Eyes of the World
Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 10 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 3 years.
The phrase necessary evil gets thrown around a lot, usually referring to subjects that must be either. When in doubt, we could certainly go without. And dualism tells us that the bad contains the good, while the good contains the bad. Instead, a necessary evil should be reframed as a coordination cost, where we are aware of the tradeoffs we're making in attempt to avoid a certain outcome.…
America is a country of refugees. It's people fancy themselves freedom fighters, but we are all descendants of people who chose to run instead of fight. We're told that there's a culture war going on. But how can that be, when we never had any heritage to begin with?
The Matrix was supposed to be a mindfuck, or so I was told.
There's been a lot of talk lately about sloppy football.
I slid the book out from the shelf. In it was a slip of faint chartreuse paper that read Book Corner - Bloomington, Indiana at the top. It's common to see all shades of yellowing on old receipts, but never before had I seen hues of green on thermal paper. Surely, in another eleven years, the remaining ink will be gone and the hues more vibrant.
I just watched the final episode of The Last Kingdom.
In thirty days, I turn thirty. Usually I downplay my birthdays, but changing the leading digit of my age is exciting. Over the last couple of years I've joked that I'll finally grow up when I start a new decade (says the man with a good job and a mortgage). But in recent months I've felt that joke turn into real pressure.
An advertising executive once said that he knew half of his budget was wasted and he didn't know which half. Marketers have a fancy term for that: wastage. And it's been their mission for decades to eliminate waste. Efficiency is the name of the game.
Welcome to America, Earth's official Home of Innovation. Beware, though, not too innovate too much. If you not only solve a problem but solve it ten times better, you will, in the eyes of the State and Public, have no competition. Lately I've defended two companies accused of being monopolies: Pantone and Ticketmaster (technically Live Nation Entertainment, after a merger). Pantone has long served…
Lately I've been thinking about discretion. It's the strangest of virtues: you're only aware of it when one is indiscrete. Should someone talk of another behind their back, we assume that this someone will cross us, too. There must be a word for this category, where you're only aware of it when it is violated. Trust is like this too, and I guess it's appropriate that trust and discretion tend to…
Alchemy is to Science as Paganism is to Religion. The former were foundational for the formalized institutions that would come later. And now that we have these big, shiny things, we laugh off alchemy and paganism. What's interesting is that most people are still alchemists. They aren't very calculated and don't tend to follow a methodology and certainly aren't trying to prove anything. They're…
Around a year ago, I started doing my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. It initially started because they're one of the only stores in town that reliably stocks the 4% milkfat Siggi's Icelandic Yogurt. The closest store is about a ten minute drive up I-71, but there are probably a hundred places to buy groceries closer than that. But that yogurt is worth it, and deserves it's own love letter.
There's a meme about dads in construction, who drive around town and brags to their kids about everything they built. Hell, my dad even did this, and he only did odd jobs with his plumber buddies. Yep, back in 97, he ran all the copper at that old party store.
I'd never listened to John Prine before 2019, and to be honest I'm not sure I'd ever heard of him before then. He was featured on some Spotify playlists and that was really that. I had no idea of his illustrious career as a singer and songwriter until he passed in 2020.
It's been four years, give or take a few days, since my life (as I then knew it) shattered. Most of us grow up believing our lives will go a specific way. And mine did, for quite some time. But one day it just seemed like the printer that was feeding me my script ran dry, pushing out blank pages instead.
I once again downloaded the Instagram mobile app on Sunday. There were some things I wanted to post, and the mobile web version isn't very good at that. I otherwise try to keep the app off my phone, because it's a black hole. I have a lot to say about Instagram, both as a business and as a cultural force. It's all over the map, so here are some thoughts:
Being the particular person I am, I bitch about little things. Often it's a sign, of which someone spent thousands to make, with atrocious typographic sensibility. Or when people try to make things fancy, like the humble grilled cheese sandwich. If you follow me on Twitter, this is not news.
I don't know why I'm like this. Perhaps it's my fierce sense of self-reliance. Could it be my endless curiousity? Or maybe it's just arrogance. I think the answer is D, all of the above. It be great if I wasn't like this. My list of todos would not be overflowing with items which I am unqualified to complete. But I have a compulsion to do everything on my own.
There's a truck stop I frequent halfway between Cincinnati and Detroit. They have a good selection of sparkling water, a rarity as far as middle-of-nowhere Ohio goes. It's one of those red-and-yellow franchises. I'm not sure why they're all red-and-yellow, but I think this one is a Love's.
Over the past couple of months, I've frequently found myself saying things like they just didn't try hard enough and obviously they have a limited imagination. These are really quite new mindsets for me, especially the latter one. I am historically a pessimist, and a calculated one at that. I always looked for some rationale that something worked, often based upon what I believed to be a…
