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🔗 I Want To Focus On My Salad by Drew Magary

What a great power it is to make another person feel loved. There’s a world out there that you and I have little control over. America, in particular, is a problem I can never solve. But in my home, and in yours, there is another world. Smaller. More manageable. You can accomplish things in this world. You can change lives, even. It’s in this world where you’ll find true love, true progress, and true hope. Also, a good dinner.

A perfectly on-point description of the current Google search experience from Tom Scocca in the Flaming Hydra newsletter.

When I type “baryshnikov”into a Google search, what I mean is what I’ve meant ever since Google first appeared and began conquering the search industry: out of everything people have filed away on the internet, please show me what would be in the drawer marked “Baryshnikov.” What Google now assumes I’m asking is “Baryshnikov????”

Finished reading: The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef 📚

Had a tough time with this one considering the author provides the following consecutive examples of this mindset in practice: Elon Musk, Trevor Bauer, and Jeff Bezos. The Scout Mindset, at least in some cases, seems to be a secret code for how to be ultra successful in spite of (or maybe because of?) utter moral bankruptcy.

Finished reading: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer 📚

And just like that I’m sucked back into Area X and planning another re-read of the series, now with additional fascinating backstory.

Notes, 2024-08-19

It’s been quite some time since I’ve done anything with any of my various blogs. I got super busy with work and, since a lot of that busy-ness deals with writing words and thinking about topics, the blogs tend to suffer when it picks up like that. But since things have slowed back down a bit, I’ve still had a hard time getting back into the habit (not that it was every anything approaching _regular_​). Part of that, I think, is the initial hurdle of thinking of something worth writing about. Then I read this post​ from Thomas Rigby today and figured it was as good a time as any to take a shot at a public day note. I’ve kept day notes in Obisidian (or before that, Notion/Roam/BuJo, etc.) for things I’m working on but haven’t ever tired combining them with the more personal “whats-going-on-in-your-life” kinds of notes. I don’t know why. So, with that preamble, here are some notes from today.

​👌 3 Good Things

  1. On the way home from school pickup, my daughter was asking for a song but didn’t really know any of the words or the melody or really anything about it other than the singer’s voice being “so smoothing”1. We tried the whole way home but didn’t get anywhere. I love this game and get a little obsessed with trying to figure it out, so I kept thinking about it while we prepared dinner. I eventually got it. Mel McDaniel’s “Louisiana Saturday Night​.” What a trip.

  2. ​When I arrived to pick up my son from his after school program at the community center, he was in the middle of coloring an Adventure Time coloring page and he was so excited about it that he talked about all of the characters the whole way home (sometimes over his sister’s descriptions of the song with the smoothing vocie). He has this way of getting so excited about something–could be a picture he’s drawing or coloring, or a Lego set he’s working on, or an obstacle course he’s built, or whatever–that he strings words together like he’s sprinting downhill… It’s pretty great.

  3. Yesterday, I bought a set of hair clippers for about $30 and decided to start cutting my own hair again. As a kid I almost always just let mom or dad or a friend’s dad cut it with clippers, then I started doing it myself as a young adult while in college, and had gotten away from it for the most part (with a short pandemic-related exception), but I’ve always liked the look of it and hated going to the barber even more. So, I’ve embraced it again. I cut it yesterday and did a pretty nice job. If I stick with it, the one-time cost of that pair of clippers is about the same as one haircut but I can use them again and again for years.

⭐️ Bonus Good Thing

  1. There’s been a coolness to the air throughout the day that feels amazing. ​Now that the sun’s down it feels almost like fall is rolling in. I’m sure it’s short-lived, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

  1. She always says this. It’s the best. ​ ↩︎

It’s amazing what a few hours off on a Friday afternoon can do for one’s spirits.