I continue to call this series of post "weekly" despite the fact that, based on actual data, it's really trimonthly. (Trimonthly is only defined as occurring every three months, unlike the confusing bimonthly.) I'm going to be stubborn about this in the hope that, over time, I will be able to make progress in making it more often.

I'm sure you've heard this from many others at this point, and, more than likely, you've already seen it, but, just in case, I can't recommend Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse enough. It's truly unlike any other superhero movie I've ever seen before, and I have seen just about everything.  The animation style, and techniques are so cool. Also, even if you have seen it, this Twitter Moment is worth checking out, Bagel!.  Every member of our family loved this movie, and I intend to watch it several more times.  I was also lucky enough to get a pair of the sneakers from the film before they sold out. 

I listen to many of the same podcasts each week, with only a rare few being "must listen" status where I never miss an episode. That's probably a good topic for a future blog post. One podcast that I have added to my rotation on a daily basis, however, is Techmeme's Ride Home.  This show is great in that, most days, they have pushed the daily episode before I get into my car to leave for the day. With the way Overcast works, this means that this is waiting and ready to be played when I start my drive. Each episode contains carefully crafted coverage of that day's tech news, and it's never longer than fifteen minutes. It's allowed me to stay up to date on several stories that are outside of my interest area. They do a really great job, and on a week like this one, with bucketloads of CES news, it helps me wade through the cruft to get to the interesting stuff.  The host, Brian McCollough, weaves his own humorous delivery into the stories, and that makes taking the medicine of tech news a bit easier as well.

I'm completely entranced by Reuben Wu's photography. He uses drones to create either objects made of light or to do the lighting for the photograph. This article by Ilana Herzig for Artsy does a good job of covering the basics of his vision and some of how he captures what he does. You may also be familiar with him from the music group Ladytron.  (Wishing that I could afford one of his works, but I'm on a budget at the moment.) 

I’d aimed to have this done on Monday, but my energy levels have been all over the place the last few days, and I just never got to it. Small subtext is that I had a medical situation a couple of weeks ago, and am recovering from it, but slowly. The energy levels are really the last thing to get back to normal when you don’t eat for a few days. I won’t get more specific than that, I’m reluctant to post medical related information on the internet or social media.

Like most of the gaming world, I’ve really been enjoying Fortnite this week and for the last month or so. For those who aren’t gaming adjacent, it’s a “Battle Royale” style game that has skyrocketed in popularity. The game is available across a wide variety of platforms, but I play on PC. I am “bumpish” should you want to friend and play with me, but don’t set your expectations too high on what my level of skill might be. I’d love to play with you in any case. I’m only on a few times a week, and for a brief time, I don’t get much dedicated PC gaming in these days with family duties.

I’m also enjoying the rollover to the Year of the Raven in Hearthstone, which happened this week with the release of the Witchwood expansion. I exalt in the end of the mill deck era. There is one card, Shudderwock, which is totally broken and makes things less fun than they could be. Here’s a great video from Disguised Toast that elaborates on how broken, at least the animations, if not the whole mechanic are.

I did go to the Atlanta Pen Show for a couple of hours until I ran out of gas.  My new purchases were an “Aiken” pen from Carolina Pen Company, which is colored to look like the Northern Lights using the same material as this pen, and a Seed A5 case from my friends at Nock.

I did also buy some Gigante Note Cards from Nock while I had the chance in person. These folded over notecards are a favorite of mine, and I keep a couple in my pocket sheath with me all the time. They are essentially the smallest available notebook, with only 4 pages.

Top of mind for me on the music side is Black Moon Rising from the Black Pumas. There are listen links for a variety of music services on that page. At first I thought it was Cee-Lo Green, but it’s not. I haven’t been able to find anything else by them, they are from Austin, TX.

Last night we watched the first episode of the Pastry Chef season of Chef’s Table about Christina Tosi from Milk Bar.  If you have Netflix, I highly recommend this episode, I found it really inspiring. Be careful though, you can order just about anything in the episode from their web site. My cookies are on the way.

I’m thinking about getting a ReMarkable Tablet based on the recommendation of some folks online who swear by it.  Seems like it might either completely replace my work notebook, or it won’t work for me at all though, making the price tag a little tough to swallow. The iPad hasn’t really worked for me for this particular use case, and I love my e-ink Kindles, so the idea of the product might be in my sweet spot.

ttfn.

This looks like it could be delightful.

The mullet getting some additional press coverage .

I went to see Any Given Sunday last night. I loved it, but I'm into the whole football thing. The Flash on the site is pretty good too. A friend of mine had told me earlier in the week that he thought it was Al Pacino's best performance to date. There were some great cameos in the movie, including Oliver Stone, the director, posing as a television announcer during the several games that were featured in the movie and Johnny Unitas as an opposing coach. A great cast including, besides Pacino himself, James Woods, LL Cool J, Jamie Fox, Matthew Modine, Cameron Diaz, Lawrence Taylor, and Bill Bellamy. A North Dallas Forty for the nineties with better undertones.

I went to see Sleepy Hollow tonight. I didn't leave disappointed. Tim Burton creates a beautiful, spooky look and feel for the movie and Danny Elfman's score added the perfect touch. I won't give away any of the plot elements here, but I think the screenplay did a good job of dressing up the classic tale for modern audiences. Johnny Depp was both dramatic and comical, and Christina Ricci was splendid in her role, better than both, however, were the supporting cast of characters that really made the movie.

Lots of graphic straight on shots of people being beheaded in this movie. The Web site is basically the standard marketing fare I've come to expect from Hollywood. Even post-Blair Witch, I don't think the studios get the power of the Web. The site does have some great Wallpaper/Desktop Pictures from the movie.

Wes over at Hack the Planet has some comments today about Wired sudden growth in size. You can add Fast Company, Business 2.0, and The Industry Standard to the list of magazines that have exploded in size over the last six months. I wonder how they manage the amount of editorial that has to go along with the amount of ads they are selling. I haven't seen as much of a decline in focus in the other three as in Wired. All of them are getting to the point where I don't want to carry them with me when I travel, it's like carrying around a phone book.

Webmonkey for Kids is an interesting idea.

I managed to scam a copy of the Matrix from an obliging store clerk a day early yesterday, and I watched the movie last night. Unfortunately, some of the extra features on the DVD require not only a PC DVD-ROM(which I have) but also specific DVD Hardware(which I don't.) This means that not only are Mac Users out of luck with it, but so are some PC users. The movie looks and sounds geat on DVD. I think I had forgotten how great this movie is until I watched it last night. I think my favorite scene is the Dojo scene which borrows from classic Kung Fu movies. Some of the extras, including the documentary on the making of the movie and the audio commentary, work on any DVD player. I was up late watching it, and I'm of exhausted today.

After reading about it everywhere on the Web over the last couple of weeks, I finally checked out eOpinions yesterday and wrote some reviews as a test. You can find my eOpionions page here.(No picture yet.)

I wrote an eOpinion about The Matrix DVD. They didn't have a listing for the movie yet. I don't like the interface for adding new things you want to review on their site. I want to be able to add categories so I can review more computer peripherals. I think they are going to find that the labor involved in keeping the maintenance of categories to themselves is going to get prohibitive as the site gets busier.

My iBook still hasn't shipped. :v(

I seem to be reading a lot of how this story means that Disney is a bad company. Does this mean that companies are responsible for the personal actions of their employees? From where I sit, this is akin to blaming the Internet for his actions. It doesn't make any sense to me. Clearly, what this guy did (or thought he was doing) was reprehensible, but can you blame the company where he works for those actions?

Over the weekend, I cleaned and purged my house and office. It's always disgusting to me how much stuff I accumulate over the course of time. Things that I think will be useful someday rarely are.

I also watched some of the E! coverage of the Cannes Film Festival. They covered a lot of movies, but the one that intrigued me the most was The Blair Witch Project. Seems like a great idea for a really scary movie. It will be released in July.

I installed Red Hat 6.0 on my FireAnt laptop over the weekend. Linux is getting easier and easier to install and configure. With the exception of some work getting the video card to work properly with X Windows, I had no issues. It's also amazing how much more responsive and speedy it is than the Windows 98 system that I normally boot into.

I heard today that an article I wrote for a print magazine last fall will be re-published as a part of a college textbook. This will be the first time my writing makes it into something hardcover. I'll post more details as I find out how things are going to be set up.

Office 2000 is making it's premiere here in Atlanta at an event tommorrow. I will be sure to post my feedback on that here. I also am going to see Steve Ballmer speak tommorrow and will pass on my notes on that. The New York Times has a detailed story today about the changes Office 2000 brings.

I'm building Ad management into our sites this week. If you have any feedback for me on good solutions, please provide it here.

I know that I still haven't written here about my thoughts on Episode One . I have seen it twice now, and I would expect to get my feelings out soon.