As an elder technologist, there’s the danger of sinking into old habits and never updating them. I didn’t see anything wrong with tmux, and there still really isn’t. But some (younger) colleagues told me about some of zellij’s features, and I adopted it. I saw ghostty and thought it was terminal emulation done right. And while the blood and tears I paid the git gods are the definition of sunk cost, Jujutsu (jj) has become my daily driver revision control solution.

And even some of the oldest and most venerable parts of my toolkit got a freshening. I have been using nvim happily after over two decades on vim. But something was troubling: I couldn’t get the color theme to be readily readable. Read on to find out how I got the color scheme in the featured image.

Recently, on his podcast “60 songs explain the 90s,” Rob Harvilla covered the Bush song “Glycerine.” Rob’s earnest and enthusiastic coverage and warm reflections about the music of our shared teen years gave me pause to think about this song, and I realized: it’s always there.

Imagine summer in the late ’90s: I’m laying in a pool on a floaty in the backyard of my childhood home and, from the wall-mounted intercom repeater, alternative radio station plays Bush’s “Glycerine.” In the home, upstairs, hours prior, I had seen the video play on MTV. In the home, hours later, I will see it again. And even later, after the sun goes down, when my friends and I are piled into a car and the radio plays “Glycerine,” we will not change the channel. We won’t hoot and turn it up, but it will be given its runtime.

Sometime in the aughts: I’m driving down the twisted backbone of Highway 101. It’s too late after a night of whatever in San Francisco. Alternative radio plays Bush’s “Glycerine.”

Sometime in the 2010s: the woman I will marry and I are driving through Austin. Maybe we’re tired of our iPods and we put on the local (101X!) radio station. “Glycerine.”

The test of time should always earn respect — even if it’s only grudging. I have to concede that I’ve been “look[ing] at this photograph” with Nickelback for a very long time; I’m not happy about it. It’s OK, I had to watch alternative dudes reckon with my fandom of Rush back in the day when I pointed out that “Tom Sawyer” was 16 years old.

“Glycerine” is double that.

It’s time to admit, then, that Bush have withstood the test of time. With nonsensical lyrics, phoneme gumbo elocution, and Gavin Rossdale’s himbo good looks, it would have been tempting to write Bush off. Many did. But you can’t square that circle against three decades of airplay. So I’m going to start from the other end of the argument: What’s great about this song and what has helped it exist in frequent-enough airplay through my entire adulthood?

In the years since I finished reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I’ve never stopped thinking about this world.

VanderMeer unites biophilic cosmic horror like HP Lovecraft; furnishes passionate descriptions of the majesty of nature like Jane Goodall or Sir Richard Attenborough; unmoors the reader with paranoia and conspiracy like Philip K. Dick; and stuns with affect-blunted narrators like Camus.

Fans had assumed that VanderMeer was done with the series after the third book in the trilogy. But I was surprised and intrigued that a fourth book was coming, some six years after the last volume appeared: Absolution.

Having listened to the audiobook narrated by Bronson Pinchot (yes, him!), I can say that Absolution was a worthy addition — perhaps the best in the series — to the Area X universe. The book works well in audio format and Pinchot in particular was an inspired choice.