True Tex-Mex Cuisine’s Long Adios—Texas Monthly: This piece tracing the ins and outs of the Tex-Mex restaurant scene (mostly in Houston) over the past few decades is essentially my life’s story in restaurants. The longer I spend away, the more likely I am to want to head to Ninfa’s on Navigation or Molina’s or El Real first (or Matt’s El Rancho in Austin) than I am to want Pico’s or Hugo’s or Sazón. One thing I worry about when people talk about Tex-Mex, and it’s present in this essay, is the conflation of the food culture of Tex-Mex restaurants initially designed to serve a primarily Anglo clientele with the “Tex-Mex food” generally. There’s good reason for that as the genrification of that menu happened in restaurants, but it’s important also to remember the Tex-Mex foodways that predate this Anglicized menu (call them “Tejano” foodways?). They are related, but distinct. Robb Walsh’s Tex-Mex Cookbook is the best example I know of letting them share the spotlight.
Just five bucks a month: Gina Trapani’s writeup of the exhausting process of having to write and rewrite the billing platform for ThinkUp seven times in the first year and a half or so of the product’s life was reminiscent of my own experience (on a smaller scale) with The Appendix and our billing and subscription needs. This is an essential story to keep in mind for anyone considering writing a service that involves recurring billing. I’m going to keep it in front of mind as I work on what comes next in the coming months.
I picked this up as an easy read having seen Glenn Fleishman recommend it on Twitter a few weeks ago. Having independently discovered that reality is only a computer simulation to which they have access to the main configuration repository, a collection of geeks find they’ve all had the idea to time travel to medieval England and pose as magicians with their new powers. For my tastes, the light humor element could have been less prominent in favor working through the consequences of the central conceit in more detail, but it was fun, easy, and great for picking up at odd hours with a newborn in the house. This is also the first book I’ve bought on one of Amazon’s inhouse imprints, and I was impressed by the presentation. I imagine I’ll eventually pick up the next one in the Magic 2.0 series.
These ten short provocations about living online and in a digital age cover ethics and etiquette in roughly equal parts all to set up the core ‘command’ that to participate in this world with purpose one must understand the perspective gained from understanding programming. I find this conclusion—that everyone could benefit from the perspective gained from relatively short exposure to programming—a great corrective to the “Everyone must code!” evangelism. Given that the book was published in 2011, however, I wonder how much of just that brand of evangelism comes from a misunderstanding of the subtleties of Rushkoff’s argument. Regardless, the collection of questions about digital age ethics put me in a good frame of mind for approaching some of the post-dissertation projects I’ve been working on recently.