Day 2,344, Quasi-Quarantine: Silicon Valley Vet Shares How To Navigate Aggressive Tech Landscape In "Build"

“The ultimate job of marketing is to find the very best way to tell the true story of your product.”

A comprehensive look at the confluence of ideas, people, and corporate politics, "Build" does a nice job of using concrete examples. Tony Fadell includes useful diagrams and anecdotes, never shying away from hard truths (a chapter on assholes is particularly insightful).

“As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business.”

Some of the concepts feel a little dated and tend to lose sight of work-life balance at times as he documents starting, building, and losing companies. Fadell also tends to focus on more, more, more, making portions of the book feel pretty finance bro-coded.

“To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together.

“You have to actually do the job. You have to love the job.”

Overall, however, this is a fascinating and instructive read. At a seminal moment for the technology industry, "Build" serves best as a catalog of the questions we should be asking ourselves, one another, and our customers.

“What you're building never matters as much as who you’re building it with.”

Limerick Friday #652: A Confusing And Stuttering Draft Marks The Return Of Fantasy Football -- Day 2,340

My QBs are the best

At tight end I'm blessed

My receivers are deep

Running backs make me weep

But I can figure out the rest

On rock bottom they alit

Before they remembered how to hit

After a trade-deadline purge

The Mets started to surge

Now they're winning for a bit

"Silo" is in its third season

Still addictive beyond reason

But juggling timelines

And different lifetimes

Has the pace kinda wheezin'

After years of dooming

Another long season looming

Thanks to decades of fail

We're in dead-cap jail

Better times ahead, I'm assuming

A bizarre fantasy draft

My roster got the shaft

Like six times I got sniped

Cursingly, I griped

But at the end I shrugged and laughed

Last time ...

Day 2,337, Quasi-Quarantine: Wet Leg Rocks KEXP In Their Very Distinctive Way

Wet Leg was probably my band of the year for 2025 after following up their self-titled debut in 2022 with "Moisturizer."

Led by pyrotechnic lead singer Rhian Teasdale, this band has a unique sound, a piquant presence, and a scintillating catalog of bangers. Be sure to check them out if you haven't yet.

Day 2,336, Quasi-Quarantine: "The Keeper" Serves As Perfunctory End To Trilogy Of Ex-Pat Ex-Cop In Ireland

 

“She looks like she popped out of Instagram by mistake and someone should put her back in before she gets smudged.”

In the finale of the Cal Hooper trilogy, the former Chicago cop finds himself embroiled yet again in an unlikely crime in rural Ireland. 

As part of a rather on-the-nose farmers-vs.-townies encounter, he helps unravel the mystery surrounding the death of a young women torn between her fiance and the village she loves.

While most of French's plots require some suspension of disbelief (see my review of "The Searcher"), this one felt even more difficult to entertain than most. The narrative wanders and the characters feel a little too one-dimensional, leading to a novel that ends up feeling like the conclusion of a trilogy that was proposed and wrapped up all in one motion.

“She says, ‘C’n Kate come for dinner as well?’

“Cal is hit by a sudden sense of wonder. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘She like tacos?’”

Day 2,331, Quasi-Quarantine: Greek Bacchanal, Mysterious Professor, And Insular Clique Drive Uneven "The Secret History"

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

Elitism and accountability clash at a small liberal arts college in New England, as a group of impressionable students gravitate to an iconoclastic professor in Donna Tartt's first novel. The narrator, Richard, ends up there from California almost without agency, falling under the spell of his classmates and their teacher.

“After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti.”

"The Secret History" often feels like a fever dream, with interiority being a challenge for the novel. Richard is often bullied, but he is also comes off as a bit of a fraud, which detracts from his reliability as a narrator.

“It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.”

The intense connections made between the characters can feel rushed and misunderstood. The dominant female character, Camilla, is granted little in the way of voice or autonomy, leaving her feelings about the events of the story unexamined.

As the action escalates out of control, a reader might wonder why Richard didn't just leave, especially as his place within the group feels unsecure and unnecessary. 

“He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what it felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened one realized it couldn’t be any other way.”

As an unabashed fan of "The Goldfinch" -- the Scooties award winner in 2021 -- I was expecting a bit more from this work, but acknowledge that it may simply feature the growing pains of a new novelist. "The Secret History" is certainly absorbing, but some may be left with a sense of incompleteness and a wish that Tartt had spent a little more time exploring the interpersonal dynamics.

“Religious slurs, temper tantrums, insults, coercion, debt: all petty things, really, irritants–too minor, it would seem, to move five reasonable people to murder. But, if I dare say it, it wasn’t until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.”

Day 2,329, Quasi-Quarantine: Remembering San Fran Along The Outer Banks

 

A beautiful new tradition we've started is an anniversary-week getaway to Duck for some restorative quiet time.

During this year's visit, we tackled a 500-piece Puzzlefolk puzzle. The subject was San Francisco, to commemorate the recent spring-break visit to the amazing city.

The puzzle featured a stellar design and unique art, and we actually ended up starting and finishing it in a single evening. I would have preferred drawing it out a little more for prolonged enjoyment, but my partner was incredibly motivated.

8.6, would jigsaw overlooking the Atlantic again

Day 2,325, Quasi-Quarantine: Confusing Confluence Of Characters And Plots Mark Pynchon's "Shadow Ticket"

 

“The city had a long history of suicide, attracting pilgrims from all over the world seeking a Lourdes not of hope but of despair, assuming that suicide in Budapest, like love in Paris or greed in New York, would be somehow more authentic.”

A dizzying cast of characters and plots marks this late-career offering from Thomas Pynchon. "Shadow Ticket" is a hard-boiled noir detective novel that follows Hicks McTaggart as he spans the 1930s globe.

Much of the work feels tongue in cheek, as McTaggart tackles Fascist goons, the mob, and cheese syndicates amid the Depression and the looming specter of war. Pynchon nails the dialogue and the rapid-fire pacing, amping up the entertainment value.

“‘MPD says they’re on the case, some think it’s the Outfit, some say the Nazi Youth.’

‘Two different kinds of trouble, ain’t it, one you end up dead, the other dead and in hell.’”

However, "Shadow Ticket" feels like it's trying too hard at times, making for a dense, confusing read. Shifts in perspective, geography, and timelines can leave a reader searching for safe ground, but the myriad characters make it difficult to find it.

The result is a whirlwind of concepts and what-ifs, alongside an appreciation for the genre and the author that doesn't quite match the final product.

“ … While in the back at any moment might be standing in wait some hopeful kid, his own instrument bouncing back highlights, his face still in shadows he’s never felt at home in, as if, when the spot finds him at last, as he steps into the full light, he’ll turn out to be somebody we already think we know …”