Forrest Brazeal

A physical book … published by NPR … about collecting CDs

A physical book … published by NPR … about collecting CDs. The past (1999) truly is a foreign country

Contrary to prevailing wisdom, there has never been a better time to share your own writing, in longform, on the internet.

why is everybody saying that conservatives don't read

theyre literally called MAGA-zines

Interesting point raised by a smart friend today:

Traditional DevRel/tech community building are over, because AI kills loyalty to platforms / frameworks / etc.

Not just because it lowers switching costs ... but because it destroys the self-identification people used to feel with their tools.

New cool kid Silicon Valley-ism I just heard is “what’s his spike?”

As in: “what’s his outlier trait/the thing he’s best at?”

Any idea where this comes from?

as an enterprise, I assert that nothing is fixed, and tbh that's how we like it

enterprises can remain irrational longer than AI developer productivity companies can remain solvent

tweet from elon musk: "With the release of version 1.0, Grok Imagine is now generating more images & videos than everyone else combined!"

interesting. images and videos of what, elon?

Here’s what I’ve learned after 3 kids:

- babies are pets, it’s like taking care of a hamster
- 2 year olds and above are people, you just talk to them
- 1 year olds are fast freaky little aliens with no reasoning and no sense of self-preservation, good luck.

A hand-drawn Venn diagram titled “Bubbles” with four overlapping circles labeled Beanie Babies, NFTs, AI, and Dot-com. Each circle includes phrases like “Gamble on plushies,” “Gamble on JPEGs,” “Gamble on LLMs,” and “Gamble on HTML.” Overlapping areas note shared traits such as “The products tend to have cutesy first names,” “Mostly in private markets,” “Good people got hurt,” “Genuinely important underlying technology,” and “This URL could be worth millions!” The center intersection reads: “Somebody got rich, but probably not you.” The overall tone is humorous and critical of speculative tech and collectible bubbles.

hope this clears everything up

(Ofc, the other reason for all the noms is that SINNERS is a period drama and a kind of musical, which just gives it a ton of awards surface area relative to its competition. OBAA isn’t a costume/HMU candidate, nor Marty Supreme for best song/best score. SINNERS is an easy nom in all 4 categories)

SINNERS is a smart, stylish movie that people actually saw, enjoyed, and talked about. The Oscars should always be recognizing movies like this. They’re actually rarer than you think.

Need a plausible theory for how Minneapolis became the main character of the 2020s

A child of mine, historically a selective eater, just downed his first-ever cheeseburger.

After each bite he said “This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”

As soon as it was gone he groaned “I never want one of those again.”

yep, that’s the cheeseburger experience. Welcome to America, kid.

Finally saw an ‘Avatar’ in the theater, in 3D, and like … I get it now.

TIL that Christopher Nolan is red-green colorblind, and suddenly so many things make sense.

silent night, holy night - cool
all is calm - sounds amazing
ALL IS BRIGHT - wait what
round yon virgin mother & child - why is it bright
holy infant so tender and mild - it's bedtime
sleep in heavenly peace - TURN OFF THE LIGHT FIRST

screenshot from Hamlet's Wikipedia page, showing the play was first performed between 1599 and 1601

screenshot from the "Tales from Shakespeare" Wikipedia page, showing the first edition was published in 1807

I just realized that Charles and Mary Lamb's famous children's book "Tales from Shakespeare" was published closer to the writing of Shakespeare's actual plays than to the present day.

“Mary, Did You Know?”

or as I call it, “Mansplaining: The Christmas Carol”

No DevRel touched any of this, I promise.

The story of this year's re:Invent expo hall is "booth inflation". Two-story palaces with built-in podcast studios! Custom art installations! Theater lighting rigs! Companies are dropping 7 figures on these McMansions.

Really doesn’t get better than seeing your little kids push back from the table with their cheeks still bulging out from their last mouthful of Thanksgiving leftovers, racing off to play with their cousins. That’s what the holidays are all about.

My old Toyota Sienna just transported two fairly large couches across town without so much as needing to have the back hatch tied open.

I could easily stuff a queen mattress AND box spring in the back of my 2001 Ford Windstar.

Minivans are hilariously useful, no home should be without one.

3 kids in, and I finally have one who likes the taste of amoxicillin. This is a game-changer.

@emilyfreeman.bsky.social and I finally started a podcast!

Get your dose of B2B sass wherever fine podcasts are vended (vended? vent? anyway, there's venting): podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v...

booked unfortunately - but happy to catch up at another time!

My plan to drive to KubeCon from Charlotte is looking more and more defensible.

When everybody's down, nobody is you want a take about the AWS outage? fine, here's a take

To put it more bluntly: newsletter.goodtechthings.com/p/when-every...

I feel like the biggest takeaway from the latest AWS outage is that there’s simply no architecting around them at this point. Even if you are 100% redundant/multi-whatever, your vendors and customers are certainly not. Order volume is dropping no matter what you do. We’re all in this together.