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Sanspoint.

Essays on Technology and Culture

One Day at a Time

New Years Resolutions are stupid, and almost guaranteed to fail. Yet, here I am on the last day of 2012, making a resolution, and backing it up with a big, public post on the Internet. That resolution is that I will be posting to Sanspoint every day—or at least every weekday.

A few months ago, for the tenth anniversary of registering sanspoint.com, I made the promise to update the site weekly. This is a promise I mostly kept—losing one week to the disruption of a new job and a hurricane. This was a promise more to myself than to any ostensible audience for this site. I don’t make assumptions that the world is listening to me.

The urge to go daily came not long after I bemoaned how hard it was to find really good blogs. It was a simple, logical leap: if I can’t find what I want, I’ll create it. I need an excuse, after all. The harder part was determining just what I wanted to write about. This lead to a few nights of determined soul-searching, trying to discover just what I’m actually passionate about enough to write about. The list, as written into Day One, went as follows:

There’s obviously more to me than this, but it’s a start. In a way, what I will post here will relate more with the name. Lacking a specific focus or point, whatever gets stuck in my craw each day, and gets my attention, I’ll share and write about. That’s the important thing. If I can’t settle on one passion, I’ll pick freely from among them. Besides, under the pressure to actually do something daily, I’ll have to find new things to say, and new things to explore. In which case, everybody wins.

One thing I won’t be doing is talking up more nebulous stuff about “work,” and “creativity,” and things like that. It’s played out. Talking about doing the work and doing the work are different things, and I’m tired of being all talk. That’s the other side of why I’m going daily—to put my money where my mouth is. Thankfully, I’m not doing it alone. Andrew Marvin of Quarter-Life Enlightenment is picking up his blog again. He’s an amazing writer, a brilliant mind, and one-third of Crush On Radio. Patrick Rhone also went daily, and he didn’t wait to start. A support structure always helps when attempting any life change—and writing every day is a big one.

Also, with the new focus on daily updates, there’s a new look for Sanspoint. If you’re viewing this in a browser, as this is published, what you see is (hopefully) temporary. The previous design of the site was suited towards the longer form articles I wrote. As I go daily, those will only be a part of a bigger range of things, and the design must reflect that. I plan to improve on it over time, iterating and improving as I go. The site itself will evolve as my writing evolves. It will be a journey, and as excited as I am to take the first step, the second one is even more important.

My Top Ten Albums (and one EP) of 2012

Thanks in part to Crush On Radio, 2012 was probably the first year I tried to keep up with what was happening in the music world. I listened to over forty albums and EPs that came out this year, and have settled upon these top ten albums (and one EP that deserves mention) as the best of what 2012 has to offer. Naturally, they skew towards my own idiosyncratic taste in music. However, I stepped out of my comfort zone on a few of these picks, a testament to the power of a good record to challenge expectations.

Honorable Mention – Dum Dum Girls – End of Daze

If this were a full-length album, I’d have this in the top ten, but at five tracks, it has to be its own thing. Dum Dum Girls combine girl group pop and Ramones style punk with enough melancholy to add gravitas. The music on this disc is earnest and serious—and from my understanding, the melancholy is well earned. A must hear.

Dum Dum Girls – End of Daze on Amazon MP3

10. Eskimeaux – Eskimeaux

You probably don’t own an album that sounds anything like this. A sparse, but lush portal into a stranger’s mind and life. Eskimeaux know how to use studio effects to drive home a lyric, and it’s done well all over the record. To say more, I’d end up repeating my review of the record for Kittysneezes.

Eskimeaux on Bandcamp

9. Kendrick Lamaar – good kid m.A.A.d city

I’m only just starting to develop the vocabulary to appreciate Rap. Therefore, I approached this album with trepidation only to be won over by a stunning production and brilliant concept—a story of redemption from violence into the arms of something larger and better. The lyrics and their delivery are amazing too, as they must to make it a compelling listen. Even if you’re not a fan of Rap, this album is worth your time.

Kendrick Lamaar – good kid m.A.A.d city on Amazon MP3

8. Japandroids – Celebration Rock

For their sophomore effort, Japandroids strip down the conventions of classic rock to fit their minimalist aesthetic of guitar and drum kit. They fill their songs with heavy power chords, pounding beats, and lyrics about drinking, smoking, and fucking. Somehow, Japandroids make adolescent angst and disaffection cool again, while being aware of the futility and transience of those adolescent things. In the meantime, “we yell like hell to the heavens.”

Japandroids – Celebration Rock on Amazon MP3

7. Actress – R.I.P

Occupying a nebulous space somewhere between house music and ambient, this album secured a spot in my top ten before I even finished listening to it. It clicked once I realized that the stop/start transitions between tracks were intentional, that each cut was as it was meant to be, alone, disconnected, its own little electronic world to fall into. I need more albums like that.

Actress – R.I.P on Amazon MP3

6. Tame Impala – Lonerism

Kevin Parker sounds a hell of a lot like John Lennon. This is a neat trick, considering he’s Australian and not Liverpudlian. Lonerism sounds a lot like the psychedelic bits of Sgt. Pepper and Revolver, redone with modern technology. It’s an album that, with a pair of headphones, lets you sink in and feel at home. And, let’s be fair, if you don’t like Sgt. Pepper or Revolver, there’s something wrong with you. Beatle-based pop never died.

Tama Impala – Lonerism on Amazon MP3

5. Daughn Gibson – All Hell

Deconstructed country music for the 21st Century. Daughn’s deep bass croon sounds like a man who’s seen enough heartbreak and horror that nothing else could faze him, but still has trouble sleeping at night, and he’s not afraid to tell you what he’s seen. And he does it over music made of samples of country music, modified to crank up the inherent darkness. Turn the lights down, pour some whiskey and listen. Fire optional.

Daughn Gibson – All Hell on Amazon MP3

4. Crystal Castles – (III)

This is the most consistent and listenable release by Crystal Castles. Previous albums have had high notes, among tracks of difficult noise. Here, the off-putting veneer is pulled back, and the noise turned to punctuation around soulful songs of cold electronics and cold vocals. Even “Sad Eyes,” the closest Crystal Castles come to pop music on an album, is stark and cold. Yet I’ve warmed up to their odd blend of synthesized harshness.

Crystal Castles – (III) on Amazon MP3

3. David Byrne & St. Vincent – Love This Giant

At this point in his career, it may be that David Byrne can do no wrong. Certainly, teaming up with St. Vincent, who is the only contemporary musician matching Byrne’s brilliance, was a smart idea. Together they created an album of surprising pop brilliance. The decision to base the songs around an eight piece brass band is simply icing on the cake. Some reviews put Love This Giant down because it was exactly as they expected from its parts. And that is a bad thing why?

David Byrne & St. Vincent – Love This Giant on Amazon MP3

2. Grimes – Visions

“Oblivion” is my favorite song of the year, without any doubt. It’s a sublime nugget of avant-pop. Its odd, throbbing baseline and helium vocals that will be on repeat in the little jukebox inside your head. The rest of the record doesn’t quite reach the heights of “Oblivion”—“Genesis” comes closest—it’s still a wild, textured ride showcasing the range of what electronic pop can be and become. It will stick with you. I can’t wait to see what else Grimes comes up with in the future.

Grimes – Visions on Amazon MP3

1. Hot Chip – In Our Heads

The first album I listened to by Hot Chip, 2010’s One Life Stand, showed a lot of promise, but failed to capitalize. Its followup, however, fulfills that promise and goes above and beyond. Hot Chip managed to make an album that, in the span of just under an hour, can have the listener undergo a transformative, almost spiritual experience and shake their booty. There’s not a bad cut on this disc, not a note or a lyric that could be deemed unessential, even on the longest tracks. Easily one of my favorite albums, not of the year, but of all time.

Hot Chip – In Our Heads on Amazon MP3

The Difficulty of (Blog) Discovery

It’s hard to find a good blog these days.

Not that there’s any shortage of good blogs, and that’s, in fact, half of the problem. The other half is finding them, or more specifically, finding the ones that scratch my personal itch. I find reading other writers to be a vital tool to inspiring me to write—at least for fiction. A good novel or short story has a tendency to get me writing something. So, I often seek out good fiction. I recently finished reading Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. I picked that up because it was mentioned in Of Course, You End Up Becoming Yourself, the amazing and sad long-form interview with the late and lamented David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. I picked that book up because I love David Foster Wallace. I love David Foster Wallace because a friend turned me on to him due to a shared love of Haruki Murakami. I discovered Haruki Murakami by sheer chance, flipping through a book of contemporary Japanese short stories at Central Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia in my college days.

It’s easy to find a good book, though sometimes I will drag my feet when it comes to reading one. It’s much the same with music. I’m a passionate music fan, but I approach a new band with a certain wariness, happy to sit in the little musical rut I’ve created for myself. Whenever I hear a lot of good buzz around a band or an artist, I get suspicious. I had been told multiple times by multiple people that I would adore the band Sparks, for example. I put off listening to them for ages, but when I did, it didn’t take long for Sparks to quickly become not just a favorite band, but my second favorite band of all time.

How It Was in the Past

Many moons ago, when the Internet was a young, wild frontier that spread out upon a metaphorical prairie stretching to an infinitely distant horizon, it wasn’t hard to keep on top of what was new. Yahoo! began life as an Internet directory, and you could even see what new pages had been added to the Internet each day. By the time I got online around 1997, this was no longer quite the case, but other directories abounded. In fact, my first website was on the now defunct GeoCities, which organized sites by a system of virtual addresses on streets in various themed neighborhoods. When I moved out, the address my site used was taken over by a Dukes of Hazzard fan page. Directories were even useful in the age of blogging. When I set up this site, I had it added to nycbloggers.com, a directory of New York City bloggers, arranged by subway stop. It’s still listed there, under the subway stop by my first college.

Still, as more and more people got online, and more people started posting things, and there were more ways to start websites that were easier and cheaper, it became harder to find cool stuff. I spent a lot of this period on LiveJournal, which made it easy to find people who might be into the same things you were, which isn’t the same thing as finding good writing about those things, but it’s the closest I’ve come. The best part it that a lot of this discovery was mostly organic. I found interesting people who shared my interests and turned me on to new ones.

Anil Dash hit me in his “The Web We Lost” essay, but his lament comes from the technical side of things. I never bothered with Technorati tags in my attempts at blogging—in fact, I always considered tags to be a kludgy and ugly way to organize writing. Still, the early days of “Web 2.0” were all about discovery of content, and now that’s fallen away. The buzzword now is curation, which is fine, but I think there’s a place left for writing, long and short form.

What scratches the itch right now

I organize my RSS feeds in a system similar to Patrick Rhone’s. In my “A-List” folder, I keep Daring Fireball, Marco.org, The Brooks Review, Minimal Mac, and 43 Folders on the off-chance that Merlin will start posting there again. I keep a “B-List” of sites like Metafilter and Boing Boing that post cool stuff, but also have a fair amount of non-signal posts that don’t interest me. This folder also holds other blogs that sometimes post neat stuff. Beyond that, there’s a folder for the friends whose blogs I follow, a folder of miscellaneous blogs that post items of interest or amusement such as bands and humor sites. Then, there’s my big-ass folder of webcomic RSS feeds.

The blogs that I follow in the A-List have certain things in common: a distinct voice, and an interest in technology and Apple products. These are not requirements, however. What is a requirement is a willingness to write long, in-depth articles on things that catch their attention. It doesn’t hurt that most of them are podcasters, too, and I listen to their shows. Sometimes, they link to interesting things, with a short blurb and/or quote, but the thing that draws me to them is not what they link to, but what they write. When I bemoan finding good blogs, I bemoan the difficulty finding blogs that do the long-form writing. I can get links anywhere. That’s why they have [Reddit].

RSS Versus Twitter Versus Whatever Else

A while back, I remember reading of people bemoaning RSS readers, and giving up subscribing to blogs in lieu of having people cultivate links for them via Twitter, or whatever. There’s been a recent trend in e-mail newsletters, like Dave Pell’s NextDraft, which I subscribe to. Apps like Flipboard can scrape out the links from my Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr feeds and put them in a shiny, magazine-like UI for me.

Maybe I’m just old school, but I like RSS readers. I don’t see it as an obligation to get to the bottom of the pile, though I do anyway. I launch my reader of choice, Reeder, when I want to read something. When I’m done, I close it. It only fetches things when I run it, and I’ve disabled the litle red notification dots on my iPad and iPhone so that I don’t have anything nudging me to read the things I neglected. Thanks to Instapaper, if something piques my interest, I can save it for later, and read it on the subway. I don’t care how often they update. I want good, interesting writing about the things I care about, or a writer who is capable of making me care about new things.

And that’s hard to find. But I know they’re out there. When there’s one, or five, there’s even more.

Too Much Self-Help

Recently, one of my favorite podcasts, Back to Work began a short series of episodes, devoted to Getting Things Done [1], the productivity system endorsed and praised by countless nerds, bloggers, and nerd bloggers. Since the start of the series, I’ve gone back and started re-reading the book, reacquainting myself with GTD and its tenets. If you’ve never read it, and you’re overwhelmed by the stuff on your plate, then by golly, go get a copy. Re-reading it has been rewarding, and lord knows that I’ve had some… issues… with getting things done [2] in my past. Merlin’s discussions and returning to the canonical text have been helping me get myself in order. What has not been helping are the panoply of other self-help books, blogs, and podcasts I’ve been reading and listening to.

I could provide a list of what I’ve been reading, or at least skimming, but why bother? The problem isn’t with the people who post this stuff. They’re only sharing what they’ve done to make their lives better, and who can blame them? It reminds me of a recent experience on the subway where a woman began reciting at us a clearly rehearsed and prepared litany on embracing the tenets of her religion. The key difference between her and the writers and podcasters I’m burning myself out on is that they’re not coming to me preaching The Way of David Allen—I’m coming to them. Nothing’s stopping me from unsubscribing from their feeds. Nothing’s stopping me from not buying their books.

Merlin Mann once wrote, “Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.” I’ve quoted it before, but it bears repeating, especially in this context. I can read all about ways to use Evernote, how I can be productive with only the pre-installed applications on my iPhone, or how setting my desktop to a shade of blue has been found to increase productivity by x percentage, but these things are not making me productive. They’re interesting, but they’re not helping. Reading about whether I should add a new application to my workflow, whether I should use Things or OmniFocus, or whether I should just write down the three things that I actually need to get done today on an index card—these can help on a theoretical level, but they’re not helping. At least, they’re not helping me.

What is going to help me is to spend less time worrying about implementing a system. What is going to help me is to spend less time figuring out what application to jump ship to. What is going to help me is to spend less time setting up fiddly little AppleScripts, templates, and other hacks. What is going to help me is not spending money on another pop-psychology book about how I can be more creative, productive, content, brave, happy, and the Best Me That I Can Be, because not a single god-damned one of these things will actually change anything. The best self-help these things have inspired me to do is to declare my independence from self-help. I’ll have more hours in the day to make things if I’m spending less time reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, and keeping up with the latest book about how I can change my habits. It’s a question of mathematics. It’s also a question of priorities.

Let me step back a bit. One of the reasons I listen to Back to Work is that I sincerely enjoy it. Even when I don’t get a whole lot of practical use from an episode [3], I still enjoy hearing Dan and Merlin talk. I still read, and will continue to read some of Patrick Rhone’s stuff, and listen to Enough because Patrick provides enough value and edification that the time spent is worth it. It’s those other blogs and other podcasts that insist on large chunks of my attention that I’m unsubscribing from. I’m not getting enough back from my mental investment to justify it.

More importantly, I’m putting up roadblocks to adding more of this self-help stuff to my life. Maybe if someone I know and respect links to a blog post that touches on some of the things I’m avoiding, I’ll add it to the ol’ Instapaper queue. That seems fair to me. What I won’t do is add that blog to my RSS reader, follow the author on Twitter or App.net, or subscribe to their e-mail newsletter—even if their ideas are intriguing to me. Life is too short. My time is too short. I’ve had enough self-help.

I’ve also had enough of writing about self-help. I no longer feel like publicly fluffing myself about being a productive person any more. I’m getting less out of writing about it than I am reading it. Every day, countless people get their shit done. For some it’s easy, and for some its hard. Either way, the vast majority of them don’t go patting themselves on the back over what they’ve done, let alone doing it for an ostensible audience on the Internet. They just get on with the business of living their lives. Count me out of the circle-jerk. I’m ready to put my hands to use doing something more important.


  1. Copyright David Co, 2001.  ↩

  2. Lowercase intentional.  ↩

  3. And, in all honesty, the episodes of B2W where I get nothing but entertainment value are few and far between.  ↩

The Dopamine Problem

I recently read an interesting article on dopamine, and our addiction to seeking information. As the proud owner of an iPhone and an iPad, and as someone with a Twitter account, a Facebook account, an App.net account, 78 RSS feeds in Google Reader, and three main e-mail accounts, I have to admit that it hit home. I’ve fallen down the Wikipedia Rabbithole. I’ve been on Reddit until stupid o’clock in the morning. I’ve gone to the bathroom, and checked all my major social networks in the space of a single micturition. I do these things daily. Multiple times.

I am the rat pressing the button, not knowing if this next press will produce the food/electrical shock to the pleasure center of my brain. Eventually, it will get to the point where I will go insane, or break the cycle. Clearly the latter is the better option.

The solution might be as “easy” as three months at a meditation retreat, but that’s not something all of us can pull off, for multiple reasons. Still, it’s probably telling that I read Michael W. Taft’s story of how a meditation retreat helped his brain recover from “being full,” and the more medically oriented article on dopamine and seeking I mentioned above. This problem is the same reason Stephen Hackett is turning off his iPhone for a year, or The Verge’s Paul Miller leaving the entire Internet for a year. These people are jumping out the emergency hatch for a certain period, deliberately defecting to other side in a technological war on boredom that has already been won.

Despite being the sort of person to quit my job, pack up my life, and move to a new city without a job or much of a backup plan, I’m not the sort for extreme solutions to problems. I’d rather adjust my relationship to the gadgets that tug on my brain than throw them away completely. One thing I’ve done is switch to using Twitter and App.net exclusively on my iPhone and iPad. [1] I’ve also started using my time on the subway as time to “be disconnected” either reading a book[2] or just not doing anything at all.

Even after only a couple of days, the results are positive. It may be too early to tell, but I’ve found myself with ideas for writing, fiction and otherwise. Even better, I’m getting off the subway and simply feeling better and less stressed. With less inputs, and less chance to seek inputs, my brain has to let go of the dopamine and wind itself down. An hour a day on the train will probably never be enough. This is the sort of thing where meditation, or other practices may help. Hell, this is one of those things where turning off the Wi-Fi may help.


  1. I freely admit this was a side effect of performance issues while running Tweetbot and Wedge on my decrepit MacBook.  ↩

  2. Typically, I do my subway reading on my iPhone, but since the subway in New York City has no cellular service except in a few random stations, I can’t go checking my social networks.  ↩