Chad Comello

Tag: internet

  • Requiem for a Mad Farmer

    RIP Wendell Berry.

    A select writer with his own tag on this blog, he was a rare triple threat in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I love his novels Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow as much as Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, his advocacy for the preservation of tangibility, his documentary, and his many poems—like “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” and “A Homecoming”, which we had read during our wedding ceremony:

    One faith is bondage. Two are free.
    In the trust of old love,
    cultivation shows a dark
    graceful wilderness at its heart.
    Wild in that wilderness, we roam
    the distances of our faith,
    safe beyond the bounds of what we know.
    O love, open.
    Show me my country.
    Take me home.

    Do yourself a favor and dive into any of it.

  • Links of the moment

    An ongoing series

    Typewriters + dictionaries + lexicography = the backwards index.

    Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail.

    A listening museum of mechanical keyboards and typewriters.

    How IKEA furniture lost its color.

    Fictional journeys drawn on the real world.

    A modern apartment full of ordinary things that once inspired awe. 

    Don’t paste the AI and don’t say just hello in chat.

  • Media of the moment

    An ongoing series

    Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. A delightfully lo-fi sci-fi goof centered around Back to the Future? You know I’d be into it. If there were any justice in the world Matt Johnson would get an Oscar nod for his wonderful, wacky performance. 

    The Odyssey. Truly what cinema is for. Zeus’s law requires that I commend movies like this for taking religion and myth seriously in all their weight and weirdness (complimentary). My first time in literal decades seeing a movie in IMAX as I usually don’t care about the format and would rather see a movie more cheaply, but I just had to make sure I saw the entirety of Agamemnon’s helmet and all the other goshdarn epic happenings.

    True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color by Kory Stamper. The author of my favorite book of 2017 is back with another one about dictionaries and the ubernerds who make them.

    How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell. As a blogger I appreciated learning a lot about the OG blogger/essayist and his era of the French Wars of Religion. Life was already hard enough during that time and then they added brutal religious violence? People, man…

    Pressure. While this is not great, it’s a first-ballot Dad Movie Hall of Famer, and I for one welcome the prospect of Band of Brothers alums—in this case Damian Lewis and Andrew Scott—getting back together to reenact World War II stories.

    Obsession. I’ve been out of the dating scene since 2012. Knew things were bad out there but didn’t realize this bad…

    Toy Story 5. This got me good a few times, probably because I went with my 7 and 3 year olds, the first time in a theater for the latter.

    If I Go Will They Miss Me. An achingly intimate movie with a magical-realist take on the universal experience of dads trying to outrun what we see reflected back by the mini versions of ourselves.

  • Podcasts of the moment

    It’s been nearly three years since my last podcast lineup check-in, so time to see where things stand in my good ol’ Apple Podcasts feed.

    Comparing all the previously check-ins, it’s interesting to see which shows have endured and which I merely visited for a limited time. I try to be extra judicious about what/who I spend my audio time with, so that often means being honest about which ones no longer hold my interest.

    On the tech side, I sorely miss Google Podcasts for letting me listen on the web. I typically use Podchaser for that now but it’s unreliable.

    My Current Lineup

    Regular Listens

    • Armchair Expert
    • The Big Picture
    • Filmspotting
    • Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
    • The Town with Matthew Belloni

    Depends on the Subject/Guest

    • The Rewatchables
    • Good Hang
    • Blank Check
    • Plain English
    • The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast
    • Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know
    • The Ezra Klein Show

  • Reading with your feet on the ground

    Mandy Brown on reading and the limits of empathy:

    To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means that you are there when you are reading; you, the reader, with your feet on the ground, a ground on which racism, misogyny, and extreme poverty are not so easily dispatched. You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt. To use reading to step into someone else’s shoes is to leave yourself behind.

  • 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.