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Things I Like

Updated February 2023: I’m just going to cut this down to the ones I think are somewhat unusual. Nobody needs me to tell them about iTerm2 or GIMP or whatever.

Tech

• I use fish shell. The big thing about it is that it’s not POSIX-compliant. I think it’s worth it.
• I use Pandoc for plaintext markup. I even added Hugo support for it.
• I manually type all my transactions into GnuCash. Okay, I probably wouldn’t actually say I like GnuCash, but it works.
• I use The Old Reader for RSS feeds. I don’t actually use its social features meant to emulate Google Reader but I just like the vibe.
• I collect web analytics with GoatCounter.

Music

I want to pull out a bunch of obscure channels with great music and 10 subscribers, but unfortunately my music tastes are generally pretty mainstream and unadventurous. God I’m such a sheep. Anyway here are some neat musicians.

• The Musical Ghost
• TWRP
• Jonathan Coulton

While you’re here, listen to Sam Tsui’s #Selfie Piano Ballad.

Stories and Games

• Ra (Sam Hughes)
• basically the entire Ace Attorney series
• Undertale
• OneShot (I would predict liking Undertale to be greatly correlated with liking OneShot)
• Crypt of the NecroDancer
• Deadly Rooms of Death
• Angels with Scaly Wings

Food & Drink

• Sushi!
• Orange juice with maximum pulp
• Pearl milk tea — 30% sugar, less or no ice
• Most potatoes and potato derivatives
• Most things without cheese, really (and even pizza is usually fine)

Everything Else

• Emoji 🐉🔥
• Bo Burnham
• Party parrots
• The word “syzygy”
• Dark red, c. #cc0000
• Haskell’s list monad
• Haskell’s Ordering monoid
• Most Dangerous Writing App
• TVTropes (especially…)
• Setting em dashes open
• Grovyle (due to), Charizard (duh), Gligar, etc.
• “COTD: This place, for instance, is terribly disturbed (9)”
• Cayley’s formula (there are nⁿ⁻² labeled trees on n labeled vertices)
• Find the missing number: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ?, 1, 1, 1
• List songs, such as “The Elements”, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, and Pokéraps (including CollegeHumor’s, Neil Cicierega’s, and obviously, Brian David Gilbert’s)
• (via Martin Gardner) You are playing a game called Say Red. A normal deck of 52 cards is shuffled face down, then you flip over the cards one by one. At some point, before you flip over some card, you should say “Red!” and you win iff the next card to be flipped over is red (diamonds or hearts, but all that matters is that these cards make up 1/2 of all cards). If you don’t say “Red!” before the first 51 cards, you have to say it before the last card. What strategies are optimal, and what is your probability of winning under them?