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.
I’m still making my way through The Years of Rice and Salt, and later that afternoon I read this passage:
The men stood and watched the spectacle, eyes bright. When the geese had all departed, they saw the reason they had left; a herd of giant deer had come to the lake to drink.
The stags had huge racks of antlers. They stared across the water at the men, vigilant but undeterred. For a moment, all was still. In the end the giant deer stepped away.
Reality awoke again.
“All sentient beings,” said I-Chin, who had been muttering his Buddhist sutras all along. Kheim normally had no time for such claptrap, but now, as the day continued, and they hiked over the hills on their hunt, seeing great numbers of peaceful beaver, quail, rabbits, foxes, seagulls and crows, ordinary deer, a bear and two cubs, a slinky long-tailed gray hunting creature, like a fox crossed with a squirrel—on and on—simply a whole country of animals, living together under a silent blue sky—nothing disturbed, the land flourishing on its own, the people there just a small part of it—Kheim began to feel odd.
He realized that he had taken China for reality itself. Taiwan and the Mindanaos and the other islands he had seen were like scraps of land, leftovers; China had seemed to him the world. And China meant people. Built up, cultivated, parceled off ha by ha, it was so completely a human world that Kheim had never considered that there might once have been a natural world different to it. But here was natural land, right before his eyes, full as could be with animals of every kind, and obviously very much bigger than Taiwan; bigger than China; bigger than the world he had known before.
“Where on Earth are we?” he said to I-Chin.
I-Chin said, “We have found the source of the peach-blossom stream.”
I think it is difficult, on the first great summer day in so long, when the breeze is gentle and you can see the light bouncing off the Sound, when the sun has lit the sky aflame and you are sitting out on your patio with a blueberry tonic, to not think of the way we tend to complicate things, to fill them with code and mortar, to take China for reality itself.
(But then you go back inside and program for a few hours.)
Technically speaking
I’ve been shipping things! Mostly small things, but still.
I’ve also spent the past week germinating on a new form of pricing: the problem with only monetizing based on subscriber count is that there are a lot of folks who are generating business value from the tool without hitting a substantial subscriber count. To that end, I’m planning on introducing a ‘professional’ plan with a couple nice perks:
- Whitelabeling
- Custom subdomains
- Custom redirect URLs
- Clearbit integration
Of these, the ‘custom subdomains’ is the only technically tricky one. It’s an interesting problem, mostly because I’ve spent my entire life willfully ignorant of how DNSes and routing works at a low level: but I don’t think it’ll be prohibitively difficult. It’s also a great example of something that I really only have the opportunity and necessity to learn about with this kind of project.
Three things I really liked this week
- Wikipedia’s list of wine bottle sizes. A Goliath is 27 litres; a Melchoir is a mere 18.
- This beautiful animation by Mikael Gustafsson.
- A series of renders by @Sir_carma.
Happy Sunday
I hope you get some time for yourself soon, and that you spend it wisely.