Tom MacWright

tom@macwright.com

November 2011

from the Development Seed Flickr

Development Seed hosted a foosball tournament for DCWeek, and my team ‘Foolsball’ - came in approximately third to fourth. Congratulations to the winners, “Backalley FC”.

My band Teen Mom got a spot playing the opening party for DCWeek , and thus got to grab (one half) of the huge stage at the 9:30 Club (for 15 minutes).

CC photo by Frank Gruber

This merited our first, albeit unnamed photos in Brightest Young Things. I did an extremely rough compression of our first single (which is being perfected at The Bastille) - so there’s some online evidence of our existence in audio form.

IMG_0655

I swung a quick trip up to Troy, NY for Elusive Persona, an opening by my sister and Carrie Will.

Consumption

There’s been quite a bit flowing in and out of my Instapaper and Kindle.

  • Cory Doctorow’s Scroogled is a rather dramatic but pretty effective piece. I think I might read a bit more, since he has a unique ability to write about technology without butchering the details.
  • Andy Woodruff’s Value by Alpha is awesome. Now that maps and visualizations are hip, there are a lot of opinions floating around, and kind of odd tangents like dymaxion maps and cartograms gain traction. But, for people who really actually make things daily, like Andy - there’s real value to having things be understandable, rather than just flashy.
  • This inverview series with Lynn Margulis is touching, inspiring, and really gripping for a million reasons. I adore this one bit in the second episode where she rephrases a question. She certainly wasn’t a spotless character - Google will pull up enough evidence for judgmental types to dismiss her - but the way that she handled science, with the attitude that sharing is the end result of research, and understanding isn’t just about publishing dry scientific articles, is a model for all disciplines. Sadly she died on the 22nd.
  • Greenland is the latest happy realization that DC produces some good music. They’ve got a lot of albums online for free: get them.