Haley has grown fond recently of calling my kitchen habits “my experiments”. She is not entirely incorrect: I’ve started binging through Kevin Kos’s excellent channel on cocktails and following along with some of the prep work. The irony of this being that we’re actually cutting back our drinking pretty heavily — it is cutting season, after all — so there’s more time spent preparing the ingredients than enjoying them.

Anyhoo. Kevin Kos suggested homemade orgeat, and orgeat is one of the few things that I haven’t found a bottle of that I’m particularly satisfied by, and it seemed pretty easy with a handful of niche but non-perishable ingredients (gum arabic, xanthan gum, et cetera), so I figured I should make some orgeat.

And then I had a bottle of orgeat, and some lime juice that we need to use before we go out of town for a week, and a Mai Tai sort of just fell into my lap. I was not actually sure what the recipe for a Mai Tai is, and the internet (as is often the case with tiki drinks) disagreed vehemently with itself. I adapted my recipe from Liquor.com’s, going with:

• 1.5 oz amber rum
• 1 oz dark rum
• 0.75 oz orgeat
• 0.75 oz lime juice
• 0.75 oz curaçao

Typing that out really makes you realize how much of a punch it packs, I suppose. The thing tastes dangerous; I was tempted to make a version of it subbing orgeat with simple just to taste the difference but I don’t think I could handle a second Mai Tai. (Once Haley gets back, we’ll do a taste test.)

Anyway, I love Mai Tais. I don’t love them as much as I think I love the Hurricane lineage of tiki drinks — there is something pure about the emphasis on bright juices that appeals to me more — but I’m excited to batch these for a coming cookout.

I made an espresso martini last night, for the first time in my life. This is surprising, if you know me — I love coffee and I love alcohol and, even more than those two things, I love the zeitgeist, which apparently has been having it in for the espresso martini as of late.

The reason I have not made an espresso martini is the same reason that this is not really an essay about espresso martinis so much as it is about Mr. Black, whose coffee liqueur forms the backbone of the espresso martini.

Most flavored liqueurs are, if we’re being honest, saccharine garbage.

Coffee liqueur is perhaps even more guilty of this than the median liqueur, since the kind of person who wants a coffee-flavored boozy drink tends not to have (at least in Big Alcohol’s eyes!) a particularly discerning palate. This is a niche dominated by Kahlua, a beverage that I have not been able to stomach since I was below drinking age.

Mr. Black is — I don’t want to mince words — amazingly boring. It is very good because it tastes like the conglomerate of three things: coffee, sugar, and alcohol. It is a very, very pleasing blend of those three things (you can sip it straight and you get some legitimate depth of coffee flavor, plus a fair bit of sugar.)

It joins the ranks of Tempus Fugit in being a bottle that I recommend without reservation, whose irony might end up being that I can probably make a batch of this myself, with enough time and reverse engineering.

The Mr. Black espresso martini — the one whose recipe adorns the bottle — is two parts Mr. Black, one part vodka, one part coffee. (I used Tito’s for the former and for the latter I subbed traditional coffee for Jot, a bougie cold brew espresso that we had lying around, to give it a bit of an extra punch, and also because we had a late dinner for which we frankly needed the caffeine.)

I am not the world’s biggest Negroni fan, in truth. I blame this on my introduction to them; it was early in my cocktail-drinking days (say 2014 or so) and I had one served up in a random Seattle bar that was participating in Negroni Week. I had never had Campari (nor perhaps any amaro) before; I did not know what I was getting into, and I did not like it one bit. I swore off the drink until around 2016, when I found myself in Italy and after three days of ordering Aperol Spritzes (Aperols Spritz?) I was cajoled by my friend into ordering one.

Turns out that first Negroni I had was just terrible! This is a drink meant to be served on rocks and in the bathing summer sun, not in a chilled coupe in some poorly lit gastropub. You live and you learn.

I am still not the world’s biggest Negroni fan, but I enjoy them every now and then, and finally found occasion to try this rum-based riff. It was — the word Haley and I both landed on was funky. The Smith & Cross can stand up to the Campari and it gives it a bit of saccharine emphasis that you definitely don’t get from the traditional varietal. I would probably make this again just to sell a friend on it, but it’s not something that I’m shouting from the rooftops about.

I adapted this recipe from Trader Jane’s, a former coworker and a treasure of a tiki blogger. Haley and I taste-tested and added two modifications, since it felt a little too lime-dominated:

1. A half-ounce of rich syrup
2. An additional half-ounce of white rum

(I’m tempted to try and be clever and throw in a coconut rum or something saccharine to get at both birds with one stone, but our rum selection is still getting rebuilt at the moment.)

I’ve got very fond memories of daiquiris: they were my parents’ mainstay during our childhood, and they would serve up a batch of virgin ones as well to placate me and my brother. This recipe, I dare say, is a great deal better than those canned varities, and a nice summer refresher that doesn’t quite deserve the hackneyed reputation it has.

My god. I found this recipe from a list of Jeffrey Morganthaler’s absolute favorites and… I get why. I am not a big fan of traditional gimlets: I would rather have a margarita if I want something lime forward or a martini if I want something gin forward. The cutback of citrus here and the inclusion of mint makes this something unto itself: a simple, refreshing, sweet-but-not-too-sweet spring and summer staple. Haley and I are both in love, and have a feeling we’re going to be crushing a great many more of these before the summer is over.

(Alas, the Richmond in its name is not a reference to my city, but still — it counts as at least half a point’s worth of serendipity.)

Saw this on Tuxedo No. 2 and was so intrigued I absolutely had to give it a whirl for myself. (Giving it a whirl meaning, in this case, running out to Whole Foods and picking up both apple butter and marshmellow creme, neither of which are exactly valuable assets in the house while Haley and I are on a summer cut. But nonetheless!)

This drink is something like a magic trick: with the use of a frother everything blends together such that all you get out of the two oddball ingredients is roughly the same amount of sugar as you’d expect from a traditional margarita (think a dive bar kind, though, so no orange) and a hint of the spice from the apple butter. If anything, the lime juice overpowered the pair; when we make another round (and we will, less out of love for the drink and more because what else are we going to do with apple butter and marshmellow creme) we’ll cut to maybe 3/4 oz of lime juice and let the weirder guests do all the talking.

I enjoyed Karl Yang’s essay on illegible work and wanted to riff on it a little, specifically from the lens of software engineering at larger technical companies. ¹

There are two failure modes that I’ve seen most often:

• A talented and proactively-minded software engineer at a large company feels that the most important and highest-leverage work they could be doing is not what they’re being “graded on” by the performance review process;
• A single engineer on a high-functioning team is saddled with important work (updating docs and runbooks; meeting with users or core dependencies; onboarding mentorship; etc.) that isn’t evaluated in the performance review process.

I think the latter of these two cases is a much more solved problem through a combination of tooling and brag docs, which I’ll be sure to write about later.

The former is trickier, and one I can empathize with: the most rewarding (both personally and financially) projects I’ve had in my career involved doing work that was mostly unrelated to my team’s success criteria.

I’d recommend two principles when setting out on this kind of work:

• Just because it’s not legible doesn’t mean you can’t leave a paper trail. If it’s hard to state the falsifiability of your work in quantitative terms, then try qualitatively. Any serious and nebulous project that’s worth your investment should also have an essay outlining why the work is important, what level of time & energy you expect it requires, and who should be invested in the outcome. Having artifacts to refer back to help build confidence up the org chain and keep you intellectually honest.
• Foster sponsorships and build trust. The harder the work is to visualize in a metrics deck, the more its success relies on the cooperation of your team, your stakeholders, and your reporting chain. The most successful folks I know who consistently do weird but incredibly high-impact work do so because they have senior leaders who trust them to go off into the wilderness for six weeks and come back with fruit. ²

If you can neither coherently state the rationale & expected return on your work’s investment nor find people who believe in it, something is Wrong. It’s hard to say what that Wrong is without context — it might be that your workstream really isn’t the right area of investment, it might be that your organization is overly risk averse — and I hesitate to prescribe in broad strokes.

The question that this cocktail poses is “What if you add Amaro Nonino to a Martini?”

The answer is… I think pretty much what you’d expect, which is a slightly spicier and herbal version of the martini. You don’t lose the nonino in the gin (I used Hendrick’s, so it might vary with something more opinionated) but it’s definitely more of a subtle shade than anything else. Haley was a huge fan — she claimed she liked it more than traditional martinis, which is a big statement for her. I was a fan, but I don’t think I preferred it to the martini which I like chiefly for its simplicity and purity. This felt like a nice novelty that I’d rather have split up into a martini and an amaro sidecar.

My first new cocktail as an unemployed layabout was this fun, tropical twist on an old-fashioned. My big regret was not having a bottle of the Tempus Fugit creme de banane — I don’t think I can get it in Virginia, and had to settle for the inferior Giffard’s — but I liked it a good deal as a banana & caramel forward sipper.

What brought this drink to new heights — or at least a different, more novel height — was making it as a scaffa (no ice, just a light stir in a snifter glass with an orange peel.) This was great! The room temperature brings out the sweetness of the rum a little bit more and diminishes the whiskey-forward base. This is a drink I see myself making and remaking as meaningfully different than the old fashioned (which feels… weird as a scaffa, as anything with a predominant syrup generally does.)

We had a bit of champagne left over from post-race Aperol Spritzes, so I scrolled through Cocktail Virgin Slut and came across the tropical champagne, which charitably reads as half-hurricane, half-mimosa. We like both of those drinks and had all the juices on hand, so it felt like a low-rent way to try something new.

The cocktail was by no means bad, but felt muddled — the dryness of the champagne neutralized the orange juice, and it was hard to piece anything out of the drink besides the passionfruit. It certainly tasted delicious and quaffable, but I also think mimosas and hurricanes are delicious and quaffable and I’d be hard-pressed to pick this chimera over either of the two cocktails individually.

It was a long night filled with mortgage application shenanigans, and Haley and I thought it would be an expeditious opportunity to unwind with something new. We’re also in a bottle-buying-freeze at the moment so we can wind down our existing cabinet in preparation for a cross-country trip, which has made trying new things a fun but somewhat challenging enterprise.

Enter the Dawn of Hospitality, which Frederic describes as a “tropical-inspired Sazerac” and struck us more as: well, we didn’t know what to think of it before trying it, but a cocktailed version of a cold brew tonic came to mind. (Note: we used passionfruit syrup rather than pineapple, since we had some left over from Hurricane season.)

The result was…somewhat underwhelming, honestly, but certainly not bad. The fruity flavors mostly got washed out in the rye, and it ended up tasting more like a coffee-forward old fashioned with a little less bite than normal. I don’t think we would make it again, but it did open me up to the possibility of using our espresso liqueur mostly as a wash for rye & whiskey.

A coworker published their list of recent cocktails on Notion, and it included this little gem. I had a bottle of Amaro Montenegro I was hoping to kill, and while I’m not a huge fan of milk punches in general this seemed up Haley & I’s alley enough to go for a swing.

It’s not a complex cocktail, but it is a tasty one. We were shocked at how reminiscent of straight-up nog the original recipe was: the amaro definitely does some work balancing out what would otherwise be a sweet, straightforward quaff, but it doesn’t quite shine through (and the same can be said of the cold brew.) We tried a variant with two ounces of cold brew and were delighted with that — it felt much more of a unique drink, and something that could be used for early boozy brunches. (In fact, we’re probably going to make a big batch of this later in December.)

I sifted through Cocktail Virgin tonight looking for a use of Licor 43 (which I had purchased, as I do with most of my dustier bottles, during the height of tiki season) and this looked interesting. It seemed like a one-two of interesting gimmicks: bitters-heavy (I remember enjoying an Angostura Sour a few years ago, though not enough to make one in the intervening period), whole egg to make it heavy.

This cocktail did not quite work for me, and I think it’s perhaps the confluence of those two gimmicks. It is certainly an interesting cocktail, and I think it could work a bit better if there was a bit more of a backbone to it: an overproof bourbon, say, or a rum/rye split or someething. But the presentation and finish are equal parts “huh, okay” — creamy, but without much of a flavor to make the creaminess & mouthfeel worthwhile. I’d rather go with something like a more traditional egg flip.

In an effort to drain my remaining bottle of creme de cacao, I found the Base Camp. This seemed like a more complex version of a drink that H & I are quite fond of — an unimaginatively named “autumn old fashioned”, which is roughly one part allspice dram to two parts rye (with a barspoon of simple).

The passing similarity was apt; this was a really fun cocktail, though our use of Laphroaig might have required a bit of downscaling (the smokiness overwhelmed some of the other notes, and we could probably downscale to just a quarter of an ounce). I suspect that it would have also benefited from Tempus Fugit rather than our bottom-shelf creme de cacao, but we liked it enough to likely go back again for seconds down the road.

I have been thinking a lot about Cowboy Bebop lately.

To be fair, this statement is almost true; I do not know if Cowboy Bebop is my favorite show, but it is easily the one I think about most often. The slow drip of Netflix promotional stills & trailers has made me think about it even more, though.

One of the reasons I loved the first few seasons of Game of Thrones was that it was a look at “what happens after a traditional fantasy narrative [Robert’s Rebellion]?” I think this is a useful lens to understand Cowboy Bebop, though with Game of Thrones it is large and overarching and with Cowboy Bebop it is deeply personal. Each of the three protagonists is defined by their story having already happened by the time the show begins:

1. Spike’s arc is that of a classic gangster who falls in love and leaves the mob for the girl;
2. Jet’s arc is that of a hard-nosed cop who gets left by a girl and betrayed by his partner;
3. Faye’s arc is that of a girl whose parents leave her an orphan and she learns to navigate a terrifying new world. (Faye’s story within the show is the best, and the most aching, because it makes this explicit: the culmination of her arc the acceptance that her truth and her story is completely behind her.)

We know all of these stories: they are comfortable tropes. This works in the show’s favor: we only get specks and glimpses of these characters and the rich inner (and outer worlds), but it’s just so easy to fill in the gaps from the various cop stories and mob stories and sci-fi stories that we’ve clutched onto over the years. Cowboy Bebop is clever in hinting just enough.

(This, by the way, is why I am not exactly torn about Ed not being in the live-action show. Ed was useful as a character: she was part deus ex machine, part comic relief, part dramatic foil, but always felt a little too atonal to do any of those things particularly well — I think this is most true in her departure from the show, perhaps the second-best image that the show conjures.)

There’s a lot of talk in almost every episode of Cowboy Bebop about running away from the past, and I think that’s a fair characterization at a textual level, but the truer read of the show is that the characters are stuck in the past. The world has moved past them! They are unimportant people, and the show emphasizes this point over and over again: even as they solve minor crises and collect minor bounties, we are reminded — by “bell peppers and beef”, amongst other things — that the only reason these are our protagonists is because we happen to be following them around.

—

Cowboy Bebop is, for everything else, extremely well-suited for the anime form. It is genre-bending and stylish and unrealistic. It does things that do not translate well to live-action.

So why are we having a live action version? What are the success criteria of this adaptation? The show-runners appear to bending over backwards to assure us, the fanboys, that they are going to be extremely faithful to the source material. I think this is nice of them: they know what we want.

That being said, if the best possible version of this show is a shot-for-shot remake of something that is already in its ultimate form? There are two answers, I think:

• The true answer: it will make Netflix a good deal of money
• The false answer, which I cling onto anyway, and the reason that despite myself I am excited about this show: there is something ironic and winking about taking a show about people who would prefer — who are perhaps pathologically driven — to live in the past and to drag it forward twenty years, into a new and worse medium, into a worse future, and to see what comes of it.

We had this cocktail last night as part of a journey to start burning down some of our lesser-used bottles. I started out trying to find something with spiced pear liqueur and ended up empty, but this caught my eye — we had a couple onces of both Aperol and St. Germaine left.

It’s really, really good! Much brighter than I expected (which I think is more on me than the drink — of course something with that much lime and elderflower is going to be light). You don’t get a huge amount of the Aperol’s bitterness: it and the agave work mostly in the background to balance things out. Really fun and would (will!) make again.

I recently came across Mela on the App Store.

It is a delightful app. Nothing clever or fussy — just the underlying architecture of an RSS reader / HTML prettifier niched down to the world of recipe management.

It is a very clever app for that exact reason. The developer is also behind Reeder, a well-known RSS application and it is fairly obvious from comparing the two that they share a lot of DNA, both in terms of UI and underlying architecture.

I am envious of this! This is a smart way of extending yourself far as an independent developer: build something, find what else can be built (and marketed) using what you’ve already built. (I’m not suggesting that Mela is literally part of the Reeder codebase, but that doesn’t matter — the tacit knowledge you get transfers just as easily as library code, and in some cases even more easily.)

I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV lately as a white mage, which of course is a healer class. Healer classes are a little different in XIV these days: I fell in love with healing back ten or so years ago playing Warcraft, where the entire job of a healer was to keep the party alive. On hard content this was a full time job: you’ve got to be glued to the tank while making sure no DPSes pull aggro or befoul themselves of raid/dungeon mechanics. But on easy content healing is…peaceful. There’s a fair bit of downtime (especially with a veteran tank), and your character’s limits mean that you’re often spending more time running than casting.

XIV has shifted this paradigm. Healers are now distinguished by the fact that they can also heal as opposed to only healing, and you get some side-eye from the rest of the party if you approach your role as if in the 2010 zeitgeist. On a good day you can approach 80% of a dedicated DPS’s output, meaning that playing a healer is more about brinksmanship — how aggressively can you deal damage without having your tank die?

I think this is probably a stilted metaphor for how I’m approaching engineering management these days, but it’s hard not to notice the parallels. The EMs who I admire most are new-style healers: they unblock, they foster, they plan, but they are deeply technical and Do The Work. The EMs who I, even if I admire, do not envy, are old-style healers: their calendar is a proxy for productivity, and they fill their downtime with ‘the work about the work’.

I set two streak goals in July:

1. Drinking less ¹. This one fell a little short but was great overall. I had to tweak my definition of less; I’m not great at refusing a single beer in social situations (such as grabbing dinner with someone on a Thursday), but I ended up cutting my alcohol intake sincerely. This fell apart in the last week of the month because I was traveling, more or less on vacation, and drinking (not a huge amount — one to two drinks) every night. Still, good! I’d like to keep this up.
2. Writing two hundred words every day. ²_. This one went…poorly. I didn’t even count for the back half of the month, which is never a good sign. I think this is more of a meta thing: just like last month, I’m bad at these creative or output-focused tasks because they always seem to fall off of my todo list and so I only notice them at the end of the night as I’m wrapping things up.

August’s goals (now that I’m exactly one day into the month) are going to be twofold:

1. Clear out my inbox every morning before starting work. This is going to be a tough one, I’m not going to lie — I’m really bad at this historically. I also think if I get good at this it will be hugely beneficial to my mental state, which is why I’m excited about it.
2. Write two hundred words every day. That’s right, I’m back at this again — I am so disappointed with how last month went I want another crack at it (starting, of course, with this very post!) I’m going to keep myself a little more honest by keeping a log of what I’ve written.

I set two streak goals in June:

1. Close all of my rings. This one was uneventful and easy: I was already pretty good about it, and making a goal out of it made it even more so. 30 for 30, baby!
2. Game for at least thirty minutes on something non-trivial ¹. This one went…poorly. I got 20 days of out 30, having missed almost all of the penultimate week in June and a scattershot of days before then. The penultimate week was because of on-call, but really what bums me out is the scattershot weeks: I didn’t make it enough of a discipline, and it just fell out of the world at the end of the night.

July’s goals are going to be in a similar vein (one for health, one for mind): writing two hundred public ² words every day and drinking less ³.

Tonight’s cocktail was brought to us by Kindred Cocktails via Cocktail Virgin, and one of those blessed occasions where I got to exactly kill two bottles (Rittenhouse, Meletti) and dig into a third I’m trying desperately to kill (Creme de Cacao.) It’s a spirit-forward drink, exactly as you’d imagine, but I was surprised by how little sweetness there is; it’s complex and has a long finish but I think on a second try (which I would definitely do, in a future where I once again have a bottle of Meletti — something probably far off) I might sub rye for bourbon or add a barspoon of 2:1. (or perhaps add more creme de cacao, which does really nicely here — adds a layer of chocolate without turning the thing cloying.)

My friend Shep sent me a new XBOX (Xbox? What’s the right branding?) as a parting use of his Microsoft employee discount. Some notes:

• The first run experience is surprisingly great. The app-based instructions worked well and it took around ten minutes total to get everything running.
• The hardest part was putting in my CC information, which is wild because I think that would be perfect for offloading to a mobile device, which already has all of my payments information!
• The form factor of the hardware is frankly really cute and nice. It looks drastically better than my previous console (a PlayStation 4).
• The “you can download games from your phone” thing is great UX and also very clever at getting around any sort of iOS/Android revenue-sharing issues; you’re not buying the games, you’re merely preloading them!

Every meeting should have an associated writeup.

Every writeup should have exactly three sections:

• Decisions made
• Action items
• Raw Notes

D, A, RN. The DARN Paradigm!

This is useful across a couple of axes. It makes it easy to skim meetings that you were absent from (which encourages people to not attend meetings, an unquestionably good thing.) It identifies meetings that don’t have clear decisions made or action items (which encourages you to cancel those meetings or push them in directions that force actions). It means you have a clear thing to review at the end of meetings (okay, so who’s doing X? what about Y? Are we all in agreement about Z?)

It’s good! Use the DARN paradigm.

(Why is this called the DARN Paradigm? Because this is the exact kind of sensible-but-low-stakes thing that you could write a fluffy 170-page book about and start a slow but inexorable rebrand as a “business expert”, and of course it needs a hackneyed, overwrought name.)

I’ve been making a fair number of Manhattans lately.

Manhattans were my ur-cocktail: my best friend’s parents in college made me them, I got comically drunk, I fell in love with them, et cetera. Even once I turned 21 and started taking cocktails “seriously”, the Manhattan was my launching pad for mixology: I tinkered with proportions, with aging, with vermouth substitutions.

Along the way, I slowly realized that while I loved Manhattans, I enjoyed Martinis and Old Fashioneds more — both seemed to suit my palate more. And so prior to the past few weeks, I could probably count on one hand the number I’ve had in the past three years despite always having vermouth and rye on hand.

I don’t know why, but something made me go back to the well recently, and I’ve been falling in love all over again. I think the Manhattan is the Best Cocktail — the platonic ideal of what a cocktail is. It beats out the Martini (a drink most commonly defined by how non-cocktail-y it is, to invoke Winston Churchill’s classic quip) and the Old Fashioned (by virtue of only having one base).

I devote a surprising amount of mental real estate to vacuuming, even though on the list of weekly chores it is minuscule — maybe fifteen minutes at most (usually closer to eight). Certainly it is less than dishwashing (around ninety minutes a week), which I don’t even bother capturing on a todo list — it is just a Thing That Happens, when we run out of dishes. I don’t mind vacuuming either: certainly it is a bit of a hassle, having to lug it up the narrow basement stairs and I hate flushing out the repository of hair & dust & grime. So why do I assign it the weight of an hour-long effort in my head? It is not clear.

I think there are a lot of work items that I do this to, as well. Writing out PR descriptions — something that certainly takes less than five minutes but leads to a much more harmonious product, both for me and my reviewer. Answering certain emails: ones that involve DNS spelunking, for instance (a slightly annoying task, but one with a very bounded problem space.)

Maybe it’s the Sisyphean nature of vacuuming? Left to my own devices — and absent any other humans — I would probably vacuum once a quarter. I am not sure.

An idle thought I had while finally admitting defeat and purchasing a handful of shirts last night to replace my old Ralph Lauren OCBDs (which are glorious and I will miss them, but RL has stopped selling them in the specific cut that I purchased them en-masse in 2015): a common trope in deckbuilding games like Slay The Spire or Dominion is that every card you add to your deck is one that you should be excited to draw more than half of the cards in your existing deck (i.e. raising the median value of your deck.) This doesn’t translate exactly to building a capsule wardrobe — you’re not shuffling your wardrobe and picking a random five items every day! — but I think it tracks, and perhaps selfishly I think the idea of a capsule wardrobe has more than a few parallels with that of running a thin deck in these games. (So now, I didn’t pull the trigger on a second chambray shirt even though I’d probably enjoy it. It just clutters up the deck, so to speak.)

After a long day of cleaning, we decided to unwind with the CGGF. We tinkered with the proportions a little bit — in particular, doubling the amount of gin to make it more full-bodied — but it was quite refreshing and turned out well. Making the cucumber juice was a bit of a pain (we ended up throwing a full cucumber into the Nutribullet and then straining, which was lossy but turned out well); the ginger syrup is really fun though I struggle to think of what else it could be used for. Would happily make and drink again!

I am playing through [[Bravely Default II]] and enjoying it quite a bit more than some of the tepid reviews primed me! There are some rough edges — the loading time especially — but it is doing a lot of interesting JRPGs that I enjoy. Some of them that come to mind:

1. The per-job ability sets are really, really good. I haven’t hit the “synergy and combos break the game wide open” part of the game yet, but the amount of support abilities and interesting combinations feels really good.
2. Accessories actually matter! Each has really interesting stat combos and it’s not just a matter of “ok give the fighters defensive stuff and give the mages +MP stuff.”
3. Weight is a very cool system that forces you to think about things more than just “okay, what is Best In Slot for everyone?”

In general, it’s a game that seems to give you a lot of interesting choices and I really, really like that.

Continuing our weekday tradition of a tiki wind-down, we made Old Port Painkillers last night.

We…were underwhelmed. I think the beauty of painkillers is in the use of coconut creme, which gives it a bit of thickness and novelty that this iteration wholly lacks. It was basically… rummy muddled orange juice. Do not recommend!

Tonight’s cocktail was the Sea Beast, a tiki drink featuring Fernet. H was hesitant — she hates Fernet — but it ended up being quite a crowdpleaser. All you really get from the Fernet is a little bit of bitterness & herbacity on the finish, and the nutmeg in a highball works really nicely on the nose. On our second crack at it, I turned the rhum agricole into a split base of rhum and spiced rum (Kraken, because we have some lying around) and I preferred that — gave it a bit more of a complexity and depth.

After a stint last year of actually completing games, I’m back to abandoning stuff two thirds of the way through. It’s frustrating! I just sunk four hours into [[Child of Light]] and abandoned it for [[Bravely Default II]]; before that I spent a solid forty hours in [[Stardew Valley]] before burning out.

I know there’s nothing morally wrong with not finishing games. Games are leisure and stopping stuff that I’m not having fun with is probably the right thing to do. But I find it weird that I’m almost masochistic about completing books that I despise and yet I can’t summon the energy for games.

(If I don’t actually finish Bravely Default II, I swear…)

It is tiring to make decisions, and it is easy to think from the outside that certain artifacts are deliberate as opposed to made from a lack of decision.

I wasn’t expecting to get Fireballed today (though, yay!), but one of the things Gruber calls out is that the newsletter still defaults to including tracking. This isn’t deliberate: it’s an artifact of that being an opt-out and then me not changing anything or revisiting it in the past three years.

One of the hurdles I have yet to overcome is the ability to constantly choose. As I juggle various hats — manager, engineer, tester, entrepreneur — the failure case I run into most is that I end up choosing paths of least resistance when I have engineering energy (tech debt; obvious feature additions; bug fixes.) This has been ameliorated somewhat with me spending time in December carving out what the high-priority work for Buttondown has to be, but now I’m seeing it bleed into Stripe life a little. (Chatted with Peter today, too, who confirmed that he fell into the same thing — it is encouraging to hear that I’m not the only one for whom this is the case.)

Tonight’s cocktail of choice, courtesy of cocktail virgin. There is a certain class of cocktail that is best described as “base plus plus”; a french 75 is champagne plus plus, the Southern 75 is beer plus plus, and this is of course a mimosa plus plus. Anything with passionfruit syrup in it is delightful inherently; the crispness of the champagne offsets it nicely.

Also, as a reminder: the one product I recommend without recommendation is Aunty Lillikoi’s passionfruit syrup. After finishing this sentence I am going back to the store and ordering three more jars.

We have an embarrassment of AirPods in this house. Two regular pairs of AirPods (since deprecated in favor of the Pros), one pair of the AirPods Max (which I’m still evaluating, but largely positive of with the exception of the comical price tag), and… three pairs of AirPods Pro. We got the third pair because H ran one pair through the washer and purchased a new pair before even testing the old pair, which managed to survive the journey (!).

The irony is that somehow the third pair has made it much harder for us to keep track of the first two; we’ve transitioned from a each-person-is-responsible-for-their-AirPods situation to more of a tragedy of the commons, where every time we go for a walk or need to do chores we suddenly have to comb the house for a charged (if we’re lucky) pair.

Every year, come late November, I have twin pangs: “it’s about time to write a year-in-review post” and “ugh, am I really going to write a year-in-review post? Aren’t these the most self-indulgent things ever?”

And of course, yes, they are, in much the same way that I think lifting is self-indulgent or spending three years working on the proportions for your ideal margarita are self-indulgent. Indulgence is good when it hurts nobody and leads to joy!

The slow trickle of posts from folks I follow and respect in late December and early January are delightful, a sort of Advent Calendar of Content. And it has been fun to have some of my late-2020 RSS cultivation habits bear fruit: I discovered the majority of these through Feedbin, rather than Twitter.

My favorites:

But if the work of this year has taught me anything, it’s that getting something, anything out the door in time can make all the difference. Progress over perfection. One foot in front of the other. So here I am, telling an incomplete, imperfect, unsatisfying story, and sharing it with the world before it’s capital-R Ready. And that’s okay. I’ve still got my health, my loved ones, and the privilege of existence. That’s more than enough. Carolyn

This year, I asked myself on more than one occasion and in more than one context, “am I good enough to do this?” I don’t feel sad or depressed about the shortcomings, but I feel I’ve grown in meaningful ways. I don’t feel like this year was a “throwaway” or that I “lost a year”; instead, I feel exhausted from the constant refinement and metamorphosis. Jowanza

Moving a ratio, rather than moving some concrete number (like reading x books, or writing y posts), feels correct. Brian

2020 underscored my suspicion of year-long goals, as so much can change best-laid plans. In 2021, I’ll again stick to quarterly personal goals when aiming for something specific. That’s enough time to focus on a few priorities while remaining flexible. Melanie

Another important consideration is that ‘hours spent on’ is not a great measure of productivity - I want to achieve things and not just spend time doing busywork. Ala

Zack Korman writes about how bad legacy media is at managing digital subscriptions:

However, when an executive asks, “How can tech and data help us to drive digital subscriptions and improve retention,” they aren’t asking about digital storytelling. They are asking about funneling more users into the payment process, managing customer engagement, and the like. They are talking about digital marketing in one form or another. That is where media companies’ tech really fails. Most media companies have inadequate control over the data that is generated on their sites, and the companies that do have that control lack the technical capabilities needed to act on that data.

It’s true! I subscribe to three digital subscriptions of print media — The New Yorker, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Kenyon Review — and all three experiences seem woefully antiquated (I receive more paper mailers from them than emails.)

I agree with Zack’s points on it being an issue that stems essentially from shipping your org chart, but the other thing it reminds me of is the lack of unifying technology across all media companies. This reared its head last decade with the advent of streaming, and the ultimate solution to the problem (the “problem” being getting a bunch of resource-strapped federated television companies to be able to competently build out a streaming platform) ended up being a productized consultancy spun out of the MLB:

BAM competes for clients with streaming tech companies like NeuLion and Imagine Communications, as well as big telecommunication outfits like Verizon. But, says Dan Rayburn, a streaming industry analyst, “there really isn’t anybody who does the true end-to-end solution like MLB does, especially at scale, out in the market.”

This part from the above article rung true in particular:

“The thing about broadcast television is, today people probably think of it as stodgy old engineers with big beer bellies and a pocket protector,” says Inzerillo. “But the truth is that there are a lot of things about the way they do it, the technology and the philosophy, that make it incredibly stable and scalable.” Inzerillo set out to fuse those two worlds, creating a platform with the agility of a web startup and the reliability of a broadcast network.

All of the engineers involved are talented. Sometimes you just need someone with a six-figure retainer to come in and tell an org “no, you’ve got to organize it this way.” (Or maybe offer a Stripe Connect abstraction with a five-digit price tag, but it seems more likely that will come from someone like Substack moving upstream.)