Notes

It’s the Max Fun Drive, so I wanted to share a few words about one of my go-to podcasts on the Maximum Fun network, Jordan, Jesse, Go!

As Jordan and Jesse regularly remind their listeners, this is an absurd and pointless show. But the most recent episode with Elliott Kalan featured a lovely and sincere defense of the pointless goofiness of this and other shows. Not everything needs to have meaning. It’s okay and healthy to have fun, empty calories in your media diet.

But there’s something that’s particularly special to me about JJGo. In that conversation, Elliott Kalan says the show has an “innocent vulgarity” to it—which I think is what’s so alienating about the show to some people and so compelling about it to others.

It is a vulgar show. But it’s not “locker room talk” in the way some men excuse the offensive misogyny and homophobia they think they can get away with when it’s just the boys. Even when JJGo is offensive, it’s inclusively vulgar.

And I find that so extraordinary, so unique, and so important. Two straight cis dudes and a guest make a show with genital jokes and naughty words that somehow is still a welcoming space to women and LGBTQ+ listeners who would never be welcomed into the performative vulgarity of male-coded spaces. In some strange way, this pointless show with no premise is a radical assertion that this kind media belongs to everyone.

I’ve been a JJGo listener for years, but it’s been incredibly important to me more recently. The last year has been one of the hardest years I’ve had—which is kind of surprising to say, given what 2020 and 2021 were like. And as I’ve struggled with (waves hands around) and tried to find a new understanding of who I am and who I want to be, JJGo has been such an important place for me.

Over the last few days I’ve read a number of reflections on the 20th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. I don’t have anything particularly meaningful to add, except this:

A few days after the war began, my small hometown organized a parade in support of the war. I was in middle school at the time, and we were notified that the whole school would be attending the parade—during what would normally be school hours, instead of attending class.

When I expressed that I wasn’t comfortable being required to attend a political event in support of a war I opposed, the middle school principal (and future school district superintendent) told my parents that my concern was ridiculous. It wasn’t going to be political, you see. It was just about “supporting the troops.”

Nevertheless, I was humored. Students were subsequently notified that we could opt out, and while most of the school attended the parade maybe a dozen of us stayed behind in a classroom and wasted an afternoon watching a movie or something.

As the photos in the local newspaper would demonstrate, it was—of course—a political event. Never mind that “support the troops” was and always will be a political statement. Kids were taken out of school to go cheer for a war and for explicitly partisan message.

In so many ways, I had a good experience growing up in an idealized small-town middle America, in one of the more affluent towns in the county. The schools were good. The people were friendly. I was safe. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to live there.

But my high school health teacher told the class that AIDS was caused by “sodomy.” I could count the number of Black people I knew on one hand. And one afternoon in March 2003, all the kids in the middle school were taken out of class to go to a war rally.

That town and that time in my life feel so incredibly far away. It’s hard to process that dissonance sometimes.

Karl Groves’ latest blog post, Understanding the cost of not being accessible, was really well-timed for some conversations at work today about making cost/value arguments as opposed to “this is the right thing to do” arguments for accessibility.

There’s nothing especially groundbreaking in Karl’s post, but I do like the way it frames the conversation. Return on investment is not why I do this work, but it is undoubtedly why someone else is paying me to do the work. For my own self-advocacy, it’s worth being prepared to make this kind of argument.

My freshman year, they lost all but one game in the Big Ten. In the last 80-some years, there’s only been one season where they won more conference games than they lost.

So this is a lot of fun: Highlights from #1 Purdue at Northwestern

I went with King Arthur Flour’s Chocolate Malt Cake, with some alterations. Good choice all around.

Am I blogging again? Probably not? But I wrote a little thing about pointing and calling and accessibility testing. I don’t know if anyone else will find it interesting but I feel like there’s some value in it.

In reply to: That post about radio ads

Also, there’s still lots of time for it all to fall apart but it would be great if every game for the rest of the season went like this game has been going. This is what offense looks like! Who knew?

I’m listening to tonight’s men’s basketball game between Northwestern and Nebrasketball on WGN while I make dinner. I don’t listen to a lot of commercial radio, but one thing that stands out to me is how radio ads don’t feel like they’ve changed at all in at least the last 25 years. They sound the same — that slightly frantic, fake conversational tone — and it feels like they’re selling the same things too.

Why is that? It’s not something inherent to audio, since podcast ads have a very different flavor. Is it audio plus time limits? User research around listening habits for people in cars? Or are the demographics of commercial radio skewed toward people whose tastes and buying habits haven’t changed since 1998?

In reply to: Radio Diaries, “The real-life refugees of 'Casablanca' make it so much more than a love story”

I was surprised by how much I was moved by this, especially since I don’t have any particularly strong attachment to Casablanca. It’s worth a listen.

We had solar panels installed on our home in July, and they were finally activated on November 2 (long, frustrating story). That means we have just about a month’s worth of data to see the impact of our solar setup.

For context: For net metering, we’re capped by our utility to produce on an annual basis no more than 100% of the energy we consumed the previous year. There’s still a lot of solar panel real estate available on our roof, but we’re just about at the maximum of what we’re allowed to generate under these rules.

Since it’s calculated based on annual consumption/production estimates, the expectation is that we’ll generate a lot of surplus energy in the summer when we get lots of direct sunlight — but we’ll draw a lot of power from the grid in the winter when the days are shorter and Chicago is grayer.

Per the chart on this maybe-questionable website that came up in search results, November is the second-least sunny month of the year in Chicago on average. So I would expect to mostly be drawing from the grid for our first month of production.

Instead, we did pretty well! 58 percent of our energy consumption was from our solar panels, and just 42 percent from the grid. We even had three particularly sunny days where we generated more power than we used and were net exporters.

That’s pretty cool, folks. There are lots better reasons to get solar panels than energy use gamification but I think I’m going to really enjoy tracking these numbers.