§ It is now autumn. Welcome to my autumnal blog.
Inspired by Matt Kirkland and the fact that a perk of my job is that I can now visit a ridiculous number of local parks and museums for free, I’ve put together a bucket list of places I would like to visit before winter:
- The Botanical Gardens
- Holden Arboretum
- Shaker Lakes Nature Center
- Penitentiary Glen
- Lake Metroparks Farmpark
- The Fairport Harbor Lighthouse
- The Natural History Museum
§ I’ve been listening back to some old Vergecast episodes and landed on one where they discussed the big Reddit blow up as it was ongoing. Looking back on it all now, it’s clear that Reddit unequivocally won.
If you were to have asked me at the time, I would have predicted that either Reddit would make major concessions to developers or a serious platform competitor would emerge. Neither of those things happened. I don’t love this outcome but I think it has something to teach us about platform stickiness.
§ The state of third-party calendar applications is dire. Apple’s default calendar app is good for casual use but as soon as you need any additional features, settings, or customization the only apparent alternative available is Fantastical.
Probably most people just use Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook? Those aren’t what I am looking for either, though. I would love to see a new entrant into this space. No need for buzzy AI features. Just a solid, well designed, service agnostic calendar app.
§ Stable Audio from StabilityAI is impressive! A while ago, I found Riffusion which uses Stable Diffusion to generate images of audio spectrograms. Stable Audio, in contrast, uses a more traditional technique.
We’ve come a long way. Generated songs no longer sound like they are being played over an underwater gramophone. Still, anything with vocals is weird and inhuman but that is at least half the fun!
§ I saw my first spotted lanternfly this week. So far we’ve been able to largely avoid them in northeast Ohio. I’m worried that might not last too much longer.
§ I bought two pairs of pants a couple of months ago that I still haven’t worn because I didn’t realize until it was too late that they didn’t have a coin pocket.
I have been carrying AirPods in that strange little fifth pocket every day since 2017. It has become an integral feature of my wardrobe in a way that I had not consciously appreciated until it wasn’t there.
§ After the grave state of affairs last week, I am rewatching Utopia (2013). The writing is smart, the cinematography is excellent, and it has the best soundtrack since Twin Peaks, composed by Cristóbal Tapia de Veer of White Lotus fame.
§ I used Blender to animate a 3D model for the first time since college. Blender is still wacky and unintuitive but nevertheless I able to get everything working pretty quickly. Sometimes a ten second animation can communicate an idea more effectively than any amount of drawing and writing ever could.
§ I saw Alice Longyu Gao live on Saturday. The day before the concert her tour car and was stolen along with all of her equipment although you never would’ve known watching her show. It was great!
