A Little Mid-August Recap

Man, the last month has felt like a bit of a whirlwind and I’ve got a few things I want to post about so let’s jump right on in.

Last Monday Rachel and I were able to go on a date night which included hot pot and pinball machines. Rachel would like folks to know that she got the best score of the night. I’d like you to know the real winner was me, since it was the first time I got to play the Rush pinball machine at Peabody Heights Brewery.

On Wednesday I went down to Reston to meet the folks based there on my new team and to also see some old friends. I skipped the evening traffic by getting Ethiopian with Clay Sharon and Poppy which was a total treat.

After getting home from Reston, I took a little nap before working a long call with colleagues from India from 1:30am-7:30am. This knocked me out, I even caught a nasty 24 hour bug that wiped out Friday. I did some podcast listening that day and one thing Ben Thompson said that stuck with me is “Facebook is Dead; Long Live Meta.” The Blue app and Instagram are shells of their old selves, just like Twitter. Constantly serving random reels and posts with phantom notifications about stuff you could care less about (Facebook is particularly bad about this). Meta is now an entertainment company trying to capture our time and attention and really I don’t want to give them any of it. I just wanna catch up with my friends. Start a blog man, I’ll sub to your RSS feed lol.

Luckily I felt much better Friday evening and Saturday wasn’t totally foiled. Because Rush > Cooper Rush, I watched 0% of the Ravens preseason matchup to see AF2K with Alice and Peter. What a delight. The drummer was an absolute animal and it reminded me just how good those darn Canadians were. I’ve been listening to Rush in the car ever since. Katherine seems to like Power Windows as much as her dad, which surprises absolutely no one.

Today Rachel’s extended family had a potluck so I smoked some chicken thighs following this recipe. I think it was fine but if I were to do it again, and I probably will, I’d sub this glaze with a gochujang based one. Or honestly skip smoking entirely as it doesn’t get too much smoke flavor in the time it takes to cook them.

Anyways, thats a bit of my last week. Welcome to The Show Dylan Beavers and Samuel Basallo! Keen to see what you and the rest of the young core can do with these last 40 or so games. Maybe I’ll even be able to see you both at your first game at OPACY.

Absolutely incredible that in the year 2025, the best way to click a link someone shares on Instagram is to take a screenshot and use Visual Intelligence to navigate to it. User hostile antipatterns all in the name of engagement.

Speaking of 1 Winning Pod, Peter was on Derek’s new podcast and I enjoyed the episode thoroughly. If you liked our jersey takes, definitely watch this episode and Peter’s blind ranking.

I genuinely can’t believe there is a home Ravens football game this evening. Now that 1 Winning Pod is retired, it really snuck up on me. Last night Jason asked me to join him for his Wednesday live stream to discuss the game. Check it out!

A very depressing day for birdland. Trying to remind myself that we should have the opportunity to resign Ceddy and O’Hearn but it’s not helping. Hopefully the excitement of watching some youngsters get their first big league experience will help in the coming days.

Finished my #SFB15 draft today and am looking forward to seeing how this team fares. The back half of the draft is a “self parody” per my friend Derek and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Had to cleanse my palate after some of those early picks that made me sick.

Had a great time drafting at #SFB15 in Baltimore. Thanks M8 for hosting! Drafted a lot of players I don’t like… but THYWSFB

iOS 26 Beta 3 Liquid Glass Regression

I anticipated Monday’s beta release as I assumed beta 3 would likely be the first to have a chance to update the Liquid Glass material after the initial feedback from developers. Disappointment would be an understatement – the light mode glass material is so incredibly frosted in some places it looks more like older materials than Liquid Glass. I run my phone in dark mode all the time, and luckily the glass updates there are a far better compromise. It almost feels like a bug how much they pulled back on the light glass material. Keen to see how the redesign settles down by the public release and over the coming years.