6.2 KiB
title, date, draft, tags, references
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| Dispatch #23 (January 2025) | 2024-12-12T12:29:51-05:00 | false |
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Some thoughts here...
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Comfort and joy to you and yours.
This Month
- Adventure:
- Project:
- Skill:
Reading & Listening
- Fiction: Title, Author
- Non-fiction: Title, Author
- Music: Voodoo, D'Angelo (literal quarter century late on this one but keen to explore the extended Dilla-verse)
Links
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“This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory,” MGM founder Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) says in Mank. “What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
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Maximization and buying stuff - macwright.com
It has been a tough transition. I’m used to finding some price/quality local maximum, and nice stuff is always past that point. Leicas, luxury cars, fancy clothes, etc are usually 80% more expensive and 20% technically-better than the value-optimizing alternative.
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Software for stationery lovers - vrk loves paper
But earlier in November, I had a memorable conversation with an artist friend I admire. In it, she mentioned how she gets the “productivity zoomies,” where she feels a burst of sudden inspiration, and that energy would propel her to be absurdly productive in a short period of time, like “designing an entire sticker line at 2am” sorta thing. It was a style that really worked for her. As she talked, it occurred to me how deeply I recognized the feeling she described, yet how rarely I let myself work off that feeling.
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fogus: The best things and stuff of 2024
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2024. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly
A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.
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What happens when the internet disappears? - The Verge
When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing has become hard to find, it creates a crisis not just of profession, but identity. Who am I, if not my content?
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But I strongly believe that there’s an opportunity for a brand like Costco’s ‘Kirkland’ or OXO to become the standard place for middle-class people to buy stuff. Paying 5-10% more for something with better odds of being genuine and high-quality, and for a less overwhelming junk-pile buying experience… there’s something there.
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One Foot Tsunami: Meat-Ax Your News Consumption
I’m fortunate that my own day-to-day life does not actually need to be so negatively impacted by Trump’s every offense. Perhaps yours needn’t be either. It is no doubt a fine line, but it should be possible to stay aware of what’s happening without being consumed by the relentless malfeasance over which we have no control.