I am of two minds when it comes to spoilers. As a reader, an audience member watching a film, or a middle-aged adult playing a video game—I’m not particularly bothered by spoilers. For me, a story is about the journey, not the destination. The notion of spoiler alerts seems to turn this around. Spoilers are…
Updates here have been too few and far between. I’ve recently completed the first phase of a major personal software development project (more details to come) and with that major effort behind me, I see the possibility of more frequent updates coming in 2025. In the meantime, I thank everyone who has stuck around despite…
I haven’t been active on social media much the last few years, but when I post here on the blog, the posts are automatically pushed to Twitter (X). I’m moving off X to Blue Sky and so future posts will be relayed there. For those interested, here is my Blue Sky profile: https://bsky.app/profile/jamietoddrubin.bsky.social. Also: I…
Lately, I have been working on a series of small archiving projects. I have been gathering 35 years of digital data, and organizing it locally, mostly in Obsidian. I’m working toward a single, text-based archive that can serve as the source of a personal LLM that will take over the role of traditional search. I…
We were in Europe recently for a few weeks, and spent a few days in the beautiful city of Budapest, Hungary, a city rich in history. Our hotel was directly across the river from the neo-Gothic Hungarian Parliament building, a building I could stare for hours, if I had the time1. There was much to…
Twice a day I take a two-and-a-half mile walk through the Bluemont Junction part of my town. I walk from our house down to the park and then follow the bike paths along what is known locally as the Bluemont Junction trail. Sometimes, I stop at a local 7-Eleven for a soft drink or a…
“Give me any random idea and I can write a story from it.” This is how I used to think of myself back when I first started to write with an eye toward selling stories. I was twenty years old, and up to that point, the ability to write, such as it was, was the…
When I first started keeping a diary, I did it mostly out of imitation. Isaac Asimov kept one, and I liked the idea. As he wrote, “I began with the intention of recording everything of significance each day. As time went on, however… my diary became a kind of compact literary and social record of…
i. A few days ago, I finished reading The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, the final entry in their 11-volume Story of Civilization series. It took me just shy of a quarter century to get through the books. Combined, they are the best history books I have ever read. It was…
2024 is turning out to be the Year of the Long Book, for me at least. I generally set myself a goal of 100 books a year, but that arbitrary. Some books are barely 100 pages, while others are over 1,000 pages. The goal of 100 books loomed large in my head for a time,…