Cassettes Are Making a Comeback, But Can Production Keep Up? “After music cassettes died in the late ’90s, National Audio kept busy with cassettes for instructional materials, spoken-word bibles and Library of Congress work until indie bands and labels came calling as early as 2006. ‘Suddenly, we were back in business,’ Stepp says.” I love that story. [billboard.com]

Things I Do Not Like Hearing. I appreciate a well-written personal grievances post. This one—about phrases the author doesn’t like—is bound to become a classic of the genre. “I have never read the words ‘friendly reminder’ and not imagined that person seething, incandescent, smoke blowing out of their ears like a hot kettle, just absolutely furious. I simply don’t believe you. I do not think that you think we are friends or that this interaction is friendly. If you want to fight, we can fight.” [holapapi.substack.com]

Engagement, Attention, Shining a Light. This is a great writing goal: “My goal is for my writing to engage readers on a ‘shared inquiry’ level, where whatever I am saying is not viewed as a declaration that demands agreement, but an exploration attempting to illuminate the subject at hand in a way that encourages the reader to go exploring with a light of their own.” [biblioracle.substack.com]

A library of words. I bet you didn’t think you’d want to read about the real purpose of a Thesaurus today, but you’re going to have to trust me. This post is fantastic. “The purpose of an ordinary Dictionary is to simply explain the meaning of the words. After you look up the word, you are given the idea the word is supposed to convey. The Thesaurus is supposed to work in the opposite direction: you start with an idea, and then you find the words to express it. A dictionary turns words into ideas and a thesaurus turns ideas into words.” [austinkleon.substack.com]

SF’s Market Street Subway Is Running on Floppy Disks. This is quite something. “SFMTA is hardly unique in using them, however. As recently as 2020, British Airways was loading avionics software onto 747s via floppy disk.” I also love that they felt the need to include a photo of a floppy disk in the article. [sfstandard.com]

Latex, severed legs and fake erections: why is a whole new generation obsessed with DVD menus? This is a wonderful homage to the lost art of DVD menus. “Some turn-of-the-century landing pages were so imaginative they cut through into popular consciousness: 2003’s House of 1,000 Corpses featured a murderous clown directly addressing (and mocking) the viewer, while the Harry Potter DVD let viewers choose a wand, cast spells, and solve puzzles to access deleted scenes.” [theguardian.com]

An Imperfect List of Books Like “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”. This is my favorite book I’ve read in a long time. Good list of others to try. [bookriot.com]

Lego reveals massively detailed Lord of the Rings Rivendell set. Take my money! [polygon.com]

The Window Trick of Las Vegas Hotels. “In order to make the buildings look smaller, less intimidating and messy, architects have come up with a ‘four or six windows in one’ solution. This means they grouped several windows (usually four or six) together and made them look like one window. This creates the visual effect of ‘shrinking’ the building, of making it more orderly and symmetrical.” [schedium.net]

You have to read this whole article for the full context, but this classification of the different ways we can choose to act online really got me thinking: “I see roughly three typical public stances: boring, lively, or outraged. Either you act boring, so the bandits will ignore you, you act lively, and invite bandit attacks, or you act outraged, and play a bandit yourself. Most big orgs and experts choose boring, and most everyone else who doesn’t pick boring picks bandit, especially on social media. It takes unusual art, allies, and energy, in a word “eliteness”, to survive while choosing lively. And that, my children, is why the world looks so boring.” [overcomingbias.com]

The Junkification of Amazon. Why Does It Feel Like Amazon Is Making Itself Worse? “If you understand Amazon as an aspiring megascale infrastructure company — a provider of systems, services, capacity, and labor — its junkification makes sense. Amazon hasn’t been acting like a store for a while. In its ideal future, selling things to people is everyone else’s problem.” [nymag.com]

People Can’t Stop ‘Spotify Snooping’ on Friends, Exes and Crushes (WSJ paywall, Archive.is link here). “When Ms. Ticoalu looked up what her ex-boyfriend was listening to in November, she saw ‘Glimpse of Us’ by Joji, a song about starting to date again after a relationship ended. Because he played the song so soon after their breakup, it led her to believe the two events were related. ‘It does lead me to overthink a lot,’ Ms. Ticoalu says.” [wsj.com]

New Form of Ice Discovered. “The newly discovered ice is amorphous — that is, its molecules are in a disorganized form, not neatly ordered as they are in ordinary, crystalline ice. Amorphous ice, although rare on Earth, is the main type of ice found in space. That is because, in the colder environment of space, ice does not have enough thermal energy to form crystals.” [scitechdaily.com]

This is such a fun and interesting story by Louie Mantia about his time working as an icon/UI designer at Apple in the early 2010s. [lmnt.me]

I love this post on the personal brand paradox by Debbie Millman:

But rather than manufacturing a personal brand, why not build a reputation? Why not develop our character? Imagine what we could learn from each other if we felt worthy as we are instead of who we project ourselves to be. Imagine if we could design a way to share who we are without shame or hubris.

Tracy Durnell builds on this:

I’m more interested in following people as people — while I might have been drawn to certain blogs in the past because of the topic, the reason I keep reading many of them is having gotten to know the writer.

Those two posts articulate why I’ve decided to relax a little bit on the blog this year. For too long I didn’t really post here any more because it was so hard to get over my own self-imposed “this is worthy of a post” line. But these days I’m so much less interested in “building a brand” than I am in just… having fun and, well, being a person. So I am sharing things I find interesting, I am publishing unfinished thoughts alongside the deeply-researched posts. And I am slowly getting comfortable with posting more personal things as well (like yesterday’s LotR post).

I know this is the year of saying “this is the year of the personal blog” so I’m sure you’re pretty tired of hearing it from yet another person. But seriously, consider it. Consider thinking out loud and sharing those thoughts on a place that you own. Plant that digital garden—it might just give you life.

In the post How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors Camille Fournier makes a great point about the split between “managerial” and “technical” career tracks:

Most people become managers right at the point where career tracks split between “technical” and “management” specializations. The result is that many new managers have most recently been very technical, yet they have no idea what it means to climb the technical track, but they will be managing people who want to follow that path. To be a great manager, you can’t afford to let the ICs on your team feel that they have no career path, so it’s up to you to manage this well.

She goes on to to list five pitfalls that new managers should work to avoid in order to set their direct reports up for success.

The Calculator Drawer is “a collection of emulated calculators, providing reference to how they worked and what the often unique interfaces would consist of.” (via Clive)

The Last Boeing 747 Leaves the Factory (NYT Gift Link). “The plane known as ‘Queen of the Skies’ helped make air travel more affordable, but it has been supplanted by smaller, more efficient aircraft.”

Here’s everything you ever wanted to read about the “This Is Fine” meme. The Meme That Defined a Decade (The Atlantic, possible soft paywall): “Memes are typically associated with creative adaptability, the image and text editable into nearly endless iterations. ‘This Is Fine,’ though, is a work of near-endless interpretability: It says so much, so economically. That elasticity has contributed to its persistence. The flame-licked dog, that avatar of learned helplessness, speaks not only to individual people—but also, it turns out, to the country.”

See also ‘This Is Fine’ creator explains the timelessness of his meme (The Verge), ‘This is fine’ creator reflects on 10 years of the comic meme (NPR), and the artist’s own reflection on the anniversary.

I adore the Barely Maps project—a collection of minimalist maps of places the author has visited. Here’s my local one:

I like this idea of “critical ignoring” as a way to be more intentional about our online time: “Critical ignoring is the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.” See also The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything.

Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight. Dang this thing is beautiful. And what an amazing piece of engineering.

Youth Spies and Curious Elders. Life goals: “Waters is what I call a Curious Elder — someone who manages to retain their curiosity as they age and stays interested in what young people are up to. The curious elder isn’t interested in judging youth, they’re interested in learning from them.”

The Thoughts of a Spiderweb. This is a fascinating article about animal cognition but I am especially blown away by the idea of spiderwebs being “an extension of the spider’s cognitive system” because I’m reading the sci-fi novel Children of Time right now and that is how the spiders communicate in the story.

Audi’s new EV is a luxury SUV with augmented reality that doubles as a pickup. I can’t decide if I love this or hate it.

Prisoners Usually Can’t Have Cell Phones. See How People Use Them Anyway. “Some men use their phones to take online classes, posing as regular students in the free-world, a ruse that only works in the age of Zoom classrooms and online meetings.”

It’s the Coolest Rock Show in Ann Arbor. And Almost Everyone There Is Over 65. “The show always starts at 6:30 p.m. and ends at 9 p.m., in time to get to bed at a reasonable hour.” Sign me up! (NYT Gift Link)

How ‘The Last of Us’ changed gaming, strained relationships and spawned an empire. Probably my favorite read of the week. “‘The Last of Us’ always felt like a mission statement, a game that wanted to prove that big-budget action shooters could not only have a sense of gravitas but could advance the medium in narrative, gameplay and representation.”

I have a few product-related articles that I wanted to reflect on and write more about, but I just don’t think I’m going to get to it. They’re all really good though, so instead of just archiving those notes I wanted to share them so you can check it out.

1.

Here’s some solid advice from Jason Knight on what to do when your product is a mess and you have to fix all the things all at once:

In a situation like this, you’re going to have to get super-pragmatic. You’ve got lots of fires all burning at the same time and you need to put them out before you can start prioritising ‘properly’. Your goal is to get back on track as soon as possible, and you’re going to have to do a bit of shovelling to get there. Do what you need to get done.

And:

What we’re doing here is looking to put out the fires, and get a variety of initiatives to a base level of quality. You’re very unlikely to be able to make 15 things amazing all at once. Your goal here is to make all ships rise together. This means working with your stakeholders to understand what the minimum viable solution to these issues is, getting brutal with scope, and expending as little precious development time as possible.

2.

Andy Nortrup writes about what he learned about product management from Bonsai:

Similarly, with software products, patience is an important skill to make sure we don’t push the team faster than they can write good code, or make changes to the product faster than you can learn from users’ response to the changes. Patience can help us be less frantic and pay attention to the work in front of us in this season rather than the whole roadmap.

3.

Rich Mironov talks about the differences between products and features, and I especially appreciated this point about what users care about:

Customers don’t care about how hard we worked. Our product either does what the customer needs, or it doesn’t. And it should be priced based on customer value, not recovering our expenses. Users don’t care how much we spent, how big (or great) our team is, margin demands from Finance, remote versus on-site teams, development velocity, scrum vs. kanban vs. XP vs. lean.

• The Minimalist Photography Awards for 2022 are out.
• The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think. “Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is insufficient, but alternatives are coming into view and changing our understanding of the disease.”
• The Battle Over Bike Lanes Needs a Mindset Shift. “Installing protected routes tends to boost local shops. But many store owners remain attached to their street parking—and fight to protect it.”
• Pepper spray for the school run? The weaponised SUV set to terrify America’s streets. I’m sorry what? “While its competitors offer heated seats and optional roof-racks, this souped-up SUV boasts bulletproof glass, blinding strobe lights, electrified doorhandles, and wing mirrors that can shoot pepper spray – handy for putting those pesky cyclists in their place.”
• See also Pickup trucks have gotten bigger, higher-tech — and more dangerous.
• Forget Google Maps: Why Paper Map Sales Are Booming (WSJ paywall, here’s an archive.is link). The kids are going analog. “While a satellite can highlight unpaved paths, cartographers actually walk down them.”
• At least let the CD die with some dignity. Amen. “Nothing in music is permanent. So if it is to die, the CD at least deserves to leave with some of its dignity intact rather than being coldly sent off with a shrug. The CD was of enormous significance but its place in history is being lost.”
• In happier music news, check out radio’s comeback! Public Radio Stations KEXP, KUTX, KCMP Grow Audiences With New Music. “A handful of public radio stations dedicated to playing new music have enjoyed notable ratings bumps in recent years. During this ‘crisis’ for new music on the airwaves, these stations have excelled at finding, and holding on to, listeners excited by the prospect of discovering a track from an artist they’ve never heard of.”