It only takes 5 snare hits and 5 tom hits to instantly transport me back to the warehouse where you go crashing through the window in the very first level of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

I spent so much time playing this game on the PlayStation. I wasn’t even particularly amazing at it. It was just fun to try and pull off the 900 again and again.

Recently, I learned that the N64 version of this game had to use abridged versions of all the songs on this soundtrack due to space limitations on the cartridges.

Amazing that we can now fit the entire contents of the Nintendo 64 library of games onto a 32GB SD card.¹

Ska is a genre of music I get embarrassed when I tell people I enjoy it. It is a genre for a specific brand of misfit. Think emo kids who aren’t overly emotional. Punk kids who aren’t anarchists.

I haven’t listened to much else by Goldfinger, but assumed that they would be playing this song toward the end of their set at When We Were Young.

Imagine my surprise when they called Tony Hawk onto stage before playing it.

Tony recalled the story of meeting the band and asking them to be part of the soundtrack. He said that he and Goldfinger grew up together and owe much of their success to their symbiotic relationship.

Then all of a sudden, the band starts playing the song, and Tony Hawk starts singing it!

There were several moments at When We Were Young where I would try to sing along to a song but couldn’t. I was overcome with emotion.

Seeing thousands of misfits singing this song in unison with the coolest misfit of them all on lead vocals? I couldn’t handle it.

Ska is fun. Ska is camp. Ska is dorky.

And I’m here for it.

Aristotle, who had a few things to say about human nature, once declared, "The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor," but academics studying the personification of tech have long observed that metaphor can just as easily command us. Metaphors shape how we think about a new technology, how we feel about it, what we expect of it, and ultimately how we use it.

I love metaphors. I gotta reflect on this idea a bit more.

There is something kind of pathological going on here. One of the most exciting advances in computer science ever achieved, with so many promising uses, and we can't think beyond the most obvious, least useful application? What, because we want to see ourselves in this technology?

Meanwhile, we are under-investing in more precise, high-value applications of LLMs that treat generative A.I. models not as people but as tools. A powerful wrench to create sense out of unstructured prose. The glue of an application handling messy, real-word data. Or a drafting table for creative brainstorming, where a little randomness is an asset not a liability. If there's a metaphor to be found in today's AI, you're most likely to find it on a workbench.

Bingo! AI is a tool, not a person.

The other day, I made a joke on LinkedIn about the easiest way for me to spot a social media post that was written with generative AI: the phrase “Exciting News!” alongside one of these emojis: 🚀, 🎉, or 🚨.

It’s not that everyone who uses those things certainly used ChatGPT.

It’s more like how I would imagine a talented woodworker would be able to spot a rookie mistake in a novice’s first attempt at a chair.

And here I go, using a metaphor again!

As I climbed up on the table, the MRI technician handed me a laminated piece of paper and asked me what I want to listen to.

MRI machines are loud, so they provide you with a pair of headphones to wear while you lay as still as possible for around an hour.

It was six in the morning, early enough that I had to squint a bit to make out the SiriusXM channel listing.

My first instinct was to pick something that would make the technician laugh. I'm sure she was underpaid, overworked, and didn't want to be there any more than I did. The least I could do was try to get her to crack a smile.

I saw an EDM channel.

Perfect.

I ask her to throw that on.

I hear a chuckle through the low-quality speakers in the headphones. Mission accomplished.

As the test begins, my mind goes back to its default place of terrible thoughts. I am exhausted, I hate myself, I am a complete failure.

All of a sudden, I hear the following words:

I don't know who needs to hear this
We came here to get some healing
You can tell whoever's asking:
"Fuck, we're sad, but we're still dancing"

The swear word shocked me out of the funk for a moment.

The repetitive nature of EDM meant I got to keep hearing that chorus again and again.

After a few times, I hear another voice in my head:

"Sorry, can you please lay as still as possible?"

To this day, I've used this song as an anthem in the fight against my worst depressive thoughts.

It just sucks I can't really listen to it around the kiddos.

I encourage people to choose a guiding topic for the month, something that will help them feel propelled to post. It could be a loosely defined goal, perhaps you are learning something new and this would be a way to talk yourself through it on a daily basis, or post about progress.

This sounds like a good challenge for me as I start to commit to launching a newsletter soon.

I think what I want to do is share 31 songs that mean something to me. I've wanted to do this for a while, and this is a good chance to just jump in and do it.

So let's go!

Okay, I guess this blog is just turning into a bunch of links about why the internet sucks these days.

But I should stop framing these links as a “here’s why what we have right now sucks” because truthfully… it doesn’t.

Or rather, it doesn’t have to.

I really enjoyed Molly White’s metaphor about gardens¹. I’ve been tending to my own garden on this site for more than a decade, and I’ve kept up patches of turf on the web since the mid 90s.

I just like being here. I like having a place where friends and other folks can see what I’m all about and choose to interact with me or not.

A part of this article that stuck out to me was Molly’s observation that the internet started becoming less fun when we all came here to work. I couldn’t agree more.²

Somewhat related here: this past weekend, I decided to finally do something about my IRL piece of land. You see, most of my backyard is now just dirt. My front yard is patches of grass but primarily dominated by weeds.

My back patio is in literal shambles, chunks of broken patio paver strewn around the yard.

The screens on my windows are either broken, bent, or missing altogether.

The cool Govee lights no longer stick to my overhang, so they dangle like a complete eyesore.

It’s frustrating.

This past weekend, I went to the hardware store and spent way too much money on grass seed. It felt incredibly rewarding to do the hard work of ripping up the old junk and trying to build something new.

It felt like a sign for me to log off a bit more often and tend to reality.

But that’s not to say this garden is going away anytime soon. I’ll keep sharing articles like these here because I think it fits nicely with the thesis under which I am about to launch a newsletter: technology is so cool, and we could all use a reminder of that sometimes.

We also could use a friend to help us figure out how to use it right.

Much like I could use a friend to help me figure out how to replace my busted up patio.

You can’t read the recipe on your phone because it prioritises the ads on the page. You bring your laptop into the kitchen and whenever you scroll down, you have to close a pop-up. You turn AdBlock on and the page no longer loads, then AdBlock sends you an ad asking for money.

The Airbnb charges you a $150 cleaning fee, but insists the place needs to be left spotless. There will be a fee if the bedding hasn’t been stripped and the dishwasher hasn’t been emptied.

You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses.

Enshittification.

I have to admit, I laughed out loud at most of these, but the one that made me the most mad was the Airbnb one.

Related: I’ve been trying to read more novels lately, and I’m working my way through What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama. I’m only a couple chapters in so far, but it’s pretty dang good.

So then I asked him: what kind of VC does he actually want on his cap table (that is, owning a portion of his company)? What would be true of the sort of investor who really gets him and resonates with what he’s building?

The same question applies here as on a first date, I pointed out: do you want them to fall in love with you, or with a fake version of you that you now either have to maintain—at the expense of the person you actually are and want to be—or else face irreconcilable conflict and disapproval when you finally drop the facade?

You want to reach the investors in the room who want to flame-spot audacious and idealistic young upstarts like you; who’ve staked their careers and reputations on the thesis that the world needs more of just the kind of company you’re building; who resonate so hard with your story and are so wowed by your talent that they’ll be willing to invest in, nurture, and protect your agency as a founder.

The baggage around nuclear power largely stems from an inaccurate, almost mystical notion of how it works. In reality, contemporary nuclear power plants boast exceptional safety records and produce astonishingly minimal waste relative to their immense energy output. Additionally, their compact footprint allows for versatile placement: They don’t require areas with ample sun or wind, are dispatchable when needed, and realistically could be placed on-site at particularly important facilities as a steady supply of clean power. 

But if we’re going to normalize nuclear power as a reliable and well-understood energy source, it’s essential to understand how we’ve ended up in our current situation. It’s also important to recognize that although much of this post focuses on large-scale nuclear fission reactors — because that’s what have been delivering civilian power for the past several decades — smaller, more modular reactors will likely play a major role going forward, perhaps as a means to address more local, and even hyper-local, energy needs.

I’m taking all of this with a grain of salt because it was written by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, but I did find this to be a fascinating overview of the history of nuclear power.

In particular, I enjoyed the explanation of a nuclear meltdown and why, thanks to evolutions in technology, those are unlikely to ever happen again.

There were also plenty of phrases used (carbon rod, Diablo Canyon) which sparked my inner Simpsons nerd.

I swear my blog isn’t going to just be links to think pieces about why the internet sucks these days.

It just so happens that there was a wave of these pieces published last year and I’m finally getting around to them in my Instapaper queue.

Two pull quotes stood out to me:

“Humans were never meant to exist in a society that contains 2 billion individuals,” says Yoel Roth, a technology policy fellow at UC Berkeley and former head of trust and safety for Twitter. “And if you consider that Instagram is a society in some twisted definition, we have tasked a company with governing a society bigger than any that has ever existed in the course of human history. Of course they’re going to fail.”

I’ve seen a few good posts about the difficulties of content moderation at scale.

On the one hand, most of the abundance and privilege we’ve built for ourselves wouldn’t be possible without the massive scale that large conglomerates can achieve.

On the other hand, if something gets so large that we are unable to keep your head wrapped around it, maybe that’s the point where it’s okay to let it collapse in on itself.

The destruction and collapse of large entities is awful, with very real consequences for people.

But it’s out of the ashes of these organizations when we're presented with an opportunity to take the lessons we learned and build something new. We get to try again.

The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy. 

My toxic trait is I can’t shake that naïve optimism of the early internet. Mistakes were made, a lot of things went sideways, and there have undeniably been a lot of pain and misery and bad things that came from the social era. The mistake now would be not to learn from them. 

Keep the internet small and weird, my friends. ❤️

One of the dominant reactions to burnout right now is an all-out rejection of work itself, like, "well, any drive to do things, it’s a capitalist construction, and the real thing to do is just do nothing", but that doesn’t last.

And the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing. They’re striving really hard to make sure that their Substacks and books about doing nothing are going to have a really big audience and they’re giving talks on it.

You can’t just focus on the "doing less" part, you need the "obsess over quality" part, and that’s where you’re able to still fulfill the human drive to create, and that’s where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living.

As someone who has been unemployed for nearly five months now, I can assure you that the “doing less” part sucks.

I don’t want to do less.

I just want to be able to go through my waking hours making something which will make society a nicer place to live for everybody.

Then, I want to go to sleep at night knowing I inflicted the least amount of harm on as many living things as possible.

Why are those goals so difficult to strive for?