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Mike· 3 years ago

RIP Damo Suzuki

As you get older, more and more entire bands will be gone. The Band entered that realm last year with the death of leader Robbie Robertson, and it's been 10 years without any original Ramones on this earthly plane. Now only the original keyboardist Irmin Schmidt remains from the classic lineup of Can.

Damo Suzuki, as the legend goes, was discovered by a recently-singerless Can as a busker and joined the same day.

When they asked me to sing, I never thought that I’d stay with this band or be invited to make recordings of LPs, I never had such a dream.

A guy who left Japan on a whim the day after his 18th birthday, he barely spoke German at the time and wasn't particularly great at English either. He had a dream of being a cartoonist, and felt that the hippies around him in '68 were trend-following egoists rather than true free spirits. Can, however, were a different story:

Everybody in the band is quite special. And they had different interests in music. Jaki was free jazz, Irmin [Schmidt] was a conductor of an orchestra, Holger [worked with] Stockhausen and Michael [Karoli] was a young rock guitarist. And I was a hippie! So five totally different people with five different directions. With the chemistry, naturally it came together. That’s why it’s quite timeless music.

He left after three stone-cold, monumentally influential and still-relevant albums at 23 to become a Jehovah's Witness. But it seems like it was a pattern for him to not be a joiner, and though he considered himself a Christian until he died, he left that organization after a couple years as well.

He spent a lot of time touring with random musicians and not rehearsing, preferring spontaneity — and getting away with such insanity because he was Damo Suzuki. I was lucky enough to see him around 20 years ago with a Boston band called Cul de Sac and he was still a magical performer.

Safe journeys to wherever you're going now, Damo.

Mike· 3 years ago

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Migration and loss

As this iteration of the blog enters its tenth year (and I believe it's on its third CMS? Fourth?) I've been moving a lot of posts finally from the old Kirby system. It just involves sucking metadata out of the Kirby format and into the frontmatter that Eleventy uses, which is something more portable for the next inevitable move.

But while the process is more manual than I would like, it has given me an opportunity to look at old content. There are some really interesting links I've blogged. Unfortunately, a HUGE chunk of them do not work anymore.

It's hard not to see this as something fundamentally messed up. Like, we've broken the internet somehow.

Mike· 3 years ago

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Zed's alive, baby

Promised for a while, finally Zed arrives. It's written by some of the creators of Atom, but instead of another Electron thing it's a very fast-performing app written in Rust.

It's multiplayer, apparently, which as someone who was once subjected to pair programming I've always found that a little weird. But it works for Figma, right?

Anyway, I wrote this post in it. Will be nice to see it appear on Linux, a platform that is surprisingly lacking in lightweight code editors. Between the anemic GEdit and a full blown IDE you have Lite XL, Microsoft's Electron-based VSCode, and of course the influential but non-free Sublime, which has persisted. I don't love any of them, but I'm liking this so far.

Mike· 3 years ago

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I knew I hated this game

From the Public Domain Review's top articles of 2023, here's the story of The Landlord's Game, which you may know as the family-destroying force of simultaneous acrimony and boredom called Monopoly. Turns out, as you might guess from how brutal the game actually is, that it was not initially pro-monopoly. In fact, it was anti-land-ownership, the product of an economic philosophy called Georgism that posited one can't actually own land. There were even two sets of rules originally: one based on equity and wealth redistribution, the other on... you know. It was also invented by a woman, and though she patented it, somehow it was yoinked by a guy who sold a version (with only the second ruleset) to Parker Brothers.

Truth will out, I suppose, but it's pretty sad that Lizzie Magie never got her due. I guess "Go" was catchier than the Marxy "Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages."

Mike· 3 years ago

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Horizon Zero Dawn

After undertaking a ridiculous repair job on our "new" Playstation 4, the logical choice was to start playing a game. Not sure what actually got me looking at Horizon Zero Dawn, but it's one of the more fun titles I've played in a while. I decided after almost 300 hours that I was done with Tears of the Kingdom so I did the final boss and didn't look back. So you'd think I might be done with swords-and-bows open world post-apocalyptic fantasy stuff. Yet I picked it up for $10 and it is a blast. Great stealth, fun combat, solid voice acting, and a mystery to unravel. There's a post-apocalyptic melancholy to the whole thing but it's shot through with humor too.

Looking forward to getting the sequel on sale, though for some reason the DLC is only on PS5. Get a PS5? No thanks! I will be giving that $500 to my daughter's preschool for approximately 17 minutes of child care.

Mike· 3 years ago

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What a gas

There are zillions of one-horse towns across the US, and most of them have a minor story worth going "huh, that's interesting" over. Mattoon, IL, (pronounced MATT-TOON with no obvious stress on either syllable, but certainly not muh-TOON) the hub of my maternal family side — a town that barely tops 15,000 people even today — has a couple that are way stranger than that.

The first of these is the country's original Burger King. The origin story was just that an ice cream stand called Frigid Queen (lovely...) needed a king when the owners expanded to fast food, and the logical choice was Burger King. In 1968 a court ruled that the more famous Burger King can't have a location within 20 miles of Mattoon, nor can the Original Burger King operate another restaurant outside the area. It's still there, and thriving as far as I know, at least to whatever extent a little burger shop can thrive in a tiny midwest town.

Perhaps more famous is the story of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon aka the Phantom Anesthetist, a 1940s incident that has over time become known as a textbook example of mass psychosis. Atlas Obscura has an interesting article on it. They posit that wartime situations and fears may have contributed to the weird hysteria that hung over the town like a fog. A chemical fog which of course did not actually exist. They make a good case.

Look at this newspaper from the time to get an idea of the national mood. Hopeful but war-weary and still afraid of phantom Nazi or Japanese enemies attacking while most of America's men are away. So what actually happened? We might never know if there was really an "Anesthetic Prowler" or if any of the attacks actually happened. But it's a creepy story and a fun one to have in the family.

Mike· 3 years ago

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Entering the last console generation the hard way

My son's friend just straight up gave him a Playstation 4 a few weeks back. I have no idea what the circumstances are in which you have too many PS4s, but there we are.

Unfortunately, it had been in storage for a while and someone had attempted a repair on it (for what? I don't know). So after buying a couple $5 games we found the CD drive just didn't want to work. I'm not the biggest fan of digital games because of course you don't actually own them, not to mention the drive sounds like it's gonna take off even if there's no disc in it.

So I did what any insane person would do: I ordered a drive from iFixit, a site with a 40%-complete tutorial on how to replace it. Turns out, the actual method for replacing the optical drive in a PS4 Slim is "just take the whole god damn console apart." That quarter inch of thickness saved over the standard model comes at the expense of modularity.

I also replaced the spinning 500GB hard drive with a 1TB SSD, which was no big deal — there's a sled that can be loosened with a single screw and any SATA laptop drive can be plugged right in.

Overall... significantly harder than upgrading a PC. But now we have a working PS4 and have been diving into Spider-Man (him) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (me), all for about $50 and some stressful tiny screw replacement.

Mike· 3 years ago

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Has it really been that long?

Not joking, I forgot how Eleventy worked.

Mike· 4 years ago

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RIP Ryuchi Sakamoto

It seems so recently that YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi passed, and now we lose another of the great trio, and probably the one who is most well-known internationally outside of the group. Ryuichi Sakamoto was not only the heartthrob of the band, he had an extremely prolific solo output (his most recent release came out in January), collaborated with rad people like David Sylvian, Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Iggy Pop, and has even won an Oscar for scoring The Last Emperor (and probably deserved another for The Revenant but was ruled ineligible for dumb reasons).

This article, titled “Music Sounds the Way it Does Because of Ryuichi Sakamoto”, is a great read but if you don't feel like taking the time, just trust the title. The man lived in the future but was grounded in organic and acoustic sounds, especially the piano. He will be monumentally missed.

Here is his beautiful collab with David Sylvian, “World Citizen (I Won’t Be Disappointed).”

Mike· 4 years ago

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Get things done or die trying

Nerds, creatives, and knowledge workers in general seem to gravitate toward productivity schemes and methodologies. If you're anything like me, and I know some of you are because that's part of why we get along, you might jump from thing to thing over time.

One of the first "named" systems I can remember getting into is Getting Things Done, probably through early tech blogger Merlin Mann (now perhaps more well-known as co-host of a podcast with a guy who later became "Bean Dad"). The system worked well for me for a while when I worked from home, freelanced, and had no kids. What Mann and others who jumped on the train might not have really grasped is that David Allen (not the guy from Gong) designed it for executives with assistants and both the time and power to lock themselves away for effectively days at a time while they did weekly reviews. The book came with a door hanger. Imagine your kid respecting a door hanger that says "Weekly review in progress."

Lately, I've been working with two systems that are more geared toward creative minds: the bullet journal and the second brain.

A friend turned me on to the "bujo" after I asked about the notebook she carried everywhere. The thing that its creator, Ryder Carroll, says about it is that it's a "mindfulness practice masquerading as a productivity method," and that's very true. Sitting down with a paper notebook and doing both your todos and your actual journaling is a great way to focus, be present, and stop farting around with the external for a minute. It's also great for people with focus issues or who have trouble sticking to systems, because you can just pick it back up if you flop for a while. Start journaling again where you left off. No biggie.

However, I have years of notebooks stacked up and one thing they're not good at is indexing and re-accessing information and insights that you've achieved. This is where Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain comes into play. The core thinking behind his system is almost the opposite of the bullet journal: It's only digital tools that can store and search in a way that enables us to truly offload a lot of data from our first brain.

That makes a lot of sense, of course, and it's what tools like Evernote, Joplin, Roam, whatever were originally designed for — but it also brings me back home to a reason that GTD worked for me: David Allen's core slogan was "If it's on your mind, it's not getting done." The second brain philosophy extends that to statements like "it's not able to be accessed," "it's not creative fodder," or more generally, "if it's on your mind, it's not doing you any good."

There's a lot more I love about the method but that's another post. But I still feel like I owe a lot to David Allen and his insane flowcharts designed to take things "off your mind" and turn you into a robot that always knows what to do. in this stupid-ass world where we have strayed pretty far from whatever-you-believe-in's light, it's a gift to be able to stop worrying about stuff for a few minutes.