SF and Near
Twitterless Weekends
Second weekend in a row in which I’ve deleted Twitter from my phone. It’s working for me. No longer feel addicted to it.
The Music of 2017
2017 was a good year for music. I ended up listening to more tunes than I had since 2013, if I can trust the data at last.fm. Tons of great records. A few really great ones. Here are my lists.
Favorite records of 2017:
- Mangaliso — Bongeziwe Mabandla
- Humanz — Gorillaz
- Damn — Kendrick Lamar
- Drunk — Thundercat
Honorable Mentions:
- La Confusion — Amadou & Miriam
- I Tell a Fly — Benjamin Clemintine
- Capacity — Big Thief
- Hug of Thunder — Broken Social Scene
- Chronology — Chronixx
- Ash — Ibeyi
- 4:44 — Jay Z
- Harmony of Difference — Kamasi Washington
- Sleep Well Beast — The National
- Africa Express Presents The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians & Guests — The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians & Guests
- In Mind — Real Estate
- Ctrl — SZA
- Antisocialites — VVaves
- Big Fish Theory — Vince Staples
And here’s a public playlist of my favorite tracks of 2017 on Apple Music.
CardStack.io
I built the new website for CardStack this week, and it went up yesterday: http://cardstack.io. What Cardstack is doing is amazing, and their roadmap is seriously impressive. Ken and Chris are fantastic people and I owe them a great deal of gratitude for the work they've given me in the last year. I'm incredibly excited to keep building things with them and the group of talented people they've surrounded themselves with. More great stuff is coming! Head to the website to read the technical details. Actual products and applications will be announced soonish.
Ask Brooklyn Museum Officially Released
Ask Brooklyn Museum was officially released this month, moving out of its year-long beta phase. The reviews have started to roll in and they're positive so far. I'll try to keep a running list here: The New York Times, The Verge. It was a winner of two 2016 MUSE Awards: a Gold award for mobile applications, and the Jim Blackaby Memorial Award. I've also written a case study, going into fuller detail about the design of the app.
Breathing New Life into Instapaper
At the start of this year, I put my Instapaper use into overdrive. Instapaper has always been one of my favorite apps, and consistently one of my most used. Even so, I didn’t have much of a system for using it and it was taking the form of a teenager’s unkept bedroom. It needed some tidying up and a new plan for keeping it tidy. I found what works for me.
The first step was to go through the whole mess and archive/delete anything I wasn’t really going to read. There were a bunch of articles from years back I clearly was never going to read, and so I unceremoniously wiped them out. Next, I set up daily To Do reminders to read one article a day, any article at all. But on Saturdays, I read the longest article I had saved. On Mondays and Thursdays, I would read the oldest. Instapaper makes this easy with their convenient Sort feature on iOS.
My account currently has about 70 unread articles in it, and for some reason it seems to permanently hover around that number. Even though I’m constantly adding articles and the oldest article is only from a few months ago.
Lately, my focus on the internet has shifted. The social web 2.0 stuff has taken a back seat to plain old reading. I took a break from Instagram, Twitter, etc. and leaned hard into my RSS reader. I’ve been thinking more about the web as a publishing platform than a messaging forum. It seems like while most people are pushing for more and more micro-conversations, we’ve lost sight of a healthier, meatier web. A web of good reading and writing. By placing greater attention on instapaper and longer-form reading, the internet became a more nutritious place. Less snark and more information.
The next move for me is to find a way to write and publish more myself.
Blur at MSG, NYC
Third time seeing my favorite band.
