My recent posts on how I choose what fiction to read and what’s going on with the publishing industry share a theme: perverse incentives. (Indeed, it seems that a lot of my writing is about perverse incentives, but more about that another time.) The intellectual/political monoculture of the modern university leads to an intellectual/political monoculture in the major media companies, and when you combine that with the many ways the internet has disrupted the economic models of all the arts, you get a general environment in which interesting, imaginative work is not just resisted, it’s virtually prohibited. All the incentives of everyone involved are aligned against it.
Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.
Or you could listen to a Sally Rooney novel on Audible while chopping the veggies. Same, basically. This is what I think about almost everything from current big-studio Hollywood movies to new literary fiction to music by Taylor Swift or Beyoncé: it’s … okay. It doesn’t offend.
But wouldn’t it be nice to have something better? Wouldn’t it be cool to be surprised? Crevecoeur famously described early America as a land characterized by “a pleasing uniformity of decent competence.” But after a while the competence isn’t all that pleasing. As Wittgenstein famously wrote in the Philosophical Investigations: “We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” I wrote an essay about this.
Of course I think about this stuff all the time.
The good news is that these production-line periods tend to produce a reaction: Romantic poetry was one such; punk rock another; the Nouvelle Vague in French movies yet another. Indeed, so was Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But the bad news is that today our manorial technocracy makes the project of finding cracks in the walls more difficult than it has ever been. So I’ll be watching the rough ground to see who turns up there, but in the meantime, here’s how I make my decisions about watching movies:
If someone I love wants me to go to a movie with them, I do.
Otherwise, I don’t watch movies produced and/or distributed by the big studios. (I had been leaning in this direction for a while, but I didn’t make it a guideline until three or four years ago.) I just don’t, for the same reason that I don’t read novels by people who live in Brooklyn: it’s not a good bet. The chance of encountering something excellent, or even interestingly flawed, is too remote. Not impossible — I really enjoyed Dune, for instance, and Oppenheimer, both of which I watched with my son — but remote.
I don’t subscribe to Netflix, or HBO, or Amazon Prime. (I do have Apple TV as part of my Apple subscription, but I primarily use it to rent movies. I did try watching For All Mankind and Masters of the Air, but both of them were too … Mid for me.) The only service I subscribe to is the Criterion Channel, because it allows me to watch (a) classic movies, (b) independent movies, and (c) foreign movies. All of which are much better bets than anything the current big studios make.
I never hesitate to watch a favorite movie again when that’s where my whim takes me. In fact, I watch movies from my Blu-Ray/DVD collection more often than I stream anything.
I ran myself ragged at soccer and after teaching a class in the afternoon I've been struggling to keep my eyes open. I don't want to work and I'd probably not be any good at it anyways in my current mental state. But I'm also too sleepy to read and too tired to go out. If I nap I know I'll either wake up feeling terrible or ruin my sleep schedule. You just can't win sometimes.
Yesterday my parents took me shopping for dress clothes. My wardrobe is woefully lacking in the formal department, and even though I only need to be in the office a few days a week I don't like feeling short on clothes I like. At a store that specialized in fitted mens shirts, the salesperson on duty listened to what I needed, took one good look at me, and came out of the backroom with one that fit just right. There's something so satisfying about seeing someone do anything that well.
Formal wear is so silly to me. Who decided that formal pants need to have their pocket open sideways instead of upwards? Or that a button down collar is more casual than its other collared cousins? Or that a certain texture or fabric is more formal than another? It’s all such nonsense. Sometimes I can't believe we can't just all agree to drop the farce. Why does it really matter what any of us are wearing?
I saw this little shelf in the Lululemon dressing room yesterday. The thought of spending one week's pay on a pair of trousers certainly gives me the heebie-jeebies, so I think they have me covered on that front. (I didn't buy the pants.)
In a week's time I'll be en route to Tokyo for the first time. I'm very excited — it's been on the top of my travel bucket list for many years now. I've watched so many hundreds of hours of Japan travel content that I wonder what it'll be like to experience things in person that I've already seen vloggers do many times.
(I only have a mere few days in Tokyo, but if you have recommendations for things to eat/see/do, please send me an email! I'd love to hear them, and file them away for next time if I don't get to them this trip.)
Our cash came in!
From a celebratory brunch with my friend: a market hash and a decadent cinnamon roll
I reckon this was the first lesson of a war-oriented society that we are all learning. Old what’s-his-name knew, with the sage wisdom of somebody living in a war-oriented society; when you are attacked, war is not optional. Killing is not only an appropriate answer to killing, it is the only appropriate answer.
In the minds of millions, opposing the violence of the police justifies any violence the police might do against any of us.
This is the seventh and final lesson of war in our war-oriented society. Killing is the only thing that will keep us safe from killing. Therefore, anyone who opposes killing represents a threat justifying further killing.
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In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.
The first time that I interviewed Sara Nelson, in 2019, she gave me a quote that I still think about: “People think there’s only a limited amount of power that you have, and if you exert some power, you’re not gonna have enough for the next fight. That’s just not how it works. Every time workers really grab their power and take action, it encourages the next group of workers to have that power and act more. Power expands, it doesn’t contract.” The constant impulse to stop doing daring, ambitious things, understandable though it may be, is wrong. It is not responsible leadership. It is deadly leadership. It is an act of turning off the tap of power, rather than opening it further.
This ethos applies far beyond the Labor movement, if we dare ask for more: at a personal and societal level.
It remains good advice not to judge an album (or a book, or almost anything) too quickly. From Oliver Darcy at CNN on Tortured Poets:
One week later, my view of the album has entirely reversed. After spending more time with the two-hour sonic feast, more methodically touring through its subtleties and nuances, I am ready to declare that it is one of Swift’s best works yet. Anecdotally, it seems others are also identifying with this experience, initially expressing tepid feelings toward the album, and then realizing after a few listens it has really grown on them.
In high school, I had a friend named Joe who owned a Honda Trail 110, a small motorcycle with enough history for its own Wikipedia page.
It didn’t go very fast (40MPH tops if you’re going downhill) but Joe rode that thing to school every day — or at least he tried, it often broke down on the way.
On those cold, winter mornings in the desert you’d find Joe striding into school five minutes before the bell rang. He’d take off his helmet, revealing a face flush red from the cold, then take off his brown leather bomber jacket he’d found at a thirft store, stuff it all in his locker, and head to class with the faint whiff of oil and gasoline in his wake.
It was so damn cool.
It made me want a Honda trail bike but my parents didn’t approve of motorbikes.
Fast forward twenty years and my moment came.
Right before the pandemic hit, I came across a local ad where a guy was selling his 1978 Honda Trail CT90 (the “90” classification meant it was even weaker than the “110” Joe had).
With three little kids to care for, my wife shared the “motorcycles aren’t safe” hesitancy of my parents. But this bike that couldn’t go more than 35MPH, which meant I was relegated to the back roads of town and desert trails. Being gutless was a feature, not a bug.
So I bought it, a 1978 Honda Trail CT90 in mustard yellow.
Yup, that is not a typo: 1978. 44 years old (at the time of publishing) — older than me! And, all things considered, it was in fantastic shape. To be frank, if I’m in that good of shape when I reach that age, I’ll be happy.
But being in good shape was a relative term for its age. It came brimming with its own idiosyncratic problems, the first of which became apparent the day I bought it. After buying it and driving it home it failed to start back up, so I went to the internet to troubleshoot the issue.
(I must admit here that I knew — and still know — basically nothing about motorcycles, which made owning a bike older than myself a bit tricky given its penchant for breaking down and needing constant work.)
A few forum posts later, I had diagnosed the problem as a battery issue (turns out the CT90 requires battery to start while the CT110 can kickstart without one, who’d have thought?)
That ended up being the first of many electrical issues to come.
Another time my bike quit on me south of town, leaving me stranded on a desert road. I later gave my buddy Joe a call asking for help to diagnose the issue. "Sounds like you have a short,” he said. He recommended I look at the wiring, starting at the battery, and following it back to the source. “The wiring on that bike is so simple,” he said, “That it shouldn’t take long to cover the entirety of the wiring and find the issue.”
So I tried it. And I quickly discovered the issue: a spot in the wiring where the outer casing had worn off and the electrical wires were exposed, intermittently touching each other and causing a short.
The fix didn’t even require a trip to the auto parts store. I went inside, grabbed some black electrical tape, wrapped it around the exposed part of the wiring, and the bike started right up, no problem!
Being able to repair the problems on that bike with such little know-how or experience made me reflect on the simplicity and elegance of such a simple piece of engineering. Everything I needed to know on that bike I could inspect myself.
Cars
Cars of my past had engine bays open to inspection. When you popped the hood, they revealed their inner workings to you.
For example, here’s what the engine bay of my first car looked like:
But now-a-days, modern cars seem to encourage a hands-off approach. When you pop the hood, everything’s covered and hidden away, almost as if to say, “No need to go any further. Don’t bother concerning yourself with anything under here.”
Websites
I wonder if there’s a metaphor in here for websites? Are they following a similar arc?
In the beginning, the mechanisms of the web were more evidently surfaced by browsers for manipulation by end users — protocols, URLs, custom stylesheets, etc. — but those have increasingly been abstracted away such that you don’t have to even think about how the web works to use it. Here’s Jeremy Keith on the subject:
Making it harder to “view source” might seem like an inconsequential decision. Removing the ability to apply user stylesheets might seem like an inconsequential decision. Heck, even hiding the URL might seem like an inconsequential decision. But each one of those decisions has repercussions. And each one of those decisions reflects an underlying viewpoint.
Ah yes, “view source”, the website equivalent of popping the hood on a vehicle. At one point, the utility of “view source” on a website felt akin to troubleshooting my 1972 CT90: inspectable and decipherable, even if you didn’t know much.
But time has led it to become much more like popping the hood on a modern vehicle: the inner mechanisms remain hidden away beneath coverings that seem to speak, “This is too sophisticated to worry yourself with, best to consult a professional.”
Abstracting away URLs would be similar. As Devine notes, giving people power over the technology that rules their lives requires going beyond providing mere solutions and instead fostering the production of knowledge.
Like owning that CT90 did for me — or owning my own website has too.
From 1696 until 1851 a “window tax” was imposed in England and Wales1. Sort-of a precursor to property taxes like council tax today, it used an estimate of the value of a property as an indicator of the wealth of its occupants: counting the number of windows provided the mechanism for assessment.
The hardest thing about retrospectively graphing the cost of window tax is thinking in “old money”2.Window tax replaced an earlier hearth tax, following the ascension to the English throne of Mary II and William III of Orange. Hearth tax had come from a similar philosophy: that you can approximate the wealth of a household by some aspect of their home, in this case the number of stoves and fireplaces they had.
(A particular problem with window tax as enacted is that its “stepping”, which was designed to weigh particularly heavily on the rich with their large houses, was that it similarly weighed heavily on large multi-tenant buildings, whose landlord would pass on those disproportionate costs to their tenants!)
It’d be temping to blame William and Mary for the window tax, but the reality is more-complex and reflects late renaissance British attitudes to the limits of state authority.
Why a window tax? There’s two ways to answer that:
A window tax – and a hearth tax, for that matter – can be assessed without the necessity of the taxpayer to disclose their income. Income tax, nowadays the most-significant form of taxation in the UK, was long considered to be too much of an invasion upon personal privacy3.
But compared to a hearth tax, it can be validated from outside the property. Counting people in a property in an era before solid recordkeeping is hard. Counting hearths is easier… so long as you can get inside the property. Counting windows is easier still and can be done completely from the outside!
If you’re in Britain, finding older buildings with windows bricked-up to save on tax is pretty easy. I took a break from writing this post, walked for three minutes, and found one.4
There were a few work-related/adjacent activities. But also a table football tournament, among other bits of fun.
One of the things I learned while on this trip was that the Netherlands, too, had a window tax for a time. But there’s an interesting difference.
The Dutch window tax was introduced during the French occupation, under Napoleon, in 1810 – already much later than its equivalent in England – and continued even after he was ousted and well into the late 19th century. And that leads to a really interesting social side-effect.
My brief interest in 19th century Dutch tax policy was piqued during my team’s boat tour.
Glass manufacturing technique evolved rapidly during the 19th century. At the start of the century, when England’s window tax law was in full swing, glass panes were typically made using the crown glass process: a bauble of glass would be spun until centrifugal force stretched it out into a wide disk, getting thinner towards its edge.
The very edge pieces of crown glass were cut into triangles for use in leaded glass, with any useless offcuts recycled; the next-innermost pieces were the thinnest and clearest, and fetched the highest price for use as windows. By the time you reached the centre you had a thick, often-swirly piece of glass that couldn’t be sold for a high price: you still sometimes find this kind among the leaded glass in particularly old pub windows5.
They’re getting rarer, but I’ve lived in houses with small original panes of crown glass like these!
As the 19th century wore on, cylinder glass became the norm. This is produced by making an iron cylinder as a mould, blowing glass into it, and then carefully un-rolling the cylinder while the glass is still viscous to form a reasonably-even and flat sheet. Compared to spun glass, this approach makes it possible to make larger window panes. Also: it scales more-easily to industrialisation, reducing the cost of glass.
The Dutch window tax survived into the era of large plate glass, and this lead to an interesting phenomenon: rather than have lots of windows, which would be expensive, late-19th century buildings were constructed with windows that were as large as possible to maximise the ratio of the amount of light they let in to the amount of tax for which they were liable6.
Look at the size of those windows! If you’re limited in how many you can have, but you’ve got the technology, you’re going to make them as large as you possibly can!
That’s an architectural trend you can still see in Amsterdam (and elsewhere in Holland) today. Even where buildings are renovated or newly-constructed, they tend – or are required by preservation orders – to mirror the buildings they neighbour, which influences architectural decisions.
Notice how each building has only between one and three windows on the ground floor, letting as much light in while minimising the tax burden.
It’s really interesting to see the different architectural choices produced in two different cities as a side-effect of fundamentally the same economic choice, resulting from slightly different starting conditions in each (a half-century gap and a land shortage in one). While Britain got fewer windows, the Netherlands got bigger windows, and you can still see the effects today.
…and social status
But there’s another interesting this about this relatively-recent window tax, and that’s about how people broadcast their social status.
This Google Street Canal (?) View photo shows a house on Keizersgracht, one of the richest parts of Amsterdam. Note the superfluous decorative window above the front door and the basement-level windows for the servants’ quarters.
In some of the traditionally-wealthiest parts of Amsterdam, you’ll find houses with more windows than you’d expect. In the photo above, notice:
How the window density of the central white building is about twice that of the similar-width building on the left,
That a mostly-decorative window has been installed above the front door, adorned with a decorative leaded glass pattern, and
At the bottom of the building, below the front door (up the stairs), that a full set of windows has been provided even for the below-ground servants quarters!
When it was first constructed, this building may have been considered especially ostentatious. Its original owners deliberately requested that it be built in a way that would attract a higher tax bill than would generally have been considered necessary in the city, at the time. The house stood out as a status symbol, like shiny jewellery, fashionable clothes, or a classy car might today.
I originally wanted to insert a picture here that represented how one might show status through fashion today. But then I remembered I don’t know anything about fashion7. But somehow my stock image search suggested this photo, and I love it so much I’m using it anyway. You’re welcome.How did we go wrong? A century and a bit ago the super-wealthy used to demonstrate their status by showing off how much tax they can pay. Nowadays, they generally seem more-preoccupied with getting away with paying as little as possible, or none8.
Can we bring back 19th-century Dutch social status telegraphing, please?9
Footnotes
1 Following the Treaty of Union the window tax was also applied in Scotland, but Scotland’s a whole other legal beast that I’m going to quietly ignore for now because it doesn’t really have any bearing on this story.
2 The second-hardest thing about retrospectively graphing the cost of window tax is finding a reliable source for the rates. I used an archived copy of a guru site about Wolverhampton history.
3 Even relatively-recently, the argument that income tax might be repealed as incompatible with British values shows up in political debate. Towards the end of the 19th century, Prime Ministers Disraeli and Gladstone could be relied upon to agree with one another on almost nothing, but both men spoke at length about their desire to abolish income tax, even setting out plans to phase it out… before having to cancel those plans when some financial emergency showed up. Turns out it’s hard to get rid of.
4 There are, of course, other potential reasons for bricked-up windows – even aesthetic ones – but a bit of a giveaway is if the bricking-up reduces the number of original windows to 6, 9, 14 or 19, which are thesholds at which the savings gained by bricking-up are the greatest.
5 You’ve probably heard about how glass remains partially-liquid forever and how this explains why old windows are often thicker at the bottom. You’ve probably also already had it explained to you that this is complete bullshit. I only mention it here to preempt any discussion in the comments.
6 This is even more-pronounced in cities like Amsterdam where a width/frontage tax forced buildings to be as tall and narrow and as close to their neighbours as possible, further limiting opportunities for access to natural light.
7 Yet I’m willing to learn a surprising amount about Dutch tax law of the 19th century. Go figure.
While things started great, my experiment using a 2012 MacBook Air in 2024 hit a bit of a snag. 4GB RAM can take you only so far these days. So I started looking at Linux distros to replace an unsupported version of MacOS I was able to install thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher.
I started with Linux Mint, which was great until it wasn’t. And then I tried Debian XFCE, which resulted in the same. On both distros, the desktop would freeze at certain points, and the quickest fix I knew was to hold the power button until the laptop shut off, and then start the machine back up.
NOTE: This issue very well may have been due to user error and no fault of Linux Mint or Debian. Maybe I could have found a solution if I were a little bit more of a nerd (something like using SWAP at installation).
Before I gave up on Debian, I had also installed i3 so that I could give tiling window managers another chance. This brief revisit led to my wanting to again try Sway, which is basically i3 with Wayland support.
NOTE: Don’t worry if you don’t know what all this means. I understand only in the most superficial terms. These technical terms are not the point of this post.
Eventually, I settled on Manajaro Sway because I like how it’s set up out of the box.
My (for now) settling on Manjaro Sway is noteworthy only if you go looking for opinions about Manjaro Linux in general. Because you’ll find plenty people saying not to use Manjaro. That it’s stupid to do so. That there are much better options out there.
And there might be much better options out there–much better options for them.
But, at least for now, Manjaro Sway has been the easiest option for me. That very well may change. But so far, so good.
If nothing else, I appreciate the option to overlay useful keyboard shortcuts that new users may forget, right on your desktop wallpaper.
‘Look at that subtle coloring. The tasteful thickness. Oh my god. It even has a watermark’ - A sceenshot of the Manjaro Sway Linux desktop wallpaper with overlay of keyboard shortcuts, courtesy of the project’s GitHub repo.
And this brings us to an often-overlooked point about Linux. What’s good about it is what’s bad about it: Choice.
Linux offers a nearly limitless number of choices. You have countless options just within the Ubuntu family tree of distros. And when you consider most distros give the option to install multiple dekstop environments, your options grow exponentially.
When you have so many options, it’s impossible to say which option any one person should or should not use, unless you are intimately familiar with that person’s use case and comfort with new technology.
But online–and especially in the Linux world–you can easily find people shouting from the rooftops about why their opinion is the only right opinion, with only limited context and with no understanding of when their preferred distro may not work for someone else.
My advice is to keep trying different setups until you find the one that works for you. Yes, setting up multiple distros is annoying and time consuming. But you can reduce some of the pain of switching by learning how to back up and restore your Home folder using rsync.
In life in general, the loudest voices are often the ones you should listen to least. The wisest voices are often harder to find. The Linux world is no different. In fact, perhaps the Linux world is the worst example of this universal truth.
Fortunately, cooler heads can be found, even in the Linux world:
As I’ve already said, what’s great about Linux is what’s bad about it. But let’s focus on the positive side. Linux offers an abundance of choice. That means how I Linux is not how you have to Linux.
You can Linux your own way.
Jake LaCaze is on a quest to remind the world that things are far more grey than we are led to believe.
Songspiration
The song that, at least in part, influenced this post:
Other news
In my constant quest to expand my skill set, I’m looking at how I can position myself for jobs in the oil and gas/energy technology sectors.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any ideas.
A special hello this week to all my new email subscribers! Not sure where you’ve all come from, but you’re very welcome. Make your self at home. This is my weeknotes newsletter.
I’ve read a lot of writing about the need to be mindful about how – and what – one consumes on the Internet recently. I’m sure you will have seen the links go by in my links section over the last weeks and months. Many of them align with my own thinking about taste and discernment online.
Last year I wrote about the need to practice discernment in order to clarify ones taste
When applied to taste, practising discernment means to:
Think critically about a cultural artefact you’ve been exposed to for the first time. Its context, meaning, intent etc.
Engage in self-reflection about one’s own existing tastes and preferences. Eg: How does this new phenomena make us feel.
Have some awareness that this reaction may be shaped by one’s social class, education, and cultural background.
Lastly, being open to new perspectives in the first place.
The practice of discernment is the activity we engage in in order to refine our tastes.
But I avoided offering any specificquestion one should ask themselves during the moment of self-reflection in that post. The reason being – I had no good questions to ask or offer. But recently I’ve been trying out variations of the following: What About This Excites You?
Feel free to substitute the word ‘Excites’ with: Compels, Interests, Arouses, Animates, etc. I’m open to reformulation. The main thing is reflecting on how new phenomena encountered makes you feel – both in isolation and more broadly:
When you are sitting there looking at an individual tweet, watching youtube video, or looking at an Instagram post, ask yourself: “What About This Excites Me?“.
The question I’m finding, serves as good jumping off point to becoming more conscious of about the engagement with the media I’m consuming. This question helps me immediately identify whether my engagement is driven by genuine interest or merely habitual scrolling. more often than not
It encourages us to consider:
The value or joy derived from the thing I’m watching.
Whether the content stimulates thoughtful reflection or provokes a positive reaction.
If the content merely amplifies existing anxieties or contributes to a negative mental state.
The other day, because the red notification bubbles on instagram were infuriating, I installed and logged into Meta’s Threads app to clear them out before uninstalling it again. Immediately upon login, the app showed me some super dumb take, from someone I don’t know nor follow, and it annoyed me immediately me. I took the bait and clicked though to look at the dumb replies – so I asked myself the question – and I realised the element that was exciting me (as in siring my feelings / emotions) was how annoying the take was. That was it.
If the answer is this does not excite me, when why are you looking at it? If the answer like the above is negative then stop watching it/close the app. And because I’m increasingly becoming a ruthless motherfucker, mute or block the person who made the content.
On the other hand, expanding the question out to the activity itself – “Why am I watching YouTube right now, and does it excite me?” zooms out our awareness as a whole. This reflection is crucial.
I personally, have often rationalised my behaviour of consuming online/social media somthing along the lines of ‘spending time here has the potential of finding something valuable’. This is in fact the unspoken/implicit promise of social media. Which masks the truth that the whole machine is structured around you advertising.
For me, over all spending any more than 20mins on any social platform: twitter, instagram, youtube etc often does not justify the time invested. So the wider zoomed out question about what about this behaviour is exciting me throws up things like:
Whether my engagement is an intentional choice, or a mindless habit.
How this activity aligns with or distracts from my personal goals and well-being.
Am I getting any real payoff from time spent versus the potential for discovering something truly enriching.
The answer to point three is almost always …. no.
Coming back to one of the most important phrases I’ve ever written on my blog: ‘Your Attention is Sovereign‘.
Every act of discernment online represents a choice—whether conscious or not—about where we direct our cognitive resources. By asking “What About This Excites Me?” we can perhpas slowly reclaim control over the choices we make in the present, future AND ones we’ve made in the past. This question isn’t just a reflection; it enables a recalibration of our engagement strategies toward more mindful, intentional consumption. It helps us refine our tastes and personal aesthetic sensibilities.
It also works the other way around. Sometimes people send me links to videos, articles etc and the question works there too. “What about this excites you?“. Ask them for more details beyond ‘I think it’s cool’. Ask them specifics, why is it cool? why do you like it? why did you want to share it with me etc/ You don’t need to do this for everything, all the time, as that would be too much.
But it is worth trying every now and then, when you become aware of the fact you have been sat at your laptop, or looking at your phone for a long time.
The moment I finished editing this week’s show about Cal
Newport’s Slow Productivity, I realised to my horror that I’d made
it before. Doing the things that actually need doing, when they
need getting done? Finishing Projects? It turns out that this is
probably the greatest challenge of my life.
I’m at a total loss.
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length,
written and recorded by @thejaymo
I’m going to be blogging on thejaymo.net in a more informal way, if you are subscribed by email you won’t get notified but i’ll be doing a round up every week in Terminal Access.
There’s a point in childhood when your awareness comes into tune with the coordinates of grown-up reality. The stories on the news are no longer an irrelevant blur, but something you try to make sense of. Years ago, some friends of mine set up a site called First Political Memory, and what’s striking about the stories they collected is how they map this moment in development. The chances are, your first political memory will come from around the age of eight.
If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.
I’ve been through close to a dozen reorgs. This article contains the advice I wish I’d been given earlier in my career when I didn’t yet have that experience. Reorgs are disruptive, and nobody really tells you what to do in the wake of one. It’s easy to feel adrift
I finished reading ‘Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet‘ by Katie Hafner which I started a number of weeks ago. It’s a 1994 book about the creation of ARPANET, and is full of fascinating details about BBN, early computing, networking etc. I really enjoyed it and can’t stress to people enough how good it is.
I’m still reading The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. I’ve taken to reading 1 interview a night before going to sleep, which means it’s going to take me about a month to get through it. I’m learning a lot about the masters of late 80’s early 90’s narrative non fiction. So many books are creeping on to my wishlist. Peabody award winners, Pulitzer prizes etc.
I started reading ‘Voice of the whirlwind‘ Jon Williams’ follow up novel to the cyberpunk classic Hardwired.
Finally, this week Zsela has announced their debut album ‘Big For You‘ and accompanying tour. The UK date is at the roundhouse in November as part of Pitchfork music festival. I can’t wait.
Lilly of the Nile, is a propulsive art pop song that suits her Contralto like voice. If the whole album is as good as the lead single then we’re in for a treat.
Remember Kids:
I like scientists for their science and not for their politics.
President Eisenhower
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