tangentialism is David Yee!
Things I've written
It occurred to me as I rebuilt this site that I've lost a lot of writing from the various platforms I've stood on over the years. In addition to anything newer I write here, I've selected some of that stuff (not all good, but all notable to me) for republishing here, grouped according to the blog that hosted it.
New stuff
- on Lara Hogan's Resilient Management
- “What Lara does here is offer that there is nothing particularly unique to the challenge of engineering management: understanding people and how they react to the world around them.”
- Amazon's jobs would have been a giant nail in the coffin for the city's underprivileged populations, already on their last legs
- “We've seen this before.”
- On our tenth anniversary
- “Looking up to see eighty people totally happy for you is a really great and unusual feeling.”
- How I knew my grandmother and her food
- “She, my father, and my aunts speak in Chinese while my brother and I sit on the floor and eat all the oranges.”
- Twenty internet things I like, in penitence for complaining
- “Dark days come and go, but Friday should be sacrosanct.”
The dothatthing years
Posts from a Tumblr blog that lived at do.tthatthing.org from 2007 to 2013, when that domain was stolen by an SEO domain squatter jerk.
- The day we announced Editorially
- “I was raised to be an editor, but I always wanted to be a writer.”
- The day I left 20×200
- “The culture of startups is overflowing with mythical personae of pirates and ninjas, but I’m not a pirate—I’m an evangelist and a plumber.”
- The day I met my wife
- “That was the last moment in my life that I did not know her.”
- A post about creative play and, in hindsight, the ephemerality of startups
- “The craft of celebrating amateurism is one of the most fruitful community acts there is—in no small part because there are so many of us.”
- Even though we had a great caterer, we ate pizza on our wedding night
- “Cake, drinking, dancing, amazing—best wedding ever, swear to god.”
- Something I wrote the day that Steve Jobs died
- “To have Jobs as a role model is, at its essence, to take on the challenge of continually trying the impossible.”
- The only thing I’ve written about September 11th
- “In 2001, I was twenty-seven. I am thirty-seven today.”
- The first major magazine switches to digital, and I have opinions
- “The hard step for magazine publishers has always been jumping in that cold pool of ‘here’s my entire magazine, no mailbox required.’”
- Just before Barack Obama is elected President, I talk about what it means that we are both mixed-race kids
- “He has to fall on one side or another of that fence, but what would that have meant to his grandmother?”
- Three things the New York Times reported on from a single day in 1876
- “Charles Gilbert, an Orange newsdealer, stole $500 from his wife’s trunk yesterday, and, it is supposed, has gone to Europe.”
The classic years
Posts from a Movable Type blog I hosted at Tangentialism from 2004 to 2006.
- A post about how technology is eating away at my memory
- “I think the connected life is reprogramming my brain to better serve my devices, games, and the Internet, and my memories of life as I once knew it are just the first victims.”
- Strangely, the only blog post I have ever written about a cheeseburger
- “I really should have called a second time.”
- What I like about John Cage
- “The week I started college at Bard was the week John Cage died.”
The wiki years
Entries from a non-chronological wiki-based blog that existed from 2003 to 2004. Ambitious and sort of insufferable. The dates for each post are approximations.
- About the coffee-shop-slash-record-store-slash-club that defined my twenties
- “I cannot think of a more relaxing way to pencil out one-seventh of one's nightlife than by sitting next to a subwoofer and eating cupcakes in Brooklyn's communal living room.”
- I whine about winter
- “You wake up with winter, and there's nothing to distract you until Valentine's Day.”
- I predict the death of vinyl records
- “Peer-to-peer file sharing is a knife in the gut of the corporate dance music industry, but it's not the killer—the industry is killing itself.”
- The first project I never finished, which ended up becoming the first blog I ever kept
- “The river of conversation is only the sum of its tributaries.”
- The day I moved to New York City
- “It was nine p.m.; I realized that I would spend my first night in New York alone, in the dark.”
- A blog post about Brooklyn in which I am appalled about rents that today seem comically low
- “Brooklyn is long stretches of quiet street, proud distance, and hopeful sacrifice.”
- Something I wrote about an early peer-to-peer music sharing site—still vastly better than today's services
- “Entire catalogs of small labels and under-appreciated musicians were enshrined on Audio Galaxy, distributed to a new generation of listeners whose encyclopedic knowledge of 1960's African Funk could challenge Fela Kuti himself.”