Inputs

The only book I read this month was Andy Weir’s latest, Project Hail Mary, which delivered more or less as promised - a scientifically dense but nonetheless easy-to-read page-turner that is surely destined for the silver screen.

I spent a lot of time with newer rap releases this month, including Dave’s “We’re All in this Alone Together”, Mach-Hommy’s “Pray for Haiti”, and Vince Staples’ self-titled album. I also fell down a deep Phoebe Bridgers rabbit hole, but that barely warrants mentioning given it happens practically every month now. Here’s a neat cover I found recently of the cheesy old Wheatus song, Teenage Dirtbag:

One podcast episode that stuck out to me this month was Tim Barker’s appearance on The Dig, “Inflation Politics”. Prior to this episode, I wasn’t as aware of how explicit the connection was between Paul Volcker’s economic efforts and the crushing of organized labor power that was such a significant project of the Reagan administration. Barker characterizes the men as collaborating on an effort to reduce the labor share of income through both monetary policy on Volcker’s part and union-busting on Reagan’s part, sharing some new-to-me anecdotes such as Volcker carrying around a notecard in his pocket with upcoming major union votes and stating publicly that Reagan’s anti-union efforts were helpful to him in his effort to control inflation.

I’ve been listening to a lot of the Changelog family of podcasts quite a bit recently, particularly Go Time, but this month I particularly enjoyed an episode on the titular podcast of the family, “Why we 💚 vim”. I’ve been making a lot of effort to optimize my development environment using vim lately, so it was great to get some more plugin recommendations and general tips. I have my dotfiles hosted publicly on GitHub, if anyone’s interested in checking out my current .vimrc file.

Outputs

Most of my output this month was for work. I’m starting to feel pretty ramped at Relay, though, and starting to have fun with Go programming as well.

The most interesting public output to speak of was my collaborative blog post with Fynn, A Tale of Two Economies. The process of writing that together with him was really fun, and I found that having a partner definitely helped me to actually complete the piece; we are hoping to work together on more collaborative posts in the future.

Also, I had my most successful season ever on MTG Arena this month, reaching the numbered Mythic rankings for the first time: