Mitch Wagner

I spent some time yesterday fooling around with Agenda, an app for taking time-sensitive notes, such as notes on meetings or notes on projects with deadlines or timelines.

agenda.com

In addition to organizing notes by date, you can group notes together into projects and categories, and add tags to organize them further. It looks like a great app, but I do not have a place for it.

Likewise, I took another look at Ulysses, which I used for years. It’s still a great app for writing and note-taking. But don’t see a place for that in my work anymore either.

ulysses.app

I’m fully committed to DevonThink for document management and note taking now. You can live inside DevonThink, or live without DevonThink, but you cannot live with DevonThink. Somebody said that recently about a different app entirely — emacs — but it applies to DevonThink as well.

www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devo…

www.gnu.org/software/…

I was inspired to take another look at Agenda after listening to Rosemary Orchard describe her setup on the Nested Folders podcast.

nestedfolderspodcast.com/podcast/e…

⚙🖥📱

I’m a journalist. I’m fine with ads. They pay my income.

I don’t use ad-blockers to protect my privacy. When it comes to the Internet, I’m just a typical shmo — I complain about privacy invasion but I do very little to protect my privacy.

I use ad-blockers because ad-tech makes the web unusable. Ads and pop-ups obscure the articles I’m trying to read. Which is nuts; it’s like websites are inviting hackers to come in and break their own sites. Ads slow down my Mac until the machine becomes unusable. I have a midrange 2018 MacBook Pro. It is not an underpowered machine, and yet ad-tech routinely slows it to a crawl.

We used to complain about TV commercials, but Internet advertising is way worse. TV commercials limited themselves to their own little time blocks. TV commercials didn’t shout over the dialogue on a TV show, or jump in between the camera and the actors so you couldn’t see the action.

Likewise, in magazines and newspapers, the ads didn’t creep from one side of the page to cover up the article. Nobody in 1973 was ever sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine article only to have an ad cover up the article nagging them to subscribe to the newsletter.

The ad-tech is winning here. I use 1Blocker. It’s just not good enough, and I’m not motivated to shop around and look for alternatives, in part because it does not seem obvious to me that there is anything better than 1Blocker available.

I don’t know what the end-state here is. Maybe the best sites will start to mix subscriptions and advertising, which is a business model refined for print periodicals over the course of a century or more. And the ads will get more restrained, because the subscribers are paying customers.

By the way, here’s a secret of newspapers and magazines in the late 20th Century: The subscriptions didn’t turn a profit. They broke even, paid for the cost of production. The primary purpose of the subscription was to demonstrate to advertisers that there were people willing to pay for the periodical, and therefore these people were worth the cost of advertising too.

The problem with subscription models on the Internet is that there are too many newspapers, magazines and blogs to subscribe to, particularly if you might only want to read one article. This seems solvable, but it’s a big deal for now. 🌕

Sammy is very relaxed 📷

Dune is a rational space opera, as logical and geometrical as a Sherlock Holmes story, with an irrational occult spirit journey built on top. It needs both parts to succeed. The David Lynch movie attempted the occult part, and was completely uninterested in the rational genre story. 🍿📚

🍿I watched the end of the Coen Brothers comedy “Hail Caesar” yesterday. We’d watched the first part weeks ago but Julie lost interest and I finally had a chance to catch up. I quite enjoyed the movie.

George Clooney does a great job playing cheerful idiots. He makes a lot of stupid faces. He seems to enjoy it and he is very good at it.

Who’s watching Lawrence Welk anymore? My grandparents watched it in the 70s. They were in their 80s then. That’s always seemed like the target demographic. Are there enough 120-year-olds around now to keep the show on the air?

I stopped in at Mystic Grill & Bakery last night to pick up a takeout dinner for myself and Julie. The chairs were down off the tables, indicating that dining service was available. But I only saw one person sitting at a table, and he may have been an employee. On a normal Saturday night at that time there would have been a couple of families there.

Several people came out for takeout, which was good to see. Staff and customers were all masked.

The TV was playing Lawrence Welk. I don’t think that’s significant from an epidemiological perspective

Julie and I watched “Dune” again not long ago. The only other time I’d seen it was in the theatrical release in the 80s. It was fine. I enjoyed it. I had zero expectations, and the movie met them.

A friend said she loved it because it visualized all the settings and characters of the novel. I said it was a terrible movie and the settings and characters looked different from the way I visualized them when reading. She said she didn’t care. Her perspective is valid.

On the It’s the Pictures That Got Small podcast: Dune, with Karina Longworth, Nate DiMeo and Natasha Lyonne.

David Lynch had no interest in the mythology of Dune. He just loved the imagery. It is the ultimate movie do to use for GIFs, or to project on the wall of a bar on the Lower East Side. Or watch in any public place with the sound off.

Karina Longworth: “It only doesn’t work if you it expect to be a movie.”

Lynch’s cut of the movie was five hours. The final cut was a little over two hours. Maybe the director’s cut would have been better?

📷 Two ducks 🦆 🦆 hanging out in the pond, a third duck 🦆 joins them. A brisk discussion of etiquette ensues.

LEEEROY JENKINS!!!!!