Ken's Blog

If the U.S. team had defeated Belgium in their 2026 World Cup match, it would have been a tainted victory. Through no fault of their own, they would have forever been saddled with the question of whether they had won only because the U.S. president had unfairly put his finger on the scales.

In the game itself, Belgium came on like gangbusters. They knew that they had been treated unfairly, and they were out for revenge.

Ironically, if the U.S. president had not unfairly intervened on behalf of the U.S. team, Belgium might have been less fired up, and so the U.S. might have won. We will never know.

It’s never a good idea to stir up righteous anger in your opponent. This U.S. president seems to consistently miss that point.

I probably spend about 90% of my time making my own software tools, and only about 10% of my time actually using those tools to create content. But I still find the process to be very efficient.

Using my own tools lets me create exactly the things that I want to create, without needing to struggle with somebody else’s idea of how I should be working. I know this approach would not appeal to everybody, but for me it works really well.

Besides, making my own software tools is really fun. 🙂

There is a lot of suffering in the world, and it can be overwhelming to think about. But some forms of injustice just seem so ridiculously petty and cruel that it’s hard to ignore them.

Yes, our idiot in chief decided to turn our nation’s beautiful reflecting pool into some sort of tasteless Long Island swimming pool. That’s not so surprising, given who he is.

And yes, he then had a big motorcade drive right over the empty pool bottom before the paint was even dry, an act that was guaranteed to cause damage. Not a very smart move.

But the part that really rankles is this nonsense of arresting six innocent people on the pretense that they had somehow caused that damage, just so he could save face.

I know that this does not equate to actual war crimes — like bombing a hundred and thirty little schoolgirls into oblivion. But the sheer stupidity of this particular petty tantrum makes it stand out, even by the crass standards of you-know-who.

Today I saw a theater production of Othello where they made the unusual decision to have Iago die in the end. It’s not the way the play was written, but the audience was clearly very happy about it.

Coincidentally, yesterday I rewatched the movie Ghost, which I had not seen since it first came out in 1990. Since I knew what was going to happen this time around, I found myself being extremely impressed with how the narrative and the character arcs were crafted. From just the perspective of story structure, Ghost is a much better film than most of what comes out of Hollywood.

But today, after watching Othello, I also realized that Ghost has many parallels with Othello. Particularly if Othello has Iago die in the end.

And I find myself wondering how many Hollywood movies borrow from Shakespeare. I’m not talking about the homages to Shakespeare, like West Side Story, or She’s the Man, or The Lion King, or 10 things I hate about you.

I mean the ones that are not explicitly doing a Shakespeare knockoff. Maybe there is a lot more Shakespeare in those movies than we think.

I celebrated July 4th by wearing my “Talarico 2028” shirt. I know it’s not much, but I am doing what I can to help promote an agenda of sanity and actual love of country.

As I walked down the street in Manhattan, people shouted out “Great shirt!”

I felt validated. 🙂

What do you do after the big push? You’ve made the deadline, debugged the code, finished the video, gotten the proposal out the door, closed the deal and — generally speaking — hit all of your target goals.

I don’t know about you, but I am going to take a nap.

When I teach computer graphics, I generally create on-line notes with embedded interactive diagrams. The idea is that if a student can interact with a diagram that illustrates the text and math, then they are more likely to absorb and remember the underlying concepts.

Recently I’ve been going back and rebuilding many of those diagrams — some that I first created many years back — to use a more modern version of my software library. And that has given me a unique opportunity to review my own work.

This process has made me come to realize that my creation of interactive diagrams isn’t so much about technology, or even about math. It’s really mostly about storytelling.

Whatever the topic, when you create an interactive diagram you are really asking your reader to partake in an unfolding narrative. By making the reader an active participant in that narrative, you are inviting them to be part of the story.

And that is really where the learning happens.

Well, we have finally arrived at the second half of 2026. The good news is that I now have an entire half a year to fix all the mistakes that I made in the previous half year.

And the bad news? I only have half a year to fix all the mistakes that I made in the previous half year.

Every day I look at the day’s Wikipedia entries. And I especially focus on what famous people had a birthday today.

For the longest time I really had no idea why I was doing this. Occasionally I would find out about some fascinating person I had not known about, but I knew that wasn’t really the reason.

Today I finally figured it out. When you go through the birthdays of famous people, you see a recurring pattern.

At first, they are all dead people. Then you get to a transition period where some of them are dead and others are still alive. At last you get to the recent birthdays, where pretty much everyone is still alive.

I think I’ve been looking for someone — anyone — who managed to escape. Has there been even one person who didn’t inevitably leave this earth after living here for some number of decades?

So far I haven’t found anyone. Alas, sooner or later they all end up dying.

But I’m not giving up hope yet. Tomorrow there will be a new Wikipedia entry, and a chance to find out that at least somebody is beating the odds.

I still continue to write all of my computer graphics programs line by line. No vibe coding, no asking an AI to “insert an implementation of this here”.

I do understand that this puts me out of step with the times. Maybe I am holding on to an ideal that will no longer be seen to have meaning.

But creating something on the computer from scratch, with my own manual labor, feels like a value in itself. I feel a bit like Ron Swanson crafting his own chair.

In the long run this may not be seen as practical by society at large. But to me it brings an intangible value that is priceless.