23 from '23
The movement you need is on your shoulder
Favorite new bee-boop computer tool: Mailspring. Finally an email client that’s 1) a joy to use, 2) totally open-source (and thus super customizable), 3) has a strong feature set on the free plan, and 4) works with basically any email address.
Favorite new restaurant: Angelo’s Pizza, Philadelphia
Favorite new town: Kyoto, Japan. Lives up to the hype.
Favorite new video game: Outer Wilds. What a beautiful game. Every person who’s played it wishes they could wipe their memory and do it again.
Favorite aesthetic: Gigantic sci-fi-adjacent works of human engineering. Every item in this list is its own rabbit hole (a ship that purposelessly sinks itself? We’re a weird species).
Favorite non-fiction book: Zealot by Reza Aslan
Favorite fiction book: The City and the City by China Mieville. Weird fiction for the win.
Favorite movie: The Boy and the Heron by Hayao Miyazaki
Favorite show: Finally got around to Andor. Yes, this is a Star Wars show:
if(reader = star_wars_fan) { print (“This is the best piece of Star Wars media ever produced. After watching this you’ll wonder why it’s taken almost half a century for the franchise to reach this level of storytelling. If you’ve ever called yourself a Star Wars fan, do yourself a favor and watch it”)
else { print (“Okay you really don’t need to be a Star Wars fan to enjoy this show. There are no Jedi, no Sith, no Force. There is no Hero’s Journey. There’s limited plot armor. The Empire really is fascist, its bureaucracy effective, its prisons ingeniously cruel, its technology terrifying. The Rebellion really is a slog, its finances fragile, its resources limited, its chances of success slim”)
Favorite song that I had never heard before: “Pleader” by Alt-J
Favorite new artist I never knew existed: Lingua Ignota
Favorite essay/blog post: Brutalist Web Design, by David Bryant Copeland. “How much better would the web be if every site embraced Brutalist Web Design? How amazing would it be to have readable text, clearly-marked interaction points, unobtrusive advertising, all wrapped up in a fast-loading site you could consume using the native tools of your chosen device?” A manifesto of creating fast, highly-functional web pages. I wish the entire internet operated this way.
Single best meal: Sushi Tokyo Ten in Shinjuku. Best sushi of my life, $60! What a great country.
Best performance: Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 3 by the New York Philharmonic. The last movement is my favorite classical piece of all time. The way that pipe organ announces itself!
Most awe-inspiring moment: Watching Fuego Volcano erupt a few hundred meters from me as I drank wine from a bottle, dusk clouds gathering below.
Lowest moment: Sitting and journaling on a train in Tokyo, feeling frustrated by the ending of a 2.5-year-long relationship and my startup’s lack of product-market fit. Feeling behind, questioning my judgment.
Highest moment: Bringing my new dog, Voodoo, home from the pet store for the very first time, and watching him explore his new home.
Biggest regret: Not pushing harder to make new friends in Philly.
Whatever the opposite of “biggest regret” might be: Visiting Japan for the first time
Most useful article of clothing: Uniqlo shoulder pack
Most important new learning: It’s good to care. It’s good to be grounded by commitments that you chose, that bring you joy. It’s good to have a dog.
Most profound new idea: How deep the chasm between two intelligent beings can be. Deserves its own essay, but I’ve been thinking a lot about communication: how hard it is to communicate your full self to another human, even another human who shares a lot of the same context. Then you fray the edges with different contexts, different lifestyles, different languages and worldviews. Then you tear the fabric when you jump to different species (What is it like to be a bat?). Then you enter the realm of the unknowable, incommunicable, when you think of truly alien species. A bit lonely, innit?
Favorite tweet:
Happy Christmas, Solstice, Saturnalia, New Year, take your pick! Thanks for reading <3