Apple's latest and greatest M1-powered MacBooks (MaxBooks?) are here, and Jared wonders if there's anything left for Mac nerds to be upset about when it seems like Apple has fulfilled all their wishes. (For a hefty price of course!) Plus a special rundown of all of Jared's favorite podcasts he frequently listens to and why they're worthy of your attention. Hmm, sounds like…a Fresh Fusion Reaction! 🤓

Yes my friends, it’s time to pull back the curtain and share about some events which have transpired in my personal life—things which have been among the most challenging moments of my life. But first, an announcement: I have a newly redesigned website! Woo hoo! =)

In today's episode, I step through some follow-up and a few items of note I've been tracking (such as the gorgeous Nikon Z fc retro-style camera!) before kicking off a rant about the ways algorithms privilege the already privileged instead of favoring content off the beaten path. Apparently you're likely to do quite well on YouTube if you're young, white, cis, "attractive", and so forth…but what about the rest of us?

Jared returns with a brilliant solution to the woes of maintaining a deep podcast content pipeline: read tweets! 😅

Join me for a dive into my design notes! What is a "personal website" in 2021? How do we evolve from the mental model of the "blog" circa 2005? And how does that all integrate with social media, newsletters, and the like?

The last two weeks have been devastating for me—on multiple fronts, both as a huge fan of the #VanLife community as well as a figure in the Ruby programming community. This podcast episode is my catharsis, as I try to work through the heartache and find something meaningful to hold on to at the end of the day.

Creator Class is my new newsletter all about the challenges and rewards of being an underpaid content creator building an audience one connection at a time. In today's episode of Fresh Fusion, I talk about why I decided to rebrand and refocus my newsletter and why it's so important to highlight conversations around motivation and ethics in content creation. (Also why I'm ditching YouTube and going back to an audio-only format!)

I opened the Patreon mobile app on my iPhone. I looked at the feed. Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, POOF! A bunch of the creators I follow vanished. Gone. Out of this world. Did they suddenly shut down all their accounts? Was there a rapture and I wasn’t notified? No, it was none of those things. Patreon just had a temporary snafu billing my debit card, and because of that, I was unceremoniously placed in fan purgatory with little elucidation of my crimes. This wasn’t a temporary user experience glitch. This was a UX disaster. And yet, buried in their help center, Patreon states this is exactly how they handle such matters. Boo! Creators and fans deserve better.

This is me stumbling my way through an episode all about systemic racism in zoning laws and white supremacist policies harming disenfranchised minorities, and how I was raised to believe affluent suburban neighborhoods are the American Dream. While the global pandemic has been horrifying and so very hard to stomach, perhaps we can also see it as a much-needed opportunity to accept just how much work remains to be done to bring liberty and justice to all. We shouldn't ever want to go "back to normal" if the new normal could be oh so much better.

This is a deeply personal episode. I spent most of my life within a 60 miles radius of where I was born. That all changed when I relocated to the Portland, Oregon metro area. I came here on a fact-finding mission in 2017 and fell head-over-heels in love with the place. It's no accident in the slightest that the most creative period in my entire life has transpired right here in Portland. I guess that's why it's a real sore spot for me when I see Portland dragged through the mud in the press—not to mention the whole concept of living in a dense urban environment. Are moving to the suburbs really the answer to the challenges of pandemic living? Does living in a "hip" city really have any influence on high-level creativity and artistic scope? Tune in to hear my story and my take.