Regular Communication 020

From Jason Rodriguez

Thursday is Thanksgiving in the U.S. Although it doesn't seem like there's much to be thankful for this year, there still is a lot that I'm grateful for: Family, friends, a good job, my health, having a few instruments to strum on, access to high speed internet (although that's often a mixed bag), a nice home, and plenty of books to read... It's not always easy to find the good in life when it seems like so much bad is on the rise, but it's still there. I hope you're able to reflect on whatever good you have in your life. We're entering a period in human history when finding and celebrating joy wherever we can will be more important than ever, so it's good to get into practice now.

If you're in the U.S., I hope you got some time off work to relax and enjoy some good things. If you're elsewhere, I still hope for the same.

On another note, I put together playlists of all my music recommendations from the newsletter. It seemed like a good time to pull them all together and share them in a simpler format. Head to the end of the email to get links to the playlists on Apple Music and Spotify. ✌️

Interesting Things

I realized that I'm failing as a parent when I mentioned RSS to my kids and they didn't have a single fucking clue what I was talking about. They thought I made up the term Really Simple Syndication on the fly and was trying to pull one over on them. Sigh. For anyone on my email list who isn't already, here's a friendly reminder from Cory Doctorow on why you should use an RSS reader. I'm a huge proponent of NetNewsWire from Brent Simmons.

Speaking of protocols that make the web and world better... email is still a hell of a medium (as evidenced by how you're reading this very sentence at this very moment). But too many people are conflating "email newsletter" with "my Substack." Anil Dash does a good job explaining why that's such an insidious, terrible idea. Own your work.

I have very mixed (and mostly negative) feelings about AI, but this post from Thorsten Ball makes a good case for exploring AI out of sheer curiosity. I don't think curiosity really offsets all of the harm to the environment, various industries, and marginalized people AI does, but it's an interesting angle.

As someone who has a lot of the A Book Apart books on my shelf, I was terribly saddened by their decision to close down shop a few years back. But, they did the right thing in letting authors get the rights to their books back. The godfather of responsive design—Ethan Marcotte—just released his two seminal works on his website (#4 and #15), for free. And shared a few thoughts on what A Book Apart meant to him.

Ugh, I hate that Ted Gioia is so right about this... Here are his 6 New Rules of Communicating.

I had always taken for granted that there's a standard library for any given programming language and then third-party packages to add functionality. I intuited that maintenance costs were a big part of that, but hadn't thought any deeper about it until reading this post from Eric Matthes about third-party packages in the Python world.

For the music production geeks here, I enjoyed this 2022 Reverb interview with Dijon about his recording process. I love the roominess of his album, and now I know how it got there: Most of it was recorded with an AKG C414 in omni mode. I also massively appreciate his mixing philosophy, which was summed up as, "...just not really a big deal. Don't try to enhance what wasn't really enhanced to begin with."

Some Music

Mustafa's new album, Dunya, is fantastic. It's a beautiful and honest record filled with interesting sounds. I've had I'll Go Anywhere on repeat for the last few weeks. I wish there was a video of him performing it online, but alas... I've yet to find one. If you stumble across one, send it my way. For now, go find it on your favorite streaming service or on my Regular Communication playlist below.

Listen to all my newsletter music recommendations on Apple Music or Spotify.

Cheers,
Jason

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