I don’t miss Twitter and for the first time in a long time, I gave serious thought to deleting my account. Doesn’t feel the same when I hop on. The magic is gone. Some change in audience and content over the last decade+, sure, but maybe it’s just I have changed? I keep bringing this up (like in week 18) because I didn’t full expect it to happen. I thought I was just going to take it off my phone, refocus a bit. In the past, while never a heavy poster, I was a diehard at-least-daily reader and generally unabashed fan. It felt like the nerve center for all my interests. Now, it’s a place I find interesting for a few minutes every week or so. Things change.
Highlights from last week include the Liberty vs. Valkyries game (wiped the floor with them), and the Powerhouse Arts Community Day, where I learned about Mucky the Dolphin.
Art
Almondsbury to Temple Quay, map in stitched canvas with hand painted silk applique by Kate Tarling. Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), painting by Francis Picabia. Bōtarō’s Nurse Otsuji Prays to the God of Konpira for His Success, color woodblock print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. A 2nd-century Roman brooch in the form of a dog attacking a boar.
Books
Rainbows End. Finally done! Appreciate the amnesia revival, wearables, competing augmented realities, asshole protagonist
Extinction, by Douglas Preston. Fun murder mystery with debts to Jurassic Park. There’s a lot of value in “whatever keeps the pages turning”.
Running
After a great stretch last week, this week I barely ran at all. On the bright side, got to fill in some big gaps in my map. I really love learning all these Brooklyn neighborhoods first-hand.
Articles & Episodes & Twoots
The case for more public youth art.
Adjusting for demographics and income, the South is an educational powerhouse.
In the U.S., more people work for the MTA than in coal mining.
Very strange and cool to see an LLM talk about how it thinks.
What happens when the intelligence goes out?
Scott Sumner suggests some overlooked films.
The Entity: On the Technologies of Late Cruisedom.
Clint Eastwood: “There are directors who lose their touch at a certain age, but I’m not one of them.”
Music
A few more form Jon Hopkins. Enjoyable, but none of them latched onto my soul the way my first exposure did back in week 15.
Blackbraid,”War Drums at Dawn on the Day of My Death“. Metal!
Elliot Cole: Percussion Music. Inventive, exploers the full spectrum of possibilities. Enjoyed this more than I expected.
Movies
Now You See Me. Did not enjoy! Wish we spent more time with the magicians instead of the cops. Maybe it all works better on a big screen?
The Return. I like how this film takes the events of The Odyssey for granted. We see everyone exhausted with this era of their lives, reckoning with what must come next. Ralph Fiennes is shredded! I hope I look as good in my 60s as he and Binoche do.
TV
The X-Files, s4e17 “Tempus Fugit”. A hangar and a cliffhanger!
Reacher, s3e6-7. Ready for it to end.
Words of Wisdom
“Nibble, and your appetite will grow.”
Mark Larson 