§ 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."