Opinion
The Cloudflare outage was a good thing
Cloudflare, the CDN provider, suffered a massive outage today. Some of the world’s most popular apps and web services were left inaccessible for serveral hours whilst the Cloudflare team scrambled to fix a whole swathe of the internet. And that might be a good thing. The proximate cause of the outage was pretty mundane: a bad config file triggered a latent bug in one of Cloudflare’s services. The file was too large (details still hazy) and this led to a cascading failure across Cloudflare operations. Probably there is some useful post-morteming about canary releases and staged rollouts.
November 18, 2025
The Supposed Half Life 3 Ending? I Just Don't Buy It.
…because the Half Life series is all about Gordon’s ascent to power.
September 7, 2017
Predator (1987): The alien tries each man's masculinity. Each man who dies does so in a manner befitting his swagger.
I originally posted this on Reddit. It’s a well-worn idea that Predator is a film about masculinity. You have seven men each competing for alpha status, showboating their strength, stoicism, roughness and physical power. I’d like to go a step further. I’d like to suggest that the trials of the film are a test of masculinity, and that each man who dies does so in a way that mocks his masculine performance.
December 21, 2016