Category: Writing

We’re finally at the breaking point of the cold front hovering over my house, and with more reasonable temperatures on the horizon, my mind starts unthawing a bit. People run from this cold, flee to deserts, to beaches, to far-flung locales to not brace themselves amid the bone deep nature of nature. I’ve lived in those places, and missed this. There’s something about a harsh Winter that makes life feel lived, time feel transitory and not a still forever of nothing. time is visible here, countable in the changing of moments into hours, into days, into months. Seasons have width, breadth, breath to them. To freeze is to know there is a thaw coming, a Spring beyond the wall of grey, glowing blue and green just over the horizon.

Inputs

1: When China, in its evolution of itself after Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to alter course, was looking to learn about America, it sent a young student to study the country and report back. Where did they send him to learn about the beating heart of America? Where did they seek the soul, the essence of an entire nation? Iowa City, Iowa.¹I’m already imagining the Shutdown Fullcast bit about China learning everything it knows about America from the 1988 Iowa Hawkeyes

To imagine what could have been if they had picked any number of other places. A China that learned about America from Miami would have been an interesting time to live in.

2: Pablo Torre had Roy Wood Jr on to talk about how the hosting of awards shows works, the issues recent hosts have run into, and the why behind the how. Really interesting inside baseball stuff, down to joke selection and timing and knowing one’s audience.

Also, Roy and I are seemingly incredibly similar thinkers in that, we’re both very deliberate and also ephemeral as hell, with very open hearts to the bountiful variety life holds and the potential of our places within it.

3: Sports Illustrated is essentially dead today. Private equity is the worst thing we allow to happen in America. The argument that they’re clearing out the chaff of unprofitable companies belies an insistence that the only reason for anything to exist is to bring a larger than average profit percentage to a very small percentage of the nation. It’s a belief system that needs more public and fervent shame sloughed on its adherents, but won’t, because people are so easily bought off, on the one axis along which their interests converge: money.

Eat the rich.²I mean, they’re stuffing themselves full of the highest quality feed, it’s like they’re preparing themselves for consumption already.

Projects In Progress

Man, who in the hell knows anymore. This section has been less about progress or reporting of statuses and more about finding a new way to shrug in print each day. Let’s see if it returns next week, or if it’s cleaved for its own good.³I am aware of the ironic rhyming of the previous against #3 above. Different instincts entirely, but I am aware.

Notes:

• 1
  I’m already imagining the Shutdown Fullcast bit about China learning everything it knows about America from the 1988 Iowa Hawkeyes
• 2
  I mean, they’re stuffing themselves full of the highest quality feed, it’s like they’re preparing themselves for consumption already.
• 3
  I am aware of the ironic rhyming of the previous against #3 above. Different instincts entirely, but I am aware.

I had an interview cancelled this morning, mere hours before it was scheduled, because they offered the role to someone else. I don’t know what kind of operation this group was running, but it’s another of those examples of how corporate recruiting treats those looking for work, and makes one wonder how they’re thinking the impression they create among interested parties will be carried long-term. They’re certainly not creating promoters through that sort of effort.

Anyhow, that’s the extent of my venting on the matter. Best of luck to them in their continued blah blah blah. I was very happy to attend the other interview I scheduled for the day, which went pretty well if I do say so myself.¹Ed note: I mean, it’s your blog bud. Of course you say so.

Also, in my grumbling afterwards, I noticed a typo on my resume. Son of a…

Inputs

1: An example of my general theory of tech incompetence when it comes to areas outside their physical presences: electric cars aren’t getting the range their owners expect in the cold.

This feeds into my general belief that large tech companies, who don’t, as a group, have headquarters located in the upper Midwest (where it gets, y’know, cold) have massive blindspots in the implementations of their technology. The one that always comes to mind for me is the Apple Weather app which regularly displays zero degrees as -0º, and has nonsensical snowfall totals every time it snows.

These aren’t things one notices in the Valley in CA or in Austin, TX, or Virginia, or Raleigh, but would be very evident to their engineers and product managers if they actually used their products in the variety of conditions afforded by a Chicago or a Milwaukee or a Minneapolis.

2: Today on Pablo Torre Finds Out, we learn about the Stanley phenomenon (yes, the brand that made the camping cookware buried in the storage tub in your garage) and how women selling to women stoked this entire trend. Plus a whole threadline on “Who was the Pop-Tart” which, if that means nothing to you, will mean something to you after watching Sarah Spain’s investigative reporting.

3: In a depressing follow-up to Tuesday’s grumbling about the declining quality of Google searches, “Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles,” from, again, 404 Media. Which, of course they are. First they broke local news, now they’re going to break the entirety of news by replacing it with AI-generated bullshit en masse to avoid paying their means of production. Late capitalism isn’t late enough, friends.

Projects In Progress

(I should note here that I pre-write a lot of these early in the day, so I’m guessing at my progress most of the time.) Good, I guess? Futzing around with hosting and frameworks and stuff.

Notes:

• 1
  Ed note: I mean, it’s your blog bud. Of course you say so.

Middle of the week, middle of the month, beginning of the year. Life continues apace, into sub-zero temperatures and the quickening darkness of thinly lit days. And yet, the blanket of white reflects the light into a landscape of glow and twinkle. Cold, and grey above, and white below, and deliberate in existence. As goes the Winter, so will come the Spring, one step at a time, one day after the other. A pacing march into March, and the year beyond.

Inputs

1: Speaking of Winter, Kottke links off to some wonderful photography of oddly frozen time and matter, and the ways that the slowing and stopping lead to the ephemeral trapped, paused, caught mid dance in the interstitials. It reminds me in a way of the in-between frames in cartoons or animations. Animators draw key-frames, that show the important moments of movement they’re looking to show, but to get from one to another, 12-24 frames per second must be generated. The frames between often look nothing like one would expect, with blurs of movement that the mind’s eye interprets as natural movement, our brains filling the gutters of space between still images, creating movement from flickers of color and light.

2: The latest edition of Felicia Day’s newsletter goes into her personal experience with something I think all of us struggle with: the difficulty of being beholden to gatekeepers who decide our fates outside our influence or ability to control. She’s fought this through owning her own means of production, which I think is probably the right impulse these days, especially with the commodification of avenues of publishing, though it does also tend to limit the scope and scale of such things.

This also jives with recent angling I’ve seen about a return to niche or bespoke online presences, away from massive platforms that sand down the rough edges and calculate for a middle that doesn’t feel like it actually addresses any middle of the curve we’re on. Long tails everywhere again.

3: Iowa caucuses happened. It went about as expected, but I think it’s important to remember that caucuses in general aren’t incredibly inclusive by nature of how they’re run in a modern world, and that, as a total of those eligible to participate in them, under 15% of those actually did. Let’s not take any sort of enduring lesson from the 53,000 assholes in Iowa fervent enough and well-positioned enough to come out in a snow storm and line up behind a fascist insurgency.

Projects In Progress

Made a server fire up on the localhost. So that’s something.