From Angelica Jade Bastién’s review of Amazon’s new horror anthology series Them:

Them – showrun and created by Little Marvin and executive produced by Lena Waithe – isn’t just rote, flagrantly biting the aesthetics of other filmmakers. It isn’t just morally bankrupt. It isn’t just grating in its empty platitudes and kiddie-pool-deep proclamations. I am comfortable calling it one of the most anti-Black pieces of pop culture I’ve seen in the last few years, one that left me spent after the grueling process of watching its virulent imagery.

Later in the article:

Them primarily feels empty during the first half of its run. But episode five, “Covenant I” – which is, notably, directed by the show’s only Black director, Zola’s Janicza Bravo — turns the show from a grating, hollow depiction of Blackness in America to one that revels in degrading its Black characters in a way that left me questioning both the Black creators involved and the studio system that is eager for this kind of work.

I’ve heard a few different things about the show over the past few weeks. I was slightly interested at first, but it doesn’t sound like something I really need in my life right now.

I just came across a series of “My Typical Day” blog posts started by Colin Devroe. He wrote the first one back in January and called out a few bloggers to do the same. It got a pretty good response. I haven’t been tagged yet, but figured I would join in too. Here’s a look at my COVID-19-era typical day:

Around 7:00 AM - Wake up and lay in the bed using my phone for a while.

For most of my life, my natural wake-up time was around 10 - 11 AM (I’ve had a pretty consistent 12 - 3 AM bedtime). Lately though, whether it’s from stress or just too much on my mind, I always end up waking up around 7 or so, unable to go back to sleep. I don’t actually want to be up at 7 though so I just lay there. My phone is usually around on my bed/nightstand somewhere, so I just look at RSS feeds or Twitter for a while.

Sometime around 9:00 AM ~ 10:00 AM - Get up and shower.

I take a 10 - 15 minute shower every morning. I do a lot of thinking in there. If I’m actively working on some kind of project/feature/article, I’ll end up doing some planning while my mind wanders. Since most of my time being awake these days involves staring at a screen, it’s good to have a block of time where I actually have to be in my own head. I definitely miss my subway commute for more of that.

About 10:00 AM ~ 11:00 AM - Make breakfast.

Either I or my partner Monique will make oatmeal and coffee most mornings. It’s pretty random who will end up doing it, but we kinda alternate.

Oatmeal: Steel cut oats. The kind you cook over the stove for like 10 mins. We usually dice apples while the oatmeal cooks and add that, cinnamon, honey, and some berries if we have any.

Coffee: We usually have some coffee from Starbucks/Peet’s/etc (whole beans, dark roast) around and we’ll grind and use a french press while the oatmeal is finishing up.

From around 11:00 AM until like 1:00 AM - Development, writing, video games, TV shows, etc.

After breakfast, most of the rest of my day just rotates between programming/development (either for a client or my own projects), writing articles, watching TV shows, and PC gaming. Usually in blocks of a couple of hours. And the order usually depends on what I was thinking about the most in the shower.

Meetings: Depending on the client I’m working with at the time, I may have meetings throughout the day. But luckily since I haven’t worked as an employee for a while, I don’t have as many as I used to.

TV: If Monique and I are actively watching a show (lately it’s been The Strain and 12 Monkeys), we’ll watch a few episodes during the course of the day. Usually after 6:00 PM or so, but it depends on our schedules. We mostly use the Apple TV - Hulu, HBO Plus, Netflix, YouTube, etc.

Cooking: If we don’t order out (which is probably about half of our lunch/dinner meals), we mostly alternate cooking, sometimes for both of us, sometimes individually. Monique is more into it than I am, so she does it more than I do. We don’t have much of a schedule for food though. Usually we just start planning whenever one of us is feeling hungry enough.

Games: I realized recently that I’ve been playing a lot of games that need the same type of brain activity as building software. Mostly base building or strategy games like Civilization, Valheim, Grounded, or No Man’s Sky. Also some Magic The Gathering Arena. And Elite Dangerous. I play (and stream sometimes) randomly throughout the day, and some of them with Monique in the evenings.

Anywhere between 12:00 AM ~ 3:00 AM - Wind down and sleep.

I don’t have a specific bedtime. Depending on what I’m working on or playing, (or if I’m running behind on a deadline) I might be up pretty late. Sometimes I smoke too much and go to bed at like 10:30 PM.

Most nights, when I’m done with code/games, I get into bed and read the exact same stuff I do when I wake up in the morning (RSS/Twitter), or I watch YouTube videos of people playing video games like Civ 6 or whatever, which will usually immediately put me to sleep.

Some things you might be noticing:

Flexibility. There’s a giant 14 hour block of time where most of the things I do every day happen. That’s exactly the way I like it.

I didn’t say anything about outdoor activities/exercise. And that’s because I pretty much haven’t been doing any of that this past year. I live in a very walkable neighborhood that I like a lot but… you know. COVID. But now that vaccination is in full swing, I’m expecting that part to change and I do things that require walking around the city and seeing people in person.

There is no work/life balance.

The things I enjoy doing (solving technical problems with code and documenting/talking about those things) happen to be really valuable. But like most people, I don’t really love doing these things as an employee. Over the past few months I’ve tried to organize things so I can do those things in a way that isn’t like what we think of when we think of work, and make enough money to enjoy my life. I switched to freelance development (working mostly by myself instead of on a team so far) late last year, and I think I got pretty close to what I was looking for.

Now I “work” at pretty much any time: weekdays, weekends, afternoons, late at night, whenever. But at times that work best for me, in the priority/order I think makes sense, doing things I actually want to spend my time doing. I’m happy so far.

I’m tagging Ru Singh, Jacky Alciné, and Monica Powell.

Thomas Wilde from an article about Twitch’s growth and the rise of “sleep streaming”:

One peculiar blip on Twitch’s radar in March came from the sudden rise of “sleep streaming,” where popular streamers film themselves while they’re napping. Two streamers in particular, Ludwig Ahgren and Matthew “Mizkif” Rinaudo, clocked in about 2 million hours watched in March where neither of them were actually conscious at the time.

I saw Amouranth sleeping on stream when I was browsing the popular page on Twitch the other day and thought it was weird. I didn’t realize it was actually a thing though.

Signal (the end-to-end encrypted messaging app) is adding anonymous payments between users via MobileCoin.

From Andy Greenberg at Wired:

Signal today plans to announce that it’s rolling out the ability for some of its users to send money to one another within its fast-growing encrypted communications network. To do so, it has integrated support for the cryptocurrency MobileCoin, a form of digital cash designed to work efficiently on mobile devices while protecting users' privacy and even their anonymity. For now, the payment feature will be available only to users in the UK, and only on iOS and Android, not the desktop. But the new feature nonetheless represents an experiment in bringing privacy-focused cryptocurrency to millions of users, one that Signal hopes to eventually expand around the world.

I’ve read a lot of unhappy comment threads about this. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of overlap between people who are using Signal because it’s a secure/encrypted messaging app (you know… the main reason) and people who want cryptocurrency in their messaging app.

The creator of Signal, Moxie Marlinspike, was a technical advisor to the MobileCoin project. I’ve been seeing people speculating that this decision was mostly about him and Signal pumping another cryptocurrency and making a lot of money.

The Wired article (which, on the other hand, seems way too trusting of Moxie/MobileCoin/Signal), is describing the MobileCoin choice as being about choosing a currency that works better with mobile devices, is more private (when it comes to people being able to trace your purchases by looking at the blockchain), and works better as an actual currency¹ than Bitcoin.

This whole thing reminds me of what Keybase did with Stellar Lumen in 2019. They added the Lumen cryptocurrency as a way for users to send money to each other. Keybase also sent free Lumens² to each user every month, which ended with them cancelling the whole thing after realizing that spammers are pretty attracted to free money.

The interesting part of the Signal thing is that MobileCoin is actually based on the Stellar network, so… that whole failed experiment should probably be on their minds as they attempt to roll this out.

But I don’t think this is gonna work out well. I get the feeling that Moxie actually thinks this is an important thing to do for the product and actually helped design MobileCoin to work well with Signal and be private and easy to use and all that. But I also think that as a side effect he’ll make a lot of money and he knows that and is perfectly fine with it³.

But more than that, I think users won’t like it, it’ll attract a lot of bad attention, and the product will be worse because of it. Which is exactly what happened to Keybase when they did the exact same thing.

Wix just started a new marketing campaign aimed at Wordpress. It started with them sending headphones to popular Wordpress users (saying that they were “from WP”), with a QR code that links to a very badly received commercial.

I knew the two companies were in direct competition, but I didn’t realize how heated it got. Matt Mullenweg (one of the creators of Wordpress) just wrote an article titled Wix and Their Dirty Tricks saying:

Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session. 🤔

The first article linked in that quote talks about some open letters that Matt and the CEO of Wix, Avishai Abrahami, sent each other back in 2016. Matt said Wix used some of the open source Wordpress code without publishing all of the resulting code like you’re supposed to. He also mentioned that Wix used to be called Wixpress??? I had no idea.

Avishai’s response to Matt (also 2016) didn’t really address his points and just came off condescending and weak.

Anyway, Matt goes on to talk about Wix not allowing users to export any of their pages or files. Once you start using their editor, your shit is stuck there. He clearly sounds a lot happier with Squarespace’s decisions:

I have to believe that users will care about that in the long run, and maybe that’s why Squarespace just passed up Wix in market share. They natively support exporting into WordPress' format and don’t have to resort to dirty tricks to be successful. I expect Squarespace’s upcoming IPO will be a great one.

I work with either Wix, Wordpress, or Squarespace for clients (but I’m not using any of them for this website). I’ve edited some Wix sites in the past, but I never noticed that was no export feature. I did notice that less people chose it over the others tho.

And after everything I read about it today, I’m definitely a lot less likely to recommend it to people myself.