Jazzy Sunday afternoon reading vibes.
On the turntable: Up At “Minton’s” by Stanley Turrentine. A perfect chill reading album.
Jazzy Sunday afternoon reading vibes.
On the turntable: Up At “Minton’s” by Stanley Turrentine. A perfect chill reading album.
I don’t know how to pick a favorite quote from this essay, so I’ll just go with this one. If you were born in the late 70s or early 80s, you have to read this. Just trust me.
I couldn’t try every sort of music, but I could find one and set up camp and live there for a week, a month, a year, and allow it to imprint in lasting ways on the way I saw the world. There’s a reason music never felt overwhelming to me the way it does now. It felt like a treasure hunt. It felt like a gift.
There’s a lot to ponder in Why Americans Are So Awful to One Another:
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.
There needs to be a better way to describe Adrian Tchaikovsky books than “It’s spiders and octopuses in space but look it’s really really good” because that’s not working for me.
Hard to pick a favorite from “Common Proverbs as Video Game Tutorials”, but I guess I’ll go with this one:
Your heart doesn’t have enough Fondness to complete this action. Try leaving the area for a while and coming back later.
Love this band. Love this album. Love this shot.
This describes my iPad usage perfectly. It has become a (delightful!) “reading for work” device. But nothing more.
Gobs of people thrive using their iPads for writing and other creative endeavors. But I know I’m best off, productivity-wise, using my iPad basically as a single-tasking consumption device for long-form reading and video watching.
See this is the problem with kittens.
I like this framing of how we react to things—Is it serving you?
I talked with a friend and told him about the situation. I asked for a sanity check. Was my anger appropriate? Or was I overreacting?
He smiled as he told me, “I think that is the appropriate reaction for what happened. But is it serving you? I don’t think it is. So you probably are overreacting.”
This is such a great idea to encourage new businesses. In America the problem would be lack of healthcare though…
Last week, I left Spotify to go full time building something new. Technically, I didn’t quit; I began a sabbatical, or tjänstledighet, as they call it here. In Sweden, you can take off up to 6 months to start a business so long as you meet some basic requirements.
This is an excellent post about “Return to Office” initiatives, including this gem:
A policy that starts with expected behaviours and actions is more convincing than an approach that suggests that merely being around a little more might be a vibe. (“We’re all in the office for ‘Meeting Free Wednesday’ including a team lunch” is better than “pick two days, any days”).
So far this is the best thing I’ve read about Barbie.
I like this Bill Hader quote, via Matt Rickard’s post on Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Feedback:
When people give you notes on something, when they tell you what’s wrong, they’re usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re usually wrong.
This quote stopped me in my tracks:
Maintain your distance, take care of your core ideas and aims, make sure you know the exact difference between what you do and anything else that’s going on, and move along quietly to the next thing.
Are we still doing How It Started / How It’s Going or is that over now? Anyway. Happy Friday, friends. May you be able to charge your… battery this weekend.
TIL! The Word “Blackmail” Has Nothing to Do With Mail:
As for the mail part, in Middle English male meant “rent” or “tribute.” It is from the Old English mal meaning “agreement,” a term originally adopted from Old Norse. So “blackmail” essentially means “evil rent” or “evil tribute.”
Interesting to see Black Hat SEO come for job seeking.
The concept: Copy a list of relevant keywords or the job description itself, paste it in a résumé and change the font color to white. The hope is that AI bots or digital filters in applicant tracking systems read the white text and surface the résumé for human review. Because keywords are in white, the résumé will look normal to human reviewers.
This seems like a smart move by Amazon. They probably can’t beat ChatGPT, so they do what they do best: move down the stack.
At the core of Amazon’s effort is a new product called Bedrock. Available inside AWS, Bedrock lets developers select from a range of AI models. Using these models, developers can build their own products, like AI chatbots, and then run them on AWS’s infrastructure.
This essay helpfully shares some important parenting lessons we can all learn from horror movies. For instance:
Don’t feel guilty about calling on the help of experts if you find yourself overwhelmed. They’ve seen it all, and can help you tend to your kid’s needs, as well as what’s best for your entire family. For starters, not building an in-ground pool on top of a desecrated cemetery.
New book arrival! Thanks a bunch to @andrewliptak@mastodon.social for putting this on my radar via his newsletter. What an absolute delight.
This is such an important album to me. It opened my eyes to many things I was oblivious to as a teenager. This essay does a great job of explaining the current controversy and how significant these songs are.
Although many are thrilled to see “Fast Car” back in the spotlight, it’s clouded by the fact that Chapman would have almost zero chance of that achievement herself in country music.
Sunday evening with a couple of this week’s new jazz & blues reissues. Turns out this is an excellent back-to-back combination for taking a breath before the week starts. Recommended.
This whole post on Death Metal English is just so good.
Normal English: “Thanks for explaining the train schedule”
Death Metal English: “PROFFERING GRATITUDE UPON THE CHRONOCRATION OF THE JUGGERNAUTS OF RETICULATED METALS AND FIRE”
Fully agree with @aworkinglibrary@mstdn.social about work friends:
I fervently believe that while work shouldn’t be the only place to make friends, it’s also not a place where friendship should be proscribed.
And I love this idea:
After my colleague started their new gig, we restored our old one-on-ones to our respective calendars. And we kept them up.
Recent jazz listens. Once I got on the Kenny Burrell train I couldn’t get off. He’s in my top 3 jazz guitarists.
