Defiant Sloth

Succinct ode to the ideation and evolution of the backpack, heralding back to the 1960s with JanSport.

Some used bags, sure. They probably called them satchels—a word my dad would say. But many still wandered the halls and the quads in ignorance. Like fish in water, they probably thought nothing of it, just as their forebears thought nothing of life without electricity.

Great to see the junk fees rule enacted (will officially go into effect in April 2025). Pricing transparency is an amazing quality of life change. And I’m curious to see how aggregator sites (e.g., for travel) will handle this in their templates and feeds.

Rich typographic find by John Gruber of the Sanborn Fire Maps. Worth re-linking to.

Seems like everyone is predicting a transformation of the browser… this from Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI:

My bet is that every browser, search engine, and app is going to get represented by some kind of conversational interface, some kind of generative interface. The UI that you experience is going to be automagically produced by an LLM in three or five years, and that is going to be the default. And they’ll be representing the brands, businesses, influencers, celebrities, academics, activists, and organizations, just as each one of those stakeholders in society ended up getting a podcast, getting a website, writing a blog, maybe building an app, or using the telephone back in the day.

(A follow-up to this.)

Om Malik predicts a major evolution of the browser:

While browsers are so ubiquitous that it may be hard to imagine life without them, the truth is that we humans have had to adapt to what has been a document-centric web experience. We have been forced to adapt to technological constraints, rather than technology truly adapting to human needs.

I’m seeing more and more of this concern amongst friends and coworkers, and journalists/artists in particular are flabbergasted:

Cinema, theatre and great novel writing has always had the power to entrance, to get us to suspend our disbelief. But we knew where the border between fantasy and reality ran. Now with AI we are entering a world where those lines will be harder to discern – and many people just don’t care.

We once distinguished reality from fantasy and used this difference for high art: interpret authors’ perspectives to embrace emotion, challenge thought, and employ critical analysis. Perhaps I’m lamenting the loss of preference for older formats. Though long-form television remains popular, the proliferation of ultra-short-form video and the lack of authorship or authenticity are the new norm.

I was surprised at how quickly I was able to identify, and moments later, buy a specific glass that was used extensively in the film, The Taste of Things.

Figuring this was likely a glass design that has been around for a while in France (the film takes place in the the late 19th century), it should be fairly easy to find.

So:

• My first instinct was to screenshot a frame from the film that featured the glass prominently, and I found this quite easily (conducted a search for the film and quickly sifted through stills until I found a suitable one)
• I then tabbed to Google Images, and uploaded a cropped version of the still frame detailing the glass
• After about 3-5 seconds of running an analysis on the image, Google presenting a grid of potential products that fairly accurately represented the glass
• While I couldn’t find the exact one, I landed on what was surely a custom design based on a much earlier variant of La Rochère’s Perigord wine glass — the glassmaker has, after all, been around since 1475

This seems, without a doubt, the closest fit, and I landed on this within minutes of conducting my search. I know this commerce image search tech has been around for several years now, it’s still impressive, and until now, I’ve actually never had the need to use it. But it certainly won’t be the last. Amazon also has a similar image search tool called Amazon Lens, but it’s oddly only available in the Amazon app. Will be curious to see ChatGPT and Perplexity start incorporating this kind of thing into their chat interfaces (Perplexity launched its Shopping capability the other week, though I haven’t used it).

You love to see Best Made Co. come back to life this year. Limited run of items so far, but still exuding that long-term, hardcore philosophy.

Last week was our third year straight year of a tradition in going up to Duluth for Thanksgiving, and equally, our third year visiting Bentleyville, the holiday lights extravaganza hosted right on a pier (Bayfront Festival Park) jutting towards Lake Superior off the downtown drag.

Admittedly, I’m not a huge holiday guy. Seasonal changes are great in the midwest, but the holidays’ commercialism can weigh heavily on the soul. Yet the lighting decor this time of year is pleasant escapism into winter, and I do enjoy it.

So... what better than to supercharge your senses with the Bentleyville experience. It’s free, has over 5 million lights, including tunnels and animated scenes, and offers plenty of free snacks along the trek — quite a remarkable event to kick in annually (21 years running).

We stayed at Pier B Resort this time, and if you are there (or park in the nearby lots), you can hop on this ATV-propelled winter ride, which cruises back and forth between Bentleyville entrance and fire pit all evening long. Also, free.

Once we got there, there was already underway a light, patchy snowflake fall in slow motion around the city, and it sparkled radiantly against the neon. When we approached one of the early outbuildings (the Cookie House), it was on full display, and when the attendant inside asked us kindly if we wanted a free hot chocolate and cookie, we couldn’t get it out of our minds that we had erroneously stepped into a holiday movie set.

There are several other pitstops along, including firing up s’mores atop firepits in the central hub, gift shops, etc. You know, plenty to do and see, at your own pace. But that Cookie House encounter hit just right. It's worth visiting!

Heading back to Pier B.

Part of me likes this book-reading weight, but it also seems fitting for hardcover books only — I would hesitate to use it against a paperback for fear of splitting the spine (ever since I was a kid, I try never to split a spine).

You have an entire article about the virality of splitting the “G” on an official Guinness pint glass, but not a single photo depicting the act.

On a separate note — Guinness has always been a really solid choice of beer.

Louie Mantia has been on a tear lately releasing (or re-releasing?) new icon packs, the latest of which reflects on the controller button styles of the Sony PlayStation.

Really digging Tom Bihn’s holiday product release aesthetic — dripping in that 1970s/1980s magazine ad style. Hoping they have some kind of digital circular they release onsite to showcase this work (and products, of course). Speaking of which, if you don’t already know — they make excellent bags.

After 15+ years, it’s astounding to me that when working with folks across multiple time zones, there still is a bias on time coordination from just about everyone on the East Coast to assume you (West Coast/Midwesterner) will always do the mental math to adjust to their time zone. Why.

This sounds way more dramatic than it is.

Both 2020 and 2024 were the years I decided to re-think personal email usage and clean up my daily behaviors for what I thought would be an easier triage, read, and archive methodology.

I do not receive an inordinate amount of personal email (work, yes, but that’s separate, and I wholly use Outlook for that). My personal email tends towards select newsletters (from companies and writers/creators), receipts/utility invoices/minutiae of that manner, service sign-ins and email MFAs, and correspondence. Not difficult, but with over 1,200 entries in my 1Password vault, I was getting a lot of email and shit from my data being sold and dealing with, as I assume many people do, triaging through endless newsletters that would pile in my inbox.

• It takes a lot of time to manage this manually
• Prior to 2020, I used .Mac/MobileMe/iCloud for the most part, paired with a Gmail account (now so old it was getting constantly bombarded with junk mail), and an Outlook account for Microsoft services (rarely ever used)
• In June 2020, the 37signals folks released their take on email with Hey, a grounds-up re-envisioning of what email could look like if a fully controlled vertical approach was taken with a major emphasis on progressive web app UI
• Four years later, I’ve partially regretted going all-in on one solution, and have retracted, but let me explain

I do like most of what Hey is doing with email. Yes, a lot of their functionality could and eventually did get copied by other email clients (like Spark and Fastmail), but even four years later, it’s still a fresh, efficient system because of three notable ease-of-use features that change behavior and save time:

1. The Screener (allowing in/out any recipients you don’t save as a contact or previously allow into your inbox)
2. Its inbox organization:
   • Bubble Up (a way to schedule or immediately elevate emails to the top of the inbox
   • Set Aside to set emails below the inbox in a stack
   • Reply Later to set aside emails below the inbox in a separate stack
   • Notes on emails via a sticky visible in the inbox).
3. Cover Art, in which you can add an image to a slider that covers up all previously read email that just collects in the bottom of your inbox so that you only ever are seeing the new emails for triaging

Again, quite a few of these have been engineered elsewhere (even Apple Mail has Remind Me, which re-schedules email to the top of the inbox). But a few things were nagging at me — I understand that there are some hard feelings against 37signals over the last few years, and this lingered on me for sure; and secondly, Hey was a vertically-integrated system that required you to only use the Hey web app and desktop/mobile apps. For a company that honors the web (they’ll operate this stuff “until the end of the Internet”), and believes strongly in rebooting the single-app-buy-once or subscribe-for-value mantras, surrendering something as open source and open web as email to a single company to own and operate seems slightly unnerving.

And so... This past month I’ve slowly unwound my reliance on my hey.com email address, which unfortunately had propagated across 200+ critical services/logins. I modified most of these to a new custom domain email account, which can be managed anywhere (the domain of which costs only $10/year). And what did I learn?

• First, you can still use Hey’s interface and features without using their @hey email address — as long as you pay, you can forward any email into it, or pay an extra $2/month to have their host your custom domain. Still pricey compared to alternatives, but you don’t necessarily have to buy all-in to the Hey philosophy to use it, and it’s basically like a $99/year app subscription (not too dissimilar from $60/year for Spark, or — I mean, really? — $330/year for Superhuman)
• I’m back to using the Apple Mail client on iOS and macOS. It’s bare bones but in a way that sometimes feels faster and fresher (likely because it’s a truly native app) than what I’d grown used to with Hey (clumsier shortcuts, poor bulk editing, non-native UI movement and experience)
• Without using a third party app, you can still do some basic but powerful rule-setting, albeit it’s a manual slog: I edited dozens of individual rules in the iCloud settings for Mail (vs in the Mac app, as it’s my understanding that rules in iCloud specifically are the primary trigger for all apps using the service).
  • And so I set up a rule to intake any contact I deemed a newsletter and move it directly into a mailbox named Newsletter, which now operates basically like Hey’s The Feed. It takes an additional 30-60 seconds setting this up for every new newsletter I subscribe to, but it does make me consider the intention of every subscription I decide to add.
• There’s no way to mimic the Screener in Apple Mail, but you can block/send to junk emails, or manually unsubscribe (another practical way of manually scrubbing that kind of shit out of your life). Again, this takes time, but it’s been therapeutic for me.
• I still have 8 months left of Hey as well, so I’m balancing between the two (forwarding any remainder emails from my @hey address to my iCloud account), so I can decide what route to eventually take next year.

One thing I will say is that the ability to change your email is a critical function that every website, service, utility, etc. should have available to you. An excruciatingly painful example of this is the inability to do so with Shopify. While I think their model is brilliant and seamless across so many sites (so so so so so many shops use its infrastructure), it’s impossible to modify your account apart from deleting it entirely and creating a new one with a new email address. This is archaic.

Lastly, this is not a knock against Hey — they’re doing some great things here. This is more of a personal reconfiguration, whereby I’ve decided to return to a more open, SMTP-accessible email management for myself, with the ability to use any other kind of client in the future, and fully owning my Email Address (custom domain) that is portable across email management providers. If you have the stomach and pain for time associated with this kind of experimentation, I recommend exploring it for yourself, as sometimes modifying the most mundane things in life can either be aggravating or spiritually redeeming.

Watched the French film The Taste of Things twice this past week, and can’t get its immaculate vibe out of my mind. My wife said it best — it’s like ASMR for food obsessives. If you like cuisine, cooking, the details of hospitality, or a lovely, focused, quiet cinema experience, this if for you.

I love how Bear blog deploys its lean analytics (cleverly via CSS) for users of the platform — Herman Martinus details it in a post, albeit from a year ago. (I’ve been digging into a lightweight homepage solution, and reacquainted myself with Bear — curious if there’s anything else that’s similar).

Placed new batteries into an old Dreamcast VMU I had sitting in an OEM controller, in anticipation of, just maybe, booting up the console for some play time this week. Twenty five years later, Dreamcast’s signature portable mini-game system memory card still seems cool.

Phenomenal animated short film, Return to Hairy Hill, found via Colossal, who describes it best:

“Rendered in black-and-white, otherworldly paper figures traverse a dreamlike landscape at the foot of a mountain range as winter approaches.”

Jim VandeHei (Axios co-founder) on The Grill Room podcast regarding new media vs the old:

“What I tell our staff is, I don’t have time to be romantic. Whatever was will not be in the future. You damn well better figure out what’s happening on the ground.

Honestly, at this point, good advice.

This place gets it — charge that extra $3 to cook the frozen pizza.

(Loony’s Brew up in Ranier, Minnesota, staring right across the border to Canada).

Westenberg’s How to Destroy a Generation:

When every feeling becomes a guiding star, resilience takes a back seat. Minor setbacks start to feel like existential crises, and any challenge to your perspective feels like a personal attack. Soon enough, you have a population that’s constantly on edge, unable to handle adversity, and primed to overreact to the smallest discomfort.

Sometimes new stories are just old stories badly remembered.

• Susanna Clarke, afterword: snow (from her book, The Wood at Midwinter)

China tightens control of rare earth minerals — what’s the plan here?

This scene hits harder and darker.