I was late to getting started on viewing HBO’s Watchmen (and I’m still behind, I just finished episode 7 this weekend, but hope to get caught up in the next couple of days). I was skeptical of the whole idea of the show from the start. For the same reason I’ve never read any of the comic book sequels or prequels; the graphic novel is pretty perfect and self contained. It doesn’t need a sequel, or a prequel, or anything else. The format of the book (all those nine panel grids and such) is also pretty intrinsic to making the whole thing work so well that I’ve always been skeptical of attempts to translate it into other formats. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but the movie version, which with a few exceptions was a pretty straight ahead beat for beat remake of the book, ended up feeling fairly flat. I think it felt that way in part because it was just trying to ape what happened in the book, but the book is so tied up with comics that that just doesn’t work well in movie form. At least not without some reinterpreting for the medium (though that opening credit sequence that gave the history of the world was pretty brilliantly done).

Anyway, all of that being said… This show is sensational. If you’ve been avoiding the show for any of the reasons I’ve mentioned, do yourself a favor and watch the first couple of episodes. I think you’ll be hooked. This show, a sequel to the comic book (and not the movie), is REALLY good. It might be the best show I’m watching right now and I’m watching a lot of shows I really like these days!

I just can’t say enough good things about the show. It extrapolates what our modern world might be like if the events of the Watchmen comics had happened as they did in the graphic novel. The show doesn’t rely too heavily one just giving you more of what was in the comics, or just leaning on the same characters, (in fact it almost goes out of it’s way, especially early on, to not do that).

The show embraces it’s format format as a TV show (if not with quite the same vigor and experimentation as the comics did their own format) far more than the movie did. The show does a great job of actually having episodes feel like episodes, not just one long movie that happens to have been broken up into roughly one hour segments, but it is still very much serialized (in much the same way that the comic book issues feel like issues of an ongoing story and not just one story that’s been broken up into issues by page count).

The acting, writing, set design, costume design, and everything else about the show are top notch. I can’t really complain about any aspect of the shows production.

I can’t complain at all about its writing either. (And I’m not just saying that because I went to college with, and was a vague acquaintance of, one of the writers.) It’s clever and interesting, and I have yet to feel like someone is doing something just because the plot needs them to, rather than because their motivations as a character would lead them to do it. These people are all interesting and well fleshed out, and they act consistently with their character even when faced with strange situations.

The only caution I have in recommending the show to everyone is it’s fairly graphic violence and somewhat nihilistic tone. Lately I’ve been less and less interested in grim and dark tv shows and movies. The world is rough enough as it is. But Watchmen, which concerns itself very much with the racism of the present in the real world, does a good job with it. Things are grim and dark and tense, but it doesn’t feel excessive and it doesn’t just make me feel worse about the world. There’s a purpose to it, and it feels natural and interesting. Not like it’s just grim and dark because “that’s what makes things cool.”

Anyway, I just can’t say enough good things about this show. Unless it really falls apart in the next two episodes that I have yet to watch (and the snippets of reviews I’ve seen for the finale don’t lead me to think that will happen) it will go down as one of the best seasons of any TV show I’ve watched.

So I think I’ve basically finished up my 2019 party playlist. You can find it on apple music here:

music.apple.com/us/playli…

It’s meant to be played on random. It’s long enough to cover one really long party, or to be used at multiple shorter events without getting too repetative.

I’ve been meaning to write up something about Jeffrey Zeldman’s excellent recent blog post Nothing Fails Like Success for a few weeks now. @Manton said some smart things about it (a couple of times actually) and so did @brentsimmons. I’m not sure I have too much to add, but I think it’s a really good read, and an important read.

I’ve been thinking about some of the ideas in the article for a while now. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how much I want to see more open standards win out on the web. For example, I know that lots of folks complain about email these days, but in my opinion it’s a pretty amazing triumph that it’s still so used and that it’s a standard that’s not controlled by any one company. So far all of the supposed replacements for email I’ve seen put forward are proprietary and rely on one company or another. (I like Slack, but I don’t really feel like it fills the same place in my life that email does and I wouldn’t really want it to anyway).

Another such technology is RSS and Podcasts. So far nothing has managed to usurp the open architecture that Podcasts use, (Though it seems like a lot of folks are trying lately) and I’m really hoping all those attempts will continue to fail. I don’t ever want to find myself in a situation where I have to subscribe to a service (or even worse, several services) just to get most of the audio content I want. I don’t mind paying for things, (I’m a member and supporter of two different podcasts networks) but I don’t want everything to be locked up behind one or several proprietary services. I think the current state of things is pretty good. Some things can certainly be improved, but podcasts work as they are, and they don’t need big VC money coming in to ruin everything.

I like the idea of more technologies working on open standards that anyone can use and that allow people more control and choice over how they interact with the web. I’m really interested in all the work that’s going on with ActivityPub (the technology behind Mastodon), and I really hope more things get built on that and other open federated technologies. I want people to have a choice of what clients they like best, what companies they trust, and the ability to run things themselves (this was part of my recent thinking in moving to an email address at a domain I own if they want to. I’m tired of the same few companies running everything and keeping things within their own proprietary silos. There are lots of smaller companies trying to do things in a more open and person-centric way and I hope more and more of them catch on.

I’m excited to be using micro.blog for my blog, here at my own domain, instead of relying on Facebook, or Twitter, or Medium or whatever. If I decide I don’t like micro.blog anymore I can take my content and go somewhere else, and keep the same url (brandonshire.blog) so the rest of the world can just going to the same place for my blog.

Anyway, this is getting pretty long and kind of rambly so I’ll wrap it up. The bottom line is that I’ve been thinking about the open standards that underlay a lot of the stuff we use and I think that openness is underappreciated. I hope we can move more things to more open standards so we’re less reliant on the whims of a few huge companies for everything we do online. There are better ways and I for one am hopeful that more and more people will start to embrace them as they get easie

This is the third post on my switch from Gmail to email hosted at my own domain. You can find the first one on how I did it here. And the second one on why I did it here.

So when I was trying to decide on an email provider I looked at a few options before settling on FastMail.

The first was actually Google! Google provides email to corporate customers and such for a fee that lets you use your own domain. I actually have some experience with this at work, so I was aware of the offerings, and they’re actually pretty good. This was tempting because it would be familiar and it would let me more seamlessly keep using the google services I wanted to keep using (though with a different email address/account, which would mean some transition too). This being a paid account you do get a bit better customer service and some extra control over things, and your relationship with Google changes at least slightly more to that of a customer, rather than a product. But this would still leave me in a situation where I’d be giving Google all that data. It would change my relationship with Google slightly, but only slightly.

Another option that was mentioned a number of times was actually Microsoft. Like google they offer businesses hosted email plans that let you use your own domain. As I understand it these work mostly via Exchange, which is proprietary, but thanks to Microsoft’s major influence in the corporate world most things know now to talk to Exchange for email, calendars, contacts etc. It wouldn’t be any problem to use this option with my iOS devices or my Mac at home or anything else I expected to use. If you had told my younger Mac-partisan self in the 90’s that he’d be considering using Microsoft for something like this he would not have believed you. But Microsoft is a different company today. I also like that their business model is just based on customers paying them for products, and not on data collection and advertising. The company is big, boring, and stable. So I could feel pretty confident that they were going to be around for the long haul and that changes would mostly be slow and predictable, and that all my stuff would likely continue to work with them for a long time to come. This was an option I seriously considered. But ultimately I liked the idea of a company that focused more on email. But if at some point I decided I don’t want to use FastMail anymore Microsoft is a pretty strong contender for a second choice.

Another option I didn’t look at too closely (in part because at the time I didn’t realize that paid accounts would let use a custom domain) is ProtonMail. Their whole selling point is security and privacy. FastMail is very privacy and security focused too, but it’s not their primary selling point. I didn’t look too closely at ProtonMail during my search as I didn’t initially realize you could use your own domain with it, but if I ever decide to switch, or get really paranoid, I’ll be looking closely at their offerings too.

The last option that got mentioned by people a lot, is a company called FastMail. This is the choice I ultimately went with. A few pod-casters I listen to have mentioned using and liking FastMail for years, and it was recommended by a lot of other folks I talked to. They focus on email and things related to email (like calendars and contacts), and that’s about it. I like that focus. They also offered some nice features like sub-domain addressing which helps with sorting email on different topics and tracking who may be selling your email address and such. I was also impressed with how polished their help documents were and how easy they make it to use your own domain (in fact they kind of encourage it). They offer a no-credit-card 30 day trial which lets you use almost all the features (it mostly just limits you on how many emails you can send in a day during the trail), and I was able to get a 10% discount if I decided to sign up by using a referal code I got from a current user, so it seemed like a safe bet to give it a try.

Once I did I was even more impressed with FastMail. I was able to use them to handle the DNS for several of my domains which let me set up redirects and such from my old blog to my new one. I was able to set up several domains I own to work with my FastMail account for not extra charge, which let me set up aliases using those domains and other such things. All of that for $5/month (or less if you buy a year or more at a time, plus I had that extra discount!). The company seems very stable, they seem to offer all the latest tech, and you have an easy to understand customer relationship with them. You pay them, they provide you a service. There’s not advertising or tracking going on there. I was also happy that everything works through standards based protocols (Like IMAP, and CardDAV), so I can use my FastMail account with pretty much any email client I might like. I even like the web-interface!

Anyway! There are lots of good options out there for email hosts that let you use your own domain. Your needs or preferences might be different from mine, but I would encourage everyone to look into making the switch to email at their own domain. Controlling your own domain means you have more choice and you’re not locked into any one vendor, and it generally gives you a lot more control over your email than using an address provided by your email provider.

If you’re thinking about making the switch I’m happy to talk and answer questions!

And if you’re interested in giving FastMail a try you can use this referral link and you’ll get 10% off for the first year. (That includes buying multiple years up front). Full disclosure: I’ll also get at small credit on my account for anyone who signs up with that link and pays for a plan.