Substrate

details from reality that betray the carefully staged set, and ground the images in the push and pull between performance and authenticity. We see details and habits revealed to us, captured in the fraction of a second the picture was taken in. ​ What makes Lee’s photographs so compelling is that they point to the infinite other moments that aren’t captured by the camera. We see a sliver of who this woman is in a fraction of a second—and behind the photograph hides a vast sea of other moments, unknown and opaque to us.

That gaze is a monolithic one: it’s the mass of readers I am potentially failing by writing something pretentious, boring and not worth their time. Everyone is watching! It had better be good! It's is the gaze that says: You can't write unless you're describing everything in the cellar. ​ And most of all, letters make me feel like I am reading things that were written to me and for me alone. And that's my favorite feeling in the world. ​ So maybe the privacy I’m talking about really is just trust, and the ability to write to someone you know will still love you despite your writing. ​ —I’m talking about a friend who loves you enough to edit your writing.

but jet lag has a way of making even comfortable beds in comfortable neighborhoods seem foreign. There should be a term for this sort of chain reaction of literary progeny: you read a book that forces you to read a book that forces you to read a book, the textual equivalent of a wild night out. but I just want to fade the instinct a little bit, to train myself for more durable content.

One of the key would be to keep it simple. It’s just one component in an ecosystem of tools. Do search, and do it well, and that’s it.

Home essentials for whatever life brings.

“i want to give a gentle reminder that telling someone they “need to get laid” or “need” anything romantic/sexual to help remedy their situation, this can be highly inappropriate for several reasons and hurtful to those on the asexual spectrum”

Recommendations for effective view models when working with RxSwift.

Sometimes I think the things that makes art beautiful are the ways in which it represents reality. But other times, it is in the idiosyncratic way each artist’s world is not quite the same as the real one. (Drawing is by Egon Schiele.) pic.twitter.com/zWuGNUZw21— Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (@RowanHLB) April 9, 2019

TDD is a procedure I can put in place to help me control my intuition until the facts are in

This guide is an attempt to correct some of the imbalance in information between companies and employees, and explain in plain English the whole stock option process. ​ Don’t be deceived if you’re offered a large number of shares without any mention of the number of shares currently outstanding. Many companies are reluctant to share this kind of information and claim it’s confidential. ​ The last thing worth mentioning here is that if you’re buying vested shares before you leave the company, than I strongly suggest you look into filing a “83(b) election”, which could significantly decrease the amount of tax you have to pay. A full explanation of 83(b) elections is a guide in itself, but essentially they let you pay all your tax liabilities for both vested and un-vested stock early, at the current 409A valuation (even if the valuation subsequently increases). ​ It’s much easier to find out the answers to these questions when you’re still at the company, so I suggest you get this information before you leave if at all possible.

and of course, my mother is upset at me for not having sent her any yet to begin the ritual of unpacking, to return to my old habits and objects and find all of them a little richer from the time spent away. My to-do list is very long right now, and I’ll be spending the rest of this Sunday in my inbox. But I am so much happier than I was this time last week — my legs more tired and my head less fogged.

i’ve been thinking about buttondown’s future a lot lately, trying to work out how to turn it from “growing and largely unmapped” into “sustainable and legible”. 1 i’ve been rereading seeing like a state, so legible might not be the best choice of words here, but i digress ↩

:wave: - The documentation for being an Artsy Engineer - README/engineering-principles.md at main · artsy/README

Instead of space, there are numbers representing flows, such as how long it takes to drive to work or the number of bars one’s cell phone gets at a certain location. Wormholes exist at every scale, from airports to freeway exits to the Redbox outside the supermarket, and determine a lot about life in these suburban environments, shortening distances between people, goods, and information and surreptitiously rearranging the city as well as the globe.

If you’re not switching over an enum, then you’re using it for its properties. We have a better tool for value types with properties: structs.

“Enums are for switching. If you aren’t going to switch over a value—outside of the type—then use a struct.”

my goal is to facilitate other peoples’ enjoyment of everything this world has to offer, whether it’s the blissful clarity of an unburdened mind ​ You will always find a home here (and, I hope, a friend).

“I contend that at 11.59 pm each night, having read all day, I am the best informed person on the surface the planet,” he says. “Then sleep cleanses my brain, and I awake next morning in a state of perfect ignorance, twitching to get to the RSS feeds once again.”

we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance.

marriage is two people in love standing in the same bathroom

But of course, email and social media and games are obvious distractions. In my experience, the more subtle threat -- particularly for non-fiction writers -- comes via the eminently reasonable belief that you’re not ready to start writing, because you haven’t finished your research yet. ​ But as much as I enjoy it, I have learned the hard way that you are never done with your research. Waiting around for the research phase to be complete is a recipe for infinite postponement. ​ when you’re researching in media res, the new ideas or details or stories that you stumble across are much more useful to you, because you can immediately see the slots where they belong.

Perhaps this is because more folks are simply not religious and that makes talking about religion easier, kind of like the dynamic of knowing what you don’t like more than what you do like (or knowing what you don’t want to eat rather than knowing what you want to eat for dinner).

When cloud processes fail, interestingly, they fall out of the cloud, re-entering our purview as small cockpitpunk crises until we fix them and banish them back to the magical aether where they belong.