my fake marble cover composition notebook
I leave for San Francisco on Tuesday. Staying a week and then I'm going to be in Portland for another few days after that. I haven't been on a plane in two and a half years and I'm little anxious about it. Hopefully I'll visit London for a few weeks in November as well. Anything I shouldn't miss?
I read The Friends of Eddie Coyle for the first time a little while ago and it is a book I’m going to be recommending to everyone forever from now on (and now I’m dying to watch the movie).
I'm also gathering and reading fiction from the late 90s and early aughts that even tangentially addresses the internet. Anything i'm missing from this list? Maybe I'll write something about it…
I mentioned earlier that I had an idea to do a short film series that would have gone along with the release of Lurking. Here are the titles that I had on an old text file:
All About Lily Chou Chou
Level 5
Egoyan's Speaking Parts
The Internship
The Net
Little Black Book
Also this note: "short cyberpunk films??" (I don't, at this moment, remember what I meant by "short cyberpunk films??")
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Another recommendation: Chasing the Moon, the documentary series about the Apollo 11 landing and so much more. It strikes the perfect balance of: all of this is bullshit and isn’t this a miracle? Includes many stories I hadn't heard before like the pink slips handed out after the launch. I've been reading a lot about the space age to get a better idea about how the computer age spun out from it (basically, as I understand it: parts built small to fit in a rocket ship meant computers could be built small.)
This quote, from an interview with Steven Spielberg, is a fascinating contrast in styles. This explains both why I don't love all his movies and why I love the ones I do. (Also, most artists seem to be a little bit of both?)
Recently, I got an iPad, something I've wanted for more than a decade now, but I could never justify the price. But I could justify the price of a past model refurbished version. I also got a cool cover for it that looks like an old composition notebook. (I probably would have gotten one earlier if I knew about the fake marble composition notebook iPad covers).
Mostly I watch TV shows at the gym with it. One of those shows: a rewatch of Halt and Catch Fire. This was my reward for reading a bunch of Silicon Valley corporate histories over the past several months. And those corporate histories helped me better appreciate the show. (I had avoided this stuff when I was working on Lurking because I knew I'd get offtrack from the stories about users.)
The regional detail is absolutely incredible — like how TI is looming over everything. And also, how Vietnam and the space race shaped the field. Knowing even a little bit now, about Tandy and Compaq, really opened up that region to me, and I can see the showrunners did their research. And season 3, really brilliantly tackles the privatization of the internet. When I first watched it, I thought the NSFNET stuff was a little boring, but after rereading Where Wizards Stay Up Late and digging into the history of other pre-Web networks, it all snapped together. The show is extremely thoughtful about what history they are entering into, and how they depict it (I guess it has to be, because people who care about this stuff are intensely pedantic).
I have so many goofy notes about the show deep in the newsletter archives, but I should probably put together a more polished appreciation of it. What makes it rare and special, I think, is it shows people motivated to build things for reasons other than acclaim and money (not that they turn down either). I’m not sure how to explain this to people who only know the stakes in life as overachieving or death. Or to those who might be inclined to think that every early tech entrepreneur was a proto-Peter Thiel. But at the same time, I don’t think the Spielberg quote about "decisions beyond your understanding" applies to this kind of creativity, necessarily. Or maybe it does. I’ll probably have to, gladly, rewatch the series again with this in mind.
Thanks for reading.