Chad Comello

  • Why should I change?

    From the Wired story More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’:

    Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.

    The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.

    Every time I hear about people changing themselves to appease the new AI paradigm, I think of Michael Bolton’s response in Office Space when asked why he didn’t change his name to avoid being confused for the singer:

    I don’t even think these writers are wrong for doing this. Three cheers for linguistic innovation! (An exception: pretentiously writing all in lowercase like Sam Altman, of all people.) I just resent being backed into it by LLMs that hoover up real people’s writing—without compensation or copyright considerations, mind you—and regurgitate it back to us non-robots well enough to make us think we’re now stealing from it.

    Oops, I used em dashes. Am I a chatbot??

  • On Glen Hansard, grace, and goodbyes

    Glen Hansard died. I’ve been listening to and writing about him and his music for damn near 20 years, so this is a gut punch.

    A few years ago I wrote an essay for Cinema Sugar about how seeing Once in the theater in 2007 completely changed how I viewed movie musicals, and much more. It’s hard to convey how electrifying it was to see “Falling Slowly” or “When Your Mind’s Made Up” unfold before me for the first time, and how vital all of Glen’s music has remained for me ever since.

    Let this excerpt from the essay serve as my eulogy for a legendary artist gone far too soon:

    Once, directed by John Carney, is fairly easy to describe. An Irish busker (Glen Hansard) meets a young woman (Markéta Irglová) on the streets of Dublin and they grow close as they play music together, discuss their bruised loves, and inspire each other as they enter new phases of life.

    But such a tidy description belies the miles-deep emotional undercurrent that runs beneath this story and propels the main characters—who remain unnamed and are credited as Guy and Girl—first toward each other and ultimately onto their individual fates.

    Probably because the film’s core of Carney, Hansard, and Irglová are real musicians, they capture both the tedium and thrill of creating meaningful music—and, by extension, art—better than almost anything I’ve seen.

    They do so by paying close attention to moments in the songwriting process that are small but significant: assembling snatches of melody, hearing someone add harmony to your song for the first time, finding replacement Discman batteries so you can finish your lyrics, and nailing a song on the first take.

    These little euphorias add up. With what Guy and Girl accumulate together, they give each other gifts they couldn’t have imagined before meeting: she helps him record his songs and find the confidence to move forward, while he reignites her passion for playing.

    It was goodbye in the best way, with grace and gratitude for what they meant to each other.

    What I took with me after seeing Once for the first time was how people can come into each other’s lives, knowing their time together will end, yet still choose to make something wonderful with the moments they have.

    That’s what music can do, and what art can do, and what grace can do if we let it. That’s what Glen Hansard’s music did for me.

    Rest in peace, Glen. You sang your melody, and you can rest assured knowing we’ll keep singing along.

  • Critters of the moment

    An occasional series

    A freshly molting cicada:

    A night heron:

    A fox in our backyard:

    A yellowjacket stuck between our window and the screen:

    A great egret:

    A snapping turtle spotted in the section of a creek under a road underpass (the lines are reflections of the ceiling):

    A Photinus pyralis, i.e. a good ol’ lightning bug:

  • Recent Views

    More photography here.

    Proud of capturing the 3 year old midair right before splashdown:

    Windshield bubbles:

    Our frontyard lilac in full bloom sandwiching our backyard redbud:

    Books on books on books at the library:

    Raindrops just hit different in the morning:

    Ahhh, ahhhhhh:

    Caught this airplane lifting off mid-cloud during my 7 year old’s soccer practice:

    Angles and elements of an underpass:

  • Hot new laptop features

    I’m obsessed with this “laptop” our 7 year old made:

    I asked him what the different features were. Check out these specs:

    • Ghost button unleashes a ghost from the laptop
    • Crossed-out ghosts buttons bring ghosts back in
    • DO NOT PUSH button activates his laser hand (i.e. an empty cup from a local ice cream shop that turned into a laser hand during a playdate with his friends)
    • Green drips are slime
    • Brown thing is rope
    • Colored buttons when pressed in different orders activate different powers

    He just whipped this together on a whim while listening to a Yoto. Kids, man. Time, space, and materials for the win.

  • Myself on Shelf Source

    Zachary Kai runs a series on his site called Shelf Source featuring “readers who share books they love on their sites.” He reached out about me completing the questionnaire, and as I am all too eager to talking about books and reading I was happy to obliged.

    Check it out here to learn which book changed how I think about the internet, which book I’ve recommended the most, and more.

  • ‘National Treasure’ is a national treasure

    I don’t believe in the concept of guilty pleasures (just watch and read what you want!). But if I did, the beautifully bonkers 2004 history-nerd film National Treasure would top my list.

    Read my America Month piece at Cinema Sugar celebrating all the reasons why the Nic Cage-est of Nic Cage movies still endures, if only in my heart.

  • Lovin’ Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’

    Just published a new essay at Cinema Sugar as part of America Month called Lincoln is the Better Angel of Biopics. It’s a celebration of Spielberg’s masterpiece as both a biopic—a genre I’m generally suspicious of—and a portrait of the man beneath the myth at a crucial juncture in history.

    Regular readers of this blog will understand how much of a bullseye this topic is for me as a cinephile and history lover. I wrote about visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in Springfield, Illinois, all the way back in 2008, which is when I also read the Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals the movie is based on. For that reason this essay is nearly two decades in the making, which probably explains why I was able to write it so quickly compared to previous ones.

    So I beseech you to read the essay and also check out Cinema Sugar’s list of the Top 76 Movies That Define America that will be rolling out throughout the month leading up to the Fourth of July. I was born for this theme, so look out for even more star-spangled cinematic goodies coming soon!

  • We Went Wild Kratts

    Last weekend we went to Wild Kratts Live! on stage in Madison. It’s basically an extended, supercharged episode of the show, with Chris and Martin Kratt in various animal costumes and doing silly antics while teaching about creature powers along the way. It was a thrill to be in a large amphitheater packed with kids and grownups who love their work as much as we do, singing along to the theme song and interacting during the show as if it were The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

    As for the brothers themselves, we were a little starstruck to see them in person considering they’re in the PBS Host Pantheon along with Fred Rogers, Bob Ross, and Julia Child. Their pure enthusiasm for animals and nature is infectious and honestly inspiring. At their age they most likely wouldn’t be hoofing it on stage in giant animal costumes for an hour and a half in a national tour if they didn’t totally love what they do.

    Their enduring power was evident in the huge cheer at the end of the show when they announced 20 new episodes were coming, including one on the family-favorite axolotl. You know we’ll be watching!

  • Links of the moment

    An ongoing series

    Several of my interests in one: Steven Spielberg on The Rewatchables talking 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

    Wikipedia as a Windows XP desktop.

    Shoutout to the Night Witches, (unfortunately) not an awesome band but an all-female Soviet bomber regiment who attacked the Nazis during World War II.

  • Media of the moment

    An ongoing series

    This Is A Gardening Show. Heard about this new Zach Galifianakis limited series on Netflix from friends, and it’s a delight. Funny, informative, family- friendly. Great hang.

    Project Hail Mary. Saw this with some dad friends, which felt appropriate since it’s both very dad-coded but also widely appealing as its box office shows. Deliberately did not read the book because I knew the movie was coming. (One of my controversial opinions apparently.)

    Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema. I read this new movie memoir from film critic Jeffrey Overstreet in advance of interviewing him for Cinema Sugar. Extremely up my alley and a pleasure to read.

    Late Shift. Reviewed and really dug this new Swiss-German film for Cinema Sugar. Like if The Pitt had a wearier, no-nonsense European cousin.

    KPop Demon Hunters. Very late to this mega-phenomenon, but now I’m in. The “How It’s Done” opening was one of the most electrifying movie sequences last year.

    A Wizard of Earthsea. Wanted to read a short fantasy novel and this Ursula Le Guin book hit the spot. Just really liked living in this world and her writing.

  • Color commentary

    I was at the library last weekend with my two boys and we were playing a board game with pieces of all different colors. My 7 year old son picked a purple piece, and another boy who was a little older than him and at the same table as us said, “Why did you pick purple? That’s a girl color.”

    This has happened many times over the years, coming from boys and girls. And every time it happens, including this time, I told him, “There’s no such thing as boy or girl colors. All colors are for everyone.” I also said purple was one of my favorite colors, which is true because purple is an incredible color.

    Parents: please make it extremely clear to your kids, both boys and girls, that all colors are for all people. There are no boy colors or girl colors. There used to be, but that time is gone.

    Color is one of the most incredible phenomena in existence. It is extremely dumb and self-defeating to segregate specific colors by gender when there are literally millions of variations of colors detectable by human eyes and available for our enjoyment.

  • The Kenny Rogers principle of dead websites

    Thanks to Chris Coyler for spotlighting the Internet Archive’s new book Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (available in print and as a free e-book). Going right to the top of my to-read list.

    Chris reflects on the report’s findings about how many websites have and have not been preserved by the Wayback Machine, and the ethics of letting websites “go dark” rather than “static-izing a site and putting it somewhere inexpensive to live as a viewable time capsule”.

    It’s a good question, and one I wrestle with a lot, both as a history lover who understands the value of preservation and as a person who is and has been responsible for the fates of various websites. I don’t plan on ever retiring from this website, but if I do a static-ized approach paired with a Wayback Machine snapshot and offline duplicate would probably be its ideal fate.

    And yet, I totally understand the impulse to just totally nuke a site. There is a weight to managing them that’s partly financial but mostly psychological. When you’re in the midst of it, you have enough energy to shoulder it. But over time, that weight can turn into a burden as you slowly (or quickly) accumulate more to deal with in life, and just casting it off can sometimes be the best decision. In the words of preeminent philosopher Kenny Rogers, “you got to know when to hold ‘em / know when to fold ‘em”.

    Perhaps this is a controversial opinion, but you can’t—and shouldn’t—preserve everything. I wrote about this back in 2013 in response to an article arguing for the right to be forgotten and the ethics of being able to delete digital memories or other assets. No matter the medium humans have used for communication over millennia—oral, cuneiform, paper, electronic—most of it doesn’t survive. We can mourn that loss for all of the illuminating history it would have contained; we can also acknowledge that’s just how it goes. Memento mori.

  • Stupid questions

    I’ve worked in libraries for a decade, much of that time at a public info desk answering people’s questions. And do you know what drives me absolutely crazy? Whenever someone starts their question with “This might be a stupid question, but…”

    You know why? Because there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

    To be clear, I’m not at all annoyed by the person or by their question. I’m annoyed by the internalized shame that has caused them to think that their lack of knowledge about something means that asking someone about it is a display of stupidity.

    And I don’t care what your question is or how simple it supposedly is. Curiosity and humility should be rewarded, not condescended to. So ask away.

  • Links of the moment

    An ongoing series

    Love this deep dive on the color theory behind why so many control rooms were seafoam green.

    What happened to movie taglines?

    I cannot believe the leaf sheep slug is a real animal. What a world.

    The Extrapolated Futures Archive maps real-world scenarios to the sci-fi stories that explore them.

    A clock that displays the current time… alphabetically.

    Worried about teens today? So were adults in the 1920s.

  • Paging The Falconer

    Yesterday I took the boys to a community cleanup event tied in with Earth Day and one of the exhibitors was a local raptor conservation group that brought live birds.

    Two key takeaways:

    1. The turkey vulture was ugly AF but had an insane wingspan. The falconers were also impressed by all the turkey vulture facts and terms the 7 year old knew. (Thanks, Wild Kratts!)

    2. The Aplomado falcon was a cute lil thing that also looked like he could completely ruin your life:

    (This is awkwardly zoomed in and cropped because we weren’t about to get too close to it.)

    They also had taxidermied wings and talons from owls and other falcons. I pity all the poor mice, birds, and other creatures that did get their lives ruined by those natural razor blades.

    The 7 year old completely lit up seeing these birds in person, as did I. We’ve seen owls up close before and red-tailed hawks from afar in our neighborhood, but there’s nothing like the live experience.

    (Requisite reference to Will Forte’s The Falconer series of sketches on Saturday Night Live, which originally aired between 2002-2006—i.e. the exact years I was in high school and thus the perfect age to appreciate.)

  • Fancy Earth Day

    Occasionally the 7 year old will for fun write a word or phrase in “fancy” letters as a way to give it a special emphasis. I can’t think of something more deserving of such an honor than good ol’ Planet Earth:

    Long may Earth (and the bonus Moon Earth) remain in all of our hearts (and the bonus little heart). (Plus some tic-tac-toe games randomly.)

  • My sons’ media of the moment

    A spinoff of an ongoing series

    A Real Bug’s Life. This National Geographic miniseries on Disney+ uses macrophotography to capture tiny insects in dramatized settings, supplemented by Awkwafina’s affable narration.

    Monsters, Inc. Before ever even seeing the movie, the two year old got absolutely transfixed by a figurine of Mike Wazowski (or as he calls him: “Mike Kadowki”), so we had to watch this and Monsters University. Good stuff!

    The Book with No Pictures. The seven year old is back into this great (non)picture book in a big way, something that keeps happening.

    Daniel Tiger. Still the toddler’s go-to, to the point where the “Brush Your Teeth with Daniel Tiger” video became part of his bedtime routine to distract him enough to let us brush his teeth.

    Ada Twist, Scientist. As kids shows go, this Netflix one based on the “Questioneers” book series by Andrea Beaty is better than the average if only because of its emphasis on science, imagination, and teamwork. The seven year old recently said he wants to be a scientist when he grows up, and books/shows like this are probably a big part why.