This isolation is something we all become acquainted with after the end of childhood. If we are lucky, we begin comfortably enough on this earth, in a state of close physical and emotional union with a devoted caregiver. We lie naked on her skin, we can hear her heartbeat, we can see the delight in her eyes as she watches us do nothing more accomplished than blow a saliva bubble – in other words, than merely exist. We can bang our spoon against the table and inspire uproarious laughter. Our fingers are tickled, and the fine hairs on our head are stroked, smelt and kissed. We don't even have to speak. Our needs are carefully interpreted; the breast is there whenever we want it. [Then] gradually comes the fall. The nipple is taken away, and we are blithely induced to move on to rice and morsels of dry chicken. Our body either ceases to please or can no longer be so casually displayed. We grow ashamed of our particularities. Ever-expanding areas of our outer selves are forbidden to be touched by others. It begins with the genitals, then spreads to encompass the stomach, the back of the neck, the ears and the armpits, until all we are allowed to do is occasionally give someone a hug, shake hands or bestow or receive a peck on the cheek. The signs of others' satisfaction in our existence declines, and their enthusiasm begins to be linked to our performance. It is what we do rather than what we are that is now of interest to them. Our teachers, once so encouraging about our smudgy drawings of ladybirds and our scrawls depicting the flags of the world, seem to take pleasure only in our exam results. Well-meaning individuals brutally suggest that perhaps it is time for us to start earning some money of our own, and society is kind or unkind to us chiefly according to how successful we turn out to be at doing just that. We begin to have to monitor what we say and how we look. There are aspects of our appearance that revolt and terrify us and that we feel we have to hide from others by spending money on clothes and haircuts. We grow into clumsy, heavy-footed, shameful, anxious creatures. We become adults, definitively expelled from paradise. [But] deep inside, we never quite forget the needs with which we were born: to be accepted as we are, without regard to our deeds; to be loved through the medium of our body; to be enclosed in another's arms; to occasion delight with the smell of our skin – all of these needs inspiring our relentless and passionately idealistic quest for someone to kiss and sleep with.

Nothing is erotic that isn't also, with the wrong person, revolting, which is precisely what makes erotic moments so intense: at the precise juncture where disgust could be at its height, we find only welcome and permission. The privileged nature of the union between two people is sealed by an act that, with someone else, would have horrified them both.

One of the difficulties of sex is that it doesn't – in the grander scheme of things – last terribly long. Even at its extreme, we are talking of an activity that might only rarely occupy two hours, or approximately the length of a Catholic Mass.

How might our society enable Tomas and Jen, and others like them, to advance towards a better outcome? First, by recognizing that neither need has the moral advantage: wanting love more than sex, or even instead of it, isn't 'better' or 'worse' than the reverse. Both needs have their place in our human repertoire of feelings and desires. Second, as a society, we have to find ways to make sure that these two needs can be freely claimed, without fear of blame or moral condemnation. We have to mitigate the taboos surrounding both appetites, so as to minimize the necessity of dissimulation and thereby the heartbreak and guilt it causes. [So] long as the only way to get sex is to feign being in love, some of us will lie and make a run for it. And so long as the only way to have a chance of finding long-term love is to hold ourselves out as devil-may-care adventurers ready to have no-strings-attached sex with near strangers in a motel, others of us are going to be at risk of feeling painfully abandoned the next morning.

We might be unnecessarily framing our limitations within a common narrative around why developers struggle to find collaborators. Doing this distracts from our unfair advantage of creating connection, which has been and can be a basis for many meaningful possibilities in our life. In the same way we can try to go beyond money to focus on the underlying need, we can go beyond traditional pathways to finding collaboration to focus on connecting with people and changing their lives, trusting that this will feed into our process positively. What are ways we can cultivate these kind of bonds with friends and strangers? How can we compose experiences or solutions from our broad skillset to blow away people with life-changing magic?

Where most people use the term community, we can use connection to play into our strengths.

Episode 81, Metamuse podcast — Muse

[The only distinction Sublime makes between free and paid users is showing the 'UNLICENSED' toolbar text, which you may not even notice in daily usage but might make you look no so serious about your tools.]
[First priority is text entry, so that people feel they can type as fast as they want. Second priority is extensibility so that community can create optimizations for specific domains.]
[Everything inside Obsidian is a plugin. You can even turn off backlinks and the file menu bar to have a barebones editor and customize from there.]

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever - The Verge

One feature took off immediately, for power users and casual readers alike: a simple sharing system that let users subscribe to see someone else’s starred items or share their collection of subscriptions with other people. The Reader team eventually built comments, a Share With Note feature, and more. All this now seems trite and obvious, of course, but at the time, a built-in way to see what your friends liked was novel and powerful. Reader was prescient.

#043 – Confronting Your Fears and Taking a Leap with Pieter Levels of Nomad List

[Netflix can use their scale to charge $10 per month, but as a small business you need to charge more than that. Corner store doesn't compete with megacorps, but instead offers something different.]
[Aggregate information and research in one place and present it in a useful way, then build a community of people interested in that info to present other products they might like.]

#246 – Doing Content Right with Steph Smith of Trends.co

[Podcasts like are best friends, newsletters like acquaintances, blogs like random people you meet at conferences. You may never even know pay attention to who's writing an article.]

[Smaller numbers but quality relationships with everyone learning and growing together]

[Podcasts are top of funnel and a big ask for people to listen for an hour. Strategically talk about the topic in other channels, and plug the podcast when it bites.]

[You wouldn't hang out with a friend for an hour a week if they had no sense of humour and were purely informational, the experience needs to be fun.]

Open Box Computers & Electronics

Was able to find an iPhone mini here not available anywhere else. 'New' here means brand new sealed in box. Claimed over the phone they resell returned items from Costco.

Is the solo model misaligned when capacity for non-projects feels chronically impossible, yet fundamental milestones seem lightyears away? How much is a celebration of what can be accomplished by one person and how much is a failure to involve others along the way?

Simply live your your life 100%. Do what only you can do. Show as much magic as possible.

[Most people buy transactionally to make money or get laid, and non-transactionally to support things they like. Framing yourself as a utility lands you in the first category. People want a parasocial relationship with creators, and will pay to feel excused from not trying the creative path themselves. Doing and publishing isn't enough to land you in the second category: documenting and explaining in an artful way can become as important as what you're making. Maintaining a community implies being more active on social media.]

[Try camming.]