So many words this week.
Rain Monday and the weekend. These are dark times, but not too cold: mid 60s for a high. Lows in the 40s. Waning moon, just full; king tides.
It was a quite busy week with a lot of work and two trips to the office.
The stupid internet is out all day. Doesn’t it know that the storm was during the weekend and not today. What happened? I will probably never know.
End of year party at the office. It’s actually pretty great. Thankfully it’s during the day.
Managed to fit in a run during the afternoon. I’ve been slacking, so it’s tough-ish. But not unbearable. I slog through.
My kingdom for a handsaw. It’s a comedy of errors in one act. We get the piece of garden furniture into the street, and cut over halfway through the woody bits that we need to remove to make it fit in the car, and realize that it is geometrically impossible to cut through the rest with the circular saw we have brought with us. Why, oh why, didn’t I remember to bring the handsaw to this remote job site? Back into the garden it goes and away we drive, empty handed in defeat. Tomorrow is another day.
B and I are having a rather deep conversation about the range of experience that different people have based on their personal or family wealth. The core of it is that people index or level set their assumptions about what is right by their own personal experience. When doing this, they neglect to account for how limited their own experience is, their own baked in biases, and the truly vast range of possibilities that are acceptable as “the right way to do thing.”
Later, I encountered this comment and it struck me as another expression of the same thing. But it’s not just limited mental bandwidth, it’s also not learned or expected or even recognized that being an active agent in choosing to direct your attention at any of these things is something that you can do. People, I suspect, just do what feels right, fits in with their group, and don’t think about it much. I think you could label that as “stupid” behavior from the outside, but it’s just normal routine on the inside.
Just speculating here, arm chair theorizing, hypothesizing at how the world works. Sounds right, don’t know if it really is, or is just masquerading as truth. Could just be achieving order in society instead.
Solstice day, shortest day of the year.
I am beginning to reflect on all the notes that I took this year, and lessons I learned. Toying with the Drafts app as a lower friction input. But is it? It should replace my shortcut to email (Captio replacement), and anytime I deal with pre-drafting things in my iPad git client. Maybe it is better. It is kind of an overwhelmingly sophisticated tool with lots of features and options behind the spartan front facing editor that you get dropped into. So, uh, how do you do… x? Baby steps, that’s what I got to say.
Partially inspired by the stray thoughts section below.
I read the Introduction to Made to Stick by Heath and Heath. That’s enough for it to win a spot on my shelf, but I don’t need to read any more than that for now.
I am also sampling the middle section (Action) of The Obstacle is the Way by Holiday. It’s the Stoic book. I wonder if this writing style (quite similar to Robert Greene’s style), heavy on the historical anecdotes, and fairly contextless for actually mapping onto one’s own context. It’s vexing, it’s own obstacle to understanding. Ironic. Probably obvious to others.
The other book, ahem “book” that I may read is the Shakespeare play Richard II, the first play in the Henriad. Or I’ll just get through the stick figure version. I’m looking for something short, that I can complete before the end of the year-ish. Plays are short, right? I realize it will make it a horribly edited paragraph, but why would I want to read this? Basically because English. Shakespeare does it well, some say the best, and I want to read it more carefully.
Ezra Klein on Population Decrease This is a two parter-ish. Or, there is a second episode on the same theme. My take-aways:
Seems to me that if you want to make a real difference, you’ll have to make some changes such that people want to have children as a choice. I doubt that some tax credit will do that. Hot take: it’s about individual agency or freedom to create the life you want, and about escaping from the traps of familial/social servitude or someone else’s entitlement overriding yours. Who doesn’t want that?
Yule Logs: Nasa, Wind Waker, Calcifer.
Maigomika does the yuzu festival.
Martijn’s new old truck. I am so far behind here.
Anjunadeep editions: 531 Anuqram and 530 Qrion
Finished the last season of Girls5Eva. It was a mistake to not renew it. I’ll have to go and look for other works by these folks.
Started rewatching Brooklyn 99. Holds up. So funny to me. I love the ridiculously absurd spins they put on mundane-ish situations.
Interior Chinatown looks to be way more than I expected. And What we do in the shadows final season is out.
Hocus Pocus I was in the mood for something with a supernatural adventure type story, or olde-timey problems.1 I mean, curses, ghosts, mummies, etc. Movies like The Mummy or National Treasure or The Tomb Raider or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not saying these are good movies, but they’re fun and not too serious, but well put together. I’m not saying that Hocus Pocus is one of these, but I hadn’t seen it before which was pretty surprising to A, so that’s what we’re watching.
Maybe next year I’ll work on migrating these things back out of the one weekly post.
Pertinacity. Pigheaded stupidly obstinate tenacity. Uber, unrelenting, inevitable, brute force tenacity.
Yaws and bejel are different expressions of the syphilis bacterium more common in tropical regions. From here.
Premiering in the new year.
All the Montaigne essays! I didn’t expect to find that this week.
A cool photo of leaves on water.
Several things broke in websites2 this week. It’s very frustrating. YT history isn’t loading. The newsletter website isn’t cooperating with the dark mode plugin. Ugh. I assume it’s ios 18.2. Or the newsletter site changing style things. Or just bad juju.
Is this related? I don’t know. But that’s a different problem that I often think about. A hammer is a hammer is a hammer. Always has been. But your pie (pocket internet engine) is about a million things and they keep changing where the business end is.
A while back I asked “what’s the theoretically smallest bureaucracy?” I think I have proposal of an answer: one person and a notebook (and a pencil) is the smallest possible bureaucracy. I notebook has enough pages that some retrieval system is necessary to find what you want in it, and it can hold a lot of information in those pages. It is durable enough to last years. It can be used to record things and make decisions with those things. The decision rules can even be noted in the book itself. There it is, a bureaucracy. Does a bureaucracy imply and require an enforcement mechanism, such as an army, police force, or jail? I hadn’t considered this angle before, after all I’ve just described a person and a notebook, which may not be very effective at influencing an uncooperative population. Of course, if the society just consists of that person who is writing in the notebook, maybe it could still qualify.3
Airlines are credit card companies with travel infrastructure department attached. The search company is really an ad company. The social network company is really an ad company. The car company also sells telemetry data to anyone who’ll buy it. All (hyperbole) the businesses are hybrid businesses, marketed as one thing but actually making money on something else or several somethings else. I conjecture that this hybridization of information will continue to push down to smaller and smaller businesses. Due to networked POS systems, you probably can’t even buy tacos without the data of that transaction being sold to someone, assuming you paid with a credit card.
The non-alcoholic business of making new (or just not on the market before) waters and other mocktails is positively booming. The flavors seem to sprout like mushrooms after a rainstorm4, heck even the companies seem to be sprouting like that too. It’s great! Keep ‘em coming.
Like conflict with an ancient evil kind of problems, not like modern inventions by science made problems such as Frankenstein. ↑
I use this loosely. I don’t know where the breakage is. And it’s not really my job to figure it out. That’s a choice that cuts both ways: I lose on emotional energy and whatever information or activity I was trying to do. And the website loses audience or customer or whatever I am to them. Also the whole ecosystem loses credibility, iOS, Safari, the plugin, the website, the author, my own internalization of what I expect myself to be able to do at any given time. All of it. Ugh. ↑
My outer reality on this is that I’ve been really maxing out my notebook usage in the last couple of years. So, of course I would think this. ↑
That one’s free but I won’t be buying any of your Mushroom rain flavored waters, thank you very much. ↑
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Tags only on this post: broken things, Brooklyn 99, bureaucracy, flavored waters, Girls5Eva, handsaw, Hocus Pocus, hybrid businesses, Interior Chinatown, mocktails, solstice, yule log.