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  • Shock Troops Of Gentrification

    San Francisco rehabbed an area riddled with crime, stolen goods and drug overdoses by… building a small-scale skate park. Skateboarders and those in charge of city planning and maintenance have not always been easy friends. The relationship is starting to get warmer though, because the skaters have been instrumental in deterring the elements that drove the normies away from places like United Nations Plaza in SF. While the city had tried more expensive ways of improving the plaza, it wasn’t until they hit upon the relatively easy to implement idea of making it skateable that real change occurred.

    A defining feature of the new skate park (or skate plaza, the name the city and skaters prefer) is that it’s a retreat from the grandeur that characterized earlier efforts. It also seems to be working better, with a $2 million price tag and just a few months of planning, than the catalog of failed projects, costing hundreds of millions, that preceded it.

    The presence of the skateboarders practicing their craft acts as a protective watch in the area.

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  • The Wanting Monster

    Maria Popova walks through a wonderful new children’s book (with plenty to say to adults) called The Wanting Monster at The Marginalian.

    A rueful wanting monster waiting for some victims to corrupt.

    Popova begins the post with an attempt to define the condition of wanting.

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  • The Democratic Joe Rogan

    I find myself a bit amused by all the talk about creating a “Democratic Joe Rogan.” As David French said on an episode of the SkyePod podcast in March, there was a Democratic Joe Rogan. His name was… Joe Rogan. However, like many others, Rogan was hectored by his tribe for every little transgression of progressive protocols. As French goes on to point out in the episode, people go where they are wanted.

  • Readwise MCP

    Microsoft made the Model Context Protocol (MCP) a major focus of their Build conference last week. Though the Microsoft engineer I spoke with, who is heavily involved in AI thought the emphasis was a little overplayed, it’s easy to understand some of the excitement. Seeing your favorite applications easily plug into agentic AI through a standardized protocol can open your mind to the possibilities. The first integration to spark my interest is with Readwise.

    In simpler terms, setting up your own Readwise MCP server allows you to chat with your Readwise highlights using an external chat client (such as Claude), rather than the Chat function on the Readwise website.

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  • The Laughing Chimes – High Beams

    Brothers Evan and Quinn Seurkamp, who primarily make up the Ohio band The Laughing Chimes, call upon the hauntings of the Appalachian foothills of their native state as inspiration for their gothic jangly post-punk. There is a wistfulness appropriate to the rust belt and its faded glory that pervades their album Whispers in the Speech Machine.

    “High Beams” is one of the catchier, more upbeat tracks on the album. The vocals call to mind Peter Murphy and the keyboards add some sparkle. One can imagine this is what Bauhaus might have sounded like after indulging in some Special-K.

    The Laughing Chimes – High Beams (YouTube)

  • Bandcamp Playlists

    Bandcamp is finally adding a feature that I, and other like-minded enjoyers of music have been wanting for some time. The new ability to create playlists feels like in most ways it aligns with the ethics of the service, which is a good thing, but the focus may be a bit too heavy in that area.1 Bandcamp describes the feature as, “Like digital mixtapes.” There isn’t much need to describe how it works, everyone is familiar with the concept of playlists and this feature appears to do exactly what it says on the tin.

    The new playlist feature from Bandcamp
    The new playlist feature from Bandcamp
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  • Pocket Closing

    Mozilla made a surprise announcement today that they are closing the Pocket read-it-later service. With nothing but a bland, corporate statement to go on, I imagine users have a fair amount of confusion about the move. I was actually looking at the Pocket entry on the App Store earlier in the day to see if it had been updated lately. I always had dreams of the service/app being improved, so I could go back to using it with a Kobo, which is a quite delightful combo. I had a Kobo a few years ago, and the sync with Pocket, while it could use a few features (like highlight sync), was key for me. I probably read more articles than books on the device. I kept this option in the back of my mind for a possible switch back.

    I would have been extremely frustrated if I had bought another Kobo under the assumption that I could fulfill my use case of synchronizing with my saved articles from Pocket.

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  • Closed Off

    My son watched the Spike Jonze movie Her a few days ago and remarked to me about how prescient some of the ideas were. I was thinking about how accurately Jonze (who also wrote the screenplay) predicted some of the aspects of generative AI and the role that it could play in our lives. The film was made not too long ago, but remember how quickly OpenAI sprang up with most of its current capabilities and how taken by surprise everyone was.

    My son mentioned the fact that everyone in the movie walked around with headphones on and how that’s now the case when you are out and about. My wife actually wears AirPods most of the day in the house. It makes it challenging to have conversations with her. I always feel like I’m intruding into her little audio bubble.

  • Cultural Stasis

    The first part of this piece was published as a separate post but I wanted to expand my thoughts and references. Expect more to come on the subject.

    W David Marx put out an edition of Culture: An Owner’s Manual last year focused on the significance of Rocky IV as a cultural artifact.

    But unlike most bad films made in 1985, Rocky IV remains fascinating nearly forty years later. It has great value to us in 2024 as a relic — an artwork that embodies the unique stylistic choices of a particular point in time. Rocky IV is a time-traveling passport to 1985: the Manichaean Reaganite politics, the sassy robot maid, the soundtrack of power ballads and cold digital synths, the artless action-film editing and over-use of freeze-frame fade-outs, the casual lack of verisimilitude in using Wyoming as a stand-in for the Russian countryside.

    My wife was arguing tonight that much of indie music in the 90s still sounds fresh and timeless today. I can see that in some ways, but overall I think the 90s was the last decade to have a real distinctiveness to its culture. You couldn’t make Empire Records or Belly’s “Feed The Tree” today. They just wouldn’t feel right in the current context.

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  • Do Not Pass Me Just To Slow Down

    I’ve long been a little allergic to brandishing symbols of my Christian faith. When I was a youth, I had a beloved cross that I used to wear around my neck. The chain for it was broken whilst I took a thrashing at the hands of a playground bully in the sixth grade. For many years afterward, I refrained from adorning myself with anything that reflected my beliefs.

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