Shit I'm currently…

• The Dark Forest - book 2 in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. I've never read much science fiction in the past, but these are pretty cool. If you're not familiar, it's written by a Chinese author, and the translations are pretty interesting. They feel much more … I dunno, descriptive than books written in native English. There are some cool concepts at play, and the second book is quite different from the first.
• The Daily Stoic – yeah, I know. Cheesy self-help, pop-psychology, Broicism™, blah blah. But I dunno, it's just a nice way to start the day (when I remember to). Ultimately, it's just a good reminder to not sweat the small shit and just pay attention to the things you can actually control. Seems obvious and easy, but, brains are not very smart. A minute to learn, a lifetime to master, etc.

• Obsidian – just a plain text / markdown editor. But, they've managed to get pretty much everything right with how I'd want to build up my collection of ideas and notes. There's a whole "Personal Knowledge Management revolution" going on right now, mostly credited to a rediscovery of the Zettelkasten method and the popularity (and subsequent downfall?) of Roam Research. Basically, it's taking a bunch of notes and easily linking them together from the text so you can have your own mini wikipedia or something along those lines. I'm a nerd who loves new apps and tinkering and this shit is right up my alley. The rabbit hole goes deep, and it's fleixible enough to look and act pretty much however you want if you put in the time with the right themes and plugins. It's essentially  emacs for normals and I'm here for it.
• Raycast – this is pretty much the latest iteration of the whole launcher app idea that started with Quicksilver back in the day, which led to Launchbar and, most recently, Alfred. Those are all great and, in my opinion, necessary tools for using a computer, but Raycast feels like the next generation of the idea. It's based on javascript, of course, and has a built in extension browser, etc. But, it also incorporates the nearly-ubiquitous command-k command palette approach to things you navigate to, and has the ability to interact with web APIs baked right in. This means you can do things like create Jira tickets right from it instead of having to open that piece of shit in your browser.

• Cardigan – I got this cardigan for Christmas when it was on sale and I shit you not, I've worn it pretty much every day since. This plus my house shoes makes me feel like Mr. Rogers. My friend Zac described it as "feral" and that feels about right. Here's a picture of Pigwidgeon and a bit of the cardigan.

• Home automation – I've gone all in with HomeKit since everything I have is Apple for the most part. This means at any given point it's hard to tell if I just misconfigured something, the network is being crappy, or if the house is haunted. HomeKit doesn't have as much stuff out there as Alexa and whatnot, but Homebridge makes it pretty good. for the most part, though, it's Hue and Lutron lights that turn on and off by themselves using some Aqara motion sensors. I'll write some more specific stuff about all this in future issues.
• Personal automation – this is mostly just stuff around using shortcuts to automate things. The main thing lately is using focus modes to automate things like turning zoom, my webcam app, and diffused light on for video calls and whatnot. I'll write some of this up in the future as well when I have it more dialed in.

• Luminist – Metroid Resynthesized — this is an album I've been looking for since I first started playing Metroid on the NES back in the late 80s. That game's music has never been surpassed (Marble Madness comes close) but the only renditions available that I knew of were the actual 8-bit game music and the band covers like The Advantage, Minibosses, and Stemage. I loved them all, but when I heard this Luminist version it was like a layer of grime was taken off of the music. It's a perfectly faithful rendition, just more lush and high resolution, and pretty much perfect.
• Messa – Close — a friend excitedly recommended this to us in our music slack describing it as a mix of doom, atmospheric goth rock, and straight jazz. Which, hell yeah. First listen… hmm. Second listen, ok there's some cool stuff here… Third, fourth listens, HOLY SHIT. It's incredible. Definite contender for album of the year.

• Superiority Burger – our 8 year old wanted to go vegetarian, so I've been trying out a bunch of recipes. I remembered that Brooks Headley (of Universal Order of Armageddon, Born Against, etc.) is now a world famous vegan chef who invented a veggie burger that's veggie/grain forward instead of pretending to be meat with beet juice blood and whatnot. He's based in NYC, but his Superiority Burger had a popup here in Portland a few years ago. Unfortunately, I found out about it too late. So, I found a recipe online and made it a few weeks ago. It's pretty involved, but damn good. Give it a try!

Yob — My first show after 2 years of quarantine. What a way to come back. The drummer from Brothers of the Sonic Cloth was filling in for the tour, and he was killer. As usual, a crushing and beautiful experience.

Shiner — I discovered Shiner 20 years too late during Covid. After falling in love with Hum's Inlet album, Shiner was a revelation. The Egg is an amazing album, and when I saw they were going to be playing Doug Fir when I was at the Yob show I mad a mental note to go, but of course forgot. Luckily I got an email or something reminding me about it, and man am I glad I did. They looked like Jerry Springer fronting a band with Joey Tribiani playing guitar and a Duck Dynasty guy playing bass. They sounded great, played for a long time, and were heavy as hell. They even played a few encore songs and appeared shocked the crowd kept wanting them to come back.

Then Deftones came out. Apparently it was the first show of their whole tour, so basically the first time playing a show in like 2 years or so. The sound was pretty crap for the first few songs, but it got better and they got more into their groove. It was pretty funny seeing how they guitar player is still a dude wearing big ass baggy shorts and long hair, Chino is Chino, and they had a new bass player after Sergio from Quicksand quit last year. They played Diamond Eyes, which was what I was mainly hoping for. They also played one of their songs from the deep Nü Metal days.

They fuckin' brought it. Crushin riff after crushing riff for more than an hour. It was everything I hoped it would be.

STÖNER – Stöner is Brant Bjork and Nick Oliveri's new band that sounds pretty much like you expect (Brant Bjork with fuzzy bass). Their albums are whatever, but they were fun live.

The main reason I went, though, is that Yawning Man was on the bill. Mario Lalli is a damn genius and a legend who doesn't get enough credit for pretty much inventing the whole "desert rock" thing, and I've never gotten to see them live. Unfortunately, someone in the band had Covid so Mario just jammed with Brant and the Stoner drummer and it ruled.

Earthless — first up was Dommengang. They played pretty great psych rock stuff, and their drummer was super fun to watch. The guitar player kinda looked like a young Michael McDonald, hell yeah. Apparently they're from Portland too, pretty cool stuff.

Finally, though, they started to ratchet things up. Building and building and building until things started to hit ridiculous levels of energy and shred. It was pretty glorious. A couple encores as well. I should have known better than to doubt them.

They started playing, and it was pretty unreal. The guitar player is singing and doing these wildly technical single note picking parts the whole time. The bass player sets up his dreads to hang in front of them so they're almost sweeping the stage while he lays down gnarly bass lines. And the drummer was technical perfection. I was pretty much blown away.

So, I've decided to stop all that nonsense and just draw. I went out and bought an iPad mini with an Apple Pencil and I loaded up the copy of Procreate I bought years ago and never used. Interestingly, I'm way more apt to draw on an iPad than in a paper notebook because the thought of ruining a nice notebook makes me even more stressed, so this has been perfect. I started out tracing over photos to get used to the apps and pencil and get some line work practice. I really like doing those extreme dot to dots, and this felt like that only better. Here's an example:

• Jerry Garcia — we haven't lived in southern california for 14 years or so now, but after 30 years there it runs deep. Jerry Garcia (no not the Grateful Dead dude) is a comedian from Huntington Park and he looks pretty much exactly like my great uncle Dickie and hearing him talk feels like a warm blanket. His HBO special is called "It's Not My Weekend" and it rules.

• Building A Second Brain – my work has a personal development budget that's normally for things like attending conferences, and for some reason I've never used it during my six years there. So this year I realized I could buy a bunch of online courses and subscriptions to educational things. One of the things is the Building A Second Brain course. It's basically an organization system for keeping track of all your projects and life areas and stuff and a methodology for making sure you just write shit down and put it some place you'll be able to find it so you don't have to keep it in your head. Not having more crap swirling around in my head sounds good to me, so hopefully this helps a bit.
• Youtube – I've been paying for Youtube Premium™ for years now mostly because I don't want my kids to see their crappy ads when watching stuff and the few times I'd click on a Youtube link I wanted no part of sitting through 45 seconds of a Geico ad or whatever. But I think I finally realized that Youtube kind of rules if you find the right stuff. I mostly watch nerdy productivity shit I'm too embarrassed to link to here, but I finally get it!

• Raised by Wolves – this is an interesting sci-fi series on HBO about some atheist androids (lol) who were sent to a remote planet to raise some atheist babies after they lost a war to the fanatically religious Sol worshippers.