September was another big month for my life, mostly for me offline. Another good month for bicycle riding, seeing more of the trails on Randalls and Wards Islands.
The New York area has taught me a few things about islands and one of them is that they're very fungible. On a map, Randalls and Wards Islands look one one island because they're "conjoined". They were conjoined on purpose: they used to be two, with a bridge and everything. But then in 1955 the government announced they wanted to join up the islands "by allowing private contractors to dump debris within Little Hell Gate for free" (!)
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The opposite happened with Fire Island: it was one island for a while until 2012, and Hurricane Sandy broke it back into two.
Dump trash to combine islands, dump water from the sky to divide them. That's just how life is.
Listening
I watched Magnolia this month and finally got the hype around Aimee Mann. It's a little frustrating that the songs from the film aren't on
And a throwback: Dusty Springfield's version of When the Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes. Originally recorded by the Supremes and forgive me for highlighting the blue-eyed soul version of this song but it's so driving and urgent in a way that most of the other versions aren't, it's such a good slice of that very particular rushing rhythm of the era.
Reading
On a meta-level: I'm getting pulled back to Instapaper from Readeck, because I rely on offline reading so often and unfortunately the Readeck iOS offline mode is unreliable. It is open source and I should contribute and in all likelihood the issue will get fixed, but in the meantime I need something to look at on the subway.
Reading: I enjoyed Spiral's launch post a lot, as well as turbopuffer's post about their refactoring. Database companies in the AI-adjacent space are a nice hybrid kind of reading, still concerned with architecture and a little more grounded than a lot of the "big idea" or marketing-centric stuff that I read from AI labs. I also liked Charles Broskoski's "Personal Business" essay (one of the are.na founders).
And I've been really liking reading Work by Bud Smith. Review of that soon.
Otherwise
The end of October will be even more packed than September for me, so if I don't post, don't worry, I'm not dead, I'm partying.