rachel binx ⤇ blog

2019 Reading Roundup

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🤠 yeehaw Circa January 2017 I decided to “get back into reading,” and for some reason was unable to stick with anything but dystopian sci-fi novels. 2018 was largely the same (although seriously hmu if you want sci-fi recs). In 2019, I blossomed into a person who is able to handle multiple types of books. Below are my favorites, loosely organized by theme.

Climate

My “most important” category of books this year was about the environment and climate change.

^ all of these books feed into my desire to blow up my life & move to the middle of nowhere in nature. Which is impractical, but I were to do it, I would need to be able to talk intelligently about the things I was looking at (chiefly rocks and clouds) so I did buy some physical books to help out with that:

Capitalism, basically

Sci-Fi 4ever

Acceptance (finishing the trilogy)
The Thing Itself (Kantian philosophy as the basis for bending time and space! What’s not to love)
Infinite Detail
Oval
Borne (yes I love Jeff Vandermeer and will read anything he writes)
The Strange Bird (yes this did make me cry)
Children of Time

Trying to have a better life

Trying to be a better person

Literally Show Me A Healthy Person
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
The Unexpected Joy of being Sober
[How To Date Men When You Hate Men](How To Date Men When You Hate Men) (LOL)
How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals
Feeling Great About My Butt (go buy this from Kawan :) )

Epilogue

For 2020, I have a few books planned/preordered that I am excited about:

Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User
Kyle Chayka’s The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism
Jeff Vandermeer’s Dead Astronauts
Melissa Broder’s The Pisces

If you’ve read this far - send me recommendations, please! I am always on the hunt for more :)

2020 Reading List

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This year was hard for me, and also everyone else I know. Sometimes I used reading for escapism, and other times I wanted to learn more about basically… why are things so bad right now. Not the most fun, but I did learn a lot.

Books That Rocked My Worldview

This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West (my top book for my 2020)
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (Kurt Anderson double-header, oh yeahhhhh)
Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years

Capitalism, Basically

Uses of Decorating (oh no this appears to be an art book with no internet presence… shoot, it’s really good!!)
Lurking
Bad Blood
Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet
Uncanny Valley
The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism
Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

Some Nice Fiction

Thinking About How I Think

2021

I’m on a heavy earth-sciences kick, so I’m hoping to read more books on geology and/or the geologic history of the American west. I’m kicking off the year by starting Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World ❤

2021 Booklist

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Wow, what a year!

In terms of general reading themes, I started with a heavy climate-focus at the beginning of the year. Climate change is a hyperobject, and it’s useful to approach it from varying disciplines and rhetorical techniques. Midway through the year, though, I felt kinda saturated with this topics. Which lead to bifurcating themes for the rest of the books:

Appreciating the hell out of the natural world. There’s no better way to honor & respect our planet than by going deep on it! Biology, geology, chemistry, ecology, gimme all of it :)
Digging into the historical/political/financial reasons for why we wound up here. Sadly I see now that, in terms of climate change, we as a species know exactly what’s going on and what we would need to do to fix it. It’s the money/power systems in place that prevent us from taking swift(er) action. So basically ya girl is finally learning econ 101.

Enjoy! I hope you find a good recommendation or two.

Climate :(

Nature :)

Culture Systems

Culture Feelings

until next year, loves :)

2022 Readings

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I daresay… I got more fun this year?? Or at least I didn’t spend 100% of my time reading climate books.

OTOH, I’m turning into a History Dad. Oh, you read a nice novel that you’d like to share? Sorry friend, I only do hard non-fiction on my various niche interests. And boy howdy are you gonna hear me talk about them :)

Art Data Map Tech

The Environment

The Experience of Living

History

Economics

Culture

Fiction

Burning Man Catharsis

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The city’s too crowded, no one goes there anymore.

In the midst of our astronomical rent prices across all major cities, we have fewer and fewer creative communities. Cheap rent is a prerequisite for artists, musicians, and other creative folks to settle down. These full-time corporate jobs suck the life out of you, you ideally want a location where you can get by on a part-time job. A little bit of freelance here and there. Ample time and space to focus on your creative practice.

Enter the small art town, the utopic vision of cheap land, cheap rent, and empty buildings that are ripe for a pop-up party. A small community of people who care for each other, and collaborate on some pretty sick projects. In our modern loneliness epidemic, who isn’t seduced by the idea of living on a commune?

There’s a joke on leftist-transit twitter that Disneyland is popular because it offers Americans the opportunity to experience a walkable city in their own country. I would argue that Burning Man has turned into a similarly placating fantasy for corporate workers, yearning to experience life on a village scale.

Take one week a year to get out of your stressed urban life and slow it down, man, take a stroll around the dusty city and get to know your neighbors. Help your campmates build out infrastructure, cook some communal meals, and immerse yourself in art and music. LARP that you are a full-time creative person, and no you’d didn’t rush-order your whole outfit off of Amazon the week before.

Carnival season has historically been tolerated by the Catholic church because it acts as a pressure-release valve for the faithful. Do a little sinning, once a year in a time-boxed way, and it makes it easier to follow the rules the rest of the time. Burning Man offers that catharsis, a week of wild revelry that makes it easier to accept going back to the rest of your life. The rent keeps going up, and the workday keeps getting longer.

The last two friends I’ve brought to Bombay Beach have both said to me, “wow! this is just like Burning Man!” No, friend, Burning Man is just giving you a taste of what life could be like in a vibrant small community. I wish it wasn’t such a rare and exotic thing!

Lunar Time

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I read an article in Nature today about the difficulties of establishing a lunar standard time. Riveting! There are a few pieces of this that I think are interesting to consider:

Lunar Time Zones

The first question would be to decide whether or not to use lunar time zones. Depending on the number of lunar bases, and how far apart they are, it might make sense just to have one single lunar standard time. Similarly to how the entirety of China is one timezone — this is certainly the quickest solution for establishing ground truth.

Determining Precise Time

If we do decide to go with time zones, however, then we have the challenge of determining a person’s longitude on the moon, in order to determine which zone to place them in. There have been a number of delightful books about establishing earth’s UTC (1, 2) but in our modern age this is solved by using GPS satellites. On the moon, however, we don’t have enough satellites to guarantee accurate triangulation for all locations!

Extraplanetary Timekeeping

To date, we don’t have a standard way of tracking “the time” on other planets, because we don’t have other humans living on planets. On Mars, for example, each rover has its own epoch time, starting from the moment the spacecraft landed on the planet. So we have highly relative calendars on a per-machine basis. It would be tempting to define lunar time by a similar metric, i.e. the first human to set up shop for a bit gets to define 00:00 on the 0th day. We’re going to have multiple countries sending missions to the moon, however, and given how well humans have got along with each other historically… it will be interesting to see how they will converge on a shared calendar system.

Just keep it in Earthtime

For the beginning, this will be the simplest solution. A lunar day lasts 24 hours and 50 minutes, which is definitely off-kilter enough to drive people crazy if they tried to stay on earth time. Martian days are 37 minutes longer than earth days — when the MSL rover was first landing on Mars, JPL operators lived on Martian time to maximize the available window of sunlight and data processing on the rover. It drove people crazyyyyy to be shifting out of sync with the rest of their loved ones, 37 minutes at a time!

The Unbearable Sameness of the Modern Web

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Today I went digging back in my portfolio and tried to pin down when I switched over to using UI frameworks, instead of rolling my own components. Misty-eyed, I rolled around the thought “there’s always a last time a parent picks up their child” but, you know, focusing on me and how I’ve given up on coding up my own UI components.

I think it happened around 2017-2018. It’s a pretty stark demarkation in my projects — from dense, angular, monochromatic UI to large amounts of padding, rounded corners, and peeks of color. It also looks… well, sloppy. Everything’s too spaced out, and you can clearly pick out which UI framework I’m using.

Ah, but think of the time savings of using a framework! Yes of course. When I was working at Netflix, I was building internal tools where the important thing was speed & insights, with visual design polish much further down on the priorities. Antd served me well for data-dense UIs, and I didn’t give it much thought.

Templatized website builders have proliferated on the web, which is mostly a really good thing! Everyone who wants their own website should be able to make one, even if it does look, well, squarespace-y. Any tech company worth their weight these days has their own design system, a nice little component library built on top of some master framework, with small tweaks for the specific business use case.

Also, it’s BORING. It’s BORING AS HELL. Guh, bring back interesting websites, bring back the creativity that the web offers. Bring back frontend devs who aren’t afraid to get down with the mouse event handlers!!

There is so much room for creative expression on the web! Standardizing UIs makes sense for large software companies — but please, let’s hold the line with the WWW also being a space for you and me to make weird little sites.

I was thinking to do blobs, but then I realized everyone’s doing blobs. So I decided to go as garish as possible.

— Ingrid Burrington

sickos voice yes, YES!!

2023 Reading List

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

What a year, what a year! This was a pretty varied one for me, with some high highs and some lowwww lows.

I’m still on my non-fiction reading kick, but my attention has been seeping outwards in different directions. I’ve been enjoying various deep-dives, a vertiable sample platter of cultural quirks.

Let me know if you decide to read any of these books — I do love to discuss! :)

Systems Upon Systems

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World
Wrong Way — Joanne’s new book!

The Lovely Search for Meaning

Nature-ish

Misc Non-Fiction

Fiction

As always — if you have reading suggestions, please send them my way :)

The Case Against Project Managers

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve just finished Jenny Odell’s latest book ”Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock,” which is chock-full of mediations and ways to rethink the (western) modernized relationship to time. Highly recommend!

Part of this book reviews the rise of Scientific Management AKA Taylorism, a movement from the turn of the 19th century that sought to increase workplace efficiency. To do so, factory workers should be tasked with small, short, repetitive tasks that can be optimized down to the millisecond, to collectively ensure a faster aggregate production. The most famous early success of this was Henry Ford’s factory, able to churn out production of their Model T cars.

Labor compartmentalization does increase company profits, but the human cost of this can be pretty brutal. In a low-skilled job, this could look like the Amazon fulfillment workers who have to wear physical monitors to ensure they are packaging up boxes fast enough for 8+ hours a day. At a highly-skilled job, this can look like an aerospace company siloing its research scientists to they point that they never learn enough context to qualify for a job at a better-paid competitor. (true story, btw)

I see this compartmentalization creeping further and further into tech companies, something that has been viscerally apparent as I have been looking for work lately. Historically I have had interstitial roles between organizations, but the current hiring landscape is asking me to pick a category to slot myself into.

As we apply Taylor’s principles to job roles and responsibilities, it is unsurprising that the workers comfortably settle in to focusing on their assigned tasks, without much critical thought applied to whether or not the task should exist. I was asked in a job interview if I would want to attend planning meetings about a feature I’d be building, or if I’d rather just have tickets assigned me. It blows my mind that people would choose the latter.

Time for a bibliographic tangent — my two most formative texts in thinking about corporate labor structures are both by David Graeber, ”Utopia of Rules” and ”Bullshit Jobs” Both concern the rise of bureaucractic & administrative work, and the very real time sink these tasks take.

I could talk for hours on these two books, but the point I am trying to make is that the Project Manager role is a prime example of these “bullshit jobs.”

Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion.

Graeber, Utopia of Rules

In all fairness to PMs — in some companies, we have created a set of workers (developers, designers, etc) who no longer want to understand or contribute to the larger vision/goals of their projects. A developer who refuses to write code until they have extensive step-by-step instructions for what they need to do — well, ok, someone’s gotta write those steps out.

I would urge, instead, for tech ICs to reengage with their labor, to participate in deciding if/when/how projects are built. Fight against the alienation of labor, if we want to get all Marxist about it.

Seize the means of (code) production! Cancel those daily standup meetings! Abolish the role of PM!

2024 Reading List

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I love putting these together becuase it reveals to me my obsessions over the past year. As a (rather upsetting) election year, you can see that I spent awhile fixating on America and contemporary culture, trying to figure out “why are we like this??”

This year also included a deeper fixation on health and longetivity — I do believe there was a larger culture shift around this, but I am probably over-weighting it because my circle and I are reaching a Certain Age. I have a backlog of several more books along these lines that friends recommended… we’ll see how much more I want to learn about seed oils ;)

rachel binx ⤇ blog

2019 Reading Roundup

Climate

Capitalism, basically

Sci-Fi 4ever

Trying to have a better life

Trying to be a better person

Epilogue

2020 Reading List

Books That Rocked My Worldview

Capitalism, Basically

Some Nice Fiction

Thinking About How I Think

2021

2021 Booklist

Climate :(

Nature :)

Culture Systems

Culture Feelings

2022 Readings

Art Data Map Tech

The Environment

The Experience of Living

History

Economics

Culture

Fiction

Burning Man Catharsis

Lunar Time

Lunar Time Zones

Determining Precise Time

Extraplanetary Timekeeping

Just keep it in Earthtime

The Unbearable Sameness of the Modern Web

2023 Reading List

Systems Upon Systems

The Lovely Search for Meaning

Nature-ish

Misc Non-Fiction

Fiction

The Case Against Project Managers

2024 Reading List

Love a good deep dive

Health & Cognitive Science

Politics, Baby

Hey look I read a fiction book

Culture Critique

A book that I read but also hated

2025 Reading Fiesta

Information Theory

Social Influence

Infrastructure & Capitalism

Environment

Misc. Psychology

1 lil fiction book :)