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I’m slowly developing my own list of advice: have a creative mindset, embrace radical transparency, and write down what makes you happy. I’d like to add one more to the list: stealing is a skill! Stealing is good for the soul. If done well, you will be able to build value at lightning pace and learn about yourself along the way. But what is “stealing”? Is reading from a textbook considered stealing? Adopting an open-source library into your codebase? No- that’s not radical enough… I’m talking about literally copying another person’s creation. My coworker Justin taught me about “the 3% approach”, coined by the late creative, Virgil Abloh. When designing his version of Air Force 1s, Abloh disciplined himself to only edit 3% of the original design, so as not to dilute the original work perfected by visionaries before him. Abloh never went into much detail beyond that, but Justin and I began to make it our own at Kibu. I love the 3% approach¹, particularly when engaging in a project unfamiliar to you. When asked to alter 3% of something, you are challenged to determine which 3% you ought to alter. This forces you to inspect all 100% of that thing: every stitch and seam of the original. To us, the best way to get to 3% was to rebuild something we loved, stitch by stitch. We had to steal to succeed. Justin and I wanted to rebuild our marketing site, but we lacked a solid vision. We knew we wanted a beautiful top-fold and a modern, minimal component library that could be reused across pages. We came across Mintlify’s 2025 marketing site and fell in love: an eye-grabbing top-fold, decisive use of colors, and a “show, don’t tell” ethos revealed all we wanted to create. The fact that Mintlify and Kibu are both documentation tools (albeit very different definitions of the word) was an added bonus. So, we literally rebuilt the Mintlify site, pixel-by-pixel. When you recreate someone’s creation, you learn their story: every piece of brilliance, tradeoff, and imperfection. Why add a hover effect here and not there? What does three consecutive black and white sections do to the mind? Oh wow, look how all components’ widths fall perfectly flush with the floating, bg-blurred navbar: Mintlify’s site wasn’t perfect by any stretch: yet stealing it proved to be an efficient way to achieve our goals. And as we stole, our intuitions brought us to that 3%. Our nav popover can be much more minimal. Our team is our brand- let’s add their pictures to the CTA buttons. Part of our product is videos- let’s have more videos than screenshots. These little “side quests” taught us more about our brand than any 3-day workshop could have. In less than a month of weekend work, we had a deployed site in Framer². Coming out of this project, I had a newfound perspective of stealing. While I’ve always admired certain people’s crafts, I now prioritize it in my ideation process. No matter the project, I always ask myself and my team, “has anyone done something similar before us?” There’s thousands of free blogs, podcasts, and videos on problems you’re actively solving. It’s never been easier to prompt AI with your use case and ask who’s come across this issue before you. However, it’s your job to go down the rabbit hole, learn the 100%, and sprinkle in your 3%. At the beginning of my career, I believed I’d be rewarded for the originality of my ideas. The truth is that you’re rewarded for identifying and solving problems efficiently. And odds are, smarter people before you have already done both. So, turn stealing into a skill: spend your days identifying what you ought to steal, why you ought to steal it, and how much you’ll steal of it. “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” - Steve Jobs Blech. So cliche to end on a Jobs quote. One more: Everything I do references something that influenced me.” - Virgil Abloh ¹ Abloh’s “3% approach” is an approach, not a rule. If you Google this term, you’ll find a lot of blogs fetishizing this as a sacred rule. I’d guess Abloh himself would dissuade you from that line of thinking. Abloh developed this concept in context to his work in a new Air Force 1 series: the fundamental task to mimic an existing design- a distinguished design that I’m sure Abloh heavily revered. You are allowed to be original! There is a spectrum to creative originality. This post is about one end of the spectrum. ² In March 2026, we migrated off Framer and into a full codebase. We bet that vibecoding would allow us to move faster than a drag-and-drop builder with ancillary AI tools and lock-in. We think it’s paying off!
It was around January 2020. I became the head coach of a youth basketball team. I was a few months into my first job out of college, and I was feeling… empty. I couldn’t explain why, so I set out to fill the void. I built side projects, went drinking with coworkers, and got really into the upcoming election. These all felt like things I should be doing as the yuppy I had just become, but the emptiness resided. Indiana loves its basketball, so it was easy for me to find a local gym to play pickup. I became friendly with the regulars and the staff. One day, the athletic director told me they were looking for a volunteer assistant basketball coach for the middle school league. Being a former camp counselor, the idea intrigued me. Unexpectedly, the “assistant” position became the “head” position, and I was quickly thrown into a clinic, where I had to draft all my players by the end of the session. Team drafted. 6 kids. 1 game per week. 2 practices per week. 14 parent emails (somehow). Practice starts tomorrow. You know those bullshit leadership positions we all had in high school and college? Like how you were “VP of Operations” for some club, and all you did was order pizza? Yeah, this was not that. Getting thrown into an empty gym with six kids and two basketballs is a thrilling experience! I’m so grateful my buddy Clayton joined me as co-coach. I spent the whole day preparing for that 2-hour practice, and I think it showed. We learned each other’s names, had a solid skills assessment, set some ground rules, and had some fun with a little knockout. Here’s the headline: I fucking loved being a coach. And, I don’t want to brag, but I was really good at it. We lost one game, our first game, and went undefeated after that. But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader. David, our self-deprecating goofball who insisted he’d be benched in the 4th quarter, made two game-changing dives for the ball in our last game. At the end of every game, I’d ask if anyone had any shoutouts to give about their teammates. Evan called David “a beast” for his dives, followed by rousing applause from the whole team. David’s smile is likely something I’ll be taking to my grave. As the kids’ confidence grew, mine did too. I walked around the gym with a strut. I greeted their families with confident eye contact, remembering every word they said. I felt myself performing better in all parts of life: work, community, relationships… I became “that guy” who made shit happen in our friend group. Heading into March, I was planning a surprise for the team. I had a contact at the Indiana Pacers, and I was scheming to get them to play on the court during a break in play. But to much ruin, Covid became a pandemic, leading to an abrupt end to the season, and an immediate global quarantine… But that’s another story for another time. This is a story about happiness- and finding it at any point in your life. I was happy when I was a youth basketball coach. And I find it notable to recall why I was happy: I love helping kids. I can’t exactly explain why… perhaps it’s biological. But I’m pretty darn good at it. I find it much easier to talk to kids than adults. I love being in the real world. If I taught those kids on Zoom… it wouldn’t have been the same. To travel somewhere, break a sweat, and high-five my team was such a gift. I love being in control. Coordinating practice, calling the plays, making substitutions- coaching let me steer my own ship. “Loving control” has its drawbacks. But succeeding within that control gave me real confidence and belief in myself. I love basketball. I can’t think of a better activity to learn about your mind, body, and role within a system. I’m a junkyard dog. When I get mad, I work extra hard doing the stuff nobody else wants to do. But I lose energy faster. I learned this from the game. If I could give any advice to someone who needs it, I’d tell them to write down the things that have made them happy, and then explore why. Why am I writing this now? I have a sense that many people in tech are feeling what I’m feeling. For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better. As someone outside the equity class, you begin to wonder what your role is in this new paradigm. And whether rectangles were ever your ticket to happiness in the first place. When I was the age my basketball kids were, The Social Network came out. Like so many, I am a product of that generation. I accepted the propaganda that my value to this world only went as far as my product could scale. At 28, I’m finally beginning to challenge that. Don’t get me wrong, I love tech. I think it’s magical. But I really hope to live in a world where my future kids find sitting in front of a rectangle all day to be dystopian and cringe. I really really really hope the invisible hand finds its way to getting me back into something I love. Maybe this “death of SaaS” talk, regardless of truth, is the wakeup call to so many us need. ¹ Names have been changed to protect their privacy.
Happy to share a new project: Things to be Happy About - things.ben-mini.com. It’s a daily blog where I simply write five things to be happy about. Back in college, I had a tiny whiteboard outside my dorm where I did the same exercise. I also brought it to my cabin as a camp counselor (below). I would always leave the marker out with a little “Bonus:” section, where any passerby could add what they wanted. Not to brag, but it was quite a hit! things.ben-mini.com is the same concept: I add my own five things every day, and anyone on the internet can add the Bonus. Just like the real world, anyone can add, append, or completely write over it. At midnight, the present the Bonus is locked- entering a readonly state with all prior entries.¹ What’s cool to me is how I built this. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that most of this was vibe coded. Here’s the Github. The whole site, with a CRUD admin view, was built in a day: Claude Code for vibe coding Vercel for hosting Convex for db/auth/realtime sync (this product is awesome! I could write a whole post about it. It actually makes the Bonus entry realtime across all visitors, like a Google Doc.) BlockNote for an easy Notion-like editor Perfect Software Three years ago, I considered making this a Substack, but it didn’t feel right. I had specific ideas about how to present the daily entries, how my own admin view should work, and how the visitor-contributed Bonus should work. Substack couldn’t hold any of that. I had to sacrifice my artistry and workflow in exchange for Substack’s convenience. Last week, I read Gaurav Ramesh’s blog about Perfect Software, where he makes the claim that LLMs make it possible to efficiently build small, non-scaling software that is “perfect” because it fits a single person’s needs exactly. Before LLMs, “perfect software” was largely a myth. For most of us, the effort required to build exactly what we wanted was simply too high. So we rented other platforms. We begged or waited for features. We accepted friction and exploitation - limitations, ads, data stealth - as the rent. In the 12 years I’ve written online, I’ve never found the perfect writing and publishing tool. […] It wasn’t because I needed something fancy. It was precisely because I didn’t. But over the last 18 months, I’ve increased my odds of finding the “perfect software”. Because now, I’m making it. This revelation is so important and liberating to me. I’ve written a fair amount about my love of software (I plan to write more!). Vibe coding has reignited that love, as it’s allowed me to explore projects like these- faster and better than ever. With that said, I don’t think Substack, or the broader SaaS market, is dead.² While Substack didn’t fit Gaurav’s or my needs, it has for a large denomination of writers. It’s also worth noting that Gaurav and I sacrificed Substack’s distribution advantages in exchange for more control over our publications. Still, I think we’re heading in the right direction, and SaaS will need to evolve to retain its users. I imagine SaaS companies beginning to launch Lovable-like build modes, with hosting, auth, and APIs already in context. Imagine a world where writers on Substack, sales teams on HubSpot, and healthcare workers on Kibu can all build interfaces that fit their own workflows. SaaS will become less valuable for its UI and more for its opinionated, shared data layer. The winners in consumer SaaS will have data layers with the strongest distribution. In B2B, it’ll be the ones whose data layers produce trusted guardrails of compliance, reliability, and operational best practices. It’s a tale as old as time and a recurring theme in ben-mini: centralized platforms that provide real, complementary value to builders will continue to dominate tech for the foreseeable future. Anyways, enjoy things.ben-mini.com! Feel free to drop your own Bonus 😄 ¹ Of course, I reserve the right to remove any inappropriate entries. ² My existing career path depends on SaaS flourishing, so I could be ignorant. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
Revisiting an old 2020 Invest Like the Best podcast that interviews John Collision, co-founder of Stripe. When asked about his thoughts on no-code: I don’t think no-code is fully a panacea. Even when you’re doing no-code, you’re still reasoning about the relations between different objects and data flows and things like that. When you’re building an app with Zapier, you’re still doing a form of engineering. If you’re looking at Excel, I think it is one of the most underappreciated programming environments in the world. The number of Excel programmers versus people using what you’d probably think of as more traditional languages is really something to behold. I actually think there are lots of features of Excel that make it a really nice programming environment and really nice to learn in. The fact that it’s continuously executed means that, unlike running your code and getting some error that’s hard to comprehend, the code is just continuously executed in the form of the sheets you see in front of you. And the fact that it’s individual cells and you lay out the program spatially, where the code and the data are interspersed and no one part gets too big, is really useful. There are all these ways in which anyone who’s developing a no-code or new software paradigm should look at Excel, because so many people have managed to essentially learn how to do some light programming by looking at other people’s models and workbooks and emulating what they see. Yep- everything is a spreadsheet. If you’re okay at Excel, you’re in the 99% percentile of most “technical” people on Earth. This summer, I reflected on why Google Sheets is the greatest application of all time: the ability to extend the Excel GUI into the cloud, introducing both APIs and multiplayer, is truly a marvel. But the core concepts of spreadsheet software have been so important to my development. The building blocks of any modern application begin with entities, the core nouns of the system. These entities are described by attributes, the adjectives that give each proper noun expression. Relationships connect entities to one another, giving the system structure and identity. And methods introduce behavior, allowing the application to perform computations that change entities. What is a spreadsheet but: A series of tabs (entities) Columns on each tab (attributes) VLOOKUP and INDEX formulas between tabs (relationships) A library of other formulas that creates or mutates data to the user’s desire (methods) An approachable interface that allows users to present data however they wish If our goal as technologists is to put the creative power of computing into the hands of every human, I firmly believe that this understanding of data and applications is baseline knowledge for everyone. This is what Collison meant in the quote above about no-code builders still needing “reasoning about relationships and data flows”. This is a foundation of data literacy. There- if anyone ever told to become more data literate, I just gave you a crash course. I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept for a few reasons: Learning the basics. It’s not that deep. Every application is secretly a fancy Excel sheet. Whenever you’re learning or communicating a new application, consider how you would rebuild it in a spreadsheet. The number of tabs relative to the number of formula is a good indicator of if their strategy is more breadth or depth. If the application asks you define your own tabs, it’s more of a platform. 10x’ing vibe coding. I can guarantee non-technical vibe coders that if they communicate their application needs like they’re building an Excel sheet, they will 10x their effectiveness. Tell the AI what your nouns are, the actions they ought to do, and their relationship with one another. Building better product. Whenever I’m met with a new product challenge, I use Excel as my mental model to figure out the data I’m working with and how it impacts the customer. How might this spreadsheet look to the customer, are we confident we know the right formulas, and how do we feel about how this spreadsheet might evolve?
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A time ago, I wrote a thing that felt like stumbling into a delightful discovery: On Foraging Mushrooms at Cheesman Park Sometimes I’ll amend a post, with updates from a later time, sometimes it’s easier to just make a separate part 2. Everything continues delightfully with picking them up from the grass I already walk around in regularly (frisbee, walking/scooting through or near the park). I’ve now encountered them far beyond {local park} I’ve now seen the same fruiting body in similar configurations in parks all around Denver. I’ll add a map screenshot. It feels like any time it rains even a little bit, and/or there is a bit of chilly weather (relative to the summer lately) or in many other conditions, these mushrooms will sprout. Anywhere there’s wood to metabolize. Mulch works, but it seems to particularly favor the root balls of long-gone trees, where there’s nothing above ground remaining. Sometimes I’ve made a guess and said “I think when it rains enough, mushrooms sprout right here: 👇” and it’s been correct. Other times I’ve simply noticed them in the grass along side of wherever I happen to be. Sometimes I see something that might be the caps in the distance, and i’ll go check and indeed, button mushrooms. Other times it’s a napkin. Improvements at cooking with 🍄 I’ve upped my bulk food prep game. I’ve always loved the instant pot, and now I have an even easier method. I could give it it’s own blog post, perhaps. I used to do a lot more chopping of things before steaming it into a meal in an instant pot. Then I’d use an immersion blender to blend it all together. Sometimes I’d use the blender before starting the instant pot, it all depended. Now I dump basically whole vegetables into the pot, washed but not cut (i’ll crack some things like carrots in my hands so they fit better), and cook it whatever amount of time the longest item needs. I might also cook soft stuff in, even the whole time (like dropping whole mushrooms into the pot before cooking everything for 50 minutes) or I’ll cook the whole thing slightly less (45 minutes), then open it up and add the ‘delicate stuff’ (like mushrooms, tomatoes, onion, garlic, still all whole or cut in half like once) and cook it 5 more minutes. Then everything gets spiced again, and then I use an immersion blender to blend/mix it all together. cooked Chickpeas can be added at the end after immersion blending to bring in some texture, ditto a few blocks of crumbled up tofu. If the tofu got a little sauté and tossed in the soup… damn. This method is much less work/time than it took before where i’d do more chopping/cubing of ingredients, sauté’ing some stuff before adding the bulk and cooking it. Sometimes the bottom of the contents would burn before the instant pot would get to pressure. So, this new method (whole plants placed loose into the container, some water, cook for as long as needed by the longest item (dry beans, squash) and then immersion blend. It’s all been excellent for me. ‘soy boy dinner’, some could call it. It’s conceptually similar (identical?) to beans/rice/sausage that I would cook for myself when I was a kid, and ate meat, but a bit more customized to my current personal preferences. I can make it delicious, and it makes a ton of food all at once. As always, I pour a big thing of olive oil over the whole thing when serving up in a bowl. An ongoing source of enjoyment and practical value I’ve now had exclusively fresh, free, delicious mushrooms from local parks now, for years, and feel reasonably changed by it. observation is a big part of curiosity, interest. Reading books by people who see some things so well and then write about it, of course changes ones own sense of observation. 1 I’m glad to have encountered cool books like this book about moss and this book about beavers, and this book about plants. I notice that if I’m doing my normal barefoot hill sprints thing, I can sometimes easily tell through my feet where I’ll find mushrooms. I continue to enjoy cooking with them, find them nourishing in all the normal ways, and of course stepping outside of capitalism is delightful. Bulk storage last year, ahead of the winter, after encountering surprisngly huge amounts of mushrooms, on a whim, I decided to try some bulk storage. the bulk storage I did for myself easily lasted through the winter, even though the winter was super dry. Turned out that mushrooms grew throughout the winter, especially in sunny spots, anytime there would be a bit of snow followed by warm-enough temps. So even after I opened my first bag of dried mushrooms that I stored in the freezer, I didn’t get very far through it before fresh mushrooms were popping up in the grass again and I’d go back to fresh mushrooms. The bag would go back in the freezer. Then I’d use up the fresh ones I got, go back to the dried ones. Last winter was very dry, but not super cold, so there were not many mushrooms growing throughout the winter, but again, I was surprised that there were any. Since last winter, I’ve made a few improvements to the process. I’ve gotten better at bulk storage. I’ll cook them at a lower temperature a bit longer in time (usually 220-240 f) and having a rack under them probably would make it go even better. I can pile them high on a baking sheet and turn them a few times: i’ll two sheets at a time, they can be condensed to a single sheet after the first bit of drying. Eventually, they’re fully dried and can be bagged and frozen. It takes a few hours. lower temperatures get closer to what a normal dehumidifier would do (140 degrees, maybe) but it takes too long for this large volume of mushrooms to get cooked down at that temperature. I finally got around to weighing the before and after weight of the mushrooms, and indeed the finished weight is exactly 10% of the pre-cook weight. The mass is about the same diminishment, so one can fit like three baking sheets of mushrooms, many pounds worth, into a small bag. In two stops at the park, I picked up enough mushrooms that, by the time I’d finished baking them down and storing in the freezer, I had enough mushrooms that I could not encounter another fresh mushroom at the park until next summer, and I wouldn’t bottom out the supply. two trips to the park, and I wasn’t even trying. I could have gotten 100 lbs of mushrooms both days, with just a few canvas bags. Here’s a photo. Up top is a container of about 2.5 pounds of mushrooms. The smallest of those bags contains the dried-out end result. The smallest bag has three containers worth of mushrooms in it. This represents perhaps 40 pounds of fresh mushrooms. Mushrooms contain every essential amino acid, and are as complete a protein as any animal flesh or excretion. I was still eating eggs for a while after I started eating mushrooms, and even after I began getting mushrooms for free. I noticed not liking that I was participating in the exploitation of animals (I’d been reducing my participation in it at a subconcious level for a time) but I was obviously paying for it every time I spent my own money on it. And ‘dairy’ and ‘eggs’ are the same as the rest. So any participation was close enough to full participation, and implied the correctness of the frame, which is low key ‘you/it/she low-key deserved what happened’, and it’s voluntary. There’s not even a health claim to be made for it. What I hope for you and mushrooms I want something for you, too. I write these things for me, sure, and even younger versions of me. I wonder where else around colorado these mushrooms grow. I suspect they may grow widely. and where besides colorado. If they grow widely like this, how many other people could slip a little of the shackles of human exploitation (capitalism) and entitlement to the exploitation of animals. and why not both-ish? at least the animals, but if one escapes a bit of capitalism, please certainly also have already freed other beings from your direct exploitation. (consuming individual animals, her excretions) what I hope for you and scooters This easy, whimsical, “oh look at me finding little fruits in the fairy circles as I prance about barefoot” energy is enabled entirely by a very particular vehicle. A scooter. 🛵 My scooter is very similar to this particular vehicle: HHH 200cc scooter Here’s a normal-enough vibe. I see something that looks like maybe mushrooms somewhere, pull the scooter up right next to them. I can ride my scooter directly to the mushroom, put the kickstand down, place the mushrooms inside the bag I store in my scooter bucket anyway, as if a basket of them had been dumped on the ground, hop back on the scooter, and take home the extra 2-20 lbs in the container I’d had in my scooter already. I can ride around anywhere easily with it, and never have to park it far from my destination. I love bicycles, truly, and yet I find denver to be too damn dangerous to use with a bicycle. Because of the entitlement of drivers, and ‘bad’/irresponsible/obedient-to-random-rules-from-supremacists road design, margins of safety and comfort just don’t quite work for me, getting around on a bicycle. I resent that, though. I loved the time of my life that I was using my bike a lot. And as soon as I got my first moped, I never rode that bike again. I’ll have another bike some day, and i’ll ride it, probably/maybe even around Denver, in some limited situations. But not at night, not if I needed to carry stuff, not if i’ll have to deal with cars/car traffic very much. buying scooters There’s been nice innovations in scooters in the USA recently! I got my scooter for $3200 in 2022 from a company based in Taiwan named Sym. Now in 2026 I’ve seen the same vehicle at the shop, also new, for $4400. On the other side of the strait of Taiwan are some quality manufacturers. One could get a similar version of the vehicle I have for $1600. It’ll show up in a week on a wood pallet, and all it needs is the front tire attached, and the handlebars attached. A friend got this scooter, it was super easy to put together. It costs more on HHH’s website directly, delivery is included. Amazon has it $400 cheaper, with a $400 delivery fee. Same either way. I was shocked at how easy the whole “buy a scooter off a website and assemble it” process was. Next time I’m getting a scooter, that’s what I’m going to do. To get my current scooter in the older way, I had to travel to a dealer in one vehicle, get dropped off, then drive the new other vehicle home. But having a brand new scooter dropped off at your house? amazing. And so cheap. It comes in a wood crate and uses metric bolts. I think most of the bolts on the crate (and handlebars) needed a 10mm socket and the front tire used a 17mm socket. A metric socket set like this is all one needs to do all the maintenance it’ll need, too. 2 Long ago I wrote a thing about scooters, since they’ve had such an impact on me, of course, how could I not, and then I could refer other folks to that page. I need to do a part 2. Any 125cc scooter from HHH also is great. One friend of mine has a 170cc scooter from them (the tank 200, obtained via facebook marketplace) and another friend has a 150 that is also lovely, obtained directly from HHH. The 150 size scooters have a 125cc engine, the 200 size scooters have a 170 cc engine. I don’t know why this is how it is. So, cheers to that. One of them gets to use the scooter now instead of an e-bike. One of them uses it instead of a regular car. Both are thrilled with the improvements. and if we all find it to be this way, maybe you will too. reducing car domination and capitalism and animal exploitation all at the same time? A scooter feels like an escape from car domination, and a way to obtain many interesting experiences (and to obtain instant free, ready-to-consume food). Foraging mushrooms feels like decapitalizing a certain portion of my food, and thus my life. Capitalism is so exploitative and coercive. How nice to reduce it’s footprint in my life. Speaking of exploitation and coercion… I cannot help think that people (me, I am people) could eat free mushrooms and replace any part of their diet that was animal flesh with mushrooms. (or tofu, or chickpeas, or store bought mushrooms, it doesn’t have to be foraged mushrooms obv), and in doing so doing escape participation in yet another exploitative system. I liked escaping capitalism via foraging, even when I was still participating in entitlement to animal exploitation. Now that I’ve Even without mushrooms, though, I would want for the same end result. The abundance of free mushrooms seems like a cool point to pass through on a stance towards the non-exploitation of animals, and a lesser exploitation of human animals (self and others). Resources The Light Eaters The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses Foraging Mushrooms from Cheesman Park (part 1) Mycorrhizal Planet: How Symbiotic Fungi Work with Roots to Support Plant Health and Build Soil Fertility Footnotes after reading a book about moss I began carrying a pocket magnifying glass and guess what? the outside is even more interesting to me now. ↩ When I got my first scooter, and at first on my second scooter, I’d let the scooter dealer do the oil changes. Now I do them myself, for the same reason I cut my own hair. It’s so convenient to do it when I want, where I want, and I’m good/good enough at it. Sometimes I can do it in 10 minutes using a plastic container I fetch from my own trashcan. It takes exactly one container of oil (it’s like 957mil or something) and I pour the discard oil back into that same now-empty container, and drop the waste oil off at a mechanics shop when convenient. It took a while and was not as easy the first few times I did it as it is now. The only cost is a container of 10w-30 or 10w-40 oil which is usually $8 or so. And I began doing the transmission oil myself too, and belt and rollers. None of it felt trivial the first time I did it, but now I’m much better at it, and can do it in a pretty low-mess, clean, fast-enough way. I feel very independent and cost-effective, having a car-like vehicle that can go 55 mph, can carry multiple people, can carry stuff, but has a 1.5 gallon gas tank, weighs only 240 lbs, and I can do all of/most of the maintenance myself, as someone who doesn’t give a shit about cars and has always disliked dealing with stuff like that. I will do the brake pads myself for the first soon, too. There’s many youtube videos about how to do anything, and the vehicle is so simple even ‘big’ car maintenance tasks are simple with the scooter. ↩
If you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music, the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens?
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello! It’s me, Craig Mod. I’m doing an event with David Marx in Tokyo this Friday night (17th) at Tiger Mountain, a small, hip bookshop. The in-person tix are all sold out, but it will be livestreamed, and there are still tickets for that bit. It costs about seven bucks, and would make the small bookshop running it super happy to sell more tickets! (Although I realize the timezone difference is terrible for most readers …)
The golden window of tech may have expired. In 2010, I came across a video of Mick Jagger being interviewed (text version here). It was for a re-release of Exile on Main Street with 10 new tracks. During the interview he says this: But I have a take on that — people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25-year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t. In 2009, I had just started to recover or find my footing from the dot-com bust and the 2008 recession. I wondered about the tech industry’s longevity and resilience then, having experienced my first taste of startup life from 2000-2002. After which, I did my best to navigate what it meant to be a maker on the internet, before it figured out how to make money. I certainly didn’t make any for a number of years. What Jagger said has stuck with me ever since. I often come back to this when I think about any industry or vocation — how long do people really make money doing a thing? Tech feels that way now, again — that for a decade or more, coming out of 2008, people started to make money hand over fist, and tech was rosy, optimistic and all blue skies. We believed we could shape a utopian future, but eventually extracting value came calling, and has always been at the core of capitalism. And tech is a capitalist endeavor. Today, streaming has lobotomized all earnings for musical artists, which has led to heavy touring schedules and lucrative reunions capitalizing on fanbases that have only become even more endeared to the artists of their youth or formative years. Audiences are willing to dole out hundreds of dollars to see their favorite artists perform for hours in an arena or venue. We’re at an inflection point again, facing a different kind of existential threat. The younger generation will chalk this up to how tech is today, while those of us with decades in this industry and the long view of experience have either accepted it, made good money from it and retired, or are fighting the good fight. Is that period gone for tech too? And if so, what’s the equivalent of touring? → This looks better on the web → Reply via email Thanks for reading and using RSS!
it’s been going well for me.
