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§ I’ve been continuing to try to spend some time drawing and painting this week. I’m very rusty but it’s a satisfying challenge and good exercise for my attention span. My biggest challenge has been ignoring the impulse to draw what looks good on the page instead of what I actually see in front of me.
§ Tis the season, I watched Beetlejuice and Halloween for the first time. I’m sure this isn’t news to anyone else but they’re both good movies!
§ Wednesday marked my 365 day crossword streak on Puzzmo. I would love to see a graph charting my “time-to-solve” over the course of the year. I feel like I’ve made huge improvements but Puzzmo doesn’t seem to have a good way to export my data to confirm.
§ On Thursday the museum I work for a received a surprise donation of a 1959 Wurlitzer Sideman—the first ever commercial drum machine. It sounds amazing and the mechanics are fascinating, it basically works like a huge motorized music box.
§ Backing out of my parking spot at the grocery store on Friday, my car made a sudden super concerning jolt and a Service StabiliTrak message popped up on the dashboard. I’ve been suspecting for a while my driver’s side rear tire might have a slow leak. Quick research into the “StabiliTrack” system tells me that one of the myriad reasons the system could fail is bad data from a particular wheel sensor.
I brought it in to the dealership on Saturday. They patched the tire and then mentioned the rear break pads were “basically gone” and a front pad was “falling off.” I got them all replaced. This seems to have fixed everything including the strange noises I mentioned last month.
I desperately wish Cleveland had better public transportation. I’m trying not to think about how many CTA trips I could take from the cost of this repair alone.
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§ Tuesday morning brought our first snow of the season. Well, technically a thick layer of freezing hail that stuck through til mid-afternoon. Still, an ominous reminder of the season to come.
§ All of this cold weather means that our figs are ripening all at once. We ate figs straight from the tree, we made fig ice cream, we cooked fig jam. Yum. It is quickly becoming my favorite plant of ours for how low-maintenance and productive it is.
§ I have two trips to San Francisco planned in 2025: one in late winter and another in early autumn. This will be my first time in the Bay Area and I can’t wait. The mix of technology and creativity, the environment, the weather. I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes the first city since Chicago to really invade my daydreams.
§ I got the opportunity to have lunch with a Cleveland photography icon on Tuesday. It was so nice to speak with someone else that views the city—and, in particular, The Flats—as such an inspiring subject.
§ An insight into the unwelcome tech consumerist side of my psyche is the impulse, after noticing that I don’t get much value out of the Apple Watch Series 4(!) I’ve worn since 2019, to think maybe if I got a newer Apple Watch I would find it more useful.
This is bad on at least two levels: 1) why would I buy another version of something I don’t particularly enjoy and 2) I don’t actually want to spend more time fiddling with my watch.
If I really wanted to fight against this consumerist impulse I would just stick with what I already have. Instead, I bought a $30 Timex.
I’ve been happy with the switch. The only trouble has been the few times I’ve reflexively tried speaking Siri reminders into my wrist, a move which makes me look completely insane.
Right now I don’t know—or, more importantly, care—about the difference between manual, automatic, and quartz movements and I’m afraid if I ever find out this could become an expensive hobby.
§ I’ve found Aaron Hertzmann’s recent posts about how he approaches painting inspiring. I’m fascinated by the prospect of being able to capture a moment in a way that feels more real than is possible with photography.
§ Somewhere in my memory The Diplomat became just another season of Slow Horses. But no, The Diplomat is its own show! And it’s much better than Slow Horses. And its second season is coming out soon.
§ I still really want to try a pawpaw, the largest largest edible fruit indigenous to the United States that also happens to be native to my area of northeast Ohio. Until then, I found the next best thing: blueberry pawpaw jam. Unfortunately, the jam mostly tastes like blueberry but maybe the pawpaw adds a sort of tropical banana flavor?
§ In the evenings Caroline and I have been decorating our house for Halloween. We still have a ways to go before we become one of those houses in the neighborhood but each year our decorations get a little bit more elaborate.
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§ I’m still feeling a bit gross and ill but much better than I did this time last week.
§ My Apple Watch hasn’t been connected to my phone since I upgraded to the 16 at the end of September. I only really mind it when when an alarm or timer is active on my phone and I instinctively try to cancel it on my watch only for it to not be there. Otherwise it is a non-issue. Maybe I should just wear a normal watch? I ordered a cheap Timex to try out for a week.
§ I’ve been shooting a lot of video with Kino recently. If this continues I’m going to really regret getting the smallest storage capacity phone. At least you can record directly to external drives now.
§ I finally saw Oddity, apt now that we’re in proper spooky season. It did have some decent creepy bits, particularly near the beginning, but overall it wasn’t what I expected. The fact that it’s mostly unlikable people doing bad things to each other didn’t help.
In order to watch Oddity I subscribed to a month of Shudder where I also watched Stopmotion which was really interesting!
§ I pulled up most of my sad, sad tomato plants and put down seeds for a winter cover crop. I’ve never grown a cover crop before and I’m sure random radish, broccoli, and alfalfa sprouts aren’t the proper choice for this but it couldn’t hurt, right?
§ I also planted a few cloves of garlic that I saved from the most successful plants I grew this year.
Last year I planted garlic early November. Maybe getting these cloves in the ground slightly earlier will make for an earlier harvest next summer.
§ You should give Taylor’s Guerilla Gardening Guide a read:
Vacant land is much more expensive than its opportunity cost. Dirt lots cause crime, reduce biodiversity, accelerate desertification, etc. Plus, they’re ugly as h*ck.
Every vacant plot could be a home, park, market, garden, farm – anything is better than that landowner’s sloth/greed currently parked there.
§ Yesterday Caroline and I visited the International Cat Expo which was exactly as cute as you would imagine.
§ Not just one but two of my weeknote pals from the UK had sudden and mysterious leg-related injuries last week. Here’s hoping the curse doesn’t make it to this side of the pond.
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§ I spent the first couple of days this week at the ASTC conference in Chicago. Despite having lived in the city for more than half a decade I never visited most of the city’s famous museums until this trip. The architecture alone of the Museum of Science and Industry, Shedd Aquarium, and Field Museum is worth the price of admission and that is before considering the seemingly infinite size of their exhibition halls all jam-packed with artifacts and interactives. I don’t know if Susanna Clarke had the Field Museum on her mind while she was writing Piranesi but I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised.
I took the opportunity to see Pissed Jeans at Empty Bottle while I was in the city. It was so much fun to see a punk show. It’s been quite a while.
On Monday there was a massive Verizon outage that knocked out cell service well into the afternoon. Apple’s messages via satellite feature didn’t work for me at all.
§ Back home in Cleveland I saw another concert on Wednesday: Lightning Bolt at Mahalls. Before this week, the last show I saw was Alice Longyu Gao more than a year ago.
§ The new season of FROM is out. It is starting to feel a little bit like the later seasons of Lost where it gets harder and harder to suspend disbelief until suddenly the whole show just sort of feels silly.
§ The essay “Too many places are STERILE and TORCHED — let’s make them COOL and FUNKY” has been rattling around in my brain nonstop since reading it mid-week. I agree on all fronts, particularly the bits about physical spaces.
§ On Friday the inevitable finally happened: I caught the cold everyone around me had. At least I was able to hold it off until after the Chicago trip.
§ But! On Friday I also got a big promotion that I’m pretty excited about.
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§ Hello, welcome to autumn, a whole new season ripe with naming opportunities from up-and-coming pop musicians.
§ All of the fruit on my brown turkey fig plant is suddenly ripening all at once. I took advantage of the occasion to make goat cheese and fig ice cream. I’ve made lots of different ice cream flavors this summer and this one might just be the best.
§ That previous link to the ice cream recipe was what made me finally realize that my Safari ad blocker didn’t automatically transfer over to the new phone. I have to assume the people who run these recipe sites view the mountains of ads as a necessary evil but jeez do they ever look at their own website?
§ I do, by the way, slightly regret upgrading to the iOS 18.1 beta so quickly. The very minor number of new features doesn’t make up for the instability.
§ I rewatched both Devs and Severance.
Severance was much better than I remembered. In hindsight, I wish I waited until nearer to the second season’s release date to start the rewatch.
Devs, remarkably, might actually hold up as my favorite show. It isn’t perfect—the first and last episodes, in particular, weren’t especially strong—but the six episodes in the middle make for some of the most thought-provoking TV I’ve ever seen.
§ I flew into Chicago on Friday. Baltero launched on Apple Arcade just in time. I can’t think of a better game to play while killing time in an airport.
I love this city so much. On Saturday evening a few coworkers and I joined an architecture tour along the river. From Marina City to Jeanne Gang’s funky skyscrapers the variety and experimentation on display is inspiring.
§ I’ve stayed the night in eight different cities throughout 2024. That isn’t a particularly crazy number to some but it is easily a record for me. I think its unlikely I’ll break it in 2025 but who knows.
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§ Every spring I’ll notice one or two wasps investigating particular area of cracked cement directly outside of my front door. Until this year I would always spray a little Raid in that spot as a sort of preventative measure. Well, earlier this year I went to grab my bottle of Raid and noticed it was empty so I just let it be. How much harm can a handful of wasps do anyway?
Now I have what feels like at least a couple hundred wasps living in a constant state of buzzing agitation inches from my front door.
Up until recently I’ve chosen to think of these wasps as a kind of Arakawa and Gins-style architectural intervention but I’m starting to fear our mail carrier doesn’t share this perspective.
On Saturday I finally called an exterminator. He poured some diatomaceous earth around the area and coaxed them out with a shop vac for a while and now it looks like we have fewer wasps at least? It’s too soon to tell.
§ All around me people are catching colds, covid, pneumonia. A coworker finally returned to work: “I feel fine except sometimes I can’t breathe.” I’m taking zinc religiously, determined to make it unscathed to my trip to Chicago next week.
§ I did some CAD work in Fusion for the first time in a while. Little by little I’m getting better about actually designing parametrically. It is incredibly satisfying to go back in the timeline, tweak a variable, and then watch all subsequent parts instantly update accordingly.
§ This week’s Roderick on the Line finally prompted me to listen to King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, at least their most recent album, Flight b741. It is a rare example of a combination of virtuosity and spontaneity that I always find electric. Frank Zappa and Geese both come to mind. You can tell each musician is totally adept at their instrument but nothing feels overworked or academic. Each song, moment by moment, is fun, unpredictable, and occasionally silly.
§ I got the 16 Pro. I didn’t pre-order it but instead went to my local Apple Store Friday morning and waited in line before they opened all the while trying my hardest, unsuccessfully, to project an air of cool detachment and not betray the embarrassing amount of excitement I had about buying a new telephone.
I immediately noticed that the phone feels way better than my 14 Pro. The weight difference is part of it but I think the updated case design with rounded off the edges makes a bigger difference.
I also immediately updated to the iOS 18.1 public beta because what is the point of getting new technology if I can’t play around with any of the flagship features?
Apple Intelligence, at this point, is honestly pretty disappointing. The new Siri UI looks good, summarization in Safari is unintuitive and doesn’t work particularly well, the Clean Up feature is better than I expected but not something I intended to use frequently. Siri now talks slower which is an odd choice.
With all that said, I’m excited to see what subsequent software updates throughout the year bring.
§ Decades ago, truckloads of soil were dumped into a local creek to build a soccer field. A few years ago our local park system bought the land with the aim to restore it back to its original state.
As of just a week or two ago they finally took down the fences surrounding the property and opened the land up to the public so I went by to take a look. The restoration work isn’t finished. In fact, it is still in a particularly fascinating early stage that I’ve never really had the opportunity to see before.
Mottled clay fields are busting with panicled asters, wild sunflowers, goldenrod, crunchy dried plume thistle, and thriving thoroughwort stretching shoulderheight. I passed a set of coyote prints circumnavigating a shallow makeshift pond.
Walking through the fields, I’m reminded of a particular large sunny plot of land walking distance from my house. It has to be the size of at least two standard city blocks and it has sat empty since well before I moved here, owned by the city holding out for the doomed opportunity to sell it to private developers. Meanwhile, nature has taken over with reeds, shrubs, and grasses filling every available nook. If you drive by at sunset you’ll often see a family of deer lazily grazing their way through. I’m still holding out hope that one day the city will turn this property over to our park system to open it up for public access and allow for a more intentional restoration.
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§ This weeknote is almost entirely tech and TV. Apologies in advance.
§ I have been on a two year phone upgrade cadence for a while now, starting with the iPhone X, moving to the 12, and finally upgrading to the 14 Pro in 2022. I think I’m going to continue the trend here with the new 16 Pro.
The biggest draws for me, in descending order: the lighter titanium body, the camera control button and action button, Apple Intelligence compatibility, USB-C, the new 48MP ultra-wide camera.
I didn’t pre-order on Friday, mostly because I want to both trade in my 14 Pro and use the gift card I still have from trading in my iPad last year so I’ll have to stop by an Apple Store. I’m planning to do that sometime soon after the new phones launch late next week.
§ The first couple episodes of Slow Horses season 4 are out. It’s still good! The momentum the showrunners have maintained is unbelievable: releasing four solid seasons in two years is seriously impressive.
§ If you like legal thrillers like Perry Mason and The Night Of then Apple TV+ has just what you need: Presumed Innocent. It is more of less exactly the same as the former two shows—it even has Bill Camp. I watched Presumed Innocent exactly like the previous two, over the course of a long Sunday afternoon, in the background while puttering around the house. A great way to inject some drama into an otherwise dull day of chores.
§ One last TV show: Sunny. I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone else talk about it. I think it might be the most original thing I’ve seen since Mrs. Davis. It even has a proper opening credits sequence, with a song an everything—an ever-increasing rarity.
§ I stumbled across architects Arakawa and Gins. Just imagine carrying an armful of groceries across this floor.
They posited that buildings could be designed to increase mental and physical stimulation, which would, in turn, prolong life indefinitely. An aversion to right angles, an absence of symmetry and a constant shifting of elevations would stimulate the immune system, sharpen the mind and lead to immortality.
While I don’t think architecture is necessarily going to grant us immortality, I feel like Arakawa and Gins were onto something. Increasingly, it is starting to seem like the high relative ratio of novel experiences is a major factor that contributes to children perceiving time more slowly than adults.
§ This weekend was Rooms to Let, an annual city-wide project where artists take over vacant storefronts, houses, and warehouses, turning them into art installations.
§ I finally made it back to my local nature reserve for their nature forum and native plant sale. Of course I totally missed my chance to pick the black raspberries I spotted last June. Nevertheless, it was beautiful to see the park in full bloom.
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§ We haven’t had a moon all week. I didn’t notice until Thursday when I was taking my garbage can out to the curb and looked up to see just a tiny sliver of a fingernail, only barely waxing. New moons must be just as common as full moons but I so rarely notice them. I guess it is difficult to register the absence of something.
§ Or it is totally possible that I just never think about the sky and it is only now top of mind because I’ve been reading Mason & Dixon and at least the first dozen chapters of which features astronomy prominently.
Somewhat contrary to my previous review, the longer our heroes are moored on remote island port towns, earnest grounded prose morphs into “conspiratorial hallucinatory” ramblings, as Pynchon is wont to do. I’m still enjoying the ride but, man, it is a long, strange, book.
§ I’ve spent the past few days learning all I can about culverts and bioswales and retention basins and stormwater runoff this week after last week’s visit to my local wastewater treatment plant. This is all in service of an enormous new exhibition all about water. Although we are still a year or three away from anything actually coming to life, the design phase is ramping up and that is honestly the most exciting part. Where nothing yet is set in stone and no idea is too crazy.
§ Looking back at previous weeknotes, it looks like I haven’t yet mentioned the rogue tomato plant that has been growing in my front flower beds, I guess out of an abundance of caution in the event any neighborhood deer reads this blog.
It has been fascinating to watch. What started as a silly sprout from a haphazardly tossed cherry tomato fruit has turned into an absolute menace. It has numerous stalks growing in a six foot radius out from the original stem, greedy for sunlight, climbing up any and all available vertical affordances—other nearby plants, the railing of my front porch, a shepard’s hook.
It is, by far, the most healthy and vigorous tomato plant I’ve ever grown and I haven’t touched it all season. I am trying my best not to read into that fact too closely.
§ It has been just over one year since I last took my car to the mechanic. Since getting it back it has made an increasingly concerning metallic grinding sound whenever I turn left or, especially, break hard. I know next to nothing about cars. A coworker thinks it might be worn-down rotors. I’ve been putting off getting it all checked out until after the wedding and, well, here we are. I don’t feel particularly comfortable driving it in its current state throughout the winter season so now is the time.
§ I’ve been—somewhat reluctantly—watching Chimp Crazy. It is pretty much exactly what you would expect but I’ll admit that it is super impressive that the guy that made Tiger King was able to do it again.
§ After some recent nudging from Matt Webb I added Cursor Party to my website—the one you’re reading right now! If anyone else happens to be visiting this site at the same time as you are, you might see their cursor zooming around your screen. If you just want to see what it looks like, it also works if you open this page in two different browser windows.
§ I guess this is the in-between times. We have a few weeks left until autumn although Brat summer is officially over. Temperatures dropped below 60°f yesterday. I put on a roomy fisherman’s sweater and made some chili con carne.
§ The Cleveland Air Show was, again, a lot of fun. This year the Blue Angels performed with their first ever female pilot.
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§ Rabbit rabbit. Happy September.
§ Some quick follow-up on last week’s fall foliage dispatch: I woke up Monday morning to a backyard covered in fallen oak leaves.
§ I’ve talked about this a lot throughout the summer so I know you will be happy to hear the saga is finally over: I finally picked a tiny ripe cherry tomato from our sweet aperitif plant we grew from seed. With that milestone out of the way I think I’m ready for autumn.
§ It was an unexpectedly jam-packed week at work which concluded in a four hour tour of our regional sewer district’s largest wastewater treatment plant. It was a fascinating and let’s say sensorially rich experience.
§ Speaking of work, I’ve noticed that I’ve recently unintentionally picked up a particularly annoying piece of business lingo: “let’s pick this up offline.”
To be clear, I’ll say this during in-person discussions. I guess what I’m trying to convey is that I would like to discuss a particular topic at a later time? It is crazy how easy it is for these god awful phrases to sneak into everyday speech.
§ Our very first coturnix quail, Earl—short for “early” owing to him being the first bird to pip out of his egg—died yesterday. All signs point to the cause being old age. We hatched him in 2021 so that definitely tracks. The end of an era.
§ Let’s balance things out with some happy animal talk: Labor Day weekend means it’s once again time for the county fair. The goats, as always, stole the show. There was a pygora for the first time this year which, come on, so adorable.
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§ Temperatures were in the 60s and 70s for most of this week. It made it feel like we are in the waning days of summer. It didn’t help that the leaves on a neighbor’s tree are turning orange. I’m desperately hoping it’s shocked from the storm and that we’re not already creeping into autumn. For the first time in a while I saw the family of deer that lived in my backyard this spring. The two babies are almost as tall as their mom now although they still have all of their youthful spots.
Much of this summer was taken up by anxious anticipation, celebration, and travel—and that’s okay! Even if we are on the slow creep towards autumn my hope is that before the end of the season I’ll have the opportunity to pick at least one ripe tomato from the garden.
§ I know all of the cool kids were at XOXO this week but I just got my tickets for ASTC in Chicago next month and I can’t wait. It has been more than two years since I’ve been back to what I still regard as my favorite city on earth.
§ It has dawned on me that, out of maybe half a dozen phone numbers I still have memorized, one of those is Mike Jones’.
§ I finally build up the nerve to try to recreate my favorite breakfast from Québec City: poutine with scrambled eggs and hollandaise over potatoes. Finding poutine in northeast Ohio was the first challenge. Aldi ultimately saved the day there. The biggest obstacle was actually making the hollandaise sauce. I tried the blender method this time which actually worked out great. I think the key was getting the butter ridiculously hot.
§ I had a nice conversation with Barry Hess who first introduced me to Leif Enger’s writing. I read I Cheerfully Refuse in June and absolutely loved it. Now I’m nearing the three-quarter mark in Peace Like a River. It has been slower going than I Cheerfully Refuse. If you zoom all the way out and look at both of the novels from space they are both about a road trip during the midsts of pursuit. I Cheerfully Refuse is fast-paced with anxiety and danger around every corner. Peace Like a River is slower, more contemplative and careful. That isn’t a bad thing but it is certainly less propulsive.
Ever since reading I Cheerfully Refuse I feel a little emotional twang whenever I see a certain type of cozy little sail boat. Now, reading Peace Like a River, I’m noticing the same thing happens when I pass old Airstream trailers on the highway.
§ I also started reading Mason & Dixon by Pynchon. I’m not 100% sure why I started it in the first place and I’m not positive I’ll see it though to the end but sitting here, ten chapters in, there is something undeniably compelling about it.
It took a while for the faux 18th century language to not be a chore. After maybe half a dozen chapters it suddenly clicked and it became a lot of fun. It has almost none of the frantic conspiratorial hallucinatory energy of other Pynchon books. More than anything else, it is warm and optimistic. Almost cozy.
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§ Throughout July our squash plants were all healthy and productive—the pattypans being a particular standout this year. Almost as soon as August hit all of their leaves began to get covered in white powdery mildew and fruit production slowed to a snail’s pace. This feels like a pattern I see each season. Maybe I should just accept cucurbits as early season vegetables. I’m noting this here mostly so that I can check back next August and see if my theory holds.
§ Now that the wedding and my summer travel is over I finally installed the iOS 18 beta. I have an iPhone 14 Pro which ineligible for any of the new Apple Intelligence features. Barring those, this is a pretty minor update.
The photos app was completely redesigned. I really like it. It offers a few new ways to surface buried photographs from my ever-expanding back catalogue.
If you thought rearranging Home Screen icons could be fiddly and frustrating just wait until you try customizing the new Control Center. Nevertheless, all of the additional functionality might make it my favorite change of this cycle. I added a static grid of all of my HomeKit lights, I added a shortcut that sets a four minute timer for steeping tea, it’s great.
§ In perfect contrast to my critique of Fallout, the new season of House of the Dragon is so packed with high drama and life-or-death stakes that it could really use some element of levity, no matter how small. As is, it can be kind of tedious to watch. It might be perfectly executed—the epitome of its genre, even—but it still can be a heavy lift to consider when settling down to relax in the evening.
§ I signed up for Peacock this week after the olympics ended to watch replay footage from the games. I’ve never been particularly interested in the olympics and I wasn’t even necessarily curious about this year’s olympics until just a few days ago when I finally got the itch to see what all of the fuss was about.
One immediate problem is that none of the events set to music are available on Peacock anymore. Notably that includes breaking and gymnastics, two of the sports I was most excited to check out. On the flip side that made for the opportunity to watch other, less famous games. Did you know badminton is an olympic sport? It is, in all honesty, thrilling to watch. Table tennis even more so. Pole vaulting is mesmerizing.
§ After trying bigos for the first time in Montréal I’ve made this recipe three times over the past two weeks. I’ve substituted the pork stew meat with ground pork, I’ve left it out entirely and doubled the kielbasa. It has turned out great every time.
§ Yesterday Caroline and I stopped by a flea market in our favorite tiny town nearby. We bought some delicious sourdough and talked to an artist that carves little birds out of driftwood. What more could you ask for from a bright Saturday afternoon?
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§ Last Sunday Caroline and I went to the zoo for an event organized by her school to “celebrate” (commiserate prior to) the impending start of the academic year.
You might remember we went to the zoo together last month for the opening of their lantern festival too although we didn’t get the opportunity to see any animals at the time. Other than that, I haven’t been to a zoo since high school? Middle school? The black squirrel monkeys were particularly fun, the sloths were silly, the ghost jellyfish were a surprise hit.
§ The vegetable garden is beginning to bounce back from all of the deer chomping that occurred while we were out of town. Still no ripe tomatoes yet but the plants all have new growth and flowers. A far cry from the sad spindly stubs they were a few weeks ago.
§ I was hesitant to watch Fallout because video game spinoff media is generally pretty bad and, unlike Last of Us, I’ve never played any of the Fallout games. Well Matthew Sheret reminded me it exists and gave it a good review so I thought I may as well give it a try.
I don’t know—and I’m not sure the writers quite know—whether they are aiming for a serious drama or irreverent comedy. The tone sort of just bounces around from scene to scene.
As with Last of Us, the set design is incredibly impressive. In this case, again, it can be kind of jarring to see live actors in such an over-decorated cartoony environment—it gives off 21st century Who Framed Roger Rabbit vibes at times.
All of this isn’t meant to say that I didn’t enjoy Fallout. It has a great cast that had me asking “what do we know them from?” multiple times each episode. I think season two has the potential to be really good especially if the writers manage to strike a balance on a consistent tone.
§ On Tuesday during my commute home my notifications lit up with half a dozen tornado warnings in quick succession. I pulled into my driveway under clear blue skies but within fifteen minutes the clouds darkened ominously enough that Caroline and I shepherded the cats with us into the basement.
Huddled underneath the basement stairs we watched the lights flicker on and off before the electricity finally gave up. Cellular service quickly followed leaving us in the dark listening only to the growing wind outside and the tornado sirens as they made their way up and down our street.
Finally, after a half hour or so, we received an SMS from a friend saying that the storm had moved past our area so we went outside to survey the damage. Our tall tomatillo toppled over, our hammock somersaulted halfway across the yard, the most shocking thing was seeing the polycarbonate roof of our greenhouse in a neighbor’s tree. I managed to retrieve and fix it in a frantic dash. Overall, we were super lucky.
Electricity throughout our neighborhood remained out all night and into the next morning. Finally, more than 24 hours later, power was restored. Internet service came back later in fits and starts.
Later, the National Weather Service confirmed at least four tornadoes touched down in the area.
I’m not going to use this as an excuse to buy an anemometer although I’ll fully admit I’ve been tempted.
§ On Friday morning I noticed an electrical transformer and telephone pole actively on fire at the end of our street. As you might imagine, we lost power again soon afterwards.
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§ It is that brief part of the summer where all of the cicadas and katydids have emerged from the soil to spend long evenings desperately calling for each other. Where, if you’re outside on a warm night, you almost need to speak up to be heard over the buzzing cacophony. In a week or two you won’t notice their calls anymore. Maybe because the cicadas and the katydids all met their matches and found peace or because the constant trill has faded into your subconscious from overexposure.
§ My wife and I spent a sunny weekend staining all of the outdoor wooden furniture we’ve made over the past four years at our house. The picnic table, the pergola, the lattice fence, the raised beds, the greenhouse-turned-quail-hutch. Everything looks much better.
§ During rainy reprieves from staining, we picked up Tears of the Kingdom again after a year-long hiatus.
Breath of the Wild remains one of my favorite video games period. Tears of the Kingdom is, if nothing else, BOTW but more. So why have we held off playing it for so long? I think it must be a subconscious response to guard against finishing it too quickly. The wait from BOTW to TOTK was six years. We very well might have to make this game last until 2029.
§ At the farmers’ market I bought some ramp salt from a friendly father and son duo. They broke the news that I unfortunately missed our nearby ramp festival in late April. I’ll go next year—it’s already in my calendar.
They may have also convinced me to try to grow ramps. I have a shady little wooded area in my yard that is covered in trout lilys each spring it seems like that could be an great environment for a ramp colony.
§ I finished reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. What a wonderful, strange, immersive book. I found the first third the most compelling. I loved reading about the day-to-day activities of Piranesi as he explored the House, mapping distant corridors, embarking on various projects. The central conflict introduced later in the book is almost unnecessary and predictable in comparison. It is a book I’m going to be thinking about for a while, certainly.
§ As promised, I tried a beautiful Standard Ebooks copy of Moby-Dick but bounced off of it after a handful of chapters. I finally settled back into Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. The world’s Enger writes seem to rhyme with Clarke’s. Grounded but magical; gritty and innocent. With protagonists that share a unique wonder for the world.
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§ Driving home east from Tadoussac we visited two more cities, staying one night in each.
First, Montréal. On the way we stopped in Côte-de-Beaupré to see one of the world’s largest cycloramas built in 1895. Our guide was generous enough to give us a behind-the-scenes tour of the building which was incredibly cool to see. In Montréal we had a great dinner at Stash. Polish food on a French menu—fun!
Leaving Quebéc, we spent our last night in Fergus. A charming small Scottish town in the middle of Ontario. It is a town with a striking number of festivals. We had just missed their medieval festival two days prior but might have to come back for their steampunk festival in September which promises to be huge.
§ After spending the night in seven different hotel rooms over the past eleven days it is nice to be home. A few final travel thoughts:
- Before arriving in a new city, pick out a few restaurants near your hotel. There is nothing worse than trying to find somewhere to eat while hungry and tired in an unfamiliar city.
- Bring more ziplock bags. They are always useful to have on hand.
- Granola is a great hotel snack. Yogurt too if you have a fridge.
- Spending seven days in French-speaking Québec taught me more about the language than I learned in two years of classes. Still, almost everyone spoke better English than I did French which was a little embarrassing but made for the perfect learning environment.
- The lack of billboards along the highways in Canada makes drives feel much more peaceful.
§ While we were out of town entropy—and by “entropy” I mean “deer”—got the better of our vegetable garden. The tomato plants in particular seem to have been a favorite.
§ Iconfactory released their first beta of Tapestry and Silvio Rizzi has been steadily improving his new Reader app. Both take similar approaches to combining all of your disparate social feeds into one unified timeline. In the course of trying them I’ve come to realize I prefer inboxes over feeds.
Inboxes are optimized for triage. Standing in line at the grocery store I can quickly archive any unimportant items and leave a shortlist of only the most interesting articles to read when I have more time. Feeds, on the other hand, are fixed. You can’t read the top of the feed without loosing your current position.
The closest analog to my current strategy possible with these new apps is to “bookmark” interesting items as I stroll past them, adding each to a “read later” list. Where my preferred approach feels like separating out the wheat from the chaff, this feels more like assigning myself homework.
§ Following the recommendation of Robin Rendle I’ve been reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
An obvious comparison is House of Leaves—another novel set inside of a mysterious house of seemingly infinite size. Piranesi exudes a similar atmosphere but is far less gimmicky, considerably more straightforward, and much shorter.
The first chapter didn’t grab me straight away. It look me a little while to get into the rhythm of the writing and of the titular narrator’s particular voice. I soon found him charming though. Smart and analytical and brimming with maybe a little too much innocent curiosity.
§ Maybe half a dozen people, independently, over the past couple of weeks, have started gushing about how much they love Moby-Dick when I brought up our plans for to go whale watching in Tadoussac. So I think that might have to be next, after Piranesi.
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§ On Monday Caroline and I packed up the car and drove north for Canada.
§ First, Toronto! We stayed one night, in the Queen West neighborhood. Heading into the city on Monday we hit some intense rainfall, narrowly missing a record-breaking storm the next day.
Toronto has almost the same population numbers and density as Chicago yet feels much bigger. Maybe it’s just been too long since I’ve been back to Chicago. It was cool to see the streetcars and all of the infrastructure required for them.
Dinner at School pretty good. My chicken Sandwitch was great, Caroline’s hamburger was just okay. That is when we remembered Canadian food safety standards forbid burgers any rarer than “medium.”
§ Next, three nights in Québec City. We broke up the eight hour drive from Toronto with quick stops in Kingston and Trois-Rivières.
Kingston was unexpectedly beautiful. We had lunch a few feet away from Lake Ontario with a fun view of a giant cluster of wind turbines across the lake. Trois-Rivières turned out to be the perfect place to stop for dinner with streets jam packed with great restaurants flowing out onto the sidewalks. It is where I had my first poutine.
We finally pulled into Québec City just before midnight. That first night—holy crap, it was like we were living inside of an anti-Vrbo attack ad. Thankfully, we checked in to a great new hotel early the next morning and spent the rest of the day exploring the city.
Old town Québec City might be the perfect scale for a vacation. It is big enough—and has enough winding cobblestone streets and bustling alleyways—to get lost in but small enough that you’ll start feeling like a little bit of an expert in less than a week. Uncharacteristically, almost all of the photos I took were in portrait orientation. It must be something about the narrow streets and all of the hills.
All of the food I got the chance to try was great. A new breakfast favorite is eggs and potatoes with poutine and hollandaise.
Québec City felt like a gateway drug for Europe. I am sure I’ll be back but my next trip might have to be over seas.
§ We missed Niagara Falls on the way to Toronto but we stopped by Montmorency Falls, which they are quick to point out is 99 feet taller, on the way to Tadoussac. What a spectacle! It was definitely worth the stop.
The entire drive through the mountains to Tadoussac was beautiful. We passed so many blueberry farms!
Our two nights in Tadoussac were a great way to wind down from the bustle of Québec City. We ate some delicious seafood and saw a few beluga whales. Our boat ride through the fjord was completely breathtaking.
Little did we know July is le mois de la guédille—“the month of the lobster roll”—we, of course, participated.
§ Next week we will be stopping by Montréal and Fergus en-route back to Cleveland.
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§ Caroline and I got married yesterday! All of the pomp and circumstance made for a singularly unforgettable, silly, heartwarming, awkward, wonderful day.
§ That’s all for now. I’ve got to hurry up and get our bags packed. We’re heading off tomorrow to spend eight days road tripping through Canada. More on that next week!
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§ Holding out four months since my last one, I caught a nasty cold at the beginning of the week. The only consolation is that it is better to get it over with now than pretty much any other time in July where it would either throw a wrench into my wedding or be a drag on the honeymoon. Still, not fun at all.
§ Where everything related to the garden was a little bit delayed last year, everything seems just a little bit early this season. Our first few cherry tomatoes are ripening. Last year we didn’t start getting tomatoes until the tail end of July.
On a related note, the first blackberries of the season have ripened too. I’m hopeful they will be sweeter than they were last year. It is hard to tell from the small handful I’ve picked so far—they might be? That reminds me, I need to check back in on the wild black raspberries soon too.
§ Have I told you about our strange variegated borage? It suddenly popped up this spring, self-seeded from a bog-standard borage plant we grew a few years ago. I guess you can buy bespoke seeds for it under the name “Bill Archer“. Maybe I’ll try saving the seeds from my plant. I am interested to see whether or not the variegation is passed down.
§ It feels like I set aside season two of The Bear just the other week, always meaning to revisit it, and suddenly the third season is already out? Looking at the actual dates, I guess it has actually been a full year. Early reviews suggest it is as good as ever. There is something about the show’s unique atmosphere of simmering tension and creative camaraderie that is totally electric when done right.
§ I finished Moonbound.
It is at its best when the protagonist, Ariel, is in motion. When the novelty flywheel starts to slow and days settle into an undifferentiated blur the whole mood turns sour. There is an in-story justification for this. Our narrator—through a clever plot device I wouldn’t dare spoil for you here—was unexpectedly thrust forward thousands of years into the future and is soaking up every little oddity right alongside us, the reader. Our narrator constantly craves new information to help piece together the missing millennia.
Moonbound is, at its core, an adventure novel. Nevertheless, every location we visit is almost unnecessarily well considered—completely alive. I could read a book set in the serious foggy alleyways of Wyrd. I could read a book set in the dense city streets of Rath Varia, always evolving and impossibly thrifty. I could read a book about how the citizens of Rath-wold use architecture as a form of communication.
Sloan has already mentioned that he views Moonbound as part of a wider series. So what happens next? A continuation of Ariel’s story? A prequel as told by Durga? More flavor on The Chroniclers previous subjects? Maybe we’ll be thrust forward a few more millennia. Whatever it is, I’m ready.
§ Our wedding is next week. Just now I got my first glimpse at the weather forecast: sunny and hot.
There has been a sort of simmering ambient anxiety about it ever since I got engaged last year. It isn’t the being married part that stresses me out—I’ve been with my fiancée for more than a decade—it’s the event planning. The feeling that if I don’t throw an adequately nice party I will have ruined a perfectly nice Saturday for all of my closest friends and family. Typing this out, I realize how silly it all sounds but anxiety has only a passing correlation to plausibility.
Anyway, as the stress reaches its zenith a new feeling is taking shape which is the growing realization of how great I’m going to feel once this is all finished.
§ A big weekend for events with both the Cleveland lantern festival and the Lebanese Food & Music Festival. The lantern festival was enormous and whimsical and the food & music festival had all the name promised along with a lively dose of dabke dancing. I can highly recommend both.
§ Links
- Keenan moved their blog off of Squarespace and wrote an alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to rebuild it from scratch
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§ Monday was my one year anniversary at my current job. It is wild to think about the variety of challenges I’ve had the opportunity to work on over the course of just one year. It has been stressful at times but more than anything else I find it totally invigorating.
§ I finally finished booking hotels for our honeymoon roadtrip next month. Nine days. One thousand miles along the St. Lawrence river. We will be staying in five different cities and seeing countless more along the way. I can’t wait.
Our wedding is in 13 days. Weeknote 28. How’s that for a stressful thought?
§ All of the super hot weather last week taught me about white drupelet syndrome—where excessive UV exposure causes parts of a raspberry fruit to turn white. It looks bizarre but is completely edible!
§ Speaking of that hot weather, it finally broke on Monday and dropped down to the mid-70s, giving me the opportunity to put some of my new plants in the ground. So now I have six tomatoes, five peppers, one tomatillo, and one mystery plant that might be a groundcherry or might just be another tomatillo.
§ How have I never sung the praises of organza bags here? They’ve become an indispensable garden tool over the past couple of years. They’re ubiquitous, cheap, weather proof, reusable, and they protect developing fruits from the scourge of hungry birds and nibbling insects while not impeding light or airflow.
§ The nights have been strangely quiet here. It is always difficult to pinpoint the absence of something but it finally clicked last night: I haven’t heard any cicadas this year. I guess Ohio narrowly avoided a rare double-brood emergence.
§ Links
- Using AI to automatically drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers
- Poetry Camera
- ElevenLabs’ new app is extremely impressive
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§ Temperatures were in the 90s every day this week. The year’s longest days were also its hottest by a wide margin. I know I’ll miss all of the sunlight and the warmth soon but right now I really appreciate my air conditioning.
§ Back in April I bought a small tube of Stuart Semple‘s “blackest black paint in the known universe”—famously, the paint Anish Kapoor is legally barred from purchasing. It’s a silly art feud, okay? Well the paint just arrived, two months later, and I finally got a chance to try it. It’s black paint. Maybe, Maybe a hair darker than your bog standard black paint. It is certainly nothing you would notice unprompted and it certainly wasn’t worth the wait.
§ I put together a little website for my wedding where guests can quickly upload photos they’ve taken throughout the day which then get automatically added to a nice single-page masonry image grid with Blot. Best case scenario: I get some amazing photos I never would have seen otherwise. Worst case scenario: I’m debugging web code on my wedding day.
§ I’m this close to choosing a Vashti Bunyan song for our first dance. All of the other contenders are either too impersonal, too long, too melancholy, or too insincere.
§ Moonbound reaches a crescendo around the halfway mark that would have been a totally acceptable cliffhanger, whetting the appetite for a sequel. I appreciate the fact that Robin Sloan didn’t stop there, though. It feels generous. The further into the book I read, the more I’m charmed by the world Sloan has crafted and its expansive cast of inhabitants. I can only hope he is fielding calls with TV studios right now—Moonbound would be perfect as an Over the Garden Wall-style limited series.
§ Links
- Matt Lakeman is back with a long post detailing his recent visit to Tajikistan. If nothing else, make sure you read his harrowing account of crossing the border into Kyrgyzstan: “My Pamir tour driver was a Tajik and therefore legally barred from crossing the border, and we had to meet a new driver on the Kyrgyz side of the border, who was a Kyrgyz and therefore also legally barred from crossing the border. But that’s ok, we should have just been able to drive up to the Tajik side of the border, get out of the car, and walk across the border to the Kyrgyz side, right? Wrong. Because between the two borders is a 14 mile no man’s land gap… The problem is that the Kyzy-Art Pass is at around 13,000 feet. Even in the early summer, it’s still covered in snow and sometimes gets hit by snowstorms, such as exactly when my group tried to cross the pass. When we arrived, the visibility was maybe 15 feet in any direction. Beyond that, everything was pure white."
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§ I found this season’s first tiny cherry tomato. I also dug up a garlic bulb, maybe a few days premature but my curiosity got the best of me. I think it was “German White” but the labels have faded since I planted it last November. It looks good! Like real garlic and not the sad tiny cloves I’ve gotten from past experiments.
Overall, the garden is doing dramatically better than it did this time last year—all of the nightshades are almost twice the size and growing vigorously. Scrolling back to look through photos of the garden last June, the difference is immediately apparent. My working theory is that a lot of the stunting last year was caused by the Canadian wildfires.
§ Moonbound is out. I really liked both of the other Robin Sloan books I’ve read, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Annabel Scheme, so I’ve been eagerly looking forward to this new novel since it was announced.
Moonbound feels like it was written by another author entirely. The Bay Area tech nerdery so central to his earlier work is replaced with a world full of talking animals, wizards, and a castle. The prologue comes at you fast with genetically engineered dragons and a war on the moon in the year 2279. It all felt like a little too much too soon that it risked turning me off of the whole endeavor before it really began. Thankfully, our perspective suddenly shifts 11,000 years into the future where, mysteriously, everything is a little bit more relatable.
Moonbound is Robin Sloan unchained, overflowing with creativity and unselfconscious. I’m sick of writers that are too cool and detached, I want to read stories by writers that are fully bought in, having fun, and aren’t afraid to show it. That, more than anything else, is Moonbound. So, screw it—dragons on the moon, sure, I’m in.
§ This is where a big long paragraph about WWDC used to be before I deleted it. You’re welcome.
§ Two new album releases sit right next to each other in my Apple Music library that represent two opposing ends of my musical tastes: As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again by The Decembrists and Brat by Charli XCX.
The loss of Pitchfork really sucks.
§ Long bright summer days means lots of cyanotype printing. I finally ordered the chemicals necessary to try Mike Ware’s new cyanotype sensitizer solution. The promised tonal range increase might be there but the additional complexity of actually mixing solution is definitely there too. The elegance of the original recipe is part of the magic. No heating and filtering necessary.
§ On Friday I booked by hotel for our quick stay in Toronto during our honeymoon next month—next month! Later that evening I went out to a gallery opening, wound up talking to the artist, and found out she had just recently moved to Toronto herself. She gave me a few suggestions of things to do in the city and validated my hotel pick—staying in Queen West is a good choice.
§ Caroline and I took a nice long walk through the local nature reserve for the first time since late winter. The ubiquitous black raspberries are absolutely overflowing with fruit, though none of it quite ripe yet. I’ll have to visit again in a couple of weeks so that I can pick a few before the birds have their fill. On the way back we saw a snake—always shocking on a sort of base instinctual level.
§ Links
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§ I’ve developed a symbiotic relationship with one very specific robin.
While continuing to fix up the various stone paths around my yard I noticed that a particular robin would hang out at a careful distance watching me as I work with intent curiosity. After a few days of this, the robin started inching closer, gathering courage. Finally it mustered up enough bravery to hop over just a few feet away from me so that whenever I unearthed one of the large flat stepping stones that comprise the walkway it would excitedly snatch up all of the disgusting insects and grubs underneath.
§ The first few berries have started ripening on the raspberry bush I planted last year. Delicious. The blackberry plan has a ton of fruit on it—maybe a pound in all—but none of them are close to ripe yet.
§ I’ve never been a huge fan of poker—or really card games in general—but I have to say I’ve had a lot of fun playing Zach Gage’s new Puzzmo game Pile-Up Poker over the past week. It tickles the usual puzzle-solving part of my brain and dollops on top the thrill of chance with each new card dealt.
§ My new Kobo arrived on Wednesday. A few initial impressions:
- The physical device feels nicer than I expected. Yes, it is no doubt plastic but the tolerances seem tight, nothing creaks or flexes, the buttons are good.
- They’ve plastered the “Kobo” branding in four separate places around the case. Once in the front, once on the back, and twice along the spine. This is one industrial design principle I wish other companies would borrow from Apple. My iPhone doesn’t have “Apple” or “iPhone” written on it anywhere.
- With the backlight off, the screen is a little bit dimmer than my reMarkable. With it on, it can get unreasonably bright. At night I keep the backlight around 15%, during the day I keep it off.
- The whole device feels just a little bit more responsive than my reMarkable. Especially when the screen refreshes. It is still an e-ink device though—don’t except anything close to 60fps here.
- It’s nice to have colors. I’m not really taking advantage of it much now, reading EPUBs, but I expect it will really help with web articles and PDFs.
§ Putting together my ebook collection in Calibre reminded me how meditative it can be to carefully curate a library—fixing metadata and tracking down the best cover art available. It’s something I used to spend hours doing in iTunes before it all went away in favor of music streaming.
§ I did it, I finished I Cheerfully Refuse.
It’s a book set in an apocalyptic world that isn’t about the apocalypse at all. There was something simultaneously cozy and bleak about the entire atmosphere that I found incredibly immersive. The language was uncomplicated, poignant, and bizarre. It’s going to stick with me for a while.
The plot was full of adventure and exploration, hurried along by the stress of tireless pursuit. The protagonist, Rainy, remaining generous and hopeful throughout it all. Through storms, robbery, and tragedy he sailed forward. A minor gripe: the final quarter of the book felt a bit out of place. It should have either been expanded upon or cut entirely. Nevertheless, the book as a whole was exceptional. I could see myself re-reading it in the future.
I started the same author’s first book, Peace Like a River, to fill the time until Moonbound is released.
§ Monday is WWDC. Rumors have been few and far between this year so I really don’t know what to expect—I’m looking forward to it. If the past is any indication this will also be the last time I’ll have a stable phone for a while since I always inevitably jump on the iOS betas as soon as they’re released.
§ Links
- Ok, I’m just going to go ahead and paste this headline right here verbatim because what more could I possibly say? “Ikea plans to hire 10 people to run its virtual Roblox store, including to help pick out furniture and serve meatballs in the Bistro, and will pay £13.50/hour.”
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§ We got all of the mulch down just in time for a week of rain. As we waited out the dreary weather, Caroline and I sketched out the outlines of a Canadian road trip for our honeymoon. We’ll follow the St. Lawrence River east from Toronto, through Trois-Rivières and Quebec City, all the way up to Tadoussac to see the fjord and the whales. I’m excited for the destination but, like all good road trips, even more interested in what we will discover along the way. This will be my first time in Canada aside from a day trip to Niagara Falls a couple of decades ago which only technically counts.
§ I keep forgetting that I have almost a dozen silver maple trees in my backyard that I would like to try tapping for syrup. It looks like it is already too late, this year, but I’ve already marked my calendar to pick up the necessary supplies next February.
I have to say, the boiling and processing required after collecting the sap sounds like a big sticky arduous mess. Maybe that’s why I keep putting this project off.
§ Robin Sloan’s new book Moonbound comes out on June 11th—nine short days from now. Can I finish I Cheerfully Refuse before then? If the past is any indication the answer is squarely no. I’m going to try my best though.
§ Undeterred by Jason Snell’s tepid review, I caved and ordered a Kobo Libra Colour. It should be here by the middle of next week.
The thing that finally sold me is the screen’s “front light.” I’ve spent the past week deliberately using my reMarkable for reading as often as possible. Aside from the size and weight, I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit during the day. Since the reMarkable lacks any form of illumination it becomes basically unusable in the evenings which is, coincidentally, exactly when I would like to unwind with a book. My hope is that The Kobo will encourage me to be more intentional about my technology use in the evenings.
§ I finally got around to watching Damon Lindelof’s new show Mrs. Davis—it doesn’t help that it’s exclusive to Peacock which Caroline, in an uncharacteristically punny move, called “Peahen”.
Lindelof’s previous shows—Lost and The Leftovers—are no preparation for what he delivers here. The tone is surreal and irreverent, constantly teetering on the edge of slapstick parody. A closer comparison would be Wes Anderson. Mrs. Davis shares a lot of his imagination and whimsy without the relentless maniacal precision that I find both so inspiring and exhausting in his more recent work.
§ On Thursday I found a newborn deer in my backyard, extremely well camouflaged in a little alcove of twigs and brush. It was completely unfazed and remained perfectly still which is, I guess, just a thing they do.
§ Links
- Steve Albini used to maintain a food blog documenting meals he cooked for his wife.
- Jim Kosem has almost single-handedly reinvigorated my love of Cleveland. I mean just look at this video he linked to.
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§ The garlic plants are sending out scapes and I picked my first ripe strawberries of the season.
At the garden center I bought a tomatillo to make up for the seeds that never germinated as well as a summer squash and a whole bunch of herbs for a new patch in the front garden. New to me this year is culantro or “Mexican cilantro” which is in the carrot family, looks remarkably like thistle, and smells just like any other cilantro plant. Weird!
We are getting to the point in the year where I start feeling guilty every time I have to buy tomatoes at the supermarket, knowing that I’ll soon be inundated with more tomatoes than I could possibly eat, once the garden catches up.
§ We—and by “we” I mean mostly Caroline—are on track to lay down a full ten yards of mulch by the end of this weekend. For my part, I’ve been re-laying the stone paths that weave through the gardens and have slowly obscured themselves deeper and deeper into the earth over the years. The large smooth slabs that make up the pathway were all found while digging up and amending the soil for these beds in the first place. All deep red dense clay littered with rocks the size of your torso, each shovelful of dirt is evidence of the former creek that ran through my neighborhood centuries ago. It’s as if the walkway, always sinking, yearns to return to it’s former state of hypogeal suspension.
§ On Tuesday, a mysterious package arrived in the mail. A giant enameled cast iron Staub pan. Neither of us ordered it. As far as I can tell, there are really only two possibilities:
- Back in January we purchased a different Staub pan for my mom’s birthday. Maybe there was some sort of glitch in their system that caused this package to be sent too? But
- When putting together our wedding registry I had, briefly, added a different Staub pan but removed it before making the registry public.
I’m totally stumped but nevertheless excited to try out this nice new (free?) pan.
§ On Wednesday the muggy humid weather gave way to a giant thunderstorm complete with upward lighting which was utterly captivating.
§ After a year of owning a reMarkable tablet, I find myself tempted by the new Kobo Libra Color e-readers. I haven’t bought one yet, and I don’t know that I will, but I feel the pull.
I still stand by my decision to exchange my iPad for the reMarkable. I appreciate the reMarkable’s focus—it truly is a great e-ink drawing and note taking tablet. The problem, if you would call it that, is that I’ve learned that I really enjoying reading on e-ink screens. While you can read epubs on the reMarkable, it really isn’t ideal. The native reading interface is janky and the size, weight, the lack of physical page turn buttons, and missing backlight make for an uncomfortable experience.
§ My big ISS project opened to the public on Thursday. A 1/64th scale model of the International Space Station constructed out of 75 miles of clear packing tape. It’s been undoubtedly one of the strangest and most ambitious projects I’ve ever worked on. It has been fun to see people’s reactions when they step into it for the first time—almost invariably the urge to explore and play. I think there is something about it being a simultaneously unfamiliar, slightly intimidating, and colorful that inspires play. Again, I would love to design a playground someday.
§ Links
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§ A busy week of celebrations. Our bridal shower, Mother’s Day, and my birthday.
§ Did you know “zip ties” are called “zap straps” in Canada? I spent three long days this week with a new friend from British Columbia installing 1,500ish linear feet of smart lighting strips all around the ISS project. Does all of this lighting make the structure look more like the actual International Space Station? No, but it is super cool and that’s more important, right?
The deadline to complete this whole project is next week. Let’s all hope I’m able to talk about it more eloquently before then.
§ I watched Full Metal Jacket after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey last week. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s command to “get up, get on your feet” immediately brought to mind “Thieves”. I guess I had unknowingly heard that line so many times, in my occasional industrial music moods. Hearing it in the film for the first time was jarring.
Speaking of “Thieves,” its chorus is exactly the same as “Mr Suit.” Who knew?
The cinematography was gorgeous. Each shot was ornately detailed, well lit, and carefully considered. Although the choice to shoot everything in black and white admittedly read as a bit pretentious.
The sound! A restrained use of non-diegetic music combined with richly textured environmental sounds was a revelation in designing immersive scenes.
The pacing felt a bit slow, particularly during the first few episodes and the characters were all necessarily mysterious and untrustworthy. The payoff was worth it, come the final two episodes, which were unrelentingly foreboding, claustrophobic, and tense.
§ I met a leonberger puppy. What an amazing, enormous, fluffy dog.
§ Micro.blog launched some new commenting features. I’ve enabled them here.
§ Everywhere I look, people are talking about the aurora that was visible over much of the United States and Europe. After the solar eclipse last month, I’m more interested than ever in rare celestial events. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to catch the aurora myself, probably due to either clouds, light pollution, or some combination of the two.
§ Links
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§ I’m back with another new recipe to use up excess quail eggs, a problem I’m sure many of you have. A sort of remixed ajitsuke tamago or mechurial jangjorim—soy sauce marinated hard boiled eggs. You could, of course, make this with chicken eggs instead, but where’s the fun in that?
Marinade:
- 1/4 cup soy sauce
- 1/4 cup water
- 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
- 1 tbsp mirin
- 1 tbsp gochujang
- 1/2 tbsp gochugaru
- 1/2 tbsp roasted sesame seeds
- 3 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 scallion, chopped
Instructions:
- Bring a large pot of water to boil
- Carefully lower a dozen quail eggs into the boiling water and cook or 2.5-3 minutes
- Remove the eggs and immediately let them cool in an ice water bath
- Once cooled, gently peel the shells off of the eggs and then let them marinate for at least two hours
- Serve with rice, tofu, over noodles, or just stick your grubby little fingers right in the marinade and eat the eggs over the sink like I did
§ This week last year I got engaged to my fiancée at Fallingwater. We’re now just about two months out from the wedding. Bonkers. I’m still on the hunt for a honeymoon location. A coworker suggested this geodesic dome yert on a goat farm vineyard in Asheville. It 1) looks amazing and 2) might be a bit of a tough sell.
§ When Evil Lurks was well filmed, well acted, and the most tense viewing experience I’ve had since The Bear. Demián Rugna’s previous flick, Terrified, unfortunately didn’t quite land for me. It was much more conventional without the same frenetic energy driving the plot forward.
§ My wild ISS project prompted a rewatch of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The laborious pacing and long stretches of utter silence add up to movie I wouldn’t exactly call “enjoyable” but every scene, every shot, is absolutely packed with visual inspiration. The colors, the machines, the digital interfaces, the architecture, the graphic design, the furniture, all such a treat. I’m going to find a way to sneak in Eurostile somewhere.
§ My raspberry and blackberry plants are both blooming. This year’s groundcherry seeds, again, have failed to germinate. But! Just this weekend I noticed a leafy sprout popping up out of my onion patch that I think might be from a groundcherry fruit I haphazardly tossed into the garden late last year. The saga continues.
§ Links
- F.C. Variable – Can you use variable fonts to store interactive 3D illustrations?
- The Illusion of Awareness
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