Defiant Sloth

Ben Thompson has a thorough, future-gazing interview with Hugo Barra about Orion and Meta’s AR initiative, spanning the hardware strategy, the Luxottica partnership, why not bother with a smartphone as part of the ecosystem, and the impetus for developers to get on board. Exciting new epoch.

Studio Neat starts a patch club concept with the focus on simple designs within the confines of embroidery — first up is a whimsical take on the NASA worm logo.

A few weeks into using the new Reeder app. Still enjoying it. Some interim thoughts:

• You have to set it up for success… but don’t over-engineer it: the core experience is reading your RSS feeds via a macro timeline, and that habit has to form
• Folders are superb for dropping feeds that have been de-activated in Home for manual checks (like a traditional RSS reader paradigm) since there are some feeds that update way too frequently on a daily basis and jam up the main feed
• Log in sparingly to other platforms (e.g., not logging into your Mastodon account; however, I’ve added some developer accounts to follow in Reeder vs on my own Mastodon account
• Workflow is better than other RSS apps/previous Reeder incarnations for interacting with content — if you are reading a Mastodon post in Reeder, for instance, you can fast swipe into your app of choice to interact further with it. Same goes with Micro.blog, Glass, etc.
• It’s great for glancing through favorite subreddits — even though it doesn’t pull in the full thread, you can manually follow various subreddits and drop them into a folder, and easily swipe to jump into the thread itself

The martini is special. I respect the craft.

But I also dig this new age shit in NYC attempting to perfect temperature retention. Sure, no one historically drinks a martini like this (unless you slam it after good preparation), but the concept is chef’s kiss. And olives… they’ve addressed them:

Just about everything, in fact, is the enemy of a Martini’s coldness. You might call the drink’s historical companion, the olive, a frenemy. “The olive definitely does change the temperature,” said Hubbard. “It’s going to move it up.” For that reason, at Hawksmoor olives are served not in the cocktail glass, but on the side in a small dish

I’d try this, but never make it the norm. Martini prep is part of the enjoyment, and while batching cocktails is economically clever, it’s bankrupt of authenticity. And the cocktail is about, if nothing else, authenticity.

Unless… there’s no going back after drinking a martini like this.

A list. Of things. Of interest.

• Podcast interview from Scratching the Surface with Taylor Levy & Che-Wei Wang of CW&T. Nice dive into their recent tape dispenser product and the rest of their design process.
• Friendly reminder on the incredible Cabinland project that is coming along (succinct but outdated article) — a joint project from Jacob Witzling and Sarah Underwood. Latest updates on their architectural shenanigans: Instagram and YouTube.
• After years of fluctuating between Mac launching apps Launchbar and Alfred, I am trying Raycast (again). It’s definitely gotten better, and is free to use if you abstain from using AI and syncing accounts.
• Sober good news on Friday: “JPMorgan Chase said the U.S. economy remains strong for both consumers and big companies, a sign that the Federal Reserve may have achieved the much-discussed soft landing with lower inflation and healthy growth.”
• Lastly, I took a gamble on a new soft wallet from Ridge — I’ve been apprehensive in trying any of their wallets due to both popularity and the hard metal designs, but this new one looks well-executed and takes aim at Trove for the title of the slim/sleek wallet crown. I’ll be reviewing soon.

Photo: new rug, in the living room.

Green Day de-masters their landmark Dookie album into 15 inconvenient, throwback musical formats in a brilliant audio experiment. The big mouth Billie bass is neat, but the answering machine? Divine. (Via Kottke. )

Movie theater popcorn solved: refined coconut oil and Flavacol.

Butter has nothing to do with it.

A reminder of the rationale for investment capital into corporate imperialism companies:

Companies were encouraged to seek growth at all costs and worry about profitability later, not an unheard-of strategy but one that could now be pushed to new extremes. Uber could burn through billions in cash for about 15 years, bending the market, smashing local regulations and monopolies, altering consumer behavior in the process, and then go public at an $82.4 billion valuation while losing $800 million a quarter.

The article links back to a similliarly damning piece from 2021 that hints at this entire ecosystem subsidizing millennial and gen z lifestyles whereby all of our behaviors and monetary attitudes towards expectations from companies like Uber, Netflix, etc. shift indefinitely.

Where do we go from here? It’s not like this line of thinking has changed in any material way over the past two decades; if anything, this is the norm, and the gambles are ever more macro in nature.

Anyway, there are a few other nuggets to glean from NYT’s assessment of the vast Netflix’s library, including commentary of the long tail of hours viewership and why certain titles may or may not have benefited from inter-country licensing and the inclusion in popular algorithmic groupings of streamable video. A question for Netflix is whether its model is actually similar to Uber’s or not: has it truly changed our video watching behavior beyond the initial SVOD (streaming video on demand) model shift with its immense library of choice in a “traditional” video format, or… are behaviors fundamentally changing again with the verticalization of video and hours spent on platforms like TikTok? Usage is almost the same between younger generations, so perhaps it’s a combination of time spent across the two complementary platforms.

Behaviorally, you could argue there is less friction to tap open TikTok and scroll (most similar to the early days of linear, live TV) than parsing through millions of titles deciding on what to watch (the Netflix model).

You aren’t alone, Ben.

Am I alone in preferring an offline, analogue, tactile reading experience? Is there something here, or is the future of media entirely, irrevocably digital?

Sitting back and reading paper is magnificent.

The hype is on point for Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. 📚

Really digging the vibes of this hulking skeleton yard decor — saw this before dipping into Halftime Rec for a beer.

Sometimes the Economist’s book reviews are (probably) a just-as-good reading of the book’s primary thesis and subsequent chapters. And while I’m curious about the topic, I get the idea behind Infantalised:

You may say that 1+1=2, but “my truth” is that it makes three. Post-modernists deem this way of thinking sophisticated. Keith Hayward calls it childish. He is right.

This Strib article really should have linked to my pull-tab library, but alas, at least it’s a good deep dive on the culture and history of the game.

Hey there.

Olga Tchepikova-Treon’s piece about Bong Joon-ho’s ‘The Host’, intersecting with the Coen brothers’ misanthropic tendencies, is a good read. After all, “who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?”

Thank you for writing this, Kevin (from @overkillwtf@overkill.social). My partner and I feel the same way. There are lots of DINCs out here trying to find each other amongst the populace, and it’s a difficult needle to thread in many circles.

Chicago. Six years after moving out, it still drips that high-octane energy whenever I visit. And what they’ve upgraded along the Chicago River in downtown is marvelous.

One of these days… my dream job.

Good to be on top — while just one of many airport rankings, J.D. Power issued its 2024 report and put Minneapolis-St. Paul #1 for customer satisfaction in the Mega Airports category. We just got back from a trip last night, and MSP airport is always a welcome respite after a day of travel.

The call for returning to lunchtime chatter that fuels the City and a new London restaurant flexing invitation incentives:

Just as important is the menu, on which top billing goes to a two-sip martini. The £5-a-glass snifter is an out-of-office message, explains Marceline’s operations director Liam Nelson. It’s a signal of hospitality, a loss leader, a statement of intent. It says: you’re safe with us — let’s get just a little bit drunk.

Yes please.

I concur, Matan Budy, on buying things you use:

…I press the pay button with love. It makes me feel good that I upgrade my life, or that I support someone who is working really hard for something I care about.

➔ A big concur to Dr. Drang’s thoughts on the most important update for watchOS — kayaking will be great:

the addition of mapping to paddling workouts… in the Workout and Activity apps. This was mentioned during WWDC, and I was glad to see that it’ll be in next week’s updates to watchOS and iOS. No waiting until “later this fall/year.”

When Silvio Rizzi released the new Reeder app, it didn’t explicitly replace the previous, fourth iteration — that one is now relegated to “Reeder Classic”, with the new version replacing the titular primary app. The experience is a very different departure from every RSS reader design paradigm that came before it. It has become a larger aggregator of feeds beyond just RSS reading material. And... its UX remains top notch.

My thoughts after using it for a week:

• The gist of the new Reeder interface: Add RSS feeds (blogs, audio, video), other selected feed types with APIs (Mastodon, Bluesky, Glass, etc.).
  • Reeder breaks feeds into separate streams, including an aggregate everything called ‘Home’
  • All posts are synched by scroll position, not unread count.
  • You can save individual posts to buckets called Links (saved web links), Later (stack integrated directly into Reeder’s feed), and Bookmarks (not actually sure what this is, to be honest), and Favorites (favorited posts).
  • You can also tag posts for organization, and turn them into public links.
• At first, I anxiously worried it would grind against my habitual RSS instincts from 20 years of using reader apps (🫡 NewsFire, my first one in 2004).
• But, after using the primary Home feed for several days, a new habit had formed, and...
  • This new method is superior.
• I do not miss seeking out specific feeds (you can still do this, and Reeder syncs your scroll position), and not surprisingly, I have been reading and seeing more from my feeds because I’d usually put off checking Colossal or

Dang, the new iA Writer app logo is beautiful.

One of those unexpected, sudden rising to fame stories that happens every so often in the literature wold: this time with Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series. I’ve only watched the Apple TV series so far (which is stellar and on its 4th season), but I’ve got my eye on the books next…