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.

At least Steve Ballmer is trying to reinforce the “twin pillars” of democracy and capitalism through his continued investment in USAFacts.org. What good it does is up to news organizations and government, fortunately/unfortunately — prime example:

Ballmer has taken his just-the-facts pitch to Capitol Hill, trying to convince Congress to ground its legislation in facts and to sign a document saying it believes in government data. “I don’t feel like I got much traction,” he admitted.

How endemic will AI feeds and content become? Sounds like this is the plan for Meta, at any rate, according to Jason Koebler:

Both Facebook and Instagram are already going this way, with the rise of AI spam, AI influencers, and armies of people copy-pasting and clipping content from other social media networks to build their accounts.

Save us all, humans + RSS.

Exactly like it sounds: The humble tape dispenser, rebooted with industrial integrity › The M.R. Tape Dispenser.

That is, after all, CW&T’s styling.

This cropped up a few months ago as a Kickstarter, a vessel for endeavors with which the design duo is intimately familiar, dating back to the release of their original Type-A metal pen (which, more or less, gave the go-ahead for a whole new generation of industrial pen designs and brands).

So I backed this thing with full confidence, and a few short months later, received the heavy metal object. It’s a beauty.

• Do you need this high-caliber of a tape dispenser? Probably not.
• Do I use tape all that much? Not really.
• Is it a joy to use? Yes, as long as the object is pinned to something, either nailed into a wall or 3M Commanded onto a desk.
• What about that tape?

Let’s talk about that tape. It comes with Japanese-branded MT, a wonderful roll of lightweight masking tape that leaves no sticky residue and applies/detaches with ease. It takes Sharpie well, but not other more soluble inks. It’s the perfect accessory to the actual dispenser, and I’m so glad CW&T introduced me to the brand, because I’m not using anything else moving forward.

I’ve found the ease of pulling the tape and tearing it a pleasure, and using it on notebooks, on paper as a highlighter of sorts, and other objects around the house (adhering things to the fridge, countertop, etc. in lieu of a sticky note or some such thing), has been a delight.

Buy it at your own discretion, but my mileage varies towards an enjoyable distance. As with any kind of specially crafted, intentionally designed object, it’s about the joy and detail more than the face price value.

At this point, what industry hasn’t been upended by private equity.

• Joan Westenberg builds a summarized, paywall-less news feed highlighting the news atop the Micro.blog platform: The Index
• I alluded to a phenomenal periodical earlier in the week (‘Delayed Gratification’), which reflects slow journalism, but two other new periodicals cropped up on my radar as well — ‘AFM’ (a new title on sex and relationships that seems interesting since it’s print, a more private/intimate environment for connecting with readers), and ‘Open Tennis’ (a lifestyle/travel publication revolving around tennis, a pairing that usually has historically only been represented by golf)
• I miss delightful touches from Apple, but when they happen, it makes an impression. I’ve noticed only recently that my AirPods Pro will detect when I’m grinding coffee beans (or any other slightly prolonged loud noise), and it soft-cancels the noise so I can keep listening to my podcast. Really nice touch.

Lastly, a behind-the-statue view of the new Loon sculpture (in b&w) that was added outside Allianz Field in St Paul.

Ridge Biflex Wallet Review

I’ve stayed away from Ridge wallets for years — they always looked bulky, too hard (literally made of metals), and too popular (in mainstream product categories, most of the time that’s a concern).

But… they recently released a soft leather and band variant called Biflex, much in the vein of the slimmest wallet currently available (Trove), and had me curious on their take. They have massive scale to do this well, and from the design approach they took, it’s a copy of the way their hard materials wallet works (thumb hole/cut-out for flipping out your cards) while adhering to a slimmer enclosure.

The Great

• Materials and construction are solid
• Dimensions are 87 x 57 x 12 mm, which means this is the size of a credit card with no excess materials hanging off
• The leather sides cover more surface area against the card length than Trove (Trove’s is square with more of the band and tip top of the cards exposed). This is actually a nice counterpoint.
• Material, stitching, and overall construction feel great in the hand and robust in usage
• Claims to hold eight cards plus cash with RFID blocking

The Not-So-Great

• Fitting eight cards with mobility is generous. I have six + a single bill and it’s a tight fit.
• There are two openings for fingers to slide out or fan out the contents: the half-circle opening against the end of the wallet is easy to use (push), but the hole-cut out in the middle of the side of the wallet on the other side is abysmal to use if the wallet is packed tight.
• The wallets are inexplicably loaded and unloaded at two different ends of the wallet (e.g., opposite exits for the cards), which requires minor mental stress as I’m still not used to them being extracted from the same side. Why.

Overall

I like this wallet. The materials are elegant and the form factor is superbly minimal. It’s a very slim profile with leather accents to make it more than merely an elastic band wallet, and protects itself contents well.

Their decisions on card extractions aside, it’s a usable, slick object for your pocket. Just don’t anticipate using it for a ton of cash and more than a few cards because its format gets cramped quickly.

Finding out about this UK publication for the first time – Delayed Gratification. Purposefully slow journalism reflecting on prior months. Obviously, my kind of periodical.

And a good interview with its Editor, Rob Orchard, on Monocle’s The Stack podcast, too.

An intriguing idea, as I for one am interested in seeing Submerged but am not buying a Vision Pro to do it:

Apple should sell tickets to go sit and experience these special Vision Pro events.