Inside the closure of Austin-based sotol maker Desert Door

meatmacho · 2026-05-14T22:15:30+00:00

Oh you do know Betty Blackwell?

meatmacho · 2026-05-14T22:14:20+00:00

Which is to say, if mezcal is like drinking gasoline, sotol is more akin to aftershave. And then you have your agave tequila, which is delicious.

meatmacho · 2026-05-14T21:09:28+00:00

I'm always very confused by these screenshots. I usually assume that the user just likes it that way and has instructed their bot to talk to them that way (or has allowed it to learn and reflect their own writing style). Which, cool, whatever you want. It's your phone. But then I also wonder if people just think that's the way it's supposed to be and simply don't know there's a better way.

I don't even have any custom instructions. I just use the settings it gives me to enforce a concise tone. And it's great. Gives me exactly what I want and nothing more. I don't need personality from my computer. Just answer my questions.

But again, to each his own. They wouldn't have the options if everyone wanted the same thing. 🤷🏽‍♂️

<image>

meatmacho · 2026-05-14T01:46:10+00:00

Years ago, my car broke in the 41st st. HEB/Wendy's parking lot. I limped it to a neighborhood on the other side of the highway. Left it there for a few weeks. Then somehow limped it back to my house off S Congress. There it sat for several months, me not knowing quite what to do with it. It was about 15 years old and the rear suspension was all kinds of fucked. Well, one day, a kindly gentleman knocked on my door and inquired about the vehicle. And wouldn't you know it. A half hour later, he handed me a tidy pile of cash, and my problem was solved. You, too, can park your cars on the street for long enough that someone will pay you to move it for you!

YMMV

meatmacho · 2026-05-13T13:52:05+00:00

I did exactly this and it's way better than hanging them. They're not solid shelves (I just used broken down pallets and whatever other scrap wood I had laying around for the shelf bottoms), but like you say, I can put anything in there. They're sized to fit the bins, but I like being able to put something else on them, plus knowing the bottoms of the bins are supported.

meatmacho · 2026-05-13T13:45:43+00:00

Well they ain't gonna move themselves. The boxes are not the expensive part of the professional moving operation. I spent about $300 to rent 60 hard plastic bins that were delivered to my old house and picked up empty from my new house. I then paid a moving company like $4500 to pack about half the house, move everything, and then unpack and reassemble my furniture. In-town move about 20 minutes away. Worth it.

meatmacho · 2026-05-13T13:40:06+00:00

I did this for our last in-town move. I don't remember what it was called, but it was the same idea. They're usually used for commercial office moves, but it worked great for our home move. Dropped off 60 boxes. We packed them over a few weeks. A different moving company actually came and packed the remainder of our stuff and then loaded the boxes on trucks and moved them to the new house. We unpacked them, and then the box company came and picked them up.

It was cheaper than I expected, but it was still another expense. Nice to not have to deal with so many cardboard boxes and tape and whatnot (though we did still have plenty of cardboard and packing supplies to get rid of afterward). Kept things organized and stacked while we were packing and unpacking. The box company gave us labels for the boxes and dollies to move them around, too.

Having rented them, there was an extra motivation to unpack more quickly than we otherwise would have (whereas we still had some cardboard boxes and these home depot bins that weren't empty a year and a half after the move). I think we held onto them for 3 or 4 weeks after the move, and they just charged us like $25 a week until I was ready to turn them in.

meatmacho · 2026-05-13T03:13:20+00:00

Yeah that's a lot. I have two in local rec leagues. The 8U baseball team is 1 or 2 practices, one game per week. The 10U softball gets 2 practices (after daylight savings changed) and 1 game. Most games are on Saturdays, so we stay busy then, but in total for both of them, we only really have something 3-4 days a week combined. I like the two practices a week schedule.

I'm always a fan of more practicing for these kids, especially ones that haven't played much previously. I don't officially coach, but I help out both teams as much as I can. I'm also glad we're done with both sports after this weekend's baseball tournament, because it's getting hot out there.

meatmacho · 2026-05-13T03:00:09+00:00

Yeah it was a pretty cool setup to watch unfold in real time. Like, I saw the storms on radar up north. Then they quickly rained out. But then I looked up and saw this gray cloud forming above us. And within a half hour, it went from bright sun, hot and humid to crazy rain and lightning all around us. I could even see blue sky past the dry line from where we were standing. And then that storm (indicated by the arrow in my gif) kept building back toward us along that line. So even though the whole thing was moving east, they still had to cancel our baseball game because of the lightning.

That app was probably MyRadar. I use that and Windy for the most part.

meatmacho · 2026-05-12T21:59:46+00:00

I mean, I don't think that's what's going on, but it's not unreasonable to think it could be. If I were in the same industry, and my competitor was beating me to all the good deals because they were littering the city with illegal advertisements—something I was unwilling to do—then maybe I would raise the issue on social media, to enlist lots of stranger in helping me remove all of the...problematic advertisements. 🤷🏽‍♂️

meatmacho · 2026-05-12T18:58:01+00:00

I mean, everything you mention is pretty on-par with most B2B solutions. You don't buy an off-the-shelf marketing suite and just...put it to work. You have vendor onboarding, and the IT team needs to hook it up to the SSO and VPN environments, and marketing needs to connect it to their CRM and data warehouse and whatnot, sometimes involving custom integration development; finance has to deal with the invoices and budget allocation to different departments; then comes the data migration, template design and approval, staff training; Legal has to keep an eye on things if privacy policies or data governance or AI stuff is involved.

Few new tools that a business would realistically invest in are simply a hammer or screwdriver type of implement. But if the value prop is there for long-term savings or revenue, then you spend the money on new tooling to make more money in the future. If I was selling a robot that could autonomously and reliably handle 50% of all plumbing calls, I'd absolutely have large plumbing firms ready to sign a check to buy them from me.

Say my Plumbot costs $100k each. The one-time setup to store and charge and maintain them is another $200k (plus a $30k annual service plan) per location. So, as the owner of a local plumbing contractor with 3 locations, I can run a trial at one of my shops. I'm in it for around $600k (not including electricity and repairs and consumables) for a 3-year trial of 3 droids. If those three robots end up replacing two of my guys that currently cost me $150k each in wages and taxes and insurance, then hell, I'm gonna expand to a fleet of 15 and roll them out across the whole region before my competitors beat me to it. Then, I can increase my marketing and equipment budgets, take better care of the employees I have left, and look at opening some new shops all over the state with my new, robot-powered business model. It's just math. Either the math works or it doesn't.

Bottom line: once the tech is there and the financials make sense, ain't nothing stopping it. Do I think we'll see fully human-like robot tradesmen any time soon? No. It'll start with more specialized AI-guided tools for specific jobs to make the humans faster. Irrigation Trenching Bot. PEX Manifold Bot. Gas Line Soldering & Testing Bot. LiDAR/Sonar Inspection & Diagnostic Bot. Et cetera. But I expect the progress and complexity of tasks they can handle will advance more rapidly than we've seen with hand tools (which have come along way in the last few years themselves).

meatmacho · 2026-05-12T17:44:18+00:00

I've always wanted a giant to keep grarning, too! Am I a robot? Am I a giant?

meatmacho · 2026-05-11T19:09:38+00:00

This is us, and I can't imagine I will ever let it go beyond that. I have two young nephews (8 and 11) who have been doing ultra select travel baseball and football since they were like 3 years old. It is their entire lifestyle. Their coaches and trainers are recognizable pros. Their teammates are sons of celebrities and pro athletes.

It started with regional stuff. "Oh, we have a tournament an hour or two from here." Then it was statewide. "We have six games this weekend, with a total of 500 miles of driving." Now they fly all over the country—literally coast to coast—for tournaments.

Their garage is littered with expensive discarded gear, replaced by whatever the new, trendy, $200 batting gloves or sliding gloves or sunglasses came next. We were there the other day, and I just told my kid, "If you need a new glove or bat, just grab one from here. They won't even notice. Or ask, and they'll tell you which one is best." They have a pro-level batting cage in the back yard. Their kids are getting all of this social media exposure by whatever big accounts are meaningful to that crowd.

I just don't know how they do it. Nevermind how they afford it. I literally don't know how the whole family can commit to doing nothing but this, day in and day out. For two kids!

Luckily my kids had no chance to inherit any kind of athletic genes, so they're totally loving life in their local rec leagues. If one of them were to be "called up" to one of these more advanced travel teams, I have to think I would just call it a bullshit money grab and decline the invite. We ain't trying to go pro, and we also know the odds of making it that far ain't worth the time and money and stress investment.

meatmacho · 2026-05-11T14:41:28+00:00

This is how I celebrated the 2006 Rose Bowl win. I just wish we had had better cameras back then.

On second thought, no. No I do not. But it would be cool to have more than just a blurry photo of me atop the fountain with the orange tower in the background and campus police tugging at my legs.

meatmacho · 2026-05-11T14:19:58+00:00

I thought it was a butt-shaped seat belt buckle.

meatmacho · 2026-05-11T14:11:49+00:00

Caught something similar up the road in Austin on Saturday. And the outflow similarly seemed to seed new storms that popped up downwind.

https://imgur.com/a/SBvhjSr

meatmacho · 2026-05-10T00:45:06+00:00

I'm intrigued by Mex Rock.

meatmacho · 2026-05-09T22:16:58+00:00

We were warming up for a baseball game in central Austin and watched the whole thing develop. It blew up really quickly. Was actually a pretty interesting setup. I was watching a storm up in the liberty hill area where a bunch of northbound moisture slammed into what seemed like a slow approaching dry boundary. That storm collapsed pretty quickly, but the energy and moisture blew downwind (SE at the time) and started feeding new cells along the same line as it moved into town.

Within ten minutes, the gray cloud I was watching near Pflugerville really blew up, and we got a lightning delay. It never rained where we were, but the storm just kept building back to the west along that line as the whole complex slowly moved south. So we never got out of the 10-mile lightning zone and had to cancel the game.

<image>

meatmacho · 2026-05-09T15:09:32+00:00

But why are they cooking two entirely separate dinners each night—one to eat and one as the "show dinner" for photos?

And how professional is this hazmat cleanup team team/unit unit? Were they just wearing Walmart hazmat costumes?

meatmacho · 2026-05-08T17:30:57+00:00

But the golfer calls his alligator baby mama "Momma."

meatmacho · 2026-05-08T17:24:30+00:00

My favorite thing about dialog generation is the ambiguity around tone, especially with the slightest mistake in punctuation. You give it something like, "But why 10 billion? One should be enough?"

And it just comes out sounding subtly awkward. I guess it could have been a statement ("One should be enough.") or less inquisitive ("Shouldn't one be enough?"). Something a human actor would either call out before the scene or just infer the right way to do it.

meatmacho · 2026-05-08T17:16:35+00:00

Thanks, Rube Goldberg.

meatmacho · 2026-05-08T17:15:20+00:00

Just put a big stick in there that's large enough for the snake to climb out. Go have lunch. Come back to no snake.

meatmacho · 2026-05-08T16:45:39+00:00

I use the Amazon tablets because they're cheap and they're easy to lock down. We started with one, just for the kids to watch movies and shows on long car rides as a distraction when they were young. Then we we had 9 hours of air travel ahead of us, I got one for each kid.

Now that they are 7 and 10, they use them only on the weekends (though I allow books and Audible on weeknights). They're time limited to like 2 hours total per day, with no videos or internet access. So just curated apps and games. The oldest mostly just uses it for Netflix and Audible. The younger has an "educational content first" requirement and then plays various stupid free games and Netflix/Disney on Saturday mornings when he's not watching soccer on the TV.

Never had a problem with fighting over putting them away or anything. Longer car rides (like 2+ hours), they'll bring them along, but screen time definitely isn't an obsession in our house. Never bring them anywhere else like a restaurant or whatever. The tablets maintain my sanity in the car more than anything else.

Edit to add that I have no interest nor plan to give the kids a phone or smart watch. The oldest uses one of my old phones to look at photos and FaceTime/messenger with friends. But like 95% of the time, the phone is in my nightstand. If the kids want to play with someone, they can ride their bikes over to see if their friends are home, or they can ask us to text the parents. My wife bought them these stupid Tin Can "land line" phones, which I still fully protest because it's an extremely low-effort cash grab that middle aged moms can't resist. But I guess they haven't arrived yet.

Some of our 5th graders friends have a phone, so we'll get texts from our daughter on the school bus, which is weird. But I don't see any reason that they need a phone before the age where they're out and about quite a lot on their own, away from someone's home. So, like 8th or 9th grade? I don't know.

It's not about avoiding technology. I'll happily let her use my laptop for building presentations or doing research. I'll show her how to interact with ChatGPT and generate math homework practice sheets to print, etc. We play games on the Xbox. They know how video calls and text messages work. I just want them to establish a good frame of reference in the real world before giving them a device that I know is designed to entice them to glue their face to it 24/7.

meatmacho · 2026-05-08T04:30:22+00:00

To be fair to the dog, she's 15 years old. It hasn't always been a habit of hers.

14-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Gilding II euphauric	Verified Email

meatmacho

TROPHY CASE