I will wait a decade for awesome.
Category Archives: Pals
Aesop ROCK – Skelethon
HOLY WOWS and happy Monday. The Rhymesayers have a full album preview of Aes Rock’s new album up!
Folks have already started checking and interpreting lyrics over at RapGenius. Definitely check those out – and the behind the scenes videos of AR talking about the songs. It’s just him and a dog in a field. Cutest thing on earth.
Illegal art
I found this huge paste-up hidden away in the overpass between platforms at the DeKalb stop.
I follow Renee’s blog and she’s helped me out by summarizing all of the newsroom.
I assume this sampling makes sense to those of you that watch and that it is perfectly accurate:
MAGGIE: Jim and I are too busy not falling in love with each other, and also vetting the prom date lady.SLOAN: But I have some actual important stuff to tell you guys! Economic stuff. About currency manipulation. If my grasp of Mandarin is accurate, that is.MAGGIE: Ugh, here we go.[MACKENZIE RUNS IN, BREAKS THE HEEL OF HER SHOE, ACCIDENTALLY STEPS ON NEAL’S PRONE BODY]
Hopefully she gets employment as a writer there. Go read the rest.
Street Scenes of San Francisco
Chris Restrepo has uploaded photos, so you should be checking them out. He’s a pediatric ER doctor, wakeboarder and snowboarder. And he takes amazing photos. Last time I mentioned Chris. I particularly love when he turns buildings into geometric patterns.
Momentum
Sometimes I get stuck. Enough things creep up in my life and I stop creating. I’m simplifying again, cleaning up so I can get moving.
Georgia writes really well about momentum:
But another issue is momentum. I have always felt wildly prone to inertia, in the law-of-physics sense: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, objects at rest tend to stay at rest. When I am in motion, man! I never want to stop. Here was my last week:
Monday — Went to yoga, made risotto
Tuesday — French class fail, dinner out
Wednesday — Special date with my sister: high tea and a walk through Central Park!
Thursday — Dinner out again before going to a friend’s awesome reading
Friday — Packing and figuring out what to wear to…
Saturday — A wedding! Followed by…
Sunday — Hungover, post-wedding brunch and movie-going, then taking the train back home from the beautiful Hudson Valley.
This sounds insane. I’m rolling my eyes at myself as I’m writing it. And it’s not — NOT — a typical week. It’s a crazy busy week that was a lot of fun. So you know what I wanted to do this week? MORE OF IT!…
It’s easier to be one thing or the other, to only have one place to focus my energy — in or out. Making the switch is the hard part, which is maybe why a wide-open Sunday holds such potential. Lots of time to travel from external back to internal. I’ll have to make more time for Sunday writing in the future.
So here is the engine starting. I had a laptop die on me and I’ve resurrected it. The tools are sharp again. Time to get moving and then finish a project or two.
I’m starting to get so many ideas and experiments I want to try, I need to finish some things so I can get on to the new fun.
But before that, I’m taking Sam for brunch to Shopsins and then off to see Beautiful Evidence at the Foley Gallery. And the Brooklyn Book Festival is Sunday!
Darrick’s Geothermal Adventure
Darrick is a buddy from up in Rochester. He’s doing something which is the heart and soul of blogging. He’s taking a minor adventure from his life, and chronicling it for the people who care:
I’d like to take a week or two to blog about our experience with researching, and deciding to go with geothermal, and show the process of installing the system. I’ll be posting the numbers that I came up with which showed why geothermal made sense in our case.
There’s two kinds of folks who care – there’s me and the rest of his friends. We want to know what’s happening in Darrick’s life. We care what Darrick is doing because he is our buddy and we bond with people by knowing and talking about our lives. That’s the ambient communication that bonds people over time, and something the internet is good at enabling for folks who don’t live in close proximity anymore.
The other audience is people who are looking for info on geothermal. Darrick talks about how he chose a contractor for his project and how he calculated the payback on geothermal. Darrick’s way of breaking down the numbers is very useful.
According to all of the estimates our calculated payback time was about 5-7 years, with an annual savings of about 60-70% our existing heating cost. This was assuming that heating oil prices continued to rise, the heat load calculations were accurate, electricity prices continued to increase at the historical rate, and the historical weather patterns continued. These calculations assumed that I was replacing an existing heating system, which I wasn’t. None of the calculations used the cost of borrowing the money, and the cost of repairing the lawn after the job was completed. After adding in these additional factors, and removing the replacement cost of existing heater I came up with a more accurate payback time of about 9-10 years. This was still a worthwhile payback as we were planning on living in this house for at least 20 years. After 25 years it was estimated we will have saved about $100k (assuming oil prices continue to rise). Considering these savings, and the addition of air conditioning to our house, geothermal seemed like a great investment!
Here is giving other people the factors he considered and the way he justified the decision. That’s useful and it’s good for people who he might never even meet. This is the great sort of thing that delicious revealed back when it first started. Lots of people aggregating things just for themselves produces a resource that is greater than the sum of its tiny little parts. Like a nation, or a blogosphere, or a person, or a mind…
JME is trying Veganism
She’s been vegetarian for a long time, but is trying veganism as a sort of cleanse. Sure, she thinks her body is revolting, but I think it’s just the light. Sorry, can’t resist a groucho marx bit!
She’s also giving up booze for a bit. I can understand doing that as well.
I like to play with these same things. When I originally gave up meat, I did it because Sam and I had overdone it so much on a trip to Las Vegas that we couldn’t look at flesh without feeling ill. We discovered that if you stayed away long enough, you didn’t miss it. Anything that you think you crave, that consumes you – that’s a thing you want to be careful around. When I’ve found myself constantly out drinking with folks and having a wonderful time, that’s when I eventually want to pull back and show myself that I can have a great time without all that.
I think we all move in waves of moderation and indulgence and asceticism to some degree. It’s healthy to pour yourself into joyous pleasure. It’s also healthy to take a break, to pull back and realign yourself. Recalibrate. Give the old machine you ride in a bit of a cleanup and workover.
The saddest part of her excellent post:
Unless you can explain that you have a problem (and they’ll probably try and talk you out of that as well) if your friends drink, they will be highly disturbed by this decision. Just telling them I wanted to clean myself (read: liver) out a bit and get into shape brought on looks of ridicule. My partner has absolutely no problem quaffing beer while I drink sparkling water or unsweetened Iced tea but others will not even hang out with me one-on-one if I’m not drinking and they are. I think that’s sad.
If you find yourself being this person – it’s a good time to take a look at why you need someone else to take a drink.
Box joint, mortise and tenon
Are all games stupid?
Hit play, and start reading.
This piece from the NY Times about stupid games really rung a bell in my head:
Stupid games, on the other hand, are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.
Continue reading Are all games stupid?