One of the highlights of the last week is "hobby night", where we took a couple hours just to scratch a creative itch. I pulled out my new loom and weaved a couple inches of progress. Then pulled out my old guitar, basically the first time in several years.

One thing that struck me was just more awareness of my body, in a different way than the everyday stuff I can do on auto-pilot – laptop work, cooking, running, chores. When weaving, so often something would feel difficult and I'd realize it's because my shoulders had gotten all scrunched up, or posture was wacky, or fingers too tense. (It also felt difficult because I'm new and bad at it.) Ditto when playing guitar. I know enough to get too far ahead of myself, so I had to stop, rewind, force myself back to basics: focus on simple finger placement, just enough tension, making clean transitions, staying relaxed, etc..

The creative outlet felt really good. Keep your hobbies available to you!

Books
War and Peace. Down to the last 30%.

Running
Trying to find my morning flow again. Still not adjusted to the time change, and it's been hard to get through everything efficiently. For the weekend long run, more exploration in Bushwick/Ridgewood.

Around the Web
A glimpse of my future, I hope: "Years may wrinkle skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul."

Middlemarch is a novel about sympathising with everyone and The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch. (Thanks James!)

The Best Guide to the AI Revolution May Be Victorian Fiction.

What do Americans consider immoral?

It seems that youth sports promote zero-sum thinking in parents.

"Humans tend to over-index on this presumed precision of language, as if it were like a laser pointer aimed at a Rembrandt. It’s more like lobbing water balloons at cave shadows."

American Diner Gothic.

Music
Ivo Jannsen, Mallet Collective Amsterdam, Canto Ostinato: Live at the Concertgebouw.

Oren Ambarchi, Shebang. The momentum in "III" makes me want to get stuff done.

Biosphere, The Way of Time. I like the bass pulsing in "Like the End of the World".

Little John, Sly & Robbie, Give Thanks and Praise.

Three works by Anton Bruckner, from Orchestre de la Suisse Romande cond. Marek Janowski. Bruckner remains an unsolved puzzle...

• Symphony No. 1 in C minor, WAB 101
• Symphony No. 2 in C minor, WAB 102
• Mass No. 3 in F minor, WAB 28. The fifth movement Benedictus may be the only thing that stuck with me.

Three from Scott Tennant and his classical guitar...

• The Segovia Sessions
• Mysterious Barricades
• Wild Mountain Thyme – Celtic Music for Guitar. When the title track came on I thought, "Hey I know that from somewhere…"

Movies
Best in Show. DNF. Couldn't hang with it. The quirky characters semd to trend in the same direction, maybe the tone flattening them. Too unmotivated to reel me in this time.

Sorry, Wrong Number. Loved this one! Suspense and intrigue, and an immobile protagonist like Rear Window a few years later. NYC movies hit different when you've lived here a while.

After Hours. Fun little film. Scorsese! A weird-as-dreams or sharper-than-life Oz-/Odyssey-like attempt to get back home over the course of a long night, thwarted again and again.

The Pelican Brief. Solid thriller. Roberts and Denzel just leap off the screen in ways that few others do.

TV
The X-Files, s6e2 "Drive". Really fun episode, great pace.

Hannibal, s3e1–2

Last week I went back home. Visited old friends, bopped around Atlanta, got my Waffle House fix, sat for an impromptu photoshoot, walked by a lake, walked in the woods, worked for a few days from my parents' house, ate too much, slept too late, went on gentle hikes, and explored some parts of the state I'd never been to before.

Hadn't had a proper museum visit this year, so we fixed that thrice over at the Museum of Papermaking at Georgia Tech, Emory's Carlos Museum, and the Etowah Archaeological Museum at Etowah Indian Mounds. Also paid a visit to the New Echota historic site. The mounds were the coolest of the set – just about every place on Earth has the echoes of a previous civilization…

Coming back home with a full heart, and very pleasantly tired.

Art
Seated male figure in basalt from the Cartago-La Cabaña cultures.

Books
War and Peace.

Running
Very glad I took my running shoes with me on my trip. Didn't run as much as I initially thought I would, but there's no outlet like it, and came back home in better shape than I usually do after week-long trips.

Around the Web
There is nothing about being a parent that isn’t a cliché.

Reviving Atlanta's south downtown neighborhood.

"You can’t have craft without being at peace with pride and embarrassment existing."

"Have Oscar voters’ tastes improved since I was a teenager, or have I become a boring, middle-aged establishmentarian who likes boring, competent movies?"

UTF-8, Explained Simply.

How to end your extremely-online era. "Most of a good life is simply refusing to do what is bad."

2026 is 20% complete.

Music
Catrin FInch, Seckou Kaita, SOAR. The kora is such a good instrument. "Listen to the Grass Grow".

Ishmael Ensemble, A State of Flow.

A few from Erik Hall…

• Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato. Really sings in
  "Sections 31–40".
• Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. One of the best from one of the best.
• Solo Three

Movies
Peter Rabbit. Pleasantly charming, good for a couple laughs.

TV
The X-Files, s6e1 "The Beginning".

Dark, s2e4-8. Second season complete.

Pokémon: Indigo League, s1e2. The plot didn't do much for me but at least the theme song rips.

Last week was Sunday afternoon reggae into Sunday evening blizzard. It's nice to feel cozy inside while outside is chaos. But you have to take care to get back out again.

Last year I went to a weaving workshop. This year I got a loom. Just a small one to scratch the itch. Now the question is figuring out where this thing fits in my life. I feel like it'll be a great evening time-passer.

My latest lifehack – from lazy accident – is doing (some of) my chores on weekdays. It's a great way to wind down productively – engaged, but not stressed – and helps the weekends feel more spacious.

Art
Far Echo, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape, acrylic on canvas on board by George Morrison. There's some really, really cool stuff in the QuiltCon 2026 Winners Gallery.

Books
War and Peace.

Running
I've now run every street in Red Hook. ✔️

Around the Web
Redefining makeovers.

"Phoniness wasn’t a sign I was fundamentally, intrinsically unworthy of my aspirations. Phoniness was, in fact, an essential part of any aspirational project."

How to get into something new.

How to make use of books you don't read. "You do not always know where to find what you are looking for."

Research as leisure activity.

A British explorer’s quest to reach all the middles of nowhere.

The nine lives of the Franklin Avenue Shuttle.

Saturday Storm, poem by Phyllis McGinley.

I love the format for Jennifer Mills' weekly updates.

Why Are So Many Teen Girls Still Tearing Their A.C.L.s?

"At this point, how many more leggings can we buy?"

Music
Listened to a few from Sly & Robbie, after learning of Sly Dunbar's death. It all sort of blurs together for me, but it's a good vibe.

• Hordcore Dub
• The Unmetered Taxi
• Crucial Reggae
• Raiders of the Lost Dub
• The Sting

Biosphere, Shenzhou. Good one! Moody and floaty and slow. Listen: "Ancient Campfire" and "Houses on the Hill".

Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air. A certified classic, and a great companion to…

Laurie Spiegel, The Expanding Universe.

The Tallis Scholars, Renaissance Radio. Solid compilation. "If Ye Love Me".

Elori Saxi, Henry Solomon, Seeing Is Forgetting. Electronics + sax/woodwinds. "Reno Silver".

Apparat, The Devil's Walk. "Goodbye".

Jamie xx, In Waves.

Absolutely, Cerebrum.

Movies
Ghostwatch. Maybe a progenitor of the found footage horror genre. Interesting more for historical reasons. Maybe would have landed more if I'd watched it at nighttime!

Juror No. 2. This one had been lingering on my watchlist forever. Glad I made time for it. Need to keep going with legal thrillers.

TV
Dark, s2e1–3.

CSI: Miami, s4e23.

It's amazing how much difference a solid chunk of time can make. A couple days I had frustratingly chopped up calendar – doctor appointment, mid-day transit, meetings on and off every 30 minutes. And on another day: early morning, empty office, nothing on the calendar 'til after lunch. Blank slate for complete thoughts.

Each draining in their own way. Last week I found myself returning home completely flatlined. Enough energy to get out a few sentences but after that: …………. What a weird feeling.

It's now the Year of the Fire Horse. Fun to read up on my own year's animal and element. It's not for me, but like horoscopes or fortune-telling or other divination, it still scratches that itch where it's inherently compelling to recognize yourself in a description.

We're set for another blizzard in a few hours, and I find myself wishing for a good ol' fashioned snow day.

A great Saturday morning: coffee, pastry, and a date at the library.

Art
Fish and Mushrooms, woodcut on paper by Luigi Rist. Oiwa (Oiwa-san), from the series "One Hundred Ghost Tales (Hyaku monogatari)", color woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai – "The title refers to a game in which people would gather at night to tell scary stories, putting out a candle after each tale until the room was completely dark." Large Mowing Machine with Horses, oil on canvas by Jacques Villon. Avatar Reef Teapot, semi porcelain by Delfina Emmanuel. Monkeys on a Fruit Tree, ink and colors on silk hanging scroll by Mori Sosen.

Books
War and Peace. You spend 1000 pages with fictional characters and then Napoleon bursts into the room.

Running
Settling in nicely, somehow my biggest weekly mileage since September. Reminding myself that the short little runs as a daily dose still have huge positive spillover into the rest of my days. Note-to-self, treat exercise like brushing your teeth.

Around the Web
Don't Call It Art!. Pre-ordered! Get on board.

"The other notion of playfulness that I find really useful is from Maria Lugones, the great feminist philosopher, in this beautiful paper called 'Playfulness, World-Traveling, and the Loving Gaze.' She says that playfulness is the ability to move lightly between worlds."

"It's not so much that we need to teach them these things, as much as we need to encourage them to keep believing these things."

Resilient Children, Struggling Parents: Mapping American Parenting. "Using a composite score that measures the extent to which children have independent, playful, socially-diverse, and technology-lite childhoods, we find that kids in the Great Plains, Mountain states, and New England have the highest scores, while a cluster of states around Southern Appalachia are where children have the least independent, least socially-diverse, most technologically-dependent childhoods."

"But needing and being needed—the bottomless empathy and vulnerability they require—are exquisite not because the feeling of love is so special but because the person you love is, to you."

"Science fiction is often called upon to cast a line into the future to plumb the possible consequences of our modern ironies."

"When I’m on set or thinking about a story, making sure that the audience is engaged and that I’m also excited, I have to fight through the sensation of, 'Oh my god, another fucking over-the-shoulder shot.' I have to push through that and go, 'You’re building a sentence. Getting upset when you have to shoot an over-the-shoulder shot is like getting upset at using the word ‘and’ or ‘the’ in a sentence. It has to be done. It’s part of the grammar.'"

A color memory game. I got 44.07/50 on first and only attempt, happy with that. (via)

Women's clothing sizes are a mess.

The Taxonomy of Merch. "Why does wearing merch in real time, in the place it belongs to, feel so icky?" (via)

Cut Gems. The art of retouching photographs of museum gem collections.

I turned my website into my feed reader. Very cool idea. 🤔

The argument for free buses.

"The 'America is behind Europe on trains' narrative compares visibly mediocre service for passengers but ignores invisibly great service for cargo. Instead of asking why America lags Europe on passenger rail, we should be asking ourselves whether America can have better passenger rail and whether it should want to."

Music
A few more from Weval this week (I really enjoyed their self-titled a few weeks ago) a few weeks ago…

• The Weight. Favorite tracks are "The Weight" and "Someday".
• Remember. "Everything Went Well" is a little Washed Out-y, in a good way.
• Chorophobia. I like "Better", especially the bassline.

Monteverdi, Madrigali e lamenti; Madrigali Guerrieri et Amorosi.

Eric Whitacre, Light & Gold. Some really nice choral music. I remember playing one of his pieces back in college (which I did not like very much).

Various Artists, WaJazz: Japanese Jazz Spectacle Vol. I and Vol. II. "Summer Wind" is cool.

Movies
The Rainmaker. Apparently I've seen this before but I didn't remember a thing. Not bad, but not sure it will stick.

Sisu. Second viewing (the first). Holds up! Great warm-up to double-feature with the new sequel…

Sisu: Road to Revenge. Buster Keaton x Fury Road. So fun. For me, the best chases involve some degree of watching and waiting and sneaking around. This delivers.

TV
Dark, s1e7–10. The story has been scifi for a while, but this is the first time we the mechanics rendered on-screen. Loses a bit of mystery and magic that way, and maybe some of the weight?

I love surfing the web. On a long holiday weekend, a perfect way to slosh around and almost-but-not-quite totally waste a few hours. Over the last couple weeks, I've seen more and more posts referencing nostalgia for the Old Web™. If you're over 30 years old, you have a better sense of it. Before the big social platforms, when all the sites were personal or academic, or even the corporate ones that were moderately inept (like the rest of us) and/or experimental. Such a great feeling then, when you caught a good wave. Slipping into the flow and hopping from site to site, finding all the warp portals between the good spaces where you see the best of our collective weirdness. Captured that again for a little while today.

Books
War and Peace. Almost halfway! Some of these people are super messy.

Running
Trying to find a rhythm again.

Around the Web
Why holidays are on Mondays!

"Here’s an idea: Appoint yourself the weekly columnist of whatever your subject is." And the self-appointed artist residency.

"The meta-skill is this: learning to spot what becomes possible when a constraint disappears."

The Origins of One of the Most Beloved Video Games of All Time.

A game(?) that rewards patience.

A Year in Drawings.

Searching for Birds.

Where do parents find the time?. Basically, less sleep and less screen time.

Parents and affordability in New York City.

The World Is Forever Ending.

Music
Choir of New College, Oxford dir. Robert Quinney, Like as the Hart: Music for The Templar's Garden. What a great, great album, all choral interpretations of Psalm 42. Came across it when looking for recordings of Palestrina's "Sicut cervus", itself beautifully done. The real show-stopper for me is Buxtehude's. "Quemadmodum desiederat cervus", BuxWV92. I keep coming back over and over.

Ninajirachi, I Love My Computer.

A couple from Yosi Horikawa, good electronic stuff often with nature sounds, city sounds, field recordings. On Spaces, I like "Crossing". And on Impulse. "Soil" is the winner.

El Jazaah, El Jazaah.

Sabri Brothers, Ya Habib.

Movies
The X-Files. The "will they or won't they" is so agonizing and fun.

Runaway Jury. Legal thriller is an under-rated genre. Seems like we're just not making them as much?

TV
The X-Files, s5e19 "Folie a Deux" and s5e20 "The End". Weird season, on to number six.

Dark, s1e6.

Hmmm. No deep thoughts? Too many long days leading to too many short nights.

Art
Exquisite corpse paintings by Kerry James Marshall. (via). Paper flowers from the Tang dynasty era. Mende artist helmet mask (ndoli jowei). Abdullahi Mohammaed with Mainasara, photo by Pieter Hugo. Face Holding a Leaf, oil on canvas by Léopold Survage. Untitled Donut Drawing, colored pencil with graphite by Judy Chicago.

Books
War and Peace. The wolf hunt is a major highlight so far, tragedy and thrill both in the mix. I love these little interludes / transition moments.

Running
Minimal!

Around the Web
Your free time is for you and How to stop being boring.

Learn about yourself by making something you’ll throw out right away. "It won’t be anything you can’t handle, because you’ve been handling it this whole time."

"The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you." (via)

"All of these sports make the process of improvement a central point in all of them. And I think that is what makes them cool."

"Athletes possess large quantities of high-value, portable items,” said Nikos Passas, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University, making them appetizing targets for burglars. And because their work schedules are publicly available ahead of time, everyone knows when they won’t be home".

Immigrants have a tremendous net-positive effect.

"One of the arguments for religion is just there’s a place you can stuff your dogmatism into beliefs about the Trinity, and then the rest of you is free to be open minded, because you’ve taken care of your dogmatism. You’ve sent it somewhere where it doesn’t really matter that much for a lot of decisions."

"Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers motivate people is in management books."

Music
M. Sage, Tender / Waiting. Reminds me a bit of the Tindersticks soundtrack for Stars at Noon.

Antonio Caldara, Complete Cello Sonatas.

Eberhard Weber, The Colours of Chloë.

Sam Gendel, Nate Mercereau, digi-squires.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Best Urdu Qawwalies. Bangers.

Sunleif Rasumussen: Songs of Solitude perf. Michala Petri, Theatre of Voices, Concerto Copenhagen.

Movies
The Eiger Sanction. A rare DNF. I really like most Clint Eastwood movies I've seen, but this one seemed slow and sophomoric.

Jaws. Masterpiece. "You lose one, you rig one."

OBEX. Reminds me of Mandy a little bit in overall vibe – dreamy hallucinatory reality-blurring. But a lighter, kinder form. But also of Hundreds of Beavers, in black-and-white creativity and constraint.

TV
The X-Files, s5e18 "The Pine Bluff Variant". Mulder undercover!

Dark, s1e3–5. It's growing on me a bit, took a few to get on the wavelength. (And also because I wasn't really paying attention.)

Line of Duty, s6e6–7. This show is over and I'm sad. Favorite all-time? It's up there.

His & Hers, s1e1. Dahlonega mentioned!

We have a whiteboard on our fridge. Most weeks, we update the whiteboard with what's happening that week, along with doodles, quotes, competitive nonsense, bragging rights, etc.. My wife is great about photographing it before we erase and start the new one, and had built a nice historical archive. So I made a photobook of the whiteboards from the last few years.

I'm growing to love digital-to-print projects like this. A while back I made my old Day One iphone journals into a printed book. I've got some ideas for more…

Had another Friday morning coffee & coworking with some friends. What a treat.

Felt like a rough work-week even though nothing notably bad happened. I gotta work on ending each day crisply before I crash! It's often better to step away and circle back rather than power through.

Art
A Qing dynasty-era cape embroidered to look like peacock feathers. Broken and Restored Multiplication, oil and silver paper on canvas by Suzanne Duchamp. Outside the Box, quilt by Jenny Voss. Double Still Life, sculptures by Katy Cowan.

Books
War and Peace.

Running
Nursing a minor injury, so I'm using that and the lingering piles of snow as an excuse to recupe.

Around the Web
Isometric NYC.

"Upload an architectural render. Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November."

Map of home values by ZIP code.

Pretty Images Are Dead. Long Live Documentary Photography. "Documentary photography survives because it possesses something AI fundamentally cannot: intent born from witness."

Found cassette tapes.

"Politics is a repeated interaction. If you want politicians to keep doing the useful things, you have to show that useful things earn support."

Five paragraph order.

An archive of mouse pointers. I dislike the latest macOS version rounded off the tip of my mouse pointer. I like it sharp.

The story of the macOS poof animation.

"Stamina is a core bottleneck to work and with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased."

"Here’s what using Claude Code initially felt like: cooking with ingredients from a stranger’s fridge."

Everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong.

Latent space engineering and management as an AI superpower.

Music
Amina Claudine Myers, Song for Mother E. Gospel organ/piano. Love the extended organ opening in "Have Mercy Upon Us".

Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 18; Franck: Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra perf. Alexis Weissenberg, Berliner Philharmoniker cond. Herbert von Karajan. The Rachmaninov is probably a candidate for top-3 or top-5 most-listened-to classical works, always pays dividends. The Franck was in one ear and out the other.

Remscéla, Milkweed. Fuzzy, distorted lofi folk songs based on the Táin saga. See "How Conchobor was Begotten".

Ø, Mika Vainio, Sysivalo. Largely rhythm-less, dark, vaguely-ombinous ambient. I like it! "Etude 4".

Purelink, Faith.

Movies
This Is Not a Film. I respect Panahi's work, and the drive/obsession/risk to put this together but as a viewer, you're mostly watching a guy talk on the phone in his kitchen and it's not the most interesting thing to watch.

Things Will Be Different. Good scifi time travel thriller. Great little world they've invented here. Wonderful sound, too. More movies about siblings!

The Meg. A re-watch. Humor falls flat, and repetitive in the way of many monster movies, but overall decent.

TV
The X-Files, s5e17 "All Souls". I like these religious episodes, and how the writers blend and remix historical materials.

Line of Duty, s6e5. Only two more episodes left of this show, and it's making me sad.

Law & Order, s1e2.

I read (kinda sorta, mostly, sometimes DNF'ed) 31 books in 2025. A drop in total count but I leaned into longer ones a bit more. I think this was a good change overall. Not my best reading year, but the highs were high, and very British!

My top two, call it a tie:

Middlemarch (Eliot). Fictional story of a town in rural England, early 1800s, and its various inhabitants – sons, daughters, doctor, lawyer, mayor, etc. – pursuing their life. Rich and lively, couldn't put it down.

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Castor). Two kings, two cousins. One who wanted all the trappings and ceremony and none of the responsibility of governing. Another who wanted the burden (and power), and took it, and learned the costs. It's a cliché but some books really do make the figures "come alive".

Other great ones from the year:

• Rainbows End (Vinge). Scifi thriller with augmented reality and wearable tech and dementia cures.
• Extinction (Preston). Jurassic Park, but detectives and Neanderthals.
• On the Calculation of Volume, Book 1 (Balle). Novel of philosophical Groundhog Day time repetition.
• Sense and Sensibility (Austen). Two daughters find their way to love!
• The English and Their History (Tombs). Exactly what it says on the tin, but just the right balance of momentum and detail.

Interesting moment to the visit the doctor this week. A routine visit, fill out forms, take some blood, quiet typing and clicking, off you go. But ambient stress from a frustrated patient, at wit's end, nearby at the reception desk seeped in for a few moments. It's such a vulnerable space.

On Friday, we had friends over for coffee and breakfast and early morning chit-chat. And since we all have cushy tech-worker jobs, transitioned into a communal work-from-home session for an hour or so before parting ways. I'm patting myself on the back for the novelty. We (bozos with no children or other practical obstacles) should do this more often. It's good to prioritize something wholesome and rewarding early in your day. (Having guests was also a helpful nudge to tidy up after moving a bunch of furniture around.)

Yesterday evening we spent some time doing some artwork, making collage masks from paper cutouts. It felt so refreshing to do something instinctual, following reflexes, running with the first idea that seemed good enough. Such a change from my usual day-to-day work, which usually requires thoughtful precision every single time. Safe spaces+++.

Books
War and Peace, cont.. Mildly regretting my choice to go with the completely-unabridged version. Humbling to be at page 640-something and only ~33% done. I enjoy the companionship of this book, though.

Running
A down week in mileage, but lucky to have two snowy trail runs in the mix. Tied my coldest run ever, out at 12° as today's winter storm laid down its first couple inches. This week's weights session was a good reminder that I should lift more often.

Around the Web
Playful children’s drawings become colorful handmade chairs. (via)

Moss and Mondrian, a nice snippet on mutual influence and how history gets simplified.

"If by any chance you are wondering how to make yourself smarter, learn how to appreciate almost everybody, and keep on cultivating that skill."

"A much more reliable way to stay offline is just to be doing things so engaging that it wouldn’t occur to you to drift online in the first place." (via)

Cover your 25 miles, then rest up.

The best way to read the internet. Amen. You'll have to take my RSS feeds from my cold, dead hands.

"You're building an anxiety management system that happens to look like productivity."

The Etymology of English Colours and How 'guacamole' is related to 'avocado' and 'mole'.

Japanese death poems.

Now that my storehouse
has burned down, nothing
conceals the moon.

Don't waste your back pressure.

"Design and planning becomes the bottleneck when agents write all the code".

Music
The South Hill Experiment, MOONSHOTS. There's some fuzzy psychedelic folk rock but also some groovy stuff. Had a lot of fun with this one. See "Gabo's Last Resort".

Weval, Weval. A theory: electronic duos are consistently better than solo acts. I like "Square People" and
"Days".

Claudio Monteverdi – Madrigali e lamenti, Montserrat Figueras and La Capella Reial de Catalunya dir. Jordi Savall. "Lamento della ninfa" is a standout. Also realizing that I've gotten much more into "early music" in the last year or so. Mostly at random/opportunistically, but I think there's room for a more serious, intentional dive.

(Usually a good sign when I keep albums around for another week, like these first three.)

Seun Kuti, Egypt 80, Heavier Yet (Lays the Crownless Head). Afrobeat will never die.

Lee "Scratch" Perry, Bob Riddim, Destiny. Dub/ska/reggae. Such a beautiful voice! "Ring Pon My Finger" and "Infinity (Dub)".

Brittney Carter, As I Am. Rap. Don't lvoe it, don't hate it. The interludes kill me, but I like the drum work in "Running".

Charles LLoyd, Zakir Hussain, Eric Harland, Sangam. Indian/jazz fusion jam session meanderings. I couldn't get into it.

Movies
The Da Vinci Code. Second view (the first). After a long day I needed some smooth-brain entertainment and it delivered. Two+ hours of non-stop conspiracy theory. I wonder if there's any good writing about this movie/franchise paving the way for 21c social distrust.

The Mastermind. A dope robs a museum, reaps the consequences. Filed under Kelly Reichardt, one of the most consistently excellent directors today.

Finding 'Ohana. Light family-forward adventure in the spirit of The Goonies. Owes a debt, mostly pays it.

TV
The X-Files, s5e16 "Mind's Eye". This season is getting confusing now. I'm not sure where anyone stands, and I'm not sure that's intentional.

Law & Order: UK, s1e1. Everything instantly recognizable and slightly "off". It delivers.

Dark, s1e1–2.

Line of Duty, s6e3–4. Is this my all-time favorite show?

I watched 127 movies in 2025, on par with last year. Of the first-time viewings, these are the ones I'd be most happy to watch again. Just like my write-up of movie favorites from 2024, I'll excerpt previous posts for the best of the best. Listed chronologically, in both the tippy-top-tier and the contenders. What I see in common for the top four is a compassionate, affirming spirit – whether that in new friendships, on the job, in love, in family and community.

Tampopo.

A stranger rides into town and helps a woman with her struggling noodle shop. The feeling may fade a bit with time, but right now I’m in love with this movie. Such a big heart. And expansive enough that the main plot is interspersed with vignettes with unrelated characters, snapshots of a world beyond, full of concerns and worries and dreams just like our own.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

Now this is a movie! Dudes being dudes.

Compensation.

Told in silent-film style, a story of two deaf Black women, in two different eras, finding love. Love the borrowing from pan-the-photograph documentary style, and vivid captions that let you imagine and dream along with the stories.

Little Women (1994).

Heart: warmed!

Honorable mentions, really can't go wrong:

• Rebel Ridge
• Nosferatu (2024)
• Love & Basketball
• Da 5 Bloods
• Sisu
• Speak No Evil (2022)
• Elevation
• The Clock (1945)
• Sinners
• Practical Magic
• The Order
• Timecrimes
• The Princess Diaries
• 28 Years Later
• Tron
• Woman of the Hour
• Black Bag
• Train Dreams
• Silent Night (2023)