Issue 13
Shorter one this week. I'm currently in Indiana visiting with family for my grandpa's memorial service and haven't had much time this week to write. Mostly links and stuff this time around.
If you want to talk about anything in here, please reply to this email (or email me at toby@takeo.email if you're reading this on RSS)! I'd love to talk shop.
Shit I'm...
Reading
How Silicon Valley Helps Spread the Same Sterile Aesthetic Across the World
As an affluent, self-selecting group of people move through spaces linked by technology, particular sensibilities spread, and these small pockets of geography grow to resemble one another, as Schwarzmann discovered: the coffee roaster Four Barrel in San Francisco looks like the Australian Toby’s Estate in Brooklyn looks like The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen looks like Bear Pond Espresso in Tokyo. You can get a dry cortado with perfect latte art at any of them, then Instagram it on a marble countertop and further spread the aesthetic to your followers.
I know I'm part of the problem when it comes to this type of stuff, but it's still a bummer. I suppose it's just part of ubiquitous connection via curated social media posts and airbnb listings and whatnot. There have always been trends, of course, but I guess never really at the same time across the entire globe.
That said, I'm currently in the outskirts of Indianapolis, and the aesthetic here is definitely not the standard Four Barrel Coffee Roasters. From what I can tell it's the standard American aesthetic for all the places that that affluent tech crowd ignores. Lots of smoking, lots of live laugh love types of wall adornments, lots of sports. Perhaps to truly experience different things we'll just need to seek out the places that haven't gotten the approval of the tech/influencer crowd.
Using
Obsidian, Taming a Collective Consciousness
For y'all still interested in things like Obsidian, this article is a really in-depth overview of how a software team used Obsidian as a shared knowledge repository. Lots of example templates and resources.
Wearing
I picked up this Lord Dying shirt when I saw them a few weeks ago. I was wearing it yesterday when I got to Indiana and my dad looked at it sideways and asked if it was a Yes shirt, so, mission accomplished.
Listening to
I was listening to something the other day and one of these songs by Candiria came up randomly after and I remembered how badass their weird jazz fusion songs were. If you're unfamiliar with them, they were a New Jersey hardcore band that did a melding of rap and metal. All that stuff is... fine, but these two songs are when they threw down some heavy fusion stuff and it ruuuules.
Seeing
Cirque Du Soleil – Alegria
Our daughter wanted to go to Cirque du Soleil for her birthday while it was still in town. We got tickets to Alegria for us and her buddy. I think this was the first one I saw back in the 90s. It was, of course, awesome. It's pretty amazing what people can do if they dedicate their lives to random shit like doing ridiculous tricks in a huge aluminum hamster wheel. It also became very apparent that the minions are 100% based on French Canadian circus clowns.
Drawing
Here's an oldie:
Laughing at
AI Religion Bot – one of those twitter accounts that purports to be a GPT3 generated tweeter trained on tons of religious texts. Lots of times they're accompanied by images derived from the passages it generates. And, yeah, some great stuff like this:
Nice.
Watching
The Church Play Cinematic Universe – Allen posted this in the group chat the other day and… holy shit.I played drums at a church for like 7 years, and we had our share of stage dramas. Nothing as intense as this, but still… this is way too real.
— Toby