There's a rule in business that's often called the “Peter Principle “. It's given in many forms, but here's my simplest summation:

People will be promoted to their level of incompetency, where they will come to rest.

Some twenty-one years ago I was on a Jeepney in Dagupan, in the Philippines.

fig. 1: A Jeepney. Technically this one is from Olongapo, not Dagupan, but close enough.

And the radio was playing. A song came on which I had never heard, but the first line I heard made me laugh so so hard, and even though I only heard it once, I've never forgotten it:

It's not a Bandcamp Friday, but I wanted to write about some music I picked up on Bandcamp recently.

Girls Who Care is not-so-secretly the same one guy who makes comedy music as Hot Dad. The difference seems to be that “Hot Dad” is comedy rock, whereas “Girls Who Care” performs more serious rock. In either case it's Erik Helwig.

I've never been good at chess. There are a few reasons for that, of course. One is that I don't play very often. And perhaps I just don't have the right kind of brain for chess to come to me naturally.

But I really do enjoy chess. In theory.

Glen Philips is often listed as the “front man” for California rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket. and, sure, he can be the front man.

RimWorld , for those who don't know isn't a game, according to the creator. It's a “Story Generator”. And it's quite good at that! But yes, you play it like a game. You are managing a little colony who is trying to survive on a moderately merciless world, and there is a “storyteller” AI who decides what to throw against you.

I want to share a lesson I’ve been learning over the past twenty years, slowly and poorly. It fits alongside my motto, which I’ll get to near the end. But first this disclaimer. I didn't write this about anyone else. I wrote this because I’ve been using it so much recently, and so people can help me stick to it.

Okay, enough burying the lede . Here’s the thesis statement:

Nobody else needs to endure my negative thoughts.

I'm not entirely sure what to say about Gemini, the new, intentionally limited internet protocol. Except that it feels right, it feels like a system whose time has come. It's the confluence and culmination of a lot of movements that have been swirling around the internet as of late.

Let's start from the beginning. Gemini is intentionally bare-bones. According to their homepage, the gemini project is meant to be halfway between gopher and the web. Thus it was named after a short-lived mid-point space program.

I thought I'd reminisce a little about an album I just barely bought. Also I might do this once a month for a while, just to add my tiny voice to the signal that boosts the joys of Bandcamp Friday.

For those who don't know, Bandcamp is a great way to buy music more-or-less directly from the creators. The site takes their percentage for running a storefront and handling all the downloads and streaming and whatnot.

But once a month, pretty much throughout the pandemic, they have had a Friday where they don't take their percentage from your purchase price. You can see when that will happen here. They call it “Bandcamp Friday”. Catchy, no?

So I try to buy an album or two on Bandcamp Friday, and I figured I'd write about the albums I pick up each month.

The Tot icon

I have wanted to love Drafts for years now. I like the idea of Drafts; a place where you input text and then you process it later, letting you capture the ideas before they run away, like a digital scratch pad.

But Drafts has become a little too intimidating for me. I love it, I really do, but I don’t use it, because I’m afraid I’m using it wrong. There are so many options, so many ways I can “process” my text when I’m done writing.