A sad reality for the book industry… via No one buys books - by Elle Griffin:
in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.
Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario requires constant reading breaks in order to stomach the existential and horrifying material, but it stands as one of the most important politically speculative books of our time. 📚
@KimberlyHirsh Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the genre, hope you enjoyed the original’s remake! Excited for you to eventually get to Super Metroid. It has remained my favorite game experience for decades.
A list of some lists, from Field Notes. A quintessential kind of post for the notebook brand, really.
July 4 Roadtrip to Michigan
A few photographic impressions from the roadtrip from the Twin Cities to west-side Michigan and back. Our excursion out on a pontoon along the Muskegon harbor of Lake Michigan was a highlight.
@michaelgemar This exactly.
@bjhess This was a good one — agreed! That instrumental rendition of 50 Cent’e song will forever be associated with the scenes in this film.
Caught up on a few posts from The Obsessor, and came across a recommendation for a new camera app called Pure from Trevor Walsh. Reminds me of the early iOS days of experimental apps — no image preview, just tap anywhere on the screen, it captures a photo, and limits you to 12 per day. It’s good.
Is there any other state in the US with such a breadth of grocery store non-dominance as Minnesota? Great piece by Adam Platt at MinnPost on the state of affairs. Big Kowalski’s fan, even if it’s only 2% marketshare.
The people have been talking about Gabriel Smith’s Brat, and after picking it up at a local bookstore on our first day of vacation in Burlington, 30 pages in, I will admit that the people are right — this is a wickedly good new voice in literature. 📚
This guy, absolute connoisseur of north Minnesota/Wisconsin dive bars. A pleasure bumping into his retrospective series of essays, and this one about south Superior’s Ray Bar and tap puppets, is just 🤌.
Ambitious collaboration of companies using “luminescent pigments [from FibreTrace’s tech] into raw cotton when ginning”, whereupon “scanning a pigment, it can be tracked throughout the supply chain, identified and verified on-site”. Love to see this supply chain innovation approach.
Om’s great suggestion for Apple resonates on a number of levels — donate to national park preservation as a backbone to copies of macOS installs (since they keep naming versions after California landmarks and to amplify their sustainability efforts). Win win.
Very pleased to see Christina Nguyen win Best Midwest Chef at the James Beard Awards last night. The other nominees were equally as great, but she’s been up for several years and it’s such a well-deserved win for her restaurant, Hai Hai, a Southeast Asian gem in northeast Minneapolis.
Nothing quite stirs an emotional energy like waltzing into your local bagel shop with “Never Gonna Give You Up” greeting you on the speakers.
This MagSafe, slide-out Nintendo DS-like iPhone game controller is brilliantly conceived, and one of those things you wish you would have thought of first. Best wishes to Josh King in building this out at scale — smart kid! He also built a nice site for it, where you can sign-up to preorder.
@Miraz These new ones have magnetic/Qi charging now? That's pretty nice, actually. I keep arguing with myself on whether to get an ereader or stick to physical books. The traveling/minimal bag footprint is the main argument I have for an ereader. Hope you enjoy the new one!
Good to hear the use of QR code scanning for restaurant menus is reversing. This has been an insufferable practice that leaves dining too transactional, diluting the experience of interaction with the environment and server.
There seems to be a changing tide to hustle culture — whether it’s the folks I follow getting more mature, or acknowledgement of irrational societal pressures — and a reckoning with slowing down, mitigating distractions, and re-balancing life. Tracy Durnell has a good list in which to adhere.
Kino was released today as a 1.0 — a powerful, fun new video recording app from Lux, the makers of the Halide photography app. Immediate download for me, foremost to just check out their neat intro-to-the-app brochure. Secondly, to record my dog, who just sat there on the couch blinking at me.
@ayjay also, doesn’t anyone share accounts with their spouse or partner? We do, and it is increasingly impossible to do this. I get everyone should have separate accounts but we use the same stuff (Amazon, delivery apps, streaming, etc.), and it’s annoying to have to ping each other codes or FaceIDs to sign in.
@jtr this is such a disappointing path so many have taken. Especially with journalism, which is already in dire straits. Many already pay them for providing the value we need. Let others read! Or sure, let us read first and then decide three thirds of the way through an article. Anything but the intrusiveness immediately.
As an admitted bandwagoner, it’s been an absolute pleasure watching the Minnesota Timberwolves navigate through the NBA playoffs.
Love this quest to make a mass-manufactured paper bottle (alc bev brands Diagro and Pernod Richard, along with CPG giant P&G, lead the way). Biggest hurdles have been shedding a plastic lining, leaks and retaining carbonation, and weight issues during transportation.
@otaviocc Oh I hear you. Always coming across amazing stationary and not having enough to actually put into them once acquired... how do we solve for this conundrum.
Worthwhile, fun article on the very talented actress Sarah Paulson, whose performance in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story as lead prosecutor comes to mind as most memorable next to her work in AHS. It’s unfortunate I’m not near Broadway to see her award-nominated play.
Love that this is the example of how LLMs working together as teams, called multi-agent systems (mas), hallucinate in an altogether nuttier level.
I just received the email about Five Dials closing shop after a wonderful 16-year run. It’s been a great digital literary magazine, curating a variety of writers for travelogues, reporting, interviews, and stories. Luckily, they posted their entire archive for perusing.
Jason Fried is finding his niche with the Once software` portfolio that 37signals is building out. This recent post of his exemplifies the catalyst for them to do it, to the backdrop of horribly over-priced parking software:
[bad, overpriced software] is a deep well that keeps on providing.
@joelhamill I agree with this notion. Keep the good architecture going. We all like it, we use it. Keep Micro.blog light on its feet, keep streamlining it, keep iterating where it makes sense.
@darby3 I had to re-read this twice before it sunk in, but crazy to acknowledge that album is 20 years old. It literally represented my driving soundtrack back in the day (aka, 2 months ago).
@otaviocc This is really nice. I’m still a text guy no matter how many times I get linked to YouTube videos. Would be equally awesome to see this for podcasts.
How do you like Matter? I used it years ago, before trying Omnivore, and stuck with it mostly due to its uncluttered, breezy design.
@brian_wolf Hope you enjoyed!
@mikehaynes 🫡
@pimoore Ha, oh I hope we get to drink both. While we are rarely driven to solve these problems far enough ahead of time, I have hope that under duress, innovation will happen and we’ll ward off coffee and drinking water extinction for at least a hundred more years…
@canion This made me laugh. And also reminded me of the time I wasted watching this a few years ago.
@jacks Looking forward to watching it tonight! Their past series have been good, so fingers crossed they pull it off. Dog fights in the air seem like a sure bet.
@jtr Appreciate the on-the-ground feedback here. I'm in Minneapolis, and while probably not seeing the same price trending you are, it's gotten more expensive to eat out, and we're seeing a major splintering of fine dining and fast-casual happening to just about all restaurants where it's hardly worth it to go to middling restaurants in the middle.
I definitely agree with you on the small print. The type is getting infuriatingly tinier, and given a typically low-lit backdrop in most restaurants (which I tend to prefer), the user experience of the menu is getting far worse. At least the paper menu is finally back. I loathed using QR codes and using my phone at the dinner table. I like eating out to escape the trappings of screen overload and distractions at home.
Ha, at any rate, thanks for your comment -- hope you continue to enjoy eating out!
@mikehaynes This is great! Another good curated directory is ooh.directory. Not quite the emphasis on a search engine for the indie web, like you're suggesting, but it's another good site for discovery.
@bjhess An excellent update to an excellent, lasting app. Looking forward to using this!
@miljko totally agree. Love that RSS is being talked about again, but how can you not mention NNW…
@moonmehta Keep preaching! RSS is the most clutch way to engage with the internet and in particular, writers and journalists.
@jacks Really bizarre play by Apple. Killers of the Flower Moon is a free stream (and so was Coda), but perhaps they’re struggling with some of the big films they’ve released in theaters first due to licensing agreements or something with other joint studios (like Ridley Scott’s production arm)? I was hoping to stream Napoleon on an upcoming flight… guess not.
@patrickrhone Agreed. Curious to see what these are, considering 37signals has productivity, mail, and now calendar under subscription SaaS. I could see a number of other Internet utilities and tools being built under the Once umbrella, if they go after territories like RSS readers, bookmarking services, file transfer management, SSH clients, etc.