takeo.blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon

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

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

If you want to talk about anything in here, please reply to this email (or email me at toby@takeo.email if you're reading this on RSS)! I'd love to talk shop.

Shit I'm...

Reading: “The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion”

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

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

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

and also somewhat eye-opening:

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

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

Wearing

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

Cooking

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

Listening to: Imperial Triumphant

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

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

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

Drawing

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

Laughing at: Stavros Halkias

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl878TKI3tw)

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

Learning: Did People Used To Look Older?

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

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

Watching: Johnny 5 is ALIVE

Google Engineer on His Sentient AI Claim - YouTube

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

And, well, yeah.

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

Shorter one this week. I'm currently in Indiana visiting with family for my grandpa's memorial service and haven't had much time this week to write. Mostly links and stuff this time around.

If you want to talk about anything in here, please reply to this email (or email me at toby@takeo.email if you're reading this on RSS)! I'd love to talk shop.

Shit I'm...

Reading

How Silicon Valley Helps Spread the Same Sterile Aesthetic Across the World

As an affluent, self-selecting group of people move through spaces linked by technology, particular sensibilities spread, and these small pockets of geography grow to resemble one another, as Schwarzmann discovered: the coffee roaster Four Barrel in San Francisco looks like the Australian Toby’s Estate in Brooklyn looks like The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen looks like Bear Pond Espresso in Tokyo. You can get a dry cortado with perfect latte art at any of them, then Instagram it on a marble countertop and further spread the aesthetic to your followers.

I know I'm part of the problem when it comes to this type of stuff, but it's still a bummer. I suppose it's just part of ubiquitous connection via curated social media posts and airbnb listings and whatnot. There have always been trends, of course, but I guess never really at the same time across the entire globe.

That said, I'm currently in the outskirts of Indianapolis, and the aesthetic here is definitely not the standard Four Barrel Coffee Roasters. From what I can tell it's the standard American aesthetic for all the places that that affluent tech crowd ignores. Lots of smoking, lots of live laugh love types of wall adornments, lots of sports. Perhaps to truly experience different things we'll just need to seek out the places that haven't gotten the approval of the tech/influencer crowd.

Using

Obsidian, Taming a Collective Consciousness

For y'all still interested in things like Obsidian, this article is a really in-depth overview of how a software team used Obsidian as a shared knowledge repository. Lots of example templates and resources.

Wearing

I picked up this Lord Dying shirt when I saw them a few weeks ago. I was wearing it yesterday when I got to Indiana and my dad looked at it sideways and asked if it was a Yes shirt, so, mission accomplished.

Listening to

I was listening to something the other day and one of these songs by Candiria came up randomly after and I remembered how badass their weird jazz fusion songs were. If you're unfamiliar with them, they were a New Jersey hardcore band that did a melding of rap and metal. All that stuff is... fine, but these two songs are when they threw down some heavy fusion stuff and it ruuuules.

Peel This Strap and Fold Here

R*Evolutionize*R

Seeing

Cirque Du Soleil – Alegria

Our daughter wanted to go to Cirque du Soleil for her birthday while it was still in town. We got tickets to Alegria for us and her buddy. I think this was the first one I saw back in the 90s. It was, of course, awesome. It's pretty amazing what people can do if they dedicate their lives to random shit like doing ridiculous tricks in a huge aluminum hamster wheel. It also became very apparent that the minions are 100% based on French Canadian circus clowns.

Drawing

Here's an oldie:

Laughing at

AI Religion Bot – one of those twitter accounts that purports to be a GPT3 generated tweeter trained on tons of religious texts. Lots of times they're accompanied by images derived from the passages it generates. And, yeah, some great stuff like this:

Nice.

Watching

The Church Play Cinematic Universe – Allen posted this in the group chat the other day and… holy shit.I played drums at a church for like 7 years, and we had our share of stage dramas. Nothing as intense as this, but still… this is way too real.

— Toby

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.

[youtu.be/-BbHhYiof...](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