My last post was on November 3, 2024 - two days before the election that made everything in the world quite a bit worse. It’s been difficult to get up the energy to put my thoughts into words. And, at the end of the day, the point of this newsletter is not change anyone’s minds. You can’t post your way out of fascism.

But I do hope that this list of links, however small or silly, gets you to think about the things that really matter to you. From art and design to cool sites hiding in the corners of the internet, this collection of mine achieves just a bit more meaning when it’s shared with others.

So let’s take a look at my bookmark bar from the last few months… together 💚

“A” Section: This Beats’ Bookmarks

Stories and thoughts from places

LAN Party House by Kenton Varda and Jade Wang

This photo album highlights all the amazing features built into Kenton and Jade’s “LAN Party House” in Austin, TX. Be sure to scroll to the bottom to read the FAQ - it’s a fun one!

the best video games by ronj

[This] 🤗 Games for “non-gamers” [list includes] games to introduce a friend or significant other to gaming! For example, “accessible” games with slow / easy gameplay, games with simple controls, games avoiding videogame clichés (violence, mediocre story, etc), or a mix of it all.

PMFS: 27 Years of Abrupt Realizations by Jonathan Wright

Planes’ Midwestern exodus hit Colorado like a meteorite — and a steady influx of Peoria ex-pats would soon enlarge the crew to a baker’s dozen. Amidst their collective jubilation, the band’s earliest shows at Double Entendre Records were jam-packed as the Denver scene came out in droves to witness the spectacle for themselves. They were immediately embraced. Planes loved Denver, and Denver loved them right back.

The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again by Benj Edwards

Every generation looks back and says, “Things used to be better,” whether they are accurate or not.

But I’m not suggesting we live in the past. It is possible to learn from history and integrate the best of today’s technology with fair business practices that are more sustainable and healthy for everyone in the long run.

How It Went by Daring Fireball

He looked around to no avail, and went to bed without it. In the morning light, he retraced his steps. He felt certain he had it on while at the restaurant — not because he took any note of it while dining, but because he knows he’d have noticed its absence. If you wear a ring every day on the same finger, you know how true that is. He almost never took that ring off.

Design in the age of AI & automation

Stop wireframing (but still start low-fidelity) by Jason Barrons

There’s this myth that wireframes will get signoff by stakeholders, and only then we’ll focus on visual design and aesthetic choices. But ask yourself this — when was the last time an interaction, content block, or feature set wasn’t changed or modified during the “visual design phase”? Every project that I have done UX on with a distinct visual design phase ALWAYS had modifications to the work I had already done. I swear to heaven, if I ever have a PM or BA tell me to update wireframes to match a visual design again, I will throw them out a metaphorical window.

Fish Eyes by Amelia Wattenberger

A fish eye lens doesn’t ask us to choose between focus and context—it lets us experience both simultaneously. It’s good inspiration for how to offer detailed answers while revealing the surrounding connections and structures.

Performance.gov by Pentagram

Paula Scher shares the process of designing the website for performance.gov, a new government initiative to document strategic goals and make them understandable to the public.

The End of Programming as We Know It by Tim O’Reilly

No matter how manual, if a task can only be done by a handful of those most educated, that task is considered intellectual. One example is writing, the physical act of copying words onto paper. In the past, when only a small portion of the population was literate, writing was considered intellectual. People even took pride in their calligraphy. Nowadays, the word “writing” no longer refers to this physical act but the higher abstraction of arranging ideas into a readable format.

Choosing to walk by Rayne Fisher-Quann

I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless, sometimes it’s cold or wet or windy and I’m retracing the same steps around my neighborhood that I’ve walked a thousand times and it sucks and I’m miserable and wish I’d stayed inside. Nonetheless, I always feel worse in my body and mind when I avoid it for too long, and it’s a loss that feels greater than just the quantifiable enumeration of calories I didn’t burn or sunlight I didn’t see.

Not articles: but cool things from the internet

• Draw.Audio is a free audio sequencer to make music in the browser. It’s even more fun on a touch screen 📲
• I Don’t Have Spotify is a relatively accurate link generator for all the other streaming services. Helpful for when somebody sends you a Spotify link but you cancelled your subscription due to their scummy business practices
• Stretch My Time Off is a calendar-based calculator for stretching your limited time off (from 10 days to 47 days) by scheduling around US holidays
• Loser Lane is a low-fi simulation of what happens when bike lanes are scarce/non-existent (spoiler: it’s not good)
• The Data.gov Archiveis a 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov.

Life is for learning: free internet resources that I found this month

• Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese is a book and website that walks through the Japanese language, writing system and useful expressions
• How Music Works is a short series of interactive music lessons by Lightnote. If you’re just learning music or want to figure out what makes music “work,” it’s a great place to start.
• Learning Synths is an interactive project by the folks at Ableton. If you have a keyboard you can plug into your computer, it’s even better!
• Learn by doing is an interactive website to learn programming, logic, data analysis and more. If you’ve been looking for a way to get more technical but feel like it’s all unapproachable, I recommend trying this out.
• Web Software Development is a good course for folks who are already familiar with programming but want to get a more fleshed out understanding of how all the technology fits together to make a modern web application.
• The Bullshit Machines is a curriculum put together by two professors from the University of Washington to help us all manage life in the ChatGPT world
• Moon is an interactive look at the Moon - our closest celestial neighbor

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That’s it for this curated collection of links. But if you’re hungry for more (or if you just want an endless stream of every song and podcast I’m listening to), check out the “I am” page on my website! I’ve been surprised by how many people actually visit that page (even after I kicked out all the AI bots crawling my site) so let me know if you do end up look at it… I’d love to know what you think!

If you’d rather just receive updates whenever I write this newsletter, you can do that by subscribing on Substack 📬

“B” Section: On Photography

As many of you know, I’ve been getting into film photography over the last year or so. As the number of AI-generated images increases, it’s nice to have only one chance to capture a moment. Perhaps the shutter speed was wrong, or something was out of focus. No matter what, you were there and no amount of post-processing can take that away.

Anyway, I’m getting over a cold right now and don’t have a lot of energy to write. So I’ll keep this B section pretty short…

First, I wanted to link to this article by Kodo Simone about What We Lose by Simulating Experience.

Second, I wanted to share this great picture of my dogs that I took right after I loaded the film into my camera a few months ago:

I tend to take a few pictures around the house to make sure the film is advanced enough to shoot on. Sometimes those pictures turn out!

Coda: Books I’m reading

Here’s some of the books that I liked reading since the last beat:

• The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville is an absolute trip. It’s as if Keanu Reeves really is the character that’s lived through millennia.
• Doppleganger by Naomi Klein is a book about the “mirror worlds” where misinformation thrives and celebrity can be found by even the most vilified. Despite being a total bummer, it’s one of the best books I’ve read.
• Gideon the Ninth takes the teenage magical school trope and turns it on its head… into a series of murder mysteries! As hilarious as it is confusing (so many names), it’s worth reading along with the text if you’re audiobook listener like me.
• Neuromancer is a book I finally got around to reading after it was gifted to me in a book exchange at the end of last year. Not all of it has aged well, but the parts that have make me wonder how much of the internet was actually made in this book’s image.
• Demon Copperhead is wholesome, funny, sad and frustrating all at once. The book is also extremely well written. It follows a boy in Appalachia as he comes of age during the 90s - come foster care or high water!

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That’s all for this EP 💽! If you’d like some more thoughts before the next newsletter, feel free to ping me in the comments on Substack (or just send me an email).

Catch ya next beat 🥁😎🥁