Odds & Ends // 2017.09.30 // Indian 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.


Previously

  • One last beach day…

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  • Fall hasn’t quite arrived yet and we’ve still been getting days that’re unbearably hot and humid.

Listens

  • LCD Soundsystem – Black Screen

Reads

  • Recode: Why Ken Burns won’t leave PBS for HBO

    “I’m at the dance with them that brung me and I think I’m leavin’ with them,” Burns said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka.

    “Every single film I’ve made for public television has been my director’s cut.”

    Onto my watch list. Thank you, commencement speaker!

  • Apple: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

    Skip to the bottom and just listen to the audio samples and ithe improvements in each version.
    The last set is almost on par with a generic audiobook narrator.

  • I’m still working through The Familiar Volume 2, and will then have to power through volume 3 to catch up there and start reading Volume 4 in October. And tacked on The Lost Weekend by for a book club.

Adventures

Renaissance Rooftop!

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and she slept a lot

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Haiku Guys and Gals Book Launch!

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Views

This was neat. I’d seen the list once or twice over the past couple years, but I didn’t know it’d become legitimized and is now such a Thing™.

  • TSN Original: Surfacing

    Since his retirement in 2011 after a series of concussions, Paul Kariya has been a veritable ghost, keeping his distance from a game that he once ennobled with his gentlemanly play, his speed and his scoring touch. In November, Kariya will join former linemate Teemu Selanne when they are inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, thrusting him once again into the spotlight. After a long – probably too long wait – Paul Kariya surfaces.

    It’s tough to hear what Kariya went through, but I’m glad he’s speaking up about it. He was one of the few non-Penguins I liked as a kid.

Coming Up

I’m going to write about my favorite movie…
And I might start writing on an actual schedule


Odds & Ends // 2017.08.31 // Summer Doldrums

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

  • Black Mountain – Set Us Free

Reads

  • Thought Catalog: 10 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than It Has To Be

    3: You fast forward to apocalypse.

    I have a bad habit of fast forwarding everything to its worst possible outcome and being pleasantly surprised when the result is marginally better than utter disaster or jail time. My mind unnecessarily wrestles with events that aren’t even remotely likely. My sore throat is cancer. My lost driver’s license fell into the hands of an al-Qaeda operative who will wipe out my savings account.

    Negativity only breeds more negativity. It is a happiness riptide. It will carry you away from shore and if you don’t swim away from it, will pull you under.

    I do this too often and it’s a tough habit to break.

  • Aeon: How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free

  • The New Republic: The Rise of the Thought Leader

    The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.”

    Takeaway lesson: be skeptical.

  • Nerdist: Hear Kevin Conroy Read the Iconic The Dark Knight Speech

    When I hear Batman in my mind, that’s the voice, always.

  • BBC: Orpheus Underground

    Novelist Neil Gaiman explores the intricacies of the Orpheus myth, the timeless story of art’s place in trying to recover the dead.

  • Marlin Mann: On Chasing the Right “Zero”

    Put to best use, Inbox Zero is merely a philosophical practice of learning to be parsimonious about which and how many inputs we allow into our lives—and, then, to responsibly but mindfully tend to those inputs in a way that is never allowed to hinder our personal commitment to doing the work that really matters to us.

  • Spoon’s Britt Daniel talks latest album ‘Hot Thoughts’

    If a band is going to exist for a while, or an artist is going to put out record after record after record. what I want to see as a listener is that they’re throwing me a left turn every now and then — that they are trying something new, that they are not resting on what they know. When we came up with a song like “Us” for this record, which is a mostly instrumental piece, mostly based on saxophones … that was something like we’d never done before. When I saw that it could be something we could turn into a song, I jumped at it. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to make it into a song, but I think we did.

  • PBS: Neil Gaiman listens to these dramatic film scores while he writes

  • On the reading front, I’ve been working my way through The Familiar.

Views

  • I got to see the partial solar eclipse. The next totality is going to swing through Ohio in 2024, so maybe I’ll travel over there and see it.

Solar Eclipse, New York City, 2017-08-21 2:43pm

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Drinks

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Adventures

  • A bee did not appreciate my golf game.

Not quite a birdie…

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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?


Odds & Ends // 2017.06.30 // Green Light

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


Previously

I found I didn’t like doing these weekly as there was too much “churn” and not enough content.
Going to experiment with monthly ones for a while and see if I like that better. 🙂

Listens

I’m on the Lorde bandwagon.

Reads

  • I read a double feature of David Mitchell: Black Swan Green and number9Dream were both engrossing reads. I could barely put them down once I started. It must be Mitchell’s writing style, too, because I wasn’t too enamored with either plot. I tried to start The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but it was just not for me. Too bad, since it’s the first part of the Marinus Trilogy, but I’m looking forward to The Bone Clocks regardless and hoping it’s on par with Cloud Atlas, which I loved.

Scenes

  • Quest for the Stanley Cup – Episode 5
    Here’s the finale! So good. I really wonder what they’re going to do for the Championship video since they probably used a lot of content already in this and the In the Room series. 1

  • Twin Peaks: Parts 7 & 8
    Part 7 moved some of the plot lines forward 2, and Part 8 was art in the form of a direct infusion of David Lynch’s imagination. Hopefully more like it ahead.

  • American Gods Ep 8 – Season Finale
    That was too brief of a season, but ok. I think it was a little overhyped before it all aired, especially with the numerous “This is the best show on tv!” reviews. It’s good, it’s fun, it has an attitude and style, but it;’s not the best. At least not yet.

  • Into the Badlands – Remainder of Season 1
    This was an unexpected surprise. Original, fun, decent writing and acting. And the action scenes are awesome and fun, they’re like a blend of the Matrix and Highlander.

  • 11.22.63
    I forgot how much of a heartbreaker the book was. It was so painful towards the end.

Coming Up Next

Starting in July, I’ll be trying The Familiar book club. The books have been sitting on my shelves far too long because of their intimidating length, but this should have a nice, structured pace to it!


  1. Which I’ve never seen, so maybe that’ll be next for my Summer sports fix…

  2. Maybe they were… swept forward. 😎


Odds & Ends // 2017.06.16 // “I’m gonna send ya back to Arkansas”

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


Previously

The Penguins won the Stanley Cup!

The Pittsburgh Penguins are back-to-back champions.

Have I mentioned the Penguins won the cup?

I might be a little excited about all of this.

Back-to-Back Champs!

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Princess is ecstatic.

Fri-YAY!

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Malteses everywhere. #RaiseThePup!

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Listens

  • Natalie Imbruglia – Torn

    This popped up on the radio when I was in DC for my sister’s wedding.
    20 years makes a big difference. I’d always change the station when it came on in the 90s, this time I made sure I figured out who it was and finally got around to downloading it last night. She’s pretty good at covers.

Reads

Words

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Scenes

  • American Gods, Episode 7

    This might be my favorite episode so far.

  • Twin Peaks: The Return, Episode 6

    Definitely better than last week, although there was a suspicious lack of certain characters and storylines…

  • Into the Badlands

    I watched the first two episodes of this. It’s surprisingly cool and catchy. I’m definitely going to keep watching over Summer while there’s not much else on. 1

  • The Pittsburgh Penguins Stanley Cup Championship Parade

    “What can we say about this group of hockey players here? I just think there isn’t a group I’ve been around that knows how to win more than these guys. … These guys are fierce competitors. They just know how to win, they just find ways to get it done. We couldn’t be more proud of them. … I said a little something last year, seeing if we could do this again. I wonder if we could repeat, or three-peat, should I say?”

    What a leader, possibly the best coach in Penguins history. There’s no reason it can’t happen again; if they could get through this season with all the injuries, anything is possible.

  • All Access: Quest for the Stanley Cup

    Screen Shot 2017 06 16 at 10 34 50 AM  2

    I binged four episodes last night. Starts at the conference finals and episode 4 ended with Nashville taking Game 4. So tonight’s episode should be pretty good. There was a great bit in episode 4 with Sullivan and his dad playing cards in their back yard.

    Another fun fact: both Laviolette and Sullivan named their dogs Stanley.

Views

Weekend

It looks rainy for tonight and Sunday, so probably catching up on some reading. Tomorrow’s supposed to be nice; maybe some photography?


  1. Come back Mr. Robot!


Odds & Ends // 2017.06.09 // “Pittsburgh & Paris & NYC!”

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


Previously

Fishing was rained out. :(

The Penguins lost games three and four to the Predators. It made Princess very sad.

Sad Princess
Then they won game 5 last night! She’ll accept it.
Pensive Princess
One more win for a happy Princess!

Listens

Reads

Scenes

  • Twin Peaks: The Return – Episode 5: I don’t know what to think at this point. This was the slowest episode so far, but hopefully it’s just one of those ‘moving the pieces around the board’ ones. I don’t feel the need to rewatch it like the first four though. That said, patience seems to be the key.

  • Logan: I want to watch it again in black and white, but not for a little while. It was a poignant sendoff for Hugh Jackman’s version of Wolverine. Superhero movies where they have grounded, personal stakes are so much better than the constant “saving the world” plots. 2

Views

  • Snapped some photos at a poetry event at Torn Page… still getting used to my new camera, but I’m having fun with it so far:

  • Rick Snyder’s Snykus brought the humor:
    DSCF0781

  • Gracie Bialecki brought the emotion:

    DSCF0884

Always amazing. This one is worth the watch.

Weekend

Probably some photowalks! And watching Game 6. Foley’s should be a madhouse.


  1. Plus the remixes are so good, too.

  2. That said, I can’t wait to see Wonder Woman!


Odds & Ends // 2017.06.02 // HellooooOOO

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


Previously

  • This week was a hectic one. Kicking it off with visits to Governors Island and Central Park was relaxing. The Penguins won games one and two of the Final, which was awesome. I helped out at Impact Hub for an event, and then bussed to Annapolis on Thursday night. Co-Piloted by BB-8.

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Listens

  • I caught up on Do By Friday through the week. The current events asides were a little alarming. I’ve been trying to just ignore the news cycles, but week after week after week being condensed into a few podcasts, that I then binged over a day or two, and it was pretty clear we’re not living in normal times.

  • Same Old Blues by Phantogram has been in heavy rotation in my recent favorites, so let’s go with that.

Reads

I really like it when something that ended on a cliffhanger or with no resolution years ago gets to come back and tie it all up. 1

I don’t think I really liked it, though. The miniseries itself, yes. I just can’t stand the heartbreaker at the end. Time-travel is made to break the rules of itself; embrace the paradox! Now I’m stuck equating Jack with Don Draper. 2

“There is a quality of spiritual pilgrimage to both series: You must make peace with the fact that you will never entirely “figure it out,” and that you will continue traveling onward without any assurance that there’s a destination waiting for you at the other end, much less that you’ll someday reach it.”

The headline alone got me to sit down and read this one.

No pull quote on this one. Just go read it. Unless you’re reading this on your phone, in which case, read it when you have time. It’s worth it. I started thinking about it when I went for a stroll and literally everyone I saw had their neck craned downwards towards a glowing screen as they walked.

h/t to Monica for that one.

One of my friends asked me about Bullet Journaling, which I’ve been trying out for the last two months. The best explanation I can give is to just point to it.

“Handwriting is more than just a form of communication. It’s part of our identity; you can always tell if something is written by you or someone else. The flourishes, how we cross our Ts and dot our Is, can be telling of our personalities. Our handwriting can change from being super neat and then chicken scrawl when we’re in a hurry.”

I think the tl;dr of this, for me, was to just slow down.

Scenes

  • It was two weeks ago, but the first four episodes of Twin Peaks. No explanation possible.

  • Season Five of House of Cards. That was fun. “My turn.”

  • Samurai Jack season five.

Drinks

Dos Caminos used to have some drink a year or so ago that used Singani as an ingredient.3 I really liked it, but then it left the menu and I haven’t found another bar that’s used it in cocktails since. Fast forward to a bunch of evenings ago; I tried a friend’s Pisco Sour and it was pretty tasty. I wondered aloud if the base liquors were similar, since they’re both from South America and were a national drink, and apparently I made a good guess: Pisco & Singani are both a pomace brandy, which I hadn’t heard of before. And that’s quite fitting, because I’ll hopefully be having one in celebration in a week or so…

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Weekend

  • Pittsburgh for some fun and celebration, both family and the Penguins.

  1. Hi there, Twin Peaks!

  2. Now I’m imagining Jon Hamm with a katana. I’d watch that movie.

  3. I think this was it: the Sour 63.