I have a friend who wears headphones on long solo runs because, he says, “I can’t spend that much time alone in my head.” I disagree. He can, and he should. Spending that much time inside one’s head, along with the voices and the bats hanging from the various dendrites and neurons, is one of the best things about running, or at least one of the most therapeutic. Your brain is like a duvet cover: Every once in a while, it needs to be aired out.
As someone who can’t do basic household chores like washing dishes or folding laundry without a pair of headphones, this cut me deep.
# Dec 10, 2018We visited the Titanic museum in Belfast last year and it was a great museum but honestly, this connected with me on a much deeper level. There’s a good reason the narrator keeps saying “just imagine”.
Because just imagine.
The best part of The Incredibles 2 wasn’t the story but the amazing world they built. This is a great, tiny peek into the design process behind creating that world.
# Nov 20, 2018This is some pretty cool news - the Rijiksmuseum in Amsterdam will be livestreaming their restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.
If you don’t know much about this painting then you can do a lot worst than checking out Peter Greenaway’s film Night Watching, which is a weirdly mesmerizing primer on the history behind the painting, told as if it was a Rembrandt painting itself.
My neck hurts. I am never not looking down. When I am not looking at my phone, I become slightly anxious. And then, when I do actually look at it, I become even more so. It reminds me of how I once felt about cigarettes. I experience the world with a meticulously crafted, tiny computer slab between me and it. I am an asshole. But so, maybe, are you?
Instead of the usual gushing over the new shiny, I wish more people wrote phone reviews like this.
# Oct 16, 2018I spent way too long on this dumb joke.
# Oct 8, 2018The new Apple Watch OS has improved “exercise detection”. Except when I’m sitting on the couch, rocking the baby to sleep, it will buzz and say “It looks like you’re doing an elliptical workout, track it?”. At least the fall detection looks like it actually works.
# Oct 3, 2018I have a really low tolerance for nerdcore, but this is actually pretty good. And it speaks volumes that even MC Frontalot is sorta renouncing nerd culture. From “Internet Sucks”:
I don't love you any more internet You used to be a safe home for my nerd hard and my intellect Now you got so much hate but you just gotta interject Now you got too many chefs up in your kitchenette# Oct 2, 2018
Delighted for Cartoon Saloon. They’re quietly pumping out some of the loveliest animations I’ve seen in a long time – like Ghibli at their finest. If you don’t believe me, check out Puffin Rock on Netflix, which is a genuinely great children’s cartoon that’s full of charm and wit and visual inventiveness and it tells stories about friendship and intelligence that have none of the normal moralising one traditionally associates with children’s tv.
# Sep 11, 2018Laura Miller reviews Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, a book about rediscovering the power to actually read – I mean deep read – in the digital world of 2018.
There’s a lot of things that stood out to me in this review, but I’ll highlight this one because it’s so obvious and also so right
One of the reasons that digital readers skim is not because of some quality inherent in screens, as Wolf seems to think, but because so much of what we find online is not worth our full attention.
Ordered.
# Aug 21, 2018