Category: wastebook
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The Millennial Aesthetic, 2020
Millennial pink, sage, ocher, beveled edges — a palette and a reading of the aesthetic that turned “good design” into the product itself. Built from Molly Fischer’s 2020 essay for The Cut.
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Laws, anecdotes, and other shit people say
Betty Crocker, mid-1950s. I heard a reference the Betty Crocker “add an egg” cake-mix story recently. It is: originally, people didn’t buy the cake mix because it felt too easy and didn’t feel loving, or at least sufficiently Calvinistic; General Mills removed the egg, then people cracked one in themselves, and suddenly they felt like…
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If you’re wondering how cold fusion produces pollution, let alone a lot of it, don’t worry, this is explained in a chapter by one teenaged prodigy tennis player to another, wherein the latter is wearing a blindfold to improve his other senses but can’t find a bathroom, so he asks the other player for help,…
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Best review of The Sound and The Fury, in Mad Men, s2e11: “Sex is good. This book is just OK.”
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The weird bastion stuff in D&D 5e 2024 makes a lot more sense after reading Dungeon Crawler Carl.
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“I have no idea what Federighi’s stance is on break-room bananas, but it seems a stretch to think it offers clues to Apple’s strategy on data centers.” The Information: ‘With Google Deal, Apple’s Craig Federighi Plots a Cautious Course in AI’
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Where there is saxophone, synth is sure to follow.
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I suppose it can be said that I’m an absent-minded driver. It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it. Glenn Gould
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No, no…AI won’t replace you. A person using AI will replace you and 4,999 other people.
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“cradle-to-crematorium biography” The best non-fiction to read this year
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“Labor is valuable only insofar as it occupies a constraint the firm hasn’t yet automated.”
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“Your brain hates unbounded risk. When there’s no plan, it escalates into dread.”
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Perhaps the attraction is that film noir is a way of traveling into the past—the world right before I was born. When watching old films, I like to remind myself that to the people in the film, their world was just as rich as ours and felt just as “now” as ours does. Here’s John…
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Once again I’m logging in from Ibiza. I wouldn’t say I’ve gone native, but I’ve been here long enough to get it. This is not fierce, grind-it-out, Silicon Valley society; even Austin Texas, that wellspring of slackerdom, has a harsher work-ethic. This little Mediterranean island with some genuine Lotus-eater aspects to it – the island…
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Enassholeification.
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Consumer tech focuses on the process, enterprise tech on the outcome.
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I became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought. A life-affirming philosophy compensated for not being very good at life. Wasn’t I smart enough to reject God, and strong enough not to need a supernatural crutch? And: We continue to see demonstrations of some of the same pitfalls…
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“Yes, a book about parking can be fascinating.” 2025 in Review: Reading and Writing Highlights
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To understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty, Napoleon is supposed to have said. The quotation is probably apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. For me, it is this world by the river that counts. When I sit down to write a novel,…
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Another writer said he “was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m.” From Rebels of Reason
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