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.

“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

The procrastinating part of me celebrates these words.

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.

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?