From Sensuous Spaces: Designing Your Erotic Interiors by Sivon Resnikoff, page 95:
The bachelor pad: success or failure?
If the success of an environment can be measured by the length of time it lingers in the memory of one who experiences it, then the bachelor pad must be declared a masterful design concept. Remembering her first encounter with a bachelor pad over twelve years before, a New York woman was able to give a detailed description, of not only the furnishings, but the mood of the space and her reactions.
The colors, textures, and furnishings are listed in the order she remembered them:
Red everywhere.
Mirrors on the walls and over the bed.
Fake fur.
Large bed, filled with water.
Bean bag chair and pillows.
Music throughout.
Her emotional reactions to the space remained equally vivid: an instant feeling of being trapped, followed by the overwhelming urge to turn and flee. She felt “repulsion” at what she described as an “overkill” not unlike that of a used-car salesman trying to score on a weekly tally sheet.
There’s a needle I’ve been trying to thread with my boudoir redecoration project: I want a space that feels sexy, but not sleazy; I want the room to feel like a place where you could hold an orgy, but entering the room should not feel like you’re being propositioned for one.
The obvious side of this is fitness for purpose; mirrors on the ceiling and a shelf with a row of butt plugs lined up like hummel figurines will make it clear that the room is a fucking-centric space. If the boudoir is meant to be a place where people lounge and chat and drink without then also having sex, that should be evident in the functionality of the room.
But the more difficult part of this to define is the “used-car salesman” vibe; the desperation and impersonality of the space. The description of the bachelor pad conjures an image that’s vivid but also strangely generic; we know that the bachelor in question really wants to get laid, but little else. And I think this is emblematic of the “horndog vs pervert” divide:
a horndog celebrates their own sexuality. a pervert sees themselves as sexless and imposes sexuality onto those around them
A horndog’s room tells you about who they are, not just what they want. The room is a window into their mind – their personality, their self-image, their flights of fancy. Sensuous Spaces describes this in terms of “fantasy” – not in the “wizards & castles” sense, or even in the erotic sense, but in the sense that a sensuous space is a setting for shared imagination and idealization.
In my last update on the conversation pit project, I mentioned that the sitting area would be built around a thickly padded rug. The rug has both important functional and aesthetic responsibilities, so I spent much of this week researching and shopping for rugs.
I wanted an “Oriental” rug with a complex design and multiple distinct colors. The conversation pit is being built around the rug, and it should serve as a visual centerpiece. This eliminated a lot of mass-market rugs, since the fashion is much more oriented towards solid colors and geometric designs; many of the remaining Oriental-styled rugs at Pottery Barn were either faux-distressed or overdyed in single bright colors.
I also wanted a rug that would be well-made. I’m not intending for this rug to be an heirloom or anything, but I want something that didn’t feel “disposable.” Though I don’t have any particular feelings about whether the rug is hand- or machine-made, my research warned me off of tufted rugs , which eliminated most of the remaining Pottery Barn options.
I ended up doing most of my shopping on Revival Rugs, which mostly sells vintage handmade Turkish rugs. Here are some of the rugs I found most affecting:
Good pattern with strong central medallion; probably too muted in color. Also, though this would be no harder to clean than any other wool rug, just looking at it makes me anxious about spilling something on it.
They have a lot of rugs with this lozenge-shaped design which doesn’t really do it for me, but the navy blue on the mostly light-colored rug is quite striking.
This is the one that made me understand why the rugs all have names. An anonymous rug that looks like this is a consumed good; a rug like this named Remon is old and frail, but still noble. You know, like Gus, the Theatre Cat.
The dusty rose & sage color scheme is restrained, but vivid. The pattern is complex but is not afraid of negative space. The fractal ornamentation on the lozenge and the frame round it off such that it looks like the enormous eye of an ancient creature.
As I was scrolling through the timeline this morning, I got annoyed with a series of tweets on the topic of mandatory ethics classes in computer science. While I believe that ethics are a fundamental part of understanding the role of one’s profession in society, I doubt that ethics classes would have much impact on the behavior in industry. I thought today I would write about how ethics is a problem with businesses much more than it is a problem with engineers, and the ethical standards for “”"”real”””” engineers are only meaningful because violating them has actual, legal consequences for both engineer and employer.
But then I tweeted about it instead, because I wanted people to actually read it.
In the absence of real work, my conversation pit project has become my primary creative outlet. I’m still figuring out the specifics, but I think the back half of the room will be a king-sized bed on a very low platform, and the front half of the room will have floor-level couches & side tables on a thickly-padded rug.
I’m still trying to figure out the overall aesthetic; my apartment doesn’t currently have any intentional color themes or aesthetics beyond “IKEA Modern”, but this project is a basically ground-up redesign of the room, so I have an opportunity to make a Statement with this.
But as I’ve been talking my friends ears off about this project, a few have pointed out the irony in building a conversation pit when I rarely had guests over before, and I certainly won’t be having guests over anytime soon. But the way I see it, I’m a “reverse prepper” – in the midst of the apocalypse, I’m planning for a recovery, or a new beginning.
I’ve been making a lot of unusual drinks lately (though nothing quite as unusual as this) so I figured I’d give it a shot. Lots of foods that I love (e.g. beer, cheese, honey) do not seem like they would be tasty when you describe the process to make them; maybe the same is true of the beef fizz?
My guess is that this drink is a family-friendly derivative of the Bullshot, a briefly trendy cocktail in the Bloody Mary tradition, and in my version I added the booze back to it (in this case, using tequila instead of vodka for a little more personality).
I took a sip of this and didn’t die, but it was surprisingly bland. I realized this was probably because I was using real beef stock and not Campbells, which is condensed & has a bunch of added seasonings. I ended up taking it in a slightly phở-influenced direction: inspired by the Gin-Gin Mule I added muddled mint & basil. After some more tweaks I added more flavors: instead of the Bullshot’s tabasco & worcestershire, I used sriracha and fish sauce.
In the end it was … fine? I described it to my partner as “about as good as a Bloody Mary at a wedding” – I probably wouldn’t make it for myself again, but I might try it if it were on a menu. I still suspect it would be better with a condensed broth base – I think much like coffee, it does not handle dilution well.
But when I was making this drink, I had a sort of epiphany about these drinks and their presence in 70s dinner party cookbooks – I think they are more fun to serve to other people than to drink yourself. The magic of this drink isn’t that it’s good, exactly, but that it’s way better than it sounds, and serving it to your guests is like performing a magic trick.
There are a lot of parallels between the systemic dysfunction in my last job and my own personal dysfunction, and given what my symptoms were all pointing towards, I’ve been referring to this as “institutional ADHD.” One particular symptom I encounter in both contexts is the notion that there is an enormous amount of work that needs to be done, but there is somehow also “nothing to do”. This is usually framed as “analysis paralysis” – you can’t choose what to work on next.
I think when people hear analysis paralysis, they think of Buridan’s Ass: there are too many good options, and analyzing each option re-prioritizes it to the top. But what I have experienced far more often is the opposite of this: upon evaluation, none of the options seem worthwhile. In this case, the number of options is basically irrelevant. And instead of being trapped in a state of indecision, you decide very quickly – to do nothing.
This looks something like:
What should I do today?
Maybe I should clean the kitchen.
Hmm, my pantry is pretty disorganized.
I should get some, like, shelves or something.
Should I order something from the container store?
This seems like a lot of money, and I don’t even have a job right now.
I guess my kitchen is fine the way it is. Well, let’s see what’s happened on Twitter in the last five minutes.
A recurring theme so far in this notebook has been my troubled relationship with projects in my early twenties – synthesizers, cocktails, ascots – but in the back half of my twenties I got a different bug in my brain: I want a conversation pit. I don’t know where it would go (I live in a fairly narrow railroad-style apartment) and I don’t know what I would do with it (I almost never have guests over) but I still, somehow, believe that a conversation pit is right for me.
I’m not exactly sure how I got fixated on this, but if any of my other projects are any indication, its about aspirational identity. And although I could give all sorts of reasoning for how this connotes a lovable oddball with regular social gatherings, there’s no getting around the obvious: this is sex furniture.
When other people talk about you, what do they say? When other people think about you, what are they thinking? For many people, these questions make them anxious, because they imagine other people talking behind their back or thinking poorly of them. But this question makes me anxious because I cannot imagine anything at all.
Logically I know that other people talk and think about me, and I could probably figure out what a person knows about me, or even how they would answer a direct question about me. And when I’m with someone, or talking to them online, I can get a sense of how they feel and what their reactions mean.
But I really struggle to put myself into the position of someone thinking about me when I’m not around. I can sometimes manage it if I prepare a specific scenario – eg the woman from tuesday’s post using her matching kettle and remembering me – but even then I have a hard time forming a coherent image of what she is thinking.
Ultimately, the fear I have when I wrestle with this is that people aren’t thinking about me at all. They don’t dislike me – they might even speak highly of me if prompted – but I do not otherwise exist in their mental landscape.
I spent a good chunk of my teens and twenties thinking of my self as a musician, but for much of this period it would be more proper to refer to myself as an “instrument owner.” I do occasionally write, record and sometimes even perform music, but for the most part I have had a significantly larger collection of gear than was warranted by the music I was making. Even when I am actively making music, most of my equipment isn’t plugged in or at-hand; it is instead piled up in closets and in corners.
As a programmer, I am always looking for an opportunity to create abstractions, and I realized there were parallels between this and my other over-provisioned hobbies. The milk crate full of soldering equipment and unfinished electronics kits, the kitchen rack with the stand mixer and sous-vide circulator, the tub full of legos, the dresser drawer full of ascots, even the bookcase full of books I will not read: all of these are instances of “shame piles”. I call them this because I see them as representations of the person I aspired to be but never became; they are the activities that I (quite literally) do not have a place for in my life, but I cannot bring myself to let go.
I think shame piles can also exist in software: I wrote a thread about this a few months ago, but the tl;dr is that a lot of software has half-baked and seldom-used features that stick around for the same reason as shame piles do – they seem too valuable to just throw away, but they’re not doing you any good just sitting there.
In my final year in Boston, a woman I was sort-of dating gave me an electric kettle.
We met on OKCupid: she was a materials scientist living in Ann Arbor, in her late 30s, at the end of a marriage and I presume a little bored of the dating scene in her neck of the woods, and she messaged me when she was on a business trip to Boston. I was 25, working at Walgreens, living with one girlfriend and seriously trying to date at least one other person who I think might have still been a teenager at the time.
She took me out for dinner and drinks and I was apparently charming enough for her to take me back to her hotel. And for the next five years or so, we wrote to each other and met up something like twice a year. We eventually drifted apart – its hard to say that our lives diverged when they never really converged in the first place, but we were both in weird, transitional stages in our lives when we met, and our new “normal” lives just did not involve the other.
The last time I saw her was early 2016 – she had moved to DC, and I went down to visit her. We got dinner and drinks but I guess my charm had worn off by that point, and I ended the evening sob-masturbating, as you do. We met up again the following day and ended up playing Cards Against Humanity with her boyfriend, her ex-husband (who, I guess, had moved with her from Ann Arbor?) and their tween daughter. She didn’t pick any of my cards.
She sent me the kettle, I think, shortly after our first date, which would have been right before I moved to New York. I had made an offhand remark about how our existing electric kettle – one of those deals you get at the drug store for ten bucks – seemed a little sketchy, so she sent me a fancy Breville kettle with buttons labelled for different tea temperatures. Now I understand that dropping a hundred bucks on a teapot is no big deal if you’re making six figures (and she had probably spent that kind of money on our date) but it seemed like a dramatic gesture to someone on a Walgreens salary.
I brought it with me to New York, though it honestly didn’t get much use for the following, uh, decade – once I started working in tech, I got much more into the habit of drinking coffee at the office or at a cafe on my commute; I would bet that for several years that kettle only made the occasional hot toddy. But much like how quarantine has gotten me making my own cocktails again, I’ve been using the kettle nearly every day to make my morning cup of tea.
I’ve been making client-heavy web applications for about eight years now, which is now approximately half of the time that pattern has existed (beginning with GMail in 2004). I’m still not 100% sure they’re a good idea.
On one hand, I am unambiguously pro-web as a platform for software distribution. Putting aside whether the web allows for good software, you can run web apps on just about any computer, you can usually run them in a matter of seconds, and – given the App Store model that dominates mobile and is slowly taking over desktop – it will soon be one of the only free-as-in-speech software ecosystems.
On the other hand, browsers are pretty shit at providing native-like app experiences, particularly on mobile. At best you get an app that’s ravenously RAM-hungry and has an Uncanny Valley-resemblance to native apps. Nobody makes a web app because they think it will be better than a native app; they make the web app because the alternative is no app at all.
The root of my discomfort, I think, is that so much of the web software I have written has been a futile attempt to simulate the feel of native apps. I’m not talking about stuff like Electron, Cordova, React Native, etc – I’ve never even used them – I mean at a much lower level: modals, tooltips, notifications, dropdowns. In other words: interactivity & state.
I recognize that this is a pretty extreme position to take; after all, half of these have been a part of the web since the DHTML era and have established web-first design patterns associated with them. But I think the early introduction of non-navigational interactivity stunted the development of the web as its own medium, just as the introduction of “talkies” stunted the development of film as a visual medium.
[TODO: insert update here when there is evidence that fireworks are, in fact, a psyop]
If you live in a major US city, you have probably heard (and possibly seen) way more fireworks this summer than you ever have before. If you spend a lot of time on twitter (which seems likely for my audience), you have probably encountered this thread:
Reporting from Brooklyn, there was yet another night of extremely loud fireworks starting at 8 pm. and ending at about 2 a.m. This is the second week straight of this; every night during the same time period, like clockwork.
— Son of Baldwin (Robert Jones, Jr.) (@SonofBaldwin) June 20, 2020
The tl;dr is that:
the cops are responsible for the fireworks, both directly (setting them off themselves) or indirectly (distributing them to the community)
the purpose of this is psychological warfare – the fireworks provoke anxiety, prevent people from sleeping, and will inure people to the sound of gunfire
Here are some alternate and additional theories for the fireworks:
People are spending their evenings bored at home because of COVID and are shooting off fireworks to pass the the time
The above, except that the fireworks are an act of protest
The above, except the purpose is to provoke police escalation, and the anarchists are funded by George Soros
People are spending their COVID stimulus checks on fireworks
There is an increased trade in illegal fireworks because underemployed rideshare drivers are “trafficking” in out-of-state fireworks to supplement their incomes
Police are selling fireworks themselves (perhaps those seized from other fireworks “traffickers”) but purely for financial reasons
Police are uninvolved in the distribution of fireworks, but are refusing to respond to noise complaints because they feel “under-appreciated”
The above, except that they are not responding to noise complaints because they blew their overtime budgets on protests & curfew
The thing is – any or all of these could be true at the same time. All of them are attempts to explain the fireworks phenomenon through deductive reasoning, and none of them have any evidence beyond the fireworks themselves. And while I have no issue believing that law enforcement agencies would wage psychological war against the people they claim to serve, this seems like a lot of work for a relatively subtle effect.
I think it’s worth contrasting the fireworks conspiracy with some other terror campaigns involving the police. Of course there is a selection bias in play here, but there are plenty of examples with only the flimsiest cover-up, eg. the gruesome deaths of activists ruled as suicides. In these cases, the flimisness of the cover-up is part of the effect – the terror comes not just from the activist’s murder, it comes from the idea that the police have the power to deny objective reality. The absence of a cover-up, with zero consequences, is the expression of power and the act of psychological warfare.
And if there is, in fact, a police conspiracy to distribute fireworks for the purpose of psychological warfare, there is probably an abundance of evidence indicating this. The scale of the plan outlined in the thread linked above suggests that lots of people were offered free/cheap professional-grade fireworks; where are these people? Some of the people who were offered fireworks (especially if they were free) must have suspected a set-up and declined; where are they?
I spent the first half of my twenties – 2006 thru 2010 – living in Boston, working at Walgreens, and cycling through hobbies and affectations. The three pillars of my self-identity during this period were synthesizers, cocktails, and “dandy” menswear; while working the long, slow night shifts at Walgreens I would hide in the photo lab and sketch out my fantasies of a “speakeasy” where I’d serve craft cocktails and host electro-pop shows, presumably while dressed like Beau Brummel or whatever.
This, unsurprisingly, never came to fruition. While I amassed quite a horde of keyboards, liquor and ascots (I have no idea how I managed this on a Walgreens salary) I never pursued any of these seriously; I never worked as a bartender, or played a show, or even really blogged about any of these topics. (The handle “modernserf” comes from a lifestyle blog I was intending to write but never got past the “purchasing a domain” stage.) Within a year of moving to New York I had gotten back into programming, which became both my career and primary creative outlet, and my emotional investment in these avocations shrunk down to a level commensurate with the effort I was willing to invest in them.
I never fully stopped making cocktails – I still maintained a formidable home bar, and I’d make drinks for parties and social gatherings – but it lost its prominence in my life. Subsequently, most of my drinking in New York has been at bars. I can think of a multitude of reasons for this: I have enough money to go out all the time, I have developed a taste for beer, I live alone and rarely have guests over, I don’t have to worry about missing the last subway home, and (perhaps most importantly) the standard for mixed drinks in 2010s NYC is vastly higher than that of 2000s Boston.
COVID threw all that out the window, and at a time when I most desired intoxication. So while my friends were discovering the joys of sourdough, I rediscovered the joys of mixology. I didn’t do this by half-measures; I dove right into Beachbum Berry’s “Total Tiki” and started working through every drink I could find the ingredients for. Soon I was purchasing multiple cases of booze from Astor Wines and a crate of bitters & barware from The Boston Shaker, a Somerville cocktail supply shop that opened the last year I was in Boston.
This project has been resurfacing some long-forgotten memories of my early twenties, particularly after reading Robert Simonson’s history of the early-2000s cocktail renaissance, “A Proper Drink”. Though Boston was a bit of a backwarter in this period (all of Boston gets half a chapter, while individual NYC and London bars get multi-chapter arcs), much of the story takes place on the blogs and forums I was frequenting. It is a little strange to consider how much of what I think of the time I was living in Boston was really the time I was living on the Chowhound forums.
