Mere Being 002

Man. May.

Lot going on right now. I'm writing this from San Francisco's Mission District. Fourth move since 2019 which is just bonkers. I hate moving. And I keep doing it.

I moved something like five times in my childhood – Coast Guard brat – and changed schools even more. In the first couple of years of my professional career I moved twice – New York City, Oakland. Then down to LA, back to Oakland, Berkeley, and now San Francisco.

Notice the way I tell that story I entirely omit Virginia, where I spent over ten years. When I do mention Virginia, I emphasize how I was unsettled even there – all those school changes. I don't like Virginia, I don't want to be from Virginia. So I'm not. Those ten years just don't count.

Launched a new newsletter this month. Mastering Neovim. 36 sign ups so far. Plus 10 new subscribers in the past 30 days to the various newsletters hosted at Simpler Machines. Feeling pretty good about both those numbers. There's some overlap – not all the subs for Mastering Neovim are new to my newsletter ecosystem – but there are some new e-mails there, too.

Objectively these are small numbers, but this time last month I was feeling pretty stuck. Simpler Machines had been going out to 188, 189, 187 subscribers for a few months. Now it's at 197. I'd like to break 200 this month, may try a little marketing push to see if I can get there.

Every single subscriber still feels hyper-significant. One more step towards– I'm afraid to say it out loud. One more person who might someday be a subscriber, might buy a book, might help me find a contract. That list, and the writing that produced it, is the first thing I've really built. My very own little bit of capital.

Ted Lasso. Are you watching it? I keep reading that this season "sucks now." And I kind of... don't get it? Yeah it's loose and ridiculous and weird but, like, remember, this was a series that started on the premise, "A woman hires an American football coach in order to destroy an English football premise and get back at her horrible billionaire ex, but gets won over by the football coach's midwestern earnestness." The show has always been absurd.

Season One was at least really tight, conceptually. It had a clean set of interlocking arcs and a neat finish. Season Three is definitely a lot looser and a lot weirder, but so was Season Two.

I just don't see what the folks who hate it are seeing. I'm not sure what's so different about the experience that I'm having.

The only thing I've been able to figure out so far is that I'm really invested in Jamie and his arc, and I can see what they're setting up there, so maybe that's making this season feel cohesive to me in a way that other folks aren't picking up on. There also seems like some real thematic coherence between otherwise unrelated plots about various terrible rich people.

One criticism that I do agree with is the way they've handled Sam. They keep giving him real, serious, interesting problems and then dropping them to go back to the white characters. I wish they'd finish the swing there. I also agree that the show's gotten just a little bit too big and unwieldy – they've got too many characters to quite give any one of them justice. That's a problem that started in Season Two but it's definitely worse in Three.