Quite a few books I’ve been reading lately start out as 3s but morph into solid 4.5 or 5s in the back half.

This Saturday morning’s air guitar and singing around the house is brought to you by Midtown’s Save the World, Lose the Girl, a very influential album to this middle school to high school transitioning, pop punk-emergent in 2001.

I loved the alleyways of Taiwan. Like grass pushing through the cracks of sidewalks, activated alleyways were this organic, human-scaled resistance to frigid modernity.

Baltimore is also a city of alleys, but most are narrow forgotten footpaths of refuse. Our alleyways are hidden folds for fringe activity. Their alleyways are revelatory and exposing.

I’m thinking about the phrase “group by”, which is great for technical folks but maybe not good UI language.

So far my alternatives are “roll up”, “drill down”, “compare by”, and narrowly, “sub totals” or “average by” (skipping group and embedding function).

For dinner I had what I called a “Mediterranean tostada”, which was really just a warmed up pita with hummus, harrisa, lettuce, tomato, pickles, and grilled chicken.

Or a regular pita sandwich. But I liked Mediterranean tostada better. No picture, ate too fast, was delicious.

Spinning Silver was brilliant. At least as good as Uprooted. Wow. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚

This great post by Craig Hockenberry on the origin of the word “tweet” just makes me feel sadder about the Twitter experience today.

Monday win— I think I did a good job with a hard conversation today.

It’s the kind of conversation I got wrong 95% of the time 5 years ago, and I probably get wrong about 25% of the time today.

Growth is hard, but possible.

I’m almost certain I’m going to finish 4 books this month and it feels great.

Is there anything more exhilarating than the last 25% of a good book, especially one where the first 25% or so was tough to get through? No way I sleep tonight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how important great editing is to great writing lately, how I almost never experienced great editing in formal education, and how many knowledge jobs have heavy writing components with no editors.

Soon Copenhagen will be a carbon neutral city Some things I learned from this video:

1. The public transit system plans to have 100s headway… wow.
2. They have centralized heating and cooling facilities for homes and businesses. I’ve never even heard this proposed in the US.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and requirements will change.

I’ve only ever read his excerpts/shorter pieces, but Robert Caro is just a joy to read. It’s time. If I make my GoodReads challenge this year, I will start 2020 with The Power Broker.

Seriously, there’s no way to map Caps Lock to Escape with a hardware keyboard on iOS?

Jimminy.

Since Reeder doesn’t support the new iPad Pro, what RSS reader should I be using on mobile with Feedbin?

My experience at the Apple Store today— walk in knowing exactly what I wanted to buy, still wait almost 40 mins. What store makes you wait 40 mins to buy something?

Better Worlds is a series of 10 original science fiction stories commissioned by The Verge.

Contemporary science fiction often feels fixated on a sort of pessimism that peers into the world of tomorrow and sees the apocalypse looming more often than not. At a time when simply reading the news is an exercise in exhaustion, anxiety, and fear, it’s no surprise that so many of our tales about the future are dark amplifications of the greatest terrors of the present. But now more than ever, we also need the reverse: stories that inspire hope.

The Verge is at its best when it’s not just a tech blog. I follow The Verge Long Reads in my RSS feed where some great journalism lives. But I still poke at the front page every couple of weeks because if I didn’t, I’d miss projects like Better Worlds. I wish we had more journalism making enough money to do projects like this.

Every book I want to read is expensive on Kindle right now. 😡

So how do I get a vim experience on iPad these days?

Surprisingly, when I went to https on micro.json.blog, it broke my OwnYourGram connection. I had to go and respecify https everywhere.

I’ve always like Conduit as a street name.

Just added open graph to json.blog for the three times a year I have an image in a post.

Worth It: Week 1 2019 five things from around the web I think were worth it this week.

There’s No Shortcut to Wisdom

A good read on Adam’s decision to dive away from reading as much philosophy as he can get his hands on and instead begin diving into fiction and poetry. While I share his view that he has “set [himself] up to argue with the Jamesons rather than the Geoghegans”, and believe me this is worth reading just to appreciate that line, I am decidely less optimistic than he is on the power of the humanities and literature to reveal truth.

The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Why not pair someone walking away from philosophy with an account of a famed philosopher whose philsophy was, itself, rejecting modern philosophy (and post-Enlightenment leanings of all kinds, it seems).

r/postrock Best Albums of 2018

This one is a playlist. The subreddit r/postrock compiled a Spotify playlist of their favorite albums of 2018. I’m mostly through it and it’s pretty damn good. This will probably be my go to playlist when nothing particular strikes me for much of the early part of this year.

Why we need to slow time and scale down

Om Malik (inspired by writing by Tariq Krim) has really captured some ideas I have been starting to put into practice in my own as a way to deal with today’s world. Three key ideas: shift focus from quantity to quality, go analog, and unscale your life.

It is a sane correction to our times. Social media and the whole “digital world” defaults to a firehose of useless information and value-free interactions. And as globalization, information technology, and the technology of capitalism itself races towards zero marginal cost, it feels easy to lose a sense of value. I have been explicitly working on slowing down. I am reading more longer form journalism, curtailing channels that push information to me rather than allowing me to pull information I wantwhen I am ready for it, and trying to chase lasting, rather than ephemeral pleasures. There’s a lot about this process which is privileged and hard, but I think it will make for a healthier psychology.

CSS Grid for Designers

When I did the redesign here on json.blog, I decided to use the opportunity to learn the basics of CSS grid. There was a fair amount of good material out there, but I wish this great post by the New York Times team was out there. A great introduction to Grid, what’s great about it, and the basics on how to use it.