Dispatch #23 (January 2025)

By David Eisinger · View original post

Happy new year! Nev turned three this month, and somewhere – not from us, as far as we know – she’s added the word “sucks” to her vocabulary. “This juice tastes like bananas … and it sucks.” This is, in my estimation, the hardest thing about parenting: how to raise a well-mannered child when there’s nothing funnier than a toddler being crass.

We threw a party for her at our local park, and it was super cool to gather the bulk of our little community all in one place to celebrate her. Nico hit six months, and he is flourishing: eating solids, starting to get some baby rolls, big smiles.

We spent Christmas in Greensboro with Claire’s family (and a bunch of dogs). Nev got a new bike and a dope three-string guitar (both pink, her favorite color). Nico got a taco.

Then we were off to Mexico to celebrate our FIVE YEAR anniversary and the new year (after a tense wait to see if Nico’s passport would arrive in time). We spent the better part of the week at Sensira Resort. It was grand.

Random small stuff:

• I am getting a lot of joy out of becoming a record player guy. I tracked down a copy of Birocratic’s Beets 4 that I’ve had on repeat, and Claire gave me the Postal Service’s Give Up, as well as an amplifier I’m going to pair with a set of bookshelf speakers. I’m pretty excited about these but this is as far down the audiophile rabbit hole I intend to go.

• We took the train from Durham to Cary and spent a morning at Downtown Cary Park, which is remarkable. Cary’s the butt of a lot of jokes around here, but we certainly don’t have anything this nice.

• Claire and I used to post about our travels on a website called Two Nerds, but we haven’t updated it in many years. The bill from Squarespace came due, and it was way too much (~$300/year) to host our old content. I pulled everything down with wget, stripped out a bunch of crap, and pushed it up to the same small Digital Ocean box that hosts this site.

  It’s bewildering the amount of engineering that goes into a nominally simple website builder – reminded me of the “static site paradox” article I linked to a couple months ago. Anyhow, it’s all much simpler and cheaper now, though I might like to port the whole thing over to Hugo at some point.

I’ll end this dispatch with a recording of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” I made with a friend and former coworker, Eli, for our company holiday party:

Merry Gentlemen.mp3

Comfort and joy to you and yours.

This Month

• Adventure: heading to Tampa for a company leadership meeting, but otherwise laying pretty low unless we decide to get out of town for MLK weekend
• Project: Nev asked if we could make something together, so hoping we can find time to DIY a little wagon she can pull her toys around in
• Skill: I want to stay focused on music, and specifically on making the sort of off-kilter beats I like so much; I’ll trial this finger drumming course I’ve had my eye on

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: The City & the City, China Miéville
• Non-fiction: Feel Good Productivity, Ali Abdaal
• Music: Voodoo, D’Angelo (literal quarter century late on this one but keen to explore the extended Dilla-verse)

Links

• DVD is dead. Long live DVD.

  “This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory,” MGM founder Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) says in Mank. “What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”

• Maximization and buying stuff - macwright.com

  It has been a tough transition. I’m used to finding some price/quality local maximum, and nice stuff is always past that point. Leicas, luxury cars, fancy clothes, etc are usually 80% more expensive and 20% technically-better than the value-optimizing alternative.

• Software for stationery lovers - vrk loves paper

  But earlier in November, I had a memorable conversation with an artist friend I admire. In it, she mentioned how she gets the “productivity zoomies,” where she feels a burst of sudden inspiration, and that energy would propel her to be absurdly productive in a short period of time, like “designing an entire sticker line at 2am” sorta thing. It was a style that really worked for her. As she talked, it occurred to me how deeply I recognized the feeling she described, yet how rarely I let myself work off that feeling.

• fogus: The best things and stuff of 2024

  Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2024. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.

• The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly

  A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

• What happens when the internet disappears? - The Verge

  When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing has become hard to find, it creates a crisis not just of profession, but identity. Who am I, if not my content?

• I want brands - macwright.com

  But I strongly believe that there’s an opportunity for a brand like Costco’s ‘Kirkland’ or OXO to become the standard place for middle-class people to buy stuff. Paying 5-10% more for something with better odds of being genuine and high-quality, and for a less overwhelming junk-pile buying experience… there’s something there.

• One Foot Tsunami: Meat-Ax Your News Consumption

  I’m fortunate that my own day-to-day life does not actually need to be so negatively impacted by Trump’s every offense. Perhaps yours needn’t be either. It is no doubt a fine line, but it should be possible to stay aware of what’s happening without being consumed by the relentless malfeasance over which we have no control.

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