Media

As best I can tell, this 2019 post was my last substantial report on the video games I’ve played. It’s been seven years, and my outlook on games hasn’t changed much. I still prefer inventive, moody, narrative- and puzzle-heavy games that capture the imagination. They represent self-contained stories that don’t require dozens of hours of investment to enjoy. Yet, I’m beginning to write this post while staring at an Xbox that has remained off for what might be months now. ...

I’m enamored by The New Yorker. It’s available via the Apple News+ subscription that Erin and I share as part of a broader service package, and indeed it’s one of the few publications I follow on that app. But I’ve spent little time reading any of its eclectic writing. I had only a vague awareness of its history, and had seen plenty of its comics. The miasma of information I’d gathered but hadn’t yet assimilated about The New Yorker came together after Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz published a detailed profile of Sam Altman. I read it all, then read the interview transcript of Farrow’s appearance on the excellent Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel of The Verge. Since then, I’ve read The New Yorker’s Wikipedia page, poked through their archives, saved the landmark “Hiroshima” report from 1946 to read later, and recently followed a link to the hilarious “Coyote V. Acme” piece.1 ...

I upgraded to a paid subscription to The Verge this year. They’ve become a premier independent media outlet covering a broad set of topics while maintaining freedom from external influence. I’m sure everyone gets something a little different from the subscription. For me, it’s the newsletters. Victoria Song does great work on Optimizer covering the intersection of health and technology; even though I’m not in the market for any of it, she writes captivating pieces about balancing the positive and insidious sides of progress. Tina Nguyen’s Regulator has become my favorite way to read a mild amount of political news without being inundated by the firehose of the news cycle proper. ...

I have a work trip to San Diego and all my other blog post ideas need more time, so here’s a quick list of my favorite tech media. I stick with these outlets for their staunch commitment to quality and independence; they’re all owned and run by excellent people with that ineffable and intangible quality of taste. These lists aren’t in any particular order. Websites Daring Fireball 512 Pixels The Verge Six Colors Podcasts ...

Effectively Wild, a fantastic baseball podcast from FanGraphs, put out the third and final installment in the scripted series Only a Woman: Ella Black, Lost and Found. It’s an excellent historical dive into the first known woman baseball journalist in the late 1800s, who is woefully not generally known and has certain mysteries hanging around her work. Each episode is thoroughly engaging and well-constructed, and I only wish they were YouTube videos with basic imagery so more people would stumble across them. ...

Eephus is a new independent film by Carson Lund, and I had the pleasure of seeing it on Saturday at Cinestudio in Hartford.1 The movie is superb and deserves all the praise it’s received. I’d liken it to an alternative take on The Sandlot, where instead of reliving the magic of youthful summers and dynamic friendships of boys, it’s a funny and somber reflection on the twilight years of adult baseball and the particularities of male relationships that rely entirely on weekend activities. I’d love to have it as a double feature against The Sandlot and force the emotional whiplash. ...

Erin and I have been binging Taskmaster on YouTube. It’s an absolutely delightful show full of British humour1 and absurd feats of… wit? Orthogonal thought? The show has remained precisely itself for years, yet each series is fresh; tasks are never repeated, and the new crop of contestants creates a different dynamic. The brain behind the show, Alex Horne, has managed to craft hundreds of unique challenges. Of course, there are recurring task types—Do the most “adjective” thing with this object is one of my favorites—but the combination of Alex’s inventive approach and the comedians actually performing the tasks ensures that you can always expect the unexpected. ...

Last week we published episode 304 of Comical Start, We Were Very Stupid and Did Stupid Things. It featured our first ever proper guest—that is, someone we didn’t go to high school with. The whole thing felt surreal as it was happening, but it was cool that it happened at all. Give it a listen. It was a unique experience.

Last week I was talking with Erin on our way to a coffee shop, and I had a sudden memory of a movie where a mouse needed to scurry about to find medicine to save a young boy who had quite a dastardly fever. Naturally I thought it was a Stuart Little movie, somewhere along the series, but that didn’t feel quite right. Luckily, the subreddit /r/TipOfMyTongue had me covered, when someone asked about this exact movie two years ago. It’s called The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and has a runtime of only 42 minutes. I haven’t rewatched it quite yet, but I was delighted to find the answer. ...

Erin and I decided to cancel Netflix the other week after subscribing for about eight years. I’d been infrequently toying with the idea for a few years, but while recording a recent episode of Comical Start Grant asked me something that solidified my reasoning. ...