• How I rate

    Over the weekend, I fleshed out this website’s library; a page that will hopefully soon be a living overview of all the media and culture I consume. It’s populated by a library.yml data file, which I appreciate for its ability to store my information regardless of the website or software.

    Sure, I have a Goodreads profile and an IMDB account, but this is more sustainable. If you’ve been on this website before, you’ll know …

  • “His observations struck some critics as the smugness of a man who escaped a shipwreck and now has some thoughts about the swimming techniques of the people behind him who drowned.” - Tom Nichols for The Atlantic

  • Where I'm struggling

    The procrastinating part of me celebrates these words.

    I want a good calendar app. One I’m excited to use, that works across devices, and is happy with multiple accounts that didn’t all originate in its own ecosystem. I want it to be lightweight.

    I want a beautiful way of organizing my areas of responsibility. The difference between organizing my objectives, and executing on them is growing larger by the day, it seems. I don’t …

  • I had the pleasure of being the +1 at The Black Archives Bijlmer Book Club, where we read Travis Alabanza’s None of the Above. Meredith and Wally were excellent hosts, and I loved meeting new people with similar interests.

    I had strong feelings about Alabanza’s insistence that this work “feels like theory”, in response to it being marketed as a memoir. Calling Get Out a comedy diminishes the value of Black storytelling in horror narratives. But calling it a documentary is just as ineffective. “Feels like theory” very much sits in that spectrum, for me.

    I enjoyed the lively conversation my strong feelings sparked about respectability and Black works, and was surprised the lyrical essay appears to be such an unknown genre when I offered it.

    A Black non-binary person with a black shirt and jeans and a white headwrap sits in a chair in between two bookcases while holding a book titled “None of the Above” Three Black people, smile at the camera while pointing at an events poster displayed in the window of The Black Archives Bijlmer Seven people stand in front of a colorful street art wall while holding a book titled “None of the Above”

    The first and last photos were taken by Wouter Pocornie.

  • How might we let users seamlessly manage calendars from multiple providers in one cross-device app that doesn’t feel heavy, slow, and unreliable?

  • Eating with hands

    There are many things I’m scared to do as a Black person. The pathways that hold the reasons why have been visited and revisited so many times that, by now, I barely remember why I do some of the things I do.

    Don’t wear track suits, use slang, or do anything that makes people think you belong on a 90s R&B song. Don’t go into White spaces where your otherness is an unwittingly casual topic of inappropriate comments and …