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After decades of advancements in semantic markup and accessibility, Instagram decided that we should consume all content as flat, inaccessible images via Stories and we just… went along with it.
The very structure of American life has changed to make the basics of stability difficult to attain, down to something as simple as eating with your partner or child…The problem of dinner is far larger than what you’re going to eat.
🔗 Dinner in America: Who Has the Time to Cook? - The Atlantic
Haven’t watched anything yet, but my first impression of Disney+ is that every single other streaming platform needs to copy how D+ handles login on Apple TV.
This new Sturgill Simpson record is the sound of an artist just straight-up Going For It on every single song. It has no chill whatsoever, and I mean that in the best possible way. I think I love it.
I somehow found the spot in YouTube TV that allows me to record all college football games with one click. I am drunk with power.
Actually, it’s fine that my rMBP battery percentage indicator decrements even when it’s plugged in. It’s fine and good.
Finished reading: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell 📚
A few thoughts:
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The “doing nothing” in the title isn’t just chilling, or conspicuous, performative self-care. It’s deeper and more profound than that, in a way I was not totally prepared for.
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I was also not preparedness all for the academic rigor, complete with a web of primary sources. This is a substantial book.
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(There is something somewhat ironic about reading this on vacation, as the author stresses the value of “resisting in place.”)
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I’ve also been rereading “Franny and Zoey” on the beach (for the hundredth time, perhaps) and I keep coming back to this quote from Salinger, a quote so large I want to live inside it:
“There’s a marvelous peace in not publishing, there’s a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don’t publish, they don’t know what you’re doing. You can keep it for yourself.”
Anyway, I really want to think about this ideas that this book is posing. Like, really think deeply about them. And I get the irony of posting half-baked thoughts about this book, but this is maybe just part of my process of thinking now… And maybe that’s why I needed this book so badly.
The vacation house has Yahtzee… but no score sheets. Downloaded a score sheet to my iPad Mini, opened it in Notes and am keeping score with the Pencil. I am living in an Apple commercial.
One of the things I miss the most about The Old Web: pages like this. One person or group of people curating a list of fan-submitted guitar tabs for a given band. So much love, passion and thoughtfulness in one place.
I’m working on building and tracking some small habits that will bring me joy and better mental health. One of the things I’m tracking is “play the guitar for at least ten minutes a day.” I’m up to 8 days in a row for the first times since… my 20s? my teens?
Please join me on the new Mastodon instance I just spun up, hejira.is, a place for like-minded individuals to beatifically discuss their appreciation of Joni Mitchell’s 1976 masterpiece.
Dropped into my local record store around lunchtime. Clerk saw me, walked over and said “Dude, I have a truckload of new, super clean 80s indie and alternative in, but that copy of ‘Green’ I posted on Insta last night just walked out the door.”
I feel very Seen. It feels good.
Listening to the audiobook of Insanely Simple, in which author Ken Segall relays a story about Steve Jobs proudly demoing a “with special offers” version of OS 9 that would ship with a 60-second startup commercial, along with other ads throughout the OS.
I’m going to maybe spend the rest of the day thinking about this alternate timeline.
Currently charging my son’s shoes via USB for his first day of school because that’s a thing you do in 2018.
Ben Gibbard’s been doing the rounds to promote Death Cab for Cutie’s quite good new record, Thank You For Today.
Gibbard was asked to force-rank all eight Death Cab albums, and his answers were somewhat controversial (The Photo Album is way too low for my liking). However, it’s this interview with Entertainment Weekly that stuck with me.
EW asks Gibbard about the 15-year anniversaries of both Transatlanticism and Give Up. His answer is very illuminating, and incredibly self-aware:
When I look back at 2003, it was the best year I’ve ever had creatively: having Transatlanctism and Give Up come out in the course of six months. I’ll never have another year like that.
I can’t imagine how difficult it is to admit that your best creative work occurred fifteen years ago as a working recording artist, promoting a new release with major label backing.
About 8 years ago, we received a coffee grinder as a Christmas gift. It was a very thoughtful gift, because my wife and I both love coffee. Except that after a pretty short while, it became a hassle. Grinding beans is just another step in the morning, I don’t notice much if any taste difference, and it’s almost impossible to make a cup in the morning with my son asleep.
Yet still, we bought bag after bag of whole bean coffee. Because we had a grinder, and we couldn’t let that go to waste, y’know?
Finally, I had a Moment of Clarity on the subject. I realized that this was silly, and that we should just buy ground coffee, and that we should ignore the “sunk cost” of already having a grinder. I felt enlightened as I went to grind beans for presumably the last time this morning.
The coffee grinder was dead.