The Dann Chronicles: January 🛍️
A healthy techier you, some recurring favs, the music video kings return, architecture on the big screen, and machines hold my hand while I code.
January 2025
Hey all,
The age of the department store is over. All that remains are the last gasps of a bygone era.
I live in Downtown Brooklyn, a New York City neighborhood that has seen tremendous change in the past decade. In 2003, as a direct response to the attacks of 9/11, the city passed re-zoning laws for this neighborhood. The goal was to give NYC additional centers of business (in addition to the Financial District and Midtown in Manhattan) to spread out population clusters and lower the severity/risk of future attacks.
Suddenly, real estate developers could get approval for massive mixed-use complexes on land previously restricted to smaller-scale office-based and civic center buildings. The following two decades reshaped the Brooklyn skyline in massive ways that make it nearly unrecognizable to pre-9/11 populations.
One of the main thoroughfares is Fulton Street, a key shopping destination once dotted with countless department stores—often two or three per block. Most closed during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as department store chains merged, shopping trends changed, and the neighborhood evolved.
Now, the last remaining department store, Macys, is officially closing its doors. Online retail has decisively won over the sprawling, all-in-one shopping model of previous generations. Younger shoppers have spoken loudly with their habits—and their wallets.
The only constant in life is change.
-Dann
🥦 Healthy h-APP-its
I lost 30 pounds in 2020 through a combination of calorie counting, intermittent fasting, and moderate exercise. I maintained that lower weight for about a year and a half, but since then, it’s been slowly creeping back up.
As of the new year, I’m back on track with my good habits. In fact, I’ve found it even easier to slip back into them this time than it was the first time around.
Part of that success is my tech stack. I use the app LoseIt to log every meal—I purchased a lifetime premium subscription at some point, so it’s nice not to worry about that aspect of the app. Additionally, Happy Scale is the best weight-tracking app I’ve found, in terms of its usability and how it smooths/presents the data.
Complementary apps on this journey include the Beautyrest under-mattress sleep tracker and Paprika for recipe management. I also track daily workouts with an Apple Watch (Series 4, still going strong) and sometimes remember to sync them to Strava, though I’ve never really gotten into Strava’s social features.
My biggest takeaways from my fitness journey:
Caloric intake, not exercise, is really where you see results
Technology isn’t strictly necessary, but it can make things more fun
Focus on building strong habits (like logging meals and exercise)
Once you have those habits, if you ever fall off, it’s much easier to get back on
🔁 Re-visiting the classics
Two creators I’ve previously mentioned in the newsletter are back with new content worth sharing.
If you have an hour to spare, you might want to spend it with Neal.fun’s new Simulation Clicker. (You may remember him from the viral Password Game.) I don’t want to say much, because I don’t want to spoil anything. But if you’re a fan of idle games (like Cookie Clicker), you’re in for a treat. Just make sure you’re at a computer instead of on your phone.
Next up is newsletter favorite Bobby Fingers, back with an intricate diorama featuring The Black Keys giving him a shoutout on Joe Rogan—only to forget his name entirely.
I’ll admit it’s jealousy that drives me to share stuff like this, because, damn, both are such cool things to bring into the world.
📱 Phoney Games
In July 2006, the band OK Go released a music video (OK Go on Treadmills) that changed the band’s trajectory, catapulted the then-new website YouTube into the global spotlight, and revolutionized the concept of “viral videos.”
Since then, the band has doubled down on its strategy of creating mind-blowing videos to accompany its music (my personal favorites are This Too Shall Pass and Upside Down & Inside Out, but they’re all amazing).
After nearly seven years, OK Go is back with their newest music video: A Stone Only Rolls Downhill. Much like their past efforts, the completed project is mind-blowing.
The amount of effort and planning for a three-minute video is mind-boggling. To quote Damian Kulash, the band’s lead singer and director:
We invested all this time and effort into this, so that you could have three minutes of wow in your day and a real sense of joy about other humans in the world.
I immediately watched it twice: first to take it all in, and second to try to wrap my mind around the logistics of the shoot. My brain is still reeling.
🏗️ Like they used to make
Despite watching a decent number of movies, I don't often recommend individual films in this newsletter. This month, however, I saw one worth mentioning.
The Brutalist is bound to appear on your radar this season. It already won the Golden Globe for Best Picture (among other awards) and I image it will probably win Best Picture at the yet-to-be-announced Oscars as well.
If at all possible, you should see this movie in theaters. Not just because it helps you sit through its staggering three-and-a-half-hour runtime (with an intermission, thank goodness!), but also because the film's sheer ambition and scale deserve the big screen.
The movie feels gargantuan in a way that most modern releases lack. Much of that is thanks to Vistavision, a "cumbersome" film format that fell out of favor for decades but was used to create iconic classics: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and North by Northwest, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, and White Christmas.
In many ways, it felt like this film came out of nowhere. Despite distribution by A24, the movie seemed to get less marketing than Babygirl and MaXXXine. But after seeing The Brutalist, I understand why.
It's one of those rare films that doesn't need marketing to speak for it. The film itself is enough.
That said, The Brutalist won't be everyone's cup of tea. Don't take these words as a promise that you'll love the movie. But it's hard to imagine leaving the theater without feeling a sense of wonder at the sheer achievement of the film.
📊 Outsized Results
I don't believe Artificial Intelligence is going to take anyone's job. I do believe, however, that a human using AI will most certainly take people's jobs.
In my view, the biggest challenge today is finding the right implementation of AI. Every company is rushing to add AI capabilities into their product or to create new AI-based tools, but most of these are either 1) completely unnecessary or 2) irredeemably bad.
Every once in a while, though, you find an AI tool that's so incredibly useful that you can't imagine your workflow without it. This past month, Cursor has found its way into my tech stack and completely revolutionized my coding capabilities and productivity.
There's a specific subset of the population for whom Cursor will have the greatest impact: technical people who, for various reasons, aren't particularly strong at writing code. I fall firmly in that category.
Writing code isn't just about knowing a programming language. Before you write a single line, you need to be clear about what you want the code to do. If you're at the point in your engineering journey where you know what you want but don't quite know how to translate those ideas into lines of code, then Cursor will have an outsized impact on your abilities.
This month, I've been revisiting several of my old projects and scripts armed with the Cursor IDE. It has empowered me to make changes that would otherwise have taken weeks—or even months—to get working.
The code isn't perfect, just as AI queries don't always make sense on the first try. But Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful brainstorming partner, mentor, tool, assistant. When implemented correctly, it offsets any weaknesses that would otherwise be fatal flaws.
End note
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I'll be sending out these emails once per month, and I'm happy you're along for the ride. I'm trying to make it one of the best things that arrives in your inbox each month, so thoughts and feedback are always appreciated. You can just reply to this email.
Also, if you find anything interesting, send it my way.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Dann