Gosh, the album cover of Skee Mask & North Americans’s Final Circle (2026) that dropped last week looks like it was designed in a lab to appeal to me specifically (via https://secretambient.club).
We are spending the weekend in Monte Rio to get a reprieve from city noise. I needed to find a trail that our eight year old could manage, or more accurately, a trail where I could piggy-back him up half the climbs. We’ve already visited Armstrong Woods a few times so I looked on Alltrails and found this one.
Figure 1. Five of ten pictures taken on the hike. Select an image to view the set.
Figure 2. A map of California. The path of a five mile (eight kilometer) hike is indicated. About 814 feet (248 meters) elevation over two and a half hours, (one and three quarters hours moving).
Figure 1. Cover of Cyberselfish by Paulina Borsook, published 2026-09-15 by Random House LLC US, paperback.
I am just barely old enough to have shadows-on-the-cave exposure to, and shared fascination with the early Wired era. I never had a Wired subscription, my money went to Mad and Guitar Player, but I was very aware of it and the 90s colors, type, and composition it brought to beige world of computing at the time. I read Hotwired and I read suck.com (I probably read Sex and the Single URL on Suck the first time around), and often enough that, looking at copies of bookmarks.html I have from that era, it doesn’t look like I even bothered to bookmark them.
As a sophomore in community college circa 1999, our graphic design class visited a local design firm’s studio in Frederick, MD (that I sadly don’t remember the name of). In the lobby of their very hip loft space, a contemporary pair of chairs and a reception desk were situated in front of a show piece bookshelf full of what could have been but probably wasn’t quite the entire run of Wired magazine to that date. The effect of a wall of that characteristic 1990s pallet of cyans, magentas, yellows, blacks, and their complements of neons and other saturations checker-boarded on rows of spines exuded a modernity that was very compelling. “You can trust us to handle your design work, we read Wired” is a whole vibe. Wired wasn’t a design magazine, after all.
I bring up all of this ancient history to situate for myself why someone as smart and engaged as Borsook would have even worked in this space and befriended those who she so expertly skewers in Cyberselfish, as a writer at Wired, with pieces in Suck and elsewhere. Because it was important, and cool as all get out, is entirely plausible! That it was also frustratingly blinkered and doomed informed Borsook’s work; she did not give it a Kara Swisher style pass.
I picked up Cyberselfish immediately after finishing The Nerd Reich, on Gil Durán’s strong endorsement. Borsook’s a very fun read! In Cyberselfish, Borsook recounts her experiences covering bay area technologists and libertarians and the theories and conferences and movements that motivated them, as a journalist and a friend of technologists in the 1990s and very early 2000s.
Borsook’s treatments of the people she is critiquing, to me, are fair, but it might help to remember, “Hey, it’s the 90s” like Michael Che jokes on SNL Weekend Update, after telling an off color joke. Antisocial behaviors are not given the accommodations they began to get in the 2010s from Borsook, and, imho, on refreshingly blunt terms.
A great read for fans of Levy’s Hackers and Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine and Ursula Franklin’s Massey Lectures, Cyberselfish should sit alongside them in the canon of 20th century tech books.
I was in Arlington, VA for work this week and had some time between meetings and dinner reservations near Du Pont Circle in Washington, DC. The weather this week was incredible, so I converted that free time into a stroll.
I visited the Lincoln Memorial, because I can’t remember if I ever have before. Like, I think I had? Surely I would have when I lived here? But definitely? idk.
Then I went over and gawked at the ruined reflecting pool and walked across Foggy Bottom (lol), with a brief detour down K Street to walk past a building I worked in twenty years ago, and then north around the circle and off to dinner.
Figure 1. Four pictures taken on the walk. Select an image to view the set.
Figure 2. A map of Washington, District of Columbia. The path of a three and three quarters mile (six kilometer) walk is indicated. About 7600 steps and 144 feet (44 meters) elevation over one and a half hours, (one and a quarter hours moving).
Figure 2. A map of San Francisco, California. The path of a 12 and a quarter mile (19 and three quarters kilometer) ride is indicated. About 387 feet (118 meters) elevation over three and a quarter hours, (one and a half hours moving).
I felt like repeating the ride I did a few weeks ago through The Presidio and Lands End but with more trail riding (mulch and dunes) through Golden Gate park.
I tagged on Twin Peaks to get started because why not?
Figure 1. Five of seven pictures taken on the ride. Select an image to view the set.
Figure 2. A map of San Francisco, California. The path of a 27 mile (43 and three quarters kilometer) ride is indicated. About 1693 feet (516 meters) elevation over three hours, (two and a quarter hours moving).
I’m up in Napa to see “Beat: Belew/Vai/Levin/Bozzio Performing the Music of King Crimson” and had some time to kill so I got in a quick hike before dinner.
This time of year, harvest has passed for much of the fruit the region is famous for but it looked to me like the neighboring vines were still laden just beyond the fence here by the park.
I saw lots of live oak, lizards, and golden grass.
Figure 1. Five of nine pictures taken on the walk. Select an image to view the set.
Figure 2. A map of Napa, California. The path of a one and three quarters mile (two and three quarters kilometer) walk is indicated. About 3300 steps and 525 feet (160 meters) elevation over three quarters of an hour, (half an hour moving).
A nice bit of trail riding and portage, a brief detour around Hardly Strictly in the park that I completely forgot about, a detour to make a flat white and pick up the family, and then a loop out to Standard Deviant for smoked kölsch and Colombian food.
It’s finally summer in San Francisco, a week after its official end on the calendar.
Figure 1. Five of ten pictures taken on the ride. Select an image to view the set.
Figure 2. A map of San Francisco, California. The path of a 29 mile (46 and three quarters kilometer) ride is indicated. About 1302 feet (397 meters) elevation over six and a quarter hours, (two and three quarters hours moving).
