Category: Posts
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Don’t read the book before the movie
I say this as both a librarian who loves books and a cinephile who loves movies: Do not read the book before seeing the movie. I cannot emphasize this enough. Whenever there’s a new movie coming out that’s based on a book, people will think “Oh, I gotta read that so I’m ready for the…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series Love this deep dive on the origins of The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine”. Certified musical legend Alan Mencken breaks down his ‘90s Disney movie hits. Lots of fun and goofy designs in this 1956 Fun With Your Typewriter book. Really cool online tool to generate slipcovers for VHS, Blockbuster cases, and other…
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Recent Views
More photography here. A trace fossil of a leaf in winter: Are those lights in the sky UFOs? Mufasa? Reflections of the lamppost light from my camera? We’ll never know: A brief respite between snowball fights: One of their favorite chores is cleaning the windows: The entrance overhang at a nearby library is very edgy:…
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Always time for ‘Sleepytime’
We had time for one Bluey episode before bed, and the first one that popped up on YouTube was Sleepytime. “This is one of my favorite Bluey episodes,” my seven year old said. Dude, same, I thought. It’s not only one of the best episodes of Bluey but also one of the finest shortform stories…
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Papa with his quotes
These days our two year old has taken to saying, “What you say, papa?” To which I reply: “I say that what you say… is what I say.” Which is, of course, from the iconic ’90s masterpiece Newsies. This is just one of countless examples of me dropping quotes and cultural references my boys (and…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series Been loving Marcin Winchary’s thoughtful design takes lately, like Flickr’s inspiring URL scheme and the software versions of molly guards and Moylan Arrows. Times New Resistance is a Times New Roman impersonator font that “autocorrects the autocrats.” These 11th-century paper flowers, sealed in a Chinese cave, are a marvel of preservation. Speaking…
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Complexity at scale
Alan Jacobs wrote about his admiration for two “enormously complex projects that only became possible after the Industrial Revolution”: the manufacturing and logistical challenges the Allies faced in World War II leading up to D-Day and the studio system in the classic Hollywood era: It’s hard for me to imagine how D-Day did not end…
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The grammar of filmmaking
Steven Soderbergh in an interview talking about the grammar of filmmaking: There’s a certain way you put a sentence together to get the idea across; you can fuck with that, but at a certain point you fuck with it so much the idea is lost. That applies to almost any form. When I’m on set…
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What are we doing here?
There’s a scene from Band of Brothers I’ve been thinking about a lot these days. It’s from the penultimate episode (“Why We Fight”) which finds Easy Company en route to Berchtesgaden in April 1945. Private Webster (played by Eoin Bailey) beholds the thousands of surrendered German POWs marching the other way in defeat and has…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series Make something heavy. Pop songs in Renaissance and Baroque style. Great longread from Bilge Ebiri on Terrence Malick and his influential filmmaking style. “What if you held a tree long enough for it to grow around your hand?” You know I’m here for a Tangible Media Collection. Which HTML element are you?
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The ‘Hi mama’ archives
Part of our six year old’s bedtime routine is dictating a text for me to send to my wife while he’s brushing his teeth. See if you can detect a pattern in some recent messages: If these don’t epitomize six-year-old boys, I don’t know what does.