PJH Studios

Category: Thoughts

My personal thoughts/opinions, or commentary.

  • 45×45, a game

    I don’t think this game has a name, but judging by its sparse, direct instructions to make 45 groups of 45 individual items, I’m going to call it 45×45. Part puzzle, trivia, logic, and clicking, you group individual items by a genre or topic. For example, you need to make a group for cheese, flowers, trees, and more. You’ll definitely need to play this on the desktop with a big screen to make your life a little bit easier.

    45x45 game screenshot

    It’s such a simple concept, but entirely immersive as you hunt for items to group together. A few improvements I would make would be to be able to move the little buttons around and also to color code them. So that once you find a certain category, you can go back and spot it easily.

  • My favorite media of 2025

    I watched, listened, and read quite a bit last year. Below are my favorites from each category. Italicized items are a thing that I really liked.

    Movies

    • Weapons
    • Sinners
    • Nouvelle Vague
    • Predator: Killer of Killers
    • Bugonia
    • One Battle After Another
    • Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music
    • Naked Gun
    • The Ballad of Wallis Island
    • Primitive War

    TV

    • The Pitt
    • Adolescence
    • Nobody Wants This
    • Task
    • Pluribus
    • Bon Appetit, Your Majesty
    • Slow Horses
    • Andor
    • Common Side Effects
    • Paradise

    Music

    • Geese – Getting Killed
    • Wednesday – Bleeds
    • Sleep Token – Even in Advance
    • Racing Mount Pleasant – s/t
    • Disiniblud – s/t
    • Turnstile – Never Enough
    • Human Pyramids – Thank You
    • Jeff Tweedy – Twilight Override
    • Not for Radio – Melt
    • Dijon – Baby

    Books

    • The Sacrificers vol 3 – Comic – 2025
    • Chris Whitaker – All the Colors of the Dark – Mystery – 2024
    • Dete Meserve – The Memory Collectors – Scifi – 2025
    • Chuck Tingle – Bury Your Gays – Horror – 2024
    • John Steinbeck – The Pearl – Historical Fiction – 1947
    • Alexander Boldizar – The Man Who Saw Seconds – Scifi – 2024
    • She Rides Shotgun – Crime – 2017
    • Kevin Hazzard – American Sirens – Nonfiction – 2022
    • Arthur C Clarke – Rendevous with Rama – Scifi – 1973
    • MJ Wassmer – Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend – Thriller – 2024
    • Gareth Brown – The Book of Doors – Fantasy – 2024
    • Richard Powers – Playground – Literary – 2024

  • Editorial Negligence

    In high school, a prerequisite for being on the newspaper staff was talking the journalism class. A lesson that stuck with me was the concept of editorial discretion–being able to judge something as (news) worthy and including it in your coverage. Editors hold tremendous sway, even in a dying industry, to determine what enters the public sphere.

    So the lack of traditional print media not covering the nationwide protest last weekend should go down as editorial negligence.

    The Dallas Morning News didn’t even know about the protests. Like, how?

  • Libertarians feed bears

    A New Hampshire town was taken over by bears because freedom means being able to feed bears so long as the bears aren’t “my problem.” It’s more complicated than that, because when you don’t believe government services have value, then problems that need government intervention don’t get addressed.

    What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

    More evidence that libertarianism is anarchy for rich people.

  • Rights vs Conditional Privileges

    From existennialmemes:

    https://www.tumblr.com/existennialmemes/774408099546185728/listen-if-a-bad-president-can-come-in-and-take

  • How Musk Took Over the Federal Government

    The New York Times goes in depth as to how Elon Musk took over the government.

    Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.

    Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?

    Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.

    And with a little education on a few bureaucratic agencies, that’s essentially what happened.

  • The Bull in the China Shop Doesn’t Care What it Breaks

    “Like a bull in a china shop.”

    We know the bull’s indiscriminately destructive, sometimes purposeful, but what’s often missing is that often the bull doesn’t care what it breaks. No matter how revered, inconsequential, reinforced with robust protections or an honor policy not to touch, it’s all the same to the bull. A thing.

    And when the minders of the shop allow the destruction to continue, while the customers watch in horror? They’re complicit in the shop’s destruction.

  • Destruction imminent

    Maria Kabas: The full force of this administration’s destruction is about to hit

    I recently told someone that being a journalist right now is like standing on the edge of a beach and watching a tsunami approaching. Other journalists, government workers and activists are on the shoreline with me, and we can all see it clear as day. And we agree we need to warn the others inland.

    So we start making calls and telling people this catastrophic wave is about to hit, but the people inland still can’t see it and don’t believe us. Everything looks fine where they are; it’s dry and comfortable. “Let us know when it gets closer,” they say. We try to communicate that every moment of preparation counts, but it’s no use. They’ll only believe it when it’s crashing on their heads.

    This week feels like the wave is about to crash.

    Social Security Administration is about to be gutted.

  • Beware of the SAVE Act

    The SAVE Act Would Disenfranchise Millions of Citizens

    The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. This legislation would require all Americans to prove their citizenship status by presenting documentation—in person—when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. Specifically, the legislation would require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship. While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.

  • Venn diagram of Trump authoritarian actions

    Venn diagram of Trump authoritarian actions, by Christina Pagel.

    Categories overlapped and mapped:

    • Undermining Democratic Institutions & Rule of Law; Dismantling federal government
    • Dismantling Social Protections & Rights; Enrichment & Corruption
    • Suppressing Dissent & Controlling Information
    • Attacking Science, Environment, Health, Arts & Education
    • Aggressive Foreign Policy & Global Destabilization