Better This Christmas

I always wanted to write a Christmas song, so here you go (performed live at The Day After Thanksgiving Ping-Pong Tournament Party):

BETTER THIS CHRISTMAS

By Charlie Harrington*

So mad at myself
That elf on the shelf
Oh, if he only knew
How good I can be
As sweet as a pea
I'll even give up my blue.

I'll be better this Christmas
I'll be better this Christmas
I'll be better this Christmas
But it better be Christmas soon

Bet ya heard I didn't listen
Messed up the kitchen
Smudged a window or two.
Just a misunderstandin'
Cause life's pretty demandin'
When you're three-foot-two

I'll be better this Christmas
I'll be better this Christmas
I'll be better this Christmas
But it better be Christmas soon

Wrote you that letter
Said I'd be better
Nothing else I can do.
Cause the clock is a-tickin'
Santa, we're playin' chicken
what are you gonna do

I'll be better this Christmas
I'll be better this Christmas
I'll be better this Christmas
But it better be Christmas soon

Now I'm closing my eyes
Hoping you'll still arrive
I left milk and cookies for you
Now I don't need a thing
But if you happen to bring
Just leave a toy or two

I'll be better this Christmas
I'll be better this Christmas
I'll be better this Christmas
But it better be Christmas soon
But it better be Christmas soon
But it better be Christmas soon!

Lots of asterisks

I listened to a recent Decoder podcast episode about how artists are just giving out songwriting credits readily, rather than face copyright issues, which explains why Olivia Rodrigo gave out credits to T. Swift and Paramore long after her album dropped. Anyway, here's who helped out with BETTER THIS CHRISTMAS:

• Story inspired by my nephew Monte
• Lyrics help from Carly, Molly, Andy, Mom during the Thanksgiving dessert doldrums
• Melody and fa-la-la-la help from Carly during our morning runs
• Musical advice text messages from Michael Byrnes throughout the week
• Performance credits to Michael Byrnes, Peter Clabby, Mikey's dad, Kevin, Patrick Clarke, and the whole Clabby-Byrnes-Harrington clan on fa-la-la-la's.

Happy Advent of Code, everyone!

As a recent subscriber to Stripe's Increment magazine, I was bummed to learn that "the final quarterly issue of Increment [was] published in November 2021." I'm sure the imprint will live on in some fashion, but, for a short moment, I enjoyed reading its well-edited, super-colorful, overall-nice-feeling dead-tree book-thing about a topic I enjoy in the meatspace.

Which got me a-thinking... what happened to the other magazines I loved as a kid, and where are they now, and can I still get them in the mail? Cause, guess what? Getting something you actually want in the mail is still fun.

So, let's find out!

Oriental Trading

Gotta start off with a banger. I'm shocked that this magazine/company still (or ever) exists. Also, I concede it's technically not a magazine. But, still, I loved crushing this thing as a kid, ogling its weird eyeball candies and probably-inappropriate holiday-themed bubble-sets, pencil sharpeners, and bouncy balls. On that note, if you were ever planning to release 10,000 bouncy balls in your high school hallway on senior prank day, Oriental Trading is how you'd do it. Request a free catalog here. Yes, you'll probably be spammed for life. But you already were, and now you can buy lots of cool plastic stuff (that the state of the California also must remind you, on nearly every single listing, is probably also poisoning you in some terrifying way).

Weird NJ

Speaking on terrifying, I'm happy to report NJ's favorite insane asylum explorers are alive and well! They're down to two issues a year, but they're just as creepy and fun as ever. Sign up for an annual subscription here, in case your local Welsh Farms stopped carrying them.

Nintendo Power

Now we're getting into the good stuff. Nintendo Power was far-and-away the most important magazine of them all to kid-Charlie. When my parents finally agreed to get me a regular Nintendo, we did so in the most Harrington-way possible: at a garage sale, where the guy threw in a bunch of other goodies, including the Power Mat and 20-odd ragged Nintendo Power issues. I read every one roughly ten-billion times before I was finally allowed to subscribe to new issues.

Then, on some horrible, woebegone day 15-odd years ago, I purged their cardboard box home in my parent's attic and only kept three issues (thankfully, I kept the Link to the Past strategy guide, I'm not a complete monster). But I'm still kicking myself every time I think about it.

That was a whole lot of backstory to say that you can't subscribe to Nintendo Power anymore.. in magazine format. But they do have a monthly podcast! And it's kinda fun! Apparently the new president of Nintendo's last name is Bowser and that's an actual, honest-to-goodness coincidence. The spirit of Howard and Nester lives on.

Also, if you really, really do want to get your NP nostalgia on, I suggest checking out retromags.com. Even YouTube doesn't have all the Mega Man X2 level-by-level walkthroughs you might need in a pinch.

CCS

Another not-quite-magazine that I treasured. Many hours were spent daydreaming over which skateboard deck and shoes I wanted to buy instead of actually going outside and practicing skateboarding.

These babies used to arrive 14 times a year, but you can still get them 2x a year by signing up here and I do and I'm still trying to pick the perfect deck rather than work on my heel-flip.

Klutz Press

AFAIK, sending this card in the mail will not result in the Flying Apparatus Catalog by Klutz Press arriving in your mailbox.

But I've just filled it out and I'll update this post if things turn out AWESOME. In the mean time, you can read all about my love of Klutz in this open love-letter, and just scour eBay and Amazon for their used books!

A future golden age

Can magazines work in 2021? Probably not. They probably haven't been working for a long-long time. But who knows? Maybe we'll be flipping through their semi-fungible representations in the Facebook-verse. For now, let's just enjoy the decline and fall while we still can.

Now, zines, on the other hand, are in full-on revival-mode. Just check out wizardzines and you'll be a believer (and you can even print these out at home!)

Actually, that's my final exhortation in this post - get a printer, cause they're awesome. Everyone thinks they suck, and they don't. They're great. In fact, this is my new answer to the What's one important truth do very few people agree with you on? question. Here's the printer I bought and love. Think about it. You can print things out! In your own house, without going anywhere else! Make a zine and print it out. Draw a maze, or a weird coloring shape, and print it out. Make Gutenberg proud.

Since having a child, I've been on a nostalgia Mega Drive. If you know anything about me, then you'll probably agree I was already at alarming levels of the stuff, and I've now likely reached the nostalgia mesosphere, even if just for a minute or so.

In particular, videos games are dominating my reminiscences. I've been thinking about their role in my development as a human. Spoiler alert: it's an extremely positive one.

There's one game that stands out: Mario Paint.

This 1992 "edutainment" title (a word seemingly devised to revile kids) is a forgotten masterpiece of creativity, fun, and weirdness.

At the surface, its existence doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's a digital art and music app on the Super Nintendo that uses (comes with!) a separate mouse controller. I can name exactly one video game like this, ever.

From what I've learned in my limited YouTube research, although the Super Nintendo was always the more-parentally-acceptable console of the early 90s console wars (see Mortal Kombat SNES grey matter vs Sega Genesis blood), Nintendo was feeling the pressure to demonstrate that their "family computers" were actually forces for good in the battle for the attention span of the world's youth.

And, thus, Mario Paint.

There's just no reason for this game to be this good. Sure, MS Paint on Windows was always a fun time-waster back in the day. But it certaintly wasn't weird. And Mario Paint is w-e-i-r-d. It's like Photoshop on Magic Mushrooms. Plus an animation studio. Plus a digital audio workstation (aka Garageband). And all this back when we were still recording our favorite songs from the radio on cassette tapes (if we were lucky enough to catch them, and even then usually missing the first few bars).

Don't talk to me about delightful UIs or UXs if you haven't played Mario Paint. Nothing makes sense at a glance. Instead, it's pure discovery. Click-and-see. The undo button is a dog's face. Why? Why not. The fill-paint animation is a break-dancing paint-brush with a smiley-face (that sentence had a lot of hyphens). I spent hours and hours clicking every button in Mario Paint, and just making weird shit.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like I exclusively played Mario Paint from 1992 forward (I probably didn't get it until 1993 or 1994 anyway). But I'd find myself drawn back to Mario Paint way more often than my parents even expected.

Thinking about it now, Mario Paint reminds me of that poster of kindergarten classroom yore:

Everything I need to know in life I learned in Mario Paint.

Why do I like making weird songs on Garageband? Mario Paint

Why do I like making logos for bands and apps and companies? Mario Paint.

Why am I a software engineer? Mario Paint.

But, Charlie, there's no "game engine" or programming environment in Mario Paint. What-so-ever do you mean?

Thought you'd never ask. In 2015, I was living in London working in business development for an edtech startup, traveling a whole lot, with a bunch of downtime in airports. I decided to Carpe Diem the idle-airport-time to teach myself programming (something I'd been trying to do, on and off, for the previous seven years), so I bought a Big Nerd Ranch iPhone book. When my company planned a two-day hackathon, I pledged to build a little iPhone app, following the book step-by-step. I've written about this experience before, so I won't fully rehash it. But the key thing is that, in addition to the basic Tinder/flash-card UX, I decided to add some fun little characters for the app (designed by my co-worker and pal Dan McGorry). Then, these characters obviously needed a backstory. A week or so later, I traveled back to New Jersey for my aunt's wedding and I was showing the app to anyone who would listen (not many). Except for my 9 year old cousin. She bit hard. She came up with even more ideas for their powers (hair that grows to become a bridge, melting down into a popsicle liquid so you can glide, and so on). The kicker: the next day, my aunt delivered to me some enemies for the game that my cousin had drawn, like Chill Factor:

I knew then and there that I wanted to create wonderful things, be good, and have fun for my career. I quit my job and studied to become a computer programmer.

Now, years in, am I creating wonderful things ever day? Not necessarily. But I try to keep the joy and weirdness alive in whatever I do.

Last week, I asked my mom to dig through my boxes in the attic to find my Super Nintendo Mouse. She graciously delivered. Even the intro screen screen to Mario Paint is a lesson in weirdness. I love-love-love it:

After about a half hour or so, I produced this masterpiece:

Yes, the main riff is more-or-less China Cat Sunflower by the Grateful Dead (I think).

I'm not the only one who loves Mario Paint, particularly the music-maker. There's a whole Internet of magic Mario Paint music like this, the entire back-side of Abbey Road (including secret track Your Majesty!):

I can't believe that this game exists (and still works!). I guess edutainment ain't so bad after all. For now, back to the drawing board!

I'm typing this post on my iPhone in the Obsidian iOS app using a Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard and I feel like a 90s computer hacker.

Not enough? How about this: I just SSH'ed into a Raspberry Pi on my home network using Tailscale via the Termius iOS app to restart a YouTube-playlist-to-podcast-feed Docker container.

Don't get me wrong -- the other stuff is pretty magical, too, especially Tailscale. But this keyboard-to-phone takes the cake.

I mean, look at this:

It's downright cute, aside from the legs.

You kinda forget that your phone is a computer, personally-speaking. Instead, it's usually just a vehicle for social media nightmares. Given the choice between doing something semi-arduous, like checking in for a flight, on a phone app vs the website (on a desktop/laptop), I always choose the latter. Somethings always missing from the app, and if you really want to get all fiddly, which I usually do, they kick you out to a crappy webview anyway.

So, I'm usually a laptop-bringer on any trip. Except, this time, I didn't want to. Firstly, my alu-min-i-um portable computer is just plain heavy and bulky, and I was adamant that we were going carry-on only on this voyage. Even more damning, I recently discovered that opening the laptop screen beyond 45 degrees results in the black screen of death. That's something for the Geniuses, if they're willing indulge an admittedly long in the tooth 2016 MBP (I'm doubtful).

But I did want to be able to work on edits for my book on this trip. You never know when inspirations gonna strike (usually, for me, around midnight, when I've already gone to bed), and while I'm reasonably fast thumb-typist, I just don't feel the flow feels on the phone keyboard.

Luckily, we had this little Bluetooth cutie tucked away in a closet. I'd purchased it as a gift for Carly, so that she could write stuff on the go (very much the same need I'm talking about here). We'd extensively discussed the need for a mobile keyboard writing thingie early in our courtship, and we even entertained the idea of building it ourselves (hint: I'm still entertaining this idea).

We're not alone. See the FreeWrite products, which somehow don't quite fit the bill for me, despite almost exactly delivering on our dream product (full-sized keyboard, e-ink-like screen, and supreme battery life). Mostly it's the calculator-sized screen (and the perceived bulky size) that's scaring me away. We want something that you can keep in a purse or a pocket.

Now this Bluetooth keyboard doesn't fit in a pocket, but it's also pretty darn cheap, enough so that I'm not going to be devastated if I lose it or spill a beer on it.

So, I thought I'd give it a try this trip. And I'm sold. It's legit fun to type on this thing and I think I'm going to bring it with me more places. Along with things like Tailscale and Termius, I can treat my smart phone as a dumb terminal to my real computers.

Carly still hasn't given the keyboard a try, but I'm holding out hope. She's watching me tap-tap away right now, and I think this is a gift that just takes a while to kick in.

And, meanwhile, I'm going to keep thinking about keyboards-as-computers, whether that's scouring eBay for Commodore VIC-20s, ogling over the latest Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard-computer, or sketching out our still-yet-to-be-realized "Kindle for writing."

On the latter item, I'm also ogling the ReMarkable 2 as an potential winning entrant, but the lack of keyboard and the lack of backlight are keeping me away... for now. If they're tracking dropped cart analytics at all, I'm just going to apologize now for what I've been doing. You can keep retargeting me if you'd like. You'll get me one day.

Earlier today, I texted some friends that I regret using Gatsby for this blog. It came at a moment of frustration, when I was stuck in some weird Node dependencies hell and all I wanted was to write another blog post.

If your static site generator does nothing else, it should make it frictionless to write a new blog post. It's hard enough to make the time to write, your software shouldn't be making it harder.

Why did I use Gatsby in the first place? Well, it was new and shiny and uses GraphQL. That's enough, right? Really, at the time, I had these grand ambitions of interactive React components within my posts, which I knew would be possible, and possibly easy, with a React-based static site generator. To this date, I've written exactly one of these interactive posts, and that was before I made the Gatsby-switch and I still have never actually ported it from my original Pelicon static site. This post used to have all these Tie Fighters flying around and now it doesn't and I'm still a little bummed about it. If any of that intrigues you, my little Star Wars game is still online - it's one of the first things I ever made when I learned how to program.

So, anyway, why not switch away from Gatsby? Am I using any of the advanced features of Gatsby? Yes, I am. There's an active plugin ecosystem and I use a bunch of them for things like generating my RSS feed or rendering images or displaying my library or my Instagram posts. But I've realized that some of these, especially the ones that leverage external APIs like the Instagram one, are more trouble than they're worth.

With the Instagram plugin/API, all I want to do is display a neat little grid of all the "walking man" street signs I've discovered and posted to Instagram. But, like all Web 2.0 API platforms, Instagram's API usefulness was continually walked back until it's virtually impossible to do basic things like display your photos (because they want to keep all these useful actions within their own platform/app), and I'm now forced to create a "test account" on a Facebook "app" with a temporary token that expires like every 30 days or something. Now, every time I go to write a new post here, which is usually > 30 days, I can't even build my blog locally because the Gatsby build process fails from the expired Instagram token. I want to blame Instagram here, or Gatsby, but instead, I blame myself.

Keep your friends close, and your blog's dependencies closer.

A simpler static site generator

Here's where I announce that I've written a new, better, static site generator, the fourth step in the hero's journey of software engineering.

But, nope. Instead, I'm just gonna use the one that my pal Ben created. It's called Syte. It's extremely lightweight, fast, and does exactly what I really want -- render Markdown files in an HTML template.

So, have I switched my blog over to Syte yet? Not yet. But I'm gonna. The main thing that's missing (for me) in Syte is RSS feed generation. I'd like to contribute that back to Ben's repo at some point. I can probably live without the rest of the junk I've bolted onto this site. It may mean that I temporarily dismantle my cool, query-param powered library searching page, but that's a worthy price to pay for being able to write a blog post exactly when I want to, no questions asked.

My inability to bear the blog switching costs at this moment isn't going to stop me from another time-waster of a side project: a new interview site, using Syte, that asks writers about the stuff they use to write, edit, and otherwise create their books!

Writes With

The Writes With syte is already live, with two interviews: Brian Dear, author of The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, and Pooja Reddy, author of The Big Bold Blue.

Making it was a joy with Syte and I'm happy with it, even if my "design" is still pretty bare bones. I also deployed it with Cloudflare Pages, which mostly importantly comes with (at least for now) free bandwidth. This blog uses Netlify for hosting, which I do like, but occasionally suffer from bandwidth spikes near the end of the monthly billing cycles that trigger their bandwidth "add-ons" fees.

Writes With is directly, clearly, obviously, duh inspired by one of my favorite websites: usesthis.com. In fact, I chatted with Daniel of usesthis.com before launching it, just to make sure he was okay with it, and he gave the thumbs up.

I like this little project, because I'm going to get to talk with more people who've published books. As a cub writer myself, I'm happy for any tips and tricks I can get.

And I know, I know, the tools aren't the important thing about writing... but I think we all still want to know about them.