Ryan Kopf's Blog

I am disappointed in the State of Iowa, my home state, for what they are doing to the trans community. Once upon a time the State of Iowa was considered top in the nation for its education system. Students from Iowa were the best and the brightest in the country.

The rise of artificial intelligence has been crazy over the last couple of months, now punctuated with the release of something called ChatGPT. The use of AI in everything from copywriting to preventing spam to building new businesses.

Hey fellow nerds. Have you ever wanted to learn a new language - like the Japanese you see in anime. I've invented an interesting new way to learn a language. It's called Sponge and it's a browser extension that helps you learn a language by replacing words as you browse with words from the new language.

I just wanted to take a moment to write about anime - since it's such a big part of my life. And I almost never get time to watch new anime or appreciate my favorites, but still - I think there are anime out there that can change your life.

As the President of AnimeCon.org, I have had the privilege of working alongside countless women who have made a significant impact on the anime and convention industry. As we celebrate Women's History Month, I am reminded of the remarkable women who have inspired me throughout my life.

I am starting to make more and more little side projects that just don't make sense in my favorite framework, which as you should know is Ruby on Rails. My Github profile doesn't even show you just how much work I do in Ruby on Rails because I mostly work on private repositories.

When I tried installing the mysql2 on Windows I had a terrible time. I was getting warnings and errors that other people didn't seem to get. current directory: C:/Ruby31-x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.1.0/gems/mysql2-0.

Let's just say you were in my shoes and you had false allegations lobbied against you. And every year these same rumors grow and they morph and they change, and every year they get more untruthful. Last year these vague accusations against me were a sexual assault thing.

My entire goal in organizing conventions is to support nerds like myself. I grew up in a high school like any other, where playing sports and partying made you cool and getting a high GPA made you a total dork.

So this month's charity highlight is St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. St. Jude's has over a billion dollars in annual expenses that funds research, doctors, patient services, and more. In fact it is around the 5th or 6th largest charity in the US.