Journal

134 entries under "article"

Monday, February 19, 2024

What is the Difference Between a Radler and a Shandy? | Druthers Brewing Company

Shandy originated in the 1850s in England where it was earlier known as Shandygaff. The Shandygaff was a mixture of beer and ginger ale or ginger beer. By the late 19th-century, the ginger ale in the Shandygaff was replaced by lemonade or lemon soda, and the “gaff” was dropped to shorten the word to just Shandy.

Friday, February 16, 2024

A Failure Resume

This document has served as a powerful reminder to myself of how much I’ve struggled to get to where I am and why I deserve to be here. And more importantly, it serves as a place to reflect and learn from the past and be less scared of failure in the future.

Keeping a failure resume has let me be so much more ambitious in trying new things and applying for things I would otherwise think I’m unqualified to apply for.

solve for distribution

[Better distribution matters more than better product because most people are satisfied beyond a certain ‘decent’ threshold. If you deliver a decent product to many customers, you can make enough to improve your product.]

“But the superior product must win!” Why? “Because it’s the superior product!” To who? “To me! And the 10 people I’ve talked to!” Ok but your competitor has talked to 10,000 people and they like his product well enough. And he’s hiring your product guy, oops, better luck next time.

I am sympathetic to the idea that great products, great artists, creators, etc should be appreciated. but also, “the audience” or “the market” is not actually some perfect, platonic ether. It’s people. And people are busy and tired and generally prefer to be met where they are.

If you don’t go out and do the work of teaching people how to appreciate you, your odds of being appreciated are very, very slim. you’re basically depending on chance, on the whim that Serious Appreciators will notice you. It’s very risky to leave this up to chance.

[Talk to a thousand people about it and you will notice patterns. When something resonates with a few dozen people, there are probably thousands of people that feel the same. Addressing what they mention means you connect with their specific experiences as opposed to what you think might be interesting.]

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

The Poor Can’t Afford the Benefits of Monogamy, and the Rich Don’t Need Them

Non-monogamy is generally cringe not because multiple people are consensually involved, but rather because relatively privileged people have dumped their neuroses and misguided aspirations for a “free” or authentic life

The people documented in our study kept households together, raised each other’s children, stayed together for lifetimes, aided each other’s work and stayed by each other during war, illness, death and grief. Much of this is the sort of relationship style I get to experience daily, too, living with my partners and my cats and I am both grateful and hardly special for it. There are lots of people like me. We are, of course, also doing a social reproduction, making the world over and over again, just slightly differently. We are generally using different relationship style and thus socio-cultural technology in a way that is responsive to the precarity of neoliberalism—not liberated from it, because we have of course not escaped material and historical trends. But though we cannot escape these trends we can counter some of their isolating or libertarian effects, and so live in a less individualist, more communal and fairly committed way.

ask: if two parents good, perhaps three parents better? Perhaps motherhood communes better? Perhaps parenting with friends better?

Friday, February 9, 2024

Frugly vs. Freemium

the following games profit solely from aesthetic upgrades: Rocket League, Fortnite, CS:GO, Path of Exile, League of Legends. In these games, players purchase outfits for in-game avatars that do not impact the competitive balance.

I plaster the word “free” everywhere until consumers pay for a license. I’m not the first to do this, and I certainly won’t be the last.

Thursday, February 8, 2024

Every child on their own trampoline

Private affluence is individuals gaining things for themselves – possessions, nice homes and experiences, trampolines. Public affluence is money spent lavishly on things that are shared – libraries, parks, buses, playgrounds.

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

The magic of doing $10,000 per hour work

[Busywork is satisfying (swoosh) and easy (ding), so do it cautiously. Email can lack affordances for priority while allowing anyone to send you one, which can easily get you absorbed in what other people demand of your attention. If you can do it hungover, it’s less valuable.]

[Increase your anti-fragility by honing keystone skills: public speaking, writing, sales, technical sensibility, design, and negotiation.]

[$10,000 per hour work is invisible and may produce no results for years or decades.]

A simple habit to let luck find you

I’ve made one [Mutually Beneficial Introduction] per day for 10+ years.

[Once both people opt-in, take thirty seconds to write with details that can’t be found by searching online. Try this regularly.]

Writing, Riffs & Relationships

[Share what you wrote with a deliberately small group of maybe five people: your metric here is conversation and meaningful connection.]

[Write for one person to focus the text and also guarantee there’s at least one person you can share with via direct message.]

[Scan your list of decent drafts considering who you could write each for.]

Grapefruit (book)

Let people copy or photograph your paintings. Destroy the original.

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Hire Me

Seriously, I won’t take your money unless you say, “I’m super jazzed with these results, and there’s nothing I would change.”

Paying Netflix $0.53/h, etc.

[Divide the monthly price by average usage to get the hourly cost. Per hour, people might be paying about fifty cents for online streaming, a dollar or few for games and movies, five to fifteen for their creator subscriptions.]

Send your users this welcome email

[Ask: “What’s happening in your world that brought you to this project?”]

Saturday, February 3, 2024

OLLOS

Most items appear in the timeline at the time they were created.

If an item attribute can be updated, such as by completing a to-do, a small update line appears at that time in the timeline.

If an item is scheduled for a future date or time, it appears there instead, and a simple update line appears at the time it was created and / or scheduled.

I see updates appear in my timeline when she schedules something. This is a very helpful transaction or record; I now know she set up an appointment for something I’m going to with her, or that she set up a meeting in the future, without any kind of extra “notification” feature, and without having to check future dates regularly for updates.

The more you hit “review later”, the longer it takes for the item to return, allowing items you’re less interested in to “float away” from you without requiring more destructive or detailed actions.


you can’t edit an existing note. Instead, you build on past notes using replies: you can reply to any past note with a new one that goes into your timeline now, forming a thread.

Much easier to compile buckets for ideas when you don’t need to label them—this is why people can write so much on micro-blogging platforms.

Beliefs

communication is a proxy for care. If the person doesn’t communicate, they don’t care.

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

I’m turning off my website analytics because I’m very brave and I promise I truly do not care about the numbers

Cosplaying internet detective doesn’t do much to sate my curiosity, it just lets me spin my wheels and trick me into thinking I’m being productive.

I turned off analytics

I don’t care about what gets ranked on Google, I’m not trying to optimise for the people who come from that channel.

People who arrive via search are just looking to get a question answered and move on. That’s great and I hope I can help them, but they are not the reason I’m here. This site is here for the people who stay a while, have a look around and then send me an email to start an interesting conversation.


I’ve been feeling similar lately, but erring on the side of continuing until there’s a specific reason to stop; there’s some underlying fear of losing something in the future that I can’t describe. The data is kind of boring—maybe the whole notion of this analytics exploits a ‘wanting to know where people come from’ and the deep-seated desire for connection. I’m curious in your case, why not ‘just’ make a filter to see the non-search data?

I definitely believe in meaningful connections as the fundamental focus for myself; measuring this might be valuable but not necessary for me, I’d prefer to hear people’s stories of change over seeing numbers. Wishing that your ‘search query’ returns results 🙏🏽☀️.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

in search of a new tab

[Each new tab feels like a choice: how do I want to spend my time?]


What a ’new tab page’ this is! I prefer queries (via keystroke launchers like Quicksilver or ‘Command-K’) over big lists, but this is beautifully personal and makes me drool; stable options can leverage muscle memory and reduce distractions. 👍🏽

Provokes me to wonder about social patterns and ‘formats’ like /now or ‘daily note’, ways of organizing that many people can practice and share so that we can all learn from each other.

Individual initiative, corporate inertia and good bad advice

Good luck finding books that somberly advise corporations on how to encourage a dangerous reliance on unsupervised individual inspiration.

A company needs to be able to treat its employees as interchangeable and expendable, both individually and collectively. It needs to be able to periodically layoff 17% of its workforce to cut its margin overhead by 1% and temporarily boost its stock price by 5%, without having to endure existential upheaval to its ongoing business processes. It needs to be able to double and redouble recklessly in size for the same dubious market reasons, without those people all piling up in the lobby where their chaos is visible from the street.

The key to these flexibilities, as we have understood at least since Henry Ford, is to formalize the operational roles so that their function in the overall system is symbolic and anonymous. As long as people are just units inserted into well-defined slots, the machinery doesn’t need to care who they are.

The secret truth of business advice is that it’s mostly about how to grimly extract residual value from the luck you already had, and the unearned love you were already unguardedly given, because there’s really no method for making more of it.

what happens in the conversations I have with the ppl I’m coaching

[I offer: space away from the rat-race to reflect, breathe more deeply, move deliberately; a good bullshit detector; place to practice, prepare, or role-play tough future conversations; help to find the right amount of stretch in your development goal without overdoing to short circuit progress; encouragement if you need someone telling you to quit your job.]

[Improve your interpersonal dynamics by seeing the relationship as something that can be co-designed in process rather than ‘agreed upon’.]

[My formal training is in engineering and agriculture. I coach because people ask me, not because I’m certified.]

[Smaller organizations might not be able to afford leadership coaching from professionals but can afford peer-to-pear from like-minded companions.]