Podcasts

  • This Conversations with Tyler episode with Chuck Klosterman was great. There are a lot of really interesting sections! At the end, Tyler breaks his Very Serious Interviewer mode and they just chat for a while. It’s still super interesting and fun to hear something a bit more conversational than ususal. I still love his standard no-nonsense approach though and wouldn’t want him to change as there is much less of that out there than there is just people chatting about stuff. Here are some favorite sections:

    On writing contemporary history:

    It’s really difficult when writing about history, but particularly history that people have lived through. The hardest thing about writing a book about the ’90s, I found, was the bifurcation between people who remember the ’90s almost like they just happened. That these things — the release of Nevermind or these Quentin Tarantino films and all these things — that this is still the history they’re living in. Then for other people, it’s no different than the moon landing. It’s just exposition about an event that they didn’t experience.

    On the most important (and oft-overlooked) parts of history:

    It’s always so tempting, when you look back at any period of time, to look for these strange apex moments. The outlier that seemed incongruous with everything else that was happening and maybe seems closer to what’s happening in the culture of the present, and you go, “Well, this is what really mattered.”

    I always sense that the thing that really mattered was the thing that we did not even view as having that ancillary secondary meaning. They were just what was being consumed, and the ideas and the morals and the values within that.

    On music discovery and how the internet has completely changed the way we experience music:

    There was Top 40 music that no one seemed to care about, and even as high school students, we seemed to view it as shallow and superficial, while we were listening to bands like Poison and Mötley Crüe, so there are lots of contradictions here. It doesn’t always make sense, but I fell into that music. My brother came back from the army. He had a Mötley Crüe cassette. He had an Ozzy Osbourne cassette. I had been listening to Huey Lewis and Eddie Grant and Madness and Prince. Got this — I just loved it immediately, and it became my whole identity for a while.

    How would that experience possibly happen now? I would be on the internet. I assume that instead of just sitting in my bedroom listening to an Ozzy Osbourne cassette and just reading the liner notes over and over again, I would be on a computer. And the experience of having my brother drop something off and then leave would be replaced by someone online that I find interesting, leading me in some direction.

    The idea of the slow cancellation of the future is also interesting. I wonder what the long-term equilibrium of this phenomenon is. Will things just continue to look the same, or will the things produced 50 years from now be distinct from those produced today. Maybe it’s just a slow down and transitions between cultural epochs simply take longer to register?

  • The Walter Benjamin episode on In our Time is a great introduction. I’ve started the Philosophize This min-series on him, which is good too, if a little unnuanced.

Data work

  • Data Engineering resources. Looks like a good list. Some of the resources I know, some are new to me. Either way, one I will likely come back to.

Ukraine

  • The Russian Military’s website was returning an obscure response code indicating that it was a teapot. From the comments on the above tweet it seems they are likely blocking traffic from outside Russia. This stackoverflow question describes it as being a way to to alert the requester that the server they’re pinging can’t handle the type of request they want, but there may be another one that can. Interesting.