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Inspiring, really.
A week of focus, and diving into some new nonfiction
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Thinking is an active pursuit
Learning how to think in three easy steps
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The Infinite Jest Review
A long time ago, I read Infinite Jest and I have what amounts to complicated feelings about. I think I fall firmly into the camp of people in which the book was not transcendental or life-changing, but still impressive to behold in its scope and depth. As I’ve been looking back through my notes on…
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Being in Time
Embracing the chaos, forgetting about time, thinking about innovation
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Men made it, but they can’t control it
And on to Grapes of Wrath
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Consuming films like Coca-Cola
Finishing my non-fiction sweep of Sculpting in Time and Just Keep Investing
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Did we tell you how the marmoset saved us from Hitler?
Advancing through the Tarkovsky opus.
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Weeknotes #2
Reading Articles I struggle a bit with what to read and when. My reading list is getting bigger and there’s no way I’ll ever get to it all. So I found some comfort in Tracey Durnell’s Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines. Especially this bit: Read fiction in as few sittings as possible, but take my…
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Weeknotes #1
I want to do it, now make me do it
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Clubhouse, and the audio social platform
Clubhouse is, I think it’s safe to say, going to be the next big source of social platform growth. Twitter Spaces will be a competitor there, possibly even the dominant one, but audio is clearly winning out here. Which makes sense in a year that a) had people be on video calls all day (I’m…
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Clubhouse Harassment, and Tech’s Move from Enthusiast to Industrial Press | Where’s Your Ed At
A16Z has benefitted immensely from the positive press in its investments – in Lyft, Facebook, Zynga, Slack, Asana, and others – and watched as the press has changed from a relatively frictionless marketing channel for their investment rounds into something that requires a lot more effort, and isn’t simply an uncritical flume of people saying…
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But wait, there’s more! | XML Conference
There’s a story that Yuri was once on a sales call with a colleague talking to some potential customers about the benefits of descriptive markup and the virtues of Author/Editor. He was eloquent, and SGML and Author/Editor were in fact a pretty good fit for this particular organization, so the potential customers were very soon…
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A Tale Of Two Ecosystems: On Bandcamp, Spotify And The Wide-Open Future | NPR
As Ek makes clear, even the COVID pandemic can be put to use by Spotify’s strategy, as can the death of an existing medium for music, “linear radio” (more commonly known as “radio”). The business model of the Internet is interesting. There is no rule, for instance, that tech companies “move fast and break things.”…
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Judas and the Black Messiah
What will stick with me — besides a performance by Daniel Kaluuya I was fully not prepared for — was the speeches. The speeches, that by all accounts, were pulled from the actual words of Fred Hampton. Rhetoric that encapsulated a moment with timeless readiness. They were treated with such reverence by the director, that…
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A New Conservatism | Foreign Affairs
In the wake of Trump’s defeat, analysts have pondered whether his brand of populism might represent the conservative future. But this misunderstands his role. There is no discernible Trumpism independent of Trump himself. Writing in Foreign Affairs, former Romney advisor Oren Cass offers an alternative view on the future of conservatism, one that I don’t…
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Quotes about the Web
It occurs to me that I come across quotes about the web a lot, so I think I’m going to keep track of them and then publish them from time to time. There’s this tweet from Vincent Bevins: I tweet this every few weeks but the internet absolutely does not work any more. You are…
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The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram | Document
And maybe here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Big Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme culture where the only ideological no-go zone is the liberal center. Caroline Busta A really fascinating look at the counterculture of now and the future, whereby the youth (those…
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California Is Making Liberals Squirm | The New York Times
Ezra Klein at his new editorial home in the New York Times on the contradiction of a conservative, progressive California: There is an old finding in political science that Americans are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals. In California, the same split political personality exists,…
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On the Rocks
In some ways, this film feels a bit like Coppola playing the hits. But it’s filled with careful staging, elegant cinematography, unique soundscapes, and these quiet moments that elevate the charisma of Bill Murray and Rashida Jones. That’s more than enough to stand on its own 2020 Dir. Sofia Coppola
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The Last Black Man in San Francisco
A captivating and beautiful love letter to the lost days of the city of San Francisco. The story frames the conflict as a relationship between a man, his childhood, and the home he had lost. But it is, in truth, a poetic film about the beauty of friendship. 2019 Dir. Joe Talbot
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Show Don’t Sell
Take credit for what CSS has done. Don’t say: “Web standards did this” Do say: “We’ve set up a system that will automatically format the page whenever you update it.” Let the client think you’re smart and give you more business… Show don’t sell – Jeffrey Zeldman I was doing a bit of research on…
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This used to be our playground
Design got its seat at the table, developed a business mindset, became increasingly inclusive, and finally grew up. So much to celebrate and so much distance travelled, and yet design seems relatively passive and polite; acquiescent in a build-by-numbers assembly process. I find myself returning to the same bit of circular thinking that Simon Collison…
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WordPess.com Launches New Website Service
Mullenweg responded to them, saying he is “100% certain this will drive more up-market consulting in the future” to consultants who handle larger projects and potentially bring more business to plugin and theme developers. He also noted that Bluehost’s full service product is a similar solution and that services like Web.com have been competing in…