• Recording with Casey (find Case Oats on Bandcamp!).
  • Adding a favicon back to my website, bringing it up to 1999 standards. [Or so I thought. I wrote the code incorrectly and I didn’t fix it until 11-25-18.]
  • Realizing I believe in at least one slippery slope argument, the one that says it’s a bad idea to open a bag of chips that’s too big for one serving but which you’ll eat like one serving.
  • Eating string beans in Chinese form for dinner and Italian form for second dinner.
  • The 1997 Atlantic article called “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” which made some pretty bombastic claims but also prescient ones about our weird technological corporatocracy.
    • A claim that sounds scary out of context (and maybe still scary in context): ”Precisely because the technological future in North America will provide so much market and individual freedom, this productive anarchy will require the supervision of [by] tyrannies—or else there will be no justice for anyone.”
    • An optimistic conclusion: “Ultimately, as technological innovations continue to accelerate and the world’s middle classes come closer together, corporations may well become more responsible to the cohering global community and less amoral in the course of their evolution toward new political and cultural forms.” We have not seen that so far. And even if it were the case, I don’t think we’d want to rely on corporations to the extent we do, anyway.
  • How I stopped using “very” and “really” in my writing because my teachers taught me that they’re unnecessary. But how that always felt like a rule I wanted to break, because veries and reallies express degree, and degree is meaningful. Of course it’s important to write efficiently and intentionally. But maybe some words that seem superfluous are actually important. And maybe sometimes we ought to let ourselves off the hook of writing efficiently altogether. Repetition and redundancy can be meaningful, too.
    • See also Neil Genzlinger’s icky op-ed about “really” in the New York Times in 2012 and Jerry Seinfeld’s response to it.