The National last night at MSG. Always a great show. The new songs were actually the highlights for me, surprisingly. The guitars sounded so great in them.
Can't believe it's been 10 years since Lisa and I saw them last at Barclays in Brooklyn, June 2013.
Music night at Forest Hills. First time there and it was to see the Smile. Nice outdoor venue; great show! I wasn’t sure what to expect, which was a nice way to go in. I knew the record, of course, and so was prepared for it to be jazzy and loose. Was pleasantly surprised that it sounded great loud, too.
The band was too far away for a great shot, but the crowd looked really cool flooded in red.
A month ago, I bought a Tidbyt. It's a fun, beautiful little lo-fi display screen for displaying micro content. The thing is really well designed and looks great on the shelf. I have six apps in rotation, so there's also a nice variety in what's displayed. A 3-day weather forecast. A photo of Lisa and I. A pretty Day/Night globe view. A fuzzy clock ("Twenty-Five Till One"), a day/month/year progress thing, and an MTA train tracker for the F line. There are a ton more apps, but these are the ones working for me at the moment. Being a relatively new product, I'm sure more great apps will be added as time goes on. I'd love to design and build one myself if I can think of something new to make.
On mornings when I go into the midtown office, I check the F train time to see if there were any delays. Yesterday, there was! Imagine that. Signal malfunctions on the line meant the train ended up stuck on the track for a long while. So I knew to walk to Jay Street to catch the A/C instead. It's a silly little techy box, but I love it. Highly recommend buying one for yourself or someone else.
I just received a "scam likely" call from the Netherlands. First time I remember getting spam calls from outside the country, and my parents just so happen to be in Amsterdam today. Provides a super weird clue to how scam callers designate who gets called and from what numbers. I knew spammers have email contact lists from purchased/stolen data lists. I hadn't considered that phone spam calls would have the same kind of origin.
What must be happening here is that one of my parents' numbers are in a spammer's list, and the spammers know where they're currently located. Creepy. Sending me a phone call from the Netherlands today is supposed to catch me worried that something has happened to my parents, that I would instinctively answer out of concern.
Most of my scam calls come from Indiana. Before now, I thought that was because I have an Indiana area code for this long-held phone number. Now I suspect those calls are somehow attached to friend or family who have been caught in a data breach somewhere.
I'm also assuming this was automated, and not a person manually cross checking data tables. Scam artists are clever and always improving their methods. Automation. Location. Batch calling. I knew better than to answer this call, but I can't say the same for any of the older folks in my parent's contact list. One of my senior family friends was recently scammed out of a thousand dollars or so. I wish I could do more to protect the people I know. There's only so much you can do.
On Sunday, Lisa and I planted a mix of plants in the boxes left for us on our roof deck. It was the first time for us doing any kind of gardening for ourselves and it went pretty great. I'm really happy with how it came out. The boxes could have used another couple inches worth of soil, which she pushed for but I wasn't sure about. I thought the mass of roots and soil which came with the new plants would make up the difference, but I was wrong. She was right. I'll probably buy some more soil soon to raise everything a bit.
I watched a bunch of YouTube videos trying to learn as much as I could about rooftop gardening, and gardening in general. A couple tips were really helpful. Originally, I had only thought about planting a single type of flower, maybe two. I hadn't considered mixing grasses, herbs, and bushes with flowering plants. That's known as polyculture, which promotes healthier soil. It's also more attractive! And it introduces another level of design into the project. I'm really looking forward to thinking through the arrangement more fully next year.
I also learned that for a windier location like our roof deck — and it does get really windy, sometimes — it's a good idea to plant bushes or taller grasses which shield smaller plants from the gusts. I've done that a little with a boxwood bush in the western-most corner. Not yet sure that's enough. We'll see.
We only shopped at the Lowe's in Gowanus, which didn't have as much variety as we hoped. The didn't have any ornamental grasses, for instance, which I wanted to incorporate. We did come home with a good variety, though. Next year, I'll do more shopping around to get what I want instead of only what's available in one shop. Here's what we planted: yellow daffodil, mediterranean pink heather, english daisy, grace ward lithodora, early bird radiance dianthus, begonia, and green mountain boxwood. Also some mint, rosemary, and basil.
It's so great to see people returning to blogging after so many years. The mass exodus from Twitter has led, predictably, to folks reimagining how they read and write on the internet. Before Twitter and Facebook honey trapped everyone's attention, blogs had been one of the main places of choice to post. It's possible, though not assured, that they could make a comeback.
My community online is made up mostly of designers, developers, and others working on software products. For reasons that might seem obvious, this group of people tend to be in the first wave of any mass movement happening online. The people who build the web tend to know the web best. Generally, at least. They're all testing out blogging again, one by one by one. My "People" folder in my RSS reader is alive in a way it hasn't been in years. Personal websites are coming back to life.
I'm watching for two outcomes from all of this movement. One: will all of this design and engineering attention returning to blogs, RSS, and other forms of web publishing result in new innovation? Better newsreaders? More creative uses of RSS? Clever applications of ActivityPub? And Two: will the non-tech community follow us into the next phase of web publishing? That will depend on how easy we can make it for people to start their own blogs, or to join federated servers, etc. It's a real challenge, as it depends as much on social dynamics as it does tech innovation.
One piece of the puzzle still missing is a centralized place to find citizens of the internet. And for good reason. Decentralization is so important to the concept of the open web. Despite needing to avoid any single institution controlling that list, it would be hugely beneficial to have one place to go to find where your favorite people are publishing. That's what my product Feeeds was supposed to solve. It was a way for a person to curate all the RSS feeds they produce online into one bundled feed. Perhaps this is a product which could be federated, too? Could this feature be added to Mastodon?
But maybe the best web possible is one that embraces the chaos. It's possible that any centralization of a certain strength tips into producing more negative outcomes than positive. I'm enjoying the conversation that's happening now. The death of Twitter has revitalized interest in all of this. The future of the web seems open in a way it didn't six months ago. It feels like nearly anything can happen now. The exploration will be well documented on the blogs.
Guided By Voices sounded pretty great last night. They opened for Dinosaur Jr., who were also good, but I guess were the closer because they’re louder. But got to take my friend Brian to his first GBV show. Doing my damndest to turn him into a super fan like me.
Over the years, I've taken numerous week-long breaks from Twitter. Logged out in all my browsers. Deleted Tweetbot from my phone. Stepped away from the birdsite and gave myself a breather from the firehose of ... everything. When Musk bought Twitter three weeks ago, I did the same. Except this break might be The Big One. And not just because I'm taking some kind of principled stand against a smug billionaire I don't like (nearly everything is owned by billionaires, anyway), but because Musk seems determined to burn Twitter to the ground. The site is imploding spectacularly. Sadly. Triumphantly. Deservedly. Idiotically.
I feel terrible for those good people who lost their jobs. I personally know a few of them. They all intended to build the best Twitter it could be. At least, until one of most childish adults on the planet bought their work from under them for reasons not yet clear to me. Musk fired half the company in the first week. Half of the rest have since resigned. What kind of skeleton crew is even left to carry the site into 2023? Even if Musk does manage to keep the site online, it's likely to be reduced to another Rightwing chat room. Can't imagine many tweeps would be interested in maintaining that nonsense for a salary.
Now that everyone appears to be testing out Mastodon as a replacement, I've logged back into my original account. I'm [email protected]. It's an instance set up by the kind founders of the XOXO conference, a community of designers, developers, and other creators of things mostly for the internet. I'm happy to be there and appreciative of the hosts. Joined in 2018, and it seems to be alive and well.
I'm also experimenting with using a second account — [email protected] — for following journalists, public figures, and other news-making folks. The plan is for that account to replace the up-to-the-minute feature of Twitter, while the xoxo.zone account is where I follow colleagues and friends and otherwise make my community. I had always intended to do this separation of concerns with Twitter, but never put in the effort. We'll see if this works. Gonna fuck around and find out.
Update 4/5/2023: Found out that it didn't work. Too many people fall into the gray area between colleagues and public figures. I should have guessed. Living in Brooklyn, you end up seeing or meeting celebrities all the time, which reminds you they are just regular people. Social media is like real life in that way. It doesn't make sense, in practice, to separate people like that.
Spent last weekend in San Francisco, visiting a couple of my oldest friends, Matt and Tiff. Listened to records, had some some great food, hiked near Stinson Beach, took a drive down to Pescadero. A perfect trip.
Brown posted my face on IG.
In April of 2020, I set a goal for myself. I was going to published a photo a day to this site for a full year. The lockdown had been in affect for over a month, and I was looking for a project to consume the new time I had at home. I knew there were plenty of good photos in my library that I hadn't yet edited, so most evenings I scrolled through them and marked what was worth another look. It turned out that there was more than a year's worth of photos in the mix, and I was carrying my new camera around and making tons of new images. I'm now on day 570 of a photo posted every day.
I'd say about half of those photos were taken pre-pandemic. Maybe two-thirds. A big portion of the newer photos were taken while on my daily walks around the Brooklyn neighborhoods near my home. I've collected those into a project I called Brooklyn Covid Walks. We took a half-dozen trips out of the city to the areas around Woodstock, which gave me the opportunity to shoot more urban and rural subjects for a change. These 570+ photos are a good mix of old and new, favorites and not, formal or expressive. I've mostly tried to put Eggleston's democratic forrest ideas into practice. I've photographed just about everything that caught my eye for any reason.
My backlog of images is starting to run out. I'll continue to take photos most days, but not likely fast enough to keep up with the photo-a-day pace. Soon, I'll be posting only when I have something worth sharing, and I'm not sure what cadence that will take. In any case, I'm proud to have met my goal and then to have overshot it by a full 200+ images.
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