10 letters a day

Incredible story from The New York Times on how Obama’s “10 letters a day” policy was instituted:

President Obama was the first to come up with a deliberate and explicit practice of 10 letters every day. If the president was home at the White House (he did not tend to mail when he traveled), he would be reading constituent mail, and everyone knew it, and systems were put in place to make sure it happened. The mail had currency. Some staff members called it “the letter underground.” Starting in 2010, all hard mail would be scanned and preserved. Starting in 2011, every email every day would be used to create a word cloud, its image distributed around the White House so policy makers and staff members alike could get a glimpse at what everyday Americans were writing in to say.

The breadth of the emails is breathtaking to consider: love letters, suicide notes, desperate please, harsh criticism. Obama read them all. And in the end, he was grateful for how they impacted him:

“I tell you, one of the things I’m proud of about having been in this office is that I don’t feel like I’ve … lost myself,” he said…“I feel as if — even if my skin is thicker from, you know, public criticism,” he said, “and I’m wiser about the workings of government, I haven’t become … cynical, and I haven’t become callused. And I would like to think that these letters have something to do with that.”

There are no words

Yesterday was the Seattle Womxn’s March, an event intended to signal solidarity with all the people who might be marginalized under a Trump administration. An estimated 130K people (more than 2x the 50,000 that was estimated) marched the 3.5 miles from Judkins Park to the Seattle Center. I was part of that group.

According to the site’s press release, this was one of more than 200 events planned in 46 states and 30 countries (The New York Times has a rundown of all the events).

Seattle’s event was “a grassroots response to the 2016 election, according to Paula Goelzer, a Seattle-based birth doula, who started the Facebook event for the Womxn’s March on Seattle after she and her colleagues heard about the march in Washington D.C.” (FYI: This is one of the most Seattle sentences that has ever been written)

As I headed downtown to join the March from its 4th and Pike entrance, I noticed the city was eerily quiet – probably because most people were already at the March’s opening rallying point in Judkins.

This was supposed to be a silent march, and as I got into the crowd, I did notice things were much more quiet and less raucous than I would’ve expected. Occasional cheers did erupt throughout the marching line, but there was an eerie, magical feeling as we all headed down the street.

One thing the event definitely affirmed to me was the creativity and spirit of my fellow Seattle residents. Lots of creative signs were out in force.

I’m going to have a more detailed post with my favorite signs from the event later this week.

As the march reached its endpoint, we did notice a few crazies. A man standing off to the side of the street. One Chinese woman with a thick accent and a Pepe shirt started screaming “BUILD THAT WALL” at a lot of the marchers (don’t get me started on why this makes no sense). Fortunately, there was a woman following her around with a sign that said “Ignore the troll.”

Throughout the day, there were wonderful moments that confirmed, yes, we still live in a country (or at least a city) that values equality and goodness. And maybe together, we can figure out how to get through this.

The thing that hit me the most were kids. Sure there were some that were clearly dragged there by their parents and had no idea WTF was going on. But others were there to take a step into political activism, to affirm that values like peace, love, and kindness were still worth fighting for in this world. I was deeply moved by them.

The future belongs to these kids. We let them down in a big way with this election. But these children remind me, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

***

P.S. Also, why spell it the “Womxn’s March”? From the website:

The spelling of “Womxn’s March” has been adapted to highlight and promote intersectionality in the movement for civil right and equality. Intersectionality acknowledges that different forms of discrimination intersect, overlap, and reinforce each other, and recognizes the impact of discrimination based not only on gender, but also race, sexual orientation, gender identity, nationality, faith, class, disability, and other backgrounds.

The return of John McTiernan

John McTiernan, the director of Die Hard, has just directed his first video in more than a decade: an ad for Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands.

Over at Vulture, Drew Taylor has the incredible story of what McTiernan has been up to:

McTiernan’s inauspicious reemergence leads to a couple of bigger questions: Where, exactly, has he been? And what makes this ad so special?

To answer the first question, you have to go back to 2006, when Anthony Pellicano, a private eye with ties to some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, was arraigned on federal wiretapping charges. It was the conclusion of both a three-year investigation and Pellicano’s 30-day stint in prison for illegally keeping explosives in his West Hollywood office. The resulting trial would eventually embroil some of Hollywood’s biggest executives (Michael Ovitz and Brad Grey) and shiniest stars (Tom Cruise and Chris Rock). At the time, Vanity Fair described the scandal as Hollywood’s Watergate.

But only one member of the Hollywood elite would actually get sent to prison for to his relationship with the notoriously scuzzy Pellicano: John McTiernan.

Like Taylor, I’m rooting for a McTiernan comeback.

The Vine archive

Sarah Perez writing for TechCrunch:

Twitter just can’t seem to let go of Vine. The company announced last fall it would close the video-sharing community site and its accompanying mobile applications, which it then did just days ago. But it also has taken several steps to ensure that the content created in Vine would not be lost, by offering tools to export videos, both online and in its app. Today, in another move to preserve Vine content, Twitter has launched an online archive of Vine videos — basically a static website containing all the posts made from 2013 through 2016.

The archive is live now and I dig the clean organization. Vine was an incredible place for light, fun, memorable creativity — often by people of color. I was really sad to hear the service would be shutting down, but glad to hear it’ll be preserved in some form.

Also, below is my favorite Vine of all time. Check it out and read the oral history of it.

 

Despite its marketing, Slack’s free tier limits your total number of users

I recently launched a Slack group for my podcast, the /Filmcast:

I used Slack’s free tier, which lets you view 10K of your team’s most recent messages. After just a few days, we’ve already accumulated about 600 members and even crowdsourced a neat spreadsheet with all their podcast recommendations.

As the group has continued to expand, I’ve started to wonder about what the group’s maximum size could be, so I went looking for whether or not Slack’s free tier had a user limit. I was dismayed to find freecodecamp’s blog post, So Yeah We Tried Slack… and We Deeply Regretted It, which points out that yeah, there is a limit, despite what Slack’s marketing says:

I woke up this morning to a mountain of tweets and emails from new campers saying they weren’t receiving our automatically sent Slack invites. Not exactly what you want to happen three days after your open source community is featured in Wired Magazine.

Slack’s support team was enthusiastic about helping, and kept saying the email notifications had gone out. In my desperation, I tried to manually send out the invites. That’s when I was confronted with an ominous message: “You have reached the maximum number of users”.

My heart sank. Our contributors had sunk so many hours into building Slack features. We’d endorsed Slack to thousands of people on our Twitch.tv streams, and even mentioned it in interviews with the media. We were heavily dependent on their service.

In a cold sweat, I started googling. There was literally nothing on web saying anything about Slack having a maximum number of users — only marketing material saying that free tier organizations could have as many users as we wanted. Apparently, we were the first community to ever hit Slack’s undisclosed limit.

Sounds like the service starts struggling at around 5,000 users and poops out completely after 8,500. This is still a pretty healthy number for any community — I think it will be more than sufficient for my needs — but it’s still a limit that Slack’s marketing does nothing to disclose, despite the fact that the above blog post was written more than a year ago.

So, users hoping to build a massive 10K+ sized community on Slack should look elsewhere before investing a ton of resources into this thing (or until they update their marketing to be more clear on how many users they actually allow).

Update: Evidently the limit has been raised since the above articles were published.


Still no word on what the new limit is. I guess there aren’t any communities that invested into Slack’s free tier long enough to find out?