It is probably not your birthday. What would even be the chances?
In fact — got a headliner here for ya; a real breaking news type situation — today is the second birthday of this very blog!
I like the idea of writing and publishing a blog post over the course of the birthday day every year — and I also like the idea of making it a collection of miniature posts — so that’s what this is.
There Are Two Versions of Your Favorite Snacks
Did you know that there’s a shitty Reese’s and a good Reese’s? I’m not talking about the unnecessary, ever-increasing myriad of ridiculous spinoffs of the tried-and-true formula1, each more pointless and offensive to the senses than the last.2 I’m referring to the fact that there exist two different kinds of peanut butter used to fill peanut butter cups, one of which is self-evidently inferior to the other.
Try this: go to the “nicest” grocery store in your area. The good Kroger. The Target which doesn’t lock up pasta sauce. I don’t know how Costco fares here because I’ve decided to stop joining cults in my life, but I bet they’ll pass the test too. Pick out a king size pack of original Reese’s and then pay for it like some kind of chump; a real fuckin’ loser. In the warmth and safety of your car or home, shnarf those Reese’s down in the Vitruvian fashion: first the chocolate rim, nibbled away with care; then the remaining chocolate shielding, expertly peeled off and down the gullet it goes; finally your prize: the solid, isolated nug of peanut butter, which you may savor as you see fit. And oh, the savoring of it! The moistness3; the salty yet the sweet; the particular viscosity and texture. A true taste and tactile experience!
Now go to the shittiest gas station you know and do the same. Notice anything? Something… wrong? Insulting? Some sort of imposter peanut butter — wait, no, not peanut butter at all! Is that… confectioner’s sugar, dyed to resemble my boy PB? It seems so, and so I’ll boldly declare that it is so. That’s a shitty Reese’s. They got to you!
If you can’t find any good Reese’s in any stores around you, you may live in a thing sociologists are only just beginning to understand: a Reese’s Desert (hereinafter “RD”).
I categorize these as poor Reese’s and not-poor Reese’s. These are crude terms; backed only by my limited anecdotal evidence; but also, to be fair, backed by my general understanding of how the world works and how decisions of this kind are made. It’s pretty intuitively obvious, right? That the poor areas get the shittier products? Perhaps they should’ve thought about that before they became peasants!
In my experience, this is generally true for a lot of the garbage4 sold in these stores: chips, candy, canned goods, dry goods, soda, etc. It’s one of those obvious little facts of life which is blatantly intuitive and obviously true; a part of the substrate of our world; not to be thought about too directly lest the inherent fucking disrespect of it all become too real.
If I get tricked into eating a shitty Reese’s one more time…
Kids Were Taught How to Not Read
I hate the vast majority of podcasts, and good lord do I hate it when people tell me to listen to one, but you absolutely must listen to Sold a Story.
Read this (made-up) word aloud: brandestimal. Did you get anywhere? Were you able to comprehend how the word sounds and is pronounced, despite having never seen it before? If so, how? Sounding it out, right? Phonics-type shit? You know, reading?
Well, a very large number of children in modern America were “taught how to read” in such a way that they would not be able to sound out that word. Because they were never taught how to sound out any word. They were taught how to vibe read.
Deeply unacceptable and a gross betrayal of our sacred responsibility to developing minds, innit?
Communities of Joyful Creation
I recently caught up with a friend of mine: a young, bright-eyed, broc-haired5 Zoomer who’s got that grind in him. That zest. That need for speed, if by speed we mean owning one’s own enterprise. He shared with me the genuinely cool shit he’d built in the time since we last spoke: various websites and SaaS APIs, each one clever and genuinely useful. And each with the same fatal flaw: a paywall.
It’s not that his creations don’t deserve to have a paywall. There’s nothing wrong with them! They solved real problems, in a competent6 way. He absolutely has the right to charge for these things. I just don’t think it’s what he’d do if he had more options.
Look, Jack, this is getting a bit weird because you read my blog, so I want to be clear that I’m absolutely not shitting on you (just the opposite7) and also I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. This is mainly about broader societal trends! I promise.
When I grew up on the internet, it was all about forums. Internet forums were the fucking bomb, man. These were things approaching actual communities; with cliques and known personalities and disputes and just a whole lot of wonderful chaos. And on these internet forums, you’d find sub-forums dedicated to creation: of art; of music; most relevantly, of software. God, I loved the programming subforums. Just a collection of dudes8 with vastly differing skill levels, all generally rocking and sharing their creations and ideas and criticisms — endless, vitriolic criticisms! — and responses to said criticisms and on and on. Building things just because it’s cool and because you know the guys will have something to say; maybe they’ll even be impressed! But mostly, no, they’re not impressed and you can’t do math and here’s the other thing that’s wrong with you as well. It’s a complicated relationship, but one of the best whetstones I know.
That avenue to just create something and share it — no profit motive — has become harder to access over time, largely because the internet is so fucking lucrative that it’s now almost entirely geared towards profit generation and building personal goddamn brands. It’s sickening, and it’s in fact what made me start this blog: I miss making shit and sharing it! Today, the only place I know of that still even remotely comes close to what I’m describing is Hacker News, but it’s pretty tenuous. Where else? Twitter, the place where the worst people in the world congregate to brutally mock and dominate one another as highschoolers do?9 Reddit, the place where every single subreddit is just a clone of the politics subreddit for some reason? YouTube, where no true connection of any kind ever occurs10? There’s nowhere, man. Even Substack has fallen to the demand for a profit incentive.
Listen, Jack: I think11 you made these websites for one reason, and put a paywall on them for another, incompatible reason. You made the website because you like to solve problems, and you wanted to make something useful and cool!12 However, you put a paywall on it because what else would you do with it? It’s the default: make a thing; make money from that thing. You don’t see people plugging their creations these days just to share; there has to be a profit incentive. The market is the only feedback mechanism one can access.13
But we learn different lessons from “the market” than we do other artisans. Building something and sharing it with your buddies and getting their feedback and trying again is useful unto itself; and each go-around certainly increases the marketability of any of your future creations.
Creating something for the joy of it; having a feedback mechanism based on this premise; fostering or finding an environment which encourages it; these are perhaps the single most useful things a craftsman of any kind could do with their time. We get truly good at stuff by doing it a lot. We do stuff more — and we push ourselves further — when joy is an integral part of the process.
This is at least true for me.
Worsted Weight
I am crocheting a few wedding favors with my fiancée, one of which calls for 50 yards of “worsted weight” red yarn. What in the hell is worsted weight, you ask? It’s 4! That’s right: the number four.
Look, yeah, whatever, metric vs imperial, tradition, I don’t care. It’s not a big deal. You just have to learn the language of the craft. Being a beginner crochetsman, I’m sure many things will confuse and frustrate me that I will later think are just fine. I have no real leg to stand on here.
But you really should just say four. Assholes!
The Point
There exist two simultaneous views of what this blog is in my mind:
A collection of words by which I, a man, am and will be known. A living reflection of the ideas I find important14 in the moment; so I may stake my place in the ideological landscape and perhaps sway the minds of those around me. A way to communicate the contents of my heart and mind to those I care about and to those who may come after and who wish to know me.
A sick little corner of the internet where a funny, cool guy writes just the best blog, my dude
I’ve played around a bit with actively trying to promote the blog. I posted my second post on Threads to Hacker News and it enjoyed some time at #1 for a few weekday hours; this translated to 16,000 views and 15 subscribers, which is an interesting thing to experience. But now, before I publish any post, I find myself thinking at least a little bit: this post is probably going to alienate the people who subscribed thinking it’s a programming blog. That’s a mindset I muchly don’t like, so I’m going to stop inhabiting it. No more internet fame game audience capture bullshit.
I feel odd, I’ll admit, about putting effort into writing about “the point of this blog.” The navel gazery is off the charts. But on the other hand, I’ve put a lot of effort into the blog over the past 2 years, so I should probably be able to justify that time, right?
The point, then, is both of the reasons I listed above. I’m just going to do that. I don’t really take pictures; I don’t record videos; and my fiancée is much the same; so this is one mechanism by which I can record my life — not a direct retelling, perhaps, but a window nonetheless. Recorded both for the benefit of myself and others in the future but also for that of those I care about in the present. I want my children to have a collection of their father’s writing after I’m dead. Separately, I enjoy publishing my work to others on the internet outside of the sphere of obscene profit incentives. I’ve impacted a small number of people in various small ways! That’s an unironically exciting idea.
Primarily, I’m still writing for the joy of sharing it with those of you I know personally. I’m writing a story about a bird I think you guys will like.
Big Cup and Original are the obvious winners
I’ve identified the point of greatest moral culpability as being the release of the white chocolate Reese’s
You call it rapeseed oil; I call the police.
I really should stress this part: this is all truly garbage and I should be far more personally insulted by the fact that they’re selling it to me at all than by the fact that one of the variations of it is not quite as nummy as the other.
It’s barely if at all broccoli hair; I just fell in love with the phrasing and I want to keep it.
I am forgiving, but will not forget, the bug which caused hundreds of emails to flood my inbox.
Jack is basically one of the sickest and friendliest dudes you’ll ever meet. Great guy. Pretty much kills it at whatever he does.
Mostly
Both before and after the Musk acquisition
YouTube is an interesting case because it does have a decently large cohort of builders who share the things they’ve built. However, it’s not a community. It is inherently asymmetric: the video-makers and the video-consumers are there for entirely different reasons; are filling different roles; and do not and cannot view one another as peers. The nature of the communication is fundamentally non-communicative. It doesn’t provide a way to achieve what I’m describing in this post.
And how wrong I could be!
The desire to be the guy who made the useful thing is of course heavily intertwined, and it should be! Nothing wrong with that.
Because of the proliferation of the hustle, you can’t share things genuinely now. I can’t share a blog post I wrote without being seen as someone on that grind, son. You can’t share a video or a website you made unless you’re willing to be the guy who has the audacity to be trying to sell something. It’s bullshit. It’s not how a culture should work. We’ve ruined everything. Subscribe to my blog.
And entertaining, I’ll grant
Your explicit description of what you do to a Reese's peanut butter cup is vile and should have never seen the light of day. I am confused and distraught.
This was a truly great post. Thanks for sharing.