Dreaming of a vacation at a Dutch suburban office park in the winter…

OK, so, first off… yes I am a nerd who watches city planning videos. But this is really, really good and eye-opening to anyone in the U.S. or Canada who has ever hated their soul-sucking commute to a soul-sucking job inside an absolutely spirit-crushingly ugly suburban office park. (Raises hand.)

It doesn’t have to be the way it is here. I seriously think I would enjoy taking a vacation that consisted of nothing but hanging out at this suburban office park in the Netherlands. It’s so much nicer than almost any developed place in the U.S.

Crypto chump change

I know artists who are exploring crypto as a new way to earn money from their work — something that is notoriously hard given the soulless priorities of our economy — but I can’t see it as anything other than a get-rich-quick scheme… or a pyramid scheme… some kind of a scheme (with all the negative connotations that word carries in the US). You might get rich — some people obviously have — but you probably won’t, and ultimately crypto is not going to solve any of our problems… but it’s already created some novel ones.

I’ve been following Molly White’s blog for a while now. I really like her approach and insights. While I personally have less than zero interest in getting into crypto, I’m somewhat fixated on it right now — how it’s changing, how its myriad flaws are gradually being revealed, and how people are misunderstanding what it really is, how it works, and how it’s impacting society and the planet. (But yes I will admit that any time I see someone is into it, my immediate assumption is they’re either an Ayn Rand acolyte or a chump.)

Speaking of Molly White, she also contributed to (and hosts) this group-annotated version of Kevin Roose’s ridiculously pro-crypto “explainer” article recently published by the New York Times. Essential reading on the topic. (The annotations that is, not the original article.)

“It doesn’t suck.”

Is it possible to be excited about a text editor? Well… yes. When it’s good enough to be an essential tool for decades.

Back in 1994 when I was a junior in college and the web was emerging, I wanted to learn how to build web pages. The somewhat helpful person in the Gustavus computer store (why did I go there? I guess because I wasn’t taking any CS classes so I didn’t know any of the faculty) told me to download BBEdit, so I did. That didn’t help me to learn HTML, but it became the program I used to write it as I did learn.

I’ve dabbled with other apps over the years — including PageSpinner in 1996, at the recommendation of my boss at my first professional “webmaster” job*, and HomeSite in the brief period when I mainly worked on Windows 2000 — but guess which program is open on my Mac right now; which program I was busy writing code in moments before I read this Daring Fireball article.

* Yes, that really was my title. I gave up on PageSpinner and switched back to BBEdit shortly thereafter, because although I liked PageSpinner’s color coding (before BBEdit supported it, or at least before I figured out that it did), it bugged me endlessly that it used proportional fonts.

Pop culture spoiled itself

I read this Vox article in the context of three recent viewing experiences Sara and I have had: Severance (season finale tonight… no spoilers!), Kenneth Branagh’s new version of Death on the Nile which we just watched the other day, and a completely different form of entertainment: cycling races.

We’ve been watching Severance as its episodes become available, so no spoilers are out there yet as we watch. The show very much is about shocking twists and cliffhangers, but our enjoyment of it is also about so much more than that — the Kubrickian cinematography, the nuanced acting by the first-rate cast, the deeper implications and social commentary in every passing moment of the story. Yes, we want — desperately — to know what Lumon is up to, but that’s not the only reason we watch.

We both already knew “whodunnit” going into the new Death on the Nile, and honestly I felt like you needed to know the story already to make sense of what was happening scene-to-scene, because this version is more than a little incoherent. Yet it didn’t seem like someone new to the story would even consider pointing the finger at anyone besides the actual perpetrators, right from the start, because its poor structure didn’t provide enough backstory to make anyone else a convincing suspect. Linette didn’t seem evil enough for anyone else to particularly want her dead. But despite these flaws, and actively criticizing it as it went, I was fully engaged the entire time. It was the most I’ve ever enjoyed watching a movie that I fundamentally disliked. Ultimately it was not “about” whodunnit, so maybe it truly was a movie for our times, in the vein of the Vox article.

Then there’s the cycling — clearly something where the end matters most, and can definitely be spoiled. And since we’re watching the replays several hours after the races end in Europe, my news feeds have already “spoiled” the winner. But I still enjoy watching them because it’s not just about who won. It’s about watching Tadej Pogačar boldly attack repeatedly on an insane climb, or Egan Bernal charging off into the mist on a mountaintop, or Caleb Ewen taking a spill on the tarmac with the finish line in sight, or Julian Alaphilippe wearing the maillot jaune for the entire Tour de France, only to lose it to Bernal on the penultimate stage when the race directors abruptly call an early end to the stage due to flash flooding on the other side of a mountain tunnel. Those are memorable moments that stick with me more than a mad sprint to the finish line, and what gets me excited about watching a bunch of lanky guys on bikes in the first place.

I think for the most part, Sara and I have definitely checked out of the pop culture world being talked about here. Partly it’s due to her vision; she just can’t track the fast movement and weird lighting in modern movies, especially superhero movies. But I’ve never cared about superheroes, whether it was comic books as a kid or the endless parade of giant “spectacle” blockbuster movies today.

We simply don’t pay any attention to any of that stuff. And it’s probably why, above exceptions aside, we are mostly these days either rewatching the grand trilogy of early 2000s NBC sitcoms (The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Community) for the dozenth time, or we’re watching BBC reality shows like Bake-Off or Escape to the Country. Hollywood just isn’t speaking to us anymore.