One thing about the Pacific Northwest that brings me immense pleasure is its cuisine. It is a culinary tradition with a unique dedication to local ingredients and simple preparation. There is a heavy emphasis on seafood; salmon being the most obvious ingredient (smoked, seared, raw, you name it), but also other fish like halibut, sablefish, and tuna, shellfish of various kinds (scallops are my favorite), even seaweed. Things like seaweed and raw fish also point toward an Asian influence, particularly Japanese, that carries with it flavours such as miso, wasabi, and sake. The essence of the Pacific Northwest is most keenly felt at the coast, where its majestic forests meet the vastness of the mighty Pacific Ocean. From those forests, our local cuisine finds inspiration in a broad array of wild mushrooms, eclectic edible plants like nettle, huckleberry, and fiddlehead fern, tree essences including douglas fir and spruce, and game meats such as elk and grouse. Duck, a less common commercial poultry, also features to my great satisfaction. Due to the uncommon and seasonal character of many of the ingredients, restaurants that pull off this unique style of cooking are few and expensive, but well worth it. I consider myself priveleged to live in this time and place, and to make enough money, that I can indulge in such sublime tributes to this wild land that I call home.

My god, this world is beautiful. At least, that's easy to say on days like these, these precious few. 350 days a year, my life is concrete, and rebar, and traffic, and chores. But days like these remind me why I do it.

There are mountain people, and plains people, and city people, people of all sorts. My spirit draws life force from the sea. May I never find myself far from it.

Juat read this article for the sake of studying history in the making. Dude's talking about 256-bit entropy seeds being leaked across an airgap by "electromagnetic, acoustic, optical, thermal, and other covert channels." Bro, priorities. Thay said, not everything in this article is complete bullshit, and I believe in reading opposing takes from people I disagree with. Worth a read if you can tolerate hearing that fucking voice in your head. View article →

There are some who, after "upgrading," held onto Ledger devices as "expensive paperweights." Tucked away in boxes and junk drawers, unused, collecting dust, possibly for years. In the last 72 hours those broadly (and deservedly) panned devices were, for some people, unexpectedly critical lifelines that rescued life savings, retirements, inheritances. Let's be frank: Ledgers blow. The company sucks. But they saved more than a few asses when "good enough" was all that mattered. Most of you are done with Coldcard forever. It's hard to imagine why anyone would ever use one again. But before you go about burning, or shooting, or smashing yours with a hammer, consider just tucking it away in a box somewhere, if you can stand to still have the thing in your possession. It may feel like inviting your rapist into your house and giving them free room and board, but consider it nonetheless. Because you never know when, or how, something shitty and undeserving of trust might save your ass. Unknown unknowns.

The arrogance and dismissive contempt for others always irked me, but I set that aside in the spirit of "separating the art from the artist." In retrospect, someone who is that brashly confident in themself is perhaps less likely to take seriously the possibility of their own failure, to question their own assumptions, to seek to disprove their own results. We've seen it in science, now we see it in engineering. I am recalibrating how I assess people who build things. Humility doesn't merely make someone more pleasant to deal with, I now believe. Self-doubt, so long as it is not crippling, is a virtue of the utmost importance.

MK4's, MK5's, and Q's starting to get cracked. The attack continues...

Feels like we're about to slay another hero tonight. As is tradition.

TFW you have to wake up and take on the surveillance state, central banks, and the military-, technical-, and financial-industrial complexes, again. Send it.

You write well, and this helped me, a distant foreigner who sees only the filtered news, understand, even if only a little, the messy complexity of this war. Keep writing, even if few are reading it at this time. Someday the world may need your voice to understand what really happened during these grim years.