Category: Discoveries

I hate when it’s been so long since I logged into wordpress that it prompts me to make sure my admin email is still correct.

December 6, 2024 /

Because I see many more interesting web pages through my RSS reader than I want to dump into my ostensibly personal blog, a sneaky thing I have done for the past while is smuggle them out through my employer’s official newsletter instead. It comes out once a week, on Friday afternoons, and has a numbered list of about seven links with a couple sentences each attached to them. My name isn’t on the masthead, but we have an internal chat channel where anyone can suggest things, and by “anyone” I mean “75% of the time it’s just Brendan again.” The newsletter is obviously a marketing tool, but our marketing team (Olivia) is very dear and lets me get away with a lot. If you type the word think, and then the word shout, and then add a dot com and hit enter, you will be able to scroll down to the bottom of your browser tab and enter a throwaway email address if you’d like to read it.

While I am recommending weekly newsletters, my long-long-longtime friend Erin has recently launched her own endeavor as The Old Shoebox, and she is so, so good at it. I’d say Erin was born for the medium, but of course that’s not true, she was forged for the medium in the fires of many a shared doc. Between her newsletter and Sophie’s, I am tempted to reactivate my own long-dormant email blaster in an attempt to form a Rogers Park Magmatron.

But the words “long-dormant” above do not exactly hint at success for my component of the robot in question, so maybe I will just recommend joining me in curiosity about izzzzi. I have been a member of it for exactly one day and I already have great respect for its creators’ choice to directly oppose the dark patterns of nearly all social networks. I’m signed up as brendn, and if you would like to email me your username so we can be mutuals, maybe you’ll find out whether I go dormant there or not.

Things I have enjoyed of late

July 6, 2024 /

A lot of these are on YouTube, so if you are not a fan of YouTube, you should skip those. But it’s a hard world out there, and videos are some of the things that help divert me from ruminating on matters I can’t control.

  • For instance, Tico and his Man are a beautiful example of what can emerge from surrendering to inspiration and letting an enigmatic artist follow his unknowable muse, especially if that artist is a parrot.
  • I also feel a great freedom in having given up on Connections and replaced it in my mornings with friendlier puzzles. Cine2Nerdle has possibly the worst Wordle-derived name anyone has yet produced, but it does exactly what I wanted from Connections in terms of interface and hinting, and it’s about movies! (Don’t even talk to me about Cinematrix, I can’t stand it.)
  • The NYT web games team can still do good work, though. Strands has actual hints that can be earned through play (not that they’re often necessary—its challenge level varies, but tips toward the easier side). But the first few minutes of looking at a new day’s grid, waiting for my pattern-recognition neurons to wake up, are a consistent if brief instruction in patience.
  • But back to videos. I found Brad the Tech Time Traveller’s channel algorithmically—I think his literally-bricked hard drive documentary was what first caught my attention. I love to wind down in the evening by watching him work, and he also has a blog which ably demonstrates his time-travel credentials by skillful use of a <marquee> tag.
  • I’ve played a number of games set in the milieu of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but I’ve never actually read the original novel. I could just try that—the work is very much in the public domain—but these days I find it easier to digest fiction via audio. So when I want to occupy one hemisphere of my brain with Minecraft, I occupy the other with the podcast that motivated me to make this post in the first place. John Zhu originally started his Romance of the Three Kingdoms Podcast a decade ago, going through the book chapter by chapter in a kind of ongoing summation abetted by his own commentary and context. I find his work so charming and affable, and generous with explanations for a naive audience member like myself. Zhu has gone on to cover other works of similar import under the umbrella of The Chinese Lore Podcast. I’m almost a quarter of the way through the 174 (!) episodes of the original, so I’m very glad there will be more to listen to when I get through all of those.
  • Oh, also I still play Minecraft (and of course I still watch Joe). I got back into the game when my nieces and nephews became interested, and then they got kind of bored of trying to coordinate with me long-distance. I kept playing anyway. I can’t play it with joysticks at all, which rules out my Switch, and my laptop is a little unwieldy for games, so I’ve been playing the Bedrock version of the game on my tablet with a bluetooth mouse. I miss being able to mod the Java version but I don’t miss having to sit at a desk to play it. I have a nice little world going now, featuring such wonders as a villager who sells mending books and also a square chunk hole that I dug one block at a time from a mountaintop to the bottom of the world. It’s just a solo local file, but if you are a friend who would like to play in it, email me and I will click the button that makes it a server.
  • This is becoming more about video games than I expected. I can’t play Minecraft on our elliptical, so to occupy that version of my brain, I use a secondhand tiny piracy machine to play a randomized version of Final Fantasy III (6) called Worlds Collide. It’s promoted mostly as a racing game—the community holds regular tournaments where competitors all start with the same seed and try to be the first to beat the final boss. I have played through probably twenty times now and I must accept that I will never, ever be fast enough to compete in even the introductory qualifiers. But the scope of the game and my own teenage familiarity with it are juuust right to make it a fun puzzle with many possible solutions every time.
  • Let’s go back to the part where I’m bad at reading books! It took me an undisclosed amount of time to finish Roaming, because at first its illustrations of youthful personality interplay were too acute. But I barreled through the back half and loved it, as I do everything by either of the Tamaki cousins. I was spurred on in no small part by the chance to participate in my first ever Zoom-based book club meeting, a privilege of my subscription to Sophie’s wonderful newsletter. It was a treat! Sophie always has excellent book recommendations, and has since motivated me to get my heart broken by a whole different graphic novel.
  • And speaking of paid subscription privileges, ACHEWOOD IS BACK, BABY.
    It's just a robot butt joke.
  • I made the above visual goof in a few minutes on my phone with Mematic, which is kind of a silly app to pay for given how much image-editing software I already own. But I like how easily it allows me to make little jokes to show my friends in small amounts of time.

    Two panels from Scott Pilgrim featuring Todd Ingram saying "you know how you only use ten percent of your brain? well, that's because the other 90 percent is filled up with WILLIAM GIBSON AND JOHN LE CARRE QUOTES"

    it's the "Travis Kelce yelling" meme with a very long block of text implying that I am ranting about how RSS is still very much in use.

    These are just headlines where I have taken the words "with AI" and replaced them with "with an unpaid intern."

  • I loved getting to see Lucy’s collections of studio dances!
  • I continue to enjoy, above all else, being married to Kat.

    Brendan and Kat at the beach!

  • There’s just one more YouTube link left in this blog post. But I promise I saved it for last for good reason.

Figure traced in light

March 2, 2024 /

I’m so sad to learn that Dr. David Bordwell died at the end of February. Kristin Thompson’s posts to the blog they both maintained had made it clear that his health was in decline, but without knowing the specifics I admit to holding out some hope for his recovery. I didn’t know Bordwell personally myself, and was a relative latecomer to his work; both he and Thompson have been held in high regard by scholars and lovers of film for decades. But even in these few years since coming to it, their work has come to mean a lot to me.

By all accounts Bordwell was as generous with his time, attention, and goodwill as he was with his writing and knowledge. I consider the aforementioned blog the gold standard for this medium, and whenever one of his books went out of print he’d just upload a copy to his site and offer it up for free. He didn’t write to critique or pass judgment on his subject matter. Instead, he clarified, contextualized, reverse-engineered, and recommended, all out of love for the work and in pursuit of sharing it with others.

I could read Bordwell’s writing forever, and it’s a sorrowful thing to know that I won’t see him post anything new again. But there are thousands of pages in his back catalog I can still look forward to reading and learning from. I think I’ll feel grateful that he left that work to this world for the rest of my life.

December 21, 2023

“The diamonds seem to be pure geometry, the clubs simple machines (the king of clubs has a rather amusing nut-cracker), the hearts are (maybe) generative geometry, and the spades comparative geometry.”

December 3, 2023

“Before we try to uncover more information about the untimely death of Harry Lemaster, let’s see what else we can ‘dig up’ about him.”

July 31, 2023

“Non-fiction CD-ROMs are an easy butt of jokes about quaint outdated technology; talking about CD-ROM brings up visions of Encarta 95, Microsoft Dogs, and ancient versions of Grolier. What makes Journey to the Source interesting by contrast is that it’s not an easily obsoletable work. Already, in 1985, there were talks of building the massive Three Gorges Dam; when it was finally completed, between 2006 and 2012, many of the places Wong had visited were now underwater, the villages flooded and their inhabitants relocated. This narrative, its photos and its videos are valuable records of a time that’s now passed.”

January 9, 2023

“Quite a few composers have had their scores rejected by dissatisfied directors… it’s a recognized risk of the profession. A few films do exist with entirely different scores, almost always as a result of release in different countries. Until now, however, I’d never come across a film that exists with three different scores.“

December 28, 2022 /

I have felt stuck about writing here for a while, and there has been a death in my family that I will need to write more about when the words come to me. But right now I just want to talk more about blogs. One of the most exciting things that has come to my awareness recently is Phil Gyford’s ooh.directory of blogs and its RSS feed of newly added URLs. I don’t know if Mr. Gyford’s manual review and curation of these things is sustainable in the indefinite, but what a great idea! It seems to me like social media and SEO supremacy have rendered personal blog discoverability broken, but one need not fix the entire internet to build a little free library in one’s front yard.

By way of that directory, I have found a new source of dailyish poems, Janette Haruguchi’s ongoing explication of sashiko stitching, Bartosz Ciechanowski’s extraordinary interactive physics lessons, Jani Patokallio’s quest to find food from every Chinese province, special administrative region and contested island—in Singapore, and Bloom, a journal devoted to authors whose first major work was published when they were age 40 or older. And Eric Idle’s book reviews! A fan blog that’s just for Peanuts! Librarians dunking on books that need to go! And the directory is still so new. I suspect there are many more entries to come after the holidays.

Lucy linked, last month, to Dave Rupert’s suggestion to be a carpenter this time, and I’ve been turning it over in my mind ever since. I don’t know any real carpentry, though I’d be glad to have the space and time to learn. But the tools I do know can still make good things at the scale of individual humans, and that’s delightful to see, after a long time when I didn’t know where to look.