From the bookmarks file: Lee LeFever on why Seattleites crave the end of summer. I disagree on the whole; summertime in Seattle is goddamn glorious and far too fleeting.
These passages did resonate with me, though:
But the arrival of summer sun comes with an obligation, a duty to make up for lost time, a need to squeeze every drop of fun from a few months of long warm days. It’s a feeling of pressure, pressure to make the most of a fleeting resource.
[…]
We Ask: Am I taking advantage of this time I’m given? What can I do to truly make this summer special?
I have certainly felt that way. In midsummer I tend to feel both manic and drunk on sunshine. I never seem to get everything done that I want to in the summer. But I've felt that way everywhere, not just Seattle. In my opinion there are better cities in which to get your cozy on, if that's your thing.
Mutate, Baby! is the name of the new Kirby Krackle album and you can get the first single "No Spoilers, Please" for free at Bandcamp right now. This tune is my current personal fave of the bunch.
These stories should scare independent artists. My opinion is if you choose to become part of the YouTube flywheel, you should prepare for the eventuality that whatever income you're making will vanish overnight with no recourse. YouTube is understandably alluring due to the huge viewership numbers and friction-free monetization (just turn on ads! What could possibly go wrong?), but today I think it's dangerous to see it as anything but a stepping stone to better things. Use it to grow, grow, grow your audience then GTFO and take that audience with you to Patreon, a sponsorship or some other platform that won't pull the rug out from underneath you.
YouTube/Adsense dominance is a problem ripe for some of that "disruption" the folks in Silicon Valley love so much.
Drawing comics with the drawings reinvigorated my interest for a while. When you have something that you do every day you can’t help but improve. Then you get bored. Then you try new things and improve. Then you get bored. Daily work is the best solution that I’ve worked out to make the big emotional swings of that cycle to drop down to a low discomforting blips. You become too slippery for your own emotional melodrama to grab on.
If you’re not regularly chipping away at the work you want to do toward your capital-D Dream each day, your Dream quickly fills up venom sacs of guilt and shame. Ugh, I should really get back to doing ____, I’m such a lazy piece of shit, I’ll never be a ______, you’ll think and then your eyes are there and not in your skull and in the moment where you are alive.
And:
If there is a thing you like to do, find a way to do a little bit of it each day. Don’t overdo it — maybe it’s only 5 minutes worth for the first three years—because some days you will be drunk, tired, sick or in Personal Circumstances. This is not a way to get famous, it is just a way to practice and to care for yourself.
My work on Neat Hobby is absolutely in the realm of "self care."
A lovely rant about how our understanding of how technology works is woefully disproportionate to our near-constant immersion in it:
Why is it that “computer classes” are electives? Why is it that those enamored with video games are the only ones expected to understand the relationship between browser tabs and RAM? Why is it that those obsessed with science fiction, participating in chess club, or enrolled in AP classes are the only ones expected to understand the severities of hard shutdowns? Why should cookies, encryption, or battery drain be mysteries to anyone born into today’s world; mysteries to those touching unfathomable technology at 12-months-old?
This is not STEM. This is fundamental. This is commonplace. This is home economics.
Nerdist's Chris Hardwick gives advice on surviving the comedy biz and digs up Hick's 12 principals as guideposts. (Although Hardwick's closing paragraph is pretty much all you need to know.)
I may be biased here, but I feel like there’s an actual and honorable goal in all of this. America needs to convince young people that there are good reasons to be civically involved. Millenials are soon to be the biggest hunk of the electorate and, if the mid-terms are any indication, they simply don’t care. And that shouldn’t be surprising since no one is connecting to them in the ways they connect with each other or talking about issues that matter to them from perspectives they can identify with.
Legacy media accuses young people of being apathetic while actively attempting to remove them from the discussion.
There’s a problem that needs to be solved and this is clearly an attempt to solve it. That’s part of what convinced me it was a good idea for me to be involved. The other part, to be clear, was that I got to interview the freaking President.
Finding relevance and value in youth culture is an ongoing struggle, one that most people give up by their mid-30s. If only pieces like this got as much signal boost as those useless "How Teens Use Social Media…By An Actual Teen!" pieces beloved by the press.
