Links
A regularly updated collection of things I find worth reading, watching, or listening to. Subscribe via RSS.-
Philip Bump, previously a national correspondent at The Washington Post, on the question of whether you can positively influence, say, X's direction by staying on it, as some are arguing.
Since I left The Washington Post, this question has guided my discussions with people interested in my writing for them. I’ve had numerous offers to write that I have (hopefully respectfully) declined. I’ve done so largely because I am trying to be conscientious about the prior question, to work with and for institutions that are directing their accrued power responsibly.
He goes on to say that this is why he doesn't use Substack, and I wish more people would follow his example.
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iA Presenter. Image by Information Architects. iA Writer has been my go-to writing app on Mac and iOS for over a decade, but I've never properly gotten stuck into iA Presenter. Its release coincided with my role shifting, and having to create fewer presentations as a result.
They've now released version 1.5 of their app, which has seen them strip away even more of its features to benefit the primary workflow, and I can really get behind their reasoning.
PowerPoint and similar apps start by letting you pick a design. Making your presentation look good right away sounds helpful. But in practice, it distracts. It shifts your attention to how the slides look instead of what you want to say.
Putting the focus on design from the get-go is a fundamental mistake. To make the user concentrate on the message, the design should stay in the background… until it’s time for design. Flashy colors in the default template are counterproductive.Most of making a good, thoughtful presentation (or website, for that matter), is the writing. Writing to tell a good story, rather than showing good slides. Most of their competition doesn't seem aware of or bothered by that, and I appreciate them doubling down on this notion.
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Teddy Blanks. Photo by Graham Dickie for The New York Times. Responsible for the opening titles of films like Barbie, Nosferatu, Midsommar and Wicked, and TV shows like Severance, Teddy Blanks is becoming the modern-day Saul Bass.
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Photo by Obsidian, image editing by The Verge. Steph “kepano” Ango, the CEO of Obsidian, was interviewed by Casey Newton for Decoder. I appreciate how he—and in turn, Obsidian—thinks about building their product. They're a small team and, while they're ambitious, they're not looking to raise (or make) hundreds of millions of dollars.
We’re not trying to take over the world. We’re not trying to be the next Microsoft. That makes it a lot easier to make long-term decisions that we feel are better for ourselves or for our users. It’s the tool that we want to use all day long. So, it’s okay if people leave.
Obsidian uses Markdown, and all files are local. That means you can take them wherever you go, or even edit them in whichever tool you prefer. It's no walled garden, and if Obsidian the company ever ceases to exist, your files are fine.
I know Kepano has been on this line of thinking for a long time. I remember researching similar things years ago and stumbling upon his thinking on File over app, which is a philosophy I can get behind.
I've started using Obsidian this summer and while the UI is a tad clunky for my taste, I can appreciate the system they've created. There's a lot to appreciate in the interview, too; on note-taking, file systems, design, and AI, among other things.
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They hardly ever miss at McSweeney's.
I would like to address the recent slander circulating on social media, in editorial Slack channels, and in the margins of otherwise decent Substack newsletters. Specifically, the baseless, libelous accusation that my usage is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence.
Listen here, my good bitch.
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Loren Stephens
№ 89Loren Stephens is eighty years old, and he blogs. His blog runs on Eleventy and Netlify, and he speaks to Manuel Moreale about his life since retirement, his blogging, and his creative environment. It's all very straight-forward, and ... isn't that kind of the point?
I quickly subscribed via his RSS feed. He's had a few good posts up recently (1, 2).
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A post from Cory Dransfeldt (from January of 2024) on the fracturing of social media, and the opportunity it's presented for the personal web.
Call it the indie web, the small web or the slow web. Do or don't label it — buy a domain, stand up a site, write and share. Find other folks doing it — maybe on Mastodon, maybe on another network, protocol or application — find out who they're following and look at their sites. See what they've linked to and are reading.
I don't remember where I found the post, but it comes at an opportune moment, as I've been investing lots of time in my personal website in the past two months, have rekindled my usage of RSS feeds, and found quite a few great blogs to follow. And, I just finished setting up syndication to Bluesky, bringing me one step closer to POSSE.
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Sunflower Sound System by Sam Shepherd (Floating Points). Photo by Angelina Nikolayeva Sam Shepherd (known as Floating Points) has built a massive sound system, consisting of eight giant cabinets and a handful of tweeters hung from the ceiling. This video from Resident Advisor shows the build, and Jeremy D. Larson wrote about it on Pitchfork. He visited Dekmantel (which quite literally happens in my backyard), where the sound system was installed at The Greenhouse Stage. I wish I had been there to experience it!
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Usable Google Fonts
№ 86
Mike of Smith & Diction put together this useful resource, in the form of a Figma file, for picking... well, ... usable Google fonts. Take your pick!
Thanks for sharing, Cameron.
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The album I didn't know I needed: Radiohead just released live recordings from their Hail To The Thief era, a somehow, somewhat impopular album of theirs that I love.
Thom Yorke said about it:
In the process of thinking how to build arrangements for the Shakespeare Hamlet/Hail to the Thief theatre production I asked to hear some archive live recordings of the songs. I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played and it really helped me find a way forward. For us, back in the day, the finishing of this record was particularly messy and fraught, we were very proud of it but there was a taste left in our mouths, it was a dark time in so many ways. Anyway we decided to get these live recordings mixed (it would have been insane to keep them for ourselves) by Ben Baptie, who did an amazing job. It has all been a very cathartic process, we very much hope you enjoy them.
This'll go into my heavy rotation immediately. The energy of this performance of There, There in Buenos Aires alone is tremendous.