A new website schoolprison.com shows you pictures of buildings and you guess: school or prison?

These two buildings should look similar, but because schools are far better facilities and prisons are as humane. Unfortunately, not the choice we made.

I’m not sure there’s a better smell then garlic, onion. and chicken skin cooking together.

I am becoming sympathetic to the idea that our COVID-19 vaccine prioritization is too complex giving our logistics shortcomings right now. It really should be as simple as possible to get the vaccine to the most folks possible as quickly as possible.

I decided to watch Millennium Actress last night, which I could swear I had seen before. Turns out, I had not. It was great!

I learned a lot about the creative process from @bogart discussing creating Incredible Doom on his latest Patreon podcast episode.

The results are incredible, so I shouldn’t be surprised how deliberate the process was to create it.

It wouldn’t be a holiday break if I didn’t make a tiny, largely semantic change to my blog template and CSS.

I shouldn’t say this, because I know how hard it can be to prioritize something that seems totally obvious, but between this and the lack of iPad app, I’m just embarrassed for the Instagram product team.

I read 32/30 books this year, in large part due to a truly stellar December of reading.

Spectre was not good, but had a good “ending” for Daniel Craig’s 007 run. He was right to try and get out.

A surprising weakness of Apple Fitness+ is the lack of filtering by muscle groups. The day after a strength exercise that was lower body focused, I have no way of finding an upper body focused strength workout.

Wonder Woman 1984 was not a good movie.

Soul was visually stunning, but it was just ok.

What should we watch tonight? Considering Tenet, Greenland, LX 2048, The Vast of Night, or Synchronic.

You can now view all the books I read this year on my Bookshop page.

The small, dumb thing I miss from the befuarantime is grocery store samples.

NIMBYism is a US plague, and it has now spread to Austin.

Being a product manager means that after week 1 of 2 weeks off, my head is overflowing with ideas that I’m desperately avoiding writing down lest I find myself working.

I’ve decided to point json.blog to what’s currently at micro.json.blog. Unfortunately I control one server and not the other. I originally avoided this because I will lose some URLs at json.blog, but I can redirect to the Archive page. Still, this is gonna be hard to get right.

One of the things I’m most optimistic about for 2021 is I’ll be able to go sit in the new coffee shop around the corner and work, finally.

This essay was my favorite thing I’ve read this month.

Ann Patchett on her beautiful friendship with Sooki Raphael, who strikes me as one of the truly great people in this world.

I don’t know how we back out of the thousands of mistakes, by local decision makers, state and federal policy, and our broader socio-political-cultural context that leads to a decision to close the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues.

Exhale

Because I truly can’t help myself, I’m now trying yet another note taking app— this time checking out Craft.

Quiet

I’m not sure this isn’t just fancy buses, but trackless trams that are fully autonomous vehicles (on dedicated ROW that are well marked and still separated in some ways) could be a very powerful way to expand transit at lower costs.

I looked at the month I read the most pages in the last 5 or so years and there was a clear outlier. I wondered, “Was I depressed? It sure helps the books were all good…”

Looked back at photos, and actually it was probably the happiest month I’ve had.

More great stuff from Alon on infrastructure costs influencing what gets build, which overall just makes me feel like no American city will have the transit system I’d like to live with in my lifetime no matter what.