Someone make a two-axis chart with entertainment and social/parasocial on one axis and user-generated v. platform-generated on the other. Or perhaps it’s a four circle Venn diagram.

I finally downloaded Discord. What are the good ones?

I’m going to miss my buddy Darwin when he goes off on all his adventures. One last goodbye.

I will be in Pittsburgh either the weekend of August 12th or the weekend of August 26th. Soliciting restaurant and summertime activity recommendations.

On the one hand, future and furrr are incredible. On the other hand, debugging subtle issues in non-trivial code that cause processes to crash/die is a horrible experience that highlights the lack of language-level features/facilities for parallel workflows.

I suspect some people really need this, but it feels so weird that Mail VIPs, Pinned conversations in Messages, and Favorites in Phone are all completely different.

Zen and the Art of Refactoring someone else’s code to remove tons of tasks from a slow inner loop and parallelizing all the things.

I have a strong bias against all op-eds that are, “In my elite circles, we are sharing anecdotes about a thing happening that’s bad for existing elites,” without a paragraph from editors stating clearly there’s no evidence this anecdote is real or represents a broad trend.

It’s Friday and I just wrote “vroom vroom motherfuckers” in a PR.

Note to self: at the end of a big push, going back to the “normal” flow of things is not possible. It’s ok to need a small break to refresh and reset.

When we moved, they had just received approval to expand the church with this side chapel. It’s quite striking.

Exhausted, but I must pack for 6 days (3 fun, 3 work) and leave the house at 6am tomorrow. 🫠

I was like, “Oooh yes, my league ended this week so I can play pickup.”

Suddenly, a completely different organization emails me to remind me I’ve signed up for a league there… so now I’ll be playing volleyball from 6-10pm tonight.

When I’m a little drunk I just want to tell the people I love that I love them and I think that’s a nice trait, even if I have to rein it in.

I had a moment just now where I thought, “Wow, it was really nice to not do anything today after a busy week.” And then I started remembering a bunch of things I did today and now I’m very confused.

LA Bahn Mi

A year ago today I was coming back from a vacation. I felt awful. It was a fun trip. I ate great. I was very active. I lost considerable weight, during vacation! Without feeling limited at all!

But at the same time, I was reaching the peak (depths?) of a months long crisis. Getting my vaccine was a huge relief, but on the other side of unclenching I realized how much had fallen apart that I had just muscled through.

I know I’m not the only one who thought, “Maybe things are getting back to normal!”, and, no matter how naive that turned out to be, found that there was a lot of damage done that needed healing before we’d feel normal.

It was my first time on a plane in over a year, which was possibly the longest stretch I had gone in my entire life without flying. I thought getting away for a true vacation would be restorative. But what I found when I broke out of my house-office was that I didn’t feel better. I hadn’t taken care of myself in all kinds of ways over the previous 18 months.

So I was in Mexico, on vacation, and found that any moment that I was not extremely occupied, I was terrified. I felt panic. I was having anxiety and concerns before I left, but I thought that I just needed a vacation. So when the vacation solved approximately nothing, I was really lost.

I am still working through some of what I found out about myself that week. A year later, I’m struggling with these dueling memories of a dual experience— I have all of these joyful memories of biking, swimming, and eating mixed in with these deep, dread-filled existential crises.

I made a bunch of mistakes last year. I let myself feel unsupported and unloved without asking for support and love. I let myself focus on small number of opportunities to refill my emotional reserves instead of finding ways to tend to them every single day. I told myself a lot of stories about the world and my place in it and invited no other voices in to challenge my perspective. I refused to let go of things that were no longer making me happy and embrace the new things that were. I resisted and failed to make some big changes that I probably should have made. I got so lost in surviving for so long.

These are things that happen to people (and me) all the time, but the pandemic made them all so much worse. I think I’m better today. I think I’m more prepared to face these same challenges when they come back again. But last year was harder than the pandemic itself for me. Instead of relief, the relative safety of being young and vaccinated without any major risk factors pre-Delta just opened the gates that held back 18 months of flood waters. I am so lucky to have been able to essentially “muscle through” 2020. I felt what that did to me in 2021.

I took that nice little fifteen minute nappy from take off until cruising altitude and I feel 100x better.

“Alternate narratives. Not memories. Not reality. Just a stream of what-if idealizations.”

– Annie Mueller, End of an era.

This one resonated.

It’s not surprising that COVID was the leading killer of Americans aged 45-54 in 2021. What is shocking is how there is a cottage industry of folks telling Americans not to believe their lying eyes, and how many Americans have fallen for it.

One of my toxic traits is insisting on sending things I enjoy to people who have told me that it’s not for them in the hopes that they will one day see the light.

More, Better Web Apps is something I’d like to see. I can’t say that I can point to a web application I enjoy using as much as native applications developed by small teams.

Bjarnason points out native applications that meet his threshold of quality (and I agree), but doesn’t mentions something important: they all use frameworks too, in this case, mountains of proprietary AppKit and UIKit (I’ll stick with UI frameworks as that seems to be the unspoken target of the piece).

Have the web frameworks failed or have the web developers?

I’m not sure.