Cloud Bites 2022-02-02

Hey all!

Quick update: I'm in Montreal! Some days it's pretty cold but mostly not too bad. It's fun to walk around a new city! Saw some people skiing in a park! It's late here, I really should be sleeping.

Any-way, let's see. We got some good stuff today!

Hi all,

It's been a while since the last Cloud Bites; things have been a little busy! November included a trip to Boston for a good friend's wedding and then to Zion National Park for hiking and general fun (photos below!). I'm feeling grateful for the coziness of cold weather and tasty food :D Hope y'all are enjoying the fall too!

Let's start with a recommendation that seems pertinent to the moment: Zeynep Tufekci on Omicron. Zeynep is a sociologist who has earned a huge amount of respect throughout the pandemic for being unafraid to speak truth to power. She was among the first (to be published widely) criticizing the US government and the WHO for discouraging individuals from wearing masks in March 2020. It's still mind-boggling and infuriating to me that both these organizations trusted with being the source-of-truth for the general public would spread outright falsehoods about whether wearing masks is beneficial in a pandemic of a respiratory virus! Disgusting.

Anyways, Zeynep does a really good job outlining exactly what we don't know about Omicron and how this should impact our lives going forward.

Cloud Bites #5! I’m writing this partly on a train through the east coast, so lots of trees and suburban malls in view. There was a nice section of misty marshland shrouded in greenery!

Four recommendations this time!

First we’ve got Frozen Tofu as an easy delicous snack. When you freeze tofu, ice crystals make a lot of small holes in the structure so it becomes kind of an open-hole foam. The texture is completely changed and it easily absorbs flavors and sauces, making it an especially good addition to soups! The recipe linked above recommends steaming the tofu before freezing it. I bet that’d work well but I haven’t had issues freezing it right in the package.

Hi all, hope everyone's future is good. Welcome to Cloud Bites #4!

tl;dr

Rec 10: Buttondown Email
Rec 11: FreeTaxUSA
Rec 13: Velomobiles

Welcome to Cloud Bites #3! Hope your weeks have been good as it starts to get a little cooler here in new york city.

Rec 7: She-Ra and the Princess of Power (netflix) — She-Ra is an excellent animated show about a group of princesses who are tasked with defending their planet against an evil hoard. I've been thinking about solarpunk a lot recently but She-Ra is an example of lunarpunk! From Wikipedia:

Lunarpunk is often considered a dark opposite of solarpunk. It portrays humans as invasive instead of using technology to improve things.
...
Aesthetically, lunarpunk usually is presented with pinks and purples with an almost omnipresence of bioluminescent plants and especially mushrooms.

I love these kinds of aesthetics. I think they hold a lot of power when it comes to shaping our future ideals and motivations.

I'm switching back to Tinyletter! They fixed the problem with sending and google groups doesn't have a signup link feature. Anyways, Cloud Bites iteration 2!

Rec 4: I stumbled across Kinopio today — A two-dimensional note-taking app with a retro aesthetic and surprisingly many features. Honorable mention goes to Amplenote, a more traditional note-taking app that seems to be competing well with Evernote and Roam. (Side note: I have been using The Archive, which is more minimal but very nice.)

Rec 5: Good Budget — A envelope-style budgeting app for web and mobile that is honestly fantastic. It's similar to You Need A Budget but free and easier to use (though the design is not exactly vogue). Some of you may have heard about my months-long saga to gain observability into my personal finances; I think this concludes that journey!

Rec 6: A Solarpunk Manifesto — I promised more Solarpunk last week so here it is!

So I switched to Google groups from Tinyletter because the latter wasn't working. Anyways, here's this week's update!:

Rec 1: The Top Shelf Principle — An article on distractions and snacking that has helped me think about how to focus more.

Rec 2: Inside the Imaginarium of a Solarpunk Architect — I am thinking that solarpunk could be a running theme in this letter. It's a steampunk/cyberpunk derivative that's trying to merge high-tech optimism and environmentalism into a single aesthetic. More to come!

Rec 3: Spikeball — A surprisingly fun game that I played for the first time this week. It's kind of like volleyball but you can play anywhere and it requires less running around!