2026-01-18

Matcha at home.

Microwaved water, superheated.
The powder hits.
Cup boils on contact.
I stir.
Milk from the fridge, quick.
I drink it hot.

Another way:
Spindle whisking.
Metal whisk.
Turbulence.
Foam.
Still hot.

I’ve watched it done properly.
Quiet room.
Tools laid out.
Powder weighed.
Sieved.
Water cooled.
73℃.
Fifteen minutes later,
the cup is warm at best.

Something gets lost when mastery becomes aspirational.
The ritual survives.
The heat doesn’t.

At what point does optimization expose theater?

I have observations on ginger beer too.

I installed NixOS on 3 computers for the accounting team thinking it would be easy to replicate and scale.

I’ve had no need to scale. Every change needs to be written in a config file and every time I have to relearn and fiddle with it.

I’ve had enough. Migrating the first one to Debian today.

The first computer programs I ever used were Hunt the Wumpus and Artillery, sometime in the mid-1980s. Hunt the Wumpus would confuse me, and I don’t think I won often. Artillery was more predictable but felt less magical.

My dad had a computer room at the office with a few monitors, some giant floppy drives, and a dot matrix printer. There was a Snoopy calendar program, and I used to love getting one of those as a long string of attached paper.

I thought he’d made the programs himself. That’s what I understood. I guess he copied the code from magazines.

He also taught me to write a program that printed my name over and over on the screen in BASIC. It was hypnotic and felt like magic. I remember asking him more than once how to make it stop. I still remember the combination and the ^C interrupting the dance on the screen.

I can still smell and hear that cold, air-conditioned room and see the green letters glowing on the screen, with the curved beige housing.

Years later that same room was full of PCs, and there was a computer guy who played Dungeons & Dragons in his free time and brought many games for me to play: Decathlon, Destroyer, Tapper, Digger, Alley Cat, Carmen Sandiego.

YOU ARE IN ROOM 8.
YOU FEEL A DRAFT
THE WUMPUS IS NEARBY