Minor Arcana

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Nightsongs

This email was going to be about the band Stars.

It was going to be about how I discovered Stars and then downloaded a bunch of their songs on Limewire (some of which having turned out not to be songs after all, which of course is part of the authentic Limewire experience).

#57
January 8, 2018
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The year of moss

First:

I published my annual end of year post, with nine hours to spare! (I still haven’t rebuilt my blog since getting my hard drive wiped a couple months back, which meant the feedback loop of “manually uploading it to S3, seeing what looked weird, then fixing it” was especially painful. Maybe that’ll act as a forcing function to finally get Hugo back up and running.

#56
December 31, 2017
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Towards yuletide

There’s been a lot of dialogue this week about how to spend your holidays. There are some terrible takes:

Whatever you’re hustling for, take note: most people/companies are shut down until ‘18. That means you get 2 extra weeks to outwork your competition. That’s 3.8% more time. For perspective: Usain Bolt won his gold medals running 1.2% faster. These 2 weeks are a gift. Get to work.

— Nathan Hubbard (@NathanCHubbard) December 18, 2017
#55
December 24, 2017
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Moving days

I moved apartments this weekend.

Here are some thoughts on moving:

  • I am the kind of person whose identity is very much wrapped up in his living space, which makes moving exciting but also extremely stressful. It is a chance to change my values, my routines, and the little pieces of day-to-day existence that make up a life! But the actual of moving is so exhausting. I draw energy from my habits, and being in a place where I can’t reconstruct them easily is draining, whether its the big things like not being able to make myself breakfast because I haven’t put away all my pans or the small things like the cognitive friction in figuring out what lights I need to turn off before going to bed,
#54
December 17, 2017
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Where you want to be forever

I think it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of jazz ever composed. Listening to it is like watching snow through a window. The room is warm, something is roasting in the oven, and outside the flakes are falling faintly through the universe and upon the trees, the hedges, the rain gutters, the telephone poles, and the rooftops of a thousand apartment buildings in a very big city. This is where you want to be forever. This is Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here.” It opens with a trembling bass, like someone coming out of the cold, stamping their feet, brushing the snow off their shoulders, hanging up their winter coat, rubbing and blowing on numb fingers, and entering the living room where there is a window for watching the flakes falling faintly upon all the buildings of the living.

— Charles Mudede

#53
December 10, 2017
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In praise of a backlog

I have not written about Buttondown in a while, because of two reasons:

  1. I have been very busy! The maelstrom of a year’s end is at times all-consuming, and with no small degree of self-restraint I’ve been sidelining a lot of side project work in favor of ostensibly more important things.
  2. Writing prose about Buttondown is almost always more difficult than writing code about Buttondown. If I have an unexpected hour free at the end of the day, its much easier to pick an item off the backlog and hack on it for a little bit than it is to commit to writing.
#52
December 4, 2017
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A cure for what ails you

I flew back from Richmond on Friday. There are many things I dislike about flying, but they are all redeemed by flying giving me the ability to read without interruption (be it from internal or external stimuli).

I finished The Screwtape Letters, which I had been working on throughout the week, and since I had more time I ended up going through Camper English’s history of the gin and tonic which I had downloaded a year or so ago but never cracked open. (Or whatever the digital equivalent of cracking something open is.)

#51
November 26, 2017
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Electronic paper cuts

Last week I talked about the primordial joy of building technology. Today, I’m thinking about the opposite: the mountains of quiet frustrations that come from using technology.

As an experiment, I thought it would be interesting to compile a list of grievances that I have encountered while using technology over the past few days. Here it is:

#50
November 20, 2017
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The joy of programming

Your growth as an engineer is mostly defined by your climbing of the ladder of abstraction. Everyone’s road is different, but the landmarks are pretty similar: you start out implementing facts, then features, then architectures, then ideas. The line of code begins as your primary currency, the artifact by which you know your job is done, but it recedes into the horizon.

This isn’t to say that I write less code than I did when I was a younger engineer; I probably write more. But the code is less important — implementation is more of an afterthought than a going concern.

Sure, the code is important. Correctness is important; readability is important; technical debt is important. I’m not saying any of these things aren’t, but I’ve recognized them more as lagging indicators of other aspects of engineering: things travel downstream, and leaky abstractions in code come from leaky abstractions in real life.

I’m asking myself “why doesn’t this code compile?” less, and asking myself “what don’t I understand about the underlying domain?” more.

#49
November 13, 2017
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The shorter line

I mentioned last week that I was in Santa Ana for work.

On my way back to Seattle, something on right on the edge of remarkability happened.

I was flying back through the evocatively named John Wayne Airport. John Wayne is small, for an airport, not quite a mere regional outlet but it only has a couple dozen terminals. It is the kind of airport that you can’t get lost in.

I was going through security, which is usually a non-event. I have TSA Precheck — the thing that lets you go into the faster line and keep your shoes on and all of that stuff.

#48
November 6, 2017
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Open water

I was in Santa Ana for the week for work stuff, and as one does in Santa Ana I found myself spending a lot of the time on a boat.

I was talking with a broker — not the one who owned the particular boat we were on, but one who owned a boat — about how he liked the area. He’d lived in Orange County for eight years now: before that he’d lived in San Diego, and before that Oklahoma City, and before that Santa Fe. And in each of those places he found things that he loved — and he loved the time he spent in those places, he assured me, and wouldn’t change them for anything in the world — but each of them were marked by a certain nagging feeling that something was missing.

He didn’t know if it was the area, or how he was spending his time, or his relationships with others. He tried changing all of those things, like an algebra student messing with different variables in an equation: nothing quite ever resolved itself. And he had a good life in all of those places, he said, and he’s never really considered himself unhappy — just afflicted with something like an itch on his back.

#47
October 30, 2017
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Two tweets

Here are two tweets that have been stuck in my head since reading them:

#46
October 23, 2017
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Class of 1905 Senior Week

The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair was in town this weekend, and naturally we went.

#45
October 15, 2017
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Momentum

I’ve found that momentum in my side projects is easy to gain and easy to lose, especially for a project like Buttondown where there are a bunch of things that I could be doing on it.

(And when I mean a bunch of things I mean that Buttondown currently has 74 open issues on GitHub, all neatly organized into “marketing” and “technical debt” and “features”. …Okay, and “bugs”.)

#44
October 8, 2017
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Back home

It is overwhelming for me to be back home after time away.

Overwhelming in a good way, I mean. My favorite part of any trip is the first two hours back in the apartment: when I can drop my bags, kick off my shoes, and idly sort through mail or listen to a podcast and breathe in Seattle air. Sometimes I’ll light some cedar or make a cocktail. It feels good to belong again to your own space.

But then the work and the readjustment begins. I am a creature of habit, and it takes time to get myself back in a space where my habits thrive.

There is the household work: the taking out of trash and recycling (and, once I’m a better person, compost), culling the pantry and fridges, the unpacking and cleaning, the mopping and vacuuming, the grocery shopping.

#43
October 2, 2017
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Resort switches

A quick email this week, because I promised myself leisure and I still have a few hours left in Paris:

I picked up Ex-formation at a small bookshop in the third arrondissement. It is a book about many things, but mostly about design alteration: about taking forms and images that we know intimately and building upon them in a way where the change brings insight not only with the new form but to our understanding of the original form.

One of the concepts the book provides that has been stuck in my head is the idea of a :

#42
September 24, 2017
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Neglected herbs

One of my favorite possessions is 172 things to do in order to increase your level of accomplishment, a tiny booklet I picked up in The Regional Assembly of Text, the most charming shop in all of Vancouver. It sits on my coffee table and I flip through it whenever I’m feeling restless. Here are some examples of things to do:

#41
September 18, 2017
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Red Zone Tasks

This Sunday marked the annual shift in Sunday habits:

Out with a productive morning filled with a bike ride and maybe an omelette followed by reading in Cal Anderson or just puttering on a side project for an hour or two.

with me parking my butt in front of my computer for five hours straight and watching .

#40
September 11, 2017
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A little bit older

I turned 25 this week. I wrote about it a little, and now I am tempted to write about writing about it.

It was hard to write about turning 25 this year because, well, I did not have particularly much to say: I am older and in slightly better shape and besides that, it’s been more or less steady. (Albeit a very fast-progressing steadiness.)

This time last year, there was lots of chaos, lots of newness: living with my partner for the first time, working from home for a new job for the first time, consistently going to bed before midnight for the first time.

#39
September 3, 2017
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Knowing what's important

I mentioned last week that this month was my one-year anniversary at TenantBase: I have officially been living the startup/work-from-home lifestyle for a year.

This has gone by exceptionally quickly, but also slowly, to the extent that I can hardly remember the cadence of my weekdays before this life. There was more public transit. There were more badges and org charts. It feels distant, which is I think a sign of my current comfort level and also how life tends to be absent of convenient touchstones after college.

Another exciting milestone at work happened this week, though: I fixed a bug. Not any bug: perhaps the longest-running bug in the codebase, one that was notoriously hard to reproduce and impossible to pin down. A bug.

#38
August 27, 2017
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Run a line around your think

How do you do your best work?

When I was at Amazon, there was a running joke that your IDE changed as you progressed in your career (or, to use the Amazon parlance, as you leveled up):

#37
August 20, 2017
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The source of the peach-blossom stream

The haze lifted yesterday, and with it came the first great summer day in a while.

My partner was in New York this weekend, so I got to live like a bachelor. Because I am an extraordinarily boring person, and because the haze lifted, I went for a long bike ride. Getting to the Burke-Gilman from the apartment is a little treacherous: its around five hundred feet downhill, across a bridge, and then you find serenity. (Because I am lame, I take the light rail back. Biking twenty miles and then going back up Capitol Hill is not my idea of a fun afternoon.)

One of my favorite things I see on the trail are people eating berries. There are, I guess, a bunch of raspberry and cranberry bushes spotted on the sides of the trail, and you’ll see entire families hop off their bikes to examine a bush, to see if there are any berries ripe enough to eat. I watched somebody’s grandmother force-feed somebody’s grandchild a berry. It was very Seattle: not something I’d necessarily want to do, but I’m happy there’s someone who does, and can.

#36
August 13, 2017
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The one about television

I.

The Ringer wrote an interesting but mostly flawed piece arguing that television seasons are in general, too lean:

#35
August 6, 2017
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Four days in Austin

We don’t take enough trips.

#34
July 31, 2017
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Thirteen percent fluent

“In an old house in Paris / That was covered in vines / Lived twelve little girls / In two straight lines.”

If you’ve been around me for the past week, you have likely suffered through my initial attempts at learning — and butchering — French. (For that, I apologize, but only because “Désolé” rolls off the tongue so nicely.)

I’m learning French through .

#33
July 23, 2017
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After the Sundance

This week is a reminder that when you live in a place for long enough, you have to watch some of your favorite parts of it fade:

  1. The Sundance on 9th is now apparently an “AMC Dine-In Seattle 10”. This is apparently not a new thing — Sundance’s sale to AMC went through last year — but the conversion process got kicked off in earnest in the past few months, and now suddenly this perfect, cozy theater that had an excellent blend of pop and independent films (and served Sazeracs the size of your head for $10). Now it’s AMC: the cozy chairs are there, but the drink menu has been replaced with things like “Blue Raspberry Margaritas” and the movie pre-rolls are just like every other mainstream theater. The building is the same — hell, even the staff is the same — but it’s no longer an escape.
  2. Clever Bottle was the only perfect bar on 2nd. To explain this, you have to understand what 2nd is: it is a maelstrom, a chaotic barrage of smoke and booze. Dive bars next to more dive bars next to barcades next to sports bars next to Clever Bottle, which was this tiny little place of refuge amongst the chaos, all candlelight and tasteful cocktails. It was the first bar in Seattle that made sense to me: the drinks were strong (but not too strong) and the music was good and everyone was quiet and pleasant. And now it’s being replaced by “Mr. Darcy’s” (which, to be fair, is from the folks who run Bathtub Gin, which is a good bar!)
#32
July 17, 2017
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Weekends

It is hard to go from a four-day weekend to a two-day weekend. It is literally half of the previous weekend.

You get to Sunday, your hands are tired from bouldering and your legs are tired from your new bike (okay, I biked like four miles, so its less of a physical soreness and more of an existential one: your body going, ah, I see how it is, this is a thing we’re doing now), you make a burger (feta, mustard aioli [okay, this is a fancy way to say “mustard and mayo”] , arugala, hot sauce), it is six pm and you finished re-reading The Folded Clock and you are thinking about watching a movie.

#31
July 10, 2017
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Burger ROI

I was in California this week for work, from Wednesday to Friday. The office is in Orange County, which is not what most people imagine when I say “I was in California this week for work [at my software job]”.

Three noteworthy things happened this week in California:

  • I spent twenty-four dollars on a half-pound burger. It was an aggressively mediocre burger: nothing about it was particularly terrible, but nothing about it was good. It was perhaps the worst burger ROI I’ve ever received. (This is why Five Guys remains so unimpeachable: even if you have a not-great Five Guys burgers, it’s such a small investment.)
#30
July 2, 2017
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Twelve hundred pounds of paint

Boeing offers a tour of their production facility (the largest building in the world by volume!), which is one of the auxiliary Seattle things that I never did when I first moved here but finally did this weekend when a friend was visiting from out of town.

It was awesome.

The coolest part of it was something not easily describable over email: the sheer scale of the facility. It was pointillism writ large: anywhere you looked there was an entire ecosystem of parts and rivets, engines and tubes and cranes in varying states of use, completion, and disrepair.

#29
June 25, 2017
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Thirty seven percent

A generalized answer to the optimal stopping problem (which is sort of a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, which in my opinion is an infinitely cooler name for the problem, but I digress!) tells us that, barring all other variables, you should spend 37% of your time evaluating options before deciding on your best.

Got two weeks to spend apartment hunting? Spend the first five days (just about 37%) just browsing, and then the last nine ready to sign a lease.

#28
June 19, 2017
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Three mostly but not wholly unrelated pieces of tech media archaelogy

1.

Anna Weiner is one of my favorite tech writers: you probably remember her from last year’s earnest and perfect piece Uncanny Valley.

Later in 2016, she published a piece for about her passion for reading old issues of magazine (aptly titled ). I think about this piece often, specifially this paragraph:

#27
June 12, 2017
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Through lines

Some weeks have through lines: I can remember things like “this is the week where it became unbearably apparent that Seattle needs more air conditioning” or “this is the week where my hair was on fire because of work” or “this is the week where I spent three hours every night falling in love with Breath of the Wild.”

This week’s through line was perfect porch weather.

I spent almost all the time I could on our porch, mostly reading but also spending some time doing crosswords (and, in fairness, some time on my laptop trying to pretend I could concentrate on productive things despite the perfect weather.)

#26
June 4, 2017
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Building a better backscratcher

What I’ve been working on

It is Memorial Day, and feels like it. It’s eighty two degrees in Seattle: we opted to stay in town for the weekend, catching up on television and chores and taking some time to breathe.

I’ve spent the weekend (which, I’ll note with glee, is only half over) cultivating a sunburn, reading Dorothy Parker poems, and working on (which is how I’m sending this email.)

#25
May 28, 2017
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Two days in Portland

We got into Portland a little past midnight on Friday.

M had a lacrosse tournament there, and a friend from college wanted to visit, so we decided to just make a weekend trip out of it. It was good!  Portland has a lot of similarities with Seattle (a reality that is greeted with equal amounts of derision from Portland and Seattle natives alike, as far as I can tell), which means it's always relatively easy to visit: there are different shops and the streets have different signs, but it's a different flavor of the same scoop of ice cream. There are things about it that I wish I could hold onto forever: the flat roads that are endlessly bikeable, the cheap beer (I had a $7 imperial stout at Cascade that was possibly the best beverage I had ever tasted!), the Powell's. Sometimes travel feels like triangulation: collecting little snippets and puzzle pieces of what it feels like to live well. Sometimes travel is just following an impulse to spend a weekend without opening your laptop.  (Okay, I opened it *once*.  Just to check my email -- and then to write this.) Still, I'm happy to be back home.  I'm happy to spend the last bit of the evening reading *S.* and listening to Belle and Sebastian.  I'm excited to spend the week chipping away at our backlog of television -- *Fargo*, *American Gods*, *Silicon Valley*, *Master of None*, *Brooklyn 99*, and *Leftovers* might be too much.   I'm happy to get back into the swing of things -- it's nice to have a change of pace, but the reason my pace is my pace is because *I really like my pace*.  Happy Sunday.  I hope you kick up your heels.
#24
May 22, 2017
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Being on a train

I try and write these letters fairly spontaneously -- I sit down at a coffee shop on Sunday, I write for around thirty minutes, I make sure there are no egregious spelling errors or broken links, and then I hit send. 

I do this for two reasons: first, it's *easier*.  The mental friction of planning out something for multiple days can feel difficult and daunting, and the reason I stopped writing these for so long was because of the multiplicative stress of planning out what I wanted to say.   The act of walking to a coffee shop, getting a cappuccino, writing this letter, finishing my drink, and then leaving the coffee shop is comparatively low-stakes and frictionless. The second reason is that I want these letters to sound like I'm talking with you at a coffee shop.  That's the vibe I'm going for, you know?  Something a little more familiar and meandering. Anyway, I'm writing this on Saturday, not Sunday. This is the first week I can remember that I've cheated like this -- I will finish writing this in a little bit, save it, and then send it tomorrow. The reason for this is simple: I am on a train from Richmond to Durham. I spent last week complaining about how the magical experience of travel -- the act of packing, of being in the sky, of planing and deplaning -- has largely evaporated into a fog of dread and grogginess. You know what is still magical, though?  **Being on a train.** Here is what I like about being on a train: - It is quiet, but not too quiet.  The ambient space of a train is a low hum punctuated by errant whispers and a big whistle.  This is *perfect* for me, plus there is a quiet car if you really need to concentrate.  Every public space needs a quiet car equivalent: libraries have quiet rooms, sure, but diners and cafes and cocktail bars and offices and parks would all be so much better if they had a space cordoned off specifically for quiet. - It is comfortable.  I have leg room and an extra seat and can walk around if I want to.  I feel like cattle on an airplane; I do not feel like cattle when on a train. - There are many interesting things to see on trains.  In the past five minutes I have looked outside my window and seen: a run-down church, lots of good graffiti, some very good dilapidated storefronts (*Hiram's Discounted Rugs*, *Shiro's Trophy Store*, *KRN BBQ*), and four cows. - There is the perfect amount of WiFi on trains: fast enough to get emails and lightly browse but not fast enough to stream media or play games, forcing you to do something productive with your time. - You can bring beverages on trains.  You can bring pretty much anything on trains, because the act of boarding a train is pretty much frictionless: you purchase a ticket, you put your things in bags, you take the bags onto the train.  At some point, a person will come around the train to make sure you have the ticket.  This is *insanely pleasant* compared to flight. I have been on this train for around three hours, and have one hour or so left.  I have caught up on emails, accomplished a bunch of side project stuff that I've been putting off for weeks, caught up on *Archer* and *Riverdale*, listened to a new album (*Cokiyu*!), and now I'm writing this.  It has been a thoroughly lovely and productive afternoon. One hour left until I arrive in Durham.  Part of me wants this ride to last forever. --- Happy Sunday.  I hope you spend some time in a quiet car.
#23
May 14, 2017
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On having packed enough

I'm writing this from the airport, because I'm going to Richmond.

I'm writing this from the airport at 9pm (PST -- sorry for the late email, east coast friends) because I spent all day packing.
Okay, that's a lie.  I spent the vast majority of the day not packing -- some of that time not packing was spent *actively procrastinating* the act of packing, but most of it wasn't.  Most of it was spent with the usual Sunday activities: vacuuming, drinking coffee, bouldering, PlayStation. I used to spend entire *days* embroiled in the process of packing: deciding what shoes would best handle the variety of situations I would find myself embroiled in (even though I would invariably end up only wearing sandals and running shoes); what books I wanted to read on the plane, what games I wanted to download. I used to treat the act of travel itself as an experience to be cherished: I loved sitting in trains or minivans or airplanes for hours, barreling my way through a book or a game.  It was an innately wonderful experience, in the literal sense of the word 'wonderful'.  I was full of wonder.  It was novel; it was fun. Right now, there is less enthusiasm.  I'm taking a red-eye, breaking my promise to myself to never take red-eyes, because sometimes you can't reason yourself out of saving four hours in DFW and $300 at the meager cost of a night's sleep. I'll watch an episode of *The Leftovers* then fall asleep on the plane; I'll pass time during my layover going through emails and reading *The Idiot* (or, more likely, falling asleep while trying to read *The Idiot*.) Don't get me wrong -- I am *thrilled* to go to Richmond.  I am excited to see my parents and my friends and my old neighborhood.  I am excited to see I-64 and Main Street Station.  I am excited for good barbecue and my mother's Caesar salad, which is perfect.  I am excited to wake up in the morning in a bed that is warmth itself, to walk down the stairs that have creaks and patterns that I've known my entire life. I am excited to remember playing with my dog, and to remember studying for the SATs, and to remember things that made me who I am. I am excited to be home, like *home* home. But I am no longer excited to fly, which worries me a little.  Flying is too chore-like now: there is no more fondness in my heart for moving walkways or complimentary sodas or baggage claim.  If I could teleport to Richmond, I would. (Trains, though? I am still excited to take a train.) --- Happy Sunday.  I hope you never forget your toiletries.
#22
May 8, 2017
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Ten mostly disjunct statements and one question about podcasts

  1. I know very little about podcasts. (I've been listening to them for all of like , which even in podcast years is not many years.). So, uh, keep that in mind that I'm writing this as someone who has consumed them from 2015 onwards but prior to that thought they were basically a slightly techie version of a bunch of old dudes talking on ham radios.
#21
April 30, 2017
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A brief, considered list of my coffeeshop heuristics

  1. A strong diversity of seating options. The ideal is a 50/50 mix of tables (for working) and big chairs (for reading.)
#20
April 23, 2017
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Spring cleaning

I've spent the past week getting rid of clothes.

This is what I'm shipping out to Goodwill, right after I send this email:

#19
April 16, 2017
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Things are good

I spent the past week or so working on a thing.

This is the thing: The thing is live now!  I am very excited about this. This isn't an email about the thing -- I still have to write an email about the thing, mind you, but this isn't it. This is an email about how good it feels to launch things. I have launched many things -- small things, large things, personal things, professional things, things that I am proud of, things that I've forgotten about, things that I'll remember forever, good things, mediocre things. It's fun to build things and set them out into the world, like paper ships or balloons into the sky.  I'm very good at the "letting a product slowly fade into the atmosphere" approach to marketing (which is to say, I'm very good at not marketing things). Something that doesn't feel innately good to me -- or, perhaps more accurately, *innately easy* -- is talking about the stuff I've done.  I've been thinking a lot about how to remediate that.  I don't really have any answers yet, but I think I'm getting closer. (Part of that is probably growing comfortable enough with my projects to refer to them more descriptively and less dismissively than as 'things'.) Either way, though.  I'm sitting in Bishop's, waiting for my hair to get cut.  I've got a bruised ankle from climbing earlier today and I just ate fried chicken.  This week, I built something and launched it into the world -- and, if I'm lucky, some folks will find it useful. Tonight I get to eat seafood and start a new book.  It's a good week. Happy Sunday.  I hope you make something.
#18
April 9, 2017
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Ragnarok and Chikhai

There are a couple authors I will follow anywhere: Neil Gaiman is one of them. I've followed him to graveyards, to a mysterious pond at the end of dusty farmland roads, to a ghost town in Illinois where children disappear, and now I'm following him to

#17
April 2, 2017
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Half a year

This weekend was tax weekend for me. (Perhaps, more accurately, it tax weekend for me -- I still need to dig out a couple lingering receipts and forms.)

#16
March 27, 2017
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How to close the great distance between people

#15
March 19, 2017
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Small chaos

([sighs deeply] Tinyletter is bad with links and they didn't work in the previous one.  Sorry about the double email!) This weekend has been a pleasant respite at the end of a chaotic week.

#14
March 13, 2017
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Parking lots, heuristics, and a corgi in a box.

My partner and I have been going rock climbing every weekend for the past few months.

(Okay, technically we're going bouldering, not rock climbing -- bouldering means no rope or harness, but using the word 'boulder' as a verb seems weird to me, and usually when you tell someone *Oh yeah, we like to go bouldering* they give you a weird glance and then you have to explain further and I'm always worried that I'll mess up the terminology.  But I digress!) We go to Seattle Bouldering Project, which is a terrific institution.  We're by no means very good climbers (or even particularly good climbers) but we've been going there long enough to know the hang of things. (No pun intended.) (Okay, pun intended.) We've noticed that since the new year, SBP has been particularly busy.  No matter when we go -- 8am, 10am, 4pm, whatever -- the parking lot is overflowing with cars, to the point where you usually have to park a couple buildings away or do the dreaded car stalker thing where you slowly follow someone leaving the gym until they get to the car. This can be a pretty good bellwether for how busy the gym is, and roughly how unpleasant the outing will be: more people means more time waiting for routes -- means more chaos. What we've noticed a couple times, though, is that even when the parking lot is packed the actual bouldering part of the gym is fine: there are a bunch of people in the building but they're not all doing the same thing I am. SBP has a lot of stuff that isn't specifically about bouldering -- there are yoga sessions, a full basement gym, event space for birthday parties, a cafe, etc etc.  I don't do these things: I am a simple man whose only goal is to hang from weird grips like  I'm eight years old.  But others do, and they take up space in the parking lot even if they don't take up space on the walls. So sometimes a full parking lot means that it's going to be a crowded day in the gym; sometimes it means that there's a birthday party, or there's a particularly popular yoga class. Anyway, I've been thinking a lot lately about heuristics.  And now I'm worrying about what parking lots I've been looking at wrong this entire time.
(On a meta note, I've been writing these little Sunday updates for two months straight and it feels good: it is not quite there yet, but it is starting to feel reflexive rather than imperative.  I hope you've enjoyed reading them). Happy Sunday.  I hope you read an article that you've had bookmarked forever, but never had the time to actually read.
#13
March 6, 2017
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Rest days

This is an email about me not knowing what I want to write in this email.

#12
February 26, 2017
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One of those slow weeks

Some weeks are slow weeks because you're slow; other weeks are slow weeks because the world is slow.

#11
February 19, 2017
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It's snowing!

That's what I said Sunday night, as little flurries started gliding their way down to the Seattle streets. it was so faint that I couldn't tell if it was just light rain, and even then I had to focus my eyes so I could actually distinguish the little blips of soft grey from the backdrops.

#10
February 12, 2017
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There and back again

I spent most of this week in Orange County, where my company is based. It was fun and valuable to with folks who I almost entirely interact with digitally: a nice reminder that, even with the slickest videoconferencing software and the liveliest Slack channels, there is no substitute for spending a couple days around a coffee machine with your coworkers. (Shuffleboard helps, too.)

#9
February 6, 2017
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So I have a cold.

There are, at least for me, two kinds of colds: the knock-you-on-your-ass kind of cold where you feel and can't really move or do anything beyond feebly reach to your box of Kleenex, and the irksome kind of cold where you mostly feel fine but you can't stop sneezing and also breathing through your nose is unnecessarily difficult.

#8
January 30, 2017
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