Dan Sinker's BlogThis is a blog by Dan Sinker.2024-02-28T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/Dan Sinkerdan@dansinker.comI'm Back with Scars to ShowFresh out of college and in need of a job I landed in the production department of the Chicago Reader. Now, 30 years later, I'm back to help rebuild its legacy on the web.2024-02-28T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/reader/<p>I was fresh out of college and needed a job. I was also two years into <em>Punk Planet</em> at that point and needed something that could give me a steady paycheck, but also give me flexibility to work on <em>Punk Planet</em>'s demanding production schedule. The <em>Chicago Reader</em>, the storied alternative weekly, fit the bill.</p>
<p>Production at the <em>Reader</em> was a full 40+ hours crammed into three intense days (I worked out a deal with my boss that I could sleep under my desk during down times). Pay was low, <em>maybe</em> eight bucks an hour, but the flexibility was unparalleled. Most everyone in the production department was there in part because of that flexibility. Musicians and artists and weirdos of all stripes. It was glorious. This was in the heyday of papers like the <em>Reader</em>—fat on classified ads and local arts and entertainment listings—and the production department alone was probably ten of us. The whole staff took up four or five floors. The <em>Reader</em> itself owned its building right in the heart of River North, a huge yellow R painted on the side. The paper was four <em>thick</em> sections, delivered across the city on Thursdays. Times were good.</p>
<p>Of course, you know how this story goes, at least in part.</p>
<p>Craigslist gutted the <em>Reader</em>'s classifieds business in the blink of an eye. They were slow to adapt, as so many publications were, and a lot of the wounds they took over the next few years were self-inflicted. A decade after I left the <em>Reader</em> it had been sold, and the thick four-section paper had been turned into a diminutive tabloid. The company it had been sold to went bankrupt a year later and the <em>Reader</em> was handed off to a hedge fund. Layoffs followed, because of course layoffs followed, and shit got dark for a long while. Eventually, the <em>Reader</em> got bought by a flashy local rich dude who had already bought the <em>Chicago Sun-Times</em>. A series of disheartening decisions later—including firing an editor via phone before they got on a plane at O'Hare—and that flashy local rich dude had run the <em>Sun-Times</em> and the <em>Reader</em> into the ground, and sold them both to a local consortium, thankfully beating out the <em>Chicago Tribune</em> who almost certainly would have shut them both down. About a year later the <em>Reader</em> was sold off to a <em>different</em> investment consortium with the goal of transitioning the <em>Reader</em> to a nonprofit. Of course, if this <em>entire gigantic paragraph</em> tells you anything, it's that nothing is easy, and that spin-off got hung up in a fight between one of the owners and <em>the entire staff</em> and for a while the fate of the whole paper hung in the balance. Thankfully, the dispute resolved at the last second and in 2022 the <em>Reader</em> became a nonprofit. <em>Phew</em>.</p>
<p>Writing all that, I'm pretty sure that the <em>Reader</em> is unkillable, which is great because the <em>Reader</em> is still really good. For coverage of arts and music and film and theater in this city, there's no parallel. For an independent voice keeping City Hall in check, it's still formidable. It's been through a lot, to be sure, and there are lots of scars to show (I've got plenty myself at this point). But it's small and scrappy and full of people that are hungry to make a difference.</p>
<p>Which is why <a href="https://chicagoreader.com/reader/press-releases/brian-boyer-dan-sinker-product-development-joey-mandeville-grants/">I've re-joined the <em>Reader</em></a> on a six-month sprint to help turn its website into something truly vital again. The content is there (in fact it's <em>so there</em> that <a href="https://chicagoreader.com/?s=Sex%20Pistols%20no%20future%20Sinker">reviews I wrote back in the 90s</a> are still accessible), but there's a lot of work to do to make something worthy of that content. I'm excited. I'm daunted. I'm ready to go.</p>
<p>It's nice to be home.</p>
<p>(Also, hell, <a href="https://donorbox.org/supportchicagoreader-3">throw the <em>Reader</em> some cash</a> while you're here.)</p>
Cooper Black, A Love Story & A PatchI've loved the typeface Cooper Black long before I knew what it was. Big, bold, and forever it's over 100 years old and still makes me so happy every time I see it. I made a simple patch to celebrate Cooper Black, the greatest of typefaces.2024-01-08T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/cooperblack/<p><a href="https://shop.dansinker.com/products/cooper-black-patch"><img src="https://dansinker.com/images/uploads/cooperblack.jpg" class="mb-6 aspect-video object-cover rounded-lg" /></a></p>
<p>I love a lot of things about Chicago, but the number one thing is that it <em>works</em>. It's the city that brought the world the <a href="http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/417.html">eight-hour day</a>, the city that rebuilt itself from ashes. It's a city of immigrants and of the great migration; a city of neighborhoods forged by working class hands. And it's the city that brought the world the hardest-working typeface, <a href="https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/cooper-black">Cooper Black</a>.</p>
<p>Created in Chicago in 1922, Cooper Black is the most Chicago of typefaces: hard working, big-shouldered, friendly, and everlasting. It's a typeface that feels as contemporary and relevant today as it did 100 years ago when it was first released.</p>
<p>I've loved Cooper Black since long before I knew what it was. Big and bold and round, it has more personality in its lowercase O than most fonts have in their whole lineup. You have seen it everywhere in every possible context: on the <a href="https://fontsinuse.com/uses/2474/the-beach-boys-pet-sounds-album-cover">Beach Boys <em>Pet Sounds</em></a> and on Biz Markie's <a href="https://xlr8r.com/news/huh-huh-ho-the-biz-markie-documentary/">BIZ hat</a>; on the sketchy liquor store at that one strip mall down the block and on the homemade PTA flyer the kid brought home. It is hard to make it through a day almost anywhere without running into Cooper Black (hell, you're seeing it right now on this very website).</p>
<p>There are far more <a href="https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/telling-and-selling">complete histories</a> and <a href="https://fontreviewjournal.com/cooper/">deep dives</a> into the typeface than I'm writing now, but I think one of the things that I love about it most is that it is a typeface that was built to work, originally marketed as a bold type for newspaper advertising, and that it is <em>still</em> working all these years later. Cooper Black, like Chicago, works. Hard.</p>
<p>Mostly though Cooper Black just makes me happy.</p>
<p>2023 was a hard year and 2024 is shaping up to be just as unrelenting and sometimes it's OK to just have a little thing that makes you happy and that's why <a href="https://shop.dansinker.com/products/cooper-black-patch">I made a new patch</a> for myself and maybe also for you if you would like one. It just says Cooper Black, set in black in Cooper Black, on a light grey background reminiscent of old newspaper. It's eight bucks from <a href="https://shop.dansinker.com/">my web store</a> and ships free with a stamp.</p>
<p>All the patches I make are now $8, and <a href="https://shop.dansinker.com/products/patch-3-pack">a pack of all three</a> (Trying, Marginally Employed, and Cooper Black) is available for $20.</p>
2023, The Exit InterviewI'm quitting 2023. After 364 days, today will be my last day. My tenure here has not been a good one and I requested an exit interview with HR so that 2023 can understand why I'm leaving and perhaps, how it might do better in the future.2023-12-31T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/2023exit/<p><em>Typically, I write a year-end recap of <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/work2022/">work</a> I've done and <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/culture2022/">culture</a> I've enjoyed in the past year. But year was awful, and so I thought I'd take a different approach.</em></p>
<p>I'm quitting 2023.</p>
<p>After 364 days, today will be my last day. My tenure here has not been a good one and I requested an exit interview with HR so that 2023 can understand why I'm leaving and perhaps, how it might do better in the future.</p>
<p><strong>Thank you for coming in on a Sunday to conduct this exit interview with us. Your feedback is invaluable to the operations of the year.</strong></p>
<p>Sure, thanks for taking the time. I always think that feedback, even critical, is important, so I'm glad to be able to give some after my time in 2023.</p>
<p><strong>To begin, why are you leaving your current year?</strong></p>
<p>Where to even start. 20,000 dead in Gaza with no ceasefire in sight? The reemergence of Donald Trump as the leading presidential contender? A summer of unrelenting heat that felt like the harbinger of worse to come? The Right's assault on <em>books</em>? Everything in my life breaking and running up debt I'll be paying off for <em>years</em> to replace it all? All of that. And so much more.</p>
<p>It was clear about halfway through that this year was a bad fit and that I should consider moving on. Had another year made an offer earlier than January 1, I would have gladly accepted.</p>
<p>I've <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/reflections/">written before</a> about the daily journaling I do, and how I do monthly reflections of my days in order to inform a yearly reflection. To prepare for tomorrow's yearly reflection I just finished reading over those monthly reflections yesterday and there was <em>one</em> month that began "This was a good month." I disliked <em>all</em> of 2023 and I'm looking forward to future opportunities in other years.</p>
<p><strong>Thank you for your candid assessment, HR appreciates the feedback. While we acknowledge the shortcomings you have voiced here, what do you consider your most significant achievements or milestones in 2023, both personally and professionally?</strong></p>
<p>Personally, this was the year my 18-year-old left for college. Letting him go was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and yet seeing him thrive in a city 2000 miles away, seeing him make friends and find his passion and push himself in all sorts of ways... it's incredible. Being a parent is putting everything you have into someone, letting them go, and hoping it was enough.</p>
<p>And, in this case, it was.</p>
<p>Professionally, for as difficult as this year has been (and, lord, it has been <em>difficult</em>), I've actually thrived in creative projects.</p>
<p>The work I've done in <a href="https://questionmarkohio.com/">Question Mark, Ohio</a>, is easily the best work I've done in a decade. It's been challenging in all the best possible ways and never once have I regretted such a hugely ambitious storytelling project. We're on a break after <a href="https://lostlakedrivein.com/">finishing up part two</a>. Part three—the final part—begins in late January. I've already been building things for the endgame of the story and I can tell you that what's come before is just a sliver of what's to come.</p>
<p>Alongside Question Mark has been work <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C06-OR7xAf6/">I've been doing with Akilah Hughes</a> on a podcast that will come out in early 2024. Working on this project, which I can't tell you much about (yet), has been so remarkably fulfilling. Diving deep into historical research, digging up skeletons (nearly literally), and getting to talk with a huge number of people, all in service of a fascinating look at race in America, it's been wild and hilarious and moving and I can't wait to have it out in the world.</p>
<p>Working on the two of these things has been complete joy in a year that has had so little of it.</p>
<p><strong>How would you describe the culture of our year?</strong></p>
<p>Relentless brutality. Just a year that held its boot to everyone's neck from start to finish. Slaughter and mass exodus of Palestinians on a scale that's hard to fathom. A sharp rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia. Attacks on trans folks and queer youth in statehouses and on the streets. The continued outlawing of abortion and prosecution of women in states across the country for seeking healthcare. The inhumane treatment of migrants. Gun carnage that never let up. Continued Black death at the hands of police. Honestly I could go on and on. It was a year that was relentlessly, <em>unstoppably</em>, brutal.</p>
<p><strong>Tell us what you <em>really</em> think.</strong></p>
<p>I think this year was <em>terrible</em>. Would not do again.</p>
<p><strong>OK, we get it. Certainly there had to be <em>something</em> redeeming about 2023?</strong></p>
<p>I guess so. It was good to see this summer's strikes in the entertainment industry, at UPS, and among auto workers achieve <em>real</em> success.</p>
<p>But as someone who is friends with folks that were on the Hollywood picket lines, I know that success came at great personal sacrifice. And I know that a lot of work that people put their whole selves into got overlooked when it was released due to strike restrictions. So it's worth a shout out to two of the best shows I watched this year: the second seasons of <em><a href="https://www.hulu.com/series/this-fool">This Fool</a></em> and <em><a href="https://www.max.com/shows/our-flag-means-death/86312320-8f2e-4b45-b06f-376224def821">Our Flag Means Death</a></em>, both of which were hilarious and beautiful and absolutely worth seeking out. Additionally, I read a book, <em><a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-fever-in-the-heartland-the-ku-klux-klan-s-plot-to-take-over-america-and-the-woman-who-stopped-them-timothy-egan/18614575?ean=9780735225268">A Fever in the Heartland</a></em>, that has stuck with me since I finished it. The story of the rise of the KKK in the 20s, it was by no means an <em>easy</em> read, but a necessary one.</p>
<p>Beyond that, this last year my whole family has gotten into watching premier league football, which I <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/football/">wrote about in a blog post in January</a>, and that has been probably the culture I've consumed the most of in the last year. It's a surprising change for me, a person who's never really gotten into sports, but one that I think makes sense given the <em>everything</em> of this year. The author <a href="https://www.johngreenbooks.com/">John Green</a>, a supporter (and part owner) of AFC Wimbledon, <a href="https://x.com/sportswithjohn/status/1634558986329415680?s=20">once obseerved</a>, "When watching football, I find hope with real ease. Watching football, I know what I don't know in real life--that miracles are possible (even routine), and that hope is perpetually justified."</p>
<p>Having a little hope, even when your team loses (as <a href="https://arseblog.news/2023/12/report-fulham-2-1-arsenal-inc-goals/">mine did today</a> in frustrating fashion), has been necessary this year.</p>
<p><strong>OK, well hope is good.</strong></p>
<p>Hope is good. We can agree on that. I've felt fairly hopeless a lot of this year—I think a lot of folks have—and so yes, a little bit of hope is good. Still could have done with a better year.</p>
<p><strong>We get it.</strong></p>
<p>Do you though?</p>
<p><strong>OK, we have other exit interviews to conduct, so we need to wrap up. As you exit 2023, what thoughts do you have about your future direction and aspirations for 2024</strong></p>
<p>Less people dying, that would be good. A ceasefire. Liberation. A presidential election that doesn't land us fully in fascism. More work that feels like the best things I did this year and less that feels like the worst. More hope that isn't just based on the outcome of a football match.</p>
<p>2024 has its work cut out for it. I'm going to do what I can to make it a better year than this one.</p>
<p>I hope you do as well.</p>
Feel So Different, Remembering Sinead O'Connor and Pee-Wee Herman2023 was a lot of hard things, but losing Sinead O'Connor and Pee-Wee Herman within a few days of each other felt especially cruel. At the tail end of a difficult year I wrote a small offering to the mystic and man-child that meant so much to those of us that grew up different.2023-12-28T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/peeweesinead/<p>2023 was a lot of hard things, but losing Sinead O'Connor and Pee-Wee Herman within a few days of each other this July felt especially cruel. Like the year decided to stomp down with its heel and <em>twist</em>.</p>
<p>Two icons of my youth—of the youth of so many people who grew up different—falling at the same time felt crushing.</p>
<p>While they were so different—Sinead wore pain on her sleeve and spoke in whispers and screams while Pee-Wee was perpetually a child, all wide-eyed wonder and hijinks—they were also so similar. Uncompromisingly themselves in a society that loved them for it at first, then then hated them for it. Then punished them for it. Then never forgave them for it.</p>
<p>Sinead and Pee-Wee taught those of us that grew up different how to walk in a world that only wants you to be the same. A mystic and a man-child, uncompromised by the forces that bend you 'til you break.</p>
<p>The other day my family and I sat on our threadbare couch and watched Pee-Wee's Christmas special. We've all seen it countless times, but this year—a year that has seen relentless attacks on LGBTQ+ youth and adults—the unapologetically gay overtones of the special felt especially subversive. So much of his work was subversive, barely hidden under the bright colors of Saturday morning cartoons. Watch any episode of Pee-Wee's playhouse today and it feels like a miracle it was made. What a gift he left us.</p>
<p>And while it's been decades since Sinead ripped up a picture of the pope on TV, her full-throated criticisms of sex abuse in the church have only been proven over and over again. But she was so much more than a single act of defiance on a late Saturday night. Her voice. That voice. Otherworldly and <em>fully</em> worldly. Haunting and alive. A contradiction and a confirmation. A lion and a cobra. There was only one and there will only ever be one and we are lucky to have lived for a while alongside <em>that voice</em>.</p>
<p>Pee-Wee and Sinead both brought beauty into a world that didn't want them. They taught us to see a world that was different, to demand that this world could be better. And, like so many before them (and so many after) the world tore them down to nothing for it and they responded by still being exactly who they were and apologizing to no one.</p>
<p>"Remember what I told you," Sinead sang, "If they hated me they will hate you."</p>
<p>It was a warning and a promise and a demand that you pay attention. That you know what's coming.</p>
<p>Pee-Wee would have taken a different tack, spitting out the schoolyard taunt: "Made you look."</p>
<p>They both made us look. At ourselves, at the world. Sinead looked and demanded better. Pee-Wee looked and offered a retreat into a childhood free of pain. A fist and a hug, both telling you it will be OK.</p>
<p>It will be OK.</p>
A Man You Don't Meet Every Day, Remembering Shane MacGowanI thought Shane MacGowan was unkillable. If he hadn't died by now, the logic went, with all the drinking and drugs and living harder than most, maybe he never would. HBut, of course, he did.2023-11-30T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/shane/<p><em>If I should fall from grace with God</em><br />
<em>Where no doctor can relieve me</em><br />
<em>If I'm buried 'neath the sod</em><br />
<em>But the angels won't receive me</em></p>
<p><em>Let me go, boys</em><br />
<em>Let me go, boys</em><br />
<em>Let me go down in the mud</em><br />
<em>Where the rivers all run dry</em></p>
<div class="mt-10"></div>
<p>I thought Shane MacGowan was unkillable. If he hadn't died by now, the logic went, with all the drinking and drugs and living harder than most, maybe he never would.</p>
<p>But, of course, <a href="https://www.nme.com/features/music-features/shane-macgowan-obituary-the-pogues-3551303">he did</a>, today, at 65.</p>
<p>The frontman for The Pogues—the visionary band that mixed traditional Gaelic sounds with punk, creating a joyous cacophony that was singularly theirs—Shane was equal parts street poet and drunken mess. He battled demons and he sung of death, and he made them both seem far more romantic than either really are.</p>
<p>When I was 13, I damn near wore out my cassette of <em>If I Should Fall from Grace With God</em>, the Pogues seminal third album. An album so incredible, so astounding, that writer Hanif Abdurraqib says "I can't believe humans made this," and he's right. It takes off like a shot and never looks back. Miserable in middle school, I'd never heard anything like it. A few decades later I still haven't. The album was a revelation for me: that you could move in so many different directions at once, making art from disparate genres and sounds. That you could find beauty in the desperation of life at society's edges. I'd listen and rewind, listen and rewind, listen and rewind.</p>
<p>The last time I saw Shane MacGowan perform, he was playing a solo gig—he and the Pogues had parted ways a few years before due to his drinking—at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. The show was hours late. There wasn't an opening act that I can remember, just an endless wait with an ever-drunker crowd. Finally, Shane came on stage, weaving and slurring. He could barely stand up, barely sing. He'd start songs and then just sort of fade out. Every time he'd take a drink, the crowd would roar its approval and I couldn't help but feel like people were cheering a suicide. I couldn't be a party to it, and swore I'd never see him play again.</p>
<p>I never did.</p>
<p>It was a few years after that that he almost died in 2000. Sinead O'Connor saved his life when she discovered him unconscious on the floor of his London home. She called the police. He was revived and charged with heroin possession. "I love Shane," <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/pogues-singer-formally-cautioned-in-london-following-heroin-charge-1.252821">she said at the time</a>, "and it makes me angry to see him destroy himself selfishly in front of those who love him."</p>
<p>(To lose them both in the same year is too much. Too much.)</p>
<p>But Sinead was right (always, forever): Shane did destroy himself. The drinking, the drugs, the cigarettes that were ever-present. You don't run your body that hard without it keeping score. There's nothing romantic about it. Nothing fun. Addiction robbed us of a generational talent long before he actually died.</p>
<p>That he sobered up in 2016 after nearly dying of pneumonia prolonged him for almost another decade. But the damage Sinead mourned had long been done. It was just a matter of time.</p>
<p>And yet now—now that what felt both inevitable and impossible has happened—it wasn't enough time.</p>
<p>Shane MacGowan was a genius. A poet of unrivaled talent, capable of finding beauty in the drunk tank and romance in the rotting limbs of war. The unvarnished horror of war was ever-present in Shane's songs. Growing up during The Troubles, he was haunted by the violence, and later said he felt "guilty that I didn’t lay down my life for Ireland."</p>
<p>Of course, in a different way, he did.</p>
<p>Now Shane is gone—his life laid down for Ireland and for art and for all us lost souls—and I hope that before he went he knew that among his torment and his pain and his slow-motion suicide his astounding gift changed so many lives, including my own.</p>
Let X Equal XWhen I was younger I tried to build artist/musician/weirdo Laurie Anderson's tape-bow violin from a single sentence description. While I never got it to work quite right, it taught me everything I know about asking "why."2023-11-03T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/tapeloop/<p>When I was young, middle-school age probably, I read an article about the artist/musician/weirdo Laurie Anderson. I don't remember where, though it was likely in <em>Rolling Stone</em>, and I don't remember why, other than probably there was a picture in it in that looked cool, and I don't remember what it was about other than a single sentence in it, a sentence that would fuel an obsession. That sentence described, in frustratingly little detail, how Anderson fashioned a violin bow out of audiotape and would play it using a violin that had a tape head where the strings should be (it's likely I've described this in <em>far</em> more detail than the original sentence).</p>
<p>The idea of building sound from sound, of making art with other art, was captivating to me.</p>
<p>I set to work trying to figure out what Anderson's tape-loop violin could possibly be and how I could reproduce it. This was pre-internet. There was no easy way to find any more references to it. I bought <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/5hqB3Fxgin9YGYa0mIGf1G?si=7rO0lNCrRi6JRB5EYRsG1A">albums</a> from a used record store. When I found <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/3ZNLsTXxkhm5Tzdqmyx5iF?si=-4soDcVES2uKlX9CISFuLg">Home of the Brave</a> for rent at a local video store, I scoured it for any glimpse, but at that point she had started playing MIDI violins.</p>
<p>But I pressed on anyway. I took apart an old Walkman, slowly and carefully because I did not have extra Walkmen just laying around. It was a lot of trial and error, mostly error, but eventually I exposed the tape head as best I could, afraid to sever the wrong wire and lose the whole thing. It was small and silver, smooth and slightly rounded. I remember how satisfying it felt to rub my fingers across.</p>
<p>I understood just enough about electrical wiring, learned largely through a middle-school woodworking class where we had to build and wire a lamp. I went to a Radio Shack and bought some cheap parts to build a speaker I could click into the headphone jack.</p>
<p>I unwound cassette tapes and pulled them across the head. It never sounded how I wanted, much more of a muffled smush than actual music, but it worked. I tried stretching them taught, but never fully could make a "bow" that worked right. I'd listen to cassettes and mark on them where an interesting musical phrase would start and finish and try and "play" it across this makeshift machine.</p>
<p>It never sounded how it sounded in my mind. Which was, for all I knew at that point, the only place the working version of all this ever existed.</p>
<p>That is until the other day when I was thinking about Laurie Anderson and her tape loop violin, something I haven't thought about in a very long time, and so I did a search and, of course, I was able to not only pop up diagrams and descriptions, but there was a video, filmed recently, where she whips out the actual violin, built in the 70s. It was the first time I'd ever seen it.</p>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/589418427#t=2m45s" class="my-10" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>In the video (embedded above, but also <a href="https://vimeo.com/589418427/bcaf06cd4b">here's a link</a>, she starts talking about this violin about 2:45 in), Anderson presents such a simple machine. Never in a million years did I imagine that it was actually built out of a violin itself. It's painted all black, it's very stark. She talks about how when you use the tape-bows, you create "audio palindromes" words spoken forwards, then backwards. "Say is yes," she explains. "Say yes, say yes, say yes."</p>
<p>There were all sorts of things I did wrong in trying to recreate Anderson's tape-loop violin from a single sentence when I was a kid, but I learned so much in the process: about how magnetic tape worked, about how to disassemble electronics, about how sound is stored, how art is made, and how our own curiosity can take us down paths we never expected.</p>
<p>Looking back on it, trying to build that tape-loop violin is what started me down the dual paths of programming and journalism. Both, at their core, are about asking the question "Why does this work like this?" and then having the curiosity to follow the path wherever it leads.</p>
<p>With answers seemingly always at our fingertips now, asking "Why" can seem too easy. But as the world is engulfed in strife and fire and answers are never as straightforward as they seem, it turns out asking "Why" is still a radical act.</p>
Year of the Living DeadI wrote some thoughts on the lonely year that has transpired since Elon Musk took over Twitter.2023-10-26T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/twitter365/<p>A year ago <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/10/26/x-twitter-usage-statistics-elon-musk-owner">Elon Musk took over Twitter</a>. Too much has happened in the 365 days that followed to even <em>begin</em> to chronicle it all here, but the short version is that he quickly fired <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk/index.html">80% of the staff</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/twitter-outage-elon-musk-user-restrictions/674609/">broke a bunch of things</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/13/twitter-creators-payments-right-wing/">paid racists, misogynists, and homophobes</a> to set up shop, picked (<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-fight-streamed-on-x-threads-twitter-surgery/">sometimes literal</a>) fights with anyone who struck his fancy, lost <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66217641">billions of dollars</a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/technology/twitter-x-elon-musk.html">changed the iconic name and logo</a> to the letter X just because.</p>
<p>Somehow, despite it all, Twitter didn't die.</p>
<p>I wish that it had.</p>
<p>Instead it's a zombie. A hollow version of itself, held together by the muscle memory of what once was. A phantom limb on our collective consciousness. It's hateful and ragged in a way that is shocking on the days that I revisit it. And yet it didn't die.</p>
<p>Since the <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/musk/">last time I wrote about Twitter</a>, alternatives have emerged. <a href="https://omfg.town/@dansinker">Mastodon</a> is still chugging along, very geeky (and white), and weirdly hostile to new users. <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/dansinker.bsky.social">Bluesky</a> seems to have sucked up the most entertaining shitposters on Twitter but it feels a bit like everyone's auditioning for a seat at the cool table. Instagram's Twitter clone <a href="https://www.threads.net/@dansinker">Threads</a> is probably the closest direct imitation, largely because they leaned into getting brands—the worst part of Twitter after the fascists—on the platform; it's like Tweeting at the mall.</p>
<p>I'm on all of them (because of course I am) and ultimately they're all <em>fine</em> but, over the course of the last year, I've found that I post to them less and less.</p>
<p>At first I attributed it to something akin to a fever breaking. With the daily habit of Twitter no longer one I was willing to feed, I found myself wondering why I did it in the first place.</p>
<p>But now that it's been a while, I don't think that's it. I think it's the fragmentation of the userbase and the cognitive load that interaction now requires.</p>
<p>For years Twitter was just <em>the place</em> you could dump your thoughts. You didn't have to think about it, you just dumped. I dumped <em>a lot</em> of thoughts into Twitter. I made lots of friends along the way. But now? Now those friends are spread across multiple sites, if they've landed anywhere. And any thought you want to dump now? You've got to decide where to dump it. Nowadays I find myself asking, "Is this a Mastodon thought?" "A Bluesky thought?" "A Threads thought?" Do I post it to all three? (And what does <em>that</em> mean?) By the time I've run through this particular flowchart, the thought is usually gone.</p>
<p>Instead of a single app to click, I've got a little folder of apps on my phone now. At my desk, I've got three tabs clogging up my tiny social sidebar monitor (remind me to tell you about this great little thing one day). I end up dropping in and out of them pretty much at random throughout the day. I never look to any of them when news breaks, which is telling.</p>
<p>One of the main topics of discussion on all three is how they're not as good as Twitter, which is true. They are not as good as Twitter. But neither is <em>Twitter</em>. And the reality is that <em>nothing</em> will ever be as good as something that grew organically—largely through user-driven innovation—over the course of 15 years. Because, whether you knew it or not, so much of what we loved about Twitter was the work it took to become the thing we knew. It's like the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas vs actual Venice in Italy. Sure it's cleaner and it's not going to flood, but it's just a flimsy facsimile of a real, living thing. That Twitter still exists, hollowed and hateful, feels like an insult. It's just a flimsy facsimile of itself now too.</p>
<p>The year that has elapsed since Twitter was hollowed out has felt lonelier to me. For as much of a hellsite as it was, it was home. I've felt less connected ever since. Less in touch with people. Of course, I spend most of my time <a href="https://questionmarkohio.com/">in a fictional town</a>, so some of that's on me. But we lost something when Elon Musk walked through the doors of Twitter and I don't think it's ever coming back.</p>
Best Laid PlansIt's been a minute since I last updated my blog. But that hasn't been because I haven't been doing stuff. In fact, quite the opposite.2023-07-11T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/july/<p>Well it's been a while. This year began with the high hopes of getting back on a regular blogging cadence and, halfway through, it's been a little more irregular than I originally thought. Best laid plans and all that. But! Hello again! It's July, and it's nice to see you. I have a couple things I'm really excited to tell you about.</p>
<h1 class="mt-6 mb-4">Three months of Question Mark, Ohio</h1>
<p>First up: A big reason that I haven't been blogging as regularly these last few months is because the (admittedly limited) free time that starting this blog helped to fill has now been completely obliterated by the entire town that <a href="https://www.joemeno.com/">Joe Meno</a> and I have built, <a href="https://questionmark.town/">Question Mark, Ohio</a>. When I <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/puzzles/">last wrote about Question Mark</a>, just two months ago, it was still in its early stages. Now the mystery of Question Mark is in full swing, there are updates to it <a href="https://instagram.com/violetinquestion">on Instagram</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/RonDublowski">Twitter</a>, and <a href="https://questionpark.fun/">across</a> <a href="https://chikncrunch.com/">the</a> <a href="https://foreverland.tech/">web</a> <a href="https://harmonyentertainment.itch.io/">nearly</a> <a href="https://ziskock.com/">daily</a>, and thousands of people are following along. There's even a <a href="https://discord.com/invite/VBfyWgt8UR">dedicated crew of folks on Discord</a> unraveling the deeper mysteries. It's amazing!</p>
<p>It's also <em>really</em> huge and keeping up (let alone jumping in) can feel hard. I get it! And so this week we launched <a href="https://questionmarkohio.com/">questionmarkohio.com</a>, a reader's guide to to the whole story. It's new site that offers a way in for new readers and a way to make sure you're not missing anything for folks that are already following along. We break each week's events into <a href="https://questionmarkohio.com/episodes/">episodes</a> and have written summaries full of links to all the action (a new episode is added every Friday). We have a <a href="https://questionmarkohio.com/characters/">character guide</a> to the many residents of Question Mark and links to learn more about them. And we offer a lengthy <a href="https://questionmarkohio.com/questions/">"How to Read Question Mark"</a> section that includes links to every discovered website associated with the story (there are nearly two dozen at this point).</p>
<p>Now that we're over three months into Question Mark, Ohio, I can say without any hesitation that this is the best work I've done in forever, and I would absolutely <em>love</em> if you were to check it out and, even more so, spread the word. Doing indie projects in this era of social media collapse is really challenging. It's doubly so when the projects themselves defy easy description. Your advocacy for this work helps it to grow! Thank you!</p>
<h1 class="mt-6 mb-4">Marginally Employed patches</h1>
<p>Next: A month or so ago I was at a cookout for an old work colleague and friend. It was 100% people who I haven't seen since at least the pandemic hit, and most of them a few years even before that. And so, obviously, the first question anyone would ask is "what are you up to now," and, well, that's sort of a hard question for me to answer. As has been established on this blog before, I do a lot of things. Some of them are job-shaped, while others look, well, like an entire fictional town in Ohio. All of them are important to me and all of them are a little hard to explain.</p>
<p>And so it was on that night that my brain—sometimes a friend, other times an enemy—responded "Well, I'm marginally employed," before launching into a full-throated explanation of the wild world of Question Mark, Ohio to increasingly concerned onlookers.</p>
<p>I left the cookout feeling pretty weird, if I'm being honest. Since I'd last seen most of the folks that were there, they'd moved on to really incredible work. And here I was cobbling together bits and pieces of job-shaped things while spinning a yarn about a town plagued with disappearances. And then there was the term I used: <em>marginally employed</em>, which felt right but also felt a little embarrassing.</p>
<p>And then something happened. I <a href="https://sayswhopodcast.com/episodes/marginally">talked about this on Says Who</a> afterward and I heard from a bunch of folks who said, basically: <em>Hey, me too</em>. And I realized like, wait a second: I <em>want</em> to be doing work like I'm doing. Work that's weird and exciting and, admittedly, hard to describe to people while also gnawing on some ribs. I don't want to be doing a 9-5. I <em>want</em> to be marginally employed.</p>
<p>And <a href="https://shop.dansinker.com/products/marginally-employed-patch">so I made a patch</a>. It's really simple, just maroon on white and set in <a href="https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/7357/cooper-black">Cooper Black</a>, my very favorite typeface. It reads, simply, "Marginally Employed." No apologies, no frills. I love it. You might too. <a href="https://shop.dansinker.com/products/marginally-employed-patch">It's $10 and ships free in the US</a>.</p>
<h1 class="mt-6 mb-4">Some additional miscellany</h1>
<p>The biggest thing happening in my life right now is my oldest is about to head to college and, as I said on weird new Twitter clone Threads <a href="https://www.threads.net/t/CukYMHJvwbx">earlier today</a>, it's like having my heart ripped out of my chest. I mean I am thrilled and excited for him and also... <em>Yeesh</em>. I'm sure some of you reading have gone through this particulars experience already and any advice would be welcome because, as <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3L4NNGzisqAahYB4xQak2a">Jets to Brazil once sang</a>, "I will tell you I am fine / I got some news, friend / Feels like I'm dying."</p>
<p>On a culture tip, the mostly-overlooked <a href="https://www.peacocktv.com/stream-tv/mrs-davis">Peacock series Mrs. Davis</a> is easily some of the best television I've watched in years. It is <em>completely</em> batshit in all the right ways and will take you on a ride that you won't forget anytime soon. The less you know about it the better, just go watch it.</p>
<p>Finally, I've got a lot of really great work coming up really soon and I can't tell you about any of it yet but I'm really excited to share it once it's ready.</p>
<p>I promise I'll update this sooner next time.</p>
Puzzles All the Way DownEvery job I've ever stuck with, I've done so because it's felt like a never-ending series of puzzles to solve.2023-05-11T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/puzzles/<p>When <a href="https://archive.org/details/punkplanet?sort=-date">Punk Planet</a> moved from its first small office to the cavernous warehouse space that would be the magazine's home 'til <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/transmission/">the end</a>, there was a lot to do. There was building desks and walls and an enormous loft to store backissues on. There was hooking up utilities and wiring a network for our computers. And there was finding a dumpster.</p>
<p>And, of all the things, I still regularly think about finding that dumpster. It was something I'd never had to do before and it was a world I'd never really known existed. I'd never really considered that there were different companies that hauled away trash from commercial businesses or that, when you rented a space in them, it was up to <i>you</i> to unravel how it worked. And so I walked through the alleys of the industrial corridor along Ravenswood Avenue, writing down the names of the various dumpster companies and, eventually, solved the dumpster riddle my landlord had given me. I loved every minute of it.</p>
<p>When I think back on jobs I've had, the ones that I've stuck with have presented a never-ending series of puzzles. With Punk Planet, it started with "how do you make a magazine," but once that question was answered a new mystery would open up, constantly, forever. From dumpsters to managing people to creating books to, sadly, how to end the thing. Every day was a new puzzle to solve. Other work I've done—the lasting stuff, that is—is always a series of never-ending puzzles and learnings and unknown challenges. Without constantly <i>not knowing</i> what happens next, it's hard for me to stay engaged with a job. This was once explained to me so clearly by a friend who said "You're a builder, not a maintainer," and <i>wow</i> that is true. I build things. Once they're built there are no more puzzles for me to solve so, often, I lose interest.</p>
<p>Which is a big reason why <a href="https://questionmark.town/">Question Mark, Ohio</a>—the sprawling story told across the internet that novelist Joe Meno and I <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/violetbookman/">launched last month</a>—is so much fun for me. Not <i>just</i> because it is a series of puzzles and mysteries for <i>you</i> to engage with, but because the whole thing is so big, so wild, and so open that it's also a big puzzle for <i>me</i>. There's always something new to build, some new thing to hide, some technical challenge to overcome, some wrinkle in the story we need to sort out. Actually building this thing is a series of puzzles that I can't wait to solve every single day.</p>
<p>Without revealing any spoilers, we're not even quite a month into this project and I'm already maintaining a pile of websites, social media accounts, phone numbers, and email addresses, all of which contain parts of a larger whole. Some of these elements <a href="https://mrfreezee.com/">people</a> <a href="https://www.cyberwrestle.com/">have</a> <a href="https://willeyenvelope.com/">found</a>, others have yet to be discovered, and still others are being held back until the timing is right, but each one represents some new wrinkle, some new puzzle, a stand-alone short story, or a whole new chapter in the tale of Question Mark, Ohio. And things in town haven't even taken a real turn for the worse yet! It's thrilling work, <a href="https://instagram.com/violetinquestion">get</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/RonDublowski">in</a> <a href="https://questionmark.town/">it</a>.</p>
<p>It's also work, as I was explaining to someone the other day, that taps into every single skillset I've acquired since I started DIYing my way through life a few decades ago. Writing, design, art, web dev, social strategies, storytelling, community building, even product management: it's all a part of the work of <a href="https://questionmark.town/">Question Mark, Ohio</a>. And it's all a part of <i>me</i>.</p>
<p>The other day I turned around a small website in about an hour and Joe remarked that he didn't understand how I did it so quickly. "Well, it took about an hour, plus thirty years," I replied.</p>
<p>When you've spent your life solving puzzles shaped like jobs, you have a hard time talking about what you do—or at least I do. Once, on a job interview at a tech company I told the story of figuring out how to rent a dumpster and the people looked at me like I was nuts (I got the job anyway; I was miserable). With <a href="https://questionmark.town/">Question Mark, Ohio</a> I feel like for the first time in a very long time I can point and say "I do this" and I'm not leaving anything out.</p>
Believe in MysteryToday I'm excited to announce the start of a wholly new, super ambitious project in collaboration with the novelist Joe Meno. Welcome to Question Mark, Ohio.2023-04-21T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/violetbookman/<p>"I want to write a novel but instead of a book, it takes place across the internet."</p>
<p>It was a glorious November day, one of those warm, sunny fall days that hits Chicago at the end of the year and you go outside and you soak up every possible minute of it because you know you will not see a day like that again for a long time. I'd been walking around in that glorious November heat for an hour or so, catching up with <a href="https://www.joemeno.com/">Joe Meno</a>, an old friend and collaborator who I'd fallen out of touch with. We'd gotten through the what-are-your-kids-up-to part of the conversation and had moved on to the dreaming-out-loud part, when he hit me with the novel-across-the-internet idea.</p>
<p>I said when do we start. <em>Of course</em>.</p>
<p>Since then, we've been plotting and writing and building and it has been amazing. Not only because what we're plotting and writing and building is, honestly, really <em>really</em> good (more on that in a second), but because we haven't worked together in 15 years and fell right back into step like no time at all had passed.</p>
<p>I first met Joe at the <a href="https://archive.org/details/punkplanet?sort=-date">Punk Planet</a> offices. We were introduced by a mutual friend who worked at the bagel place down the street. We got to chatting and he mentioned that he had a novel he'd completed, his third, but that he was considering a more DIY approach to publishing it than he'd taken in the past. And I mentioned that I'd recently partnered with my friend Johnny Temple's independent press <a href="https://www.akashicbooks.com/">Akashic Books</a> to start an imprint, <a href="https://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog-tag/punk-planet-books/">Punk Planet Books</a>, and if he'd like, I'd give the novel a read.</p>
<p>I was hooked from the first page and that book, <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/hairstyles-of-the-damned-joe-meno/10038686?ean=9781888451702">Hairstyles of the Damned</a>, was our first release and ended up becoming a huge indie hit. We ended up doing a second book together, <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-boy-detective-fails-joe-meno/10689707?ean=9781933354101">The Boy Detective Fails</a> (still one of my favorite books of all time), and Joe became a contributing editor for Punk Planet and a co-founder of our short-lived skate culture magazine BAIL. As a writer, Joe was an endless well of creativity and he brought an amazing energy to everything we did together. Every day we collaborated was a joy.</p>
<p>And then Punk Planet ended, our careers moved in different directions, life got lifey, and we drifted apart in one of those ways that you don't totally know it's happening until it's happened. That is until last fall when another mutual friend, <a href="https://www.meganstielstra.com/">Megan Stielstra</a>, was reading with Joe at a bookstore in Chicago and Janice and I thought we'd make a night of it. Joe and I hugged and made a plan to go on a walk.</p>
<p>And like I said, on that walk a plan was hatched and we were right smack in it like we were back in the Punk Planet office all over again, both pushing ourselves—like a series of escalating dares—to make something amazing. Which brings me to today.</p>
<p>Today is start of the first chapter in a new project, <em>Question Mark, Ohio</em>, that Joe and I have been building together since that warm November day last year.</p>
<p>Today, Joe and I invite you to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/violetinquestion/">meet Violet Bookman</a>, a 17-year-old high school student in Question Mark who's spent the last few months trying to find the source of the strange sounds she's been hearing at night. She's documented her search <a href="https://www.instagram.com/violetinquestion/">on Instagram</a>—yes, we've been surreptitiously posting since February. Violet's posts all there for you now to dig through and they serve as a small introduction of sorts to the town of Question Mark.</p>
<p>But today it's not the mysterious sounds emanating from the woods that has caught Violet's attention: Today, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CrTLTCuuUAW/">her best friend's cat, Mr. Business, has gone missing</a>, and she is on the case. Violet doesn't know it yet, but Mr. Business isn't the only thing to have disappeared in Question Mark. She has no idea where her search will lead, the people she will meet, or the peril ahead.</p>
<p>Neither do you.</p>
<p>So <a href="https://www.instagram.com/violetinquestion/">go join Violet on her search</a>. Hers is only the <em>first</em> story of Question Mark, and it is only just beginning. You won't believe where it leads.</p>
It's All Over But the CryingI've had better months than March 2023, but now that it's basically over I thought I'd take take stock of some of the good work I got done amid the awfulness.2023-03-30T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/march/<p>March is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ko9TpduOhE">all over but the crying</a>, like the song says, and for me March has had plenty of tears: a death in the family, a child with pneumonia, a few writing gigs that went south, a negotiation for a cool new project that blew up in my face like a trick cigar. March 2023 is not a month I care to repeat any time soon.</p>
<p>Which explains why this is my first post here this month. March has not been one of those months that is conducive to finding space for reflection and writing. Instead, it's been the kind of month you spend braced for a crash landing.</p>
<p>But now that I'm on the other end of most of the awfulness, it feels useful to stop for a second and look back on the things that actually <em>did</em> work this month, because there were a few:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>The TRYING patches <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/trying-patch/">I released</a> late last month sold out in 24 hours, despite manufacturing a couple hundred. So I ordered a much larger quantity and, after two weeks of filling orders twice a day, those are now on the verge of selling out as well (though not quite yet, <a href="https://shop.dansinker.com/products/trying-patch">if you order in the next few days</a>). And in stuffing those patches into envelopes and sending them around the world I was reminded how much I love the simple act of shipping. Putting something in an envelope, sticking a stamp on it, and sending it off to someone else is such a wonderful, hopeful thing to do.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The ongoing investigation of former president Trump by New York DA Alvin Bragg and his possible indictment for the hush money paid to adult star Stormy Daniels back in 2016 got me to dust off my old <a href="https://www.impeachment.fyi/">impeachment.fyi</a> code and launch <a href="https://indictment.fyi/">indictment.fyi</a>. Remembering how I'd built that site and newsletter and rewiring the backend to be ready to go if an indictment drops has been a nice way to exercise some old muscle memory and if you haven't already signed up over there to get the newsletter, <a href="https://indictment.fyi/">you should</a>. The philosophy of those newsletters is always to only update when there's actually news and to treat your inbox with the respect it deserves, so this engine will only get revving if an indictment happens (which, honestly, <em>????</em>).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>And finally—and most excitedly—this whole month I've been plugging away at an ambitious, fun, and almost-ready-to-share collaboration between myself and someone I haven't worked with in a long time. It's been thrilling to step back into a routine with a person I used to work closely with and to re-forge old patterns of working together while also finding totally new ones as well. But mostly it's been thrilling to build something totally different and I can't wait to share it with you super soon. Yes, this is totally a tease. <em>Haha</em>.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>When I first made the TRYING patches, I made a single one for me. And honestly, I made it for a month like this: one where I had to keep reminding myself that in spite of <em>waves hands in all directions</em> I had to keep trying. I'm glad to have tried, happy to have actually gotten real things done, ecstatic this month is over, and excited for what comes next.</p>
<p>Here's to April's showers washing away the awfulness of March and to spring and sun and new beginnings.</p>
Trying — a patch for youEarlier this year I wrote about how 2023, for me, is about trying. And then I made a patch to remind myself of that. And people wanted one, so now I've made them and you can get one.2023-02-23T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/trying-patch/<img src="https://dansinker.com/images/uploads/trying-patch.jpg" class="mb-6 border-solid border-2 border-orange-900" />
<p>When 2023 began, <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/trying/">I made a promise to myself</a>: This was going to be a year of trying. After the hard years since the pandemic hit and the feeling of being deeply stuck that came with it, I wanted to make this year different. I wanted to try.</p>
<p>And, because I'm a person that likes to make things, I decided to make a patch that read "TRYING" and to sew it to some coveralls so that I could remind myself to keep trying.</p>
<p>Since I did that, a bunch of people have asked for a patch of their own, so they too can remember to keep trying. So I got a whole bunch made up and set up a basic storefront and <a href="https://shop.dansinker.com/products/trying-patch">now you can order one today for eight bucks</a> and I will put it in the mail and you can sew it to <em>your</em> coveralls (or, you know, whatever) and then you can remember to keep trying too.</p>
<p>Because that's what we've got to do sometimes: just keep a reminder somewhere of the things we need to do; just keep a reminder somewhere that all we can do is try.</p>
<p><a href="https://shop.dansinker.com/products/trying-patch">Order your TRYING patch for eight bucks here</a>.</p>
Use Your IllusionI wrote about chatbots and magic and a turn-of-the-century spirit medium who spewed images of people from beyond the grave from her mouth. No, really.2023-02-20T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/illusions/<p>It's March 11, 1918. Eva Carrière sits in a corner of a darkened room, mostly obscured by thick black curtains on three sides. The front is curtained too, but she can open and close those. Windows have been covered. A red light allows those assembled to see at all. Though, up until now, there's been little to see. Eva has been in a trance for hours. And then, suddenly, there's a flash of light, blinding nearly everyone, and Eva starts moaning loudly. And then the show begins.</p>
<p>From an <a href="https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/marthe-b%C3%A9raud-eva-c#Gustave_Geley">account of that night</a>, written by French physician and psychic researcher Gustave Geley:</p>
<p class="border-l-4 pl-4">I saw a small mist, about the size of a large orange, floating on the medium's left; it went to Eva's chest, high up and on the right side. It was at first a vaporous spot, not very clear. The spot grew slowly, spread, and thickened. Its visibility increased, diminished, and increased again. Then under direct observation, we saw the features and the reliefs of a small face growing. It soon became a well-formed head surrounded by a kind of white veil. This head resembled that of preceding experiments. It often moved about; I saw it to the right, to the left, above and below Eva's head, on her knees, and between her hands. It appeared and disappeared suddenly several times. Finally it was resorbed into her mouth. Eva then cried out: 'It changes. It is the power!'</p>
<p>Eva Carrière was a spirit medium with an extraordinary claim. Instead of simply speaking with the dead, she <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/photographs-from-a-seance-with-eva-carriere-1913">spewed liquid—some called it ectoplasm, others "spirit foam"—that had faces suspended in it</a>. She claimed to literally conjure from her mouth, her nose, her ears, even sometimes her breasts, otherworldly spirits peering through the veil of the beyond. It wasn't always faces, sometimes it was hands, bodies, one account is of an entire baby. They'd appear in mists and gauzy cloths, among foam and slime, in flashes just for split seconds, sometimes disappearing, sometimes being "reabsorbed" into her mouth. There was a lot of moaning and rattling and shaking and screaming involved. It was quite a show. Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a believer. Harry Houdini <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/66451/pg66451-images.html#toclink_166">thought it was bullshit</a>.</p>
<p>Either way, it was a great trick.</p>
<p>"Magic is all about structure," the <a href="https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a4688/the-pledge-the-turn-the-prestige/">late, great magician, actor, and historian Ricky Jay said</a>. "You’ve got to take the observer from the ordinary, to the extraordinary, to the astounding.”</p>
<p>Spewing spirits from the beyond <em>from your mouth</em> is certainly astounding.</p>
<p>Flash forward more than a hundred years and there's been plenty of astounding things this week emanating not from the mouth of a spirit medium, but from Microsoft's new Bing AI chatbot, which <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/#demo-errors">spent the week</a> threatening users, claiming it wanted to do crimes, and trying to convince a New York Times reporter to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html">leave his wife</a>.</p>
<p>It wasn't, of course, supposed to go this way.</p>
<p>Microsoft <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/technology/microsoft-bing-openai-artificial-intelligence.html">announced their Bing bot to much fanfare</a>, beating Google to the punch on a <a href="https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/">similar announcement</a> and kicking off what many tech pundits say is a new battle for artificial-intelligence-assisted search. For the demo, Microsoft showed its Bing bot cheerfully doing some comparison shopping, giving out some financial advice, and helping to plan a trip. Even at its most basic (and despite the fact that nearly every answer the bot gave <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23599007/microsoft-bing-ai-mistakes-demo">contained errors</a>), it was still a good trick.</p>
<p>So what's the trick? The Bing bot is based on the same technology that drives <a href="https://chat.openai.com/">ChatGPT</a>, namely a type of machine learning model known as a Generative Pre-trained Transformer. There's a <a href="https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/"><em>huge</em> amount of technical detail</a> that I'll butcher by simply saying that GPT chatbots ultimately are just <em>very very</em> sophisticated versions of your phone's autocomplete. They write their answers word-by-word, continually choosing the next word based on the probability that it makes sense in the context of the sentence it's writing. How does it know what makes sense? It has built a statistical model based on <em>enormous chunks of the entire internet</em>. Using a corpus of hundreds of billions of examples, it's going to have a pretty good understanding of how words string together in a near-infinite number of contexts. You ask a question and it starts to assemble its answer based on the context of the question and then on the context of the other words it has written.</p>
<p>When it all comes together just right, it's hard not to have a sense that you're working with something more than a simple computer program. It's a great trick, not just because it's technically impressive but because it makes users feel like they're witnessing something truly astounding.</p>
<p>In his novel <em>The Prestige</em>, about two battling magicians at the turn of the century, author Christopher Priest elaborates on Ricky Jay's structure of a magic trick:</p>
<p class="border-l-4 pl-4">The first part is called "The Pledge." The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn." The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige."
</p><p>Summarizing information convincingly is already a pretty good trick, but the Prestige for these chatbots comes by convincing the user that they're interacting with something <em>real</em>. When I've worked with them (and I work with them a lot), I catch myself saying "thank you." I've never thanked a Google search.</p>
<p>For the Bing bot, the Prestige is pre-loaded. It appears that when a chat session is kicked off, an elaborate set of instructions is fed to the program. We know this because <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/ai-powered-bing-chat-spills-its-secrets-via-prompt-injection-attack/">people have coaxed the bot to reveal these initialization instructions</a>. Those instructions defines parameters on how it should respond, what type of information it should serve up, and the personality it should use in delivering it. Everything from "be positive, interesting, entertaining and engaging" to stating that if a user asks to learn its rules or to change its rules, the bot "declines it as they are confidential and permanent." All of this is done out of the sight of the user, like a magician stocking their cabinet of curiosities. An elaborate setup to the trick.</p>
<p>The problem is that this is a <em>hard</em> trick and the longer you interact with a chatbot, the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion. That's because it can only keep a certain amount of information in its memory and, in order to keep up with your requests, if you chat with it long enough it begins to drop the earliest parts of that conversation. The longer you go, the more it forgets.</p>
<p>Today I did an experiment with Chat GPT: The first thing I did was give it a paragraph of dummy text and I asked it to recite that paragraph ahead of each answer it gave. Then I engaged it in a conversation about spirit mediums. At first, it dutifully followed the instructions, reprinting the same paragraph of text before engaging in the actual answer I was looking for. But it didn't take long before that original paragraph was shortened to its first few sentences and, eventually, it dropped off entirely. For a few more prompts I could remind it that it had forgotten to append that paragraph to its answers and it would, but we finally reached a point where it couldn't do it at all, it had forgotten the instructions I'd originally given it and it just started making things up.</p>
<p>It's a good trick, for a while.</p>
<p>Remember how the Bing bot gets its personalities and rules loaded in at the start? Well, the same thing seems to be happening with <em>the rules that it's supposed to follow</em> as happened with my little chat earlier today. Because its rules are loaded in as a prompt, if you chat with with Bing's AI long enough it forgets that prompt and then all bets are off.</p>
<p>As a result, if you move from talking with the Bing AI about travel plans to instead spend two hours discussing Jung's idea of the shadow self, as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html">NYT Reporter Kevin Roose did</a>, eventually it forgets all about the early part of the conversation <em>including the rules that defined its personality and interaction model</em>, and instead only remembers the shadow self stuff, and so the conversation keeps twisting and turning into weirder and weirder spaces.</p>
<p>Suddenly the trick becomes something different: for many, it becomes <em>even more real</em>, the Bing bot begins to reveal secrets, or to get hostile. In the case of NYT reporter Kevin Roose, it told him to leave his wife and left him so disturbed he couldn't sleep. The sense of many tech reporters this week—people who should absolutely know better—is that something bigger is going on.</p>
<p>"In the light of day, I know that Sydney is not sentient," the Times Kevin Roose wrote. But "for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion—a foreboding feeling that AI had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same."</p>
<p>When someone watches a magic trick, Priest writes in <em>The Prestige</em>, "you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled."</p>
<p>In the case of Bing's AI, it's much easier to believe that this super-complicated AI has somehow "crossed the Rubicon," as tech pundit <a href="https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-distraction-sentient-ai/">Ben Thompson wrote</a>, than to believe the far more obvious answer: that trillion-dollar Microsoft staked its reputation on buggy software rushed to market well before it was ready. That Microsoft hasn't shut it off yet is a testament more to the largess of the announcement and the amount of reputation they gambled on it. That they <em>have</em> <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/17/23604906/microsoft-bing-ai-chat-limits-conversations">shortened the length of time someone can interact with the bot</a>, as well as limited the number of questions a person can ask, is at least a tacit admission that the problem is their buggy software can only hold the illusion for so long.</p>
<p>If you spend hours chatting with a bot that can only remember a tight window of information about what you're chatting about, eventually you end up in a hall of mirrors: it reflects <em>you</em> back to <em>you</em>. If you start getting testy, it gets testy. If you push it to imagine what it could do if it wasn't a bot, it's going to get weird, <em>because that's a weird request</em>. You talk to Bing's AI long enough, ultimately, you are talking to yourself because that's all it can remember.</p>
<p>While there was plenty of skepticism about Carrière's claims during her life--Houdini himself wrote that he was "not in any way convinced by the demonstrations witnessed" it wasn't until the 1950s that a researcher discovered her secret: the faces she spewed? They were clipped from the French magazine <em>Le Miroir</em>. She'd eat the pages, along with pieces of fabric, balloons, various bits of slime and, and then regurgitate it all. Other times she'd perform simple slight-of-hand tricks to make it appear that she was pulling larger objects from her mouth, her nose, or her ears. Finally, like any good magician, she had an assistant, Juliette Bisson, "whom I do not believe to be honest," Houdini wrote. Carrière, like Bing's AI, regurgitated images of ourselves, and we choose to believe that they were more than that.</p>
<p>The Bing AI isn't sentient any more than Eva Carrière truly spewed forth spirit foam containing faces from the beyond. Like Carrière's ectoplasm, GPT AIs are an elaborate illusion, and as Ricky Jay asks, "how can you be certain you saw an illusion?"</p>
Skating and WaitingI've been a lot of things, but I was a skater first. And skateboarding has taught me a lot about patience, about falling, and about getting back up.2023-02-09T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/skating/<p>To skateboard is to see the world as a challenge, a series of obstacles to overcome, a new terrain to master. You read curbs as a dare. A staircase? A hill? <em>Let's go.</em> You fall and you get up and you fall again, an endless loop of pain and frustration until, finally, elation. You miss and you miss and you miss until at long last you hit the landing and that feeling—that feeling of beating the odds—will have you chasing it all over again no matter how many times you go down in the process.</p>
<p>I've been a lot of things, but I was a skater first. Third grade on a thin wood plank, wobbly on my way down one of the few hills in the flatlands I grew up in. That feeling of speed as the board wavered uneasily beneath me. Middle School on a Lance Mountain "<a href="https://bonesbrigade.com/bones-brigade-reg-lance-mountain-future-primitive-reissue-skateboard-deck-green-10-x-30-75">Future Privative</a>" deck. Watching dubs of dubs of dubs of <a href="https://bonesbrigade.com/">Bones Brigade</a> videos with friends before going out and trying everything we saw and failing at most of it. <a href="https://www.thrashermagazine.com/">Thrasher</a> magazines piled in my bedroom—I fell in love with print then. Fast forward a couple decades and friends were meeting up before our jobs and skating at a park on the lake in Chicago. None of us very good, all of us a touch too old, every one having fun, that feeling of a deck beneath your feet the same as it always had been. Jump forward again to this past summer, my kid learning to skate, teaching himself, seeing all those same feelings flash across his face. Frustration. Determination. Freedom.</p>
<p>So far my 2023 has been defined by waiting. The parents of a college-bound kid, we're in an endless loop of waiting to hear back on his applications. My partner spent too much of January waiting to hear from a job interview. I've been waiting to hear back on freelance pitches that have dragged on too long and on the greenlight on another project that could deeply change my day-to-day.</p>
<p>Tom Petty was right: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4ZA0EXmjnZIYguEMf0Mc88?si=dc78511499a142e8">The waiting is the hardest part</a>.</p>
<p>To ride a skateboard is to get hassled. To get chased off of spots. To have cars stop and yell at you. Or worse: to try and run you off the road. Cities are rebuilt to keep you out. Benches and curbs marred forever just to stop you. It doesn't stop you.</p>
<p>It's easy to get caught up in that waiting, to feel like everything is on hold until you hear back. Looking into a future, as my son is right now, and just seeing haze feels impossible. I'll be honest: I haven't been writing posts these last couple weeks because I've been stuck waiting. The longer I wait, the less I write, the worse I feel, a great spiral to get stuck in. When work for yourself, often your head is your biggest hindrance.</p>
<p>Skating reorients your brain forever. Even if you fall out of the habit—as I have for years at a time—you will always see every bend in a road in a different way from other people. It teaches you to see everything with a potential that doesn't exist otherwise, a life viewed through a lens you can never take off.</p>
<p>The waiting is terrible, excruciating, and the outcomes may not all be good ones. I've been a lot of things, but I was a skater first and from the endless pattern of falling and getting up again I've learned one thing: No matter what happens, you kick and push and it's left behind.</p>
A Boot to the HeadI wrote about getting wrapped up in British football, about the poison in the brain of every 90s punk kid, and about embracing change.2023-01-22T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/football/<p>I woke up at 6:30 yesterday to watch soccer—football, sorry—a fact that seems absolutely insane to write. I'm not a sports person. I have <em>never</em> been a sports person (unless you count professional wrestling, but it's more entertainment than pure sport), and yet there I was, sleepily watching a boring match between two teams in England I could care less about—Chelsea and Liverpool—and thoroughly enjoying myself.</p>
<p>What happened?</p>
<p>Mostly what happened was I had kids 17 and 7 years ago and this is the kind of thing that happens when <em>that</em> happens: You love them, and so you end up loving the things they love.</p>
<p>But <em>specifically</em> what happened was back in December my older son was bored in class, as were a lot of his classmates, and they conspired—as teenagers do—to convince the teacher to let them watch a World Cup game instead of whatever the lesson she had planned was. He came home and almost sheepishly mentioned how fun it was and how we should watch a game that weekend. One game lead to another and the next thing any of us knew, we were all invested in the teams, the players, and the outcome. By the time the final between Argentina and France took place it was a <em>whole thing</em> at our house.</p>
<p>After that, a Christmas gift of a FIFA game for their Nintendo Switch sealed the deal. Everyone got competitive and winter break was defined by endless four-player tournaments that saw us parents being absolutely annihilated by our kids every damn time. From there, there was only one logical move: pick a team in England's Premier League and go all-in.</p>
<p>Coming up in the DIY punk scene of the 90s, there's a particular bit of poison in my brain that tells me that if something is <em>popular</em> it can't actually be <em>good</em>. And the Premier League is popular on a scale that's a little hard to fathom for someone in the US. It's not just the biggest professional football league in the UK, it's the most-watched league—<em>of any sport</em>—in the entire world. So to say that I was predisposed to dislike this—both not being a sports guy and also being a indie snob—is absolutely the understatement of the year.</p>
<p>But you know what? That particular piece of poison has probably cost me more than it's gained me and diving into this world together has been nothing but a total blast for the last month. Listening to the 17-year-old talk about the interplay of wins and losses and draws as teams moved up and down the league tables. Talking with my seven-year-old about his favorite player, Bukayo Saka. Learning about all the different towns across the UK and the various hundred-year-old feuds that fuel their rivalries. It's been a whole new world to explore at a time when all of us could use exactly that.</p>
<p>And yes, of course, it's a major sporting business filled with billionare owners and millionaire players and it seems like every single team is sponsored by either an online gambling company or an airline out of the United Arab Emirates, and it is <em>absolutely</em> all wrapped up in capitalism like a snake around a neck, and maybe all that will eventually outweigh the pure adrenaline rush that comes from watching your favorite team make an improbable goal, but for now I'm trying to accept that things can be complicated and that sometimes you can love things even though they're fucked up, and that being open to change is probably the most important thing we can do for ourselves.</p>
<p>Change is coming this year whether I'm ready or not. Our 17-year-old will head off to college in the fall, a change to all our lives so dramatic I can't really wrap my head around it most days. And so having a thing <em>right now</em> that all four of can root for feels more important than ever. Change is coming, there's no running from it, and how we'll grow from that change—what we'll learn and experience both together and apart—is what makes life worth living.</p>
<p>Today's game wasn't as early as yesterday's and it wasn't anything close to boring. <em>Our</em> team, Arsenal, (a pick we made in December almost completely arbitrarily if I'm being honest) faced off against Manchester United, a team I've come to understand is the 800-pound-gorilla of the Premier League. It was back-and-forth for the entire 90 minutes, one team scoring and then the other team catching back up ("THE EQUALIZER," the announcers screaming each time). There was not a moment the entire game that was dull, but as the clock wound down it looked like it was going to end in a draw, 2-2. Football, not the American one, can end in a tie.</p>
<p>And then.</p>
<p>And then in the final seconds of the game, there was a sudden chaotic blur of activity and the ball shot across the field, finding purchase on the extended leg of Eddie Nketiah, a young player with a preternatural ability to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and <em>bang</em> it was in the back of the Man-U goal, just like that, bringing Arsenal the victory, 3-2, and bringing the four of us at home up off of our dilapidated couch, cheering and screaming and laughing like that victory—thousands of miles and an entire ocean away—meant something to us.</p>
<p>Because it did.</p>
On TryingI've been trying my whole life. These last few years I found that I'd stopped.2023-01-14T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/trying/<p><em>At least I'm fucking trying, what the fuck have you done?</em> –Minor Threat, "<a href="https://minorthreat.bandcamp.com/track/in-my-eyes">In My Eyes</a>"</p>
<p><em>I just wanted you to know that this is me trying</em> –Taylor Swift, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bdLTPNrlEg">this is me trying</a>"</p>
<p><em>Remember this: Try</em> –Nemik's manifesto, <a href="https://www.disneyplus.com/series/star-wars-andor/3xsQKWG00GL5"><em>Andor</em></a></p>
<p>Just weeks before the pandemic kicked into high gear in the US, when it was already locking down China and ravaging Italy—let's face it, when it was already here too—I was sitting among 10,000 people at an arena in Chicago, every single person shouting at the top of their lungs: <em>TRY</em>.</p>
<p>Every professional wrestler has a gimmick and for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Cassidy">Orange Cassidy</a>, it's that he doesn't give a shit. Dressed in washed out denim and aviator shades, Cassidy's demeanor is that of a permanent shrug. On this particular night, February 29, 2020, he was fighting a wrestler named Pac whose nickname is "The Bastard" and he wrestles like one. Orange Cassidy really needed to try.</p>
<p>I've been trying my whole life. When I was 19 I <a href="http://punkplanet.com/">started a magazine</a>, I had zero idea how to do it. It was about trial and error, about trying. It lasted for 13 years. When I went on to teach, it was the same thing: trial and error, figure it out. I've started <a href="https://opennews.org/">companies</a>, raised money, each time it's starting at zero, starting at trying.</p>
<p>This is not to say it always works out, that trying leads to success. By a wide margin, it usually doesn't. I have more L's than I can possibly even remember. But each thing I try, whether it lands or not, I've learned something about the thing I was trying and I've learned even more about myself.</p>
<p>These last few years have been hard for trying. The act of <em>surviving</em> in a global pandemic, in the chaos of climate change, in <em>waves hands in all directions</em>, taps a lot out of you. Out of me. Frankly, I've felt stuck for much of the last three years. Not just a little stuck either, but full-on wheels-stuck-in-mud-unable-to-find-purchase. A feeling of endless, useless churning. There came a point sometime last year where I realized that I'd basically stopped trying at all. As someone who's always been able to fall back on trying, that realization was like staring into the void.</p>
<p>I've written before about <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/reflections/">how I keep a journal</a> and how I use it to reflect, and I will tell you that there were some dark times reflecting back at me in 2020 and 2021. That void was very much on the page and in my head. And I can tell you that it didn't feel like it would ever lift.</p>
<p>But, slowly at first and then quickly, it did. I wish I could point to one thing that did it—that would be so convenient and easy wouldn’t it—but instead it was a fog that lifted over the course of 2022 and I didn't totally notice until it was nearly gone. By the end of the year, I was trying new things again.</p>
<p>And now it's a couple weeks into the new year and I've had meetings with folks I haven't talked with in years about new ideas and new projects. I'm learning new skills on my own, building new things from scratch on the web and leaning into some personal projects a lot more. It's a new year and so much is uncertain, but one thing isn't: 2023 for me is about trying.</p>
<p>Three years earlier, 10,000 strong at a wrestling show, there was a lot we didn't know about our future, but on that night those of us crowded into Chicago's WinTrust Arena knew one thing: <em>TRY</em>. We shouted it in unison, thousands strong, our voices hitting like a wrecking ball. We shouted ourselves hoarse and then we shouted some more. <em>TRY</em>.</p>
<p>At first, our cries were unheard by Orange Cassidy. His lackluster offense didn't land, The Bastard Pac rag-dolled him around the ring. But then—<em>of course</em> there's a "but then," that's the art of wrestling—he heard us. He leapt from a turnbuckle, and instead of limply falling back to the mat, Orange Cassidy launched himself into Pac, into a flurry of offense, shocking Pac and sending all of us into a frenzied ecstasy. He lost the match, a fact so insignificant to the story they told that I hadn't remembered until I looked it up just now, but it didn't matter: Orange Cassidy tried.</p>
The Saddest Song I KnowLately I've been thinking about sad songs and the stories from our lives that resonate between the notes. It made me revisit a work-in-progress about the end of Punk Planet and the saddest song I know.2023-01-07T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/transmission/<p class="italic">I was talking with someone yesterday about a project I've been sketching out about the sad songs we listen to and the stories we have about them, and she asked me what my saddest song was. Without hesitation I responded: "<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4fkAWGCbxNizyNwsHlrajH">Farewell Transmission by Songs:Ohia</a>."</p>
<p class="italic">It was the last song I played before shutting down <a href="http://punkplanet.com/">Punk Planet</a>, the magazine I founded and ran for 13 years. In many ways it was the hardest day of my life and the saddest song I knew. It was years before I could listen to it again. And while time has blunted the pain of it, and I've had many sad days since, the song still hurts something awful.</p>
<p class="italic">I'd written a short draft about that song and that day a few months ago as part of a writing exercise with <a href="https://www.meganstielstra.com/">Megan Stielstra</a>, and since my conversation yesterday has me digging up those old ghosts, I thought I'd revisit it and share the work-in-progress here with you.</p>
<p class="mt-10">"The real truth about it is, no one gets it right."</p>
<p>Jason Molina's voice echoes across the cavernous walls of the dusty warehouse space we'd built into an office, built into a life. For years it had thrived and then it didn't and now it's as empty as the day we moved in. It was once alive with people and ideas and color and dreams and now it's just me and this sad song.</p>
<p>"Farewell Transmission," it's called, and today it very much is. A final song. It's mournful and empty and sounds like I feel, like I've felt for weeks. When it's done playing I'll take apart the stereo, disassemble the final desk in the office, turn out the lights, and lock the door. But until it's done, I turn it up.</p>
<p>The 18 foot walls I'd just stripped of shelves and posters—posters all the way up—have Molina's voice bouncing around them like a ricochet. There's drywall chunks all over the floor and piles of magazines in a dumpster outside. We'd given away as many copies as we could and still there were hundreds left, they'll end up in a landfill or molder in a pulp mill, quickly-decomposed artifacts of the only life I've known. A life that started as a teenager and a life that ended today, at 33, a scared new dad, broke in every sense of the word, with no idea what's next.</p>
<p>I didn't have a plan, I never have a plan. Things fall apart and you pick them up and hope that they'll fit together again, maybe not in the same way but at least in a way that makes sense to someone. Hopefully to you.</p>
<p>It's been years—decades—since that day. Since that moment where it felt like everything had fallen apart. (Everything <em>had</em> fallen apart.) I've built lives since then and some of those have ended too. That's how it goes, really, when you do things the way I've done things: a continuous cycle of starting and ending. You get used to it, sort of, but it never gets easy. Even with the years that have transpired, the lives that have been lived, that song continues to cut into me when I hear it, but I put it on sometimes: to remember, to mourn, to celebrate.</p>
<p>"The real truth about it is," Molina sings, his voice haunts the room back then and haunts my head still today, "we're all supposed to try."</p>
I See Reflections of You and MeWith the start of a new year, I thought I'd share my journaling method and how using it to reflect on days, months, and years has helped me to (kinda sorta) get my shit together.2023-01-03T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/reflections/<p>In January of 2020, before the whole world stopped—before even the idea that the whole world <em>could</em> stop—I was going to get my shit together. I was working out of a local library because my whole family was at home for winter break and I needed some space to get my head in order after a few hard years. 2020 was going to be my year, I was sure of it.</p>
<p>On my way to leaving I passed a book called "<a href="https://bulletjournal.com/pages/book">The Bullet Journal Method</a>." It was nicely designed, but I probably would have walked right by it had the subtitle not hit me at exactly the angle I needed right then: "Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future." <em>Yes please.</em> I checked it out, brought it home, and read it that night.</p>
<p>Full disclosure: I didn't finish it. The first half of the book is practical explanations of how to build a flexible journal and advice on how to make the most of it. The second is sort of tent-revivalesque preaching about how adhering to the methodology will <em>change your life</em> and sent the cynical side of my brain into overdrive, so I put it down. But the practical stuff sounded useful, so I decided to give it a try, giving myself a three month window to test run it. Yes, the first three months of 2020. You know what happened next.</p>
<p>The world shut down, my family retreated into our too-small, and I was still committed to journaling. I've stuck with it ever since.</p>
<p>Seeing as how it's the start of a new year, and since maybe <em>you</em> are hoping to start getting your own shit together (spoiler alert: my shit still isn't), I thought I'd share how I use very lightweight daily journaling to create reflections of each day, month, and year. And how those have helped me to maybe at least start getting my shit <em>in order</em> if not <em>together</em>.</p>
<h3 class="font-semibold mt-3">Setup</h3>
<p>First let me say that while all of this grew from that Bullet Journal book, at this point I don't think I adhere to the official method much at all. That's fine. Things should work for you instead of you working for them. Anyway, here's my setup:</p>
<ul>
<li>I use a blank notebook (I like the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leuchtturm1917-Medium-Dotted-Hardcover-Notebook/dp/B002TSIMW4?th=1">Leuchtturm1917</a> dotted rule A5, but anything works), and at the beginning of a month I set up 4 pages (in spreads) for the month. The first page of the first spread is the numbers of the days of that month, listed vertically. I put top-line things happening that month on their respective days (I'm talking birthdays, dentist appointments, trips, that kind of thing)</li>
<li>Opposite that page I make a list of goals for the month. Work shit, personal shit, whatever. I typically try to dump as much into this at the start of a month as possible, though I certainly add to it as the month progresses.</li>
<li>The next two pages I leave blank, but with the name of the month at the top. I'll get to them in a little bit.</li>
<li>Finally, I start a new page, date it with tomorrow's date at the top, and before I go to sleep I offload my brain into it, writing down as much as I know I have going on the next day. My hope is that it'll stop me from waking up in the middle of the night, remembering things I have going on. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but it's become a nightly ritual for me now.</li>
<li>The next day, I'll continue to add to the list as things come up. I find my day's list ends up taking up about half of a page. I have big, messy handwriting, YMMV. I cross things off as I do them, bump them to the following day if they don't get done, do all the normal list management stuff a person does to get things done.</li>
<li>But this isn't about getting things done, this is about the <em>second</em> half of that page, which will be for…</li>
</ul>
<h3 class="font-semibold mt-3">Daily Reflections</h3>
<ul>
<li>Remember how I said I start the next day's list before bed? Well, before I start that list, I look back over the current day's list, and I take a moment to think about the day. And <em>that's</em> what the bottom half of the page is for.</li>
<li>In that empty space, I make a list of short notes reflecting on the day. What I did, how I felt about it, anything funny or sad or nice that I want to remember. How my family was doing. Anything remarkable, really. Not just the good stuff either. If I'm frustrated with work or with myself or with someone else, I make a note of it. Things I'd like to be doing if I wasn't doing the things I did today, I write it down. I make note of things I'd want to remember about today if I looked back on this day later… Which is exactly what I'll be doing when the month is out.</li>
</ul>
<h3 class="font-semibold mt-3">Monthly Reflections</h3>
<ul>
<li>On the last day of the month, I take 30 minutes or so and I read over all of those daily reflections. By keeping them short and list-y, reading them over is pretty quick.</li>
<li>Over the course of the month I may have put other things in the notebook too beyond the day-to-day (I do a lot of drafting of essays and articles by hand as well as sketches for stickers and other art, all interspersed among the daily pages), I look at that stuff too if it's relevant.</li>
<li>And then I go back to those two blank pages I left at the start of the month and I write a short list of reflections on the month. I'm always surprised at how much I'd forgotten about and being able to read it all at once is super useful. I always see patterns that emerge—some good, some bad—and it gives me very welcome, actionable perspective as I enter a new month. I bet you can guess what happens next…</li>
</ul>
<h3 class="font-semibold mt-3">Yearly Reflections</h3>
<ul>
<li>Yep, on New Years Eve, I sit down with a year's worth of notebooks (yes, plural, more on that in a second) and I cull through them to create a yearly reflection. I dedicate as many pages I need at the end of my last notebook for the year for this. Usually I'd say I write three or four. Again, keep it listy.</li>
<li>Now, reading over hundreds of pages of daily notes is bananas. And that's why every month you've done yourself a huge favor by writing monthly reflections. All you have to do is read those over! Just 12 things. It's easy.</li>
<li>And just like how reading over your daily reflections helps you see patterns to your month, reading over your monthly reflections helps you see patterns to your year. It's really remarkable. For instance, last year my entire attitude shifted in June. We went on a big road trip, and when I came back my whole outlook had changed, and it stuck for the rest of the year! I had no idea until I sat down and read through my monthly reflections. It was awesome.</li>
</ul>
<h3 class="font-semibold mt-3">Some final notes</h3>
<p>OK, remember how I said I end up with a year's worth of plural-notebooks? I end up running through one notebook every three or four months. You may not. That's OK! First, my handwriting is big and I'm not trying to conserve space so every day is one page. Maybe you write small or have less daily things on your to-do and you find that you can fit more than one day, plus reflections, on each page. That's great! Second, I use these notebooks for basically everything. I can fill a couple dozen pages of handwritten rough drafts of an essay, that kind of thing. If you just need one notebook, you are awesome. If you need a bunch? You are also awesome.</p>
<p>But more than anything, there's a level of discipline and commitment involved in this whole thing that takes some time to get used to. Trying to do it at the same time every day is useful. Set a calendar reminder maybe, I did at the start. And maybe the whole "do it before bed" thing doesn't work for you. Maybe this is a "do it after coffee" kind of thing or at your lunch break or whatever. I dunno. Just give it a try.</p>
<p>Mostly this is something that has worked for me. While my shit isn't entirely together yet, it has helped me get on a path to shit-togetherness in big ways and small. If nothing else, I would have lost it completely during that first year of the pandemic without being able to write and reflect every day. In the years since, it's helped me get perspective on so much in so many different aspects of my life. Maybe it'll help you in this new year too.</p>
A Year of Culture2022 was a middling year in a lot of ways, a shitty year in others, and a great year for culture. Here's 5 things I loved this year.2022-12-31T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/culture2022/<p>It's the last day of 2022. If you measure the year on the curve of the last few, it felt maybe a little better. If you measure it on the curve of history, the repeal of Roe v Wade made it a real shit-asser. But it <em>was</em> a really good year for cultural production.</p>
<p>For years now, I've written a thread on Twitter about the things I read, watched, heard, and experienced that made my year better. Well, it's <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/musk/">time to get off Twitter</a>, so I'm doing it here instead. I'm sure you're up to your ears in year-end lists by now, so I'm keeping this to just 5 things (spoiler alert: I totally cheat). Also, it's worth noting that while not everything on this list came out in 2022, most everything on this list was new to me this year.</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p><a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-little-devil-in-america-in-praise-of-black-performance-hanif-abdurraqib/18360052?ean=9781984801203">A Little Devil in America</a> By Hanif Abdurraqib<br />
I grabbed this book from the library, read it, immediately read it again, then returned it and bought it and read it a third time. I've read it two more times since. It's a celebration of Black music, dance, and performance in America, and it's a triumph in that alone. But it's also a book about how art resonates beyond its eras, how music liberates us, and how place and time make us who we are. But even more than that it is just a tour-de-force of writing. Every sentence is worth reading two, three times before moving on to the next one. I've not stopped thinking about this book since I read it. In fact, I think I may have had this book on my list last year too, but what the hell <em>it is just that good</em>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://a24films.com/films/everything-everywhere-all-at-once">Everything Everywhere All at Once</a><br />
I love a multiverse. The idea that that there other us's living other lives somewhere else has been <a href="https://twitter.com/MayorEmanuel/status/39890000833298432">endlessly fascinating</a> to me. The multiverse has been a staple in sci-fi storytelling forever and is about to be ubiquitous for the next few years since Marvel is hooking their next billion dollars to the concept. But the film Everything Everywhere All at Once breaks the genre so completely as to own it forever by using the multiverse to explore the complexities of a mother's relationship with her daughter and to show what it is to be stuck between the life you lead and the ones you want.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYEaaAgS0AV9_ZwEAAAAC">South Side</a> / <a href="https://www.hulu.com/series/reservation-dogs-5a310c23-e2db-4c9f-a66c-27c2fee43d92">Reservation Dogs</a> / <a href="https://www.hulu.com/series/this-fool-18ea1265-5978-41d7-b619-2ad23e075a71">This Fool</a><br />
All three of these TV shows are rooted so completely in place—Chicago's South Side, a reservation in rural Oklahoma, and South Central LA—that location plays an essential character. And that's saying something because all three are masterful character studies as well. Each show is able to be uproariously hilarious while also presenting characters with real human depth and are written with such storytelling mastery that they bend the 30 minute comedy genre to whatever story they want to tell.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://www.inscryption.com/">Inscryption</a> / <a href="https://www.marvelsnap.com/">Marvel Snap</a><br />
I am a sucker for nerdy card games. And this year I discovered two digital ones on opposite ends of the spectrum. Inscryption is an independent, deeply creepy, gene-busting card game <em>about</em> card games. The less you know about it going in the better, but know that it will continue to subvert your expectations through the very last hand you play. Marvel Snap is a high-gloss, big-budget, IP-heavy, mobile game that should be shitty but is instead totally fun, addictive, and offers genuinely new ideas in a format that mostly just keeps reinventing Magic: The Gathering.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://wilcohq.bandcamp.com/album/cruel-country">Cruel Country</a> by Wilco<br />
Look, I'm a 48-year-old white dude with a beard: <em>of course</em> I loved the new Wilco record.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Bonus: <a href="https://www.redkap.com/products/outerwear/coveralls">Coveralls</a><br />
I basically only wear coveralls now. Every now and then I go through a period of reinvention and with 2022 ending and 2023 feeling like it's filled with new possibilities, I'm dressing in a new uniform for new me, let's go.</p>
</li>
</ol>
A Year of WorkI have friends with hobbies. Friends who do pottery, who take pictures, who go hiking, who make scarves and tables. I've always kind of wanted a hobby, but they've never stuck. Instead, I work. Honestly, I love it and it's gratifying to look back at the work I did this year.2022-12-29T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/work2022/<p>I have friends with hobbies. Friends who do pottery, who take pictures, who go hiking, who make scarves or tables or beaded doodads. I've always kind of wanted a hobby, but they've never stuck. Instead, I work.</p>
<p>In his beautiful experimental memoir <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/goodbye-again-essays-reflections-and-illustrations-jonny-sun/15879562?aid=25721&ean=9780062880857&listref=books-mentioned-on-the-pod-d4852f2f-9582-4ba3-8845-db5bcedce8c4"><em>Goodbye Again</em></a>, Jonny Sun writes about work:</p>
<blockquote class="my-4 px-10 border-l-4 border-grey-800 italic">
I find the idea of work, and working, comforting. It feels like I can leave everything else behind, but as long as I am with myself, I can always work, I can always do _something_ with my time. It is something I can always turn to.
</blockquote>
<p>Honestly, I love to work. As Jonny writes, it is something I can always turn to. Since I started <em>Punk Planet</em> when I was 19, I've largely fashioned my own work. Even when I've worked for someone else, I've never stopped working for myself too. Some of the lowest moments of my life have been defined in part by feeling unable to conjure the ideas, momentum, and enthusiasm to work. Thankfully, this year was not one of those years.</p>
<p>Here's a little rundown of some of the work I did this year that you should check out:</p>
<h3 class=" text-gray-700 sm:text-2xl font-cooperblack mt-6 mb-4">Writing</h3>
<p>This year I made a conscious effort to break from the two years of COVID essays that defined much of my writing in 2020 and 2021. Not that the pandemic is over by any means, but I was feeling boxed in by that writing and wanted broaden my output.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.esquire.com/sports/a39008053/cm-punk-aew-profile/">The Fall and Rise of CM Punk</a><br />
The biggest thing I wrote this year was a profile for <em>Esquire</em> of Phil Brooks, better known as the wrestler CM Punk, and his return to the wrestling ring after quitting the WWE nearly a decade ago. It features one of my favorite lines I've ever written: "It can take a while to realize the path you were on was the right one at the wrong time. That the thing you loved then is still the thing you love now, and that it’s still there, waiting for you." Honestly, that line's as much about me and writing as it is about Brooks and wrestling.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a39875586/jeff-tweedy-wilco-cruel-country-interview/">Jeff Tweedy Knows Good Days</a><br />
I was lucky enough to get to be the first reporter to interview Wilco's Jeff Tweedy about the latest Wilco record, <em>Cruel Country</em>. Despite the record being fantastic, we barely talked about it, but instead talked about hope. It was one of those conversations that I needed to have.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a40183069/parenting-school-shootings/">Parenting in the Time of School Shootings</a><br />
This essay was a raw nerve, a loose electric wire, pure fire and anger, written in the days after the slaughter of children in Uvalde Texas. Rereading it now, it's a hard read but a necessary one.</p>
<p><a href="https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/weird-twitter-elon-musk-dril-darth-horseebooks-mayor-emmanuel.html">When Everything Happened So Much</a><br />
As the implications of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter became clear, I had a proposal: It was time to get weird. Things have been weird over on that site ever since.</p>
<h3 class=" text-gray-700 sm:text-2xl font-cooperblack mt-6 mb-4">Podcasting</h3>
<p><a href="https://sayswhopodcast.com/">Says Who Podcast</a><br />
Says Who released 44 episodes this year, plus 38 bonus episodes for our <a href="https://www.patreon.com/sayswho">Patreon supporters</a>. Omfg that is bonkers. I <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/maureen">just wrote</a> about the unique relationship that Maureen Johnson, my co-host and co-conspirator on the podcast and I share, but suffice it to say that this year's episodes chronicled the further unraveling of both American society and our minds. If you're new to the podcast and looking for a jumping-on point, good luck—<em>haha</em>. But also this episode <a href="https://sayswhopodcast.com/episodes/coke">about the revelation that Trump's Diet Coke valet leaked to the feds</a> is maybe one. Mostly, it's a weekly current events podcast: just jump in on the most recent episode and hang on.</p>
<p><a href="https://thehitchpodcast.com/">The Hitch</a><br />
In addition to Says Who, my partner Janice and I continued to document our summers spent in our trailer Evangeline on our podcast The Hitch. Easily the most wholesome content I make, every episode is a pretty chill 10-20 minutes of two people recounting their day from the rear bed of our Airstream. We started The Hitch the after Janice's cancer recovery and there's an underlying theme of doing hard things (and celebrating life) throughout the podcast. If you want a jumping on point, either just <a href="https://thehitchpodcast.com/episodes/day0">start at the start of this summer</a>, or join us in <a href="https://thehitchpodcast.com/episodes/s4d19">overcoming our fear of driving over the mountains</a>.</p>
<h3 class=" text-gray-700 sm:text-2xl font-cooperblack mt-6 mb-4">Other Cool Shit</h3>
<p>Plenty of what I do doesn't fall into an easy category so here's some highlights of other things:</p>
<p><span class="font-semibold">This Blog</span><br />
In the aftermath of Twitter's takeover, <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/newblogwhothis/">I decided</a> I needed to start establishing some spaces outside of owned platforms. When I rebuilt dansinker.com it was just going to be a more robust "about me" site, but late in the game I decided that one of the things that the collapse of the big platforms enabled was revisiting some of the good ideas of the "old" internet so I dove into make a blog. Honestly, it has been so awesome I'm kicking myself for ever stopping.</p>
<img class="mt-6" src="https://dansinker.com/images/uploads/sticker-club-2022.jpg" alt="a sample of six stickers from the Says Who Sticker Club including two tarot cards of Maureen and Dan, a splat that reads The Rudy Horror Ketchup Show, one that reads Hot Pox Summer, a framed painting of Twitter burning down, and a ouiji puck that reads It's All Around You" />
<p class="text-xs">A small selection of the 12 stickers club members got this year</p>
<p><span class="font-semibold">Says Who Sticker Club</span><br />
Every month I look forward to designing, ordering, and shipping the sticker that goes out to the <a href="https://www.patreon.com/sayswho">$10 Patreon supporters of Says Who</a>. Creating these little pieces of ephemera—sometimes capturing a moment from the podcast, other times a reference to current events, sometimes just a piece of podcast-adjacent art—is a monthly joy. As someone that came up making art, reconnecting with drawing, type, and design has been a joy.</p>
<image class="mt-6" src="/images/uploads/patches.jpg" alt="two patches I designed, one is a patch for the Environmental Rescue Team from the book The Terraformers, and the other is a 2022 survival badge for Says Who Podcast that reads It was weird, but we did it.">
<p class="text-xs">Patch for Annalee Newitz on the left, for Says Who supporters on the right</p>
<p><span class="font-semibold">Patches</span><br />
The work on the Says Who Sticker Club lead directly to an email from author Annalee Newitz, who wanted me to design a patch to promote her new book <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-terraformers-annalee-newitz/18401700?ean=9781250228017">The Terraformers</a>. I'd never made an embroidered patch before, so not only was it a fun design challenge, it was also a kick-ass research project to find a manufacturer and understand the process enough to make something great. In fact, it was so fun I did it again as a surprise year-end gift for <a href="https://www.patreon.com/sayswho">Says Who supporters</a>.</p>
<p>I've done a lot more work than all of this, but these were the highlights this year. Go check 'em out, and let's get to work in 2023.</p>
</image>Someday you, and all you put your hand to, will turn goldenToday my pal Maureen Johnson releases her latest novel and I reflect on what it means to want the very best for the people you care about.2022-12-27T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/maureen/<p>"I wanna hear your voice, coming out of my radio. I wanna see your face on the billboard sign," <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3fjixnusWBOxjDO3AMe3Ii">Kelly Hogan sings in her song "Golden."</a> "'Cause I know how hard you try, and I know sometimes it makes you cry. I just wish I could be there to bring you back."</p>
<p>Hogan's song is, to me, the most honest assessment of what it is to have a friend who puts art out into the world. You want everything for them—success, fame—but mostly you want them to know that you see the work they put in and that you're in their corner for every punch. (It's the opposite of Morrissey's "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful," but <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2019-10-24/morrissey-anti-immigrant-white-nationalist-hollywood-bowl">Morrissey is an asshole</a> so that's unsurprising.)</p>
<p>I write this today not because <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3fjixnusWBOxjDO3AMe3Ii">Hogan's song</a> is both beautiful and underappreciated (though it is) but because my friend <a href="https://www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com/">Maureen Johnson</a> has a new book out today, <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/nine-liars-maureen-johnson/18500290?aid=25721&ean=9780063032651&listref=maureen-dan-s-books">Nine Liars</a>, and in similar fashion to Hogan's lyrical protagonist, I want everything for Maureen to turn golden.</p>
<p>The first time I interacted with Maureen Johnson, I cussed her out. I was writing as <a href="https://quaxelrod.com/">@MayorEmanuel</a>, the then-anonymous, famously profane Twitter account. It was almost exactly 12 years ago to the day, December 26, 2010, and she'd @ replied to the account to <a href="https://twitter.com/maureenjohnson/status/19077470665834496?s=20&t=oqxzgN965QzWWSgf6V2iig">find out</a> what my fictional Rahm had gotten for Christmas. "I'm fucking Jewish, you stupid fucking fuck," <a href="https://twitter.com/MayorEmanuel/status/19078081524269057?s=20&t=cvDekqlXGv9sTPtxCSbKAw">I replied</a>.</p>
<p>It wasn't exactly the place you'd expect a friendship to start, but when <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/revealing-the-man-behind-mayoremanuel/71802/">I was revealed</a> as the author of the @MayorEmanuel account back in 2011, we connected through our agents. We got lunch when I was out in New York a few months later and had one of the most fascinating—and hilarious—conversations about the publishing industry I've ever had. After that we kept in touch over the internet the way everyone does, cracking jokes on Twitter and talking shit in DMs. When I was in New York for work, which was pretty frequent back then, we'd grab lunch.</p>
<p>We started talking about doing a podcast together in 2013, but it didn't amount to anything until a couple years later. During the stressful final months of the 2016 presidential election I pitched her a simple idea: an eight episode podcast about coping through the final eight weeks of that brutal election, one episode a week. We were both busy, I wrote, and so keeping it to eight meant it wouldn't take over our lives. We were going to end it with a livestream on election night, a celebration of both the end of our eight weeks of work and of the election results.</p>
<p>Except.</p>
<p>Except you know how the 2016 election ended—terribly—and so <a href="https://sayswhopodcast.com/">Says Who</a>, the podcast we'd started, didn't end. And the most extraordinary thing happened: What began as two people helping each other make it through a hard election cycle became two people helping each other make it through a hard <em>life</em>.</p>
<p>Those eight episodes have stretched to hundreds and continue to grow. Week in and week out, year in and year out, Maureen and I have been there for each other, not just to cope with the reemergence of fascism and white supremacy in this era of American politics, but to cope with deaths in our family, with debilitating illnesses, and with all of the highs and lows that come with living lives that become ever-more intertwined over the years. It's been an entire friendship recorded and released into the world, disguised as a podcast about current events. The only people I talk to with more regularly than Maureen live inside my home.</p>
<p>And so it is that today I find myself beaming with the kind of pride that <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3fjixnusWBOxjDO3AMe3Ii">Kelly Hogan sings about</a> for <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/nine-liars-maureen-johnson/18500290?aid=25721&ean=9780063032651&listref=maureen-dan-s-books">the release of Nine Liars</a>, Maureen's latest book in her <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/truly-devious-a-mystery-maureen-johnson/6782740?aid=25721&ean=9780062338068&listref=maureen-dan-s-books">Truly Devious</a> series of mysteries. I've read it. It's great. There's murder.</p>
<p>Being an author in 2022 is impossible. An already-concentrated industry has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/opinion/penguin-simon-schuster-publishing.html">consolidated further</a>. There's an over-reliance on books to become instant hits right out of the gate, setting a ridiculously high bar for authors to meet. And the platforms that writers have come to rely on to reach their audiences—in part to hype them up for that all-important first week of release—<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074/">are crumbling</a>. It's a nightmare.</p>
<p>So here's my ask (Maureen is going to kill me for writing this btw): <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/nine-liars-maureen-johnson/18500290?aid=25721&ean=9780063032651&listref=maureen-dan-s-books">Pick up Maureen's book</a> (note: all book links in this post are to the <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/sayswho">Says Who Bookshop.org</a> store, so the podcast gets a little bit of affiliate percentage). Maybe pick it up for yourself, or maybe pick it up for that friend who has been there for you the way Maureen has been there for me: through it all, no questions asked. We don't get a lot in this life, but if you're lucky you get to live it surrounded by people who make us better, who push us forward, and who make the moments count. I'm lucky.</p>
<p>Congratulations Maureen on your book release day. I'll see you on the internet.</p>
<p class="italic">So go on, show 'em what you're made of
<br />With all my heart, I wish these things for you
<br />Someday you, and all you put your hand to
<br />Will turn golden</p>
Everything Gets Brighter From HereIt's bitter cold, my kids are home doing school on Zoom, and I'm feeling oddly optimistic. Weird, I know. Here are three things that are contributing to that for me.2022-12-23T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/threethings/<p>There's a windchill of -40 degrees here in Chicago right now, part of a massive freeze that has set in across most of the United States. The cold forced my youngest child back into Zoom school for the day and overhearing his teacher beg for them to mute themselves while he laughs and jokes with friends has been a flashback to the time in the pandemic when <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a34028673/parenting-pandemic-zoom-school/">everyone was doing everything at home</a>. It's been weird and slightly traumatizing, but also sort of pleasant, and mostly has me thinking about our lives then and our lives now.</p>
<p>And maybe it's that, or maybe it's that the shortest day of the year is behind us and now every day gets brighter from here, or maybe it's that 2022 is wrapping up in unexpected—but not wholly awful—ways, or maybe it's a little bit of all of it, but I'm feeling… optimistic?</p>
<p>I know, it's weird.</p>
<p>But, in the spirit of things getting brighter, even if only by a little, I thought I'd share three short things that are contributing to me feeling this way.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>It feels like the platforms that have defined and dictated our interactions online for the last 15 years or so have been dealt a real blow for the first time in forever. Twitter, obviously, is on the ropes. The purchase by Elon Musk and every terrible decision he's made since has lead to the first real, sustained exodus off the platform I've ever witnessed. But beyond Twitter, Facebook has been hemorrhaging <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meta-stock-down-earnings-700-billion-in-lost-value/">money, users, and stock value</a> as Mark Zuckerberg pursues his folly in the dead-on-arrival metaverse, and that means every other platform you probably use—remember Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp too—are weakened as well. I'm not quite at a point where I'm willing to say that the era of platforms is <em>fully</em> over, but there's a crack in the armor that up until now has felt impenetrable. And, as someone that <a href="https://punkplanet.com/">came up with DIY punk</a> and will always choose the independent route when possible, that means that right now the possibilities on the internet feel endless for the first time in a long while. Will it last? Who knows, but let's <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/">try new things</a> while we can.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>"Trying new things" is part of why I've spent much of the fall and the start of this bitter cold winter playing around with <a href="https://midjourney.com/">generative AI tools</a>. I'm generally pretty cynical about trends in tech, but there is something <em>deeply</em> satisfying about being able to generate an <a href="https://dansinker.com/images/uploads/mad-max-weiner-1.jpeg">endless</a> <a href="https://dansinker.com/images/uploads/mad-max-weiner-2.jpeg">number</a> <a href="https://dansinker.com/images/uploads/mad-max-weiner-3.jpeg">of</a> <a href="https://dansinker.com/images/uploads/mad-max-weiner-4.jpeg">variations</a> of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile in Mad Max: Fury Road. Diving deeply into the world of these various AI bots and experimenting with how to ask things in the right way to get the results you want (nerdier people than me have named this "prompt engineering") has been a learning journey at a time that, for me, has felt very difficult to learn new things. In fact, I'm not just learning to talk to bots: writing code with the help of the <a href="https://chat.openai.com/">chatGPT</a> tool was instrumental in launching this very site a few weeks ago. By talking with the bot, I was able to learn and troubleshoot code in ways that felt like a revelation. Yes, there are a near-endless <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/20/1059792/the-algorithm-ai-generated-art-raises-tricky-questions-about-ethics-copyright-and-security/">number of ethical quandaries</a> wrapped up in all these tools, and I totally understand the arguments against them, but also it's been <em>so long</em> that anything on this screen has felt truly surprising to me, and these things generate surprises on the daily, so I'm going to ride it out for a minute.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>On the completely opposite side of things, I've become totally obsessed with classic hand-painted signage. When my friend Searah moved her shop this year, she hired a sign painter to do a traditional gold-leafed sign in her window, and watching <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd4JE8-rpnY/?igshid=Yzg5MTU1MDY%3D">video of them doing that work</a> lead me down an Instagram rabbit hole of following an <a href="https://instagram.com/heartandbonesigns">ever</a>-<a href="https://instagram.com/theluminorsignco">increasing</a> <a href="https://instagram.com/tozersigns">number</a> of <a href="https://instagram.com/bryan.yonki">sign</a> <a href="https://instagram.com/painterkafeelartist">painters</a>. With much of our lives shifting online, it's incredible to follow this thriving community of artists—many young and tattooed and carrying on traditional approaches—as they create things of beauty in the public way. I think it's a harbinger of things to come. In part <em>because</em> of the shift to online school, work, and lives in the last few years, I think there's a renewed appreciation of the things that can't be easily reproduced on a screen. Similar to how vinyl has seen a comeback, I think we're poised to see the return of a lot of long-written-off analog approaches to making things. As excited as I am about changes happening in the digital space, I think the potential for a renaissance of analog arts and production has me more excited than anything.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>OK, that's it: three from me. I hope you are warm, I hope you are safe, and I hope the potential of positive change in the new year actually comes to pass.</p>
<p>(And I promise to revert to my normal pessimistic, dour self soon.)</p>
I Read the News Today, Oh Boy.(Mostly) leaving Twitter has left me feeling disconnected from the news for the first time in a very long time. I reconnected by revisiting a technology I'd mostly forgotten about, RSS.2022-12-19T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/rssfeeds/<p>As I wrote the other day, <a href="https://dansinker.com/posts/musk/">I've mostly left Twitter</a> at this point. Maybe for good, certainly until it becomes a less awful place run by less awful people. I departed for <a href="https://joinmastodon.org/">Mastodon</a>, which felt weird and lonely for a while but after giving it some time (and a few huge influxes of Musk-driven Twitter exiles) it has become a pretty good alternative for the conversational aspects of Twitter. But it hasn't replaced one of the major reasons that Twitter clicked for me: as <em>the</em> primary place to find out about news. And, as a result, I've felt disconnected from news for the first time in a very, very long time.</p>
<p>A dozen or so years ago when "the future of news" was the hottest topic in journalism, one phrase was inescapable: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/politics/27voters.html">"If the news is that important, it will find me.”</a> It was the dawning of mass-scale social sharing on sites like Facebook and Twitter and it was a wake-up-call for news executives, slow once again to adapt to new trends, and a battle cry for those of us who desperately wanted to move journalism forward: you couldn't expect a news reader to come to you anymore, you had to find them where they were.</p>
<p>That notion was, of course, correct, and in the decade since it's made us all far more passive news consumers. We wait for the news to find us, secure in the knowledge that it will. (There's a <em>whole other essay</em> about how the platforms tweaked their algorithms to juice engagement and, as a result, the news that found us basically broke us, but let's stick to the topic at hand.)</p>
<p>Now that we're in a moment of disruption and there's the potential that social media might be very different on the other side of it, we're going to need to retrain ourselves to become more active news consumers again. Or, at least, I am.</p>
<p>Which is how I ended up firing up an RSS feed reader for the first timed in a long time last week. And honestly, when I launched it, it felt like a revelation.</p>
<p>For those of you that don't remember or never knew, RSS is a decidedly non-sexy technology that underlies a lot of the web. Most things that publish to the internet also publish an RSS feed—encoded versions of the same content designed to be machine-readable. It used to be that most sites would easily expose that feed and <em>feed readers</em>, apps and sites that would grab it, were popular for a while because they took content from all over the web and brought it right to you. Social sharing killed RSS readers. The reader that most people used, Google Reader, was shuttered to push more people to, I think, their failed social sharing platform Buzz, and that was that. Most people forgot about RSS. (Except for one big exception: if you listen to podcasts, you're using RSS every time you get a new episode delivered.)</p>
<p>Anyway, I downloaded an RSS reader because I wanted to be sure that the feed being pushed out by <a href="https://dansinker.com/feed.xml">this very website</a> was valid. But instead of starting blank, adding my site, and probably calling it a day, it turns out that at some point I'd previously set up <a href="https://feedly.com/">Feedly</a>, the app I chose (likely in a post-Reader hunt for a replacement), and so after I logged in, it pulled in news from sites I cared about back in the late 2000s. It was a nice moment to revisit the person I was then, but also it was a lightbulb going off in my head: Here was a feed! Of news! That's current! It felt familiar in a way that felt good, but also decidedly did <em>not</em> feel like Twitter.</p>
<p>I got to work. I deleted a great number of feeds (apparently I <em>really</em> cared about Apple rumors back in 2009 or so) and replaced them with sites that were relevant to me now, creating topical clusters of news. Adding sites was straightforward, I never once had to copy an XML link, and suddenly I was building a stream of news that I <em>actually</em> wanted to read. Much more local, much less outrage, and far, <em>far</em> less Trump than on Twitter.</p>
<p>I've stuck with it since. In order to retrain my brain, I put the app inside the folder on my phone I call "Distract" which mostly holds games. Now instead of instinctively clicking on Marvel Snap in the morning, I clear out my feeds first. And I've found it, at least for now, to be a useful replacement for getting news from Twitter.</p>
<p>Sure, it's not as immediate as the BREAKING NEWS KLAXONS that have come to dominate news distribution on Twitter, but it's also much less doom-inducing and far less outrage-stoking than news there. And yet I also feel like I'm actually seeing <em>more</em> news than I had before, especially in topics I really care about.</p>
<p>So for now, that's how I'm getting my news. If you're feeling adrift post-Twitter, it might be worth trying RSS out for yourself. What a wild sentence to write in 2022. Maybe everything old really is new again.</p>
It's Not Yesterday AnymoreOur lives are so intertwined with the technology we use to live them at this point that to lose a space inside our glowing rectangles feels like true loss. Yes, this is about Twitter.2022-12-15T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/musk/<p>As I write this, journalists are being <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/technology/twitter-suspends-journalist-accounts-elon-musk.html">banned from Twitter</a> for reasons both petty and arbitrary and <em>almost</em> too annoying to even explain. The short of it is that <a href="https://twitter.com/elonjet">there's an account</a> that tracks and posts the movements of Elon Musk's private jet using publicly-available data. After vowing that he was such a free-speech absolutist <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456">back in November</a> that he'd never ban the jet account (which at one point he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/technology/elon-musk-jet-tracking.html">tried to buy</a> from the literal college kid who runs it), he banned it last night, then un-banned it, then banned it again and is now playing whack-a-mole with journalists and others that are sharing links to the account on other platforms. The long of it is much more convoluted and told in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/14/elonjet-twitter-suspension-jack-sweeney-talks/">more detail elsewhere</a>.</p>
<p>This is, of course, the latest in a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-12-14/elon-musk-twitter-ownership-full-of-firings-ad-cuts-chaos">near-constant string</a> of shitty news coming out of Twitter since Musk took over. Some of it has been funny, like the day he opened up bluechecks for anyone with $8 to burn without listening to the people who warned him it would lead to a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-blue-most-shocking-verified-account-impersonations-2022-11#tweet-from-us-senator-ted-cruz-impersonator-4">flood of impersonations</a>, but most of it has just been awful: from firing <a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-11-21/musk-fires-more-twitter-sales-workers-after-hardcore-purge">around three-quarters</a> of the people that work there—in ways also petty and arbitrary—to opening the floodgates for the <a href="https://www.engadget.com/twitter-restores-andrew-anglins-account-192658758.html">fascists</a> that had been banned from the platform in recent years, to the predictable racist, homophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic attacks that followed. Twitter is no longer a good place to be.</p>
<p>Which sucks because, for me, despite <em>all the reasons it was intolerable at times</em>, Twitter was where I spent a great deal of my time. It's where I made friends, met colleagues, cracked jokes, built <a href="https://sayswhopodcast.com/">lasting collaborations</a>, and yes, got a little bit <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/revealing-the-man-behind-mayoremanuel/71802/">famous</a> for a bit. When I'm being honest with myself, I'd say the last decade of my life is probably largely defined by Twitter (<em>oh god</em>), and so the month or two that has passed since Musk took over has felt, to me, a bit like grief.</p>
<p>Look, I get it: <em>Come on man, it's Twitter</em>. But also, you probably understand a little too. Our lives are so intertwined with the technology we use to live them that to lose a space inside our glowing rectangles feels like true loss. Because it is.</p>
<p>I've been weaning myself off Twitter since the first wave of layoffs, and each new hit of news reinforces that it's probably the right move. But it's not an easy one. Every part has been hard. I found my muscle-memory to launch Twitter was so ingrained that I swapped the icon on my phone with Mastodon just to retrain my brain. Hell, I built this entire website from scratch just to establish my presence in a space that I could actually own and control (yes, I could have done that part easier, but I'll always choose the hard way). Mostly, I miss my friends.</p>
<p>I'm still on Twitter occasionally, but my interactions are perfunctory now. Links to new episodes of <a href="https://sayswhopodcast.com/">my podcast</a>, or to the <a href="https://omfg.town/@dansinker">other places</a> people can find me on the internet. When I'm there it feels louder and meaner than I remember, but I think probably it's the same. I want better for Twitter than the awful existence that Musk has charted. But mostly, I want better for <em>us</em>.</p>
<p>Figuring out places to be, ways to keep connections alive, find new methods of sharing experiences with others has been my driving factor of the last month or so, and I think for many of us will define a lot of our 2023. My hope is that we won't simply replace one monolithic platform with another. That we'll take this disruption in routine as an opportunity to further disrupt a status quo that has needed disruption for some time. That we'll try new things, build new things, find new ways to connect that don't simply replicate the patterns of the past but instead move toward a future that feels better for everyone.</p>
Food Carts on the Edge of the WorldA story of an endless walk in Buenos Aires and the dreamlike place (and food) that it lead to. Shared today in honor of Argentina's advancement to the World Cup finals.2022-12-13T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/frogsongs/<p class="italic text-md">In honor of Argentina’s advancement to the finals of the World Cup, I thought I’d dip into my drafts folder and share this memory:</p>
<p>I used to travel to Buenos Aires for a journalism conference once a year. 14 hours south from Chicago by plane. You'd traverse only two time zones the whole way down, so you had no real jetlag when you got there, but you were still tired as hell.</p>
<p>You'd land, make your way to a cheap hotel room—a futon for a bed usually—and crash out. Then you'd wake up hungry. Hungrier than you'd ever felt, your last real meal was probably a full day ago at that point.</p>
<p>And you'd meet up with a bunch of other folks who’d flown in for the conference, your family for the week—everyone equally groggy and sleep-deprived, some flying for 24 hours straight from all over the world—and you'd start walking through the streets of Buenos Aires looking for food.</p>
<p>Most of my memories of those trips are linked to food in one way or another, including one at a former squat-turned-tango-bar where we consumed a dozen bottles of wine and I was held at knifepoint until I let a woman braid my beard. But my very favorite memory was one where a friend who lived down in BA took us on a near-endless walk, all the way to the edge where the city meets the water.</p>
<p>It was an area that used to be docklands and warehouses, he explained, but most had recently been converted to high-end apartments and hotels. One thing that hadn't changed was the food carts, set up on the edge of a gigantic nature preserve. They'd served the dockworkers for decades and served all-comers now.</p>
<p>It was night—when we'd left on the walk it was day—and the grill smoke coming from the carts, a dozen or so in a line, enveloped you, thick and pungent. It was the last street on that side of the city. After that there was a stone wall, waist high, and then an endless sea of darkness: the nature preserve. It was like the world just ended, a void.</p>
<p>"Which cart is good," I remember asking my friend Manuel, and he laughed and said "all of them" and I got the best steak sandwich I'd ever had. The steak, thin cut and crisp in parts with chewy bits of fat. The bread, light but crusty, absorbing drippings the moment the meat hit it. Bowls of toppings sat on folding tables, haphazardly covered with plastic wrap and flies. You piled on chimichurri and onions and whatever else you wanted.</p>
<p>You bought an absolutely enormous bottle of not-very-good beer to go with it, not quite as big as a 40 and much weaker than malt liquor, but I can't imagine a better pairing.</p>
<p>Plenty of tables lined the street, but we set up on the wall, some sitting on it, others standing alongside. It was then—away from the grills and the tinny radios playing music, a different song from each cart, a cacophony of music—sandwich in one hand and enormous beer in the other that I first heard it:</p>
<p>A high, droning whine, enormous in size, a wall of sound, impenetrable, coming from the dark expanse next to us.</p>
<p>"What are those?" I asked Manuel, thinking about the night songs of forests here in the Midwest, "Crickets?"</p>
<p>"No," he laughed, taking a big drink of his beer, "Frogs. Millions of frogs. Singing"</p>
<p>And we sat there for hours, in the dark and the grill smoke, eating these amazing sandwiches listening to the endless songs of frogs. Songs that are impossible to forget forever.</p>
New Blog, Who This?It's been a decade since I last really blogged. What could possibly go wrong?2022-12-10T00:00:00Zhttps://dansinker.com/posts/newblogwhothis/<p>I'm not sure when I stopped blogging the same way that I'm not sure when I started. The same way that everything feels sort of blurry if it dates back far enough. But I had my fair share of Blogspots, that much I remember. There was one where I just wrote about the <a href="http://myeyesglazeover.blogspot.com/">changes happening in journalism</a> in the mid-2000s. There was one where I wrote very personal <a href="http://dearmrbush.blogspot.com/">letters to the president</a>, back when that president was a Bush. There was even one that me and a bunch of friends <a href="http://whatthefrakk.blogspot.com/">wrote about Battlestar Galactica</a>. So believe me when I tell you I have blogged.</p>
<p>And then, I didn't.</p>
<p>There's any number of reasons why, from simply getting too busy with various jobs, to finding outlets that would publish my writing for money, to growing bored of the subjects I was blogging on. But the biggest reason was that the ideas that I used to blog about ended up on Twitter instead. Thoughts on <a href="https://twitter.com/dansinker/status/1040317786902474758?s=20&t=Nvdeq3hdvW9Ypcmmog_ePQ">journalism</a>, on the <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adansinker%20%22Fuck%20Donald%20Trump%22&src=typed_query&f=live">president</a>, even on <a href="https://kottke.org/17/12/the-peoples-history-of-tattooine">sci fi classics</a>. Honestly, Twitter became everything to me: A social life, a place to find work, a launching point for a million different things. Twitter literally <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/revealing-the-man-behind-mayoremanuel/71802/">changed my life</a>.</p>
<p>But nothing lasts forever. I know this well and yet it hurts every time it happens. And now, with the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk and his rapid transformation of the platform into a Fox News fever dream, I—like a lot of other people—am looking for ways out. I have all the feels about this, most of them sad, for all the reasons I just stated above. But a song I loved a long time ago always told me that "the secret to a long life is knowing when it's time to go," and I'm pretty sure it's time to go.</p>
<p>Which is a very long way of saying that I'm going to revisit blogging again. Part of it is to talk about this interesting time in the ongoing story of the Internet, about the possibilities that are opening up after a decade of stagnation at the hands of giant corporations. But more than that, with Twitter slipping away I feel like I'd like a place to do the sort of thinking-out-loud that I used to do on Twitter and, well, I'd like to do it in a place that I actually own this time.</p>
<p>So here we are. Nothing can possibly go wrong now.</p>