Category: Writing

So, I decided to take the weekends off from writing this journal, but did that mean I didn’t still mentally write bits, and then throw bits into the drafts for it? It absolutely did not. Which feel like an accomplishment in itself, that I’m finding desire to write regularly, to my imagined¹Also imaginary, but still, addressed in tone, I suppose? audience even without it being an assignment or requirement or whathaveyou. We’ll see if we can keep it up, eh?

What I read

The newest edition of Metafoundry, the newsletter from Deb Chachra, whose new book, How Infrastructure Works, I’ve noted here before. This latest edition is a collaboration with Robert Martello to jointly discuss a topic I’d never heard mentioned before: how the Boston Tea Party, which happened 250 years ago Saturday, had causal ties to the brutal actions of the British East India Company in Bengal a few years earlier.

The Company directly contributed to a famine, by enforcing strict taxes into a food shortage, killing between 7 and 10 million people in 1770. This led to worldwide outrage at their actions and the permission and latitude they were given by Britain. Which led to a credit crisis that the British responded to with the Tea Act (which functioned as an effective bail out of the East India Company by allowing them monopoly sales of their Chinese tea stocks into the American market).

Which the Americans responded to by dumping the whole lot into Boston Harbor.

We think of Globalization as a modern response to new ages of communication, transportation, and commerce, but actions on the other side of the planet resulted in local ripples in 1773. The world is a whole ocean of interconnected ecologies, communities, and systems, which can go unnoticed until the waves collide and crash into precipitous actions.

What I watched

I watched the Tampa Bay Buccaneers take down the Packers up in Green Bay! Though I didn’t watch it in Green Bay, as was planned, due to some unexpected and untimely illness. Still though, hell of a performance from the Bucs!

Additionally, as I have a first round bye in my fantasy league, I got to watch the week (mostly) carefree. Which was nice!

What I listened to

The morning edition of Dan LeBatard, which touched on the most unhinged bit of the offseason so far, whereby message board nutters floated the disruption of airline travel to keep a QB from transferring:

Projects In Progress

Webapp: Spent a lot of time thinking about this while trying to sleep, which was fun. Then put some time into actively implementing a backend solution, learning as I go. So, forward progress, I suppose?

Notes:

• 1
  Also imaginary, but still, addressed in tone, I suppose?

As mentioned yesterday, last night I made kringle.

In my family, by tradition, the men make the holiday treats. I come from a line of Norwegian settlers, who, at the holidays, traditionally have made caramels, peanut brittle, lefse¹A type of flatbread of a crepe or tortilla thickness, made from potatoes, and kringle²I’ve seen others spell it as kringla, which is how the word is pronounced, however for my family, it has always been kringle. Also to note, not Danish kringle, which is a flat ring with ingredients stuffed inside, then frosted.

For years, my grandfather and my father both would make kringle right around Christmas time, and I first recall eating them very young. The first time I can remember making kringle myself, however, was after my father left. There was a school project about family histories and tradition, and as part of it, I decided to try and make kringle. My mother, who had never made it herself, stood by to assist, as I was at best 10 or 11, and not yet to be trusted unsupervised with an electric mixer.

The most distinct thing I can remember is how sticky it was, and how impossible mixing it seemed. Kringle are sort of a doughy cookie, and its dough is made similar to many cookies, with sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla, plus flour and baking powder. What sets kringle apart is the sour cream, into which is mixed baking soda, to cause a chemical reaction that induces a bubbling rise into the mixture, before blending in with the sugar-creamed butter and eggs. After mixing in the flour, what you’re left with is a dough the thickness of cookie dough but the stickiness of pizza dough. It’s the worst of both worlds to handle, and without experience or the right tools, my first attempt was a nightmare. I remember my hands, coated in dough so thickly that I couldn’t separate my fingers. They came out well enough in the end, and my classmates seemed to like them³Though, being in 4th grade, they didn’t have the most discerning palates., though were clearly missing something by way of technique.

Later in life, while visiting my father’s family at Christmas, I got my opportunity to learn at my grandfather’s side. I saw the benefits of a floured cheesecloth board and how it took much of the pain of rolling the dough away. I learned the importance of mixing the baking soda in with the sour cream, letting it bubble and froth before mixing with the other ingredients. I sieved flour in with baking powder, getting a thorough mixing. There are things a recipe card, Xeroxed and copied and photographed and digitized, will never contain. That must be learned at the knee, watched and ingrained in the timbre of one’s forebears.

I still hear my grandfather’s voice in my process, though he’s been gone for years now. I still hear my father’s as we laugh over how his father would grouse about our pretzel shapes instead of his figure-eights, as was tradition as he learned it. Both men are gone now, but they’ve passed on a legacy. I make what they made, how they made it, when they made it, and for whom. As I watched the first batch cool last night, while rolling out the second, I twisted one into a poor infinity, a crossed loop, in my grandfather’s memory, and his son’s after him.

I miss them, and I’ll carry their lessons with me. And I’ll teach them to the generations to come, the way they were taught to me. With patience, love, expectation, and reverence for those that had taught them before.

What I read

A Robot the Size of the World, which is an essay from Bruce Schneier on the longer-term implications of IoT combined with networked AI and where it might lead. A lot of the initial discussion around Internet of Things applications was regarding straight algorithms. I’m curious to see what the implication around more intelligent, morphological neurally networked algorithms open up in that space and that line of technological advancement.

What I watched

After the talk about the First World War yesterday, I finally caught They Shall Not Grow Old this morning. The resonance of the stories about the conflict told only through the voices of those that fought, and the recordings of their lives, was incredibly poignant. To hear a chorus of men from varying backgrounds all share their similar experiences, focus on the little details that still stuck with them decades hence, and to think back on events that rhyme even now with those of the soldiery of the present, was something to behold. It’s definitely earned its accolades, and I’d highly recommend trying to catch it before Netflix lets it go at the close of the year.

What I listened to

The latest episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, the new show by the inimitable Pablo Torre. His show is an explosion of his inner self portrayed audibly and visibly externally. And then more than anything, I was thrilled to listen today because my absolute favorite sports talker, Katie Nolan, was on the show.

I’m a long-time Katie Nolan fan, back to her days recording YouTube shows in her time between shifts at the bar. I’ve followed her from the internet to Fox and her time teaching Regis Philben about the future and launching Garbage Time (which might be the most she was ever herself on screen) , to ESPN and the COVID casualty of her time there (where I listened to every episode of her podcast and watched every episode of her show, even as their leadership flailed around trying to find the right way to user her talents), and even to her time cohosting Apple TV’s Friday Night Baseball (which she took more seriously than most veteran broadcasters).

Wherever I can find her work, I’m there, and wherever she ends up next, I’ll be there. Katie helped me learn more about myself, showed me new ways to think about topics I’d not given enough thought, and was one of my vital points of connection to the wider world during COVID.

Projects In Progress

This thing: I made an executive decision to go with a Monday-Friday schedule, so we’ll seeya back here after the weekend.

Notes:

• 1
  A type of flatbread of a crepe or tortilla thickness, made from potatoes
• 2
  I’ve seen others spell it as kringla, which is how the word is pronounced, however for my family, it has always been kringle. Also to note, not Danish kringle, which is a flat ring with ingredients stuffed inside, then frosted.
• 3
  Though, being in 4th grade, they didn’t have the most discerning palates.

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.