Unauthoritative Pronouncements

First World Podcast Problems

Stan Alcorn wrote a really brilliant piece about why audio isn’t as omnipresent in our online experiences as video is. He conducts interviews with many people responsible for sharing video, and audio, to dissect the reasons non-musical content is so seldom shared.

I agree with the points of many of the interviewees in regard to podcasts. Many of the things holding podcast-listening back are things that I see podcasters lament on Twitter. There is a lot of consternation over SoundCloud from some people, and a warm embrace from others. Their program is in beta, and appears to have some quirks. People want searchable, legible, text versions of hour-long podcasts to spread links about the really good stuff. Even the ability to jump to a specific moment in playback as part of a URL has been bandied about.

There is one thing Alcorn doesn’t elaborate on and that is for listeners willing to go down the full Podcasting Rabbit Hole, we are left without easy ways to change where, and when, we playback. We are trained by the podcast players to become creatures of habit. “Is it Tuesday? Can I listen to Back to Work live today? Well… I can listen to half… Should I wait?” “I need to force Downcast to refresh before I get off WiFi or I can’t listen to today’s Your Daily Lex because he has no web player.” “I streamed half this episode of Bionic in the browser… Where did I leave off?” Those all sound silly, but they are the minor annoyances that dedicated fans fret over.

Podcasting really relies on making listeners jump through these silly hoops; over-and-over, week-to-week. They are trivial, of course, but if fans need to think about these minor things then I imagine they must be part of what’s keeping the unwashed masses away from podcasts. Live listening is particularly annoying because you need to contort your schedule to get your happening-right-this-second dopamine fix. The 5by5 network has their own mobile, streaming-player apps, but there is no way to pause and record it like a DVR. There is no way to bookmark that location and shift it to your podcast player when the episode is available for download.

A huge improvement will come when people can pass time codes as arguments for players. Not because I want to manually format those time strings, but because I hope apps will helpfully offer to do that for me. They will say, “Here’s the bookmarklet to save your position to Downcast, or anywhere else.” Then I will drop to my knees, weeping tears of salty joy.

I could add the podcast to my podcast player, but that is often a commitment to a show you may only be trying out. Something that was linked to off of Twitter which may, or may not, suit your taste.

YouTube is, in any meaningful sense, everywhere. Likewise Vimeo. You can watch their short, burst-like content in one sitting, stack up URL’s for later, or sign in with your account and add it to a list.

It’s really that last thing that is crucial. Think about the other long-form media providers. Instead of YouTube, and Vimeo; think Netflix, and Hulu.

I can sign in to NetFlix on a toaster oven, or TV, and it will remember what I was watching and where I left it. Many podcast playing applications offer ways to sync, but they are extremely clunky and almost totally unreliable. Worst of all, your sharing, and syncing, is confined to that one application. Many apps let you export data about your feed as OPML to take in to another app, but that’s not syncing those player apps, that’s moving. SoundCloud is trying to work in this space, but their beta isn’t refined enough, and if it ever is, then it’s SoundCloud instead of iTunes with leverage over the podcasters. Multiple, federated, interoperable players should really be the goal instead of lining up behind one.

No Way In

Another way audio contrasts with video is that if we take an average, hour-long podcast and put it up against an hour-long TV show we start to see a huge difference in time. Podcasts don’t have the same series runs each year because they are mostly released weekly. How can you convince a friend to catch up on a podcast with 52 episodes? More than 52? This isn’t a podcast player problem at this point. Where’s the in point for a new listener? Are we all standing around in comic shops talking about how no one can start without starting at the first comic? There need to be starting points for people that aren’t comic podcast geeks.

It is very easy to lay the blame for podcast-listening’s technical shortcomings on the developers, and on Apple’s iTunes Store, for basically stagnating, but the content creators should really feel empowered by this. They can really take charge of their platform for themselves. If a creator can make content more easily digestible, then they drive up their listenership. If they can make it easier for loyal users to share segments, wiki-transcribe bits, and push context-shifting, then they will be able to exponentially increase their reach.

If Merlin and Dan have a really great talk, and it’s 3/4 of the way in to the episode, how do I share that with the uninitiated without disclaiming, “Oh just skip all this because you won’t get it”? Only fans get that.

I have the flu, so I was trying not to say something silly about viral content but: viral, viral, viral, viral…

Update: Andrew Clark, Zac Cichy, and Bradley Chambers discussed many of these things in an episode of The Menu Bar that was released after my post went up. Enjoy this attempt at trying to share it.

caseyliss:

I’ve lamented on the last couple episodes of my podcast with friends that I have several gigabytes of text and picture messages stored on my iPhone.

If Apple were to offer to include your text message history in iCloud–without it counting against your storage limits–how would that make you feel? Would you be happy? Scared? Impressed? Depressed?

What if Google offered the same thing? Would that change your feelings? If so, how?

The weird thing is that I think they are already storing this information. When I open my MBP after a few days of sending images and texts over iMessage, everything locks up while the Messages app tries to download all of it. It has to be downloading this from Apple, not from my phone, so they do have some kind of record of my iMessages. Perhaps it is incomplete? Or so unreliable they don't want to use it as a backup?

Of course that is only iMessages, not the totality of my communiques. It may be the case that they don't want to be responsible for collecting and storing SMS and MMS data. With iMessage, both users have consented to Apple's iMessage policies.

Does Apple want to send out this disclaimer when an iPhone customer sends a SMS to an Android customer?

This conversation is being stored remotely.

Could you picture the headlines about that legal disclaimer?

Keep in mind that those conversations are already stored by the user, and backed up, but the unit of backup is your phone, not a server-side log.

I don't see anything nefarious about Apple doing it (my concerns would be about reliability of the service) but I would have concerns if Google instituted a similar program. Would I want my conversations with friends that have Android phones backed up and indexed to prioritize what kind of ads are sent to my iPhone? Gmail does that, why wouldn't their message backup service?

All these 30th Anniversay Macintosh posts made me heart-wrenchingly nostalgic. I dug up some terrible thing I wrote 12 years ago and reworked it to be slightly less embarrassing.

The first Mac I ever used was my mother’s computer. It was a Mac Plus that my grandfather gave her in 1992 after we moved to Florida. It had a very loud, 20 MB, SCSI hard drive. My mother had specifically told us that the computer was for work only, not for playing games. Yeah, right.

My favorite game was Stunt Copter. I loved to drop the stunt guy on the horse – an early warning sign of my sadistic streak. Video game violence, etc.

My mother used that computer faithfully for a few years, but it was underpowered when she got it. We frequently spent time at Kinko’s so she could use their less-outdated IIci’s and IIsi’s. In 1993 she bought a Quadra 605 when it first came out. Again, this was a business computer, not a toy. One year we got a SupraExpress 33.6 modem and AOL 2.5. That is when I realized how incredibly slow it was compared to my friends’ computers. The Quadra 605 and I had a love/hate relationship.

When my mom bought a Compaq in 1998, she gave me the 605. I customized and upgraded that thing as much as I could (mostly just system extensions the decreased performance, and another 4 megs of RAM since the PPC upgrade card had been discontinued). Unfortunately, the monitor died, and it was replaced with an old PC monitor with a giant adapter.

I used that Quadra 605 all the way up until 1999, when I accidentally killed it by turning the computer around. The monitor adapter sticking out the back hit the wall and cracked the motherboard.

My school got rid of a LC II, so I picked it up. It couldn’t really do anything, but it was nice to have it around.

My mom’s office’s art department was getting rid of their computers, so my mom managed to get me one of them. It was a Performa 637CD. It was the first Mac I ever owned with a CD-ROM – a major failing of the Quadra my mom had selected.

I upgraded the Performa to OS 8 and maxed out the RAM. (68 MB). It had Photoshop 3 on it, so I was pretty happy. I gave it to my sister for Christmas and purchased a used Performa 6115CD for my younger brother. I was a pretty good Mac zealo– I mean, enthusiast. I also purchased an antiquated Quadra 700, and a used Performa 6360 for myself. I knew I couldn’t get a hot, new Mac, but I still wanted a Mac. In a time when Jobs was remaking the Mac, I was buying up the discarded, pre-Jobs machines.

In 1999, the school yearbook teacher switched over to using Quark XPress for the yearbook and bought three new 450 MHz G4s. She needed some guidance, though, so I became the “Technical Editor”. I also had to network the following: three G4s, two 7200/120s, six 5500/225s, a HP LaserJet 4MP, and a StyleWriter II (the same kind I used at home). We still passed Zip disks around to transfer most things.

I went off to college, and I had to build my own PC with Windows 2000, etc. because my major was something you could not use a Mac for.

I regret telling my mom to sell all the misfit Macs that I had accumulated – but only at times like this. I have no practical place to store those things, and even if I did, I would almost never turn it on. I did keep all the system disks though.

I spent most of the 2000’s wishing I had a Mac. MacWorld Keynotes were still a big deal and I’d pretty much want whatever was announced. After I graduated I kept inventing reasons why I couldn’t buy one. It wasn’t practical. Then, after my supposedly powerful PC laptop started having serious performance issues after only one year, I decided to go back to the Mac. I spent $2500 on a brand-new, 15” MacBook Pro (2007 edition).

When it came time to replace the 15” MBP with a newer model, I made sure to hold on to my old one. It’s a little easier to store than Performas, Quadras, and CRTs.

There was some handwringing, and mocking, and more handwringing, about SquareSpace announcing a logo design program.

The way I feel about this development, as a non-SquareSpace user, is, “big whoop.” The people that will use this service were very unlikely to be a designer’s future customer. It also has the ability to raise the bar for the bare minimum a designer must do for a logo. I mostly object to it because I really doubt this is what SquareSpace should be focusing their efforts on, based on the purely anecdotal complaints I see about their services, but I can’t judge the whole thing based on that. Perhaps the fact that I have not been swayed to be a customer before today, or since, should serve as some kind of evidence that it might not be the most crucial path for new customers?

Still, the logo program means almost nothing to me, as an artist. I don’t talk about my job, but let’s just say I do shmisual sheffects for shmilm. There is often a notion that the process involves computers, so it must be something that can be automated to use very little input from humans. That it is something a computer does and I am just there to turn the computer on. There is the notion that anyone can just go buy some software off the shelf (or internet, these days) and make their own stuff without needing training, or artists.

The SquareSpace logo program doesn’t prohibit users from making a bad logo. It provides some structure through limited options. Users can still make really terrible, ill-suited, generic, eye-rollingly-silly, dumb things with it. They can go buy a copy of shmisual shmeffects shmof- software and make things too.

There is never going to be a wizard, program, or widget that gives users control, and taste. Users have to bring one, or both of those, to the table. If it’s only providing the taste, users have clip art. Cellophane-wrapped, mass-produced logos have a shelf-life that is already expiring when they are purchased.

If users think they can make a logo, then they can go on and make one. A text editor can make a logo. The software that “helps” you is really software that sets guides, and limits, on your behavior. Without limits, you can do something far better, or worse, than the program allows.

Anyone can cook by assembling some prepared, or partially prepared, items together. That doesn’t mean what they cooked was any good. Rudimentary cookbooks don’t put chefs out of business. If anything, they provide the chef with clientele that expect better than what can be had at home; that elevates the discussion of the food beyond fish sticks and tater tots. And who do you think sets the trends for the next round of cookbooks when everyone is tired of this?

Great, now I’m hungry.

I saw Sid O’Neil’s post today, Farewell to Text Files, and my immediate reaction was to tweet him and debate it. You should go read it now, because dude is smart1. I didn’t agree with the conclusion he drew, abandoning plain text, because I thought that unfairly laid the blame on a file format. When Linus Edwards and I pestered Sid on Twitter, it became clear the real problem was that the flexibility that text afforded him meant he could keep tinkering with the tools of writing. Ulysses III was just a way to constrain his urge to tweak, to tinker with This Week’s Hot New Text App in the ironically titled, “Productivity” section of the iTunes store.

However, Ulysses III is only a circle of protection that will help for X amount of time. I can’t help but feel burned by the times I’ve invested in software that sputtered out, or were acquired, and I have to come to terms with terminating my relationship with said application. Aperture, not a writing program, is my current hobbyhorse for stagnation in application development. It has a proprietary way to store, and reference, the data inside of it. I have been on the fence about transitioning to Lightroom since Lightroom 3 was announced. I went with Aperture 3. We are now on Lightroom 5 and … Aperture 3. When I posed this argument, Sid correctly pointed out that it is trivial to generate text files from Ulysses III at any time he wants. It’s not nearly as painful as trying to bake out multiple versions of images, the EXIF, and then to import and then to … oh god I really don’t want to do it. Do you hear me, Apple?!

Writing programs stall too. Elements for iOS stagnated when the developer was hired by Hipstamatic. He was, unfortunately, laid off and decided to devote his time to developing his own apps again. He then released Elements 2, but now that’s fallen behind the curve again. The data inside of it, however, was not locked up. It was one of the first of many plain text editors that supported markdown syntax, and Dropbox file storage. As Sid mentioned in his post, this makes the data almost universally portable. His problem was using that portability to try apps, rather than write.

The option problem Sid had was one that I’ve bumped in to with blogging plaaaaatforms, and that is you can get overwhelmed by the options. You can start yak shaving, and wind up configuring every, little thing you come across. Do you see this blog? (I hope so, because I’m all up in your face right now.) Do you want to know how long I spent this morning trying to do @media hacks to force the Tumblr template to do what I wanted on smaller screens? DO YOU?

I had stopped writing, or taking photos, because I was so hung up on where the writing and the photos would go. I’m still not 100% behind SquareSpace because every time I test a demo there is always something just a little off that I can’t easily tweak. It makes me hem-and-haw about spending $8, or $16 a month. I don’t like WordPress, because their backend is unpleasant. (Knowing wink.) I don’t like {{%insert static blogging engine name here%}} because it requires setting up a Rube Goldberg machine to publish to it from anywhere that isn’t your computer. I have even devoted days of time to writing my own Python-based static blogging engine that runs in Pythonista for iOS, but never finished it, because: yak. Ironically, I like Tumblr least of all, but it is the easiest to just shove HTML in to from anywhere. (Pro Tip: Lifehack: Their native markdown support is crazy-bad!)

I’ll circle back to all of this again, and again, but at least I’ll have the comfort of knowing that the posts are all saved, and backed up, in UTF–8, plain text. Dump in the text and see if I hate it or not. Move on and do as little with shoehorning the content in as possible.

This thinking even factored in to the silly iTunes reviews I write. Fountain, a markdown-inspired screenplay format for plain text files, lets anyone copy and paste the text from the review to generate a screenplay. Also, because of this, I can just write them wherever I see fit. ByWord, TextEdit, TextWrangler, SublimeText, Editorial, Highland, and Slugline are all programs I’ve used to write these 12 things. Earlier this week I wrote what basically amounts to a love letter to Fountain’s ideals and principles because I can write my terrible fan-fiction wherever I want to. If I didn’t have these text editors, I’d actually be less productive in my ridiculous, “creative” endeavors, because they mainly serve as a conduit to start writing, even if I will pass it to something else.

I fave things on Twitter a lot. A whole lot. I should probably not do it so much. What impulse drives pushing that button?

If I really scrutinize this to an unwarranted degree, it boils down to:

1. What the person had to say was amusing.
2. What the person linked to was interesting.
3. To use the fave as a bookmark to revisit a link later.
4. To impart a small ‘nod’ to the conversation.
5. To say, “This was a good back and forth, but it’s done.”
6. When reading a conversation involving people I follow, I may weigh in to the conversation by favoriting a tweet in the thread I agree with, to nudge the conversation without interrupting, or branching it.

The barrier to entry in those first three categories just happens to be very low for me. At least, it is when I compare the frequency of my faves with those of other people.

This is at odds witch my feelings towards retweeting. I rarely retweet because I would much rather have a personal conversation, and retweets rarely spawn any conversation, they just get retweeted. I know that I have an assortment of people that follow me, and that there is an even wider range of people whom I follow. I don’t want to jam up someone with things they don’t want to read. I’d much rather have a directed conversation with someone through @-mentions so only people following the both of us will see it — presumably, they are interested in that since they follow us.

Some people seem to be caught off guard by getting their tweets faved often. It seems to put them off. I’ll try to tailor my copious issuance of stars to spare them from “too many”. I do wonder if that means that other people also feel that I favorite things far too much and are simply trying to be polite and not tell me.

I would very much rather have people give me input on this since this is hardly something where there is an etiquette guide.

I really like you. Here, have this: ★ . It’s free.

I have always had an interest in film and television, but I have only recently started to venture in to writing for the medium. One of the catalysts for my interest is Scriptnotes, a fantastic podcast with screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin. They just came back from a holiday break and they are hitting it out of the park. Episode 125 is centered on dissecting an old post from Jeff Atwood (of StackExchange fame) called The 10 Commandments of Egoless Programming, and Episode 126 had a chunk on screenwriting software, specifically Final Draft 9. If you have any interest in technology you should listen to it (Then stay for the Three Page Challenges). Final Draft has remained relatively unchanged for years, but still dominates the entire screenwriting app market. Just a word processor, so what? It’s a $199.99 Mac App Store purchase which puts it in a unique weight-class. Final Draft also has mobile companion apps for iPad and iPhone. The iPad version appeared in Apple’s new, aspirational advertisement last Sunday.

What follows is an excerpt transcribed from 22 minutes in to Episode 126, but I strongly encourage you to listen to the entire conversation, particularly for Craig’s passion.

CRAIG
I just don't understand what -- If this is what they were doing, why did it take this long, exactly?

JOHN
I don't understand -- That's a very good question.

CRAIG
The other thing that bothers me about Final Draft is that they are so clearly driven by a naked desire for revenue over taking care of their userbase -- 

CRAIG (CONT'D)
At least that's my opinion --

JOHN ^
Mm-hmm.

CRAIG (CONT'D)
because a lot of these features should have just been released, incrementally, as free updates on top of 8. There is **nothing** here that justifies a brand new release. and to charge whatever they charged. What does this thing cost?

JOHN
It's an 80 Dollar upgrade.

CRAIG
80 Dollar upgrade! In a world where the entire operating system for Mac is free! And you're going to charge 80 Dollars for **what**? For colored pages  -- That you don't need. And ... what?

JOHN
For full -- For full screen mode that really should have been a point one release.

CRAIG 
Full screen mode and Retina compatibility? That's outrageous.

JOHN
Yeah.

CRAIG
And that's the upgrade! I mean, what does it cost new?

JOHN
Umm, 199, I believe.

CRAIG
Oh please. We live in a time where you cannot -- I'm sorry --  to sell a piece of *word processing* for a hundred and what?

JOHN
99 dollars.

CRAIG
I mean **what**?! Are you out of your mind when you can get Highland for how much, John?

JOHN
Uh, Highland is 29.99, right now.

CRAIG
I think FadeIn is 40 bucks?

JOHN
Yeah

CRAIG
Uh, It's **ridiculous**. It just doesn't make any damn sense.

JOHN
Yeah

CRAIG
I think -- I don't get it -- I think that, frankly, Final Draft is, um, they are perilously close to being disrupted, as the Silicon Valley term goes. Because nobody cares about this Final Draft crap any more, we're in the age of PDF for transmission. They're going to go bye-bye.

John goes on to play devil’s advocate, briefly, when discussing several limitations of competing screenwriting apps, mostly in the area of script revisions. They are, as Craig said, perilously close to being usurped if they think this situation will last much longer.

John August is a co-developer of the Fountain markup language, and the Highland app that functions as a converter for files to, and from, FDX, PDF, and Fountain plain text. The work he has put in to Fountain, along with the other developers, has allowed competitors to emerge and start to challenge Final Draft. Craig mentions FadeIn, which imports and exports Fountain to its own format, but there is also the popular Slugline which uses Fountain natively , and many other alternative apps, all using Fountain as leverage against Final Draft’s “.docx”-like hold on the market.

Here’s a short video John August made to demonstrate some key features of Fountain, and some drawbacks of Final Draft (and WYSIWYG in general):

The Slugline developers have their own video boasting WYSIWYG-ish functionality through on-the-fly parsing of what’s been typed. This bridges the gap between truly plain text, and the visual cues of what the final output will be. This is similar to ByWord’s approach to Markdown (which makes a small cameo).

On the same day as Scriptnotes 126, ArsTechnica released some thoughts on the fall of desktop publishing giant QuarkXpress. It is not pure coincidence that many of the reasons cited for QuarkXpress’ fall are cited by John and Craig as current issues for Final Draft. This was not lost on John and Stu Maschwitz (Fountain, and Slugline developer) either.

Yesterday, January 15th, Slugline got its first major update since it premiered mere months ago. The developers are moving at a quick pace, and they are clearly motivated to gain traction while Final Draft sleepwalks. I have no vested interest in winners and losers here, but I do like it when increased competition can lower the barrier of entry to the tools needed.

I sent a tweet to all of my followers to stop tweeting about something I do not like.

Read that sentence again. Doesn’t it sound absolutely ridiculous? Who would want to say that sentence? Who would want to own up to that sentence being an actual activity they performed?

I did it, and I’m terribly ashamed of it.

I don’t barge in to a room full of people and yell, “Stop talking about football!” or “Shut up about The Golden Globe Awards!” Instead I wait out the conversation, subtly change the subject, or I leave the room. Why would Twitter be any different than that? Why should I get to scold people for talking “too much” about something I have absolutely no interest in? These days, I just scroll past. You’ll be amazed how easy it is to scroll. Problems will literally slide away.

This weekend was full of people I follow complaining about people they follow. I do not want to scold these people, because it’s really about a collective improvement in attitude and understanding, than specific actions.

Every time I feel compelled to complain about someone else’s interests, I reflect on the last few things I have talked about. Maybe I talked about computers, maybe it was a local news story, maybe it was Star Trek, maybe it was a dumb joke — Whatever it was, there is someone out there that was not enjoying it. I find that thing, I hold on to it, and it keeps me from standing on a soap box and shouting at people. I selected to follow whole people, not a topic-based mailing list, or a bunch of clones.

However, it is still very important to disagree with people; to have a discussion about certain things. That is best left to directed conversation, not broadcasts. Instead of aimless shouting, I talk specifically with someone about a topic I am in disagreement with. Maybe with two or three people.

It can feel good to let out a big, passive-aggressive tweet about a thing you have no interest in, mocking the interest “all” these other people have in it, but it’s not something people like to receive. I feel ashamed of reacting so poorly to situations in the past, and I would not want people to feel the same way.

Having said all that: Stop talking about football.

terriblepodcastscreenplays:

I hope the 4th wall has an insurance plan with a low deductible.

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I appeared in Andrew J Cast episode 17: A Glorious Phoenix. It was about my Terrible Podcast Screenplays. He has been hounding me for one since the first day of his podcast. Unfortunately, he ended his podcast at episode 21. I technically have the longest episode of the podcast, and may have killed it.

Yesterday afternoon Tonx (a service that ships you freshly roasted beans on a fixed schedule) announced a new program to allow people to exchange their Starbucks gift cards for Tonx coffee instead. This is an interesting program for people that like Tonx coffee. Those people proceeded to evangelize it for the next 24+ hours over Twitter.

I don’t particularly care for Tonx coffee. I tried it and convinced myself I did, for a time, until I realized I had bags of coffee beans I didn’t want to drink. That doesn’t mean that those people that enjoy Tonx should not tweet about it, or that I should say something horribly rude about Tonx — I would never want to make someone feel bad about something they like just because I don’t share their enthusiasm.

What actually happens is that I feel insecure about not sharing in this euphoria. Many of the people talking about the Tonx offer are people that I deeply respect in the podcasto-techno-blogo-sphere. I get these momentary pangs of guilt whenever I do not like something that they enjoy. There is something wrong with my taste, and I am inferior.

I have gotten much better about reconciling this recently. I don’t like everything my friends like. I don’t like everything my family likes. If they recommend something to me, I am likely to take their recommendation seriously, but I don’t feel bad if I don’t like what they’ve recommended. I realized that the reason I feel bad about the blog-tech-pod-onians is because I feel like I’m disliking something in a dish they cooked for me. As if Myke Hurley has baked me a button mushroom casserole and I have to tell him I don’t like button mushrooms. Instead, I eat the casserole, all of it. “This is so good. My fave. Love it times infinity — plus one,” I say.

It is fine to not like something. I can even say, “Thanks, but I don’t like this.” Because we’re all adults. Myke Hurley will not cry. Marco Arment will not drive over me with his M5. Jason Snell will not ban me from computers. Merlin Mann will not eat me. Same goes for anyone else. Nothing bad will happen at all. Be respectful, enjoy a free trial (you may like it), and don’t worry about it if you don’t.

Tonx was not suitable for me, but it could be suitable for others. We are not all one hive mind, and our tastes in these matters are our own. When Nate Boateng stated he didn’t like Tonx, Linus Edwards and I agreed. Linus also seemed to feel like there was something wrong with him for not liking it. I said to him:

@LinusEdwards @nateboateng It’s not about being a coffee nerd. Tons of other roasters are still in business. It’s OK to not like something. >

I leave you with this parting thought: The title of this post was almost “Not my Cup of Joe”, because I love puns. You may not love that pun, and that is fine.