Defiant Sloth

A sad reality for the book industry… via No one buys books - by Elle Griffin:

in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.

Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario requires constant reading breaks in order to stomach the existential and horrifying material, but it stands as one of the most important politically speculative books of our time. 📚

As breweries continue to excel at their core product, but look to monetize in adjacent ways, several in Minnesota have tuned to both hop water (N/A option) and THC seltzers (part of a growing $180M revenue state-wide business that now includes taps).

While the THC seltzers are a genre of beverage unto their own (several have experimented with both light flavoring/zero calorie options, like Chill State, while others have loaded ingredients to create a more substantial beverage, like Trail Magic), there is increasing sophistication in the hop water offerings, and they have gotten so good I enjoy them more than half the time vs grabbing a beer, especially in the summer.

Surly

Was just out on Lake Minnetonka with Surly’s offering, simply called Sparkling Hop Water, and it was a very pleasant alternative to keep the DD (me) from intoxication. The citrus + mosaic hops smash through the light but bubbly carbonation, fulfilling on its promise to deliver the flavor you’d be looking for, all in a package with minimal ingredients (but including Vitamin C!) and 0 calories. Can design is a little Liquid Death-like and extreme for my tastes, but it’s what’s inside that matters.

Overall, this one reminds me of a flavored La Croix can, so if that’s your fix, this is a good option.

Fair State

A clear winner here is the set of hop waters from Fair State. They batch a set of cans for each hop predominantly used — so they’ve got a Citra & Centennial, a Citra & Galaxy, and more recently, a Hop Water Plus that features mosaic and strata hops paired with 50 mg of caffeine (because everyone seems to be finding new ways of pile-driving caffeine into our system). Each of these tastes, rightfully so, unique based on the hop(s) used, and I love the large format 16oz cans.

The Citra & Centennial is my favorite, I could drink this all day — it’s a super bright and super hoppy chug, and it will convert you to the hop water cause.

Fulton Hop Water

First of all, this can design is just lovely. Fulton has had an iteration out prior to this with an even more charming design, but I couldn’t find it as it looks like they changed the product to fit into their Hop Kingdom Family. It’s now called Hop Kingdom Hop Water, and I imagine it tastes the same as before. This one was a fairly chill, lightweight can when I originally tasted it, and I imagine it hasn’t changed. It was (and still isn’t) clear what kinds of hops are used in this, so your mileage of taste expectation may vary. Given that it’s kin to their variety pack of IPAs, it’s anyone’s guess. But this is a nice option to have if the other two I mentioned here aren’t available.

It’s better than Lagunitas’s option, which honestly I would have as a backup but never as a first choice.

It’s too bad these local cans aren’t more easily found across the state (so many nationwide grocery stores, like Whole Foods, stick to more national brands like Lagunitas), but I’ve spotted Surly and Fair State at several liquor stores and spots like Kowalski’s. They’re an excellent substitution for alcohol, but they’re also just a stellar beverage option.

A few photographic impressions from the roadtrip from the Twin Cities to west-side Michigan and back. Our excursion out on a pontoon along the Muskegon harbor of Lake Michigan was a highlight.

A list of some lists, from Field Notes. A quintessential kind of post for the notebook brand, really.

So... Cyan released a remake of 1997’s adventure game Riven (the sequel to Myst) this past month, and I took the plunge to nostalgia-surf my way to nirvana. And it worked. This game is tremendously engrossing, and every bit as intriguing as it was for my 12-year-old self when I played the multi-CD-ROM switching original. And I feel like I can solve most of its densely-layered, nonlinear puzzles without a guide this time.

This isn’t a long-winded review of any kind — just declaring that this game is wonderful, escapist artistry steeped in what I guess I’d call historical video game design. It'll bring you joy if you only just move around its environments, let alone solve its puzzles. Huge kudos to the Cyan team for rebuilding and adding perfectly-tuned modern updates the quintessence of the puzzle-adventure genre.

Caught up on a few posts from The Obsessor, and came across a recommendation for a new camera app called Pure from Trevor Walsh. Reminds me of the early iOS days of experimental apps — no image preview, just tap anywhere on the screen, it captures a photo, and limits you to 12 per day. It’s good.

Is there any other state in the US with such a breadth of grocery store non-dominance as Minnesota? Great piece by Adam Platt at MinnPost on the state of affairs. Big Kowalski’s fan, even if it’s only 2% marketshare.

We went cruising across Vermont last week for a vacation, staying in a variety of towns (including Burlington, Stowe, Waitsfield, and Woodstock). Lovely place. It's very much a "Wisconsin of the eastern US plus mountains", as we visited a number of dairy farms and tasted our way through a terrific breweries. I didn't take as many photos as I would have liked, but... here are a handful of shots (specifically of the beer and cheese we tried).

The Alchemist’s legendary Heady Topper IPA, tasted off the draft line at the brewery near/in Stowe. Really nice campus there.

Fiddlehead’s IPA, which I saw in a can at just about every restaurant and bar we frequented.

An excellent pack of Plymouth Cheddar. We nibbled our way through this paired with a bottle of Ira Sylvan Trousseau wine, unintentionally good together.

The Waterbury Club Lager, brewed by Prohibition Pig. Apparently they were heavily inspired by signage across the street and “copied it nearly to a T” as much as they could, in all fairness.

A package of the Willoughby Cheese by Jasper Hill Farms. Alas, we didn’t get a chance to visit this farm, but ate this while staying at a farm B&B, so kind of worked out.

For consistency’s sake, I usually always pose a photo of a water bottle. This was taken at the Billings Farm in Woodstock after a short bike ride there. Aluminum bottles or bust.

The people have been talking about Gabriel Smith’s Brat, and after picking it up at a local bookstore on our first day of vacation in Burlington, 30 pages in, I will admit that the people are right — this is a wickedly good new voice in literature. 📚

This guy, absolute connoisseur of north Minnesota/Wisconsin dive bars. A pleasure bumping into his retrospective series of essays, and this one about south Superior’s Ray Bar and tap puppets, is just 🤌.

Ambitious collaboration of companies using “luminescent pigments [from FibreTrace’s tech] into raw cotton when ginning”, whereupon “scanning a pigment, it can be tracked throughout the supply chain, identified and verified on-site”. Love to see this supply chain innovation approach.

Om’s great suggestion for Apple resonates on a number of levels — donate to national park preservation as a backbone to copies of macOS installs (since they keep naming versions after California landmarks and to amplify their sustainability efforts). Win win.

Very pleased to see Christina Nguyen win Best Midwest Chef at the James Beard Awards last night. The other nominees were equally as great, but she’s been up for several years and it’s such a well-deserved win for her restaurant, Hai Hai, a Southeast Asian gem in northeast Minneapolis.

Nothing quite stirs an emotional energy like waltzing into your local bagel shop with “Never Gonna Give You Up” greeting you on the speakers.

This MagSafe, slide-out Nintendo DS-like iPhone game controller is brilliantly conceived, and one of those things you wish you would have thought of first. Best wishes to Josh King in building this out at scale — smart kid! He also built a nice site for it, where you can sign-up to preorder.

Good to hear the use of QR code scanning for restaurant menus is reversing. This has been an insufferable practice that leaves dining too transactional, diluting the experience of interaction with the environment and server.

There seems to be a changing tide to hustle culture — whether it’s the folks I follow getting more mature, or acknowledgement of irrational societal pressures — and a reckoning with slowing down, mitigating distractions, and re-balancing life. Tracy Durnell has a good list in which to adhere.

Kino was released today as a 1.0 — a powerful, fun new video recording app from Lux, the makers of the Halide photography app. Immediate download for me, foremost to just check out their neat intro-to-the-app brochure. Secondly, to record my dog, who just sat there on the couch blinking at me.

As an admitted bandwagoner, it’s been an absolute pleasure watching the Minnesota Timberwolves navigate through the NBA playoffs.

<img <a href=”https://x.com/shahbazmkhan/status/1792382876794949981?s=46&t=RRblB6tLGcoaq7_iJ34Cnw”> src=“https://defiantsloth.com/uploads/2024/2a611d0645.jpg" width=“541” height=“600” alt=“A menagerie of Minnesota Timberwolves images”>

Love this quest to make a mass-manufactured paper bottle (alc bev brands Diageo and Pernod Richard, along with CPG giant P&G, lead the way). Biggest hurdles have been shedding a plastic lining, leaks and retaining carbonation, and weight issues during transportation.

Worthwhile, fun article on the very talented actress Sarah Paulson, whose performance in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story as lead prosecutor comes to mind as most memorable next to her work in AHS. It’s unfortunate I’m not near Broadway to see her award-nominated play.

Love that this is the example of how LLMs working together as teams, called multi-agent systems (mas), hallucinate in an altogether nuttier level.

I just received the email about Five Dials closing shop after a wonderful 16-year run. It’s been a great digital literary magazine, curating a variety of writers for travelogues, reporting, interviews, and stories. Luckily, they posted their entire archive for perusing.

Jason Fried is finding his niche with the Once software` portfolio that 37signals is building out. This recent post of his exemplifies the catalyst for them to do it, to the backdrop of horribly over-priced parking software:

[bad, overpriced software] is a deep well that keeps on providing.