Month: December 2023

I get real windy below, so I’ll go short here, in anticipation of a longer graph tomorrow:

Made (Norwegian) kringle dough last night, will be baking kringle this evening. More on the topic mañana.

What I read

There Once Was An Empire, by Anton Cebalo, which discusses the nature of collapsing empire and how the cosmopolitan nature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire allowed it to be observed more thoroughly through modern eyes in its fall, and in the transition between the seemingly permanent world before and the aftermath of a raw new world emerging amid the glacial ruin of the First World War.

A common refrain these past twenty years has been about the perils of living through history and how it’s difficult to keep an outside perspective on current events. Much of the past from which we might hope to learn is undiscovered, the contemporary catalogs lost to time and tide.

Dan Carlin’s series on WWI does many things well, but the piece that most stuck with me was the belief among every stanchion of society entering the war that it would be just another conflict like those that came before. That there would be the glory and triumph and honorable sacrifice that their cultural experience both allowed for and cherished. The unforeseen effects of the automation and industrialization of machinations scoured both the physical and cultural plane.

The generation of artists, writers, and poets that emerged has long been studied for their style, tone, and vantage on the era. It is important that their historical perspective also be learned from, in a time where it feels like we could be on the verge of a renewed crumbling of empires. Lessons forebear and lessons abound.

What I watched

I wrapped a rewatch of Enterprise, which was probably the least loved of all the Trek series, but the one that most resonated with me. It bloomed in the days after 9/11 and spoke in a voice that was still reeling from and reflecting on a new world we had stepped into after the collapse of a status quo coming out of the fall of the Soviet Union and what seemed like a new era of (generally) calm on a geopolitical stage. (As in the previous block, history rhymes.)

Enterprise¹Later Star Trek: Enterprise, but premiering with the mononym, unlike the shows that came before and after, dealt with a humanity still within living memory of their last world war and the darkest times of their history. Hunger and poverty and homelessness had been conquered, but through the work of peoples they knew, through institutions and actions that had living resonance with them, as opposed to the achievements of some ancestral age. They were still struggling to get their heads above water and to step out into unknown space beyond the solar system. To go was still inherently to do so boldly, and the show wasn’t afraid to demonstrate a humanity that was not yet as enlightened or free from internal conflict as Roddenberry would portray.

It had its faults, certainly. An eye that was happy to appeal to male gaze, an instinct to follow the “ripped from the headlines” trend of other hour-long television programming, and a finale that was far too happy to try and pull from a Next Generation fandom for ratings rather than staying true to the voice of the show itself, leaves a hastily wrapped run to a show tied in a sloppy knot. Also, don’t get me started on the damned temporal cold war and how much it weighed on what could have been a straightforward narrative arc.

Still, it was a show willing to be itself and allow interpersonal conflict and growth in a canon that was all too willing to let humanity off lightly as the peacemakers and the anodyne middle ground. It was mostly fun, and let an able Scott Bakula dig his teeth into a Right Stuff role out among the stars.

What I listened to

The newest episode of RIP Corp from Ingrid Burrington and her stellar team. RIP Corp is a podcast about the failure of businesses and what we can learn from the various avenues, experiments, and attempts at building something, and what both the opportunity and the failure can teach us about our society and ourselves.

This ep was on Fansteel and tantalum, which is a “rare metal” whose mining and use in various applications make for a great framework to examine intended and unintended consequences behind profit motives and human behavior. Ingrid focuses on the geographic interplay of a corporate desire for economic certainties and the willingness to cause chaos to achieve them. Listen wherever you get your podcasts these days.²For the record, I’m an Apple Podcasts app guy.

Projects In Progress

Webapp: Played around a bit with v0.dev, which is pretty damned remarkable, especially as someone with no React chops. A big part of the Why behind this project is to try and learn the modern web stack after learning a bunch of it in my late teens/early 20s, letting that atrophy for two decades, and coming back to an entire world that evolved in the meantime. I’m reminded of The Genesis Tub bit from The Simpsons, in that I fell asleep and woke up into a world of massive change beyond my absent eye. I’m not sure who Bart is in this stretched metaphor. Probably Facebook.

Anyhow, time to lean in hard and learn how Node works!

Notes:

• 1
  Later Star Trek: Enterprise, but premiering with the mononym
• 2
  For the record, I’m an Apple Podcasts app guy.

Weird day today, as I had one of those nights of constant thought while trying to sleep and found that I could not. Too much background noise in my own head, too many thoughts about a dozen different tangential lines. Too much noodling over possibilities, avenues, right and wrong pathways to take. At two different points I sat up defeated, tried to do something more concrete, felt myself tiring, set it aside, then slipped right back out of that sliding consciousness and into the miasma of thoughts.

Tonight, we’ll try better not to drink the late coffee.

What I read

I spent some time this morning reading the newest issue of Capital Gains, from Byrne Hobart. I came to read Byrne as the natural step from reading Matt Levine and then Patrick McKenzie, who form a sort of cabal of interesting thought on capital, finance, money, and tech. I can’t say I read every thing thoroughly, or that I thoroughly understand everything I read, but building their insights into my wider understanding of the tech world has helped me immensely to understand flavors of Why behind What that I wouldn’t otherwise have any insight into.

What I watched

The final match of the UEFA Champions’ League group stage. International soccer is weird for an American to try and get into, and for most fans, there’s a story at some level of depth about how they came to the team they support. Many are the fans of Real Madrid or Manchester United, who came to that fandom the way Cowboys fans outside central Texas came to root for the star. For others, there’s some ancestral tie, or a love for a team shared with a friend or family member that brought them also into the fold.

I chose to root for Manchester City out of spite.

I’m a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan, which happened before I lived in Tampa, adopting the hometown team of the town my father relocated to after his divorce. It was a way to bond with him from across a country, to have a shared rooting interest in something.

The owners of the Buccaneers, the Glazer family, first purchased shares in the storied club Manchester United the year after they won a Super Bowl, then steadily increased their ownership over the next two years. After pumping all of their funding into United, suddenly their desire to improve the Buccaneers began to wane, to where the team felt like an afterthought.

Right around 2006, after I first moved from Florida back to Wisconsin, I began spending a lot of time with friends who’d grown to be significant soccer fans. Through them I saw the beauty and the appeal of the sport, and after a time, looked for a team of my own to root for. And lo, did I find, that United was not the only team in Manchester. They, the new jewel in the eye of the owners I despised, had a cross-town rival. An upstart with a long history of struggle, who had recently found their footing again in the top division of English soccer, and who would prove to be a thorn in the eye of the Glazers’ jewel. I became a fan of Manchester City.

Not long after I chose the club, so did new owners. Deep pocketed oil wealth was still a fairly new thing in the sport, and suspicion was not unearned. They did, however, do what the Glazers had seemingly refused to in Tampa. They invested in building a champion. In came new players and new managers, and a winning attitude. A revitalization of style and substance, and a growth into what now stands as a dynasty of success. It’s the one way I feel a connection to fans of teams like the Patriots. I had a front row seat (from 4000 miles away) to the carving of a monolith of success.

Soccer, for me, has been an experience that built from ignorance to fervence over the course of the last two decades. It wasn’t a natural fandom, not one inherited or inculcated at birth, but one I came to in adulthood, by way of connecting with friends and with a wider world. And so, at the bleary hours of weekend mornings, or on an otherwise quiet Wednesday afternoon, I find myself, for 90 minutes (plus stoppages), watching a wide green swath of turf, and the murmuration of 22 men across it. A beautiful game indeed.

What I listened to

A bit of Penelope Scott’s two new EPs, who I started listening to from TikToks. Modern music discovery’s weird for me. I was never a big magazine guy and haven’t ever had the kind of wide-ranging taste that brought new bands and musics to me organically in the way others seem to. But now that radio is in decline and algorithmic discovery is so oddly dissonant, I end up finding new music in ways I’d not imagined before. Like as backgrounds to 30 second videos leading to crawls down ladders into catalogues of unknown depth.

So yeah, Penelope Scott. Pretty good!

Projects In Progress

Webapp: As part of that recurrent insomnia, I did register a new URL for the project and get hosting set up for it. So there’s something, I guess?

Writing: I have this scene, that I have no idea how it connects more widely, or to what, that’s been kicking around my head for years now. It’s set in a future that, when I first had it, felt farther off, but for which I keep coming across random reference materials as the present catches up with that imagined future. I really wish it’d go tie itself to a longer plot line, or at least tell me how it becomes a more substantial vignette so I could stuff it into a short story, or something. Instead, just this recurring thought about a mechanical pigeon that doesn’t flutter off with the rest of the organic flock it has hidden within, at the loud report of a gunshot, from an office across the way, that it has sat staring at for hours.

I made my fantasy football league’s playoffs, but as no one enjoys hearing about anyone’s fantasy football team (least of all me), let me instead reminisce a bit about our league as a whole, and the profound connection it has kept between a group of friends from the mid-90s through today.

I’m old enough that I started playing fantasy football in the days where a live draft was the only available option, as the internet was still mostly BBSs, Usenet, and AOL, and where all scoring was done by poring over the afternoon Waukesha Freeman on Mondays after school, to add up the totals by hand. In our first few years we played Touchdown Only scoring, mostly for ease of tallying, and maximization of heartburn. Looking back at the rosters now is a deep cut of Remember A Guys, not only for the players but for the league members as well.

Throughout the years our lineup has flexed from 10 teams to 12, to a short-lived 14, and to include friends of friends, college acquaintances, and now wives of original owners. We’ve not quite handed teams down to anyone’s kids, but I see that day on the horizon, and suspect some owners might improve if they let their kids do their drafting…

We’ve had owners leave for disinterest¹Miss ya, Weis, for malfeasance²C’mon man, you cannot pay your dues in PokerStars bucks., and for playing above the level of the competition³AKA the Wendorf Rule, which has never been enforced since that departure. We’ve had rules come in and out of vogue⁴Return yardage was a mistake, team names change and evolve⁵And sometimes not, as the team named after Harambe stands in attestation, and interest wax and wane, but throughout, we’ve kept a core group of friends from high school together through moves, colleges, marriages, children, lives and deaths, and every other event that can impact a group of people. We get together once a year to draft (virtually, lately, but often as we can in person), and once more to celebrate our friendship and commiserate our losses.

Fantasy football is a weird little hobby that America loves and loathes in various forms and flavors, but for us, it’s been a tie that binds a group of friends together, wherever we’ve gone, and wherever we’ll go. More than missing football once the season ends, it’s what I miss most at the closing of the year. That collective bond of lighthearted competition between people who’ve grown up, and out, but not apart.

Good luck in the playoffs, everybody.

What I read

The Day Twitter Died, a series on The Verge about the death of one of the great things in my life, Twitter. I shouldn’t have felt as attached to it as I did, but damn if Twitter wasn’t the central focus of my attention for the last decade plus. I loved Twitter so much that I mourned Tweetbot and briefly considered writing my own shitty version of it to sneak under the temporarily available API hurdles before that all became one massive lost cause.

The tech industry gives a weird type of reverence to people who don’t really deserve it. Most of them are cosplaying as a different person who kind of did and kind of didn’t deserve it, and from whom they learned all the wrong lessons. I worked for a very long time at the most notable company founded by the man and, even after his death, there’s a weird cult-like visage of his presence that turns people that talk about him into caricatures and sycophants.

There are few good people after the checks clear. Money makes monsters of them, and leaves us searching for the narrow avenues of goodness in the wake of their largess. We’re a weird people, with odd reactions to all too imaginable glories, both from the outside and from within.

What I watched

Animation vs Physics from Andy Becker, which is from the same team that made the amazingly crafted Animation vs Math you’ve likely seen previously.

What I heard

“Listened” to the Dan LeBatard Show, as I do most mornings, via YouTube.

Dan, for me, was a revelation in how I enjoyed sports. Rather than the same 5 topics from 20 different mouths, Dan focused on the humanity, the connection that sports has to larger life, and how one can see the world through a community’s cultural lens on what they cheer, what they celebrate, what they boo, and what they froth over.

He built the careers of a gang of the smartest, funniest, wittiest, and worthiest new breed of sportswriters and sports talkers. He supported weird experiments and gave voice to those who’d be drowned in a sea of “Stick to Sports”-ism, whether within the national broadcasting titanic that is ESPN or beyond, by example.

He started his own crazy experiment when that ship started sinking and I’ve been happy to float along beside, listening to a different sort of radio program in a time where we’ve lost radio, lost faith in experimentation, and have largely lost the courage to not be everything for everyone.

As has been said about another of my favorite things, it’s a niche show, for a slice of humanity I’m glad to call myself a part of.

Projects in progress

Webapp: Gonna keep being vague about this thing, as is my wont, but I got some more general structural modeling knocked out, and also found some notes I’d made previously about how I wanted to do this. My organizational system is much less a system than faith that the stack of various notes, clips, screenshots, post-its, napkins, scraps of torn off paper, and coffee-stained coasters contains what I put into it, because I never throw anything away.

ADHD: It’s a Lifestyle!

I also rewrote some of the product descriptions for my mom’s store (get your teddy bear for Christmas now!) and cleaned up some weird nav issues therein.

Notes:

• 1
  Miss ya, Weis
• 2
  C’mon man, you cannot pay your dues in PokerStars bucks.
• 3
  AKA the Wendorf Rule, which has never been enforced since that departure
• 4
  Return yardage was a mistake
• 5
  And sometimes not, as the team named after Harambe stands in attestation
• 6
  Yep, that one’s in the RSS reader too.