The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one:

“It’s kind of exhausting playing to an empty room day in and day out with no results,” one Redditor wrote on a now-deleted thread on r/Twitch.

“It’s fucking hard to stay positive when doing this 5 days a week when it feels like nobody drops by,” another Redditor wrote in a different thread, after spending months streaming to nobody. “I’ve come to a realization that streaming just isn’t working for me.”

“Been streaming on and off for 4+ years and everytime I come back I go weeks where the majority of time I’m streaming to no one,” another Redditor wrote. “It’s tough.”

I think about this story in the context of this website and my podcast. I maintain both of them more for myself than to have what I do seen and heard by others. Sure, I’d love to have an audience that grows every day, but I do these things as hobbies and mental exercises more than anything else.

I’ve become a better writer from writing here since 2006, and I’ve become a better speaker from doing a podcast semi-regularly since 2014.

The same goes for my Instagram account. The fact that I have around 1,100 people interested in my photos street cars is great, but I was doing it way before Instagram existed (how about me with a 2.1 MPX Canon PowerShot ELPH S100 on the streets of Manhattan in 2000).

Clearly some Twitch streamers enjoy the sense of community they get from it, but for the streamers who don’t enjoy the actual process of streaming, then maybe it’s not the right hobby for them.

In this episode Mike talks about how anyone’s spirit can be broken and how everyone can also succeed, a Porsche guy Mike met at Madrone Art Bar, restaurants as workspaces, and 10 years of the App Store.

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@alexismadrigal

12 Russian Agents Indicted in Mueller Investigation:

Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, on Friday announced new charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The announcement came just a few days before President Trump is expected to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki, Finland.

The 11-count indictment includes charges of conspiracy by the Russian intelligence officials against the United States, money laundering and attempts to break into state boards of elections and other government agencies.

The indictment is part of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. It’s become increasingly obvious over the last 2 years Russians have been interfering in American politics for quite some time. The Mueller investigation is just further confirmation.

A good trick I learned when listening to Trump is just think of the opposite of what he says to know what’s really going on. If he says the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt, it’s not a witch hunt. If he says Putin is a strong leader, he’s really a scumbag. If he claims he didn’t criticize British prime minister Theresa May yesterday, he did criticize her.

10 years of the App Store: The design evolution of the earliest apps

Nellie Bowles looks into the rise of restaurants in big cities being converted into co-working spacing during off-hours:

The company that laid the extension cords and power strips across Elite Cafe’s copper tables is called Spacious. Since it was started two years ago, Spacious has converted 25 upscale restaurants in New York and San Francisco into weekday work spaces. Membership, which allows entry into any location, is $99 a month for a year, or $129 by the month. With $9 million in venture capital it received in May, Spacious plans to expand this year to up to 100 spaces. A restaurant makes for the perfect conversion, the Spacious team argues. Bars become standing desks. Booths become conference rooms. The lighting tends to be nicer, less harsh and fluorescent, than an office, and the music makes for a nice ambience.

Originally, the founders of Spacious thought they would have to sell restaurateurs on the idea. Instead, restaurants, struggling to pay rent and wages and frustrated with disappointing lunch traffic, are coming to them, eager to strike deals for a slice of the membership dues. Only 5 percent have made the cut to become Spacious spaces, said the company, which is unprofitable.

It’s interesting to see businesses adapting to the changes in industries and technologies. The idea of using restaurant space when meals aren’t being served makes a lot of sense, but I wonder if this business model is a solution or a band-aid.

This article reminds me of a book on my to-read list, Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

Over at The New York Times, Mark Bowden looks into our obsession with superhero movies:

If heroes are idealized humans, then today’s reflect an exaggerated Cult of Self. They are unique, supremely talented beings who transcend laws, even those of nature. Hollywood has always cherished mavericks, but these are, literally, cartoons — computer-generated.

They celebrate exceptionalism and vigilantism. The old American ideal of succeeding through cleverness, virtue and grit is absent, as is the notion of ordinary folk banding together to overcome a threat — think of “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the original “The Magnificent Seven” or any of a dozen World War II-era films. Gone is respect for the rule of law and the importance of tradition and community. Institutions and human knowledge are useless. Religion is irrelevant. Governments are corrupt and/or inept, when not downright evil. The empowered individual is all.

The superhero is an alien or outcast who possesses unique powers acquired either at birth or through some accident or gift. You can imagine the avid consumers of such films electing a president who boasts “I alone” can solve the nation’s problems, and who delights in tagging his domestic and foreign opponents with villainous, comic book monikers — “Crooked Hillary,” “Rocket Man.”

Bowden doesn’t talk about what two of the biggest superhero franchises – Iron Man and Batman – have in common: their wealth provided them means with which they were able to transform themselves into superheroes. Tony Stark was not only a brilliant engineer, he inherited Stark Industries from his father and Bruce Wayne inherited Wayne Industries from his father.

Wealth affording you otherwise unattainable opportunities could not be more relevant in today’s world.

In this episode Mike talks about employers not always wanting to hear the truth in interviews, Harlan Ellison’s advice on not working for free, another reason Mike loves Anthony Bourdain, one movie reco, and one doc-series reco.

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Young people still love Twitter — as screenshots on Instagram:

“You’d think, ‘I have a viral account on Instagram. Almost 50,000 people pay attention to me. Surely they care about what I’m tweeting?’” says Hartwig. “But people absolutely do not give a single shit about what you’re tweeting,” she says. “When I post on Instagram, I can expect about 2,000 likes a post. With Twitter, I expect about two retweets and 20 to 30 likes.” She says Twitter rewards trends and current social relevancy, while Instagram offers more topical flexibility.

In theory, Twitter should make sharing content easy; retweets are a vital part of its model, and you can share anything with one click. Going viral on Twitter is also a double-edged sword: even if you pop off a good joke, its success is unlikely to reward you with substantial new followers, and most meme creators are looking to build a fan base, not just go viral for 15 minutes. Having viral tweets can often make the platform virtually unusable, not only because of spam, but due to the personal harassment and dogpiling that often accompanies it.

This sounds very similar to my experiences with Twitter and Instagram. I’ve had my @combustion Twitter account since 2007 and for the last 4-5 years I’ve been hovering around 330 followers, whereas on my Instagram @combustionchamber, I’ve gone from ~500 followers in 2017 to ~1100 followers this year. Admittedly, I put more effort into maintaining my Instagram account, but my effort and focus is rewarded with more followers who appreciate my obsession for snapping shots of the old cars I find on the streets.

There’s a simplicity to both viewing and creating content on Instgram that I think makes it much more approachable than Twitter, regardless of age. In light of the news last week that Twitter is replacing their head of product (again) it should be no surprise their platform seems like a shitshow with no clear focus or objectives.

Let’s also not forget they dropped support for their Mac desktop client earlier this year. Luckily Tweetbot still exists.

Obama offers Democrats tough love ahead of midterms: ‘Enough moping’:

At one point, he turned to the crowd and declared, “Enough moping, this is a mope-free zone.”

And the former President even suggested to the roughly 200 donors in attendance, who also enjoyed a performance from Christina Aguilera, that Democrats can’t get fixated on the glitz and personality of politics.

“We shouldn’t expect (politics) to be entertaining all the time — and Christina Aguilera was wonderful — but you don’t need to have an amazing singer at every event,” he said. “Sometimes you are just in a church basement making phone calls and eating cold pizza.”

Word. Dems need to toughen up, fight back. The old rules of politics are no longer valid. This doesn’t mean lying, cheating, and treating others with hostility and prejudice like Trump does, but it does mean fighting back.

Science fiction author Harlan Ellison has died:

The science fiction genre has lost one of its greatest — and most controversial — authors. Harlan Ellison, who wrote and edited groundbreaking sci-fi anthologies, short stories, and television episodes, died at the age of 84, according to his wife, via an associate.

Ellison was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1934, and published his first short stories in 1949, before moving to New York City to focus on writing science fiction. Throughout the 1950s, he wrote hundreds of short stories, and served in the US Army for two years. In the 1960s, he relocated to California, where he began to write scripts for television shows such as The Outer Limits, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Star Trek. He later served as a consultant for shows such as The Twilight Zone and Babylon 5. Ellison also worked briefly for Walt Disney Studios, only to get fired after a day when co-founder Roy Disney overheard him joking about making a porn film with the company’s characters.

I’m not big sci-fi reader, so I only discovered Ellison about 8 years ago from an interview posted on Youtube:

That clip had a profound effect on me as a graphic designer and artist.

All artists would be wise to heed the words of Ellison. Health Ledger’s Joker also said it nicely, “If you are good at something, never do it for free.”

Netflix, HBO, magazines, publishers, they’re all nothing without the creative output of artists. Sure, I’ve bartered, exchanging the services of someone else for mine, but that’s the exception, not the rule (I did a hair salon’s website for free in 2002 in the East Village in exchange for free $60 haircuts for 8 years).

Know what you’re worth and and get paid for it.

In this episode Mike talks about entitled, white pedestrians and cyclists in San Francisco, the loss of Anthony Bourdain, fighty people on Twitter, being educated by the youth, and a movie recommendation (and a non-recommendation).

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iFixIt’s Kyle Wiens wrote a scathing and eye-opening piece on the Macbook Pro Keyboard fiasco:

Thin may be in, but it has tradeoffs. Ask any Touch Bar owner if they would trade a tenth of a millimeter for a more reliable keyboard. No one who has followed this Apple support document instructing them to shake their laptop at a 75 degree angle and spray their keyboard with air in a precise zig-zag pattern will quibble over a slightly thicker design.

This is design anorexia: making a product slimmer and slimmer at the cost of usefulness, functionality, serviceability, and the environment.

A repairable pro laptop is not an unreasonable ask. Apple has a history of great keyboards—they know how to make them. There are very successful laptop manufacturers who consistently earn 10/10 on our repairability scale. Apple fans are already making noise about the dearth of new Macs, especially upgradable options for professionals. Fortunately, Apple seems to be listening with their new warranty program.

I’ve been aware of the keyboard problem in the latest version of the Macbooks since last year, so I’ve known to steer clear of them and stick with my Mid-2015 Macbook Pro.

Aside from the dust problem, I know from riding the Apple Shuttle for an entire year in 2017 that these keyboards are also annoyingly loud. When a coworker told me she couldn’t stand it when her husband was working on his Macbook in the same room as her, I thought she was clearly being dramatic. It couldn’t be that bad.

I was wrong, it could be that bad.

It makes me sad to see certain Apple products as something to avoid (opposed to my iPhone X which is amazing). What’s naive to do, though, is jump on the This-would-have-never-happened-when-Steve-Jobs-was-alive bandwagon. Antennagate happened under Steve, as did MobileMe.

I think Apple is suffering from the hubris a $900 billion company exudes that continues to be the most imitated in the tech industry, so it’s taking more cold water in their faces to course correct when a product is broken. But the sky is not falling and Apple is not doomed. As Kyle notes, Apple knows how to make great keyboards.

The only thing we can do now is wait and see what comes next.

In a piece for Harper’s Magazine, Kevin Baker writes about the continued rise of affluence in New York, at the expensive of diversity, community, and affordability (via kottke):

New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great.

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring.

Boring is the wrong word and trivializes all the bad things Baker lists out that have happened in New York. I don’t give a shit if New York boring. What pisses me off about New York in 2018 is that it continues to cement it’s status as a playground for the rich.

A culturally “rich” city is the result of diversity: of income, of ethnicity, of trade, of perspective, and many other things. New York continues to trade a rich culture for a culture of rich.