It was good to get outdoors this week and do a bit of walking in the woods. We have a nice park nearby with several trails amongst the trees. It does require a drive to get there, and that always feels wrong to me. Wrong enough that I don’t visit as frequently as I should. I think I’ll go again today.

The Consumption

Over the past week I’ve been reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. To be honest, I find it a bit dry and I kind of get the gist at a glance. I’ve considered putting it away in favor of someone else’s notes, but then that someone else (in this case Nate Eliason - someone I do not know) said:

Everyone needs to read this book. The observations were made in a pre-internet era, and they’re 10x as relevant today. Nothing will do more to help cure your information addiction that the healthy dose of reality provided in these pages.

It’s a 200-page book. I should be able to barrel through! At about halfway through I have definitely hit some interesting bits. Quote dump time!

First it’s pretty interesting to me to read discussion about “the telegraph” and feel like I could just replace it with “the internet”:

The telegraph may have made the country into “one neighborhood,” but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.

And:

[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the “information - action ratio.”

So what are the results of this “Peek-a-Boo World” the author describes?

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself [a] series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold.

More than ever we are ingesting mountains of information that does not impact our daily lives. What do we do with it?

Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930’s and 1940’s and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful “Trivial Pursuit.” In one form or another, each of these supplies an answer to the question,“ What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?” And in one form or another, the, answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game?

The book goes into much greater detail about what life was like before and after the telegraph (and photography and radio and television). At times it might get a bit “the world was better back then,” but not in a “people were happier and healthier” sort of false way, but in a true value judgement way as in “absorbing and processing knowledge through typography is a better state of being.” The author also points out that the entertainment and “junk” side of these technologies is probably the actual value of them. Those things fit the technology well and add value to our lives. The entertainment-izing and snippet-izing of news, politics, and so on does appear damaging to society and to each of us individually.

I haven’t come to my own conclusions as of yet. It’s apropos because this very newsletter is at times about sharing trivial information that isn’t going to impact anyone’s decision making within the context of their lives. I’ve also been considering starting a blog with similar bits and bobs of things I find on the Internet. Would that be contributing to the problem? On the other hand, this stuff is all written (typographic) and in theory I could write at further length and express ideas that add value to the conversation. On the other other hand, maybe this is just junk entertainment and shouldn’t require too much thought?

In a dramatic twist, it turns out this letter’s writing is probably more valuable to myself and others than my prior letters.

Land of Confusion

I’m listening to Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Somewhere along the line I bought a Lorin Maazel version (Spotify, Apple Music) and I’ve always loved it. It’s at parts beautiful and at parts crunchy and dark and nasty. My favorite track is “Act 2 - Romeo resolves to avenge Mercutio’s Death - Finale.” The cord hit at 3:46 is just gross. I love it!

Unplug

As we come out of this year-long semi-quarantine (🤞), I hope we can all find a way to simplify. In some regards the infotainment world has been a useful distraction. Though I think it has also been easy to get darkly taken up into it. The dark side of immersing ourselves into it has led to damaging and deadly actions in the real world. In order to reduce the influence of the news-as-entertainment enterprise we do have to tune out and make that influence less valuable for the companies that are pursuing it.

There is a lot of talk about how “if something is free, you are the product.” That is definitely true of our data. While it is also true of our attention, I think in that regard we are the product in more enterprises than just those that are free. Or if we’re not the product, we are the catalyst that multiplies the value for companies pushing anger and outrage as their product.

How would it feel to stop subscribing to the nationwide or worldwide newsfeed? How would it feel to keep our finger on the lighter pulse of our local news and then move on with our days? Not only how would we feel, but how would we act differently?

Perhaps more walks in the woods are in all our futures, hopefully with friends, family, and neighbors.

Winter Evening In The Forest by Vilhelm Kyhn

Oh, baby, is it getting springy here. I even made some guacamole! We sat around a bonfire with our neighbors. It was 30 degrees. Springy!

With spring, comes the introduction of a March of Time theatrical reading. It comes from my friend Mike who hears the title of this letter in a certain way.

Also, baseball is starting. Though fewer than expected are going to watch it what with the streaming packages not able to carry the regional sports networks. The regional sports networks are careening toward their own, overpriced streaming options. It looks like we’re moving toward $40/month to watch your baseball team, whether that’s a direct streaming package or paying for overpriced cable TV. Faaaaaantastic.

File photo: Standard baseball play

The Consumption

We’ve been watching The Morning Show and I have to say it is pretty compelling. I think thus far they have handled #MeToo pretty well, showing all sorts of different angles, implications, and involvements. Issues like this are complicated, and the show provides some nuance.

It has also been interesting to see behind the curtain of a morning show, which is the epitome of the “news as entertainment” issues I touched on last week. Some in the program discussed their commitment to journalism and you believe them. Some discussed their commitment to journalism and all you can muster is believing that they believe themselves.

We have one episode left and we’re definitely curious how/if they’ll wrap up most of the storylines.

The Morning Show is an actual show in Canada

Finally, check out how Daft Punk created the sample for “One More Time.”

Childhood Bedroom

Do you remember your childhood bedroom? I do and I don’t.

Before my parents moved from my childhood home I made a point to walk around the acreage and take pictures of the various things that made it home to me. While I have a good number of pictures of the kitchen and living room of my childhood home, I did not think to take pictures of most of the other rooms. Even if I had thought to do that, my childhood bedroom would not have looked then as it looked when I was a kid.

I spent a good deal of time in that room. Reading. Playing games. Reading. Playing with A/V gear. Reading.

For most of that time I had a 13” black and white television. It was black and white, but the picture was decent if I could get a good signal on the rabbit ears. I think my favorite memory with that TV was when I wanted to connect my Nintendo’s RF connector, but didn’t have one of those UHF antenna adapter things. I suspect the reason I didn’t go find an adapter elsewhere in the house was not because of laziness, but rather because a friend and I were having a sleepover and were probably not supposed to be playing Nintendo. Anyway, we figured out we could take some wire from one of those Radio Shack electronics kits, wrap one wire around the center conductor of the coax cable connector, wrap another wire around the outer conductor, and send each of those to a separate UHF screw on the back of the TV.

I don’t think we burned the house down. And I don’t remember getting in trouble. I’m sure it was all worth it to play StarTropics!

Childhood by Leonid Afremov

I am writing today’s letter from a Toyota dealership. What started as a routine oil change has turned into a three-and-a-half hour oil change, alignment, and tire change. I’d say today’s letter is sponsored by Toyota, but the money is flowing the wrong way for that. Does this mean it’s a reverse sponsorship?

Yes, it pains me to be changing tires at a dealership. Everything in my being distrusts car dealerships and maintenance shops in the same building as car dealerships. However, we bought an all-wheel drive minivan, it needs run-flat tires, it had two holes in one tire, and the price looked more than reasonable. The reasonable price was a big surprise, and while I still distrust their tire-wear measurements it seemed prudent to just get it done before going on a road trip to Arkansas next week.

Swagger Wagon

The Consumption

I wonder why I write a fair bit about consumable media? Maybe this week I should just say what I’m consuming?

Watching: The Morning Show, Kim’s Convenience.
Listening: Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, Natalie Prass’s The Future and the Past.
Reading: Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift.

And when I seek nostalgia, it’s time for My90sTV.

This really is starting to feel like a blog from 2003.

Common Good

In the beginning months of the pandemic it became clear that masks were going to be an important tool to cut down on the spread of the virus. I remember in the first weeks of lockdown saying, “If we could find something that cuts down on even 10% of the deaths, we should and we will do it.” Masks were that thing. In a year that saw more than 1% of Americans die for the first time since 1947, who knew that saving way more than 10% of lives would be so controversial!

There was argument. Then there was entitled griping about the tyranny of telling people what to do. Then there were absurd and offensive comparisons of wearing masks to a number of historical happenings, such as wearing a “Jewish star” during World War II.

Some counterarguments sought to reach back to a time in America’s past where all Americans collectively did what was right for the common good. With no sense of irony, these folks were hoping to make America great again. A common emblem of this effort was sharing pictures of masked Americans during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

At the time I wondered if these pictures were really the truth of America during that pandemic. Why in this one thing would the old America have been any better than modern America? The most striking example that this was not a collective American effort came from the stories about the varied attempts to enforce a sort of social distancing at the city level via having or not having parades – Philadelphia had one while St. Louis did not. One mayor helped their city sacrifice for the greater good while the other did not.

If you thought there had to be some moments in our history where we all came together because the threats to our existence were just too acute, you might think the revolutionary war was that moment. Every day I visit what I call “my Twins forum,” a place where baseball is only a small part of the discussion. The founding member of the forum is reading consecutively the biographies of every American president. He has been sharing what he’s learned, and yesterday he wrote:

I’m coming around to the idea that the US has almost never had the will – even when fighting a War for Independence – to sacrifice collectively to make things happen. While our troops were dying in winter camps in tatters, the general population seemed to carry on as if it wasn’t happening. We were unable or perhaps the proper word is unwilling, as a fledgling country, to provide food and clothing for the men fighting for the existence of the country. It could have been done. It wasn’t. It was more profitable to sell food to the British (it was probably more complicated than this, but the idea that we left our troops to starve was disgraceful). We will see if this continues as a theme throughout our existence. As I continue through my book on [John Quincy Adams], this idea that it was only a few who sacrificed to make this country go is continually driven home. The 2020 pandemic response, to me, seems to be consistent with Americanism back in 1800 or thereabouts.

I expect when our grandchildren or great-grandchildren learn about this pandemic they will learn about the great sacrifices made for the collective good. They will be shown pictures of empty stadiums, social-distanced voting, masks, masks, and masks. Some national or international issue will be facing them and they will be called to come together with their fellow humans to do what is right for the world at large, just like we all did in 2020.

We sit in the midst of this global pandemic and it is hard to see it that way. It is hard to feel like we all came together for the collective good because we didn’t. Yet many millions of us did sacrifice for what is my perception of the collective good. Many millions of others came together for their versions of the collective good. While many people did not do what I may have wished for them to do, they did change their behavior to a degree. In a global pandemic, degrees matter. Of course we’d make a change to save 10% of the deaths.

When this version of Covid-19 is past, perhaps that is all worth celebrating even if it is in a sugarcoated sort of way.

And let us never forget that sitting atop all this consternation is the amazing response from the world’s scientists, medical professionals, and front-line workers. Thank you!!!

The Attributes of the Sciences by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

Since my sixteen-year-old and I were on a call list at our local pharmacy, we were able to get the vaccine on Tuesday evening. These lists are for when a pharmacy has vaccine that is going to expire and get thrown away. This is especially applicable to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which can only be out of refrigeration for six hours. These lists are long because people from around the state have called numerous pharmacies to get on many lists. The pharmacist called many people before us, but they all either didn’t answer or were not able to get there quickly. Fortunately since we live so close we could actually get there in time to get the shot.

So if you haven’t gotten the shot, I would recommend calling a couple of your nearby pharmacies and getting on a similar list if they have one. This will help make sure that no vaccine goes to waste.

I am thankful for the nurses and pharmacists who are distributing this shot. I am thankful for the systems, government and otherwise, that are getting it out into our communities at a faster and faster rate every day.

I am thankful for the hundreds of years of scientific progress that led to this point. If this pandemic happened even twenty-five years ago, we would be left in the wilderness for many, many more years. (In actual fact, even five years ago could have been much deadlier. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are the first ever mRNA vaccines approved for human use.) I’m thankful for the scientists who have spent decades of their lives being educated, learning, and discovering. I’m thankful that they keep discovering ways to combat viruses such as this all in the face of a concerted and maddening effort to discredit their work. I hope the opinions of talking heads with no scientific background do not damage our ability to recruit future scientists into the field or our ability to combat the next potential pandemic in the future.

I’m glad to have done my little part to protect those around me. Stopping this as a deadly and constant disease will take billions of others standing up to do the same.

Dog Vaccination with a Big Blue Syringe by damedeeso

The drive to Arkansas was a long one, but not excruciatingly so. We picked the location due to a self-imposed we-won’t-drive-more-than-ten-hours radius from our home base in southern Minnesota. As we drove through the states we noticed more green buds in the trees, though the difference between here and there was not as great as we had expected. As we hopped from gas station to gas station we noticed fewer masks.

As we went through Kansas City we noticed fewer signs than we’d like to have seen. Then we were on a road we were not supposed to be on. Siri kept asking us to please cross four lanes of traffic to exit in one-quarter mile. Eventually our helpful vehicle, via advice from its GPS system, intoned, “Welcome to Kansas.” Those in the know realize that Kansas City is in Missouri. Well, except for little-sibling Kansas City that is actually in Kansas. In the end we visited both Kansas Cities (Kansas Citys? Kansases City?) on our drive.

This is not an April Fool’s letter, though it happens to be written by a fool on the first of April.

Approaching Arkansas brought an end to the monotonous countryside that is driving north-to-south through the center of Iowa and the left of Missouri. The Ozarks were a welcome change in scenery. Trees with slightly more hints of green, land with many more undulations, and gas stations with a few more masks.

Northwest Arkansas turned out to be a nice place to be. The businesses we visited in Bentonville, Fayetteville, and Springdale were being logical about the safety of their employees and customers. The natural places to see were numerous. The neighborhood art museum was quite a wonderful place. I suspect if you live in this place and meet someone from another state you don’t tell them “I’m from Arkansas,” but rather “I’m from northwest Arkansas.”

For this vacation we generally wanted to be away from people. It was a thirty-minute drive from the main road to the home we rented. I’ve been to the Rockies in both the U.S. and Canada. I am one of those that is happy to make fun of various other series of hills in the United States calling themselves mountains. Yet the switchback roads around the man-made Beaver Lake certainly did remind us of Going-to-the-Sun Road. It was the lite version to be sure, but we took it slow enough to wonder if we would even leave the house to explore during our stay. It turns out we got comfortable with the drive and made our way out on several days.

The time away warming our faces had to end eventually. We hopped back in the car and trekked the nine hours home. The masks ebbed and flowed as before. The land was ironed of its wrinkles. The green buds followed us back to Minnesota, sure to bring spring with them soon.

We live in a five-star world. I am definitely not saying everything in the world is amazing. (Though who wants to go back in live in 1904? Nobody, that’s who.) What I am saying is that many of us engage this world as if the things we purchase and partake in always need to be five-star experiences.

Years ago when one had a need for a tool, article of clothing, or whatever, one visited a store, looked at the selection of things available, and picked a thing. Over time one would learn about trusted brands and tend to buy them more frequently. Or one would learn about a good product by the social experience of talking to friends or family. In theory this process is costly in terms of time. Travel to the store, dig around the shelves, travel to another store to compare products, purchase, and travel home. It is much more streamlined to open a web browser, purchase an item, and receive it in a few days.

In practice I can’t help but believe I spend significantly more time in the overall purchase process in today’s world than I would have in the world of thirty years ago. I always want the item that provides the best ratio of performance to price. I research what the best things are in the category. Then I pull back and get reasonable because the best things are often expensive. Maybe there is a very good thing that costs considerably less? While I’m a proponent of buy once cry once, I also don’t want to waste my money. What is the cry to buy ratio on this item?

I want the five-star experience and I often spend too much time trying to get it.

When I look at item reviews I get snobby. If this item is not getting a perfect rating, there must be something wrong with it. It must be getting shoddy, surviving on its reputation alone. I need to spend more time scouring the internet for reviews from actual people who have used the thing for an actual extended amount of time.

This comes into play when I’m writing reviews as well. Recently we rented a vacation home. It was a lovely home. It was nearly brand new, clean, and inviting, but it wasn’t perfect.

The listing said the property had wi-fi. It did technically have wi-fi, but upon arrival we learned that you’re not actually supposed to use the wi-fi. They had very slow satellite internet and with a capped plan. Thank goodness I didn’t need need the wi-fi.

At one-thirty in the morning the toilet next to our bedroom started making loud gurgling noises. We could also hear something in or around the house making noise at the same time. This repeated every few minutes for forty-five minutes. Jesse and I were awake for most of the night making sure the toiled wasn’t overflowing and reading about these noises. All our reading pointed to things we probably did to cause a septic system problem, even though we don’t remember doing any of the things that we read may have caused a septic system problem. In the morning Jesse was finally able to text the owners, who replied with, “Yeah, that’s a something-something septic cycle that happens every two weeks.”

It was a lovely home that I wouldn’t hesitate to visit again. Was our visit five-stars, though? I thought it was a very good four stars. When I was prompted to review the property did I give it a five-star rating? Yes, because I know people like me would look down upon a four-star rating.

In the future I’m going to try to be less concerned about finding the best possible thing. I will still do my research, but it seems prudent to intentionally limit the time I spend digging into the backstory of the item and its category. Especially when considering inexpensive things like a small tool or household item. It’s not really a five-star world after all.

Untitled by Ji Un Seong

It’s my good friend’s birthday today, and so he is the inspiration for me to write. (I don’t mean that he inspired the specific words. This isn’t an homage. Mostly I mean that I wasn’t going to write, but it being his birthday makes me feel like, well, I really should write. It’s like a gift to him!)

Regular activities are starting to pick up around the household. Soccer, gymnastics, and marching band practices are happening near daily. The oldest is at the beginning of working through her college decision. Standardized tests are frequent. Spring sniffles are also bringing about Covid tests. All negative so far!

It has been a bit of a challenge to adjust to the arrival of prior reality. While we haven’t enjoyed the isolation, we have enjoyed the calm. The obvious response is DON’T OVERCOMMIT YOUR CHILDREN OMG!!!1!! We keep a close eye on their commitments. This seems like a reasonable level. It’s just that our boundaries are pushed even at a reasonable level.

It will probably feel good when we get to see those soccer and gymnastics teams play. To see them play while in the vicinity of other humans. Hearing the marching band’s music will likely be emotional.

Each normal thing we resume post-pandemic is going to have this hesitancy for us. It will be hard. We will be overly cautious on some things and overly reckless on others. We will try to consider those likelihoods as we step into each situation. We will make mistakes. We will keep the lines of communication open as we navigate.

What even is normal at this point? With luck we’ll begin to discover that in 2021.

A Friendly Game of Soccer by Anthony Falbo

It has been a minute. Summer came upon me and time spent with the family became a priority. I also worked on a few woodworking projects. And we took a glorious, two-week road trip. Writing took a backseat.

Don't expect any consistency from this little letter going forward. Sometimes I might write one, though. It could be a week between letters or it could be months.

Organizing

The GOP strategy of motivating voters by sending out operatives to disrupt shit at the local level has arrived in my city. “Public challenges School Board on rights during open meeting.” It’s all around Critical Race Theory (there was a high school class with that same name last school year, but no such class is on the schedule this school year).

The key bit:

"This is not your meeting, this is our meeting," said Todd Pearson, of Spring Valley, Minnesota, a town 30 miles south of Rochester. Pearson, who has been mobilizing people from around southern Minnesota to attend Owatonna School Board meetings and present opposition to Critical Race Theory and equity being taught in the classroom, demanded that school staff and members of the press be forced to leave the meeting [rather than community members because the fire capacity of the room had been met].

This dude is not part of our community. He lives 70 miles from here. He’s mobilizing people from outside of our community to come in and throw fits at our school board meetings. He’s making demands for meeting accomodations that are not legal or reasonable. The local newspaper, which hardly ever takes a stand on anything, wrote an entire article about how his statements do not actually align with the requirements, rules, and laws around these open government meetings.

Maybe this is the other side of the community organizing coin? Maybe this just another type of nonviolent protest? I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel quite right. (I'm not commenting on the issue at hand [Critical Race Theory]. That's … complicated.)

The practical impact of this pressure, these yelling fits at school board meetings, is that there is no chance our school board will bring in a mask mandate for the schools. Even though a city just down the road from us started high school a week earlier and immediately experienced 35 Covid-19 cases and 300 quarantined students. Even though our Covid cases are rising fast and our positivity rate is at 12%. Obviously infections are going to run high in our schools, but the school leaders are too scared to rile people up. Even if our district has just as bad of an experience, I will be surprised if masks are mandated.

I hope we make it through. I hope the innocent are not hurt.

One More Year

I keep thinking I turn 43 today, but I definitely turn 44. We are all saying that the pandemic has lost us our sense of time; lost us a year. I guess my brain has decide my 43rd year went unlived?

As I get older I have realized that a lot of my ways of working, my ways of motivating myself, are tied to the culture around me. Specifically these motivations are tied to the culture of my geography; the culture of America. In this case, when I speak of culture I am talking about the work ethic that “made America great” and the moral value tied to that work ethic.

A read a book that opened my eyes to how many of us have been manipulated by this intentional culture creation. Things like the protestant work ethic were latched on to by capitalists in order to tie morality to work. In the first half of the 20th century literal war-time propagandists were enlisted by the business world to conflate workers’ senses of self worth with their ability to achieve results in the workplace.

(I’m 90% sure the book was Do Nothing. I don’t know if I recommend it. Parts were “Woah?!” and parts were “Wha?”)

I have been trying to learn how to separate my daily motivations from this engrained morality code. It is very difficult to unlearn these things. Actually, applying the word “learn” to my efforts is a bit high-minded as I haven’t been doing any intentional, directed training. If I discover any tools or courses out there I would be happy to do some targeted re-education. For the time being I am focusing on being aware of the existence of these engrained motivations and practicing considering what other motivations I might draw on for the activities I wish to pursue.

This summer our oldest had a difficult decision to make relating to her final season of high school soccer. The soccer program had gotten strong enough in our city that not all senior athletes would be on the varsity team as in years past. She needed to decide if she was going to quit playing soccer or if she was going to continue on a junior varsity team. At first this seemed like a straightforward choice. Why waste your time at an activity that is ending soon; an activity where your progression is halted? While it wasn’t her highest priority activity, she gave countless hours to getting better at the sport. She had hit a wall of natural athletic talent as well as hours in her day that she was willing to push her training further. Perhaps it was time to move on.

Before making her final decision, we as parents offered her a different perspective. She had expressed a disappointment with the attitudes and teamwork within the soccer program. Instead of focusing her efforts in this final season on the athletic and competitive aspects of sport, what if she focused on modeling the behavior she wished she saw in the team? Perhaps she could use this opportunity to compliment younger players, focus on being a good teammate rather than a competitor against her teammates, and help build her team up into one that she would enjoy being a part of? If that sounded like a good use of time, perhaps continuing to play would make sense.

To her credit she took that ball and ran with it. We used some words to offer a new perspective, but she went out and did the thing. It was a great example to me and others on how you can willfully adjust your motivations through careful consideration. As with many things, I think this is harder to do the older we are. Or maybe I’m just making up excuses?

What is it that motivates you to do the things you do each day? A certain amount of work is required in this life to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. Perhaps that’s where the moral purpose of work should end? I talk a big game above, but I’m not sure what the best thing is for each of us as individuals or for the society as a whole. It does seem useful from time to time to think deeply through how we relate to work. Thinking about work from a vastly different perspective is a valuable way to disrupt your default tendencies. Give it a shot!

Hello!

I hope 2022 has been treating you well so far. I’ve found it to be a decent year so long as my head is sufficiently in the sand most of the time. At the very least it has been a surprising year for me.

My long lost itch to blog has returned. This wasn’t a new year’s resolution, but it entered my brain around that time. I spent a fair bit of time trying to decide on a platform. Did I want to stay on my antiquated Ruby/Sinatra blog running on Heroku? Did I want to dive into static site generators (😈)? Or did I want to use some sort of service?

In the end I chose Micro.blog. It took me a while to wrap my brain around it, but once I did it gave me in a nice, big hug. I don’t think it’s for everyone. If I wanted something turnkey that I didn’t plan to style, I’d probably pick Write.as. Blot and Wunderbucket are also very intriguing.

The biggest surprise so far this year is that I wrote rails new app in my console again for the first time in I don’t know how long. A friend and I talked over a few website ideas, and one particularly kept itching us. So here we are scratching it. Ask me in a few weeks if I’m still scratching!

With all this writing and doing, I would like to keep the newsletter going as another option for folks to catch up on things if they so choose. What I think I will try is to get an end-of-month schedule going. I will intro with something original for the newsletter followed by a blog post from the month. Then I’ll share links to any other blog posts I’ve written as well as a few smaller tidbits. The format will probably evolve as I go.

And there it is. I hope everything is going well in your world. Let me know if you have any exciting news to share!

Movie Art

I like to watch art movies. While I don’t only attend art house movie theaters, it’s definitely worthwhile to me to sprinkle some such movies into my regular viewing. I’m more than entertained with a lot of Hollywood properties, but it is a fact that most of those movies do not offer surprises that you’ve never seen on screen before.

Some movies-as-art that I’ve watched in the past few months are A Ghost Story, Annette, and The Power of the Dog. The former two are certainly different from any movies I’ve ever watched before. The latter doesn’t feel all that unique on the surface, but offers a depth of experience that keeps giving long after the credits roll.

A big hangup folks have with movie art is one I think we each have with at least some of the art out there: they don’t understand and the art makes them feel stupid. What is the most common response to something that makes you feel stupid? Call the thing the thing it makes you feel: Stupid!

The lesson I try to take with me from my enjoyment of art movies is that I rarely understand the layers being presented while I watch the movie, and I rarely figure out the layers on my own after the movie is completed. The best I usually do is to have a sense that, hey, something was going on there and I bet this or that meant a thing. If I viewed the movie with someone else, we then get to discuss what just happened, trying to puzzle it out for ourselves. We eventually hit the Internet to read the thoughts of others, background on the movie, and so on.

The meaning of movie art is not a thing I understand immediately, but a thing that provides a depth of experience factory farmed movies don’t quite satisfy. It’s like admitting that, yes, a Big Mac (or Filet o’ Fish) is tasty, but it doesn’t offer the same experience as a restaurant with an intentional menu of deep flavors. Sometimes I want that easy hit of dopamine, but I do enjoy mixing in meals with more layers of flavor. If I can’t quite describe what that flavor is, part of the fun is sorting it out with the people around me.

Blog

This month I also wrote about some other things:

• An exercise in reading poetry every day: Discomfiture of Thought.
• My belief that Writing Is a Muscle.
• A love letter to Tab Groups in Safari.
• A long log of my challenges while standing up my blog at Micro.blog.

Announcing

I made a website! Well, actually more of a webpage. But it’s a thing that’s out there helping a few people! If you’ve lived in a community that has obscure winter parking rules, you might find it interesting: Owatonna Even/Odd Parking.

Ephemera

Rather than a social media presence, I have a microblog. The Ephemera section is where I log little things like what I watched, read, or cooked. Some highlights this month:

🥘 Dilly Bean Stew with Cabbage and Frizzled Onions

So much flavor, so few ingredients! Also, homemade bread.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

From Jenny George’s collection The Dream of Reason (I could find no place to link to, so this is printed without permission):

Spring

Speckled egg, brown egg, or sky blue with black marks –

Having broken once, the world re-forms
in miniature.
Over and over, in the nest
between two limbs; in the hollow of grass
at a marsh edge.

It’s relentless, the way it keeps trying
to return.
Joy
Joy
Joy

🍿 Encanto (2021)

That moment when you realize these two are the same people. Love it! 🍿

📚 Where the Deer and the Antelope Play (2021)

I like how Nick Offerman writes. It inspires me to be more playful with my scribbles. Maybe I can be a little janky, leave some words out, and use a fancy phrase or five for fun. There’s definitely a schtick to it and he can spread it too thick at times. One of the themes in the book is “nuance,” which makes it striking when Offerman paints 40% of the American population with a pretty obese brush. The dual focus of describing our beautiful land right next to lamenting our ugly politics doesn’t really do a lot of favors to either discussion.

Click through for more ephemera!

(Note: Maybe a newsletter of the sort you see here isn’t what you had in mind. If that’s the case, now is probably a good time to unsubscribe. No harm if you do! If you’d like to subscribe to my traditional blog posts, here’s the RSS feed. If you’d like to subscribe to firehose of blog + ephemera, here’s a different RSS feed.)

In early June, 1989, I went to my friend Alex’s family cabin. I was eleven years old. Many things about the weekend are hard to remember. I think they had a dirt bike, but I was too nervous to ride it. I believe we went golfing one day, though I don’t remember how I played. We must have spent time on the lake? I don’t recall.

I will never forget what happened the last day of our visit. Alex and I were out in a nearby grassy area. Maybe it was a pasture. We had his BB gun. It wasn’t far from the surrounding cabins, but there were 180 degrees of no people in one direction. We set up cans as targets. Since we were careless eleven-year-olds, we probably tried to shoot at flying birds.

Eventually we got bored with that, turned around, and trained our eyes on the pavement leading down to the water access. This is where vehicles would play the back-up game, maneuvering their boats down into the water before gently releasing them into the waves. There was a truck by the lake, it’s cargo floating. There were people near the shore, helping to manage the driver. Talking idly amongst themselves as managers do.

We were in our own world, though, when we decided to shoot our ammunition at the pavement twenty feet in front of us. It was warm, but not hot. As tar gets soft in the heat, we may have been curious if the BBs would lodge themselves in the pavement. We may have just wondered if the BBs would deflect and how high they would travel. I doubt we had very detailed thoughts about what we were doing.

How many times the trigger was pulled, I don’t know, but suddenly a woman 100 yards in the distance snapped alert and grabbed her back. I knew then that something bad had happened, though my friend wasn’t so sure. “Probably a wasp or a bee,” he said. Indeed.

Memory is a funny thing. I don’t remember which of us had the gun in our hands, but I did know that we made a mistake. We did what any child would do and ran back to the cabin. His parents knew something was up when we said we just wanted to play inside for a bit. “On our last day? It’s gorgeous out!”

The knock came 10 minutes later. We heard voices outside, but couldn’t make out what was said. I think there was a, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” I don’t recall being drug outside to apologize to the woman, but I’m not sure how that wouldn’t have happened. Memory is a funny thing.

That Sunday we returned to my home town. I was eating at a local cafe. I don’t remember if it was with Alex’s family or my own. I don’t even remember if Alex’s parents told mine what had happened. It seems like something I would have been incredibly stressed about; something that would have caused me to break out in my frequent hives. A waiting for punishment that would have seared itself into my brain.

The cafe had newspapers. Growing up, we generally had the television on during dinner. I was accustomed to seeing the local and national news as I ate. Whatever was going on in the world that the networks deemed worth broadcasting, well, I was aware. Except for that weekend. With a different family at a cabin with no antenna reception, I was behind on world events.

It was the weekend of June 3-4, 1989. On June 3rd Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the leader of the Iranian Revolution, had died. The face I associated with the Iran hostage crisis and the Salman Rushdie fatwa was no more.

It was the weekend of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The months of protests had ended with thousands of casualties. The pictures were excruciating to see.

These huge world events obviously loomed large in my head. When looking up these dates to see if it was even possible that these things happened on the same weekend, I was surprised to confirm the timing of things. I know I often remember stories in a bit more interesting of a light than how they actually happened. Some memories may even dislodge others, like memories of getting (rightfully) yelled at by your parents.

Memory is a funny thing.

Everyone’s a Starter

Through the years I have participated in all sorts of groups. There have been sports teams, both individually focused and team focused. There have been staff positions, working as a group to support students. There have been traditional jobs, which generally combine both the individual competition with group support.

Out of all these my favorite form of group activity has been the musical group. A successful musical group is trying to lift everyone in the group up. While there are often soloists and “star players,” the importance of each participant is nearly identical. So the group tries to encourage and inspire their lesser players to rise to the occasion.

This doesn’t seem to result in a homogenization of talent, but rather a growth of skills across all the participants. Everyone feels like they could be better. Everyone’s efforts matter. My high school band director liked to compare it to athletic teams when he would say, “Everyone’s a starter.”

It strikes me as curious that there are not a lot of successful examples of this attitude in business. I’ve seen some similarities as I’ve looked at young businesses. On paper they have the intention to be a supportive group that builds each other up. As they grow they write more about this intention while building structures directly in conflict with that goal. Creating salary bands and role differentiation that explicitly says, “These jobs are not of the same value.”

I wonder if a business could be built and maintained in a way that carries on indefinitely the idea of a supportive group where everyone is a starter? I wonder if human nature would allow the participants to maintain that attitude over many years of working together? I wonder how compensation could be defined to best support this structure?

I’m going to leave those things as questions for now. Perhaps they are good fodder for future thinking.

(Originally posted on the blog.)

More from the Blog

This month was light on blogging, but I also wrote about some other things:

• Google Programming in 2022
• log.txt
• Magazines at Your Library
• Numbr

Ephemera

I’m starting to build up a list of my favorite albums as well as tracking those albums that I spend significant time with each year. Thanks to Shawn for some styling help!

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🍿 Last Night in Soho (2021)

I love me some Edgar Wright, but I’m still not sure what I think about this one. I did love the creativity of shots in the first half. And the music was 😙👌.

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The poetry books I’m currently reading have quite the titles. Will see if these bring out my angst or if they are just clever irony. 📚

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Recipes. Seriously. I picked up the knife for a “preparation 5 minutes” recipe. First ingredient: whole bulb of garlic (10-12 cloves), chopped. lol

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Learning to sharpen chisels:

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Some links I found interesting:

• On Keeping a Logbook & … On Keeping a Logbook: I find the logbook idea fascinating and I think it has many uses
• Building a modern home: I’ll admit I didn’t read this, but I wanted to
• Interstellar on pipe organ: Just how?
• ASCIIFlow: I have a weird thing for ASCII flowcharts
• Mac Mouse Fix: use more of the buttons on your non-Apple mouse (sorta related is Karbiner-Elements)
• It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart: Is a long read

I’m on the “mostly enjoyed Bo Burnham’s Inside” of history.

Click through for more ephemera.

I tried to read Ducks, Newburyport. I really did!

This is a book that has been lauded with praise in the literary community. It is a book that a couple of acquaintances, both of whom seem to have good taste, completely fawned over. It was the best book they read that year and maybe the best book they’d read in years. It was a book they felt was a top all-time work. An amazing book.

So I checked it out from my library and took it on vacation. My first concern landed immediately. The book clocked in at over 1,000 pages. I’m getting older and when I see a book, or series of books, that wants this much of my time I get suspicious. I don’t have as much time left as I used to! But I figured this book is said to be amazing and what else better do I have to do with my reading time? I’ll finish it eventually.

So I set about reading. The style, for me, was immediately off-putting. This book is written as a single run-on sentence. It is the protagonist’s stream of consciousness. There are connecting and filler words galore, just as you might expect there to be if you dictated your mental spaghetti to someone. The biggest connector is the phrase “the fact that.”

The fact that this and the fact that that. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Generally when I pick up a book I’ll give it about 100 pages before I set it down. I’ve started some books that are considered very good by the world at large, yet I’ve set them down after 100 pages because they just weren’t jiving for me.

(Don’t think of me as incredibly disciplined. I wasn’t able to adhere to this rule until very recent years. In my life I have finished a fair number of books I hated.)

Somehow I got myself to 100 pages. I asked these acquaintances if it gets better or easier to read. They asked if I’d gotten to the part where she’s driving and sees someone on the side of the road (or something). I had not. So I decided that, since it’s such a long book, maybe my 100-page rule should be a 300-page rule.

The fact that the book is written in this streamed style means it’s hard to get your mind locked into the story borey glory story, the fact that the constant interruptions with filler words that beget words that beget words makes you try to skim, but skimming is hard headed rock hard place because of the fact that the important story words are in amongst all these thousands millions billions google search snopes of other words that actually do not have any impact on the narrative, the fact that it was like trying to light bright flight of the navigator light a match while driving on a bumpy gravel road.

I kept on, though. I read 300 pages. I think I might have read even more than that. I gave hours of my life to this book that I never found interesting. I gave hours to this book that I actively disliked the whole time I was reading it. I regret breaking my 100-page rule.

As reviewer Meike said on Goodreads:

Let me try to put it Ellmann-style: The fact that this book has nothing substantial to say, the fact that this text relies fully on its faux-innovative style, the fact that the associations are often simply screaming “look at me, I’m experimental fiction”, for Pete’s sake, Pete Buttigieg, St. Petersburg, Putin, Trump, MAGA, Lady Gaga, WTF, the fact that this book loves itself very much, the fact that you feel like riding a dead horse after you got the gist of the whole thing, maybe ride to the Old Town Road, can’t nobody tell me nothing: This is not great literature, you can’t tell me nothing (…) fast forward: Dead forests, guns, the end.

Don’t be a Barry. Just because others are enjoying a thing doesn’t mean you have to try to force yourself to enjoy it, too. It’s okay. Set the book down and go do something that brings you happiness.

Are Straight A’s Worth It?

Spoiler alert: I do not know, but I do have thoughts.

A high-school kid with straight A’s through all four years of schooling could represent a number of situations. The kid could be a genius. The kid could be smart and a hard worker. The kid could be clever about choosing their classes. The kid could be very good at communicating with their teachers and getting second chances. The kid’s parents might have any number of the above skills.

There is certainly a financial value to finishing high school with all A’s. Class ranking can automatically get them scholarships at a number of colleges. Class ranking, GPA, and valedictorian status are a part of their financial aid story as well as the story they share on their scholarship applications.

Where it gets more interesting, I think, is when considering how valuable straight A’s are to the student’s growth and happiness. For most students, that amount of grade excellence would require a lot of hard work. Most societies around the world consider a strong work ethic to be a positive moral characteristic. (There is a lot of social engineering behind that fact, but this isn’t the time to delve into that topic.)

It seems likely that a student with straight A’s has learned a lot of things. Learning things is a good practice in my estimation. I don’t believe that straight A’s mean a student learned the most things, though, nor do I think we can know if straight A’s mean they learned the right things. What if a student had to work incredibly hard at a math class that was particularly challenging to them? Odds are they did not learn that material much beyond getting by (if you can call an A getting by). Odds are they won’t retain that material. Odds are the time they took struggling with that one class stole time away from a more natural, deeper learning they could have been doing in an area in which they were more interested. Or perhaps the stress of that studying took them away from extracurricular or social activities that would have been better for their growth into adulthood?

Along similar lines, students pushing towards these top grades may also be pushing happiness and contentment away during their pursuit. There is certainly an argument that dealing with imperfection in life, with situations that are not perfectly what you want, is a useful skill to learn. No matter how much we hope for an ideal environment, that’s just never going to be the case for any of us. Conversely, I think we would do our teens good to help them learn to seek fulfillment. It would be good for kids to discover how to discover what they excel at; to be given opportunities to go deep into those areas and learn to build skills around focusing on those topics.

When comparing the extremes, of course I would deem more successful the kid who achieved straight A’s than the kid who barely passed any of their classes. For the average and above-average kids I don’t think grades tell as clear of a story. There is certainly data that proves me wrong. There is certainly data that shows grades correlate pretty strongly with common measures of success: career achievements and monetary rewards. Though I suspect many of the highest achievers were not from that straight-A group. I suspect we could do more to foster these less-tangible skills that make for well-rounded, happy, and fulfilled humans, which to me is a truer measure of success.

(Originally posted on the blog.)

More from the Blog

This month I also wrote about some other things:

• Watching a Musical Six Times
• View from My Doom Scroll
• Trying Phoenix and Elixir
• Auto-generate sitemap.xml with Rails on Render.com
• And an extra nerdy post on a Using a Kinesis Foot Pedal (which I have since returned)

Announcing

You may have already heard this, but if not my friend Shawn and I have put together a website to help us stay motivated to do the daily thing we like to do to keep ourselves happy. If you need to make sure you do one thing every day, this might be for you, too? Give it a try!

doevery.day

Also, I am flying away on vacation. Actually, I’m probably on vacation as you read this. I flew somewhere! In a plane!

Ephemera

🎵 Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, the Four Seasons (2014)

Vivaldi had never been my thing. Then I was going through old emails and was reminded that a friend had told me, “Yes, but this is different.” It’s so good.

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🔗 Say yes and never do it

I love this message. I think it can go further. In my head is a reasonable person telling me how careful I need to be with my projects. How prepared I need to be for whatever inevitability. A lot of times I should say yes to that voice and never do what it says.

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Sheet pan pancakes.

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📺 Ted Lasso, season 2 (2021)

We watch television shows pretty slowly. Season 2 dug deep into some issues. And the twist at the end didn’t feel right to me, though watching over the course of months might have led to that confusion.

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🍿 Philomena (2013)

What an outstanding film! Judi Dench is superb and Steve Coogan provides a great counterpoint. I’ve loved Coogan for years, and was excited to see he produced and co-wrote.

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From Dobby Gibson’s “Ode to the Future”, published in Little Glass Planet:

so let’s make America a set of problems
we can admit exists again, and still have the will
to solve

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Some links I found interesting:

• Alternative Ways to Spend 5 Minutes of Awkward Downtime has a great way of saying it in the last few paragraphs
• tlk.io to fire up ad hoc chats
• Gigapixel AI is science
• A Good Used Book – let me know if you pick one up
• I didn’t know my lifetime Alfred subscription came with text expansion!
• I’ve taken a deep dive into the Obsidian notes app and this series has provided a lot of information
• Hey, Let’s Talk About Death takes the long way around to get to an important documentation topic

Click through for more ephemera.

My father played fastpitch softball until his forties. His final season was in the early nineties. As he says it today it was less that he wanted to be done to go golfing, but more that the manager was not his favorite. In any case, the game was no longer fun and it was time for him to transition to his next competitive endeavor. He’d go on to win numerous club championships golfing near-scratch. Now he is seventy-two, still golfing almost as well as he was twenty years ago.

I was only fourteen or fifteen at the time he stopped playing. I have lots of memories of attending softball games, but they are mostly of the wavy sort, as if they’re in amongst the fog of a summer morning. From time to time I’ll repeat these memories to my parents to see if they match reality, and surprisingly most of them check out.

Fastpitch softball in southwest Minnesota was a community event pulling involvement in from throughout the countryside. The county where we lived had around 11,000 residents, and by my count there were nine fastpitch teams. Over half of the population for the county was in my home town, which had two teams. The second-largest town of 1,100 residents also had two teams. From there every little town of 200 people had a team. In all cases these teams were also drawing from the surrounding rural area farmers.

Back then golf had not come to the fore Slowpitch softball was a thing these seasoned ballplayers joked about, if they even were aware of its existence at all. Townball has ruled Minnesota for decades. While townball was big in this region in the sixties and it returned in the aughts, fastpitch softball ruled the southwest corner of the state at the time. If you wanted to keep active and have some beers with friends during your summer, fastpitch softball was the way to go.

The skillsets ranged from former minor league baseball players to guys who had trouble throwing the ball in the direction that they were aiming. You had farmers rushing in from the field in May only to rush back out to continue planting soybeans until three in the morning. There were even youth teams from the region that won multiple national championships.

One of those kids ended up having a long career as a backup quarterback in the NFL. In those days, though, he was the youngest of three and overshadowed by his brother, who was the talk of the softball community. When Shane made his way to town from the northeast part of the county, hundreds of people came out to the game. The legend was that he threw a softball around eighty-five MPH. The fastpitch mound is at forty-three feet, versus baseball’s sixty feet and six inches. This makes a softball pitch at that speed look the same as a baseball thrown between 110 and 120 MPH. The conversion charts that I’ve found seem to stop at seventy-five MPH, so I do wonder if his speed was more legend than reality. It was fast to my eye! Shane quarterbacked in college and played professional softball for many years. Nowadays he’s coaching softball at the college level.

And yes, my dad hit a homerun off the NFL quarterback. I cannot remember if he was able to get around on one from Shane, though.

League games were generally two nights a week, and the team would also play a few tournaments each summer. When I was eight or nine my dad had an away game about thirty minutes from home. Games nights were fun! I would play with other kids at the game; my friends for the summer. This particular game didn’t have a lot of kids in attendance. That was okay for me. Since my siblings were five and eight years older, and my younger sister was not yet born, I was good at making up my own entertainments.

It was not an uncommon sight to have pastures and fields right next to the softball diamonds. After all, most softball communities were tiny and the ball fields were naturally placed at the edges where the town transitioned to countryside. I approached the fencing of the nearby pasture to take a look at a cow munching on grass. We had cows on our farm, so I had some level comfort being around them. And a single cow, well, that certainly felt more like a companion than a concern.

The first thing to test in these situations was if the wire fencing around the pasture was electrified. None of us kids actually knew how to test the fence, so often one kid would dare another to give it a touch. It would be quite a jolt. Being alone, I had no one to challenge, and so I collected a couple sticks and a handful of grass to throw at the fence. Clearly I did not understand the path of electricity.

Feeling confident about my safety after this test and a visual inspection looking for barbs on the wire, I hopped through to meet my new friend in the pasture. The cow seemed to take a little more notice of me than cows usually do. These beasts were generally satisfied to continue eating and eating and eating no matter what silliness was going on around them, so discovering this inquisitive cow only made me more intrigued.

I began calling to the cow. Maybe a curious cow would come to me like a dog? “Here cow. Come on Moo-Moo. Come here. Come here.” The cow made a few snorts and took a few sort of side-to-side steps, left then right. “Come on. Come on. Come here!” Some louder snorts. The cow even stamped a front hoof a couple times and scraped at the ground.

“Barry! Get over here right now! Get out of there!”

My mom has become pretty cautious over the years, but I was certainly given a lot of freedom as a kid. Having my freestyle life interrupted meant that there was probably a good reason for her to call me out of the field, so I complied quickish and without much complaint. Even at that age there was a small bit of awareness that I was trespassing where I shouldn’t.

As I climbed back through the fence the cow had began trotting, or whatever a trot is called in cow parlance. It was trotting back and forth, all the while keeping its eye on me. Snorts and huffs continued.

“What are you thinking?! Do you know what that is?”

“Yeah, a cow. We have cows!”

“No, honey. Oh, no. That’s a bull. And he’s angry.”

What an embarrassment for a supposed farm kid. Cows were everywhere in my life, but I did not have much experience with bulls. I still don’t remember if we often had bulls on our farm, though I do know we had steers. I’m guessing our bulls were rare since I don’t recall a lecture about staying away from the bull.

So I returned to the softball field, not fully realizing how much I must have scared my mom. I loved playing baseball, so I enjoyed watching softball. I paid attention when my imagination allowed a break from whatever games it invented. I tracked down foul balls to bring to the concession stand for a nickel. With fewer kids in attendance, I probably made a good haul that day. Richer in pocket and richer in experience.

From the Blog

That got a bit long, and I only wrote a couple blog posts this month, so instead of reprinting a blog post this month you get the links:

• Video Gaming vs Videos of Gaming
• Anti-Joy in Sports Commentating

Announcing

Shawn and I have been working a little it on doevery.day. It’s been a busy month with vacation and some family health issues, so not a whole lot has been accomplished. We did make some fun audio interactions when clicking your calendar, we worked on a system to follow people, and right now we’re close to launching a system for cheering on your fellow streakers. All in all not bad!

We were featured on a podcast! It was interesting to listen to Jean's discussion about how she uses the site. That discussion begins about seventeen minutes in and it has some surprise discoveries. Listen to The Weekly Review now!

Ephemera

First fire of the year.

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I think my least favorite response to reporting a bug to a company is "Here, look at our over-populated forum and see if someone is talking about it there. If not, create a new post."

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🍿 The Batman (2022)

I went into this expecting a super hero movie. By the end I realized it was more of a crime movie. I would have enjoyed the movie more if I had that attitude while watching. There are some beautiful moments in this one.

Home theater nerd aside: This movie is so dark (visually). Even in a good, average theater I was straining to see at times. 1) This would be spectacular on a reference setup and b) I feel like this is going to translate very poorly to streaming. Remember how the penultimate Game of Thrones episode was blasted for its terrible, blocky visuals in a mostly dark episode? I'm curious how HBO, or anyone else, is going to deliver a not-gross version of this via the reduced-bandwidth of streaming.

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Some kids.

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Some links I found interesting:

• Earth Reviews
• A Hidden Art Form You’ll Flip For
• Wordle creator describes game’s rise
• The Case for American Seriousness
• The Former Netflix DVD Library Is a Lost Treasure We’ll Never See Again – This does make me sad. I've subscribed as recently as last year, and the disc subscription (for reproduction quality reasons) is something I enjoy when I have an extended period of free time.

Click through for more ephemera.

I don’t think I’m the first to feel like the United States is in a cold civil war. It feels like we are so at odds with each other that the relationships are irreparable. This conflict is being encouraged through the behavior of our “leaders” in order to hold on to their positions and enrich themselves. Meanwhile the behind-the-scenes power structure is controlled by corporations and ultra-rich donors.

Growing up I was taught a deep respect for this country and its institutions. Continuing to maintain that respect for the institutions of today very much feels like disrespecting those same institutions of yesterday. Though I understand that perhaps none of these epiphanies are new; perhaps these conflicts and power dynamics have existed in some way, shape, or form for most of American history.

Still, the dynamics of today, and my understanding of them, sure makes the Gettysburg Address hit different from when I last read it a year ago. (Emphasis below is mine.)

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

As a people of this country still undertaking this grand experiment of democracy, it is advisable to take a lesson from this very painful civil war of our past. The whole speech, genius in its brevity, arrives at its ending declaring that it is in our hands to tend a government of the people, by the people, and for the people such that it will flourish for generations to come.

Our citizens have gotten complacent. We have expected the machinations of our politics alone to maintain high standards ad infinitum. We have compromised a human, moral need for honorable and just representation for all in order to get the things we want for ourselves. I’m not sure how we the people dig ourselves out of this hole. Maybe it’s too late, but recovery can only start with acknowledging how deeply entrenched we are in the hole and recognizing who it is that is throwing dirt on us from above. We the people will then have to work together to climb out and push back the very destroyers we have enabled.

From the Blog

This month I wrote about:

• Anti-Leadership
• My Basic Salad Dressing
• Moving my site to HTML
• Why I moved my site to HTML
• Building a little macOS service to convert Markdown to HTML

Announcing

Aside from spending too many hours rebuilding my blog in HTML files, I also started another newsletter this past month! Shawn and I have started writing A Good Enough Newsletter. We don’t really know where we’re going with it, but sharing our goofy discoveries and silly words is a fun time!

Ephemera

I was fortunate to take my two brass-playing kids to see Canadian Brass. Such virtuosos! After browsing the merch table we realized we were standing next to the horn player. Our talk finished with a very motivating high five to my horn-playing daughter. W00T!

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I don't believe in guilty pleasures…if you like something, like it.

– Dave Grohl

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Wow, the original WWW logo was spectacular.

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So now that I've moved my main blog off of Micro.blog, my theory is that I will feel more incentivized to use my microblog as a microblog, posting more small updates and random thoughts. I guess it makes sense that my first random thought is about having random thoughts? Random.

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Holding court at the bedroom window. (I acquired COVID-19 three days before my daughter’s high school graduation party.)

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Some links I found interesting:

• About Those Kill-Switched Ukranian Tractors by Cory Doctrow
• The Heart Part 5 by Kendrick Lamar
• Margaritas by Rick Bayless
• How Chrome and Google Use Your Data
• The Real “Rules” of Haiku

Click through for more ephemera.

While driving back from a soccer game this morning I realized I had not written a newsletter this month. It’s now Saturday and tomorrow at three in the morning I depart for a trip to Orlando with my daughters’ marching band. The newsletter will thus be short and possibly sweet.

Looking back at my school years, almost all my distant trips were based around band. In high school I traveled to California to march in the prestigious Rose Parade (A picture can be found in issue #2 – did I not write my Jennifer Lopez story yet?). We also marched in parades near Washington D.C. and NYC. In college band took me to Arizona, Chicago, Minneapolis, Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Bismarck, and more. Oh, and our biggest family trip before I was in these bands was to follow my older siblings’ marching band to Portland, Oregon. So listen here, kids. If you want to travel, join band!

This time we are chaperones on the trip and I can’t help but remember the trouble I witnessed on those band trips. After hours swimming, overfull hot tubs, bus rides, late nights, and plain ol’ mouthy teenagers. I was fairly well-behaved, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t help eliminate all the water in an Arizona hotel hot tub.

I’m hoping the kids on our trip are at least safely behaved. I’m hoping I don’t have to report anything or deal with anything I can’t handle. I’m hoping they are so warn out by the heat and the amusement parks that they collapse into bed so they can do it all over again the next day. I’m hoping.

From the Blog

Only one, hard-hitting post this month:

• Shared Photo Library

Announcing

We put up a Good Enough website this month. And we’re still writing newsletters. I think that’s all.

Ephemera

Oliver Burkeman's latest newsletter includes this bit. I'm happy to read someone agreeing with my estimation of the actual amount of expertise out there in the world. This is my personal way to handle feeling like an imposter:

Imposter syndrome? Worse than you think – because you think the issue is that you don't yet have the qualifications to hold your own among your colleagues, when in fact the truth is that everyone is winging it, all the time, and that if you're ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you're going to have to do it in a state of unreadiness.

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It’s marching band season.

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🎵 Hard (2022) by Tove Styrke

Pop that brings you back. Gated drums on the intro track make you think Phil Collins is involved. "Start Walking" and "Show Me Love" also slap. h/t @zioibi

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Taking a break as the oldest wraps up her college orientation.

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I think Observations on 6 years of journaling might have helped me to crack the code of this thing I need to do for myself, which is daily journaling. I’ve never believed I could do it at night. Now I believe that’s when I need to do it. 🤞that tool research doesn’t bog me down.

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Some links I found interesting:

• Against Gun Idolatry
• I’ve not caught up on Stranger Things, but I did learn something new because of the music.
• Writing One Sentence Per Line
• Victor Wooten is amazing and this is amazing. I should have taken about five pages of notes on this interview.

Click through for more ephemera.

I’m writing the day before we board a plane to fly to Las Vegas, and then drive up to southern Utah. We are all pretty excited to have a vacation even though the temperatures are going to be brutal. It’s time for me to learn what a dry heat truly feels like!

Those of you reading along have probably experienced both my desire to write with some frequency and my inability to keep up that habit. Recently Arun shared with me this blog post and I think things have finally clicked. I have since written in my journal sixteen of the past seventeen days.

It’s an odd feeling because my writing in this journal has not been substantial. My total words written in these past few weeks have been less than many other stretches throughout the past years. The big discovery here is that I’m not worrying about it. I’m just forming a habit, and worrying about doing it “correctly” is sure to end things before the habit forms.

In order to start journaling I only wrote 2-3 sentences a day. These would be the thoughts at the top of mind, or the experiences that seemed the most relevant. I start by describing the events of my day.

This has always felt like at best a cheat or at worst a waste of time. Yet if it helps me form a habit that I want to form, how can it be a waste of time? It is not cheating to use known-techniques to form a habit!

I’ve stopped trying to journal at my computer. I’m using a notebook and a pen. It’s not out of a desire to throw back to 100 years ago or to be hip or to be “that guy” with a collection of hand-written journals. It’s just practical because the other thing I’ve changed is to journal at the end of the day rather than in the morning. I already have enough screen temptations at night, so avoiding a nine o’clock journaling computer session seems for the best. Journaling at the end of the day means it’s pretty easy to use that trick of journaling by “describing the events of my day.”

Also, I wouldn’t mind being “that guy” with a collection of hand-written journals.

So I’m trusting the process. If I build this habit, I think I will start mentally processing my days in a different way. I think I will start making better (for me) choices throughout the day. And when I sit down in the evening I think I will eventually write more than just a few sentences, and more interesting things. I think I will.

More...

I have not written any blog posts this month, nor do I have any announcements. Keeping it light for ya!

Ephemera

Wet theme park conditions on this very trying “vacation” as a chaperone.

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It was a trip with challenges, but the kids had a blast and they got experiences like this. Success!

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Our roof was replaced last week while we were gone on a marching band trip. The roofers did not do an adequate job cleaning up. Unfortunately one of these ended up in my youngest's foot. So she got to make a surprise Fourth of July emergency room visit for a tetanus shot.

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Good Enough is taking a summer break, but we squeezed out one last newsletter for all of our superfans.

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A good night. 🎵

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Sculpture, what does it mean?

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Some links I found interesting:

• Latitude Studios – Continuing to feed my backyard office dreams (though their Instagram seems dead, so...)
• Non-Consensual Doom – A good reminder for me to avoid popping other people’s balloons

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My kids have gone to lots of first days of school over the past fifteen years. In those years none of these days were too emotional for me. I was happy to have my children out of the house for part of the day. They were learning a couple things, and getting some much needed social time with people their age. They were figuring out how to navigate relationships. It seemed like the right progression.

Thankfully I had little enough foresight to get caught up in the eventualities of this process. Year-by-year I’d send my children out into the community schools. They’d come back every day. That was that. No need to think about the future slowly creeping up on me.

Some might call this lack of foresight a lack of empathy. Though in this case it would be a lack of self-empathy, and I think by definition self-empathy cannot actually be a thing. In any case, I spent little time imagining myself in the shoes of my future self, and boy did this save me a lot of pain.

Last week I dropped my eldest daughter off at college. This is a whole different category of first days of school. It was incredibly emotional leading up to her departure. She had feelings of excitement and nervousness. She could anticipate the homesickness as well. Her parents and her siblings had feelings mostly of the more selfish variety: we were going to miss her terribly.

Logically we all knew that it was time for her to take this next step. Logically we knew that this wasn’t the end of anything, but just a continuation of our story together. Logic doesn’t soothe the ache of missing each other, though, at least not in the days around the moment. We all ignored logic and allowed ourselves to experience that pain.

As I write this it has been five days since dropping off my eldest daughter at college. We have rearranged bedrooms. She has decorated her dorm room to make it feel like an inspiring home. Today she attends her first classes and starts to get an inkling of what is ahead of her these next four years. We’re all learning to live this new phase of life.

I still miss her deeply. Yet logic has returned to its seat in my mind. It tells me that this is a natural progression. It reminds me that we will still see each other frequently. It repeats to me: “Your job as a parent is to get them prepared to go out into the world.” It is excited to hear all the stories of her new experiences. It assures me that I will hear about the lives she touches and feel like I also touched those lives a little through her.

Having a strong relationship with your children is something I will always encourage. Yet be prepared. If you are fortunate enough to enjoy spending time with your children as they grow older, naturally the departure from them will be that much more difficult. Let logic have a place in your mind. Let emotion overtake it for a time. And in the months leading up to that moment, try not to let future worry get in the way of present experience.

From the Blog

This month I also wrote about some other things:

• Vin Scully
• Lutz (adapted writing from A Good Enough Newsletter)
• Shatner in Space

I also started a travelogue for our July trip to southern Utah. So far I’ve written about the first three days.

Ephemera

I've spent a lot of time in my life learning about saving, finance, and investing. That doesn't mean I taught my kids any of this. I've felt bad about it until I found this article by JL Collins. Now I have a plan for discussion when they go off to college and careers.

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Found myself in a strange place tonight.

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Confession: I'm a life-long Minnesotan and a rock & roll fan, but I've never really listened to The Replacements. I've only listened to everyone they've influenced. Time to at least get familiar with their catalog.

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This response to "Quiet Quitting" is delicious.

Bosses want to be religious leaders rather than actual leaders. Managers want to be productivity cops, ever-vigilant of anyone failing to contribute to the company while avoiding every reflective surface.

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Heh. Ran into old school Book-A-Minute and Movie-A-Minute. Reminds me of a project I tried way back in the early 2000s. I called it Flicksticks, and it used the only drawing I could pull off: stick figures. Freaky Friday:

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Some links I found interesting:

• Rediscovering the Small Web
• Look, there are still human-edited web directories!
• Another friendly reminder that you don’t have to participate in the social media and news cycles
• Entitlement Issues is an oldie by Neil Gaiman about readers feeling entitled to receive an author’s writing
• None of the trailers for The Rings of Power have given me any hope…until this one. Maybe?

Click through for more ephemera.

I have never had good eating habits. It goes back a long way. I am learning that it also goes forward a long way, which has me concerned.

Growing up I lived on a working farm. For the first ten years of my life the farm was busied with both field planting and a sizable herd of dairy cattle. During the remainder of my childhood years the farm was strictly field work, and even that was reduced over time as my dad transitioned from farming to other careers.

In my experience the stereotypical farmer is a voracious eater of heavy food. My extended family of farmers had terrible habits around eating. It makes some sense. In the crucible of harvest season you are working near constantly for weeks, getting little sleep. You are burning tons of calories. You are under stress hoping the yields of your crop are adequate for profit, managing the breakdowns of your equipment, and feeling the winter weather creeping into harvest season, threatening it all.

Typically someone would be back at the house, preparing large meals for the work crew, and these meals were always centered on meat and potatoes. The eating style was that of people knowing all the food would be gone soon and you better get yours before it disappeared. Even though the amount of food prepared looked like mountains to us flat-land Minnesotans, the food was indeed eaten down to crumbs within minutes. For my extended family, all this habit has not only led to obesity, but also the ailments associated with obesity, such as heart issues, diabetes, and kidney failure.

My immediate family had pretty poor eating habits as well. Part of the challenge was the times we lived in. Looking back, I don’t think the eighties were known for their well-considered foods fads. Got Milk, boiled vegetables, margarine, and TV dinners abounded. We were a busy family that took advantage of any new conveniences.

I also remember being told that buffets were a good deal. A good deal was important to us because we did not have much money. Our rare restaurant meals needed to be efficient. “We could go to McDonalds and each get two big macs, a large fry, and large soda and it would cost more than this buffet!” At the time no one ever thought to ask why this example expects us to get so much food at McDonalds!

If we hit a buffet for a weekend lunch, we also talked boldly about not eating dinner that night. We ate like we would never eat again, assuring ourselves that these calories would sustain us until morning. Yet when evening arrived, there we were draining the chill and leftovers out of the refrigerator. If no leftovers existed, we’d turn to a sandwich, a bowl of cereal, and perhaps some ice cream to chase it all down. Since money was tight, nutrient-rich snacks and leftovers were never discovered.

I’ve come to believe that habit is the most powerful force on earth. Almost everything I do each day is habit. It’s amazing how these habits persist, not only in myself, but through the generations. Many of my poor habits have passed themselves, like a virus, to my children. My habitual behavior begets their modeling behavior begets their habitual behavior.

Though I feel a bit down on myself for letting my poor habits pass through to my kids, it is never too late to try to bend the arc of this habit-formed behavior. Though my children are older now, they still model themselves on my actions. Two of them still live full time in our home and continue to be steeped in the family habits we encourage. While we have been able to help form a lot of positive habits in them, we can still work toward swinging the habit ledger further to the good side for both them and ourselves.

More from the Blog

Looks like I haven’t written much on the blog this month. I did add a couple days to our Utah travelogues, though.

Ephemera

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Two of my daughters wanted to get into vinyl. I love it! However, I have successfully steered them toward CDs as a start because they are more affordable, convenient, and portable (for that college life). Of course this means I am now getting back into CDs. 🤣

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A package from overseas.

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Socks rocked off.

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Some links I found interesting:

• 90’s Cursor Effect
• Jeffsum
• Songwhip
• Libro.fm
• science:

  [I]t’s important to remember that science is ultimately a specialized way of being wrong.

Click through for more ephemera.

Over the past month I have gotten madly into making cocktails. It has been a pretty fascinating experience filled with many surprising flavors.

Earlier this year my friend, Mike, started sending me interesting cocktail links, blog posts, and newsletters. It wasn’t frequent, but just every few weeks. Each time I responded with some form of, “That looks really interesting, looks like you have a new hobby!” To which he’d reply something on the order of “No time now, but you on the other hand…” Leading to my final, “Uh, no, I have enough hobbies not going to happen.”

Then came October. I’m not even sure what triggered it. Probably an algorithm serving me a couple cocktail videos and articles. And they were interesting! Now I’m not talking about complicated recipes with custom made syrups or fat-washed alcohols. It was the classics that intrigued me. The Old Fashioned. The Negroni. The Last Word.

At the same time I realized that I was kind of sick of beer. We have arrived at a paradox of choice in the beer world. Everyone is making beer and all of it tastes about the same. I said to Jesse, “Right now I feel like I could either stop drinking alcohol entirely or I should get into making cocktails.”

You know the choice I should have made.

You know the choice I did make.

Cocktails hit a few of my sweet spots. They are similar to cooking, which I’ve enjoyed in the past. They are creating a thing greater than the sum of their parts, which always intrigues. And stocking up on bottles is a form of collecting, which the CDs, Blu-Rays, and vinyl records in my office will tell you is me all the way.

Shopping trips ensued, both online and in person. My community is rather small, so alcohol delivery has been a godsend. I now have almost every bottle I could need to make any classic you could think of. I’ve whipped up several different syrups. Most of them are easy (giving you the side-eye, orgeat!).

Family visited after Thanksgiving and I tried batching a few recipes. Alton Brown’s Hot Toddy was okay, but nothing too special. The real hits were Brandy Alexander and Jack Rose.

The secrets to batching are:

• Test the recipe by figuring out your dilution (water). If it’s a shaken recipe, measure your finished cocktail, subtract the original ingredient measurements, and the difference is your dilution.
• Do not mix in juices or carbonated ingredients until just before service. Fresh-squeeze them just before adding.
• Chill your premix. Four or more hours would be good! Since you won’t be shaking or stirring with ice, the mix needs to be cold on its own.
• Chill your glasses in the freezer. Keep that drink cold for as long as possible.
• As a consumer, sip it, but don’t take all day. These drinks don’t taste nearly as good after sitting in the glass for an hour.

I did not fully test my Brandy Alexander. I suggest you test before finalizing your ratios because ours ran a little hot. (Also, I’ve learned that Wisconsin has a tradition of Brandy Alexanders around Christmas, but usually with ice cream instead of half and half. Many families would also let their kids have a single serving to celebrate the season.)

Brandy Alexander (basis)

750ml Cognac/Brandy (St-Remy VSOP French Brandy)
375ml crème de cacao (Tempus Fugit)
375ml half and half/heavy cream
100ml water

In testing the Jack Rose, I was stuck with apple brandies I could find locally. I tried E&J and, ooo boy, was that thing sweet. It wasn’t bad, but it was sent out of balance with sweetness and low alcohol content (only 30%). I was able to order J. Carver Apple Brandy, which is local to Minnesota and 45% abv. The common recommendation is Lairds Straight Apple Brandy 50% abv.

Jack Rose (basis)

750ml Apple brandy (Lairs Straight 100 Proof)
375ml Grenadine (prefer homemade)
125ml Water
375ml Lemon Juice (at serving time)

More from the Blog

One lonely blog post this month: Before They Were Huge.

Last month I reflected on seeing a They Might Be Giants show.

Announcing

Big news on the Good Enough front. We have launched Album Whale! Come on by and give it a try!

The reason for Album Whale was that Shawn and I were maintaining our own “2022 Favorites” lists on our websites. We wanted to automate building such lists. We also wanted a place to keep track of albums to try, as streaming services are terrible about giving us a place to save albums other than our collection. With enough people stopping by Album Whale, we also hope to have a place to discover and talk about music!

Thanks to Patrick for hopping on board and lending a hand as well. W00T!

Ephemera

Amazon Prime says:

More ad-free music, increasing from 2 million to over 100 million songs in shuffle mode

I wondered what that meant in practice, so I logged in via my browser. I searched for Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I can listen to the album, but only on shuffle. So strange.

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If you’re consistent, I guess this’ll happen to everyone who plays daily.

Wordle 505 1/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

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Last mild day for the fall, so I went for a walk.

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What do you think happens when you click on this in macOS’s Apple Music?

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A few days until this little creation becomes useful to my community again: www.owatonnaparking.com

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Read Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan 📚

The right book, exactly. At exactly the right time.

I really quite enjoyed this book, but the Google / Silicon Valley love has not aged well, unfortunately. It was easy for me to dip into the book’s world, though.

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DMB, been awhile.

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Just now realizing that Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” predates The Phantom of the Opera. Apparently it was a whole thing when Phantom premiered. What do you think?

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Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets.

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Read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Yeah, that was good. Though I never really internalize books like this. Gonna process my Kindle highlights, though, and hope for the best.

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It was a Detroit style night. I like it too much.

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Did you know Wayne Brady played Aaron Burr in Hamilton’s Chicago run? Wild.

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Passing on my concert love to my middlest and her good friend.

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Some links I found interesting:

• This thread seems awfully familiar to me.
• Could we be getting a CAPTCHA replacement soon?
• It’s important to keep tabs on all of the catastrophes.
• In the waves emanating from Twitter, some interesting sites have been rising. Not that I’ve signed up for Nicheless.
• Mike also reminded me of the genius of Weird Al’s Bob.
• My phone has been looking pretty minimalist lately, and this wallpaper ties it all together.
• This does seem like a better way to consume YouTube (I’m addicted to the place), but it’d be a lot of work. I would have jumped all over this 20 years ago.
• Doing some video processing (I take them off iCloud and put them on my NAS for easy family Plex viewing) and I’m reminded that this little ExifRenamer software is worth its weight in giving the author a PayPal donation every year.
• Are you on the latest photo sharing social network?
• Someone with a PC, please play Kevin Costner’s Waterworld and tell me how it is!

Click through for more ephemera.

One More Thing

As I went to send this newsletter I realized that I never sent last month’s letter! How embarrassing!

The good thing is that my intro story last month was terrible. So I’m not going to send it, though maybe I’ll rework that story for later presentation.

I did litter the above sections with some stuff meant for the prior newsletter, however, and that’s why this thing is so long. Don’t expect it again!

New Year’s Resolutions are terribly cliché. So are newsletters saying that New Year’s Resolutions are terribly cliché. There is also the cliché of the form, “I’ve always felt that my year has a different rhythm, which is why I think about my hopes for upcoming accomplishments in the fall.” It’s all cliché. Everything’s been done before. There are only seven stories in the world. Clichés all the way down.

When I think about what I want the next year to bring, it is generally full of lightly-considered hopes. I hope I exercise more. I hope I eat better. I hope I sleep well. I hope all these improvements lead to more quality time, healthy happiness, creative creations, and so on. It’s possible I even want these things, though I find it hard to believe I want things that I don’t actively pursue.

One particular idea has been on my mind these past few days. While I really do enjoy consuming things, a collecting habit seems to go hand-in-hand with consumption. I like collecting. The tangible objects of my affections are things I enjoy and things that I like to share with others. I feel kind of sad for the generations coming after mine who have largely been detached from the act of gathering and storing these physical things.

This past year, though, I find that I don’t love how my collections have been outpacing the time I set aside for consumption. I might have more purchased albums that I haven’t spun than those that I have listened to. Movies are approaching that threshold as well. And to be clear, a majority of my consumption is still delivered by streaming means just like anyone else. (While I would be willing and happy to take breaks from the stream, I have a family’s consumptive needs to support and shutting off these faucets are a battle I’m not currently going to fight.)

So I’m toying with setting a timeframe where I simply stop buying things that I don’t need. Particularly in mind is consumptive media, but also perhaps some other things like new clothes, new bottles for my cocktail bar, new toys for my kitchen and so on. What I want to say is that I’ll do this for all of 2023, but what I think I’ll do is make a target of one month with plans to expand it to three, six, and twelve months. I mean, maybe I’ll hate it?

The outcomes here could be life-changing, or at least life-calming. I would like to work through this backlog of media. I would like to put a hold on the expense of these collections. I would like to organize and edit the collections I have. I would like to put things in their place.

Perhaps the greatest gain for me would be to free up the time I spend looking for a five-star experience. Or rather, moving that time to be spent on the hopeful things I discuss above: health and happiness. I would still be spending on health. I would still be spending on travel. This experiment would be properly placing the nutritive activities necessary for a fulfilling life a little above the things that add the spice. I want both and I have both, but maybe the nutrition and spice shouldn’t have the same weight when I plan my day-to-day?

More from the Blog

I wrote one post on the blog about silly customer service. I’m thinking I might try to write a few more blog posts in January. Maybe you want to sign on with me and Bring Back Blogging?

Announcing

Nothing new to announce this time. A fair number of album lists have been created on Album Whale. We would love to see things pick up early in 2023 and we especially hope folks sign up to share their favorite albums of 2022. I’d be super thankful if you gave Album Whale a try and shared it with your friends!

Oh, and speaking of consumption, I’ve also been playing with a thing called Feed Nozzle (thanks for the naming help, Patrick!). The idea is to have a place where you can keep track of all of the things you consume over time. This could be by passing it RSS feeds from other services where you track what you consume (Letterboxd, Album Whale, etc), by clicking a bookmarklet when looking at the consumed item on another site, or by manually creating an entry in your log. I believe that all of these things we consume are a major influence on our creative output, and I find interesting the idea of keeping a consumption record.

Ephemera

I feel like every time there is a day I try to stay tech free, some random event puts me back on the computer/device. This time it is a new iPad’s screen pooping out.

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Reading the first 2/3s of Robin Sloan’s Year of New Avenues has me excited! Getting the word out about projects has become rather challenging these days. I’m excited for new projects, and I’m excited for a world where they start being discovered again!

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Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

– Carrie Fisher

I mean, I heard this quote from Carrie Fisher, but I think it probably originated elsewhere.

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The little guys win again: “Equifax Breach Settlement Fund has sent you $5.21 USD.”

At least we’ll always have “Plaid, Inc. Privacy Litigation Settlement Administrator has sent you $35.97 USD.”

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An aggressive day of Klask.

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Click through for more ephemera.