A couple Monday mornings ago, I stumbled across this post about how a Danish gaming company moved to a four-day work week in the first quarter of 2020. It seemed like a good idea—a way to encourage doing actual work rather than performing work—so we’re going to give it a try at Three Point Four Media. I hope to do constructive things with my Fridays, to use a large block of time for larger projects, but we’ll see. Today I might just watch the Ryder Cup.
We’re not very good at the four-day workweek yet. I’m writing this newsletter on Friday morning; Bill has a call with someone later. But it’s only been a couple weeks and we haven’t codified the four-day workweek in the Official Three Point Four Media bylaws. We did skip our morning meeting this morning, so that’s a start. If it’s good enough for Angela Merkel, it’s good enough for us is something I never thought I’d write.
An Article
Paradise Lost: The Rise and Ruin of Couchsurfing.com
The subhead says it all: “The once-utopian accommodations site, now headed by an alum of surveillance-analytics firm Palantir, has gone back on its always-free ethos.” Not a paywall!
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A Concert (Video)
Nirvana - Live At Reading (1992)
The New Yorker ran an article about a writer who became friends with Kurt Cobain after profiling him for Rolling Stone in the 90s, which I enjoyed reading but was also a random thing to run. I'd love to know how this many thousand-word article with no real point or time hook or reason for existing at this present moment ended up on NewYorker.com on September 22, 2021. So anyway, the writer Michael Azerrad mentions a concert at the 1992 Reading Festival, widely considered to be one of Nirvana's best sets by people who rank these sort of things. Because the internet increasingly contains all the useless ephemera you could possibly want and much much more, it took all of 20 seconds to find video of the full show (although I can’t out how to embed it here). Thanks to Three Point Four Media's unusually liberal Paid Time Off to Watch 30 Year Old Concerts policy, I spent part of Thursday afternoon viewing the whole thing. (Cut to: Bill spending an entire Tuesday watching The Grateful Dead play half a song.) Some random dude named Tony dances around the stage for almost the entire show. Cobain dedicates All Apologies to his 12-day old daughter and gets the crowd to scream We love you Courtney. More Than A Feeling segues into Smells Like Teen Spirit. Dave Grohl hits the hell out of the drums.
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A Book
Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
This book is terrible. All the purported wisdom contained within it could have been relayed in a tweet thread. And not even a long tweet thread. One of those tweet threads when the tweeter puts 1/x at the end of the first tweet and you wonder if you're invested enough to read the whole thing and then it's six tweets total and you think is this it? Just work four days a week. 0 out of 10. Would not recommend.
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A Project
NCAA Athletes Can (Finally!) Start a Business
For Shopify, I talked to a bunch of NCAA athletes who are taking advantage of the change in Name, Image, and Likeness rules to sell stuff, like merch. Nice how that worked out. My favorite part, where I talked to 6’4” 313-pound Marshall Thundering Herd offensive lineman and burgeoning country music star Will Ulmer about being able to play shows under his own name now, got cut because it had nothing to do with the focus of the piece. Editors, you know? Because no one edits this newsletter, here’s one of his songs:
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A Run
You can see a lot of New York City on a 10-mile run. The Williamsburg Bridge could be much less steep. Running across the Brooklyn Bridge, previously one of the most unpleasant experiences, now feels like a luxurious jog due to the bike lane moving to the street bed. Good edit, Bill de Blasio, you doofus.
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Happy almost October. A good month, that one.