What are we doing here?

There's a flare gun in my hand
I point it straight, I point it high
And to the universe it applies
It lit things up in lavender
Where I'd been, was, might go

Welcome to Universal Applicant, our little space for rumblings and ramblings about culture, media, and whatever else catches our fancy. Expect some things long-form, others more bite-sized, but all at least somewhat considered.

Universal Applicant is me (Keith Adair) and Eric Gifford, two friends who spend enough time spinning hot takes about movies, TV, music, and culture that we thought it might be worth the effort to try to see how those takes hold up under the cold light of The Internet™.

The only viable way to stake our claim on our thoughts is to put them up somewhere that we own.

The impetus for Universal Applicant to be a blog first and foremost, and probably other things second (or fourth, or fifth) probably comes from growing up in the Live Journal and MySpace age, rather than Twitter or even Tumblr, and definitely before TikTok (and also before TikTok gets banned, maybe?), and thinking highly enough of our own thoughts to imagine that others might go far enough out of their own ways to stop by. I was very convinced by Monica Judge's recent piece for The Verge, Bring Back Personal Blogging; it seems obvious to me given the rapidity with which petty billionaire dictators alter their respective deals – pray they don't alter them any further – the only viable way to stake our claim on our thoughts is to put them up somewhere that we own.

As such, Universal Applicant is up on its own server, (hopefully) impervious to some of the changing winds that threaten the places we all go to read stuff – we'll crosspost to Twitter, but we don't want to blog via Medium, newsletter via Substack, etc, etc. We'd like to own this thing, however meager it ends up being.

So, what are we doing here? Well, Eric likes movies and U2 (even the one they put on our iPhones) when he's not fundraising for UC Davis. I sort of like TV and tech more than Eric does, and I'm a Springsteen guy (even after he sold out with Ticketmaster) who product manages software for cool scientists. We both love a concert and a museum and a thoughtful take, and so expect to hear about all those things and more besides. I recently moved away from Eric's region of California (the Sacramento "metro" region), and this is our way to keep our patter going, and maybe let some others into the circle.

Universal Applicant

Bill Callahan's outstanding Universal Applicant is, to me, a song about using whatever meager light you have to peer into the world around you, and allowing the beauty, the good and bad, and the wild around you to broaden your perspective and humble you. The (slightly lofty, I realize) goal of this place is to force Eric and I to keep seeking out new and interesting things, and to do some real thinking and talking and writing about them – keep our tools keen, as it were – while also producing something worthy of your attention; something for you to grab onto and bounce off of.

Whether we accomplish even that much remains to be determined, but we are going to square up and take a run at it!