If anyone asks, I'm feeling great

I'm not even mad, look at my face.

Now That You Mention It

Art thou pale for weariness:

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth,

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?

Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said, to Talk of Many Things

This was nice to see on LinkedIn today from one of my re/Start learners:

🙏 A Special Word for Todd Pritsky

Todd, you are, without exaggeration, one of the most inspiring educators I have ever encountered. Your generosity in sharing knowledge, your humility despite your extraordinary expertise, you carry decades of deep, practical wisdom, yet you teach with the openness and patience of someone who remembers exactly what it feels like to learn something for the first time.

The way you delivered every class — with clarity, passion, and genuine care — didn't just teach me cloud computing. It ignited something in me. It made me think: "I want to do this too. I want to inspire others the way this man inspires me."

And so I did. Today, I am an AWS Academy Certified Educator, and I can trace that decision directly back to you. Your example gave me the courage to believe that I, too, could guide others through this incredible journey.

Todd, you are living proof that the best teachers don't just transfer knowledge — they transform lives. Thank you for being a beacon of what excellence in education looks like.

Gracias totales. 🚀☁️

I note this with some bittersweet news: the TechU program that I have been a part of my entire 7-year tenure at AWS is no more.  Yet another reorg announced today, and my team has been split apart under the Skilling and Social Impact (SSI) banner.

I'm staying with my awesome boss as part of her new SSI Learning Innovation team, where I get to apply my decades of experience not only in design and delivery of training, but also in building systems and processes to support everything across the SSI organization, including re/Start, Academy, and the Skills Centers (I've mentioned previously I taught several of their special offerings for the University of Texas at Dallas).  I'll be teaching a bit less, but doing a lot more fun things (talking about EC2 for the eleventy millionth time has gotten a bit tedious, ngl), and partnering with my former instructor teammates to make their deliveries effective in this new AI-dominated world.

Change is always scary, yet provides opportunities.  One thing in particular that I'm excited about is I am charged with making sure the tools I built and methodologies I put together for a successful pilot this summer will continue to grow, expanding to new audiences and addressing the challenges of today in ways I could only dream of when my career began way back in the 20th century.  

The SSI organization allows me to lean into who and what I am (a talkative geek) whilst doing some actual good.  Maybe not quite in the same manner or to the same degree as my work at HealthLeads or with affordable housing back in Vermont, but more fulfilling than just teaching people how to use technology to make money and increase shareholder value.

In conclusion: I still get to talk of many things that I love (and get paid to do so).

Selah.

PS - Sent that post to my boss, who responded: "One he called you old Two you are brilliant".  Then she shared it out on the SSI Slack channel, so now everybody knows I'm old.

Get it back baby

Put the chaos to bed.

The World's Grown Honest

The Bearer:

Like all his people he felt at home in the forest.

The silence beneath great trees, the dimness there,

The distant high rustling of foliage, the clumps

Of fern like little green fountains, patches of sunlight,

Patches of moss and lichen, the occasional

Undergrowth of hazel and holly, was he aware

Of all this? On the contrary his unawareness

Was a kind of gratification, a sense of comfort

And repose even in the strain of running day

After day. He had been aware of the prairies.

He had known he hated the sky so vast, the wind

Roaring in the grasses, and the brightness that

Hurt his eyes. Now he hated nothing; nor could he

Feel anything but the urgency that compelled him

Onward continually. "May I not forget, may I

Not forget," he said to himself over and over.

When he saw three ravens rise on their awkward

Wings from the forest floor perhaps seventy-five

Ells ahead of him, he said, "Three ravens,"

And immediately forgot them. "May I not forget,"

He said, and repeated again in his mind the exact

Words he had memorized, the message that was

Important and depressing, which made him feel

Worry and happiness at the same time, a peculiar

Elation. At last he came to his people far

In the darkness. He smiled and spoke his words,

And he looked intently into their eyes gleaming

In firelight. He cried when they cried. No rest

For his lungs. He flinched and lay down while they

Began to kill him with clubs and heavy stones.

Hayden Carruth.

We Are Ruled By Abusers

Rep. Max Miller: "My former wife has claimed that during a custody exchange at my home that day, I assaulted her…If I had assaulted her, would she have offered to cook me dinner six days later?" pic.twitter.com/1IhkykMWpw

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) August 2, 2026

Six days later?  Hell, I regularly cooked for Ericka¹ quite literally the same day she gave me black eyes or strangled me or told me to kill myself.  That is dispositive of absolutely nothing.  

Everybody needs to really understand domestic violence dynamics better.  I find the current political climate to be especially triggering because all these abusive assholes are in power and flaunting their impunity, and gaslighting so much even our abuser would find it beyond the pale.

Selah.

1 - I mean, I did always do the cooking since the very beginning of our relationship.  We all would've starved to death if I refused just because she treated me like shit.

Yeah, it's gone, daddy, gone

The love is gone away.

Le Passeur

The giver (for Berdis):

If the hope of giving

is to love the living,

the giver risks madness

in the act of giving.

Some such lesson I seemed to see

in the faces that surrounded me.

Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,

what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?

          The giver is no less adrift

          than those who are clamouring for the gift.

If they cannot claim it, if it is not there,

if their empty fingers beat the empty air

and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer

knows that all of his giving has been for naught

and that nothing was ever what he thought

and turns in his guilty bed to stare

at the starving multitudes standing there

and rises from bed to curse at heaven,

he must yet understand that to whom much is given

much will be taken, and justly so:

I cannot tell how much I owe.

James Baldwin.

For the Gilt of France (O Guilt Indeed!)

Coincidentally, I fired up Henry V last night because there were no WNBA games on, and I just noticed that on this date in 1415, Sir Thomas Grey was executed for his role in the Southampton Plot.  Seems like a good excuse to make a little blog post.

I've remarked before that I prefer Branagh's film to Olivier's, and the traitors scene is one reason why.  The former excised it and pretty much all icky feelings and whatnot, which is a damn shame:

The Olivier film was shot near the end of the Second World War and dedicated to memory of English military sacrifice, specifically to the "Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has humbly attempted to recapture." A film explicitly and unapologetically of the moment of its production, its audience a war-weary Britain in need of an emotional boost, it understandably portrays Henry and his war as benignly patriotic, eliminating any moral or ethical ambiguity in the king and any sense of fractured will among his troops.

Gone are Henry's seemingly sadistic threats to the citizens of Harfleur (3.1). Gone is the traitor scene (2.2) -- replaced by expansive pageantry and a dumb show of Henry's pious devotion before the troops set off to storm the beaches of Normandy. Gone is the sense, in the play's opening scene, of faction among the English governing powers, replaced by clerical slapstick. Gone is the nuance built even into the play's most apparently jingoistic moments. Olivier stripped the danger from the bickering captains and the personality from the French lords, reducing both groups to caricatures.

What remains is a bluntly-realized Merrie Olde English past, exemplified by the film's spectacular opening model effect, a shining and splendid Shakespearean London straddling a pristine, glimmering Thames.

Branagh's 1989 film, on the other hand, was made for a film audience whose view of war had been conditioned by the failed adventure of Vietnam, honed by the many films that captured the disillusionment of the following generation, and given point by the British conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982, a controversial and much-politicized military victory.

I guess given his different historical epocha, I'll cut Sir Lawrence some slack on his cinematic choices.  After all, if little faults proceeding on distemper shall not be winked at, how shall we stretch our eye when capital crimes, chewed, swallowed, and digested, appear before us?

Selah.

Verily, I say unto you

The days spoken of in the Apocalypse are nigh!

There Is a Wisdom That Is Woe

Misgivings:

When ocean-clouds over inland hills

Sweep storming in late autumn brown,

And horror the sodden valley fills,

And the spire falls crashing in the town,

I muse upon my country’s ills—

The tempest bursting from the waste of Time

On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.

Nature’s dark side is heeded now—

(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—

A child may read the moody brow

Of yon black mountain lone.

With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,

And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:

The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

Herman Melville.

Писатели — инженеры человеческих душ

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by N. Todd Pritsky (@ntoddp)

It is a sunny, relatively cool, pleasantly breezy day.  Sitting in my corner of the yard, thinking about maybe motivating to mow or otherwise putter, but I'd rather just be.  Looking up at the trees moving in the light wind, I am reminded of one of my favorite short stories from the Soviet era, Yury Olesha's Love (Любовь)

First, the Russian:

Он подумал: « Деревья встречают Лелю овацией». Дальтоник ошибался, но Шувалов ошибался еще грубее.

По-английски:

He thought: "The trees are greeting Lelya with an ovation." The colorblind man was mistaken, but Shuvalov was even more mistaken.

Also reminds me of a particular shroom trip with a couple buddies in college - which in turn reminds me of the paper I wrote about The Grand Inquisitor, in Russian, whilst shrooming - but let's not get into that now.

Ahem.  So anywayz...I originally was going to use the story's last line ("Go and eat blue pears") for my post title, but decided to go for a deeper cut with "writers are engineers of human souls."  Seemed fitting for our new AI-plagued Stalinist era.

Selah.