Rian Johnson has published all of the scripts for the movies he’s written (minus The Last Jedi) on his website; this should be required reading for any aspiring screenwriter. I’ll be diving into the script for Brick later this evening.
I’ve had an idea for a T-shirt design bubbling in my head for a while now, and while I was working on video editing (and waiting for files to render) last week, I put it together in Illustrator: a profile view of a Travelall with the script I’ve already built underneath. This time I built two designs—one for light-colored shirts and one for dark, which is more work but avoids a pet peeve of mine, when printers just reverse out a design in white and the negative spaces aren’t correctly negative. The other big leap I took was to post it up in a couple of Travelall-specific groups on Facebook, the first time I’ve posted there (other than Marketplace) in years. Within 24 hours I sold seven shirts and got two requests for custom truck colors and one for a coffee mug, which was easy to do because of the way I set the file up.
Here’s to hoping the orders keep coming in; I think I might do a Scout II next—until the VW group sends me a cease-and-desist.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I stumbled on a list of movie watches by accident the other day and quickly passed over 95% of the stuff shown there—James Bond’s unobtanium Omegas, weird RDJ/Iron Man novelty watches, unaffordable Rolexes—and stopped at an interesting field watch from, of all places, a Rowan Atkinson TV show, made by MWC:
It’s a pretty standard field watch layout but I like the crown and bezel, and it’s remarkably affordable. However, it’s also super-thick for some strange reason, and 40mm diameter, which is the absolute largest I’d consider for a watch. Looking through their other offerings, there’s a really nice 40’s pattern British field watch with a second hand dial that’s got some more personality at 39mm in diameter:
The website says it’s 1mm thicker than the first watch, which means it would be pretty bulky. I’ll keep an eye out on used prices, but as with lots of other things (jeans, cars, glasses, bathing suits) this is the kind of thing you have to try on in person before you buy. Interestingly, MWC was actually founded as a partnership including Albert Wajs, one half of the company who produced my estate sale diver. Unfortunately their only dealers are in Minnesota, California, and on eBay, so I’d have to take a chance if I really wanted one. I then fell down a horological rabbit hole and found a beautiful 39mm pilot that was for sale in 2012 and apparently hasn’t been made since; that was my sign that it was time to stop.
We had our first real snowfall in something like 700 days, so naturally we had to get out there and get some sledding in. I sanded and waxed the rails on our wooden sled, dug out the car, and we headed over to the local community college to meet up with the Geblers and get some runs in.
Greased Lightning did not disappoint. I had an envious kid ask me if our fast wooden sled steered; I told him to hit an antique store and get one for cheap.
On my third run or so I ran into a jump someone made, and the sled stopped while I kept on going. Laughing, I picked myself back up and walked back up the hill. Later I realized that landing on the snow had broken the zipper on my jacket and shredded several of the down pockets at the bottom, as well as popped one of the lenses out of my glasses that were in the pocket.
A few runs later, Finn drove our plastic sled directly into a tree and gave herself some mild abrasions on her chin. We returned home to get some hot chocolate and attend to the patient. I went online and found The North Face Renewed, where they repair and re-home used gear. I got a replacement jacket for $100, which is half of what a new Patagonia is going for (and from what I’ve read those don’t hold up very well). I’ve had this jacket for (5? 6?) seasons and it’s been great, so I figure it will be the new work jacket.
I got a random notice on Facebook during my daily Marketplace scrape about one of the items I’ve had listed there for months: somebody wanted my CO2 bottle and 4-port manifold. I set up a time and met him down the street in front of the coffee shop, and $125 later I had one less piece of brewing equipment. With that, I’m down to the carboys, a copper chiller, a bin of assorted brewing tools, the propane stove, and a shelf full of bottles. When I get some free time I intend to package it all up to consolidate space in the basement. Plus there’s a lot more down there that needs to be sorted and pitched.
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I was not aware until today that the local conservative prick who runs the Sinclair Broadcast Group just bought the Baltimore Sun from a private equity firm. The Washington Post quoted him as saying he hasn’t read a newspaper in 40 years, and that a newspaper’s job is to “manufacture content.” So that’s going to real well.
I read this morning that Pitchfork, the music review site that basically set the tone for criticism and indie approval in the early days of weblogs, is being folded into GQ Magazine after mass layoffs. Apparently they were bought by Condé Nast a couple of years ago and weren’t getting the kind of eyeballs some algorithm required. They lost their hold on the critical pulse of modern music years ago but they were still good to check in on every couple of days to see what was new. Stereogum is still going (and is an independently owned site again) and there are a couple of others out there, but this is sad news.
Six years ago, I was facing a very serious battle with cancer in my abdomen, and at that time we had no idea how serious things would be. While I faced radiation and chemotherapy, Jen set Finn up with friends who could watch her while she shuttled me to and from the hospital for treatment. One of the fathers of those friends knew what I was up against and offered her homemade marijuana candies to help keep my appetite up and pain levels down, and I gratefully accepted them (we only just got legal weed last year). They were a godsend when the radiation completely fucked up my digestive system and my body was expelling chemotherapy four or five times a day. I never forgot that, and I don’t remember if I ever properly said thank you. That’s been on my mind intermittently for the past year.
We found out he passed away suddenly last week, and I’m kicking myself for not having followed up on that thought.
I was in DC today preparing for WRI’s yearly stories to watch event, and I got several emails from the school telling us they’d cancelled after-school activities. this was shortly followed by more emails letting us know that they were dismissing students early in light of the storm system coming up the coast. I saw several flood warnings appear across my news feeds in the mid-afternoon. By 4PM it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to make the express train home and Jen and I traded texts: she told me all of the houses around us had lost power, and water was leaking into the basement through the hole drilled for the electrical service to the greenhouse. Alarmed, I had to put that out of my head and focus on work. I caught a 6:30 train and Jen came to get me at the BWI station, which was being whipped with sheets of rain. We got home and assessed the leak: steady, the size of a straw, but not increasing. We dumped the water in a pan Jen had set up to catch the inflow and blotted some errant leaks on the floor with towels.
A row of houses behind us, who share power with us from the line that bisects our yards, are all lit bright. Everywhere else, the houses who get power from the lines on our street, the church opposite us, and the school down the street are all dark, and generators hum into the night.
I’ve got a plastic bin in the basement with a stack of journals, notebooks and sketchbooks that goes back to my college days. I’m sure at some point I’ll recycle the majority of them (hopefully before we move out of this house) but for now they’re a fun physical time machine that shows what I was focusing on at any given point in time. At the top of that stack are a series of softcover unruled Moleskines, which have served the purpose of keeping daily notes, project sketches, receipts, and other things my brain isn’t big enough to contain.
I’ve dabbled with other notebooks but none of them have matched the shape and feel of a Moleskine—I’m a very tactile guy when it comes to my paper and pens/pencils, and I like the weight and tooth of the paper—rough enough to feel good under a pencil but not too rough to collect dirt easily—and the binding, which is a tough polyurethane that has stood up to my messy hobbies and lifestyle. The only two issues I’ve ever had were when I spilled water in the hospital and soaked one of my books completely—it wound up smelling like the chemicals coming out of my chemo-soaked pores and it was enough to make me sick, so I replaced it. The second was with this last book, where the elastic closing band came off only months after I’d started using it. (I wound up using one of two high-quality rubber drive belts I took from Rob’s two junked Sony 100-disc changers, which fit the cover almost perfectly.) I don’t like the hardcovers for reasons—I tend to tuck these in my waistband when I’m running to Lowe’s or tucked in a stack of stuff I’m carrying, so small and flexible is key.
I reached the end of my current book right before Christmas; doing a little archaeology I dated its beginning to July 2021, as I was painting shutters on the house and gearing up for a trip to Delaware to have the Scout looked over. I think 1.5-2 years per each book is pretty average; there’s something satisfying to see each page filled (and in some cases overfilled) all the way to the end.
As usual, here’s some weblog data to close out 2023. There are 6,193 posts on the site as of December 31.
The first graph is splitting that number into category count totals for this past year. I’m working on a stacked bar chart version of this graph but I’ve got to finish the math up for the 2023 numbers.
And here’s the monthly post count. Looks like things are trending down slightly (that spike in 2005 is hard to match) but as usual the summer months tend to be higher than winter. This graph does not take into account the posting I’ve done over on the Scout blog, which has actually seen a lot of activity this year with red bus updates.