takeo.blog

Feb 3, 2023 ∞

Currently reading: Ducks by Kate Beaton 📚

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book, I just knew she drew the canonical “Old as balls” image and that was reason enough to buy anything she makes. Turns out it’s a super moving autobiography of a difficult period of life, perfectly captured in the comic medium. Her master of facial expressions is superb.

Jan 2, 2023 ∞

Best of 2022 – Insta360 X3

When I started Onewheeling, I naturally went to YouTube and watched as many videos of people trail riding as a I could. Whenever I find something new, I dive pretty deeply into it, trying to absorb as much as I can. With the Onewheel, it was a lot like watching old VHS skate videos back in the day. Just watching other folks do it, even if it’s relatively basic, gets me pumped up and stoked to go out and ride.

While watching all these videos, I noticed how good video stabilization has gotten, and how these folks were able to take these really great, crisp, high-resolution videos of themselves. I realized, “oh, this is why GoPro was such a big deal”. The whole action camera thing never really registered with me in the past, but now I understood. For some reason, there’s a compulsion to document the trails I’m riding, and the improvements I’m making to my riding. I loved watching other peoples’ videos so much, and I wanted to provide the same thing for all the rad trails around Portland. And, let’s be honest, I just wanted to make my own videos and play with a new toy.

I assumed that a GoPro would be the obvious choice. They were clearly the dominant player with a multi-year head start, and most of the people I was watching were using one. I noticed some videos looked a bit different, though. While some of them had the rider’s lower torso, some of them had their whole body… almost like a drone was following them.

I discovered there was an entire other genre of action cameras that were capturing 360 degrees with two lenses, essentially filming everything around it. Throw one on the end of a selfie stick and carry it while you ride, and it’s like someone else is riding with you filming. It even manages to get rid of the selfie stick in the final product, which is rad, but also kind of silly since it looks like you’re riding while clenching onto some invisible talisman. Which, I guess, you kind of are.

This, naturally, sent me down the rabbit hole of finding out which 360 camera was Best. Many searches and YouTubes later, I determined that Insta360 was actually a much better 360 camera than GoPro. I guess it makes sense, they have 360 in their name, but I dunno… it kinda sounded like a cheap knockoff type of thing. Guess not.

Since I still wasn’t too sure about the whole thing, though, I decided to hedge a bit and buy one second-hand. I found a dude on OfferUp who was selling an X2 after he used it a couple of times on a vacation or something. I met with him in the Fred Meyer parking lot in the traditional Let’s Not Get Mugged ritual, and I was off to the races.

I went to the Trail of Doom to try it out, and it worked really well. The selfie stick disappeared and everything, and holding it while riding wasn’t too bad at all. I was in. I took a bunch of videos and started posting to the YouTube account I’ve had for like 15 years.

I got a few accessories, of course. One of them was a backpack rig where you could strap it to your backpack and a selfie-stick would stick off the back of it like an RC car antennae. Someone told me I looked like a Star Wars droid while wearing it. I can live with that.

The second or third time I wore it, I was on a pretty mellow trail near home. I was just getting warmed up, not going too fast or anything. I went down a little hill with a turn at the bottom and somehow just … ate complete shit. I fell backward right where there happened to be a bunch of boulders forming a small cliff. I did a backward somersault down the boulders and landed in a bunch of thorny bushes.

Fuck.

Luckily, I was all padded up and, aside from a sore neck, I wasn’t hurting too bad. My camera, which I’d had for like 2 weeks at that point, and my backpack rig, which I’d had for a few days, were another story. Doing a backward somersault while wearing a backpack and camera antennae meant I rolled directly onto both of them. One of the two camera lenses was completely smashed, and the carbon fiber selfie stick was snapped in two. Worst of all, since the camera got smashed during the fall, I was unable to get the footage of the crash. Dammit.

This whole thing taught me a few things:

The Insta360 is legit. The image quality is kind of astonishing, the stabilization is incredible, and the software for making a coherent video out of the 360 ball that has been filmed is surprisingly easy.
These things are going to break. Buying them used might save you a bit of money initially, but I was SOL when it broke. I ended up buying the new X3 version from Amazon with the stupid insurance that you usually ignore out of hand. This is the only time I can think it will actually make sense. We’ll see how it goes when I finally do break another lens, though.
Wind is a thing. I ended up buying a separate wireless mic setup so I could have a higher quality sound input with the dead cat furry cover to get rid of the wind. The recorded sound of the trail rides are some of my favorite parts of the videos. It’s soothing, in an ASMR type of way.
Having videos of your activities is pretty fun, even if no one really watches them. It’s cool to see where you’ve been, and how you’re advancing.

I also used the camera when we were in Mexico walking around the pyramids, which is another pretty cool use for it. I felt like a bit of a dork walking around with a big ass selfie stick, but whatever. I’m a dad, I’ve earned it.

Dec 29, 2022 ∞

Best of 2022 – YouTube

Yeah, I know, I’m only like 10 years late, but I finally “get” YouTube. I was always kinda mad at them for becoming kazillionaires by hosting a bunch of pirated stuff back in the day. I guess the ends justify the means. Regardless of the provenance, what it is these days is pretty incredible.

I remember one of my friends a few years ago saying they pretty much only watched YouTube and no other streaming services. That seemed super weird to me. They mentioned liking stuff like MKBHD and whatnot, which I, as a gearhead, understood in theory, but it never really hooked me.

I think what finally made things click was getting into the whole personal knowledge management and productivity stuff scene. That’s when I realized there were a bunch of people out there posting some relatively high-quality videos about the stuff I was most interested in at the time. Tutorials, reviews, recordings of presentations, etc. on the most niche shit, all easily available.

Then, when I got into onewheeling, I couldn’t stop watching videos of people riding trails. What most people would likely find super boring and tedious was completely enrapturing to me. 30 minute raw footage of a dude riding a trail in Canada without any background music or anything? Hell yes. It inspired me to start my own channel of pretty much the same stuff.

So yeah, I get it now. YouTube is my default place to chill and just watch some stuff. Now that I think about it, that’s probably the secret – it’s the easiest place to just find something that’s probably only like 8 minutes long to watch without much commitment, and it’s easy to just queue things up and skip around. At this point, I’m much more attracted to bite size “casual” stuff than big investments. Much like with video games, I’d much rather be able to play Tony Hawk for 20 minutes than have to invest 100 hours into some interactive epic movie type of thing. And YouTube is pretty much that for videos.

Some cool channels I like:

WestCoast.LandPirate – great onewheel trail riding
Some More News – ultra-snarky current events stuff
Nicole van den Hoeven – lots of good Obsidian content
Come Join Friends – gigantic archive of old hardcore shows
Jenny Nicholson – wild deep dives into random stuff
66Samus – death metal drummer acting like a child

And, of course, The Algorithm feeds me a bunch of related stuff and a bunch of political current events and whatnot. I’ll admit to watching to many of the political things, but that’s life.

Oh yeah: I happily pay for YouTube Premium because it’s essentially useless without it. Yes, some of you just use ad blockers or whatever, but I’m not interested in a game of cat and mouse with Google. It’s worth it.

Dec 29, 2022 ∞

Best of 2022 – Onewheel

Growing up as a skater kid, I’ve been pretty comfortable on boards with wheels for a long time. Thankfully, the muscle memory is still kinda there. Without wheels… that’s a different story. I tried snowboarding once when I was like 42, and it was terrible. Like, I truly hated it. Just sliding around with no control, while being strapped to the damn thing.

I tried skating again as an old, but it didn’t really stick. My mind wanted to do all the tricks I could do as a kid, but my body was like nah dogg, come on. It was pretty frustrating, and I just didn’t have the drive to build back up to any sort of reasonable level that would be fun again.

Another factor is that living in Portland in 2022 means the options for skating are almost entirely outdoor skateparks during the months it’s not raining, which is a far cry from growing up in SoCal where weather was never a factor. We skated literally every single day unless we were sick or hurt or something. On the rare occasion it was raining, we’d hit up a parking garage. We didn’t have skateparks at all, so we just went to schools and malls and parking lots, skating curbs and doing tricks down stairs. Transitions, whether ramps or concrete, were an exotic rarity for us, which means skating the parks here in Portland feels super foreign.

Anyway, skating didn’t stick as an old man in a new environment, snowboarding sucked, and I wasn’t interested in hiking or cycling. I wanted to ride a board. I considered standup paddleboarding, which is pretty huge around here, but my only experience with it was in Hawaii on the ocean, and that didn’t go very well. I was still interested, but it just seemed like such an … ordeal. With skating, you just grab your board and go outside, and you’re good to go. Paddleboarding seemed kind of tedious, always having to inflate and deflate the boards, and, well, you have to go to a lake or river. That’s not that hard around Portland, but still.

Onewheeling addresses just about all of this:

it’s a board sport
my feet aren’t strapped to it
don’t have to inflate it
doesn’t require snow
doesn’t require water
small and portable

What I didn’t realize were all the things I hadn’t even thought of:

it can go off-road!
it’s fast
it’s smooth
it can go up hills
it’s… liberating

The off-road part is the most important. Living in Portland for 11 years now has been great, I really love it here. But, I’ve never taken advantage of what the area has to offer. Everyone here is a Hiker™, taking advantage of all the trails and nature the northwest has to offer, and, well, I was just never interested in taking walks on dirt. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool every once in a while, but it’s not a hobby or anything to me.

The onewheel being able to go off-road changed all that. Riding all these trails are like the best skatepark I could imagine, except even better. They’re organic, almost alive. I know they’re technically manmade, but being out in the woods, made of dirt, imperfect and raw, just makes them feel like they’re supposed to be there, and we’re lucky enough to have stumbled across them to experience them.

Back when I was a kid, I loved making marble tracks in the dirt. My brother and I would make some wild ones on the hill in the backyard of one of the houses we lived in. We’d make berms and tunnels and jumps and connectors, and then drop the marble down to see it go through, swerving and gaining speed. Riding trails is the closest I’ve come to that feeling, except now I get to be the marble, and the tracks are way more creative, beautiful, and fun than anything we ever came up with.

A few weeks back I went out to Post Canyon in Hood River and rode the El Dorado trail. It was right when all the trees were turning orange and dropping onto the trail, and the dirt was a bit damp and smooth. The whole time, the only thought going through my mind is “man, this is so cool” as I rode through terrain I never would have enjoyed otherwise, listening to the subtle, soothing sounds of the wheel on the terrain. It forces me to just about forget anything else going on in my life and just enjoy the present moment, the place I live, and the opportunity I have to just float through it. And, well… it’s just so cool.

Dec 28, 2022 ∞

Best of 2022 – Continuity Camera

Because we all live in a world of nonstop Zoom calls now, things like webcams actually matter. We all know laptop cameras are not great, and if you use an external monitor you might not even have one built in. That’s the boat I was in, since work gave me a huge 16” MacBook Pro that is way too big to use as a laptop, so it’s docked and connected to some random LG monitor.

I had some ancient Logitech webcam, but it was garbage. Never focused, really bad at low light, etc. I remembered hearing about and app called Camo that let you use your iPhone as a webcam. I installed the trial and the difference in quality was immediately apparent. Like, way better. Once I tried that, I couldn’t go back.

One tricky situation, though: how to mount the phone above my monitor? This was before continuity camera, so Belkin hadn’t yet made their little contraption for MagSafeing your phone on top. I ended up rigging a Rube Goldberg contraption together with a clamp, articulating tripod arm, and MagSafe cold shoe mount from Moment. It’s super janky, but it works well enough.

So, once that was figured out, I subscribed to Camo (like $39/year or something) and happily used it for a year or so. It has plenty of tools for tweaking the image, and was pretty rock solid. One downside, though, was that it required the phone to be plugged in via USB. Understandable, but a pain when setting things up multiple times a day for Zoom meetings.

Then I noticed that my SetApp subscription added a new app called Detail that was similar to Camo, but included in the subscription I already had. It also claimed to work over Wi-Fi instead of having to plugging in, which was intriguing. In practice, though, the Wi-Fi thing didn’t work very well, and you could tell it was super compressed. It didn’t have the same level of tweaking as Camo either, but it was passable.

Automating Annoying Stuff

One thing about these products is that they need to have apps on both the phone and Mac running at the same time to work. The Mac app receives the signal from the phone and registers it as a virtual camera for apps like Zoom to use, and the phone app sends that signal. I guess with Camo, it also does a lot of the image processing on the phone as well. This is all well and good, but it does pose a problem: making sure the apps are running when you need them to be. On the Mac, it’s usually just running in the background, no big deal. The phone, however, is a pain. Having to unlock it and open the app, and then gingerly set the phone onto the MagSafe stand thingy without accidentally exiting the app or opening control center, is a non-trivial task.

What I ended up doing was cobbling together some Shortcuts. I don’t use Shortcuts nearly enough, but this was a good opportunity to try them out for something actually useful. The basic gist of what I did:

On my Mac, create a shortcut that
– changes the focus mode to Zoom Meeting (custom focus mode)– opens OBS using a shell command to start the virtual camera (/Applications/OBS.app/Contents/MacOS/obs --startvirtualcam &)– sets a HomeKit scene that turns on my El Gato Keylight Air and desk light strip, as well as lowers my green screen – hides the OBS window.
On my phone, creation a shortcut automation that
– triggers on the change to the Zoom Meeting focus mode (focus modes sync across all your devices, which means changing it on my Mac propagates it to my phone, allowing this automation to happen automatically. Cool!)– opens the appropriate app (Camo or Detail)– if I’m using Detail at the time, turn off screen-rotation lock (Detail doesn’t let you change the orientation in the Mac app, while Camo does).

I also set up a “meeting clean up” shortcut that

turns off the Zoom Meeting focus mode
turns on a HomeKit scene that puts my green screen up, turns off the Keylight.

And an automation on my phone when the detail app exits to turn the rotation lock back on.

Whew. Yeah, it’s a lot. While it’s kinda fun to think all of those things through and get it working, it’s a lot of work and relatively brittle.

Dedicated Webcam?

Some folks in the Mac Slack channel at work bought one of the Opal cameras that purported to be “DSLR quality” in a normal(ish) webcam form factor. It was spendy (like $300) but I figured I’d give it a try since it would be super convenient to not have to think about putting my phone up while still having good image quality. However, the quality was nowhere near what I was getting with Camo and my phone. I tried tweaking the software, but it just didn’t get much better in the lighting available in my office. So, I requested a refund. To my surprise, they refunded me immediately and told me to go ahead and keep the camera. Maybe it’ll improve as the software gets better.

Finally, Continuity Camera

Ok, enough backstory. When macOS Ventura came out, one of the things it included was Continuity Camera™, which was basically Camo being Sherlocked. I tried it out and, true to form, Apple was able to make it much nicer in many ways since they own the whole stack, and they, of course, made it far too simple in some other ways.

First off, pretty much all the annoying shit is gone. Since it’s baked into the operating systems, there’s no need to run apps on either the Mac or the iPhone, so all the weird shenanigans for having things set up is no longer necessary. What this means in practice is that I can just toss my phone up onto the magnet when I’m getting ready for a call and whenever Zoom accesses the camera it Just Works. No need to start apps or turn the phone on or anything.

And yeah, I didn’t say anything about plugging it in. They got things to work over Wi-Fi really well compared to Detail (I haven’t tried the Camo update that supports Wi-Fi) and the added convenience really adds up.

Since it’s an Apple camera, it means you can take advantage of the built-in camera effects as well, like portrait mode and Center Stage which follows your face around automatically. The portrait mode is quite good compared to Camo’s, and light years better than the god awful Zoom blur things, but obviously not as good as a real DSLR. Center Stage is pretty neat, but it can be really nauseating after a while as it constantly moves the focus around to follow your head moving or your arms while gesticulating. Turning it off also makes the image a lot sharper.

So, overall, it’s really nice! But, there are some annoyances:

While the Wi-Fi connection works really well, it requires that you can’t have AirPlay going at the same time. It’s understandable since they both likely use up a ton of bandwidth, but it requires that AirPlay not even be connected, which means I’ve been having to close down the Music app when using the camera. Not a giant deal, but an annoyance.
Being an Apple feature, there are basically no controls over things. The Camera effects are there, but you can’t do anything to control the image quality, exposure, cropping, zoom, etc. etc. Camo really excels at that type of stuff, letting you tweak tons of things and saving them for the future. Overall, though, the Apple quality on everything is Good Enough to not worry too much about it.
Since the wireless connection works so well, it means the phone is doing some pretty intense stuff without being connected to power. Of course, I like not having to plug it in, but killing my phone’s battery after a few calls kinda sucks. So, sometimes I’ve been plugging it in just for power. I’m going to try to see if I can rig up a MagSafe charger onto my Rube Goldberg machine to provide some easy power while keeping things stuck above the monitor, but I’m uncertain that’s going to actually work.

So, overall, I’m happy with it, especially when compared to all the alternatives. Getting a new studio display with a built-in camera would probably be the easiest answer, but they’re expensive, and the iPhone is still going to provide a better image.

Dec 26, 2022 ∞

#portland #timbers on Christmas Eve eve

Dec 24, 2022 ∞

Best of 2022 – Music

You know the drill. Here’s some of my favorite stuff from this last year, starting with music. I listened to a whole bunch of things this year, but these stuck out to me for some reason. Hopefully you dig some of it.

GAUPA – Myriad

I stumbled across this band GAUPA while looking through my apple music recent releases. I don't know if I'd ever listened to them before that, but I had no idea what to expect. Turns out it's basically a Björk impersonator fronting a heavy rock band from Sweden. At first I was like 🤨 but then I was like 🥹. Once you get past the hyper awareness of the whole Björk thing, it starts to click, and it's awesome. At this point I’m pretty sure it’s my Album of the Year.

Also, the cover is rad.

Messa – Close

We have a rarely used Slack for talking about music with some friends. The only time it’s ever really used is for one of posting a recent discovery we think the rest of the crew needs to know about. One of those was this album by Messa. Eric busted in and said something like “dudes, this has everything – heavy, jazzy parts, proggy parts… it’s incredible”.

As is tradition, the first time I listened to this album, I didn’t quite get it. It was definitely intriguing, but kind of a slow burn. The female vocals are wonderful, but take some getting used to. A lot of what makes this special is pretty subtle. After a few more listens, I got it.

It’s probably not much of a coincidence that the top two albums of the year for me (this and GAUPA) are both fronted by women. I’ve long been into women fronted artists, but more on the brooding side of things like Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Portishead, etc. Having more heavy bands fronted by women approaching things a bit differently has been a breath of fresh air. There are women doing heavy Cookie Monster vocals (Arch Enemy, for example) or standard power metal vocals (Holy Grove, Witch Mountain, etc.), which is great, but when I come across bands doing something kinda different I get stoked. Messa definitely fits the bill.

BUMMER – Dead Horse

This album has only gotten better the more I listen to it. I saw Bummer a few years ago, I think with Whores, at the Ash St. Saloon (RIP) and they were pretty good. I checked out their recorded stuff at the time, and it was also… pretty good. I never really listened to it much again.

Then, earlier this year, I was at another Whores show, and who happens to be opening again? Bummer. This time, it clicked. Heavy, pissed, and chaotic. The next day I listened to their latest album, and holy balls. Some of the gnarliest, grimiest riffage I’ve heard in a long time.

Also, they have a song called I want To Punch Brice Springsteen In The Dick and it’s incredible.

Mammoth Volume – The Cursed Who Perform the Larvagod Rites

I’d heard of Mammoth Volume a few years ago, mostly because their name seemed so… on the nose? Their latest album came across my New Releases feed so I gave it a shot, and whoa. It was not at all what I remembered or was expecting. It has a definite psych feel to it, and being from Sweden gives it a bit of a different vibe than American stoner metal stuff. Lots of wacky keyboard stuff, time signatures, and riffage. Hopefully they make it out to Portland some time, I’d love to see them live.

Doomer Jazz

One day Ted dropped a link in the group text to a YouTube video. The preview card showed this image:

The title was “1 Hour of Late Night Doomer Jazz” and, needless to say, I was intrigued. I love jazz, and I love doom, so it stood to reason that I would also love this.

And, of course, I did.

The image that they made for it is pretty much perfect. The best way to imagine what this playlist sounds like is to think of a grimy old detective movie from the 70s in NYC with lots of fedoras, trench coats, dirty cabs, and lots and lots of moody saxophone. You’ll recognize it as soon as you hear it.

Dec 21, 2022 ∞

TSA Preeeeez Nuuuuuttzzzz

A sort of continuation of the budget culture article I posted a few months ago. This article goes over the absurdity and sheer usefulness of the TSA PreCheck system. I've had Pre for a long time now because I got it as a perk with my fancy points credit card. Actually, that allowed for Global Entry, which is kinda like PreCheck except for international flights, letting you get through customs a lot faster when returning home. I was doing a bunch of travel to speak at conferences and whatnot back then, and Pre and Global Entry were awesome, especially when traveling with the family.

This whole thing is, of course, another example of people who don't really need the perks, or would be able to afford them, getting them for free. If you have never used Pre, the experience is basically this: if you're old enough, remember air travel before 9/11? You can almost experience that again by paying the government $85 to get your fingerprints and do a background check so you can go in a (usually) shorter line and not have to take off your shoes and belt.

Put another way, remember Cool Ranch Doritos? Of course you do. Remember when they first came out? They were amazing, right? New flavor, and plenty of it. Then, over the years, they didn't have the same kick that they once used to. But never fear! Now there's COOLER RANCH, with more XTREME flavor!

But, I'm fairly certain they just slowly tapered off how much of the magic dust they put on the chips over the years and then returned it to the original formula and reintroduced it as COOLER. I think this is a pretty common playbook, especially when they can charge more when they return to their original glory. Shrinkflation, Walmartization, etc. Start out with something good that people love, get them hooked, and then slowly remove what they love until competition isn't a problem and you can raise the prices to return them to your original selling point.

So yeah, PreCheck. Stripping away your dignity in the name of Security™ for 20 years so they can charge the people who can afford it (or who get it for free as a perk) to return a little bit of it, all while collecting a bunch of fingerprints and tracking people who haven't (yet) committed a crime.

It’s not a new observation that the American justice system has two tiers. The wealthy (and, often, the white) have the ability to warp and pervert it for their own gain, bending rules or financing the rewriting of regulations when they can’t be adequately tweaked for their purposes. Those who lack the means to distort the system for their own ends are subjected to the pitiless letter of the law. Nowhere is the bifurcated nature of justice more nakedly on display than in the presence of the TSA PreCheck line. While the general boarding class is subjected to all manner of indignity, the people with PreCheck breeze through while experiencing just the briefest overture of security theater.

And you better believe that it's fucking great. There is such satisfaction in showing up to the airport, consistently some of the worst, most human-hostile places on earth, and getting through the line a little bit quicker while not having to remove your damn belt. It's the small things. But it's also proof that all it takes is a slow trickle of continued bullshittery until we're ecstatic to return to … how things used to be before they got unnecessarily shitty.

By all logic, PreCheck shouldn’t exist. We should not have to sacrifice privacy for convenience, and we should not be allowed to pay to bypass “necessary” security measures for a small fee. Either no one deserves these privileges or we all do. “TSA PreCheck For All” would be an immensely popular political platform for a Democratic presidential candidate.

"TSA PreCheck For All" is an interesting idea… but that's just "return to the pre-9/11 world" which means nobody would be getting anything special. Which I guess is the point? If everyone could keep their shoes and belts on and not have to go through the porno scanners, things would be better and faster for everyone. But it also means you wouldn't really get anything "special" from the experience. No smug look at the proles in the long regular line putting their arms up while standing in the Rapiscan.

Maybe not, though. I suppose this type of program would still mean everyone who wanted to take advantage of it would have to register their info and fingerprints etc. to The Deep State to bypass the security theater. Which means, of course, that there would be a 40%+ contingent of people who would refuse to actually do it and would turn it into a massive conspiracy about government overreach and all that shit. So, perhaps it would still be a shorter line? I guess, kinda like the whole Covid vaccine thing, it would morph into the line where you don't have to take off your belt, and then the Other line where all the Patriots are taking off their red hats in protest, martyring themselves in the name of Freedom. All while their heroes from TV and the internet fly on private flights or, at the very least, go through the PreCheck line because, well, of course they are.

Dec 18, 2022 ∞

Issue 17 – Like a phoenix rising from the ashes

Ok, so I obviously haven’t sent anything out or posted in a long ass time. My bad. An explanation:

I started takeo.news in early 2022 and posted every week for like 4 months straight. Well done, me!

Then, I went on my sabbatical.

I wrote one issue in the middle of the first week of it, but once I acclimated to the time off and doing other things, I just kinda… stopped. Previously, I didn’t really have any hobbies to speak of, and the newsletter was something to do that wasn’t work, and also applied some of the interest I have in things like personal knowledge management and whatnot. However, once I got a hobby, especially one that took me outdoors, I just wanted to use all my time doing that, and the newsletter fell victim to my short attention span.

Fast-forward a few months, and it’s now winter in Portland, which means I have way fewer opportunities to go outside and hit the trails on my onewheel. Compound that with the whole Thing going on with Twitter and, whoops, you have me running my own mastodon instance (takeo.social), switching to my own email domain (takeo.email) with Fastmail, and, naturally, resurrecting my newsletter (takeo.news). The takeo.vanity empire continues to grow.

As a result, in the grand tradition of obsessing over tools instead of actually creating anything, I’ve been dinking around with apps and platforms for reviving the takeo.news newsletter. Here are some of the results of that dinkage.

takeo.email

Spinning up the Mastodon instance gave me the taste of owning my content again, and the email was the net domino to fall. I already had a Fastmail account (because fuck Google), but my dalliance with Hey had left it collecting dust. But, as mentioned, the friction with posting the newsletter got me looking around again. I came across some posts other folks wrote about making the same move, and, for the most part, it works pretty well. Obviously, the workflow isn’t as smooth as Hey’s purpose-built tools, but it’s half the price, and it’s nice being back on a more “standard” email provider. Standards mean I have access to all the “normal” email tools that standard IMAP and SMTP provide, and I can use standard email clients. All the benefits of leaning into the underlying open protocols.

Which brings me to Mastodon.

takeo.social

Just like email has proven over the last 40 something years or whatever, a federated approach with a “protocols not platforms” ethos definitely seems like the right approach. After a couple of decades of Zuccs and Jacks and Brins getting rich by centralizing all our shit, it’s time for a change. At this point, when it comes to “social” media, that pretty much means Mastodon, or, at least, the underlying ActivityPub protocol.

Honestly, I haven’t been posting to Twitter for years now. A couple of tweets here and there, but it was mostly a place to doomscroll every once in a while and try to get new people to see my newsletter issues. Facebook is pretty much only for the marketplace crap these days, and Instagram is all right if curated well, but… meh. And I don’t understand TikTok at all.

After hanging out on Mastodon for a bit, I dig it. For now, it feels a lot like the early days of Twitter, just shitposting with friends, but we’re now a lot smarter about things after 15 years of posting. To me, that means: post stuff, not too much, mostly positive.

So takeo.social is my personal mastodon instance. Is having my own instance necessary? No, not at all. Is it practical? No, not at all. But I like having my own domain and identity, and truly owning everything that goes on in my little world. Sure, it costs a bit of money, but not any more than Twitter Blue™ and all that shit, and I’m not burdening some volunteer running an instance with yet more image storage. And, fuck it, might as well go all in.

My doggs and I also recently spun up a private dogg.zone instance to replace a long-running iMessage group chat. It had become too real-time, too disruptive, and had too much chance of starting discussions that some/most of the crew just did not want any part of. When folks started leaving the chat to take time off, we knew something needed to change. So, we started up an instance of the Hometown fork of Mastodon, which gives us a place for everyone to hang out. We can make posts that are only visible to other folks on the instance, and ignore anything they would rather not see with the content warnings and tag filtering that mastodon provides. It’s been pretty nice.

It’s nerdy, and likely just another echo chamber, etc. but, so far, it’s been a very nice change from Twitter and whatnot. Mostly positive, with tools for having some real talk with folks who get you. It’ll probably never be anywhere near as popular as the centralized services, but that’s also kinda the point. Hopefully, I’ll see you there.

takeo.news

While using Hey for my email, I also used its built-in “Hey World” newsletter functionality in an attempt to keep things “simple”. But, I wasn't happy with the process of authoring the issues in Obsidian and then pasting the HTML into the Hey email composer. It was fine, but it always involved a fair amount of editing after pasting. Not a huge deal, but enough to be annoying. And I wasn’t going to actually write in the email composer, I’m not an animal. So, I gathered ideas and wrote stuff in Obsidian, cobbled the issues together, pasted them into Hey, cleaned things up, posted, and got 16 issues out on a pretty consistently weekly basis.

While I like the format of a newsletter, I think I’ve placed a bit too much emphasis on completionism and having multiple sections per issue. They can get pretty long, and it’s also a lot of pressure to publish on a regular interval with a bunch of content. Which, I guess, is the point. But in this new world of everyone owning their content again, I think having a regular ass blog is a pretty important part of the whole mix. Mastodon is pretty nice for shitposting and scrolling through random stuff. The newsletter is cool for more complete collections of things for people who like receiving them in one dose. A blog seems good for things in the middle – posts about random stuff I don’t feel like putting into a newsletter, but longer than a toot, and people can subscribe if they'd like.

I’m thinking maybe all the posts are just random things, and the newsletter itself could just be an aggregation of the posts I’ve done over the last couple of weeks for people who like that format?

I dunno, I’m probably overthinking it.

Ghost

Either way, I ultimately set up a Ghost account because it does both. It costs some money every month as well, but again, that’s the point. If I want to own my shit, I gotta pay for my shit. I think they’re trying to be like a more open Substack type of thing, where people can subscribe and become “members” and pay you for access to members-only content and whatnot. I’ll probably never use any of that, but it’s nice to know that’s what the platform was built for. It’s a solid blog engine, it can do advanced newsletter stuff, and it’s well-supported in lots of tools. It’s also open source and available to run on your own server, but I think running a Mastodon instance is more than enough for me. Their hosted service costs about the same as a comparable Digital Ocean droplet.

An aside: micro.blog

There were a couple of other tools I was looking at as well. Primarily, I was intrigued by micro.blog since it seems purpose-built for all the stuff I’m trying to do. It’s kind of a hybrid twitter/mastodon/blog/newsletter/photo sharing/bookshelf product. It’s meant to aggregate your stuff from all your feeds and whatnot. And it’s about the same price as Ghost. But, it’s just kinda… rough. It’s pretty barebones and, well, basic. I’m sure I could have dialed it in and gotten it all humming along nicely, but I just didn’t feel like it. Maybe in the future. Now that I’m using personal domains and tools that are open, I can spend as much time as I want getting nerdsniped by this shit.

Ulysses

The main thing that got me to use Ghost, though, is the ability to publish from Ulysses.

Wait, Ulysses? I thought you were an Obsidian maximalist, Toby?!

Yeah, I know. And I still am. But, a few things:

It’s all just markdown under the hood. The whole plain text thing has its benefits, and portability is a massive one.
Ulysses is super native and super nice. Obsidian is an Electron app, and it’s all HTML/CSS/JS. And, with that in mind, it’s fucking incredible. But, native is native, and Ulysses is extremely native.
Ulysses is included in SetApp, so I already have access to it.
Ulysses has built-in publishing integration for Ghost (and micro.blog and wordpress and medium). Obsidian, of course, has a plugin that provides similar functionality, but it’s a bit rough. The first time I tried, it gave me some sort of error and, well, I just didn’t feel like digging into it. The Ulysses integration is super smooth and polished, and feels a lot more solid. Hopefully, it’ll let me concentrate on writing and not publishing.
Ulysses introduced Projects recently and, while seemingly a small change, is exactly what I was looking for in Obsidian. It basically just lets you create projects in the sidebar, and when you open a project it replaces the sidebar nav with just the listing of content in that project. It really helps with gathering stuff up for specific issues and putting it all together without being distracted by other stuff.
And speaking of “putting it all together,” Ulysses has a pretty neat metaphor called “sheets” where you can write e.g., chapters as separate sheets, and then easily combine them all together at publishing time. I’ve always written my issues up with each section as a standalone file, and then had to jump through some hoops in Obsidian to combine them all into one post. In Ulysses, that’s how you’re supposed to work. So, I can open the takeo.news project, start a new issue “group,” and the write each section as separate sheets within that group. Then, when I’m ready to publish, I can rearrange the sheets into whatever order makes sense, select them all, and publish using the ghost integration. It just works.

Anyway, it seems that the Web 1.0 revolution is upon us, and I’m here for it. Blogs and emails and mastodons and rss and all that good stuff. See you out there.

Dec 10, 2022 ∞

📷 #caturday

Dec 10, 2022 ∞

About this site

takeo.news is my blog/newsletter about the shit i'm currently interested in. thanks for checking it out and subscribing.

Colophon

I use the following tools to publish this site and do other stuff:

Ghost – blog/newsletter platform
Ulysses – writing and publishing posts
Obsidian – collecting stuff and planing posts
Readwise Reader – collecting articles, highlighting, RSS
Drafts – writing down fleeting thoughts and ideas
Cleanshot – screenshots and marking up images
Darkroom – editing photos
Pocket Casts – listening to podcasts
Fastmail – email

Nov 27, 2022 ∞

#mexico #oaxaca #mitla

Nov 23, 2022 ∞

churro is a cool #cat

Nov 23, 2022 ∞

#onewheel trail riding in oregon is the best

Aug 10, 2022 ∞

Issue 16

Hey all! I'm officially 1 week into my 6 week sabbatical, and so far doing absolutely nothing is everything I thought it could be. Over the last week, the little dude went to skateboarding camp and absolutely loved it, the teen went to cheerleading hell week and did great, Jen did a bunch of dancing and sewing... which left me to figure out what I should be doing. What should my Nothing consist of? So, I'll mostly be recounting the stuff I came up with in this issue.

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

Budget Culture and the Dave Ramseyfication of Money

This one hit pretty hard. I spent almost 5 years helping build Simple, one of the first Fintech™ Neobanks™ back from 2010-2015. The general premise was to build a checking account that had amazing customer service, a beautiful UI, and built-in Personal Finance Management tools, which basically amounts to... budgeting.

We spent a lot of time building tools to let folks virtually divide their money up into chunks that were dedicated to specific types of spending. Initially, these were savings "goals" since the underlying premise was enabling folks to save up for a specific amount of money over time by moving a small amount every day without them really noticing. That worked pretty well for the cliche purchases like "save for a new computer over the next year" but we quickly learned that people wanted to divide their money up for regularly occurring everyday things like bills and food. AKA budgets.

There has been a big focus on "zero based budgeting" over the years that I think was popularized by Dave Ramsey where you take every dollar of income and allocate it for a specific type of spending when you receive it. Then, as you spend, you decrement that bucket of money and when that bucket runs out, you don't spend any more in that category. Or, if you must, you transfer some money fro a different bucket. It makes a lot of sense and works really well. If anything, it makes you pay attention to your money and put some thought into where you're planning to spend it, even if it doesn't always go to plan.

We made a lot of iterations to the product and made it possible to do this kind of budgeting all in one place if you used our debit card. Lots of people loved it, and some even reported it changing their lives, getting out of debt, saving for homes and weddings, and just having a better relationship with their money overall. It was pretty great.

Naturally, I went all in. Being one of the people designing and building it gave me an immense sense of pride, and even more of a desire to use the shit out of it. I gave talks all over the world about the thinking that went into designing it, and I was a designated instructor for new hires at work, demoing the ins and outs of the product and system by demoing my own personal account.

After I stopped working there, I still used it, but not too long after the company went through another migration of a major system, this time swapping the underlying bank for the one run by the company who acquired us. My account, being one of the earliest and most gnarly, didn't survive the transition. My account wasn't working right and they weren't able to figure out what was wrong. I was about to head out on a family trip and decided I needed a working checking account, so I hastily opened up a an account with Schwab, the place where my stock from work got deposited. I'd heard they had good checking, and it was free if you had a brokerage account. Signing up was fine, I got my account, and I transferred money over in time.

Thus begun the slow losing of my religion.

It wasn't long until I signed up for a credit card with a huge points bonus for signing up. Of course that meant moving most of our spending over to the credit cards to meet the requirement to get the bonus. And once we saw the points add up, it was pretty hard to turn back. Besides, we were responsible enough to pay the card off every month so we wouldn't pay any interest.

And therein lies the rub. Like everything else in this shithole country, the true answer to money problems is... having money.

Paris Hilton weraring a Stop Being Poor shirt — Stop Being Poor

🇺🇸

From the article:

The budget culture blueprint has been copied over and over by financial experts who think they’ve pinpointed the problem keeping us all poor, from lattes to avocado toast to mindset mistakes. But they all really have just one secret to getting rich quickly: aggressive investing. And you can invest as aggressively as you want with $1 or $5 at a time — tons of apps will help you do it! — but you won’t quit your day job that way. The only sure way to make money is to have money, but no personal finance expert wants to admit their wealth is built on anything other than a solid foundation of hard work and self-control — not their degrees in finance, Ivy League educations, middle class upbringings… or their ability to sell you a fantasy.

The whole sticking to your budget instead of buying avocado trope is pretty much just that – a trope. Something for boomers to say to get around the fact that they sucked the host dry and left their kids with nothing. All the budgeting and investing apps in the world can help folks get a little bit ahead, know where their money is, maybe even get out of crushing debt. But it's all a bunch of band aids on top of a gushing wound.

After I stopped using Simple with the baked in budgeting I tried out YNAB. They're kind of the gold standard in the zero-based budgeting space, and they've basically formed a cult. People are fans, not customers. And the system is pretty good. I stuck to it for a while, but as I made and accumulated more money... I just kind of stopped using it. Why? I guess because I stopped being poor. I worked for a few companies that got acquired and gave me a bit of a cushion. Then I took a job with a company that was public and had a big rise in stock price over the years. Sure I worked hard etc, but a lot of it was just luck and timing and, of course, privilege.

As the author states:

But I’ve stopped giving financial literacy the credit, because I know the real reason my finances are “healthier” now: I have more money. I took a job with a salary that quadrupled my income, and voila — I became a lot more “responsible” with money.

Having money makes the problem much less of a problem. Sure, you still have to be responsible, save, keep track, blah blah... but all that is made a lot easier when you don't have to worry about it.

The game is pretty much rigged. A recent twitter thread came up about people who used to work and/or used Simple trying to find a bank that could provide the same set of features and budgeting. My contribution to the conversation? Give up and just get a regular ass checking account with Schwab like I did. Why? Because it's a really good checking account, much better than what we could have ever done with Simple. Sure, there's no budgeting features, the UI is dogshit... but it does everything you need from checking – super high limits and spending ability, free ATM rebates, reliable. And boring. Which is fine when it comes to a checking account. All the Fintech Startup Banks have really cool features, but the underlying banks are just... bad. They can't feature their way out of you not being able to transfer enough money to make a down payment to make a big purchase like a down payment on a house.

The only problem? Well, Schwab gives you this great checking account for free... if you have a brokerage account. Who has brokerage accounts? People with money. Who gets the shitty checking accounts with cool features for budgeting so you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps? People without money.

Fighting budget culture means remaking the world in a way that lets everyone experience the ease of being “rich,” regardless of the numbers in their bank account.

If people who didn't have a lot of money could get checking accounts that Just Work and also provided the tools for helping them make sure they've allocated for all their upcoming bills and spending, it would be a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the incentive structure is pretty much upside down. The people with the money get the good checking as a loss leader with the assumption that they'll pay a bunch of fees pretending they're Gordon Gekko trading stocks. Meanwhile folks who don't have stocks (yet) get super low limits, long waits on deposits, a bunch of hoops to jump through when they finally save up for a small down payment... all because the companies providing the services can't make much money off of interchange, and have to deal with a bunch of fraudulent bad apples who take advantage of the massive growth targets these startup banks have in order to pay off their VC loansharks.

I don't really know what the answer is.

Listening

Ted posted a Youtube video to the group text that was titled "Doomer Jazz." The cover image was a meme drawing of a guy driving a NYC taxi with a thick 5 o'clock shadow, sunglasses, and a fedora smoking a cigarette. I was intrigued.

As soon as I hit play I instantly got it. Dark, moody, noir jazz that you expect from movies or video games. It's super cliché and I'm sure The Kids started putting these playlists together as a new meme to make fun of Olds, but I don't care, it rules.

Laughing

This kid rules

Petting

Around 7 years ago we got a cat. She was our first family pet. Due to allergies, we've never gotten any animals besides some fish and frogs.

In our old neighborhood there were a couple cats that would cruise around that looked like little leopards with tons of cool spots in their fur. I looked up what kind of cats they were and saw that they were bengals. When I was looking them up I found out that bengal cats were one of the more hypoallergenic cat breeds due to their fur being more like a pelt, which I didn't even know was a thing. We decided to get one.

I found one on craigslist or ebay classifieds. We went to go check it out and as soon as we saw her we knew we were going to get her. Her owners were a small family with two little girls who said they were being relocated to Hawaii and they couldn't take her along. I went back later that night to pick her up.

We named her Pigwidgeon and we love her to death. Sure, she's destroyed something like 2 couches and 3 chairs by peeing on them over the years, but she's so dang cute she gets away with it:

This year for her birthday Jen wanted another cat. Since the allergies worked out pretty well with Pig it had to be another bengal. This time, though, we wanted a kitten.

I know, I know, you're not supposed to get kittens, let alone a Designer kitten since there are so many cats out there looking for adoption. But, while we love Piggy to death, she's a bit... quirky. Getting a second hand, thrifted cat was great and we were glad to give her a loving home when her original family couldn't any longer, but we wanted to try our hand at raising a kitten. So, here's Churro:

He's ridiculous. I wasn't prepared for how soft he is or his tiny little meows. We're still trying to get through the phase of Pig hissing at him every time she sees him, but she's getting better. So far he's a great little dude.

Doing

All right, so I've been needing a hobby. Since our first kiddo was born 15 years ago my hobby has pretty much just been ... work. Since we moved to Portland in 2011 Jen has had synchronized swimming, and lately she's also been doing a ton of dance workout stuff. As in, every day for hours at a time. Sure, I've been drawing, but I wanted to get out and do something, and sabbatical was a perfect time to find that thing.

Playing Music

I've made a few half-hearted attempts at being in a band again, but that of course depends on other people, and we all know how that goes. A few years ago I found a bass player on craigslist and we clicked pretty well, but for the life of us couldn't write any actual songs. Lots and lots of weird/fun riffs, but no real songs. Our search for a guitar player went on and on and we finally found a guy. We still had trouble putting songs together, though.

And, then, Covid. Playing music in person was of course off the table. I recorded a song remotely with my friend Justin, which was super fun, but it isn't the same. The bass player guy disappeared, and I jammed with the guitar player a couple times after the vaccine, but it didn't go anywhere.

So, back to craigslist. I found a couple guys who wanted to play some metal, and we hit it off. We played together for a few months but the bass player was always traveling and was in another "real" band, and then the guitar player decided to move to San Diego. Welp.

Craigslist. Again.

This time I responded to two ads. One was for a band called Beast Mountain that is a stoner metal type band. Definitely right up my alley. The other was for one called Rival Sharpe that is more of a singer-songwriter type of thing. Not necessarily the metal I was looking for, but something I'd enjoy playing. Beast Mountain got back to me and asked if I wanted to meet up for some beers. When I got there I recognized the guy... from the other band. I wondered if I mixed up the replies or something? Turns out he's the main guy behind both bands. We talked shop and it also turned out he recognized me because he was one of the guitar players who tried out for the bass player guy and I back in the day who was unceremoniously rejected (by the bass player, in my defense). They were also meeting with a potential keyboard player, so we all set out to get together to play soon to see how things go between us. That practice went great and we were in.

The next day the guy texted me saying the drummer they had lined up to try out for the other band before me bailed on meeting up because it was "too hot to load his drums into his car" and asked if I wanted to try out for them too.

Sure, why not.

Played with them and it went great as well. So, now I'm in two bands.

Getting Outside, As Nerdily As Possible

Being in a couple bands is great, but that's pretty much limited to a couple hours of practice two nights a week. And, as mentioned, it relies on a whole bunch of other people to be successful. I needed something else that was entirely in my control that I could do whenever I wanted.

Matt, the bass player in the more mellow band posted a video he made in the group text that was about something called the NW Electric Fest. I figured it was something about music, but it turned out to be about ... electric skateboards. You know those skateboards with one fat tire in the middle you sometimes see people riding around on? Those things.

That sparked some memories I had of some of my friends getting onewheels. I was always intrigued by them because it was like skateboarding, which I spent most of my youth doing every day, except ... nerdy. Basically a skateboard version of a Segway. It also seemed challenging. It got the wheels (wheel?) turning in my head: this could be what I've been looking for.

I texted the band dude a bunch of questions about it and he told me I should just go for the top of the line model if I was going to get one at all, and by the way, they also have a weekly ride every Friday night where up to 200 people riding electric things take over a bunch of Portland streets, like a Critical Mass of dorks. I was in.

The next day I went to Gorge Performance and picked a onewheel GT up. I spent the next day trying to learn how to ride it. Appropriately, I had just dropped the little dude off at skate camp and the closest area that looked good was... the Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery. It took a while but after a few attempts and a bunch of scratches in my brand new board I was able to ride around the paths for a couple hours, unsuccessfully looking for the grave of the original owner of our house.

While I was able to ride, I wasn't sure about going on an 11 mile ride through the streets of Portland with 100 other riders though. I rode as much as possible on wednesday and thursday and decided to give it a try. I showed up to OMSI and parked next to a dude who was there for the ride as well. Turns out he is OG and had like 6000 miles on his boards. He gave me a beer and rode in to the meeting spot. It was an early indication of how friendly the scene was. As we got to the meeting area I started to get a feel for the magnitude of the squad. Tons of people tooling around on nerdy devices. Lots of stereotypical outcast types of folks. Lots of music. I found the guy from my band and he immediately started introducing me to a whole bunch of folks. I'm normally a bit of an introvert when it comes to these types of situations, so it was nice having someone there to break the ice for me.

We set off and I was definitely nervous. These folks had been doing this every Friday for a year or two now, and I was on my third day of riding. Asking how many miles you had on your board was a pretty common question and I was like "... 32". Thankfully, though, I was able to hang. There was a wide variety of paces that folks were going and I was riding along just fine. We went all throughout the waterfront area, crossed some bridges and stopped at a fountain at the end of the first leg:

We continued on to the Lucky Labrador brewery for food and drinks. Matt introduced me to his girlfriend, who he had mentioned was also into a bunch of weirdo metal. We hit it off immediately and talked shop the whole time we were there. By the time we set off for the final leg of the trip it was dark. We rolled out and took over some more streets:

That night pretty much cemented things. A thriving scene, a regular ride, and a bunch of nice people excited to have another person into the sport on top of it being something I can do on my own whenever I want is a perfect combo.

Now that I had the bug, what I really wanted to try was some trail riding. As a skater I was pretty much 100% street, focusing on tricks and technicality. But now, as an Old, I'm much more interested in just getting outside and riding. We've lived in Portland for almost 12 years now and I've just never been really interested in all the outdoorsy stuff. The whole cliché of everyone being obsessed with hiking has totally escaped me.

But, now, though...

Now, I want to go out and explore every park within driving distance with mountain biking trails. I headed out to Hood River yesterday to check out a place with a ton of biking trails for the first time in my life and it was amazing. Beautiful surroundings, a huge variety of trails for varying skill levels, and not a ton of people crowding things. It ruled.

Naturally, the trails were way above my pay grade. But, I managed to make it through the loop a couple times with only one crash and a badly bruised foot that has given me a limp and will likely keep me out of commission for the next couple days. I'm counting the minutes until I can get back out there.

Aug 1, 2022 ∞

Issue 15

Another late one. I just started a six week sabbatical so my schedule is a bit off. I'm still going to try to post weekly, but the day might shift as I (hopefully) lose track of what day it even is.

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...

Wearing

While we were in California a few weeks ago I bought some dad shoes:

After many years of flat bottom shoes, these things feel like clouds. Broke em in at Disneyland and they performed flawlessly.

Playing

I responded to a couple Craiglist posts looking for drummers a couple weeks ago since they guys I was playing with are moving and/or in Real Bands. Turned out both ads were for the two different bands the main guitar player / songwriter are in. The first band was a heavy stonerish type of band. That initial practice went pretty well, as that stuff is definitely in my wheelhouse. The other band has another person lined up to try out but it turned out he said he didn't want to come over because it was "too hot out to load my drums", so I played with that crew as well. It's more singer/songwriter stuff which I'm pretty comfortable with after playing for a church band for like 7 years. They did have a song with the (apparently) standard Country Shuffle beat that I could not do for the life of me. But they still want me to come back so that's cool. I guess I'm learning the country beat.

Laughing at

I’m an anesthesiologist. The best story was something a 40-something-year-old woman for an appendectomy said while I’m giving the propofol to induce anesthesia. She slurred, 'Oh, I don’t remember it tasting like that before.' I said, 'What does it taste like?' since propofol doesn’t usually elicit a taste reaction. She yelled 'DEEEZ NUTS,' and was promptly under anesthesia thereafter

Beautiful. From some buzzfeed listicle.

Reading: Californians and other Americans are flooding Mexico City. Some locals want them to go home.

With the US being an absolute tire fire, the resurgence in hypothesizing about where to move when things get really bad has hit high gear, and Mexico has become a lot more of an option than in the past. The typical escape to Canada seems to have lost some of its luster as prices there have gotten expensive and they're not too eager to let a whole bunch of Americans in. So, Mexico City it is, apparently.

My family is mostly Mexican, with multiple generations native to Southern California, and northern Sonora before that. When I was a kid, my grandparents lived in Álamos for 15 years or something like that while they set up a church school of some sort. We used to go down there for Christmas every other year or so. Their house was huge since it was a sort of dorm for a lot of the students, and it was beautiful. I remember it being a bit strange, though, since my friend I'd play with directly next door lived in a kind of converted shed or warehouse type place with dirt floors. I was only around 6 or 7 so I didn't think too much of it. We went a couple more times before my grandparents donated the house to the school and moved back to CA.

Apparently that city was a popular destination for expats to land for cheap luxury retirement, though somewhat under the radar. Looking back it makes sense, as we visited a few old white people in big villa type places. It definitely seems like it was a nice place to settle down.

Fast forward almost 40 years and Covid has made being a Digital Nomad™ the in thing. Take your laptop anywhere with a wifi signal and you can live like a king. I'm not gonna lie, it sounds pretty awesome, especially after the inevitable Trump/De Santis victory in 2024. But I dunno. When it comes down to it, Portland and Oregon in general will continue to be a nice place to live (well, unless the whole "Portland is Sodom and Gomorrah" bullshit persists and the Proud Shirts continue to try to get some air time on Fox. which... of course they will), and articles like this remind me of the flip side to the cost of taking advantage of a place like Mexico City being "cheap" for Americans and too expensive for the locals. And, even though our family is mostly Mexican, which I feel would kinda justify a family like ours posting up, our generation was the one that had parents who didn't teach their kids Spanish, so we'd be burdening folks with English until we learned enough to get by.

Also, seeing a bunch of American tourists going around on fucking Taco Tours sounds pretty unbearable.

Anyway, this type of pondering is only going to get more and more important as things get worse and worse here. Not too sure what to do.

Reading: For 50 Years, the Zodiac Killer’s 340 Cipher Stumped the FBI—Then Three Amateurs Cracked the Code - Popular Mechanics

Apparently the Zodiac cipher was cracked? Pretty interesting read about how the people did it. The message itself has some Al Capone Vaults vibes, though.

Learning

I wasn't aware of the La Menina painting by Diego Velázquez but it's pretty intriguing.

Listening: The First Transformers Theme Was WILDLY Confusing

This is pretty rad. Apparently the original Transformers cartoon theme song was some sort of prog masterpiece with a time signature that would make Dillinger Escape Plan shake their heads in confusion.

Jul 23, 2022 ∞

Issue 14

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: “The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion”

After writing about abortion a few issues ago, it's been heartbreaking and enraging to read about the wholly predictable and preventable outcomes and consequences that are already happening.

This article is a collection of quotes from clinicians about their experiences with protesters who come in to receive an abortion. The hypocrisy is, of course, wildly frustrating:

Many anti-choice women are convinced that their need for abortion is unique — not like those “other” women — even though they have abortions for the same sorts of reasons. Anti-choice women often expect special treatment from clinic staff. Some demand an abortion immediately, wanting to skip important preliminaries such as taking a history or waiting for blood test results. Frequently, anti-abortion women will refuse counseling. Some women insist on sneaking in the back door and hiding in a room away from other patients. Others refuse to sit in the waiting room with women they call “sluts” and “trash.” Or if they do, they get angry when other patients in the waiting room talk or laugh, because it proves to them that women get abortions casually, for “convenience”.

and also somewhat eye-opening:

“A 21 year old woman and her mother drove three hours to come to their appointment for an abortion. They were surprised to find the clinic a ‘nice’ place with friendly, personable staff. While going over contraceptive options, they shared that they were Pro-Life and disagreed with abortion, but that the patient could not afford to raise a child right now. Also, she wouldn’t need contraception since she wasn’t going to have sex until she got married, because of her religious beliefs.” (Physician, Washington State)

There's not really any logic or introspection happening in these cases it seems. Lots of religion, parental/family pressure, wishful thinking, and mental gymnastics to help them justify things.

Wearing

Found this shirt when we moved. Achewood continues to rule. I think I may re-read it while I'm on sabbatical.

Cooking

I'd never heard of Shirataki noodles before I came across this Youtube video about them. I like noodle dishes and these noodles are only like 5 calories per serving or something wild like that. They're not as good, of course, but with lots of veggies and a hot homemade sauce, they're good enough. Gonna try doing meal prep ahead of time with these for some quick lunches.

Listening to: Imperial Triumphant

Imperial Triumphant is one of the most creative bands out there right now. Super wacky black metal type stuff wearing robes and masks and the whole deal. But, unlike Ghost or Gwar or whatever, these guys back their shit up with some truly unsettling music. They're kinda like Gorguts taken to their next logical extreme. I love it.

Their new album doesn't disappoint. Dissonant, undulating, ugly. And the video for Merkurius Gilded is, again, unsettling. Surreal and disconnected, it just puts you on edge and disturbs the senses.

Also, the song has Kenny G playing on it. Yeah, the Kenny G. Apparently his son used to be in the band and made a guest appearance in a saxophone duel with pops.

Drawing

No new drawings again this week. Here's an old ink wash style thing I did of Pigwidgeon a while back.

Laughing at: Stavros Halkias

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl878TKI3tw

This dude is one of my favorite recent discoveries. His roasting of Portland in Portland is great, and has one of the best off the cuff roasts I've ever seen. His full length special is super good too.

Learning: Did People Used To Look Older?

This is something I've long wondered about and talked to some friends about. It definitely seems like people from previous generations looked way older when they were young than we do now. The canonical example is the whole "This is Wilford Brimley and Paul Rudd at the same age" thing:

I've always chalked it up to all the smoking and drinking and shitty life decisions and circumstances that are no longer as common, but this video says there's more to it than that.

Watching: Johnny 5 is ALIVE

Google Engineer on His Sentient AI Claim - YouTube

So everyone, including me, was roasting the Google dude super hard when he said their AI thing was "alive". Mostly because this was the main photo of him going around:

And, well, yeah.

But, I watched this video with him explaining his whole point and it's pretty interesting. Sure, he's likely trying to save face by playing it off like "I was just trying to get everyone's attention to talk about something serious" it's just a prank bro, etc. but I think it's worth watching.

Jul 16, 2022 ∞

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.

Peel This Strap and Fold Here

R*Evolutionize*R

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

Jul 9, 2022 ∞

Issue 12

While we were in socal, we made the required pilgrimage to Disneyland. It's weird after growing up down there and having annual passes. What used to be a "do you wanna go to Disneyland and get some pizza" type of thing is now a Big Expensive Vacation Activity thing for us. That said, I love going to Disneyland. It's a nice escape and I enjoy seeing all the design details and stuff.

So we bought the tickets and made the reservation. After talking to some folks, we learned they no longer have the FastPass™ system. Instead, you have to spend an extra $20 per person to be able to schedule times you can use the Lightning Pass™ lines. And if you want to go on the new Star Wars ride with a shorter line, you spend another $20 per person. God dammit. We bought the regular one.

Turns out, it was probably the best Disneyland experience we've ever had. The weather wasn't too hot, there weren't tons of people, and the lighting lines actually worked pretty well. We bought tons of snacks and went on lots of rides, and finally saw the Star Wars land. It was pretty cool! And the little dude spent some of his birthday money on building a lightsaber:

The Millennium Falcon ride is pretty cool. Kind of like a $10M version of Space Team. The kiddos were the pilots, and Jen and I were in charge of pushing flashing buttons to shoot stuff. Felix didn't quite understand the whole "pull down to go up" thing, so we were crashing everywhere. It was a lot of fun.

Seeing: Failure – July 6, 2022, Hawthorne Theater

Failure is one of those bands that I discovered well after their prime. They released their magnum opus back in 1996 and I didn't hear of them until a dude in a band I was playing in played them in the tour van all the time. Like many of the "alternative" type bands from 90s, they were much heavier and more complex than they had any right to be. Back in my day, music had balls, etc. But seriously, looking back at big bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Hum, Alice In Chains, Shudder to Think, and Failure, that shit was heavy. Of course, at the time, that stuff just seemed "normal" and "weak" compared to the ultra-heavy Slayer ripoff hardcore we were listening to instead. But I could still tell there was something there.

So, I discovered the Fantastic Planet album around 2003 or so. At first it seemed like pretty standard post-metal, post-grunge type of stuff. But after a few more listens it started to click. A few years earlier, I discovered the Jupiter album by Cave In. Cave In had always been big in the hardcore scene, and I had always kinda written them off as a low rent Converge. But when I searched for Cave In on Napster and downloaded the Jupiter album, it wasn't what I was expecting at all. At some point they had morphed into some sort of post hardcore band with a really spacey type of sound. It was still heavy, but the vocals were clean and there were lots of guitar effects and stuff that seemed really unique. I loved it.

After listening to Fantastic Planet a bunch a couple years later, it clicked that, oh, Jupiter was just a tribute to Failure. The influence was hugely apparent once I realized what was happening. Not to diminish Jupiter, it's still great, but I learned that Failure was much more important that I had known.

Fast forward another 20 years and I'm seeing Failure. It's my second time after seeing them like 5 or 6 years ago here in Portland. This time, of course, is after the 3 year drought of live music and another new record from them.

When I got the notification that Failure would be playing the Hawthorne Theater here in Portland, I was both stoked and surprised. The Hawthorne is generally reviled by lots of folks here in town. It's pretty small and the sound isn't as good as many other venues. It definitely seemed like a step down from the Wonder Ballroom where I saw them last. But that didn't matter to me, I wasn't going to miss them.

I arrived to the theater right around 8pm when it was supposed to be starting. I assumed there would be an opening band, and the time sheet listed Documentary: 8:30 - 9, Failure 9 - 10:30. I bought a drink and stood up front waiting for some band named Documentary. Failure's drums were already set up, so I figured they were some sort of duo with a drum machine or something.

The lights went down and the screen in back of the stage started to show a Ren and Stimpy cartoon where they're in space getting Space Madness or something. It went way longer than I expected... it seemed like almost half of the episode. When it finally stopped, no one came out and the video continued with a person from Paramore talking about the influence Failure had on her and her band. Huh. And then it cut to a clip of Butch Vig and co. from Garbage. Then it clicked... there wasn't an opening band named Documentary, it was an actual... documentary.

It went for the allotted 30 minutes or so. It was both really cool to hear from lots of different bands (and even Rick Beato, who everyone in the audience cheered for and was the only person in the documentary who got any sort of reaction lol) talk about how much of an influence Failure had on them and how much respect they had for them over the last almost 30 years.

But it was also kind of ... weird. Like, the documentary was effusive about the band. It essentially felt like a hagiography, which seemed odd for the band to immediately come out and play after. But, I suppose they also deserve the praise. Much of the stuff the people said was how they were essentially overlooked. A band's band. A group who made an essentially perfect record and then imploded due to drug use and infighting without ever receiving their due. Which is all true.

So, they came out and started playing. I was taken aback by the stage setup at that point because the drums, which were clear, acrylic vistalites of some sort, were really close to the front of the stage, and there were no amps on the stage. Like, none. Huge pedalboards and mic setups, but no amps at all. Which seemed weird for a heavy guitar driven band like them who were lauded for being super loud with their walls of amps only a few minutes prior in the documentary.

They sounded great, though. My spot right up front threw off the mix since I could hear the drums by themselves louder than though the PA, but no corresponding amps to balance it out. I'm sure the mix was much better back in the room where everything was through the PA, but it was kinda jarring right up front. But I got used to it.

They played for about an hour and a half total. The first hour was all stuff from their most recent albums and their earliest album. Which is all solid. But, we were all there to hear stuff from Fantastic Planet.

Fantastic Planet, as mentioned earlier, is essentially a perfect album. There are a few albums I consider to be perfect — Siamese Dream, Protestant, 9 Patriotic Hymns for Children, Tidal, Through Silver In Blood, for example — and Fantastic Planet is definitely in that upper strata. The songs are well crafted, the recording is good, and there's a continuous thread throughout that just feels very intentional and well executed. There's just something about it.

My dream was that they'd be playing the whole thing. The first hour of all the newer stuff shattered that, of course. But when they went off for the requisite encore thing, they came back and said "So, we didn't play anything from an album we did back in 1996. We're going to play the last third of it now, if you don't mind."

Aw yeah.

It was amazing. By then the sound was more dialed in (and I was more used to the mix) and the songs just soared. And, yes, it's their big hit, but Stuck On You just fucking crushed. They did the thing where they supplemented the bass electronically or something, and it was just so heavy and perfect. It was one of those things where I would have been perfectly happy to pay the ticket price for that one song and then gone home. Luckily it was accompanied by another 1:25 of greatness.

Reading

So yeah, the whole Elon Musk Buying Twitter thing. I haven't paid too much attention to it, but it did seem like a generally bad thing. Musk is a ridiculous attention whore who thinks he's hilarious with way too much money ($54.20 per share, get it?! 420! 🤣 LOL! LMAO!). Even though I don't really use twitter much anymore, I still browse it occasionally and know it can have some value if you put some effort into curating your feed and posting to a receptive audience. But overall, it's whatever.

I came across this article after seeing some rando getting roasted after questioning where Matt Levine's acquired his info on M&A since it seemed so naive (a classic twitter move) and him just replying, in all lower case, "i acquired it at wachtell lipton." which is, apparently, the most profitable law firm in the world, specializing in complex corporate transactions. The rando has since deleted his tweet, of course:

![[CleanShot 2022-07-09 at 10.10.07@2x.png]]

Anyways, this article is pretty long, but does the best job I've seen of just laying all this bullshit out after Musk announced he was pulling out of the deal (insert requisite joke about it being the only time he's ever pulled out here).

Eating: Rap Snacks

We went to southern California last week and I found some Rap Snacks, so I bought them. They were pretty good.

Listening

Steve Von Till is one of the guys from Neurosis. Neurosis is one of those bands I would always see metal dudes wearing shirts and patches from, but I never really listened to them. One day when I was in the record store around 1996 or so there was something awesome blaring fro the speakers and I asked the guy what it was. He said it was the new Neurosis album, Through Silver In Blood. I bought the cassette.

It was incredible. The next year at college in NYC, I had two cassettes — that and Great Southern Trendkill — and I listened to them on repeat for an entire year. Those albums are ingrained in me, forever associated with a challenging but memorable time of my life.

Before I was very familiar with Neurosis, my band had the privilege of playing with them. It was gnarly. They were so loud and heavy, with a full AV display and noise guy. I wish I would have known what I was experiencing at the time. Since then I've thankfully seen them a bunch of times, and even went down to SF to go to both of their 30th anniversary shows with a few of my doggs. And, without fail, at every show they'll play at least one song from Through Silver In Blood and it will just annihilate.

Ok, so Neurosis is incredible, and Steve Von Till is an integral part of that. He recently made a video where he went over 11 non-metal albums he recommends to folks who like metal. This is relevant to my interests. He clearly has good taste and deep knowledge of music, and most (not all) of the recommendations are things I'd never really known about or given my attention to.

https://youtu.be/-BbHhYiofXY

I won't go over all the albums, but if it sounds like something you'd dig, check it out!

Jul 2, 2022 ∞

Severance

I mentioned a few issues ago that we were watching Severance on AppleTV+ on the recommendation of some friends. It looked pretty interesting from the marketing but I didn’t really know much about it. Folks said it got better as it went on and the ending was pretty wild.

The first episode hooked us, and it did indeed escalate as it went on. The cinematography is pretty intriguing. On one hand it’s super sparse and bleak, with one of those aesthetics that blends modern things with elements from older decades. Things like modernish phones alongside old 80s computer workstations and cars, while most folks are dressed in pretty normal, modern clothes. Kinda increases the sense of unease.

In general it kinda had a Charlie Kaufman type of feel. Just generally weird and unsettling, but not hitting you over the head with it. The actors put in some great performances, and in general it’s just really well done. It definitely hooked me after the first episode, I looked forward to every episode’s exposition, and the season finale was fuckin' wild. Can’t wait to see season two.

When I mentioned we were watching it in Issue 7, I got a reply from Liz (you should definitely subscribe to “Mondays, amirite?") telling me I needed to read an article titled “‘Severance,’ ‘Severance,’ and the Dissociative Demands of Office Labor”. This is the type of shit I love about having a newsletter. Even though only a few people read it, those who do are badass like Liz. Coincidence?

Anyways, I put off reading the article until we finished watching the season, as I didn’t want any spoilers etc. I could tell from the title, though, that it was going to be banger, and after reading it I was not disappointed. There was a lot more to it than a basic TV show review.

The article is, on the surface, a review of both the Severance TV show and the book of the same name that came out a few years before the show. I wasn’t even aware of the (unrelated) show, but it’s on my list to read now. The article’s main thread is, unsurprisingly, about the dehumanizing aspects of modern, capitalist work. As an old man who’s been working non-stop for the last 25 or so years, I get it.

But like I said, this article goes way beyond it. As we’re all still processing the continued march of the supreme court et al, the following passage really hit

The sheer panic of realizing you don’t have bodily autonomy resonates well beyond office walls in 2022. As state governments and the Supreme Court continue to make clear that women and trans people, in particular, are property of the state, their bodies to be legislated and controlled against the will of the individuals who inhabit them, it has become harder and harder for workers to ignore the terrifying world and do our little Zooms to make enough money to pay for the rising cost of rent, healthcare, and other essentials to human life. Yet it is more and more urgent to corporations that we close our eyes in the service of productivity, hitting quotas and yielding profits before the economy tips into recession.

The last band I was in that actually played shows and released stuff was Tafkata. We had an album called Worker and Parasite that was pretty much a concept album about how much work sucked. Nothing as sophisticated as any of this, but the same general mood. While I love to build things and have mostly liked my jobs over the years, I know deep down it’s all kinda bullshit. I feel lucky to have found some things that I like that are generally helpful. But, at the end of the day, we don’t have a whole lot of choice. As the Severance book described the pandemic they presciently wrote about:

Shen Fever turns the infected into the walking dead of capitalism: wordless creatures doomed to perform the same routines over and over.

This is the system humans have created for themselves. It’s possible to break out. But damn is it hard.