What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams? / Keep it to yourself.

God, we used to be a great country.

Everything about this film feels true. The foundation, without which nothing matters, is the pitch-perfect triptych of Hunter, Hurt, and Brooks: all three are perfectly cast, perfectly written, and perfectly executed. Every single person in the world has worked with a Jane and an Aaron and a Tom; the movie never flinches in showing us who they really are, both in virtue and in vice, and Brooks is wise enough to resist trope and obvious resolution in favor of a progression that trades satisfaction for honesty.

But around them, an equally impressive orbit. Joan Cusack doing her usual shtick; Jack Nicholson in what feels today like a stunt-casting role that borders on metafiction; sets and dressing details that never feel too outre, and interstitial newsroom scenes (with the exception of a brief and silly Central American soujourn) that feel far less contrived than the usual romantic comedy fare.

I think it is tempting to dwell on the "message" of the movie, and to think about Jane's opening monologue: as someone who grew up with broadcast news firmly in the rear view mirror, the idea of the "advent" of the anchorman and what it did to a serious journalistic praxis is novel, and of course Hunter's character is proven prescient over the forty years that follows. (One is reminded of the ending to Between the Lines, but in that film the folks getting laid off appear to be neither interested nor competent, which of course cannot be said of our protagonists here.)

But this is a film much more interested in the human condition than the newsroom, and while I don't think it ever succeeds quite on marrying the two as neatly as it would like (the workplace is compelling; the characters, dominated by their work, are compelling; I am not sure this symbiosis teaches us much about the way the world works) it does not matter because you leave the theater understanding the world more clearly because you understand these three people in vivid technicolor. Tom and Aaron have found various satisfactions in paths that are still not quite exactly what they wanted; they know it, and you know it. And Jane — god, what a perfect performance from Holly Hunter — is the one who we know is fiercest, is smartest, is bravest, and all we can do is hope that she stops crying.

Trundle is not quite the right word. When I hear trundle, I think of layers, of wool and dampness, of hitting the road before the sun does, wrapped in a blanket and uncaffeinated haze. One cannot trundle in the summer, and so this morning we did not so much trundle as we did shuffle our way to the car: Haley and I sporting matching pairs of sunken eyelids and cans of Celsius that could not kick in soon enough; my mother, gracious as ever, bright-eyed and cheery at 6:00am, and Lucy, still wearing her pajama onesies, awake but not quite conscious, confused but thrilled (as she always is) to be involved. And off we went to Ashland — not a far drive at all, maybe twenty minutes from Richmond. Ashland is a lovely and small town known for the following items: a train station, a sniper attack, a very pretty college campus, a strawberry festival, and a half marathon / 5K.

That last item is the source of our 5am alarm clock. We ran the Ashland 5K two years ago, the weekend before our wedding; we would have run it last year, but Haley was deep into her third trimester.

We get there; we park; we make our way to the packet pickup tent. To give you a sense of the size [or lack thereof] of this race, it is such that we can arrive ten minutes before the race begins, grab our bibs, and still have time left over to stretch and enjoy the sun slowly coming over the quiet environs. Lucy is captivated by the novelty and the relative chaos; she is not sure what’s going on, but she is delighted all the same.

It is very quickly clear that the weather will be perfect for a morning run, a welcome change: it’s been unbearably (though not uncharacteristically) gross in Virginia this year, hot and still and sticky, but this morning it is crisp. We’ve got fresh legs, though too fresh at that: the last time we ran was a 10K a few months back, which itself was the last time we ran since Lucy was born. And, as such, the race proceeds: it’s a very forgiving route, flat and calm, and our pace is a slow and steady jog, neither impressive nor unpleasant.

Time passes. My left knee twinges, as it is oft to do; I shift from listening to Charly Bliss to Navy Blue, and then toss my AirPods in my pocket. We hit the three mile mark; the end is upon us. We turn right onto the main stretch of road that cuts through Ashland, sitting parallel to the train track, and immediately we start to hear the generic “you have finished the race” Top 40 playlist and a guy on P.A. shouting out the half-marathon finishers (who, frankly, deserve the praise more than us). With one difference: my mother and Lucy, rather than waiting at the finish line, have camped out at the bend, and with a smile and nod I stop, pick up Lucy and begin running again — because, after all, it is her race too.

Haley, Lucy and I all cross the finish line, hand in hand in hand. Lucy is, as always, jostled and deliriously happy.

Strava gently informs me that it was my worst 5K pace in quite a few years; I gently inform it back that Lucy just set a new PR, and she’s only going to get faster from here on out.

Any place you don't leave is a prison.

Ebert wrote:

Liberal Arts is an almost unreasonable pleasure about a jaded New Yorker who returns to his alma mater in Ohio and finds that his heart would like to stay there. It's the kind of film that appeals powerfully to me; to others, maybe not so much. There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth. There is a word to explain why this particular film so appealed to me. Reader, that word is 'escapism.' If you understand why I used the word 'reader' in just that way, you are possibly an ideal viewer for this movie.

I am predisposed, by Ebert’s definition of an ideal viewer (see my idolation for The Secret History), to like this film. The cast have only grown more striking in the decade since its release: pre-Marvel Elizabeth Olsen, Richard Jenkins, Allison Janney, John Magaro, and Zac Efron. The Wikipedia article for this film all but promises it would be an instant favorite of mine, and I admit I blush a little to recall how much I once loved it (after all these years and all this time). I have no problem with early twenty-first century schmaltz: I’ll still defend Garden State, and I’ve always liked Josh Radnor as an actor. (What he did with How I Met Your Mother is, in my view, the only thing that kept that show together as it veered into the saccharine and the zany. His earnestness and affectations worked for me. It’s a rare skill to play a character who makes you want to both punch him in the face and give him a hug, and Radnor did it for nine seasons.)

Those niceties aside, we’re left with the film itself: half-baked, boring, and ill-advised, with little to cherish beyond Olsen’s solid performance. This is, transparently, a passion project for Radnor—shot at Kenyon, his alma mater, and populated with fellow alumni. Yet, for all that, the film never really conveys the beauty or serenity of a liberal arts campus, except in contrast to its depiction of a miserable thirty-something New Yorker who, for some reason, has a 1,500-square-foot apartment.

For a love letter to the small liberal arts campus, there is precious little lazing about on the quad in the screenplay (to be contrasted with, say, Everybody Wants Some!!!). You could summarize every act in a sentence or two, and most of the action takes place in houses or at house parties, with barely a whiff of the Kenyon atmosphere. The central relationship—between a 35-year-old and a college sophomore—feels impossible to take seriously, not just morally but on the level of basic plausibility. I’m 32 as I write this, three years younger than Radnor’s character, and while I have my own bouts of arrested development, I can’t for a second buy what the film is selling either at an earnest or ironic level.

So: the relationship at the film’s core rings hollow on the page and fares little better on screen. Without the charm of the campus or any real chemistry between the leads, we’re left with the film’s accessories:

1. Allison Janney hamming it up, supposedly for pathos but really just having fun being a weirdo;
2. Zac Efron in a proto-Neighbors role, an entertaining but weightless diversion;
3. and, perhaps the one kernel of truth, Richard Jenkins as a professor forced into retirement after four decades, unsure which way to walk.

Jenkins gets one masterful scene, but that single moment of honesty can’t redeem the rest of the runtime, which—despite Olsen’s best efforts—is not just incoherent, but boring.

At this point, Tony Gilroy is probably best known for a different project—one where he uses the trappings of a beloved IP to Trojan-horse his ideas and sharp scriptwriting into a mass audience. Andor is both a more ambitious and more successful version of that conceit, but you can see the blueprints here, a film that lives and die on the strength of its script — that often feels like an inversion of the very thriller tropes it’s trafficking in.

The most boring and unsuccessful parts of this film are, ironically, the action scenes, which sometimes descend into self-parody. (The wolf sequence and the interminable Manila chase, come to mind.) Conversely, the film thrives in the spaces Gilroy cares about: the substrata, the nameless, dimly lit war rooms populated by Ed Norton and his ilk, the Reston and Fairfax offices often left generic and faceless in the hands of less interesting filmmakers. The script’s most interesting moments are spent here: snapshots from a Canadian forestry company, being on hold with an Australian rent-a-cop agency, a perfect combination of terror and banality that feels, in 2025, ahead of its time. Gilroy is interested in exploring (without valorizing) the deep and unsettling ways we are always surveilled: his direction here is at its best when Ed Norton and Jeremy Renner are playing cat and mouse—not with guns and flashbangs, but with grainy surveillance photos and hastily glued passports.

This is not a great film, but it has its moments and has earned its devotees. Rachel Weisz does a great job in what is, frankly, an underwritten role; Renner, while he doesn’t quite sell himself as an action star, is doing something more than cosplaying Matt Damon, with hints of nuance and personality around the edges that make a meaningful difference for the film.

This could have been a much worse movie than it ended up being; Gilroy did the best with what he had.

Lucy is now at the age where there's some level of predictability and structure in the evenings. She goes to bed around 7, and I generally have around three hours where I need to head upstairs myself. Most of this time is spent away from rectangles: cleaning up the kitchen, getting back into a barbell program, walking the dog, and so on.

But in the precious little time that remains, when I don't have anything Buttondown-shaped that demands my attention, I have been refurbishing Shovel to bring it to some sort of 1.0, out of its perpetual half-assed alpha. Part of this work has been deciding on a name. I really love Shovel: it's fun because the tool itself is a faster and more ergonomic way to dig. It combines both a certain physicality and sonorous bent; it feels good to say the word "shovel", as if parsing DNS records is not so far away conceptually from digging ditches.

But Shovel as a name has a big problem, which is that it's a violation of my core belief at this point that the name does not matter and what matters is having a dot com. Shovel.com is for sale, by the way, and some early entreaties to the current owner reveal an asking price in, and I quote, "mid to high seven figures." So that was out, and thus began a long and protracted discovery process in finding a replacement name.

It is shockingly difficult to come up with a name based on the following constraints:

1. The dot com is available.
2. There is no obvious competition from other proper nouns or brands.
3. It doesn't sound like absolute shit, which I note is a different threshold than "I like it".

This, in my mind, is a meager list, and yet I spent two months trying and failing to find domains that satisfied it.

The two biggest frontrunners were Foxlight, which had mysteriously been registered between my coming up with the idea and my trying to purchase it. And Pingfisher, which is in and of itself a fun refernce to one of my previous projects, but failed the test of "do I feel embarrassed when I say this out loud?" And if I'm going to have to break one rule with this name, then I ultimately decided that I break the first. Shovel.report is now... shovel.sh.

Not exactly a premium TLD, and I'm sure right after publishing this, I'll end up grabbing shovelhq.com or use useshovel.com, some anodyne TLD just to cover my bases. Again, I cannot emphasize enough how little emotional investment I put into finding this domain, and yet it still was that difficult. (The comedy option I was seriously considering, by the way, was just going full retrograde with it and registering as the Virginia Milling Company, a trademark which surprisingly does not yet exist.)

After what has felt like a long winter of habitual reliance on my existing tools, I’m finally playing around with some new ones. This is a healthy habit—so long as you don’t convince yourself that you’re just one more App Store download away from a previously unimaginable level of personal satisfaction and joy.

I like exploring new tools because onboarding is fascinating: I get to see where I stub my toe so many times I forget the toe even exists. Most of these experiments end in failure, and I’ll probably write about those someday. For now, though, I want to talk about three tools I’ve used every day for the past week—tools I enjoy enough to justify the effort of adding metadata to a 10-minute voice memo recorded while walking Lucy to the butcher.

1. NetNewsWire
   I started using NetNewsWire knowing only two things: it’s very old, and it’s maintained by a guy named Brent, whose blog I loved back when I was cosplaying as an iOS developer. Also, it’s responsible for at least one incident in Buttondown's history, thanks to some unfortunate thundering herd tendencies. NetNewsWire sounds like the kind of app people might optimistically call “vintage,” but it’s not. It’s simply an excellent RSS reader. It feels exactly like a native iOS or macOS RSS reader should. I can’t think of a higher or more succinct compliment.

2. Sol
   Here’s a dirty secret: I’m a Spotlight guy. I know Raycast is the trendy answer, and most people who nerd out about this stuff use either Raycast or Alfred. I’ve tried both, but neither felt consistent or harmonious enough to justify giving them so much real estate in my workflow. Not that I liked Spotlight—on the contrary, I found it egregiously annoying, slow, and full of jank. Sol, to its credit, doesn’t aspire to much. It’s a very fast, open-source launcher with a couple of Swiss Army knife features, and that’s it. No startup, no cottage industry of automations—just a really fast launcher. I installed it on a lark and haven’t once been tempted to switch back.

3. Helium
   Helium is the CostCo to Chrome's Walmart, a comparison which I mean to be a compliment that will nonetheless probably draw the ire of everyone involved with the project. What I mean is: it’s a faster, more performant version of Chrome, minus all the awful and annoying stuff. (A fun fact: I discovered Helium by spelunking around for alternatives after discovering that Chrome now ships a 10gb LLM model to your hard drive and immediately crashes all of your local data if you try to delete it.)

In retrospect, I think there are two really noteworthy things about Chance the Rapper's career:

1. The first is that he was both the vanguard and the dying flame of a certain kind of 2016 Parks and Recreation core optimism and naivete that seemed to suffuse pop culture right before the great pendulum of fate swung hard back in the other direction.
2. The second, of course, is that he is the most prominent artist that I can remember enjoying and discussing in my lifetime whose career was not just derailed but extinguished off of one extraordinarily poor album.

And it was, to be clear, only one album. It is trendy to pretend that a since-disgraced artist never actually had anything of merit, but I have fond memories not just of 10 Day and Acid Rap and Coloring Book but the entire Chance the Rapper extended universe. I'm grateful that he introduced me to Surf and, most importantly, to Noname, one of my favorite artists today. But The Big Day was bad—perhaps not irredeemably for Chance himself, but it felt like a nail in the coffin of his entire shtick, an album that failed not just thematically but sonically.

Six years later, we find ourselves with Starline, a 77-minute sprawl of an attempt to return to some kind of form. This album is, first and foremost, better than its immediate predecessor. Beyond that, though, the qualifications start seeping in.

I'm not sure what the goal of this album is beyond an overdue gallon of Listerine. There's some good production, some bad production, some good tracks, and some bad tracks. There are hints and feints at thematic through lines, but it feels indulgent and overlong, as if Chance's throwing spaghetti at the wall in hopes of finding a new identity that sticks. (You could lodge this exact criticism against Coloring Book, by the way, and Coloring Book staves off it by having an incredibly strong bookend to the album and an obvious through line of its message.) There is a fun, pleasant opening track and then 16 more tracks of varying quality. I harp on the length because I do come away from listening to this album with a sense that Chance has something meaningful and interesting left to produce.

I think there's a really solid 45-minute version of this album; I wish that is the one I got to listen to instead.

Telemachus turned five, two weeks ago. He did not have a great July; Richmond's been roiled by storms (ten nights in the past two weeks have ended with him hiding in the bathroom before bravely emerging at two in the morning, having wisely assessed that the threat has passed); add to that the fireworks on the fourth and the fireworks from the Flying Squirrels games the corgi blood pressure is high.

Despite this, he soldiers on: yesterday morning, just like every other morning, he woke up right as I did, patiently waiting thirty seconds for me to put on slippers and quietly tiptoe downstairs to feed him and put on the Moccamaster. He stood guard as I padded around the house in the early morning light; when Lucy woke up, ten minutes later, he was the first one in the nursery, snout pressed against the crib, checking in to make sure the situation was under control. And now, like every other evening, he's asleep not at but on my feet as I write this, having worked a double shift and knowing by that his work is done by the sound of Lucy's (happy, raucous) splashes in the bath upstairs.

Tomorrow will be more of the same; he is a creature of routine and I am as well. August will be fun and busy: we're going to Antibes for a wedding (Lucy's first European soujourn!) and as excited as I am to showcase my truly awful command of French and subsist on a diet entirely of pastis and pissaladière, it will be hard to extinguish the sight and thought of him glued to the front door, stoic and patient, guarding his home until his family returns.

"I mean, if we're going to make it, we gotta take risks." "Spoken like a man without a seven-year-old on Sunday afternoon."

I have been lied to. I have been tricked and bamboozled. The past two years has given me a faint impression that Air was a film in the lineage of Moneyball: a treatise about what the industry is and was, an underdog story, and an interesting story at that, presented with panache and polish. And, having considered Shoe Dog an above-average autohagiography, I was excited to finally watch it!

In reality, this film is an overproduced infomercial, devoid of gravitas or tone or thesis besides "boy, Michael Jordan sure is cool". And yet, despite that, the film does not even treat Michael Jordan seriously as a person or a brand, referring to him only in the prophetic perfect tense and giving him the same amount of depth that every other character has, which is to say close to none.

The reason I am so drawn to the cynical reason of this film's existence is because the cynical reason is pretty much the only one I can summon. None of the actors in this film are trying very hard to do anything at all (with, it should be said, the exception of Viola Davis, who effortlessly commands every single scene and who brings the only sole source of intensity and realism in a film too interested in needle-dropping the 1980s to bother much of anything else.) Even serious scenes are undercut: Jason Bateman's character gets to deliver a very sweet and resonant monologue about the idea of taking risks, and then the characterization of "you've got a seven-month-old you can only see on Sundays" vanishes into the air, never to be spoken of again, except for one or two lingering pans onto Jason Bateman looking vaguely somber, as though there was a studio note that said, 'Hey, make sure audiences care about this guy.'

The whole thing just feels fake and plasticine in the same way I grew to hate Ted Lasso, as if caricature and levity were knobs that you could dial up or down — never too far in any direction — depending on how the scene demands it. And this bothers me, because I think there's a good story, an interesting story to be told here about Jordan before he was Jordan, about Nike before it was Nike, about the birth of the sports-industrial complex. And the film is not interested in telling this story; this film, again, seems interested in very little at all.

People compare this film with Moneyball. This, I emphasize, is sacrilege. Moneyball is a rich text. Moneyball can be read four different ways at four different ages: it is a story about the plight of the underdog, it is a story about the struggle between capital and labor, it is a story about a dad having to choose between his daughter and the dream he never quite fulfilled, it is a story about what it means to fight in America, even though you know you're not going to win.

And it does the other parts too. You can watch the Scott Hatteberg home run on YouTube with This Will Destroy You in the background and immediately feel as if — know as if — you have the power to tear down a brick wall, to emerge with clay on your hands and history in your grasp. You can sit back and admire the Sorkin quips delivered in between bites of a seemingly indefatigable supply of snacks consumed by Brad Pitt in an effortlessly perfect performance. It works on both the elemental and intellectual levels — it can be watched and studied and is always rewarding.

Conversely, I'm not sure on what level Air works at all. You can't even say it's an interesting '80s movie, because then you are forced to compare it to Blackberry, a film that came out a fraction of the budget, a fraction of a fanfare, and the same shtick — a blend of "aw, shucks" voyeurism towards the not-so-distant past and a desire to reckon with the distance between that past and our present.

But Blackberry was actually good: it was both anchored and buoyed by interesting performances, it told a meaningful story with wit and conviction, and more than anything it did not feel like I could see the script notes from a ninety-minute meeting between Apple and Jordan Brand, lurking in the margins of the screen like an errant boom mic.

I don't know. I moved onto a boat. You know we work in the daily business, right? As in, today? What do you think we were doing back then? Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed? He offed a few citizens, he wrote a few letters and then he faded into a footnote.

“I tell actors all the time: I’m not going to cut around your hangover, I’m not going to cut around your dog dying, I’m not going to cut around the fact that you just fired your agent or your agent just fired you,” Fincher concluded. “Once you get here, the only thing I care about is, did we tell the story?”

Zodiac is the kind of film whose reputation exceeds itself to the extent that I've been seeing it for a long time, not because I didn't think I would love it, but because I didn't think I would get that much from it. I mistakenly thought that everything the film had to impart had seeped its way into pop culture, American filmography, and the collective zeitgeist, and therefore into me—a sort of film as microplastic. This is true of some films, but Zodiac is so much more interesting than its footprint would suggest.

I can only really talk about this movie and its depth by starting with the ending and ending with no clear moment of victory or emotional payoff—an ending that takes place 20 years after the opening scene, at which point the protagonists have either died or become disgraced. This is a deconstruction of true crime rather than a celebration of its truth. Truth is thin and scarce, and even hard truths do not meet a bar for action. Our last shot of Robert Graysmith, the obsessive cartoonist who becomes our eyes, ears, and nervous heart, is of him staring deep into who he believes to be his target's eyes. His wife has left him. His kids are gone. He has no job. If the prison scene is anything to go by, he is sure his quest is at an end. (If there's one quibble to make in Fincher's masterwork, it's that ending with a smash cut on this scene, I think, would have been even more perfect.) Graysmith is portrayed perfectly by Jake Gyllenhaal, who I hate to say I have not really enjoyed in any role until this one. There's a subtlety to his growing mania that feels somehow warmer and more realistic than in other such depictions, and the same can be said, by the way, of Chloe Sevigny in an understated and thankless role as a foil who I think plays her part perfectly.

Reading through contemporary reviews of the film, focus is drawn to Fincher's obsession with the character work and procedural work — the anti-obsession with gore and how little blood and violence is actually depicted on screen. This is true, but watching it now I feel like the strongest statement is not even with the case itself but with the world growing around the case. You don't have to believe Mark Ruffalo's half-hearted protestations that the killer doesn't matter compared to a bad traffic accident or an average Wednesday at the docks to understand that in a larger situational context. He's right—the Zodiac killings existed as a pop culture phenomenon more than a series of deaths we watch, with every member of this insanely stacked cast growing older, more disheveled, and beleaguered by the world passing them by until there is no one quite left to run everything together.

I think if there's any thesis, it's this one—sometimes in life, the accomplishment of something great requires everything to go perfectly right and perfectly in concert, and you better hope that it's worth it because otherwise 20 years is going to go by, and you have yourself a best-selling book, an empty house, the memory of someone heavily breathing on the phone, and never quite knowing how safe you are.

My wife got sick this past weekend, and as a result we had to cancel or at least postpone a trip to Seattle that we had been looking forward to. She's feeling much better now, and I am left with the task of recouping what I can from our reservations — a task much more satisfying and much less stressful than force-feeding her electrolytes and naan.

Whenever I do this, I am reminded of how flexible the world can be in ways that are not necessarily obvious if you just read the H1 tags. We had two hotels, both of which were trivially canceled despite being labeled as non-refundable, by calling the concierge, asking very nicely, and explaining with truth and humility the situation at hand. (The second hotel required a call back: the first concierge said no, so I waited until the night shift started, called back, and got a yes.)

The world is, to a certain extent, filled with barricades and policies designed for the lowest common denominator and concomitantly staffed with field agents whose job it is to open doors for you so long as they can quickly and confidently assess that you are neither a con man nor axe murderer. I do not suggest that all things work this way — nor would I suggest designing your entire worldview around progress through supplication — but asking nicely for something comes with zero marginal cost and outstanding efficacy.

When talking about the power of open formats, discussion generally gravitates to one of two ends of the same spectrum:

1. SMTP, which by all accounts has been a roaring and smashing success story (so long as you ignore the fact that Gmail is for all intents and purposes a benevolent dictator in the space) in no small part because the mechanics of "using the protocol" is abstracted away from the end user.
2. RSS, which is extremely powerful and useful as a medium but has largely failed as a consumer-facing technology in part because it demands, at some level, an understanding of the underlying technology. (We do not call Mimestream an "SMTP client"; we do call Feedbin an "RSS reader.")

Nestled somewhere in between the two is ICS. ICS has a handful of interesting characteristics:

• It is a protocol that has, for all intents and purposes, won. Every major calendar app is backed by ICS.
• It's an extremely simple and portable protocol. It's a little janky (XML is underrated!) but it's plain-text and easy to parse in any language or context.
• Everyone uses ICS; very few people who own iPhones don't use their Calendar app.

And yet there's very little discussion about ICS. It doesn't feel like a lot of people are experimenting with it as a form or surface, despite distribution being easy (if you have a useful ICS, every single person on the planet can use it with an app they already have in a single click) and production being easy (again, it's just a text file, which is trivial to generate). The obvious answer is "well, there's not that much stuff to do with a calendar" — I reject this. I think we (or perhaps just I) think about the world through a temporal lens; one can imagine a world where people treat calendar apps as more of a B2B application. A calendar showing every deploy and every incident; a calendar showing every new registration and new churn. Calendar apps have done a lot of shared work in terms of filtering and collating "events" that seem naturally extensible to non-personal use cases.

All of this is prelude to the fact that I am, to a certain extent, talking my book: I just built a small little converter from ICS to RSS, arguably the opposite of what I'm espousing above. (If you're looking for the inverse operation, I recommend rsstocal, a tool with an equally creative name.) But I am thinking a lot about calendars these days, and where they might be useful in ways hitherto unconsidered.

More than anything else, Bodies Bodies Bodies is a perfectly reasonable and delightful way to spend 90 minutes. It is beautiful, well-acted, and consistently funny, with a banger soundtrack and a propulsive pace. Much like Glass Onion, I think a lot of the attempts at social commentary work better if you treat them as being in service of broad comedy rather than any meaningful point; this is not a horror or a satire so much as a comedy film in the vein of Game Night or Do Revenge, where half the fun is trying to keep up with how seriously you should take it. (For a film obsessed with youth, it reads so obviously written by someone who thinks they understand The Youths better than they do; the great one-liners salvage dialogue that is otherwise mired in someone reading Tumblr for research.)

A few weeks after Lucy was born, I was chatting with my brother-in-law, who has two kids aged four and two. I told him that I thought the furor about changing diapers was a bit overblown (no pun intended): it's not pleasant, but it's certainly not particularly difficult or onerous compared to all the other duties of dealing with a newborn.

His response has stuck with me, and now that Lucy is old enough and agile enough to reach out from under her and grab her own diaper (sometimes the clean one, sometimes the used one) it is newly fresh in my mind:

That's because right now it's a one-player game. Very very soon, it will become a two-player game.

Progress is easy to make when there is no counterparty; the reward of progress is a counterparty which, at times, seems as though its main goal is to thwart your advances in any direction.

In the before times, meaning not just before Lucy but before I was working on Buttondown full-time, a four-hour work block felt luxurious and vast. An entire feature could be built; whole swathes of surface area could be mapped and given flesh. And, in a certain way, this was true: the rate of change relative to the gestalt was much more rapid than it is now, even though now it is not just me but a whole team, all of whom I consider better and more productive writers and engineers than I am. This is not for any interesting or idiosyncratic reason: now we have to think harder about scale and performance, now we have to think harder about accessibility and localization, now we must be much more cautious and paranoid about security and reliability, now we have to answer twenty (valid, rational, and positive-value) emails before even getting to the greenfield.

There are ways of combating this, of course. An underrated method to keep your overall surface area small is to shift your biases towards disjoint surfaces: rssrsssrssrss, for instance, is the kind of thing that would have been an order of magnitude more difficult to build within Buttondown than it was to do outside of it. (I suspect that this will become increasingly true over time, as the collective industry matures.)

But one thing that is easy to take for granted — one thing that I really did not internalize until much later — is that there is a certain freedom in those first few halcyon periods of a codebase's life, when the streets are empty and the cost of breakage rounds down to zero. Success begets friction; every incremental user is a strip of papier-mâché.

(This is also, in lieu of a crisper ending, why I think the phrase "a startup within a larger company" is a scam; one cannot be so neatly separated from the other.)

There was a point in my life where I was excited about the Apple Watch. I think in no small part because it represented a new frontier in consumer technology. I was the consumer for whom marketing material about leaving your phone at home and going for a run listening to music really resonated. I was also the consumer for whom sleep tracking really resonated. In many ways, I am the perfect ICP for Apple's marketing—an affluent yuppie with social and physical aspirations and a fervent believer in the power of technology to solve my problems. Bit by bit, though, the Apple Watch has lost its luster for me. I've more or less given up trying to use it as an input device, with the exception of voice-to-text memos, and somewhere along the way, letting every single app buzz my wrist turned into a Foucault-like horror. The dream of replacing my phone has been fully slain by the reality, which is my phone being strapped to my wrist in a smaller but no less distracting or pernicious form factor.

But tracking! Biometrics! Yeah, sure. The reality is I cannot point to a single action or decision I've made based on the data that my Apple Watch has collected for me over the past year or so. This was not always the case, to be fair, and I'm grateful to the Apple Watch for building in me a habit of walking. But I've internalized that habit to the point where I don't need a device to suggest closing my rings, and my problems these days are not due to lack of proximity to the things that a smartwatch makes viscerally close.

So: in the hallway drawer the Apple Watch goes, destined for a year of me throwing it on for random Saturday morning jogs, only to discover that the battery has died.

It feels bad to write a dour post, particularly one about a product towards which I feel no real animus. (This is, after all, an essay about myself more than it is about the watch.) So let me balance it out with an Apple product that I have grown to truly love: Stickers.

When Apple launched custom stickers it just seemed so needless to me — the kind of feature that looked interesting in a three-second sizzle real and fun to show off in a sparsely-attended Genius Bar session but whose usage data barely justified its own existence.

And then — as so many turns go in essays this year — Lucy was born, and suddenly Haley and I had a prime target for stickerification. It is hard to convey how much entertainment we get now out of turning things into stickers: Lucy, sure, and Telly of course, but quickly we turned our attention to the whole universe. Glenn, our 2009 Toyota RAV4: sticker. Can of Polar Orange: sticker. Particularly bulbous loaf of our friend Shep’s sourdough: sticker. Our text messages (much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of our friends and family) are littered with a confetti of our little sticker extended universe, a frivolity that software rarely grants us and that I try harder than ever these days to take for granted.

Part of Capote's genius is that it is impossible to talk and think about it without talking and thinking about In Cold Blood, a task I am procrastinating (having finished In Cold Blood yesterday and immediately stopped to watch this film). The book is a skeleton key for American storytelling; the film is, by extension, a deconstruction of that skeleton key, and an exploration of what we now call parasocial behavior — what does it mean when the observer upends the observed, and who has the right of way?

So to talk about this film without talking about In Cold Blood leaves us with the performances. PSH is, obviously, tremendous — even setting aside the metatextual implications of his portraying an author who died to drug abuse, there is a viscosity to every single scene and frame he's in; he is selfish and smart and well on his way to his terminus, and you never for one second doubt who you're watching on the screen. (This is to say nothing of the supporting roles, uniformly excellent even if their jobs are chiefly orbital.) To hear him tell it, this is a story about how great art will just absolutely fucking kill you: it is a story about deciding whether or not the lethal dose is worth it.

This is the fifth summer that we've stayed in Richmond since moving back east, and therefore also the fifth soilday of our backyard garden. Our garden is not spectacular, but it is special; it is both calendar and time capsule, a lodestar around which we orient our daily lives and our memories of the years past.

This year, we came close to disaster.

Lucy was born in September, and she was approaching five months as the weekend which we had earmarked to plant our seeds approached. That week was a tough week — not for any interesting reasons, but for the uninteresting and hazy reasons common to all new parents — and the conversation Haley and I had went from "how shall we Tetris the seeds this year?" to "how many boxes should we do?" to "should we be doing this at all?"

After much deliberation we decided that a single four foot by four foot box (scaled back from last year's garden which was quadruple that size) felt appropriate and represented a commitment to our lovely hobby tempered but not extinguished by slightly more pressing concerns. A few months later, that decision proved to be one of the better decisions we've made: every morning, Lucy comes out to the garden with me and helps with the morning's work, picking overgrown mint and basil, inspecting the peppers, re-latticing the cucumbers, and weeding by proxy by occasionally anchoring herself to a nearby patch of crabgrass.

One of the things that anyone who has ever dabbled in gardening will tell you is that mint is a weed. Bizarrely, we have not shared this plight: we try to grow everything we can from seed for the fun of it, and for some reason, mint is the one thing on which we never manage to really get a consistent handle. We grabbed some clippings from my mother and, thinking it a wise idea to hedge our bets, grabbed another from our friend's parents in Fairfax while we were up there.

You can imagine that this was perhaps an overcorrection, and we were left with a copse of mint that bordered on calamity 1 ^[1]. We can only drink so many juleps and mojitos! We ventured to far-off lands (which is to say, to recipe blogs not yet registered in my Feedbin) for inspiration. We finally stumbled upon a winner almost obvious in retrospect: mint chimichurri. Garlic, red wine vinegar, oil, spices, food processor: call it a day. Goes perfectly with red meat and breakfast sandwiches; goes great with a lot of other things too.

I mentioned that the garden is a time capsule, and this is what I drive at: 2025 is the year of many things, but now too it is the year of mint chimichurri in much the same way that 2022 was the year of Oops! All Cucumbers and 2023 was the year of driving out to Louisa County to score a great deal on industrial-sized bags of vermiculite.

Simon Willison writes about the recent Cursor changes:

Firstly, the era of VC-subsidized tokens may be coming to an end, especially for products like Cursor which are way past demonstrating product-market fit.

First, have some epistemic disclaimers:

1. I am a happy and paying user of Cursor (the past two months I averaged ~$5 of overages above the $20/mo plan).
2. Even predating this latest situation, I am fairly bearish on Cursor’s prospects as a company: I haven’t found any of the arguments as to how they’ll protect their marketshare as meaningfully cogent or persuasive.
3. I also pay for Claude’s chungus-sized $200/mo plan 1 ^[1], and use the hell out of it.

That aside: I love — and find especially apt — the phrase “VC-subsidized tokens”.

In 2015, Lyft would charge me $7 for a ride from West Seattle to Belltown; Uber would charge me $5. It was not clear to me if this was because Uber had better magic or because they were more aggressively loss-leading. I certainly did not (nor did anyone I know) have "loyalty" to one or the other — we simply opened both apps and chose the cheaper quote.

In 2025, both companies would charge me $30 — a price that is less beggaring of disbelief, and also a price that wouldn’t cause me to say “okay, time to call a cab company” but would cause me to look up how delayed the C Line has been lately 2 ^[2]. It’s unambiguous that the ridehailing wave resulted in an objectively better user experience for getting a cab; it’s also very clear that a lot of the temporary shift towards these services was more about taking advantage of very generous a16z subsidy and less about enduring behavioral change. 3 ^[3]

I use these tools every day; I find myself starting to shift from a “the marginal costs round down to zero!” mindset to scrutinizing the bill of a random Claude Code session as if I ordered a burger and a beer at an airport bar and the bottom of the check reads $80. (“$12 to fix two linting errors in the OpenAPI spec? Really?”)

As always, I remain particularly interested in the field of open source models, not just for the obvious moral and custodial benefits but increasingly for the economic benefits. If you subscribe to the broad idea that open source models will lag a year or so behind frontier models, a lot of these conversations shift towards discussions of trading price for speed, rather than accuracy. (And for much of my Claude Coding, which is of the genre “hey, go run off and do this thing that I thought of while walking the dog”, I do not care about the wall clock time so much as I care about the quality of the final artifact.)

Jesus, nobody twisted your arm to be here today. You're here of your own volition. You like to think the weight of the world rests on your shoulders. Like this place would fall apart if Dante wasn't here. Jesus, you overcompensate for having what's basically a monkey's job. You push fucking buttons. Anybody can waltz in here and do our jobs. You... You're so obsessed with making it seem so much more epic, so much more important than it really is. Christ, you work in a convenience store, Dante! And badly, I might add! I work in a shitty video store, badly as well.

You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work.

When I told my brother that I had finally watched Clerks, he responded with a bit of surprise that I had never seen it before. I couldn't help but share his reaction on paper—highly influential, semi-ironic auteurish indie comedy has my name written all over it, and yet I have never been an acolyte of the View Askewniverse, perhaps because my one and only real taste of Kevin Smith's work (besides the worst tweet in the entire world) is Dogma, played on TNT after school—a film that upset me in a very literal sense, having struck me then and still striking me now as unpleasant for the sake of unpleasantness, which is never a thing I really go for.

All of that aside: Clerks is great. It's a simple, funny, thorough film that never feels anything close to masterly, and is all the better for it. At some point over the past decade or so, our popular definition of the term indie film has become bastardized into meaning that the director has only done one Marvel film and not multiple. And Clerks is a movie that you cannot love for production value: you can only love for what it is trying to be relative to everything else, for filling a void in the zeitgeist that might now today seem banal (it is charming to think of a time where Star Wars banter was niche and idiosyncratic).

I can't pretend to have experienced anything about the early nineties enough to speak to it being true to form, but these characters are real people in a timeless and obvious way: they are clever, cynical, selfish, and miserable, without a neat narrative or crisp resolution. You hang out with them as if they are friends of that one older friend of yours: you're not sure if you like them, you're not sure if you'll ever see them again, but they're pretty damn funny.

We are officially in H2, gang. I published fewer posts than I had hoped:

Summer's here and the ink flows slower than the sweat (we lost A/C for a few days, the misery of which was counterweighed by me correctly diagnosing the problem as a busted capacitor). So much still in the drafts folder: NotePlan, Nixonland, Husbands and Wives, Let Them All Talk, Hex, The Score Takes Care of Itself, The War Room, The Straight Story, Clerks. We'll be travelling (Seattle, then Reno); we'll be keeping busy.