Let Go and Haul: crazy wall becomes sanity, shout outs, one giant playlist
Week 39, 2018 – Brooklyn
PSA: It’s Canadian Thanksgiving next weekend so I’m taking Sunday off to most likely eat turkey (or something) with my sister & fam, so no newsletter next week. In the meantime, tell your friends to subscribe to this thing if you like it because I have zero time to do that! It’s so motivating to log into Tinyletter on a Sunday night and see the numbers tick up a lil. Everything is hard all the time right now so it’s nice to know when people like stuff. Recognition is a powerful drug. Hit that forward button :)

Journey: where we’re at
Ok! We’re gonna keep it short and sweet tonight because I’ve been working all weekend, it’s getting late, and I still need to take care of my plants (by watering them) as well as take care of myself (by getting a good night’s sleep) before another bonkers week unfolds. Yep. Priorities. Water, sleep. They’re good ones.
Remember crazy walls from the other week? Detective shows with someone like this going mad trying to crack a problem?

This week we hit peak crazy wall and then I synthesized it all into like ten slides of (almost) sanity and boy does it feel good.
We’ve been experimenting with bits of things all summer in TestFlight. We’ve course corrected our thinking on some things, validated other things and are emerging with a much clearer vision of what we’re making.
Deliberately impossible to read, this is the madness.

I don’t trust a team that doesn’t have this, that works to neatly or too digitally. It’s like the messy desk being a sign work is happening.
Journal: what I learned
Since we’re talking about crazy walls, I thought I'd tell you a family story I often think of when I’m standing in front of a whiteboard with a fried brain trying to figure out a hard problem being like agh why do I do this to myself? There’s a story I always think about to put it all in perspective:
My grandpa Gerry (who wasn't my biological grandfather, but is the one I grew up knowing), grew up dirt poor between the UK and Canada. When Canada joined the Allies in WWII, he signed up for the army out of duty but also because it seemed like the best option for his life at that time. After his first week in the trenches, the dude in charge of his unit asked for a volunteer, and he was the only one who stepped forward. I remember asking him why as a child, and he said that clearly – it was not a good scene in there, so nobody wanted to risk even more and put themselves on the line by volunteering. He on the other hand, figured it couldn't get much worse, had nothing to lose… so why not? Maybe that would lead somewhere better. He was asked if he was good at math, to which the answer was yes, and ended up getting transferred to different unit that needed help with the organization and transportation of people and supplies. That ended up being his gig. He’d joke that he went to Europe a young man and came back an old man (because he’d lost all his hair by that time). He was so good at his job, that when the war was pronounced over was when his real work began. It was at that point he and others had the vast job of figuring out how to get everyone home. It never failed impress me how much someone’s life could be altered (and probably saved) by just stepping forward. The funny part of this story though, and why it relates to crazy walls, is that when he was tasked with this, the first thing he asked for was a big chalkboard.
Fun fact: apparently the first depiction of a crazy wall in a movie is in Dr. Strangelove.

In completely different news, Instagram. I’m seriously impressed with how long Kevin and Mikeyk continued shipping product there, and I feel like this week marked the end of an era. What an incredible feat of culture to build, stand by and grow. There’s been a lot of speculative press this week, but all I have to say – and all I think we really should be saying is thank you. They built something massive that’s left an irreversible mark on culture.
Last but not least! Shoutout to Indie Web Camp for being the only place l can carve out time to work on my personal site, like ever. I dragged my exhausted ass there on Saturday and set up a new development environment after the “computer goes swimming” episode that happened back in April, made some overdue changes and save some annoying poking at a DNS thing (which Tantek helped me with), actually managed to do everything myself. I’m totally not a real developer, so having helpful people around me is nice in case I get stuck on an issue. And I didn’t even get stuck! The power of supportive groups.
Jams: what I’m listening to
It’s playlist time! I moved all my monthly mixtapes to ONE BIG PLAYLIST so you only have to hit FOLLOW once.

Here’s a video from of the tracks this month to slay your week to. Big Freedia & Lizzo’s Karaoke looks like it was way too much fun to edit. The BINGO footage? Here for it.
