For the first time in a long time, I didn’t make it to midnight on New Year’s Eve. Jetlag took me down early, and I was too drowsy to set the 11:50pm alarm I’d told myself I would just a little while earlier. But I woke up and took a walk in the park and saw a new sunrise on familiar streets, a celebration in its own way. I appreciate how many good things came my way in 2024 – wedding, graduating school, new job, family visits – and plenty of other small victories here and there. What do I want from 2025?
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.” (via)
Art
I fulfilled my 2024 week 51 hope of seeing the exhibition of Gee’s Bend quilts at the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery. Worth clicking through their gallery there, but to call out a couple favorites:
- Marlene Bennett Jones’s “Gee’s Bend Pockets (2024)“, made me think of barns and corduroy farmland.
- I like how the checkerboard quilt from Rita Mae Pettway, “My Way (2017)” used a few different shades in the lighter-colored squares, and the overstitching guides your eyes across.
- The photo of “Star Bright (2023)” by Mary Hall, Doris Mooney, and Elaine Spencer doesn’t quite do it justice – the ruching gives it a three-dimensionality that only translates in person.
Running
Returned to running after 10 days away while vacationing. Felt good to get back out there. Now I’ve got a three-month window to prep for a 20-mile trail race in early March.
Books
The Path of Daggers, finally done. I’ll wait a while before tackling the next in the series. Glad to have momentum again.
Middlemarch. Only a few pages in. I’ve heard raves and I’ve heard rants. What will I think?
Articles & Episodes & Twoots
I’m loving Issue 1 of The Metrograph. Great collection. From the “Movies Come To This Place for Magic” interview, a couple of fun excerpts:
“Michael Weber: We believe that as magicians, we don’t keep our secrets from our audiences, we keep secrets for our audiences. […]
Derek DelGaudio: […] There’s this dictum, ‘Magicians guard an empty safe.’ It’s about the disappointment laymen experience when they discover a secret is something simple or banal, like a mirror.”
And when telling a story, magic and drama are somewhat at odds:
“There is a fundamental difference between drama and magic. Drama aims to keep the audience wondering, ‘What happens next?’. But an audience’s reaction to magic is the opposite, it’s reflective. They see something magical and ask, ‘Wait, what just happened?'”
India has too few tourists and how to visit India for normies. I should move it higher on my list?
Enjoyment is a skill. You should buy into this idea, and I like a lot of the suggestions here. “Sometimes, when I encounter creative work by someone from a location I’m not familiar with, I’ll go on Google Street View and take a poke around a neighborhood they’re from, or might be from. I feel like it gives me hints about the lived texture that they’re drawing from or commenting on.”
Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks. I appreciate these reflections on something I’ll never experience first-hand.
Using LLMs and Cursor to become a finisher. There will be earth-shattering discoveries and breakthroughs to come, but AI will also unlock a lot of progress by unlocking small, incremental progress that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Music
The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis. Funky jazzy big-band. Mostly didn’t click with me but I liked the downtempo “Railroad Tracks Home“.
Mary Halvorson, Cloudward. Angular jazz ensemble. I like the layers in “Tailhead“.
Movies
Alien: Romulus. I have mixed-to-positive feelings, but it is decidedly an Alien movie, and delivers everything you’d expect. I love that our main android is not especially smart. He’s slow, loyal, vulnerable, needs babysitting. “Let me borrow your robot” is a great starting point. Too bad some of the digital effects looked pretty cheap, the sweeping space vistas for one, but most especially and tragically the rival android – really poor choice. I struggled with the young cast, too. They seem too fresh and healthy for indentured laborers in a mining colony? Nice touch with the dipping birds and the canary in the mine. Lots of fan service, cliches, and echoes, but it ties into the mythology well, and it’s all fun!
TV
The X-Files, s4e2 “Home“. Maybe the grossest, most uncomfortable episodeinbreds, gross, so dark
CSI: Miami, s6e9. Calleigh’s life is threatened! I’m astounded by the number and length of time-killing filler scenes – their main use of the crime lab.
Cross, s1e7–8. What a stressful ending! Great wrap-up, and I hope we get another season. The fake-out with the sedatives and faulty execution was brutal. I love the occasional swerves into Shaft mode, in music and tone.
Words of Wisdom
“never underestimate the power of going somewhere beautiful and just sitting there“
Mark Larson 
