My brother Andrew and I in front of the Opus 40 monolith ~30 years apart.
Coyote Redux
Ed Rutsch
Ten years ago I blogged about renowned archeologist, and family friend, Ed Rutsch.
I noted at the time that, “when he died, a Yahoo Group was setup for his many friends to share their Big Ed stories. Because everyone has a Big Ed story.”
Yahoo Groups shut down 5 years after I wrote that post, but before it did I grabbed an export of all of the Remembering Big Ed memorial group messages and pictures so these cherished memories wouldn’t be lost.
It took another five years but, with the help of AI, I have finally cleaned up all of those messages and have made them all available so Ed’s many friends and family can read these stories and memories once again.
Coyote in the yard last night
Sterling Lake Loop with Allie and Tommy
The Amazing Art of the Video Game Marquee
The Amazing Art of the Video Game Marquee
After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the idea of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren’t going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade.
These vintage marquees, to me, are such a beautiful vernacular artform that perfectly capture the moment where our lives were transitioning from the physical to the digital. So, during this long, hot summer, enjoy a gallery of video game marquees I took while walking around the Galloping Ghost.
The hardest working font in Manhattan
The hardest working font in Manhattan:
In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.
But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.
Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.
The font’s name is Gorton.
Really Simple Licensing
RSL is an open standard that lets publishers define machine-readable licensing terms for their content, including attribution, pay per crawl, and pay per inference compensation.
A new standards proposal for managing (AI) licensing terms for your content.
Tabstract
Tabstract is a free Safari extension I built to save/manage tabs and reduce clutter while I work. It has all of the features I’ve missed from similar extensions like OneTab or Tab Space, and, well, it looks a lot nicer.
I built it for myself, but it’s also been a fun learning experience being a developer in Apple’s ecosystem, and not just a customer.
You can learn more about Tabstract and download it on the Mac App Store.
Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’
Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’
For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline,” as spotted earlier by Jason Kint and reported on by Search Engine Roundtable.
New Jersey Punk
New Jersey had an incredible punk rock, ska, and hardcore scene in the mid/late-90s. Breakout bands like Lifetime, Thursday, Bouncing Souls, Bigwig, and Midtown got their start playing in the basements of northern New Jersey’s American Legions, Elks Lodges, VFWs, and fire houses.
Some kind, old punk rockers have archived many of those basement shows on YouTube. You can probably spot a teenaged and bleached-blond Paul somewhere in the crowds.
This is a clip from Outline…not a terribly popular band in our scene at the time, but they were fronted by future-megastar, Taylor Swift-collaborator, and member of Bleachers and Fun, Jack Antonoff.
WordCamp US 2025 Wapuu Claw Machine
.jpg){kind=link}
Fox
It’s a little NY and a little PA. Meet the only N.J. town squeezed between 2 other states.
My hometown of Montague, New Jersey: “It’s a little NY and a little PA.”
The only municipality in our state that borders both New York and Pennsylvania is finally starting to feel a little bit more like New Jersey.
Residents of rural Montague Township, population 3,753, no longer have a New York mailing address. High school students are no longer being bused across the border to [New York].
Now, that’s not to say that Montague is the typical New Jersey town. It covers more than 45 square miles, but there is not a single traffic light to be found. It’s home to High Point, the tallest elevation in New Jersey at 1,803 feet, but prohibits buildings from rising above 35 feet.
What’s in my inbox
I subscribe to newsletters at a whim, but don’t read many of them consistently. Here are a few (more) that have been must-reads for me lately:
Amazon Chronicles
Tim Carmody’s brand new email 100% focused on tracking and contextualizing the movements of one of the most influential companies on the planet.
Squirrel Notes
Deane Barker’s Squirrel Notes is a must-read for CMS wonks, reporting on the latest content management trends, tools, events, etc. Usually a good bit of nostalgia too.
Heath Row’s Media Diet
My pal Heath‘s venerable blog, reborn in newsletter form. A roundup of interesting news and commentary across the landscape of culture, media, technology, politics, science, health, and more.
Manipulating text with BBEdit
But the other thing I use BBEdit for is a bit more esoteric and hard to describe—something I call “text munging”, for lack of a better word.
Text munging takes many forms, but generally it happens when you’ve got a bunch of text in one format and you need to get it into a different format. I’ve used BBEdit to transform the source pages of websites, to format a mailing list properly, and more. Today I used it to generate a podcast feed out of a chunk of HTML.
BBEdit has been my go-to text editor, notepad, and “text munger” since I started using a Mac as my primary computer, I think around 2001-2002.
I depend on it many times daily, and similar to Snell, just last week used BBEdit to migrate blog posts from a broken Movable Type installation by transforming its static HTML files into XML for importing to WordPress.
Related reading: learning regex via BBEdit.
New music: Pedro the Lion’s Phoenix
David Bazan’s first album as Pedro the Lion since 2004. It’s very Bazan-y and very good.
In the Shadow of the CMS
How content-management systems will shape the future of media businesses big and small.
3000 words on content management systems? 😍
Sweet Darkness
A colleague recently sent me this poem, by David Whyte, as a way of encouraging a new perspective. It helped.
When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your home tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
“Sweet Darkness” by David Whyte by On Being Studios is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
You Should Meditate Every Day
The best way I can describe the effect is to liken it to a software upgrade for my brain — an update designed to guard against the terrible way the online world takes over your time and your mind.
I started meditating for 5-10 minutes per day around October of last year (inspired by a talk from Dan Harris), and while I’ve faltered a little along the way, I do feel better when it’s part of my daily routine. I had been put off by the apparent spirituality of meditation, but Dan’s talk helped me understand that I can enjoy the benefits of practicing mindfulness without the spiritual…baggage.
If you’re looking for mindfulness app recommendations, check out Oak—it’s simple to use and free; a good place to start.