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Reading
Our Misguided Obsession with Twitter Cal Newport, Thought Leader extraordinaire, doing a victory lap on his claim that he's never even had a Twitter account. But, that's a pretty justifiable boast at this point, seeing that it's become a hellsite dominated by a bunch of shitheads.

I, along with a bunch of people I still call friends, were on there super early. January 2007, to be exact. I'm user #616,673 out of however many billions of accounts have been created at this point. It used to be a pretty fun place to just be a nerd and meet folks from all over the world with similar interests. I used to go to Ruby meetups at the Twitter office back in 2007/2008 when none of the Twitter employees could even participate because they were too busy putting out database fires. It's not an exaggeration to say being on Twitter that early on largely impacted the trajectory of my life. I met lots of cool, smart folks who I would have never met otherwise. I pretty much worked at Simple because of Twitter.

But once it started hitting critical mass, it got to be pretty unhealthy for me. I mentioned in a previous issue that I got into a pretty bad cycle of searching twitter for mentions of the product I was building at Simple, naturally honing in on the minority of negative comments. It became the first mass market platform for people to just talk shit under the protection of relative anonymity. It mostly took moving on to a different job that I didn't help directly build to extricate myself from it.

I still used it to keep track of friends and get links and whatnot. But then, as Newport puts it…

I definitely consider myself one of the "original users" of the platform. I loved the sharing and discovery. And, I have sense fled.

I'll still browse it every once in a while to see if I can capture a few interesting nuggets, but, for the most part, it's a tire fire. Some folks say you can still derive a lot of value if you are diligent about curating your lists, blocking people judiciously, etc. But after the whole Trump thing, and now the Musk crap… it's just not worth putting any time into.

I've found myself going back to the old stuff for the most part. Those friends I made on Twitter are now mostly in private group texts and Slacks/Discords. I subscribe to email newsletters and now, of course, author one (👋🏼). RSS is back and better than ever, even though I replaced it with Twitter and even built a whole product around that 12 years ago. But now, with services like Readwise Reader, Feedbin, and apps like Reeder, it's a really nice way to aggregate all your interests. And clever services like Mailbrew let you mix and match a whole bunch of stuff that gets delivered to you every day via email.

So, anyways… this article articulates a lot of the underlying reasons why Twitter just kinda sucks these days and why it's bad for your health. It was fun while it lasted, but, like so many other things, it's probably just time to admit defeat and let the loud assholes have it. Or, move to TRUTH SOCIAL lol.

Hey – So if you're reading this, you may have noticed I use something called Hey.com to publish it. However, it's not really a newsletter/blog publishing platform… that's kind of a byproduct of its main focus — email.

First off, a disclaimer. Yeah, I know, the 37signals/Basecamp dudes are fuckin' douchey. They've become ultra rich tech dudes by telling the world they've Figured Everything Out , proselytizing to anyone who will listen. They drive race cars and have Three Letter Acronym personal brands.  Watching the whole company implode after decades of that was both disappointing and extremely satisfying.

Aside from all that, they've been making products since like 2004. They kinda invented the whole modern SaaS thing with Basecamp and Rails. Basecamp is decent, I used it a few times back in the day for project management. Rails, as much as its maligned these days, is still probably what I'd build a new app in if it came down to it. In fact, I'm pretty much currently employed thanks to Rails, and lots of people like me are as well.

They came out with an email service a couple years ago called Hey. Basecamp had a "Hey" section that was their cutesy name for notifications etc, and I guess they brought the name over for a full product. Sounds like they spent a shit ton of money on the hey.com domain, even though they used to preach that type of thing didn't matter. Either way, Basecamp has been heavily email based for the last 18 years, so I figured they knew a bit about managing email (which is a damn nightmare). I already had a Fastmail account (referral link for 10% off if you're interested), which is actually super nice, but their approach of trying to just be Really Good But Normal Email as much as possible never really grabbed me. And, I of course have had Gmail since like 2004 or whenever, but I don't like Google. I'd rather use something by douchey loudmouths running a relatively small app than a shitty multinational advertising company.

Anyways, Hey has some pretty novel ideas. The main premise is that any email that arrives gets put into a screener where you can choose to allow that address to email you or not. If you choose to screen them out, any subsequent messages from them get sequestered into its own section. Not quite a spam folder, but similar. Makes it pretty easy to sign up for stuff with your regular address when you know you'll have some control over it.

If you choose to allow it, you can specify if you want it to go to the "Imbox" (IMportant Inbox or something like that… yeah, I know 😑), the Newsfeed, or the Paper Trail. Imbox has an interesting behavior in that reading a message puts the thread into a "previously seen" section automatically. It's available on the main screen, but it's below the unread stuff. You can even choose to put a picture over the previously seen section so it doesn't distract you. It's kinda nice just having the stuff go away while still being easily accessible.

The Newsfeed is optimized for the email newsletter renaissance, with all the stuff that lands in there as a continuous feed where you can read them inline. It's pretty nice, but now that I'm in the Readwise Reader beta (I wrote about it in Issue 2), I just choose to have newsletters go directly there, or I forward them in. It's still a nice feature for the way folks actually use email these days, though.

And the paper trail is a place to send email receipts for the most part. Lots of email addresses just send you transactional emails, and the paper trail is a pretty good place for them to go.

You can mark any message as "set aside" to refer to later, or to "reply later". Lots of email apps have a snooze functionality that will take them out of the inbox and bring them back later, but these keep them available from the main page in a little stack. Again, people have been doing the "set aside" with flags or labels and a saved search, and reply later with similar strategies or snoozing, but these are two features that are directly addressing the normal flow most people have organically landed on.

The basic workflow and features pretty much cover everything I need for personal email these days. There are lots of other features, but I don't make much use of them. 

Except, of course, for the Hey World feature. When they first came out with it, I didn't really think much of it. Kinda seemed like an "easy" thing for them to do with the Hey foundation, and it just felt like another way for them to spout off their self-important diatribes. I mostly ignored it. But, when I took the newsletter writing class with Bob Doto, it occurred to me that I should just use it instead of "researching" a bunch of email newsletter platform options. I'm fully aware that, for me, researching is usually just procrastination, and the whole point of the newsletter class was to actually publish something.

So, yeah. The Hey World thing is just good enough that it's Fine™, at least to start. And it's included with the account I'm already paying for. Realistically, it's probably good enough that I should never really have to think about it for a really long time. Which I guess is kind of the point. All you really do is send an email to world@hey.com and it creates a simple page and gives you the option to send it to your list. That's pretty much it. No templates, no options, no metrics. It's probably for the best. The last thing I need is obsessing over open rates and shit.

Finally, I bought the takeo.news domain and just forwarded it to the world.hey.com/takeo URL and called it a day.

Some folks have mentioned they don't actually receive the emails. Man, email sucks. I guess just make sure you opt in on the verification email they send you, and mark it as not spam if it happens to get sent there. Or just subscribe to the RSS feed like a G.

Waxed cotton parka by Bridge and Burn, a local Portland brand. I love this thing. I got it for Christmas a couple years ago and it's been great. It's warm, has a hood, lots of pockets, and the waxed brown fabric is good in the rain and is getting a nice patina. And since it's waxed, I can rewax it next winter. I don't think they're available anymore, though.

Ghoulies Soundtrack — I was watching a review of a comic book and the reviewer wasn't very impressed with it, but he mentioned that the Ghoulies soundtrack would be the perfect accompaniment to it. I love me some old spooky movie soundtracks, and the cover fucking rules, so I checked it out. It delivers.

No shows this last week, but a few years ago I saw Ramprasad open for Cult Leader at Tonic Lounge (a rad bar venue here in Portland that had tons of good metal shows and went through a whole bunch of shit before being bulldozed for more condos or something).

I was there to see Cult Leader, but Ramprasad was easily the highlight of the night for me. Local boys playing killer proggy/sludgy instrumental stuff. Tsuris – was one of my top albums of 2019 and I still listen to it all the time. "Controlling Tides" is my favorite from it and has one of those riffs I wish I wrote.

Cooking
49er Flapjacks — if you've ever been to the Original Pancake House you might know how much these rule. Thin, gooey, delicious. I suppose they're basically crepes. If you have a 10" carbon steel pan, you're good to go.

Drawing
Didn't get any new drawings done this last week, but here's one I did a few weeks ago:

Learning about
The 20/20 Just In Case Rule – I know it's a Dad Trope, but I have always had the Just In Case collection of computer cables that I've carted around every time we've moved. Admittedly, they have come in handy a couple times over the decades. But, this idea of getting rid of anything that you can replace in less than 20 minutes for less than $20 makes even more sense.

Watching

 How did this guy not win

— Toby