Elsa and I have long discussed a road trip up to Montreal through New Hampshire and Vermont. Every year I look at the fall foliage predictions and think “Maybe this year we’ll go.”

Consultants– bad for the culture of consulting firms, bad for the culture of their clients, bad for the organizations that hire mostly former consultants on pattern matching.

Fascinating look at how our built environment impacts behavior. What if we had an “abandoned property” theory of crime instead of “broken windows”?

I’ve always been liberal. Two men I disagreed w/ but respected from GOP were John McCain & Colin Powell. They helped me understand it was possible to respect people who were wrong, which was hard when Peter King was my congressmen & Bush/Cheney were in the White House.‬

I have a confession. The other day I was about 45mins into an intense work meeting with a client when I looked down and noticed my Diet Coke had the name Jason. I played it so cool like nothing happened.

I felt very much like an adult.

It’s a huge bummer that our best friends all live in NYC.

I think a lot about how I’m falling short of the example set by those I admire.

I guess I should cut myself some slack. I admire them for a reason. We all need aspirational examples to follow.

Sometimes I imagine dedicating myself to being a skinny person and then I remember milkshakes exist.

Audio Engine N22 or TEAC AI-101DA? I want one to drive an extra set of Paradigm Atoms and my Fidelio X2s for my home desk setup…

If this rumored Mac Mini is:

• real
• ~ $1000
• can drive LG 5K display
• has 16gb of ram (upgradeable oh pleeeeeease)
• 256gb SSD

I will buy it so hard.

Tips ∝ Diet Coke refill rate.

I hate Sunday night packing so much I’m gonna turn it into Early Monday Morning packing. #lifehacks

I thought I liked this song, and then the trumpet came in and now I love this song.

A New Citizen Decides to Leave the Tumult of Trump’s America

A great read on the complexity of becoming American, and then the complexity of deciding to leave.

A great example of why I use Spotify over Apple Music and why open platforms win: there is a bot on Reddit that identifies songs that are posted to r/PostRock and adds them to a play list on Spotify that contains all the top voted music from that week.

This is a great article about the discovery of archaea, how paradigms change in science, and the peculiarity of scholarly pursuit. Via the great sixcolors.com

Took a hiatus from guitar for the last few years. But boy, I never regret buying this Larrivée DV-03R. I spent years trying acoustics before choosing this model. Still has the best sound of anything my fingers have touched. Perfectly balanced tone, so comfortable to play.

We All Die! What A Circus! is quite the eponymous album. I’ve played it at least 5 times since someone posted it on r/postrock a few days ago.

Good reminder, Tina.

Just because you think something is embarrassing doesn’t mean you have to be embarrassed by it.

True nerd survivalism.

How Jason can a day get? So far I’ve: eaten cold leftovers for breakfast, bought a Jewish cook book from a public radio interview, added an album to Spotify from public radio, visited two bookstores, drove 30 mins for a new bbq place, & wrote some YIMBY stuff on the internet.

Media personalities are better follows on most social media platforms because they are generating content in a specific area for a living. I am not just following a person I trust, but that person is likely to spend 80-90% of their time writing about an interest I share.

Individual users on social media tend to post about 2-4 subjects in equal measure to cover that same 80-90% of their posts. The result is I have far less overlap between their posts and my interests.

Over time, social feeds become some combination of noisy and toxic when following people I like which dilutes the amount of my feed that is about interests I have.

This is similar, but distinct from so-called filter bubbles.

I remember forums fondly because although they were not 100% on topic, there was a community constructed around common interests. I knew what kind of stuff I’d read when I popped on a forum, and even off-topic posts tended to share baseline common knowledge and references built off those interests.

It’s in this spirit that I’ve started to explore Reddit seriously for the first time in a while. Twitter is not a happy place. Facebook is not a happy place. Instagram is nice, but I find discovery to be difficult. Reddit offers an opportunity to curate an interest-driven internet, focused on areas that don’t make me feel bad.

I still use an RSS reader. If there were more original blogs I could follow, it would build the same thing I’d like to see on Reddit. But blogging is not as popular as it once was. It’s discovery and social layer is broken. I’m hoping efforts like Micro.blog could turn that around over time.

Until then I’ll continue to try and find ways to read about things that make me think and make me smile and make me laugh. I want my experience with the internet to be a lot more like my experience with podcasts.

This $500 reverb pedal is how I’ll become a great guitar player right?

GYBE is playing in Baltimore and I didn’t know and I’m not going and this seems wrong.

Someone posted in our neighborhood Facebook group a picture of a groundhog. Now like 10 more pictures of this groundhog lounging in back yards and on shed roofs are being shared.

This is the happiest Facebook has ever made me.

When does it get easy?