December 17, 2023

Hit and Miss #328: omg me too

Hello!

Much like Sameer, I’m finding myself with little to say before the links these days. So, in addition to encouraging you to go read Sameer’s (frankly far more interesting) set of links, I too will just head directly to mine for this week :)

• Another post to which I had an “omg me too” reaction this week, Rach Smith with a deceptively simple goal for 2024: “to remember it”. I feel this so deeply. As we near the end-of-year reflection period, I’m dabbling with some reflection time of my own—Day One has a newsletter of daily prompts, I did a Year Compass exercise a few years ago and enjoyed that—but, mostly, I’m thinking about how to build that practice for the year ahead.
• For the year ahead, some kind of long walk vacation feels in the cards. Craig Mod wrote about his and Kevin Kelly’s sixth “Walk and Talk”, and, while I don’t think Thailand will be where I (or we, if T and I do one together!) end up, respondents to Derek Sivers’s post on the topic shared loads of good ideas. (Also, we recently got Craig’s Things Become Other Things, and it’s a beautiful, thoughtful book—much recommended.)
• Book club today talked about a few different “apocalyptic fiction” we’ve read in past years—most recently, the Moon of series by Waubgeshig Rice, but also, in years past, the Parable series by Octavia Butler and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. I brought up a recent post by Jeremy Keith, in which he points out the characters in such fiction living the Station Eleven motto that “survival is insufficient” (in his words, “there’s a difference between surviving and living”). In each of these series, there’s some group—generally white, vaguely cultish—focused on survival through violence, with seemingly little attention to why they seek to survive (and thus, if they’d thought it through, why violence ought be set aside). The protagonists, though, tend to be grasping—and working—for something more, for something worth living for.
• Waldo Jaquith compared contracting for home improvement to contracting for digital government services, and the same principles apply to both: you’ll save if you work upfront to reduce uncertainty (both because you can seek more precise quotes, and you can separately manage what’d otherwise be an omnibus contract with extra costs for overhead); doing this, though, requires a bit of in-house knowledge (well worth it!).
• Lorin Hochstein with one of his most succinct posts explaining a core concept in safety engineering: ‘“Human error” means they don’t understand how the system worked’.
• For the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Deb Chachra teamed up with Robert Martello to explain the colonial revolt’s connection to the 1770 Bengali famine.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas