TMoney

Happy birthday, Peter!

It is indeed correct.

FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE - Brian Eno New Brian Eno. It is exactly as ethereal, relaxing, and melancholy as you would expect from the man!

I’d feel like duck a l’Orange would be a tasty dinner! Honestly? Glad they got to live a life outdoors. Alternative would be the ducks who are bred for human consumption/pet food.

Happy birthday, Carl!

Happy birthday, Peter!

My first experience with MM Wave 5G at Ohare in Chicago. This is legitimately impressive speed for a mobile phone.

When in Michigan…

So Amazon only released the first two episodes to reviewers before the show aired. I read some interview where the Amazon TV head was saying how proud she was that the show was doing well overseas. Coded language for it bombing in the US?

I did. I'm always going to give more of the benefit of the doubt to a show that feels like it is pushing the boundaries or taking creative risks. WW season 4 certainly did that. It is not without its problems, but it had me coming back week after week. Sounds like it didn't get the viewership HBO wanted though so I think it is done for. I'm ok with that.

What a contrast between the two big budget fantasy shows right now. I think the GOT reboot is great. It is more or less exactly what I would have wanted from a GOT revival. Fun characters, lots of backstabbing. Love the casting, the costumes, the sets. Maybe a little too much computer generated dragon stuff, but on the whole I think it worthy sunday night "event television." Great job by HBO. The Amazon LOTR show, on the other hand, feels like a disaster. I set my expectations low but still find myself disappointed. I can't believe they could spend this much money on the show and not have a few more adults in the room to set them down a better path. The pre-season articles about how they found the right show runners... yeah... I don't know about that. There are just so many scenes where there is zero drama and it is obvious to any viewer that it was filmed on a soundstage. It may or may not look pleasing to the eye but the brain knows it is completely fake. Example below. See also the interminable amount of fake CGI helicopter shots in landscapes that obviously don't exist. Eye-rolling every single time. It sounds like Amazon is already deep in to production on season 2 so hopefully if they can't change horses this late in the game they can at least bring in some new editors. Just yikes. I can't believe how boring season one has been and it has to stick in Bezos' craw that the GOT show is making them look like amateurs. I'm done with the show for now and may revisit down the road if people say it is worthwhile. I'm not hearing any buzz for it online at all from people I follow, and rightfully so. 😴

Kind of a crappy end of the season with two rainy races in a row, but congrats to Max V. He had the fastest car, but he drove the wheels off the damn thing. Since about the third or forth race of the season he has left exactly zero doubt who the world champion would be. Here is hoping that Ferrari, Merc, Alpine, etc can give him more of a run for his money in 2023.

Wouldn't say no!

I own the Stealth, John. It is a very nice headphone. If there was a trade-in option I'd have been tempted to trade out for the Expanse as it seems to fix the one major issue I have with it, namely a lack of perceived bass. While I don't mind it as a closed headphone, I also generally prefer open. That all being said, it is a much better listen than the HD800S, my other flagship. I enjoy it very much, it just isn't perfect. Looking forward to seeing what you think of Expanse.

Indeed, a lovely way to start a Sunday. Getting to drive the Macan on the road to the trailhead an added bonus!

Cool It Down - Yeah Yeah Yeahs New Yeah Yeah Yeahs. What is not to like!? Welcome back!

Pitchfork updated its list of top songs and albums from the '90s. I like the idea of going back and redoing the tier lists a decade after they made the first set of them. I've been slowly working through the songs list. Top 250 Songs: https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-best-songs-of-the-1990s/ Top 150 Albums: https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-best-albums-of-the-1990s/

The frame interpolation/amplification tech looks to be the real deal.

Happy birthday, Wayne! Hope none of these hurricanes come anywhere near you!

I’m pretty excited for 40 series nvidia. Frame amplification tech is pretty much exactly what I want for some of these ray tracing heavy games. Being able to turn a 60fps experience into a 90fps one with some fancy frame interpolation sounds amazing, even if you do need to buffer frames and trade off a little latency to achieve it. 4090 also looks like a beast. An expensive beast, but unlike the 3090 this one might actually be worth the price delta over the 4080s.

A Game of Thrones - GRRM I'll give the HBO folks a ton of credit. At least when it comes to this first book, the GOT show feels like about as faithful a book-to-show adaptation as I can remember. AGOT the book is entertaining and reads like a beach read, with lots of momentum from chapter to chapter. You can tell GRRM loves him some food. The flowery descriptions of all the feasts and food got to be a bit much after a while. 😂 I think I will probably keep going with the books. I'm betting the deeper you get in to the series the more the books diverge from the GOT Show.

^ Just be aware when you get to the third part. I had a hard time going to bed after watching it because I was so sad and angry. It is a lot to take in.

The U.S. and the Holocaust This is very good, despite the difficulty of the subject matter. History will never forget the crimes the German butchers perpetuated against the Jews, the Poles, and the peoples of Eastern Europe. What was less well known to me was the story of how things went down over here. A lot of us already know about the bigotry of folks like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh and his “America First” party (sound familiar?). What I did not know about was the behavior of our state department, of the immigration quotas and the pervasiveness of the anti-immigrant and anti-semite crowd. I don’t think these were all necessarily bad people so much as people who could have done way more, yet did not. They were on the wrong side of history. The stories of the survivors, as always, are the most heartbreaking of all. I’ve never understood anti-semitism beyond the fact that Jewish people usually lean to the left politically and hold themselves out as unapologetically different. It didn’t make sense back then and it doesn’t make any more sense now. Streamable on PBS here: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/

Happy birthday, Jim! Hope you are able to get out for a nice hike as well today! Looked like an awesome one you did a few weeks back.

Shakedown hike complete. It’s kind of cool how the Apple Watch has gone from a goofy communication device with watch 1 to a full on health and fitness device today. It’s a great training companion for aspiring weekend warriors like me