Now:

A page that updates periodically about what I'm up to and into right now. One of many. You are viewing the version of this page from November 25, 2024. When it's gone, it's gone.

Making

I have a piece I've been messing with for a while but I think it needs one or two more original parts to feel finished, since it started as a study of something else and hasn't diverged from its influences enough yet.

I'm also working on a few gigs, although right now I'm in more of a one for them phase than a one for me phase.

The other thing I've been working on is my favorite albums of 2024 writeup, which always involves the two equally-difficult steps of remembering what came out this year and thinking of something beyond it's good to say about them. And, often, picking something I liked but then cutting it from the list because I don't have anything to say about it. So watch out for that in about a month.

Doing

Busy lately! Last weekend was a triple-header of shows: Cory Wong at AE, then Dave Matthews Band with Lauren's family at PPG, and then Pond at Mr. Small's. All three of them were fun. PPG Arena is so big that it kind of freaks me out to be inside of it, especially given (and I think this is intentional on the architect's part) the bizarrely confined, narrow escalator up to the top level where you then have to walk through a curtain to enter this quarter-mile-wide somehow-indoors space.

The place was coated in flyers for Jeff Dunham, who was apparently doing a show the next night. I keep thinking about how (unintentionally) funny it is to do ventriloquism in a venue where the back row is 200 yards away. Squinting at the stage and just imagining that the racist skeleton puppet must be moving its mouth when he's doing the accent.

Just the other day I got to see Julian Glander's BOYS GO TO JUPITER at its Pittsburgh premiere. It's great: sweet and honest and really funny, and the cast is truly stacked. There was hooting and hollering when Joe Pera showed up. It's got a little bit of that Hot Rod "here are some losers hanging out with nothing to do" formula but it's also about the ambient oppression of modernity and how that affects coming of age and wanting more out of life. It's impossible to get mad because Julian is a super nice dude but it's so good that I am a little jealous.

Thursday night Lauren and I and one of their friends went to Olive Garden and it was snowing, which was a relief. The span between Daylight Savings and the first snow is always my worst mental-health stretch of the year, so I'm happy to report that now I'm normal again and everything is fine.

Thinking

I've been thinking about slop lately. Twitter sucks worse every day, and I'm using it with uBlock and another plugin to block checkmark dweebs and hide the constant quote-tweets of accounts called "EXTREME MOMENTS 😱" posting shit like "Would YOU Eat This BURGER?" with a stolen video with eight watermarks on it, and then cashing in the 450K quote-tweets of dumb guys variously saying "yes" for a $90 payout that I assume comes directly from Elon's checking account because Twitter has never turned a profit and I can't imagine they started in the last six months. Every day I am followed by three to five fake women named Bok Lenius whose bios are a link ending in .ru.

Bluesky is less hostile to be a human being on but it is also teeming with the most 40-year-old, corny, and/or Dutch posters in the world. Plus it still feels pathetically downstream. An account followed me on there that runs up the "trending topics" every five minutes and for as long as I cared to scroll back "Twitter" was in the top ten. It reminds me of how the Newark airport only sells New York City souvenirs. Have a little self-respect.

YouTube is like Twitter now, too, in that you have to use multiple third-party modifications to make it pleasantly usable and not a massive wall of ads and shorts. And even once you get your software stack set up to hide all the sludge there's nothing good on there anyway, just ten identical cooking guys with forearm tattoos and some 16-year-old geek making four-hour documentaries about the Rise and Fall of a TV show you faintly remember from back when he was in first grade.

It's always so jarring when you open YouTube on, like, the TV at a hotel and it's not logged in to anyone's account so it just suggests the most popular stuff on the platform, which is either guys yelling while displaying their obscene wealth or child exploitation. And you always think, like, who would ever choose to spend their limited time alive watching this stuff? and somehow the answer is so many people that all of these videos' creators are taking six-figure payouts to be presented by Kia Motors. If the mythical algorithm YouTube videos have to appease is the precursor to some Ellisonesque world-dominating machine mind, it's already got a deep contempt for humans' intelligence down pat.

The other day Nintendo emailed me to tell me I have some eShop points I have to spend before the end of next month or they'll go bad, so I spent like an hour scrolling the Switch store for a game under five bucks that didn't have the word "hentai" in the title. It's so funny that Nintendo has hundreds of real, decent-or-even-great video games in the vault (and are working furiously to make them legally unplayable) while 90% of the titles available on their flagship console are stuff like Anime Girls: Gorgeous Girlfriend or Ecchi Memories, both of which are a) real and b) games where you assemble a jigsaw of an AI-generated anime lady. I think it's worth remembering that the NES, and therefore Nintendo, only took off in America because it swooped in after Atari ate shit for pumping out too many hasty, poorly-conceived, not-fun games. You guys used to have a literal Seal of Quality.

Anyway, I ended up buying Puzzle Bobble.

Reading

After about twelve years of oh yeah I should pick that up I finally got my hands on a copy of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. It's fantastic. It is mostly about comics and how they're unique as an art form but it also presents a theory of artistic practice that I have immediately subscribed to and will be thinking about forever. If I read this in high school like I should've maybe I would have kept drawing comics more than once a year.

Listening

I've been going back over a bunch of releases from this spring & summer as I round up my annual faves list and I've listened to this Photay album from September several times the last couple of days. It's excellent, it's going on the list, I'm sorry I forgot about it. Other rediscoveries I've had back on heavy rotation include this one and this one.