Season 3, Issue 9: Cosmic Horizon
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Season 3, Issue 9: Cosmic Horizon
Chicken, egg, gorilla, duck. And Chris Paul.
1. The Week That Was
Dear friends, Chris Paul is now a Warrior. In the grand scheme of things, it means nada, but for little ol’ me who is interested in seeing the Warriors win one more championship with Steph Curry, it is a very big deal. What can I say? I spend a lot of time thinking about and fretting over these young men whose (very lucrative) job is to put an orange ball through a metal hoop.
A few weeks ago I promised to explain to you what we’re doing here at Good Enough, and finally I wrote a blog post about it. In short: we’re spending the rest of the year building prototypes and experimenting with different ideas. We’re a month and a half into it, and so far we have:
Built a prototype for an app called logloglog,
Made a little website called Chicken or Egg, which has led to a very interesting project that we hope to share with you soon.
Finished a zine. YES, a zine! More on it below.
Made Good Enough TV.
Put on the finishing touches of a simple online editor called Quack. (Maybe Barry will share it next week?)
And James has assembled the pieces for us to put together our own little thermal printer (which we’ll build in August).
And we’ve been writing! Not only have we kept our promise of writing this newsletter each week, we’ve also been writing on our blog:
Barry explained how to deploy a Sinatra app to Render.com
James tried to argue that cool URLs don’t die
Lettini shared something he learned about the Web Manifest file
Barry compiled a list of our favorite video games
And Lettini wrote about his connection to a Marvel Winter Soldier cover
My family and I are going on a summer vacation next week, and my brave colleagues will carry on this newsletter. Have a fantastic summer, and I’ll see you all in mid-July! ––SL
2. Cosmic Challenges
While we’re hoping to land amongst the stars with our 2023 moonshot, this way of working doesn’t come without its challenges. Having the ability to build almost anything can also lead to a bit of mental lock-up due to a “paradox of choice.” Decision fatigue can also creep in, as we each are choosing what to work on, how to scope what we’re working on, and how to build the details of each prototype. We have also had to figure out on the fly how we’d like to organize each project, who will lead the decision-making process on a given project, and how to talk about all of our ideas for a given active project.
In particular, we need to determine the goal of each project. Is it to play with some technology, as a basis of building a piece of tech that we can use throughout future products, or to test the product we’re building itself? We are also fighting our tendency to apply all of our experience in order to make each thing we’re building into the best version of the thing that we’re building. At times it is difficult to focus as we consider all the possible useful paths we could go down with a given idea.
None of these avenues of thought are bad in themselves, but they can get in the way of our goal to try to play with many, many ideas this year. Thankfully we have a good grassroots effort in practicing idea generation. Thankfully we have a good sense of checking and balancing each other, raising concerns when our conversations get confusing or unfocused. Thankfully we’re aware of the challenges! —BH
3. A Good Enough Zine
Six weeks ago Arun suggested that we make a zine, and I thought: what a stupid idea. I told my wife about it, and she said, that sounds like a great idea and you should do it! And so I’ve started A Good Enough Zine.
The first issue documents the goings-on at Good Enough in May 2023. It’s at the printer right now, and I can’t wait to see the printed copies when I get back to Brooklyn in late July! ––SL
4. Open Tabs
This week I asked my fellow Good Enough colleagues what are some of their open tabs in their browsers, and here’s a short list of curious links for you to accumulate:
Lettini: CJRB Pyrite is an edc pocket knife that’s all the rage right now (and I just Kickstarted a titanium version).
Lettini: Seiko metronome watch is pretty cool. Was googling after watching this.
Shawn: An interview with the designers behind the beautiful Le Puzz puzzles.
Barry apparently have 80 (!) open tabs and he shared this: Entire nation of Liechtenstein (almost).
Barry: I was reminded of Dragon’s Lair recently, and remembered it as stupid hard. So after all of these years I want to watch a playthrough.
Patrick: Using Diatomaceous Earth on Ants: Complete DIY Guide: We had ants for a couple days (including in my freaking wifi router) so I was googling about how to use a non-chemical solution to control them. They seem to have stopped on their own???
Arun: Pocketmod & one-page RPG systems
Happy browsing! ––SL
5. Lettini Screeni
This week’s Lettini Screeni is too scary and gruesome for children, but that’s when I first watched it. My exact age escapes me, so let’s say I was lucky number 13. I had stayed up too late watching tv, this came on HBO or something, and I watched the whole thing. It’s now one of my all-time favorite movies and the reason I like horror generally: Event Horizon. Watch it with your kids! [I did, and it’s totally not appropriate for kids! ––SL]
It’s about a ship that can create wormholes as a means to travel the galaxy faster than light, except it goes missing after creating a wormhole to hell. Now it’s back, and it brought hell with it. That sounds cheesy, and it is! But it’s also great. It also stars two sci-fi legends—Laurence Fishburne and a fresh-off-Jurassic-Park Sam Neill—so you know it’s good.
Horror and space don’t often mix well. Outside the Alien franchise, most movies that try to do scary-in-space just don’t work, for whatever reason. Ignoring some absolutely dated CGI in the beginning, Event Horizon is the exception—it’s fucking creepy, and pretty brutal at times. Highly recommended late-at-night watch. —ML
6. In Conclusion
