2025-05-30 05:42:25
I don’t really identify with music. I mean in the sense that I don’t use music to attach to specific meanings or feelings. Lyrics are like instruments in that I couldn’t tell you what the words are or what they meant any better than I could tell you what the guitar or drums are saying. Everything comes together in rhythm and melody in a way that I enjoy.
Every now and then, though, a song will ingrain itself into my brain and become completely linked to a particular point in time due to repetition.
When I was a teenager, I collected comics. I bought the twelve issue series of Watchmen, which by the early 90s had already had multiple printings. While I read it, I’d listen to music on my Compact Disc player. I had maybe a dozen CDs at the time including Paula Abdul’s Spellbound featuring QSound technology, and Phantom of the Opera. Clearly, I am a man of impeccable taste in music.
The album I listened to on repeat, though, while reading these engrossing comic books was Soul II Soul’s debut album, Club Classics Vol. One. To this day, any time I hear Back to Life come on, I’m instantly transported to my teenage bedroom, the afternoon light coming through my window, as I sit on the floor, wondering what Dr. Manhattan would do.
After that, it wasn’t until March of 2009 that another song would create such an intertwining to an indelible moment. The song was Wake Up by Arcade Fire. While the song had been released in 2004, I first came across it when it was used in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are—a book I had and enjoyed reading when I was a child and that I enjoyed reading to my kids, then 5 and 1½.
My wife (at the time) and I were in the process of adopting our third child. Unfortunately, it never came to pass. We had gone through failed adoptions a few times before and the reason this time was no different than those other times: the mother chose to keep the child—a perfectly reasonable, respectful, and honourable decision.
Perhaps because I had been more open about this attempt, the failure hit me hard. (Failure doesn’t feel like the right word here. Nobody failed. It’s nobody’s fault. Circumstances changed.)
Wake Up was played on repeat.
To this day, 16 years later, whenever I hear that song, I’m brought to tears.
Somethin’ filled up
My heart with nothin’
Someone told me not to cryNow that I’m older
My heart’s colder
And I can see that it’s a lie
That failed adoption precipitated events that led to my asking for a divorce three months later.
2025-05-28 07:52:30
I enjoy those who do weekly or monthly life updates. I don’t plan (right now) on doing a similar cadence. Partly because I usually don’t consider my life that exciting—which, honestly, I’m enjoying things being boring right now.
In my year-end recap, I mentioned my youngest was doing longer stretches splitting his time between homes. Little did I expect that less than two weeks after that update, he’d be at my place since and will likely continue until he’s off to college in the fall.
That has meant staying in Ottawa and keeping travel to a minimum. He and I went to Paris for March break where we stayed at an Airbnb in Le Marais. We spent too much money on clothes and food, including three Michelin-starred L’Ambroisie. We had a mostly decent experience there but not as good as I was expecting, given a lot of the online reviews I had read. We made up for it by going to Five Guys the next day.
It’s nice having more one-on-one time with him before he flies the coop.
He just went to his prom. I never went to my prom and my oldest missed out due to the pandemic so I’m glad my youngest got to have that experience. He won an award for Best Style. Unsurprising. He’s always been a stylish kid.
As for me, I’m happy to be in a place right now where I can support those around me.
I’m focused on downsizing in preparation for the empty nest. I’ve been selling or giving away things I don’t need anymore. My spending has dropped considerably, which has been nice.
I’ve started to spend more time reading. I felt like I was spending too much time on social media in general and TikTok in particular. I enjoy the inspiration that can come from TikTok—especially with cooking and cocktails—but needed to…diversify the inspiration.
I finally finished Think Little by Wendell Berry. I appreciate the message of preserving the environment but I found the writing style a bit underwhelming. Having finished that, I went back to reading Romance Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is a light book about a comedy writer working for a fictional version of SNL falling in love with a celebrity host. I’m enjoying it. I have a few other fiction titles lined up for when I’m done that including The Perfume Collector, Service Included, and Food Person.
I go in waves with music. I rarely listen to albums, instead preferring to listen to singles and then adding them to a big playlist. Again, TikTok comes in as my place of inspiration. Sometimes the algorithm will narrow in and give me just music recommendations and that’s where I’ll start adding different things. Dreamwalker by Dogpark has a Maroon 5 feel. Kilby Girl by The Backstreet Lovers. Indie Hills by Jonny K. Oh, and Dead Beat City by Kids That Fly. That’s a song to crank nice and loud while driving with the sunroof open.
For something more chill, Texas Sun by Khruangbin & Leon Bridges is so smooth. Love that guitar. Which lead me to Leon Bridges’ Smooth Sailin’.
I’ve added a couple songs from Galdive and St Paul & The Broken Bones to the list. And when I couldn’t get enough of Jungle, I feasted on Loaded Honey’s recent releases.
My playlists are on Apple Music and while Current Vibes is my main playlist, I’ve been slowly curating my other playlists, too.
I stopped buying whisky as I wasn’t drinking it nearly enough to get through everything I was buying. My urge to “collect them all”, even with a particular brand, was getting to be a bit much. For example, I love Octomore but they release four bottles every year. I hadn’t finished off the 9 series but then I bought the 10 and 11 and 12 and 13 and 14 series. Now I have 20 bottles of Octomore sitting on the shelf.
Instead, I’ve been buying vermouth and amaro and other interesting liqueurs. China China and Fernet Branca Menta were the recent additions. I fear I am no further ahead in these matters. Now I just have 20 bottles of liqueurs on top of the 20 bottles of whisky.
Last cocktail I made was The Getaway. Although I just used lemon juice instead of a lemon/lime split. I’d totally have it again.
Here’s to a good summer. With the warmer weather, I look forward to relaxing outside, having a drink, and catching up on my reading.
2025-05-25 02:48:16
I enjoyed Anh’s open tabs post and thought I’d do the same.
Tabs open: none.
Well, on the computer I’m writing this post, none. I try to keep things minimal. I have a couple other devices with maybe a dozen tabs open.
Tabs usually stay open when it’s for things I want to buy. They stay open until I buy them or until I decide I don’t want to buy them.
I also use Safari Tab Groups but tend to use them more like bookmarks where things go in there for months. They’re more oriented around projects. For example, I am redoing the laundry room and have a tab group for wallpaper options. What do you think?
When Safari first introduced tab syncing, it was fantastic. Now it’s unreliable and inconsistent. No idea why. Restarting the browser seems to update the synced tabs.
That’s it for now.
2025-05-13 23:24:44
The biggest problem I run into with my side projects is keeping dependencies up to date.
I’ll not maintain a site for months and then when I come back to do a small update, I’ll discover something along the way that has been deprecated. It results in more time being spent on updating the dependency than it does to do the actual update I want to perform.
This latest one, much like it has been for the past year or so, was an issue with my deployment setup. I used to use a third-party service and now use GitHub Actions to deploy to GitHub Pages. I had my deployment pinned to using Ubuntu 20.04, which GitHub no longer supports. I’ve switched it to use the latest Ubuntu, which hopefully doesn’t come back to bite me down the road.
Anyway, problem fixed… now to actually work on the site.
2025-04-28 01:51:24
George Carlin said “People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people.”
I enjoy what people have to say. I hate hearing what bots have to say. And the problem on many platforms is that it’s near impossible to tell the difference.
I used to have comments enabled on this site but since the rise of Twitter, useful comments from actual people declined quickly and useless comments from spammers trying to create backlinks found their place.
Twitter and Facebook and Instagram were once a linear feed of people you knew. They were replaced with algorithms that threw unknown people and advertisers randomly into your face.
Connecting with real people, creating and expanding a community, was replaced by engagement-seeking sycophants and mass manipulation. The more divisive one can be, the more engagement they can farm. The more engagement they can farm, the more “valuable” they are.
One of the more benign but frustrating trends I’ve seen is asking “what does it mean” on content, in spurring others to lift up their comment, perhaps driving people to their profile, and increasing engagement in their other content. A video of a bear eating a fruit: “What fruit is the animal eating?” “What kind of animal is that?” They ask questions that are extremely obvious and are often already answered in the caption of the video.
As Simon Willison reports, AI is ramping up the increasing uselessness of internet content by pretending to be real people with real anecdotes. “The idea that my opinion on an issue could have been influenced by a fake personal anecdote invented by a research bot is abhorrent to me.”
I’d add that the idea of my opinion on an issue could be influenced by a friend who has been influenced by a fake personal anecdote invented by a bot is abhorrent to me and is one of the reasons I’m extremely frustrated by the swaths of disinformation perpetrated by bots, foreign and domestic governments, AI, and disingenuous actors.
It is for this reason that I feel like comment sections were a mistake. Newspapers shouldn’t have them. News media shouldn’t be quoting random tweets. Blogs should be more restrictive in who can comment. Social media platforms shouldn’t let content from people you haven’t explicitly subscribed to become part of your feed—and that includes retweets/reposts.
In my attempts to maintain some sanity, I consciously have to tell myself how the verity of comment sections should be ignored and never engaged with. I turn off reposts on any platform that has them. I use platforms that have a linear feed with no injected content (currently, Mastodon and Bluesky). I haven’t accepted comments on my site in years and will avoid comment sections on other people’s sites.
Individual people are wonderful. I’m just a little more antsy when it comes to anything that is indiscernible from manufactured content.
2025-04-26 03:05:21
“The most subversive thing you can do right now is blog.”
That was a thought I had and considered just posting that line. As I tend to do, I analyze it.
“Most? Really? There are most certainly other things that are more subversive. We’re just talking about blogging here.”
I over-analyzed it. It’s true, though. I quickly talked myself out of the blog post idea.
Then I saw a blog post which had a similar sentiment. I should’ve marked it down to give credit where credit is due but it’s lost to the ether now. The blog post was enough to revisit my thought.†
Right now, blogging within ones own space feels like having a garden or buying from independent store owners and producers. They feel like net positive activities. They feel like we’re not just trying to funnel money and attention into large corporations hellbent on world domination.
Perhaps this leads to what (anecdotally) happened in the mid-2000s: a boon of independent creators, tending their own gardens, and the butterfly effects of more independent projects and products in the world—that hopefully don’t lead into new world-crushing monopolies.
That would be nice.
† Post facto, I found that quote in an open browser window on my phone: “Blogging is small-p political again, today. It’s come back round. It’s a statement to put your words in a place where they are not subject to someone else’s algorithm telling you what success looks like; when you blog, your words are not a vote for the values of someone else’s platform.”
