After many, many years of failed attempts to read through The Wheel of Time series, I’ve finally done it. 14 books. 4.4 million words. 457 hours if one listened to the audiobooks.

『葬送のフリーレン』第2期ノンクレジットエンディング映像／EDテーマ：「The Story of Us」milet／フリーレンED YouTube video by TOHO animation チャンネル

An anime ending, animated by one person using colored pencils.

youtu.be/FY4Bx2qtkRM?...

Oh yeah, and this best-of-seven series went all the way to the final match.

The Sad Decline of the Hon'inbou Title What happened and what does it mean?

Then he had to face the current title holder, the strongest player in Japan, in a best-of-seven series that took place over three months. Each match takes two days to play, as the players have 16+ hours to play each match.

I’ve written about one of the other Go titles previously.

He first had to win a round-robin tournament in an S League, composed of the five other strongest contestants in Japan. He then had to win a matchup against the winner of a mini-tournament that comprised the runner-up of the S-League and the winners of the lower, A, B, and C Leagues.

Exciting day for supporters of Japanese professional Go player Shibano Toramaru: he won the Kisei title, potentially the most prestigious Go title in Japan, for the first time today, banking a quarter million dollars in prize money.

Just an absolute grueling feat for Shibano to accomplish.

But, I also worry how much a search engine can combat the vast amount of slop that plagues the internet. Honestly, contrary to my wish to use more ethical tech sources, I have been using AI frequently to get information I previously would have used a search engine for, at least on initial searches.

I’ve been trying to figure out a search solution. Duck Duck Go has long been a default on my phone, but I want to spend more time with Kagi. It’s useful to be able to pin domains like Wikipedia to the top, as half the time I search for something I just want to see the Wiki page for it.

I’ve been doing a lot of work lately to organize my tech usage and re-examine businesses I used to rely on. As part of that I’ve been transitioning off of GMail, switched full time to Linux, and switched back to exclusively using 1Password after having Apple default me to their native pass manager.

One thing that AI evangelists seem to assume, particularly legal AI evangelists assume, is that the thinking and analysis is quick, and the writing is just tedious busywork that slows us down.

But the writing IS the thinking and analysis. You work out the thinking and analysis by writing it down.

- Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience, William P. Alston
- Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law and Politics, Linda Radzik

Honorable Mention 3:
- The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced, Stephanie Dalley

- Economics and the Interpretation and Application of U.S. and E.U. Antitrust Law, Richard Markovits

Category 2:
- Sense and Sensibilia, J. L. Austin
- Being For: Evaluating the Semantic Program of Expressivism, Mark Schroeder
- On the Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis

- The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)

Honorable mentions.

Category 1:
- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
- Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, G. A. Cohen
- The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, G. E. M. de Ste. Croix

- The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Lord Dunsany (1924)
- As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner (1930(
- The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis (1953)
- The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault (1956)
- A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)
- Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)

My partner and I each came up with our top-15 book list. Here is mine:

- Iliad, Homer (~800 BCE)
- Heart Sutra, Unknown (~500)
- King Lear, William Shakespeare (1605)
- Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard (1843)
- Idylls of the King, Lord Tennyson (1859)

This is a great example of why I value transparency with computer designs. Hiding or obscuring information or control for the sake of “user friendliness” is anti-consumer in my book.

Some additional details here (leiterreports.com/2026/01/06/t...).

As a philosophy alum from A&M… this is pretty insane to see.

But there’s no basis for this. (1) Mamdani’s own book only claims that Amin worked as “kitchen help” for the British at age 11. (2) Amin’s military records only start at age 18. (3) One Ugandan source states Amin was brought for conscription at age 16, but was rejected for being underage.

Mamdani then says: “[Idi] Amin was trained as a mercenary, a child soldier, by the British... He was taught to be a ruthless, violent person. And he indeed was ruthless and violent.”

So, he ascribes Amin’s violence to having been trained as a child soldier-mercenary by the British.

I got tripped up somewhat early in this interview. Mamdani says: “I gained some appreciation of Idi Amin in the sense that I began to understand the context in which he was acting, his reasons.” Idi Amin has been called “the butcher of Uganda”, responsible for a half million deaths.

We’ve been getting lot of a visits from red-breasted nuthatches with temperatures starting to fall. I went out this morning to replenish the feeders when one landed just two feet away from me, and hung out for a bit. I wish I had had my phone to take a picture. They are very small and very cute.

Exclusive: A teen’s live-streamed suicide illustrates the challenges of investigating a new and growing form of online predation, especially when the suspected perpetrators are outside of the U.S. https://wapo.st/3IT6EaZ

The 1,000 year old Three Rivers Puzzle YouTube video by Telegraph Go

youtu.be/tYJTCinXlW4?...

A walkthrough of a beautiful and artistic, 1000 year old Go problem that revolves around three rivers flowing into one.

I’m just saying, I don’t want judges and clerks to read my briefs and think “wow he’s so smart, he did such a brilliant job of arguing that claim.” I want them to think, “how does that bozo luck into all these cases with slam-dunk claims?”

Had the pleasure to take some time off work and attend the 2025 U.S. Go Congress in Texas. I took part in the national tournament and went 4-2 in my games.

Wild how the Fed chair saying that *entire regions of the United States* won’t be able to get a mortgage in the next decade barely registered as a news event

“Instead of giving credit where it’s due for the most useful citation development in decades, we have invented a brand new phrase to communicate the same thing that is not as good and also is affirmatively misleading, given that the citation is not, in fact, modified.”

A thing media outlets could do to improve their credibility is to cease the practice by which the body of the article is attributed to a real person, but the headline, social media posts and push notifications linking to the article and placement of the article are all totally anonymously decided.

My rule of thumb is that if Thomas, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kagan are all on the same side, then I will agree with the opinion. This lineup may be an interesting point of discrimination.