PicoBlog

When I sat down to watch the latest documentary about the BSA’s bankruptcy and sexual abuse crisis, I was not expecting to learn very much. I had already seen last year’s Hulu documentary on the topic, and had read every update as the BSA’s bankruptcy unfolded over the last couple of years. But I came away from “Scouts Honor,” the new Netflix documentary released earlier this month, absolutely stunned by what I saw.

Netflix's Tech Stack This post is based on research from many Netflix engineering blogs and open-source projects. If you come across any inaccuracies, please feel free to inform us. Mobile and web: Netflix has adopted Swift and Kotlin to build native mobile apps. For its web application, it uses React. Frontend/server communication: GraphQL. Backend services: Netflix relies on ZUUL, Eureka, the Spring Boot framework, and other technologies. Databases: Netflix utilizes EV cache, Cassandra, CockroachDB, and other databases.

Spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen the series yet, you may want to avoid reading this article. Readers of this Substack and the Facebook Samurai History and Culture Japan site often ask for my opinion on the series, and so with a few tweaks, this is a reprint of my initial reactions to having watched the series when it first came out in early 2021. I don’t want to go into too much detail or this will become a novel, but here goes;

Netflix’s new documentary Trainwreck: Woodstock 99 is bound to get people talking, but is it actually worth the watch? Trainwreck: Woodstock 99, as you’d expect, covers the story of one of the literally shittiest (we’ll get to that) festivals in history. From July 22 to July 25, 1999 about 200,000 people descended on an old air force base in New York to watch and listen to very bad music by the likes of Limp Bizkit, Creed, Insane Clown Posse and Kid Rock and some good music from like Rage Against The Machine and uhhh Willie Nelson.

This contains plot spoilers “The Talented Mr. Ripley” is one of my all-time favorite movies, so I welcomed the arrival of Netflix’s new eight-part series “Ripley”. Though “Ripley” mines the same material, I knew that in the hands of writer-director Steven Zaillian and actor Andrew Scott the result … ncG1vNJzZmign6WyorrDnqmsp55jwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89opZ6slqG2ub%2BMq6CppJWuerW0xGafop%2BYqLqqwMdmpaiulaE%3D

Last week, I woke up with a migraine, emailed my therapist to rearrange in urgent tones, ordered my partner to get a gel eye mask I had kept in the fridge, took painkillers, and then slept until 6pm. I don’t recall any of this, other than the brief feeling of cool gel on my eyelids as I fell back into unconsciousness. Waking up from a migraine like this, the intense pain at the front half of my head has usually dulled, as though it has gone to have its own nap somewhere in the back of my mind, where it lurks heavily for the few hours that are left of the day.

They say you should never go to bed angry with your spouse, which in theory is all well and good and something we tried hard to practice in our early marriage years, except I’m (occasionally) a passive-aggressive Enneagram 9 who waits too long to get in the first word, so that by the time I start telling Maile how angry I am about something, she’s asleep. Reality is often where good advice goes to die.

Of late, I’ve noticed that the algorithm gods have started feeding me a steady stream of nostalgia posts targeted directly to the fact that I grew up in the 1990s. Stuff like pictures of landline telephones with a question like: Do you remember using one of these? You’re this old if you do. I always ‘like’ these posts. It’s an easy trick to get a generation engaged – to hook them in with content that speaks to their youth and remind them of how much things have changed.

I dedicated my book, “To anyone who’s been pushed around by the American health care system.” That’s pretty much all of us. Working Americans and employers have been getting bullied for decades by medical billing fiascos, insurance runarounds, ridiculous prices and more. So the best part of publishing “Never Pay the First Bill: And Other Ways to Fight the Health Care System and Win” is hearing from people who have applied its tactics to save huge money on health care.