Odds & Ends // 2017.07.31 // Dog Days of Summer

Like it says: odds & ends; I’ll try to post this once a week to track things I read, quick updates, thoughts, links, etc.


Listens

  • Coldplay – Miracle

Reads

  • Caps Honored to Hoist Garbage Can

    After the Caps beat the Seals, Tommy Williams, who had two assists that night and was the game’s second star, picked up the trash can, held it over his head and passed it around the room. The Caps paraded it around the room. After all, the Caps finally won a road game!

    Sounds about right. I wonder if they raised a banner, too…

  • The RNC Files: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

    This reporter was able, after determining his RNC ID, to view his modeled policy preferences and political actions as calculated by TargetPoint. It is a testament both to their talents, and to the real danger of this exposure, that the results were astoundingly accurate.

    So annoying that all our info keeps floating around out there because people are woefully negligent. Not to mention that it’s being collected and sold like this in the first place.

  • Building Mental Toughness Off the Field

  • I used to be a political cartoonist. Here’s what you should know about satirizing political assassinations.

    An artist’s job is to take risks, and taking risks means sometimes doing things that turn out to be stupid and wrong. The riskier the subject matter, the better or funnier your art had better be. If you fail, people are going to be offended and mad and call you names on the internet. They will also do this if you succeed. If your intention is to provoke, you don’t apologize when you succeed; the correct response, when you waggle a severed president’s head at the public and the public is outraged, is: “That’s right, and here’s Mitch McConnell’s, too.”

  • Ron Burkle opens up on Penguins ownership, Mario Lemieux and the future

    “The parade almost means more than that moment on the ice [after the Cup was won],” he said. “That moment on the ice is exciting, but when you sit there and you see a community like Pittsburgh, and the size of Pittsburgh, and the turnout in the community … and it was [goalie Marc-Andre] Fleury’s last moment. And seeing people holding up Phil Kessel signs, that is probably the highlight of the whole thing.”

    Definitely missing Molinari on the Penguins beat. PG would’ve been better served to aim for something like this on a bi-weekly or monthly basis rather than relegating him to the Penn State beat.

  • Redesigning Waxy

    Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.

    Obviously I don’t have 14 years of posts, but if I had stuck to when I actually started playing around with wordpress, I’d have 7 or 8 years at this point. Facebook has 12 years of me, and twitter had 9 1

  • The Zelda-‘Twin Peaks’ Connection is Real

    Tezuka: I didn’t try to do that on purpose. About Twin Peaks. We were talking about this before you [Iwata] arrived. I was talking about fashioning Link’s Awakening with a feel that’s somewhat like Twin Peaks. At the time, Twin Peaks was rather popular. The drama was all about a small number of characters in a small town. So I wanted to make something like that, while it would be small enough in scope to easily understand, it would have deep and distinctive characteristics.

    This was my first Zelda game and it had a lot of quirks and oddities that the rest of the series hasn’t really had.

  • I read Ready Player One. The movie should be fun.

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Words

“Only when a republic’s life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.
This Republic’s life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands. The stupid phrase needed help, and it got another one: ‘Even if the war be wrong we are in it and must fight it out: we cannot retire from it without dishonor.’ Why, not even a burglar could have said it better. We cannot withdraw from this sordid raid because to grant peace to those little people on their terms–independence–would dishonor us. You have flung away Adam’s phrase–you should take it up and examine it again. He said, ‘An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war.’”

Gotta get my Mark Twain in during times like these.

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  • Happy 4th of July

Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree besides the river of truth, and tell the whole world – ‘No, you move.’ —Amazing Spider-Man #537, December 2006, written by J. Michael Straczynski

My favorite Captain America quote.

Scenes

  • Speaking of which, Spider-Man: Homecoming was fun.

  • Wonder Woman is still probably my favorite movie of the year until October.

Views

  • Marvel: Making a Difference in the Real World
    Keeping the Marvel run going, this was a really good talk that I stumbled onto. It meant even more when I took part in a Narrative 4 story exchange and was able to share it with the person I was partnered with after we shared our own personal stories.

  1. Twitter is so ephemeral, I don’t see why it bothers to archive posts from a user-standpoint (obviously, they need the data to sell ads). I like to keep it between 3-6 months and routinely nuke everything beyond that. There’s usually nothing I’m embarrassed by or regret posting in the first place, but how often have you gone to someone’s profile and scrolled past a few weeks worth of posts? (Somewhat the same with facebook, the only time you’re going years previously into someone’s profile if trying to find something specific about them… And who does that?


Moments of Escape & Solace

Photography is about freezing a moment in time, creating a memory that you can share by showing others. There’s a lot of blanks to fill in, and I’m always happier to leave it that way. 1 Some of the answers can remain unsaid, others cannot be said.

About three years ago, I got to have some of my photos exhibited as part of a group project. 2

I was nervous when the exhibition night rolled around. I think I was actually shaking with anticipation. I hadn’t had my photos on display since high school, maybe nine years prior. It felt good to have my work up on a wall in a gallery for people to see. And we had sponsored drinks and snacks, so that made it a bit easier to pass the time. Turns out, only two friends showed up. 3

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It’s odd going back and seeing what I focused on.4 Looking at the pictures now, the set of them definitely reflect the lonely and isolated feeling I had at the time. The rest of 2014 would be a roller coaster as well, but that’s another story….

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We also had to write a didactic panel to go along with our work. This was the scariest part for me. I like to let my photos speak for themselves to the point that I won’t even give them titles if I can help it.

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This project was initially a foray into exploring the use of black and white photography in New York’s urban environment, but a funny thing happened on the way to the darkroom… Manhattan’s unrelenting hustle and bustle, brusqueness, and confinement led to exhaustion and a need to escape. I found myself searching for open, natural, and quiet locations; trying to find a small measure of peace and solace. Whether it was New York’s parks where one could almost (but not quite) leave the city behind, to the edge of Long Island on the beaches of Montauk, or far up in the Catskills in the rolling, foggy mountains, I needed to be away from everything in order to read, write, or relax. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes the concept of the city as “the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.” These photographs are an attempt to illustrate respite from that inferno.

That was me in that moment, three years ago; it almost sounds like someone else, or at least it doesn’t sound like me now. No better or worse, just different. I think I was still coming to terms with everything I had gone through in the first year or two in New York. It was quite the tale of two cities, and this was the cap on the end of a particular phase.


  1. That’s the point of art, everyone can interpret it in it’s own way.

  2. Moments seems defunct now, which is too bad. I think I was a little advanced for their target audience, but it was a lot of fun going through it with a group, discussing our work, and having an assignment or goal every week or so to go out and work on.

  3. So heads-up if you miss out on something I do: it might take years to catch it again!

  4. Pun intended, ha!