Category: Posts
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series Size of Life is another banger from Neal.fun, one of the best places on the internet. Shoutout to ROMAN and other obscure Excel functions. Unfortunately, I have to side with Marco Rubio in the Times New Roman/Calibri font war. In praise of the prescient and “punishing digitopia” of Spielberg’s Minority Report. The…
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Blogging as whittling
In his year-in-review post, Tom MacWright lauds the benefits of blogging: Blogging has been, for me, an unalloyed success. It has connected me to people, given me a place to develop my thoughts, made some of my work on the internet – a place always decaying and forgetting – a little more permanent. I absolutely…
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Media of the moment
An ongoing series Christmas music. ‘Tis the season! Some newer albums I’ve been enjoying: Happy Golden Days by The Arcadian Wild, Sleigher by Ben Folds, and Family Christmas Album Vol. II by The Oh Hellos. Homestar Runner. I didn’t realize this web series was still around, but browsing the website was a blast from my…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner. How Marlon Brando changed acting. Red sprites FTW. How to fix a typewriter and your life.
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Dadgeball!
The hit game this autumn among my six year old’s playground friend group was one-way dodgeball, where another dad and I tried to nail them with a regular-sized dodgeball and one of those small rubber balls that come with the Little Tikes basketball sets. We’ll call this game… Dadgeball. Let me tell you: there are…
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Vega + aurora borealis = a movie sequel waiting to happen
Thanks to a few large coronal mass ejections from the sun, Chicagoland was treated to a brilliant display of aurora borealis tonight, which I attempted to capture through the trees outside our front door: Don’t think I’ve ever seen it in person before, so that was neat. Also neat? (Stay with me here…) If you…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series As a Class of 2010 graduate, I can confirm: the best time to be in college was 2006-2010. Approaching our work as art can change our worlds. Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is an “incredible informational product that is 100% EXEMPT FROM DONALD TRUMP’S STUPID TARIFFS!” A dad turned his favorite…
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My sons’ media of the moment
A spinoff of an ongoing series A Minecraft Movie. We watched this a few weeks ago as a special treat and the Minecraft-obsessed six year old was completely locked in. (To be clear, he’s never played the actual game but has absorbed a lot about it from books and his friends.) Books. The two year…
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Do Not Pass, Pass With Care
We were driving through southern Michigan awhile back and I noticed how the signs on country roads would change between DO NOT PASS when approaching a hill or turn and then PASS WITH CARE once the road straightened out. But it was rather comical how quickly they went back and forth, because it’s not like…
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Recent Views
More photography here. Caught this ornate fountain sculpture in Middleton, WI, in the perfect morning light: Specters of autumn at our local park: Will never get enough of the two year old’s chubby hands: And the two year old will never get enough of playing fetch with his fur cousin: Spotted this heart-shaped root on…
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Against future-proofing
Joan Westenberg on the absurdity of trying to future-proof your life: We’ve all seen the LinkedIn exhortations: learn the right skills before the machines take your job, invest in the right companies before automation hollows out the market, anticipate the right policies before artificial intelligence rearranges the political order. Etc. But the more we live in…
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Three layers of focus
In his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, Johann Hari quotes former Google strategist James Williams about what he classifies as three types of focus. 1. Spotlight: This is when you focus on “immediate actions,” like, “I’m going to walk into the kitchen and make a coffee.” You…