Currently Reading

Currently reading: The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver 📚

Currently Watching

• Agatha All Along, Season 1
• Slow Horses, Season 4

Currently In Queue

• Wolfs
• Challengers
• Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
• Furiosa
• The First Omen
• Skinamarink

Currently Listening

Currently Planning

• October: Eastern Shore
• November: Palm Springs for Eric’s wedding (maybe Vegas on the back end?)
• December: post-Christmas trip to Kentucky
• January: Ski Trip to Québec Charlevoix

Concurrently

• New Zelda game! Starring Zelda! In the style of Link’s Awakening! Time to dust off my Zelda-playing machine (i.e., my Nintendo Switch) and get to saving Hyrule.
• A few highlights from what I wrote this month:
  • I put out my digital yard sign as to why I’m voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz
  • I went and saw Weezer and Bruce Springsteen and wrote about the limits of nostalgia

Finished in September:

The Wild Robot: just as much a meditation on the necessity of community as the plight of parenthood. Screenplay did a ton of good work introducing a lot of tough concepts without flinching. This also may be my favorite animation that Dreamworks has ever done.

Finished reading: On the Edge by Nate Silver 📚 Silver lays out a clear and compelling case for us all to be taking more risks. His framing (gambling, crypto, AI, with a dash of politics) is inevitably going to turn people off, but he gives each subject a fair shake– none of it is universally negative or positive. His conclusions are not far from my own.

But…this book is Exhibit A of what people don’t like about Nate Silver: while I think he’s “right”, his prose is dripping with the fact he knows he’s right. He spends the book showing the divide between two groups–the Riverians and Villagers– with a very clear framing of building up his side (the Riverians). But then in the last three pages of a 500+ page book, he concludes that the members of the two tribes need to stop moving towards the tails of their group. He’s right about this, but I wish he’d spent more time on what a hybrid Riverian/Villager looks like.

Overall, if you can put aside the negatives, this is a vital book– risk is a subject that’s not well understood and Silver clearly shows why this is hurting society. jordon.me

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: the world and cast are left (mostly) intact, so it would be very difficult for this to be a bad movie. But wow– it did its damndest to be completely forgettable: no new ideas and nothing to say

The Bear, Season 3: this was the vibes season. Not bad, but it just didn’t have the propulsion that previous seasons had. Still one of the best on TV

Previously, in Current Things…

September 2024
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