Greetings from dry-ass Tijuana, Mexico. About 1 million people are without running water across over 600 neighborhoods this week due to a burst water main. Guess who’s smack dab in the middle of the affected area? Yep. 3 clean pairs of undies and a dream over here. We’ll be alright.
Took a little trip to LEGOLAND yesterday with Natalia. I didn’t grow up in the tax bracket that allowed for travel or theme parks as a kid, so I try to take advantage of these opportunities as much as I can as an adult, because… why the hell not. Legoland is very much geared toward preteens, but the tickets were freebies from N’s dad, and due to an issue with the parking system we ended up not having to pay the $36 parking fee either, so the price was right.
Instead we dropped that $36 on milkshakes and breakfast food at Ruby’s in Carlsbad after a few hours wandering a pretty empty, very dry, partially under construction, Legoland park. It’s the off-season, the brutal period between Summer Vacation and Halloween. If you have young kids I could imagine it being a whole lot of fun for not a whole lot of money. Ruby’s remains a pretty great diner chain, fwiw. The biscuits and gravy, and milkshakes, are quite legit, and this is the true measure. The preceding is not an endorsement or paid promo of anything, just some stuff that happened. Overall a pretty nice way to spend a Tuesday.
I lived in Carlsbad for awhile pre-crisis, and it was funny to be back there after being away for the last many years. All the annoying road construction was finally done, and the whole place had a very “managed community” vibe in that Stepford Wives way that Southern California beach towns tend to acquire unless they go the other way, which is “lawless hellscape of military brats and junkies.” Oceanside, I’m looking at you.
LEGOLAND always makes me think of the show Arrested Development, which if you weren’t around in the early 2000s, was something of a cultural touchstone for the “has watched far too much television than is healthy” crowd. The TVTropes-ers loved it. I loved it. At least the first couple seasons, anyway. I wonder if it holds up at all, or if it’s one of those shows that was so well situated in its time and place that to remove it from that location loses something essential to the thing. I fear it is the latter.
It was a heady time, The US of A was just getting used to never feeling good about itself again after that thing in New York and it colored absolutely everything in brown and olive drab, a stain we carry to this very day over 20 years later. I recall it feeling a lot like… well, a lot like 2025 feel right now in a lot of really awful ways. I am in no way enthusiastic to revisit 2003, but like the great Herman Cappuccino, we suffer for our art. S01E01 here we go. Maybe I’ll tell you about it next time.
Today’s Date Stamp
Every day I wake up and choose violence stamp the date on a sheet of paper and post it to YouTube and TikTok. It is my latest long-running doomed art project. If you like it, you can tip me.
This Week on OpenCV Live
On this week’s episode (#184!) of OpenCV Live we welcome community member Ali Pahlevani, who will take us a walk through the current state of Simultaneous Location and Mapping technology for robotics and other computer vision applications. It should be a great entry point for new people and a nice refresher for hobbyists and pros, so tune in if that’s you.
The Good Links
Let them shine upon your dull existence.
- All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity, the final boss: Real Soccer 2009.
- The Satchel Paige Project, an attempt at cataloging every game the great Satchel Paige pitched. So far 1,900 games are accounted for including one in my hometown of Niles, MI.
- KUZ Folding Meshtastic Case, a very nice folding communicator case for the Meshtastic off-the-grid comms devices which I’m getting interested in lately.
- CL-32, a rad pocket terminal with an epaper display and full mini keyboard.
- The AI Darwin Awards, as it says on the tin, an AI offshoot of the classic Darwin Awards.
- How Trump’s Tariffs Have Ruined Hobbies, this is the least of our worries, but it is worth pointing out.
Parting Shot
I’m linkblogging like it’s 1999 for the rest of the month. Check out the Links category on extrafuture.com for a couple of links every day, with light commentary, off-the-cuff, like we used to do. Nobody’s stopping me. Jump on it.
See you down the road,
Phil Nelson
2025.09.10 +8UTC
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