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.)
I cultivated my farmer’s tan by spending an hour every day after work reading on our porch:
First it was Practice, a lovely collage of thoughts and stories that is ostensibly about products and design but is really about many other things. It is a very good way to spend an evening.
Now I’m going through The Nordic Theory of Everything, which is an interesting and persuasive book in many ways but I wish it came with fifty pages of counterpoints.
Every now and then I forget how perfect it is to spend a few hours reading in the sunshine – and then I rediscover it all over again, and find that it has lost none of its luster.
(I’ve got a watch tan, now, which is pretty weird. The Apple Watch is still somewhat value-neutral to me – I have never caught myself thinking “man, I’m glad I have this thing”, but I find myself sometimes thinking “man, I should put on my Apple Watch”.)
Some stuff about Buttondown because obviously I’m going to talk about the product I built to send this email
I informally announced Buttondown to the world this time last week, and the feedback was really nice and made me very happy! I still have a gripping fear of announcing anything of consequence on the internet – especially something that involves email – and to see the positive response made me feel truly fortunate. Thanks for that, y’all.
(Thanks especially to those of you who acted as beta testers, because I am largely bad at software and it had many things broken. Don’t get me wrong, there are still things broken, but probably fewer things.)
I spent the first few days of the week putting out fires, as is tradition, and then got to work on a few tremendously fun things:
- Drag and drop image uploads!
- Notes!
- Unit tests! (Unit tests can be fun, I promise.)
Three things I really liked this week
- The End of Books, a New York Times piece from 1992. It features the following gem of a sentence: Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple.
- island_map, an Instagram account devoted to cataloging every island as it appears in mapping software. This is a kind of project that, as far as I can tell, provides no aesthetic value and yet gives me much joy that it exists. (Which, I guess, means it does provide aesthetic value.)
- Infinite Artwork Simulator, a artwork description generator. My favorite so far: This work is an industrial, urban chrome chameleon consisting of the artist himself engaged in an act of unexplained violence which is reminiscent of formal precision and tenderness.
Happy Sunday. I hope you spend some time this week near a body of water (or, failing that, on a porch.)