A wonderful excercise in positive thinking by David Smith:
Optimism isn’t enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a feeling, optimism is a choice. […] Something I’ve learned as I’ve aged is that pessimism feels better in the moment, but then slowly rots you over time. Whereas optimism feels foolish in the moment, but sustains you over time.
«Love Hotel!» is a collection of photographs of the facades of Japanese Love Hotels, taken in 2023 during a road trip between Tokyo and Shikoku Island. Photographer François Prost paints a vernacular portrait of Japan, made by ordinary roadsides, faded signs and colorful facades, far from the usual clichés.
Alicia Stella has been covering the construction of Universal's new park Epic Universe for a long time now. It has been a while since I've seen a full update video, and I'm amazed by the progress. This park looks absolutely spectacular!
A lovely new puzzle game by Klemens Strasser — an Apple Design Award finalist of Letter Rooms fame. It is a pretty straightforward puzzle game where you have to piece together illustrations of various wildlife. Simple, but the beautiful illustrations, thoughtful design and luscious sound design make it a very relaxing experience.
Also, 20% of the proceeds are donated to nature conservation organisations.
I work as a mobile app developer for Efteling, the largest theme park in the Netherlands. Our app is built (partially) in React Native, so I'm up to speed with the community.
In 2020, Shopify made waves when they announced that they would move their mobile efforts to React Native. Since then, Shopify has grown to be a prolific contributor to the React Native community with projects like React Native Skia and Flashlist.
Mustafa Ali reflects five years after their last introduction:
"We’re happy to share that our transition has been quite successful [...] Engineers are able to work across web and mobile, allowing teams to do more with the same number of people and unlocking new growth opportunities."
I also strongly agree with their stance on using native code in combination with React Native:
"100% React Native should be an anti-goal. It is great for building features just once, but is not the right technology for everything. [...] Instead of thinking native or React Native, think native and React Native."
This has been our mentality at Efteling as well — React Native allows us to build features fast, but sometimes you just need the performance. Our map, for example, is just plain-old UIKit on iOS.
One thing I also noticed in this video from the BBC is the amount of people horse riding in Hyde park — something you can do even today apparently. Just not something I would think possible in a large public park in a city like London.
Bryce Bostwick takes us on a journey into the binary of TopWidget⁺ — an iOS app that blocks debuggers from attaching, exits early when code is injected, and even has the audacity to crash your entire phone just for fun. Why the app goes to such extremes will be explained in an upcoming video. If you'd rather not watch a video, Bryce has also written an article on the topic.
Bryce's channel is a goldmine of in-depth iOS content. My favorite video of his — and the reason I started following his channel — is when he unsolicitedly fixed a bug in the Disneyland app. If you're interested in iOS development, definitely check out both his blog and YouTube channel!
The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.
I recently returned from a three-day trip to Disneyland Paris. Since meeting my girlfriend (now fiancée) in 2017, I’ve visited the park three times. The last time I went was in September 2021, so I was greeted by a lot of new experiences. This time, we went with two good friends of mine who were visiting for the first time, which added a whole new layer to our experience.
Trip Details:
Duration: Three days, two nights
Travel: By car. (We were able to borrow my father-in-law’s car because my own car broke down at a concert two days prior 🙃)
Weather: The first day was sunny and beautiful. The other two days were foggy but still manageable. All days were freezing 🥶
How did we book? We booked our stay with Oad.
Hotel: Newport Bay Club
The entrance of Hotel Newport Bay Club
We stayed at the Newport Bay Club Hotel — one of three hotels on Lake Disney. This hotel is huge (the largest in France) but still has a nice, welcoming feel. The theme is fun without being too "in-your-face" Disney. We stayed in a Superior Room. The beds were very comfortable, and having a bath was a major win (my fiancée will go out of her way to find a room with a bath on holiday).
We had drinks at the Captain’s Quarters on the second day but decided not to eat at the hotel’s restaurants, opting instead for the Hunter’s Grill at Sequoia Lodge — the group I was with wasn’t big on seafood.
We also made use of the swimming pool and spa facilities. There’s a large pool, a small kids' pool, and a whirlpool. The water was pretty chilly in all of them, but the pool stayed open until 10:00 PM, making it a nice way to relax after a long day at the parks.
Overall, I really enjoyed my stay at Newport Bay. The common areas and services are all very nice, but the rooms do show their age. The hotel was renovated in 2016, but I wouldn’t have blinked if you’d said it hadn’t changed since 1992. From what I’ve heard, the renovations have benefitted the other hotels more (my partner stayed at Hotel New York: The Art of Marvel a few years ago).
Tales of Magic
On January 10th, Disneyland Park premiered Disney Tales of Magic, a new nighttime show in front of the castle. We saw it twice — once on our first day, standing on the plaza in front of the castle, and again on our last day, from the back of Main Street.
I really liked this show! The effects and music are beautiful, and the story is emotional. This was the first time I saw the drones in action, and WOW, what a cool effect! The drones are especially impressive when used for big gestures, like when they form a huge Emperor Zurg during the Buzz Lightyear section or the crazed eyes of Bruno in the Encantomedley. They also add nice touches in smaller moments, like the sparkles that pop out from the castle. For me, it makes up for the reduced fireworks.
I also believe this show — unlike earlier shows in the French parks — was created largely by European Imagineers. The songs and properties chosen really seem to resonate with a European audience.
Avengers Campus
This was my first time visiting Avengers Campus, one of the only major attractions at the Studios park! During our visit, all the shows except Pixar: Together were unavailable, and with the fencing around Studio 1, the park felt a bit crowded.
That said, the park definitely improved with the introduction of Avengers Campus. The whole area has a great vibe. The theming is well done for what they had to work with. Creating an inviting space using an industrial theme isn’t easy, but I think they pulled it off here. The best way I can describe it is that it just looks cool. It probably helps that I enjoy the Marvel movies (mostly up until Avengers: Endgame; after that, I think they lost their way a bit).
Avengers Assemble: Flight Force was better than I expected. The theming is (once again) cool, and the ride and layout are fun. It didn’t feel as empty as I’d heard others describe it — maybe because of the later additions. I’ve ridden it twice, and both times, the Iron Man animatronic wasn’t working 😤.
The biggest surprise of my trip was WEB SLINGERS (ALL CAPS). I had a fantastic time with this ride. The gameplay was fun, the animation and 3D were great — overall, just a very enjoyable experience. One downside, though: I got a bit too competitive. I was working way too hard to get a high score and didn’t focus enough on the ride itself. This could be blasphemy, but I think WEB SLINGERS might have been my favourite ride of the trip.
Walt’s - An American Restaurant
The menu at Walt's
On the second day, we had lunch at Walt’s on Main Street. The experience of sitting down for a meal (whether lunch or dinner) on a busy park day is something I highly recommend. I had the Creamy Pea Soup, Farmhouse Chicken with a Golden Honey and Cajun-Spiced Coating, and the Flower Street Sundae for dessert. The price for a three-course menu (without drinks) was €55.
Creamy Pea Soup with Whipped Isigny Cream and Smoky Popcorn
The restaurant is lovely, but, like every other restaurant at Disneyland Paris, the food suffers from being made in advance and often feels hastily plated. For example, instead of scooping fresh ice cream for the sundae, it was definitely re-frozen. The food was still tasty — though the chicken was a bit underwhelming — but you expect a bit more from the dining experience.
Other Observations:
The entrance and the Disneyland Hotel look stunning. I really came to appreciate the design and beauty of the turnstile area. Everything looked clean and fresh.
The updated scene in the Nautilus is a definite downgrade. The 3D effect was convincing, but the stock footage of whales and other marine life just felt cheap. Couldn’t they have animated a cool Kraken attack or something?
I felt like the parks, more than ever, were centered around merchandise. The stores were filled to the brim with items catered to Disney Adults. The shoulder plushies were everywhere. This might have been more noticeable since we were visiting with first-timers, but it did feel different compared to previous visits.
Final Thoughts
All in all, I had a fantastic stay at Disneyland Paris. However, I do think I won’t be back very soon — the resort desperately needs new attractions. But it’s pretty remarkable that a park that hasn’t had any major new attractions in two decades still manages to entertain as much as it does. It really is a testament to the amazing work the Imagineers did when building this park.
“Every pencil is filled with a book.” It sounded very poetic to him so he went on to research this: “And as things turn out, a regular no. 2 pencil has enough lead to write about 45 000 words — a small novel.” He does further math calculating how many words are in the Harry Potter series and that writing them (if one were to write with pencils) would take a bit more than “the use of twenty-four pencils.”
I dream of a Disney where WDI could still say "we'd like to build a multi-million dollar attraction that celebrates humanity and reminds our guests that we all share a very small planet, the only one we'll ever have, so our similarities outweigh our differences. oh, also, an earworm loops forever"
I am currently visiting Disneyland Paris for three days. Although Paris’ It’s a Small World has remained largely untouched (thanks to 25+ years of neglect in Disneyland Park), I do feel this sentiment from Cabel.
A lot of the modern Disney park experience is built on artificial hype for one franchise or another, catering to a bubble of social-media-heavy Disney Adults.
My ears have limited range. I can’t hear into infinity. Twitter gave everyone in the world the capability to shout into my ear. There’s nothing sustainable or healthy about that.
If the idea of a more handcrafted internet resonates with you, the best way to be part of the movement is simply to make your own website. This may seem intimidating if we expect webpages to be a holistic reflection of ourselves, like a resume, portfolio, or blog. [...] A website doesn’t need to be anything but your own.
I made this blog—first and foremost—for myself. I want to have a place to call my own on the internet, but I want to not set any goals for my website. It's just mine.
This looks incredible in the video, but I can't help but wonder how it holds up in real life. It feels like something they could drop right into a Universal Park...
Just today, the git bisect command came in clutch for me. By marking commits as ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ it quickly pinpoints the exact commit that introduced a bug.
The video linked above is a great example of how this command works, presented by the awesome Typecraft.
I don't recommend Supabase for your personal projects
I recently built my wedding website in NextJS — I have a lot of experience with React and hosting via Vercel is free for the traffic I expect to get.
There is information about the wedding on there, but I also wanted to collect RSVP's via a form. I wanted to try Supabase for this purpose. The development experience was good, the dashboard is nice but recently this has been my life...
Me and Ant Wilson are best friends now...
Supabase will pause projects after seven days of inactivity. Our wedding guests are not RSVP'ing every single day so this happens every seven days for me.
Not a knock against this product, but just be aware of this rule if you want to use Supabase for a project with infrequent activity.
I’m of the opinion that Magic Links are a superior way of authenticating users for infrequent services. In this post Ricky Mondello makes a great case for how Passkeys could work together with Magic Links. The example video speaks volumes—this is how we all should implement auth from now on.
McNally has since designed more than two thousand Irish pubs in over fifty countries, according to his own records. [...] He had all those interiors fully built in Ireland. McNally and Guinness established that this would be a requirement to grant pubs abroad the label of "authentically Irish."
A good bar is a good bar by design, whether that design is "authentic" or not. Theme parks are a great place for this — spaces are designed to be fun and inviting without a pretence of authenticity.
Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.
I used to use the fantastic iTerm2, but recently I have gotten on the hype train and switched to Ghostty. I really enjoy the defaults it ships with—most people won't need to do any configuration for a great terminal experience. Highly recommend you check it out!
For a long time now, I wanted to create a little corner of the internet for myself. As Simon Willison states:
[...] blogging doesn’t have to be about unique insights. The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all).
The format of a linkblog (like Daring Fireball) speaks to me on this front. I want to keep a collection of interesting stuff I find on the internet and have a little website to tinker on.
