Time is a flat circle and so are narratives about new social media platforms being safe havens for earnestness and authenticity. The newest victim of this cycle? TikTok. Kottke nails it again with the linked post, but had already done once before in 2016:
Blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Vine, and Instagram all started off as places to be yourself, but as they became more mainstream and their communities developed behavioral norms, the output became more crafted and refined. Users flooded in and optimized for what worked best on each platform. Blogs became more newsy and less personal, Flickr shifted toward professional-style photography, Vine got funnier, and Twitter’s users turned toward carefully crafted cultural commentary and link sharing. Editing worked its way in between the making and sharing steps.
Nothing has changed but the names. You can just copy and paste the articles for every newly heralded platform. And when the next platform gets big, the same editing and crafting and overthinking will suck the life from that one, as well.
In an attempt to track and briefly note what I consume, here’s a roundup of (mostly) everything I watched, read, and listened to this month. As the first one, some October is slipping in because there were some goodies I didn’t want to miss. Also, I make no promises of actually doing this every month, but I’m going to try.
La Dispute’s reissue of Somewhere at the Bottom is a master class in honoring an original performance while updating it only for the better. This record defined a lot of my early college years and I’m glad to see a reissue so well cared for. Supergroup boygenius put out their self-titled EP that gets it right by playing to the strengths of all three members throughout. Julien, Phoebe, and Lucy’s output have been amazing separately, but all three together really have come up with something special. My favorite band of all time, Minus The Bear, put out their final EP, Fair Enough, in the middle of October and is still getting regular plays from me. I’m truly heartbroken over their end, but I’m glad they’ve left such an amazing catalog I can bring with me forever. TTNG put out an acoustic reissue of Animals with their original vocalist for its 10th anniversary. Some of the complicated guitarwork falls flat on an acoustic if you aren’t familiar with the electric versions, but I love these songs so much it all works really well for me. JPEGMAFIA put out a new tune with Kenny Beats called “Puff Daddy” with one of my favorite beats of the year. Veteran is my favorite rap record of the year easily and the singles he’s put out since its release have held up just as well. Speaking of Kenny Beats, the new Vince Staples record, FM!, has been on regular rotation since it came out earlier this month. It’s a fun, relaxed effort that let’s Staples show off some interesting flows and wastes no time clocking in at just 22 minutes. I’ve given a few cursory listens to Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers’ Bought to Rot, but it hasn’t really stuck for me. Lastly, Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells is an idiosyncratic jazz and pop outing that I find myself coming back to while at work these last few weeks. It’s much more lush and ambient than her previous albums.
I got through a lot more TV than I expected to this month as I started biking indoors for the winter. I wrapped up the new season of Big Mouth and caught up on Steven Universe and The 100, both of which I had left lingering in my queue over the summer. Big Mouth’s potty humor appeals to the immature side of me that I can’t help but cackle at. Steven Universe is continues to dominate animated television, especially post-Adventure Time (RIP, I need to weep about how much I love and miss this show publicly soon) and the expanding world and history they’re creating have only made it better as it’s gone on. The future of that show is bright. I think I’m finally done with The 100 now. The first two seasons were great and it’s all been downhill for me since then. This one finally ended on a concrete enough note that I’m happy wishing it good luck and moving on with my life. I’d still recommend those first two seasons, though. I swung back around to Disenchantment, the new Netflix show from Futurama creator Matt Groening, which was…okay. I feel very meh about the show as a whole, but I’m holding out hope for season two to move things forward. It was a fun watch, but definitely fell short on expectations. I also watched all of Cowboy Bebop for the first time, which I plan to write a lot more about in the coming week. Spoiler for that post, the show is amazing in pretty much every way and its cult status makes sense to me now.
I cut down my weekly queue a good amount this fall, so my list of actively airing shows is down to just South Park, Riverdale, Bob’s Burgers, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I watch South Park mainly out of nostalgia at this point, and this season isn’t really doing anything to change that. The Manbearpig episodes have been a nice moral about-face and making fun of vaping is still funny, but the charm of that show left many years ago. Riverdale I watch mainly because my girlfriend wants to, but boy is that show getting weird (in a good way) this season. Bob’s Burgers still finds a way to be the most lovely, hilarious show, even 9 seasons on. And Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is holding steady as it finds its exit with a final season. What’s nice about the show is that it’s actually attempting to work through and show character’s growing and changing and it shows that progression in an honest, realistic manner.
I don’t watch a lot of movies, so this area may be sparse most months, but I did watch two Jackie Chan movies this month: Legend of Drunken Master and Rumble In The Bronx. The movies exist with almost zero plot (Rumble literally had no denouement), but that’s not the point: Jackie Chan doing amazing martial arts on screen is and he delivered in both movies. I hadn’t seen any Jackie Chan movies other than Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon prior to this, so it was a fun chance to see some of his earlier work. If you are looking for some easy laughs and awesome stunts, both of these movies were great for exactly that. My intention is to watch Amour of God and Police Story next.
I finished up The Dark Forest, the second book of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, in late October and started burning through Death’s End immediately after. The Dark Forest ended on a crazy note and Death’s End hasn’t let off the throttle at all. What makes the series so good is the way it balances philosophical problems with big picture science fiction story-telling. I find myself having trouble how good these books are without spoiling the story, so I’ll leave it at that for now. I started Eating Animals because I might eat meat, but I know it’s not the most moral decision I make each day and I want to investigate that feeling more. I’m also reading Extreme Ownership at work. I think the principles it presents are great for any leader to hear and consider how to apply themselves, but all the military stuff sours it for me because I can’t decouple my personal politics from those stories.
Thrillist’s ‘I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.’ is probably the best piece of writing I read this month. It contemplates the power of sharing and The Media™ through a non-controversial lens. “Is it good to share this?,” “Do we have an obligation to?,” and “What are the consequences of doing so?” are questions that don’t bubble up in the era of social media and click-based revenue models. It doesn’t reach too deep into answering those questions directly, but it’s good to see them being considered and I hope this article’s popularity starts more conversations around these questions.
The Atlantic’s exploration of the sex recession brought together a bunch of ideas around dating, romance, sense of self, and a bunch more interpersonal topics I think have been bubbling up for a few years now and made a case around how it’s happening. I’ll be interested to see if the trend continues in the data over the next generation.
There are few things I enjoy more than Current Affairs taking right-wing and centrist schlock to task and Being Mr. Reasonable does a hell of a job on Sam Harris. As always, it’s well-researched and articulates in great detail what makes these moral scam artists so horrific.
I finally got around to Longreads’ piece from back in September, No, I Will Not Debate You. It sharpens a point I’ve been trying to make in my head for a while around the always-dumb debate about civility and giving the microphone to lunatics. It puts a cap on a point I’ve been trying to make in my own head for a while now:
If we deny racists a platform, they feed off the appearance of censorship, but if we give them a platform, they’ve won by being respectfully invited into the mainstream. Either way, what matters to them is not debate, but attention. There is no perfect choice.
Federico Viticci’s explanation of how he uses GitHub for a writing and collaboration workflow on iOS has inspired me to create a platform agnostic notes system using GitHub as my sync server. More on this later, though. I just found the article interesting from a technical ingenuity standpoint.
As I’ve been piecing this place together and learning how Jekyll works, I realized I could not figure out how to embed media from across the web, mainly YouTube videos and Spotify songs, albums, or playlists. After a bit of fiddling, I figured out the easiest way was to create standalone files in the _includes folder and then call an include tag on a post when I need to embed something. Here’s how to do it:
First, create a file named youtubePlayer.html in the _includes folder and put this code in there:
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/{{ include.id }}"
width="560"
height="315"
frameborder="0"
allowfullscreen>
</iframe>
When you make a post and want to include the embed, call this in your markdown file:
{% include youtubePlayer.html id=page.youtubeId %}
With the above syntax, include “youtubeId: $foo,” where $foo is the youtube video’s id, in the frontmatter of your post. You can also choose to hardcode the youtube video’s id into the snippet like this:
{% include youtubePlayer.html id="4EU7vvSvV-0" %}
I plan to do it the second way. Here’s an example of it in action:
The above will get you rolling, but I would recommend one more thing: wrap your youtubePlayer.html document in a <div> with a class name (I called mine embed-youtube) and give it this CSS so that the video will properly scale with the device:
.embed-youtube {
position: relative;
padding-bottom: 56.25%;
padding-top: 25px;
height: 0;
}
.embed-youtube iframe {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
}
This operates on the same principles as above, but is a little more complicated because of the different types of media you can share and how that changes the URL. I broke this out into three separate files: one for sharing songs, one for albums, and one for playlists each called spotifySong.html, spotifyAlbum.html, and spotifyPlaylist.html, respectively. You’ll also need to include the CSS I provide below. The embeds don’t look right without it, so don’t skip it.
In each of the files, put the following:
spotifySong.html
<div class="embed-spotify-song">
<iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/{{ include.id }}"
frameborder="0"
allowtransparency="true"
allow="encrypted-media">
</iframe>
</div>
spotifyAlbum.html
<div class="embed-spotify-list">
<iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/{{ include.id }}"
frameborder="0"
allowtransparency="true"
allow="encrypted-media">
</iframe>
</div>
spotifyPlaylist.html
<div class="embed-spotify-list">
<iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/spotify/playlist/{{ include.id }}"
frameborder="0"
allowtransparency="true"
allow="encrypted-media">
</iframe>
</div>
The main difference here is the source URL, which splits out what you’re embedding. Once you have this set up, like the YouTube link above, you’ll use something like the following in the post you want to embed a Spotify link into:
{% include spotifySong.html id=page.spotifyId %}
And again, like the above, you’ll need to include “spotifyId: ###” in the frontmatter if you use the syntax above or hardcode it and do this:
{% include spotifySong.html id="3V9Ndh1badVfBXnv3niDgE" %}
If you want to embed the album or playlist files instead, just change the include above to spotifyAlbum.html or spotifyPlaylist.html, insert the proper id, and you’re good to go. Here they are in action:
Song:
Album:
Playlist:
Now, for the CSS. Unlike the YouTube embed, this provides core functionality for the embed to display properly, so be sure to include this.
.embed-spotify-song {
width: 300px;
height: 80px;
position: relative;
max-width: 100%;
}
.embed-spotify-song iframe, .embed-spotify object, .embed-spotify embed {
position: absolute;
width: 300px;
height: 80px;
top: 0;
left: 0;
max-width: 100%;
}
.embed-spotify-list {
width: 300px;
height: 310px;
position: relative;
max-width: 100%;
}
.embed-spotify-list iframe, .embed-spotify object, .embed-spotify embed {
position: absolute;
width: 300px;
height: 310px;
top: 0;
left: 0;
max-width: 100%;
}
You can tweak the width/height to your liking, but I selected ones that I thought looked best and then used max-width to make sure there was no overflow. You could also use “margin: auto;” to center them if you’d like. With all that out of the way, you should now be able to embed videos and music with no problem going forward.
Back in April, I wrote about how I track my entire life using Toggl. I’ve continued to keep up with it, and with a full 10 months of data, I feel like I have enough to discuss the breakdown, how it’s helped me, and where I’m headed with it going forward.
To start, let’s get the numbers up on the board. Looking at January through the end of October, I have tracked 7231 hours. Here’s the breakdown with some highlights pointed out.
Smudging the math a little bit for ease of use, it breaks down to a week that, on average, looks like this:
There are 168 hours in a week and the above add up to 166 hours I have accounted for. Not too bad. I’d probably say the other 2 hours go to fitness and personal projects, which I didn’t account into the math because they were such small numbers.
So let’s dig into this but first, a caveat: These numbers aren’t literal or scientific and aren’t meant to be. They’re a general overview of where I’ve reported my time to be. The easiest way to explain it is the “sleeping” project: that’s not my actual time literally asleep the way a sleep tracking app would attempt to figure out. I hit the timer when I lay down and turn the lights off, but it doesn’t account for the amount of time it takes me to fall asleep. It’s the same with all of these. Other activities or “dual activities” happen (“Watching” a movie while out with friends is almost always under the “Socializing” task, not the “Watching” task). I’m trying to answer the question “What action am I taking at this moment?” and then report that to myself.
Work and Sleep are both pretty spot on. I work a standard 9-5 and am lucky to have a job I don’t take home with me very often, so with an hour for lunch/break each day (which I change the timer for), 35 looks about right. That total also wouldn’t include several weeks of vacation where I wouldn’t hit the work timer at all, so that would bring it up by another, say, 100 hours (I’ve taken a little over two weeks off at this point). The number is trending toward 38-40 in recent weeks after a promotion in June, but it’s fairly stable around there. As for sleep, 57hr/week equates to eight and a half hours in bed. Taking into account the time it takes to fall asleep, I’m probably averaging 8 hours of sleep every night, which is healthy and about what I expect. I’d like the napping number to trend downward until it’s zero, but other than that, things are stable and healthy in these categories, in my opinion.
The infrastructure number has been enlightening, but also is still a bit vague. Seeing how much I drive has been interesting since I hate driving, so it’s been helpful for my mindset to know where that time is going. It’s even made me hate driving less because I feel like it’s been a reasonable number most weeks, which makes me feel like I’m not losing too much of my life to it. It’s also been interesting to correlate that with my gas expenditure each month in Mint. I spend about $120 on gas every month and average about 30 hours of driving every month, so an hour of driving costs me $4. I’m at peace with that.
“Maintenance” is where the my main pain point arrives. This task has been a black box since I started. It’s what I use in the morning when I am getting ready or in the evenings when I come home from work and when I get ready for bed, but it’s also what I use whenever I did projects around the house or if I was fixing something or putting something together. That just isn’t giving me the insight I want with those two things together.
My intention is to split out maintenance into three new tasks: Daily, Home, and Other. The first two will handle the aforementioned separately now: Daily for any action that is routine and home for “Oh, I need to vacuum or set up these posters or put together a new bookcase or clean out cabinets” sorts of tasks. I think this will cover a majority of my previous “Maintence” tasks, which will be a big win in better understanding Infrastructure as whole, especially how long my daily routines take me. “Other” may not even end up being necessary, but will then become the new, hopefully smaller, black box of infrastructure activities that don’t fit into the above. I’ll reevaluate this decision once some more data has come in and if I still need further refinement.
Entertainment is the most enlightening, but the averages aren’t the interesting part. Watching the trends month-to-month is. The most noticeable one is watching reading come and go in spurts. There’s one month with 30 hours, then the next two slowly trickle down, then another month of 30 hours and then it trickles down again. I’m definitely up-and-down with my relationship with reading and it was valuable to see that play out for me throughout the year. The interplay between them was also fun to watch. As video game playing went up, my television inverted, and vice versa. It obviously showed these as my two main hobbies, and one suffers in time in favor of the other.
The last notable aspect of the entertainment category is the almost perfect curve that my socializing makes. I hibernate a bit in the colder months and find myself much less interested in seeing people and the chart shows this. January through July are a slow climb up as the weather gets nice and now the chart is heading back downward as winter approaches again. I’ll be interested in watching an even longer term trend on this because of one main reason: this September, I moved in with my girlfriend. I’m unsure how to handle using the socializing tag in relation to the time we spend together, but having her right there and joining our lives together certainly makes that tag come up a lot more. In two years’ time, I’ll be interested to see if I maintain the same curve as I’m fairly certain I always have with winter while having a partner around to drag me out of the house.
Onto the bad news. 2018 has been a year where I didn’t take care of myself or move forward with any personal projects. Well, that’s not entirely true and the year isn’t over, but the numbers certainly don’t pan out very well for me. Regarding my fitness, the last few years have seen me gain and lose about 20 pounds each fall (which is happening again right now, but that’s for another post), so I do eventually find time to work out, but it’s almost always after my physical for work in October and then I fall off by the new year, which the evidence lays bare. Almost all of this year, I just didn’t work out. Period. And that’s heartbreaking to have to confront while looking at the numbers to write this post. Getting older isn’t making it easier, but more necessary every year that I keep my shit together. In any case, before I digress further, the numbers being right in front of my face are helpful. I’ve been diligent with my tracking and seeing such a low number is the only signal I need to know I have to crank that number up. I’ve already made strides in the last month, but I have to keep it up this time and make exercise a habit, not a passing trend.
I also didn’t really work on my personal projects this year. I still want to write my own notational velocity clone for Windows, which I’ve made exactly zero progress on. I didn’t write any music. I didn’t even think about trying to podcast. Lots of zeroes on my report card on this front. I did start this blog, though. It’s been slow going, but I’m feeling a bit of momentum lately. I’ll call it a win even if I’m just hitting double-digit posts on here at the time of writing. I’m starting to have and jot down more ideas on a regular basis and that’s inspiring me to keep going. I also must admit that a lot of my writing is done during down time at work–including this very post–and I rarely switch my timer for that, so there is definitely missing data here. I still haven’t written a lot, but it’s a start.
Having data brings me clarity. I trust it. I’m skeptical of data in a vacuum or used as an ideology, but my process-oriented, planner brain craves it. Digging through these reports has made me be honest with myself because I have faith in the numbers. I’m not happy about all of these numbers and sharing them is scary. Who wants to tell people they’ve spent 800 hours playing video games this year? Not me. But it is the undeniable truth of who I am, and all I can do is work with that and put effort into changing the numbers and continuing to be honest with myself about them as the months go on. So just having access to all this data in a digestible format has been helpful in and of itself.
I get a weekly report email from Toggl with my numbers from the previous seven days and it’s been a helpful nudge to reflect on last week’s choices in a concrete way that resonates with me. I definitely found myself reacting to the numbers every week and changing my behavior based on it. Sometimes I let myself slag off and not care when I saw “45 hours” on my video game line item, but most of the time I took a second to figure out what suffered because of that and being forced to confront it every week has been a really helpful tool for me.
Knowing there’s work to do, I wanted to publicly document a few things I want to commit to changing over the next year:
I’m honestly really happy with the process side of things that I have stood up. I feel like my categories are pretty solid once I work out the kinks with the “Maintenance” task and Toggl’s iOS 12’s Shortcuts are going to make this easier than ever to handle. From here, it’s all about continuing to keep at it and put more focus on having an active mindset each and every day about changing the numbers to be where I want them to be.
I ground up some apples last week and pressed them into cider. It was a deeply satisfying (and delicious) project. I had never made cider before, but I’m lucky to have a friend who grows his own apples and was willing to lend me his press and a little knowledge to help me along. It was really quite easy: Chop up the apples, throw them in a food processor, put them in a barrel, and press them down, and voilà, cider.
Weirdly, the simplicity caught me off guard. When I went to drink the cider, it tasted, well, exactly as I knew apple cider tasted. I had always figured store bought cider had something more complicated in its process, but, no, apple cider was completely demystified for me. I often feel like this when creating something for the first time. Not everything has a magical, complicated process that’s beyond my reach of figuring out if I just try it. What was important about this moment for me was that it reminded me of the value and enjoyment of trying new things and doing it yourself.
The complacency of adulthood is digging its claws into me a bit these days and the cider incident has been a bit of an emotional jolt reminding me that breaking out of that cycle is fun and good. It’s easy to rely on the comfort foods I’ve built up for myself. Playing Destiny, watching television shows and movies, listening to the same 15 podcasts every week, cooking with my girlfriend after work, playing D&D on Thursdays. These things work for me. They’re consistent and bring order to my life. But, if I let the sameness of life takeover, I’ll never learn and grow in the ways I tell myself I want to. I’ll certainly never make headway on the big goals I have in my head like biking across America or walking the Appalachian Trail.
Apple cider will always be a reminder to get a little uncomfortable. Not everything is scary or difficult. Life can be fun and new and an adventure in small ways every day if you let it. Go out and demystify the world, one batch of cider at a time.
This post contains major spoilers for the movie ‘Sorry to Bother You’ from sentence one, so please stop reading now if you don’t want the movie spoiled for you.
Sorry to Bother You’s twist reveals that WorryFree CEO Steve Lift is transforming workers into horse-human hybrids because it will make them “stronger, more obedient, more durable, and therefore, more efficient and profitable.” This quote comes from a promotional video WorryFree has put together to pitch the idea and Lift is showing it to protagonist Cassius Green in an attempt to calm him down after discovering the equisapiens and convince him to become one himself for $100 million. In this scene, the movie’s central political critique is laid bare: Capitalism breeds a worldview that believes efficiency, obedience, and profit are intrinsically moral principles.
Lift tells Cassius he wants to show him the video to prove he isn’t “doing this for no reason” and that the idea—which, to reiterate, is performing gene modification on humans to turn them into half-horses—”isn’t irrational.” When Cassius pushes back and asks in a horrified voice if he’s doing this “so you can make more money,” Lift’s response is a flippant “Yeah, basically.” To Lift, needing any more justification beyond profit is the absurd idea being presented. He couldn’t possibly conceive of any further rationale needed because profit is the ultimate moral good in his eyes.
We live in a world where Amazon warehouse workers piss in bottles instead of using a bathroom so they don’t miss their quota of boxes filled during a shift and get fired. Here, the value of efficiency and profit is placed above that of human dignity. The quota is in service of spreadsheets and charts, humans be damned. The same way Lift only needs to rationalize a policy of gene modification in the name of profit, so do the capitalists of our own world rationalize dehumanizing workplace practices to satisfy the charts and spreadsheets they’re tracking. As long as the numbers are headed in the right direction, that’s the end of the discussion.
In this way, Sorry to Bother You’s critique rings true because it doesn’t mischaracterize the motives of capitalists. It doesn’t try to pull any punches or lean on lazy interpretations of free market ideologies. Lift’s plan may be absurd, but his rationale for doing it is straight from the mouths of any businessman in America right now.
What makes this worldview a moral nightmare is that it’s dehumanizing. Abstracting humanity into data points to manipulate in the name of profit is the ultimate embrace of “the ends justify the means.” As long as the ends are seen as good in a vacuum, the means and their effects are never even considered. To obfuscate humanity behind the data creates an impersonal distance between all of us and validates the mistreatment of each other while feeling self-righteous about doing it. It creates men like Steve Lift who are confused and insulted when asked to provide more rationale for taking action than it making them more money. And it creates corporate bureaucrats who are incentivized to punish workers so a line on a graph looks better to their boss.
This particular brand of western, corporate capitalism explored in the movie has been argued as the end of our ideological evolution for almost 30 years. It can feel overwhelming to just accept the homogenous, numbing oppression of Steve Lift types that will lord over us and to just get in line, work the charts, and shut up, with the exact docile obedience Lift wants from the equisapians. But Sorry to Bother You leaves hope for us to move beyond this so-called end of history. In the movie’s climax, the equisapians are released and fight back, mirroring the idea of a proletarian revolution.
Corporate capitalism doesn’t have to be the end of history, and we don’t have to create impersonal, dehumanizing relationships between ourselves based on shallow, selfish justifications. We can create a moral vision of optimism and hope. There is a space in this world for that flower to bloom and Sorry to Bother You is one raindrop on that seed.
I started writing with pen and paper again this year. I bought a nice notebook and a new pack of V5s, the only pen you’ll ever need. I wanted to give myself a space for slow, thoughtful reflection to find some clarity of self and ideology. I wrote almost every day for the first few months of the year, but I eventually fell off the wagon and it’s been sporadic since late April. This is a regular occurence in my hobbies. Even when creating in complete privacy, I get overly critical of myself and become paralyzed at the thought of continuing due to feelings of inadequacy. I feel useless or trite any time I start writing and like I’m not making any valuable point to myself or anyone else by continuing. I even feel like that right this instant! And that feeling is its own topic for another day. From this paralysis, though, I recently found one small piece of reprieve: a legal pad.
The one with the black bar at the top gluing all its pages together and yellow, legal-ruled paper with the double red line on the left. I grabbed it randomly on my way to a meeting one day at work because I couldn’t find my usual notebook and knew I would need to jot some things down. The clarifying moment came when I noticed how casual I was about my scribbling throughout the meeting. Using a notebook, I’ve often assigned some invisible importance to what gets written down in there, but the legal pad felt closer to scrap paper for stray and meandering thoughts. I wrote more in that meeting than I had in several months. Sure, not all of it was perfectly jotted down and maybe won’t be referenced again, but I definitely felt like I was more present and that I took more from the meeting because of it.
When I went to think about writing for myself again, I realized that my “nice notebook” and favorite pen may be making me overly ritualize what needs to feel more casual, so I picked up another legal pad and started writing there this time and I instantly felt more at ease with myself. I was able to quickly fill up several pages with random thoughts and ideas I was considering and swapped between them as I saw fit. I never felt overwhelmed by the idea of needing to follow-through and stay on topic or write War & Peace in one draft. I scratched things out, wrote in the margins, left myself notes, crossed things out, and rearranged whenever I wanted. It made writing more personal and less stressful than it had been in a long time, and I think the casual, “scratch pad” framing of the legal pad helped me reach that point.
I almost exclusively listen to music in album format, but every now and then a real earworm climbs into my brain and I can’t help but turn on repeat. This column is a list of some of those songs for me right now. Here’s the playlist.
Christine and the Queens - “Tilted” | YouTube
“Tilted”’s delicate vocals and soft synths with a subdued, bouncy beat backing it make this embrace-your-weirdness anthem a perfect candidate for dancing alone to in front of your mirror with just your socks on during a peaceful summer afternoon. It’s a song of quiet confidence where it’s okay to be an oddball wrapped up in a set of hooks that I couldn’t get out of my brain for weeks. I’m pretty certain I listened to this song 20 times in a row one day.
Now, Now - “SGL” | YouTube
Where the appeal of Threads is its brooding, synthy pop-punk riffs and KC Dalager’s breathy voice getting swallowed up by huge drums and synth layers, “SGL” and its follow-up singles have turned Now, Now into a pop powerhouse. The song tangles up its foundational acoustic guitar riff in buzzy synth leads during the verses and leans on a stripped, swelling pre-chorus between them dangling a refrain like a carrot on a stick before twisting itself right back into the second verse. It makes for a fun take on pop structures and keeps the song’s tension high for when the refrain does arrive just over halfway through its playtime. Paired with the hookiness of nearly every melody, it makes for a song worth back-to-back listens each time I turn it on.
Pale Waves - “Television Romance” | YouTube
Pale Waves’ strength lies in their relationship with subversion. It’s an easy sell to compare them to label mates and musical mentors The 1975, but Pales Waves are special because of how their goth-pop aesthetic melds with poppy, ’80s-inspired riffs and slurred hooks about being sad at parties and disinterested in suitors. They’re making a depressive dance party that doesn’t lose itself in a sense of irony or nostalgia, but instead crafts a modern emotional space to work through things not always working out.
Arcade High - “Phone Lines” | Bandcamp
Synthwave is all about overindulgence in the ’80s revival on all fronts. Massive snare/kick beat, video game bleeps and bloops, and neon retro-futuristic covers. It’s 0-60 on sensory overload at every turn. “Phone Lines” takes all of those tropes and turns it into a thumping pop tune that finds its footing in its repetitious structure. The main groove cycles through a refrain that’s only interrupted by several 8(and one 12)-bar patterns of synth leads before closing out with a double refrain where the second drops the beat to let it wash away in a sea of synths. The simplicity lets the song dig its teeth in and rewards repeated listens.
Oneohtrix Point Never - “Sticky Drama” | YouTube
Not exactly an earworm in the same way most of my other picks are, but “Sticky Drama” has ended up on repeat a lot for me because of its glitchy whiplash, angular synth work, and heavily warped vocals. The song finds its way from arpeggiated keys to a screeching breakdown and back around again without losing the thread along the way. If you find a sense of Zen in chaos, “Sticky Drama” is the song for you.
Drake - “Nice For What” | YouTube
Song of the summer and I am here for it.
Twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, I have a timer running that describes what I am doing. I have found this helps keep myself accountable for what I spend my time on because any time I start or stop doing something, I have to consciously mark it down. That moment forces me to confront what I am doing and ask myself if I will look back on that activity and the amount of time I spent on it and feel good about myself.
Hopefully that moment encourages me to engage in more productive activities. That’s the plan, at least. I’m not trying to conquer the world or even start a business or something grandiose. I would just like to spend more time reading, writing, working out, cooking, etc. instead of sinking into my couch for eight hours of Fortnite or mindlessly scrolling across the internet. At the same time, I don’t want to become my own personal productivity tyrant. If I want to play some video games or binge a new show, that’s totally fine – click the button and go. I’m allowed to enjoy myself! Eight hours later, though, I will have to reckon with clicking stop on that timer.
The plan doesn’t always work out. There definitely have been more than one or two eight-or-more hour video game or television timers that I’ve shrugged at and accepted as who I am that day. But having the data is still useful for looking back at what exactly I have been doing with myself. As long as I keep myself honest with the timers, the reports won’t lie. It can be easy for life to feel like it’s just passing by without feeling like I know what I’ve been doing, but time tracking has alleviated a lot of that because I know exactly what I’ve been doing and for how long I did it. Having that data laid out clearly has made it a lot easier for me to have an honest conversation with myself about what is consuming my time vs. what I wish was consuming it.
So, for me, there’s a two-fold benefit I find in tracking my life:
The quick, in-the-moment “Hey dude, do you really want to start playing video games right now?” reflection that forces me to own up to my actions right then and there.
The big picture view the reports give to evaluate what I’ve been doing lately, which then feeds back into the first benefit if I know I’ve been telling myself I should be focusing on other activities but go to start something else instead.
I take care of all of this in one application: Toggl. In it, there’s a four-level hierarchy for organizing: Workspaces, Projects,Time Entries, and Tags. Each of these is nested in the previous, so a Workspace contains Projects, a Project contains Time Entires, and Time Entries contain Tags. There is also a Client functionality which is structurally adjacent to projects, but I do not use it.
As I’m not tracking business the way the app is classically built for, I keep my setup pretty straightforward. I only use one workspace (“Life”) and from there I have six high-level projects and around 20 or so Time Entries. I’ve spent the last six months or so tweaking the exact language I’m using, but I think I’ve built a solid foundation for what I’m trying to track while giving myself room to grow from here. My structure looks like this:
Getting started can be easy from a mechanical perspective: make an account, create some projects, and you’re off to the races. The harder part is keeping with it. There’s definitely a mental overhead to remember to switch timers and create your own standards for what to track. I still forgets sometimes! There’s no trick to it, but slowly building up what you track and when is a nice way to ease your way into it. I also have learned to lean on other things to retrace my steps to when I change activities like my last “I’m here” text message to someone if I accidentally left my “Driving” timer on after arrivign at a social event. Going whole hog from zero to 24 hours is a quick way to feel overwhelmed. I have also found that tracking every moment of my life can feel…clinical. It’s at odds with my softer side that wants the human experience to feel less rigid. Quantifying everything doesn’t always feel good, so pick a level of detail that makes you feel comfortable with your own humanity.
I set off all my timers through the iOS app. At one point I used some Workflow actions inspired by CGP Grey and Federicco Vitti’s writing and podcasting about time tracking, but I found it more burdensome than just flipping open the app, clicking the start button, and typing into an auto-complete field. If you’re just starting, I recommend not overcomplicating things at the get-go by trying to overengineer your solution or structure. Make some projects and tasks, start collecting data, and go from there. Feeling it out week by week was the only way I was able to stay consistent. I’ve had to go back and purge or change entries a few times to standardize everything, but it helped me wrap my head around what I wanted and how detailed to be about my project and entry names. Being consistent in that language is really helpful and figuring out what works is unique to everyone.
I think the big idea for me with this whole ordeal surrounds self-reflection and accountability. I want to know where I’m focusing and give myself the opportunity to change that and because the data is self-defined and curated, it’s my own little microcosm of truth about who I am. If I tell myself I want to spend more time doing something, but the data doesn’t bear it out over several weeks, then it’s easier to call myself out with the report that shows me what I was doing instead. Toggl won’t force me to make a good decision, but it does force me to reflect on that decision and live with it. That’s a small step in the right direction, so I’ll take it.
Execution isn’t exactly my strong suit. I’m a process person — planning and tracking is where I excel. Setting up all the minutiae of a project’s scope, requirements, etc. really meshes with the way I think. I often find myself more interested in defining & pushing up against the boundaries of how something is meant to function and discussing the plans than actually executing. Creating vision? I’m your guy! Actually doing the work? Well…
This makes me a good project manager, but it cripples me from actually creating. I get too lost in planning to make something that I never end up actually making it. So that brings us to this very page in all its glorious irony: getting to talk about what I want to make in this space and why. It’s the vision — the meta, if you will. Which is probably why it’s been so easy to write so far: I love talking about plans as much as I love planning! I want to give myself a lay of the land on what I want to be worked on in this place and why. I also want to talk a little bit about the technical details of how this blog is set up and why I chose this specific way.
So I’ve got two main points I want to pin down here, mainly for my own reference: the “What?” and “Why?” of the actual content I’d like to publish, and a meandering philosophical diatribe on the technical setup, which could probably be its own post, but I want it here and that’s that. It being for my own reference is maybe the place to start with this and connects to the “why?” of both points I’m trying to get at in this piece.
I want to publish—and specifically publish here—because I want to remember how I think about myself and the world over time in a space that’s all my own. I want to get things wrong and be able to look back at myself and how I’ve changed. I want to remember the things I was interested in during a specific time period, even if they didn’t change my life in a big way. And I want to share those things with the world because I think it’s important to try and translate what’s in your own head for someone else to understand. From head to paper isn’t a trivial step. Sharing is a pivotal step in the process, which is why this isn’t literally a diary.
This space being “my own” brings me to the brief technical diatribe I want to go on about this place. thisisablog is hosted using GitHub Pages and generated using Jekyll, a tool that turns text files into static web pages. I like this because it makes the site lean and its purpose clear. This place is, at its very core, just a folder of markdown text files. That simplicity appeals to me, especially in The Age of Platforms where the words you write and publish are sucked up and partially owned by someone else’s proprietary system with little ease of exporting and barely any sense of ownership. This is distinctly not that and I feel much better for it.
It’s not my philosophical ideal as GitHub does have my folder of text files, but over time this will never complicate, and I do have a local copy of my repository at all times and the drafts all exist in my text editor. I can carry my bundle of text files anywhere I choose with little fuss in tearing my site down and standing it up wherever I please. That sense ownership of the space I publish in is important to me. Maybe some day I will stand up my own server and instance of Jekyll and publish it there, bringing me even closer to my ideal state but, for now, GitHub with Jekyll sucking up a bundle of text files feels like a good start.
With the why out of the way, I suppose it’s time to get to the “What?” of the content I intend to share here, which as I sit here is really just a list of my general interests. I’m not particularly unique in that capacity. I want to share my recommendations and critiques of modern culture — generally just talking about the things I’m liking and not liking in all forms of media. So a lot of it may be of the “check this out” variety of link blogging. But on top of that, I want to be more personal in my exploration of who I am and how I perceive the world and culture I inhabit.
I find myself drawn to language, philosophy, and political science because of my interest in authors like Richard Rorty, Mark Fisher, and George Lakoff. I read a lot of leftist cultural critiques from following publishers like Verso and Zero Books. I enjoy considering technological utopias and dystopias via science fiction media. I listen to several different podcasts that I find always challenging me to think about my relationship with myself and others in ways that help me grow.
It’s those sorts of things I hope to spend the majority of my time here wrestling with and noting down. I want to watch myself grow and be challenged to work out what I actually stand for and square up who I am vs. who I want to be. I’d like to think publishing and sharing those thoughts is an important step in the growth process.
I want to be better than I was yesterday and leave myself some breadcrumbs along the way.