2020s
How “Starship Troopers” Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat
For most of “Starship Troopers,” humanity, in every possible facet, gets its ass kicked. A culture that reveres and communicates exclusively through violence—a culture very much like one that responds to peaceful protests with indiscriminate police brutality, or whose pandemic strategy is to “dominate” an unreasoning virus—keeps running up against its own self-imposed limitations.
Well that hits home.
Terrace Martin in heavy rotation this week: 808s and Sax Breaks and Dinner Party 👍👍 Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder, and Kamasi Washington mean you can’t lose!
Tips from HBO’s Watchmen on building an inclusive workplace:
The most valuable thing a showrunner—or any manager—can do to create an inclusive workplace is to listen carefully and respectfully to what their employees have to say, while checking their own defensiveness.
The overlap between showrunning and managing a team creating software continue to intrigue.
Periodic reminder that we are worse off for letting folks run Kathy Sierra off the social parts of the internet.
Peak Texas weather. The moment I step outside, I’m thoroughly warmed by the sun. A pleasant glow. For 5 seconds. Then it’s time to plan how I’m getting back to climate control. Rinse and repeat until mid-September.
I probably write this every summer because every summer I love it.
The pandemic that has dominated the past three months strikes a useful contrast with what’s happening now. Unlike coronavirus, racism and police violence are problems caused by humans. There’s a saying, “You aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic.” Similarly, the unrest occurring right now isn’t something that is happening to anyone, but a phenomenon that everyone is a part of, even if they haven’t left home or directly participated at all. Like traffic, the reason you’re surrounded by protests is partially because of you, regardless of your perceived level of involvement.
A tale of Ghosts’n Goblins’n Crocodiles
There is something noble about developing on a dead platform – it is so completely for the joy of the development, without any commercial motivation.
- John Carmack
When does a platform truly “dies”? A “dead language” is defined as “a language which is no longer in everyday spoken use”. By analogy, a dead platform would die not when it ceases to be profitable or when it is obsolete, but when people stop playing it and caring about it.
Now the question becomes “what draws people to retro-computing?”. Is it nostalgia, the diversity, the creativity, the simplicity, or is it inexplicably fun?
Come for the sentiment, stay for the backstory of an old computer you may have never even known existed.
Yin and Yang: Lessons of Creativity — David Perell
Flow states are the holy grail of productivity. To achieve flow, we need a proper skill-challenge ratio. Skill: Yin (Order) Challenge: Yang (Chaos) We do best when we’re pursuing goals that are a little bit tougher than what we can easily accomplish.
A little bit of disorder makes many things better!
H.264 is Magic. There’s so much amazing stuff you can do with math in the pursuit of distinctly non-math-y endeavors. I’ve always thought compilers, and their cousins the query optimizer, are magic. Computer graphics too. Turns out video compression is also uniquely amazing.
Bonus quote from Revenge of the Intuitive:
Years ago I realized that the recording studio was becoming a musical instrument. I even lectured about it, proclaiming that “by turning sound into malleable material, studios invite you to construct new worlds of sounds as painters construct worlds of form and color.” I was thrilled at how people were using studios to make music that otherwise simply could not exist. Studios opened up possibilities. But now I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
I am, in general, a sucker for the notion of the studio as a kind of musical instrument unto itself. It’s a very maximalist, Romantic-era symphony sort of thinking. I want to be Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson or Rite of Spring-era Stravinksy when I grow up.
They say never let a good crisis go to waste
We should use the pandemic to reevaluate how we value service, child care, and education labor. It’s apparent we undervalued them. Their value is now explicit for those clamoring for a return to paying people to handle their chores and obligations. So let’s pay them more when we emerge from this!
The burden of navigating urban sprawl to reach our offices, shops, and entertainment is now explicit. Density won’t be the answer for this is in the short or medium term. Perhaps we could value the ease by which we can drive around right now and work backwards from there.
The bit that has worried me is how density is no longer a virtue. Public transport and dense neighborhoods won’t be desirable for a while. What’s the alternative that reduces our environmental toll and increases the cohesion of our neighborhoods?
“Building quality things of substance takes time.” - Rands in Repose, One Thing