts/open-door-policy.md): That sure was a Hold Steady album! I don’t know; it doesn’t have the unpolished verve of early THS and it feels like what the band is trying to do now is mor...
- [Life After Death](https://jmduke.com/posts/life-after-death.md): It is an overstuffed record and there is a bit too much going on but man, he is just so so so good and there are too many classic tracks.
- [Charmed](https://jmduke.com/posts/charmed.md): Leisurely, delightful, warm house music. Comically long run-time, but it's so familiar and yet expansive that I find myself listening to it over and over again.
- [Holiday](https://jmduke.com/posts/holiday.md): Early-era Grant and Hepburn: charming(ly obvious) plot, dynamite script, 97 minute runtime. I don’t know what’s not to love. It is not as obviously wonderful...
- [The Midnight Library](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-midnight-library.md): I am struggling to think of kind things to say about this book, the chief virtue of which was that it was never so painful or unreadable that I had to leave...
- [Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor](https://jmduke.com/posts/syllabus-notes-from-an-accidental-professor.md): What is this book? It is hard to say. It feels like an art school version of Bird by Bird, in a lot of ways. It is sweet and vivid and deeply evocative of a...
- [A N M L 7](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-n-m-l-7.md): Lo-fi sadboy forgettable hiphop.
- [HANADRIEL](https://jmduke.com/posts/hanadriel.md): Way too scattershot to legitimately enjoy.
- [[USA]](https://jmduke.com/posts/usa.md): There were some nice, chiptuney bops. I probably should have paid more attention, but it didn't seem to demand it of me!
- [The Finish Line](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-finish-line.md): Above average rote chill hop.
- [Pop Music / False B-Sides II](https://jmduke.com/posts/pop-music-false-b-sides-ii.md): Every single Baths album has one line that absolutely murders me and apparently this one decided it should be Is it love / or is it focus?
- [Like That](https://jmduke.com/posts/like-that.md): Six long poems over a hundred pages. The finale — an endless barrage of questions and prompts — is a beautiful work unto itself.
- [The Aces](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-aces.md): Some isolated bops but extremely uneven and unfinished in terms of feel.
- [All The Good Times](https://jmduke.com/posts/all-the-good-times.md): This is not my genre of music! But it was sweet and loamy and wistful in a way that I can appreciate, even if it's not a bottle I see myself reaching for often.
- [Kissa by Kissa](https://jmduke.com/posts/kissa-by-kissa.md): This is a long essay interspersed with gorgeous photography about Japan, walking, pizza toast, comfort, age, and self-discovery. It is warm and sweet. I don'...
- [Status Anxiety](https://jmduke.com/posts/status-anxiety.md): The classic criticism of Alain de Botton is that his arguments are vacuous and facile, and rescued by an impressive rolodex of quotations and above-average p...
- [Collapsed in Sunbeams](https://jmduke.com/posts/collapsed-in-sunbeams.md): Gen Z Corinne Bailey Rae, which is not to say that it sounds bad but it is (to steal a great phrase from the Pitchfork review) a pleasant monotone. I will pr...
- [31 Poems](https://jmduke.com/posts/31-poems.md): A couple absolute bangers ("On Being Asked by a Student If He Should Ask Out a Certain Girl" is perfect). The prose is fun and discursive and fluttery (to us...
- [Stardew Valley](https://jmduke.com/posts/stardew-valley.md): Here's my hot take: Stardew Valley as a game is overrated (Rune Factory 4 is, I think, a more fun game — the gameplay feels better, the combat is deeper, the...
- [Burden of Proof](https://jmduke.com/posts/burden-of-proof.md): Honestly, get rid of a couple of the features and this would be an all-timer for me. I loved the verses and production.
- [Post-Nothing](https://jmduke.com/posts/post-nothing.md): I feel embarrassed to say I like Japandroid's later, more polished efforts, but its still solid and growly garage music that errs right on the side of listen...
- [Tenet](https://jmduke.com/posts/tenet.md): pros: beautiful shots of the amalfi coast; excellent costume design cons: two and a half hours runtime; the single worst script I think I have ever experienced
- [.wav](https://jmduke.com/posts/wav.md): I remember listening to a couple Flux Pavilion remixes on Hype Machine and Spotify recommended me this album so I thought I would give it a shot. It is one o...
- [Isles](https://jmduke.com/posts/isles.md): Immemorable but fun (and occassionally trippy) dancehall beats. Good coding music!
- [Moonflower Murders](https://jmduke.com/posts/moonflower-murders.md): What is one supposed to like about this book? I think the answer is the postmodernism — sure, the book-within-a-book is interesting in theory, and there are...
- [Serial Experiments Lain](https://jmduke.com/posts/serial-experiments-lain.md): This was a series with lots of flaws, but it was so relentlessly interesting and unsettling — in aesthetic, in content, in message — that I don't think I wil...
- [A Million Miles Away](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-million-miles-away.md): Lots of incredible bops (the opening six tracks are all fire emoji) with little cohesion and no sense of "oh, this album is over".
- [Basketball (and other Things)](https://jmduke.com/posts/basketball-and-other-things.md): This is a very fun book that is just a collection of three dozen Ringer prompts or /r/NBA shitposts. I don't mean that in a negative way — the book (and it c...
- [Demidevil](https://jmduke.com/posts/demidevil.md): I didn't hate this (there are Charli XCX-esque peaks in here somewhere) but it feels like a bizarre and intentionally bad mixtape than something to actually...
- [The Death of Stalin](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-death-of-stalin.md): I don’t think this movie quite succeeded at threading the line between satire and comedy-of-errors; the points where it wavered into what felt like gravitas...
- [Mandalorian](https://jmduke.com/posts/mandalorian.md): Season one: terrific, and my favorite piece of Star Wars content ever. I get that it's just a space veneer around Westerns, but its done so damn well — the c...
- [Forager](https://jmduke.com/posts/forager.md): This game is a classic empty calories idle game, except with bits of Minecraft mixed in. Numbers go up, there are tons of things to do, the core gameplay loo...
- [HHhH](https://jmduke.com/posts/hhhh.md): I have never read a postmodern historical non-fiction, and I thought it served the book incredibly well.
- [Waken](https://jmduke.com/posts/waken.md): Dreamy and ethereal and just a whole bunch of good vibes. Not super memorable, but impactful (and good lord the opening track is so good.)
- [AINOU](https://jmduke.com/posts/ainou.md): Pleasant, sunny, genre-bending Japanese indie pop. Not a lot of cohesion but delightful to listen to throughout.
- [OK Bamboo](https://jmduke.com/posts/ok-bamboo.md): Pleasant, elegant, and utterly forgettable piano-driven lo-fi. (Discover Tokyo is an incredible track, though.)
- [Limbo](https://jmduke.com/posts/limbo.md): I think I might just be a little spoiled because a couple fun puns and sunny production is no longer sufficient to get me into an album.
- [Savage Mode II](https://jmduke.com/posts/savage-mode-ii.md): Some truly awful lyrics but the production and flow is just incredible. Such a fun listen.
- [Fargo](https://jmduke.com/posts/fargo.md): This is probably my least favorite season of Fargo and it was still really solid. - Terrific acting. Chris Rock (and Glynn Turman) were spectacular. - The Wi...
- [How To Be Human](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-to-be-human.md): Chelsea Cutler belongs to what in my mind is a vanguard of interchangable, pleasant-but-never-transcendent soundcloud pop singers (EXES of course is my favor...
- [Breasts and Eggs](https://jmduke.com/posts/breasts-and-eggs.md): I think if I were to recommend this book to someone I would do it simply: do not read the second part. This is an amalgam of two novellas (explicitly demarca...
- [What Are You Going Through](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-are-you-going-through.md): The book was good but it felt like a step back from the masterwork of The Friend; they are so similar in structure and style but it felt a little bit like ev...
- [Days of Rage](https://jmduke.com/posts/days-of-rage.md): The Goodreads hivemind correctly outlines the two distinguishing characteristics of this book: 1. It is incredibly well-researched. 2. It is incredibly conte...
- [So](https://jmduke.com/posts/so.md): I would probably have loved this album even more if: 1. Sledgehammer was not on it. 2. I had listened to it ten years ago so I could base entire swaths of my...
- [Good Guess](https://jmduke.com/posts/good-guess.md): The instrumentals on this album are soft and nice and gorgeous and the lyrics are pleasant and introspective and I think I would love this album if the vocal...
- [The Price of Tea in China](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-price-of-tea-in-china.md): Alchemist’s sensational beats (and very Madvillain-y sampling) make this fun but Boldy’s verses just do not do anything for me, in tenor or in substance.
- [God's Fifth Wish](https://jmduke.com/posts/god-s-fifth-wish.md): I'm not one to criticize Fat Jon instrumentals (they're great!) but I literally forgot what this album was a week after listening to it.
- [Portrait in Love](https://jmduke.com/posts/portrait-in-love.md): I listened to this album twice and both times I forgot that I was listening to an album and not just a generic lo-fi playlist.
- [A Japanese Horror Film](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-japanese-horror-film.md): Mumblecore Liquid Swords, and I mean that in a very positive way.
- [Purity Ring](https://jmduke.com/posts/purity-ring.md): I mean, it’s a Purity Ring album, and a polished one at that. Macabre lyrics, sleek production, pop hooks. It is not novel for them but it is very well execu...
- [Wonder Woman 84](https://jmduke.com/posts/wonder-woman-84.md): Good things about this movie: 1. The Gadot-Pine chemistry is a lone bright spot in the vanilla hellscape of superhero romance. 2. The “hey, we’re in 1984!” s...
- [Live at the Harlem Square Club](https://jmduke.com/posts/live-at-the-harlem-square-club.md): Joyous, joyous soul that feeds on the live crowd. I don’t think it’s possible to listen to this album without singing along to it.
- [When Man Fails You](https://jmduke.com/posts/when-man-fails-you.md): Limerence is a work of art and a couple other tracks are standouts, but it lacks a certain level of coherence that makes me want to listen to tracks, rather...
- [Live at Tubby's](https://jmduke.com/posts/live-at-tubby-s.md): The riffing is fun and I have to imagine that if I was there live for this set I would have dug it but man, it is a chore to listen to.
- [It's a Wonderful Life](https://jmduke.com/posts/it-s-a-wonderful-life.md): You can say whatever you want about this movie. You can say the plot is nonsensical, that every line is twice as maudlin as it needs to be, and any character...
- [Everything Will Change](https://jmduke.com/posts/everything-will-change.md): This is not the best Ben-Gibbard-related live album (that is the inimitable The John Byrd EP), and it feels strictly inferior to Give Up, but as far as live...
- [NBA Jam: The Book](https://jmduke.com/posts/nba-jam-the-book.md): I’ll be honest, I was shocked at how good this book was. I bought it on a lark (who doesn’t love NBA Jam?) and when the name of the publisher is Boss Fight B...
- [Real Bad Boldy](https://jmduke.com/posts/real-bad-boldy.md): I absolutely abhored the opening title track but it heats up from there, with Street Shit and Champion being standout entries in the back half of the album.
- [Six Memos for the Next Millenium](https://jmduke.com/posts/six-memos-for-the-next-millenium.md): This is a great book about art in the twentieth century, and it left me with a better sense of how and why Calvino wrote and how to think about the art I con...
- [You Never Forget Your First](https://jmduke.com/posts/you-never-forget-your-first.md): This was fun and good, and I prefer this genre of biography — postmodern, airy — to the Chernow school of nine hundred pages of idolatry (the genre the autho...
- [Holographic Universe(s?)!](https://jmduke.com/posts/holographic-universe-s.md): There were some fun samples in here but I can't think of a worse sign for an album than not knowing that you had finished it and moved onto the next album.
- [Floating in the midnight sun](https://jmduke.com/posts/floating-in-the-midnight-sun.md): Classically pleasant and forgettable jazz-hop, focusing more on th
- [evermore](https://jmduke.com/posts/evermore.md): Some pleasant, catchy bops!
- [DJ Vision](https://jmduke.com/posts/dj-vision.md): Pretty fun, as far as forgettable electronica goes!
- [Linus and Juicy](https://jmduke.com/posts/linus-and-juicy.md): Every year, the Jose Gonzales Trio put on a live performance of the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack to raise funds for the Strawshop Theatre (a troupe of...
- [A Written Testimony](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-written-testimony.md): Probably not a great sign that I thought “oh, I should listen to this, I didn’t realize Jay Elec had finally dropped an official album” and then remembered h...
- [Little Eyes](https://jmduke.com/posts/little-eyes.md): I think this book was really something special, and the best science fiction book I've read in a long time. It is basically a book about making acquaintances...
- [Thoughts on Design](https://jmduke.com/posts/thoughts-on-design.md): This book was a disappointment. I can’t say that it was bad — it’s not! And I can understand why it was (is?) treated as so seminal in the designer’s canon....
- [We Will Always Love You](https://jmduke.com/posts/we-will-always-love-you.md): The Jamie XX feature and Leon Bridges alone make this a classic but wow the entire thing is just beautiful from start to finish.
- [Paul Rand: Conversations with Students](https://jmduke.com/posts/paul-rand-conversations-with-students.md): This is a small and quiet pearl of a book: a handful of discourses driven by Rand interspersed with a number of microbiographies of how various students and...
- [Digital Minimalism](https://jmduke.com/posts/digital-minimalism.md): I find myself weirdly torn on this book. It's a thesis that I strongly espouse and agree with (we should use our phones less, we should disengage from social...
- [The Searcher](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-searcher.md): I don't really feel like I have a grasp on this book. There are a few things I know about it (the "twist", such as it was, was well-telegraphed and earned; i...
- [The Holiday](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-holiday.md): I think this is what a low-stakes, low-investment romantic comedy should be! There are, I guess, suggestions of conflict and stakes — will Cameron Diaz’s cha...
- [Do: Inhabit](https://jmduke.com/posts/do-inhabit.md): It feels almost mean to rate this book so low. It was not a bad book, it was just a wisp of a book: pretty and insubstantial and vacuous. I am no interior de...
- [The City We Became](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-city-we-became.md): The core concept of this book — cities are real, vaguely metaphysical things with avatars — is so fun that it carries the wide proportion of the day, alongsi...
- [Beowulf](https://jmduke.com/posts/beowulf.md): Three things I liked about this book: 1. The translator's preamble, which both accurately called me out as a "person whose only experience with Beowulf was a...
- [American Cheese](https://jmduke.com/posts/american-cheese.md): What a book. I have some scattered thoughts: - The writing is gleefully, uh, cheesy. I mean that in an earnest way: it is written pretentiously, it is litter...
- [The Mezzanine](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-mezzanine.md): What a glorious book that I loved despite it being thirty pages too long (which is a thing to say, given that the book comes in at a tidy one hundred and for...
- [Anxious People](https://jmduke.com/posts/anxious-people.md): The friend who suggested this book for book club prefaced it with "I like this author because nothing is left to subtext", and that certainly is true! If you...
- [Hocus Pocus](https://jmduke.com/posts/hocus-pocus.md): Exactly three entertaining things about this film: 1. Bette Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker absolutely chewing up the scenery and being legitimately entertai...
- [Are You Listening?](https://jmduke.com/posts/are-you-listening.md): This grade reflects a strong bifurcation between the book's aesthetic & coloring, which is as potent and lovely and beautiful as anything can be (and exactly...
- [The End of Policing](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-end-of-policing.md): This book is really good, and I kind of wish it had a different cover. This book primes you to think that it is about the gestalt of policing, that it is a r...
- [Hades](https://jmduke.com/posts/hades.md): I don’t think I have anything interesting to say about Hades that hasn’t been already said by many of its (justifiably) adoring fans. It’s a legitimate conte...
- [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2](https://jmduke.com/posts/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows-part-2.md): If there’s ever a movie that seems unfair to judge on its own terms its this one. Part 1 was tough to judge on its own terms because it existed purely as tab...
- [God-Level Knowledge Darts](https://jmduke.com/posts/god-level-knowledge-darts.md): This book is a five-hour shitposting session between Desus and Mero. That’s all it is! That’s not a bad thing. The book is entertaining and hilarious. It is...
- [It Happened One Night](https://jmduke.com/posts/it-happened-one-night.md): My understanding was that this was the ur-romcom in a lot of ways, and it felt like that! The chemistry between the leads was great — and not great in a “gre...
- [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1](https://jmduke.com/posts/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows-part-1.md): It's interesting the extent to which this movie feels divorced from the ones preceding it "Hogwarts is the best and most important character" might be a stal...
- [Piranesi](https://jmduke.com/posts/piranesi.md): There's a lot to like about this book. The narrator (both in an audiobook and a diegetic sense, though I think the former certainly accentuated the latter) i...
- [The Lying Life of Adults](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-lying-life-of-adults.md): My general understanding of Ferrante's non-quadrilogical work is that it pales in comparison, and so my expectations for this book were relatively low. Not c...
- [Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince](https://jmduke.com/posts/harry-potter-and-the-half-blood-prince.md): Okay, now this is what a fantasy movie should be. Absolutely gorgeous effects & cinematography (a marked improvement from the drab darkness and excessively c...
- [No Filter](https://jmduke.com/posts/no-filter.md): A pleasant and uncontroversial read; it is not the exciting tell-all that Bad Blood or to a lesser extent Super Pumped was, but I think its lack of emphasis...
- [Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix](https://jmduke.com/posts/harry-potter-and-the-order-of-the-phoenix.md): What a joyless two hours. Some notes: - An important test for a fiction is: does it imbue its villains and obstacles with any redeeming or interesting charac...
- [The Goal](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-goal.md): It feels unfair to read — and grade — this book after reading The Phoenix Project, which in retrospect clearly purloins so much of its style and structure fr...
- [Pillow Talk](https://jmduke.com/posts/pillow-talk.md): A very good low-stakes rom-com. There were just a lot of things I liked: - The return of Tony Randall, who was delightful (and perfectly weaselly) in Will Su...
- [The Awful Truth](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-awful-truth.md): Just a really, really solid slapstick. Cary Grant is incredible (reading on Wikipedia this was the impetus for his launch into superstardom, which is totally...
- [The Phoenix Project](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-phoenix-project.md): This book is terrific at a conceptual level. It is absolutely a didactic non-fiction book about management (you could say it's a book about IT or a book abou...
- [Quantum of Solace](https://jmduke.com/posts/quantum-of-solace.md): You know, the conventional wisdom is that the Craig Bond movies have been in a tick-tock nature: Casino Royale is glorious, but Quantum is bad; Skyfall is gl...
- [An Absolutely Remarkable Thing](https://jmduke.com/posts/an-absolutely-remarkable-thing.md): I think there's a charitable and an uncharitable way to evaluate this book. The uncharitable way: the plot is hilariously unrealistic; every twist is telegra...
- [Casino Royale](https://jmduke.com/posts/casino-royale.md): I rewatched this having watched it once a long time ago; I remembered liking it quite a bit, and I still do, though perhaps my patience/illusionment with Bon...
- [Vectors](https://jmduke.com/posts/vectors.md): Hmm. I am both a sucker and a critic of this genre of aphorism/poetry/short-essay format: I loved 300 Arguments even as I hate, well, the vast universe of tw...
- [Evoland](https://jmduke.com/posts/evoland.md): I struggle to think of anything too positive about this game besides the fact that it is mercifully brief. The entire conceit revolves around it hitting you...
- [Hannah and her Sisters](https://jmduke.com/posts/hannah-and-her-sisters.md): I came in with high hopes: I like Allen's ouevre and this was supposed to be one of his best. And there were parts that I really liked: I thought Allen's sel...
- [Postwar](https://jmduke.com/posts/postwar.md): Postwar is not a book so much as it is a college course on 20th century Europe. Judt makes it clear in his introduction that rather than try and propose a gr...
- [A Spell of Songs](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-spell-of-songs.md): I thought this was a really remarkable, potent book of poetry. Shippy’s style does not change dramatically — each poem is unstructured couplets that spiral o...
- [Touch of Evil](https://jmduke.com/posts/touch-of-evil.md): Incredibly good if not revelatory. Heston and Welles (and even Leigh!) were all amazing. The script was great and the core plot was tight (even if the script...
- [The Decline And Fall Of Practically Everybody](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-decline-and-fall-of-practically-everybody.md): What a fascinating book that I didn't find myself enjoying! There is a lot to love. It is legitimately very very funny, the history is all accurate, and the...
- [Cowboy Bebop](https://jmduke.com/posts/cowboy-bebop.md): I am maybe being too harsh on this movie with its rating: if I watched it divorced of context, I would surely raise it higher. But, viewed in light of the se...
- [Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?](https://jmduke.com/posts/will-success-spoil-rock-hunter.md): It was...fine, bordering on solid! I definitely laughed at a handful of parts, and it was surprisingly meta/postmodern (I initially ascribed this to the fact...
- [Seattle City of Literature](https://jmduke.com/posts/seattle-city-of-literature.md): The book is repetitive but warm: stories generally fall neatly into the following templates: - I started taking this creative writing class at the UW and it...
- [Kokoro](https://jmduke.com/posts/kokoro.md): I thought this was great, and much more serious than the first part (and the prior reading of botchan) prepared me, even knowing that the book ended with Sen...
- [Kiki's Delivery Service](https://jmduke.com/posts/kiki-s-delivery-service.md): I think my partner and I called this wholesome at least seven times over the course of the film. It was so good! I love Kiki; I love Jiji; I love the cast of...
- [Roman Holiday](https://jmduke.com/posts/roman-holiday.md): Gorgeous cinematography; really really lovely denouement; pretty fun and chill time overall. And yet, feels regressive compared to, say, Bringing Up Baby (ma...
- [CrossCode](https://jmduke.com/posts/crosscode.md): Okay, the game has flaws. It’s overtuned and overstuffed; dungeons should be half the length, a third of the quests should be removed, and the challenge is c...
- [Looper](https://jmduke.com/posts/looper.md): In retrospect, almost a proto-Blade Runner 2049. I thought the acting and general plot was kinda milquetoast but the underlying setting was a hair above neat...
- [The First Ninety Days](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-first-ninety-days.md): This book is an excellent example of the “would this be better as a long blog post” litmus test (which it strongly fails.) It’s not that the book is bad on i...
- [The Philadelphia Story](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-philadelphia-story.md): Objectively a fun, good movie. (I don’t know about “best romantic comedy of all time” — When Harry Met Sally still holds that crown in my opinion — but it’s...
- [Blitzed](https://jmduke.com/posts/blitzed.md): It would be a lie to say this was an interesting book that I didn't think was good; maybe it would be more accurate to say that this book contained interesti...
- [Palm Springs](https://jmduke.com/posts/palm-springs.md): This movie was exactly what we expected: kind of clever, utterly predictable, very pleasant. I will probably not think about it other again but I recommend it!
- [Xenoblade Chronicles](https://jmduke.com/posts/xenoblade-chronicles.md): Hmmm. On the one hand, Xenoblade grabbed me really hard. I have fond memories of playing through it in 2012 — in Seattle for the first time — and being blown...
- [The Need to Hold Still](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-need-to-hold-still.md): A couple knock-my-on-my-ass poems that outweigh some of the second-half duds. Mueller has a command of voice — calm, wise, and yearning — that I truly wish I...
- [Shape Up](https://jmduke.com/posts/shape-up.md): This sounds like a damning with faint praise but my favorite part of this book is how short it was! There is no filler, and it advocates for its strategy pre...
- [A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers](https://jmduke.com/posts/a-concise-chinese-english-dictionary-for-lovers.md): I liked the book. I found it charming and winsome and funny. There were no elements, of, like, transformative exultation: so many of the books in this genre,...
- [The First Great Train Robbery](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-first-great-train-robbery.md): There were a few particularly memorable bits to Connery's performance — his scene peeling and eating an orange, and his absurd over-the-top double entendres...
- [The Song of Achilles](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-song-of-achilles.md): I think I was spoiled by having read Circe first, which seemed like an utter improvement on its predecessor. This book was good, and gave a depth and heft to...
- [Bandit](https://jmduke.com/posts/bandit.md): This is a very good book and equal parts ascent and descent. It is an interesting story about a sad family; it is an interesting self-diagnosis and meditatio...
- [Botchan](https://jmduke.com/posts/botchan.md): I liked this a lot! There were some inversions of cultural shorthands that I weren’t expecting: Botchan’s journey from Tokyo into the countryside made me exp...
- [The White Calf Kicks](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-white-calf-kicks.md): I loved Betrayal, and there were a few moments of triumph, but the entire thing didn't work for me. (How do you evaluate a mediocre book with one of your fav...
- [Weathering With You](https://jmduke.com/posts/weathering-with-you.md): My hot take is that this was wholly better than Your Name; the supernatural elements were more interesting, the romance was sweeter, and the auxiliary charac...
- [Excellent Evidence of Human Activity](https://jmduke.com/posts/excellent-evidence-of-human-activity.md): Short and wildly effective group of prose poems. Ryan manages to do a tricky thing, which is wringing mortality and apocalypse out of the minutiae of privile...
- [The Thirty-Nine Steps](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-thirty-nine-steps.md): 1935-era production is rough, mechanically speaking, but the core plot is fun and the climax is Peak Welles.
- [The Poem of the Cid](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-poem-of-the-cid.md): The actual plot seems much less, uh, engaging than the big Greek triumvirate, but I found myself enchanted by the Cid's epithets: "he who was born at the rig...
- [I Served the King of England](https://jmduke.com/posts/i-served-the-king-of-england.md): The narrator's earnestness was the most powerful bit of this. I get that it serves as a backdoor Czech history, but I found it more compelling as an evolutio...
- [Sister Outsider](https://jmduke.com/posts/sister-outsider.md): The Robin Eller narration was truly awful, but the book was as great as its legacy accords it. (Her poetry is even better, though.)
- [Charade](https://jmduke.com/posts/charade.md): Delightful! Felt like a spiritual predecessor to Knives Out. (The age difference between Grant and Hepburn did not age well.)
- [Winners Take All](https://jmduke.com/posts/winners-take-all.md): The book is not groundbreaking, and it owes a lot (in terms of "MarketWorld" and "protocols") to James Scott, but I liked it more than I thought it would. Th...
- [Ficciones](https://jmduke.com/posts/ficciones.md): Terrific stories that leave you wanting more (and now I understand where a lot of Calvino and Chiaing comes from.) Death And The Compass is the best short st...
- [My Neighbor Totoro](https://jmduke.com/posts/my-neighbor-totoro.md): A perfect movie about warmth and innocence and what it means to be childlike (and what it means to be adult).
- [Utopia of Rules](https://jmduke.com/posts/utopia-of-rules.md): Strictly less interesting and less persuasive than Debt or Bullshit Jobs, with an odd (and admittedly self-aware) discursiveness rather than an actual thesis.
- [Dune](https://jmduke.com/posts/dune.md): Amazing worldbuilding and terrible characterization, which... seems kind of par for the course considering it's place in the science fiction canon.
- [Thinking in Systems](https://jmduke.com/posts/thinking-in-systems.md): This was a pleasant, well-written book for which I (or anyone who has done any systems thinking reading before) is not the target audience.
- [Ara Fell](https://jmduke.com/posts/ara-fell.md): A pleasant, short JRPG throwback with some clever affordances (particularly around equipment progression) and a truly braindead plot. Nice as a palate cleanser!
- [Waiting for Guffman](https://jmduke.com/posts/waiting-for-guffman.md): Watched in honor of the late Fred Willard. Pleasant and funny but never quite as, uh, ROFL-tier as I hoped.
- [Diablo III](https://jmduke.com/posts/diablo-iii.md): A perfect brain-smoothing game. Hold down buttons and watch demons explode and numbers go up. A little short (a friend and I maxed out co-op in two weeks), b...
- [Final Fantasy VII Remake](https://jmduke.com/posts/final-fantasy-vii-remake.md): I didn't think you could remake a game with twenty years of nostalgia and weight behind it and have it be as good as this was.
- [Ethics in the Real World](https://jmduke.com/posts/ethics-in-the-real-world.md): Cursory essays, generally in a frustrating way but with some great gems.
- [Mary, Queen of Scots](https://jmduke.com/posts/mary-queen-of-scots.md): Great acting by Robbie and Ronan; inconsistent tonal bits and a lack of cinematic urgency; I can't hold it against the film, but boy does Queen Mary frustrat...
- [The Farmer's Hotel](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-farmer-s-hotel.md): My first piece of work by O'Hara, shockingly, and it was a cute little three act play filled with as much drinking and death as I'd been led to believe.
- [Hunt the Slipper\t](https://jmduke.com/posts/hunt-the-slipper.md): Delightful in its largesse, feeling lightweight and urbane — a better version of a Whit Stilman screenplay.
- [Against the Grain](https://jmduke.com/posts/against-the-grain.md): This was a lot of fun, and I think a better and more persuasive book (largely due to its focus) than Seeing Like A State. But Scott still needs a better editor.
- [Pokemon Shield](https://jmduke.com/posts/pokemon-shield.md): I found this game both objectively bad and unchallenging (discounting the metagame, which I don't dabble in) and also weirdly enchanting. The Wild Area is gr...
- [After The Thin Man](https://jmduke.com/posts/after-the-thin-man.md): Noticeably worse in every way than its predecessor save a delightful Jimmy Stewart against-type performance.
- [The Thin Man](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-thin-man.md): inspired by my recent acquisition of nick and nora glasses: this was just....delightful? a noir with the sensibility of a light-hearted soderbergh movie and...
- [Radical Markets](https://jmduke.com/posts/radical-markets.md): This book went from enchanting to cursory extremely quickly, but learning about self-assessed taxes and quadratic voting was worth the anodyne second half. (...
- [Emma](https://jmduke.com/posts/emma.md): this was so fun. i am reminded of walter scott's description of austen as a flemish painter: "[the] subjects are not often elegant and certainly never grand;...
- [Only Yesterday](https://jmduke.com/posts/only-yesterday.md): wonderful, wistful depiction of the conversations we have with our former selves (and beautifully animated.) unfortunately, though, ridley and patel are very...
- [The Third Man](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-third-man.md): Haunting Welles performance, incredible lighting & camerawork, and a perfect ending scene. I can't think of a single flaw.
- [Slouching Towards Bethlehem](https://jmduke.com/posts/slouching-towards-bethlehem.md): I think I am spoiled by late-period Didion, who has all of the precision and wit and remove of this book but can augment with it the wisdom and perspective t...
- [Topics of Conversation](https://jmduke.com/posts/topics-of-conversation.md): this is a version of rachel cusk that does a few things better (voice chief among them) and a number of things worse (triteness chief among them.) clever and...
- [Dear Friend, from My Life I Write To You In Your Life](https://jmduke.com/posts/dear-friend-from-my-life-i-write-to-you-in-your-life.md): interposed between an act of therapy and a syllabus on the people for whom we do & do not write. i think it was a not-so-great book from a great writer and a...
- [How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy](https://jmduke.com/posts/how-to-do-nothing-resisting-the-attention-economy.md): a bad book with a good thesis. the author warns you of its incoherence early on, which is a shame because there are very good pieces of logos amidst the circ...
- [Paddington 2](https://jmduke.com/posts/paddington-2.md): It is a very cute bear, Hugh Grant was terrific, and the scene of the cute bear showing his old bear aunt a pop-up version of London pulled me to tears.
- [The Next Loves](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-next-loves.md): this was something simultaneously special and inconsequential. love and angst mediated (but not devoured) by modernity: felt like reading someone's xanga (wh...
- [Getting Things Done](https://jmduke.com/posts/getting-things-done.md): GTD, the methodology: love it. GTD, the book: ehh...
- [Luigi's Mansion 3](https://jmduke.com/posts/luigi-s-mansion-3.md): A fun game that I loved playing with my partner — but fuck that sewer level.
- [Marriage Story](https://jmduke.com/posts/marriage-story.md): Great and honest performances that honor a great and honest script.
- [Parasite](https://jmduke.com/posts/parasite.md): Worth the hype.
- [The Farewell](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-farewell.md): Lead performance was bad; everything else (in particular the cinematography of a very different side of China) was great.
- [Caffeine](https://jmduke.com/posts/caffeine.md): This book was a fun listen but I don't think any of it stands up to serious thought or scrutiny
- [Sputnik Sweetheart](https://jmduke.com/posts/sputnik-sweetheart.md): Murakami feels more and more like an old friend with whom I feel comfortable: most of the conversations and stories are ones we've had before, but it is stil...
- [Agatha Christie’s Poirot](https://jmduke.com/posts/agatha-christie-s-poirot.md): Delightful. I’d recommend pacing out your consumption a bit more than we did — like the books themselves, and perhaps like the format writ large, the formula...
- [Game of Thrones](https://jmduke.com/posts/game-of-thrones.md): Okay, so, Game of Thrones. I don't think I have a lot of interesting material to cover here: no show before or since will ever be so completely trampled upon...
- [Sports Night](https://jmduke.com/posts/sports-night.md): Sports Night is, in the final calculus, a not very good show that is the obvious prequel to The West Wing (a show which itself is probably Not Very Good but...
- [Hamilton](https://jmduke.com/posts/hamilton.md): I was not a Hamilton hater exactly (I, like many other snoots, didn’t hate Hamilton so much as I hated the people who, for a brief but painful time, were rea...
- [Slay the Spire](https://jmduke.com/posts/slay-the-spire.md): In lieu of more to say, I think this is the most well-designed game I've ever played. The size of a given session is perfect for me (45-75 minutes); the diff...
- [The Boys in the Boat](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-boys-in-the-boat.md): 1. A friend of mine who's in finance told me that the book is a cult favorite in his office, as most of them did crew in college. 2. There's gotta be a word...
- [When Harry Met Sally](https://jmduke.com/posts/when-harry-met-sally.md): This, to me, is the ur-romcom — the gold standard against which all others are compared, and most are found wanting. The chemistry, the script, the everprese...
- [The Hunting Gun](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-hunting-gun.md): A slim, potent, and dense novella. The easy (lazy) comparison is to rashomon, and the way we see Misugi change from thin and narrow to nuanced and vital and...
- [Happy Endings](https://jmduke.com/posts/happy-endings.md): This, to me, is the perfect sit-com. It’s that simple: for two seasons (skip the first season; you don’t need it and the show tries to be too conventional) i...
- [Between the World and Me](https://jmduke.com/posts/between-the-world-and-me.md): It was hard to get through BtWaM, and not because of the dense, beautiful prose or the sprawling indictment of the American institution. The central thing Co...
- [Bluets](https://jmduke.com/posts/bluets.md): The most powerful fiction I read this year (and in a very long time), Bluets felt more like an extended lyric poem than an actual book. Nelson confesses, at...
- [Dept. of Speculation](https://jmduke.com/posts/dept-of-speculation.md): A book that at times filled the same holes in my head that Bluets did; a poetic and bittersweet narrative about connections that are made and then severed an...
- [Microserfs](https://jmduke.com/posts/microserfs.md): If DoET was a primer on how the way we use technology hasn’t really changed in the past couple decades, then Microserfs is a primer on how the way we create...
- [The Bell Jar](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-bell-jar.md): I read this, as I suspect many others did, on the insistence of Master of None. It was hard to separate the cut of the meat from the butcher, given Plath’s h...
- [The Clasp](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-clasp.md): This is the first book I’ve read in one day that wasn’t by J.K. Rowling. Even as I was reading it, I wasn’t entirely sure what was captivating me so strongly...
- [What We Talk About When We Talk About Love](https://jmduke.com/posts/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-love.md): I remember going through these stories in an udon place on 15th, with the first long September rain coming down outside. I didn’t really know what Carver was...
- [The Design of Everyday Things](https://jmduke.com/posts/the-design-of-everyday-things.md): My favorite book of the year. I’m not going to gush about it — enough others have in the decades of its existence — but know that it is that good and that ti...
- [Final Fantasy IX](https://jmduke.com/posts/final-fantasy-ix.md): I’ve noticed that if I want to give something a perfect score but know that it’s not a “perfect” thing, I always start off with “okay, so, it has flaws.” Fin...
- [Final Fantasy](https://jmduke.com/posts/final-fantasy.md): The game certainly shows its age, I can tell you that much. (I played Dawn of Souls, which was the slightly easier remake, and even then it was a bit of a sl...