takeo.blog

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!

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...

Seeing

As mentioned in the last issue, I'm an old 90s hardcore kid. I was also a skater who skated as much as I possibly could between the ages of 11 to 17 or so. As a result, I watched many a skate video over those years, and aside from the obvious influence they had on my skating, they had an even bigger impact on me with the music they introduced me to.

A prime example of this is New Deal's 1281 video. It had a ton of songs by The Odd Numbers, an obscure bay area band that still remains relatively mysterious to me. But the last two segments of the video were Ed Templeton and Mike Vallely's parts. They were undoubtedly the big dogs of the video, and they both had songs from a band we'd never heard called 411. At the time, I hadn't heard anything like them. It was hardcore, maybe even kinda straight edge, but melodic, with really unique vocals, political lyrics, and pro skater Mario Rubalcaba playing drums. They were instantly a Big Deal to me and my friends.

We got ahold of the album and listened to it constantly. At one point we learned they were going to be playing at Spanky's in Riverside. Fuck yeah. We all packed into Forrest's minivan and made the trek to the IE.

It was glorious. Tiny club, packed, a few opening bands, and the main event of 411 playing most of their album. We were young enough to jon everyone else in crowd surfing and jumping on stage to yell along with the singer. It felt like we were seeing the biggest band around.

That was back in 1992. I was 15. Fast forward 30 years and 411 announces a few 30th anniversary shows. Well, shit, of course I want to go.

We've been in socal this past week visiting family for the first time in like 3 years. By complete coincidence (honestly!), it happened to be the same week that the shows were happening. Fate.

I bought a ticket and, after some ridiculous amounts of driving and logistics, showed up at Alex's Bar in Long Beach on Friday night. First off, the fact that this show is at a bar is pretty poetic. I don't think 411 was necessarily a straight edge band, but a big part of their fanbase was at the very least heavily intermingled with the straight edge scene at the time. The singer was in some early and influential bands like No For An Answer. But, 30 years later, everyone at the show was at least 30 pounds heavier, 30% balder, and many were drinking something from the bar. So it goes.

When I arrived it was clear this was pretty much a class reunion for the social outcasts of our day. There were a bunch of people milling about in the outdoor patio, and people doing the same inside. The average age was probably around 47, some folks were wearing shirts from our youth, and there were various levels of arrested development on display. I stood at the bar looking for people I recognized from way back when. There were plenty. It's interesting how back in the day, the big dogs of the scene were kinda intimidating and revered. When we were 15 and they were 19 and in the Big Important Bands, the age difference felt gigantic. But now we're all just olds looking for a bit of nostalgia.

Right off the bat, I saw Dan Sena, a dude who had been in bands at the same time as us down in Orange County, and who i played with for a couple years in a band called Bullet Train to Vegas. At one point while I was playing drums for our southern hard rock band called The Accident, Bullet Train needed a bass player. I played bass for Enewetak for a long time, and told them I'd be down to try it out. I'd never been on tour before and they were planning on doing that whole thing, so I figured why not. the band was kind of an At The Drive In clone named after a Drive Like Jehu song, but it was pretty fun to do for a couple years. It was cool seeing him.

Forrest, my friend for the last 34 years that I learned how to skateboard with and was in many bands with, showed up right as the first band was playing. We chatted for a bit, got approached by a dude we didn't recognize at first but who turned out to be Chris Smith of Redwood Records who played guitar in Enewetak with us for a short stint. It was rad catching up with him. Turns out he also live in Oregon, getting his PhD at Oregon State.

There were a couple opening bands that played to a relatively sparse crowd. The first was Overexposure, which did a decent rendition of old school hardcore type stuff. Not really my bag. Next up was Ursula, who were a lot more interesting. Some wacky chords and progressions, grindy parts, and good vocals.

Then 411 took the stage. The third band dropped off the shows for some reason, so, as fate would have it, the show for the Olds was actually going to end before midnight, thank god. They sounded great, and the crowd was doing their duty singing along and even attempting a bit of crowd surfing.

aka:

The best shirt of the night went to the guitar player wearing a SWEET JESUS I HATE TED CRUZ shirt. All in all a good time.

Watching

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 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.

Drawing

My friends Alex and Nicole had a baby recently and Nicole asked me if I could draw a picture of little Io. I was of course super honored for the opportunity to help make Alex's first fathers day special. I found a beautiful photo in their extensive photo collection and got to work. After 12 hours and 4000 strokes in Procreate, I felt pretty good about it.

That beanie was a killer though!

Nicole had it printed out, which was the first time any of my Procreate drawings had been printed out. I was a little bit worried, mostly due to my past in the print industry and botched print jobs. Luckily getting things printed out is way better now. One emailed tiff file later and it looked pretty good:

With this newfound confidence in getting stuff printed out I wanted to draw something for my dad for father's day. One of his favorite dogs passed away a while back, so I asked my mom for some photos. It was pretty slim pickings since they were all just random phone snaps with bad lightning, but I found one that was pretty cute. I decided to give color and painting a first try, which made me pretty nervous. Gotta start some time though.

It turned out pretty cool. I have long forgotten all my art school color theory, so there's no fancy, unexpected color contrasts or anything, mostly just colors straight from the photo. But for a first attempt I'm pretty happy. I went a bit of loose with the strokes and texture to make it seem a bit more like a "real" painting, and had it printed out on canvas. Here's the raw image file:

And here's a framed print of it in my parents’ house:

Pretty neat seeing it in physical form! Hopefully this will prompt me to experiment with more color and painting styles. We'll see.

Becky Bell by CAMPAIgN

I grew up in socal, going to high school from 1990 - 1994. I was a skater and I got into straight edge and hardcore right around then. It was a fertile scene, following the era of the Reagan and Bush 80s, and people were still pissed. The Moral Majority and all that shit were just winding down after claiming a complete victory, with Falwell spiking the football and declaring "Our goal has been achieved…The religious right is solidly in place and … religious conservatives in America are now in for the duration."

The hardcore scene was a respite from all of that. It was ugly, visceral music with kids screaming about vegetarianism/veganism, the perils of drugs and alcohol, the oppression from cops, politicians, and religion, and the need for equality for all sexes and races. It felt super subversive to me after growing up in such a conservative environment, but it also felt right. It made sense. And it helped shape me.

Bands like Born Against were a revelation. Just the name itself felt dangerous. Like I had to hide it. But it clicked. And everything they were about, 30 years later, is just as relevant as ever. Here's Mary and Child from the incredible Nine Patriotic Hymns For Children album:

Once again the battle field is your body and those who want control have laid down their terms in black & white and red all over
they keep the backstreet butchers in business as advertised from a bullhorn and the all knowing man has set up his make-believe graveyard with tiny white crosses for millions of make-believe souls
someday I'd like to see a cross set up for a real live human being who bled to death to maintain the sanctity of mary
mary & child scream the bigots who couldn't care less about human life
obey their self-righteous lies while your sisters & daughters die
all decisions are final
your body is forbidden

When I was a young teen, I couldn't really absorb this type of song. I didn't really know what was happening with the abortion culture wars. But here, 30 years later in the year of our lord 2022... well.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about hardcore and these types of bands/songs. On one hand, it's mostly a bunch of young white men screaming about stuff that isn't really their burden to bear. It was somewhat performative at the time, a bunch of privileged rich kids preaching about things they would never experience because that's what you were "supposed" to do in the scene. But, on the other hand, I'm glad they were singing about these issues instead of about getting drunk or chasing girls or whatever. It opened my eyes to things that were, and continue to be, injustices in this fucked up country and world. It planted seeds.

It's also indicative that this scene, which was largely focused on social justice, not getting fucked up, animal rights, equality, etc. was a tiny niche subculture. Caring about this stuff was for the weirdos.

Another band that impacted me from that time was called CAMPAIgN, which I stumbled across at some shows in Claremont in like 1993. We drove down on halloween to see Econochrist, Outspoken, and Heroin. Outspoken no-showed, but we got there on time to see CAMPAIgN open. They were 4 random looking dudes. The singer was from new york, but going to Claremont for college. The bass player was Egg (the Process singer), and the drummer looked like Freddy Mercury.

They started playing and it was an immediate Holy Shit moment. At that time, it was expected that bands would "go off" while playing. Flailing, falling on the ground, etc. But these guys took it to a whole other level. It was one of the most intense sets I've ever seen. You could tell they meant it. And the music was incredible, perfectly capturing the ugliness and complexity and dissonance that resonated so deeply with me.

They played a pretty short set, but ended with a song called Becky Bell. It was an epic 4 1/2 minute song of pure emotion and fury. 4 1/2 minutes doesn't sound long, but when it's a continuous buzzsawing of your ears with sheer intensity, and every other song of the night clocks in at 1:30, it hits super hard.

A few months later we found their 7" in the record store and promptly bought it. It even turned out that the photo on the back was from the show we were at, and we were in it:

Check out those pants.

The 7" is fucking great. The songs are about veganism, cigarettes, questioning the feelings of futility we have against the system, and abortion.The abortion song is a painful essay and tribute to Becky Bell, a child who died in 1988 because her state of Indiana required parental permission to have an abortion. She was too afraid of telling her parents, and didn't want to try for an exemption from a judge out of fear her parents would still find out. She ended up dying from septic abortion complicated by pneumonia after having an illegal procedure that got infected.

Paradoxically, as stated in this documentary clip, the better and more open a child's relationship is with their parents, there can be even more chance to hide things like an unwanted pregnancy out of the desire to not let your parents down. This is something I can relate to. I was always The Good Kid™ but, like any human, did stupid shit and made plenty of mistakes. I can't even imagine being presented with the situation of unwanted pregnancy as a young woman. I can 100% understand doing anything possible to hide something as stigmatized as fucking up and getting pregnant at 17 to my conservative evangelical family. "Luckily" I'm not a woman. I will never be faced with this type of decision.

And here we are, 30 fucking years after this song was written, and we've just been slammed into a massively worse situation. We're no longer dealing with parental consent, but access at all in most of the states in this ridiculous country. So it won't just be under 18 children seeking out alternatives, but all women. And while people have made the valid point that this is purely class warfare since rich people will always be able to get their daughters/wives/mistresses an abortion, the story of Becky Bell shows that it goes even deeper and the stigmatization means many will not even let the people who would be able to get them out of their state know. They will instead take pills, go to underground clinics, try random methods they find online. And some of them will die. And some of those who die will be the children of the people who have forced all of this through. Will that lead to any change? If the daily mass shootings and children dying in schools is any indicator, no. The dedication to death and suffering is the whole point.

BECKY BELL

WE ALL SEEM TO THINK THAT IT DOESN'T MATTER

IF THE RIGHTS OF A CHILD ARE LESS THAN SACRED

THIS CHILD NEEDS TO GROW WITHOUT FEAR OF DEATH

BUT IN THIS WORLD THERE'S NO CHANCE OF THAT

OUR CHILDREN ARE DYING… AND WE DON'T CARE

WOMEN ARE DYING… AND WE DON'T CARE

THERE'S A FORCE ON THE STREET IN THE CHURCH AND THE COURT

AND THEY'RE MAKING THEIR INTENTIONS PAINFULLY CLEAR

MORALITY COMES BEFORE THE LIFE OF A CHILD

AND THE ONLY DEATH THAT MATTERS IS THAT UNBORN

FUNDAMENTAL HYPOCRISY…

YOU THINK YOU CAN FORCE MORALITY ON US WITH LAWS

WHEN THE LAWS YOU ENACT END UP KILLING MORE THAN THEY SAVE

AND YOU TURN THE OTHER WAY AS CHILDREN GO WITHOUT HOMES

IN THE END YOUR CRUSADE IS FUNDAMENTALLY DIS-SERVED

COLD GLOSSY PICTURES PAINT THE GROTESQUE

BUT WE NEVER KNOW THE TRUTHS OF WHAT THEY ARE

A TRAGIC MISCARRIAGE PORTRAYED AS A FETUS

AND A FAITH-DRIVEN MOB ACCEPTS THE MYTH

I KNOW WHY YOU DO IT

MAYBE YOU DON'T SEE

IT'S DISPLACED GUILT FOR A LOVE STARVED WORLD

SO YOUR VISION IS FAILING AND YOUR VAIN ATTEMPT

IS TO RECLAIM MORALITY WITH A SINGLE STANCE

AND THE REAL GOAL HERE'S NOT TO SAVE A LIFE

BUT TO PUSH YOUR ETHICS ON A HEATHEN MASS

AND IF YOUR FAITH'S SO STRONG

WHY DO YOU NEED TO CONVINCE WITH VIOLENT FORCE AND NOT BELIEF?

AND WHAT REALLY HAPPENS WE DON'T ALL HEAR

BUT WOMEN HAVE DIED FOR YOUR THOUGHTLESS "CARE"

AS WE HEAR IT ITS A RIGHT BUT ITS FADING FAST

AND THE WORD OF LAW DOESN'T GUARANTEE A THING

YOU PROBABLY DIDN'T KNOW SOMEONE'S ALREADY DIED BECAUSE AN INDIANA

LAW SAYS A MINOR'S A CHILD INCAPABLE OF MAKING THE DECISION HERSELF AND COMPLETELY AT THE MERCY OF HER PARENTS' MORALS

OUR CHILDREN ARE DYING… AND WE DON'T CARE

WOMEN ARE DYING… AND WE DON'T CARE

WHAT SEEMS AT FIRST AS CLEAR IS OBSCURED BY BLOOD

BECKY BELL DIED AT THE HANDS OF A BUTCHER

BECAUSE SHE WAS AFRAID TO CONFRONT HER PARENTS

BECAUSE SHE WAS TOO YOUNG TO BE GIVEN HER RIGHTS

FUNDAMENTAL HYPOCRISY...

SO ALL OF OUR DEBATE AND PROTEST SEEMS SAFE AND CLEAN

BUT FOR MANY THE CONTROVERSY'S MUCH CLOSER TO HOME

AND COLD LAWS DON'T FIND A PLACE IN THE WARMTH OF THE FAMILY

THERE WILL BE A FEW LESS MEMBERS HOME IN SOME STATES THIS YEAR

IT'S HAPPENED

OUR LAWS HAVE KILLED

Sending this one out a bit later than usual because I was hanging out with a friend who is moving away to Nashville tomorrow, and then went to a pride party until 2am. My old ass is not even remotely able to handle that anymore, so instead of getting home and posting, I slept until 11am. I think I'll probably just aim to get this out some time on Saturdays moving forward.

Shit I'm...

Reading

The End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy

Now that the economy is starting to collapse again, the Think Pieces that state obvious things as though they're shocking revelations are starting to flow. This one is a good example, opening with outrage that a 10 minute Uber ride was going to cost them $50!!. Then it sinks in:

It was as if Silicon Valley had made a secret pact to subsidize the lifestyles of urban Millennials. As I pointed out three years ago, if you woke up on a Casper mattress, worked out with a Peloton, Ubered to a WeWork, ordered on DoorDash for lunch, took a Lyft home, and ordered dinner through Postmates only to realize your partner had already started on a Blue Apron meal, your household had, in one day, interacted with eight unprofitable companies that collectively lost about $15 billion in one year.

I mean, yeah dude. That's exactly what they were doing. Not that hard to figure out. Granted, as this guy links out, he wrote about this coming back in 2019. But it's been obvious from the start. Like people shocked that a bunch of unqualified people were getting mortgages on gigantic McMansions without even proving they had a job in 2006 was bad, what the fuck did they think was going to happen? Does no one remember Kozmo.com? Do people really think that, no, this time GoPuff figured it out because they're using Gig Workers™ instead of employees?

It's long been a running joke that San Francisco startups of the past 15 years or so were basically a bunch of man children realizing that being an adult sucked and obviously they needed to fix things by trying to get rich by providing all the things their moms did for them to each other. Looks like mom is finally kicking everyone out of the basement.

Using

This week is about an app that is Obsidian adjacent.

Drafts is one of those apps that I've tried to use for like 10 years now at this point. It's one of the earliest iPhone apps that's still going strong, and it's one of those things that I know I should like but just haven't been able to get my head around. Kind of like Rush and Tool and PJ Harvey. By all accounts they check my normal boxes, but they just don't... click.

The whole premise of Drafts is that it's the "place where text starts." Basically, any time you have a thought or task or whatever in your head, open up Drafts and write it down as quickly as possible and worry about it later, rather than have the thought and then think about where you want it to go (tweet? email? newsletter? group text?) and then find that app, wait for it to open, tap whatever compose button there is, etc. etc. Drafts opens up super fast and is just a blinking cursor ready to accept text.

The wild thing about Drafts, though, is all the workflows it has to get the text out of it. You can script pretty much anything up to massage your text into whatever format it needs to be to get it into other apps. This is usually done through URL schemes (he actually invented the x-callback-url spec) or API calls to apps that support it. There's a huge community of users who have made workflows for tons of different apps and destinations, and they're pretty easy to cobble together yourself as well.

This is Obsidian adjacent for me because it's become the default place for me to capture most things I want to end up in Obsidian. If I'm already doing stuff in it, then using QuickAdd to shuttle things off to the right place works great. But as I try to take notes on things throughout the work day while I'm in Zoom or google docs, or trying to write things down as I'm out and about, Obsidian is not really the quickest way to do it.

As an electron app, it's not super well integrated into the system to do things like provide a global quick capture window or anything like that. I know it's possible for electron apps to do that (see the recent 1Password version that everyone got mad about), but that type of stuff isn't super high on the Obsidian team's list, at least yet.

And the mobile app, while being a remarkable achievement in supporting an entire electron app's functionality in a completely different environment, isn't quite up to native standards. Since it's a javascript app with a bunch of plugins it has to load everything up when it first loads, which takes a few seconds. Once it's up and running, switching back to it works fine. But if you haven't used it for a bit, iOS unloads it from memory and it needs to load back up again (I know, Android probably doesn't have this problem). Those few seconds of friction mean I'll be less prone to capturing things.

So, Drafts it is. Throughout the day I'll write stuff down in it and then go back to whatever I was doing. It's one of the only apps where I turn on the unread indicator badge so I know how many things I need to go back to at some point. I've created a few Drafts actions to send stuff to the right place in Obsidian using the Advanced URI plugin. For example, there's one to send things to the list of newsletter ideas I have, and another to save a timestamped line in my "Daily Log" section of my daily note file. Once I got it dialed in, it works pretty well.

One caveat, though, is that it works way better on the desktop. While the mobile versions of Drafts and Obsidian support everything necessary, if you try to send something to Obsidian and it first needs to load things up, it just kinda silently fails. But, capturing things on my phone and then sitting down with my laptop later to journal and go through all my stuff is how I usually want to work anyways.

If you want me to send you some details on the Drafts > Obsidian things I've got set up, send me an email!

Wearing

I got this shirt when I saw Chelsea Wolfe for the first time back in like 2016 at Revolution Hall in Portland. It was weird seeing her in a place with seats, but it was also kinda nice. It also made me realize that there were definitely still goths around town. This is one of my favorite shirts, and I feel lucky I got it when I did because, while she's put out some cool shirts since then, a lot of them lean toward the cheesy side of things with switchblades and stuff, and I love the relative subtlety of this one.

Seeing: Whores, Bummer, Capra

First up was Capra. They're from Lafayette, LA and were pretty rad. Capra means goat in Italian, which is even cooler.

Second up was Bummer. I saw them open for Whores a few years ago. They were pretty cool back then and I checked out a couple of their EPs, but that was about it. This time was different. They put on a great show and it seemed heavier and more pissed than I remembered. Their drummer did the whole "flip off the audience and tell them to fuck off the whole time" schtick. It prompted me to check out their recorded stuff again, and their most recent album is fucking great. It's in the listening section.

Then it was time for the main event. I've seen whores 3 times now, and I’m convinced they’re one of the best live bands going right now. The first time I saw them was at the Ash Street Saloon as mentioned above, which is sadly no longer around. The location is now a fancy chicken strips place. It was one of my favorite venues. It was a scrappy bar with a side room that had a stage. The ceilings were really high, and for whatever reason, the sound was great.

The first time I saw whores there I didn't really know what to expect. I knew they had some killer riffs, but you never know how well stuff will translate live. As soon as they started, though, I knew they were one of those bands that was meant to be seen live. They are only a three piece, but they have guitar and bass tone like I've never heard before.

I suspect their guitarist/singer is one of those musical genius types. You can tell he's the mastermind of the band, the one who has the vision and writes most of the songs to achieve that exacting vision. Reminds me of Mike Scheidt from Yob. He also seems like a pretty cool dude with a good sense of humor.

The thing about seeing Whores live is a) they are fucking loud, and b) their guitar and bass tone is absolutely perfect. They've mastered the art of massive dynamics while only being a three piece. They have the parts that start out kinda quiet and tinny and then explode as super heavy riffs that slam you right in the gut. I love it.

Also, their new drummer used to live in Portland, and it was his birthday, so he was having the time of his life. You love to see it.

When they played their second to last song, Christian left his guitar in the audience and it made its way to me. I finger tapped smoke on the water when I had the chance:

Listening to

I Want To Punch Bruce Springsteen In The Dick by Bummer

This song is a great example of what I love about the Dead Horse album by Bummer. Wacky, dissonant riff, pissed vocals, and heavy as balls. Also, I too want to punch Bruce Springsteen in the dick.

Drawing

One more week of oldies. This one was mostly a tracing of the Teddie Munster image I made a long time ago that I've been using as my avatar in various places over the years. While it's not as much of a "drawing" since it was tracing on top of the photo, I still really like the way it turned out. There's still a whole bunch of decisions to make on abstracting things down to just lines that is really fun to do. It was also one of the ones that made me realize if I make things for myself just because I enjoy it, who cares.

Laughing at

Watching

As mentioned in the last issue, Tori Amos and her band played Cornflake Girl with the Rosanna Shuffle underneath when we saw her a couple weeks ago. This led me to discover that her new drummer, Ash Soan, is a freakin beast. He posted a video of this version of the song, and it's awesome.

Shit I'm...

Considering...

I don't have a single tattoo on my body. I've always been pretty certain I'd never be satisfied with anything enough that I wouldn't obsess over it and regret it. But, dammit, Paw Tattoo is really making me rethink that.

Using

Obsidian Stuff, Part 2

A couple issues ago I talked about the general baseline theming and stuff that I feel is table stakes for making Obsidian something that feels joyful to use. Again, it's not a native app, but people are taking advantage of the underlying web technology and the hooks the developers built into the foundation to make it both beautiful, but also wildly extensive and powerful.

So as mentioned, I've gone pretty deep with an excessive amount of plugins and tweaks. But I think it would probably be best to demonstrate that stuff in course of talking about some workflows.

Daily Notes

First up is a daily notes setup. I think Roam Research (which essentially kicked off this whole craze as far as I can tell) always defaults to a daily notes page. The idea is essentially that, with a graph database instead of a traditional folder based hierarchy, you should't have to "organize" anything. Just capture stuff on your daily notes page and use links and tags and outlining hierarchy to get things into a logical structure and leave it at that. That inherently provides a time dimension since you'll always know when you wrote things down, along with whatever tagging and linking you do.

As an aside, I suppose "daily notes" is just... a diary. But, tech is no stranger to reinventing things that have always existed and calling it revolutionary.

Anyways, it turns out having a diary is pretty cool. One of my biggest problems with this type of stuff has always been where to put things. It seems like it should be simple, but it's just enough friction that I tend to just not write things down so I don't have to figure out where to organize it. And then I of course forget about it. With a daily note you just write shit down on it. You can have some structure to the page if you want, but when in doubt, just write stuff down on your daily notes page. It's pretty liberating.

Obsidian is a bit of an odd duck compared to the more "pure" graph based apps like Roam and Logseq, though, in that it really is just a folder filled with folders of markdown files. Technically Logseq is as well, but they abstract all that away in the product, whereas in Obsidian you can open up a file browser on the left just like any other normal app. The cool thing about this, though, is you can kind of get the best of both worlds.

I took the Building A Second Brain course a few weeks ago and I've mostly adopted the PARA folder system of just having Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive folders. Obsidian has files, and files need some sort of organization, and this is good enough that the Tiago dude is making millions of dollars recommending you should just use four folders. Again, it's just a way to not think about things and just do it, and it's also pretty liberating.

Ok, so daily notes provide a lot of the benefit of the graph approach with the time dimension while still having the crutch of folders and files under the hood. Luckily, Obsidian has a built in Daily Notes plugin that works really well. However, I've been using the Periodic Notes community plugin because it provides a more broad approach with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes. So far I only use daily and weekly, but I want to move toward using all of them at some point as I get better at this stuff.

Daily notes are of course the backbone, though. I have a keyboard command set up so hitting command-t always takes me to today's note, and creates it if it doesn't yet exist. By default, daily notes are just blank pages. This is fine for jotting stuff down, but for maximum nerditude you need to set up some templates.

Templates

Obsidian also comes with a stock templating plugin, but I'm using the Templater plugin for unlimited power. It essentially gives you a full templating language and the ability to harness as much javascript as you want to do some pretty interesting things, but even just the base functionality is great.

My daily notes template has accumulated a lot of stuff:

• The weather in portland at the time I create it (using wttr.in)
• My daily highlight (a concept from Make Time, basically the most important thing of the day)
• Morning / evening routine checklists
• The day's calendar events (retrieved with a shortcut that is launched with a button)
• Daily log where all the random thoughts and interstitial journaling stuff lands
• My Readwise highlights for the day using dataview (dataview probably warrants a whole post itself)
• Tasks for the day (using the Obsidian Tasks plugin which is also pretty gnarly)

Here's a partial screenshot of the template:

That probably seems like a lot, and I guess it kinda is, but it's mostly automated, ambient info with areas dedicated to dropping random stuff (which I do with various methods depending on where I'm recording it... more on that in a future issue). And having things like my calendar events and tasks give me one place to see my day at a glance, as well as easily take notes on any of them as the day progresses, which is especially great for meeting notes. Also, all the :: items are actually data that you can query in other places, which comes into play with my weekly pages (which I'll cover in a future issue).

It's definitely taken a lot of trial and error to evolve to this point. In fact, looking at it for this write up distracted me and started me down a path of trying to only get the different task headers to appear if there were actually any tasks and I had to drag myself back to finish this. But I think that's what's kinda rad about Obsidian – it's infinitely moldable to your needs. I finally understand all the nerds who were obsessed with emacs and org-mode.

Anyways, whatever tool you use, having a daily diary is pretty cool. Maybe Doogie Howser was a genius.

Wearing

Now that it's kinda warming up a bit here in Portland, I've been wearing my denim jacket more instead of the parka. I got this 3sixteen overdyed type III jacket a few years ago and I really love it. It's an indigo denim jacket in the regular Levi's trucker jacket style, but dyed a deep black on top of it, which gives it a really soft texture and an interesting blue that pops through on the parts that fade. The sizing is super wacky, as my normal medium sizing required an XL in this. But it's really well made (in the USA 🇺🇸) and has really soft corduroy lined hand warmer pockets.

Listening to

Impel - Omnidirectional – back in like 1993 a bunch of my high school crew drove the 2 hours down to San Diego to see the best band in the world, Unbroken. It's an understatement to say Unbroken was a gigantic influence on all of us. Their music was incredible, yes, but they also had a sense of style and attitude that was different than any of the other hardcore and straight edge bands of the time. While everyone else was still wearing basketball jerseys and baggy shorts, the Unbroken dudes were super into Morrissey, rockabilly style, and gothy shit. As a result, all of us drove down in our button up shirts and pompadours to see them play.

The show got moved from the original larger location for some reason, but luckily we found out the new location was Cafe Mesopotamia. The place was a tiny coffee shop type place in a random strip mall that had a little stage in the back. When we walked in there was already a band called Impel playing that we'd never heard of before.

San Diego always had a pretty magical music scene. Something about it generated tons of super unique bands during the 90s. Well, unique in terms of they all had a super weird "San Diego spazz" type of sound. The scene was ultra incestuous, with lots of people being in 3 or 4 bands at once, ending and stopping bands all the time. San Diego has always felt like a foreign country to me, a super isolated mixture of Mexico, marines, and man child beach bums. The kids who were the weirdos of that mix were the ones making super wacky punk music.

Anyways, the fact the Impel was opening for Unbroken gave them instant credibility. Also, it turned out that their bass player was June Cate, a pretty famous skater at the time. We only heard a few songs, and what we did hear was most definitely not Slayer influenced metal like Unbroken, so we didn't give it much thought.

I never really came across much of their stuff, and to be honest, I wasn't really ready to appreciate the more emoish type of stuff they were doing. I never really forgot about them after that show at Mesopotamia, though, they always had an air of mystery about them to me.

A couple weeks ago Steven Miller from Unbroken posted on Instagram that Indecision records had (re?)released an Impel album. He has always been a legend after being in Unbroken, and he went on be in lots of other bands as well, including a few that had folks who had been in Impel back in the day. So I checked it out.

Turns out it's pretty great. It's heavy and intense, but not "metal". Much more along the lines of Quicksand and emo type bands, with the vocalist veering between the Julia-style whininess and the Refused guy's screaming. The music is pretty complex and layered and I dig it. Pretty cool to finally get around to listening to them and realizing I saw another rad band back in the day.

Seeing

Lots of shows this week!

The Mixtape Tour

All right, so first up – New Kids on the Block, Rick Astley, En Vogue, Salt 'n Pepa. Yeah. A friend of Jen's had their birthday this weekend and set up a last minute squad to go to this show. Gen Xers and Elder Millennials were in full force.

You gotta understand, NKOTB was enemy number one to 12 year old Toby and his skateboarding buddies. My friend's sister was a huge New Kids fan, with the sleeping bag and everything, and we mercilessly talked shit. I know, young boys are crappy. But that's how it was with the New Kids. They were the worst.

Fast forward 33 years and I'm paying to go to the NKOTB Mix Tape Tour™.

Not gonna lie, it was pretty badass. A lifetime of going to bar and club shows always leaves me in awe of big ass stadium shows. And even the stadium shows I have gone to are still usually on the pretentious side of things and relatively stripped down and raw. This show was not like that.

To say this show was "extra" would be an understatement. I mean look at this:

It was packed as hell. Most everyone was dressed in 80s/90s gear. Jen had a bodysuit, iridescent fanny pack, and borrowed a bunch of Paisley's clothes to pull off a perfect 90s look. I went as the grunge boyfriend who loves his lady so much he's willing to see NKOTB.

Real talk, though... it was a lot of fun. The whole show was extremely self-aware. Everyone performing was at least in their 50s and weren't really pretending otherwise. Little Joey McIntire said something like "I've been singing this song for 35 years" which hit everyone pretty hard. I think Jonathan Knight was just happy to be there collecting a paycheck. Donnie was still doing the bad boy thing, shaking his ass and pulling up his shirt etc. Rick Astley is still a good singer, and he IRL rickrolled us not once, but twice. Salt 'n Pepa were still badass, and En Vogue still fuckin' rule.

🥵

Tori Amos

Two nights later we had tickets to see Tori Amos at the Schnitzer theatre. I love me some brooding women, and Tori is an undisputed queen of brood. I've seen her live twice now, and both times it was just her and a piano. Her piano playing is of course genius, and I am extremely down to just have her play some dissonant piano runs while singing... but I'm a rhythm guy at heart. Most of her albums have a band backing her, and I absolutely love when she goes huge with the full band.

So, I was super stoked when I saw she had a drum set and bass rig ready to roll.

While I celebrate her entire catalog, she's one of the artists where I'm the annoying "her old stuff is the best" guy. While I usually don't agree with that when it comes to stuff like Sunny Day Real Estate (Rising Tide is their best album, fight me), Tori's early stuff is just untouchable. Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, and even some of the mid to late 90s stuff like From the Choirgirl Hotel are just super dark, dissonant, and brooding. And even her covers/tribute albums like Strange Little Girls and Night of Hunters are super complex and dark. Her recent stuff is still super good, but it's just not quite as ... intense.

Naturally, though, her live shows are a mix of old and new. She wants to play her recent stuff, but the audience wants to hear the 30 year old shit. Luckily it's all pretty great. The highlight of the show was absolutely their rendition of Cornflake Girl. The new drummer touring with her is Ash Soan who I'd never heard of before, but he was incredible. They did Cornflake Girl with the Rosanna Shuffle and it was magical.

Here she is doing her signature Rick Wakeman move:

WHORES.

I'll be seeing whores tomorrow night. They've always been awesome live and I haven't seen them in a long time. Here they are crushing St. Vitus Bar back in 2017. It'll be in next week's issue!

Drawing

I finished up the drawing I mentioned in the last issue, but I'm going to wait a bit before posting it. In the meantime, here's another one I did a little while back!

Laughing at

Watching

Severance is much wilder than I anticipated. It's pretty great! We still have a few episodes to go, though, so I'll discuss more when we finish.

Also, speaking of Ash Soan, this episode of him playing the Zildjian youtube series is pretty great. The definition of RESTRAINT.

— Toby

Shit I'm...

Reading

I just started reading The Untethered Soul. Seems kinda cheesy, but it came as a recommendation. Not much to say just yet, but it’s pretty wild right off the bat. Starts off with stuff like this:

There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it.

Should be an interesting read. I’m sure I’ll have some more to say in the next few weeks.

Using

Not going to do much in the Obsidian series this week since I'm writing so much about another dorky thing below. Probably next week. Some of this issue was written on the iPhone app, though, which has gotten really good!

Wearing

Since I've already covered jeans, my sweater, socks, and flannels, that doesn't leave too much. So, I think I'm going to do some t-shirts for a few issues.

Y'all probably know I love the band Yob. I have three of their shirts so far. They have pretty rad designs. Here's one of them:

Automating

All right, strap in, this is a dorky one.

We all live in the New Normal™ where most of us likely work remotely still. As for myself and my team, we've been deemed "permanently remote" as part of a Digital First™ initiative. Basically, we still have offices, but they're only for collaboration and projects/meetings moving forward. Hardly anyone will have a desk to call their own. I'm actually pretty into it. Like I mentioned in the last issue, I have my dedicated office space at home and I love it. I can't really imagine going back to an office full time again.

As a result, of course, we all pretty much live in Slack and Zoom. Slack is slack. Whatever. Zoom, though, is how we actually see each other every once in a while. Yes, it gives us Zoom fatigue when you're on it too long, and it's still never going to be as good as being together in person, but it is what it is.

Over the last couple years I've slowly tried to dial in my Zoom game. I don't even have that many meetings or give tons of presentations compared to some folks, but it's something else to tweak and get some gear for, so why not. I've added a face light, a mic on a nice low profile arm, a stream deck, and I use my phone camera instead of a regular webcam to get a way sharper image. As you can see, much like Zoom, El Gato is a company that unexpectedly benefitted from a global pandemic where everyone had to start streaming.

Zoom has always had the ability to put a virtual background in, but it never worked very well for me. My background environment has always been way too noisy for it to do a very good job. I usually instead tried to make my actual background acceptable, but that's not super fun and can be kind of tedious. Lots of colleagues always have a background enabled for various reasons, but not many have ever looked all that great.

The other day I was chatting with the doggs in our group text and the discussion started to talk about how Zoom and the image we present on it has taken over for things like the way we dress to a normal office. I mentioned how I'd wanted to replicate the Pee Wee Herman phone booth in my office, and it occurred to me that I could probably rig something up pretty easily.

If you're a fellow old, you'll remember Pee Wee's Playhouse. Amongst all the other wonderful stuff, he had a magic phone booth for making video calls. Future shit. And the main thing with the magic phone booth was pulling down a backdrop and putting on a costume to make it more fun. How prescient.

So, we've all essentially been biting Pee Wee's style with the virtual background and Snapchat filters and all that stuff. Except it never looked as good as his setup. I’ve been thinking about giving this a go for a while, so I used the long Memorial Day weekend to finally get it going.

The first piece was getting a green screen, of course. I just ordered some shitty piece of green cloth off Amazon. It’s fine.

The real magic, though, was the automation part. In the past I’ve set up a bunch of motorized blackout shades, and I got the Ikea Fyrtur ones because they work with Homekit, which is how I do all my home automation stuff. They work really well, especially considering how much cheaper they are then ones from Lutron, etc.

By making sure they work with Homekit, it means I can make them part of scenes, which enables me to control a whole bunch of things in multiple configurations depending on what I need a the time. For example I already had a "Meeting" scene that does the following:

• turns on my philips hue light strip that's along the back of my desk for some ambient light behind my monitor
• turns on the hall light outside my office. It's also a hue light, and the main idea here was to make it turn red when I'm on a zoom call so folks know I'm busy, but I haven't gotten that working too consistently yet.
• turn on my key light to get some warm diffused light on my face so people can actually see me and so i don't look like a zombie
• pause my homepods if I have some music playing (which I usually do)
• turn on a "do not disturb" virtual switch using Homebridge dummy switches... homebridge is a topic for another day, though.

Then, since Homekit is built into the Apple ecosystem, it lets me do some more cool stuff with Shortcuts. So, when I have a meeting, I use Raycast to run the "Meeting Time" shortcut that does the following:

• turn the above Homekit scene on
• send a key command (using BetterTouchTool's shortcut support) that activates the Meeter app's ability to autojoin the zoom call for the next meeting in my calendar
• start the Camo Studio app to run my phone camera as the zoom camera
• sets my mac to the "Zoom call" focus mode so I can control what notifications come in, and, as a bonus, set the same focus mode on all my other devices

And since my iPhone gets set to the same Zoom call focus mode, I use that as a trigger for a shortcut automation on it to start the corresponding Camo app on the phone so they can talk to each other and Zoom.

Are you still with me? If so, from there I plug a lightning cable on the back of my monitor into the phone to give it power and connect it to the computer, and then stick the phone to a Moment magsafe mount that firmly holds my phone right above my monitor where a regular webcam would be.

It sounds ridiculous, but once it was all set up it means I can join a meeting in just a few seconds by running that one shortcut command from Raycast and then plugging my phone in.

All right, so the green screen. Since I have all this stuff already working, adding the green screen to it was pretty easy. I of course had to mount the blind to the ceiling of my office in back of where I sit/stand in front of my desk. It took some dialing in to get the right placement for it so it would adequately fill the camera's viewport. The Fyrtur blinds max out at 48" wide, which isn't all that wide when it's behind you with a relatively wide angle phone camera lens. But it worked out ok.

Then, I figured out how far the blind had to lower to fill the viewport, then pinned the green screen cloth to it. I had to only put as much cloth on top of the blind as absolutely necessary since it makes the rolling of the blind a lot thicker and prone to get stuck. I chopped off a bunch of excess fabric, and of course did it all crooked and janky. But it's good enough.

Then, I added the blind to the Meeting Homekit scene and set it to lower as part of it. Now, whenever I run the shortcut, the green screen lowers behind me. I have another shortcut that runs when I exit the Camo app on my phone that basically does the opposit of all this to clean up. Fuck yeah.

But, there was still a missing piece. My initial trial of the built in Zoom green screen functionality was pretty shitty. There's a checkbox to let the app know you have a green screen and you can choose the color to knock out, but it's super basic and didn't work well at all for me. So, I had to add another piece to my contraption.

OBS is a free, cross platform, open source streaming app that lots of gamers and stuff use. It's pretty rough looking, of course, but it has a ton of features and does a whole bunch of stuff I didn't even know I was going to be able to do. Primarily, it provides better green screen support using a "chroma key" filter on the camera source that lets you dial in the green screen removal way better.

OBS also lets you make scenes that let you switch between setups for quickly changing backgrounds, camera positions, etc. I initially set up a scene to have my camera video in the iconic Queen II album cover:

This was a big success. Joining meetings like this blew people away, even though it was relatively basic. But now that I knew how to make scenes, it was time to kick it up a notch.

Like I mentioned, different scenes can have different backgrounds, but also different placement, sizing, and rotation of the camera's live video. Once I realized this, I made another scene:

Needless to say, this one got quite a bit of attention. I suppose it's probably a bit distracting to other participants, but it seemed like everyone got used to it right away, and all the meetings I had went just fine.

And since I already had the stream deck, I was able to set up buttons to quickly switch between scenes. So, now I have a button with the Queen image, and one with the Metallica image, and they each activate their respective scenes. I'm planning on making another scene that I can quickly switch to that will let me put a window with a presentation as my background so I can give presentations with my head in the lower left corner or whatever. It's gonna look pro.

Finally, one last thing that took me a while to figure out was how to get OBS to start with the virtual camera already going. By default, OBS is made to stream to services like Twitch, and if you want to use it in Zoom you have to make it a "virtual" camera. I'm already using Camo as a virtual camera feeding into OBS, and then the OBS virtual camera feeds into Zoom. Like I said, Rube Goldberg.

Anyways, I added the a shell script action to my shortcut to start OBS with the camera on by default by running this command:

/Applications/OBS.app/Contents/MacOS/obs --startvirtualcam &

All right, that's probably enough. Ridiculous? Yes. Fun and satisfying? Hell yeah.

Listening to

In preparation for seeing Tori Amos next week, binging on some of my faves:

Under the Pink – pretty much perfect

Night of Hunters – an amazing album of classical variations

Little Earthquakes – of course. check out this video of Rick Beato fawning over it

From the Choir Girl Hotel – the first album of hers I really got into back in the late 90s. The first song still slays me.

Seeing

Writing this section on my phone between bands!

First up was Glacial Fall. Two piece from here in Portland. Mostly two bases with heavy, droning sampled drums. Really good.

Then Lord Dying played. They made one my favorite albums of 2019, Mysterium Tremendum. They seemed a bit rusty, but were of course awesome. I picked up the double LP.

Then Zeke played a bunch of fast punk songs that all sounded the same. Pretty fun though.

Bongzilla is about to go on. I got their first album back in like 1998 or something. They’re still up to the same schtick ("did we mention we smoke lots of weed!?"). Hopefully they’re fun live.

Jen and I are going to see Tori Amos next week, so that’ll be in the next issue!

Drawing

I’ve got a pretty special drawing in the works right now but it’s just getting started. In the meantime here’s another one from a few weeks ago:

Laughing at

Watching

Finally started watching Severance on Apple TV and it’s pretty rad so far. Everyone said it’s great and so far it’s living up to the hype. Kinda reminds me of a Charlie Kaufman type of thing? Looking forward to seeing where it goes.

— Toby

Shit I'm...

Reading

More or Less – his and hers apartment, side by side – interesting article about a couple splitting their living space into two different areas to accommodate their wildly different aesthetic preferences.

The wife, a former curator for the Cooper Hewitt museum of design, is a collector and her area is pretty extra. Reminds me of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, just filled with stuff.

The husband's side, on the other hand, is a faithful rendition of an austere Japanese tea house and sleeping area. It couldn't be more different than the other half of the house.

Kinda weird, right? There's a lot of expectations around how things should be, the default thinking of "we need to agree on everything, have the same tastes, compromise or give in on this type of stuff or something is wrong."

What this approach presupposes is – what if you didn't?

There's another similar movement called Living Apart Together where married couples live in separate places. Again, seems weird, right? But, after Jen and I were separated, there was a period of time where this was essentially our situation. We decided that we wanted to work things out and stay together, but logistics and a general desire for transition meant we kept living where we were, moving between places on a schedule. It was naturally a pain in the ass moving between homes every few days, especially for the kiddos, but I dunno... there was kinda something nice about having our "own" spaces.

So, we found and bought a house we both love that has enough room for us to have our own spaces. The vast majority of the house is shared, of course, and we worked with a designer to help us figure out an approach to decorating and furnishing those areas that we both agreed on. It went a lot more smoothly than we expected. Much like a therapist being a neutral third party, the designer made it way easier to figure out what we both liked rather than fixating on the things we didn't.

And we also have our own spots that we can kinda do whatever we want with. Jen claimed a corner room for doing crafts and sewing. We call it the Rainbow Room since, well, it's covered in rainbows, has a rainbow rug, a pink chair, and a pink accent wall.

Meanwhile, the attic, while unfinished, is pretty big and cool. Tons of potential. At some point we'd love to finish it, maybe put a south facing window in the roof, etc. In the meantime, though, Jen's converted half of it to be a cozy, bohemian/witchy zone with tons of blankets and pouffes and trinkets and candles. It's pretty sweet. Felix loves hanging out with her up there.

And since I work from home permanently now, what used to be the maid quarters or whatever in the basement is now my office/lair. It's pretty well separate from the rest of the house and has a bathroom, entry room, and main room, both of which have windows looking out onto the backyard. And, for some reason, the main room was equipped with some speakers on the wall and ceiling. It's kind of a perfect office for me. I can keep it set up how I want, blast music on the built in speakers, use the bathroom, chill on the couch in the entry room, whatever. It's just my own space. I love it.

Now, I know this is a super privileged situation. We bought a big ass house with lots of room, and I recognize that we're super fortunate. Similarly, the original article is about 2 people living in a 4000sf loft apartment in Manhattan. I can't even imagine what it's worth.

I'm sure this type of approach would likely be pretty hard in a small place, especially with kids etc. Like one of those sitcoms where the kids split the room with tape:

Also, I suppose "man caves" and "sewing rooms" and all that aren't all that uncommon. This is just the first time I've ever really lived somewhere that can reasonably sustain both.

I dunno. I guess it's just one of those things that I never really thought about, but is probably a lot more common than I ever considered. And, maybe, it's just one of many important tools that can help sustain a relationship through creativity and acknowledgment/respect of differences.

Using

All right, things are gonna get nerdy.

So, the main reason I started doing this newsletter is because I took a class on building a "second brain" which is basically "take a bunch of notes instead of keeping all that shit in your head and stay up all night thinking about it." If you know, you know.

Lots of folks have been getting into this stuff lately. This type of shit is catnip for nerds. Arguing over the best tools and processes for taking notes and gathering knowledge rather than actually getting work done or writing? Just like old painters sniffing each others brushes to critique their choice of materials, we just can't help it.

The building a second brain course is intended to get you to actually produce something, though. The main dude still just uses Evernote. At the end of the day it's just organizing text, the point is to make something out of it.

This newsletter is the result of that. And I'm super glad I was pointed in this direction instead of just obsessing over the tools and methods and only paying attention to how other people are taking notes instead of what they're making.

Anyways, now I'm going to write about tools and methods and hacks. Alex requested it, blame him.

Obsidian

I already wrote about using Obsidian a few issues back. It's my weapon of choice in the linked notes arms race. It's extremely flexible and has a huge amount of community folks making plugins. It's pretty great. I'm also keenly interested in Logseq, which is a block-based outliner based on markdown files, but I need to just settle on something. So, Obsidian it is.

The blessing and curse of Obsidian is that there's an infinite amount of customization and tweaking you can do. This is great for dialing in your specific workflows etc, but it's also a very deep, tempting rabbit hole.

I'd like to show you around my rabbit hole.

This will probably go for many many issues. Warm up that unsubscribe finger.

First things first: Themes and tweaks

Ok, first off, if you're going to use Obsidian, you have to get a decent theme. The default is ... fine, but it's meant to be cross platform and inoffensive. If you're going to bother using an app that's essentially a website and not actually native, you might as well take full advantage of that fact and tweak it to ridiculous levels.

I've been a designer for a long time, and I love trying to make the computing environment I use all day every day pleasing. As the kids say, I want to make it Aesthetic™. So, if you want to roll in Aesthetic™ style, you need the Minimal theme. There are lots of other nice themes, but, to me, Minimal is the gold standard, especially if you're on a mac. It's clean, well thought out, has nice typography, and tons of options to tweak the small stuff if that's how you roll.

And if you want the full extent of the Minimal goodness, you're going to need to install a couple plugins to go along with it.

So, yeah... plugins.

Plugins

This is where shit with Obsidian goes off the rails. The Obsidian community is pretty huge and active and everything is built with html/js/css. As a result, there's a ton of cool plugins available. Even a numbskull like me could make some if I remembered how to write code.

I will admit, I have a plugin problem. The number of plugins I have installed is so high I won't even type it here out of embarrassment. You don't need to follow my bad example. Much of this series will likely focus on the plugins I use and the general workflows I've cobbled together.

For now, keeping with the theme of, well, themes, here's a list of a few visually focused plugins I like:

• Minimal Theme Settings – what it says. Adds a whole bunch of cool options for the Minimal theme, including color schemes, typography, nicer icons, turning some stuff on and off, etc.
• Style Settings – this one provides a way for themes and other plugins to make it easy to add options for visual styling. It can get pretty in depth, but it's nice to have available.
• Hider – gives you more options to turn interface elements on and off. I turn off the entire title bar to get into a frameless mode, the vault name, and scrollbars, etc.
• Icon Folder – let's you add nice, monochrome icons to the folders in the file browser sidebar. Lots of folks use emoji, but they're too garish for me. I mostly use the remix icons, and I really like the extra scannability and personality they give.

I have settled on the Things color scheme in dark mode because dark mode is objectively best.

Here's a screenshot of my setup as I'm authoring this post. Inception shit.

Ok, that's probably enough. I'll get into more stuff next issue.

Wearing

Iron Heart Ultra Heavy Flannel Shirt

All right, so I live in Portland. Yes, flannels, plaid, beanies, lumbersexuals, etc. Get it out of your system now.

All done?

Ok, cool. With that out of the way, these things kick serious ass. I got one on a big sale a couple years ago, and I love it so much. It's THICC. It has cowboy snaps instead of fiddly buttons for easy on/off. And the inside is brushed to make it super soft. And did I mention it's thicc as hell?

Even on sale it was still stupid expensive, but I'll have this thing for the rest of my life. Highly recommended.

Listening to

8-bit Metallica – say what you want about Metallica, but The Big 3 albums will always rule. These are pretty much perfect translations to 8-bit chiptune style. The only inaccuracy is that Lars's drums are in perfect time.

Emberthrone video – I've been playing music with a couple dudes recently and Monte, the bass player, also sings for a Real Metal Band called Emberthrone. They just dropped the first song and it crushes.

Seeing

No shows this last week, but I'm gonna see Bongzilla, Zeke, and Lord Dying next week. I'm stoked to see Lord Dying again. Their last album continues to be one of my faves, and they're local Portland boyz.

Drawing

Here's another drawing I did few weeks back. I need to get back on the wagon and get some new ones done.

Laughing at

Learning about

The Cube Rule of Food Identification

Something to think about...

Watching

Baker Street – great sax riff, or greatest sax riff?

• Kids doing Baker Street
• Baker Street Saxophone Event - Paisley 2021
• Gerry Rafferty- "Baker Street" LIVE 1978

Dennis Chambers plays a tool song after hearing it once without drums – this is absolutely mind blowing. What a master.

Heely King – you may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

— Toby

Shit I'm...

Reading

Our Misguided Obsession with Twitter

Cal Newport, Thought Leader extraordinaire, doing a victory lap on his claim that he's never even had a Twitter account. But, that's a pretty justifiable boast at this point, seeing that it's become a hellsite dominated by a bunch of shitheads.

I, along with a bunch of people I still call friends, were on there super early. January 2007, to be exact. I'm user #616,673 out of however many billions of accounts have been created at this point. It used to be a pretty fun place to just be a nerd and meet folks from all over the world with similar interests. I used to go to Ruby meetups at the Twitter office back in 2007/2008 when none of the Twitter employees could even participate because they were too busy putting out database fires. It's not an exaggeration to say being on Twitter that early on largely impacted the trajectory of my life. I met lots of cool, smart folks who I would have never met otherwise. I pretty much worked at Simple because of Twitter.

But once it started hitting critical mass, it got to be pretty unhealthy for me. I mentioned in a previous issue that I got into a pretty bad cycle of searching twitter for mentions of the product I was building at Simple, naturally honing in on the minority of negative comments. It became the first mass market platform for people to just talk shit under the protection of relative anonymity. It mostly took moving on to a different job that I didn't help directly build to extricate myself from it.

I still used it to keep track of friends and get links and whatnot. But then, as Newport puts it...

The original users of the platform, attracted by the optimistic appeal of sharing and discovery, began to flee, leaving behind a more radicalized band of keyboard warriors.

I definitely consider myself one of the "original users" of the platform. I loved the sharing and discovery. And, I have sense fled.

I'll still browse it every once in a while to see if I can capture a few interesting nuggets, but, for the most part, it's a tire fire. Some folks say you can still derive a lot of value if you are diligent about curating your lists, blocking people judiciously, etc. But after the whole Trump thing, and now the Musk crap... it's just not worth putting any time into.

I've found myself going back to the old stuff for the most part. Those friends I made on Twitter are now mostly in private group texts and Slacks/Discords. I subscribe to email newsletters and now, of course, author one (👋🏼). RSS is back and better than ever, even though I replaced it with Twitter and even built a whole product around that 12 years ago. But now, with services like Readwise Reader, Feedbin, and apps like Reeder, it's a really nice way to aggregate all your interests. And clever services like Mailbrew let you mix and match a whole bunch of stuff that gets delivered to you every day via email.

So, anyways... this article articulates a lot of the underlying reasons why Twitter just kinda sucks these days and why it's bad for your health. It was fun while it lasted, but, like so many other things, it's probably just time to admit defeat and let the loud assholes have it. Or, move to TRUTH SOCIAL lol.

Using

Hey

So if you're reading this, you may have noticed I use Hey.com to publish it. However, it's not really a newsletter/blog publishing platform... that's kind of a byproduct of its main focus — email.

First off, a disclaimer. Yeah, I know, the 37signals/Basecamp dudes are fuckin' douchey. They've become ultra rich tech dudes pretty much by telling the world they've figured everything out and proselytizing their doctrine to anyone who will listen. They drive race cars and Well Actually... everyone. Watching the whole company implode after decades of that was disappointing, but also kinda delicious.

Aside from that, they've been making products since like 2004. They kinda invented the whole modern SaaS thing with Basecamp and Rails. Basecamp is decent, I used it a few times back in the day for project management. Rails, as much as its maligned these days, is still probably what I'd build a new app in if it came down to it. In fact, I'm currently employed thanks to Rails.

They came out with an email service a couple years ago called Hey. Basecamp had a "Hey" section that was their cutesy name for notifications etc, and I guess they brought it over to name a full product. Sounds like they spent a shit ton of money on the hey.com domain, even though they used to preach that it didn't matter. Either way, Basecamp had been heavily email based for the last 18 years, so I figured they knew a bit about managing email (which is a damn nightmare). I already had a Fastmail account (referral for 10% off if you're interested), which is actually super nice, but their approach of trying to be Normal Email as much as possible never really grabbed me. And I of course have had Gmail since like 2004 or whenever, but I'd rather use something by douchey loudmouths running a relatively small app than a shitty multinational advertising company.

Anyways, Hey has some novel ideas. The main premise is that any email that arrives gets put into a screener where you can choose to allow that address to email you or not. If you choose to screen them out, any subsequent messages from them get sequestered into its own section. Not quite a spam folder, but similar. Makes it pretty easy to sign up for stuff with your regular address when you know you'll have some control over it.

If you choose to allow it, you can specify if you want it to go to the "Imbox" (IMportant Inbox or something like that... yeah, I know 😑), the Newsfeed, or the Paper Trail. Imbox has an interesting behavior in that reading a message puts the thread into a "previously seen" section automatically. It's available on the main screen, but it's below the unread stuff. You can even choose to put a picture over the previously seen section so it doesn't distract you. It's kinda nice just having the stuff go away while still being easily accessible.

The Newsfeed is optimized for the email newsletter renaissance, with all the stuff that lands in there as a continuous feed where you can choose to read them inline. It's pretty nice, but now that I'm in the Readwise Reader beta (I wrote about it in Issue 2), I just choose to have newsletter go directly there, or I forward them in. It's still a nice feature for the way folks actually use email these days.

And the paper trail is a place to send email receipts for the most part. Lots of email addresses just send you transactional emails, and the paper trail is a pretty good place for them to go.

You can mark any message as "set aside" to refer to later, or to "reply later". Lots of email apps have a snooze functionality that will take them out of the inbox and bring them back later, but these keep them available from the main page in a little stack. Again, people have been doing the "set aside" with flags or labels and a saved search, and reply later with similar strategies or snoozing, but these are two features that are just directly addressing the normal flow.

There's a lot of other features, but I don't make much use of them. The basic workflow and features pretty much cover everything I need for personal email these days.

Except, of course, for the Hey World feature. When they first came out with it, I didn't really think much of it. Kinda seemed like an "easy" thing for them to do with the Hey foundation, and it just felt like another way for them to spout off their self-important diatribes. I mostly ignored it, but when I took the newsletter writing class with Bob Doto, it occurred to me that I should just use it instead of "researching" a bunch of options. I'm fully aware that researching is just procrastination, and the whole point of the newsletter class was to actually publish something.

So, yeah. The Hey World thing is just good enough that it's Fine™, at least to start. And it's included with the account I'm already paying for. Realistically, it's probably good enough that I should never really have to think about it because that's a waste of time. Which I guess is kind of the point. All you really do is send an email to world@hey.com and it creates a simple page and gives you the option to send it to your list. That's pretty much it. No templates, no options, no metrics. It's probably for the best. The last thing I need is obsessing over open rates and shit.

Finally, I bought the takeo.news domain and just forwarded it to the world.hey.com/takeo URL and called it a day.

Some folks have mentioned they don't actually get the emails delivered. Man, email sucks. I guess make sure you opt in on the verification email they send you, and mark it as not spam if it happens to get sent there. Or just subscribe to the RSS feed like a G.

Wearing

Waxed cotton parka by Bridge and Burn, a local Portland brand. I love this thing. I got it for Christmas a couple years ago and it's been great. It's warm, has a hood, lots of pockets, and the waxed brown fabric is good in the rain and is getting a nice patina. And since it's waxed, I can rewax it next winter. I don't think they're available anymore, though.

Listening to

Ghoulies Soundtrack — I was watching a review of a comic book and the reviewer wasn't very impressed with it, but he mentioned that the Ghoulies soundtrack would be the perfect accompaniment to it. I love me some old spooky movie soundtracks, and this is no exception. I mean, look at that cover.

Seeing

No shows this last week, but a few years ago I saw Ramprasad open for Cult Leader at Tonic Lounge (a rad bar venue here in Portland that had tons of good metal shows and went through a whole bunch of shit before being bulldozed for more condos or something).

I was there to see Cult Leader, but Ramprasad was easily the highlight of the night for me. Local boys playing killer proggy/sludgy instrumental stuff. Tsuris – was one of my top albums of 2019 and I still listen to it all the time. "Controlling Tides" is my favorite from it and has one of those riffs I wish I wrote.

Cooking

49er Flapjacks — if you've ever been to the Original Pancake House you might know how much these rule. Thin, gooey, delicious. I suppose they're basically crepes. If you have a 10" carbon steel pan, you're good to go.

Drawing

Didn't get any new drawings done this last week, but here's one I did a few weeks ago:

Laughing at

Learning about

The 20/20 Just In Case Rule

I know it's a dad trope, but I, like lots of folks, have always had the Just In Case collection of computer cables. Admittedly, they have come in handy a few times over the decades of keeping them around. But, this idea of getting rid of anything that you can replace in less than 20 minutes for less than $20 makes even more sense.

Anything we get rid of that we truly need, we can replace for less than $20 in less than 20 minutes from our current location. Thus far, this hypothesis has become a theory that has held true 100% of the time. Although we’ve rarely had to replace a just-in-case item (fewer than five times for the two of us combined), we’ve never had to pay more than $20 or go more than 20 minutes out of our way to replace the item. This theory likely works 99% of the time for 99% of all items and 99% of all people—including you.

Watching

How did this guy not win

— Toby

I haven't seen most of my family for three years now because of covid and all that. It sucks. I'm originally form southern california, have a pretty huge family, and am the only one who has moved away. Portland isn't that far, but it's far enough that it means we don't see each other often. Throw in a pandemic and vaccinations and all that and it makes things 10 times harder.

My brother recently bought some property in southern Utah, in Kanab to be precise. I've never really been to see any of the cool stuff down there. He told me a while back that they were going to be going to an Airbnb with his family and my mom and dad and that we should try to come out. The kiddos are in school and I planned on driving anyways, so this was destined to be a solo trip. No way was I going to try to take a kid on a 24 hour cannonball run.

I made the drive, leaving this last Tuesday at around noon. After hitting up a ton of superchargers on the way and taking a 3 hour nap from like 2-5am somewhere in Idaho, I got there around 12:30. My parents didn't know I was going, so it was a really fun surprise.

We had a great time going out and doing all the rad stuff southern Utah has to offer. Off-roading, caves, sand dunes, slot canyons. It was awesome to see my brother and sister in law, my little nephews who call me Uncle Slime, and, of course, my parents. It was a pretty great Mother's Day. Can't wait to go back with the whole fam.

Shit I'm...

Reading

The Sandman I and II Audiobooks

Yeah yeah, audiobooks aren't really reading, and this is a comic book (ackshully, it's graphic novel 🤓), but I drove about 40 hours this week going from Portland to Kanab, UT and back, and this was perfect for the drive.

I didn't really know anything about the Sandman series, but I'd always heard good things from back in the day, and it seemed like it had a cool goth vibe. I had an Audible membership for a couple years where you get 12 credits per year to get any of their audiobooks. Seems easy, but it always ended up being one of those things where I didn't want to "waste" the credits and I overthought my selections until it got to the point where I had to use up like 7 credits in 2 days before they expired. That's what happened last year, and among a bunch of other random stuff, I snagged the 2 Sandman productions they did.

Turns out they rule.

When I set out on the first leg of the trip to Utah I put on the Dune audiobook that I had grabbed a while back. I tried getting into it a couple times while taking walks but I never got past the first 30 minutes or so. I don't know, something about it just kinda bugged me. It felt... kinda cheesy? But, it's supposed to be great and I wanted to read/listen to the book before seeing the movie. This trip felt like It Was Time.

I couldn't get past the first 30 minutes again.

I know, I'm probably just not sophisticated/smart enough to get it, but I tried. Maybe someday.

So, I put on the Sandman stuff instead. They're long as hell too, with series I clocking in at 11 hours, and series II at almost 14 hours. Enough to fill up a lot of the drive.

The production is pretty great. I think Audible was trying to make this one of their flagship exclusive productions, and they went all out. Neil Gaiman narrates it himself, and there's a huge cast of voice actors for all the characters. And there are lots of characters. The stories are really fun, intertwined, and varied enough to not get monotonous. The voice actors are laying it on pretty thick, but I think it works. It's much more like an old radio serial than something like Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter. Some people complain about it in the reviews, but they're probably boring pedants.

If you have 25 hours to kill, you could do a lot worse than these.

Using

Convusic — I'm an Apple Music user. I have the whole Apple one bundle thing, and it's a pretty good deal. It works on my HomePods, is native to my devices, works great in CarPlay, etc. etc. Also, for whatever reason, a lot of my close friends use it as well, which means we can easily share links and I get to discover new stuff by seeing what they've been listening to.

Of course, though, this is an anomaly and everyone else in the world uses Spotify for whatever reason. I've never forgiven Spotify for putting Rdio out of business even though it was vastly superior, and for not supporting saving full albums to your library without making playlists out of them. Come on, man.

Yeah, I know it hasn't been like that for years, and their music discovery playlist thing is "better" etc. I don't like it.

Thankfully something like Convusic exists. It's a Safari extension (yeah, I also use Safari, fuck Chrome). It's an extension that lets you register what your preferred music streaming service is and then it translates links to crappy services to the one you like. Now I can click on music links in messages or slack or wherever and get forwarded to the equivalent on Apple Music instead of that open.spotify.com junk.

Wearing

House pants

One of the cool things about doing the newsletter is hearing from people I haven't heard from in ages. One such example is an email I received with a subject of "House Pants". I'd never really given much thought to sweats, etc that we've all been wearing as full time remote workers now, but it's a great point. I have House Shoes, I should have House Pants.

Personally, I've been rocking some Icebreaker pants and some made by MeUndies. The Icebreakers are nice. As usual, they're primarily merino wool, soft on the inside, and well made. I actually wore them on my drive to and from Utah rather than sitting in jeans for that long, and I actually ventured into restaurants and shops in them. I wouldn't be too comfortable doing that in regular sweats, but these were passable.

The MeUndies ones are interesting. They're the company with all those bad podcast commercials, which made me never really consider them. But I heard good things about the modal material, so I gave it a shot. The pants are super soft and floppy. They're really nice for lounging around the house. I wouldn't wear them outside though.

And the ones Kyle recommended in the House Pants email:

While we’re still on the subject of old man comforts, if you haven’t gotten into house pants yet, I absolutely recommend the Rhone Spar Jogger.

Now that I'm thinking about House Pants as a category, I will likely give those a try as well.

Listening to

Dr. Dre Beats but they're MEDIEVAL

My friend Ted sent this to me a week or two ago and I've been listening to it non-stop. Does what it says on the tin — Dre beats but medieval. Lutes and flutes and zithers and shit. It works. My favorites are probably No Diggity and Gin 'n Juice feat. Sneuppe Thee Hound.

Seeing

Mastodon, Opeth, Khemmis

Mastodon's bass player went into covid a mild mannered metal guy and came out as Gandalf the White.

As soon as I saw that Opeth was touring I bought tickets. They've been one of my favorite bands for a long time now, and they're pretty great live. It was really weird that they were playing at the Keller Auditorium. I think that's where they've been doing Hamilton? But whatever, I guess if they can fill it with this tour, cool. Very classy.

Khemmis was pretty good. They do some doomy power metal type stuff. The singer guy had a Spinal Tap haircut. At one point he said "WE'RE KHEMMIS FROM DEN..." and I was hoping for Denmark or something cool, but it was just "VER, COLORADO."

Opeth ruled. I'm a sucker for the ridiculous 70s prog stuff, but I'll always love their older death metal cookie monster vocals stuff. Thankfully they're playing old stuff live again. They ended on a massive riff played for like 8 minutes straight, which is how every metal set should end.

Mastodon headlined. I didn't realize how big they were now I guess. I was apprehensive because out of the 8 or 9 times I've seen them over the years they've almost never actually sounded good. I really like their stuff, but it's never translated well live for me. My band opened for them and High on Fire back in like 2003 where we all played to like 30 people, and they ruled back then. They also had a Mastodong shirt for sale that I guess I could have sold for $80 these days. But seeing them at various places like opening for Dethklok or headlining at the Roseland convinced me they couldn't really pull it off live once they started doing the cleaner vocals and concept albums.

But, they pulled it off pretty well at this show. I could actually understand what they were playing and the vocals were pretty good. However, at one point the sound started glitching out. It sounded like when an MP3 is playing and Winamp runs out of CPU. They took a brief break claiming there was an electrical outage that needed to be repaired, but I suspect they may be Metal Vanilli.

Drawing

Another Joseph Wyman tintype photo. This one was super hard and I still don't really like it. Oh well. I posted an initial version because I just wanted to be done with it, and I got some feedback that helped me figure out what wasn't sitting right. So I went back and did a bunch of revisions. It made it better, but not really how I wanted it. Also, when it's full size shrunk down it gets super distorted looking, so here's a detail section.

Learning about

The Feynman Technique

Basically, this is learning by teaching. One of those things that you kind of intuitively stumble across, but having it laid out as a methodology is pretty cool. Explain like I'm five, rubber ducking, public speaking, etc. all seem relatively similar too.

Portland, OR – Portland: ⛅️ +60°F

Shit I'm...

Update: Jen's 40th birthday was awesome! Here's me dressed up as a wish.com interview with a vampire type of thing:

And here's Jen looking fabulous as a moon goddess:

Reading

Personal Socrates – I heard about this from the Bookworm podcast. I was intrigued as it seemed to present an interesting way of thinking about things by providing profiles of folks and then asking relatively simple, yet difficult-to-answer, questions. The format of the book is kinda unique, and I bought the hardcover purposefully to get the Full Experience. It's published by Baron Fig, which makes a whole bunch of nice journals and pens and whatnot. The podcast mentioned that the hardcover version had a cool feature where each segment's right hand page indicated how many pages were left. That's something I love about reading on the Kindle, and it works well in a physical copy as well. In addition to the niceties of the design, it also comes in a hardcover sleeve that also includes a bookmark.

The book isn't a linear thing, it's supposed to be a choose your own adventure type of thing where you can look at the section topics and read whatever resonates with you at the moment. Personally, I've been just reading them one after the other. Each section is really short, usually 3-5 pages, and start with a bullet list of facts about the person the section is about. Then there's a short essay about the person and their experiences and a general question that is intended to get you thinking about how you'd answer it in your own life. It's pretty neat.

Using

Concepts – as mentioned in the last issue, I've been checking out a bunch of drawing/painting apps for the ipad and pencil. While Procreate is definitely the king of the hill when it comes to "natural" media emulation and community, Concepts is worth a look and has some really nice advantages.

First off, it's a vector based app as opposed to pretty much every other painting/sketching app being raster. Event though it's vector, it does an amazing job of emulating natural media, which is pretty wild. It doesn't have quite the same feel as something like Procreate, especially when it comes to things like blending and watercolor styles, but for pencil and ink sketching it's pretty great.

Being vector comes with some pretty subtle but powerful benefits. First off, you don't really have to worry about the size of things since vectors are inherently scalable. One of the things I don't particularly like about using Procreate after having started with Concepts is the whole need to have to think about what size canvas you want, and what resolution it should be. Having worked pretty much exclusively on building for the web the last 20 years or so, that's not really something my brain has had to calculate for a long time. It's not really that big of a deal, but since I'm using these apps to actually draw things like portraits and whatnot, there's a chance I might actually want to... print them out 😮 When printing gets involved, then you really have to think about resolution and size and all that.

Along those lines, while Procreate starts out any project with selecting a canvas size and resolution, Concepts has an infinite canvas, which means there's just a viewport that you can draw on and then simply drag it over to draw some more next to it, pretty much as much as you want. This is pretty freeing. I've been using apps like Fireworks, Sketch, and, most recently, Figma to design web app interfaces. All of them have an infinite canvas paradigm as well, where you can have as many screens within the canvas as you want (as well as multiple pages of infinite canvas), and I've taken advantage of that to a somewhat absurd degree. For me, designing things is an exercise in constant iteration, making something I'm somewhat happy with and then duplicating it to make some tweaks and improvements over and over and over. It's not uncommon for me to have a file that has hundreds of variations on one canvas. Heres' an actual image of me designing a website:

![[Pasted image 20220502075119.png]]

Having an infinite canvas in a drawing app is pretty neat, and the vector aspect has some other really cool advantages as well, like being able to just select strokes and delete or resize them without losing quality. It's also got some weirdness as well, like "erasing" actually just masking the shapes, and a little bit of uncanny valley syndrome when it comes to the natural media. But, it's also super great if you're doing more industrial, landscape, or product design oriented stuff.

It also has a pretty unique UI that is optimized for stylus interaction that I miss whenever I use a different app, and a cool color palette system based on those expensive COPIC markers.

Wearing

Heavy ass jeans. Growing up we were pretty damn poor. Most of my childhood, my jeans were of the Toughskins variety if I was lucky, but usually whatever they had at Kmart or thrift stores. In my teens I did the whole ridiculously baggy pants thing when I skated, and that usually meant getting one or two pairs and wearing them every day. As I got older I maybe got stock Levis or Gap jeans. They were always pretty thin and distressed and "relaxed" fit or whatever. I didn't really care or know any difference.

When I got into my late 30s I decided to maybe think about the clothes I bought a little bit. I had a bit more money, and wanted something higher quality that would last. The whole workwear thing was big and jeans were a Big Thing. I dipped my toes into the water by buying some that cost over $100, which freaked me out. I loved them. The quality was really apparent, they fit way better, and they were made in America 🦅. I was hooked.

So after wearing that first pair to death, I got a pair that was made in Japan (where they do everything better) that were a bit heavier. Something like 17oz instead of 14oz. I liked these even more. Wore the shit out of them. Had to buy a new pair.

I decided to try out the big dogs — the 21 Ouncers. They're absurdly thick, stiff, and heavy. When you first get them they're downright silly. But, living in Portland, and growing up mostly wearing pants or jeans even when it was hot socal weather, they're just right. Like lots of things that are worth it, they have an uncomfortable breaking in period where you question if it's worth it. But once they break in and conform to your body, they soften up and feel like butter. They're thick enough that they almost take on a flannel type of texture when they loosen up. And, of course, they last a long time since they're so well made. They're expensive, but capable of being worn pretty much every day for super long stretches of time, and when they inevitably get a crotch blowout or whatever, they're able to be repaired and worn for another long stretch of time.

It took me almost 40 years to learn, but yeah, I guess paying a bit more for better stuff is pretty worth it.

Automating

As I've been trying to do the interstitial journaling throughout the day, I've landed on a system that seems ok for now. Like I mentioned before, I use Obsidian for all my writing and notes, which I really love. But, as a cross platform Electron app made by two people, it's not super native feeling on a mac. With the right themes and plugins I've been able to make it feel really great. But, it's still pretty much a single window to type into. After years of using apps like Things that are super tightly integrated into macOS and have quick entry palettes that an be accessed from anywhere, I really wished Obsidian had something like that so I could quickly send off whatever was on my mind at that time and log it into my daily notes page with a timestamp. Yes, I could switch over to Obsidian relatively easily and type it in and then switch back to whatever I was doing, but that really takes me out of the flow and feels kind of counter to the whole idea of interstitial journaling. It's just enough friction that it would prevent me from doing it at all.

So, I cobbled something together with Drafts and the advanced URI Obsidian plugin. Essentially, all I do is use the cmd-shift-2 quick entry window command for Drafts, which brings up a small window that I can type some markdown into when I want to log something, and then hit cmd-enter to send it off to the Drafts inbox. Then I occasionally go to the Drafts window to see what I've logged and then send it off to my Obsidian daily note with a quick action that puts the content of the draft as a timestamped bullet item under a "Rapid Log" header on my daily notes page (get the action here).

It's not perfect, but it works. I'll probably try doing it with Raycast at some point too for even faster entry and directly sending it to Obsidian without having to process it later, but this is pretty ok for now.

Listening to

Robert Bray on the "Scream Therapy" podcast — the drummer for The Locust (Gabe Serbian) passed away a few days ago. I've never really been into The Locust. I think I was at their first show back in like 1994 at Cafe Mesotopamia. That's when Dylan from Struggle was in the band, and they had some long hair singing. It was pretty much a Crossed Out tribute at that point and they weren't wearing costumes and shit. Anyways, Bobby has always played guitar for them. While I was looking around for stuff on them after learning Gabe died I came across this podcast episode he was a guest on. I've only listened to this episode, but it's a really interesting premise of "scream therapy" wherein the act of screaming is a form of getting your anger and frustrations out.

I suppose it's just primal scream stuff, but I never really thought about it in that way much. Like Bobby, I've been in bands that scream for vocals since the mid 90s. It just works with the style of music we always played. Beyond that, though, it's always been cathartic. Screaming your head off to ultra heavy, pissed off music has always felt natural.

I was always a pretty tightly wound kid. First born of my entire generation of cousins within an evangelical Mexican family, I always had the feeling of responsibility, of being a Good Kid. This of course led to me being straight edge because it mixed being a Good Kid who doesn't do drugs with heavy music, which I loved since I first heard Metallica in the late 80s.

And a key component of the straight edge music was screaming.

Well, I suppose much of the early days of straight edge hardcore had vocals more along the lines of "aggressively yelling," but as things got more evolved and extreme, much of the hardcore scene embraced straight up screaming. Rorschach, who is probably my favorite hardcore band of all time, broke things wide open. When I first dropped the needle on their Protestant album and heard Mandible, everything clicked. This is what I'd been looking for.

Now, most folks will listen to that song and be like what the fuck is this guy screaming about and why is the music so ugly sounding? In fact, a Rorschach song was used in Zero Dark Thirty in a scene where they were torturing someone. To me, though, it's beautiful. Instead of making me angry or aggressive, it energizes me. I could listen to this stuff pretty much any time of day and be into it.

My first Real Band was called Enewetak and we definitely screamed. I even did some backup screams in a few songs, and even did the main vocals on one. I loved it. There was nothing more energizing and liberating than just playing extremely loud and ugly music while we screamed our fucking heads off. And while most folks would assume the shows were super violent and everyone involved was aggressive, it was pretty much the exact opposite. We played shows in tiny coffee shop like venues while people stood around in baggy pants and oversized shirts with their backback on, nodding their heads up and down. Most of the lyrics were entered around vegetarianism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism, etc.

So yeah. Life is full of paradoxes I guess. Screaming your damn head off as therapy. The shit works.

Cooking

This is another dish I made during that Middle Eastern dinner party we had a while back, and it's super good. It's deceptively simple, as it's just sweet potatoes with garlic sauce, but it's super good.

Seeing

Like I mentioned in the last issue, no shows coming up until the Opeth and Mastodon show next week. But, I thought I'd go through the archives and see the last show photos I had before the Unprecedented Times of Covid-19. I went to see Blackwater Holylight, Earthless, and Yob show at Bossanova Ballroom in December 2019. It was pretty awesome, of course.

![[4DEDA7F5-4ED5-4BCE-A464-8FFDC2D6DA92_1_105_c.jpeg]]

And then I saw Thrice at Roseland on Jan 24, 2020. I guess that was probably the last show I saw before ... well, you know.

![[9FC7B4B3-227F-4294-8F2F-A189E8CA36A8_1_105_c.jpeg]]

I'm going to Opeth and Mastodon on Tuesday, so I'll have a writeup in the next issue!

Drawing

![[AF9EE485-DFB4-45CB-9005-6F4EE3E6CA82_1_102_o.jpeg]]

I came across a photographer names Joseph Wyman and instantly fell in love with his work. I'm still getting used to drawing portraits, and high contrast black and white photos are the best for practicing at this stage since it makes the image really pop. He does old school tintype portraits, and they're all beautiful. I drew this dude with a huge beard and I'm really happy with how it turned out. I'll definitely be drawing more of his stuff.

Laughing at

![[D61BFFB3-477D-4888-BFF9-14C8FB1FD752_1_105_c.jpeg]]

Learning about

The Paper app that was (I think) the first really nice natural media style drawing app for the iPad turned 10 years old, and one of the founders wrote a pretty neat history of how it came together.

Watching

Adriano Celentano - Prisencolinensinainciusol – some of you may know that I have a complete inability to understand lyrics when listening to songs with vocals. Like, I can't understand them at all. I remember being at work when we were trying to determine the most depressing album of all time and someone nominated Beck's Sea Change. I listened to it and was like what the hell, this isn't depressing at all, it just sounds like Beck. And someone was like "but didn't you listen to the lyrics?" and I was like "Ohhhhh." Vocals are pretty much just another instrument in the soundscape for me, I just can't discern what they're actually saying. Maybe I have some sort of auditory processing disorder or something, I dunno. But either way, I got a link to this video from Bob Doto's High Pony newsletter and I was shocked that I could finally explain to people how all music sounds to me. Also, the song slaps.

Portland, OR – Portland: ☀️ +41°F

Also, today is my wife's 40th birthday!! I'm extremely lucky to have her in my life, and I love her with all my heart. We're throwing a big party tomorrow to make up for her 10th birthday 30 years ago that no one showed up to because of the LA riots. Here she is looking super beautiful and cute as heck in her EGL dress while holding a fake raven:

Shit I'm...

Reading

Orbiting the Giant Hairball

(This turned out much longer than I anticipated, but hopefully you find it worthwhile. Take a seat as Grandpa Toby spins a yarn.)

My current job at Zendesk is kinda unique. I've been there around six and a half years, which is the longest I've ever been at one place. I was originally hired on due to some interesting circumstances. Back in 2008 or so, I had a side project app I had made called Stafftool that was a web based product for managing churches and non-profits. It was pretty wild. I had been into Ruby on Rails for a year or two at that point and wanted to make something, and when I saw how inefficient the church I played drums at was with scheduling and communicating, I thought "I could fix this with technology." So I made an app that did calendaring, membership management, group communication, and even donation tracking. I definitely went overboard, but it was super fun and one of those things were I pretty much became obsessed with making it. So many ideas and interface experiments to try out, and I thought I might actually pull off doing this as a full time job at some point. Turns out that takes knowing how to actually sell something, though. Whoops.

Anyways, I didn't want to have all the support requests and bug reports go into my personal email, and I wanted one of those cool "feedback" tabs on the side. Instead of making all that stuff myself, I initially got GetSatisfaction. They turned out to be this bizarre protection racket thing for support, kinda like Yelp is for reviews. "Everyone is coming to this weird support portal thing thinking it's the official support place, it'd be a shame if people got bad support here." Nah. So one day I saw an ad on Daring Fireball for Zendesk and I signed up.

I got it all set up and was happily using it for my customers. Then I got an email from the Zendesk founder asking for some feedback. Turns out I was the only person using it by myself, which confused them since the whole point was using it as a support team. This led to a lot of emails and a kind of friendship around us both running a couple of fledgling Rails SAAS apps. They said they really liked my app, I gave them some quotes for their promo sheets, and they even asked me if I would go work for them. They had just moved to Boston from Copenhagen at the time, and I had no interest in moving there, so I passed.

At the time I was in SF working at Powerset, doing Stafftool on the side, usually working on it from like 8pm-2am. Eventually, Zendesk moved their headquarters into a building right down the street from our apartment. The Zendesk folks contacted me to let me know and invited me to their office warming party that the Tamale Lady (RIP) was catering. Here's a pic of me holding Pea (who's now 14) at it:

Not too long after, Powerset got bought by Microsoft. Those were the bad old Ballmer days and no one wanted to work for them. So, everyone was looking for a new job. I worked with Tom from GitHub at Powerset and almost became one of their first employees when he decided to quit and go full time, but their funding fell through and they could only afford to hire Scott. Damn. Then the Zendesk folks hit me up about working there instead of Microsoft. I told them I was interested, but Microsoft was going to pay a pretty hefty retention bonus if I stayed. They said they couldn't give me a bunch of cash like that, but they could give me a bunch of stock. I was like "why the hell would I care about Zendesk stock" in my head. Whoops. So, like an ass, I stayed at Microsoft.

After a couple years of hating it and learning vim and building laterstars to stay sane, I quit a year early and joined a few friends to help build BankSimple, which went on to become Simple. Being on an amazing founding team and building something that I cared about from the ground up was one of the best professional experiences of my life. I poured my heart and soul into building that shit. I even got to go on a bit of a speaking circuit, traveling all over the world telling people the story of designing it. It was a good time.

But, it had a dark side. My obsession with building stuff got my identity and self-worth a little too wrapped up with this pile of pixels and code. Simple was super overhyped with expectations from nerds that were impossible to meet, but I still ran Twitter searches all the time, ignoring the good stuff and fixating on the negative.

And then, a few years in, our VP of Product quit and I offered to run help product in his absence. One of the pieces of advice he gave me before leaving was to not join the Executive Leadership Team because you spent all your time in meetings that were essentially therapy sessions, and no time actually thinking about, let alone building, product. So I took his advice. I later realized that that all but guaranteed me not being taken seriously.

Eventually, a new VP of Product was hired. No one really understood the reasons for hiring them, but they were married to the CEO's friend, and, well, sometimes that's just how it goes. It turned out that we absolutely hated each other. They were 100% Business™, saying shit like "the Product org needs to assert our place and authority in the company" and I was (naively) 100% idealistic about the product, replying "uh, what about building good stuff for our customers," which went over like a lead balloon. I still loved the product and company, but it was clear this wasn't going to work out. I was super stressed and despondent over the turn of events.

One day I was at home sitting on the couch watching TV when all of the sudden I thought I was having a heart attack. My chest hurt like hell, feeling super tight, and I didn't know what the heck was going on. I went into urgent care and it turned out I had shingles on the entire left side of my body. Not cool.

Not long after, I had a meeting with the CEO where I kind of broke down about things. He told me I should take some time off, and I reluctantly agreed. My new boss, the VP of product they had just hired, told me there was "no shame in moving on from things" or some shit like that. I took a month or so off, and I realized I didn't actually need to work there anymore. It was kind of a revelation after thinking I'd be there for at least 10 years. I resigned before having another job lined up. Simple was super gracious and gave me a nice going away send off and a few weeks of pay.

By chance, Mikkel from Zendesk emailed me asking what I was up to while I was unemployed. One thing led to another, and I ended up finally working for them. They originally wanted to see if I'd be interested in moving back to SF to manage the product design org. After a polite "lol hell no am I moving back to SF," someone mentioned talking to Alexander, one of the co-founders, who had a side project he'd been working on. I came on board to work with him on that. Luckily, he said I should just stay up in Portland and build a small team here to stay away from the "enterprise bullshit." Little did I know this would be a pretty pivotal moment.

Ok, I promise this all ties into the book. That decision to let us be a "separate" team set the stage for this whole phase of my career. Some amazing Zendesk engineers were already working on it, and I hired a few more great folks and we worked on the project in relative peace. I still had to give status updates and at one point was made a General Manager when the company split things into product lines, but for the most part we were kinda living the "startup within a big company" lifestyle. I was doing all the design work myself, all the product stuff, talking to customers, putting decks together, and my team was a self-contained unit of engineers, whereas the rest of the company operated in a much more vertically siloed manner. Engineers reported up to the engineering org, designers were part of a completely separate org, and product was it's own thing as well.

We have always been viewed as the Weird Team up in Portland doing who-knows-what. For a long time we had the protection of the co-founder, but like most co-founder side projects, it ended up in failure. Luckily, instead of canning us all and calling it a day, the head of product told us to think of something else to work on that would contribute to the main product's bottom line. We were on the hook for $1M in recurring revenue within a year.

We ended up building a an add-on product that took some of the learning from the failed side project and ended up generating something like $3M that first year. We earned a little bit of capital by pulling that off, and for the next few years were pretty much left alone to keep growing that product. By last count, it was up to around $38M.

Ok, so that was pretty great! We pulled it off! But, along the way, there's been a constant tension in the back of my mind about My Career Path. In 6 years I've gotten one promotion, and that was kind of a perfunctory thing around the whole GM structure as far as I know. My team has hovered around ~5 people the whole time, while most of my peers have put tons of effort into growing their team and, by extension, influence. I'm quite a bit older than most of my peers, and many of them have "caught up" to my equivalent position while I've, by most accounts, stagnated.

And you know what? I'm kind of fine with it.

By all accounts, I have carved out a pretty incredible life. Relative autonomy at work, an amazing family, more money than I ever dreamed of having when I was younger. But more importantly, I've mostly managed to separate my identity and self-worth from my job. Sure, I like it, and I get satisfaction from making things and having a great team. But I've made peace with a less traditional career path than a normal corporate ladder climb, and have instead made it my goal to keep the good thing we've got going as long as we can, while shielding my crew from the Enterprise Bullshit.

And that's what this book is about.

While talking to a colleague who recently came back to the company after taking a year off to be unemployed and just live, we went pretty deep into our whole situation. He asked if I had read Orbiting the Giant Hairball. I said I hadn't, and I ordered it as soon as I got home that night. They didn't have a kindle version at the time (they do now, apparently) so I ordered the hardcover. I'm super glad I did. I'm a die hard ebook reader, dating back to reading shit on my Palm Pilot in the early 2000s, but this is definitely a book worth having a physical copy. A perfect small size and peppered with tons of whimsical full color illustrations throughout the funky layout, it's more like a poetry book than a Serious Business Book.

I dove in and was immediately struck by how much I related to everything he was saying. As proof that there's truly nothing new under the sun, this book was written in the 90s by a total hippy dude who worked at Hallmark for 30 years. On paper, that type of job couldn't be further from a person working a 2022 tech job, and yet it's all the same shit. All of it.

The tl;dr of the book is right there in the title. Early on he makes the analogy that companies of any size eventually turn into a giant tangled ball of hair, twisted around themselves to try to stick to and recreate any successes they've had in the past. More people get added to the mix in the name of growth, and just add more hair to the ball. And, like any hairball, the bigger it gets, the grosser it is.

And his solution is to extricate yourself from that hairball and orbit around it, finding the things that you connect with most that align with the organization's goals, but don't require you to get deep into the muck.

Without knowing it, I had been blindly trying to do what he laid out in the book, but without the 30 years of hindsight to articulate it. The thing that's funny is that I now have a sense of comfort in knowing that this is Just The Way Things Are for the most part. Businesses gonna business, humans gonna human. Same shit, different day.

I've recommended the book to a few friends over the past month or so when I see them going through a similar arc. I was recently talking to a younger colleague at work who's partnered up with my team on a relatively juicy project. It's gone through the full course of corporate shenanigans, and is a prime example of the whole hairball thing in real time. As we were talking, I explained how I have pretty much been the same level with the same sized team for six and a half years, and they were wondering why I'm still there. And I was like, you know, all things considered, it's a pretty damn good gig. I have a tight knit team who has, for the most part, been with me the entire time, and we are left alone enough that we can do good work that contributes to the company in, in my humble opinion, an outsized manner. I can do a day's work and not have to put in crazy hours or be consumed by it at all times of day. I've witnessed a bunch of colleagues chasing bigger teams and bigger titles, and, you know what? I'm good. If I can keep things going, essentially treating it like a puzzle to figure out how to keep our autonomy while contributing to the ever-growing company, I can't really ask for much more.

I recommended the book to them. A few days later we were chatting and they remarked that, after reading much of the book, everything we were talking about before made a lot more sense. They asked how long ago I read it, and I told them "oh, a month or two" and they were shocked. They were under the impression that I read it a super long time ago and had consciously shaped my whole tenure there trying to accomplish the same arc. But nope, I've just been stumbling along, happening to land on a path very similar to what folks like him figured out countless times before me.

So, yeah. If you've actually read this far and any of that resonated with you, I heartily recommend this book. Attempting any type of orbit can be scary and a bit dangerous, but once you experience the weightlessness of it, there's no going back.

Using

Procreate

When I started drawing again, I tried out a bunch of different apps. I was kinda shocked at how good the whole iPad/Pencil drawing ecosystem is. The main apps I landed on were Concepts, Tayasui Sketch, and Procreate. They're all really great. I'll probably talk about Concepts in the next issue, but Procreate is definitely the Big Dogg. On the surface it seemed pretty standard, not all that different from the others. I remember buying it ages ago when it first came out, but only did a few scribbles. In the intervening 10 years it's become a damn powerhouse that apparently dominates the whole digital art space. It took watching this Procreate for absolute beginners Skillshare class by Molly Suber Thorpe (get both of us a free month of Skillshare here, it's pretty great). Watching this made me realize it's not just a Photoshop clone, but a drawing/painting app built from the ground up for touch interfaces, and it really shows. Tons of thoughtful features and interactions, way more power than I'll ever use, and a vibrant community of people making new classes, brushes, textures, and kits for it. I got the Sketchbook Artist Bundle and it's pretty great. So yeah, if you have any interest in drawing on your iPad, get Procreate (only $10 and no bullshit subscription) and do it!

Readwise Reader

I've been lucky enough to be a beta tester for this, and got damn is it great. I built a read later app back in 2010 called laterstars that was built on top of pulling links out of twitter faves, and Readwise Reader definitely feels like the spiritual successor to it – tons of keyboard shortcuts, an inbox/archive workflow, extracted articles, etc. It goes way beyond what I did, though, with ambitions to be a one-stop shop for anything you'd like to read and highlight. It's really quite incredible.

And, it's of course built on top of the core Readwise service for aggregating your highlights from all across the web, which makes it super easy to save things for spaced repetition and getting things into Obsidian, etc. I can't show you anything yet or give many details, but believe me when I say these folks are really onto something. Sign up here for a free month!

Wearing

Icebreaker socks are the absolute best socks I have ever worn. I know I'm old because I'm raving about socks, but hear me out. I have gone through the entire arc of sock wearing over my lifetime. Starting out as a kid with the 70s/80s calf-high striped ones, to rando white ones for many many years, to black socks when I was told white socks were not cool, to a whole variety in middle age. There was a time when I wanted to get rid of all my socks and get a shit ton of the same exact ones so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore. Jen ordered me a whole bunch as a gift at one point, multiple packs of the same socks. It was beautiful. But, wouldn't you know it, even though she ordered all the same stuff, they were still slightly different from pack to pack. There was no winning.

So, after that experience, I drifted back to more "creative" socks over the years, as the designs got nicer and I had more money to spend on stupid shit like that. I tried Stance, SmartWool, even some of those toe socks. They were all pretty nice, and I thought they were "high quality" since they were the same price for one pair as a pack of Hanes or whatever. Without fail, though, they all ended up with a hole where my abnormally longer than the rest of my toes big toe went. Every damn time. And if that didn't happen, the back heel area got worn through really quickly.

Enter Icebreaker.

I got some of these and they didn't feel much different than the other merino wool ones, but, man, do they last. I've had a variety of models and weights, but they've all been excellent. The best are the "anatomical fit" styles that tell you which foot to put them on, so they conform to your toe box better and you don't get that weird feeling when they're worn in more for the other foot. It's the little things.

Ok, so these fit great and feel great, and they're merino wool so they don't get stinky too fast. And did I mention they last? I've had some for literally years without getting holes in them. I don't know how they do this, but the pulled it off. My knife feet, previously undefeated, are no match for this shit. However, one of my oldest and most worn pair eventually did get a slight big toe hole. Haha! I've still got it.

This is where shit gets wild.

I had heard legend of a lifetime guarantee they have where they'll straight up replace socks if they get holes in them. It was a big factor in spending the money on them, but I never really got to test it out since they lasted so damn long. But when I finally felt that first hole, it was time to put it to the test. I took that pair and another that was starting to show some thinness near the heels into the store and kinda sheepishly asked them if I could exchange them. It felt super weird bringing in old ass socks and asking for a replacement, like the people who buy shit at Costco and use it for 7 years then go in demanding a refund when it inevitably gets damaged. But, if this sock thing was actually true, then the game has changed for me.

To my shock, they exchanged the damn socks, no questions asked.

Needless to say, I will never buy socks from any other company. The thing that's wild, though, is that I may never need to actually buy socks ever again until Icebreaker goes out of business from me returning expensive socks or the giant meteor finally takes us all out.

Wasting money on

Cool S Clock. Totally worthless, but cool as hell. Definitely going on the wall in back of me so it shows up in Zoom calls. Available on Redbubble.

Listening to

• Resilience and Despair by QAALM – first off, my dogg Brock rules. I've been in two bands with him, he was in my wedding, and he's just an all around rad dude. He's in this band, and it fucking crushes. Atmospheric doom clocking in at no less than 15 minutes per song. Super stoked to hear this after they've been working on it for so long and that it's getting a great reception.
• Out of the Woods by Oregon – I remember seeing this album in my dad's record collection for ages and being intrigued by the album art. Now, like 35 years later, I totally get it. Haunting, complex, yet relaxing jazz fusion stuff.

Cooking

Eggplant curry – we had some friends (the family of a friend Pea has had since kindergarten) over for the first time since Covid started, and I kinda went a bit overboard with the menu I put together to cook. It was a whole middle easternish type of thing. I pulled it off by the skin of my teeth, still cooking when they arrived, and everything turned out pretty well. This curry was super tasty, definitely recommended.

Seeing

No shows this week, but I do have tickets to see Opeth and Mastodon coming up, which should kick ass 🤘🏼 My pal Zac saw the show in Chicago and said it ruled, so I'm stoked.

Drawing

Just finished this one up:

This one was pretty tough for some reason. There's a lot of nuance in her expression, and at first I just didn't have the placement of features correct. After tons of erasing and starting areas over, and a bit of cheating by overlaying my drawing on the reference photo to make sure things were in the right spot, things started to flow. I feel guilty for cheating, but not too much since all the detail was done by sight once I was sure the placement of the features wasn't too far off.

This is one of those things I struggle with a bit. Is it actually "cheating" to take advantage of the ease the ipad makes overlaying images? I know the old timers made use of similar cheats to aid accuracy. I'm really trying to to just have fun and not care about the “purity” of it all.

Laughing at

Too real.

Learning about

Interstitial Journaling – basically, this is just writing down a timestamped log of what you're doing or have just finished, and what you're going to do next, throughout the day. Seems pretty basic and maybe even pointless, but it definitely seems like there's some good thinking behind it. It's essentially a way to be more mindful of what your intentions are throughout the day, and what prevents you from focusing on those things. There are lots of apps that can do this automatically for you, but the whole point here is the real-time reflection throughout the day to keep you focused on your accomplishments, struggles, and what's next.

I've been giving this a try for the past week or so. It's not as easy as it seems. I of course have wrapped myself around the axle trying to figure out the best technology solution for it (should I use Drafts quick capture throughout the day and then figure out a way to automatically import them into Obsidian? Should I build a Raycast extension that makes it easy directly from there? Should I just do it ... on paper?). But it's also difficult to remember to do it... which I guess is the whole point. I keep thinking I should maybe use Day One with it's reminders and quick entry prompts. Or maybe use Session to also do the whole pomodoro thing and record thoughts after them.

I don't know. The times I've actually gone a full day writing most things down, it's pretty great. I suppose I just need to keep at it. If you've tried this, or have any pointers, let me know!

Watching

• Just started the second season of Raised By Wolves. It's getting pretty wild. Trying to get through this season so we can move on to Severance.
• Learning about the Asian Squat
• My cousin's YouTube channel where she does stuff like reaction videos to Infant Annihilator songs

I dunno, I guess I'm going through a bit of a mid life crisis. I'm 45, which, if I'm lucky, is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the ~4500 weeks I'll have on this planet, and all the things that sound like cliches are kinda true. My hair, which has always been black and thickly luxurious, is much thinner than it used to be. I'm still waiting for my Mitt Romneys to come in, though. And now I have shitty quarantine long hair that's usually in a little man bun like four years after the trend. So yeah.

Leading up to now, Jen and I were separated for a year back in 2019 - 2020, and I was pretty much resigned to the fact that I was going to be another 40-something divorcee. That was a damn wake up call. That whole experience made time slow down and stretch out much like how years felt when I was a kid. So much shit packed into one short year that felt like 3. Happily, we worked things out and I feel like I have a new lease on life. Being on the edge, just about to fall off, can really wake your ass up. I don't want to fuck things up again.

So, lots of changes have been and will always be in order from now on. Therapy, meds, mindfulness, yoga, all the usual stuff. And I suppose this newsletter is part of all that. I've always been reluctant to share anything because what the hell does anyone care about anything I have to say? But, I guess one good thing about getting old is the increasing ability to say "fuck it" and care a bit less than I used to.

So, hope you enjoy. Smash the like and subscribe button, etc, and reply if you want to talk about anything here!

Shit I'm...

Reading

• The Dark Forest - book 2 in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. I've never read much science fiction in the past, but these are pretty cool. If you're not familiar, it's written by a Chinese author, and the translations are pretty interesting. They feel much more ... I dunno, descriptive than books written in native English. There are some cool concepts at play, and the second book is quite different from the first.
• The Daily Stoic – yeah, I know. Cheesy self-help, pop-psychology, Broicism™, blah blah. But I dunno, it's just a nice way to start the day (when I remember to). Ultimately, it's just a good reminder to not sweat the small shit and just pay attention to the things you can actually control. Seems obvious and easy, but, brains are not very smart. A minute to learn, a lifetime to master, etc.

Using

• Obsidian – basically just a plain text / markdown editor. But, they've managed to get pretty much everything right with how I'd want to build up my collection of ideas and notes. There's a whole "Personal Knowledge Management revolution" going on right now, mostly credited to a rediscovery of the Zettelkasten method and the popularity (and subsequent downfall?) of Roam Research. Basically, it's taking a bunch of notes and easily linking them together from the text so you can have your own mini wikipedia or something along those lines. I'm a nerd who loves new apps and tinkering and this shit is right up my alley. The rabbit hole goes deep, and it's flexible enough to look and act pretty much however you want if you put in the time with the right themes and plugins. It's pretty much emacs for normals and I'm here for it.
• Raycast – this is pretty much the latest iteration of the whole launcher app idea that started with Quicksilver back in the day, which led to Launchbar and, most recently, Alfred. Those are all great and, in my opinion, necessary tools for using a computer, but Raycast feels like the next generation of the idea. It's based on javascript, of course, and has a built in extension browser, etc. But, it also incorporates the nearly-ubiquitous command-k command palette approach to things you navigate to, and has the ability to interact with web APIs baked right in. This means you can do things like create Jira tickets right from it instead of having to open that piece of shit in your browser.

Wearing

• Cardigan – I got this cardigan for Christmas when it was on sale and I shit you not, I've worn it pretty much every day since. This plus my house shoes makes me feel like Mr. Rogers. My friend Zac described it as "feral" and that feels about right.

Automating

• Home automation – I've gone all in with HomeKit since everything I have is Apple for the most part. This means at any given point it's hard to tell if I just misconfigured something, the network is being crappy, or if the house is haunted. HomeKit doesn't have as much stuff out there as Alexa and whatnot, but Homebridge makes it pretty good. for the most part, though, it's Hue and Lutron lights that turn on and off by themselves using some Aqara motion sensors. I'll write some more specific stuff about all this in future issues.
• Personal automation – this is mostly just stuff around using shortcuts to automate things. The main thing lately is using focus modes to automate things like turning zoom, my webcam app, and diffused light on for video calls and whatnot. I'll write some of this up in the future as well when I have it more dialed in.

Listening to

• Luminist – Metroid Resynthesized — this is an album I've been looking for since I was like 13 or whenever I first started playing Metroid on the NES. That game's music has never been surpassed (Marble Madness comes close) but the only renditions available that I knew of were the actual 8-bit game music and the band covers like The Advantage, Minibosses, and Stemage. I loved them all, but when I heard this Luminist version it was like a layer of grime was taken off of the music. It's a perfectly faithful rendition, just more lush and high resolution, and pretty much perfect.
• Messa – Close — a friend excitedly recommended this to us in our music slack describing it as a mix of doom, atmospheric goth rock, and straight jazz. Which, hell yeah. First listen... hmm. Second listen, ok there's some cool stuff here... Third, fourth listens, HOLY SHIT. It's incredible. Definite contender for album of the year.

Cooking

• Superiority Burger – our 8 year old wanted to go vegetarian, so I've been trying out a bunch of recipes. I remembered that Brooks Headley (of Universal Order of Armageddon, Born Against, etc.) is now a world famous vegan chef who invented a veggie burger that's veggie/grain forward instead of pretending to be meat with beet juice blood and whatnot. He's based in NYC, but his Superiority Burger had a popup here in Portland a few years ago. Unfortunately, I found out about it too late. So, I found a recipe online and made it a few weeks ago. It's pretty involved, but damn good. Give it a try!

Seeing

Live music is back, and I'm like a pig in shit. Here are some shows I went to recently:

Yob — My first show after 2 years of quarantine. What a way to come back. The drummer from Brothers of the Sonic Cloth was filling in for the tour, and he was killer. As usual, a crushing and beautiful experience.

Shiner — I discovered Shiner 20 years too late during Covid. After falling in love with Hum's Inlet album, Shiner was a revelation. The Egg is an amazing album, and when I saw they were going to be playing Doug Fir when I was at the Yob show I mad a mental note to go, but of course forgot. Luckily I got an email or something reminding me about it, and man am I glad I did. They sounded great, played for a long time, and were heavy as hell. They even played a few encore songs.

Jonah's Onelinedrawing opened, which was kinda funny/weird. He's the singer from Far doing a solo singer-with-guitar thing. Not really my jam, and he's pretty extra. He did play a version of the good Far song, which was cool.

Back story: I payed drums for Gehenna back in like 1995 for a small west coat tour with Integrity. We hooked up with Far and Damnation AD for a couple shows. One of them was at some line dancing club in Sacramento. My drums were on the tallest drum riser I've ever seen. There were like 30 people there or something. While we were playing something happened and the club wanted us to stop for some reason. We kept playing the song we were in the middle of and Jonah was freaking out telling us to stop. He probably didn't want the show to get shut down because they hadn't played yet or something. He ended up unplugging out amps like a dickhead. So yeah, that's Jonah.

Deftones — the first "big" show since lockdown. I bought the ticket like 2 years ago and it was postponed a few times, but it finally happened. It was at the Moda Center where the Blazers play, which is pretty wild since the last time I saw them was in like 2012 at the Crystal Ballroom with Alex.

The opening band was called VOWWS and they were whatever. A two piece guitar + keyboards thing trying real hard to be goth with trench coats and stuff. Pass.

Next up was Gojira. Las time I saw Gojira was at the Hawthorne theater opening for Devin Townsend Project, so seeing them in a huge venue was pretty wild. They're really fun live and they know how to work an audience. They're famous for their weird guitar slidey screechy thing and wild double bass drumming, but I never realized how they can get down with some four-on-the-floor, meat and potatoes headbanging stuff. Pretty fun.

Then Deftones came out. Apparently it was the first show of their whole tour, so basically the first time playing a show in like 2 years or so. The sound was pretty crap for the first few songs, but it got better and they got more into their groove. It was pretty funny seeing how they guitar player is still a dude wearing big ass baggy shorts and long hair, Chino is Chino, and they had a new bass player after Sergio from Quicksand quit last year. They played Diamond Eyes, which was what I was mainly hoping for. They also played one of their songs from the deep Nü Metal days.

Monolord — Jen bought me tickets for this show at Dante's for my birthday last year, which was awesome because I had no idea they were even touring. I'd never seen them live, but have played the shit out of their albums over the last couple years (especially the instrumental versions that are excellent work music).

First up was Simple Forms, which is the bass player from Yob's side band with his brother on vocals. They were pretty cool and pretty unique.

Then Firebreather was up. They're pretty much Sweden's answer to High On Fire. Pretty ballsy. I need to listen to their album some more.

Then Monolord took the stage. A power trio's power trio. Their drummer had his UNFUCK EVERYTHING shirt on and signature slicked back hair, and the bass player was dressed like a Scandinavian Les Claypool or something. The guitarist/singer looked the regular part, skinny with long ass hair. He had one of my favorite tattoos I've seen too.

They fuckin' brought it. Crushing riff after crushing riff for more than an hour. It was everything I hoped it would be.

Earthless — first up was Dommengang. They played pretty great psych rock stuff, and their drummer was super fun to watch. The guitar player kinda looked like a young Michael McDonald, hell yeah. Apparently they're from Portland too, pretty cool stuff.

Earthless took the stage and proceeded to do like a 20 minute mellow intro buildup thing. Honestly, it was getting kinda old. Like, I know 20 minute songs is their thing, but this was kinda ridiculous and a bit boring.

Finally, though, they started to ratchet things up. Building and building and building until things started to hit ridiculous levels of energy and shred. It was pretty glorious. A couple encores as well. I should have known better than to doubt them.

Sunless — a tiny metal show at a shitty bar (High Water Mark).

Nature is healing.

First band was Magdalene. The guys I'm currently playing music with used to be in this band, but quit for Artistic Differences or something. They were pretty cool. Their album is rad.

Next was Aseitas. The dudes in the band were super nerdy and one of the guitar players had a ridiculous medieval axe looking guitar and dangly feather earrings. They were pretty great. Just super technical nerdy shit that I love.

Then Noctambulist, the band touring with Sunless played. They were pretty good death metal, not really my thing.

Then Sunless came on. Holy shit. I've loved their albums for a few years now, and I kinda equated them as a newer, younger Gorguts. I wasn't really anticipating their live show though. Their bass player is a tall nerdy guy with glasses, a beard, and dreads that literally go down to his shins and a six string bass (of course). The guitar player looked like a cross between Nautas Kaupas and Hank Schrader from Breaking Bad wearing a black leather jacket. The drummer was a Normal Looking Dude.

They started playing, and it was pretty unreal. The guitar player is singing and doing these wildly technical single note picking parts the whole time. The bass player sets up his dreads to hang in front of them so they're almost sweeping the stage while he lays down gnarly bass lines. And the drummer was technical perfection. I was pretty much blown away.

All of this for like 35 people.

The guitar player I've been playing with was there for the first few bands. Unfortunately he missed Sunless because the girlfriend of one of the first band's members threw up her entire stomach on his girlfriend's nachos and she was bummed out and wanted to leave.

Drawing

A few weeks ago I decided to start drawing as a hobby. I haven't really drawn since I dropped out of Pratt back in 1998. I had the classic "you're not good at drawing" childhood and never tried to draw until I decided I wanted to get into graphic design after taking a chemistry class I hated my first semester of junior college. I figured I had to be able to draw to be a Real Designer, so I took some basic classes at the JC. After a bit of instruction I realized I wasn't too bad, it was just a matter of learning how to see differently. Then I transferred to Pratt and got put into an advanced drawing class that was pretty much all life drawing, which I had never done before. My teacher, Mr. San Felipo, had some pretty intense "not quite my tempo" vibes, literally removing me from my seat so he could draw instead of me because my shit was so bad.

But, I learned a lot.

Then I dropped out and pretty much never drew again. For a lot of people, drawing is "therapeutic" or relaxing or whatever. For me it's the opposite. While I'm drawing my heart rate increases, I feel nervous, and I catch myself holding my breath for no reason. Basically, super high anxiety, judging myself the entire time.

So, I've decided to stop all that nonsense and just draw. I went out and bought an iPad mini with an Apple Pencil and I loaded up the copy of Procreate I bought years ago and never used. Interestingly, I'm way more apt to draw on an iPad than in a paper notebook because the thought of ruining a nice notebook makes me even more stressed, so this has been perfect.

And, dangit, I'm having a ton of fun. Rediscovering my abilities 24 years later has been pretty cool. I took a couple Skillshare classes (that link will get you and me a free month) on Procreate and portrait drawing, and they were surprisingly helpful. I'm feeling like I'm in The Zone™ for the first time in ages. I actually look forward to drawing, which is really new for me. I have a lot of practicing to do, and maybe someday I'll get up the courage to use color, but I'm going to try to stick with it this time.

Here are some recent sketches I've done, and I'll post more in future issues.

Laughing at

• Jerry Garcia — we haven't lived in southern California for 14 years or so now, but after 30 years there it runs deep. Jerry Garcia (no, not the Grateful Dead dude) is a comedian from Huntington Park and he looks pretty much exactly like my great uncle Dickie and hearing him talk feels like a warm blanket. His HBO special is called "It's Not My Weekend" and it rules.

Learning about

• Building A Second Brain – my work has a personal development budget that's normally for things like attending conferences, and for some reason I've never used it during my six years there. So this year I realized I could buy a bunch of online courses and subscriptions to educational things. One of the things is the Building A Second Brain course. It's basically an organization system for keeping track of all your projects and life areas and stuff and a methodology for making sure you just write shit down and put it some place you'll be able to find it so you don't have to keep it in your head. Not having more crap swirling around in my head sounds good to me, so hopefully this helps a bit.
• Youtube – I've been paying for Youtube Premium™ for year snow mostly because I don't want my kids to see their crappy ads when watching stuff and the few times I'd click on a Youtube link I wanted no part of sitting through 45 seconds of a Geico ad or whatever. But I think I finally realized that Youtube kind of rules if you find the right stuff. I mostly watch nerdy shit I'm too embarrassed to link to here, but I finally get it!

Watching

• Raised by Wolves – this is an interesting sci-fi series on HBO about some atheist androids (lol) who were sent to a remote planet to raise some atheist babies after they lost a war to the fanatically religious Sol worshippers.