I haven't seen most of my family for three years now because of covid and all that. It sucks. I'm originally form southern california, have a pretty huge family, and am the only one who has moved away. Portland isn't that far, but it's far enough that it means we don't see each other often. Throw in a pandemic and vaccinations and all that and it makes things 10 times harder.

My brother recently bought some property in southern Utah, in Kanab to be precise. I've never really been to see any of the cool stuff down there. He told me a while back that they were going to be going to an Airbnb with his family and my mom and dad and that we should try to come out. The kiddos are in school and I planned on driving, so this was destined to be a solo trip. No way was I going to try to take a kid on a 24 hour cannonball run.

I made the drive, leaving this last Tuesday at around noon. After hitting up a ton of superchargers on the way and taking a 3 hour nap from like 2-5am somewhere in Idaho, I got there around 12:30pm on Wednesday. My parents didn't know I was going, so it was a really fun surprise.

We had a great time going out and doing all the rad stuff southern Utah has to offer. Offroading, caves, sand dunes, slot canyons. It was awesome to see my brother and sister in law, my little nephews who call me Uncle Slime, and, of course, my parents. It was a pretty great Mother's Day. Can't wait to go back with the whole fam.

So now I'm authoring this newsletter at 1:30am from a random motel in Burley, Idaho. Please excuse any typos or incoherence.

The Sandman I and II Audiobooks
Yeah yeah, audiobooks aren't really reading, and this is a comic book (ackshully, it's graphic novel 🤓), but I drove about 40 hours this week going from Portland to Kanab, UT and back, and this was perfectfor the drive.

I didn't really know anything about the Sandman series, but I'd always heard good things from back in the day, and it seemed like it had a cool goth vibe. I had an Audible membership for a couple years where you get 12 credits per year to get any of their audiobooks. Seems easy, but it always ended up being one of those things where I didn't want to "waste" the credits and I overthought my selections until it got to the point where I had to use up like 7 credits in 2 days before they expired. That's what happened last year, and among a bunch of other random stuff, I snagged the 2 Sandman productions they did.

Turns out they rule.

When I set out on the first leg of the trip to Utah I put on the Dune audiobook that I had grabbed a while back. I tried getting into it a couple times while taking walks but I never got past the first 30 minutes or so. I don't know, something about it just kinda bugged me. It felt… kinda cheesy? But, it's supposed to be great and I wanted to read/listen to the book before seeing the movie. This trip felt like It Was Time.

I couldn't get past the first 30 minutes again.

I know, I'm probably just not sophisticated/smart enough to get it, but I tried. Maybe someday.

So, I put on the Sandman stuff instead. They're long as hell too, with series I clocking in at 11 hours, and series II at almost 14 hours. Enough to fill up a lot of the drive.

The production is pretty great. I think Audible was trying to make this one of their flagship exclusive productions, and they went all out. Neil Gaiman narrates it himself, and there's a huge cast of voice actors for all the characters. And there are lots of characters. The stories are really fun, intertwined, and varied enough to not get monotonous. The voice actors are laying it on pretty thick, but I think it works. It's much more like an old radio serial than something like Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter. Some people complain about it in the reviews, but they're probably boring pedants.

If you have 25 hours to kill, you could do a lot worse than these.

Convusic — I'm an Apple Music user. I have the whole Apple one bundle thing, and it's a pretty good deal. It works on my HomePods, is native to my devices, works great in CarPlay, etc. etc. Also, for whatever reason, a lot of my close friends use it as well, which means we can easily share links and I get to discover new stuff by seeing what they've been listening to.

Of course, though, this is an anomaly and everyone else in the world uses Spotify for whatever reason. I've never forgiven Spotify for putting Rdio out of business even though it was vastly superior, and for not supporting saving full albums to your library without making playlists out of them. Come on, man.

Yeah, I know it hasn't been like that for years, and their music discovery playlist thing is "better" etc. I don't like it.

Thankfully something like Convusic exists. It's a Safari extension (yeah, I also use Safari, fuck Chrome). It's an extension that lets you register what your preferred music streaming service is and then it translates links to crappy services to the one you like. Now I can click on music links in messages or slack or wherever and get forwarded to the equivalent on Apple Music instead of that open.spotify.com junk.

House Pants — One of the cool things about doing the newsletter is hearing from people I haven't heard from in ages. One such example is an email I received with a subject of "House Pants". I'd never really given much thought to sweats, etc that we've all been wearing as full time remote workers now, but it's a great point. I have House Shoes, I should have House Pants.

Personally, I've been rocking some Icebreaker pants and some made by MeUndies. The Icebreakers are nice. As usual, they're primarily merino wool, soft on the inside, and well made. I actually wore them on my drive to and from Utah rather than sitting in jeans for that long, and I actually ventured into restaurants and shops in them. I wouldn't be too comfortable doing that in regular sweats, but these were passable.

The MeUndies ones are interesting. They're the company with all those bad podcast commercials, which made me never really consider them. But I heard good things about the modal material, so I gave it a shot. The pants are super soft and floppy. They're really nice for lounging around the house. I wouldn't wear them outside though.

And the ones Kyle recommended in the House Pants email:

Now that I'm thinking about House Pants as a category, I will likely give those a try as well.

Dr. Dre Beats but they're MEDIEVAL
My friend Ted sent this to me a week or two ago and I've been listening to it non-stop. Does what it says on the tin — Dre beats but medieval. Lutes and flutes and zithers and shit. It works. My favorites are probably No Diggity and Gin 'n Juice feat. Sneuppe Thee Hound.

Mastodon, Opeth, Khemmis at Keller Auditorium

Mastodon's bass player went into covid a mild mannered metal guy and came out as Gandalf the White.

As soon as I saw that Opeth was touring I bought tickets. They've been one of my favorite bands for a long time now, and they're pretty great live. It was really weird that they were playing at the Keller Auditorium. I think that's where they've been doing Hamilton? But whatever, I guess if they can fill it with this tour, cool. Very classy.

Khemmis was pretty good. They do some doomy power metal type stuff. The singer guy had a Spinal Tap haircut. At one point he said "WE'RE KHEMMIS FROM DEN…" and I was hoping for Denmark or something cool, but it was just "VER, COLORADO."

Opeth ruled. I'm a sucker for the ridiculous 70s prog stuff, but I'll always love their older death metal cookie monster vocals stuff. Thankfully they're playing old stuff live again. They ended on a massive riff played for like 8 minutes straight, which is how every metal set should end.

Mastodon headlined. I didn't realize how big they were now I guess. I was apprehensive because out of the 8 or 9 times I've seen them over the years they've almost never actually sounded good. I really like their stuff, but it's never translated well live for me. My band opened for them and High on Fire back in like 2003 where we all played to like 30 people, and they ruled back then. They also had a Mastodong shirt for sale that I guess I could have sold for $80 these days. But seeing them at various places like opening for Dethklok or headlining at the Roseland convinced me they couldn't really pull it off live once they started doing the cleaner vocals and concept albums.

But, they pulled it off pretty well at this show. I could actually understand what they were playing and the vocals were pretty good. However, at one point the sound started glitching out. It sounded like when an MP3 is playing and Winamp runs out of CPU. They took a brief break claiming there was an electrical outage that needed to be repaired, but I suspect they may be Metal Vanilli.

Drawing

Another Joseph Wyman tintype photo. This one was super hard and I still don't really like it. Oh well. I posted an initial version because I just wanted to be done with it, and I got some feedback that helped me figure out what wasn't sitting right. So I went back and did a bunch of revisions. It made it better, but not really how I wanted it. Also, when it's full size shrunk down it gets super distorted looking, so here's a detail section.

The Feynman Technique Basically, this is learning by teaching. One of those things that you kind of intuitively stumble across, but having it laid out as a methodology is pretty cool. Explain like I'm five, rubber ducking, public speaking, etc. all seem relatively similar too.


Ok, I'm going to sleep.

– Toby