Telling You Today: March 7, 2025
Friends,
Clare and I were chatting about the sensation that right now the daylight seems to extend each day at an accelerating rate. Whether real or perceived, it's felt like this recently, like there's a propulsive quality to the seasonal change. I notice the timing of sunset acutely since I commute by bike. Twenty minutes more daylight makes a big difference practically and emotionally. The combination of longer days and the exuberance of early spring in L.A. has boosted my mood in spite of the obvious horrors and uncertainty. But it's still hard. When I get stuck in a loop of compulsive scrolling and browsing I have found my mood darkens very quickly (as it probably should). How are you holding up, friends?
On Saturday Clare we drove to Ojai with our bikes, and rode a mellow circuit around the town and some surrounding areas. It was a truly glorious day, and we detoured to some of the trails by the Santa Clara river and I dipped my hand in it. The water was cold but not as icy as the mountain streams of the sierras. I thought that if it had been a hot day I'd gladly have gone for a swim.
Wednesday I rode home in the rain instead of bussing it, and took the river path. The high water meant that the usual aquatic birds, normally wading around, were instead lined up on the concrete at the river's edge, evenly spaced about 10-15 feet apart, staring at the rushing water. There were maybe 20 of them lined up like that.
Possibly Boring Newsletter Stuff
I use Buttondown to send these, and one thing I like so far is the ability to dial down tracking. Most non-personal emails track your behavior. If an email is just plain text, the sender doesn't know if you've opened it. But this email is HTML, and it can tell your email program to display an image hosted on a server somewhere and then track when it's loaded. Most marketing emails use a single-pixel image that you won't see in the email. When you open the email, it loads from their server, letting the sender know if you've opened the email.
Senders can track opens, links clicked (by passing the links through a custom URL redirect so they know if you've clicked), and in many cases, what you did on a website after clicking the links. At work, we use tools that let us see which newsletters individual subscribers have opened (and which links they've clicked), which I honestly find troubling.
ANYWAY, I turned off all the tracking for this newsletter. The final step was resolving an issue where my links were converted into redirect links, so if you hovered over a link in the newsletter, you'd see:
https://postal-service-02.buttondown.email/sbbaox/tiTMg1fRhjgt7eRs
instead of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower
Now you should see the latter (the actual link instead of a redirect). This prevents me from seeing your clicks, and makes links trustworthy and transparent.
Does this matter? I'm sure some care and some don't. But I'm into the idea of being less of a snoop, and maybe some of you appreciate that.
Recs
- This is old, but I was in a funk when I re-stumbled upon this exhaustive exploration of Jerry Saltz's totally unhinged coffee habit and it really cheered me up.
- I've been enjoying Yazz Ahmed's A PARADISE IN THE HOLD
- Sam Matey's Weekly Anthropocene is distinct due to both its global scope and its focus on optimistic climate developments. It's nice to know there's some legitimate good news on this front - such as the almost unbelievable boom in solar construction worldwide.
- We watched Her last weekend and I think I enjoyed it more than I did when it first came out in 2013. Not because of any connection to current events, I just think it's a coherent, successful story.
Pics
