A strange thing happened to me this morning. I was slowly waking up, browsing Instagram absent-mindedly… when I saw this video from nicolestorydent.
It’s pretty quick, so see if you can spot it. I almost missed it, the first time it flashed by. And then I watched it again, in disbelief.
I had Liz open the envelope as a surprise, as I don’t think she knew what it was. On seeing it, she immediately burst into tears.
Of course, Liz took some photos (on my phone, no less) of me nodding off. To add insult to injury, check out that double chin.
She always bounces back, but it’s hard not to be reminded of how Phineas was, when he started to decline.
Liz and I were out for an early brunch today, and had the idea to bop around the city a bit. After our meal, we were playing with the idea of going to visit the Garfield Park Conservatory.
The blog is a weird animal. Part of it is a personal diary, part of it is like a very large notebook of things I want to just save for some future reference or reflection. I don’t even know how many people still have blogs anymore.
Once all the rage in the early 2000’s, I feel like the act of sharing one’s personal life has continued and grown – but fractured into smaller, more consumable pieces of media. A tweet, an Instagram photo, a TikTok video.
The gameplay is a bit mesmerizing, and I find a kind of hypnotic appeal to the constant building and re-building of structures and roads, clearing out trees and setting up trade routes. Is it weird to say that it feels somewhat calming?
The warnings of pending layoffs (particularly in the tech sector) have been in the news lately. A lot of big name companies have, or are planning to cut costs by letting employees go.
Amazon has said it would be looking to lay off 18,000 people; Meta (Facebook’s parent company) is looking to reduce its workforce by 13% (around 11,000 people).
Estonian musicians Ann-Lisett Rebane and Katariina Kivi form Duo Ruut, whose name roughly translates to “Duo Square.” The two play a single Estonian zither in tandem, and I find their melodies/harmonies both haunting and inviting.
“O, great nation, it won’t be pretty.
What land will we now barter
for our lives?”
Liz and I have a silly saying that we use, whenever we see that Daisy is fast asleep. If we can tell she’s really out sleeping, we’ll say “She’s hard down!”
I want to argue that Cog (which came out in 2003) was one of the first “viral” Rube Goldberg machines to make the rounds on the Internet. Which was no small feat back then, since it would be another 3 years until YouTube came to be.
I’m a big, big fan of Sean Dunne, and am really taken by how he looks at the world. At people, in particular.
There’s actually two banks of elevators, but the vestibule area was cordoned off for some reason. The elevators were still working, but you could only enter them from the outside.
Peering into the vestibule area, every elevator door was criss-crossed with caution tape. It made taking the elevators feel really, really dicey.
I think that on seeing this, Plastic Bertrand immediately started playing in my head.