Allen Pike @apike@mastodon.social

Do Great Work, Then Tell People About It: What to do when you’re not marketing detergent.

https://allenpike.com/2021/do-great-work-marketing

2021 Ioniq EV: “I’m basically a Prius”
2022 Ioniq EV: “I’m a cyberpunk crossover concept come to life”

For a short week, it’s been a long week. But today my wife Karen got vaccinated, and our wee Thomas said his first word. So today’s a good day for this “dada”. 😊

A better headline would be “Canada vows to be *first* country to make Facebook pay for news” 🙄 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-next-country-facebook-news-1.5919665 As @benthompson@twitter.com has put well, taxing social media to subsidize news could work, but Australia’s scheme is ridiculous. Canada replicating it would be ridiculous.

AI-hallucinated rotoscoping demos have existed for a little while now, but today I learned:
a) There’s now a pretty slick free tool for doing it: https://ebsynth.com/
b) People are embracing the style’s limits to create new art, which is pretty rad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP468OEln4U

Clubhouse certainly has some problems. But today I stumbled in to an “Office Hours” Q&A with @jasonfried@twitter.com, and it was effectively the most useful podcast I’ve listened to in months. But also it could have just been a podcast, and that would have been even better? 🤔

*browsing nintendo switch e-shop with daughter*

me: This one’s interesting... but $80? For a 2D game?
4yo: Does Mario need to toot in that game?
me: What? I don’t think so.
4yo: Are there... other butts?
me: ...what? In Mario?
4yo: You said it was a *tooty* game?

This week’s productivity is brought to you by @LofiLiaMusic@twitter.com’s two-hour album “Season One”, featuring chill lofi covers of ALL the hits:

- K.K. Bossa
- Mario 64 File Select
- The song from Persona 5 when it’s raining at nighttime
- The Wii Shop Song

https://open.spotify.com/album/4QfsnrppdNmC4EoN5lUwZX?si=kySYNgjvQPaxPpygUoN12A

Streaming Stories and Troubling Tales: A search for streamable kids’ stories, from royalty to racism to royalties.

https://allenpike.com/2021/streaming-stories-troubling-tales

I tend to under-use workflow automations like Shortcuts, for fear that some update will break them and my workflow. Finally, I built a couple simple Shortcuts. I like them! But within a couple days, they broke. Apparently this is a known iOS 14.3 bug. 😣 At least I tried?

Although @calendly@twitter.com is quite useful for finding good meeting times, some folks just don’t like receiving a “book a time here” link. Solution: offer one time that would work for you, and the calendar link as a backup. More personal, and people seem to like it.

Every time you install a Steam game, it asks whether you want to create a “start menu shortcut”. Macs do not have a Start Menu.

Valve has no management structure, so it’s nobody’s job to fix this bug. It’s now been there 11 years. It annoyed me at first, but now? It’s kinda cute

Of course, many days we transcend this. We realize our potential for invention, beauty, connection, resilience.

Other days we’re just a bunch of poop tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal#Bilaterian_animals

Most animals, from trilobites to humans, are bilaterals. According to Wikipedia, this is “an idealized bilaterian body plan”.

Yup, that’s me

The least bad solutions I’ve found so far are:

1. Manually sending all interesting longer articles to Instapaper and juggling over to reading them there, or
2. Rigging up a script to auto send every item from every long form feed to Instapaper instead

Both are not great.

Does this exist?

1. An RSS reader
2. Where I can start reading a long article
3. Then get interrupted by a baby/kid/life
4. Later, pick up the article in the same position on another device

Every reader I’ve seen has no concept of “is being read”, let alone scroll position.

We're looking for another mobile developer to join our team at Steamclock. This role will initially focus on Android, but will have a lot of opportunities to work on other platforms as well, including iOS and the web. Come help us build awesome apps. 🌈

https://steamclock.com/careers/android-developer

My daughter (4) and I love playing Switch games together. I’ll control and narrate, and she’ll propose what we should do next. Sandbox and exploration games work great.

This week’s hit: A Short Hike. Wholesome and charming. https://ashorthike.com/

Addendum to this essay: “subtly gendered” words are another interesting category. Words like bossy, sassy, or feisty are mostly used to describe women and children, and it’s worth thinking about why. One attempt at cataloguing these here: http://sacraparental.com/2016/05/14/everyday-misogyny-122-subtly-sexist-words-women/

Two Birds, One Scone: On why evolving our vocabulary – not just the words we know, but the the words we choose – is worth the work.

https://allenpike.com/2020/two-birds-one-scone