September 2022

After years of daily drinking, I recently quit booze forever. You can read my outer-inner-monologue about alcohol here. Confronting my demons forced me to consider other things I don’t like about myself.

taylor.town

New Essays

• 1,000 Weekends Without a Drink
• How to Become the Worst Version of Yourself

Other Essays

• never wait for the check at restaurants
• Parental-Self-Controls
• Do It for the Music
• Long Live Plain Text!
• How Do Taoists Quit Smoking?
• Time

Updated Lists

• Podcasts
• Bucket-List
• Music

Project Updates

• paused writing How to Pilot a Meat Machine
• plotted initial designs for secret app idea
• started planning a tech conference for 2025
• continued switching from emacs to neovim
• implemented passive life-logging using iOS shortcuts
• planted white clover in my yard to improve soil health
• started working on secret VR experience
• added cool stats to nowify

Recommended

Cool people

• Brian Hicks
• David Schmudde
• Wendy Randolph
• Jack Rusher
• Randy

Purchases

• iPhone 14 Pro
• Seven Potions Beard Wax

YouTube channels

• Randy, the Sequel: the logs of a man grappling with game-development and self-development. Almost 2 years ago, he suddenly left YouTube/Twitch; he abandoned a game he’d been working on for years. But this month, he popped back into existence with a brand new outlook on life… and a finished a game!

Videos

• MunMun’s Song
• PPPP PaPiPuPePo
• Lessons learnt from making my first game
• DeEp WOrK
• I RELEASED MY FIRST VIDEO GAME
• The Self Destruction of HBO Max
• SO SAD THAT STEVE JOBS DIED OF LIGMA
• Can Terrible Places Become Walkable?
• The Rehearsal is a Masterpiece

Images

• take it easy
• drugs

Television series

• The Rehearsal: an uncomfortable masterpiece. HBO gave comedian(?) Nathan Fielder an insane budget to do insane things. In this short series, he constructs elaborate simulacra of situations so that he and others can “rehearse” real life for deeper insights. It’s difficult to watch, but extremely worthwhile.

Books

• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck: a heartbreaking rags-to-riches-to-rags story about wealth, family, work, fairness, kindness, and land. It’s easy to see why a book about rural Chinese peasants was the best-selling book in the US during The Dust Bowl and The Great Depression. This book will inspire or haunt you.
• Solaris by Stanislaw Lem: a sci-fi book that gave me literal nightmares. It’s unsettling and thought-provoking.

Other

• itemlabel.com: Best. Store. Ever.

Podcasts

• 99% Invisible
• Björk: Sonic Symbolism
• Deep Questions with Cal Newport
• Epic Gardening
• Everything Everywhere Daily
• the memory palace
• The Permaculture Podcast
• Software Unscripted

Podcast episodes

• Planet Money: Wake up and smell the fraud
• Epic Gardening: In-Depth on Macro and Micro Nutrients
• Conversations with Tyler: Shruti Rajagopalan talks to Daniel Gross and Tyler about Identifying and Predicting Talent
• Cautionary Tales: Tim Talks Bicycles with Patented
• Endless Thread: Swimming Hole: The man, the myth, the leap
• the memory palace: Weather Conditions Above Mount Fuji
• Freakonomics: This Is Your Brain on Pollution
• Materialism: Making Materials in a Microwave
• Materialism: Turning Heat into Electricity
• The Permaculture Podcast: The New Wildcrafted Cuisine
• The Permaculture Podcast: The Wildcrafting Brewer
• The Permaculture Podcast: Jeff Speck - Creating Walkable Cities
• The Permaculture Podcast: Allan Savory - Managing Complexity and Holistic Management
• The Permaculture Podcast: Sustainable Suburbs - Serenbe | Steve Nygren
• The Permaculture Podcast: Eric Puro - Chaga and Medicinal Mushrooms
• The Side Hustle Show: The Side Hustle Snowball: Erase Your Expenses One Extra Income Stream at a Time
• The Side Hustle Show: 16 Marketing Tips for Books (and Other Products) From Bestselling Authors
• Software Unscripted: Database Apocalypse
• Materialism: Ceramic Dental Composites
• Deep Questions with Cal Newport: The Art of Saying No
• Patented: Powerpoint
• Everything Everywhere Daily: The Berlin Airlift
• Revisionist History: Outliers, Revisited
• Two Minutes in the Garden: Using Human Urine in the Garden – Benefits and Risks
• The Permaculture Podcast: Katy Bowman - Nutritious Movement
• Patented: Baby Formula
• The Permaculture Podcast: Natural Farming and Masanobu Fukuoka
• Everything Everywhere Daily: The Doolittle Raid
• Twenty Thousand Hertz: 1-900-20K-HRTZ
• Epic Gardening: Food Preservation Methods
• Conversations with Tyler: Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market
• Everything Everyhwere Daily: Shakespeare’s English
• Epic Gardening: Foraging for Food
• Platen Money: Econ’s Brush with the Law
• Everything Everywhere Daily: Astronomical Distances and the Age of the Universe
• Epic Gardening: Bulb Selection and Succession Planting
• Deep Questions with Cal Newport: Ryan Holiday: Discipline is Destiny
• Everything Everywhere Daily: Getting to the Bottom of Shoes
• Quanta Science Podcast: Researchers Achieve “Absurdly Fast” Algorithm for Network Flow
• Planet Money: The miracle apple
• the memory palace: Nee Blinky