After MPR read the headline, the 9 year old immediately asks:
“Hey Google, what’s third degree murder?”
#MyHeartKeepsBreakingAgainAndAgain
==
==
On Sept 11, 2001, a dozen years into the militarization of local police departments, I was working for a startup an old skyscraper on the north end of the Chicago Loop. The CEO survived the Bosnian civil war prior to immigrating.
We sat stunned watching the live coverage. I can still remember him dismissively observing, as he walked out of the room:
“It’s not a war, get back to work.”
Instead, we all went home.
One by one, over the next two weeks, we took better jobs.
If I was a DINK today, leaving Chicago in the driver’s seat of a U-Haul seeking balance – fully aware I could live anywhere – I might keep driving and try my luck in Absaroka.
==
In the Days After I’m predicting more regionalism and while I’ve personally noticed an increased sensitivity to out of state license plates, I did not expect this:
==
Turns out I’m the reason there’s only sliced and shredded cheese in the house:
“I feel like, if I buy you blocks of cheese you’re just going to eat them like a woodchipper.”
#YesYouTrulyTrulySeeMe
==
An Ongoing List of the Unexpected Global Pandemic Impacts to a Homebrewer’s Supply Chain
Kegerator’s CO2 tanks unable to get refilled.
Preferred yeast strains out of stock.
Fewer neighbors are swinging by to have growlers refilled.
Mistaken for an end-of-days survivalist while pushing four 5-gallon jugs of water through the grocery store aisles.
==
Jen says to the oldest child:
“If you turn that broken plastic toolshed into a chicken coop, we can have chickens.”
…a couple hours later he comes to me all excited…
“The internet says you should start with 2-3 more chickens then you want to end up with.”
The neighbor around the block has four chickens.
I asked them how many conversations about death they’ve had with her kids.
For their mental health, we’ve been strongly and persistently encouraging the teenagers to make in-person plans with their friends. Provided they stay outside and don’t climb on each other – we’re cool.
Ensuring in-person social interaction is far tougher for the elementary school kids, as coordination still happens through parents.
Turns out, asking about comfort levels of previously banal activities with a parent of your kid’s friend inside a global pandemic is more awkward than asking, “Do you have guns in the house?”
I mean, at least new mothers practice asking each other that question in neighborhood ECFE classes.
I’m going to start couching the question in Pixar movies:
“Oh, hi, um, yes, just wondering, how you feel about our kids playing together outside. Are you more:
or are you more:
It’s cool either way,…oh you haven’t seen Monsters Inc? Fun movie. Makes for some timely conversations. Twist at the end. Yea, for sure it’s on Disney+.
==
The kids, before their distance learning started, would mock me working. They’d put their arm in the air like a T-Rex at an invisible standing desk, taunting, “I’m Dad. Type. Type. Type.”
==
I’ve been (near exclusively) listening to Mike Doughty, specifically his The Question Jar Show album, these past couple months. I find a great calm in his voice and his presence. The Halloween treat in the last verse of Grey Ghost is complete magic to me. Every. Single. Listen.
By the way, I’d like to take this moment to formally nominate Andrew “Scrap” Livingston’s upright bass for: Instrument Most Embodying the All the Feels of 2020
Autumn morning.
Inside the Loop.
Suburbs of grey flannel suits
Streaming among the tallest towers,
As they look away.
A voice in my head whispers:
“See, you can hide anywhere, if you want to.”
==
I thought it was odd the brewery credited their illustrator and design firm on the label.
Doubly odd, I recognized the design firm. My friend Jon started out there nearly 20 years ago. Jon tells me, the brewery owner and the designer firm owner have known each other since childhood.
That’s so great.
Where can labels are increasingly works of art, it’s fantastic to see credit given, whatever the situation.
Cheers to more artists getting credit on beer labels.
According to Kevin Stroud over at The History of English Podcast, the reason we speak English is in part due to the Black Death. The plague was an indiscriminate killer, peasants, scholars, royalty alike.
At this point in our story in the mid-1300s (which is one of my most beloved Stroud-isms), French and Latin were the the languages taught and spoken in England’s upper class. English was for peasants. Yet, after the plague, not enough French and Latin scholars remained. So, English was taught and took hold.
==
If Google really wants their Assistant to be part of our family, it’s going to need to inherently recognize and respond to the casual nicknames we give it (e.g. “Hey Googs”) and know when the question that follows is mocking, rhetorical and a joke for the people within earshot.
“What if We’re Wrong” asserts that Time is continuously and aggressively deeming our work, our art, our efforts, insignificant and eroding them into dust.
Like so much sound and fury.
Chuck wants you to take this as license to push hard against the outer bounds of your work just as aggressively. To delight in the challenge and throw caution to the wind. Cuz it’s the only chance we’ve got at being remembered the day after tomorrow.
==
Futures Wheel is my current favorite lightweight scenario planning tool. Some may comment that it’s nearly indistiguishable from mindmapping. There is a difference. Mindmaps are stupid.
FUTURES WHEEL ARE SERIOUS! THEY’RE ABOUT THE FUTURE! GAH.
I like to start with a highly-controversial statement that feels ridiculous and just out of reach something like:
“10 Years After COVID-19 Pandemic, Americans are Healthier.”
Then answer the question, “What does this mean for the world around us?” and continue to innocently ask that recursively working your way around a circle.
Maybe start a branch with:
People with even a slight sniffle stay home, which means…
Substantially higher & more unpredictable utilization of sick days (even with working from home), which means…
the govt covers sick days on behalf of employers, which means…
health care is disconnected from employers, which means…
increased taxes (Huh).
We could do another branch with:
People eating healthier, which means…
Less carb consumption, which means…
Alcohol popularity decreasing, which means…
Local craft breweries go bankrupt (Argh! Wait! Wut!).
Maybe a third with:
People no longer commute, which means…
Fewer cars on the road, which means…
Less air and water pollution, which means…
Wildlife comes in closer, which means…
More human-animal incidents (argh, that’s how this all started)
Jeebus, FUTURES WHEEL sure can make you anxious about what comes next faster than an episode of Fortitude.
==
…In dialectal Norwegian, “kveik” is two different nouns. One is female and means yeast, while the other is male and means to breathe new life into something…the act of kindling a fire. – Lars Marius Garshol, Historical Brewing Techniques
==
Back in March, we took friend and multi-book author @HopeJahren’s advice and started some seeds. Today, it’s a massive 12×4 raised garden that the 9 year old checks every morning between breakfast and starting his school day.
We’ve lost lots from the seedlings to the garden bed. Plant Dr. Jahren says that’s OK. Trying to have some grace, considering this is my first garden in 33 years and I’ve read nothing on how to make it successful (library’s closed).
The boy is confident we’ll have lots of pumpkins, corn, tomatoes and peppers. Though, this morning he handed me the radish seeds says he’s not so confident in the canteloupe.
The Dutch settled in modern day New York and brought their knowledge of brewing with oats, rye, wheat with them. The English (and Scots), with their barley-exclusive brewing practice, settled further south in Virginia and struggled to grow barley. So, they switched to tobacco and traded it for malted barley and finished beer from the aforementioned Dutch.
In addition to the primary benefit of trade itself, this had the secondary effect of supplying the Dutch West India Company’s global trade network with tobacco while simultaneously starving the English crown of the tax revenue.
With work shifting to video conferencing, rather than in-person meetings, we’ve lost the signaling of accessories – fountain pens, fancy bags, stickered laptops. So, inspired by the back of my iPad (that no one sees any more) and NASCAR paint-jobs, I created my own fake background for Zoom.
Unfortunately, without a physical green screen, the MacBook doesn’t have enough reality distortion to keep me from disappearing into the matrix (yes, I’m the black smudges in the above image).
==
Day and night
are in equilibrium
along the equator.
Further north, clocks
were invented
to continually remind us of long summer days.
==
“OK, it’s a line-by-line reboot of Good Neighbours, but instead of suburban London, it’s set on the 97th floor of Central Park Tower.”
“Didn’t Tom plow the front yard under in the opening scene?”
“Good point. We’ll need to move it to the penthouse floors so we have enough space.”
Despite all the 5Ks I’ve run, I’m against adopting the metric system for a single reason:
The metric system is completely devoid of a personality.
It’s key feature is scaling (“watch me as I only move the decimal point!”, “ooooh ahhhh”).
The metric system is the thing of science fiction – a perfectly engineered utopia confidently asserting every imperfection can be perfectly traced with pixels. If only we could scale the pixels small enough.
Measuring is a human-centric practice and the US system is full of human-centricity:
inch
hand
foot
Smoot
mile
anything base-12 (hint, count knuckles)
It’s also full of units rich with human culture;
yard (how stuff is taxed)
bushel (how grain is sold)
stone (how potatoes and animals were sold)
gallon (how wine and beer is sold)
barrel (how everything is sold from cranberries to butter to oil)
I’m pretty sure one reason we care about oil is that it’s still traded in barrels. We understand a barrel. Every time the news mentions oil, we imagine millions of literal barrels of oil packed tightly together somewhere. It’s one small way we convince ourselves we understand that world, even though our experience is only with far smaller quantities.
Like the gallon.
In the United States, two kinds of pint are used: a liquid pint and a less-common dry pint. Each of these pints is one eighth of its respective gallon, but the gallons differ. — Wikipedia
Wait. Whut? How can the gallons differ? I thought I knew and understood…you know…gallon. Milk and gas and all.
Turns out, there’s a corn gallon or dry gallon that well, I’ll let Wikipedia continue to explain (emphasis mine):
The dry gallon is not used in the US customary system – though it implicitly exists since the US dry measures of bushel, peck, quart, and pint are still used.
I hope you feel a sense of calm.
Finding out there’s an invisible unit of measure that many common units are derived from but is not itself used, this can be unsettling. Or it can be calming like a puzzle piece sliding into place, expanding our understanding of the world. I hope you found the latter.
Oh, there’s also a 40 ounce French Canadian pint.
I’m off to drink in Montreal. Later milliliter.
==
minimialism is officially over.
it’s too much fun (by fun I mean a blend of delight and relief) to realize the tools and supplies needed for your latest project are already in your possession.
anecdata:
having an inventory of malt, hops, and yeast means I don’t need to wait for a delivery. Boom start brewing.
both fountain pens ran out of ink today. Right before I hit re-order on Amazon, I found a box of cartridges. Boom back to work.
one of the teenagers wanted to bake a carrot cake, we had all the ingredients. No grocery list or trip to the store required. Boom start mixing.
minimialism (defined for these contexts as: not having unused surplus lying around) is great when transaction costs are extraordinarily low. Getting stuff you don’t have is easy in that environment.
right now, transaction costs have spiked to all-time highs.
“I’ve found a recipe for ‘how do you make gin?’. Would you like the ingredients or instructions first?”
“Ingredients.”
“OK, now playing dance hits of 2010s on Spotify.”
For all their promises of convenience, Google Assistants are at best undelightful and at worst mildly frustrating. And, Google provides the most consistent, expected results of all internet-connected devices. For substantially worse misbehavior, follow @internetofshit
If you’re not familiar, internetofshit is this era’s Fucked Company (which was that era’s Suck.com).
My current internetofshit schadenfreudlich delight is the remote cat feeder that stopped functioning because….the company quietly went out of business. Then they came back to ask for more money.
He’ll calmly whisper horror stories into your ear things like;
“the current world order is slowly dissolving into pre-WWII territory disputes…you’ll probably be OK.”,
“oil’s going negative and there’s no way for you to profit from it” and
“…but that is where the similarity between the hardworking, morally upstanding people of Iowa and the turgid pile of frigid confusion that is Minnesota ends.”
==
playing foursquare on the driveway,
planting a huge garden from seedlings,
watching early seasons of the Amazing Race as a family,
1000 piece puzzle after 1000 piece puzzle,
trimming the neighbors pine tree with a 20 foot pole saw,
still being asked to declare my favorite thing of the week every sunday night for 2020’s ‘jar of awesome’.
When my grandkids ask their parents about the COVID-19 pandemic, I hope this is what they recall.
==
Prior to the pandemic, we had a family calendar where we played Tetris with our respective commitments. These days, family logistics is more of a game of Clue between video conferencing apps, devices, and commitments.
Microsoft Teams on the iPad = Work
Skype on the MacBook = Drums lessons
FaceTime on the iPhone = Piano lessons
Zoom on the MacBook Air = Clarinet lessons
Google Meet on the Chromebook = 8th Grade Band
Google Classroom on the other Chromebook = 6th Grade Band
Vidyo on the MacBook = Speech therapy
==
Rumspringa is a subtly sophisticated mechanism.
It gives youngins a opportunity for independence while opening a controlled channel of experimentation, innovation, and cultural education to the wider community. It also exposes the entire community to a existential threat in a controlled enough way cultural antibodies can be generated.
The risk is both for the individual and the community. The goal is both survive. But even if the youngin flees to the English, the community will persist.
And, either way there’ll be discussions how to use TikTok for Business at the next Elders meeting.
==
Speaking of work on the iPad, April marks month 24 of the iPad Pro as my primary machine. I see no reason to go back to a laptop. I’m almost tempted to double-down and switch to my iPhone as my primary machine (you know, like the vast majority of the rest of the world).
==
This weeks winner for both Best Capturing the Current American Drinking Zeitgeist and Worst Dad Joke is, Anchor Brewing’s “Seltzer in Place“.
==
In more optimistic beer news, Other Half Brewing in NY, announced a global beer collaboration, “All Together. Other Half is developed an IPA recipe and is asking breweries around the world to produce it and contribute the proceeds to support the hospitality industry in their local area.
Here in MN; Modist, Wild Mind, Black Stack, and OMNI are participating. BTW, Wild Mind delivers free within the 494/694 loop.
Thanks to MusicMayhem [1] our Fridays are now marked by 90 minutes of music trivia against our neighbors. Last week the two teenagers of the house competed on their own – three teams in one house. This week we came back as a singular force to achieve 2nd place overall. While all have our strengths, though an overall blindspot is hip hop 2005-present. We are still trying to replicate our 1st place win on March 24th.
Somewhere, there’s an angsty teen novel being written with the working title, “The Summer of Nothing.” In a decade, it’ll be considered that generation’s Catcher in the Rye.
==
I’m keeping a running list of my predictions of the cultural consequences of this crisis, using McLuhan’s Media Tetrads as the framework. I’m most excited for the fine dining speakeasys.
I entered a virtual kubb league. By the time you read this I will have played against someone in across the metro, down in Arkansas, and over in Sweden. Playing against a opponent on Facebook Messenger adds a level of absurdity to an already absurd game. Still got stuck in a six kubb grind for 20 minutes.
With my recent cognitive surplus [3], I’ve been diving deep, deep into my ancient family history. Somehow, my 11th great-grandfather has bent history in towards himself in some small way as multiple sources praise him similarity:
“He is entitled credit for never swerving from allegiance to Dutch government which is more than can be said for his English neighbors who proved themselves to be traitors to the colony which they fled from persecution.”
I seem to have found a glitchy corner history not written by the victors.
I’m grateful for all those – medical professionals, emergency workers, school administrators, governors, etc – working continuously to contain the COVID-I9 global pandemic we’re currently in.
With so many activities, events, and businesses shuttered indefinitely, in the back of my mind, I’ve been wondering, “What does the world look like after containment?”
Which takes me to one of my favorite tools for thinking through effects and consequences, McLuhan’s Tetrad. While McLuhan developed the Tetrad tool to think through how media changes us, I’ve found it works for anything phenomenon impacting society at large. Like the Myers-Briggs, it’s more effective when statements are articulated in their most positive manner.
What does it enhance? What does it make obsolete? What does it retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? What does it flip into when pushed to extremes?
What does COVID-19 enhance? – Depression and anxiety disorders related to lack of face-to-face social contact. – Brand-name universities offering online high school curriculum – Corporations’ level of comfort with the majority of their labor force being remote – Companies no longer providing computers to their employees – Depression in commercial real estate – esp office buildings. – Tribalism and mistrust of others – Tightening of pre-existing social networks – Delivery services – Corporate adoption of robotics and automation to ensure higher sanitation standards & reduce variable labor force availability. – Climate change advocacy (sudden drop in global pollution levels creating higher air and water quality) – Solo hobbies & sports – esp inside sports (e.g. knitting, playing music, homebrewing, yoga, cooking, yo-yo-ing, karate) – Membership- or subscription-based business models – Home exercise equipment sales (e.g. Peloton) – Self-stable and freezer-friendly food sales (maybe the US now gets shelf-stable milk) – JustWalkOut by Amazon – Demand for box seats at stadiums and theaters – Single-payer health care in the US – popularity of eSports – Disney divesting ESPN
What does COVID-19 make obsolete? – Casual physical contact with strangers – Business models based on confining strangers for a period of time (stadiums, theaters, cruise ships, airplanes, public transportation, professional sports) – Business models based on individual, retail sales – Globalization – Social pressure to attend events that you’d rather not attend. – work from home is no longer a differentiating HR benefit, it’s an expected part of the employment contract. – The decline of church-going (esp Catholic) in the US, and by extension the Boy Scouts. – General seating at stadiums and theatres. – Minimalism – checkout clerks – Co-working spaces
What does COVID-19 retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? – “The milkman”, local businesses making regular deliveries in a localized area. – a need to ‘stock-up’ when something is available, for it may not be tomorrow (pantries, root cellars, and chest freezers) – Victory Gardens – Speakeasys (for dining and social experiences and gyms [1, 2], not just drinking) like this. – Drive-in Movie Theaters – Party lines (always on video multi-party video conferences) – “Back to the Land” movement – Offices (as opposed to cubicles or open-plan spaces)
– investing in front yards over backyards
What does cultural phenomena does COVID-19 flip when pushed to extremes? – Continuous monitoring of individuals’ health in all locations accessible to the general public (e.g. fever monitoring in convenience stores) – Isolationism at micro and macro levels – Every neighborhood is “The Village” – Redundancy in supply chains, leading to greater expense and under utilized capacity.
If you wanted to ensure it lasted for 150 years – you’d choose paper.
As amazing as our current electronic technologies are – despite their strengths – terribly, terribly ephemeral. The code the worked yesterday isn’t support today. The processors of – five years ago, ten years ago – are brought to their knees by the computational complexity and presumed processor capabilities of today’s software. The runtime environments required by the digital creations I manifest as a University student not only do not exist – computers of today don’t even recognize the file types.
Perhaps it’s good that my chances of becoming a world-renowned graphic designer are quite slim. For if they were higher, and exhibits celebrating my early digital work were to be held, recovering that early work would be a significant undertaking. Even today. Unlike like my drawings and pastels – for those seem to be holding up just fine. I looked at them just the other day. The same day I went through the box in my office containing 25 years worth of my sketchbooks. All the paper – just as I remembered it. All the sketches just as they were the last time I looked at them.
I didn’t need to convert them into a different file format or upgrade the software before I opened each sketchbook and revisited each page. I simply opened it. I simply turned the page. No need to for anything more. The paper persists.
One story at a time, I’m writing down the stories of my life.
In a book.
A high-quality, hardcover book.
One story at a time, handwritten on paper in the book.
A book I want to exist for a century and a half, if not longer. The book will go into the box with all the other family stories and photos – all of which are on paper. Stories and photos that – while they may not be on their original paper – are on paper.
Sure, I could type out these stories into this site just as I’m writing this. I enjoy writing here. But there’s no chance this site will be around in more than a century. I even have a hard time envisioning it living another quarter century. Even if it does, that will mean countless technology migrations, not just server migrations, but also application layer and database migrations. All of these changes requiring regression tests – however humble.
Somewhere out on the internet there’s a story describing the problem of archiving electronic art. In it, the author describes the process. The process of picking the ideal computer for perpetually running the archived software, completely isolated from the rest of the internet. They described the need to prevent any of the bits of software from ever updating, from the intended application, all middleware, to the operating system, everything. All of which will ensure that this singularly valuable bit of software can continue to provide value for generations to come.
Unless those generations have something other than electrical service expected by the computer’s power supply.
Then – poof. It’s gone.
Last month, I brewed a batch beer. This particular recipe was originally used by a British brewery circa 1868. It was included in a book collecting a number of British and German beer recipes from 1850-1950. Theses recipes were extracted from the actual brewers logs of the time. Brewers logs that were written on paper in books and shared in-house to ensure a consistent product from batch to batch.
Am I using the same ingredients the Tetley Brewery did 147 years ago? Highly doubtful. Today’s grains, hops, and yeast are far more optimized for brewing than they were a century ago. But, since I have the beer’s characteristics; alcohol, bitterness, color, clarity, along with specified grain, hops, and yeast, I can get very close to recreating this beer. As can anyone else.
I don’t necessarily need their equipment or their process for creating fire. That’s all changed. I need the identifying, distinguishing characteristics. The same distinguishing characteristics that were originally written down 150 years ago on paper to help the next brewer on the shift.
