Do we really believe that the intent when the US Constitution was written was to permit an individual, with virtually no restrictions, to fire 300 rounds of ammunition? 300 rounds of ammunition designed to shatter bone and eviscerate tissue?

In just a few minutes.

Does it even matter if that was the intent? Are we unable to make a different choice for our society?

Muskets, the standard issue firearm for late 18th century armies fired, on average, three rounds per minute. Three.

I could care less what people thought about guns that fired soft lead, slowly and inaccurately, at three rounds per minute in a world with AR15s. And frankly, I can’t imagine a system that cannot acknowledge that such a dramatic change in circumstances matter.

I played some pick up volleyball today. All the leagues I’ve signed up for so far have been intentionally as recreational as possible. While I love playing, it’s been 17 years since high school– so my confidence wasn’t very high and I wanted to start at the beginning. I’ve had a blast, and intend to continue to play recreationally.

I knew today might be a bit different. Pick up, rather than league play, would likely attract people who really like to play volleyball. And sure enough, it drew a small crowd of folks who all play in leagues regularly. It was time for 3v3, not 6v6 with two subs, and each team didn’t have 2-3 folks who had essentially never played volleyball.

I was nervous. Have I built up the cardiovascular health to play for 90 minutes like this? Will I be good enough or feel like a fool? Proudly, I was not a fool, and I was able to keep up. My blocks were consistent and strong enough to almost shut down a very strong attack game by the other team. I frequently found myself in the right position to get some solid digs from the back on meaningful attacks. I had a couple of strong hits, including one where I had to reach well behind myself and attack with my left because of a high set.

It felt like playing volleyball.

And although my knees and ankles and back feel their age, I’ll be playing a lot more pickup. I think I might even sign up for a 4v4 intermediate league to go with my recreational playing.

I don’t like running or aerobics at the gym. I like my time with weights to be focused on strength training. Ramping up to 2-3 volleyball games a week has not only been an absolute blast, but makes me feel great about having a well-rounded workout routine. It’s the best I’ve felt physically in a long time, and it sure feels like I’m focusing on fun.

Eight years ago today, about this time, I was heading to the ETC in Baltimore to meet Jess for the just the third time, but this time as an employee. I had no idea what I was doing or what it would mark the start of.

But despite being terrified, we started filling a whiteboard with “what is Allovue?” She had already been at it a year and was finally ready to start building the product. I’m not really sure if she was supposed to be mostly telling me her vision or if I was meant to participate.

As I recall, I just jumped in, excited, and by the time Ted (our soon to be CTO) came in, Jess and I had just about covered the two whiteboard walls. Then Ted and I started working on a data model while Jess took a call about some award she was about to receive.

Jess will often pull out a Moleskine from the (now quite short, relatively speaking) time before I joined Allovue to show me how my new idea was just her old idea. I still sometimes mention that whiteboard.

As I headed to the airport that night, I still didn’t really know what my job was or fully understand how anything start up worked. But I knew I was still excited and thinking about Allovue, which is how I had felt every time I talked to Jess and why I knew I needed the job.

I’ll tell the embarrassing story of what happened next in two years, on my tenth Alloversary.

Instagram’s ad unit is excellent, especially compared to both Tumblr and Twitter. There’s no reason these platforms aren’t better at this. The problem with social media is not ads, but clearly there aren’t many teams that succeed at building a good mobile ad product.

This is true as a user of the core social products, not someone buying ads. But it’s pretty clear to me that ads that are good from a user experience translates to ads that are valuable to ad buyers.

Paul Graham is a smart guy who consistently writes essays that are thoughtful and powerful, and sometimes dumb as fuck and transparently demonstrate the weird bubble he lives in.

Today he wrote one of those, interestingly linking the term heresy to a new emerging, non-religiously-based set of views that can serve to make one persona non grata in some circles (while also guaranteeing you a lifetime of funding from the Mercers and Peter Thiel alongside the adoration of their funded lackeys).

It’s just incredible how during a time of widespread book banning led by the Evangelical right and “Don’t Say Gay” laws that this statement was made as though it were fact,

There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right and the left. The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like.

The “wave of intolerance” Graham points to seems to be coming from the left these days because Silicon Valley individualism demands it— that’s why he ignores anti-trans and homophobic laws and anti-Blackness and racism. I don’t quite know why he ignores the xenophobia that bristles Silicon Valley because they want plentiful, inexpensive foreign labor in the US. I know he ignores misogyny because he’s spent his life literally building and profiting off of a “good old boys” network and can’t understand any critique that it’s been something less than a meritocracy.

The more left driven intolerances challenge Paul Graham to be better. The right wing ones affect other people.

I don’t love the lack of repentance and forgiveness in our world. I think we all have a right to redemption. I think we have a right to have our worst moments be forgotten, or at least to have them fade and let their stench dissipate. I think “call out” and “call in” culture have real limits and challenges we haven’t worked out. But while the right wing is literally using the power of the state, often in minoritarian governments assisted by gerrymandering, to spread a chilling effect on speech among professors, teachers, and doctors, I’m not sure it’s the dirtbag left on Twitter or a few college student protests that we should be concerned about.

It’s nice to see a Batman movie spend its time with Batman doing Batman things. Almost every other Batman movie wants to spend its time with the villains or show Bruce Wayne at a charity gala. I was worried we’d get the same given how many characters are in this film. But instead we spend most of our time with Batman moving through one coherent (though expansive) crime story.

They succeeded at telling a coherent, balanced story with an ensemble cast. Despite having four well-known Batman villains—Penguin, Catwoman, Falcone, and Riddler— everyone was in the same movie telling the same story. This is rare in Batman (and the superhero/comic book genre generally).

Pattinson was possibly the least well cast actor, but that’s only because the rest of the cast was that great. He’s totally fine, but being a movie that spends its time with Batman and not Bruce, I’m not sure it’s a big deal who is behind the mask so long as they have the physicality to perform the action scenes.

As shot, it’s hard to point to things I would cut in the movie even though it’s too long. If I were reviewing the script, I’d probably remove either Falcone or Penguin (their roles for this story can be collapsed). This will be blasphemous to those who rightfully love Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman, but I also suspect you could cut this movie significantly by removing her. It’s not that she wasn’t great or didn’t pull together a lot of plot— she was far better integrated than I feared— it’s just that I think they could have saved Catwoman and write an equally effective story without it.

This whole movie gave me a very Seven/Fincher vibe.

I think it might be the best Batman movie.

The car was dumb.

The internet is this big confusing place. I want a place that feels like home for me… It’s easier, in some ways, to do governance around these real communities because you can say, “We have some shared assumptions in common. We have some shared belief. We know that we need this space because there’s no other spaces out there for us.”

– Ethan Zuckerman in The Good Web: Competing Visions for the Future of Social Media

When I think about The Good Web, it was one full of real communities. We have real communities today, but they are far more porous and amorphous. Real communities on centralized platforms confront mega-scale problems within tiny spaces, and the poorly defined boundaries on most mass social platforms breaks down the ability to do community governance.

The Good Web was filled with bad behavior– the abusive forum or list moderator is an ancient web archetype. It wasn’t always welcoming, but it was governable.

Riccardo More wants you to believe that Catalyst has led to an empty landscape of new, great Mac apps, claiming

An operating system (and relative first- or third-party applications) that really embraces the potential and the characteristics of the specific hardware it runs on needs to be built on an equally specific set of frameworks, and does not need to be contaminated by frameworks and paradigms from an operating system that historically is a simplified derivation of Mac OS X itself.

But I think Christian Tietze has it right,

Riccardo is not happy about something, and I don’t understand what or why. Is it just existential fear for the Mac? Or is he genuinely unhappy with the tools in his toolkit? Which are these? … All in all, the Mac app landscape appears to be in good shape.

More’s own list of “old (some very old), tried-and-trusted applications” includes NetNewsWire, which is a completely modern Swift rewrite that only shares it’s name (and creator) with the original.

But there are many great new Mac apps, they just may solve problems that More has already solved his own way. He mentions nvAlt for notes, which is about to be re-released as a ground up, rewrite commercial product. Unless he only pays attention to the Obsidian and Notion crowds, there are many other great macOS note taking apps like Craft and Bear, both of which feel great. He’s happy with BBEdit– who can blame him!– but it’s not like Nova didn’t just get released. He doesn’t mention any email applications, so I’m assuming he’s just using Mail.app or webmail, but Mimestream is phenomenal if you’re using Gmail ¹. I could say the same about calendars and Fantastical.

What’s going on here? Some of us have started to reach middle age. We have the tools and solutions that work for us and have become engrained in how we think about using computers. Just like seemingly every generation decides that music is worse than it’s ever been and nothing new is as good as what came before, we just don’t look for new solutions to our problems. We rebuild ourselves around the tools that we have that work great. New stuff loses any luster it had just for being new, and it turns out a lot of “problems” we have with our tech… aren’t.

Look at how someone ten years younger than you uses their phone or computer. I bet they have a whole different set of obviously essential tools solving the same problems we have but in a way that works for them.

The apps haven’t gotten worse. The platform simply hasn’t changed that much. What we use computers for has stopped changing so much. And the problems we have haven’t changed that much. It’s natural the tools and solutions haven’t changed that much either, provided they have a sustainable business model.

After years of trying to get my emotions more under control, the most successful thing I’ve ever done professionally is verbally acknowledge and annotate.

“I feel like I sound angry right now, but I’m not.”

“If I seem frustrated, I think it’s because I didn’t sleep well.”

“I understand I’m being reactive right now and may feel differently later.”

If I could somehow recognize the emotion, reset, and talk and respond a different way in the first place, that would be amazing. But meditation, therapy, and all kinds of trying never got me there.

What I have learned is how to feel when it’s happening and correct afterwards.

I was thinking earlier about what it would be like to rearrange my life around monthly travel when it suddenly dawned on me that monthly travel would be a decline from my pre-pandemic lifestyle.

Of all the things I’m hoping for, a return to travel has got to be the top of my list. Even when it’s for work, even if I can just tack on a day or half day, the refresh I get from a change in environment is so important.

Routine siphons vitality.

That’s true for me even when the routine has not become a grind. But the pandemic has made all routine a grind, and getting out and about is fixing something inside me.

I sent my proof of vaccine to Puerto Rico before entering. Without my QR code, they would not have allowed me to leave the airport.

At nearly every restaurant or indoor store, I’m asked to present proof of vaccination. Hand sanitizer is still common and requested upon entry places.

Masking compliance is universal among those who live on the island, even outdoors (at least in tourist areas in San Juan).

I’ve spent this trip comfortably dining indoors and out, in and out of boutiques and galleries, and by the pool and the beach. ¹

None of these measures feel meaningful restrictive. All of these things fade into the background. Were they all necessary for safety? Maybe— masking outdoors seems like the least meaningful of these measures.

Really this whole experience reminds me that all of the fabricated outrage over simple public health measures has created far more inconvenience and disruption than the measures themselves. Fear of the anti-vax, anti-mask crowd showing up and getting rude and violent with retail and food services workers has halted any attempt to protect public safety in favor of self-imposed restrictions that are far more severe.

I can’t help but believe that it is not the COVID cautious who have changed normalcy, but the COVID denialists who have led us to an extended pandemic, with no public health interventions being acceptable.

I haven’t been restricted from doing anything at all in months… maybe more than a year? But I have also been to places with very different COVID responses and know how much safer some places feel. And guess what? When I feel safer, I do more.

The mistake I made is a common one: I conflated a fandom with the art that the fandom loves.

– Jordan Calhoun in Stop Blaming Fandoms, FFS

I know that I personally have a difficult time separating art from its fandom. With critical conversation expanded to include, well, everyone these days, it’s hard to experience any art without being “exposed”. Discovering a community centered around something you love feels categorically different than being surrounded by a community that loves something you haven’t experienced.

Maybe I can mature past this, but for now, I need distance from community to form have own experience.