From the Couch of Ben Johnson

Father, Principal Engineer at Prodigy Education, serial hyperbolist.

It named it: “The Calendar Crush Incident”.

Someone needs to sell placebo kids medicine.

There’s no way this can go wrong.

The 7-year-old apropos of nothing: “Who would win in a battle? Moses or Jesus?”

Let the Passover and Easter celebrations begin!

“Sorry kiddo, but over the summer I have to work.“

“That’s ok, we can go on vacation and you can go boop boop boop on your computer while we’re there.”

I wish Intuit would use some of that enormous lobbying budget to get a law in place where all the banks need to provide an API.

My 7-year-old just fired me from the building project I was working on in our shared Minecraft world. “I suggest you work… on other things. I’ll make it properly and we’ll find some other things for you to do.” #PerformanceReview

The only thing worse than being on hold for three hours is that two days later I still have the hold music stuck in my head. I’ve put myself on hold.

The kids will be… alright?

Book with the title “My butt is so silly”.

My kiddo is having some trouble learning how to read. The Meg and Greg books have helped enormously. They focus on phonics, not boring stories, and split reading. Highly recommend for kids 5-8.

People add “reddit” to their searches to get results without SEO spam. What’s amazing is this works because Reddit has human moderators. We’re still not at a place where automatic moderation can fully do the job. And, I bet generative AI makes the gap even wider.

I can’t say enough good things about the Double Fine Psychodyssey series. It’s an incredible look behind the scenes of the making of Psychonaughts 2 over 6 years. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll empathize with people trying to do their creative best.

I hope that the success of Cocaine Bear convinces Hollywood to fund the Snakes on a Plane sequel that we all deserve.

I wonder how different the world would be if XML had won.

Startup idea: Start a call from the app and it’ll stay on hold for you until someone real answers and presses a digit and then it’ll warn you.

I’m going to be fascinated to see how much AI changes interaction design. There’s an opportunity here to make interfaces that fit what humans need.

Friends don’t let friends use AWS Glacier.

A disaster movie where all at once, for some inexplicable reason (aliens?), CRON stops working, everywhere.

Startup idea: a phone number you can use as two-factor for banks that removes the whole “phone” part of the equation.

I believe there’s room in the world for a really good Star Trek video game… but it hasn’t happened yet.

“In early 2021, Yachty was reported to be producing and starring in a live-action movie based on the UNO card game, which is being developed by Mattel Films.”

And I thought Battleship was a challenge. UNO is hard mode. Good luck to the screenwriter.

I was getting a bunch of spam calls every day. It was very frustrating, so I signed up for RoboKiller. Now I’m so used to not getting interrupted, I can’t cancel. It’s like an ad blocker — I’m stuck with it.

Me: Ok, time to go to sleep. I have to be up early tomorrow.

My Brain: It says here that the CIA developed exploding seashells in an attempt to assassinate Castro. This seems very important.