Did

I haven’t made one of these posts since March. That’s mostly because we had our first child in May! So it’s been quite hectic. Everyone is healthy and happy and we are loving getting to know our little one. I’ve been collecting links to post since last time, so some of these are going to be a little stale, sorry!

Read

• How the New York Times Managed to Avoid Ruining Wordle. In a world where anything fun online is being actively ruined by business interests, I enjoyed this writeup of how Wordle wasn’t ruined by the NYT.
• John Wick 4’s director and crew walk us through its stunning one-shot fight. This was by far my favorite scene in John Wick 4, and I loved this breakdown discussing it.
• Candy Crush Mom Accidentally Entered $250k Tournament, Kills It
• Thirty-Five Years Later, There’s Nothing Like ‘My Neighbor Totoro’
• Oral History of Susan Harris, Creator of Golden Girls
• 64 software bugs, complex union rules and a $15.8 million mistake: Why S.F. can’t pay its teachers on time. an incredible technical breakdown of what went so horribly wrong with the San Francisco Unified Schools payroll system.
• ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Has the Most Words Per Minute of Any TV Show. They never say the words have to be smart.
• Ryan Gosling GQ Profile promoting Barbie. There’s an overwhelming amount of press around the upcoming Barbie movie, but I really enjoyed the photo shoot and the interview here. On people saying he was too old to play Ken:

But suddenly, it’s like, ‘No, we’ve cared about Ken this whole time.’ No, you didn’t. You never did. You never cared. Barbie never fucked with Ken. That’s the point. If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed. This is why his story must be told.

• How some people get away with doing nothing at work. I really enjoyed some small details of this piece that I hadn’t seen elsewhere of people coping with having their job mostly disappear without anyone noticing, like consciously having to keep up your skillset on the side, and being afraid to make any moves or changes internally lest you get noticed and immediately laid off instead.

San Francisco/Bay Area

I’m making this its own subsection because there have been a lot of breathless fear-mongering discussions about the San Francisco death spiral, doom loop, etc. I love living in San Francisco, it has its fair share of problems, but the national media (and local newspaper the Chronicle) depictions of San Francisco don’t really represent the city I live in and love. So I’m going to regularly post links to positive things about this city.

• SF Chronicle Now Seems to Regret Amplifying the ‘Doom Loop’ Narrative It Heavily Amplified
• Great SF Tourist Advice for Elderly or People with Limited Mobility
• The San Francisco Nordstrom is closing. It was also a wild success
• The Character Assassination of San Francisco
• Laser light shows are coming to some of San Francisco’s biggest landmarks. These have been really fun, the header image of Sutro Tower is from this.

Social Media Discussions

It’s mostly been an exhausting and tedious navel-gazey discussion, but here are some pieces that I enjoyed:

• Erin Kissane’s thoughtful piece on Mastodon
• Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out
• Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon: where are we all supposed to go now?

Watched

• April 1st SNL Weekend Update. The reason it’s funny has nothing to do with the title of the video.

• Rushmore Academy and the Max Fischer Players at the 1999 MTV Movie Awards. How had I never seen this before?! The kids from Rushmore parodying other movies from 1999.

• The Giant’s Dream: The Making of the Iron Giant

• In TV,

  • We finished the most recent season of Survivor, which was excellent, and my partner won $200 in our fantasy Survivor league. Congrats to her!
  • I watched Jury Duty and thought it was just ok. The final episode after the reveal was very wholesome and fun, but I think the absurdity of Nathan For You and How To With John Wilson and similar shows made the hijinks in this one feel tamer by comparison.

• In Movies, you can see everything in my letterboxd but here are some standouts.

  • I rewatched all of the Mission Impossible movies leading up to watching Dead Reckoning in IMAX at a fan event on Monday with my friend Brook. We had a great time at the movies, just like Tom wanted!
  • Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of The Dana Carvey Show: A very fun watch, everyone involved has gone on to be so successful that they aren’t bitter about the show’s failure and can be very honest about the decisions that they made that doomed it.
  • Fast X was bad, but I expected it to be and still love the franchise, no hard feelings. Momoa was great in it though.
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was an uplifting and fun delight.
  • BlackBerry and Air were solid movies about business.

Played

• I purchased a bunch of games from the Steam Summer Sale but haven’t really gotten to play any of them yet.
• I did install and start playing a fan made Sonic game on my Steam Deck, it seems really ambitious and in the brief amount of time I’ve played it I’ve really enjoyed it! Here are some instructions on getting it to work on the Steam Deck.

Computered

• I’m still really enjoying Arc Browser, and think this writeup is a great intro.
• Subscribe to your Mastodon bookmarks as an RSS Feed with this free tool. You gotta love the open web. I have a similar workflow in place that uses Pinboard instead and follows my Pinboard RSS feed, but if I didn’t have that set up already I’d definitely check this out.

ok, bye.