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weekend todos

  • Get John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood EDIT 17.07.19 – I finally read this! It’s nuts
  • Find a copy of An Anthology of English Medieval and Renaissance Vocal Music ed. Noah Greenberg
  • Write down last week’s Dockside Chicken recipe for further refining
  • dat dat dat dat dat & pie w/ GC and HB
  • Try making Semmelknödel ◯ Start with this recipe but consider steaming, refrigerating beforehand, adding nutmeg. Aim for Knödelwirtshaft perfection. Think we had dandylion, goats cheese + red pepper, cheese, and bacon? Thx FB!

And go all in w/ iced tea. Hot tip for cold tea: cold-brew tea + squirt of lemon juice + splash of peach and elderflower squash = top-notch summer beverage. I am a little over caffeinated right now.

Read notes post-semmelknödel

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If a tree falls in a forest

❤️👍😍⭐️🙌

The quick-kudos tools that have evolved online definitely have their usefulness, but most of the time it feels like sugar. Satisfying and fostering a hunger. It cultivates a bottomless pit of competition, arbitrary measurements of self worth, and requires a level of intrapersonal gymnastics that I’m not personally capable of sustaining.

Is the problem just the public-ness of it all? What about deliberately quiet kudos?

I want to give those sorts of kudos almost every day. It’s hard to describe the use cases, though there are many… Maybe someone famous does work you admire. That’s the I-want-to-tell-you-that-this-is-fantastic-but-I’m-genuinely-not-latching-on-for-likes use case. Or a rather private friend finishes a project they should be damn proud of. That’s the you-need-to-know-this-is-great-but-we-both-know-you’d-prefer-if-I-didn’t-turn-this-in-to-a-conversation use case.

And I sure as hell would be happy to receive that sort of thing. Little pick-me-ups are critical, especially when you are mostly/fully your own employer.

It’s the digital equivalent of a great compliment from a stranger. The sort of compliment that leaves you feeling a tiny bit lighter. The sort of compliment that isn’t motivated by a mob of people giving you the same compliment. And it usually has little to do with the identity of the complimenter. (In fact, when a complete stranger follows up an IRL compliment by introducing themselves, that’s often when the moment sours a bit, or gets a smidge creepy.)

So how to give quiet kudos? It should be as simple and familiar feeling as similar features – as in, just select an emoji – but definitely not public. It shouldn’t associate an identity with the kudos either, IMO. Hopefully that would avoid spamminess. It’d probably also need a daily/weekly/monthly summary setting but good lord, it definitely shouldn’t ever send a “you received 0 kudos this week!” sort of email. And it should include other reactions, the bad with the good.

I would be surprised if this doesn’t exist already in some form or another… need to dig a little harder. I suppose one preexisting version of this is the e-newsletter since it’s an opt-in system. Particularly TinyLetter. But that just feels a little too business-y for what the sort of thing I’m imagining. Might look in to making the tool I’m imagining. Add it to the someday list.

In summary:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I say yes.

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“She sprinkles flowers in the dirt / That’s when a thrill becomes a hurt”

Wanted some soulful-but-not-overly-corny tunes to work to so I put on a “song radio” Spotify station for music related to Gillian Welch’s “Look At Miss Ohio”, specifically the v. from Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains. First track to pop up was “That Day Is Done” with vocals by Elvis Costello and The Fairfield Four, Larry Knechtel on piano.

Oof, my heart…

The song was written by Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney, and it looks like it was originally released by Paul McCartney on his album Flowers In The Dirt. Personally, I prefer the Costello + Fairfield Four version. For a similar version, see live recording on YT. Related: see the history of The Fairfield Four, pretty exceptional. The group will soon be 100 yrs old.

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Exploring the use cases for serverless website architecture

Last Saturday, Sam introduced me to Chris Coyier’s talk on serverless-ness, The All-Powerful Front-End Developer. Pretty interesting and useful. I’m glad he leads it by breaking down the problematic nature of the word “serverless”! The following day was spent in agorama’s p2p workshop at furtherfield. Coincidentally, there is a lot of overlap in these topics.

I’ve spent the past few days wrapping my head around all of this, contextualising it against the sorts of concerns and projects we work with. Though I desperately want to get going with Dat, I’m starting with serverless because it may solve an urgent need in my day-to-day work. Right now, I’m spending much more time than I realistically can maintaining CMSs and hosting environments for older websites.

All of the below is a thought dump on the topic, an attempt to pick apart the meaning of and the use cases for a serverless website architecture.

Read more

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Link dump: P2P, serverless, sushi, etc.

Weekend activities resulted in an explosion of information that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. 💥 Link dump below for reference. Most of these are via Sam B, Gemma C, Hannah B, and agorama.

Going to write up more about serverless and P2P, and how they kind of intersect, once I’ve digested some of this.

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cold water didn’t hurt my ears (~1992–2000)

light blue stucco
navy blue shutters
kitchen window like a fishbowl, or a porthole
one floor, mostly

mom splitting her knee open on the brick stairs up to the front door

pots & pans band

dad’s lime green motorcycle, briefly

agapanthus & jade plants
bougainvillea
the scariest palm tree

garage always full, but never the car

where did mom keep her drawing board?

huge glass sliding door at the back
games through the wicker rocking chair
cinder blocks and chain link

ice plant covering the hill to the creek behind the house

sliding closet doors, the paint would stick

neighbors with the scary Halloween ghost
Zeke & Aileen, and the toys they made for us

white painted brick surrounding the fireplace that we rarely used

– – –

blue stucco and blue shutters again,
but this time with white wrought iron
two floors now
wisteria taking over at the back

parents’ brass bed frame, with ceramic decorations on the spindles

mom and her study, wooden artboard and captain’s chair
endless stacks of continuous form paper
tins of colored pencils, meticulously organized by hue
AOL and computer games

the oven that went baroom

Sega Genesis behind the couch
Brett was way better

possom in the wood pile under the lemon and lime trees

the water main broke, water gushing down the street
jumping over the water to get to school

Mr. and Mrs. Redlitz next door
the not-so-nice lady on the other side
Teddy & Dmitri

games barefoot on the berm
until I stepped on a bee, and dog poo
Cassiopeia, Pleiades, Big & Little Dippers

Pleiades was mine, my little tornado

people jumped off that cliff sometimes, but we didn’t hear much about it; probably on purpose

falling about 5 feet on to my back on the rocks after trying to climb the cliff instead of using the path
I was lucky, it was one of the first times I really felt lucky
it could have been so much further
the grass at the top felt incredible

there’s an edible plant that grows on the cliffs and tastes sour, dewy and pink
and mustard, and fennel

owls, sometimes; gulls, always

still dream about walking down the storm drain, through the rocks and down to the bay
not sure it’s possible

we were always told to keep well back from the cliff edge, it could be soft even when it’s been dry
it was usually dry

the road leading to a friend’s house near the school fell in to the sea not long before we moved away
the rollercoaster road near the best tidepools was always changing
we didn’t go there often

countless tadpoles in the storm drain
one day we weren’t allowed to play in the storm drain
it didn’t seem like anything had changed in the little tadpole pools

never once saw the green flash

running my fingers through the sand just after the wave recedes, feeling millions of sandcrabs

mile swims around the buoys
mile runs in blistering, soft sand
Neil, a first crush
his real name is Donald
he was the only faster swimmer

a ray in the shallow water, briefly, before I can show anyone
a vivid purple jellyfish
dolphins in the bay, rarely

don’t dive in head first, always wade out and check the levels first
how to brace someone’s neck if you’re waiting for first aid
don’t touch a seal, it’s probably sick
don’t step on kelp bulbs barefoot, there might be something sharp inside
don’t step on the black “rocks”, they’re chunks of hot tar

cold water didn’t hurt my ears