Listening

Via David Crespo, I got into Greet Death, a band that’s been hustling since 2011. It’s great in a simultaneously familiar and innovative way. The album has a great amount of variety: Small Town Cemetery is a really effective quiet, acoustic track whereas Die in Love reminds me of classic shoegaze or, ahem, my old band, Teen Mom. We put out some good music.

Earlier today I decided to look up Happy Apple on Wikipedia. They’re one of my favorite bands of all time, sharing a drummer with The Bad Plus but with a very different songwriting approach. Their new-to-me-as-of-looking-it-up-this-morning album (released in 2020), "New York CD" immediately clicked, it’s just as good if not better than their older stuff. The grooves on the new stuff feel a little more sinister in a very very good way.

Reading

Some of the complaining sounds like “Oh no, I’m such an undisciplined feral beast for enjoying my interests for hours!”

From Ava’s blog, which I really enjoy reading, even when it makes me question how I spend my time. Recently I’ve had phases of social burnout, then loneliness, working a lot, then balance, and I feel exactly what she’s writing about, the feeling of having free time and then beating myself up for not using it ‘productively’ enough. In part this is a continuity thing: I’ve had so many hobbies and commitments that at I’m always dropping the ball in some way, letting something wilt. I just try to remember the evergreen Louise Miller tweet: No love, however brief, is wasted.

Saying that a social-media feed is the product of users is like saying that a hot dog is the product of cattle.

From The "User-Generated Content" Ruse, about how recommendation systems and algorithmic feeds make all modern ‘social media’ more of a produced set of preferences than a person-to-person communication mechanism. I like my RSS feeds and chronological timelines.

A Donor Advised Fund sounds all high-falutin’ but it’s basically just a financial instrument that decouples the timing of a donation’s tax event (when money leaves your account) from the actual granting (when money goes to the charity).

From Michael Gris, writing about how bunching donations and donating stock can be a win-win. This overlaps with another article that made the rounds this month - What if we stopped paying taxes? - about how states could attempt to stop paying taxes to the federal government (summary: hard, dangerous, barely possible). But anyway, I rethought my ‘giving’ strategy this year for two reasons:

1. Last year, I spent time and money focused on politics and donated to political campaigns in New York City. I also spent a little time volunteering for those campaigns.
2. This year, there are fewer inspiring campaigns, and the behavior of our current political administration makes me excited about nonprofits that support the rule of law, as well as excited about paying slightly less federal tax because of itemizing.

It was pretty quick and easy. I’m using it as a pass-through: immediately granting out the money that I put into it, just taking advantage of how DAFs make stock donations a little easier and simplify the paperwork.

The gist: if you think you have these problems, it is likely that the correct solution is to do nothing, to not manage, and to go back to building product and talking to users.

I enjoyed, and feared this blog post about early-stage engineering management. I’ve been a very early stage engineer or an early-stage manager for my entire career, and it more or less mirrors what I do now. Which is good, because it confirms that what I’m doing makes some sense, but bad, because I still always have the feeling that someone, somewhere, knows how to do everything better.

Watching

I didn’t mention Hundreds of Beavers. It is a revelation. It’s brilliant and dumb at the same time. It’s silent, in black and white, low-budget, endlessly endearing. Absolutely hilarious. I highly recommend seeing it in a theater for the full experience. One of the best movie experiences I’ve had in years. (via Leanne Abraham)

This video from Jamelle Bouie, whose channel I highly recommend, is of a piece with this crossover episode of the Volts podcast about "Reactionary Centrism", with Michael Hobbes. As Michael Hobbes puts it, we live in a basic, one-dimensional reality where there is an obvious evil. People are tempted to dress it up or to find similarities, but the truth is that there’s a clear problem and it’s the Republican party.

Stuff

I have been enjoying some manufactured goods. In particular, I got a letter opener for the first time in my life, and it makes my brain happier to open letters neatly. JetPens in general is lovely. I just got some Bronson t-shirts (via Justin Duke) because my American Giant ones are starting to fray, and they look like a good next step. But props to American Giant, because I’ve gotten a full decade out of some of their stuff. I switched to Comply foam tips for my AirPods and they make then work with my apparently non-standard ear canals.