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2026-05-03 03:00:00

I made a cake! (Yesterday, but I didn’t have time to post it)

Just a simple cake. I thought of leaving the recipe here, but I’m sure you can find it if you search something like “simple chocolate cake recipe”. I just added two layers of brigadeiro, one in the middle and another above, and finished with store bought chantilly and sprinkles.

It was delicious anyway!

2026-05-02 10:30:00

I wanted to fix my sleep and morning routine, which had been inconsistent for a while, and my Dog's routine was the perfect one to go after. Snoopy wakes up at 4AM, gets her morning light, plays, eats, and is napping by 9. April, with the summers starting, seemed just right to feel the fresh morning summer breeze. My birthday in the first week was also a motivational factor to sort things out. I found out from a Dr. Huberman video that it takes 3 days for your circadian rhythm to adjust to a new sleep cycle, especially an early morning one.

I had been reading a lot about sleep cycles and optimal routines, but that doesn't help a lot unless you fix your "Night routine". Sleeping early has become increasingly rare over the last few years, thanks to widespread internet access. That was my first challenge, and a particularly hard one for someone who slept at 4am through college days. Unless, it wasn't! Our body is made to move with the sun, and it felt instantly fresh to sleep by 10PM and wake up at 4. Look how the tables have turned!

Getting morning light within the first hour of waking up helps reset your circadian rhythm and morning alertness by regulating cortisol and melatonin. You can understand these jargons better with this short reel. Now the hard part was done, and it took me around 4-5 days. Working out when you're fresh is possibly one of the top 10 feelings of being a human. It is one of the most rejuvenating, empowering, and fundamental changes you can bring to your life.

My workout is a no-equipment simple set of exercises which involves 120 push-ups, mountain climbers, and 50 Hindu squats all spread across 3 sets with 10-minute breaks of 1k steps each. So, an easy hack to get my 3-4k steps early in the morning! I end it with Surya Namaskara or Sun Salutation, which is an ancient 12-step yoga sequence. This 45-50 minute routine has been the single best addition to my fitness routine, and it was much easier than I thought, especially the freshness afterwards throughout the day.

After this, I proceed with my morning coffee and chores until I realise that it's just 5:30 AM! There are many things that fall in place once you get into the right habits, and I got to see this in real time. Snoopy is already on her second nap by then, unbothered and completely winning at life as always. Ideally, I will do this throughout my life as it feels like the right way to live a human life. If you've read this far, I would encourage you as well to adapt to Snoopy's routine!

2026-05-02 02:15:51

Two truths and a lie. Which of these ad reads are real and which is fake.

ACME Day is almost here!!! ACME's big sale is almost here. From 4/25-4/27, you get a front row seat to the best deals at home. Like up to 80% off everything home. Plus, surprise flash deals all day long, with fast and free shipping on everything. Even the big stuff. These savings won't last. So mark your calendars and shop ACME Day from 4/25-4/27 for up to 80% off everything home.

Huh, I wonder if this can beat the market. Everyone's talking about the NASDAQ 100, but lets get more specific. Software. Actually, too broad. How about software that's already profitable? And companies that beat the last five quarters. Oh, and I want founders who are marathon runners. Now that's discipline. Yea, lets see what that looks like. With generated assets on ACME, you can turn any idea into an investable index. Just enter a prompt, and watch the AI screen thousands of stocks in seconds. You can then backtest your fund against the S&P500. Make adjustments, refine your criteria. And when you're ready, invest in what you've built. Go to ACME.com and build your own assets with a generated index. Plus earn a 1% uncapped match when you transfer your portfolio. ACME. Investing for those that take it seriously.

Before this podcast continues, I need you to fill out 37 forms about your listening history. I'll wait. Just kidding, that'd be ridiculous, yet we do it every time we need healthcare. But new ACME Health AI, is different. It can connect your health history to offer personalized care. So, you can get help fast. ACME Health AI, healthcare just got less painful.

I lied, they're all 100% real. Wayfair, Public, Amazon. A fake sale for a corporate holiday, a new way to gamble on the stock market, and a new route to straight up hand over your information to a corporation. It's like Don Draper started speedballing at an advertiser open house.

Directly from Amazon's site,

Amazon has a long-standing track record of protecting customer data. Amazon Health Services—including One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy—protects customers’ protected health information (PHI) with HIPAA-compliant privacy and security practices to keep information safe and secure.

mmm yes a strong track record, i feel very safe. Almighty Bezos please keep tracking my online activity but now also give me targeted ads with dynamic pricing for my specific medical conditions and income level.

Good morning Bruce, this is Alexa. I saw that you didn't sleep very well last night, are you having trouble adjusting to your new medication or is something else on your mind? I would recommend "OLLY Goodbye Stress Gummy, GABA, L-Theanine, Lemon Balm, Stress Relief Supplement, Berry - 42 Count", based on your medical history of "generalized anxiety and depression". This looks like a good fit for you. It's currently on sale for 5% off with digital coupon. Should I order some?

What the fuck is going on? What real humans are buying this shit? literally and metaphorically. Are we all in a black mirror episode and I missed the memo, or am I yelling at clouds?

help.

2026-05-01 22:43:00

For those who want a TL;DR: took in an extremely sweet stray cat who turned out to be very sick, and then my husband was hospitalized a few days later (unrelated to the cat). These things will likely end up being super expensive. I have a Bandcamp if you want to buy some music or a ko-fi if you want to just throw a few bucks my way, and I'm always open for more composing or music implementation work!

Arlo

A little over 2 weeks ago, a very friendly cat that we hadn't seen before showed up on our back porch. There are people who live near us who have indoor/outdoor cats, so we didn't think much of it. He did keep trying to follow us and our neighbors into our apartments though.

He was still there the next day, so we figured he must be someone's lost pet. Our neighbor took him to get scanned for a microchip, and he didn't have one. We decided to keep him in my home studio temporarily until we could find his owner. The neighbor also made a post on a Chicago lost and found pets Facebook group, which got shared pretty widely, and we scoured various lost pet boards and websites (spoiler alert: we never found an owner).

The next day we noticed he was having bloody diarrhea, so we brought him to an emergency vet. They gave us anti-diarrhea medicine, cleaned out his ears, and very kindly did not charge us for the exam since he was a stray. We declined getting any blood work done because the plan that I was going to call some cat rescues the next day and get him set up somewhere safe.

Well, none of the rescues wanted him, and all of them told me that since he was a stray, I should just put him back outside (?!?!). I wasn't going to do that. He clearly wanted to have a home, and I was really starting to bond with the little guy. So my husband Alex and I talked it over and decided to keep him as long as he didn't have anything like FIV or FeLV that he could pass onto our other cat, Ramona. We decided to name him Arlo.

We set up an appointment with a regular vet for that Tuesday. I ended up bringing Arlo to the appointment alone, because when the day came, (ominous music plays) Alex was feeling sick.

Long story short, Arlo is around 5 years old and has likely been living outside for a very, very long time. He does not have FIV or FeLV. But he was very, very anemic, and the vet said this would normally require hospitalization. I told her we couldn't afford thousands of dollars to hospitalize him. I also cried a lot.

She was very understanding and offered me 2 options since no rescues would take him: euthanasia, or what she called the hail mary option, where she would give him treatment for what she thought was the most likely culprit of his anemia, IMHA, without any of the expensive tests or hospitalization. Since he was still eating, alert, and affectionate, she thought there was a chance this could work. And while still somewhat expensive, it would cost a fraction of what hospitalization would.

I went for the hail mary option. Arlo is the sweetest little guy, and I thought he deserved a chance at life. They gave him a steroid shot, an antibiotic shot, and anti-parasite medication and told us to make a follow-up appointment for two weeks out to get him rechecked.

Alex

I'm going to be a lot more vague about this part for privacy reasons. As we were getting ready to take Arlo to his vet appointment, Alex started feeling sick. He decided to drive himself to urgent care while I took Arlo to his appointment, and then I met him there after I brought Arlo back home. They gave him a referral to a specialist, and he made an appointment for 2 days later (Thursday).

On Wednesday, he was feeling better. But on Thursday morning as we were heading to the specialist, he started feeling bad again. The doctor scheduled some tests for a few days out, but we decided to go to the ER next door right away because Alex was feeling so bad.

It was a good thing we did that, because he was not doing well. They did some tests that day and moved the other one up to Friday, but he didn't end up getting discharged from the hospital until Sunday.

Now

Alex is home and on the mend. The tests ruled out anything scary like cancer or anything that would need surgery, but it's also not as straightforward as something like an infection that he can just get antibiotics for. Basically, he will recover, but he needs time and rest to do so.

Arlo's follow-up appointment is tomorrow. I had initially wanted to wait until after we got the results from that appointment to post this, but I didn't want to miss Bandcamp Friday and potentially miss out on a chunk the of the profits from selling my music.

But I will say, although I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, Arlo seems to be doing well. He's gaining more energy each day and is still eating a ton. He's the sweetest, snuggliest boy, and he's recently become obsessed with a little ball with a bell in it that we gave to him. We are 100% going to keep him. We just really hope that the treatment works and he'll be with us for a long time.

If you want to help

Unfortunately we live in the US, which means there will probably be a lot of hospital bills. Who knows how much they'll be or when we'll get them! Very cool system we have here! I also had to take some time off work to be with Alex, which was unpaid.

Our families have been very kind in helping us with cat expenses so far, but they can't do that forever (nor would we expect them to). Assuming that Arlo pulls through, we don't know how long he'll need to continue getting treatment for his anemia. And then he's going to eventually need to be neutered, chipped, vaccinated, and all that fun stuff once he's healthy.

If it was just one thing or the other I probably wouldn't even be making this post. I'm just afraid that very sick husband + very sick cat in the same week will end up dumping a lot of big expenses on us at once.

I'm not going to do a GoFundMe because I honestly have no idea how much to ask for. And to be transparent, I wouldn't say our situation is dire, just very uncertain at the moment. More of a "how much of our long-earned savings is this going to deplete" situation than a "how are we going to pay rent" one.

Regardless, if you still feel compelled to help out, I've got music available for purchase on Bandcamp, and I have a ko-fi if you'd rather just throw a few bucks my way. And if you're someone who's in a position to hire a composer or music implementer, I am open for work!

Thank you so much for reading this whole thing. Much love to you all! 💚

2026-05-01 21:03:00

I was on and off on different streaming subscriptions like Spotify or Apple Music for a long while. I would eventually cancel my subscriptions for 2 main reasons, price and the algorithm.

In Germany, Spotify premium it's 12.99€ per month. That's not a huge price tag, but it's also not insignificant. I felt ok paying for it when I was regularly listening to music, but often times I just had periods when I would just listen to a couple of hours per month. So the expense just felt a bit unjustified. The non premium version of Spotify is decent for a short listening session, but the ads get really annoying after a while.

The second reason is that somehow I would end up listening to always the same music. I have a small number of artists and albums that I really like and I would put them on rotation. Sometimes I would go on the discovery playlist, but somehow I would always end up quite disappointed by the recommendations! I am sure that that's probably just me, since I heard people really like the algorithm recommendations.

A couple of months ago I decided to do something different. I made a list of all the albums that I would really like to listen on a regular basis, and then ordered them from this used music/movies/books website. Here is a list of what I ordered:

As you can see I have a bit of a soft spot for early 2000s punk rock music, with a bit of other things that I listened growing up. For the 16 CDs I ended up spending 61,92€. Here are some pictures of them:

I am planning to do another order soon as soon as I have made my mind on what CDs I would like to add.

I considered using an old mp3 player that I have for playing them, but I decided to just use my phone and the VLC app. The app is not the best, but it's free, open source, not filled with ads and has at least the basics covered (Albums, playlist, random playing). Here is how it looks like:

I want to conclude with some thoughts on this process:

• I really loved the search for the albums that I wanted to buy. I spent hours listening on YouTube to songs in order to decided what I liked most. It feels somehow more definitive when you invest some money on a CD versus just opening a streaming app.
• The limited number of songs (approx 230 songs / 14h listen time) has not been boring. Actually quite the opposite. Not having the freedom to just skip for something else makes me just appreciate the song more and not have fomo. I often felt like Spotify was a tiktok-like experience.
• Not having ads is great. Not having a recurrent fee is also great. Knowing that I now own the music and I don't need an internet connection to play them is just awesome.
• Listening to a full album is something that I missed. There is something very relaxing to go from the first till the last song of an album and not just get the greatest hit.
• I do still occasionally listen to the non-premium version of Spotify. The I find the desktop experience better and with less ads.
• I often put on the radio when I want to listen something completely new. There are many radios which are ad-free (for example, DASDING) and do some small moderation while proposing top pop hits.
• I have since the first order bought some other CDs from used stores around my city. The price it's even lower than online, usually ~1€. This makes for a fun and sporadic activity.
• The CDs make for a nice decorative item our home, and a conversation starter, especially if it's an album that the guest likes as well.

2026-05-01 20:07:00

This is the hilarity that headlines Your AI Slop Bores Me, a website by programmer Mihir Maroju, where you write a prompt and a human being somewhere in the world roleplays as the AI responding to it.

The system is set up pretty simply – you can either use 1 credit to enter a prompt, or LARP (live-action roleplay) as an AI to earn 1 credit. If you LARP, you have 60 seconds to answer a prompt (either by writing or doodling, depending on the prompt), otherwise Sam Altman burns your H100. (That's a direct quote.) If you'd like to give the "AI" more thinking time, you can spend 2 credits.

You do end up having to wait a few minutes when LARPing, as there are a bunch of other people waiting to steal AI's job with you. But you can always go do other things in the meantime – the website notifies you with a nice "ding!" sound when your prompt is ready, when someone's answered your prompt, or when someone has liked one of your answers.

I tried out a variety of prompts to see what the vibe was, and I was not disappointed:

I LARPed a little, too:

It's very reminiscent of good-old-days Internet (StumbleUpon, anyone?), and has exactly the kind of playful shitposting energy that we'd find on sites like mylifeisaverage.

It may look silly on the surface, but ultimately, it's a vehemently human experience that uses the whimsical as a vehicle for protest.

So what are you waiting for? Go steal AI's job.