Tag: books

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31 Days of Reflection, № 1 – Escapes

I’m going to attempt to post a thought every day this month reflecting on the year overall. It went by way too fast, so I want to bring some of it back. Some of these might be surface skims, some might be deep dives…

№. 1 — Escapes

Today I’ve been reflecting on how much I like to escape to other places, people, and thoughts. I think I’ve let that happen far too often this year. A lot of it has been reading (especially after slacking off last year and early this year), a lot of it has been media consumption, and yes, escaping through people, too. But it’s also been letting busyness and distraction get in the way. I found myself getting lost in work, then checking the calendar to see what I was supposed to be going to for the evening, then running off to that without thinking. Stopping to think and reflect didn’t happen enough (if at all), thus these notes.

At least reading-wise, this year’s been great. The last couple of months have been dominated by one writer, five books, and 4400 pages. All about a cat. I read the fifth volume of The Familiar in two days because all the different plot threads that were so disparate in the first book were finally interlinking and crossing over in the catchiest ways. Waiting a bunch of months for the sixth entry is going to be tough, but hopefully it won’t fly by like this year did. As a recommendation, I’d hunt down how the book club broke each book into sections spread out over the course of a month for each volume. I’d been buying the books as they were released, but avoided reading them do to their heftiness. Appearances can be deceiving and luckily they’re not endless pages of dense text.

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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. 😎 ↩

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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. ↩