Recently

The headline news is that the product I’ve been working on for months now with Mike Bostock and Jeremy Ashkenas is out: Observable. Check it out.

It’s a big change to be able to share links & build a community instead of only building and hoping that we were building something good. I think it’s pretty good, and the response has been super positive - we even got a mention in kottke.org.

I also launched a fun project - truisms.space - Jenny Holzer’s truisms in a format made for iPhone / Android wallpapers.

I’ve also been using are.na quite a bit, if you want to follow me over there. I upload mostly screenshots of UI elements.

Listening

• Xiu Xiu: Sharp Dressed Man
• Moondog: Chaconne in G Major
• Kendrick Lamar - Section.80
• Tyler, The Creator - Flower Boy
• Vince Staples - Summertime ‘06

Highlights:

• The first 20 seconds of Dopeman are beautiful: I love the sharp contrast in timbre.
• I got Section.80 because of Rigamortis which I saw in a punchesbears video. I love the free-floating groove.
• Sometimes the slower songs on hip-hop albums sound like they’re just imitations of the past, but 911 / Mr. Lonely on Flower Boy feels right.

Still listening to a majority rap & hip-hop, loaded up in Swinsian. I’m looking into a way to run a personal music backup - the ideal would be something like rsync that ran automatically from my laptop to a Linux computer in my apartment, then propagated to S3 from that computer. Does such a thing exist?

• reading: Six Easy Pieces
• reading: The Politics of Anti-Semitism
• watching: Betting on Zero was extremely enjoyable, and great for the multi-level commentary on morality versus capital.