Stuff Jesse Likes

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell has been on my list for a long while, as somebody who wants to do more nothing and wants to do less compulsive scrolling of reddit and youtube.

I spend a lot of time on my computer, and a lot of time thinking about how to be a person that doesn't just want to spend all my time on my computer. I've read "Digital Minimalism" and other books by Cal Newport and liked them, about managing our relationships with technology and the adversarial relationships with tech companies that constantly want more of our time and attention.

How To Do Nothing is a very different kind of book, and not what I expected. It isn't a list of tips and strategies for managing your attention, or a deep dive on the incentives and structures of the modern tech company attention economy.

I think her thesis is that the type of attention we pay to twitter and the type of attention we pay to the real world are very different, and we need to develop rich and disciplined attention to the people around us, the physical world we live in, especially the natural world, the species and ecosystems there, the physical and cultural history of it. By doing that we'll naturally resist and reject the fleeting anxious attention to social media and apps. We don't need to set time limits or uninstall apps, once you're fully engaged to the real world you'll be able to engage with facebook or youtube in healthier, non compulsive ways.

I like her "ooooOOOOoooo"s.

What genre is this? What genre is Caroline Polachek? (Many, it feels like.)

Somebody in the youtube comments said this gives them nostalgia for 2000s Turkish and Greek pop and now I need to look into that.

Do you remember when you were a kid and you'd look out the window of the car as you were driving, and it would look like the moon was following you?

That was just cause of parallax, that wasn't me buddy, don't worry about it.

Youtube recommends this to me again about once a year and I'm always happy to see it.

And then years later watching a technical art talk on motion tracking in Blender I learned that it was the same guy.

Alpha Phoenix is a consistently great science communicator on youtube, he builds really cool experiments. Two of my favorites are:

Measuring the speed of light in a super understandable way. There's something just really cool to me that it's even possible for somebody to do this, on earth, with reasonably accessible technology.

Super stunning timelapse videos of trying to grow perfectly aligned ice crystals. Normal ice has no consistent structure, but snow flakes have perfect hexagon based shapes - what happens if you grow ice from a single snow flake?

But his whole channel is great, definitely check his history of videos for anything that jumps out at you.

I've been really loving this game for the last three months. It's in the very niche category of "games about programming", inspired by Zachtronics, another favorite of mine. For each puzzle you're shown a 3d voxel shape and need to write a program that outputs that shape.

The program runs once per voxel (x,y,z coordinate) and returns a color or no color, like a 3d version of "shader" programs in videogames, and can be an animation with multiple frames.

(Photo credit: Semira Menghes)

La Capital Tacqueria

Birria is beef or lamb stewed in super flavorful rich broth (consomé) and usually served with the broth for dipping. I've mostly seen it in tacos with and without cheese and sometimes in tortas. They usually dip the tacos in the consomé and then fry them on the plancha so they're crispy and all the flavor is seared into the tortilla.

Jalisco is famous for it, and I'm learning now from wikipedia that it's a regional variant of barbacoa.

We spent a month in Puerto Vallarta (in Jalisco) and had a lot of birria tacos and consomé, and the best I've ever had is still La Capital in Troy NY.

We love to get two orders of the birria tacos and a burrito, and then pour the consomé into the burrito as we eat it.

Definitely eat it hot at the restaurant if you can, it's still good as takeaway but best hot. I think we liked all the burritos except for the al pastor one.

Credit for the original recommendation goes to Shivon. I then forgot that entirely and excitedly told her about it a year later.

I have an idea for a new holiday I'm trying to make happen: "Mug Renewal Day".

(I'm open to other names! Renewal day? Mug day?)

On the day, everybody picks their least favorite mug from the cubbard and dramatically smashes it on the ground, as a sacrifice representing the things they want to remove from their life, and leading us to think upon the better things we want to replace them with.

Pros:

• This makes room for the new, better mugs that come into our lives.
• Smashing things is fun and therapeutic.
• Gives you a social opportunity to think about renewal in your life, what you want less of and what you want more of.

Cons:

• More consumer waste. (I'm assuming you're inevitably getting more mugs every year anyways though.)
• Somebody might step on or drive over ceramic shards if you don't clean up well.

I guess you could use something representative of a mug, like a mug piñata, but I feel like the shatter is going to be way less visceral.

This is one of my favorite youtube channels, a carpenter/general contractor team that do video series of their full home builds and remodels.

I've been parasocially following along with these guys for years now. It's always fun and educational, if you want to learn about foundations, concrete, framing, inspections and following code, roofing, etc etc.

They do biweekly videos that are super in the weeds, but if you just want to check them out you can start with their edited full build series, that condense months of videos into an hour or two. You can find a playlist of their complete build videos here.

I didn't realize how much nostalgia I had for this very particular type of pizza until watching this. I don't know why I always assumed they got it frozen premade somewhere, it's cool to learn why a lot of the unique aspects of the pizza are due to the recipe being specifically designed for easy mass production by the cafeteria workers.

It's a great game!

You play as a young woman on a desert planet, leaving your tribe as part of a coming of age ritual, to ride your hover bike around the vast deserts, meet people, and figure out what you want to do with your life (by helping people and collecting masks representing roles and jobs you could take on).