That Fall Feeling

Here’s what I’m talking about today.

1. That fall feeling: Christmas may be next week, but it really feels like fall in Dallas.

The leaves finally turned color, but it’s still warm enough to comfortably do long dog walks before and after work. Although that may change – we are going from a high of 75° on Saturday to a high of 32° on Sunday.

Looks like brunch won’t be on a patio.

2. Dropbox: They had an unfortunate Twitter incident yesterday. On the positive side, their annual “diversity in the workplace” report probably got way more views than last year’s.

3. The Airbnb Effect: I came across this interesting 2014 article about how Airbnb is contributing to an affordable housing shortage in the tourist town of Marfa, Texas. Many landlords in the town are finding it more lucrative to rent to tourists via Airbnb than to full-time residents.

Some of my friends came from Chicago last year and stayed in an Airbnb near my apartment building. The 2-bedroom Airbnb was gorgeous and didn’t have any occupants besides Airbnb guests.

I thought this was extremely clever at the time, but I never considered how terribly this can impact housing availability in areas that don’t have an overabundance of apartments like Oak Lawn. (Meanwhile, Miami Beach is taking an aggressive stance on Airbnb by slapping homeowners with $20k fines.)

4. Wellness: There’s a hilarious article in The Outline about how the wellness industry is full of quackery.

The author goes into specific problematic subsets of the industry, like anti-vaxers and magic lamps, but this is the core takeaway:

“Health is all the stuff that you know you should do. Wellness is all the peripheral shit that someone marketed to you because it sounded almost like health. It’s modern-day snake oil, and today it either comes from extremely well-off celebrities who look healthy under 18 layers of makeup, internet charlatans who probably know they’re full of shit, and people who might not know there’s no science to back them up, but they do see your open wallet and know when business is good.”

The tested routines of healthy eating and exercise aren’t sexy, but they are definitely less expensive than the alternatives.

5. Typography for lawyers: it’s a thing.

Although that site is targeted at the legal profession, it has an important message for all writers:

“Typog­ra­phy mat­ters because it helps con­serve the most valu­able resource you have as a writer— reader atten­tion.

Atten­tion is the reader’s gift to you. That gift is pre­cious. It is finite. And if you fail to be a respect­ful stew­ard of that gift, it will be revoked.

Once your reader revokes the gift of atten­tion, you’ve achieved only the low­est form of writ­ing. Yes, you scat­tered some words across some pages. But your reader dis­ap­peared. So what was the point? Your writ­ing might as well be a ran­dom string of char­ac­ters. Like the prover­bial tree falling in the woods, no one’s there to notice the difference.”

This lesson extends from blogs, to newspaper websites, to business publications: few people will read your writing if it looks like crap.

Tonight

Here’s what’s going on in the gayborhood tonight.

• Drag shows at Station 4 and JR’s Bar & Grill around 11 p.m.
• TMC – Now open on Thursdays
• 2-4-1 Burgers from 11 a.m. until close at Cedar Springs Taphouse